Cat's Cradle ... Chapter 1: Home
Remember the first Harry and Cat drabble Home? Well, I actually did write an extended version of it and yes there is a whole backstory to the drabble. And guess what? Here is “Home: The Extended Version” *grins*. If you look carefully, you’ll see the original 100-word drabble scattered within the 2000+ words that follow.
And before you all groan at Fran starting yet another WIP, the next bit of Handsome Stranger is almost finished and should be posted at the weekend.
This is for shezan ... she of the incredible cat photograph collection. Where would I be without cat!Harry, cat!Draco and all their friends?
Summary The war is over, and not in a good way. Harry finds a stray on his doorstep.
Warnings Animagus cat and despondent Harry.
Rating PG-13 (to be on the safe side)
Cat’s Cradle
Home
Godric’s Hollow is a tiny Cornish hamlet on the north coast. According to the locals, on a clear day you can see Wales from the cliff tops; visitors would stare across the sea while villagers smirk at the stupidity of Emmets.
The village has a pub, The Flying Ferret, a shop with a post office, and a church. It also has its own haunted ruin.
The remains of Cliff Cottage stand about half a mile from the church up a single track road and the story goes that on a wild, windy Halloween night nineteen years ago, a group from some strange cult attacked and killed the family who lived there. The husband and wife lie in a corner of the churchyard (where flowers had mysteriously started appearing), but no one knows what happened to their year-old son. Some say the cult stole him away.
People have tried to buy the land, but no one is quite sure who owns it. So the ruins of the cottage remain in the corner of the overgrown garden and the local children dare each other to sneak up there and steal apples from the trees.
Some say that if you go to the cottage at Halloween, you might see the son sitting on the doorstep weeping for his dead parents. And they say that if you look carefully, you can see him walking through the village up the single-track road to his ruined home.
* * * * * * * * * *
War, Harry Potter had long ago decided, wasn’t what he’d expected it to be. He knew about Muggle wars from books and films, with bombs and bullets and bloodied people dying. But Wizarding war was very different. Oh, there was death and destruction (a wand in the wrong hands can do an incredible amount of damage), but there was never two armies standing in ranks facing each other across a battlefield.
It was as if each battle was a personal fight between two protagonists while the rest of the Wizarding population went about their business as if nothing else was happening.
Oh, they worried and complained about the latest editorial in the Daily Prophet or missive from the Ministry. They wanted to know why it was taking so long to round up a rag-tag group of miscreants and why their owl post was being intercepted when the Department of Law and Order could be doing better things with their time. They complained about the rising cost of Floo powder and why it was almost impossible to get hold of stinkhorn mushrooms since the embargo on continental trade.
But most of all, they just wanted it to be over and done with.
And somewhere within the political spin and lies, they had forgotten who was fighting whom and just which side were the good guys.
To some extent, Harry blamed himself.
It was one thing to be Dumbledore’s man through and through, but another when the Minister of Magic had decided that throwing his lot in with Voldemort might not be such a bad idea after all.
If Harry had become part of the Ministry, he might have been able to halt the ‘pro-Voldemort’ lobby (lead by Delores Umbridge no less). But he was just an 18-year-old boy with a long history of rumoured instability and of telling lies. It hadn’t taken people (some of whom Harry had once considered friends) to happily retell every little snippet about him they could remember and embellish it in any way they thought might get them on the Prophet’s front page.
Lord Voldemort’s rise from villain to victim started with a book written by Percy Weasley about the trials that had taken place after the First War. It told of corruption and lies and doctored transcripts. Unfortunately most of the people who could have refuted what he’d written were now dead -- Barty Crouch and Albus Dumbledore to name two.
Even Harry’s parents had suffered under Percy’s poison pen.
Then came the Tom Riddle biography (by Percy, of course). It was the heartbreaking tale of a poor orphaned Wizarding child condemned to the horrors of living with uncaring Muggle relatives who beat and mistreated him at every opportunity. Harry, of course, fumed and managed to break just about every glass object in 12 Grimmauld Place as he saw his life transferred to Voldemort. But the worst thing about the book was that it portrayed Dumbledore as the villain, condemning Tom to his fate of living in a cupboard under the stairs.
Harry hated the book because it dug into his own psych and asked questions he’d often thought but never voiced. Like why he’d spent all those years with the Dursleys when Dumbledore could have found him a safe haven somewhere ... Hogwarts for example.
Then one day, he’d opened the Prophet and found a photograph of Scrimgeour shaking hands with Voldemort. The war was over, the Minister of magic declared; Wizards shouldn’t fight amongst themselves when the real enemy was out there despoiling their world.
Voldemort, the most feared wizard in a century, had managed to con the world into thinking he was their saviour. While Harry was nothing but a deluded boy who should be safely locked away in St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries (Have you seen this wizard? If so, do not approach him as he is dangerous. Instead contact your local Auror office....)
Harry had stared at the photograph for a long time, trying to work out if Scrimgeour was under Imperius. Then he’s set the bloody thing on fire, put his head in his hands and wept with frustration.
* * * * * * * * * *
Harry Potter Apparated to the same grove of trees he’d used nearly every weekend for the past year. It had been Hermione’s idea for him to find a sanctuary, a place only Harry knew the location of and for which he would be his own Secret Keeper. His choice was simple -- if someone wanted to know where he was hiding, they had to first find him to get the secret.
Shouldering his bag, he strode down the road, stopping at the village shop for bread and milk and to check if there was any post. Mrs Barnicoat, who ran the shop, as usual mothered him and called him “Evann, dear” as she handed him the package addressed to ‘Evann James’. Harry smiled, declined her invitation both to the village barn dance and to Sunday lunch, and waved goodbye.
He paused briefly at the church and wondered whether to visit his parents, but it was getting late and he really wanted to get home. Maybe tomorrow. Instead he turned up the single-track road, but rather than walking the half-mile to what was left of Cliff Cottage, he opened the gate to what had once been the vicarage. His original plan had been to rebuild the cottage under the protection of complex wards, but he soon realised that while it was possible, it would take too long for his immediate needs. So instead he took over the vicarage and worked at mastering several reconstruction spells he’d found in one of Professor Dumbledore’s diaries.
Stopping to deadhead a couple of roses, he strode down the path. He could feel the familiar wards beginning to close around him and he almost didn’t notice the cat sitting on the doorstep. He stared down at the creature, which looked like it had seen better days.
“Go on ... shoo.” He waved a hand, waiting for the cat to turn tail and run, but it merely got to its feet and stood there, staring up at him with grey eyes.
Crouching down, Harry reached out a hand, letting the animal smell him. “So who do you belong to then? Someone in the village?” He checked for a collar and name disc, but the grimy white fur hid nothing. “Are you lost? You seem tame.” Gently he stroked a hand over the cat’s flank and noticed blood on the fur. He peered closer. “Been in a fight then?”
Harry straightened and stared at the cat as big raindrops began to fall from the darkening sky. He glanced upward, a drop hitting his cheek and then back at the cat. He should just scare the creature away. Then it meowed, a long, sad, forlorn sound that made all Harry’s resolve disappear. “Well, I can’t leave you out here can I? Are you going to let me pick you up?”
The animal didn’t struggle, but Harry felt it tense as he walked through the wards, each set more powerful than the previous one. Could the cat feel the magic, he wondered. He’d often thought that just about every villager had latent magical tendencies, so perhaps that extended to their pets. The cat had settled in his arms and Harry had no idea what to do. He wished he could take it to Hagrid, the giant would know what to do.
Thinking about his dead friend made Harry sad and he stood for a moment in the lounge just holding the cat.
The creature’s claws digging into his arms finally brought him from the morbid thoughts and he finally looked down at it, noticing for the first time that there was both fresh and dried blood on its fur. Would the animal let Harry treat the injuries, he wondered.
“You really need a bath, you know.”
The cat purred.
* * * * * * * * * *
Bathing a cat wasn’t the easiest thing Harry had ever done.
He wasn’t sure who ended up the wettest; himself, the cat or the kitchen floor, but once the grime and dirt had been washed away, he found the cat had a snow-white coat. Beneath the fur were several nasty looking wounds and he wondered just what had attacked the animal.
Even more worrying were some healed scars he’d found that reminded Harry very much of his own lightning-bolt scar. He frowned as he gently parted the fur to look at a scar on the cat’s front leg, quickly dismissing the ridiculous idea that a stray moggie might have a curse scar.
“So what happened to you then?” He stroked the cat’s head and deliberately kept his voice soft. There had been something in one of his Care of Magical Creatures books that soft voices soothed kneazles and he hoped it worked with ordinary cats as well. “Or are you someone’s familiar?”
The cat lay quietly on the table, nestled on a thick fluffy towel and purred.
“Well, that’s something. Doesn’t purring mean you’re happy?” Harry began sorting through his first aid kit, wondering if the potions it contained were safe for animals. He paused. “But I remember Mrs Figg telling me once that Tibbles purred all the way to the vets when he wasn’t well.” He glanced at the cat. “Tibbles was one of her many cats in case you wondered.”
The cat blinked, watching him with shrewd eyes and Harry scratched it behind the ear.
“Your owner must really be missing you.”
Carefully he cleaned the injuries and even managed to get the cat to drink a little of a potion that was supposed to work with any infection. Then he found it a cushion in front of the fire, “just to make sure your fur is properly dry,” he assured the cat.
As it lay there purring, Harry wondered what had brought the creature to his home rather than one of the other houses in the village. And more importantly, what was he going to do with it? The wards would effectively trap the animal inside the house unless Harry was there to let it out into the garden.
Maybe he should check the local papers and see if there were any missing cat announcements?
Deciding that could wait until the next day, Harry turned his attention to the package he’d picked up from the post office. He already knew what it contained because he’d sent it to himself, a much safer way of moving it around the country. The cat watched with interest as Harry dropped the wrapping paper onto the floor and for a moment it looked like the paper was going to become a toy. But clearly the cushion was just too comfortable and it settled down again.
Harry ran a hand over the cover of the parcel’s contents. The book was another of Professor Dumbledore’s diaries and he flipped through the pages, glancing briefly at odd words and phases. He would read it properly tomorrow, but somewhere in one of his mentor’s diaries had to be the answer he was looking for. The answer of how to destroy a Horcrux.
He yawned and glanced at his watch. It was getting late and it had been a long day.
Getting to his feet, Harry rummaged in a kitchen cupboard and found a tin of tuna. He put some on a plate and placed it, with a dish of water, on the floor.
“Hope you like tuna.” He petted the cat one last time. “Goodnight, Cat.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Later, after Harry had petted the cat ‘goodnight’ and the lights in the bedroom finally went out, the cat stirred. It pawed briefly at the cushion before stretching elegantly.
But the stretch didn’t end. It stretched and stretched, shifting shape until a pale figure sat before the fire.
Draco sighed. Finally he’d found a sanctuary.
----
“Emmet” is a disparaging nickname that some Cornish people use to refer to the many tourists who visit Cornwall.
A “Moggie” (or moggy depending on the dictionary) is a name for a non-pedigree cat.
----
And before you all groan at Fran starting yet another WIP, the next bit of Handsome Stranger is almost finished and should be posted at the weekend.
This is for shezan ... she of the incredible cat photograph collection. Where would I be without cat!Harry, cat!Draco and all their friends?
Summary The war is over, and not in a good way. Harry finds a stray on his doorstep.
Warnings Animagus cat and despondent Harry.
Rating PG-13 (to be on the safe side)
Cat’s Cradle
Home
Godric’s Hollow is a tiny Cornish hamlet on the north coast. According to the locals, on a clear day you can see Wales from the cliff tops; visitors would stare across the sea while villagers smirk at the stupidity of Emmets.
The village has a pub, The Flying Ferret, a shop with a post office, and a church. It also has its own haunted ruin.
The remains of Cliff Cottage stand about half a mile from the church up a single track road and the story goes that on a wild, windy Halloween night nineteen years ago, a group from some strange cult attacked and killed the family who lived there. The husband and wife lie in a corner of the churchyard (where flowers had mysteriously started appearing), but no one knows what happened to their year-old son. Some say the cult stole him away.
People have tried to buy the land, but no one is quite sure who owns it. So the ruins of the cottage remain in the corner of the overgrown garden and the local children dare each other to sneak up there and steal apples from the trees.
Some say that if you go to the cottage at Halloween, you might see the son sitting on the doorstep weeping for his dead parents. And they say that if you look carefully, you can see him walking through the village up the single-track road to his ruined home.
* * * * * * * * * *
War, Harry Potter had long ago decided, wasn’t what he’d expected it to be. He knew about Muggle wars from books and films, with bombs and bullets and bloodied people dying. But Wizarding war was very different. Oh, there was death and destruction (a wand in the wrong hands can do an incredible amount of damage), but there was never two armies standing in ranks facing each other across a battlefield.
It was as if each battle was a personal fight between two protagonists while the rest of the Wizarding population went about their business as if nothing else was happening.
Oh, they worried and complained about the latest editorial in the Daily Prophet or missive from the Ministry. They wanted to know why it was taking so long to round up a rag-tag group of miscreants and why their owl post was being intercepted when the Department of Law and Order could be doing better things with their time. They complained about the rising cost of Floo powder and why it was almost impossible to get hold of stinkhorn mushrooms since the embargo on continental trade.
But most of all, they just wanted it to be over and done with.
And somewhere within the political spin and lies, they had forgotten who was fighting whom and just which side were the good guys.
To some extent, Harry blamed himself.
It was one thing to be Dumbledore’s man through and through, but another when the Minister of Magic had decided that throwing his lot in with Voldemort might not be such a bad idea after all.
If Harry had become part of the Ministry, he might have been able to halt the ‘pro-Voldemort’ lobby (lead by Delores Umbridge no less). But he was just an 18-year-old boy with a long history of rumoured instability and of telling lies. It hadn’t taken people (some of whom Harry had once considered friends) to happily retell every little snippet about him they could remember and embellish it in any way they thought might get them on the Prophet’s front page.
Lord Voldemort’s rise from villain to victim started with a book written by Percy Weasley about the trials that had taken place after the First War. It told of corruption and lies and doctored transcripts. Unfortunately most of the people who could have refuted what he’d written were now dead -- Barty Crouch and Albus Dumbledore to name two.
Even Harry’s parents had suffered under Percy’s poison pen.
Then came the Tom Riddle biography (by Percy, of course). It was the heartbreaking tale of a poor orphaned Wizarding child condemned to the horrors of living with uncaring Muggle relatives who beat and mistreated him at every opportunity. Harry, of course, fumed and managed to break just about every glass object in 12 Grimmauld Place as he saw his life transferred to Voldemort. But the worst thing about the book was that it portrayed Dumbledore as the villain, condemning Tom to his fate of living in a cupboard under the stairs.
Harry hated the book because it dug into his own psych and asked questions he’d often thought but never voiced. Like why he’d spent all those years with the Dursleys when Dumbledore could have found him a safe haven somewhere ... Hogwarts for example.
Then one day, he’d opened the Prophet and found a photograph of Scrimgeour shaking hands with Voldemort. The war was over, the Minister of magic declared; Wizards shouldn’t fight amongst themselves when the real enemy was out there despoiling their world.
Voldemort, the most feared wizard in a century, had managed to con the world into thinking he was their saviour. While Harry was nothing but a deluded boy who should be safely locked away in St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries (Have you seen this wizard? If so, do not approach him as he is dangerous. Instead contact your local Auror office....)
Harry had stared at the photograph for a long time, trying to work out if Scrimgeour was under Imperius. Then he’s set the bloody thing on fire, put his head in his hands and wept with frustration.
* * * * * * * * * *
Harry Potter Apparated to the same grove of trees he’d used nearly every weekend for the past year. It had been Hermione’s idea for him to find a sanctuary, a place only Harry knew the location of and for which he would be his own Secret Keeper. His choice was simple -- if someone wanted to know where he was hiding, they had to first find him to get the secret.
Shouldering his bag, he strode down the road, stopping at the village shop for bread and milk and to check if there was any post. Mrs Barnicoat, who ran the shop, as usual mothered him and called him “Evann, dear” as she handed him the package addressed to ‘Evann James’. Harry smiled, declined her invitation both to the village barn dance and to Sunday lunch, and waved goodbye.
He paused briefly at the church and wondered whether to visit his parents, but it was getting late and he really wanted to get home. Maybe tomorrow. Instead he turned up the single-track road, but rather than walking the half-mile to what was left of Cliff Cottage, he opened the gate to what had once been the vicarage. His original plan had been to rebuild the cottage under the protection of complex wards, but he soon realised that while it was possible, it would take too long for his immediate needs. So instead he took over the vicarage and worked at mastering several reconstruction spells he’d found in one of Professor Dumbledore’s diaries.
Stopping to deadhead a couple of roses, he strode down the path. He could feel the familiar wards beginning to close around him and he almost didn’t notice the cat sitting on the doorstep. He stared down at the creature, which looked like it had seen better days.
“Go on ... shoo.” He waved a hand, waiting for the cat to turn tail and run, but it merely got to its feet and stood there, staring up at him with grey eyes.
Crouching down, Harry reached out a hand, letting the animal smell him. “So who do you belong to then? Someone in the village?” He checked for a collar and name disc, but the grimy white fur hid nothing. “Are you lost? You seem tame.” Gently he stroked a hand over the cat’s flank and noticed blood on the fur. He peered closer. “Been in a fight then?”
Harry straightened and stared at the cat as big raindrops began to fall from the darkening sky. He glanced upward, a drop hitting his cheek and then back at the cat. He should just scare the creature away. Then it meowed, a long, sad, forlorn sound that made all Harry’s resolve disappear. “Well, I can’t leave you out here can I? Are you going to let me pick you up?”
The animal didn’t struggle, but Harry felt it tense as he walked through the wards, each set more powerful than the previous one. Could the cat feel the magic, he wondered. He’d often thought that just about every villager had latent magical tendencies, so perhaps that extended to their pets. The cat had settled in his arms and Harry had no idea what to do. He wished he could take it to Hagrid, the giant would know what to do.
Thinking about his dead friend made Harry sad and he stood for a moment in the lounge just holding the cat.
The creature’s claws digging into his arms finally brought him from the morbid thoughts and he finally looked down at it, noticing for the first time that there was both fresh and dried blood on its fur. Would the animal let Harry treat the injuries, he wondered.
“You really need a bath, you know.”
The cat purred.
* * * * * * * * * *
Bathing a cat wasn’t the easiest thing Harry had ever done.
He wasn’t sure who ended up the wettest; himself, the cat or the kitchen floor, but once the grime and dirt had been washed away, he found the cat had a snow-white coat. Beneath the fur were several nasty looking wounds and he wondered just what had attacked the animal.
Even more worrying were some healed scars he’d found that reminded Harry very much of his own lightning-bolt scar. He frowned as he gently parted the fur to look at a scar on the cat’s front leg, quickly dismissing the ridiculous idea that a stray moggie might have a curse scar.
“So what happened to you then?” He stroked the cat’s head and deliberately kept his voice soft. There had been something in one of his Care of Magical Creatures books that soft voices soothed kneazles and he hoped it worked with ordinary cats as well. “Or are you someone’s familiar?”
The cat lay quietly on the table, nestled on a thick fluffy towel and purred.
“Well, that’s something. Doesn’t purring mean you’re happy?” Harry began sorting through his first aid kit, wondering if the potions it contained were safe for animals. He paused. “But I remember Mrs Figg telling me once that Tibbles purred all the way to the vets when he wasn’t well.” He glanced at the cat. “Tibbles was one of her many cats in case you wondered.”
The cat blinked, watching him with shrewd eyes and Harry scratched it behind the ear.
“Your owner must really be missing you.”
Carefully he cleaned the injuries and even managed to get the cat to drink a little of a potion that was supposed to work with any infection. Then he found it a cushion in front of the fire, “just to make sure your fur is properly dry,” he assured the cat.
As it lay there purring, Harry wondered what had brought the creature to his home rather than one of the other houses in the village. And more importantly, what was he going to do with it? The wards would effectively trap the animal inside the house unless Harry was there to let it out into the garden.
Maybe he should check the local papers and see if there were any missing cat announcements?
Deciding that could wait until the next day, Harry turned his attention to the package he’d picked up from the post office. He already knew what it contained because he’d sent it to himself, a much safer way of moving it around the country. The cat watched with interest as Harry dropped the wrapping paper onto the floor and for a moment it looked like the paper was going to become a toy. But clearly the cushion was just too comfortable and it settled down again.
Harry ran a hand over the cover of the parcel’s contents. The book was another of Professor Dumbledore’s diaries and he flipped through the pages, glancing briefly at odd words and phases. He would read it properly tomorrow, but somewhere in one of his mentor’s diaries had to be the answer he was looking for. The answer of how to destroy a Horcrux.
He yawned and glanced at his watch. It was getting late and it had been a long day.
Getting to his feet, Harry rummaged in a kitchen cupboard and found a tin of tuna. He put some on a plate and placed it, with a dish of water, on the floor.
“Hope you like tuna.” He petted the cat one last time. “Goodnight, Cat.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Later, after Harry had petted the cat ‘goodnight’ and the lights in the bedroom finally went out, the cat stirred. It pawed briefly at the cushion before stretching elegantly.
But the stretch didn’t end. It stretched and stretched, shifting shape until a pale figure sat before the fire.
Draco sighed. Finally he’d found a sanctuary.
----
“Emmet” is a disparaging nickname that some Cornish people use to refer to the many tourists who visit Cornwall.
A “Moggie” (or moggy depending on the dictionary) is a name for a non-pedigree cat.
----