Harry Potter: A Tale of Revenge

Sue Ruthson was a short plump woman who loved the outdoors in principle, but preferred the comforts of the tearoom in practise. She flipped the sign on the door to the office from closed to open and turned to man—or in her case, woman—the reception.

"Excuse me," said a child's voice behind her. She turned and beheld a small skinny boy in baggy clothes with a mop of unruly black hair and piercing green eyes behind sellotaped glasses. They seemed to stare straight into her soul and force her to reexamine all her hopes, dreams, and fears.

"Y-yes, dearie?" she asked, looking around for the lad's parents. They were no-where to be seen. Probably let him run ahead of them.

"Is this the Royal Forestry Society?"

"Yes, it is, where are you parents dear?"

"Oh, they're around. I'm doing a school project and they said I could ask some questions for it. I'm interested in really old trees." He smiled a smile that screamed future-heartbreaker.

"Well dear. Why don't you just take a seat here and I'll get you something?"

The lad beamed. "Thank you Mrs…?"

"Ruthson dear."

"Thank you, Mrs. Ruthson."

This was one polite kid. "Any particular types of tree you're interested in?" she asked, probing the boy's knowledge while fishing in a filing cabinet behind her desk.

"Um… Yew? They're supposed to be really old, right?"

"They are. Yew trees are among some of the oldest in the country." She found what she was looking for and handed it to the boy. "Is that enough information?" she asked.

The boy flipped through the glossy paged brochure before stopping at one particular page. "Oh, yes, Mrs. Ruthson. Thank you! I need to get back to my Mum and Dad now — they're waiting for me."

"Not to worry dear, happy to help."

The boy left the office and Sue smiled. What a nice young man.

...

Alan and Jennifer stumbled into their hotel room from a night of holiday filled excitement and romance when Jennifer noticed something was wrong.

"Alan," she said, sounding worried.

"Yeah, Baby?"

"I can't find my wallet."

"Seriously? Where did you last have it?"

"It was in my pocket. But it's not there anymore."

"I'll check the bags."

"Oh no… oh shit! shit!" She threw up her hands. "My cards were in there!"

"Jen, don't panic, its probably in here." But his search was proving fruitless.

"What if someone uses them! Oh shit! shit!."

"Jen! Calm down! We'll just call up the company and get them to freeze them!"

"Oh shit, shit, there was like a hundred pounds in there, that's like what, 150 dollars? Shit! Shit! …Well!?"

Alan had stopped searching the bags.

"Yeah, it's gone."

"SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!"

Several blocks away, Harry inspected his catch in the privacy of a public toilet. It was a rule of life as far as he was concerned. If you were a wizard and didn't charm your money pouch to be non-summonable, you were an idiot.

And if you were a muggle tourist and didn't attach your wallet or purse to your person, or keep it deep in your bag, you were an idiot. Better he snagged it than some less deserving cut purse.

He finished counting out 107 British Pounds and smiled… Breakfast time.

...

Harry spent a relaxing day eating and practising his occlumency in various hotel lobbies around London. The great thing about hotels was that the staff didn't ask too many questions about kids on their own in lobbies. It was assumed the parents or guardians were around and had dumped them there with instructions to wait. If people had started getting too nosy, plan B had been some tiny village teashop in the middle of nowhere.

The sun was going down and it was time to hit his first target.

He paid for his final drink, left the building, turned down an alley, disappeared with a loud crack, and reappeared in a field on the flood banks of the River Thames. The ground was boggy and Harry had to struggle for his footing on every step before he smacked his head in frustration, and remembered he could fly.

Hovering a half-inch from the ground, and making every attempt not to be seen doing so, he flittered from bush to bush in the rapidly failing light of the British summer.

Ahead, he spied the distinct, majestic outline of his intended — The Ankerwycke Yew.

This tree was ancient. Not the oldest in the country by any measure, but at over two thousand years old, it had been around well before the Peverell brothers played their games with Death. The tree was steeped in myth and legend.

It was here that the Magna Carta had been signed, forever breaking the absolute right of the King to rule, which included the magical population, and included passages, now invisible to muggles, granting the magical community autonomy from the muggle government.

It was said that under this tree, the muggle king Henry VIII, had started his illicit affair with his future wife, Anne Boleyn, resulting in the split between the churches of Rome and England, and the end of the witch hunts in Britain.

It was perfect.

Harry drank in its beauty, hungry for the potent combined symbol of freedom, death, resurrection, and unofficial polygamy. He could feel the magic radiating from it, even from back here.

He pushed forward and suddenly felt something sweep over him — something subtle, but very definitely noticeable to one trained to sense the flows of magic. His breath hitched. He'd just tripped a detection ward. Dammit! Too late, he realised most of the magic hadn't been coming from the tree, but from the wards around it.

He ducked behind a nearby bush and waited. Who'd go through the bother of putting wards around a tree?

Crack! A figure in a dark robe appeared around the trunk of the tree, wand out and alert. Even at the distance he was hiding, the figure was recognisable. It was Mr. Ollivander.

Oh, damn.

"I know you're there!" Mr. Ollivander called, "I want to know why."

Harry struggled to rip his shirt off and tie it around his head to hide his face, hair, and, most importantly, scar. The eyes might give him away, but there wasn't much he could do about that.

"If you don't come out, I'll just come to you," the old wand maker continued. "Homenum Revelio!"

Merlin damn homenum revelio! Screw it. There was nothing to do but make a break for it.

Crack! Harry appeared in a field some fifty miles away and turned.

Crack! His pursuer appeared right behind him.

Crack! And he disapparated again, appearing in an empty city street at a dead run.

Crack! A red stunner passed mere inches from the back of his head before he turned a corner, out of sight, and immediately shot up, towards the moon, over the edge of a rooftop, and away over the city skyline.

Crack! The silence lasted only a moment before a quickly fading and frustrated voice shouted, "Homenum Revelio!"

Please, please, please, let him be out of range. Harry ducked behind the massive chimney of a huge industrial building and quickly accelerated right to the top before disapparating with a final, definite, Crack!

There! After several more cracks, he appeared in the graveyard of a small village in Devon. Let the creepy bastard follow me up there!

He stumbled over to a bench and plopped down on it with an audible, "phew."

His breath started to slow, but his pulse was still going at a mile a minute, his adrenal glands still pumping concentrated 'fight-or-flight' into his small body.

He was an utter idiot. Why hadn't he spotted the very obvious fact that the perfect candidate for a yew wand tree in the country would already be 'taken' by another wand maker?

He could only hope to Merlin that the old man had neither spotted him flying, nor been alerted to his aerial presence by his last homenum revelio. He wanted to keep every advantage he had secret, and if an identifying skill became public knowledge, he couldn't use it and remain anonymous. Flying was definitely an identifying skill. Only he and Voldy could do it, after all.

Harry sighed. All in all it could have gone worse. With luck, the only thing Ollivander would have learned about the wizard sneaking around was that they were very short for a wizard who — because of their ability to apparate — should be in their late teens, at least.

Oh… He might also have spotted him apparating without a wand… bugger.

And since Ollivander could detect him with homenum revelio, he'd be forced to conclude I was a very short, and very powerful, humanoid. I suppose it might be more credible to suspect a metamorphmagus rather than a child… or possibly a half-breed like Flitwick… or someone under the effects of polyjuice… okay, so there were actually lots of possible ways to explain him away.

Harry stood back up and dusted himself off. The night was still young and he still had a list of other trees he could hit. There was a loud crack, which echoed around the church stonework, and Harry Potter was gone.

.......

A/N

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