Handmaiden

Chapter One- Arrival

Wherever you go, there you are.
-Mike Brady

It was dark. Perhaps ridiculously so, as the shadowed figure who was hunched over a battered writing desk was obviously trying to read something. He raised his head momentarily as a tall, nervous lackey scuttled in. The lackey, let's call him Victor for the sake of a narrative, had to blink several times before deducing that his master was glaring at him with what seemed like ill disguised murder in his hooded eyes. Victor found himself wondering why all that was running through his mind right now was the theme music to 'From Russia With Love,' when imminent death was quite obviously on the line. He found this even more surprising when he realized that he hadn't actually seen 'From Russia with Love' in the first place.

"You're late," the seated figure said, abruptly but accurately. " One hour, 15 minutes, and 57 seconds late, to be quite precise."

"Yes, well, you see, sir..." Victor trailed off miserably, when he realized that he should stop trying to make excuses and start thinking of some memorable last words instead.

"And if you try to feed me some kind of crap about the lady at the archives, I will throttle you myself."

"But sir..." Shut up, mouth! Victor's brain was desperately pleading, as he considered the merits of calling now and ordering a nice granite tombstone. If there was anything left to bury.

"Come on now, boy. It didn't work the first hundred and eleven times, why the hell did you think it was going to work this time?" The man paused, then asked rhetorically, "Ah, but you don't think, do you?"

"Sir?"

"Never mind. You do have the papers, don't you?"

"Right he-" Victor attempted to gesture with his hand, shifting the weight of precariously balanced papers, causing them to topple to the floor in a heap. "Er, right there, sir."

"Idiot."

Victor scrambled about on hands and knees, desperately gathering the papers in the bottom of his robes. When he had shuffled them into a somewhat untidy pile in front of the seated man, he bowed and scurried quickly to a corner, one in which he hoped he would be inconspicuous.

The rather Sinister Gentlemen, poring over the stack of papers, spread them over the desk. More than nine years of back issues of the Daily Prophet met his eyes, each with the same headline:

Ministry of Magic Official Missing, Presumed Dead.

Victor sat in the corner, watching dismally as his master drew out a piece of parchment and a quill, and began to jot down notes. Probably some kind of execution order, he thought pessimistically, glancing down at his sweaty palms. Maybe I should start writing a will. With his course of action determined,Victor rummaged in his pockets and began the tricky business of deciding who should get his best set of Gobstones.

* * * *

With a resounding screech, the last train on the Northern Line pulled wearily up to Highgate Station and began the laborious process of opening its doors.

"Mind the gap, please, mind the gap," intoned the conductor as a solitary passenger debarked onto the decidedly dingy platform, hefting a rather large and unwieldy trunk. Picking her way delicately across the various drunks and hobos littering the steps, she at last emerged from the tube, only to be met by an extremely large gust of wind, which nearly sent her slight frame sliding back down the stairs again. Hitching up her jeans, pulling down her t-shirt and extracting a tattered map of London from her pocket, she assumed the air of a tourist definitely sure that they had in fact missed the flight to Barbados, but going to try and make the best of things anyway.

Several minutes later, battling against the wind, she attempted to refold the map, losing a good half of Greenwich in the process. This accomplished, she turned, surveyed her surroundings and set up resolutely along Jackson Lane.

* * * *

Harry Potter sat, perched on his window sill, staring up at the stars in a desperate attempt to seem both romantic and somewhere else. Each summer, he reasoned, seems to be competing for the worst summer of my life, and now, in retrospect, they've all lost. Thanks, in a large part, to a small slip of the tongue earlier in the summer, the Dursleys had unfortunately discovered that Sirius Black, though a convicted felon, was both innocent and on the run, which unfortunately for Harry left him unable to turn his Aunt, Uncle and Cousin into something small and slimy.

Left without even the slightest leverage over them, and Uncle Vernon's lingering disgust, Harry had once again been relegated to the position of house-elf for the Dursleys. No, he corrected himself. Sub-house-elf. At least they have Hermione pitching for them. Despite his frequent and frenzied attempts to get in touch with his friends and commiserate, his volumes of prose had met with nothing. Wondering for a brief second whether the Dursleys were stopping his mail, Harry once again felt himself overcome with a wave of hatred. If thoughts could kill, the Dursleys would be in an advanced state of rigor mortis by now. Instead, they remained soundly asleep, Dudley's piggish snores occasionally drifting in from the next room. Bitterly, Harry thought, When I'm legal...when I'm legal...

* * * *

Remus Lupin was abruptly shaken out of sleep by a persistent ringing. Rather disgruntled, as he had been happily walking through the gardens of slumber with some extremely buxom werewolves, he shrugged on his pink bunny slippers and wandered into his kitchen for a drink.

After three double shots of espresso, which left him twitching like the Energizer bunny, but no more awake, Remus hopped out to his hall to answer what he assumed must be the doorbell.

Upon opening the door, he found himself confronted with a small girl, looking up at him through masses of curly hair. Remus looked down at her. When a very pretty girl looks at you like that, he reasoned, you don't just ignore them. And yet, something about that face, that hair, seemed familiar. She shifted the hair out of her eyes with a peculiar toss of her head. With that, Remus' mental picture was complete. He began to swoon. Through rapidly decreasing vision, he saw the small lips mouth, "Moony?"

Remus barely found time to mutter, "Lily? My God..." before he fainted dead away on the steps.

The girl watched dispassionately as Remus collapsed in front of her. That seems to happen a lot, she thought, and turned away. Extricating a small notebook from somewhere about her person, she flipped to a page marked in scrawling script:

To do list:
-new jeans
-more cat food
-FIND HARRY POTTER

Underneath this last item was a list of addresses, most of them crossed out. She scanned the list for a moment, then glanced at the second to last address. No. 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.

* * * *

"Victor?" Several hours later, the man at the desk looked up expectantly. He stared expectantly. Directing his vision to the corner where Victor was slumped over a receipt from Madam Malakin's, with the words My Last Will and Testament scrawled across it, he glared expectantly. Even in sleep, that was not a glare you mess with. Victor started.

"Custard Pies!" he cried, whacking a wall sconce as his arm shot up above his head. "Uh...huh...whuh?" Victor opened his eyes a crack and looked dazed. This was only emphasized as minutes later the sconce came crashing down on his head.

"For God's sake, man," groaned the seated gentlemen, "act your age! Stand up and wipe your mouth. You appear to have been drooling." Victor, looking more confused, but not at all abashed, complied.

"Now then, Victor," the man began. Victor, beginning to realize that his participation was somewhat required, saluted. "Do you see these clippings?" He gestured towards the Daily Prophet.

"Y-yesh, shir," Victor replied, slightly cross-eyed.

"Well thank heaven for small miracles. Do you see this?" He brandished a small scrap of parchment with a sketch on it.

"Yesh."

"Do you know this person?"

"No, shir."

"Well you will. Listen closely. I don't care how long it takes, I don't care how you do it, I don't care how many men die, I want this person here, dead or alive!"

"Yesh, shir. Right away, shir." Victor stumbled out of the room, crashed into the posts and grinned foolishly. "Thish will be an en...enour...emourmoush honor, shir." He saluted again, unsteadily, and preceded to weave his unsteady way down the hall. The man sighed and buried his head in his hands.

* * * *

Remus groaned and stirred groggily. A face shifted into view above him, a worried frown barely distinguishable through the misty haze that was his vision. "Mummy?" he whispered, forgetting for a moment that he was 35 years old, lived on his own and hated his mother.

"Sorry, guv," said an indistinguishable but decidedly male voice. "I'm just Bertie, and I've been your milkman for the past seven years."

"Ah," Remus muttered, pretending a greater deal of understanding then his brain was actually capable of at the moment. As he gradually adjusted to his environs, he discovered that he was, in fact, sprawled across his doorway, with his feet on the boot scraper and one of his arms in the mail slot.

"Rough night, mate?" asked the milkman, as he conveniently placed the six pints of skim exactly where they would be most inconvenient if Remus ever thought of getting up.

* * * *

It was eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning, in the middle of July. The weather, as it had been for most of the summer, was swelteringly hot. The sun beat down on No. 4 Privet Drive as if there was no tomorrow. Indeed, most of the neighbors reasoned, if the heat continued there probably WOULD be no tomorrow. Thus, the entire street was celebrating the end of its days in a decidedly straitlaced, English suburban way. Dudley had reacted to this news with great glee. As he couldn't go outside for danger of "Poor Duddydiddums getting sunstroke," as Aunt Petunia put it, he had attached himself firmly to the kitchen table and proceeded to eat his way out of house and home, to coin a cliché.

"More toast, Duddy-poo?" Aunt Petunia simpered, bustling around the kitchen in what was intended to be a vaguely comforting way. With her large summer smock, and hair scooped up out of the way of her neck, she looked more than slightly like a greyhound with mange. Dudley shoveled all the toast off the plate and into his large mouth when he paused. From the front of the house, a long persistent ring came, as though someone had taped their finger to the doorbell. With a muttered "no respect," Aunt Petunia bustled off to answer it.

Outside on the front steps stood a girl. Small and skinny, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans that had seen better decades, she sported a brilliant crop of long red hair and glittering green eyes. Aunt Petunia narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Some thing about that face was very familiar, and decidedly unwelcome.

"What do you want?" she asked, wondering how quickly she could get rid of this rather unwelcome distraction.

"I'm looking for Harry Potter," the girl said pleasantly. Petunia blanched visibly.

"Who are you?" she asked, almost snarling, bearing direct resemblance to a rabid dog.

"I'm Lily Potter."

Aunt Petunia screamed and fainted. Aroused by the scream, the until recently convalescent Uncle Vernon let out a bull roar and charged towards the door. Unlike Petunia, he had absolutely no trouble recognizing their unwelcome visitor.

"YOU!" he yelled, his face beet red. "Get out! Leave us! WE DON'T WANT ANY POTTER GHOSTS AROUND HERE!" With that, he slammed the door inches from Lily's rather quizzical face. She stood on the front lawn, completely poleaxed for ten minutes, staring stonyfaced at the door. At long last she stepped back and clenched her fists so tightly the knuckles shone white.

"That was rude," she said quietly and turned away. Hearing an explosion behind her, she spun around just in time to see all the shingles on the Dursley's roof fly off.

Harry, sitting in his room, bemoaning his sad and sorry fate to a very obliging pillow, heard the noise. Glancing out of his window, he saw the shingles littering the lawn and a somewhat familiar looking redhead retreating down the road. Shaking his head, he turned away from the window, only to be met with a resounding, "HARRY JAMES POTTER!" Harry saw his summer flash before his eyes. With a last despairing look out the window, he began to descend the Dursley's stairs, dragging his feet all the way.

"Bugger," he muttered.

* * * *

Ron Weasley was having a crap summer. Although, to be perfectly fair, he was hardly the only one. Early in the summer, practically as soon as they had stepped off the Hogwarts Express and unpacked their trunks, Fred and George had enlisted (*coughblackmailedcough*) his help to peddle their new batch of Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes door to door in London, under the pretense of visiting their Aunt Virginia. In reality, they had barely made it five feet down the path outside of their own door when Mrs. Weasley's powerful summoning charm had hauled all three of them back into her kitchen, and up past their necks in boiling water. As Mrs. Weasley had succinctly phrased it, "You are grounded until you die, and even then you are not allowed out of your coffin without asking my permission first. Is that quite clear?"

Much as Ron had wanted to reply to the memoir's worth of letters that Harry had sent him, Mrs. Weasley kept very close tabs on their mail, and made sure that they spent every waking hour either degnoming the garden, scouring cauldrons, sorting out the ghoul in the attic or any one of a thousand other "little jobs" that she found for them to do every day. So here he was, on a lovely July evening, with no friends available, and stuck in his room to boot. Wit one of his rare flashes of brilliance, Ron drew out his wand, one of the very few items he was still allowed to keep about his person, the others being his clothes. "Escribo," he whispered, drawing characters in the air with his wand. Dear Harry, he began. . .

* * * *

At twelve o'clock in Surrey, Harry was jolted out of a very deep sleep by an eerie green glow by his bedside. Having been an inhabitant of the wizarding world for nearly six years now, Harry should properly have been used to strange glow-y things appearing without notice, but they still managed to startle him out of sleep. To his great surprise, pale green and slightly luminous words appeared to be hanging in the air next to his bedside table. "Dear Lord," he muttered somewhat belatedly, and groped for his glasses. When the words finally shifted into focus, he noticed Ron's shaky scrawl.

Dear Harry,

the letter read,

Sorry I haven't written. Do you want to save my life? Please reply.

Ron

P.S. Use 'Escribo'.

Rather puzzled by this brief message, but nevertheless delighted to finally hear from his friend, Harry crossed the room to remove his wand from where it was hidden underneath the loose floorboard the Dursleys still hadn't discovered. "Escribo," he whispered, and proceeded to compose a reply to Ron's cryptic letter.

* * * *

Sirius Black, munching on a takeaway curry over his dimly lit kitchen table, considered the benefits of being a criminal on the run. The list was short. There were none. As he couldn't risk being discovered by the Ministry of Magic, he had been forced to take a flat in the seediest, grungiest part of Muggle London. Living under the alias of Brian Woodsworth, the only consolation he had was that at least nobody could find him. Then the doorbell rang.

For a moment, his eyes took on the terrified cast of the criminal he had been. Then he remembered that Brian Woodsworth had absolutely nothing to be afraid of. It was probably just the milkman or something. Then he remembered that milkmen don't come at one o'clock in the morning.

Opening the door warily, he saw an all too familiar face. The face of someone he hadn't seen in fifteen years. The face of someone he had once loved.

"Sirius?" the girl whispered, her lips cracked, her cheeks grimy and sunken as if she hadn't eaten properly in weeks. As if she was on the run too. She looked as if she were about to collapse.

"Oh, God, come in, quickly. Explanations later." Sirius threw the door open. True to form, the girl collapsed into his ams. He embraced her tightly, slamming the door shut with his foot.

"Padfoot?" the girl muttered, her face crushed against his black T-shirt. "I've found you at last."

* * * *

Ron, who had been waiting all night for Harry's reply, started with expectation when the words finally appeared in front of him. The reply, however, was somewhat less than he had expected. In front of him, glowing faintly and quivering slightly in the night breeze, Harry's fine copperplate simply read:

What the hell?

With a tremendous sigh that jolted George out of sleep in the next room, Ron pointed his wand to his throat with an expression of infinite patience, and uttered, "Voco Harrii."

* * * *

Sitting alone in his study, absentmindedly sipping a cup of tea and fiddling with a quill in an offhand way, Remus Lupin was deeply engaged in thought. Despite a whole wastepaper basket full of attempts, and almost two days of trying, he still had not found a satisfactory way to convey the actions of the past day to his best friend.

Dear Padfoot, he wrote,

You're not going to believe what just happened...

* * * *

Seated on a rather comfortable armchair, with parchment spread out in front of him, Sirius mused. Sucking on the end of his eagle feather quill, he barely heard the girl creep up behind him. She perched on the arm of the chair and peered over his shoulder.

"What are you writing?" she asked abruptly. Sirius, with whom her presence had barely registered, started.

"Jesus Christ!" he yelled. "Give me some warning when you do that!"

"Right then. Next time I try and talk to you I'll be sure to announce it with a fanfare of trumpets, 'kay?"

"Very droll," Sirius muttered. "You know you've posed quite a problem for me."

"Um?"

"I'm a criminal on the run, you know that right?"

"Oh no," she said, rolling her eyes. "I just assumed that you had a fake alias and lived here for the fun of it."

Sirius snorted, and gave her a friendly shove. As he was about a foot bigger than her, and much stronger, she toppled off the chair and she landed in a somewhat undignified heap on the ground. Sirius glanced gloomily at the letter for a minute, then turned to glance at her. "This is never going to work," he said dismally.

* * * *

"Harry Potter...Earth to Harry Potter..." Harry glanced around the room as the disembodied voice of Ron echoed.

"Ron? Ron Weasley?"

"No, I'm Rachmaninoff, but thank you for inquiring anyway. Of course its Ron you great wet prat!"

Harry glanced around, just as confused and now equally as insulted. "Oh sod off," he muttered rebelliously. When he heard Ron's intake of breath that invariably meant Ron was about to say something that he thought was incredibly witty, Harry began again. "No, wait, tell me what's going on! Is this a spell or something?"

"No, Harry," a voice drifted back that sounded suspiciously like George Weasley. "This is merely a product of your feverishly delusional brain, a result of the enormous unrequited love that you feel for your best friend. Said love being unrequited, you have begun to make up delusional fantasies in which you have fictional conversations with said attraction."

"Shut up Weasley, or so help me I will transfigure you into a hamster."

"You can't, Harry. Or was the reason you failed Transfiguration not because your dust bunny dissolved in a puff of green smoke, but instead because of the fact that you-"

"If you finish that sentence, George Weasley, I will-" Now a disembodied voice that sounded a lot like Ginny broke in. If this is a dream, thought Harry, it deserves several Oscars for best supporting roles.

"Ron?" he asked, "does your family habitually sit in on your phone calls?"

"What's a phone call?" came the unanimous cry from the other end. Harry thought he could hear Bill and Charlie in the back as well.

"Never mind. What's this all about then?"

"Harry," Fred intoned solemnly, "we are busting you out, so to speak."

"Again? And I thought your father confiscated the Ford?"

"Well," Ron said, sounding somewhat sheepish, "he did. But Fred charmed a moped last year for extra credit, didn't help him pass of course, but it works quite nicely."

"Um-hm. And when are you coming?"

"Hello, Harry!" came a chorus from outside his window. All the Weasley children, sans Percy, seemed to be hanging off a flying moped slightly larger than Harry's school trunk. With a cheery wave Fred and George climbed through Harry's window, grabbed his school trunk and Hedwig, and pulled him out after them. Balanced rather precariously on the end of the moped, and rather grudgingly being forced to cling to Ginny's waist, Harry felt himself jerked up and forward, and suddenly realized that he was flying through the sky.

* * * *

"Morning, Harry," Mrs. Weasley said pleasantly, scooping more fried eggs on his plate then Harry had seen at one time before. She had been unusually nice to him, considering he was the reason that Ron's and the twins' punishments had been prematurely drawn to a close. However, as she made her way around the table, Harry noticed her giving Fred and George several very nasty glances.

"Morning, dear," Mr. Weasley pecked his wife on the cheek as he made his way over to his seat. "Letter for you, Harry," he said, tossing him a parchment, "just came by owl this morning."

Harry snatched at the parchment, and ripped open the seal with eager fingers. He immediately recognized Sirius' handwriting.

"Whose it from then?" asked Ron, leaning across the table.

"Sirius," whispered Harry under his breath. The Weasleys, like most wizard families, still considered Black to be an extremely dangerous criminal. Harry had never bothered to explain otherwise. He glanced down and scanned the sheet.

Dear Harry,

How goes your summer? I hear that the Weasley boys broke you out again. I am living in Muggle London now, under the name of Woodsworth. Don't try and visit me. You won't like it. Hell, I don't even like it. I would like to see you before you go back to Hogwarts, though. Do you think you can meet me outside the Leaky Cauldron on Wednesday the 28th? There's someone I want you to meet.

Sirius

"Give it here, then," Ron said, gesturing at the letter. He read it quickly. "The twenty-- eighth, hm? That's today. Mum was going to take us shopping today anyway. We can meet up with him there."

Harry nodded, his mouth full of toast.

"Whose this someone he wants you to meet, Harry?"

"I dunno," Harry said, shrugging eloquently, "probably another tarty girlfriend."

"You WHAT?" George asked, butting in.

"George, never interrupt anyone's conversations without hearing the whole thing first," Ginny said. "So what were you guys talking about?"

Harry groaned, and was about to do something that may have resulted in mass murder when Mrs. Weasley suddenly announced, "time to go, kids!"

As Ron, Ginny, Harry and the twins filed to get their Floo Powder, Mrs. Weasley rounded on Fred and George. "And exactly what are you two doing?"

"Well, mum," Fred began, "do you remember when we didn't pass?"

"Yes, but I thought Dumbledore offered you a makeup summer course?"

"Well," George continued, "D'you remember when we didn't go?"

With a sigh that shook the house to its foundations, Mrs. Weasley rolled her eyes, and raised her arms to the heavens. "Honestly, you two, you are IMPOSSIBLE!"

Fred grinned and climbed into the fireplace.

* * * *

The Leaky Cauldron, was as always, bustling. Harry emerged, dusting off his robes, from the fireplace, and wandered slowly outside. He scanned the hoards of Hogwarts children, desperately trying to finish their homework before the term started again. No Sirius. He glanced at the dozens of witches and wizards crowded into the Leaky Cauldron, desperate for an iced pumpkin juice on this sweltering day. No Sirius. Harry was beginning to get impatient when a hand reached out, grabbed his arm and pulled him back into the shadows.

"Sirius!" Harry exclaimed with delight, hugging his godfather tightly.

"Shhh," Sirius whispered, throwing his hand over Harry's mouth. "I'm still a wanted criminal, remember?" He released Harry. "Its great to see you though," he added as an afterthought.

"So where's your fancy bit then, eh?" Harry asked, grinning impishly.

"Cheek!" Sirius exclaimed, swatting him playfully about the head, "she's not going to like that!"

"Hello, Harry," came a calm, distinctly female voice, from behind them. Harry started, and Sirius looked somewhat abashed. "I've been looking for you."

Harry spun. He stared. He gaped. "YOU!" he exclaimed.