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Chapter 5 - Departure

The plan was basic enough, though it would involve him withstanding the pain afflicting him and his body's overall weakness. There was no other option, however - or no other option that Harry was willing to submit to, at the very least. As far as he was concerned, a little pain was worth avoiding unnecessary risks, and sticking around and risking being shipped off to St. Mungo's was the absolute definition of unnecessary risk in his book.

"You can't just run off," James said in protest, as he tracked Harry's movements about the room with sharp, hazel eyes from where he stood leaning against the edge of his son's writing desk, his arms folded over his chest.

"I get that you don't trust me, James, and you have every reason not to. I'm but a stranger to you, and you're but a stranger to me,"Harry said, as he added a pair of toffee colored, corduroy pants from his counterpart's wardrobe to the rucksack that he had been packing. "However, you need to trust me in this. They will try to break your resolve. When that doesn't work, they will plot to go behind your back, in order to do what they believe is best for your son. I could see it in their eyes. Every one of them is set on shipping me off to St. Mungo's. The only thing you'll achieve by going down there and trying to convince them of the truth is cause unnecessary strife between you and them."

"You're not well," James argued once more, a point the man had been attempting to argue for the last fifteen minutes.

"I've lived through worse." Harry looked over his shoulder at the man. "I've fought and survived a war. A little bit of pain and few days on my own, while I figure this out, is nothing compared to all that I've experienced. I may not be entirely well, but I'm well enough for this. Ipromise."

"I should come with you," James suggested for a third time.

Harry shook his head and went back to packing. "You said it yourself: you're not keyed into the wards protecting Grimmauld Place."

"Should I find it disturbing that you are and are apparently very familiar with the Black Library?" James asked, his eyes narrowing and brow drawing tight with consternation.

"If I were your son and had been raised as a Potter ought to be raised, yes, you probably should." Harry gave the man a sardonic look. "Seeing as I'm not your son and was raised with little knowledge of my heritage and have lived a majority of my life in a hostile environment, you should just be happy that I have turned out as well as I have."

Silence reigned between Harry and James, as Harry finished packing a change of clothes into the rucksack and moved on to packing a few other items that he thought might be useful to him.

"You're certain that the wards will recognize that you've been keyed into them back in your world?" James asked dubiously, as he stepped aside to allow Harry better access to the desk.

"You don't know much about the nature of magic in regards to the soul, do you?" Harry asked, while pulling open the left hand drawer and removing an unused, leather bound journal that he had located earlier. He plucked up a sealed pot of ink and a few fresh quills from one of the upper compartments of the desk.

"No, I don't," James admitted, his hazel eyes continuing to track Harry's every move.

Harry hummed and began riffling through the back, right hand drawer of the desk, looking for the chalk that he had found during his previous search. "I don't have time to explain in detail the relationship between one's magic and one's soul or the link between one's memories, one's magic, and one's soul. It's all very complex and the dependency correlations get a bit messy. The gist of it, though, is that wherever the soul goes, one's magic and memories follow...to an extent. After all, the creation of a horcrux divides the soul, which divides the memories and magic...and, well, it all really does get fairly complicated, especially if one creates more than one horcrux. Giving up too many memories or too much of one's innate magic...the results -"

"Woah! Hold up a minute," James interrupted Harry's tirade. The man's horror showed plainly on his face. "Horcrux? Dividing the soul? Just what in Merlin's name are you on about?"

Harry froze in his movements, blinked, looked up at James, and blinked again. He was so used to the people around him knowing what a horcrux was and that Voldemort, specifically, had created seven of the blasted things that he hadn't even thought to censor himself. Curse it all! he thought irritably, reminded by the man's ignorance that in this timeline the world had yet to face Voldemort's second rise to power. Though, if events surrounding the upcoming Triwizard Tournament in this world went anything like the events that had surrounded the Triwizard Tournament in his world, James and the others would be faced, once more, with a very immortal dark lord very soon.

"Well?" James demanded with impatience.

"Do we really have to do this right now?" Harry asked just as impatiently. He did not have time at the moment to discuss just how depraved Voldemort truly was, and if he didn't have time, then James didn't have time for it either, even if a long winded discussion about Voldemort's horcruxes would ultimately prove beneficial to this world's future. As it was, he needed to leave, before someone came up to check on them. "We're already cutting things close as it is." Every second that he stayed was one more second closer to discovery.

Conflict waged in James's eyes, as the man warred with himself between pursuing the subject further and allowing Harry to get on with his packing, which would ultimately contribute to his true son being returned to him sooner rather than later. "What you were talking about..." James trailed off. "Porteur, how do you know all that? Why do you know that?"

"The war," Harry stated plainly, as if those two words answered everything. In his mind, they did. The war against Voldemort was his life, had affected every aspect of his evolution as a human being. There was little, if anything at all that had occurred in life that couldn't be traced back to those two words.

"Knowing about dividing the soul...is important to...the war?"James asked stoically, his words careful and weighed, as if he were measuring the meaning of each one.

"There are some things that you should know," Harry conceded, as he secured the items that he had collected from the writing desk within the already partially packed rucksack. "Not just you, but the Order of the Phoenix as well," he clarified and turned on his heel to head back over to the wardrobe to retrieve a muggle jacket and trainers. As he did so, he ignored the circumspect way that James was watching him. "I'll be sure to write down what Ideem is important, before I leave. If you and yours act quickly enough on the information, you may just prevent this world from suffering a similar fate to my own."

"Our worlds are that similar?" James asked, looking troubled by the very thought.

As well as he should be, Harry thought regrettably, but instead shrugged and moved to sit on his counterpart's bed, so that he would have an easier time of pulling on and lacing up the trainers. "I can't be certain without actually looking into your world's history and attempting to compare it to my own, but from what you said about Voldemort being inactive and how his demise came about...it appears that our worlds are similar enough that some of what I know might be useful."

As Harry bent down to secure the trainers on his feet, pain thrummed through his body. The pain was nowhere near as intense as it had been after his earlier altercation with James, despite how much he'd been moving around in the last few minutes. He wasn't entirely sure if that was a good thing. In fact, he was almost entirely certain that the decrease of pain was a bad thing. Mayra had said that it was as if his magic was burning upon itself. Less pain meant less burning, which meant that his magic was settling. If his magic was settling, that meant that his soul was settling within its new environment as well, which wasn't good - wasn't good at all. If his soul found a home within his counterpart's body, his efforts to reverse whatever had happened to him and Harry would be met with greater resistance.

"Something wrong?" James asked, his keen eyes observing Harry's subtle change in mood.

Harry looked up from looping the laces of the trainer encasing his left foot. James stared back at him, the man's face unreadable, despite the man's stance being restrained and tensed with concern. He sees his son sitting here, yet knows by my mannerisms alone that the person occupying this body is not his son. He couldn't even begin to imagine how difficult that had to be for the father. The only thing that he could even think of that would even give him any sort of perspective on just how strange and upsetting that had to be for James was his experience with polyjuiced spies attempting to infiltrate his ranks and get close to him by using familiar faces that he knew and trusted. Unlike polyjuice, however, his appearance wouldn't revert to its original form after an hour's time. In fact, he had been in James's presence for over an hour now; a time-lapse that the man had most likely noted even in spite of the man's conviction regarding his origins.

Standing, Harry held James's unwavering gaze. "You're asmart man, Mr. Potter."

James raised a quizzical eyebrow.

"Don't do anything stupid," Harry said, giving the man agrave look that he usually reserved for the most dire of situations. "I'll do everything in my power to bring your son back to you. You have my word on that."

"If I don't hear from you in two days -" James began.

"You will," Harry stated firmly.

"I don't like this," James reiterated his initial take on Harry's proposed plan.

"Noted," Harry said and pulled on the bomber jacket that he'd taken from his counterpart's wardrobe. Definitely a gift from Sirius, he decided, as he zipped up the worn leather. Slinging the rucksack over his shoulder, he cast a glance around the room. "Where does Harry keep his wand?"

James pointed to an empty expanse of floor near the center of the room.

Harry walked over to the area, paying close attention to the way that the floorboards behaved under his weight. It didn't take him more than a few seconds to locate the one that was loose. He bent down and pried the floorboard up, revealing a secret stash of his counterpart's things. There were a few scrolls of parchment, a folded photo, an antique pocket watch, and a 10 1/4" ash wand. Harry sighed, as he picked up the wand. Ash wands were notorious for being loyal to their original owners and refusing to work properly for anyone else who attempted to use them.

Upon replacing the floorboard, Harry stood back up. He examined his counterpart's wand for an extended moment, before turning to the scattered books by the bedside table that had been toppled over during his altercation with James. Giving the wand a flick, the books obeyed his command and neatly restacked themselves on the bedside table. While the wand was workable, he had felt a twinge of resistance. Not great, but it will due, he thought, resigning himself to the wand. It most definitely wasn't a proper match, but a wand was a wand. He had learned that right quick, after Ollivander had gone missing and his wand had been shattered in battle.

"So, do you want me to actually stun you, or can you pull off the act without the realism?" Harry asked, turning back to James, who was still hovering by the writing desk, and stowing his counterpart's wand up the sleeve of the bomber jacket.

"I can do without the realism," James said stiffly.

Harry smirked at getting the response that he had expected."Suit yourself."

Under James's ever watchful gaze, Harry crossed the room over to the lone window in the room that overlooked the front garden and the street beyond. He unhooked the polished latch and pushed the left pane outward, opening the window. Using the sofa below the window to assist him, he climbed onto the window's ledge, straddling the sill with one leg dangling outside the house and the other still braced against the sofa. Looking out the window and down towards the ground a full story below, he assessed the quickest and safest route down.

"Do you climb out second story windows often?" James asked, sounding a bit closer than he had before.

Harry pulled his head back inside and looked to James, who had taken several steps towards him. "Not even six months ago I scaled Hogwarts's Astronomy Tower in the dead of night. A twelve foot drop in broad daylight with plenty of hand and foot holds is nothing compared to that."

"What were you - never mind, I don't want to know." James motioned for Harry to carry on with what he was doing.

"I wouldn't have told you anyways." Harry grinned, before easing himself out of the window, while being careful not to snag the rucksack on the window frame. Using all the strength and experience that he had, he began his descent. The old wattle and daub cottage provided ideal hand and foot holds. He braced one hand on the window frame, as he reached out for the closest vertical timber and inched his way along the horizontal timber marking the beginning of the second story. Once he had a hold on the vertical timber, his descent became very straight forward and a simple matter of keeping his grip. In less than a minute, he was standing on a firm patch of earth below the window.

Harry spared one glance back up to the window and nodded in silent farewell to James, before turning on the spot and heading for the garden gate with a scowl marring his face. His climb down had cost him. His entire body was aching once more, acidic pain burning in his veins and sizzling his nerves. Ever present pain or not, however, he didn't have time to stick around. He needed to put as much distance between him and the Potters' cottage as quickly as was possible, before it was discovered by the others that he had gone. Employing controlled breathing and Occlumency against the pain afflicting him, he pushed himself forward. At any rate, he had lived through worse.

Past the garden gate, Harry turned right, making his way towards the center of the village. With each step that he took and each observation that he made, as he took in his surroundings, the fact that he was no longer within the same time and space of existence that he had come to know over the last 23 years of his life was made indisputably clear.

The last time that Harry had walked the streets of Godric's Hollow, the entire village had been nothing but rubble and ash. The pungent smell of burnt flesh and the overpowering stench of death had punctuated the hot autumn air with such intensity that he had lost his measly breakfast, only to continue to empty his stomach well past there having been nothing left to sick up. The sour rot had lingered on his skin, in his hair, embed within his taste buds, and up his nose for days afterwards, as did the images of decayed bodies of blackened flesh and the mass graves that they had dug to bury the dead linger on his conscience. Though it hadn't been the first time that he had come across a burnt corpse, the shear depravity of an entire village having been leveled had disturbed him greatly. He could still feel the skinless, charcoaled bodies that he had helped pull from the destruction pressed against his own body of flesh and life, if he allowed the memory to claim him fully. The only positive had been that the village had appeared to have been hit with Devil's Fire, which meant that the residents hadn't suffered long. It would have been over and done with within a matter of seconds. Most had probably passed on before they had even registered that they and their entire village were burning alive.

Shaking himself from the better left forgotten memory, Harry forced himself to focus on the present and took in a large pulled of crisp morning air. The fresh, country scent that invaded his nose and, subsequently, filled his lungs pushed the last vestiges of the memory away. With his sense on high alert, he moved up the lane at a steady pace. He had far too much to worry about without fretting over the existence of buildings and people that ought to have been long gone in accordance to the world that he knew as his own.

Your mission is clear, Harry reminded himself firmly.Do what needs to be done. Nothing else matters. It's all temporary - a dream outside of a dream.