Chapter 6

“And how do we do that?” asked Ron. “Just ring him up? We don’t even have his number.”

“Yes we do.” Ginny held up a business card. “I swiped this. It has his phone number on it.”

“I think that talking to them might be a good next step,” said Hermione, “but I want to learn a little more, first. We should be getting the report from the Home Office on Alexander Harris and Dawn Summers soon.”

As far as Dawn and Xander could tell, there was nothing missing from their apartment. They thought that a couple of items might have been moved, but they couldn’t even be sure about that. Dawn’s examination of the computer activity logs didn’t show any attempts to access it, only that it had been awakened just a couple of minutes after the apartment alarm had gone off. Willow had called while they were still searching, to report the success of her shopping trip to Diagon Alley, and been told to meet them at the flat.

When she and Kennedy arrived in the apartment, Willow took the heavy bag that Kennedy was carrying and started pulling books from it. “We’ve got this one: The Boy Who Lived: An Unauthorized Autobiography by Rita Skeeter.”

Dawn took the volume, and looked at the moving picture on the cover. It showed a spectacularly bad fashion disaster of a woman with curly blonde hair, in green robes and rhinestone glasses, who kept dragging a boy, a younger version of what Xander now looked like, back onto the cover from which he seemed to be trying to escape. “Unauthorized Autobiography? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“Yeah,” said Willow. “From what Neville said, we should take everything that Skeeter writes with a very large grain of salt. I talked a bit with the bookshop owner, and he agreed with Neville, but the book is a best seller. He recommended this one: The Rise and Fall of Lord V— by Hermione Granger.”

“Who’s Neville?” asked Buffy.

“He’s a guy we met; showed us around a bit. He seemed nice enough. He said he was a friend of this Harry Potter’s,” said Kennedy.

“And who, or what, is a Lord V—?” asked Xander.

“Lord Voldemort,” said Willow. “An evil wizard who was making a major nuisance of himself a few years ago. From what I’ve read, these people have a very hard time saying his name. It doesn’t appear at all in Skeeter’s book, she calls him things like ‘You-Know-Who,’ and ‘He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,’ but Granger is quite free with it, inside her book. It’s only on the cover that they put a sticker over it. The Flourish and Blotts manager told me that Granger’s prose is a lot less florid than Skeeter’s, and her factual content is much higher.” Willow flipped through the pages of Granger’s book. “I’ve skimmed both of them, and even without knowing anything else about this, I think I have to agree with him. Skeeter tends to rely mostly on unsubstantiated gossip, but Granger’s book is full of footnotes, and references. She might be a bit biased though, since she was one of Potter’s best friends through school, and from what I’ve read, still is.

“The upshot is that Harry Potter was instrumental in bringing about Voldemort’s downfall, a few times. He knocked Voldemort’s plans off the rails the first time in 1981, and then destroyed him utterly in 98.”

“81!” said Xander. “I was only a year old then.”

“So was Harry Potter,” said Willow. “It wasn’t really public knowledge at the time, but it was really his mother who did it. She used her own death, protecting her son from Voldemort, to energize a very powerful protection spell for him. As a result, when Voldemort tried to kill Harry, his spell backfired, and nearly destroyed him.”

“Why was this guy trying to kill a baby in the first place?” asked Buffy.

“A prophecy,” said Willow, which got groans from everyone in the room. “Yeah, that’s pretty much the way it worked out, too. Doesn’t anyone read Oedipus Rex anymore? Voldemort spent so much effort trying to kill this one child to keep a prophecy from coming true, that he let himself get distracted from his other evil plans. Not only that, but the things he kept doing to try to kill the boy in the end just gave Harry Potter more and more power over Voldemort.

“They had their final showdown when Potter was 17, and that time Potter finished him off for good, which made him almost a super-hero, as far as most wizards were concerned.”

“Which kinda explains why those guys who spotted me, acted that way,” said Xander.

There was a knock on the door. Dobby appeared in the sitting room a few seconds later, and announced, “The Lupin family is here, Harry Potter.” He ushered Tonks, Remus, and little Teddy Lupin into the room.

Harry rose quickly to his feet. “Remus! It’s good to see you! How are you feeling?”

“The full moon is past, for another month. I would have been here sooner, otherwise.”

Harry nodded in understanding. The monthly shifts into his werewolf form were wearing on Remus, though Harry did think that he usually looked better than he had when they’d first met. Married life was agreeing with his old teacher. That wasn’t true now, though. Remus was looking very tired, and very worried.

Teddy looked at Harry, his features changing, blending into a smaller scale mirror of Harry’s new face, as they tended to do these days whenever he met someone new. Harry was happy to see that he didn’t go so far as to lose his eye. His abilities as a Metamorphmagus didn’t go that far, yet. “Are you really my Uncle Harry?” he asked.

Harry smiled and nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“You look funny. Are you becoming a ’morphmagus too?”

“Nope,” said Harry. “Something happened, and now my face is stuck this way. Does it bother you?”

Teddy’s features changed again, into the younger melding of his parents’ faces that was his normal appearance. “No. Most people have boring faces that never change. I like your new face.”

“Well, I’m glad that there’s someone who thinks so,” said Harry.

“Can I go play with Dobby?”

“Of course you can!” said Harry. “Why don’t you go out in the back garden with him, and chase away the gnomes.”

Teddy ran off, calling for Dobby to come with him. He and the house-elf were great friends, and you really couldn’t ask for a better baby sitter.

“So, Remus, no twenty questions? You’re not going to ask me what creature was in your office, the first time I saw you there?”

“I figured you must be getting tired of doing that,” said Remus. “Dora already took care of verifying who you are, and a wise husband never contradicts his wife.”

“Too bad Ron hasn’t learned that,” said Hermione.

“Yes I have!” said Ron, indignantly, then he looked a little sheepish. “I was just never was the one that anybody looked to for wisdom,” he added under his breath.

“So, why are you here?” asked Harry. “Not that it isn’t great to see you, but you didn’t come over so Teddy could play with Dobby, and I don’t think it was just so you could get a look at my new face. What’s up?”

Tonks waved a large envelope that she had brought in with her. “The information we asked for from the Muggle government came into the Aurors’ Office.”

“Oh, good!” said Hermione, holding out her hand. “May I see it, please?”

“That’s why I brought it,” said Tonks, handing the envelope over to her.

Hermione opened it, and pulled out several pages of Muggle paper. She started reading through them quickly, and then handing them off to Harry, who barely had time to skim over each one before getting the next from her. They were surprisingly unsurprising. Alexander Harris was an American, in England working for a company that was only identified as ICSW. Dawn Summers was here on a student visa, with a scholarship to Cambridge, also from ICSW. They had both been in the country for nearly two years now.

“I showed those to Remus, on the way over here,” said Tonks. “He hasn’t told me why he wanted to see them, or why they’ve upset him so.”

“Ah, well, they just corroborated an idea that I had,” said Remus. “After hearing what happened to you, and then that there was a Muggle wandering around London with your face, I was reminded of something from years ago. I’m afraid that things are starting to make sense.”

“Really?” asked Ginny, “Because to me, things just seem to be getting more confusing.”

“Oh, if I’m right, this could be a real mess to get sorted out. Knowing how it got started is just going to be the beginning of it.”

“How did it get started?” asked Hermione.

“Well, I suppose, it all goes back to when James and Sirius first decided to become Animagi—”

“What?” burst out Ron. “That was thirty years ago!”

“Yes,” said Remus, “and that’s why this is going to be such an awful mess to get straightened out. Thirty years ago, when they first started researching how to become Animagi, James and Sirius found another spell. It seemed pretty trivial at the time. I never learned the details of how it worked, or why it was buried in the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts library—maybe it was in a book that had other, Darker spells—but what it did was fairly simple: it exchanged one person’s looks for another’s.”

“Well, that certainly seems to be what happened to me,” said Harry, “but why? If this is someone’s idea of a joke, I don’t get it, and no one has shown up to laugh about it, yet.”

“I don’t think it was done as a joke,” said Remus.

“Why would anyone want to switch Harry with this Harris fellow, if not for a joke?” asked Ginny. “It doesn’t seem to be him who did it: aside from the fact that he’s a Muggle, he seems to have been taken as much by surprise as Harry.”

“No, if I’m right, it wasn’t Harris who was responsible for this mess.”

Remus rubbed his face, which was looking as haggard as Harry had ever seen it. “Er, would you like a drink?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to one.”

Harry went to the cabinet in which he kept his bottle of Ogdens Old Firewhiskey, and poured a generous portion into a glass for Remus. “Leave the bottle out,” said Remus. “I think you’re going to want some yourself when I’m done.” He took a sip from the glass. “Where was I? Oh, yes, James and Sirius had found the switching spell…

“It didn’t really seem to be all that useful, to me. They mostly just used it to fool their friends, pretending to be each other, not so unlike Fred and George. They used it a couple of times so that Sirius could sit a detention for James, if James had a date with Lily, or something like that, but she really didn’t like them doing that—as far as anyone else could tell, it looked like she was going out with Sirius, which led to some misunderstandings that he found hilarious, but no one else was amused by them—so they didn’t do it often.”

“Yes,” said Hermione, “But what’s that all got to do with what happened to Harry last week?”

“For that we need to jump forward a couple of decades, to a Halloween night…” Remus held up his glass and looked at the golden liquid inside it. “…and what started out as a full bottle of Ogdens Old.”

He took another sip from his glass. “It was when Sirius was stuck in Grimmauld Place, with Professor Dumbledore not letting him go out anywhere. It was the fourteenth anniversary of James and Lily’s deaths. He was feeling miserable; I was feeling miserable; so we decided to get miserably drunk together.

“By the time we got to the bottom of the bottle, we were both pretty much snockered, and neither of us was making any sense. Sirius started rambling on about how he’d tried to save Harry from the Dursleys, before going after Wormtail. How he would have been better off in Sunnydale. But it hadn’t worked, and Dumbledore must have discovered the switch, and Harry must never find out about it. I never understood what he meant, and by the time I’d sobered up, and recovered from the hangover, I’d pretty much forgotten all about it. It only just came back to me the other day. Your change in appearance, and this other bloke looking like you now … It reminded me of James and Sirius’s old switching spell, and those things Sirius said that Halloween … and it occurred to me … what if it had worked, and Dumbledore hadn’t discovered the switch?” He drained his glass, and banged it down on the table.

There was stunned silence in the room, that lasted for several seconds.

“So, you’re saying that I’m not really me?” asked Harry. “That I’m really this Harris person, and he’s the real Harry Potter?”

“How could that be?” asked Ginny. “I mean, he’s always been Harry!”

“He’s the person you have always known as Harry,” said Remus, “but if I’m right, you’ve never met the real Harry Potter, and I haven’t seen him since he was a baby.”

“But the prophecy!” said Ron. “It said that Harry would be the one to defeat Voldemort, and he did!”

“That prophecy always had an element of self fulfillment in it,” said Remus. “From the day Voldemort learned of it, Harry became a target, and one of them was bound to die.”

“But what about the Horcrux?” asked Hermione. “When he killed Harry’s parents, he made Harry one of his Horcruxes. That’s what protected Harry from the second killing curse. If Harry wasn’t really Harry…”

“I don’t know,” said Remus. “Maybe the spell switched more than looks. It seems to have taken away Harry’s magic. Maybe it shifted the Horcrux too.”

“If it did something like that, wouldn’t Dad and Sirius have noticed, when they were doing it back in Hogwarts?”

“Would they?” asked Remus. “They were both powerful wizards. They’d trade wands whenever they switched, or it would have been a dead give-away, and their wands always worked just as well. Even their Animagus forms switched when they did it. James would become a dog, and Sirius would become a stag.”

“But I remember it,” said Harry. “I remember hearing my parents die. I remember the sound of the Killing Curse.”

“Do you?” asked Remus. “Do you really remember? Memory is a tricky thing, especially of something that happened when you were very young. Do you really remember James and Lily’s deaths, or do you just remember imagining their deaths, after you had heard about them?”

Harry reached for the Firewhiskey bottle. He refilled Remus’s glass. “You were right, I do want a drink.” He poured some Firewhiskey into his empty tea cup. After a glance at his friends, he gave some to Ron and Hermione. Ginny looked like she wanted some too, but she shook her head, while rubbing her pregnant belly. He looked at Tonks, and held the bottle up in a silent offer, but she waved it away.

Harry took a swig from his cup. “And you were right about this being a god-awful mess.” Everyone else took a sip as well.

“But why now?” asked Ginny, after everyone had set their cups back down. “Why did Harry change now?”

“I don’t know,” said Hermione. “Maybe the spell just wore off, after twenty-three years. Or maybe something happened to this Harris fellow. He does seem to be involved with magic, of some sort.”

“What?” asked Tonks.

“There were books on Ancient Magic in his flat,” said Hermione, “and he is from Sunnydale. That was a major mystical convergence for Dark forces. Why Sirius thought that would be a good place to send Harry!”

“At the time, the Sunnydale convergence had been quiet for decades,” said Remus. “If it was mentioned in our DADA classes at the time, it would have only been in passing. I doubt if Sirius would have remembered. Was it mentioned at all, while you were in school?”

“I never heard of it, then,” said Ron. “It was only later, after I became a Hit Wizard, that I learned anything about it.” His face scrunched up in a frown. “It was only during our last couple of years at Hogwarts that it started to erupt again, and by then, everyone was so caught up with the war, that it never came to anyone’s notice. We had bigger problems, much closer to home.”

“What do we do now?” asked Ginny.

“I think it’s time that we followed your suggestion, and made a phone call,” said Harry.