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SIYE Time:21:51 on 28th March 2024
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The Lives We Touch
By Kennedy

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Category: Pre-OotP, Alternate Universe
Characters:Harry/Ginny, Hermione Granger, Remus Lupin, Ron Weasley, Sirius Black
Genres: General
Warnings: None
Rating: PG
Reviews: 152
Summary: *** The author has been reminded via the e-mail address on file that this story is listed as incomplete and has not been updated in over 2 years ***

When ten year old Harry Potter is assigned to Maggie Thompson's fifth year class at Little Whinging Primary School, the young teacher takes an immediate interest in and liking to the strange but sweet young boy. As their friendship grows through the years, Maggie finds herself pulled into a new world beyond her wildest imagination that sets her on a course for love and adventure.
Hitcount: Story Total: 67002; Chapter Total: 6030





Author's Notes:
I was going to follow JK's story up until the events of Order of the Phoenix, but I changed my outline a little! So, things are still pretty much the same for Harry as he heads back to Hogwarts for his third year...but I have spun my own version of how he got to The Leaky Cauldron. Enjoy...




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Chapter Five - An Unexpected Reunion

Late July 1993

Maggie wasn’t sure why she always took this route to work and back home again. It wasn’t exactly that far out of her way, but it was a detour. Nevertheless, every day and every evening she turned her car down Privet Drive and past the stream of houses on her way to and from the Primary school. And every day she found herself staring at the neat garden in front of number four with a mixture of guilt and shame she had never managed to dispel. The feeling was almost as much of a habit now as was the act of driving down the road itself, something which had started with a feeling of hope and longing, and which had grown into a weekly…then daily…ritual.

She was barely even looking for him anymore, the tiny little boy she had to remind herself would be a teen-ager by now. Driving down his street was more about paying a small penance for her failure, for being too late where Harry was concerned. It was coming to an inevitable end though, as she had finally gathered the courage to move on. She had stayed at Little Whinging longer than she had ever intended, had passed up numerous opportunities for promotion all because of a gut feeling that she couldn’t leave, not until she knew.

There came a point where she just couldn’t stay any longer, when she realized that it was time to let Harry go and to accept that there were some things about which she would simply have to live in ignorance. Until that day, however, she would continue to drive those extra couple of blocks over so she could pass his street.

Her friend Katie had referred with good nature to her habits as an unhealthy obsession. But the more Maggie looked back on that year with Harry, the more she became convinced it was not. It was more than that. Something in the boy had called to her, something she had been blind to when it could have made a difference, and against all logic the call seemed only to have grown louder without his quiet presence. It was something she couldn’t dismiss, something that defied nature itself, something that left her feeling inexplicably tied to the small boy, indebted in a way she couldn’t shake. She owed him for her failure, and it had gnawed at her until fleeing had seemed the only option left. It was that or go mad.

Besides, Maggie rationalized to herself as she turned left onto Magnolia Crescent, she barely even looked at the street she drove down any more, passing as if in a trance from one end to the other.

Which was why when the thin boy dragging an extremely large trunk collapsed against a wall on the side of the road, she barely blinked, watching with mild disinterest as her car drew closer to the fated wall. With the window down to let in the breeze, Maggie could hear a familiar voice muttering softly as her car slowly drew level, barely idling now as the noise from the street dimmed and faded into the background and the boy looked up with those eerily familiar green eyes boring straight into hers.

Harry Potter.

Maggie’s head snapped back round violently as her car mounted the curb, grazing a trash bin and sending its metal lid crashing to the concrete pavement, stopping the last of the vehicle’s momentum as a part of her brain remembered to knock it out of gear and pull on the hand brake with shaking hands and a series of loud clicks before they rested on the steering wheel.

“Excuse me, are you all right?” Harry was tapping gently on the window and he stepped back as Maggie pulled the latch so the door swung outwards, pushing herself upright and blinking quickly in case the boy should disappear from right in front of her, to be swallowed into the ground before her very eyes.

“Harry?”

“Miss Thompson?” The boy looked both guarded and surprised as he spoke, but his words were not unfriendly.

Maggie took a deep breath to collect her thoughts, running a trembling hand through her golden hair, which she hastily tucked behind her ear.

“I didn‘t know if you would remember me,” she said finally, with a small smile. The statement was met with an awkward silence, as Harry flushed an unexpected and deep shade of red, his gaze flickering anxiously at something across the street before resting on his feet.

“Of course I remember,” he mumbled softly, looking up with a small smile through his wayward dark fringe. “You were nice to me.’

Maggie couldn’t help the smile, although the happiness the comment gave her lasted only a moment before something far more fundamental occurred to her.

“You’re still here? In Little Whinging?” The question came out harsher than she had intended, more of an accusation than anything else.

“Where else would I be?” Harry shrugged, unperturbed by her outburst.

She had only hoped he had gone somewhere a little brighter.

He hadn’t actually gone anywhere at all.

“I came back,” Maggie blurted out, a sudden gust of wind blowing her hair back across her face as she swiped at it irritably. “After you left.”

The flush was back as Harry looked decidedly awkward at the statement and the words behind it that remained unspoken. “I contacted Stonewall High that fall because I wanted to warn them, make sure they knew you were…”

She wanted to say special, and for some reason bit back the words as they rose in her throat.

“They said you were pulled out,” she finished pathetically instead.

“My Aunt and Uncle decided to send me somewhere else at the last minute,” Harry told her and if the boy had looked embarrassed before, now Harry was painfully and obviously uncomfortable.

“They claimed you were gone,” Miss Thompson told him as Harry rubbed the back of his neck, looking for an answer he didn’t want to give. She wondered how many people, if any, he had ever really spoken to about this, although she already knew the answer. This was the first and last time he would acknowledge or speak openly about it, as if he were compelled by the same spell she was sure dragged her repeatedly back to this place, tied by the same childish longing he had once placed in one of the few people who had seen him as anything but a troublemaker or waste of space. “Mrs. McNamara and I called on the house and your Aunt said you had been sent to some school for the criminally insane that didn’t actually exist. I figured…hoped, actually…that someone had finally taken you away from The Dursleys and they were just covering their tracks.”

“Someone did take me away,” Harry verified, and he grinned wistfully as he said it. “An old friend came and rescued me.”

“Did he take you somewhere brighter?”

It was a stupid question, and she blushed as soon as she asked it, aware of how banal it sounded. There was no denying the smile that lit Harry’s face though.

“Yes,” Harry confirmed. “He did.”

“But you’re back.” Maggie seemed only able to state the obvious this evening.

“The Dursleys are my family.” It obviously pained him to say it and Maggie felt the familiar tugging of her heart strings.

“Then what are you doing out here at this time of night?” she asked pointedly, glancing down at his trunk. “Are you going somewhere?”

“I don’t know, actually. I just…” The uncomfortable look was back again, as it seemed Harry was hovering on the verge of blurting something much deeper. But instead he admitted, “I need to go to London.”

“What’s in London?” Maggie pressed, not sure what to make of the situation. “Your school?”

Maggie didn’t like the look on Harry’s face as he seemed to be searching for an answer to her simple question. Finally, he blurted, “I‘m meeting some friends in London. We‘re going on holiday before we go back to school.”

“Where in London?”

“The Leaky Cauldron.” Harry said quietly, looking up at her guiltily. “Have you heard of it?”

Maggie searched her memory before she shook her head and said, “Can’t say that I have. Is it a restaurant?”

“Sort of.” He said, looking down again…but not before Maggie caught a small smile spread across his face.

Leaning back against her car, Maggie folded her arms over her chest and asked skeptically, “And are you planning on walking all the way to London?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” he admitted, looking at her guiltily. And once again he looked as if he wanted to say more, but instead looked back down at his trunk.

He wasn’t going to ask the question, so Maggie knew she was going to have to offer. Smiling at his ever present shyness, she asked quietly, “Harry, would you like a ride to London?”

“With you?” He asked, raising his head suddenly and looking at her in surprise.

“Do you see anyone else here?”

To her surprise, Harry allowed his eyes to scan the deserted street before he shook his head and grinned up at her. “Would it be too much trouble?”

“If it was, I wouldn’t have offered.” Maggie reassured him. “But your Aunt and Uncle…”

“Don’t care,” Harry interrupted. “They’ll be happy to get rid of me and even happier that they don’t have to drive me themselves. Besides, I won’t tell them if you won’t.”

Maggie, against her better judgment, reached around and opened the door to the backseat of her car as she said, “Let’s get your trunk.”

Together, Harry and Maggie lifted his surprisingly heavy trunk up off the ground and stowed it away safely in the backseat of her small car.

When they were both safely buckled into the front seat, Maggie began to steer the car toward London and they fell into a comfortable silence.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you, Harry.” She finally said, looking over at him in the darkness of the evening.

“You did more for me than most people,” Harry said with a smile and an undertone of bitterness that wasn’t aimed at her. “Really, it’s nice just to know someone cared.” And with his words it seemed that something in Maggie’s chest loosened its hold on her, as though he had cut away the thing that had tied her down, leaving her freer than she had felt in a long time. “You did all you could.”

“I could have done more, but the…”

“Miss Thompson, look out!”

Maggie slammed her foot on the brake and the car jerked to a sudden stop. She turned to check on Harry, but he was distracted by a pair of pale yellow eyes staring back at them from the middle of the road. They belonged to a dog, and a very large one at that. The dog's tongue was hanging out of its mouth and it was panting with exhaustion.

“"Th-that black dog...I saw that dog before,” Harry breathed, simply staring at the black canine through the front windshield of Maggie’s car. “He was on Privet Drive when I left the house. It’s like he’s following me…”

Maggie dismissed Harry’s foolishness with a chuckle and followed his gaze until it rested on the dog. And then it suddenly cocked its head to the left and fixed its ears, as though better to follow the two of them with it‘s eyes. Now that Harry mentioned it, the dog did seem to be watching them. She couldn't quite prove it because every time she looked at him, he moved his head to gaze out someplace else.

“Why isn’t it moving out of the way?” Harry wondered aloud. “Don’t the headlights scare him?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie replied, studying the dog intently. “Maybe it’s hurt,” Opening her driver’s side door, she moved to get out of the car but looked back at Harry and warned, “Stay in the car.”

With cautious footsteps, she approached the mangy black mutt who seemed to watch her every move. But he didn’t snarl or move to attack her, so Maggie knelt down next to the animal and whispered, "What do we have here?"

The dog raised up so that she could see him more clearly. He wasn’t so menacing up close, though he did look rough and his eyes seemed worn. Stroking his neck, she murmured, "Hmm, no collar. Poor thing, you look half starved!”

The dog whimpered and looked at her so intensely that Maggie sat back on her heels and was unable to hold back the shudder that raced up her spine. And then just as suddenly as he had appeared, the dog disappeared into the darkness.

Maggie looked back at Harry, who was watching the scene very closely from his seat in the passenger seat of her car. He shrugged and she stood up to walk back to him. Settling back into the front seat, she smiled at him and said, “Well, that was strange,” Putting the car back into gear, Maggie continued on down the road as she asked, “Now where exactly is this Leaky Cauldron place?”






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