38 Chapter 38

It would take another two days to prepare a private room for Harry near Madam Pomfrey's office and the school's Infirmary and to secure transportation for the child, the few belongings he owned, and the muggle equipment that was some how sustaining his life in conjunction with the child's magic. Something that had involved more than a few arguments from the older two Dursleys once they discover that Harry (a child that they had absolutely no knowledge of) had been in possession of Dudley's long lost gaming console.

Albus had left the details of housing and transporting the child to the others as he spent his time gaining custody of Mr. Potter and keeping word of the child's current condition from leaking to the wrong people. The old wizard wished he could prosecute the Dursleys for their obvious neglect of their nephew but because they had no memory of Harry (aside from those involving the removal of the child) he couldn't even prove that they were responsible for the child's current condition; even if there was no doubt in his mind that they were.

If Harry ever woke up, then he could get the proof he needed from the child; providing that Harry had retained all of his memories. They couldn't check until the child woke up though, because using Legilimency on a sleeping or unconscious child could potentially damage the child's mind. There was also the fact that the child's mind was currently preserved by a powerful stasis ward which meant that they wouldn't have been able to pull up any memories even if it had been safe to read the mind of a sleeping child.

Once Harry's body (frozen empty shell that it was) had been settled into a private room near the Hospital Wing, Madam Pomfrey began preparing for the day when the child would hopefully wake up. This mainly involved installing a potions cabinet in the child's room and stocking the cabinet with multiple doses of nutritional potions, pain potions, general healing draughts, calming potions, sleeping potions, and a number of other potions designed to counteract the negative effects of long-term stasis spells, long-term malnutrition and neglect, and stabilize a person's magical core due to disruption of the soul. With the help of Minerva, the healer also dug through the castle's lost and found for a couple of outfits that would fit the child after discovering that Harry had owned nothing but ill-fitting hand me downs that had belonged to his older, fatter cousin.

Once those preparations had been completed, there was nothing else to be done for the child until he woke aside from monitoring his body around the clock for any signs that Harry's soul had returned to his body and the stasis preserving his body had been lifted.

By the end of August, most of those that were aware of Harry's current condition had almost lost all hope that the child would ever wake (many of them believing that he was far too gone after his soul had been missing from his body for nearly two years). Albus's health had taken a steep nosedive in the aftermath and he'd willingly stepped down from his position as Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot; passing the title to his former Assistant Chief Warlock, Tiberius Ogden. He'd considered resigning as Supreme Mugwump as well but hesitated to disconnect himself from the international scene while he knew Voldemort was still out there some where biding his time until he was strong enough to rise again.

When September first rolled around and the students returned to the castle, rumors about the missing Harry Potter (who the wizarding world had known should have started Hogwarts this year) were flying fast and thick both inside and outside of the school. A statement was released to the press that same day declaring that Harry had been moved into seclusion for health reasons earlier in the summer and that more information would be released at a later date. Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge had confronted Albus about the whereabouts of the missing Boy-Who-Lived (Harry's unofficial but widely accepted title in the wizarding world) but the Headmaster rebuffed the Minister as was his right as the child's newly confirmed legal guardian.

Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months and still Harry showed no signs of waking.

It wasn't until just over an hour before noon on November seventh of the year twenty-twenty-one when Madam Pomfrey was alerted to a change in Mr. Potter's condition. The school healer had dropped what she was doing at the time and immediately hurried to Harry's room where she found the magical stasis preserving Harry's body rapidly breaking down and the child going into convulsions as his body and magic struggled to cope with reanimating the billions of cells that made up his body. At the same time, the monitoring charms that had been placed on the boy indicated that his soul was attempting to return to his body.

The process would take close to forty-eight hours to complete; eight times longer than it had taken for his soul to be moved out and his body preserved (not that the Mediwitch knew that).

Madam Pomfrey had needed to restart Harry's heart a total of eighteen times during the process, treat the numerous injuries that had mysteriously appeared during the first six hours, and administer over fifty potions. The unexplained injuries had healed into scars by the time the ordeal was over bar the rather nasty hole that went all the way through his right shoulder just below the collarbone; a wound that proved rather difficult to heal (as if it had been made with dark magic). The healer tried reducing or completely erasing the new scars but they were resistant to all healing magic, which was rather tragic because they were very painful looking and some of them would be difficult to cover up.

There was what looked like a bite mark from a large animal of some kind on the back of his left ankle. Then there were two long lines that started several inches above right knee on either side of his right thigh and twisted around his leg twice before ending at his right ankle. Next there were several faint crisscrossed gashes and circles on the back of his neck, across the top of his shoulders and the upper half of his back, and down both arms. There was also the thick line that ran from between his middle and ring fingers on the back of his left hand down below the thumb before wrapping around the underside of the wrist.

And then there was what the healer considered the worst of the scars; the two claw marks down the left side of his face starting somewhere beneath the helmet he wore, crossing down over the left eye (just barely missing the eye itself) and ending nearly at his chin.

After Harry had been stabilized once more, the magic running the muggle machine connected to the child withdrew back into the child's core and the machine immediately ceased to function. Madam Pomfrey was quick to remove the helmet from the child's head to find his once inky black hair now had two crisp snow-white patches where the scars on his face ran beneath his hairline. The contrast was rather startling and drew even more attention to the two scars on his face. The lightning bolt scar that had become famous in the wizarding world, in contrast, was nothing more than a thin faded line sitting above Harry's right eyebrow that was easy to miss if you didn't know it was there.

It was at that point that Madam Pomfrey sent an update on the child's condition to those that were aware of his presence in the castle. The healer had been unreachable during the forty-eight hours it had taken for the stasis spell to break down completely and for his soul to settle back to where it belonged on top of the additional sixteen hours it had taken to completely stabilize the child. Minerva would be the first to arrive on the scene and the stern witch would keep watch over the recovering wizard for a few hours while Poppy got some much needed rest.

Like Madam Pomfrey, Minerva had been appalled by the scars that had mysteriously appeared on the much too young child lying on the bed and Albus would receive a second blistering lecture (and more than a few painful hexes to tender and unmentionable places) from the Scottish witch the moment another took her place beside the child. Two hours after Minerva sat down to watch over the child, Harry slipped into a healing coma as his magic worked overtime to finish healing his body with the aide of the numerous potions flowing through his veins.

During that time, Harry's magic was also expanding his magical core to accommodate the magical growth that he had undergone and to incorporate the fundamental changes that his magic had undergone as it systematically assimilated the complex programming code of the game during the past two years (the majority of the coding taken during the collapse of Aincrad). The magically implanted NERDLES at the base of his skull continued to feed information into Harry's sleeping brain as Harry's magic now used the small device as a bridge between his soul, his magical core, and his brain.

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