Harry played with Fawkes for a while longer, but eventually, he felt an intense urge to sleep. Seeing his eyes droop, Fawkes cooed softly and nuzzled into his chest, closing his eyes. The two drifted off to sleep together.

Harry blearily opened his eyes, looking around. It took a minute for his groggy mind to process what was around him.

‘Right, I went to that space with Fawkes and fell asleep. I’m back at the Dursleys now.’

Harry thought to stay in bed. Now that they locked him in his room, he had no reason to get up.

At least that was the plan, until he heard a commotion from downstairs. It sounded like his uncle was yelling and someone.

‘No surprises there,’ thought Harry with a grimace.

His curiosity finally won over his desire to stay in bed, so he pushed his ear against the door, trying to hear what the fight was about.

What he heard was not something he expected to hear.

“You can’t just lock him in his room! Even for a muggle, that’s illegal!”

That was unmistakably Lily’s voice.

“You don’t come to my house and tell me what I can and can’t do!” roared back Vernon.

“Let Harry go- “ Lily said, but she was cut off abruptly by the sound of a door slamming.

“Petunia, call the police if she comes back!” Yelled Vernon.

Harry moved away from the door and sat on his bed, unconsciously he had a grin on his face.

“At least there’s one person I can count on,” he said to himself.

‘I wonder how I can tell her I’m fine and that she shouldn’t worry.’

As he pondered to himself, he heard something hit his window.

Harry walked over to it and opened it up. Looking down, he saw Lily waving happily at him.

“Harry, are you alright?” She asked, as softly as she could.

Noise carried into the house rather easily, so Harry was worried Petunia or Vernon might hear Lily and drive her away, so he quickly put a finger to his lips and gave her a signal to wait.

Harry rushed to his table, grabbed a parchment and quill and hastily scribbled a note to Lily, telling her he was fine and that she needn’t worry. He added he would leave the window open in case she wanted to throw any messages in.

Harry balled it up and tossed it to Lily, who promptly opened it up and read it.

Lily smiled, then looked back at Harry and mimed writing. Understanding what she meant, Harry grabbed his quill and tossed it down to her. Having just used it, it should hopefully have enough ink on it for her use.

Lily scribbled something on the note, and then, looking around, she found a small stone. Balling the note around the stone, she tossed it back to Harry.

Harry opened it up. Reading it brought a cheerful grin to his face. It read,

Hang in there, Harry, I’ll definitely get you out!

I’ll come back tomorrow with a plan and we can get you back to my place for the rest of the summer.

Don’t worry about my aunt and uncle, they already gave the okay.

Harry grinned and gave her a thumbs up. Lily waved animatedly and scampered off, probably to write that plan of hers.

Smiling to himself, Harry sat back on his bed.

‘Now that I have some time to myself, maybe I can go over the powers Fawkes showed me,’ thought Harry.

Concentrating like he had seen in that space earlier, Harry imitated that figure and not a moment later, there was a ball of flames dancing on his palm.

“That was easier than I thought.”

Harry then started experimenting with the fire. Throwing it from hand to hand, making it move in the air in odd ways or trying to change the shape into something else.

What he found doing that was that he could change the shape to anything he wanted, but it was limited to the size of the initial flame. So he couldn’t convert a fist sized flame into a full-sized car. Though he could make the flame bigger, which made that issue more or less disappear.

Then, intending to test out the healing flame, he did what any rational human would do. He found a knife and made a sizable cut in his palm.

“Ouch!”

Harry then concentrated on the feeling he recalled from earlier, but this time the healing flame instead.

A blue-ish purple flame sprung up on his hand and Harry promptly directed it towards his cut hand. He watched in amazement as the wound closed in front of his eyes.

In the blink of an eye, all that was left of the wound was some blood on his hand.

“This is amazing!” Cheered Harry.

Harry really wanted to see how far the healing ability went, but couldn’t get himself to do that much self-damage just to test it out.

‘I’m sure I’ll test this out properly in the future.’

With that thought, Harry turned his attention to the last power he had.

“Summoning Fawkes in such a small place might be a bad idea. Isn’t there something else I can do?”

Wracking his brain, Harry suddenly thought of something. Rather than summoning Fawkes, if he were to create shapes with the flames used to create Fawkes, would they be any different from regular flames?

Eager to try it out, Harry promptly did what the figure had done, summoned both the regular flames and healing flames and slowly merged them. As he got the ratio right, Harry held his hand out and converged all the flames on his hand.

Moments later, a ball of deep teal flames appeared in his hand.

“Let’s see what this can do now.”

Harry played with the ball of fire for several minutes, making it into various shapes, moving it around and anything and everything he could think of, which is when he noticed something rather peculiar.

“Did that thing just respond to me?” Harry asked aloud, astounded at what he had just seen.

A moment ago, Harry had changed the ball into the shape of a mouse and made it scurry around his desk. When it was heading to the edge of the desk, without thinking, Harry had just called out to it, telling it to turn back rather than use his control over the flame and make it do the same.

The mouse turned around promptly and came to a stop in front of Harry.

‘Does this thing have a will of its own?’

Harry tested it out and found a few interesting things. Only the teal flame had any semblance of a will. The purple and yellow flames could only be controlled by Harry directly. Also, while the teal flame had a will, it was fairly minor, and it was to where it could follow some basic commands.

The most interesting find though, was the fact that he could link his senses with the flame and see and hear what the flame could, though it seemed to have no sense of smell. The size of the flame seemed to make no difference. It could be the size of a pea or the size of his bed and the abilities were mostly identical.

Finally, he found that he could have the flame send what it saw and heard to him periodically and that once the flame vanished, everything that it saw and heard would be immediately sent back to Harry.

‘There are so many ways this can be useful, thought Harry.

Harry was absolutely giddy with these discoveries, but shortly after, his mind went back to the events of the day before.

Where did those dementors come from? What was the Ministry thinking? Was he actually expelled from Hogwarts?

Mr. Weasley had said they would figure it out, so there must be some way out of it. At least that’s what Harry hoped.

He obviously couldn’t do any more magic, lest the Ministry would cause a bunch more trouble for him.

That was when he recalled a certain memory he had seen when he was reliving Voldemort’s memories.

‘Oh right! Voldemort killed people and did a bunch of magic even though he was a student.’

Harry closed his eyes as he combed through Voldemort’s memories. Thankfully, looking at the memories felt like watching a movie and not like he was living through it himself. Harry wasn’t sure he could handle actually living through those horrific memories.

After Sifting through a bunch of memories, he finally hit upon something useful. There was a way Voldemort had learnt from somewhere on how to cut off the trace, the magic the Ministry had cast to track every underage wizard.

‘Weird, I’m not able to see where Voldemort learnt the method even though I can see him using it.’

Harry shook his head and went over the method Voldemort used to cut off the trace. It was rather simple now that he looked over it. The trace was nothing but simple signal magic.

What the charm did was, the people who had the trace on them would trigger a signal every time any magic was done in a ten meter radius. That would explain why he got reprimanded back in his second year, even though it was Dobby who did the magic.

All Harry had to do was disrupt that signal so it would never reach the Ministry. It was a simple charm that disrupted all signals around the one who was charmed, though that would also mean that regular signal magic wouldn’t work on him until that charm was removed. A sacrifice he was more than willing to make, not that he actually used any signal magic.

Harry promptly used the charm on himself and to test it out, levitated a few books and made them dance around a little.

After setting the books down, Harry waited with bated breath for almost half an hour. Only once he found no letters from the Ministry did he finally let out a breath of relief and broke into a grin.

With this, he could do as much magic as he wanted and no one could get in his way.

“It’s already nighttime. Did I spend the entire day doing that stuff? I didn’t even eat anything.”

As if on cue, his stomach growled.

‘Time to sneak into the kitchen, I suppose,’ Harry chuckled. ‘Can’t wait for tomorrow. Hopefully, I can get out of this hellhole by then.’

Unlocking his door with magic, Harry crept to the kitchen. At least he didn’t have to be worried about food till tomorrow.