Summary: Dumbledore is plotting. Harry gets placed at an orphanage by his Aunt and Uncle. There are no horcruxes. Peter was caught by the ministry and convicted for his crimes. Sirius gets released when Harry is 3, and has been trying to locate him since (Dumbledore refuses to help by saying that Harry is fine with his relatives).

Disclaimer: If you recognize the characters from the HP books/movies then they obviously do not belong to me.

Chapter 1- The stage is set

Nov 1, 1981

Petunia Dursley woke that morning expecting to have another normal day. She was NOT expecting to find a baby wrapped in a blanket on her front step when she opened her door. She knew that the gossip chain on Privet Drive was fast and extensive and so she quickly brought the child in to the house, hopefully before anyone else on the street noticed.

Once inside she quickly tried to make sense of the baby. Unwrapping the child from the blanket he was in, the first thing she noticed was the bright emerald green eyes that were looking back at her. And after recovering from the initial shock of seeing eyes that reminded her of her sister, she moved on trying to solve the mystery surrounding why the child was outside her door, in the winter.

While unwrapping the baby, a letter fell out from the blanket. Petunia began to feel a sense of dread, she recognized the envelop from her past. The envelope belonged in the world of magic, the world that took her sister away from her. Noticing that her name was printed on the outside, she opened it up to read. But, what she read shocked her. The letter was written by Albus Dumbledore (an evil man according to Petunia, since he wouldn't allow her to accompany her sister many years ago.) The letter told her that the child was her nephew Harry James Potter and that his parents, James and Lily, were killed the night before. Dumbledore told her that she needed to raise Harry till he could come of age to attend Hogwarts and take his place in the magical world. The letter also mentioned that she wasn't to tell Harry of magic till he got his letter and she and her family were to treat him anyway that they wished.

Petunia put the letter down. To say that she was shocked would be a bit of an understatement. 'Why would Dumbledore place the child here with me when he knows that I dislike anything to do with that world?' she thought. The only thing that came to mind was that Dumbledore was planning something and she knew that she wanted no part in it. She was not heartless when it came to children. She knew that Harry was innocent in all this, though she also knew that she would not be able to be objective towards the child, especially with those eyes. Plus, she was still upset at Dumbledore, first for separating her and Lily, and she realized that she didn't trust Dumbledore and began to blame him for her sisters death. In her mind he shared at least partial responsibility for making an orphan of her nephew.

Glancing at the child again, she made up her mind. She quickly wrote a short letter explaining who Harry was and that his parents had been killed and that her and her husband wouldn't be able to take care of him properly. While she felt some guilt at abandoning Harry, deep down she knew that this might be his shot at possibly finding some happiness in his childhood. So, when her husband Vernon came down the stairs, she explained the situation to him and he agreed with her idea. Sometime before lunch, Harry Potter was dropped of at an orphanage located somewhere near London.

Little did anyone realize, this one act, would disrupt the well thought out plans of a meddling old man, and would eventually shake up the wizarding world.