I'm sure I'm supposed to put some sort of disclaimer here stating that I don't own harry potter and what not but I didn't see it in the guidelines but I don't

Harry Potter – Potential hero potential villainChapter 1 – Before Witchcraft and Wizardry

Harry James Potter was many things, none of them where happy and you might expect he would be he had in fact not three months ago defeated one of the greatest dark lords of all time in single combat. So why is our hero not happy, well let's start several years earlier at the beginning now knowing most of Harry's life story you might things the beginning was in fact 1980 when a prophecy was made and a child born or even 1981 when his problems began, but no his problems began with a very small act one so insignificant as to be the first pebble of a land slide.

It was primary school he had just escaped from Dudley and his gang by mysteriously appearing on the roof of the school now let me put this in prospective for you this was a three story high school for thousands of children and none of them noticed him get up there now some might think the impressive part was the getting up there had he known about it at the time harry might have thought so too but it was still "playtime" and no one noticed him up there.

With no way down and plenty of time to think harry being something of an odd boy for his age looked back at his short life remembering some of the other odd things he had done like the time he tripped and broke his aunts favourite china while Muriel was staying and while he was panicking about what she would do to him it repaired its self or the time the time where his aunt cut all his hair off and he was up all most all night in his cupboard thinking about what the other kids at school would do.

While he was thinking of these things he began to notice he was getting tired wondering why as it was still mid-morning and he hadn't had to do that many chores before school he began a self-examination the kind a child would do he looked to see if his clothes where suddenly inexplicably heavier or if he had something on his back and that is when he began to notice it. It was like a sore arm after pulling up a particularly tough weed only it was in the area of his chest now had it been any lower he might have just thought he was more starved than usual but as it was he began to rub his chest in an attempt to sooth the pain like a muscle as a child often dose. Fortunately for our young hero this had the effect of heightening his sensation of the phenomenon and as it did he noticed it was as if it was still in use like when you have ran until you get a stich and then keep running or running on a pulled muscle wondering what he could be doing to make this happen he noticed despite being on the roof of the school feet dangling over the edge no one had even noticed him let alone gone and got a teacher and he had been up there a while now or at least it seemed so and "playtime" was coming to an end.

He began to panic about getting down again and what would happen if he wasn't in class when it started and no sooner did he start thinking about this than he was suddenly on playground near the entrance now had these events been spaced out or had he not done it more than once he might have passed it off however as it was he realised he had somehow teleported himself from the playground from in front of Dudley and his gang to the rood and they HADDN'T noticed. Now that he was back on the ground he calmed down some and could feel the strain in his chest ease some now I say some you might expect it to ease altogether but he could still feel a strain for lack of a better world but harry couldn't think of what he might be doing to cause this so passed it off as just exhaustion after all he had just teleported twice and no one noticed.

Now you might think it odd for a young boy to make the connection between the feeling in his chest to the odd things that happened to and around him but it had happened many times over the centuries most recently to a young boy called tom now often when this happens there is an adult wizard for that's what those with the power inside themselves are called is around when a child dose something like this and would them it was just a case of accidental magic and that when they get their wand they would be able to learn to do these things intentionally or other wondrous things or at least this is the case in family's with magic in other cases the parents just pass it off as the child having a very active imagination and so the child eventually forgets. But in this case and a few others in history the child began to think about what he had done and like tom so many years before he had decided that ether he was some kind of mutant as he was not ignorant to his cousins cartoons or the comic books or it was magic like that of the story books from the library however unlike tom he didn't think this made him special after all there had been stories of wizards since a long time ago whenever Arthur ruled and being a child he had no idea that king Arthur is generally accepted to be myth.

Now again you might ask how he would know of king Arthur given that his aunt despises all things magic and that such things as the tails of merlin and his king would be the last things she would let in to her house however on a day where a teacher had not turned up due to heavy snow outside of town where she lived and a replacement teacher could not be found for first period a teacher put in a video tape of Disney's the sword in the stone in fact harry thought sir Edger was very reminiscent of uncle Vernon not that he used that word. He got a lot of ideas from that film and perhaps the most important of which was not what you might expect it was indeed quite subtle. Wizards cheat when a wizard wants to clean they have the pots, that and they all seem to be utterly barmy. Thus began Harrys life of deceptions and magic in fact that very day when returning to his aunt's house and cooking his relatives tea he decided to try a little magic to get the pots to clean them self's. Unfortunately such things aren't as easy as willing yourself to get away from bullies chasing you such things are primal ingrained into your instinct not that Harry could know this and so after twenty minutes of willing the stubbornly immobile pots and pans to wash themselves his aunt returned to the kitchen during a commercial brake seeing that Harry had not done the dishes reached for the nearest thing around to discipline him as she did often when he didn't do something upon command finding a frying pan and swinging at him. Harry seeing this tried to defend himself with his arms but wasn't quick enough catching his hand at an odd angle to the pan broke a couple of his fingers and the pan continued on to the back of his had knocking him unconscious.

Waking in the middle of the night finding himself in his cupboard taking stock of himself again he first noticed that his fingers hurt but he had long since learned not to cry out when in pain because it both wouldn't help and if he disturbed his aunt or worse his uncle they were only lightly to add to his pain and that the strain in his chest was back and worse than before. Trying to figure out what the magic was doing this time helped to keep his mind off the pain of his fingers that's when he noticed the sensation something a kin to pins and needles running down his arm to his broken fingers looking at them and having had to do something similar before with his toe he put some of the rag that the Durslys had given him as a blanket in his mouth and put them back into a strait position the pain was immense and he passed out again.

When harry woke the next morning he noticed his fingers had healed in the night a single night to heal broken fingers now Harry wasn't stupid in fact even if he was this many coincidences in such a short space of time would be hard for even the most blockhead of idiot to miss, Harry decided that he was going to need to practice if he wanted to be able to use his magic, for he had come to the conclusion that's what it was, when he desired which is why a lunch time we find harry in the least used part of the school during lunch the class room concentrating on that feeling in his chest and the pencil on the desk in front of him by the end of lunch all he had managed is a slight tingling along his arm. Over the next week he did this every lunch time by the end of the week he had managed to get the pencil to float, to come to him and to write what he thought.

The next few weeks at school during lunch he was made to stay outside as the teachers had found him in the classroom one lunch time thus Harry was attempting to recreate the teleporting he had done before and it came fairly easily to him something else that had come fairly easily was getting everyone to ignore him or rather not notice him at first he wasn't sure if it was magic until he noticed the drain on what he had begun calling his core. When he realised he could get everyone to not notice him things began to get a little better for Harry he could avoid being singled out by his aunt and uncle and he could even get food during meal times without being noticed by his relatives oh he was still made to do unreasonable amounts of chores but like with the pencil writing his school work he had learned to make the chores do themselves such that pots and pans where scrubbed by animate cloths and floors moped themselves all without his relatives noticing oh it was tiring but he was becoming less so now that he was doing it often and getting fed on a regular basis.

So it continued for several years Harry using his magic to do chores and remain unnoticed in his tenth year things had been going quite well for some time for Harry and he decided it was time to learn something new after all wizards cheat and he hadn't been cheating much oh he had made his pencil do the writing and the pans do the chores but he was still learning like everyone else like a chump that was following the rules to learn, now he thought about how to cheat about learning and he thought about having books read themselves to him but that seemed very close to a teacher reading to him as they do so often in class and it wouldn't help him with maths nor would having the answers present themselves as he probably wouldn't learn how to do the questions.

Harry figured what he needed was something like the understanding his teachers had would be what he needed but how to get that was where he was stuck, staring at the back of the teachers head demanding his magic tell him what the teacher knew and that was how it happened stuck on the introduction to algebra question as he was when his teacher turned from writing something inconsequential on the board and scanned the room to check for misbehaviour he made eye contact with Harry. In that moment there seemed to be nothing to harry other than maths for that is what he wanted from his teacher everything he knew about maths and that's what his magic took from him but maths is a complex thing to understand and to go from understanding addition, subtraction, division and multiplication to collage level understanding in maths in a single moment is a very impressive feet unfortunately it was not without consequence for both teacher and student for teacher it was a small headache as if he had just crammed hard for his A-level exams and for Harry it was much worse harry in fact from this influx of information nearly died.

So much information in such a short time is far too much for a normal mind to deal with fortunately his mind was not normal it had magic flowing though it at the time oh it was still too much at once but the mind of a wizard is a resilient thing when it has magic flowing though it in fact taking in all this magic at once forced harry into a coma such that he was taken to hospital from school and his relatives alerted. Now in most cases you might expect they would leave him there to be helped but the Durslys feared that the Drs might look closer at the child's body and notice his scars and so instead of being left in the hospital to recover he was dispatched to "recover in a familiar environment" and palms where greased to make it so. All the while Harrys mind and magic where working overtime to deal with the massive influx of information such that it needed to be organised and his mind defended from further overload thus when he woke up a few days later his mind was a veritable fortress or perhaps a fortress of learning might be more accurate as that's what the defences where geared towards, being able to process information in whatever form it came sort it and understand it. That's not to say he suddenly developed massive reasoning skills or sudden understanding of the ways of the universe no what Harry had developed is the ability to learn very quickly from the minds of others not that he knew this of course why would he, but at least he did get his desired knowledge of maths despite his coma he felt quite please at that he smiled to himself as he went back to sleep.

(A.N. this is my first fan fic and the most ive written since I left school where in I failed English so please forgive pathetic spelling and grammer . I know chapter one seems both short and has a lack of dialoge but this was mainly to get past the early part of the story where the conversations wouldn't really have had much impact later on anyway.)

(A.N. you may notice harry seem quite powerful you may also notice I tried to compare him to tom a lot especialy in cases where I wanted you to dispend you disbelief something that has grated on me since it was pointed out to me was that harry is VERY VERY mediocre he is not good at anything if there is a power the dark lord knows not its obviously luck espcialy given incident with the taboo and bella I say very mediocre because look at what tom achived by his 6th year at the absolute latest not only was he prefect but he had achived immortality now im assuming its not as simple as reading a single book and thinking that looks like fun ill give that a try and immidiatly wanding into a toilet stall to kill a girl or even lets look at harry own father he became an animagus by 5th year and created the marauders map I say that because dispite what a useful tool it could have been for the staff nether Sirius or Remus made a copy for them where as all of harrys achivements can be directly linked to luck almost every one of them except his patronus but lets look at that for a moment what kind of teacher subjects your to a soul destroying mind altering demon before ensureing you can at least cast the shield veriaty of the patrous so to recap my rant tom and james both achived gr8 things while still young tom even managed multiple purposeful uses of magic without a wand b4 hogwarts its not inconceivable that harry might if he used even a little brain power).