A different beginning
Chapter 1
Disclaimer, enough said. Everyone knows what one of them is so why bother.
This is a plot bunny which I thought might be interesting to chase down its hole. I just wanted to make sure I had the first chapter down so I wouldn't forget it. I don't know when I'll get around to continuing this one since I'm working on another story at the moment. I dare say reader response will determine if I devote any time to this in the near future.
/ Little Whinging 1st October 1985 10a.m. \
Harry Potter was currently taking a walk around the neighbourhood, not an unusual thing for a young boy to do, but then Harry wasn't your typical boy. He was currently five years old, and not too many children that age would be allowed to wander too far from home. In fact most children were well protected from the dangerous world outside their front-yards and weren't allowed to leave without an older family member to escort them.
Harry had no such restrictions placed on him and would garner many odd looks as people watched him wander aimlessly by, either uncaring about the boy or unwilling to poke their noses into others business. In another town a concerned citizen might call the child over to chat with them while they called the police to help the lost child but that was a different town to Little Whinging in Surrey and thus has no part in this story. No, here in Little Whinging people were to busy gossiping to actually wonder what a child that young was doing alone, and besides Little Whinging didn't have any of that 'Sort' to worry a child. Though if you believed the gossip then the boy they were currently watching was growing up to be that sort and would bear watching in the future.
If anyone had thought to ask the child what he was doing, or where he was going they would have been amazed and massively disturbed at his imaginative answer and assumed that the child was having a flight of fancy. They would however have been wrong, Harry wasn't a fanciful child at all having had such drivel pounded from his waifish body by the cloddish fists of his uncle 'Won't be having any of that nonsense' Vernon. Harry's answer would have been factual and concise since neither of his relatives could stand to listen to him waffle on about his day, not when they could be listening to their Duddykins anyway.
He would have merely explained that he'd observed that whenever he did something strange at home an old man with a stick would appear as if from nowhere. The old man wasn't just old either, he was strange, he always looked like the pictures he'd seen of Rip Van Winkle in the one book he'd been allowed to keep. Not that he could read it, but the pictures were good if not as colourful as the old man who kept coming to his cupboard was wont to dress. When the man arrived he'd find Harry no matter where he was hiding and then he'd wave that stick of his and say something like Oblivate or something like that, no hold on Obliviate, that was it. Then he'd talk to Harry for a while telling him he'd forget what he'd just done and go on about his day as if nothing strange had happened. Then the old man would do the same thing to whomever Harry had done the strange thing to. The difference was that the person would stare at the old man blankly and nod their heads as if agreeing with him. The man would then wave his stick and undo whatever Harry had done to them or around them before he'd once more disappear with a loud cracking sound.
The young boy wasn't sure how long that had been happening to him, but he did remember the first time he recalled it. It was…
/ Flashback to 2 a.m. 19th August 1985 \
It was dark in his cupboard when he woke up panting in fear. He knew he'd probably screamed out loud, but he couldn't help it, that dream always scared him. The loud cackling laughter and the sound of a woman screaming something that Harry never quite heard. The flash of green was always the point where he'd wake up sweating profusely as his body prepared him to run away. He had a bad feeling that this had been one of the times when he'd had the dream lots of times and hadn't been able to wake up quickly. That wasn't really his fault though since he'd been weeding the garden and doing numerous other chores around the house all day and he was much more tired than usual.
That wouldn't save him though, he knew that shortly his uncle would come thundering down the stairs and tear the door of his bedroom open to begin berating him for waking him up when he had work in the morning. If he was unlucky the man would continue like that for ages, ironically losing much more sleep than if he'd just rolled over and gone back to sleep in the first place.
Gods he wished he could see something, anything! He'd woken up, he knew that much but he really couldn't tell if his eyes were open, though his brain said they were. There was absolutely no light in the enclosed space and Harry couldn't escape the effects of his dream totally because of it. In his desperation to be able to see Harry was unaware that he manipulated his magical core and produced a small globe of magical light that floated above his head. He was too busy sobbing in relief to care what it'd mean to him. He wouldn't hear the door to his uncles' room opening upstairs, though it was hard to miss the aforementioned 'Thundering descent' and he could see the dust as it was shaken from the underside of the stairs. A moment later Harry's eyes widened in apprehension as the door to his space was opened with wrenching force and the purple demon head appeared above him.
"Why you…" his uncle was extremely agitated, he could tell by the fact that the man wasn't worried about the spittle that flew from his quivering lips as he ranted on and on with the veins in his temples pulsing in time with his rampaging heartbeat. A minute later Vernon would finally notice that the light he assumed Petunia had left on under the stairs wasn't in fact coming from the light-bulb but was floating in the air. The vein of his outburst changed into his standard 'You freak' speech as Harry called it. Though this time the man was already angry enough and thus it didn't quite happen as Harry thought it would. A massive meaty fist reached into the cupboard and grabbed onto the poorly fitting clothes Harry was forced to wear to bed and pulled him from the cupboard.
"Damn freak! I'll show you! Oh yes you'll rue the day you came to my home with your monstrous ways." Vernon shook the young lad's tiny frame viscously before slamming him back into the wall above the small cupboard door. The breath exploded from Harry's body, and already fearful after waking from the nightmare he'd panicked further. Another point was that he was already primed to using magic since he'd created the light that started all of this. One thing that all parents of wizards are taught is that a scared wizarding child will do unpredictable things if scared or startled enough. This was something that should have been explained to the Dursley's but unfortunately, either by haste or design no one had taken the time. Thus it would come as a complete shock to Vernon when a shaft of wild magic struck him in the sternum and pushed him backwards with incredible force. He could feel it as his ribs shattered tearing his innards to shreds. A pain that was eclipsed a moment later when his back forcefully impacted the plastered wall to the living room with a thud that shook the entire house.
The plasterboard gave way under the force of the blow and exposed the beams that actually formed the wall, though Vernon didn't care about that at the moment as his spine had just impacted a cross bar while he was travelling at nearly a hundred miles an hour with a rather inevitable result. There was another sickening crunch as three vertebrae gave way, tearing the spinal cord. In a sense it was a relief for the fat man since he could no longer feel anything below his chest and thus the pain he had been feeling vanished completely. That left him time to wonder how Harry was just suspended in the air like that completely unaffected by gravity. He wasn't faring much better, though it should be explained he was actually lodged between two upright pieces of timber that were spaced two feet apart so the force that was still trying to push him into the front room was superfluous. More important was the fact that Harry's eyes were glowing in the darkness with a vivid emerald green that lit his face in eerie and frightening ways.
Vernon was the first to catch sight of movement out of the corner of is eye. He'd have turned his head but his energy was fading fast and it didn't really matter all that much, nothing mattered very much anymore. Having a full grown wizard enter his house had an odd way of refocusing his mind though and he began to glare as an extremely old man with a long white beard stalked over to his nephew. For some reason he found that the man's eyes sparkling in the darkness as they did were nearly as terrifying as Harry's green glowing eyes. Those eyes also turned to regard him before returning to the little boy.
"Oh Harry, I wish you hadn't done this." Harry who hadn't seen the man until he'd stepped between him and his uncle looked up at the tired sounding voice and looked into the weathered face of a very old man. Once he locked eyes with the man he watched the stick the man held as the man said something that he missed completely. He heard what followed though.
"You'll return to sleep shortly and when you awake you'll think that nothing strange has happened. None of this is important and neither you nor your uncle has done anything strange tonight." The man had then waved his stick again and Harry had felt himself falling into the man's arms, then very carefully he was laid back onto his cot and the covers were pulled up over him. "There you go Harry, now sleep," the man said before turning away to deal with his uncle as if he expected Harry to obey him and just go to sleep. Harry on the other hand was too keyed up to sleep and hadn't felt the effects of the spell that should have put him to sleep. Neither did the stranger notice that the young boy hadn't done as he expected and that he'd assumed his magic had worked without stopping to make sure. Harry watched as something was put on his uncle's body and then almost yelped as the fat man vanished without a trace. If he'd have been less tired he would have grinned and wished he could do that to the other Dursley's.
The man wasn't finished yet though, and Harry watched fascinated as the man waved that stick of his again and said, 'Reparo'. The spectacle of seeing the damaged wall pull itself together once more almost had Harry excited enough to want to wake up fully and ask the man how he'd done what he'd just done. The old man hadn't given him a second glance since he'd told him to return to sleep and he didn't as he said, 'Finite' and sighed as the light above Harry finally extinguished.
The magical backlash of having his spell ended was enough to send Harry to sleep as he'd used a lot of magic for such a young boy. By the time Dumbledore was paying attention to the boy once more those emerald coloured eyes that reminded him so much of young Lily Evans were closed so he didn't know that his spells hadn't had the desired effect. He wouldn't allow himself to feel remorse for Harry's current situation because it was for the 'Greater good' of both the child and the magical world as well.
/ End Flashback \
He'd never figured out how his uncle had gotten to the bottom of the stairs. He hadn't known how much damage he'd done to the man but apparently he was much better than he had been. He certainly wasn't spewing bloody froth from his mouth like he had been the night before. When aunt Petunia had found her husband she'd screamed bloody blue murder and bolted for the phone to call for an ambulance which turned up with its sirens blaring. It was a sight that Harry would miss since he was still locked in his cupboard after the strange man had left. When the paramedics had asked what had happened she'd answered that she didn't know, which was true. She suspected Harry had something to do with it. She couldn't actually blame him though since he was still locked in his cupboard and she certainly didn't want to draw official attention to the fact that they'd locked a five year old, no matter how much of a freak he was, into a dark enclosed space.
His uncle would be in hospital for a long time after that with a damaged spinal cord. The doctors said there was some hope that he'd walk again but that they shouldn't get their hopes up. They were right as well, Vernon would return home early the next year in a wheel chair. He had full use of his upper body. It was just his legs that wouldn't respond to his wishes.
He was a lucky man in one sense; Grunnings was a family run business and tended to treat all of its staff members as such. Though in Vernon's case he was the much disliked second cousin you saw as rarely as possible since he was a bullying git whom you'd hated since you first met him. He was still family and family stuck together, or so Mr Grunning insisted. That was why he'd kept Vernon's job open, he'd also paid him half salary while he was in the hospital. When he'd returned to work they'd discovered that it wouldn't be possible for him to do his old job so he'd been promoted into the sales department. On top of that the company had allowed his injury insurance to be paid out, along with the fact that Vernon himself had understood just how dangerous it was to work in a factory with lots of heavy machinery had double the insurance voluntarily. With the double insurance payout and half salary they hadn't suffered any hardship in the months that he'd been out of the house. Even rebuilding the house so that he could move about more easily in a wheel chair hadn't been a financial burden so they were all quite happy. Except for the fact that he was injured in the first place that is.
Harry didn't see any of the benefits of all of this extra money in the house, well other than the stairs being widened slightly to allow for the chair lift, which expanded his bedroom. He'd had to sleep on the kitchen floor while that was happening.
After that fateful 'accident' he'd seen the old man quite often as he allowed something strange to happen to whomever happened to be making him angry at any given time. The man never introduced himself so he never learned a name but he came to know what the man would do when he arrived. First he'd seek out anyone who might have witnessed the incident and 'Obliviate' them, they always looked glassy eyed after he did that and seemed to forget whatever Harry had done to them or around them. Then he'd repair or stop whatever Harry had done before turning to Harry and obliviating him. The fact that Harry still remembered what had happened after the old man left while no one else did escaped both the man and the boy. One thinking his spell casting was infallible while the other didn't know why it was important.
After a while Harry stopped the strange 'events' from happening since he'd gotten tired of the game. The old man always turned up no matter what he did to hide what he'd done. He would rather wait until he had them away from the house anyway. He'd noted that the few times he'd done something to Dudley during a chase that the man hadn't appeared. Now it can't be said that Harry was stupid. After all genetics will tell, and Harry had both a master prankster and the brightest witch of her generation in his gene pool, even if he didn't know it. So it didn't take him long to figure out that when he was away from his home it was open season on Dudley and his gang. He'd done some experimenting after that and discovered some interesting things. The small park that Dudley favoured for his 'Games' was too close to home and the old man appeared when he did something strange. While the library was far enough away that the old man wouldn't show up.
He'd sat in the library thinking for hours after that. He'd figured that the man had some way of figuring out when something strange happened, it didn't take a genius to figure that out. What did take a rather smart lad to figure out was a way to test the extent of the man's sensors without giving the game away. That was what he was doing now. Starting at the library where he knew the man couldn't sense him he'd begun to walk back towards Privet drive. Every so often he'd 'do' something and then wait five minutes or so for the man to appear before walking another fifty paces and repeating the process.
It might seem strange to do it that way but he figured that even a dense man would figure out what Harry was doing if every ten minutes of so he was called back to Little Whinging and found that he was a little further away from Harry's house. The way he was doing it he'd only have the man turn up once and hopefully he wouldn't realize where they were in relationship to the house he lived in.
When the man finally turned up Harry tried to think about how far he was from his house but didn't have the words to describe it. Later on he'd find that it was about a mile, a considerable distance when thinking about the age of the person the sensors were set to watch.
He was a little startled when he heard the by now common crack that accompanied the old mans appearance. He might have been waiting for it, but then he'd been waiting for it the last thirty times he'd stopped so he'd relaxed a little. Like any other young boy he'd looked around to find the source of such a loud noise that happened near to him and thus saw the man approaching at an ambling walk while looking around for whatever Harry had done. Today he was wearing a Van Winkle robe in bright orange with yellow stripes and Harry had to wince and look away it was so bright.
"Ah, good morning young lad. If I'm not mistaken you're name is Harry right?" If Harry hadn't already known the man he might have believed the kindly old mans softly spoken words. As it was he nodded silently in assent before asking a question of his own.
"Who are you?" He really wasn't expecting an answer since people rarely bothered to introduce themselves to five year olds so he was a little surprised when the man spoke up.
"My name is Albus Dumbledore," Harry filed the name quickly and ran it through his head a couple of times to make sure he had it right, "and I knew your parents when they were not much older than you." Well that was certainly unexpected Harry thought.
"You knew my mommy and daddy?"
"Oh yes, I knew them for a long time. Until they died in fact." Albus murmured sadly as he remembered that sad day in October. It was such a bittersweet memory, on one hand two of his brightest pupils had died, while on the other the Dark Lord Voldemort had been driven from his body. He didn't know why he was being so candid with the child. Maybe it was the fact that he knew the child wouldn't remember any of it shortly that had him speaking of the past today. Halloween was approaching once more and he always became slightly maudlin around this time of year.
"Oh," Harry said quietly, after all what else could he say? "Could you tell me about them?"
"Well maybe a little bit. You see your mummy was a very intelligent young witch, while your daddy was quite a powerful young wizard. Together they were fighting a very bad man along with some friends," Albus decided that was enough about the bad things. A child this young didn't need to know that the bad man had killed his parents to get to him. "You remind me so much of them. You look just like your father, you even have the same hair as he did. Your eyes though are just like your mothers, she always had the most expressive eyes I've ever seen." The old man smiled as he reminisced.
Something about what Albus had said had finally cottoned on in young Harry's mind though, 'Hold on. Witch? Wizard? Like in the stories? Magic and all that?' A whole new world of possibilities opened up before Harry with those thoughts.
"Is that what I've been doing?"
"Pardon?"
"Magic?" Harry asked impatiently.
"Magic? Why? What have you done Harry?" Albus asked softly. It wouldn't matter how or even if he answered the question since he was going to obliviate the boy anyway and it might prove a to be a quicker and better way to reverse whatever the child had done this time.
"I was looking at these flowers," Harry waved his hand at the shrubs by old Mrs Willkins place. It was true as well, he'd been watching the bees busily at work collecting pollen, the flowers had just been a side effect of that. Then he'd had the idea for his next piece of what he now thought of as magic and 'wished' for them to turn from bright yellow into a bright blue. They were still very pretty flowers and they'd win Mrs Wilson more awards than they ever had before if she saw them but that wasn't what Harry was after. "They were yellow."
That was enough explanation for Albus, "I see," he actually smiled at what was a good feat of magic for anyone let alone a five year old without a wand. "Then I suppose I'd best return them to their natural colour. Though I must admit this shade of royal blue is rather striking." Flick-swish went the stick in his hand and Harry noted that the flowers were once more bright yellow. Then he turned to Harry once more, "Obliviate. You're a long way from home Harry, maybe you should return there. It would also be wise if you didn't venture this far without someone being with you, don't you agree?" Harry nodded obediently and turned with a dull look towards his 'home' and trudged off. Albus watched him for a while before apparating away.
Harry on the other hand was wondering who the old guy thought he was and why he thought he could order him around like that. If he understood what he'd seen before he knew that the man was making people forget things that this Albus Dumbledore didn't want them to know, and that added another thought to his growing list of questions. The only place he knew of that he could get answers was the library where he'd started this experiment earlier. Well he could get answers from school he supposed but he wouldn't be going there until he was six. He would normally have been in a pre-school but as they cost money neither of his relatives had wanted to spend the extra money. Not when public school would be available in just a year. Dudley of course would get the extra year of schooling just so that they'd have another piece of evidence to wave in front of him to prove how superior their little Diddums was in comparison to the freak.
Hearing a sharp cracking sound Harry immediately reversed his course and headed for the library since he knew the old man never stuck around to watch him do whatever he'd been 'ordered' to do. Harry might not know the word 'assume' but he knew what it meant just by observation.
The return trip was much quicker for the sprightly child than his trip home since he didn't have to stop for five or so minutes every fifty paces. So it was with a sense of relief that Harry pushed open the door to the old building and stepped into the cool interior. It was only early October and so it could still get quite warm during the day a fact that wasn't helped by the lack of cloud in the sky. The air was moist and humid since it had rained briefly just yesterday and now that the sun was out again it felt even hotter.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the artificial lights but he smiled when he was finally able to see the head librarian sitting at the counter. He would admit under duress that he actually liked the old battle-axe as she jovially called herself, since she was in fact nicer to the patrons than the young woman who assisted her.
"Hello Harry dear, back again?" she asked earning herself a glare from the young woman next to her. Mrs Crump ignored the lass though since she was the senior librarian, and what was the point of being the leader if you didn't get to flout the rules? Besides it'd been a really quiet day and the only other person in the room was old Mr Delkins from over in Avercombie St and nothing short of a bomb going off in his vicinity would disturb that man since he was deafer than the proverbial post.
"Um yes Mrs Crump. I want to learn about magic and witches and wizards and stuff like that," Harry stated quickly. He wasn't sure how you generally asked people stuff like this, in fact the only times magic was brought up at home his relatives would get real angry. He sure hoped Mrs Crump wasn't going to get angry at him or he didn't know how he'd find out about it.
"So you want to learn about magic huh?" she chose to ignore the indignant snort from the junior librarian. "Enough of that Flo, it never hurts a child to use their imagination. Besides there's a lot you can learn about the world even if most people don't believe in magic. If you don't mind I think I'll take a little break and show young Harry here some of the books we have." She didn't wait for an answer that would have been meaningless in any case since she was in charge and it wasn't like they were rushed off their feet.
"Why don't you come with me? Firstly though we have to figure out what you want to know about since there are so many aspects to magic."
/ To be continued at some point….. \
A/N – I seem to remember that the summer of 1985 or maybe it was 1986 was particularly hot and I was living in Durham at that stage and that's in the north of the country so it's a little cooler than what Surrey would have been. Now that I live in Australia though I know what hot really is, lol. But back then it felt like the heat would never end and even late in October the days were quite warm.
Anyway like I said I just wanted to throw out this plot bunny because it was disrupting the story flow on 'Hell hath no fury'. Still all that aside reviews are always appreciated.