Celebrate! The rewrite is out!
Alastair Patheroy sighed deeply as his Legilimency probe sought to bring to the surface memories emotionally repressed by his ward. On the outside, he seemed calm and serene, brown eyes twinkling, a slightly wrinkled face devoid of anger and a calming presence emanating from him.
"Where's my fucking revolver! They're going to fucking die in a mother-fucking hole!" screamed an irate seven-year-old, ignoring the serene looking man, whose face broke, momentarily, into an amused grin twitching the short German goatee adorning his chin. It was better to channel anger than to fear or to try and bury the memory again. Why boy had ended up in that orphanage, he didn't know.
The boy, tall, powerfully built for his age with a head of unruly raven-hair was destroying almost everything around him with accidental magic. Randomly, lightning bolts and fireballs burst from the glowing, eerie green aura which flared around the boy. They lanced out and shattered objects, singed and incinerated others, causing significant damage to all but the man sat comfortably behind a powerful shield.
It took fifteen minutes of anger, expressed through insults, threats and often gory and tortuous deaths for those responsible for his abandonment. It devolved into cursing in fluent Arabic and the ancient tongue of serpents, Parseltongue. All the time, his magic was flaring, lashing out until the kid finally screamed with pain and rage before falling unconscious from magical exhaustion. It turned out that memories were enough to startle a powerful child into accidental magic, and that accidental magic was significantly more powerful than the elder man had ever seen. The child would need to learn to control his magic and harness that power.
Overlooking the glowing lights of the Las Vegas Strip, with its infamous casinos, the luxurious penthouse was owned, mainly, by businessmen who either owned businesses in the area, or came to the area frequently enough to lose their money. In this case, the occupants were Alastair Patheroy, a wizard of some repute in his own field, and his ward, Harry Potter. Because who actually calls a kid 'Hadrian'?
However, a bit of background would explain why this event was occurring. Born July 31st 1988 and followed two years later by his younger brother Nathaniel Potter, Hadrian 'Harry' Potter. When Harry was three years and three months old, the family had been in hiding in a cottage under the powerful Fidelius enchantment, when they were betrayed. The serpentine visage of the self-proclaimed Dark Lord Voldemort was one that still gave Harry nightmares. He had walked into the cottage, immediately stunning and binding both of the elder Potters. Oh how the 'light' would lament when, destroyed by the deaths of their children, two of the most prominent supporters of the light would withdraw from the war.
Upon entering the nursery in which Nathan was smacking two wooden bricks together and Harry looking disgustedly at the second Narnia book for its lack of gore, bloodshed and general violence which apparently C.S Lewis had found gratuitous, Voldemort had immediately trained his wand on the elder. It was natural to go from eldest to youngest. He spoke the words, a bastardisation of Ancient Aramaic healing spell. Voldemort prepared to cast again at the younger, when he was blasted apart by his own spell rebounding on him.
The reason was a combination of factors. It would later turn out under Alastair Patheroy's care, that Harry was first wizard in centuries known to be capable of fully mastering weather magic and becoming a storm mage. Unnaturally intelligent for his age, Harry could feel the malevolence rolling of Voldemort, and knew he was the being his parents and their friends feared to speak of and lived in terror of.
Mustering some significant hatred for the snake-faced wizard, Harry felt out for the magic around him and blasted the killing curse back at him. His uncontrolled power had sucked in all around him and his brother, draining a shattered soul fragment, though the shade of Voldemort fled, screaming, flying through the destroyed back wall of the cottage. Voldemort's body was vaporised, leaving his wand and robes on the floor as a grey shade swooped into the night.
Unfortunately, his parents decided that because Nathan had a V-shaped cut on his hand from one of his wooden blocks which had exploded from a fragment of Harry's lightning-throwing aura meant that Nathan had vanquished the Dark Lord. Despite his honorary grandfather Albus' best efforts, James and Lily often seemed to forget his presence. Remus Lupin had to remain present to remind them of Harry's needs, as they seemed unnaturally obsessed with the well-being of Nathan. They moved to another safe house and stayed behind its enchantments for two months, leaving Sirius Black in Azkaban for that time before leaving to testify of his innocence.
Thus, the Occlumency training which was forcing Harry to relive his every memory had just brought up when James Potter left him at an orphanage, stating that he felt he could no longer trust himself to care his sons, the thought of hiring a nanny for the heir to one of the richest of the Ancient and Noble Houses never crossed his mind. It was a strange coincidence that, after the enchantments bound to the ring of the head of the Potter family rejected James as its wearer, that Harry picked it up and pocketed it.
Harry suspected it had happened mainly as he almost never overtly displayed accidental magic. Preferring to read and learn, rather than becoming emotional and thus triggering outbursts of magic, unlike his brother. While Alastair wasn't entirely convinced it was the cause, Harry had come to believe that he was abandoned because his progenitors believed him to be a squib, placing him at opposites with his oft-spoiled younger brother.
Though he only remembered snatches, it had affected Harry at a subconscious level. He had a significant wariness of adults in power over him, which had only grown with time in a number of orphanages. Thus he was moved from that orphanage to another for his unsociable tendencies, namely swearing often, refusing to adhere to curfew, reading books way beyond any near-four-year-old until his adoption by Alistair Patheroy.
He was still much like that. He swore often and loud, with an impressive vocabulary. He also refused to adhere to many rules, particularly ones concerning his repeated attempts to build explosive devices, attempts to impose diets and curfews. He spent time reading books on maths, history, various languages and the sciences, often consuming a book that most university graduates would have to spend a week or two on in a couple of hours.
From memories Harry had shared with him, Alastair could confirm that his birth mother had a sharp, wicked temper, while his birth father, James was one to hold a grudge for a long time, simmering. Harry was unfailingly capable of exploding in moments, or keeping a grudge on a slow simmer. He was usually horribly cynical, prone to sarcasm and capable of ripping a man apart with his tongue at ten paces. And as a number of their neighbours would bear witness, he usually was plotting something which would end up with somebody in tears. Usually his social services case officer. Often when he was particularly cranky, Harry would lash out at people with lethal levels of sarcasm, with a healthy dose of contempt and snideness, or occasionally, when the occasion warranted it, a lightning bolt of magic.
As an expert in Harry, an interesting subject with unplumbed depths, Alastair should not have attempted to dump a bucket of ice-cold water on his charge. When Harry awoke with the first drop of ice-cold water touching his face, Al really should have been expecting the rest wandlessly banished straight at him, every drop electrified by the follow-up lightning bolt.
"Fuck off!" Harry swore at the grinning old man who had raised a shield powerful enough to atomize the water droplets. Had the lightning bolt been directed at him, not through a medium, he would be medium barbecued. Needless to say, Alistair was still cautious around the young man who had once managed to submerge downtown Las Vegas in monsoon-level rain and thunder storms for two days running.
"Come on little Harry, you've been asleep too long." teased the elder man.
"No shit Sherlock." was the reply from the bed; "Magical exhaustion, how long was I out?"
"I gave you an hour and a half." replied Al.
Harry slid out of bed, patting the bedside tables for his glasses before remembering that he hadn't worn glasses for over a year, swore briefly and settled into a meditative trance, once more going over memories. It couldn't be that hard, he only had another three and a half years of memories to review. At most. Maybe a few months less.
After spending a year hopping from orphanage to orphanage, finally across the coast to America, Harry had caught the eye of the-then Head Auror of the Los Angeles Auror Division, a former member of the American magical army, the Corps of Magic. Thus, he found himself living in the care of Alistair Patheroy, or technically, living in the apartment next door, he was far too independent to live with someone.
He'd skipped all previous schooling and gone straight to high school... for no more than a fortnight before he left in disgust and took up home education. Al arranged a series of tutors in magical subjects while allowing Harry to self-teach non-magical subjects, often through the medium of the burgeoning internet. It meant less headaches for Al as he didn't have to sit by the phone just waiting for the call that Harry had blown up the school science laboratories. For Harry, it meant he had more time to put towards shooting his new Ruger Single Six .22LR revolver and building a dune buggy in his sitting room.
They were two of his favourite hobbies, apart from building explosives, shooting things and fast-moving vehicles.