Author's Note: I've been planning this story for at least six months now, and thrilled to finally post it online. Technically, this story resumes from the end of Deathly Hallows (the book), but it will include some elements from the movie franchise, as long as those details don't conflict too much with the book. I.e., Lavender Brown's death will be included. However, I'm starting this story after sixteen years, rather than J.K. Rowling's nineteen year time jump, but with the Potter children (James, Albus, and Lily) around the same ages they were at the end of Deathly Hallows.
I don't own any characters, settings, or anything else from this story. J.K. Rowling and Scholastic, Inc., own all literary rights, and Warner Bros., owns the movie rights. I make no money off this story, so please don't sue me. I'm a recent college graduate with student loan debt lol…
I hope you enjoy this chapter. Please review and follow, because I'll update more quickly if there's a lot of feedback, positive or negative.
Chapter 1:
Platform 9 ¾
If anyone had peered into the windows of number seven, Gobstone Road, Godric's Hollow on the morning of September 1st, (not that anyone did very often anymore), he or she would have observed that the Potter family was very normal.
Harry (he preferred to be called by his first name, and not Mr. Potter, if you didn't mind) had a respectable position in the Ministry. Before breakfast in the morning, he came downstairs in pajama pants and a white shirt, barefooted, to retrieve the morning paper. For breakfast, he ate toast with marmalade and butter with a glass of orange juice. During breakfast, he talked animatedly with his wife and children.
Harry had a fine layer of stubble at breakfast because he hadn't shaved yet, but he would after breakfast, as he usually did. His hair was unruly, as it always had been since his childhood. His sight had changed since Harry's childhood, so his green eyes were enhanced by a slightly thicker set of glasses than he had worn as a young adult. For a man who had just marked his thirty-third birthday that summer, Harry Potter was a surprisingly slim man. People who knew Harry well (particularly his mother –in-law) commented on his small size, and those who did not know Harry well kept their thoughts to themselves.
Ginerva (who did not answer to her first name unless called by her father or mother), Harry's wife, was also rather normal. She rose at dawn to cook breakfast and to guarantee that her two older children, James and Albus, had their trunks and other belongings already downstairs before they departed for the beginning of term. While she cooked, Ginny—which she preferred to be called—kept her red hair in a ponytail while she cooked. In her former life, she had been a renowned athlete, but during the pregnancy with her first child, Ginny retired from that world and settled into a domestic life with her husband. She'd become a very good cook and a very skilled homemaker.
They were exceptionally normal, at least, that is, on the surface. Which is the only normal place for anyone.
On that morning, when Harry came downstairs to the breakfast nook of his rather large and tidy home (which was entirely attributable to Ginny's cleaning skills), it was a welcome reprieve to find that someone had cooked breakfast for him. Ginny still stood at the stove, waving her wand at eggs in the frying pan. Harry had not enjoyed a home-cooked meal for the last three weeks. He came downstairs with due reluctance because it was the morning of the beginning of the school term at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and he had slept only two hours. In addition to the stacked trunks and a satchel of schoolbooks belonging to James, there were two cages housing two sleeping owls beside the door. One was snowy white, and the other was golden brown.
That was just the beginning of the differences between the world of the Potters and the non-magical, Muggle World.
"Looks delicious, Ginny." Harry walked up to his wife and hugged her. "And I'm not just talking about the food, either." With his arms still embracing Ginny's waist, Harry placed a playful kiss on her exposed neck.
"Oh stop, you!" Ginny swatted him with her spatula. It was a playful strike, rather than the more aggressive and lethal one she reserved for household pests, or the sharp, disciplinary one she administered to the children. "The children will be up at any moment, and you're playing around like we're still at Hogwarts."
"Do you want me to find my wife less desirable?" Harry hadn't let go of Ginny yet. He rested his right cheek on her left one and watched her wrist guide the food to perfectly cooked perfection.
"At it again, are you two? Will there be a fourth in our number soon?" a boy's voice came from the kitchen stairs.
Two pairs of reluctant feet stepped down the stairs and dragged across the kitchen. They belonged to two dark-haired, lanky boys. The taller, older boy had his father's dark green eyes and the lean height and easily freckled complexion of his mother. The younger one had the dark brown eyes of his mother, his father's jet black hair, and healthy complexion.
"Don't be so curde, James," Ginny admonished her older son. "So what if you've heard about the birds and the bees over the vacation. There's no need to tell the whole world. Nobody likes an insufferable know-it-all."
James Potter sat at the table beside his father. At only fourteen years of age, he was already two inches taller than his father, and it was obvious even when he sat down. When Ginny set a plate of toast in front of him, James started devouring it immediately. "No one except Uncle Ron."
"Your aunt is not that type of woman. And don't ever say that again," Harry warned James.
"Don't ever say what, Dad? Aunt Hermione is a know-it-all, and it's very insufferable. She's always rattling off some fact or figure. 'Did you know that Borneo is part of an island chain that includes some of the longest lived wizards in the world?' 'Chinese wizards had developed a use for every metal thousands of years before European wizards began their investigations of alchemy.' And I have to see that woman today?"
Harry started to laugh at James' spot-on imitation of Hermione's voice, but Ginny shot him a glance over her shoulder. "James, I don't ever want to hear you speak of your aunt or any other adult in that disrespectful tone again."
"Now you sound like Gram, talking about Uncle Charlie's newest girlfriend."
The younger Potter boy sniggered behind his hand. Harry still saw it. "Is that funny to you, Albus?" Ginny demanded from the sink.
"No, Mum. I'm sorry." Chagrined, Albus folded his hands in his lap and stared at his breakfast plate.
Harry decided to change the course of the breakfast conversation. "So, James, what did you do during your holiday?"
"Dad, I stayed home while all my mates went to foreign countries. Even Hugo and Rose traveled, and they're not even old enough for wands yet! The prats." James tapped a particularly dry piece of toast against the plate. "Oi! Mum, can I have a bowl of Magic Pops instead?"
"Eat the food your mum just fixed for you," Harry said sternly. He glanced at Albus, who had already cleaned his plate and still sat at the table, waiting to be dismissed. "And James, you had your holiday abroad in New Zealand just during Christmas."
"So did Hugo and Rose." James broke the toast. "Mum, please, can I have some cereal instead?"
Harry glanced at Ginny, who was already removing a bowl from the cabinet beside the pantry. Within a few silent seconds, she had poured a bowl of Magic Pops cereal with ice cold milk, just the way James liked it. Ginny set the bowl in front of her elder son and glanced at Harry. When their eyes met, Ginny went to the stack of dishes in the sink. If she washed with magic, the task would have taken less time, but Ginny washed by hand instead.
Harry watched James eating his cereal. "We've discussed this before, James. You and everyone else in this family have to deal with less travel than most children your age because…"
"Because my dad is the Boy Who Lived?"
"Precisely because of that."
"What a great big whoop for me. Sometimes I wish I hadn't been born!" James slammed his hands on the kitchen table and stormed from the room.
Albus glanced from his father to his mother and back to his father. The only sound in the kitchen was that of Ginny scrubbing the skillet. "May I please be excused?" Albus said quietly.
"Yes, Albus; make sure your brother is packed and ready to depart. The train leaves in an hour." Harry groaned and rested his face in his hands. He waited until he could not hear Albus' feet on the stairs before he spoke to Ginny.
"I am tired of having the same conversation over and over with James. Life for us was harder than it is for him at that age. He doesn't have Voldemort trying to kill him every day that he breathes, or Death Eaters lurking around every corner. We've talked about these things since before he was born. He just makes every day difficult."
Ginny scrubbed furiously at a glass with a smooth dishrag, so she wouldn't leave scratches on its surface. Harry watched his wife at work. He had learned that Ginny, growing up as the only daughter of a homemaker, preferred a house that was spotlessly disorganized. She was dedicated to the cleanliness of everything in the house, even if things didn't always stay in one place.
"James is just a child. Being who he is, that's hard for him. He's just lashing out."
"What could be hard for him? We've worked hard to provide everything for him. Ginny, he didn't have to grow up the way you or I grew up. He's been loved and all his basic needs have been met."
"It doesn't diminish the impact of being who he is."
"Being who I had to be, that was hard."
Ginny set the last of the dishes in the drain beside the sink. "Harry, he's just a child."
"I was just a child, too, but I dealt with my duty!"
Harry slammed his fist into the tabletop. He and Ginny had had the same argument too many times lately, and James wasn't the one who had to deal with the detrimental consequences. There were times when their discussion had grown so heated that objects had flown across the room, from either of them losing control over their magic, or that words had been exchanged from which there was no retraction.
Ginny walked to her husband's side, took his left hand in both of hers, and knelt down beside him. In the post-dawn sunlight, Harry thought she was as enchanting as when they had begun dating in his sixth year at Hogwarts, as amazing as the day they had married.
"We went through those Dark Days, so he wouldn't have to. You faced Voldemort and his army of Death Eaters so that children like James, Albus, and Lily would be born into a world without that kind of terrifying power looming over their heads. You died, Harry, so that our children—and a thousand, thousand others—would never have to fear a Dark Lord. You've given our children a hope and a future."
Harry sighed. As the head of the Auror Department at the Ministry of Magic, there were things he knew about and did not tell Ginny. Things were transpiring in the world around them, even as they spoke in the safe solitude among stainless steel cookware that Harry could not tell her. He had created a safe world for her and their children, and he had to defend it.
"James doesn't appreciate…" Ginny swooped in and kissed Harry on the side of his mouth.
"Yes, he does. He has no idea how to show it. No, come on, we have to meet the Weasleys at King's Cross in thirty minutes, and I'd rather be early this time. You know how insufferable Ron is when we're late."
Bathed, packed, and dressed, the Potters departed from the house with two large trunks, two gilded owl cages containing two large mail-carrying owls, and a dozen schoolbooks in a newly modified Range Rover. Harry took the driver's seat, while Ginny rode in the front passenger's seat. Fourteen-year-old James sat behind his mother, and ten-year-old Albus sat behind Harry, while their daughter, seven-year-old Lily sat between her brothers. As she climbed into the SUV, Ginny said, "Dad said you'll appreciate the latest additions to the car."
Arthur Weasley, Harry's father-in-law, had an insatiable fixation for Muggle technology. He took apart commonplace things like toasters, cell phones, and computers used by non-magical people in an effort to understand how the non-magical people functioned without magic. At one point, his wife Molly had exiled him and all his projects to their garage, because he had filled up their home with so many modified things. Arthur had taken the opportunity to work on even more projects, including a flying car, without his wife's daily supervision. Since he had a position with the Department of Muggle Artifacts, Arthur was at least influential in writing laws that legitimated his explorations.
Harry laughed at his wife's observation and steered the car onto the highway that bypassed Godric's Hollow and flowed into London. The long road from Godric's Hollow, a village populated entirely by wizards and witches, to the highway was made to look like the entrance to a privately owned, dilapidated estate and dominated by a crumbling castle, which were not rare in their area of Britain. Muggle trespassers occasionally ventured onto the estate, but they were turned away by magical enchantments that caused the non-magical people to become distracted by a ringing cell phone or a sudden emergency. In Harry's opinion, the magical defenses around Godric's Hollow were the best he had seen outside of Hogwarts.
The Range Rover got the Potters to London in thirty minutes. It seemed to Harry that Arthur had modified the car to ease between the fast-moving cars of London's traffic, and to slide from one corner to the next without jumping a curb or striking any pedestrians. His latest additions also included the car's ability to find an excellent parking space near the front doors of the train station, so that Harry and Ginny managed to locate a trolley immediately and rush their children and luggage into the train station.
The train that the Potter children had to catch was, as many other things in the magical world were, hidden from Muggles in plain sight. Young witches and wizards boarded the train to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry at Platform 9 ¾, which was concealed within the barrier between Platform 9 and 10. There were a variety of ways wizards and witches chose to reach the platform. The Potters chose the most subtle way: They leaned their trolley of luggage and against the barrier, and glancing around the station, they slipped through.
"Bollocks, Ron and 'Mione are already here." Although Ginny said this through gritted teeth, Harry saw that his wife's face was alive with levity at the sight of her brother and sister-in-law.
Because of the sizable field of camerawizards that had already gathered around someone on the platform, Harry already knew Ron and Hermione were at the platform. There were only a few people who could have drawn that many camerawizards, and none of them were tall and lean with striking red Weasley hair. And none of them would have pushed aside a crowd of camerawizards to embrace old friends like Ron and Hermione did when Ron spotted Harry and yelled "Harry! You made it!"
Ron hadn't sought fame or fortune after the Battle of Hogwarts; even though, as the youngest of six brothers, he had spent most of his life feeling overshadowed by the accomplishments of his older brothers. He simply tried out for the position of Keeper for the Chudley Cannon Quidditch team when Quidditch resumed its normal schedule. With Oliver Wood at the helm as the team's Captain and top Keeper, it seemed unlikely that Ron would ever have had any playing time at all. It was only because of an injury that took Wood out of the game for three weeks during the Quidditch World Cup, that Ron had any playing time at all.
In his first Quidditch World Cup appearance, Ron made fifty-eight saves and led England to its first Quidditch World Cup in centuries. His celebrity status was cemented.
Camerawizards followed Ron as he approached and hugged Harry. "Beat you here again, mate," he whispered into Harry's right ear.
"It won't happen again," Harry whispered back.
Hermione hugged Ginny then Harry. She knelt down and gawked over the Potter children. "James, you're getting so tall! You know, at your father's age, he already had his first crush: Cho Chang, that Seeker who went to play for the Manchester Medallions? Lucky for all of us, your mum never gave up on him. Cho was a dreadful person….Albus, how are you feeling today? It's your first year, I bet you'll make excellent marks…And Lily, you've become such a beautiful little lady!"
Ron and Hermione's children, Hugo and Rose, dragged their feet to join the two couples. At five years old, Hugo was already showing the Weasley height trait as he towered over his sister, the three-year-old Rose. Both children had their mother's dark brown eyes and their father's flame-colored red hair. They smiled shyly at the older Potter children.
As Hermione and Ginny began chatting and gushed over the children, Ron pulled Harry aside. Camerawizards followed them from a distance. "Listen, mate, Perce said there's been an uptick in Dark activity lately. Said you'd know more about it than anyone else," he whispered warily. "Is that true? Is it…?" His eyes drifted to the lightning bolt scar on Harry's forehead without another word.
Harry was only one year old when he received the scar at the hands of the greatest Dark wizard in history. Voldemort had come to Godric's Hollow, to a cottage just down the street from where the Potters now lived, on the ill-gotten knowledge of a prophecy predicting his downfall from one of two children born on Harry's birthday. Voldemort had chosen Harry, and had broken into the cottage, slaying Harry's father James first. Then he advanced upon Harry, but Lily Evans Potter refused to stand aside and let Voldemort slay her son. Because of her sacrifice, Voldemort's attempt to kill Harry had backfired, ripping him from his body and destroying half of the Potters' cottage.
But Harry had lived.
"No, Ron, Voldemort's been dead for more than seventeen years. We destroyed all the Horcruxes. He has no more ties to this world. And I can't believe you're still afraid to say his name!"
"What do you expect? When he was at full power, there was a Trace on his name that abolished all of our security spells, and we were caught. Hermione…" Ron flushed, swallowed, and glanced at his wife. Hermione met his gaze and offered a wistful smile before turning back to her conversation with Ginny.
"Ginny told me she still has flashbacks sometimes," Harry said.
"I promised her I wouldn't say anything, ever."
"And you didn't. My wife did."
Ron laughed an empty, sardonic laugh. "Do you know what the biggest regret is, form that day? I wasn't there to protect her. I also regret not killing Bellatrix, but…"
"Mum did what she had to, Ron. It was her chance for some closure, you know that. "
Ron nodded slowly. "If there has been more activity of late—and you haven't said there isn't…"
"There has been, but it's not Voldemort. Someone has begun to do the foul things…"
"Like what?"
Harry fretted over a response. As the Head of the Auror office, he received all reports of Dark wizard activity in England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and even coordinated with Magical Defense in Spain and France. He had blocked publication of any stories of Dark Activity. Aurors who reported to the scene of an attack were under orders to Oblivate any witnesses within a four block radius. Harry guaranteed one hundred percent secrecy by Oblivating those same Aurors in person. No one could know. And Ron, like Ginny, wouldn't understand Harry's motives.
"I can't disclose that information, Ron."
"Bloody hell! Why doesn't the public know? The people have a right to know!"
"Don't be naïve, Ron. That's not even possible."
"Why, Harry? Is it because you're the Head of the Auror Department, and I'm just a Quidditch player? Or is it because I finally achieved recognition at something other than being the sidekick of the Boy Who Lived?"
"Ron, don't be a prat! I thought those days were far behind us!"
Hermione and Ginny joined their husbands. "It's almost time for the train to leave," Ginny said. She looped her arms around Harry's. "We'll see you two after the children leave," she said to Ron and Hermione.
Ginny pulled him to the children, while Ron and Hermione spoke in low tones. James had gone off and joined a group of friends in his same year. One of them, a lean girl with curly blonde hair, ruffled James's jet black hair. He playfully swatted her away. Teddy Lupin, Harry's godson, was hugging Bill and Fleur Weasley, the parents of his girlfriend Victorie. Harry had allowed Teddy to spend the summer holiday at the Weasleys' cottage on the coast, but just like his biological son, Harry felt that Teddy was growing up better than he had been allowed to. Albus had the fretful look of a boy who was without friends or companions as he stood beside the train.
"Albus, what's wrong?"
Harry's younger son stared up at him. "Dad, James said the Sorting Hat is going to send me to Slytherin. O-or it might send me back home. I'd rather go home than end up in Slytherin."
Over Albus' head, Harry spotted James stepping onto the train with his friends. Harry wanted to speak to his elder son, but James was gone too quickly for anything more than a tense glance.
"There is nothing wrong with the Slytherin House." As he said this, Harry ironically spotted Draco Malfoy. From his first day at Hogwarts, Draco Malfoy seemed determined to oppose Harry. They were even opposites in looks: Where Harry was dark-haired, green-eyed, and composed of lean muscle from his physical training as an Auror and as a Seeker, Draco was slim and almost colorless in both hair and eyes. But since the defeat of Voldemort—the most powerful Dark wizard of his age and the murderer of Harry's parents—Draco had proved to be a trustworthy member of the Hogwarts Board of Governors and a good confidant in the Department of International Magical Affairs. He simply wasn't the same Malfoy that Harry had known.
Harry gave Draco the slightest of greetings, a simple nod of his head. Draco returned it, and placed his slender left hand on the right shoulder of a small boy with parted blond hair and a pale complexion identical to Draco's. He guided the boy onto the train.
"B-but James said."
"Listen to what I'm saying…"
At that moment, an explosion ripped through the front of the train.