Harry Potter and the Secret of Erised
Chapter 1:What Goes Around Comes Around
By: The Brat Prince~ Jondy MacmillanDisclaimer: Not mine. Belongs to JKR and Warner and who ever else decided to buy into it. If I owned it, well, better not to think of that right now.
A/N: I started with serious misgivings about this fic. I know that's a horrible way to introduce it, but it's the truth. I usually do not write novel length fics (not originals) due to the waste of time (copyright infringement), but this one just came to me. Plus, this has het couples. I used to consider myself a snobby, elitist slash-writer only, although in the early days of my fic writing, I wrote het. So far, I like this though, and I hope it turns out well. Expect a few common couples and a few that you didn't expect. I will be making use of an alternate universe, and if that's going to bother you, feel free to stop reading. Oh, I also have to mention that I run off reviews. If I don't get at least one review per chapter, I usually won't continue. ^^ I'm easily discouraged. So R+R, please.
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Rainbow colored light filtered through the dirty glass windowpanes that lined the attic of number four, Privet Drive. Corroded cardboard boxes, warped from the passage of time and a bad leak in the roof sat on the cool hardwood floor, oblivious of the sweltering July heat. And scattered in the shadowed corner niche that the youngest member of the house had secured for himself were several old black and white photographs, half blurred from long past fallen tear drops and a few traces of smeared blood.
Sixteen year-old Harry Potter had thought nothing of it when his relatives, the Dursleys, had told him to clean the attic up. He knew they were trying to get rid of him so that their only son, Dudley could enjoy his birthday party, which was really a get together for all the local delinquents of England. Harry didn't really mind missing the party, he had never cared to attend in the first place.
It really wasn't his place to even snicker at Dudley's misguided antics when the one person he loved most was gone. Recently, his godfather, Sirius Black, had passed on in a most unusual way. He had been murdered by his own cousin, at the orders of one the rest of Harry's world called You-Know-Who. No one else grieved for Sirius, because Harry was all he had. In fact, most of the world still thought of him as a vicious killer. Only a few members of the wizarding community knew the truth. Yes, as in wizards, witches, and magic.
Harry Potter was not a normal boy, you see. In fact, he was a wizard, like his mother and father before him. They had been killed by another, more sinister wizard named Lord Voldemort, or You-Know-Who, who had terrorized the wizarding world for over a decade. No one had ever survived Voldemort's attacks until Harry. He had only been a baby when it happened of course, but somehow, some mysterious force had caused him to survive the killing curse Voldemort had put on him, and simultaneously banished the evil wizard to some barren corner of the earth. Everyone thought he was gone for good.
For eleven years Harry had been ignorant of his magical heritage. Then, one day, he had received a letter from Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, telling him that he had been accepted to the prestigious academy. A lot had happened that year, including the discovery that Voldemort was alive, although not doing too well. He had been haunted by the memory of the wizard throughout his second and third years, and come face to face with him in his fourth. That encounter had ended in the death of a fellow student. His last meeting with Voldemort had resulted in Sirius's death. Now, Harry was about to begin his sixth year at Hogwarts, with all the signs of more death on the horizon. He didn't think he could stand it.
Throughout the summer, Sirius's final words had haunted Harry. He had taunted Bellatrix, toyed with her when death stood behind him. Sirius had thought he was invincible, just as Harry's friends seemed to think Harry himself was. Harry alone seemed to realize that nothing in this world was permanent. Sirius had shown him that. Yet now Dumbledore expected him to kill or be killed? All he wanted was to rest, and enjoy the time he had been given. For Harry Potter was not, and swore he never would be, a killer. One look at the moldy attic had drowned his hopes of getting a peaceful day's rest. Then he stumbled upon the box.
It had been labeled inconspicuously; small, unfamiliar handwriting scrawled lightly in black ink and reading 'old photos'. Assuming that they were more of his Aunt Petunia's multitude of Dudley's baby pictures, he had skipped opening it, instead choosing to rewire the broken light fixture above him. As he really had no intentions of cleaning the attic, but no will to go back downstairs and partake in Dudley's mundane festivities, Harry proceeded to do his only intended task of the day and fixed the light. He opened an old boxes of old clothes, baby items that both Dudley and he had worn out, enjoying their musty smell. The gentle, steady stream of morning light emitted from the fresh bulb and through the dust blackened windows lulled him to sleep, dancing over his head in a spectrum of unimaginable colors.
However, as the day wore on, his eyes were forced open by the steadily increasing bullets of sweat tracing wavy paths down his forehead and coming to rest on the curve of his eyelashes. The mid-afternoon heat was unbearably heavy, almost a tangible weight on his chest. That moment, right before he really woke up, right before his eyelids flicked open was when he felt the box calling to him. He was not one to ignore the voice. The box called to him again, and unconsciously he moved to respond.
In an instant, he was at its side, fingering the hurried, slanted, curves of the words on the side of the box. Almost desperately, he ripped the box open, eyes falling to rest on almost a dozen black leather bound books; photo albums, the first's title covered in a soft, silky spider web. It contained no pictures of Dudley, as he had assumed, but of his aunt and uncle's wedding, a candid affair. Aunt Petunia looked punch drunk, despite her high collared, stiff backed dress, and Uncle Vernon didn't seem to have changed a bit, except for the development of a few extra pounds a more than a couple gray hairs over the years.
Bored, Harry skipped the rest of the book, and the next one, and the next one, pausing to rest his hand on the cover of the fourth in the box. Unfortunately, it was just pictures of Aunt Petunia, albeit much younger and wearing something that looked suspiciously like a sincere smile. In one she held a tennis trophy, trussed up in a white skirt and golf-tee, in another she clung to the arm of a solemn-faced boy, obviously ready for some sort of formal dance. Although amusing, it was of no use to him, and he again set the book aside.
The fifth album proved to be much more productive. Harry was gifted with a few muggle (non magical) images of his mother as a young girl for the first time. Not that he had many pictures of her as a woman either. Actually, as far as muggle pictures went, he didn't have a single one. They were mostly images of Lily and Petunia Evans in their early youth, as his mother had left for Hogwarts at age eleven as well, and been estranged from Petunia from then till her death. It seemed that Aunt Petunia had a few anger management problems, evidenced by the fact that the majority of the pictures had Lily's head covered in permanent black marker. Harry could have easily lifted the stains had he been allowed to use magic outside of Hogwarts. Which was not the case. Since the end of the school year, he hadn't really been sure he wanted to ever use it again. Magic, for him, seemed to mean bad things for other people.
There were a few photos though; one of his mother as a baby, cradled in Aunt Petunia's tiny toddler arms with their mother, a kind faced woman with soft auburn hair swept back in a severe bun kneeling beside them. He assumed it was his grandmother at any rate, having never seen her before. Another depicted Lily and Petunia around ages six and eight lying in a flower garden, both covered in dirt and brandishing spades much too large for their tiny hands. The third of the bunch was a family portrait; his aunt and mother and grandmother gathered around a grand birthday cake laughing, as well as a clean cut man he supposed was his grandfather. Oddly the picture had no effect on him, at least not in the bitter way pictures of his mother had in the past. He had almost accepted the fact that his parents were gone, because unlike Sirius, they had never been there in the first place for him.
Closing the album, Harry dug deeper in the box, emptying it of all its contents. There was nothing there. Something had been calling him, but whatever it was wasn't in the box. It was in one of the albums. He picked up the last one, a black affair with gold script writing and a heavy layer of dust coating the surface. A small, yet surprisingly heavy iron lock secured the book's entries. The curly letters on the front cover formed the words 'Untouchable'. Weird thing to name an album. The word almost reminded him of the unspeakables, people who worked in the Ministry of Magic, in a department that contained all the mysteries in the known world. The Department of Mysteries, of course, was where Sirius had met his end.
Firmly, he grabbed a pin lying on the floor near him. He was incredibly adept at picking locks the non-magical way, due to his best friend's mischievous brothers. They had determined that it was always prudent to know the muggle way in these types of things. It only took a second. The lock fell to the creaky wooden floor with a loud 'thunk'. Flipping open the cover, Harry found the first page to be thin tissue, over which was written a single phrase; Nothing Is Untouchable Except For Those We Leave Behind.
"What in the world does that mean," Harry asked himself, but inside, he thought he already knew. Resolutely, he turned the next page, but the tiny black script blurred in front of his eyes, and he never did make out what it said. That day, Harry Potter found the book that would change his world. Whether the change would be for the better or for the worse was an entirely different matter.