Prologue: My Training, Perfect.
Harry looks up, sweat clinging to his brow as he raises his wand and screams, "Expelliarmus!" He is only seven years old, and he is facing an auror. The auror's name is Jack Harrington and he is a muggle born, not that Harry cares. He simply wants to finish this duel, which has lasted for the past two hours, and go back to sleep.
The auror casually flicks the spell away, and whispers, "You will have to do better, soldier."
Harry sneers at the auror, and sends a silent stinging hex at the auror's feet. Jack side steps it, and whispers, "CruciO!"
Harry's eyes widen at the harshness of the spell, at the manovalent magic he can practically feel searing toward him, and he casts frantically, "Protego!" The pain curse rushes past his shield, and he feels the full brunt of it hit his chest, spreading outward through every nerve fibre in his body. Pain rushes in every sense of the word, filling his world. He blacks out.
When he regains consciousness the first thing he does is stay absolutely still. He even slows down his breathing, making it nice and even as he recalls Jack's training, the lecture on what to do when captured and in an unknown situation. He knows he is the boy-who-lived, and as such a high profile target for death eaters. What happened?
He can't seem to remember no matter how hard he tries. The last thing he can remember is having a duel with Jack, which is a familiar thing to him. But now he is lying on a soft bed, and he hears whispers of Minister Fudge, alongside Jack, and the Director of the Department of Mysteries - his department, the one that is training him to be a soldier for when Voldemort returns - in the midst of a conversation.
He relaxes inwardly, knowing he hasn't been captured by death eaters. But wait, his young mind reflects, what if it is polyjuice potion, and the death eaters want to trick me into trusting them? His heart races, but he keeps a cool and collected demeanor and does not reveal a single twitch or expression on his stony young face.
Instead he strains to hear the whispers, and feels his senses sharpen. The experiments the department of mysteries unspeakables had performed on him were some of the most secretive and successful, created by geniuses of the highest levels. He hears the three men in the hospital room (or is it? It could be a death eater trap, he reminds himself) talking about him.
"Did you really have to use it, Jack?" asks Fudge, his voice a bit broken, a bit nervous. Harry can instantly make out that the Minister is afraid, but of what? Why would the Minister of Magic be afraid? It doesn't make sense.
"I did, Harry is old enough so that the curse won't have any lasting effect. A bit of bed rest will help him get back to his feet in no time, I'm sure-"
"He blacked out, Harrington," The icy cold voice of the Director echoes in the room and the other two men freeze. The Director, Harry knows from personal experience, rarely ever speaks. "A seven year old boy shouldn't black out. He should still be conscious, so it seems that one of our experiments was a failure. To determine which one will be very complicated."
Harry wonders what the curse Jack used on him was, and as if on que he remembers, a flash of red light hitting him in the chest, and a phantom pain rushes through his arms and legs, toward the source where the curse had hit him. As if he was hit again, he feels the same effects, less intensified, but still pain beyond belief rush through him. Though he tries to keep a cool facade, to show no emotion lest he was in the grasp of death eaters intent on converting him (his mentor Jack had warned him about it many times), he can't help but scream. It feels as if the pain will last for ever. The three men turn their attention toward him.
Harry opens his eyes wide open, and he screams his throat out, screaming to get rid of the pain, a primal animalistic scream of raw emotion, of raw hurt that courses through his veins.
"Nurse, get some sedatives," The director says, but Harry can't catch the words, as if he is floating in deep water, as if he is sinking into a tub of ice cold slime. Everything fades and loses colour, and the shapes around his bed - the white grey walls and the rows and rows of empty beds, the table in the far corner next to the window - seem to distort strangely. Ah, the room is familiar, Harry thinks as the pain lessens and then fades away. He is breathing hard, hyperventilating and it is a struggle to control it, to bring it to a slow even pace from the diaphram.
He barely feels the needle plunging into his left arm as Nurse Welinda injects muggle tranquilizers into his bloodstream. Harry knows they have to use muggle medicine to inhibit the risks of magical interactions from the potion he had consumed last month that was supposed to have increased his already wiry strength.
He still hates it. He wants the instant magic cure, not this muggle shit.
Where had he learnt the swear word? Shit. Shit. "Shit shit shit!" He says, and giggles, and his green eyes look toward the man who has cared for him, trained him, taught him for the past three years, ever since they took him from the Dursleys at the age of four. Jack seems guilty, but there is a glint of determination in his eyes, and deeper than that there is an ocean of shame. Harry can see this with a strange clarity of perception he has never felt before. He wonders why the Ministry is doing this to him, the experiments, the constant duelling, the lectures, the potions, the isolation. They have been doing this to him since he was a four year old.
Ever since that day when Voldemort regained his body, using Albus Dumbledore's blood.
The head of Albus Dumbledore was found hanging on a pike in front of Hogwarts for all to see, as the green mark of the death eaters and Voldemort's personal insignia lit the darkness of the midnight hour.
The wizarding world, Harry recalls, had gone into panic mode and screamed for a solution to their problems, and who does the fearful ministry look toward but Harry Potter?
Harry giggles as he reaches his wand, feeling utterly calm, utterly placid, as he pulls his wand from his waist belt and points it at the minister.
"Crucio!" He screams, fuelling all his rage, all his darkness at the man who is indirectly responsible for his loss of a real childhood, for his isolation, for his pain.
He is quickly subdued, and punished.
By now he should know better, but later that day, after all the tests are done, he has a two hour learning session with one Dolores Umbridge and her blood quill.
He is in a state of isolation, and in his darkest nightmares he wonders if the pain will really last forever.
They decieve me, he thinks, recalling how the aurors lured him to signing the ten year contract for training. They told me they will teach me, but all they do is hurt me.
I will kill them all, he vows, as he writes in his own blood, "I will stay calm and collected at all times for I am a soldier, disciplined and loyal to the Ministry of Magic."
Chapter One: Initial Meetings
Harry is in his cupboard, looking at his hands as if they are the most important things in the world right now. He is waiting for his punishment, for what he did today. He wonders what Vernon will shout this time - not say but shout, loud and hard - and what would the punishment contain.
Will he go without food for a day? That was always reserved for the extremes. But today in the first day of class, he turned a teacher's hair blue. Harry thinks about that and chuckles softly inside. The teacher was a crab to him, and Harry doesn't feel any guilt over what he did.
The skies are dark by now, he notices, having an innate sense of time. He can hear the rain drops harder, and rumbling in the clouds from the thin wood of his cupboard. It seems to him that on night like these magical phenomenon occur, on nights like these miracles can happen. He closes his eyes and imagines himself on a lawn, lying down on cool grass looking at the stars in the sky. And he percieves the feeling through a warm filter of happiness, of calmness, for he feels the sense that he is free, free of all burduns and limitations.
But it is getting cold and Harry shivers, wishing that some miracle will take place, that he will get out of this house, go home, to his parents. They can't be dead, they couldn't have just left him here. Harry sobers at the thought of his parents really being dead. He had asked his aunt this morning after helping make breakfast, and to think of them as drunkards sickened Harry. His parents were important people, loved by those around them, not a waste or a scavenger on society's doorsteps.
The hate in his heart warms him, and in the dust of the cuboard wall, where the light flickers from the dying bulb, he draws his name with his finger. "Harry Potter."
The bell to the house rings, echoes, vibrates through the walls of his cell, or the walls of his mind because he has the feeling, the intuition that something magical is indeed about to happen to him, a miracle. His instincts had never failed him. He straightens his back, and put his utmost concentration to hearing everything.
He feels a sort of twitching on his head, and then suddenly he can hear with a crystal clarity, each heart beat - his aunt and uncle's, and the stranger at the door.
As he sinks into this new state of being, he feels he can see through closed eyelids the scene playing out on the porch. The fat man red in the face opens the door, expecting a salesman or someone of an equally annoying and trivial profession come to disturb family dinner time, but instead he sees a tall black man wearing red robes with a gold and silver trim. Hard brown eyes rest on Uncle Vernon and Harry wonders what the man will do - is he a killer? Harry thinks the strange man has the eyes of a murderer or someone who has seen a lot. His intuition tells him this - screams at his consciousness about the danger this man poses, held at bay by will alone.
"Hello Mr. Vernon, my name is Kingsley Shacklebolt. May I come in and have a few minutes of your time?"
"Why should I let you in?" Vernon asked with a degree of calm, holding his rage back. "You are obviously not of our kind, your manners of speech and movement are unnatural, your clothing stinks of freakish behavior, of which I do not approve, and your face - it is so heavily scarred you might as well be the meat under a butcher's knife. Go away, you vile freak!"
Kingsley raised his wand, and held the tip to Vernon's throat. "What I had phrased as a request was my mistake. In truth, I give you no requests whatsoever, but commands. You are to obey me like you obey your superiors, muggle, for if you irk and annoy me I can make your existence a hell without end."
"What in the-" Vernon stops, frowns and looks at the strange man up and down with a critical eye. "Well then explain, wizard. If you are superior to me, like you say you are, like you falsely claim to be, then why the hell are you wearing a dress of all things?"
"Not a dress, a robe," Kingsley corrects gently. "May I come in?" His voice has a bit of coolness to it, a bit of ice, a bit of dislike and a tad more of disdain, of arrogance. To Harry, the man strikes him as contemptuous of Uncle Vernon, and he wonders why this is so. He knows Vernon is a powerful man at the company, well liked, in for a promotion in a few months, and he wonders why or how Kingsley can have such a hold on his being that he is not afraid of Vernon.
Harry's afraid of Vernon.
He always has been ever since he was dropped off here by social services, and he hates it. But now he knows something, a truth that Vernon tried to hide, and he grins in satisfaction as he hears the footsteps of the two men enter his abode, his territory. Harry hates to be the one without control, but now he has some measure of control over his situation.
Magic exists, a concept that seems alien yet familiar, and he thinks back to his time as a one year old, to memories that no boy should remember. But he remembers in dreams that end with a nightmarish sight of an ocean of green murderous light. Harry can recall precious moments of his mother and father, and knows in his soul that they were not drunks, but were great men and women.
Harry sits in his cupboard and waits, but he fingers the kitchen knife he keeps under his cot at all times, because if things went dangerous, Harry would not hesitate to defend himself. He has never allowed anyone to touch him, and he never will. Vernon once tried to beat him, but Harry dissuaded the man of any such notion right away with a fierce jab to the throat and a hard kick in the family jewels.
The cupboard door opens, and light shines in Harry's eyes. Harry looks up at the face of his aunt with emotionless expressions, like he is a statue. Still, yet fully ready to attack the woman at the first sign of hostility, he waits to be addresssed.
"Harry, you are wanted in the living room," the woman says in clipped tones, but Harry inwardly grins when he sees the fear in her eyes.
Harry nods, and follows Aunt Petunia down the stairs whereupon he stops and stretches his senses to hear what Vernon and the Other Man are speaking. But all is silent. They await his presence. Harry almost smirks, because by their silence they convey that this matter is for him, that he is important enough to warrant such focused attention.
Harry has always wanted to be important. He enters the living room with his spine erect, his head proud, and his eyes as probing as knives. Instantly gleaning information from the situation, Harry knows that the man has come for him, and him alone.
Harry takes a seat opposite the man, next to Vernon on the rose coloured sofa.
"Harry, my name is Kingsley," says the man gently, smiling softly. "I am a wizard, and so are you. Would you like to see a spell performed?"
Harry shakes his head, "I believe you but tell me, how do you perform these, what do you call them, spells?"
"Yes, spells," Kingsley says, "We do them with wands. Here, this is my wand," the man says pulling out a thin wooden stick.
"Let me hold it," Harry asks.
Kingsley hesitates for a second, which tells Harry that the words he is saying is true. The wand is indeed precious to the man, and from his response Harry will gauge how much to trust the man.
Kingsley hands Harry the wand, and passes the boy's test. Harry feels the wood, and takes a deep breath, he does the trick he always does with his senses. He extends them outward toward the wood, and feels a unique fiery sort of energy course through his arm, like electricity. He looks at the wand in amazement.
"Why are you here?" He asks, not giving the man back his wand. This puts the man on edge, but Harry wants the strange man on edge, he wants to be in control, he wants to be the superior one in this conversation because he has a feeling it will change his life.
"I have an offer to make, an offer to train you, like a true wizard. You will learn magic, of the finest sorts and you will live a life of luxury. Indeed, the ministry of magic offers you full protection from all danger to yourself, such that the wards around this house cannot even come close. You will have a contigent of aurors surrounding your presence whenever you come into public eye, to protect you from the dark lord and-"
"Who do you think I am?" Harry whispers softly, yet it halts the man suddenly. The man swallows and then says, "You are the boy who lived."
He proceeds to explain the situation, of his parents' death, of how he is famous for having defeated the dark lord temporarily, and how the ministry requires his aid, his presence as a moral boost.
Then Kingsley whips out a pile of parchment at least three inches thick, and tells Harry to read and sign, and if he does not sign, he will not be trained in magic.
Harry holds Kingsleys wand still, and when the man asks for it back, he ignores the request. Instead he says, "Show me a spell first. Describe the mechanics of casting it to me."
Kingsley describes how to cast the lumos charm, which Harry does with ease. Staring widely at the pale light that illuminates from the stick of wood, Harry grins. Such power at his finger tips. He would do anything to become powerful, important, to become a somebody.
He does not bother to read the contract, and signs it with Vernon's pen.
They take him away, and Harry decides only three weeks later he has made the biggest mistake of his life, for he has signed on a decade of his life to a government that will use him like a tool, and once broken, discard him without a second thought to his wellfare.
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Next Chapter: Harry is introduced to the wizarding world, and gives an interview. He then begins his training to be a soldier, whereupon he is trained in all forms of magic until he is ten years old. Given his first mission, he will have to decide between his duty to the wizarding world, and his innate thirst for power as he meets a certain death eater named Rosier, who offers him a place as the dark lord's heir.
