Harry Potter awoke with a shout, still seeing flashes of green light and hearing a women's screams in the background. His eyes focused on the faint sheen of the spider webs above him and the familiar darkness of his cupboard.
He reached up and grabbed the chain above his head, hearing the familiar creak of his cot as the faint light illuminated his surroundings, revealing the "Harry's Room" sign he had scratched into the wall with a broken nail when he was 7.
Opening the door, he slowly emerged the cupboard, rubbing his eyes and trying to fully wake up. Harry walked to the kitchen, putting a pan on the stove and began preparing breakfast for his guardians. When he was almost done he started the bacon, the sizzle usually brought his aunt downstairs to finish the food as he got ready for school.
Pulling Dudley's oversized shirt over his head and yanking the pants up his waist, Harry tightened his belt with a grunt. The familiar slick of the mail brought him to the door, smiling slightly as he remembered that today was his eleventh birthday. Giving the letters a once-over, he brought them into the kitchen and handed the pile to the enormous walrus that was already gorging itself. With a muffled growl, Vernon flipped through the letters and seeing nothing emergent, continued eating.
As Dudley came downstairs and his mother served him, Harry finally had a chance to grab the leftovers before anyone went back too early for another serving.
A quiet knock on the door interrupted the proceedings.
"Boy," his uncle growled threateningly, and immediately Harry got up to answer the door. As he got closer, he started to feel a sense a foreboding, and paradoxically, excitement. He pulled open the door, curious to see what was causing such an instinctual response from him. His gaze was immediately drawn to the magenta pants, and as his gaze slowly slid upwards, his lips twitched into a half grin as he saw the bright pink shirt and the white beard that stretched from the waist up into the face of a man almost twice as tall as him. The man was old, maybe one of the oldest men he had ever seen, with half-moon spectacles halfway down his nose and bright blue eyes.
As he met the gaze, he immediately called "Aunt Petunia!" slightly intimidated and knowing that there was something about this man that made him different from anyone Harry had ever seen before.
He could hear her sigh of frustration as the chair in the kitchen scraped across the floor and she stood up. As she walked into the hallway connecting the kitchen to the front door, she froze in surprise, eyes widening in surprise as she looked at the man.
"You" she whispered, sounding more fearful than Harry had ever heard her.
"Me" he replied genially. "May I come in Petunia?" he asked politely. Taking her silence as assent, he stepped in, hesitating just a second over the door frame. Now standing next to Harry, he smiled down at the boy, eyes initially focusing on his taped glasses before they met Harry's brilliant green.
Curious about the man who could intimidate his horrid aunt so easily, he grinned back.
"Good morning Harry, my name is Professor Albus Dumbledore." Harry opened his mouth, about to respond but was interrupted from a shout in the kitchen.
"You" yelled Vernon, waddling into the kitchen after finally getting curious after all the silence.
"Me" said Dumbledore again, this time without the politeness and with a sharp glance into Vernon's dull brown eyes, the larger man looked away. "I was wondering if I might speak to Harry?"
Vernon looked ready to argue aggressively against it, but with a tug, Petunia pulled him away. "Come on Diddy" Harry heard her say in the kitchen, pulling both her husband and her son out the back door and locking it behind them.
As Harry looked back at the old man, he heard the engine start outside and the spray of gravel as the car pulled out of the driveway. The professor gestured gently at the couches in the living room in front of the TV, sitting in the armchair as Harry nervously sat in the middle of the large couch, wondering who the strange old man was that he had been abandoned with.
"As I said before, my name is Albus Dumbledore and I am the headmaster of a very prestigious boarding school in Scotland." Here he smiled gently at the boy. "The very school your parents went to my boy".
Harry who had shifting uncomfortably until that point froze and gave the Headmaster his full attention, green eyes latching onto blue. "You knew my parents," he blurted out.
"Indeed I did, some of the better people I have had the pleasure to be acquainted with my long life," replied Dumbledore with a chuckle. "But now is not the time or the place for that discussion." Then suddenly, with a burst of energy, the old man fluidly stood up. "Come, we have much to do and very little time to do it."
Harry stood up, wary of a stranger, but desperate to learn more about his previously unspoken of parents. He followed the headmaster outside, seeing a stretch black limo in the street with the engine idling. Walking into vehicle past the door the headmaster held open for him, he sat on the seat closest to the driver as the Headmaster sat opposite to him.
"To the Leaky Cauldron Andrew" Dumbledore said looking to the driver before his gaze focused once again on Harry. As the car sped away, Harry leaned back in his seat, he focused back on the old man, trying to gain a measure of his surroundings again.
"Tell me Harry, what have your aunt and uncle" here Harry the slightest tightening of the lips on the old man's face "told you about your parents".
"Not much" Harry softly responded, feeling more out of depth than he ever had in his short life. "They died young, my mum was at university and my dad had joined the army. There was a car crash when I was only a year old, and while they died, I was able to walk away with only a weird scar on my forehead" he said brushing his bangs away self-consciously, revealing the lightning bolt etched into his forehead.
Dumbledore ignored it, his eyes still focused on Harry's. "There is a bit more to the story. Your dad was indeed training to be a soldier of a sort, and you could even say that I was his general."
Harry's gaze sharpened, reevaluating his opinion of the old man as the ambiance of the limo shifted slightly, suddenly becoming heavy before returning to the energetic feel he had become accustomed too. He frowned to himself, wondering how much his suspicions about the story his Aunt had told were true.
He was shaken out of his musing as the car suddenly came to a stop, not more than five minutes after they left Private Drive. The door opened, seemingly on its own as Dumbledore left the vehicle. Harry too stepped outside, and seeing the headmaster leaning against the side of the car, he joined him.
"Tell me Harry, do you see anything different about that storefront?" the professor asked.
Harrys eyes scanned the crowd walking past the building. "It's old, really old, and kind of shabby." In truth, he was understating it, afraid of offending the only connection he had who seemed to be willing to tell him about his parents. The store looked very out of place, with a sign hanging sideways from the front of a cauldron and a rod stirring itself as a bit of liquid dripped out the bottom.
He looked to Dumbledore, "it's really out of place, but no one seems to notice. And the sign especially is super weird, what is that, some new television? And no one seems to notice it, indeed the crowd was walking by in a rush, ignoring the out of place entirely. The businessmen and women seemed to not see it entirely.
Dumbledore smiled down at him, "not a TV no. Let's go inside, it'll be easier if I show you." The to two men, young and old, walked past the commuters, entering the grungy pub. The inside was only slightly cleaner than the outside presented, and they immediately found a booth in the empty locale.
A hunchbacked man hobbled over, inclining his head respectfully to the professor. "Anything to eat or drink professor?"
"Just a couple classes of milk, Tom" he replied, glancing at Harry to make sure that was alright with him. Harry nodded. Tom hobbled away returning not a minute later with two glasses. Dumbledore took a long stick out of the pocket of his jacket, tapping the table twice with it, before setting it down beside him. Suddenly, the room seemed quieter, as if it were only Harry and Dumbledore, and nothing existed outside their little booth.
Dumbledore took a sip before leaning back in his seat. Ensuring he had Harry's full attention, he began to speak.
"The world is more alive and strange than you can imagine my boy. Let me start with a complete introduction. My name is Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy, Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards and Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot. I am 109 years old, and if I do say so myself, one of the powerful of famous sorcerers of our time."
"My world, your parent's world, and now your world is a magical one." Here his eyes sharpened slightly as he saw Harry's eyes widening slightly. He grabbed his stick, jabbing it harshly at the table, conjuring a dove, the seemed to snap into existence, hopping closer to Harry as it let him rub a finger along its head.
"What you need to understand Harry is that the magical world is more incomprehensible, more amazing, and more dangerous than anything you have ever been exposed to." His want began to wave through the air as images appeared before him. Dark humanoid shapes appeared before him with sticks in their hands creating potions in bubbling cauldrons, casting spells at each other across the table, flying through the air on tiny brooms, creating animals and buildings from nothing. The show captivated Harry and his new dove.
"Magic makes us different from the non-magicals, or muggles as you will undoubtedly hear. We used to live together, in famous cities like Camelot, led by the famous Merlin and King Arthur, but eventually we split, and our worlds have become separate. A witch or wizard is different than a non-magical. While their world is ruled by logic, reasoning, and laws of nature, our only limitation is our imagination and our power. While science guides them forward, often the greatest magical advancements are made solely through powerful emotion."
He paused here, letting his Harry collect himself before he continued onward.
"The most important thing to a magical is freedom, freedom to practice magic and live as they choose, to conduct their experiments as they so choose. To a witch or a wizard, their magic is their life, and to control their magic is put bars of their lives. Most of us cannot even abide the thought."
But then he waves his wands again, the shadows changed to figures shoot brightly colored lights at each other, and images changed to death and destruction on battlefields. He showed Harry magicals facing off against each other, having battles of unimaginable wonder and danger, and then his wand twisted, ever so slightly and it was one wizard to one hundred muggles, massacring them with explosions.
"But some think that makes us better than muggles, so they treat them as pets, as less than us. I can't claim any innocence in this either my boy, we've all participated in it to a degree. To hide our world we control their minds, make them forget things they shouldn't know, controlling them and making sure they never become a threat. The truth is we don't know what the differences our between us except our magic, and while some believe we are gods compared to them, I simply believe we are different."
Here he frowned, looking sad for a moment, before looking up at Harry. "You'll have to make that decision for yourself." He put his wand back into his pocket, and folded his hands together on the table.
"Your mother and father were a powerful and influential witch and wizard. Your father was a heir to a long line of witches and wizards with a rich history. Your mother was the first witch in her family, a muggleborn. They fought against a powerful wizard who believed that magic made us better than the muggles, and that a bloodline of magic made a wizard of pure blood superior to the muggleborn. A man who didn't believe in equality, morals, and ethics, but who only believed in power and the survival of the strongest."
"The last thing I must tell you Harry is this, power is indeed important in the magical world. Wizards like Voldemort, myself, and if I'm right, even you have the power to shape the world the world as we wish, and convince wizards and witches to follow us on our path. In a world where the world can reshaped with a wave of a wand, the most powerful have no rules. You must always consider what kind of wizard, and what kind of man you will want to be, for the decisions you make with your power will define you."
He smiled softly a the overwhelmed boy, pulled his wand back out and jumped out from his seat. He waved it in front of him, changing his suit to a deep purple robe, covered in moving galaxies and stars and above his head, a tall wizards hat appeared. He smiled.
"But enough of that, let us move on to your true introduction into the magical world to which you have found yourself."
Harry stood up and followed the man, his mind abuzz with thoughts of the future and a sudden insatiable curiosity about the world he was about to enter.
