Title: The Godson
Rating: K+
Disclaimer: I, of course, own none of the characters. If I make up a character, I will state so in an author's note preceding the chapter. I do, however, claim the fan-fiction ability to mold the characters as I like, therefore, the personalities I have adapted to these characters are, in fact, my own creation.
Author's Note: This is an extreme Alternate Universe sequence of Harry Potter. If you do not like alternate universes, please do not read. I do not like being criticized for writing out of character when that isn't the intent in the first place. It will save me aggravation and you the experience of me yelling at you.
Summary: Harry Potter was raised by his godfather, Sirius Black, and through which was raised with full knowledge of the wizarding world. His best friend Draco Black, is as excited as he to attend Hogwarts this upcoming year. He and Draco meet a pair of twins on the train, Ron and Ginny Weasley, as well as another girl, Hermione Granger. Faced with difficulties in their first year, Harry and Draco must learn to overcome their differences with Ron, Ginny, and Hermione in order to save the school.
. : . CHAPTER ONE : IRVING PLACE . : .
The warm August morning introduced the sun rising over the treetops outside of 142 Irving Place, Missident, Great Britain. The sparse decoration of houses down a grassy plateau, stretching for miles, contained no ordinary road in sight. It is not a typical neighborhood; the houses face inwards to the grass expanding between them; and on the front lawn, instead of the normal vehicles that roll rapidly on four wheels, there lay broomsticks of all sorts. Enchanted with blue, misty binds, one might wonder why the inhabitants of these houses need brooms with names such as Cleansweep and Nimbus.
But the residents of all the houses along Irving Place have no need for roads or vehicles, which they attribute to Muggles, and the brooms are not for sweeping, attributed likewise. The likeness of the sight has never been seen outside of the neighborhood, and rightly so. Any normal folk would declare such behavior as preposterous, scandalous, and unnerving.
Alas, these residents were unlike most common fold, such as the eleven-year-old boy still sleeping in the top floor of 142. His face glinted in the reflection of the sun peeking through his window, and it slowly traveled upwards on his face as the sun rose until it poked him quite annoyingly in the eyes. A small groan emitted from the boy's lips and his bright green and glorious eyes blinked open.
Rolling over onto his side, he tried to ignore the blazing sunlight streaming through his open window. The soft morning song of the lark drifted in, toning the sunlight into a strong essence of its August-born warmth.
The song was low and sweet and might have been able to put him back to sleep if a fourth sense hadn't drifted into the boy's bedroom. It was lustrous, tempting, and carried a two-fold of deceiving pleasure. To accept its call would mean to leave the comfort of his bed, but not to accept it would be an act of any criminal! It was too inviting to pass up, and although Harry Potter could recall the same smell every morning of his life, it never seemed to lose its desirous nature.
I swear he's bewitched the scents, Harry thought to himself, referring to the man downstairs who whipped up his breakfast every morning, there's no way anything can consistently smell that good. He allowed his nose to pick his head from his pillow and strained to take in more of the smell by lifting his nose high into the air. Breathing deeply, he smiled and sat himself firmly onto the mattress beneath him. Sirius Black, Harry's godfather, could cook better than anyone he knew.
It was no surprise, however, that his godfather could cook so well. Sirius always seemed to stick something extra into his cauldron, which Harry knew had to be love. He'd never known a man so devoted to a single cause than raising a boy that wasn't his own, no one in the wizarding world bet he could have done it. But from a very young age, when Harry first could recall addressing his godfather by "dad", the man had become so stern with him, the word Harry uttered could have passed for a foul one by any onlookers. He wasn't angry, in fact, he seemed touched, but he would never forget what he said to him.
"Harry, my boy, I am not your dad," Sirius had said, a glimmering spark of pain tracing the outline of his dark brown eyes, "I am your godfather, and someday, perhaps soon, you will understand how this works. Call me Sirius, or Padfoot, or, if you must, Snuffles, but not dad…no…" And then he had just walked out of the room.
It wasn't mysterious, Sirius had never let on that he was the boy's father, but his response was strange. Harry, although never really meaning to call him dad, didn't know why the man refused to be labeled as such. But it became clear last year, when he turned ten, and Sirius finally sat him down and told him why it was he came to live with him.
It had been ten years, well, nine from last year, since Harry had come to live with Sirius. Dreadful, Sirius had said, was the death of his parents. The dark lord of the time, Lord Voldemort, had forced entry into the secret hideout of Lily and James Potter, who had gone into hiding a month before their death. No one knows exactly what happened, but what they did know was that something happened that kept Voldemort from killing Harry. From the positioning of his mother's lifeless body, Albus Dumbledore, the most powerful wizard of the age, had revealed to Sirius that he believed it was Lily's sacrifice that deflected the killing curse from the baby boy, leaving him with only a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead, centered slightly to the right, to mark the deflection of the deadly curse.
"No one knows for sure, as I said, Harry," Sirius said thoughtfully, grazing his fingers over the scruffy hair on his chin. "But it would be wise not to let on that you know what I've told you about that. It is extremely old magic, but just as powerful as ever and can, without the slightest trace, be used again." Harry could remember staring blankly at him, completely not understanding, but Sirius had continued on as though it was the easiest and most comprehensible fact.
Instead of Harry dying from the killing curse that had killed every other person it touched, it had rebounded on the dark lord himself and sent him away. Not dead, but not whole either. Dumbledore stormed into the Potter's house when he'd heard of Voldemort's movement, but was too late. He only found Harry, curled up fast asleep on the floor beneath his mother's arms. Quickly removing the child from the home, the wizard's first instinct was to bring him to his only living relatives, for surely their bloodline could pass on the magic that Harry's mother had left beneath his skin. But before his parent's died, they had a hankering that this might be their fate and prepared for it. Performing magic that only the truly great wizards could have conjured, they formed a will that would bind Sirius Black as a brother, for both he and Harry's father were pureblood, that is to say, fully wizard with no trace of Muggle ancestry. It was only through this will that Dumbledore relented to the godfather taking the child.
But as Dumbledore went in search of Black, as countless other wizards were scouring the globe in search of the remaining death eaters, he caught wind that he was in pursuit of the traitor Peter Pettigrew, more commonly known as Wormtail. Pettigrew had exchanged hands with Black and betrayed the Potter's secret house to the dark lord, which had driven him to find them. Black and Pettigrew dueled in a street scattered with Muggles and if it hadn't been for Wormtail's capture, Black may have been sent to Azkaban Prison. Instead, he was given the rank of Merlin, first class, for Wormtail's capture, and willingly took the boy to complete the will's magic which put a stronghold over Harry's protection.
Harry couldn't remember a day that had gone by within the last year that he was thankful that his godfather took him in. A day after his birthday the previous year, they had met the Muggle in-laws of his mother, and although they were a pleasant lot, a bit on the odd side, they weren't too fond of magic and were always slightly afraid of Lily's abilities. On the same note, their son, Dudley, was the size of a baby elephant, and Harry couldn't imagine he'd ever have been too agreeable to grow up with. But it had only been one day, and, in a way, it was nice to meet the blood-kin of his mother, whether or not it made a difference in his life.
But it wasn't only because his relatives were Muggles that Harry was pleased his godfather took him in, it was also because he grew up with a man who'd never fully grown up himself. Sure, Sirius was responsible, incredibly intelligent, and extremely loyal to Dumbledore, which was always a beneficial attribute in the day and age, but he was a boy at heart. Sirius retold countless occasions of his experiences with James, Harry's father, and their schooldays at Hogwarts, where Harry was to go in the upcoming year.
It was through these stories that Harry began to understand the emotion behind Sirius' refusal to be called "dad", Harry began to see. Sirius and James were the best of friends, and it was only through their deep friendship, and Sirius' everlasting guilt of trading places of secret keeper with Wormtail, that Sirius cherished Harry as a godson, but treated him like his own. Sirius taught Harry all the fundamentals of magic, showering him with his expertise on the gift of pranks, and sparked Harry's interest in learning so greatly that it was a wonder he hadn't hopped on his broom and attempted to find Hogwarts before his letter came. Inescapably, Harry could feel himself writhe in his own skin, desiring more and more information out of Sirius about the intricacies of the wizard's world.
He was able to talk Sirius in to bringing him with to the Ministry of Magic when he was called in to work so that he might spend time reading in the library. The shelves were lined with countless books swarming with information that Harry couldn't wait to get his hands on. Though not very enthused about his godson's boring hobby of reading, Sirius relented due to the fact that he was pleased Harry wasn't involving himself in mischevious behaviors, as many of the boys his own age do, not to mention he himself.
Sirius worked as a part-time Auror, or, dark wizard catcher. There wasn't much need for hunting down dark wizards, but the ministry found him useful at times, particularly when he took the form of a dog. Sirius was an Animagus, which he was required to register, and assisted the Ministry of Magic mostly through his usefulness as a dog. Since a great number of death eaters had been captured and imprisoned or had died since Lord Voldemort's fall, there wasn't much use for Aurors, but every once in a while the Ministry would catch wind of suspicious activity and send wizards to check it out in case it might be the dark lord himself, who had been alluding capture for ten years now in a shape or form of which no one knew.
"Harry!" the booming voice broke Harry from his trance. "Harry, are you up?" it was Sirius, from downstairs. Harry shook his head as if to shake drops of water from his hair, as untidy as always.
"Yes! I'll be right down…" Harry called back, "…Snuffles…" he added, much lower.
"I heard that!" Sirius growled. Harry sniggered, he had told Harry to call him Snuffles, if he must, at one point. It wasn't as though Harry had created this name for him. Sirius had willingly divulged the information to him.
He jumped out of bed and whipped off his pajama bottoms, and the same time rummaged through his shirt drawer for the birthday present Sirius had given him yesterday. He found it and smiled in triumph as three Quidditch players, Troy, Mullet, and Moran, raced towards him on broomsticks while a leprechaun danced jovially in the background. The shirt was a dark green that brought out the brilliance of Harry's eyes, and said IRISH NATIONAL across the back. He enjoyed the small teams like the Holyhead Harpies, but it was exhilarating to watch the National teams compete.
Throwing on a pair of jeans, Harry hurriedly bounded down the steps, jogged a couple paces, and was standing in the entrance of the kitchen where the smell of food was even more lustrous than before. He saw the plate of sausages, bacon, and eggs sitting in the center of the table and practically drooled just looking at them.
Sirius lowered his Daily Prophet from view of Harry and looked upon him almost pityingly. "I don't know what drove me to buy you that for your birthday," he picked up a sausage and bit off the end. "It is the most menacing thing I have ever had the privilege to watch."
Harry made a face and sat down across from him, picking up a sausage as well. "You said that about my cooking and handwriting as well. Shall I start keeping a list?"
Sirius folded the paper and sat it down next to his plate. "Listen, Harry," he said, taking a swig out of his water goblet, "I have to go to a meeting at the Ministry of Magic today and I think it would be best if you stayed here." Harry was about to protest when he lifted a finger, and Harry's mouth snapped shut. With a sly grin, Sirius continued. "I have a reputation to uphold and if I let you go to the library weeks before you are to begin at Hogwarts, well, I don't think I could live with myself. You can play with that new broomstick set that Narcissa sent you yesterday, you haven't had the chance to play with that."
"I've played with Draco's a hundred times!" Harry said, as the spell on his jaw was released.
Sirius leaned in over the table, as though there were ears pressed up against the glass waiting for him to divulge this very piece of information. "Don't tell Draco, but she got you the newest edition. It comes with a pair of Nimbus 2000's."
Harry's jaw dropped. "You're joking! No way!" Suddenly, books vanished from his mind as his Quidditch play-set came into view, perfectly depicted in his mind's eye. He and Draco had battled continuously, discussing play strategies and wondering how long it would take them to make the House teams at Hogwarts.
Narcissa had taken her son Draco into hiding about a month before the Potter's had, her husband, and Draco's father, Lucius, was deep into the service of Lord Voldemort and it was all she could do to keep herself and her son safe from the dark lord. Now that the man was dead, and Lord Voldemort MIA, the wizarding world was beginning to learn that she really was dedicated to the Ministry, and her allegiance to her husband was unbeknownst. Upon marrying him, and even at Draco's birth, she had no idea that he was involved in death eater practices. Then, it was only right that Narcissa, who's maiden name was Black, reacquired the surname and she and her cousin, who was evidently, Sirius, allow their boys to meet long before Hogwarts began. It turned out to be a success, as both boys hit it off immediately.
"It's lucky he doesn't have a trace of his father in him," Sirius has said, darkly, to Harry one evening when the boy and his mother left. "That man was a piece of work."
Draco was a pale boy with scruffy white-blonde hair, misty gray eyes that tended to change shades with his mood. He and Harry were both rather scrawny, yet average height for their age. Draco preferred brooms and Harry, books, but both delved into topics on either one. Both shared a fascination in learning more about sorcery, and could not stand the wait before Hogwarts began.
"All right," Harry said, eating more of the bacon in front of him, and scooping some of the scrambled eggs onto his plate. "Quidditch versus myself it is."
"That's my boy," Sirius said with a chuckle, "enough with books! You'll have plenty of time for that nonsense. It's the practical stuff you've got to look forward to. My old friend Remus Lupin is rumored to have the Defense Against the Dark Arts post. And you remember ol' Snape? He's still there teaching potions! He loved you, let's just hope you aren't in Slytherin…"
"Why not?" Harry asked. He was always curious about this one. The entirety of Sirius' family had been in Slytherin except for him, but Sirius had never bothered to mention why he held such a negative disposition to the House.
"Because I was a Gryffindor! You'd have to be barking mad to want to be in Hufflepuff, let me tell you. My friend Amos Diggory at the Ministry brags about his son Cedric all the time. The poor bloke doesn't realize you need a drainage pipe through your head in order to be in Hufflepuff," Sirius snickered. "Ah, well. It isn't up to us to decide anyway, the sorting ceremony will decide that." A glimmer of something mysterious behind his words held Harry's gaze. He loved it when Sirius went on rants about Hogwarts, it was, by far, the most fascinating information Harry could never find in books. All he wanted was the honest truth, not some sugar-coated god and bad that other people might tell him.
"Draco says he doesn't care what house he's in," Harry said, "I just hope we get into the same house. His father was in Slytherin, wasn't he?" Sirius grunted, which Harry interpreted as yes. "Well, Slytherin doesn't seem all bad. I'd probably have the most fun there, wouldn't you say?"
Again, Sirius grunted, but Harry waited in silence for his godfather to say something. It was a couple moments, but Harry's stare made Sirius give in. "Slytherin might give you the wrong impression, you know? You're 'The Boy Who Lived'. What would it say to the wizarding world that the boy who defeated Voldemort was put into the only house who turned out his death eaters?"
Harry sat on this a moment. He had a point, but it wasn't his job to keep up his image. "Let people think what they want! Isn't that what you've always told me? Besides, you just said it yourself, we don't choose what house we're in anyway."
Sirius nodded gravely, surely he was thinking differently. But then his gaze shifted from Harry's eyes to a spot right above his head. "Well, I'll be…" Sirius nodded towards the window behind Harry.
As Harry turned, a small bronze owl flew gracefully in through the window and landed softly on Harry's shoulder. "Thanks," Harry said to the owl casually, and slipped a piece of sausage into the bird's mouth, as he loved to do. It wasn't uncommon for Harry to get mail, but for some reason, Sirius had a bedazzled look in his eye. Harry glanced down at the letter that the bird had dropped in his lap and picked it up, his eyes widening.
"Mr. Harry J. Potter, 142 Irving Place, Missident, Great Britain," he read from the front. Slowly, his hands trembling , he turned it over and instantly, ecstasy shot through his body as he recognized the label all too well. "Hogwarts!" he ripped the envelope open and whipped out the letter. With a sudden idea, his furrowed his brow and stared depressingly at the parchment. "Dear Mr. Potter, we are sorry to inform you that you do not possess enough magical talent to enter into the great…"
"WHAT?" Sirius boomed. He snatched the paper from Harry as Harry let out a girlish shriek and collapsed onto the floor in spurting laughter. The owl, once perched comfortably on his shoulder, squawked and flew into the air distastefully. Sirius's red hot face looked as though he were going to reach a boiling temperature and before Harry knew it, he was dangling from the ceiling by invisible ropes.
"Whoa!" Harry let out a whoop as he was flung upside-down and staring into his godfather's panic-stricken eyes.
Sirius looked up at him coldly. "Remind me to thank Severus for that one," he retorted. He handed the letter to Harry, still dangling upside down. "Go on then."
Harry, who's voice became cold-like from the pressure exerted on his nose, snatched the parchment. "Come on, Sirius, let me down!" he complained. He hated it when Sirius pulled this one on him, it was one of those spells that could be cast without saying anything, which gave Harry absolutely no warning for what was coming. With a loud thud, Harry was released and crashed to the ground. He tucked his head inside his stomach and covered his neck with his hands into the roll he became much too accustomed to after the spell. "It was just a joke," he muttered, picking himself up and sitting back down. Sirius grunted. Shaking himself off, Harry began to read again, for real this time. "Dear Mr. Potter, it is our pleasure to inform you that you have been accepted to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."
"Tell us something we don't know," Sirius grumbled, still obviously shaken from Harry's joke.
Harry scanned the letter, then sat up straight and handed it to his godfather. "Well, Padfoot, it seems to all be in order," he said, in a very dignified tone.
Sirius shot him a look, but a playful shimmer danced in his eyes. "Well, maybe you'll have to come to the Ministry with me after all. We can make a trip to Diagon Alley to get your supplies."