Harry Potter

And the Price of Ability

Here's chapter 2. I'm writing about 3 chapters ahead, so that at the moment I can upload and get responses on this and see what people think. If people don't like it, I might go back to the drawing board. I'm trying to add some new points that I haven't seen anywhere else so far, but I doubt one can be truly original having read so many FF's and the original books of course.

Chapter 2: Intensity

The next day Harry awoke with a throbbing headache, which was only compounded by the pounding on his door. He also felt more exhausted than usual, and wondered why, before he remembered the events of the previous night. His uncharacteristic grin was wiped from his face a fraction of a second after it formed by the screeching of his Aunt Petunia.

"Up! Get up boy! If breakfast isn't started within 10 minutes, you'll get none!"

He heard the lock on the door slide back, and with a sigh, he forced himself out of bed, and began to dress. Reaching down to a small pile on the floor at the foot of his bed, he grabbed a t-shirt and jeans that were both far too big for him and shook them free of dust before pulling them on. Knowing that the threat of no breakfast was very real, and that in his state his ration of two slices of toast and a glass of milk was desperately needed, he hurried to pull on some socks. Opening the door of his cupboard, he walked out and stretched briefly before entering the kitchen, wishing he could have more time in bed to allow his headache to go away. It was going to be a long day.

That evening, he was too tired to do anything except fall asleep the moment he was locked in his cupboard. After washing up the dinner plates (the Dursleys refused to spend money on a dishwasher when they had Harry who did it for free), he'd had the usual 10 minutes to use the bathroom before being confined for the night. By 9 o'clock, he was in bed and dead to the world.

The next day started better than the previous, as this time he was actually up when his Aunt came down in the morning. However, the rest of the day was just as tedious as the previous; another day spent pretending to be an idiot in school, hiding in the library at breaks because it was the one place he knew Dudley would never step foot in. Harry liked to read because nobody could judge him on it. The Dursleys wouldn't care if Harry read all the books in the world, because he still wouldn't do as well as Dudley did in school. Vernon's belt would make sure of that. Furthermore, Harry could lose himself in the world of books. In that world, Harry had been on adventures and fought beasts, solved mysteries, and made friends. It was so much better than real life, and he wondered if any of the more fanciful tales were true. After all, there were plenty of stories about witches and wizards, and although he'd never met any, he was sure he couldn't be the only one in the world.

Upon returning to his cupboard that evening, Harry waited for everyone to go to bed whilst he lay in the darkness, clearing his mind so he could focus on his magic again. After Dudley had jumped up and down on the stairs on his way to bed, shaking lose lots of dust and causing Harry to cough violently, Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had also gone to bed, where they could watch TV more comfortably. Once he could hear the low noises from upstairs, he ran through what he had come to think of as his lights and colours exercise, before returning to the task of the night before. Extinguishing the light from the palm of his hand, he lowered his hands and focused instead on forming a light in front of him. He immediately noticed the difference in difficulty; without the focus of his hand, he was only able to generate a small spark in front of him for the first 10 minutes. Finally, pouring in as much energy as he could, he got the light to form properly. To his shock it continued to surge. He shut off his energy and the light blinked out, plunging the room into pitch black darkness whilst the afterimage that the intense light had burned into his retina flashed across his eyes. It appeared to him that although it took a bit more focus to form the light in front of him, once it was formed it required the same amount of power as before, and in his determination he had given it too much power. Suddenly he heard a shout from upstairs.

"DAMN TV!"

Harry froze in the darkness. From the thumping and muted talk coming from upstairs, it appeared that the television in his Aunt and Uncle's room had stopped working. Shortly after, there was a low thud, followed by a shuffling of heavy footsteps and a door creaking open.

"Daaaaddddd, my tele stopped working! Can you fix it?" Dudley's voice whined.

"Ours stopped too. It's 11pm: go to sleep and we'll fix it tomorrow" came the sleepy, irate tone of his Aunt. Dudley's door slammed, and a few creaks were heard as the rest of the house got back into bed. Harry knew he'd have to be careful not to overpower his magic in the future; it seemed like it had affected electronic items because a short moment later, there were some angry rumblings from upstairs in which Harry picked out the words "alarm clock" and "radio".

The next day, breakfast was full of anger. Harry had wisely got up early, and somehow, someone had forgotten to bolt his door the night before. By the time the three Dursleys were downstairs, Harry had cooked a large full English breakfast complete with baked beans, hash browns and fried bread. He was even feeling happy because he'd managed to steal a few spoonfuls of beans and a small, thin rasher of bacon that had been an extra in the pack. This was the first time he'd had anything tasty at breakfast, and by managing to eat it before the Dursleys were up meant they'd never know, so he wouldn't be punished either. For once, they didn't say anything about him being out of his cupboard early, as they were all too annoyed with the electronics and enjoying breakfast too much to care.

It turned out that not only the televisions and radios upstairs were fried, but the television, VCR, hi-fi, and telephones downstairs had all broken too. Vernon had to go to work to call a repairman, and Harry and Dudley left for school. It was an extremely annoyed Vernon Dursley who arrived home that evening to inform the rest of them that there had been an "unexplained power surge", and that they'd have to replace all of the items that were broken. Vernon spent the entire evening ranting to Petunia: they were going to have to replace every electrical gadget that ran off the mains; the electrical couldn't be claimed on insurance, as theirs only covered fire and theft; the manufacturers had told him that their fuse box should have shorted out to protect the items from the surge, and to cap it off, the electrician that Vernon had called out claimed there was nothing wrong with the fuse box and that it was working perfectly. Harry was extremely glad that the oven ran on gas, as if Vernon hadn't received his dinner, Harry was sure that his uncle would have vented some anger on him.

The next day was a Saturday, so the Dursleys went off to the shops to buy new electricals. Dudley had cheered up slightly: he'd been miserable the previous evening due to the lack of TV, but had been promised a bigger one in replacement. Harry was locked in his cupboard when they left. Even if he couldn't break anything (as everything important to them had been broken the night before), they didn't want him to steal their food or sit on a comfy sofa. Harry just accepted this and smiled on the inside: at least this way he'd have more time to practice magic!

Two years later, and a very different Harry Potter was lying curled up on the small bed under the stairs. The clothes on the floor were enormous compared to the ones he'd been wearing two years ago, as Dudley was bearing more and more resemblance to his father every day. Harry, on the other hand, and grown quite noticeably. He'd always been quick, but after he noticed his rapid exhaustion when using magic, he'd started to try and increase his stamina. He'd often go for a jog after school, which suited him just fine as it meant he could stay away from the Dursleys for much longer. As long as he was out of the house, they didn't care where he was, and they often seemed disappointed when he came back. This seemed a bit odd to Harry, as they'd lose all their free labour if he ran away or died, but as long as he got to stay away from them he didn't care what they thought.

Unfortunately, his increase in exercise meant an increase in his appetite. A breakthrough had come when the Dursleys had started to send him out to buy shopping. Whilst he was never sent out on major trips, as he was too young to buy the beer, spirits, and wine that his Aunt and Uncle consumed, he'd often be sent to the small supermarket nearby to fetch milk, bread, eggs, or anything that the household ran out of. During this time, he became well practiced at the art of shoplifting. No-one would suspect the polite 10 year-old in very baggy clothes to be stealing tins of fruit and meat when he always paid for the basic supplies in his basket and never went near the obvious attractions of sweets, crisps, and magazines that the other children always loitered by. The Dursleys never noticed the missing tin opener and, as it was Harry's job to take out the bins, they never noticed the extra tins either. They had conceded that as he grew older he would need to eat more to supplement his growth, but he was still underfed. They never realised he'd been acquiring extra food, and so whilst he was never going to be tall, he was only slightly underweight due to all the exercise that he was doing both physically and magically.

His magic had advanced considerably. Two years ago, he had struggled to make a coloured light appear in front of him. Now, he regularly used illusions to help him out. By creating various lights around him, or altering the path of the light itself, he was able to hide things behind an illusory mask. To everyone else, he appeared an inch shorter than his height of 5'2", and there was a reason he'd never been caught shoplifting. He also used his ability to help himself to slightly larger portions of dinner than he was allowed. Whilst the Dursleys would notice if a sausage went missing, they wouldn't notice an extra inch in a slice of lasagne or a pie, assuming that either Vernon or Dudley had eaten it. He also used it to 'extend' his punishments. The Dursleys would get suspicious if they saw how quickly he healed; a bruise would appear and disappear in a day, and scabs would form and fall off in two or three, as opposed to the two weeks when Dudley moaned about skinning his knee after falling off of his bicycle. The Dursleys saw bruises and scabs on Harry's body where they expected them to be; in reality they were long gone, healed faster by his growing magic.

This particular morning, Harry was curled up on his bed (he didn't have room to stretch out), recovering from the night before. In the last two years, he had spent a lot of time in the library reading any books on wizards and magic that he could find. He'd been a bit disappointed with The Hobbit: despite having a wizard as one of the main characters, Gandalf seemed to do very little. But one of the more interesting things he'd come across was the power of telekinesis: moving an object with your mind. He'd been attempting it for a while now, and found it much harder than the light based magic of illusions. He'd been using a marble he found when cleaning the house as a focus; he doubted Dudley would ever miss it. He'd had no success until the previous night, when the marble had risen about a millimetre up before dropping back onto the small shelf in the cupboard with a tiny 'clink'. If Harry hadn't been concentrating so hard on the marble, he might not have even noticed that it had happened. Feeling tired, he'd curled up and gone to sleep. The next morning, he woke at 6am.

-End of Chapter 2-

Thank you for reading, please review, and I will try and answer any questions that don't spoil the plot.

Author's note

Magic and electricity: In this fic, magic will only interact with electricity if it's on a large scale. It's stated that muggle devices don't work at Hogwarts, yet it's never mentioned with regards to accidental magic at home. On the other hand, wizarding homes don't have electricity, due to their reliance on magic and general lack of technology. Therefore, I decided that things like wards, mass area effect spells, and high energy spells (like a patronus) will affect electrical devices that fall into their range. A simple reparo, on the other hand, will have a limited power output, and so affect a small area. In other words, unless it was cast right next to, or on, the TV, it wouldn't damage it. In this case, Harry's wandless lumos ended up getting out of control, and so the area it affected was much much larger than normal.

This chapter has been edited since first publishing. No content has changed, just correcting errors and (hopefully) making things better for you, the reader.