A/N: I would like to make a few comments in response to some of the reviews I have received, as a hope not to get the same points posed. First of all, I agree that young children shouldn't be doing push ups or weight; I tend to think of Vernon as a 'do first, think later' sort of person, so of course he didn't think of this. In chapter seven it was stated that the boys a) did not actually do what Vernon wanted as he wasn't watching and b) Petunia forbid such an attempt to happen anyway.
As for the snakes, the only snake whose species I specifically identified was a smooth snake. The smooth snake is a TYPE of constrictor according to my research, which just specifies the way it gets its prey, not its species. However, I did have the boys look up the types because I hardly thought it realistic that they would just 'know'. So yes, I know there are only three species native to Britain.
Thanks for putting up with such a long A/N and thank you for reading and reviewing!
For the time being, Harry and Dudley had put aside any hope of finding witches or warlocks or whatever they called themselves. Instead, partially to prove its reality to themselves and later to the adults so that maybe they could get the full story, the two tested Harry's boundaries. One of his current exercises, for instance, was to levitate a pencil and try to get it to perform aerial maneuvers such as spinning and occasionally writing in the air.
Of course, the trouble with this plan was figuring out not only what to try and if it was possible, but also when to make their attempts. This strange possibility of magic was not their whole life after all. There was still school, football, chores, friends, and for Dudley a still growing fascination with rugby and now boxing (he was torn between the two). At night though, or whenever they were at Mr. Lupin's or home without any adults in sight, Dudley would call out things for Harry to try. For the most part, they had been unsuccessful and progress was slow. Harry had found it required a great deal of concentration and a certain determination to make things happen.
One week in particular, they had hoped to make progress. It was career week at school and several parents and other invited speakers had come to talk to the children throughout the week about their jobs. One such speaker was a stage magician, and while his performance before his talk with the kids was informative, it was only awe inspiring until he started using such words as 'tricks'. Immediately after, Harry had dragged a certain somewhat reluctant blonde cousin with him to the library. It had not taken too long to discover a book on it in the career section (they hadn't thought to check there of all places before).
It also took very little time for both boys to become disgusted. Harry, because they were basically professional liars and conmen and Dudley because he was wasting perfectly good pranking time in the library for no results. The book they had found only mentioned card tricks and escapism at any real length, and Harry did not have any particular desire to pull a rabbit out of a hat, so even inspiration wise it was a bit disappointing.
All the same, it did have an effect on Harry's plans to convince either Aunt Petunia or his Uncle Remus into telling them the truth about magic and, more importantly to him, the story of why his parents died, just not in the way the two near six year olds liked.
That evening had progressed as normal, with the sharing of stories at dinner and clean up and such. After some discussion before school ended, the two boys had agreed to casually bring up the stage magician's inclusion in their career talks at school. As soon as the word 'magic' left Harry's mouth, both boys noted a profound effect on their guardians. Petunia had gone stiffer than one of Uncle Vernon's ironed shirts and Uncle Vernon himself was slowly turning a particularly unattractive shade of puce.
After letting this continue for a minute, Harry spoke again.
"It was complete rubbish of course."
Oddly enough, this made his aunt choke a bit, but his uncle fixed him with a beady stare until Harry and Dudley explained how patently false and rather stupid the presentation had been.
In the end, his uncle was calm, jovial even, but his aunt had the strangest guilty look on her face.
Later that night, the two boys listened in on their guardians' conversation. Unsurprisingly – to them anyway – the subject of magic came up. There was a certain thrill, hearing Aunt Petunia hiss something about 'maybe we ought to tell him'. Vernon was firmly against revealing the secret though.
One sentence caught both boys off guard, causing them to freeze so much it was a wonder they didn't get caught.
"The lad's got a decent head on his shoulders, just remember what we decided Pet', best to leave all that rubbish be for now then for you or me to have to deal with another freak turning teacups into rats."
Scurrying away from the keyhole, it would take some time for either of the boys to fully process this as the summer hols had begun and stood to be almost busier than the school year.
That conversation did mark another turning point in the way Aunt Petunia treated Harry (and Dudley for that matter). It was as if she had just realized that they were well and truly growing up.
Much to both boys' displeasure, she started buying them practice workbooks for over summer and had them start reading a book a day. The reading in and of itself was not that bad, particularly since they could read about building or sharks or anything else of their choosing. The brief quizzing about what they'd learned from the book did put a damper on their interest at first though. In time, it grew to become a competition – Harry and Dudley even collected points based on the number of questions answered well, and they couldn't just be recitations from the books. The points could be cashed in for treats, either candy or trips somewhere of their choosing.
She had also begun to express serious disapproval against their handwriting. She'd handed both boys a fountainhead pen and told them to practice, muttering under her breath that 'if you can write with one of them, you can write well with anything'.
This was not to imply they did not enjoy a mostly carefree summer. There was still time for football and races and wrestling inside and down at the park. The neighborhood gang often tried to find out who could swing highest and jump furthest from the swing without getting hurt. There were even some friendly water gun skirmishes.
Whenever Harry was alone, he still saw the snakes. Or rather, he heard them, rarely actually seeing where the voices were coming from. It wasn't the most reassuring arrangement for his sanity, but he listened just the same. Oddly, the snakes were the ones who managed to calm him whenever he had a certain sort of strange encounter. Every once in a while, either in the marketplace with his aunt (who insisted he and Dudley should learn to manage money and therefore had to come) or on the trains going to and from, weirdly dressed people would come up and insist on shaking his hand from time to time. Originally, his aunt looked mildly irritated with him, but the direction of her ire quickly changed when she noticed that every time, Harry would step back towards his cousin and mutter a nervous 'We'll just be going now'. Dudley of course had no problem glaring away the intruders into the boys' personal space.
It was from the snakes that Harry first learned about his past. He never heard anything extensive or even much, just whispers. Just that another speaker had tried to kill him as a nestling, that there had been much blood spilt, and he heard murmurs of an encroaching darkness that was forced to flee when his mother lay down her life. These conversations always ended with the warning that he had 'much growing to do, little nestling, and not many suns to grow in'. It was all rather puzzling, but at least it was something.
The second project of the summer that Petunia set was plotting a vegetable garden. Understandably, this was not met with much cheering. After all, weeding just the flowerbeds was chore enough, even though the blonde and raven haired boys shared that job, it never seemed to pass any quicker. Petunia insisted that a little hard work would not kill them and repeated what must have been one of her new favorite phrases. "You'll need to know when you are older. You'll thank me someday; you'll see."
Well they certainly were not going to be thanking her now. Plotting and planting a new garden under the heat of the sun, even with suntan lotion and plenty of water, just wasn't the six year olds' idea of a picnic. While they would grow to be proud of it later, particularly when some of the plants actually started to bear fruit (er… bear vegetables?), the initial stages was simply quite a bit of toil. Petunia did most of the work of course, they were still too young to do most of the digging and maneuvering involved, especially unsupervised. What she did have them do was help with each step of the process after watching her take care of a few plants. She would have them walk out and measure the paces to where the next seedlings should be planted and started digging a bit. She would come and finish the hole while they patted the dirt down around the plot she had just left. As they all wore gloves, one would take some fertilizer and sprinkle the soil while the other watered the plot. The planting of the entire vegetable garden continued in this vein. It wasn't perfect, but it was a learning experience.
At least time with Mr. Lupin did not really change any. He was still quiet but friendly, always willing to listen and offer advice, particularly on new books to try reading. Uncle Remus, as Harry and Dudley had slowly begun to call him, also had a stash of various types of candies he would let them try as long as they promised to keep it a secret. Both boys had promised this wouldn't be a problem, and because of this found themselves snacking on candy from kitkat bars and gummi worms to Honeydukes chocolate and chocolate éclairs that caused your eyes to spin through the colors of the rainbow while you were eating them (an effect they pretended not to notice, naturally).
He also took them to see a few movies (the boys had 'redeemed' their reading points and Petunia allowed them to go with Remus and Peter while she was with her bridge club). The two movies that probably made the most impact on the young Harry Potter and Dudley Dursley were Short Circuit and Labyrinth. Whenever something went wrong or neither could figure an answer out, the two would inevitably chorus 'Malfunction, need more input!'
This would, in time, drive most of their minders into a very irritated state of mind, but the duo couldn't care less. You see, by the time they had seen these movies, the gardening was done except for weeding (ah, the joys), leaving the two with more free time on their hands. And thanks to this free time, and watching a certain movie that may have involved a petulant child and a freakishly dressed David Bowie with the hilarity of a child's imagination gone wild… they had learned a few things.
The first was that men should not wear close fitting tights. The second was that it was never wise to state that something was a piece of cake, particularly while in a competition for something important, like say life or liberty. Still, the Escher room with all of the stair cases and the concept of a thirteenth hour – not to mention goblins with a humanlike king – was absolutely fascinating.
It was also, unfortunately, something Harry knew that was way beyond him. Heck, even turning – what had his uncle said? – teacups into rats was beyond him. Turning anything into something else might be for all he knew.
And so it was that Harry resolved to learn the art of Transfiguration, or rather (as he put it) changing things into something else. He decided to start small. His first attempt involved turning a blade of grass into a sewing pin. An hour of focusing, adding another blade and then taking it away, ripping weeds angrily from the soil as a distraction, and trying some more for him to acknowledge he had absolutely no idea how to go about this. He knew that it was possible, if Uncle Vernon mentioned it, then it pretty much had to be. But the details of how the changing occurred, what he had to do to make the switch work were something he had not yet grasped.
Taking a deep breath, Harry dusted the dirt off his clothes, finished weeding his section of the garden and marched inside. For some reason, the trick that he used to manipulate other objects into moving the way he wanted them to did not work in changing them. He wasn't sure why, but he wasn't really curious as to why either. He just wanted to know how he was supposed to do it if it was so different. That and if there was another way to get objects to move, he thought that perhaps there was one way to do all sorts of different things. After all, it was just magic; surely magic should all be the same? Magic was magic after all.
Perhaps there was something more to it, a way to connect with his magic that would allow him to use it more easily. Harry didn't have a clue what would this entail though. So instead of worrying about it, he went upstairs to their toy room and plied open a certain loose floorboard. Underneath it, he and Dudley had stored all of their ideas involving Operation: M is Mashed Potatoes, which was a story in and of itself.
Picking out a notebook, Harry slowly wrote with the fountain pen his aunt insisted he learn to use, before storing everything back in the hiding place. When he was older and he knew more, Harry knew that he would be able to come back and hopefully answer some of the questions he and his cousin had come up with. For now though, he had something much more fun to focus on – football.
The first day of school next year saw Peter dropping them off at school for the first time. Petunia was on some serious painkillers due to the mess her dentist had made of not using topical anesthesia… or any effect anesthetic for that matter. Vernon had been growling ever since. He was in a bit of a bind as Grunnings was in negotiations with that office, and so he couldn't yell their ears blue like he would have liked. He did insist Petunia find another dentist for the entire family, not wanting anyone to have to repeat her experience.
Because of the inevitable jarring of driving, Petunia had stayed home, and because it was close enough to the full moon that Remus was out like a light, and Petunia didn't want cat hair on her Popkins or little Harry, Peter was elected designated driver.
This was the first time Peter drove them, but it would not be the last. Peter turned out to be quite the conversationalist for all that he was typically quiet. When pressed, he could offer an opinion and back said opinion up on almost any topic. However, other than this change in arrangements, the third year of Infants began uneventfully. There was, of course, the typical exchange of what happened over the summer. Piers' family had gone to Majorca. As exciting as this sounded, Harry didn't particularly envy Piers for the awful sunburn he was still sporting. Linda's summer had been quieter than the Dursley household's had. All she had done was go to visit some family friends who had the sad misfortune of being a stockbroker and an accountant with a two year old.
School passed as uneventfully as it always did with mostly uncaring teachers and mostly uncaring students. If any of the teachers thought it was odd that Potter or Dursley would occasionally start writing in ink – and fountain pen at that – they did not comment except to remind students using pens to make sure they did not write down any answers in ink unless they were positive it was correct. Well, that and to remind everyone to write legibly if they expected to receive any grade higher than failing.
A few more pictures found their way around the Dursley household. There was a photograph of a skinny dark haired boy and a somewhat plump blonde showing off vegetables from a backyard garden. The same two boys were featured in a more recent picture, only in this one the dark haired boy's messy hair had grown a little more so that it covered his eyes. He was leaning over a desk, pointing something out on a worksheet to the blonde, who seemed to reach a healthier weight with each photograph and no longer resembled a puffed up beach toy or balloon. There were more photos of football games, some with the blonde hoisted on his team's shoulders, and a few where the green eyed boy had clearly run up and jumped on his cousin's shoulders, his chin resting just on top of the blonde's with an utterly mischievous smile as the blonde boy pumped the air.
In short, the Dursley household was rather normal, thank you very much. Aside from the obvious exceptions... well, maybe it wasn't exactly normal, but it certainly was happy, and that was something to be thankful for. After all, not everyone gets to live in a happy environment, and some people do not even get to have happy memories.
Far away on a gloomy island covered in fog and near constant gloom, there stood a fortress of a prison guarded by some of the vilest things known to wizard kind. This prison was known as Azkaban and it held prisoners serving stints from as short as a few weeks or a month to what amounted to Death Row – lifetime prisoners. It was well known that the longer someone stayed in an Azkaban cell, the more insane they became. This was because dementors are creatures that fed on happy memories for sustenance. Prolonged exposure caused the erosion of one's happy memories until all that you were left with were the worst memories of your life, on a never ending play loop.
Inside one of the cells set aside for life term prisoners was a shaggy dark haired man with wild looking eyes. He was surrounded by screaming. There were screams of despair, screams for help, and screams of terror. This particular man was silent. While his fellow prisoners struggled to retain a semblance of sanity, he did not worry over this either. His entire focus was on one thing – a small little boy far away with green eyes and a lightning bolt scar on his forehead.
