Chapter 10

Dumbledore's office was quite a fascinating thing—more so to someone who had only just been introduced to magic. With all the complex creations around the room, moving and mobile, silver and wood, Harry was quite sure that the room held more magic than Diagon Alley in its entirety.

A bird sat on top of a perch, steadily burning, as if that was normal. When it had had sung, it hadn't been hard for Harry to recall the song of his wand, and thus figure out it was a phoenix. Unlike his wand, however, it brought no comforting warmth, only a compressing coldness. Fawkes, Dumbledore had said the bird was called.

With how old Dumbledore—now back in his normal form— looked, Harry wasn't quite sure whether the bird had been named after Guy Fawkes, or if it was the other way around.

"So," Harry said. "I've missed four years of my magical education."

Dumbledore nodded soberly. "Term begins on the first of September, in just over a month, so you do have some time to catch up."

Harry's eyebrows rose. "Four years in a month?" He could operate on four hours of sleep at the least, which would leave him with twenty hours a day. That would give him around…six hundred hours of time to study if that was all he did. Assuming school days of six hours that still only added to a hundred days' worth of schooling. Maybe if these children were complete idiots and he somehow managed to study constantly, he would have a slight chance. Or, in other words, he had no chance whatsoever.

Dumbledore gave a slight shrug. "You already have an incredible affinity for magic," he said. "The vast majority of children are not able to purposefully control their magic without a wand. Out of these children, the one who I have seen do it the most was Lord Voldemort, and your ability is his tenfold, though it is focused in different areas—or so I assume from your performance at the SHIELD base."

There was no point in lying if not doing so would help progress his magical knowledge—even if Harry didn't trust Dumbledore. "I could have continued doing that for a while; that was only a small amount of my power."

"And concerning what you did when you looked into my eyes?"

"All I can do is sense vague emotions," Harry said, "and it doesn't work on some people."

Dumbledore frowned, nodding. "I would have predicted it to be the other way around, with you being strong where mental magic is concerned, and not so strong in the physical aspect."

"Why?"

With a sigh, Dumbledore leaned far back into his chair. "You must understand, Harry, that I was not planning on telling you these things until you were much older, and much more experienced in matters of magic. It irritates me greatly to give you such a great burden mere hours after your introduction to our world." He sighed again. "I only tell you this due to your…" He coughed. "…unique upbringing."

"What?"

"Something of Lord Voldemort lies within you, Harry. The same Dark magic that he used for his false immortality, resulted in his soul being ripped to pieces, and one of those pieces lies within" –he pointed at Harry's forehead—"that scar."

Harry slowly nodded. "I'm going to assume that child Voldemort was good at mental magic, and you thought I would be too."

Dumbledore nodded. "It is a good sign; it means the fragment of him doesn't have much influence over you."

A sigh heaved from Harry. He had fought his way from Hydra's control, was planning or bargaining his way out of SHIELDs, and now there was possibly a being inside his head. "Why did Voldemort fail anyway? You made him out as some ultra-powerful guy who slaughtered hundreds, yet he falls to a baby?"

"To be straight forward, I do not know, but I do have multiple theories—three, in fact, all involving old and near ineffable magic. The first is your mother's love and sacrifice. The second is Voldemort breaking a promise. And the third…" Dumbledore hesitated. "…there is a prophecy."

Harry blinked. The first two reasons sounded completely idiotic; that said, so did the third, but if prophecy actually existed… "As in the crystal ball fortune-telling?"

"A muggle perversion of true divination, but, essentially, yes." Dumbledore got to his feet. "Come, Harry." He moved over to a door in the corner, holding a vial of silver liquid. The doors opened to reveal a golden bowl sat upon a pillar of a matching colour; both pillar and bowl were carved with strange symbols and runes. As the liquid was poured into the bowl, it swirled around, a storming ocean for a quick moment. And then it was calm and still.

"Fall into it, Harry," said Dumbledore.

Harry looked to him, and then to the bowl, and then to him again. "How do you suggest I fall into a bowl?"

"Not a bowl, a pensieve."

Harry stared at Dumbledore, and said, "Thanks for elaborating on how I fall in."

Dumbledore smiled in his usual deliberately mysterious way. "Just lean into it."

Well, if Dumbledore wanted to kill him, he would have done it a hundred times over, so without further question, Harry leaned forward and fell into the bowl—pensieve, he reminded himself.

The world tipped around him, and he rushed through silver light for a moment before reality came crashing back and he was standing on the floor once again. It took him only a moment to get his pistol drawn and up as he glanced around the room. He appeared to be in a pub filled with wizards, though it definitely wasn't the Leaky Cauldron.

No one appeared to have noticed his sudden appearance, and when he tapped someone on the shoulder, his hand passed straight through. What the hell was going on? Harry glanced around the room, and then saw Dumbledore. Well, the person looked exactly like Dumbledore, though his hair and beard were a bit shorter, and he had a tiny amount less wrinkles.

Across the table from him was a woman with frizzy, blonde hair. Thick glasses sat upon her face, and she, like Dumbledore, wore a robe. As Harry approached, he noticed she smelled heavily of some kind of herbal smoke. Her and Dumbledore appeared to be having a conversation, yet as Harry approached, she sat bolt upright.

Her eyes, already slightly mad, glazed over with pure insanity as she gazed upon something she could not comprehend. From her mouth came, "The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies..."

Harry had no time to do anything but glance at the horrified expression on Dumbledore's face before he found himself drifting upwards, and then through the ceiling. He was suddenly standing on solid ground once again, and staggered backwards a few steps before impacting the wall and slumping to the floor.

Dumbledore offered him a hand and he ignored it on instinct; Agent Smith had tricked him like that a few too many times. His head span as he got to his feet, and he staggered back to his chair. "Prophecy indeed," he muttered. He looked up at Dumbledore. "Are you sure it's me?"

Dumbledore nodded. "Almost certain. Your parents defied him three times. You were born at the end of July." He smiled. "Happy birthday for a week ago, by the way."

Harry started in surprise. He hadn't ever had anyone say that to him. "Thanks," he said.

"Anyway, carrying on; there was another who fit the aforementioned terms, but unlike you, he was not marked as an equal."

Harry nodded. "The scar," he said. "But I'm nowhere near his equal."

Dumbledore smiled. "Well, we're going to have to fix that."

"Accio," Harry said, pointing his wand at a book. It flew across the room, landing in his outstretched hand. He threw it back, and whilst it was in mid-air, thought, Accio. Once again, the book met his hand a second later.

It had been two weeks since Harry had been introduced to magic, and he had found that spells that involved pure force came incredibly easy to him, a result of already having used variations of them for around seven years. With an incantation, wand, and wand movement, using his power was a lot easier. It didn't seem to actually require any energy; rather than taking something from within him like wandless magic, wand magic seemed to simply channel an outer energy—magic—through the wand.

Harry agreed with Dumbledore's theory that the source of his wandless magic was the piece of Lord Voldemort—Dumbledore wasn't exactly likely to be wrong. He also theorised that the reason wandless magic tired him out was that Voldemort's piece of soul was an ineffective focus, or something of the like, so it actually required a physical effort on his part as well. Admittedly, he knew next to nothing about magic, so he could be completely wrong, but he found it a likely explanation for his seemingly natural affinity.

Harry had decided to skim over the theory of all of the first-year classes before he attempted any spells. None had been very hard to understand—that was probably because they had been designed for eleven-year-olds, which Harry was decidedly smarter than.

He had found that spells that involved bringing something like fire or water into existence, such as Incendio and Aguamenti, weren't as easy as the telekinesis-based spells, but still simpler than the ones that involved sending forth bolts of light that had different effects, like Stupefy, the Stunning Spell, which rendered its target unconscious.

What was more difficult than both was Transfiguration. Well, it wasn't exactly hard to do; it was just hard to do fast, which made it useless in a fight and therefore near useless to Harry.

After all, he highly doubted that someone as powerful as Lord Voldemort was going to wait around for a few seconds while Harry changed matches into needles. It would probably be wiser to bring his own needles, should he ever need to use them to defeat Lord Voldemort.

Lord Voldemort apparently wasn't as powerful as he had formerly thought. Apparently Dumbledore was not only a simple headmaster, but commonly referred to as the world's most powerful wizard. Voldemort was supposed to be near his level, but not quite there. Whilst still formidable, that was still a lot less scary than the massive and godly levels of power that Harry had been imagining.

Still, Lord Voldemort had managed to escape death somehow, and that was quite impressive, or so Harry thought. He hadn't had time to look over his only history textbook in detail, so for all he knew, resurrection was something any wizard could pull off.

Realistically, Harry was fairly sure that it would be nigh-on impossible for him to defeat Voldemort using magic without a stroke of luck a few miles wide. That didn't mean he wouldn't try to improve at it, however. Maybe he would stand a chance if he used other things in combination with magic. Then again, he was fairly sure that a bullet wouldn't kill an immortal wizard—thus the adjective, "immortal."

Dumbledore had been rather secretive on the subject of how Voldemort had become immortal, citing that he was "researching on the matter." Harry didn't trust that was entirely true. After all, what he had seen of Dumbledore, and what he had read of him were two very different things. He was a seasoned liar, undoubtedly, and Harry had no idea what might've been concealed behind those twinkling, blue eyes of his—all he knew was to not look into them.

Magic, it seemed, had brought with it many new challenges, the threat of Voldemort's plans and Dumbledore's plotting alike. But, hopefully, in due time, it would also bring solutions to those challenges, as well as ones for the other problems that plagued Harry's mind.

He had to ensure SHIELD had no leverage over him, and one other thing had been weighing down upon him for some time, a persistent and unsettling feeling buried in some dark corner of his conscious. It warned that something was awfully, awfully wrong, that Harry was being in some way deceived.

Where had it come from, he didn't know. He did suppose, though, that the best place to start looking would be where it had all begun. Something told him that Hydra wasn't completely gone. After all, if you cut off one head, two would grow back. This time, he didn't plan on cutting of its head. He planned on turning it to ash.

A/N: So, I'm sure you can tell by now that Harry isn't going to be content to just sit at Hogwarts. Anyway, tell me what you thought.