Hello everybody. Thanks for all those great reviews. I am really happy to be over 370 with only 13 chapters of the story. That motivates me to continue writing. This chapter is a bit shorter, but next chapter is the return to Hogwarts.
As always I own nothing of the Potter verse. Have Fun.
Adoption and an interesting article
Harry stood opposite of Sirius both holding a goblet filled with a potion the goblins had provided. The only thing Sirius had had to add were seven drops of his blood. Lily's and James portrait had been placed next to the place so they could see the ceremony.
"Are you ready Harry?" Sirius asked.
"Yes." Harry answered.
Sirius activated the runes he had drawn with a mixture of ink and his blood onto the stone floor. Over them the moon had reached his highest point.
"I, Lord Sirius Orion Black, call upon the ancient magic of bonding for this holy ceremony." He intoned.
The runes flashed red. Sirius took the goblet.
"I take this boy, Harry James Potter as my lawful son under the ritual of blood adoption. He will become my flesh and blood and my heir. So mote it be."
Sirius drank three gulps of the potion and the runes flashed green. He gave Harry the goblet.
"I, Harry James Potter accept the blood adoption by Lord Sirius Orion Black. I will be his son in flesh and blood and will respect and love him as a son does his father. So mote it be."
Harry drank four gulps of the potion and the runes flashed blue. Then three lines of light erupted from the runes and circled around Harry and Sirius. Three minutes passed till the light ebbed away. Harry had slightly changed. His hair was still black but it didn't stand up in the way James' hair did anymore. It also had gotten a bit of silkiness and had grown a few inches longer. He had grown four inches and the signs of malnutrition had disappeared. While Harry still wasn't overly muscular he had gained a few pounds which cured the much too thin look he had had before. It was the weight the healer had deemed the least healthy weight for a boy Harry's age.
Harry swayed but Sirius supported him.
"Are you alright Harry?" Sirius asked.
"I think so, just a bit disorientated. Everything is spinning."
"Let's get inside so you can lie down. Your body has changed a bit so I think it is normal to feel a bit under the weather."
"Thank you." Harry mumbled are let himself be supported by Sirius to get to his room. His father he corrected himself, feeling warm at the thought.
Then he thought how he would call Sirius from now on. He called his father James Dad, it would be confusing to call Sirius the same, but what else could he call him? He would have to think about it. Calling him father would be way too formal for them.
Sirius sat in the living room, speaking with the portrait of James and Lily. He brought them up to date and it would have been the understatement of the century to say Lily was furious. Sirius was sure, if she would have been alive, she would have apparated to Hogwarts directly, stormed the castle and murdered Dumbledore the most painful way imaginable. Her curses were quite colorful and James and Sirius had cringed at some of her more inventive torture ideas for Dumbledore.
James was also livid with Dumbledore's schemes but also very proud of his son. Harry had managed to do things no normal boy his age would have been able to do. They got into planning the ultimate revenge against Dumbledore.
Harry woke up to loud laughter the next morning. He sat up in his bed, put a morning robe over his pajama and went down, following the laughter into the kitchen. He found Sirius sitting at the kitchen table, the Daily Prophet in front of him, laughing his ass off. He walked over and looked over Sirius shoulder.
"Morning Pa." he greeted him.
"Morning Harry. Come, sit down, you have to read this, Rita printed her article about our visit to Diagon Alley. The Ministry will be in uproar."
Sirius smiled at Harry. He really liked being called Pa. He had wondered with which short form Harry would call him, as James had the 'Dad' reserved for him. Harry sat down next to Sirius and took the paper.
Harry Potter's return
By Rita Skeeter
Two days ago on the 29th of August the wizarding society could finally lay their worries about Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived (13) to rest as he and his charming new guardian Comte Orion de Jarjais, head of the noble and most ancient house de Jarjais (a pureblood family from France that has served the French kings for generations before the muggle revolution), arrived at the Leaky Cauldron via Floo Network.
Many of us feared that Harry would be in a bad condition for having been forced to leave his horrible muggle relatives. Indeed those fears were confirmed as young Harry told the wizards and witches there what had happened in his past. Many had to suppress their tears hearing such a horrible story from the nice boy.
"You can't imagine how hard it was to keep my emotions inside without having anybody who liked me. Those muggles hate everything connected with magic. They have called me a freak all my life. I was so glad to be able to escape them when I got my letter to Hogwarts, but every summer I had to return, being an orphan."
Thankfully Comte de Jarjais seems to have taken very good care of Harry and made sure that a personal friend, who is a healer, did a thorough health check of young Harry. He told he had symptoms of malnutrition and signs of not getting enough sun. This leads to more questions. Did those muggles imprison our hero? Why didn't he get enough food? As I wrote in my first article after the disappearance of Harry Potter, I took it upon myself to investigate the muggles with whom Harry lived before. So I am in the position to describe to you my faithful readers how those muggles looked like. I found out that the man was like a fat pudding with a moustache, the woman a thin, bony horse-faced bitch and the son resembled a baby killer whale (a muggle water-animal which becomes as big as a small dragon breed when grown up, the babies still are bigger than a hippogriff).
A well-known fact in the wizarding world is that the noble and most ancient house of Potter never had any problems with money. Why did Harry have to starve if there was no need? More so when his muggle relatives are as fat as they could get. To my experienced eye it was obvious, that Harry Potter is suffering from a severe case of abuse.
I couldn't let this matter rest with good conscience and again went to Little Whinging, the village where the muggles who raised Harry live, to find out exactly what was going on there. After all it should be impossible that all the muggles never noticed how horrible our hero was treated. What I found out left me speechless. Their neighbors told me that they had been warned about Harry attending a school for criminal boys. Dudley Dursley, Harry's cousin is feared by the other children in the neighborhood for being a brutal bully who likes to harm those weaker than him. A boy Harry's age remembered Harry from his primary school years. He told me, that nobody dared befriending Harry because they feared his cousin would beat them up for it as he did Harry.
So Harry had not only to suffer mental abuse, but also physical. It doesn't surprise me now, that he lost control over his emotions, even after being trained at Hogwarts for two years. Everybody has a breaking point and Harry's has been triggered by a very cruel muggle woman who insulted his parents.
Contrary to most beliefs in the past, Harry Potter seems to have been properly trained in pureblood customs as it is becoming of the heir of such an influential family like the Potters. He was a true gentleman from what I could observe during his shopping tour at Diagon Alley. He is even able to speak Gobbledygook as I could personally witness when he was visiting Gringotts Bank to get some gold for shopping.
This brings up the one question: How was young Harry able to learn all this in such a short time? He was known to leave his muggle relatives house on August 7th. Now there were just 22 days for him to learn proper etiquette, Gobbledygook and who knows what Comte de Jarjais had thought important for his young charge to learn. From an interview with Pomona Sprout, Head of Hufflepuff House at Hogwarts and teacher for Herbology, one gets a different opinion of Harry Potter's abilities.
"He is really a nice boy, he tries hard in his classes, but until now I never found any kind of brilliance in his marks. Perhaps with the incident something has unlocked in Harry. He also had a hard year last term as all our students."
The hard year Professor Sprout mentioned was the opening of the infamous Chamber of Secrets the deceased Salazar Slytherin had built inside the castle to get rid of muggleborn students, who he thought unworthy of learning magic. Now the facts were kept really quiet, it is only known, that young Misters Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley were awarded for services for the school.
I was already on my way back to the Daily Prophets premises to write my article, when I coincidentally walked into Florean Fortesque's Ice Cream Parlor to get some of my favorite ice cream, vanilla with chocolate chips by the way, when I saw Harry with his two best friends, aforementioned Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger sitting in front of the parlor eating sundaes.
They talked about the new school year and which subjects they had taken. When Ronald told Hermione that he couldn't understand why she wanted to take so many subjects, I have to admit by judging the girl's book bag, she is really ambitious to learn everything she can, and that he was glad that he and Harry had only taken two new subject, Harry answered he had changed his elections a bit. Thanks to some good advice of Comte de Jarjais, whom Harry calls Uncle Orion, he now takes Care of Magical Creatures, Arithmancy and Ancient Runes.
It seems young Harry is trying to keep many possible career perspectives open. But the next thing I heard shocked me massively. His reason why he wants to be as prepared as he can is that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, who Harry fearlessly calls by his name, is still somewhere out there and trying to get his body back. From young Harry's and his friend's conversation I could get, that in their first year their teacher in Defense against the Dark Arts, Professor Quirrell was possessed by the spirit of You-Know-Who and tried to get the Philosopher's Stone, that had been hidden at Hogwarts for safety reasons.
Then after this failed attempt of You-Know-Who, he was trying to use the life energy of Ronald's younger sister Ginevra Weasley to return to full power by some bewitched diary. Undoubtedly there had been some very dark magic at work for this being possible. The poor Weasley girl had been tricked by the master of manipulation and nearly died. I could see Harry was really shaken by this. But who wouldn't be if he had to face a basilisk, the legendary monster of Slytherin? You read right, there was a basilisk living under the castle.
Now the question is, how could headmaster Dumbledore allow all of these horrible things to happen at Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Why does the Boy-Who-Lived have to face so many dangerous things at the supposedly safest place in Britain in the magical world? From a well informed source I can tell you that this year will no doubt be no different for the poor boy. Dementors are sent to Hogwarts to prevent Sirius Black from attacking Harry Potter. But who knows if the dementors wouldn't be the greater danger to all of the students?
I especially doubt that Harry Potter will see the wisdom in the Minister's decision regarding an earlier statement he made at the Leaky Cauldron:
"I was really concerned that they would send me to Azkaban. A friend of mine, he was really my first friend in the magical world and the first person to ever give me a birthday present on my eleventh birthday, has been sent there last year despite being innocent of the things that happened at Hogwarts last year. My friends and I managed to prove his innocence, but what he told of the place was terrible."
As this reporter sees it, Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic never had any evidence that Rubeus Hagrid, the friend Harry Potter spoke of, was the culprit behind the opening of the Chamber of Secrets. Despite this he sent the man to Azkaban. I am questioning why our Minister seems to always depend on Dementors to solve critical situations. Every self-respecting wizard avoids those foul creatures but the Minister insists on positioning them around the school where our children will be exposed to them 24/7.
I call upon all concerned parents to get the Minister to rethink this decision. While Sirius Black is one of the most dangerous men who had ever been in the services of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, he already managed to escape them once. Why wouldn't he be able to do it again and attack the students of Hogwarts regardless the presence of the dementors?
I will keep you informed and I will find the truth about the things that seems to be hidden in the shadows Dumbledore and the Ministry have built over the years.
"Oh wow, this is something. Dumbledore and Fudge won't be happy that Rita spread the seed of doubt about them. I wish she hadn't heard the thing about Ginny, but I really didn't see her at the ice cream parlor. I hope Ginny won't get problems because of this."
"I doubt it. The article clearly shows that she was a victim. And as the public loves you, they will read it as if you are very protective of the girl. I fear they could spin a love story between you and Ginny from this. But that would be all there could be. Try to be nice to all of your comrades at Hogwarts who haven't wronged you and you should be fine. And some witty responses will get you farther then rage, always keep that in mind Harry."
"I will Pa." He said smiling.
"I like being called Pa." Sirius said smiling and ruffled Harry's hair.
"And I like calling you that. It's strange to have someone I can call that. Thank you that you adopted me." Then Harry pondered about something.
"Uhm, I just thought about something. Will the staff at Hogwarts know that you have adopted me?"
"A good question. I think if this had happened before the new booklists would have been delivered they would have found out, but now the only one who could possibly find out would be McGonagall. She is the head of your house and gets the updates of all the students' familiar affairs. Dumbledore will only find out, if she tells him."
"I hope she was serious about not telling anyone my secrets. I mean my new subjects are out in the open thanks to Rita's article but that was not a real secret. The thing I am concerned about is Dumbledore finding out I found out about my heritage."
"We will cross that bridge when we reach it. Try to just behave like a normal student. I have signed your permission form for the Hogsmeade weekends so McGonagall shouldn't have any problems with that. As I have formally requested guardianship for you with the Ministry and Rita's article nobody should give you a hard time about it."
"Thanks Pa. I am really looking forward to explore the village with my friends. And I sure as hell will look into the shrieking shack. You told me so many stories about the time you were there keeping Moony company."
"Yes those were great times. I really miss having my friends around me. Cherish those times Harry as long as you can."
"I will." Harry answered. Then he grew sober.
"What will I do because of the dementors? Madam Bones said she would try to get rid of them but as they will be around the school in the beginning, I fear what they will do."
"I will try to teach you the patronus charm as soon as I can. The patronus is a kind of guardian against the dementors. It acts like a shield between you and the dementor. It is built by concentrating on a very happy memory and speaking the incantation expecto patronum. It will take some time for you to learn it, it is really advanced magic. We can start today but don't expect immediate success."
"Better than nothing Pa. I don't want to be helpless when I am confronted with one."
"Fair enough. Let's go into the hall, get Prongs' and Lily's portrait and start with the training."
Harry nodded relieved and followed Sirius out of the kitchen. He forgot that he hadn't eaten yet. The thought of being able to protect himself against those foul things took all of his attention.
That's it for today, next chapter will be longer again.