Disclaimer : This work is a fanfiction based off of the Harry Potter Universe created by J.K Rowling. Any Characters, plots and settings already established in this universe belong exclusively to her. I do not nor will I ever claim ownership over them.
I'd also like to point out that the formatting of the location, time and date of each scene is taken from ACI100 with his permission, somebody that I follow on Discord. His stories are truly a work of art and inspired me to write my own so I'd advise also checking his profile out on this site. This will eventually turn into a Multi POV story like his so it is there so as to not completely confuse people. His formatting makes sense and is easy to follow.
Feel free to leave reviews letting me know your thoughts on each chapter or on the story as a whole as I dive further into it. Praise and constructive criticism are both welcome, though outright insults over my writing are not. Anyone who has attempted to write a story knows how much harder it is than it looks and we are all nervous to put our work into the world. We don't need to be made to feel like crap.
The same goes for any mistakes you may find like punctuation, grammar or spelling. I do make it a point to re-read my work thoroughly but there may be things I miss because I am not a robot so feel free to point out things I may have missed if you spot anything. Don't go batshit insane over it like I've seen some people do on here for other works.
Thanks and Enjoy.
Harry Potter and The Forsaken's Awakening
Year One - The Diverging Paths
Chapter Two - Fickle Enlightenments
July 13th, 1991
No. 4 Privet Drive
6:55 am
All was silent … other than the early morning birds tweeting away, that was.
And the occasional snore every now and then.
With two of the four bedrooms occupied in the middle class, suburban home, and all three inhabitants of said rooms still asleep, one could be forgiven for thinking that nobody within the house was aware that another day was already well underway.
But they would be mistaken.
If anybody were to enter the house at that exact moment and open the door to the cupboard under the stairs, they would see a boy sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed and his hands resting on his lap, breathing deeply.
The boy meditating quietly was a rather common occurrence, which was to say it happened every morning.
It was some technique he had read about in a book years ago as a way of being able to clear one's head and control his emotions.
One needed extreme patience when dealing with cunts like the Dursleys, after all.
Meditating helped to quiet his mind. It stopped the darker, angrier thoughts he often had from creeping and settling inside his head. Thoughts he had been tempted numerous times to act upon.
Those thoughts were especially dangerous.
The boy had a head of mess that was as dark as a blackboard, though it did thankfully lay flat when he took a brush to it. Even in this sitting position one could tell that he was thin, which was made to look worse by the fact that he was inexplicably tall for his age when he was standing upright.
That wasn't even mentioning the fact that the only clothes he owned belonged to his cousin, who weighed more in kilograms than he stood in centimetres. He might as well have been a hobbit stepping into a fully grown man's clothing. In short, he looked completely ridiculous.
For as long as Harry Potter could remember, the darkness of the cupboard under the stairs had been his 'bedroom', and for someone with a memory as good as his own, that meant he had always lived in here since the day he had arrived at Privet Drive. The mouldy, lumpy mattress he called his own which had bits of metal spring poking through the top had been his bed for a decade.
His cousin, Dudley, angel that he was, was given the luxury of two bedrooms, the second consisting of broken things that Dudley usually hurled in a fit of rage whenever something didn't go his way, or things he grew out of or was simply never interested in, like any book ever published.
Harry had once asked why he wasn't allowed to have a bedroom like Dudley and all the kids at school who liked to share all the cool things they had in their rooms.
Freaks weren't allowed bedrooms, they had said.
He had been five then, just starting out his first year of primary school, and even then, naïve as he was, he should've known nothing would come of it. Firstly, because he wasn't allowed to ask questions. And secondly, because bedrooms were a luxury.
Harry Potter was never afforded any luxuries, whether that be a bedroom, a bed, a comfortable mattress, a warm blanket, a pillow, a full meal or even a present for his birthday or Christmas.
His eyes snapped open as the first creak came from the floor above, revealing forest green eyes, the colour one might find on a wet leaf deep in the amazon rainforest, something he only knew from doing research for a case study on it in geography a while back.
That creak was the signal that his Aunt was now awake, undoubtedly heading straight to the bathroom as she did every morning. That meant that it was now seven o'clock. How Petunia managed to wake up consistently at seven without even using an alarm, he would never know. If there was one thing he actually respected about her - miserable, hateful person that she was - it was that she never seemed to lose track of time. Ever.
With a lazy flick of his wrist, a small fireball the size of a tennis ball appeared in his hand, hovering slightly over his open palm and lighting the cupboard up.
It was one of the strange, mysterious things that Harry could do that others simply couldn't. The first time he actually recognised himself doing these things was six years ago; he had been locked in his cupboard for three days for 'misbehaving' and had been starving and terrified that nobody would ever let him out. He had wished so badly that he could escape, and the next thing he knew, the cupboard had unlocked itself and clicked open.
At first, he thought that it must have been his relatives finally taking pity on him, but nobody other than himself could move around the house without making so much as a sound. Everyone else was so heavy-footed you'd hear them coming a mile away, his aunt included. A quick check outside in the hallway, on the stairs and around the bottom floor only confirmed that nobody had done any such thing, and that somehow, he had managed to escape his cupboard all by himself.
Grinning with accomplishment, a shocking rarity of a four year old who was just starting to figure out things for himself, Harry had gladly taken the opportunity to sneak food from the fridge. It was only when he had eaten his full, which wasn't all that much, that his relatives would notice the food gone, would see his cupboard unlocked and would punish him.
He had run back into the cupboard and shut the door in a state of panic.
At least, he had panicked until he realised that the cupboard lock had gone back on with a small click when he had wished it would just as badly as he had wished it to unlock.
He had tried it again every night for a week after that, without success, and was almost sure the door unlocking had just been some freak accident. But on the eighth night, he managed to lock and unlock it several times, wishing it as badly as he possibly could.
That was when he realised that he might have supernatural powers, or as he had called it back then up until very recently, the force.
When he was that young, the Dursleys simply locked in his cupboard when they went out for the day, and after Harry had unlocked his cupboard door, he sat and watched the Star Wars film that he had only caught glimpses of when doing his chores. Darth Vader choking someone to death using only hand gestures stuck out in his mind, as did Luke Skywalker summoning a ship up from a swamp using nothing but his mind and the evil Emperor electrocuting Luke with nothing but his fingertips.
He had been enraptured by the things that they could do. The powers that they seemed to have.
He had tried to replicate them.
Choking someone to death and electrocuting people seemed a bit dangerous for now, so he started with simply trying to get things to move without touching them. It was surprisingly easy, even if the plastic cup he was practising with only moved half a dozen inches or so at first, but Harry had been delighted with his achievement, and it had kickstarted him diving into his powers and trying to do more and more.
And more he had done. He had even done some things he had no idea how to replicate.
The conjuring of the fireball in his hands had been his most recent addition to his bag of tricks. While he had managed to conjure a ball of light some time ago, it didn't give off the warmth he needed during February when it was freezing cold or on a particularly cold night in spring when his paper-thin blanket simply wasn't enough.
It truly seemed as though - with the exception of one thing so far - the only limitation to what he could do was his own imagination. As long as he wanted something bad enough, with the exception of that awesome teleportation trick he had done a few months ago that he still didn't know how to replicate, it would eventually happen.
It helped that some of the things he could do conveniently got him out of trouble, like the locking doors thing, for instance. Harry had never once been blamed for taking the food, because how could he when his cupboard was locked every night from the outside? In their eyes, Dudley simply woke up for a late night snack before returning to bed.
This was perfectly fine with them, because their precious Dudders was an angel and they would never punish him for anything.
So he kept taking food every night. And he kept getting away with it.
It was a nice change from having to scavenge bins for scraps just so that he could eat something everyday.
That didn't mean he got away with everything, though, fighting the urge to groan at the pain that shot through him when he stretched forward to grab a pair of spider-infested socks with his free hand before curling his other hand into a fist to extinguish the flame, the familiar smoke drifting through the gaps in his fingers before dissipating. Another couple of flicks of his wrist later and a ball of light was hovering above his head in mid-air so that he could see the spiders on his socks before he took them all off.
The Dursleys liked to punish Harry for pretty much everything that ever went wrong, even if he had absolutely nothing to do with it. Some of the favourites in the household were for being smarter than Dudley, for costing them precious money every week to keep. For somehow costing Vernon a massive order of drills at Grunnings and for taking up their fresh air.
The teleporting incident had landed him a severe punishment, though, because he had been caught on the school roof and they came to the rather obvious and boring conclusion that Harry had climbed the building and would be suspended for a week. That was one time he hadn't been able to convince the school to not phone home over anything.
Petunia had screamed at him the whole way home and when Vernon had come home, he had rounded on him immediately after finding out what he had done.
It hadn't been pretty.
It never was.
It had taken way too long for him to realise that they despised his very existence, and that they wished he had died with his parents. It was a sobering thought for a six year old, and it hadn't really gotten any easier once the punishment had moved past being slapped in the face a few times and shoved in his cupboard. No matter what he did, he would be punished.
If he showed them how smart he was, they would punish him for making Dudley look bad.
If he acted dumb, he would be punished for making them look bad.
If he didn't manage to do his enormous list of chores for the day, he would be punished for being worthless.
If he did manage to finish his chores, he would be punished for not doing it quickly enough.
If he was spotted by Vernon after he had a bad day at work, he would be punished.
If he existed, it was only to be punished.
Because that was all freaks deserved.
It used to infuriate him, making him boil with such righteous anger that he couldn't keep it in. When he learned that yelling at them only made things a thousand times worse, he looked up ways to control one's emotions, hence the meditating.
It still made him angry, to be fair, but not nearly as much as it used to and he was much better at controlling it. He had long accepted that this was the way things were and it was the way it would always be until the day he was old enough to live on his own. They hated him and he hated them. Nothing would ever change that.
The sound of the bathroom door opening made Harry dismiss his light source with a drawn-out sigh and he was once again shrouded in darkness. Time for another day in hell.
Petunia came not long after, banging on the door screaming for him to get up, as if he was ever not up when she did this. He was always an early riser, waking up before Petunia did every day, though he knew the time between him getting up and hearing her get up varied everyday. He didn't quite have the strict morning schedule that she did.
Making breakfast was a dull affair. Initially ignoring Petunia's daily reminder to not burn anything, something he hadn't done in years considering they had the same breakfast every morning, she went back upstairs to wake Vernon and her Diddykins, leaving Harry to his own thoughts.
It was honestly better than being in her presence. He would take a dull affair over having her criticise every little thing he did.
Before long, the three Dursleys were sitting at the table with plates of food in front of them, one regular sized portion for Petunia and two mounds for Dudley and Vernon. Harry sat at the table as required, his placemat empty as per usual. He would only eat whatever the three Dursleys couldn't finish, which was rarely ever anything.
It never helped that they always seemed to eat as slow as humanly possible, as if to torture him even more with the fact that they could eat whatever they wanted while he had to suffer in silence. Dudley seemed to get a kick out of it, commenting every now and again that the food was really good and even going so far as to thank his mum for it.
The absolute prick.
Nothing even remotely interesting happened until a thunderous knock echoed around the entire house, coming from the front door, making them all jump, and for Vernon's head to snap around so fast with a crack loud enough that Harry wondered for a moment if he snapped it.
Vernon's head then turned like the owl he'd seen three days ago and focused his eyes on Harry.
The message was pretty clear.
Get the bloody door.
Harry, expecting it to be one of the many visitors they had in the morning, didn't think much of it, other than wondering why the hell they had decided to scare him half to deaf by knocking so goddamn loudly.
He got his answer the second he swung open the door, because standing there was easily the largest man Harry had ever seen, both height wise and girth wise. Harry's jaw almost hit the floor in his surprise, but thankfully, he did not gape like a whale ready to eat its meals.
Though it was a very close thing.
"Can I help you, Mr. … erhm …?" Harry asked slowly, just about managing to form a coherent sentence and recovering slightly from his shocked state.
This ... man, whom Harry was hesitant to call such a thing, was almost hidden completely behind shoulder-length, shaggy hair and a wild beard tangled in several knots. His beetle eyes, though, black as his hair and beard, were crinkled as he looked down at him. A common occurrence for people who smiled, Harry had observed.
"Rubeus Hagrid, but jus' call me Hagrid, everyone else does." The stranger held out a large hand, big enough to probably crush Harry's head, for him to shake. Harry, not wanting to come off as rude and anger the mountain of a man in front of him, tentatively shook it.
"Yeh mus' be Harry, o' course," Hagrid continued. "Las' time I saw yeh, yeh was only a baby. Yeh look a lot like yeh dad, but yeh got yeh mum's eyes."
"Right," Harry said slowly, wondering if Hagrid was ever going to get to the point of why he was here like he'd asked, or whether he was just going to keep dancing around the point.
"And o' course," the man kept going, and Harry took a deep, calming breath, "I'm the Keeper o' Keys an' Grounds at Hogwarts. Yeh know all abou' Hogwarts, o' course."
Finally, some bloody answers to that weird letter that had come three days ago.
The thick, heavy yellow parchment with green ink telling him he had been accepted into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry along with a list of some very questionable items that he had to acquire. He was inclined to believe it, because he did basic magic everyday, but when the owl he had found sitting outside on a tree that afternoon had come and taken his reply, which had taken three days to respond to by the looks of it, he hadn't been as sure as he had that morning reading the letter in his cupboard.
He had allowed himself to get his hopes that he might finally get away from this hellhole, for at least ten months of the year, but as each day had gone by without reply, his hope had diminished, to the point where he thought it might've been some cruel prank by Piers or someone else in Dudley's gang.
"Sorry, I don't."
"Huh?"
Harry did sigh that time, making sure not to look at the stupidly blinking giant in front of him. Did he not understand plain english when it was spoken to him? Did he not even read the letter Harry sent back? Harry had quite plainly stated in it that he didn't know anything about magic or Hogwarts, which is why he had pleaded that someone help him acquire the items on his list. Surely he must have known that? The man was standing right in front of him.
He said as much to Hagrid, who was getting redder and visibly more angry with each passing second, never a good sign if his Uncle Vernon was anything to go by, and this guy looked like he could eat Vernon for dinner and have Dudley for dessert.
Harry did not want Hagrid to be pissed off at him.
"Yeh don' know?" Hagrid growled.
Duh. Hadn't he just said that? Why did the Headmaster send this idiot to help him? He was thick as a brick. The eyeroll came forth that time, luckily Harry had managed to duck his head before he did it so Hagrid wouldn't see.
Hagrid made to move forwards, and immediately made himself as small as humanly possible against the wall in the entranceway, thinking that Hagrid was going to attack him. He didn't though, he simply moved past him and into the dining area, where the Dursleys could be heard talking with each other even from the doorway.
Stunned, Harry made to follow him, eager to see Vernon get his arse handed to him by Hagrid, who was easily big enough to dwarf him. Quickly, he opened his cupboard door and took out the letter hidden underneath his mattress. He figured he'd need it.
Later that morning …
Hagrid led a silent Harry into a dingy looking pub called the Leaky Cauldron. On the outside, he looked like a normal child just walking along. On the inside, his mind and his emotions were in an absolute whirlwind. He had learned so many things back at the Dursleys, and so many conflicting thoughts and emotions were running through him that he wasn't even sure how to go about digesting it all.
Seeing the Dursleys get taken down a peg or three had been highly entertaining. They had whimpered against the wall for the most part while Hagrid yelled at them. Harry would have liked to see him tear them to pieces, but he knew you couldn't have everything you wanted in life.
Magic was indeed real, not that Harry didn't already know that, and he definitely would be going to Hogwarts whether the Dursleys liked it or not, which could only be something to celebrate.
They certainly hadn't liked that idea, and had protested profusely. He even found out that they knew about magic, Petunia especially. How Lily was the special one in everyone's eyes because she had magic while she was nothing but a common muggle, a rather apt word for describing them, in Harry's opinion.
And yet, Harry couldn't celebrate entering the world in which he had always belonged, because Hagrid had dropped another couple bombshells on him that he wasn't quite sure how he should feel about.
His mother was alive, and he had a twin brother and a little sister.
Not only that, but his brother was famous for surviving a supposedly unstoppable curse and vanquishing the Dark Lady known as Voldemort when he was a baby in the same attack that had killed his father.
According to Hagrid, she had been a right mess after the attack and had struggled to deal with everything that had happened including losing Harry's dad. Harry wasn't sure how to feel about it. If she had struggled so badly then, why had she given him to Petunia, of all people. Why had she never visited, or tried to get in touch. It had been ten years, and from what Hagrid had said, she seemed to be doing alright now.
Why had he been the one that was abandoned? Did she even care? Had she ever wanted him in the first place?
He managed to jerk himself out of his depressing thoughts just as the barman spotted Hagrid and started waving at him.
"The usual, Hagrid?"
"Can't today, Tom. Hogwarts Business. Got young Mr. Potter with me," Hagrid replied proudly, clapping Harry hard on the shoulder making him flinch violently and causing his knees to almost buckle, not that Hagrid noticed. He couldn't help noticing that the bar had gone completely silent, every head turned in his direction. Harry realised exactly why that would be a moment before the barman spoke again.
"Bless my soul, Evan Potter. What an honour."
He hurried out from around the bar and he could see starting to stand up, causing his eyes to widen. They were all going to come over and maul him!
"Sorry, sir. My name is Harry Potter. I'm afraid you have me confused with somebody else."
The man stopped in his tracks, as did the people getting up, clearly ready to come over to him. "Ah, my mistake, my mistake." Tom turned around and headed back to the bar, and everyone who had made it to their feet sat down. Harry caught a few mutterings here and there and he and Hagrid made their way through.
"I've never heard of Harry Potter?"
"He can't be from our Potters, everyone knows they only have one son."
"Got to be a muggleborn."
The only outward reaction he gave to hearing the comments of people around him was a clenching of the fist hidden between himself and Hagrid's enormous frame.
It did sting on the inside, though. The comment about the Potters only having one son stirred something within him that he hadn't felt in a long while; something painful and constricting. It seemed that Lily had dumped him with Petunia and simply refused to even acknowledge his existence, to the point that nobody even knew that she had three biological children, and not two.
It hurt.
And it made him angry.
Everyone had been ready to clamber to get close to him when they thought he was his brother because Evan showing up was an honour, and yet when he introduced himself properly, he wasn't even worth a 'nice to meet you'.
He glanced up at Hagrid, if only to see how he had reacted to hearing those comments … only to find him smiling and waving at other people in the bar.
It didn't even surprise him. The guy was an imbecile. Honestly, it was bad enough that he hadn't been able to answer three quarters of the questions Harry had asked him about the wizarding world while they had travelled to the pub. Why the bloody hell had the school sent this guy to guide him through his first foray into the magical world? Why hadn't his mother come and explained it all to him instead?
Half an hour later …
Diagon Alley was really cool, Harry decided. It practically screamed the word, especially after the way the bricks had parted at the entranceway like Moses and the bloody red sea, something he would be strong enough to accomplish one day, he vowed to himself at that moment. There was something new and interesting in every direction, and he genuinely couldn't wait to explore and look at it all.
Gringotts stood out at the corner of the path they were on before it branched out into separate ones. There were actual goblins, and dragons deep down underground guarding some of the bigger and fuller vaults. The joint shock and elation he experienced at seeing the mounds of gold, silver and bronze in his own vault wouldn't be replicated for a long while.
Galleons, Sickles and Knuts were easy enough to remember, as was the conversion of Knuts to Sickles and Sickles to Galleons. Maths had been his best subject at primary school, which was saying something considering his prodigious marks all across the board.
He had wanted to question Hagrid so badly when they had stopped to pick up another little package in a separate vault, a vault which only contained said package. Whatever it was, must be extremely valuable, considering the goblins had been so cautious about it when Hagrid had first asked to go to this vault. He knew better than to think Hagrid would tell him, though. If he hadn't even mentioned the object's name earlier, he wouldn't now, no matter how many times he asked.
All of that led him to now.
He was standing outside the uniform shop, Madam Malkins, and Hagrid had just gone back to the Leaky Cauldron for a drink after riding the carts, which Harry couldn't understand. How could that have been anything other than fun?
In his hands was a bag filled with money, more money than he'd initially suspected the bag could hold, until he learned the bags were enchanted to be bigger on the inside than they were on the outside, which was probably the coolest magic he had done or heard of so far.
Harry was very eager to start learning everything he could about the wizarding world and settle in as smoothly as possible, so with that in mind, he discarded the uniform in favour of heading over to the book shop: Flourish and Blotts. Harry moved around, first looking for his school books before he went about looking for other books that would help him in other areas of the magical world.
The last book he ended up needing on his list was Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 by Miranda Goshawk. Having not seen it on the ground floor, Harry carried his books up to the first floor and began searching. It only took a few minutes for him to find the series from one to seven, grade one being at the very top of the bookshelf, way above his reach.
"For fuck sake," Harry muttered.
"Rather colourful language, that."
Surprised, Harry jolted and spun, his books tumbling out of his hands. They never hit the floor, though, coming to a halt in mid-air a couple of feet off of the ground.
The stranger that surprised him was a very short man, not a great deal taller than Harry. He was above average in weight, with short, brown hair, a pointed nose and watery eyes. Kind of like a rat, in Harry's opinion. He wore an open, knee length robe with a symbol on it which made it perfectly clear that he worked at the shop.
In his hand was a wand pointed at the books. Evidently, he'd stopped them from crashing to the ground.
"My apologies, I didn't mean to scare you," the man spoke in a rather high voice, raising the tip of his wand and making the books fly up into a neat pile and stop in front of his chest, which Harry took in both hands. The wizard didn't stop there, flicking his wand again, making a basket appear from thin air and land at Harry's feet. Grateful, Harry carefully placed the books vertically until the bottom was full before laying the couple of books he had left in his hands horizontally over the top.
"Thank you," Harry said sincerely when he straightened up again.
"It's alright," was the response. The man was smiling at the layout Harry placed his books in.
"What is it?" Harry asked defensively, gesturing to the basket.
"Oh, nothing, you just reminded me of an old friend of mine, is all. He used to lay out his books the same way whenever we came in here."
Harry, unsure of what to say to that, didn't respond.
"Need a hand?" he asked, pointing to the shelf Harry had been looking at beforehand.
Harry scrunched up his nose as if in thought, then looked at the man and shook his head, holding up an open hand.
"No need."
A moment later, he caught the book he needed by the spine with ease. Triumphant, he used his free hand to levitate the basket, placing his newly acquired item inside.
"Impressive," the man said, returning Harry's attention to him. Both his eyebrows were raised, and he looked genuinely impressed. "I can't say I've seen many people have so much control over wandless magic, and never in someone as young as you."
Outwardly, he shrugged it off, but he was delighted to hear that he was more unique in being able to control magic without a wand so well. It strengthened his desire to be powerful with a wand as well as without one.
Lazily, he moved the basket over to one arm and gripped the handle before letting go of his magic on it.
He underestimated the strength it would require to stop the momentum of the basket falling.
It pulled him down with it, Harry having forgotten to let go when he realised he wouldn't hold it up.
"Oh shit," Harry exclaimed as he tripped over his fallen basket and fell forward, managing to spin himself to land on his back instead of his face. Pain, directly from his latest punishment, lanced through his back, bringing a grimace out of him as he stared up at the ceiling in a daze.
Unrestrained laughter came from above him, and he realised the man he'd been talking to was the culprit, bent over at the waist, clutching his stomach with one hand and slapping his thigh repeatedly with the other.
Harry wanted to be mad at him for laughing, but he couldn't. He had gotten cocky and made a stupid, embarrassing mistake. It was his own bloody fault for acting like a moron and trying to show off.
"Ah, that was great," the man gasped, still letting out small spells of laughter. "Merlin, if your dad was here he would've pissed himself laughing watching that. That's exactly the sort of thing he would've done when we were in school."
"You knew my dad?" Harry remarked as he gingerly got to his feet, so interested to hear about the man from somebody that wasn't named Rubeus Hagrid that he completely ignored the pain he was still in. The man opposite him sobered quite quickly at the change in topic. He must've known him well if asking about him changed his expression from mirthful to sad that quickly, Harry mused.
"Yeah," he sighed, "I knew James."
Harry waited for the man to continue what must've been a difficult subject for him.
"I met your dad my first night together, when we were sorted into the same Hogwarts house together, and we hit it off straight away, quickly becoming friends and becoming a group of four with two other guys by the end of the next night. James and one of the other boys became the leaders, if only because they were the most loud, outgoing, self-centred and arrogant of us, and me being me, having never had a friend before Hogwarts, joined in with them so that I could fit in."
"My dad was self-centred and arrogant?" Harry asked in confusion, interrupting him before he could go any further. Hagrid had told him that the man had sacrificed himself for their family the night he had been killed. That didn't sound like somebody who only cared about themselves.
"He was when we were eleven, and he had a right to be. He was the heir of an old, rich and powerful family and lived a life of luxury in a manor that belonged to the Potters for centuries. He was a talented wizard who barely had to put any effort in to get good grades, and he was easily the best flyer at Hogwarts by the time he hit thirteen. He did grow out of it, though, when he was sixteen. Wanted to show your mother he wasn't the toerag she thought he was." the man smiled in reminiscence. "Worked, too," he added.
Harry listened attentively, even if he didn't understand most of what had just been said.
"James was a great man," the man continued after a moment. "One of the best I knew."
He cleared his throat, saying no more on the topic, and although Harry desperately wanted to hear more, he respected that it was still a sore subject for the man opposite him, and he was grateful that he had spoken about him at all.
"Thank you. It was nice to hear about him. The only things I've heard about him before today weren't nice, and probably weren't true now that I think about it."
The other man smiled. "It was my pleasure." He seemed to hesitate for a moment, before sticking out his hand. "The names' Peter, by the way. Peter Pettigrew."
Harry only hesitated for a moment before taking it, crushing the unease he felt at any form of physical contact. "Harry Potter." When their hands broke contact, Harry gestured back down to his basket. "Did the way I set my books remind you of my dad, too?"
Peter grinned. "Merlin, no. James hated this place more than any other in Diagon Alley. He never picked up a book unless he had to, even in the Potter library in the manor, which holds some of the most ancient and powerful magic in the world, I've heard."
Harry's jaw fell open, sure he had misheard. "I'm serious," Peter reaffirmed, "You Potters have been around for almost a millennia at least, and you've got all sorts of scrolls and ancient tomes in your family library that I wasn't allowed to touch while I was around there in my youth because it's all secretive and classified as family magic. You'll have access to all of that when you go there."
"My mother and siblings live there?" Harry asked, to which Peter nodded.
"Ever since the war ended."
Sensing Harry's unease to talk about his family, Peter quickly returned to the topic at hand. "But no, you didn't remind me of James. You reminded me of another one of mine and James's friends; Remus Lupin.
"Sounds wolfish."
A short burst of amused laughter escaped Peter's mouth. "You have no idea." After a moment, he spoke again. "Did you only want to pick up your school books or did you want to get some extra reading material?"
When Harry answered in the latter, explaining that he wanted to learn more about how the wizarding world worked, Peter offered to help him find some good books to buy, help that he graciously accepted. As Harry went to lift his basket, the older man stopped him and tapped it with his wand once before gesturing to him to pick it up. It was the lightest thing he had ever held in his life. Lighter than even a pencil.
"A featherlight charm," Peter explained when Harry sent a confused, questioning glance his way. "It makes anything you cast the spell on as light as its namesake." When Harry's only response was to glare accusingly at him for not doing that in the first place, he gave him a cheeky smirk. "What? Where's the fun in doing it straight away? I got a good laugh out of that stunt you tried to pull."
Harry's facial expression only deepened. That was, until Peter waved his wand as they went to move away from where they had been standing, sparking his interest.
"A privacy spell, so nobody heard our conversation. One your mother helped invent in our fifth year at Hogwarts."
"How do you invent spells?"
The eagerness with which he asked that made Peter chuckle for some reason. "A combination of Arithmancy and either Charms or Transfiguration, depending on the type of spell you're going for. There's obviously more to it than that, but that's the basic gist of it … it's nice to know you have some of Lily in your personality, too. She was always so eager to learn. Your siblings seem to be exclusively one of your parents in terms of personality at the moment."
Harry didn't respond to the bits about his family, unsure how to feel about them still. "What's Arithmancy?"
"An elective you won't be able to study until your third year at Hogwarts centred about maths and calculations, though there's no reason why you couldn't start studying for it now, assuming, of course, that you want to?"
He couldn't nod fast enough.
Author's Endnotes :
This marks the end of chapter 2, and the entirety of Diagon Alley. The rest of Diagon will be touched upon briefly in the next chapter, but only as an internal monologue. There won't be anymore scenes for Diagon until second year.
Honestly, I've had that Harry and Peter scene in my head since I started planning this story. I did say I wanted to do something different for Diagon, and I think I've done it in a fresh way. If there are any stories out there that have a Harry and Peter scene in Diagon, feel free to send me a link for the story if you have it, because I haven't seen it done.
If you can't tell already, I kind of dislike Hagrid. I really liked him when I first read Harry Potter, but reading it over hundreds of times, I've found that I like him less and less as time goes on. He really did not prepare Harry well for the wizarding world at all, and the constant danger he puts the trio in on purpose throughout the series really annoyed me after a while. Also, his accent is a bitch to write. I can't wait until I get to Fleur. Yay!
I will be diving more into Peter as the story goes on, because we all know that while he is very cunning and an excellent quick-thinker, he is far from competent with a wand. It doesn't take much skill to cast an unforgivable, as we know. This Peter is way more skilled, pulling out silent N.E.W.T level conjurations in a blink of an eye, something I'm almost certain canon Peter couldn't do. There is a reason for his competency in this story that will be delved into later.
How did people feel about me skipping the whole Harry getting the letter thing? I've never really liked it and seeing the letter address and the contents of it has always broken the flow of the chapter it's in for me whether that be canon or fanfiction. I didn't want to go through the hassle of writing a letter that's been done a million times already by other people. We all know what it says by now.
Chapter 3 is going to have our first switch in POV for a scene, so that's something to look forward to for those that are enjoying the story so far. I probably won't start writing it until Thursday evening British time, so hopefully its out at some point over the weekend.
As always, comment and let me know what you think so far.
Until next time.
