- - - - - - - 30 July - - - - - - - - - - -
A shadow crept silently across the western wall of a small bedroom in Surrey. Highlights of pink and orange were making their first appearances far off to the east, peeking above the horizon; and a small teenage boy lay sleeping on his bare mattress at number 4 Privet Drive. The shadow watched, and waited.
As dawn approached, rustling sounds could be heard coming from the large master suite on the second floor of the house, but the young inhabitant of the smallest bedroom was unaware. Harry Potter lay dreaming on his mattress, his eyes moving swiftly behind their lids as his watched the closing events of a rather unimportant, but still painful Death Eater meeting. As the movement of the elder Dursleys became louder, the Shadow Watcher crept closer to Harry's bed, but as it drew up next to him Harry's eyes shot open and he sat up, panting, the stinging in his scar fading away to nothing, and the shadow was gone.
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Unaware of his nighttime visitor, Harry opened his eyes and stretched out a hand to find his glasses, which he had placed on the floor beside his mattress before falling asleep the night before. He could hear the shower running across the hall and knew it was only a matter of minutes before his Aunt Petunia would be screeching for him to...
"Get up! And cook our breakfast Boy!"
He groaned quietly as he heard the predictable yell coming through his door, and stood slowly, stretching his body full of muscles, sore from long hours of manual labor. After he had arrived 'home' from his 5th year at Hogwarts, Harry's Uncle Vernon had insisted that he get a job, "To pay your way boy. We've spent enough money on you through the years and it's time you started pulling your weight around here", was his argument. No matter that Harry already did all of the cooking, cleaning, gardening and repair work at the house. So, for the past month and a half Harry had been going to his job at the local gravel yard, where he was paid 10p for every 50lbs. of gravel he bagged and loaded onto a steel; funds that were immediately collected by Vernon when he brought them home at the end of each week.
The Order, of course, was aware of this as whomever was guarding Harry at the time had to accompany him to the gravel yard each day. Not that they were any help. They would follow him to work, and then follow him home, but they never bothered to find out what went on inside the house.
Therefore, at the start of another normal day at number 4, no one outside of the Dursley family saw as Vernon came out of his bedroom in time to see his nephew Harry preparing to descend the stairs, intent on beginning the morning meal. And no one (besides Petunia) saw when Vernon's eyes took on an almost maniacal glint, and certainly no one saw as Vernon pushed his nephew down the stairs, to land in a quietly moaning heap on the throw rug in the entrance hall below. What happened next, though, was seen by no one, inside the house or out.
A cool hand brushed softly across his eyes as Harry lay curled into a fetal position where he'd landed at the bottom of the stairs, and a gentle body guarded him from the kick Vernon aimed at 'the boy's' back as he made his way past. Weary emerald eyes opened to see who had come to his aid, but immediately sharpened when they saw no one. His body tensed as he prepared to jump to his feet, but relaxed slightly as an ethereal voice surrounded him.
"Calm child, and be still. I have much to say and little time."
Harry sat up slowly as he felt the cool touch again on his face, and put out a cautious hand to touch his invisible visitor, but swiftly drew it back when it encountered nothing. He glanced cautiously around the hall, seeing nothing but shadows that shifted in his periphery.
"Who are you? How did you get into my house?"
"I am but a messenger today, how I am here is of little consequence."
The voice was distinctly feminine, but deeply resonant, and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Harry wiped at the trail of blood that was making its way down his chin from the puncture wound in his bottom lip, where his teeth had gone through when his face hit the fifth stair. He glanced around the room once again and his gaze settled on a patch of wall where the shadows seemed to writhe and shift on their own. He stayed where he was, cautiously waiting for the voice to speak again. He had learned patience sometime during the past few months, and had come to the conclusion that waiting was often his best option when it came to the unknown.
"Many changes are to come, set in motion by the passing of time, and by Fate, who is always with you. Do not be afraid, for these changes will mold you into what you are meant to become. A guardian awaits you, and you must trust to her guidance. Do not seek her, for she will reveal herself to you when the time is right. As your day of birth passes, be prepared for the first changes, and keep them secret, others will not understand. Take heed of my advice young one, for it shall not be offered twice. Remember that which I have said Harry Potter, and all will be well..."
One last cool touch across his brow, and the shadows and voice were gone. To say that Harry was shocked speechless would be putting it mildly, as he was at that moment standing there in the front hall, opening and closing his mouth at a random spot on the wall, with one arm raised above his head, like a primary school child waiting to be called on by his teacher. A thousand thoughts were racing through his head, each clamoring for a spot at the forefront of his mind.
'Changes? What kind of changes? Barmy female shadows waltzing around the front hall telling me weird stuff... Well she was rather persuasive, wasn't she? What!? She barely told me anything useful at all! That's because you don't listen you twit! Yes I do! Do not! Do so! Not! So! Shut up!' (Well, no one ever said that Harry was completely sane did they?)
And that was how Mrs. Petunia Dursley found him. Mouth open, one arm in the air, blood trickling down his chin and one shoe untied, staring at the wall. For one miniscule moment she actually considered asking him if he was all right, but the thought quickly left her and she snapped at him to stop standing about like an idiot and get to work. This served to shake him out of his conversation with himself, and he rushed to clean the breakfast dishes before beginning the 5-mile jog to the gravel yard.
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10 miles, 5000 lbs. of gravel and a 3-minute chat with Mrs. Figg later, Harry was on the front step of his house preparing to enter. He had just taken off his shoes (because his aunt would have a fit if he tracked dust through her lovely clean home) and opened the door when he felt the ghost of a cool hand on the back of his neck. He froze. He had completely forgotten about his morning visitor, but as he looked in at the entrance hall the events of the morning came crashing back into his head. His thoughts became inverted as he continued into the house and up the stairs to take a shower before starting on his afternoon chores.
As he stood before the full-length mirror in the bathroom looking at his naked form, he wondered exactly what sort of 'changes' the shadow had meant when she said he would change. He took a moment to inspect his body, noting the short stature (around 5'7"), dark tan (from 2 months of working in the summer sun), wiry muscles and various scrapes and bruises. He prodded at a particularly nasty looking black and purple boot-shaped bruise on his mid-abdomen; a souvenir from the day before, when his uncle had caught him taking a break while painting the garden fence. Wincing, he pulled back and set about rinsing himself of the day's covering of gravel dust, but not bothering to wash, as he knew another shower would be needed by evening. Dressing quickly in the same over-sized clothes that he had just taken off, Harry went down to the back garden to begin work on the new gazebo that Vernon wanted built.
That was how his uncle found him later that afternoon, using a hand saw to cut boards to the correct lengths for the floor of the gazebo. He had already set the foundations, and was waiting for the concrete to set some before leveling them. Evidently though, his day's progress was not sufficient for Vernon Dursley, who could be found at precisely 6:42 pm Greenwich Mean Time, beating his nephew Harry with a rather green piece of fencing lumber. 'Could' being the key word, as no one actually happened to find him at it. Whoever it was that was meant to be 'guarding' Harry that day had obviously gone for a toilet break; unless of course they'd shut their eyes and put up a silencing charm, in which case they really ought to be sacked. As it was, no one saw and at 8:00 pm Harry drug himself through the house, past the oblivious Dursley family (congregated rather cozily in the TV room), and up the stairs to the bathroom, for his long awaited shower.
He lay in the floor of the shower, letting the warm water soothe his aching body; watching the stream of pink-tinged water make its way toward the drain, and thinking about his life.
'What did I do to deserve this? Perhaps I was a lawyer in a past life? No, you were a mortician. I was a what!? Why do you always pop up and say annoying stuff like that when I've just managed to start a good whinge? I'm just sitting here minding my own business, feeling sorry for myself and there you are, ruining it. Well, technically it is my business as well, since I'm you and all, but you're so bloody boring sometimes that I feel I must interrupt you, if only to save my insanity. And that takes me back to where I started! I'm bloody and bruised, and I really can't think of what I've done to deserve it! Well, you did get Cedric killed, and nearly got Sirius and all of your friends killed last year, brought the Dark Lord back from wherever he was... All right! I get it! So what if I do deserve it, I can still whinge about it can't I? Not when I'm around you can't. Well then you can bloody well GO AWAY!!'
At this point Harry was interrupted, quite rudely, by the water going ice cold, so he pulled himself to his feet and got out of the shower. (If he spent more than 8 minutes in there his aunt always shut off the hot water.) Wrapping a towel around his waist, he made his way across the hall and into his tiny bedroom, where his owl was waiting for him, a letter clutched in her beak.
Had he bothered to look in the mirror on his way out of the bathroom, Harry would have noticed something decidedly odd. All of the cuts he had received that day had already mended themselves, leaving only the red lines of fresh scarring on his skin. But as he did not look into the mirror and was sufficiently distracted by his conversation with himself, he did not notice that his over-worked and abused muscles had stopped aching several minutes prior to his entering his bedroom.
"Hello Hedwig." Harry whispered, walking up to the beautiful snowy white owl and running two fingertips down her neck. Her eyes lulled shut at the affectionate contact, but opened again as her Master spoke to her again. "Is that for me?" At this rather inane question, Hedwig would normally have given Harry her signature 'I'm not some common barn owl' look, but as Harry had yet to receive any mail at all that summer, she decided that it was indeed a fair question and hooted gently instead.
He had been sending his reports to the Order every three days, like they had asked. They were always short, to the point, and basically identical.
"I am fine. Nothing new here. Will be in touch if anything changes. How is everyone?
-Harry"
He had expected that he would receive some type of response to these notes, or at least to the chattier (is that a word?) letters he had been sending to Sirius, Ron and Hermione, but he had heard nothing from them since he had left them at Platform 9 ¾ . He was getting rather depressed about it actually, and his loneliness had often been the subject of his internal arguments with the voice in his head. This in itself only served to depress him even more as his other voice was rather annoyingly sarcastic, and for some reason sounded disturbingly like Roseanne Barr. Not that Harry actually knew this, having never had the chance to watch any American sitcoms. So, having fallen into a fairly unshakeable funk, Harry took the letter from Hedwig, expecting it to be for some other 'Harry'.
What he was most certainly not expecting, when he broke the plain blue wax seal on the parchment Hedwig had given him, was to feel a cool touch across his back and to hear the musical voice of the shadow woman he had spoken to that morning, resounding through his head.
"At midnight they will begin to appear, young Harry Potter. Your fate will be set into motion and your time of greatness, and great trial, will begin. Trust in your guardian and all will be well."
As the voice drifted off, and Harry's eyes fell shut, his mind and body entering into an enchanted sleep, his last thought as a 15 year old was, "Fabulous, one more thing to make me a freak."