Harry Potter and the Dream of Something More
Harry Potter One-Shot. Would be an epilogue to book seven, if book seven were out yet. HP is seventeen, and reflecting on his life as a Wizard. Can't give too much away in summary, but I really like this concept, so please read and review, even if you hate it. Thanks!
Harry Potter put down his quill and smiled. Another perfect ending.
"Harry! Harry, get down here!" He heard his rotten Uncle Vernon call from downstairs. With a sigh, he put his parchment and quill back in his desk and went downstairs to see what his mother's brother-in-law wanted this time.
"Harry Potter, you have chores to do, and if you think I'm going to let you sloth about just because it's the start of your summer vacation…"
"Yes, Uncle Vernon," Harry said complacently, taking the garbage bag out of its plastic 'can' and tying the top in a knot. "Trash, dishes, dusting, mow lawn. My jobs for the day."
"And you think lucky there isn't more either!" Vernon ordered, his beefy neck wobbling as he spoke. At the kitchen table, a large pile of sandwiches in front of him, Harry's obnoxious cousin tore his eyes from the kitchen television to watch.
Harry went about his chores, secretly wishing he was back at school, where he felt safe, happy, comfortable. He had two friends there, Hermione and Ron, and he longed to see them again, but alas Ron was on holiday with his family in France, and Hermione had already gone to live in her own apartment not far from the university she had been accepted to. Harry wasn't going to university. His cousin hadn't been accepted to any, so both boys were going to be going to a small local college, because the Dursley's weren't about to allow their scruffy nephew anything that was obviously too good for their darling little (well, not little) offspring.
After dinner that night (Ham and potatoes, Harry's had been the smallest portion) the teenager retired to his tiny bedroom upstairs and took out his parchment and quills again. Reviewing his work, he smiled for the first time all day. (Well, second time. He had stifled a laugh when his fat cousin slipped on a banana peel his aunt had just dropped on the floor. But who wouldn't? It was like something out of an old slapstick comedy routine!)
He had broken everything into sections, by year, and tried to write one tale a year too, to keep each on as close to truth as he possibly could. The first book was his favorite. Actually, to be completely honest, the first three chapters were. Harry reached his hand up to touch the scar on his forehead.
He had made quite a few changes to his life when writing the stories. But he had kept quite a bit true to life as well. For example, his best friend Hermione. She really was the daughter of dentists, as he depicted. She did have bushy brown hair and was the smartest girl in his class, maybe in the whole school. And She did have a bit of a (mutual) crush on Ron. Ronald Wayans, the rich raven-haired boy who sat next to him in several lessons, had become poor, red-headed Ron Weasley. An only child in real life, Harry gave his literary equal many siblings, as Ron often said he wished he'd had. Hermione's last name, Ranger, had simply been given a G, easy enough transition.
Harry's rotten, spoiled cousins were mentioned in the book as well. Dudley, the eldest Dursley child, became Draco Malfoy, Harry's skinny blond nemesis. Dexter was given his brother's name (Dudley) and he was listed as the only Dursley child. The other boys in the family, Carter and Gregory, became Crabbe and Goyle, and the girls were named Millicent and Myrtle, characters who fit them well.
Nigel Hollins, the pudgy, forgetful boy who also sat by him in lessons, was rechristened Neville Longbottom. His parents, who had in reality been murdered when he was a baby, were in the books driven insane.
Harry pretty fairly depicted his teachers (yes, Snape really was a slimy git, and formidable McGonagall a stickler for rules) and was honest in writing about his upbringing.
Well, mostly honest.
For whatever reason, Harry found it too painful to write a truly detailed account of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Dursley's, his bellowing hard-fisted Uncle and his angry, horrid Aunt with nails that could scratch through metal. He simply put them on paper as idiots, jerks, horrible cruel human beings just a few shades kinder than the monsters they really were. He didn't bother to change their names. Maybe if his stories were ever to be published. Maybe then.
Harry loved writing about his parents the most.
He had little memory of his parents. He could hear screaming, his mother, and that flash of green light. He knew that he looked like his father.
They had died in a car crash.
But oh, how much better it was to pretend it happened as he wrote, as he felt himself sinking deeper and deeper into the fantasy world that had consumed him these last seven years. To write them this way, as if they had died honorably, not to say the accident was their fault. It wasn't.
They were approaching an intersection when a drunk driver appeared out of nowhere and broadsided them. The drunk had been running a red light. The Potter's light was green.
That flash of green light was all he remembered.
But oh, how very much better it was, to pretend that he was special. To create a world in which he could save the day, be a hero, fight the evil he was powerless against in his own home! To pretend his strangely shaped scar was a badge of honor!
He often hoped that his dream would come true, and one day a huge hairy man on a flying motorcycle would arrive to take him away to the land of fantasy and mystery that he had created first on the playground and in pictures as a little boy, and, at age eleven, on parchment. He wished for a godfather to come and adopt him, for Ron to fly a car to his window and rip off the bars the Dursley's had put up after catching him sneaking out to meet his friends when he was twelve. Cedric's real name was Chance, and he died in a car accident three years ago, just after getting his liscence, stuck by a drunk driver. Just like Harry's parents.
Harry created a world in which he could escape.
At one year old, after the accident, Harry was brought to the hospital. His parent died on the scene, his father immediately, his mother minutes later. But Harry was, somehow, relatively unharmed. An officer first on the scene removed him from the car and handed him over to her partner. "Amazing," she had said later to the doctors in the hospital. "Hardly a scratch on him anywhere, not even a bruise!"
The doctors were surprised as well. "My new favorite little miracle patient," one had said. "Until we know his name, what do you say we call him The Boy Who Lived?"
"Good idea," another doctor had agreed. To the other she said, "You're sure he's really alright? Nothing wrong with him?"
The man smiled. "Nothing at all, except this little cut above his eye."
The cop nodded her agreement. "Poor dear, it looks like it's going to leave a scar."
A/N Rumor has it that the last word in the seventh book will be "scar." This is probably not true (rumors rarely are, lol) but even so, I chose to run with it. My aunt actually had this idea after watching the first two movies the other day, she's never read the books and didn't realize how addicting it is. She called to say, "at the end of the last one, do you think maybe he was just a sad lonely boy with a crappy home and none of it ever happened?" I was like, "Hmmmm…" Thus, "The Dream of Something More" was born. Please review! Thanks. :) AL