Chapter 3 Unrecalled memories

Harry tried to open his eyes but everything was black, and he wasn't sure whether it was because he failed to peel his eyelids apart and his eyes were still closed or the place where he was laying flat on his back was really that dark.

When he had finally managed to open his eyes it turned out that he was nowhere other than his very own bedroom on Number 4 Privet Drive. It was the middle of the night, and the back of his head hurt, throbbing painfully in the spot where he had hit it when he landed on the floor of the bedroom. There were no streetlights burning outside and nothing was lit in the room, yet the intensity of the pitch black darkness it created was eerier and more unnatural than it should be. This forceful darkness enveloped every object around him, swallowing the entire space whole. He had no idea how he got there. He was afraid to move. He simply lay there staring straight above at the black ceiling, unable to sit up. By the looks of it his back was out too.

The last thing he remembered was Lucius driving through the streets of London, speeding noiselessly through the crowds of unsuspecting muggles. Harry tried to think hard, forcing himself to remember more. He saw himself sitting at the passenger's side, looking blankly out of the window as he noticed Lucius out of the corner of his eye, reaching over to the floor and picking something up. Harry jerked his head toward him fast, but just as he got to that part of the memory his scar exploded with pain. He simply could not remember anything else…

At this point the pain he felt all over his body became too overwhelming, his scar, his back and his head teamed up and knocked him out for good. He actually felt himself pass out as the last conscious memory of the night swam through his mind – a distinct cold voice laughing gleefully in his head.

When Harry came to, the next morning, it was already past noon and yet no one had bothered him. Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon or Dudley….none of them had woken him up. Odd…he thought, and tried to get up. His back was creaking and cracking, hurting tremendously, but it was working nonetheless. It wasn't broken, and that in itself cheered Harry up quite a bit. Mostly because he spent a full seven minutes trying to remember the right charm that would be able to fix it and he could not get the last four words of the incantation straight, which was frustrating.

He needed Pansy for this. The smartest Slytherin girl he knew, who also happened to have been fancying him for a few years now. Harry did not find her attractive however, and spent most of his time for the past three years dodging her in the common room. That was also the reason why Harry and Draco did not hang around in their dorm too much, and were forced to find different places for entertainment. Such a seemingly inconvenient "motivation" actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, throwing Draco and Harry into the path of Rosemerta, an overly friendly woman who owned a pub in the village of Hogsmeade. Consequently they chilled out there with her a lot. At 24, she was only about eight years older than Harry and Draco, and therefore the three of them found many things in common. Having inherited the pub from her father when she was only eighteen, she has dedicated the next seven years to taking great care of it. Rosemerta enjoyed flying and loved talking about Quidditch (Harry and Draco were both on the house team). She cooked amazing exotic dishes, gave them excellent girl advice, shared many amusing Hogwarts stories from when she went there, abusing and discussing various teachers in the process, and overall was the best gal friend they could ever wish for. There wasn't a single instance that they spent in the Hogsmeade village that didn't involve her. Harry Potter smiled as he thought about the last time they all sat together outside the pub making little mini fires out of butterbeer (BB) bottle stickers.

Draco thought it would be funny to put gummy bears on top of the little papers and see if they would burn. The thought actually made Harry laugh out loud, as he vividly pictured Draco jumping up and down, determinedly placing the candy bears into the center of several BB stickers stuck together. He knew of course that the idea was ludicrous, but that was part of his charm – Draco's "playing dumb" bits added crude but solid humor to their otherwise potentially boring existences during the school year. (These bits were "life saviors" in class, especially with those professors who still haven't caught on.)

The gummy bears didn't burn of course, but all three of them got plenty of stomach hurting laughs out of it.

Just as Harry was dwelling on that pleasant memory he heard loud noises coming from downstairs. Seems like the Dursleys were there after all.

He slowly made his way to the door and opened it, listening carefully for tidbits of early morning conversation. Such conversations usually went something like this at the Dursley household:

"Pass the bread Dudley," Vernon would say.

"No," would be the simple one sylable answer.

"Manners Dudley!" Vernon's wife would try to stick up for her husband.

"Pass the bread Petunia," while he would completely ignore her just like he did Dudley.

"Here darling. Would you like some fried bacon on that, I made some yesterday, it is truly really good, simply superb quality. Mrs. Parkinson has got it for me at the market on Sunday while it was perfectly fresh, because we were still on holiday, and I asked, I simply had to have had a-……."

"Dad, Dad!!?" Dudley would yell just for the sake of cutting his mother off.

"WHAT Dudley?!" an already irritated Vernon would scream.

And get just the same kind of annoying snap back -"Nothing."

Which would cause his mother to try and reason it all out in a sweet voice- "Dudley! Mind your manners! Darling, cant you see I was just telling daddy-…."

And finally Vernon would blow up -"WOULD the both of you just let me read the bloody PAPER!!! Or I-…."

At that moment Harry normally walked into the kitchen and cut off the argument. He then proceeded to make coffee, which tended to make everybody happy and restored peace around the table for the rest of the dreadful thirty minutes that they had to spend in each others' company before going off for the day.

Mornings were considerably pleasanter at the Malfoy Mansion. In fact compared to this, Harry would have even described them as blissful.

Nobody screamed, nobody yelled, the adults didn't lose their temper, (not that it was even possible in Harry's opinion, to drive Mr. or Mrs. Malfoy to lose their cool…) and the children were not bothered with anything but the ever consuming task of diminishing freshly prepared abundances of French toast, pancakes, scrambled eggs, croissants, bagels, muffins and a million other choices Malfoy's chef has cooked. They normally ate breakfast in the upstairs dining chamber, where the thick, gold embroidered curtains blocked out every single ray of unwanted sunshine from the eyes of its sleepy owners. Mrs. Malfoy was usually already sitting at the lavish wooden table with her back to the windows, reading the morning edition of Witch Weekly and sipping orange juice, by the time the boys woke up and filed into the room through the heavy, ornate double doors.

In the mornings she liked to dress in ridiculously expensive silk house robes, with oversize old-fashioned sleeves that opened up to form foot long circles and fell to her knees when standing. Her hair was always up in a tricky looking bun with some loose curls falling to the sides, and some escaping down her back, underneath the robe's silky fabric. She could not have looked more elegant if she were wearing the best cocktail dress in all England.

It seemed that Narcissa was nearly flawless in all respects, and even if she ever had moments when she wasn't, Harry was not there to witness them and thus not able to tell.

With her beautiful long blonde hair Narcissa often reminded Harry of his "ghost" girl from Hogwarts, whom he kept seeing or maybe imagining or maybe …who knows what, year after year after year.. This intriguing connection that he has made between the two women drew him even more toward getting to know his best friend's mother, but somehow it never really worked out that way. Draco came first for him whenever he stayed at the Malfoy mansion; Lucius and Narcissa, being insanely "cool" parents were rarely in their way.

Anyone who saw Lucius's wife would be left in no doubt of where Draco's good looks came from. And one would certainly have no trouble guessing why Lucius would want to marry this woman. She complimented his blue blood quirks and personality traits perfectly.

On top of it all she was also quite quick witted, with a sense of healthy cynicism that came hand in hand with swift and constant sarcasm. And even though she might not have been the smartest woman in Britain, she was clever enough to have made a pretty good life for herself considering where she came from.

Narcissa had an extremely privileged life, which at first glance seemed almost like a fairy tale.

She had a son whom she loved dearly, the son who was her pride and joy. She had a handsome husband who really loved her, a beautiful luxurious mansion in the heart of England and more money than she could ever spend. She had a high class circle of friends with whom to gossip on lonely winter nights, have cocktails in the middle of empty spring afternoons, and shop on long dull summer Sundays. She had a mother in law that adored her and a classic beauty that never failed to shine.

Her little boy turned out to be everything she ever wanted. Bright, confident, independent, funny and socially skilled. The flaw of overly exaggerated arrogance which he got from his father, bothered her only a little, for she understood that a handsome, wealthy and popular young boy would be hard pressed to stay humble. No matter how she tried to weed this out of him, it would not go away and with time she decided to give up. She would have liked for him to be kind, but she saw that it was not possible as long as Lucius was his role model. Draco loved his mother and respected her more than anyone else in the world, but his father…- his father he worshipped. And she could not compete with that. All she could do was settle for him being considerate to people he was close to. He was a sweet boy underneath it all, just like her… She knew very well that she did not exactly come off as the friendliest woman in town. And she didn't feel the need to. After all the Malfoy family had an image to uphold- a cool, untouchable, mysterious… dark… image. So it was all for the better. She was content.

But she wasn't happy...

!BAAAM!

Harry snapped out of his reverie just in time to hear a door slam and aunt Petunia shriek like a badly wounded banshee. Actually fearing for his closest relative, he jumped at the sound and without a second thought he set off down the stairs at a run, while limping only slightly.