Note: Hi! Take a second chapter. Sorry that it's really short. Feel free to leave any constructive criticism or anything at all in a review, particularly if you all would prefer longer chapters or shorter but more frequent ones.
Chapter 2
Minerva McGonagall spoke softly, and the whole world seemed to be silenced as Harry Potter heard her words.
She spoke of a boy who had everything - status, money, power, family. He had been rebellious and sometimes outright arrogant, she had admitted, a nostalgic smile on her face, but he had a pure heart and a brave, adventurous soul.
She told him of a girl who had come from nothing - knowing nothing of her people, introduced to a world that defied everything she thought she knew, from a family that could never truly understand what it meant. The girl loved this new world and learned all she could of it, even though it so often shunned her for not being born from its people.
They had met at Hogwarts, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, McGonagall explained, and they changed each other. The arrogant boy grew into a kind and trusting man, and the girl with nothing became a confident and powerful woman.
James and Lily always brought out the best in each other.
They fell in love.
They married.
They had Harry, and their dreams were fulfilled, and they were finally whole -
Until he came, McGonagall had whispered, the man so feared as to be referred to as "You-Know-Who".
He had taken their lives from them, stolen the future that could've been, ripped their dream into oblivion.
He tore Harry's childhood from him, and banished him to eleven years in the darkness under the stairs.
But not without cost. For some inexplicable reason, when the man McGonagall hesitantly called "Voldemort" turned his weapon upon Harry, it had backfired.
Harry had been left unscathed - or as close to unscathed as anyone subject to the Killing Curse could've been, McGonagall said, as her eyes flicked to the scar on his brow - but Voldemort was destroyed.
He had taken everything from Harry and disappeared.
Minerva McGonagall left the letter on the kitchen counter along with instructions on how to reach Diagon Alley, a place for the magical people, and was gone, twisting away with a pop.
Harry felt as if she had taken part of him with her - a sort of quiet innocence, an oblivious contentment in not knowing, in being unimportant and normal.
He took the letter.
He wasn't like his father. He had no money, no power, no influence.
He wasn't like his mother. He wasn't patient, or particularly kind, or forgiving.
He was alone, and he had nothing.
But here was a chance to restart, to rebuild from the ground up, and he would be damned if he didn't take it.
Alone in the kitchen of the cold and empty house, Harry Potter vowed that in this new world, he would become great, and nobody would ever tear his dreams away from him ever again.