Harry kicked a rock as he walked to the park he'd frequented on occasion to escape his hateful relatives. Having his own mother, or rather her counterpart disbelieve him when he'd told her of the abuse he'd only recently started opening up about really stung. What hurt the most though, had been the way she hadn't even wanted to look at him, how she hated him for being James Potter's son just as Professor Snape had.
If he wanted to get out of this bizarre world where his own mother hated him, he would have to do the task that he had been summoned for. By exiting the summoning circle, he had entered himself into an unbreakable contract. Hopefully the task wouldn't take the seven years it had back home. The fact that the Pettigrew child had faced Professor Quirrel/Voldemort while trying to protect that gigantic charmed garnet that Flamel handed over when Dumbledore had requested the Philosopher's stone was a promising sign that things weren't too different.
Getting Hufflepuff's cup from the Lestrange vault would be tricky, but if the deceased Sirius Black had died without any children and done for this world's Dudley what he had done for him in his universe he wouldn't have to break into Gringotts if he played his cards right.
That was for the future however, for now he would go to his favorite swing set to calm himself down and get his thoughts in order. Seeing his mother or at least a facsimile of his mother behaving like Aunt Petunia had been disturbing to say the least. It was strange that in this universe his aunt became the saint his mother was generally regarded as by the wizarding world. The only difference he could really think of was that she hadn't married Uncle Vernon. Maybe that was the key. There was probably something about Vernon that caused any woman who married him to go from saint to bitch in no time flat.
It was as he neared the swings he noticed that one of them was already occupied by a small boy who on closer inspection greatly resembled the occupant of several of the photographs that lined the living-room walls of the Dursley home.
The boy looked up at him and apparently noticed his scar, since when his eyes reached his forehead his jaw dropped. As he moved to sit on the swing next to the boy, the child finally found his voice.
"Aunt Lily did it!" the boy breathed in awe.
"If you're referring to her yanking me out of my home universe to deal with someone I never wanted to or even expected to see again, then yes, Lily did it." he said.
"Are my parents alive where you're from? Did you know them?" the boy asked eagerly, having apparently ignored his anger at being forcibly drawn from his home to deal with something that was no longer his problem.
Those questions had probably been burning through the child's mind ever since he had heard what his aunt was planning to do, and he didn't know how to respond to them or even if he should. How do you tell a nearly twelve year old child that if things had been different, his parents would not have been the heroes that he'd been raised hearing about? How do you tell the child that you hated both of his parents' counterparts because they were evil, traitorous, backstabbing bastards each in their own way? How do you tell a child that his father would have betrayed his best friends who would have died for him? How do you tell a child that his mother would have made her nephew's life a living hell out of spite and jealousy?
After several moments of silent thought that seemed to stretch out for an eternity, he had finally found how to answer.
"Let me tell you about two people who would have been very different had they not met each-other..."