It would be ten years since Lord Voldemort failed to kill the Potters that Halloween night when he ambushed them in their home at Godric's Hallow. Nearly two hundred miles away in Bournville within Birmingham, the sun had yet to rise on the tidy lawns in Magpie Row.

It was in Number Seven Magpie Row where a boy of ten laid awake in his bed. His green eyes staring up at his ceiling fan. Harry Potter's mind wandering to what lied ahead that Saturday. He'd rather go to Andrew Blacks' house across the street and spend the day there. He'd rather go to the park with Alfie Lewis.

Harry would rather much not go to the Surrey Zoo for his swollen, spoiled bully of a cousin's birthday. To not have to endure his Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia's narrowed eyes of suspicion as if they thought he was up to no good. He could stay laying in bed gazing at the ceiling like this all day.

As the aroma of eggs, kippers, and sausages reached his bedroom door, Harry sighed as he changed into his trousers and shirt. Gazing in the mirror as he tried to pat down his untidy black hair, which was just like his dad's mind you. As he tried to move his bangs away from his forehead, he noticed something strange. Something peculiar he never seen before.

There, on his right temple was what appeared to be a scar the shape of a lightning bolt. He frowned. Did something happen last night to which he got it? No, it couldn't be, as it appeared fairly old and lacked the caked, dried blood around the outside like a cut received a few hours ago.

"Harry, come down and get your breakfast!" came his dad's shout from the kitchen.

"Coming!" he yelled back. He'd have to ask his parents about this. With a dash, he swings his bedroom door open and rushes down the steps. Nearly tripping over the family's brown, squashed-face cat.

"Sorry, Patches," he says as the cat hissed at him and ran up the steps.

Harry saw his dad lower some fried eggs onto a plate as he entered the kitchen. "Morning, Harry," mum greeted, lowering her copy of the Birmingham Post.

"Morning, mum." Harry greeted. "Morning, dad. Um, mum, dad, what would this be on my forehead?"

"Oh, let me see." Dad puts down the spatula to examine Harry's forehead. Mum stayed seated, though Harry could see that she let the top of the newspaper fall over her fingers. The concern visible on her face as dad rubbed his finger over the funny shaped scar. "Huh, odd. It's not new either, what do you think, Lily?"

"Well, I say it appears as if he had that scar for more than just a few hours," mum agreed looking it over. She shakes her head. "You know what, just use your fringe to cover it."

Harry did move his fringe as mum bid but he had a feeling that a faint outline of it could be seen anyway if someone squinted real hard. Maybe Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon would as they always seemed to find reasons to see him as abnormal.

"It should be a beautiful day for you at the zoo," dad told mum as they sat around for breakfast. "Should be sunny all day, from what I checked on the weather bulletin this morning."

Anything else than with the Dursleys', Harry thought as he ate his eggs. Thinking that it would be a good day to ride his bike to Andrew's house and play a round of football with him. Maybe with the both of them going to Alfie's house later on where they could watch movies they shouldn't in his room.

It was thirty minutes after seven when dad picked up his briefcase. Kissing mum on the cheek and on Harry's forehead as he bid, "Alright, I should see you sometime this evening. Try to have a good day."

"We will to the best of our ability," said mum.

"Bye, dad!" yelled Harry. Waving his dad goodbye as he left their home to go to the bus stop to travel to his job for Oliver & Abernathy's Holdings. Or at least that's what the name was when Harry would try to make phone calls. His mum worked there as well, though she seemed able to come home for the weekends when dad wasn't able to often.

It was by eight o'clock was he in the backseat of the car as mum made the two-hour drive from Birmingham to Surrey on the motorway, with Dudley's present in the seat next to him. Harry played Mario on his Gameboy, hoping to keep his mind off on how unpleasant it might be.

What Harry knew, mum and Aunt Petunia had only begun to speak to each other five years ago. That for a time Aunt Petunia pretended that mum never existed. He met them for the first time at gran's and poppy's on Christmas when he was six. Harry didn't remember much of it, but he remembered how Dudley threw a tantrum how Harry got the toy robot that he wanted. Seldom did his parent's leave him with his Aunt and Uncle's, though when they did, Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon always made sure that he wasn't alone with Dudley as if he was going to hurt him some way or another. They never even wanted him alone in their house even. As if they might come back to find it reduced to fire and ash.

Aside from that, it seemed Aunt Petunia found a thing or two to complain about.

"You should realize that you don't need to work if your husband is the one bringing the money in," he'd heard Aunt Petunia tell mum. "They say it's not good for the mum to work outside the home."

Harry failed to see the difference between a mum that worked outside the home and a mum that worked in the home. His mum was still able to take him to the park and to the shops and shopping centers like Alfie's mum.

The car park was nearly filled as they arrived at the zoo. Yet mum was still able to find a spot next to Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon's car.

"Hello, Dudley," mum greeted as they got out of the car. Harry noticed that Dudley had taken his rat-faced friend Piers Polkiss along. Harry tries to keep himself hidden as mum bends down to hug his cousin, who'd seemed slightly bigger than the last time Harry saw him. "How's the birthday boy?"

"I'm doing swell," he answers when Harry's Uncle noticed him.

"Morning, Harry," Uncle Vernon greeted. "Doing well, I hope?"

"Yes, thank you," Harry answered. Deep down, he felt that Uncle Vernon didn't wish him well.

"Beautiful day, I say," he said. "Let's hope that nothing funny happens, eh?"

"Why would something funny happen?" Harry asked. Mum frowned while Dudley and Piers chuckled. "Nothing funny is going to happen."

Though his aunt and uncle never seemed to believe him. They seemed to believe that odd and funny things surrounded him. The problem was, strange things often did happen around Harry. Strange things that even his parents never noticed. Things that they never explained to him even if they did know.

Bruises and scrapes healing themselves a day after he got them. His hair changing back to how it was after an unwanted haircut. That day when both he and Andrew found themselves on the roof of the school kitchens, and their parents received an angry phone call from his headmistress that they were climbing school buildings.

"Alfie, Andrew, and I were trying to hide from Dylan Benson and jump behind the rubbish bins," Harry had tried to explain. "The wind must have caught us in mid-jump."

But, today nothing funny will happen. He didn't want Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon to add another point of how odd they thought he was.

It was a very sunny Saturday and the zoo was crowded with families. The Dursleys bought Dudley and Piers large chocolate ice creams while Lily bought Harry a cone topped with his favorite black treacle. Which Harry slurped happily as they watched a gorilla scratching its head who looked remarkably like Dudley, except that it wasn't blond.

There were no problems, thus far. He had made sure to stay close with mum as they watched a family of lions in their enclosure so that Dudley and Piers, who were starting to get bored with the animals by lunchtime, wouldn't fall back on their favorite hobby of hitting him. Something that they did when no one was looking during one of Harry's visits to 4 Privet Drive. Of course, his aunt and uncle never took his side, as if he provoked them. He never told his parents, of course. He didn't want to have the conversation on how to hit back from his dad.

"I'm starving," Dudley moaned as they sat at their table in the zoo restaurant for lunch.

"You're always starving, Dudders," said Aunt Petunia fondly. "Do you want to see what your Auntie Lily got you?"

Harry noticed that his mum clenched his fists as Dudley removed a Legend of Zelda game from his package. "I got this last year," he said with a frown.

"That's to replace the one you accidently stepped on," Aunt Petunia said, almost as if she was trying to avoid trouble. "Remember? You seemed very upset about it."

Also, what wouldn't be a day with the Dursleys' without a typical Dudley tantrum? Today, it was because there was not enough cream on his knickerbocker glory. Uncle Vernon bought him another one, while mum offered to finish the rest.

Harry felt, afterward, that the mysterious scar was only the first peculiar thing to happen during the day.

After lunch they went to the reptile house. It was cool and dark in there, with lit windows all along the walls. Behind the glass, all sorts of lizards and snakes were crawling and slithering over bits of wood and stone. Dudley and Piers wanted to see huge, poisonous cobras and thick, man-crushing pythons. Dudley quickly found the largest snake in the place. It could have wrapped its body twice around mum's car and crushed it into a trash can – but at the moment it didn't look in the mood. In fact, it was fast asleep.

Dudley stood with his nose pressed against the glass, staring at the glistening brown coils.

"Make it move," he whined at his father. Uncle Vernon tapped on the glass, but the snake didn't budge.

"Do it again," Dudley ordered. Uncle Vernon rapped the glass smartly with his knuckles, but the snake just snoozed on.

"This is boring," Dudley moaned. He shuffled away.

Harry moved in front of the tank and looked intently at the snake. He wouldn't have been surprised if it had died of boredom itself - no company except stupid people drumming their fingers on the glass trying to disturb it all day long. Something he himself wouldn't want to imagine.

The snake suddenly opened its beady eyes. Slowly, very slowly, it raised its head until its eyes were on a level with Harry's.

It winked.

Harry stared. Then he looked quickly around to see if anyone was watching. They weren't. Mum and Aunt Petunia were deep in a conversation a meter away. He looked back at the snake and winked, too.

The snake jerked its head toward Uncle Vernon and Dudley, then raised its eyes to the ceiling. It gave Harry a look that said quite plainly:

"I get that all the time."

"I know," Harry murmured through the glass, though he wasn't sure the snake could hear him. "It must be really annoying."

The snake nodded vigorously.

"Where do you come from, anyway?" Harry asked

The snake jabbed its tail at a little sign next to the glass. Harry peered at it.

Boa Constrictor, Brazil.

"Was it nice there?"

The boa constrictor jabbed its tail at the sign again and Harry read on: This specimen was bred in the zoo. "Oh, I see - so you've never been to Brazil?"

As the snake shook its head, a deafening shout behind Harry made both of them jump. "DUDLEY! MR. DURSLEY! COME AND LOOK AT THIS SNAKE! YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT IT'S DOING!"

Dudley came waddling toward them as fast as he could.

"Out of the way, you," he said, punching Harry in the ribs. Caught by surprise, Harry felt his mum's arms catch him before he could hit the ground. What came next happened so fast no one saw how it happened - one second, Piers and Dudley were leaning right up close to the glass, the next, they had leapt back with howls of horror.

Harry sat up and gasped; the glass front of the boa constrictor's tank had vanished. The great snake was uncoiling itself rapidly, slithering out onto the floor. People throughout the reptile house screamed and started running for the exits. Mum, on the other hand, did not run. She seemed still against him. As if something about it rooted her in place.

As the snake slid swiftly past him, Harry could have sworn a low, hissing voice said, "Brazil, here I come... Thanksss, amigo."

The keeper of the reptile house was in shock.

"But the glass," he kept saying, "where did the glass go?"

The zoo director himself made mum and Aunt Petunia cups of strong, sweet tea while he apologized over and over again. As he and his mum said their goodbyes, he swore he could feel his Aunt and Uncle's eyes on him. His mum never said a word as she made the drive home. She was never this silent during one of those "funny episodes". Something that worried him.

They had just stepped inside their house when the phone began to ring. Harry picks up Patches and runs up the stairs with him. If it was Aunt Petunia, he didn't want to be in the same room. On his way to his room, he managed to hear mum exclaim, "It's not like he can help it at his age, Tuney!"

Harry frowned. Not able to help what, exactly? Surely, she didn't mean the talking snake, did she? She didn't seem to notice. Or was the vanishing glass something that his parents would brush under the rug, as they had like that day he found himself on the roof of the kitchens?

"You have it easy," he tells Patches. "You don't have strange things happening around you."

Harry might have stayed in his room for maybe a couple hours until he forced himself to go downstairs for dinner.

To Harry's surprise, dad didn't ask about how Dudley's birthday went. How their trip to the zoo went (though much later, he would make the correct assumption that mum didn't want to discuss it until he went to bed). Instead, starting off the conversation about his day at work ("I believe it took both Emrys and I three hours to wade through the paperwork to make sense of it all.").

Harry didn't have the appetite for dessert.

"May I go to my room?" he asked as he set his fork on his empty plate. "I'm not hungry for pudding."

"Go ahead, kiddo," dad answered with a smile.

Harry swore that he could feel their eyes on him as he went up the stairs.

Lily watched as their son went up the steps to his room.

"How bad are we talking about, Lilypad?" James asked once they had heard his bedroom door close shut.

Lily swallowed. Tapping her fingers against the tabletop. How should I begin this, she thinks. "Well, all went well until we went to the reptile house," Lily started. "Dudley and Piers nearly fell into the habitat of a Boa Constrictor when the glass enclosure disappeared."

"Good old accidental magic," James sighed. "I'm sure your sister and her husband loved that."

Lily then proceeded to bite her lip. Bracing herself for what she was going to say next. "I heard Harry talking with the Boa Constrictor before it happened."

It only took that sentence for James to grow pale. She could see the fear and uncertainty that she felt herself hours ago. When she was trying to convince herself that she was hearing things as the goosebumps sprawled on her skin. That her son wasn't speaking Parseltongue. It just wasn't possible.

It shouldn't be even possible.

"I hope you meant that he was pretending to hold a conversation with a snake," James said, tearing her from her thoughts. "That it wasn't actually…."

"I couldn't understand a word he said to the snake," she said. "There was a lot of hissing in his words. I mean, I could understand why Dudley and his friend thought it came from that snake. They came rushing to it's enclosure."

"How could Harry be a Parselmouth?" James asked, sounding as lost as she was. "My family tree doesn't trace back to Salazar Slytherin. Yeah, he was the well-known one and it goes all the back to Herpo, but this pops up every generation."

Lily had wanted to try and make sense of it all. However, doing so would be migraine inducing.

"You'd think we should write to Albus Dumbledore about it?" she asked, as it seemed to be the only other viable option she could think of that would work.

"That's not a bad idea," James answered with a shrug. "He might have a better idea of what's going on then we do."

With the decision made, Lily wrote the letter to Albus as James went to check on Harry.

During our trip to the zoo for my nephew's birthday, we had this incident at the reptile house after lunch. Lily gazed over the line a second time before continuing. I heard Harry holding what sounded like a conversation with a boa constrictor. At first, I didn't want to believe what I was hearing, except snakes don't make out words with their hisses. If you have a possible answer to it, James and I would greatly appreciate it.

She seals the letter in it's envelope and placed it with the letters for the outgoing post. The Birmingham Post Office isn't operational on Sundays, but a quick trip to the Ministry to mail it would ensure that it reached Albus's desk as soon as Monday at the latest.

Lily pulls out her half-finished pint of Neapolitan ice cream before turning to watch the telly. It was maybe around nine when James had plopped next to her on the couch.

"How was he?" Lily asked.

"He seemed okay, though I think today probably did a number on him." He's quiet for a few moments. The silence filled by the newscaster of the BBC One before he says, "We could conceal his scar again. It wouldn't take much to…."

"Not when he noticed it, James," Lily pointed out. "We can't play with his mind like that. He'd notice it more gone than he did when he saw it."

Giving him a glamour to cover that ugly scar was among the first things they did when they took Harry from the wizarding world. It was better that way. When Albus Dumbledore made the suggestion that it be best for Harry to raise him away from the wizarding world, to give him a chance of a normal childhood, Lily didn't argue. Neither did James, surprisingly. For she expected him to put up some kind of fuss being raised in the wizarding world himself.

"Let's not have any more kids," he said even. "Because once he finds out, it's not going to be fair for his siblings."

Though Lily would rather give Harry siblings, she didn't want a repeat of everything she experienced with Tuney. For she sometimes felt that Petunia felt that she was under her shadow. And she didn't want a replay of that.

If only she and James had that option of disappearing into the Muggle world as well, for they only remained in the Wizarding World, for it be dangerous for Harry if they had. Even if they were surrounded by friends at their jobs in the Ministry of Magic, it was the friends that had survived the War and managed to evade Voldemort. A reminder that she and her family were the only ones who managed to survive when others hadn't. Only Harry was called "The Boy-Who-Lived" for he survived the direct attempt on his life while she and James were only knocked out cold.

Even if Harry had most of that weight on him, it didn't gnaw the guilt she felt in the pit of her stomach for having lived when some of their friends were killed. Though it would be selfish to claim survivor's guilt for her and her family alone. For Marlene was still grieving the deaths of her family after all these years.

"Do we tell him now," he asks in the present. "I know we agreed to wait until the Hogwarts letter came. Though with anything that has happened today…."

The scar appearing, the vanishing glass, Harry speaking with the snake….Lily would rather wait until the letter arrived as planned. Though it be very unlikely that they should wait. That they shouldn't sweep these things under the rug as with prior incidents of accidental magic.

"It be best if we tell him tomorrow first thing tomorrow morning," Lily suggested. "Then we'll tell him together at breakfast."

"Best if it's not all at once," James noted. "Otherwise it would be as if one large dungbomb detonated over his head."

Even if finally being honest with Harry about their background would lift a weight off their shoulders, she was unsure how Harry would take it even if they take it step by step.

A thought that had Lily lie awake for parts of the night.