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To: Spencer Reid
From: Harry Potter
Saturday 11/7/92 6:42pm (GMT)(3pm 5th day time dilation)
"I know that it's an amazing opportunity to be able to complete a whole year of regular school each summer and keep up with my classmates who didn't go to Hogwarts, so I won't be too uneducated to get a job in the non-magical world or into university if I want to when I leave Hogwarts but honestly at this moment, I'm so tired I don't care. I just want to spend the next week lying in the sun doing nothing. We have two more classes left for the day and tomorrow off. I'm glad Dean and I are coming to school for our day off. I'm going to spend at least half of the next five expanded days sleeping. I also miss cooking, Mrs Finnegan has dinner ready when we get home and we don't get to help except with the clean-up. I hadn't realised how much I missed helping out at the restaurant until I was helping Mrs Thomas in the kitchen the other week, I still don't miss cooking for the Dursleys though, it was too horrible to cook a meal and not be allowed to eat it, especially since they seemed to favour whole steak or roast or things that I couldn't sneak a bit of while I was cooking or dishing up and the stress of knowing that I would be punished if it wasn't perfect. Not that I got punished in the last few years unless Dudley managed to sneak into the kitchen and ruin the food which he didn't do very often because he loved to eat too much.
I'm exhausted but other than the amount of work because we're trying to do a full class load when most of the others aren't and the teachers assign homework expecting their students to have more free time than we do, classes aren't difficult. As you know, I love math and science but the classes were the most boring because I knew everything that they were teaching. Seems my teachers noticed that I was bored so they've offered to let me sit the end of year exams this weekend and move up a grade if I get more than 75% so I've read through the whole textbook and most of it looked familiar so I think I can do it, I've been studying every spare moment. It's going to stuff up my timetable being in two different class levels and of course they are half way through the year already so I'll have lots of catching up to do, but it will be better than being bored.
English or they call it Literature is easy but more interesting since I hadn't read any of the books we are studying, though I don't really like any of them, my language classes are going well, geography is also fairly new stuff, we're learning about Asia and history is fascinating. I wouldn't want to change classes and miss that.
I'm glad that you think that history class is teaching me what I need to learn but I do think I want to know what I would've learnt in history in a normal school too. I think I'd rather just buy the books and save myself the extra essays since you've told me I've learned the things that the essays were supposed to teach me about thinking for myself and trying to see both sides of an event rather than take a correspondence class for something I already have a credit for. I want to get some more books about the history of the wizarding world too. All we learned last year was goblin rebellions all from the same book and looking at the book critically it was written entirely from the wizard point of view and by someone heavily prejudiced against goblins. From what I've see of the older year levels working on their history essays they all have textbooks by the same author as well so I can't even hope it would get better. I know that you don't think much of the quality of wizarding books but if I ask Mr Blott for some recommendations hopefully I should be able to get something semi decent.
To: Harry Potter
From: Spencer Reid
Saturday 7/11/92 11:15am (PST)
Even semi decent history books have some value if you read them with a critical mind, though it's better to read several different books about the same event or time period. Keep in mind who might have written it and what their motives were. In other words, don't believe everything you read, just because it's published or chosen as a school textbook doesn't make it accurate even in the nonmagical world. Remember when we read Sherlock Holmes and used to play at deductions. Those skills can come in handy for critical reading. Use the book to deduce the author and then to deduce the reason why they've written things the way they have. Did they have a grudge against one side or were they paid to present the facts a certain way or is the book just old and written in a time that saw the events differently from the way they're viewed today. Analytical skills like this are easier to use to evaluate research papers than history books and you might not be able to work out the reason for the bias but keep in mind that authors want to sell books and you can sell more books about a battle or war by agreeing with the majority of people's opinions than arguing against them, and more books about a well-known figure by revealing shocking new facts or secrets about them.
If I were you, I'd try to avoid the books that mention the boy-who-lived and the death of your mom and dad. I know you want to know more about them but none of those authors were there and most of them wouldn't have known your parents. The information in those books would be mostly speculation and you're too emotionally invested in the subject to be able to clearly judge what might or might not be true. And the prevailing theory is not necessarily true just because the author thought it would be popular with readers. I don't think that anyone really knows what actually happened that night or you wouldn't be famous for it.
To: Spencer Reid
From: Harry Potter
Sunday 12/7/92 11:01pm (GMT)(7pm 2nd day time dilation)
I'm afraid you were too late with your advice about not reading about my mum and dad. I couldn't resist looking at the books in the library and the ones Hermione had. You're right nobody actually knows what happened. The expert explanations contradict each other completely and none of them admitted that they were just speculating or presented any evidence for their conclusions. They also all made a perfect hero who never did anything wrong out of my father and pretty much ignored mum. No doubt they were all written by purebloods or with pureblood readers in mind. Another sign of the amount of prejudice against muggleborns in this world that they'd all rather believe a half blood one year old could defeat the most feared dark lord in centuries than that my adult muggleborn mum did it even though people less prejudiced say my mum was the brightest witch of her generation. In any case they made dad seem like someone I could never live up to and the professors won't talk about them at all.
To: Harry Potter
From: Spencer Reid
Sunday 7/17/92 10:17pm (PST)
Harry the only thing I do know about your father is that he was human. He grew up a normal kid, well whatever passes for a normal wizarding child, he made mistakes and had some good traits and some faults like everyone does, though I'm glad that the authors of the books you read thought that he was a good person he definitely wasn't a perfect paragon that you need to try to live up to. I also know that your parents were smart, compassionate good people because you are and we both know that you didn't get that from your upbringing, so it must be inherited from your parents. I also believe that they would be proud of you as a son and as a person. You are smart, hard working, loyal to those who deserve it, good at sports, helpful around the house, naturally neat, polite and magically powerful. Everything that your parents could have hoped for you to become. There is no reason to think that you're failing to live up to what they were or what they wanted for you.
As for people not realising that you weren't raised by wizards, I think that the prejudice against nonmagicals is part of the problem, I think that the other students can't even imagine a wizarding child being given to nonmagical relatives, and that is there problem not yours. Keep in mind that it isn't your fault that you don't know things when they come up. Nobody remembers things that happened to them at the age you were when your parent's died, even the memories they think they have from when they're very young are influenced by hearing their family recount the story over and over as they've grown old enough to make permanent memories and what they really recall is the story and not the actual event. That didn't happen with you because none of your parents' magical friends and relatives visited you while you were growing up which is their failing not yours.
To: Spencer Reid
From: Harry Potter
Sunday 12/7/92 11:01pm (GMT)(7pm 2nd day time dilation)
I am still using my fake wand, and I don't think anyone has noticed it yet, here or at Hogwarts but I don't think that it's as common as I used to think. I picked up Dean's wand the other day, he dropped it and it rolled under my feet, and it is definitely not fake, I felt the magical core in it so I's just as well that nobody is likely to pick up mine and realise they can't feel anything. I don't think that Seamus's is fake either I haven't touched it but I was standing close to him when he used it and felt the change in his magic compared to what his magic felt like when he lost his temper at school that first day when he didn't have it on him. After noticing that, I realised that I can often feel a slight charge in a wand if I'm close enough to one just after it's been used.
It doesn't exhaust me to use magic, or at least it didn't to use the same amount of spells that I normally would use at Hogwarts which is about a dozen spells most days, two or three attempts at a new spell, and then eight to ten regular spells, small stuff like cleaning, light, levitation, erasing written errors in my homework. I think that the others use about that much magic most days at Hogwarts too, and we haven't used all that many more here, though maybe some slightly flashier spells to draw attention. I wouldn't think it would make that much difference. It has got easier and I generally get most of the spells as quickly as most of the class. I'm rarely the first person to get a new spell if it's not something I've done before but I was generally about the middle of the class. Mostly after Hermione but before Ron, Neville and Lavender. If I'm being honest I probably could beat Hermione more than I do but I don't need the attention of being first and I think she actually does somehow so I hold off really trying until she's got it half the time. Her need for the professors praise concerns me, it suggests she's really insecure about herself and it makes her too easy for the professors and Dumbledore to manipulate her even without magic.
To: Harry Potter
From: Spencer Reid
Sunday 7/12/92 10:55am (PST)
So, you were right that you don't really need a wand to do magic, but I think that you're probably wrong about pureblood witches and wizards also using fake wands to hide the fact that they're unnecessary. I'm glad that you realised that you didn't need a wand and found a way around becoming dependent on one, and that it isn't exhausting you not to use one, but I'm wondering why you seem to be so unique. Also, could the others be getting tired using the magic because of the time compression. You said that you use about twelve spells a day but in time compression that would be sixty spells per calendar day, perhaps if you still age at the normal rate, your magic wouldn't recover faster than the normal non-compressed rate either.
To: Spencer Reid
From: Harry Potter
Tuesday 14/7/92 6:42pm (GMT)
Thanks for the advice to listen to the tapes while I'm sleeping, yes it really does seem to help me progress faster but more than that I'm actually sleeping better with the tapes. It seems to help my mind settle and I haven't had a single bad dream or woken in the middle of the night since I started. Just as well since I'm exhausted from the amount of work we have without not sleeping as well, perhaps it's not the language crystals helping me sleep, and I'm just too tired to dream anything unpleasant or perhaps I'm still having nightmares but I'm too tired for the dreams to wake me up and I just don't remember them.
Seamus is going to take us to the shopping district in Dublin on our day off next week and I thought I would look for a language crystal for Spanish, if I can't find one there, I might try to by muggle tapes and a Walkman to listen to them overnight. I'm not sure if they'd work at school but they would the nights I spend at Seamus' house.
To: Harry Potter
From: Spencer Reid
Thursday 7/16/92 10:55am (PST)
Please be careful shopping on your day off, particularly in the magical shopping area. I don't think anyone would be looking for you in Dublin but your new classmates all recognised you so it's safe to say that are quite famous in Ireland and if enough people gossip about seeing you there then the news might reach people that you don't want to know about your whereabouts. Or some of your new classmates have probably told their parents and they told their friends and the news might already have reached the people that want to return you to the Dursleys, it would be a real pity if you can't finish this school year after all the work you've put in and it will make it more difficult for you to disappear again if your enemies have noticed that you've been missing most of the summer. That's going to be a problem when you start a new school too, though I'm not sure how famous you are over here, and I have no way of finding out for you. It might be worth trying to find a magical way to alter or disguise the way you look, or perhaps to try a nonmagical way like bleaching your hair blond or coloured contact lenses.
If you cannot find tapes to learn Spanish in Dublin then let me know, Spanish or at least Mexican Spanish is a common second language here and I'm sure I could find some to send you. The American version of the Spanish tapes might even be more useful to you if you're going to go to school in Mexico as pure Spanish and Mexican Spanish probably vary quite a bit.
A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.
I wish everyone the best in this time. Please stay safe and keep your distance, stay at home if you can and keep in contact with family and friends on line, take care of your mental and emotional well being, support each other and seek help if you need it. Hang in there a little longer, we are on the home stretch, with the vaccine being rolled out in the countries that need it most, life will go back to somewhat normal, we will get through this.