Chapter 1

Ten-year old Harry Potter couldn't believe it. He always knew that his cousin Dudley was a bully, but he had expected the teachers at least to notice and object to the big lump's behavior. Although, they have been ignoring his ne'er-do-well ways for the last several years. That still doesn't change the fact that they should do something about him. It's as if they don't give a crap about preventing these idiots from turning to crime!

As you can see, Harry Potter was no ordinary boy. He was more intelligent than a great number of people his age. He knew it, but he didn't want anyone else to know it. Ten years previous, he had been left on the doorstep of his absolutely horrid aunt and uncle, Vernon and Petunia Dursley. Vernon was a big (his waistline was bigger than his height) bully, and probably always had been, to Harry's young mind. He was also the strongest of the three Dursleys, and therefore the only one to actually hit him, however rarely that happened. Petunia was quite the opposite, at least as far as appearances went. Behind the closed doors and windows of Number 4, Privet Drive, Little Winging, Surry, she was the least abusive, not violent at all. He could tell that she was not that much nicer a person than his Uncle Vernon, but she also seemed afraid of him. Dudley, even at almost ten years of age, was well on the way to becoming his father in miniature.

Harry was also different in one more way. He had discovered this almost by accident, when his aunt and uncle had left him locked in his cupboard under the stairs while they went somewhere with Dudley. He had gotten thirsty, and wanted a drink of water, but knew that the only way to get one was to get out of his 'bedroom.' As these thoughts swirled in his mind, he felt a rush of, something, from the pit of his stomach. It surged upward, travelled down his arm, and then… 'click!' The door to his cupboard swung quietly open.

Having discovered this power, Harry had decided to do some experimentation. He found that he could move objects without touching them. He had power over light, producing it when needed, bending it at his whim. He could manipulate fire, and was immune to its burning. After several years of study, he had mastered these powers. He had decided to call this ability Magic, as he couldn't understand it beyond the fact that he had it. He had once thought that he was going to have to continue working hard at studying magic in secret, until he could use it to escape his current 'home.' Home, yeah right! Prison, more like.

But on this twenty-fourth of August, 1990, Harry Potter wasn't thinking about magic. He was at school, as usual, performing one of the Kung Fu forms he had learned. That was also normal for the young wizard. Even though his master had taught him about magic, they took time to improve his physical fitness regularly. 'Strong body, strong mind, strong magic,' as Gilderoy had once said.

Even as Harry worked through his Kung Fu form, he thought back to the first time he met the only father figure he had ever known.

He was five years old, and had just finished his first week at Primary. He had turned in his first piece of homework the day before and received high marks for it. He had been so excited that evening that he ran back to 4 Privet Drive to show his aunt and uncle. He thought that they would finally see that he was not worthless and actually be nice to him. He was wrong. His uncle had bellowed something about how he must have cheated off of their 'precious Dudders' and actually given him a lash with his belt.

Being a boy of greater than average intelligence, Harry concluded that his relatives would think him worthless regardless of how well he proved himself. He resolved to never do more than Dudley, never score higher marks than Dudley, never learn faster than Dudley, until he could escape from his prison.

Today was different, however. After school, Harry knew that he would have a problem with Dudley, and observed that the baby whale would never set foot in a library. But before he could even think about which way to go to avoid his cousin, he heard the Head Teacher calling him to his office. O, what have I done now? Harry thought. The young wizard trudged out of the classroom to the sound of Dudley laughing with his friends at his back. Once there, Harry saw a man with bright blond hair and dazzling white teeth talking with the Head Teacher. The stranger said a few more words Harry couldn't hear, then put a hand on his shoulders and steered him to another building behind the school.

Once on his own with the stranger, Harry became nervous. The man had not been kind in his mannerisms, and had made it seem that Harry was going to be kept back as some kind of discipline case. But after the door closed, the man sighed in relief, and tapped a symbol on the wall. Harry could feel something rising from the floor, pushing outward, as if to protect the building he found himself in. He didn't know then what he felt or how, but it startled him enough that he could no longer think about what the stranger was doing.

When Harry decided that he couldn't figure out what that strange sensation was, he was in some kind of nurse's office, lying on a clean bed. A young-looking woman stood over him, waving a stick and muttering in some foreign language. A few minutes later, she put the stick away, fetched a few bottles from the wall behind her, and started pouring them down Harry's throat. Some tasted rather unpleasant.

Then the blond man came in, took out a stick of his own, which looked different than the one in the woman's hand, and waved it. Harry rubbed his eyes in disbelief; the man had just made a comfy-looking chair appear out of nowhere! "Hello Harry Potter. My name is Gilderoy Lockhart, and thank Merlin I found you. Healer Johnson has discovered a number of health issues that all of us find most disturbing. I will not ask you how they happened; I think we both know the answer to that one already."

Harry froze. How could this stranger know about that? The Dursleys haven't done much to me, and nothing recently enough for it to matter… Then the stranger continued. "Your name is Harry James Potter. Your parents were James Charles Potter and his wife Lily Marie Potter, née Evans. And most importantly, you are a wizard."

Ever since that day, Harry had been under the tutelage of Gilderoy Lockhart. Every weekday, after school, Harry went to the building behind the school to meet with his master. Gilderoy had explained that he had convinced the Head Teacher to allow this by telling the man that it was a program for trouble-makers, and that Harry had to seem to fit the mold to make the story believable. The young wizard learned many things in the 'program,' both magical and mundane, from Master Gilderoy. The man was a positive fount of knowledge, and never hesitated to share it with his apprentice.

Healer Johnson had overseen a potion regimen that had built Harry's body up to where it would have been but for the Dursley-enforced malnutrition and beyond. He was now one of the tallest in his class, and the strongest. The mental damage took quite a bit longer to heal, but the constant love and support from both his master and his healer eventually brought him out of his shell. He remembered the lessons his relatives (primarily Vernon) had forced on him, with their cruel words and occasional actions, and thanked them for some of them. His high efficiency and effectiveness both came from his activities at 4 Privet Drive, as did his unusual tolerance for discomfort. His new family provided him with the reserves of strength to make the most of his situation, while minimizing the negatives he would have learned otherwise.

Harry was a very eager student, and soaked up knowledge rapidly. Every day, he learned something new. The schedule was rather predictable. On Monday, he had lessons in magic, what Gilderoy had called Charms, Transfiguration, and Magical Defense. On Tuesday, he trained in physical combat, and had become a prodigy in Kung Fu and with the broadsword. On Wednesday, he entered the lab for Potions, Runic Studies, Herbology, and Arithmancy. His Thursdays were filled with lessons in politics, strategy, languages, and other non-magical intellectual subjects. Fridays were the odd ducks; some were lessons with various females on the social arts, others were gladiator matches in which Harry fought some beast or other.

When Harry asked his master why he had to learn so much combat, shortly after his ninth birthday, Gilderoy had sat him down and told him how his parents died. He learned about Lord Voldemort. The story naturally led to the Boy Who Lived, the fictional interpretation of Harry's life and person. Gilderoy had done what he could to shape the legend, but it was not in his control entirely. Once Harry returned to the wizarding world, he would be judged based on how he measured up to the image of him conjured up by the dozens of authors, even if none of them could agree on anything. He would be a target for the followers of Lord Voldemort, any resurrected Voldemort himself, and likely any new Dark Lords who chose to replace him. Harry was most put out by the knowledge that people were already forming opinions of him, despite never meeting any of them, and threw a-small-fit over it.

"Excellent form, Harry!" His master's voice dragged him out of his musings. "You have reached the point that this has become instinct." Harry shook his head, "I apologize for my inattentiveness, Master." Gilderoy nodded, glad that his apprentice had heard the rebuke, and held out a letter.

Harry took it, knowing immediately who it was from. That handwriting could only be from his best friend, Hermione. They had met through an inter-school pen-pal assignment in English class, and liked each other so much that they decided to maintain the contact. He sometimes thought it a bit strange that a pre-pubescent boy would feel closer to a girl of his own age than any of the boys he had met, but it made sense in a way. Their early letters were marked by the loneliness of genius. They had no-one else in their peer group to talk to regularly, and clung to each other tightly.

Hermione Granger was even smarter than he was in many things. Her grades were some of the highest on record, and she displayed such aptitude for books and logic that Harry could easily see her becoming a researcher. But it was something unusual which had truly drawn them together: Magic. His best friend was a witch, and had told him about her accidental magic in a number of letters. The one he could not think of without chortling was the time her parents had given her a frilly pink dress, only to have her throw a tantrum because she hated the color, and find that the dress, still in her mother's hands, had changed to emerald green.

He opened the letter.

Dear Harry,

I WON! I know you said I'd win that Maths competition easily, but I scored higher than anyone has before! I wish you could have been there. My parents took me out to a very nice restaurant afterwards. I would have very much enjoyed your company. Thank you for your letter explaining why you couldn't come, I would have been devastated otherwise.

Your advice on the Flame and the Void has been most helpful. I can now control most of the powers I have developed. How long have you been learning magic? And why did you never tell me? That technique could have been an accident, even if it worked well enough to suggest otherwise. But fireballs? Levitation? All the other spell ideas you've given me? The only way I can think of that you could have known about those is if you yourself have been learning magic, and decided to help a fellow mage.

Your dearest friend,

Hermione Granger

Harry sighed. He had shared some of his techniques with her after she rather tearfully wrote that her parents were becoming wary and even fearful of her. Seeing how his own family had been torn apart, he couldn't bear the thought of his best friend suffering the same. He had gotten a good scolding from his master about sharing his magical knowledge with anyone, even if it was somewhat mitigated by the way he phrased it. I really should have expected her to see through my ruse. She's too intelligent to be so blind. Harry then picked up his favorite fountain pen and a piece of his personalized letterhead, and began to write.

***Scene Break***

When that day's scheduled time with Gilderoy ended, Harry bid goodbye to his master and turned his feet toward Number 4. He didn't like living there; in fact, he could scarcely think of a house more miserable to live in, save for that one owned by a witch who liked to eat children. (When he'd brought up that comparison with his Healer, she had told him the true tale, in which the witch was actually a Hag-a parody of a woman who had to eat human flesh to survive-and the breadcrumb trail hadn't actually saved the lives of those two children, only let their loving uncle take revenge by executing the Hag.)

No, the only reason he still lived there was the intense degree of protection he had within its walls, and to a limited extent outside them. Blood was costly and highly tricky to use for magic, but there was no focus more powerful without delving into truly the Dark Arts of Necromancy. The wizard who had placed Harry with the Dursleys had converted his mother's ritual of protection into a ward schema that would protect him so long as he lived with his Aunt for a certain period of time every year. When Gilderoy explained this, he said he would have had to bring in a full team of master Wardbuilders and a lot more magic to draw from to get Harry better protection.

Lockhart had speculated that Dumbledore would probably say that the protection could be ended early if Harry no longer called the place 'home,' but Harry shot that down immediately. I don't understand how anyone could call that place a 'home.' It is a place of residence, nothing more, and that is what I've always considered it.

Regardless of what would actually bring down the blood wards, they worked so long as Harry and Petunia lived within them. Harry didn't so much care about whether the walrus and baby whale (his terms for Vernon and Dudley) were protected. If a Death Eater were to attack either of them, he would consider it poetic justice and no more important to him than whether rain or shine were predicted the next day. His Aunt, on the other hand, was quite a bit nicer to him whenever the others weren't there. She wasn't particularly kind to him, but she never hurled abuse at him if neither of the others could hear it. He wouldn't want her to get caught by a stray curse in that hypothetical Death Eater attack, even if her death wouldn't end his protection.

That thought completed, he walked the final stretch of road to Number 4. Nothing unusual had presented itself to him, just like most of the previous ones. He had learned that he should always be aware of his surroundings, and his master had reinforced the lesson by hiding unexpected things on his route home from time to time. He had eventually found a way to avoid having to deal with them at all, and Gilderoy had congratulated him heartily on that stroke of brilliance.

He stopped on the porch to his place of residence, pulled out the key from under the doormat, and stepped through the freshly-unlocked door, replacing the key as he went with a bit of magic. Vernon would sometimes lock the door so Harry would have to knock to be admitted to the house and be punished with a smaller helping than normal (which was already rather small). Harry didn't actually know if Vernon had yet learned that such actions did absolutely nothing to Harry, who had alternate sources of nourishment, but figured that it wouldn't matter anyway. He had problems enough without his so-called uncle yelling at him.

The Dursleys were washing up for dinner when he walked in. Rather than wait for the kitchen sink to become available, he went to the upstairs bathroom to clean his hands. The one thing Aunt Petunia insisted upon even though her husband grumbled about it was not getting unneeded dirt on the silverware, and she held the whole household to that standard. He'd learned that she was not alone in this, so never complained about it. Who could win an argument with a housewife over her domain, anyway?

After a meal that was heavier on the lard and salt than Harry knew to be perfectly healthy, the young wizard cleared the table and began scrubbing the soiled dishes. Before his master had come along with his "Ne'er-do-well's program," Harry had been expected to help his Aunt cook dinner, but he couldn't get out of the aftermath so easily. The amount of time he spent with his master (and healer), whether training or simply in his company, had drastically cut down the number of chores Vernon could force upon him. This was one of the easier ones, in that he was indoors and thus not exposed to the heat of the summer evening.

As he worked, he allowed his mind to wander. I know I've thought about this many times, but why do the teachers ignore Dudley's bullying? He's been held back for summer school every year since we started Primary, so the teacher's should be paying more attention, making sure he does the work properly. The only explanation I can think of is willful blindness, but that doesn't explain just why they are willing.

Most of the possible answers he came up with revolved around his uncle. The man was well-known, and seemed to always get his way. He didn't know if that was simply because all the authority figures in this town were classmates of Vernon's from Smeltings, or if the elder Dursley was involved with organized crime, or if some magic had been worked on him. Regardless of what it was, it protected the man's son from the consequences of his own stupidity in much the same way the magic did wizards.

Harry placed the last dish, cleaned and dried, in the cabinet it had come out of. The Dursleys had all retired to the sitting room to watch the tele, so he knew that they wouldn't pay him any attention for some time. Since he had a few reading assignments to finish up for mundane school, he went to his cupboard, lay down, and opened the first book.