Harry Potter

And the Price of Ability

Author's Preface (can be ignored)

This is the first chapter of my first piece of fiction. As a warning, I DO NOT DO short stories. I can't remember the last time I read a book under 400 pages long, and my favourites tend to be series of books that create whole worlds anew. For example, the works of Terry Pratchet, Robert Jordan, Robin Hobb, Tolkien, and Rowling spring to mind. For younger readers, I would also recommend the Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddle. In short, this piece is likely to end up covering the 7 years of Hogwarts, and possibly a time afterwards, if there are any characters alive at that point. I will be 'shipping, Harry will be a clueless teenager, and I am writing as I go. This is not going to be an ultra-powerful Harry, though he will be a bit smarter than he is in the books. I guess I'm kind of basing him around myself and my own experiences, as how else do you write about the emotions of a growing boy without reflecting on how you were at the time?

This will probably go quite slowly, as it's only a hobby.

Please review, be honest, and I will try to answer questions in subsequent notes.

Anyway, enough rambling from me, enjoy the story!

Chapter 1: Hideaway

At 6am, the town of Little Whinging was quiet. The ambient noise from the odd car and the dawn chorus of birds created a peaceful atmosphere, and indeed at first glance the town appeared near idyllic. A suburban area full of semi detached houses, with large, well maintained gardens, fronted with fences or neatly trimmed hedges, presented a view of peace and prosperity that the townsfolk viewed as their rightful status. The majority of the streets were well swept and well lit, but as it was an early July morning, the sun was starting to come up, and the street lights had already turned off.

The residents of Little Whinging would have boasted about their perfect town to anyone visiting, but the town was far from perfect. On a street that looked like any other, stood a house with a beautifully maintained lawn, flowerbeds carefully planted to create a pleasing splash of colour, and a gleaming car stood on the gravel drive. Their neighbours would have said, with a slightly fixed smile, that the residents of Number 4 Privet Drive were perfectly ordinary, good folk that exemplified the type of family living in Little Whinging. However, if pressed further, they might have let their smiles drop a little; there was something a little... odd about the Dursleys.

Mr Dursley was a large man. Most would call him fat; he preferred to describe himself as "well rounded". He had short brown hair that was combed to one side, and if it wasn't for the fact that he had grown his moustache in the walrus style, he could quite easily be compared to a fat Hitler. The director of a drill company, he was the sole earner in the house, and had little patience with anything that got in his way. In contrast, his wife was thin, with long blonde hair that she spent hours grooming to perfection. If they had been less polite, her neighbours would have described her as a "nosy cow"; she was constantly peering out of the windows to spy on them, or strolling around the town trying to work out how to make her house look better than everyone else's. The Dursley's had a single son, who was just as fat as his father. Ten year old Dudley was constantly spoilt by his parents, was used to getting his own way, and would often throw his considerable weight around to ensure that it would remain so. But what all three had in common, aside from their snobbish, self-righteous attitude, was their hatred of the fourth resident of the house.

Harry Potter hated living in his Aunt and Uncle's house just as much as they hated him being there. The Dursleys treated him like a second class citizen, and he sometimes felt that the only distinction between him and a slave or a prisoner was that he had no shackles. Despite living in a 4 bedroom house (AN), Harry's tiny bed was in the cupboard under the stairs, or as the Dursley's called it, his nest. Dudley bullied the smaller boy mercilessly, constantly taunting him about his good for nothing parents, who had died when Harry was one, and picking on him for his small size, glasses, intelligence, and his scar. The scar, Harry thought, was pretty cool. A jagged lightning bolt carved into the skin above his right eye, the legacy of the car crash that had killed his parents. But cool as it might have been, it didn't prevent Dudley from calling him an ugly rat, and no-one at school would ever say that anything about Harry Potter was cool. Dudley made sure of that, as it was well known that Dudley hated Harry and liked to take his anger out on him, often getting his gang to partake in 'Harry Hunting'. This involved catching Harry and beating him up. Fortunately for Harry, they weren't always successful, because although Harry was quite small, this gave him a slight advantage over Dudley: he was a lot faster and more agile, and the years of bullying had taught him good reflexes, so he was usually able to dodge the blows that Dudley tried to inflict. However, he could do nothing about the treatment by his Aunt and Uncle.

Petunia and Vernon Dursley were worse than Dudley. They made Harry cook every meal for them, and let him eat very little of it. Coupled with the physical labour that ensured the car in the drive was kept polished, the lawns kept trimmed, and the house kept tidy, it was no surprise that Harry was underweight and small for his age. They even beat him regularly; Uncle Vernon was a firm believer in discipline through punishment (not that he would ever lay a hand on his Dudders), and had him beaten for not completing the chores fast enough or well enough. This meant that Harry got hit very often, because if he tried to complete the chores faster then he didn't do them well enough. But the worst was when he accidentally let some of his "freak abnormalities" show. Aunt Petunia was terrified someone would find out about them, and so she had Vernon strap him with his belt whenever something unexplainable happened. This would often be followed by a long stay in his cupboard, followed by increased chores as he couldn't complete them whilst locked in the dark with only water and a meagre ration of food.

However, Harry had a secret. The first time he'd made anything weird happen, it had been an accident. When he was 7, his Aunt had decided his messy hair needed a trim, and had shaved nearly all of it off, except a long fringe to hide his scar. Harry had been trapped in his cupboard, forced to listen to Dudley's gloating about how much teasing would happen at school the next day, and Harry had gone to sleep with nightmares about what would happen the next day. Much to everyone's surprise, his hair had grown back completely by the next morning. He'd been sentenced to a week in his cupboard for that, despite having done nothing wrong, and been belted for "freakish behaviour". After that, whenever Harry's emotions had gone to extreme levels of fright or anger, something odd had often happened.

However, what the Dursleys didn't know was that these "freak" incidents happened a lot more often than they thought: they only saw the times when Harry lost control, and the effects were obvious to anyone watching. They didn't notice that the bruises on Harry's upper arms went away faster than normal, because they always hit him where it wouldn't show, and never bothered looking at him. They covered Dudley in insect repellent, and were confused when he still managed to get stung by insects more often than any of his friends. But Vernon blamed that on an increased number of insects due to "the filth in the city", although that didn't stop him from driving his 4x4 to work every day and ignoring the litter of sweets wrappers and fizzy drink cans that Dudley dropped behind him wherever he went outside. They never noticed that there wasn't always an insect nearby when Dudley was stung, or that Harry had hate in his eyes, and a small glimmer of victory appeared in them whenever Dudley jumped up with a yell, clutching at another "bite". And they never knew that at night, in the dark of his cupboard, Harry had begun to try and control his abilities after the third of the obvious incidents (in which Dudley's spaghetti had turned into worms). He knew he was special and caused these things to happen, and he knew there was only one way that could be possible. He was able to do magic.

Knowing he was able to do magic made Harry feel special, even if it was obvious to him that the Dursleys hated it. He'd hidden behind the sofa in the living room whilst Dudley watched cartoons, and knew that abilities and superpowers were a common theme. The X-Men could fly, control weather, make explosions and lights, read people's minds and move things without touching them, and all the kids at school thought they were cool. He could actually do something like this, and was persecuted by the Dursleys just as the X-Men were persecuted for their mutant abilities. Harry realised that the best thing to do was emulate the X-Men: try and keep his magic secret whilst learning to control it. Of course, he couldn't hide it completely; sometimes his anger got the better of him, and they were never going to forget his previous displays of power. But if he could keep his magic as unnoticeable as possible, they would beat him less, and maybe think he'd stopped altogether.

In order to control his magic, Harry decided that the best thing to do would be to practice his abilities so they wouldn't get out of hand unexpectedly. The first ability Harry had attempted was the ability to make light. He had reasoned that if he could grow hair or change spaghetti into worms then this ought to be relatively easy. It had taken a lot of focussing for a feeble spark to appear in the palm of his hand, and the first time he did it he had fallen asleep immediately after. With his malnutrition coupled with the strain of performing magic when it wasn't fuelled by his emotions, he'd been exhausted and it had been nothing short of a miracle he'd woken up in time to cook breakfast the next day. However, the next night it had taken a lot less effort to achieve the spark. Harry found that by imagining a flame and pouring all of his emotions into it, he was able to clear his mind and truly focus on the task at hand. This technique came in handy several times over the next few weeks, helping him restrain himself from exacting revenge on his cousin, and thus helping him avoid a beating or two when he knew that, if he hadn't stopped himself, something very bad and obvious would have happened. Practicing every night, he eventually built up the ability to summon the spark almost instantly. Having mastered this, it didn't take long for him to increase the brightness of the spark until it looked like he had a ball of light approximately the size of a ping-pong ball floating above his hand. This was more than sufficient to light up his small cupboard, and he didn't want to increase it any further lest his Aunt and Uncle notice the glow from under the door. Although the light wasn't much, it gave Harry a small comfort when he was trapped in his cupboard, and he practiced it whenever he had the energy. It wasn't until a year later that he found out he could do more.

An 8 year old Harry Potter stood at the back of the class, watching his teacher silently. The other children in his class had pushed him out of the way, eager to see the science demonstration that the teacher had hoped would encourage them to learn rather than argue all day. There was a single torch on the table, shining into a glass prism, and the kids watched as the white light split into a rainbow of colours. Harry was interested, because up until then, he had thought that coloured light was caused by the object it travelled through, like a stained glass window, or Uncle Vernon's empty beer bottles. The teacher went on to show how light refracted through a glass block, seeming to appear a bit further over than where it should have come out. The other children were disappointed; the boys had hoped to see fire and explosions, but Harry remained thoughtful when he went home.

That night, he tried to change the colour of the light he created. At first, it stayed the same brilliant white, but after some careful thought as to what he wanted, he noticed the light turned slightly yellow. Half an hour later, a buttercup yellow orb hovered just above the palm of his open hand. Buoyed by his success, Harry spent the next 2 weeks creating as many different colours as he could, before moving on to his next goal: creating a fixed light. He already knew that he could move his hand around, keeping the light above it, so he reasoned he should be able to leave the light in one place. After all, it wasn't like the light was attached to his hand. First off, he conjured the light. It was a deep crimson red, his favourite colour. Although he was able to create any colour of light, he had let a particularly bright shade of green go almost instantly; for some reason he felt scared by it. But the red was his favourite, so he decided to use that as it was the one he felt most comfortable with.

Having conjured the light, the first thing he tried was to turn his hand over, in order to double check that it wasn't somehow supported by his hand. The light stayed hovering just under his face down palm, and lit up the floor beneath him, creating creepy shadows of a couple of discarded socks. He turned his palm upwards again, and then moved his hand from left to right, the light staying above his hand. Finally, he held his left palm out, and moved his right hand, along with the light, towards it. When his right hand was on top of his left, he tilted it, and willed the light to transfer to his other hand. Removing his right hand, he was pleased to note that the light now floated above his left hand. This was new for him, as he had always created the light in his right hand. However, he found that he didn't feel a change in focus or energy; he was still just concentrating on maintaining the light. Very slowly, he turned his left hand on its side, and, willing the light to stay where it was, moved his hand away.

Staring at the ball of light suspended in the air in front of him, Harry felt an immense sense of pride. This was a relatively new feeling for him. Previously, whenever he'd done something well, he was only happy because it meant that he wouldn't be punished for it. It didn't matter how amazing a dinner he'd cooked; he could have been a Cordon Bleu chef and he still wouldn't have gotten praise from the Dursleys. He never did well at school; it wasn't that he was stupid; it was that if he did significantly better than Dudley he'd be beaten up. None of the teachers cared about him because he never showed how smart he was, and he never even bothered trying to do anything creative because he'd never be allowed to pursue it as a hobby. He couldn't afford to buy nice pencils, let alone an instrument, and the Dursleys certainly wouldn't buy one for him. Dudley wouldn't let him near the drum kit he had persuaded his parents to buy and then barely touched; when they were 6, Harry had picked up a tambourine to tidy away and Dudley had punched a hole through it because he didn't want Harry to use it. But here in front of him was a magical light, floating in mid air, and he had worked out how to do it and made it himself. No one knew about it, and nobody would ever take it away from him. It was his, his first brand new possession apart from his bargain bin underwear. At that moment, Harry collapsed onto his bed, and 400 miles away, a strange silver instrument in a circular office emitted a small puff of yellow smoke that the sleeping owner missed.

-End of Chapter 1-

So that concludes chapter one! I hope you've enjoyed it, and keep reading. Please review, comments and critique are always welcome.

This chapter has been edited since first publishing. No content has changed, just correcting errors and (hopefully) making things better for you, the reader.