Chapter 1 – Chance or Fate

It was breakfast as usual at the Number Four Privet Drive. Vernon had left for work an hour ago, leaving his wife Petunia to feed the boys and take them school shopping.

Harry had awoken to an impatient rapping at his cupboard door. "Up, Harry! Get up!" She didn't wait for him to answer, but instead walked back into the kitchen.

Harry barely registered her retreating footsteps and the sound of the kitchen door shutting itself loudly. Half aware, he felt around on the shelf behind him for his glasses and shoved them on.

"I'm up, I'm up." He called, moreso just to say it than out of the expectation that she would hear him.

Shoving the ratty old football (soccer ball) bedspread off of him and to the side, he reached forward down to the end of his cupboard where it got small. This was where the spiders lived, rather undisturbed because not even his feet fit in that tiny end space where the stairs met the first floor.

A small web was in one of the corners and he knelt down to look at the black spider sitting in it. "Good morning, Charlotte. Did you sleep well?" He looked at it for a moment, pretending it could listen and imagining it could talk back. What would a spider say, anyhow? Would it ask for a bug to eat?

"Harry, are you dressed yet?" Petunia yelled from the kitchen. "You're going to make us late!" She had no patience for him.

He rolled his eyes at her behavior. Why did they have to leave this early, anyways? "Nearly, Aunt Petunia!" Without standing, he pulled his pajama shirt over his head, quickly replacing it with a plain t-shirt that was two sizes too big for him. He did similar for his trousers, pants, and socks and changed sitting down.

He had to get dressed like this because even at ten, he was too tall to stand up straight in the cupboard. 'Stupid humans. They won't even give me a bedroom because I'm not like them. It's a four-bedroom house, there's plenty of room.'

When he entered the kitchen, Petunia was fawning over Dudley. "I can't believe this will be your last year of primary school!" She was nearly in tears, sitting at the table watching Dudley eat his plate of three huge, double-chocolate muffins and drink his glass of chocolate milk. "It'll be my last year of driving you to school."

Harry couldn't wait. It would be his last year of going to the same school as Dudley! Dudley would be going to a boarding school called Smeltings next year while he would go to the local state school, Stonewall High.

Harry grabbed a small plate from the kitchen cupboards. "Aunt Petunia, I'm having muffins too." He said, and before she could stop half-crying about Dudley's final year of school, Harry had already taken a single muffin from the tray and duplicated it twice, making three muffins, before placing the original back in the tray.

"Harry James Potter!" Aunt Petunia was marching right up to him, in his face, seething with rage, in moments. "How dare you?! I bought you cereal, and you will eat it! Those are Dudley's. And I warned you, no more of your nonsense! You are a normal boy, and you will behave like one!" Dudley was laughing in the background at the exchange. He loved watching Harry get in trouble, even if Harry wasn't afraid like he was as a small child.

Harry just watched, content to eat his muffin and watch as her face went from pale to red with rage. "When we get home this afternoon, you are grounded to your cupboard for two weeks! Do you hear me? Two weeks! No meals!" She didn't really mean no meals. He would only get no meals until she stopped being mad at him, and then he would get two small meals a day.

Harry finished his muffins and turned his back on her to wash his plate off in the sink and put it in the dishwasher. "Yes, Aunt Petunia." She was just a human. She couldn't do anything to him that he couldn't fix with his magic.

They got ready and Aunt Petunia took them into London to go school shopping. Harry would get the bare basics plus hand me downs from Dudley, while Dudley got new everything whether he needed it or not. Or even if he didn't want it. Dudley never used the big pointy little colorful erasers that you stuck over your pencil's actual eraser.

Harry was drug along through several different stores to buy Dudley's school uniform, Dudley's entire school supply list and more, and new day clothes for Dudley because he had gained height and weight since last term. Harry was drug along mostly to push the trolly, put the bags in the trolly while Dudley picked out candy and pokemon cards, and get tripped and poked and hit with pencil boxes by Dudley. Harry would cry out and tell Dudley to stop, and Petunia would yell at them both to stop fighting in the store. Just more of the usual.

They stopped at an ice cream parlor on the way back to the car.

Petunia picked out a table and motioned for him put the bags down. "Wait here and watch the bags, Harry." With a heave of effort, Harry sat down all the bags. You could hardly see him over the mountain of them. 'She really went overboard this time. Uncle Vernon will be mad.'

"What would you like, Dudley?" Petunia asked, her voice automatically losing its cold, icy tone and turning sunny like a young mum talking to her toddler. "Knickerbocker glory?"

Harry watched their backs bitterly. "I want a lemon ice pop!" He called after them. He knew he wouldn't be getting one, even if it was the cheapest thing on the menu.

He watched the people and the pigeons and took in all the sights and sounds of the city. It was nice to get away from Little Whinging. He hated the small town where everyone either looked at him with pity or disgust. Where all the women gossiped over tea and where all the children bullied him for not having parents, wearing hand me downs, and wearing glasses.

'I'd do anything to just get on a motorcycle and fly away from here. Far, far away. Be king of a castle so that everyone would have to respect me.'

Then, he saw something odd. A book was falling out of the sky. He watched, bewildered, as a plain black notebook fell out of the sky and into the road in front of the ice cream shop. 'Huh? What in the world? It couldn't have fallen out of a plane…'

Looking back and forth, up and down the sidewalk and shops, no one else was paying the book any mind. Curious, he darted into the road and retrieved the book and went back to his seat before a car could come.

'Safe!' He didn't have time to open it and look at it, though, because he heard the bells of the door opening, and he hurriedly placed it in the small shopping bag full of his school supplies. 'Surely they don't want it anyways, throwing it in the middle of the road like that…'

Dudley came back grinning, eating his favorite knickerbocker glory and pointing at his ice cream, mocking Harry.

Harry ignored him and looked at Aunt Petunia. "Where's my lemon ice pop?"

She shot him an affronted look. "You? A lemon ice pop? Young man, you're already grounded for two weeks for your behavior this morning. You're not getting ice cream." Aunt Petunia herself was eating a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone.

It was all an act. "Yeah, right." His behavior this morning didn't matter. He wouldn't have gotten one even if he'd gotten up two hours early to cook them a three-course breakfast. Concentrating and staring at Dudley's ice cream, he duplicated it and dug in, glancing pointedly at his Aunt Petunia.

His aunt's incomprehensible noises of exasperation beside him were funny. The both of them knew she wouldn't pitch a fit in public. "I hope you're proud of yourself, young man." She whispered threateningly under her breath over the table at him. "You've just earned yourself another week to your grounding."

Harry snickered and ignored her. 'Stupid human. I'm a magician! I can do anything. You can't stop me.' Then he remembered the notebook hidden in his shopping bag. 'I wonder what's up with the notebook. Notebooks don't just fall out of the clouds like that.' He paused, remembering one of his lifelong recurring dreams. 'Then again motorcycles aren't supposed to fly either. But I really want one, anyways.'

When they got home, Harry obediently went right to couch to be lectured. Dudley darted up to his playroom to eat his candy and see what pokemon cards he got.

His aunt was yelling at him now. "How dare you treat me like this. We took you in and gave you a roof over your head and food to eat. You know I don't have to give you a mattress and Dudley's nice hand me down bedding, right? I don't even have to let you eat from the table, I could just give you peanut butter crackers an water. We've been very generous with you, Harry, so that you don't turn out to be the same drunk, unemployed low-lives your parents were and grow up to be a good, civilized, upstanding boy like Dudley will be. And this is how you repay us with your freakish tricks! It stops now, Harry! No more. You will be grounded to your cupboard until it stops. Indefinetally. Even if it means you're in there till you're 17."

Harry knew this was meant to be some life-threateningly terrifying punishment, but he just couldn't bring himself to feel scared. "Yes, Aunt Petunia. I understand." Best keep it simple, or she will think he's mocking her when he's not.

He hadn't felt scared of anything they did to him since the one and only time Vernon belted him two years ago for accidentally getting on the school roof somehow. 'I wish I knew how. Then I could do it again and actually go somewhere nice.' It was quite the spectacle – the fire department had to come and everything. It was all over the local news and everyone was talking about it for what felt like weeks.

"Go to your cupboard." His aunt ordered, pointing angrily at his cupboard. "No meals for the rest of the day. Or tomorrow. Your uncle will be hearing about this when he gets home!" It was an empty threat, because his uncle was afraid of him now. His uncle used to bring Dudley in and tell him to hit Harry, breaking his glasses every time and sometimes his nose too.

"Yes, Aunt Petunia." Harry replied, easily, grabbing his shopping bag and going to his cupboard and shutting the door behind him. He heard his Aunt follow him and lock him in. 'Now I can look at the notebook I found!' Grinning with excitement, he pulled out the black notebook from the road with the words 'Death Note' on the front.