Strangeland

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Chapter One Past Becoming Future



“So what’s the old fraud having you do this term? Anything that doesn’t involve your death, Harry?” Hermione asked, her eyebrow raised and a smirk stretched across her lips.



They were sitting at the large round table in the Gryffindor common room with their books and parchment spread out but still just idly flipping through the pages as they were too full from the Halloween Feast that had ended not moments before. Harry had his Divination text open at a random page in front of him, and he was doodling little Golden Snitches on it with his newly bought eagle feather quill.



“Nope.” he replied, dipping the quill into the bottle of jet black ink and turning to a clean page. “Doesn’t seem to get the message that I’m still around after four years of her endless predictions.”



“We’ve started ‘soul interpretations’, and you can imagine how excited Trelawny was when she used Harry’s life as a brief example.” Ron said with a grin. “She was convinced that Harry’d probably seen the Grim right after he was born but just can’t remember it ‘cause he was too young.”



“Well, she’s half right. It could have been Sirius.” Harry smiled sadly. “Or Padfoot rather.”



“He was no Grim, Harry.” Hermione said softly.



“I kept thinking I was seeing the Grim in third year when Sirius kept popping up out of nowhere. I thought all those catastrophes that were happening to me had to do with him.” chuckled Harry. Ron and Hermione’s expressions lightened at Harry’s laughter and they joined in.



“And I thought he was the Grim too, when he pulled me into the Shrieking Shack.” Ron pointed to his leg. “I still have a weird bump where he broke my leg.”



Hermione patted Ron’s leg in mock sympathy. “Well it can serve as a nice memory, then.” she paused sharply before reaching over and plucking the quill out of Harry’s hand. “You shouldn’t write all over the text Harry. It’s a bad habit.”



“It’s just a text.” said Harry, glancing down at his artwork.



Hermione tutted. “There was this famous Arithmancer named Daisy Nettles a few centuries ago, and brilliant enough to be in league with Albert Einstein -.”



“Albert what?” Ron asked, scrunching up his nose.



“A muggle genius.” Harry explained.



“Anyway,” Hermione went on. “they say that people who have really ingenious minds tend to be a bit... unsettled at times and Daisy Nettles, well she had this problem with her hand where she just couldn’t keep it still.”



“And?”



“And it led her to a very severe incident which caused lots of mayhem for the Floo Powder manufacturers she was working for at the time, because when she handed in her calculations that they needed to make the floo powder, some of her irrelevant scribbling got in the way and they misread her nine for an eight and the product they came up with simply blasted people’s fireplaces to smithereenths.”



Harry suppressed a smile and looked sideways at Ron who was looking back at him with one of his ‘she’s mental’ looks on his face again.



“So your point?” asked Ron.



“She’s telling me not to doodle in my books. Right, Hermione?” said Harry.



“Could’ve just said that then.” Ron frowned. “A lot shorter and a lot less confusing.”



Hermione shook her head and pulled her tall stack of books toward her, her face setting into a more serious expression.



“That’s enough of that now, we should get started on our studies.”



“But I’m still stuffed!” complained Ron, slouching in his seat.



“Then you shouldn’t have eaten four slices of pumpkin pie.” said Hermione exasperatedly. “I don’t think Professor Snape would excuse you from that essay for something like that.”



Ron muttered something under his breath and reluctantly pulled out his tattered potions book from the unorderly stack in front of him.



“You want to help me on this, mate?” Ron asked hopefully, glancing at Harry.



But Hermione intervened as usual. “Harry’s not going to help you, Ronald. You two need to start working by yourselves now that we’ve got our NEWTs ahead of us. Honestly, you’ll fail if you don’t take things seriously!”



Ron bristled as if hearing the word NEWTs was like hearing a foul insult.



“Fine!” he exclaimed hotly and practically ripped open his book and buried his face behind it. Harry sighed and decided that Hermione had a point, and that he should take NEWTs more seriously, as his whole future depended on it. He flipped halfheartedly back a couple of chapters in Past Becoming Future and began reading.



After about five minutes, he heard the slam of a book from his left and looked up to see Ron shoving his Potions book away moodily and retrieving his own copy of Past Becoming Future.



“Sod Potions.” he said in an undertone, flipping open his book. “I’m doing what you’re doing.”



Hermione kept her mouth shut but she did send Ron a disapproving look before returning her attention to her own book, An Anthology of Eighteenth Century Charms.



Ron leaned over slightly and whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “You started on your report?”



Harry shook his head. “Still on the reading.”



“You have in mind what you’re gonna write?”



“I’ll just list all my near-death encounters with Voldemort and she’ll be happy enough.”



Ron showed only a tiny flinch of fear. “You’ve got a tragically intriguing enough past but what am I supposed to write? Fred and George’s pranks are the only really big events in my life so far.”



“I bet if you described the day you became friends with me, she’d somehow interpret that into your doom.” Harry suggested thoughtfully.



Hermione rolled her eyes and put down her book. “Oh you two are helpless. I don’t see why you didn’t just drop the pathetic subject before it was too late and take Arithmancy with me. All you ever do is write down rubbish anyway. How is it helping you any?”



“It’s not really.” said Ron, pulling out a fresh roll of parchment and his quill from his bookbag. “But it’s great for a good laugh now and then.”



“Definitely.” Harry grinned and pulled out his own parchment and took back his quill from Hermione.



“You’re taking the class to get a good laugh?” Hermione asked incredulously, staring at Ron as if he’d said the most atrocious thing she’d ever heard. “It’s clearly just a waste of time.”



“Better then that Arithmancy jumble.” retorted Ron, nodding with a grimace at the long arithmancy chart spread out beneath the book Hermione had been reading.



“You’d like it, if you tried it.” she argued.



“No I wouldn’t.” Ron said flatly.



“How would you know?”



“Because it looks boring and it doesn’t make any bloody sense.”



“Well if you stopped acting so thick, maybe you’d understand it more.” Hermione gave and injured sniff and ignored him completely after that. Which left Harry and Ron free to work together on the Divination assignment afterall.



“Right. So the first main event would be...” Ron started, biting his lip.



“Us being born.”



“Oh, yeah. Forgot that.”



They scribbled their birthdates quickly on their parchment and then looked back up.



“Then... Well, I guess erm, I’ll write about what mum told me how dad nearly dropped me down the stairs of St. Mungo’s when they were leaving...”



Harry fought hard to ignore the faint pang of remorse that prickled in his chest when he thought of the fact that he really didn’t know anything about the year he spent with his parents before they were killed. It was painful to know that his first and last memory of them was the scene of blinding green light, his mum screaming, his dad fighting to protect his mum, and Voldemort’s high-pitched, cruel laughter...



Determined to forget about it, he quickly scribbled down his parents’ death in as few undescriptive words as he could and went onto the next memory of his childhood.



“And then there was the time Fred and George turned my stuffed bear into a spider.” Ron went on shuddering from head to toe. “And I was only three!”



The Dursleys. Harry thought grimly to himself. Worst thing that could’ve happened to me.



“Oh and when I was five, they dumped a whole packet of Belch Powder in my hot chocolate and mum had to take me to the hospital because it wouldn’t stop for days!”



As for living with the Dursleys, Harry couldn’t really think of anything significant and worth writing down. All he remembered of it was a bitter childhood of his cousin’s taunts, overlarge hand-me-downs, his aunt’s list of endless chores, and his uncle’s shouting whenever and wherever there was a need to blame someone, and that someone always being Harry.



His ‘abnormality’ had always been treated like dung and he was as proud to tell the wizarding world that he’d been living in a small, dank cupboard under the stairs as much as he was proud of being a Parsel Tongue.



So that left about a ten year gap in his life that he would rather ignore.



He absentmindedly looked over at Ron who was currently telling him about the time he had tried to hide Fred and George’s box of Dungbombs in a cauldron that his mum had been bubbling a fresh concoction of Doxycide in, and how the black liquid had exploded and singed Percy’s hair to a crisp.



Ron already had about ten things listed on his parchment whereas Harry only had two.



“How many do we need to have again?” he asked when Ron had taken a breath in between stories.



Ron paused and then consulted his book.



“Doesn’t say how many, but it says we need at least an event every two years. Well that’s okay then -”



Harry sighed. “I can’t think of anything that happened before I came to Hogwarts. And I don’t think I want to write down all the times where I made things happen unintentionally with magic and Uncle Vernon locking me in my cupboard for days without food.”



“Well then make up something.” said Ron, shrugging. “It’s worked before with Trelawny.”



Normally Harry would have been perfectly happy about making things up, but somehow, for this particular assignment, he didn’t think he could. Of course, there were a number of things that he wanted to have happened in his life, and there were a greater number of things that he wished he could just erase from his past, but writing lies would only make him wish that he’d been born a different person. Anybody but the famous Harry Potter with the scar on his forehead.



So, however reluctantly, he began writing not all, but a few of the unpleasant happenings he’d experienced in the grimmer half of his life.



“And I think Trelawny said that for the year about coming to Hogwarts, we have to elaborate on everything that happened because school’s supposed to have a changing effect on you, or something.”



Harry finished with a total of six events for the first eleven years and then smiled. Ron had been by his side during thick and thin; he could brainstorm events with him now.



“So about us meeting, we should write that.” he said, grinning widely. “In King’s Cross, before going through the barrier to platform nine and three quarters.”



“And you asked us how to get through.” Ron added.



“Yeah, and then on the Hogwarts Express, you asked me if I was really Harry Potter and if I had the scar.”



“And then you bought us loads of sweets and you got your first look at Chocolate Frog cards and I thought you were weird cuz you were surprised when Dumbledore disappeared from his.” Ron sniggered. “And to think you didn’t even know about Quidditch! I mean, you’re the school’s best Seeker now!”



Harry snorted and leaned back in his chair, reminiscing about that first train ride with Ron and how fun it had been.



“And then ‘Mione came up to us asked us if we’d seen Neville’s toad!” Ron continued, completely forgetting about the assignment. Hermione looked up swiftly from her book with raised eyebrows. “I thought you were the most stuck-up know-it-all ever.” Hermione’s expression quickly turned into a scowl.



Harry laughed out loud and sat up eagerly. “What was that bogus spell again?”



“Ehem.” Ron made a show of twirling his wand before holding his nose high in the air and chanting,

“Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow,

Turn this stupid, fat rat yellow.”

Nothing happened of course and that made Ron and Harry thump the table with their fists, guffawing loudly.



“Brilliant.” Harry said, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. “And then Hermione told me that she’d read about me in all these books and I was so stunned...”



After Ron had recovered from his fit of laughter, his face quickly darkened, and he crossed his arms coldly.



“And then there’s Malfoy.” he muttered wrathfully, hissing out the name ‘Malfoy’ as if it were poison on his tongue.



Harry’s grin faltered as the image of Draco Malfoy swam into his mind. The annoyingly arrogant air as if everyone and everything around him was nothing but dirt, the conceited smirk that never left his face, the first time Harry’d actually seen him in Madame Malkin’s, and the small, pale hand he’d turned down on the train in anger toward Malfoy for insulting Ron...



“Well, we don’t have to write that anyway.” said Ron defiantly. “Malfoy’s not worth scum.”



Harry just nodded silently and fiddled with the quill between his fingers. The mood had considerably fallen and now, he was finding it hard to think of anything happy again. All because of Malfoy.



He’d never really thought anything of it before really, about that handshake Malfoy had offered. Turning it down had just been the most obvious thing at the time. He’d done it without a second thought... not that he regretted it of course. But what if when they’d first met in Madame Malkin’s, they’d become friends. What would he have done then? Would he have ditched Ron for Malfoy?



No, I wouldn’t have. Harry thought firmly. I didn’t like him from the start anyway. We’d never have become friends, no matter what the circumstances.



“I don’t think you need to go into that much detail, you know.” said a quiet voice, interrupting Harry’s thoughts. He looked up and found Hermione glancing at each of them in turn with a half smile on her face. “You’ve already named about ten things and you’re still on day one.”



“Right, well then.” Ron picked up his quill hastily, as if he was eager to moving on to the next topic. “What happened next?”



“The sorting I suppose.” said Harry. “We were all scared that the sorting had to do with something painful, like Fred told you. And it turned out to be the hat and we all...” he trailed off, another lump forming in his throat.



“- got into Gryffindor.” finished Ron proudly, his quill racing across the parchment. “The hat told me that I was Gryffindor through and through. Did it say anything to you, mate?”



Harry fell silent for a moment.



“Harry?”



“Wha-?”



“I said, did the hat say anything to you?” repeated Ron.



Harry coughed and shook his head. “Oh er, no. It didn’t. No.”



“ ‘Mione, what about you?”



“It said that I had the brains of a Ravenclaw but a mind of a Gryffindor.” she said with a shrug.



“What’s the difference?” Ron asked, confused.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

That night, Harry lay in his four poster with the hangings shut tight around him, unable to find sleep even though he was so exhausted from the piles of homework that they’d managed to finish earlier.



He could hear Ron’s steady breathing from the bed next to his, and Neville’s soft snores, and wished that he could just make his mind go blank and join them in deep slumber.



A part of him was confused about the rush of emotions that were going through him at that moment. And those tears that were falling silently onto his pillow weren’t welcome either. It was almost two years ago that Sirius had gone through that veil in the Department of Mysteries, and he’d begun to spend his days without feeling torn and miserable for the past year; he’d even healed to the point where he could talk about Sirius without having to bite back waves of tears.



He felt ashamed. He knew Sirius wouldn’t want him to be so weak and pathetic. He knew his parents wouldn’t want him like that either. He was the wizarding world’s most anticipated young wizard and the whole magical population depended on him to rid the world of darkness and evil. To rid the world of Lord Voldemort and right all he’d done.



There was a prophecy to fulfill, yet no one knew who would be fulfilling that prophecy. Would it be Harry? Or would Lord Voldemort end up victorious and murder the only boy that had the power to vanquish the Dark Lord?



There were some things that he wouldn’t even dream of trading for anything else. Like Ron and Hermione, like Gryffindor, like the gift of flying. And there were other things that he could only dream of changing. Like the death of his parents, the death of Sirius, the death of Cedric, the scar on his head, the gift of snake tongue. He often imagined what life would be like if he had a warm family that loved him more than anything, and a life where he didn’t have to deal with being the Boy Who Lived. But alas, he was destined to the life he had now, and he’d made the choices that had brought him to all of this. There wasn’t anything he could do that could save him from his fate. Even before he’d been born, the prophecy been told.



With that last thought, he finally drifted off to sleep.