A Darker Form of Magic, book three: Dementors

Chapter Two

Harry drew his coat tighter around his shoulders as a summer breeze chilled the air. He couldn't help but marvel at now dreading something that he'd always been grateful for in the past summers when his aunt and uncle hadn't cared that the summer's heat was killing him, but only for their yard fence that wasn't the right shade of white just yet.

It didn't take him long to realize that it never would be.

The tree bark was rough on the teen's back as he leaned against it, far out of the sights of concerned and prying eyes of the muggles in the area as Harry read through the passage from his History of Magic textbook once more, searching for something related to the fourteenth century witch burnings. He'd learned his lesson early in the summer about doing homework in a park, as he had originally thought to do since it was out in the open where nothing could be done to him without another seeing. The only downside to such a thing was that he couldn't do anything either without everyone else in Surrey seeing.

The teen had decided to seek out another spot to do his homework after the third concerned mother had approached him about heat stroke, and the fifth child had wanted to know what he was reading as most of his books were leather bound. Harry figured that the latter number would have been much higher if he'd been using a quill as he was supposed to instead of the pen that he'd nicked from the Matron a day before.

So that was how the teen found himself in the wooded area behind the boy's home that Jude lived in, muscles sore from helping with the chores around the home in exchange for being allowed to play football with the residents on Sunday afternoons. It hurt his knee to do so - both the playing and the chores - but the Matron seemed to think that it would be good for his knee if he built muscle while using it - something that Harry didn't agree with, but brushed aside because playing was actually enjoyable, and so unquestionably normal, on the days that his knee didn't hurt too much to do so - and chores were one of the few things that the teen is actually good at.

The Matron didn't ask questions about his sudden appearance, and Harry didn't offer up any answers as the woman let him have one day of normalcy a week outside of the life that he had built for himself in the muggle world, and the one that he'd been thrown into in the magical world.

Harry thought that this would be like any other Saturday, as he worked through his summer homework while Alex and Thomas each picked up extra shifts at their jobs, and Jude did his own summer studies assigned by the Matron. Normally the teen would have been right - he had been every Saturday before as he'd already worked through Potions, Transfiguration, Charms, and Herbology - but today was different.

He didn't know if that was such a good thing.

-

The sun was low in the sky when he came.

A loud crack filled the air, one primal enough that Harry would have thought that it was about to storm if it wasn't for the sky being clear and the overwhelming feeling of magic filling the air.

Magic was always the most overwhelming for the teen when he'd gone an extended amount of time without it. It was all consuming and demanding of his attention. Even being around the muted magic of Alex wasn't enough to stop Harry from turning to the sudden flurry of it like a beast that feeds on magic itself (like a basilisk).

That desperate movement was enough to draw cold eyes to the teen, fixing him with the sort of harsh glare that made the boy draw in on himself on instinct alone.

"Potter," the potions master sneered, his voice cold in the way that it often only was with idiotic first years, Neville, or Harry himself when he had done something that caused the man to call him by his last name rather than avoiding saying his name at all if he could.