Fixing the past (Sirry)

Chapter 11

Since Harry had come home for the summer break, or as Harry liked to say, since he was forced to go to the house of those Muggles, which was only days before his birthday, it should be added (he made a tantrum so that the stay was minimal), Uncle Vernon had treated him like a bomb that might go off at any moment; because Harry wasn't a normal boy. As a matter of fact, he was as not normal as it is possible to be.

Harry Potter was a wizard — a wizard fresh from his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And if the Dursleys were unhappy to have him back for the holidays, it was nothing to how Harry felt.

He missed Hogwarts so much it was like having a constant stomachache. He missed the castle, with its secret passageways and ghosts, his classes (though perhaps not Snape, the Potions master), the mail arriving by owl, eating banquets in the Great Hall, sleeping in his four-poster bed in the tower dormitory, visiting the game-keeper, Hagrid, in his cabin next to the Forbidden Forest in the grounds, and, especially, Quidditch, the most popular sport in the Wizarding world (six tall goalposts, four flying balls, and fourteen players on broomsticks).

All Harry's spellbooks, his wand, robes, cauldron, and top-of-the-line Nimbus Two Thousand broomstick had been locked in a cupboard under the stairs by 'Uncle Vernon' the instant Harry had come home. That was the condition that the Muggles put in to receive Harry before the arrival of letters and in truth nobody protested, after all, those were the indications that the Blacks were about to tell those fools to be able to put everything together as Ron had specified in his vision. What's more, Vernon's conditions ended up convincing Orion and Walburga about the redhead's vision and the benefits they would get from those negligence.

Uncle Vernon had even padlocked Harry's owl, Hedwig, inside her cage, to stop her from carrying messages to anyone in the Wizarding world. Something that had rubbed Harry in all the wrong places and from letters from his uncles, when they found out about that detail of his terms, they didn't enjoy it either, but it had to be done. Plus it wasn't like Harry was truly incommunicado.

Harry looked nothing like the rest of the family, which should have alarmed the wizarding community long ago, or at least his mother, that is, there was nothing similar to his supposed sister. Uncle Vernon was large and neckless, with an enormous black moustache; Aunt Petunia was horse-faced and bony; Dudley was blond, pink, and porky. Harry, on the other hand, was small and skinny, with brilliant green eyes and jet-black hair that was always untidy. He wore round glasses (that didn't really have a prescription anymore), and on his forehead was a thin, lightning-shaped scar.

It was this scar that made Harry so particularly unusual, even for a wizard. This scar was the only hint of Harry's very mysterious past, of the reason he had been left on the Dursleys' doorstep eleven years before.

At the age of one year old, Harry had somehow survived a curse from the greatest Dark sorcerer of all time, Lord Voldemort, whose name most witches and wizards still feared to speak. Harry's parents had died in Voldemort's attack, but Harry had escaped with his lightning scar, and somehow — nobody understood why —Voldemort's powers had been destroyed the instant he had failed to kill Harry.

So Harry had grown up with his maternal uncles, never better, because at the age of five (at least this time), his true maternal family came to take him out of the house of his mother's adoptive family. They took him to give him everything his heart yearned for and to explain more of his world, things that he even ignored in advance.

Exactly one year ago, he received the letter that changed his life and broke the bubble he was in. Since he went to occupy his place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where the clock hands ran again and the race to survive began anew with Voldemort coming out of hiding and showing his ugly face for the first time in years. But the school year ended and he went back to his family, but no one was supposed to know about it, so after a vision, he was now back with the Muggles. People without magic who for his luck and their luck ignored him in every breath, although that didn't take away from them how mean they were.