Chapter Two
When Harry woke up, just for a second, everything seemed somehow very, very wrong. His head ached as though it had been splitting open along his scar. His next thought was, `What scar?' He didn't have any scars save the small round one on his wrist, the souvenir of a burn from when he was small.
The next strange idea that reared its head was that someone had for some reason kidnapped him in order to give him a far nicer room then his original one, this was no cupboard under the stairs-wait, cupboard? This had always been his room, this small, bright little red room, decorated with posters of various quidditch teams, the players waving cheerfully or zooming around, doing loop de loops or huge corkscrews.
`Well,' he thought, `I certainly never had anything this nice at the Dursleys'-wait, who were the Dursleys? Harry remembered then, they were his relatives, the only ones on his mother's side that he knew of. He vaguely recalled his mum mentioning her sister-Petunia, he thought it was, and her husband, Vernon. They also had a son, about his age, who had some funny name…started with a "D…" What was it?
It didn't really matter, he decided at last. Why would it? After all, he had never met his cousin.
"Harry!" came a somewhat irritated shout, "Good grief boy, are you going to sleep all day?"
Harry rolled his eyes and threw back the covers on his bed, smiling. "Coming, Mum!" he yelled back down the stairs.
He skipped down the stairs, kissed his mother on the cheek and sat down at the little round kitchen table. Halfway through breakfast he began grinning widely as he heard a roaring thrum above the house. Lily sighed. "Well, it looks like Sirius is here."
Harry grin widened to the outer limits of what was physically possible.
"Oh, you won't be good for anything else as long as he's here. Go on. I know that you want to."
"Thanks mum!" He ran over and gave her a hug and then ran into the backyard, where he saw a stag and a giant black dog. The dog ran over and tackled him, licking his face enthusiastically. The stag was slightly calmer, but finally came over to the boy's side and, lowering his head, used his great antlers to flick the other animal away.
Instantly they began chasing each other around the yard, the dog barking excitedly and the stag tossing its enormous head and lifting its hooves high in the air.
"Dad, Sirius, stop it!" he yelled, running after them. The dog tackled the stag, which fell down, and then…wasn't there anymore. Neither was the dog, two men had taken their places. Harry tripped over them both and got tangled in the heap of limbs and shaking, laughing bodies. Finally the three black-haired people sat up, still laughing so hard that they had a difficult job remaining upright.
"So, Sirius," said one gasping, wheezing individual, "what brings you to my house on this fine day?"
The man in question climbed to his feet, still laughing, and said, "It's my motorbike. The invisibility mechanism seems to be giving out, and as Lily got top marks on the charms portion of her N.E.W.T.s, I figured that we could all work on it together. I've invited Arthur Weasley over too-you know that we'd never hear the end of it if he got left out of pulling apart some muggle machinery."
"And I'm good for nothing, I suppose."
"Oh, `acourse not James. You can shine shoes fairly well. Dig ditches, paint walls-"
Harry's father laughed and tackled him again, cutting the boy's godfather off in mid-recital.
Harry could almost hear his mother sighing from inside and a few seconds later, right on queue, the two old school friends were lifted from the ground where they hung, several feet away from one another. "Stop roughhousing, you two," came the call out of a window. "Just think of the example you're setting for Harry. Corrupting him, you are."
"Hey Sirius," asked the youth, who happened to think that his corruption was a lot more interesting then what normally went on round his house, "is Ron coming with his dad?"
"Lily, are you going to let me down sometime this century?" he roared through the open window.
"Only if you promise to behave!"
"Fine, fine," he grumbled as he began floating back to the ground. When he began mumbling under his breath, the invisible support suddenly let out, leaving him to crash to the ground. "Right nuisance your wife can be, James," he said as he picked himself up again.
"What was that?"
"Nothing!"
"Right then, Harry. Of course Ron's coming! I didn't think that you'd forgive me if I invited his dad but not him! Ginny's coming too, if Melody's up yet."
"I bet she isn't," Harry muttered darkly. "Honestly, girls."
"Go and get her, Harry," James said, finally coming down to greet the lawn again himself. "Now, Sirius, let's go and start fiddling, shall we?"
"Dad, do I have to?"
"Yes. Now go!"
Harry sighed as he went to wake his little sister up. He supposed that she wasn't bad, as sisters went, but when she and Ginny got together they had a rather nasty tendency to talk for a while, look at him, and then giggle madly. Ginny always blushed as she looked at him, giggling away. He was sure that they were laughing at him, but he never quite understood why. Was he really that funny? And then, to his horror, he found that he was blushing, just thinking about it!
`Why are girls always giggling anyway?' he wondered disconsolately. `I mean, what do they find that's so funny?' Yes, he supposed, his hair never would lie really flat unless he used copious amounts of Sleek-ez hair potion, but that stuff was for girls! The only time (thankfully) that he had ever had the stuff on his head was when, at the age of seven, his mother had decided enough was enough and frozen him with a charm to apply it for the family photos for greeting cards and so on that year.
Harry (he was always pleased to see) had walked out of every single copy of that particular photo. Luckily his mum had never pulled that stunt again. He had, however, rehearsed the counter-charm to the full body bind ever since he had learned what it was.
He paused by the door of his sister's bedroom. Melody Ann had auburn hair, like her mother, (when she was awake) sky-blue eyes, and was (also when awake) one of the most annoying creatures in existence.
`You'd never know when she's sleeping,' Harry thought, a bit resentfully, as he looked down at her. She looked so innocent, lying there in her Winnie-the-Pooh nightshirt. Yet another case of never being able to trust what you see.
"Melody," he called reluctantly from the door, "Dad says get up now."
The girl opened her eye, peeked at him, closed her eye again and muttered something about it not even being dawn yet and to come back at a more reasonable hour. Harry glanced at the clock (it was past 10) and sighed. Melody was prone to exaggeration.
"Listen, Ginny's coming over and if you don't get up, Dad is going to send her home!"
"What?" she shrieked, leaping from her pink, lace-trimmed bed to the pink floor. In his younger years, Harry hadn't even dared enter what he had perceived as being a horrifyingly lacy, pink torture chamber-and that had contained such things as Pretty Pretty Princess sets and Barbie houses in its unexplored depths.
He turned around now, rolling his eyes. "She's coming!"
He started down the stairs again, his hands in his pockets.
At least she was up now.
Smiling, he headed off to the shed were various clanging noises were emitting.
-
I have never been, or ever will be, a teenage boy, and so if anyone has any suggestions on how to write Harry they are free to tell them to me. Trust me, I can take criticism. Constructive criticism only please, if you are going to tell me just how much I am doing something wrong, then give me suggestions on how to do it right.
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