It was a worried Aunt Petunia that greeted Harry when he arrived back home in the evening. Slughorn had declined to enter the house again, simply dropping Harry off via apparition. Harry didn't even get the chance to ring the doorbell before he was ushered inside, hot cocoa pressed into his hands, along with a ham sandwich. Harry bit into it gladly. It had been a long shopping trip and he'd only had ice cream.
"Everything went alright Auntie," Harry assured Petunia as he sat down and sipped his drink, causing his aunt to breathe out in relief.
"You'll be going to Hogwarts then," she stated.
"What kid doesn't want to attend a magical academy?" Harry joked, before sighing. "Hogwarts makes the most sense, especially since I finished my non-magical education. Magic is just another skill I can learn to live a better life in the end."
"If you stay alive long enough to use it," Petunia said bitterly. "However, considering how incredibly, ridiculously bright you are, I imagine you'll do fine," she said with a gentle smile and not a small amount of trust. Trust that Harry had carefully built up over the years. Although to be honest, with an adult mind, it wasn't challenging being an exemplary child genius. Rather, it was too easy. If he didn't have his magic to practise he might have gone insane from boredom and grief. Losing everything and every one, one's whole life. It was incomparable to the gift of magic, but at least he'd gotten a gift. He could just as well have been reborn ordinary, or even sick in some way.
Harry still missed his old life, but 11 years was a long time to heal wounds. Magic helped, but what he expected to help more would be getting older and having more options in what to do. Being a child under the authority of others wasn't particularly fun when one had previously enjoyed adult autonomy. Maybe he'd even come to a point where he wouldn't trade this life for his previous one in a heartbeat as he aged.
"Thank you for the vote of confidence," Harry said after the long break in the conversation during which they'd just both sipped at their drinks, his aunts being considerably more alcoholic. A gin tonic. What Harry wouldn't do to get one as well. "My mother's fate hangs like a dark veil over the whole ordeal and society I will be participating in. Especially since her fate was just a symptom, not the root cause of the disease."
"Just promise me you'll get out if it starts being bad again. God knows when these freaks will start another war."
Harry shook his head. "No worries here. I'm quite attached to my life. Even if I want to participate in the Wizarding World after Hogwarts I probably wouldn't even stay in Britain. Too many problems. There must be other, untroubled countries somewhere out there where I can gain a better impression of the magical community."
"Read up on it and by god, if there's a magical way to learn languages take advantage of it. We'll even go to France if the worst comes to worst. I'm not losing another family member to… that," Petunia said bitterly while looking at Harry as if he would disappear if she let him out of her sight.
"Thanks for worrying about me. You know I'll always appreciate having a family like we have, even if our paths end up diverging," Harry said, making Petunia snort.
"Oh, there's no way you're getting out of visiting at least twice a year, even if you end up in magical China."
"Never wanted to imply anything else," Harry said and finished his hot chocolate. He stood up, "I should be getting to bed now, it's been an exhausting day." He went over to his aunt to give her a hug, before leaving for bed.
"Vernon also told me to give you a message from him," Petunia said as he was just about to exit the room.
Harry paused. "Yeah, what is it?"
"That he'll miss flipping cars with you and to always be the one finishing a fight, but not starting it," she said.
"I'm still here for another month, he could have just told me himself."
"He got emotional, left for the pub and wanted me to speak to you," Petunia replied while rolling her eyes.
"Good night, then."
"Sleep well," Petunia said.
Harry exited the room to the sight of his aunt refilling her gin.
-/-
Harry stared at the tall apple tree that had grown on top of the graves of his past life. The magical phenomenon that had occurred on that wretched day had in the end made something sad into something beautiful. He hadn't been here for a while and the tree had grown even bigger than the last time he'd seen it. Its crown almost seemed to envelop the whole clearing. It's ridiculously red apples gleamed in the sun, out of season, always.
The ground around the apple tree was beautiful, overgrown with wildflowers and berries. Harry had hesitated eating anything growing here for a long time now. He looked at an apple tantalisingly being offered to him by an overburdened branch and didn't grasp for it.
He thought about his partner, and his family and grieved for a second.
The dreams? Not something to mourn too much he'd recently decided, considering he could still fulfil them. He could still go to university after all, and the economy was in better shape than it would be 30 years in the future. Being a homeowner didn't seem impossible.
Magic was the thing that changed everything. Technically he could just put muggle-repelling wards on some abandoned strip of the Mediterranean and magic himself a house. "Moving a bit fast aren't you Evans. Wards, houses, you came here to practise household charms," he chuckled.
He shook his head and with one last indecipherable gaze towards the tree, he picked up his bicycle to go towards his actual destination. A cave a few hundred metres away from the clearing in which he'd buried everything he'd ever had or wanted. Once there he threw a branch into the small rocky crack in the hill, ready to bolt, just in case something had found residency there. Once nothing happened he simply left his bike in front of the cave and entered the shadowed space. He pulled out a lantern from his backpack, turned it on and put it on the ground where he sat down on a flat rock.
Glancing to the right, where one could already see the end of the cave, barely five metres away from its entrance, he began unpacking his green backpack covered in little frogs. Out came the books he'd bought on household charms, two water bottles, one thermos, a box with his lunch in it and last but not least, some miscellaneous items he'd taken from around the house.
"But first the wandless magic," Harry said to himself and lifted a hand, snapping his fingers. A flame alighted on top of his middle finger, adding +5 fire damage to any wordless insults. Harry made the flame glow larger, as big as the finger itself, smaller, as small as a pea. These were easy exercises. Beginning to really concentrate Harry made to change the fire's colour to blue, however, after a minute he only managed to tinge it a bit into yellow instead of its previous orange. Green worked a bit better and normally Harry would have pursued the avenue more, but he had other things to do today. Flicking his hands towards the end of the cave a small fist-sized fireball evolved from the minuscule flame and fizzled out before it reached anything.
Seeing as he was dealing with the elements, the next thing Harry did was swirl his finger in a circle, collecting the moisture from his surroundings. He was barely able to gather a thimble after several minutes of trying, but freezing it was more successful than ever before. Achieving the feat with a wand must have helped get the feeling right.
Harry muttered appreciatively at the success and added the created ice ball into his thermos full of lemonade.
"Last but not least," Harry said as he picked up a metal ball usually used to play petanque and threw it towards the far end of the cave. Before it could smash against the wall he extended his hand into a gripping motion and held the ball in place in the air. With a beckoning motion, he returned it to himself, at which point he made it orbit around his sitting torso. After a few turns around him it fell on the ground, behind his back.
Picking it up again he held the ball in the palm of his right hand and pointed it at the end of the cave. He enveloped the ball slowly with his magic and mind, before pushing as hard he was able. It flew off, as fast as an arrow and crashed against the end of the cave, chipping off parts of the rock and creating an unbearable noise. "Still not able to stop it after a shot like that," Harry muttered before summoning the ball back with a lazy gesture of his arm.
Done with wandless magic he sat down in a lotus position and began to meditate, clearing his mind. Something that had been more difficult recently, since his Hogwarts letter and the accompanying professor had arrived. Who was his father? What was the difference between this world and the one he'd read about? Why had he been reborn? These were all questions that he shunted out of his mind with great proficiency, clearing it as well as he could.
There was a void, for an indecipherable amount of time and then there was something again.
Harry opened his eyes, picked up a chipped plate he'd brought with him and smashed it on the ground. The shards flew in all directions, leaving behind only a memory. With the dull-eyed gaze of someone who had just meditated he extended his arm, his wand and thinking of nothing, flicked it at the plate, "Reparo."
The shards vibrated in place, moving closer together, if one squinted.
The next step was closing his eyes, imagining the shards coming together and fusing back into what they once were. Harry willed it to happen like he did his sorcery, and then he opened his eyes, setting a focused gaze on the former plate. A flick, "Reparo."
The parts of the plate flew together slowly, spiralling in a circle on the floor as more and more pieces mended with each other. Harry didn't have to do anything, just watch the aftermath of something he'd already cast. That was until the charm stopped working halfway through, leaving the object only partially fixed.
Harry furrowed his brows and ran his thumb along his slightly rough-to-the-touch wand, wondering what the problem could have been. The book said that one needed to focus on the effect one wanted to achieve using one's imagination, and then one needed to back up the imagination with willpower and focus.
Perhaps the theory was incomplete? Possible. Harry would find higher-level material at Hogwarts. "Quite likely though. It is simply a matter of practice. Considering this is my first spell it's going very well actually," he muttered, glanced at the half-broken plate and flicked his wand at it, "Reparo," he willed the broken parts together and they did, leaving behind a pristine plate. The success caused Harry to smile. There was a reason he wanted to learn the mending charm first and that reason was simple. It was because Harry was a collector, not even out of necessity, but out of enjoyment.
However, being transported to the past and being able to buy the first edition of any collectable, and then also have a spell to repair it to perfect condition. Suffice it to say, if the whole magic or career thing didn't work out, Harry could probably live out the rest of his life buying antiques from flea markets, casting reparo at them and reselling the result for ten times the price.
Case in point, a broken first edition vinyl of ABBA's Waterloo.
"Reparo."
Correction, a pristine version of ABBA's Waterloo.
"If anything it's the mending charm that I should learn to cast wandlessly," Harry muttered, before turning his attention away from the mending charm to the spell that would save him the most time during his life unless he acquired a house-elf somehow. The scouring charm, a charm that cleaned up dirty shit and funnily enough, if it was cast at a person, would make soap rinse their mouth. Something that didn't really make sense considering a charm that vanished dirt, shouldn't be also capable of conjuring soap, but such was magic, apparently.