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AN: Wasn't easy getting here, but we're finally at the Summer before Year Three.
-/-
If anyone had happened upon a certain clearing with a gigantic apple tree and three tombstones during the first weeks of summer vacation, they would have found a scene that would have confused them as to what century they were currently in. A boy, approximately thirteen years of age, who was filling out nicely with some growing muscles and height, was swinging a silver sword up, and down, up, and down, relentlessly. He was shirtless, with his longish red hair tied into a neat ponytail. Sweat was flying everywhere and his pants clung to his legs like hyenas to dead meat.
It was naturally Harry Evans wielding the sword, and it was naturally the magical hat that was the sword being wielded.
"98," the sword said when Harry swung it down.
"98," it said when he raised it back up in a diagonal slash.
"98." A block.
"97," a down-wards slash.
It was endless. Just practise after practice after practice. Harsh breaths and gulps for air being taken in a staccato of desperation. Muscles aching, being repaired by the wiggenweld potion, before being torn to shreds again and then coming back stronger.
Harry loved every second of it. There was just something about learning how to use a sword that spoke to his inner, and outer child. There was no need to fear that he was being instructed suboptimally either, as he was literally being taught by the sword he wielded.
"And, done," the sword said. They'd finished the drill and it was time for a short rest. "Good job, Harry," Chanithachuah said. "Glad to see you put in an utterly ridiculous amount of energy and dedication into anything you set your mind to, be it Occlumency, the disarming jinx, or sword-fighting." The voice seemed to be coming from the big red ruby embedded in the pommel, but really it was coming from a slight vibration of the entire blade which culminated in that area.
"It helps me think for the rest of the day," Harry said as he struggled for breath and walked slowly around the clearing trying to still his heart.
"Well, that was it for me. I'm looking forward to this mediaeval festival you promised, but otherwise, you do you," the sword said before transforming, still in Harry's hand, into a leather hat. Harry promptly carried the hat to his backpack, pulled out a Walkman and started playing some music. David Bowie, this time. Chanithachuah had explained after they'd come back that in hindsight, classical music was a type of music that was readily available at Hogwarts, and that he'd rather spend his limited time exploring modern muggle music instead. Harry had been all too happy to oblige. The classics were great, but not to the extent that the hat had insisted on listening to them last year. It didn't help that its favourite composer had crystallised to be Mozart, who was Harry's least favourite.
Done with hooking up the hat, Harry mentally went through the set of priorities he'd given to himself this summer.
Wand-magic was still out of reach due to the trace, none of the wands he'd looted ended up being compatible. Sword-fighting and Occlumency had just been finished. It turned out that Chanithachuah greatly enjoyed probing Harry's mind while being wielded, perhaps even more so than at all other times of the day. Something about constant vigilance, especially in combat.
The only thing Harry really worked on in the clearing other than that was wandless magic. He'd been given one task from Flitwick, and that was to concentrate the effect created through a wandless finite into his left fist.
But… Harry had already been doing that every day since he'd come back. He wanted to work on something else.
"I'm allowed to work on something fun, not just something useful," he told himself as he considered his options. As a second wandless priority Flitwick had told him to work on telekinesis since it would likely be the most helpful in the ring. A third priority was water since it could help him against opponents with veela heritage who could unleash firestorms at a moment's notice.
But Harry also liked fire. It was fun. And it was what he'd used to win his first duel against Tonks. Perhaps it was a bit of a dumb idea to put a whole day's focus on it. Especially in a forest. But… His water-shaping skills and telekinesis had recently plateaued. Sure, they'd passively increased the mastery with which he could use water spells and force spells, but still, it was time for a change of pace.
He held up a hand and clenched his fingers, summoning forth a blazing hot orange fireball at the top of his palm. He stared into the flame like an idiot for several minutes, mesmerised by the patterns of his own magic being given thermodynamic form. Then he started shaping it.
Triangle.
Circle.
Square.
Circle.
Triangle.
Square.
The variations were as endless as they were boring. At some point, he started trying to replicate Tom Riddle's trick of writing his name into the air. Harry Evans didn't offer quite as many possibilities as Tom Marvolo Riddle, but, it did offer gems such as:
Rary Hevans; Hary Revans; Sarny Harev and the best one, in Harry's humble opinion, As Har Revan. Which, if one pronounced it a bit oddly, could be read as 'Ass Hair Revan,' which was just Harry's personal homage to the Star Wars universe.
Unfortunately, he never did manage to get past five letters. The fire dissipated after that regardless of how focused he was. As Har Revan would forever remain unspelled, but not unthought and unappreciated.
After he was done with the fire Harry had to quickly ride home, so that he would be back in time for lunch. His aunt would give him shit if he didn't manage. But, thankfully, the pedals of a bicycle could be propelled by telekinesis, which made the whole thing vastly simpler.
Harry zoomed home. The only lament was that he wasn't a Zoomer anymore. Now he was just a filthy millennial. An early one at that.
-/-
"That looks nasty," Harry said once he arrived back home and parked his bike in the garage. He was referring to the oil spill on the floor, which a grumpy Vernon and Dudley were busy cleaning up with a bunch of rags.
"The guy who sold us the Cadillac didn't tell us he forgot to empty it," Vernon grumbled, referring to the highly stylised and baby blue car taking up most of the space in the garage.
"What's the point in fixing up an American car, the driver's seat is on the wrong side anyway. No way will you get to drive it anywhere, or sell it to anyone who wants to do that," Harry said with a slight tone of confusion. He hadn't bothered asking where his uncle and cousin were going this morning, just knowing that they were picking something up. He hadn't known it was a car.
He smiled. It seemed like the two had bonded now that Harry was gone most of the time and Dudley had gotten old enough to help with the car repair part of the family business.
"We already called a car museum and asked," Dudley said proudly, with a tarred face and black hands. "They said they want it."
"If we can fix it up properly," Vernon added. "They're this new thing that's opening up outside London. A car museum where you can drive the cars, for a fee of course. They have a private track so the inversion isn't an issue."
"That's cool, I'd actually be interested in going to something like that," Harry said with a surprised mutter. It was quite a great idea actually. The only issue was. He still didn't have a driver's licence. And likely wouldn't, for a while more considering he was only now turning thirteen.
"Get in line," Vernon said with a smile. "I'll sell this to them for cheap if I get an all-inclusive ride around."
"Dad!" Dudley exclaimed. "You promised I could get that skater VHS set if we sold it for more than 500 pounds."
"I never said I'd not try to sell it below that," Vernon snorted with a roll of his eyes. "Skating, where is this world coming to," he muttered.
Dudley looked disappointed and mad, which gave Harry a great idea of what to give the boy for Christmas. A skateboard hardly counted as a corrupting present, did it?
"Come on guys, let me get this," Harry said with a sigh and bent down towards the oil spill, putting a finger towards it. He wanted to test something and now was as good a time as any.
Due to his developing sensing skills, which were originally meant for better identifying curses and enchantments and such, Harry had found something new when coming back to the Dursleys. He'd found the trace on his wand, a small thing that he hadn't noticed back in Hogwarts due to the ambient magic. But either way, it was such an inoffensive little piece of spell-work that hardly anyone would be able to tell it was there.
A little knot of grey magical thread wound around the stick-shaped magic of the wand. It had shrivelled up to even smaller proportions in the magic-less environment of Privet Drive, but it created a small field, in which, Harry imagined, if magic was cast, it would alert the ministry.
It just so happened that the garage was outside of that field, so without further ado, he channelled a wandless scourgify into the floor. Under Vernon and Dudley's stupefied gaze, the oil spill started clearing up. Harry's spell wasn't powerful enough to disappear the whole thing at once, but if he continued channelling it?
The spill was gone soon, leaving nothing behind.
In a synchronous movement, Vernon and Dudley looked at each other, before looking at Harry and holding up their absolutely filthy arms entreatingly, with puppy dog eyes. It didn't look nearly as cute considering their coal miner look, but it wasn't up to Harry anyway.
"Not comfortable casting that one on humans yet," he said with a shake of the head.
"Aren't you going to get in trouble for this?" Vernon suddenly asked, concerned.
"Yeah, no magic outside of school. But I saw you playing with water last year in France…" Dudley said before trailing off.
"I think I found a way to circumvent that particular issue," Harry said. "If I don't get an angry letter from the ministry then maybe I can clean the whole house. God knows that no matter how hard Petunia tries, there will always be things that can't be removed by a non-professional."
Vernon nodded sagely. "It can be my birthday present, to her," he said.
A tick mark developed on Harry's forehead.
"If anything, wouldn't it be my present?" he asked.
"Is this the gratitude I get for raising you all those years? Who do you think taught you the work ethic that allowed you to develop that skill, huh?" the man sputtered. Both his son and his nephew gave him doubting looks.
Vernon sullenly crossed his arms and looked away. "You'll see," he muttered. "My present will be much better than any fancy magic." He looked towards Dudley. "Let's go hose down. This is a mess."
They parted ways, father and son going outside to get cleaned up, and Harry going into the living area of the house, where he walked into Petunia holding up a phone speaker.
The woman turned towards him and gestured for him to come over. "It's for you," she said, "Tonks. Right on time for lunch, she knows your habits, this girl," she said and handed Harry the speaker before disappearing into the kitchen.
"Thank god you're here Harry," Tonks said over the line once they'd exchanged greetings. "Your aunt was grilling me like a sausage. Please never be late again for whatever you do in the mornings, that was horrible."
"You haven't told me yet why you can only call at lunchtime and after dinner," Harry said while rolling his eyes.
"It's a surprise, dumbass," Tonks huffed. "Anyway, are you free this weekend? My parents just told me that they were invited to a wedding, no children allowed. You could come hang out for those days, they're letting me be since I'm 17 now. Adult in the magical world and all that."
"Tonks," Harry started, unsure of how to communicate this next bit to his good friend. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this. But you live in Manchester."
"Haha," his friend said in a dead voice. "Thanks for breaking the news. But you don't get it. I'm gaggin for someone to talk to who has a ball in the game. I'm so down in the strops I snapped at me mum yesterday. I need to see a friend or I'm gonna go bonkers."
"What about your other friends, the ones who did the apparition licence already? Can't they just, I don't know, literally pop over?" Harry asked a bit doubtfully. Why did Tonks want to hang out with him specifically?
A longer silence followed on the phone, followed by a bit of a sad
confession. "I was neglecting my friends already at the start of the year, for Charlie. Then after the… you know, I continued doing it for the grind as you would call it. We've had a falling out."
Harry could have made a joke that with Cedric and Penny he officially had more friends than Tonks, but decided against it. Tonks needed encouragement, not jokes. "I'm sorry to hear that. But in the end, if this was the limit of their patience, you wouldn't have made it after graduation anyway. It might surprise some students, but Hogwarts is in fact the time of your life when you have the most free time you'll ever have."
"Thanks, Harry, for that absolutely depressing take, you wanker," Tonks said with a sigh. "So, are you coming or not?"
"Of course I am," Harry said while rolling his eyes. "I'm a loyal puff alright. I just think that my aunt will want to speak to your dad first."
"Oh, no worries, I'll go get him," Tonks said.
"No, you dumb cunt," Harry hissed, preventing the girl from leaving. He repeated himself, more slowly. "I'm saying, maybe you should use your very special talent, to call your dad, so that he can talk to my aunt, and tell her that he'd love to have me over, under his adult supervision."
"Ah, right, sorry, I'm such a snit sometimes," Tonks said, her voice switching to a deeper and more masculine pitch in the middle of the sentence. "Alright young man, can I talk to your guardian?" she said, affecting the tone of voice of a strict middle school teacher.
"Auntie!" Harry shouted, and it was obvious that Petunia had been trying to listen in on the conversation from how she appeared around the corner to take the phone off his hands and talk to 'Ted.'
-/-
AN: Imagine the shenanigans you could get up to with metamorph powers...
If you want to read ahead you can go over to Patreon, all Tiers are worth it imo atm for this story (but especially if you like my other ones as well). next five chapters of tier 1 are a whole mini-arc including the longest chapter I've ever written for this fic. Tier 2 includes the Dumbledore interlude that was voted on a while back, and Tier 3 is already in Year 3 of Hogwarts with the duelling tournament done with. it's also kinda worth it to be a free Patreon, cuz you can give suggestions on the Posts where I ask for interlude suggestions and first chapter suggestions for future polls.
Also, there is this new Patreon feature that I enabled where an algorithm sends discounted memberships to free members it thinks are most likely to start paying, lol. Was pretty surprised when that popped up as an option recently. In the end the website just wants more of your money, which I don't of course. I value primarily your emotional support... which I measure in amount of money donated to the cause (cause being me affording my high fucking rent) Did you know that Switzerland legally allows landlords to raise rent even during the contract for the current interest rate of the central bank? I didn't, until my rent suddenly got more expensive out of nowhere (of course they are not obliged to lower the rent back after the interest rates fall again), that after I already had to start paying more for gas heating after the Russia thing started, which mostly just gave companies the chance to price gouge my ass out of my non-existent savings.
Anyway I'm starting to rant, have a great week y'all.
Over.