Guys, the first 8 chapters are thoughts and reflections Harry is having.

If you want a more clarity on the story you can read them. Or you can go to chapter 9 and start reading the story directly.

.....

Harry Potter was sitting on a huge boulder in his backyard at #4 Privet Drive in Little Whining, Surrey, England. The rock was sheltered by a gnarly old fruit tree and was one of Harry's favorite places in the yard to hide.

When he was younger, his cousin Dudley, who was something of a bully, often forgot to even look for him there because he couldn't scale it. If he did remember to look there for him, Harry could outlast him, as Dudley grew bored very easily. Aunt Petunia had never once called Harry down from the rock while Dudley was lying in wait for him.

Harry didn't know it, but it was because he liked the boulder as a place to sit and think while hiding from Dudley that the rock was still in his Aunt and Uncle's backyard instead of having been broken up and hauled away a long time ago.

His Aunt had noticed how Harry was using it and made his Uncle stop calling contractors to get rid of it, pointing out that so long as Harry had a place to get away from Dudley's need to roughhouse, they didn't have to worry about Dudley taking an injury due to Harry's freakishness.

If he was on the boulder, it meant he wasn't interested in or wanting to join Dudley as he played with his friends, which meant dear Dudley was safer, or having to deal with the neighbors calling to complain about him. Which they had done more than once. Which him, they would complain about, wasn't something she specified and Vernon didn't ask since he just assumed it'd be Harry, his freakish nephew, who'd disturb them.

Petunia knew better. But then she'd never told Vernon it was their sweet Dudders the neighbors didn't like. She knew the neighbors saw Dudley as nothing but a bully whose favorite victim was his own cousin, and more than one neighbor had warned her if she didn't get the situation under control, chances were good it'd lead the boys into a criminal lifestyle as adults.

Both boys, the neighbors had insisted when she'd tried to point out that her nephew was predisposed to that lifestyle already given who his parents had been but that her sweet Dudders had her and his Father as an example of how decent people lived.

They'd pointed out that children who were bullies, to the point where they had a favorite target for their abuse, often grew up to become thugs and enforcers for petty crime bosses. And the prisons were full of men like that.

So she'd looked for a way to separate the boys without alerting Vernon to those nasty comments from the neighbors as to their son's possible future.

Giving Harry more chores to do didn't work because, if Dudley was bored enough, he'd just go disturb Harry and often make a mess of whatever chore the boy was trying to do. That would lead to Vernon punishing the boy for failing to do his chores properly because of course he wouldn't be done when Vernon went to check them.

Which only gave her Dudley more reason to go bad as that was his intention when he'd gone to mess with the boy to begin with.

But then she'd seen Harry scaling the boulder only to sit calmly on top of it while Dudley danced around the base yelling and screaming because he couldn't reach him.

After a bit Dudley got bored and wandered off. Harry had come down the rock and gone back to what he'd been doing before Dudley had chased him onto it. The boy had never said a word about Dudley's behavior or how he'd interfered in his work that afternoon.

Of course, it wouldn't have done him any good to complain about her Dudders anyway. It took a few more times of seeing that before she understood, but once she did, she stopped Vernon from trying to get rid of it, and it became Harry's rock to both the household and the neighbors.

But today Harry wasn't hiding from his cousin. There wasn't any need to. His cousin wasn't here anymore. No one was. No one but Harry.

He was thinking. Thinking as he had been for most of the summer, actually. It was three days until he returned to Hogwarts for another year of school and near-death experience disguised as saving someone, the school, or just the whole freaking world. He idly wondered which it would be this time.

Would Dumbledore place another student in harm's way again to force Harry to rescue them? Or would he bring someone or something dangerous into the school thereby placing everyone in danger? Or would the threat actually come from Lord Voldie again this year? There was no doubt in his mind it'd be one of the three. It always was.

Actually, it was rare that the Snake-faced, self-proclaimed Lord was a threat to Harry's well-being of his own accord. Usually, the only times he and Harry had a run-in at all was due to Albus' manipulations and games.

Just because he was over a hundred years old gave him no right to include the innocent lives of children under his care in his efforts to relieve his boredom.

Harry well understood being bored and doing anything you could think of to relieve that boredom but the old professor took things too far. Way too far, if you asked him. Unfortunately, no one ever did.