Privet Drive was a perfectly normal street. It was lined with perfectly normal houses, one nearly identical to the next. The inhabitants of these homes were all perfectly normal people as well, save for one house. In this house lived a family who tried its hardest to be perfectly normal. But there has always been one aspect of Mr. and Mrs.
Dursley's lives that has never been anything close to their definition of normal. That thing was sitting on his lumpy bed in the smallest room of the house, filled with their son's old, broken toys accumulated throughout his pampered life. That thing was none other than their nephew, Harry Potter.
Harry Potter didn't pay any attention to the numerous objects strewn about his room. He sat motionless on his bed staring unseeingly at the bare wall in front of him. He had been sitting in the same position since he had returned to his "home" for the summer exactly 36 hours ago. Harry Potter had not eaten, slept, spoken a word, nor even averted his gaze in all that time.
It was his snowy white owl, Hedwig, who finally broke Harry out of his reverie. Returning from her nighttime hunt, she alighted on his shoulder and nipped affectionately at his ear, giving a soft hoot. Broken from his trance, Harry glanced at his bedside clock to find that it was just after 3:00 in the morning.
Harry absentmindedly stroked Hedwig's feathers as he realized something else he'd neglected to do in the past 36 hours. He then promptly ran out of his room to use the loo, leaving an indignant owl in his wake.
Finished relieving himself of his most pressing concern, Harry realized how hungry he was. A growl from his stomach reaffirmed his decision to sneak down to the kitchen to scrounge up something to eat.
He quietly made his way through the hallway and down the stairs, careful to avoid the floorboards and steps that he knew to creak. Once reaching his destination, he set out to make himself a sandwich. It only took Harry two bites before realizing that despite his obvious hunger he didn't have much of an appetite.
Harry forced his way through the rest of his sandwich despite the rising sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. Finished with his midnight meal, Harry cleaned up after himself and soundlessly made his way back up the stairs and into his bedroom where he collapsed onto his bed and promptly dropped off into a fitful night's sleep.
The next few days progressed in much the same manner for Harry. He only ever left his room in the middle of the night, and he had not encountered any of his relatives since the day they had picked him up from King's Cross Station. This was one of the very few things in his life for which he was grateful for at the moment.
He spent those days in bed drifting in and out of sleep. To be honest, Harry couldn't really tell the difference between his sleeping and waking hours for he continuously relived the same moments within his mind regardless of his state.
Harry had become rather adept at avoiding and eluding his enemies. (He had been doing it since he was a baby when Voldemort first targeted him.) His years of practice could not help him this time though, for Harry Potter had become his own worst enemy, for the moment anyway. He did still have the darkest wizard of the century plotting his death.
Harry could not escape the mental images of that dreadful night when he dragged five of his closest friends from their school in Scotland to the Ministry of Magic in London into certain danger on a harebrained scheme to rescue his godfather from the clutches of Lord Voldemort.
What Harry had not known at the time was that he was being duped by Voldemort; Sirius, his godfather, was actually safe and sound in his London home at the time. The ensuing disaster led to injury for all five of his friends plus several Order of the Phoenix members who had come to their rescue and worst of all, the death of his godfather, who had been a part of the rescue team.
The moment Harry relived most often in his mind was watching as his godfather fell through that accursed veil. This moment brought a mix of emotions through Harry: pain and grief at the loss of the closest thing to a father he had ever known, anger at his murderer, Sirius' own cousin Bellatrix Lestrange, anger at Sirius for not taking the duel seriously (if only he had attacked her rather than wasting time taunting her), helplessness as he could do nothing but watch as Sirius tumbled through the archway, and confusion as to what the bloody hell that veil was exactly.
Remus Lupin, Harry's only remaining connection to his long deceased parents, had held Harry back from following Sirius through the archway explaining that Sirius was gone and would not be coming back. Everyone he had talked to since then only reiterated this fact, yet Harry didn't understand how it worked.
If the arch was a doorway to the world of the dead, shouldn't it work both ways? It wasn't as though Sirius had died properly, leaving behind his body while his spirit moved on to its next adventure. No, Sirius still had his body with him, and as far as Harry was concerned, that should mean that there was still hope that he could come back. Hope was all he had at this point.
When Harry wasn't brooding over his godfather's state, he was reliving the rest of the events of that evening. After the shock of Sirius' tumble through the veil, Harry had raced after Bellatrix and cast the worst curse he could think of on her: the Cruciatus Curse.
It was this act more than anything else that stole Harry's appetite away. The thought of what he had done made him physically ill. He had cast an Unforgivable Curse. Not only that, he'd cast the worst Unforgivable in his mind.
He wasn't looking for control or a quick death for Bellatrix; he wanted to inflict pain, to make Bellatrix suffer as he was suffering at the time, as he was still currently suffering. She had mocked him for his effort, for the curse did not work properly. He had learned the hard way that when casting the curse you had to actually enjoy causing others pain. If you didn't enjoy causing others pain you were only left with a feeling a self-loathing. Casting that curse had made Harry feel as though he was no better than Voldemort himself.
It was that feeling that had left Harry completely powerless when Voldemort confronted Harry that night and had allowed Voldemort to possess Harry and gain control over his body. Harry still shivered when he thought of that; it left him feeling as if he was dirty, tainted, like he was covered in dirt that would never wash off.
His hatred of himself in conjunction with his grief over the loss of Sirius caused Harry to drop his guard and welcome death's sweet release. Had it not been for Albus Dumbledore's impeccable timing, Harry would have been reunited with his parents and godfather in the afterlife that night. Being in the Headmaster's debt was not somewhere Harry wanted to be at the moment.
Harry learned later that night that the illustrious headmaster had been withholding quite a bit of information from him, not the least of which was the reason why Voldemort had tried to murder him almost fifteen years ago when he was only fifteen months old and the reason why Voldemort might want to lure Harry to the Department of Mysteries in the Ministry of Magic.
Harry learned that a prophecy was made before he was born about the one who would have the power to defeat Voldemort. One line kept playing repeatedly in Harry's mind: "And either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives." That is what Harry's life had come down to: kill or be killed. The entire war rested on Harry's shoulders, and nobody had saw fit to let him know or to help him prepare.
The headmaster thought it best to hide this from Harry for the five years since they had first met. Surely nothing bad ever came from acting out of ignorance, right? Dumbledore was the great puppet master in the story, and Harry realized that he'd been nothing but one of his puppets all along, his strings manipulated behind the scenes. Harry realized that the real weapon the Order had been guarding all along had been him and the knowledge that he was in fact their only weapon against Voldemort.
With this thought, Harry realized why he had been left with his viciously cruel relatives all his life and why he had no say even now in where he spent his summer vacations. No one ever worried about his well-being or happiness; they just wanted to make sure nothing damaged their precious weapon.
Harry was sick of everything in his life right now: himself, his relatives, the Order, his headmaster, and more than anything else Harry was sick of feeling helpless and out of control in his life. It was this final thought that Harry focused on one night as he drifted off to sleep. Before sleep claimed him, he made a vow that no longer would he sit idly by and be manipulated.
"From now on, my life is in my own hands. I'm taking control. If Voldemort wants to come kill me, let him come. Next time I'll be ready for that bastard and that bitch," Harry murmured as his eyelids began to droop and he finally succumbed to sleep.