Disclaimer: I do not and am not trying to own any of the works or ideas of J.K. Rowling. She is the sole owner of that material.
Chapter 1
Harry sat quietly in the corner of the library staring at a dusty tome he had picked from the shelf behind him. His eyes, staring blankly at the text, fell from line to line, his hand reaching out and turning the page. To the casual observer, it looked like he was reading. He was trying to, but his mind could not focus.
It had been a couple days since Sirius had fallen through the veil. “It’s my fault,” Harry thought. He turned another page, slowly tracing the lines with his eyes.
“I’m so sorry Sirius,” he whispered as a tear fell to the page.
He watched the tear hit the page and slowly soak in, smearing a letter of the handwritten text. As Harry looked at the smudged letter, he noticed the sentence it blurred and started reading.
“What one must understand about magic is that there is no such thing as good and evil. Magic is sentient to a certain extent, but not enough to split itself by defining aspects of its nature with moral ambiguity. The ‘darker’ magics are considered evil due to their effect on the castor and the person affected. Apart from the sometimes detrimental aspects of darker magic, it -- by nature of being more powerful -- is exceedingly more difficult to control. The result is either untalented warlocks throwing about massive amounts of uncontrolled magic that has been defined by the castor to cause destruction of some nature, or it results in extremely talented wizards and witches using some of the most powerful spells ever developed. Neither of these options were appealing to the Ministry of Magic and so in 1543 they established…”
He sat there. He felt he should feel some strong emotion but his body was simply too tired and drained for him to feel anything other than mild curiosity. He flipped to the first page of his book, Magics by Arthur Sarcosta.
Harry stared at the book, trying to remember what shelf he had grabbed it from. He turned the pages to the end of the chapter he was reading.
“There is no such thing as good and evil when it comes to magic. There is only power and the minds that use it.”
His mind traveled back to his first year. “There is no good and evil, only power, and those to weak to seek it,” he muttered to himself. He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe the statement, not because it came from the Dark Lord but… well, to be honest, he didn’t know why. Everything about the way he had been taught since he came to Hogwarts was the opposite. There were strictly defined lines of good and evil, and what was useful and what wasn’t. It didn’t surprise Harry at all that the Ministry restricted knowledge and labeled it as evil because they were nervous about people using it to cause problems.
Harry might have been disgusted or upset with the world he lived in a week or two ago, but again he was simply too tired to feel anything more than mild interest in the situation. “I could get used to this,” he thought. “It’s so much easier to think about everything when I’m too tired to feel anything.”
He grabbed the book and performed an obscuring charm he had found when he was looking for something to teach the DA. Instead of removing the wards or charms already on the object, the charm blocked their presence off from the rest of the world, the people the wards would alert. In short, it meant that he could put the book in his bag and walk out without having to check it out with Madame Pince and without worrying about any anti-theft charms going off.
Walking out of the library, he briefly wondered why there weren’t protections against the charm he had just performed. It was a simple enough charm, which could bypass just about any basic anti-theft ward and some of the more complicated ones. As he made his way to Gryffindor tower, his mind wandered and he zoned out.
* * *
“Courage,” Harry said, rolling his eyes slightly at the simple password as he stepped through the portrait hole. He looked around and didn’t see anyone he knew very well. Ron and Hermione were still at St. Mungo’s recovering from their injuries, so he walked up the stairs to his dormitory, dropped his bag and collapsed onto the bed. He lay there for several minutes before taking his wand out to cast a silencing spell and a privacy ward. He lay back down, hesitating only for a moment before spending the next thirty minutes clearing his mind.
* * *
Draco Malfoy sat in the opposite corner of the library finishing an extra potions project that he was doing for Professor Snape. He set his quill down and looked over his essay. He sighed. It still needed work and he prepared himself for another hour of writing. He put his hand to his neck and tried massaging the kinks out of it, then pulled his hand away thinking of the reprimand he would receive from his father if he saw him giving in to this habit in a public area. He sighed again and then winced as he thought about even more reprimands against sighing.
He glanced up and looked around the library. Potter. He was sitting across from him. Draco leaned back in his chair and regarded him. Now here was an enigma. Everything about Potter confused him. The Boy-who-Lived, champion of the wizarding world… Draco always assumed Potter would own every part of those titles. Using his fame to get away with all kinds of things, using it to make the school worship him in all his arrogant glory. But he didn’t.
When Potter first arrived at school, he looked starved… for food or love or both, Draco couldn’t tell. He looked at everyone with those bright, shining, green eyes, searching for something. Again, he wasn’t sure for what, affection maybe. But that had changed over the years. Each year Potter became more and more private. Ever since the end of last year, when he appeared with the Hufflepuff’s body, he had changed even more. To be honest, though he would never admit it, Draco was a little scared of Potter. “Well, scared isn’t quite the right word,” Draco thought as he reflected. Nervous was a better description.
No, Potter had changed a lot. He reminded Draco of his father’s friends. It was the way he walked, the way he looked wary, wild and dangerous. Just like his father’s friends, the sense of wariness seemed to be a part of who they were, as though they expected to be attacked at every corner but were too prepared and confident to look anything more than dangerous. Potter stood up, grabbed his book and cast a charm that made Draco’s eyes open in surprise, though not so wide that anyone else would notice.
“Well, well, Potter. Casting dark charms so you can steal a library book,” he thought. “And he did it wordlessly which adds a level of difficulty beyond the fact that that charm is no simple feat.” He then tried to forget what he’d just thought. It just added another layer to Potter that, as he had observed more and more, he didn’t entirely want to know about. But his own curiosity, and the thought of a reward from the Dark Lord for providing interesting information, made him sit back and continue his thinking. His essay sat untouched in front of him until curfew when he made his way back to the dungeons.
* * *
When Harry awoke the next morning, he was startled to find that actually it was morning. Not only that, but he wasn’t sweating. He couldn’t feel the spells placed around his bed straining against his magic, and his throat wasn’t raw from screaming. He made an instant decision that he would put all of his focus into learning oclumency. Clearing his mind was the only explanation for not having his usual nightmares as well as the ones that the Dark Lord continuously gifted him.
Trying not to wake his roommates, he quietly walked into the bathrooms and showered quickly. As he stepped out, he looked at his body in the mirror. His first thought was that he didn’t look as skinny as he used to. He had been running in the mornings ever since the Room of Requirement had given him a book that explained a link between physical strength and magical strength. He continued his examination, counting all the scars on his body. A variety on his back and upper legs were from Uncle Vernon.
The basilisk scar was particularly nasty. He always made sure to keep it covered because it emitted a kind of aura that could put the viewer in a trance. He had tested that after he caught Neville staring at it when he looked up from reading in bed. After he had shaken Neville out of his trance, Neville had vomited and continued vomiting throughout the night. Neville didn’t guess that it had anything to do with the scar and just assumed it was something he ate. But it drove Harry to test the scar for lingering magic. He had spent days searching for a spell which would show the magic in an area. When he finally found and used the spell it definitely showed the latent magic in the scar; it resembled his lightning bolt curse scar in that it was surrounded by dark magic. The difference was that the magic in his curse scar appeared to be swirling and pouring from it, whereas the basilisk scar was surrounded by a latent field of dark magic. “Of course,” Harry thought, “it isn’t really dark magic, is it? Just magic used with intent to do evil.”
He continued surveying his scars. As Harry looked at each of them, he remembered how and why he got them. It reminded him of how much he and others had given up over the years as well as much they had achieved.
He pulled his clothes on after toweling off and was about to go grab his bag from his room when he remembered that classes had ended. Instead of grabbing his bag, he opened it and grabbed the book he had taken the night before and headed for breakfast.
He was in a pretty good mood considering everything going on right now. He hadn’t had any nightmares and he’d miraculously made progress in oclumency. So far, it was a good day. As he made his way into the Great Hall, the empty seats where Ron and Hermione usually sat dampened his mood.
He walked to the furthest end of the Griffindor table and sat down. Grabbing a couple pieces of toast, he pulled his book out and turned to a chapter titled “Runes”.
“Runes and rituals are the origins of the modern day method of focusing magic that was developed by the Romans during the height of their empire. Though the word ‘origins’ implies a level of simplicity, runes and rituals are far from simple so they evolved into the simpler method of using wands and words as foci. Rituals were, and still are, incredibly complicated methods of invoking magic. Runes on the other hand have gotten much simpler with the discovery of wand-making. Much information on runes has been lost and classes taught on the subject lean toward learning the runic language rather than using it for its actual purpose ” magic. The method is quite basic in theory. Draw the rune with your wand while focusing on the image of the rune, then push your magic into the rune to power it. This idea is simple enough, but…”
Harry stopped reading the book. “Just draw the rune and push power into it. Huh. Sounds pretty easy to me.” He glanced around and noticed a fourth-year sitting at the Ravenclaw table reading a runes textbook. Harry was about to get up and ask if he could borrow it when two things occurred to him that made him sit back down.
Draco looked up from his table and saw Harry lean back with a scheming look on his face.
‘I can’t just ask the girl for her book, apart from the fact that I don’t even know what would I do when I got it,” Harry realized. “Would I look at the rune and try and remember it till I have time to draw it out? Or do something right here? Either way, I’d be calling huge amounts of attention to myself.” He paused in thought. “‘Dammit! I am a wizard. I have the power He knows not. There is only power, those who use it and those too weak to seek it.’
Harry pulled one of the large wooden bowls of fruit toward him and wordlessly banished all the fruit from it and transfigured the bowl into a small empty journal. Harry was kind of impressed with himself. He’d never performed magic in this way. The most he’d ever used magic outside of class was for the DA or when he was being attacked. He’d only just started researching things for his own use this past year.
Frowning slightly, he cast another spell, though he wasn’t sure it would accomplish what he wanted and there was no way he would be able to tell if it had worked until he’d cast his next spell. He tried to make the journal able to accommodate all the pages in the girl’s textbook without actually having to make more physical pages. He used the space-modifying spell that allowed trunks and rooms to have more space than what was physically possible. When he performed it, he focused on the idea of what it should do to the book. He thought it should work since the spell itself was a charm that was rooted heavily in transfiguration theory, based on willing an object to change, or at least he guessed it was, due to the spell’s effect. So, he simply willed the spell on the book to do what he wanted it to.
He began to have doubts about his spell work. What he had just done went against everything he had been taught, but he had this nagging feeling that it would work. He cast a quick anchoring spell on his empty journal so that his copying spell would have somewhere to copy to.
He leaned forward a little, grabbed his fork with left hand and started eating as he moved his right hand and wand under the table to aim at the girl’s book. “Ha!,” he thought. “I got something from the Dursleys after all, whether they wanted me to or not.” The various injuries that had been caused by ‘his family’, as Dumbledore called them, had at times left him unable to use one hand or the other. He had been forced to learn how to use both growing up, partly preemptively and partly because there were times he just couldn’t use his dominant right hand.
Smirking, he shot the copying spell at the girl’s book. Then, placing his wand back into the holster on his right wrist, he continued eating. He tried not to look at his journal. He looked up again and scanned the Great Hall. His eyes drifted across the Slytherin table. Draco was sitting amongst a group of older years eating calmly. There weren’t many students down this early. He was beginning to think he was too paranoid when Draco glanced up and made eye contact with him.
Harry jumped a little in his seat. Malfoy sneered at him and looked away laughing at a joke the boy on the right of him had said. Harry sat there wondering what his problem was. He picked up the transfigured book and stacked it underneath the one he had taken from the library. He calmly walked out of the Great Hall heading towards the seventh floor corridor.
Beginning Again by Epicurous
Story Notes:
This is an AU story. It starts at the end of Harry's fifth year and the story deviates from canon from there.
Chapter Notes: I'm writing this because I love Harry Potter Fanfiction and also so I can work on my writing before I start college at the end of the summer. So, feel free to critique and review as much as you want; I would appreciate it. I'm going to try and write a couple of chapters a week. So without further ado, here is the first chapter.
I do have five chapters written and am currently working on the the sixth. Just waiting for approval.
Chapter Endnotes: Review... pretty please :)
epic