1 Chapter 01

Number 4, Privet Drive

Harry Potter was an intelligent boy. Not the most unusual statement by any means. The thing was, nobody saw his intelligence, not his teachers, not his classmates and certainly not his "family". None of them had any inkling of the potential he had, the prodigy right beneath their noses, the intellect he refused to display, because Harry Potter hid his true self, cloaked it in averageness and disappeared from the inquisitive (read snoopy and gossipy) minds of the (lack of) humanity he dealt with daily. After all, he was certain that without these precautions his life was forfeit.

Seven years is not the best age for any human being to fight a war. Indeed, war is not meant for people of any age. But Harry was fighting a war. Indeed, for him life was war. For Harry, every day was a battle for survival, a day by day affair, where every single day was spent with steadfast resolve, where a lack of broken bones was a cause for quiet celebration, and pain was the reminder that he was still alive.

And like all wars and battles, this one was fought against an enemy, an enemy who he shared a backyard and his home with, the ever accursed Dursleys. They treated him like the scum of the universe, quite literally in fact. He was their slave, their pet, some thing for them to do whatever they wished, an unending nightmare enforced through the ever present threat of bodily harm, one which they frequently acted on. Harry hated them, all three of them, Whale senior, Whale junior and Horse face, as he humorlessly called them sometimes.

But those were not their true names of course, those of Vernon, Dudley and Petunia Dursley, his enemies from birth, the ever mocking nemesis, and the ones he would probably end up wiping from the face of the earth, if he could. Harry was not an idiot, irrespective of what his despicable relatives chose to believe. He knew that what they were doing was illegal, that their very actions were contrary to the 'normality' they tried so fanatically to maintain. But any authority figure he tried to tell only called up the Dursleys, who would reassure said authority figure with tales of juvenile delinquency and tale telling. And after the 5th time he had found himself with broken ribs, Harry simply stopped. One did not pursue actions that were detrimental to oneself, no matter how correctly it followed the 'proper' response to such actions. He also took to heart the subconscious lesson he had learned, the system could not be trusted. Not that it helped him of course, for predators are seldom deterred by unmoving prey.

Harry had long learned that the least painful way of living would be to lie low and stay average, letting the Dursleys forget he existed, a cloak of normality, one that let him be questionably safe. Well, outside of his slave labor or 'well deserved' punishments at any rate. It helped keep the broken bones at bay, a desirable condition, no matter how fast they tended to grow back or rather heal at astronomical speed. Harry had in fact begun to suspect that his body had simply begun to do it to prevent him from dying, something which was not too far off from the truth, all said and done.

Harry had learned quite early on that one of the surefire ways to get brutalized was to score better than Dudley. Any time he did so, Vernon would go into a red faced, spittle flying rage, screaming about freakishness and freaks, in episodes that eventually ended with broken bones. So Harry simply stopped doing better, going into a near extreme averageness, placing himself near the bottom of the class. It wasn't to say that Harry stopped learning of course. No, he simply stopped displaying exactly what he knew, preferring to hoard his knowledge and the true extent of his talents – the primary of which was the healing that he constantly utilized to keep his school attendance out of jeopardy.

Harry, like all the troubled people of the world, had a place he had to go. A place he went to whenever he could, because there was one person who treated him like family, or at least as one should. His name was Daniel Richards aka 'that old geezer'. The people in school knew him as old man Richie. He was a second world war veteran, one of the men who survived Normandy, the Ardennes, and the innumerable villages that dotted the retreating German line of the era. He did not go to the pacific theater, nor the African one much before that. He had also been to India for a while, though it was only in passing. The rest of his unassuming life was spent in the same house a mile from the school, whose library was under his care.

Richards was a librarian. And a well traveled one, prone to telling stories, his own or that of others he'd heard. Stories of courage, valor, and the indomitable human spirit. He also told stories of sadness, of loss, the struggle to go on when all anyone else would do was curl up and cry, and stories of the evil men can do, the utter destruction of humanity, and the lengths that men go to because of greed and power. And he told these stories to one young man.