Chapter 31

Sensing his panic, McGonagall slammed her hand onto the counter. The whole place fell silent. "Enough," she said in a voice barely above normal, and with a smile and a nod Mrs. Crockford patted his cheek and turned her back on them. Within seconds, the crowd cleared up and Tom, the barman, led them to a small hidden little booth without any further trouble.

"Professor?" Harry said once they were sitting down. "What was that?"

Professor McGonagall was giving him an odd look. "Mr. Potter, how much do you know?" she asked. Harry shot her a questioning look. "How much have your relatives told you about how your parents died?"

Harry returned a steady look, he'd have to be pretty good at his lying to pull this off. Fortunately, the lie wasn't extreme at all and his always active Gamer's mind allowed his skills to gain an almost surgical precision.

"I was told that they were driving drunk and were killed in a car crash. However, from what you said earlier, I'm assuming that they lied to me. Now all I know is that they got 'blown up'. All that I can get from that is that it wasn't good."

"That is a correct assumption." Professor McGonagall said quietly.

"What happened?"

And thus, for the first of many times, Harry was told of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The Dark Lord Voldemort.

A chill swept over Harry when he first uttered the name…his own mana fluctuated in sync with the very magic that saturated the air of the pub even as he pronounced the word. It seemed for a moment as if the age-old adage that names have power was truer than most thought it to be.

"The Dark Lord," the Professor told him, "had raged upon Wizarding Britain for a long number of years. His followers, the Death Eaters, also called the knights of Walpurgis, had followed in his wake. He was not the most powerful dark lord to ever come, but he was certainly the most brilliant. He was as cunning and manipulative as he was ruthless and vicious, inspiring almost fanatic loyalty amongst his followers. Their numbers weren't too great at first, but soon he enchanted the minds of youngsters with the thought of beguiling magic and elders with the draw of incomprehensible power. They flocked to him."

She paused to take a drink of water before continuing.

"Soon, he had his people in every major wizarding organization. It was as if he was building a lethal blade at the throat of the wizarding world, and all it took was one invitation for him to use it. In one fell swoop, he almost beheaded it. Anyone who stood in his path; and people did; he killed. Blood lined whichever path the Dark Lord wished to walk. No one really knew what his true motives were, though his since followers claimed it to be blood purity, that was what the world believed."

Harry kept staring at the table. His eyes were closed and he spoke with naught a waver in his voice "So what happened then?"

"The Dark Lord came to Godric's Hollow," Professor McGonagall said in a whisper. "The Dark Lord killed James, and he killed Lily. Then he tried to kill you."

"The Killing Curse strikes directly at the soul, severing it from the body. It cannot be blocked, cannot be shielded from, and whomever it strikes, they die," she took a deep breath, "No one ever lived after he decided to kill them. He'd killed some of the best witches and wizards of the age. The McKinnons, the Bones, the Prewetts. But you were only a baby, and you lived. The Killing Curse rebounded and destroyed the Dark Lord."

"Have you ever wondered how you got that mark on your forehead? That is no ordinary cut. That's the mark of a survivor of a powerful, evil curse touching you. That is why you're famous, Harry. That is why you are a hero."

Harry kept staring at his hands laying on the table. Fighting through the strange painful coiling of his stomach, he finally looked up. He could

"We should be going. My relatives would expect me to be back soon. And we need to buy all this magic stuff," he said, making to get up from the seat.

Frowning at the lack of expression on the boy's face, McGonagall grew worried. She could only take a guess about what was happening in the young boy's mind, and she wasn't too far off the truth. In a rather frightening way, it reminded herself of her own alcoholism. Debating between staying out of it and maintaining her distance from a student, she finally decided to throw caution into the wind.

"Not yet." She said, and Harry paused, frowning before he sat down. Taking a deep breath, she spoke, "I know a thing or two about losing people Mr. Potter. I have lived through the war. And I also know a thing or two about pushing away your grief so that it will not hurt you anymore."

Harry looked up at her with the same blank expression. In his mind, he felt some muted surprise through the Gamer's mind that her guess about him shielding himself from his own emotions was so close to the real truth.

"But it doesn't help," she continued, "It ends up hurting your life, taking away what makes you yourself. You must acknowledge the grief Mr. Potter, and only then can you truly move past it."

Harry's expression did not waver, but he was well aware of the maelstrom of emotion roiling around behind his shields. He couldn't…he couldn't push himself into that.

"But it hurts," he said, trying to somehow convey to her the magnitude of what he was hiding from. The betrayal of the Dursleys, killing Johnathon, and the tragedy of his parents' death…he couldn't find the right words…

"It hurts to think about them. I remember that night. I think," he finally said in a small voice as he looked back at his hands. He heard a gasp from the professor but didn't stop. He couldn't, "I have dreams about it sometimes. Green light. Her pleading with him to kill her and let me live. It hurt even when I didn't know who she was. Now…"

"I know Harry," Harry looked up at her use of his first name. Her wet eyes were somewhere far away, lost in some distant memory, "And it always will. But that hurt, that pain in your heart is what tells you that you are human. That you are a good person. And in the end, it will always make you stronger."

After that, Harry had taken down his Gamer's mind for the first time in a while. It took him a good twenty minutes to calm himself down. He spent that time sobbing into his hands in that quiet booth in the corner of the pub. Professor McGonagall simply sat there, rubbing his back and waiting for him to pull himself back together.

Slowly the tears stopped and Harry eventually pulled himself together.

It didn't take long for him to decide that he was feeling objectively better after letting all of that out of himself. He looked at the professor, intending to thank her, but as much as he tried, no words came out. She caught his eyes, and something in them must have conveyed what he wanted to say, because she gave him an understanding smile.

"Now eat up Mr. Potter," she said, her face morphing into a rather mischievous smile he didn't even think it was capable of, "I don't think Lily and James would ever forgive me if I let you get your first look at the Diagon Alley on an empty stomach."

Soon, they finished up their meals and after applying on a simple magical disguise on him, McGonagall led them to the back of the pub. Harry was just starting to feel a bit confused about why they were standing in front of an old brick wall, when she answered his unspoken question,

"Pay attention, Mr. Potter, You'll need to remember this. Three up, two across. . ." she muttered as she tapped her wand on the wall. Just as Harry was about to ask what she was doing, the wall hollowed into a hole which shivered and expanded into a huge archway, revealing a long row of shops with signs advertising cauldrons and dragon livers and dozens upon dozens of wizards bustling around, getting their shopping done.

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