So, here is my attempt at a Harry Potter fic.
.
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There were seven of us there that morning, boys from ten to eighteen, gathered by the low brick wall at the edge of the pitch.
I was one of the youngest at eleven and had found myself a seat on the wall, my heels knocking lightly against the bricks as I stared at them all with a smile I could not quite hide.
The others did not look nearly as pleased.
Well, why would they?
Most of them had lost the bet.
“Well,” I said, letting the word hang there for a moment, “it’s time to pay up.”
“You cheated somehow, Adler,” Darren said at once.
Darren was twelve, broad-faced, and permanently offended by the world. He had a football tucked under one arm and a packet of crisps in his other hand.
I looked at him with open amusement. “How would I cheat, Darren? How could I possibly bloody cheat?”
“Dunno,” Darren muttered. “You just did.”
I gave him a slow clap. “Bravo,” I said. “What an argument. Truly devastating.”
A couple of the younger boys laughed, which only made Darren scowl harder.
Mark Ellison, who was fifteen and usually had more sense than the rest of them put together, stepped forward with a resigned sigh.
“Well, you did win, Adrian,” he said. “Fair’s fair.”
He handed me ten one-pound coins.
I took them with a smile and held them up between two fingers. “Feels good to win, boys.”
The money came from a betting pool we had put together. Nothing grand, just a few quid here and there from lads who spent most of their free time kicking a ball about and arguing over whose club was best. I had met all of them two years ago, after moving into the area with the Hargraves.
My fourth foster placement. Quite a record, as I had once overheard one of the social workers say. Back then, I had been the quiet sort. I kept my head down, answered when spoken to, and joined in football because it was easier than standing alone.
That had been before the incident.
Before I fell, hit my head on the pavement, and woke up with a second set of memories from a man who had lived all the way into the 2010s. That sort of thing had a way of changing a person. Over the last year, I had basically become someone new as both sets of memories in my head merged together. It had been a strange few months, and I did not think anyone in the world could relate to what had happened to me.
And here I was, at the end of the football season, putting all that knowledge to good use.
Making money off the Arsenal and Liverpool match from last night.
I had bet on Arsenal winning the match and the league, and it had happened just as I remembered it would.
“I still can’t believe you got the score right too.”
I shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a football genius.”
“Jammy little git,” Darren said.
I turned my smile on him. “You owe me a card too. Well? Give it here.”
Darren muttered something under his breath, dug into his pocket, and flicked a card at me.
I caught it.
“Pleasure doing business with you.”
He looked like he wanted to kick me.
I glanced around at the others. “So, are we playing this afternoon?”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “Why shouldn’t we?”
That led to another ten minutes of talking about the match. Or, in Darren’s case, complaining about it. The others argued over Arsenal and Liverpool. James complained about the referee, and Darren once again became conspiratorial over whether I had somehow bribed someone, despite being eleven years old and having about as much influence over professional football as a garden slug.
Soon, one by one, they drifted off, until only I and the oldest of the group were left.
Mike.
He was eighteen, and I knew him better than the others. We had lived in the same foster home once, my second one.
I had always wondered why I kept getting rejected by families.
Even after the new memories, even after becoming someone different over the past year, that fact still bothered me. It sat at the back of my mind like an itch I could not scratch. I was a good kid. I knew I was. Quiet, polite when I needed to be, not much trouble.
So why did they all give me up?
It was strange.
Very strange.
Well, my life was quite strange, especially after last year.
“How did it go?”
Mike let out a breath and ran a hand over his face.
“Fuck, Adrian,” he said. “I almost didn’t do it. Nearly bottled the whole thing.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” he said, giving me a look. “Because you were too convincing.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a fold of notes. Then he handed them to me.
“There. That’s your share.”
I counted it quickly.
Three hundred pounds.
For a boy of eleven, it was a fortune.
“Thank you.”
Mike watched me for a moment, his expression odd.
“You were always a weird one, Adrian,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow.
He hesitated.
“I mean, the Marlows did have reason to…”
My smile faded.
The Marlows. The family both Mike and I had lived with once. The family I had been taken from. Or kicked out of. Or given up by. No one had ever properly told me which word was the right one.
I looked at him.
“What does that mean?”
Mike’s face shut down at once.
“Nothing.”
“Didn’t sound like nothing.”
“It’s nothing,” he said again, too quickly this time.
For a second, neither of us spoke. I studied him. Part of me knew when someone was hiding something and wanted to demand answers, but I decided against it. It was not that important anyway.
Not yet.
I gave a small shrug.
“All right then.”
Mike looked relieved.
“So,” I said, patting my pocket where the money rested, “I suppose you’ll help me make more next season.”
Mike stared at me.
Then, slowly, he smiled too. “Are you sure? Maybe this was just a one-time lucky thing.”
I hopped down from the wall. “Well, then you’re throwing away easy money.”
“See you when I see you.”
I walked off with my hands in my pockets and a smile on my face.
I walked home beneath a dull English grey morning. The streets were damp. Puddles sat in cracks along the pavement, reflecting crooked bits of houses and clouds. Somewhere behind a fence, a dog barked twice, then gave up as if it had lost interest. A car crawled past with one window down and the radio playing.
“Oi, Adrian!”
I looked towards the voice.
Two boys were sitting on a garden wall a little way ahead, both younger than me. I knew these two idiots.
“How’d you know who was going to win last night?” the first one asked. “You even got the score right.”
I stopped just long enough to give him my most mysterious look. Then I raised both hands slowly, fingers spread, and said with great solemnity, “I can see the future.”
They both stared at me.
Then they burst out laughing.
“Yeah, right!”
“Mad, you are!”
I carried on walking.
A little farther down, old Mr Henshaw stood by his gate in slippers, his dressing gown hanging open over a jumper, watching the street as if waiting for it to do something interesting.
“Afternoon, lad.”
“Afternoon, Mr Henshaw.”
He lifted his chin. “Leicester’ll do better next season, you watch.”
I almost laughed.
“Course they will.”
His eyes narrowed. “You taking the mickey?”
“Me?” I pressed a hand to my chest. “Never.”
“They will,” he said firmly. “You watch.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I said.
Soon, I was back home. I pushed open the front door and stepped inside.
The house smelled of old tea, fried onions, and the sour damp that lived permanently in the carpet near the back door. The television was off. The radio in the sitting room murmured something about kidnappings in the city. Somewhere upstairs, one of the girls was moving around. There were two older foster kids, both a bit older than me and both deeply uninterested in me. The feeling was mutual.
Mr Hargrave sat in his chair by the window, newspaper spread open in both hands, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, braces stretched over a stomach that had grown larger in the two years I had known him.
Mrs Hargrave was not in the room.
Probably in the kitchen. Or smoking near an open window and pretending the smell did not drift through the whole house anyway.
I hung my jacket on the hook.
“You left early,” Mr Hargrave said, without looking up.
“Met some of my friends,” I said. “We were talking about the match last night.”
Mr Hargrave grunted.
His eyes stayed on the paper.
I started towards the stairs.
“Same old Leicester,” he muttered suddenly.
“Not awful enough to go down,” he said, “not good enough to go up.”
I rested one hand on the banister and looked back at him.
“I don’t know, Mr Hargrave. I’ve got a feeling we’ll go right to the very top one day.”
For a second, he simply stared at me.
Then he barked a laugh.
“Listen to him,” he said, turning back to the paper. “The very top, he says.”
The Hargraves were not good people.
They were not monsters either.
The Hargraves were ordinary in the worst way. They fed the children in their care. They gave them beds. They made sure we went to school. They did not beat us. They did not lock us in cupboards, starve us, or anything like that.
They were fine.
That was the word.
Fine.
Fine meant I had a roof over my head. Fine meant regular meals. Fine meant stability, and I had learned not to spit on stability just because it came without affection.
Before the accident, I had hated them. That hatred had been childish. I had hated their rules, their lack of warmth. I had hated knowing I was there because someone paid them to keep me. I had hated the way they looked at me as if I were a temporary inconvenience.
After the accident, things changed.
Or rather, I changed. A second life in my head had given me perspective, and perspective was a strange thing to give a child. The older memories understood something the younger me never could have.
This house was useful. No one here watched too closely. No one here cared enough to ask difficult questions unless they had to. As long as I went to school, came back on time, and did not cause trouble, I could move around the edges of their lives almost unnoticed.
And for me, now, it was perfect.
I reached my room and went inside.
It was small. A single bed pushed against the wall. A wardrobe. A desk. There was a water stain on the wall shaped vaguely like Ireland, though I had no idea why my wall had decided to take an interest in geography.
I shut the door behind me.
Then I took out the money.
First the notes from the boys. Then the folded ones from Mike.
I counted it again, slowly, savouring the feel of it between my fingers.
For a moment, I just stood there looking at it.
This was only the beginning of me taking advantage of my very unusual situation.
Crossing to the wardrobe, I opened it and pushed aside the few shirts hanging inside. My reflection flickered briefly in the mirror fixed to the door: brown hair, olive skin, a skinny frame and hazel eyes.
At the back, near the bottom, there was a loose bit of wood where the panel did not quite meet the frame. I had found it months ago and widened it carefully, just enough to make a hiding place.
I crouched, slipped my fingers into the gap, eased the panel open, and placed the money with the rest.
Then I fell back onto the bed, trying to think of what to do in the future.
.
.
.
The sky was still the same dull grey as last week. There were children on the far side of the park, shouting around the swings. A woman pushed a pram along the path. Somewhere behind me, a dog snuffled loudly through a hedge.
I barely noticed any of it as I sat alone on a bench, away from the noise, lost in thought. The strangeness of having two sets of memories had faded over the past few months. They no longer felt separate. They were both mine now.
I could become a writer, or maybe a filmmaker. I could even write the Harry Potter books. Ha. That would be fun. I knew they would come out in a decade or so, and it would set me up for life. I would be seen as a child genius who had invented a magical world.
Then I remembered one unfortunate fact.
I was shit at writing.
It would have been a disaster if I went down that path.
I stood up and began walking, and was halfway up the path when I saw it.
A man was jogging towards a car by the road, one hand clamped around the wrist of a small child. The child could not have been more than four or five. A little boy, maybe, in a red shirt and dark trousers. His feet dragged against the pavement as the man pulled him towards the car.
My steps slowed.
What the hell?
The man bent down and said something sharp that I could not hear. The child shook his head and tried to pull away.
“Oi!” I shouted.
The man’s head snapped up.
For one second, we stared at each other across the wet grass.
Then he yanked the child harder towards the car.
“Help!” I yelled, already running. “Somebody help!”
There were people in the park, but not close enough. No one who could stop him in time.
The child began to struggle properly now, crying out as the man hauled him closer to the car.
“Let him go!” I screamed.
The man reached for the car door.
I ran harder. My lungs burned. My heart hammered in my chest. I was eleven, smaller than him, weaker than him, and some distant sensible part of me knew this was stupid.
Brave, maybe.
But stupid.
Then something happened.
The space between us seemed to shrink.
One moment, I was too far away.
The next, I was there.
I slammed into the man’s side with all the speed I had, shoulder first, and the three of us went down in a heap.
The child cried out.
The man swore.
Pain flashed through my elbow and knee, but I rolled towards the child, grabbing at him without thinking.
“Get up,” I gasped. “Come on!”
The man was already pushing himself upright.
His face was twisted now, red and furious.
“You little bastard.”
He lunged.
Not just for the child this time.
For both of us.
I threw one arm out in front of the boy.
“Get away, you fucker!”
The air snapped. That was the only way I could describe it. Something invisible burst from me with a sound like a sheet cracking in the wind.
The man flew backwards.
Flew.
He was hurled off his feet and slammed down several yards away, landing on his back with a horrible wheezing grunt.
I stared at him.
The child stared at him.
Neither of us moved.
“Right,” I breathed.
The child looked up at me, his mouth hanging open.
I looked down at him.
“You saw that happen too, didn’t you?”
He nodded quickly.
Good.
So I was not losing my mind.
Probably.
“Where’s your mum?” I asked.
He pointed shakily towards the far side of the park.
“Then run,” I said. “Run to her. Now.”
He did not need telling twice. He bolted across the grass, sobbing and shouting for his mother.
I looked back at the man.
He was groaning now, trying to move.
That was my cue to leave.
I turned and ran. Behind me, I began hearing strange sounds.
Pop.
A sharp sound, like air being punched out of the world.
Then another.
Pop.
Pop.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
I did not know what it was, and I did not stop running until I reached home.
========
The next two weeks were uneasy.
That was the best word to describe it.
Uneasy.
It was not the same as before. I was not the same.
Because no matter how many times I tried to think around it, no matter how much I told myself to be practical, I could not forget what had happened.
I had not imagined it.
I had not dreamed it.
I had disappeared from one place and appeared in another.
Teleportation.
And then hit the man with some kind of telekinesis.
It all sounded ridiculous in my head.
Then again, so did waking up with an extra life’s worth of memories. I had already become a new person, a boy with two sets of memories that were slowly knitting themselves into one. Why not add teleportation to the list?
I tried to do it again.
Of course I did.
How could I not?
I tried in my room, standing in the middle of the floor with my fists clenched and my eyes squeezed shut, thinking very hard about the landing outside.
Nothing happened.
I tried to blast objects away like I did to that man.
Nope. Nothing happened.
Whatever had happened that day might have been a one-time thing. But the more I thought about it, the more things started to make sense. Some things that had happened in the past.
The memories from before the accident had always been hazy in places, especially the ones from the earlier foster homes.
I slowly started to remember fragments of my time in those homes.
“He is a demon. We can’t have him here.”
Mrs Marlow’s voice. Not angry, but frightened.
Another memory followed it.
“I saw him. Don’t tell me I didn’t. One second he was by the table, then he was halfway across the room.”
Then another.
“He made the glass break. I didn’t touch it, I swear.”
“There is something wrong with him. Something wicked.”
So that was it, then.
That was why families had given me up. Because strange things had happened around me.
The doorbell rang, breaking me out of my thoughts of being a superhero.
I was sitting in the living room. Mr Hargrave was in his chair by the window, as usual, one hand resting on the newspaper spread over his lap.
He did not look up when the bell went.
“Get that, Adrian.”
“Yes, Mr Hargrave.”
I got to my feet, walked down the narrow hall, and opened the door.
A short, stout woman stood on the step.
She had flyaway grey hair escaping from beneath a rather battered hat, and a round, friendly face with bright eyes. She looked like someone’s favourite aunt.
That impression might have been perfectly ordinary, if not for what she was wearing.
Robes.
Actual robes.
For a second, all I could do was stare.
The hell?
The woman smiled kindly at me. “Good afternoon,” she said. “My name is Pomona Sprout. Am I speaking with Adrian Adler?”
My hand tightened slightly on the edge of the door.
Pomona Sprout.
No.
It could not be.
I knew that name.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Adrian Adler.”
“Splendid,” she said warmly. “May I come in?”
I stared at her for half a second too long before remembering myself.
“Right. Yes. Of course.”
I stepped back and let her into the hall.
She entered with a little nod of thanks, glancing about with interest but no judgement, which was more than most adults managed. Then she turned back to me and reached into a pocket somewhere inside her robes.
“This is for you,” she said.
She held out a letter.
“And where are your parents?” she asked, then corrected herself gently. “Your foster parents, I mean.”
I barely heard the second part.
My eyes were fixed on the envelope.
It was thick. Heavy-looking. The address was written in green ink.
My mouth went dry.
I took it.
Mr A. AdlerThe Third Largest Room26 Ashmere RoadLeicester
For a moment, the hallway seemed to tilt around me.
This could not be happening.
Except it was.
And horribly, wonderfully, impossibly, it explained so much.
Mrs Hargrave chose that moment to appear from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea towel. Her eyes landed first on Professor Sprout’s robes, then on me.
“Who’s this?”
Professor Sprout turned to her with the same pleasant smile.
“Good afternoon. My name is Pomona Sprout. I’m here regarding the matter of schooling for young Adrian here.”
My eyes were fixed on the letter as I began to open it.
HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY
Welp.
That confirmed it.