Assignment Harry Potter: A one-shot fan fic

This was written as a reader response... I decided to write the first bit of what I imagine the seventh book, or an interlude between six and seven might look like. I had two challenges: it had to include enough reflection on Sorceror's Stone to fulfill the assignment, and I had to mit any details that would give away things in the end of book five or book six, as my professor had not yet read them.

The sun was barely rising over Godric’s Hollow when Harry Potter, aged seventeen, arrived at what was once his parent’s front gate. The August heat had him sweating already, and he ran his hand across his forehead, brushing his lightning-shaped scar. This was where he had received that mark, sixteen years before, and the start of his life as a marked man. The house had been leveled, but the fence and gate still stood across the front of the now empty property.

Harry had no memory, other than what he had been forced to relive in the vicinity of the dementors, of what happened then, nor any happy moments before his parents were murdered by Lord Voldemort. He stared at the standing trees, and a few perennials that perhaps his parents had planted, and tried to peer through his miserable years with the Dursleys, alone and unloved in a crowd of small minded people, to see even a shadow of Lily and James Potter, his parents, the talented witch and wizard that died protecting him.

“Harry?”

He shook his head, and smiled a bit. “Hello, Hermione, Ron.”

Ron and Hermione, his constant companions since the funeral last spring, had planned on sleeping in that morning at the inn, but Harry slipping out alone before sunrise had clearly worried them.

“Hard to have your back when you keep wandering off, mate,” Ron said, stretching and scratching his thick thatch of bright red hair.

“Voldemort won’t bother me at sunrise,” Harry said, leaning on the fence and taking in his friend’s appearances. Hermione had given up fighting with her bushy hair in the summer humidity and had braided it back from her face, which now wore a scholarly scowl he had seen too many times before.

“He’s not a vampire, as far as we know,” she said, crossing her arms.

Harry just looked at her for a moment, then turned around to look at the empty plot again. “I wonder where they put all the stuff that was inside, if there was anything worth saving.”

“Dunno,” said Ron, coming to stand and look next to him, “maybe at Hogwarts for all we know. It was the safest place to put things. Dumbledore had your invisibility cloak, for example. Or maybe Gringotts – in your vault?”

Harry shook his head. On the way to Godric’s Hollow, he had the same thought, and had already searched the corners of his vault. He had even searched the Dursley’s house, much to their chagrin, opening cupboards that had always been forbidden him before, and even going into the attic. The only thing he found was a picture of his mother and his aunt when they were in their early teens, perhaps just before his mother got her letter to Hogwarts. Lily had her arm around Petunia, but the latter did not look happy about it. He had even gone back into his cupboard under the stairs, but they had cleaned out any traces of his years there, all except a faded ticket to the zoo from the day he magically (but without knowing it) set the python free on his cousin, Dudley.

Harry tried the gate, and when it wouldn’t budge, he climbed over it. Hermione and Ron followed. “It’s so quiet here,” Hermione noted.

“A little too quiet?” Ron asked. He pulled his wand out from his right sock, and shook a bit of fuzz off of it.

“Ugh, Ron,” Hermione said wrinkling her nose, “can you store your wand someplace else? Your wand smells like a mountain troll from being in there.”

“We would know,” Ron said, grinning at her. “Reckon Harry’s wand still has a bit of troll bogies on in, dried someplace. You know,” he said, attempting to put his arm around her, “that troll is what brought us together.”

“Only because we accidentally locked it in the bathroom with her first, Ron,” Harry said, exploring ahead of them.

“That’s right,” said Hermione, “and I wouldn’t have been in there at all if you hadn’t been horrible to me earlier that day, that week –“

“Enough, enough,” said Ron, putting his arm down in defeat. “We’re together now, right?”

Hermione looked at Ron and scowled for a second, then smiled, and took his hand gently. With her other hand, she took a swig of pumpkin juice from her flask. She turned to find Harry kneeling down, looking at something in the dirt.

“I understand why you wanted to be alone here, Harry,” she said softly. “Did you find something?”

Harry nodded, and reached down and unearthed a shiny golden ball, about the size of a walnut. He turned and showed them.

“Looks kind of like a Snitch,” Ron said, reaching over to touch it. Just before his fingers touched it, small tiny wings slowly unfolded from within the sphere, and the snitch hovered a few inches about Harry’s hand.

“How’d it get here?” asked Ron.

Harry smiled, grabbing it, and letting it go again to hover as it had before. “That would be Dad’s fault.” For the first time since looking into the Mirror of Erised, Harry felt that if he could just reach out a bit further, he could be with them again – with the rest of his family. He caught the snitch again, turning it over this time in his hands, giving it a closer look. Tiny writing was stamped into the underside of it:

Property of Hogwarts School of

Witchcraft and Wizardry

The snitch flew a bit higher this time, and started to drift toward the far corner of the property. It settled above two rounded stones, one leaning against the other, and alighted at last on the taller of the two.

“Are you going to take it with you, Harry?” Ron asked, his voice full of empathy as he read the stones.

“No,” he said, smirking a little at his father’s headstone, with its tiny golden finial, and turned to put an arm around his two best friends. “The seeker’s caught that one already.”