Number four Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey. A perfectly normal house in a perfectly normal neighbourhood. Living there was a perfectly normal family, a mother, a father and their just turned eleven year old son. That's what it looked like on the outside. On the inside things were very different. Because, like every local knew, there was another boy living at the house. A supposed delinquent. The boy's name was Harry Potter. The boy ran around in old, shabby clothes, his messy hair never looking proper and his green eyes always up to no good. At least in the eyes of the locals, which was supported by the horrible stories Petunia Dursley, the woman who lived at number four, always told her gossiping friends over tea.
Harry Potter was an orphan after his parents had died in a car crash, which they had caused due to drunken driving. That was what they told the neighbours. As the boy's only living relatives, they had been burdened with the child. They were seen as good people for taking in their orphaned nephew and trying to raise him to become a good member of society.
Now if somebody would risk a closer look, things were very different. Instead of a stupid troublemaker, Harry Potter was a highly intelligent and calculating child. He had to be to not be subject to too much abuse from his so called family. Early on he had noticed that strange things happened around him. When he was six, he had turned the wig of his teacher that had shouted at him blue. The things he had been accused of had been done by Dudley, but of course nobody would shout at Vernon Dursley's son. With Vernon's high position at Grunnings many of Dudley's flaws were overlooked and the easiest target next to Dudley was Harry.
When he was seven he had ended on the school roof while running away from his cousin and his gang of bullies. His aunt and uncle had punished him terribly for that, even if Harry said over and over again that he had no idea how he had got there and only had tried to jump behind a trashcan. Then a horrible looking jumper, orange with maroon baubles, had shrunk while his aunt had tried to force him into it.
And that wasn't enough. Many people seemed to know him, strange people in cloaks. He had been greeted by them; one man had even bowed to him once. Whenever these strange things happened Harry was punished. Most of the time he was locked in the cupboard under the stairs, which doubled as his bedroom, or sometimes, if Vernon was in an extremely bad mood, he would be beaten with a belt. That had stopped though when Harry was nine and in a bout of fury about an unjust punishment had somehow made Vernon unable to move. From then on, the Dursleys had been even more unpleasant, but the punishments never again got corporeal. They were afraid something more severe would happen.
Harry had analysed these incidents. They always had happened when he was angry or afraid. So there had to be an emotional trigger for his strange power. Whenever he felt very strong emotions, it happened. He had no doubt that it was his power, otherwise the Dursleys wouldn't have always shouted at him for being a freak and to not do what he did. He had researched what he could find about it in the local library, but hadn't found something that sounded like his strange power. The Dursleys knew something, but they wouldn't tell him. They hated him and he hated them. How he wished he could just leave there and live somewhere else. But with him being only ten years old, eleven in two weeks, there was no chance to do it.
He couldn't work yet to earn the money he would need to leave them. The only thing he would be able to do were chores for neighbours, but with the Dursleys always telling lies about him, nobody would let him do them. They were all stupid sheep in his mind. Adults always tended to believe other adults, never the child that had to say something else. If he did, they called him a liar. No, he couldn't trust adults. All his anonymous letters to the police had been ignored or if they came to investigate, Vernon always talked them out of the suspicion, presenting the perfectly honourable family father. He would show them. They would regret how they had treated him one day. But he needed capital to achieve this.
So Harry had investigated just what kind of jobs paid highest and gave most power in society. Thankfully the librarian didn't think him to be a delinquent. Perhaps because the library was on the other side of Little Whinging and the people there hadn't heard about the stories the Dursleys made up. All jobs he had found interesting had one thing in common, he would need extremely high grades, would have to study at university after taking his A-Levels and build up a social network to have contacts with others that would also hold high positions later in life.