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Chapter Three

The train journey back to London was uneventful, Harry’s newest pet lay on his knee, hidden from the eyes of the Muggles by the Seamus’ body. On their arrival to London he slipped him into the specially provided pet carrier that shrunk once closed, and slipped it into his pocket along with a few of his minimalised purchases. He had given most to Seamus to look after as Seamus made Harry promise to come visit him in Ireland along with Dean. On arrival in London, they spent a few minutes making plans to that effect, although Harry had to leave in a hurry as Seamus had once again started looking a little bit shifty and muttering about fake moustaches after Harry had assured him he couldn’t grow a moustache in a week. He had learned his lesson from seeing Dudley’s attempts, dead-mouse-on-the-lip is not attractive; even Uncle Vernon had noticed and suggested Dudley shave.

Unlike his bus journey into London, the return journey was far from boring and very productive. Harry filled his being-nice-to-people quota for the week by helping an old woman get her bags onto the bus, and karma nicely rewarded him for this deed as she sat beside him and started talking to him. What made this so satisfying was that the woman was old Mrs Patterson who lived in number nine, the undisputed queen on gossip and society of Privet Drive. At first she didn’t recognise him and looked mildly startled when he introduced himself which he politely pretended not to notice. The real reward was when he gravely informed her that he had just returned from his exclusive boarding school and had had to go to London to dip into the trust fund his poor murdered parents had left him to feed and clothe himself as the Dursleys refused to.

At first she was disbelieving but his continued shy tone along with the sweet yet innocent look he had on his face during his heartfelt and just ever so slightly tearful confession soon had her shaking her head in disapproval and patting his hand in sympathy. To Harry's great amusement a few of the other passengers heard his woe-filled story of the orphan left with his cruel and uncaring relatives, and seemed outraged on his behalf, although he barely had to embellish his story at all. By the time he got to the part about how hurt he was that the Dursleys told such horrible lies about him to the neighbourhood, the whole bus was listening and one woman actually gasped in horror when he told Mrs. Patterson about Uncle Vernon threatening to throw him out on the streets last summer when he was just trying to help his poor cousin who was having a bit of a turn.

As the bus approached his stop, the one just before from Mrs. Patterson’s stop, he quietly thanked her for listening to him, blinking rapidly with his head ducked shyly, and left the bus to a few gruff handshakes from some elderly men and a hug from a mother with a toddler.
Jogging back to number four, while crouching down low to avoid being seen and slipping through hedges, he wondered if he could train himself to blush on command, it would be so useful in the coming days, but focused his thoughts as he reached his distraction of choice. Speed was of the essence for this one to work. Again, it was simple but far less traceable to him than this morning’s diversion had been. Both Mr and Mrs Number Five worked, a fact that made Aunt Petunia sniff in disapproval, and they were both rather paranoid. Of course, they were but mice to Moody’s mighty elephant of paranoia, but they did have a very loud, very sensitive state-of-the-art alarm system.

Harry just picked up a fair sized pebble and threw it at the front window of number five as he dove through the hedge and dove rather dramatically through the side window of number four, a window he had been sure to leave open this morning.
He was most thankful Aunt Petunia had not closed it; the potential collision with the closed window would have been painful, embarrassing and obvious.

Flitting up the stairs quietly, he slipped into his room and softly closed the door behind him. He waited a tense ten minutes, but no letter from Dumbledore arrived, and then he knew his return, and his day long absence, had been undetected.

He smiled triumphantly and sprawled out on the bed surveying his now empty room. Apparently, during his drugged up state Aunt Petunia had caught Harry gnawing and slobbering over some of the broken toys littering the room, perhaps mistaking them for food. In fact, catching him grinning widely while licking the broken television had been the final straw and what had caused her to empty a bucket of cold water over him.
Luckily, Dudley had broken that television in his pre-teen years when he had had a slightly better understanding of personal hygiene, so Harry, once coherent, had only had to use half a bottle of mouth wash.
The thought of adding mouth wash to the gift basket full of Muggle hygiene products he was planning to give Snape on his graduation crossed his mind, and he thoughtfully added it to his mental list. Really, it was his way of helping future generations of Hogwarts students.

It seemed while Harry was out today, Aunt Petunia had removed all of the broken toys and appliances, perhaps afraid he would revert back to his state of the earlier few days, enraptured and totally unable to contain himself at the sight of the broken television. Honestly, if she had to worry about anyone and their unnatural attraction to the furniture it would have to be Dudley and the couch in front of the television in the sitting room, Harry expected to walk in on him humping it any day now.

Slightly tired now that the adrenaline that had been racing through his veins during his rush home was gone, he decided to relax by re-reading and trying to memorise the brewing instructions for the Revelation Potion in the short time until dinner.

Surprisingly, no comment was made over dinner about his absence all day, but then he was amusing himself by letting his aunt catch him gazing longingly at the television. Her twitching was providing excellent dinner time entertainment and helped distract him from Dudley’s excuse for table manners.

Over the next few days he spent most of his time in his room practising the complex stirring techniques and the long and intricate sequence of ingredient additions for the Revelation Potion. He knew he looked like a complete pillock, stirring an empty cauldron and pretending to prepare and add ingredients, but the practise was essential as this potion was by far the trickiest to brew he had ever attempted. Because of this, he had bought enough ingredients for five attempts at the Revelation Potion, hopefully he would have been successful by the fifth attempt.

Aunt Petunia was becoming more and more paranoid over the next few days as he was amusing himself by letting her catch him hovering outside the sitting room or staring amorously at the television. It had come to the point that whenever his aunt heard him coming downstairs she rushed out into the hallway and guarded the entrance to the sitting room zealously.
Even Uncle Vernon and Dudley had begun to notice and Harry exacerbated the situation by looking at his aunt in a concerned fashion whenever her back was turned.

What was perhaps bothering his relatives more than the situation inside the house, was the situation outside the house. They simply could not understand their neighbour’s new attitude to the Dursleys and to Harry. Where once the neighbours ignored or glared at Harry, they now smiled at him and called out greetings as they passed by. The Dursleys were now subjected to the same treatment Harry used to receive, a situation felt more keenly by Petunia then by any other member of the Dursley family. She had not been invited recently to any of the lunches or coffee sessions the other ladies participated in and had, to her horror, once overheard Mrs. Number Nine tutting with Mrs. Number Two over the disgraceful treatment that poor orphaned Potter boy received at her hands.
Again, Harry aggravated the situation with shy smiles at the neighbours and a nervous looks directed at his relatives if they were around, Mrs. Patterson had done her work well.

Later that day Harry set Monster, his newly named pet, to guard his bedroom door as he prepared to attempt to brew the Revelation Potion on a small portable gas cooker bought on his way back to Little Whining a few days ago. Monster absolutely loathed the Dursleys, Dudley in particular, and in return they were all terrified of him.
Harry had wandered out to the park the day after he had arrived home from shopping with Monster in his shrunken carrier concealed in one of his oversized sleeves. He had wandered through the park for a while, apparently moping, but had stopped by some bushes as if he had heard something. Tilting his head as if listening he had crept towards them and then swiftly plunged his hand into the bush while simultaneously opening the carrier and tipping Monster out. The next second he had withdrawn his hand now holding Monster with a triumphant look and had marched home to the Dursleys with his beloved new pet.

In preparation, Harry closed his bedroom window, pulled the blind, and blocked the bottom of the door to prevent any smells escaping using one of Dudley’s larger old t-shirts. The potion would take eight hours of almost continual work to be properly brewed and Harry wanted to start early. Aunt Petunia was, thankfully, out for a few hours buying groceries and had, with a deeply suspicious look at Harry, locked every room containing a television before she left. Apparently she was too afraid of wizardly retribution to lock Harry in his bedroom.

He glanced at the expensive timer he had stolen from the kitchen and again checked all the alarms he had set on it were for the right times, rolling up his sleeves he turned on the cooker and began.

Four hours later Harry was exhausted and the potion ruined. It had congealed into a gelatinous-like mess in his cauldron with remarkable speed when he his attention had wandered and he had miscounted his stirring, but he had swiftly chipped it out before the mess had hardened and wrapped the noxious purple gunk in newspaper. Harry then crept into Dudley’s room, patting Monster as he passed, and threw the ruined potion into his bin; he suspected no-one would notice the smell through the usual stench pervading his cousin’s room.
He doubted the presence of the potion would have any ill effects on Dudley. In his experience, the botched potions that were going to be deadly had an almost immediate effect and the bin was being emptied the next day by Petunia as she made one of her desperate weekly attempts to clean her sons room to the same standard as the rest of her unnaturally clean house.
Harry had begun to aid her in this admirable goal by messing up the rest of the house whenever he could get away with it. Watching his aunt’s frantic attempts to alphabetically reorder the books in the sitting room while glancing warily at him and his proximity to the television was an excellent way to occupy himself. It’s the small things in life that keep him happy.

After rubbing some of the muscle soothing balm he had brewed into the aching muscles of his arms, he prepared his new work area for another attempt at brewing the Revelation Potion tomorrow. He had brewed a number of useful potions along with the potion of mental tranquillity during the last week of term when the others had been trapped in the hospital wing, envisioning his usual summer of heavy chores, and was thankful that he had. ‘You can never have too many mind and bodily altering substances’ would have to be his new motto.

The next day he had a now atypical early morning wander around the neighbourhood, during which he practised his moody yet sad face, and hoped it had improved from earlier in the summer and that he no longer looked like he was crapping himself when he pulled it.
These early morning walks had two main benefits; it allowed his guards to see he was still depressed and unproductively living in number four, and the second was that the neighbours on their way to work all noticed him and greeted him as they ignored Uncle Vernon. This drove his uncle crazy, but he could do nothing without making the situation worse and Harry had noticed that his uncle’s face had developed a new colour. It was a sort of greenish red and even more unattractive than the usual angry purple present when he looked at Harry. He was most impressed, it seems you can teach an old dog new tricks, who would have known?

Attempt two at the Revelation Potion was also unsuccessful and had failed during the third hour when Harry had chopped the salamander nails half a centimetre too long, but attempt three later in the day had only failed on the seventh hour with another stirring mishap. After depositing the two additional failed attempts in Dudley’s bin, which was getting quite full, Harry decided to practise once more. He had had a surprise during his practise when Dudley began to play music loudly, he had caught himself stirring to the beat and realised that he was finding it easier to stir and add his pretend ingredients, a much needed assist.

Harry had absolutely no intention of brewing potions to the crap that Dudley listened to; Uncle Vernon didn’t listen to music while Petunias taste in music was dubious at best, so Harry just solved the problem by nicking Dudley’s alarm clock while he slept. He didn’t even have to creep into his cousin’s bedroom, as his cousin was snoring loudly and stunk of alcohol, the smell noxious even at as far of a distance as Harry could physically keep from him.
The tissue paper shoved up his nostrils and the scarf covering his mouth were essential and Monster had actually recoiled when Harry had opened the door to his cousin’s room. Harry was amazed on seeing that Dudley’s bin was empty, and that the smell was from his cousin and had nothing to do with the botched potions,. He wondered if a healthy human being should be able to produce such a horrendous stench. He noticed that an alarm had been set for four in the morning but presumed that the only reason that Dudley would be getting up at that time was for reasons better left unsaid and unimagined.

The next morning Harry woke very early and after feeding both himself and Monster, set Monster to guard his door and he began his fourth attempt at the Revelation Potion. Eight hours later and with the potion perfectly matching the description in the text of the changes in both colour and texture at the different stages, Harry deemed it a success and immersed a scroll of parchment in the potion.
He set the timer for an hour and left for the kitchen. He was starving, bone tired and the continual concentration necessary to prevent mistakes had left him with a pounding headache.

An hour and a headache relieving potion later, he carefully withdrew the parchment, cut his finger and allowed seven drops of blood to fall onto the top of the parchment. Immediately shapes started to appear but they would take another ten minutes to be fully visible according to the text, so he busied himself with tidying away the extra ingredients and potions equipment. As he emptied the now useless potion down the toilet, he idly wondered what effect it would have on the plumbing before shrugging. He was hopefully not going to be around long enough to find out.

Ten minutes later and he was reading the list, thoughts of his trusty imaginary spork and its many wonderful yet painful uses again surfacing in his mind.