The Boy and His Departure.
Harry had once heard a phrase spoken by the Normals.
Taking baby steps.
Harry took good advice to heart, no matter the origin. Harry knew that he had been lucky, possibly due to the adrenaline high and his wild emotions at the time, which had kept him from becoming a Harry pancake on the school grounds the day he realized that magic was real.
Harry had discovered that the flying was proving very hard indeed.
His stories gave no instructions. They were fiction after all, so the boy had used his experiences with the first time, but applied them in a safer setting. In this case, his practice area was a small patch of overgrown field that was sandwiched between Wisteria Walk and Privet Dr. More a vacant lot really, but it had an old rusted picnic table and so much overgrowth, that no one could see inside. This was the perfect cover for a boy attempting something decidedly unnatural in such a highly congested Normal environment.
It had been a week since his flying experience and epiphany. He had already started separating himself from the rest of his surroundings; not hard to do really, given how he was treated. He had begun to mentally refer to the rest of humanity and its environments as Normals and the Normal world. The boy thought this was a rather practical category, and made it easier to deal with his family to think that he was not a freak, merely in a separate category as them.
In the meanwhile, back to his flying.
He had started off with merely trying to lift off the ground. He had found, with a calmer emotional state, it was harder to call up the magic, a rushing feeling in the pit of high gut just before he flew.
Yes, magic. It was a glorious and terrifying concept for the boy, especially when attached to himself.
He had seen that documentary on the telly, had been forced to watch by his gleeful aunt, about the Salem Witch Trials. Despite him not understanding what a witch was at the time, other than a Halloween decoration (something the Dursleys didn't celebrate), and usually depicted as presenting as female, and he had been horrified by what he did understand, people who didn't conform being burnt at the stake.
Though, it is perhaps worth noting that Harry didn't associate himself quite so personally with the burnt witches as his aunt might have hoped to in her efforts to scare him off of his own freakishness, as Harry had been only six at the time and was already identifying as a boy, so the nuance of threat and fright tactic was lost, and misinterpreted, on his young mind.
Despite that little reminder down memory lane, Harry couldn't help coming to live that part of himself more everyday, no matter how Abnormal it seemed, a word Harry was beginning to reclaim with greater ease as a point of pride.
While his magic was rather reluctant and sluggish at first, coming in fits and starts when it did, leaving him terribly tired afterwards, Harry had learned to limit his practice times so he was not too tired for returning to number four and his chores for the evening.
After two weeks of solid practice, he had managed to hover about a few feet off the ground and move in several directions horizontally without tiring.
He graduated after that to the picnic table.
This lead to more bruises then he would have liked, but he persevered. The jumping, he found, seemed to help with taking off, and he mastered this much more quickly.
By the time he had made it to leaping from trees and then onto his neighbors roofs and then from roof to roof, it was nearing the end of winter and heading into the first blush of spring.
During this time, he had mastered maneuvering in mid-air, and was no longer growing tired at all, sometimes occasionally even hovering in the air in his tiny cupboard as he awoke from sleep or was engrossed in a book or thought.
It was during one of his thought sessions, reclining on air in his little practice lot in mid-April, that he began to wonder if he could make other things then himself fly. He had read stories of a few mythical heroes and creatures being able to do this.
He bit his lip thoughtfully. He was a little nervous, what if it didn't work?
Still, he decided to try. He looked down at the book on his chest. It was a book about the 12 labors of Hercules.
He concentrated, much like he did for the first times he flew (now more instinctive with all the time he put in) and thought of the rushing feeling, this time reaching out to the book on his chest.
Nothing happened at first.
He frowned. Then he nearly smacked himself, of course!
He thought of the book hovering up a foot or so.
This time, there was a wobble, a brief flutter of paper.
He focused harder, wanting it to happen with as much of his being as he could.
The book wobbled again, until it rose finally, hesitantly, off his chest before flopping back down when Harry lost his concentration in his surprise and joy. He had done it!
He found that the smaller the object was to his own person, the easier it was to master at moving. He had found that Lifting, as he called it, was another exercise that took time to master.
He had a problem though when it came to anything bigger and heavier then him. It was a frustrating barrier, though he wasn't to concerned over it, after all, lifting small items was more useful, it greatly aided in his scavenging and knicking, which were usually small items.
One day, as he wandered into town, he noticed that he local movie theater was showing a re-showing of the Star Wars trilogy.
Harry of course, had never even heard of the movies, but he was intrigued non-the less, especially when he noticed the tall furry creature with the weapons belt that reminded him of the story of the Sasquatch he had read in his Local legends of Canada book from the box (1).
Harry lifted a bit of money from a few passersby, and paid for a ticket to see all three, thankful that his relatives were away for the entire day, giving him ample opportunity to watch the films.
Harry discovered the genre called Science Fiction that day. Though it was not really the same as his fantasy stories, as alien worlds were not really a concern of his, he had found that Luke Skywalker's lessons in the Force, from the second movie, were something similar to what he faced trying to use his magic lifting things.
A scene in particular caught his attention. It was with the tiny creature known as Yoda. He was lecturing a rather put out Luke about how using the force was more about the mind than anything related to the crude mater of the physical, proving this point by lifting the man's fighter from the swamp (2).
After the rather entertaining adventure at the theater, he considered the scene he had watched.
He had to admit that he was rather encumbered by the notions that the bigger something was, the harder it was going to be to lift. It was an entirely sane thought, a Normal notion.
And therein lay Harry's problem. He figured that he would have to face and let go a lot of misconceptions that he had learned through being part of the Normal's world. Such as the notion of heaviness; after all, didn't Hercules lift monsters over his head? Hell, he and Atlas both had held the very sky! And that was a big expanse (despite it not being solid, Harry figured that the ancient Greeks didn't know about atmospheres and such back then) (3). If Hercules and Atlas could defy the notions of the physical through sheer muscle, couldn't he do it with his magic?
With this new mentality, he determinedly went into the garage early the next morning, and practiced trying to lift the heavy lawn mower he was expected to drag outside to begin the grass cutting.
It took him practice, letting go of the ingrained notions of weight was a tricky thing indeed, but after another few weeks, he had graduated to lifting his uncles car up and down in the garage.
Harry was pleased with his progress, and if his relatives didn't notice the fact that he disappeared a little too quickly, or that there was certain verve in his chores, they never bothered enough to remember.
Ooo ooo ooo
Spring was already in full swing, with the barest hints of summer filling Privet Dr. with scent of car soap, hyacinth, and BBQ's.
Harry felt a certain expectancy, a sense of something in the wind, which seemed to whisper to him that it was finally time.
By this time, Harry had already read the books enough times from the box to the point where leaving them on the door step of a church was not so difficult a duty. His preparations were already done and all that was left was to pick a direction.
Ooo ooo ooo
It was a pleasant evening in late May when a green eyed boy, nearly invisible to the quiet, normal neighborhood, disappeared from a long forgotten over grown lot with a rusted picnicking table, and soon just as forgotten as the table by the people. After all, they were an ordinary, normal little neighborhood were nothing extraordinary such as boys disappearing up into thin air ever happens.
The only ones to notice were the boy's family, and they only celebrated their luck briefly before pushing the wretched memories of the boy to the back of their minds.
Meanwhile, in an old Headmaster's office of an infamous and ancient school, a bird on a golden perch watched, with the stars peeking through the arched tower window, and the distant snores of said Headmaster from his quarters next door; as a selection of whirling, glowing trinkets or mysterious purpose sputtered, then went dead forever.
Ooo ooo ooo
A/n: I know the chaps are short and time has progressed somewhat fast, but I wanted to get into the journey part of this fic.
(1) Sasquatch is the name given to a cryptid ape, or hominid-like creature that some people believe inhabits forests, mainly in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. Bigfoot is usually described as a large, hairy, bipedal humanoid.- Wikipedia. (2) Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back.(3) Hercules and Atlas are from Ancient Greek Mythology, Hercules is the son of the god Zeus and a mortal woman, while Atlas was a Titan punished to hold up the sky.