September 2, 1996
The Daily Prophet
Dear wizarding world of the UK,
My name is Harry Potter, and I’m writing to inform you all that I quit! I will no longer be the Savior upon whom you depend to protect your pitiful, cowardly lives. I lost the only person who ever offered me a safe and loving place to stay, and he was taken from me by Bellatrix Lestrange directly, and by Lord Voldemort, Albus Dumbledore, Cornelius Fudge, the DMLE and the Ministry tangentially. Let me explain a few truths to you.
I grew up in the muggle world, as most of you know. However, what you don’t know is that I was abused from the time I was dumped on the Dursleys’ doorstep on November 2, in the middle of the bleeding night. Who, might you ask, was the idiot who abandoned me on a concrete stoop? Why, none other than the great and powerful Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. He thought that I’d get a swelled head, or that I’d be in more danger if someone from the magical world took care of me. So, he left me with magic-hating muggles, and the first thing they did was toss me into their small boot cupboard, underneath their front stairs. That’s where I spent the first ten years of my life there; it was my bedroom, my cell, my prison.
From the time I was four years old, when magical children were learning what accidental magic was, I was made to cook and clean for Petunia and Vernon Dursley, and their whale of a son, Dudley. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks; anything that could be eaten, I prepared. Did I get any of the food I made? Of course not. It was made perfectly clear to me that they were only to make sure I lived, not that I thrived. I got the bare minimum of everything; food, clothing, normal amenities. I couldn’t use the bathroom but once a day, but since I barely ate and didn’t drink a lot of anything, those occasional loo visits sufficed. I wasn’t allowed to shower inside; instead I had to use the hosepipe on the outside of the house for my washing up. I did the dishes and washed the clothes; I hoovered the whole house and dusted every surface. I cleaned the shed and garage whenever they told me to, and I did most of the yard work and gardening. All of this was to ‘earn my keep’; the pittance they fed me and the clothes they gave me. By the way, the reason my clothing looked so awful is because they were my cousin’s hand-me-downs, and he weighed a good five stone more than me. They were paid, I later found out, from a fund established by my parents, but spent not one single ten pence piece on me.
If I messed up breakfast, I got a fry pan to my head. If I had any accidental magical outbursts, I was locked in my cupboard anywhere from a day to a week, without food. If I didn’t perform my chores to Vernon’s standards, or if I didn’t complete them all, my punishments ranged from no food to a swipe to my head from Vernon’s meaty fist. Dudley is the biggest bully I’ve ever seen, and he was given free rein to beat me up whenever he pleased. He and his friends created a game they called ‘Harry Hunting’, where they’d chase me all around the neighborhood and, if they caught me, they would physically assault me until blood flowed or bones broke. This is the ‘loving care’ to which the headmaster consigned me, with the excuse that the ‘blood wards’ were to protect me from Voldemort and his Death Eaters.
Did it never occur to that old man that, all the minions had to do was seal up the house so that we couldn’t escape and set it on fire? Or, any one of them could have scouted out my neighborhood and snatched me up whilst I was on my way to primary school, or going to the store for my jailers. Hell, I sometimes went to the park down the street, and any of the Death Munchers could have gotten me there. Those wards, if they even existed, only protected me as long as I stayed inside my prison, and there was no way in hell that I’d ever voluntarily subject myself to the Dursleys’ constant companionship.
Here’s some food for thought: my Hogwarts letter was addressed to the Cupboard Underneath the Stairs. Funny, that. And when I went to Dumbledore about alternate lodgings for the summer, he flat out told me that he knew he was subjecting me to ten difficult years, where I wouldn’t be treated as well as he would have liked. That I didn’t come to school well-nourished or happy, but that at least I was still alive. Who in their right mind thinks lack of ordinary care is okay for a child, and then expects that child to just take everything that’s thrown at him? My return to the wizarding world wasn’t met with fanfare, as the headmaster expected. It was met with staring and pointing and gossiping, and I was slandered almost from the moment I showed my face in your traitorous world. I was alternately heroic or demonized, depending on the mood Rita Skeeter was in at the moment. Or, depending on how much Fudge paid the paper to slander me.
The school is an entirely different matter altogether. I was exposed to blatant bigotry and blood politics from the moment I got on the train. Malfoy...Draco Malfoy felt he had the right to tell me that ‘some families matter more than others’, and that he’d be able to help me figure out which was which. I’d made friends with Ron Weasley by that point, and completely rejected that blond prat’s narcissistic attitude. Of course, I didn’t realize until later that Weasley was just as much of a fan of my ‘fame’ as the rest of you. His first comments to me were, ‘Are you really Harry Potter?’ and ‘Do you have the scar? Can I see it?’ I had absolutely no friends growing up, and I was so desperate to fit in that I accepted this as normal. I didn’t know any better, but I do now.
Ridicule, harassment, bullying, gossiping about me behind my back, ostracizing me for things that were well beyond my control, like my parseltongue or being illegally entered into the Triwizard Tournament by someone else, is what I received in Hogwarts. Oh, I made a few acquaintances, and Hermione Granger was a friend of sorts, but for the most part, I was so very alone, surrounded by hundreds of people, because none of you ever really saw me. All you saw was the scar on my forehead or my father’s face and my mother’s eyes. The only distinction I made at that school was becoming the youngest seeker in a century. And even that was compared to my father’s skills at quidditch. As with my life with the Dursleys, nothing at the school was ever mine, either. The teachers continually compared me to my mum and dad; in fact, one of you treated me like garbage because you saw my father’s face.
Out of all the years I spent in the castle, with the professors ignoring my treatment at the other students’ hands, I think the last year was the worst. Albus Dumbledore, who is Chief Warlock, couldn’t seem to do anything to get rid of Umbitch; a woman who spent the better part of my fifth year torturing me and several other students with a black quill. None of the professors or the heads of house saw anything, and I even tried to talk to McGonagall about it, but all she did was brush me off and threaten to take points, just like in my first year when I tried to warn her about someone stealing the Philosopher’s stone. Another student in Gryffindor house, by the name of Lee Jordan, was also punished with the quill, and when he went to the deputy headmistress, he was blown off, too. Is it because of his skin color? Because he hung out with the Weasley twins, who are notorious pranksters? Or is it because she really doesn’t care for the students? I’ve noticed that she never held a house meeting, nor did she have an introductory meeting, explaining the rules, during the whole time I was there. Other heads of house did, though.
Here’s more information that has been withheld by the great Albus Dumbledore: my godfather, Sirius Black, was not the secret keeper for my parents. He managed to talk Mum and Dad into making Pettigrew the one to hold the secret, thinking that his rat animagus form would be beneficial should he need to escape. He also knew that he’d be the first one targeted in order to get the secret. Little did any of them know that Pettigrew was a Death Eater, and embodied his animagus in human form. Sirius was sent to prison for murders he didn’t commit; it was Pettigrew who blew up that muggle street and killed those people because he was trying to find a way to escape Sirius’ wrath. Had my godfather been given a trial, as is his right as a British national, he would have been exonerated immediately. However, because the Ministry is so corrupt, they left him to rot in Azkaban for twelve years, and when he escaped and my friends and I had proof that he was innocent, Cornelius Fudge refused to listen. He took the word of a Death Eater who was unconscious for most of the confrontation between Sirius, Remus and Pettigrew.
Albus Dumbledore, the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, could have called to stop the Kiss on sight order, and he could have called for an investigation into the case. Instead, he convinces my friend and I to help Sirius escape completely, and turns around and imprisons the man in his old family home. Sirius Black died through incompetence and legal malpractice. He never got the help he needed, from anyone who knew him. Hell, headmistress McGonagall was present for most of the Order meetings, and she didn’t do anything to gain Sirius’ freedom; too afraid to upset her master, I’ve no doubt. He was the only hope I had to hold onto, and you all took him away from me. He promised to take me in and raise me; to give me a loving home, but the headmaster had his own plans for me, and Sirius would have disrupted those.
You all deserve Voldemort! Now that he’s back, and now that everyone KNOWS he’s back, I hope you enjoy whatever your life turns out to be, because I’ll not lift a finger for any of you.
Sincerely,
Harry James Potter
Former Boy Who Lived
“Well, cub, you sure told them,” Remus remarked after he finished the article. He had helped Harry escape by taking him to Gringotts as soon as he exited the Hogwarts Express when it stopped at King’s Cross station. The teen had talked things over with the werewolf, via the two-way mirror that Sirius had given him, and both agreed that everything that had happened to the boy from the moment his parents died was working toward some sort of final showdown, and Remus was afraid that Harry wouldn’t survive that confrontation. So, they concocted a daring plan to pull the emerald eyed boy out of the coming storms by going to Gringotts and having the manor house, that Harry had inherited on Norman’s Cay, opened up and readied for their occupation.
The island was sparsely populated, and the section in which the house stood had no neighbors around it for quite a distance, since the manor and the property surrounding it sat at the far end of the island, near the Exuma sand bar. Goblins had been out to put up the strongest, safest, and deadliest protections known to wizardkind, ensuring that no one would ever find either being ever again. “They had it coming,” the raven haired teen snarked angrily. “All that shit I had to put up with, including the torture that Umbitch called detentions, and no one did anything to help me. I just hope that we’ll be able to figure out the right necromantic magic to use to pull Sirius out of the Veil.”
“We’ll figure it out, cub,” Remus reassured the teen gently. “I promise.”