Prologue

Warning: this chapter, in fact this entire story may contain clichés. I know that for a fact and recognise it. You'll only be pointing out the obvious when saying that in a review. Oh, and everything takes place seven years after canon. i.e. canon Harry's fifth year was in 1995-1996 but in this AU, it is in 2002-2003.

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2010

Harry Potter contemplated life as he sat in his well appointed study in his ancestral manor. He occasionally took sips from a glass of firewhiskey that he held in his hand as he stared into the fire in front of him.

Just today he had started his morning off with a confrontation with his former friend Hermione Granger. Well, 'confrontation' was a bit of an understatement; it had been more of a blazing row than anything else.

Harry supposed it was a good thing that his office doors had a silencing ward embedded into them, automatically cutting off all sound the minute the doors were closed. Had it been a muggle office, the whole floor would have been able to hear the shrieking of that harpy; that was a fact that Harry was sure of. As it was Harry's ears still rang with the sound of her voice.

Was she always this shrill, Harry thought, or did living with the Weasley matriarch along with her twit of a husband improve her shouting ability?

Harry amused himself for a bit thinking of Hermione Granger sitting with Molly Weasley in one of those acoustic rooms and practising her vocals with Molly interrupting her with tips now and then ('no no, dear, you should modulate your A's like this ... add a bit more snap to the name there ...') before he sobered and his thoughts returned to the topic of the conversation.

The Harry Potter Magical Child Protection Act, or as he liked to call it, the HPMCPA, (he still was getting used to having his name associated with anything much less important bits of legislature) was an important part of his plans for the wizarding world.

It was a wild idea, one cooked up by two lost sixteen year old former school rivals who were really feeling the pressure of the world on their shoulders, albeit for different reasons who had decided to get drunk just once to forget. To forget the bitter rivalry they once had, the fact that they were both pawns in opposing sides of a war that was really between two bitter manipulative old men who should have died long ago, a war that was never going to really end as long as one of those aforementioned old men lived, a war that would probably end the wizarding world's existence for good.

As such neither of them ever in their wildest dreams imagined that anyone would have ever been interested in their drunken ramblings, much less that the same person would have actually formed a coherent plan from them.

Then again, considering that the same person has managed the impossible and has successfully cheated death nearly seven hundred years ago, and still continues to do so, it really shouldn't have been so surprising.

He definitely had come far in his life. He no longer was the eleven year old wide-eyed child who saw Hogwarts as a haven from his abusive relatives, nor was he the same naive fifteen year old who only saw the world in black and white and was convinced that Dumbledore was always right.

Harry remembered exactly when everything had changed for him. The precise moment when he stopped being Dumbledore's pawn and had finally seen the world for what it was and what needed to be done;