1

In a small town, in a nice house, in a tiny bedroom, on an uncomfortable bed lay a teenage boy. Messy black hair covered his face, obscuring the jagged lightning scar that adorned his forehead. He was staring idly up at the ceiling with eyes that were a remarkable colour of green and were usually filled with amusement, though at this moment they were clouded with resentment. He had a certain aristocratic look about his features; his cheekbones were high and sculpted, his lips were plump and would look feminine had they not been paired with the beginnings of a beard scattered across his chin. He was tall for his age, his feet reaching beyond the end of the bed to dangle inches above the mess covering what little floor space he had in his room. He was thin, there was no denying that, but on Harry, paired with the lean muscles that were a by-product of the last few years of Quidditch, it did not look unhealthy, but rather gave him an elegant, athletic grace that very few could ever truly achieve.

His name was Harry Potter, and he was pissed off.

His last school year had ended somewhat better than previous years, certainly. He now had a family member, a link to the parents he had lost when he was a baby. He had not been forced to fight Voldemort either, which was always a good thing in his eyes and nobody had died, not even Buckbeak. Even the Dursleys were being nicer than usual, scared as they were of Sirius. All in all, one could say that this should make for a happy Harry Potter, but if one did, then one would be forgetting a very important point in the equation of Harry's emotions.

Harry Potter was a teenage boy. Not only that, but he was a teenage boy who did in fact have an incredibly unfair life. He had been brought up by a family who didn't love him, and barely put up with his presence only to be thrown, at the tender age of eleven, into a world of magic and wonder and violence and death. Trouble and danger followed him everywhere in this new world, despite his best attempts at escaping it, and it had reached a point where Harry was simply fed up with it all.

Fed up with teachers, with detentions, with rules and restraints and being forced to risk his life again and again and again.

The door to his room crashed open, thudding loudly against the wall, snapping Harry out of his brooding thoughts. His hand grabbed his wand from his bedside table, demonstrating his Quidditch honed reflexes, and instinctively pointed it towards the figure in the doorway, on an instant alert for danger. He realised a second too late that the figure that was filling the entire doorway was his cousin, Dudley, who was now stood stock still, frozen with fear, his eyes fixed on the wand.

"What do you want?" Harry asked tiredly, lowering his arm. As soon as the wand was not in his face, Dudley recovered himself, sneering at his cousin in a way that would surely make Malfoy proud.

"Yeah, like I'd want anything from you, freak," he spat out, puffing up with bravado, determined to cover his earlier fear, "just putting some rubbish in the bin, that's all." With this, he turned on his heel, throwing a bundle of what were probably expensive items over his shoulder as he left, slamming the door behind him.

Harry sighed, running a hand through his hair, causing it to stick up messily in all directions. He pulled himself from the bed, wading through the mess to retrieve whatever it was that Dudley had deemed so unworthy of his interest. In Harry's experience, whatever his cousin did not like was usually something that Harry himself could find at least a little enjoyment out of. It was slightly amusing, he supposed that Dudley assumed that by putting all of his unwanted belongings in Harry's room that he was making Harry's life harder, when in fact, it helped a great deal towards staving off the boredom which often grabbed hold of him in the summer months.

He flopped back onto the bed with an armful of things, flipping through them quickly to determine if there was anything worth his interest. A slight smile graced his face as he realised that his cousin had just dumped enough stuff to hold Harry's attention for the rest of the summer. At least, if he read the books slowly, and listened to the CD's several times over.

The thought was not enough to completely dispel the resentment he was feeling, but it was a start. Grabbing the nearest CD from his bed, he put the disk into an old radio on his windowsill (another of Dudley's cast offs), throwing himself backwards onto the bed as soon as he'd pressed play.

The music exploded from the speakers viciously, capturing Harry's attention in a second. Then the lyrics began and any speck of focus that he owned which wasn't already directed towards the music pumping from his stereo was now. It was bitter, violent, angry and everything other resentful emotion Harry was feeling. It rushed through his being, lighting it on fire and banishing the brooding thoughts he had given himself over to, replacing them with ideas of chaos and anarchy.

By a few songs into the CD, Harry had begun to laugh hysterically where he lay splayed out on the bed. He hadn't felt this alive in years, if he ever had at all, with so many indescribable feelings rushing through him. He felt suddenly restless, needing to get up, to go out, to do something, anything that would mean this feeling wouldn't go away.

With a smile on his face, and a plan in his mind, Harry Potter jumped off his bed, grabbed his wand and jacket, shoved his feet roughly into some shoes and left.

By the time he was finished, they wouldn't know what had hit them.