Protection: The Sword and the Shield

......Smallest Bedroom, 4 Privet Dr., Surrey, England

Harry Potter had gone to sleep an average 8 year old boy. While his home life was not ideal by any stretch, his relatives could no longer afford to starve or mistreat him as they had liked. At his last physical he had weighed 56 lbs and was 4'3" tall. Both measurements within the normal developmental range for a child his age. The young man who awoke was different.

As Harry Potter came back to the waking world he smiled to himself. He had no doubt that in the coming years, the knowledge and skills he had stolen from the evil calling himself Voldemort would be very helpful, but as he lay in his bed he was awash with the happy memories of his time with his parents. His completed occlumency had given him access to all of his memories.

His earliest one being the moment he looked up into his mother's eyes in the hospital and recognized the odd figure as his mother. He didn't identify her as mother in his memory but rather as some weird baby feeling of safe, but he remembered her face looking at him and that made him smile.

He remembered playing with his father and mother and their friends and just allowed himself to bask in the memories of love, warmth and family. He had thought that he had been happy with the friendships he had built in the last year but these confirmations of love that he know had access to filled a hole in himself that he hadn't known was there.

Feeling energized and ready to face the day he stood from his bed and stumbled. He had a quick feeling of nausea and vertigo before he steadied himself. Looking down at himself it became clear what the problem was as his body had obviously grown and changed. He walked into the hall bathroom and closed the door before taking a good look at himself. He was definitely a few inches taller and looked like he had filled out some and gained some weight.

He looked like himself but somehow better. As if every imperfection had been erased. The most obvious was that he was seeing himself clearly but had not remembered to put on his glasses. His eyes were the same shade green but still seemed brighter somehow and his ears though still human had a slight taper at the end that reminded him of the elves from what was becoming an important magical resource for him, the book, the Hobbit.

He heard his aunt get out of her bed which surprised him as her bed was through two closed doors and at the opposite end of the house from where he was. As if his brain realized it had access to more information, all of his five senses flared. He could feel the small imperfections in the concrete counter he was leaning on, smell and taste the dirty laundry in the basement, hear his aunt getting dressed and see the brush strokes in the painting hanging in the bathroom.

All the information gave him a headache before his brain reordered itself instinctively and he returned to his normal level of sense input. Gagging at the residual taste and smell of the laundry, he quickly brushed his teeth. He took off his clothes and stepped into the shower allowing the warm water to run over him as he closed his eyes and used his occlumency to re-center himself.

While taking a quick shower he tested his senses one by one extending them to test their limitations and his control. It would take some work but he thought that he could get the hang of it. It was pretty cool that he seemed to now be the match of any werewolf or vampire when it came to his senses. That thought died when he felt his face......shift. Opening his eyes he saw that he now had a dog muzzle. Before he could properly panic, his face shifted back to normal. He felt another tingle in his head but could not identify what it was until he was getting out of the shower and noticed in the mirror that his hair was now blue. Realization came from his knew knowledge and he smiled. "I guess I am a metamorphagus too" he said out loud to the empty room.

Now that he was paying attention and trying to catalogue the many changes he could find in himself he noticed that his special awareness was much sharper and that the way he walked had shifted. He felt stealthy and dangerous. After getting dressed in his freak clothes, which still fit him but was definitely tighter he made his way to the kitchen to get breakfast.

......Master Bedroom, 4 Privet Dr., Surrey, England

Petunia Dursley looked at her sleeping husband and sighed. It didn't happen often but every so often she would have a moment of self-reflection and cringe at the life that she had built for herself. She was a pariah in her neighborhood as everyone now knew that she had mistreated her nephew and while she was lucky that she had ceased her criminally abusive behavior toward him before the investigation had happened, people still suspected and looked down on her.

Her husband had grown from the big and athletic rugby player she had met at university to a big and fat man that snored and had night sweats. Her son was a carbon copy of her husband without the drive and so had no desire to work his natural large frame into anything remotely athletic.

Not happy with where her thoughts were leading her she did what she always did and turned her unhappiness to anger and directed it at her nephew. She no longer tried to justify her anger by assigning blame for her troubles to the boy but just allowed the anger to burn everything else away.

Her face set in a scowl, she left her bedroom and headed down to the kitchen. The boy would be making breakfast as he supposedly enjoyed it and she didn't really want to have to do the work. When she entered the kitchen she froze. The boy at the stove was obviously her nephew but he was as different as night and day from the person who had went to his room the previous evening. Her mind struggled to define what was different and then like a flash it came to her.

The boy was gorgeous. The changes were very subtle and most people would just think they had over looked it before as they were more concerned with his wellbeing, but the boy had become, by far, the most handsome 8 year old Petunia Dursley had ever seen. She could see all the best features of Lily and James in the boy.

The first time she had met James her jealousy had overcome her, especially when she learned from his friends that Lily had rejected the hunk for 5 years. She had to jump on the first half-decent looking bloke that paid her any attention and still had to fight another woman for his affections and here her sister had strung along the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

She had tried at that time to make small flirtations at one of James's equally handsome friends and been soundly rejected. It had been polite but it still burned. Now their spawn would probably be the same. Beautiful and loved and desired. She couldn't take the unfairness of it all and she grabbed a knife from the block with the intention of making him less perfect.

Harry had used his new senses to track his aunt from the bedroom to the kitchen door. He had been able to feel the tension rise in the room as her anger grew and was surprised when she drew the knife but was fully prepared for it. As she stuck at his back he danced out of the way with a grace that only added to his aunt's stormy thoughts as she turned to press her attack. Before she could blink Harry stepped into her guard and plucked the knife from her hand and pressed the tip against her chest. At that point her anger fled her and she was left only with her original feelings of a wasted life. She fell to her knees and started sobbing. Feeling no pity for the woman, Harry stepped around her, finished making breakfast and walked out of the house and went to school.