Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The field was still warm from the day’s sun as Harry laid down in it, staring up at the vast night sky. The bugs and frogs buzzed and croaked almost pleasantly in the distance, a soft melody that was just about as close to a lullaby as the boy knew that he would ever get. But he couldn’t sleep just yet.

Grass rustled by the boy’s ear as another sat down in the field next to him. Harry didn’t need to look to know just who the newcomer was. There was no one else that it could be after all. No one else would really be crazy enough to sneak out at night to meet the green eyed boy in a field at night, especially not for so many nights over the past school year.

“Nice night,” Jude Finley observed as he fitted himself at the younger boy’s side, their arms pressed closely together in a way that neither of them ever allowed for anyone else to do so.

Jude’s voice was gruff as he spoke, even at the age of eleven. Harry liked it that way though as opposed to his more joyous classmates, the ones that could hardly ever be found without a laugh in their words. Harry understood the gruffness of the other much better than anything else. It matched his own after all.

“No shit,” the lightning scarred boy cursed, ignoring the older boy’s false gasp of disbelief. Jude had no room to be making such noises, both of the boys knew that much. “Oh, shut it Finley. You’re the one that I learned it from.”

“Fuck it,” the older boy cursed indignantly. Out of the corner of Harry’s eyes he could just make out the older boy threading his fingers through the tall grass. “You’re right.”

Harry hummed gently, biting down the remark that he normally was. “How did you get away?” The black haired boy asked the brown haired one instead, even though he’d already heard the answer before too many times to count.

“Out the side door,” the other boy lied. Harry knew that it was one as sure as he knew the name of the brightest star in the night sky. 

There were fresh scrapes on the older boy’s arm from getting it caught on a tree limb while he was climbing out of the window of his room on the second floor of the Boy’s Home  that he lived in. It was a lie that Harry knew Jude told and stuck to after the green eyed boy had become angered with the reckless blue eyed one for twisting his ankle the first time that they had met like this. 

It was a lie that Harry let the other tell him so that they wouldn’t fight. 

“How did you escape?” The older boy asked even though Harry knew that he already knew the younger boy’s lie. He just didn’t know that it was one.

“Through the patio door and over the fence,” Harry told the other easily. And really it wasn’t much of a lie at all as he’d done just that. It was a lie of omission as he’d done so much more before that.

The cupboard door had been shut and locked tight when the Dursleys had gone to sleep for the night, but that didn’t really matter so much when Harry was a freak, as his relatives so kindly called the boy. The door had thrummed and heated almost as if it was alive when Harry had placed his hand upon it and vanished the structure altogether for long enough for the boy to slip across the threshold before it came back. After that, everything had gone exactly as Harry had said.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Harry had learned that when he really wanted things to, he could make seemingly impossible things happen. He could remember running once, as far and as fast as his legs could take him, which was much farther than most boys his age given his practice despite his sorry state, as Dudley and his little gang had chased after him. ‘Harry Hunting,’ they had so joyously called it. 

But Harry in no way had wanted to be found. 

He could still remember how it had felt to so desperately want to be almost anywhere but where he was right then, and how in the next moment he had been on the school’s roof. 

Between that and the time that his hair had grown back completely overnight after his Aunt Petunia had taken the shears to it, Harry had understood that these were things that he was doing. So he sought to control it.

Intention and emotion were everything, Harry had learned quickly enough after being locked up in his cupboard for a week after the hair incident. It had been nearly three after the occurrence at the school. There had to be emotion and a cause to drive and change the emotion into fuel. Harry had more than enough anger and drive for both. 

Though he never dared to put a name to what he was or what he could do.

Harry knew that Uncle Vernon would surely kill him if he did.

“How are the Dursleys?” Jude asked, the scorn evident in his tone as he drew the other boy out of his thoughts.

Harry stared up at the night sky and studied the constellations there for a moment, tracing the ones that he knew, and whispering their names in his mind. He didn’t want to talk about the Dursleys, but the only other option was the happenings at the Boy’s Home and all Jude would have to speak of is the extra readings that the Matron was making them do in hopes of raising the boys' literacy levels. She got on tangents like this every now and then, according to Jude, usually more so as summer drew closer.

“As normal as always,” Harry answered at last, taking a moment to breathe in the scent of the night air to ward off the harsh screams that still lingered in his ears from hours before, his own screams. “Dudley is going to throw a fit in the morning, though that’s normal enough I suppose.”

The older boy’s chest rose and fell in a way that might have been a laugh in another life, but not quite this one. “And why’s that?” Jude asked as he shifted in the grass and laid his head against the younger boy’s shoulder as if it belonged there. 

Most nights it did.

A sigh escaped Harry’s chapped lips, the crease in the middle opening painfully as blood sprung from the bust, but the slight boy only licked it away. It was nothing new after all.

“He only got thirty - six presents this year,” Harry explained almost bitterly, showing just how much he cared for his cousin’s idiocy, “last year he got thirty - eight.”

“The poor bastard,” Jude falsely lamented, his voice filled with enough sarcasm that Harry knew that he would get slapped seven times to Sunday if he were to use even half as much at the Dursleys. 

A familiar bitterness curled in the younger boy’s chest at the way that the other boy could act so blatantly like himself, the easy way that he could let go. Harry could too if he wanted, could switch everything on and off like some sort of game. And sometimes he did, but it was a taxing ordeal. Harry normally conserved his energy for the Dursleys.

In moments like these, Harry thought that perhaps he hated summer and all that it brought with it.

He thought that sometimes he hated Jude too.

The boys had pressed up against one another in the grass, talking about nothing and everything that came to mind as their eyes began to droop heavily and the conversation’s lull grew longer and longer with the passage of time.

The pair parted slowly, Harry making his way back to the Dursleys slowly with an apple tucked neatly in his hand, something that Jude would never let him leave without. Sometimes the other boy’s kindness was at war with everything else that he knew of the older boy, but Harry thought that he quite liked that about the older boy. He would be boring otherwise, it added layers to something that would have otherwise been much too simple.

—-

Morning came far too early for Harry as his Aunt rapped on the once more locked door of his heavily dusted cupboard before screaming demands for the boy inside of it to wake. Harry could hear the heavy sounds of a lock coming undone as he proved his eyes open just before closing them once more in a wince.

“Up!” Aunt Petunia screeched loud enough that Harry was almost surprised that the neighborhood dogs didn’t start barking at the awful noise. He could hear the woman storming away towards the kitchen as he sat up in the small bed and searched for a pair of socks. She was back by the time that the boy had pulled his trainers on.

Harry pushed the door to his cupboard open quickly, giving his Aunt a good view of the state that she’d willingly  put her own nephew into as she stood there with her hand raised to hit the door once more. Harry had few joys in his meager life, but one of them was the subtle ways that he just refused to disappear in the way that his relatives so clearly wanted him to. The way that they always seemed disgusted with Harry and - in part - themselves, was just an added bonus. It felt almost like a form of revenge, maybe it was.

Though the only real revenge that he would want would be their bodies in the ground. Not that Harry would ever admit that out loud.

Aunt Petunia balked at her nephew for a moment before she lowered her arm down to her side with all the grave of a toddler.  “Get a move on,” the woman said at last, though she made no move to get out of the way so that Harry could do just that. Not that Harry would have dared to point such a thing out. “I want you to go look after the bacon, and don’t you dare let it burn,” the woman snarled at the small boy as he shuffled to the edge of his bed. “I want everything to be just perfect for my Duddy’s special day.”

He wanted to groan in annoyance at the childish name for the boy that was older than Harry himself. But he didn’t do so out loud, not when - as of right now - he was still being allowed to eat breakfast.

Aunt Petunia moved gawkily down the hall and Harry followed quietly behind her to take his place in the kitchen, up behind the stove. He’d been cooking for the family since he was tall enough to reach the burners and had the scars lacing and marring his arms to prove it.

Harry tried his best to ignore the almost buckling table as it all but bowed under the weight of all of the presents that Harry’s Aunt and Uncle had bought their son.  The sight made Harry feel almost ill to see, though resentful would be the best word to use as he rolled up the sleeves of the shirt that was once Dudley three times just so that it would not swallow the boy whole as he flipped the simmering bacon. Though just because Harry tried to ignore the sight, doesn't mean that he actually did.

He could see a new computer, a second television, and a new racing bike of all things. Out of all of the presents there, the last one made the absolute least sense to the younger boy as he knew that his cousin hated anything that had to do with exercise that didn’t involve punching whoever Dudley and his sycophants could get their grimy hands on. Harry knew that the boy’s favorite punching bag was usually Harry himself, but the younger boy was harder to catch than most would think, years of running laying firmly under his belt. That, and his ability to disappear at will when he so wished it.

Uncle Vernon walked into the kitchen as Harry turned over the bacon, the sizzling of the grease was nowhere near enough to cover up the sound of the man barking at the boy to comb his hair, something that he did at least once a week Harry found. That, or he’d look over his paper and say that the boy needed a haircut. Not that any that the child had ever gotten had stuck. 

A part of Harry wanted to ask the man why he bothered to do so at this point, but he’d learned a long time ago that the first rule for surviving the Dursleys was to not ask questions. Things have only ever gotten ugly when Harry had broken that rule.

Harry was putting the plates onto what little room was left on the table by the time that Dudley had gotten around to getting up and inspecting his presents, because of this Harry got to see the exact moment that the other boy’s face fell. 

“Thirty-six,” the plump boy said as he looked up at his parents. The older boy’s fingers were still held in the six Harry noted as he sat down on the other side of the table to eat what food had been left for him. A piece of bacon and the scraps of eggs that were left, a small portion that Harry wouldn’t put it past anyone in the house to take. “That’s two less than last year.”

Harry watched silently as his Aunt attempted to placate the older boy as warning signs of an impending meltdown began to flash in the minds of everyone else in the room. Harry could almost physically feel the tantrum that was coming as Aunt Petunia bargained with the other boy.

“-Two more presents. Is that alright?” The woman asked as Harry quickly scarfed down what little food he had left, knowing that Dudley turning the table over was still a very decent probability.

The older boy thought for a long moment, enough that Harry could almost see the clogged gears not turning in the other boy’s mind as he tried to do the basic math. “So I’ll have thirty… thirty…”

“Thirty - nine, sweetums,” Aunt Petunia said in that sickly sweet voice of hers that Harry had noticed that she reserved only for the plump boy and particularly nosy neighbors. A part of him wondered if the woman even noticed the silent manipulations that she used, but to ask would only land him on the wrong side of a locked door.

“Oh,” the older boy said at last, all of the fight suddenly leaving the boy’s body as he sat down heavily in his chair. The other members of the room all let out a silent, relieved breaths. Not that any of them would ever admit to that. “All right then.”

Harry heard Uncle Vernon chuckle as Dudley reached for the nearest parcel, dragging it towards himself rather than bothering to pick it up. Sometimes Harry couldn’t help but wonder just how the older boy could exert so much energy into remembering a number of presents from a year ago, but couldn’t be bothered to do simple math or pick up a package. Most times he found it easier to just not care at all. Life was always much easier when you didn’t have a stake in it.

There was a blunt sound of plastic crashing into plastic as Aunt Petunia hung up the phone and stormed back into the room. Harry was quick to identify the anger on the older woman’s face and even quicker to make himself small at the table, hiding neatly behind the growing pile of trash on the dining table. 

“Bad news, Vernon,” Aunt Petunia said, speaking the obvious as Harry had noticed that most people had a tendency to do so for reasons beyond his understanding. “Mrs. Figg has broken her leg. She can’t take him.” 

The ‘him’ in question was Harry himself, something that he would know well enough even without his Aunt’s hateful gaze flickering to him as she spoke.

That was another thing that Harry had noticed that most people tended to do. Adults liked to talk about children as if they weren’t there, even as they sat in the same room. The Dursleys liked to talk about Harry. The only person that he knew that didn’t do this was Jude, but he was often the exception in most things, not the rule. Harry sometimes thought that life would be much easier if the older boy had set the rule.

Harry could see the exact moment that Dudley registered his mother's words, as his hands ceased their endless pursuit for gifts and his mouth fell open in shock. The boy turned an angry gaze at Harry as if he were somehow responsible, but Harry didn’t so much as prickle at it as he might usually. He was too busy feeling relieved that he wouldn’t have to spend the day with Mrs. Figg or her cats for another year until Dudley’s next birthday came around. Aunt Petunia, Harry thought, seemed to share her son’s view of things if her angered glare was anything to go by.

“We could phone Marge,” Uncle Vernon suggested.

“Don’t be silly, Vernon, she hates the boy.”

“What about…” that was when Harry stopped listening to their verbal game of deciding what to do with him. There was almost no point in bothering to listen when he would get no say in what happened to him anyway.

Story of my life. 

The sound of tears is what brought the boy’s attention back to the conversation at hand. 

Across the table from him, Harry could see the older boy wrapped up in his mother’s arms as he wailed, acting as if this was all an injustice against him. The tears weren’t real of course, Harry knew that Dudley hadn’t seriously cried in years, it was just another manipulation in a house overflowing with them. The younger boy thought that the other occupants of the house knew this as well, they were just too cowardly to go against the older boy and risk a real tantrum.

The doorbell rang almost forebodingly through the house and Harry saw Dudley stop pretending to cry at once, as if to prove a point. The older boy shot Harry a nasty look as his mother pulled away to answer the door and welcome Piers Polkins into the house. The older boy had a rat - like face and beady eyes that sometimes made Harry wonder if he wasn’t related to Uncle Vernon in some way. The fact that Piers was the boy that held children's arms behind their backs as Dudley beat them bloody only reaffirmed the idea in the younger’s mind.

When half an hour had passed, it was time to leave for the zoo and no one in the Dursley house had found a decent solution for the problem that was Harry, the youngest of the three boys found himself walking out of the door with the other four to go to the zoo with them. He almost would have been excited if Uncle Vernon hadn’t taken a vice - like grip to his arm and pulled him to the side on the way to the car.

“I’m warning you,” the older man leered, his voice low and threatening in a way that Harry knew the man would never take with his son. Uncle Vernon stuck his face close enough to Harry’s that the boy could make out the small chips in the man’s yellowing teeth. “I’m warning you, boy - any funny business, anything at all and you’ll be in that cupboard of yours until the New Year.”

“I won’t do anything,” Harry assured quietly, just loud enough for the other to hear. He always tried his best not to speak while at the Dursleys. Nothing good ever happened when he did speak, but it was only slightly better when Harry didn't.

Uncle Vernon didn’t seem to believe Harry, he never did, but the boy really wasn’t planning on letting his freakishness show, not today. He would never purposefully act in such a way where so many people could see. The punishment would not be worth the price.

Sometimes Harry wished that his instincts would listen to the logical part of his brain.

The zoo was busy, filled with families and the like as they took advantage of the cheaper prices that the facility offers on Saturdays. The sun was beating down with a viciousness that had the older two boys complaining as they walked and studied the animals with slowly dulling gazes, but Harry found that he quite liked the heat. That he liked the burning kiss of the sun, the unforgiving nature of it all. He wanted that ruthlessness.

The group walked to the reptile house after they’d finished lunch and Harry wasn’t the least bit surprised to see the older boys walk straight for the biggest snake in the room. The reptile was easily big enough to wrap itself around Uncle Vernon’s car twice over and crush it into something unidentifiable. But the brown coils were asleep, something that seemed to bore the older boys as Dudley wined and Uncle Vernon rapped on the glass as if it was Harry’s cupboard door.

The four of them moved away from the snake, moving onto whichever one would catch the pudgy boy’s attention next, but Harry only moved closer to the reptile. The snake glittered prettily beneath the warm fluorescent lights, but he couldn’t really find it in himself to appreciate the beauty of it all. Harry knew what it was like to be locked away like you belonged to someone other than yourself. To be alone. Harry felt more like the snake than he did like any human most days.

As if noting Harry’s gaze, the reptile lifted his head and met the boy’s eyes and winked.

Harry was quick to look around subtly, as if deciding where to go next. Once he saw that no one was watching, the boy shoved down the absurdity of it all and winked back. 

The snake jerked its head in the direction of where Uncle Vernon and Dudley had gone before giving Harry a look that seemed to convey to the boy that the snake was quite used to the treatment that the group had given him. Used to being gawked at.

Maybe if Harry had been a bit duller, or more childish in nature he wouldn’t have noticed the breathy way that his voice came out when he spoke, or the hazy thrum of something in his chest, but he did. “I know how that feels,” the boy said to the boa constrictor, knowing somehow that the snake would understand him as well as Harry did it.

Harry had been about to say more when there was a scream from behind from a voice that made the boy’s body go stiff at the position that they were in. He could only vaguely hear Piers calling for the Dursleys over the panic rising in the boy and telling him to keep his arms pressed closely to his chest.

The panic had morphed into that unspeakable thing by the time that Dudley had waddled over to the tank, punching Harry in the ribs hard enough that he fell harshly to the concrete floor as the older boys pressed themselves up against the glass. By that point, Harry couldn’t have hoped to stop the wave that rushed through the boy’s body in the shape of the first panicked thought that had come to him.

To say that the glass gave way under the boys’ combined weight would be a lie, because in order for it to break or fall like that, the glass would still have to exist at all. But it had vanished just as Harry's cupboard door did at night.

Harry sat up to the sounds of howls of horror echoing through the large room as the boa constrictor uncoiled itself with a blinding speed and slithered out of the display and to the floor as people rushed past and around it to the exit. Harry knew that he wasn’t imagining it when he heard the snake hiss a quiet thanks.

Though the snake had only so much as nipped at the boys as it had passed them, Dudley and Piers in hysterics, swearing that the boa constrictor had tried to eat them whole by the time that the group had gotten to the car. That was a story that Harry was glad to let the boys keep so long as no one gave the vanished glass so much as a second thought.

But then Piers had calmed down enough to think about the events that had just transpired clearly, and had turned to look at Harry in the car. “Harry was talking to it,” the older boy had said almost to himself before focusing his gaze to look right at the boy with glasses. “Weren’t you, Harry?”

Harry hadn’t known just what to say to that so he had chosen to say nothing at all.

Uncle Vernon had only waited until Piers was halfway down the driveway before he had turned on Harry, grabbing at the boy’s hair harsh enough that Harry thought that he was about to just rip it out. The boy didn’t even struggle as he was dragged to the cupboard and thrown harshly inside, his shoulder banging painfully into the metal corner of the bed frame as the cupboard door slammed shut.

The burly man could hardly speak as his anger made him almost mute, proving to the boy what he already knew about those who expressed their anger out on others, a quiet anger was much more deadly than any explosive anger could hope to be. Harry was just grateful that Uncle Vernon was normally more prone to loud anger.

“Cupboard - stay - no meals,” the man stammered before stomping away to his chair.

Harry could hear Aunt Petunia’s flats slapping against the ground as she ran to get the man a brandy. Harry didn’t really think that giving someone that was already angry alcohol was really the best of ideas, but Aunt Petunia didn’t really seem to care about that. After all, she didn’t need to. It wasn’t her that would take the brunt of the anger anyways.

That night as Harry slept, he dreamt of flying motorcycles that would come and take him away to somewhere safe. 

But he knew that it would never come.

Chapter Text

The incident with the boa constrictor was something that Harry knew that Uncle Vernon wouldn’t just overlook, not with him believing that Dudley had been put into danger by the younger boy. So Harry wasn’t surprised in the least that the next time that he was allowed outside of his cupboard it was already well into the summer holidays.

 But with the holidays came Dudley’s friends coming to the Dursleys each day, looking for another ten year old to beat senseless. More often than not, that honor fell to Harry, so the boy was always quick to finish his chores for the day and escape to the field where he knew, hoped, that Jude would soon come.

The sun was beating down with an unforgiving heat by the time that Harry got to the field that day, his too large clothes hanging on the boy’s much too small frame like an extra weight as he walked. Harry could see the top of brown hair that gleamed almost red in the midday light. He moved and met the boy in the tall grass, sitting down beside the older boy. Harry could already feel Jude’s eyes on him before the other even turned his body to look at Harry fully.

Jude reached out and cupped Harry’s face, turning it to meet his own. Harry could feel the slight sting there as the older boy ran a thumb over the cut on his brow. He could see the undeniable anger that always seemed to linger behind those eyes of his when Harry showed up in such a state, but the anger never burned him. Jude never let it.

“I think that Dudley’s aim is getting better,” Harry joked snarkily, something that Jude did not seem to appreciate if the harsh way that the other boy shoved Harry’s face away was anything to go by.

Harry could see the older boy gritting his teeth as he attempted to calm himself. Each of them had a temper on them, one that they both knew would hurt the other if they didn’t take the time to try and control it. 

“You know, if you would just learn to duck…” Jude started, but his voice trailed off the way that it always did when this topic came up over the past year that the boys had known one another.

“Then it would be twice as bad when he finally does get his hit in,” Harry reminded the other anyways. “Making it easier for him to get it all out from the start is the best form of self preservation that I have,” the ten year old finished as he pulled himself to his feet, Jude following closely behind Harry.

“I know,” the other boy said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his worn jeans as the pair set off for the woods at the edge of the field. “I still fucking hate it,” the boy cursed.

You’re not the only one, Harry thought but he didn’t have to voice it for the other to know.

The pair walked through the woods, relishing in the shade that it provided. The trees were thick and the foliage full enough to block out the majority of the heat and the pair moved through them, tracing their fingers across the same bark that they’d climbed a hundred times before over the past year. If Harry were to think about it all long enough, he could almost feel that force within him longing to reach out to the woods as well. Harry didn’t give in though, not with Jude around to see and leave him for being a freak too.

“Stonewall High will be better,” Jude said suddenly as the boys sat on the tallest branches that they could without breaking them, the leaves pricking at each of their skin.

“No shit,” Harry cursed, kicking the other boy’s trainer with his own as they faced one another from opposite branches, their feet dangling in the open air.

For the first time in ten years that Harry had lived with the Dursleys, next school year would be the first time that he got to go to a school without Dudley and even some of his goons. What was even better, Stonewall High was the same school that the boys from the group home went to as well. Next year would be the beginning of five years spent at the other boy’s side. And five years without having to see Dudley for twenty - four hours a day.

Even with the power thrumming dangerously under his skin, constantly begging to be released, Harry couldn’t imagine anything better.

—-

Harry was surprised to find his body waking up naturally the next morning instead of to the sounds of his Aunt’s screeching, but the heaviness of sleep was soon washed away by a horrid smell coming from the kitchen. Wrinkling his nose, Harry ventured out of the cupboard and into the other room to find the source of the offending smell.

“What is that?” Harry asked, his eyes taking in the sight of what almost appeared to be dirty rags cooking in gray water. He thought that he might already know the answer, but was just hoping - almost desperately so - that he was wrong. 

Aunt Petunia’s lips tightened into the same thin line that they always did the few times that Harry had ever dared to break his own set of rules and ask a question. “Your new school uniform,” the woman said with more than a hint of spite.

“I didn’t realize that it had to be so wet,” Harry muttered bitterly under his breath, just quite enough that no one else in the room could hear him.

Harry thought it best not to question the woman anymore and moved to the table, getting about as far away from the smell as he could while remaining in the room. It wasn’t long before Uncle Vernon and Dudley waddled into the kitchen as well and sat down at the table. The older boy seemed to take great, oafish joy in banging his Smelting’s stick on the table as he did so, leaving Harry to wonder - not for the first time - why the school thought that giving boys such things in the first place was such a good idea. He could only imagine how much it would hurt to be hit by one of those. Harry figured that by the end of secondary school he wouldn’t have to imagine at all.

The mail slot clinked as it fell closed and a small stack of letters hit the doormat. Harry stood to get them without being ordered to do so, anything to get a reprieve from the stench slowly filling the house.

There were only three pieces of mail waiting for Harry when he went to pick it up. One was what looked to be a bill while another was a postcard of the Isle of Wight from Aunt Marge to Uncle Vernon, and the last… the last was a letter with his name written on the envelope in a dark green ink.

Harry walked to the kitchen slowly, staring at the letter in his hands as his mind was numbed from shock. If Harry had been thinking more clearly, he might have hidden the letter away in his cupboard before the Dursleys could see it, but as it was Harry was too busy staring at the address on the letter and the seal on the back.

Mr. H. Potter

The Cupboard Under the Stairs

4 Privet Drive

Little Whining 

Surrey

The envelope was thick and made of a heavy parchment that reminded Harry of the old kind that he would see people using on one of Aunt Petunia’s historical dramas. The seal had the image of a crest on it, divided into four pieces. There was a lion, an eagle, a badger, and a snake surrounding the letter H, all of it made from purple wax.

“What are you doing boy?” Uncle Vernon all but snarled at Harry when he stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Checking for letter bombs?” Harry handed over the postcard and the bill as the man laughed at his own joke.

Moving quickly, Harry sat down at the table and started breaking the seal on the letter before any of them realized that he had it and accused him of stealing from the Dursleys. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

“Dad!” Dudley squealed suddenly, causing Harry to jump and bite his tongue to keep from cursing out loud, Aunt Petunia was not one to tolerate such a thing. “Dad! Harry’s got something!”

No sooner than Harry started to unfold his letter, was it ripped away from him by his Uncle’s meaty hands. Harry didn’t bother to make any noise in protest, he knew that it would do himself any good to fight.

Harry watched as his Uncle shook the letter in what seemed to be triumph before he actually took the time to look at the paper in his hand. He could see the exact moment that undeniable fear took over the man’s body, washing his face out into a paper white complexion.

“P - P - Petunia!” The man gasped, looking almost as if he had been possessed.

Dudley made a grab for the letter as Harry watched his Uncle all but hyperventilate at whatever it was that he had seen on the page, but Uncle Vernon moved the letter out of his son’s reach. It was the first time in ten years that Harry had ever seen the man defy one of his son’s whims.

Aunt Petunia walked over to her husband’s side and gave the letter what was supposed to be nothing more than a cursory glance, but after reading the first line the woman looked one decent shock away from fainting where she stood.

“Vernon! Oh my goodness, Vernon!” The woman choked out once she was able to speak once more. Harry personally didn’t believe that the woman had any goodness to her to speak of, but that was his personal opinion.

Harry and Dudley etched as the adults stared at one another, the older pair seemingly to have forgot one that they boys were still in the room at all until the older boy tapped his father on the head with his Smelting stick, a sight nay would have been almost comical in any other situation for Harry.

“I want to see that letter,” the boy loudly proclaimed, lowering the stick back to the table with all of the grace of a drunken bastard.

Harry fought the urge to scoff at the older boy. “I want to read the letter,” the younger boy said bitterly, knowing just how useless doing so was going to be, “you know, since it’s mine.”

“Get out, both of you,” Uncle Vernon ordered, denying his son for the second time in as many minutes. Not for the first time, Harry wondered why all the interesting things always tended to happen when he had a stake in it.

But Dudley didn’t move, so neither did Harry.

When Uncle Vernon saw that neither boy was going to easily comply, the man rose from his chair and grabbed both of the boys by the scruff of their necks. The man threw the boys into the hall and slammed the kitchen door shut with enough force to rattle the pictures on the wall. 

Harry and Dudley stared at one another for a moment, the pair sharing a strange case of likeness as neither could really believe what had just happened inside of the kitchen. It only took a beat for the pair to remember just what was going on inside of the other room and fit themselves against the door to listen.

“-what should we do, Vernon?” Harry heard his Aunt ask, her voice filled with a peculiar kind of fear that he only ever heard her use when a certain thing was mentioned. “Should we write them back? Tell them that we don’t want-”

Harry could hear the distinctive stomping steps of his Uncle on the other side of the door come to a stop as he cut his wife off. “No,” the man decided firmly. “We’ll ignore it. If these people don’t get an answer…”

Harry didn’t know who it was that they were talking about, but he could guess, he was no fool after all. There was only one unspoken rule within the Dursley household - all of the others were laid out bare as soon as a line was crossed and they needed to be created - and that was that the things that Harry could do, the freakish things, were not to be spoken of or encouraged.

The letter had to have been from someone like him.

—-

The night of the kitchen incident Harry was moved into Dudley’s second bedroom, sharing the space with all of Dudley’s old and broken things. He didn’t bother asking about the change, figuring that it was some idiotic ploy made up by his Aunt and Uncle to fool those that had sent the letter, or to at least not make themselves look as bad. The cupboard under the stairs wasn't a pretty picture to have painted after all.

The room was the smallest of the ones inside of the house and almost filled to the brim with all of the things that Dudley had cast off over the years. The only things in the room that appeared to be unharmed were the heavily dusted books lining the once sleek shelves, filling them to the brim. If the condition that they were in were anything to go by, Harry had a good guess that they were the only things in the room that had never suffered the older boy’s touch.

What had caught Harry’s attention the most was the month old broken camera in the corner of the room. The damage on it didn’t look too extensive and that was enough reason to work on it well into the night to drown out the sounds of his cousin’s whining about the new arrangement and his Aunt’s placating voice.

—-

The next morning had to have taken second place on the strangeness scale of Harry’s life as Uncle Vernon had been almost civil with him the entire time, going as far as making Dudley get the mail that morning. 

Not that it had anything close to the intended consequences.

The second letter had come that day, Dudley had it in his hands and was trying to open it as Uncle Vernon lunged for the envelope, wrestling the older boy to the ground to steal it away. Harry stood back and watched quietly as the pair grappled with one another for the letter as Aunt Petunia squalled for them to stop.

Harry had learned one thing that day when he’d caught a flash of flash of the address on the letter, the people sending the letter knew that he’d been moved.

—-

More letters came through the mail slot as the day passed on, the number of which steadily increased as well (though Harry privately thought that this was more to annoy his relatives than anything else). Those letters were burned in the fireplace and the mail slot boarded up.

Next came twenty - four letters hidden inside of two dozen eggs that were shredded by Aunt Petunia through the food processor of all things on Saturday.

—-

Sunday was when Harry saw things hit their first breaking point as forty letters had come barreling out of the chimney during breakfast. While the Dursleys had ducked, Harry had dove to the floor to grab as many of the letters as he could, but Uncle Vernon had slapped them harshly out of the boy’s hand and drug Harry out of the room before he could get a good grasp.

“That does it,” the man proclaimed with a false calmness that always set Harry more on edge than the man’s blatant anger ever could hope to.  “I want everyone back here, packed and ready to leave in five minutes. No argument!”

At that moment Harry knew that Dudley and Aunt Petunia saw in the man what Harry did most days as the pair scrambled up the stairs in a whimpering fear with Harry trailing close behind them.

Harry wasn’t even surprised this time when Uncle Vernon had struck the older of the two boys across the face for taking twice as long as the time that he’d given them. 

The four of them drove and drove for the rest of the day, not making so much as a single stop for food or drink the entire time no matter how much Dudley whined about his two missed TV programs and the like. They didn’t stop until they were at a dinghy motel in Cokeworth for the night.

—-

The morning didn’t stop the letters though as another had come while they were at the hotel breakfast the next day.

—-

The cabin that they went to next would have been dreary enough on its own without the persistent rain pouring down on Harry and the others as they rowed out to it. The inside smelled strongly of seaweed and there were more holes than the number of walls in the shack. The fireplace was damp and cold from the sea, refusing to light no matter how much Uncle Vernon fought with it.

Despite all of this, Uncle Vernon was in a very good mood.

Harry could tell that the man believed that no mail could reach them here. Privately, Harry thought that his Uncle was foolish to believe such a thing, not if those sending the letter could do what he thought that they could.

Night fell and the storm outside raged on, chilling the bones of everyone in the shack. Harry watched silently as Aunt Petunia gathered up all of the spare blankets that she could find and made up a bed for her son on the couch, leaving the thinnest of the blankets and the floor for Harry himself. But that was fine by Harry. Between the thundering storms, Dudley’s snores, and the anticipation coiling in the boy’s stomach, Harry highly doubted that he would sleep at all that night.

Time ticked away quickly as midnight approached, closing in on the day that Harry would turn eleven.

The storm grew louder and the house creaked something fiercer as someone knocked on the door hard enough to shake the whole shack as midnight rang in.

There was a loud banging noise as Uncle Vernon came crashing into the main room, a rifle in his firm grip. “I’m warnin’ ya, I’m armed?” The burly man shouted as the knocking ceased.

Then the door fell to the floor with a great bang.

Harry pulled himself to his feet quickly from the ground at the figure of a man easily ten feet tall standing in the doorway, towering over everyone else inside of the shack. Harry watched the stranger with careful eyes as the man squeezed himself through the frame that the door had once sat in before bending down to put the door back where it had been. Harry knew that he could never hope to beat the stranger in any type of physical fight - really that last was never much of a question -, but Harry thought that he might be able to outrun the giant if it came down to it.

The stranger's eyes seemed to scan the Dursleys, or more likely just Uncle Vernon and the pair hiding behind the man, before landing and staying on Harry himself.

“Ah’ here’s Harry!” The giant exclaimed with a booming voice that Harry thought was more likely than not just the man’s usual volume.

Harry looked up and met the man’s eyes and was surprised to find that they were crinkled in a smile. It was the first time that anyone had looked at the boy like that. It made Harry want to claw the warm feeling out of his chest before anyone could take it.

“Last time that I saw you, you were just a baby,” the stranger said, his voice inexplicably fond for some reason that Harry couldn’t fathom. “Yeh look a lot like your dad, but yeh’ve got your mum’s eyes.”

Harry’s breadth caught at the slip of information, all but trapping him there like a butterfly in a display case. He’d never know what his parents looked like before just then. There were no pictures of either of them in the house and Harry was forbidden from asking about them after being told how they had died. He didn’t even know when they died.

Some part of Harry registered Uncle Vernon yelling at the stranger to leave and the giant bending the rifle into a knot as easily as someone breaks bread, but it wasn’t until the man pulled a box for his coat that Harry found it within himself the capability to function again.

Inside of the box was a crushed sort of cake that said Happy Birthday, Harry in green icing that reminded the boy of the ink on the letters. It was Harry’s first birthday cake.

“Who are you?”

The man chuckled loud enough to sound like distant thunder.

“Rubeus Hagrid, keeper of keys and grounds at Hogwarts,” the giant - Hagrid - answered, tacking on the title behind his name as if it was supposed to mean something to the boy before him. Though it meant nothing to Harry, the youngest boy noticed Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon both stiffened at the name almost instinctively and had a pretty good idea as to what Hogwarts was. Or at least who went there.

Harry watched as Hagrid sat himself down on the old couch, making the thing creak and groan under the new weight. Questions prickled at the boy’s brown and for once he was going to ask them while there were answers that he could still acquire.

“What exactly is Hogwarts, sir?” Harry asked before anyone else could say anything to stop him from doing so.

Hagrid looked down at Harry within a shocked expression that made the youngest boy want to shy away from the older man’s gaze. The giant turned to stare at the Dursleys who were still cowering in the corner of the room, tucked as much into the shadows as their figures would allow them to.

“You didn’t tell the boy about Hogwarts?” The man asked, more to himself it seemed than to anyone else in the room before turning back to Harry. “Blimey Harry, do you even know what you are?”

Something cold swept through the already frozen room as a bitter taste filled Harry’s mouth. He didn’t need to be reminded of what he was.

“Stop!” Uncle Vernon suddenly commanded, seemingly finding his voice at last since it was lost with the rifle before. “Stop right there, sir! I forbid you to tell the boy anything more!”

Realization and rage seemed to play in equal parts over Hagrid’s face as he took in the situation. “You never told him anything?” The giant bellowed, seeming to finally have concluded just how clueless Harry was supposed to be. “Yeh never told him what was in Dumbledore’s letter? I was there! I was Dumbledore leave it, Dursley! An’ you’ve kept it from him all these years?”

“I know what I am.”

All the eyes in the room landed on Harry as he spoke, his bitter voice carrying over the sound of the arguing adults. He took pleasure in the way that Aunt Petunia gasped in horror and raw ashen look that took over his Uncle’s face.

“You do?” Aunt Petunia asked, her voice breathy with panic.

But Harry ignored the woman in favor of turning to the fireplace. A simple flick of his wrist was all that it took for the once dead fireplace to spring to life with flames that flashed a dark purple before changing to the usual hues of red and orange.

“I know what I am,” Harry repeated, enjoying the fear that shone in his relatives' eyes at the simple action, but the shock in Hagrid’s dark eyes made much less sense to the boy.

But then the giant chuckled. “‘Course you’d figure it is of your own,” the man said, breaking the tension that had built, though Harry could still see some of the surprise lingering there. “You’re Lily’s son, aren’t ya.”

So they were like me… Harry realized, taking in the information that he could only speculate on before then.

“I reckon that it’s about time that yeh read yer letter,” Hagrid decided, taking out another one and handing it to Harry. For the first time, no one tried to stop the boy from reading it.

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Wizard…

Harry let the title sink in, let himself think it for the first time since he realized that it was him causing all of the strange occurrences that he knew to be scientifically impossible.

Wizard…

It sounded a lot better than freak.

“What does it mean that they ‘await my owl’?” Harry asked, finding that he quite liked getting to pretend that his relatives were not in the room at all as he spoke.

The giant cursed something about galloping before pulling out a quill, paper, and a legitimate owl from his coat pockets. Hagrid wrote down a quick message about taking Harry shopping the next day before putting the quill away and moving to the window to throw the owl out into the storm. Harry almost felt bad about asking. 

Almost.

So they use owls for post then…

“Now, where was I?” Hagrid asked as he sat back down, now birdless… Hopefully.

Harry opened his mouth to ask another question, but the sight of Uncle Vernon moving had him slamming it shut more than once. The man’s face looked beyond angry, livid, as he moved in front of the fire light, but even then he and Hagrid were only at eye level with one another… Magic or no, Harry felt his body curling as he willed himself to become small.

“He’s not going,” Uncle Vernon said angrily. Harry knew that his Uncle was only one wrong word from screaming.

But Hagrid only grunted, feeling none of the fear coursing through Harry’s small frame. “I’d like Te see a great Muggle like you stop ‘em,” was all that the giant said.

Harry thought for a moment on the word that Hagrid had used, Muggle. Growing up in a house where he was the only one banned from asking questions, Harry had learned early on what lines to read between, behavior to study to get the answers that he sought after. It wasn’t hard to figure out that Muggles were those born without magic.

They’re the normal ones.

“We swore when we took the boy in that we’d put a stop to all of this rubbish,” his Uncle bellowed, his foot stomping uselessly on the ground. “We swore that we’d stamp it out of him! Wizard indeed.”

Anger rose up inside of Harry and with it came magic, coursing through his veins as good as any drug, like pure adrenaline. Wind began to rustle and stare in the shake, the walls creaking violently as an unnatural thunder cracked in the distance. There was a storm raging inside of the boy, always had been, and he was getting close to willing it to let go.

Everyone else seemed to know it too.

The Dursleys were looking at Harry with ashen faces as Hagrid stared at the boy with the same look of shock that he had worn earlier with the fire.

“They were like me? Weren’t they?” Harry asked, moving close to the cowering family, forcing them to tell him of the answers that they’d withheld for years. “My parents.”

Harry watched as his Aunt shrieked, a rant years in the making falling from the woman’s lips. She spoke of a sister born with magic, of a letter that came and whisked her away to a faraway school every year. Of a family that was proud of the girl, even though Aunt Petunia only saw her as a freak. 

“Then she went and met that Potter at school, got married and had you. Course I knew that you’d be just as strange, as abnormal. Then they went and got themselves blown up and we got landed with you!”

The wind picked up and grew much stronger, rattling the table and chairs, tossing everyone’s hair this way and that until it looked like a tangled mess. “Blown up?” The boy questioned harshly. “You told me that they died in a car crash!” Harry yelled, the wind picking up until it was hard to hear.

That didn’t stop Hagrid from yelling over it.

“Car crash?” The man screamed, springing to his feet with enough force to shake the entire shack. “It’s an outrage! A scandal!” The man insisted. “Harry Potter boy knowing his own story when everyone else in our world knows his name!”

“What happened?” Harry asked, his confusion damping the winds into a not so gentle breeze.

Hagrid’s face softened into something anxious.

"I never expected this,” the giant said in a voice that would probably be his version of a whisper. “I had no idea when Dumbledore told me there might be trouble getting hold of yeh how much yeh didn’t know…” the man continued on, but Harry only half listened to the giant's ramblings about all of the things that he didn’t know.

Because Harry was taking that time to analyze what he did know. Because he’d just found out in the course of one conversation that the Headmaster of his school was the reason that he was placed with the Dursleys, that he’d given Harry to them himself, fucking letter and all. And that the man must have known at least the minimum of what was happening inside of that house, but still did nothing to help. 

He wondered where the bastard got off on playing god.

Harry had never seriously thought of killing someone before, but he thought that Dumbledore might be at the top of his list. Right up there with this Voldemort bloke that Hagrid was telling him about.

“Took you from the ruined house myself, on Dumbledore’s orders. Brought yeh to this lot…”

Harry could understand everything that Hagrid had explained about Voldemort easily enough, about the killings and the war, but what he couldn’t piece together was why a school teacher was legally allowed to give such orders. Was allowed to dictate where a child would end up. Harry thought that there had to be some laws about that kind of thing. 

“What happened to Voldemort?” Harry asked instead, feeling that asking something about the headmaster to someone that seemed to follow his orders so absolutely wouldn’t be the best idea that the boy could have.

The faint flinched as if Harry had hit him. Harry didn’t feel so bad about causing such a reaction.

“Some say that he died,” the giant said once his face had regained its proper coloring. “Codswallop,” the man cursed. “Don’t know if he had enough human left in him to die. Most of us reckon that he’s still out there somewhere but lost his powers. Too weak to carry on,” the grounds keeper explained. 

Harry was glad that the giant didn’t seem to notice the catch in Harry’s breadth, or only took it for childish fear if he did. But Harry was relieved to learn that the wizard was still around, Harry wanted to kill him with his own hands in a way that he could remember for years to come.

“Somethin’ about you fished him Harry,” Hagrid continued. “There was somethin’ goin’ on that night he hadn’t counted on - I dunno what, no one does, but somethin’ about you stopped him.”

“None of this matters,” Uncle Vernon hissed, seeming to have finally found his voice once more. Harry wished that he hadn't. “I already told you he’s not going! The boy is going to Stonewall High and he’ll be grateful for it. I’ve read those letters-”

But the man stopped talking as Harry saw Hagrid raise the pink umbrella that he’d had at his side this whole time. “Harry has had his name down since he was born. He’ll be going to the finest school of witchcraft and wizardry in the world. He’ll-”

But Uncle Vernon, Harry knew better than most, was never one to be questioned or talked over. “I am not paying for some old fool to teach the brat magic tricks!”

Harry saw Hagrid’s face contort into something ugly as he stood, his umbrella still aimed at the Dursley lot. Harry knew that he wasn’t imagining the sparks that came out of the thing, hitting Dudley square in the chest. The boy squealed and danced, his hands covering his rear, but Harry could still see a pig’s tail curling between his cousin’s fingers.

“Never insult Albus Dumbledore in front of me,” Hagrid said dangerously to Uncle Vernon.

The man roared, but he knew - just like Harry had so many times before - that this was a fight that he wouldn’t be winning. Harry watched with silent satisfaction as Uncle Vernon grabbed his family in a vice grip and dragged them into the other room, closing the door tightly shut.

Hagrid sat back down as the door closed, a sullen look on the giant’s face as the anger seemed to have mostly drained away. “Shouldn’t lost my temper,” the giant mumbled ruefully before meekly meeting Harry’s gaze. “I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell anyone at Hogwarts about that. Strictly speaking, I’m not supposed to be doing magic.”

Harry only nodded, choosing not to ask why. He was just grateful that he’d known better than to question the headmaster’s orders out loud. If Hagrid was willing to do such a thing to a muggle boy only a year older than Harry, he didn’t want to think of what the man would do to Harry himself if he were to have insulted the man, Dumbledore.

Hagrid gave Harry his coat to sleep under that night, but Harry was still wide awake by the time that the sun rose.

Chapter Text

Harry kept his head down as they moved through Diagonal Alley not wanting to have to face a repeat of what had occurred in the Leaky Cauldron when Hagrid had all but boasted his name to the other patrons, drawing all of the gazes in the room to the boy instantly. People - witches and wizards - had swarmed Harry in only a matter of moments, closing in on the boy with no possible way of him being able to get away until Hagrid had pushed through the crowd. 

Harry would have screamed at the oaf if it wasn’t for the man’s sheer size. He doubted that the gaint would need much more than one good hit to kill Harry where he stood. But even with his head ducked as it was, Harry could tell that Diagon Alley was beautiful.

Every shop was filled with magic, making Harry feel as if he’d walked in another world altogether. In a way he supposed that he had. Everyone dressed in robes, the signs were old in the way one would see in more historical towns, and there wasn’t a hint of technology to be seen at all. Children were laughing and ogling an actual broom of all things, and everybody was filled with more color than Harry thought that he’d ever seen in his life.

Above all of it, Harry could feel the magic in the air, almost intoxicatingly so. Everything around him seemed as if it was drenched with it, almost as if Harry could taste it if he truly wanted to. It was wild in a controlled way, like a firework that hadn’t been lit just yet. You know exactly what it would do once given life, all you had to do was light the spark to see it.

And Harry desperately wanted a match.

And yet, as much as he wanted to see the place come to life more than it had already, it all felt off in a way that Harry couldn’t hope to properly describe even if he had wanted to. Foreign, almost. But Harry didn’t want to think about why that could be, not when his pockets jingled happily with more money in them than he’d ever had before in his life.

The trip to Gringotts had been nothing like what Harry had thought that it would be like when he had heard that they were going to the bank. When the giant had told the boy of their first stop, Harry had immediately imagined a depressing brick building with nothing but dull colors to it that seemed to drain all of the life out of its patrons to sustain its own. Harry hadn’t thought that the bank would look something like a muggle museum that had been carved from white stone and was tilting at odd angles. He hadn’t expected the creatures inside of it either, the goblins that had looked upon him with intelligent eyes that spoke of knowing something that Harry himself didn’t just yet.

The ride to his vault has been the most alive that Harry had ever felt, the wind flowing through his hair as adrenaline had coursed like fire through the boy’s veins. That didn’t stop Harry from noticing the package that Hagrid had retrieved from the previous vault for the illusive headmaster, and it didn’t dull his senses enough to allow Harry to think that it was allowed for him to ask either. Not that he would’ve if he had thought that it was allowed. Anything having to deal with Dumbledore, Harry was planning on staying absolutely clear of this year and all of the ones following. The man had already been allowed to meddle enough, Harry wasn’t stupid enough to all but hand the headmaster more opportunities to do so on a silver platter.

Harry hadn’t been able to stop the feeling of resentment that had bubbled up inside of him once he had seen what had laid inside of his vault, buried beneath his feet this entire time. 

Growing up, Harry always had nothing. He got Dudley’s hammy downs - no matter the fact that they were always at the least, three times to big for him - and slept in the cupboard under the stairs - hidden away so that no one outside of the house would ever know that he had existed at all. Food was always few and far between, and the only toys that Harry had ever had were the little toy soldiers that Dudley had thrown such a fit about upon receiving them that he hadn’t even wanted them in his second bedroom.

The excuse to those that had asked once that saw the state of the two boys had always been that they didn’t have enough money to afford Harry too, but Harry had stopped believing that when he was six and had been given that answer for the first time. Harry knew that if his relatives had known about the small fortune left behind to him, they could have found a way to steal it away faster than he could have hoped to breathe, and he still wouldn’t have been treated any differently. That didn’t stop the frustration that had built up inside of Harry at the thought that he could have been taken care of this whole time if he had just taken a trip underground.

It didn’t stop it at all.

Harry walked into Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions alone as Hagrid had slipped away for ‘a pick - me - up’ as he had called it. He didn’t really know if the older man was that much of a drunkard that this was something that the giant really needed, or if he was really just sneaking off on some more business for the headmaster, but Harry didn’t care either way. He was just glad to be rid of the other for a short while.

Distracted as he was, Harry almost didn’t notice when his skin felt like it had been set ablaze.

—-

Draco was teething with a familiar boredom as he stood on a stool in the back of the robe shop, waiting for the witch that was pinning his robes to finish. The robe shop that he and his family usually went to every year for his normal clothes didn’t sell Hogwarts robes, but Draco didn’t hold that against them… not much anyways. There were very few shops that were permitted to sell the school robes and Madam Malkin’s was the only one in Diagon Alley that did.

Draco let the boredom run freely within his mind, not thinking of anything better than to do with it. That was until someone else walked in.

The boy had messy black hair that Draco doubted could be controlled even if his mother were to cast a spell or three on it to do so. Even from the back of the shop Draco could tell that the other boy was much too skinny for it to be healthy, though the ragged clothing that appeared to be, at the least, three times too big almost hid that fact. The boy’s glasses were crooked and broken when the other boy stepped up onto the stool next to them and Draco had a thought that he was probably used to them being that way.

Draco normally would have sneered something snide at the smaller boy by now, but something stopped him this time. 

Draco’s skin was prickling in the way that it didn’t just before he did accidental magic, only it wasn’t Draco who was drawing it out this time. 

It was him.

He stared at the almost sickly boy for a long moment, not understanding why his magic would react at all to the other, but his train of thought was cut off by a small, but firm, voice.

“You know, if you’re going to stare like that, you could at least buy me dinner first.”

Draco startled as he could see both Madam Malkin and the witch that was tending to him stop moving at the smaller boy’s words, the crudeness coming as a shock to all three of them. Gray eyes immediately snapped to meet the other boy’s and he was almost surprised once more by the vivid green there. The blond almost averted his eyes before reminding himself that he was a Malfoy, and Malfoys didn’t do such things.

Draco felt his gaze harden as he looked at the smaller boy. “And why in Merlin’s name would I do that?”

The witches started moving slowly once more, seeming to have regained their composure as the boys spoke, but Draco could tell that they were ready to interfere if things were to go south. He could also tell that the other boy knew this as well and didn't seem to care.

The other boy smirked, Draco thought that he saw a bit of the devil in the twist of the other’s lips and wondered for a moment if maybe the muggle religions were onto something. “It’s only polite to do so,” the smaller boy all but snarled.

Years of schooling in proper etiquette was the only thing that kept Draco from reeling back, away from the other boy. That was until a cruise of his own formed. “Well, if we’re being polite,” Draco started, “then I suppose it would be appropriate to inform you that rags went out of season two years ago.”

Draco had expected the other boy to be offended by his words, but instead an almost interesting light came to the other boy’s green eyes. Draco thought that the strange boy looked much better with it than without.

“Well if that’s the case,” the other boy started, that wicked gleam returning to his eyes as he spoke, “then you should know that the slick back hair routine went out of style in the fifties.”

The blond resisted the urge to laugh at the smaller boy’s spine, because he knew that he shouldn’t be having this much fun talking to a strange boy like this. Let alone trading insults with one. If his father were to find out, they would both be cursed Seven ways to Sunday. Yet, this was probably the most fun that Draco's had in years. No one else in the blond boy’s life was bold enough to speak with him in such a normal way, like he was human. Not even the children that he’s grown up alongside do so anymore when their partners are around, all of them having the role of a perfect heir to uphold.

Draco was about to respond when someone else did first.

“That’s it, darling,” Madam Malkin said to the other boy. “You’re done, my dear.”

Draco watched as the smaller boy stepped down from the stool without so much as making a sound when he moved. To the blond’s surprise, it seemed almost as if the other boy wasn’t even aware that he was doing it.

The small boy looked over his shoulder just once at Draco before he left, that small smirk still dancing dangerously on his lips as he did so. Draco had a feeling that he would be seeing it again more times than he could reasonably hope to count. He wanted to see the danger that laid just behind it, the kind of magic that makes the air fill with it.

“See you at Hogwarts,” Draco whispered, speaking the words like some sort of promise. Maybe they were.

—-

Harry had liked Flourish and Blotts, the way that the books were stacked from the floor to the clerking in a kind of orderly disorder that he’d never seen before. Some of the tomes had been as large as paring stones, while others had been small enough to fit in the boy’s pocket. Harry found that some of the books had symbols on them, runes and Roman symbols for the platens that he’d seen when reading in the school library on mythology and on astronomy.

 Hagrid had to all but drag the slight boy away from a book on curses that Harry had found. He didn’t tell the giant that he’d been looking for something to use on his cousin the next time that the older boy decided to knock his lights out now that the Dursleys know that he was aware of his magic, but he didn’t really have to in the end.

“You really shouldn't be using magic outside of school,” the man said as the pair walked to the Apothecary. “Yeh could get in big trouble for doing so once yeh get yer wand.”

Harry forced down his scowl at the older man’s words. He had already figured out on his own that there had to be some kind of Statute of Secrecy the witches and wizards in the muggle world would have to uphold  to be allowed to live in it, or else everyone would know about the magical world, but Harry wasn’t too thrilled about the whole wand thing either. He didn’t understand why he needed one at all, not when he could do magic just fine without it. But if his abilities were considered freakish by even magical standards then Harry was going to be keeping them to himself. He didn’t want to know what the headmaster would do with such information and Harry had no faith in Hagrid not to tell the man this the moment that he saw the man.

The Apothecary had been interesting enough. Though the whole shop had smelled like sulfur, a smell that Harry did not understand how the shop keeper could stand to live with, the variety of ingredients was something that had caught the boy’s attention. There were jars of herbs, various fangs and claws and dried flowers everywhere in the room that there could be. The silver unicorn horns were what had told Harry that the creatures were real and what had convinced Harry to read Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them first on the train ride back to Surrey.

Looking over the list once more, Harry pointed himself at Ollivander's - the wand shop in Diagon Alley if the sign was anything to go by - but was stopped by a large hand on his shoulder. Harry had to force his body not to tense as he twisted to look at Hagrid, the giant's kind eyes not matching the unease that coiled in Harry’s gut each time that the man touched him or looked at Harry for too long. It wasn’t Hagrid’s fault that the giant's size reminded the boy of his uncle, but that didn’t mean the reaction wasn’t there.

“We should get yer an animal,” the gaunt said happily, speaking the idea as if he had just been waiting for the best time to do so. Harry only shook his head no, watching as the older man’s face fell. “Why not?”

Harry didn’t want to have to tell the giant that he barely got enough food as is at the Dursleys, and that any animal that the boy brought home was sure to starve within the month. Toads were a no, too loud, and the Dursleys were not too fond of cats either. That only left owls, but Harry knew from experience that a summer spent in a cage wasn’t much of one at all.

Not getting one at all is just the best option all around.

“I don’t really like animals all that much,” Harry lied, shrugging off Hagrid’s touch as he moved towards the wand shop once more, leaving the giant to follow.

Ollivander's was a small shop, completely filled to the brim with thousands of narrow boxes just as Flourish and Blotts had been with books. The shop seemed to strongly whisper of magic in the same way that everywhere else in Diagon Alley did, except this magic felt close enough to reach out and grasp, to touch. It had Harry’s skin tingling in a similar, if greater, way as to how it had in the robe shop with the blond boy. Though he could feel that this magic was different from his own and from that of the blond boy’s, it was more wild. More raw. Almost like what the goblins had held.

“Good afternoon,” a soft voice murmured as its owner stepped into view.

Hagrid must have jumped from behind Harry because he could hear a loud crashing noise coming from the direction of the chair that the man had sat himself down in. Harry didn’t dare take his eyes off of the newcomer though to look. 

Harry didn’t answer the man. Mr. Ollivander didn’t seem to notice.

 “I thought that I would be seeing you soon, Harry Potter,” the man continued on. “Seems like only yesterday your mother was in here buying her first wand. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wand, good for charm work.”

Ollivander moved closer to Harry, causing the boy to take a step back to keep the space. He could see the details in the older man’s silver, unblinking eyes. They were darker than the ones belonging to the boy in the robe shop, and Harry found them to be much more unsettling in nature.

“Your father on the other hand,” the ancient man continued almost feverishly, “favored a mahogany wand. Eleven inches. Pliable. A little more power and excellent for transfiguration. Well I say that your father favored it, but really it is the wand that favors the wizard, Mr. Potter.”

Harry watched as Ollivander's eyes traveled north, ducking his head just as a long, spindly finger reached out to touch the first scar to mark the boy’s body. The wand maker removed his hand, drawing it back to his side, but his eyes never left the scar there as he spoke.

“I’m sorry to say that I sold the wand that did that to you as well,” the man said softly, his voice sounding truly remorseful. “A powerful wand… if I’d known back then what the wand would be going out into the world to do…”

Ollivander didn’t finish his sentence, Harry could guess why. With things like this, where you're only looking back on time with the gift of foresight as to what your action would create, it was hard to tell exactly what you would do. Harry thought that the wand maker might have broken it, or perhaps killed the boy that had sought to buy it. But there was no telling what he truly might have done.

Harry watched as the man shook his head before, much to the boy’s relief, the wand maker’s gaze fell on the other man in the room.

The pair spoke for a moment, the conversation long enough for Harry’s assumption that the giant still had pieces of his wand stored away in his umbrella to be confirmed.

“Which is your wand arm?” Mr. Ollivander asked suddenly, turning back to Harry with a measuring tape spooled in his hand.

“My right,” Harry answered unsurely. It was the hand that he wrote with. The hand that he held a knife in. 

“Hold out your arm,” the man instructed softly, almost like a school teacher telling students to pull out pencils. “That’s it,” he said approvingly as Harry complied.

Harry stood tensely as Ollivander measured him from shoulder to fingertip, wrist to his elbow, knee to armpit of all things, and - the most absurd in Harry’s opinion - around the boy’s head.

“Every Ollivander wand has a powerful magical core,” the man informed Harry as he moved away to the shelves, leaving the measuring tape to float on its own. “Unicorn hair, phoenix feathers, and the heartstrings of dragons are the most suspects that Ollivander wands use. No two of my wands are the same, Mr. Potter, just as no two creatures are quite the same. You will never get as good of a result with another’s wand as you will with your own.”

Mr. Ollivander had created a small pile of boxes on his desk before stopping in front of Harry once more. “That’ll do,” the man said and the tape measure immediately crumpled to the ground under the other’s words.

And all without a wand, Harry mentally remarked bitterly, still not understanding why he was buying one at all.

“Right,” Mr. Ollivander said, shoving a wand at the boy. “Try this one. Beech wood and dragon heartstring. Nine inches and flexible. Just give it a wave.”

Harry grasped the wand firmly, feeling the magic within it reach out to his own halfheartedly. He wasn’t surprised at all when he waved it and the only thing that happened was that the wand maker ripped the wand away, out of his hand. Harry hadn't exactly wanted to continue holding it either.

Another wand was forced into the boy’s hand, but that one was quickly retreated too. And another wand, and another. The pile of rejected wands was only growing more and more as the time passed on, though it seemed to be doing so in tandem with the wand maker’s level of excitement.

“An unusual combination, but I wonder,” Mr. Ollivander muttered as he climbed down the ladder he'd been using to reach the higher shelves. There was a crazed look in the man’s eyes that Harry almost thought that he liked at that moment. It was a light that he had seen before, one that all but promised that something interesting would soon follow. Jude had this light in his eyes more often than not, and Harry knew that he did too sometimes.

Harry took the wand and immediately felt its magic gasp onto his own like lovers intertwined in a dance, or a snake coiled around its prey. Warmth flooded through him, consuming him as if at any moment flames would be dancing across his skin.

Harry raised the wand in an almost dream - like state and brought it swishing down through the air, almost like a knife. Green and silver sparks danced through the air in a way that he’d never seen fireworks act before. It was beautiful in a way that Harry had never truly realized that magic could be, only ever having used it to survive before.

Harry thought that perhaps he loved magic almost as much as he haired it. As much as he hated himself for having it.

Hagrid whooped in joy, but Harry noticed that Mr. Ollivander looked almost stricken. Like someone that had seen a ghost after never having believed in them before then. Though Harry wasn’t sure if that was a comparison that he could still stand to make in a world where ghosts are likely a very real thing. 

“Curious…” the wand maker muttered, not for the first time as he packaged the wand back up.

“What’s curious?” Harry asked, speaking for the second time as annoyance whittled away at his better judgment. 

Ollivander looked down at Harry with a pale face and all too hollow eyes. “I remember every wand that I have ever sold, Mr. Potter,” the man said, his soft voice shaking unsurely. “Every single one. It just so happens that the phoenix whose tail feather resides in your wand, gave another. Just one. It’s curious that you would be destined for this wand, when its brother gave you that scar.

“I think we must expect great things from you, Mr. Potter. After all, the other did great things too - terrible, yes, but great.”

Harry placed the galleons on the store counter and ran out of the shop before the wand maker could say anything more.

—-

Laden with more packages than Harry rightfully knew what to do with, the pair made their way back into muggle London together. Hagrid left after making sure that Harry got on the right underground back to Surrey. Harry steadfastly ignored all of the stares that he was being levied with by the other passengers on board as he read through his Fantastic Beast book, learning about all of the creatures that he had never really thought existed until then. He let himself be lost in another world that he would soon enter, a train ticket tucked neatly in the potions textbook that he was planning on reading next.

—-

That night, alone in his room with his stool things stacked neatly in the corner of the small room that Harry had been able to clean of Dudley’s broken belongings, Harry sorted through it all. There was a whole other world waiting for him just beyond this one and Harry wanted to survive in it until he never had to return to Surrey at all. Until he could learn how to live in it, to call it home.

Chapter Text

Harry’s last month with the Dursleys passed quietly. Dudley refused to be in the same room as the younger boy, fleeing with a squeal any time that Harry so much as was even close enough for the other boy to look at with those beady eyes of his. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had each taken to pretending that Harry didn’t exist at all, something that Harry didn’t mind in the least bit since it meant that neither would ever question where the boy had been when he stumbled into the Dursleys’ home at all hours of the night.

They didn’t question the bruises blooming on the boy’s skin, or the dirt in his hair or the blood on his clothes when it was there.

Harry liked it better that way.

He liked living for a month without being struck by anyone in the house, or forced to do anything, or screamed at till one of the other occupants of the house reminded the perpetrator that the neighbors would soon become nosy if they didn’t stop.

It felt like something akin to the boy that had never truly known any. Like a kind of peace.

On the last day of August Harry knew that he would have to break the routine that had formed, no matter how much he had come to treasure it.

Harry walked into the kitchen early in the morning as the Dursleys had sat down to eat breakfast. Ignoring the way that his own stomach grumbled at the sight, Harry stopped in front of his uncle and spoke tentatively to the older man.

“Uncle Vernon?” The boy said just loud enough to force a response.

The man however did not look up from his paper, but Harry heard the grunt his uncle had made and took that as about Sam much acknowledgment as he was bound to receive from the vile man.

“I need you to give me a lift to King’s Cross Station tomorrow so that I can go to school.”

Another grunt.

Figuring that this was just about as good as he was going to get, Harry was about to turn when, for the first time in a month, Uncle Vernon spoke to the boy.

“Funny way getting to a wizard school, the train,” the man said, ruffling his paper irritably. “Magic carpets are all torn, have they?”

Harry knew better than to rise to the older man’s bait, that doing so - answering his uncle right now - would mean something dangerous for the small boy even as Aunt Petunia and the cowering Dudley were still in the room. He especially didn’t want to tell the man that magic carpets were actually outlawed by the British magical government, Harry didn’t want to send the older man into a tangent.

“Where is this freak school of yours anyways?” Uncle Vernon asked with an almost self righteous voice.

For the first time, Harry realized that he didn’t know. He had spent the last month reading every book that he’d bought from Diagon Alley, some of the shorter ones even a few times over, but it had never occurred to him to think of just where he would be learning all of these things.

It wasn’t like he hadn't had other things on his mind as well though.

“Does it matter?” Harry asked instead of truly answering the cruel man. “It’s nine months without me haunting your house.”

His uncle actually laughed at that, as if he had said something humorous, that cruel laugh of his that Harry had come to know spoke of more violence than humor. “Right you are, boy,” the man remarked, making Harry’s skin crawl uncontrollably against his bones. “All right, we’ll take you to King’s Cross. We’re going to London tomorrow anyway or else I wouldn’t bother.”

Though Harry doubted that the man would risk his chance to be rid of him for so long, the boy walked out of the door of the house before his uncle could think to change his mind.

—-

Jude was already there by the time that Harry escaped to their field, the morning sun shining down on his brown hair in a way that made it almost look red. He didn’t smile as Harry stopped next to him, Harry hadn't expected him to. Smiles were things much too pretty for boys like them.

“You ready?” The older boy asked just as he had almost everyday for the past month, the excited gleam still stubbornly in those blue eyes even after one of them now had a deep bruise beneath it.

“As I’ll ever be.”

—-

The day after Harry had gotten back to Diagon Alley, he hadn’t had very much faith that the other boy would be in the field waiting for him. It had been days since they had spoken to one another, days spent with the Dursleys trying to outrun letters. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the older boy had stopped coming altogether.

But he was there and Harry was glad that he was.

They’d sat down in the familiar tall grass, their knees pressed firmly against each other as if to remind the other that they were real. Neither said anything for a long moment, Jude seemingly having left it to Harry to break the silence, and Harry having to draw up the courage to do so.

“I’m being sent away to boarding school in the fall,” Harry said at last, watching the way that the older boy’s eyes seemed to dull sharply at his words.

“Why?” Jude breathed, his voice too soft, too hurt for Harry’s liking.

He never wanted to hear his friend like that again, so full of a loneliness that they both knew better than their own minds. He never wanted to be the cause of it either.

“My parents set up something before they died,” Harry lied, knowing that the other boy wouldn’t question it further if he used them as an excuse. Being orphans as they were, each boy knew that there were lines that you didn’t cross, even if Harry was doing so purposefully just then. Though, it wasn’t truly a lie. He knew that he wouldn’t be going if it wasn’t for them. “At least it’s away from the Dursleys,” he said, hitting the nail into the coffin that he had just built.

They watched together in silence for a long time as the clouds moved slowly across the sky above them, swirling and shifting into unknown shapes. A part of Harry felt that if he just reached far enough, that he could grasp them himself. Though Harry knew enough about science to know all of the reasons that he couldn’t.

Jude sighed, a tired thing that spoke of being used to loss. It was a state that Harry didn’t truly understand. You have to have something first to lose it, after all. 

“I always knew that you were meant for more than this shitty place,” the blue - eyed boy says almost solemnly, his voice holding none of the gruffness has always been so fond of.

More than me, is what the younger boy heard beneath what was said by the other.

Harry shifted and placed his head on the other boy’s shoulder, neither of them paying any mind to the summer day’s growing heat. 

But then the other boy pulled away from Harry suddenly before staring at Harry deep in the eyes. Jude was holding the younger boy’s face the same way that he did each time that he checked Harry for injuries.

“I’ll teach you how to protect yourself,” the older boy decided, determination setting nicely into his eyes and drowning out the grief that Harry could still see lingering there.

Harry almost wanted to scoff. There wasn’t much that anyone could teach him to protect himself from magic of all things. But he could see the appeal of it still. After all, Harry would be around other eleven year olds, ones that - presumably - need a fancy stick to do magic. Learning how to fist fight wouldn't be the worst idea that Jude had had. Not by a long shot.

“Alright.”

—-

Harry ducked under the other boy’s arm, narrowly avoiding the well aimed punch that Jude had sent. He rolled and landed a hit of his own while Jude was still off balance from the missed hit, sending the older boy stumbling to the ground. Moving quickly, Harry pressed the sharp stick in his hand to the opener boy’s neck, his knee pressed painfully into Jude’s open palm.

But Jude had a proud look on his face. So did Harry.

“Get the fuck off of me, man,” the older boy said in a way that almost sounded like a laugh.

And Harry did, reaching down to the other with his bloodied knuckles on full display for all to see. Jude met the offered hand with his own, letting himself be pulled to his feet by the scrawny, but quick boy.

Harry could feel the makings of a small bruise forming on the side of his brow, coloring his face in a way that he was much too familiar with for a boy his age. But Harry found that he didn’t mind it much. A part of him couldn’t help but think that he wouldn’t truly be himself without something imperfect marring his body.

“I won,” Harry remarked proudly, his small figure aching slightly from the sparring that the pair had just done.

“You won,” Jude agreed, something close to a smirk on his face. For the first time the other boy looked worse off than Harry did.

Both of the boys threw away the sticks that they had been using as a replacement for knifes, but their gazes never left one another. Not when they both knew that this would be the last time that they would see one another for almost a year. 

“Here, a going away present or whatever you want to call it.” Harry watched as Jude held out his hand and Harry saw a flash of silver as he moved to meet it.

The metal was warm in his palm as Harry looked down at the knife in his hand. It was a simple switch blade, old if the nicks on it were anything to go by. He opened it and felt the comfortable weight in his palm, giving the small blade an experimental twirl.

“Where’d you get it?” Harry asked, closing the blade and slipping it away into his trouser pocket. 

Jude shrugged, his eyes hungrily taking in each of Harry’s movements as if he thought that the younger boy would disappear at any moment. Harry didn’t fault him for it as he knew that he was about to. “One of the older boys at the home gave it to me when the bloke aged out.”

Harry nodded and wished desperately that he had something else to say, but the sky was beginning to grow dark. Night was sure to fall soon and Harry needed to be back before then. The creeps tended to come out right after the sun fell.

“Ten months,” the boy said instead of anything resembling a proper goodbye.

“Ten months,” Jude agreed.

—-

Harry woke up early on the morning of September first, his body thrumming with a nervous energy as he checked that everything was packed for school. As much as Harry didn’t want to leave his only friend, there was just as much of him that wanted desperately to know what it would be like to be with others like him.

To be free.

Wearing his best fitting clothes, Harry drug his trunk down the stairs and to the car while the Dursleys finished their breakfast, his new knife sitting comfortably in his trouser pocket. A new but welcome weight.

The ride to King’s Cross station was mostly dull after Aunt Petunia had convinced Dudley to sit in the car next to Harry, pulling out that voice of hers that she only reserved for when her son was being truly unruly. The boy still pressed himself up against the car door as much as he could to get as far away from Harry as he could manage. Which, Harry noted cheerfully, wasn’t much at all as the older boy was much too plump to get more than an inch’s difference at the most.

Uncle Vernon all but waved as the Dursleys pulled away from the train station, not so much as stopping to help the boy out his trunk on the trolley. Harry found that he didn’t particularly mind that after he’d gotten everything situated, he wanted his uncle’s paws on his stuff about as much as the man wanted Harry in his home.

Walking quickly, Harry all but ran to Platform Nine. The boy saw that as he moved through the station that none of the numbers had quarters attached to them, but each did have four pillars leading to the next number. Harry figured that if to get into Diagon Alley one had to push some bricks in a certain inane order, then it wouldn’t be a stretch to find some type of passage to the platform.

They wouldn’t want muggles wandering in after all.

The third pillar attached to Platform Nine looked normal enough when Harry laid his eyes upon it, but when the boy got close enough he could feel the now familiar pull of magic attached to it. When he touched his hand to the stone, Harry almost stumbled as it fell right through as if the pillar wasn’t there at all. With a wolfish grin Harry pushed his cart through the column and into another platform altogether.

A deep scarlet train was the first thing that Harry saw, smoke billowing out of the top of it. The label on it read Hogwarts Express. There was a wrought iron archway where the barrier had been only a moment before, Platform Nine and Three - Quarters was carved at the top of it. Owls hooted as much as witches and wizards wished their children goodbye, and cats wound between the legs of the people gathered as if it was something natural. Harry thought that he might already love the chaos of it all, a far cry from Privet Drive.

Harry pressed through the crowd and past a small sea of red heads that he reasoned must all be related, or having some sort of convention if not given the sheer number of them. He thought about looking for an empty compartment, but stopped when he all but ran over someone’s toad.

Picking the creature up, Harry held it protectively in his hands as he glanced around for anyone that looked out of place among the children milling about the train. Finally, Harry’s eyes settled on a round faced boy that couldn’t be much older than himself. The boy was ducking in and out of compartment doorways and through the hall with his eyes glued to the ground.

“Trevor?” The boy called out, his voice sounding panicked. A lot more so than Harry thought was needed for a toad of all things. “Trevor!”

The toad croaked in Harry’s hands and the boy figured that this was confirmation enough.

“This yours?” Harry asked, thrusting the amphibian at the other boy as he passed, causing the boy to almost trip as he stopped in his tracks.

The round - faced boy turned to Harry with panicked eyes that soon turned relieved as he saw the toad. “Trevor!” The boy exclaimed, grabbing the toad from Harry's hands quickly.

“I’ll take that as a yes then,” Harry muttered almost bitterly.

The boy looked down at Harry with wide, thankful eyes as he smiled brightly. “Thank you,” he whispered almost feverishly. “I’ve got a compartment just a little bit down from here,” he said, pointing down the way that he had come from with his free hand. “Do you want to sit with us? It’s just me and another first year.”

Harry thought about saying no and finding any empty compartment that he could, having a quiet ride. But given the amount of time that he had spent waiting on the toad boy to hurry up and retrieve his strange choice of pet, Harry figured that there wouldn’t be another empty cart left. At least the round - faced boy was indebted enough to Harry to not immediately turn on the smaller boy.

Giving the other boy one last considering glance, Harry quickly figured that he could take the taller boy if it came down to it, not that he truly thought that it would from the soft look on the boy’s face. “Sure,” Harry agreed with more confidence than he felt and the other boy smiled.

Taking the toad into account, Harry and the other boy were able to push through the lingering crowd of students to get to the compartment where they quickly shut the door and window before  even so much as acknowledging the other student in the small room.

“You know, it’s quite rude to pretend that others do not exist,” the bushy haired girl sniped almost primly, placing her book to the side with a snap. “Especially when they’re in the same room as you.”

Harry noticed that the other boy seemed to cower under the witch’s reprimand and rolled his eyes at them both. “Well, a good fucking hello to you too,” the black haired boy snarled sarcastically before nodding to the other boy that it was safe to open his hand once more.

The toad, Trevor, immediately jumped out of the boy’s hands and to the door, only to find it closed. Trying the window next, the toad found that path blocked as well. Harry watched with faint amusement as the amphibian made it up onto the overhead storage bars and hid behind the luggage there. It seemed to have as much bravery as its owner did.

Harry sat down next to the other boy, leaving a good deal of space between the pair as the girl balked at him. Harry crossed his arms and stared right back into the girl’s expectant brown eyes.

“I’m N-Neville Longbottom, by the way,” the other boy, Neville, said shakily, obviously trying to diffuse the tension that had risen so quickly.

Harry nodded at the other boy before turning his attention back to the prim girl. She felt a lot to Harry like the girls that went to his old school, the ones that thought that they were above him because they come from money and he so clearly didn’t. Though that comparison didn’t set right with Harry so much. It was more like she thought that she was smarter than Harry was.

Maybe she is, Harry reasoned, but book smarts only gets you so far at the end of the day.

“I’m Hermione Granger,” the girl said a lot more reluctantly than most would when introducing oneself, seeming to have realized that he wasn’t going to speak until she did. She looked rather put out about it too.

“Harry Potter.”

Harry felt his body go rigid as both sets of eyes snapped to him with some sort of twisted fascination that the boy felt that he should have been expecting. Hermione started talking about all of the books that she had read with him in it, while Neville just balked at the boy sitting next to him. None of them noticed the door slide open as a third boy stood at the mouth of the compartment.

“Are you really?” A familiar voice asked.

Harry turned quickly, his eyes landing on the boy that he’d met at the robe shop about a month ago now. Among all of the other bouts and sources of magic, Harry hadn’t been able to feel the other boy’s until the blond was already in the room, but he would recognize it anywhere. There was a slight look of wonder on the other boy’s face, one that was decidedly different from that of the other two children. It was the sort of surprise that came from knowing something grand that others didn’t and finding out that it was even better than it had been before.

“I am,” Harry confirmed, looking at the other boy with a wonderful look of his own as his magic began to thrum pleasantly beneath his skin once more, begging to be known. To meet a kind like its own. “I never did catch your name before.”

The boy shook his head lightly, seeming to come out of whatever trance it was that he had been in before. The blonde boy stepped deeper into the room and took the open seat by Hermione, though his eyes never left Harry, not even as the door clicked shut behind him. “I’m Draco Malfoy,” the fair haired boy said poshly. “Shouldn’t you know someone’s name before telling them to take you to dinner?”

Harry smirked at that but then he noticed the way that the boy next to him had gone stiff at the name, but he couldn’t find it in himself to particularly care about why at the moment. Not when someone like him was so close. 

He leaned forwards, bringing himself even closer to the other boy. “So, whatcha doing wandering the train, Draco?” Harry asked, ignoring the other boy’s previous remark. He liked the way that the other boy’s name rolled off of his tongue. He liked the constellation that was attached to it as well. You tend to learn a good deal about the stars when you spend most nights sneaking out to meet someone beneath them.

The other boy didn’t turn red by any means, but his cheeks did flush a pale pink. “Would you believe me if I said that I was looking for the rude boy from the robe shop?” He asked, the look on his face hiding none of the embarrassment that the other boy so obviously felt.

We’ll have to work on that, Harry decided, surprising himself as he did so. Making a note like that implies further conversations in the future. He couldn’t say that he was particularly against the idea.

“You know,” Harry started, his body relaxing once more, “I think I would.”

Whatever tension that had built within the compartment was broken as the trolley witch knocked sweetly on the door, but a seemingly innocent croak from within the room had three out of four of the children shaking their heads quickly at the woman while the fourth reached for his money. Draco sent to group an annoyed glare as the woman angrily rolled away, not so much as glancing back at the four children as she did.

“What was that for?” The blond asked, clearly annoyed with the other first years, if not a little more than vexed.

But Harry only held up a hand, motioning for the boy to wait and hold his anger. The scarred boy stood up from his seat and walked across the small compartment to the door, opening it. He didn’t get much more than the handle moved downwards before an all too familiar toad leapt down from the overhead, aiming for the ground. 

Moving nimbly, Harry caught the creature before it could land and handed it to its owner before retaking his spot. He didn’t note the three sets of big eyes on him as anything special, assuming that the pair were just surprised that Harry would risk Trevor getting free and that Draco was only surprised by the toad in general.

“I’m surprised that he didn’t try and escape earlier when you came in,” Harry noted calmly, shrugging off the stares laying uncomfortably against his skin.

The three looked like they wanted to say something but in the end they couldn’t seem to find the proper words to use. It didn’t matter anyways, the trio figured, first years aren’t allowed a broom after all.

“… Do you think that the Trolley witch will ever serve us again?” Neville asked at last, before letting the toad in his hands slip away to hide for the rest of the train ride.

“I’m sure that she will-”

“Absolutely not.”

Draco and Hermione turned to look at one another, each slightly annoyed by the other having spoken. Harry found the sight rather amusing.

“She’s an adult,” Hermione said in that stubborn, knowledgeable voice of hers that Harry knew could take some time to either get used to, or work her out of it. “Surely she won’t be petty enough to be so spiteful towards children.”

Draco only shook his head, the gel there making it stick stubbornly in place. “My father said that she could hold a grudge with the best of them,” the boy informed, and Harry found himself liking the witch more and more at that little tidbit.

The forgiving sort were never the kind that interested the boy much, but then again, he’d never really met anyone all that forgiving before. The closest that he’d ever come was Jude, but forgiveness with the other boy always came with prices, ones that Harry was pleased to never have had to pay.

“Just owl your parents and ask,” Draco continued. “I’m sure that they’ll agree.”

Harry watched as a confused look seemed to flit over Hermione’s face for a moment before realization seemed to dawn in the girl. “My parents never went to Hogwarts. I’m the first witch in my family,” the girl said proudly, a pleased smile on her face that slowly started to droop.

Harry noted how the boy across from him seemed to pale slightly at the information and lean away from the girl in a way that he clearly had hoped wouldn’t have been noticeable,  but was. It didn’t take Harry long to reason as to why.

“You don’t have a problem with that, do you Malfoy?” Harry asked slowly, letting the boy take in the use of his last name rather than first. Letting him see just where Harry stood. “‘Cause my friend back home is muggle and he’s worth ten pompous brats that seem to think that ‘keeping it in the family’ isn’t just some gross indulgence of incest. Or ‘cause they liked fucking their cousin so much that they decided to marry them,” Harry said crudely.

Both of the other boys in the compartment seemed to go green at the smallest boy’s words, telling Harry all that he needed to know about Neville’s parentage.

“My father has always told me that pure bloods had the strongest magic,” the blond said almost timidly, as if he’d never been questioned in such a way before. 

Harry thought that it was probably safe to bet that he hadn’t been.

Daddy issues, got it.

“Your father, the pure blood?” Harry asked rhetorically, the other boy nodded anyway, seeming to pause at the fact. “Cause that’s not bias at all,” Harry muttered though everyone else in the compartment still heard him. “Look, from what I’ve seen, muggles tend to hate magic because they don’t have it. Because they fear it.” They’ll call you a freak and lock you away. “Why make more enemies out of our own simply because of where they come from? Magic is magic, no amount of bitching on your father’s part is going to change that.”

Draco slunk back into his seat within a contemplative look on the boy’s face. To Harry it almost looked one step away from a paradigm shift. Hermione looked at the dark haired boy with a thankful gaze, an expression much kinder than any that he had ever seen the witch wear before. Harry wanted to wipe it off of the girl’s face because he hadn’t done it for her, not really, but for a woman that he had never met but had died for him all those years ago.

“That was very Gryffindor of you,” Neville said admiringly, looking at Harry with wide eyes that the other boy could all but see stars in. Hermione seemed to agree as she nodded in approval. Draco only scowled more.

“Very what now?” Harry asked not to kindly, looking between the other three first years with bewilderment. To him it sounded as if they were speaking of some sort of sickness.

“Gryffindor,” Hermione started, her voice taking on that prim note to it once more, much to Harry’s dismay, “is one of the Hogwarts houses,” she explained.

“There’s four,” Draco continued for the girl, holding up four fingers and ignoring Hermione's glare as the old tension was temporarily forgotten. “Students are divided into them based upon the traits that they value and possess the most.”

Neville nodded, drawing Harry’s gaze to him. “My Gran told me that your house is who you eat and sleep with, and go to all of your classes with for the first two years,” the boy added timidly.

Divide you up with those like you, Harry reasoned. Like calls to like and all that shit, I guess.

“So what are the other three then?”

“Well,” Hermione said excitedly, taking control of the conversation once more. Harry wasn’t surprised that the other two let her, information seemed to be her strong suit. “You already know Gryffindor - the house of bravery and courage. Then there’s Ravenclaw with their intelligence and wit. Hufflepuff who values loyalty and justness above all else. And Slytherin, who use cunning and ambition to meet their ends.” 

Harry noted that the girl said the last house with a bit of a sour voice, Draco seemed to note it as well.

“Do you not like Slytherin, Hermione?” Harry asked when the other boy kept his mouth shut, walking on eggshells around the girl.

The girl’s eyes flitted between the three boys warily before settling on Harry once more. “It’s his house, Harry,” the girl whispered with more than a hint of fear in her voice.

But Harry only looked at the girl boredly, unimpressed by her fear. “You said that it was the house of cunning and ambition, right?” Harry asked, looking at the girl with a piercing gaze. Hermione nodded slowly, suddenly unsure of herself as Harry’s voice mirrored the tone that he had used only a minute or so ago. “So all military strategists are evil now?”

Hermione reared back a little in her seat from shock. “What?! No-”

“Right,” Harry cut her off. “It’s the Ravenclaws then, I mean it takes a lot of intelligence to incite an uprising. Bravery too, now that I think about it. So what about the Gryffindors? The Hufflepuffs too, can’t leave them out. Followers tend to show a good deal of loyalty, don’t you think?” Harry sighed as the girl looked properly ashamed and Draco looked overly interested in what the other boy had to say. “Everyone is a mix of traits, Hermione. You can’t define a whole group of people by the actions of one man.”

Harry knew that muggles were cruel because all of the ones that he had ever met were, Jude being the only exception to the rule that he has found yet. But he wouldn’t judge the older boy based on the actions of those around him.

An awkward slice hung in the air once more before Draco broke it. “Slytherin if for those that use whatever means it takes to survive,” he said and Harry felt something thrum inside of his chest at that.

Survival has been all he’d been doing since he was born. He wondered what it would be like to be around others like that as well, if maybe they had the same gruff voice as Harry and Jude, and all of the others from the Boy’s Home. 

“Merlin’s was a Slytherin, after all,” Draco continued. “He was alive during the time of Camelot, back when magic was outlawed and used his cunning to survive.”

“I didn’t know that,” Hermione admitted slowly. Harry thought that this must be a rare thing for the girl.

Draco only shrugged and looked at Harry with contemplative eyes, like he was a puzzle that the boy had yet to properly solve. Harry looked right back at him, holding the steady gaze. 

“We should change into our robes,” Neville said unsurely, having been the only one to notice the approaching caste. Harry guessed that he had likely been looking out of the window to avoid having to watch the rest of them play a verbal game of ‘who is ticked off with who?’

Draco got up and left the compartment to return to his own with a small wave that the other two boys returned. The three left in the compartment quickly set upon dragging their robes out of their trunks and throwing them on over their normal muggle clothes. A task that was much easier for Harry then Hermione and Neville as he never put his trunk in the overhead.

“So you're aiming for Ravenclaw then?” Harry asked the bushy haired girl once the three had settled back down in their seats. 

Hermione shook her head no. “I was actually hoping for Gryffindor.”

Harry nodded slowly but he couldn’t really see it. Sure, he’d read all of their school books at least once in the past month, but Hermione was the type that had a thirst for knowledge that drove her to do much more than just that. She learned everything that she could about their world. But Harry supposed that it wasn’t really his business either way.

The train came to a slow crawl that had the three standing as anxiety filled the compartment. Harry’s stomach coiled up tightly with nerves as the group made their way out of the train and onto the dark platform. He found comfort in the blade that rested soothingly at his side as he shivered in the September night air of Scotland.

A warmth pressed up against his side as the three waited for everyone else to get off of the train, but instead of soaking in it, Harry resisted the urge to grab for his blade. The warmth slipped away slightly, seeming to notice the other boy’s mood as Harry turned.

Draco stood at Harry’s side now, a careful distance being preserved between the two boys. Harry couldn’t help but feel shame cool in his gut at being so easily read by a near perfect stranger.

The four stuck together as they followed Hagrid and his lantern down a long, narrow path, away from the other years. Harry noticed Neville clutch Trevor tightly as the boy stared at the giant with wonder. Hermione and everyone else’s expressions were much the same from what little Harry could see. Only Draco seemed to share Harry’s dislike of the man, though he knew that it was for much different reasons than his own. But all thoughts of the giant left the students’ minds as the narrow path opened  up for them.

The first thing that Harry saw was stars, hundreds upon thousands of them shining brightly in the night sky. It was more than he’d ever seen in his life. Harry wanted to pocket a picture of it to show Jude later, he loved the stars too. 

Next, was the mountain - reaching up high into that vast sky - and the castle that sat upon it. The windows were all lit up with a warm light like something out of a story that Aunt Petunia used to read to Dudley when she thought that Harry couldn’t hear.

It was perfect.

“No more th’n four to a boat!” Hagrid called, breaking the first years’ trance as he pointed to the small fleet that waited for them at the edge of the lake.

The four of them climbed into the boat shakily, Harry and Draco sharing the front seat as Neville and Hermione brought up the back. Harry and Draco snickered to themselves as they watched a red headed boy almost fall into the lake despite Hagrid’s instructions to be careful and have someone hold the boat steady from the outside. 

This earned each of them a slap of the back from the annoyed first year girl behind them, not that either minded much. Harry had thought that Draco might, but Harry supposed being defended by and against the same boy on different - yet incredibly similar - occasions would make anyone reevaluate a few things.

As Hagrid screamed forward the boats began to move on their own through the water, not stopping until they were at an underground harbor of sorts. The first years followed the man up a winding flight of stairs and to the castle door.

As they got closer and closer to Hogwarts, all of the other students oohed and awed at the close up sight of the castle before them, but Harry’s skin began to crawl uncomfortably on his bones, his magic threatening to lash out like a feral animal trapped in a cage. The boy only had one thought on his mind as they stopped in front of the tall door:

This place is dangerous to me.

Chapter Text

The castle door swung open with more force than Harry felt was necessary to reveal a tall, stern faced witch in emerald - green robes looking down upon the first years. There was something in the analytical expression that the woman held that reminded the boy of Aunt Petunia spying on the neighbors, silently judging them from a distance. Harry didn’t like the feeling much and could tell that the others didn’t either from the way that the other kids shifted under her hard gaze.

“The first years, Professor McGonagall,” Hagrid announced. It was not lost on Harry that the giant held this woman in a similar level of respect as the school headmaster that he seemed to all but worship like a kind of deity.

“Thank you, Hagrid. I will take them from here.”

The witch pulled the door open wide to reveal what Harry could only assume was the entrance hall to the castle. The ceiling was high enough that Harry had to crane his neck back to see it fully. One of the walls was filled with what looked to be an seemingly endless store of an army of carved, faceless soldiers made of stone. Harry felt as if they would come alive if he only knew the right words to speak.

Professor McGonagall led them across the flagged stone and into a small, empty chamber off of the main hall. Harry found himself crowding and bunching himself up next to Draco more than he would ever be willing to admit as everyone pressed together nervously. Though his reason for doing so was different from the other first years.

The magic in the castle felt almost suffocating, drowning the boy in something so other than his own that he couldn’t help but feel sick from it all. No one seemed to notice or be bothered by it all, but Harry could hardly stand it. So Harry pressed closely to the boy who’s magic felt the most like his own.

Harry didn’t hear what the professor said, whatever long speech it was that she gave. He cared more about the hand resting on his arm, steadying the smaller boy even though the blond couldn’t possibly know what was wrong. 

“The Sorting Ceremony will take place in a few short  minutes in front of the rest of the school. I suggest that you all take this time to smarten yourselves up as much as you can while you are waiting.”

Harry watched as the witch's eyes went to Neville’s upturned cloak, and how they seemed to linger on the red headed boy from the boats which seemed to have dirt smudged on his nose somehow.

With one last sweeping glance, Professor McGonagall strode away and left true students alone in the chamber.

—-

Snape watched with a growing headache as the stool and the Sorting Hat were brought out to the front of the Great Hall. The student's voices rose excitedly as they did each time that they saw the ragged, old thing. To them it was still a marvel to see the first years sorted, to place bets on who would go where. The professor just found the whole thing to be a waste of time that he could be spending doing absolutely anything else other than watching nervous brats sit on a stool, wearing a too big hat. But this year was different.

Because of course it was.

The Professor watched carefully as the first years walked cautiously into the hall, all of them huddled foolishly together as if it would protect any of them from the prying eyes of the older students. It didn’t. It wasn’t until the last ten or so students walked in that the potions master found just what he was looking for.

Four students stood bunched tightly together at the back of the crowd of first years. One was a bushy haired girl and another was the Longbottom boy, who looked more nervous than a fairy around iron. A shock of blond hair caught the professor’s attention next, to say that he was surprised to find the Malfoy boy next to Potter would be an understatement.

The pair of boys were locked in tightly against one another, Malfoy holding onto Potter’s arm as if the smaller boy was some kind of toddler that couldn’t walk on his own. Snape would have scorned at the sight if the image of James Potter himself rolling over in his grave at the sight didn’t bring the man so much joy.

The Sorting Hat went through its usual song, speaking of each house in just enough detail to draw in the first year’s attention to one or two. It wasn’t a short song either, but the small group didn’t part at all during it. The most movement that was made was the Longbottom boy grappling with what seemed to be a toad.

Thick as thieves already and they haven’t even known one another a full day yet, the potions master thought bitterly.

Images of another group of four came to the professor's mind without meeting much reluctance, how could it when one of them was a photocopy of someone long gone. Looking down at them, Snape was sure that there would be another brat or two in Gryffindor.

He never dreamed that he would be wrong.

Snape watched as the three boys clapped furiously as the bushy haired girl, Granger, was sorted into Ravenclaw, not a single one of their expressions shifted into anything but pride. A curious sight, given the fact that the girl was most certainly a muggle born, and Snape knew exactly what the elder Malfoy’s views on them were. He couldn’t help but wonder what made the younger’s mind change from that of his father.

Next was the Longbottom boy, who Snape was more than surprised to see found his way to Gryffindor. The boy looked more like a hazard in the lab than anything resembling an idiotic lion. Hufflepuff would have been a better sort in the potions professor’s opinion; but then again, he wasn’t some all knowing hat.

Thank Merlin for that, the man thought, taking a deep sip from his goblet.

Snape had expected the youngest Malfoy to swagger up to the stage when his name was called, filled with whatever sense of righteousness his father had taken the past eleven years to instill in him. What he saw instead was the blond looking down at the smaller boy, only leaving once Potter gave an unsteady nod. 

The younger Malfoy moved quickly through the crowd of students, seating himself on the stool nervously and was sorted into Slytherin a moment after the hat had touched his head. Through it all, the professor noted, Malfoy’s gaze never left Potter.

The sorting carried on, with Snape recognizing more names than he truly wanted to as the children of people that he had once known were sorted into Slytherin.

Then it came.

“Potter, Harry!”

Whispers erupted anew among the students and between the staff as well, all of it about the short boy. Snape couldn’t hear what the students had to say, but the staff were taking bets on who the boy would take after and which house the boy would go to. Snape knew that the brat would be just like his arrogant, wretched father, but no one had asked the man for that exact reason. 

The boy slipped through the crowd as if he was made from water, the students that remained moving out of the brat’s way as they took the opportunity to gawk at Hogwarts's newest celebrity. The boy didn’t even bother to meet their eyes. Snape watched as the boy slid onto the stool, his legs dangling high above the ground. The hat was placed onto the boy’s head, all but swallowing the brat whole. Snape waited for the inevitable verdict.

…and waited.

It was a long moment before the tear in the Sorting Hat opened once more to form a mouth, yelling out the name that the professor hadn’t been expecting in the least. 

“SLYTHERIN!”

What the actual fuck?

The Great Hall was completely silent as the boy slid off of the stool, a complete contrast to the usual loud cheers that should have been heard. It wasn’t long before furious whispers broke out once more, but Snape didn’t watch the boy cross the hall or the students within it. The professor’s eyes tore quickly to the aged wizard sitting at the center of the High Table. 

The Headmaster’s usually twinkling eyes were much colder than anyone’s should have been when regarding a child - not that the potions master thought that he had much room to speak in that regard. The man’s mouth was twisted in displeasure and something else that the professor couldn’t name, something haunting, as if he was regarding a monster that he had already seen once before.

Nothing was going the way that Snape thought that it would.

—-

Darkness settles over Harry’s eyes as he sits down on the stool, the feeling of the foreign magic making the boy feel sicker than he had only a moment before. 

‘Tricky, very tricky…’ a voice whispered in Harry’s mind and the scarred boy fought back the urge to flinch, knowing that he couldn’t show weakness with everyone watching like this. The hat seemed to notice anyways. ‘A boy fearful of showing weakness and a thirst to prove himself to accompany it,’ it mused thoughtfully, making Harry’s skin crawl as the hat rooted around in his mind.

You can see my memories, right? Harry thought, feeling more than foolish about speaking with a dingy old hat of all things. A magically sentient one sure, but a hat all the same.

‘Ah, curiosity as well, no matter how much you have tried to force it down,’ the hat continued, not bothering to answer the boy as it continued to dig.

Either sort me or I’ll shred you with my switchblade, the boy thought seriously, punishment be damned.

Harry wasn’t even surprised when the Sorting Hat quickly screamed out the name of the house of snakes, he just hurried to Draco’s side, not even caring that hardly anyone clapped. Harry was more concerned with pressing himself tightly against the fairer boy, with drowning out the magic around him. 

The sorting finished with a dark skinned boy, Blaise Zabini, taking the seat in front of the two boys at the Slytherin table, something like interest written in his dark eyes. Harry didn’t have the time to evaluate it though as a man that the boy could only assume was the school headmaster rose to his feet.

Anger was swift to swell in Harry’s gut as the man that had placed him with the Dursleys spread his arms out wide and smiled down at all of them kindly with a smile that he didn’t truly believe. In the back of his mind Harry couldn’t help but wonder if the others around him could feel the anger tingling against their skin as well.

“Welcome!” Dumbledore called out loudly, all of the voices in the hall quickly quitting down to allow the wizard to speak. “Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Now, a few words before we start our feast, and they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

“Thank you!”

The man sat back down and all of the older years and staff clapped as if anything that the other man had just said was remotely normal or made any sense at all. Looking around at the other first years, Harry knew that it wasn’t.

“What in the ever living fuck was that?” Harry whispered just a little too loudly under his breath. Draco, Zabini, a girl that he thought might have been named Parkinson, and a third boy - Nott? - all turned to look at the smallest boy. Harry thought that he ought have shrunk under their gazes, but he only looked at the other four and shrugged. “We were all thinking it.”

 Draco laughed, drawing the startled eyes of the other three children to him. “Merlin, Harry,” the boy all but gasped, “only you would have the gall to insult the Headmaster before the term had even started.” 

Harry noticed that the other boy seemed to be proud.

Harry glanced up at the Head Table, at the wizard in question with strangely false eyes. “Before then, actually,” the boy corrected.

Draco looked down at Harry with a wild shine in his gray eyes that the boy couldn’t really understand. The closest that he had ever come to seeing a look like this before was just before Dudley and his lot decided to jump him, but the other boy didn’t seem threatening at all. Not to Harry at least.

“Blimey, you pair are strange,” a new voice cursed. The boys looked away from one another and to the boy sitting across from them. Harry and Draco only shrugged at the accusations they reached for the food that had appeared on the bronze platters before them all.

All across the table there was more food than Harry had ever seen in his life, and it was surprising to know that he could have as much as he wanted. Food was always a rarity for the boy at the Dursleys, with the family gathering to have their fill first and Harry being allowed the scraps. Dudley took those straight from the boy’s plate more times than not, even though it often made the older boy sick to do so.

At the end of the table Harry could see two plump, bovine boys sitting next to and in front of the bloodiest ghost in the Great Hall. The man, though transparent, was dressed in the clothes of old nobility, thoroughly stained by blood that looked as if it would never dry. He didn’t pity the pair that got stuck sitting by him, he was just happy that it wasn’t him. 

“That’s the Bloody Baron,” Parkinson informed, having noticed the boy’s staring, leaning across the table almost conspiratorially from Zabini’s right. “He’s the Slytherin House ghost.” 

The girl had short cut black hair and a proper face that made her look like some daughter of high society. Harry didn’t think he’d be wrong to think so. Most of the Slytherin students looked far more posh than Harry ever thought that he would.

Harry nodded at the girl and returned to his food, eating as much of it as he could, which was to say not a lot. His stomach seemed to protest when he tried to take in more than a few bites. The other boy, Zabini, seemed to notice but had apparently chosen not to comment on it. Harry noted that he hadn’t eaten very much either. The pair shared a look before turning to talk to others at the table.

Daphne Greengrass, a pretty blond girl on Harry’s other side, ended up being a good person to speak with. The girl was interested in Transfiguration, a subject that sounded a lot like Alchemy to the black haired boy, just without the muggle science mixed into it. Transfiguration was purely magic, and seemingly very intention oriented.

A hush fell over the Great Hall as the food disappeared and the Headmaster stood once more. Harry pushed down his anger with the man to listen to the start - of - term announcements that the wizard had to make, he didn’t really fancy getting on any of the teachers' bad sides so early into his schooling, not with a full seven years left ahead of him.

The older wizard informed that the woods surrounding the school were off limits to all students. Harry didn’t think that he was imagining the way that the man’s eyes seemed to linger on the Gryffindor table for a beat longer than rest upon saying so.

The wizard continued to speak, going through what must be a familiar speech by now. “And finally, I must inform you that the third floor corridor is off limits to all those who don’t wish to die a most horrible and painful death.” Harry noticed that some of the older years looked confused about the rule, glancing at one another as if it was a new one.

“‘Horrible and painful death,’ sign me up,” Harry said in the most monotone voice that he had, laying his head in his hand. The others around him snickered lightly under their breath. It seemed that even the posh had a sense of dark humor.

“Now,” Dumbledore continued, “before we go to bed, let’s sing the school song!”

Harry watched as the teachers’ smiles became rather forced on their faces as all of the older years sprung to their feet like the children that they were. The first years were slower to rise. Harry shot Draco a look as the words to the supposed school song appeared before them at the front of the Great Hall. Draco returned it with a look of his own as everyone else began to sing.

The song was offbeat and had no rhythm to it once so ever, everyone finishing at different times as two red headed Gryffindors - twins? - sang it so slow that one would think that they were soldiers marching to their own death.

When the boys were finally done, the headmaster released the student body to go to their house dormitories. The prefects led the first years after telling a few of the older years what the password was so that they wouldn’t be stuck outside all night after catching up with friends from other houses.

Harry watched as the three other houses made their way deeper in the castle, going the opposite way of the house of snakes.Hufflepuff seemed to be sticking to the main floor, but the other two made straight for the stairs. Slytherin did as well, only they went down them, not up.

The lighting became dimmer as the windows disappeared and all there was to light the way were the torches on the walls. Eventually the prefects, a cruel faced boy and a jittery girl, stopped in front of a torch with a little green gem at its base. A difference so small that it was much too easy to overlook. 

“The password for the next two weeks will be a knocking pattern, so that you lot can find the door. After that we’ll change it to a word phrase,” the female prefect explained before turning to the wall and raising her first.

Knock. Knock. Pause. Knock. Knock. Knock. Pause. Knock.

The first years watched in wonder as a portion of the wall shimmered and disappeared to reveal a lavishly decorated common room. Everything was shades of green, black, or silver. The ceilings were tall enough that it felt as if someone could set off fireworks inside and the ceiling still would not be touched, though Harry knew that the idea was illogical. Didn’t mean that he didn’t want to try it any less.

There were dark couches and chairs that Harry thought that the Dursleys would have drooled over if they were to see them. Rugs covered the cool stone floors as tapestries covered the walls. The most breathtaking sight was the far wall that was completely made of glass, showing off the inside of the lake that they had gone through only a few hours before.

It was beautiful in the same way that the night was often stunning.

But it wasn’t just that.

The magic here felt different from that of the rest of the castle. 

Being in the Slytherin common room, it felt as if Harry could finally breathe again. As if he could function without Draco pressed into his side like some sort of oxygen mask. For the first time since coming to Hogwarts, Harry almost felt healthy of all things, better than he ever had before.

The prefects let the first years gawk for a moment longer before speaking once more.

“My name is Gemma Farley,” the girl introduced, her eyes traveling slowly over the small sea of students. The perfect had a small build, tanned skin firm the sun, and dark brown hair that was either dyed or spelled to have blue streaks in it. “And this is Hall,” she said, motioning to the more built boy at her side. “We’ll be your fifth year prefects this year.

“I want all of you to find a seat and wait for the rest of the house to come,” Gemma continued, already looking tired. “We have one last order of business to deal with tonight.”

And so they waited.

Harry and Draco sat next to each other on the smallest couch while the other first years took the rest of the chairs and the larger couch. Each of them leaned into the fire and spoke only a little as they waited. 

The others, Harry noticed, seemed to be falling asleep like they had been at the end of the feast, but Harry was wide awake. His magic seemed to sing in his blood more and more the longer that he spent in the common room, latching onto the ambient magic in the air that felt so similar to his own; to Draco’s, the walls of the Dursley home, and his cupboard as well.

The rest of Slytherin House slowly added to the common room over the following hour, mixing about in already formed groups from the previous years. Though none of them were subtly about staring at Harry, they boy chose not to point it out. He figured if they got their fill now, then it would be easier to coexist in the long run. The only stare that he did meet was that of the last person to join the common room: the Slytherin Head of House.

Dark eyes met green for long enough that Draco seemed to pick up on the gaze. The boy shot a confused look between the pair before settling on Harry.

“I don’t think he likes me very much,” Harry whispered to the other boy, ducking his head and breaking the stare, Harry twisted to sit properly on the couch once more.

“It’s only the first night,” Draco started, following suit, “Snape can’t hate you already.” But Harry could tell that not even Draco believed what he was saying. 

all of the students stood up quickly and made their way to the center of the room, forming a wide circle around the Professor. Harry indulged in his urge to stay to the back of the mass, even if that put him and Draco near the seventh years, and it meant that they couldn’t exactly see the wizard speaking.

“I won’t stand here and tell you that being in Slytherin House will make your time here easy, because it won’t,” the Professor drawled, surprising Harry with his candor. All of the other adults that he’d ever met before would only tell pretty lies at a time like this. “If you wanted easy you should have chosen Hufflepuff. Slytherin is the most hated of the four houses,” he continued. “But we are also the ones of those that will do anything to meet our ends. We may lack a Gryffindor’s moronic bravery, but we are of the cunning sort that survivors are made from. I don’t care what binds form among you all, but outside of these walls, you will act as one united front.”

In the professor’s speech, Harry could almost hear his own from the train being echoed, about not making more enemies than already exist. It was a surreal experience to say the least.

“I’ll leave it to you now, prefects, you know what to do.” And with that, the Head of Slytherin House swiftly left as if he’d never been there at all.

Hall moved in the crowd and took the place that the professor had just vacated, drawing all of the attention to him. “In Slytherin, we have beginning of the year duels to decide alliances and flush out any bad blood from years previous,” the perfect explained for the first years’ benefit. “The only rule is that nothing lethal can be cast. Anyone can be challenged, just as anyone can challenge. You don’t have to accept, but remember that this is your chance to prove where you stand, if you want that to be at the bottom then that’s your own fucking problem.”

“Anyone who doesn’t want to fight should leave now,” Gemma said, stepping up beside the other prefect. “Those wishing to watch should know that they risk being challenged too.”

Harry watched as some of the younger years scurried away to the comfort of their dormitories, Greg and Vince among them. Some of the older students went as well, though with much less urgency than their younger counterparts. Harry and the other Slytherin first years stayed, the group moving together to the edge of the room as a clear space was created for the dueling to take place.

“The first challenger may step forward.”

A tall boy with a slothish face and thick fingers to match his large build stepped forwards, his slightly down turned eyes much too cold. His gaze traveled slowly around the room before landing on the small huddle of first years. On Harry.

Gemma and Hall noticed it too.

“Warrington, you can’t be serious,” the girl protested. Even Hall looked as if he wanted to as well. Harry guesses that it must be frowned upon from someone that is likely in at least their fourth year to challenge a first year. The age gap and experience gap was too great for it to ever be anything close to fair.

“Nothing says that I can’t,” the boy reminded her, more than a hint of self righteousness coloring the older teen’s tone. “Besides, he can always take the shame of giving up. Right, Harry Potter?”

Harry could feel the eyes of every soul in the room laying on him, but he couldn’t have cared less. Not when there was a boy just like his cousin standing before him. Not when he could make him hurt.

Brushing off the set or two of hands that tried to grab onto him, to hold him back, Harry walked into the clearing and stood opposite of the older boy. “I accept.”

Harry noticed that everyone else in the common room had fallen silent as the two students moved a decent distance from one another. He could tell that, while no one was happy about Warrington challenging a first year, that didn't stop them from being instructed as to what’s to come. Harry just wondered if they could all feel the magic in the room too, because he felt almost indestructible from all of it.

A truly dangerous thing to feel.

“Are you not going to pull out your wand, Potter?” The older boy asked, a laugh in his voice that no one else, save two particularly neatly looking twins, felt the need to echo.

But Harry only shrugged. “I was raised muggle. I don’t know any spells to use. The wand would only be just some fancy stick in my hand.”

It wasn’t exactly true, actually it was a blatant lie. Harry had already read all of their Defense Against the Dark Arts book for the year, The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self - Protection, and had found some interesting spells in there and in The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1). He just hadn’t been able to try any of them just yet. 

He didn’t need them either.

Some of the older students scowled at the mention of muggles, but - much to Harry’s relief - the other first years only looked concerned for the boy.

Harry looked to the prefects and nodded, showing that he was ready. With an endless laugh, Warrington did the same.

“Begin,” Gemma said, speaking as if she was condemning Harry to the gallows.

“Stupefy!” Warrington yelled, a jet of red light sprouting from the tip of his wand, but Harry was already moving.

The younger of the two boys let his body go into autopilot and twisted away from the spell as if it was a knife.

Roll. Duck. Evade.

Harry dodged each of the spells coming towards him until he got close enough to the older boy to see the details on the boy’s wand. Warrington raised his other hand and punched Harry across the face with a manic smile. Though the older boy was slow, they were too close for Harry to properly evade so he took the brunt of it.

However, Harry only smiled in a dangerous way as blood ran freely down his nose. “C’mon,” the boy taunted, “my uncle hits harder than that.”

Surprise flashed across the older boy’s face and Harry took that moment to kick the wand out of the boy’s hand, grabbing it in a swift motion as it fell to the floor.

Ducking behind Warrington, Harry hit the older boy in the back of the leg, forcing him to the ground despite the vast difference in height that was present. In less than a moment Harry had his knife at the boy’s throat and Warrington’s own wand poised at the other boy’s temple.

“You know, I really don’t know how to use this thing,” Harry lied, pushing the wand further into the soft spot of the older boy’s head until he winced, “so you should call it quits now before I do something that I shouldn’t.”

The older boy made a deep growling noise but nodded nonetheless, careful of the blade at his throat. Harry pressed the switchblade in harder anyways and made a tsking noise. “Verbal answer,” he said coldly.

“I forfeit,” Warrington spat.

But Harry wasn’t going to let him go just like that.

With a quick movement, Harry brought the blade across the older boy’s throat, pressing just hard enough to make the older Slytherin bleed. To make the boy scar. But not enough that he would die.

“Potter wins,” Hall announced with a strange note in his voice that Harry couldn’t identify.

Pushing Warrington the rest of the way to the ground, Harry walked back to the other first years as another boy rushed to the older teen’s side. He could feel the glare of the older boys on his back, but only dropped the wand in response and wiped the blood from his nose.

No one clapped, but Harry didn’t expect them to. The boy just headed to the first year dormitories. He was surprised though when the other boys followed behind him.

The Slytherin dorms were just as painfully posh as the common room, with lavish wallpaper that showed images of trees with snakes slithering from branch to branch. The fireplace was already burning brightly in the back of the room when they walked in, casting a soft glow across it, but once the four boys had come in fully small fairy lights the color of the lake sprung to life, illuminating the room more fully. There were six four - poster beds in the room, each of them with a trunk in front of it, and thick green curtains drawn around them. The two beds closest to the door were already taken by the last two Slytherin boys.

Harry found his trunk in front of the bed on the left side of the room, closest to the fire. Draco’s was across from his, with Nott next to the other boy and Zabini taking up the middle on Harry’s side

The boys moved quietly around the room while getting dressed for bed, each of them careful not to wake the sleeping snakes.  Harry changed quickly in the bathroom after washing the blood from his face. He didn’t want the others to see the scars marring his body or the dark bruises from sparring.  

When Harry laid down to sleep that night, he closed his eyes and thought of the stars, of the constellations that he knew now by heart. When he opened them once more, Harry saw those very stars glistening across the roof of the bed.

That night Harry dreamt of a field and wondered if the other boy thought of it too.

Chapter Text

Snape watched closely as the Slytherin students walked into breakfast that morning. The potions Professor always took special care to watch the students the morning after opening duels, to know what line had been drawn among the snakes. Something as simple as that did wonders with deciding who to place where in class, partner as prefects, and so forth. Or so the professor told himself.

It was always good to know where loyalties lie.

The NEWTs students came first, each of them dragging one another into the Great Hall with green written on their faces. By seventh year all of the alliances had already been made and the novelty of duels had long worn thin. Opening night was just an excuse to get drunk with their friends before they had to forgo the rest of the parties to study and cram.

Everyone else tricked in slowly after the NEWTs students, though the potions master was met with two irregularities.

In all of his years of being the Slytherin Head of House, the potions Professor had seen his fair share of injuries, almost always from a spell getting the better of another student’s defense. There were always at least three or four of his snakes dragging their feet into the hall with some cut or bruise evident, but never just one.

Not until now.

Snape watched as Warrington walked in with a nasty gash across his throat and wondered just who could’ve gotten close enough to have the boy sporting that. He knew that the wound wasn’t from a spell, no one would risk casting a cutting spell too strongly and it going wrong and killing another student in a way that couldn’t so easily be passed as a splicing since students can’t apparate within Hogwarts.

No, Snape knew, someone slit that boy’s throat.

The Professor watched his students carefully to find out just who could have done it, but all of the other snakes were keeping a careful distance from the teen. Some of the older years were looking at the boy with disappointed gazes - whether because he lost or who he lost to, Snape didn’t know - but Gemma Farley looked outright hostile as far as the man could tell. He’d only ever seen such a look on the girl in her first year when someone had tried to hurt her based on her blood status as a half - blood. The boy hadn’t come out of it for the better.

It was the one time that the potions Professor had allowed for hostility to be publicly shown outside of the common room.

The second anomaly presented itself when the first years walked in.

The ten Slytherins walked into the Great Hall as a unit, not a single one of them missing from the group. Normally the lines were drawn between them during the first night as well. Slytherins naturally vied for the position of power, to have the most of it and align themselves to those who do when they aren’t the strongest in the room. That meant that there was always a divide.

But not this time, Snape reminded himself as he watched the group take the large space that had been left at the center of the table, that all of the others had avoided as if on purpose.

And it had been.

Where the older Slytherin’s gazes had been cold before, there was a degree of warmth that the professor could see in his snakes towards the first years. It was the kind that only one predator could hold for another: an acknowledgment of power. A show of respect.

The potions master studied the group wearily, looking for just who had earned such a thing. Greengrass and Davis were sitting across from Parkinson and seemed to be gossiping of all things on the first day of term, as Zabini turned his back to the three girls to speak with Potter who sat beside him, and Nott on the other side of the scarred boy. Malfoy sat on Potter’s other side, pressed just as closely to the boy as he’d been the night before as the blond spoke with Crab and Goyle - who sat next to one another, in front of him. Only Bulstrode seemed to be left out, but the gazes going to her were pitying at the most.

The professor had almost given up hope at solving this particular mystery before lunch when Warrington looked down that table at the group hatefully, Potter - of all people - meeting his gaze evenly. The older had something of a nasty look on his face, but Snape noted that the boy didn’t seem to mind. Potter only picked up his knife and twirled it easily in his hand as if it were an extension of himself, his eyes never leaving the other.

And Warrington flinched.

—-

McGonagall had never really cared much for the intricacies of Slytherin politics, they left something of a sour taste in the witch’s mouth, but the opening night duels were another thing altogether. After seeing how much smoother the tensions were among the snakes, the four heads of houses made an agreement after the first one not to mention them to the headmaster. The other three, while not condoning them for their own houses, had to agree that the dueling system worked well for a house such as Slytherin.

And betting on the victors was always fun and a good way to make quick money.

“I see the dueling went well last night,” McGonagall observed, noticing the distinctly formed alliances at the table below.

“I suppose so,” the potions master agreed, though the Deputy Headmistress could hear the unsureness in the other professor’s voice.

She could easily tell why.

The Warrington boy was a nasty one, one that had been brought up in pureblood views about as much as any other of the Slytherins had been; if not more so than some. Now there was a wound across the boy’s neck, marring it to match the teen horrid personality. 

And Potter was twirling a knife with a purposeful boredom as the older boy flinched.

McGonagall glanced at the Headmaster and found Dumbledore studying the scene as well, looking at the small boy as if he was a monster in the making rather than a young child.

The witch found herself inclined to agree.

He looks nothing like James.

—-

Despite being some of the last to arrive, the Slytherin first years were the first to leave breakfast to go to class, identical timetables in hand. Being a first year meant that none of them had any idea as to where to go, some of the students only going off of stories that had been told to them by their parents at the most. But Harry didn’t mind leaving early, they were going down to potions after all.

The sick feeling from the night before had risen with a new vigor as Harry and the others had left the Slytherin common room and the dungeons altogether, but this time the boy had been expecting it and had already positioned himself at Draco’s side long before the group had ever reached the Great Hall. The feeling had lessened a little more once Blaise had taken his other side at the table, and Theodore had sat across from the three. The closeness of them all left the boy’s skin tingling as he realized that they too felt like the magic that came from the youngest Malfoy.

The effect of having so many Slytherins close was enough to allow Harry to think with a clear head and debate with Blaise and Theo on whether or not the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor was going to last this year. Though the “debate” quickly turned as they all agreed that Quirrell wouldn’t for differing reasons. Eventually the trio just spoke of Astronomy, dragging Draco into the conversation as well as his mother’s side of the family apparently had a habit for naming their children after celestial bodies in the sky.

Even talking as he was, Harry took the time to study the older Slytherins and saw that some of the sixth and seventh years seemed to be at a similar level of discomfort as Harry was. He watched as they shifted in their seats as if their skin no longer sat right on their bones and he knew that it was for the same reason that his didn’t. Even if he didn’t know why just yet. But they seemed to notice it on him too, if the gazes were anything to go by.

Harry didn’t see Hermione in the Great Hall and, though disappointed, had figured that the girl must have come down earlier so that she could find the library before class. It seemed like something that she would do anyway. He didn’t see Neville either and figured that he’d see them both in class.

Walking into the dungeons had an effect akin to having the other Slytherins around him, as the dark, underground halls only seemed to be twinged with whatever magic it was that made the boy so ill. It felt like breathing too hot summer air rather than almost none at all.

The potions classroom was as dark as the halls that it sat in and just as dark. There were lab tables with cauldrons already atop them. Set up neatly on the far side of the room as two rows of two person desks were set up on the left, closest to the door.

Harry and Draco took the seats at the front of the left row, Theo and Blaise taking up post behind the pair. Harry noticed quickly that all of the Slytherins followed suit and filled the left row as they all walked in.

The Gryffindors took the right.

The lions walked in sporadically, no more than three of them at a time. A red haired boy, brown haired one, and a dark skinned boy all rushed in just before the bell, taking seats at the back of the row. Harry shrugged sympathetically at Neville who had trailed in behind them and had gotten stuck with the red head.

Quiet mummers came from the lions, but none of the snakes uttered a word. They knew from their time meeting the potions master the night before that he was a strict man, and none of them were willing to push the bounds of the Head of House’s rumored favoring until they knew just which boundaries that they could push and get away with it. They were Slytherins after all.

The door to the potions classroom slammed closed with enough force and suddenness to make Harry flinch, something that only the three perceptive Slytherins surrounding the boy seemed to notice; much to Harry’s pleasure and dismay. The dark haired teacher stormed to the front of the classroom, his cloak billowing behind him as he did. Harry thought that the look was a little outdone, but only just refrained from rolling his eyes when he saw the stars shimmering so brightly in Draco’s eyes.

The Professor spared none of them an introduction as he immediately moved into calling out roll, pausing on Harry’s name.

“Ah, yes,” the Professor said softly, scorn laying thickly within his tone. “Harry Potter, our newest… celebrity.”

A few of the Gryffindors snickers at the potions master’s words, but the most that the Slytherins did was glare at the lions, and some even at their head of house himself. Harry didn’t know if any of them did this out of a sense of budding friendship, house unity, or just not wanting to get on the bad side of the boy that had slit a fourth year’s throat the night before, but he found that he didn’t care all that much. It was the first time, Jude aside, that anyone had ever tried to stand up for the boy, even in such a subtle way.

Harry didn’t think that he was imagining the subtle look of pride on the potions master’s face at the sight either, even though a portion of the hostility was directed towards him.

“You are here to learn the subtle art and exact science that is potions making,” Professor Snape said after finishing the roll. The potions master’s voice was quiet but held the same level of sternness to it as the witch that had led them into the Great Hall. It grated on the boy more than he cared to admit. “Many of you will hardly believe that this class counts as magic, but I don’t expect you to appreciate the delicacies of such a subject just yet. If you aren’t as much of a bunch of fools and dunderheads as I normally have to teach, then I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even out a stopper in death.”

The professor’s cold eyes roamed across the quiet class before Harry saw them settle on himself once more. “Potter!” The man announced with enough forewarning that Harry’s flinch was minimal this time, though still enough to warrant a cursory glance from the boy at his side. “What would I get if I added a powder root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”

Harry let his mind wander back to the books that he’d read at least two times over the last month, knowing that potions should be his best subject after all of the time that he had spent in the Dursleys kitchen since he was old enough to stand at the burner.

“Draught of Living Death,” the boy answered with more sureness than he rightly felt.

The man looked down at Harry with a hint of surprise that was there and gone as soon as it had come, but it was enough for the boy to know that he wasn’t supposed to have been able to answer the professor’s question.

“Where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?” The older Slytherin asked, his voice louder and more obviously annoyed that it had been before. 

The cabinet, I would assume, Harry wanted to say, but he bit down the remark. Nothing good  ever comes of speaking in such a way to an adult, he knew.

“Stomach of a goat,” is what the boy said instead.

Harry could see the other Slytherins shifting in the seats around and behind him, torn between looking proud of their housemate and confused with their professor’s obvious show of hostility. Harry knew that the man before them was acting nothing like how they had heard about from their prefects and the older snakes.

The boy couldn’t read the emotions on the older man’s face, but he was able to read the potion master’s body language well enough to know just before the man barked once more and shot down a flinch. “What is the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane?”

Harry felt his brows scrunch together at the question. “Aren’t those the same plant, sir?” The Slytherin boy asked, his voice lacking his unsureness even as his face showed it all too well.

“…Correct,” Professor Snape said slowly, his dark eyes looking over Harry appraisingly. Harry still couldn’t read the man well, but he could sense the conflict in his eyes well enough. “Three points to Slytherin.”

Draco glanced at Harry questioningly once he saw that the test was over, but all that boy could do was shrug.

The potions lesson continued from there as everyone was paired off and assailed to make a simple potion to cure boils. Harry crushed the snake fangs as Draco weighed the dried nettles. The boys tried not to let too much pride swell in their chests as theirs was the only potion that escaped the potions master's scathing remarks.

Harry looked up and glanced around the classroom as their cauldrons gave off a satisfying hiss and clouds of green smoke. He’d only wanted to see how the others were progressing, but his heart had raced quickly when his eyes landed on one of the Gryffindors.

“Neville, stop!” The boy screamed out, not caring if it would cause any of the others to mess up their potions from his outburst, it couldn’t be any worse then what the other boy was about to do. The Gryffindor’s table was too far away from Harry’s to allow him to do anything but scream.

Neville immediately stilled, his hand still over the cauldron, as did everyone else in the classroom. 

“Potter,” the potions master spat, “care to explain to me why you’re being so arrogant as to yell in my class?” The man asked, his voice colder and much more dangerous than it had been at the start of class.

Harry swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat at the man’s tone, knowing that he expected an answer even when Uncle Vernon often didn’t give the boy a chance to do so when he spoke with such scorn. He raised his hand quickly and pointed at the Gryffindor boy with his hand still over the cauldron.

“The fire is still on,” the boy said quietly, not daring to look at the older man as he did so.

Harry watched quietly with the rest of the class as Snape walked over to the other boy and looked between Neville’s cauldron and what was still in the boy’s hand. He could see the man’s shoulders move in a sigh from across the classroom. “Well, idiot boy,” the man said to the now cowering lion, “it seems that Potter had just saved your pathetic life from what would have been a particularly nasty explosion and case of boils.” The man quickly glanced between the pair before adding a quiet, “two points to Slytherin and three from Gryffindor for such idiocy.”

Harry privately thought that the professor had probably never sounded so glum about giving points to his own house before.

Potions continued on uneventfully from there as the boys finished the potion with it looking exactly as the board said that it should, earning the pair a nod of approval from the potions master before the man began to reprimand Neville and the red headed boy - Weasley - for how poorly theirs had ended up being. 

Harry and Draco quickly moved to Neville as the class was dismissed, following the other boy out of the class.

“Thank you, Harry,” the other boy said earnestly as the three shuffled out of the dungeons, the other Slytherins trailing behind them. “Really, I would have hated to have been covered in boils on the first day. Even worse, make Snape hate me even more.”

Harry shrugged, not really caring about the other boy’s gratitude. Hardly anyone ever meant it. “I think I've got you beat on that one,” the boy grumbled, annoyed. He really couldn’t understand just what the man’s problem with him was, or why Snape even had one already

“He’s just stern is all,” Draco attempted to defend the man that Harry had already guessed that the boy so clearly idolized.

“And the fucking solo pop quiz?” Harry countered almost angrily, but letting none of it show. It never did you any good to show angrily, only gave people more to use against you. 

Draco had nothing to say to that.

“Well I think you did well, Harry,” Blaise complemented, his hand coming close to the other boy’s shoulder before pulling away after seeing how tense Harry had grown. The Slytherin knew that Blaise wasn’t going to let that one go just yet.

Harry didn’t know if he wanted the other to.

—-

History of Magic was the Slytherins next class, something that - in theory - should have been one of the most interesting classes that they took - it was taught by a ghost for fuck’s sake! - but wound up putting almost everyone to sleep in minutes as Professor Binns droned on boringly. Harry didn’t even think that the ghost noticed the condition of his class as he lectured on goblin wars. The only thing that made it even remotely salvageable was that it was with the Ravenclaws.

The girls took the front of the class this time, Pansy and Daphne taking the front row as Tracey sat by herself on the second row. Harry, Draco, Theo, and Blaise filled in behind them in the same manner as they had in the last class; the Slytherins taking special care to surround Harry now that they were back in the upper portion of the castle. He couldn’t tell when the others had realized that the boy felt ill in the main parts of the castle, or if they were all just surrounding him instinctively, but Harry was grateful for their presence nonetheless.

Hermione walked in with a flurry of books well before the bell, and separate from the rest of her house. Harry found it strange just how divided the other houses were, the Slytherins stuck tightly to one another but not even the Hufflepuffs seemed to exhibit that level of loyalty.

Harry motioned the girl over, ignoring the confused glances from his housemates as he did so. He didn’t care about what pureblood views they’d all been brought up in. Tracey didn’t seem to either.

The Slytherin girl motioned for the other girl to take the empty seat at her side, much to Harry’s pleasure. “I’m Tracey Davis,” the girl introduced, holding out a hand in the snake prim manner that Harry had noticed most Slytherins seemed to be born oozing.

“Hermione Granger,” the Ravenclaw replied, meeting the other’s hand and taking the offered seat.

Pansy and Daphne's eyes met Harry’s with a clear question in them. The girl’s understood well enough that Hermione was to be welcomed if she wasn’t already to be when the boy returned their gazes with a look that was startlingly similar to the one that Harry had given Warrington only the night before.

“So where are you lot coming from?” Harry asked, leaning his head against his knuckles as Binns floated across the front of the classroom. 

Hermione gave the boy a scathing look for speaking in class, but it seemed that even she had to admit how poor of a lesson it was when her shoulders sagged in something akin to defeat. “We had Defense Against the Dark Arts with the Hufflepuffs,” the girl said, which seemed to catch Blaise and Theo’s attention as the boys leaned forwards on their desks, close enough that Harry could feel Blasie’s breath on the back of his neck.

“And?” The eager Slytherin boy asked, his eyes gleaming with something that Harry could only describe as mischief.

“Well - I…” Hermione’s face grew a shade darker though Harry didn’t think that it was from the sudden increase in the attention being given to her, but rather of speaking ill of a teacher.  “It was his first class, I’m sure that he was only nervous,” Hermione protested weakly.

“He’s not going to make it the year, I knew it!” Blaise said excitedly.

“We all knew that!” Harry reminded the other Slytherin. “That wasn’t what the bet was even about, you toss pot.”

“Yeah, you toss pot,” Theo chimed in, hitting the other boy good naturedly on the shoulder. It was strange for Harry to see someone touch another in  such a way without the intent of violence.

Draco groaned dramatically. “Merlin save us all, there’s two of them now.” Though Harry could tell that the other boy didn’t truly mind it at all.

The girls laughed and Harry was happy to see that Hermione allowed herself to as well.

Harry couldn’t help but wonder if this was what friends were supposed to feel like. He thought he could get used to it if it was.

—-

Transfiguration with the Hufflepuffs felt a lot like potions had as McGonagall glared at Harry with a gaze that was much more heated than it had been the night before.

“Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic that you will learn while at Hogwarts,” the witch said, looking at them all sternly, her gaze staying on Harry for  just a beat too long. “Anyone found messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You’ve been warned.”

Harry felt disappointment swell in his chest at the witch’s harsh demeanor. Transfiguration and Potions had been two of the classes that Harry had been looking forward to the most. He hated that the professors seemed to dislike him so much on the first day.

The class spent most of the lesson taking some intricate notes that had Harry’s wrist aching by the end of it, long before they even drew their wands.

They were each given a match and were told to turn it into a needle. Harry could feel the bite of the match head as he ran his fingers over it and knew that he could change the object with little more than a thought if he so wished, he also knew better than to do so.

Raising his wand for the first time since he’d bought it a good month ago, Harry pointed it at the match on the desk and quietly muttered the spell, watching with satisfaction as it changed into a needle sharp enough to prick a finger. 

McGonagall only glanced at the sight.

—-

Charms and Astronomy were both rather uneventful in nature, both focusing on more introductory theory than practical, but they did seem to beat the odds that all of Harry’s teachers would hate him on sight. Harry supposed that was something.

Chapter Text

Classes continued on nicely from there, with Harry happy to find that only the Gryffindor and Slytherin heads of houses seemed to have a problem with the boy; though Harry was pleased to see that the latter had begun to tolerate the boy more during Thursday’s potions lesson. Or he wasn’t openly trying to find Harry to be overly incompetent to say the least.

Defense Against the Dark Arts on Tuesday was just about as much of a joke as the Slytherins had gone into it thinking that it would be, with the professor stuttering every few words. Harry couldn't help but wonder by the end of the lesson if the stutter was even real or not for how often it occurred. Not that Harry had much time to ponder at all given the thick stench of garlic from within the classroom and a headache that seemed to pulse almost like a heartbeat.

“You should go to the nurse,” Pansy whispered quietly as the Slytherins left their Tuesday morning defense class in the second week of term. Harry was holding his head as if it had done something to personally offend him as the group walked to their History of Magic Class. “You might be allergic to something in there if you react so badly to the room.”

“Yeah,” Blaise said with a mock supportiveness that no one needed any sort of help to understand. “He’ll just go there and say what? ‘Hey, I’m allergic to the bloody castle, you got anything for that?’” The other boy asked in a sarcastic, but passable imitation of the smaller Slytherin.

“So, what do you think that he should do then, Zabini?”

“He should go to Snape-”

“Hey! I know, why don’t we ask Harry?” The boy in question said with a rough voice. “It’s not like he’s standing right here or anything.” Harry looked at Pansy and then at Blaise, his gaze hard. “No Pomfrey, and no Snape either,” the boy decided, his voice holding no small amounts of finality.

The other two Slytherins pouted but didn’t say anything else. Harry couldn’t understand why they seemed to care so much in the first place.

—-

Wednesday morning, the Slytherins woke to find a notice pinned in the common room about flying lessons with the Gryffindors on Thursday. Harry felt a small smile curve onto his lips at the thought.

“Someone looks happy,” Draco said, taking his place at Harry’s right side as the Slytherins made their way to breakfast, the group subconsciously placing the pair at the heart of their little mass.

Harry shrugged. “I’ve always loved the idea of flying,” the boy said honestly. He didn’t tell the other of the way that he had longed for the freedom of it, or of the dream that he’d had of flying before. It didn’t seem relevant; or at least that was the lie that he told himself. At the same time though, he thought that the other snake could at least understand half of it.

Draco practically beamed at the other boy’s words. “You’re going to love it,” Draco decided, and Harry knew that he would be right.

The blond spent the morning explaining to Harry about some wizarding sport called Quidditch, but it sounded to Harry like some sort of demented version of football on brooms. Though not even he could deny that there was an appeal to it all.

—-

At two o’clock that Thursday, Harry and the other Slytherin first years hurried down the front steps of the school grounds with little less grace than the group usually held, childlike grins on each of their faces. The sun shone down nicely on the clear September day. The front lawn of the school was smooth, lacking any sign of the tall grass that might get tangled in. It was just another foreign thing for Harry to add to the list of them.

The Slytherins each moved to stand by one of the twenty or so brooms that had been laid out for the lesson, excited chatter breaking out among them at the promise of flight, it flying at all in Harry’s case.

The Gryffindors arrived soon after, teetering on the line of late as they always seemed to do, though Harry noticed that no one from either house seemed too interested in starting a fight as the lions muddled closely to one another. Not with Madam Hooch - a short, gray haired witch with eyes like those of a hawk’s - coming closer.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” The witch asked the Gryffindors. “Everyone go and stand by a broom. Hurry up!”

Harry glanced down at his broomstick as the lions moved into place and saw that it was in much poorer condition than he figured that the other Slytherins were probably used to. There were twigs sticking out at odd angles and enough splinters to make the boy not want to touch it at all, Harry found himself copying the other snake's upturned noses.

“Stick out your right hand over your broom,” Madam Hooch instructed once the Gryffindors were in place, “and say, ‘Up!’”

Harry moved his hand over the slender wood on the ground and felt his magic reaching out to it as well, feeling it begging to do something. “Up.”

The broom all but leapt into Harry’s hand at his quiet command. Harry smiled despite himself as he glanced around and found that he was the first to get his broom off of the ground, quickly followed by Draco. The boys snickered as they watched Weasley get sacked in the face by his broom before he got a proper handle on it. The redhead glared at them, but that only made the Slytherins laugh more.

Madam Hooch had the first years Mount their brooms before walking around to correct their grips.

Draco pouted as the witch walked away after all but telling the blond boy that he’d been holding his broom the wrong way his entire life. Harry, Blaise, and Pansy hadn’t lasted long before laughing quietly among themselves. “Shove off, you prats,” the boy said without any real heat to it.

Madam Hooch started to speak once more, but Harry’s attention was caught by a swell of magic coming from right in front of him. Neville had his hand on his broom, trying to steady himself, but Harry could see the old broom all but shaking with the other boy’s nervous magic.

Looking quickly to the left and right, Harry flicked his wrist as Madam Hooch blew her whistle, draining the broom of most of the magic that had built up inside of it. A wave of sickness rolled over the small boy and drowned him in it, but it wasn’t anything that the boy wasn’t already used to by now.

Class went uneventfully from there, though Neville’s broom never got more than an inch or two off of the ground. Harry couldn’t help but think that the other boy didn’t look too disappointed by that.

Harry kicked off of the ground with a sense of glee that he couldn’t remember ever having known before then as he rose a few feet into the air, the wood of the broom sitting comfortably in his hands.

Harry was right, it did feel like freedom.

—-

Ron walked inside of the castle bitterly as his nose still stung from the hit that the broom had given it. Dean and Seamus were with the boy, the three of them, usually staying together, but that didn’t stop the jealousy that arose every time that he saw the Malfoy prick with Harry Potter of all people.

Every child in the wizarding world grows up hearing stories of the Boy Who Lived, the savior of the wizarding world. Ron had been so sure that Potter would be in Gryffindor, that they would be in it together. It angered him to see the ‘hero’ end up among the house of snakes, all but glued to the side of the child of the man that his father had always hated- for good reason though.

“Your nose okay there, Ron?” Dean asked, seeing how the redhead was rubbing at it.

Ron immediately pulled his hand away in shame as he walked into the corridor in front of the Great Hall. “Yeah, I’m more annoyed by that snake Potter and git Malfoy laughing at me because of it.” Ron could see the other two Gryffindors rolling their eyes at his complaint, but that didn’t stop him from continuing. “They’re two Slytherin prats and you know it, prancing around about the castle with all of the other snakes. That stunt in Potions with the questions and Longbottom’s potion mishap,” the boy said angrily, his voice rising heedlessly of those who might hear it. “Then there’s Malfoy and we know who that git comes from. And from what I’ve heard they’re all friends with the know - it -all Granger from Ravenclaw-”

Ron was cut off from speaking as he was pulled harshly back and pain akin to falling off of a broom bloomed in his jaw. The boy fell to the ground, when he looked up Harry Potter was standing over him looking absolutely murderous.

—-

The Slytherins placed their brooms down in the neat row that they’d found them, knowing that the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs would be coming soon for their lesson as well. The group had a free period before dinner and were planning on going to the lake when they passed the entrance of the school and stopped to listen to an angered raised voice.

“…Slytherin prats and you know it,” Weasley said hotly from inside of the hall, his voice echoing out of it with perfect clarity. The Slytherins came to a stop at the mention of their house, though maybe they should have kept walking. “That stunt in Potions with the questions and Longbottom’s potion mishap,” Weasley continued.

The Slytherins all turned to look at Harry, easily deducing that the redhead was ranting about him even though the pair had never so much as exchanged a hello before. Blaise looked at Harry and shook his head, but Harry only shrugged. He’d grown up on harsh words, a few more from an eleven year old wasn’t going to kill him, they didn’t even scratch the surface. Truthfully, Harry thought that the other boy should be more worried about Draco, who was all but growling at Harry’s side, only stopped by the hold that Harry had on his wrist.

“Then there’s Malfoy, and we know who that git comes from. And from what I’ve heard they’re all friends with the know - it - all Granger-”

Harry didn’t listen to what else the boy had to say, his feet were already moving with the same speed that he had used to escape Dudley and his friends. This was the first time that he was running towards someone with it though. His hand reached out and grabbed the taller boy’s shoulder, pulling  him backwards towards him. Harry’s hand was already drawing back in a mean punch by the time that the other boy had completed his turn, knocking the Gryffindor straight to the ground.

Anger burned in the snake's eyes as he looked down at the lion. It was a surprise to no one when the smaller boy followed the Gryffindor down, another punch landing on the other side of the boy’s face.

The Slytherin boy could hear the screams and chants of those around him, but he only cared about the taller boy beneath him  who had begun to grapple with the snake, trying to get away from the smaller boy and the blood lust that Harry could feel coming off of himself.

Dark emotion coiled at Harry’s fingertips as the boys traded blows, none of the other first years daring to try and break them up, just waiting for the boy to add intention to the emotion and magic already there. A good punch landed on the chest of Harry’s cheek, knocking the boy to the side. Weasley followed him and attempted to hit the other boy once more, but Harry head butted the Gryffindor first.

Then all of the blows and noise stopped.

Weasley quietly removed himself from Harry as all of the other students pulled away from the beaten and bruised pair, save Draco and Blaise who moved forwards to help Harry to his feet.

Once Harry saw who had come to stop them, the boy almost wished that they had left him to pass out on the ground.

Snape stood in front of the four boys with Pansy trailing behind him, a guilty look on the girl’s face. The man’s eyes were cold as he regarded the bloodied pair, almost icily so.

“Weasley? To Professor McGonagall.”

“But, sir? Potter-”

“Now, Mr. Weasley!” The angered man exclaimed, his voice rising to a height that none of the snakes had heard before. “Potter! With me.”

The potions master had turned before he could see the boy flinch, but Harry knew that Blaise didn’t miss it at all, not when he had already been watching for it.

Harry followed the professor quietly, his head ducked towards the ground. The only relief that he found was that the teacher was leading him towards the dungeons and away from the adverse magic of the main parts of the castle.

Harry wanted to feel sorry about what he had just done, but he couldn’t find it in himself to do so, so all he did was follow the older man and hope he wasn’t expelled.

He really didn’t want to have to go back to the Dursleys just yet.

—-

Snape watched as the boy walked timidly into the potions classroom, taking the desk that he’d directed him to without so much as meeting the man’s eyes. A part of him has still expected for the boy to start ranting about how unfair it was that he was being carted off like this, soon to be punished, but Potter only quietly stared at his hands, not making any sort of sound- like he thought being quiet would make the professor forget that he was there at all.

He looks exactly like he did when I yelled at him for stopping Mr. Longbottom on the first day of class.

When Snape realized that the other wouldn’t speak.

“Care to explain to me why Miss Parkinson felt the need to interrupt the end of my NEWTs class to tell me that you and Mr. Weasley were fighting?” The Professor asked, his voice as cold as he could make it.

Potter mumbled something that Snape couldn’t hear.

“What was that boy?”

And Potter, he… flinched.

Snape felt his body go still at the fact that a part of him had just instilled the same fear in the young boy before him as he’d felt growing up in a house that was never a home. At the fact that Harry Potter of all people was well familiar with such a fear.

But Snape couldn’t get into that right now, that could wait until after this… situation had been properly dealt with.

“Just talk me through what happened,” the potions master said, surprising himself with just how soft his own voice had grown.

Potter nodded slowly, still not looking at the older man. “We were leaving flying lessons and figured we’d go and sit by the lake until dinner, ya know,” the boy said evenly, his voice unnaturally blank for an eleven year old. “I heard Weasley saying some stuff about Draco and Hermione, and I guess that I just lost it.”

Snape nodded to himself, knowing that the account aligned with what Miss Parkinson had told him before when she had rushed into the classroom looking as if someone was about to die. “And he said nothing about you?”

The potions master wasn’t exactly sure what he had been expecting but he knew that it wasn’t the cold, hollow laugh that he was given. But Potter on,y shrugged as if a child was supposed to be able to make that noise. “I’ve heard a lot worse than that before, sir.”

The Professor hummed and looked down at the bloodied boy before him with a careful gaze.

Potter had a gash above his eye from his glasses breaking due to a well aimed punch. Bruises were blooming on the left side of the boy’s face, dark ones that likely wouldn’t go away for weeks without some sort of potion or healing spell tending to them. Despite it all, the child showed no signs of pain. He only looked used to it.

The man sighed heavily, the faces of too many other children ghosting across his vision. Of a house on Spinner's End. “Hand me your glasses.”

Snape watched as the child did so almost robotically, following the orders that he was given, still without looking at the other person in the room. If Snape hadn't seen what he did, he was sure he would have thought that the boy was acting with arrogance.

The potions Professor took the broken glasses and tapped his wand to them silently, watching as the object repaired itself until the glasses looked better than they had before the boy had even stepped on to school grounds. Snape handed them back to the boy and quietly wondered just how this came to be his life.

Fucking Dumbledore, that’s how.

When the boy put his glasses back on and finally raised his gaze to meet the potions master’s, the child had Potter’s looks and Lily’s eyes and yet he looked like neither of them at that moment. Looking down at the small, underfed boy with a penchant for fighting, Snape felt as if he was looking at a younger version of the wolf instead.

“Thank you, sir,” the boy said with a politeness that had Snape wondering if it was natural or more so had been beaten into the child.

“Three days helping Madam Pince shelve books in the library,” the Professor decided. “You’ll start tomorrow after breakfast.”

“Right,” the boy said, taking the punishment and not arguing in the least.

“Since that’s dealt with, let’s get you seen to by Madam Pomfrey…” Snape started but trailed off once he saw the boy shaking his head.

Potter brushed a finger over his bloodied knuckles and shook his head once more. “I’d rather just let it heal naturally, if that’s alright.”

“Fine,” the potions master tiredly agreed, in no mood to fight with a boy that is like the wolf in any way when it comes to injuries. “Just in the future leave the foolishness to the Gryffindors, it’s all that they’re good for.”

“Alright, sir.”

—-

Harry walked into the common room slowly, inside of what greeting he would receive, but clapping wasn’t it. All of the Slytherins clapped and hollered, smiles plastered across what were usually cruel faces.

They were still cruel, just in a different way.

Gemma bounded over, her curls bouncing as she did. “I do not not usually condone fighting outside of duels,” the prefect said sternly, “but,” she added, “I’ll make an exception for defending a fellow snake.”

Hall walked up beside the girl and looked Harry up and down as if checking for any injuries that he might be hiding from view. “I do condone fighting,” the boy said, earning himself an elbow to the ribs from the brunette, “just don’t get caught next time.”

Harry, not wanting to take either side and knowing that he was likely to get into another fight before the end of his seven years at Hogwarts just raised two fingers to his brow in a mock salute and moved to the waiting first years.

Draco moved to meet him first, stopping just before touching the smaller boy. “Don’t you dare get all beat up again like this in my account,” the blond said, looking over the other boy with a careful gaze.

“I don’t know,” Blaise said, stepping up beside the blond, “I thought that it was pretty cool.”

“What punishment did you get stuck with?” Theo asked, taking Draco’s other side, concern in the boy’s eyes. Concern for Harry.

It wasn’t a look that the boy thought that he would ever get used to.

“Detention with Pince,” the boy answered, shrugging once more. He didn’t really mind, libraries have always been a safe place for the boy, it was one of the few places that Dudley would refuse to look for the boy when he was Harry Hunting.

Tracey and Daphne came next. Tracey had a small jar of something in her hand and pushed it at the boy. “It’s a bruise balm,” the girl explained, “figured Snape would be too pissed to remember to give you any.” Harry nodded at the girl thankfully as he ran his fingers across the cool glass.

The only first year that was present that didn’t join the welcoming part was still standing where the other had been before, stubbing the toe of her boot into the ground in a way that Harry was sure would make her mother scream if she were to see.

“Pansy,” the Slytherin boy called out, making the girl stop and look at him, “thank you.” The first years looked at the boy strangely, but Harry was too tired to mind. He’d been looked at strangely all of his life anyways. “I think that I would have really hurt him if you hadn’t gotten Snape to stop me first.”

Harry could still remember the way that his magic had begged to reach out, to do something. He didn’t know what, but Harry knew that it wouldn’t have been anything good. That it would have been a lot worse than a broken nose.

The girl smiled. “You did a good job with the weasel,” Pansy complimented. “He definitely came out of it looking the worse.”

“Worse punishment too,” Daphne chimed in. “He got stuck with Filch.” Harry saw the girl shudder and felt compelled to agree.

Harry fell asleep that night feeling light even as a familiar pain weighed him down. Maybe because it did.

Chapter Text

Harry reported to the Hogwarts library right after breakfast and was met with a particularly stern looking witch waiting for him in the hall.

“You will reshelve the sections that I tell you to and will not go anywhere near the Restricted Section, or speak unless I speak to you first,” Madam Pince said, her voice grating on Harry’s ears like nails on a chalkboard. “Is that clear?” Harry nodded firmly to the question, all too used to nonverbal communication. The witch almost seemed to smile at the sight as something dark twisted in the boy’s stomach at the familiarity of it all. “Alright then.”

Harry followed the witch into the school library and almost gasped at the sight. 

There were shelves upon shelves of books that stood so tall that ladders had to be installed to reach anything above half way. All of the books were hardback and bound in leather like old tomes from stories. There were already some other students gathered in the library despite the early time, nose deep in books with more in a great pile beside each of them. Harry wasn’t surprised to find that most of them were either Ravenclaws, NEWTs students, or - more worryingly so - both.

Madam Pince led Harry over to three tall stacks of books , easily double, if not closing in on triple the boy’s height. Harry had to crane his neck back just to see the top of each stack.

“You’ll reshelve one of these stacks each day,” the librarian quietly explained before drawing her wand and flicking it at the stack nearest to the pair. The books immediately took on a silvery hue to them and glided gently to a table in about twelve or so more manageable piles. “Once you finish your stack for the day you’re free to go.” And with that, the witch walked over to her desk and sat quietly with her own book though Harry could still feel her eyes on him.

Looking down at the piles, Harry found that the books were actually already arranged by section for him, all Harry had to do was find the books’ places on the shelves.

Harry saw no point in wasting more of his day and grabbed the pile closest to him, Advanced Charms, and got to work. A part of Harry thought that he shouldn’t have been surprised with the way that his limbs seemed too heavy for his body now that he was away from the other Slytherins and the common room, but it was still a good hour or so before he’d made much of a dent in the stack. He let himself get lost in the action of searching titles and names to distract him from it all well enough. He’d been sick plenty of times in his childhood before and still expected to work, so it really wasn’t all that bad.

“Harry,” a short voice called from behind the boy, making him twist and almost drop the books in his hand.

The boy spun and raised the book in his hand like a blade on instinct, pointing it at the throat of the girl now in front of him. Hermione squealed and raised her hands by her head, a slight look of fear entering the Ravenclaw girl’s eyes.

“Sorry,” the boy said sheepishly, lowering his hand slowly so that the other could see his every movement. Hermione did the same though Harry could see the distance that she had created.

“It’s fine,” Hermione said softly, but they both knew that it wasn’t, not to her. A heavy silence stretched between the pair for a long moment, something that Harry didn’t like hearing, but had no experience in fixing. He couldn’t just curse and the pair laugh it off like he and Jude might. “I heard that you got into a fight,” the Ravenclaw said at last, eyeing the deepening bruises on Harry’s face with no amount of subtlety.

Harry only shrugged. “Not as intriguing as the Ravenclaws reading half off the books in the library before the end of the second week of school.”

Hermione smiled, but Harry could tell that it was a little more forced than it should be. “Thank you,” the witch said softly, almost as if lying. Maybe she was. “I heard that my name was tossed around in there.”

“Course.”

Harry watched as the girl sullenly gathered her things and began to walk away, before pausing. Hermione didn’t look back at Harry, but he knew that she was speaking to him. “The books that you are shelving now have information in them pertaining to you, if you wanted to know more about that night,” she said quietly before slipping away, the words landing heavily between them like a parting gift. Harry was staring at where the girl once stood and wondered just what he’d done.

But he knew, of course he did.

It didn’t take any sort of genius to know that those that come from pretty homes would be put off by the actions of those that were made by bloodied knuckles and knives. Harry was starting to think that this was one of the reasons that Slytherins always seemed to stick so close to one another, the other three houses didn’t like the cruelness that stuck to them like a second skin- that they were raised to think was love.

Harry sighed and looked down at the book in his hand, Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century. A part of Harry just wanted to put the book back on the shelf and carry onto the next section, to not ponder and investigate the lives of two people that he’s never known before, but the rest of him wanted to know just how he ended up where he did; how he came to grow up alone. 

It really wasn’t much of a choice at all.

Opening the book, Harry flipped to the last chapter: The Fall of The Dark Lord, and read through every sentence with a care that he had never truly possessed before. That was how the boy learned that Voldermort had hunted down his family, just as Hagrid had said, and found. Them in a wizarding - muggle town called Godric’s Hollow. It’s how he learned that they had died on Halloween, a holiday that his Aunt had always seemed to hold a special hatred for that went beyond its magical affiliations. Now he knew why.

October 31st, 1981.

The sickness that Harry always felt in the main castle washed over him in droves. Harry let it.

—-

Fred and George were sitting at one of the tables in the Gryffindor common room with plans for future products drawn up before the pair, when the portrait hole opened and their youngest brother stepped heavily through, his robes and skin cracked in mud, and his face badly bruised all over from Madam Pomfrey not having bruise balm in stock just yet.

“How did detention go, little Ronikeens?” George asked, his voice loud so that it would call the attention of everyone else.

“Little Ronnie’s first detention-” Fred lamented, casting his hand dramatically over his face.

“-with Filch no less,” George continued, watching the way that the youngest Weasley at Hogwarts seemed to almost growl as he stomped across the common room .

“Mom’s going to be so proud,” Fred called, enjoying the way Ron went pale as he walked past, ignoring the pair.

“I can’t wait for the Howler to come, Gred,” George called loudly as the door to the first year dorms slammed shut.

“Indubitably so, Forge,” Fred agreed before his face grew more serious and the pair simultaneously quieted back down as if they’d never had such an outburst at all. “But seriously,” the twin said to the other, sitting normally once more, “what could Ron have possibly said to make Harry Potter of all people hit him?”

George tapped the feather of his quill against the table and wondered the same thing.

The thing with Harry Potter is that the boy is an enigma. All of the Gryffindors - Bloody hell, all of Hogwarts - had been expecting the savior of the wizarding world to go straight to the house of lions as fast as the Malfoy boy had gone to Slytherin. No one had expected him among the snakes. While everyone had expected a loud boy, they got a quite, reserved, analytical one that somehow managed to get close enough to Warrington to give him the nasty gash that he’s been sporting since breakfast the first day of term if the twin’s guess was right. 

Where the Weasley twins had expected the Boy Who Lived to look strong, Fred and George found a concerningly underweight boy that somehow always managed to look sickly.

A true anomaly.

“I hear that he’s serving detention with Pince tomorrow…” George said, an idea blooming in the boy’s mind. He could see that his twin shared it even before the teen opened his mouth to speak it.

“I could use a book or two.”

—-

Harry ignored the way that his arms shook under the weight of the books that he was carrying, his body in no way built for such long hours of moving things as he was even before the sickness set in as profoundly as it had. The books that had seemed so pretty only a day before now looked little better than rectangular demons that Harry was sure multiplied each time that he turned his back on them.

Still better than whatever the Weasel has to do, Harry forced himself to believe so that he wouldn’t be left alone with bitter thoughts for hours more. Harry had already spent ten years like that, he didn’t need anymore.

Exhausted as he was, Harry couldn’t find any remorse for his actions, not even with the way that Hermione - of all people - seemed to be avoiding the library like the bloody plague while he was within it, only sneaking down during the middle of meals. He knew that - knowing how everything would go - Harry still would have punched the bastard again.

Harry stared up at the ladder before him as if he was contemplating just dropping dead where he stood and froze when a feeling of normalcy washed over the boy. Harry turned quickly and saw two boys that looked identical to one another walking towards him from either side of the aisle. Harry’s skin didn’t prickle with magic as they drew closer, but he could still feel it there. Nor did he feel suffocated like he had only a few moments before. Harry felt completely normal, as if he was still in the muggle world or in the field where it was easy to forget the quiet sing of magic.

He felt his wand slide into his hand like a blade, destructive and beautifully deadly, before he even bothered to speak to the Weasley twins. “If you're here about what I did to your brother, then you really should have picked a less public place,” the boy quickly warned, eyeing the pair wearily. 

Harry had heard that the twins were gifted students, but virtually harmless, saving most of their energy for pranks. But Harry knew that anyone could easily turn violent if prompted enough. After all, Uncle Vernon had only been mean before Harry’s magic had started to present itself.

“Gred, I think the snakes is trying to get us alone so he can fight us for ickel Ronikeen’s honor,” the twin on the right, George if the rumors on how they switched their names like this was to be believed, said in a voice that sounded much too light for someone intending to cause harm.

“Seems that way to me, Forge,” Fred agreed. Harry could feel the twin’s eyes studying him carefully, as if he had found something that he hadn’t expected to.

Harry only shrugged.

“We’re not here-” Fred started, his eyes still as curious as he stepped closer.

“-to fight.”

“We just-”

“-want to know-”

“-why you and-”

“-Ron did,” George finished.

Harry didn’t bother attempting to look at the twins as they spoke and just fiddled with his wand as he listened instead. “I get it, you’re twins,” the Slytherin boy said irritably. “You can stop with the back and forth now.”

The boys seemed to almost pout and Harry sighed. “Look,” the boy said tiredly, the respite from the foreign magic not truly enough to bring back the energy that Harry had spent shelving books for three hours now. “Your brother decided to insult two of my friends and I have anger issues. Shit happened,” the boy explained before moving to the ladder, book in hand. Harry raised an eyebrow as Fred stepped forward and held the ladder still as Harry climbed it, but none of the three said anything about it. “Do what you want about it, but I don’t regret it in the least.”

“Ooh, a snakey with a backbone,” George cooed, handing Harry another book and earning him his own confused look. “Not very snakey of you.”

Harry took the book and shrugged once more. “Slytherins are loyal to their own,” he said in lieu of a proper explanation.

“So Ron insulted a Slytherin then?” Fred asked, sounding more curious than anything else that he might have.

“And a Ravenclaw,” the younger boy was sure to add.

Harry saw the twins glance at one another before identical sly grins crept across their faces.

“Tell us, Mr. Snakey-” Fred started as George handed Harry another book.

“-what do you think about pranks?” The other Weasley twin finished.

—-

Sunday morning Harry walked into the Great Hall with the other Slytherin first years with a small smile curved on the boy’s lips that Blaise noticed and raised a questioning brow to, but the smaller boy only shook his head slightly.

Wait, the gesture seemed to say.

The other boy only shrugged.

There was a good ten minutes before the post came when the Weasley twins walked into the Great Hall, each of the boys dramatically dressed in as much green as they had been able to find (which really wasn’t much; only a shirt, beanies, and scarves since they come from an all Gryffindor family). The twins strutted forwards, the eyes of the Gryffindors immediately gravitating to their most chaotic members.

But the twins didn’t walk to their own table.

From the Head Table, McGonagall watched, mystified, as Fred and George walked over to the Slytherins and sat on either side of Potter, shooing the Malfoy boy and Zabini boy away from the smallest snake’s side. The twins, from what the Deputy Headmistress could see, pretended as if the entire occurrence was normal and moved to grab food, piling it onto their plates and Potter’s as well as if it was the only natural thing to do. 

She was even more surprised when she saw the ever rule following Percy Weasley walk into the Great Hall and scan it slowly for his siblings, only stopping once he’d found the misplaced pair. Instead of yelling at the two boys though, McGonagall almost has a stroke as he joined them at the table next to Ms. Parkinson, sitting opposite of the strange trio.

Snape sighed heavily and wondered if he should have seen this coming as the three redheads are at the Slytherin table as if they had been sorted into it themselves. The boy may be more likes the wolf then the Potter that the potions master had grown up with, but Lupin had still been a Marauder nonetheless. He was also sure that the wolf had been the one to plan most of the group's more intelligent ‘pranks’ during their school years. Still, he couldn’t even find it in himself to reprimand the three Weasley brothers, not when he and all of the other Hogwarts staff knew just what was coming in a few minutes' time. He’d want to be on the other side of the hall too.

Harry smirked into his water as the Weasel walked into the Great Hall and stopped short at the sight of his siblings. He wiped the look clean from his face though as the youngest Weasley boy stormed towards the Slytherin table with righteous indignation, and a fire in the boy’s dark eyes.

“What in Merlin's saggy balls do you think you’re doing, Potter?” The Weasel asked angrily and quite loudly too.

“Language, Ronald,” Percy chastised primly, fitting in nicely with the posh manner of the Slytherins around him as the twins gasped dramatically and immediately moved to cover the ears of the children closest to them, much to Draco’s and Blaise’s displeasure.

“Yeah, language, Ronald,” the brothers chorused before being shaken off by the younger Slytherins.

“I didn’t do anything,” Harry said, boarding the line of lying. The older Weasley brothers had chosen to sit by Harry on their own, he just might have given them the idea to do so the day before.

“So you’re not trying to corrupt my siblings with one of your little Slytherin schemes?” The boy asked, waving a hand at the other three red heads.

Harry sighed tiredly despite feeling normal once more in the Weasley twin’s presence. “Look, Weasel,” the Slytherin started, ignoring the way that more than one of the other snakes choked on their food at the name. “Sorry, but obviously you’ve mistaken me for someone that gives a shit. Please tell me where you got that idea from so that I can never do it again.”

The other boy blundered, looking between those around him, but seeming to have nothing to say anymore.

“Now look at what you’ve done!” Fred exclaimed, gesturing at the Slytherin surrounded by Weasleys.

“Shame on you, Ronniekins,” George joined in. “Corrupting the youth.”

“Hardly,” Draco scoffed good naturedly, taking a sip of his pumpkin juice as if to distract himself from the fact that he was being civil with more than one of the Weasley clan. “Harry came that way.”

Harry only shrugged, not fighting the accusation. Especially not when he was proud of it. “It’s true.”

“Bloody Slytherins,” Ron cried before walking to his own table and his friends there.

Just in time for the post to arrive.

The owls descended in the usual flurry of madness and motion, swooping down and gliding as feathers fluttered down and letters were dropped in front of their owners. The Weasleys and most of the Slytherins all turned to watch as a particularly flat faced owl landed messily on the table in front of Ron. None of them could see exactly what it held in its beak, but Harry could tell from the way that everyone leaned away that it wasn’t going to be pretty.

And Harry was right to think so.

“Ronald Weasley! How dare you get into a fight, and on only the second week of school no less!” A disembodied voice screamed into the hall. Harry could see all three Weasley boys wince and knew that it must be their mother. “Think of what example you are setting for your sister!”

The letter continued to scream on from there but someone cast a silencing charm to mute it. However, that person was slightly misguided in their attempts to help since the letter - the Howler, as the twins had called it the day before - only started its speech once more, screaming even louder than before.

“Really?” Percy Weasley asked, his eyes flicking between his brothers.

“Never too early for pranks,” Fred said, a sly grin on his face that sometimes made Harry wonder how most of the Weasleys didn’t go into Slytherin. 

“Or owls, dear brother,” George finished.

By this time the Gryffindors were beginning to look for seats among the other houses as well, only to find none as everyone was already down for breakfast, and the smarter Gryffindors had already done just as the older Weasleys and moved when they saw the Howler coming unmistakably closer.

“I’m off then,” Harry said, rising from the table and nimbly avoiding the pair of hands that tried to grab him. 

All three Weasleys stared down at the barley touched plate of food with concern for the small boy as the first year Slytherin walked away. It looked as I’d he’d hardly eaten a thing at all.

“Is it normal for him to eat so little?” Fred asked, pointing to the abandoned plate beside him. 

The other Slytherins glanced at one another quickly, unsure of what to do. They all knew the answer, it was just a matter of  whether or not they wanted to share it with the Gryffindors.

The Weasley brothers watched the silent communication with thinly veiled fascination. All three of them knew that Slytherins were well adept at such silent conversations, but it was interesting to see it in first years, only two weeks in at that. None of the three knew of the ways of talking that one learned when they were not allowed to speak at all.

“He’s been doing better with it actually,” Blaise said at last, ignoring the betrayed look from Draco as he spoke. “He ate a lot less the first night.”

Blaise looked at Pansy and blatantly ignored the silently fuming blond. Both him and Pansy had noticed the sickliness that seemed to cling to the smaller boy with the fierce grip of a dying man. The way that just being in the castle seemed to make the boy ill if he wasn’t among another Slytherin, how he seemed to become even worse during defense.

Mrs. Malfoy had insisted on holding off on testing Draco for what kind of magic the boy held after the last war, but Blaise’s and Pansy’s parents had not held the same reservations. The pair knew the signs, felt them themselves to a much lesser extent, it was why they wanted to get the smaller boy to Snape. They’d seen him helping some of the older Slytherins, giving them potions to help with the adverse effects of being in the castle.

Only Blaise thought that there might be more to it than just magic.

The Slytherin had seen the way that Harry was too small for someone their age, the poor condition of his glasses, and the way that he flinched at loud noises and sudden touches that almost everyone else seemed to shrug off.

Blaise knew just how cruel adults could be. His mother had already had seven husbands over the years, each of them dying in the same suspicious way as the others. 

He couldn’t remember his own father or even what number the man had been, but the Slytherin boy knew that the man hadn’t been innocent. His mother - though she always married rich - was not longing for money, having more than enough of her own to suffice for any whim. Nor was she someone that killed for the fun of it, though she had plenty of blood on her hands. 

She was someone, Blaise knew, that would do anything to protect those that she called hers from the first time that she saw even a sign of violence coming their way. Husband number six had been ill before the brisket had even set on Blaise’s skin. 

Seeing Harry run at the youngest Weasley boy that day, Blaise couldn’t help but thinking that his mother would like the smaller boy a lot too.

—-

The last day of detention was going relatively smoothly for Harry as he spent hours on end cussing at the Ravenclaws under his breath and plotting just how likely he could get away with cursing the next one that added a book to one of his piles. The calculations weren’t favorable, but as the number of books rose higher the Slytherin found that he cared less and less about that.

“Where can I find a book on advanced summoning charms?” A voice asked firm the boy’s right.

The younger Slytherin repressed a growl as he turned to see the figure of Marcus Flint, a Slytherin fifth year, smirking at him. Harry had seen the older boy around Warrington from time to time in the common room and knew what his stance on the younger snake was by now.

“Already struggling that much are we?” The younger boy asked him with a sweetness that he’d learned from Petunia before his voice fell flat. “Top shelf, two over from where the ladder is now,” Harry said boredly before toning back to the books he’d been sorting through before.

“Potter!”

Harry tired quickly to the source of the sound, hearing the genuine alarm in it as he did so. He felt his arm moving before he’d even fully registered that something was coming, falling towards him, as caught a particularly thick copy of a Charms textbook, his body slightly sagging under the weight. He was sure that if it were to actually have got him, a concussion wouldn’t have been far behind the action.

Turning his head up to the older boy, Harry openly glared at the other Slytherin as he climbed down the tall ladder. “What the fuck are you playing at, Flint?” Harry growled, thrusting the book at the older boy’s general direction and enjoining the way that he scrambled to get it in a good hold.

“Bloody hell, Potter,” the older boy cursed quietly, careful not to draw any more attention than they already had amassed. “I wouldn’t try anything in public, you know that.” Harry then watched as the older Slytherin’s eyes flickered from the boy himself to the book that the elder now held in his own hands. When he spoke again he almost looked as if he saw signing a death warrant for himself. The younger boy loved it. “You have some good reflexes on you,” Flint complimented. “Ever thought about playing Quidditch?”

Harry felt a brow raise at the sudden question but otherwise showed no outward reaction. “You help me put away the rest of these books and I’ll consider it.”

Flint sighed but relented as Harry had known that he would. “A snake to the end,” he thought that heard the other mutter as the hungry look in the older boy’s eyes was too great for him not to agree. “Quidditch Pitch tomorrow before breakfast.”

Harry handed the older Slytherin a book.

—-

“Damn it,” Marcus cursed from the ground as he watched Potter dive and rise in the air as if he’d been born for it and not the Earth at all. He groaned as the boy raised his hand over his head triumphantly for the third time in under an hour, the practice snitch fluttering desperately in the younger boy’s grasps.

Sometimes Marcus hated his own curiosity, especially when it meant that both Warrington and Higgs were going to kill him for it.

He called the boy back to the ground and watched with something almost resembling empathy as the boy complied only reluctantly.

“You have potions first, right?” Marcus asked as soon as Potter was in front of him. The boy only nodded. “Come on then.”

Potter followed Marcus quietly as he led them into the silent dungeons. The older Slytherin shivered as the cold washed over him, but noticed with a minute interest the way that the younger boy seemed to become more alive then he had seemed since setting foot on the ground once more. It was still only a shadow as to how the boy usually looked in the common room, but it was intriguing enough to warrant a second glance.

Snape was sitting at his desk when the boys walked in but Marcus didn’t fall for the man’s cold gaze. He knew just how much of a soft spot the Professor had for his snakes. Anyone who paid proper attention could see the way that the man watched them all carefully at the start of the year and the more jumpy Slytherins soon found themselves in new homes if that had been the problem- it was the Slytherin coldness that Marcus knew that the potions master hid behind.

Who didn’t?

“You two better have a good excuse for coming here so early,” the professor griped, putting down his quill as he did so.

“I found you a new seeker,” Marcus said confidently, though he noticed the way that the youngest Slytherin seemed to draw in on himself almost protectively as the professor’s gaze turned on the younger boy.

“We already have a seeker,” Snape said dismissively, waving the boys off.

“Higgins is constantly one step from academic probation,” the fifth year reminded the man, “and Potter is simply better.” Snape and Potter both seemed to still at the last part, the younger boy’s cheeks noticeably flushing from the simple spoken fact. “You want to beat Gryffindor again this year, right?”

Marcus smirked as the potions master muttered something that sounded a lot like a curse and knew that he’d won.

“Reserve seeker,” the Slytherin Head of House conceded, but Marcus knew that he could hear the for now in it.

A good season was coming, he could feel it.

Chapter Text

Harry’s head ached something horrific as he placed it down on his desk for the third time in the lesson, completely ignoring the fact that Professor Quirrell was making his way down the aisle right now in front of him and could turn at any moment. Pansy and Blaise sat on either side of the boy as the three took the back of the Defense classroom, leaving the eager Draco to sit with Greg and Vince at the front of it. The youngest Malfoy liked the idea of vampires too much to ‘dwell in the back of the classroom as if I am one.’ 

That was how when the bell rang, signaling the end of the lesson, Harry found himself with a soft grip on either side of arms guiding him out of the room. But instead of making their way to History of Magic, the boy was led down to the dungeons instead.

It wasn’t long before he was being sat down at one of the long benches in the potions classroom, as the smallest Slytherin heard three voices speaking quietly around him. Harry knew that he should care about what was going on around him, but he couldn’t find it in himself to do so. Not as the pain was finally ebbing away.

—-

Blaise stared firmly at the potions Professor as Pansy shifted nervously from foot to foot at his side, Harry hidden protectively behind the pair. The Slytherin knew that the professor wouldn’t do anything to the smaller boy, but that didn’t stop Blaise from noticing the way that the man’s eyes had been so filled with hate when they had looked at Harry for the first two weeks of term. The gaze might have shifted now, but that didn’t mean much to someone that had been on the receiving side of such a look so many times before. 

“Just what are you three doing here?” The older man drawled before his eyes flicked to where Harry should be. “And why in Merlin’s name does Potter look like he’s about to pass out?”

Blaise almost winced, knowing just how accurate that classification of the other boy’s condition was. “Because he probably is,” the Slytherin boy answered dryly, never letting any emotion slip through.

“And you brought him to me, why?” Snape asked, though Blaise could almost hear a hint of concern for the boy in the man’s voice.

“Because Harry has absolutely refuses to go to Madam Pomfrey,” Pansy replied with a Slytherin clinicalness that Blaise knew from experience that the girl did not truly feel. “He resisted the idea of you just a little bit less the last time that we brought this up.”

The pair watched as their professor studied their faces for a long moment. Blaise had begun to contemplate just taking the other boy to the hospital wing anyways, magic and Harry’s personal aversion to the place be damned, when Snape’s cold eyes met his own.

The professor drew his wand and made a shooing motion with his free hand that the pair were happy to comply with, doing so quickly. Blaise watched as the potions master raised his wand and moved it in a simple, but familiar pattern over the figure of the dozing boy. 

Though he could see Pansy’s  brows knit together in confusion, Blaise knew that what Snape had just done was one of the more extensive diagnostic charms that traced back years. The Slytherin had been subjected to some of the more mild ones before by his mother over the years, and knew to expect a piece of parchment to appear in the air in front of his professor. Still, even Blaise - who had already guessed at the particulars of Harry’s situation - hadn’t expected the list to be so long.

The parchment easily curled at the potions professor’s mid thigh, hiding just how long the list truly was, but Blaise didn’t need to see it to know that even the most clumsy child on earth wouldn’t have such a length.

“Out,” Snape said suddenly. Blaise could see that his eyes were glued to the parchment just as his and Pansy’s were, though the professor got the burden of the words that accompanied it. “Get out. Now.”

Blaise ignored Pansy’s noise of protest as he grabbed his own things and Harry’s, and dragged the girl into the Slytherin common room. 

“Not a word,” the Slytherin boy said lowly once they were almost in the shared space, everyone else was in class or taking advantage of the warm day outside. “Harry got sick, that’s all. Not a word about the parchment.”

Blaise only stayed around long enough to watch the girl nod before he left for the dorms and placed his wand carefully out of reach. His mother had told him that magic was often ruled by emotion. Emotion and intent. He thought that it might be dangerous to fuel one without first knowing the other.

The boy looked around the empty room, his eyes falling momentarily on the snakes that moved about, animated on the walls like the portraits. But eventually his gaze fell to the bed just past his own, as it seemed to a lot since the first day of term. 

Almost guiltily, Blaise walked over to the bed and ran his fingers across the perpetually drawn curtains. When he pulled them back, the Slytherin was met with the sight of stars shining down from above, a perfect replication of the night sky that only came from watching it for a very long time

Somehow the sight was enough to make the boy want to break.

—-

Snape’s eyes flitted between the roll of parchment in his hand and the boy dozing away at one of the professor’s tables. An unreadable expression forced itself on to the man’s face, but anyone could see the turmoil in his dark eyes.

There were records of burns tracing back to the age of six and horrible bruises that had taken weeks to heal that went as far back as one, where the only other information at that age was the killing curse. There were no broken bones, but the Professor didn’t know if that was because the people hurting the child were careful in doing so, or if the boy’s magic had protected him from the worst of it. Though there were no breaks, there was a vast history of sprains, enough that the boy was likely going to have knee and ankle problems in the not so distant future. And bad enough that potions wouldn’t truly be able to fix it, just help with the pain at the least.

Then there were the scars.

Its normal for children to have a few scars at this age, they are kids after all - running around and tearing themselves apart in the name of having fun - but it’s not normal for there to be so many. 

The diagnostic spell revealed scars on the boy’s back, long thick ones that criss crossed over one another as if from a belt. Thin ones that laced the child’s hands in the same way that one would see on the hands of someone used to working in a kitchen or potions laboratories for a long time. The professor thought back to the boy’s proficiency in potions over the past month and began to feel a little sick at the thought.

To top it all off, there was the obvious history of malnourishment. The kind that one could see just by looking at the child’s gaunt face and stature. Lily, Snape knew, had possessed a decent height to her, and James Potter - though never reaching the wolf’s height - hadn’t been exactly short either. There really was no reason for a child of theirs to be so short, even at this age.  Not unless the boy’s growth had been stunted for one reason or another.

On top of that - though much less obvious due to the school robes that the children wear - the boy wasn’t thin, he was skinny, slight. The results of the spell make it seem as if he only takes in enough to continue functioning, even after being at Hogwarts where there was always more food than could possibly have been eaten.

The professor went and sat down at the bench in front of the boy, feeling an eerie familiarness as to the day of the fight between the Slytherin and Mr. Weasley. McGonagall hadn’t been too pleased that one of her lions had been ‘attacked,’ as she had put it, but Snape now found himself feeling a small swell of pride at the boy before him. All of the things detailed on the parchment and the boy finally got to fight back, though admittedly less publicly would have been preferred.

“Potter,” the Professor called with a firm voice, though not quite loud enough for the boy to stir completely. “Potter,” he tried again, reaching out to touch the boy’s shoulder, his fingers just barley grazing the fabric there when-

The boy moved like water, like the snake that their house brandished; all lethal grace and swiftness. There was a blade at the potions master’s throat before Snape had been fully registered that the boy had begun to move. No one had been foolish enough to give Lupin a knife when they were in school, but the older Slytherin couldn’t help but think that this might have been an outcome if someone had. Especially around fourth year or so when the wolf had knocked him out in the hall of the train going to Hogwarts.

Just as soon as the blade was there, it was gone from sight as an embarrassed blush spread across the boy’s face. Though, the man noted, the younger Slytherin did not apologize in the least for his actions, nor did he attempt to lie and say that he was. Snape didn’t know if he should be proud of this or not.

The potions master moved back and gave the boy distance, figuring that to be the best move to retain any hopes of a civil conversation. Or how civil a conversation such as this one could hope to be.

“What’s that?” The boy asked, pointing a hand almost absentmindedly at the parchment still held loudly in the older man’s hand. As soon as the words had been spoken, Snape saw panic fill the younger Slytherin’s eyes, as if the boy had broken some sacred rule. “Nevermind,” the boy hastily, “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

If Snape hadn’t already had enough suspicions about just what was going on inside of the muggle house that the boy lived in, that response would have been enough to convince himself of it.

He’d heard it fall from his own lips before.

“This,” the professor said, blatantly ignoring the way that his student had begun to protest, “is a medical history,” the man explained carefully before meeting the boy’s eyes - her eyes. Except his were filled with sorrow in a way that Lily’s had never been in all the years that Snape had known her. “Your medical history.”

Snape had been expecting to see the small boy panic as many students in his position had before when their reports had been laid before them. He’d thought he would hear the Slytherin boy try and explain away the more obvious signs of abuse as his predecessors had. He didn’t think that he’d see the boy’s face contort into something so utterly devoid of emotion as the child sat at the desk as if awaiting a verdict.

“Blaise and Pansy brought me down here because of the headaches that I’ve been getting in Defense,” the boy said emotionlessly, factually even. “Does it explain why that is?”

“No,” the potions professor admitted slowly, his face forcefully relaxed. This was a turn that he would have expected from a second year Slytherin or older to make, but not quite someone at the beginning of experiencing the house’s influence.

“Then it has no relevance,” the boy finished simply.

“Harry,” Snape said, surprising himself with just how disgustingly soft his own voice sounded, directed to the spawn of James Potter no less. “Where did you get these injuries from?”

When the boy smiled, so seemingly sweet yet bitter beyond belief, the potions professor was reminded once more of a certain werewolf that should pared the same smile with the boy before him each time that the Boy’s Home that he came from was mentioned, or his reading capacity before second year, or his frequent illness. It was something deceptive that could easily turn angered and violent if pressed that wrong way. The potions master would know, he’d been the one to feel its sting first when he got punched in the mouth by the wolf when they were eleven in this very classroom. Looking back on it, Snape supposed that it might have been deserved.

“I was a very active child, Sir,” the boy lied smoothly, so much so that Snape could have almost believed him had he not been holding the proof to the contrary in his hands. “Injuries are bound to happen, Sir. Burns too when you tell a child not to play around the stove, it only makes them want to do it more anyways.” The young boy looked so at ease in his lies that it made the older Slytherin wonder just how many times the boy had heard them spoken around him before when others had come asking questions, and how long before he’d been instructed to say them himself.

The Head of Slytherin House sighed as he stood and walked over to his personal stores of completed potions, ignoring the way that the younger Slytherin’s eyes never seemed to stop tracking his movements as if he expected an attack of some sort to come at any moment. Maybe he did.

“Here,” the man said almost sullenly, hiding his worry behind professionalism. He set down two large bottles of potions and little empty bottles next to them. “This,” the professor said, pointing to the larger of the two bottles, “is a pain reliever, pour some into a vile and take it before going into your Defense Against the Dark Arts class. It should be enough to last you for the rest of October, so come back at the beginning of November for more,” the man explained in a voice that he knew sounded a lot more like the one that he used in class rather than the soft one that had made itself known earlier in the conversation. He pointed to the second bottle next. “This is a nourishment potion, it should be able to get you to a more healthy weight. Just take it once a day until it runs out and don’t skip any meals,” the professor insisted sternly.

The boy took the bottles and vials gingerly into his hands as if he expected them to leap out and try to bite him, or was waiting for them to be taken back and didn’t want to hold on too tightly for when they were. When they weren’t the boy stood quickly from his seat.

“Thank you,” the Slytherin said with a politeness that seemed almost branded into him by a heavy hand.

The boy began to walk to the door of the potions classroom, but Snape spoke before the child could leave. “Why lie?” The man asked, acknowledging the simple fact that they both knew that the boy had done so.

The younger Slytherin didn’t bother to look at his professor when he finally spoke, not even taking the time to turn to face the other, something that would have grated greatly on the man’s nerves had this been any other situation. Any other day. “Dumbledore,” the boy said simply. “Why don’t you ask him?” And with that the child left without being dismissed.

One word, spoken as if it was the answer to everything. As if it was some all knowing truth that could never hope to be denied. As the door closed softly behind the silent boy, Snape couldn’t help but think that it just might be. It always had been before.

—-

“Candy corn.”

Snape watched almost glumly as the gargoyle moved back and stairs started to appear in its wake. This really wasn’t a conversation that he wanted to be having with the older wizard. And if it were any other child, then the potions master wouldn’t be. But this was Harry bloody Potter, and Albus was the one that placed the boy in the muggle world.

Knocking on the door, the man waited for the quiet affirmative to come into the Headmaster's office.

“Severus,” the older wizard greeted kindly from his desk, a grandfatherly smile curving on the man’s lips. “Candy?” Albus asked, holding out a small pot of what appeared to be the snapping candy that tried to bite you as you ate it, but the potions master only waved the offer off and moved deeper into the room. “To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit, my boy?”

“It’s about Harry Potter, Sir,” the professor started, only to stop when he saw the older man’s expression fall into something horrible, looking as if he expected the muggle grim reaper to appear in the office at any moment. The Slytherin couldn’t help but think that this was a rather severe reaction to the name of one eleven year old boy.

“And what about Mr. Potter?” Dumbledore asked slowly. Carefully, Snape noted. Almost guarded, as if he had some scheme that he wasn’t sure if he should play just yet.

“I’ve been noticing some rather concerning things about the boy,” the potions master admitted just as carefully, watching as surprise didn’t come over the Headmaster’s face, but rather a resigned look of inevitability. 

He’s been waiting for this since the boy was sorted into Slytherin, Snape realized suddenly as he took a moment to remember just who it was that was sitting before him.

But what he’s been waiting for, Snape didn’t know just yet.

“And what has Mr. Potter done, my boy?” The Headmaster asked with a forcefully calm voice that the other man could hear was a little strained.

Done? The Professor wanted to ask, but then he remembered the cold look that the older man had worn at the Sorting Ceremony. How he’d looked at the boy as if he’d seen a monster.

Snape chose not to comment on the other man’s accusation on the boy that he had never met before, and withdrew the parchment that he’d created earlier in the day. “This is a result of the boy’s medical records from a diagnostic spell that I cast today,” the younger man explained, sliding it over to the elder wizard. Snape watched as the other man gave the parchment a curtsy glance and hummed, but not much more of a reaction the the information before him than that.

“Children can be very clumsy at times,” the older wizard said benignly, the conversation clearly having taken a turn that the Hogwarts Headmaster wasn’t expecting, but was already prepared to handle all the same.

The potions master shook his head, clearly exasperated with the old Headmaster before him. “This isn’t mere childhood clumsiness,” the potions professor insisted, speaking the words like a truth that they both held between them, “you and I both know this.”

But the Headmaster only slid the parchment away from himself and towards the potions Professor with the lingering, consuming coldness in the other’s gaze. “The boy is safest where he is now, with the only family that he has left,” the older wizard said firmly, leaving no room for questions. “You are dismissed, my boy.”

Snape had never been one to put much stock in family after living with his own. He knew just how safe a family like the one that he had lived in and the boy was placed with now could be.

The Head of Slytherin House left the Headmaster’s office with a considerable dock in the amount of faith that he held for the man that he had followed for the past number of years, and a sinking realization that the boy had known that this would happen from the moment that the older Slytherin had first asked his question.

Chapter Text

Time passed as Halloween drew closer, but for the first year Harry wasn’t excited to celebrate the holiday so filled with magic that you could taste it in the air. The only consolation that he could really find was the way that Blaise seemed to watch him closely now, making sure that Harry took the potions that he had brought back with him from Snape’s classroom that day. Though it was always a bit of a toss up depending on the smaller boy’s mood as to whether or not the boy was actually grateful for the other’s constant care or not.

On the morning of Halloween, Harry decided that he was.

Opening his eyes, the boy wanted nothing more than to close them right back and ignore that the world even existed at all, but then the curtains to his bed were being ripped back and light was shining obnoxiously through. Harry could just make out the fuzzy frame of the other boy holding out his glasses to him wordlessly. The smaller boy took them in the same manner and sat on the edge of his bed as the other Slytherin handed him the last of the nourishment potion. They didn’t speak, but Harry smiled weakly at the other snake and allowed himself to be pushed off of the bed to where Draco and Theo were waiting for the pair.

 Charms class was almost fun enough to make the boy forget what day it was as Professor Flitwick had decided that they’d learned enough to be allowed to attempt the levitation charm, something that many of them had been waiting anxiously to do for weeks.

The charms Professor had put the class into pairs and Harry was very pleased to be with Blaise, the other boy acting as a quiet accomplice during the lesson.

The silent pair watched in amusement as Draco and Theo were paired together, knowing that the other two Slytherins were fine together outside of class, but often butted heads ruthlessly when academics were involved. Harry could hear Pansy, Daphne, Tracey, and Milicent making quick bets from the row above the boys as to how long it would take for one of the two to explode on the other.

Not long at all.

“You’re saying it wrong,” Theo said firmly, keeping his voice low so that the Hufflepuffs on the other side of the room wouldn’t hear the pair.

Just as Slytherins do not fight in public, they don’t correct one another either.

Blaise and Harry glanced at one another before turning their gazes to the other two boys, seeing that Greg and Vince were doing just the same from the other side.

“How am I supposed to say it then?” Draco whispered harshly. If there was one thing that Harry knew for sure about the other boy, it was that he never did like to be questioned. ‘To be looked down upon’ as Harry had quickly realized that Draco saw it, even when it was not so.

Pureblood bullshit.

“Like this,” Theo said, picking up his wand surely and waving it at the feather, a simple ‘swish and flick’ as the Professor liked to call it. “Wingardium Leviosa!” The other boy said fiercely. Harry could feel the magic swell in the room for a moment before the feather between the two Slytherin boys began to float off of the table.

Harry,  Blaise, and the Slytherin girls snickered quietly as Professor Flitwick clapped excitedly. “Well done, Mr. Nott. Well done!”

“Harry never does the reading in advance either,” Draco said accusingly, drawing disappointed looks from almost everyone that heard the blond to be pointed at the boy. “Why don’t you help him with it?”

Theo looked at Harry with an almost quietly accusatory gaze. “You haven’t done any of the reading either, Harry?” The other Slytherin asked, sounding disappointed with him, a tone that Harry was all too familiar with and entirely against. 

But Harry only shrugged. “I did all of the reading over the summer,” he decided to say by way of explanation. While Theo nodded approvingly at that, Draco only rolled his eyes in a very unpureblood manner. Harry was pleased to see that he’d already been a poor influence on the posh boy these past few months.

Harry saw Blaise raise an expectant brow from his side of the desk and smirked before picking up his wand. Raising it, Harry spoke the incantation quietly and did the proper wand movements, feeling a little silly as he did each time that he had to use a wand at all in class. Two months of school and Harry still couldn’t understand why wands were needed at all.

“Well done,” the other boy complimented as Harry made his feather float lazily through the air, doing slow twists and turns. Blaise looked impressed and Harry found himself smiling at the other boy, just a small quirk of the lips, but an honest one.

—-

By the time that they all sat down for the Halloween feast, Harry was in a much better mood than he had been that morning, but was still considerably more reserved than his other housemates.

The Great Hall was decorated with thousands of live bats swooping about and carved pumpkins floating through the air above. The feast had just appeared before them all with the same suddenness as it had at the Start - of - Term banquet, when the doors to the Hall slammed open loudly, all other noise ceasing as Professor Quirrell sprinted into the room, a panicked expression marring his face.

“Troll!” The defense professor screamed. “Troll in the dungeon... thought you ought to know.”

Harry raised a brow as the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor fainted, falling backwards hard onto the stone ground. The backwards part is what drew his attention more than the troll. Harry had passed out enough himself to know that you typically fall forwards.

Decent determination though, the boy was willing to admit as he eyed the sprawled out figure.

The Great Hall erupted with motion as each house was told to go to their dormitories. Curses were whispered by the Slytherins as they knew that their common room was in the bloody dungeons.

“Well fuck that,” Gemma cursed harshly before running off to speak with the Ravenclaws prefects before they all left. A moment later the girl returned and told them to follow behind the other house.

Harry and the other Slytherin frost years peered out at the crowd of blue, looking for one girl in particular, but they all had to keep walking before any of them could find Hermione.

The Slytherin boys rushed down the halls at the back of the group, the other three hovering to deal with a - while now considerably more healthy - still ill Harry that couldn’t seem to escape the effects of his… condition even in times of panic. It was because they were at the back of the houses that the four heard the definite scream of a girl coming from the other hallway.

Theo, Blaise, Draco and Harry all fell still at once, their breathing ragged as the four looked between one another and the hall that the scream came from.

Theo looked at Harry and the smaller boy could tell that gray the other snake could read the intention in his eyes. Theo sighed heavily. “You three go, I’ll let you lot in,” the other boy decided. “Don’t die.”

“As if,” Draco scoffed, though Harry could hear the fear in the undertones of the blond’s voice. “We’re not a bunch of Hufflepuffs, Nott.”

“Or idiot Gryffindors,” Blaise added helpfully.

Harry only nodded at Theo and pulled on the sleeves of both of the other boys, drawing them away. “Tell the girls that we’re okay, and to keep their mouths shut about it.”

Theo only nodded back and the four parted quickly.

They smelled the troll before they saw him when the three boys ran into the girl’s bathroom to the sound of another terrified scream. The monster was easily twelve feet tall, gray, and smelled of rotting flesh left to decompose out in the summer sun. The most alarming sight though was that of Hermione Granger crouched beneath one of the sinks, moving out of the way just before the troll brought its club down upon her.

“Expelliarmus!” Blaise screamed. Harry watched as the club in the troll’s hand gave a small leap, but remained firmly in the creature’s grasp. Though it seemed to distract the troll enough to bring its attention to the three rather than the Ravenclaw.

Harry knew that they could try the levitation charm to incapacitate it, but that would risk angering the troll further if something went wrong and it didn’t fully go under. An idea sprung to the boy’s mind, and as much as he hated it, he knew that it was all that he could hope to do.

“I’m about to do something, but you lot can’t tell anyone about it. Alright?” Harry asked, looking quickly between both boys as panic and magic filled his veins. They both nodded just as hurriedly, fear coursing through theirs as the other two boys realized just how out of their depth they were.

Harry stepped forwards surely, much to the horror of all three of his friends that were in the room. He could feel someone try to pull him back, but simply raised his hand, the magic in the bathroom swelling around him until he felt as if he could feel it all, taste it even, in the air before him.

“Stop.”

Harry could feel the magic in the room rush forwards as the magic inside of him curled and twisted almost intoxicatingly so, finally being let loose. He watched as the troll went stock still from his command, every muscle freezing with the spoken word. The creature didn’t so much as breathe.

He twisted his other hand quickly, a sure flick as the club in the troll’s hand was ripped from it and brought down upon the beast’s head, knocking it out clean. Only then did Harry relinquish his control of it.

Harry looked around at the other three faces in the room, his eyes flitting from shocked expression to shocked expression. The surprise didn’t last long though.

“That was bloody brilliant,” Blaise cursed, something unidentifiable filling the other boy’s voice as he spoke, but Harry was still intoxicated by the power inside of him, filled by the rightness of it, to care enough to try to figure out just what it was.

“Wicked,” Draco agreed almost breathlessly. Both of the boys looked almost as affected by the magic as the caster had been.

Harry heard a rustle from behind him and was reminded of just why they had come into the girl’s bathroom in the first place.

“Is it… dead?” Hermione asked slowly, speaking to Harry for the first time in over a month.

Harry was right in thinking that the girl hadn’t been pleased with the fight that he’d gotten into with the younger Weasley brother. There was a big difference Harry supposed, in a single hit - to defend another and make a point - and trying to beat another boy bloody. Knowing that he would do it again in a heartbeat, Harry let her keep her silence even as all of the other Slytherins spoke to her in class.

Hearing the girl’s horrified voice, Harry thought that he had made the right choice in doing so.

“No, it’s just been thoroughly knocked out,” the smallest Slytherin said surely, watching as the troll took in shallow breaths that were slowly growing deeper. “We should leave before the teachers come searching for the thing.”

The other three agreed and the four of them took off with a speed that they hadn’t posted before as magic still sung so pleasantly in the perpetually ill boy’s veins, just managing to catch up with the other Slytherins. The two houses had taken longer to climb the stairs than they normally would have due to the sheer number of students that had to go to the common room, and the riddle having been one of the more tricky ones that the door had to offer due to the mere presence of the Slytherins.

Theo raised an eyebrow at them as the four joined the boy at the back of the mass, but knew better than to ask right now where everyone else could so easily hear. They tell him the story later in the confines of their own dorm room. 

The five students went and sat down next to the girls and Greg and Vince. Though they couldn’t see the Ravenclaw common room all that well due to all of the students gathered within it at the moment, from the telescope to the books on the walls, Harry didn’t think that it would be all that bad of a place to spend time. He could almost forgive the lot for all of the books that they had read at the beginning of the school term due to the stunning sight of the stars enchanted on the ceiling. Almost.

Hermione sat down silently next to Harry and bumped her knee against his, the touch there one moment and gone the next. He knew that this was the closest that he was ever going to get to an apology for the past month, or a thank you for the past hour. 

He didn’t think that it was quite enough.

Harry decided at that moment that he would never show her such an honest display of the power that he held again, not if he wanted to keep her as a friend.

—-

Professors Snape, Quirrell, and Deputy Headmistress McGonagall hurried down to the girl’s bathroom near Ravenclaw tower, a loud noise that sounded almost like something akin to snoring drawing the three near, the horrid smell encouraging their course of action. When the three entered they quickly found the source of the peculiar noise.

Some of the sinks were smashed along with a good few of the stalls, but a clean wave of McGonagall’s wand was enough to make the pieces of wood and porcelain strewn across the room begin to rectify themselves. No, the main issue was that of the fully grown Mountain Troll that had been set loose within the castle, and was now knocked out cleanly on the ground as if it had fallen asleep where it stood. But all three teachers could feel the sheer amount of magic in the air that disproved such an easy theory.

While Snape and McGonagall whispered hurriedly about who could have done such a thing, accusations from both houses being brought up by the other and quickly dismissed by the Head of  House that the student in question belonged to, Quirrell moved closer to the beast, to the source of what had been affected the most by the magic. 

While all three of the Hogwarts Professors could easily feel the raw well of power permitting from the room, only the vessel could tell the nature of it with an absolute certainty that would have drawn unnecessary questions from the other two Hogwarts staff members if voiced, from Snape in particular. He knew exactly who cast the spell - if you could even truly call it one - but he also knew that accusing Potter without any evidence would only draw the potions Professor’s ire, even if McGonagall might be reasoned with on the matter. Though the Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor doubted that even she would agree to accuse a first year of such a feat of magic, accidental or not.

So, he’d let the boy keep his secret. For now at least.

—-

The Slytherin house table was silent at breakfast the morning following Halloween, plates of food being left prepared and untouched at the center of their table as everyone carried on eating their own meals as if it wasn’t strange to do so. Harry wanted to ask, but it somehow felt wrong to the boy to break the silence that had so unanimously formed among his housemates. He was perfectly fine with letting it stand anyways as the usual sickness had returned after the initial high of magic had finally worn off from the night before and Harry felt like a complete wreck.

“So what was with all of the silence back there?” Harry asked quietly as the Slytherin first years made their way to their  Transfiguration class, some of the Hufflepuffs in it following behind them, though well out of ear shot.

The other Slytherins glanced at one another, even Greg and Vince had the gall to look embarrassed for the smaller boy, but it was Daphne who took pity on him and spoke. “Sometimes I forget that you were raised by muggles,” the pureblood said almost pityingly. “There are eight major wixen holidays that most of the older magical families still observe,” the blonde girl explained, earning her a nod from the other snakes.

“One of the major eight,” Tracey cut in, smirking at the other Slytherin girl with no shame once so ever for doing so, “is Samhain, or more often called the Day of the Dead,” the girl explained factually. “One of the common practices of the holiday is to hold a silent meal, leaving food for the dead as the barrier between life and death is thinner today.”

Harry nodded, taking in the information as he thought back to any ghost that he might have seen this morning. He could remember seeing the Gryffindor house ghost, Nearly Headless Nick, for a moment before the ghost had fled as he always seemed to do so where the Slytherin boy was concerned. Looking back now, it had seemed harder for the ghost to go through the wall than it normally would have.

“It’s also the beginning of the wixen year,” Theo explained as the group drew close to the Transfiguration classroom, seemingly abandoning that topic altogether as they walked inside of it, as the boy immediately turned to Draco to talk with him about some strange wizarding game as if they’d been doing so the whole time. Harry didn’t bother being annoyed by the sudden change, having used something similar to it himself more than a few times. It was no secret that the Head of Gryffindor house held about as much fondness for the snakes as Snape did for her lions.

Curiosity is how Harry found himself rushing down the grounds towards the Forbidden Forest that night with the other Slytherins around him, magic running through his veins like blood. From the edge of the woods, the boy could see the familiar shadows of some of the students from other houses moving in the night as well, the groups each heading in varying directions, though the number was much smaller than that of Slytherin house that had almost everyone from all seven years moving about the woods that night.

The Slytherins soon split off into groups of seven as well, forming vast circles in the clearings that each of the years managed to find. Harry grinned, his blood singing as he was brought in too, standing between Blaise and Draco as Theo, Daphne, Pansy, and Tracey made up the rest.

The others muttered words and enchantments that Harry didn’t yet know, blessings that felt of the same sort of magic as that taught throughout the castle, but twinged with something more. Though Harry didn’t yet know the words, he could feel the magic swell in the air and added his own to it, letting it be bent and shaped into whatever it was the rest of the group had seen fit.

An hour or so later, the seven first years giggled and laughed among themselves as they made their way back into the castle for the night, each of them drunk on magic- though not nearly as much as they could have been.

That night as Harry laid in his bed and stared up at the stars about him, he knew that this was a feeling that he wouldn’t want to give up for all of the normalcy in the world.

Chapter Text

“There cannot be seven hundred ways of committing a foul in this damn game,” Harry cursed disbelievingly, as he, Theo, and Blaise sat on one of the couches in the Slytherin common room, the cold making it far too chilled to be outside anymore. But Theo only nodded as he flipped through Quidditch Through the Ages. The smaller boy groaned and flopped his head into his hands. “You have got to be shitting me.”

“You learn quickly that it's best not to question Draco when it comes to obscure Quidditch facts,” Blaise said, earning himself a glare from the boy flush against his side.

November had continued on, bringing the cold with it as it did. The lake had chilled into something resembling muggle steel, driving fish and the such down into its depths. The boys had seen the squid more times in the last week or so than in the past three months prior due to this change. Every morning that the school grounds were painted with frost, the older Slytherins took turns casting warming charms every morning on those that had to go outside during the early morning classes for Care of Magical Creatures and Herbology, and teaching the younger snakes how to cast them themselves on Fridays.

With the cold came the official start of the Quidditch season, and the Gryffindor - Slytherin game that was set for early Friday morning. The main reason that the three had gotten roped into reading the damned book on the sport by their blond friend was because Harry had no idea as to why the school would willingly choose to base it schedule around a sport, going as far as to leave Fridays devoid of classes.

Though Theo and Blaise had known more about the sport than Harry had, the blond Slytherin had been aghast to hear that none of them had read Quidditch Through the Ages and had sat the trio down on the couch with the book, forcing them to read it in the posh Malfoy voice of his that sounding oddly like a scolding mother.

“The referees turned up months later after going missing in the Sahara desert of all places,” Theo read, his academic mind causing him to have far too much fun with all of this as the other two listened to him quietly summarize.

Harry looked at the other boy with an unabashedly perplexed expression, something that the smaller Slytherin was still learning that he was allowed to so openly express if he wished. “How the absolute fuck does someone go missing in the middle of a sporting match that they’re apart of?”

The smallest Slytherin looked between both boys but only groaned once he saw that neither of them had an answer for him. Blaise just patted Harry’s knee in a silent show of support - or a preemptive farewell - as they listened to Theo tell the pair of all of the horrific ways that the younger seeker could potentially get hurt, some of them would damaging the black haired in a way that even he hadn’t been before. 

If it was possible, Harry would think that the other Slytherin wanted him to play even less than Harry himself did at the moment. But Blaise has always been a tricky one for the Slytherin boy to read so he didn’t put much stock into the idea.

The fire burned well into the night and in the morning Harry was dragged by an excitable Draco down to the Great Hall at a time that the smaller Slytherin didn’t fully believe was even appropriate to call dawn yet.

“Remind me to kill you for this later. Please,” the dozing boy growled as he shook off the other’s grip. Draco at least had the decency to look slightly concerned.

Food was shoved onto a plate in front of the seeker and after a pointed look from Blaise, Harry attempted to eat most of it. Though he was eating a lot more than he had at the start of the year, Harry knew that it was still less than all of the others his age.

He decided to let the other boy worry about that for him though at the moment, the other Slytherin already did anyways.

“Well, if it isn’t the little sneaky seeker,” a voice said from Harry’s left, already too mischievous for so early in the bloody morning.

“You sure you don’t want to transfer to Gryffindor?” An almost identical voice asked from the younger boy’s right, drawing closer.

“Be a lot better than bloody Cormac McLaggen.”

“Annoying.”

“Arrogant.”

“Stupid.”

“Boarish.”

“Vile.”

“Sounds like your typical Gryffindor,” Blaise cut sharply into the back and forth between the twins as Draco snickered. Even though the blond tolerated the pair of Weasleys, Harry could always tell that he got a sense of satisfaction from times like this, no matter how rare they were.

Harry kept his face blank as he looked at the dark skinned boy, genuinely confused as to why the other was speaking with the twins in such a way. He knew that they hadn’t interacted much, but the last time hadn’t been unpleasant for anyone but Ron who had gotten that blasted Howler.

“Sorry Fred, George,” the Slytherin said, looking at each twin in turn, “but green really is a much better color on me. I think that I would lose brain cells just from stepping into the Gryffindor common room, so I’ll be sticking with Slytherin.” Harry smirked as the twins’ mock expressions of insult, though he figured that they probably knew that their house shared one brain cell. Hell, they most definitely knew it the best since the two seemed to steal it away the most for pranks and the like. “See you lot at the game,” Harry said to the other two Slytherins before walking out to the pitch to get changed early.

The air hadn’t warmed much by the time that the rest of the Slytherins had finished changing out, sans Higgs who hadn’t been able to keep high enough grades to be allowed to stay on after all. Warrington glared at Harry from across the changing room, but the slight boy only stared back, a harsh look in his eyes they spoke of violence to anyone that thought it wise to touch him; housemate or not.

“Save that energy for our opponents,” Gemma chided as she looked between the two scarred boys. Harry just nodded at the prefect and turned his attention to where Flint had moved to the center of the room, broom raised high in his hand.

“The Gryffindors expect us to lose,” the older boy said, scowling as if the idea alone was completely absurd. “Let’s go out there and uphold our tradition of disappointing and pissing off all of the other houses or else the next practice I’ll have you lot running laps instead of flying them.” More than one Slytherin shivered at the threat, knowing that the captain would do just that if they really were to lose. “Harry,” Flint called out, drawing all of the attention to the team’s youngest member, “no one wants to freeze their asses off today. Let’s make this game a quick one.” 

Harry brought two fingers to his brow in a kick salute and stood, broom in hand, the older snake only rolled his eyes.

The feeling of wood beneath his fingertips was a welcome distraction as the team walked out onto the pitch. The broom was a Nimbus 1998, a cast off that Harry had bought off one of the older Slytherins on the team so that he wouldn’t be using one of the school normal ones all year. Technically, the broom was still the older Slytherin’s, as first years weren’t allowed to have their own brooms, but the money had already traded hands a while ago.

The two teams filled in the circle that was painted at the center of the field as Madam Hooch stood at the center of them all, broom in hand and bird - like eyes especially piercing. Harry couldn’t help but wonder if the eyes were natural or a side effect of a potion gone wrong. He’d seen McGonagall turn into a cat a few times prior and knew that turning into an animagus was possible, just not without its risk.

“I want a nice clean game, from all of you,” the witch said, her eyes carefully studying the fourteen players, though Harry noticed that her gaze seemed to linger longer on Flint than anyone else. Which Harry admitted was, while fair, a waste of time since the boy in question was locked in a staring contest of his own with the Gryffindor captain, Oliver Wood. “Mount your broom, please.”

Moving quickly, everyone clambered onto their brooms, nervous smiles and ruthless smirks chattering in the cold as the students that had come out to watch shouted and hollered as the players took to the sky.

Higher and higher, Harry rose, going above the opener players enough to watch the sky and the ground below, to watch for that particular gleam of golden light.

“And Johnson immediately takes the Quaffle for Gryffindor - what an excellent chaser she is, rather attractive too-”

“Jordan!” Professor McGonagall screamed, making Harry snicker as the Weasley twins’ friend, Lee Jordan, had to apologize before continuing to run commentary on the match. The Slytherin boy felt as if it was some sort of karmic justice that the witch got stuck with monitoring him when she spends most lessons either ignoring Harry or watching the boy as if he was a bomb just waiting for the right time to go off.

Harry glided in lazy circles above it all, with only a little bit of attention as Jordan spoke, keeping an ear out for points so that the margin wouldn’t set too close. The snake watched the Quaffle get stolen by the chasers of each team and blocked just as mercilessly by the keepers, but he almost growled out loud when the Gryffindor seeker, McLaggen, made his way over to Harry and started following close enough that the Slytherin could stop suddenly, and be run into only a moment later by the other boy.

Eyes flickering quickly over the field, Harry leaned into his broom and began a steep dive, McLaggen following just behind him like some sort of hideous shadow.

“It seems that first year Slytherin seeker, Harry Potter, has seen the Golden Snitch,” Jordan said as he saw the sudden movement form the pair. “Cormac McLaggen is following closely behind as they approach the ground and - ouch!” Harry had changed the angle of his descent so that he was level as the pair had gotten closer to the ground, the two seekers neck and neck the entire time. But he had turned up sharply as the pair had reached the inside walls of the pitch, so sharp that McLaggen hadn’t been afforded the time to do just the same and was now sticking into the Hufflepuff crest like some sort of misshapen arrow.

“Merlin! What are they teaching these first years? So - after that obvious and brutal bit of cheating-”

“Jordan,” McGonagall all but growled once more at the Gryffindor boy.

“I mean, after that revolting trick-”

“Jordan, I’m warning you-”

But Harry had stopped listening, rising into the air once more as the game carried on uninterrupted but with the Gryffindor seeker stuck in the ground pulling his broom out of the pitch coverings. The Slytherin knew that what he had just done wasn’t a foul, not yet at least. He’d scanned the complete list of fowls committed during the Quidditch World Cup, looking for ideas on what to do if out into a pinch. The move had been one of the few that they hadn’t gotten around to doing back then. One of the very few, but it was still always better to know the rules so you knew the loopholes as well.

Flint nodded approvingly as Harry passed him and the younger Slytherin thought that maybe he’d be allowed to keep playing in the next match as even Warrington didn’t look as pissed with the younger boy as he normally did. But that wasn’t saying all that much there.

Harry glared at George as a bludger was sent his way, zooming dangerously past the younger boy’s head like a muggle rocket. He raised his hand to flip off the older boy when his broom gave a frightening lurch to the side.

Panic filled Harry’s mind as his broom continued to lurch and buck every which way, rising Harry higher and higher into the sky. The boy looked for anyone on his team, the twins, or even Warrington if it came down to it, but they were all out of earshot of the quiet boy.

The broom bucked more and Harry held on tingly, wishing now more than anything that wandless magic was allowed.

—-

People in the stands began to scream and point as Harry dangerously rose into the air, but Hermione wasn’t one of them. The girl’s gaze was glued onto where Professor Snape was watching the young Slytherin and saying something under his breath. Hermione had read all about jinxes from the books in the library, she knew what it meant to cast them and how the professor wasn’t blinking at all.

Looking between the muttering potions Professor and the boy that had saved her life only about two weeks ago, Hermione stood quickly and ran under the stands to where the teacher's stands were and walked up beneath them.

Going against all of her better judgment, Hermione cast a small fire spell that she had learned, blue flames jumping from the girl’s wand to the hem of her professor’s robe. It took a good thirty seconds for the man to realize that he was on fire,  but once he did, Hermione heard the potions master curse and saw him moving around to stomp it out, disturbing most of the other professors in the process of doing so.

Hermione only hoped that it was enough as she dashed back to her seat in the Ravenclaw stands.

—-

 Harry grinned as he regained control of his broom and began to scan the field feverishly once more, a glint of golden light catching the boy’s attention quickly near the ground.

Diving once more, Harry sped to the ground and reached his arm out, his fingers brushing and grabbing the snitch before his broom tipped over on the ground. Rolling out of it, Harry raised his prize high over his head.

“Potter had caught the Snitch,” Lee Jordan commented, sounding more than glum. “Slytherin wins, two hundred and ten points to twenty.”

Harry grinned as he looked up into the stands, watching his housemates jump around with much less decorum than they usually showed in public. There was a light feeling in the boy’s chest that made Harry wonder if this was how it felt to do something right for a change.

—-

Harry looked up, confused as a shock of Ravenclaw blue sat down in front of the Slytherin first years for the first time all term. He glanced at the other members of his year, but found that they looked to be mirroring his own confused gaze.

“What are you doing here, Hermione?” Pansy asked, not unkindly.

The girl in question glanced between the Slytherins gathered around her with a look that spoke of her wanting to say something but not knowing how it would be perceived.

“Just spit it out, ‘Mione,” Harry said impatiently after the third worried glance.

The girl nodded and took in a deep breath as if for courage. “I think that Snape was trying to kill you,” the Ravenclaw said hurriedly, her eyes falling on the smallest of the Slytherins who was staring at the bushy haired girl owlishly. “Look, I know he’s your head of house, but I know what I saw and-” 

Laughter rang out between the group as Harry slapped a hand over his mouth to try and contain it all. The others were looking at him with varying levels of concern and shock, but no one dared to speak. It was the first time that they’d seen him laugh in such an honest way before. In a way that could be heard and wasn’t followed by a snear.

“That’s completely absurd,” the boy said once he’d calmed down enough to properly speak.

Hermione balked, not having expected that reaction from the Slytherin boy. The others gathered looked between the pair with something like concern. “Harry,” she started, “I know a jinx when I see one and Snape wasn’t blinking!“ her voice, while remaining quiet so that those outside of the group wouldn’t hear, was annoyingly insistent.

“Hermione,” Blaise started drawing the girl’s worried and frustrated gaze to him, “I know what you think that you saw,” he said placatingly, “but Snape has been helping Harry for almost two months now, brewing headache potions so that he doesn’t become ill during defense. That doesn't really seem like the actions of someone that wants to kill him.”

Pansy nodded along with the other Slytherin, having been told of the conclusion of that day that she and Blaise brought Harry down to see the professor in question. “Besides,” the girl broke in, “Draco and Harry are good at potions, they get us most of the points for the class even without favoritism.”

The Slytherins could tell that the Ravenclaw girl was growing more and more frustrated by the moment, but none of them really believed her to be right.

“Then how come when I set his robes on fire, Harry’s broom returned to normal?” Hermione asked, crossing her arms like a small child.

The Slytherins looked between one another, none of them having expected that to come out of the normally tame girl’s mouth. Everyone in the castle knew how much of a stickler for rules the girl was, this wasn’t in the realm of possibilities for them.

Blaise whistled as Harry raised a brow.

“Bloody hell, Granger,” Draco cursed, looking at the girl as if seeing someone completely new. “I didn’t know that you had that in you.”

Daphne nodded in agreement. “That’s a lot more spine than I thought that you had,” she easily admitted.

“Though preferably,” Tracey cut in, looking proud of the Ravenclaw girl’s blatant disregard for the rules that she normally follows so strictly, “I wouldn’t go boasting it so openly if you want to avoid detention.”

“Or possible expulsion,” Daphne added, nodding once more with Tracey. “A little more Slytherin discretion would do you some good here.”

Harry watched with amusement as Hermione looked between each of the Slytherins as they spoke. It was funny the girl that had been so against the house before coming to Hogwarts now being surrounded by them and encouraged to act like them.

“Maybe what you saw,” Theo said, bringing the conversation back to the topic at hand, “was Snape performing a counter jinx,” the boy suggested. “They share the same elements of staring at the affected like you described.”

The girl nodded slowly, considering the point. “Then how come when I broke his concentration it got better, not worse?”

Blaise tapped a finger against his lip in thought. “I suppose setting someone on fire as you did would create a commotion in of itself,” the boy reasoned at last. “It’s likely that by playing the role of arsonist, Snape distracted the real culprit while trying to put the fire out.”

Though she nodded in agreement, Harry could tell that Hermione wasn’t fully convinced by the Slytherin boy’s explanation of the events, but no one felt like figuring on it anymore, so they collectively pushed the topic aside.

They’d get an answer soon enough

—-

Harry grinned as he walked into the Slytherin common room after dinner that night. Music was already playing loudly as some of the older students cast muffling charms on the door and walls so that no one roaming the halls would hear it. The long tables were pushed to the side and laden with enough booze to give half of the castle a hangover just by being in the same room as it all. Silver and green orbs floated through the air like little lanterns, but Harry could see them pulsing in time with the music, playing songs by some wizard band that he didn’t know.

Harry thought about just going up to the dorms to hide out until the party was done, knowing that it wouldn’t be all that fun sober, but chose to stay once he saw space being created for dueling. He couldn’t wait to see the mess that the normally composed older years would make when blind drunk and trying to cast spells at one another.

Smiling, Harry places himself down unceremoniously next to Blaise on the couch, grinning subtly as the other boy knocks their knees together in a silent greeting before turning back to Pansy. The smaller Slytherin turned to Draco, who was on his other side - a space in the couch having been instinctively left for the seeker - and started talking tactics that they could use next year if Draco made chaser when one of the seventh years graduated.

“Flint and Wood need to pull their heads out of their asses,” Harry heard Blaise say, drawing the attention of both of the scheming boys.

“I know right!” Pansy agreed almost conspiratorially as the pair gossiped.

“What are you two going on about now?” Draco asked, looking annoyed that they’d stopped talking strategy for this.

“Flint and Wood,” Blaise supplied easily. “They were basically flirting the entire game.”

“Were not!” Draco argued, looking scandalized that someone would do so during a match. “Harry, tell them.”

Harry shook his head. “You don’t have to be down there with them,” the boy complained with a long suffering sigh that was only going to get worse as the next few years passed. “They couldn’t take their eyes off of one another.”

“Ha!” Pansy exclaimed, pointing at the blond Slytherin with a victorious smile.

“I mean, did you see the way that Flint was showing off on all of his shots?” Blaise asked.

“Wood was no better, blocking them.”

Harry leaned back and let the conversation flow around him and laughed along with the others as a pair of sixth years fell over one another trying to hex the other. Both ended up with rainbow colored skin from the spells reacting poorly with their drunk castors and one another. Harry thought that maybe he could get used to living like this, even if it did make him a freak. He’s never really been one for being normal anyways.

Chapter Text

Harry shivered as he left the warmth of the Slytherin common rooms for the chill of the Hogwarts halls, the air so cold in the dungeons that his breath came out in little puffs the deeper that he went. He was the only Slytherin that had chosen to stay for the holidays, so he wasn’t all that surprised when the Weasley twins cornered him on his way into the Great Hall and dragged him over to the Gryffindor table for breakfast, grateful for it even.

Basking in their balance.

“Little ickle Harry,” Fred said, poking the boy in question lightly in the ribs.

“A lone snake in that castle that now has to be taken in by lions,” George lamented dramatically from the Slytherin boy’s right.

“Well,” Harry said slowly, glancing up at the Head Table to see that most were watching the scene with what appeared to be interest, but all were too far away to hear, “I think that I may have an idea as to how to repay the favor.”

“You Slytherins,” Fred sighed as the three sat down in a neat line at the Gryffindor table, “always focused on getting even.”

“Let’s hear it then,” George decided.

Harry smirked, looking between the two before reaching for a biscuit to appease the potions master that was sure to be watching to make certain that the boy kept a reasonable weight. “Tell me, do either of you know how to make Howlers?”

The twins only grinned.

—-

Harry drew his clothes close to him as he walked the long corridors of Hogwarts alone, peeking behind portraits and running his hand across the ridges of the  cool stone. Hogwarts during the holidays was little more than a child’s paradise as - other than the professors that had to stay as well - only a handful of students remained. The Slytherins always stuck with one another between and during classes, knowing that they were the most hated of the four houses and therefore the most likely to be cursed by another. This was the only time of the year that Harry could truly explore the vast castle alone if he wanted to.

There were dozens of little nooks and short descending hallways about the castle, hidden innocently behind the decorations on the stone walls. On the second day of the holidays, Harry found a set of stairs on the fourth floor that seemed to lead to an empty room that wasn’t quite on the third or fourth floor but somewhere between the two. Harry grinned as he left and knew that he would find something to use the space for in the future.

There was a painting of the sky on the second floor that opened like a door to reveal a small reading nook with a window that showed off a view of the Black Lake glittering in the sunlight, the snow capped mountains behind it.

Harry didn’t spend long exploring the castle each day though. With the other Slytherins gone, the sickness that had plagued the boy since stepping onto school grounds rose up inside of him with a fever, forcing the boy to finally feel the full force of what had become a tolerable ache over the past few months. The Slytherin commons room became something of a prison and a strange sort of salvation as he only left it for two hours at most each day outside of meals.

It was on the sixth day of the holiday that Harry made his way to the seventh floor of the castle not long after dinner. He didn’t truly intend to be there, but his mind was drawn to a place that he hadn’t thought of in a long time despite seeing its sky every night. To a person that he hadn’t thought of. That was how he found himself pacing back and forth in front of a tapestry of a man trying to teach trolls how to do ballet of all things. Back and forth he walked, thinking of a place that he couldn’t go, when suddenly the boy heard what sounded like stone moving and shifting in the walls.

When Harry turned around, he was met with the sight of a door that he was sure had not been there only a moment before. Gazing at it for a long moment, he thought of if he should go into it or not, or whether he would be able to leave if he ever did. After all, there was no telling if a door that magically appeared on its own wouldn’t disappear in the same sudden way.

A part of him, a broken part that fed on the sickness that he felt and was born from the pain that the boy had endured all of these years, decided that it didn’t care either way.

Harry opened the door.

Where a room should have been, there was a vast open field and a tree lining that Harry knew like the back of his hand. The grass went up to his knees and smelled just as sweet as it did in the spring. Weeds sprung up from the ground in patches, little false flowers that Aunt Petunia hated but Harry had always loved. The sky was the same night that he had conjured so that he may see it each night before he went to sleep, a vision of the night before he left for school. There was only one thing missing, and Harry’s heart ached from the other boy not being there.

Moving deeper into the room and laying in the tall grass, Harry felt the sickness that had clung so desperately to his bones for months now slip away as his eyes fell shut, visions of stars and another boy that loved them because the younger did dancing across his mind.

—-

When he woke up sometime later, Harry didn’t know how much time had passed, nor did he care to. The boy simply picked himself up from the ground and walked to the trees, placing his hands flatly against the warm bark as he passed each one. 

There were no bugs or insects, animals or rivers in the strange room, but Harry didn’t mind that, not too much anyways. The trees were tall and felt real, but Harry suspected that if he were to dig into the ground, he would find the stone flooring where the roots should be. And though the stars seemed to shimmer, Harry suspected that the sky was much more like the one in the Great Hall: bewitched, not something real.

Harry loved it all the same.

It was well past curfew by the time that the Slytherin finally left the strange room, the halls were deathly silent as he moved through them, the sort of silence that one only ever found at night when all others were asleep, and the world was finally still.

Until it wasn’t.

Footsteps tapped lightly against the stone floor, drawing nearer to the boy, but Harry had no idea where to run to. The closest hiding place was the place that he had just come from, but the boy knew that he would be caught long before he ever figured out just how to get back inside to the field once more.

“Mr. Potter,” a familiar voice crawled and Harry froze, silently cursing himself for not staying in the field for only a minute or two longer than he had, “what exactly are you doing wandering about the castle at this hour of the night?”

Slowly, Harry raised his head and met his professor’s dark eyes, just barely being able to make out the image of the man in the dark corridor. He almost wished that he hadn’t.

There was a look in the potions master’s gaze that was much too similar to the one that the younger Slytherin had seen on the first day of class for the boy to be able to suppress the flinch that shook his body when the dark haired man moved closer to Harry. But just as soon as he had seen it, the expression had seemed to dissipate and shift into something that could almost foolishly resemble guilt.

“I was exploring the castle after dinner,” the younger Slytherin said quickly before the harsh gaze could come back. “Fell asleep in one of the hidden rooms,” he replied truthfully, not wanting to be in the hall any longer as that persistent feeling of sickness began to set in once more.

The Professor nodded, accepting the answer as fact. “Come on then,” the potions master said tiredly, “let’s get you back to the common room.”

Harry followed silently and without question, not wanting to risk the man’s anger returning, and knowing from experience that silence agitates adults less. But as the pair made their way down into the mouth of the dungeons, Harry thought of a question that had bothered him for some time now and would be worth the other’s ire.

Stopping outside of the common room, Harry turned to his Professor but looked just past him. “Sir?” He began tentatively, already treading on unsteady ground with the other. “May I ask you something?” The words almost choked him to speak then, so unused to even the idea of being allowed to do so by another that wasn’t his age without immediately being screamed at.

He still felt as if he might be screamed at.

“You may,” Snape said, though Harry could hear the annoyance in the man’s voice.

“Do some people - witches and wizards that is - grow ill around magic?”

—-

Snape felt his body go rigid at the question that the boy had asked, at one of the few questions that the professor had never expected Harry bloody Potter of all students to ask.

Though he knew that some of his older snakes were afflicted in such a way, none of them had ever come to him so blatantly as the boy before him just had. None of them had been so young either. But Snape had seen the boy’s almost sickly complexion in the halls, and had seen how the boy appeared to become healthier around the other Slytherins in his year, or in the dungeons in general. Most days he’d just chalked it all up to the condition that the boy had come to the school in, but he had to admit to himself that the excuse had begun to wear thin in November.

At least I can explain away the headaches well enough, the man thought bitterly, his mind flashing to a certain defense teacher that was almost certainly related to the Dark Lord somehow. One way or another.

Snape glanced suspiciously around the hallway, never more thankful that the school had forgone the enchanted portraits this far down in the dungeons.

“Let’s speak of this inside,” the man said, pointing towards the wall where the common room door would appear. “This is going to be a long conversation.”

“One that you don’t want anyone else to hear?” The Slytherin boy guessed in a way that didn’t truly seem like guessing at all to the potions master.

The man didn’t give a response though, and only gestures to the child once more to reveal the door.

“Pluto,” the boy said, a password that was no doubt influenced by a certain former Slytherin herself and current Astronomy professor.

The common room looked as it always did at the start of the year, untouched by anyone else that might have been there. The only indication that a child had spent the past week in the room at all was a book on one of the common room tables, open to some page with parchment laid out next to it. Snape didn’t get a chance to see what the book was about as the boy closed it and put it away.

The two sat down on opposite chairs and the potions professor noticed the way that the boy drew his legs to his chest and began to pick at the sleeve of his much too big clothes in a nervous and defensive way. A manner that reminded him to tread carefully with the child before him, and in a way that spoke more of a boy broken by the moon than the ghost of a long dead Marauder who had once roamed the castle with three others. 

Snape may still hate the wolf for almost killing him all of those years ago - willingly or not - but in times like these, looking back with a more adult perspective, he thought that he might hate the one that had turned a child into a monster that tore itself apart more. Because children shouldn’t look like this.

And he remembered all too well what it was like to look like this.

“Tell me,” the older man started, studying the boy before him like a particularly difficult potion that wasn’t coming out the way that it ought to, “what do you know of the different types of magic?”

He watched as the boy’s face took on a blank look, the type that children who didn’t do their homework wore when asked a question from it in class the next day, but Snape didn’t believe it for a moment. Not truly.

“I know that creatures like goblins and those of the elven family possess different magic than we do,” the boy said carefully, giving no indication once so ever as to how he knew this other than by reading or by being told, neither of which the man believed it to be.

“Anything else?”

The boy shook his head and the potions master could almost believe the child.

Almost.

“Every witch and wizard has what is called an affinity,” the professor explained factually, as if giving a lecture. “A natural inclination for one of the three types of magic that a witch or wizard can possess.”

“Three, sir?” The boy asked, though Snape thought that the confusion sounded a little more forced than it should for someone that claims to know nothing of it.

“Light, dark, or gray - something which is also often called neutral,” the man explained anyways, watching as the boy took a true glint of interest in those familiar eyes of his. “Most witches and wizards tend to be gray oriented, though there are those from quite a few older families that are dark inclined; however, there are very few light witches or wizards still around.”

Ones that practice at least.

The boy was staring at the man intently, soaking in more of the knowledge then he did anything that was taught in class. Snape couldn't decide how annoyed he wanted to be by that. “But what’s the difference between them, sir?”

Though he didn’t ask it, Snape could hear the true question lying beneath the one that the boy had asked:

Does it make you evil to be one and not the other?

The Professor sighed solemnly and was glad that he had never had to ask anyone such things being as gray aligned as he was, even if he was a little more dark oriented than most gray wizards tended to be, though that was mostly from exposure.

“The only difference is where the magic comes from,” the professor stated plainly. “Gray magic, which is taught here at Hogwarts as it can be cast by everyone, is all about intention. You want the match to turn into a needle, you cast a spell and it does. Simple as that. There’s no emotion involved in it. A student being desperate for the spell to work won’t make it do so anymore than a student who is casting with no emotion at all.”

Snape watched as the boy nodded, seeming to understand what he had said thus and takes a second to marvel at the fact that he was teaching Potter’s son about magical affinities and hopes that the poor sod is rolling over in his grave.

“Light magic, on the other,” he continues, “is purely about emotion. There are very few light spells left, one of them being the Patronus Charm, but none of them require any silly wand waving, only an incantation and the correct emotion in abundance.”

“The patronus charm, sir?” The boy asked, his brows pulling together in genuine confusion.

The man thought about how best he wanted to explain such a thing without going too far off of the topic at hand. “A spell that allows the caster to create an animal protector,” he decided on. “You don’t choose the form that it takes, and only know what it will be once you have successfully cast a full patronus for the first time.”

“Can you…” the boy asks, his question trialing off as if he hadn’t meant to ask it at all.

Snape withdrew his wand and thought of the years before the war took hold, of simple times and friends that were now long gone without a whisper of what had happened to them, locked up, or buried deep within the ground. Lazy days by the lake and the rush of learning a new spell. And as always, a girl that would never love him back. “Expecto Patronum!”

A doe burst forth from the tip of the older man’s wand, glittering with silver light as it ran through the air, circling the boy as if it knew who it was cast for. Snape watched as green eyes filled with honest wonder, something that otherwise seemed to be stripped from the boy that held it, but noticed that the child made no move to attempt to touch the creature. The doe bowed its head before disappearing just as quickly as it had come.

“It was beautiful,” Harry said and the professor could hear the raw honesty in the boy’s voice.

“Hogwarts was built mostly on light magic,” the man continued, bringing them back to the topic at hand. “Back then, when magic was known and those that held it were hunted by those that didn’t, the founders wanted to create a safe haven for the magical youth to learn and created Hogwarts. At the time, magic was mostly light and dark, gray not being nearly as prevalent as it is now. Since three of the founders were light oriented, they cast the enchantments that warded and built the majority of the school, weaving it together so that it would be stronger.”

“And the fourth founder?” The child asked in a way that said he already knew, had figured it out on his own but wanted to hear it still.

“Salazar Slytherin, he wove his magic into the dungeons.”

And when the boy nodded, it seemed as if he had been given little more than a death sentence.

“Dark magic, Harry,” the potions master said much softer than he had ever meant to, “is simply emotion driven magic with intention,” the man explained and he could see the boy’s mind working, running through the actions of his life at breakneck speed. Snape would bet anything that the boy had a dark affinity. “Dark magic isn’t evil, just as light magic isn’t necessarily good, no matter what some might say to the contrary. The only reason that the dark arts are seen in such a poor light is that those who wield them often have something of a temper that drives their magic to more violent places and intentions. Nothing more, nothing less.”

—-

Nothing more, nothing less.

The words rang in Harry’s mind like some kind of saving grace. Like a salvation that he hadn’t known that he was ever asking for. But there was still one thing that he needed to know, even as he now knew more than he ever could have hoped to before.

“And the illness?” Harry asked, voicing more questions then he ever had dared to ask before.

Harry watched as the Slytherin head of house sighed like a man that had hoped some things would be left forgotten beneath the weight of everything else that had been spoken. “Some wizards - mostly those with dark affinities - will perform a ritual to declare themselves to their practice,” Snape explained tiredly. “When they do this, places such as Hogwarts that are very light oriented can make one ill. Though I suppose the same could be said of someone with a very strong affinity even before the completion of the declaration rights.”

But when the man spoke, Harry could tell that he was also attempting to convince himself.

That night, as Harry laid in his bed, he thought of the magic within him, of the darkness that he was now sure that it had. But he also thought of the magic in the walls of the Dursleys' house, the magic that felt so like his own even as he knew that it surely wasn’t.

He wondered just who it came from.

—-

Christmas arrived and with it came the first presents, true ones, that Harry had ever received. There were chocolate frogs from Hermione, and a stack of spelled parchment from the twins. Wizarding jelly beans from Treacy and Theo, and a case of something called Butterbeer from Daphne. Harry smiled as he ran his fingers over the leather of a green journal from Draco, who didn’t ‘believe in giving something as cheap as candy for a holiday. Merlin Harry, why would you even suggest such a thing?’ and a set of expensive sketch pencils from Pansy who held similar views.

His favorite though, was a book on the constellations from Blaise. It told the stories of each of the recognized constellations in the sky - ancient and modern alike - and was spelled to illustrate them, bringing the words to life on the page after it had been read. Harry smiled as he watched a dog come to life among the stars, a water stream on another, and arrows were knocked by a hunter on a third.

The most interesting though was a package with no name attached to it, one that when opened held a shimmering, silvery cloth that felt like water of a long forgotten steam instead of fabric. When he drew it around himself, Harry watched with fascination as his body disappeared from view as if it hadn’t ever existed at all. The only thing that came with it was a note telling him that the cloak had been his father’s, and to use it well.

Chapter Text

Harry spent the remainder of the holiday with the Weasley twins, mucking about the castle and in the warmth of the Gryffindor common room, much to the displeasure of the other two Weasley boys present and the Fat Lady who had to let him in. Even with the company, Harry was glad to see the holidays come to an end and the rest of the school come back, to be surrounded by Slytherins once more.

The small Slytherin glanced at those around him as they walked to the Great Hall for breakfast, together once more after too long apart. He watched as Blaise and Pansy pressed closer to him almost instinctively and remembered the pitying looks that the pair had given him in the days leading up to their departure. He knew that he would need to speak with them about it soon, but not just yet. Not this morning at the least.

Today they had other plans.

—-

From the High Table, the professors watched as the students all came down to breakfast on the first day of the new term, smiles on the children’s faces as they recounted their holiday for those that would listen to them.

Everything seemed normal, blissfully even. That was until the post came.

The owls swooped down in a great flurry, carrying with them more post than most of the professors had seen since one rememberable Valentine's Day in the seventies, but even on the day after a holiday where the most that they should be expecting was some forgotten jumpers. Hundreds of letters soared through the air in the clutches of the school’s owls, enough that McGonagall was sure that the sender had used just about every one that the school had to offer.

The letters were all unceremoniously dropped onto the tables, and as a long beat of silence rang out, the Deputy Headmistress couldn’t help but wonder if that would be it. But then she saw the Potter boy reach for one, his fingers barely brushing it before they all sprung to life.

I don’t give a damn ‘bout my reputation 

Living in the past, it’s a new generation 

A girl can do what she wants to do and that’s what I’m gonna do

An’ I don’t dive a damn ‘bout my reputation 

Oh no, not me…

Most of the Professor’s eyes went straight to the Weasley twins as the Howlers came to life, finding them staring at the scene with false looks of innocence that no one in the Great Hall believed as the Muggle song continued to play. Though all of the professors were sure of where to put the blame, only the Slytherin Head of House saw the covert way that the twins glanced at a certain young snake across the hall, and the smile that the three shared. There was no question in the potion master’s mind as to where the peculiar song choice came from. 

The man sighed and took a sip of his tea, wishing silently that it was something stronger. He supposed that he should have expected something like this sooner or later, they all should have. Even if the boy wasn’t much like James Potter, he had still befriended the Weasley twins. Snape figured that no other Professor would figure the boy’s involvement though, so he only drank his tea and waited for the song to end.

Harry grinned as he watched the muggle born students start to sing along with the song, much to the confusion of the purebloods who were staring at the entire scene as if they had no idea what to make of it. When Blaise sent the other Slytherin a questioning glance, all Harry did was wink and mouth along to the chorus.

It hadn’t taken the Slytherin very long to figure out how to cast the spell that had played the music at the common room party, especially when all he needed to do was envision orbs filled with magic as no one else was around to expect him to use a wand. The hardest parent had been figuring out how to create the Howlers themselves, but the Weasley twins had come through on that end. Then all the Slytherin had to do was sneak into the Owlery underneath the cloak that he had been given on the first day before term.

Easy.

Watching the way that half of the castle was dancing around the Great Hall and seeing the annoyed look on McGonagall’s face, Harry thought that it was worth the hours spent having to record the song into each of the letters and spell them to open at once. An added bonus was the knowledge that Aunt Petunia would have had an absolute stroke if she were to have heard it.

—-

Term passed quickly after the holidays, classes continued and with them so did Quidditch.

The Slytherins drew tightly together as they headed down to the Pitch for what could be the last game of the season if it went the right way. All Gryffindor had to do was to lose to Hufflepuff and the point gap would be too large for another match with either to make a difference. Slytherin would win the cup.

The stands were filled to the brim with students from each of the houses coming to watch. Harry smiled apologetically at Neville as they passed him to sit with the older snakes, but the boy only shrugged. Something told the boy that the lion didn’t really want his house to win either.

“Did you firsties hear?” Gemma asked as the group sat down at the bottom of the Slytherin stands, each of them drawing their wands to cast warming charms on one another.

“Hear what?” Tracey asked as she leaned into Daphne.

Gemma smiled, something that Harry had noticed that the other half - blood didn’t do all that often. “Snape is referring.”

“Bloody Hell,” Theo cursed and when Harry looked at the other boy, he saw that the Slytherin had a pretty good imitation of Peeves’s sly grin carved into his face. 

“This should be good,” Blaise decided as he pulled out a biscuit from breakfast that was under a stasis charm that Harry had cast when the other wasn’t looking. The other boy gave Harry half. Neither said a thing about it.

“This will be bloody brilliant,” Draco said from Harry’s other side, all but vibrating in his seat. Harry was inclined to agree with his friend. Even if Gryffindor won, he knew that the match would still be extremely entertaining to watch.

And he was right.

The players flew through the air with desperation that none of them had shown to this extent before, going higher than they normally would and throwing the Quaffle with enough force to make Wood and the Hufflepuff keeper work harder than they had all year, and make Flint hide a wince.

Harry and the rest of Slytherin house laughed as Hufflepuff was awarded a penalty shot on the Gryffindor goal for the lions having hit a bludger at the potions master. Harry almost thought that he could see Fred’s embarrassed blush from the stands as house points were no doubtfully taken.

And then the fourth year Hufflepuff seeker, Cedric Diggory, was diving for the ground, going at a speed that Harry would have liked to have been flying himself at the moment. The older boy barely missed Snape by a few inches as he flew past the Professor in a shock of yellow. Diggory was holding his arm high over his head before the Gryffindor seeker, McLaggen, had even begun his own dive.

Hufflepuff had won the game, but the Slytherins cheered the loudest of them all. The snakes had just won the Quidditch cup.

—-

Harry never thought that he would have said that he would be happy to have exams closing in quickly upon them, but as the months grew warmer and the days closer to the end of June, he found himself thinking that very thing.

Theo and Tracey had taken to pouring over every book that they had been assigned that year, reading them together late into the night and asking anyone that they came across to quiz them, much to the surprise of some poor Hufflepuffs and the pleasure of quite a few Ravenclaws that were doing the same thing. The pair were horrible after curfew when there were only the other Slytherin first years to annoy and absolutely insufferable when put in a room together with Hermione, who was deeper into the frenzy than they were. Worse off, as exams drew closer, the other first years around Harry started to adopt a similar mindset to the trio, even Blaise who was easily the most cool headed of them all.

“Just because you are extraordinarily gifted at magic doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t need to study,” the Slytherin boy had snapped one day when Harry had asked if he wanted to play Wizard’s Chess.

Needless to say, Harry was glad when the exams finally did roll around, as he might have snapped and killed one of his mates the next time that they tried to ask him about Potions or Defense Against the Dark Arts if they hadn’t.

The written exams were given in large classrooms that Harry had only ever been to on the days the he’d spent wandering the castle during the Christmas holidays, each of them sweltering with a heat that wordlessly explained to the small Slytherin just why that had been the only time that he’d been to them. Each of the students were given quills spelled with special anti - cheating charms that Harry could feel buzzing within them as he held it.

Gray magic, he thought, smiling to himself at the question that had he’d had since the welcoming feast and had been answered.

Besides the heat, the written exams themselves weren’t all that hard, they were just the theory that stood behind the magic that they had all performed. Theory that Harry knew as well as he knew how to breathe. He had to understand the workings of magic to translate it - in a sense - from what he can do easily to what is expected of him at this age. After all, that was why he’d memorized all of the books before coming to school.

There were practicals too of course.

In Transfiguration, they were asked to turn a mouse into a snuff box and were given points for how pretty it was and how little animal features it had. Harry made his was an emerald green with deep accents of blue that was almost black, and silver trimmings and details on the outside. He knew that not even McGonagall with her disposition to him could find a fault in his work.

Charms was much more entertaining as they were asked to come up to Professor Flitwick’s desk and make the pineapple there dance. Harry had his do a demented version of the Electric Slide.

Potions was by far one of the more mentally taxing of the test, as Snape had decided to loom over them even more than usual as they each attempted to remember how to brew a Forgetfulness Potion. The irony was not lost on any of them either.

History of Magic was the last of their exams and Harry found himself cheering along with the rest of the Slytherins and Ravenclaws as they were told to put their quills down by the ghostly professor Binns. Harry thought that if he did poorly on any of his exams that it would be that one, but all of the other first years seemed to share a similar thought as well.

The first years all but ran out of the castle and into the fresh air of the courtyard the moment that they were let out of the classrooms, a strict ‘talking about the exams would get you hexed by whoever is closest’ rule set in place as the group made their way to the edge of the Black Lake, spending the rest of the afternoon under a tree watching as the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan tired to tickle the giant squid.

Everything would have been perfect if it wasn’t for the steadily growing pain in Harry’s scar.

Harry smiled at the boy as Blaise handed him a headache reliever potion, the other Slytherin still holding onto them even after all of these months of him taking them. Harry found that Blaise had become very good at reading him because of this.

He also found that he didn’t quite mind that at all.

—-

As the day progressed, Harry found that the now too familiar ache in his head didn’t lessen, not even as he walked into the Slytherin common room, which took away his usual bouts of sickness. Blaise, Draco, and Theo looked at the boy pityingly after dinner as the three got ready to leave for Litha, the Wiccan celebration of the summer solstice, but Harry just waved the trio of boys off and slunk farther into his bed. It wasn’t until when he was sure that the rest of Slytherin house was either gone or asleep that Harry grabbed his father’s cloak and snuck out into the hall.

It didn’t take long for Harry to find his way back to the seventh floor corridor, the path now a familiar one to the boy after that first night. Pacing in front of the tapestry three times, he envisioned the field once more, the scent of the grass and the sounds of the summer night. The magic in the strange room was special, almost like the twins where all other magical influence seemed to fade away.

A safe haven.

The field was the same as the time before, an almost perfect copy of somewhere that was more of a home to the boy than any building had ever been. Harry ran his fingers through the grass and dreamed of another doing just the same at his side.

The stars shined like diamonds in the sky as Harry gazed up at them, naming each of them that he now knew and tracing the constellations that he’d known for a long time now. If someone were to ask him just how long he had spent like that, the only answer that the boy could possibly give was until his arm began to ache. But he did know that the pain in his mind didn’t lessen in the least; in fact, it only seemed to increase as the night aged.

With a forlorn sigh, Harry pushed himself to his feet and threw the invisibility cloak across himself, figuring that if he were to be in pain until the rest of the castle rose, he could so in a place so breathtakingly filled with his sort of magic that he could almost taste it in the air.

Walking through the castle, Harry bit back an annoyed groan as the stairs moved beneath the boy and stopped at the third floor corridor rather than a main access landing to the Grand Staircase. Harry knew that he could probably will the stairs to come back if he wished to, but he figured that it would probably be best not to break the stairs if he could keep from doing so.

Cursing silently, Harry stepped onto the landing and decided to wait for the stairs to come back and change direction once more to something more favorable. In the years to come, Harry would find himself wondering just how wise of a decision that was.

The door next to the Slytherin slammed open with enough force that it had Harry scrambling silently backwards so that he would not be hit. But Harry might as well have been as loud as a horde of hippogriffs because the newcomer was looking directly at him, and Harry was looking directly at the professor.

Dark magic.

 Quirrell lunged forward and tore the cloak from Harry’s body as the boy tried to move back from his grasp, but only found his back pressed against a stone railing. The only other way to go would be the opening in the railing, but that was more of a drop then Harry truly wanted to make.

“Potter!” The man said like some sort of curse, throwing Harry’s cloak to the ground. “You’ve taken the stone, haven’t you! Where do you put it?”

Harry tried not to let his confusion show, adopting a careful mask of calmness as the older wizard screamed. “I don’t have it,” the boy spat, staring defiantly into the Professor’s eyes.

“I’m going to kill you tonight, Harry Potter,” the man promised, raising his wand for the boy to see. “If you give me the stone, then I might be inclined to make it as painless for you as possible.”

“Look, I don’t know shit about any stone,” Harry cursed, holding his hands up in a way that usually made Dudley’s gang give a small enough pause for him to get a head start, “but if you tell me what it is maybe I can find it for you,” but even Harry could hear the shake in his own voice. 

Ever since he’d come to the castle, dark magic had been a sort of comfort to the boy, long before he knew its name. This was the first time that he’d met someone whose magic felt like something of a muddled version of his own, but was on the opposing side. It was the first time that he had felt magic that was stronger than his own pointed at him through the tip of a wand as well.

Instinctively, Harry moved to the side, but no spell was cast. The magic only built up inside of the older man, the rage waiting to be given purpose by the castor.

“Let me speak to him.”

Harry felt his body freeze as a tired voice spoke, one that felt so close, but no one else was there. A chill ran down the boy’s spine as the Defense professor spoke as if there was someone else to speak to.

“I have strength enough for this,” the voice insisted before  Quirrell seemed to reluctantly pull down the turban that no student or teacher in the castle had seen the man go a day without.

Now the Slytherin knew why.

There was a face on the back of the professor’s head, grotesque and snake - like. The boy thought that it resembled a monster from muggle fiction more than something that could ever resemble a man.

Pain exploded in Harry’s head as he met the monstrous red eyes, a kind so profound that words and sound became useless things to the boy.

But his body still knew what to do.

Springing forwards while the older man’s back was still turned to him, Harry grabbed not for his wand, but the blade that he always kept on his person since Jude had given it to him all those months ago. Grasping onto the face for support, Harry ran the small knife across the throat of the now screaming defense Professor, much deeper than he had with the older Slytherin boy at the start of the year. Because this time he was moving to kill.

Blinding pain that Harry could only describe as a unique form of agony was what the boy was met with the moment that he touched the older wizard with his bare hands. But Harry has been in pain all of his life, so he held on, knowing that Quirrell was screaming too. Knowing that for some reason, as blood poured down the gash in the man’s throat, ashes fell from the second face, created by his touch.

The body crumbled to the ground before the blood could hit it, only having soaked into the professor’s clothes and the boy’s skin, but the man that had worn them soon disappeared into ashes as well.

Glancing around, Harry quickly cast a silent cleaning spell on himself and the robes on the ground before levitating them above himself. With a quick flick of his wrist, Harry was able to open the door that the man had come from, silently forcing the empty clothes into the room before whatever sleeping beast inside of it had time to wake. 

Then Harry ran, silent and quick, until he was back in his common room, in the warmth of the first year dorms.

—-

Blaise watched with interest as Harry tore into the dorm room like a man that was being chased, his cheeks flushed a deep red from what must have been a long distance. The Slytherin noticed a cold light in the other boy’s green eyes as they looked at one another, it was the same gleam as what he saw in his mother’s each time that another man fell mysteriously ill in their home.

The tremors that wrecked the smaller boy’s body were entirely his own though.

Glancing at the sleeping forms of the other Slytherin boys in the room, Blaise wordlessly held out his hand, a silent invitation for the other boy to take. One that Harry accepted quickly, only shaking his head as Blaise pulled back his own sheets. Harry nodded to his own bed instead - the one that was always closed - and they moved to it, curling around one another as if that could keep either of them safe.

Neither boy said a thing when the smaller Slytherin woke them both up later that night, jolting up in the bed from a silent scream. They only laid back down and watched the stars that Harry had bewitched until the quickly approaching dawn had risen.

Neither boy said anything the next day either when they were told that Professor Quirrell wouldn’t be in class, or when it was announced that night that he was dead.

—-

Two days after the incident Harry watched with a held breadth as Snape walked into the Slytherin common room, a stormy look on his face. The smaller Slytherin felt Blaise squeeze his wrist in reassurance as Harry went ahead and stood before the potions master’s eyes had even found him among the crowd of anxiously watching snakes. A quick beckon to follow was all that the boy needed to know that he was right in his assumptions.

“The Headmaster has called you to his office,” the potions Professor said once the common room door had closed firmly shut. Harry only nodded, figuring as much already. The older Slytherin sighed, clearly exasperated by the younger. “I want you to tell me exactly what happened,” the man commands, using a voice that Harry hasn’t heard from him in a long time now and hadn’t missed in the least.

So he did, though Harry found himself pausing at the mention of the invisibility cloak being ripped from him.

“Fuck!” The boy cursed suddenly and much louder than he had intended to. “The fucking cloak!”

“Five points from Slytherin,” the professor said, seemingly subconsciously. “What did you do, boy?” The Slytherin Head of House asked lowly, not seeming to notice the way that the younger snake flinched at the title, the same one that his uncle had always used. Or maybe he did notice and finally didn’t care.

“After Quirrell turned to dust,” the boy explained, “I was so focused on getting his robes hidden that I forgot all about that damned cloak.”

Harry watched as Snape sighed once more - something that he seemed to do a lot where the boy was involved - and drug his hand down his face harshly. 

“An understandable mistake, given the circumstances, but an undeniably foolish one.”

Harry couldn’t really argue that.

The pair walked into the Headmaster’s office not long after, Harry nearly falling over from the intense bouts of light magic coming from the man inside of it. But he held himself together, he had to.

Dumbledore was wearing dark robes of colors that did not go with one another and made the younger Slytherin fear just how wizards thought that muggles dressed if the almost ancient man before him thought that cyan went well with brown and the golden half - rimmed glasses that the Headmaster always wore.

“Ah, Professor Snape!” The man greeted as if he hadn’t already seen the snakes walk in. “I see that you’ve brought young Harry, you may leave now if you wish,” the man said in a too kind voice that had Harry drawing back as he didn’t believe for a moment.

A quick glance at the potions master said that he didn’t quite either, something that seemed to bother the older Slytherin.

“I think that I will stay, Albus,” Harry was relieved to hear the older man say coldly, as if he found the very notion of leaving the boy alone with the Headmaster akin to the idea of leaving a snake in a lion’s den. Harry knew that the comparison wasn’t exactly wrong. “Potter is one of mine after all.”

“Very well,” the Headmaster said, but Harry could tell that he didn’t like the idea at all. “Have a seat, why don’t you?” The man instructed in a way that sounded like an offer, motioning to the chairs before him.

Dumbledore’s eyes turned serious once both had sat down, cold even as they trained on Harry, a pricking feeling tracing across the boy’s mind that had him forcing it away as best he could. Harry barely heard the eldest wizard wince. 

“Harry, my boy, I would like you to tell me what you know of Nicholas Flamel.”

—-

The words shocked the potions Professor more than he thought that they rightfully should given the recent death of the defense professor. Snape cursed himself for thinking that Albus wouldn’t attempt to connect the death of the bastard to the stone - an inevitable conclusion given where Harry had hidden the robes - and then to the boy himself.

The potions master glanced at the boy, expecting to find a mask of calmness there, but all he found was his student looking at the greatest wizard of the age as if he was some sort of fool. A memory Snape thought that he might have to look back on later when the older wizard concocts his next scheme. But then the other Slytherin’s eyes filled with a light so bright that the potions Professor had to physically fight back a wince.

It was the first time that the boy had actually looked like either of his parents since coming to the school, and yet he still managed to look like another dark haired boy that had disappeared without a word one night when the war was still new.

“Wait! You mean to tell me that he’s real?” The boy asked, slapping his hands harshly on his knees in his hurry to lean forwards with that hungry gaze of his, the boy’s voice more excited than Snape thought possible. “I mean of course I know that he was real,” the boy continued quickly, his hands moving animatedly around as he spoke in a way that was so different from the controlled mannerisms that the potions master had come to know over the last year, “he has a grave in Paris and everything. But you wouldn’t be asking about him unless he was still relevant - still alive - so that means that the Philosopher’s Stone should be real too, and the Elixir of Life.

“Holy shit!” Harry exclaimed suddenly in the middle of his tangent, looking quickly enough between both of the older wizards that Snape began to worry for the boy’s neck. “That’s why his grave was empty when they dug it up!”

Snape glanced at the older wizard and found him studying the boy with the contemplative look of someone that didn’t know if the person before them was lying or not.

“You seem to know a great deal about Flamel, Mr. Potter,” the Headmaster carefully observed when the boy finally took a breath.

Snape watched as the boy almost physically deflated at the reminder that the eldest wizard was still in the room, a cold gleam taking over the boy’s eyes.

“Of course I do, sir,” the boy said, speaking the title as if it was some kind of curse rather than a sign of respect. “The Dursleys hate magic more than anything in the world,” Harry informed, and only a fool would fail to notice the barb in the boy’s voice. Albus Dumbledore was not a fool. “So of course I had to know all that I could about it. And since it was Alchemy I could always lie and say that I was studying science, something perfectly muggle.”

Slytherin indeed, Snape thought, vowing to never question the boy’s placement again.

“Yes, well,” Albus said awkwardly, adjusting a trinket on his desk as he spoke. “This has been rather informative, you are free to leave now, Mr. Potter. Ah and take this.”

Snape watched as the younger snake took the folded cloak that the Headmaster was holding out to him with a grandfatherly smile, but was proud to see that the boy didn’t rise until the potions Professor nodded at him to do so. Proud to see that the boy still saw the eldest wizard as something of a threat as he was sure Albus still saw the boy.

But then Harry paused before he left, still standing before the Headmaster’s desk. “Sir?” The boy asks clumsily, his tone much more respectful than it had been before. “Why did you ask?”

A strange light entered the other man’s eyes before he spoke. “Until only a day or so ago the famed stone was being held within the castle,” the older man said in a strange bout of honesty.

Snape watched as the boy baked at the Headmaster once more, truly a sight to behold. “You mean you were keeping a thing like that in a school, with children?” The younger Slytherin asked ludicrously, still looking at Dumbledore as if he had lost his mind. “Wait! The elixir has to be brewed on the full moon of each month or else the Flamels age very quickly, all of the years catching up with them within the month, but if the stone has been here all year… Did you kill Nicholas Flamel?!”

—-

It took longer than Dumbledore would have liked to assure the young Slytherin that he hadn’t killed the Flamels and that they still had enough elixir to set their affairs in order as they wished. The headmaster would be the first to admit that the boy is just about as stubborn as they come, so much unlike his trusting father and his mother who saw the kindness in everyone that she met - though the stubbornness no doubtfully came from her, she just usually required a reason to lose faith first.

The boy, it seemed, did not.

Yet, he was so much like another Slytherin boy that the headmaster had known all of those years ago. Dumbledore remembered well enough how that had ended.

“Albus,” Severus said, reminding the elder that the former spy was still within the room, “while we are here, I must implore that you reconsider sending the boy back to those people this summer,” the younger man said, reigniting a conversation that he had hoped to leave dead. “You heard what the child said, they hate magic-”

But Dumbledore only had to hold up his hand to silence the younger man. “I heard,” he agreed, “but I’m sure that the boy is only exaggerating as children so often do about everything.”

The blood protections that are in place will make sure of it, the man thought, the Quirrell incident having only proven that, the Order members observing the house as well.

Dumbledore frowned as the other man did not fight him on his decision, but didn’t truly seem to agree with it either.

—-

The last week of school passed quickly, but Harry found that he was never alone for long, not even as he slept, Blaise pressed comfortably at his side like that first night. The other Slytherins seemed to have now noticed the silent battle between the Headmaster and Harry as each moved carefully around the other. 

For now.

It wasn’t until just before the End of the Year Feast that Harry spoke to the potions master once more.

“I did try and speak with the Headmaster about not sending you back to those muggles, but-”

“But he wouldn’t hear of it?” Harry guessed, too tired from sleepless nights to care about being imprudent. Though he knew that it wasn’t truly a guess at all. He knew that Dumbledore wouldn’t remove him from a place that he had placed him there himself.

Everyone always wants to believe that they are infallible. Hardly anyone ever is.

Harry only shrugged. “I’ll survive,” the boy insisted. “I always do. It’s why I’m a Slytherin after all,” he insisted in case his Head of House had seen fit to forget.

Neither Slytherin mentioned that surviving was not the same thing as living.

—-

Slytherin won the House Cup that night and in the morning the students were boarding the train home. To most of the others in his compartment, it felt like going home, but to Harry it felt a bit like a sort of death.

Chapter Text

By the end of the summer, Herny was dead.

Harry had killed him.