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Harry thought that the Dursley’s abuse being discovered the summer after his third year would make his life easier. And it did, in a way. Vernon mixed up the days that his no-good nephew was due to be picked up for the world cup, and the entire Weasley family walked in on him beating Harry to within an inch of his life. A horrifying experience for the Weasleys to witness, but just an average Tuesday for Harry. Or was it a Thursday? Vernon wasn’t the only one who had mixed up the dates, but in Harry’s case, the mix-up was more of a fevered delirium from the infection he’d picked up from his last punishment, which was Vernon’s annual ‘welcome home’ gift ever since Harry had started at Hogwarts. For all that the man mocked what he called ‘the baseless superstitions of the less cultured sort’, a statement that he always accompanied with a pointed look at Harry’s brown skin, Harry didn’t know what else, if not a superstition, that one could call ‘beating the stuffing out of your nephew before he even crosses the threshold of your door, as if you could knock off loose Hogwarts magic like dust out of a rug’.
It certainly wasn’t the ‘logic and reason’ that was supposedly the birthright of people like Vernon, with their pasty white skin and colonial mindsets. Even Harry in his fevered delirium could have told you that, although preferably after submerging himself in a bucket of ice-water to relieve the fire under his skin. Ugh, he really wished that Vernon would at least occasionally clean the beating belt.
But anyway, where were we? Oh yes, you see, Vernon was beating the stuffing out of Harry after mixing up the days and assuming that the world cup was next week, and then right through the fireplace stepped the Weasleys to pick Harry up. What followed was a lot of screaming, and some flying hexes. Harry didn’t really remember much of it, frankly. He was pretty close to ‘sepsis’ per Madame Pomphrey, so he’d been pretty out of it.
He still wasn’t exactly sure what ‘sepsis’ was, but apparently, according to Ron, upon being informed of this little fact while high off his arse on the pain potions after the danger was (mostly) passed, he’d groaned “ugh, why’d you let Snape in here, and why was he so close to me?” He didn’t remember this, but he definitely did remember how someone charmed the faculty list in the great hall so that “Sepsis Snape” was now proudly listed as the potions master and head of Slytherin. Said Slytherin was sure it had been the Weasley twins, somehow using magic during the summer (and no, he didn’t know how, Minerva, but he still thought it his right to preemptively assign them detention for the entire year, and what do you mean that’s against the rules?!). Charlie would have felt bad about the fact that Snape would most definitely be even more of a stick up the twins’ arses in the coming year, but they had cheerfully assured him that it would merely encourage them to up their game, so ‘no harm, no foul, happy to take the heat for this one, big bro.’
Anyway, this is all a very long way of saying that Harry is now a Weasley! Legally, that is- he had been emotionally adopted by the family a long time ago, not that he was fully aware of it. And okay, yes, his name still is Harry Potter (or Hari Puttar, if anyone were to look at his actual birth certificate! But whatever, ‘anglos gonna anglo’ as Padma Patel would tell you. And really, she knew her father’s handwriting wasn’t great, but how does an immigration officer mix up an i and an e?!).
The point is that the Weasleys have custody of him now, at least until Sirius can pull himself enough strings to get an actual trial and stop hiding out on the old Puttar ancestral estate in Andhra Pradesh. Harry wasn’t sure what the timeline was on that, since besides worrying after Harry’s welfare via owl post, Sirius’ main topic of conversation in his letters seemed to be about how monsoon season was just hell on his hair!
Which brings us back to Harry’s new problem, now that the school year has started and he is in (somewhat) decent shape. It turns out he had a lot of magic. Like, a fuckton. A supremely ridiculous amount, really. He hadn’t been aware of just how much had been going to not only keeping the glamours up to hide his scars and just how malnourished he was, but also to keeping his body functioning during 10 long years of near-starvation and abuse with the Dursleys. And then three years of mitigating and managing the long-term after effects while at Hogwarts.
But now there were no more glamours to hide behind, and a very determined Poppy Pomphrey and a frankly ludicrous amount of medical potions taking care of the other stuff, so now he had a lot more magic than he was used to, and his power levels have gone from “Wow, this kid is pretty magically impressive and gets even the harder spells in class right on the first or second try” to “Holy shit, it’s the first day of class, they’re doing warm-up levitation charms to stretch their cores out after not using magic for the entire summer, and now Harry Potter has accidentally blown a hole through the roof. With a feather. The entire class can now see straight up nine floors and through the gaping cavern in the turrets that had, until 30 seconds ago, been standing in their original condition since 991 A.D.”
“Um, oops?” Harry tries.
The prolonged silence is eventually punctuated by Parvati turning to Lavender, who is sitting at her left. “And this,” she says, in all her South Asian wisdom, “is why I told you you shouldn’t get a pet lizard. And now it seems you don’t even have the decency to keep your bad luck to yourself- poor Hari.”
“Weird stuff always happens around Harry,” her best friend protested. “I highly doubt that this is Balli’s fault!”
“You named your lizard lizard?” Harry asked incredulously. The Telugu his father had spoken to him his whole first year of life was still buried deeply in his mind and in his heart, brought forward and advanced by all the practice he got with the Patel twins, whose family was historically very close to the Puttars.
“There’s a brick on your desk from the g-ddamned roof, and you’re worried about onomastics ?” Hermione asked, even more incredulously.
“I hardly see what muggle acrobats have to do with any of this,” Harry’s (now-legal) brother jumped in to defend his honor.
“And I think” Flitwick finally found his voice, although it was far squeakier even than it normally was, “that we ought to let out early today. I will see you all next class.”
“Well bugger it all,” says Ron. “Now we all have to go to potions and deal with sepsis.”
“For Hanukkah this year, Ronald, I am buying you a dictionary,” Hermione groaned. If my Sephardic ancestors could survive the Spanish inquisition, the French invasion of Morocco, and then colonial Britain, she told herself, then I can survive the idiocy of my best friends.
An hour later, as they all evacuated (or rather, were violently evacuated from) the potions classroom, she was questioning her assertion.
It had just been a simple ignus , the same one they always used to light their cauldrons, but the flames had leapt up and consumed the entire table. Then, Harry’s panicked protego had blasted the entire class backwards with such force that the potions classroom was now a smoking pile of rubble. Hermione grumbled as she tried to shake the dust from her afro. She literally just had wash day.
“Now will you get rid of the lizard?” Parvati begged Lavender.
“That’s not very nice,” Lavender said, deliberately obtuse. “Harry’s a bit skinny and his knees are kind of knobby, sure, and he did just destroy our potions classroom, but I still think that name-calling is entirely uncalled for.”
Harry glared at her. “Is this because I made fun of your naming skills?” he asked the girl, pouting, idly tapping the end of his wand like it wasn’t a weapon of mass destruction in his small brown hands. He looked nothing like a lizard, thank you very much!
“Seriously, Harry, what the fuck is up with your magic today?!” Seamus broke in, feeling like he was going insane and wondering if he’d hallucinated the whole day. “I think we all thought that I’d be the first one to set fire to the potions classroom, and I think you owe me an explanation as to why you’d upstage me on my own greatest ambition.”
“I dunno, Malfoy probably put a curse on me or something, because I’m casting just like I always have,” Harry asserted, glaring at the blond ponce a few feet away.
“Potter, you absolute buffoon,” Pansy Parkinson declared. “There is no curse in the world that can turn someone into the magical equivalent of a fucking nuke, and if there was, there’s no way Draco could do it.”
“Hey!” Draco declared, indignant. “I resent that remark!” And then, pensively: “What’s a nuke?”
“Better question: How does a pureblood Slytherin know what a nuke is?” Dean asked.
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Pansy sniffed haughtily. “But if you must know, I personally don’t have any problems with muggles. Assuming that I do is very anti-Slytherin of you, Dean. And just for the record, I know lots about muggles. My horse riding instructor is a muggle, I’ll have you know!”
Harry groaned and rolled his eyes. “No you don’t” he snorted. “Not even the muggle studies teacher knows shit about muggles.”
“Um…” a muggleborn Slytherin whose name was not deemed relevant enough to Harry’s story to be put in print piped up from the outer edges of the gaggle of students, “Am I the only one with the sudden fear that Pansy’s horse riding teacher is making weapons-grade uranium?”
They were ignored. Their opinion, like their name, is deemed not to be relevant to Harry’s story.
“Potter, please put down your wand.” Snape finally emerged, lightly toasted, from putting out the last of the fire and stabilizing the wreckage so it didn’t threaten the structural integrity of the entire hallway. “It’s making me rather nervous at the moment.”
Harry obligingly put his wand in his pocket, not wanting to annoy the professor any worse, if such a thing were even possible after blowing up his entire potions classroom. Even though it was probably all Malfoy’s fault anyway, the poncy git.
“Harry, Malfoy didn’t curse you- he’s not that skilled,” Hermione told him, her voice patient in a way that she felt she deserved quite a lot of credit for.
“Did I say that out loud?” He asked, surprised.
“Nah mate, you’re just making your ‘Malfoy is a git’ face,” Ron replied, blue eyes sparkling with mirth. First he got to live with his best friend, and now he was getting him out of potions class! Potential threat to Hogwarts masonry aside, Ron was quite pleased with the way things were going so far this year.
“Huh, I didn’t know I had a specific face for it,” Harry mused quietly. Snape continued to stare at his now-empty hands more than a little warily.
“Is magical puberty a thing?” Harry wondered idly, ignoring Snape with an ease borne of practice.
“Please,” Seamus snorted, “You haven’t even hit regular puberty.”
“Everybody’s a freakin’ critic today, geez,” Harry complained huffily, crossing his scrawny arms in front of his chest.
“I mean, you did just blow up the potions classroom,” Neville reminded him, almost apologetically.
“Or,” Harry continued stubbornly, “I had a weird feather in charms, and then the potions classroom just happened to blow itself up. I mean, it is full of volatile ingredients.”
“Denial is an Egyptian river, Harry, not an Indian one.” Lavender was still quite peeved that Parvati was blaming her lizard for everything.
Meanwhile, Snape was casting diagnostic charms. “Well, Potter, you’re not cursed.” He declared eventually. “Neither is your wand, for that matter.”
“Ha!” Malfoy pumped his fist. “Now Potter, I believe you owe me an apology! Although, I totally could have cursed you if I wanted to, no matter what Pansy says.”
“Maybe the cauldron was cursed?” Ron wondered, as Harry stuck his tongue out at Malfoy. He thought it unlikely, but his support for Harry was something he took far more seriously than his logical reasoning.
“Well, we’ll never find out now; it’s a smoking bit of rubble,” Harry grumbled. “We have transfiguration in ten minutes, by the way,” he pointed out, checking the watch Arthur had given him for his birthday.
“Yes, for the love of Merlin, go make this Minerva’s problem,” Snape declared, motioning his hand in Harry’s general direction. He didn’t even bother to give the brat a detention, seeing as how he had rendered him without a place to hold it.
_____
It was a couple hours thereafter that Harry was forced to reluctantly reckon with the fact that oh shit, maybe I am the problem. But before that, he’d had a blessedly peaceful few hours.
Transfiguration class was always theory the first week. It was much more complicated, easier to fuck up, and much harder to reverse than other branches of magic when you did fuck it up. For this reason, the first week of every year was always intensive study on the theory behind the spells they would be learning the rest of the year, so they were familiar with them before they started bandying their wands about. McGonagall only ever made one exception to this, and it was letting first years turn matchsticks to needles on their first day, since it was one of the few spells with next to no possibility of coming to harm if you went in with little knowledge and an excess of enthusiasm, as first years are wont to do. It was usually upon having a difficult time actually doing it that they were better able to appreciate the need for spending the next week on theory.
So there wasn’t any magic that day, although there was a slight draft from the hole Harry had blown into the ceiling above the charms classroom. Thankfully, nobody mentioned it, since one did not make idle chit chat when Minerva McGonagall was giving a lecture.
Then came lunch. Pallavi Patel always sent her girls to Hogwarts with enough tiffins under stasis charm that, if they rationed it carefully, they could at least have one meal a week that was a break from white people food. Padma and Parvati had shared with Hari that first year, thinking that he had a right to the food of his culture that James never got to make for him. Every year after that, Mrs. Patel had sent along tiffins for Hari as well, since it was apparent that he could handle his spice just as as well as her girls despite not growing up with anything more exotic than Sunday roast (not that Harry ever got to eat Sunday roast with the Dursleys, merely smell it as he cooked it).
Sunday roast was well enough, Harry found out at Hogwarts, but it certainly couldn’t hold a candle to Pallavi auntie’s cooking. Hari and Parvati chatted idly in their mother tongue while scooping bites of tart, fragrant pulihora into smiling mouths. Parvati kept her gongura pickle on the side of the container, taking separate bites of it occasionally, while Harry mixed his right into the tamarind rice. If Pallavi auntie had been there, she would have pointed out that that was how James used to eat his, but Parvati didn’t know this and merely wrinkled her nose.
“All goes to the same place,” Harry pointed out, upon reading her disgusted expression.
“So? That doesn’t mean they should be all mixed together like that! Payasam also goes to the same place, but you don’t mix that with pickle.”
“That’s different,” Harry argued. “It’s dessert. There’s different rules for dessert.”
“Yeah,” Ron jumped in, now that the two had switched back to English. “Everyone knows that!” He still had a lot to learn about his favorite brother’s paternal culture, but he did know for sure that he’d always defend Harry, even over something as trivial as taking up arms on behalf of his culinary opinions. Besides, there were different rules for dessert- this much, at least, was universal.
“Your dessert opinions are null and void, since you like your payasam with rice and not tapioca.”
“Because it’s better that way! Padma agrees with me,” Harry rebutted.
Whatever Parvati might have had to say next was promptly quite literally swept away in a wave, as Harry went to cast an augmenti in an empty bowl so he could clean his right hand.
His hand was certainly cleaned, but so were his clothes. And everyone else’s clothes, for that matter, as a geyser burst from his wand. Dishes and platters of food were sent hurtling from the tables and left to float soggily along in the six inches or so of standing water that now covered the floor of the entire great hall.
“Well,” Harry eventually said, tightly, into the stunned silence, after he’d spent a solid 30 seconds blinking in disbelief at the now-nautical Great Hall. “I think, perhaps, that I might be the issue after all.”
Nobody even had time to point out that, "yes, fucking duh! ” because just then Snape, having decided to break for a spot of lunch before resuming repairs on his classroom, entered the Hall hoping to make a plate to take to his quarters and instead slipped on the wet cobblestones in the entryway, falling flat on his arse into the gigantic puddle that, not five minutes ago, had been the floor.
Harry groaned into his hands. There was no way he was passing potions this year.