Chapter Text
Halloween party at the John Bowlby Primary School.
Paper bats hung from the ceiling on strings too long, so they kept bumping into the heads of anyone taller than a nine-year-old. Someone had strung orange lights along the gym windows, and the whole hall smelled of sugar, plastic pumpkins, and the fog machine somebody's dad had brought from work.
As Harry was studying there along with Dudley, the Dursleys were not able to leave him out. They could say that the boy was sick, but they were even more afraid of what he could have done to their house in their absence.
But even after managing to attend the party, everyone there ignored the boy.
Children were playing and laughing. Teachers and parents were at their own table. Someone's mum had brought a whole plate of biscuits shaped like ghosts, and Harry counted eleven of them before he made himself stop, aware nobody was about to offer him one anyway. Harry sat at the far corner, knees pulled up to his chest, watching the party the way he watched most things - like it belonged to somebody else's life, one he'd wandered into by mistake.
That was so unfair!
Rage was quietly consuming Harry.
Suddenly, a strange feeling went through him.
Just like before, when Mrs. Thompson, their English teacher, tore out all of her hair. She had been trying to make him read the passage, but the letters kept jumping on the page, sliding past each other as if they didn't want to be caught. When he tried to tell her that, she'd only said he wasn't trying hard enough.
This made Harry angry. He was trying - really trying. More than almost everyone else in the class. It was not his fault that their books were defective.
And then that same feeling had come over him: a pressure behind his eyes, a buzzing under his skin, like the air before a storm. Mrs. Thompson started laughing too loudly, loudly enough that Mr. Coul, their Art teacher, passing by in the corridor, looked in to check on the class. And then Mrs. Thompson's own hands grabbed her hair. She didn't seem to notice the scratches her long nails were leaving on her scalp, as though that were the least of the damage, and started tearing her hair out in big chunks. Her head began to bleed.
Nobody moved for a second too long, as if the whole room needed time to believe what it was seeing.
Mr. Coul called for the doctor, and they never saw Mrs. Thompson again. Afterwards, everyone acted as though Mrs. Simmons, their new English teacher, had always been there. As if Mrs. Thompson had never existed at all, and Harry was the mad one for asking after a teacher nobody else remembered.
On the one hand, Harry was glad nobody remembered Mrs. Thompson, since he would probably have been the one blamed - he always was. But on the other hand, he started to question his own sanity.
And now it was happening again.
Harry clung to Mr. Plum, his purple plush dolphin, its stitched-on smile lopsided and one fin worn soft from years of being held. The toy had simply appeared in his cupboard the night after Mrs. Thompson's accident, and nobody but Harry could see it. That didn't do much for his doubts about his own sanity, but he was glad to have the one thing his family couldn't take away from him.
So Harry carried Mr. Plum everywhere. The dolphin was his best friend now, and he didn't care how the other students widened the gap between them whenever he talked to what looked, to everyone else, like empty air. They already thought him mad - partly because of the rumours the Dursleys spread, and partly because of what Harry himself had said after the accident.
That didn't mean Harry didn't want more friends.
The beat in his head grew louder. The boy lowered his head to press it against Mr. Plum. On the other days when this kind of headache came on, holding the dolphin close usually dulled it a little. Not today.
At some point it hurt so much that the boy started to cry.
Caught up in his own pain, he didn't notice the madness spreading around him. The music had stopped, though nobody had switched it off - it simply couldn't be heard over everything else anymore. People were crying while they danced, wound up far too tight. Children started biting each other, playfully at first, until it stopped resembling a game at all. The smell of wine grew thick in the air, though there wasn't a drop of it anywhere in the hall.
Harry's headache grew stronger than it had ever been. The boy lost consciousness.
***
The next morning, the police arrived. Almost half of the party's guests were dead.
They called it a gas leak.
Harry had no memory of that night, but something in him screamed that it hadn't been a gas leak. Still, the boy was smart enough not to say so out loud. Nobody would believe him anyway, and if they did, he was sure they'd find some way to pin it on him regardless. Simple logic: Harry Ariadne Potter was a freak, so Harry Ariadne Potter was the culprit.
They had never much cared for Harry's wellbeing, so he didn't see the point in caring about justice for people who wouldn't have cared about his. The Dursleys, for their part, didn't ask him a single question about it - not even to accuse him, which somehow felt worse than if they had.
Besides, the boy had his own problems now. From the next day onward, the feeling of being watched never left him. At school. Doing his chores in the Dursleys' garden. Hiding on the playground at lunch. The only place the stare never seemed to reach was inside the Dursleys' house itself - though Harry wasn't sure whether he preferred being watched by something that might want to eat him, or spending one more minute than necessary under that roof.
It went on for more than a week. A few more stares joined the first, one by one, though each of them vanished the instant Harry turned to check.
Then, suddenly, a new student named Grover Underwood joined his class - and once again, everyone acted as if this tall, limping boy had always been there.
Harry was sure he was either going properly mad, or the whole thing was some cult trying, for reasons he couldn't fathom, to recruit him. Though wasn't even considering the second option its own kind of madness?
Even though none of the other students seemed to find anything strange about their classmate's sudden appearance, they weren't kind to him either. Grover had some kind of leg condition that made it hard for him to walk properly, and none of the school's little groups wanted him - to the point that Dudley's gang sometimes picked him as their target, which made everyone else even less eager to be seen near him.
Harry recognised something of himself in that - in being the one nobody chose first, the one whose bruises everybody politely failed to notice. Since they were both outsiders, and since Harry had always wanted more friends than just a plush dolphin, some small part of him wanted to try.
Not that it mattered how many friends he made; Mr. Plum would always be his first, and nothing would make the dolphin any less important.
But even freaky Harry Potter found this newest student strange. Not because of his legs - Harry wasn't like Dudley, and refused to hold something against a person that they couldn't control.
No. Not because of that.
It was because Grover was always muttering things under his breath. Things like -
"My first task…"
"He's just like him…"
And, most worryingly of all -
"They're coming… I can smell it…"
Harry never worked out what, exactly, Grover thought he could smell. He decided he didn't want to know. Could anyone really blame Harry for wanting to keep his distance from someone who was almost certainly part of a cult?
Then again, normal people probably shouldn't reach for "cult" as their first explanation for anything. Shouldn't they?
The boy was fairly certain he was losing his marbles.
How else could he explain it, when a month later, already in December, Grover Underwood came sprinting at him waving a bronze knife, while both of them chased by a swarm of green snakes, each less than a metre long, hissing about a "tasty half-blood" between mouthfuls of green fire?
Harry didn't remember deciding to run. His legs simply did it for him, Mr. Plum clutched tight against his chest, while behind them the hedges Mrs. Figg was so proud of went up in flames one after another, like a fuse burning down the street.
Bloody hell!