When a teacher seized every opportunity to insult and diminish you, effort felt pointless.
Yet Harry still believed Potions mattered.
The weekend after that first disaster he collected Neville, commandeered an empty classroom, and the two of them began teaching each other the coursework.
He invited Ron as well; the redhead laughed until he nearly fell over at the mere suggestion of extra work.
Within a few weeks Neville and Harry had made solid progress, and Harry privately cackled whenever he imagined the end-of-term exams and the expression that would cross Snape’s face.
Transfiguration and Charms, while fascinating in principle, struck him as an extravagant waste of energy.
He finally voiced the thought during the Halloween lesson.
“Professor, why use a charm for this when a rune would be simpler and far more permanent?” Harry asked while the rest of the class struggled to levitate their feathers.
“It would be rather difficult to etch a rune onto a feather, Mr Potter,” Professor Flitwick replied with a chuckle.
“Besides, runes are far too advanced for a first-year course.”
“True, you can’t etch it onto the feather itself. Still, it seems silly to memorise such a precise wand movement when I can draw and link a rune in a few seconds instead. Here—watch.”
Harry slid his feather aside, inked a quick Flight rune onto a scrap of parchment, then added a small Synchronisation rune and a Feather rune intertwined with it.
Less than half a minute later he touched his wand to the paper and energised the cluster.
The feather rose neatly from the desk and hovered for a full five seconds.
Then the parchment containing the cluster burned to ash.
Harry scowled at the smoking remains.
“Stupid paper. Horrible conductor. I should have torn a strip from my robes instead—that would have lasted at least a minute.” He sighed as the feather drifted back down.
“Well, it made the point, didn’t it?”
Looking up, he found Professor Flitwick staring at him with eyes bulging, mouth agape, and one hand clenched so tightly around his wand that the knuckles had gone white.
The entire small body had gone rigid.
Harry had seen that expression often enough on the faces of his relatives.
The Freak had revealed himself again. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
He blinked hard and began mentally tracing the most complex runes he knew, forcing the rising heat behind his eyes to subside.
He would not cry in class.
He had stopped crying years ago.
It was not going to happen now.
“Mr Potter, how… how did you…?”
Before
Flitwick could finish, Hermione’s clear voice corrected Ron’s pronunciation several seats away, and her feather soared upward.
“Five points to Gryffindor for excellent spell-work, Miss Granger,” the professor said without once looking away from Harry.
He opened his mouth again just as Seamus Finnigan’s feather detonated in his face.
Flitwick shook his head and hurried off to check that the boy was unharmed.
Harry exhaled slowly and released the mental exercises.
I should have known better than to ask questions.
I’ll keep the clusters private and study the ordinary material with everyone else for now.
The bell rang.
Harry seized his bag and left with Neville and Ron before Flitwick could intercept him.
He would not let the Freak surface again—not here, not among people who had known and liked his parents, not in front of someone his mother had once admired.
“She’s mental! Mental, I tell you!” Ron prattled beside him. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
Harry nodded absently, barely listening.
“Levi-OH-sa, not Levi-oh-SAH! Bossy little know-it-all! Why can’t she mind her own business for once? No wonder she hasn’t any friends. No one will ever put up with her!”
Hermione pushed past Harry’s shoulder.
The sound of muffled sniffling cut through his thoughts.
“Hermione?” She was already sprinting down the corridor and vanished before he could do more than reach out a hand.
Frowning, he turned to Ron.
“What did you say to her?”
“Weren’t you listening? I only told the truth. Not my fault if she overheard.”
“That was really mean, Ron,” Neville said quietly from Harry’s other side.
“She was only trying to help. And she was right.”
“She should mind her own business!” Ron’s face had flushed the colour of his hair.
“I didn’t ask for her help and I didn’t need it! She’s too bossy. Thinks she knows everything just because she’s top of the class and hands in twice the homework. If she wants to cry about it, serves her right. Maybe now she’ll stop making the rest of us look bad!”
Harry stopped dead.
The rest of the class flowed around him.
A few steps later Ron and Neville turned back to find him standing motionless in the middle of the corridor.
His hands clenched; his teeth ground together.
“You.” He stepped forward, mouth curling into a snarl, and jabbed a finger into the redhead’s chest—forgetting entirely that his wand was still in his hand, or that it had begun to glow.
“You want her to make herself dumber so she doesn’t outshine lazy idiots like you.” His voice was ice.
Neville edged quickly away from Ron, fumbling for his own wand, uncertain which of them he ought to cover.
“You’re jealous that she’s better than you. That she actually understands the subject while you can’t be bothered to try. How dare you. Dudley was bad enough. I can’t do anything about him yet—but I can do something about you.” Harry thrust his hand forward, still unaware of the wand.
“You stay the hell away from Hermione. And stay the hell away from me.”