1: Mind Over Hatter

"Potter, Harry."

Harry ignored the stares and whispers. They weren't all that bad, and he knew they'd only be happening for the first few weeks. He hoped, at least.

Suddenly his was on the stool, and he wondered why he hadn't noticed sitting down. Then he dismissed the question; that always happened.

The hat was placed on his head, and while his face showed exactly as much emotion as it had since he'd spoken to his only close friend in Surrey, his mind was almost a literal whirlpool.

"Good lord," the hat said in his head. Its exclamation was lost in the mental rendition of several different songs, which clashed horribly with each other.

"I'm male and prefer to just be called Hat," the hat answered around six dozen half-formed questions, but more just took their place. The only reason he wasn't swamped by them was because all the other plans and ideas and music and broken images kept the questions away. "How do you function?"

"I'm male too," said a voice. "Then again, that's pretty obvious, or not so obvious I suppose, since I could just be a girl pretending to be a guy for no particular reason. I function because I don't care how messed up my thoughts are. I'm not a hat though, how do you function?"

"Magic," the hat grumbled, and was suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of death and hate and humour and "Merlin, why do you exist?!"

"Merlin isn't here," Harry Potter said through the cacophony of his thoughts. "Only me. This is where you sort me."

Several hundred terrifyingly creepy chuckles echoed at some inside joke - and at that thought, more joined them - and the hat felt a shiver go down its spine.

"Or lack of," Harry commented, and the laughter welled up, from different voices this time.

"You can't do that!" The hat sputtered indignantly, stiffening when the voices came up with many more descriptors for that same action. "You can't read my mind, I'm supposed to read your mind! I don't even technically have a mind, so how are you doing that?! I'm not. You seem to be adopting my thought process," Harry said, but this time the hat felt like he'd answered his own question.

"FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS MAGICAL, GRYFFINDOR!"

Schooling the very slight smirk into a perfectly blank mask, Harry cackled in his mind and absently plotted the simultaneous death of Dumbledore, Voldemort, the hat and Scabbers the rat.

He dismissed the plan. That would involve too many rats for none of them to have some contagious disease, and he was sure he didn't know where to get a bingo machine.

Harry ignored the stares. They were doing that before anyway. Instead, he looked up at the staff table and locked eyes with each staff member in turn. Most of them shivered, and the headmaster and some pale, black haired guy turned a very ill shade of grey.

Interesting.

This is just a quick series for when I don't feel like making anything else.