This is a translation of my OS "Poufsouffle". If you're fluent in French, go read the original version and spare yourself the many mistakes I've made while translating :)
If anyone is willing to help me correct this OS, please let me know, I'm always trying to improve my English!
Have you ever heard of the Butterfly Effect?
A seven-year-old Harry Potter sits at the back of the classroom. It's the worst possible place for him: taller children hide the blackboard from view and his glasses, not strong enough for his eyes, turn the words into blurry lines of chalk anyway.
He wants to sit in the front row, as close as possible to the teacher. The teacher is nice to him. She always congratulates him when he answers her questions correctly. She's nothing like his aunt; Petunia calls him an idiot when he doesn't answer and an insolent brat when he does.
He used to be such a good student too! There was even a day when the teacher told him to stay after class. She had looked at him, kind blue eyes that made him feel all warm and happy, and had asked a lot of questions. He… hadn't known the answer to most of them, actually-what is an IQ test? Why would he see a sykologist? But the teacher hadn't been angry with him, so it was probably okay.
Now that he's retreated to the back of the room, things have changed a lot. The words on the blackboard have gotten harder and harder to read. How's he supposed to copy the lesson when he can barely make out the words?
It's not that he has given up, no! Harry Potter doesn't give up like that. It's just that, well, lessons are like his old wool sweater: everything is alright when the threads hold, but when you cut too many of them, the whole sweater falls apart.
It's a pity. He liked the grey sweater.
When the teacher asks him a question, he's not so sure of his answer anymore. It breaks him to see her so disappointed but what can he do? Go back to the front row?
He sees Dudley flip him off from his seat and shudders. No, no front row for him. He doesn't like disappointing the teacher but he'd be a fool to allow Dudley at his back.
Harry keeps walking the path of a mediocre student, burying deeper and deeper the sharp intelligence Lily Potter left him.
We've all read the same story. One day, the malnourished boy in his cupboard under the stairs receives the strangest letter-written on parchment of all things with an emerald green ink that reflects light in a thousand bright colours…
But this time, something has changed.
Dudley's merry band of bullies beats up another boy. Harry wants to help him, he does, but he already tried once and Dudley hit him instead. Harry's not like the other boy, he can't run from Dudley. The boy can change schools. Harry can't.
So Harry lowers his eyes and hates himself for it.
Did you expect anything else? He's only eight. Justice, bravery, courage-he's heard of them all, but they're values too big for him, too huge for his developing brain.
A nine-year-old Harry Potter sits at the back of the classroom. He's become a permanent resident of the last row. That's how the new teacher knows him, he thinks: the kid who sits at the back of the room, the skinny boy wearing baggy clothes.
(Maybe the teacher wonders why Dudley Dursley has fat on his bones and ironed shirts over his skin while little Harry is the skinniest child she's ever taught and only ever wear second-hand clothing. Maybe she calls the director, who knows, and maybe the director starts wondering too.
There might even be a call to the NSPCC-I'm quite sure, yes, he's technically their nephew but sometimes it feels like the poor boy is straight out of a Dickens novel…
And maybe on a bright spring morning, a strange man wearing an even stranger black dress enters the director's office unannounced. He says he's very sorry, that Harry Potter's security relies on his blood ties to his Aunt, and the director is about to call the police when the man raises a stick of wood and whispers some pseudo-Latin.)
Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't; neither the director nor the school teacher remember.
Harry never learns about any of it. He just goes on living. True, his meals are nothing next to Dudley's, his chores take far too much time and what passes for his bedroom makes him feel a bit claustrophobic, but well. He's used to it.
He's never known anything else.
He only wishes that he could sit in the front row: he likes the new teacher and the way she sometimes speaks as if her pupils were much older than nine years old.
Have you ever heard of the Butterfly Effect?
An accident on the Victoria Line forces the teacher's husband to stop at Highbury instead of Oxford Circus. What better way to spend time than to read? He buys a magazine with a ridiculous lime green cover that promises a revolutionary analysis of Milgram's infamous experiment. What a preposterous claim, the man thinks, and reads on anyway because it's not like he's got anything else to do.
He talks about it with his wife afterwards. First she laughs, then she thinks: wouldn't it make a good lesson? No, it wouldn't-what nine-year-old could understand the finer points of pathological obedience to authority?
She still plans her lesson. The kids won't benefit from the lecture but she will; she needs something more intellectual than what her pupils could understand. She likes children, she does, but she should've gone for secondary school teacher instead of primary. Dumbing down everything so her audience doesn't fall asleep is more exhausting that she used to believe.
When she gives her lecture, the kids soon lose interest. They're not even ten, you see, and moral considerations are so boring!
Three of them will listen till the end, though. Two the teacher expected; the third she didn't.
Not that she's going to complain. Capturing the attention of the skinny kid in baggy clothes is an accomplishment.
The test is as follows: two subjects volunteer for an experiment which will evaluate how pain influences memorisation. Do light electric shocks help remember a list of words?
The subjects draw. One of them go sit in the chair and is given the list of words, the other stays in front of the buttons. He's told he is to administer the shocks, ranging from 45 to 450 volts. Near the maximum voltage stands a warning: dangerous!
So the experience begins. Invariably, the man in the chair forgets some words and the man with the buttons sends the shocks. Light shocks first, then stronger and stronger and stronger until the man with the buttons starts hesitating. Isn't it too much for an experiment?
Not for the scientist who asks him to keep going. The man in the chair disagrees. Enough, he's had enough, he withdraws his consent!
Keep going, says the scientist.
Now tell me: will the man with the buttons obey? Will he send the shocks, stronger and stronger and stronger until he reaches the red button that reads danger?
Will he obey authority?
None of it's true, of course. It's all a play, there are no shocks and the man in the chair is part of the staff; the one true subject is the man pushing the buttons.
Here's the real question: how far will someone go when ordered by an authority figure? How many will push the red button, knowing in their heart of hearts that they're wrong but submitting to whoever's in charge?
Psychiatrists had said one out of a thousand. The average maximal shock, they had said, would be around 150 volts.
Reality begged to differ. Out of forty subjects, twenty-five-62,5%- pushed the red button; nervous, sweating, muttering protests, they pushed it. The average maximal shock was 360 volts.
You don't have to be evil to do evil.
When Harry Potter leaves the classroom, nothing has changed and everything is different.
He's not evil, he's not not not not but those people weren't either. Does it matter, in the end? The children who watched him get beaten up by Dudley aren't evil, he knows, and he still wished they had done something.
I should, he thinks cautiously, do good things and not easy things.
It's just his luck that for him, good things are also the hardest things.
It only takes two days for Dudley and his friends to find another victim. She's cute with her curly blond hair and chubby face. A little angel wearing a light blue dress.
Harry grinds his teeth. He shakes, he sweats, he wants to puke and his brain is giving him so many excuses not to go Dudley will beat you again Uncle Vernon will be so mad let someone else go they won't be punished like you'll be…
The good thing, not the easy thing, Harry thinks, and goes help the girl.
The good thing, not the easy thing.
Good, not easy.
It becomes his motto. It's not the best motto in the world, sure, but it's his and he'll stand by it.
Dudley's furious, of course. Yet when Harry goes to bed that night, with his entire body hurting so much he's not sure he can sleep, his heart feels lighter than ever.
He's done it.
He's fought his demons and won.
From then on, Harry always helps the children Dudley hurts. It becomes easier with time, a habit that makes him black and blue and insanely proud of himself.
He used to be afraid of his cousin's tantrums. Now they make him angry. Accidents happen more and more: not against Dudley himself, because Harry still fears his aunt and uncle, but what can Petunia do when a boy Dudley insulted reappears on the other side of the school? What can Vernon do when the doll his son stole is suddenly in the arms of her true owner?
The first month is the hardest. Dudley's been taught that weird things are Harry's fault and that Harry should get punished for them. He dutifully reports to his father every strange event and gets oral permission to beat the freakiness out of his cousin. But even the fat boy tires of Harry's unnatural resistance. Besides, the teachers are starting to narrow their eyes at him and his own mother tells him to stop, or else the neighbours will notice and that boy is not worth, no he's not!
Harry rides the high of victory. He sits in the front row again, and nevermind the paper pellets that rain on his back! An eraser misses him and hits the teacher instead; Phil, one of Dudley's crew, gets punished. The paper pellets stop.
Harry follows the lessons again. He soon becomes the teacher's pet. He's brilliant; he works hard; he's the epitome of the good kid.
"What's there not to like?" the teacher tells her husband.
It's not the end of the story. It's only the beginning.
A gigantic man with the nicest smile shows Harry a universe filled with magic, literally, and the little boy cries like a baby when he realises his parents were not alcoholics who died in a car crash.
He boards the Hogwarts Express and meets a boy named Ron Weasley. A girl with wild hair asks if they've seen a toad-"A boy called Neville's lost his", she says. They haven't, but she still stays long enough to ask them about the spells they know.
She leaves the compartment. It feels a bit like watching a tornado go. Ron snorts and says something mean-what eleven-year-old boy likes having an eleven-year-old girl insult his skills with a wand?
And Harry, Harry is about to agree with his first friend ever when he remembers his motto.
Good, not easy.
"If I lost Hedwig, I'd be really anxious too", he says by way of explanation.
When he closes the door behind him, it's only Hermione's wild hair that helps him find her.
- Wait! I can help you find the toad!
Professor McGonagall puts the Sorting Hat on his head. Harry swallows nervously. Being watched by so many children is unnerving, he thinks, but he keeps his chin up and his emotions hidden. He'll show them that he belongs here. This world, this amazing world filled with colours and magic, it's his too now!
Plenty of courage, I see, whispers a deep voice inside his head.
Harry can't help it: he jumps. Or rather he tries to, because his body just won't answer his brain.
Ah, that? A little spell so you won't drop me while I Sort you. But let's go back to you… You could be great, you know, it's all here in your head…
Harry has met Draco Malfoy. He's intelligent, yes, but he's still an eleven-year-old as familiar with hasty judgements as any other. So he closes his eyes and repeats like a chant: Not Slytherin, not Slytherin, everything but Slytherin!
Are you sure? Slytherin would help you on your way to greatness, there's no doubt about that!
Not Slytherin, Harry keeps praying.
Alright then… Not Slytherin. Where, though? You're a bright boy indeed and you don't dislike learning, yet Ravenclaw would be singularly ill-fitted…
Harry wants to ask why but the Sorting Hat doesn't stop.
And then there's Gryffindor. Yes, you would fit well in Gryffindor: such courage in one so young, that is not something common. You do what you believe is good, young Potter. My noble creator very much wanted such a quality in his Lions. Yet I wonder…
Harry can't move. Hermione's a Gryffindor, and so is Ron. Hagrid's let it slip that his parents were, too.
But he's not sure. Courage is important, of course, and you need courage to be truly good, but Dudley has courage too when he confronts teachers and Harry's pretty sure his cousin is not good.
What matters more, he thinks: to be brave or to be good?
Truth be told, Harry is tired of being alone. He very much wants to be good but once, just once, he'd like to have other good people around to guide him. People who will be nice to him, people who'll be loyal to him: the orphan wants a family.
I see, I see. That makes the choice obvious, doesn't it? Go, son of Lily, to the House so many forget, and endeavour to make it great again.
Nobody believes their eyes when the Sorting Hat announces its choice.
"HUFFLEPUFF!"
Have you heard of the Butterfly Effect?
Thank you for reading! Hufflepuff deserves much more love than it gets, if only for being the House of badasses such as Tonks or Diggory.
(And I want to read a Hufflepuff!Harry mentor!Diggory fiction. If anyone knows one, hit me up)