Prologue.

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"Is it just me," Amy Benson asked, "Or has that cat been staring at us since forever?"

Dennis Bishop looked behind her, and yes, there was a black cat with eerie green eyes sunning itself on the street. It noticed him looking and gave him a slow cat-smile.

He turned away, visibly disturbed.

They ran back to tell Mrs Cole. She didn't believe either of them when they told her about it, but after a lot of begging, Mrs Cole promised to come out and take a look at it. "Shoo, cat, shoo!" she said, and it ran away.

"What a strange cat it is," she said sarcastically. "Has Tom been telling you stories again?" They shook their heads - no one spoke to Tom if they could help it.

It was back there again the next morning.

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Chapter 1.

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"There you are," Petunia said. "We're going to London tomorrow, so you need to pack your things by tonight."

Harry shook the grass from his hair. There was dirt smudged all over his face, hands and feet, but he'd wash up later. "Why are we going to London?"

"That's where you're going to school. Here's your ticket. If you want any questions answered, don't talk to me," Aunt Petunia said, and walked back into the house.

She gave him a ticket that said station 9 and 3/4's. There was an accompanying letter saying 'Hogwarts, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry' and a copy of a note that said 'Yes, he's going, stop sending your bloody owls already!' Witchcraft, he wondered. Owls? Robes? Wands? Cauldrons? Harry scanned the letter - he didn't have any of the things on the list, but he never usually had the items for school anyway. He'd have to borrow from the teachers again.

Harry began to grin with delight. His hands were shaking with excitement. After summer, he'd always had to go back to the same boring routine as usual, but this - this was starting to sound like a new adventure quest for yours truly. Collecting information! Finding resources! Evading enemies! An adventure into the unknown was always the best kind of adventure, and it was the sort of thing he excelled in.

"Thank you, Aunt Petunia!" he yelled, running to his cupboard. Best. Belated. Birthday-present. Ever.

:::

Harry was magic. It wasn't a new fact - Harry had known this already, and it felt like he'd known this forever, but there was always the possibility that his cat-adventures were really just very vivid comas that lasted three months. It wasn't until he got his Hogwarts letter that he could finally confirm that yes - he was magic.

As a younger boy, he had tried to question his teachers about his special ability several times. When he asked 'what animal do you turn into?', they would say 'I would like to turn into a lion, or a wolf, or a pigeon, or a crab.' He would repeat his question - 'but what animal do you actually turn into?' and they would correct his word choice - 'what animal would you actually 'like' to turn into, don't forget the 'like', Harry.'

He tried to explain further. He told all of them about his little cat-adventures; about how he really was a kitten named Lightning, and he told them about Sarah, the lovely young girl in petticoats and stockings who liked to feed him and wrap him in fur coats. It was her - not the teachers - who'd taught him how to read. They all smiled at him, told him he had a very good imagination or interesting dreams, and wrote 'child has a minor obsession with cats' in all their report letters back home. The Dursleys never read those.

Eventually, Harry would come to the conclusion that all his teachers were stupid. It explained why they still tried to ask him where his summer homework was after he clearly explained that he'd had cat paws and so, wouldn't have been able to complete it, and it also explained why they didn't seem to realise that Harry did all of Dudley's homework during the term.

It wasn't just the teachers though. The Dursleys didn't seem to realise that he disappeared for three months of every year either. After the third moon, Harry would find himself back in the Dursley's lawn, and Aunt Petunia would let him inside the house and tell him to do dishes without asking any questions.

It was an epidemic. Harry vowed to never become that stupid. He did realise though, that if the other children were learning how to do things in the summer, he'd better find a way to do them too or he'd fall behind.

:::

The cat appeared outside Tom's window one day. It was a black cat, with a distinctive white bit of fur shaped like a lightning bolt on its head, and Tom only knew about it because he'd overheard two of his neighbours talking about it during breakfast. Apparently it'd been spotted in various places around the orphanage for about a week.

It disappeared before dinner and Tom dismissed his sighting of the cat. Cats weren't very important to him. Instead, he took out the 'Magical Theory' book he'd bought second-hand from Diagon Alley and began to read that for leisure. The dinner bell rang, interrupting Tom in the middle of a chapter, and he was forced to stop his reading to grab food.

When Tom got back, the cat was on his bed, looking at his textbook and apparently absorbed by the wand-movements for Alohomora.

Tom silently pulled out the bread-knife he'd hidden underneath a plank of wood, and slowly crept towards the cat - because if it was stupid enough to pick his room out of all others, it was practically begging for it - and then saw the cat use its paw to flick the page.

"What," Tom said, because that was not normal cat behaviour. He hissed at Nagini to go and bite it. The cat hissed right back at his snake.

'Cat is not tasty', it'd said. 'Tell master.' Nagini nodded and repeated the cat's words at Tom.

Tom thought about what to do next. Although he found the thought of a talking cat strangely odd, he knew he'd been talking to the snakes and they'd been talking back to him for the longest of times. With the discovery of magic and Professor Dumbledore's recent trip to the orphanage, Tom knew logically that there had to be other odder things in the world. He only found it strange because the neighbourhood cats had never talked to him before - or maybe it was that he wasn't able to understand them before. He had to check first.

"You can talk?" he asked the cat. The cat looked up, as in in surprise, and meowed something in a questioning sort of tone at Tom.

"Don't play games with me," Tom said, a little bit angry now. "You just told Nagini not to bite you!"

The cat quirked it's head and considered Tom for a moment. Then it began hissing again. 'It's because I can talk to snakes. I speak their language as well,' it said. 'Do you know that language? Can you understand me?'

Tom stared for a moment. There was his confirmation.

"So you are - a cat that can talk to snakes."

'You can understand me!' it replied, doing a happy little wiggle. 'And yes, the snakes and I have been friends for the longest of times.'

Tom threw a look at Nagini. She gave the snake equivalent of a small shrug. 'Is true,' she told him. 'Cat knows human-speak as well. Knows tricksy words. Cat tells snakes when humans are coming. Master is not always there.'

'Sorry, I didn't realise you were speaking snake. It all sounds like English to me, you see.' the cat added, apologetically.

"And does a cat understand magic as well," Tom said, waving a hand at his textbooks. "I find that a little harder to believe."

'That's because I'm not always a cat. Sometimes I'm a boy too. But I'm mostly a cat, just a cat-who-can-turn-into-a-boy. I saw Professor Dumbledore walk in here, and I knew, I knew that one of the children had to be magical like me, but I wasn't sure which one,' it replied.

'I can't turn back during the summer, but I need to get the summer reading done, or Professor Snape will kill me. He really will.'

Ah. That made more sense. Tom reluctantly put the knife away; he'd always wanted to see inside a cat, but that would have to wait until he caught one of the neighbourhood ones, he supposed.

"You can read the books while I'm not here," Tom said, crawling onto his bed. "But you'll have to tell me all about Hogwarts in return."

The cat nodded and waved its tail. 'Fine by me.'

:::

The house at number four, Privet drive, Surrey Hills was normally just as plain and as ordinary as any other that might've existed on the street, but today, it was being watched carefully by people who seemed to be celebrating an early Halloween.

"I can't see him," Professor McGonagall said. "Has anyone seen him outside all day?"

Fred and George had come and visited the Dursleys after Ron and Hermione complained that Harry hadn't written a single response to any of their many letters. After half an hour of circling the house in their borrowed car, they'd tried to sneak into the house. They didn't find him. The Dursleys told them that Harry wasn't home, and if they caught the twins sneaking through their house again, they'd call the muggle police.

After that, Fred and George had gone straight to their mother, and then Professor McGonagall.

It turned out that Headmaster Dumbledore had a contact who lived nearby; a squib by the name of Mrs Figgs. She said that she hadn't seen hair or hide of him all summer. When Dumbledore heard, he cut short his meeting with the Flamels, intent on paying a personal visit to the household.

Professors McGonagall, Snape, Flitwick, Sprout and Hagrid all did a thorough sweep of the house. Aside from finding a few old clothes and a mattress underneath the cupboard, there was no sign that Harry had been in the house at all.

"Where is Harry Potter?" Professor Snape was shaking the thread-bare and blood-spotted blanket they'd found inside the cupboard at Petunia Dursley. "If he turns up dead—"

Petunia replied, voice sharp and bitter. "Isn't he with the rest of you freaks?"

"No," Professor McGonagall replied slowly. "No, he isn't with 'the rest of us freaks'."

"He disappears for three months every year. Not our business what devil hooligans he gets up to," Vernon interceded.

The professors looked at each other.

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A/N: Yes, I'm doing the obligatory catfic that every slash writer does. Yes, I've had this since forever. Yes, I know it's embarrassing. :P