Shadow Child
Mitry

Chapter One:
"..."

Harry Potter was not normal.

This was not so much an opinion as a fact of life.

There was something odd about him, something damaged. He never cried. Never moved. Sometimes Petunia would see him sitting in the corner and wonder if he had died in the night, and watched him for a moment to see if he was still breathing. Where her lively Dudley would scream and giggle and cry, Harry was silent as the night and still as the grave.

His eyes were unnatural. They were the same color as Lily's, the same shade of green, but they held none of the life that Lily's had sparkled with. They tended not to show any emotion at all. They were seemingly too- too- strange to be real. Like they were false, a product of some madman's imagination. Those strange eyes, and the boy, still and silent and unfading. Sometimes she would look at him out of the corner of her eye, and his eyes wouldn't appear to be green at all, but some shade of red.

Dudley was loud, almost to the point of being irritating. Harry was so silent that they had thought he was mute for a while. Dudley had learned to crawl very young, and learned to walk and run soon after. Harry had moved only when he needed to, and walked slowly on steady legs. Dudley was like his father and mother, blond-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked and beautiful. And Harry was the opposite of Lily. His eyes were dead, and his skin was an unhealthy pale shade next to that tangled mess of black hair.

When he was young, she had to set a timer to remember to change him and feed him. She had to put sticky notes on the fridge to remind her where he was. When he was hungry, thirsty, or tired, one could not tell the difference from when he was entirely content.

They had taken him to the doctor. Part of her hoped that he did, indeed, have a life-threatening condition, and could thus have an excuse when he died. For the first few months, she had tried mothering him, but found that the boy simply repulsed her. Vernon hated him as much as she did, and it would have been relieving if he had died and taken his weirdness with him to the grave. He frightened Dudley. He was so utterly void of anything childish or normal.

He learned words quickly. He learned to walk soon after. By the time he was two, she didn't have to take care of him at all. He ate little. He slept little.

And as each day passed, he became even stranger.

When Harry sleeps, he dreams.

His dreams varied. Sometimes he would have dreams that gave him a light feeling when he woke from them, like the feeling he got when he had slept and eaten well. He couldn't usually remember those dreams. Sometimes he would have dreams that didn't mean anything at all. And sometimes he would have dreams that made his heart beat faster in a strange way.

Those dreams usually involved a high, never-ending cackle, like a madman's laugh, and bursts of colored light all around him. He would dream of flying through the air without anything to support him. He would dream of snakes fighting one another in a big pit, and eating each other alive until just one snake remained in the pit, a huge cobra. And then, slowly but surely, the snake would turn and start eating itself, and Harry would feel strange inside, shivery and cold. It made his brain buzz inside and his eyes go wide.

Sometimes he would dream of a huge empty marble train station. It was all very stately and regal, with brick and metal trimming. There were ticket inspector booths, and train tracks stretching down in one direction as far as the eye could see, but there were no trains. There were no people, either. Just him, and the Other.

Sometimes the Other would send him away, and he would wander the station, opening doors and following the tracks, or just staring at the big clock, slowly ticking away. He would count seconds, minutes. 12,867. 12,868. 12,869. He once tried to walk out of the station by following the tracks, only to find that he didn't seem to be going anywhere. He tried to estimate the length of the track divided by the length of a pace to find out how many steps it should have been, before remembering that it was a dream and maths probably wouldn't work anyway.

But sometimes the Other would let him stay, and would brush out his tangled mess of hair by working his fingers through it. He would smooth his hands along the tangles until Harry slapped his hands away. The Other didn't seem to mind that. Sometimes he would amuse Harry by telling stories about witches and wizards and magic, or by playing games. He didn't seem to mind that Harry didn't talk to him, either.

When Harry sleeps, he dreams.

But mostly, he does not sleep.

By the time Harry is three, he knows that he is different.

He is very smart for a three-year-old; he sees what they think he does not notice.

He sees that his hair is too long, because his aunt does not like to touch him and therefore does not cut it with the kitchen scissors like she does with Dudley. He sees that when he enters a room, his uncle leaves. He sees that Dudley, so greedy with his playmates, will not take anything that Harry has touched. He sees that they are frightened of him, and they don't know why. His touch makes them go cold and shy away.

He sees that they do not like him, that they do not care for him. They shiver when he comes near. Sometimes Uncle Vernon makes to push him away, but stops, unable to touch this foreign child. When Dudley brings over playmates, they whisper about him. Weird eyes, they say. Creepy. Wrong. Too still. Too quiet. And he hears the disgust and fear in their hearts.

He hears things.

He hears voices. When he looks into their eyes, he hears the things that they do not say. He hears their fear, their repulsion, their urge to escape. When he looks into their eyes, he hears their thoughts and knows their hearts. He hears their hearts telling them to Run! Get away! Not natural! Wrong! And eventually, they all heed the warning and go.

He is shunted aside. He sleeps under the stairs in a dark cupboard, because when he is around other people, they feel strange and see the same things he does; the same dark memories and evil thoughts. He does not eat with the Dursleys at the kitchen table or watch the telly with them in the evening. He sits alone in his cupboard for hours and hours, staring into the black.

He doesn't mind, really. He understands. Because he isn't normal.

He feels the buzzing in his head and sees the gory visions pass over and over before his eyes, and sometimes he laughs, high and cold under his breath. Then he stops, because his own heart is telling him the same warning, over and over.

Over and over, he hears the warning in his own heart and cannot obey.

He cannot run from himself.

But that doesn't mean he can't try.

Harry turns four alone in his cupboard.

By now, he rarely sees his relatives. Uncle Vernon puts in longer hours at work, staying away from early morning until late at night. Dudley's friends no longer come to play, and instead he visits their homes, joins some sports teams at school. He stays at their houses at night, sometimes not coming home for over a week at a time. Aunt Petunia starts working part time as a receptionist.

Harry knows, though. He sees how haunted their eyes are when they look at him, and when he listens to their hearts, they whisper No more! Please... and he knows they can't stand it anymore.

The family isn't religious, but they make something up about teaching the value of Christian morals and they send him to the day care at the church, which is free and keeps him out of the house from 7 to 5.

Harry likes the day care center much better than the Dursleys' house. The children at the day care aren't old enough to notice his big, ratty T-shirts or his too-long hair. They let him play with them and they let him make crafts with them. They teach him the tune to the hymns they sing in class, and for a while, Harry is happier than he has ever been. He revels in it.

But eventually, when he looks into their eyes, when he listens to their hearts, he sees the old fears coming to haunt him again. He hears their hearts whispering to him, No. Wrong. Different. Too still, too quiet. His hair is too black, too long, too messy. His skin is too pale. They don't like it. They don't like him. His eyes are too wide, the color is wrong. The worst. He stares at them. He stares at everything.

Of course, Harry is used to this. And he doesn't cry when, slowly but surely, they stop playing with him. When they don't go near him anymore. He knows what it's like. He feels it too, the strangeness inside him. He understands why he is left alone during free time, and why they edge away from him during crafts. He tries to be normal, but the whispers of the heart do not abate.

He draws pictures of snakes, and they are unnervingly accurate.

Vernon had always hated the boy.

Oh, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, he supposed. The boy didn't fight or argue. He barely spoke at all. Sometimes, he seemed to know the effect he had on people and hid himself away. He was obedient, quiet, and polite enough. He tried his hardest to fit in, to be unnoticeable. He ate what was given, wore what was provided, never complained. He was compliant with the Dursleys' every wish. But he was different.

He was like a shadow.

He could try to hide, but Vernon still felt that sense of freakishness around him, reaching out and tainting others around him. Sometimes, when he looked at Vernon, his odd green eyes would appear to flash crimson. But that couldn't be right; after all, whenever Vernon blinked and got a better look they were back to that wrong shade of green. And he would stare at them. Maybe he didn't mean to, but he did. His gaze followed them, and whenever he caught the boy's eye for too long, he would feel a buzzing in his head and an urge to run away.

The boy played in the backyard. Vernon wasn't sure what he did back there, and he didn't want to find out. In any case, it was better if he stayed outside, always. When he was outside, the air inside wasn't so strained and tense. When he was outside, the Dursleys could breath properly once more, if only for a precious hour or two. There was something about that boy that was wrong.

He ruined things with his mere presence. He changed things. Vernon didn't think of the boy as a child anymore. He didn't even really consider the boy to be entirely human. He was part ghost, part human, and part something else entirely.

They couldn't keep him.

They had kept him for so long on the orders of that old fool from that place. They had kept him and fed him and clothed him. They had done as they were asked for four years now. But they couldn't carry on like this.

The boy was poison.

Harry has lived with his aunt and uncle and cousin for as long as he can remember. He is six now.

All the same, he is not upset.

"You're going away," he says wide green eyes staring out from underneath his black bangs. It isn't a question.

"That right," says Aunt Petunia jubilantly. "We're going far away, and we will never set foot in this place again!" She looks simply delighted as she tugs the last of her bags down the stairs. Harry knows that she is happy. She is very happy, not only to be leaving this house, but to be leaving her freakish nephew behind her at last.

"That's right," agrees Uncle Vernon. He, too, is happy. Harry saw him marking off the days on the calendar since two months ago.

Harry nods. "Where will I go?"

Uncle Vernon waves his hand. "We've found you an orphanage to stay at. It's a respectable establishment, good school program. We've put some money in an account for you."

Harry looks into his eyes and sees that this is true. He nods.

"We'll drop you off on the way. You won't need to bring anything, I've already packed for you," says Aunt Petunia. "You'll be fine there."

Harry sees no reason to argue, so he gets in the car. Most of the bags and boxes went in the moving van, but in his seat there is a satchel that looks like it has been hastily stuffed with clothing. Dudley sits in the back seat with him, but it is clear that his cousin is attempting to squish his bulk into the smallest space possible, so as not to accidentally bump into Harry. Harry's touch makes people cold.

The car ride is silent and tense, but they've only been riding for about thirty minutes when Uncle Vernon takes a turn and parks in a deserted lot.

Harry looks around; he sees nothing that looks like an orphanage.

"Now look here," says Uncle Vernon emphatically. "We will not be seen walking a boy your age into an orphanage of all places. Can you think what would happen if we saw someone we knew?"

Harry looks at him blankly but does not speak.

"It would be a scandal! Now, the orphanage is two blocks that way, and then one block to your left," he takes out a sheaf of papers and stuffs them into Harry's hands. "Give these to whatever receptionist or adult you find there. Got it?"

Harry nods. He understands that the Dursleys do not want to be near him any longer, and he sees that they do not want to be connected with him in any way. He hears it in their hearts, and he doesn't blame them.

And he walks down the sidewalk as the Dursleys' car pulls away. He doesn't find their actions cruel. To the contrary- they are doing exactly what he would do if he could. Harry is envious of them. He wants to run away too, if he could.

Harry likes the orphanage.

There are exactly two things which he prizes above all in this place. The first is a library. It is a bit of a shoddy affair, to be sure, but there are all sorts of books that he has never even heard of before. This immediately ranks it above the Dursleys' place and the day care in Harry's book: neither of those had more than a picture book or two.

For the first day, he is excused from classes. After a reluctant volunteer shows him around, he immediately goes to the library. There are shelves and shelves of books that were donated by various societies and associations, and most of them aren't really any good. But he delves into the boxes and studies every tome, and in these he finds a few precious treasures.

There is a copy of collected fairy tales, and a copy of Charlotte's Web, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. For the better part of a day, he sits in a corner of the library and reads, holding the books inches away from his eyes to account for his blurry eyesight. He reads these, and many others, but they do not sate his desire for new material.

By the time the clock shows eleven o'clock, he has perused most of the books on the shelves.

The girl who sits at the desk- hardly a librarian, she doesn't look older than sixteen- stares in surprise as the strange, small, black-haired, green-eyed boy comes up to her and asks if there are any more challenging books available for the residents of the orphanage.

He can't be more than six, so she shows him a few chapter books. Cam Jansen and the Triceratops Pops. Then, when he asks for something harder, The Hardy Boys. She encourages him to read some before refusing it.

He opens the book, glances at the first page, closes it, and recites it from memory in a monotone. His voice is completely wrong for a six year old, somehow. It isn't childish, it isn't boastful. It isn't even sarcastic. It's as if he is looking down at her from above and trying to get her to understand something very simple. She shivers and takes back the book.

When his fingers brush her skin, she feels cold.

She offers The Hobbit. He does take this one, and she feels a sense of relief as he walks away. She knows she oughtn't to feel that way about an innocent child, but there's just something wrong with him.

In half an hour, he's back asking for another.

She gives him a copy of The Lord of the Rings, a large tome with all of the three books compiled into one volume. This takes him an entire four hours to read. He appears a little more satisfied with that one.

To buy time- because she doesn't think that the poorly-funded library has any more challenging books- she asks him how he liked it.

In that quiet, odd, different voice, he tells her that he found it enjoyable. His eyes are weirdly green, and he stares at her in a way that is distinctly wrong for a six-year-old. His skin is pale, like a ghost. His long thing fingers grasp the spine of the book tenuously. She wants to make him go away, and wonders what would happen if she told him to- but she pushes that thought away.

His eyes grow wide, wider than wide, and he stares at her for a full minute. She wants to shy away from that cold gaze, but she can't seem to break eye contact. She is scared. He isn't right. He isn't whole. There's no way.

In a quiet, trembling voice, she asks if he wants another.

His gaze holds her there for a moment longer, and then he turns silently and walks away.

XXX

The second thing which he likes about the orphanage is the seemingly endless supplies of paper and pencils. There are stacks and stacks, and they give him as much as he likes so long as he doesn't waste it. To Harry, who is used to scavenging and scrimping for paper at the Dursleys, not having to draw on the edges of newsprint is a welcome change.

He takes three sheets of clean paper and a pencil so sharp that it hurts when he pricks himself, then curls up in a corner with a clipboard. He covers the paper with snakes. Vipers, cobras, rattlesnakes, water moccasins, diamondbacks, garter snakes, yellow rat snakes, king snakes, coral snakes, black racers, green mambas and milk snakes. He draws giant boa constrictors and tiny ring snakes. He draws snakes sleeping and he draws snakes attacking.

He draws their eyes. Their fangs, their scales. He draws and draws, covering all three pages entirely with snakes.

XXX

It isn't until that evening at dinner that he notices. That even the other unwanted kids don't want to be near him. They still shy away when he comes near. He still makes them uneasy and eats alone at dinner that night. The caretakers and the volunteers don't like him either. They give him less food than they do the others, and they make up excuses to have him sit in the corner, away from them.

It isn't until that night in bed that he realizes.

He had thought that after six years, he might have gotten over it, but the rejection hurts every bit as much as if it was new.

He likes his classes at the school. He hadn't gone to kindergarten or preschool like the other kids, but when they try to put him in with his age group, he finds that he already knows everything. What they are teaching the children his age seems silly, ridiculous. They give him a spelling test and he's certain that they're making fun of him. They give him words like 'kitten' and 'wiggle.'

They give him a maths test with addition and subtraction. He takes one look at it and asks for something harder, but they refuse. They act as though he's trying to get out of doing his work, and, frustrated, he tries to explain that he already knows all of this, but they laugh and don't seem to believe him. When he pleads a second time, they start to look irritated and become upset at him.

One teacher gives him a nasty look then, and replaces his test.

Harry looks at the test and feels happier; the questions are a bit harder and much more interesting. Some of them look like logic problems, like: If a=6, then what is the value of b in the equation a - 17 = b + 2?

It takes him a while to figure out the concept of variables, about two minutes. After that, he completes the entire thing in one minute thirty seconds and hands the test over. The teacher who gave him the test smiles mockingly before picking it up.

Harry sits at the little desk for a while longer, then starts as he hears his name being called.

He is told off for cheating.

Harry's eyes widen in surprise and he looks into the eyes of the teacher. Creepy kid, says the teacher without speaking, No way. Cheated. Not possible. Grade 7 test. Brat. How?

"I didn't cheat," he says. "It was easy."

In five minutes, he is put in a empty storeroom, alone except for the two teachers with him. His pockets are checked for a calculator and he sits in a chair facing an empty desk. One of the teachers tells him that this is going to be an oral test, and that he should let them know if it gets too hard for him. He nods, but does not speak. His voice frightens people, like the lady in the library.

This teacher is nice. Harry doesn't want to frighten her.

It starts off ridiculously easy. Five plus one. Six. Nine plus seven. Sixteen. Four plus sixteen. Twenty. Four minus two. Two. Sixteen minus seven. Nine. About twenty questions in, they start multiplication tables, then negatives. After that they have longer equations, like fourteen plus twenty-seven minus eight minus fifty plus seventeen. Zero.

This goes on for awhile longer. The teacher reads the question off of the paper, and Harry answers immediately after without skipping a beat. The numbers grow bigger, in the hundreds for addition and over twelve for multiplication. They start division.

In fifteen minutes, the teachers are aghast. She reads off the final question (22,763 times 3,223 divided by 2. Take your answer and subtract a quarter of the value. Give your answer in decimals to the hundredth place.) and Harry gives the answer in exactly two seconds of calculation (27,511,930.87)

They are momentarily silent.

"Is that all of the questions?" inquires Harry. The teachers are acting odd, and it frightens him. The test was exhilarating, but now he thinks that perhaps he did something wrong. Dread grows in his stomach. He doesn't want to go. He likes it here.

The female teacher puts on a smile, but it looks fake. "Why, yes, Harry dear. That is all of the questions. You got all of them right."

Harry is silent. He already knows this.

"Er, Harry?" she asks, faux-cheerful. "Could you tell me how you got those answers? Did you do the calculations in your head?"

"I didn't do anything to get them," Harry says, perplexed. "They just were."

"Could you elaborate on that, dear?"

"They were," Harry says emphatically. "Question 47: One hundred and twenty-five divided by twenty-five. The answer is five. I don't have to do anything to get them that way."

She nods and smiles, but he looks in her eyes and hears her heart whisper that she doesn't understand. He leaves when she dismisses him, but goes to the library instead of waiting outside the room like she asks. Her face smiles at him but her heart is repulsed.

Sometimes he gets tired of being repulsive.

He's always been like that.

He hears things that other people don't. He supposes that it's just one of his other attributes, like his pale skin and his eyes. He has to widen his eyes even more to see, because his eyesight is getting so bad. It helps a little, but it makes his eyes seem even more different and strange. He's always been different, in more ways than just his appearance, although that in itself doesn't help at all.

He's small for his age, and very thin. He eats and exercises little, and sleeps even less than that. His hair, always so messy, was down to his shoulders. From underneath, though he tries to hide them under his bangs, there are two further abnormalities: a crooked white scar like a bolt of lightning and his unnaturally, unbearably, impossibly green eyes. His skin is pale from too much time spent indoors in the dark.

And then there are the dreams.

There are three that reoccur regularly, although they aren't always exactly the same. The first gives him an exhilarated feeling. He laughs, high and cold, and there are screams and flashes of green light. He isn't sure why this would make him feel exhilarated, but it doesn't frighten him at all. It makes him feel powerful in an unwholesome, violent sort of way.

The second is the dream of the pit of snakes. There are all different kinds, all fighting each other, eating one another alive. This goes on for minutes, until there's finally that last snake, slowly and inexorably devouring itself while he can't tear his eyes away. That was the worst nightmare, the one that made him bolt upright with sweaty palms and harsh breathing, and a pounding heart and spasming fingers.

The last dream varied much more than the first two. He was always in that great empty train station with the Other, but that was the only thing that remained the same. Sometimes he thought that this dream was his subconscious plea for acceptance in society and a normal childhood. The Other was odd, too. And the best part was that the Other was never, ever afraid of him.

But the last strange ability is something that even he didn't understand.

For his entire life, Harry has heard two different types of speech. First is the speech that people speak out loud, with tongue and teeth and vocal cords. Everyone else hears this speech too, and in that way he is normal, at least.

The second type is something that other people don't hear. He hears it when he looks into other people's eyes and listens. He calls this the whispers of the heart, the voice that people have coming from inside of them. Sometimes this voice says the same thing as what the people say. More often than not, it doesn't. He soon figured out that it was those people who were lying.

It was only recently that he supposed that he might be reading minds.

This night, Harry goes to sleep.

In his dream, he finds himself in the station. As always, he is under the big clock in the station, the one with Roman Numerals and decorative wrought-iron curlicues decorating the outside. Brick barriers separated the platforms on either side, and the floor is made entirely of rich, beautiful white marble. There are windows high up letting in sunlight, even though it should be dark now.

And as always, the waiting bench across from him is occupied.

The Other looks up in surprise. He is about eleven years old, give or take a few, and he wears strange dark robes trimmed in green.

Harry walks over and sits next to the Other. He doesn't speak.

"Hello," greets the Other. "I haven't seen you in a while."

The Other reaches out and smooths out Harry's too-long, too-messy hair. Instead of slapping the Other's hands away like he usually does, Harry leans into the touch. It has been much too long since he had has any real contact with another human, and he finds himself stupidly wishing that someone would give him a hug, like they did with normal children. It was idiotic, but he couldn't seem to stop.

If the Other is surprised, he does not show it. "How have things been?" he asks quietly. "Did you make any friends?"

Harry looks at the Other with bright green eyes and a face that says nothing. The Other seems to see something in his eyes and sighs. He tugs Harry over to him so that Harry leans against his side, and then puts his arms around the boy.

"Would you like me to tell you a story?"

Harry is silent for a moment. "They left me," he says. "I thought I wasn't upset about it, but I am. I don't even miss them at all. It's just the principle of the thing." He holds on to the Other's arms with a tight grip.

"I'm sorry," says the Other. "I'm sorry."

"Would you leave me too, if you could?" asks Harry. Then he closes his eyes and concentrates. "Of course you would," he laughs bitterly. "I would leave myself too, if I had the choice." He still does not pull away.

The Other, however, freezes for a moment. Then he pulls the six-year-old entirely into his lap, stroking his hair with one arm and holding him with the other. Harry leans desperately into his touch, so starved for contact that he can't summon the willpower to move away. They sit there for hours as the clock ticks away, on the bench in the empty white train station.

The last thing Harry remembers is so bizarre he thinks it must have been a figment of his imagination: A low whisper.

"I will never, ever leave you. I will protect you forever."

End Chapter One