Harry Potter knew that something wasn't right about him.
Apart from the whole his parents were dead thing.
He first noticed when his hair managed to grow back after Aunt Petunia had cut his it almost all off - within a night. It happened again almost a week later, when she attempted it again. Then, when she tried to force him into one of Dudley's old, unworn sweaters - and it was brown and orange, she must have bought it just to spite him - it managed to shrink gradually until it was somehow the size of a small hand puppet. Aunt Petunia tried to brush it off, saying it must have shrunk in the wash, and Harry didn't argue the point.
Even if that one could be explained, Harry definitely could not work out how he managed to land on the school roof when he was running on the playground a second previously. He decided that there was no reasonable explanation - it had to be magic.
So something wasn't right about Harry Potter, he thought on the way into the library, and that meant something had to be done to hide it.
"Alandra," Harry whispered quietly as he walked up to the desk, handing back the copy of The Two Towers he'd kept hidden in his cupboard for the past three days, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Of course."
"If you've got a talent you think is really good, but you can't do it very well, how do you get better at it?"
"Practise." Alandra looked thoughtful for a second, before smiling at him. "You like your books on magic, don't you?" She walked to one of the shelves, before pulling one off and handing it to him. "Maybe this one will help."
Harry looked at the title curiously. Matilda. It was worth a try. He gave her a small smile. "Thank you."
The book might have been for children, but it did give Harry some pretty good ideas on how to improve his magic.
Once he got home, Petunia set him to cleaning the upstairs bathroom, giving him the perfect opportunity to get into Dudley's second bedroom to steal a few of his pencils without any of the Dursley's noticing him, and he stuck them in the oversized pockets of his trousers while he waited to go back to the cupboard.
That night, he sat cross-legged on the bed, laying the pencils out in front of him on top of the blanket, brushing away any pieces of dirt around them. He stared at the first one in the line, picturing it moving away from the others, rolling over and over towards the wall as he wished it. It didn't move.
He tried again, scrunching his eyes shut tight as he focused on the pencil. He could feel it somehow, lying in front of him, as if his hand was already on it, but it wouldn't move. He tried moving the hand he could feel reaching out…
Why wouldn't this work?
Then… He felt it. It felt like a light, at the back of his mind, just out of sight, thrumming with energy. Harry kept his focus on it, letting it continue pulsing with a light that somehow matched his own heartbeat, and it had a sense of… rightness to it that stopped him from pulling away. Maybe this was what he needed to get his magic to work? This energy- or whatever it was?
Harry pulled at it, dragging it to the front of his mind as best he could, and it stayed. He could see it clearly now; the energy seemed to be flickering, switching rapidly between a rainbow of colours too fast for him to discern clearly, but it was beautiful. There was no other way to describe it. This had to be it, had to be what he was looking for.
He moved his attention, keeping half on the energy, half of it on the set of pencils in front of him, and focused, again, on making it move. He pulled at the energy, wishing for it to direct the pencil towards the wall, pushing it away from him, and opened his eyes slowly.
He had done it.
Harry made sure to practise every night from then on. Within a week, he could move three of the pencils at the same time. By the next, he could move five, in separate directions. Through the third, he learnt to move them in any direction, from any place, without watching, even summoning them from the floor into his hand. By the fourth, he could unlock the lock on the cupboard door without making a sound, and he could sneak out each night to the kitchen to take some food from the cupboards in under a minute in complete silence.
After all, if he was going to be given magic, he might as well use it.
The garden was coldest in the mornings, hidden in shadow by the fences and houses blocking the sun. So it was no surprise at all that Aunt Petunia decided that it was the best time to get him to do the weeding. The knees of his trousers soaked wet and stained green by frosted grass just as the sun began to rise - just what he wanted in the mornings. Still, it gave him a chance to think and practise, away from his Uncle's fists, or Dudley's screaming tantrums that were bound to occur at something stupid on the TV. He'd started to get the hang of changing the temperature of his clothes and objects around him, and the mornings were the best time to try warming himself up, as he could notice the change almost immediately (he'd rather not freeze to death, thank-you-very-much).
Despite hating the weather, Harry found the gardening itself wasn't too bad - in fact, it seemed quite calming: the quiet was a nice change, and he enjoyed seeing the flowers he'd planted grow into something incredible, and he didn't particularly care if his aunt didn't see it the same way he did.
He focused back on the area he was working on, pulling another weed from the ground, careful not to disturb the lavender, and brushed some of the soil from his hands.
"Stupid humans. That hurt!"
He stopped. There was someone there, someone had spoken, their voice had come from between the plants. Shifting his weight forward, he edged towards the plants, moving them apart gently so as not to damage of them.
It was a snake, no longer than his forearm, curled around itself and covered in darkened green scales that camouflaged almost completely with the plants' shadows. He was sure that if he hadn't heard the voice coming from it or seen its slight movements , he wouldn't have noticed it at all.
"Go away!"
"I'm sorry."
The snake stopped, almost frozen where it sat in the soil, and Harry stared at it curiously.
"You can talk."
The snake looked offended at him, or at least, that was how it appeared, for a brief moment, then stared right back with something akin to annoyance.
"Of course I can." Harry hesitated slightly, and the snake continued, unperturbed. "You are a curious case, though. I've only met one other speaker, and that was long ago." It watched him for a moment. "Do you have a name, Speaker?"
"Harry. Do you have one?"
"I am called Jasa." He could hear the hissing more clearly in the name, which was probably what anyone normal would hear for all of their conversation - if he was guessing right. "You are magical, Speaker. Could you warm this place for me?"
The snake - she sounded more feminine now, strangely enough - seemed sort of embarrassed at her request, and Harry tried to smile reassuringly. "I'll do my best." He took off his gloves - although they had too many holes to really deserve that name - and placed his palms on top of the soil, gripping it slightly as he closed his eyes. Reaching back, Harry could feel the energy in his mind, no longer pulsing softly but violently flaring with bursts of energy that seemed to grow brighter each time he used his magic.
A wave of satisfaction came over him as the temperature of the ground rose, a few degrees at a time, until all the frost had melted into nothingness, and Jasa wriggled comfortably. "Thank you, speaker." Harry nodded, giving her another smile, before continuing the gardening a few feet away, listening while Jasa talked proudly of her newly hatched snakelets (there were four, he discovered, three male, one female, hidden at the back corner of the garden where the sun hit most in the day).
He was upset to be called inside by Aunt Petunia fifteen minutes later, only comforted by the knowledge that Jasa would remain in the garden as long as she could, and that she promised she would try to bring some of the other snakes she thought knew about magic there for him to speak to.
(So what if his one friend was a snake?)