"Fine, I'm going! But I'm definitely telling Professor Snape you've brought a thrice-cursed boggart to school! You won't get away with it!"
Blaise snorted. "You do that." The boggart, now panther-sized and taking up most of the floor-space, lunged at the intruder, stopping short of actually touching him, but teeth close enough to his face to make him flinch back. "Bye, now."
Draco slammed the sliding door so hard that it bounced half-way open again, in time for Harry to see him stalking away down the corridor, presumably back to his own compartment. The boggart briefly turned into a little gremlin-like creature to latch it, before popping back into the form of a cat and, to all appearances, going back to sleep on the seat between Harry and Blaise. Harry surreptitiously tried to pet it, only to find that it wasn't entirely tangible — sort of like cold, dark magic condensed not just into a spell, but enough that it was partially solid. Rather...squishy, like Harry imagined a jellyfish might be. Not entirely unpleasant, but not the sort of creature one would generally stroke, in spite of appearances. It didn't seem to notice Harry's fingers, and probably couldn't have actually bitten Draco. Blaise, on the other hand, clearly did notice Harry attempting to bother his awesome pet demon, and was equally clearly amused.
He was about to say something, Harry thought, when Theo preemptively interrupted with a deliberately bland, bored-sounding drawl. "His hatred of you truly is a mystery, Blaise."
"He might hate Harry more, when he realises he's actually Harry Potter," Danny said, giggling like a madman. "He just— You can't be anyone important..."
"As far as I'm concerned, I'm not," Harry informed him. "Lily sounds kind of awesome, but I'm pretty freaking sure I didn't do anything to survive back in Eighty-One, so." He shrugged. "What's this Truce thing Theo oh-so-significantly mentioned?"
"Oh, well," Blaise said, grinning. "It's nothing official, because if it were that would be tantamount to acknowledging that Bellatrix and the Death Eaters were an autonomous power — they were, the actual government just can't admit it — but unofficially, after the Dark Lord was vanquished— You know he's not really dead, right?"
Harry nodded. He wasn't sure how people knew that, but the general consensus was that he'd be back sooner or later, somehow.
"Right, well, after Lily blew him up — and I'd like you two to take note, I'm not the only person who calls their mother by her given name—"
Danny rolled his eyes. "You're still a bloody weirdo. Lady Potter's dead, Harry doesn't know her, I'm pretty sure that makes a difference."
"Whatever. Anyway, after Lily blew up Old Snakeface, Bellatrix sort of had a mental breakdown. She tried to keep the war going for a couple of weeks, while most of the more sane and influential Death Eaters started preparing their defence and trying to distance themselves or literally getting the hell out of Britain and the ICW states entirely. She was eventually caught trying to torture information out of some of your parents' allies — trying to find out what Lily had done to the Dark Lord, because she knew he wasn't dead — but they didn't know anything. When the aurors showed up to take her in she went quietly, but she refused to cooperate with a trial — they really wanted a public trial for her, to delegitimise the Death Eaters as a whole and make it clear to anyone still resisting that it was bloody well over. Mira talked her into it, in exchange for certain terms.
"Every alleged Death Eater was guaranteed a trial and prisoners, including Bellatrix, couldn't be killed. In exchange, Bellatrix would stand trial and accept a life-sentence in Azkaban which, on the one hand, is generally considered a fate worse than death, but on the other hand means that if the Light doesn't abide by the Truce she can break out and pick the war up again. Mira visits her regularly to assure her that the Truce is being maintained. She likely wouldn't be allowed to visit and tell Bellatrix to break out, but that just means that keeping her from visiting is as good a signal that the Truce is dead as anything. The Light — the Ministry — agreed to the Truce because the ruling class of Magical Britain was completely decimated by the War, and would literally not be able to function if we didn't have some sort of agreement, and to letting Mira visit Bellatrix because they considered that a silly, sentimental request by a flighty girl in over her head with these negotiations, still holding out hope that her one-time lover's sanity was recoverable. They absolutely did not believe that Bellatrix would still be sane and therefore a credible potential threat almost ten years later — most people don't last two years in Azkaban before they're so miserable and apathetic they starve to death."
...Well that was horrifying. Harry resolved to be even more careful not to get caught breaking the law in Magical Britain. "So, what does that have to do with us, exactly? And Darling Draco?"
"We don't talk about things that happened in the War," Theo said abruptly. "At Hogwarts, kids from Death Eater families, like the Notts and the Malfoys, can't bully muggleborns for being muggleborn, including going around calling them mudbloods. Kids from Light families can't go around insisting that Death Eaters who were exonerated somehow faked evidence or bribed people to get off. People can't try to hold kids accountable for the crimes their parents and uncles and cousins committed. It's pretty generally recognised that the Death Eaters were in the wrong and started the whole war, and there are a lot of families who believe men like Malfoy's father and mine escaped justice for their actions in the war, claiming they were compelled to fight for the Dark Lord. If anyone breaks the Truce, everyone on both sides is supposed to come down against them, because the only way for us to move on as a society is to move on, not get caught up in decades- or centuries-long blood feuds over who killed whose uncle in the Seventies, and whether those deaths were justified under the circumstances."
"Your very existence is sort of a hot-button issue," Danny noted, in case Harry didn't realise that, presumably. He definitely did, though. "What with the whole Boy Who Lived thing. If I were you, I'd just try to avoid stating anything like an opinion on anything to do with the war. And probably also don't mention everyone thinking you're Sirius Black's kid? I mean, I can see how people would think so, especially since it'd be much more likely that he sired some bastard who's now running around Charing unsupervised than it would be to see Harry Potter, Boy Who Lived, living on his own. But James Potter and Sirius Black didn't really look that different from each other. If people are expecting to see a Potter looking at you, they'll probably see a Potter."
"A Potter who got phenomenally lucky in the hair department," Blaise noted. "If you ever see a picture of James Potter, his was even worse than Danny's, here." He grinned, leaning across the compartment to tousle the artist's dark, already-untidy hair.
Danny batted his hand away. "Piss off, wanker. My hair is fine."
"Yeah, if you're going for the absent-minded artist look." Blaise grinned at the annoyance on his friend's face, eyes scrunched into a glare behind his John Lennon-esque glasses, lips twisting into an entirely unthreatening pout.
"Professor Snape noticed right away," Harry said, heading off their impending squabble.
"Probably because your magic is already attuned to the Dark," Theo said. "That's something the Blacks were really known for, and Snape's a legilimens, he'd be more sensitive to it than most people, so he'd think to look a little harder and maybe ask himself if you might have a little more magic in your blood than the average person." In response to Harry's blank stare, he added, "You know, if you move a little quicker and more gracefully than most people, or you can see patterns in ambient magic and you're unnaturally quick picking up spells, or there's something a little off about you, like thinking a bloody boggart is a cool pet."
"Don't listen to him, Coco," Blaise cooed at the creature, now curled up again between Blaise's leg and the outer wall of the train, looking less like a cat and more like a small puddle of magic and darkness with cat ears and eyes glaring out of it. "You are the coolest of pets."
Theo rolled his eyes. "There's something wrong with you, Zabini..."
The artist in the room sniggered. "Yeah, he'd fit right in with Mum's family, from what I've heard. I really wouldn't worry about it, though, Harry. Like I said, people will be expecting a Potter when they look at you. Sirius was obviously closer to the heart of the Blacks than James Potter — in looks and temperament — but James's mother was a Black. He and Sirius looked enough alike to be close cousins, if not brothers. Stand you next to a portrait of James, and it wouldn't be unbelievable you're his son."
Harry sighed. "Noted. So, just to be clear, seeing ambient magic isn't normal? Because these blokes I ran into in Diagon Alley said that magesight is a thing. And what's a normal rate for picking up spells?" Not having any frame of reference for what the average eleven-year-old wizard was capable of made it awfully difficult to avoid drawing attention to the fact that he was clearly a freak. "What about just sort of knowing things sometimes, like when the telephone's going to ring and how things are connected, and understanding words in languages you don't speak?" He never had gotten around to asking anyone if that was normal for mages.
The other three boys exchanged a look that said it probably wasn't, even before Blaise said, "That sounds sort of like being a Seer, precognition and intuition. It wouldn't be surprising if you got that from Lily — ritualists almost always turn out to have some degree of Sight, even if it's relatively small."
"Would explain the Blacks' sense of timing, though," Danny noted. "And the understanding foreign languages thing could be latent legilimency or omniglottalism. More likely legilimency, omniglottalism is much more rare."
"I think I would have noticed if he were a latent legilimens," Blaise said...in...
"Is that Italian?" Harry blinked, surprised to hear the words come out of his mouth in...whatever language that was. (Probably Italian. Something about it felt Mediterranean, and Zabini was an Italian name.)
Blaise laughed. "It was, yes. I'm going to say omniglot. That didn't feel like legilimency."
"O...kay... So that means...what?"
"You'll find it really, really easy to pick up languages and their cultural context if you learn them from a native speaker. I don't think it helps you just learn languages out of a book?" Theo said.
Danny shrugged. "No idea. I can ask Mum — she had to learn five languages as a kid, could be the Blacks expected shite like that because it was supposed to be way easier than it sounds."
"Or it could have been Druella being insane," Blaise suggested.
Danny shrugged again, then explained, "Mum's mother is a bloody genius history professor who may or may not be human and also may or may not know literally everything. Her standards were always impossibly high, and she apparently insists that anyone who can't meet them because they're not a genius magical prodigy is just lazy and there's nothing at all freakish or inhuman about her abilities, thankyouverymuch. I've never met her because Mum disowned her, but Blaise has. He says she's terrifying."
Blaise nodded. "I still like her better than Mira's actual parents, but yeah. And Mira says she's mellowed a lot since going into academia. Making her kids learn a bunch of languages because she thinks it's easy is definitely the sort of thing she'd do."
Theo weighed in with a shrug. "Most nobles have to learn three or four languages. The House of Nott does English, French, Latin, and Gobbledygook. Five isn't that unusual. Though most people aren't fluent in Gobbledygook, if they speak it at all, and a lot of people who aren't serious scholars never use Latin after they learn it. Anyway, Harry, a few seconds' precognition and the occasional intuition about things is pretty normal. Omniglottalism is rare, but not something the Blacks or Potters are known for, so wouldn't necessarily sway people's assumptions either way. Magesight — kenning the magic of active spells and enchantments, and sometimes the properties of latent energy in unactivated wards, that sort of thing — is something practically all of the Blacks had, but it's also a talent found in almost ten per cent of the population at large.
"Seeing ambient magic, like, just a fog of magic around yourself that isn't particularly doing anything, just existing, is considered a hypersensitivity problem. About five per cent of mages with magesight have that, enough that there are corrective charms to help filter it out of their perception. Seeing patterns in ambient magic — how it moves around other people and the way currents flow through a landscape — is not a thing humans can do unless they're possessed or, rumour has it, Bellatrix."
"And Bellatrix might not be human," Danny put in. "She is Dru's daughter, so."
Right, so Harry should probably not mention that it was really easy to spot mages because ambient magic acted differently around them. (Though if he'd gotten that from Sirius, it suggested it wasn't anything to do with Druella.) "And picking up spells?"
The boys exchanged another look, and various shrugs. "It sort of depends," Danny said.
"On...?"
"The difficulty of the spell, both in shaping complexity and initialisation energy required." Theo began counting off points on his fingers — that was two. "How long the caster has been practising magic and how many relatively similar spells they already know; whether the caster has been able to see it demonstrated; and... I know I'm forgetting one..."
"Magical alignment or polarisation," Danny reminded him. "Dark magic is easier for mages whose magic is attuned to the dark. Light magic is much harder. Most of the charms and stuff we'll be doing at school aren't polarised, though."
"Yeah, okay, but for someone who just started learning formal magic and is pretty much just learning them out of a book—" Harry had only seen a few of the spells he'd learned cast by someone else first. "—and not necessarily the practically useless shite in the Standard Book of Spells Grade One — I picked up a copy of Spelman's Comprehensive at a used bookstore, and that has a lot more useful stuff for living on your own, like heating charms and magically-sustained fire, and minor hexes and jinxes and shite— Give me a number, here."
A smile twitched at the corner of Blaise's lips. "Or you could tell us how many spells you've learned in the past month and how long it takes, and judge from our reactions whether that's reasonable."
Harry was almost certain their consensus would be that it was not reasonable, and from the smirk on Blaise's face, he knew it, too. But fine. "How many I've learned, like I have them memorised and could do them without the book and the incantation right in front of me? About fifty." Yeah, that look was definitely not a sure, Harry, totally reasonable sort of expression. Which was expected, but he still had no idea how unreasonable it was. "It takes maybe an hour and a half or two hours to figure out a new spell the first time, and a couple of weeks until I might have a good enough idea what the magic feels like when I'm casting to not need the words if it's one I use a lot, but I'm not sure those really count as mastering a new spell with silent casting, since all the ones I can do silently now are charm effects I could already do without a wand at all — summoning and repulsion, levitation, changing the colour or temperature of something, lighting a candle with mundane fire and so on.
"I was learning two or three new ones every day, and practising old ones for a few hours so I wouldn't forget them, but then I got distracted watching the Summer Duelling Championship and started focusing on matching the starting and ending wand-motions and syllables like the duellists — are you related to Nymphadora Tonks, by the way?" he asked Danny, ignoring the very intimidated looks he was getting from all three of them. "She's bloody brilliant. That two-stage shield-breaker piercing hex at the end of her last match was a cheap shot."
"Uh...yeah," he said, shaking himself out of whatever reverie all three of the wizard-raised wizards seemed to have fallen into. "She's my sister."
Harry felt his eyes grow very wide. "That. Is. Awesome. Did she say if she ever got that rematch at Morgenstern's?" He wanted to ask if Danny would introduce him, but didn't, because he was pretty sure that would come off as unnervingly fan-boy-ish, and since he was pretty sure Nymphadora Tonks was out of school it would probably be months until he had an opportunity, anyway.
"Um...no? I don't know, she's got her own flat now, and if Mum knew she was at Morgenstern's, she'd go spare. Wait, they didn't let you in there, did they?"
"No," Harry pouted. "'Fighters only. No lookie-loos,'" he said, imitating the bloke at the door. "Just heard her say something to that Horowitz bloke who ended up beating her, after."
"Oh, well, no, I don't know. I do know her S.A. took her to task because not recognising that last hex was a rookie mistake, and the fact that she is a rookie is no excuse."
"S.A.?"
"Senior Auror — she just finished their Certification course over the summer, barely finished the Practical in time to—"
"Excuse me," Blaise interrupted. "Can we get back on topic, here?"
Danny raised an eyebrow at him. "The topic is now Dora's general awesomeness. Keep up, Blaise."
"No, the topic is, what the hell even are you, Potter?"
Harry blinked at him for several long seconds, trying to come up with a witty response. The best he could find was, "The Boy Who Lived, or so they tell me."
Blaise just continued to give him that same, I'm dead serious look. "Uh-huh. And next, you're going to tell me that you learned occlumency out of a book at some point in the last month too."
"Well, no, I've been advised that admitting to getting my hands on any book I could have learned occlumency from would be a bad idea, because restricted literature, actual prison time, soul-sucking monsters, blah, blah, blah. Though, hey! If you can do that legilimency thing, you can tell me if I'm doing it right, right?" He grinned, fairly certain that none of the others were going to spread it around that Harry had been reading illegal books. Even Danny, with his auror sister. (It stood to reason that if Dora Tonks was the sort of auror who would go to Morgenstern's for a rematch, she probably didn't care about trivial little laws like underage book-reading.) Besides, he hadn't actually admitted it. He'd specifically said he wasn't.
"Yes," Blaise said shortly. "You're not controlling your emotions very firmly, and I could probably get in if I were really trying, but you'd definitely notice—" There was an odd jolt at the edge of Harry's awareness. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the dizzying sensation of his mind wobbling like a jello mould which had just been firmly poked. "—and, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I want to know what the hell is on your mind."
"Mostly the awesomeness of Nymphadora Tonks, at the moment," Harry informed him, trying not to laugh. "Also a bunch of curses I looked up after seeing people use them in the tournament, but definitely can't cast yet. And wondering if there's a duelling team or club or something at Hogwarts, and if not how difficult it would be to start one, and whether it's feasible to combine duelling and edificeering into the world's best sport ever. Also, jello."
All three of them were staring again. Theo cleared his throat. "The number you were looking for, earlier, is two or three new spells per week. Maybe four, if you have a good tutor. Learning fifteen to twenty new spells in a week, out of a book, some of which are almost certainly outside what any eleven-year-old should be capable of casting — Summoning is a fourth-year charm, for example, most people don't have the channelling capacity to manage it before the age of thirteen or so at the earliest — let alone silently, that's a sixth-year topic — is absurd. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to hear a lying braggart like Draco say—"
"I'm not lying," Harry assured him, slightly offended.
"I didn't think you were. I'm just saying, no, that is not a realistic number of spells for any normal mage to have learned in a month — and did you say you were intentionally doing charms before you found out about magic?"
"Well, no, obviously I knew I was magic. The Accidental Magic office kept making me forget, but I remembered everything every time I re-discovered magic, and I managed to figure out how big a spell I could do without tipping them off by the time I was about six. The bloody idiots at the Ministry just didn't know I knew I was magic. You should have seen the looks on their goon squad's faces when I got the drop on them, it was great."
"What?" Danny frowned.
"Oh, well, it's kind of a long story, but basically there was a logistical problem with me accepting my invitation to the school — namely, muggles don't use owl-post — and someone was having fun with Aunt Petunia, because she has a habit of writing letters of complaint to people who annoy her, and Dumbledore dropping me on her without so much as a by-your-leave is probably the biggest single annoyance of her life, so I did a spell to intentionally get Accidental Magic's attention and trap the Reversal Squad they sent to fix whatever I'd done, so that Aunt Petunia could make them carry letters for her. It was really funny, especially the look on their faces when I told them they wouldn't be able to do magic in my house unless I let them."
"You... But... How?" Blaise stuttered.
Harry blinked at him. "Well, first I just stopped them moving, but then Blake Morris, sarcastic arse extraordinaire, tried to do something to stop me without his wand, so I pulled all the ambient magic away from him. You can't do magic if there's no ambient magic to work with, so." He shrugged.
Theo and Danny were now giving him disturbed expressions to match Blaise's. "I second Blaise's sentiment," Danny said, sounding slightly horrified. "What are you?"
"Yeah, you know how I said humans can't see patterns in ambient magic? We can't just manipulate the entire magical environment to stop someone else touching the ambient magic, either."
Harry rolled his eyes. "Well I can't normally, that was part of the trap, just sort of— You know how you sort of pull magic into yourself and shape it to do a little spell? I just did that, but with all the magic in the room, pressing the idea of trapping intruders into it, but letting it go without shaping it, and, I mean, obviously I had to do it a little bit at a time, but claiming the magic in a space doesn't alert the Accidental Magic people until you do something with it, and if you claim it first it's much easier to do big spells outside of yourself, and you always have at least a couple of minutes before the Goon Squad shows up, which gives you plenty of time to shape the magic you laid a claim on however you like by sort of just extending your own magic out into it and making wave-patterns that you sculpt into the shape of the snares, and when the goon squad apparates in—" He clapped his hands, making all three of the boys jump. Tee hee. "—the trap snaps closed around them so they can't move so much as a finger. Which, that part worked perfectly, but then Morris was his usual charming self, so I had to improvise and change it to trapping him in an empty bubble of magicless sadness."
All three of them just sort of continued to stare at him.
After a long moment, Harry added, "I don't know why you're all so impressed, Professor Snape walked in and disrupted my hold on the room in about thirty seconds. I still don't know what he did, and I have been looking. He said it was a freeform interference field expressed through mind magic? Does that ring any bells?"
He didn't really hold much hope that it would. All Odysseus had had to say on the subject was that hardly anyone had written much of anything on freeform magic, and he'd definitely never seen anything like Harry described, but (cryptically) The Knights were into all sorts of esoteric fuckery back in the beginning, so who knows? I'll keep an eye out... And the assistants at the legal shops just told him that anything to do with mind magic was restricted, come back when you're of age.
"Well...I know not all magic is on exactly the same...frequency, you might say," Theo offered. "So you probably weren't controlling the frequency mind mages use, or something."
"Nah," Blaise said. "Snape's subtle enough he probably just got in your head and cast his interference field through you."
Okay, maybe Harry had underestimated his new year-mates, because that sounded...uncomfortably like exactly what had happened. Or rather, when Harry tried to imagine what it might feel like having someone else cast magic through him, what he imagined was uncannily similar to what it had felt like when Snape did...whatever he did.
"That's a thing legilimens can do?" Theo asked, his wide-eyed look of shock turning to Blaise instead of Harry.
Blaise nodded. "If you can possess someone to use their body, why shouldn't you be able to possess them to use their magic? Honestly, if he hadn't told Harry it was a disruption field I'd say he probably could've just distracted Harry and made him lose his hold by destroying his focus, but, yeah."
Harry shook his head. "Distracting me might have made me drop the isolation bubbles, but it wouldn't have made the ambient magic not mine anymore. I think you were right the first time. Still, he obviously recognised it and knew how to break it, so it has to be a thing other people do."
"Just because Snape figured it out and reversed it in about thirty seconds doesn't mean it's a thing people do," Danny informed him. "Dora says he's a bloody genius, and scary good at freeform magic, which is what it sounds like you were doing, sort of. Maybe cheating a little attuning the magic to yourself first, but basically. Rumour is he learned it from the Dark Lord, and he definitely learned what he knows about curse-breaking from the Death Eaters. He's Dumbledore's problem-solver now, he makes him fix all the really weird shite Hogwarts students manage to do by accident. When Saint Mungo's — that's the hospital, Dad's a Healer — has a weird case involving mind-magic or potions or even just general dark magic no one's seen before, Dad says they call Snape in, and he makes them all look like idiots. Walking into a completely unfamiliar magical situation and figuring out what's going on and how to stop it without killing anyone is probably par for the course for him."
Oh.
Well...still. Harry was pretty sure it was a thing other people could do. Maybe a thing they could only really do at home — it was way harder to lay claim to magic in his little rented flat than the house he'd lived in his entire life — but it still felt like a thing other people should be able to do. Though...thinking about it now, it sort of seemed like something he might've learned from the dying not-girl in his dreams, one of the Dark Nights she'd been trying to help him understand what he needed to do, so maybe it wasn't.
For about half a second, Harry entertained the idea of asking whether these boys had any idea what that was about, since they'd managed to solve one of his weird magical mysteries in about two minutes, but not seriously. He'd only known them for a few hours. He had no reason to trust they wouldn't turn right around and tell Snape or someone that Harry was going to sacrifice a random stranger to some demon that spoke to him in his sleep. Honestly, he had no reason to trust that they wouldn't start spreading rumours about him being some sort of freakish, inhuman magical prodigy as soon as they got to school, but if they did, judging by how little time it took for them to adjust to the idea and move on to discussing Snape in a relatively reasonable way without giving Harry terrified looks every few seconds, he figured the news would blow over in a few weeks. And it wasn't as though Aunt Petunia was here to get angry at him for not keeping a low profile. He'd just sort of wanted to avoid attention out of habit.
"Okay, whatever. So, I shouldn't tell people I've been doing magic intentionally since I was like three if I don't want them to flip out, and probably shouldn't tell them I can do anything silently, and definitely don't let on that I can absolutely see patterns in the way ambient magic moves around mages—" He figured it was fine to admit that now, since the shite he'd done to trap Flo and Friends was apparently even more 'impossible'. (Sure enough, none of them so much as blinked.) "—or that I probably could've learned well over a hundred spells in the last month if I'd been focusing on that rather than finding out everything I could about Magical Britain—"
Blaise snorted. "Spending, what, six to ten hours a day on something for weeks at a time doesn't count as focusing on it?"
"Um, no? I did also spend ten to fourteen hours a day doing other things." Mostly talking to people about random shite. He gave a light shrug in answer to the sceptical look the boy gave him. "I don't sleep much when I'm excited about something, and maybe you don't think magic is all that cool growing up with it, but the shiny hasn't worn off yet for me. Spending eighteen hours a day learning spells wasn't out of the question, but I've been trying to be responsible and learn more about this society I've been dropped in the middle of, too. Also, duelling is awesome."
"Ah, yeah...not sleeping much when you're a little up?" Danny said. "That's definitely a Black thing. Also, on the subject of duelling, don't tell people you've been working out spell-chains for yourself."
Harry frowned. "I didn't work the concept out for myself, I saw the duellists using it and realised that was sort of the obvious thing to do, if you want to cast as many spells as possible as quickly as possible."
"Yeah, well, it's still generally considered a more advanced technique kids our age don't have the focus to pull off."
Harry couldn't help letting out a little huff. "Fine, noted. Is it normal for mages to be able to see in the dark?"
Theo shook his head. "No, but the magesight might help you out, there."
"Right. What about being more...durable than non-mages? Not just healing fast, but like, one time I accidentally broke my cousin's arm wrenching it around in a way Uncle Vernon had definitely done to me before, and it didn't even really hurt me, let alone break anything. Also, Dudley's much bigger than I am, so it's not just like, that I was manhandling a five-year-old or something. Also, is it normal for wizards our age to be this short?" He hadn't really seen any of the others standing up yet, and most of the people he'd spoken to over the past month were adults, so.
Blaise snorted. "Yes, it's normal for wizards to be a little harder to break than muggles, and the more magic a person channels the slower they tend to age. So on the one hand, you have normal people who age almost muggle-fast, but then at the other extreme, I've seen pictures from Bellatrix's trial. She would've been at least thirty at the time, but she looked like she could still be in school. Danny's mum is thirty-seven, and most muggles think she looks about twenty-five. So, yeah, it is weird that you're so tiny, but most people will just think, oh, obviously the Boy Who Lived is going to grow up to be a crazy-powerful sorcerer. And on the plus side, you probably won't look old until you're like a hundred and fifty."
"They might write off picking up spells really easily and shite like that as expected for their little Dark Lord defeating Light idol too, actually," Theo noted. "Though the fact that your magic is obviously dark sort of screws up the Harry-Potter-is-actually-a-phoenix-in-human-form theory, for anyone who can sense that sort of thing."
"Thunderbird?" Danny suggested.
Harry gave them a sharp grin. "I hear nundu are hard to kill."
"Nundu," Blaise said flatly, "are bloody terrifying. That panther I was using to threaten Draco earlier? That's about the size of a six-week-old nundu kitten."
Harry giggled. "Right. Sold. I am now officially a nundu kitten in human form."
Theo was not amused. "Uh-huh. That's almost as disturbing a statement as your enthusiastic insistence that Blaise's stupid boggart is the coolest pet ever — and don't think I didn't see you trying to pet it earlier—"
"You tried to pet it?" Danny said. "Why?"
...Because it was there, mostly, and he was curious, and it was cool. He didn't say it, though, because Theo kept talking over Danny in the first place.
"—or the fact that you've known about Magical Britain for all of a month and you've already found your way to Knockturn Alley, or that you've spent the past month living on your own, actually."
"Why is that disturbing? All the secondhand shops are in Knockturn, and I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself..."
Theo just gave him a don't be dense look. Danny was the one who said, "Um, because most eleven-year-olds aren't capable of taking care of themselves? I wouldn't want to spend a week in Charing by myself, let alone a month."
Blaise and Theo nodded, which meant it was Harry's turn to give all of them a don't be dense look. "I literally spent the entire time practising magic, reading history books, wandering around talking to people, and watching the duelling competition. I didn't even have to cook for myself. It was easier than spending a month at home, with cleaning and cooking and weeding the gardens to do, and my cousin pestering me to show him cool magic, not just boring, useful magic. I would've done all my shopping and gone to the bank and such by myself anyway, because Aunt Petunia doesn't like magic, and probably would've spent all day wandering around talking to people in Diagon and Knockturn and practising magic even if I had had to keep taking the bus in every day and going back to Little Whinging at night. I really, legitimately do not understand why it's so bloody problematic for me not to be supervised at all times. Professor McGonagall about hexed me when I demanded she give me my bank key and let me get on with my business rather than stand around while the other muggleborns got their wands, like it's inherently dangerous to just walk around and talk to goblins by myself."
"Well, it sort of is," Danny said, giving him a very earnest, concerned look. "What if someone tried to kidnap you and steal your life-force to make viv, or Imperiused you to have sex with sickos for money, or mugged you and stole your vault key — the goblins will let anyone clean every last knut out of a vault if they have the key — or realised you're Harry Potter and just straight-out murdered you, because you're Harry Potter?"
Harry shrugged. "Dunno. Didn't happen, so I can't really say what I would've done. Probably kick anyone trying to kill me in the nads and gouge out their eyes, and if I could make it to the bank before this hypothetical mugger I could probably sweet-talk Firebloom into freezing my account because someone stole my key. She's this sweet, mumsy goblin who works as a teller — we've spoken a few times, and I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm adorable. If I was ambushed and enslaved by some pimp — not likely, I don't think, I can tell when people are casting magic around me and most spells move slowly enough to dodge, but if — I suppose I'd just have had to wait until I didn't show up at school, and they sent someone to find me. Unless I found an opportunity to escape, in which case, nad-kicking, eye-gouging. Possibly dismembering, I hear that's the traditional response to arseholes attempting to kidnap children in Knockturn Alley. Granted, I don't actually know any curses to dismember someone, but human anatomy isn't that different from cats', and I do know a few good cutting spells now." He grinned at the shocked horror on their faces.
Theo recovered first. "That. All of that. Very House of Black. Especially the grinning. Stop that, it's creepy. And don't say that sort of shite unless you want people to think you're Sirius's kid."
"Or Bella's," Blaise said. "She had a kid who was our age. He was living with Narcissa and Draco at the end of the war, but the Wizengamot gave his guardianship to Dumbledore at the same time as yours, Harry, and no one knows what he did with either of you."
Danny snorted.
"What?"
"Nothing, just. If Harry Potter was raised by some random muggles, completely ignorant about magic, maybe it's actually the Black kid Dumbledore hid away with some secret cult of monks to be trained in esoteric light arts to defeat the Dark Lord once and for all if he dares show his snakey face in Britain again."
"Secret cult of monks?" Harry repeated absently, barely listening to the response, because he was remembering Aunt Petunia asking him once who Aunt Cissy and Drake were. He couldn't have been more than five or six at the time, and when he said he didn't know she'd just said never-you-mind, but...
No, he decided. It couldn't be. Everyone said he had his mother's eyes. He couldn't be the Dark Lady's missing son. Dumbledore had probably had him killed, or left in the Forest of Dean to die of exposure or be adopted by a kind-hearted woodcutter like a prince in a bloody fairy tale or something.
Danny nodded, very seriously. "In Nepal. According to a series of adventure novels that definitely didn't mention you're secretly Sirius Black's bastard son."
"Well, they wouldn't, would they?" Blaise said. "They're kids' books. For normal kids who haven't grown up around Mira and weren't intimately familiar with the term 'marital infidelity' at the age of six."
Theo snorted, trying not to laugh. "No, see, they don't mention Harry's Sirius's bastard son, because Harry — this Harry, I mean — is actually Bellatrix's son, and Dumbledore switched them, so it really is Harry who's off with the monks, see—"
"And this Harry's secretly Rigel Black! Or whatever he's called! Brilliant, Mister Nott! You've solved it!" Danny exclaimed, clapping.
"I think his name was Eridanus, actually," Blaise said, giving Harry a peculiar look that seemed to hold some significance beyond the moment, though Harry couldn't for the life of him imagine what it might be.
"That's even better," Danny declared, "Eri, Harry, easy to confuse — this theory, I like it!"
His silliness was interrupted by a rap on the door, a woman's voice calling, "Anything off the trolley, dears?" from the other side of it.
"Ooh! Me!" Danny jumped up from his seat, fishing a coin-purse out of his pocket, and leaving a half-finished sketch of Harry and Blaise on the other side of the compartment.
Theo held it up for them to see. "You know, I think he's really captured the complete insanity of this conversation," he said. "Something about the expression on Harry's face. Wouldn't you agree? That mad gleam in his eye..."
"Hey! That's not done, yet!" Danny objected, falling back into his seat with a double-handful of sweets he set between himself and Theo. "Help yourselves." He tossed Harry something called a Chocolate Frog. "Careful, they try to escape."
"You never think any of your sketches are done," Theo said, flipping back a few pages to several sketches of a messy-haired, bespectacled young man, drawn from multiple angles. "New self-portrait, aged up a few years?"
"Eh?" Danny said, clearly more interested in a little sponge-cake cauldron. "Oh, no. There was an article about the Potters in the Prophet last weekend, part of their Ten Year Anniversary thing? I was just copying the photos. Lily's a couple pages back..."
"Can I have a look?" Harry asked, tearing the chocolate open without really looking at it. He'd never actually seen a picture of his parents. It hadn't occurred to him to try to find back issues of the paper or something, from back in Eighty-One, and if Aunt Petunia had any pictures of Lily they were long forgotten, buried somewhere in the depths of the attic.
He set down the frog to take the book from Theo, and barely managed to catch it as it made a desperate leap toward the open window. He still did, of course, plucking it out of the air halfway through Danny's ooh, careful! He wasn't really sure how one was supposed to eat such a thing — maybe bite its head off, and it would stop squirming? — but he was really more interested in the sketches, struck by how much Danny really did look like James Potter. His face was a bit different around the eyes and chin, but Danny looked much more like a Potter than Harry. He even got the messy hair they were apparently known for. And Lily, a few pages back... Comparing her face to his own, he could almost see some similarities, in the high forehead and pointed little nose, but in black and white the feature they most notably had in common — their eyes — didn't look much the same at all. He might have gotten their colour, but...
"Didn't realise until I saw her in the papers in black and white..." Odysseus had said that, the first day Harry met him. Later, he'd gotten the old man to explain that Lily's bright red hair and shocking green eyes had sort of distracted people from her actual face. She used to charm her hair black and her eyes blue and lurk around the Underground in the summers calling herself Asphodel, and Odysseus swore he never would've realised she was the same girl if he hadn't seen her picture in black and white, without the green of her eyes and the red of her hair...
Harry definitely didn't have Lily's eyes.
The colour, yes, but the shape, the spacing of them, those were different, and his were set noticeably deeper. Lily's eyes...
Lily's eyes looked like Danny's, just light where his were dark. And he looked a hell of a lot like James Potter. If Harry was standing beside a portrait of James, it might not be out of the question that they were father and son, but if both Harry and Danny were standing beside it, anyone would have to be an idiot to think Harry was his son. Danny even wore glasses!
And he was the right age, and Harry was very obviously a Black, and there was that half-remembered mention of Aunt Cissy and Drake...
Harry was suddenly absolutely certain that he and Danny had been switched back in Nineteen Eighty-One, in the confusion following the Dark Lord's fall. Danny Tonks was really Harry Potter, and Harry was really Eridanus Black — Danny, not Eri — and—
There had to be ways to permanently change a kid's eye colour with magic.
Someone had definitely done this intentionally, though Harry couldn't imagine why. Had they wanted him to grow up with Lily's muggle sister (were the Dursleys still his family, if he was never actually related to them?) so he wouldn't know anything about magic specifically to sabotage a kid who might very well take after his parents (who the hell was his father? the bloody Dark Lord?) and turn out to be some sort of terrifying, dark magical prodigy? (If so, that had obviously been a legitimate concern, since he arguably had, even without the resources of a filthy rich magical noble house to exploit, but.)
Had they wanted to ensure that the real Harry Potter got the benefits of a normal, magical childhood, being raised pretty much anonymously by Bellatrix's estranged sister?
Was the anonymity intended to protect Danny — the real Harry Potter — in case anyone realised that he was supposedly with Lily's estranged sister and tracked her down to kill him?
Had whoever was responsible for this looked at two one-year-olds and decided that, out of the two of them, Harry would make a better icon for the Light, or that, when the Dark Lord returned — as practically everyone was sure he would — that Harry would stand a better chance of killing him for good? (Arguably he would. Not that Harry had any idea how good a mage Danny was, but just looking at him, having spoken with him for a few hours, Harry could already tell Danny didn't have the same potential to kill someone that he did. That was just...obvious.)
Some other reason, or all of the above?
"What do you think, Harry?" Blaise asked, drawing Harry's attention to the same peculiar look he'd worn earlier, telling them Bella's son's name.
I think you know, he thought. I think your mother, Bellatrix's friend and lover, the architect of this Truce we apparently live under, she was in on it somehow, and you know...and you wanted me to know.
Why?
Danny obviously didn't know. Did his mother? She had to. Growing up with Bellatrix, she had to realise soft, silly, artistic Danny wasn't her sister's son.
Who else knew? Dumbledore, almost certainly. Aunt Petunia didn't, Harry was positive. (And yes, he decided, she was still his family — she had raised him, after all, and God knew that was a thankless task.) Beyond that...
You and I are going to have to have a talk, Blaise Zabini...
"These are bloody brilliant, Danny. And you really do look a lot like James."
"Yeah, well, he was as closely related to Mum as he was to Sirius, so it's not that surprising." Wait. Did Danny not even know he was adopted? "About half of the purebloods look pretty much the same. And thanks. I'll show you some of the animated ones when we get to school. Er...maybe after classes tomorrow? They're in my trunk... Are you going to eat that frog or not?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah! Just got distracted. Seriously, those are great," he said, passing the book back and turning his attention to the bit of chocolate still wriggling between his fingers — rather half-heartedly as it started to melt where he was touching it. "How'm I supposed to eat this thing, exactly?"
For the record, Danny does know that he's adopted and that Bella is "his" mother, he just doesn't know or care what "his" birth name was — he would prefer to think about the fact that he's "actually" Bella's kid as little as possible, and has therefore made a point of not considering it much at all. He likes to pretend for the same reason that Andi is his real mum, hence the joking about Harry being the real Eridanus, even though he "knows" that he's the "real" lost Black heir.