When he'd first seen the beds, Harry hadn't believed his luck. Large and soft. Fancy sheets that were smooth against his skin. The curtains would even stop him feeling vulnerable sleeping in the open like in Dudley's second bedroom. But after half an hour of trying to get to sleep he knew he'd been mistaken.
He was full of food, warm wrapped in the blankets and tired from his journey but he couldn't get to sleep. The pillows were so large they twisted his neck to the side and the mattress so soft he felt like it might begin to swallow him at any moment. He was uncomfortable.
After much tossing and turning, Harry sighed. Rolling on his front his put his hands flat on the mattress. He wanted his mattress harder. Not like stone or metal though. More like his mattress from the Dursley's but not as small. So he reached for his magic again and concentrated on the feeling of his bed at the Dursley's and changing the feel of this new one.
He felt the tingling flood his stomach and move up his arms and into the bed below him. The mattress began to change and Harry let out a breath he'd been holding. This wasn't exactly like the other stuff he'd done without a wand. He'd never changed anything or transfiguration as the books called it. He didn't think shrinking things counted.
When he was satisfied he did the same to the pillows. Harry felt even more tired than he did before, transfirgiration was supposed to be very hard, and settled in for the night.
The nightmare came as it had done so many times before. But there was more this time.
There were golden bubbles and he laughed as he tried to get them. Someone picked him up and he felt himself pressed into someone else's arms. His mum. Red hair fanned over his face and wrapped around the fingers on one hand. He was safe.
But then there was a change. A crash sounded. His mum held him tighter. A man was shouting.
"Go Lily. It's him. Take Harry and go!" It was his dad.
A door slammed shut and Harry felt his mother put him down. She was a blur of hair as she knelt beside the crib. Fear was creeping up in him but he couldn't understand.
With a flash of light the door behind her flew open and she span around.
"Not Harry. Kill me, not Harry." He heard her beg.
"Stand aside foolish girl." Came a high pitched hiss.
Green light filled his vision and his mother fell to the side as the man began to laugh.
"Avada Kadavra!" And the green light flew at him once more. Pain lanced through his head and Harry woke with a jolt.
The night his parents died. He had remembered more of it. He gasped for air. Pulling his wand out he attempted the tempus spell. On his second try he had it. It was half past five. He wasn't getting anymore sleep.
He lifted the charms around his bed and collected his uniform before going into the bathroom for a shower before his dormmates woke up.
He spent some time skimming through the first chapters of his books in preparation for his classes before moving to the things he hadn't read yet. Now he could use his wand he couldn't wait to try out half of the spells he had read about. Not that he was going to neglect his wandless abilities but he wanted to wait to see where the other children were power-wise before he showed the full extent of what he was capable of.
An hour and a half later one of the prefects wandered into the common room. He looked Harry over before making his way over to the sofa in front of the fire.
"What are you doing down here so early?" He looked at Harry's books suspiciously.
"I'm an early riser." Harry answered casually. "I was wondering when curfew lifted."
"Why? Breakfast is served at eight. You won't be able to eat earlier, it's same rules for everyone." An edge working it's way into his voice.
"No. Usually I go for a run at six." It was a lie but a practise he wanted to pick up, it was hard keeping fit at the Dursley's but it seemed he'd be getting proper portions at Hogwarts and he wanted to build some muscle.
The prefect narrowed his eyes. "A run?"
"Mmm Hmm." He'd be in shape for duels or running away or a number of other things he might have to do.
The seventh year prefect narrowed his eyes at him but shrugged to himself after a moment.
"Curfew lifts at half past six." He turned and headed back up the stairs.
Harry sighed. He cast the tempus charm again and found that it was ten past seven. He went back to reading. It wasn't long before people started the common room started to fill up. Harry switched chairs so he didn't have his back to the room. He began observing his fellow Slytherins, through his fringe, occasionally turning the page to make it look like he was reading.
Most seemed to interact mostly within their own year. One of the glaring exceptions was a group of boys lounging by the stairs. They were all listening to one of the seventh years as he made hand gestures. Harry guessed that that was the quidditch team and the captain.
It was then that someone crossed his field of vision and sat in the chair adjacent to his own. It was the Nott boy. He looked Harry up and down, focused momentarily on the book in his hands before nodding at him.
"Morning." Harry murmured returning the nod.
Nott was a bit rat-like in the face, there was a small resemblance to Piers Polkiss but he didn't have that haughty superior look about him. His eyes weren't as squinty either, they were wide and a deep brown colour. When the boy didn't look away, Harry rose an eyebrow in question.
"I'm thinking of trying to find the Library later." His accent was upper class but he didn't drawl like Malfoy.
It seemed like an invitation, without truly being one. It would probably be better to move around in numbers until Harry had a better feel for his surroundings. So far Nott didn't seem repugnant.
"Me too." He wasn't going to be the one to ask though.
Nott seemed to understand what he was doing because there was a spark humour in his eyes before it was gone. His eyes flickered past Harry and he shifted slightly to see what had drawn the other boy's attention. It was the rest of their year. Malfoy led the way, chattering away with Parkinson, followed by Crabbe and Goyle and Davis, who was trying to break into the conversation. There was a distance between Malfoy and the second group that Harry thought very deliberate. Zabini and Greengrass walked side by side not saying anything, with Bulstrode trailing behind looking sullen.
Malfoy's eyes drifted over the two of them before he tilted his face up and away from them. Harry saw the snub for what it was and snorted rolling his eyes. But it wasn't just him.
"So did you do something other than sit with me this morning?" His eyes cut across to Nott as the others crowded together not too far away.
The boy gave a somewhat self-deprecating snort. "Well, Draco and I, our families run in some of the same circles. We've met on occasion at parties and gatherings. We've never got along particularly well. I was always a bit too bookish for his tastes."
The boy smirked at Harry then and Harry returned it imagining what might have happened between the two of them. Nott seemed much more subtle than Malfoy.
"So you know a lot of people here," He gave the room another once over cataloguing faces. "And those in our year?"
Having someone to set the scene would be an asset at the moment. He needed to know who these people were and he could only get so much from a distant surveillance. He needed context. Nott's eyes narrowed for a moment before he rose his eyebrows.
"Sure." He answered with a shrug.
Harry only nodded.
"Maybe we can find the Library at Lunch." He said instead.
Nott smirked at him again and nodded. Then the prefects strode in, calling for the first years to follow him.
Nott sat beside him at Breakfast. He didn't say much, just loaded his plate and began to eat. Harry picked himself out two slices of toast, buttered them and slipped three rations of bacon between them. He had to work himself up before he could stomach half of the greasy foods on the platters without throwing it all back up.
Once they were on their way to their first class, he and Nott hung slightly behind and Nott began with the Wizarding world's who's who.
Draco Malfoy's father was on the Board of Governor's for the school, donated quite a lot of money to charity and had the Minister in his back pocket. Malfoy's mother hosted a big party every Yule that everyone who was anyone hoped for an invitation. Crabbe and Goyle's families owed the Malfoy's fealty and had since a Malfoy heir saved the lives of the Crabbe and Goyle's heirs a few hundred years ago. The Parkinson's were of a slightly lower class but had recently broken in with society and Nott thought Pansy was angling for a marriage contract between her and Draco but was unsure if she had her families support.
Davis was a half-blood, a pureblood father and a muggleborn mother like him. Nott said that Mrs Davis was a classy woman and had worked hard to be accepted but she'd done it elegantly where as Tracy as a little too desperate to fit in. The Greengrass's were a well respected Pureblood family, traditionally neutral. They only had two daughter's, Daphne and a younger sister. That meant Daphne was an Heiress. The Zabini's were an Italian family but Blaise's father had been an English man of the lower upper classes. His father had been killed in mysterious circumstances as had Madam Zabini's other husbands. Most called her the Black Widow but not within her hearing. The Bulstrode's traditionally followed the Malfoy's, like the Crabbe's, Goyle's and the Burke's.
Harry noticed that he didn't mention who's families may have been Death Eaters but since Harry was pretty sure his father had been one, he didn't say anything. He judged the individuals and Nott didn't seem to bad.
They did leave lunch early with directions on how to get to the library and how to get to their following class from there. It was an extensive library, he was not able to see either end from the door. The stack closest to the door had the label transfiguration on the side.
"How do you reckon they organise the place?" He asked absently as he took in the sight of so many new books to read. "The muggles have the Dewey decimal system but I doubt that's going to apply here."
Nott gave him a sideways look.
"Know a lot about Muggle's, do you?" He asked casually.
Harry wondered for a minute if he had made a mistake. But he decided he couldn't hide the fact that he had been raised in the muggle world very long. There was too much he didn't know that simple isolation in some fancy manor house somewhere wouldn't cover. It was not a conversation for now at least.
"Mmm Hmm," He nodded instead and carried on his looking around the almost empty library. "One to ninety-nine would be the encyclopaedias and reference texts, dictionaries and the like then a hundred to a hundred and ninety-nine is philosophy and so on."
Nott's face scrunched up his face and gave Harry a half shrug.
"What are you interested in looking for?" Nott asked motioning to the library around them.
Harry had to think about it a moment. There were so many things he wanted to know.
"Wards." He settled on, security had to be a priority.
"You'll need to know Arithmancy before you could attempt a ward. It's supposed to be quite advanced." Nott informed him, leading them to the right to begin their search.
"Arithmancy? Mathematics? Like numbers and stuff?" That was probably something he would be good at, he always understood the math at primary school easily.
Nott nodded and pointed to a shelf on their left labels arithmancy.
"You'll want a basic primer to explain the subject. Not numeracy though, that's predicting you future. Not what you're looking for. We have to wait until third year before we can take it as a lesson." They both went over to the shelf and started browsing the titles.
"An interest of yours?" Harry asked watching Nott out of the corner of his eye.
"Yes. It's important in spell crafting. That's what I want to do when I come of age." He replied.
"That does sound interesting." He agreed.
Creating ones own spells did sound interesting and useful. He could already imagine spells no one else knew the counter to and didn't know how to defend against. Possibilities were already spinning around in his head.
He looked directly at Nott then. He seemed smart, smarter than Malfoy at any rate. He hadn't spoke up in their first classes of the day but neither did Harry. And at the moment he was scouting for Harry's alliance.
"Arithmancy is supposed to be quite tricky, yes?" Nott nodded. "Maybe we should work together on this then. Learn what we both need to together and then I'll concentrate on wards and you'll concentrate on spell crafting. Then we can teach the other what we've learnt."
It would be worth it even if the alliance didn't last.
Nott nodded at him with a friendly smirk and shook his hand. They picked out three books to get out between them and, after Harry cast the Tempus charm, they were siging the books out and hurrying to their third class of the day.