Broadcast #2: Vision

It's okay to be bad at first. You think I got a bullseye right off the bat? I wish. No, at first, I was terrible. Could barely pull back on the bowstring. It took me, not kidding ya here, three months to hit the target twice in a row. It took me three years to hit two bullseyes in a row, and that was mostly luck.

Some people are better at it than others, but no one starts out great. If you think you're a hotshot at first, I'd bet it's just because you're not good enough yet to even know how bad you really are. You're so bad that you can't even imagine how good people can be at it. Things take effort and time. You just gotta be tough enough to wade through the mud you start out in.

I mean, look at what I'm doing here. I have no idea what I'm doing on the radio. My voice still acts up on me every once in a while. I can barely organize the schedule for it. And man, I'm terrible at getting guests. It's a miracle anyone's even listening. But you only get better by doing, right? So here I am doing it.

—Rowland Macmillan, Archery Club EP. 4

Professor Snape had been giving him the evil eye from the moment class begun. Harry could tell; he'd gotten the same look from his aunt and uncle for years, so he had enough experience. It was the look of someone who didn't like you and never would, the same look most people had for rats and other vermin infringing on their cozy homes. There wasn't any logic to it, Harry knew, only a feeling of deep, dooming distaste.

Just as he knew the look, Harry also knew its appropriate response. He simply didn't do or say anything that could raise even the smallest bit of attention. The boy only sat still, listening to the instructions, following the steps on his textbook, and preparing his potion ingredients. Unfortunately, while this did help him escape his professor's ire, it didn't do much to help his unease with it. And it especially didn't help that he'd ended up sitting next to someone else who made him just as uneasy.

Susan Bones. He hadn't spoken to the girl since the entrance ceremony, and even then they'd only exchanged a few brief and pointed words. It wasn't that he didn't like her—he barely knew her—but she certainly didn't seem to like him. Or to be fair, she didn't seem to like anyone very much. She had a very no-nonsense air about her, very serious, unlike any kid he'd ever met. And so Harry, unlearned as he was in the art of making friends or even acquaintances, was intimidated into silence.

At least it was a silence matched by the rest of the class. Harry had taken a special place in Snape's hate list, but the man was rather dark and moody to begin with. A malcontent aura oozed out of him, stinking up the very air around him, so that any glance from him would cause a lowered head or downcast glance. The room itself was oppressively dark too, down in the bowels of the school dungeons, bricked stone walls slick with strange humidity. So far, it was Harry's least favorite class ever, including the ones in normal school.

The work was somewhat gross, his fingers already growing sticky from the mashing and slicing of several bulbous, brown, potato-like things. Harry wasn't sure that they were even vegetables. Maybe they weren't even edible. He would've made a joke about that, but Justin was two rows ahead of him, sitting next to Ernie. Those lucky two had paired up, and although there wasn't a chance to have any kind of fun in Snape's class, they could at least survive it together.

Even Hannah had paired up with someone she seemed to like, Bradley whatchamacallit. Harry forgot his family name, but he was a nice enough Ravenclaw chap from what the boy had seen. Those two were working together on their own potion, whispering to each other, pointing at their textbooks.

Hannah looked up and saw Harry looking at her. She raised one of her potato things to show him how she'd cut it. A pained face had been carved into its smooth surface, cartoonish, but clearly one that was crying out. Hannah held the ingredient over her cauldron, the liquid inside bubbling, and slowly dipped it in. She shook it as she did, mimicking its thrashing as it fell into what Harry imagined to be boiling lava.

He almost laughed. Almost. At the last second, Harry coughed instead, but it was too late. When he turned around, Snape was already scowling at him. Behind the scowl, Harry saw a glint of pleasure, as if the professor had been waiting all along for any excuse to cast his disparaging eyes on his dreaded student.

"Mr. Potter," Snape drawled, voice slick with contempt, "don't tell me you're allergic to balbazaar nuggets. A skinny little brat like you, I wouldn't be surprised."

"No, professor," Harry said.

"Then I would advise you to carry on with your own brew. This is an easy enough potion to create without looking around for answers like some sort of confunded groundhog," Snapes eyes' finally left him, and Harry could already feel his breathing ease, as if he had surfaced from a deep dive. "Five points from Hufflepuff for silent rabblerousing."

So he had seen. Harry ducked his head, grabbing the balbazaar pieces he'd cut up with his knife and sliding them into his bubbling cauldron. The heat that rose up his neck to cover his face was so distracting that he didn't notice, or didn't realize the mistake in, the overabundance of pieces he'd added to his potion. Almost instantly, his bubbling cauldron began frothing explosively, a yellowish foam quickly filling it up to the brim and threatening to overflow out onto the table.

As shocked as he was by this, Harry's reflexes were something to be praised, so his solution to this newfound crisis was as immediate as it was short-sighted. He grabbed a lid from the table and slammed it down onto the cauldron. When the dark and rusted lid began shaking, some foam seeping through the crack, Harry pressed his arms atop it and leaned hard.

Snape, hearing all the clattering metal, returned his attention to Harry. His brow raised a modicum of a centimeter, as surprised as he would allow himself to appear in front of his students. "Already onto the final step, Potter? Didn't make you out to be a fast one, for rather obvious reasons."

The insult was easy for Harry to ignore, seeing as he was currently struggling to keep the lid closed without looking like it. He gave the professor his best approximation of a smile, and it came out just shaky enough to give the impression of simple nerves rather than bodily strain. "Just following the steps," he said, voice breaking a bit, "easy enough, right?"

Snape stared long and hard, eyes borring into Harry's before he blinked and cast them around the rest of the room again. "Hmph. We'll see what pathetic rainwater you came up with at the end of class."

Harry almost sighed in relief, except the lid began shaking again when he relaxed his pressing to do so. He leaned forward again, beginning to sweat, and he had to force himself not to turn his head all around like he had moments before, else he might draw Snape's ire once more. Instead, he just looked to his left, completely at his wit's end, if only to see whether or not Susan had seen.

She had. In fact, Harry had caught Susan's attention so thoroughly that she had stopped brewing her own potion completely. Instead, she looked back at him with the same stony expression he'd seen on her since he'd known her. Her icy eyes trailed up to his face, then down to his trembling cauldron, then down to his shaking knees as he tiptoed in the effort to push down with more force.

"Pfft."

Her face broke into a sly, almost malicious smirk. As soon as it did, Harry felt a strange mixture of validation and horror. Validation because he was now certain, even without any discernable proof, that his discomfort with Susan had been justified after all. Horror because she'd chosen the most unfortunate moment to justify that discomfort.

As if to prove his point, Susan raised her hand.

"Yes, Ms. Bones?" Snape said, sounding quite displeased being interrupted from his in-class brooding.

"Professor, I'm having some trouble with my potion. I was wondering if I could ask Harry to show me his. To compare, of course."

Snape's frown deepened at this. "Your textbook should have a picture, or are you blind as well as incompetent?"

If the professor's remark bothered her, Susan didn't show it. Her sly little grin had faded, but Harry could still see it playing on her lips, hidden in the upturned corners. "I just think that seeing the hue in person would be better. My textbook is a hand-me-down, you see, so the pictures are a bit faded."

Snape sighed, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. "If you insist. Potter, if you please, I'm sure Ms. Bones isn't the only one who would be thrilled at seeing your masterpiece."

That last word had been said with such thickly dripping sarcasm that no one in the room could confuse it for real praise. Even so, Harry's eyes were only for Susan, disbelieving, no longer seeing her as the classmate she was, but as the stereotypical witch whose image he had forced himself to cast out of his mind upon his entrance into Hogwarts. He'd seen real witches after all, and they were nothing like the pointy-nosed, wart-filled, evil-eyed, hunched and scheming villains he'd seen so often in muggle culture. But here, in that moment, Susan seemed to contort into that very figure before his eyes, not in appearance, but in soul, and Harry wasn't sure whether to scream in despair at his unfortunate situation or in revulsion at his close extremity to the cause of it. But, Harry had learned nothing in his short eleven years if not acceptance of unfair situations. So, with a long breath, he prepared to ease his force on the cauldron lid.

Then, just as his arms were set to slacken, he had an idea. The same smile he had seen on Susan's face now came to his, and their roles were, in that brief instant, suddenly reversed. It was her turn to stare with blank confusion as Harry, with the first touch of malice he'd felt since his escape from the Dursleys, said, "No problem, professor. Here Susan, why don't you take a good long look."

Harry opened the lid. To be accurate, he opened it on one side, so that all the foam and bile that had been waiting to explode out to freedom did so in a rushing spray, all of it directly at Susan's face.

She spluttered at first, then brought her hands up to try and block out some of the potion, but by then it was too late. A wave of yellow-brown liquid washed over her as if from a showerhead, and in seconds she was soaked. Her red hair, lobbed up in mounds of sticky fluid, clamped down against her face and cloak, and the cloak clamped down onto the skin underneath. By the time Harry's potion spray ran dry, Susan Bones looked very much like a wet cat shivering in the cold.

The potion soon began showing its effects. Susan's skin—what little of it there was uncovered by the potion's yellowy stain—turned a sickly green. Then, a wart popped onto her face. It was followed by many others.

Harry, who had just seconds before imagined this very transformation, began laughing hysterically. He was joined by first a ripple of lowered giggles, then another one, louder this time, and finally a full-blown chorus. Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws both laughed, fingers pointing, eyes in tears, hands slamming desks. Justin and Ernie were holding each other up to stop themselves from bending over in their cackling. Hannah was covering her mouth, but it wasn't helping anything, since her eyes were closed shut from the enormous, full-toothed smile she hid.

As for Susan, she took this all in with as much class as could be expected. Her cheeks colored red, even through their now-green tinge, and her eyes remained closed to it all, as if not looking at her situation might make it disappear. The lack of reaction actually caused Harry to begin feeling a bit sorry for her, and he started thinking that maybe he's gone too far. After all, it was still the first week of school. Harry knew from first-hand experience that one's reputation in school was created soon and proved difficult to cast off. Now Susan might be known as the green girl for the rest of her seven years in Hogwarts.

The regret left him when Susan calmly and deliberately picked up her own cauldron and splashed all its contents on him, soaking him just as well as he had soaked her. This was followed by another round of laughter. Justin and Ernie were now on the floor. Hannah had given up on trying to hide her smile, and was now bent over the table, shaking with the force of her chortling. It was, for the first time in Professor Snape's entire teaching career, complete and utter chaos in his class.

Harry and Susan left Snape's office, now clean and dry, each with their own personal detention slip in hand. It would be a shared detention, twice a week after classes for three whole months. They would be stocking potion ingredients for the first few, helping Snape manage his intimidatingly expansive cabinets, and then he'd figure something else out for them to do after.

As it was, Susan was furious. She stomped down the hall towards the Hufflepuff common room, pretending not to notice Harry walking alongside her. Unlike her, hands balled up at her sides and head pointed straight up in hidden rage as she was, Harry kept a leisurely pace, his face set in contemplation.

They went down the floating grand staircase, then back up when it changed directions on them mid-climb. They went past classrooms, most of them empty and a few home to one or two students lingering within them after-hours. Some of these students were couples looking for privacy, both first-years noticed, but this went unmentioned. In effect, they waked across the whole of the castle, from the dungeons up to the fifth floor and back down again, both too new to this strange and labyrinthine castle to know their way, and they did it in complete silence.

It was Harry who broke that silence, once they'd walked by the same stone gargoyle on a wall for the third time. It winked at them as they did, as if amused at their failing efforts.

"You're lost, right?" Harry said.

Susan didn't respond. She just kept walking, as if she hadn't heard him.

"Hey, Susan."

"Yes, I'm lost!" she said, whirling around on him. Harry stumbled back, the full force of her fury triggering his flight instincts. "But so what? You are too!"

"I am," Harry said, voice low. "I'm just, you know, making sure."

"Making sure of what?"

"That we're both on the same page here."

Susan glared at him. Her warts had disappeared, but her skin was still the faintest bit green, pale like she'd come down with something. "I'll have you know, Potter, we are most definitely not on the same page!"

"But we're both lost…"

She kept her glare on him, then it dropped, and Susan sighed. She walked over to the wall and sat against it, right under the stone gargoyle looking down on both of them. Susan drew her knees up against her. "We're lost alright. And I've got a detention to boot. Bloody hell, Auntie's not gonna like this. First week of classes…"

Harry gulped, hesitating, then leaned against the same wall she sat against. He didn't sit, careful to not get to close to her. She was still mad, he could tell. But it was a dulled anger now, stored on the fridge and saved for later. Right then, Susan just wanted to be back on her bed and curled up under the covers. If he were honest, Harry felt the same.

"You don't like me much, do you?" he said

Susan sent him a narrowed glance. "You got that right."

"No, I mean, even before today." Harry looked across the hall at the paintings that hung on the opposite wall. He could see them mingling with each other in a sort of secret language, their mouths opening and closing but no sound coming out. He figured that they could hear each other, if paintings did such things as hear, but he certainly couldn't. It was as if they were speaking an entirely alien language, one which he could neither understand nor hope to learn. "And Professor Snape too. He doesn't seem to like anybody much, but I could tell he had something against me for some reason."

"Oh, boo-hoo," Susan said, staring at the paintings also. She saw them speak to each other, but didn't particularly care to listen, or even to imagine listening. They were just paintings, after all. "Poor little baby Potter, so sad. No one likes him. All of wizarding Britain isn't wanting to be his friend, poor little famous Potter."

"I suppose it does sound kind of pathetic."

She stared up at him, the first time she'd looked straight at him since they'd been brought into Snape's office after class. They'd both received the lecture silently, staring straight ahead at the professor, and she'd kept up the habit, too mad or too proud to stop. But she did stop and look at him here, because it finally occurred to her that he wasn't mad or proud like she was.

"I tried getting you in trouble, you know."

"I know," Harry said. He looked down at her, and their eyes met. "You didn't exactly try to hide it."

His eyes were green, Susan noticed. Bright green. "You're not mad about that?" she said.

"Not really. More surprised. I didn't think you'd do something like that."

"Something like what?"

"Something mean."

Susan huffed, and turned away. "Well, maybe next time you'll pay attention when brewing dangerous potions. And I didn't figure you to be that type either."

"What type?"

"The type to get revenge. Or is my skin color an accident?"

Harry chuckled. "You got me," he said. "I just did it without really thinking. For what it's worth, I'm sorry about that."

"Well, it's sure not worth much," Susan said, but her head dropped at that, hiding behind her knees. Harry thought he'd seen something like a smile, and he grinned. She saw it, eyes narrowing again. "I'm still mad at you."

"Sure."

"No, really. I'm telling on you to my aunt."

"Okay."

A beat of silence passed, and now Harry could feel himself relax. He'd been tensing without even meaning to, but now the air he breathed felt a little cleared, like someone had bust open a window and the stale indoor air had circulated out, replaced by a cool outdoor breeze.

There had been something about Susan he'd seen when he first met her, something about the way she stared. It had scared Harry off at first, but now he saw that he'd been scared only because he'd confused the seriousness that came as a result of that indiscernible something in her eyes for coldness.

Looking down at her, Harry could see that stare of hers right then. He'd though it cold seriousness, and while he saw that it was a certain kind of seriousness, he also saw that it wasn't cold. It was a sharp look, a seriousness which came not from the absence of fire but rather from its control. Susan looked to Harry like she was seeing through the wall across from them, through the paintings, out to something beyond even the hills and valleys that rolled outside the castle grounds, out past the far shore.

The distance of that stare was too much for Harry. He could follow her line of sight, but his vision wasn't good enough to see whatever it was she saw. Harry stared at the wall again, eyes roaming the moving paintings, trying to see past it, really trying with more intensity than even he expected. But he couldn't do it. His eyes couldn't pierce through the walls.

It had been that piercing which he so vividly remembered her for during the entrance ceremony. She'd looked up at his scar, a brief glance he'd grown used to ever since finding out about his fame, but unlike the others she'd looked through the scar, and to him it had felt as if she'd found whatever she saw past it wanting. So Harry had covered it, also a first, brought his hands up and covered the scar completely.

Compared to that stare, what was his? What must his own stare look like to her?

Eventually, a fourth-year puff found them. It was pure luck; the fourth-year had also been meeting with a teacher and had just happened to walk by that hallway. Harry and Susan followed him down to the Hufflepuff commons, and after thanking him, the two first-years had been left with the awkward task of saying goodnight.

Well, it had been awkward for Harry. Susan didn't make much of it.

"Remind me to never get you as a guide," she said, already walking away. "Don't let the bedbugs bite and all that, Potter."

And just like that, Harry was left alone on the stairway down to the first-year dorms. Walking down, he heard himself say, "you wouldn't make much of one either," but even as he said it, Harry knew he would follow her if she asked. He didn't know where, didn't need to know, but he would follow her, if only to one day see what she was seeing, so far away.

AN:

This is probably going to be more of a slice-of-life kind of thing. I've never really done that before, but I'm kinda digging it so far. Leaves me a lot of room to screw around.

If you're more about straight narratives, I have other stories you might be curious about. A Percy Jackson one called Percivelly, and a Naruto one called Plan B. Both of those take far more extensive liberties with their respective canon than this one does. That's me saying that knowing that I'll soon throw this canon out the window and into a crocodile-filled moat where it can die a horrible death, so yeah, watch out for that.

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