An entire world had opened up for Harry, and it had nothing to do with magic.
Unless, of course, friendship could be defined as magic.
His memories of his life before the Dursleys were vague at best, but he had a fuzzy impression of being badly dressed and given funny looks when he went out in public. When he went to the playground he'd played by himself, made sand castles only to watch other people knock them down, slid down slides with no one to cheer him on, run with no one chasing him.
With the Dursleys it was no better; he'd always gone to the same school as Dudley, who hated him, and nobody wanted to be friends with anyone Dudley Dursley hated. So he'd done his homework alone, played alone at recess, eaten alone at lunch, been picked last during P.E.
It didn't bother him as much as it might have; he liked to be alone with his thoughts most of the time, and he usually found other people, even grown-up people, almost unendurably stupid. Still, he knew somehow there was a difference between being alone and being lonely, and seeing other people do things like share desserts and trade books and tell jokes gave him a sort of forlorn, empty feeling, like he'd missed something nice. Sometimes he'd wished he just had one friend.
Now, all at once, he had two.
It had taken him the better part of two months to realise why Weasley seemed to talk to him all the time. If he thought about it at all, he simply considered that between sharing a dormitory and having all their classes together they were usually in the same place at the same time, and Weasley was the sort who had to talk to someone. He didn't have the least inkling of being friends with Weasley until one evening they were lying flat on their stomachs in front of the fire in the Common Room, doing Charms homework and gnawing treacle fudge that Hagrid had given them.
"Harry, what'd you get for number eighteen?" Weasley asked, un-sticking his teeth with an effort.
Harry attempted to separate the roof of his mouth from the jaw to which it was cemented. "Grnrdbfrnkwngrdm," he managed eventually.
"That's what I got too," Weasley said, grinning stickily. Had that been a joke?
And Harry remembered suddenly, as he showed Weasley his paper, that Dudley and his rat-faced friend Piers used to do homework together—or Piers would do homework and Dudley would copy—and that as a reward Aunt Petunia used to give them sweets. Doing homework and eating sweets and making jokes…Weasley was his friend.
He blinked once or twice.
"Wrslr," he said. He tried again. "Weasley?"
"Eh? You know, Ron is fine."
"Ron?"
"Sure. I mean, I call you Harry."
Harry looked at Ron for a long critical moment. "Ron, then…" He leaned forward conspiratorially and couldn't stop a grin from spreading over his face. "Did you ever hear the joke about why six was afraid of seven?"
Then, after defeating the troll on Halloween, it turned out that Hermione Granger the bossy know-it-all was his friend too. She walked with them to breakfast and to all their classes three mornings in a row, and she even offered to help them with their homework. They told her about what the three-headed dog might be guarding, and about this mysterious Nicolas Flamel. (She suggested they look for the name in the library, and they started spending all their spare minutes in there together.)
With these newfound friends, Harry found himself required to speak some of his thoughts aloud on occasion. He found people laughing at some of the things he said, and he found himself laughing at some of the things they said. He didn't eat alone, or play alone, or do his homework alone. He had someone to answer his questions about school (Hermione) and about being a wizard (Ron) and no one telling him not to ask them. And he always had someone to tell things to if something really interesting happened in, for instance, Quidditch.
Quidditch training proceeded apace. He'd learned what a Snitch was and how to dodge a Bludger. He'd spent what seemed like a hundred hours on his new broomstick and about a hundred more in the changing room listening to Wood, the captain, give them pep talks and plan team strategy. Harry liked the feeling of being on a team, of being a part of something. It was almost like having six more friends, but he didn't think that thought for too long because the idea of having eight friends all at once overwhelmed him. Even Dudley didn't have eight friends.
Harry also liked Quidditch itself, mostly. He liked flying after he got better at it; he liked the scarlet robes that made him look like some kind of soldier or science fiction hero; he liked the moment when he caught sight of the Snitch and the feeling of racing toward it; he liked those moments when the Snitch was nowhere to be seen and he could just watch the play for a few seconds while he was looking for it. He liked almost everything.
What he didn't like was the bit where, once or twice a week, Coach Potter showed up to check on them.
He did it to all the teams, Wood said, but Harry was sure he wasn't nearly as demanding of the others. He criticised everything, from Wood's game strategy to the Weasley twins' aim, but he seemed to spend most of his time criticising anything and everything about Harry.
"No dawdling, Snape!" he would say if Harry paused in midair. "Eyes open, Snape!" he would say if Harry blinked. "Catch it, Snape!" if Harry was chasing the Snitch. What did Coach think Harry was trying to do, teach it to dance? "Handling, Snape!" he would say when he couldn't think of anything else. His handling was always wrong.
Harry was quite a good Seeker virtually all the time, but Coach Potter brought out all the fumbling, pea-brained oaf in him. So it was with a sinking heart that he learned that Coach refereed almost all the House matches.
"Don't sweat it, Harry; he's always been fair before," said George Weasley in the changing room about a few days after Halloween. They were dressing for their last practice; the match against Slytherin took place that Saturday.
"He's never refereed a match with me before," Harry muttered darkly.
"I'm sure he's just looking out for you, lad," said Wood. "You being a first-year and a rookie."
"Yeah, he was looking out for me when he stopped practice to point out to everyone that my feet were seven-tenths of a degree from where they should be! I just hope he doesn't show up today…."
That hope was dashed almost as soon as they entered the Quidditch pitch. Coach stood at the other end of the field, holding his broom and talking to Professor McGonagall, who headed up to the stands when the team appeared.
Coach caught sight of them. He brought his broom down and started to mount it, but winced; putting weight on his right leg seemed to bother him. He switched and mounted awkwardly from his left, leaving his right dangling, useless, as he kicked off toward them.
"Right, you lot!" he called. "Off you go!"
Harry watched him all during practice. He heavily favoured his left side, resisting moving his right leg at all. When on the ground, he had a pronounced limp.
Harry wasn't the only one who noticed, either; George Weasley drew level with Potter at one point, Bludger bat slung over his shoulders.
"Oi, Coach," he called, "leg all right?"
Coach smiled tightly. "Fine, thanks, Weasley. Just cramps."
"Yeah? Only there's blood on your robes," said George in a low voice.
Coach glanced down in alarm at his black-and-white striped robes, which did indeed stick to his calf via a spreading red stain. "Damn!" he muttered. "Wood, I'm taking a break," he called. "Don't stop play."
Harry focussed then on getting the Snitch, anxious to have five minutes without Coach's evil eye fixed on him. He caught sight of the flash of gold almost immediately and took off after it. He wanted to hold it up when the Coach returned, to prove that he could do something right….
The Snitch perhaps sensed his eagerness to get at it, because it seemed to be flying faster than it had ever done before. It didn't have much of a brain, though, if it was trying to get away from him, because it was heading right toward the corner of the Pitch, when it would have to double back and it would only have a limited amount of directions to fly. It wasn't allowed to leave the pitch, everyone knew that…
Except it seemed to have forgotten.
"Oi!" yelped Harry. "No you don't! You're not allowed to…come back here!"
He chased after it. It flew in its customary fast zig-zag off the pitch, up into the air, back down, and around and around the stands. Harry lost sight of it entirely for one moment, but then the tiniest golden sparkle disappearing behind the far stand sent him off again.
As he zoomed around the corner after it, he saw Coach Potter, leaning against the back of the stand. His teeth were clenched and he was holding his robes above his knees with one hand while conjuring bandages with his wand hand.
His right leg was indeed bloody, and mangled. Harry saw four deep impressions, like bite marks…
The Snitch stopped careening and started serenely buzzing around Potter's head, like a pet bird. The sound and the buzzing made him look up, and he caught sight of Harry.
"SNAPE!" he shouted, dropping his robes.
"Sorry, sir, I was chasing…"
"Get back to the Pitch!"
"But, sir…"
"Just GO!"
He did, though he had nothing to do as the Snitch was gone. The Coach came back a few minutes later, his temper even worse than before. He snapped at the slightest thing, especially if that slightest thing had anything to do with Harry. Harry had never been yelled at so much in his life, even by Uncle Vernon, who had turned Yelling-at-Harry into an Olympic sport.
"Snape! Watch that Bludger!" "Snape! Don't get in the way of the play!" "Snape! Why didn't you see that Snitch, it was right in front of you!" "Snape! Handling!"
I'll give him handling, thought Harry darkly, close behind the practice Snitch. He did what he'd always done in situations like this—he shut his brain down, concentrated on one thing. The Snitch. Catch the Snitch. Potter doesn't exist, the other players don't exist, focus, concentrate, compartmentalise.
He managed in this way to get through the entire practice without losing his temper. Still, in spite of his best efforts, he fouled up again and again, turning from Harry-the-Youngest-Seeker-in-a-Century to Harry-the-Alleged-Seeker. The others had noticed that he had driven the golden ball off the Pitch (which, Fred Weasley noticed, shouldn't even be possible), and once he fell off his broom because he'd mistaken the hum of a bluebottle for the whizz of a Bludger. He only fell six feet onto springy turf, but he was sure the humiliation of Potter's comments would stay with him for days.
That night, amid piles of library books they flicked through in search of the name Flamel, he told Ron and Hermione about what he had seen behind the stands.
"It was like something bit him," he said slowly, "something huge. It had almost gnawed off his leg…here's a Flammery…"
"But what would do that?" Hermione asked.
"Come on, think," said Harry. "What do we know that's being kept in this school right now that's huge with big teeth?"
"You don't mean that dog?"
"I bet he tried to get past it on Halloween—this book's no good, no Flamel or Nicolas, any spelling—you remember how he acted when he came into the bathroom, when he had a hard time standing up? I thought it was just because the troll was so gross, but he must be after whatever that dog is guarding. I'd bet my broomstick he let that troll in, to make a diversion," said Harry.
"I dunno, Harry," said Ron, looking sceptical. "He hasn't been very nice to you, but he's not all bad. I don't think he'd go after something Dumbledore wanted to keep safe. It couldn't be Flannel, could it?"
"No. And you only think that because he's a big Quidditch hero," snapped Hermione. "I wouldn't put anything past him, personally. But what do you think he's after, Harry? And what is he going to do to you now that he knows you know?"
A horrible thought struck Harry. Potter would be refereeing the Slytherin-Gryffindor Quidditch match; he'd have all kinds of opportunities to do practically anything he wanted without anyone suspecting anything…
Just what exactly was going to happen to Harry at that match?