As I have written the entire story as one single file, I have to break it up into chapters as I go through it with my beta. I have no idea how many chapters it's going to be, and I'm afraid they'll vary greatly in length, as I'll have find sensible 'breaking-point'. Hope you don't mind!
Learning to Live With Tom
Harry quickly became used to living with the voice in his head. It was possibly due to the fact that he had always been alone, but he latched on to Tom like he was indeed a long missing sibling. Or maybe it was the other way round, and Tom was the one who had latched on to Harry. Both boys revelled in the feeling of finally having someone who cared for them and understood them, often without words. They were no longer alone.
"How do you think you ended up in my head?" Harry asked Tom while he was weeding Aunt Petunia's flower beds.
"I really have not the slightest idea."
"Well, what exactly do you remember from before? Where did you live? Who were your parents?"
"I didn't have any. I lived in an orphanage."
"That's probably worse than living with the Dursleys," mused Harry. "Where was the orphanage?"
"Not sure. In England, I suppose. I remember there were bombs falling."
"Bombs?" Harry asked, aghast. "There haven't been any wars around here for a long time."
"Maybe I lived a long time ago and then died. And instead of going to heaven, I ended up in your head."
"In religious education, our teacher said that in Hinduism and Buddhism, people believe in re… what was the word again? - reincarnation: Souls being reborn after death with a new body. Maybe you ended up in a body that was already occupied by mistake?"
"Hm, that's a possibility. Does that make me a Hindu or a Buddhist?"
Harry frowned. "I don't know. Maybe we should ask someone who knows about religious stuff. Like a priest."
"No, you can't!" Tom said, panic in his voice. "Harry, you mustn't tell anybody about me, never! If you do, they'll try to get rid of me."
"How would they get you out of my head?" Surgery probably wouldn't work. Tom wasn't a tumour. Or was he?
"Exorcism, I guess."
"What's exorcism?" Harry had never heard the word and wondered how Tom knew.
"I'm not sure. It's something priests do to get rid of evil spirits. I think it hurts a lot. You don't want them to do it on you."
"But you're not an evil spirit, are you?" He couldn't be. Tom was nice.
Tom, too, frowned at the thought. "No, I don't think so."
"Well, how can we find out what you are if we cannot ask anybody?"
"Maybe we can do research in the library. Like with your science project last month. Remember what Mrs. Wright always says: There is no answer that cannot be found in a book."
"That's because she wants us to read," Harry said, wondering how Tom could have fallen for that. "I don't like it. It's difficult."
"No, it's not. You just have to practice some more, maybe start with reading out loud. We can read together, if you want."
"Hm. Okay. We can try."
It's not like Harry had something better to do when he was sent to his cupboard in the evenings. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon didn't want him in the living room when they were watching TV, and Dudley had his own TV upstairs in his room.
Harry had mostly been staring at the underside of the stairs above his head, listening to the sounds drifting in from the living room and trying to follow whatever movie they were watching just by hearing the noisy parts of it.
The idea to open his school books had never crossed his mind, until Tom made him pull out his English book and insisted on starting over with it, reading from beginning to end. Tom helped him with the pronunciation of long and difficult words and taught him to pay attention to punctuation marks so he would figure out the structure of a sentence more easily.
In school, reading had always been a bit of a struggle for Harry, but now that he and Tom were reading together every night, he soon got much better at it. Harry suspected that Tom was a lot more talented school-wise than he was. He did his calculations just as easily, and had a quick grasp on any subject. Fortunately, he was able to explain to Harry everything he hadn't quite gotten the hang of in school. Harry found that reading was a nice pastime now that it didn't require such an effort anymore, and he soon began to take books home from the school library. Harry's grades gradually improved, and he found himself greatly motivated by this.
"You have to tone it down a little," advised Tom, when the teacher praised Harry's good work on a written English test, and his cousin was shooting him killing glances from across the classroom. "We're making Dudley look bad, and upsetting him is not something that usually ends well for us."
Sadly, that was true. Not that Dudley needed an excuse to play 'Harry hunting' with his friends, but he felt an even bigger need to prove that he was in power when Harry caused him to feel stupid.
Harry, however, soon found a way of dealing with Dudley. In a period between classes, he and Tom sneaked into the biology classroom that held the terrarium with a harmless corn snake to find out if Harry, too, could talk to snakes. As it turned out, he could!
The snake didn't have much of interest to say, but as Harry knew from experience, hardly ever leaving the place you were kept in made for a boring life. Knowing of his ability though, he was now constantly on the lookout for grass snakes when he was working in the garden. The news that he was able to talk to them travelled fast – not among his human neighbours, but within the snake community. Harry often found himself in the company of yet another curious visitor. Harry seemed to be some kind of oddity even with snakes, who liked to come and gawk at him.
And as Harry eventually found out, snakes were highly susceptible to bribes. He made sure to collect all the snails and slugs he could find – and the occasional egg stolen from the fridge – to persuade them to scare Dudley for him. Having snakes turn up unexpectedly everywhere – his school bag, his trainers, his lunch box or from under his bed – made him go ballistic. Of course he suspected Harry behind it, especially since the snakes always mysteriously disappeared before Dudley could show his mom. Aunt Petunia believed him even so, and punished Harry for doing something freakish, but that didn't make Dudley's problem disappear. Snakes continued to appear even when Harry was locked into his cupboard.
Harry finally offered a bribe to Dudley as well: Leave Harry alone and he would make sure no snakes found their way into his room. It wasn't an offer, really. Dudley soon learned not to mess with Harry unless he wanted to keep seeing snakes everywhere.
With Dudley finally out of his hair and Harry's reading skills much improved, Harry soon felt ready to start on their research project: Finding out how Tom had gotten stuck in Harry's head.
"Let's make a list and write down all ideas we can come up with," suggested Tom when they were sitting in their closet one evening. "Then we research all of the possibilities and cross out what's unlikely."
That's why Tom was doing so much better than Harry in school: he was very organized and methodical. Harry himself was more prone to doing things on the spur-of-the-moment. Fully in agreement with taking a more structured approach for this, he got out paper and a pencil and noted down:
1. Hallucination
"You still think I might be a hallucination?" asked Tom incredulously.
"If you are, then you are a really vivid one. But if you want to do this scientifically, we cannot rule it out yet. Nobody else can see or hear you, so how can we prove that you really exist?
"Good point. Put 'Possessing evil spirit' under two."
"Now, that's really unlikely," Harry objected. "I think we have strong enough evidence that number two is wrong. You're not evil."
"How do you know?"
"You've been kind to me and helping me with stuff. That's not what an evil spirit would do."
Tom thought about that for a moment. Then he said: "Fine. Cross out 'evil'. I might still be a possessing spirit, though."
Harry put that under two, and added 'Tumour' under three.
"What's a tumour?" asked Tom, and Harry explained about cancer, which had killed one of their neighbours on Privet Drive. It had been in her brain, and made Harry wonder if she had heard voices as well.
"But you said she was sick a very long time. You're not feeling sick, are you?"
"No. But that might still happen."
"I really hope not. If I'm a tumour, I will die with you."
"What else did we have? Reincarnation. That's four. And I have another thought: What if you're not someone else being reborn into my body, but if you are, in fact, me? A previous me. From a former life?"
"No, I don't think that's likely," said Tom after giving the idea some thought. "We don't even like the same things."
"I like reading now, too."
"Yes, but you also like tuna sandwiches, which are horrible."
"How would you know? You can't eat them."
"I can smell them just fine, unfortunately. You also like Mrs. Wright, even though she didn't believe you when you said that you didn't know how you ended up on the roof."
"Of course she didn't believe me," Harry reasonably pointed out. "I lied."
"Even so."
"Then how's this for five: Maybe you're my undeveloped twin brother who should have been born with me, but whose body died."
Tom liked the idea. "I think it'd be awesome to have a brother. Note it down!"
"I like the idea, too. Much better than hallucinating or being possessed."
"Anything else?"
"Not for the moment. But we can add more if anything comes to mind."
Harry and Tom soon found out that the school library didn't offer any books for their particular kind of research and decided that they would need a membership for the local library.
"That's going to be tough," Harry predicted. "I don't think Aunt Petunia will allow it."
"Why not? Reading is perfectly normal. It's quiet, too. And it doesn't cost anything to get registered. Tell her your teacher suggested it."
"But she didn't."
"She did say kids should read more. That's basically the same, because in order to do so, they need access to books."
Harry thought this over for a moment, then nodded. "Makes sense. Let's see if we can persuade her."
As expected, Aunt Petunia did raise objections. "How am I to know that the library is where you really are, and that you're not getting into trouble somewhere?"
"You can call them or send Dudley to check on me!" offered Harry, who knew that Dudley would never set foot in a library. "I'm also going to check books out."
"Hmph. And what about your homework and your chores?"
"I'll be doing them, Aunt Petunia, I promise! And you won't hear anything from me while I'm reading – it's a real quiet activity."
The last argument, Harry thought, was what brought her around. Aunt Petunia got him a pass and allowed him to walk over to the library after he had finished his chores. So motivated, Harry was much quicker than before doing his chores, and his aunt was happy to have him out of the way.
Finding a starting point for their research, however, was difficult, especially given the vast collection and the variety of books. Harry had to ask the librarian for help.
"Excuse me, Ma'am …"
"What can I help you with, dear?" the elderly lady in charge of the information desk asked kindly.
"I'm looking for books on possession."
"Sorry, what?" She looked at Harry with wide eyes from atop of her glasses.
"I mean, novels," Harry quickly explained. "Stories that have something like that in it.
"Oh, you mean like horror and mystery fiction, ghosts stories and parapsychology books, sweetie? That would be in the sci-fi section, labeled Para/Science. Or you could check out psy-fi and horror."
"I'll do that. Thank you, Ma'am."
Of course, novels might not be the best choice for scientific research, but it was a beginning. And they were definitely more entertaining than the scientific books Harry had a brief look at. Those were much too difficult. They'd have to wait until Harry was much older to read those.
Tom, Harry found out, was a true book lover. Harry had never been very studious before Tom, he hadn't seen the point. If he got better grades than Dudley, it was only a reason more for him and his parents to hate him and punish him for it. But Tom pointed out that knowledge was power and that Harry would need a lot of knowledge to better his situation and eventually become independent of the Dursleys. So Harry spent a lot of his free school hours in the library and borrowed everything that Tom thought was a topic worth exploring.
They often got into discussion about what to read, though. Tom wanted Harry to check out the much more difficult books, like the ones on psychology, Harry liked the horror and ghost novels.
"Why do you want to read about child raising?" he asked Tom, exasperated. They had had the same argument when Tom wanted to borrow a book on how to deal with moody teenagers. "You don't have kids, and you don't have to deal with teenagers!"
"Harry! We are kids and we are going to be teenagers at some point, and Dudley is moody all the time! We are putting ourselves in the shoes of Aunt Petunia. If we know how the enemy thinks, we can use that to our advantage."
"But I bet Aunt Petunia has never read a book on child raising in her life. Or does she come across as particularly competent in that area?"
"No. But after reading the book I'll know what she does wrong. We can use that against her."
Harry sighed. "Alright. We'll read it. But don't blame me if my eyes fall shut in the middle of it out of sheer boredom!"
