Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters, settings, or worlds within this work, outside of a few OC's. Any recognizable characters are not mine; I'm just playing with them. Harry Potter and its associated works belongs to J.K. Rowling. X-men and Marvel belongs to... er... Disney, I suppose? I am not making any money off of this fan work, nor do I wish to.

Chapter 3

Harry

Many people have asked the famous Harry Potter when his mutant powers first began to activate.
I am writing this letter to the editor in response to the palpable confusion that has arisen within the
magical community regarding his answer to such a query during an interview last Thursday.
I will include a transcript of his statement here for those who have not yet seen it:

"I don't know when exactly I got them, and it really doesn't matter. I get that question a lot
and I really don't have a good answer for it, can we please just move on?"

It's an honest question, really, and I don't blame people for their curiosity. But what most folks
don't realize, is that it may be more difficult for a young muggleborn magical mutant
to discern that their powers are, in fact, anything out of the ordinary, especially
in the case of those whose abilities show up after they have begun their magical education.

Such was the case for our young Mister Potter- he has stated several times that he doesn't really know
when his powers developed because by the time he realized they were there, he had already attributed
most of his prior use of them to magic, a mistake which a young witch or wizard born into a wizarding
family would be far less likely to make.

"But Anonymous!" I hear you exclaim, "He's Harry Potter! Harry Potter isn't a muggleborn!"
Well, you are technically correct- Mister Potter was not born a muggleborn. But, birth circumstances
aside, Harry Potter was not raised in a wizarding home. For all intents and purposes, when
he started at Hogwarts, his knowledge base was the same as that of most muggleborns. As a
result, his experiences within our world line up more closely with a muggleborn than a wizard-born.

-excerpt from an Anonymous letter to the editor posted in the Quibbler in response to an article about Harry Potter's life as a mutant,
written when he was in his mid-twenties.

While facing the basilisk, Harry felt something odd, like a prickle in the back of his head. Suddenly, an intense burst of wind began swirling through the room.
Harry felt... oddly connected to it, but he had no time to stop and wonder why; there was a giant serpent in front of him to take care of, no time to think about weird feelings that cause sudden inexplicable cyclones-

Later. He'd definitely think about this later. Preferably sometime when he wasn't about to die...

Later saw Harry alone in an abandoned classroom, hopefully far enough away from potential intruders to avoid any unwanted interruptions.

It really is funny, sometimes, the way a person can realize things in hindsight that they never paid attention to at the time.

Harry was a wizard. As a wizard, it wasn't exactly strange for odd things to happen around him. But... what had happened in the Chamber of Secrets, with the wind and everything, was... odder. More odd? Whatever. It was... weird, even for him. Weirdest of all... He didn't think it was magic. He knew what magic was like, and there was something about that wind...

Where had it even come from? And why did he feel like he'd had something like that happen before?

Had the wind come from... Him?

Memories began flashing through his head. The same odd thing? Multiple times? From the same person, in lots of different situations? Wandless, no less! And it was easy- far easier than doing regular magic. Accidental magic didn't work like that. Controlled magic didn't work like that. So what did?

Something niggled at the back of his mind. He'd... he'd heard about people who suddenly obtained odd powers before, even before he knew he was a wizard. The Dursleys didn't like him talking about anything strange, so he'd done his best to just forget about it, but now...it was in some class during primary... some public safety announcement lecture...

Oh.

Oh. That's right. He remembered now.

Mutants.

Mutants were different from wizards, weren't they? Wizards all had the same basic powers, and used them in mostly the same ways. But mutants- they had the same genes, or something like that, but their powers were all different, and they usually only had one kind... Like being able to move things around with your mind without a wand. Or being able to create fire without a wand.

"Or...being able to- to move air, and make wind... Without a wand..."

The possibility of being a mutant- genetically, anyway- had legitimately never entered his head before, even with all the magical things that had happened around him throughout his childhood. But now... he couldn't stop thinking of all these different moments where he'd done something that was rather odd, even for a magical person.

Harry blinked. He stared down at his hands. They didn't look any different than usual. He drew his wand and swished it. The warmth of his magic spread through him, as usual. "Definitely still a wizard, then... Now, to test this...mutant thing. If I really am a mutant, then I should be able to use my power whenever I want... right?"

Re-holstering his wand, he hesitantly raised his hand in front of him, memories flashing through his mind-

-Harry was running as fast as his feet could take him.

This wasn't particularly unusual when Dudley and his cronies were around- chasing him down was their favorite game, after all. No, what was unusual was what happened while he was running. One moment he was down on the ground, legs pumping as hard as they could go, and the next, he found himself up on the school roof.

It was a very strange day, all around.

What Harry hadn't paid any attention to at the time was the way he left a burst of wind behind him, brushing over his pursuers in his wake. Thankfully, everyone was too focused on how Harry got up to the roof in the first place to take note of a gust of wind running through the schoolyard-

-As Harry swished the holly and phoenix feather wand, and sparks flew out from the tip, a soft breeze inexplicably blew through Ollivander's closed-in, dusty shop. Nobody paid it any mind, as Harry, Hagrid, and Ollivander celebrated their success in finding the right wand for Harry-

-Harry shifted into a dive on his broomstick, racing down after Neville's Remembrall. People screamed in horrified fear as he dove faster and faster-but he wasn't afraid. He instinctively knew exactly where he was, and he was certain he'd be able to stop when he needed to. His instincts were proven correct moments later, as he managed to pull up short just in the nick of time.

He never questioned why his flight instincts were so strong- any curious thoughts he may have had about it were tossed to the side as he was ushered off with Professor McGonagall to... speak with the captain of the Quidditch team? Well okay, then. Much better than an expulsion, certainly-

-The troll crashed around in the bathroom. The situation was... not looking very good. So Harry did the first thing that came to mind- he ran at the troll and jumped.

In the panic of the moment, he didn't notice the air solidifying around him, buoying him up just enough to latch onto the troll's neck-

-His broom was acting weird.

No, actually, let him rephrase that.

His broom was going completely insane. Harry had proven himself to be quite good at flying these last several weeks, and he felt pretty confident in his skills on a broom. But this was next-level. He was barely able to stay seated-

The broom jerked, hard, and Harry fell off. He managed to catch onto the handle as he felt himself becoming unbalanced, but it was a near thing.

He was going to fall, wasn't he?... He was pretty sure he was going to fall. Oh, he was holding on for now, but...the broom was simply behaving too erratically; he wouldn't be able to maintain his grip for much longer...

Though, come to think of it, he was having an easier time holding on to a broomstick with one hand than he would have expected himself to have had he been watching himself... himself.

...He wasn't sure what to make of that sentence, and he's the one who thought it...

"Focus, Harry!" he told himself, as the broom began to shake violently. The wind whipped around him in a frenzy; the air itself seemed to be frantically reacting to the situation. To Harry's surprise, it helped- the breeze seemed to be helping his spatial awareness, and he managed to keep hold of the broomstick handle.

Down below, Hermione Granger bumped into Professor Quirrel on her way to interfere with Professor Snape-

The broom stopped jerking around like a wild bronco. Harry allowed himself a moment to breath a sigh of relief, and climbed back onto his broom.

The wind died back down, and Harry dived for the safety of the ground, Snitch-in-mouth-

-As the car hurtled towards the tree, the air thickened around him, and the car began to slow but it wasn't enough to stop it from crashing-

-Hermione was petrified. She was petrified, and Harry hadn't been able to do a thing about it-

"Come to think of it, Hogwarts was extremely drafty that day, wasn't it?"

It had certainly fit Harry's mood at the time, but he hadn't thought to connect it directly with himself.

But he was connecting it now, wasn't he? Now to test this theory...

He focused on all the times he could think of when the wind came to help him, searching for what they all had in common, looking for that odd feeling he'd had in the Chamber of Secrets-

There! He found it, twinging at the back of his mind. He captures the feeling, pulls on it, focuses on bringing it outward-

WHOOOOOSH

A bright, strong gale began to blow, with Harry at the epicenter, circulating through the room and creating a whirlwind that sent abandoned desks and class materials flying into the wall. Harry gasped, then laughed in sheer wonder at what was happening. This was... this was amazing.

But...

This also confirmed everything. He was a mutant. Probably.

Did the wizarding world know about mutants? What did they think about them? What would Ron say if he found out? And Hermione...

Hermione was a muggleborn...She had to know about mutants already.

Did she support them? Fear them? Somewhere in-between?

"I shouldn't tell anyone until I know if being a mutant is considered a bad thing here..."

Harry let the wind die down. The classroom looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Which, well... He supposed it had.

"I won't tell them...Not yet. But perhaps eventually..."

Author's Notes:

The Anonymous letter to the editor was written by Hermione, who was every bit as frustrated as Harry with all the interviewers asking the same question over and over again, sometimes with even the same people. His answer never changed, and it became clear to Harry and his friends that they kept asking in the hopes that he'd eventually give them a better response. So, Harry didn't want to write a letter or make a statement himself, but when Hermione approached him about it, they came up with that letter to the editor together, with Hermione writing the bulk of it and checking with Harry to make sure he was okay with what it said.

-This chapter has honestly been one of the more difficult ones to write. This is largely because I know Harry Potter is the main character of...well... Harry Potter, and I felt it would be appropriate to incorporate some of his scenes in canon as part of his mutant-awakening journey. However, I want to portray the scenes in a way that actually fits the scene, which is a bit difficult when you've never actually read/seen the official thing. Soooo... cue the research/clip searching!

But even at that, it's been tricky to decide what exactly I wanted to write for Harry. Did I want him to awaken/discover his mutant powers when he accidentally teleports to the roof of his school as a kid? Did I want him to do something during his first flying lesson with catching Neville's remembrall? Did I want his powers to emerge during a high-adrenaline situation such as the fight with the troll on Halloween or the encounter with Quirrelmort? Did I want it to be a more mundane situation like Quidditch practice or something?

I eventually settled on having his mutation partially activated when he's a kid, so that we see brief short weak bursts of his powers, but nothing so intense that it would be noticeable if you weren't looking for it. And then, I finally had to settle on a specific part for the "full-activation."

It needed to be a high-stress moment, because Harry is activating his powers a little earlier than he would have had his life been a little less exciting (eleven years old is usually pre-puberty, after all, not during) and I wanted his powers to officially activate sometime during first or second year. I hope that the moment I chose was satisfactory. :P

All of these factors had to be taken into account, and it definitely left me stuck for a bit in a way that Luna and Neville (and even the next couple characters' chapters) didn't. I think it's because Luna, Neville, and the others I have in mind are all much more minor characters, and so there is a lot of "blank space" for me to work with, which gives me a bit of leeway if I want to write what they're doing or where they're going at different moments without worrying about disrupting canon.

(This story will diverge from canon eventually, but I'm trying to keep it mostly canon-compliant up until the diverging moment, because literally the only thing different about this world so far is that some characters are mutants.)

If you haven't noticed, I'm trying to focus on a different type of journey for each character in regards to their mutation.

Luna feels a bit estranged from most people, but she has the benefit of having a mutant father (though neither of them know that) and the fact that her powers themselves offer her a bit of guidance. Her journey is more about intellectual and emotional curiosity, wanting to understand her abilities better so she can understand herself.

Neville is just downright confused, alone, and a bit scared. He has this weird, unpredictable power, no idea where it's coming from, no idea how to control it, and no way to figure anything out because all the information he needs is in the muggle world. His journey is more about learning that he's not alone, that there are answers to his questions, that he can learn to control his abilities... I'll figure out more about him as I write him, I'm sure.

Harry's journey has to do with coming to terms with himself as a person who will always be fundamentally different than everybody else. He wants to be accepted as he is, but various things keep getting in the way of that- people's preconceptions about him because of his celebrity status, people who see him as a miniature of his father reborn *cough*snape*cough*, and... people who will see his Mutant status and think differently of him one way or the other. Ergo, his story has to do with accepting himself as he is, and becoming at peace with his own differences.

I'll explain more about the next couple characters' journeys once I actually, y'know... post their chapters.

By the way, I am NOT making every single character in the book into a mutant. Just FYI. I have a specific set of characters whom I've singled out, and while there are one or two other mutants at Hogwarts, they're minor background character OC's, and I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to flesh out any Hogwarts-based OC's at this time. Similarly, I have a couple adult wizarding characters in mind whom I've chosen as mutants, but they won't show up for awhile and I'm not planning on giving them more of a role than secondary characters at best.

I'm starting with the individual "mutation-discovery" chapters for each of the principle Hogwarts Mutant Characters, but after I finish those, I intend to move on to some actual plot.

-As usual, a description of Harry's mutant abilities will be in my profile.