Originally Posted on AO3 December 2021 to September 2022

complete in 29 chapters

Harry Potter of number four, Privet Drive, had always known he was different.
He could move things without touching them, could make them float in the air and fly across the room. He could make objects invisible or burst out in flames. He could make them change their appearance. He could even light fire in his hands and it never burned him. He could also talk to snakes. They liked talking to him, but they never stayed long.
In short – Harry Potter had a Gift.

In which Harry is magically gifted and maybe just a bit darker and possibly a touch too indifferent.
This Harry gains a different friend on the train, is sorted into a different house and ends up as part of a different trio that is certainly not golden but not exactly silver, either.

AN

This Harry won't be like Tom, I just liked that certain scene in the orphanage. This Harry is too apathetic to be like Tom.

July 1991, before 1st year

Harry Potter of number four, Privet Drive, had always known he was different.

He could move things without touching them, could make them float in the air and fly across the room. He could make objects invisible or burst out in flames. He could make them change their appearance. He could even light fire in his hands and it never burned him. He could also talk to snakes. They liked talking to him, but they never stayed long.

In short – Harry Potter had a Gift.

But despite having this Gift, Harry did not have a perfect life. Oh, it wasn't bad, but it just didn't live up to his standards, either. Sometimes, he wondered whether his parents would have given him a more interesting life. They had possessed the same Gift as he did, after all. Petunia, Harry's aunt, called it 'magic' and she used the word like an insult. She had told him, once, that his parents had possessed magic.

Petunia didn't like magic very much, but that was fine. It just meant that Harry couldn't ask her any questions about it. Her husband and son hadn't even known magic existed until Harry's Gift had first manifested. Or they had known and never truly believed in it – not that it made a difference.

The Dursleys – that was, Petunia, Vernon and their son, Dudley – weren't bad as far as families went. They weren't the nicest people and they weren't always good at providing food, but they did provide Harry with a roof over his head and were at least smart enough to leave him alone most of the time. It helped that they were actually afraid of his Gift. Petunia had once tried to cut his hair in his sleep, but Harry had sensed her approaching before she had even opened the door to his room and welcomed her with blue flames dancing in his palms and a pair of scissors floating in the air right next to her head. She had never tried to cut his hair again.

Her reasoning wasn't even good – she was just narrow-minded, thinking boys shouldn't have long hair. But Harry needed his hair to be that long. For one, the longer it grew the more manageable it became. If he wore it any shorter than his collarbone, it would stand up in all directions and look like a bird's nest no matter how hard he tried to tame it. But its current length added enough weight to soften it into beautiful curls. Harry had enough problems with the side-swept fringe (which often fought against his wishes to stay in place and it fought hard) – the purpose of that was to hide the lightning-bolt-shaped scar people liked to stare at. Of course, all of this was pure convenience and also, maybe, a touch of vanity, because Harry liked to stand in front of the mirror and admire the way his mother's emerald green ribbons complimented his black hair and his green eyes. Also, having a little bow at the base of your neck was adorable. Yes, Harry liked his hair to be long.

Harry was aware that this made him look like a girl. He was small and scrawny and wore his hair in long curls. It was sometimes easier to be mistaken for a girl. It made people underestimate him immensely. And it drove aunt Petunia mad. Harry liked making her mad.

In the beginning, before he had discovered his Gift and learned to use it, making aunt Petunia mad had been a bad idea. Making uncle Vernon mad had been worse. And Dudley – well, Dudley always followed his parents' example. The Dursleys had long learned to leave Harry alone and Dudley now knew what a bad idea it was to go 'Harry hunting'. He had learned the hard way. Dudley now knew better. Dudley now knew that his parents were right to leave Harry alone. No one wanted to bear the consequences of angering Harry. So the Dursleys left him alone and he didn't hurt them – it worked out rather well most of the time.

It had taken Harry long enough to get there. His Gift hadn't manifested until his seventh birthday and by then the Dursleys had grown accustomed to their personal little servant. They had kept him in the cupboard under the stairs, not even worthy of having a proper room. They had only given him scraps or denied him food entirely when he had 'misbehaved'. They had started given him chores and the older he had grown, the more those had become. Harry had endured and Harry had wished for something to happen, someone to come and take him away. But no one ever came. Not even all the people who kept staring at him, waving at him, bowing to him, thanking him – odd people, dressed in strange, strange clothes. What were they even thanking him for? He had never done anything that someone would thank him for in his entire life. He supposed the Dursleys should be thanking him that he wasn't making their life as difficult as they had made his, but …

Well, in the end, Dudley punching him in the face, on his seventh birthday, had been the last straw.

It had been one thing to receive no presents – the Durselys had never given him any, anyway – it was another to be used as a punching bag.

Revenge had never tasted so sweet.

o

School was so very boring.

Back in elementary school, before Harry had discovered his Gift, his classmates and his teachers and just about everyone had been horrible. Life had been hell.

Harry hadn't been allowed to be better than Dudley, which had been a difficult feat in itself. Harry had worn Dudley's old and baggy clothes and a pair of broken glasses. He had had messy hair and wobbly knees and an odd scar.

Harry's hair was longer now, less messy and more beautiful. His scar had disappeared behind a fringe that was hard to tame but definitely worth it.

One of the very first things Harry had done with his Gift, had been correcting his eyesight. He could now see the world sharper than he had been able to with the glasses, before.

One of the very first things Harry had done after he had used his Gift to make the Dursley's fear him, had been to demand proper clothing and a room. Just a room. They had given him Dudley's second bedroom – Dudley had by then already learned his lessons and been too afraid to protest – and that had been more than little Harry had actually hoped for.

It had been a valuable lesson.

Harry was now ten years old. He would turn eleven in a week. Harry now knew what he could demand of the Dursleys – what he reasonably needed for a comfortable and normal life. No one could protest as long as Harry wasn't abusing his Gift to live in luxury. Not that anyone could have done anything about it – no one else was gifted like he was, after all. But it didn't hurt to be cautious. Harry only wanted a peaceful life, after all. It wasn't his fault that the Dursleys had needed a bit of, ah, encouragement to provide more than the bare minimum.

So.

School was boring.

Harry had a Gift, but Harry was also gifted in other ways. It made the other children jealous and jealous children often became mean, but no one was mean to Harry. Not anymore. The other children left him alone and Harry used his breaks to read whatever book from the school's library he hadn't read so far and school was so very boring.

The teachers either didn't care about Harry or they believed the Dursleys over him – the old Dursleys, the ones that hadn't learned their lesson, yet – and thought of him as a bad boy. And he had to be a bad boy, or the other children wouldn't be scared of him. Yes, that was very logical, indeed – very adult.

Had the teachers cared about Harry, they would have surely moved him up a year or two – maybe more, had he been lucky. They would have recommended him for a special school, a school for gifted children. But they didn't care and so school was simply boring. They wouldn't even let him read during lessons.

But school was over, for now. The summer holidays had begun and Harry gladly spent most of his days in the local library, where it was cool and quiet and the librarian never bothered to pay attention to the books he read there. She only ever looked at the ones he checked out and he had stopped doing that years ago. It would have been nice to have something to read at the Dursleys' house, to keep the boredom away – all they ever did was to be boring, or watch television, which was also boring – but the librarian would have never let him take 'adult books' with him, even if it was just simple math or classic literature. So were the woes of a ten-year-old.

The local library closed at five-thirty in the afternoon. The walk to the house took Harry about half an hour, depending on his mood. The Dursleys liked to eat at six sharply, but they never said anything about him being late, only set aside a plate for him and started eating without him. Harry preferred to eat after they had already retired to the living room, anyway, so that suited him just fine.

It was different today.

Harry had taken his time on the way back and then gone upstairs to put his bag away and wash his face and waste a few more minutes to make sure the Dursleys were definitely finished eating – he was nice like that. Yet he still found his aunt sitting at the table. She was alone and there was only one plate – Harry's plate – but she was still there, clutching a letter in her hands.

The look on her face made something in Harry ease up. That was the first sign that something good was about to happen.

"This," aunt Petunia said, "has come for you in the mail today." She paused, staring at the letter in her hand.

Harry reached out, palm up, and waited. It took her a moment, mouth thin and eyebrows twitching. Then, reluctantly, she put the letter in his outstretched hand. It was a heavy envelope, thick and made of parchment. No one used parchment anymore. There was no stamp, meaning the sender must have delivered it personally – or have it delivered personally – and the address was written in green ink. They had even written his bedroom on it.

The envelope was also sealed with an old-fashioned wax seal – purple wax and a coat of arms depicting four animals, surrounding the letter 'H'.

It was a rather strange letter. A special letter.

Harry silently broke the seal and took out a letter and a list. He read through both of them twice. Then he looked up at his aunt.

She was wringing her hands and looked like she was about to faint.

"It is a boarding school, I assume?"

Petunia's eyes met his for a moment, before she hastily looked away again. "Yes. You would only need to return during the summer."

"And my parents went there, too?"

"Yes."

"You are afraid of what I might learn there."

"… Yes."

"But you are relieved to have me out of the house for most of the year."

"Yes."

Harry nodded.

Her fear was irrational, of course. As long as they left him alone, there was nothing to be terrified of. But it still gave him a deep satisfaction to know that he could make her cower so easily.

"I shall go then, to this Hogwarts," he said. "You will have to bring me to wherever it is I can buy my supplies and I expect you to bring me to the station, as well as collect me from there when the school year is over. Can you do that?"

"I – Yes, I can do that." Petunia nodded to herself. "We will have to take the train – unless you want Vernon to drive you?"

"No, thank you," Harry said.

He didn't like cars. Cars were small and loud and uncomfortable. Trains were a much better means of travel. Had Harry been older, he would have just asked his aunt for money and gone by himself. But people would see a little boy all by himself – or a girl, sometimes they thought he was a girl – and they would worry and ask unwanted questions and he didn't want that.

Aunt Petunia would have to endure.

It was fine. Harry was sure she could do that. She had some kind of experience with magic, after all – and that was more than Vernon could say for himself. She was also less prone to fits of anger or panic and more well-mannered than her husband. When choosing between the two, Petunia was not the worst choice.

Harry wondered, briefly, if having a whole school for magical people, people like him, meant that he wasn't special, after all, that he was gifted, but not the special kind of gifted. But he would have to find that out for himself. And if it turned out that he wasn't special, after all, then he would have to make sure he would be, in the end. Yes, Harry was confident that he could do that. Because Harry had a Gift.

o

Diagon Alley was an interesting place. Yes, it would take Harry a few years to get bored of this.

Aunt Petunia had brought him to a dingy pub called 'the Leaky Cauldron', where Harry had left her to go and do his shopping alone. He figured he might get away with it in a bustling street and he did. No one paid attention to him and Harry liked that. He always liked it best when people just left him alone.

Some older witch had let him into the alley by tapping her wand – that was what the stick was probably called, unless the magical world had a different name for it – against a brick of the wall behind the pub, which then had transformed into a stoned archway and revealed the cobbled street beyond.

Diagon Alley looked like it came straight out of a picture book – one for children, with lots of fantastical and magical elements. There was a shop for cauldrons and Harry thought of an old woman, bend over, crooked nose, stirring some slimy green potion over a fire. There was an Apothecary that did not sell any of the medicine Harry would have expected on the other side – what were non-magical people called, anyway? A shop for pets, a shop for owls – why owls, specifically? – a post-office – oh, that was why the owls had their own shop – a shop selling broomsticks, flying broomsticks, and another selling quills.

It was all very typical. Harry was sure he would find some dark side-alley selling dark, ominous items, maybe even cursed objects and skeletons and anything worthy of a proper All Hallows Eve.

This new world was colourful and hectic and full of magic, but it was also very predictable. It was exactly how Harry would have pictured a magical shopping district. Whether that was a good thing remained to be seen.

But first, he had to exchange some money. And while he was at it, he should ask about his parents' accounts. He wasn't sure whether there were different banks – he only knew they used a different currency and he knew that, because he wasn't blind, but there was only one bank he could see so far, so he decided to try his luck.

The building was tall, white and very impressive. It was called Gringotts and the people working there were small and ferocious-looking with their long fingers and their sharp teeth. They were not human, Harry realised, and then it didn't matter what they looked like, anymore. For all he knew, humans might look like baby-faced monkeys to them, or something like that.

The goblins – Harry wasn't deaf, either – were rather grumpy fellows. The one Harry ha spoken to had had a rather odd reaction to his name and then called some of his colleagues over and they had all sneered and huffed and asked pointed questions he had not known how to answer and that had made them all even more gruff with him.

At least Harry now knew that his parents had left him a vault. There was probably more they had left him, or more he might inherit someday, but the goblins were busy grumbling about him not possessing a key and rather unwilling to answer any of his questions.

In the end, they brought Harry to a private room, had him cut open one of his fingers to let a few drops of blood fall onto some kind of special parchment and for a fee of an heirloom or two or thirty Galleons, Harry would be issued a new key.

Wizarding money, even though goblin-made, was apparently of no use to the goblins. They did accept Galleons as payment, but they did not want them. Harry concluded that thirty Galleons was more than the new key was worth – Harry had no idea how much a Galleon was worth, nor did he know what kind of heirlooms he possessed – but he was rather annoyed by now and wanted this to be over as soon as possible, so he didn't argue and agreed to pay in gold. He would figure it out later.

If the goblins were ripping him off, then so be it – he could afford to be exploited once. The sheer amount of golden coins, Galleons, in his vault confirmed that. And there were no heirlooms of any sort in sight. The goblin, in a grumpy voice, pointed out to him that this was not the only vault to the Potter name, but Harry did not have access to these other vaults as of right now, so he could not have checked them for any heirlooms. He was rather glad to leave the bank and tell aunt Petunia that she could go back on her own.

Harry had taken out a large sum of money. Well, he didn't know how large, because he hadn't had the chance to figure that out, yet, but it was a lot of coins. If it wasn't enough, he could always go back to the bank. He didn't want to, because the goblins were not pleasant to deal with, but he would do it. It was nothing personal, most people were not pleasant to deal with, the goblins just had annoyed him for much more time than any person had before, not counting the Dursleys.

In any case, Harry still had the money Petunia had given him and he would buy a train ticket back to Little Whinging and bear with the nosy people. This way, he could take his time and Petunia wouldn't have to wait in a dingy pub, surrounded by the magic she hated so much. Harry was nice like that. Sometimes.

Petunia was very relieved and even said goodbye to him, which was as good as a 'thank you' from any other person would have been, and then she was gone. Harry resolutely ignored the people that were staring at him, went to the man at the bar and politely asked him to let him back into the alley. The man gave him an odd look, but did as Harry asked and that was all Harry had wanted from him.