"Harry Potter, we've come to get you!" A cold voice floated on the wind, chilling him to the bone. He shot up, wide awake to stare at the laughing face of Rabastan Lestrange. Harry cursed the man violently as he stormed to the bathroom to get ready for the day.
From breaking into Gringotts, a topic they still hadn't dropped, to murdering Umbridge, the topics of conversation of his minions were utterly nerve-wracking. If anyone was to overhear their conversations, Harry was going to get into so much trouble it wasn't even funny.
"I want the lot of you out of my way today," he said, as they caught up to him in a relatively abandoned hallway.
Harry pitied the poor kids who were making out when Fred and George made obnoxious faces at them. The kids, however, didn't seem to notice the adults standing around him, which Harry found odd.
"But why?" Malfoy pretended to whine like a little child, and the resemblance to his son was so shocking that Harry had to blink a couple of times to get it out of his head.
"Don't you like us anymore?" Lestrange gave some truly awful puppy eyes. And all around Harry, that expression was mirrored (except for Bill, who seemed to be contemplating murder again.), leading to a disconcerting effect of double vision and déjà vu.
Harry stuck his tongue out, very maturely. If they could bring out the puppy eyes (which they did), then sticking his tongue out wasn't unfair at all.
"I never liked you lot!" Harry replied finally.
"You never liked us?" Bill asked, astounded and with such a guilty expression on his face, Harry felt guilty just looking at it.
"I always liked you, Bill," Harry said, not wanting to be offended. "It's the rest of them I don't like."
"Not even us?" George? asks, waving at himself and the other twin, who Harry was certain was Fred.
"Sometimes," Harry replied grudgingly, walking into the Great Hall. As he sat down, he saw the utterly miserable expressions on the others' faces, and he ground his teeth together. "Sometimes all of you are really nice."
And then he focused on his breakfast because emotions and teenage boys are not a good combination as he has learned. Just when the fact that he was surrounded by seven people he barely knew slipped his mind slightly, Ron sat down a couple of seats away (exactly avoiding said seven people) and called his name.
"Harry! There you are," Ron started. "I've been meaning to talk to you, mate. But you were asleep yesterday, and the twins warned me about going near you today. They haven't pranked you, have they?"
Harry scowled into his bowl. Ron's concern was all well and good, but how did he not notice the twins and five other people at the table with them right now? Because Ron had certainly not commented on the fact that Lucius Malfoy was sitting at the Gryffindor table. Which was so headache-inducing now that Harry thought about it. A Malfoy, at the Gryffindor table. Oh, the horror!
"Terrible, isn't it?" Elvis commented again, reading his mind. "Who's the sneering, mean-faced man at the head table?"
"Hmm… oh," Harry turned to the head table and Snape's sneering face caught his eye. "That's Snape, the potions master."
"He's terrible at teaching," one of the twins added, helpfully.
"He's terrible at a lot of things," Malfoy added, absent-mindedly, spearing a piece of bacon with his fork viciously. Next to him, Lestrange did the same thing, as if mocking Malfoy. And third in line, Black copied the same thing with a slightly too sharp grin.
At that, the twins did it too, just to avoid being left out. Malfoy lost his temper and exploded upwards, launching across the table in a single jump and pushing the twins' smirking faces into their food. Harry turned away from the efficient and brutal roughhousing that followed. He turned to Elvis instead.
"How can you read my mind?" He asked and Elvis smiled mysteriously. Harry had the feeling he would say something along the lines of 'That's for me to know and for you to find out!'.
But Elvis answered truthfully, explaining it. "You project your thoughts, Harry. It's very easy for anyone trained in the mind arts to pick them up. Or even take a peek into your head and read your surface thoughts."
Harry frowned at that. "And who all are trained in these mind-arts?"
Elvis glanced at him blankly. But Bill turned to him in earnest.
"Everyone with any idea about the existence of mind-arts has trained in it. They'd be stupid not to. But amongst the people here, who can actually peek into your mind?" Bill paused and glanced around. "Probably the seven of us, as a special case, Snape and Dumbledore."
"A special case?" Harry tossed back, curious despite himself. This was pretty interesting. Reading someone's mind, how much simpler it would make his life! And it was also pretty interesting that he had never heard of this before. Did the safety of a student's mind count as safety in general? Because that was not being taken care of. Dumbledore's security, here's another flaw!
"Aren't we special?" Elvis asked, a spark in his eyes. Harry didn't reply to that.
Breakfast was more important than their confusing and obscure statements. Regrettably, looking back at the table meant looking at the destruction that was left of the meal. For something that was definitely not the last time, Harry groaned pitifully and ignored the mess left behind in favor of his classes. (Oddly, nobody else noticed the mess). There went his breakfast (It was still the most important meal of the day.).
With some stroke of fate, he was left alone for the rest of the day and the rest of the week. That left him with a sense of false safety that he would regret far beyond his death.