In CoS when they try to sneak into Myrtle’s bathroom to ask her about her death, McGonagall catches them and Harry makes up the excuse that they wanted to see Hermione in the hospital wing and Minnie doesn’t give them detention and then comes this and since we all know Harry’s dumbest excuse, here’s the official suggestion to rate all of Harry’s excuses on a scale from
to
Harry Potter oscillates from 100% effort to coasting on a wave of apathy.
It just occurred to me, how does Amortentia work on aromantic people? Asexual people? (I don’t know if it’s based on romantic or sexual attraction; I assume at least romantic attraction, but possibly both). I’m specifically wondering about Amortentia because of the smell.
What would Tom Riddle have smelled in Slughorn’s classroom, a cauldron of hot strong love bubbling away at the head of the class? Would he smell anything? Or would he smell a few favorite smells, but no special final thing that would remind him of someone?
For that matter, how does it work? Does it work on something physical, hormones or something, and thus might work on anyone barring some sort of chemical difference? Or does it work on a different level, and can only draw on something that is there in the first place – i.e. existence of sexual/romantic attraction, current conscious or subconscious experiences of which it recalls to the mind with its smell?
Could aromantic or asexual people be immune to its effects? Could a person’s sexuality affect whether they become infatuated with the person who administers the potion? How much can magic really create here?
Just things I’m suddenly wondering.
When the potion was worked on Ron it seemed to cause major obsession rather than lust so I have no doubt it would work on someone with an incompatible sexuality to that of the administer of the potion or someone who is Aromantic/Asexual spectrum.
It’s definitely got a mental aspect to it at the least. Perhaps it works by changing the way you think, perhaps changing the way you associate things to people and creating positive associations with the administer of the potion. Or perhaps it takes existing positive associations/feeling towards another person that already exist and re-routes them towards the administer of the potion instead.
Another way it could work would be through the combination of three neurochemicals: phenylethylamine, norepinephrine and dopamine which are found in the hormonal system when people first fall in attraction with later stages of long relationships being guided by oxytoxin and serotonin.
Possibly also it could have an aspect which hijacks the human body’s ability to sniff out certain parts of our potential partners’ DNA that make up their immune system, called major histocompatibility genes (MHC), to determine whom we’re compatible with. It would explain why a potion which would make people fall in infatuation with others would have a scent aspect which makes the potion smell good to them.
At the very least it has been shown to affect mental autonomy and has been shown to adversely affect decision making ability. I find the potion extremely disturbing and it honestly seems to be a magical variation of a roofie.
Crack theory: Voldemort deliberately got rid of his nose in order to make it harder for Amortentia to work on him so no one could control him.
it is a harry potter fanfic from like 2009, 160k words, 50 chapters
basically, adult Harry accidentally goes back in time and wakes up on his 11th birthday again, but with all his memories of the future intact
(the way he travels back makes no sense whatsoever but it doesn’t really matter)
harry decides upon 3 goals:
fuck up as much shit as possible
make a shitload of money
save some lives or whatever
it is
H I L A R I O U S
his go-to explanation for how he knows what’s going to happen?
he has a psychic scar
(hermione is SO PISSED about this)
(neville’s like “either he’s psychic, or he’s the greatest conman alive”)
everyone just sort of assumes harry’s insane and he doesn’t do much to dispute this
harry also decides to make it his mission in life to LOSE the house cup every year
“snape is my sole ally”
he also goes out of his way to befriend neville, ginny, and luna earlier this time, so they’re part of the gang throughout and it’s great
even draco is a friend!
(kind of)
(when harry’s not spreading a rumor that draco’s the lovechild of narcissa and snape, anyway)
harry’s motivation for everything he does in this story is basically, “oh, this will be hilarious”
either that or, “it’s probably a tax deductible”
because the way lockhart is written in this story is also amazing and harry ends up teaming up with him to merchandise The Boy Who Lived so he can have cash to burn
(so he gets a LOT of shit done via bribes)
it gets to the point where harry is able to convince everyone that he’s not the heir of slytherin…. because if he was, he’d have found a way to make money off of it
and everyone’s like “yeah ok that checks out”
in this timeline, neville’s boggart isn’t snape…. it’s harry as the minister of magic
harry also decides to make sure cedric lives by quizzing him constantly on what to do if he ends up in a graveyard
harry: by the way, that reminds me – cedric. graveyard.
cedric, not even really listening: run like hell.
the sheer magnitude to which harry does not give a fuck in this timeline is truly awe-inspiring
he mouths off to everyone, and i mean everyone. lockhart, snape, the dursleys, malfoy, friggin’ voldemort
everyone is like “what… what the fuck, harry”
(though by the end of first year it’s more like “… *deep sigh* … fine.
snape is so angry
it’s fucking hysterical and just about everyone ends up better off
draco malfoy and the rest of sytherin house is allowed to run rampant hardly checked when they hurl slurs at other students – hogwarts is not a safe school and dumbledore does not make it safe ever
yeah like
don’t let your teachers be biased and abusive
teach some tolerance
do something
don’t abandon children just cos they were born into this kind of beliefs
don’t wait for them to be “chosen” to kill you
i mean okay he didn’t know about DE teachers he kept hiring but he should’ve paid attention to Snape’s classes at least
like it was what he was supposed to do, as a Headmaster. That was his job.
are we not even going to talk about how unexplored the ginny/tom relationship is
they wrote to each other for an entire year, tom riddle was closer to ginny than anyone else had ever been without reservation and she in turn was the object of his almost religious focus and devotion and study, he knew her deepest and darkest most innermost secrets, secrets that curled up inside her like velvety tendrils trying to claw their way out of her throat, secrets that she had never breathed a word about to anyone else after he had ensnared her into the deceptive cradle that was his gentleness and warmth. she went to him for advice, confided in him about her bruised heart, asked him all of the questions she had never dared ask her parents or brothers or teachers, clutched the diary dearly to her chest and told him the little details about her life, everything everything, they were profoundly close, chillingly so. tom riddle knew ginny weasley inside and out, lived vicariously through her, she had literally poured her soul into him, so much that he began pouring a little bit of his soul back into her i cant breathe
tom riddle aka voldemort poured bits of his soul back into ginny weasley
a part of him will always be inside her, lying dormant but sharp-eyed in the dark corners of her mind
she got to know that side of him so thoroughly, the solicitous kind thoughtful tender side, he was everything and everywhere all at once, ginny weasley was best friends with fucking lord voldemort ok
why was this never explored, where is the narrative for this
why did jkr not incorporate this more into the story, why did ginny not have a more pivotal role in tom’s downfall, where was her part in the tom/harry chronicle of which she was so clearly involved and included, the only other character to be consumed and completely drowned in tom riddle’s darkness and come out thriving and pulsing and very full of the life he tried to devour, why was this simply left untouched, this could have been so much more, so much better, it nearly writes itself, its all there, what the fuck
Tbh “Slytherin’s reputation as a violent anti-muggle bigot is mostly revisionist history on behalf of his descendants” isn’t a BAD concept, especially given the tactics of modern white supremacists and how they treat viking culture in particular, but the fact that everyone always handles it like 100% of everything associated with him was false (he was NICE to muggleborns and he would NEVER put a basilisk on the school and the chamber of secrets was a PANIC ROOM and DEFINITELY NOT BUILT FOR THE DARK ARTS) is like…………… do you have no concept of grey morality. You can have a Slytherin who resents muggles for hunting magical children & families and is reluctant to train muggleborns because of his prejudice (justified to himself by saying it’s a safety measure for their school) who has a clear bias but also ISN’T a mass murderer who wants to kill all muggles. But guess what! You guys completely woobified a canonical dark wizard who left a tool of genocide in a castle full of underage children, so now this whole concept is banned. Absolutely no white people are allowed to write this any more. You guys ruined it for everyone. Thanks a lot.
The first time Harry Potter met Hermione Granger, she was standing with her chin up and her hands on her hips a few paces from the old olive tree in the schoolyard, glaring into the far distance. The wind was trying to twist and buffet her hair into her face, but mostly it was just tangling cheerfully with itself.
Dudley and Piers were busy kicking all the other kids off the play structure, so Harry had retreated out into the grass. He stood a safe distance from the weird girl who was pretending to be a statue and thought wistfully of lunch.
“There’s a fallen bird’s nest,” the girl said in a rapid and certain tumble of syllables. “The boys knocked it out of the tree, but I chased them off and I’m hoping the mama bird comes back. I’m Hermione Granger. We just moved here.”
“Harry,” he said.
“How’d you get that scar?” she said.
“Car accident.”
“That’s a weird scar for a car accident.”
Harry shrugged. “It killed my parents.”
She blinked quickly at him and even at that distance he wished vaguely that she wore glasses, too, because her gaze was something that really felt like it should have some built-in bluntedness. “Mine are dentists. Mum’s taking me to the library after school, want to come?”
–
Before they went into Diagon Alley, Harry asked Hagrid if they could find a payphone. Hermione picked up on the first ring.
“Harry! Where have you been? I’ve been trying and trying to call–”
“Sorry, yeah. Um, so, I’m not coming back to school next year, I…” Harry drifted off, staring at Hagrid’s massive moleskin shoulders. The giant man saw him looking and gave him a tentatively cheerful little wave. “It’s been weird, Herm.” He pressed his forehead into the phone stand, but not too hard. “I think you’re the only thing I’m really going to miss.”
“Harry,” Hermione said and Harry started to frown, because that wasn’t her stern and startled voice. That was the voice that meant she was off down a charging war path of other thought and might not have heard him at all. “I’ve been reading.”
“Of course you’ve been reading,” he said. “I’ve been being forcibly hidden from a swarm of post office owls–”
“You’re in books,” she said in breathless delight, squeaking over the telephone line. “First thing we did, of course, after the professor explained, was get her to escort us to a bookstore– a whole bibliography, Harry, a whole world’s bibliography I haven’t even touched– how am I ever going to–” She took in a little calming breath, and murmured, “Different infinities, it’s okay, Hermione, okay.” A sharp exhale and then she tumbled right back into her rushing rivelet of a sentence. “And I picked up a good dozen, besides the school books, of course, and Harry, you’re in books, in Dark Wizardwork of This Century and A Modern Wizards’ History and October’s End: A Biography–”
“Hermione,” said Harry with slow enunciation. “Are you a wizard, too?”
“A witch, I think,” she said. “But I’m still reading up on the sociology of it all.”
–
Hagrid wouldn’t say Voldemort’s name, but Hermione would. She came over with a stack of books up to her chin, gave the Dursleys her normal pointed little stare that said she’d like to set them a little on fire, and curled up in his cupboard with him.
He supposed she probably could learn how to set them on fire, now, if she really wanted to.
She gave him passages and excerpts with his name in them, with his parents’ names, a home he hadn’t known. There were pictures of a ruined house with the smoke drifting in little curls of ink. There was his mother, smiling and waving in black and white. There was his mother, laid out on the floor, with a sober little caption below it. That picture was still, except for curtains fluttering in the window.
Hermione finally dragged her face far enough up from the pages to see Harry holding his own hand very tightly, and then she closed the book and reached for one about which magical creatures you should pet and which you shouldn’t.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I wanted to know.”
“I’m still sorry.”
–
The Grangers drove Harry, Hermione, Hedwig, and their trunks to King’s Cross Station. Mrs. Granger kissed the top of Hermione’s head while Mr. Granger mussed Harry’s mop of dark hair affectionately, and then they swapped children and repeated the treatment. Hermione pushed her hair back out of her face and marched them all to Platform 9 ¾, the entrance mechanism of which she had read all about.
“Before you go,” Mrs. Granger said, “let’s buy you some sandwiches? I don’t know what sort of food they’ll have past that–”
“There’s a trolley,” Hermione said, but her parents dragged them off to a snack kiosk anyway, Harry happily in tow.
As they were on Hermione’s tight schedule, there were plenty of compartments open, and they took one all to themselves– well, to themselves, Hedwig, and Hermione’s books, which took up two seats. (Harry would wheedle Hagrid into taking him to Diagon Alley for Christmas shopping that year, where he would get Hermione a carry-all bag for her small personal library.)
Hermione took a long preparatory breath while Harry unwrapped his sandwich. “Harry? What if I go and sit down under the Hat and I just sit and sit there, and then it says I’m not a witch at all?” Hermione said, the words getting more squashed together and higher-pitched as she went. “I’m not magic, it just got confused, and they send me home? Harry, I don’t want to be a dentist. Other people’s mouths are disgusting–”
“You’re not going to get kicked out,” Harry said, chewing amiably on his sandwich. It was not good, but the Dursleys hadn’t bothered with any breakfast for him and he hadn’t wanted to bother the Grangers about it either. It was a bit dry on the way down, but it settled warmly in his belly.
“But what if I do?”
“I’ll stage a protest,” said Harry. “Refuse to do my homework til they reinstate you.”
“You’re not going to do your homework anyway.”
“See how dedicated I am to you.”
She made a dismissive little noise at him, wringing her hands in her lap.
“Hermione,” he said, and she lifted her bush of hair to look at him. “You’re the most magical person I know. It’s gonna be alright.”
She gave a long slow blink but whatever she might have said was interrupted by an uneven knock at the door. “Um,” said the pudgy boy standing there. “I’ve lost my toad.”
Hermione leapt to her feet. “Where did you see him last?”
Harry followed in the wake of her forward charge, but he brought the rest of his sandwich with him.
–
(Harry did not know this and would not know this until Mrs. Granger mentioned it casually over a Christmas dinner years and years later– but she and Mr. Granger reported the Dursleys for child abuse and neglect, over and over.
The reports got lost– minds scrubbed down, papers vanished– but they kept calling in reports. They considered kidnapping. They couldn’t imagine why the wizarding world might want to keep their chosen one somewhere so toxic, why they might want to keep this underfed child and his messy hair with those people.
“My mother left me a blood protection spell,” said Harry, whose scar had not ached in years. He poked at his mashed potatoes under the focused attention of Mrs. Granger’s stern little forehead wrinkle. “I had to live with family, blood family.”
“Then they should have made them treat you right,” Mrs. Granger said, as though it was that simple.
Mr. Granger gave Harry another helping of peas.)
–
On the steps of Hogwarts, Draco Malfoy thrust out his hand to the Boy Who Lived, who surveyed the open palm with amusement. “Thanks,” said Harry. “But I think I can tell the wrong sort for myself.”
The redheaded, freckly, hand-me-down clothes boy Malfoy had been bothering snorted. Harry slipped his hands into his pockets.
“You’re the kid with the rat from the train,” Hermione said. “And the spell that didn’t work.”
“It was a cool rhyme anyway, though,” Harry said. “Hi, I’m Harry, this is Hermione.”
“Yeah, she said, then. I’m Ron– uh, Ron Weasley.”
“Yeah, he said,” Harry said, rolling his eyes Malfoy’s direction. “Come on, you wanna stand with us? Hermione will tell you about the ceiling.”
“It’s enchanted!” said Hermione.
–
When Hermione founded SPHEW, Harry was not surprised. He had spent too many schoolyard days escorting spiders to safe spaces, keeping vigil over fallen bird’s nests, and watching Hermione stand up on her desk chair in heated pitched verbal battles with teachers. She’d driven at least two teachers to tears and taught most of them at least a few new vocabulary words.
–
Over summers and holidays, Harry and Hermione took Ron to the movies, to the seashore, to Hermione’s top three favorite libraries. Hermione’s Aunt Meg taught them how to whittle under a cloud of cigarette smoke that clung to Harry’s hair until he washed it out.
In this life, there were things in the Muggle world that Harry missed, that he wanted to see again. He loved Hogwarts, and he nominally went home to the Dursleys each summer, but he knew he always had a bed at the Grangers’. He knew the weird system they used to organize the books on their shelves. He’d pass Mrs. Granger the marmalade in mornings before she had to ask. He got free dental check-ups all his life, which was good because the Dursleys rarely bothered taking him into the dentist.
The whole Granger family tore apart newspapers every morning, calling article excerpts across the table and pointing each other to their favorite journalists. Before Hermione even first stepped onto Hogwarts grounds she got a subscription to the Daily Prophet. During Harry’s fourth year, Mr. and Mrs. Granger got Arthur Weasley to buy them an owl and then began an unending campaign of furious letters to the editor that never got published.
–
In a crumbling boat shed, Severus Snape died, but first he pressed a shining bundle of memory into Harry’s hands.
The fight was still going– Neville newly broad and certain; Luna whipping out quiet, barbed little curses; Ginny charging like an army in and of herself. Hermione had her arms full of basilisk fangs. Ron was moving people like bishops and knights. But Harry had a long damp walk before him, so he had time to wade through that life not his own.
Severus had been a lot of things– one of them was in love. Harry dragged his feet through forest mulch, seeing a little redheaded girl in sunlight, hands not his own offering her transformed flowers. It had been just them for so long. For Severus, for so long, there had been no one but him and Lily.
Even in Hogwarts, Severus had drifted through the classrooms and common room and library. He had believed in magic, in the cool slide of good knives through dried roots, and in Lily– always, always in Lily– Lily in sunlight, Lily chewing on her thumbnail over Transfiguration homework, Lily flicking soapsuds at him in her kitchen at home over summer, Lily pig-tailed and seven, wide-eyed as he showed her the first magic she’d ever seen, a leaf to a flower, a bit of sunlight to a bit of fire.
He had loved, and it had been a real thing. He had fucked up, and it had been a real thing, that heartbreak, that regret.
When Harry turned the Stone in his hand and saw his mother step into pseudo-life in that forest clearing, he thought I wish I’d known you. He thought about how she was in sepia and gray, here, just like in the pictures in the pages of Hermione’s books.
But he was also thinking about Severus. He was remembering Lily in sunlight, remembering her walking away, remembering her in that same cold photographed sprawl but in color–in grief–in bruised knees and heaving gasps.
Severus had been the first to find Lily’s body and it had felt like someone had cut the sunlight out of him. Harry was living through that grief, but he was also living through the wail of the child crying unacknowledged. His tiny pudgy hands were wrapped around the guardrail of his crib.
Harry was thinking about a girl standing in a field like a statue, hands on hips. He was thinking about Hermione’s raised hand ignored in Potions, or the way Snape had sneered that he didn’t see a difference in her cursed teeth. Love had made him brave, perhaps. It had killed him, but it had not made Severus good.
Harry wondered if his mother would have escorted spiders to safe places, if she would have stood guard over fallen bird’s nests, if she had worried herself to pieces that first time on the Hogwarts Express about the Hat telling her she didn’t really belong.
“I wish I’d known you,” he told the specter of Lily Potter. He held his own hands tight.
For Harry, for so long, there had been no one but him and Hermione. Even in Hogwarts, there were things only she would understand– parking meters, the cobweb ceiling of his cupboard, the silence of marmalade at breakfast. Harry believed in magic and he believed Hermione Granger was the most magical thing he knew.
“They’ll be alright,” he said. “I’ll be alright. I was alright, mum. I wish I’d known you– but I wasn’t alone.” He squeezed his hands tighter– Hermione showing him her favorite spots in her favorite libraries; Ron shyly showing them the Burrow like it was anything less than a magnificent masterpiece of warm rooms and patchwork architecture; Hermione standing in the field like a statue, bushy-haired and seven years old, jaw set. “She wasn’t alone, either,” he said. “And she’ll be alright. Ron will be alright. I have to do this, don’t I?”
“We are so proud of you,” Lily said.
“Thanks,” said Harry. “Sorry,” said Harry, and wondered if Hermione was going to be able to read the little passages and excerpts with his name in them, with those un-moving pictures and the sober captions underneath.
He dropped the Stone.
–
When Harry Potter died for the first time, crumpled in forest mulch, he didn’t go to a squeaky clean King’s Cross Station. There were no crescent moon glasses to twinkle kindly at him.
He stood under an old olive tree and a little girl looked up at him with those eyes that needed shielding, needed blunting, needed a manufacturer’s warning. “A wind’s coming,” she said. “You can just go. It will be easy.”
He stood outside Diagon Alley, a Muggle payphone tucked between his shoulder and ear. “You’re in books,” she said, with a breathlessness he’d barely heard for years. There had been too much weight on his shoulders, on hers. “You’re done,” she said. “You’ve done enough. Go on, tap three bricks up and two to the left.”
He stood in Godric’s Hollow, in the snow, holding her hand, looking at the ruined house. “You should have had this,” she said. She was seven and small, not nineteen and weary like she had been in life. The sky was overcast but there was sunlight glinting in her hair. “You can still have this. You can have everything.”
“You’re not real,” Harry said.
“But you are,” she said. “There’s a wind coming. It will be easy.”
“You’ve never done anything easy in your life,” he said.
She took both his hands– hers were so small against his grown fingers, his broad palms, and how had they done everything with hands that small? Basilisks and werewolves; shouting down teachers from atop desk chairs.
Harry was sitting in his cupboard in the light of its single bulb and he was too big for this space, his shoulders curling forward, his head bowing. She was standing there with sunlight still in her hair and her arms piled high with books. “You don’t belong here,” she said. “It will hurt. You won’t fit, if you go back. Everything can be easy. Everything can be fine. It doesn’t have to hurt, ever again.”
“Hermione,” he said and leaned forward, put his hands on her hands where they were gripping her books. “It’ll be alright.” He smiled and she was staring at him with those eyes, those goddamn eyes. “We never fit, remember?”
“We tried,” she said and Harry squeezed her small hands gently.
“Send me back,” he said. “I want to go home.”
–
After the battle, as Hogwarts rang with frantic healing, crushing grief, and raging celebration, the three of them retreated to the library. Hermione hauled them down narrow aisles until she found her favorite tucked-away nook and they all collapsed on sagging sofas that seemed to not have been touched at all by the war.
“Well,” said Hermione. “What now?”
Ron let his head flop back against the seat, hair tumbling all over his pale forehead. “I’m going to nap,” he said. “For a month.”
“That’s not physiologically possible,” said Hermione. “Or if it is, then it’d be a coma.”
“It’s a metaphor,” Ron said, then: “no, wait, a hyperbole.” Hermione beamed at him. He blushed a little and elbowed her gently.
“After this, you’ll be in books, you know,” Harry told her.
“Not– I mean–” Hermione rubbed at her nose furiously. Ron laughed enough to wake up and sit up, throwing an arm around her shoulders.
While Ron came up with outlandish titles for Hermione’s eventual many biographies, Harry pulled his feet up onto the sofa. He watched the candles float quietly between the shelves.
When Petunia Dursley refused to take Harry in she forfeited his birthright protection, so Dumbledore took the baby to the safest place he knew: Hogwarts.
The applicable staff (mostly just… not Snape) took Harry in on a rotating schedule as he grew from baby to toddler to child. They traded extra credit for babysitting among the older students, and Harry grew up knowing a few dozen different laps that were safe and warm to nap in.
This was a Harry who grew up among books, among old transient walls and learned professors. They gave Binns night duty sometimes, and let him talk young Harry to sleep. This was a Harry whose world changed, on principle, daily. The stairs moved. The walls became doors. You had to keep your eyes open–you had to pay attention. So he did.
He grew up in a school. Knowledge was power, but knowledge was also joy. This was his sanctuary. There was magic in his world from birth.
“The castle will keep him safe,” said Dumbledore, when McGonagall came into his office to complain for the eighth time about Albus’s rather cavalier take on child-rearing. “That’s what it does.”
“Then why do we bother with chaperones ever,” McGonagall said, tempted to shriek it. “Should we let all the children run about willy-nilly at all hours, or just the orphan waifs?!”
“He’s not a student. He’s a ward of Hogwarts. It will take care of him, Minerva.”
McGonagall walked off fuming. A cat with spectacle markings followed Harry almost constantly from ages three through four. At some point McGonagall was far enough behind on her paperwork, and had seen enough suits of armor carry the kid back to his room, enough draperies lift off the wall and tug Harry away from edges, and enough stairs creakingly shift their slope for his tiny toddler legs. She gave a grumpy sigh, stole some of Albus’s lemon drops, and resigned herself to a magical world.
The Grey Lady, the ghost of Ravenclaw Tower, didn’t really like boys but she liked children. She especially liked patience, and politeness, and Harry had been raised by McGonagall’s stern table manners, by Victorian portraiture and quite a few House Elves. He said please, thank you, and ma’am, and as a child he was very cunning in how he got bedtime stories and bedtime snacks out of most every adult he met.
The Grey Lady told the best stories, you see, the ones with riddles in them. You had to think and ask questions to get all the way through them. So he hunted her down with big patient eyes and plates of very smelly cheese, and she told him stories that made him think.
When Harry was stable enough on his feet to walk, and then to run, Sir Cadogan would race him through the castle, the knight scattering banquet tables and galloping across landscapes, twisting through the abstract gallery up on the seventh and a half floor. Harry stumbled and sprinted up stairways and didn’t notice for years the way Cadogan waited at the end of corridors for him to catch up.
Harry was a chubby-legged toddler, in this world–cute cheeks and stubby limbs. It’s a cute image, yes– but this is important. He was a chubby kid. He ate in a high chair on the teacher’s dais, getting peas and mashed potatoes on the adults beside him– Sprout laughed. Snape didn’t.
But this is important–Harry filled his plate. He wobbled up on little legs and grabbed biscuits from the table, slurped his soup, got marinara sauce on his chin and forehead and somehow behind his ear. When he was hungry, he ate. If he snuck down to the kitchens at night, it was for the adventure of it and nothing else. When he was hungry, he ate.
When he was four, they started letting him go sit down with the students. Bill Weasley, on route to be a prefect next year, took him under his wing and scrubbed his face down after meals. Harry was passed around the Hufflepuff table; theirs was the House Common Room he most liked sneaking into, with its barrels and cozy warmth. Nymphadora Tonks turned her nose a dozen different shapes to make Harry laugh, gurgling, as a toddler (and then a child) (and then for the rest of her life, honestly–it never stopped being funny).
The whole Ravenclaw table got distracted from meals, trying to solve riddles from a book one of their Muggleborns had smuggled in.Harry pushed his fork through his gravy, trying to draw out his thoughts but only making squiggles.
It was years before Harry sat at the Slytherin table for the first time–no one had ever set him down there, like they had with the others. But he liked green–it was the color of Professor Sprout’s greenhouses, where he went and napped sometimes in winter. It was the color of his mother’s eyes, from the little book of moving pictures Hagrid had given him when he was three.
All the Slytherin kids seemed big, but everyone Harry ever met seemed big–except for Flitwick, who was seeming smaller with every growth spurt. He leaned forward, teetering on the bench, and grabbed a chicken drumstick. “Hi,” he said, because he’d had a childhood full of tea parties with high portrait society– the French nobility and the tired housewife from the third floor and an old witch with her sleeve on fire but very particular table manners. “I’m Harry. What’s your name?”
By the end of the meal, they were flicking peas across the table with their spoons, like catapult projectiles. Harry had been unwelcome in so few places in his life, after he’d left 4 Privet Drive, that he simply didn’t expect it. He asked Warrington, a Slytherin with shoulders like a bulldog’s, to help him with the juice, which was too unwieldy for his kid-sized wrists. Harry sat there blinking, smiling, until Warrington took the jug and poured him a brimming glass.
Cheloneuniverse 