Chapter Text
A/N: Hello, people!
I don't own Harry Potter.
I have no beta.
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"We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand." - Pablo Picasso
Weird.
Ever since he was a child, Harry had wondered if the reason he couldn't speak was because if he could, he'd be able to tell people the strange things he Saw in his Dreams or while sitting in class and getting distracted. But when it became clear he couldn't actually make a sound and needed to learn BSL, when he tried to sign the things he Saw, his hands would freeze up. If he tried to write it down, his fingers would clamp together and go unresponsive.
It was like every method of communication to him was refused if he tried to share what he knew.
Since childhood, he'd known when someone wasn't trustworthy or whenever someone had secret intentions. He'd have a Dream about it and then it would happen soon after.
The problem was that there was no way for him to warn anybody about the things that he saw in his Dreams, because every time he tried, his body would just lock up and wouldn't let him do anything. It was as if he was incapable of moving.
Of course, he didn't get an inkling of what was going on until he discovered magic existed, and then some things began to make some semblance of sense. At least in knowing that things were going to happen and that he was actually Seeing the future to an extent, and that it always happened exactly as he Saw it.
Discovering magic had raised his hopes that he would finally be able to find a way to talk about this with someone and tell them what was going on, but every time he tried, nothing happened. In a way, it almost felt like he was forbidden from sharing what he knew.
It took very little effort for him to conclude that there must be a magical reason for why he couldn't share the things he knew in any of the traditional ways.
Just because he understood to some extent now, though, didn't mean he liked it. And it didn't mean he didn't try to tell people what he Saw.
Unfortunately, it seemed that doodling was his only option and his artistic skills… were severely lacking.
Many times did he try putting his Dreams and Visions into a visual form only to barely recognise what he'd made. The very designs came from his mind and yet when looking at what his hands created… the source and the inspiration weren't very clear at all.
The worst part of it was that he didn't even need to draw realistically. It should be really easy to draw a circle, like a steering wheel, with two triangles on the top at ten and two, and three lines coming out of nine and three. Even the way he envisioned it in his mind looked easy, but the moment he placed pencil to paper, that cartoonish cat he tried to draw just looked very much… not like a cat.
Or any kind of animal. It just got worse and worse the more he tried to fix it, hyperventilating in the process because of the stress.
Harry's ability to draw circles was also questionable.
They always came out more ovular and even that was being generous considering how much his hands shook and made all the lines more like a child's squiggles rather than a legitimate shape.
So, great! Magic allowed him to draw the things that he was able to See, but it made it so that everything he drew was practically impossible to understand. Even to himself!
If he didn't already have a clear memory of the things he was trying to recreate in a two dimensional form, he would have been completely lost. What kind of curse could be the cause of this?
Because clearly it was a curse!
Why else would Harry be able to See the future, but then not be able to share it with anybody except in an incredibly limiting way?
What? Would he have to sign up for art classes to learn how to make better art so that he could draw better pictures of the things that he saw in his mind? All of this because he couldn't tell anyone that the famous murderer that they were all so terrified of was going to return at some point in the future?
He'd Seen it already. A graveyard, a disfigured looking fetus, a rat-faced man, and even Harry himself. Some strange ritual and then snake-face rising from a cauldron.
And he couldn't tell anyone! He couldn't really do anything to stop it unless some big miracle happened to change his fate but had no idea what such a thing could even be.
He'd had that Dream on his first night in Hogwarts months back, and even now he could recall it with perfect clarity. But no matter how clear the image was in his mind, he could not transfer the image onto the paper. So, he'd been sitting on this information, aware that sometime in the next few years, he was going to be forced to help his parents' murderer bring himself back to corporeal form.
And probably the worst part of all of this was why was it always Harry that had to be at the centre of all of these horrible Visions? It felt as if the universe was just out to get him, completely targeting him all the time and making it like he was the main character of this story.
Surely, there were better options for entertainment.
His head slammed onto the top of his desk as he gave up on another page of attempted doodles. He'd gotten the idea that if he tried to make a cartoonish cat head over and over and over, eventually muscle memory would kick in and he'd be able to do it just fine without having to look at the former attempt.
No matter how many circles he drew, they were never round. No matter how many triangles he drew, they looked more and more like basic sticks. And no matter how he tried to make the slitted eyes, they were uneven, shaky, and not even slightly eye-shaped.
It would seem that practice makes perfect does not apply in this kind of situation.
Okay. Baby steps.
Perhaps he didn't need to draw eye shapes in order to convey the existence of eyes.
If he drew some semblance of a circle and put two dots inside, along with a half-circle to form a smile, then it should look passable enough, right?
He put pencil to paper… and frowned.
It looked like a smiley face, yes, but it also looked a bit demented. The general idea was captured but even a toddler would do a better job.
Every art class in school had been a mess, and Hogwarts didn't even offer any kind of art class. There was an Art Club, but considering his apparent fame for something stupid, he didn't trust the idea of joining a club when he was a friendless loser. At least not now.
Finding out about magic was great. Finding out that he could learn to use his magic without even having to speak was even better. But then finding out that his parents weren't actually drunks who got themselves killed in a car wreck and that they had been murdered by somebody who had also tried and failed to murder Harry, wasn't so great.
On top of all of that, he had to find out that he was famous for not dying when everybody else who that man pursued died at his hands. Of all the things to come to understand about himself and his place in life, that was the dumbest thing. No one even entertained the idea that his parents must have done something personally to ensure that he survived. Everyone just decided that Harry was the one who saved himself and defeated the Dark Lord.
And the Dark Lord himself!
Voldemort.
Flight from Death.
These magical people were so obsessed with their Latin-based magic, names, and teaching. It was a bit lame, in his opinion, to choose to be called such a thing.
And to make things worse… he was in the school!
Just another major problem that he couldn't even solve, because his art was just so terrible that there was no way for him to tell anybody about what he had seen.
On Harry's first ever night in the castle, after he had been Sorted into Slytherin and eaten more food than he had probably ever had in his entire life, up until that point, he had laid down on the fourposter that he had been given in his dorm room, and he had a Dream. In that Dream, Professor Quirrell's turban was hissing at him.
It was like those little snakes in his Aunt Petunia's garden. Harry had always been able to understand the snakes. From what he could tell, nobody else could understand them, which was proven that day at the zoo.
So, the hissing turban was actually saying words. It was grumbling about Quirrell being a fool and how it couldn't believe it needed to use him to regain its former strength.
Harry wasn't daft. He had heard some of the drama about Quirrell and how he had gone off and come back a very changed man. He never wore a turban before he left. He was never obsessed with garlic. He didn't even have a stutter. Yet now he was scared of his own shadow, and he was using a turban to hide something that could speak for itself. And considering the speaking was done through hissing, Harry had assumed that it was some kind of snake.
From what he managed to find through several history books, Voldemort had managed to twist his own features over the time he terrorized all of Magical Britain. His appearance became more and more serpentine as the years passed, and people were even terrified to describe what he looked like for fear that he might somehow appear behind them.
So, Quirrell goes to the mainland of Europe, comes back a twitching mess and hides half of his head with a turban, and something beneath the turban was perfectly capable of speaking in a serpent's tongue, and insulting him without him being aware.
Also, towards the end of this strange Dream he had had, the man actually talked to the turban and called it, 'my lord' and the turban replied!
Who else could it be but the Dark Lord that Harry had supposedly defeated all those years ago somehow coming back from the grave? Or specifically, in Rubeus Hagrid's belief, back to power since Hagrid didn't think he'd died back then, he'd just lost his powers.
And Harry wasn't capable of telling anyone because every time he put pencil to paper he didn't really know what to do. When he tried to draw people, the most he could attempt were stick figures, and even those weren't great. He couldn't draw a straight line to save his life and he couldn't draw shapes very well either.
How did one draw a man in long robes and a turban? And how can one link that kind of picture to a picture of Voldemort from their own interpretation of what he was described to be like because there existed no photos of him anywhere because people thought his name and appearance were jinxed?
The most snakelike thing that Harry had ever actually managed to draw was a curved line.
Harry was being forcefully silenced by Magic itself and was unable to share what he knew with anybody. He had been sitting on this information for months and had absolutely hated every minute of it. Spent all this time trying to improve his drawing so that he could at least draw it and then… Well… he wasn't sure.
Who was he supposed to go to about things like this because McGonagall was so biased toward her Gryffindors that she didn't think that anyone in any other House was particularly important. And maybe she didn't believe that, but she clearly wasn't doing a very good job approving his assumption otherwise. And when it came to Snape, his own Head of House, the man was like McGonagall, but in Slytherin form.
Though at least he hadn't thrown a tantrum over Harry being unable to speak and needing a bit of extra help. McGonagall couldn't say the same.
Flitwick and Sprout weren't exactly inspiring either and their own reactions to Harry's 'disability' weren't great either.
Getting a hold of Dumbledore seemed impossible and he was probably the most biased against Slytherins in the entire school despite how much he twinkled and preached about unity.
Harry has a Dream about Quirrell letting a troll into the school, and then the very next day a troll ends up in the school. And Dumbledore decides to tell all of the students who live in the place where the troll was last seen to go back to that exact place with only Prefects as their protection. Totally not biased or anything.
Maybe Harry was the worst kind of person to give such an ability to.
It served to separate him from many people. It also made it practically impossible for him to be endeared to pretty much anybody when he was seeing all the personal stuff about them but was unable to share any of it.
Harry was forced to be involved in people's business but was unable to control how much of what he Saw or when each session ended.
It was also why he hadn't made any friends despite being at Hogwarts for several months. Draco Malfoy attempted to use his family and his wealth, not because he wanted to actually be friends, but because he wanted the benefits of being friends with Harry Potter. He felt that because of who he was and how he was born, he was entitled to Harry's attention and friendship. And the people in his life basically allowed him to think that way.
Nobody else in their House wanted to really be friends with Harry. Some hated him because their parents hated him, but most of them were rather indifferent.
And anyone who may have wanted to be his friend prior to the Sorting definitely didn't want to be his friend now that he was in Slytherin. Because of course, there couldn't just be the regular prejudices, there also had to be weird, classism-based prejudices as well.
It wasn't lost on Harry, through personal observation and his Dreams, that Slytherin got the abused children in abundance. Children who had parents or grandparents with incredibly dangerous beliefs, and even while many of them were brought up with the same beliefs, they clearly weren't safe and didn't feel safe and had to learn how to navigate hostile upbringings.
Harry had Dreamed of every student in his year, not just in Slytherin, but across the whole school. Every First Year student he had a class with at least some way. And he had a dream about every single one of them and knew more about their personal business than he ever wanted to know. Things that he definitely wouldn't be trying to share with anybody and wished that he could just forget completely. But for some reason, his memory was perfect.
Overwhelmingly, Slytherin was filled with the abused and neglected kids, and even Draco Malfoy, who had it a lot better than a lot of people, wasn't really safe because his father was a follower of Voldemort, who constantly put him in danger by that association, and his mother was no better for allowing such people near her child even though she wasn't a marked follower. Draco even seemed to live with doubts about whether or not his father actually liked him and was constantly trying to impress him only to fall short in some way.
In class, it was because he was never at the top for grades, he was always beaten out by Hermione Granger from Gryffindor or even Harry himself like in Defence. In Quidditch Classes, he was beaten by Harry who was a better talent despite a lack of training. And despite all of his privileges, he wasn't the most popular person in Slytherin, let alone in First Year.
He came to school expecting to rule the roost and was constantly behind a Muggleborn and Halfblood. He worried constantly about his father being disappointed and worried about what would happen if he ever got mad enough.
Comparatively, with students from the rest of the Houses, they got to have such normal and maybe even basic or average upbringings. They didn't have to sit there wondering if their parents secretly hated them or resented having them, and many of them didn't even know of the concept of abuse or neglect.
Between the Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw First Years, five had troubling home lives. the rest were all Slytherins.
And Harry still couldn't do anything about it. All of this personal information about people he barely knew, and he couldn't even do anything to help them.
Well, things seemed to magically sort themselves out somehow, or maybe Dumbledore finally decided to actually do something to help.
Quirrell tried to go for the Philosopher's Stone and ended up getting nowhere because Dumbledore did something to make it difficult.
Harry knew because he had a Dream about it happening and he knew that Quirrell had initially intended to kidnap him if he couldn't get the mirror to work. Because for some reason he had a thought that Harry would somehow know how to get past the fancy mirror in order to get him the rock of immortality.
As such, Harry made sure that he would be found alone in the library after hours and then was marched straight off to Snape's office by Filch of all people and given detention. So, during the time Harry would have been kidnapped, he was getting an earful from his Head of House about his irresponsibility and costing the House ten points.
"I do not care if you want to study a bit more, you can do that at a safe hour under proper supervision, Potter. You will be serving detention on Saturday, from noon to four. You will be scrubbing cauldrons, so wear your worst clothes and don't be late."
And that was how Harry successfully managed to avoid being drawn into something that was none of his business and that he didn't really care all that much about. In his opinion, the teachers should be doing their jobs as teachers and the headmaster should be doing his job as headmaster and if the headmaster was perfectly aware of the fact that Voldemort was on the back of one of the teacher's heads, then he definitely should be the person that was handling the problem.
Seeing as nobody was made aware of any kind of dangerous situation that happened, Harry was going to go out on a limb and say that it got handled. And since Professor Quirrell was announced to be departing from his position the very next day, Voldemort should be long gone for the time being.
For some reason, something just told Harry that he definitely wouldn't be staying gone and that Dumbledore definitely didn't defeat him for good. In fact, Dumbledore probably wasn't going to be putting in much effort to actually defeat him, but that was a topic for another time.
No, Harry had to focus on his detention, and then his exams, and then figure out what he'd be doing for the summer.
Honestly, the conclusion of his First Year at Hogwarts went about as Harry had expected. He'd had a Dream about the Philosopher's Stone and had a Dream about Dumbledore deliberately hiding it in the school in a very dangerous artifact because he wanted to trick Voldemort into using it. Because Dumbledore had apparently known the entire time that Voldemort was in the school and just decided to not do anything about it.
Harry understood that it was probably the whole 'keeping your enemies closer' thing, but he felt that it was foolish because Quirrell was not a good teacher. His teaching ended up sabotaging the entire class because he was so bad at it. Why did the students have to suffer just because Dumbledore wanted to be secretive?
The history books all said that Dumbledore was the person that Voldemort feared the most. So why was Dumbledore not using the power that everyone believed he had in order to handle the Dark Lord and make sure that he couldn't come back?
Either way, the entire Philosopher's Stone nonsense was none of Harry's business, and he decided that since Dumbledore clearly wasn't going to do anything about the problem, it wasn't his job to solve the problem either. If it got stolen, then that was completely on Dumbledore's head for putting it in such an easy to reach location and endangering children with it in the process.
Though it did all apparently end up fine, so who was Harry to really care? He was instead more focused on his. Art class. And it wasn't an official art class, but more like he'd decided to just suck it up and join the Art Club. And had to do remedial lessons provided by one of the teachers' assistants.
The Art Club was a lot different than what he was expecting, but he actually found himself appreciating learning different styles of art and how they came about and how many cultures had basically the same thing, even if they called it something different.
Still friendless and still incapable of drawing to save his life, but at least he was learning new things, and at least he was coming to terms with his magic and his Dreams and what his future would look like.
And not just the future in school; the future back with his Muggle relatives too. Because of course, now that the cat was out of the bag, they had to be even more annoying than before. Harry couldn't even speak and yet Petunia looked at him like he was a ticking time bomb, ready to blow at any moment. He had to wonder what kind of experiences she had with Lily Evans Potter to be so wary.
He knew, based on many of his Dreams, that it was not just purely out of jealousy. Yes, it had to suck growing up with a sibling who showed that they had magic and was able to go to a far-off school for ten months every year and learn how to use magic and eat cool food and see cool things all the time. But there was clearly something deeper than just plain jealousy.
Sometimes Harry hated that he was able to See people's truths in his Dreams, because sometimes he would like to just continue disliking somebody and not have more context for why they were the way they were.
What could he say? He was just a child, after all. Even if he was a little more mature than other children, because being able to See the future and to See the personal business of other people in such detail gave him more perspectives than the average child, but he was still a kid and he was still childish. And he honestly didn't feel bad about being childish because that was the whole point of growing up.
He looked down at his newly acquired sketch pad and wondered if he would be able to actually finish his homework from his Art Club because his relatives kept taking his stuff away and locking it in the cupboard under the stairs. At the same time, he wasn't so sure that his skills would actually improve no matter how much he tried. It almost felt like this was a limitation specifically set by Magic itself.
The club leader was an older Hufflepuff student about to go into her Seventh Year and hadn't minded that a Slytherin wanted to join the club. She had also told everyone to leave him alone because it was a club for people of mutual interests to share their thoughts and feelings and to learn about all forms of art.
And then she saw his 'art' and decided to give him a little booklet of basic art techniques and told him to read it and then replicate everything to the best of his ability. 'Repetition is the backbone of practice,' was what she'd initially told him.
He had to keep breaking into the cupboard just to get his things and then they'd get taken away again whenever his uncle or aunt found him with them. If he knew how to make things invisible to outside people, this would be so much easier than the back and forth.
His relationship with his relatives hadn't improved but it definitely hadn't gotten worse even with that little hiccough earlier in the month.
There had never been an instance where his relatives had ever been on his side for anything ever, but when he came running down the stairs because there was this creepy, little pointy-eared hobgoblin thing following him, and then the hobgoblin spoke to his aunt and uncle and said that Harry told him that he didn't want to go back to school, they all just kind of looked at it like it was mad.
"But Harry can't talk," was Dudley's admittedly genius reply. "And dad took away his pencils and paper."
"GET OUT!" Vernon had hollered, practically making the glass of the kitchen cupboards shake in the process. "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FILTHY FREAK OF NATURE!"
Petunia had thrown herself between Dudley and the bug-eyed thing, as if to protect him from it while Vernon brandished a spatula like it was a suitable weapon. Eventually, the thing decided to pop away, leaving them all confused.
Unfortunately, not even his aunt knew what it was and wasn't able to answer his questioning glance. While things weren't great, he could say that they weren't as bad as they had been before that thing appeared. Now, whenever he broke into the cupboard to get his things, his uncle didn't yell at him, he would just take it away if he saw Harry having it and then put it back. So, it was this never-ending tug of war over Harry's drawing materials.
Harry would be returning to Hogwarts come autumn, and he just hoped that his ability to at least draw lines would improve by then.
There was a snake slithering around the inside of the school and Harry couldn't even tell anybody about it!
You know, there were many notes to suggest that Seers went mad, usually because people didn't believe them when they spoke or because they Saw things that traumatised them. And Harry could fully understand because being able to know things and then not being able to share them was really weighing him down.
And the worst part about all of it was that it was connected to Ginny Weasley because Ginny Weasley got her hands on a book that was able to talk and for some reason, didn't think that that was suspicious. Harry had dreamed of Ginny bent over the book writing and the book absorbing the ink of her words and then returning words of its own.
Tom Marvolo Riddle.
Harry actually had to look it up to see if that was anybody in the school's records and it was somebody who had attended the school fifty years prior. The exact time that the Chamber of Secrets was last opened to be specific. And wouldn't it just make sense that the monster that Slytherin himself supposedly had would be a snake, and wouldn't that just coincide with the fact that Harry was hearing his snake slithering around?
Honestly, the most unnerving part about the Dream was the fact that Ginny just stayed hunched over that book for hours, writing in it and answering every single question that the book had. She was so fixated on writing to this Tom bloke, that she completely ignored her homework and her classwork and hadn't even spoken to any of her friends.
Obsessing over a weird talking book wasn't normal. The best thing to do would be to get the book away from her but in order to do that he would have to break into Gryffindor Tower, which he didn't even know how to find, and then break into the girl's dorms, which were forbidden to boys, and then rummage through her things until he found it, which sounded creepy.
And he couldn't even write a note and leave it in her brother's things because what he learned came from one of his Dreams, so he couldn't even share what he knew in a normal sense!
As if the snake in the walls wasn't bad enough, they also had to deal with a new Defence teacher who was worse than the last one.
Even with Voldemort on the back of his head making him a twitchy idiot, at least Quirrell was educated and actually had the right information when he could get the words out. This dunce was probably the dumbest person Harry had ever met, and he grew up with Dudley Dursley.
It was as if he had been surrounded from the very beginning, by people telling him that he was the smartest person around. Either that or he truly deluded himself into thinking that he was an absolute genius and that he knew more than people who had gotten the degrees necessary to be Masters in their fields.
Gilderoy Lockhart could choke and Harry wouldn't do a damn thing to help him.
And seeing so many of the students practically fawn over him was weird. He wasn't even handsome. When out shopping in Diagon Alley before heading off to Hogwarts, Harry had spotted Lucius Malfoy and had taken a moment to appreciate his hair. That was and actually handsome man. If Lockhart had looked like that then maybe he could understand why everybody was losing their minds… But he didn't.
Oh!
Someone that he noticed didn't seem interested in Lockhart was a girl in Ravenclaw. Though from what Harry could tell she didn't seem particularly interested in anything and seemed to float through her life like nothing was going on.
Even many of the Slytherin girls were salivating over him which was so weird to think about.
The worst part of all of it was the fact that despite the fact that Harry wasn't actually very popular at the school despite his supposed fame and the supposed wealth his family had, for some reason that wasn't enough to deter Lockhart. The man seemed to want to ingratiate himself to Harry at any given opportunity, like that was somehow going to make Harry interested in him.
Harry was always chosen to help him demonstrate things in class and Harry was always picked on to answer questions about things that had nothing to do with what they were supposed to be learning about. And he could even speak so he was the worst choice overall. And so many of the girls were jealous of him because of this because he got to be closer to Lockhart than they did.
Did nobody think it weird that a grown man wanted the attention of a twelve-year-old boy so much?
Perhaps the best part of it all was the fact that Harry was mute and therefore couldn't say any of the lines from Lockhart's books and therefore didn't have to embarrass himself with poor acting. Of course, the man treating every lesson like it was a stage play meant for him and him alone was enough to fill him with secondhand embarrassment.
Sometimes in the depths of his being, Harry wished that the snake in the walls would pop up and just eat Lockhart and save them all from his annoying self. That was a bad thing to hope for but honestly, Harry was practically at his wit's end! It wasn't even Christmas and he was already tired!
Couldn't they just get a normal year at school without the new teacher being weird?
On top of all of that, kids were turning up petrified and it was the cause of the snake in the walls and Harry couldn't do anything about it!
He'd even encountered Hermione Granger poring over books in the library, trying to find anything that could cause petrification. If somebody like her who practically lived and breathed information and living in the library, couldn't even find anything, then Harry didn't see a reason in him trying. He'd done an abrupt about face and left the room and Granger behind.
He needed to get better at art, pronto! That was the most important thing to him at present.
Harry got to learn something new about himself. Apparently, being able to understand snakes was actually a unique magical ability and not everyone could do it. It was such a limited magical ability that barely anybody in the world could do it anymore and most of them were either in India or Africa.
The most interesting part was that he had learned that he could speak Parseltongue, which was the language of the snakes. And it wasn't just he could understand snakes and therefore commune with them in that way, but he could actually speak the language because it was all hissing whispery sounds created through breathing out a certain way around the teeth. The vocal cords did not react at all for Parseltongue because otherwise Harry wouldn't be able to physically speak.
Harry got to learn this new information about himself during Lockhart's attempt at making a Dueling Club, which lasted all of maybe two hours. After watching Snape put Lockhart on his arse, students got paired up. Harry got Malfoy and Malfoy decided to go against the rules and summon Stalks-By-Night, the cobra.
He learned the name because it announced itself and then proceeded to demand to know where it was. And all Harry could recall was his body moving toward the snake and thinking about where it was from, only for the snake to turn to him and announce it wanted to go home and demanded Harry send it back.
That was when he enlisted Snape.
Snape was literally the only person in the entire school who knew British Sign Language.
The snake wants to go home, sir.
"Vipera evanesca!"
Harry was choosing to believe that the snake was sent exactly where it was supposed to go and that nothing happened to it.
Of course, it couldn't just be as simple as that. No, the entire school got to hear about how Harry Potter was capable of talking to snakes despite being mute, and now suddenly he was the second coming of Voldemort or Slytherin or whatever bad person that they wanted him to be the second coming of.
"No wonder he was sorted into Slytherin!"
"I bet You Know Who tried to kill him because he knew he'd be a threat later on."
"He's probably the one petrifying the students."
And Harry couldn't share anything he knew from his Dreams in order to defend himself, because Magic wouldn't let him!
So as expected, Harry remained completely friendless for a second year in a new school.
Snape ended up having to be the one to tell him to use his ability sparingly and people would eventually forget it.
He was actually right which was the interesting thing about it. People forgot after the holidays were over there were more and more attacks and more and more beds in the hospital wing were being taken up by petrified students. Harry couldn't understand how the snake was capable of petrifying people and why it was only petrifying students but not eating them.
From what he could tell by how loud it was whenever it spoke to itself, it was very large and surely something that big would be hungry. So, how was it that it was consistently turning students to stone but never eating anyone? That was the part he couldn't seem to understand.
There were no magical snake species that were capable of petrifying anything, and all of them did eat meat. It was almost as if the snake hadn't been put in Hogwarts for the intended purpose that everyone claimed Slytherin's monster was there for.
Another issue was that Harry knew a lot of things, but Harry wasn't exactly an adventurous kind of person. Growing up unable to actually speak for himself gave him a very unique perspective on the world and he had to be a lot more cautious about things. He didn't like the idea of going off on his own to try and solve a mystery when he wasn't able to call for help and wasn't able to sign for help to anybody who would be able to see it.
Until he mastered completely non-verbal, wandless magic, Harry was not the kind of person who should be out and about solving mysteries.
And it all came to a head when Hagrid was carted off to Azkaban, taking the blame for everything happening because he was expelled the last time the Chamber was opened.
Ginny was still obsessing over her book and her 'friend Tom' and getting more and more sick by the day. Students were still being petrified by the snake in the walls but not eaten by it. Hagrid had been out of the picture for two weeks and three more students turned up petrified, but he was never returned to the school.
It was becoming more and more clear that the magical community kind of sucked.
Magic was cool, and being able to do much of his curriculum non-verbally seemingly put him ahead of his peers, but being able to cast spells didn't yet feel like it was worth all this drama.
Maybe staying on the Muggle side would have been fine.
"Harry Potter."
He blinked and found himself face to face with someone familiar, but whom he'd only seen in an old photograph from the early 1900s.
Tom Riddle. Ginny Weasley's little pen pal from the book. The one who 'caught' Hagrid during the last Chamber incident.
If Harry ignored the cold and damp floor under his back, he would have to admit to himself at least that he did not mind the view. Tom Riddle was even more handsome than Lucius Malfoy, and his cheekbones were totally unfair.
"I hadn't expected us to meet this way, but it was necessary."
Harry sat up, his back aching as he did so, and moved to crack his fingers to prepare them for signing.
Sorry, but I can't speak.
Riddle's eyes trailed down to Harry's hands, his brows furrowing in concentration. He waved his wand twice. "This will speak for you then."
Harry's hands raised to sign, between them appeared bright green, floating words that looked like they'd been typed on an old typewriter. Hi, Tom.
Riddle's eyes narrowed. "You already know who I am?"
Yes.
"How?"
When Harry's hands moved to sign, his fingers froze. Then his hands and his arms. The more Harry fought it, the more he froze up, until his entire body just stopped moving, trapped in an odd position.
An odd and completely unfair thing because why couldn't he say that he Saw Tom Riddle in an old yearbook? It wasn't like that had anything to do with Ginny Weasley!
The rules for what he couldn't share were so unfair!
Thankfully, or maybe it was actually a really bad thing considering the situation that they were in, Tom Riddle was not an idiot. In fact, Tom Riddle was able to put two and two together when he had absolutely no numbers to work with whatsoever, and come out with a reasonably close answer.
"You cannot physically share this information."
When Harry moved to respond, his body seemed to unlock itself. No.
"A magical restriction," Tom hummed thoughtfully, his hand waving a few times in a complicated pattern. "There is no curse on you. You are not ill. In fact… you should not be mute as there is nothing wrong with your vocal cords. So, if you are incapable of speaking and when you try to communicate specific information a specific way, your body locks up on you, then this is a magical ailment, and such things are only put in place to alleviate an imbalance of some sort."
Voldemort's teen self was scary smart. If this was the man that went on to try and conquer Magical Britain, then Harry could totally understand how he managed to get as far as he did before a baby somehow managed to do him in.
Tom leaned down, so that Harry could get a good look at his very handsome, and slightly transparent face. "Something about you required Magic to personally intervene. My guess is that you have a special ability you aren't allowed to share and that is what restricts you. And only a few abilities would require such forceful control."
He reached out, a thin finger trailing over Harry's cheekbone, his dark eyes following the motion to an almost obsessive degree. He looked as if he'd devour Harry if given the chance.
"You are very special indeed, Harry," Tom said, practically caressing the word. "I can see many benefits to having you around."
Before Harry could even reply, something caused his eyes to droop and his hearing to go wonky.
The last thing he recalled was Tom's handsome face hovering over his own, and a cold but soft hand petting his messy hair.
When Harry awoke, he was in the Hospital Wing, surrounded by arguing teachers.
"Mr. Potter!" McGonagall gasped when he sat up and looked around.
"Do you remember what happened?" Snape cut in before she could go on some kind of rant.
I met a handsome man named Tom, Harry revealed. He wore a really old version of the Slytherin robes and had very nice cheekbones. He was beautiful.
With every word, Snape looked more and more disturbed, which meant that he probably knew who Tom was and that was probably why he was uncomfortable. There were a lot of rumours that Snape was once a follower of Voldemort. Harry knew some of them were true, that it was probably less of a total agreement with Voldemort's beliefs, and more of a need for stability that he wasn't getting from Dumbledore's camp.
"And did this Tom tell you what he had taken you for?"
No. I think he said that he wanted to meet me and was shocked that I recognised him from an old Year Book.
"Did he say anything else to you?"
He said that I'm special and it would be beneficial to have me around. And then he made me sleep again.
Harry considered it for a moment and then had to ask, Is there anything off about me since I was found?
"No," Snape sighed. "You don't seem to be cursed, and you don't seem to be in bad health, so it would appear that he didn't do anything to you which is actually surprising."
This entire conversation happened without any input from the other professors or Dumbledore, who watched on with obvious horror.
He was promptly ignored as the teachers proceeded to go back to arguing, except now with way more intense words. From what little he could gather, Ginny Weasley was dead. Tom Riddle was probably the cause, a,nd if Harry had to guess it was probably through that little book.
Weird.
Strangely, Harry was more focused on Tom touching him and telling him he was special. That wasn't something he'd expected after all.
It was sad that Ginny died, but how no one in her life noticed something was wrong the entire time, was the bigger issue in his opinion.
He wondered if the students would stop getting petrified now. He wondered if they could even be saved. Hermione Granger was on the bed right beside him after all, and she didn't seem to be waking up any time soon.
He flopped back onto the bed and allowed the arguing voices to fade out.
Maybe, if he was lucky, he could force himself to go back to sleep.
And if he was extra lucky, he'd Dream of Tom Riddle's handsome face in the process.
A/N: The first is done!
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