Harry Potter & Burning Cheeks
Tom walks him to his Divination class. “You really didn’t have to,” notes Harry. “I can find my way on my own. This castle is my home.”
But, thinks Tom, that does not mean you know it well. “It’s no trouble, really,” says Tom. “And that is no way to say thank you.”
Harry flushes. “Right. Thank you. For getting me into this class, also.”
“Even less trouble, I assure you.” Actually, it was an exchange of three favors owed, two accounts of blackmail, and straight up lying. It was a lot of trouble. But Harry didn’t need to know that and for Harry, no trouble is troublesome enough.
“I’m surprised you aren’t mad. About the whole… incident, if that’s the right word, with your friends.”
Tom is. Just not at Harry. “Why would I be? They knew what you could do and acted irresponsibly in response. I can hardly blame you.” If Pansy and Co. were not at home, waiting for their trial to be set, and also not disowned from the Knights (“They are no better than Squibs now,” he’d say later, at their following meeting. “And we know what Merlin makes of Squibs, don’t we?”), he would punish them. Even the idea of it calms his unruly magic.
He’d told them not to hurt Harry. Had ordered them. And don’t they know that the quickest way to cause him pain is to hurt his friends? That his heart is not standalone? This is the result of their own foolish actions. They got and will get what is coming to them.
Honestly, Harry’s retaliation was better punishment than Tom could even hope to conjure. Tom should be thanking him.
(He is also deeper than ever in love. This power, when belonging to anyone else, would be worrisome. Cause of envy and anger but with Harry, it is impressive. He was infected with love before and now it lives in him, off him and of him.
This is how Harry feels all the time. How can Tom ever blame Harry for protecting the source of this feeling? For stealing magic in the name of it?)
Tom clears his throat and head. “I apologize for not visiting you when you were awaiting trial.” It was an unfortunate result of his nagging necessity to know everything there is to know about Harry and then to memorize it, to let it ink itself into his brain like a mental tattoo. He was too obsessed with the father to care for the son.
He learned a lot from it, though. He can hardly keep himself still with the knowledge he’s armed with -- reluctantly admitted from Draco Malfoy, of course.
He wants to blurt it out. Wants to tell Harry what he has a right to know. But he doesn’t. Can’t. Madame Pomfrey and Lily do not work ever in his favor. What use is knowledge when forgotten immediately afterward?
“It’s chill,” says Harry. “I assumed you couldn’t sneak your way in like Blaise.”
Tom hides his souring expression, hides his jealousy. He has a power, special, gained at birth, but revealing it to Harry would reveal too much. Perhaps he is not jealous of Blaise’s power, but his ability to carry openness alongside it. Ah, yes, thinks Tom, bitterness renewed. The wonderboy. The man you praise keeps so much from you. What would you do if you knew the truth?
Though, thinks Tom, I am not much better.
“Future telling will help with that,” says Tom. He keeps his voice light, ambient. Blaise will be gone in time. Neville, too. He will figure something out. There is no good to come from raising suspension so early on.
“Yeah. I was wondering if you’d talked to him lately, actually -- any updates on Petunia?”
“Not that I know of,” says Tom. “Why haven’t you asked him yourself?”
Harry smiles, but it is stretched too far at the corners. “I don’t know,” says Harry, a little nervous laugh at the end. “He’s been avoiding me, I think.”
“Really?” Light, Tom reminds himself. Light and conversational and not joyful. Certainly not gleeful.
“I think something happened during my trial. Back here. At Hogwarts. He hasn’t talked to me since I got home.”
Oh, yes. I might be the cause of that, won’t I? Losing a duel to the man you hate the most really will sore the ego. “I wonder what that’s all about.”
Tom stops as Harry readjusts his schoolbag in order to scale the ladder to Trelawney’s class. Harry glances back at him. “Tell me if you hear anything from him, okay? You two haven’t always been on the best terms, but…” Harry shrugs. “But, yeah. Would mean a lot to me. Okay?”
“Okay,” lies Tom. Perhaps, thinks Tom, he won’t need to get rid of Blaise if he makes him ashamed enough to get rid of himself. He loves Harry but, quite plainly, his love is weird.
Harry takes a step up the rungs, but stops. He jumps down and quickly plants a kiss on Tom’s cheek, his face so red Tom can feel the heat. “Erm -- yeah. Thanks again,” Harry says, then scurries off again, so quick, Tom has no time to respond.
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
Something sweet burning. Rot. The smell of this place fills his nostrils. It is familiar. The layout, the look of it all, is, too.
Harry sets his bag down in the closest free seat, most of the other students already having taken their place, his eyes still sweeping the classroom. The desk a few rows back -- a kid he can no longer recall the name of sat there during his days as the living ghost of Hogwarts, great, Harry vaguely recalls, at tea leaf readings.
This place, with all its imperfections, is just as it was years ago. But it is different, too, however slightly. Or just the same in ways Harry’s fuzzy mind has blocked out.
On the ground, there is a scratch not there before. On the walls, new quilts draped about. Faces in this crowd are unrecognizable from one another. They are all younger than him; Harry is mixed in with the third years. He will get no credit for this class and will likely be the only one here not to.
All of a sudden, from a heart that is partly his and partly not, he feels so jarringly out of place.
But maybe that is part of growing up. Childhood places cannot stay put in your childhood forever. Harry Potter is fifthteen. He feels old but knows he is young. Still. It is time to grow up. (However slightly.)
Trelawney emerges from the back room. Shawls and glasses that make her eyes bug-like, and frizzy hair washed all wrong -- Harry recognizes her, too. There are more wrinkles by her eyes and less hair on her head -- he’s heard teaching at Hogwarts is unbelievably stressful -- but it is her.
He wonders if she recognizes him too and realizes she does when they slip back into their old routine. She begins her walk around the room, arms moving eccentrically, her voice a false shirl. She makes eye contact with every student and exceeds in making them all uncomfortable.
Everyone and all except Harry, of course. She pretends he doesn’t exist. She gifts him comments from her Seer third eye or whatever the fuck or memory and Harry grasps onto them, these tidbits about his parents never heard elsewhere.
He wonders if she will say anything this time.
She tells them today they will be doing crystal ball readings. They will work with the person they’re seated with and try to get a good read of the other -- whether or not, she adds, you know them well.
Harry’s partner is a small girl with dreads. “Do I know you?” she asks.
The answer is probably. The answer is he sure hopes so. “I dunno. Will you go get the ball? I don’t know where it is.”
“Shouldn't you?”
Probably. But, “No.”
She concentrates on his face one last time, like she is trying to place it and just can’t quite, which is something Harry heavily relates to, before rolling her eyes and running off.
She returns with a crystal ball. “You’re tall,” she says, setting it down.
It is the first time he has ever heard that. “Thank you.”
“No, not like that.”
“Aw.”
“You’re tall for a third year.” She polishes the ball with obviously practiced motions.
“That’s cause I’m not a third year.”
“Oh,” she says. “I couldn’t have guessed that alone.”
“Punch to the gut after punch to gut.”
“Don’t take it so harshly. I mean alone as in without the ball.”
“Like the crystal ball?”
“Mhm,” she says, holding the crystal ball between her palms. Lights dance around in it. “It’s my strong suit. Professor Trelawney thinks so too.”
A Seer. Harry remembers Trelawney telling him his parents were not good at Divination. (Though it was not for lack of trying.) “Can I try?”
“Sure,” she says, but the moment the glass rests upon his hands, the light swirling in it fades. Harry frowns and shakes it. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry.” And here he is again, the same as his predecessors. “I guess it’s just not my thing.” And it doesn't bother him, the same way his failure here has never bothered him before. He loves the arts even if they do not love him. “What all can you do with it?”
“Everything,” she says. “I can see whatever I want whenever I want it.”
“That’s quite impressive.” Quite the bold claim from a child who does not yet know the value of Seers. It is not one he hopes to crush so soon. “Tell me, what’s your name?”
“Erada,”she says. “Erada Smith.”
“Why don’t you know me what you got, Erada?”
“Are you mocking me?”
“If I was, you’d know.”
“Is that a yes?”
Harry shrugs.
She huffs. “Alright. I’ll show you what I got -- and I warn you, it’s impressive.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Hell yeah. I’m gunna be big one day. So you best be treating me with respect, alright?”
“If you say so,” but Harry really wishes she didn’t. He thinks about graduating and finding what his father did. He will save this girl and Blaise alike. And then it won’t matter if her claims are bold as long as they are true.
She stares into the glass and the lights arrange themselves. They take shape and rhythm and dance to a tune Harry cannot hear and though Harry’s sure the form they settle on is nonsensical, Erada sees something else. “Your name is Harry Potter,” she says.
Harry blinks. “Oh.”
“Oh? Is that a ‘no’?”
“No,” says Harry. “I guess I’m just surprised.”
“Why? Didn’t I tell you I’m the best?”
Harry’s sure she’s wonderful. Sure she has a right to whatever title she wants to call herself, despite or because of the danger -- but he also wants his future read. “It’s not that cool.”
She glares at him.
“It’s just a name. Not that impressive.”
She huffs. “Alright, then,” her fingers tighten around the crystal. “I’ll show you something cool then. Something really freakin impressive.”
“If you so say,” he says dismissively but he’s smiling. He misses this. This place, its energy. The casual Seers he sure surrounds him.
Blaise would love this place, too. If it was not a beacon to the Ministry, a hit list of who’s next.
(His mood dims slightly but not entirely. This place has that effect on him -- a world away from the Ministry, his family, his muddled mind. It is a safe haven. He wonders why he ended up not signing up before.)
Erada, Harry notices, is not sharing his great mood. A strong crease sits between her eyebrows and her eyes are screwed tight.
“Eer,” says Harry. “Is everything okay?”
“For me?”
“I guess?”
“Or for you?”
Seers, he reminds himself, are not always rational. Blaise has felt not himself before. He’s said strange things, eyes glossed over, heart racing. Remembering them all afterward, he says only, every time, that when the future calls, the body answers.
“For whoever needs to pick up,” says Harry.
“I think something’s wrong.”
“Other than the norm?” Harry laughs. “My mind’s not the best, but I--”
“It’s the norm.”
“What?”
“What’s wrong with you,” she says. “It’s the norm. It’s also not.”
“That’s helpful.”
“It’s gunna be soon.”
He realizes that Blaise would hate it here, actually. His future-telling is different because it actually gets to the fucking point. “What will?”
“Your death.”
“Oh,” says Harry, danger spilling out of him. “Like. How soon?”
“Pretty.”
She is all talk and no tell-the-future. It is still a warning he will heed, though. He writes it down in his journal. He will ask Blaise about it later. “Any last advice, Greatest Seer of All Time?”
“Heal your half a heart,” she says. “And stay away from big hands.”
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
Erada will figure out where she knows Harry from a week later. Leaving a prayer circle for the great Merlin, she will hear his name whispered in tense breaths.
He is trouble. A secret weapon. A terrorist. A danger to society. Bad company.
He opposes the Church so the Church opposes him. (It really is that simple.)
He’s hurt their members and plans to hurt more and it is a wonder she did not put his name to his actions the moment she got it.
… But he did not seem like a terrorist. He seemed like a child with dreams too big for his body. A teenager a little over his head.
Harry Potter is bad company. But he is her company nonetheless. What’s the worst that could come from it?