Survivor

Harry opened his eyes momentarily only to slam them shut a second later when the sun threatened to blind him. The sudden pain in his head made him groan as he reached up to try and rub the spots from his vision. It took a good few seconds until he felt any better, and he rolled onto his side to face away from the burning light when he next decided to take a look around.

He found himself in an organized, peaceful room. He was laying on a soft, green couch. Across the room from him was a series of bookshelves, each filled to the brim with tomes and textbooks. In the corner, his eyes found the form of Jason gently dozing away, and his tensed muscles immediately began to relax. Taking in everything as it came, he shifted his eyes to the right until it settled on a large desk, behind which sat Professor Quirrell, the very man he was supposed to be staying far away from. Harry’s eyes shot wide as everything came back to him all at once, but he quickly forced them down. 

The stranger warned him about Quirrell, and Harry trusted that advice without question. The man was dangerous. He saw how capable Quirrell was with his own two eyes when they'd talked about dementors. 

At the same time, Quirrell was the one who rescued him from whatever it was that took the form of Vernon Dursley, and that was hardly the first time his professor had helped him. On the first day of class, Quirrell was the one who gave him enough time to keep his animagus form at bay before releasing the class from the hallucinogenic mist he’d used as an initial demonstration for the importance of taking his class seriously. 

He was healthily afraid of the man, yes, but he was also oddly grateful. Whatever that combination of emotions did to him, he certainly wasn’t getting out of here without interacting with the man. He was about to speak when Professor Quirrell looked over at him and paused whatever he was marking.

“You’re awake,” he observed with nonchalant neutrality. “I expected you to be out for a while longer still. You had quite the ordeal.”

Someone else mentioning what he’d gone through last night made it all the more real, and he glumly slumped his head back against the couch. “I don’t even know what that thing was.”

“That thing,” Professor Quirrell said with the same emphasis on the word as Harry. “Was called a boggart. It shows you your deepest fears, and it feasts on the emotions they cause, becoming more realistic the more you feed it until it’s real enough to eat you in a much more literal sense.”

Harry could still see his uncle kneeling in front of him, caressing his face while tearing him apart with his words. He'd thought it sounded unlike his uncle, and he was right. They weren’t the words of Vernon Dursley; they were words from himself. He was equal-parts embarrassed and ashamed when he realized that Professor Quirrell, a man he very much respected for his power, got a good long look at what his worst fear was. He also remembered that, for a moment, Harry saw Professor Quirrell’s worst fear too.

A weak, deathly skinny boy with such a familiar look of fear on his face. 

He felt exposed, raw, knowing that his professor knew something so intimate about him, even if the man probably didn’t know the context behind it. At the same time, he got a lot of information from Professor Quirrell’s worst fear too. That kid didn’t look much like the man, but he wasn’t stupid. For Quirrell to be afraid of that child, it had to mean something more than the physical. Even if it wasn’t taking the form of his younger self, the representation of weakness and compliance was obvious to see. It was so startlingly like some of his own worst fears that… well… he couldn’t help but feel some sort of connection.

“Why would they put me in a room with that thing!? ” he heatedly asked, more talking aloud while he was lost in his thoughts than anything else.

“Well, you would know far better than me about their motives. I was but the one who found you.”

“I don’t know either,” Harry responded, unconsciously finding himself falling into an oddly familiar routine of general brainstorming that he’d gotten used to since arriving at Hogwarts. “He mentioned something about teaching Farley a lesson, but I have no idea why he thought he could do that by hurting me.”

“Ah,” Professor Quirrell quietly exclaimed with interest gleaming in his eyes, not even attempting to hide it. “And are you involved with Miss Farley?”

“I…” Harry started to say something sarcastically affirmative, thinking that it should’ve been obvious, before he realized that he wasn’t talking to the stranger and was revealing a lot that he didn’t need getting out. “I mean, she helped me earlier in the year with my hair to keep me out of trouble with Professor Snape, and she saved my life twice now. Why would it even matter though?”

The man hummed in response, and Harry wasn’t sure if he’d bought the lie or not. “Well, far be it for me to spoil surprises, but I suppose we could say that each founder left some boons for the future students that particularly represented the traits they valued, and we’ll leave it at that.”

“So,” Harry drawled, only slightly confused. “Farley is competing for that, and other students attacked me to get her to stop?”

“Perhaps,” the man gave him with a shrug, obviously pleased that Harry was catching on so quickly. “I have little interaction with Slytherin House outside of my classes, but from what I’ve seen, she could most definitely be a contender. That would be surprising and, perhaps, offensive to some, considering she’s a very outspoken half-blood. If they thought that she was teaming up with another half-blood who’s also a standout in their year, particularly when it comes to your unprecedented class score in transfiguration and your talent on a broom, they might’ve gotten concerned.”

Harry was understandably shocked. He hadn’t even thought to question Farley’s blood status, mostly because she seemed so unbelievably comfortable in her position here. That she was only slightly above him in the pecking order, considering she grew up in the wizarding world while he didn’t, made her accomplishments only more impressive in his eyes. Of course, those fucks would start on him once he stepped out of line.

It was fine for the little wizard wannabe to earn them some points by kicking arse in transfiguration. They’d even let him join the Slytherin quidditch team a year early if it got them more points. The second he started hindering their own progress though, that goodwill collapsed. It sickened him that his uncle’s lines yesterday were so accurate.

He really did think it was going to be better here.

“A few upper-years thought a half-blood was getting too uppity, so they decided to kill me by putting me in a room with a monster?” he asked seriously, just in case he missed anything.

“Essentially,” Professor Quirrell flippantly answered. “I don’t think they thought things through that far. They probably thought your fears were going to be like theirs. They thought you were maybe scared of a bad grade, getting caught doing something that’ll get you in trouble, or disappointing your guardian. Maybe they could’ve even watched Miss Greengrass appear and say she didn’t want to be your friend anymore. They forgot that not everyone’s fears and worries are so trivial, something that will certainly inhibit their ability to win whatever prize they think Salazar left for them.”

And that was just the cherry on top… his fear.

More than anything that happened to him after Daphne got injured, that was probably the most demoralizing. Through all of the shit, even with the world against him, never would he have thought that he’d be taken down by the things his “uncle” told him. Maybe the stranger was right; maybe he really was pathetic.

“I don’t understand why I’m so weak,” he admitted out loud to the first person ever.

Maybe he said it because someone in this damn castle besides Weasley wasn’t being an arse. Perhaps it was because Professor Quirrell was so undeniably strong. With the stranger and the zouwu no longer there to bolster him, maybe he was, as always, praying that someone better than him was there to help.

Maybe he thought that someone might finally understand…

The fact that it was out there now was nauseating, but it was also irrevocable. His words were already too far gone for him to pull them back. His eyes were glued to the floor. The humiliation and shame sloshing around inside of him was almost unbearable. When nothing was said, he slowly made himself meet Professor Quirrell’s eyes. What he found was possibly the closest thing to solemn understanding he’d ever seen on that man’s face.

“You are not weak, Mr. Potter,” he said with nothing but sincerity. “Had you possessed magic at the time, I feel as though you would’ve handled the boggart quite easily, even if you didn’t know the specific spell for it. They are shapeshifters, but that makes them highly susceptible to transfiguration, something I know you’re very skilled with.”

“It’s not just that!” Harry spat back, needing this man to understand after he'd started. “It’s everything! I thought I was better; I thought I was strong now, but I’m not. Things just keep happening, and I keep fucking them up!”

“Oh, Harry,” the man said, a very different expression forming on his face as he thought back to when an offshoot of himself performed such impressive magic with the power of a small first-year. “If only you could see how wrong you are.”

“Please, sir, I can’t even cast a single spell you’ve taught in your class. Don’t lie to me.”

It was at this comment that Professor Quirrell gave Harry one of those looks. It was the one he'd received when he accidentally showed a bit of his animagus form or when he'd finally figured out what Professor Quirrell wanted to teach him about dementors. 

"You do lack a certain spark for my class, Mr. Potter. I wonder why you might think that is," Quirrell asked, looking genuinely interested in whatever response his question garnered.

“I have no clue,” Harry said back. “I’ve tried everything. I practice every spell you give me; I’ve tried casting them at the backs of people who annoy me just to make sure I had the intent right; I’ve even asked Daphne for help a few times. No matter what I do, nothing comes out, and I don’t know why!”

“What do you know about magical power?” Quirrell asked as he gently leaned forward in his seat.

“Sir?” was Harry’s eloquent response.

“Magical talent is a very personal thing. Your magic is intimately connected to your soul. I’m sure you’ve felt it before, the way it yearns to help you and attempts to mold itself to your person,” Quirrell told the boy, getting a hesitant nod in return. “It isn’t a coincidence that people are good at certain types of magic while they are poor or worse at others. There’s a reason why some forms of magic come easier to you than others. I wonder, Mr. Potter, what it is you think of when you cast. How does your magic connect to your person? How are you so attuned to transfiguration?”

“... I don’t know, sir,” Harry stammered, caught on his back foot once he realized that Quirrell seemed to know something about his unique take on Professor McGonagall’s subject. “I just follow the rules and make it work-”

“Do not give me the tripe you feed to McGonagall!” Quirrell demanded in a manner more comparable to a hiss than a snarl. “I know when you lie!”

The man’s aggressive demeanor didn’t much frighten him, not after he lived with Vernon and was saved from a monster’s version of him by the very man attempting to intimidate him. He was much more intimidated by how much the man was aware of and how hard it was to fool him. Knowledge was everything; he’d said it many times before. It was disconcerting for the man to know something he'd made certain to keep private while simultaneously having a strange understanding of his abilities, possibly even more so than himself.

“Her lessons grate on me,” Harry hesitatingly decided to admit now that he was caught. “She puts so many rules on things. Every transfiguration we learn, she spouts off about understanding each item and detailing the steps we need to take to get from one to the other. I’ve been ignoring her since the first lesson, but I always get it right. The way she transfigures, I just can’t see the life in it.”

“Tell me, then, how you think of transfiguration,” Professor Quirrell requested as he delicately rested his chin upon a closed fist, his elbow propped against his desk.

“I see it as art, I guess.” Harry sheepishly started, not feeling exactly comfortable with such a powerful, intelligent teacher looking at him as if he had something to teach. “Rules and steps, they just never occur to me. I imagine the thing I want to create and focus on how it feels to me. I sculpt it with my magic, using the image I think of as a reference. To try and do things McGonagall’s way just doesn’t work for me.”

“So it’s true,” Quirrell said in a whisper, his eyes shining so brightly that Harry thought they might catch fire. “To think I’d see a Stilt during my brief period of teaching at Hogwarts.”

“... A what?”

“Has there ever been a point in your life where you wanted to hurt somebody so badly, so desperately that it burned, but you forced yourself to stop?”

Voldemort could feel the way his least competent student spiked at his comment. It was as if a hurricane had suddenly appeared on the border of his mind. He smiled widely, knowing that he was correct. His other self had practically given him everything already, but the confirmation of it was blissful . 

"How did you know?" the boy growled, sounding very much like the zouwu hidden beneath his skin. 

Amazing…

So young, so inexperienced, but he could see the potential even clearer than when he'd last spoken to the boy. He'd met a few of them before; he'd ended up fighting against most of them too. It was strange seeing one of them so young, before they'd managed to get a grip on things.

It was equally shocking that their aura didn't seem at all lessened by the lack of training. The power and talent was just as overt in the boy sitting on his couch as it was in the grown, terribly experienced adults he’d warred with in his past. It wasn't Potter’s capabilities that needed improvement. He already had everything he needed right there, like a predator would with the skills to hunt. The proclivity for a certain branch of magic was instinctually, naturally present within the boy. All he had to do was realize the things he had lying dormant within him and practice enough to hone his talent into something more. 

“Why, Harry, I already told you how I know. Magic is a very personal thing. If you’re logical and strict, your magic naturally becomes more structured, efficient, and streamlined. If you’re very emotional, your magic will undoubtedly become more esoteric over time. If you spend a large amount of time forcefully and thoroughly denying a part of your magic… well…”

Voldemort knew exactly when the boy understood the point of his lesson by the look of horrified clarity on his face. Yes, he could imagine how he would’ve felt in the child’s shoes. To learn that a part of himself was somehow hurt by circumstances outside of his control would’ve enraged him beyond what words could’ve possibly described. After seeing the form of the boy’s boggart, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. 

“Can it be fixed?” Harry asked his professor, his voice bordering on the cusp of desperation. 

“I’m not sure,” Voldemort honestly answered through the mouth of his host. “I would assume that if you were to equate the time you’d spent repressing a branch of magic with expressly and exclusively favoring it, your magic would adapt just as surely as anyone else’s.”

“...So-” the boy started with almost dead eyes, doing little else but staring into the space between the corners of his office. “So I’m hopeless then? I’m just destined to be like this?”

Just barely holding back the urge to laugh at such a ridiculous notion, Voldemort overlapped his hands and let just a hint of amusement leak into his tone. “When it comes to the kind of spellwork you’ll most often come into contact with in my class, yes. Whether or not you are hopeless, well, I assume your lightning-covered companion should be enough of an answer to that.”

“What does my animagus form have to do with anything?”

“Everything, Harry,” Voldemort said in a quiet voice so powerful that it could shake nations and break the foundations of governments. “You’re the one making liberal use of sacrificial magic. You tell me how you got such a unique and mighty form before even knowing what animagery is.”

Harry got the feeling that he was being watched by a particularly hungry predator as the gears in his mind worked with his churning thoughts. Magic was an exchange, a barter; he knew that very well. Every interaction with magic was a trade of some kind. Nothing was ever given for free, but, at the same time, nothing lost to it ever… went… unrewarded…

“Do you see it now, Mister Potter?” Quirrell asked him curiously.

He did.  

The boggart form was probably what had finally connected all of the pieces for his professor. For the entirety of his childhood, basically from the moment of consciousness, he was taught what happened when his magic fought back. Every single day before he escaped was spent getting the message hammered into his skull, sometimes literally, that overt resistance only resulted in crueler punishments. If Quirrell was to be believed, and the man had no reason to lie, then his magic eventually conformed to his situation, gradually giving up on magic that he couldn’t make use of without getting hurt. All of the ability he had for the kinds of magic exclusively meant to harm another living being was eventually given away, and, with that excess material, he was instead given more aptitude for a branch of magic that could help him.

The adaptability given to him by his skill with transfiguration was what kept him going in his relative’s house. The zouwu’s eyes gave him the ability to carefully traverse the house in the dead of night. The ears of his animagus form allowed him to track his family as he went about his daily chores. His fur kept him warm when temperatures got too low in his secluded cupboard. It was the creature’s steadfast, unbreakable disposition that sometimes kept him sane throughout the lonely days and nights spent withering away in that god awful house. Eventually, it was his form that allowed him to escape his relatives at all, and his skill with transfiguration had already given him so much since he'd gotten his wand. 

Even still…

“So I’ll never be able to fight like you?” Harry asked, burning with the need for some method of improvement, begging for a chance to better himself when it recently became so obvious that he wasn’t yet good enough to live safely in this world or finally escape the one he'd left. “I’m stuck making clocks while I get kicked around by whatever wizard wants to take me for everything I’m worth!? I can’t live like this, professor… I can’t.”

And there it was.

Voldemort heard it in the tone of Potter’s voice. He saw it in the boy’s eyes and posture. It was more than just an attitude, want, or desire. The need to be stronger, to rise beyond the constricting chains of mediocrity and weakness, was shining so brightly within the boy that it burned everyone around him… but none so much as himself. It was a feeling that he knew intimately, one that ailed him to this very day. 

It was a sad existence, in some perspectives, but it was what built people like himself, people like the boy in front of him. He didn’t need to know everything to know what it was that drove the boy’s magic to become mutated and stilted like that. He didn’t need to know every detail to see why the boy’s boggart was that fat, disgusting worm of a human. He understood what it meant for every single day to be defined by those moments of rock bottom, where he could feel as though it wasn’t enough even when he was soaring so far above where anyone else had ever been before. It could never be enough, not after he knew what it was like to have nothing, to be nothing. Those kinds of things, it didn’t require a lot to see them in another.

But there was one comfort he could provide the boy…

“Harry,” the man said in a voice so earnest and filled with promises that it was impossible to not be captivated . “If you let me help you, I can show you a universe that you couldn’t even comprehend right now. The talent you possess is special; you are special. All you need is someone who knows what to do with your unique abilities. Let me be that person, and I will promise you that, one day, even Albus Dumbledore will pale in comparison to you.”

Voldemort smiled at the look on the boy’s face. It was possibly the most genuine smile he’d ever given in his adult life, and he was sure it looked absolutely sickening from the outside. The glimmer of hope in Potter’s eyes that mixed just the right way with an ounce of greed and a sprinkle of pride reminded him perfectly of the way he’d felt when his own mentor gave him a very similar promise. When the boy nodded, Voldemort wasn’t surprised in the slightest. Not wanting to go back to a common room half-filled with hostile snakes, the boy asked if he could stay for a while longer. The Dark Lord allowed it and went back to silently grading as the boy laid back down on his couch.

Victory had never tasted quite so sweet…