Survivor

Harry stood in the middle of Quirrell's past training room as he watched the man stare down a transfigured dummy made of wood. It'd taken him a week to adjust to the indescribable feeling of finally putting a stop to his horrifying journey of discovering just how low his rock bottom was. Being powerful on his own, in a combative sense, was strange and new to him. Quirrell proved to him that he had strength. Now, the problem was unleashing it without going through a tsunami of mental anguish. 

"You read all about those alternative stances back before we started our training sessions. Do you remember the open stance?"

Raising an eyebrow, Harry nodded in the affirmative. "The book called it the dullard's stance too."

"Quite," Voldemort answered with a smirk. "The stance is squared with your opponent instead of positioned away. It gives you a strong base, but it also makes you a bigger target. The lead foot faces the opponent while the back foot is positioned at a 45 degree angle to them. You will hold your wand in your back hand, and you will keep it down by your side. You don’t present your wand to your opponent. Instead, you will point your wand off to the side and a tad behind you. A general shield is created in whatever direction your wand is pointed, meaning blocks in this stance are very complicated and difficult compared to pretty much any other stance imaginable. That’s why it’s colloquially known as the dullard's stance because only an idiot or a madman would voluntarily position themselves in a way that affords no viable options for defense."

"Then… why would you recommend it for me, sir?"

"Because of the only benefit it provides, Potter. Do you remember it from the book?" 

"It said the stance is for cutting curses, sir."

"Correct," Voldemort affirmed as he assumed the stance, holding his wand out to his side. "The point of the stance is to position your wand in a way that allows you to perform the sweeping motion of a cutting curse without the need to build it up. If your wand is facing the opponent, you must first bring it off target to then create the slicing spell with your swing. In this stance, you can simply let it fly."

Standing as he was, Voldemort glared at the wooden dummy before giving it a subtle grin. "Lacero."

Twisting his back foot against the ground, he torqued his body and brought his wand around in a deadly arc. As it flew, the wand cut through the very air, creating a visible blade of glinting light that dashed across the room before it bisected the dummy with practically no resistance. Harry watched with barely hidden awe as the top half of the target slapped against the floor. 

Holy fuck…

"Your opponent, believing you a fool, is unprepared for the strike. The absent windup time means you attack much faster than them unless they’re inclined to immediately take action. The inventor of this stance killed several opponents in sanctioned duels before the professionals respected it enough to create counterplay. Even now, it's rare enough that only fairly practiced duelists will have enough time on their hands to know how to properly respond to the strategy."

"But how am I supposed to use it if I can't use a cutting curse?"

"You can’t use the curses most benefited by the stance, yes, but that doesn't mean you don't have spells that do similar things. We’ll be focusing on only one for now.”

A sweep of his wand repaired the dummy, and Voldemort assumed the same stance for a second time. "Flagellum."

Before his eyes, a whip materialized on the end of Quirrell's wand, like the magical focus was the handle of a new weapon. Swinging it in an arc that was deeply reminiscent of the cutting curse, the man flung the whip with an eerie, supernatural speed at the target. He flicked his wand right at the end, sending a rolling wave across the whip until it snapped against the dummy's neck, decapitating it with a burst that broke the sound barrier. 

"You want me to use a whip?" Harry eloquently asked, and Quirrell gave him an indulgent grin. 

"Yes, but it isn't like the ones you’re thinking of. The incantation is flagellum , and someone with your particular skills won't even need that for long. The trick to the spell is the way you conjure it. Don't think of it as an object but as an extension of yourself. You want it to grow from your wand, attached to both yourself and your magic."

Harry closed his eyes, deciding to trust the man and his instructions. He said the words, and he experienced one of the oddest sensations to ever grace him since the beast developed inside of him. It was almost like another limb was growing from his wand, inch by inch. Once it reached the ground, he could feel the stone as if he were touching it with his own skin. He gave an uncomfortable shiver as he tried to get used to it.

"Have you noticed it, Mister Potter - the way it feels as though your own body has extended into the whip? This feeling is not just for show; you’ve literally created an object that has been bound to yourself in every way based on your intent. This extends to control. You need not use it like some muggle weapon. It moves how you want it to, not how you physically force it to."

His curiosity quickly overcame his discomfort, and he attempted to raise his new limb. He gave a laugh that was born of a queasy feeling in his chest when it lifted itself from the very middle, leaving the ends near his wand and the floor completely limp. Pushing that anchor down the whip, he slowly heaved the entire thing up. 

"This…" Harry said as the abomination sloppily wriggled about in the air. "Is the creepiest thing I've ever fucking seen."

"Magic can do many amazing things, some of which are far more disturbing than this," Voldemort told the boy, amusedly watching him experiment with what was admittedly a unique bit of magic. There was a reason he’d chosen it for him. Very suddenly, though, his voice got deadly serious, and his command came out in a sibilant whisper. "Strike with it."

Harry's brow twitched, and the whip lashed out at the dummy like a monster's arm gone feral. There was hardly an ounce of control, but the sheer speed was scary by itself. It was so eager that the curl barely made it down the whip in time for it to viciously snap at the end of its shallow arc.

… Meters away from the target…

Voldemort looked at the area it’d struck, seemingly extremely pleased by the attempt before looking at his grinning student. It was a failure, but it was also the first try, and it was a good one at that. The aggression behind the strike, the hunger for a hit, showed him what would eventually be when the skill was mastered, and he liked what he saw.

"Again.” 

Another violent crack immediately followed.

Training with Quirrell’s spell was grueling work. It was one of those spells, like the levitation charm, that was easy to cast but had a massive skill curve when it came to actually utilizing it. He’d created the weapon on the first try, but learning to maneuver it in any sort of controlled fashion was nigh impossible, let alone controlling it by reflex at high speeds. It was actually almost as difficult as trying to figure out how he was supposed to respond to the letter from Ginevra that he’d been putting off.

He assumed that Ronald and his offer to “talk to his parents” didn’t pan out after so long without any news. Harry didn’t expect it to work, not really, but that meant he owed Ginevra an explanation. Well, actually, if he were being honest, he’d spent about four whole days trying to figure out exactly how he was going to lie to her and make it convincing without risking her digging into things enough to find out the real story from her parents or one of her brothers. The next five days were spent arguing with himself over the fact that he’d already almost gotten a friend killed by lying and concealing important shit. That was why he'd been sitting for another two days trying to write down what happened without losing the only true friend he had left.

"You're going to incinerate that parchment if you don't stop glaring at it like that.”

Harry sighed as he put his quill down and sat back in his chair. They were in his mentor’s office at the moment. Quirrell was designing a lesson plan for his sixth-years, and Harry was avoiding his classmates as per usual. He glanced at his professor’s inquiring gaze, and he hesitantly decided to bring someone into the fold who might have an idea of what to do.

"... You know the sacrificial magic stuff I used?" Quirrell's unimpressed stare told him that they both knew he was just stalling. "Well, it's probably the worst kept secret I've ever seen. Everyone in the Ministry knows about it, and all of their kids do too. One of my friend’s parents found out, and they've decided to cut me off from her. She doesn't know what happened, and I don't know what to tell her."

Quirrell obviously empathized with such a conundrum, giving Harry the impression that his problem wasn't one exclusive to himself. The man seemed to be considering what he wanted to say. Harry could practically feel the reluctance in the air until his mentor made a decision.

"I grew up in an orphanage, Mister Potter," was what Quirrell said, perhaps intentionally ignoring the way it shocked him to his core.

"Was it a magical orphanage, sir?"

"No, it was a muggle one." There was a mixture of so many emotions behind his words that Harry couldn’t properly decipher any single one of them. "My mother didn't want me to grow up in the magical world, so she gave birth in the middle of a London orphanage. She died not long after naming me."

Harry wasn't sure what to say, so he decided to say nothing. That such a terrifyingly powerful man grew up in such a situation was almost unimaginable. He remembered the way Quirrell's boggart appeared as a young boy in a shoddy uniform, scared and starved, and he now understood why. If he was right, then the two of them shared much more than the fact that they both had dead parents. 

"Do you want to know what I learned there?" Quirrell asked him, and he gave a small nod in return. "Some people respect power… other people fear it. You’re better off without the ones in the latter camp."

"But what if-" Harry started to say until Quirrell cut him off with a raised hand. 

"You showed the world that you have power when you used sacrificial magic . It doesn't matter to most people whether or not you used it for good or evil. Some will respect you for what you can do, and some will be afraid of the fact that you can do it at all. If your friend doesn't respect you for your strength, if they fear you because you're powerful, then they aren't worth your effort."

Struck silly by a truly strange sense of deja vu, Harry went back to his parchment and contemplated what he wanted to do. That was something he would've expected from the stranger, and he honestly shouldn't have been so surprised. Two men who were both so unapologetically powerful, who wore their strength like a suit, proudly displaying it for the whole world to see. Of course, they had the same opinions on who was worth their time. 

Neither of them understood that he didn't care about all of that. Power was something he wanted, something he craved, but mostly because it protected him from the rotten, grasping hands that threatened to drag him beneath the earth by his ankles. If he didn’t need it, then he wouldn’t really care for it all that much, so why should he lose something he actually cared for because of power that only truly served as a means to an end?

But at the same time, he knew he’d never let it go, not when it gave him so much.

It was clear to him now that Quirrell wouldn’t help him with his dilemma. Sadly, though, that left him with a letter he still didn’t know how to write. He pondered for a few more minutes before eventually deciding to throw it all to the wind and tell the truth. His situation with Daphne taught him just how badly things went when he lied about stuff like this. 

She was bound to find the truth anyway. If it didn’t come from him, it would be from her brothers or her parents when they eventually found out that Ginevra wasn’t respecting the permanent ban they’d put on her friendship with him. It was better to show all of his cards and hope that she stood by him because she was lost for sure if he wasn’t honest.

Once he was done with the letter, he forced himself to get up from the chair and leave his mentor’s office. All the way to the owlery, he walked with his head on a swivel. Even with the knowledge that someone from Farley’s group was watching him, he was so damn paranoid that he couldn’t help himself. Jason, of course, was under his robes too. 

His friend was reasonably livid but felt unreasonably guilty that the bastard Slytherins managed to stun him so quickly before basically tossing Harry into the hands of a monster that wanted to kill him while wearing Vernon’s face. Jason wasn’t used to the idea that he couldn’t always help anymore. As a mundane snake, magical humans had a plethora of methods to make him irrelevantly harmless. Getting stunned out of nowhere and tossed on the floor was the final straw.

Jason reacted to this just as poorly as Harry did, becoming paranoid and jumpy. He was always hidden now, waiting to pop out and strike anyone he deemed worthy of it. Even in his own room, Jason was no longer comfortable with laying out in the middle of the bed or coiling up on the nightstand. Harry tried to console him, saying that both of them were caught off guard and that Jason, out of the two of them, shouldn’t have been the one expected to detect a magical attack and ward it off. In fact, Harry was the one who should’ve been apologizing because Daphne’s injury put him off of his A-game. If he were just utilizing the skills he had, they wouldn’t have been caught unawares.

That was apparently the wrong thing to say…

Harry pushed the troubling thoughts to the back of his mind as he walked into the owlery itself. He gave Hedwig a wane smile when she flapped over to him and asked her if she’d be willing to sneakily deliver a letter to Ginevra. The dutiful hoot he got in response made him chuckle just a little, and his owl seemed to take pride in the fact that she managed to amuse him.

After Hedwig went off to deliver a letter that may very well end his last remaining friendship, he sat around for a while and just watched the owls. That was, at least, until a hiss from Jason got him in gear. He began his walk back to the Slytherin common room just before sunset, mostly because he didn’t want to walk around the castle when nobody but Prefects were filling the halls. 

Saying the password and entering the room, he took stock of everyone lazing about and was satisfied that everyone he saw were usually down here at around this time. The sixth-years by the fireplace were the ones he really didn’t want to see defying his expectations. They were around the same height as the guys that jumped him, and they also had a Prefect in their group. Exactly what “competition” Quirrell was talking about eluded him, but he suspected that Prefects were most likely in the running if Farley’s magical skill and academic success was what made her a threat. He couldn’t handle these Slytherins like he did the Hufflepuffs after how disastrous his attempt at revenge turned out to be for him, but he was going to find out who it was and make their lives hell.

With that, he entered his room and locked it behind him with the basic lock that he still hadn’t found a way to improve. He’d been too busy to look up those extra spells to reinforce his locking charm that the stranger had mentioned to him, but he also hadn’t found anything that he’d like to sacrifice as of yet. Unfortunately, his mediocrely locked door would have to do for now because he had other things to learn at the moment.

“Flagellum,” Harry whispered as a whip grew from his wand. 

Slowly, he exerted control over the extra limb and directed it to the side of the room opposite of him, where he struggled to place it on the surface of his trunk. It felt as though he were fumbling around for his glasses with a numb hand, and it was unbelievably frustrating for him. He fiddled with the damn thing until he triumphantly managed to get it to wrap around the trunk. 

Giving it a firm tug, he reflexively cursed as his whip nearly tossed his trunk into the ceiling. He froze with his trunk hanging in the air because all of this information pumping through his head was overwhelming, and simply standing still was the only way he could think to not end up chaotically throwing his trunk around the room. Taking a deep breath, he focussed on the way his magic ran up the whip and tried to figure out how to manipulate something that had no joints or muscles.

Almost smacking himself in the head, he coalesced some of his magic into a messy little clump about halfway down the whip, and he used it as a pivot point. Very shakily, the whip lowered his trunk onto his bed and then collapsed into a limp heap that stretched all the way across his floor. Letting it vanish with an annoyed glare, he walked over to his trunk and opened it himself. It wasn’t the best way to control the thing, for sure, but it was a start for now. 

That was what Professor Quirrell told him he had to start doing. Apparently, one of the best ways to control something independently of his own body without using some special tricks that the man refused to share with him was to simply use it to do normal things until it actually was another limb in his mind. Despite how aggravating it was to purposefully complicate easily accomplishable tasks for the sake of training, he did it anyway. 

Quirrell was also the reason that he pulled a new book out of his trunk. It was a treatise on the “open” stance. The introduction book he’d already finished was mainly used to help a beginner choose a stance that sounded as though it would work for them. What Harry didn’t know was that there were entire books, plural, that spent every single page talking about different ways to apply each stance, specific combinations that each stance allowed, and the various techniques famous duelists and avid fighters alike had popularized over the years.

It was a slog of a read, and most of its contents weren’t useful to him. Honestly, if Quirrell wasn’t insistent on him learning everything in it, he would’ve already tossed the damn thing from the astronomy tower with zero regrets. He was so done with the book after about an hour of reading it that he was almost grateful when his unlocking charm was suddenly taken down.

“Professor Snape wants to see you, Potter,” a prefect told him, the one who was paired with Farley and the person Harry thought most likely to have been behind the boggart attack. 

“Did he tell you why?” Harry asked with just the tiniest hint of edge in his voice. 

“It isn’t my job to ask questions, and it isn’t yours either. Just get to his office.”

For the briefest of moments upon rising from his bed, Harry considered hammering the prefect with his magic and trying to tear the fucker’s mind to shreds. It was only the stranger’s warnings of pushing too far without guidance and getting lost in the mind of his target that kept him from lashing out, but that didn’t stop the dangerous glint in his eyes from reaching the bastard. A knife could’ve cut the tension that grew between the two as Harry gestured for the boy to lead the way out of his room, and he let it hang that way for a moment longer before abruptly killing it as he went to meet his professor. 

“Good evening, Mister Potter,” Snape said as Harry took a seat on the other side of his desk. “How have you been feeling?”

“Much better, sir. A prefect said you wanted to see me?”

“Yes, I did, mostly to inquire about your health. I take it you’ve been using magic again?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And have you noticed anything off since you’ve started? Have there been any instances of pain, exhaustion, nausea, or the like?”

Harry shook his head, feeling oddly touched that the man was checking up on him. It was his Head of House that kept him from having a major relapse after temporarily losing his connection to Jason. The amount of adults he actually trusted was up to an astounding figure of one, but Snape was worming his way in bit by bit. 

“I’ve noticed that you’ve been acting… strange around the other Slytherins for a while now. Is there anything you’d like to tell me? Helping you is part of my job.”

And that right there was the reason he couldn’t add a second finger to his list. The man was head of Slytherin house. He was clever, perceptive, and unabashedly nosey. Just by observation alone, Snape knew that something had occurred between him and some people within his house. 

“I just feel like, after what happened to me and Daphne, that some people are treating me differently. It makes me feel uncomfortable,” Harry decided to say, hinting at something unpleasant that Snape already knew about to lead him away from what actually happened. 

“Is that why you’ve been spending so much time around Professor Quirrell?” Snape asked, freezing Harry’s blood in his veins as he gave a small, hopefully convincing nod. “I see… Do keep in mind that I’m here as your Head of House for anything you may need. You’re always welcome in my office, be it to escape from the eyes of your classmates or to seek guidance from a professor.”

Harry nodded, but he already knew there was no choice to be made. The man certainly seemed genuine, but he was also in the employ of Albus Dumbledore, a man the stranger deemed to be just as dangerous as Quirrell. At least he had the assurance that Quirrell would’ve already done away with him if he wanted him dead. The headmaster was still a wildcard, and he had no intentions of getting anywhere close to that mess at the moment.

After telling the potions professor that he’d be sure to come back if he needed it, he left the room as fast as he could without arousing suspicion. Harry knew he couldn’t hide his whereabouts from Dumbledore for long, but it was official now. They were aware that he was spending time with the man they were playing games with. All he could do now was pray that nobody saw him as a player because of that connection, and that included Quirrell too. 

Things were becoming so complicated now that he wasn’t exactly sure how to handle all of it. Of course, that was before he saw Lord Greengrass marching down the hall toward the infirmary. Not daring to hope, he let his magic leak from his skin and crawl across the stone floor until it reached the hospital wing. His eyes shot wide when he felt a familiar presence groggily stir before blasting his senses like a flashbang. Things just got infinitely more complicated, and he wasn’t sure whether to laugh, cry, or start nervously wringing his hands.

… because his best friend just woke up.