There Is More Than This

Alternate Universe: Fusion with Fantastic Beasts, universe in which Harry is an obscurus. Pre-Hogwarts Era. 

Additional notes: This is also posted on Ao3 under the pseud "Shameless_Weeb_Lacking_A_Filter" and FF.net under "AkatsukiLover465". I am both of them and they are me; don't go getting salty on me saying that I stole something. 

...

Freak's real name is not Freak, even though that's all that he's called. 

His name is Harry James Potter, and he was born on a Thursday on July 31, 1980, to a deadbeat mother and a drunk father whose names he doesn't know and probably never will know. He is nine years old in exactly six months and three days, not that anyone will celebrate his birthday when it comes. 

His schoolteachers always call him "Mister Potter" and peer down at him past thick-rimmed spectacles, their mouths hard lines pinched in disapproval. Sometimes he almost wishes they would call him "Mister Dursley", just so that he wouldn't feel so alone, so held separate even from his relatives. 

Once, when he was in Year One of primary school, the teacher, a heavyset lady with a pretty face and bleach-blond hair, asked them all to draw a family portrait. 

Harry sat quietly in his chair for the whole hour, hands folded neatly in his lap, paper blank in front of him. Nobody asked what he was doing or if he ever planned to start working. 

Everyone just left him be, walking deliberately past his chair and engaging the other children in conversation. Like he was forgettable. Dudley threw a tantrum from his chair across the room, sobbing great fake sobs and whining that he didn't want to put Freak in his portrait. 

Harry continued sitting still, back rigidly straight, making no noise and pretending he didn't exist. 

But that was four whole entire years ago, and things have changed since then. Now if asked to draw his family he would gladly cover the whole thing in  pictures of his aunt and uncle, with hearts doodled in the margin, even. 

He knows that the Dursleys are not-nice bad people, but no one else seems to think so, and they are so comfortingly normal. Not like Harry. 

He only wants to not feel so isolated, in his own little bubble of weird and bad and freak. If he was a Dursley he would have an actual family. He would have friends, maybe. Even Dudley (especially Dudley) has friends, and Piers Polkiss might be insufferable, but he's still another human being. 

It isn't so hard these days for Harry to doubt that he himself is one of those. Human. 

"Mister Potter," a voice croons-- the female teacher for the Year Five students. Her tone is a mocking lilt that reminds Harry of a cat, pleased to have caught its prey. Pleased to have caught the Freak off-task, doing something he's not meant to. 

The boy looks up from his paper (it's torn from a secondhand composition book, the one Dudley used last year, in fact), green eyes wide and trying to look as innocent as possible. 

The teacher's face does that funny thing that adults' faces do when they're angry, but by now they're just so tired of reprimanding you that they're reduced to weary sighing and disappointment.

"Pay attention in my class, Mister Potter," she says finally after a long quiet, and walks back down the aisles of desks, heels clicking harshly on the tiled floor.

He can hear the other children whispering and tittering amongst themselves at his expense, like they always do when he screws up. He's numb to it now, mostly, so he picks up his stubby little pencil before pressing it down into the paper so hard that the tip of it snaps.