Unforeseeable

Joy of the Orphanage

The Dursleys alway told him how horrible an orphanage was.

Not that he would believe any word coming out of their mouths, but it let him consider if he really wanted to live there.

It wasn't that bad, if he had to answer honestly. The patrons left him alone because they thought he wanted to be alone, not that they hadn't tried talking to him. However every time they did, he just played shy and stepped back a few steps like a scared animal. They thought they had to give him time to adjust to the new situation, living arrangements and people. Fouls.

Harry spent his time in the library of the Orphanage. Despite the Dursleys' best efforts to keep him dumb by denieing him to borrow any books from the school library or read any that were on the shelves at home or given to Dudley, they did not manage to dumb him down. They just wasted their, and more important, his time.

That gave him the adorable nickname 'Little bookworm of St Mary' and soon they began to accept that he judst didn't want their company.

Things still weren't overly different  despite his living arrangements or the fact that he changed school to the more local one in London that was only a six minutes-long walk away. He still didn't make any friends with the people in his classes and the teacher kept ignoring him because of his lack of participation in class. And soon as his year made a knowledge test to determine their future schooling he was sent two years up which did not really help him either and for he got even more teased. Those classes didn't work out for him either as he already knew what they were trying to teach him. So he had to skip again to the last year of primary school by the age of 6.

His 6th birthday was the first birthday that he could remember, in which neither he or his parents were insulted and where it was his very first birthday cake. He even got presents from the patrons and the old caretaker visited him and gifted him some books on anatomy and psychology. He didn't really care for the cake or the presents, but didn't let it show as he didn't want to be seen as ungrateful. Well, as long as they didn't expect anything from him in return.

Somewhere in the middle of the summer holidays even the other children of the orphanage warmed up to him, well, the older ones and mostly those who spent a lot of time in the library, like him. One of those children was 11-year old Aurora Winterhart. The first friend he ever had. She would be in the same classes as he when school would start. However that would not happen.

Harry didn't know what happened to her. Everything was kept hush-hush, and Aurora was no where around. They never told him where she was or when she would come back. That was until he saw that they gave her clothes and other belongings to others and tidied up her bed.

And he was nowhere dumb. He knew she wasn't adopted or she would have taken her one bee plushie along with her. He newer saw her without that thing near her and she would not have given it up because it was the only thing she had left from her mother.
He assumed she was dead and a part of him felt bad, but not because of her apparent death, but about that he knew he did not really care, even if he had saw her as a friend.