Shadow Magic • Harry Potter X Theodore Nott •

(1) Ordinary Shadows

Harry only realizes how extraordinary he is when he mentions that Dudley's parents make disgusting noises when they're rolling around together on their bed, and Dudley stares at him with blank eyes and asks, "How did you see that?"

Then, of course, Dudley tries to beat Harry up for seeing that. But Harry slips around the corner and into a shadow that extends across the grass from the school building, and he winds up on the roof of the school while Dudley and his gang search in vain for him. When class is about to start again, Harry slips back down through the shadow of a tree and the shadow of a door, appearing calmly in the back of the teacher's room just as Dudley is about to tell her a lie about Harry not being there.

So Harry doesn't get in trouble that day. It doesn't keep him from ever getting in trouble. The teachers don't believe Dudley's stories that Harry disappears when he's always right there, but Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia do.

So Harry lies in his cupboard that night with his hands behind his head to cushion it a little, and thinks.

He thought everyone saw through the shadows, they just didn't walk in them like he does. He's only seven, how he can be all that different? But now he thinks about the way Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon call him "freak," and he nods. So that's what they mean. Shadows are his friends, and not theirs.

Harry turns on the light bulb inside the cupboard and slips under the door through the shadow the light bulb casts. As always, it feels slightly cool and soft on the back of his neck and shoulders, and he sees a grey path in front of him winding through walls of darkness. Then he's standing in the kitchen, opening the fridge carefully. He can be gone in an instant if he wakes his aunt and uncle up, but that wouldn't stop them from suspecting him.

Harry makes himself a slice of cheese and roast beef covered with mustard and eats it, thinking. Then he slips back through the shadows cast by the lights outside and into the cupboard, only having to switch once where the lights' shadows cross the shadow of the cupboard.

Back inside the cupboard, Harry turns off the light and starts thinking. When he assumed everyone saw through the shadows, he never tried to do anything much with it. It's walking that's been more useful.

But now...

*

"It's perfect marks! There's no way he could get perfect marks in maths, Mum! I'm good at maths!"

Harry widens his eyes innocently while Aunt Petunia pats sobbing Dudley on the back and glares at him over Dudley's shoulder. He never dared get perfect marks before, because Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon would punish him. And he probably couldn't get them even with a lot of studying.

But he can get them when he goes through the shadows into the teacher's office and looks at the exams before she hands them out.

And now he has a weapon to fight Aunt Petunia with.

So he only waits until she sends Dudley into the kitchen with the promise of a huge chocolate ice and turns to face him. "Boy," she begins ominously. "You know that you're not smarter than my Dudders, you must have cheated—"

"You make a lot of noise when you're with Mr. Higgins from Number Three," Harry says innocently. He's had a lot of practice in sounding innocent, too. "More than you make when Uncle Vernon is on top of you."

Aunt Petunia goes so white that Harry thinks she's going to faint like Mrs. Verner did last year when her "blood sugar fell." She reaches out and gets hold of the wall, though. She's staring at him. "What?" she whispers.

"Sometimes you're in your bedroom with Uncle Vernon on top of you, and sometimes it's Mr. Higgins. It was yesterday when Uncle Vernon was at work." Harry slipped back through the shadows from school yesterday during lunch to see it. It was kind of disgusting and really noisy, but right now it's paying off.