Chapter Text
Harry Potter was a quiet lad.
This was the opinion of everyone who met him, and the speed at which it was formed was only relative to how long Harry managed to be in the presence of the person in question without being noticed. Even the Dursleys, always quick to list Harry’s faults, couldn’t deny that he was quiet.
He never, in fact, said a word.
The Muggle doctors to whom the Dursleys reluctantly brought him (because how wretched would it be if—shudder—the national authorities saw fit to get involved?) had been baffled by Harry’s condition. There was nothing wrong with his respiratory system, laryngeal system, or articulatory system, as far as any of their tests could discover—and yet, even when the young boy was obviously attempting to follow the instructions of a speech therapist, no sounds emerged from his lips.
At Hogwarts, he taught his closest friends how to sign. Hermione was excited about it, likely because she was excited about any new knowledge that offered itself up. Ron thought it would be cool if they had a secret way to talk to each other without getting in trouble in class.
For non-signers, Harry had long ago learned to carry a small notepad where he could write whatever he needed to communicate. It was slower than speech, but it got the job done. In their second year, though, Hermione found a spell in an advanced text about forming letters made of light with the tip of a wand. After practicing for months, Harry could hold enough letters in place in the air at once to make a floating word. By his fourth year, he could manage a sentence.
His letters never looked quite as Hermione’s book said they ought to, though. They wavered and rippled, as if constantly shifting from side to side. This was proving to be the case with a lot of Harry’s magic, actually: it worked, but not quite in the usual way. The Hogwarts professors seemed to agree that this was because Harry’s spellcasting was by necessity wordless. Incantations gave precision to spells. For someone as young and untrained as Harry, casting wordlessly meant that his magic would be rawer, less controlled, more like the accidental magical outbursts of a child.
Harry’s trick—if a trick it could be called—was to think about the words of a spell very hard whenever he cast it. But gradually, he found that he was thinking less about the words and more about the feel of the magic as it seeped or broke or boiled through him. Different spells felt different: friendly or dangerous, calm or roiling, brackish or sludgy or even effervescent. And sometimes he could feel the magic of the people around him, too. Hermione’s burbled cheerfully. Ron’s was less steady: it would either be trickling or sloshing over the top.
~
The happiest day of Harry’s life so far had been his eleventh birthday, when Hagrid showed up on the spit of land where Uncle Vernon had dragged them to escape the Hogwarts letters and broke open the hut’s door and gave Dudley a pig’s tail and Harry a birthday cake.
Harry had fallen in the ocean earlier that day.
Later, when he found the Mirror of Erised in a dusty old classroom at Hogwarts and saw his parents and a crowd of family behind them, he would wonder if it were possible to get to that place at the other side, the place where the depth of the image wasn’t an illusion.
Then he would remember that he’d been there once before.
It had felt like that, at least. Vernon had been rowing them all as Petunia and Dudley huddled miserably in their anoraks against the rain, and Harry had been feeling…odd, to say the least—it was difficult to remember now, really. But he’d been just as wet as the others, except that he somehow kept finding himself leaning over the little rowboat’s side even as the waves bounced it about.
And then a particularly large swell over the side had pulled Harry into the water.
It was salty, obviously. Salty and cold. In fact, the water was an icy fist that was squeezing against him on all sides, from everywhere at once. He had the sense that he was sinking—or maybe it was floating, or maybe flying.
In the dark and the cold, he should have been starting to panic. But what struck him the most was how calm it was, just under the turbulence of the water’s surface. Even if he’d dived into the clearest lake on the brightest day of summer and had been able to see around himself for half a kilometer, he wouldn’t have had a greater sense of the world opening up.
And then Uncle Vernon’s meaty hand had grabbed the scruff of his coat and yanked Harry back up into the air, slamming him against the side of the boat and then pulling him over it with a mighty heave and the help of a shrieking Petunia.
“Damn fool boy!” Vernon was yelling as Harry curled and coughed at the bottom of the boat. Glancing up past Dudley’s terrified eyes into the rain and the storm, Harry barely heard him.
Uncle Vernon only stopped shouting when Aunt Petunia started screeching at him to keep rowing before they all went under. Then she was leaning over Harry with her long neck and whispering in her vicious falsetto that they ought to punish him for his carelessness by leaving him out in the wet, wild world that night.
I would like that, Harry thought. He was shuddering, shivering, blue-lipped. He might have been back on his own side of the mirror, the side made of air and rain and, at present, the Dursleys—but he could still feel the frigid squeeze of the tide around his ribs.
It was the happiest day of his life.
And still, he didn't go into the sea again for many years.
~
“Harry, shut that thing up!” Ginny Weasley shouted.
In the Gryffindor common room, all of Harry’s housemates had slammed their hands over their ears.
What’s wrong? he signed awkwardly to Ron, still bracing the golden egg open against his chest.
“Can’t you hear it?” Ron yelled.
Baffled, Harry looked toward Hermione. All he could hear was a song—something strange and beautiful. He strained to make out the words.
“It’s screaming at you, Harry!” Hermione shrieked, her eyes wide.
Harry closed the egg, and everyone else in the Gryffindor common room seemed to relax, their hands finally dropping from where they were mashed protectively over their auditory organs.
“Bloody hell, Harry! Why did you hold it open for so long?” Angelina Johnson demanded in a gasp.
As this question was echoed in various forms by the other Gryffindors who’d assembled to congratulate him on winning the First Task, Harry shrugged weakly.
When he didn’t give any other explanations, the crowd gradually dispersed.
”Harry, can you tell us what just happened?” Hermione asked in a whisper once only she and Ron were left.
It didn’t sound like screaming to me, Harry admitted.
His friends shared a puzzled glance.
“…What did it sound like?” asked Ron.
~
On one of the rare days in November when it wasn’t raining or sleeting or snowing or blowing great gusts of wind in everyone’s faces, Harry and his two best friends decided to take advantage of the relatively pleasant weather to study on the grass outside.
The topic of the Yule Ball had come up, along with the revelation that, as Champion, Harry was expected to bring a date and dance in front of the entire population of all three schools.
Can’t I just ask Cedric to be my date? he signed.
His friends were suspiciously silent.
Because of solidarity among Hogwarts’ champions, Harry added.
The silence continued for a beat, and then they both spoke at once. “Mate—” Ron started.
“I suppose there’s nothing in the rules…” Hermione said.
And because he’s fit, and I like boys, Harry finished. This had been on his mind for some time lately and he was tired of worrying about what his friends would think of him when they found out.
I agree, Hermione signed after a few seconds that felt like an eternity. Cedric is really very handsome.
They both turned to Ron.
Ron was scowling. “Oi, don’t look at me like that, you two.” He wrinkled his nose. “I suppose he’s all right.”
Hermione snickered, then slapped a hand over her mouth.
Smiling, Harry lay back on the grass and laced his hands behind his head.
“Are you going to ask him to be your date, then?” Hermione wondered a while later.
Harry sat up again and nodded. Worth a try, though I doubt he'll go for me.
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Hermione answered slowly with a frown. “I do see him watching you all the time.”
“You do?” Ron asked, at the same time as Harry looked at his female friend sharply.
“Yes, definitely. Ginny and I were talking about that the other day—she noticed it, too. Cedric watches you almost as much as Professor Snape does.”
Ron made a gagging sound. “You’re daft, ‘Mione. Why are you bringing that greasy arsehole into this?”
Hermione sniffed. “I was only saying that Professor Snape looks at Harry quite a bit, but so does Cedric. I doubt it means the same thing.”
It doesn’t mean anything at all, Harry signed while his two friends were still glaring at each other. With Cedric, anyway. Snape just wants to catch me breaking the rules.
Harry felt his good mood and his patience for this conversation evaporating.
But he still asked Cedric Diggory to the Yule Ball.
And Cedric, to Harry’s shock, said yes.
~
It was the day of the Second Task, and Harry was attempting to control his movements in the lake water with increasing desperation.
Standing with the other champions on the platform in front of the crowded stands, he’d smiled and given a thumbs-up to Cedric, then taken out the gillyweed he’d gotten from Professor Moody and chewed and swallowed it when the starting bell for the Task rang. And then he’d jumped in, trusting that his body would transform once he was in the water.
After the first brace of cold, though, he became aware that something was going terribly wrong. Instead of growing gills and getting webbing on his hands and feet, all he felt was a crippling pain. He twisted against it and sank as he thrashed, his feet finding no purchase. Bubbles of his last air escaped his mouth. The rippling daylight above the lake was getting further and further away.
And then Harry felt himself being yanked up, as if by an invisible lasso around his waist. A second later, the magical tether was replaced by hands hoisting him. Water sluiced off of him as he broke through the surface and was summarily deposited back on dry ground.
The pain didn’t ease. Harry’s back arched in an agonized rictus. He might have been vomiting. His lungs were burning; it still felt as if he couldn’t breathe, even here in the dry air.
There was a crowd of faces around him that swam in and out of focus. Chief among them was Snape’s pale visage and dark eyes, with his uncombed hair dangling down as he leaned over Harry, his wand flicking rapidly over Harry’s constricting chest.
Snape’s front was soaked. Harry’s last conscious thought before he sank into oblivion was to wonder why.