For the past few days, Harry had become a phantom.
He had taken Flint's advice to its extreme, treating the Slytherin dungeon like a toxic zone. He only entered to sleep, and even then, he was gone before the first light hit the lake windows. He had mastered the art of the "Slytherin Glide," moving through the halls with a silent, focused intensity that made him nearly invisible to the casual observer.
Harry finally learned the names of those three boys: Lucian Vaisey, Damon Hersey, and Perry Fawley. And they are livid with him. Harry could feel their glares burning into the back of his neck whenever he crossed the Great Hall, but those instances were becoming rare. Thanks to a tip from Iris, Harry had discovered the kitchens. The house-elves were more than happy to provide him with a quiet corner and a warm plate, far away from the judgmental eyes of his House.
But Iris wasn't fooled. She had been watching the dominoes wobble for days, and she didn't like the pattern they were forming.
"Are you sure you're fine, Harry?" Iris asked, cornering him near a suit of armor after History of Magic. Her eyes narrowed, scanning his face for the tell-tale signs of a lie. "I haven't seen you in the Great Hall in three days. And I noticed you aren't hanging out with Blaise, either. What did that brat do?"
"Nothing, Iris. Don't dwell on it," Harry said, his voice flat as he adjusted the strap of his bag. He didn't want to tell her about the bed, or the "spare" comments, or the way the common room air felt like it was running out of oxygen. "I'm just... working on a personal project."
"A personal project?" Iris crossed her arms, her Hufflepuff yellow scarf looking like a splash of warning color against the gray stone. "Since when do you have personal projects that require you to eat dinner with house-elves and dodge your own roommates? What is it?"
"It's nothing, Iris. Just some extra reading," Harry lied, his voice remaining perfectly level.
He hated dodging her, but he hated the idea of her seeing him as weak even more. Because he wasn't. Back in the No-Maj world, Harry had always been the shield for Iris and Dudley. Whenever a bully at school so much as looked at them the wrong way, Harry had been the one to step in. He had never been the type to let things slide.
But he wasn't in a No-Maj school anymore. Here, the rules were written in a language he was still learning, and the bullies carried wands. Harry was acutely aware that even in the hands of a child, a wand was a lethal weapon. His caution in Slytherin wasn't born out of fear, but a need for a tactical footing—he had been trying to navigate the shadows without making waves.
All of that had been blown to pieces the moment Godric's name was announced as the new Seeker. The "Godric incident" had painted a target on Harry's back that no amount of caution could hide.
He stepped around Iris before her curiosity could sharpen into more questions, his jaw set as he headed straight for the library.
It was time to meet Neville.
Ever since the start of term, the one person Harry spent the most time with—aside from Iris and, to a lesser extent, Blaise—was Neville. Harry didn't care for the petty House rivalries that seemed to consume everyone else, and while he truly considered Neville a friend, he was pragmatic enough to admit he benefitted from the relationship.
Neville was brilliant; he just lacked the confidence to realize it. The boy had an intuitive talent for Herbology and anything related to the earth, subjects that were inextricably linked to Potions. The exact moment a herb was plucked, or the soil it was raised in, could drastically change the affinity and quality of a brew.
Harry had limited access to that kind of specialized knowledge. The Peverells were well-versed in many things, but Herbology wasn't one of them; they had always been the type to simply buy their ingredients off the market, treated as mere commodities. It was a sharp contrast to the Longbottoms, who treated the earth like a living legacy.
In return for that insight, Harry acted as Neville's anchor in the dungeons. Neville wasn't actually bad at Potions, his hands were steady enough when they were alone, but his confidence came plummeting down the moment they stepped into the classroom. Harry attributed it more to the boy's paralyzing fear of their Head of House than any lack of brewing ability. Even after weeks of classes, Harry still didn't quite understand where this irrational fear of Professor Snape came from.
But Professor Snape didn't really care whether or not Harry partnered with Neville. Is that it became a common theme that Neville has been less accidental with Harry than on his own or another partner. The one-time Neville partnered with anyone else, it always ends up in disaster and a trip to the hospital wing.
But as Harry sat at their usual table in the back of the library, the chair across from him remained empty.
Neville finally appeared at the door of the library twenty minutes late, and Harry knew immediately that something was wrong.
It wasn't the red-rimmed eyes, though those were there. It wasn't even the scratch across his cheekbone that caught the light when Neville turned his head, a jagged thing that hadn't been there yesterday. It was the way Neville moved — hunched inward, like he was trying to take up less space than usual, which was saying something because Neville already moved through the world as though he was constantly apologizing for being in it.
Harry stood up. "I started the draft for the Herbicide Potion. I think if we cross-reference the drying times with—"
"I can't today, Harry." Neville's voice was barely above a whisper. He didn't sit down. He didn't even set his bag on the table. "I'm sorry."
Harry looked at him for a moment. Then, carefully, he sat back down. "Okay."
Neville blinked. He'd clearly been braced for questions.
"You can sit, if you want," Harry said, pulling the parchment back toward himself. "You don't have to talk."
Neville sat. He folded his hands on the table and stared at them, and the library filled up with the quiet scratch of Harry's quill and the distant rustle of other students who had nothing to do with either of them.
After a while, Neville said, "They said I was an embarrassment to Gryffindor."
Harry didn't look up. "Who did?"
A pause. "Some of the older years." Another pause, longer. "Some of my own year, too."
Harry set his quill down then. He didn't make a production of it, didn't lean forward or arrange his face into something sympathetic. He just looked at Neville the way he had learned to look at things he wanted to understand — quietly, without pressure.
"Because of me?" Harry asked.
The way Neville's jaw tightened was answer enough.
"Gryffindors aren't supposed to be scared," Neville said, his voice pulling in on itself. "That's what they say. They say I shouldn't — that a real Gryffindor would just..." He stopped. Pressed his lips together. The scratch on his cheek had gone an angry pink.
Harry didn't fill the silence with reassurances. He had learned, somewhere between primary school and Portland, that people who were ashamed didn't want to be told they shouldn't be. They just wanted someone to sit with them in it for a moment without flinching.
"You're not a coward," Harry said finally. It wasn't soft. It was just a fact, stated plainly, the same way he would tell Neville his drying times were off. "You show up. Every Tuesday. Even when you clearly don't want to."
Neville looked up at him.
"That's not nothing," Harry said, and picked up his quill again.
They didn't talk much after that. Neville eventually pulled out his own parchment, though he didn't write much. When the hour was up, he gathered his things slowly, like a person who had nowhere particular to be.
At the door, he stopped. "Harry." He didn't turn around. "You should... be careful. In the common room."
Harry looked up. "I know."
Neville nodded, once, and left.
Harry sat alone in the library for a long time after that, staring at the Herbicide Potion draft he had barely touched. The scratch on Neville's cheek stayed in his mind, bright and sharp as something carved.
He had been keeping himself outside the common room because he had thought, foolishly, that walls were the same as protection.
*****
The days after that had a particular kind of silence to them.
Harry had always been good at silence — at moving through spaces without disturbing them, at making himself unremarkable. It was a skill he had developed early, back in Surrey, when being noticed by the wrong people meant trouble for Iris and Dudley too. He had refined it in Portland, sharpened it further in the first weeks of term. By now, he had it down to something close to an art form.
But there was a difference, he was beginning to understand, between being invisible and being absent.
He ate in the kitchens. He studied in the library. He arrived in the dormitory late enough that most of the conversations had already wound down, and left early enough that he caught nothing but the sound of other people's breathing. He was not, technically, in any danger. Vaisey and his group hadn't managed to corner him again. From the outside, it probably looked like a strategy.
He was starting to suspect it wasn't.
The problem with removing yourself from a chess board was that the game kept going without you. Other pieces kept moving. And Harry, who prided himself on seeing three moves ahead, had made the fundamental error of watching the board so carefully that he had stopped accounting for the players.
Neville's scratch. The way he'd said be careful like the words cost him something.
Harry turned it over and over the way he turned over everything — methodically, without sentiment, looking for the shape of it. The bullies hadn't touched him. They had touched Neville instead, which was tactically smarter than anything he had given them credit for. They couldn't reach Harry in the corridors, so they had reached for the next available target. They would keep reaching. That was what people like Vaisey did when they were frustrated — they expanded the radius of their cruelty until they found something that stuck.
The question was what else, or who else, was inside that radius.
He was in the middle of this thought, walking the long corridor back from the library on a grey Thursday afternoon, when someone said his name.
"Oh, hey Harry."
He surfaced slowly. Susan Bones was standing near the window at the corridor's end, Hannah Abbott beside her, both of them carrying the easy warmth that Hufflepuffs seemed to emit without trying. Under normal circumstances Harry found it a pleasant contrast to the Slytherin common room's ambient temperature of mild suspicion. Right now it barely registered.
"Good morning," he said, and then caught himself. "Afternoon." He adjusted the strap of his bag. "Sorry. I was somewhere else."
"You look rather dour," Susan said, studying him with the particular attentiveness of someone who actually meant the question to follow. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," Harry said.
Hannah's expression shifted, something moving across it that he didn't immediately identify. "I certainly wouldn't be fine if my sister were in the Hospital Wing," she said, and her voice was careful in the way that voices got careful when they were carrying something fragile.
Harry looked at her. "Your sister?"
The two girls exchanged a glance. The kind of glance that contained an entire conversation.
"I'm not talking about my sister, Harry," Hannah said quietly. "I'm talking about yours."
The corridor kept existing around him — students passing, someone laughing far away, the distant echo of a door — but Harry had stopped being part of it. He was aware of Susan saying something, of Hannah's face doing something sympathetic, of the way the grey light from the window sat flat and cold on the stone floor.
"The Hospital Wing," he said.
Not a question. Just the words, finding their shape in his mouth.
"We thought you knew," Susan said. "We're sorry, we didn't mean to—"
But Harry was already moving.
They got to her.
The thought repeated in his mind like a frantic, jagged pulse. They got to her.
Harry was caught in a violent collision of terror and incandescent rage. Those bastards. They couldn't break him in the corridors, and they had grown tired of chasing a shadow in the common room. So, they had stopped hunting him and started targeting his friends (and sister).
First Neville, and now Iris.
The air in his lungs felt like ice. A raw, ancient protective instinct, the same one that had seen him through every scrape in the No-Maj world, screamed for blood. He had tried to be smart. He had tried to be "Slytherin." He had tried to play by their rules and find his footing through caution.
But there was no caution left. Not when it came to Iris.
By the time Harry reached the heavy doors of the Hospital Wing, his hands were shaking. "Iris?" He called when he went in expecting his sister on the hospital bed.
Harry stopped when he found his sister sitting on a chair. Between two beds. There are two boys on the hospital beds. He recognized them as Crabbe and Goyle. She does not look harmed. In fact, she look rather happy while drinking tea.
"Harry?"