Chapter Text
"...and you are absolutely, completely, utterly sure that you have no Seer blood in you."
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Malfoy, God's be good! Yes! Yes, I am sure." When he saw the blond's lips move to open again, he added: "Asking again will not change my answer. Shut your mouth."
"But Harry," he whined, with that annoying tilt to his voice that grated on Harry's nerves like no other, "what if someone down the line was a bas–"
"Continue that sentence and the next time you're walking drunk and trip over your robes I will let you fall to your death in the Moving Stairs." He spat the words out. "Go on."
"How... how did you know! I didn't tell anyone it happened!"
The gobsmacked look on Abraxas face did something funny to his insides, a thought between a laugh and despair at this silly blond boy who had simply been too drunk to look behind him to notice Harry had been following him the entire night, making sure he made it safely back to his dorm and into his bed.
Harry didn't comment.
Abraxas groaned in an untimely, entirely inelegant way.
"You must be the devil. I get why Tom likes you so much."
Harry made a face, feeling conflicted. He didn't need to know exactly how much Tom Riddle liked him. He had enough at one glance, thank you very much.
~
Things had gone to shit one fine Tuesday afternoon when Falco Lestrange almost killed all his Slytherin and Ravenclaw peers in a Potions Classroom.
The boy had been distracted, stealing glances across the tables and admiring the way the light hit the hair of a pretty Ravenclaw witch, where it cascaded in lustrous curls down her back to reach her waist. Her dark skin shone in the afternoon sunlight, and Falco was thinking about the best ways to present his courting gifts, possibly in the courtyard surrounded by white flowers, assuming they would be well received—
His hand slipped.
Instead of stirring his potion twelve times clockwise after simmering for twelve minutes, he stirred only eleven before picking up the Angel's Trumpet flower just after adding the last uneven cut pieces of Bloodroot.
His hand was about to drop the flower into the cauldron with distracted movements when another hand, smaller, colder, closed around it.
Startled out of his trance, he let out a grunt of discomfort as the cold hand closed more firmly around his. The noise drew the attention of his classmates.
When Falco followed the hand upward up an arm and up a body, he found Evans' face attached to it, black and white curls bouncing as the owner tilted his head towards him.
Before he could pull away in disgust, Evans hissed at him.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing? Are you trying to kill yourself? Kill us?"
Falco stared uncomprehending at him, their hands still clasped.
When Slughorn hurried over, yellow robes flowing and catching on the corners of the nearby tables, he took one look at the putrid color of the potion, another at the cutting board where the uneven pieces sat innocently, and a final glance at the crushed flower trapped between their hands. With a dramatic wave of his wand, he vanished Falco's unfinished potion to the void without further ado. His big blue eyes were wide, shock written plainly across his round face.
"You almost killed us all!" he exclaimed, as flamboyantly as ever despite the gravity of the situation. "One touch of a whole petal in the potion and the explosion would have taken us all out! And if not, the fumes from the poisonous plant would have done us in!" Evans had finally let go of his hand, green eyes hard. "This is a NEWT level class! Mistakes like this are grounds for expulsion Mr. Lestrange!"
Falco's mouth opened and closed, no explanation gracing his lips.
"If I may, Professor," the blasted boy at his side dared to utter. "I think it was an honest mistake." He cast a glance at Falco, venomous green eyes piercing him down to his soul. Falco flinched. "We can't all be potion prodigies. Especially when our minds are not in the classroom, but down in the Courtyard instead."
Falco turned incredulous eyes on him.
And that was that. It was the day the rumor started.
Harry Evans, the fucking Seer of the House Slytherin.
(What they didn't know was that Harry had been sitting in one of the windowsills facing the courtyard with his sketchbook in hand when Falco Lestrange had walked in, hand in hand with a Ravenclaw. Harry didn't know her name, but could guess from the way Lestrange's eyes darted from side to side and how nervously he fixed his hair every few seconds that she was either his betrothed, or was about to be.
Harry guessed the latter Otherwise the lad wouldn't look so anxious just to stand in her presence.
The boy seemed to catalog every nook and cranny of the inside yard, from the vines creeping up the walls and the statues, to the fountain drizzling water in the middle, to the few students sat scattered around.
He was thinking about it, Harry knew. His hands kept twitching towards the lapels on his robes, only to move out of the way at the very last moment.
Ah.
The proposal was to be carried out at a later time, it seemed.
He sketched them just like that, standing side by side and smiling shyly at each other with blushes high up on their faces.)
~
It was not the only instance, sadly.
There was one time when one of the more damaged, older Moving Stairs had graced the path of the sixth-year Slytherins on their way back to the Dungeons. Harry had simply taken one look at it, remembered the disgraceful fall he'd had on his fourth year when his leg had been trapped up to his hip, and loudly commented from the back of the group:
"I wouldn't step on the second to last step, if I were you." He still had nightmares about being trapped there as the old staircase moved and disappeared to wherever it went to when it was not in use.
But as things were, here, he was a new student of questionable origins and no name to back his claims, and every Slytherin simply dismissed him as if it had been an annoying insect buzzing past rather than a wizard speaking.
Until, one of the boys walked to the second to last step, and his leg fell right through.
"Told ya," Harry muttered to himself. He waved around the crowd and jumped down the last couple of steps without looking back.
Or that one time Harry slapped the tart out of Orion's hand when he had been about to take a bite.
"Don't!" he had said.
And that was that.
(For the next long hours, the majority of the Hogwarts population had been in line seeking treatment in the Hospital Wing for a horrible stomach bug.)
(Not Orion, though.)
Or that time when Harry had predicted that Greengrass would fail her Care of Magical Creatures practical exam, looking at her with sorrowful eyes.
Or when he correctly gave books and trinkets and supplements to people before they even knew they needed them.
"I have an iron deficiency!" one student muttered excitedly at another. "Evans gave me a booster the other day and recommended I speak to the Matron! And he was right!"
"One time I failed a Transfigurations essay and before I could tell anyone about it, he dropped a whole stack of books on my table in the library. Said they might help!"
Or that one time with the tea leaves—
By the time Harry stopped a Hufflepuff fourth-year from being impaled to death by a stray broom free falling from unknown heights, close enough to the outside walls of the castle to not be noticed until it was too late, Tom Riddle had taken to watching the boy from the shadows, dark blue eyes tracking his every movement.
He moved through life as if it were a dance to be had. He drifted close to people and pulled away again, like a symphony only he could hear. The skips and turns of his steps were unpredictable, sometimes even brisk but non the less graceful, when he seemed to go one way but change directions at a moment's notice, something dark passing through his green eyes.
He looked at situations backwards and from a distance, head tilted in a curious way before his green eyes lit with recognition and he could, to a point, predict entire scenes just from one glance.
The way he looked at people —haunted and knowing and compassionate— was unsettling. Like he knew each and every secret hidden inside their souls.
As if he knew Tom's secrets too.
The first night after the feast, Harry Evans had stared long and hard at Tom from across the common room, green eyes unreadable and face not betraying anything. It had been going on for twenty minutes straight, seemingly not noticing other students' stares, before furrowing his brows and quietly nodding to himself.
Tom had dismissed him at the time, thinking the boy had probably noticed the hierarchy of the snakes and deemed Tom on top of the food chain.
But strange things seemed to happen around him. More importantly, didn't seem to happen.
He had an uncanny ability to predict the future, it seemed.
The rumors started to spread around Hogwarts like wildfire. Slughorn was a terrible gossip, and soon even the portraits knew of Harry's careful consideration of the world.
It was not without consequences. This beautiful, beautiful boy could be an asset.
It didn't help that he was pretty, with his wide green eyes and honey colored skin. His curls were mostly black, except where they were not, white had slowly but surely begun to take over the parts at the back of his neck, and the hairs framing his face. Tom often wondered if it was intentional, or if he'd had it since birth.
Tom wanted him for himself.
And another man wanted him gone.