By LastCrazyHorn

Word Count:

Rating: PG-13 for brief language, violence, and depictions of abuse

Summary: A disabled Harry comes to Hogwarts story. Everyone expects him to be like his dad, but how can he be with such a different past? A Slytherin Harry takes on Hogwarts in an unusual way.

‘Both wandless and silent magic are achieved through intent . . . learning how to focus one’s magic to achieve a particular goal . . . although not usually practiced by the underage wizards, they are not impossible skills to master, provided one has the right drive and will to make things happen . . .”

Harry’s eyes skimmed through the book, picking out various passages as they caught his eye, and taking notes whenever he found anything that looked particularly useful.

Like what I tried to ask McGonagall about the first day of class. I knew I was onto something!

Something flashed in his peripheral vision, and he looked up to see Teddy drop more books on the table.

“Can I sit here?” Teddy asked with a grin, indicating the seat opposite Harry.

“Sure,” Harry said, flashing a half-faced smile back at his roommate after a brief pause. He wasn’t used to smiling at people, but he had quickly found that it made things run smoother between he and Teddy.

And other people, he thought with a small smirk.

“Urgh,” Teddy said, looking at something over Harry’s shoulder.

“What?” He instantly tensed up, pulling his crutch closer to him.

“Mr. Dork himself,” Teddy mouthed; his hand on his wand under the table. Unlike Harry, Teddy knew and could execute a few useful spells already. Of those, the one that Harry liked the most was a stinging hex that he desperately wanted to learn himself.

“Didn’t know he could read,” Harry mouthed back.

“He can’t,” Teddy retorted with a self-satisfied smirk. “Probably just looking for someone to cheat off of.”

“Hope he isn’t trying to pick up girls,” Harry shuddered.

“Well, they certainly aren’t going to pick him up,” Teddy rolled his eyes for good measure.

“Might catch something.”

“Slimy bastard.”

Their banter continued on like that for a few minutes until Teddy announced that he saw Weasley heading for the door.

Harry relaxed then and looked back down at his book. After a moment he glanced back up and broached a question that had been on his mind since his conversation with Snape the day before.

“Ever hear of sign language?”

Teddy shook his head in the negative.

“It’s a way of silent talking,” Harry said, pausing to think before he continued. “You do it through signing symbols with your hands.”

“Like how?” Teddy asked, looking genuinely intrigued.

“Well . . . here, let me show you.” He put his hand into a fist and put it against his chest; the back of his hand pointed outwards towards Teddy. “This means ‘my,’” Harry explained.

“So, my name,” he moved his hand to his head and extended his index and middle fingers towards the side of his temple. “It’s almost like a two fingered salute,” he said, showing Teddy as he moved his fingers from the side of his head and then in an arc outwards, keeping them upright.

“Does it matter which hand you use?” Teddy asked, entranced by his motions.

“You’re supposed to use your main, or what’s called your ‘primary,’ but I usually use my left, just ’cause it has more fingers.” He shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. “I used to be right handed, see,” he added, ducking his head back towards the table.

Nothing happened between them for awhile and then Harry felt Teddy poking him in the arm.

“Yeah?” He asked, looking up and swallowing against his hesitation.

Teddy looked at him knowingly, but wisely didn’t say anything else about the previous statement. Instead, he asked, “How do you say ‘Harry?’”

“For ‘H,’ you put your hands palm to palm and then move your primary hand across from wrist to out past your fingertips. And then ‘A’ . . .” he continued explaining how to make the motions for the rest of the letters in his name. He enjoyed having Teddy as an avid listener. The other boy was bright and he asked intelligent questions that he rarely heard from others, regardless of their age.

“So you have to do all that when you want to say hi to someone?” Teddy scratched his head as he tried to understand the implications of all that Harry had told him.

“Actually,” he admitted, “most deaf people have special signs that they use to represent who they are in sign language.”

“Give me an example.”

Harry thought for a moment and then began signing the letter ‘H’ again. “Say, this is the first letter of my name, yeah? You take something about that person and you can combine those two signs into something unique. Look at this,” he turned his hands over, palms down and moved his left hand on top of his right, rubbing his fingers over the bottom edge of the backside of his hand, near the wrist. “This is the sign for ‘blue,’” he explained, glancing down at his still extended crutch.

“You really like that colour, don’t you,” Teddy grinned.

“It’s a good colour,” Harry retorted, pretending to be offended. “Anyway, I could combine them by putting my hands back up like I’m about to sign an ‘H;’ only instead of having my hands be palm to palm, I could put both of my hands palms up.” He showed Teddy what he was talking about; moving his left hand and touching his left fingers to the back of his right hand.

“Okay okay,” Teddy stopped him. “So basically, you just changed the position of your left hand?”

“To the back of my right hand,” Harry continued.

“But still do the motion from wrist to fingertips,” Teddy rolled his eyes after a significant look from Harry, “Or beyond,” Teddy corrected himself. “And that could stand for you?” Teddy paused, looking thoughtful. “That’s a lot easier than having to sign out each letter every time.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Can you give me a sign then?” Teddy’s brown eyes back at him entreatingly and Harry grinned in response.

“Sure.”

Harry explained how to make the sign for the letter ‘T.’ “It’s pretty easy. In my case, I bring up my right hand perpendicular to the floor and then touch left index finger to the palm.” He paused, looking at Teddy with a calculating gleam in his eyes. “I have an idea,” he finally said after a moment of contemplative silence.

Putting his left hand in a fist, but leaving his thumb extended, he brought it up to his face and touched it to his cheek. Moving the tip of his thumb down his cheek, he explained briefly that what he was doing was the sign for ‘sly.’

“I like that,” Teddy grinned.

“Thought you might,” Harry snickered. “Now I’m going to do it again, but with my right index finger touching my left palm, see? Like ‘T’ and ‘sly’ at the same time.”

“Teddy,” Harry said, signing his roommate’s sign.

“Harry,” Teddy responded, signing the sign that Harry had made up for himself. “Cool.”

They studied on their own for a little while longer until Teddy poked him again. A sly grin, just like Harry’s sign, was on his face and Harry found himself leaning in closer in anticipation to whatever Teddy wanted to say.

“What’s the sign for ‘W’?”

“Um, you just bring up your hands together and interlock your fingertips, palms down,” Harry explained before showing what exactly he meant.

“And what’s the sign for ‘stupid?’” Teddy asked, his eyes alight with humour.

“Ah hah,” Harry understood suddenly. “Take your fist and tap it against your head.”

“So, if I were to take the sign for ‘W’ and bang it against my head, could that mean ‘Weasley?’”

Harry snorted aloud and then cringed and looked back at Madam Pince, who was staring at them in thinly veiled disdain.

“Sorry,” he mouthed back to her and then looked back at Teddy with a mock glare. After a moment he negated his glare by briefly sticking his tongue out towards the other boy.

He brought his left hand up in a fist and stuck his pinkie finger upwards with a warning look in his eyes.

Teddy grabbed his quill and hastily scribbled, ‘What does that mean?’

Harry picked up his own quill and responded, ‘Bad!’

‘Oops,’ Teddy wrote, looking sheepish.

Harry only smiled.

. . .

Harry lay in bed that night thinking about what he knew of British Sign Language and if there was anyone else he could give signs to.

Just to make things easier, he thought to himself with a pleased expression.

Of course, Snape came immediately to mind, but the sign for ‘S’ was interlocking pinkies, and he didn’t like that, given that he was missing one of his.

Thinking hard, he tried to remember everything that the nurses had told him about sign language. He had caught on fairly quickly, but he hadn’t had much of a chance to use it after he had left . . . his eyes drifted shut as he was going through his memories and before long, he was fast asleep.

The night passed fairly quickly for him, at least until his dreams began. They came and went in shifts from bad to horrible; the bad ones leaving him shaken and the horrible ones making him ill with terror.

His dream that night was somewhere in-between those two levels.

He was riding in the backseat, strapped in beside his monstrous whale of a cousin, Dudley. It had just started raining, the droplets hitting the window only to be whisked away by the car’s windscreen wipers. It was dark, except for their headlights, so very very dark.

His uncle and aunt were arguing again, and he could hear Dudley chiming in every so often with an, “I want” or, “This is boring!” Of course he didn’t say anything. He knew better than to; especially after living with the Dursleys for the past six years.

“No one wants to hear from a little spindly legged freak like you!” Had been a familiar phrase thrown his way throughout his childhood.

A car began to pass them on the left, its headlights bright and suddenly piercing in the darkness surrounding their little world within his uncle’s company car. He was on the left side of the car, his aunt in front of him and he had seen the look in his uncle’s eyes as the car had begun to pass them.

“Thinks I’m driving too slow does he!” Uncle Vernon had roared, his moustache vibrating with the force of his yell. In total disregard for the ever increasing downpour, his uncle had sped up.

“Vernon, just let it go dear,” Petunia had murmured, her eyes on the road as the steady downpour suddenly began creeping towards torrential.

“I’ll show him!” Had been his uncle’s savage retort.

In the dream, time seemed to slow down around Harry as his uncle’s temper seemed to get the better of him. He could feel the car’s tires lose traction once, twice and then again; a phenomena he learned later was called “hydroplaning.” He tried to speak, maybe to warn his uncle that they were sliding or to scream for help, he couldn’t remember which. He tried to speak, but couldn’t say anything, couldn’t move as the car slid across the road, out of control to the left, always to the left.

Dudley fell onto him. Seatbelts barely fit him, even at seven, and he usually took it off shortly after they were on the road. His weight was suffocating, painfully heavy and he could hear the other boy screaming ridiculously high pitched directly into his ear. The light swirled around them and little Harry had to shut his eyes against the nauseating whirl of colour and motion.

There was a terrible CRUNCH, followed by a sickening SNAP, and he’d felt his leg collapse under his cousin’s girth. The pain had blossomed in his heart and throat and then suddenly they were still and there was vomit on his lap, on the seat beside him, and blood dripping into his eyes.

Time lurched forwards and he felt Dudley’s weight leave him and he screamed. His right leg wasn’t just snapped, it was pulverized, and now he realised that his aunt’s seat in front of him had gotten pushed back and was now resting partially on that leg too.

Trapped, trapped! His mind had screamed, was screaming and he began struggling against his bindings. The door on the other side opened and his cousin was pulled out, wailing as though he were dying, despite only a few bruises that later would turn out to be nothing. His vision swam before his eyes and he could hear himself very weakly crying out for his aunt.

“Please Aunt Petunia, I’m stuck, please!”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish! Look what you’ve done now!” He vaguely heard his Uncle Vernon shouting and belatedly he understood that the man was yelling at him.

“Please!” He tried again, banging on the window desperately, his hand streaking bloody lines onto it.

He remembered and he saw in his dream as Petunia stopped beside his window, her horse-like face marred by a swollen black eye as she gazed back in at him. He coughed and vaguely the smell of petrol came to him, and he realised that the gas tank was leaking. He could smell something burning and the thought of being cooked alive terrified him into pounding on the window and screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Come along Pet!” Vernon shouted, grabbing his aunt by the arm and roughly yanking her backwards.

“No! I’m still here! I’m still here! I can’t get out!” He screamed, beating his hand black and blue, barely aware that he had two broken fingers on that hand as well. “Don’t leave me, please!”

Petunia was still in his vision and he could see her mouthing something at him. He strained to understand, to see, wiping at the blood coming from the right side of his face irritably as it continued to block his sight.

“Just stay right there, just stay,” she was repeating and he sobbed aloud at her words.

“Please! Don’t leave me! Please! I’ll be so good! I’ll do anything you like! Please get me out! I don’t want to die!” He had sobbed.

But she was gone and the car was smoking and he was trapped as the world exploded around him.

Harry sat up in his bed sobbing, gasping for breath and wheezing as the terror ricocheted through him. He pulled his left leg up to his chin and wrapped his arms around it desperately as he tried to stifle the sounds of his sobbing into his arm.

He had begged and cried and she hadn’t come back for him, none of them had. His magic had reacted as Snape had said, throwing him out of the car and dumping him on his left side down in the wet earth in the dark. But his right had continued to burn and he had screamed himself into unconsciousness.

It had been three days before he had awoken and another week before he had regained any awareness of himself.

His breath still hitching, he slid carefully out of bed and felt down on the ground for his leg. Roughly shoving his pyjama pants leg up, he pushed his stump into his prosthesis and whispered for it to tighten back down. Flicking out his crutch, he also grabbed his slippers and a light blanket. On his way the door, he picked up his satchel from the foot of his bed and slipped out into the corridor, heading for the Slytherin common room.

Taking a seat on one of the sofas nearest the largest fireplace, he wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and then curled up into a close approximation of a ball. His arms still free, he reached for his satchel, which he had sat on the cushion beside him, and pulled out a book and a long piece of parchment. Bypassing his quills, he grabbed a regular muggle pen and set the parchment atop the book to use it as a writing surface.

‘Dear Moody,’ he wrote shakily at the top.

‘You said I could write if I wanted, and I guess I want to now. Just woke up from another bad dream of the wreck and I can’t go back to sleep now. Might as well do something sort of useful, you know?’

‘They were so close to me, where I was. They could have saved me, but they didn’t. They let me scream and they just watched, knowing I was gonna die.’

Harry’s fists clenched as his heart fluttered dangerously in his chest; his breath uneven as he fought to get control of the anger that begged to be let out of him.

When he was sure that nothing was going to catch fire around him, he picked up his pen again and continued with his letter.

‘It’s kinda ironic really. Until I met you, I always thought that my parents had died in a car crash, and I was just sort of following in their footsteps. Hah. I guess it’s more like we both got betrayed by people we thought just wouldn’t do that sort of thing to us.’

‘I’d like to think I know better now, but I can’t help but let people in despite knowing the risks involved. I might have made a friend actually. His name is Teddy and he’s my roommate. He . . .’

Harry paused, his eyes distant as he thought of how to describe the other boy.

‘He’s got his eyes open like some of the kids I knew from . . . before. He understands how to be careful, and although I hadn’t thought about it much, I suppose that means that he doesn’t have too great a past either, you know? I wonder if he’d tell me if I were to ask. I don’t know if I should though. It’s a little too personal still, I think.’

‘You were right when you told me to be careful of Malfoy. That boy is a serious git. He could really use a serious slap across his face, but I think I’d get in trouble. I’ve already . . . I’ve already been in two fights this week.’

Harry’s cheeks burned as he wrote about the fights. He wasn’t used to the idea of someone being disappointed with him, but he suspected that Moody wouldn’t be too happy after hearing about that.

‘You told me that Weasleys were a good family to know, but that must be the older generation, because the one in my year is a mean ol’ bastard. He told me he hoped someone would do me in before the end of the month was up. I’d like to drag him to a dark corner and slice one of his fingers off, but I suppose that would just get me in more trouble. Still though, the thought is awfully tempting.’

He sniggered to himself and then turned back to the letter.

‘I told you that I always made friends with the ones other people discount, remember? The cripples and blind and the ones that stuttered; those were the best people to know, because other people didn’t expect them to be able to fight back as well as they could.’

‘It’s not the same here, but it’s similar. I’ve been watching the other students in my classes, and I have a few ideas of who to talk to now. This is my list so far: Millicent Bulstrode, Neville Longbottom, Morag MacDougal, Sally-Anne Perks, and Blaise Zabini. There’s also this muggle girl in Gryffindor named Hermione Granger. She seems real smart, but her people skills really suck arse. I dunno. I think she’s worth keeping an eye out for. She just gives me a feeling that I might need to know her, but I don’t know why.’

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