2.4.16, Sat - 5.4.16, Tues (twenty past midnight though, so just barely out of Monday) (I usually write chapters all at once, then publish them, but I didn't have time this weekend.)

A/N: I really hope you like where I'm taking the story. I have to do actual plot now, and that's going to be hard. Really hard. Like, concentration hard.

I also hope you reviewed last chapter. And this one. I like reviews.

Yawning, and more than a little befuddled after the impromptu sing-song before bed, Harry plodded up the many, many stairs to the dormitories.

Hermione was still on his left, yawning just as he was, but he'd managed to escape Ricky for the moment. His twin - and it was still weird to think about - had apparently fallen in love with Ron Weasley and was even now attempting to continue their conversation about Quidditch. Harry wasn't entirely sure what had happened to Neville, but Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnegan were sleepily walking in tandem behind Percy, who proudly herded the procession of eleven-year-olds up to Gryffindor tower. There were a few girls with them, including one of the Patil twins, who looked not at all despondant, having acquired another girl wearing lipgloss to chatter with. Harry saw the irony in the situation: it mirrored the setup he'd planned for himself and Ricky, right down to giving the Gryffindor twin a new best friend to distract them.

In his dreamlike state, Harry barely even registered the pointing and whispers of the portraits surrounding them, despite having waited years to finally see such a spectacle. Regardless of the fact he'd grown up with a television, he'd always been fascinated by the idea of a moving picture. The photo of his mother McGonagall had once brought him was beautiful and precious to him for entirely different reasons. He had a picture of his father too, but didn't value it nearly as much. After all, if he wanted to know what his father looked like, he could always just look in the mirror.

Or, indeed, at Ricky. Harry hefted a deadened arm to rub his eyes underneath his glasses. All his thoughts were circling back round to his impossible identical twin, and he just couldn't stop -

He didn't understand why McGonagall hadn't said anything. He didn't understand why his aunt hadn't said anything - that reminded him, he needed to write to her in the morning. Or tomorrow evening. Or on Saturday when there was no school. Keeping secrets he could understand. Keeping a secret like that - that, he couldn't fathom for the life of him.

He might not have been the most candid person in the world - not by a long shot - but he expected a certain level of honesty from others, always had done. It was a part of his personality he'd tried to erase for years. That, and his ability to see the goodness and trustworthiness of everyone around him. He hated that. It was a vulnerability on his part, one he made sure to hide if he could. Frankly, he found it embarrassing. He had no desire to be one of those people who thought the entire world was made of candyfloss and unicorns.

With a jerk, Harry was pulled out of his dazed musings when he walked right into the Patil twin. Before he could ask why they'd stopped, his attention was captured by Percy up ahead.

"Peeves," the Prefect whispered. "A poltergeist." He raised his voice to address the bundle of walking sticks floating in the corridor. "Peeves - show yourself."He was answered with the blowing of an obscenely loud and drawn-out rasperry. "Do you want me to go to the Bloody Baron?" The Slytherin ghost? Interesting...

There was a pop and a little man with mischievous dark eyes and a gaping, grinning mouth appeared. Floating in mid-air with his legs crossed, he was clutching the walking sticks.

"Oooooooh!" The poltergeist cackled evilly. "Ickle firsties! What fun!" He suddenly swooped down on them.

"Go away, Peeves, or the Baron'll hear about this, I mean it!" Peeves stuck out his tongue and dropped the walking sticks. Harry heard Neville yelp. So that's where he went. Percy sighed and motioned for them to continue. "You want to watch out for Peeves," he said as they resumed their trek. "The Bloody Baron's the only one who can control him, he won't even listen to us Prefects. Here we are."

Once again walking right into Patil's back - this time with a mumbled sorry - Harry looked up at the wall where they'd stopped. It was the end of a corridor, and there was a portrait of a fat woman in a pink silk dress hanging there. The woman turned regally to face them, and she asked, "Password?"

"Caput Draconis," came Percy's reply, and the painting swung out at them (they all stepped back hastily) to reveal a round hole halfway up the wall. One by one, they all wriggled through - Harry had to give Neville a leg up - into what appeared to be the Gryffindor common room. It was a cosy, round room full of squashy armchairs, with two doors in the wall opposite. Percy pointed the girls to one door and the boys through the other. "Your year gets the highest dorms," he added. "They belonged to the old seventh-years, see?" Harry was quite sure he and Hermione were the only ones awake enough to do so.

They said goodnight to each other and went their separate ways, Harry falling into step alongside Neville on their way to the top of the spiral staircase. Eventually, the boys found themselves in a large room with five four-poster beds lining the walls, hung with blood-red velvet curtains. Their trunks had already been brought up and placed by the beds, so they didn't have to go through the process of choosing where to sleep. Harry found himself between Neville and the door, with Ricky on Neville's other side, then Ron, then Seamus, then Dean.

"Great food, isn't it?" Ron yawned. Ricky grunted in reply, finally having run out of energy. "Get off, Scabbers! He's chewing my sheets."

"Shouldn't take rats to bed, then, should you?" Harry muttered to himself. He paused. "Huh. Metaphor for life, right there." The last thing he heard before he fell asleep was Neville's quiet snickering.

The whispering was seriously getting to him.

Not only did Harry share all his classes with his unwanted brother, he also apparently shared the attention of the masses. The whole school seemed to be talking about 'the other Potter kid' just as much as 'the Boy-Who-Lived', and people were even standing on tiptoe and doubling back through corridors to look at them. Soon enough, though, Ricky started stealing the limelight once more. He and Ron had managed to get caught attempting to enter the forbidden third-floor corridor on their very first morning, saving themselves a detention with Filch only by rescue from Professor Quirrell, who had happened to be passing at the time.

As a result of Ricky and Ron's blossoming love affair (as Harry had gleefully labelled it), Harry and Hermione often found themselves spending time with Neville. This was perpetuated by Harry's lack of friends among the boys in his dorm, as he refused to socialise with Ricky or Ron and was reluctant to intrude on Seamus and Dean's fledgling friendship. This left only Neville, and so the pair found themselves talking and playing games together when the other 'couples' were doing their own thing. It turned out that the two of them actually got along rather well, though. They enjoyed all the common wizarding games like chess and Exploding Snap and gobstones, and they were both a little more lonely and isolated then they would like to admit. Neville was trying to adjust to life apart form Ricky, his pseudo-brother, for the first time, just as Harry was adjusting to the loss of Dudley. Whether it was a boy thing or a twin thing, each Potter boy had grown up living with a best friend of the same age and each had found a new one upon entering boarding school. What Harry found odd was that Ricky had done it even when he'd been able to bring Neville with him.

"Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't hang out with Ron if you paid me, but it is a little weird that Rick'd just dump you the minute they met. Knight to E2."

Neville frowned. "Well, we couldn't really spend time with other kids when we were younger, y'know? Because of the whole Boy-Who-Lived thing. So I guess he's just excited about new people. Bishop to F3."

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're killing me here, Nev. Let's see... Knight to... G... 1?" He winced as Neville's own knight hopped out from behind a row of pawns and smashed his to pieces. "Ouch. But seriously - for him to just latch on like the creepy limpet he is, it really must have been love at first sight."

Neville sighed. "They're not gay, Harry."

"Actually, given that Harry claims to be heterosexual, and they're mirror twins, it's entirely possible - probable, even - that Ricky is gay." Hermione dumped a pile of books on the table next to them with a thunk.

"See?" Harry crowed. "Even Hermione thinks that - wait, 'claims to be -'?!"

"The recent Buhrich, Bailey, & Martin study found the correlation of sexuality to be 47% for identical twins. That's less than half. Earlier studies found the percentage to be higher, but the numbers go down the further forward in time you go. One wonders if that's to do with the decrease in homophobia..."

Harry and Neville shared a look.

"Pawn to B5."

"You can't do that."

"What? Why?"

"You've just put yourself in check."

"Oh, for-!"

Aside from his developing social life, Harry was also getting used to his new timetable and lessons. Harry had assumed Transfiguration was going to be a sore spot, and in the first lesson he had felt awkward and out of place. Too distracted to concentrate on his work, he'd accidentally managed to transfigure his left pinky finger into a match instead of a match into a needle. Professor McGonagall took him to the hospital wing herself, and seized the opportunity to talk to him about Ricky and Hogwarts and everything else that was bugging him. It transpired that, as a member of Dumbledore's staff, she was obliged to 'follow the party line', as it were, which, in this case, meant keeping Harry in the dark about Ricky and vice versa. "Not that I ever visited Ricky," she added. "Albus thought it best to let him have a normal wizarding childhood, without his future teachers in his life. Besides, I thought you'd probably need me more."

"So... Professor Dumbledore didn't care whether or not I had a good childhood?" McGonagall bit her lip. Harry chuckled bitterly. "Right. I'm not the special one."

Placing her hand on his shoulder, McGonagall answered softly, "You are special. Special to your parents, your godfather, Hagrid, me... You're not the Boy-Who-Lived. But who says that's the best thing to be?" Tears welled up in Harry's eyes.

"Sorry," he gasped. "I don't know - it's the stress, probably, I'm just - I'll be fine in a minute, honest - "

"Don't be ridiculous, Potter," she said gruffly, encasing him in a bony hug. "You've held up remarkably well so far. Everyone has a breaking point."

Wriggling out from under her arms, Harry ripped his glasses off and rubbed his eyes angrily. "I don't! Or - haven't, I don't know - I mean, it's just a little release from bottling things up, y'know? Had to happen. Always does, in the end. I'll be good for the next six months at least. You'll see. It just - happens, every now and again. Like clockwork. I'm not - I wouldn't be crying, otherwise."

Patting him on the back, McGonagall shot him a doubtful look, but decided that it was probably just a botched explanation of how boys pretend they don't have emotions. "Will you be alright to go to lunch in a wee while? You might as well have missed Charms."

He nodded, and she left him in Madam Pomfrey's care to ensure the reversal of the spell had not damaged his hand at all.

In his first Charms lesson, Harry discovered that he and Hermione had been split up by the alphabetical order of the seating plan. Much to their dismay, the Potter twins ended up paired together for the lesson. As it turned out, they would be paired together for the entirety of the following year. Suffice to say, neither were terribly pleased by the arrangement, and each went to speak to Professor Flitwick in private about it. Both were rebuffed.

Astronomy and Herbology were different matters entirely, and the quiet majesty of the heavens and the happy chaos of the greenhouses were paradises for Harry and Hermione both. Herbology in particular was a good lesson for them, as it appeared to be the only subject for which Neville possessed any aptitude - and his talent more than made up for his other studies. Harry and Hermione found Herbology to be a fail-safe way of getting Neville out of his shell, and he himself found great pleasure in discussing rare magical plants with peers who both understood and cared about them.

History of Magic, on the other hand, was sacred only to Harry and Hermione. They both loved history and had expected to enjoy this lesson above all others. Finding that the lessons themselves were less than enthralling, the pair still took notes all the way through and read more colourful accounts of the events in their free time. It was soon revealed that they were the only two students in the school who cared at all about the subject, however, and it wasn't long before the requests came in.

"Oi, Potter, you done the HoM essay? Lend us it for half an hour, would you?"

"Hermione, you wouldn't happen to have the notes from the middle of Binns' lecture, would you? Only I was... um... I missed that part."

"Wait, so is it 'Emeric the Oddball' and 'Uric the Evil', or 'Emeric the Evil' and 'Uric the Oddball'? See, I get the alliteration thing, but 'Uric the Evil' just sounds better..."

It wasn't until Ron and Ricky decided to approach them that sparks really flew.

"Hey, uh, Harry?"

Harry froze. Thus far, he and Ricky had managed to avoid social interaction almost entirely. Without looking up, he answered, "What?"

Taken aback by the frosty tone, Ricky gulped. "I, uh, I was - I just wondered if you'd done the notes for HoM. Er, History of Magic."

When Harry failed to answer, Ron snapped, "What's the matter with you?! Is it really too much bother for you to help your own brother?!"

Harry was on his feet in an instant. "He's not my brother! And if he cares so much about family, why has he barely spoken to Neville since we got here? That's the real question!" With that, he spun on his heel and stormed up to the dormitory, leaving Ron fuming and Ricky gobsmacked.

Most of the first years were very much looking forward to Defence Against the Dark Arts, and filed into the classroom ready to be dazzled. Unfortunately, the lesson itself failed to live up to the hype so utterly that, once they had experienced all of their different subjects, it became Harry and Hermione's least favourite. Despite being brave enough to rescue Ron and Ricky from Filch earlier in the week, Professor Quirrell turned out to have a crippling stutter ("How could they hire someone as a lecturer when they can barely speak?!" "It's not his fault, Hermione!") and the classroom smelt overwhelmingly of garlic. This was generally attributed to Quirrell's fear that a vampire he'd met in Romania would one day come after him. Another odd anecdote was the story behind Quirrell's turban; according to the Professor, it had been a gift from an African prince for getting rid of a zombie, but since Quirrell went pink and started talking about the weather when Seamus asked about it, most people subscribed to the Weasley twins' theory that the turban - which smelt funny itself - was also stuffed with garlic, just in case the mysterious vampire attacked Quirrell outside of his classroom.

Harry and Hermione were very much looking forward to their first Potions lesson on Friday morning. They had both eagerly anticipated Chemistry lessons at a Muggle secondary school before finding out about Hogwarts (another detail McGonagall hadn't shared) and were delighted to discover a wizarding equivalent. Neville, on the other hand, was far less enthusiastic.

"Everyone hates Snape, y'know? They say he's evil, like, really, really scary. And he favours Slytherin, because he's their Head of House, which means he hates Gryffindors. Hates us, okay?" Harry reached out to grab Neville's arms, which were flapping wildly to punctuate his points.

"Try not to poke anyone's eye out there, Nev. Relax. I'm sure it'll be fine."

It was not fine.

Snape took the register, as did Flitwick, only instead of squeaking and falling off his desk (he was, after all, of an average height and had no need to stand on one) when he reached the Potter twins, Snape curled his lip into a vicious sneer. "Ah, yes. Mr Harry Potter, our little... surprise. And Mr Ricky Potter. Our - new - celebrity."

Harry had tensed when Snape got to his name, but soon realised he was not the true target. In response to his own introduction, Ricky - who sat two rows behind Harry - slid down his seat, apparently trying to become invisible. Three Slytherin boys - one blond, two - well, huge - snickered behind their hands at the jibes. Snape continued to read the register, then set it down.

"You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making," he began. "As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don't expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses..." Harry and Hermione sat on the edge of their (front row) seats, enraptured. Neville merely trembled, though he did have a slightly awestruck expression. "I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death - if you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach."

Harry and Hermione exchanged determined glances. They had no intention of proving themselves dunderheads. Neville shrank back a little when they raised fierce eyebrows at him.

"Potter!" Snape said suddenly.

"Yes, sir?" They answered - and jumped - simultaneously. Snape glowered.

"Ricky Potter." Harry relaxed. "What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"

Harry grabbed Hermione's hand under the table to stop her from raising it. He smirked as Ricky stuttered before saying that he didn't know. He soon stopped when Snape's eyes flashed back to him briefly.

"Tut, tut - let's try again. Potter, where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?"

The three Slytherins who'd snickered earlier were now shaking with laughter. Harry, too, was finding it difficult to appear unamused. Petulant as it was, he considered this to be partial payback for the emotional turmoil he'd been put through that week. Also, if he focused on how funny it was, he'd stop feeling so guilty about not helping Ricky when he was being picked on.

It turned out Ricky didn't know about bezoars, either.

"Thought you wouldn't open a book before coming, eh, Potter?" Harry could feel the indignation radiating from Ricky. "What is the difference, Potter, between monkshood and wolfsbane?"

"I - I don't know!"

"A point from Gryffindor house for raising your voice at a Professor, Potter. As this is the first week of term and there are few points yet for me to take, I am being lenient. Next time it will be twenty." Ricky shrank back in his seat as Snape turned away from him. "Harry Potter!"

Startled, Harry jumped. "Er, yes sir?"

"Bearing in mind that you were raised away from the magical world, let us see how you fare with the same questions." Snape stalked up to Harry's seat. "What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?"

Shooting a guilty glance at Ricky, Harry swallowed. "Well, they're - aren't they, um, poisonous, sir?" Snape's face remained blank. "So - so wouldn't they make a - a sleeping draught or a poison?"

"They combine to make a sleeping potion so powerful it is known as the Draught of Living Death. Well done, Mr Potter. Next question," he said when Harry sagged with relief. "Where would you look, Potter, if I told you to find me a bezoar.?"

"Um," Harry's face screwed up in concentration. "They're something to do with gallstones, right? Wait - alliteration... gannets, goslings, geese, goats - it's goats, isn't it? Goats' gallstones?"

Harry could have sworn he saw a smile flash across Snape's face. "Correct, Mr Potter. A little crude, but - correct. Now," The last one! Harry thought. Thank goodness. "What is the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane?"

Smiling nervously now, Harry said, "Well, I had thought they were different names for aconite, but if there is a difference, might it be different genuses of the same plant?"

"You were correct in your original assumption, Mr Potter, and the plural of genus is genera. Five points to Gryffindor." Snape turned away, ignoring the sharp intake of breath from the other students in the room. "It seems fame isn't everything, Ricky. Now, why weren't any of you - save Miss Granger - copying that down?"

That prompted a sudden scrabbling for quills and parchment, during which Snape swept back up to the blackboard and wrote up the instructions for a simple potion to cure boils. As the children worked, he swooped down on them one by one like an overlarge bat.

"Lovely work on those snake fangs, Mr Malfoy. Perhaps just once more to be absolutely certain, there's a lad."

"Heavens above, Mr Weasley, what on earth possessed you to start stewing sea slugs? Fetch some horned slugs from the cupboard and start again."

"No, Longbottom! Take the cauldron off the fire before you add the porcupine quills!"

"See me after class, Potter." Harry would have been terrified were it not for the blank expression Snape wore. The Potions master openly sneered at Ricky, so a blank expression should be safe. Right?

After the class ended, thankfully without incident, Harry packed up his things and told Hermione and Neville that he'd catch them up. Snape sat at his desk and fixed Harry with a contemplative gaze. He was the first to speak.

"Stanwell Fields Church of England Primary School, Stanwell Moor, between Little Whinging and Cokeworth. I didn't know Mrs Atherton still taught there."

Gaping, Harry asked, "I - yes, sir, but how-?!"

"Your mother and I both went. We had to learn about goats' gallstones too. I suppose your aunt mentioned it was our old school?"

"Actually, no, sir. She did mention you though, now that I think about it." Snape's slight smile twisted into a grimace.

"Nothing good, I take it?"

"Well," Harry said slowly, "Nothing much, more like. Just 'that awful Snape boy from Spinner's End', and something about you insulting my mother near the end of Hogwarts and how you didn't speak after that."

"I see." He paused. "We used to be best friends, your mother and I. When I... insulted her, I'd just been thoroughly humiliated by your father. He was a bit of a bully in those days, always took his pranks a step too far and somehow singled me out from day one - probably because he liked Lily, and thought I was turning her against him or some such nonsense. Well, with me out of the picture, she managed to make him change his ways, but he never did bother to apologise for the five years of torment he'd given me. By then, of course, we were on opposite sides of the war, so I suppose... Never mind." He could see that his ramblings were going over Harry's head just a little, so he concluded with, "Well, it seems that you'll be a much better potioneer than... the other one... and tell Miss Granger I expect great things from her, too. Dismissed."

And with that, Harry went to join his friends, head spinning. I'm going to sleep all weekend. This is way too much to process all at once.

A/N: Whew! Mammoth of a chapter, eh? This is what happens when I get interrupted. I just write almost a whole chapter, then when I get back to it I have a new chapter in my head and they just sort of conjoin. Speaking of conjoining - just for the LOLs, I googled sexualities of twins and I found some really interesting answers online:

"Identical twins have the same sexual orientation approximately 60% of the time. If they are fraternal twins it happens approximately 16% of the time.
The 1952 Kallmann study found the correlation to be 100% for identical twins and 15% for fraternal twins; the 1968 Heston & Shields study found the correlation to be 50% for identical twins and 14% for fraternal twins; the 1991 Buhrich, Bailey, & Martin study found the correlation to be 47% for identical twins and 0% for fraternal twins; the 1991 Bailey & Pillard study found the correlation to be 52% for identical twins and 22% for fraternal twins; the 1993 Whitam, Diamond, & the Martin study found the correlation to be 65% for identical twins and 29% for fraternal twins. In a study exclusively with lesbian identical twins, the 1993 Bailey, Pillard, Neale, & Agyei study found the correlation to be 48% for identical twins and 16% for fraternal twins."

"Identical twins actually ARE clones. They're natural clones, but they are genetically identical. They were the same person until the developing embryo divided in the womb. The genetic code was already 100% decided and permanent from the moment of conception, so identical twins are genetically indistinguishable from each other.
This can create some confusion and apparent concerns or false logical triumphs for people on various sides of certain socio-political issues. That's only because they don't understand the biology or psychology of sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is not a binary thing. Nobody is gay. Nobody is straight. Preference is not an "Either/or" thing, it's an entire infinite spectrum, with nobody on the extreme ends of either. Your hardwiring (genetics, etc.) determines your tendencies. Your software (experiences in life) influences how you perceive it. Even identical twins raised together have different life experience, even if they do the same things together all the time, it's always from a different perspective.
The whole "choice" argument is silly to start with. Ultimately, nothing is a choice. We are biological computers. We will do as our biology and our programming dictates in any situation. Free will is an illusion. It's an important one to our social construct, but nobody really chooses anything. It's all chosen for you."

Also, I found this awesome webpage about the location of Privet Drive in the real world and the island Vernon takes them to when Harry gets his letter. It's totally awesome - it has a really weird web address and links don't work on this anyway, but I googled "primary schools little whinging surrey" and it was the second result. Seriously, check it out. Also, Stanwell Fields C of E is a real school. I used it because according to that page, Stanwell Moor is the real Little Whinging or the nearest place to it, assuming Little Whinging is a totally fictional suburb.

Also (and I am very much overusing that word today), if the gay thing worries you, a) most kids that age make those jokes and no-one cares, and b) I'm gay so I'm allowed. So there.

VVxxxx