There wasn't a single member of faculty at the orphanage that didn't worry about Harry. Whether they were concerned about his solitude, or wary of the reasons that caused it, there wasn't a monthly meeting that didn't include an incident.

There were only five of them, in such a large establishment, with just over a hundred children, and yet Harry Potter managed to be at the forefront of several minds. Ever since the day he'd arrived, a shifty-looking 6 year old on the stone porch, Madam Nelson had disliked the boy. He had air about him. Oh, and that hair! No matter how many times she had told him to comb it, it had never improved. Honestly, that sort of hair was not the way to get adopted! They'd never see the tail end of him, the way things were going.

Yes, he was a trouble maker that one. Jane couldn't see it though, the poor dear, she was very new, fresh out of school, and clearly had no experience of dealing with bad kids. She was always defending the boy, going far too easy on him. Bless her. She'd have to learn eventually. Mr Knights, the groundskeeper, also seemed to like the boy, though she couldn't fathom why. Well, perhaps he couldn't be blamed either, he was rather a halfwit.

Luckily, they were the only ones to fall for the boy's antics, and she could be rest assured he'd be punished if she was away while he was misbehaving. Just this year caning had been made illegal in schools, a mistake if you asked her, but luckily for them the orphanage was not a school, and as legal guardians, they still maintained the right to punish children as they saw fit. And so they did.

Harry Potter had received the cane many times, getting into so much trouble. He started fights, often disobeyed curfew, and downright hated the other children. He could often be found alone in the garden, mumbling to himself. She had tried her hardest to stamp out that habit, but as long as it kept him out of trouble, she wouldn't push the matter.

He seemed to really not get on with Nathan Hansen and Peter Connolly. Those boys were lovely really, charming, active, friendly. The only reason they hadn't gone yet was their age. People tended not to want anyone over the age of nine, and both boys had just surpassed that sad limit. A true shame, but she always put in a good word for them, and often offered their files up first to prospective parents.

Ever since the boy had arrived, he had started all sorts of nonsense with them, fighting, stealing food, messing up rooms, you name it.

Whenever she questioned him, he had nothing to say. Well, at least he didn't bother lying to her. He might have at first, but he clearly realised it wasn't going to work with her, no sir.

His troublesome behaviour certainly earned him no friends, which was probably for the best, there was no reason for his mischief to be rewarded.

She really should be stricter with him, this behaviour had apparently been going on for years, according to the lovely people that dropped him off. They explained so politely how badly he acted, how they just couldn't afford to support two children anymore, poor dears, she could completely understand, and it was much more reasonable than the young whores that dropped their spawn off in the night to be cared for.

And how bad could a child be that their loving family had to abandon them? Harry certainly fulfilled the criteria. That boy. There was just something so…disturbing about him.

With a shudder, she walked outside to see what the commotion was about.

Harry Potter did not like the orphanage. He liked it more than the Dursleys of course, but that wasn't a very high standard to keep. He'd been there for two years, and he had long ago given up on adoption.

Not that he wanted to be adopted. That could be very inconvenient for him. Especially now.

He knew exactly why he was here, and he knew why his relatives hated him. He had magic.

He'd known since the incident with his teacher, Mrs Ambling, where her wig turned blue. He'd only known because he'd heard the argument between his aunt and uncle that followed the beating he'd received. He'd had no idea why he was being hurt, or why he was being called a freak, but he crawled behind the sofa to hide away from them, out of his cupboard, at least until they found him.

He'd heard Petunia lament that he was like her sister, that she had found out why all the students had been sent home through gossip, that he was the one that caused it. Then the argument changed into a discussion of what they were going to do with him. He listened, with baited breath. And he remembered exactly what Petunia said.

"If we send him away, he'll come, Dumbledore," She hissed the name like it was a curse word, "And he'll be angry, he told us to look after him!"

After that Harry had blanked out for a moment. Dumbledore. He had no idea who that was, but he knew he was the reason Harry was stuck there. The reason Harry was holding a fist to his bruised shoulder, lying on the dusty floor, hiding. He knew with a passion that a six year old should not possess that he hated this man.

"I have had it Petunia, I'm taking him tomorrow afternoon, and that's final!" Uncle Vernon stormed off, leaving a rather shocked looking Petunia standing alone in the living room, before she followed him upstairs, seemingly to continue the argument more quietly.

He had lied there for hours after the revelation, in the dark, waiting for everyone to go to sleep, before creeping to his cupboard, hunching over in the dark.

So they were getting rid of him?

No, he was getting rid of them. He didn't need them. If he could turn wigs blue, what else could he do?

He grabbed one of the broken toys he'd stolen from Dudley off the small shelf above him, focusing on the leg that was twisted the wrong way on the action-man; he thought it back to normal. Nothing happened. He imagined it looked the way it should. Nothing happened. He sort of contracted the muscles in different parts of his body, focusing and squeezing. Nothing happened.

Feeling rather hopeless, he threw the toy to the other end of the cupboard and lay down petulantly, sulking.

Ok, so it wasn't that easy.

It had been the next day he was told to pack his few possessions and get in the car.

It was an old looking building, with classic faded red bricks slowly crumbling. The tall, slanted roof gave the building a nightmarish element, making it look like an old abandoned house. It might have been a Victorian manor at some point. The inside wasn't much better, splintering pale floorboards creaked underfoot, small damp spots and stains marking the walls, the only sign of individuality the beige paint could muster.

The worst part was the cold. There was heating, but it was expensive to heat the entire building, so they usually just kept the warmth within the canteen and common areas. Plenty of tatty jumpers and blankets were provided to keep them warm though.

The moment he'd arrived here there'd been trouble. It was a large establishment, but there were about a hundred kids, ranging from the ages of 4 to 14, and that was always going to be a mess. Most people had to share a room, usually in pairs, but there were a couple of trios, so some people had to sleep alone. Usually the younger ones were grouped up, since they were the ones that got anxious in the night.

Harry had been thrilled to enter his small, cold bedroom. He could sleep on a real bed, rather than the fold up one that he had slept on all his life. It was a fairly small room, at the very end of the corridor, behind a green door identical to every other along the hall. Inside the room, there were two beds facing the door on either wall, with maybe a meter and a half between them. Over each bed was a large shelf running along the long side of the bed. Each bed was leaning against the back wall, which curved in to create a rectangular space at the end of the room, the perfect size for a desk, which sat precisely there. Above the desk hung a large window looking out into the garden, surrounded by faded blue curtains.

At a second glance, the room looked much worse. The pale olive wallpaper was peeling in several places, and there were multiple wet spots soaking through. The curtains had torn edges, and the window pane had a long crack running from the bottom almost all the way up the top of the window. Looking down, the floor was the same horrid floorboard that Harry wouldn't touch without shoes. The desk was probably the nicest thing in the room, a dark brown wood with a small shelf running along the back, housing several books.

He was left by the disapproving woman that had introduced herself as Madam Nelson to his new room. With a sigh, he walked over to the bed on the right, under the shelf that was empty, and unpacked his few belongings. He discovered a small bedside table at the end of each bed, jammed between the wall and the bed that would serve as a dresser and he shoved the few hand-me-downs he had brought into it.

Just as he shoved his old leather briefcase under his bed, a boy walked in.

"Hey, you must be new; I'm your roommate, my name's Scott, what's yours?" The boy asked rather quickly.

"I'm Harry." He responded, slightly disappointed he would have to share his room, as he suspected.

"Cool, I'm nearly seven, how old are you?" He seemed like a fairly pleasant boy, floppy blonde hair falling over his forehead, nearly poking his large brown eyes.

"I'm six. I was six in July." He responded politely. Who knows, maybe this kids could be his best friend someday.

"Well I'm older than you; I'll be seven next month, the 18th of December." He boy seemed to care a lot about age, that's pretty weird. But then again, Harry didn't know much about other kids his age.

"Cool." Harry answered, not really knowing what the boy wanted him to say.

"That's my bed ok, so don't touch any of my stuff." Scott warned Harry, before jumping on the aforementioned bed, as if to prove his point.

"That's ok, I already like that one better." Harry reassured him.

And with the smile Scott gave him, Harry felt slightly better about the terrible accommodations, and thought maybe things could turn out fine.

Until dinner of course.

The boy on his right kept giving him dirty looks, even though Harry kept trying to ignore him, used to the attention from Dudley. It was when the boy started taking the food off his plate he got irritated. He'd just gotten away from this. He'd left this behind, hadn't he? Apparently not. He didn't want to start a fight, not on the first day, so he did what he used to do with Dudley. He ate all of his food as quickly as possible. He managed to eat a whole sausage in one bite, before scarfing down the other one. He shoveled the mash and gravy into his mouth in less than thirty seconds. He looked in triumph at the boy.

He was met with a scowl. The boy also finished quickly and left. Harry stayed while Scott finished his dinner, making small talk, being introduced to Scott's friends, who all found Harry's display very entertaining to say the least.

When Harry returned to his room, he saw his belongings on the floor. He picked up his action-man, the one with the broken leg. It was missing a head. Frantically, he looked through all of his things, and each one was damaged even further than when they arrived with him.

Pure anger filled him. He knew who it was. It was that boy. That one at dinner that had been trying to eat Harry's food.

"Scott. Who was that boy at dinner, the one that was sitting next to me?" Harry interrupted Scott's inane rambling about football.

"Oh, that was Peter. He's not really very nice, but he's best friends with Nathan, who's even worse." Scott said flippantly, walking past the broken toys to his bed.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"How do you mean?"

"Why didn't you tell me that boy was not to be messed with?"

"Dunno."

Maybe it was the flippancy of Scott's tone, but the answer infuriated Harry more than he could describe. How could he do this? He let Harry trick himself into being the butt of the jokes again. The runt. The hunted. No. That wasn't going to happen.

Harry finally sat down on his bed, feeling the threadbare blanket underneath him. It felt rougher than a potato sack. He sat there for a few minutes, anger building up inside him. He finally looked at Scott, who was reaching up for a toy from his shelf. A perfect, brand new toy. The anger finally reached a crescendo, as the large shelf collapsed on top of Scott!

Scott let out a scream of agony, as it hit his pelvis with a sickening crunch, all his possessions falling off, scattering over the floor.

Harry sat there for a moment, not knowing what to do. He felt the anger leave him, but a very small part of him was suddenly euphoric. Like all his problems had been solved. He had liked it when Scott was hit by the shelf. He deserved it. He had caused Harry to undoubtedly be the weak kid, the one everyone picks on. He hadn't even cared. Why should Harry care about this?

Finally he got up, and walked calmly to the door to fetch Madam Nelson from her office.

Scott had a broken pelvis. He had needed to go to the hospital, and since he was in the middle of the process of being adopted, he never bothered coming back. Harry never saw him again.

Good.

Harry had been right. Peter and Nathan had turned out to hate him. They were crafty of course, and they always managed to get away with things, since Madam Nelson seemed to like them so much. Everything they did to him they would re-enact and blame on him. They would come and start fights with him, leaving him bruised and bloody. He was no match for two boys two years older than him.

On Christmas every child received a donated toy. Harry got a box of little green army men, which he was delighted with. He made sure to keep them in his leather bag, locked in, and stuffed right under his bed. He didn't have to share a room anymore though, which was marvelous. The wall on Scott's side was too damp to install a new shelf, and they decided it would just be easier to leave the room alone. And thus, Harry alone.

Since the little fights had started, Harry had been basically blacklisted as a friend to every child in the orphanage. Each one knew that associating with him would mean facing Nathan and Peter alongside him, which was something no one was willing to do.

Harry had started getting his own back. If the bullies were going to stage Harry's acts of aggression, he might as well get to do them. Soon enough he figured out which room was theirs, and that was when he started messing up their room, tipping things about and breaking toys. He knew they both sneaked out of bed to go watch TV in the common area, but no one ever caught them, since the door to the common area was locked at night, and no one knew how they got in. Well. Harry knew. He followed them one night, and saw them remove the panel on the door. All it took was a screwdriver on two corners and it could easily be taken out.

He made use of this information regularly, to go through their room when he knew they weren't there, or even to sneak into the common room himself occasionally. Of course he got caught a few times, the floorboards were creaky and old! They made a racket every time he moved! But he'd been getting better. He'd memorized the ones that were louder than others, and the ones that were safe.

He was getting fairly sneaky if he said so himself!

He almost screamed the first time he heard it. The whisper in his head. It was a smooth male voice, saying something incomprehensible. Harry was on edge all day the first time he heard it. The teachers asked if he was ok, or if he wanted to go home. Eventually he went back to the orphanage, collapsing on his bed. The whispers were getting more coherent all day.

"Hello Harry." The whisper greeted him, finally. Harry jumped up in bed, nearly shrieking with terror. Not that it would have done much good, the walls were surprisingly sound proof, as he found out when Scot had screamed bloody murder and no one had realised.

"There's no need to be alarmed. I'm your friend Harry." The voice soothed.

"I don't need friends." Harry thought instinctively.

"No Harry, you don't need them. I can be your friend. I'll never leave you. I'll help you; I can see you're on the path to greatness Harry. I can help you harness your gifts. I can offer you so much power. Just say yes."

Harry found himself pausing. What if this voice was connected to his gifts? What if he could finally get control? He couldn't afford to pass that up. The voice seemed to hear his thoughts, so maybe he could think his answer?

"Yes. I'll be your friend." Harry could somehow feel the voice smiling at his answer.

"Hello Harry, my name's Tom."