Harry’s prioritisation of the spiritual over the physical exposed him to his mother’s love; it also exposed him to Voldemort’s hate. On the whole though, the knowledge that he was in fact loved was a net positive, and like Lily hoped, the depression spiral ceased. Unfortunately it came at a cost. Divided from himself, and as young as he was, Harry was not really even aware of the things in the physical world that he was missing. The things that should have held his attention, many of the things that he should have been learning. Neither Lily, who wanted her son to be healthy out of love, nor Voldemort who looked at Harry’s body as a conquest, the future young Tom Riddle, wanted him stunted in terms of learning things like walking, getting dressed, bathing and other activities of daily living. Thus even as they fought, there was an unspoken truce and Lily was allowed to work with Harry to teach him to manipulate his almost remote-controlled body just enough to survive. Vernon would not allow the boy to thrive.
But teaching Harry required legilimency, which always comes at a cost, even to the target. This cost started to become apparent in Harry’s fourth year. Harry’s dreams started to become periodically confused, invaded by strange sights of strangely distorted forests, where all the plants and trees seemed weirdly over sized. Harry could knot know, and Lily did not have the science background to know that this distortion came from the differences between human and reptilian eyes - Harry was seeing, in his dreams, as if he were the main piece of Voldemort,1 currently possessing a snake in the forests of Albania. Harry’s magic had changed. He had longed for years to connect to someone alive the way he had felt connected to the bright soul when she taught him things. Now, triggered by the chaotic mutations that come from excess exposure to active legilimency, his magic was actively seeking to make such a connection. Harry was not in control of this questing for connection, it was simply happening. Intent matters greatly in magic, even when the nephilim are being punished for its abuse. Thus while Harry (specifically his magic) changed, the changes did not leave him at the mercy of a random connection. Awake, anytime his magic came even close to the soul shard, the sense of evil repelled him, and even sleeping, while he might be confused enough to superficially connect, the essential incompatibility between Harry’s desire for love and Riddle’s desire to destroy Harry caused the connection be disrupted, break down, and result in nothing but some troubled dreams.
Thus fortunately, at least for now, the bizarre connection was both short lived and only went one way. Even more importantly, Riddle remained ignorant of the connection Harry’s magic periodically attempted to form. The shard in Harry was focused on Lily; the majority of it in the snake was limited by the snake’s limited animal brain, and thus struggled with complex thought (for thought is always affected by the physical brain a soul inhabits). Thus Riddle gained no extra knowledge of a sleeping boy in Surrey England.
Aunt Petunia may not have actively hated him, but she certainly did not want to be reminded of her sister more than was really necessary. As Harry grew and learned to be more self sufficient, he also learned to be more and more introverted and silent. It was better that way. Being rarely seen and never heard was the best way to avoid Vernon’s ire, Dudley’s bored abuse, and even annoying Aunt Petunia with a disconcerting green stare.
Children are remarkably resilient, and magical children even more so, but by this time, Harry was going months without talking. There was simply no one for him to really talk to on any regular basis. Lily’s lack of any real sense of time was acting against him, this was not someone actively harming him, it was just a gradual lack of activity. Atrophy of the vocal cords and the muscles around them is something that doctors usually only see, if they see it at all, in the elderly. Children normally either have or create plenty of opportunity to talk and thus exercise their voices. Harry was quickly falling into that rare exception case, unfortunately there was no one to notice as his voice became breathy and high pitched, even for a young child. Having learned within weeks that crying out just caused problems, Harry never tried for high volume, so no one noticed that it was less and less possible for him to yell. He so rarely said anything more than “thank you Aunt Petunia.” or “Yes Uncle Vernon” that his vocal fatigue went unremarked, even by himself.2
Having heard from his spy, Arabella Figg, Dumbledore had worried that this effectively undocumented child might make waves in muggle society and had taken steps to prevent that. As Harry started school that fall3, teachers would take notice of the small boy in ill fitting clothing who could barely talk, but then would forget before they would remember to file official reports about it.4
As Dudley was exposed to a wider audience, Petunia and Vernon needed a new form of denial to deal with the resulting problems. Reports that Dudley was a bully got transferred to Harry in their minds, and when they subconsciously realised that might not be sufficient, Petunia started a campaign to have the neighbourhood blame Harry for Dudley’s misdeeds as well. Up until this point Petunia could honestly say she did not hate Harry. But as she convinced herself that he was a miscreant, bullying other children and causing problems for Dudley in school, she turned against him. There was really no choice. The alternative was to face up to the disaster that was her own son. She could not do that.
In his first year of school, Reception, Harry happened to honestly be sick and miss class the day they had a presentation about talking to adults about abuse. It never occurred to him to do so spontaneously. In his second year of school, he tried, but was disappointed - the teacher could not remember their conversation the next day. Indeed, she barely seemed to remember him at all. Something odd was clearly going on. Harry noticed, and more, Lily noticed.
It took some time. She could not spare much magic for diagnostic spells, and even when she could, she would forget just how quickly time was passing for Harry. He kept asking though, and eventually Lily realised that someone official had placed some variant of the spells that prevent humans from noticing the Leaky Cauldron or Platform 9¾ on the area. The number of people who could have done so, would have done so, was vanishingly small. A “muggle-born” herself, she knew there was no reason for the Ministry of Magic to have be-spelled a random muggle home, even if it did happen to house a young wizard. It had to have something to do with his placement with the Dursleys instead of with Sirius or the Longbottoms as her Will had specified should have happened.
That her son’s enemies could act with such immunity meant that her plans were going to have to change. Harry was learning that he could not trust anyone. As he came in contact with more and more people only to find that they joined in with the Dursleys rather than helping him, or even staying neutral, his faith in humanity was taking a blow. If Lily did not want her son to become cynical and embittered, something would have to be done. It was time to teach Harry true legilimency, so that he could understand what makes people tick, and start to separate the evil from the weak, and to find the good even when they feel helpless and scared. Even just knowing their emotions, she would be able to help Harry understand when they acted on fear versus anger, greed, or selfishness. She knew that actively accessing their thoughts was a step she must not, could not in fact5, help Harry take, such an act was always a violation, but surely building just a little on his existing abilities would not hurt; purely passive legilimency could be done without a cost, right? Thus, as she was teaching him, she was careful to guide him away from Petunia and Dudley’s memories, and to focus him on the areas where a nephil differs little from the human. Harry, excited by the wealth of information, and more by the potential safety that information offered, did not notice that anything even was different between the two of them and Vernon.
Lily did not realise whether she was making a mistake. Using legilimency solely to read emotions might be morally neutral, but the act of teaching Harry anything was also, accidentally, but very effectively, teaching him to communicate using legilimency. It was not what she was teaching so much as the fact that she had to herself use legilimency to do it. It would be a small step from using magic to communicate between two souls in one head to communicate between two minds existing as actually separate persons. Lily would never have intentionally taught Harry to use legilimency in this fashion. Sure it was only wrong if forced, but it was always risky. It always invited unpredictable effects. Harry was already experiencing that, and would learn more about those risks the hard way.
I know that in the actual Harry Potter books, this connection has a different explanation. Frankly the way Mrs. Rowling did things does not fully make sense, If Lily’s protection lived on in Harry, then we need a reason for Riddle’s soul to be able to both latch on and, even more, affect Harry the way we see happen. I’m providing that here.↩︎
look up presbylaryngis for where I got this idea. It is primarily age related, but from what I read, can happen for other reasons. I realise this is extremely unlikely.↩︎
Kids in England start school at age four. See “THE BRITISH EDUCATION SYSTEM” © Copyright The Learn English Network - All Rights Reserved, last viewed 2021-02-08.↩︎
The idea that magic is being used to prevent people from noticing Harry’s situation is not original here, it occurs in birdwoman95’s The Sound Of Silence and other works. I have not read Lomonaaeren’s Forget-Me-Not since the main pairing offends me, but I am told it features a reasonably similar idea.↩︎
See note about Lily and free will in Chapter 1.↩︎