It was not until part way through Year 4, when Harry was eight, that an idea occurred to him that would, along with his skills in mind magic, drastically reshape his future. Harry had tried, with no real hope, but rather with stubborn persistence that it should work because it it was right, to report his relatives’ abuse to his newest teacher.1 As he returned to school the next day he observed that yet another teacher had, disappointingly but not unexpectedly, forgotten him and his report. A little older, it occurred to Harry to wonder if there was something he could do to make himself less forgettable. Perhaps he could do more than just see into his teacher’s head. Perhaps he could make his teacher remember him.
This started a new pattern. Every day Harry would attempt to report his aunt and uncle, the fact that he lived in a cupboard, the frequent missed meals. Each time he would try to use his legilimency (he did not know to call it this, but it was in fact legilimency) attempting to do something to make his teacher remember the conversation. He spent months trying to directly force the memory to be, in fact, remembered, but eventually gave up. Harry realised that the only people whose memories he could see were Aunt Petunia’s, Dudley’s, Mrs. Figg’s and the random strange people who seemed to know him and disappear, like the tiny man in the violet top hat who had bowed to him once.2 If he could only see memories from a handful of people, only three of whom he saw more than once, it made sense that he could not make memories … more memorable for most people.
Next he tried making the problem seem more memorable other ways. He tried making his teacher angry about it, he tried making his teacher worried about him, he tried telling his teacher about no one remembering and making his teacher scared. Each of these seemed to work, but each time, as soon as his teacher was out of sight, the whole thing would be forgotten. Once he was left sitting out side the principal’s office while the teacher went in to talk. Five minutes later, both had walked out and neither remembered asking Harry to wait for them there. They got upset when Harry tried to insist that he had just been talking to them. Clearly whatever was at work was far more powerful (so Harry’s thoughts went) than anything he could do.
Still, that did not mean he was powerless. He had learned quite a bit with these months of experiments. Perhaps, if he was going to be unable to get away from the Dursleys, he could make living with them more endurable? Perhaps instead of being less forgettable, he should try to become more forgettable? If Dudley forgot about him, then he and his gang would probably pick some other target. Harry disliked this solution, he would prefer that no one get picked on, but it would be nice to get a break now and then, to be able to relax and let his guard down at least some of the time.
This new approach was almost as frustrating as his attempts at being remembered. Harry had just enough success that he kept trying, but not enough that he ever stopped looking for something that would work better. On the plus side, Harry had few chores that summer - he successfully manipulated his aunt such that she preferred him out of the house and out of sight. On the down side, he had much less success with groups of people, like Dudley and his gang. This gave him lots of opportunity for practice, but, with each failure, lots of bruises, and on two particularly memorable occasions, broken bones to heal with the healing magic he’d been forced learn.
His most promising approach so far was to make Dudley feel more lazy, less inclined to chase Harry. The problem was that Piers Polkiss, Dudley’s best friend, was twice as mean and half as inclined to be lazy as Dudley was. If Piers had not been such a scrawny thing, and, despite his meanness, secretly scared of Dudley’s temper, he probably would have led the gang, and not Dudley. Distracting one of them was doable. Keeping both of them distracted required different emotional manipulations, and so inevitably Harry would loose his concentration and one of the gang members would find and catch him.
If Lily had been paying attention, she would have been appalled at the results of having taught Harry passive legilimency. The mind magics are one of the more dangerous fields of study — easy to abuse, rife with the potential for long term effects. Had she still been alive, her body and soul still integrated, she would have realised that she was putting Harry in a situation where the temptations would be beyond his ability to resist.
Harry entered Year 5 having spent most of his life using mind magics to commune with his mother’s spirit and to fight off the attacks from Riddle’s spirit; much of Year 3 in relatively harmless passive inspection of the people around him; then most of Year 4 in active attempts at subverting the minds of the adults in school; and finally the last two months of school and all summer in the frequent and routine invasion of and manipulation of the minds of his classmates. He had used more of the mind magics than most adult practitioners do in entire lifetimes. Even inveterate meddlers like Albus Dumbledore knew to keep their touch light and their time in someone else’s mind short. A dark lord like Riddle had no problems ransacking someone’s mind for information, but the very willingness to brutally violate the person meant that they rarely spent more than more than a few minutes actually in the other person’s head. More responsible people like those few healers who knew something about helping the victims of such attacks might spend hours on a single patient, but rarely worked with more than one or two such patients in a year. Harry was constantly fumbling and experimenting each day every day on a dozen classmates. He spent hours to achieve results that a trained legilimens might do in seconds. With practice Harry got better, faster, more adept, but in a real, though unseen, sense it was already too late.
The nephilim are an unstable hybrid, and the abuse of their powers, no matter that Harry had no ill intent, comes at the cost of destabilising the very nature of their being. In times past, this destabilisation has taken many forms. Sometimes it has mutated the abusers physically, leading to the existence of centaurs and dwarfs. Other times changes that the abusers hoped to be temporary were made into permanent hereditary changes, such as what happened with the merfolk.3 Harry had already experienced one subtle change in the way his mind and magic worked, now he would experience another. Like the last, because Harry’s use of this destabilising magic was not malicious, the worst effects of this destabilisation were avoided, still, exaggerated versions of things Harry was using the magic for became locked into place.
In the first change, Harry’s desire to connect to someone the way he connected to his mum’s soul became realised as his magic started actively seeking and connecting him in profound ways. So far this had resulted in only fleeting (and unwelcome) connections to Riddle. In this second change, it was Harry’s use of legilimency to hide that finally crossed the threshold and triggered change. Having abused legilimency (no matter how good the reason) to enhance the area magic that caused people to forget him, he started to emit a field that duplicated that magic. Unlike the one he had lived under for the last eight years, this one did not have the built in exceptions that allowed the Dursleys or Mrs. Figg to remember him. More, unlike that field that simply made him forgettable, this made him hard to see at all.4
As Year 5 began, these changes were only starting to take hold, to find form, and to shape the kind of person that Harry would be. The field that Harry was emitting was not yet as strong as it could be. Someone who knew he was there could see past it. But then, Harry was only nine years old, and a nephil’s magic grows profoundly as he (or she) approaches his eleventh birthday.
I think this is in character for Harry. In the first book, Harry cannot actually expect fair treatment from his uncle. It has to be pure stubborn instance in demanding just treatment that causes him to demand his letter the way he does.↩︎
Mrs. J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone p. 30. Pottermore Limited. American Kindle Edition.↩︎
Harry has not seen what happens to people near the Leaky Cauldron. If an observer saw what happened to non-magical people there, and what happened to people trying to look at Harry, the similarities would be profound. The primary difference is that Harry’s magic affects everyone.↩︎