TITLE: Harry Has the Worst Luck
FIRST PUBLISHED: May 25, 2012
SUMMARY: "I AM Harry Potter!" Harry said, but no one believed him.
oOo
Harry woke up. He was lying in a bed with emerald green curtains around it.
That isn't right, Harry thought confusedly, the curtains are red.
After a moment he realized he could see perfectly clearly even though he wasn't wearing his glasses. Huh? Harry thought. He sat up and got out of bed, noticing as he did so that the ground seemed farther away than usual…was he taller as well? Now even more confused than before, Harry looked around, to find that he was in a place that was most certainly NOT the Gryffindor Common Room. In fact, if he had to guess, he'd say that… but no. That was impossible.
Harry went out into the Common Room. He recognized it, from his second year. It was the Slytherin Common Room. "What is going on?" Harry asked himself. Just then other people began to filter their way out of the dormitory.
Nobody seemed to notice that Harry Potter was standing in the middle of their Common Room.
In fact, now that Harry looked at them, he didn't recognize any of the Slytherins who came into the room. This was disturbing, to say the least. But then he saw someone who looked familiar, and he was relieved, something he'd never thought he would feel looking at that particular person. He strode over. "Malfoy," he hissed, "What is going on?"
The boy who looked almost-but-not-quite-now-that-Harry-saw-his-face just like Draco Malfoy gave him a questioning look. "Nothing, as far as I know," he said, and his voice wasn't antagonistic. In fact, it might have even been the tiniest bit… respectful? What was going on?
Harry looked around. "Oh," he said. "That's good."
"Were you planning something, Tom?" the-boy-who-was-presumably-a-Malfoy-since-he-hadn't-seemed-surprised-when-Harry-called-him-that asked.
"Er…who?" Harry asked.
"What?" The boy said.
"What was that you called me?" Harry demanded.
The Malfoy seemed to freeze for a moment and then he said, "Sorry, I meant Voldemort, I forgot…" He looked quite petrified.
"I am having a very bad day," Harry said to no one in particular. This was amazing, considering he'd only just woken up.
Malfoy blanched a few shades paler, and looked around the room to where everyone was studiously avoiding noticing what was happening with them.
Harry turned to the-person-who-was-most-likely-a-Malfoy. "I'm not going to curse you," he said irritably.
"You're—you're not?"
"No I'm not!" Harry yelled.
"Thank you!" Malfoy said, hurrying away. Harry rested his head against the wall. Could this day get any worse?
Apparently it could.
Everyone went to their lessons, and it turned out Transfigurations was the first one of the day. Harry realized he must have traveled back in time or something, because Professor McGonagall wasn't the one teaching. Harry saw Professor Dumbledore giving him suspicious looks throughout the class. His hopes sank. He couldn't ask Dumbledore for help; Dumbledore would never help him, not if HE thought Harry was Voldemort too.
When he got a chance, he went into an empty bathroom and stared at his reflection in the mirror. The person who looked back looked a lot like Harry Potter, but he looked a lot more like one Tom Riddle, a.k.a. Voldemort.
Harry pushed his hair out of his forehead. No scar.
His wand was not his wand, it was Tom's, though he'd found to his surprise that it worked as well for him as his own. Harry was not sure whether to be relieved or horrified or just plain confused.
"I'm Harry Potter," he said to the mirror.
"Of course dear, if you say so," the mirror answered.
"I AM Harry Potter!"
"I never said you weren't," said the mirror, in it's sickeningly agreeable tone.
Harry shattered the mirror with his wand. He looked down at the pieces. "Why did I just do that?" he asked. He hadn't meant to do that.
"Probably because you're rather prone to sudden mood swings, even though you do an admirably good job of hiding it from other people," the mirror suggested in a rather cracked voice.
"I am not," Harry said. "Voldemort is. You're mistaking me for him."
"Who's this Harry Potter you keep going on about?" the mirror said in a broken tone. "And will you please get around to fixing me anytime soon?"
"No," Harry said shortly, and left the bathroom. Behind him, he could still hear the mirror speaking.
"The nerve!" It said.
He didn't know where to go next. Somehow, after long wandering the halls, he found himself in the Room of Requirement. He walked in front of it three times and tried to focus on something. Someplace useful, he thought. Someplace useful.
He went in, and found himself in a library.
Perhaps this would help him figure out what was going on. To his dismay, though, all of the books were on Dark subjects, and one in every five seemed to be "On the Making of Horcruxes."
"I don't want to make a bloody Horcruxe!" Harry shouted, shoving yet another one roughly back into the shelf. "That's Tom you're thinking of. I'm Harry Potter!"
Unsurprisingly, the library didn't answer him.
Very disgruntled, Harry left, and went to the rest of his classes. At the end of the day, though, instead of going to sleep, he went through the empty corridors until he came to the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets. There was no Myrtle here yet, so he got in unobserved.
He strode into the Basilisk Room.
"Alright," he said, with his eyes tightly closed, "Will you please come out and kindly explain to me why everyone thinks I'm Tom Riddle?"
"Because you are Tom Riddle," the Basilisk answered. "Or was it Voldemort now? I never can remember."
Harry didn't have a wall to bash his head on, so he just slammed his fist into his forehead. "I want my scar back," he said mutinously. Sometimes he wished he could be someone other than Harry Potter, The-Boy-Who-Lived, Savior of the Wizarding World. Never again.
In fact, he was thinking so hard that he didn't even notice the Basilisk slithering away, and that was something very hard to do.
The next few months were spent desperately trying to catch it before the Petrifications turned into a Killing.
He failed, of course. He was just a little too late. He got the Basilisk locked up in it's hall again, but not before Moaning Myrtle had given up the ghost. Or become a ghost, however you wanted to put it.
"THIS IS IT!" Harry shouted. "I REFUSE to be Voldemort."
He was in the middle of a crowded corridor at the time.
"Oh, so it's Tom again then?" someone asked him as they passed by.