“Mr Potter,” came the silky drawl. All the hairs on the back of Harry’s neck stood up. “Is there a reason your Delirium Draught,” a derisive pause, “appears to be orange?”

“No, sir,” Harry gritted out.

“Really, Mr Potter? You took it upon yourself to cast a modification charm for no good reason?” Another pause echoed in the silent classroom, and Harry ached to strangle the smug git. “Or could it possibly be that your ineptitude has caused to fall below even Mr Longbottom’s poor standards?”

The Slytherins snickered loudly into their caldrons, and Harry glared down ferociously at his potion which was, indeed, orange. He wouldn’t lose his temper, he just wouldn’t!

Snape ladled up a bit of the potion, and let it slosh back into the caldron. “Absolutely despicable. Well? Nothing to say in your defence, Mr Potter?” A malicious smile curled the thin lips. “Or are you waiting for your favourite Defence Professor to bail you out… again?”

Malfoy was now outright laughing at the Potions Master’s revenge for Harry making a fool out of them both during the Hogsmeade fiasco. Snape didn’t take the slightest bit of notice; his eyes boring into Harry and making him feel like a specimen in one of Snape’s jars. An angry specimen.

Harry raised his head and locked eyes with the Potions Master – green eyes glittering, lips pressed so tightly together that they were white. Harry’s hands twisted frantically in his robes under the table as though trying to wring out the humiliation, the distress, he was feeling. He hated them! Hated them, hated…

“Up! Get up!” the shrill voice snapped out, accompanied by the metallic rattling of the locks as they slid out of their resting places. The dream shattered apart like so many pieces of glass.

Harry groaned and flopped out of bed. A tension headache already forming was testament to him falling asleep much later than he usually would. He looked at the clock and groaned. It was six in the morning! That meant that he had only spent four hours asleep! His body was strongly protesting that teenage boys needed a lot more rest than that – preferably about six hours more.

Blearily he kicked his feet into his trainers as he headed out of the room, snagging his glasses along the way. He always slept in his clothes when spending his summers at the Dursleys’, knowing they would expect him to be up and about the second they called him. It didn’t matter how he looked during the summer; his relatives did not care about his appearance. In fact, they even appeared to derive pleasure from how scruffy he looked compared to their precious ‘Diddy-kins.’

Harry crept into the kitchen, feet swimming in the boats that were his shoes, hoping to start the breakfast before Aunt Petunia got angry with him for dawdling. Unfortunately for Harry, his Aunt was already waiting for him, box of cleaning supplies at the ready. She quickly shoved it into his arms.

“Bathroom!” she snapped. “I want every inch spick and span by this evening. Vernon’s got guests coming from work and if anything like last time happens, Boy,” she broke off and eyed him with dislike, “you’ll be sleeping in the shed from here on in! As it is, you’re spending tonight out there, we don’t need you anywhere near us!”

The boy nodded, “Yes, Aunt Petunia,” before scurrying up to the bathroom.

Urgh! It looked like Aunt Petunia wasn’t performing to her usual cleaning standards. For some reason the bath had a dark ring of muck around the edge. It would take ages to scrub; the tiles had a slightly murky cast, and the sink was covered in so many toiletry messes it looked as though Dudley had been having toothpaste-painting competitions in there.

This is gonna take ages! He sighed and grabbed up an old cloth and the bottle of ‘Bar Keeper’s Friend’ – Aunt Petunia always was a great believer in elbow grease – and walked determinedly towards the bathtub. Time to start scrubbing, he thought as he mentally catalogued the toilet to be the last on his to-do list.

The shampoo stains were tough: the streaks of indefinable gunk were even worse, more importantly because Harry kept finding them after he thought he’d finally finished. Chucking the cloth and bottle down, he ducked out into the hall to check the time; it was almost half-past seven. This meant that Uncle Vernon would be up and moving about very soon – preparing for another full day at Grunnings – and Harry hadn’t even finished the bath yet!

Harry walked back to the sink and leaned his hands on the sides, dropping his head forward with a sigh, and trying to unknot some of the tension that had crept up his spine. Rolling his neck from side to side, he lifted his head and stared into a face that was not his own.

With a stifled yell, Harry leapt clean across the bathroom, flattening himself against the opposite wall. When his heartbeat had slowed to less than one hundred beats a second, he realised his reflection was laughing at him.

“You know, that’s really freaky when you’re not expecting it,” he told the mirror, unable to suppress his own smile. The last of his fatigue fell away and he eagerly approached the mirror, more relieved than he let on that last night had not been a dream.

The brown-haired boy had the same blue bruises beneath his eyes that Harry did, telling of their late night and early-rising. Their exhaustion, however, did not diminish their delighted smiles at seeing each other again. Harry noticed first.

“Hey, you have the same teeth as me!”

That probably was a pretty stupid thing to say, Harry thought as he watched his double laugh so hard that he fell over.

“Err, hello? Come back?” It was extremely disconcerting to look into a mirror and see nothing there. He wasn’t a vampire after all!

The counterpart’s flushed face came back into view as he clawed his way up the sink on the other side of the glass. He looked out at Harry, rolled his eyes, and tapped the side of his head three times.

“Yeah, yeah, I know I’m crazy, aren’t we all?” Harry grabbed his cleaning utensils and started on the sink before something occurred to him. “What d’you want me to call you? Shall I keep calling you Shadow, or do you want to be Harry too?”

The reflection shrugged, pressing his fingertips to the side of his temple then pointing towards Harry.

“I… think? No wait, decide!” Harry exclaimed, getting a thumbs up for his pains. He thought for a moment. “Shadow it is then, nobody in their right mind would want to be ‘famous Harry Potter’ if they had the choice.”

Shadow patted the mirror sympathetically as Harry got on with his chores.

“So, I’ve been thinking about what you said about our parents, and I reckon our Mum is still the same ‘cos we’ve both got her eyes, so it must be our Dad that’s different.”

Shadow grinned and nodded.

“So that’s that, then. Don’t reckon I can do anything about it until I get back to Hogwarts.” Harry was silent as he battled a particularly stubborn toothpaste stain, before musing, “Guess you can’t talk, huh? Must be really annoying to only be able to communicate with gestures, hey, Shadow?”

Shadow raised his hands as if to say ‘tell me about it!’ He then glanced around the bathroom and tapped his wrist urgently.

“Huh?” Harry’s forehead wrinkled, but before he could ask anything further, muffled footsteps were clumping down the hall towards him. Harry froze, Oh no!

The bathroom door banged open to reveal a drowsy and pyjama-clad Uncle Vernon. “Out, Boy!” he snarled, “and take these cleaning things with you, they’re cluttering up the floor.

“Y-yes, Uncle Vernon. At once, Uncle Vernon,” Harry stammered, snatching up his cleaning things while Shadow looked on, eyes worried and lower lip held tightly between his teeth as Harry scrambled to obey. After about twenty seconds of frantic activity Uncle Vernon reached the end of his early-morning patience, and aimed a kick at Harry just as he was about to exit the bathroom.

The kick jarred Harry’s shin and caught him off balance. Almost in slow motion, he watched the bottle of bleach slip from his arms and splatter its contents all across the bathroom floor.

The boy went completely still. Oh no, oh no, how could I be so clumsy? He barely heard Uncle Vernon’s snarl under the litany of panic running through his head, but he certainly felt the huge, meaty hand grab the front of his shirt and begin to shake violently. The rest of the bottles and jars clattered to the floor, noise hidden in between Uncle Vernon’s shouts.

“You clumsy, worthless little brat! How dare you!”

“I-I-I’m-m s-s-orry-y, Unc-l-le,” the boy gasped as his head snapped back and forth, please let him stop, please let him stop, please let him stop.

The hands stopped shaking him, instead closing painfully around his upper arms and lifting him up to his Uncle’s height. The boy caught a brief glimpse of Shadow silently screaming at Uncle Vernon, banging his hands on the opposite side of the glass, before his whole world tunnelled in to that large, purpling face.

“I’ll show you sorry, Boy,” it hissed, the man swinging his fist so that it struck off the side of the boy’s face. He threw the boy to the floor and kicked him hard.

The boy bit his tongue to keep from sobbing as the kicks lifted him across the floor over and over again, angry shouts a symphony to the dull thud of pointy shoe applied to flesh.

A door slammed and all of a sudden the pain stopped coming. Harry looked up from his position on the ground, and stared at the closed bathroom door. Wincing, he slowly got to his feet, ignoring the painfully throbbing areas where the shoes had connected. Probably the only reason he wears shoes before he gets dressed in the morning, Harry grumbled as he limped back to his room, pulling the door to and sitting on the bed, twisting the only cleaning rag he’d been able to hold onto between his hands. He did not look at the window.

As far as Harry could see, the only good thing about the Dursleys’ physical punishments of him were that they were short and sharp, almost as if he wasn’t worth the effort of disciplining. Well, that was just fine with Harry, especially seeing as most of those punishments were over nothing anyway.

Harry sat still for fifteen minutes, listening to the sounds of the shower turning on and off, the flush of the loo and finally, the click and swish as the door as it opened. Heavy footsteps thumped down the stairs, the last step squeaking in protest, a muffled pause, and then voices sounded from the kitchen. Only then did Harry move, slipping out of his bedroom and down the corridor again.

Upon entering the bathroom, he stared around in bewilderment. There was no sign of the carnage that had been there when he’d left; the floor was clean and no bottles were in sight, only the lingering smell of bleach and his aching body proved that it had happened at all.

Not looking into the mirror, Harry checked all the cupboards for hiding places. There was nothing there, leaving only one other place for Harry to check. At least, he hoped that Uncle Vernon hadn’t taken the things with him. Harry suppressed a smile at the idea of his Uncle walking into Grunnings, arms full of cleaning supplies, and limped over the window. Harry opened it and peered down into the back garden.

Sure enough, all his things were nestled on and around the flowering buddleia below. Harry sighed, what a ridiculous thing for his Uncle to do. It was like he was trying to sabotage the evening he had planned for his clients. Though, Harry thought darkly as he hurried down to fetch them, I wouldn’t put it past him to think up a way to sabotage the evening, and then pin all the blame on me!

Back in the bathroom once more, Harry methodically cleaned every surface, making sure everything sparkled before moving onto the next spot, and all the while consciously avoiding the mirror. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to Shadow again; it was more he was ashamed that someone had witnessed his Uncle besting him so easily.

He heard Aunt Petunia coming upstairs and waking Dudley for lunch, then both of them making their way downstairs. No one bothered him as he systematically worked his way through the rest of the room, shadows shortening and lengthening as he worked. And still he did not look in the mirror.

Honestly, Harry thought as he pulled kak from the plughole, if this is my reaction to my Invisible friend  finding out what it’s like with the Dursleys, I shudder to think what I’d do if anyone else found out.

Eventually, he could avoid it no longer, dolefully dragged himself over to the mirror; prepared to get this over as quickly as he could, and then get the hell out of the bathroom. He raised a clean cloth, trying to keep his eyes unfocussed, and froze.

Shadow was watching him dejectedly out of the shiny surface, a large purple bruise covering his right cheek. Harry gasped and dropped the rag, reaching out to touch it as best he could while lifting his other hand to brush over his own swollen cheek.

“You really are me, aren’t you?” Harry breathed, watching as Shadow nodded. “I’m sorry I was ignoring you earlier, it’s just that... I was…”

Shadow clasped his hands, bringing them up to his chest, and mimed turning away.

“Yeah, I was ashamed. I’m sorry, I’m such a prat.” Harry laughed and swatted the mirror when he received an enthusiastic ‘thumbs up’ for his last comment. “Shut up, you! Now hold still, so I can clean the mirror without you distracting me!”

Shadow patiently waited while Harry finished polishing the surface, but he started rolling his eyes dramatically when Harry buffed it over with a shammy-leather. The second Harry had finished, Aunt Petunia’s voice shrieked down the hall, “Boy, you’d better be finished in there! Your dinner’s in your bedroom, but I can easily take it away if it isn’t spotless in there!”

“I’ve finished, Aunt Petunia,” Harry yelled back before turning back to Shadow. “Guess she really was joking about shutting me in the shed, I’ll see you later, okay, Shadow?”

Shadow made an ‘okay’ gesture before strolling out the side of the mirror, leaving Harry staring, once more, at his own messy-haired reflection. How can Shadow and I be the same person? Harry wondered as he hurried back into his room; listening as his Aunt slid the locks home once more. He’s so suave and well-groomed; I’m just a scrawny little runt!

Harry sighed, and flopped onto his bed, snatching up the plate of bread and cheese as he went. Hmm, quite a lot too, Aunt Petunia must be bribing me to keep quiet about the filthy state she left the bathroom in, the weird woman! Harry slowly munched through all of his meal. Experience had taught him that leaving the food he was given for the next day often resulted in it going mouldy. Once he had finished, he lay back on his bed, and listened to the house coming alive around him as the Dursleys prepared for the evening – Uncle Vernon coming home, Petunia twittering, Dudley whining, the timer over the oven sounding loudly. Harry let himself drift; gazing out the window to the gradually darkening sky.

Around eight he heard the sound of the Dursleys growing exciting – apparently their guests had just turned down Privet Drive. Harry pulled the covers up over him, preparing to roll over and go to sleep when Shadow appeared at the window.

Harry blinked up at him; this was highly unusual. For one thing, Harry could barely see his outline due to the amount of light outside, Harry flung back the covers and padded over to the window to get a better look at his counterpart’s expression.

It was utterly panicked; Shadow’s eyes were wide, his face contorted in terror, and his lips were trembling. Desperately he gestured again and again for Harry to look out of the window.

“Shadow? What’s the matter?” Harry slipped over to the window and peered around his counterpart’s body.

Two people were leisurely strolling down Privet Drive towards Number Four. Harry squinted to make out their features through the haze, his efforts hindered by Shadow’s panicked motions. They were a man and a woman, he was sure of that fact, but not much else.

He pressed his face closer to the window only to leap back as though scalded as the couple passed under a streetlamp. A stately woman with long, platinum blonde hair, her nose wrinkled as though she could smell dung, was being escorted down the street by none other than Lucius Malfoy!