It certainly helped his case that the school staff were taking a closer look at him now that he was performing better and noted how different he was compared to Dudley. The school nurse, one of the nicer adults around, had tried to complain about the obvious abuse but people had ignored her in the beginning. Now with Dudley beginning to gain detentions and remedial lessons in conjunction with his immense weight, she was able to make some progress in fixing Harry's issues and she along with a couple of other teachers started to gather evidence in case the Dursley adults decided that Harry was going to be a bigger burden then they needed to tolerate. Harry remembered her demonstrating her colourful vocabulary when she was checking his body condition and appalled at what she found.
The teachers themselves took a good look at him and Dudley, taking note of how his cousin always had issues with even the simplest of questions and bullied those he deemed weaker than him, while Harry kept mostly to himself but stayed polite to those around him and to them while keeping track with his work, a far cry from what the Dursleys had told them about Harry being a trouble maker. From what Harry could tell, a few were troubled by how easily they fell for the Dursleys' lies and sought to make up for their actions, or in-actions, by intervening on Dudley's bullying attempts on him or others, and making sure that Harry was being challenged intellectually. One of them had even got into blows with one of the nastier teachers who was apparently friends with Vernon and had tried to dump punishments on Harry for 'taking away Dudley's intelligence'. Something that honestly dumbfounded Harry at the reaction considering the rather stupid reasoning given by the nasty teacher in his opinion.
It was around the start of his second year of school when Harry would make a discovery on the supposed 'freakishness' Vernon and Petunia kept blaming him for. Dudley did not appreciate Harry's placement in the school's rankings or the praises he would get from the teachers, and how Dudley would keep getting detentions for actions his parents had ignored or downright encouraged (much to the horror of the teachers who had to write out his detention form many times to the point they had created a new standard for his level of bullying) or the fact that Vernon was now getting stricter with him to try and get him into his old Smelting Academy. He and his motley crew of bullies would start a tradition of 'Harry Hunting' whereby they would go after Harry just so they could feel better after 'teaching the Teacher's Pet a lesson'. Harry had to run away quite often before, but at the time it was perhaps the most hectic chase he had to outrun. The boys kept cutting off his escape routes and it was only due to his size and reflexes that Harry managed to escape at the last second, but just as he was getting boxed in, Harry wished at the bottom of his heart that he could be somewhere safe from Dudley.
Then it happened.
One moment, he was ducking around the corner that led to the playground, the next moment he would find himself on the roof of the small shack at the school. Harry barely had time to stop at the edge before he swung his arms backwards to throw himself to the floor, the wind taken out of him by the suddenness of the action. It took a few minutes to get his bearings but once he calmed down, Harry felt an odd excitement bubbling inside him as he looked at his hands as though to see if he was dreaming.
He had some inkling as to what was going on, after all there was no way to explain him gaining back a full mane of hair after Petunia cruelly shaved portions of his head bald the night before, or the nasty teacher getting his hair colour changed after insulting Harry and a couple of others wrongly. There was also that time towards the end of his first year when Vernon got heavy-handed and slammed him hard against the door, breaking a couple of his ribs in the process, only to somehow be healed the next morning or at most two days time. He recalled in all those periods how angry he was for the former two, and how much in pain he was at the last, and how he wished for something to happen. In all those times, he got something that came without warning but definitely most appreciated.
On a whim, he looked to where the school library was situated, focused hard on the image and the previous emotion he had experienced before taking a step forward. A good thing he did just one step as he almost smacked his face against the door, but that did not dampen his excitement as new possibilities and ideas started to erupt from this discovery. He had actual powers at his fingertips, if he could heal from injuries and teleport from Dudley, that meant he could do other stuff that he had read from those comics he pilfered from Dudley when he was bored of them. And if he had powers, he could also protect himself from Vernon, Petunia and Dudley when they try to punish him.
He could practically do anything!
Harry managed to stop himself from getting too excited at the idea, he needed to understand more about the powers he had. He needed to know their capabilities, limitations, his overall control over them and then he needed to master them so that he could call them out easily.
At the back of his mind though, he had to wonder...
Was he the only one, or were there others?
~ooOOoo~
Harry would like to say that his first foray into understanding his powers were adventurous, outstanding or even earth-shattering, but truthfully it was a more of a hassle.