Potions?
I want to see a Harry potter who has a little more time to get used to magic before hogwarts.
I want to see a Harry potter who is overwhelmed by everyone's expectations of him, who's scared of not being any good, who feverishly reads books want waving and incantations and just panics.
I want to see a Harry potter who sees potions and goes, that's just cooking isn't it? And Little Harry Potter is very good at cooking. Its a recipe and detailed instructions and this is familiar right?
He'll read the recipies and instructions over and over, will practice mincing and crushing and jullianneing in the kitchen at number four, working on herbs and vegtables instead of beetles eye's and lamb's liver.
Maybe he finds an easy recipe early on in the book, maybe a bruise balm for where Dudley kicked him in the shins and they still hurt, something simple, and not knowing better he makes it, hunched over the little burner in the Dursley's kitchen.
He cries when it goes on and it just stops hurting, hides the jar in his new school trunk the Dursley's are scared to touch. He decides then and there he's going to learn everything.
He all but memorizes the book, and in his first potions class when snape asks the questions he's delighted because he knows these answers!
Instead of a little James Potter, Snape can only see a tiny baby Lily, bright eyed and all but wiggling in his seat from excitement, and that sets the tone for their relationship from then on.
Harry isn't so good at wand stuff yet, the girl he met on the train is so much better than him, but at potions no one else is as good as him in his year and it feels so good.
He makes friends with Neville and they bond over not being so great with a wand and geek out together over potions and herbology both, even if they don't quite get eachother's interest, they appreciate it, you know? Whatever makes the other happy.
Maybe Snape sees the way Harry flinches from loud noises and folds like a stack of cards anytime someone raises their voice around him and puts a stop to that whole situation with prejudice. (The unlikely kinship only grows from there.)
Later on, instead of immediately jumping on being an auror like his dad, he thinks back to that first bruise balm, how increadibly magic that made him feel, and thinks maybe he should take up healing instead.
(He still names one of his kids 'Severus' in honour of the most kickass mentor he's ever had, and no one who knows him is really surprised.)
(Except Snape, who survived Nagini's bite due to some quick wand work and a handy beozor, who is flattered and horrified in equal measure.)
He does a lot of very good work over the years, and in his third year as a researcher for St Mungo's Infectious Curses and Magical Diseases Ward, he manages for the first time to cure lycanthropy. A picture of the little girl in question, beaming from her place in his arms makes to front page for weeks.
(The parents who dumped her there and left try to take back custody, and Harry uses his slytherin cunning and bullheaded stubbornness his mother was so very good at to shut that shit down. His Lily Luna has been asking him for a baby sister, anyway.)
Basically I want a Harry potter who saw something he could do, a place to fit in and threw himself into it whole heartedly.
