A different School of Power

Disclaimer: Good Omens to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Harry Potter to JK Rowling.

AN: Before you say anything, I think of this as much as an 'Outside looking in' fic as I do a crossover. I believe that it could go neatly into either catagory because both sets of characters feature if not in person then otherwise rather strongly. I'm putting it in the Good Omens catagory because there are less stories there. So there ;P

---

A few months after the fiasco that had been his first – albeit mostly invisible – Hogsmeade outing, Harry was back.

Ron and Hermione however, were not with him and did not know that he was here at all. Ron, for the reason that it was that much harder to escape trouble when his friend was around and for Harry to be distracted by, and Hermione because . . . well, because Hermione would just be insufferable again.

"Oof! Oh, sorry. Didn't see you there for a minute."

Harry froze. Looked down – nope, still invisible. So he thought, anyway. Looked up. Saw a pair of intense blue eyes set in a pale face, on top of which sat a wavy mop of golden-blond hair that looked like it had been either been sculpted by Michelangelo or made that way by regular magic.

The blue eyes seemed to bore right through him for a fraction of time, and then it was over. Harry could have thought that he had seen pity in them before they turned back to normal.

A slightly harassed, embarrassed look found itself on the boy's face.

"Oops. Sorry," He said again. "I didn't know you were tryin' to be invisible and all. You can talk now, though. No one'll pay any attention so long as they can't see you. Honest."

Harry blinked. Two things were currently at war in his head; one, that this boy not much older than him could see through his dad's invisibility cloak, two, that said boy was not only suggesting something that went against all logic he could think of, but also that Harry was finding himself agreeing on the outside if not on the inside.

"I haven't seen you around here before," he heard himself say.

"You wouldn't have. Oh, and I'm Adam, by the way," said Adam. "Adam Young."

"Harry," Harry countered. "Harry Potter."

Harry half expected the customary forehead-check, but none were forthcoming. At least he knew that he didn't have to worry about the strange boy telling any of the teachers about his being here.

"So, uh, what are you doing here, then?" he asked self-consciously. "Only most everyone else I know who's my age who can get here goes to Hogwarts."

Adam smiled.

"Oh, I don't go to school here. I just persuaded my parents to let me have a day out with friends. I'm. . . well, I guess you could say homeschooled. Crash course."

Harry blinked behind the moderate safety of the Cloak and his glasses.

"I didn't know you could be homeschooled. I mean, I thought any one with any magic went to Hogwarts."

"Nope," the boy – Adam – said absently, looking off in a vague direction. "Not all. Well, not me, anyway."

Feeling peoples' eyes on them that weren't there, the two moved onward towards the Hogsmeade branch of Flourish and Blotts.

Harry had been in desperate need of extra parchment and various other stationary equipment, ever since Scabbers' and Crookshanks' private war had escalated all the way to his schoolbag. Luckily, nothing of great importance had been in it at the time of the incident, and the bag itself had been easy enough to repair (albeit by an apologetic Hermione) but some of his other things had been beyond a mere reparo spell.

He wondered in passing what had brought a person like Adam – who had ever heard of homeschooled wizards? – up to Hogsmeade just now. He certainly hadn't been getting anything other than vague aspirations towards answers to his questions, even if they didn't sound like outright lies.

Harry shrugged, and slipped through the still open door of the bookshop.

"Hey, Mr. Fell?" Adam called out towards the back of the shop. "Mr. Fell, you done yet?"

The other customers sent polite disapproving glares his way, which Adam promptly either ignored or didn't notice. Probably both.

"Ah, not yet," came a distracted and undeniably effeminate voice. "In fact, I just found. . ."

"It's just that I lost Mr. Crowley a while back, an' he was sayin' something about snakes. . ."

Adam trailed off at the sound of what seemed to be the collapse of at least a shelf or two of heavy books.

"Oh dear."

Harry stared in amazement as a man just on the earlier side of middle age ambled nervously over to them. He looked just like he sounded; dressed in old-fashioned tweed, with books carried on either arm despite the apparent emergency.

Harry had the distinct feeling that his father's Cloak had failed him yet again when the entire package of things that he had gone out to buy somehow miraculously were paid for along with the books in a hasty exit, during which everything that belonged to him neatly found itself under his invisibility cloak with him.

With that, the two strange individuals vanished off down the road, a dog following behind them that looked so much of a mongrel that Aunt Petunia wouldn't have let it anywhere near the street, let alone the house.

As they got steadily further and further away, Harry wasn't sure whether or not it was his imagination, but he was sure that he overheard a bit of conversation that had drifted over on the wind.

---

Adam smiled as he walked along the old path, an angel by his side and Dog running to catch up to them.

"I told you it was a good place, didn't I, though?"

"Yes. I do suppose you did. It would have been much better without a certain demon running off like that."

"But you've got to admit. It wouldn't have been half as interestin' if he hadn't run off or something."

Mr. Fell, or rather, Aziraphale, sniffed.

"I still wish he wouldn't, though. I shall have to come back here. I can only imagine what the school library is like. Not that I'm sure I haven't already got all of the more important first editions anyway, though."

For a while they walked and didn't say anything, both wondering in their own ways what Crowley had been up to. Then –

"Still doesn't hold Jack squat against Tadfield, you know."

Aziraphale smiled. Nothing ever did.

---

The next day, students dressed and went down to breakfast as usual.

The commotion caused by one normally unremarkable bit of the decor was, however, probably going to be spoken of for decades to come.

"-don't know who did it, but whoever it was is going to get expelled-"

"-don't even know what it means. I mean, I think I do. . ."

"-bet it was one of those Gryffindors. I bet. Probably one of the Weasleys; just like them to do something like this-"

"-bloody brilliant!"

"Ron! And I'll have you know that it's obviously highly advanced magic. Nothing else could have done it. Though why that, I'm not quite sure."

No one really was. The Slytherin table thought it was the Gryffindors, as it had been their mascot that had been targeted. The Hufflepuffs only knew that it wasn't them. The Ravenclaws could be heard talking all through the day about how advanced and complicated the magic must have been even for a small change, but none of them owned up to it. The Gryffindors themselves knew that it wasn't them, because the Twins, Fred and George, looked at the defacement of the Slytherin banner with envy every time they saw it, or any other snake emblem.

For the life of them, no one knew why or how the Slytherin snake had suddenly decided to sport sunglasses.

---

AN: ... I really, really wanted to do that with the Slytherin snake. That was fun. So was the story as a whole, though. It was inspired by the sheer number of HP/GO crossovers out there, and I didn't want to do yet another so-and-so-gets-a-letter-fic. I figured their dates were close enough to fit together, so here we've got a Book Three/Thirteen year old Harry and a post-Apocadon'tactuallywanna Adam Young, aged here at fourteen and still living happily in Tadfield most of the time.

-Oh, and Aziraphale miracle'd himself out of the 'book disaster'. I think he was on a ladder at the time. I take artistic license at the fact that there may or may not in fact be a Hogsmeade branch of Flourish and Blotts. I couldn't be bothered to look it up, and it fitted.

(Crowley would like to point out at this point that he takes full responsibility for Salazar Slytherin and his fallout with the rest of the Hogwarts team, and is quite proud of the fact that he's paraded around by every green student.)