Rebirth in the Room of Requirement (Part One)

He picked up his fork and speared a piece of potato.

Then he felt it—that familiar gaze again.

He looked up and glanced around.

At the Slytherin table, Draco Malfoy was saying something to Crabbe. Draco wasn't looking his way, but several people beside him were. One of them—Harry remembered his surname was Pucey—sat turned sideways, elbow propped on the table, watching the Gryffindor table with lazy indifference and the faintest hint of a smile.

It wasn't a challenge or a sneer. It was something more unsettling, as though he were watching something amusing that had nothing to do with him.

At the Ravenclaw Table, an older girl was whispering to the student beside her. She spoke softly, but her face was expressive: a frown, a raised eyebrow, then a dismissive twist of her mouth. When she finished, the student glanced toward Gryffindor, lowered their head, and hurriedly stuffed a bite of bread into their mouth.

At the Hufflepuff table, Ernie Macmillan was sitting there again, surrounded by even more people than he had been in the library. He was saying something in a low voice, and everyone around him was listening. Now and then, someone glanced Harry's way before quickly looking away.

Harry looked down at the potato on his plate. His whole body burned—not from heat, but from being watched by too many people, as if he were standing under a spotlight. He remembered going to the zoo with the Dursley family when he was little, standing before a glass tank in the reptile house and watching a boa constrictor. It lay coiled on a dead branch, motionless, its eyes half-open as though asleep. Only the occasional twitch of its tail showed it was alive.

Plenty of people had passed the tank that day. Adults led children by