Chapter Text
When Henry Duncan Spens Goodsir is born the second time around, it is with red lines on his tiny, paper-white wrists.
"It's nothing to worry about." The doctor tells his frightened, exhausted parents. "Just birthmarks. Your baby boy is perfectly fine."
Harry, his dark eyes too alert and too serious for a newborn, watches everyone from his mother's arms. He hadn't even cried when he was born. For a healthy baby, there's something almost grim about him, as if he's aware of everyone and everything and doesn't like what he sees.
Still. Nothing to worry about.
***
Grim newborn becomes brooding child, and Harry's oddities only grow with age.
When he is seven, he suddenly decides he can no longer stand the sight, smell, or taste of meat of any kind. After a panic attack in a butchery and becoming violently sick at the smell of the pork chops his father had been cooking for dinner, his parents decide that perhaps a meat-free diet isn't such a terrible idea.
At age eight, Harry begins to have vivid nightmares, frightening his family by speaking a language they can't identify, calling out for people they don't know, splaying his arms out at his sides and displaying those odd birthmarks. He frequently wakes up sobbing, but never tells anyone exactly what it is that he's dreaming of.
He shows an intimate knowledge of anatomy by the time he's a preteen. [A teacher, amazed, once asks Harry how he knows so much about the human body.
"The library." He deadpans, and the conversation is swiftly ended.]
Harry has a way of looking at people that make them feel like a pinned insect, as if those too old, too tired eyes are gazing right into the worst parts of you and categorizing them one by one. He's well behaved, never causes fights, never even raises his voice, but most of the other kids avoid him because they're scared to find out what he's capable of, and the rare few who try to come close quickly find that Harry is cynical and aloof.
Nobody can figure out where this unpleasantness spawned.
He has loving, supportive parents, and brothers who adore him. He does well in school, particularly in biology and history. He's perfectly healthy. He, more or less, has everything he could ask for. And yet, Harry, it seems, is perfectly content to stew in this bizarre bitterness, to watch people go by with as if he knows them and has found them lacking.
There is a sadness to him, too. A melancholy that touches him sometimes, when he thinks nobody is looking, that floods his dark eyes with old, terrible pain. It's possibly even more frightening than the cynicism, that aching sadness, as if he's haunted by something only he can see.
Harry's only solace seems to be the natural world. He regards flowers and plants with a tenderness, as if seeing old friends. He shows genuine delight around animals of any shape or form. There is capacity for warmth in Harry, for gentleness and for love, but something inside of him seems... broken. Like he's seen too much, and given up completely.