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Harry closes his eyes when he sees the Dursleys' house begin to grow closer in the car’s front window.
He was nervous and giddy. It was the first time he was pretending to be asleep in the car. Once, when Dudley had fallen asleep in the car, Harry had watched Petunia, with slight difficulty, pick the slumbering boy up and carry him inside
She had brought Dudley to his room, tucked him into his bed, and kissed his forehead while Vernon looked on fondly at the two of them. Harry watched from the bedroom door, a good distance away from Vernon, still holding on to the shopping bags of that day’s shopping trip.
And since then Harry was enamoured with the sight. He wanted to be held, he wanted to be tucked in, even if it was in his cupboard, and kissed just like Dudley, even for a little bit.
(He wanted to be loved)
He closes his eyes and tries to keep his eyes and body from moving and to shut out the light from the lampposts. He tries to refrain from twitching when Dudley crunches loudly on a packet of crisps on the seat beside him.
His uncle is driving and his aunt is sitting in the passenger seat. Harry wonders if she’s checking on him through the rear mirror. (He hopes she is).
As the car pulls into the drive way and stops, Harry’s heart hammers in anticipation and he pretends to not hear the car turning off. Dudley is loudly telling Petunia about his day and how he had terrorised some of the children at the park; Harry tries not to fiddle with his hands so it wouldn’t give him away.
The car’s automatic lights turn on as Dudley is the first to open his door. Harry doesn’t flinch at the onslaught of light and keeps his breathing slow and steady.
He keeps his breathing slow and he doesn’t even peek open an eye to check if they’ve noticed him. He’s gotten better at pretending recently. It's simply one of the things that come with being seven years old. (Pretending not to be hungry, pretending that the Dursleys’ words don’t get to him.)
He hears one door shut. Then a second. And then a third.
The car’s automatic lights turn off.
Eyes still closed and not daring to breathe, Harry waits patiently. One of his teachers had once said patience was a virtue. That good things come to people who wait.
Somebody should be coming back for him now. They must be. Everyone has gotten out, so surely they’ve noticed that Harry isn’t there. They must’ve have noticed that he didn’t get out of the car with the rest of them, that he had ‘fallen asleep’ in the car, that he should be carried out or at the very least ‘woken up’-
The car makes the telltale noise of being locked.
Harry’s eyes fly open.
They… left.
They just left him in the car.
(They left him alone)
Harry’s big now. He’s a whole seven years old now, older than some of the kids in his class, and much more mature than them and Dudley. He’s mature now because he doesn’t cry when Dudley pushes him and he grazes his knee and the other kids in his class do. He knows he’s mature because he no longer cries when he’s locked in his cupboard or when he’s hungry and denied food once again.
He had learned that crying only made things worse with the Dursleys.
Unlike Dudley, Harry can take it. He wasn’t as big as Duddley but he too is brave and strong and decidedly not upset that everyone ignored him, that nobody came back for him and carried him inside.
The boys in Harry’s class at school were always embarrassed when their mothers hugged and kissed them.
Harry doesn’t understand. He’d give anything for that. For someone to pick him up from school and hug him as a greeting and be happy to see him and ask him how his day went.
He just stares at the front door from the backseat of the car. The streetlights automatically turned on as the sky got darker.
They aren’t coming back.
Harry has long learned not to cry.
But when he watches the Dursleys leave, he notices the familiar feeling of tears building up in his eyes, blurring his vision of the closed front door and dirtying his glasses.
A horrible sinking feeling settles in his stomach, the same one that appeared whenever the Dursleys were together, laughing merrily with each other, as a family, as Harry watched on from the sidelines, unwelcomed.
With a muffled sniffle, Harry moves from his ‘sleeping’ position, lying on his side on the backseat of the car. He hugged his chest and shut his eyes. Tears ran down the bridge of his nose.
The feeling in his chest had been getting better as he had gotten older, slowly disappearing as a dull ache, but it didn’t make it hurt any less.
Maybe it's getting worse, Harry wonders. He thinks it's getting worse, the throbbing ache in his heart.
It hurts. It hurts like the sharp sting of Petunia’s slaps or the burns he gets from cooking or the throbbing bruises he gets from Dudley.
But he won’t let it get to him. He can’t.
(He had learned to not expect anything from them. Not food, not clothing, and certainly not love)
He took a shuddering breath and wiped the tears from his face. It would do no good for him to not be in the house lest Petunia or Vernon called for him and neither would the tear tracks.
When he opens his eyes, Harry is not surprised to find himself in his cupboard. He hears Vernon and Dudley laughing at something on the television while his aunt pours herself a cup of tea.
Harry curls up on his ratty mattress along with the things in the cupboard that were forgotten and abandoned by the Dursleys, and thinks that maybe, he is too.