Chapter Text
10th of July, Number four, Privet Divet.
Petunia Evans Dursley.
Petunia always woke up at 7am sharp. She took a shower before Vernom woke up, did her hair and descended the staircase, towards the kitchen, in order to make her husband and precious, chubby Duda a lovely breakfast. Petunia considered herself a great mother and wife – aways did and aways will – to her family. She took good care of her son, made sure he was well fed every day. Four to five meals a day, without mentioning also his school lunch, which she did it herself every morning before Duda got ready for school. She also made sure that he had the perfect amount of presents on every holiday of the year – 55 each, sometimes more – that she bought months in advance, just to be certain that her sweet boy would get the best and newest models of any present he wanted.
Petunia also made sure that every single day, without missing even one, Vernom would have the same breakfast, just the way he liked it, accompanied by a fresh journal by the table, just where he’s used to sit. She loved her large and round husband with every single ounce of her being and did not regret marrying him at all.
What she did regret, though, was not putting her dead sister’s baby up to adoption the moment she saw it , crying pathetically by her doorstep.
That child was the utterly cause of all the disgraces in her life, and why she could not live a peaceful life in her house. Of course, given how her sister was a blood freak, she just had to go and die to some maniac freak and leave her stupid baby for Petunia to provide shelter for. She did not want that monster baby out in daylight, what would she have to say to those who visited her peaceful house once they had a glimpse of the freak things that horrendous boy could do?
That's why she made sure he was well locked up. Thankfully, the boy stopped bothering her about eating more than two meals a day – which she found already enough for that scrawny, looking thing – after his 8 years, as she hated wasting her voice screaming at him to just shut the hell up and do as he's told.
The cupboard under the stairs was a good spot, no one would want to look inside it when they came over, especially Vernon's coworkers or bosses. She did not want to mess up any of her husband's meetings at home because the freaking monster boy couldn’t suck up his "tummy aches" during the day.
Giving him a bedroom would have just made things more difficult. It would make him think that he was a part of the family – which he absolutely was not –, so she would have to acknowledge him as a person, not a freak thing.
She did not even bother to call him by his name. Names meant giving him a sense of identity, that his “feelings” were valid, that he should be cared for, that he was something more than a monster, an irregularity, something that did not belong anywhere. Something not meant to be hidden.
None of those descriptions matched that boy. He was not human, he was not a child, he was nothing worth labelling.
The boy did not know his own name, or his parent’s, or anything regarding his actual family, specially where he came from and who he was.
And if all of this depended on Petunia, it would remain the same.
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Despise what we are used to know and what the history taught us, Harry Potter would not want to be the boy who lived if he found out about that statement. In fact, he would wish he had died with his parents on that car crash, but the universe wanted him alive, the wizarding world needed him alive, and it did not matter the circumstances of his life, he just had to be alive.
That's how he ended up living with the Durley’s for ten years, ten miserable years wishing something else would happen, wishing someone would come and save him from that hell of a place, wishing that anything would happen to prove to him that there was something else in life, that he had a reason to keep going and to be strong, that things would get better.
But it did not get better. It got worse as the days went by.
How many days has it been? How many years? Has it been a decade already? Harry didn't’ know. He had lost notice of time passing for a long time, and it's not that it mattered, really. His days have been filled with emptiness, screaming and mistreatment since the day he gained consciousness about himself, unfortunately.
The cupboard was the only thing Harry knew better than himself. He did not remember his parent’s faces, nor their voices, their deaths, or even his birthday. If anyone was to ask him to describe something about himself, he would have answered them with a deathly silence. He used to collect scraps of football cards his cousin, Dudley, left behind or thrown in the trash when he got bored of them, no matter how expensive it was. His cupboard was full of those. Scraps of another person’s items he used to build something that could define himself.
Harry only knew sport teams and players that Dudley liked, because he watched them on the living room TV constantly. He was incredibly educated on the most devious, dangerous criminals and government slips on economy because that was what he could read in his uncle’s morning journal. He knew how to cook a large diversity of breakfast, and could do it fast and efficiently, cooking the best eggs and bacon known to mankind, but just because his aunt demanded he learned how to make Dudley’s favourite type of breakfast fast and tasty, or else he would be starved for another 2 days.
He learned to walk fast but quietly all around the house, and also predict when exactly his aunt and uncle would lose their patience, so he could rapidly walk back inside his closet and avoid any unnecessary conflict – which, unfortunately, did not work most of the time. They would just yank him out of the cupboard to scream at him, just to shove him back inside.
Someway, between his six and eight years, Harry realized there was not an ounce of anything Harry knew that did not come from those individuals. From sports to the types of foods he learned how to cook to perfection, he realized all of those things that defined who he was and what he could answer about himself, where, in fact, crumbs picked from the people he despised.
He caught himself judging people that passed by the road, in front of the house. The way they dressed themselves, the way they talked, and even rolling his eyes when Mrs. Dorothy, the gentle, nice old lady that lived across from them tried to make Aunt Petunia donate money to an animal shelter. He used to get irritated of how insistent and overly empathic the lady was with animals that were going to die anyway, until he noticed that exactly what his aunt complained about every time the woman left her porch.
Harry also began to notice how rude he was with anyone who talked to him in school. Professors who tried to correct him when he answered a question wrongly would receive and immediate aggressive response – normally towards their appearance, or some other critique featuring everything but a real, constructive argument about how exactly he messed on the question, instead of ignoring the problem and blaming the teacher instead. That was a trait he picked up from his uncle Vernom, who constantly found creative ways to insult people who pointed a questionable action he made or a wrong route he took instead of acknowledging the problem.
He distinctively remembered a classmate of his making fun of his messy hair. Harry got so mad about that single comment that recalls asking how exactly the girl could give her opinion about people’s hair so openly when her mother made her pigtails while high on alcohol, because she could only even bother to spend some time with the girl when she was high on whisky, just so the woman would not puke by remembering who much she resembled her father. Mind you, her parents divorced because her mother’s husband cheated on her mother with a younger version of her, and they had a beautiful daughter together while her mother scrambled to get money working as a “needy alcoholic slut” – a term he heard his aunt using while referring to the girl's mother in a parent-teacher conference.
That conflict earned him four days without a single meal besides scraps that barely fed him, but his aunt could not make him take back what he said when she thought the exact same thing, so she insulted him until his ears started to hurt and locked him inside the cupboard for that period of four days. Not that it made any difference how much time he spent inside the cupboard, it was the final destination at the end of the day – the only thing, really, that he could even dare to call his on that house
There was also something more within the screams and insults that those adults used whenever they spoke to him. They were normally chosen with the single intent to remind him that he did not belong there. To tell him how much of a burden he was to this normal, united family, and how much he disrupted the peace of the house by just exiting when he should not.
Harry knew that he was not normal. He aways knew there was something wrong with him, he noticed how strange things happened when his emotions where overflowing, and how much his aunt and uncle panicked when that happened, immediately locking him up in the cupboard, as if they feared that he would end up doing something else and worse.
In school, when his mathematics professor, Mrs. Holly, called him “skinny prat” because he couldn’t answer a question on the blackboard, he got mad at the fat lady and insulted her back, and suddenly she started to write over and over on the blackboard, “Mrs. Holly is a stupid big back”. She certainly did not like that and sent him to the principal’s office.
She could not explain how her “compulsive writing” had something to do with him, thought, but he did get a two-day suspension. His uncle was livid, he locked him inside the closet for the full two-day suspension – no food, no bathing – and invited Dudley’s friend over. They kept banging on his door for hours, which earned him a big headache. After that, uncle Vernom threatened to get him out of school – which he did, but not that he really cared to be taken out of that place, really, but being able to walk on the corridors and properly eat for a day was something he was going to miss.
His hair was the one that bothered his aunt the most. She would cut his long, untamed hair one day, and by the next morning it was the same length again, passing by his chin. She hated that and screamed at him every time it happened. Uncontrollably and unintentionally growing his hair back would earn him another day without eating, and he found that punishment utterly outrageous.
Unfortunately, that was not the only time he was punished unfairly by all his family. Somehow, every single inconvenience was his fault. Every weird thing that happens, someway, its linked to him or what he’s doing. Plates swinging out of auntie’s hands? Him, even thought he was not even nearby. Uncle Vernom’s journal being stuck to the ceiling? He did that, “magically”. Dudley’s fat face being randomly slammed against his 7th birthday cake? Yeah, him too, somehow (thought he was, for sure, not even close to the cake, he did imagine his cousin’s big, round face being slammed against that chunky thing).
He himself did not even know why those things happened, and his uncle and aunt seemed to panic so much when something, even slightly, looked out of place, automatically looking at him to blame.
They told him he was abnormal, that he was an obstacle in the way of their happiness, that he was dangerous, and he believe their words heavily the moment he realized that, no matter what he did, he could not change anything about himself or do anything in order to make those people’s life’s easier. The only problem was his entire existence, and removing himself from it was an option Harry did not considerate, yet.
He was starting to get frustrated with his situation more than anything. He did not have any hobbies, any taste in food, any favourite sport nor any favourite anything. God forbid he had anything of his own. Every time he even seemed to like something, it being a dog or a stupid colour, Dudley would come and destroy it, or just demand his parents to buy it for him, to later barge inside his cupboard – the only thing, really, that he could even dare to call his on that house – and then proceed to show it off, making sure harry got the message.
“You’re not worthy of the right to like something.” That's the message he got from it all.
He knew that, always did, and it was unnecessary to remind him of that fact. He knew how worthless he was, how much of a dead weight he was to his aunt – specially to his aunt – and how much his entire existence made her miserable. As much as he hated the woman, he could not feel like trash when his mind reminded him of that fact.
He hated his life. He hated his uncle, for screaming at him and having that smug smile every time he slapped his face for God knows what he could’ve possibly done. He hated his aunt for making him do free labour like he was some kind of slave and reminding him of his abnormality. He hated his cousin for tormenting him without any bloody reason.
It was so, so exhausting, having to deal with those people every. Single. Day. Just breathing the same air as those people made him sick. He was mistreated, starved, and yelled at constantly since he knew he existed, unfortunately. He was genuinely curious as to how his aunt managed to take care of him as a baby. He figured the woman would have thrown him against a wall the second he started crying. But, yeah, he was pretty much alive, however not very healthy.
He hated his parents for dying, he wished he could have died with them. At least, he would have been in peace, and he hoped, been loved. It was a very common feeling for him now. He got to just pass the day hating everything, everyone and everywhere, but he was careful not to show it just so he could have a little bit of peace sometimes of the day, without Aunt Petunia screaming his ear out.
That morning was not any different, unfortunately.
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06:04 AM, 10th of July, Number four, Privet Divet.
Harry Potter.
He knew Aunt Petunia woke up at 7am sharp, so he made sure to wake up before her. Apparently, Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernom were taking them – yes, them – on a Zoo. It surprised him, honestly, that they were going to take him, willingly, somewhere. But it turns out that the old lady that used to take care of harry when they were out couldn’t do it that day – just a raised hand close to heaven –, so they were sort of obligated to take him on it too.
He could not say he was excited for the trip, thought. Going out with the Durley’s meant he was going to be heavily watched by them all day long. No running around, no smiling too much, no touching anything, no ordering or asking for food, and specially, no talking to people. They could not bear the thought of him making friends, or just someone wanting to come over and have them treat him as a bloody human being.
He got up from his mattress and put on another one of Dudley’s old, stretched out T-shirts. As he was leaving the cupboard, he tried not to make any sudden sounds while waking – no one wanted Uncle Vernom to wake up and come straight at him with any objects he found on his way.
He made his way into the kitchen and started opening the cabinets slowly, already frustrated that he would take ages just to fry some eggs because the people in that house could not handle the fact that a 11 year old, very much small for his age, could not cook food without making a single sound. Just demanding him to “manage the oil quieter” was absolute bullshit. Please do tell him when someone discovers a “mute oil”, thank you very much.
He got the pans from the cabinet was quiet as he could and took the lighter to light out the stove. He took some eggs from the fridge and a lid to close the pan. He braced himself mentally and, as fast as he could, placed the oil in the pan, broke the eggs and closed the lid, muffling the sound of the oil. He waited a few seconds, just to see if one of the adults would suddenly develop a supersonic hearing, but all he heard was silence. He breathed, relieved, and started cooking, slowly, while also making sure to keep everything clean as he cooked.
Ironically, even though cooking and cleaning was a part of the obligated work he had to do in the house, it was the kind that he enjoyed the most. Keeping things clean and organized gave him a sense of calm, despise the chaotic normality of that house. When he was given that task, he felt strangely connected – great lords, how strange that sounds – with the one single thing his aunt also found calming too, and that was house labour.
Speaking of the devil, footsteps of his aunt could be heard from the upper floor some minutes later. Slowly, he got the fried eggs in a plate and started preparing the bacon, while also making coffee because he knew his uncle liked his coffee done the exact same time that the bacon was done. When she fully descended and got inside the kitchen, she looked at him with disgust, and he could already guess how the evening would go.
Aunt Petunia walked behind him, inspecting the bacon he was frying – this time, for Dudley –, looking for any irregularity on the food to scream at him and slam his hand on the stove. She leaned over, looking at his neutral face while he cooked. “You better not burn this bacon, you hear me? Dudley needs the best breakfast for today
“Making sure of that...” Harry responds, flipping the bacon by her deathly stare as she travels to the other side of the kitchen.
Uncle Vernom entered the kitchen some minutes after, looking at Harry’s wild, untamed hair with an ugly, twisted face “Didn’t you cut his hair yesterday, Petunia? Why does it look like a rat’s nest already?” He asked, collapsing in the dinner table chair, the poor wood furniture barely accommodating his horizontal larges.
“I cut it, already considering just shaving it all the way and blaming his genetics.” Aunt Petunia grunted, placing a coffee mug in front of uncle Vernom while Harry put the cooked eggs and bacon on the middle of the table. Harry just kept quiet. That was not a bad idea, honestly. At least they would stop blaming him for magically growing his hair back all the way – or he could show up by Dudley’s bedroom and threaten to make him bald too, like he was infected with it. The unintelligent sphere would certainly believe him.
The main attraction descended the stairs, just as Harry dared to think ridiculously about him, already wearing his “explorer uniform” that Aunt Petunia had brought him – witch basically consisted of a ridiculously tight, yellow shirt with buttons ready to explode and big brown shorts. He practically jumped as he walked into the kitchen, posing with his arms by his waist in front of his aunt and uncle.
Aunt Petunia was the first to notice him, and she opened a large, bright smile as she hovered towards him “Oh my lord! Look at my sweet Dudley! You look so handsome with those floats, dear!” She adjusted the shirt, which was so tight it did not even move.
Uncle Vernom was the next one to go and glaze at Dudley, smiling fondly and huffling with the boy’s hair playfully “Look at this distinguished gentleman in front of me! You’ll certainly get a lot of girls showing off those muscles!” He spoke loudly, and Dudley started rambling on about which of the water park rides he would go first. Harry just kept quiet, making sure his face did not reveal his urge to laugh at how ridiculous his cousin looked, with buttons holding themselves with the power of Jesus.
Harry carefully stepped away, getting into his cupboard to go and pack his things. He did not get too much stuff, since he was sure that they would not let him even get near the water with other children, so he just got a change of clothes and tried to make his hair look less entangled and wild.
When he was out, they were already eating the breakfast chatting about mundane things, sometimes insulting harry just for the fun of it. Harry sat on the table and ate his part of the breakfast silently, looking down and filtering out their conversation. He got awfully good and used to that. It was a common occurrence for Harry to just kind of “zone out” on the table and keep quiet, since he did not want to deal with them making jokes about him, or humiliating him more than they did every day.
Unfortunately, Harry’s peace and quiet was interrupted by uncle Vernom leaning slightly in his direction with that twisted-in-disgust face of his “You better behave, you hear me, you pest? You go out the line once and you’re going to hallucinate the rats inside your cupboards are beef Wellington, understand?” He pointed a fat finger at Harry direction, and Harry had to fight the urge to roll his eyes
“Yeah, got it, no running, no speaking, no looking, no asking.” He chanted what his aunt used to say every time they were out somewhere that Harry was too.
Uncle Vernom did not look satisfied, but he just grunted and got out of the table “And comb that stupid hair!” He snarled before going out the front door. Harry touched his freshly combed hair and felt it was already pointing to all sides again. He grunted and got inside the cupboard, again, to try and comb his hair. Maybe he should bring it with him too.
Two hours later, Harry found himself sitting in the back of the Dursleys’ car, making sure there was as much space as possible between him and Dudley – which was honestly a challenge, considering how his horizontal expansion was taking over the car.
Harry counted thirty minutes from their house to the Zoo, which was surprisingly close. He was not expecting too much from that day. It would just be another boring, full of screaming day with the Durley's.
Oh, how he was wrong.
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