Chapter Text
Summer, 1986
A bead of sweat meandered down the little boy's forehead as he worked at the hardened dirt with a trowel. Small depressions in the soil awaited the sprouted tomato seedlings, but Harry's tired fingers lost their grasp of the nursery pot and it tumbled onto the grass.
"Stupid boy," the stern woman slapped at his hand, then picked up the seed pot with much more gentleness. As she carefully unearthed the white roots of the sprout, she sharply gestured her chin towards the weeds beside the garden bed. Dutifully, he got to work, getting to his grass-stained knees once again.
Among the weeds, there was a snake. Harry froze as the creature raised its large brown head, revealing the zigzagging pattern extending down its long body. Ready to defend, the adder's body reared into an 'S' shape to prepare a strike.
In fear, the boy tried to say, "No!"
The snake stopped. It seemed to consider him, and then it hissed back. "You ssspeak?"
Harry stifled a gasp, quickly turning his head to see if Petunia had heard anything. She was facing away from him still, kneeling in comfort on her foam gardening pad as she continued working on the vegetable seedlings.
"You can understand me?" Harry whispered in awe.
"Yesss. What do you wish of me?" the snake asked.
Harry licked his parched lips, glancing once more at his aunt. A flash of anger filled the little boy, and he heard himself hiss, "Bite her."
The snake was fast, slithering between plants in various stages of growth as it sped towards the woman. A shriek filled the air, and then Harry saw the snake rear back once more in that curved pose. It struck then, plunging its fangs into Petunia's hand.
She screamed again, flinging the snake off of her with a wild gesture. Just as quickly as it had appeared before her, it slithered away under the fence and into the bushes.
Petunia clutched her hand to her chest, hyperventilating. She pulled off the torn flowery gardening glove, revealing blood dripping from two swelling puncture marks.
"Aunt Petunia!" Harry said, and rushed to her side. His heart was pounding in his throat, amazed and afraid in equal parts. The child thought about what he could do now, what he had practised in the dark cupboard. Harry took her bleeding hand in his smaller, soil covered ones, and felt a familiar tingle flow through his fingertips.
A faint silvery blue light shrouded the snake bite, and even when Petunia yelled out again Harry did not let go. Slowly, the skin around the inflamed holes began to knit itself together. The swollen skin and the streaks of blood began to fade away. When the blue glow dissipated, Petunia's hand was unmarred once more.
She let out a frightened, choking sob.
June, 1991
It was a strange feeling, to lay curled up in your own bed and be overcome with homesickness.
"I want to go home," wished the child, eyes shut tight and aching arms wrapped around himself. But what was home? Had he ever been home?
Harry shifted on the bare mattress, old springs creaking beneath his leaden heart.
The Dursleys had made it abundantly clear that he didn't belong here, that he was an unwanted intruder in their otherwise idyllic life. Why else would they have delegated this dark cupboard to be his; when their actual son had two rooms to himself, and the guest bedroom lay unused most of the year? This disparity, among many others, only highlighted to the boy how he would never be accepted in this family.
Harry wanted, more than anything, to be loved. He was envious of Dudley, envious of the care and the doting that his aunt and uncle enveloped the other boy in. He felt envious of his schoolmates who looked forward to the end of the school day so they could go back to their loving homes, who didn’t have to worry about their next meal or of being hurt if they drew attention.
While his peers played and laughed freely, Harry learnt important lessons like how to decipher the moods of an approaching person from nothing but the sound of their footsteps. From such a young age, he had been forced to learn how to lie convincingly and how to sneak away scraps of food for later. He had to learn how to survive, no matter what.
Harry was envious of all the kids who got a chance to be children; while here he lay, rotting beneath the stairs.
As he got older, Harry grew angry too. He started to feel ashamed of his own envy. He hated that even a small part of him still sought out the impossibility of approval and belonging, despite how his supposed caregivers rebuffed him at every turn. He didn’t understand why after everything they had done, something inside him still yearned for a hug from his aunt or a pat on the back from his uncle. After all, he had tried to earn their approval – keeping his head down, not speaking unless spoken to, doing every chore they demanded of him – and yet there seemed to be something intrinsically wrong about him that they still objected to. It didn’t matter if he did everything right, because the problem wasn’t in his actions but in something he couldn’t change – his very identity.
It was easy to tell his parentage was a sore spot for the Dursleys. Harry had memorised every scrap of information he had heard about his parents over the years, and even though he had never seen a picture of their faces he still wondered what his life would have been like if not for the car crash that took their lives. Sometimes, he thought he heard a woman’s voice in his dreams, crying and saying his name – he wondered if that voice had been his mother, and if so, did that mean somebody had loved him, once?
Questions and curiosity forever burned inside him. The first rule of living with the Dursleys was to refrain from asking questions, but Harry pushed ever so slightly from time to time, and if he was lucky he’d get an answer of some kind. Vernon especially was a terrible liar, but it was riskier to push him. Without her husband nearby, Petunia was tight lipped but depending on what he wanted to know, that was often an answer of its own.
Through careful needling, he had figured out that Petunia held strong feelings about her sister, and sometimes that emotion let some small information slip out; however, even hinting at Harry’s dad was completely off limits and would land him an evening without supper. While in the cupboard after asking the wrong question, he would sometimes hear her stomping about as she cooked dinner and muttering odd words that he filed away for later dissection: Freakish. Abnormal. Wrong.
So he knew he had something in common with his parents, at least.
That thought brought him some small amount of comfort as he shifted restlessly in the cramped space of his room and listened to the repetitive, thumping footsteps on the staircase above him. Watching the wood dust jostle and fall from the ceiling brought his mind back to the other issue the Dursleys had with him.
Strange things happened around Harry. He couldn’t control it, not really. Not yet. That was never good enough for his aunt and uncle, though, and they did everything in their power to stamp it, whatever it was, out of him.
Just the sight of his unruly hair was sometimes enough to get Vernon’s face turning purple, because no matter what was done to it, even that time his aunt had shaved it clean off, his hair always sprang back to its default state as a bird’s nest.
One time, the tablecloth caught fire on its own when he was being yelled at, and on other occasions where he had felt angry at his mistreatment, the fine china on the shelves would clatter and shake until they fell to his feet in sharp, blue-painted shards.
But it wasn’t always destruction, no.
For he had also spent many lonely nights with a warm feeling caressing the bruises he sustained from Harry-Hunting; a soft light would envelop his wounds in the dark and heal him much faster than could ever be natural. When his shoulder had been dislocated from a particularly hard yank one day, he had woken up for school with the bone back in the socket, although the area remained tender. The only thing that wouldn’t heal away was the jagged scar above his brow, which forever looked freshly carved into his skin.
In a way it was both a blessing and a curse; on one hand the pain didn’t often last more than a night, but on the other he had nothing to show as proof of his suffering – who would believe his injuries if they just fixed themselves?
Harry had begun calling these abilities his ‘power’, but of course that was only in his head – he feared what the Dursleys would do if he ever acknowledged it out loud. Harry knew this power was just another thing that made him different, that made him so hard to love, but he couldn’t bring himself to dislike it. When he felt his most alone, Harry could almost feel his power purring deep within him and he would let himself wonder if the warmth it came with was what a hug felt like.
Only when he was absolutely sure everybody else was asleep, Harry started trying to reach out to the energy inside him. For many frustrating weeks, he had felt rejected by this part of himself when he could make nothing happen. However, every so often he could feel it working in his favour when he really wanted something – the turning point had been when he had woken from the hunger pangs and wished the latch on the cupboard would just slide open so he could get something to eat. When he heard the soft click of the latch, he braced himself for someone to open the door to his cage, wondering how his usually keen hearing had failed to warn him of another person’s presence. But no hand appeared to drag him out, and he continued to hear nothing but distant snores. With trepidation, he eventually pushed lightly on the door and watched in wonder as it swung open.
He had silently thanked the power inside him for the help, and his confidence in what it could do grew greatly. Maybe it was his strengthened belief, but from that point on when Harry would try to tap into this potential, he could feel it try to answer. The dreadful and lonely nights in his cramped cupboard slowly began to transform into something he looked forward to, a space to himself away from the Dursleys where he could see things that were truly magical.
When he visualised it in his mind and believed that he could make it happen, his power responded. Orbs of coloured lights chased away the shadows and floated around him like fairies, dust rabbits came to life and danced with the spiders on the wooden beams overhead, and he even managed to fix his glasses on the bridge of the nose where they had been snapped by a punch from Dudley. Of course, he had been smart enough to keep the Sellotape wrapped around it so his aunt’s critical eye didn’t spot the mend.
The fear of being caught practising his power kept him alert throughout the night. If he even thought he heard the creak of a step, the colourful lights would instantly snuff out and he would make sure to catch anything which floated in mid-air before it could thump to the ground. It was absolutely essential that the Dursleys didn’t suspect him of trying to nurture the part of him they most hated. Harry dreamed of the day he could put his growing power to the test, and leave this house once and for all.
Sometimes when he felt really resentful at the unfairness of it all, he would let himself entertain small fancies of revenge. The occasional thought of Dudley flying off into the air like a particularly grotesque hot air balloon, or the idea of an infuriated Vernon shrinking to the size of a mouse could bring a small smile to his face. But mostly he dreamed of a life without their company at all, where he could use his abilities to keep himself safe from any who wished him harm.
Harry remembered the first time he had tried to run away: he hadn’t yet reached the age of 7 and he didn’t really know what ‘away’ was yet, but he knew he had to keep running. Dudley’s gang had chased him onto the cafeteria roof-top at school, and the thought of trying to explain how he’d gotten up there to his uncle made him want to burst into tears. So when the group of boys had gotten tired of jeering at him from afar and went inside to have their school dinners, Harry carefully climbed down onto the lid of the large bin, where he scaled the gridded fence and hit the ground running.
The sun was setting by the time he had to stop from sheer exhaustion. Clutching at the stitches in his sides and rubbing at the burn in his calves, Harry collapsed on a patch of grass outside a park he’d never seen before. He laid there for hours, until darkness enveloped him and the sky above was blanketed in twinkling stars. It was beautiful, even as the exhaustion and cold began to blur his vision. Vaguely, he remembers an oddly dressed silhouette approaching him, briefly illuminated by street-lights that went dark in an instant, and the words, “It’s time to go back, Harry.”
And the next thing he remembers is waking up inside of his cupboard, full of hopelessness and despair, where he would stay for three days.
Harry never forgot how Aunt Petunia had told him that she was praying he wouldn’t return. When he’d asked who brought him back, she had sniffed haughtily and lied that it was the police, unfortunately, and that evidently even officers could make mistakes. He knew it was a lie from the way her jaw clenched and her grip tightened around her teacup, and because the Dursleys would never have called the police to tell them he was missing – and that person had known his name, no?
Older now, Harry resolved that the next time it came to running away, he would be much better prepared. That was the motivation he drew on as he spent his nights practising control of his biggest advantage, the wealth of power held within him. It didn’t matter how many locks or latches the Dursleys tried to use to keep him under their control if he could one day blow through the door entirely, after all. And if he had to survive on his own out in the big world, he would be able to cross each obstacle with this power at his fingertips.
A particularly loud thump on the stairs above his cupboard, followed by snorts of laughter, brought Harry out of his thoughts again. He rolled onto his back, minding the wonky spring on the mattress, and then spluttered as some falling dust made its way into his mouth. A flash of anger surged through his body as he heard Dudley’s guffaw in reaction to his coughing.
Harry was locked in his cupboard because Vernon hadn’t liked the look of defiance in his eye this morning, even though Harry had thought himself almost a master of the pleasant and otherwise blank expression. The carefully neutral mask would need a bit more work, it seemed. ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, it’s you they have a problem with’– the thought rose unbidden.
Meanwhile, Dudley had just scarfed down a large lunch and apparently decided that taunting Harry was the best use of his Sunday. The bully was running up and down the stairs, putting his full weight behind each step and jumping repeatedly to disturb him. Every time he got out of breath or lost interest he would amble back to his second bedroom, where he was probably breaking something expensive or shooting aliens on the computer. But the minutes of silence Harry was allowed were sparse and hard to savour before the older boy went on another annoying romp.
Harry threw his arm over his face and took some shallow breaths to avoid the wood dust, and tried to get his emotions under control. It worked, for a while, when Dudley wandered off again, only for him to come back after several minutes with renewed vigour. The portly boy stood at the top of the stairs and started to jump heavily in place, raining more wood shavings down onto Harry. This was accompanied by ugly laughter and playground insults yelled down at him.
The power inside Harry raised its head in response to his overstimulated state, the warm tingle blooming in his chest and encouraging him to lash out. Before Harry could consider the consequences of his fantasising, he was already imagining Dudley slipping on the top stair as he mistimed one of those jump, foot slipping out from under him. Harry could picture his cousin tumbling down the stairs, hitting his head on the edge of the steps while flailing limbs struggled to grab onto the side of the railing. Harry imagined it hurting the brute, and for the briefest moment felt some satisfaction in the daydream.
That was until he heard the sudden sharp cry from Dudley, and his cupboard was filled with the sound of the loudest thumps he’d ever heard. It was silent then, and panic shot through Harry as he sat up and tried to listen for any further laughter or taunts from the older boy. There was nothing for the longest moment, followed by a rush of sound as doors flung open and running footsteps approached. Harry couldn’t breathe when he heard Petunia scream, her shrill voice yelling for her husband to call an ambulance. He heard Vernon move with speed he didn’t know the man was capable of, sprinting to the kitchen to get to the landline. He heard nothing from Dudley at all.
Petunia’s sobs of her son’s name filled the air and joined the distant din of Vernon’s shouts into the telephone receiver. Harry sat frozen, mind thinking of the worst case scenario. A sound he wasn’t expecting to hear shook him out of his state, the click of the latch to his cupboard door followed by the door slamming against the wall, and then he was being pulled out by a woman whose face was ashen with fear.
“Boy, please…!” she said with desperation in her tone.
Harry didn’t dare to breathe as he scrambled to Dudley’s side at the bottom of the staircase. His cousin’s blonde hair was tinged in the deepest of reds, a stream of blood steadily pooling beneath his head. A shard of stark white bone jutted out of the other boy’s arm, which lay at an odd angle to his limp body. Harry swallowed down his panic at the sight. Memories of the myriad nights he spent healing his own bruises and of the incident a couple years ago with Petunia’s snake bite came to mind.
He felt the warm hum of healing at his fingertips and he poured all of his strength and power into the ten year old before him. Harry visualised the blood flow slowing down, the wounds mending themselves.
That familiar glow of silvery-blue washed over Dudley’s body, seeming to hold him in stasis as it worked its magic. The nasty gash on the forehead sewed itself back together as if needle and thread had expertly reunited the skin. The crack of a bone moving back into place was loud and jarring to see, but Harry kept his power working at its fullest.
The blood and rush of power in Harry’s ears made it hard to hear, but he distantly noticed that Vernon had returned from the call, spluttering in fear and rage at the sight of his boy enveloped in light. Was that Petunia holding him back with soothing words? He couldn’t spare much more thought to the matter, the healing taking every ounce of his concentration.
Dudley’s pale flesh stretched and wrapped around the broken bone in his arm, and Harry tried to picture those shards he’d glimpsed rejoining the rest of the humerus without a fracture to be seen. He felt remorse as he tried his best to imagine this to be a painless procedure for the other child, pouring everything he had into the blue light.
The sirens of the ambulance came as a relief, and Harry fell backwards, depleted of all energy. Dudley lay before him, looking for all the world to be asleep – if one ignored the darkening stains of red on his clothes and pale skin, that is. Things from then were a blur; paramedics entered and carefully moved Dudley into the ambulance, and then his aunt and uncle hurried into one of their cars to speed off to the hospital after it. On the brink of collapse himself, it was as if Harry watched the happenings from outside of his own body.
Finally when the house was empty and silent, all he could do was drag himself to his little cupboard and slump onto the thin mattress before the exhaustion took over.