Chapter 1
Hadrian Sirius Potter was five when he realised his parents didn’t love him. That much was made clear very quickly. When he cried, he was told to hush and stop having a tantrum; his father’s headache was bad enough. When he laughed too loud, he needed to be quieter; he was breaking his mother’s concentration on her new potion. When he asked for something, he was ungrateful for everything they had gone through to give him a roof over his head. Hadrian quickly grasped that in the Potter household, it was much easier to be seen and not heard.
Hadrian was eight when he realised that not only did his parents not love him, and that was fine, he told himself, but they didn’t even like him.
It was his eighth birthday, a warm, sunny day in Godric’s Hollow, where the Potter family resided. The sun shone softly through his bedroom window, dust glittering in its beams. Hadrian watched them float for a while before finally getting up, flinching slightly at the sting of the cold polished wood beneath his toes. He got dressed in casual robes that were slightly too big for him — hand-me-downs from the Longbottom family, apparently — and quietly made his way downstairs towards the kitchen, stepping lightly so as not to alert anyone to his presence just yet.
He needn’t have bothered; the kitchen was empty. His eyes, a bright, electric green that his mother told him not to look at people with because they looked “creepy” and “unnatural”, locked onto a scrap of parchment left on the counter. Hadrian picked it up, and it read:
Harry,
Hadrian cringed. He hated being called that.
You slept in too long and we didn’t want to wake you. Dad, Eric and I have popped to the zoo for Eric’s birthday — the two of them were just so excited about the dragon exhibit you see, so we decided to head on without you. Call Flopsy if you’re hungry, and don’t leave the house. We’ll be home by 2.
Mum.
Hadrian hadn’t realised he was gripping the parchment so hard until his nails tore through it by the end. His hands were trembling. Happy Birthday, Hadrian, he thought bitterly to himself. Of course, Eric’s whims would always be put above Hadrian’s needs. Despite the fact that it was Hadrian who kept his room tidy, who said please and thank you never a word more, it was always Eric who got the extra slices of pie, and got to go to the zoo, and got everything he had even the barest conception of wanting.
Because Eric James Potter was The Boy Who Lived.
Hadrian had been told this story many, many times. When the Dark Lord Voldemort visited their house when he and Eric were babies, their father had been called away for an emergency auror-related incident in Diagon Alley. When Voldemort ascended the stairs to their nursery, their mother had been stupefied and cast aside. Then, Voldemort attempted to kill Eric, but the spell mysteriously backfired, killing the Dark Lord instead and leaving Eric with a large, twisted scar over his heart. The impact of the spell caused the room to collapse, miraculously leaving Lily and her eldest son unscathed. Hadrian would not be so lucky. Pieces of shrapnel carved into his forehead and down through his eye and cheek. Fortunately, his eye was able to be recovered, but the scar tissue was not, marking him with a jagged cluster of lines like lightning that tore white across his tan skin.
The Boy Who Lived, Vanquisher of the Dark Lord, Bringer of Peace, et cetera, could only be afforded the absolute best, even if it was at their useless, pathetic, bystander son’s expense.
Rubbing at the raised skin beneath his eye, Hadrian sighed. On the bright side, at least he’d get some peace and quiet today. Hadrian folded the parchment, pointedly ignoring the new wet spots that dotted his mother’s signature, and wandered to the Potter Family library to spend his birthday waiting for his family to return.
He would be later woken by a house elf who let him know it was past his curfew and he’d missed dinner, so the Lord and Lady of the Manor said he’d go without. They did not bring him back any gifts, though he was free to take anything that Eric didn’t want. Hadrian elected not to take any.
The scent of peonies and something close to licorice floated intoxicatingly from his mother’s potions lab. Hadrian stood in the doorway, entranced. He loved watching his mother experimenting with potions. Her willowy arms chopping and adding ingredients in a rhythm to a song he couldn’t quite hear. Usually, he wasn’t allowed in the potions lab, but that was only when the door was shut, and Hadrian was here for a reason, so it had to be fine, right?
He had woken up late that morning with a pounding headache, throat raw and itchy like fire ants had made their home in his tonsils, and his nose running and staining his pillowcase. To put it simply, he was miserable, and in desperate need of relief.
“Excuse me, Mum,” Hadrian spoke quietly, not wanting to disturb his mother’s concentration.
She didn’t react, seeming not to have heard him.
He crept closer to her, walking slowly in socked feet. “Mum?” he whispered hoarsely once more. There was no response. He reached a trembling hand to her elbow, his vision wavering slightly.
When he made contact, Lily yelped, dropping the entire contents of the jar she was holding over the potion. Her face went pale, and she cursed, putting a stasis charm over the brew and whipping around to Hadrian, who until then still held her sleeve.
“HADRIAN SIRIUS POTTER, just WHAT are you doing in here?!” She demanded, her face flushing with rage, “You know that you are not allowed in here when the door is closed, and now–”
“But it was–” he tried to interject, coughing through the pain.
“Do not interrupt me when I am speaking, young man! Now this potion I was making for Lady Abbott is going to take days to complete, and I was supposed to send it off today! Do you have any what this means for my business, Harry?”
He flinched, “I’m s–”
“I don’t want to hear it! Go to your room, now!” She turned back to her potion.
“But–”
“I said ‘now’, Harry!”
His vision blurred, this time not from his persistent dizziness, and he stumbled out of the laboratory, fists clenched to distract himself from crying. It was always worse when he cried.
Flopsy, the Potter house elf, found him later in his bedroom, curled up on the floor, passed out in his own vomit and tears.
Hadrian discovered that time was hard to keep track of when fading in and out of consciousness. One moment, he was climbing the stairs; the next, he was on the floor and uncomfortably sticky. He blinked, and then he was in bed, far too hot and yet toes numb from freezing. He’d bitten his tongue more than once due to how much his teeth her chattering. Days passed in minutes and seconds passed in agonising hours.
Finally, after many changed sheets and meals left untouched, Hadrian finally felt conscious enough to get up without immediately needing to throw up bile. He decided to go brush his teeth to get rid of the chalky, stale taste the potions Flopsy had fed him had left in his mouth. He rose, teetering slightly, and headed to the bathroom. It was dark, probably very late at night, so his eyes quickly caught the golden light emanating from a room down the hallway.
Eric’s room.
Before he’d even had the thought, Hadrian found himself peeking through the crack of the door left slightly ajar.
Inside, Eric was lying in bed, thick, cushy blankets swaddled up to his chin. His mother sat at his bedside, his father gripping her shoulder in support. His mother ran her hand lovingly through Eric’s hair, kissing his forehead softly. His father moved to tuck Eric in tighter, rubbing a thumb reverently over the apple of Eric’s slightly pinkened cheek.
Hadrian felt nauseous. He wanted to cry. He wanted to run. He wanted to throw up again.
All of these things would have drawn unwanted attention to him, so he did none of the above, and instead carefully withdrew from the doorway and slunk back into his room, locking the door before sliding down it, head on his knees.
Hadrian wished he felt angry. Well, he was, but not in the way he was used to. There was no horntail in his veins, thrashing in his chest, rattling and shattering his mother’s knickknacks and chinaware. No heat, no pressure.
Just an endless and all-consuming emptiness. Cold and deep, and completely, utterly inescapable. He flexed his fingers that were no longer his own and forced himself to forget how to feel. He forgot sadness. He forgot hope. He’d forget love if he ever knew its touch.
Because if Lily and James Potter were going to overlook their youngest son in favour of Eric, then he sure as Hell was going to make them regret it.