Chapter 1
Harry Potter, that's me, the most hated boy in privet drive. I was living with my relatives, the Dursleys and they were under the strict impression that I was the most heinous boy to ever live. They constantly beat me and starved me, all because I was different. Yes, I knew I was different, I knew it very well in fact. Every since I could think, strange things have happened around me. When I was angry at one of our teachers, his toupee turned blue, when I was especially hungry from being starved all the time, food would vanish from the fridge and appear in my closet under the stairs but the strangest thing that happened and kept happening was my ability to talk with snakes. Yes, snakes. It is as weird as it sounds. Whenever I saw a snake, I could talk to it in this weird hissing language that I somehow understood and the snakes responded in the same language! It was the weirdest thing and after some training, I was able to use this language even when no snakes were around. And what made this even more puzzling was that I could feel a sort of energy traveling through my body from my gut when I talked this language and when I concentrated really hard whilst speaking this language, I could make things happen on purpose. I could say ‘fire’ and a small fire would appear on my palm or I could say ‘come here’ and telekinetically bring one of Dudley's old toys to me. Dudley was my cousin, the son of Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon. He was fat, beyond fat, he was very obese, just like his father and had the same sparse blonde hair that barely covered his skull.
He was doomed to suffer male pattern baldness. I was different, my hair was unruly and thick. Uncle vernon had once upon a time tried to get it under control by cutting it but after it grew back night after night, he stopped trying and now, my hair reached down to my shoulders, it wasn’t as unruly as it had been a bit shorter, it was more wavy than a crows nest. My long hair was another reason why I was bad in the eyes of the neighborhood, after all, a boy with long hair? That was unheard of, only ‘those damn hippies’ -as vernon liked to say- had long, wavy hair as a boy but I liked my long hair, I even snagged a few hair ties from Aunt Petunia and sometimes wore my hair in a man bun. Petunia was different from Dudley and Vernon. She was neither fat nor blonde, she was a dark haired, thin woman with more neck than she knew what to do with.
She often spied on the neighbors over the fences of the garden, whilst she worked in the flower bed. She used to make me do the weeding but after she found me conversing with a very chatty grass snake. From then onward I was only allowed to do chores inside or -in rare occasions- outside to wash the car but nothing with the flower bed anymore.
That didn’t mean that I wasn’t able to talk to the snakes anymore, however. In the summer, I was forced to go outside and play. I mostly sat in the park and talked with snakes, only when I knew no one was around, as to not anger my relatives. Their anger came with a heavy price, beatings and more starvation, verbal abuse too… But I didn’t let it break me. One day… one day when I have honed my powers enough, I will stand far above them… I will be a god amongst men with my powers.
Now, let us get back into the story of how my life changed forever… that day when everything opened up to me.
I was cooking the bacon for my relatives, as I often do, when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it”, Petunia said, “wonder who that could be at this hour of the day”
She walked past me and opened the door. I could only hear a gasp before she began shouting, “You! I don’t want any of your kind in my home! It is worse enough that the freak lives here with us, go away!”
She slammed the door shut and came walking into the kitchen, “Dear, get duddikins to his room, this will get ugly, it is them”
“Yes dear”, Vernon looked serious and dragged Dudley upstairs to his room, very unusual… after all, Vernon never laid his hands on Dudley the way he did on me. Petunia was anxiously looking from the door to me and to the door again until there was an audible *klick* and the door opened. By now, I had laid down the frying pan. From the door came a man in dark, flowing robes with dark, greasy hair and piercing black eyes, that searched around the room, first looking at Aunt Petunia and then at me. He looked me up and down, noting my small, underfed fraim under the way too big hand me downs of Dudley and my bruised face from when Dudley had hit me. His eyes then snapped back to Petunia with a righteous fury, “You dare let Lily’s son get into this condition? You haven’t even fed him properly, look how thin he is and those bruises, don’t tell me you laid hands on him! I should hex you into oblivion right now”, the man’s slow voice drawled every word and said them dripping in venom, “Does he even know about his parents, about how they died, what they were?”
“He doesn’t and it will stay that way, I won’t let you make that freak better at the freakishness than he already is. He has been talking to reptiles, do you know how it sounds, having to explain that to the neighbor-”
The man pointed a stick at Petunia and said “Silencio” and her words became silent. My eyes grew wide. He was like me, he could make things happen too but he didn’t use the snake language but what sounded like latin? I needed to know more, “Who are you sir, what is going on?”
“I am Professor Snape, I teach potions at Hogwarts, that is a school for wizards and witches like yourself”, he told me, his voice soft and comforting, “Your parents were witches and wizards too, your mother was a childhood friend of mine”
And so, he told me the story of my parents and how they died and by extension, how I became famous.
“Really, I’m famous? Does that mean I have money? I want to wear my own clothes if that is the case, not the hand me downs from Dudley”, I said.
“Haha”, he chuckled, “Yes you have money, a lot of it, your father was quite rich and people have been donating vast fortunes to you as thanks for ‘defeating’ the dark lord. I will take you shopping now, we can get you some fitting clothes”