It’s a normal day in the Dursley house, birds are singing, Vernon’s reading the morning paper at the table, and an eight year old Harry’s cooking breakfast. All is as it should be, all except that Vernon seems to be getting a bit impatient today.
“Boy!” He barks. “I haven’t got all day you bloody ingrate, hurry up with the food before I eat you instead.”
As always, his voice grates on Harry’s mind and the suddenness of it causes him to flinch a bit. His own quiet voice comes out automatically in a reflex to placate his temperamental uncle. “Yes sir”, he all but whispers.
His uncle didn’t seem to be looking for a response though as he had already gone back to his paper. Harry’s trying to hurry, he really is, but his hands are shaking and he has to be careful to not drop any of the pans or cooking utensils.
Last night he had gotten in his uncle’s way when he’d come back home from a long day at the bank. He doesn’t know what had gone wrong at work, but it had stressed his uncle out enough that when he saw Harry heading to his cupboard to avoid this exact scenario, he had started in on him. Yelling at him for something or another and then when Harry didn’t respond in the way he wanted, or maybe he hadn’t wanted a response at all, he had just slammed Harry against the closest wall.
It had knocked the air out of him and he’d felt something crack. A rib he thinks, his uncle had broken one of them before he’s pretty sure.
Well anyway, he had gone to sleep that night with his back aching in a deep sort of way that he knows isn’t good, and this morning he at first could barely move at all. His ribs hurt something fierce and his back was sore in the way he knows meant he had dark bruises all on it.
But oh well, it’s not the worst condition he’s had to do his chores in and so he’d gotten to it after taking a few stabilizing breaths. Right now, however, the pain is trying to draw his focus off his work, and he’s having to move extra carefully to make sure he doesn’t mess anything up.
Privately, he thinks that even if he made an absolutely perfect meal, they would still find fault with it and punish him just for fun. ‘Isn’t that what they do already?’ A little voice in his head says.
Shaking it off, Harry goes to plate the bacon that he’s just finished up. It takes half a second, maybe less for Harry to realize he’s miscalculated the distance and angle which he needs to move the pan and spatula.
It’s too late by then and he feels the sting of boiling oil on his skin as it splashes on the side and over the pan. In reflex, he drops the skillet still containing the boiling oil and it just makes it so much worse. He jumps back a couple milliseconds before it hits the floor and some of the grease burns his ankles, but he barely feels it.
No, his mind is too occupied with the blaring panic screaming at him that he just messed up, he’s messed up so bad. He whips his head towards the table just in time to see his uncle, gaze locked onto the pan on the floor, realize what Harry’d done and start turning a peculiar shade of purple.
He imagines that his face is as pale as it feels as his uncle lurches to his feet sending the chair he’d been sitting on back a foot or two. The bulbous man starts screaming at little Harry before he even reaches him and then grabs him up by the throat.
The boy’s so small, even for his age that it’s not that difficult for the man to wrap his hand almost all the way around. Not letting up in his deafening tirade for even a moment, his uncle slams him into the counter. Harry doesn’t have the chance to feel dazed before he’s being slapped with what seems to be the full force of Vernon’s hand and falls to the floor.
He curls up just as the first kick comes and lets out a choked off scream when it feels like it’s cracked his collarbone, which he likely has. The air is driven out of him at the same time so he can scarcely make a sound when the second kick comes and almost gets him directly in the head.
He curls up the rest of the way though into fetal position and so it just grazes his ear and glances off his forehead.
Even though this is far from the first time, the pain from one of his uncles beatings always stuns him sick. A tiny child like him can do nothing against an adult, especially one so enraged, but he wishes he could at least try because everything hurts so bad and he’s so scared and he’s sorry please stop.
Laying curled up on the floor trying to protect his head, he’s kicked and beaten by his uncle until something in his mind….switches.
Abruptly, he doesn’t feel scared. The pain from the hits suddenly seem…less…..than they were. He knows that it’s still the same, can tell that there’s no actual difference, but all of a sudden it’s just, not really important. His mind isn’t prioritizing telling him about all the broken bits of him, and he knows that he is different. His mind isn’t clouded by fear or anxiety, and all he can manage to feel is annoyance. He is annoyed by this worthless thing that dares to hurt him.
There’s a whisper in his mind, a whisper that feeds his surety that -How dare he-. And he just somehow knows that he doesn’t have to take it. With the most minor encouragement from the whispering, something in him, a reflex, an intangible muscle—flexes, and everything seems to click.
The sensation of that little intangible something being used is the most right feeling he’s ever known. It has the strongest sense of belonging to it and he never wants to let it go. And with it, his uncle is screaming on the floor.
He’s tearing at his skin and his screams are unlike anything Harry has heard before, so unlike his own screams. He thinks he likes the sound of it a great deal better too. His uncles’ mindless agonized pleading is so unlike Harrys own desperate cries for mercy, that unbidden, a slight smile, oh so soft but filled with such sheer satisfaction spreads across Harry’s face.
He’s not too sure why his uncle’s in pain, but at the same time he can feel within himself that something else knows, and that’s good enough for Harry. Scooting back a little bit from his place on the floor to avoid the growing pool of orangish blood, (is it supposed to be that color? He doesn’t think so.) he watches in fascination as the large man’s rib cage seems to begin collapsing in on itself.
Even though it feels like an eternity, it’s only been scant moments that his uncle’s been screeching before his aunt crashes in from somewhere else with horror written on her face.
“Vernon!” she cries out.
Deathly pale, she rushes to her husbands’ side, however as soon as her hands touch the skin of his arm she begins to scream as well. She drops to her side and arches her back in some instinctual attempt to lessen the burning torture. Now that both are writhing in agony on the floor, Harry draws closer.
He looks at his uncle and sees that he seems to be a bit different than before. Where he had appeared to Harry as a terrifying giant, now he just looks pathetic.
Was it all in his head? Harry wonders. Was his uncle always this weak and worthless? However, it’s not merely the mans presence that he notices has changed.
Much more tangible of a difference now is that along with his significantly flatter torso, it also appears as if his uncles’ skin is falling off. Literally.
A puzzled look finds its way onto the little boys face, one that may have looked cute to someone else in different circumstances. ‘Strange’ Harry thinks to himself. ‘I don’t think it’s supposed to be doing that’.
Somewhere in the back of his mind there is the faint reminder that he thinks he should be upset by his family members actively melting into a pile of blood and bile on the kitchen floor. Then again, they weren’t actually his family, right? They told him often enough to make sure he knew that there were three family members and then him.
Three perfectly lovely, normal people, and then the freak. Worthless. Good for nothing. That’s what he was. So no, he reminds himself with certainty. He isn’t obligated to be upset about this since he isn’t family, and they probably wouldn’t want a freaks concern anyway.
During his short musings, Petunia had turned in her torment to look at her nephew, the child she had taken in, the little bastard that she knew without a shadow of a doubt had done this.
“Monster”, she rasps out in pure terror, her gasping voice barely fitting around the syllables.
She feels her insides liquifying, she feels her brain boiling, and she manages to look up from her place on the floor. Manages to look up into such vibrant green eyes, green like her sisters, but no,’ she thinks, those aren’t Lily’s.
Her sisters’ eyes had been a muted forest green, not whatever bright radioactive swirl this abomination’s is currently glowing.
She looks into fervent green eyes wild with madness and feels the resonating certainty that she should have drowned this monster before it had gotten the opportunity to grow.
She should have killed it when she had the chance.
And the last thing she sees as she oozes on the floor before fading into oblivion by her husband’s side, is poisonous green eyes.
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