lux in teberius

"I'll be in my room, making no noise and pretending I don't exist." 

I run up the stairs as quietly as I can, the subtly creak of the carpeted stairs above my old room being the only sign I was leaving to do as I was told. I'd planned just to do my homework as this may take a while and I really shouldn't rely on Hermione forever, however, When I opened the door to my room, making no sound or slight of my arrival, I stepped back almost yelling - startled. 

What is THAT?! A strange creature is jumping on my bed, not currently alerted to my presence. I think of leaving and shutting whatever is in my room but if Vernon sees me out of my room? He'd have my head. I must make a choice, facing this unknown creature that could be potentially dangerous or facing Vernon, where the outcome is definitely dangerous. 

With that in mind, I quietly close the door behind me, not taking my eyes off the long-eared thing still occupied with the bounce of my mattress. 

"Oi! who are you?" I whispered harshly, an attempt not to be heard by my uncle. 

The Bouncing creature stopped, turning to look at me and suddenly I was glad I asked the more polite thing rather than ‘what’ it was because it still looked kind-of humanoid. The wrinkly being looked startled at my polite talk like it was foreign speech but it still understood my words. It tilted its head at me with a worried gaze. 

"Harry potter sir should not be going back to Hogwarts! It's not safe!" 

~ 

You've got to be kidding me.  

Dobby dropped the cake onto the visitors under the pretense that getting me in trouble would keep me out of Hogwarts. Little does the house elf know, Vernon want’s me gone but not in the way I would prefer. He locked me in my room, saying how I will not be eating again this summer and that I was never to go back to the ‘Ghastly school of freaks’.  

I wasted what little hydration I had that night when he beat me, the feeling of his fists hitting my face and cracking my glasses as he had done many times lingered with the bruises on my back and collarbone.  

My mind wondered as I stared at nothing in my room, the only thing I could do while waiting for my daily glass of water to count the days that pass. 

~ 

Harry was sat at the little desk in the corner, summer homework the only thing to keep him company despite the lingering reminder that he wouldn't be able to hand it in. Why do it? He kept asking himself, but this was drawn a line threw quite quickly every time his mind wondered. 

It’s all I have left.  

A few hours went by, and Harry had done all his homework. What now? What could he do? He read through all his work, checked to make sure it made sense and re-wrote what didn't, words that looked wrong because his writing with a quill will never be quite like the handwriting pens he used in primary school, corrected spelling mistakes and realized when he'd done all that he'd never actually read all the way through the books he'd gotten for his class work.  

Reading is Hermione’s thing. That's what he kept telling himself throughout his first year. But if he read anything, anything at all, about the wizarding world he would've had an easier time in classes and maybe even with his rendezvous with professor Quirrell in the deep depths of Hogwarts. He always enjoyed reading back before Hogwarts, his imagination and muggle chemistry always fascinating to him, Harry doesn’t know what changed. 

Well, Hermione isn't here? Is she? And with the way things are going, she won’t be ever again.  

So, Harry gets on his bruised knees and reaches under his bed for his trunk, he'd snuck it up to his room the second day of summer, he popped open the brass clasps and lent the lid on the bed as he sat on the floor to relieve the pressure from his knees then Harry dug through his trunk looking for something he knows will be interesting. 

'Defense against the dark arts.' is written in bold on the front of the hardcover book. Harry loves defense, there’s no way the theory would be less interesting that the practice, right? So why is it so hard for him to open it...? He read the title and all excitement for magic and DADA just drains from his body. His motivation to read as some form of entertainment in this living hell he's stuck in is gone. No, it's still there but almost feels covered, He can't feel motivated to read but he can feel it glowing silently, waiting to be used, tinted by something else.  

It was an hour later before anything new happened; Harry was laying on his bed staring at the ceiling. 

Tap tap, tap tap... 

bang. 

Terrified by the loud noise, Harry leaps out of bed and hurries to the window. There he sees a light blue car with the Weasley twins at in the front and- 

RON! Relief flooded Harry as he watches the familiar faces jail break him from his bedroom. 

~ 

Harry struggled to get inside the car safely but to hell with safety when Vernon is clinging to his ankles as if Harry was some kind of escaped convict. 

 ~ 

Harry spends the rest of summer with the Weasleys, he's ecstatic to be away from 4 Privet Drive and Its finally time to go shopping for school supplies, Harry loved being in Diagon alley with Hagrid so surely, he’d love it just as much with the Weasleys! But the idea of walking through fire to get there made him anxiety-ridden and he fumbled his words. 

"Daiganlily!" Harry yelled with as much confidence as a Mimosa pudica.  

So, with a flash of a vibrant sunny green our dark-skinned protagonist finds himself in a scary bits and bobs shop 'Borgin and Burks' and wait Malfoy? 

 ~ 

Gildroy Lockheart is the strangest man, don't touch me. 

 ~ 

Harry Potter loves defence! 

So, when it all goes downhill because Malfoy shot a snake out of his wand instead of attempting to get the wand out of his hand, Harry finds himself asking it to not attack him, because he can talk to snakes. And now everyone's looking at him like he IS Voldemort and definitely the heir of Slytherin. Harry potter isn't very happy at all.  

Distraught by all that has happened, the 12-year-old Harry James Potter decides that Malfoy is the heir of Slytherin and he's going to prove it. 

 ~ 

Malfoy was not the heir.  

after a few more months of brewing Polyjuice in a haunted creepy girls' bathroom and petrification's of anyone with a reflective surface nearby, Harry finds out he was wrong, and nothing is coming up Potter this year, is it? But it can't get worse, it's only up from here! 

 ~ 

The heir kidnapped Ginny Weasley and Harry is going insane. The tiny first year, baby Ginny Weasley? Really? She's a pureblood what is wrong with these people?! 

Oh, okay so Harry found the chamber and what would you know, It's Voldemort as a 16-year-old which is fucked up by itself, but it's more fuck up that he's hot and ow- Harrys been bitten by the Giant snake and why did he come down here...?  

Harry knew he didn't wanna endanger himself again and here he is fighting some big snake thing that talked but not to him because nothing ever goes Harrys' way and that snake fang that bit him earlier got stuck in his arm so yeah he used that to destroy the book while the snake was down for the count. 

 Is it dead? Next year I'm not getting involved. 

~ 

When I blink and I'm in the main hall on our last day I finally realize something is wrong. I don't know what it is, but I can feel it, everywhere. the feeling of being caged in suspension high in the sky, something crawling through my veins.  

I felt it so much I wasn't quite all there this year, dissociating and going numb as I'm used once again to destroy some big evil force that the professors neglected to find before they opened the school for the new year. the pressure on my lungs got stronger, I'm clapping with everyone else when we win for the most house points, but merlin somethings not right. I might be sick. 

~ 

Harry looks up at the teachers table, making eye contact with the headmaster.  

Then Harry felt better.