Chapter 2
The first thing Harry feels is relief. He takes a deep breath and presses a hand over his heart to confirm that either he's miraculously alive or else the afterlife is a lot more like regular life than he'd imagined.
The second thing Harry feels is a tickle in his throat from inhaling the stale, dust filled air that he had nearly forgotten the feeling of. Coughing hard, he sits up from his ratty little mattress and wheezes through his confusion; muscle memory takes over and he snatches up his glasses before groping at the cupboard's door and attempting to shove it open. He's positive that the thing shouldn't be so hard to break through, but his muscles all ache from exhaustion and stiffness. The hollow feeling of drawn out starvation is something he's intimately familiar with despite the brief respite he had found in Hogwarts before everything went to shit. Shoving past the protests of his body fits like an old coat, and Harry braces his shoulders against the shelves for more leverage in slamming both his feet into the door.
It's startling how easy it is to send it flying open with the lock still perfectly intact, if a little wobbly now that it's dangling from the door instead of holding it flush to the frame.
Crawling out, Harry looks around with growing incredulity. The Dursley household is as he recalls, complete with the thunderous steps coming down the stairs towards Harry as he squints at his surroundings. This can't be the afterlife, can it? Purgatory, maybe?
He doubts his parents are waiting for him here, and since Vernon is already closing a meaty hand around his shoulder to shake him as he shouts something about disrespect, he reasons this couldn't possibly be the afterlife. Last he had heard the man was still alive, and Harry doubts he's done anything bad enough to warrant sharing some kind of hell with him.
Head still flopping about from the manhandling, Harry feels a little more awake. Probably not a dream. Maybe an echo of a memory as he dies?
No, then he wouldn't have been able to change things. Or was that how these things worked? For as many times as he's had brushes with death, Harry feels like he should be something of an expert on near death experiences, even if it doesn't apply to actually experiencing death firsthand.
Harry's mind snaps into the present when Uncle Vernon seizes his hair and twists hard enough to make Harry shout and thrash in his hold. His nails leave nasty red welts down the man's forearm and it infuriates Harry that he can't reach up and-
Ah. Right. Harry steadies himself and drives a bony fist up between Vernon's legs. Distasteful to the extreme, but he doubted a punch to the gut would do much considering its size.
Scampering back to watch the man double over and start properly hollering, Harry grabs the nearest thing (some stupid knickknack documenting one of the vacations they'd gone on without him) and hefts it in both hands just in case his dubiously real relatives get any ideas. Petunia is gaping at him over the banister, eyes bugged out unattractively while her mouth opens and closes like a dying fish.
She breaks out of the paralysis when a young Dudley makes it far enough downstairs to catch sight of Vernon's sorry state, positively trembling with rage. Impressively, Vernon looks closer to a heart attack than when he'd threatened Hagrid with a shotgun. A hysterical giggle of utter disbelief jumps from Harry's lips before he lets glass fall from his hands and shatter across the floor, putting dozens of shard between his and his barefoot uncle just in time for the man to lurch upright. "BOY! That is IT, I told myself I wouldn't put up with any nonsense from a little rat like you, you worthless bloody leech! We take you in," Here, spittle flies from his lips. "And THIS is the thanks we get for putting up with a useless lump like you? I'll not have it! I won't, mark my words! You're going to regret the moment you thought-"
Aunt Petunia is in her slippers and fussing over her husband with all the appropriate noises of outrage and promises to him that she can handle his punishment. Likely because Vernon may just strangle him now if he's left to met out discipline on his own, and nobody wants to deal with his corpse.
Harry, meanwhile, turns and darts out the door into the backyard. Shoeless and swimming in the rattiest cast-offs he wore as pajamas, he stumbles in the dirt and spins around. It's early morning, still dim, and the neighbors haven't seemed to notice anything yet. His heart is racing and he takes a few deep breaths to steady himself and desperately grasp at some plan to handle the situation. Being outside grants him some buffer since anything too loud would draw the attention of the neighborhood and the Dursleys could never endure such humiliation as their dirty delinquent nephew making a scene at this time of day.
An idea takes hold, and failing anything better, Harry snaps a branch off one of the shrubs he's tended since he was big enough to hold the pruning shears and rips away the greenery with unsteady hands. He manages to get all but a stray leaf before Petunia is hissing out the cracked open back door.
"Come back here this instant! You're going to make breakfast instead of being an ungrateful lump of a child, and then you're going to- to..." Her eyes have caught on the stick in Harry's hand and she visibly pales when he brandishes it as he would a wand. "Put that down! What do you think you could possibly do with a twig, do you think you can attack me like you did your poor uncle? To the cupboard, now!"
It's too late though, Harry's spotted the moment of hesitation and points the wand stand-in at her face. "Shut up. You know what I can do to you, don't you? Call Vernon off and pretend nothing happened, and I won't hex all of Dudley's bones into jelly."
The woman's hands wring with growing frantic energy. "There's- there's nothing you freaks can do! I know you can't do anything outside of that disgusting school!"
Harry bares his teeth. "On penalty of being expelled, yeah, but I'm not enrolled yet am I? And they'd have to set up a trial for me first. Do you want to find out how much I can fit in before an owl arrives to tell me off? I could give you a horse's ass for a face and make you live like that, not that it would be much of a change. Or maybe I could turn you lot into beetles and call the exterminator." Absurd threats he can't follow through on, but they're evidently alarming enough to earn proper consideration since Petunia only gulps fearfully before backing into the house and slamming the door.
Shaking from the adrenaline rush, Harry sits down in the cold dirt to try and find his bearings in this nightmare. The morning chill seeps through his worn clothes bitingly enough for him to dismiss that it's any kind of dream at all. He didn't have such vividness and keep his own point of view when he would dream, and he hadn't thought of the Dursleys in months so why would they pop up now?
He recalls the green jetting towards him and Voldemort's high laughter, but not hitting the ground.
At least it was painless. That is the most he should have let himself hope for.
Harry stays out of sight as he watches the rest of the household depart for the day, safely sat in the shade of the garden to ponder the absurd situation he finds himself in. At least they all can silently agree that it's for the best if there's some distance between the family and their dirty little secret.
When he goes back inside and climbs onto the bathroom counter to check his reflection, it's hard to judge how old he is exactly. Eight, nine maybe? Ten? He'd always looked a bit younger than he was, and the couple years couldn't matter less to him when facing that he's been shoved back in time. Here, Voldemort hasn't so much as tried for the Philosopher's stone. He hasn't successfully killed anyone since his destruction at Godric's Hollow. The war hasn't happened, hasn't even begun.
In this time, Harry would have no clue who or what he was beyond the discarded child of two irresponsible drunks that had been so generously sheltered by his aunt and uncle. He would be concerned that his time at Hogwarts had been an elaborate fantasy if not for how Petunia had reacted to his stunt with the "wand". It's sickening.
Still, he goes inside to cook himself a simple breakfast of eggs and toast, unwilling to test if his stomach can handle anything heavier. He's pissed off the Dursleys already so he may as well "steal" some well deserved nutrition to fuel his terrified contemplation.
It's a sick kind of irony that his life ended as deprived as it had begun. Hungry and standing alone to clean up his world's messes right up until his legs gave out.
Automatically doing the dishes, Harry begins clearing out Dudley's second bedroom and is kind enough to toss the junk and broken toys into Dudley's bed rather than leaving them in the hallway. It helps his nerves to be physically doing something useful while his brain runs on overtime for any decent explanation. It all makes his head hurt and his stomach threatens to rebel when he thinks through all the things he might have to do again.
He'll negotiate something with the Dursleys or run away, he decides. There's no way he can pretend everything is how it was, like he isn't fresh from battle and wistfully thinking of obliviating any memory of himself from the Muggle world. Maybe the wizarding wold while he's at it... no, that's not true. He's still the bloody prophesized boy savior but he can deal with that again if it means getting back to his friends. If he's smart, he might be able to undo whatever twist of magic let him slip between the sands of time, and instead find himself alive and whole with Voldemort perfectly mortal mere feet from him now that his final Horcrux has died.
Harry decides not to consider the possibility that coming back to life might protect Voldemort. There are years between now and any real urgency about that question; he'll burn the bridge when he crosses it.
He's painfully aware that he isn't the kind of brilliant academic to be able to figure out that mystery given the kind of qualifications usually needed to muck about with the kind of artifacts found in the Department of Mysteries. He hasn't even taken his NEWTs for Merlin's sake. That kind of dense theory is beyond him.
The thought occurs to him to spend the upcoming years studying and utterly immersing himself in magic before anyone can realize what he's up to, but before he can fully contemplate it, Harry slips on the stairs and jolts straight up in his cupboard again.
The door is intact and Harry draws his knees up to his chest as he waits for someone to let him out of the cupboard.
He is silent and keeps his head down, content to be utterly ignored by the Dursley's as he serves them a hearty breakfast and is rewarded with a burnt heel of toast. He takes his chore list without complaint and goes through it on autopilot until he gets to vacuuming the stairs.
There's no indication of what happened there, or none that Harry can spy. It's as terribly normal as it ever was. No bloodstains or strange new dents where his skull collided with the floor. The most he finds is some crumbs from Dudley sneaking snacks up to his room and that's hardly out of the ordinary.
The idea that for his every death he'll start from that point on is deeply upsetting. On one hand, theoretically infinite attempts to get everything right; on the other, that sounds like fucking agony. He knows that he'd go loony if he made it all the way to fifth year only to die from something stupid and go back again. No, absolutely not. Hell, he would probably go a bit bonkers if he stuck to everything exactly how it was because there's no way he can manage that big of an act for entire years, and that's assuming he can even remember enough for everything to happen the same. Knowing himself, he'd screw it up the moment he walked into Hogwarts.
Hogwarts is the key to everything, as usual. He simply needs to keep it together long enough to find Dumbledore, share his memories of the future, and then the once-late headmaster can help him put together a plan that would work around Harry's apparent age. They know where the Horcruxes all are.
Harry screams into towel when he stops to realize that a large portion of him has already given up the hope of returning to his time. He needs to deal with this reality or else he's going to lose the plot long before any opportunities present themselves. He shouldn't linger on how if he can't make a heroic return, all the friends he's ever made are effectively dead to him. He'd probably scare Ron with his current intensity and he knows he wouldn't have the patience to endure Hermione before they had sorted themselves out. He isn't the same person that grew up with them. He's a fucking adult, a fully grown martyr stuffed into a scrawny kid's skin.
When he lets the towel fall, he finds the windows all cracked.
Accidental magic. Lovely. Because that's just what he needs, isn't it. Even less control.