Switched

It was a perfectly normal day in the Dursley household when the Letter arrived. Harry, who had woken early — after falling asleep late, but he wasn't tired — had already tidied and dusted the sitting room, weeded the gardens, and read the paper. He'd already been getting the iron out to do his and Uncle Vernon's shirts, so he'd ironed the creases out of it while he was reading it.

Dudley, Harry's cousin, thought it made him a pansy, wearing properly pressed shirts. Uncle Vernon wasn't, of course, but he was a grown-up. Harry was only ten — he'd be eleven in a week or so — but he saw no reason he shouldn't dress like a grown-up. And besides, next to the fact that he was tiny — just over four feet tall and about four and a half stone — and his face was too pretty, or that he did most of the cooking and housework around here, dressing like a grown-up was hardly the most nancy-boy thing about him. In fact, he wasn't really sure why it counted as sissy at all, since dressing like an adult man wasn't really girly...

In any case, he'd only said it once. Pansy or not, Harry was quicker than Dudley, and more than willing to risk a few minor burns himself if it meant Dudley would one day have to explain an iron-shaped scar on his arse to his wife.

Generally speaking, Harry didn't mind being called names, especially when they were accurate — Dudley called him "Freak" more than "Harry", for example — but he'd been jostling the ironing board trying to make Harry burn his fingers and when Harry had gone to the loo, he'd tipped the iron over and burnt a hole in one of Harry's shirts, and then, when Harry started yelling at him for it, said he didn't see what the big deal was, wearing shite like that made Harry look like a pansy, anyway. Obviously he'd had to do something to make the lesson that it was not okay to go around ruining Harry's things sink in a bit more than just shouting, so. Uncle Vernon's retaliatory belting had been worth it because Dudley hadn't dared touch any of Harry's things in almost two years now.

By the time Harry reached the last shirt, the sun had begun to come up, and Aunt Petunia had risen with it. She'd known he was awake and where he was before she reached the laundry, the scent of hot starch giving it away. She took a few minutes to inspect the rest of the house before she came to find him, a hint of fear in her eyes — well concealed, but she had been (nominally) responsible for him since he was about a year old, he was very familiar with the expression by now.

Harry didn't try to be a trial to his aunt, but he was a rather unusual boy in a number of ways, most of them apparently somewhat disturbing. Harry, for example, thought it was completely reasonable to scorch Dudley's stupid fat arse as a lesson, and he really hadn't meant to break his cousin's arm that one time — they'd just gotten in a bit of a tussle over their scores on their English tests, and Dudley had hit him first. Harry tried not to take advantage of the fact that Dudley was an idiot because that was just unfair, but he refused to hold back when their arguments became physical because while Dudley was an idiot, he was also almost twice as large as Harry and had a good eight inches on him — he'd always been bigger than Harry, though it had grown more noticeable in recent years — and he was almost always the one who took a swing first. And, not only had breaking his arm stopped him trying to hit Harry, but it also gave him an excellent excuse not to take any more English tests or do his homework for at least two months, Harry was pretty sure that counted as a win-win.

He almost always thought he was behaving reasonably, but he was aware by now that everyone else had some unspoken but mutually agreed-upon idea of lines that weren't to be crossed, which no one ever saw fit to tell him about until after he'd crossed them, playing a little too rough with the other children or retaliating a little too harshly, like with Dudley and the iron. He'd gotten in rather a lot of trouble for tripping Kevin Wilson, who was two years older than Harry, into the street on the way home from school, even though Kevin was being mean to Karen and Stacey and being polite to girls is What One Does (and it wasn't as though that car had actually hit him), and even more trouble when the school had threatened to expel him because Ella Carmichael broke an ankle in the one and only meeting of the (very unofficial) Little Whinging Primary Edificeering Club. (Harry was fairly certain that climbing school buildings hadn't been against the rules until he'd decided it sounded like fun.)

The words "authority problem" and "anger management issues" had been bandied about by the school counsellor in more than one meeting with Aunt Petunia. She'd also come out with "paranoid" and "delusional" after he'd killed the neighbour's cat (the way that thing watched Harry and followed him around was unnatural, it probably hadn't even really been a cat — he still maintained that killing it had been the only reasonable option), and the general consensus within the house (between Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon) was that there was something absolutely abnormal about a child who took his beatings for breaking the rules without a peep, or acknowledged that he would not be having supper for a week with a calm nod.

They didn't seem to understand that Harry knew the consequences of his actions almost all of the time. He wasn't going to try to escape them, he just didn't always consider them a prohibitive cost to whatever thing he wasn't allowed to do. Sometimes they were, and he decided it wasn't worth it and didn't do the thing.

Also, it was apparently weird that he'd admitted to killing the not-cat when Aunt Petunia had asked him, like he somehow should have known that was a bad thing without anyone ever telling him and that he was going to be punished for it, and should want to avoid said punishment. Which, he might have tried to hide his culpability if he'd realised he was going to have to write a letter of apology to Mrs. Figg for disposing of the demonic creature which had infiltrated her house disguised as a cat — he hated apologising when he knew he was in the right, just for the sake of politeness — but he honestly hadn't anticipated that anyone would have a problem with it. Since they apparently did, though, and Mrs. Figg had been cut up over the loss of her precious 'cat', he supposed it wasn't unreasonable to make him apologise for unintentionally upsetting her (even though he'd probably saved her life from whatever it actually was). He still wasn't certain why that would be the sort of punishment he would want to lie to avoid. He'd known he was going to get at least a few smacks for taking a kitchen knife outside and using it for something other than making food (Aunt Petunia was very particular about her knives), but he'd decided that would be worth it to get rid of the creepy thing following him around and he was absolutely right.

Afterward, he'd been informed that there was a new rule against killing living creatures (other than bugs), regardless of whether they were or were not actually cats, and he would be belted within an inch of his own life if he ever did it again, which, fine. If he was ever being followed by another creepy, arguably living thing, he would take that into account when he decided how to get rid of it, and maybe make some effort not to get caught if he did decide he had to kill it. (It only counted as breaking a rule if one was caught. Getting caught lying or trying not to get caught was also against the rules, and one of the most harshly punished offences, so he usually didn't bother unless he was sure he could get away with it.)

As long as Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon followed the rules about what happened when Harry didn't, he really couldn't object. Take the time he was five and almost burned the house down, for example: He'd known he was probably going to get his arse beaten bloody for using the stove by himself to make pie in the middle of the night, but he'd really wanted pie. A few days of physical pain were a small price to pay for the instant (two hours later) gratification of pie. Or, they would have been if he'd actually gotten the pie. (A towel had gotten caught in the oven door, and things had escalated when he'd tried to put it out. Fire liked Harry. It didn't like Harry trying to kill it any more than Mrs. Figg's 'cat'. And fire was a lot smarter than Mister Paws had been.) If he hadn't accidentally started a house fire and ruined the pie, and Aunt Petunia had decided that as an extra punishment on top of the beating he wasn't allowed to have any of the pie, then he would have objected.

But he only ever objected when they didn't follow their own rules about the consequences of Harry's actions (punishing Harry for not following rules they also weren't following was hypocritical) or changed the rules without telling him, which wasn't fair (how was he supposed to decide whether it was worth it to do a thing if he didn't know what the consequences would be?), and they hardly ever did that anymore. Uncle Vernon might be able to beat Harry into submission if he tried to fight back against an unfair thrashing or whatever, but he would definitely get a few scratches and bruises of his own (and possibly bites, because Uncle Vernon was about five times bigger than Harry, Harry had no compunction about fighting dirty), and Harry would find some way of getting back at them, even if he also got in trouble for dumping out Aunt Petunia's perfume and replacing it with water and just enough bleach to ruin her blouse or making Uncle Vernon's coffee with dirt.

The way Harry and the Dursleys went about negotiating more or less fair consequences for Harry's actions was one of those things which seemed perfectly reasonable to Harry, but everyone else — the Dursleys and Aunt Marge, a few of Dudley's closer friends, and a few of Aunt Petunia's closer friends, whom she trusted to sympathise with her position and the difficulties of trying to discipline an incorrigible little hellion like Harry — seemed to think was insane.

Over the past three or four years, they'd more or less come to an understanding about what was and was not acceptable punishment for various trespasses, as Harry decided to physically fight back or make his aunt and uncle's lives a living hell with pranks, or by just not being helpful around the house when he felt they'd gone too far. Yes, they could punish him for refusing to do his chores, but they couldn't actually make him do them, and since Harry did a fairly large proportion of the housework and cooking, labour strikes were a very effective negotiating tool.

Harry's relatives weren't very creative. All they ever did to punish him was hurt him or take away meals, and pain and hunger didn't bother him nearly as much as Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon seemed to think they should. They weren't actually going to beat him or starve him to death — he'd overheard Uncle Vernon telling Aunt Petunia after the Midnight Pie Incident that he wasn't comfortable beating Harry as thoroughly as he just had because he was afraid he might actually kill him — so they really had no power over him. Harry, on the other hand, could make his aunt and uncle's lives miserable in hundreds of ways. He could not think of a single occasion on which he hadn't been able to endure one of their little negotiating contests of will longer than they.

And on top of all that, there was the magic.

Harry would admit that this sounded insane, but ironically Aunt Petunia and even Uncle Vernon were more willing to admit that, yes, Harry clearly had supernatural powers, than they were to admit that it was reasonable to kill that stupid (not-)cat or make pie in the middle of the night. They certainly didn't like it, and it wasn't at all acceptable for him to talk about it, but they didn't deny it was real. Apparently it ran in Aunt Petunia's family — Harry's mother had been a witch, and since she'd met his father at her magic school, he'd probably been a wizard — and there was a shady government agency of some sort that sent evil wizards around to make normal people forget about magic when they thought Harry was being too obvious about it. (And Harry, but he always remembered the next time he discovered, oh hey, look at this thing I figured out I can do...wait a minute...)

One of his and Aunt Petunia's greatest areas of common ground was their shared hatred of the evil secret government wizards and their meddling. Aunt Petunia did blame Harry for getting their attention, a bit, but she knew he didn't do it on purpose, and they didn't make her forget about magic (because her sister had been a witch, she was allowed to know, apparently), so she'd actually told him about magic herself the last couple of times after they made him forget, because it stood to reason that he'd do a better job not doing (big, attention-catching) magic if he knew it existed than if he didn't. Harry thought this was smart and very reasonable, and it made the two of them allies of a sort, at least in this.

At the moment, though, she was giving him that particular look because Harry's good moods could be very good for his aunt — see: tidying the sitting room and weeding the gardens, and pressing Uncle Vernon's shirts as well as his own because he was bored and needed something to do — or they could be very, very bad — see: the time he'd tried to make pie and nearly burnt down the house. And it was sort of hard to predict if and when they would go from one to the other, since Harry was fantastically bad at judging whether his decisions were acceptable even when he wasn't in a particularly good mood and certain that he could do no wrong (even if he knew he was doing something which was against the rules and would have consequences).

The fact that Aunt Petunia found Harry a little terrifying, even when he hadn't done anything bad or broken any rules at all, did amuse him. He gave her a charming grin. "Good morning, Aunt Petunia."

"Good morning, Harry," she replied, a certain note of wariness in her tone. "How long have you been up?" (Translation: What have you been doing while I was asleep and couldn't keep an eye on you?)

Harry shrugged. "Since three thirty? four? Long enough to tidy the sitting room and weed the gardens."

Her eyes narrowed, as though there was something inherently suspicious in Harry doing chores. There wasn't. Harry did at least half the chores around here, even when he wasn't awake and bored in the middle of the night. If it were Dudley doing chores, that would be suspicious — Harry's cousin was entirely incapable of doing anything for himself.

How much of his general inability to be a productive member of the household was laziness, and how much the fact that he was obviously slow, and couldn't solve even the simplest problems for himself (or apparently remember which plants were herbs and flowers that hadn't flowered yet, and which were weeds), Harry couldn't really say. He suspected at least part of it was laziness, but he also suspected there was some truth in Aunt Petunia's implications (years ago now) that Harry had to take care of Dudley and do chores when he didn't because Dudley was...special and couldn't be expected to accomplish much of anything in his life or take care of himself. (Dudley couldn't be allowed to know this, because it would be very upsetting to him, and rough as they might occasionally play, Harry didn't hate his cousin. It wasn't his fault he was special any more than it was Harry's fault he was magic and freakishly good at everything, so Harry tried not to make him feel shite about it.)

"You're lucky the neighbours didn't call the police, seeing you skulking around outside with a torch in the middle of the night."

Well that was silly. He giggled. "I'm pretty sure they were asleep. It was the middle of the night. And besides, I didn't use a torch. It wasn't that dark out." There were streetlights, after all, and the moon was nearly full, and Harry was pretty sure he was better at seeing in the dark than most people, anyway. He did have perfect eyesight, and just sharper senses than most people in general (which he thought might be a magic thing), but he attributed his night vision specifically to spending so much time locked in the cupboard under the stairs when he was very small, before he'd learned how to use magic to unlock it and gotten big enough Uncle Vernon wasn't (too) worried about seriously injuring him if he smacked him around as a punishment instead.

He might have attributed it to the fact that he might actually have cat eyes — humans simply didn't have eyes that colour green — but his pupils weren't slitted. His mother's eyes had, apparently, been the same, and one of the evil wizards (an evil witch, actually) who periodically made him forget about magic had eyes that were purple, so he thought maybe it was just that normal humans didn't have eyes that colour. Magic freaks could, Harry suspected, have any colour eyes.

The look Aunt Petunia gave him said not needing a torch didn't make it better, so he changed the subject. "I was going to make waffles for breakfast, unless you had other plans."

"Fry the bacon too, before it goes off. And I couldn't find one of my blue shoes yesterday. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?" she asked, again with unwonted suspicion.

"The robin's egg ones, with the little heel?" He held his fingers up about half an inch apart.

"Yes, those."

"Aunt Marge's dog chewed it last time she was here. That's why you told me I could neuter him the next time he tried to bite me." Unfortunately she'd said it in front of Aunt Marge, who had ensured that Ripper, prize-winning bulldog and the star stud of her dog-breeding business, stayed well away from Harry for the rest of the visit. Not that Harry had particularly wanted to emasculate the poor animal and/or ruin Aunt Marge's livelihood — he wouldn't have done it — he just liked playing with him. Well, Harry was playing, Ripper was dead serious about proving himself the biggest, baddest dog in the room, which was just adorable, really. (Ripper might've outweighed Harry at the time, but Harry had thumbs, so.) Aunt Petunia was the one who was worried that the neighbours would see Harry rolling around on the ground fighting a dog like a bloody animal himself. (She said it was because she didn't want to have to take him to A&E when Ripper finally took a chunk out of him, but that was obviously a lie, taking Harry to A&E would be a great excuse for her to spend several hours away from her sister-in-law.)

Aunt Petunia scowled at the memory. "Oh, yes. Never mind, then. I'm taking Dudley to the shops to get his new school uniform after breakfast — and apparently to look for a new pair of blue flats. Bloody dog." That was muttered under her breath, despite the fact that Harry was well aware of her opinion of Aunt Marge and her dogs, and that she swore when she thought the boys weren't listening. "You can come if you lighten your hair."

"I was waiting until you and Uncle Vernon were awake to take a shower," Harry said, by way of explaining why his hair wasn't already a much lighter, reddish brown. (If he waited until Dudley woke up of his own accord as well he might have to wait until noon.)

Aunt Petunia did not, as a rule, like magic, or the fact that it existed. She wanted nothing more from life than to be financially secure and attract as little attention from the authorities as possible (and only admiration from the neighbours). She didn't like sticking out, and found it personally offensive that the world didn't always make sense, and there were parts of it she would never have access to, like magic and Buckingham Palace. Most of the problems in Aunt Petunia's life, Harry thought, came down to her desire to be normal (despite being stuck with an abnormal child like him, and before him a sister like Lily) being at odds with her desire to seem normal (even if that meant endorsing certain abnormalities to compensate for other abnormalities).

For example, one of the few bits of magic which Aunt Petunia had declared to be acceptable, and even encouraged, was changing his hair colour, because it meant strangers didn't look at her funny for having a child who so obviously didn't match her colouring or her husband's. Dudley's hair had grown darker over the past several years so it might almost be called brown rather than blond. It was still much lighter than his father's, but their faces were very similar, and they were both chunky blokes and tended toward ruddiness, so it was obvious he was related to Uncle Vernon, and he didn't look impossibly different from Aunt Petunia.

Harry, on the other hand, was short and thin, pretty and deceptively delicate-looking. (Approximately no one would expect Harry to be able to win a fight with Dudley, or anyone else for that matter.) He had cat-green eyes, hair so black it was almost blue, and skin pale enough he looked like a bloody vampire. (A sunburned vampire at the moment — he hated the oiliness of sunscreen, and overly-large hats could only do so much, which was why he preferred to weed the garden in the middle of the night.) Aunt Petunia was thin, but also tall — very tall, for a woman. She might be called willowy if she weren't so tense all the time, Harry thought. If Harry were Aunt Petunia's child, his father would have to have been a very striking midget, and snapping at random store clerks and passers-by that he was her nephew was not normal, unobtrusive behaviour, especially since he also didn't look much like a boy.

Unlike using magic to change his hair colour, they hadn't actually discussed it, but Harry suspected that Aunt Petunia was aware of this, and deliberately cut his hair longer than was fashionable for boys because he would stick out more if strangers thought he was a girl with a boy's bowl cut. On more than one occasion — thankfully when it was just the two of them, Dudley would never shut up about it if he knew — shopgirls had adoringly insisted that Harry would look just precious in some frock or other, and Aunt Petunia had been pressured into 'letting' Harry try them on. Not that he really objected to doing so — the shopgirls weren't wrong, he did make a cute girl, which made Aunt Petunia hilariously uncomfortable — but it was hardly as though he'd been begging to try them. He liked his slacks and button-up shirts.

He might look less girlish if he didn't make a point of wearing pressed shirts and trousers all the time, but on the other hand, he might just look like a girl Aunt Petunia didn't care enough about to dress properly. If he was going to look like a girl, he'd rather be a somewhat eccentric but undeniably well-dressed girl than a girl who looked dressed out of a charity bin, in denim shorts and vests. Not that his clothes weren't mostly from second-hand shops — it would be more work to take Dudley's cast-offs in enough not to fall off of Harry than it was worth to save a few pounds buying second-hand clothes — but in clothes like those the boys in Little Whinging favoured, it was very obvious that he was the smallest, skinniest boy in the neighbourhood. It hardly mattered that he could kick Dudley's arse, he still looked undeniably weedy and pathetic, more so the easier it was to compare them. Therefore, it was better to dress differently. Plus, Aunt Petunia had allowed Harry to pick his own clothes for the past couple of years, so long as they were cheap and serviceable, and since the poncy nancy-boy aesthetic wasn't exactly popular, he tended to find nicer, less worn things in his size going that direction.

Though Harry did also just like making people expect him to be completely different than he actually was. It was never not funny when they realised how badly they'd misjudged him, and there was a certain intimidation factor in portraying the image of a buttoned-down, handwringing sissy while actually having nerves of steel and somewhat notoriously having bitten a piece out of John Carson's ear when he first moved to the neighbourhood and thought pushing around the short, skinny, soft-looking weirdo whose company they obviously didn't much care for would endear him to the more rough-and-tumble looking boys. (Dudley had warned him, but apparently he'd thought Dudley was saying he would beat John up if John kicked Harry's arse. Hysterical.)

So, prissy little fusspot-looking Harry Potter had a reputation for being very well behaved, a perfect little angel...until he really, really wasn't. And in some circles (mostly boys his own age and Petunia's close friends) for being a dangerous psycho freak who once killed (something that he still didn't believe was) a cat for looking at him funny and threatened to cut Piers's balls off with a piece of glass from a broken pickle jar and make him eat them if he didn't take back that Harry's dead mother was a dirty cow. He'd gotten as far as pantsing the twat before Malcom had managed to knock him out with a cricket bat. (Harry had been in a particularly bad mood that day. He'd actually apologised after because that was...admittedly disproportionate for a bit of standard teasing.)

Besides, taking pride in one's appearance was classy.

In any case, Aunt Petunia approved of Harry having long hair and dressing like a very short adult because he looked more normal if people thought he was a girl, and she thought people would think she starved him if they saw him in shorts and tee-shirts. (Arguably she didn't even when he was denied meals for several days in a row, because if he would just do whatever she was trying to coerce him into he would be allowed to eat — clearly it was Harry's choice not to behave, and therefore not to eat.) Even though long-haired hoodlums were a symptom of the moral decay of society (per Uncle Vernon), and it was objectively not in keeping with fashion norms for a ten-year-old from Little Whinging to wear slacks and pressed shirts every day.

(The neighbours knew, of course, that Harry was a boy, but they assumed Aunt Petunia had to choose her battles with him. The neighbourhood, generally speaking, held a great deal of sympathy for Aunt Petunia, forced to do the best she could with the mad nephew she'd never asked to be saddled with. That didn't mean they didn't also expect her to fail, and Harry to end up in prison by the age of eighteen. Or possibly a mental ward.)

Similarly, she supported Harry lightening his hair a bit more every couple of months or so over the past few years — slowly enough that he was fairly certain none of the neighbours had noticed — to the point that it was very obvious when he hadn't done it, and when he was out in public with Aunt Petunia he might pass for her (eight- or nine-year-old) daughter with little notice from strangers. It didn't last all day, though, and he needed a mirror to get the colour right, so he usually did it after taking a shower in the morning, and again when he came home from school (or, since it was summer, just any time before he went out in the afternoon).

"Very thoughtful," Aunt Petunia said, in a vaguely approving tone. "If you're still bored after we return, the upstairs windows could use washing."

Harry nodded. Aunt Petunia hated washing the windows. "Noted. Can we stop at the library as well as the shops?" (Translation: I want a reward for doing your least-favourite chore.)

"I suppose, if you do the blinds as well." (Translation: Yes. Thank you, Harry.)

"MUM!" Dudley called, most likely from his bedroom. "Where are all my shorts?!"

Aunt Petunia raised an eyebrow at Harry.

"They were all dirty. I brought the laundry down, too." He grinned. "Tell him to man up and go commando."

"Don't be absurd, Harry. The uniforms will need to be fitted. It's summer. He can wear swim trunks until you finish a load of underclothes." (Translation: Please start a load of laundry, Harry — the annoyance in her tone was for Dudley delaying her plans, not Harry.)

"Yes, Ma'am."

She stalked back toward the stairs to solve her oversized offspring's wardrobe malfunction for him, muttering under her breath about the challenges of raising boys. Harry didn't entirely think that was fair. He, at least, was fairly self-sufficient when it came to things like making sure to put his dirty clothes in the laundry before he ran out of clean ones. He occasionally even did the laundry himself, as evidenced by the fact that he was currently ironing shirts. (Dudley, he was fairly certain, had no idea how to iron a shirt, and after that unfortunate run-in between his arse and the iron he had no interest in learning.) Really, most of the challenges of raising Dudley were related to the fact that he was actually a mentally retarded tub of lard than the fact that said lard tub was pretending to be a boy. (Though of course that was the sort of thing Harry wouldn't say to his face, because bullying one's own cousins for things they have no control over was not What One Does.)

Forty minutes later, Harry had taken a shower and fixed his stupid hair, bacon was frying, and the tub of lard, in his violently orange swim trunks and a Hawaiian-print shirt, was seated at the kitchen table with the waffles. When the letters flopped onto the mat, Aunt Petunia was dissecting a grapefruit and Uncle Vernon was eyeing his perfectly pressed newspaper with extreme suspicion. (Harry was pretty sure he wasn't insane, he'd definitely read somewhere that was a thing upper-class nobs used to have their servants do, though personally he'd found it a bit awkward, trying to read the oversized pages without creasing them again. He wasn't entirely certain what the point was meant to be...)

"Get the mail, Dudley," he ordered his son, as though the paper might explode if he took his eye off it for the thirty seconds it would take to fetch it himself.

"Get the mail, Harry!" the fat arse demanded through a mouthful of waffle and a gratuitous amount of butter and syrup.

("Don't talk with your mouth full, Darling," Aunt Petunia reprimanded him.)

"Fine, but if the bacon is burned, it's on you!" Harry said, with absolutely no intention of leaving the kitchen.

Dudley, outmanoeuvred, scowled through the doorway at Harry, but scooted his chair away from the table with a horrible scrape of wood on linoleum. A minute later he announced, "Oi! Freak! Some school wants to teach you how to be a witch! Ha!"

Uncle Vernon choked on his coffee. He, like Aunt Petunia, truly wanted nothing more from life than to be perfectly normal and boring. He liked going to his office and feeling important shouting at people, and watching football and rugby on telly (their shared appreciation of rugby was Harry's greatest area of common ground with Uncle Vernon), and going golfing with his boss and the owner of their company on weekends. He took a great deal of pride in the greenness of their front lawn and the shininess of his new company car, and spent too many hours and far too much money (in Harry's opinion) decorating Number Four for the holidays, in a mutually unacknowledged (but very real and very obvious) competition with Mister Billings at Number Seven.

For several years when Harry was younger, from perhaps the age of two or three to six or seven, Uncle Vernon had held some hope that, with enough corrective effort on his part, Harry could be trained not to do magic, at all, ever. Such corrective efforts generally consisted of locking Harry in the cupboard under the stairs — which was very boring, Harry had generally resorted to making annoying noises until he was let out, but that didn't really work when the Dursleys went out to dinner or something to avoid his annoying noise-making — or, later, thumping him, because doing magic was against the rules. Like with most rules, though, the punishment was hardly ever reason enough not to do a thing, and since Uncle Vernon, like Harry and everyone else besides Aunt Petunia, was periodically made to forget that magic existed (when Harry accidentally did a big magic, and the evil wizards showed up), his enforcement of that particular rule was inconsistent at best.

The general pattern had become: Harry discovers magic; Harry remembers having discovered magic several times already; Harry practises little magics he knows won't make the evil wizards show up; Uncle Vernon and/or Aunt Petunia notice the little magics; Harry is informed that magic is Not Allowed and punished for doing little magics; Harry ignores said rule, because he knows that Uncle Vernon is not actually going to kill him, and one of the little magics is healing really fast, so beatings aren't really that bad; Harry gets overconfident and/or accidentally does too big a magic; evil wizards pop out of nowhere and make everyone forget about magic.

When Harry was four and starting school, they'd been in the Harry ignores said rule part of the cycle, and Aunt Petunia had finally explained that normal people weren't supposed to know about magic, for reasons she said were stupid and political, and you'll understand when you're older. (Over six years later, Harry still didn't understand.) They made magic freaks born into normal families forget about magic every time they did it accidentally until the evil wizards thought the kids were old enough to keep it a secret on their own. Aunt Petunia knew about magic because Harry's mother had been a witch, and they let freaks' families remember about magic when the kid was old enough to be whisked off into their secret magic world (when they were eleven). But Harry was even more of a freak than most magic freaks, because most magic kids only did magic big enough for the evil wizards and their Ministry to notice accidentally. She knew Harry was doing magic on purpose, and she had begged him not to — it was against the rules because she didn't want the evil wizards to come and do something worse to both of them than just making him forget if they realised he was doing it on purpose — and especially not outside the house, because they'd be much angrier if he was doing magic on purpose in front of people who weren't eventually going to be allowed to know about it anyway.

If she'd told him that a year earlier, they could've avoided at least two visits from the evil wizards, but what had been done had been done.

It had made sense that Aunt Petunia was afraid of what the evil wizards might do to them, and Harry had absolutely agreed that he should avoid their attention if at all possible. Uncle Vernon smacking him around was one thing, but who knew what the evil wizards might be able to do to someone they really wanted to punish? (Harry could think of plenty of awful things he could do to someone with just little magics, and he didn't even have one of those neat magic wands to do real spells.) He'd promised not to do magic outside the house, but he hadn't stopped doing magic, and it had taken another three visits from the evil wizards before he figured out exactly how big a thing he could do before they noticed and/or cared.

And in the meanwhile Uncle Vernon had tried to stamp the magic out of him, because Uncle Vernon didn't understand that Harry truly couldn't stop doing magic. Asking him to try was like asking him not to breathe. He had eventually accepted that Harry was going to keep doing magic no matter what he did, and Aunt Petunia had agreed that certain little magics like changing his hair and using magic so he didn't have to break other rules or when he was being helpful were acceptable, as long as he didn't tip off the evil wizards. (She was much more scared of them than she was of magic in general.) And since Aunt Petunia made the rules, Uncle Vernon had stopped hitting him for using magic to get dishes from the cupboards without climbing on the counters and finding his keys when he lost them in the sofa and warning them that a telemarketer was going to ring during dinner so they could take the phone off the hook.

Not that he didn't get punished for disregarding plenty of other rules all the time, but Uncle Vernon now greatly preferred not to acknowledge that there was anything unnatural about Harry at all. Or at least nothing magical. Uncle Vernon was absolutely convinced that it was unnatural for a child to be so very unconcerned about pain and injury, and there was definitely something unnatural about a boy as pretty and sissified as Harry.

(Uncle Vernon expected this to become more obvious as Harry grew up, something about not liking girls, which was...kind of weird, because Harry liked girls just fine, and most of the girls (and women) he knew were friends with more other girls than boys, so it stood to reason that if he was a bit girly he'd probably end up around more girls than he would otherwise...right?)

So, letters announcing to all and sundry that Harry had been invited to a magical school were not at all the sort of thing Uncle Vernon cared to hear about over breakfast, and especially not to have sprung on him out of the blue. Aunt Petunia put on a face like her grapefruit had suddenly been replaced with a lemon, but otherwise didn't react. She didn't like to talk about her sister, but he had managed to tease quite a lot of information about the secret magical world in general from her, over the years. Enough that he knew she'd been expecting this sometime this summer, if not necessarily today.

Dudley, though...

Harry, bringing in the bacon, could not for the life of him say whether his cousin was joking. He...did know that Harry was magic...didn't he? He had to...right? "Er... Is the funny part supposed to be that I'm too girly to be a wizard?"

"No, doofus, the funny part is some scam thinks they can get people to pay them money to teach them magic. How stupid are you?"

Aunt Petunia's eyes darted from her son to her nephew and back again, clearly terrified, though Harry wasn't quite sure what she thought he was going to do. "Dudley, love..."

"Are you serious?" Harry interrupted, quite unable to stop himself. "Are you seriously telling me— Magic is real, Dudders. That school, Hogwarts?" He assumed it was Hogwarts, at least. He couldn't see the letter from this angle, but he was in their catchment area, and one of the evil wizards had mentioned the arseholes who ran the magical world thought it was perfectly acceptable not to tell anyone anything about magic until they were eleven, and then tell them, surprise, you're magic, come to our school. Or, surprise, you're not mad, Harry supposed — how anyone could not have noticed that they were magic by the age of eleven was entirely beyond him. He had to have re-discovered that fact at least half a dozen times after being made to forget it by said gits. (Aunt Petunia said some official from the school had come to tell Lily in person, but they probably knew she knew about magic and assumed she could tell him all the important things.) "It's real. My parents went there."

"The hell are you on about?"

"The hell are you on about? I'm a wizard, Dudley."

"What?"

"Oh, for the love of God," Harry muttered, snapping his fingers to break the magic on his hair, then pointing at his head. "Magic."

Dudley fell out of his chair, taking the letter with him. His father let out an outraged bellow. Aunt Petunia's fingers rose involuntarily to massage her temples. "Boys! Please! Vernon, calm down!"

Harry calmly took a seat, doing his part to encourage the return of normalcy (or at least a reasonable degree of regularly scheduled weirdness) to breakfast by spreading peanut butter on a waffle. "So, are you going to let me read the letter?" he asked his cousin, as he scrambled back to his chair.

Dudley tried to fling it at him. With his comprehensive understanding of basic aerodynamics, the thick sheet of paper made it all of two feet before wafting down to the table. Harry rolled his eyes, telekinetically snatching it to himself with a twitch of his fingers.

"So, you're... You're not kidding," his stupid cousin observed. "You're really... With the..." He pointed at his own head like a bloody moron. "Why would you...?"

Harry looked up from the shockingly brief note — no more than he expected from the magical authorities, honestly, but still an utterly horrible official introduction to their society — to raise an eyebrow at the other boy. "Well, you see, Dudley, looking like a girl is one thing. Looking like a bloody elf or some shite—" ("Language, Harry!" Aunt Petunia interjected, apparently by reflex, as she flushed when his eyes flicked over to her.) "Sorry, something, is a different thing entirely. And Aunt Petunia likes me to look like I'm actually related to you on occasion. Or at least like we're the same species."

"You're an elf?"

"No, Diddy-kins, he's not an elf. He just looks like one," Aunt Petunia assured him, glaring at Harry for confusing her poor son.

"He might be an elf," Uncle Vernon disagreed.

Aunt Petunia's glare shifted to him. "Vernon!"

"Well, I'm just saying, Pet. We never did figure out what that weird language was..."

"Weird language?" Harry repeated, for once just as lost as Dudley.

Uncle Vernon nodded. "Some fake-sounding nonsense we figured the freaks had been teaching you, along with French. And English, obviously."

Harry had no recollection of ever speaking French or some magical, possibly elven language. "Huh."

"So... Magic is real...and you use it to do your hair?" Good old Dudders. Focused on the important things, he was.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Yes, and yes. And I'm aware that you think I'm the girliest pansy who's ever lived. I continue not to care." The washer beeped, giving Harry an excuse to slip out for a few minutes, and his aunt a few minutes to try to explain to Dudley that yes, magic was real. He left the completely useless letter on the table.

You have a place at our school; here's a list of all the shite you'll need to buy at stores you have no access to; please send an owl by the end of the month.

Harry didn't have an owl, and he wasn't entirely certain what he was meant to send with one if he had, so he supposed he'd be waiting for the school to realise there was a logistical problem, here. Well, he could do some big magic, force the Ministry to send one of their evil teams of memory-erasing wizards and ask them to tell that Albus Dumbledore or Minerva McGonagall or whoever that he didn't have a bloody owl, and Aunt Petunia was probably going to want to talk to someone about fees and all the other nonsense she and Uncle Vernon had been concerned with when Dudders got into Smeltings. But he really preferred not to see those bastards ever again if he could help it.

He switched the load of underclothes to the dryer, minus one very large pair of shorts for his cousin. Since they were all talking about magic already, Harry figured it was probably okay to just use magic to dry them, and then they wouldn't have to wait until the laundry was done to go to the shops.

"I also use magic to do laundry," he informed his cousin as he re-entered the dining room, pulling the water out of the shorts with one hand and throwing them at Dudley's astonished face with the other. Dudley failed to catch them, staring at the little ball of water floating above Harry's left palm, so they very nearly fell onto his syrupy plate and defeated the entire purpose of washing them. "Go get dressed, I have things to do today."

Like see if the library had gotten the latest Terry Pratchett book back yet, and wash the bloody windows. Maybe spend a couple of hours laughing at Dudley in his Smeltings uniform...

(Harry had seen Uncle Vernon's old yearbook — orange knickerbockers and maroon tailcoats, with silly little straw hats, didn't even look good on blokes who were fit. Dudders was going to look ridiculous.)

"You are going to go," Petunia said, trying very hard not to make it sound like a question.

She took her eyes off the road long enough to take stock of her nephew's expression. His eyes flicked up to meet hers in the mirror, somewhat surprised to be addressed, but not negatively so. He set aside his book, one of those absurd fantasy novels of his. (Petunia didn't like Harry reading novels about magic — he didn't need help thinking of horrifying things he might try to do with it — but she couldn't really stop him reading them at school, and taking him to the library as a bribe required very little effort on her part.) They hadn't discussed the letter from the wizards since breakfast. Harry had, to all appearances, entirely dismissed it, and failed to notice Dudley's newfound (somewhat intimidated) fascination with him. He'd been watching him warily out of the corner of his eye all day, as though hoping to catch him doing something magical.

Petunia was quite certain Harry had noticed Dudley's interest, but their relationship dynamic had shifted over the years such that, while Petunia thought Dudley considered Harry more or less his equal, Harry seemed to see Dudley as a younger sibling whose taunting of Harry was expected, generally not annoying enough to acknowledge, and tolerated even when it was annoying enough to acknowledge, which was honestly for the best. They were the same age, of course, Dudley nearly two months older, in fact — looking at the two of them, anyone would think him two years older — but Harry was, much to Petunia's chagrin, by far the more intelligent of the two of them. She didn't know where he'd gotten the idea, but he seemed to think that Dudley was somewhat mentally impaired, simply because he wasn't a freak or an adult, and that Harry should go out of his way to excuse Dudley's attempts to antagonise him on that account. He'd once told her that he knew mocking "special" children for being "special" is inexcusably boorish, so.

Petunia, though she was quite certain Dudley was not stupid (even if he wasn't abnormally quick), had done nothing to disabuse Harry of the notion, because she would prefer her nephew not deride her son for being comparatively slow, even if the alternative was somewhat patronising. If Harry accepted the status quo — Dudley being perhaps a bit spoiled, routinely neglecting his chores (including bringing his laundry down to the wash), while Harry was expected to contribute significantly to the work of keeping up the house; not retaliating for the constant name-calling (Fairy-boy had already made an appearance in the rotation, as Dudley attempted to appear unintimidated by the fact that his freakish little cousin was actually a wizard); and refraining from using magic on his cousin or physically harming him regardless of the provocation (Petunia would admit that Harry was careful not to actually injure Dudley in their roughhousing, now that he realised yes, you freakishly resilient idiot, other people's arms break when you twist them like that! and that Dudley, despite appearances, was comparatively fragile) — for whatever reason, Petunia would do nothing to disturb it.

"I expect so. Assuming they follow up when they realise I haven't responded. I didn't see a return address, and I presume you don't want me to do something to get the Ministry's attention on purpose, so."

She grimaced. No, she would prefer he not bring down an Accidental Magic Reversal Squad on them yet again. It had been nearly five years now, since the last time, and she would be only too pleased if she never saw another Ministry of Magic 'Obliviator' again.

"Ministry?" Dudley asked.

Harry made an affirmative little hum. "We don't like them. They're high-handed tossers, worse than Doctor Knightly."

"Well, piss on that!"

Doctor Knightly, the boys' paediatrician, had recently told Dudley that he was horribly overweight for his height and age, and if he didn't drop at least two stone he was going to have a heart attack by the age of thirty. (Harry was both too thin and too short for his age, but the doctor hadn't been able to deny Harry's observation that he was at least proportionately short and scrawny.) They would not be going back to Doctor Knightly.

Petunia sighed. "Language, dear. And no, Harry, you presume correctly."

Though she also didn't have much faith in the wizards to follow up when Harry didn't respond. Wizards were, as a rule, horribly flakey. They had just left Harry on the bloody doorstep in November, for Christ's sake! She'd come outside to put out the milk bottles, and found an empty basket with a note — not even a proper letter, just a few paragraphs — telling her that Lily had been killed by a terrorist, and the child — who had not been in the basket under "sleeping and warming charms" as the note also claimed — was now her responsibility.

She'd nearly been at the point of calling the police to search for him, and damn the fact that she couldn't explain why her nephew had been left on her doorstep in the middle of the night, when she'd found him in the back garden, wrapped in a blanket and watching the birds, doodling in frost on the patio table. Not in the frost, making patterns of frost, which he had shown her proudly, like any other child with his crayon doodles, before asking who she was and where "Aunt Cissy" and "Drake" were — in French. He hadn't responded to the name "Harry" at all. If he hadn't had Lily's eyes, Petunia seriously would have wondered whether Albus bloody Dumbledore had somehow sent her the wrong child by mistake.

So far as she knew, that Potter bloke hadn't had any siblings — if he had, surely the child would have gone to them, so "Aunt Cissy" had to be a friend of the family or perhaps his nurse — though the thought had occurred to her several years down the line that Harry reminded her more of that would-be rock-star arse at their wedding reception — the best man, who'd told her to ditch "the muggle" and come have a ride on his flying motorbike. Potter hadn't exactly been ruggedly handsome, but whatever the arse's name was, he'd been much prettier, with the same delicate, heart-shaped face, too-dark hair, and too-pale complexion as the boy, and an easy feline grace in the way he moved. So perhaps there'd been a scandal, and the boy wasn't Potter's at all, and "Aunt Cissy" was actually the sister of horndog Whatshisface. (Petunia would admit, she did like the idea that her perfect baby sister had finally slipped up and gotten caught not acting like the perfect little magic princess everyone had thought she was, mean though it might be.)

Not that it mattered, the flakey arseholes wouldn't even answer her letters demanding more information. The note about Lily's death had included an address to contact the man who had dropped her nephew on her doorstep without so much as a by your leave, but the only thing she'd managed to get after nearly two dozen letters had been a copy of his birth certificate and NHS number, which at least seemed legitimate enough, though it had struck her as odd that Lily would have given birth in one of the muggle hospitals she so disparaged in comparison to their magical counterparts. She couldn't say she held any hope of getting a response if she were to write them about this (if the address was even still good, anyway). They'd certainly never told her anything more about the circumstances of her sister's death, and she'd learned precious little more from the periodic visits from Ministry wankers. She was positive it wasn't healthy, making children forget they were magic, to say nothing of making any witnesses forget they'd seen magic! She shuddered to think how many times they might have altered her memories over the course of Lily's childhood...

No, she would rather not summon those horrible people unless it became absolutely unavoidable.

She did want Harry to go, though. They had come to what she might characterise as an uneasy truce over the course of the past ten years, but she simply wasn't comfortable having him in the house. No, strike that, in her life.

The magic wasn't even the worst part of having him around, which, if she'd been asked before he was thrust upon her, she would have guessed it would be. He'd never used magic against her or Vernon, never showed off to Dudley like Lily had with Petunia when she was a child. (Associating his first experience of magic with such a mundane task as doing the laundry was probably the best way Dudley could have been introduced to it, from the perspective of avoiding any envy on his part. She had actually thanked Harry for that, while Dudley was in the fitting room earlier.) Petunia's sister had always been an entitled little bitch, taking it as her due that she was (un)naturally good at everything, and pretty and magical and special, and while the same could be said of Harry, Petunia had managed to drum it into him that he hadn't earned any of that. That the fact that he was freakishly gifted didn't mean he deserved to be, and he shouldn't be praised or admired for it any more than for the fact that he was born in Britain. (Her parents hadn't even tried to teach Lily that.)

Plus, being unusually pretty wasn't nearly as positive a trait for a little boy as it was for a little girl. Petunia was mature enough now to admit that she'd been jealous of Lily's looks as much if not more than her magic when they were small. Dudley might've resented the fact that he couldn't push his cousin around, despite being so much larger than him, but he was never going to wish he was pretty like Harry.

No, the worst part about Harry's presence in her life was that the little monster was certifiably insane.

It was the look of wide-eyed innocence asking why he shouldn't have killed Arabella Figg's cat, the genuine surprise that killing people's pets wasn't acceptable behaviour. It was the way he could turn into a snarling, feral little animal 'playing' with Marge's horrible dogs, and apparently had no sense of fear or self-preservation to speak of. It was the way he could be a perfect angel one minute, and attack Dudley with a hot iron the next; that he would let Vernon beat him half to death for scorching Dudley or breaking his arm (even though Petunia believed Harry when he said that was an accident) without the slightest complaint, as though this was simply the way of the world and a natural consequence of his actions, but go to bloody war over Petunia slapping him for using profanity, when the previous punishment of 'time out' hadn't made an impact. (Because "changing the rules without telling me isn't fair, Aunt Petunia!" he'd claimed, when she'd finally admitted defeat and negotiated a truce — it was impossible to truly discipline a child who would simply decide that any degree of pain and suffering was acceptable in order to make a point or keep to some bloody-minded principle.)

It was the way he never cried, not when she told him he couldn't go home to "Aunt Cissy" or that his mother and father had died, not when he was hurt or frustrated, never...except a few days before Christmas, every single year, when he was positively inconsolable — on the winter solstice, she had eventually realised. All he could tell Petunia when she asked what was wrong (afterward — he would try to hit or bite her to drive her away in the midst of whatever madness seized him) was that he failed the lady in his dreams, the one who wanted him to kill for her — who was starving and needed him to kill for her.

Not, he assured her, Petunia or Vernon or Dudley (She doesn't want me to kill my family, Aunt Petunia, that would be...counterproductive.) and he couldn't do it here — he didn't know where he was supposed to do it, which was part of the reason he couldn't do it, period. But every year "she" tried to make him understand what he "needed" to do. He had earnestly insisted that it was important, "she" was dying, and if he could help her, he would, but he couldn't — not because her nephew, who had been seven years old when he'd managed to explain that much, was unwilling to kill someone for this voice in his head, just because he didn't know how it wanted him to kill them — so the only thing he could do was suffer with "her" and feel her growing fear and desperation and disappointment in him.

(Petunia was not reassured. Not at all. It sounded unnervingly like one of the 'imaginary friends' that Lily claimed had taught her to do magic in her dreams, but instead of teaching him how to make flowers bloom out of season, it was trying to convince Harry to do some evil ritual or something he didn't actually know how to do. Yet. She didn't really doubt that he would figure it out eventually. She locked him in his room now on the winter solstice, and stayed up through the night to make sure he didn't somehow escape anyway.)

It was that he wholeheartedly considered Petunia and Dudley, and even Vernon and Marge, to be his family, interpreting even their worst-concealed scorn and fear and hatred of him in the best possible light, making himself helpful around the house in spite of their lack of thanks — Petunia did appreciate not having to wash the windows and weed the garden herself, but she found her nephew a little too unnerving on the whole to feel much honest gratitude for his help — and doing his best not to make a nuisance of himself with the magic and fit in, fixing his hair to look more normal, and so on.

And it was that he never quite did manage to fit in, despite having learned to control himself and the magic, always a little too mercurial, too graceful and quick, too smart, too well-spoken (what seven-year-old used words like counterproductive?) and well-dressed, but simultaneously too violent, always prepared to jump into an argument or a fist-fight at the slightest excuse, as though the polite young man he presented himself as was just a part he was playing to amuse himself until something more interesting happened.

It was impossible for Petunia to relax with Harry in her life. She would say when he was in the house, but when he wasn't in the house, he was usually at school or out playing with Dudley, and she worried about what he might get up to when she wasn't watching him even more than what he might do while she was. She didn't want to make him feel unwanted and risk breaking the familial delusion which, she suspected, was the only thing stopping him from murdering them all in their beds. But she also really didn't want him anywhere near herself or her son.

If she had to pay for him to go off to Hogwarts and learn magic to get him out of their lives without overtly rejecting him, she would absolutely do it. Yes, learning more magic would probably make him more dangerous (she couldn't help that uneasy certainty that it was only a matter of time until he did kill someone for whatever demon spoke to him in his dreams), but it would also give him a chance to decide for himself that he didn't want to stay with her. The best possible thing she could imagine, she thought, would be for him to go off into the magical world, just like Lily, and get caught up in the magic and wonder, just like Lily, and, again like Lily, grow bored with his boring, 'muggle' 'family' and eventually just...stop coming home.

So, no, she didn't want him to intentionally annoy the Ministry and force them to send their meddlers to act as carrier pigeons, but to give Harry an opportunity to make a life for himself outside of her home — hopefully well away from her for the rest of their lives — she would allow it. "But I suppose if they haven't sent someone by the Thirty-First, you may have to."

Harry gave her a bright grin in the mirror. "Don't sound so excited, Aunt Petunia. I'm sure Flo's just dying to catch up. It's been years."

Petunia scowled. With her luck, they would send Florence Brightnel and her team. There were several Accidental Magic Reversal Squads — Petunia had met three — but Ms Brightnel's was the one routinely dispatched to Little Whinging to deal with Harry. Annoying bint seemed to think it appropriate to act chummy with her, as though her repeatedly barging into Petunia's life to magic her son and husband back into blissful ignorance of the fact that Harry was a bloody freak every few months over the course of several years made them friends.

"Who's Flo?"

"Not important, Diddy-kins." If they did end up having to call the Ministry freaks, she'd make sure Dudley was well out of the way, first — maybe pay Wendy Polkiss to take him and her younger brother miniature golfing or something...

"She's an evil witch who thinks she's one of the good guys, and that she's helping people by making them forget magic exists."

"Sounds like a cow."

"The biggest."

(Normally, Petunia did not approve of the boys calling women cows, but in this case, she thought she would make an exception.)