Harry Potter & Getting Hurt
I am going to hurt you.
The first time he heard that is a time that Harry doesn't remember, but that's okay, because Harry doesn't remember much. His childhood is often times a mess of colors and feelings and emotions that he isn't ever sure are real, nor ever sure are his. He thinks the Potter's home was beautiful and fancy and decorated with an ugly red and gold. He thinks his mother's eyes are sharp and intelligent and kind and just like his. He thinks his mother and father are the very picture of true love.
He thinks. About most things, he is never certain.
But about the first time he heard the words I am going to hurt you, he is. He doesn't remember it, but that's okay, because he wrote about it. When Harry was around the age of five, Lily gave Harry a notebook. It's never-ending, organizable by category. Every part is customizationable.
"Write down everything you don't want to forget," she told him. She sat with him for hours, working until his handwriting is readable to even James, whose comprehension skills are less than sub-par. Harry writes about their owl, a white, commutative girl who rubs her face against his. He writes about his mother's stories with her Muggle family. He tries to shove his memories into his journal all the time, and the hardest part about that is that he forgets to.
When he says this to Lily, she laughs and rubs his head, quoting something about irony. She planned to show him how to use a pensive, once he was older, and the only fault in this plan is that she would not live to see Harry grow older. When the first howler is brought in, she realizes this.
"I am going to hurt you." It said it once, quietly, before exploding. Lily ran a hand through his hair. "Don't worry about it, Harry dear." The shaking in her voice betrayed, and the fact that she scampered off to tell James not long after, but Harry didn't comment on it.
Instead, he wrote.
A red letter came today. Looked fancy. It spoke to mother and she almost cried. "I am going to hurt you." But mother's strong, I think. So's father. Kind of. He's a bit of a baby, but mother's strong enough for the both of them. That's what father said to me. That mother's got enough fight in her for all three of us. If someone's going to hurt her, they've got another thing coming!
Most of the time, Harry is able to believe that everything is fine. There are a few moments, just out of place enough that Harry thinks to write them down, that the facade of a perfect family slips.
James fires all the houselves. Even Bubbly, Harry's closest friend. Harry doesn't understand why. "We mustn't traumatize anyone further," he said.
"Traumatize?"
James sighs, cheeks red and flustered, holding back obvious irritation. "It means hurt, Harry, we don't want to hurt anyone who doesn't have to be hurt, okay?"
"Why would Bubbly get hurt by staying here?" Harry asks, tearful. Father is scaring me, he'll write later.
"Because this house is tainted!" he shouts, throwing his arms up in the air. Harry flinches back and James softens. "I," he says, quieter, "am tainted."
If he is tainted, then why did Bubbly have to leave? He's the one endangering people. Why do we have to suffer for it? Harry added in smaller text, I miss him. Referring to Bubbly, but maybe to his father, too. He is sick and not himself. Harry can see that clearly and he can't see much.
The second letter arrives. This time it's for James. Lily tells Harry with a soft voice not at all hers that she's got to send a letter. "A precaution," she says, and doesn't elaborate. She sends it to Madame Pomfrey of Hogwarts and does not get a response.
Harry overhears James sobbing and saying in a thick, angry voice that sounds not at all like him, that "Harry being born is the worst thing to ever happen to them."
Lily shushes him. "Harry could hear."
"Do I care?"
"You should," she snaps. "He's our son."
"He is our downfall."
"Why do you blame him for existing, James? We did that, alright! We made the conscious, deliberate choice to start a family, knowing full-well what would happen if we did. And, James," she lets out a sob. "We were happy! Why is it different now?"
"Because I do not want to fucking die, Lily!"
A laugh. Bitter and sour. "A little too late for that, huh?"
Harry decides not to write down that conversation. Some things he is happy to forget.
Lily hugs him a few weeks later. James huddles moodily by the doorway. He will not even look at him. Harry's happy to forget that, too. When the door opens, Madame Pomfrey stands tensely. She looks so, so sad.
"You're going to be staying with her for a little while," says Lily. The way she talks, Harry will write, she already sounds dead.
"This is my home," he says and he's surprised by his anger. "This is my home. Why are you doing this?"
"It's just for a little while," she says, petting his hair, unruly and wild, just like his father who will not talk, will not look at him, Merlin, why won't he even look at him?
"You're a liar." He can feel anger lick at his bones, at the corners of his eyes, and he isn't sure that, after that, it ever goes away. "Why are you sending me away?"
"I'm not," she says. "It's a sleepover. You like those, right?"
"Not like this." Harry is shaking, he realizes. His face hurts from all the blood rushed to it. "You're dying and you won't tell me why."
"I'm--" Lily chokes. "I'm sorry." James shifts uncomfortably. He wants to hug his wife but does not want to move closer to Harry.
I am your son, he thinks. I am your flesh and blood and you cannot even stand me.
Your death will not haunt me. It does not deserve to. This time, he writes it down.
"I love you," Lily says.
His tongue feels like lead in his mouth, but, although Lily's a liar all the same, he does not hate her. "I love you, too," he finally says.
Madame Pomfrey grabs his hand, dragging him out out the house with a gentle tug. He glances back to his parents, hugging each other now, and he feels something curl and flood into his blood. He doesn't recognize it then. He will later.
It's an ache for retribution. He has never felt so righteously bloodthirsty.
Whoever is to kill his parents, he will find them. It's a promise.
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
I am going to hurt you.
The second time Harry heard that phrase was when he was six years old, resident of the Hogwarts castle. The plan at first was to ship him off to the Muggle relatives Lily spoke so much about, but Harry wakes up from a night with Poppy that he cannot remember (normal; not disquieting in the least) and emotions in his chest that he no longer feels "just detached" from, but as if holds someone else's heart entirely. It is the first time that his body feels shared. It is in no way the last.
Poppy had, after that night and his first night sleeping in the castle, fought tooth and nail to not only keep him from his relatives, but to also raise him herself.
"He needs magical influence, Albus, magical! Lily has told me about Petunia, you know, she peaked in grade school and never learned to grow up, that's what I think. The castle is safe, too, that's worth taking into consideration. He's just experienced a trauma, do you really think it's safe to insert him into an erratic, non clinical environment without psychiatric supervision? Do not prove yourself the senile old fool Severus says you are--"
Albus agreed, after much huss and hassel, to let Harry be her ward, if only to get her to shut up. Albus does not dislike him, but he doesn't like him, either.
Harry wonders why.
The Medical Wing is nice. Most of the students that come ago, all carrying semi-to-fully horrific injuries, are nice to him. He gets a lot of questions -- "what brings such a youngin like you here?" and "are you actually a Potter?' -- but Pomfrey glares at them and they usually shut their mouths. He spends most of his time there, the white walls giving him odd solace. Later, he will venture out into the castle and sit through classes with wizards years older than him, writing everything he can down in the only possession his mother left him. But for now, the Medical Wing is good enough.
He meets this Severus fellow that the students mention a lot. He's ugly -- doesn't take care of his hair properly. Hasn't he ever heard of conditioner? -- and yet moves elegantly into the Medical Wing, robes billowing behind him. Snape has been described to him so many times -- and so very vidly, too -- that he knows this is Severus on sight.
Harry sets down the book he was reading -- The Tales of The Beetle and The Bard -- and stares at him for a moment. Snape opens a cabinet, frowns deeper, which Harry didn't even think was possible, and then continues shuffling.
"You looking for something?"
He turns his head toward him, eyes narrowed. Snape knows him, just from looking at him. There's acknowledgement and then there's something else.
Anger. Harry recognizes it. Beyond that, if he digs a little deeper, he finds hatred in those eyes. He recognizes that, too. He's not sure what he did to deserve it, but that doesn't stop from from returning it.
An eye for an eye.
"No," Snape eventually says, curtly.
"Sure seems like you were looking for something."
"Poppy was supposed to have a package here for me. I am simply retrieving it."
"So you were looking for something."
"Quiet, you insolent boy." Merlin, he reminds Harry of his father. He almost says so but thinks better of it. Best not to give someone who obviously does not like him insight into his daddy issues.
"Madame Pomfrey won't be back until later, if you need her to find it for you. Apparently some first year got his tongue merged with the fireplace and they need her there."
"Which Tower?"
Harry shrugs, opening his book again. "How would I know?"
Snape's lips curl. He mutters something about back talking and disrespect and "I know your type," and then Harry gets it. Because Snape doesn't know him! Snape doesn't know his type because he doesn't know him! One conversation and Snape hates him and Harry gets that it's not his fault. Not really.
It can't be.
The words spill out of his mouth before he can stop them. "Which one was it?"
Snape's head snaps toward him. "What?"
"Which parent hated you? Of mine, I mean."
Snape grits his teeth, rises from his chair and says, hand gripped tightly around his wand, "You know nothing. I suggest you act like it, you incompetent Squib."
Lily would tell him it's time to shut up. She'd say it nicer, like "he's a little stressed out right now, tensions are high, it's best to be let him be," but Harry would get what she meant. That, yeah. It's time to shut up. Do not provoke the unstable.
But Lily's not here, is she? An eye for an eye, right?
Yeah. Exactly right. "It was my dad, wasn't it? What'd he do? Call you a Squib, right? He seems the type." He nods to himself. "I can see tha--"
"I am going to hurt you," says Snape. His jaw wires itself shut with a clink. Harry waits a moment, wanting to see if his threats are empty, if maybe his mother was right, but nothing comes from it. Snape spins on his heel, retreating from Harry with that same, out-of-control expression frozen on his face.
If Snape hating him wasn't his fault to begin with, it sure as hell is now.
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
The third time he hears the words I am going to hurt you is because they come from his own mouth. A gang of fourth years jumped a second year and Harry wanders upon it and sees it and, furthermore, he sees red.
Their entitlement to her well being is nauseating. He joins the fight and spends a week in the hospital.
The fourth time is something similar. So's the fifth, the sixth, the seventh...
Eventually, he stops counting.
Violence -- anger and vigilante inclinations -- it lives within him, a sick, deep parasite, nestled in his very soul. It makes itself a home behind his eyes and blurs his vision and sometimes his judgment, too, but he can't help it, or doesn't want to help it, because it feels righteous. Fuck diplomacy. If violence is their only language, they cannot understand anything else.
If violence is their only language, I can and will speak it. An eye for an eye.