Mirror images and Flower beds
He stared at himself, shock buzzing through his body like wild bees, his Aunt's arms seeming to become suffocating around him. His lips parted in a silent gasping motion, aching to delivery oxygen and rationality to his numb limbs and brain. He blinked, trying to wash away the crimson image of himself he had seen in the glass. He blinked again, shaking his head. Maybe Harry could rattle himself, and his freakish reflection would return to its familiar banal appearance. He looked in the mirror again and the same pretty face as before stared back. Harry wondered why he looked this way, if Dudley had poured box dye onto his pillow as he slept, or if his magi-- freakishness had just decided he looked good in red. Actually that was an understatement, looking at himself now, Harry could confidently agree with himself that he looked more that good in red, he looked pretty. Delicate even.
Before the change Harry had been an olive skinned short-stack, all gangly limbs and scruffy hair and white patchwork scars. But now he was beautiful. Of course he was still a boney short-stack, but now his rough calloused skin had smoothed over and was the kind of pale that looked pretty and not sickly, like vivid snow against the harsh scarlet background of Harry's hair. He'd never seen himself as anything but a freak, but... Somehow, as he lay ragdoll in his aunt's arms and with an unfamiliar visage instead his face, he began to feel different. He began to feel like he might actually have worth. Like he was somebody to be admired. Because the face that stared back into his with glinting eyes and scarlet locks was the image of beauty. And what kind of freak was pretty?
Someone who wasn't a freak at all.
Harry crouched in the dirt, his thin fingers pressing into the earth, compacting the dirt back into the rough but pristine flat of the flowerbed. The brown soil stained his hands like bitter chocolate and smeared his face in ebony streaks on his milky skin. The pot of spilt seeds was creaking, the wind swaying it's plastic packaging in tiny buffets as he gently scooped up the little seedlings and forced them into the earth with his tiny but practiced hands.
They would grow new life here.
The sun pulsed like music on his skin, the waves stinging but warm. He basked in the glow, his naked feet burying deep into the dirt to feel the soil between his toes and the cool dampness on his skin. His red hair was pinned back with clips and tiny hair bobbles in odd places, curling in tiny pigtails at the sides and pulled back softly with pink clips at the front to hold the rose strands out of his eyes as he worked in the garden. It was getting longer now, it's rich and heavy weight had straightened out the smooth but sometimes chaotic frizz into waves, and he didn't want to get dirt into his hair because it was pretty now, so he tied it up. Aunt Petunia liked it clean and long as well.
The other boys at school said he looked like a girl, but Harry didn't mind because girls were pretty and he wanted to be pretty too because pretty people aren't freaks. Aunt Petunia said so; she liked his red hair.
Harry liked spending time in the garden too because flowers were beautiful and delicate beneath his fingers. He would stroke their smooth petals and trim their long stems his tiny shears.The little plants and worms in the soil were always bright even when the sky was grey or when Aunt Petunia was feeling blue, or when Uncle Vernon was turning that dark, dark purple colour that ate up his pale skin and made his eyes look black in his head, a foreboding warning to his storms of anger.
Behind him, his Aunt watched, a tall glass of something sweet and heavy smelling in her trembling hand. She lay in a sunbed dazedly, staring at Harry like he was some mystery she could not solve. Harry knew she was enraptured by his beautiful face, everyone was, and people tended to be nicer to him now that he wasn't a freak. Harry enjoyed it, that feeling of love from people he didn't know, or used to know who would now be kind and helpful and watchful- like he was something precious. He'd turn his big, green eyes on them and could ask for anything, anything at all. And he'd get it. He'd changed everybody's minds about him so he made sure to always be good and polite to keep it that way as well. Well, he'd changed most peoples minds at least.
His cousin Dudley was a bit of an oaf. Often prone to jealously and fits of anger and pettiness over little things, he was obviously and hilariously confused about the new change of attitudes towards his cousin who so far everyone had hated. It made sense, he supposed, but it made him really annoyed because he couldn't hide from anyone or be forgotten when Cousin Dudley was always stropping about him or complaining that Aunt Petunia was spending too much time with Harry.
He didn't think it was funny, they were 8 now which meant that they had to be big boys because it isn't very long until your really old after that, which meant that Harry knew he had to be cleverer and always getting better at everything, because he wouldn't be a failure at getting older either. Harry was top of his class, so that was a good thing, and he would watch people to prove that he was observant because he'd heard that smart people noticed things that other people didn't, and were good at keeping secrets.
Harry was good at keeping secrets. So was Aunt Petunia.
Uncle Vernon was... Odd. Now that things were different Harry could notice how bad things really had been Before. Now that it was After, though, his home life seemed all the worse because he was being treated so much better outside of it. Harry wasn't sure if he really had a home anywhere.
Now a-days, Uncle Vernon would ignore Harry as of he never existed. Only getting furious and ordering painful punishments when Harry managed to so something actually wrong this time. Like when he broke a glass washing up, for example. He had to spend a week off school to let his back heal properly from the belting and his fever to go down. It was strange and often scary, but it was easy to manage. Harry could do his disappearing trick and stay out of Vernon's way as often as possible. Or just stick around Aunt Petunia, he found.
When Aunt Petunia wasn't home, Uncle Vernon would become more open with his thoughts. Harry wasn't sure if he was scared of his Aunt, or if it was just weird adult problems, but normally his Uncle would moderate his behaviour around Aunt Petunia. If she wasn't there, he would be worse to Harry, sometimes even hunting him out to find him and tell him what a burden he is to the family and everyone around him.
It was frustrating for Harry because he could do nothing to stop that. Harry's skills at hiding and getting around unnoticed never seemed to work when he really really needed them. They never seemed to work when he was crippled with the terror of his Uncle's wrath.
It seemed to Harry that being special made no difference where it really mattered.
He also wasn't sure why Aunt Petunia was so set on protecting him either. She never did anything outright, but she would help in little ways. Sometimes she'd send him to bed before his usual bed time, but that was just so that she would do the washing up for him. It was maybe a bit of kindness, but it meant that Harry went to bed hungry since he missed the scraps off the plates.
It was always like that. She would do something with good intentions perhaps, but inadvertently make things more tedious or harder for Harry in the long wrong. The only help she actually did was against Uncle Vernon. She kept him away from Harry sometimes by setting him chores in other parts of the house and she would give him a pointed look if he seemed like he was about to do something undeserving to Harry in her presence. That was their compromise.
Aunt Petunia would buy Harry clothes and items too. They were never very expensive or noticeable, and some of them he was only allowed to wear inside the house when Uncle Vernon wasn't around either. Harry didn't understand properly what Aunt Petunia had explained to him, but maybe his uncle just didn't like dresses very much.
So Harry sat in the flower bed, pruning blades of grass that were facing the wrong way because Aunt Petunia said "It looks wrong, you are going to sit here and make my garden look better than it ever has before! I'm going to sit and watch you all morning until you finish!"
Sometimes Harry wondered if this was what all little boys had to do, but he knew that he had to stay on his Aunt Petunia's good side because she was the only one left in the house who liked him. She was the only one who would protect him from Uncle Vernon's cruelty and beatings.
She was the only one who would notice if he died.