Out of the Cage and Into the Woods
Harry Potter was an unusual boy.
This was not for lack of trying, from the first time he could remember Aunt Petunia screeching at him to stop it with his freakish-ness, the first time Uncle Vernon cuffed him upside the head for saying something too abnormal and weird, and the first time Dudley had hit him for the ‘creepy look on his face’, Harry had tried his hardest to be normal.
When his perfect grades and teacher comments of him being ‘such a gifted child!’, ‘so much smarter than his age level!’, and ‘a prodigy! Should be placed in higher class levels!’ reached his Aunt and Uncle, they muttered and scowled at him, not so subtly saying how he had used his freakish-ness to cheat his way through school. Harry immediately dropped his effort in class, making sure to calculate what level of work he needed to turn in to keep an average class score. When he could tell Aunt Petunia all the names of his classmates and what their parents did and who they were, instead of relishing in the gossip (like Harry had hoped) she sneered at him and asked him how he managed to hoodwink them into telling him. He quickly became the loner of the class but that didn’t seem to change his Aunts’ opinion anyway.
He kept looking at other children, how they acted with their parents and spoke of things they did at home and attempted to copy what they said, but nothing seemed to work with his family. They all just sneered at him, and muttered about how much of an annoyance and a burden he was to them.
At one time he came to the conclusion that he just wasn’t enough like Dudley, who always received praise for the simplest things, and that he just needed to act more like his obviously better cousin. He decided that in order to act like Dudley, he should push back at him instead of cowering like usual. Maybe Dudley was just trying to play this way and if he acted the same he’d fit into his family.
Harry never made that mistake again.
From when he was three years old and had his first real memory of Aunt Petunia scolding him for crying about being hungry when,
“Freak babies like you have to wait for Dudders to be full until you can eat!”,
To when he was seven years old, and sat crying in his cupboard because it was his birthday and Harry had thought Aunt Petunia had made him a birthday cake (maybe he had finally started acting right) but only to realize that she’d made it for the dinner party she was hosting for some of Uncle Vernon’s business partners that Harry was to stay in his cupboard so as not to disturb anyone with his freakish tendencies for the duration of, Harry tried with everything he had in him to act normal, feel normal, be normal. But all to no avail.
Harry Potter was an unusual boy.
And when he was seven years old, crying his heart out in his cupboard while simultaneously keeping as quiet as possible to not disturb the dinner party, Harry realised that he could never not be unusual in the eyes of his family, that he would always be a freak to them.
And so, late that same night, he found a bag, filled it with all the hand me downs he owned and some food from the cupboards, took all the cash that was in Aunt Petunia’s handbag and Uncle Vernon’s wallet, and slipped out the door of Number 4 Privet Drive into the night with no intention of turning back.