Work Text:
Harry’s earliest memory with the Dursleys is his three-year-old self excitedly blowing bubbles with Dudley. His fingers are sticky with soap and glimmer like stars. When he focuses, he can almost hear their childlike wonder.
It’s a nice memory.
There are no nice memories after that.
***
Life with the Dursleys is not always bad. It would be easier to run if it were.
They never hit him, yet sometimes he wishes they would. Wishes that Aunt Petunia smacked him with the same rage that shattered the vase on the countertop. Maybe then his teacher would stop sending him home to the Dursleys, like she did for Mary-Anne, whose father was a drunk who beat her.
His parents had been drunks he’s told. Aunt Marge says that it runs in the family. Eventually, Harry will become one too.
But Aunt Petunia is also family, he thinks.
So he hopes for her to drink.
She never does.
Eventually, once he grows up and has children of his own, he will be glad they didn’t hit him. At six, however, locked inside the cupboard too big and small at once, where the air is stale and salty, he yearns.
It’s not the first time his wishes don’t come true. It’s not the last time, either.
***
Their home doesn’t hear his name Harry starts kindergarten. While his relatives have an endless amount of endearments for Dudley—their real son—Duddy, Sweetums, Pumpkin, Duddykins, Precious Angel, et cetera, et cetera, he has none. They barely address him at all, unless they are angry. If they are, they call him freak. Harry will never admit how often he drove his aunt to fury, just so she would call him the one word truly his: the one Dudley could never steal.
The boy is no one. But freak—freak is someone. Someone to be hated, someone to be despised, but someone all the same. How else would he know that he exists at all, if not for their hatred? Hatred is more permanent than love. No one forgets those they hate. It’s enough for him. (It has to be)
Of course, even if it is never spoken, he knows his name is Harry. Mrs Figg calls him Harry whenever Aunt Petunia ships him off to her and her million cats because she can’t be bothered to keep him. And still, the first time Mrs Figg said it, Harry hadn’t quite know what to do with it. It’s strange, to be called a name—especially the one his drunkard father chose.
Once Aunt Petunia does start to use it, she misses no chance to remind him how terribly common his name is. How mundane. It’s not very fair.
Then again, his aunt has never been fair, has she?
He comes home from being called Harry, to being called Freak. Or boy, if Uncle Vernon is in one of his rare good moods. It’s almost more cruel. That the house is terribly, achingly aware of his name, yet no one uses it.
In the dead of night, Harry mouths his name until his tongue goes numb. He hopes that if he says it enough times, it will balance out how often he is called nothing at all.
He doesn’t think he ever manages.
Dudley throws a tantrum at kindergarten when the teacher has him apologise to Harry for calling him Freak. Dudley cries until she lets it go.
He tattles to Aunt Petunia anyway.
She calls him Freak so viciously he doesn’t think it can ever be balanced out.
Harry is sent to his cupboard without dinner. Dudley smiles at him when he does so, crocodile tears drying up. At this moment, he hates his cousin with such intense fire that he scares himself. That night, Dudley laughs with his parents, while Harry cries alone. He hates them as much as they hate him.
Someone shoves a plate of leftovers into his cupboard just before midnight. He cries when he eats it, and is so utterly grateful. He hates himself too. For thinking, for just a moment, that everything will be all right, and they do love him.
He never finds out who gave him the food.
He never hears the words I love you, either.
***
Harry is six and just entered his first year of primary school. It’s different from kindergarten, because the kids are bigger—more than they were before—and Dudley even meaner. One of the boys in his class, a boy with the same brown skin as Harry’s, wants to be his friend.
Harry tells him he isn’t allowed to have friends, and that Dudley will bully him, too. The boy says that he won’t be scared away.
A month later, the boy doesn’t look at Harry anymore. Three months after that, he moves away with his parents due to excessive bullying.
He doesn’t apologise to Harry, but Harry understands his guilty eyes all the same.
In the end, even an apology wouldn’t have mattered. Harry doesn’t remember the boy’s name, but he remembers the bitter, all-consuming feeling of envy that courses through him that day.
Why couldn’t he have parents that move him away from Dudley?
Because they are dead. He knows that. And sometimes, Harry wishes he was dead, too.
No one tries to make friends with Harry after that. He doesn’t mind. He knows that he doesn’t deserve them, anyway. Just like he doesn’t deserve parents.
***
He lied.
There is one good memory.
It’s not as easy to recall as his first one: that warm, idyllic summer morning, but Harry grips it so hard it cannot escape, no matter how it tries to over the years.
He’s four, digging to the garden, and his fingers sticky with soil. Harry knows he’s too little, and he shouldn’t disturb the carefully pruned petunias. But he’s four, the mud calls to him, and he wants to bury himself in the ground.
Aunt Petunia finds Harry just before supper. He giggles in delight as he runs over to her, nearly tripping over his stubby legs.
His aunt opens her mouth, but Harry stops her.
“For you!” he says, and hands her a blindingly white flower. A few drops of mildew cling to the petals, almost like tears.
Or maybe it’s his aunt, who is crying now.
When she scoops him up, she is far more gentle than she’s ever been before—or ever will be again. Harry makes bubbles float around him in the bath, and it’s magic, and yet his aunt doesn’t say a thing.
Aunt Petunia puts the flower into the same vase she would later hurl at Harry.
If he listens closely, he can hear her whisper, “thank you”, through the rickety doors of his cupboard.
***
Harry learns the name of the flower the day he visits his mother’s grave. Lilies.
***
Harry is five and Mother’s Day is coming up. He knows Aunt Petunia is not his mother, but the kind teacher tells him that family isn’t blood but those who raise you. Dudley doesn’t bother making her a Mother’s Day gift. He doesn’t see the point. If anything, he should receive a gift—without him, she wouldn’t be a mother at all.
As if his entire life isn’t just one huge gift.
Harry is frightened by how much he wants to hurt Dudley. Late at night, he dreams about shoving Dudley down the stairs the same way he shoved Harry down once. Until his body splits open like a melon in the summer heat, when the flesh swells and throbs, and the rind gives away. He doesn’t, because he knows that he’ll be punished far worse than anything Dudley could ever hope to do.
Yet, in the dead of night, he can wish. That it wasn’t his parents who died that night, but the Dursleys, and he would be the one they loved, as he took his cousin’s place. Harry would make sure Dudley suffered just as much as he did.
It’s a childish dream he grows out of rather soon. But it remains there, lurking.
Harry makes Aunt Petunia a necklace. It’s not very pretty, but he’s five, and it’s not supposed to be. All the other boys’ necklaces are even uglier, but their mothers wear them with unadulterated pride shining in their eyes.
“What is this?” Aunt Petunia snaps the moment they are at home, wrenching the offensive rubbish off her.
“It’s a necklace I made for you for Mother’s Day.”
“I’m not your mother!” she shrieks, and Harry flinches.
“I know that, Aunt Petunia, but—” he whimpers, and he is weak, because there are tears forming in his eyes, and he does his best to stop them, but he can’t.
“Stop crying, you brat!”
But Harry can’t stop crying, not for years. Not until one day, he looks down at his hands, tears blurring his vision, and he shuts off. After that, it takes him years until he can cry again at all. He doesn’t know what he hates more: always crying, or being unable to.
“The teacher said,” he tries, because Harry is a child, and he’s foolish, and he thinks reasoning with his aunt is going to work now, even if it hasn’t worked before.
“Take your—your—” her breaths are heavy and ragged as she thrusts the gift into his shaking hands. “Take your rubbish back! I am not your mother! We are barely family, and in moments like these, I wish we weren’t at all.”
Harry wants to snap back, and tell her that, fine, I don’t want to be your family, either, or I’d rather my mother be dead than you, but he can’t. Not over the sobs wracking his body, or the trembling in his limbs. He wants to be strong, but he’s so small, and his chest aches, and he curls up inside his cupboard until his head hurts from crying. He’s always crying, or yelling, and he hates it. Hates being angry and sad and a baby.
He can’t stop; and once he does, he can’t go back, either.
Aunt Petunia, predictably, doesn’t apologise. She never does. But neither does she mention the incident the next morning. She snaps at him to get out of bed, breakfast is ready, and sniffs unhappily when she ties his shoes. Dudley whines and grumbles at Harry eating the last piece of bacon, and Aunt Petunia tells him he can have Harry’s bacon tomorrow.
Both receive a turkey sandwich for lunch, and Harry only manages to eat his because his aunt started making it with whole-grain bread and rocket, and Dudley wouldn’t touch a vitamin or complex carb with a ten-foot pole. It’s in moments like these that Harry thinks his aunt might care, even if just a little bit. Or maybe it’s just because the neighbours commented on Harry being too small and skinny for his age, and she doesn’t want them sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong.
Harry likes the lunches. They’re his, only his.
The next year, Harry throws away his Mother’s Day gift before he gets home. He doesn’t wish her a happy Mother’s Day again. Dudley doesn’t, either, but he gets a gift, nonetheless. Aunt Petunia coos over him until he throws her off.
Harry can’t stand the sight of them.
“I’m going out,” he tells her, because he needs to, or else he’s going to suffocate.
“Don’t cause any trouble,” she snipes as she opens the door for him. “Supper is at six. Make sure to be back by then, or you’ll go to bed hungry.”
Harry spends the afternoon on the playground, wordlessly swinging back and forth.
Just as he’s about to slip in, Aunt Petunia shrills, “You’re late. What did I tell you about your disrespectful behaviour?”
It’s not fair, and he’s not even that late, but he doesn’t argue. His aunt doesn’t make good on her threat, and Harry is allowed to eat anyway. Uncle Vernon calls him a freak three times during dinner, but it’s different than when his aunt says it.
Uncle Vernon calls him freak like it’s a condemnation.
Aunt Petunia says freak like she wishes she’d be able to say son.
It takes him far too long to realise why the latter hurts so much more.
***
Harry is six when he hears her say that for the first time, on the day he got sent home after another fight with Dudley. None of the teachers care that it wasn’t Harry who started it.
Aunt Petunia doesn’t say anything the whole ride home, but her lips are tightly pursed.
The house is hollow around them.
It’s late, and he’s not supposed to be awake, but the bruises on his cheeks sting too much to give him rest.
“Vernon, I can’t understand him. We took him in after his useless father got himself and my sister killed. We care for him, we shelter him, we feed him. And this is how he repays us? By being a delinquent? Let’s hope he never has children of his own. God knows he would be a terrible father!”
Harry doesn’t hear Uncle Vernon’s response, not over the tears gathering in his eyes.
***
He’s eight and just received his first grades, and it’s the worst day of his life. Dudley barely passed—and he doesn’t even know how one can be stupid enough to fail second grade—yet Aunt Petunia coos over him, as if he is the smartest boy in the whole world.
“Don’t worry, Duddykins, I know this is all the teacher’s fault. Mummy will get it sorted.”
Of course, she doesn’t manage to get it sorted, because you can’t tantrum your way into better grades, but she sure as hell tries.
Harry doesn’t even want to show her his, because he knows there will be a fight. Knows that his relatives don’t want him writing better grades than Dudley, because how could their freakish nephew ever surpass their perfect Dudley?
As with everything, his aunt finds his report card, anyway.
To this day, Harry remembers the grades, even if all the ones after that blur together, because how can he not? He is not the best student, but, but, he’s doing okay. He isn’t stupid. But he struggles to focus sometimes, and, and, and—
It doesn’t matter, in the end.
With a shriek, the door slams open, and Aunt Petunia is standing in the doorway—and that doesn’t make any sense, because he was still in his cupboard back then, but in his memory it’s always her in his second bedroom, nostrils flaring.
He doesn’t remember everything she says, but he remembers curling up on himself, and the trembling he just can’t stop.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Petunia,” he thinks whimpers, because he always apologises, so he must have.
“You think a sorry is enough? How dare you—how dare you look me in the eyes with such horrible grades? You are a disgrace to the family.”
Harry’s alone again, and he’s crying, and he wished he’d screamed, You’re not my family, you said so yourself!, but he can’t. Because she’s right; he is a disgrace. He’s weak and pathetic, and if he goes on like this, his aunt will send him away. Send him away to work at Aunt Marge’s dog farm, where everyone hates him even more than they do here.
As much as he wants to, Harry’s grades don’t improve enough, and neither do Dudley’s.
“You’re dragging my son down with you!” his aunt shrieks, and he thinks that maybe she’s right. He’s dragging everyone down. If he weren’t such a burden, everyone else would be happy.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Petunia.”
He’s not sure if he means it the way she wants it to.
“Why are you…If only you weren’t so lazy! You’re always scampering about, being useless and unproductive. Maybe if you spent more time studying than getting into fights, you wouldn’t be such a disappointment.”
She nods, as if she had just discovered the solution to his nature.
Harry is put on house-arrest.
Predictably, his grades don’t go up. It wasn’t his running around that caused him to slack, even if she never once asked why he was always running. He doesn’t remember a time where he ever was still. It was Dudley. And now that he’s at home with Dudley, and no way to escape…
When she releases him from his house-arrest two months later, it’s not because she realises her mistake. Harry doesn’t think she ever thought of anything she did as a mistake.
No. Instead, it’s because one of their neighbours needs help mowing the lawn, and Dudley can’t be bothered to do it. To keep her image as the caring, kind neighbour intact, she sends Harry.
Mrs Taylor pays Harry five pounds, and tells him to buy himself a treat. It takes no less than two hours for Dudley to find the money.
Harry does not get his treat.
When his aunt finds out, she has a pinched expression on her face. Harry finds a five pound note crumpled up in his backpack a week later. Neither he nor his aunt mention it, and for a second, Harry almost feels wanted.
***
Harry is nine and Uncle Vernon just got a promotion. He takes them all to the amusement park a two-hour drive away. Thanks to the jovial mood, neither he nor Dudley comment on Harry’s presence. They’re not kind to him, but they do their best to tolerate him during the day.
Dudley dares him to ride the biggest rollercoaster and calls Harry a pansy when he says he doesn’t want to. Harry thinks he was rather smart for not going, when Dudley returns from the ride with wobbly knees and sicks up on the pavement. Aunt Petunia shrieks and leaves Harry alone while she takes care of her sweet Dudders.
The money Uncle Vernon hands him is enough for five rides. By the time he is called back, Dudley is too delirious to notice the smile on Harry’s face. Aunt Petunia allows a stop at McDonalds, and Harry can have a whole Happy Meal to himself. He even gets to keep the toy, because the employee accidentally gave him the one for girls.
Then again, he thinks it might not have been an accident at all. The girl smiles at him knowingly, and zips up her mouth. Harry tries not to cry at the fact that this is the nicest an adult has ever been to him.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and Uncle Vernon is back to his usual grumpy self when the realisation set in that a promotion means more workload.
Harry doesn’t mind too much. Whenever his thoughts get too loud, he imagines himself on the rollercoaster, soaring through the air.
It’s almost like flying, he thinks.
It’s a few years later when he finally learns how wrong—and right—he is.
***
Harry can’t regulate his anger well. He knows that. Everyone at school knows that. By nine, he’s developed a reputation as the crybaby with aggressive tendencies. It’s not a nice combination, but then, nothing has ever been for him.
He’s alone at lunch, as he is during all breaks, and watches the other kids with an envious, twisting feeling. More than anything, he wants to have a friend. He will never have one, if Dudley has anything to say about it. Privately, he looks forward to their secondary school years. At least then, with Dudley shipped off to Smeltings, Harry is finally be free to make friends.
At nine, it seems just as simple as that.
It won’t be.
Dudley is pestering him again, and he rips Harry’s lunch out of his hand. Not to eat it, because the day Dudley eats a vegetable is the day that pigs fly, but because he loves tormenting Harry. Harry doesn’t have control over his emotions on a good day, and especially not when he’s hungry. With the Dursley’s, he’s always hungry.
“Give that back!” he rages, and Dudley laughs as he trashes in his grip like a rabid dog. Dudley holds up the sandwich teasingly.
“What did you say, Freak? I don’t think I heard you.”
His pathetic friends laugh with him, and Harry sees red. He’s snarling and trashing, and he’s pretty sure he bites Dudley, because the boy yelps in shock, but of course he doesn’t let up.
“He’s like an animal!” someone shrieks, and Dudley gets that look in his eyes Harry hates.
“You’re right. And if he wants to act like an animal…then I’ll treat him like one.” Dudley draws back his arm, and throws the sandwich across the room. “Go fetch, mutt!” Like he knows Harry will still eat it.
Harry’s lunch lands on the floor with a thump.
He’s not sure when the tears start, or when the bell rings and he’s dropped onto the floor, or when his fists tremble so much his bones ache. He hates Dudley so much he wants to rip him apart. Especially because even with all the cruelty, he is right: Harry eats his lunch.
No matter if it was on the floor, or someone stepped on it, or it makes him no better than a dog.
He’s hungry, and he’s angry, and he wants them all to burn.
Years later, when they’re both grown up and Harry tells himself and others that the past is in the past, he goes back to this moment. He’s a liar, he thinks. Because even if he rings Dudley every year for Christmas and says he forgives him, the rage remains. He doesn’t think he can forgive that, no matter how hard he tries.
Sometimes, he’s scared that makes him a bad person. Most other times, he doesn’t care whether it does.
***
Harry knows he has rage issues. They send him to a shrink after he throws a chair out the window. He doesn’t listen to a single word the kindly, bespectacled woman tells him from her stupid armchair.
He needs to find healthy ways to express himself.
Suppressing his emotions is not the solution, because he will blow up. Whenever he feels himself get angry, he needs to count to ten.
It’s all rubbish, because she doesn’t understand. He can’t allow himself to feel his emotions, because emotions are for girls, and he’s already shameful enough. He’s lazy and an embarassment, and he should know better and do better. God, how can he be so ungrateful? After everything his aunt and uncle did to take him in after his drunkard parents died?
He is shameful—shameful—shameful.
The shrink doesn’t understand that he always feels like he’s going to explode. Like there is a storm bubbling under his skin that wants to break free.
Years later, when he finally has a word for it, he still doesn’t feel better. It only proves how defective he is, that his brain developed wrong. That his emotions are a tidal wave dragging him down with them.
The shrink asks him whether he thinks the way anger is modelled at home affected him.
Harry thinks it’s Uncle Vernon first. There is no day where his uncle his quiet. He’s loud, and he yells, yes—but it’s different. There’s always a build-up: a de-escalation.
It takes him another year to realise it’s Aunt Petunia who’s the problem.
Living with his aunt is like walking on eggshells. There is no rhyme or reason to her screaming, only pure, uncontrolled rage. She’s better at masking it, making it seem like it’s Harry’s fault she’s screaming, but it’s not. She’s not like Uncle Vernon, who could be quiet but chooses not to—she can’t control herself.
Harry remembers when he’s six and talks back to her, or even just says something she doesn’t like, and like flipping a switch, his aunt screeches at him to get out! She rages and calls him names, and Harry doesn’t understand what he did wrong—he didn’t do anything wrong! The memory is slippery, and he can’t grasp it, no matter how much he tries. Perhaps because even he knows that it doesn’t matter what he did, only that it was Harry who did anything at all.
For the next three days, the house is quiet. So quiet that Dudley doesn’t dare say anything either. Even if he’s never the direct target of her fury, Harry thinks it must be terrifying. Dudley, who is never silent has is fear in his eyes, and he doesn’t dare breathe too loud either. For the first time Harry considers that maybe, being Dudley wouldn’t be that much better either.
When he learns about the Golden Child and the Scapegoat, his childhood makes a lot more sense. When he learns that even the Golden Child suffers under abuse—because abuse is never harmless—his adulthood does, too.
He doesn’t dare call it abuse until he’s well into his thirties, and it’s Dudley of all people who says it first.
“I was talking to my wife about Mum,” he starts, and takes a sip of tea, because his throat is already dry as sand from those few words. “She said what Mum did to you—to us—is abuse. And I think she’s right.”
It’s easier after that. Looking Dudley in the eyes. Because he’s right, and even if he was pampered and spoiled, during the times of Silence, he was just a scared little boy, just like Harry, who desperately wished his mother would come back. It doesn’t make Harry forgive Dudley, but perhaps he doesn’t have to. Perhaps he can simply leave it in the past, just like the terror of looking his aunt in the eyes when she had one of her episodes.
They never know how long the Silence lasts—it could be an hour, a night, a day, a week. There is never any warning to its end, either.
It’s almost as if, suddenly, the rage simmering inside his aunt deflates like a badly baked souffle, and things are back to normal. Dudley is his mummy’s sweetums again, and Harry can finally breathe.
Aunt Petunia never apologises for her outbursts. Not to Harry, and not even to Dudley. Most times, it’s Harry’s job to apologise, even if he did nothing wrong. He thinks it broke something in him; is the reason why he can’t apologise well, even as an adult. Sometimes, however, in the rare cases it’s Dudley who messes up, and Uncle Vernon forces him to keep the peace, Harry can see the trepidation in his pale eyes. Dudley is even worse at apologising than Harry. He can’t look his mother in the eyes, and he mumbles, and sometimes he just waits it out, and Harry feels pity, for just a moment.
Then everything is back to normal, and his cousin hates him again, and Harry has to run, run, run before he catches him and throws him in a bin.
It’s strange. How he can hate and love a person at the same time. It’s easier to hate Dudley, because he’s just his smelly cousin who’s not so bright; it’s far harder to hate his mum’s sister. Even if he knows it’s futile, Harry tries to get her to love him. He’s quiet, and polite, and studious, and does all the chores without being asked, but it’s never enough.
He’s never enough.
Dudley receives all her love as if it’s his birthright.
In a way, it is.
Harry learns to control his temper. His aunt does not.
He resents her for it. Why does she have to be such an immature child? He managed to pull himself together, so why can’t she?
She doesn’t want to change.
She doesn’t care whether her behaviour hurts him.
That, more than anything else, hurts the most.
***
Harry is eleven and he’s a wizard, and he finally has a chance to escape from the Dursleys! Not even them denying him supper for the rest of the summer is enough to tamper his joy. He’s finally free; he’ll finally be enough.
***
He’s not enough.
***
Hogwarts is different than the Dursleys, but not as different as he had hoped.
He has friends, finally, but half the school hates him. It doesn’t matter, he decides. He doesn’t need them anyway.
When Professor Snape yells at him during class, those dark, evil eyes narrowed, all he can think of is his aunt. They have the same temper, the same bubbling rage beneath their bones. Harry doesn’t ever make the comparison out loud, and he’s glad, because neither would have taken it kindly.
It takes all his self-control to keep his fists still as Snape sneers at him, calls him names. It doesn’t hurt as much as it should. Of course it does hurt, how could it not, but he doesn’t start crying like Hermione, who never had her parental figure stare down at her and call her worthless.
He’s not even angry, he’s used to it; so why does he burn?
I’m used to it!
I’m used to it!
I’m used to it!
It takes him another few years to realise that’s even worse. That he is all the angrier, because he wasn’t. He is so angry, because he is used to it.
Harry hates Snape just as much as the man hates him. It doesn’t matter what he finds out in Fifth Year. He’s still a pathetic, disgusting excuse of a man who uses his bitterness as an excuse to torment children.
Yet, Harry thinks he understands him, just a bit.
Snape, above everything else, is a weak man—a coward.
Becoming like Snape is easy. Forgiving, on the other hand, is not.
This is why he embraces Dudley that day just before his seventeenth birthday. Because as much as his aunt screeches at him, Harry has never been weak. Thus, he doesn’t allow bitterness to consume him.
It’s the hardest thing he has ever done. And the most worthwhile.
***
Ron flushes scarlet when he unwraps his mum’s gifts, and complains about how he isn’t five anymore, and she doesn’t need to write him a reminder to brush his teeth. Harry stares at his own present—if one could call the taunting the Dursleys sent him that—and for a moment, he hates Ron, too.
That he gets to have his mother and father and siblings and a hand-knit sweater, and Harry gets a fifty pence and a cotton swab he knows they only sent to remind him how unloved he is.
It’s not the first time he wishes he could trade all his money and fame for a family, and it’s not the last. Harry wants to be loved. He makes sure not to glance at the note Mrs Weasley sent Ron complains is embarrassing. He would trade everything to get an I love you from his mum.
Mrs Weasley wraps him up in a ferocious hug the next time she sees him, and Harry can barely breathe. (He never wants her to let go)
Ron and his siblings grumble in protest as they’re scooped up as well.
When Harry makes his way to Uncle Vernon, who’s been waiting by the parking lot, far away from your kind, he’s not foolish enough to wish for a hug as well. So why does his chest still sting when all he gets is a grunt?
***
When he looks at his hands, and all he sees is ash.
He killed a man with these hands.
Voldemort is alive, and he’s coming for Harry.
His parents are dead, and they’re not drunkards, but they’re dead, so what does it matter what they were? They died for nothing. Because Voldemort is still alive, and he’s worthless, as Aunt Petunia said. He’s supposed to be the Boy-Who-Lived, the one who defeated Voldemort, yet Voldemort is alive, and Harry is a failure.
He dreams of fire and burning flesh.
Dudley taunts him for his nightmares, but not like he used to. Hagrid scared him; magic scares him. And when Harry stares at his fingertips that still reek of melting flesh, he finally understands why.
He doesn’t write about the nightmares to his friends. Even if they say they care for him, there surely is a limit, and being freakish is it. He spends many nights curled up on his bed, staring out the window, hands empty.
He doesn’t understand why they don’t write.
No, that’s a lie. Harry understands far too well. It’s him. Of course they wouldn’t write.
***
A house-elf has been intercepting his mail. Harry wants to strangle him. Especially after the house-elf ruined the dinner with the Masons. This time, it’s not just Aunt Petunia’s rage he fears. She screeches at him until his head hurts, and the next day, his uncle installs a cat-flap at his door.
Look at the mutt, Dudley’s voice taunts him. Harry can’t even retort anything, because he’s right: look at him. He’s pathetic.
Ron and his brothers pick him up a few days later with their flying car.
Harry almost cries from joy. It doesn’t matter how much Mrs Weasley scolds them, or how much trouble they get in once they crash into Hogwarts, too. For the first time, Harry is wanted, and no one can take that away from him.
Not Malfoy, or Snape, or even the fragment of the 16-year-old Dark Lord.
Tom Riddle laughs at him in the Chamber of Secrets, about how he’ll never be enough. The Diary is good at targeting weaknesses. But Harry already knows he’s not enough; that he’ll never be loved, and that he’s weak and a failure and worthless.
It’s just another cruel voice repeating what Harry already knows.
Stabbing him with the Basilisk fang is easy.
And if in his dreams, Tom Riddle’s young and handsome face morphs into Aunt Petunia’s sneer as he’s destroyed, no one has to know.
He wins Gryffindor 200 House Points. Snape looks like he wants to kill Harry, but he always does, so what does it matter?
Harry is with his friends, and he belongs.
***
The Dursleys make sure he gets that foolish notion out of his head the moment he steps inside.
Predictably, they haven’t forgiven last year’s escape.
When Dudley finds out about the Basilisk, he laments Harry not dying. Even if she doesn’t say it, Harry knows Aunt Petunia agrees. Her cold, pale eyes lack emotion as she regards him, and not for the first time he wonders whether she even sees him at all. Or if, like Snape, the only one staring back at her is his father.
Harry wishes he could say that she finally learns to control her temper. He hates her because she doesn’t.
When he blows up Aunt Marge and trembles out the door, he hates himself, too. It’s not the same, he knows. It feels the same.
***
He dreams of Cedric. Of his cold, lifeless body. Dudley pounds on his door when Harry screams in his sleep again. He’s already getting too little sleep. Not that anyone cares.
The Dementos almost suck out Dudley’s soul, and it doesn’t matter that Harry saved him. They are magic, and Harry is magic, so of course it’s his fault.
Aunt Petunia’s face twists into a grimace, her nostrils flaring. “I knew it was a mistake, taking that thing in. Just like his father. Always bringing misery into everyone’s lives.”
“Shut up!” Harry screams, because he is Petunia’s child, even if she loathes that fact. She raised him, he has her temper, and he knows she knows it too, and hates him all the more for it.
“Watch your mouth, brat! Look at what you’ve done to my poor Dudders! After everything we’ve sacrificed to raise you and clothe you, this is how you thank us? By bringing these creatures into our home?”
“Mum,” Dudley says, looking up.
She ignores him. “When that headmaster of yours wrote to me that I’ll have to take you in, I knew it would be a challenge, with you being her kind. But I could have never imagined how…I’d hoped I could stamp it out of you—that you could be normal, and yet! Of course I was mistaken! You’re already the reason my sister died, and now you want to kill my son, too? Haven’t you already done enough?”
He doesn’t even see her raising her hand.
The slap echoes so loud his eardrums shudder. He thinks back at how he lay curled up in his cupboard, wishing either of them would just strike him. Would hurt him bad enough. It doesn’t feel as good as he’d imagined, and it doesn’t hurt nearly as much.
Yet he raises his hand to his cheek, almost on autopilot, ears ringing with white static. He doesn’t see Dudley get up, or stand before him. He doesn’t even hear anything except, “Mum, enough!” but then both of them are yelling, and Aunt Petunia’s face is red, and she’s shaking. Dudley is shaking too, still weak from the Dementors, but for the first time, he’s not backing down.
Harry has no idea how long the two fight, or why Dudley stands up for him, but eventually, Aunt Petunia leaves, and Dudley slumps back down.
Harry doesn’t ask why. He doesn’t think Dudley has an answer.
They don’t speak another word when the Order of the Phoenix comes to collect Harry. But as he looks into his cousin’s eyes one last time, he can see an emotion in them he’s never seen before. And when he comes back a year later, rabid with grief and Dudley leaves him alone, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, his cousin finally grew up.
The same can’t be said for his aunt, of course.
***
There is a reason Harry skipped over the summer before his Fourth Year. He doesn’t know how to say it, but he has to, eventually. Better get it out with as soon as possible.
***
Having a godfather feels a bit like what he expects having parents feels like. Only Sirius is much less responsible than any parents he knows. That is Professor Lupin’s job.
Harry doesn’t ask, what Professor Lupin is to Sirius. It doesn’t much matter, does it? Not when the big, black dog visits him, his favourite professor in tow.
He doesn’t think Aunt Petunia and Professor Lupin meeting would be an issue. He should have expected it.
It’s Aunt Petunia who recognises him first.
“Lupin,” she spits, as if the mere mention of his name is sacrilegious. “Seems like the years haven’t treated you kindly.”
Professor Lupin laughs, because of course he does, and he doesn’t seem affected by her vitriol. “You haven’t changed one bit.”
And Harry doesn’t understand, because they seem to know eachother, but she never once mentioned him. Professor Lupin wants to reach out, maybe to ruffle Harry’s hair, maybe to hug him goodbye, but his aunt is faster. She shrieks in disgust as she pulls Harry away.
“You’re setting your sight on little boys now, Lupin? Did that criminal of yours twist your perversions even further?”
Professor Lupin is as pale as a sheet, and he is trembling, and Harry wants to ask what’s wrong, but Aunt Petunia is dragging him away, and he knows that fighting is futile. Once they’re home, she makes him take off all his clothes and tuns the shower scolding hot. Harry has to scrub every inch of himself. The clothes he wore that day are gone when he steps out.
“I’d hoped that perhaps age would teach him reason,” his aunt says, making sure Harry properly dried his hair.
He doesn’t ask his aunt what she means, but he doesn’t have to. Even if she never says the word, the disgust is clear in her voice when she talks about their perversion. How Harry has to be careful that he doesn’t let himself get twisted as well. How it’s unnatural—freakish.
Part of him agrees with her. It’s dangerous.
Boys shouldn’t like boys.
If he hadn’t, then maybe Tom Riddle wouldn’t have led him astray like that.
If he didn’t, then maybe he would be able to look at Cedric Diggory and his blinding, handsome smile, and feel anything but revulsion.
His aunt is right: he’s a freak.
Him falling in love with a woman a year later doesn’t change that.
It must be a mistake. He must be a mistake. Is he just pretending, so he doesn’t become a pervert as well?
Years later, when he lears about bisexuality, he cries in relief.
It’s not him who’s wrong: it’s her.
Even if he would never admit it, he’s glad for his freakishness.
God knows he wouldn’t have been kind on Albus and Scorpius if he wasn’t a freak, too.
***
Dudley grows up.
Aunt Petunia does not.
Much like everything else in that house, she is stagnant. She refuses to grow, to change with the seasons.
Dudley is not perfect. He still taunts Harry, he still steals his food, but he’s not as cruel anymore. And when his mother isn’t watching, he asks Harry about magic. Ever since his almost-expulsion, his relatives lost their fear of mistreating him due to his magic. Dudley lost his fear, too, just not in the way they wanted.
Harry tells him about dragons and mermaids and unicorns and moving photographs. Dudley doesn’t understand what’s so different about moving photos than the telly, and this time, it’s Harry who doesn’t have an answer for him.
During those nights, when they’re both hiding under the blanket, just two whispering boys, he almost feels normal.
It doesn’t last.
The Death Eaters blow up a hospital. Fifteen Muggles die, and seventy three are injured.
“It’s your fault!” Aunt Petunia hisses, face contorted. “Do you enjoy causing pain to others? It was a maternity ward. Just because you were almost killed as a baby doesn’t mean everyone else’s baby has to die, too. I hope you never become a father. You’d be a horrible father.”
Harry wants to scream, wants to cry, wants to say fine, what does it matter anyway when I could die tomorrow because of Voldemort, or even, I’d be a better parent than you!, but he does neither.
“Shut up!” he explodes, and the windows shatter, and Aunt Petunia throws a plate at him, but Harry doesn’t care.
“Drop that attitude, boy!” she hisses, “Do you have no manners!”
“Can’t blame anyone but yourself. You raised me, or did you forget?”
“Go to hell,” she snarls, and Harry blinks.
He wants to say something snarky, wants to say, I’m already in hell, seeing as you’re here, but he stops himself. Because he’s not a child, and he can think before he speaks.
Suddenly, he sees her. Really sees her. Sees her for the bitter, twisted woman she is. Suddenly, she’s not so large anymore, and when did Harry grow taller than her? It doesn’t hurt, not really. It should, but he’s so used to it that he can only nod. Knows that she doesn’t really mean it.
It is a stupid thing to say, just out of the heat of the moment, yet…
Yet she said it.
“Okay,” he says, far calmer than he’s been in a long time.
He goes to his room in silence. His aunt doesn’t stop him. Whether it’s out of anger or guilt or shame, he doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter.
He’s not angry at his aunt, but he doesn’t talk to her, either.
When Dumbledore picks him up, he doesn’t spare Privet Drive a second glance.
***
He’s turning seventeen soon, and then the blood protection will be gone. He’s finally free of the Dursleys. A few years ago, the revelation would have made him cry from joy. Now, however, he can only nod.
All right.
That’s it, then.
The Dursleys have to go into hiding. It’s odd, seeing Privet Drive all empty. His aunt stands in the middle of the now bereft living room, staring out the window.
“You didn’t just loose a mother that night,” she says, finally looking at him. “I lost a sister as well.”
Harry wants to open his mouth, but he doesn’t know what to say. She looks broken and sad and old. All Harry feels is pity. It must be sad, living like this.
He doesn’t owe her any words. He doesn’t owe her anything.
So, Harry turns around, and walks away.
“We needn’t see eachother again,” he says, when they finally escort the Dursleys out, and this time it’s his aunt who is silent. He wants to turn back to look her in the eyes, but he’s not that kind. She can die without ever seeing her—Lily’s—eyes again.
Dudley hugs Harry goodbye, and Harry lingers just a second too long, or maybe it’s Dudley who lingers, but when they finally depart, and Harry croaks, “take care, Big D”, and Dudley says, “don’t be a stranger, yeah?” and as Harry nods, he finds that he actually means it.
During the whole encounter, Aunt Petunia is silent. Harry can see in her tightly pressed lips that she wants to say something
For the first time, she doesn’t.
Harry is under no illusion it will last.
***
Harry is the final Horcrux. As long as he lives, Voldemort does, too.
It’s easy, walking into the Forbidden Forest. He has been waiting for that moment ever since he was eight years old and the silence of Aunt Petunia’s hatred so suffocating he only wanted to escape.
***
“My wonderful boy. I love you so much,” his mum whispers, and Harry breaks down in her arms. She hugs him like he should have been hugged. It gives him enough strength to wake back up.
***
Harry dies.
***
Predictably, it doesn’t stick.
***
Voldemort is dead, and he should be happy, and he is, but he’s also so tired, and he just wants to go to sleep. Teddy Lupin is so small and fragile in his grip, and Harry is so afraid he’ll hurt him. But the boy just gives him a gummy smile, and then he laughs, and Harry cries.
He takes his role as godfather as serious as it deserves.
Teddy Lupin is the first son he and Ginny raise. In some ways, he’ll always be Harry’s favourite. He was the one who taught Harry that he didn’t have to cry himself to sleep anymore, fearing that he would become his aunt.
Teddy is a lot like him, yet loving him is as simple as breathing.
Harry thinks that maybe it wasn’t him who was the problem, but his aunt.
***
He doesn’t invite Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon to his wedding, but he does invite Dudley. Partly out of obligation, and partly because he wants to take advantage of his childhood fear of magic by throwing him right in the middle of it.
Dudles is delighted by magic.
He asks George to make the table float at least twenty times, and Harry’s pretty sure that once party was over, he’d established himself as Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes best customer.
“He’s different than I remember,” Rom murmurs, and he’s right.
He throws the kids around until they shriek in delight, and chant up! up! up! because being thrown by a mountain of a man is much more fun than simply using a spell, apparently.
Dudley and Mrs Weasley talk about food. Even if Dudley is now more muscle than fat, he’s still Dudley, and he wouldn’t have been himself otherwise.
“Yeah, he’s changed,” Harry says. It’s not enough. It never will be enough, but it’s a start.
It’s easy to be hateful.
It’s much harder to forgive.
***
Somehow, Aunt Petunia finds out Harry got married. He only knows because Dudley tells him she complained about it. Thankfully, she doesn’t bother him about it.
When news of Ginny’s pregnancy are leaked, Harry is drowned in fan-mail. Near everyone in Wizarding Britain wants to express their well-wishes. He even gets a letter from Viktor Krum, which he teases Hermione about.
What he doesn’t expect is a Muggle postcard.
He doesn’t know how his aunt found his address, but he knows it’s her. Even after all these years, Harry knows that handwriting. He also knows better, yet he opens it.
Predictably, she tells him that he shouldn’t have a child and that he’ll be a terrible father. If he has any mercy with Ginny, he should leave her now before he destroys her, too.
Harry burns the post card and makes sure to cast a ward so his aunt would never reach him again.
***
Contrary to her word, Harry is a great father.
He’s not perfect, and sometimes his anger bubbles just below the surface, but he knows better than to speak the words out loud.
***
When his son is crying on his bed, shaking terribly, and confesses that he’s in love with his best friend, Harry doesn’t have the right words, he knows. He’s never been good with words, but he hugs him all the same, and it’s not over, or enough, but it’s enough for now, and tomorrow he’ll find the words.
***
He tells Albus about Cedric, and a weight is lifted off his chest. Because if his son’s eyes sparkle so brightly when Harry confesses what his aunt called a sickness, then maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t so bad at all.
***
Albus is a lot like him. Even more than Teddy is. So, yes, raising him isn’t always easy, Harry knows his temper, Merlin, does he know it, but loving Albus is never a question.
He makes sure his son grows up in a house he can breathe in, and with emotions that don’t sweep over him like a tsunami. That his brain doesn’t fear the silence so much he splits himself apart.
Once upon a time, Aunt Petunia said she wished that Harry wasn’t her family at all. It was a cruel, twisted thing to say. Harry still feels the scars of that curse deep in his soul.
So when his son rages and screams, and the words threaten to bubble up Harry’s throat as well, he chooses to hug his son instead. Because he is the adult, and it is time he grows up.
He is not his aunt, and if he has anything to say with it, he never will be.
***
Harry Potter is invited to all his children’s weddings, and he cries at every single one.