Chapter Text
He knew that, really, he lived in a house. He lived with Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon, Cousin Dudley. He lived.
But he also knew that these things weren’t really true. Really, he lived in a small room tucked beneath the stairs. That didn’t seem to be quite the same as Cousin, who had a room Upstairs. Upstairs, which might as well be a different world, because he was so rarely allowed there. Cousin, who was the same age as him, had toys, things that were to play with, something he didn’t get to do, because he had to do other things.
Things like mop, broom, wash dishes, garden and cook. He had jobs, and Cousin played, a word that never stopped seeming strange to him. It wasn’t a job, it didn’t look like. Cousin sat around and waved his arms around and yelled and used these toys and there wasn’t something that had to be done. When someone was mopping, it was so the floor got clean. But playing didn’t have something that had to be finished when it was over. It didn’t make sense to him.
Cousin sometimes said things that made no sense to him. Cousin said things that made it sound like he should want the toys, and to play. But he didn’t really like them because he didn’t understand them. There was no point to them. The work was better, at least they made sense to him.
The only thing Cousin had that he really wanted was – he didn’t even know what to call it. When Uncle or Aunt ware mad, he got pain. Cousin didn’t get pain. They never even got mad at Cousin. That was what he wanted. He wanted to not get pain the way Cousin didn’t get pain. When the red stuff came out of him, that’s when things hurt the most.
It was a lot of work, making sure that he didn’t mess up the jobs he had to do. When Aunt or Uncle got mad, he got pain, and he had to say sorry, and do better. He was put away into his room, and he couldn’t get out. The door didn’t let him. He didn’t get food either, but he was more used to that. Cousin always got food, he was the one who decided what he had to cook, even. No food was better than pain, anyways. If he could choose, he would choose no food.
He liked his room. It wasn’t as bright as the rest of the house. The light hurt him sometimes, made his head hurt, especially after he’d been in his room for a while. His room was safe from pain, from work, and even not eating wasn’t as bad when he was in his room. The other rooms were too big for him anyways. Uncle, Cousin and even Aunt were bigger than him, of course they got bigger rooms! They could have them; those rooms didn’t make him feel as safe as his own room did.
There was one thing that really confused him though, was when Cousin started to disappear most days, the way Uncle did. Uncle had his own work, he understood that. But Cousin started to go to too. Work called school. Cousin complained all the time about school, but he didn’t understand why. This work seemed like it was easier than his own work. And it had a point, unlike playing.
But in the end, none of it mattered, because his own days remained the same, just without Cousin. Aunt still had things for him to do, so he just kept on doing them. And it stayed that way for a while.
And then –
He had been gardening. The winter was finally letting up, so he’d been preparing the ground for the planting that was to come. Clearing out anything that hadn’t decomposed over the cold season, figuring out what had survived. The grass needed to be coaxed back into lush greenness too.
He didn’t have much to combat the brisk air, the clothes that were too small for Cousin were big on him, so they weren’t protection, and he didn’t have that big thing Cousin or Uncle wore when there was snow outside. What he did was, every so often, he’d stop to tuck his hands close under the clothes to warm them up a little before continuing.
He’d been doing that when someone, from behind him, said, “Hello.”
He glanced back, a little curious. No one said hello to him, that was for people. He looked because he wanted to see who was behind him, he needed to know.
There was just one person, a lady, like Aunt, but, different? She had grey hair and lines on her face. She was looking at him that way Aunt did sometimes, like there was something not quite right with him.
He waited, looking at her.
“Hello.” She said again.
He blinked. What did she want? Maybe he was supposed to say hello too? Aunt sometimes did that when she spoke to people. But he wasn’t people? Maybe this lady just didn’t know that yet.
“Hello?” His voice didn’t sound right, but that made sense. He didn’t use it often. He tried to say it the way he’d heard Uncle say it on the phone.
The lady smiled. “What are you doing?”
He looked at her, confused now. “Gardening.”
She laughed. “Too young to be in school then?”
He shook his head. “I’m bad, I don’t go to school.”
The lady frowned. He leaned back a little. He knew that face. That was a bad face.
“What does that mean?” She said.
He looked at her, worried now. Maybe she didn’t know he wasn’t people, but she knew how to make that face. So maybe, she knew how to give pain too. With Uncle, being quiet was better, it meant less pain. So, he had to be quiet.
He looked at her, not saying anything. She seemed to be waiting for him too. Maybe for an answer? Was this like those times Uncle asked a question and got mad when he was quiet? He hated those. There wasn’t ever an answer where Uncle didn’t get mad. They were all wrong. But if she kept looking at him like that, it would just make things worse and worse.
“I don’t go to school?” He said slowly, quietly. “I’m bad so I don’t go.”
Just then, another lady came by, saying some strange sound. The way the lady in front of him moved told him that maybe it was her name. Like how Aunt was Aunt Petunia. Petunia was a weird sound.
“What’s going on?” The second lady asked.
The first lady gestured at him. “He says he’s bad and doesn’t go to school.”
“What?”
They were both looking at him with those faces. This was like Aunt and Uncle were both there. Both mad. And then, Aunt came.
“Hello, can I help you?”
He understood Aunt, this was better. These ladies were weird. Talking to him like he was people and asking questions where they got mad at every answer. Even Uncle only did that sometimes.
“We were just having a little chat with your boy.” The first lady said, smiling. It wasn’t a nice smile though. “No school today?”
“He was suspended.” Aunt said, coming further outside. “He kept hurting the other boys, so he’s being kept home for a week.”
The second lady eyed him, that same mad look on her face, while the first hummed. “That’s a shame. Have you considered therapy? My son was a bit of a handful when he was younger, but that helped loads.”
Aunt shook her head. “It’s not that bad. Just have to keep boys like him busy. Idle hands and all.”
He ducked his head. Aunt was mad he’d stopped working. He turned back to the gardening but kept track of them out of the corner of his eye.
“I suppose.”
The second lady moved closer to the first, “We’ll be on our way now. Good luck with your boys.” She waved to Aunt before threading the same arm through the other’s and moving them along.
Aunt looked down on him, but he didn’t move away from the garden. She went back into the house, rubbing her arms, and muttering to herself.
Aunt and Uncle had words that night, when Uncle came home. They said things about school and mentioned his one of his names over and over, boy, which meant they had to be talking about him. He wondered yet again which name came first. Aunt came before Petunia, but he didn’t know if freak came before boy.
He was so preoccupied with the order his names came in that he didn’t realise that the veg on the grill was starting to burn along the edges. The smell is what shook him out of his thoughts, and he moved them out of the way of the heat quickly. Sneaking another look to make sure Aunt and Uncle were still in the parlour, he plated the beans, and carefully cut off the burnt parts.
When he started to hear footsteps heading towards the kitchen, Aunt’s feet, he started putting the rest of the food on plates. It was better to only have a couple of burned parts and full plates than empty plates with no burned food.
He was finishing the plates when she came in. She took two of the plates, and he, very carefully lifted the last. He was too small to hold more than one plate at a time, and he had to be very careful not to drop that one either.
Aunt called Cousin, and he came charging down the steps. Cousin sat at the table, and Uncle came out of the parlour, face still red from talking with Aunt. The three sat down, and he stood in the corner of the kitchen, eyes fixed on the window, as always.
He didn’t listen to what they said, there was no point. Half of it made no sense to him, he didn’t leave the house very often, so he didn’t know much. The rest just had nothing to do with him. When their voices got very loud, sometimes, he would look, just to check everything was okay, then he looked away again. A couple of times, Uncle made him fetch more water and Cousin had him fill his plate again, but otherwise, he stood in the corner and waited.
Once Uncle and Cousin had left the table, and Aunt had gotten up, he approached very slowly, and started to make little piles. It took him two trips to get everything to the sink, and he moved his little stool to the sink so that he could reach into it and wash the dishes.
Aunt had his food ready when he was done, ham and cheese, and crumbling ends of a loaf of bread. His food wasn’t served on plates, that was for people, and he had to eat over the garbage.
It was late, and he could see that Aunt wanted him to hurry up. It looked like she and Uncle still had to talk, but she also had to close him into his room for the night.
“Aunt,” he said, quietly. He was always careful when talking, they could get more mad. “Can I eat in my room?”
She eyed him, suspicious even when he was doing something helpful. But she nodded and shooed him into his little room. The darkness that enveloped him and the closing of the latch were so familiar to him that he could have identified them in his sleep.
Ages later, when it was starting to get chilly again, he was sent to school for the first time.
----
School was weird. They made him sit on a chair and got mad when he sat on the floor. They got mad enough that he didn’t feel like correcting them and that he wasn’t allowed. If he sat on the floor at school he got yelled at, and if he sat on a chair at the house, he got pain.
They kept calling him hairy. He wasn’t hairy! He had a lot of hair on his head that Aunt didn't like, but he thought it was a little unfair to say that his name was hairy. He tried to explain that his name was boy, it was easy to remember he thought, easier than freak, but that just got him in trouble with Aunt and Uncle when he went home.
So, even though he hated it, he let everyone call him hairy, and didn’t say anything. It was better than pain. Everything was better than pain. Cousin had friends, which were like family except you didn’t live with them. They tried to hurt him the way Uncle did, and he learned to hide. At school, hiding was allowed, and it was the best . He could run away from them, and he didn’t get in trouble for it. Cousin and his friends still tried to hurt him, but they did that even if he didn’t hide, so hiding was better. Less pain.
It took a while, but he finally realised that school was better than the house. A lot of the teachers didn’t like him, they made the same faces that Aunt and Uncle did, but they didn’t hurt him. He learned to read and write, and that the name everyone called him was spelled Harry. He learned how to cross the street, and how to count to big numbers, and the names of colours – he hadn’t known they had names! He knew he was getting smarter. He had to be.
It was hard sometimes when he couldn’t see what the teacher was writing on the board, but if he listened to the teacher instead of trying to see it, then it was okay. Harry still didn’t get to talk to a lot of people, though. Sometimes, he would get to talk to them, or the teacher would make them work together, and he would get a friend too. Not like Cousin, not real ones, but ones that were okay with him for one class, or sometimes two. A couple of times, they even talked to him all day.
They made him play, and he didn’t know how as it didn’t make sense to him. He’d never got to practice like Cousin, so normally, when the teacher made them use toys, he would do it alone, trying to copy what the other kids did. It was better when the toys taught you things, he found. Then he would know if he got it right.
Harry learned that the library was full of books, and it became his favourite place to hide. Cousin and his friends never thought of the library, and it could teach him so much. He became glad for school then as they’d taught him to read, and if school was good then reading was the very best. He was always nice to the librarians, because they were the ones who let him stay even when he wasn’t supposed to. They never talked to him, but when summer holiday was about to start, one of them told him about public libraries.
Summer wasn’t as bad when Harry knew school was going to start again. He knew about months and days now, so he could count how long until he could go back. Aunt was happy that he was back to doing work every day, he could tell. She kept saying how it was a sacrifice to let him away from his chores to go to school. He tried to work hard to make up for it.
He was starting to understand what they said better now. He knew what the word sacrifice meant, and he knew what Uncle meant by saying he was ungrateful. Harry thought that was a little unfair. He knew that the only reason he had the room was because of Uncle and Aunt. They were the ones who gave it to him. Maybe he just hadn’t said thank you enough?
The best part though, was that Aunt had gotten used being home alone, so sometimes, sometimes , when he was done his chores, she told him to get out. He wandered around, trying to find one of the public libraries that the librarian had told him about. It took him almost two weeks, but he found it.
He walked from the library back to the house three times to make sure he knew how to get there before he let himself really go in. He found the kids section, the one with the little chairs and a few toys. He knew what they were for now, they had them at school. But he still didn’t understand them, and so he kept to the books.
He found out, after days, that he could sit on the floor in the library, and no one got mad. One day, he had a bunch of books on the floor with him, and he went to put them back before he had to go home, and a librarian found him. He thought she would tell him get up like his teachers did, instead she told him that he was putting them in the wrong place and messing it up.
Harry asked her if she could show him how to put books back properly so that he wasn’t making a mess, and she showed him where to put them. It was a little plastic square thing, with some other books in it too. He thought it was better for him to put them back on the shelves, but she made him put them in the square, and he didn’t want to get in trouble, so he did.
Then she told him that he could take the books home. He said no, because he wouldn’t have time to read at the house but said thank you very politely so she wouldn’t think he was ungrateful too.
---
The next several years repeated themselves in this fashion. Harry learned more about himself the longer he went to school. He found out he had a birthday, that Aunt and Uncle were his guardians not his parents, and that he didn’t have a mom and dad. His teacher told him it was because they died, but Cousin said that it was because he didn’t deserve them. Harry thought Cousin was right because the teachers kept pretending he was people, and he wasn’t.
But eventually, Harry realised that everyone was people, except him. People had parents – parents were a mom and dad who loved their kids. People got to sit on chairs, and they were allowed to have good grades, and didn’t have to do as many chores as he did. People didn’t live in small rooms or have to wait for their family to eat before they could have leftovers. They got new clothes, and toys, and didn’t need to keep food for later, in case they were bad and couldn’t have dinner. They could talk whenever they wanted, and they didn’t even get in trouble unless they said something mean.
Harry couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t people though. He knew he wasn’t, but he didn’t understand what was different. At first, he’d thought it was because he didn’t have parents. Not having parents meant that he wasn’t people. But a year later and he found out that one of the girls in his class lived with her Aunt, and she was definitely people.
Then he thought it was because his skin was always brown, and Uncle and Aunt and Cousin weren’t. But then he realized that the other kids in his room who had skin even more brown than his were people. They had parents and new toys all that time. That couldn’t be it.
So what was it?
He knew enough now to know that boy and freak had never been his names, that they were describing him. And he was a boy, but how was he a freak?
This lasted another year until one time, while running from Cousin and his friends, he ended up on the roof. He hadn’t meant to, but suddenly, there was a different wind in his hair and a different ground beneath his feet. And he didn’t know how to get down.
Uncle beat him and left him in his room for the weekend without food, but it was okay. Because now Harry knew why he wasn’t people. He was a freak, and he was a freak because he could do impossible things. And it made sense. It made sense why he wasn’t allowed new clothes and had to work all the time. Uncle and Aunt were trying to get him to be normal, and maybe, if he could be normal, he would get to be a person too.
So, he tried. He tried really hard to not be a freak. It was hard sometimes, because he didn’t always know when something freaky would happen. Aunt was cutting his hair once, complaining about how messy and ugly it was. She cut it all off, and Harry went to bed, thinking that it would be easy to keep it short if it bothered her so much. Except the next morning his hair had all grown back.
He cried that night because even when he was trying not to be freaky, it was still there. It didn’t care about what he wanted, whatever it was, it was going to keep him a freak. He’d never get to be people.
He was sad for a while after he realized that he’d never get to be people as long as he was still a freak. His Aunt and Uncle would keep reminding him how he was never going to be normal. He thought about running away for a bit, thinking that if he couldn’t be normal, then at least he could get away from the house. Things might be better if he could find out if there were other freaks like him. That way, they could be people to each other, even if they weren’t to anyone else. Maybe he could have a real friend then.
Except –
Except one day, when Harry was ten years old, they had an assembly about what was normal for families. They called it abuse, said that every kid was allowed to have a happy home, to have people love them, and that it was never okay for an adult to hurt a kid. That the police and their teachers would keep them safe if they knew anyone like that or if their families were being mean to them. They even talked about how some adults touched kids, but it sounded really scary and gross, so Harry tried not to pay attention to that part.
Harry knew that it wasn’t quite right. He knew it wasn’t good that he got hurt, but he also knew that he didn’t have a real family. He didn’t have a real home, so what they were talking about didn’t really apply to him. The teachers didn’t like him, and the one time the police had talked to Uncle, they had left, telling him to be good for his family. They weren’t going to help him, because they knew he was a freak too.
So, they weren’t quite right. But Harry also knew that he was a kid, even if he wasn’t people. If he just had chores, or maybe chores and no new clothes and his little room, that’d be okay. Maybe Aunt and Uncle were being mean. Maybe they were abusing him a little by hitting him when they were meant to only help him be normal.
Harry had been having enough trouble with trying to figure out how much of Aunt and Uncle making him normal was abuse when his teacher talked about discrimination. It was a big word that Harry had to work hard to learn to spell. It meant that it wasn’t fair to be mean to people for something they can’t change. Like how he was brown, or how his teacher was a girl. Everyone was still a person, no matter what they looked like and no matter who they were.
But that couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be.
He couldn’t control being a freak, so that meant that Aunt and Uncle were wrong to do all those things that helped him be more normal. That was discrimination. But that couldn’t be right. They were a little mean, sure. They hit him when they didn’t have to. But that meant that everyone was people, even freaks. And if he was actually people, then it was abuse.
It hurt his brain a little. He kept thinking about it, getting stuck in the same circle of he had to be a person, but he was a freak, so if freaks were people, why was this happening to him?
Why was this happening to him? If he was stuck being a freak, if he couldn’t help it, maybe it meant that nothing could change him. He’d been trying hard not be a freak for almost a year and a half, and those impossible things still happened. His teacher’s hair had turned blue in 10 seconds, he had once talked to a snake, and he’d made a ball float away.
If nothing could change him, then that meant it was wrong what Aunt and Uncle were doing to him. But if it was wrong, then why hadn’t anyone stopped it? Because he’d thought that his teachers and the police, and even that lady who’d talked to him that one time outside, hadn’t done anything to stop Aunt and Uncle because he was a freak, and they knew about them trying to make him normal.
If he could never be normal, and it wasn’t allowed to hurt people, and he was a person even if he was a freak, then it should be wrong to hurt him too. But it wasn’t, because no one had stopped them, and everyone still acted like he was a freak.
He was missing something. There had to be something else then. Either he wasn’t a person because of something else, and it wasn’t his freakiness that made him different or –
Or, Aunt and Uncle were wrong. They were the ones who had done something bad, and they should be getting in trouble, but they weren’t.
Either he was wrong, or everyone else was, and he couldn’t think of anything else . He’d thought of everything that made him different from other people and tried to find out what made it okay to hurt him, but there wasn’t anything. So it couldn’t be him. It had to be everyone else who was wrong.
Aunt and Uncle were wrong for hurting him, but no one was helping him. No one was getting them in trouble or making them stop. Which meant that Harry had to be the one to do something. Because even if they were right, and it was okay for him to have to bleed and hurt and do chores and live in a little room and never get new things and have to get bad grades and all the other things – he was tired of it.
Because now that he knew that it wasn’t okay, now that he knew that he could be people too, it was all he thought of. He imagined having new clothes, and a room that was big enough for a real bed (he’d seen pictures and they seemed so comfortable) and not having to get hit all the time. He imagined a bath, one that felt nice, the way he thought they must be if Cousin screamed for another ten minutes when Aunt told him to get out.
He imagined getting to open presents that’d been put under a tree because someone had thought of what he’d like and bought it new for him. He imagined having people who wanted him to be happy and treated him like they cared about him. He wanted parents like his classmates, not drug addicts that left their kid on other people’s doorsteps. He wanted to be able to get a library card and get to read books at home. He knew what he’d been missing, and he wanted a turn too.
So, he made a plan to leave.
When school broke for summer, Harry snuck home several carefully chosen books. He knew now that he wasn’t going to get to come back, not if his plan worked. School told Uncle and Aunt too much, so if he was to run away, then he couldn’t go to school, or they’d make him go back.
He went to the public library and did the same thing, sneaking books into his bag to take with him. He figured that if he took books with him, he could learn from them instead of going to school. He’d be able to come back to the public library later, so he didn’t take too much. But when he ran away, someone might come looking for him there, so it was better to take a couple and just not come as often.
He knew his birthday was the 31st of July, and he figured that it was better to be on the run as an eleven-year-old than ten. It would be his first birthday present to himself, sleeping in a house one more time before leaving. It also gave him more time to prepare things to take with him if he left in August.
Over his last month at the house, Harry took pieces of food, more than he’d tried before. He spaced out his thefts so they wouldn’t be noticed, being extra careful so he wasn’t ever caught. Eventually, he also had to take an old bag of Cousin’s that had sat unused in the laundry room for ages in order to fit everything he was taking.
It wasn’t too much, he thought. He had some food; it would last him about two weeks if he kept eating the same way he was used to. He had his books, which took a lot of spaces, but he managed to fit some clothes around them anyways. Cousin’s were always thin so it worked in his favour for once. Especially as Harry had also taken a couple of winter items. He figured they wouldn’t be noticed until later in the year, and he’d be well-gone by then. He was sort of excited to see what winter was like with an actual coat. He thought that he’d done a good job packing. Two bags wasn’t too much, and it was all stuff he’d need.
He’d been ready to leave for a couple of days by the time his birthday arrived. One bag was stored outside, in a bush that only he checked because he did all of the gardening at the house. The other was in his room. He figured that he’d wait until Aunt decided that he should leave the house again and take his chance to run then. Carrying out two bags would be suspicious, which was why he had just the one in his room. Plus, his room couldn’t really fit both bags and him. It was sort of exciting, having enough things that they didn’t fit in the room with him. One day, he’d have a room that could.
On the night of the 30th, Harry stared at the little watch he’d found, cracked outside the library last year. It slowly counted out the last minutes of the day, counting down one of the last days he’d have to stay in this little room, in this house that wasn’t his. It was a little tradition he’d started, the year he’d found out that he had a birthday too. He waited for midnight, for when his birthday started.
When he’d been really little, before he’d started going to school, he used to wish that Aunt and Uncle decide one day that he got a birthday like Cousin too. They’d open the little room’s door, hug him, and then give him presents. They’d tell him that he didn’t have to do his chores that day, that he could watch TV with Cousin, that he would get ice cream (everyone loved it, maybe it was good).
Harry knew better now, knew they wouldn’t change, but it was still a nice idea, having a real birthday party like in the books. Maybe one day, he’d have enough people to sing happy birthday to him, like he’d seen Cousin’s friends sing through the crack in his room’s door. He’d get a cake with his name, and they would cheer when he blew out the candles.
He imagined it that night, thinking about the cheering, and the people and the cake, and promised himself, as the date changed on the clock, and he turned eleven. He promised that one day he would have that. He would have a real birthday party one day, and only people he loved would get to come.
Eventually, he let sleep take him. He wasn’t going to get to sleep indoors much longer, he should get all the rest he could. He slept that night, for the first time, excited for his birthday.