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Chapter Text

The Dursley's were dicks. 

That's frankly the only thought that could escape past harry's blind hunger, as he lay in a crude imitation of a fetal position on the floor of his cousin's second bedroom. 

He had not eaten in three days. Sorry, two and half, that's if you count the burnt end of a sausage he stole when he was still allowed out of his room. 

Hunger is a very odd thing, harry thinks. It comes in stages. It starts off as a sort of nagging feeling, like your brain is going 'hey!', it's gentle, like what harry imagines your mother waking you up in the morning feels like. Ignore that for long enough and it becomes a sort of ache, a feeling like you're being slightly scooped out. Like a little ball of ice cream at the movies. Leave that one for long enough and it becomes this dizzy feeling, nauseous and tired and starving yet feeling like looking at a plate of food would make you literally internally combust. Harry has to say that one's the worst. Once you get past that stage, it get's kind of weird. 

Your brain kind of gives up. Like a mum that's too tired to tell her child off for throwing all the flour off the shelves at Tesco's, so she kind of just walks away and hopes that he stops. You stop feeling hungry for a while. In fact you kind of stop feeling everything. Everything goes very numb. And it feels like you're almost not there, as though your body is saving fuel by kind of ejecting the conscious part of the brain. It's a nice feeling while it lasts. There's not many thoughts that can happen there. the raging stream of his consciousness is swept away for a while. 

That is of course until the third stage comes back times ten. 

Harry regrets not fighting harder as Vernon locked him in his room, regrets not stuffing an extra roll from the trolley on the Hogwarts express down his jumper. Regrets waiting this long to feel regret. Because there is nothing he could do now. Laying on a floor that was not really his. Feeling the weakest he had ever felt since he left for Hogwarts in his first year. 

There was extra locks on his door now. A silver chain on a deadbolt, and a huge padlock thing as though he were a gorilla, or some sort of wild beast. Frankly Harry did not know whether he could open a normal door by himself anymore. never mind busting down a door with as many chains and padlocks and bullshit that had been haphazardly drilled onto his door. It was overkill if you asked him. 

But the Dursley's would not ask him, in fact they would not talk to him at all. 

Harry did not like thinking about these things, so he didn't. And focused on the aching, gnawing pain eating through him instead. 

A much better plan. 

*****

His friends hadn't talked to him in weeks. 

Sirius was innocent. 

Pettigrew was alive and free. 

And no one, not one single person, not Dumbledore, not remus, not Mrs Weasley, not any of them, had seen it fit to inform him what the fuck was going on. 

He nearly gets kissed by a dementor, he nearly sees his fucking godfather get kissed by a dementor, he gets hunted by a rabid werewolf, and then turns back time to rescue a man he barely knows, produces a full bloody corporeal patronus, hides a international fugitive from the minister of fucking magic, potentially becoming an international fugitive himself if caught, and not one of them. Not one single person, after all that fucking shit. Could take two seconds to send him a letter. 

Perhaps he was being selfish. 

Perhaps. 

But he missed voices other than the dark hoarse croaking of his own mind in pitch black darkness, and he missed not being alone.

He would take being labelled selfish over this cruel bullshit any day. 

He was laying in the foetal position, hands tucked over his knees as he compressed himself into the smallest shape he could muster. Trying with all his might to stave away the prickling feeling of his consciousness ripping itself from his body, when he heard them come in. 

Neither Petunia, nor Vernon were home, Vernon was working, as he usually was during the weekdays, and Petunia had had to pick up some shifts as a secretary at Vernon's company to keep the lights on in their perfectly normal home. Which meant that the people that had now intruded his space was probably Dudley and his band of moronic idiots. 

He looked out his window, at the rapidly climbing sun, and realised that it was not yet even noon. Vernon and Petunia would not be home for hours. And while, they would not punish their beloved duddy-kins, or even stop him, they would prevent him from outright killing him. The social support checks they received from the government for taking him in too good to lose over a punctured lung, or a ruptured artery. 

But for whatever little protection that his aunt and uncle did provide from their brute of a son, they were not there. In fact no-one was. He knew from experience that no matter how much he screamed, how loud he yelled, no one would come. 

So he tensed every muscle in his body as he laid there, already half dead on the carpet of his cousin's second bedroom, and waited for it all to be over. 

****

It was getting dark when Harry woke up. He did not know what time it was, or what time Dudley and his gang had finished their beatings, but he knew it had gone on for a while, at least until Harry lost consciousness when one of Dudley's goons kicked his head in. 

He gingerly flexed his knee, wincing as he drew it up to his chest to assess the damage. He could not quite remember who had done it, but someone, probably piers had stamped their very thick boots on his bent knee, drawing out a rather horrible wet cracking sound. They had not stopped at that, no, instead they had just laughed at the noise it had made, and carried on. 

Blood had pooled beneath him where the sharp bone had pierced skin. 

Harry was quite sure that something was broken, he could feel a sharp pressure in his chest and wondered solemnly whether Dudley had cracked a rib or two when his boot had collided with Harry's sternum.

Harry had the sudden and rather unpleasant thought that this was how he was going to die, laying helpless as he oozed life on a carpet that he did not own, and in a room that was not his. 

This was the furthest that Dudley had ever gone, Harry wondered how long it would take before he went farther.

It was funny, he thought morosely. That he had survived all these years of a psychopathic killer trying to kill him, just to be killed by fucking Dudley Dursley and his friends. Life was a cruel joke, and Harry was the punchline. 

Harry could feel his brain wasn't quite working yet. The edges of his mind feeling fuzzy and un-defined. In all likliness he probably had brain damage, but Harry resigned that to be a problem for another day, as he flopped back down onto the bloodied carpet and let his consciousness fall away for the second time. 

****

Chapter Text

Harry was dreaming. At least he could have assumed he was dreaming. 

Though for some reason, Harry's brain could not seem to accept that fact. It all felt too real, too crisp to be the disjointed half-truths of his subconscious mind. 

He was standing in the middle of a field, and the grass was golden, each blade shimmering and shining as the sun hit it. Every strand of it was swaying in different directions, as if they were moving on their own accord, rather than by the wind.

Harry became acutely aware that he was not really present in his body as such, but rather he was looking at himself through some other eyes, as if he was some strange spectator on his own life. He felt like that a lot anyways actually. 

Perhaps he should have been scared, perhaps he should have screamed at himself to run. He was too vulnerable here, too many blind-spots for people to take advantage of. But he didn't. 

It was like a strange calm had washed over him. He knew he was safe. He didn't know how he knew it, but he knew it. Neither Vernon, nor Petunia, nor their horrible little shit of a son, not even Voldey-shart himself, could reach him here. He was completely alone, and completely at peace. 

The world changed, and Harry was back in his body, though now, he was laying flat on the ground, arms outstretched, his fingers dug deep into the earth. On the tips of his fingers, he could feel the sheer intensity of the magic running through the ground, he didn't know how he knew it was magic but he did. It felt distinctive, like the sound of a friend's laughter, or the scent of summer air. 

He felt the ebb and flow of it as it passed through the Ley-lines, like water in a tide, the gentle tingling of it on his skin as magic coiled itself around the roots of plants, tunnelled into ancient rocks, and all the while moving. 

Flowing and coursing through the earth like a stream, never stagnant, never resting, and never rapid, it was steady and constant. He could feel as magic passed through him as he breathed, wrapping around each of his ribs, moving in time with his blood, making a circuit round his body. 

It was everywhere. Harry could feel there were dead-patches in the earth around him, where the restless energy of pure magic seemed to go numb. A tree hit by a fungus, an animal rotting in the forest. But even then, there surrounded them a different kind of magic. Something transformative, something changing. 

Harry pressed his ear to the earth, he could hear the song of it all. The gentle humming of a thousand songbirds, the steady, unchanging rhythm of an army worms toiling the dirt beneath him, the sway of a planet's worth of plants dancing in time to music only they could find meaning in. 

He listened. He listened until the singing of the earth filled his brain, every inch of it. Until his thoughts were only of sunlight, and of song, songs as old as the earth, and as universally shared as magic herself. 

He listened, and he understood.

***

Harry woke gently that morning, unlike his usual awakenings filled with sweat and tears and screaming. 

He knew he had been dreaming, but of what he did not know. When he closed his eyes, he had only a faint impression of a sunlight that painted the inside of his eyelids a golden yellow. 

But he remembered nothing of the contents of this dream, only the feeling of genuine peace, that had filled every crevice of his sleeping form. 

Harry only felt the remnants of it then, the creeping sensation of panic, fear and doubt that regularly haunted his waking hours had already begun to set in.

He was still laying in his own blood, though by now it had well since dried, forming a crust of crimson red on his clothes, his skin, and his carpet. He knew if Petunia saw the blotch of crimson that was probably permanently stained into their perfectly normal household, she would most likely have an aneurysm. That is, of course, before she would quite literally beat him within an inch of his life. 

But right then, as the pain of his broken bones, and the ache of his loneliness seeped back in, he couldn't really give a shit what petunia thought.

So he lay there, grimy and filthy with sweat and tears and blood, waiting for anything. For even just a sliver of hope that this wan't going to be him for the next two months.

Nothing came. 

What did come, was a flurry of shouts and bangs from outside his door. 

'Boy! Get out here now!' It was his uncle. Harry wasn't allowed a clock, along with many other things, so he couldn't check the time to even guess what Vernon was angry about now. 

Harry motioned to stand up. He braced himself, closing his eyes against the pain that was surely to follow. He swallowed a whimper as he pushed himself off the ground, using his bed as a hoist. He felt his vision swoop as he finally stood up, the world spinning around him. 

He shuffled over to the door, which Dudley had evidently locked behind him as he left. He called out just as much. He heard movement on the other side, and the jangle of keys, before systematic clicks of locks being undone echoed through the wood. Finally, after what must've been a minute or two, the door swung open, revealing a very red faced Vernon Dursley. 

Harry could feel his uncle's eyes take stock of his mangled form, the blood that had soaked through every inch of his t-shirt, turning the usually grey fabric, a deep scarlet. Harry caught a look of shock passing over his uncle's face, but he evidently he could school his features well, because within an instant, Vernon's face returned to one of burning rage. 

'What on earth have you done you insolent bastard? Do you think I give you these clothes, out of the sheer generosity of my heart, just for you to destroy them?' Harry thought that the phrase sheer generosity was a bit of a stretch. All his clothes were wither Dudley's old hand-me-downs, or if he was lucky, a rag, that petunia's friends had donated, to help, as they said, ease the burden of that bloody criminal on your blessed family.  

'I hope you don't think you'll be getting a new one! Because believe me it'll be a cold day in hell before I ever lend you my kindness again! Now get downstairs, and make us some bloody breakfast, before I beat you there myself.' Vernon huffed with one last cold look towards harry, before turning around towards his room on the other side of the hall.

Harry knew his uncle's threat was no bluff, he had acted on it many times before. So Harry, trying his goddamned best to ignore the shooting pains that were emanating from every corner of his body, gingerly made his way down the stairs, and into the kitchen. 

Petunia was already down there, sipping what looked to be a cup of coffee, her hair still tucked in her pink rollers. 

She looked up as Harry walked into the kitchen, her expression immediately forming itself in to one of shock, and something akin to disgust.

Harry ignored it, and opened the fridge, pulling out two packs of bacon, a carton of eggs, and two links of sausages. Setting them down next to the hob, Harry quickly turned it on, and splashed a dollop of oil in a pan before he set it over the flames. 

Harry relished the gentle heat that rose up from the metal, as it warmed up his hands which had almost begun to turn blue with cold. 

He could still feel his aunts eyes, burning holes into his back. He understood why. He looked like an absolute wreck. Harry felt something hot and wet drip from his leg, harry was pretty sure it was blood. He felt it pool by his feet, as blood continued to flow from his knee. He had no energy to even acknowledge it. 

Harry finished cooking the bacon and the eggs, and so quickly spooned them onto their serving plates. He quickly put the sausages on the pan to start cooking, before he walked over to the table to set the two plates down.

He heard Petunia gasp. Her eyes were focused behind him, so Harry turned his head around, scanning the room to see what he had done. His eyes landed on the floor, to where he had evidently tracked blood with him as he walked, forming a set of bloody footsteps in his wake. 

Harry still said nothing, instead he grabbed a towel, wet it under the sink, and quickly mopped up the blood with his foot. (he didn't trust himself to get back up had he bent down to use his hands). It was futile though, the shitty flooring that tiled the Dursley's kitchen had eagerly taken up the pigment of his blood, permanently staining his bloodied steps into the cheap grey vinyl. 

Harry felt a strange sort of satisfaction at seeing this. If Harry was to be ignored in every sense of the word, by everyone that could possibly acknowledge him, at least he could have this. At least he could have something in this grim existence proving that he existed at all. 

He quickly abandoned the task, and slung the ruined towel over his shoulder. 

Harry had just finished putting the sausages on a plate when his uncle and cousin walked through the door. Vernon ignored harry, choosing instead to plop himself down next to his wife. 

Dudley however, on seeing Harry's rather haggard appearance, started to snicker, a half-turned smile forming on his lips, evidently appreciating his own work.  

This seemed to push Petunia over the edge, because suddenly she stood up, and her hand slapped across his face, his smile quickly fading. 

The room was silent. Petunia sat back down into her chair, sipping her coffee once more. 

Harry, still slightly in shock, set the sausages down on the table, and made his way out of the kitchen, not wanting to wait until the conversation turned his way. 

The room was till silent up until harry started up the stairs, when it descended into hushed murmuring, and angry whispers. Harry ignored it, and plopped himself down on his bed, wishing, praying, for the incessant pain to relent. 

It was only an hour or two later when harry heard the clicks of the locks, the rattles of the chains against his door.

Harry rolled over on his side, hoping for a day, when the sound of sheer captivity would not greet him like a friend. 

***

Once he managed to muster the energy, Harry looked around his room for what must've been the thousandth time that day. It was the only thing he had to look at really, over the summer at least. And god what a sight it was. 

He didn't really exist here, he noted. He had no posters on the walls, no books in any shelves, not even clothes strewn across the floor, or stacked into a wardrobe. The only evidence he had ever stepped into the dammed room, never mind lived there for practically three months out of the year, was the mussed up sheets of his bed.

His uncle had taken most of his things, like his schoolbooks, his broom, and even his wand. he didn't know where he put Hedwig's cage, but he knew he didn't have Hedwig herself, because she still pecked quietly on his windows a couple times each day, either to see if he had any letters to push through the bars, or to check that he was alive. 

He looked through them now. They were as ugly as the rest of his room. Grey and dull, and all together quite disgusting.

Harry hated them. He hated them because they were unnecessary. The Dursley's knew that Harry could never escape, for one the window was too small for even a twelve year old to leave through, and never mind the fact that they were a story off the fucking ground, but it wasn't even as if he had anywhere to fucking go was it now?

Dumbledore didn't even tell him where they were staying, so it wasn't like he could just run off to him and leave, he couldn't go to the Weasleys, they were staying at Dumbledore's mystery locale too, and that was it. Those were all his options exhausted. 

The bars didn't trap him there, no, he was trapped already. He was stuck there, and the Dursley's knew that, Vernon knew that. No, Vernon didn't keep the bars up on Harry's window to trap him, to stop him from escaping, no he put them there because he could. Because no one cared if harry had bars on his windows, not the neighbours, not the police, and especially not fucking Dumbledore. 

And Vernon knew that, and he relished in it. 

And when he thought about that too hard, when he looked at those stupid fucking slabs of metal, and all they meant for his pitiful little existence... well he couldn't really, he couldn't stand the stinging it brought to his eyes, the hollow ache in his chest. 

He often thought about what it would be like to be a normal child on summer holiday. 

Maybe he would come back from Hogwarts, and he would be greeted by someone. Maybe not his parents, he wasn't foolish enough to daydream about them, but someone that loved him. He would run off the train and into their arms, and they would tell him they missed him, and it would be true. 

He'd eat three meals a day, and he'd never know what it felt like to be starving. They would go places, and they'd visit museums, and lounge in parks. And when Harry was alone, he would invite his friends to come visit, and they'd go swim in a lake, or take a port-key to the beach, or they'd watch a movie, anything really, because they'd enjoy each other's company, and to put it frank, they could.

It made him unnecessarily angry to think about it, because he would never be able to that. He never has been and never will be able. He will spend the rest of his summers, for the rest of his life, until he's inevitably blown up by Voldemort or beaten to death by Dudley and his goons, bleeding and broken, and completely and utterly alone. 

He allowed the anger to settle in him, seep into his bones like it was made there, and weigh them down like his anger was made of lead.

He felt empty, numb even, save for the hollow sinking of his chest, and a faint, constant buzzing in his fingertips, that he put down to pins and needles.