Freakishness

Two years later :

"Mm, I'll tell you what, if they let any more immigrants into the country we might'as well call ourselves The United Colony of India!" Aunt Marge guffaws as she gesticulates exaggeratedly with her fork, mouth half-filled with Sunday roast.

"What's an immigrant...?" Dudley innocently asks while making the massive effort of pausing from gorging himself. They could say what they liked about the freak, but he cooked far better than anyone in the household, even Petunia, much to her chagrin.

"Bad people Duddikins, they come over here, steal jobs, attack women, everything you can think of." she states but quirks an eye at Harry as he stifles a snort in the corner of the room. "Something to say, boy?" she flowers.

He shrugs, "Maybe 'Duddikins' is an immigrant, from how you describe it."

"You take that back, freak!" Dudley shouts back, causing half-chewed roast potato to fly from his mouth and onto Petunia's plate. She grimaces slightly and deftly slides the slobber onto the floor for Harry to clean later.

"Now, now Dudley, you can't expect bad blood like your cousin here to be as respectable as us. A son of drunken wretches can only end up like them. See, like Butcher here," she pats the face of the pitball sitting next to her chair, causing it to snarl and try nip at her fingers, "You can usually tell a good breed, if the mother's wild and stupid, the offspring'll be one too."

"Well, that makes sense with how Dudley's turning out." Harry whispers to himself while eying the pitbull. That thing attacked him the first time it saw him, but a glare and a hard punch on its nose made it wary enough of him.

Shaking his head, he looks at Vernon, who'd been observing things with caution. "There's some weeds that need pulling." he states while leaving through the back door.

"You remember to be back to clean up, boy!" the portly man growls.

"Yeah, yeah..."

It'd been two years since Kaa's death, but it'd only taken two months to come to terms with things. He'd been childish, expecting much from a world that hated and despised him. School had been a great boon, and the library even more so in helping educate himself, but the more answers he found only laid the foundation for more questions.

His caretakers, as that's what they were... They weren't family. They abused him, hurt him, lied about him. Yet, that wasn't it. He'd slowly come to the realisation that something else was afoot.

After finding that how Vernon treated him was illegal in this country, he'd gone to speak with the Headmistress of the school for help. She'd initially been sceptical due to the rumours of him being a ruffian thug, but after showing the belt scars on his back, upper arms, and thighs, she'd gotten on the phone immediately.

Not hours later, he'd been sent home without a word, only to arrive at a furious Vernon who beat him within an inch of his life. Both of his arms had been broken and the doctor said he'd fractured his skull and some ribs.

Figuring something must've gone wrong, he'd spoken with the doctors about his abusive caretakers, and they also 'started' trying to do something, contacting social services and making inquiries... Again, nothing happened, aside from yet another beating from Vernon that exacerbated his already existing injuries. Harry knew the Dursleys weren't above the law, nor did they have the power to stop government employees from stopping the abuse... So someone or something had to be involved.

He honestly felt like the man was going to kill him that night, but two days later he'd awakened in his cupboard with blood soaking his dirty mattress... His broken bones were healed but he felt more exhausted than he'd ever felt before.

It was disconcerting, honestly. The hollow sensation in his gut was unbearable, an itch he couldn't scratch while being the center of his tiredness for the next three weeks. That wasn't the last time he experienced it.

A month after giving up hope for rescue he'd tried to run away, but after falling asleep behind a dumpster he'd awakened back in his cupboard. Vernon didn't even bother beating him that time, maybe he hoped Harry would've died from the cold?

With everything laid plain, he'd decided to just wait this hell out. They wouldn't be able to keep him there once he reached sixteen, so on that day he'd be free. All he needed to do was lie low and keep his head down.

Unfortunately, his caretakers made that a monumental task...

The second time he felt that hollow sensation was during one of the many 'Harry Hunts' Dudley and his friends participated in. Since they were actually getting fed, they were all larger than he was, and since he was always outnumbered, he was forced to flee whenever they approached.

That time they caught him and started beating him with sticks, he'd shouted "STOP!", and much to his surprise, they did... Upon looking up, He'd found that their sticks had flopped over like pieces of cooked spaghetti, the phenomenon looking mightily odd when applied to formerly sturdy oak.

The feeling in his gut struck him hard after that causing him to pass out.

These strange things kept happening, and Harry had found they only occurred during highly stressful situations. It wasn't just violent ones either, as he'd somehow turned his teacher's hair blue while she was berating him for dragging dirt into the class room, y'know, after getting ambushed by Dudley and his friends.

Harry wasn't delusional, or at least, he didn't think he was. So, he'd decided to investigate it. He'd skimmed through almost every book in the non-fiction section of the library and found little to nothing, aside from some bits and pieces from history books, specifically those based on mythology.

Thus, he'd ended up delving into fiction... and... well... Much to his embarrassment, the first book he'd picked up had something sounded eerily similar to what he'd been doing. It was a childhood story based on King Arthur, and the Wizard Merlin.

That had been an epiphany... It was magic. He was doing magic and he'd never even realised it!

"Don't do your freakishness, boy!" Vernon voice shouted in his mind, and he could almost picture himself tied to an unlit pyre with hundreds shouting the same.

"Don't do you magic, boy!"

...

"They knew." he murmured to himself, clutching the book tight even to strain its spine. They knew he could use magic, and they hated him for it. It was magic that let him speak to Kaa, magic that turned his attacker's weapons floppy, and magic that turned his teacher's hair blue!

No...

They didn't hate him.

They were scared of him.

Scared of what he might do if he found his magic.

Harry gritted his teeth and his eyes squinted in anger as he thought of his caretakers. A gust of wind suddenly threw open the door to the library and threw up some loose paper the librarian was looking at.

He blinked, he'd felt that. The sensation in his gut felt fluttery, like a butterfly had squeezed its way through his skin... It wasn't pleasant, but if that was the price for power, he'd pay it as many times as he needed.

Again, he squinted his eyes in concentration, recalling the times his Uncle hurt him over the littlest things. 

Again, he felt the drain from his gut, but this time all that happened was the page of his book turning...

"Why..." he muttered to himself, why was that phenomenon so weak when the earlier one had been able to slam a door open?

This needed testing.

-----------------------------------

The days preceding his discovery of magic had been the most tiring and irritating in his life. Trying to summon up his magic was an effort in futility, his best efforts only achieving minute results.

He'd moved from trying to move small objects or create fires to simply trying to float a feather. And even then, he could barely blow from his hand with a small gust, and even that left him unable to move for hours.

He didn't know if this was because he was weak, or lacked magic, or something else, but practice slowly allowed him to improve... However, when he reached seven years old all he'd been able to do was make the feather float for a couple seconds, pathetic given his one-and-a-half years of effort.

Magic, he found, was comprised of two things... Power, which he apparently lacked, and Intent.

Magical power was obvious, something that was innate and could be improved like a muscle... But Intent was strange and unstable at the best of times. It wasn't just wanting something to happen, no, it needed you to want it more than anything else in existence.

He needed to want the feather to float so much that his eyes bled and he chewed through his cheek. So much concentration and focus that it left him with a migraine for the rest of the day.

His intent needed to be so focussed, so sharp, that his one single thought, wish, desire, and goal was to make that damn feather FLOAT!

Emotions, he'd found, also contributed a huge amount to this... Though, this was even more unstable than singular intent was. For example, while he could only make a feather float for a couple seconds, if he had something like 'Dudleys favourite feather' or something related to him, he could make it slam into the roof of his cupboard with some ease.

Unfortunately, drawing upon his emotions usually led to side effects. Like that time In the library.

He was determined not to give up despite the difficulty and trouble he'd been running into however, which left him where he was now. Standing in the cold garden trying to move plants with his mind while his relatives and Aunt Marge ate the Sunday roast he'd cooked.

The day he had the power to make them regret what they'd been doing to him was the day he'd finally be free, happy.

After all, without Power you were nothing. Kaa had said it best, "If you aren't the Predator, you're Prey."

------------------------

2nd September 1986, a skinny seven year old boy with a lightning bolt scar on his forehead sprinted through a park while pursued by three, larger boys. He huffs as rocks and other dangerous objects get thrown past him, some even making contact with his back and legs.

He grits his teeth and bears through it though, knowing it'd be worse if they actually caught him. "Leave me alone!" he shouts over his shoulder, already aware they wouldn't listen... Just last week he'd barely escaped by somehow moving himself to the roof of the school, earning him another beating when the fire service had to come to get him down.

"No way! Get that tosser!" Piers laughs.

"Keep running freak! It's no fun if you give up!" Dudley shouts.

It seems his miraculous escape last time had pissed them off... He shakes his head and steers towards the nearby forest, one that barely anyone ever went in after some buried bodies were uncovered. Uncle Vernon said it was all 'freakishness', when meant magic was probably involved.

He slips between the trees while the trio followed, his small stature allowing him to weave between branches and rotten logs. Barely two minutes in and he'd already lost them, but just as he's able to stop some catches his foot and Harry tumbles over a hill.

Unfortunately, he was unable to stop his momentum as he quickly approached a gathering of black-clothed teens, all sitting around a growing fire. They all shouted in surprise as the seven-year-old dropped atop their fire and started screaming. Thankfully they came to their senses quickly and dragged Harry off of it, but by the time they did he'd already been rather badly burned.

His legs, back, and arms were all either a bright raw red, slightly blackened from fire and soot, or leathery and stuck to the muscle underneath. Needless to say, the teens weren't mentally prepared for this.

"H-hey! Are you okay!?" a girl with black lipstick and eyeliner exclaimed, shaking Harry who blearily blinked at them, still half in shock from the burns that were growing more painful by the second.

"C-Charise you're hurting him! He needs to go to the hospital now!"

"No way!" a boy with a spiked-up mohawk hurriedly retorts, "We get in trouble as it is, what do you lot think people'll say if we bring a burned kid to the hospital!? They'll pin it on us or something!"

"B-but-" Charise starts but trails off at the furtive glances between the rest of the group. It appeared that a consensus had already been reached.

"He'll be fine anyway, once he wakes up he'll get treated. We just can't be here when it happens!... You're not gonna stay here and snitch on us, are you?" he shoots the girl a glare.

"N-no..." she looks to Harry who was still face down and hypoventilating, "I-I'm sorry." she mutters as they all make off out of the forest, leaving the injured boy alone, sucking in air through his teeth and crying as he glared hard at the ground.

"Rats." his growl trails out even as the pain continues to rip through him.