Chapter One

Harry groaned as he tried to straighten up from the ball he'd curled into after Vernon had tossed him into his cupboard. His head was pounding, and the scar on his forehead was particularly throbbing, having caught a direct blow from Vernon's knuckles. His eye was also black and blue, and his nose felt broken.

While this wasn't the first time Vernon had beaten him like this, this was one of the worst beatings Harry could remember and his mind was all of a jumble. "But it really was an honest mistake." He groaned to himself while he began to crawl towards the small blanket that he called his bed in one corner.

It had been an actual mistake too, though it was Harry's rather than the teacher as Harry had tried to imply. Almost since the day the Dursleys had been forced to send him to school Harry had been very careful to get lower scores than Dudley. The beating he had gotten in primary the first time he brought home an assignment sheet with a 'Fantastic!' sticker on it had stayed with him.

But scoring lower than Dudley particularly in Reading and Writing took a lot of effort. And this time Harry had made a mistake, he had put down what he thought was the wrong answer on a vocabulary quiz, but it turned out it had been the right one.

Of course the teacher's comment on finally seeing some improvement from a boy she knows is smarter than he lets on in his tests had added to the effect of the 'little freak' scoring better than 'my dearest Duddykins. Harry scowled at that thought. The beating had begun with Aunt Petunia, and had continued when Vernon came home in a bad mood about something from his work at Grunnings. Worse it was a Friday, so neither of the Dursleys had to worry about keeping where his injuries wouldn't show.

Harry wasn't very bothered about any of the injuries to his chest or back, Harry knew he'd be healed by Monday, it had happened before. His head throbbing like it was though, that was worrying. Worse he was beginning to get flashes of dreams, but they felt a little too real to be dreams, they were almost like memories, full sight, sound and sensation memories.

Pulling the rag he called a blanket over himself Harry groaned, curling up into a ball again. Bugger me, they really worked me over this time, the last time I've felt this way was…Suddenly Harry's thoughts ground to a halt, as he remembered that incident.

Dudley and his gang of bullies had decided that they didn't want to run after Harry any longer, and had taken to throwing stones at him instead. One of them had caught him in the cheek, and Harry had feared that they would put out his eyes if they continued to fling stones at him.

Before this how Harry had escaped them that time was hazy, but now it came through bright and clear and almost his mind. He had run away, only to find that the alleyway he had run into near the school was a dead-end. He had heard them coming, had felt the pain in his cheek, had heard them shouting, "20 points for the eye, 50 points if you can hit the freak's scar!"

Harry had panicked trying desperately to think of how to get away, how to reach a safe place. He heard one of them shout to the others, ducked as a rock had hit the wall behind him, and suddenly, Harry was no longer in the alleyway, but up on top of a roof nearby.

The memory was so vivid now! He could remember the feel of the shingles under his feet, his old hand-me-down sneakers so thin on the bottom he could actually feel each shingle in turn as he skated a little down the side of the slanted roof. He remembered with a wince the pain he felt when he desperately grabbed onto a chimney to stop himself from losing his footing.

He could even remember the sounds of the three bullies below him shouting angrily at one another about how they had missed him. But after that the memory faded back to nothing. No like how memories from years ago faded, like the ones from his earliest years, which he could no longer tell were dreams or real memories, but simply nothing. Yet the rest of his memory of the incident was so clear…

"But, but that couldn't have happened. People can't just disappear from one place and appear somewhere else. Can they?" he said aloud staring up at the sloped ceiling of his covered, using some of the vocabulary he never would use in school or anywhere else where it could get back to the Dursleys. "That's like something out of that Star Trek show. But I didn't have any kind of teleportation device or anything."

The memory was so real, Harry thought, falling silent for a moment. It was a real memory, just as real as the memory of the beating I just took, or the recipes I've had to learn over the years. I don't have that good of imagination, do I?

Then an odd thought occurred to him, possibly made from this latest beating. Could this be why, could I really be a freak? Could the Dursleys know about my ability to pop or whatever, and that's why they hate me?

Harry knew his so-called family hated him, he had seen far too many normal families and how they acted, even to relatives rather than their own children, to have any doubt on that score. What he had never been able to figure out before was why!

He did everything he could to get on their good side, he cooked their meals, and he knew it was a better cook than Petunia by this point. He did all the chores he was assigned. Petunia had gotten some awards for her roses of late because he was able to clear out all of the bugs and weeds that would harm them. Then when 'Freak' was sent to school and found out his name was Harry Potter, he still routinely tried to make himself as small and unobtrusive as possible after that first incident.

Yet nothing worked and still the Dursleys hated him. The beatings had become less over the years simply because Harry was now spending most of his time at school or the municipal library, and Vernon and Petunia in particular were leery about giving people the 'wrong idea' by marking Harry where it would show in public.

Yet this could be the reason why they called him the freak. "But is it just because I can do that? I can't control it, whatever it was, I was just so scared." He said aloud again, bringing one finger up to rub at his scar wincing at the pain of it. Suddenly he stopped, pulling away his finger and then touching his nose and eye gingerly. Then despite the pain he began to smile…