Harry Potter, The Boy Who... Wrote?

It was your typical summer morning. The sky was a beautiful blue. The grass was green, just as it should be, only a few miniscule patches of brown daring to peep out from the sea of foliage. A shiny blue car drove down the street, and turned left at a sign that read 'Privet Drive'. It drove past a house that looked like any other, the slight shifting of the curtains in one of the upper windows going unnoticed.

A pair of green eyes looked out of a bedroom window, double layers of glass reflecting the sun right into them so that their owner squinted against the glare. He tugged the curtain shut, leaving only a small gap for a chink of sunlight to stream through, and returned to the wooden writing desk in the corner. Unconsciously, he ran a hand through his already messy black hair as he went.

Harry Potter had been writing. Again.

Sheets of paper lay scattered across the wood, a few of them crumpled up into rough balls that decorated various corners of the otherwise neat room. Some of the papers were covered in scribbled notes, others, simple ink sketches. Harry sank into the chair next to the desk, and stared at the patterns in the wood. Suddenly, his eyes lighted up with a brightness that was even more intense than the one outside. He removed a pen from behind his ear, twirling it between his long, thin fingers, staring down at the blank sheet of paper before putting the cheap Bic ballpoint to it, the silence of the room broken by the frantic scratching sounds of his writing.

The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive. Cars that were usually gleaming stood dusty in their drives and lawns that were once emerald green lay parched and yellowing-

He was so busy, the words flowing from his pen onto the paper, his eyes roving across the page, that the creak of the door went unnoticed, as did the entrance of the rather large figure. He stared at the scene, the expression on his face slowly but steadily transforming into a practiced sneer.

'What are you doing, Potter?'

A shadow fell across the page as the bespectacled boy looked over his shoulder at the owner of the voice, raised his eyebrows and then returned to scratching away furiously on the paper without giving an answer.

'Oi, I asked you a question!'

The boy looked up, an exasperated look in his eyes. 'I am writing, Dudley. Familiar with that concept?'

Dudley stared down at him. 'Writing? Writing what?'

'None of your ruddy business.'

'Bet it's those stupid stories of yours again.'

'And what if they are?'

Dudley snorted. 'I've read that crap... you, making yourself out to be some big hero, eh? Harry Potter, the Boy who Lived!' he simpered, taking a step back just in case Harry tried to do anything.

Instead, all he got was the sound of a short laugh. 'At least it's better than 'Dudley Dursley, the Boy who Ate. And Ate,' Harry retorted, turning around in his chair and replacing the pen behind his ear.

Dudley narrowed his eyes. 'At least I'm not some sick-looking pansy with glasses and weird eyes.'

'I happen to like the way I look.'

'You don't like that scar,' Dudley shot back, smirking as he saw Harry consciously put a hand to his hair and try to flatten his fringe over the odd-shaped scar on his forehead. It was shaped like a lightning bolt- a grisly souvenir of a car crash he had been in when he was a year old, a car crash that had claimed the lives of his parents and condemned him to live here, with his aunt, uncle and cousin, the only family he had left. While he had been quite proud of it when he was younger, because it made him look 'cool', now he thought it was a right annoyance since he found more people staring at his forehead than anything else.

'Yeah, well...' Harry's voice trailed off as he tried to think of a comeback, but before he could open his mouth to say anything else, a loud booming voice sounded up the stairs.

'Dudley! Dud-LEY! Come down for lunch!'

Harry's Uncle Vernon had a voice that rattled all the windows in the house; sometimes Harry would jokingly check that his glasses hadn't developed any more cracks in them from the intensity of the sound. He hated the way everything shook when Uncle Vernon shouted and had once told him so. As a result, Uncle Vernon shouted even louder.

'See you, Potter!' Dudley called as he turned and walked out of Harry's room, making sure to slam the door extra hard, just because he knew it annoyed Harry.

'Like father, like son,' Harry muttered under his breath as he turned back to the desk, staring longingly at the page he had just written. Downstairs, he could hear the sounds of chairs scraping against the floor and wondered if it would be wise to skive off lunch, then decided against it as his stomach gave a low rumble. He twirled the pen again, purely out of habit, then stuck it behind his ear again.

'I'll just have to get back to that after lunch,' he thought to himself. 'That beginning needs to be worked on.'

And he laughed.

'Hmm, maybe I really should stop writing about myself and write a book about Dudley... the Boy who Ate sounds quite interesting...'

With this thought in his head, he made his way downstairs. The television was on in the sitting room- Uncle Vernon was, no doubt, watching the news. Not like there was anything interesting happening... as Harry passed the door to the sitting room he overheard something about a water-skiing budgerigar and rolled his eyes, making a mental note to himself to see if he could include the ridiculous item in the story he was working on.

'Yes, Harry. As of now, you officially need to get a life,' he mused, opening the kitchen door. Dudley was already seated at the table, gulping down something that Harry couldn't identify. His Aunt Petunia had her back to him, but he could see her spooning out some of the same unidentifiable stuff Dudley was eating into three other dishes. Just as always.

Everything was just as it always was, so... normal. Life was so boring.

Harry went up to the counter and took two of the plates in silence. He went into the sitting room, and gave one plate of what he had decided could only be called mush to his uncle, who only grunted an acknowledgement and returned to watching the news. Harry stared at the screen for a minute before taking his own plate and walking out, seating himself on the stairs and picking at his food.

Just as usual. His life was so blah.

Well, this life was, at any rate. A smile crossed his face as he imagined what he termed as his 'other life'; the life he had created for himself on paper. Drawing castles in the air? no, of course not; Harry Potter drew up a world in pages, a world of wizards and magic where he was somebody, a very important somebody, not just this little nobody who sat at the foot of the stairs every night and picked at his food but never really ate it.

An escapist?

Well, he'd admit to that. Even though he preferred the title of creative genius.

The truth was, Harry Potter didn't like the life he lived, so ordinary. He didn't like living with this family because it wasn't really his family, and it was just... disconcerting... to think that his real family hadn't been anyone important and that when they died, they weren't remembered by anybody. That he was probably just another nobody, like the many others who had come before him, and the many who would come after.

Besides, the way his aunt and uncle treated him, that should account for something, shouldn't it? They did give him a roof over his head, but it was a roof he didn't want. It was almost like he was a family servant, bound to them by ties he didn't create. He didn't really want to believe that they treated him in such a demeaning way for no reason at all... there had to be a reason, there had to have been something about his real parents that made the Dursleys act this way. Being forced to use a cupboard under the stairs as a bedroom for most of his life was pretty disheartening... and having to wait on them, hand and foot... and watching as Dudley was pampered beyond belief while he was usually kicked around by one and all...

Low self esteem was a word that Harry had gotten used to hearing, in hushed whispers when those teachers didn't think he was listening, pitying words for the sad little boy with the too long hair, the sellotaped glasses and the huge hand-me-down clothes that were worn through. But of course, none of this reached home- he made sure of that. It would just get worse if anyone found out. Or so he had thought.

Now he sat on the stairs, remembering the day when 'it' happened. He still referred to the event as 'it', mostly because he still couldn't find words to describe how he had felt. Unusual, really, since it was rare for Harry to find himself without a way to describe anything and everything...

*

Uncle Vernon opened the newspaper and then immediately dropped it as if it were on fire.

'Harry Potter!' he snarled, his face turning its all-too-familiar shade of purple. The eleven year old boy poked his head out of the cupboard, clutching at its edge with trembling fingers. He had heard Uncle Vernon shout at him so many times that he knew exactly what each tone of voice would mean for him, and the tone that his uncle had adopted now was a particularly frightening one.

'Yes... sir?' Harry said in a voice that sounded more like the whimpering of a kicked puppy than anything else before slinking into the sitting room and standing before his uncle.

'So! So! SO!'

Harry stared at him. What could be wrong now? Mentally, he rushed through the list of chores, trying to remember if there was something he had forgotten. Maybe it was cleaning out the ashtrays...

'What is this, boy?' Harry found the paper pushed into his face, the print right up against his thick glasses. He tried to will his hands not to shake as he straightened the paper, holding it up so that he cold read properly.

For a second time that day, a shout was heard through the house, but this time it was Harry. His reaction had been almost identical to his uncle's. Almost. While Harry did shout, and drop the newspaper too, his shout was a whoop of delight and astonishment, quickly cut short when Uncle Vernon slapped him. Hard.

'What are you trying to pull, boy? There you stand, right in front of me, in the clothes that we gave you, under MY roof, and you have the guts to... to...'

Words failed Uncle Vernon. By this point, Aunt Petunia was in the room, having run in from the garden when she heard her husband shouting, and reading the paper herself.

For a third time, it hit the floor, definitely a lot more crumpled than it had been before. Aunt Petunia's lips were pinched together in a tight, dangerous smile.

'What did you go do this for, Harry?' she said in a low voice. Harry felt his joy evaporating.

'I... there was... I entered...' He took a deep breath to try and clear his garbled thoughts, uneasily glancing at Uncle Vernon's fists as he did before rushing through an explanation.

'There was a competition and the teacher sent the best story in every class in. I won.'

'But... what kind of sick story is this?!?' Aunt Petunia shrieked, all her previous composure gone. 'You could have written a nice, perfectly normal story about a nice, perfectly normal family. Instead... you've gone and made us look like... like... like we mistreat you or something! What will people think when they read this? They'll think that we've been mistreating you when we've been bringing you up, all these years... after the way we took you in even though I had no obligations to my good-for-nothing sister, no obligations whatsoever, but no. This is what you go and do, and... oh Vernon!' Aunt Petunia stopped in her tirade, her eyes wide and her hand clasped over her mouth. 'Vernon... what if they come to check on the boy?'

By 'they', Harry knew that his Aunt meant the social services people. They were a weird sort, a different woman every visit, appearing out of seemingly nowhere once in a while, examining him, always exclaiming that he was too thin and small for his age and Aunt Petunia's tense laugh, brushing it off as some sickness he had apparently contracted or the intense love he supposedly had for sports. He never told them that his bedroom wasn't the large blue one with the double bed and the television in the corner, that he didn't own the videogames that were neatly stacked in a corner, that the large, shiny, red bicycle outside didn't belong to him. He'd wave to them as they left, and then spend the rest of the evening locked in his cupboard, listening to Aunt Petunia go on and on about how nosy this certain so-and-so was (he could never remember their names) and how 'the boy' had almost let slip this time and that.

This time, he wished that maybe they would come in and check on him, unannounced, not with their customary phone call that usually gave Aunt Petunia time to prepare for the visit. His story hadn't been anything bad... well, not as he had seen it...

All he had written about was himself. Except that he was... well, he wasn't just Harry Potter living in the cupboard under the stairs... he was that, but he was a wizard, a world-famous wizard forced to live with his cruel foster family who hid the truth about him and how his parents had been murdered by an evil dark wizard. He was rescued by a giant of a man who told him the truth and how he was going off to study magic, like all wizards and witches, and he left the family behind because he didn't need them anymore.

Apparently, his descriptions of the family seemed to bother the Dursleys... yeah, fine he had based the family in the story on them, but maybe they were taking this a little bit too seriously.

But in the back of his mind, he knew it was because whatever he had written about the Dursleys had been true... most of it, anyway. He still doubted whether his uncle would really go storming off to a deserted island if he was pushed too far. Maybe he would... maybe he'd be so upset about the idea of strange people coming into his house and exposing the 'nice and normal' Dursleys that he'd really run and take the whole family along with him...

Maybe that's exactly what Harry had wanted to happen. But he wasn't going to tell them that, not while both his uncle and aunt were looking at him in a manner that suggested that he was a dangerous and wounded animal. A silence had descended upon the room, and Harry shifted from one foot to another uncomfortably. Finally, he couldn't take the quiet any longer. Glancing longingly through the open door and down the hall, he said quietly, 'I guess I should go lock myself in my cupboard now.'

He had barely turned to go when he heard Uncle Vernon calling him, the sound of his voice... different. It was a sickly sweet voice, one he had never, ever, heard him use. In fact, Harry stopped and turned back, just because he was surprised at this sudden change in his uncle's speech, rather than the fact that he was being called.

'Harry... I think... I think, well. You're getting rather big for that cupboard of yours... how would you like to have Dudley's second bedroom?'

Harry stared at him, open-mouthed. Aunt Petunia stared at her husband too, and their eyes met for a second. What unknown communication passed, Harry didn't know, but from the way his aunt began to nod, he could tell that she thought that whatever plan his uncle had thought up was acceptable.

'Yes, Harry,' she said in that same tense voice that she often used with the social workers. 'Why don't you go upstairs right now... we'll move you into that extra bedroom.'

Harry didn't need to be told twice. While he wondered what had come over his aunt and uncle, he knew that it had something to do with whatever he had written and with the fact that they were dead scared of being found out.

*

That had been the day when Harry had discovered what writing could do for him. He had always been a dreamer; given his situation, sometimes his dreams were all that kept him from going beserk and ending up as a juvenile serial killer because he didn't have a way to take out his anger at the way he was treated, or the pent-up energy that came with being kept in a house he didn't want to live in.

With his writing, he could do just that. He loved the world he had created; even now, as he thought of it from his uncomfortable seat on the stairs, he couldn't help but smiling. Sure enough, he tried his best to keep what he wrote away from the eyes of the Dursleys, because he didn't want to try and push his luck, but it always helped to have a little of it leaked to them when he wanted them to realize that he was getting tired of their antics and might just phone the social worker on duty himself. A page left here and there usually did the trick, although it had almost backfired on him once when he wrote a particularly nasty scene about his fictional self inflating Uncle Vernon's sister, Marge, in a fit of rage. He would have liked to have actually done it, but, as reality left him devoid of magic powers, all he could do was fantasize about having her blow up like a balloon. That time, he hadn't even meant to have left the page out; he was leaving for school in a week and he wanted to avoid upsetting his uncle at all because he needed to have 'a guardian' sign a permission form that allowed him to leave school on open days. Most students just went to the nearby village for a day of fun, stocking up on sweets (and tricks)... but the point was, he needed to have Uncle Vernon sign the form.

Unfortunately, he hadn't realized that he had left the page he had been writing out, and it was his bad luck that his uncle stumbled across it. The row that had resulted, and the fact that Harry had been locked into his bedroom for the rest of that week... and of course, couldn't have the form signed... had taught Harry that maybe he would have to be a little more careful.

Still, for the most part, Harry was happy in the little world he had created for himself.

He rose from the stairs, the food on his plate almost untouched, and walked into the kitchen. He ignored his uncle talking (about him and his 'attitude'- 'that boy simply has to understand that this is not an effing holiday!') as he placed the plate on the counter near the sink, then walked out into the hallway. Dudley was nowhere in sight.

Harry shrugged. It wasn't like he particularly cared where Dudley had gone... he wasn't on particularly good terms with his cousin, anyway, never had been, because Dudley had bullied him too much when he was younger for Harry to ever think of him as human. Harry stood out in the hall, and his eyes fell upon a picture of Dudley in boxing gloves. His cousin had recently taken up boxing.

And gleefully, Harry turned and ran up the stairs, two at a time. He knew exactly how this new story he was working on would start out, now.

'If only Dementors were real... Dudley would probably forget to be such a prat if he really met a dementor...'