Harry Potter, The Boy Who... Wrote?

Chapter Two: Just The Boy

BZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

Early morning in the Dursley household was not exactly the best time. There was always havoc as Aunt Petunia rushed down to the kitchen in her robe and slippers, Uncle Vernon stomped about the house making noises like a huge, sleepy bear and Dudley... and as Dudley usually rolled over and went right back to sleep with his usual grunts after smashing his (what seemed to Harry) millionth alarm clock to the floor in an effort to make it shut up.

Today, Harry barely heard the alarm at first, but burrowed deeper into his bed, curling up inside the blankets as he tried to ignore the buzzing and instead focus on a very fuzzy remainder of a dream he had been having. He wasn't sure what it was about, but it had involved corridors.

Corridors to where?

He wasn't sure.

However, the more he tried to hold onto this dream, the more it seemed to slip away, drowned in the god-awful buzzing from Dudley's room as the alarm clock refused to quiet down.

Harry groaned. 'Might as well get up... it's not like that git's going to shut off that dratted alarm...'

The sounds of several thumps on the stairs convinced him that he wasn't going to get any more sleep. Uncle Vernon was making his way downstairs, which meant that in exactly 7. 84 seconds, Harry was going to hear his Aunt Petunia-

'HARRY POTTER, I WILL NOT HAVE YOU LYING IN BED ALL DAY WHEN THERE IS BREAKFAST TO BE MADE!'

-Well. In all his years, Aunt Petunia had only been off by one second, but today she was actually off by two! She had actually called him down to make breakfast in only 5-point-something seconds... or rather, she had screeched up the stairwell in a voice reminiscent of a fire engine tearing to the scene of an arson attack for him to attend to the Dursley family's culinary requirements in only 5-point-something seconds.

The alarm went on. Its buzzing pricked Harry's ears and made him feel as if a swarm of angry bees were doing a war dance next to his ear drum. He tried covering his head with the blanket, but it didn't work. Neither did squashing his palms to his ears... if anything, the sound was even louder.

'Stupid, good-for-nothing piece of shit.'

Normally, Harry didn't swear. Not seriously anyway... if anything, he mainly confined himself to 'light' terms because he didn't think much of swearing.

However, he wasn't too thrilled by the sound of the alarm clock either, partially because it was adding to the huge headache he could feel coming on, and otherwise because it was just plain annoying.

Still. The alarm went on, and if the vague grunting noises from the next room weren't enough to hint to Harry that Dudley couldn't hear a thing, then the sounds of snoring definitely pointed out that, short of an earthquake, possibly nothing was going to make Dudley shut off that alarm.

Harry mumbled under his breath. He was still too sleepy to really make any sense and now, the dull throbbing that seemed to originate somewhere above his right eye was really getting to him. It wasn't quite painful...

Yet.

'Gah, just what I needed. A wonderful migraine. Now I've got to look for those dratted painkillers before I can do anything,' Harry thought, screwing up his eyes to try and see his glasses. He patted the bedside table, fingers searching for the familiar feeling of his round frames, but couldn't find them. With his horrible eyesight, Harry was reduced to virtual blindness without his glasses, and the mounting headache wasn't helping him to find them. He scrambled around in the bed, feeling the sheets and under his pillow, but they weren't there. How was he going to find anything for his head if he couldn't even see?

'Maybe I left them on the desk... yeah, I was writing and I probably just took them off there.'

Harry turned to the side and stretched before putting his feet on the floor... immediately regretting it. He felt the frames bending under the weight of his feet and he cursed violently under his breath as he reached down to pick up his glasses, now bent oddly so that when he put them on, one side stuck out from his face, bent upwards at an angle.

For a second, Harry wanted to laugh as he imagined what he must look like, but the impulse was lost in his general bad mood. Still squinting, since the glasses were actually impairing his sight further rather than helping, he stumbled over to his desk and pulled open a drawer. Papers filled this one, as well as assorted junk: sweet wrappers, interesting looking stones, torn brown paper from a parcel someone had sent him a long time ago, but nothing for his headache. Holding his glasses to his face with one hand and trying to maneuver them so that he had some degree of vision, he searched the drawer with his free hand, pausing every time his fingers closed around anything that could contain painkillers, because now it felt like someone was tugging at the skin over his forehead with a pair of pliers- the migraine was swinging into full force. Every so often he'd close his eyes tightly, willing away the pain and the heaviness that was lurking right above his eyes.

The drawer held no cure for his headache. Slamming it shut with a bang that only made his head hurt more, he tugged open the one below... only to pull it out of the desk fixture altogether in his continued irritation. It fell to the floor loudly, prompting a shout from Uncle Vernon in the kitchen below.

'POTTER!'

However, Harry didn't care about Uncle Vernon- at least, not for the present anyway, for the drawer had fallen squarely on his foot and as much as he appreciated the fact that he was able to momentarily forget his headache, now he had another problem... a pain in his foot which did not go away when he remembered that he had been, ironically, searching for those damned painkillers. His toes throbbed even more than his temples, and Harry gritted his teeth as he ignored the urge to give the drawer that lay on the floor a good kick as he knew that it could only result in further injury.

Instead, he sank down onto the floor and began to search through the mess of broken pencils, scraps of paper written on in illegible handwriting and several rather dirty erasers. This time, though, he was able to find the small cardboard box with its blister packs of painkillers easily- they peeked out from under a hideous figure of a rubber hippopotamus with green skin and Harry snatched them up in relief, sending the miniature animal flying to the back of the drawer. Still pressing his glasses to his face with one hand, he crossed back to the bed and picked up a glass of water from the nightstand. He knew that he should take the tablet on a full stomach- however, at this point he didn't care; as long as it stopped the pain in his head, he'd even take the tablet dry and deal with any side effects that might come later. He swallowed the small white pill, feeling it go down in his chest and gulping down more water every time he felt the constriction, as if it was sticking in his esophagus.

'Gah,' Harry muttered, putting his glass down. Not even an hour into the day and so far, nothing seemed to be okay.

He hurried into the small bathroom adjacent to his bedroom, vaguely noticing that Dudley's alarm was still on. It would take about fifteen minutes for the painkiller to have any noticeable effect and considering that the bathroom was the quietest place in the house, it was as good a place as any to wait until he was sure he could stand the constant din that was a part of the Dursleys' morning routine.

Aunt Petunia and the morning fry-up could definitely wait.

*

Half an hour later... the tablet had not worked. Well, not as well as Harry had hoped it would. His head definitely hurt less, but the pain had somehow gone and concentrated itself in his scar so now there was an almost tangible line of pain running down his forehead, right from his hairline and almost to his brow. It was a ferocious, searing pain, more noticeable than the throbbing had been anyway. Harry was beginning to wish that he had taken two painkillers instead of one.

He stared at himself in the mirror. His hair, usually messy, was even wilder than he could have ever imagined it to be, and his crooked glasses sat awkwardly on his face, halfway sliding down his nose with one lens slightly cracked. He had dark circles under his eyes from not sleeping well and the expression on his face was one of unmasked irritation.

He half-heartedly tried to smile at his reflection, and the mirror showed a boy who smiled with his mouth and not with his eyes and who could do with some sleep. It just showed the face that Harry would put on for the rest of his day, a fake smile and a dreamy look, while he hid behind it, angry and saddened, and more than a little ashamed of his own thoughts. The mirror didn't show the loneliness that Harry had been increasingly trying to ignore for the most recent part of the holidays.

Usually, his two best friends from school, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger sent him letters once a week, and phoned in the meantime, but this holiday there had been nothing from them, save for a single birthday card that they had both signed. Even that had arrived about three days late. Harry had found himself thinking about them increasingly, and every time he did there was an unpleasant squirming in his stomach that he did his best to ignore. Still, he couldn't block out the small voices that only he could hear, the small voices that confronted him about what he was really feeling.

Now was no exception. Harry swallowed heavily as he stared at the mirror, his shoulders sagging and his eyes betraying his troubled mind.

'They've probably forgotten you in their great summer adventure,' Harry thought. 'They're having a swell time, while you just sit here, all alone, with no one who cares, with this pathetic excuse for a family-'

'No,' Harry interrupted, not willing to let the righteous-sounding voice in his head say anything else. He felt guilty for even allowing such a thought to enter his mind; all the same, he couldn't ignore the feeling of being so utterly alone. He knew that the Dursleys really couldn't care. At all. Any chance and they'd throw him out on the streets. There was nowhere for him to go to, no one for him to talk to- at least, no one who would listen. He had hoped that this holiday, he could have stayed with Ron instead of going back to Privet Drive, but events at the end of the previous term had destroyed any plans before they had been put into place.

For all his love of creating adventure and his loathing of his 'normal, boring life,' Harry had to admit that maybe the term before had been a little... traumatizing. A boy in Harry's school, Cedric Diggory, had committed suicide by leaping from the top of one of the school buildings, and Harry had been the only eyewitness. More than anything, he couldn't forget the look on Cedric's face as he had fallen, or the sickening sound of Cedric's yell being cut off by the thud of his body crashing into the ground.

Harry didn't know why he had done it... when he replayed it in his head, he hadn't even been looking at Cedric, just heard his yell and looked up, horrified to find that Cedric was no longer on the roof. He wanted desperately to believe that Cedric had been pushed, that there had been someone else whom he hadn't seen who was responsible for Cedric's death... what building it had been, he didn't know, he couldn't even remember why he had followed Cedric there, just the sound of feet and... no-one had believed that Cedric would have killed himself, but there was nothing to support any other argument, even if Harry was sure he had heard the sounds of someone else whom he hadn't seen... he had run to the side and looked down in time to catch a glimpse of Cedric's face, contorted in fear with the mouth wide open, but then, Harry didn't want to see any more and he had turned away and blanked out.
For a while he had even thought that maybe he had imagined it all, unable to accept what he had seen. He could only remember the moment when it finally hit him that Cedric was dead. Three weeks after everything was over.

Three weeks of denial...

Three weeks of the summer in which Harry wasn't even sure what he was doing...

Three weeks in which the pages and pages that he wrote piled up, only to be torn to shreds in moments of uncontrollable anger at himself for not being able to do anything...

Three weeks before he could finally allow himself to cry, more out of desperation to feel anything that out of actual grief...

Three weeks before the nightmares began...

Images of Cedric's body as well as the funeral had haunted Harry's dreams since then. It seemed alright when he was awake because he just pushed it all down and pretended that nothing was real; in his dreams, though, everything became much too real, much more frightening and even when he tried writing it out so that he could perhaps deal with it as he had been dealing with everything for a long time (since no one in the Dursley household cared enough to talk to him about it, except to taunt him) he just couldn't forget. If anything, it only made him angrier because it forced him to accept what he wanted to hide from the most.

And the only people that he could have talked to, Ron and Hermione... the authorities that were called in had insisted that Harry remain with his relatives so that they could keep an eye on him in case anything happened (although nothing seemed to be happening), his questions about what was going on went unanswered and the one time he had tried to bring it up they had avoided the subject completely, ignoring him until he had given up on writing them, desperately thinking that maybe they would write in a panic if he pretended to be too grievously ill to even pick up a pen.

Nothing. Not even a cheap postcard saying 'Wish You Were Here' with a fake beach on the front.

Just thinking about it now made Harry feel sick- or maybe it was just the fact that he was unwell that made him want to lie down on the cool tiles of the bathroom and sleep there with his cheek against the floor.

His ever-increasing guilt, coupled with his increasing anger at being ignored, was now affecting him physically as well. He couldn't sleep properly due to the nightmares and was constantly lethargic, not really caring about much that was going on around him apart from when he had an idea to write out. Then he was almost normal again, even if his stories did seem to have a darker quality to them and usually involved the deaths of the characters in them. As soon as he had spent his creative energy, though, everything came rushing back. As long as he let himself get lost in the worlds he was creating, nothing in the real world mattered, but right now it was almost as if everything was coming at him at once and he had no idea how to stop this tide of emotions that he'd never known how to deal with before.

Even now, the thoughts made him feel weaker, sicker; if it was possible, Harry was sure that he was actually getting ill because of his emotions.

'Maybe I'm just... depressed...' he thought, and he shook his head slowly at his reflection.

'Or maybe I'm just looking for another scapegoat.'

*

The day passed like so many that summer- with Harry thrown out of the house from the morning, to do some chores or just set free to wander the streets as he wished. Evening came, and Harry tried to think of what he'd done that day, but there was nothing noteworthy. His head hurt from thinking of Ron and Hermione, of Cedric and numbly wondering if he'd ever forget the sound of flesh smacking into the pavement. He sat on the front steps of Number Four, listlessly watching the color of the sky fading fast into darkness as the sun set. The notebook on his lap was open to a completely blank page, and his pen lay by his feet where it had fallen but he hadn't bothered to pick it up. The migraine was still there, like an itch that he yearned to scratch but couldn't reach. He was sorely tempted to take another painkiller, but knew that it probably wouldn't make much of a difference.

Through the open front window, he could hear the clink of a tea cup- probably Aunt Petunia's- and Uncle Vernon's deep voice grunting something about Dudley. Aunt Petunia laughed, and Harry closed his eyes.

He felt cold, and not just because of the light wind that was blowing around him. Aunt Petunia was still talking, and he could pick out the affection in her voice whenever she mentioned Dudley.

And every time she mentioned Dudley, Harry fidgeted with his fingers and chewed on his lower lip and felt even worse than he had before, like he did not matter to anyone. He was usually happy when the Dursleys pretended that he wasn't there, but sitting out there on the steps of the house and watching shadows of people behind curtains in other houses, shadows that swung babies around and bent down to tuck in children and embraced each other, Harry couldn't help but long to be one of them.

Even in his stories, he didn't have the one thing he wanted the most, the one thing that everyone else seemed to have: a family.

It wasn't for lack of trying, though. Maybe he wasn't trying hard enough to be something acceptable to the Dursleys...

Maybe if he tried hard enough, one day Aunt Petunia would wish him goodnight from his bedroom door-

Uncle Vernon's voice brought him back to reality, though.

'And the Boy?'

The Boy. The Boy. He was nothing but The Boy. Maybe that was why Ron and Hermione weren't answering his letters; he wasn't important enough for anyone to give a damn about him. The Dursleys had known for years that he had been worthless, and now his friends had probably realized it too. Sure, he had other friends, but they weren't here now...

'Because you don't deserve friends. Because that's just what you're here for, to be abandoned,' he thought miserably, for once shutting out the little voice of reason in his head that was telling him to shut up and stop wallowing in his own self-pity before he got drunk on it. He knew that he was being irrational, but he didn't care; he had been past caring a very long time ago.

Or maybe he just cared too much.

His stomach gave a funny jolt as Aunt Petunia mentioned Dudley again and, making a pained face that no one would see, he grabbed his notebook and pen and set off down Privet Drive. He didn't know where he wanted to go, and his feet scraped along the pavement as he walked against the wind, ignoring the fingers it raked through his hair and the icy touches on his cheeks. He wanted to be somewhere far, far away from anyone he knew; at the same time, he wanted desperately for someone to call him from behind, to tell him to wait up, to acknowledge his existence so that he wouldn't have to wander around with just his thoughts for company.

'You really don't know what you want, Potter,' he thought to himself. 'You're confused, and...'

He exhaled softly. 'And now you're talking to yourself on a dark road because no one else wants to talk to you,' he muttered, kicking out at a can that lay in the road. It clattered away to his right and collided with something and then stopped. The road turned left, a low wall running around the playground at the corner, and Harry turned around so that he could look back at the distance he had walked, not really seeing anything except patches of the pavement glowing under the streetlights.

He wasn't sure what he had wanted to see, what he had hoped to see, when he turned around, but he still couldn't ignore the odd feeling of intense disappointment when he faced the empty road. The next minute his foot hit another can and he was slightly distracted... just enough to kick the can out of his way again, not noticing when the loud sound of it rolling away abruptly stopped, not noticing the oddly shaped lump on the pavement until he tripped over it and it gave out a sharp yell and punched him in the face.

Harry blinked. Stars waltzed with black spots in front of his eyes and he dropped his notebook to the ground as he felt the hand on his ankle. It was cold, and there was a strong stench of liquor floating about that made Harry want to throw up. There was another smell, almost as powerful as the alcohol, something rotten that Harry couldn't identify but wasn't sure he wanted to as his left hand was covered in whatever muck it was that smelled so foully. His right hand shook as he reached out to try and disentangle himself from the fingers that were now locked tightly onto his trouser leg- and brushed against another can.

'Stupid can,' Harry growled as he tried to pry the fingers away.

'Yes, we think so too,' a dry voice remarked as a flashlight temporarily blinded Harry, the sharp beam directed straight into his eyes as he promptly let go of the hand that was clutching at him and tried to shield his eyes from the light. He didn't have to look at the figure when it whimpered his name softly to recognize the frightened boy, nor at his left hand to identify the funny smelling substance as a pool of vomit the boy had been lying in. He was trying to look at the owner of the flashlight, and, his heart sinking, he saw the definite outline of more people behind, all of them wearing smug grins and staring... at a point somewhere behind him.

Harry chanced a glance over his shoulder. The wall had been spray-painted; a hand displayed a rude gesture with a literal subtitle of the same directly below it as well as various other designs of the same nature, and a pile of cans littered the pavement below. He turned his head again, staring straight at the man in front of him, all his previous thoughts forgotten as he got to his feet.

'Potter, isn't it?'

Harry nodded, still shielding his eyes with one hand.

'Well. It looks like we've got ourselves at least two of the vandals. The rest must have run right before we got here...'

Harry shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut against the harsh light that was still focused directly at his eyes.

'This is NOT happening...'

But he had no choice but to obey when he felt a strong, cutting grip on his arm turn him around and begin marching him back up the road he had come from.

'Oh, shit.'