Yellow

Harry hated yellow.

He knew, logically, that it was a transitory thing; he had never before had a problem with yellow, and this irrational anger with the colour had only started since -

But he didn't think about that.

Whenever Aunt Petunia started to do the dusting, Harry always had to leave the room because the duster she used was yellow, with red stitching around the edges of the handkerchief-sized piece of material to keep it from fraying before it had done enough service to be thrown away, forgotten. The marigolds she wore to keep her hands dry when she washed up after their meals - smaller now in the hope of making Dudley smaller, which was unlikely - were also yellow, so Harry bolted his food and ran outside after their meals, but only until sunset, when he went back in to avoid the frail tinting of the undersides of the clouds that the Sun produced before it died for the night. Not like -

But he didn't think about that.

When Aunt Petunia served a fry-up on Friday night, Harry carefully cut the unbroken egg yolk away from the white and pushed it to the edge of his plate where he didn't have to look at it save from the corner of his eye when he didn't concentrate hard enough on the rest of his food. Since that incident at the station at the end of last year, his relatives had been giving him less stick in case they got unwelcome, unpleasant visitors in the middle of the night, not unlike when Harry had started threatening them with visits from -

He cut that thought off too, ruthlessly, and stared accusingly at the small corner of the yellow plastic mackintosh sticking out from under the pile of the rest of his clothes where he had buried it, feeling ill at the sight of it.

Oh, Harry knew that this was all a displacement reaction, that he had arbitrarily picked yellow to hate and that if he was honest with himself it was just another colour, no harder on the eye than, say, blue or green, but yellow was easy to loath and some things were hard to remember. Hard as in unpleasant, not hard as in being forgotten. No, if they were forgotten then at least he would sleep at night. Yet somehow, to forget them would seem like a betrayal to -

No. He didn't think about him.

One day Aunt Petunia went out in the garden to empty her dishwater over the lawn - there was another drought and the government had imposed another hosepipe ban, useless as that was - only to find that the heads had been ruthlessly lopped off all her long row of sunflowers, planted in a vain attempt to outdo the neighbours in time for the local gardening competition. The soup-plate wide flowers, now bedraggled and sodden in the morning dew that had so briefly moistened the grass, lay, when she investigated further in her dismay and confusion, in the top of the dustbin. All the glorious yellow petals had been shredded into tiny pieces, smaller than even the most diligent vandal would have bothered with after their decapitation. When she commented loudly on it over breakfast, inspiring her husband's disgust and Dudley's obsequious chiming in, Harry just stared at his unbuttered toast and wondered why she thought it mattered.

Sometimes Harry debated with himself what he was going to do when he got back to school and had to work with the Hufflepuffs. After all, even if their ties were yellow he couldn't just attack every one he saw. And the constant candlelight of Hogwarts gave the entire castle a creamy glow when it was dark out of doors. There would be too much yellow entirely for his peace of mind, rather like there had been too many of Them when he -

Harry ripped down and viciously screwed up in his shaking hands the poster he had been looking at and threw it out of the open window. Uncle Vernon found it later when he was leaving for work, grunting at the lead singer's rebellious grin and oversized yellow boots. He tucked it into his pocket to throw away when he next had opportunity, because he didn't want anyone thinking his house was a pigsty. What would the neighbours think?

Hermione and Ron's letters were becoming more and more worried as the summer went on (who said that yellow was the colour of summer? And why weren't they in jail?) They seemed to think he was having a rough time of it. When Harry wrote back it was on plain white muggle paper, ripped from a pad he had unearthed in the pile affectionately known as 'Diddy's school things' and written in black biro. He was having no worse a time than he ever did at the Dursley's, he assured his friends (halfheartedly, because when he dreamed it was in black and white and there were no colours to hate. None of them wanted to hear about those nightmares, the memory-inspired ones he woke up shuddering and shaking from and occasionally even running to the bathroom to vomit from as quietly as he could down the toilet so that the Dursleys didn't wake up. The sick was yellow and he flushed it away, thrusting the whole incident from his mind so that he didn't have to deal with that awful colour.)

Tonks sent him a letter asking if he wanted any of his belongings sent along to the Dursleys' house, but Harry said no, leave them where they are, I'll come and choose what I want to keep some other time. She might have sent him something yellow if he'd acceded, and he wasn't sure he could deal with it yet.

The colour, not the belongings, Harry reassured himself as he cut the mac into tiny little squares and put them one by one down the waste disposal.