Harry Knows #1 - Harry and the Dursleys Attend a Lecture

or

"Practical Anatomy 101"

AN: I didn't want to get super-technical or bore the casual reader with medical minutiae, so the description of the dissection scene is very basic, and more geared towards the "Horror" aspect as opposed to the "Medical" side of things.

Harry Potter loved his father; he always gave such interesting lectures. Oh, he was well aware of the fact that he was adopted. Not legally, of course - what messed-up government agency would allow Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka "The Scarecrow", to have legal custody of a child?

John Crane never disguised who and what he was from Harry. He'd explained that by the standards of modern society, he was a madman, a sociopathic criminal who'd used his medical training in ways that would turn the stomachs of the hardest, most jaded murders.

Harry knew this, and he understood why he'd been told. Not to frighten him or in some twisted attempt to 'atone' or warn Harry away from such a path...but rather to prepare Harry for the day when he, too, would forge his own path perpendicular to the morals of society.

Today was Harry's tenth birthday. Jonathan Crane thought Harry was ready.

Harry knew he was.

"Now, Harry," his Father was saying, holding a scalpel up to the light and examining the incredibly sharp edge with a practiced eye, "The first thing you need to understand about a dissection is that you must always treat the subject with respect." The tall, gaunt man's baby-blue eyes blinked slowly behind his spectacles. "I can't tell you how many potentially excellent doctors I've seen removed from the medical programme because they treated their 'patients' lightly or mockingly. Medicine is a serious business, and while humour can and does have its place in the field, now is not the time nor the place."

"Yes, Father."

"Harry..."

"I mean, yes, Doctor Crane." Behind the blue surgical mask, the older man's lips curved into a tight smile.

"Much better. Remember, right now I'm your attending, not your parent."

"Yes, Doctor Crane." Harry turned to his 'patient'. His green eyes shone with excitement, even as he solemnly asked, "And how are you doing today, Mr. Dursley?"

Vernon would have roared and throttled the boy, were he able. But the Sarapin-based cocktail administered in the back of his neck precisely in a certain bundle of nerves had rendered him unable to muster the strength to raise his arms. The straps on the table would stop him even if he could. All he could do was stare wildly into those green eyes.

HER eyes. Oh, how he hated those eyes - he'd hated them when he'd seen her last, he'd hated them when he saw them on the boy earlier this evening, and he hated them - and was terrified by them - even now as he stared into them, helplessly listening to their owner casually make planes to butcher him.

Dissection was normally performed on corpses donated to the medical field, Dr. Crane had told him, but as no medical facility would allow him entrance, he was reduced to procuring his own subjects.

"Always engage your patient in casual conversation, Harry," the not-so-good Doctor urged. "It builds interpersonal skills." Harry paused and looked at the overweight man, and then back at his father.

"Doctor Crane, isn't that what led to this situation?"

A pause. "True enough. We'll work on that later. Now," he said, handing his son the scalpel, "make your primary incision, directly over the sternum, working your way down in one smooth motion towards the groin."

A low hiss of air was all that escaped Vernon's mouth; the vicious nerve-block had robbed him of the ability to shriek in agony.

"No, stop right there. We'll study the abdominal organs on your cousin and aunt; it would be quite difficult to deal with such a large amount of fat. Now, cross-section him...not too deeply! Good."

Under careful guidance from his father, Harry gently peeled the mass of skin and fat back to reveal...

"What's that?" Harry said, eyes wide with confusion as he pointed to the throbbing, dark-red wet...thing that seemed glued to the underside of his Uncle's ribs.

"That's the pleura. If we went down further into the abdomen, you'd see something a bit similar called the peritoneum. The pleura covers the lungs, but it is quite delicate. Here, let's take a closer look at it."

Harry watched as, with gloved hands, his father grasped two ribs and snapped them with a twist before gently scraping the sticky red thing underneath free of the bone. Vernon shuddered slightly. Harry was impressed; he didn't know how much strength it took to accomplish, but the sheer ease with which his father had done it spoke of strength far outstripping what his gaunt features would seem to allow.

When all the ribs had been pulled away, Harry's father made a precise cut in the center and slowly and delicately peeled the sticky sheath away. Harry's eyes grew wider and wider as the lungs reluctantly came into view. And also...

"That," Doctor Crane said triumphantly, waving a bloodied hand at the reddish-yellow quivering lump barely visible behind the lungs, "is your Uncle's heart. He has a condition called dextrocardia. It means that instead of inhabiting the left side of his chest, which is much more common, it's on the right side."

"I thought they were supposed to be redder than that, Doctor Crane," Harry said in wonder, ignoring the twitching of the still-living man. "Why's it so yellowy?" He asked, poking it gently with a gloved finger.

"You'd be right, if this was a healthy person," his father admitted. "But Vernon is morbidly obese, and the yellow colouring is due to deposits of fat on the pericardium. Notice up here?" He asked, pressing his fingers into viscera to reveal a tubular shape. "This is the trachea, and right next to that, leading down into the abdomen, is the esophagus." Baby-blue eyes took on a teasing cast. Pointing to a feathery clump of something, he quizzed his son. "And what is this?"

"Um...a nerve?"

"Which nerve?"

"The...the numo...numa...something stomachey nerve."

Dr. Crane laughed. "Close. Pneumogastric nerve. And this?"

"Oh, that's easy," Harry said confidently. "That's the subclavian artery."

"Which one?"

"Left, Doctor Crane."

"Good. And what is this area called?"

"Mediastinum. Middle, sir."

For an hour, Jonathan Crane grilled his son about various bits of anatomy. Harry stumbled over some of the more difficult names ("Who the hell named it Innominate, anyway?"), and occasionally got things wrong, but overall, he'd done quite well.

"You've done very well, Harry," Jonathan praised, earning himself a smile. "Why don't you do a little bit of exploring with your uncle while I go prep your aunt?"

Green eyes looked up at him trustingly. "But what if I accidentally kill him, Doctor Crane?"

His father sighed. "Harry, Harry - if I come back and find that you've accidentally killed him, I'm going to be upset. Do you know why?"

"Because you told me that if you're going to kill a man, make sure you kill him on purpose?"

"Quite right. Don't worry! You'll do fine." Smiling down at his adopted son, he ruffled the boy's hair with his bloodied glove, earning him a squawk of protest. "Go on, have fun!" With that, the thin man strode out of the room, humming merrily, leaving Harry standing, scalpel in hand, as he thoughtfully looked into his Uncle's chest cavity.

Several minutes later, he shook himself, smiled slightly, and shifted the blade in his grip. "Well, Uncle Vernon," he said cheerfully, "Let's see what makes you tick. And after that, we'll find out what makes you stop ticking. Won't that be interesting?"