Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor am I using the name and its affiliations to make money. All rights go to J.K. Rowling.

Prologue

Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy, and his oddness could be traced to one very clear cause: his memory.

His memory enabled him to remember everything that happened to him.

Images, smells, sounds, textures - they were all stored in his mind, never to be forgotten, always ready to be recalled. The sheer amount of input - noise, sights, sounds - that Harry took in forced him to organize his mind in a way that most adults couldn't master.

This ability also affected his behavior. Where other babies would fuss and scream, he would simply lay there and take everything in with his piercing green eyes. His parents quickly learned that he responded better to words being clearly spoken - not the inane baby talk that most parents used.

Overall, little Harry was a very well behaved child and much admired by family and friends. The only truly strange thing that his parents and family friends noticed were his eyes. A bright, almost luminescent green, sometimes seeming to glow, and filled with knowledge out of place on a child. Eyes that saw through others and seemed much too old for a child's face.

Although they loved their son unconditionally, James and Lily Potter sometimes found themselves wishing he would act more like other babies his age and give them a chance to enjoy doting on a cooing baby. As it was, Harry was a quiet child who preferred watching the actions going on around him, and listening to the conversations he couldn't yet understand.

However, on one tragic Halloween night, a little over a year since he was born, Harry Potter's life changed forever, and he found himself forced to utilize his strange abilities in order to survive. He was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, and was forced to grow up much, much too fast.

-Time Skip-

Just after Harry Potter's fifth birthday, though his relatives didn't acknowledge the date as anything more than another summer's day, he'd been enrolled in a preschool class at the primary school building. For the first time in his short life, he'd been allowed into a place he'd dreamt about ever since he'd first heard Petunia describing it to Dudley: the library.

The library was directly across the street from his new preschool, and he'd found it all too easy to slip away from his class and lose himself in the stacks and stacks of books. He devoured the picture books and thin chapter books for children his age,before moving onto the novels for older kids. Cookbooks were read, and new dishes began to appear on the Dursley's dinner table. Books on the world, different countries and people, books about animals, books about arts and crafts, books on songs and dances - Harry read and remembered them all.

During his voracious reading, he found a great number of unfamiliar words. So, he found several dictionaries, a couple in different languages, and worked his way through them. And because of his strange memory, he never forgot a single thing he read.

One word he found in a middle school novel was 'abuse'. After looking it up, he recognized what the Dursleys had been doing to him his whole life.

His aunt acted the taskmaster, wielding a frying pan as efficiently as a whip as he completed the endless list of chores she always had ready, only to be sent to his cupboard with an empty stomach at the end of the day. His cousin ostracized him from the neighborhood children, ensuring he had no friends by encouraging lively games of 'Harry Hunting'. His uncle never missed a chance to knock him about, and was always on the lookout to use his belt.

They'd done nothing but neglect his well-being, and abuse him psychologically, verbally, emotionally, and physically. Even at five, Harry understood this, and knew that it was not what a family was supposed to do. So, as soon as he got to his preschool class the next afternoon, he tried to tell his teacher. However, her response was to smack him lightly on the side of his head and snap at him.

"Just because your family expects you to do chores, doesn't mean they're being abusive. Do not say that."

Harry, though extremely intelligent and possessing an eidetic memory, was still a little boy of five. Adults, especially teachers, were the ultimate form of authority. So he listened and withdrew, distancing himself from everyone around him. Adults, he concluded, were to be treated respectfully, but with extreme caution. They could not be trusted.

This conclusion was confirmed when, after he'd tried to tell his preschool teacher about his relatives, she singled him out as an example to the rest of the class of what to avoid, and never failed to point out his faults, in loud carrying tones.

However, preschool became a sanctuary as it much as a danger. His teacher may smack his head, but Harry quickly learned she couldn't do anything more. She was not the boss of the school, merely overseer of this one classroom. The headmaster ruled the school, like Uncle Vernon ruled Privet Drive, and he did not like the teachers to hurt the kids.

Comforted by this knowledge, Harry faced school with something close to happiness. His teacher settled for verbally flaying him from the minute he came in through her door. She criticized and insulted everything from his baggy clothes (castoffs from Dudley), his rebellious attitude (he was the only kid to read during playtime), his appearance (absolutely nothing would tame his wild, thick, black hair), and his seeming lack of intelligence (he deliberately scored lower than Dudley on every worksheet and assignment - an easy feat considering the fact that he was the one to do Dudley's homework).

Despite this, school was where Harry felt, not necessarily happy, but at least secure. The rules at school were different, and better, than the rules at Privet Drive. In class, he was safe from beatings, and he'd long since learned to ignore the hurtful words thrown at him by his cousin, peers, and teacher. Sometimes, he even found himself smiling softly as his teacher viciously berated him. It didn't matter what she said; words were the only thing she could throw at him. It was even comforting to know she paid attention to him. She noticed his clothes, his skinny body, his thirst for books, his preference for out-of-the-way corners. She knew him better than anyone.

Through preschool, kindergarten, and grades 1-5, Harry did his best to stay in the shadows. He rose before dawn to start breakfast and his never-ending list of chores, his performance in school remained well below average, and he remained a loner. He snuck off to the library at every opportunity, until, on his eighth birthday, Vernon found out. After the subsequent beating and six days and nights locked in his cupboard with no food, Harry gave up speaking. There simply was no reason to do so anymore.

So, ten years after being left on the Dursleys' doorstep, Harry Potter's eleventh birthday approached. He was silent, scarred, and alone, with no plans for his future other than a certainty that, one day sooner or later, he would fall asleep in his cupboard and never wake up.