'Perhaps' Harry pondered, dimly aware that his limbs were beginning to spasm and his fingers were tingling in the precursor for shock, 'there was some truth to what the Dursleys said, after all. Maybe I am a freak.' Then, 'My head hurts,' because that was as deep as he was capable of thinking at the moment. He watched, transfixed, as the mutilated, gelatinous mass of brain matter slid agonizingly slowly down the side of the Dursleys' new television set before landing with a muted thunk on the floor. He shuddered, teeth beginning to chatter, and tried to goad his limbs into movement. Skinny biceps strained uselessly.
God, it was cold. He could've sworn it was summer earlier that same morning. Then again, a sizeable chunk of his brain was now mingling with the leftover antibacterial wash in the carpet; honestly, it was a miracle he was even capable of thinking at all.
'Oh…oh no…the carpet…' Aunt Petunia was going to kill him. Why wasn't he dead yet? His brain was there, and he was here, and why wasn't he dead? His brain…was….
Harry retched violently, tremors sending him shuddering back to the floor. The carpet (white; Aunt Petunia would kill him, bring him back, and then lock him in the cupboard for YEARS) had a faintly chemical odor. No doubt it was because of his Aunt's constant, borderline-obsessive scrubbing. It itched against the skin of his cheek.
His cheek…his cheek felt weird. Really weird. He should do something about that. About his cheek feeling weird.
Once Dudley, incensed that Harry had received the last piece of bacon, had smacked him, hard and in the mouth, with a metal serving fork. (Never mind that it was his ONLY piece of bacon. While Dudley had wolfed down four pancakes, three pieces of bacon, and a sausage, Harry had been up to his elbows in dishwater in accordance with his Aunt's shrill insistence that he "Finish the dishes, boy, or you'll get no breakfast. I won't have you skirting your duties in any home of mine!") Due to an unfortunate blend of chance and uncoordination, Harry had received the fork in such a way that the tines dug straight through his cheek and pierced his upper right gum. Four hours and a brief debate later (Vernon had insisted he was faking it, whereas Petunia had been busy comforting a hysterically sobbing Dudley; his cousin had always been comfortable in the knowledge that a couple of tears could absolve him of any guilt in his parents' eyes, up to and including manslaughter.) Harry had emerged, blinking, into the bright sunlight of the county hospital's parking lot, his cheek shot full of lidocaine. The experience was rather singular in that during the short time before the drug wore off, he could've been absolutely sure that he was taking a drink from the nearby drinking fountain, while in actuality he was letting water drip off his face and soak his shirt. He'd pinched his lip and been completely unaware of any sort of discomfort; when he'd ran a curious tongue over his stitches the pain that he'd known was there had lain dormant and unresponsive.
The feeling was remarkably similar to what he was feeling now, save for the fact that his head felt a bit like it had imploded. The rest of his body-toes, arms, torso, cheek-felt unattached, as if they were no longer under his jurisdiction. That would certainly explain why he was having so much trouble moving.
Harry tried to clench the fingers of his left hand and was dismayed to see that they didn't so much as twitch. He felt slightly less hopeless when the fingers on his right hand did; being confined to one side was slightly better than being unable to move at all. After all, it wasn't like anyone was going to come to his rescue; the Dursley's had left town for a car show earlier that morning, and the list of chores they had graced him with probably wouldn't be very useful in this situation. He felt slightly vindicated in that they couldn't possibly expect him to paint the walls, mow the lawn, and do the vacuuming when his brain was in two different places. Probably.
They would be furious about the television, though. He hadn't intended to drop it, but somehow he doubted that they would be feeling particularly sympathetic in light of the rather…broken…state of their newest electronic. He'd been moving it out of Dudley's second bedroom; the punishment for getting PAINT on his cousin's most recent plaything wasn't very fun to dwell on, and he'd only just got his glasses to bend back into a vague semblance of what they used to be before Dudley had punched him in the nose the other day. He'd known it was heavy (it was kind of hard not to notice, to be honest), but he'd figured he'd only have to lift it into the hallway. Halfway there he'd realized, in a rare moment of forethought, that he was going to have to paint the hall as well. Why not carry it downstairs now, while it was already situated as comfortably as possible-which is to say, not comfortably at all, but he wasn't picky. He'd staggered down the hall, the vein at his temple throbbing as his face steadily took on a reddish hue, and trundled down to the first step. The second. The third. The fou-
He had slipped sideways and forward, the height of the staircase suddenly sprawling out before him, and made a desperate, foolish grab for the television. 'Should've grabbed the railing,' he thought numbly, recalling the blinding pain as he'd landed, heavily, at the bottom of the stairs. That had been nothing, however, to the millisecond of absolute horror he'd experienced when he caught a glimpse of the enormous, weighty television right before it had smacked into his skull and rolled, corner over corner, across the room. There was a spray of blood on the carpet for every time the bloodied edge had come into contact with the floor. "My edge," Harry said aloud, and his voice was swallowed by the silence.
God, his head hurt. And it was so cold….
He shakily dragged himself forward-everything was blurry, he must've lost his glasses in the fall-until he was even with the television. He stared at it. Vaguely he wondered who was sobbing, then realized in a moment of clarity that it was himself. For some reason that was immensely funny. He laughed uncontrollably, then suddenly screamed. His high, unearthly shrieks rent the silence; he continued until his voice was hoarse before abruptly going silent and clutching up the brain matter gathered on the floor in desperation. It was rubbery and slimy between his fingers- like the raw chicken he'd tenderized for dinner the night before, just the same- and blood immediately soaked his palm.
There was an awful lot of blood, too-it saturated his hair and slid down his face in thin, erratic trails of crimson that ended at his chin-and he couldn't quite conceive of how it could possibly all be his. Perhaps the television had landed on someone else as well? Harry squinted around at the room; nothing looked out of the ordinary, save for the irregular red patches dotting the carpet and the craggy black shards of broken plastic and glass. Huh. So it was all his. How odd.
Harry laughed, screamed, and shoved the handful of brain matter into his open skull. The world exploded in unbearable, all-encompassing agony, and he fainted dead away.
Harry awoke with a vague sense of unease and a headache. He lay there, quietly contemplating the new development and lethargically attempting to remember why, exactly, he was lying on what was undeniably not his cot in the cupboard, for close to three minutes. He let out a quiet huff of breath, then lay there for three more. Though eluded him. At around the ten-minute mark, he hesitantly cracked open one eye-a blur of white and brown and the weak light of midmorning-before he let it droop back into place.
He was tired with a bone-deep weariness; it brought to mind, vaguely, the memory of the time when Vernon, furious over some sort of perceived slight, had forced him to run up and down the stairs as punishment. By the time his uncle had remembered him it had been well over five hours, and Harry had ached to the point where each step felt like a mile. The next day he'd been unable to walk, and had spent several long hours trying in vain to massage out the knots in his calves and thighs. At the moment he felt remarkably similar, except his legs weren't nearly as sore and he had a killer of a headache.
Harry summoned his energy and managed to open both eyes and blink owlishly for a bit. He indulged in a moment of pride at the marked improvement before concentrating on his surroundings instead. The entrance hall ceiling spun wildly for several moments before coming into focus; Harry swallowed painfully, feeling suddenly parched. Why was he in the entrance hall? Had he been sleepwalking?
An attempt to sit up resulted in his vomiting violently onto the rug. God bloody damn. He was going to have to clean that up. Speaking of bloody, it would be hell to get out all those stains-
Harry froze. Somewhere in the background, the clock chimed two.
"SHIT." His hand flew instinctively to his forehead and he cringed, expecting to be sent back to the floor in a wave of agony, but was shocked into silence by the presence of a slight, barely-there throb. His fingers tangled in crusty strands of curly black hair, and when he pulled his hand back it was coated in a rusty spray of reddish flakes. The room spun. He ignored it.
Harry slowly, shakily, pressed his palm against the hallway wall, using it to drag himself to his feet. His legs nearly bucked and he locked his knees, sucking in deep, steadying breaths. His arms quivered. He felt brittle, as if he was an autumn leaf that had been trampled straight to dust; his heart was pounding frenetically beneath his ribs. He spared a moment to lean against the wall before making his faltering, agonizingly slow way to the downstairs bathroom. The small boy paused in the doorway, briefly contemplating letting himself sink to the floor, and then continued on until he could face the gilded mirror. Haunted green eyes stared back.
Well. That was it then. He was dead. There was absolutely no way someone who looked like that-cracked blood dried across his face and hair plastered to his head in a stiff, matted glob-could be alive.
Harry stood expectantly, waiting to see what horrors his revelation would bring, for several more minutes. When nothing happened, he tenderly parted the hair on his skull in an attempt to see the ghastly, broken mess of his head. It wasn't there. What WAS there was the pale, unbroken skin of his forehead, soft and pliant beneath his fingertips as it had always been, and a thin, jagged scar. He scratched at the dried blood surrounding it idly, watching, transfixed, as it fell to the floor in powdery clumps.
'Ok. Not dead, then.'
Harry nodded, straightening. He could deal with this. He had dealt with the Dursleys for years now. He had drank from the toilet, once, on Dudley's rather forceful command, and had staunchly fended off Petunia Dursley's attempts to fit him into a rather hideous orange sweater until it mysteriously shrunk to a quarter of its size. Once he had turned his teacher's wig blue, and consequently stuck out his resultant punishment in the cupboard afterwards. He had put up with Aunt Marge, who insulted his too-dead-to-defend-themselves-parents, and spent several hours of his childhood waiting out her cantankerous bulldog, Ripper, while in the branches of the feeble-looking tree in the backyard. Once, Dudley had even sat on his face. Harry Potter was, without a doubt, incapable of being fazed by anything the world had to throw at him.
Four minutes later he clambered back to his feet from where he had been previously sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth and muttering panicked entreaties to "help, oh help oh God oh help oh shit oh shit shit shit shit SHIT-". He stepped into the shower, clothes and all, and turned on the water full blast. Then he stripped himself of his too-baggy clothes and scrubbed every trace of blood from his body.
Forty minutes later a thin, rather bedraggled looking boy stepped out of the shower, leaving his clothes to drip rose-pink water trails, and changed into a baggier, albeit cleaner, set. Then he spent two hours painstakingly scrubbing the carpets with enough bleach to turn a black lab white and an entire bottle of dish detergent. When there were only faint, for the most part unnoticeable patches left, Harry checked the kitchen clock-it said it was two in the afternoon, but without an automatic calendar his calculations could've been off by an entire day-went back to the bathroom, and washed out his clothes. He steadfastedly ignored the way tiny specks of blood swirled down the drain when he picked them up and concentrated on wringing them out instead.
There was nothing to be done about the television. No doubt he would be in quite a bit of trouble, but with the TV looking as it did-like a giant, black pile of scrap-there was really no helping it. The Dursleys would be upset with him either way, seeing as how he wouldn't be able to finish all his chores before they returned. Harry carefully swiped the blood off the cracked screen, then stooped down to pick up his glasses, which had been laying, discarded, beside it. He placed them on his nose, gingerly holding the bent frame in place, but frowned when his vision instantly blurred. 'What-'
He yanked them off and the room jolted back into clarity. 'How…'
…he put them on. The room went fuzzy. He took them off. It snapped back into focus. He put them on again, just for the hell of it, and almost tripped over his own feet. Harry giggled, his eyes widening as he realized, with an elated rush of disbelief, that he could SEE. He crammed his glasses back onto his nose, then laughed out loud with his discovery.
"Blurry! Brilliant!" He tore them off.
"Brilliant! Just, just absolutely-can see everything, and I'm not even wearing them-" He took in the sharp corners and defined angles of the room, then repeated ecstatically, "Brilliant!"
No more too-thick lenses! No more whispers at school about "tape-face Potter" and his four-eyed face! Harry read the title off a book half-way across the room-"Grunnings", no doubt it was Vernon's-and whooped for joy. Just yesterday he had been part blind, and now, as if by magic-!
Harry slowed, thinking hard. 'As if by magic'. His Aunt and Uncle had always been violently opposed to even the mention of anything out of the ordinary; they were the epitome of normal, and that was how they liked it. Harry had always felt rather smothered by such a concept, seeing as how science had never really given him much of an explanation for some of the…things…that he did. Was it wind that had carried him up onto the school roof during his desperate attempt to get away from Dudley and his entourage of schoolyard bullies? Was it a spontaneous chemical reaction, as Aunt Petunia had explained acerbically, that had turned his teacher's wig blue? There were no scientific theories that could explain away the ability of a human boy to stare at a bit of his brain, pick it up, stuff it back into his head, and then wake up with nothing more than a mere headache. Harry was fairly sure there wasn't, at least. And what about that time when Dudley had pushed him into oncoming traffic and the car, instead of breaking his ribs, had simply gone through him as if it was nothing more than a midsummer breeze? Or the time when he had apologized for stepping on the tail of a garden snake and it had excused him in a sibilant, whispery voice? At the time he'd thought he had imagined it, but in lieu of all that had occurred….
Harry glanced nervously around the room, feeling suddenly paranoid that the Dursleys would pop out at any moment screaming in fury, then turned back to his thoughts. If, just for a moment, he entertained the thought that maybe it wasn't just a string of coincidence that had brought about the unexplainable events scattered throughout his life… if magic was REAL….
It was at that moment that Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived and unwitting savior of the wizarding world, tentatively began to believe in magic. He was seven years old.