Chapter One:
Happy House
The first time he'd cut himself had been when he was six.
It was Dudley's seventh birthday party, and Harry had been beaten for ruining the cake. Uncle Vernon had thrown Harry into his cupboard, ranting about bad blood. Harry had been so mad at the Dursley's that thinking all the bad things he could about them didn't calm his nerves. So, he did the next best thing.
He went through his school bag and found a pair of scissors. They were the ones the school had given him to use for class projects and such. Harry opened the scissors and brought them down across his upturned wrist, hard. He calmed down quickly after releasing all his pent up anger in the one quick movement.
Harry looked down at his wrist, expecting to see a shallow cut at most, and found blood bubbling out of the self inflicted wound. He gasped, but did not move to stop the blood flow. He was mesmerized by it. Harry's gaze followed his blood's slow trail down his thin, boney wrist until a droplet fell onto his blanket. Then another droplet fell next to the first one. He waited for what felt like hours before the final droplet rolled down his wrist and onto his blanket with the others.
He starred at his wrist, wondering if the blood had stopped. Slowly, Harry reached out a finger and touched the blood. The blood felt gooey, barley a liquid, and left a tiny smudge of red on the pad of his index finger.
He wiped the drying blood off on his blanket, causing the wound to open again. He covered his wrist with his right hand and squeezed, praying to God that the bleeding would stop. A few minutes later, when his breathing had slowed, Harry peeled his hand back from his wrist. The bleeding had stopped. He sighed happily. He had been terribly frightened that he would bleed to death. Not that anybody would have noticed if he had died. The Dursley's would have buried him only to keep the smell of death out of their perfect house. The school would think that he had finally been sent off to a school for troubled children, or an insane asylum. It's not like they hadn't been suggesting the Dursley's do so since the first day Harry had started school.
Harry sighed as he packed up his school bag and moved it back into its corner. As he curled up into a ball under his blanket, he thought of what it would be like to be cared for. To be liked. It's what he had wanted for as long as he could remember. He wished he could remember his parents. If he could remember them, he would remember what it felt like to be cared for. Harry fell asleep dreaming, once again, about the happy life he had been neglected.