Disclaimer: If I owned Harry potter, I would be rich and I wouldn't have to write on a fan fiction sight. Enough said, so on with the story….

Odd Pastimes

Once upon a time, there was a boy. This boy had a mob of raven colored hair and the most brilliant emerald eyes you could ever see hiding beneath a pair of spectacles. He was quite handsome, for a five-year-old boy, that is. This particular boy was currently wearing a huge baggy tee-shirt that ended an inch above his knees and a pair of faded jeans that were twice his size were being held up by a thick, worn leather belt. As strange as his appearance may seem, his location was even stranger. He was sitting on a lumpy mattress in a cupboard under the stairs.

The boy was currently staring up into the corner of the cupboard, seemingly contemplating the spider that was weaving a web. His concentration on the web would have been unnerving to anyone who might have seen him; but there was no one to see him. The house was empty, except for a five year old boy that was locked in the cupboard under the stairs.

The boys name was nothing spectacular, and didn't even have a nice ring to it. All the same, it was the boy's most prized possession; his parents had given it to him. His name was Harry Potter.

Why was this boy locked under the stairs? The Dursley's, Harry's only living relatives, had gone out for dinner to celebrate their son's birthday. Dudley had just turned six, and according to Vernon and Petunia, that was a major accomplishment. Knowing that they could not bring the boy and that they could not hire a babysitter on such short notice, the figured that they would just leave him home. Knowing that the boys freakish nature would infect the house, they had decided to pen him up, and what better place to do so, than his room- the cupboard under the stairs?

Staring up at the spider, Harry's mind wondered. Why were his aunt and uncle so mean to him? Was it something he did? No, he hadn't left a mess at dinner yesterday…he had even cleaned up the crayon marks that Dudley had left on the walls.

Coming up with no conclusion, he laid his head down onto a flat shapeless pillow and stared at his ceiling. Knowing that sleep would not claim him for another few hours, he continued to stare at the spider web.

The Dursley's, often locked Harry away into the cupboard for hours at a time, and Harry had grown used to finding ridiculous pastimes to keep him busy. His favorite by far was watching the spiders spin their webs. He often stared for hours, finding the tapestry of silver threads fascinating, sometimes even staring into the designs, trying to pick pictures out of the intertwining threads.

Harry was a very unusual boy. Most five-year-old boys, put into Harry's position, would have whined, and thrown tantrums until they were given whatever they wanted. Harry, however, just sat silently. When told to do something, he did so without a question. When there was nothing to do, he hid in the garden and watched the insects, or he took one of Dudley's books and tried to read it.

The Dursley's did not like Harry. In fact, you could even say that they despised him. This was how Harry Potter had grown up- not knowing what love was and thinking that manual labor from a five year old was completely normal. He had no clue that the Dursley's had no right to treat him the way they did. Harry Potter was oblivious to it all as he sat in his cupboard staring through the meager light at the spider throwing its silk around into an elaborate web.