Disclaimer - I don't own the rights to Harry Potter. I merely own this story. This is a particularly dark version of Harry, but not super dark and unoriginal or unimaginative.
This is just an idea that popped into my mind.
Feedback is appreciated, thank you.
The First Change.
Harry winced as he stood in front of the mirror, wincing at the pain in his arm from where Uncle Vernon had grabbed him. His obese uncle had been furious with the latest piece of 'freakishness' but there were so many counts of him being a freak, it was hard for Harry to keep track. Last night Harry had endured his disgusting Aunt's hands on his hair which she attacked with a pair of scissors.
Uncle Vernon had this really stupid view about his hair, saying it was abnormal since it stood up everywhere, and no matter how many times Harry tried hard to comb his hair, it never worked. He didn't bother anymore. He simply didn't see the point if his hair was going to stick up on end. Anyway, his dear 'uncle' told Petunia to get rid of it, and she had. Like Vernon, Petunia hated the sight of Harry's hair, but she never elaborated why. Armed with a pair of really sharp scissors, the blades reminding her unfortunate victim of a sharp kitchen blade, Petunia had not wasted any time, taking sadistic pleasure in cutting every piece of hair off his head.
Harry made a face, reminding himself of how he'd appeared when he'd seen the nearly bald kid with a large piece of black hair covering his lightning bolt shaped scar. Dudley had laughed himself stupid at the sight, giving Harry a taste of the things to come. Vernon had enjoyed the sight as well, but then the fat pig enjoyed it whenever he tortured Harry, be it physically, emotionally or psychologically.
All night harry had lain in the thing that passed for a bed in the Cupboard under the Stairs, tears rolling down his cheeks, hating his parents for crashing their damn car and landing him here, but wishing he'd never been born. But he had dreaded the day, he knew that if he went into school he'd be laughed at all day.
But when the morning came, his Aunt's shrill shrieking had woken him up and he was dragged out of the cupboard by his aunt and his uncle had beaten him up for being a freak, because his head had grown back!
Harry looked at his hair, wondering if he had some strange disease or something that made his hair grow back rapidly. But he sighed and looked around the toilet. He couldn't be here for long, lessons resumed shortly and he didn't want to be here if Dudley and his gang came knocking.
The Dursleys had been forced to stop the beating which had gotten out of control, and he had felt many of his already fragile bones start to break before Petunia had noticed the time, and though the pair of them would have liked nothing better than to stop him going to school, they had to keep up appearances. Harry grimaced even harder. The Dursleys didn't care about his education despite their constant preaching that if it weren't for them, he would never have had the benefit of an education, but he knew that wasn't true. Once more he cursed his parents for being lowlifes, but even he wondered if that was true; the Dursleys loved lying to magnify their own importance, so he wouldn't put it past them to lie about his parents. The Dursleys had already told their precious neighbours he was a delinquent, and the massive clothes (courtesy of Dudley) reinforced that image on the street. It wasn't Harry's fault that Dudley was a massive pig in a wig who seemed determined to pick up health issues later in life because his parents were simply too stupid to recognise that Dudley was putting his life at risk, and besides who would listen to him about what was going on? He was already seen as a weird child of a drunk and a whore, and Harry couldn't see anything he could do to change that image.
Harry looked at his hair, closed his eyes and wished he had short, neat, close cropped hair instead of a shaggy mess. He sighed and opened his eyes and jumped back in surprise. His hair had changed. It was no longer a shaggy, unkempt mess; now it was short and close cropped. Eyes wide, Harry ran a hand over his scalp. It was real, it wasn't an illusion.
He closed his eyes again, pictured his original hair, and concentrated. When he opened his eyes again, he saw his hair was back to its shaggy appearance.
A slow smile crept over Harry's features as he pictured his face, and he closed his eyes and focused again. When he opened his eyes again, he grinned when he saw the face looking back at him. His hair colour had changed, becoming blond rather than black, his eye colour changed to a grey colour and his skin looked tanned.
Footsteps outside alerted him to someone being nearby, so he quickly closed his eyes. When the door opened, admitting another kid, Harry Potter was back to his original appearance. Harry recognised the kid as one of those who had been threatened by Dudley and the gang with a beating from hell if he ever tried to make friends with the freak.
Harry ignored him as he walked out. He had long since resigned himself to his fate as a lonely kid, and besides he wasn't sure if he even wanted to have friends. He had always sworn that when he entered secondary school, hopefully a place he could get away from Dudley, he would finally break through some of the conditioning the Dursleys had put on him and make friends. But he wasn't hopeful - as the years went by, he felt bitterness towards the very concept of friendship.
Harry winced with pain as he was thrown into the Cupboard under the Stairs, cursing his uncle for being such an animal. He could hear the hideous orang-utan lurch away, muttering about freaks being put in their place. Harry didn't know what it meant to be a freak, and he didn't really care since the Dursleys seemed to label everyone who wasn't a member of their disgusting clan a freak.
He turned on the light, knowing from long experience he couldn't keep it on for very long. But he needed to see if he could change anything else other than his eyes, hair and skin tone. He held out his right arm and began concentrating, and when he opened his eyes again he saw that his arm had become much longer, thicker, and hairier.
Once on a trip to London, Harry and the Dursleys had gone shopping, but he had seen a really big man with greasy, slicked back hair, a grizzled face, and arms that made Uncle Vernon's flabby arms look weak. One of his striking features were the tattoos on his arms; his Aunt Petunia might hate tattoos, but to Harry they were a sign of normalcy, because the person who had them was different. He might have been mentally conditioned by the Dursleys about how important it was to be normal, but to be honest he couldn't see why the Dursleys simply couldn't be their own people, and stop trying to outdo their neighbours. In fact, Harry was willing to bet that men, like the motorcyclist, didn't care one bit. Harry had always envied the man's strength, believing that if Vernon tried to hurt the man, it would be a fatal mistake on his uncles' part.
Harry closed his eyes and changed his arm back to the way it was, but then he concentrated again and pictured another arm. When he opened them again, he grinned when he saw that his pale skin which looked so white on a good day like a tin of paint was now a deep, black in colour. Running his other, really white hand over his darkened skin, Harry lifted his shirt to see how far the transformation extended, and saw that the effect ended at the elbow.
Cool, he thought to himself.
"FREAK! Cook breakfast!" Aunt Petunia snapped through the door, unlocking it as she went back to the kitchen, and Harry struggled to wake himself up. After leaving the cupboard to cook the Dursleys their breakfast, where once again he was forced to take scraps and a glass of water - Harry wondered not, for the first time, why he hadn't died of malnutrition yet. He didn't really get much to eat anyway. He walked back to the cupboard to get ready for another day of school, but just as he was getting inside Dudley came down, laughing his stupid head off at something, and happily shoved Harry into the cupboard.
Harry groaned and picked himself up…..and then he sighed; Dudley had pushed him and managed to make him trip and spill some of the water. Pig, he thought to himself, knowing only too well if he said one word about their precious 'ickle Duddydums' he'd get a beating he would be lucky to walk away from.
After getting out of the house, Harry followed behind Dudley and Aunt Petunia. His aunt had made it very clear to him she didn't want him close by, and she didn't care if he was kidnapped off the streets. After all, in her own words "who'd want a freak like you?" Personally, Harry didn't really care if he was taken away from the Dursleys; even if the kidnappers were as violent and as mercurial as the Dursleys, Harry knew he could cope since he'd been beaten up so many times.
While Harry followed the two Dursleys, thankful that neither of them seemed that bothered he was behind them at all for the time being, he asked himself and not for the first time, why the Dursleys hadn't just simply thrown him out long ago? Some people would say he was being ungrateful thinking something like that, to them the Dursleys were raising him since his parents had been drunks who'd died in a car crash, but the way the Dursleys worded it made it seem like they were raising the next Adolf Hitler. Worse, everyone on the street seemed to believe that he was being raised right, so as a result Harry never went to them for help anymore than he went to the teachers. He remembered the last time he'd tried, he had received a nasty beating (they were all nasty) from Vernon and Dudley, who joined in after eagerly asking his father.
And yet he still didn't understand why the Dursleys bothered to keep him; they complained about him, they beat him, they verbally abused him, they tormented him, they moaned everyday about having to keep him, they tried guilt-tripping him by saving if they hadn't taken him in he'd have been sent into an orphanage when his parents had died.
Harry felt he would have preferred the orphanage; at least there the chances of it just being him seen as a burden would be spread out onto other kids, and there was also the chance someone, somehow, would want to adopt him. But his mind was cynical. His life had made him a cynic and a pragmatist, and with each new day, each new beating, he lost a little bit more of what made a child a child.
Later that night, Harry sat in his cupboard again, moving carefully, each stab of pain in his back stoking his hatred for the Dursleys. It had been a fairly easy day, something that Harry instinctively became wary of. When he'd gotten back to Privet Drive, dreading going through the door but knowing he had better get it over and done with…. Only to find that things were quiet there as well, Aunt Petunia was ignoring him which wasn't unusual.
Harry had been dreading the return of Uncle Vernon, knowing that whatever was going to happen to him would not be good.
Uncle Vernon had been calm during the night, and it wasn't until Harry was inside his cupboard that the fat man had dragged him out, and repeatedly whipped him with his 'special belt' the belt with the most vicious buckle he could get, the whip that was bought specially for him. Harry had no idea how much time passed while he was whipped, his neck gripped tightly by the hand of his Uncle while the filthy animal whipped him. Petunia eventually called her husband off since Harry's screams were so loud that the neighbours had probably heard, but Harry doubted they would do anything; the neighbours hadn't cared about him before, never giving a thought about his agony, why should they start now?
Harry painfully dabbed his back with disinfectant, courtesy of his Aunt who'd just given it to him with a piece of kitchen paper, so he had to make it all last. Washing his back was difficult, but he managed to clean the wounds as best he could.
Harry hissed, wishing that his terrible excuse for an aunt had enough compassion to bandage his back, but he knew that he would somehow manage to survive, though it was amazing that he was still alive in this filthy hovel. He felt nothing for the Dursleys, nothing but hatred. As he lay on his stomach, wishing the pokey cupboard had enough air circulating through it to help in his healing, he thought about leaving the Dursleys, but he knew he would need to make a plan, find some money but knew from experience that the Dursleys would take the money from him no matter what he did.
I know abused Harry's kind of used, but there's method to my madness. Please review and tell me what you think.