I really should not be starting this, but the idea just got stuck.

Disclaimer: If I owned the Harry Potter series, it would have never been finished.

Once upon a time there was a young boy named Harry. He lived a normal, mundane life with his Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and cousin Dudley. Nobody in his family really liked him, and nobody in his family ever comforted or enjoyed being with him, but Harry supposed that it was alright.

He wasn't sure why nobody really liked him though. That thought made him a bit sad at times.

Usually, Aunt Petunia would send him out to work in the gardens, so that she and Uncle Vernon wouldn't have to see him (Harry never realized this until his 4th year). It wasn't so bad. He was a quiet kid who would amuse himself by playing with the weeds. He'd pretend his rake was a laser gun and mow down the saplings and dandelions and onion grasses like the main characters in sci-fi books.

Harry always like reading sci-fi books, ever since Aunt Petunia decided to bring him to the library and discovered that Harry could keep himself occupied for hours, alone, in the cupboard, with a book. Aunt Petunia had tried to give him stories of knights slaying dragons, at first, but those were boring.

Unbeknown to Harry, Aunt Petunia sometimes felt uncomfortable with the way Harry was so silent and indifferent to his isolation. Weren't neglected children supposed to be needy? She supposed that Harry was shy and introverted, a bit like his mother.

Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia always told Harry about his no-good parents. They certainly didn't want Harry thinking that he was better than them simply because he had those freaky powers. Aunt Petunia shuddered to think of how the boy could harm them, ruin them.

As for Harry, he didn't think he was special. In fact, he didn't think too hard about anything. Just simply daydreamed day in and day out about fantastic worlds he'd create in his imagination while he was weeding or locked up. He hated cooking, though.

Harry hated cooking because it forced him out of his daydreams. Uncle Vernon would always whip him with his belt if he burnt something, and he's done that too many times to count.

He used to hate Dudley, too, with an even greater loathing than he did with cooking, because Dudley would hurt him and laugh. Even Uncle Vernon didn't laugh at him when Harry was punished, and he only punished Harry with reason. He wouldn't just hit Harry for fun.

But then, one day, Harry stopped hating Dudley. It was the third day of third grade, and Mrs. Coleman had just returned their math worksheets. His paper had been decorated with a smiling butterfly sticker and an A+ at the top. Feeling especially cheerful, Harry had just taken out his old orange folder to store his paper when he spied Dudley's grade.

Dudley looked like he was going to cry. He'd gotten a four out of ten on basic multiplication problems.

After quickly scanning other student's sheets, he realized that Dudley had gotten the lowest score, and, at that moment, he couldn't help but pity Dudley. Suddenly, his old anger vanished, and in place of that came a type of nothingness. He shivered. It felt…a little…funny to know that Dudley was an idiot.

After they'd gotten home, though, Harry had been yelled at for scoring higher than Dudley. As Uncle Vernon, in his great sputtering rage, backhanded him once, Harry couldn't find it in himself to hate Dudley, who was sobbing, face puckered with pain and hate. Harry would probably hate himself a little bit, too, if Mrs. Coleman hadn't given him a smiling sticker. If he had been the only one without a smiling face on his page.

After that, Aunt Petunia got Dudley a tutor.

From then on, Harry wasn't allowed to score very high, but he wasn't allowed to turn in blank pages, either. At the end of fourth grade, Dudley had taken to waving Harry's grades and making fun of them. Mrs. Coleman would occasionally smile at him, though, and in his heart he pretended that she knew it was all a farce, and that she'd been storing up his stickers in her big filing cabinet.

It was his biggest wish. On the last day of school, he stayed in a recess, hoping that today would be the day Mrs. Coleman would reveal all the stickers that she'd kept for him. He felt a little sick as sat stock-still in his chair, listening to Dudley and the others play outside. He wouldn't look in her direction.

After what seemed like an eternity, Mrs. Coleman walked up to him and asked him if anything was wrong. Harry felt his heart thudding in his chest, and blood rushing in his ears. He didn't want to ask her though, because that would be embarrassing, but, in his feverish desire, he wholly believed that she had them.

She was going to give them to him. She was reaching into her bag to get his stickers out. He clenched and unclench his fists, hands clammy.

It was a tissue.

"Why?" he asked, both surprised and disappointed at the same time. There was a part of him, deep down inside, that said, it's over. There were no stickers. But most of him believed that there was still a chance, that maybe she knew because she'd always smiled at him when he left her classroom.

"You're crying, Harry," she told him gently. "Is there anything you need to talk to me about?"

"Do—" his throat caught, but he pressed on. "Do you—have my stickers?" he whispered, embarrassed and frightened at the same time.

"What?" she asked, confused. "I didn't hear that last part."

He regretted this. It was humiliating, but he forced himself to say "my stickers."

"Oh," she answered, surprised. "You want a sticker? I'm sure I have a few left over. You can chose any that you'd like."

Harry nodded, but he felt the tears come faster. Without any really feeling, he followed her to her desk and chose a sticker, almost ripping it in half as he took it off. It was a yellow smiley face.

"Thanks," he muttered. She beamed at him, and hugged him. "Now you run off to recess and have some fun with your friends."

As Harry walked out of the classroom, he felt a bit like his heart was twisting itself, kind of like how he wrung out the wash sometimes. He put the sticker on the back of his hand and ran to the bathroom to dry his tears and make himself look normal.

Later, on the ride home, Harry couldn't remember why he'd wanted a sticker so badly in the first place. It was all in all, an extremely embarrassing memory.

After another summer of normalcy, his Hogwarts letter came.

Uncle Vernon and Dudley had gone to spend some time together bowling and doing other stuff at the local fair. Aunt Petunia was upstairs, looking over furniture catalogs, and she had permitted Harry to stay outside of his cupboard for the day. Harry had been reading his science fiction books again, when he suddenly heard a tapping on the window pane. At first, he wasn't sure if he had imaged the great, big white owl hovering near the living room window.

Then he'd ran over to get a closer look at it. It wasn't every day that someone got to see something so cool as an owl in the daylight. Carefully, he touched the windowpane with his fingertips and admired the owl. It looked super clean and pretty.

The owl hooted, almost angrily, and rapped the glass again. Harry jerked back his fingers, realizing the consequences of having a huge, powerful owl near breakable glass. Aunt Petunia would never let him forget about this freaky incident.

He waved his arms frantically, trying to scare off the creature. "Shoo!" he whispered harshly. "Shoo!"

The owl rapped on the window some more with an irritated look. It waved its talons at him, and for a second, Harry thought the owl was saying hi. But then he noticed the parchment that was tied to one claw.

His curiosity getting the better of him, he opened the door a creak and stuck his head out. Immediately, the owl rammed into him and the two crashed into one of the potted flowers. Sounds of ceramic shattering and muffled yells were heard, and Harry knew with dread that Aunt Petunia would be downstairs very, very soon.

"You stupid owl!" he cried, yanking off the piece of paper and shoving it into his pants pocket. He didn't even care if it got crumpled. The owl glared at him before it flew away dismissively.

"WHAT'S GOING ON DOWN THERE?" Aunt Petunia shrieked, and Harry closed his eyes.

Harry was forced to stay into his cupboard for the next two days because of the owl incident. Nobody would have believed him if he told them that a giant owl with a message had knocked him over. Or even worse, they'd think he was doing something freaky, again. Harry grumbled. The freaky things always came to him, not the other way around.

Luckily, this provided the perfect chance for him to inspect the letter. It was addressed to him, and gave an extremely accurate address, so much that Harry felt very uncomfortable opening it. Aunt Petunia had once called Mrs. Figgs, their next door neighbor, a stalker, because she was always observing their house and had coincidentally met them on two of their entire family trips. Mrs. Figg would never send him a letter, though, and Harry couldn't for the life of him think of anyone else who would be interested.

The letter itself was made from the same yellowy parchment of the letter, and the calligraphy was quite beautiful. It went somewhere along the lines of "Hello, Mr. Potter, we are crazy wackos who are trying to prank you."

He'd tossed it into his closet, but he couldn't shake off the feeling that it meant something. It was a very elaborate prank, Harry reasoned, and focused on a very insignificant person. For a split second he thought maybe he should show it to Aunt Petunia and ask her what it was, but he discarded the idea. It would just be looking for trouble.

The next day, more letters came, and Uncle Vernon shook in fury. Aunt Petunia paled as she caught sight of the letter, and Harry was locked in his cupboard, again. Dudley was upset that Harry was the center of attention.

All throughout the day, Harry could hear Uncle Vernon raving about freakishness this and freakishness that. If Uncle Vernon was so angry, and if it was about freakishness, then maybe it wasn't a joke…

Harry rummaged around his school supplies for a pen. He was thankful that Uncle Vernon was too daft to believe that he had already received a letter, but unfortunately for him, Aunt Petunia was not as stupid. She remembered the cracked flower pot and the scratches on skin.

She refused to let Harry out to send his letter, and she took away all his pens and markers and pencils. Harry glared at her as she snooped through his stuff, undoubtedly trying to find the missing letter and his unsent response. As if she could deter him from going to Hogwarts. He'd memorized the address, and they'd be fighting him forever if they tried to make him stay.

Soon, Harry realized that he had underestimated how much his Aunt and Uncle hated magic. Hogwarts sent two new letters every day, and soon, Uncle Vernon moved them out to an abandoned camp in what seemed to actually be the middle of nowhere. There was no electricity, no plumbing, and no inhabitants nearby. They stayed there for a month, and Harry started to get nervous. The Hogwarts curriculum had already started, and what if they didn't allow him to enroll now?

After enduring another week of hunter-gatherer life, Aunt Petunia finally snapped. They were promptly moved back to civilization and Uncle Vernon gave Harry his most thorough thrashing ever.

"You'll be getting one even worse if you try to go to that school of freaks," he promised.

He did anyways. He wasn't sure if this would play out just like the stickers and Mrs. Coleman thing had, but after a week of waiting and pacing and high tensions, he was ready to give up.

He'd go to Stonewall, and work hard, he promised himself. Even if Uncle Vernon beat him. Especially if he did. And then when he was a legal adult, he'd run away from home, and never come back. He'd try to get a college scholarship and show everyone, show Vernon, show Petunia, show Dudley, show Mrs. Coleman, show that dratted Dumbledore…

But first, he'd get revenge on Vernon. Today they were expecting Vernon's boss for dinner, and Harry had been ordered to stay in his cupboard for the entire dinner and be absolutely silent. Well, guess what? If he was called a freak, then he'd do something freaky and ruin it. He didn't care about being beat later, because blows would never hurt Harry as much as losing the promotion would to Vernon. He didn't even understand why his "family" had taken him in.

Harry sniffed and dried his tears as the doorbell rang.

Aunt Petunia rushed downstairs and flatten her hair in the mirror before opening the door with an exclamation of "It's so good to see you, Mr. Croft!"

Then, the words died in her throat, and her face turned ugly.

"Vernon!" she yelled in a panicky voice. "There's a freak here! Get your gun!"

"WHAT?" boomed a voice. "I'm here to pick up uh…" he shuffled through some papers. "One Harry James Potter!"

"Oh no you don't!" she cried and ran over to Harry, shoveling him into the cupboard. "We're not going to let you having him and turn him into one of your freaks! He'll grow up to be an upstanding citizen!"

To Aunt Petunia's surprise, Harry ran into the cupboard, and she locked it behind him. She hadn't realized yet that Harry was starting to pack his things into his backpack. Clothes, papers, books, pens…he paused when he saw his yellow smiley sticker on the wall, and decided to peel that off and take it anyways. He realized his toothbrush was upstairs, but he'd give up a toothbrush for a chance to go to magic school. Once finished, he jiggled the latch, but it wouldn't budge. He pounded on the locked door. "Let me out!"

Suddenly, he heard a gun go off. He collapsed onto his bed, shocked speechless. They'd…they'd actually shot him…

His hopes and dreams…

Abruptly, his door flew off his hinges, and a large man with a bushy beard and friendly eyes peered down at him. "Are you Harry Potter?" he asked, then nodded to himself. "I reckon you are. C'mon Harry!"

Numbly, Harry followed him.

They ran out of there into the streets, and, before he knew it, he was picked up and put in a motorbike seat. They raced down the driveway, and Harry finally laughed as he felt them pick up speed and soar into the air. He looked down the small houses, and the tiny, insignificant Vernon and Petunia and Dudley.

And then the most wonderful thing happened. The Crofts car drove up, and a very confused Mr. Croft walked out. Harry laughed again, and turned back to face the sunset with the softest smile on his young face.

He was free.

What do you think? I'm at a bit of a writer's block for what should happen next, but hopefully that'll resolve itself.