Chapter Two

I do not own Harry Potter or any of its affiliated properties. This is a work of fiction written with no intents for profit in any monetary sense.

It was Halloween, almost two months since the night Vernon had given Harry a concussion, and while he'd healed up fine within a day thanks to Aster, his uncle had gotten steadily worse ever since. Vernon had been home early that day because the office had begun to cut his hours, mostly due to his increasingly belligerent nature. Having enough whiskey to get drunk before he'd finished his breakfast every morning probably played some part in all that, although if anyone asked Vernon (and indeed even if they didn't) he'd tell them that it was all his freak of a nephew's fault he was getting less work. And so, as Grunnings gave Mr. Dursley fewer and fewer hours, he began to drink more and more, and the more he drank the more punishment Harry had dished out to him. It'd gotten to the point, the drinking, not the child abuse (Petunia didn't care in the least about that), that even Mrs. Dursley had begun to get into arguments with her husband. By the last week of October it wasn't odd at all to hear screaming and yelling coming from Number Four, Privet Drive in the evenings after Mr. Dursley had arrived home from work.

Harry and Aster tried to keep their heads down, but with Vernon specifically blaming the nine year olds for his woes, it was bound to get ugly eventually.

And it did. On Halloween, the thirty-first of October, nineteen-eighty-nine, the situation finally came to a head.

"ENOUGH! That's it, VERNON! The last straw! I'm taking Dudders and leaving! You drink till you can't stand up every damn day! And NOW! NOW, you're telling me you've been fired! Really Vernon?! Really!? All you do when you're home is drink! And now, you've been caught drinking ON THE JOB!? Do you know what the neighbors are saying Vernon? Do you know what they're calling us? They're calling us trash Vernon. TRASH! I won't stand for it! Come on Dudley. Grab your bag. You and Mummy are leaving. NO Dudley! Just the bag! We'll come back for the rest of-"

SMACK!

Both Petunia and Dudley froze in place, Vernon's hand still raised from delivering the backhand. Petunia and Dudley could scarcely believe what'd just happened. Even Vernon looked shocked that he'd struck his wife. In the past, even piss drunk, kinda like he was now, he'd never hit Petunia. Other than those few times with Aster, he'd never really hit anyone but Harry.

Petunia didn't say a word. There were tears in her eyes as she ushered her son out the door and into the car, but still she held silent. Vernon just stood there in the middle of his living room, coffee table turned on its side and a few picture frames shattered on the ground, shards of glass laying at his feet. The twins listened from inside their cupboard where they'd been since they'd gotten home from school three hours ago, praying that they'd be forgotten by the man they called uncle, at least for the night.

Vernon must have stood there in the living room for fifteen minutes, just thinking. He asked himself, what led to this? What caused it? Why had he been fired? Had his wife and son really just left him? When had his perfect life become the shit-storm it now resembled? Where did it all go wrong?

And then it hit him.

Motherfucking, cocksucking, dirty-little-no-good, FREAKS!

With a great roar, Vernon tore across the living room and drunkenly slammed into the cupboard door. He bounced off of it about a foot before he wrapped his meaty fist around the doorknob.

The twins had been listening to their aunt and uncle's argument, sitting side by side on their cot with their hands fisted on their knees for its entirety. Every time one of the adults would yell, they'd flinch a little, knowing from experience that unrest in the house usually found its way back to the two. Anger at one another was taken out either physically on Harry or, less frequently, verbally on Aster.

That's why neither of the two was especially surprised when their uncle suddenly bellowed and ripped their door open. Not especially surprised, but terrified all the same.

Vernon reached a large red arm in, grabbed a fistful of Harry's white shirt, and yanked the nine year old out of the closet, sending him across the room. Harry landed on the glass from the picture frames his uncle had knocked over in his drunken fit earlier in his argument with Petunia, his thin shirt doing little to stop the jagged pieces from slicing into his back. With another bellow, Vernon straddled Harry's waist, getting glass all in his knees, not that he could feel it through the adrenaline and alcohol permeating his system. Vernon wasted no time wrapping his huge mitten like hands around Harry's neck, quite literally trying to choke the life out of him. He leaned forward, putting as much of his considerable weight into his grip as he could. Harry's neck would have undoubtedly snapped, had Aster not read the situation as far more desperate than any time before and acted.

Seeing that her brother was about to be murdered by her uncle in front of her, Aster came barreling into Vernon's side with a panicked scream, making him lose his grip on the young Potter, forcing him to remove one hand to catch himself.

With the red haze already consuming his vision, Vernon spared no thought to Harry's old threat and whipped his hand around, closed-fist, and clocked Aster just below her left eye. With a sharp cry she tumbled back, landing on her rear just clear of the glass. Time seemed to slow down for Harry as he watched his uncle's meaty knuckles connect with his sister cheek and send her to the floor.

When Vernon had first started to really lay into Harry, the male Potter would try to fight back a little, a flailing leg here and a blind swipe of the arm there. The retaliation for such antics was always brutal, and the one time he'd managed to claw three lines into his uncle's cheek he'd pissed blood for a week, despite Aster's help. Within a few months of the start of his beatings, Harry had learned the best thing he could do was weather his uncle's fury and try to protect his face and sides. He'd taken his learnings to heart and made it implicitly clear to Aster that under absolutely no circumstances was she to ever interfere, lest their uncle's attention shift to her. The few times she'd gone against Harry's orders had been the few times she'd been hit too when she was younger. After a screaming match that ended with them both sobbing on each other, Harry had finally made her see his way and convinced her that nothing hurt him more than seeing her in pain. Harry delivered his threat to his uncle soon after, and Aster was never hit again.

The moment Vernon's fist connected with his precious sister's cheek, Harry's face transformed form the pained wince it had been to a wide-eyed, teeth-bared snarl. With almost no conscious thought, Harry reached out his right hand and fumbled for a piece of glass, quickly slicing his hand open as he wrapped it around a five inch long shard. Swinging his left hand up and grabbing a fistful of his uncle's hair, Harry then swung his right hand up and buried the shard into his neck.

Vernon cried out in horrible pain as he tried to jerk away from his nephew, but he only managed to roll over so that Harry now sat on his fat belly.

Without a second's hesitation, Harry yanked the glass out of his uncle, only to immediately bring it back and sheath it in his neck again. And again. Three, four, ten, fifteen times he stabbed, before he then started swinging it around at his face, cutting above Vernon's brow, and then across his chin, and then everywhere. For almost an entire minute Harry carved his uncle in a rage, like the Jack O' Lantern's he and his sister never had the chance to, until finally, he stopped.

Chest heaving from exertion, his hair matted down with blood, Harry took in his surroundings, noting but not quite feeling the many pieces of glass in his back and the pain in his mangled hand. Blood was splattered in all directions from his uncle's head, thought the majority of it was pooling out of the sloppy wounds on his neck. While not quite dead yet, Vernon had long since gone into shock. They blood loss from his neck, where Harry'd managed to sever the blood vessels, would ensure he'd pass out soon, and die shortly thereafter.

Harry's eyes traveled from the gruesome scene, partially of his making, over to his sister. Aster, with a hand on her swollen cheek, was sneering down at their tormentor, taking vicious pleasure in his gruesome state. She'd seen enough blood and gore, though no neck or facial injuries of comparable severity obviously, on her brother that she was well and truly desensitized to such scenes.

Dropping his improvised knife to the floor, Harry staggered away from the now dead body of his uncle over to his sister, who he then dropped to his knees in front of. Reaching out with his less bloody hand, Harry cradled his sister's bruised cheek in his hand, brushing the skin tenderly with his thumb. He looked in her eyes for a second before he began speaking.

"Does it hurt, Sissy?"

Aster leaned into her brother's touch before bringing both of her slightly smaller and paler hands up and laying them on top of his. She closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath before responding.

"A little. Give me your hand."

Harry looked down at the raw hamburger trying to pass as his right hand. As he shifted to bring it up, sharp pain lit up in his back. In just in the few seconds he'd been talking to his sister, the adrenaline coursing through his system had managed to lessen; breathing new life into his injuries and making him wince.

Shaking his head, Harry instead turned and dropped to his butt with a soft whimper. He responded as he began to take his off his ruined shirt, "No. First I need you to pick the glass outta my back, ok?"

Aster swallowed the bile creeping up her throat at the sight of his back, feeling much sicker at the comparatively less gruesome scene, when compared to the injuries on her uncle's cooling body which was just a few feet from her. The wounds being her brother's made all the difference in the world, kinda like how you could see a snake or a fish's head chopped off and feel less than if someone in your family lost a leg in front of you. It was all about perspective.

Harry sat on the ground for a few minutes waiting for his sister to find the tweezers and get started on his back. He'd been beaten badly and often enough to know that the massive lack of emotions he was feeling was due to shock, which he could already feel wearing off in the form of slight tremors. He heard Aster sit back down behind him, but his mind was a million miles away. While his sister worked on his back, he worked on their situation.

They'd need money, though there should be enough upstairs and in their uncle's wallet to last a little while. He could use his changing power to look like an adult and buy a train ticket to get away from the house. They'd have to do that as soon as the two took a shower and packed. Number one priority at this point was to get as far away from Number Four as soon as possible. With them gone, the police would most likely think that whoever killed Vernon had taken them, which would be much better than sitting around with cuts on his hand consistent with the ones across Vernon's fat fucking face.

Harry spared a quick look and sneer at the body before refocusing.

Once they had taken a train far enough away, they'd get a hotel for the night. Tomorrow they'd probably need a more long-term plan, but that would have to do for now.

By the time Harry had decided on a tentative plan, Aster had finished healing his back and moved onto his hand. Honestly, with how bad it was hurting, Harry wanted nothing more than to sit and let his sister heal his hand for the next hour. He knew though, that the sooner they split, the safer they'd be. The police arriving was something he didn't want them there for, but Petunia suddenly showing up would certainly be a disaster as well.

Mind made up, Harry gently pulled his still wounded but no longer bleeding palm free from his twin's healing hands. When Aster looked up at him in askance, Harry shook his head and said, "We're leaving. We'll take what we can and head to the city."

Aster's eyes grew large with disbelief and wonder, before she mutely nodded her head, shocked from a combination of the day's events. Between the stress of listening to her aunt and uncle's screaming match, seeing her uncle try and choke the life out of her brother, seeing her brother hack her uncle's face up into hamburger, and finally hearing her twin tell her that they were running away, was almost too much for the nine year old. Undoubtedly it would be too much for almost any other child her age, but the two Potters had been through a lot and were made of tough stuff on top of their rough childhood. As long as she had her brother with her, Aster knew everything would be fine.

Harry gave a small grin at her nod before he continued.

"We'll need to shower, obviously, but before we get clean there's something we need to do," he said, looking over at his uncle's cooling body. "We're gonna need his wallet for the ID and cash it has. There's no point to me looking like him if we don't have a license, ya know? Help me roll him, would ya?"

Aster gave a grimace at the thought of touching her uncle's bleeding carcass, but relented when Harry gently nudged her with his shoulder. They made their way next to Vernon, blood squelching between their toes from the ruined carpet. They got on their knees and, on the count of three, heaved Vernon over onto his side. Harry fumbled through Vernon's back pockets, fishing out his ostentatious Aspinal leather wallet. A quick check found a bank card, an ID, and just under one hundred and fifty pounds.

Harry set the wallet by the door while his sister grabbed them a change of clothes from the trunk in their cupboard.

"Don't bother digging me anything out Sis! I'll be changing into Uncle Vernon when we leave so I'll have to wear something of his."

Aster came back out of their 'room' with a change of clothes for her and nodded. The two then headed upstairs to the bathroom.

Harry stared at his reflection for a few seconds, taking in how completely covered in blood he was. There were splatters across his face, and his hair was laying limp against his head it was so matted down with the stuff. Feeling his mouth water with the desire to hurl, he quickly turned away and dropped his pants and underwear. He'd been bloodied before, but there was something fundamentally different about the blood belonging to someone else, something sicker.

Now eager to rinse himself clean of the bloody mess he was, Harry stood with his back pressed against his sister's front at the rear of the tub as they waited for the water to warm. Ten seconds later, they pulled the middle handle to stop the water from coming from the faucet and instead from the showerhead.

Harry felt Aster's hands snake around his middle and her head come to rest on his neck as they stood under the warm water, both needing the comfort only physical contact could provide. Aster squeezed her arms a little, needing to reassure herself that Harry was there and ok. Her mind kept flashing back to the sight of her uncle straddling him, trying his level best to kill the most important person in her world. Harry let out a soft relieved sigh, happy that his sister wasn't too disgusted with what he'd done downstairs to touch him. Aster'd given no indication that she was upset at Harry, but he was worried anyway.

Suddenly feeling very happy, Harry turned around and laid a big kiss right on his sister's lips. When she gave a pleased but confused smile back, Harry elaborated.

"We're free," Harry whispered fiercely. "We'll never have to sleep in that closet again. Vernon won't be doing anything to anyone ever again!" Harry wrapped his arms around Aster's lower back, pulling her flush against his chest. "We can do whatever we want! We're free baby!"

Harry's face was lit up like a Christmas tree, the joy infecting Aster, causing her to grin back. She realized what he said was right. They were free. Tomorrow they could do whatever they wanted. No one was ever going to hurt her brother again. They could finally be like all the other kids!

"We're free," She whispered back, just before she leaned in and kissed Harry. When they pulled away a second later, they were both smiling like loons.

"Wash my back Sis. The sooner we get clean the sooner we can blow this Popsicle stand."

Half an hour later, Harry was closing the front door behind him before he joined his sister on the sidewalk. They'd managed to scrounge up around five hundred pounds between the hundred and fifty in Vernon's wallet and their relatives' emergency stash upstairs. Harry, now having transformed into Vernon, took Aster's hand and the handle of the suitcase containing their things and, without a single glance back, took off towards the bus station.

An hour later saw the two getting off of the bus at the train station. Harry managed to fumble his way through the process of purchasing two tickets to London. Once there, the two took a final trip via cab to the Apex Hotel. They'd spent most of the trip chatting about what they were going to do tomorrow, but by the time they got to their room, they were both too exhausted to talk.

Quickly changing back to his real body, Harry locked the door behind them and popped open their suitcase, hunting out a set of pajamas. As he began to wiggle out of the comically large clothes, Harry asked Aster something that'd been troubling him for hours now.

"Hey, Sissy… You're ok with this, right?"

Aster's eyebrow rose in confusion as she asked back, "Well yeah. Why wouldn't I be? Am I missing something?"

"No. I mean, I don't think so. Well, I mean, I really hope not. It's just that, everything kinda went down so fast that I just wasn't sure if you were cool with it. You are, right? I mean, do you think differently of me? After what I did, I mean?" Harry fumbled over his words worse and worse the more nervous he got, until his voice was so quiet Aster had to lean forward to hear his last question. Her eyes widened when she did.

"Harry," Aster whispered as she closed the distance between them. Grabbing both of his hands in hers, Aster silently led Harry over to their bed, her twin only having managed to slip into a pair of plaid boxers before his impromptu question. Aster walked backwards until her butt touched the bed. Then, letting go of Harry's injured palm but holding tight to his other one, Aster gently pulled her brother into bed and then under the sheets and comforter. Finally letting go of his hand, she flipped over and turned off the lamp on her nightstand, the room's only light source extinguishing with a click. She then nudged him, motioning for him to turn away from her. Any confusion or sadness that may have been on his face at her nonverbal order was wiped away when Harry felt Aster throw her right arm around his waist, just before she molded herself to the back of his body. Propping herself up on her left elbow, Aster leaned down till her lips were touching the lobe of Harry's ear.

"No, Harry. I don't think you did anything wrong today. You're the same person I woke up next to this morning. I love you, Harry, and nothing you do will ever change that. Ok?" Aster asked, looking down into Harry's eyes, his emerald orbs carbon copies of her own. Aster felt her face heat a little as she waited for her twin's response, the seconds ticking by as he held her in an intense gaze. Finally, after what seemed like forever, his face broke into a wide, genuine smile before he nodded. Aster's own lips quickly copied the expression, his happiness making her happy even if she didn't really understand what Harry was grinning about in the first place.

Leaning down and delivering a swift peck to his lips, Aster let her elbow slide under their pillow until she was level with Harry. Snuggling into his back, she unknowingly had the same exact thought as her twin, just before unconsciousness claimed her.

'As long as we're together, everything will be fine. As long as we have each other, nothing else matters.'