Author's Note: Though there are no particularly graphic descriptions, this chapter does include quite a lot of abuse (physical, mental, emotional, and verbal). I wouldn't consider anything in the chapter to be fully M-rated but I want to convey that much of it is in the very high T-rating range, so please don't continue reading if you are easily disturbed or offended by abuse or language.

Also, I intend to continue writing this story in third-person omniscient but want to warn that the perspective will likely jump around frequently during each chapter, as it does in this one. I hope to make the source of each new perspective fairly clear when it has obviously shifted, but let me know if there is any confusion.

I occasionally use italicized text to emphasize a word or short phrase. However, longer phrases and complete sentences that have been italicized are mental dialogue. Hopefully, you should be able to tell the difference.

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the chapter!

Chapter 2: Departure Of The Freak

"BOY! YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO BE IN THE CAR READY TO GO WITH ALL YOUR FREAK STUFF IN THE BOOT OR YOU CAN JUST FIND YOUR OWN WAY TO THE BLOODY TRAIN STATION!" Harry was in the backseat of Uncle Vernon's car in under two minutes.

He had been up and fully packed, pacing his cupboard in anticipation, since five o'clock this morning. Harry was both incredibly nervous and incredibly excited for the day's upcoming events, preventing him from getting a sound night's sleep. It was a vicious circle really. His anxiety caused the short sleep he did manage to be a restless one, which he knew would leave him tired for the big day to follow, increasing his worries and thus making it even more difficult to sleep properly. He had badly wanted to a good, full night's rest that night to ensure that he was in top form when he arrived at King's Cross the next day. Harry was desperately hoping to be able to blend in (or at least to not be obviously noticed as someone who was clueless about magic and the magical world) but also wanted to be fully alert and aware so that he could absorb as much of the new information and experiences, which he was sure the day ahead would hold in abundance, as he possibly could into memory.

Admitedly though, it was not only nerves that had contributed to his difficult sleep (or lack thereof). The Dursleys had attemped to fully ignore Harry's very existence during the what remained of the holidays, after the incident on his birthday, out of lingering apprehension of the possible repercussions for interaction with the freak. It now seemed to him as though, they had been saving it all up for the final week. They had not fed him at all the week prior to his departure for school. Any food he managed to get his hands on had come from Dudley's rare leftovers (anyone could tell by a mere glance that the large boy rarely allowed anything he even remotely believed to be food to cross his path and be left uneaten) found in the garbage. He had remained locked in his cupboard for the majority of the days that week as well, only allowed out in the mid-afternoon to do the housework.

In addition to these restrictions, which Harry considered rather standard having been subjected to similar treatment from the Dursleys almost all his life, he was subject to Uncle Vernon's bad mood and temper five times that week, a record breaking count for him. The beatings during those last few days were increasingly violent and more cruel than most of the beatings he could remember receiving over the years, reaching a staggering height in brutality on Harry's final night at Number 4 Privet Drive.

He suspected that Uncle Vernon's troubles at work, about which he had overheard the man ranting to his wife at a volume high enough to reach Harry within the confines of his cupboard, greatly contributed to the frequency and severity of his attentions.

Harry's presence had always allowed Vernon to release his frustrations and upon a victim entirely deserving of the punishment. His last night at the Dursley's, Vernon gave Harry such a thrashing that the boy was knocked unconscious for a few hours, waking up later in the evening to find his torso and legs covered in bruises and cuts, several large lumps on his head that were sure to be covered by his perpetually untamed hair once cleaned of blood, and a large burn on his shoulder blade that had obviously been received while unconscious as he (thankfully) didn't remember it being given to him.

'I'M GOING TO KILL THAT DISGUSTING EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN BEING THE SECOND I'M OLD ENOUGH TO CREATE THE OPPORTUNITY!' Harry focused for several minutes on calming her down by trying to only think peaceful thoughts.

You heard right! Harry Potter heard voices in his head. Well, actually it was just one voice. One voice that had been present as long as he could remember and was decidedly feminine. Harry had only spoken of her once and never planned to repeat the mistake.

When he was young, he had believed that hearing the her was perfectly normal, that everyone heard other voices in their heads. Luckily, when he had made the mistake of mentioning the voice in front of his aunt, who had immediately reported the incident to her husband upon his return home from work, they assumed Harry had an imaginary friend rather than suspecting that he was actually hearing a voice in his head. The Dursleys insisted that there was no such thing as imagination. They finished the lecture by claiming that telling lies about such things was unnatural and disgusting and was a habit for which he would continue to be punished. Vernon followed this lecture with a beating that had been fairly severe at the time, since Harry had only been four. Harry had never again spoken of her to anyone, even denying that he still heard her when probingly questioned by Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon, who occasionally checked hoping for a reason to teach the boy a lesson.

Once Harry was old enough to realize that everyone did NOT hear a different voice in their head and that it was NOT normal, he started to become concerned. The voice was definitely not his. It was, without a doubt, a girl's voice and her personality was distinctly different from his own. The older he got, the more confused he was about who or what the voice actually was. Once he knew its presence wasn't normal he thought he was just crazy. But the more he thought about it, the less sense it all made. She never directed his actions, usually she just talked to him. That would have made sense, after all his life was incredibly lonely, were it not for all the other aspects. Sometimes he would overhear thoughts that were not purposefully directed at him, almost as though they just slipped through to him. Sometimes he would catch actually images and scenes from someone else's life, or memories that did not belong to him, all accompanied by the owners corresponding thoughts. Harry was positive that these thoughts were all in her voice. He wasn't sure if he had just imagined all this and deluded himself into thinking that there actually was a voice whose thoughts he could hear, his subconscious trying to combat the loneliness of his miserable life. Or maybe he was just absolutely bonkers and he actually was hearing a voice because he was mentally unhinged. The Dursleys were right, he was a freak.

'Don't you ever think such a foolish thing again! You are not a freak! Besides, if you're crazy than I am too because this is not exactly a one-way-street.' Oh well, he supposed it didn't really matter whether or not he really was insane. No one would ever know about this particular abnormality unless he told them, and that had as great a likelihood of happening as Dudley had of losing weight. Besides, he liked his voice, she made life more entertaining and kept him company since his family hated him and he had no friends. Even if she wasn't real.

After calming her down, he returned to the matter at hand. Harry breathed a sigh of relief when his self-inventory revealed no visible marks on his face, neck, and arms, though he was not really all that surprised – Uncle Vernon never left evidence in areas where it might be seen.

No visible marks meant no reasons for suspicion. Wouldn't want the neighbors to know that the respectable family at Number 4 was not all respectable after all, now would we? Of course, the neighbors didn't know what Vernon knew – that the boy was a no-good, ungrateful freak, product of worthless, no-good parents, who were probably better for society now that they were dead than they had been alive. If the neighbors only knew what he did about the boy and his unnaturalness, no one would blame him for teaching the boy a badly needed lesson every now and then. But of course, even if discovered, he could never and would never tell anyone the truth of the boy's despicable nature. Really, how could he? It would be unlikely to result, as it rightfully should have, in understanding of his actions and methods. Instead, it would more likely than not only lead to Vernon being sentenced to an extended visit to the loony-bin.

So, along with his anxieties, extreme hunger and his inability to find a position that didn't cause him any pain because of his injuries and was comfortable enough to sleep in, Harry was not very successful in his efforts to rest up for his big day, on his way to a new school tomorrow.

The Dursley's made their way out of the house and to the car, looking as comical a procession as ever, in Harry's opinion. Aunt Petunia was in the lead, scampering ahead of her whale of a son. Although she certainly resembled a horse in looks, Petunia Dursley lacked any semblance of the grace and poise of the large majestic creatures and instead often moved in a manner that suggested she was too busy, nosily watching others in hopes of catching them doing something she could later gossip about, to be entirely aware of her own actions. At the same time, she always appeared to be in a bit of a hurry to get wherever she was going, probably to both minimize her vulnerability to the prying eyes of others and maximize her chances of having information others didn't through sheer volume of eavesdropping (after all, with exposure to a superior number of potential sources, she was sure to catch more to gossip about than her "friends"). The resulting movement was, for lack of a better description, reminiscent of the scurrying of a mouse but with her neck fully extended and her head constantly whipping in one direction then another, eyes darting to and fro in survey of her surroundings, while clutching her purse tightly to her chest as though she was afraid it might be snatched from her in her own driveway.

Dudley waddled along behind his mother, sticking rather close to her. He was still jumpy after the incident on Harry's birthday and had taken to staying in close proximity of his mother ever since. That way, "Mummy can make sure nothing happens to her precious baby Duddykins," Aunt Petunia was now fond of saying, as if she could in fact protect her son from any magic directed at him.

Uncle Vernon was last out of the house, pausing to lock the front door on his way out. Although Vernon was happy to finally be rid of the foul boy, who just happened to be related to his wife, he was not thrilled by the fact that he would no longer have a punching bag on which to release his frustrations. He got in the car and turned it on but then noticed the cage that held the boy's revolting pet owl, when looking in his rearview mirror in preparation for backing out of the drive, in the backseat between the little freak and his son.

"Get that piece of filth out of my car! I told you to put your unnatural things in the boot, which includes THAT! Only a freak would have something like that thing for a pet!" Harry reluctantly opened his door and got out of the car, bringing Hedwig's cage with him, as Uncle Vernon pushed the automatic button to release the boot.

'What? He can't do that! There's no way that cage will fit in there unless it's turned on it's side!' Harry had already realized this fact when loading his trunk into the boot, which is why he had brought the cage with him into the car's cabin, all the while hoping that Uncle Vernon either wouldn't notice or wouldn't say anything.

"I'm sorry Hedwig, but it's the only way," Harry regretfully informed the snowy beauty. The owl cooed a small hoot of understanding before Harry closed the boot and got back into the car.

The ride to King's Cross Station was virtually silent. Harry watched as she packed all her belongings and was similarly escorted to King's Cross, just as excited as he was. Was this supposed to show him what today would have been like had he not been placed with the Dursleys after the death of his parents? If so, then why not something a bit happier? Why not a life where some long lost relative or generous stranger had adopted him, a life in which he was loved and had grown up safe and happy? The life he had been watching in his head all these years, her life, was hardly any better than his. She may not have been regularly beaten or starved by her guardians, but she was still the victim of frequent beatings from the other children that lived in the orphanage and an occasional spanking from the nuns, not to mention that the food served at the orphanage was so awful that starving may have actually been a pleasant alternative had they not been forced to eat every morsel they were given. Similar to the treatment Harry had received at school thanks to Dudley, unless she was being picked on or made fun of by the other children, she was as good as invisible and no one took notice of her.

It seemed to Harry that her life was just as lonely as his. No one deserved to be that lonely, not even himself (even if he was a freak), but especially not her, not Elizabeth, not his Izzy. Even if she wasn't real...

Author's Note: There you go... Chapter 2. I hope you enjoyed it! The next chapter will be in Elizabeth's POV.

*Please, please, please review!!! I haven't received ANY reviews on the first chapter yet.*