No one could say that Harry was unlucky at birth, at least not in the Wizarding World. Having been born as a firstborn son to two of the most famous wizards, his parents doted on him, overjoyed that they could share him with the world and that he was the product of love given life. However, his happiness was short-lived and his luck changed once Voldemort came to visit. Although the babe was protected from deathly harm by his mother's everlasting love, it was the last time he was ever given genuine love. While every wizard learned his name and the tale of You-Know-Who was passed on a legend told to children to behave, people assumed the baby boy was secretly raised by another wizard family until he came of age to debut at Hogwarts, prophesied to grow up and defeat the Dark Lord once and for all. They were very and unfortunately wrong as no one would have guessed the child would grow up in the Muggle World, unloved no less.

Petunia Dursley was a simple woman, for all she needed to be happy was her hard working husband and the love of her son. Imagine her shock when she saw a baby in a basket at her doorstep, with a letter delicately held in hand, when she went out to grab the daily milk bottle delivery. She would have shoved him to the street, abandoned him in all manner of speaking after having read the description of how he best be raised by her, as the sole blood relative of Lily Evans Potter, after the murder of the couple. Petunia wanted nothing to do with her sister, in fact, she pretended as if the sibling didn't exist at all, having lived in the shadow of her younger sister. Lily, the pretty one, talented, doted upon by her parents, respected by peers, and married by a handsome bloke, everything Petunia wasn't. Perhaps if she too had been blessed with magic, a chance to be noticed and better than Lily at something, then the idea of it wouldn't have offended her so. However, that wasn't the case and if it weren't for the horrid word, magic, that she had stopped at when reading the letter, the woman wouldn't have brought the child into her home, feeling threatened that her normal life was at stake if she didn't.

While the neighborhood soon learned of this new addition to her home, thinking of her as the most gracious woman for taking him in, all she could think about was the hope that if she raised him to be normal, then anything relating to freaks would never show. Petunia's hope was bashed in minutes as soon as she brought him in and dropped him on the ground to take off her coat, the wee babe having woken up from his slumber only for her to witness him suck on a baby bottle that floated to him from the kitchen table. She screamed, as most people would have, and was determined from that day on that she would do everything in her power to make sure that her family was never touched by his freakishness. The woman changed his diapers, fed him, and cared for him with the least physical contact possible until he could self sustain himself, but that was very well like caring for a pet.

"Get up! It's blooming daylight!"

Harry, a child of eight woke up, to the barely illuminated darkness the light from the stair cupboard's door grate let in through its gaps, blinking away sleep and wiping his tears on the jumbo sleeve of his faded jumper, partially thankful for his aunt's shrill voice tearing him away from his nightmare. It was always the same recurring one, the warmth of something cradling him, a woman screaming, and a bright flash of light. He rubbed his scar, a phantom searing pain that lessened as he did so, the only mark he had from what his aunt claimed was from the car accident that killed his parents.

"Worthless, disorderly drunk your father was, along with that dropout deadbeat sister of mine," her words laced with disgust, "Perfect pair, serves them right, to end that way at the wheel. You should be thankful we had the heart to take you in after that bloody disaster."

It was the most he ever learned about his parents, carefully asking her how and where they went when she was in a good mood and slightly tipsy on wine after her 'precious Dudleykins' had graduated nursery care. He never pressed on more as he had learned his lesson from the time he had woken her up in the middle of the night as a kid on the reoccurring nightmare, his temporary fear of monstrous shadow figures greater than his fear of breaking the rules. Harry had simply asked his aunt, startling her awake with his voice, wondering if she would grant him a small kindness to soothe him like she did his cousin after he had bad dreams. Instead, she woke up Uncle Vernon, crying out for him to do something about the Freak. If anything, the understandable want for comfort lead to nightmare fuel in the aftermath. Harry could still remember as he was beaten black and blue by his uncle's fists, all places where people couldn't see under his cousin's hand me downs, before being thrown into the cupboard under lock and key, yelled at for bloodying his uncle's knuckles and raising his blood pressure. After all, if there was one thing the Dursleys hated most, it was questions. Early on, he knew it never applied to Dudley as his cousin constantly whined and asked for just about anything someone else had or a sweet he saw in stores, but Harry kept the slip of info at heart.

"Did you hear me?!" she angrily asked, upset at having to repeat herself.

"Yes, Aunt Petunia," he called back, careful not to have his voice deemed a shout, "I'll be right there."

He heard her shoes clack against the tiled floor of the hallway toward the kitchen as his uncle complained about tax inflation and how laziness bred freaks. Harry did his best to ignore it and propped on his glasses, annoyed that the non-prescription spectacles kindly given to him by his first year school teacher weren't going to be fixed anytime soon. The nose bridge was held together with old sellotape and one side was crooked, but they still held on. After a quick trip to the restroom, Harry made his way into the kitchen.

With ease, he autopiloted himself into making eggs, toast, and bacon after putting a full teapot on the back of the stove to boil. The toaster easily toasted the bread to perfection and the eggs were dealt with well enough if he cracked them on the side and not harshly. If there was one thing he made sure to take notice of was the frying of the bacon. The bacon had to be cooked well enough not to be the cause of food poisoning, but not past the point of crispness that the redness and oil could easily deceive him to burning.

"If anything burns, I doubt what happens next won't be something you deserve," Petunia commented as he kept his focus on the pan.

Her words dug into him more as predictions for failure, hoping he'd trip up so she could 'fairly punish' him, if fairly was the word that should be used. His aunt's piercing gaze ran down his back as if he hadn't made them breakfast every morning since she had taught him to, his shoulders tensing up as a result. Harry bit his lip to avoid saying anything back. The last time he had burnt the bacon and spoke back on how unfair their punishment was when he could just remake it without complaint, they'd doubled down and left him without food the whole day, calling it his reward for talking back and how ungrateful he was when it was their hard work that brought food to the table.

Luckily, everything turned out fine and he plated the meals on the table. His uncle thanked his aunt for her patience and the delightful meal as he dug in. She blushed and said it was nothing, ignoring the guilt Harry wondered if she ever felt while taking credit for his work. Vernon's grubby hands dropping the finished newspaper on the ground for Harry to pick up. The boy did so, sliding it into his jumper's sleeve for later reading in his cupboard when he had time.

"Acceptable," she said curtly, silently signaling that he did well enough to grab breakfast. "The list is up for you on the refrigerator. See that you make haste with it," his aunt's tone sharp as she carried a plate onto a tray.

He added a cup of tea to the tray, having mixed some honey in for Dudley's sore throat as per her instructions. Her tone changed to a worried one as soon as she started up the stairs and he could hear her call out to his cousin, "Dudley, Mummy's got food. You're going to need your energy to heal."

Harry rolled his eyes, grateful as his uncle was more immersed into the news playing on the tv than him. Dudley had gotten sick with a cold and it had made his Aunt Petunia go on overdrive to spend her time caring for him. If anything, that led to her ordering Harry to do more things. He cleaned up his uncle's mess and then made himself a peanut butter sandwich before scarfing it down in record time, grateful that his stomach stopped gnawing itself to smithereens. Even when he had something to eat, it was never enough as the Dursley loved controlling him, punishing him for just about anything that they could, and it didn't help that the tasks he did were physically grueling on his growing body. He sighed and made his way to the refrigerator, pulling the magnet away from the slip of paper and a small banknote of ten pounds. He moved the items into his gigantic gray sweatpants pocket.

The list wasn't long but was rather extensive in the time of which it would take to do them. The first thing on the list was snow shoveling the driveway, a task Harry dreaded to do as the winter wore on. The note continued with buying cough medicine for Dudley, making lunch, mopping the floors, and doing the laundry. He was glad it was a Saturday so that he wasn't on a time crunch to manually plow the snow before his Uncle Vernon needed to head to work.

Harry headed to his cupboard and placed the acquired newspaper on the one shelf which held some of his favorite rocks and broken toy soldiers he played with when he was younger. Grabbing his few jumpers he gained from Dudley outgrowing them, he slid them over himself, preparing for the biting cold that lay ahead. From the bits he could tell from the news playing on the telly, even London was warmer than them despite not being that far apart. Not that it mattered as the slushy muddy snow was still an obstacle he had to face compared to the pristine white snow that fell in sheets in movies he'd seen played in shop windows.

From the moment he stepped outside and closed the door behind him, the paper cutting wind dashed across his cheeks, ears, and hands. The sky, clear as it was with some clouds muting the sun, took away any heat the house had given him and made him sneeze. He urged his nose to adjust to the chilling air, rubbing it softly. The jumpers together barely held a candle to a good jacket as the wind slid through the gaps the material had and how loose it was to his small frame. If one of them had fitted him properly, Harry was sure that a decent jumper wouldn't let the small warmth his body emitted escape through the neck hole, leaving the cold to seep through his bones. It was a miracle he never got frostbite.

Grabbing the shovel he left on the side of the garage's brick wall the day before with his cotton covered hands, he hoped that the jumpers wouldn't get soaked before he finished. It would have been better if he had some mittens or proper snow gloves, but the last time he had received Dudley's thumbless pair, it had been torn off him and into a gutter in a matter of minutes on a school morning due to his cousin's favorite game, Harry Hunting. Harry would have laughed at the affair of how Dudley managed to get in some exercise chasing him, as the humanly royal pig in a wig of a cousin hated sports, if he wasn't the one targeted for a beatdown. It had been a sore day after his aunt had threatened him that if he didn't take care of the hand-me-down mittens for at least a week, he wouldn't be getting anything more valuable. Not that he had a choice with Dudley's say in the matter and the eventual boot stamping from his uncle he got later as punishment for losing them.

Harry bit his cheek in frustration, already feeling the cold muck seeping into his hole filled shoes from the years of wear, a couple sizes too large and getting heavier as he sloshed through the snow. He'd only cleared a meter in the five minutes he had been out. The driveway was a four by five meter plot but each snow pile he stacked made him groan.

"I might as well be a snowman by the time I'm done, without a care for warm places lest I melt," he mused, shoveling another piece. "At least it isn't snowing anymore."

Although there was nobody out as it was cold and early, with a few cars breezing by on what he assumed were people going to work overtime, Harry found himself quite content. When he wasn't putting his back into shoveling the snow, he took in the silence of it all. It wasn't the kind where he sat fearful of what nightmares could plague him before he fell asleep but rather the peaceful kind that let him be still with his thoughts. While he could feel his muscles fatiguing and his brain screaming to go inside or find somewhere warm to brace the cold, he took respite in the fact that at least outside in the front yard, he didn't have to worry about being watched, getting beat up, or having ear deafening beratements thrown at him. Harry, doing his best not to let the situation dour his mood, imagined that he was getting ready to have a snow fight with some of the neighborhood kids. All he needed was some snow piles built as protection to fortify his base and another row of snow piles on the opposite side of the driveway as future ammo to make snowballs with.

An hour passed by with determined pride, Harry glad that the driveway was done as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had almost slipped on the sidewalk at the end of shoveling trying to clear out the edges of the concrete car park, which would have been a surefire way to get himself dirty and soaked without a proper change of clothes, had it not been for his timely use of the shovel as a crutch to support himself.

He headed inside, taking off his shoes at the welcome mat, grateful to feel some warmth. His uncle was smirking from the sight of him, something that was never a good sign, but he ducked into his cupboard. Without turning on the light, he peeled his wet socks off his feet and plastered them to dry on a few old nails that were stuck in the wall. Putting on dry ones, he felt less icky about his wrinkly and numb feet. As soon as he got out, he was attacked as his aunt threw a water bottle at him, which he barely dodged as his body was on edge. It hit the side of his right arm as his hands immediately went up for cover. It was sure to leave a bruise, but at least it didn't hit a spot that had a newer and healing bruise.

"Where have you been?!" she shrieked. "Taking your sweet time now to nap, have we, as my poor Dudley is dying?"

She was in one of her moods again where his existence itself was enough to irritate her as she got more huffy about her son as if it were the plague and not the common cold. "I'm sorry, Aunt Petunia, I just finished shoveling. I'll get right out to the shops."

She slapped him, nearly knocking his glasses off, looking at him with pure disdain that her skin had come in contact with his. "Did I ask for your excuses?!"

From his peripheral vision, his uncle was smiling as he cheered, his fists pumping in the air like he was watching a televised rugby game, "You teach him a proper lesson, honey!"

pShe grinned, quite satisfied in exacting her power on her prey. The bony woman held her nose high as Harry adjusted his glasses, shaking his head and lowering his gaze as his cheek burned, stinging and red, and his green eyes brimmed with tears. Petunia took pleasure in seeing her sister's spawn cry, primarily because his green eyes very well were a match to Lily's and as a bonus, no one could stop her from using him as a surrogate punching bag for her grudges against her seemingly untouchable sister.

"Are those tears I see? Did it hurt?" she asked tactfully, teetering on the edge of being unnaturally sweet as she pretended to show him some concern. "Should I give you something to cry about?"

He shook his head again, knowing that his voice would give him away with shakiness from fear and anger if he replied. Getting used to blows had prepared him to not yell out if he could help it and to not shed tears in front of his aunt and uncle. Doing so would only be giving into them and anger them towards dealing out more.

"Mummy, where's my chocolate?!" Dudley's whine reverberated down the stairs, unknowingly saving him from further torment.

"I'm getting it, sweetums," she cooed back. Turning back to Harry and waving him away, heading towards the pantry, "I'll let you off the hook this time. Shoo!"

Harry immediately sprouted into action, slipping on his soaked shoes, and headed out the door. He just hoped that by the time he got back, they would open the front door for him as he wasn't considered family enough to get a house key. Harry stopped next to the shrubbery that lined the grass and picked up the cleaner pieces of snow, not caring how his hands burned from the coldness as he brought it to his cheek. A relieved sigh escaped his lips as the soft and slightly packed frost melted against his face and he felt his pain ebb away, temporarily soothing him.

He clapped his hands together to rid himself of the snow, blowing his breath into them in an attempt to warm his bright fingers, and finally burrowed his hands in the extra sleeve material to protect them from the harsh winter. The walk to the nearest Tesco was a brief ten minutes away, but each step felt like his feet were magnetized to the ground. All around him were families going out to do early holiday shopping as he got to the strip of shops, most of which were screaming out in loud festive colors or sales floor associates boasting about the sales inside. Lights and tinsel danced on Christmas trees that were decorated with fake presents underneath.

He felt like a stick in the mud. There were no parents to walk with him, no money to buy things with, and the holidays were just another time to make sure he didn't get his hopes up. The most he ever got was the old jumper wrapped around cleaning supplies to aid in his chores and the random half filled gum pack as a family present. Even though he knew his aunt and uncle bought his cousin most of the presents under the tree, he still wondered why Father Christmas saw him unworthy of gifts every year. He didn't even have a stocking to denote his place on the mantle on Christmas Eve but that didn't stop him from hanging a large gray sock on a nail in front of the fireplace, wishing for a miracle. While Dudley's stocking with hand stitched lettering was always filled with plastic chocolate filled candy canes and small toys, Harry's heart dropped finding coal in the morning when he woke up and checked, the black particles coating the rim and the inside of the sock. He'd never seen Dudley do a nice thing for anybody but he was sure Father Christmas saw something he didn't and maybe mistook him for somebody else. After all, it's not like Harry ever received any mail, unless word got out that he was a boy living in the cupboard under the stairs.

It took all his energy to look away from the beautiful sights of things he envied and to ignore the rumbling in his stomach as the smell of apple cinnamon and pumpkin spice danced in the air. Harry could feel his ears getting heated despite the cold as strangers walking nearby gave him some odd looks, some even muttering what they thought he couldn't hear as they wondered what he was wearing in this weather and where his parents were. Course, he could bear the usual stares or looks of pity he got when he was allowed out, but this time he was embarrassed at the visual sweep he was. The boy hoped none of them were looking at him too closely in case his aunt's palm had managed to imprint itself in red, redder than the usual flush faces got in the cold.

An old lady with her friend walked up to him and grabbed his hand, placing a sweet in his cold palm. "I'm sorry, that's all I can give." Her eyes were a sapphire of kindness as her friend's were full of pity.

Harry shook his head and put out his hand to return the caramel to her as much as his mouth salivated to try it. She must have mistaken him for a homeless kid. He couldn't accept it, for his instincts told him that if word got out to the Dursleys that he was mistaken as such, he'd never hear the end of it. "Oh no, I'm not-" he started before he was cut off by the elderly woman.

"Love, please take it. An old person like me can't have too many, you know," her warm hands nurturing as she cupped his own around the sugar candy.

He nodded, feeling his throat closing up and his eyes burning from gratitude. "Thank you," he replied.

They walked on their merry way as he made it closer to the Tesco after a few pedestrian crosswalks. He plopped the rare sugary treat in his mouth, the delectable richness coating his mouth with its notes of butter and bitterness, making his outlook a little brighter. His cheeks hurt from smiling, a thing that he didn't even know he could feel for so long. He threw the wrapper away into a rubbish bin at the front of the store, tossing away all evidence of the sweet.