The situation with the Dursleys eventually came to a head one Saturday evening. Dudley was having a sleepover at a friend's place and would be gone until the following day.

Harry hadn't planned to do what happened, but after it was over, he was glad that the incident had taken place.

The day had started just like any other, helping Petunia make breakfast, do the dishes without breaking them, folding laundry, and so forth. Basically doing more than any five year old should.

Around 6pm, Harry heard a car pull up in the driveway, soon followed by the slam of the front door. Vernon was home and clearly in a foul mood. He figured it was best to keep his distance and complete his chores in silence.

Harry watched through the corner of his eyes as Vernon went straight for the liquor cabinet. He kept dusting the surfaces of the house that he could reach with a cloth, working as silently as possible.

The large man filled his glass with scotch and downed it within seconds, before topping it up again. Instead of leaving the bottle where it belonged, Vernon carried it, and his glass, over to his favourite chair in the living room.

Petunia waltzed in with a smile on her lips and tried to greet her husband, only to get grunts and clipped replies in return. She too realised that Vernon was best left alone, so she returned to the kitchen with the promise of dinner soon being ready and that she'd cook up his favourite dessert.

Harry had never thought about it before, but now he wondered if Vernon was abusive to his wife as well. It didn't seem likely, he had never seen any bruises and his aunt didn't show any signs of being afraid of him. No, in all likelihood, Harry was their punching bag and they were both despicable human beings that deserved to be miserable together.

"BOY!" Harry was brought out of his musings by the blustering voice of his uncle. Damn it, he thought. He'd been trying to keep himself inconspicuous.

"Yes uncle Vernon?" His young voice replied demurely, not wanting to seem like he was challenging the man.

He still hadn't decided what he was going to do about his relatives. He had been back in time for a few weeks but the solution hadn't come to him yet. He knew Death had said there was no Trace on him, but the irrational fear of getting caught lingered.

"DON'T JUST STAND THERE YOU FILTHY LITTLE FREAK! FETCH ME ANOTHER BOTTLE!" Vernons face was getting redder and redder as he shouted at his young nephew.

Harry did as he was told and scampered over to the liquor cabinet. By standing on the tip of his toes he managed to wrap his tiny fingers around one of the bottles, he didn't know what it was but anything was better than nothing.

Meanwhile Vernon was ranting about how he lost a big client at work to 'those corrupt swindlers!', Harry took it to mean the firm's competitors.

There was a sudden crash and the sound of glass breaking. Harry looked in shock at the bottle he had just knocked over due to his uncoordinated, fumbling limbs. Amber liquid pooled on the beige, linoleum floor between pieces of glass. The alcohol soaking into the rug by the fireplace.

The room was quiet, calm before the storm. Harry looked at the remains of his accident, he should probably clean that up, he thought.

His eyes darted over to where Vernon had risen from his chair, washed out blue eyes glaring at him with menace and hatred. His face that had previously been red, now changed into more of a purple hue. Humans definitely shouldn't be that colour, it couldn't be healthy, Harry thought in morbid fascination.

"LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID YOU UNGRATEFUL FREAK!" Vernon roared, spittle flying in his frothing rage. His jowls quivered, making the fatty double chins that hid his short, wide neck, wobble.

The ruckus had summoned Petunia from the kitchen, but instead of trying to calm down her husband, she merely watched on with a pinched expression.

Vernon kept spewing his insults and blaming everything from his car making weird noises, to the loss of his client at work, on Harry.

"You should have been killed along with your worthless parents. Filthy, abnormal freaks the lot of you!" The fat man said as he grabbed the front of Harry's too large t-shirt and shook the little boy like a rag-doll.

Before Harry had time to react, a large fist connected with his young face. The force of the punch knocked him into the mantle of the fireplace, and he felt pain blossom in his jaw. Blood filled his mouth and he spit it out on the floor along with the tooth his uncle had knocked loose.

Petunia's shrill shriek of 'Vernon! Not the face, the neighbours will see!' went ignored by both of them.

Harry glared at his uncle with hatred. He felt his magic surging around himself, flooding his veins with cold power.

"They were not worthless or freaks!" Harry snarled, ignoring the stinging of his split lip and the aching of his bruising face.

Vernon went apoplectic with rage. How dared the freak talk back to him? He moved forward to beat the boy senseless, but instead of hitting the freak, his fist connected with an invisible wall that shattered his bones. The giant walrus of a man howled in pain.

Caught up in the moment, Harry grinned savagely with vindictive glee, his remaining teeth stained with blood. The shield hadn't been a conscious spell, it was more like accidental magic that he had slight control over.

"Vernon!" Petunia shrieked again as she rushed over to her injured husband.

The man's anger hadn't abated, if anything the vitriol he spewed got stronger.

Instead of the boy backing down as Vernon expected, he had always been meek and rarely fought back after all, Harry took a step closer to him, green eyes nearly glowing with unholy power and menace.

"How dare you! We took you in by the goodness of our hearts despite you being a nasty little burden, and this is how you repay us?" Petunia harped in outrage, joining her husband.

"Heart?" Harry asked calmly, too calm. "You don't have a heart auntie. Neither of you do." Harry sneered, an expression that didn't belong on such a young face. It unnerved the two adults.

"But that's okay, neither do I." He continued, lying just to creep them out.

He took another step forward and made a squeezing gesture with his left hand, watching with malicious satisfaction as Vernon began choking on thin air, his stubby hands clawing at his throat, trying to get rid of what was choking him.

"STOP IT!" Aunt Petunia cried out, face pale as a ghost and hands trembling in fear. "You're going to kill him!"

"Yes, it would be such a shame, wouldn't it?" Harry sighed theatrically, but still loosened his magical grip. He didn't actually want to murder the man, but he was angry, very very angry. He needed to hurt and punish for all that had been done to him.

"Things are going to change from now on," Harry said and looked right into his aunt's terrified eyes. She was the most intelligent out of the two adults. "I'll no longer be sleeping in the cupboard, " He spat out the word.

"From now on I'm going to claim Dudley's second bedroom. I won't be doing any slave labour for you either. If the work is too much for you alone, make Dudley." He glared at them both, seeing if they would speak up against him.

Vernon started to bluster but as soon as Harry tightened his grip on his magic, the man nodded his head in agreement, cowed for now.

"I'm gonna go have a bath, you should probably take him to a hospital or something" Harry said nonchalantly with a blank expression, his anger and oppressive magic reigned in.

"I'll give you one day to have my new room sorted." He waited for his aunt's shaky nod of assent before he walked up the stairs to have a nice long bath.

He heard the front door close and the car start. Petunia had taken his advice to rush her injured husband to the emergency room then, good. It would give him some time alone in the house to get his shit together. Also, to eat.

Now that the adrenaline of the situation had started to abate, Harry felt dead tired and slightly shocked at his own behaviour. He hadn't meant to hurt Vernon that badly, but by Merlin did it feel good . All the anger and resentment from his childhood had bubbled up to the surface, like a dam finally breaking.

In the past he had been powerless to do anything against his abusers, but not anymore. Vernon and Petunia were never going to hurt him again, he would make sure of it.

He used the step stool in the bathroom to have a look at himself in the mirror. It wasn't pretty. Almost the entire left side of his face was bright red in colour and swollen. His upper lip had split open when Vernon's fist knocked out one of his canines. Right now he blessed his Potter luck that at least it was just a baby tooth and that his permanent one would come out later.

As he let the bathtub fill with hot water, he thought back on the 'accidental' magic he had used. Was it really accidental? Even though his body was only four, Death said that he had sent his old magic through as well.

Wait… hadn't he mentioned the ring he'd been given working as a sort of amplifier for the Hallows? Harry looked at the innocent piece of jewellery adorning his left pinkie finger.

Had he just done wandless, wordless magic? Wasn't that supposed to be extremely difficult? Harry frowned and instantly winced as the action pulled on his painful injuries.

He would have to experiment on that later to see whether it was a fluke brought on by his heightened emotions. Being able to do wandless magic would be a great ace up his sleeve if he could replicate it.

Harry lowered himself down into the steaming water, sighing in content. He let the heat soothe his aching bones. He hoped this new power dynamic between him and his relatives would last, but he had his doubts. Still, he'd take what he could get. If Vernon and Petunia acted up again he'd just have to show them who was in control.

Only about an hour and half had passed by the time Harry had cleaned himself, patched up his injuries and eaten a small meal.

Without thinking twice he collected his fallen tooth off the floor and returned to his cupboard. It wasn't by any means comfortable, but he was dead on his feet and about to pass out any second.

This would be his last night in the cramped area, if his face hadn't hurt so much he would have grinned victoriously. Instead he huddled underneath his threadbare blanket and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the mattress, exhaustion keeping the nightmares at bay.

ΔΟΙ

The day after, Harry was moved into Dudley's second bedroom. Unlike in his first timeline, the rotund child hadn't had enough time to turn it into his toy graveyard. Sure there were a few broken items here and there, but it had mostly been used for storage.

Petunia had done a good job of cleaning it up. At the end of the room there was a nice, wooden bed next to a small nightstand.

The room itself had originally been intended as an office for Vernon so there was still a beautiful, mahogany desk underneath the window.

Harry wondered where the desk had gone in the future, because he could distinctly remember having one of much poorer quality. Maybe they sold it just to buy something shittier since it was meant for him? It wouldn't surprise him.

The bed had been added to the room once they bought a new and better one for the guest room. Marge usually stayed in that room when she visited and the old bed wasn't big enough for her anymore. To Harry it was actually rather luxurious. It was obviously well worn, but it was heaps better than his cupboard or camping in random forests.

Petunia had even been nice, or scared, enough to supply a fluffy down pillow and a thick duvet, all of it covered in freshly cleaned bedding.

Harry sat down on the wooden chair, his feet dangling underneath him. His magic had helped speed up the healing of his injuries, which made them look even worse today than the day before, all black and purple. If he went outside and the neighbours saw, surely the police would be called.

When he was younger that is something he would have loved, a chance to be free of the Dursleys. But now, being at Privet Drive was almost a comfort in its familiarity. As long as he didn't have to worry about being beaten or not getting to eat, this house could be a decent enough base for the time being. He wasn't ready to show his hand to Dumbledore yet.

Plus he didn't know if the supposed blood wards even existed. Was there even such a thing as blood wards? He certainly hadn't noticed them in all his years living at Privet Drive. Then again, it wasn't like he knew much about wards, the regular kind nor the blood kind.

Dumbledore had said that they would keep him safe as long as Harry considered the place his home. But… ever since he started Hogwarts, Privet Drive had stopped being his home. He never thought of it as such. Hogwarts was his real home. Which made him wonder how they could still be effective, if they were at all.

Also, why was only a few weeks during the summer enough to 'charge' them? It didn't make any sense and Harry thought that they might just have been a ploy to keep him with the Dursleys so he'd be meek and downtrodden.

But, if the wards did exist then it would be foolish of him to leave them completely. He decided to put those thoughts on ice for the moment, until he was able to research wards.

Harry realised that the way he'd spoken like an adult yesterday must surely have frightened Petunia just as much as the magic had. It wouldn't surprise Harry if she thought of him as a monster or spawn of the Devil. That was fine though, they were monsters too, just of a different variety.

Thinking about that day brought Harry's thoughts back to the wandless magic. He wondered if it would be possible to recreate it.

Over the next few months Harry practiced wandless magic for at least an hour or two every day. It was exhausting and often without results.

He'd done some tests with and without the ring and concluded that yes, the ring did work as a conduit for his magic.

He ran the same tests with the Elder Wand and figured out that doing wordless magic with the Wand required the same amount of effort as doing it with just the ring.

All these discoveries meant that he wasn't suddenly some all powerful wizard who could do wandless magic of incredible feats. What he had done to the Dursleys was a combination of wordless magic using the ring as his 'wand', and accidental magic brought forth due to his heightened emotional state.

Still, he kept practicing with his alternative magical focus. Levitating objects, lighting fires, extinguishing said fires, and so on. The more he practiced the actions the easier they became.

He went through all the spells he had learned at Hogwarts, trying to succeed in casting them wordless. For some he failed and for others he succeeded. But no matter what, he refused to give up.

It took effort and concentration, but Harry was determined to get it right in the end, even if it took him years.

ΔΟΙ

It was the first day of primary school and Harry watched the tiny children being led by their parents through the gates and into the classroom. He had been dreading this day for a while now. Spending his time together with a bunch of snot-nosed five year olds who needed to learn their A, B, C's was not exactly his idea of fun, it was more like a nightmare. His only hope was to prove enough of a 'genius' to skip a few years. Of course he wasn't really a genius, but being an eighteen year old man in a five year olds body would definitely make it seem like it.

Harry wasn't dumb though, no, far from it. He didn't have an eidetic memory, but it was still above average.

There were several reasons why he had gotten such poor grades in school the first time around. In primary school he had been punished whenever he got better grades than his aunt's precious Duddikins. As a young child, that made him stop trying. What was the point in doing well if you were scolded and punished for it? Staying in his cupboard without food, or earning another bruise was definitely not worth it.

At Hogwarts, the Dursleys hadn't been the problem. They never saw his grades, nor would they have cared if he did well at his 'freaky school'. No, the problem had been Hermione and Ron. They were his first friends and he was afraid of losing them.

Ron didn't seem to care about his studies at all and would often mock those who did, so Harry followed his example. Always doing enough to get by but never to exceed.

Hermione on the other hand was the opposite. She had a fierce competitive streak and almost a compulsive need to be the best academically. He was afraid that if he got grades that were equal or better than hers then she wouldn't want to be his friend anymore. At the time, Harry hadn't been willing to risk it, so he dumbed himself down and made a minimal effort.

This time, he had decided, would be different. He was going to learn everything he could.

Harry heard his name being called and turned his head to see who it was. His aunt stood a few feet away, face pinched and pale, almost as if she was afraid he would torture her if she as much as spoke to him. Ever since 'The Incident', as he liked to call it, had happened, the adults in the household had changed their tune in regards to him. Now they were more afraid than any of the other negative feelings they'd harboured before.

Harry didn't mind. In fact, he derived some sort of sick glee from it. They had hurt him so much over the years, an innocent child who knew nothing of what he was or why his relatives wouldn't love him.

"Yes aunt Petunia." He said softly and followed after the skittish woman into the classroom where he and the other five year olds would reside for the next school year. He sighed mentally, it was going to be a loooong childhood.

Petunia introduced him to the teacher who would be the children's main point of contact during their first year. She seemed nice enough. Harry gave her a slightly strained smile and returned the greeting.

His aunt had hightailed it out of there as fast as she could, Harry wished he could do the same.

He sat down at one of the available desks and waited for the games where the children introduced themselves to be over, only vaguely making an effort. He wasn't exactly interested in making friends.