Waking up in a hospital is quite the disorienting experience.
The room is instantly recognizable as one of those shared hospital rooms with multiple patients. Each bed is separated by a cream dividing curtain, so I can't see who is beside me, but the one across from me is open with the person awake and eating from a tray. I'd never spent any significant time in a hospital before but there is no question that's where I was.
The only problem is that I had no idea how I'd ended up here.
Beside me, a nurse is replacing an IV bag while another is speaking quietly to some people at the foot of the bed. I don't recognize them, but assume they have a good reason to be there. Perhaps they're the family of one of the other patients?
It isn't until the man at the foot of my bed's voice is raised in agitation that I actually focus on them instead of staring blankly around the room.
Then the nurse at the foot of the bed looks my way.
A flurry of questions and worried exclamations are thrown at me as soon as the people in the room realize I'm awake. Why the thin woman and the fat man are concerned is a bit baffling but it is hard to focus on what they are saying. It's like I can hear the words, but my brain isn't able to process them properly.
The nurse next to them manages to hush them and approaches my bedside with a raised clipboard.
"Hi there," He speaks slowly and clearly, his accent clearly British. "Everything is going to be ok. You've been very brave so far and I just need you to answer a few questions, ok?" The nurse says this in that higher pitched, almost sing-songy voice you use when talking to kids. It reminded me of a professor in university who used to talk that way to the class. Used to piss the students off with how condescending it sounded.
"Nod if you understood what I just said, can you do that for me?"
Resigned, I nodded my head, confused but hoping he would just go away if I played along. I'd only been awake for a few minutes but already I felt tired.
"Ok good, now if you feel up to talking, can you tell me your name?"
I opened my mouth, but what came out shocked me so much afterwards that my mouth shut with an audible click. "Boy."
What the fuck.
I panicked. What happened to my voice!? And why did I say that? That wasn't my name!
In my shock I distantly noticed the nurse turn to look at the mismatched couple at the end of the bed. Their mouths moved, but I couldn't hear anything over the ringing in my ears.
For some reason, I could hear the nurse no problem though, "I'm glad you're feeling well enough to joke." The nurse smiled.
Why, when I tried to bring up a memory of people saying my name, that was all I could hear? That and another word hissed, but not as a name, as an insult.
"It's alright Harry, you're not in trouble." The nurse assured, his smile dropping from his face, reacting to my panic.
I tried to speak. To deny that my name was Harry. To most especially deny that I was a boy! Or that my name was boy! But I couldn't make a sound past the panic choking my throat.
"Now Harry, none of your usual lip." The thin woman approached the other side of the bed, while the large man stayed at the foot of it with his arms crossed, scowling. "You need to answer the...nurse's questions."
A small corner of my mind noted the pause and wondered if she had something against male nurses.
Blackness started to creep into the corner of my vision and I gladly welcomed it. This was all just too weird. It felt real, but couldn't possibly be. Maybe if I closed my eyes and slept, I'd wake up and it would all make sense.
"Ah no Harry, keep your eyes open for me." The nurse gently touched my shoulder. "You hit your head pretty hard, I need to ask you some questions first."
Still with that condescending baby voice, I thought to myself. Against my desires, a larger part of myself forced my eyes back open. It was almost like I was conditioned to respond to authority figures.
"Tell the truth now, this is no place for your wild and false stories." The unknown woman cut in, her high-pitched voice cutting through me and waking me up more than anything else had so far.
"Now I just have a few quick questions and then we'll see about you getting some rest, alright?"
I hesitantly nodded, grateful to be able to look away from the strange woman and her weird demands.
"How's your head feeling? Do you have a headache? Any nausea?"
I answered no to the nurse's questions, the only real problem being how tired I was. He asked me a few more questions, and I answered, but I had a lot of trouble keeping my eyes open through the whole thing.
"Have you ever had a concussion before? A concussion is-"
"No he hasn't." The thin woman cut in. "He's perfectly healthy."
"...who are you?" I asked, blinking blearily at the woman. Who did she think she was, answering for me?
"Nephew! What did I just say before? The nurse is very busy and doesn't have time for your games."
What. I'm related to this woman? That's impossible. I think I'd remember having a British aunt!
"Hmm." The nurse said, making a note on their clipboard. "I think it's time to let the boy rest. We can discuss what you have to expect from his concussion outside." The nurse turned and walked away, my supposed aunt and the big man following him.
I would've said something about his rude dismissive words, but my eyes, which I could now barely keep open, slid closed one last time and stayed shut. I tried to say something in protest at being called a 'boy.' But all that came out was a nonsensical jumble.
I fell asleep to the sound of the woman asking the nurse if her son could 'catch' a concussion from her nephew.
Leaving the hospital the next day was quite the ordeal. Not only was I still reeling from the discovery of my shrunken body and the sudden sex change, which resulted my very first panic attack, but also the fact that the thin woman and large man were my guardians.
I'd tried to protest that it couldn't possibly be true, and refused to go anywhere with them.
Unfortunately, the first conversation with the nurses seemed to be the precursor to how my so-called 'family' would handle me. My 'relatives' profusely apologized for me, claiming I was 'acting out' and that it was common behaviour they were working to rid me of.
I may or may not have been in hysterics when they dragged me away. I was probably screaming about how I didn't know them and to be let go as the big fat man dragged me painfully by the arm. What finally got me to be quiet was a meaty hand smacking me across the bum.
It was so painful and shocking that I was struck silent.
I don't come out of my frozen stupor until it's too late.
They stuffed me into the back of a small car and spent the whole thirty minute drive berating me for embarrassing them and causing a scene. As soon as we arrived at their home, without saying a word, they shoved me into a cupboard under the stairs.
The action is so out of nowhere it finally makes me move. I try to open the door, pushing against it, only for nothing to happen. I hear the slight rattle of a lock and can't believe it. Did they seriously lock me in a cupboard?
"I better not hear one peep from you if you want any super!" The giant of a man who is supposedly my uncle shouts.
I flinch back from the anger in his voice, the body acting on its own.
There's a bunch of blankets on the ground around me, I can just make them out through the light shining through the cupboard door. I arrange them as best I can into a bed and lie down. Maybe if I go to sleep, I'll wake up and this all will have been a crazy dream.
A crazy dream bordering on a nightmare. But a dream nonetheless.
I close my eyes and hope. Nothing had changed after the last two times I'd woken up, but I figured the third time's the charm.
Of course, my wishes for the new reality to be nothing but a dream never get granted.
Instead I am treated to a new and confusing reality. The first few days, no, the first few weeks, are extremely hard. My so-called relatives expect me to immediately go back to performing a truly ridiculously long chore list. If I do or say anything to protest, I'm punished with no meals.
I spend a lot of time locked in the cupboard and starving those first weeks.
Apparently saying anything other than 'yes aunt Petunia' counts as back talk.
But eventually it sinks in that nothing is going to change. That I'm not going to magically wake up one day and be back in my old life. I do however come up with a few rationalizations on how this has happened to me.
One, is that the real me is currently in a coma due to some accident I've forgotten. The world around me is some strange world my brain has come up with to explain what has happened to me. The idea doesn't fully work. For example I can't figure out why my brain would decide I'm a boy.
Two, is that reincarnation is real. The fall and the concussion somehow allowed the memories of a past life to take over, erasing the young boy who used to inhabit the body. Although the problem with this theory is that it meant I also travelled decades into the past.
Three is similar to Two only instead of reincarnation it's possession. But I don't think there's a little boy cohabiting this body? At least I can't talk to him if there is. I do however get urges to say and do specific things when exposed to a stimulus. Like flinching when uncle Vernon moves unexpectedly. Or tiptoeing around the house when the family is home.
Giving up on figuring out an explanation and just trying to survive in this new environment soon takes up all of my time and attention.
Later, much much later, I found out the truth of how I ended up in the hospital.
At first I was told that I'd climbed a tree like the reckless hooligan I was, while taunting my cousin. However, I climbed too high and the branch I was on broke. I was lucky I didn't hit the ground head first, or I'd be dead.
This was all told to me while I was still in the hospital. When there were others around who could hear them. I'd been too panicked to notice that they were surprisingly cold for people who claimed to be my family. It wasn't until I was discharged and sent 'home' that I realized why I'd found them so off putting.
It was because of how false their act had rung.
Over the course of the month after returning from hospital, once I started to accept my new reality, I came to heavily doubt their version of events. Not only because blaming me for everything was a theme for them. But from the abortive motions my uncle made towards me, like he was holding himself back from something, like he wanted to do more than just grab me, made me suspect my uncle as the true culprit.
In fact, if there hadn't been multiple witnesses from my school, I would have assumed the whole story was fabricated. A cover-up for my uncle's behaviour. But apparently a teacher had witnessed the event, albeit from a distance, and had been the one to call an ambulance when I stayed unconscious.
So I really had fallen from a tree. And my cousin had been standing under it. That much I knew was true. I severely doubted the claimed reason for why I had been in the tree as I got to know my cousin. In fact, overhearing a bunch of his friends bragging to each other about how they hadn't gotten in trouble when I fell was the final clue.
Being sent to an elementary school had certainly been a shock on its own. Especially when I finally learned this body's name. Harry Potter was a very odd thing to hear called and have it mean me. It cemented in my mind that this was all a very detailed coma dream.
I didn't act on this belief. Many nights spent starving in my cupboard proved that I needed to treat this as real.
So I mostly kept my head down and tried not to stick out.
My 'cousin' went to the same school, unfortunately. He also was in the same class. I tried to ignore the little shit as much as I could. Especially at school. His taunting and pushing got on my nerves but...
I quickly found out that any attempt to 'tattle' on Dudley to a teacher would end in the same result every time. The little monster would claim I was either making stuff up to get him in trouble, or claim that my injuries were self-inflicted. The little bastard even had the audacity to bite himself and claim it was me.
I thought about running away a lot in that first year, of course I did. The only problem was I didn't know what would happen to me out in the world. Would an orphanage take me in? What did they do with obvious runaways?
What stopped me in the end was the dread of being sent back to this awful house. At 10 going on 11 there just was no way it would end well for me. Maybe if I had confidence in the British child services I would have done it. But my brief exposure to how the school handled my complaints did not leave me with any hope.
My attempt to finally do something about my living situation started with a trip to the counselor's office. I told them everything my aunt and uncle had said and done to me, and ended my confession by stating I wanted to live with someone else. Unfortunately, at that point I had no idea they had been telling the adults in the school that I was a compulsive liar.
The counsellor followed up on the things I said though, so there was that at least. But apparently my reputation had already primed them into believing my aunt and uncle over me. It didn't take a very long conversation, with overly exaggerated disappointment from my aunt, for them to dismiss everything I said.
My stomach cramped horribly from lack of food for days after that.
It would have been for weeks, if I hadn't started 'stealing' food from the pantry and hiding it around the house. One advantage to the many chores I was tasked to do, was that it gave me unsupervised time in rooms with lots of storage.
I was also tasked with taking out the garbage every few days, which I took shameless advantage of. Every trip to the car port to deposit a full bag in the bin was used as an opportunity to take food that had been thrown out and either quickly scarf it down or store it behind the shelves.
It wasn't much, given that most of it would go mouldy if I left it out for a couple days. The most reliable scavenges were the bread crusts cut off every day for Dudley and the uneaten fruit he'd toss in the bin.
Eventually, I even started to rummage through the school garbage bins. I quickly discovered that they were a treasure trove of uneaten and unopened wrapped crackers, fruit and vegetables. Even the odd sandwich. All food that the picky eaters in my class would throw away so their parents didn't realize they weren't eating what was put in their lunch.
Getting into the cafeteria lunch bins was harder, but worth the effort to do on occasion. The biggest problem was not getting caught.
The constant awareness of my surroundings eventually took a mental toll. It wasn't noticeable at first. Every time I was home I needed to have half an ear out for my 'relatives' to avoid being snuck up on. It only took a few pushing incidents to realize that to avoid being hurt I needed to stay on my guard. And that when in a room with them I always had to keep one eye on them.
Of course, even if I could hear or see them coming, that didn't mean I would dodge what was coming. That always led to harsher attempts the next time. I quickly learned that different reactions appeased them in different ways. Dudley enjoyed exaggerated reactions. Petunia preferred instant apologies and a downcast expression. Vernon I just learned to roll with and exaggerate in a similar manner to Dudley.
School, much as I'd initially hated it, came to offer a temporary reprieve.
Most of the students refused to play with me for fear of retaliation from Dudley. Some participated in his harassment during breaks, but most just ignored me. I learned to distrust when a kid initiated something with me. More often than not they were playing a joke on me for their own amusement or at Dudley's behest.
The one place I was able to relax in, I had to fight for the right to over many months. The librarian did not trust me to be left alone with the books, not after I'd supposedly destroyed some of Dudley's a year ago. It took multiple lunch breaks begging to be let in to read, instead of playing outside like I was supposed to, before being allowed in. And after that I had to endure reading 'age appropriate' books in full view of the librarian.
The day I was allowed to sit in the back corner of the library and read what I wanted was the best day I'd had since the start of this waking nightmare.
Only one other thing broke up the boredom going through year 5 brought (grade 4 in America). I needed to keep all of my grades lower than Dudley's. Imagine my surprise when I was accused of cheating because of what I had thought were mediocre grades once I returned to school from the hospital.
Apparently I was worse than a mediocre student with a history of cheating. What became challenging was trying to figure out how many questions to get wrong to be lower than Dudley, while also getting a passing grade.
Imagine being asked the maths question 1 + 1 = ? and purposely getting it wrong. That was how it felt.
Well it wasn't quite that bad. We were working on decimals and fractions now. Though they may as well have been that easy. I never would have thought that deliberately answering a question wrong could be so hard. Ironically I had to resort to 'cheating' to ensure my wrong answers were believable.
Eventually, by the end of the school year, I'd settled into a decent routine. I decided the best way to deal with this strange reality where I lived with people named after fictional characters was to treat it like it was real. And make plans for emancipation.
Little did I know that my upcoming birthday would provide a shock almost as bad as waking up in a child's body.
A/N:
A while ago I went on a Self-insert reading binge and this little story is the result of it. Finally decided to post it! It's not exactly a self-insert, more an OC exploration of one. It's a way for me to have fun with the tropes as well as explore some of the more forked up things in the magical world. It'll be a mix of humour and angst for the most part.
For now I'm just gonna treat it as a two-shot but may add more chapters as inspiration hits me. If I do add more it will not be a retread of the books (beyond what is necessary for the story), but more an exploration of specific scenarios. Basically the troubles and tribulations that come with an adult brain in a child's body. The tags will change depending on where my head goes. I'm leaning towards Snape playing a pretty major role as well as not sorting 'Harry' into Gryfindor (I'm personally a fan of Hufflepuff Harry) but am undecided at the moment.