The Social Worker
It was an anonymous tip, and the party in question was popular in the community, so naturally the claim of abuse vanished almost immediately. Someone caught it, though, and wouldn't rest until she learned the truth about Number Four. Abused!Harry fic
If asked, Christine wouldn't be able to answer how, exactly, she had stumbled onto the tip-off about Number Four. Not without incriminating herself. She had been at work and digging around in a place her employer would be furious to find her. One could only be a stand-in for a broken text-reading scanner for so long, however, and she would forever claim the short moment of rather serious rule-breaking had been medicinal. Questions of how did not matter. What did matter was that she came across the short, terse, flaming mad, and completely anonymous cry of abuse right before it was abruptly erased from the system.
Her first, ingrained thought was that it wasn't any of her business. Her second was that if she started investigating the vanished claim when she was supposed to be working, the boss ogress would eat her with caper sauce. When she still found herself hesitating to return to typing up two-hundred page contracts, she asked herself why the hell she cared.
The answer was she had no clue, but that didn't stop her from needing to do something. Anything.
That was why she lingered one moment more on a part of the computer she wasn't supposed to have access to and quickly jotted down the address of one Number Four.
—
That Saturday Christine found herself looking between a haggard-looking piece of paper and her destination. Number Four stared innocently back at her, flanked by its near-identical neighbors. Only near-identical; the one she wanted did give off a slightly more prestigious air than those surrounding it. She wondered for a moment if the air was just that: hot air. That done, she went back to asking herself what the Hell did she think she was doing.
The abuse charge had been deleted. What was more, it was the weekend, and her only responsibility that fine morning was to be fast asleep in her bed.
She crushed the paper in her fist.
—
Her first impression of the inside of Number Four was: "Whatever you're selling, we don't want any!" She rocked back on her heels, blinking. It had happened again, which begged the question of exactly how pervasive these roving door-to-door sales people were to elicit such a uniform, automatic, and all-together annoying response. She gritted her teeth, though, forged on, and worked her way through the clichéd introduction.
In that painstaking manner, Christine progressed her way further into Number Four's little world. And then she saw him. Or rather, she was blinded by the golden child before her. There had to be a better word for it, but obese fell off the tongue so nicely. Someone had taken a more or less normal, delightful little boy and swelled him to gigantic proportions. He was actually painful to behold. It was like staring into the sun. And like the sun, this enormous body of matter had pulled all sorts of things into orbits about itself. She stared, shocked by the sheer number of gifts encircling the boy.
Yes, she had heard of Marys and Harrys whose progenitors felt the need to lavish them with every gift imaginable, but until now she had never personally witnessed such slavish devotion. Good God, it was understandable not to want a cherished love one to want for anything, but didn't they know that a lack of adversity made for weak character?
Weak character was one way to put it. Being spoiled rotten was another. How anyone could expect a child to grow up immersed in such gaudy…opulence and not turn out as an arrogant pig was beyond her.
Distracted as she was, it took several minutes to realize her jaw was dropped and had been for some time. Though she did manage to shut her open mouth eventually, she couldn't help her disapproving frown. Over-providing may not have constituted abuse, but it was still extremely bad form.
She sighed. It wasn't something that was easily fixed, though. The proud creator of such a glorious being would be hard pressed indeed to admit to even the most trifling of character flaws. She fought back the need to groan and rub at her temples. As if on cue, Vernon Dursley let loose a volley of, oh God, CAPITALILZED exclamations of the most zealous kind. Truly, she had never met a more flat, one-sided character.
That is, until she met Petunia. As for their son Dudley, she could hardly bear to look. Perhaps if she scrutinized him closely she could find traces of personality and (dare she hope?) humanity in the bloated whale; however, she had neither the proper excavation tools on hand, nor the time—nor the stomach—to dig through so many miles of corpulent blubber merely to find his only presumably un-rotten core.
At first it seemed a blessing to finally move onto the final occupant of the pleasant home on Pivet Drive. Harry Potter, Petunia's nephew, stood in front of the stove, cooking eggs, bacon, and griddle cakes with a sort of economical grace that would turn the cook in a waffle house green with envy. Dressed in worn, oversized castoffs, he fit the picture of a waif: slender and, God knew how he managed it, innocent-looking, a physical embodiment of purity and all that was good in the world.
He didn't even seem particularly affected by the bone-deep bruises so poorly concealed by his ill-fitting clothes.
She almost gagged as bile wormed its way up her throat.
Harry did something, then, what exactly wasn't really clear, and Vernon predictably reared up in a fit of rage. Christine sighed, walked to the fridge, poured herself a glass of ginger ale and sipped at it quietly for a time to settle her stomach before turning back to the scene of domestic violence. She frowned. It was rather cliché and—not that it would have helped overly much—executed poorly. She had to give points for trying, though. The bruises were rather beautifully rendered. Still, the whole thing left a sour taste in her mouth.
She took another sip of soda. In an uncharacteristic flare of indignant ire, she momentarily seethed and wondered what to do to knock some sense into Number Four. However, the earlier charge of abuse's prompt disappearance made it abundantly clear that there was nothing she could really do, so she shrugged and only paid enough attention to the boy's screams to know when they ended. She was hardly concerned for his wellbeing; there was little doubt he would come out of the abuse unscathed. Oh, there could be possible superficial damage such as blindness, shattered bones, or psychological scarring from repeated rape, but there was no way in Hell his charm, boyish good looks, or, God forbid, his libido would come to any permanent harm.
To an outsider it must have seemed a bit odd, but she found herself completely indifferent towards Number Four's Harry Potter. The only thing that would make her bat an eyelash was if he actually died.
Just to shake things up.
—
He was curled up in a pitiable ball of battered limbs in the darkness, now, making all the right noises to elicit complete pity from the reader. It was too little too late. Christine frowned and thought back to the sickening image she had been hit with upon entering Number Four's domain, the sight of a corpulent golden child laden down with every gift on God's green earth and then some: Harry bloody Potter. Wandless magic, multiple Animagus forms, the uncanny ability for his mulish opinion of Severus Snape to be completely right despite any and all evidence to the contrary—he really didn't lack for anything, now did he? Even the Dursleys' abuse was a blessing in disguise; it forced everyone else to love and pity him because he had problems so much bigger than anything anyone else had ever suffered.
Right.
She looked down at her softly fizzing ginger ale. Yes, it was Number Four's treatment of Harry that had turned her off. The author loved him and everything about him, there was no doubt about that, but the girl only seemed capable of showing that love by giving him praise he didn't deserve, lauding him for qualities he didn't have, and showering him with more gifts he had had any right to. And (if that weren't enough) she made his pedestal seem all the more high by ignoring the redeeming qualities of her Harry-kins' fellow characters and reducing them to disgusting, ungrateful, criminally insane worms. How…
She laughed and almost choked on her drink.
How Dursley-ish.