It was a bright, cold morning in August, and the clocks were striking six.
A young teen was asleep on a chair with his hands on a table in front of him and his head resting on them as a pillow.
Although he had a handsome, angular face, he came off as soft because of his innocent, content look. He was bathed in a gentle, warm glow as the sun's first rays touched his face. Anyone who came across the sight would certainly declare, "He is an angel."
A soft breeze rustled his hair as it flowed through the open window, causing a few strands to dance across his calm face.
A stunning snowy owl flew down the open window in a blur, landing softly on the table despite its rapid speed. The owl's intelligent, piercing yellow eyes surveyed the sleeping teen. With a grand sway, it unfolded its lovely, feathery wings and gave out a loud, "Awroo!"
The young boy's eyes fluttered. He slowly woke up, rubbing the sleep crust out of his eyes. With a sigh, he extended his hands upward and spread his legs. When he finally sat up straight, he noticed the owl perched on his desk.
Bright and beautiful emerald eyes met intense golden ones, and for a moment they simply gazed into each other's abysses. The young man's expression changed to one of realization. "Oh, Hedwig," he murmured in a scratchy voice, having barely awoken. "Thank you for waking me up."
"Hoot!"
The emerald-eyed teen smiled tiredly towards the owl and scratched it under its chin, making it purr contedly.
The boy pushed his chair back—the chair producing a shrill sound as it scratched on the floor—got up, and left the room.
There was a single book on the desk that the boy had recently vacated. Perhaps the boy had fallen asleep while reading it. It appeared to be a regular book in pristine condition. There were no annotations on it, except for a singular word. It was circled again and again and again, obsessively—with very thin, black strokes—until the scratching was visible for several pages behind.
"Ego"
A young teenager, one by the name of Harry Potter, found himself staring at his own reflection in the mirror in front of reflection smiled.
It is not the smile of any meaning; it utterly lacks substance—all of what we might call the "heaviness of blood" or perhaps the "solidity of human life"—and it has not even a bird's weight. It is merely a blank sheet of paper, light as a feather.
Pretense, insincerity, fatuousness—none of these words quite covers it.
If you look carefully, you will begin to feel that there is something strangely unpleasant about this handsome young man.
The smile faltered.
His lips curled downward slightly in a stiff twitch. And twitch by twitch, he would no longer be smiling. The reflection frowned heavily. One who is expertly intimate with beauty and ugliness will see that—despite how well the boy's countenance might reflect his emotional state—his frown is just as fake as his smile.
And so it went, the boy switching expressions as if it were a carefully choreographed routine. He finally settled over a smirk—a cold and cruel smirk—eerily mismatched on his angelic face.
This expression, however, was the only one that was completely and genuinely real.
The boy's eyes flickered suddenly as he sensed a movement out of the corner of his eyes. Finding nothing, his eyes flickered back to gaze into its reflection. As if the entire surreality and eeriness of the situation finally caught up to him, he flinched back in horror.
Something was very, very wrong; Harry Potter's eyes weren't crimson.
Harry Potter gracefully moved around the kitchen, effortlessly gliding from one task to another. With each movement, there was a certain elegance and finesse that was captivating to watch. As he cracked the eggs into the bowl, his hands moved with precision and grace, whisking them together in a seamless motion.
He smiled contently to himself, having learned to enjoy doing his chores. He relished the solitude and quiet of the morning.
"Don't fool around in the kitchen, boy!" A shrill, high-pitched voice screeched loudly. The type of voice that grates on your ears and makes you cringe. There was no other voice in the world that irritated Harry so quickly.
The smile on his face instantly morphed into a frown. Robotic and stiff movements replaced his previous grace.
"Yes, aunt Petunia." He bit out, trying to neutralize his voice to show some respect.
Clearly, he hadn't been as deferential as Petunia wanted him to be, as she started her usual tirade of insults and criticisms. Listening to it for years on end should have made Harry used to it by now, and it had, to some point. However, today, especially, Harry could not help but cringe at the insults she threw at his back.
"Ungrateful and lazy"
His bright, cool morning and cheerful mood were all but destroyed, and his days were always miserable whenever he interacted with the Dursleys. He hoped that, just for one day, they could ignore him and let him be.
"Unwanted burden on this earth"
He was as reluctant to step into this mundane, muggle building as they were to house him here. He doesn't want to return here every summer. He just has no other option. With how frequently they remind him, he will never forget that he is unwelcome in this household.
"Just like his incurably criminal parents."
Her incessant screeching, high-pitched voice droned on and on, and it was the worst kind of torture for his ears. He was steadily getting angrier, his cringe giving way to a grimace, and the grimace to an expression of sheer hatred. The pan on the stove was all but forgotten, his hands balled into fists, and his body was shaking in fury.
Petunia Dursley could see only his back, however, and thought he was shaking with tears. She smirked in satisfaction. She had thought for years that he had become insensitivized to her tauntings after attending the freak circus that his kind called a school, but apparently not. She was afraid she had lost her power over him, but she was more than satisfied to see that her scathing words still left wounds.
"The spawn of filthy scum is, of course, scum."
Harry had enough.
"Shut up!"
He abruptly turned around and yelled. Not the kind of shout you use to intimidate people, but rather the kind in which you scream at the top of your lungs—a loud, guttural cry that erupts from the lowest recesses of your chest.
The horse-faced woman flinched back in worry and shock, her face grimacing and her hands instinctively reaching up to cover her ears. She had thrown countless cruel insults over the years, more biting than any of the niceties from today, but he had never replied to any of them with such vitriol. She was thus, understandably, rendered speechless.
Harry Potter did not deign another glance towards the horse-faced woman as he stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him loudly. The force of his anger reverberated through the entire house, leaving an eerie silence in its wake.
"…"
Usually, Harry would feel a little more at ease in the silence, but right now, the only thing he felt was deeply bothered: the expression of dread on his aunt's face aroused a sense of cathartic pleasure within him.
He didn't want to believe himself, of course, but however much he deliberated and convinced himself otherwise, the pleasure was readily bubbling somewhere deep inside him, and the kindness inside of his heart was betrayed by the cruel, cold smirk on his face.
A run-down playground stood in eerie silence under the scorching afternoon sun. The swings creaked ominously in the gentle breeze. Grass and weeds grew in the cracks in the pavement. A singular teen sat on a swing, rocking back and forth gently, his hands gripping the rusty chains that held the swing in place. His eyes were fixed on the sky, where a small, white blur was flying around in lazy circles.
Harry's feet had carried him to this desolate playground after he stormed out of Dursley's, his mind desperately seeking to reclaim some of the peace that had been lost to the ramblings of an unpleasant woman. This was the only place where Harry would feel truly alone. The noise of traffic and cars was so distant that it was all but forgotten. Moreover, there was no one in sight for at least a mile.
The only problem? Harry had an uncanny feeling in the pit of his stomach that—even though he was the only visible human in miles of radius—he wasn't alone.
He didn't know how he knew; he just the wind wasn't whistling as it should, or the light wasn't bouncing off the trees as it should; Harry really didn't know anything for sure except for the dread pooling inside the pit of his stomach.
He couldn't shake off the eerie sensation of invisible eyes watching his every movement, lurking in the shadows of the playground. Every rustle of leaves or creaking swing set him on edge. A singular, cold sweat drop clung to his back, slowly flowing down his back. Even under the afternoon summer sun, his back and forehead felt chilly.
'Don't look back. Don't look back.' He chanted in his head. 'If you look back, they will know you know.'
If only he could use his wand now. A simple Homenum Revelio, and he would actually be able to enjoy his solitude rather than constantly being on edge.
Harry took a deep breath and released a sigh.
He got up from the swing and walked straight forward, distancing himself from the slides and other obstacles, standing where he would be free to move if the situation called for it. He slowly, in a deliberate motion, turned back and surveyed the area.
Empty.
Just as he expected, then.
Harry rotated his head anticlockwise and cracked his neck with a satisfying pop. He closed his eyes and considered his situation.
There are no humans nearby to call or shout for help. An invisible enemy is stalking him. He has his wand on him, but he cannot use it until he is completely sure there is an enemy. It could either be a dark creature or a wizard. He didn't know any dark creatures that could turn invisible. Wizards could escape the scrutiny of the eye either by using an invisibility cloak or a disillusionment charm.
If push comes to shove, he can use wandless magic, which can't be tracked. But the only magic he can do wandlessly is the summoning and banishing charm. He is decently proficient in hand-to-hand combat. If the situation gets too dire, he can also run very fast.
Harry opened his eyes again, his eyes positively glowing. He rotated his head clockwise and cracked his neck on the other side.
"I know you are there!" He yelled defiantly. He surveyed the playground for any disturbances, trying not to think about how he must look like a paranoid lunatic right now and the possibility that maybe there truly was no one here and he was talking to air.
He saw a few blades of grass—that were escaping from the cracks in the pavement—turn invisible right in front of his eyes.
'Gotcha!' he thought.
He whistled loudly while maintaining an emotionless expression. At the sound of the whistle, the white blur that was floating idly in the sky swooped down rapidly but stealthily, its wings flapping silently.
Harry glared and pointed towards where he deduced the invisible stalker was, and Hedwig flew towards it with no hesitation. The white bullet crashed into something invisible with a thud.
"Aaaaa!" Harry heard the squeal of a woman who had been knocked over and whose legs were now visible. Harry deduced that she must be using an invisibility cloak, which Hedwig quickly stripped away without him needing to tell her anything.
'Hedwig is such a smart girl.' He thought with pride.
Harry wandlessly summoned the stalker's wand while she was frozen in shock, or perhaps pain.
"Incarcerous," he hissed softly in parseltongue.
Imagine this: you are lying with your back to the ground. Your chest hurts, and your breath is knocked out of your lungs. You feel light-headed because your head just hit a concrete pavement. The lack of oxygen makes you even more dizzy and disoriented.
You regain your breath in a gasp, but suddenly you feel a rough and cold sensation crawl across your legs. Your immediate reaction is to want to scream, of course, but you have no breath to scream. You choke on your own breath.
You begin to cough, and you are still feeling the uncomfortable presence crawling up your body, leaving an oily residue all over your skin and robes. Your spine tingles in horror and revulsion. Something similarly coarse and damp chokes your throat, taking your breath away in the middle of your cough.
Black specks form in your vision, and your eyesight gradually dims; nonetheless, a pair of piercing, yellow eyes catch your gaze, peering deeply into your own. That's when you realize you are face-to-face with a King Cobra, its hood flaring menacingly.
You want to scream, but you can't, and then you know no more.