Chapter Text
Nearly 10 years have passed since the Dursley family found a scarred baby on their doorstep but a lot of things seemed to have stayed the same. There were still pictures of Dudley Dursley that were taken while the family was on one of their vacations but now he had grown up. There were pictures of Dudley on his first bike, on a carousel at the fair, playing a computer game with his smiling father, or being hugged and kissed by his mother. There were pictures of Vernon Dursley after he got promoted to director of Grunnings nearly 12 years ago. There were pictures of Petunia Dursley’s beautiful and carefully tended garden. There were no pictures of anybody else who might have been living in that house.
"Up! Get up! Now!"
Harry Potter woke with a start. His aunt rapped on the door again.
"Up!" she screeched. Harry heard her walking toward the kitchen and the sound of the frying pan being put on the stove. He rolled onto his back and tried to remember the dream he had been having. It had been a good one with a flying motorbike in it. He had a funny feeling he'd had the same dream before.
His aunt was back outside the door.
"Are you up yet?" she demanded.
"Nearly," said Harry.
"Well, get a move on, I want you to look after the bacon. And don't you dare let it burn, I want everything perfect on Duddy's birthday."
Harry groaned.
"What did you say?" his aunt snapped through the door.
"Nothing, nothing..."
Dudley's birthday. How could he have forgotten this dreaded wonderful day? Harry got out of bed and rummaged around for a pair of socks. He found them with a small spider inside one of them. He carefully eased it out and placed it on the small desk crammed into the corner. He was used to spiders because the cupboard he lived in was full of them. They were calm, careful, and tried to stay out of the way. A bit like him.
The kitchen table groaned under the weight of Dudley’s presents. It looks like he got that new computer he wanted, and the second television, and the racing bike. Harry didn’t know why Dudley wanted a racing bike since he was a bit on the heavy side and hated exercise. Unless punching smaller kids counted as exercise. Dudley loved punching Harry when he could but Harry was often too fast for him.
Harry knew that living in a small cupboard underneath the stairs along with minimal food had impacted his growth but it wasn’t like that was going to change anytime soon. The only clothes he had were the old ones that Dudley didn’t want anymore and that made him look much smaller than he already was. Harry had a thin, sharp face that was almost like Aunt Petunia's, knobbly knees, messy black hair, and striking green eyes. He wore round glasses that were held together by tape and prayer from all the times that Dudley had punched him in the nose, making that part of his face slightly crooked. The only thing Harry liked about his appearance was the scar that ran across his face. It started from just underneath his hairline and splintered down his forehead, with some parts arcing around his eyes. Sometimes, when the moon shone just right, it made his scar glow like silver spiderwebs. Another reason why Harry felt a fondness for spiders. The first question he could remember asking was how he had gotten it.
“In the car crash when your parents died," his aunt had snapped. "And don't ask questions."
There were a number of rules that governed Harry’s life with the Dursleys including:
1) Don’t ask questions.
2) Do as you are told without question or complaint.
3) Stay quiet and stay out of the way.
4) When there are guests in the house, either stay in the cupboard or go to the park for a few hours. But pretend you don’t exist either way.
5)Don’t tell anyone about the cupboard. They don’t need to know.
6) Be grateful for everything we have given you.
There were a lot more but those were the main ones. Uncle Vernon entered the kitchen just as Harry was turning over the bacon. He made no indication he even knew Harry was there. By the time Harry was frying the eggs, Dudley was led into the kitchen by his mother. Dudley took mostly after his father with a large pink face, thick neck, and small blue eyes. He inherited his thick blonde hair from his mother. Aunt Petunia always said Dudley looked like a baby angel. Harry always said she was an excellent liar.
Harry placed the finished food on the small space on the table that wasn’t covered by the presents, then retreated to his small corner of the kitchen where he was allowed to eat. Meanwhile, Dudley was counting all the presents and frowned.
“36? That’s two less than last year.”
Harry was impressed. He didn’t think Dudley could count that high.
“Darling, you haven't counted Auntie Marge's present, see, it's here under this big one from Mummy and Daddy."
“Alright then, 37.” His face had started going red. Harry wolfed down the rest of his food so he could escape the kitchen faster.
Aunt Petunia sensed what was coming as well and quickly added "And we'll buy you another two presents while we're out today. How's that, pumpkin? Two more presents. Is that all right"
Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work. Finally, he said, "So I'll have thirty... thirty..."
"Thirty-nine, sweetums," said Aunt Petunia.
"Oh." Dudley sat down and grabbed the nearest present. "All right then."
Uncle Vernon chuckled. "Little tyke wants his money's worth, just like his father. 'Atta boy, Dudley!" He ruffled Dudley's hair.
Harry just thought that Dudley was spoilt and that the Dursleys were enabling behaviour that would spiral out of control in the next 10 years. But no one listened to him so he didn’t say anything. The telephone rang and Aunt Petunia left to answer it while Harry and Uncle Vernon watched Dudley unwrap the racing bike, a video camera, a remote control aeroplane, 16 new computer games, and a VCR. He was ripping the paper off a gold wristwatch when Aunt Petunia came back from the telephone looking both angry and worried.
"Bad news, Vernon," she said. "Mrs. Figg's broken her leg. She can't take him." She jerked her head in Harry's direction.
Dudley's mouth fell open in horror, but Harry's heart gave a leap. Every year on Dudley's birthday, his parents took him and a friend out for the day, to adventure parks, hamburger restaurants, or the movies. Every year, Harry was left behind with Mrs Figg, an old lady who lived 2 streets away. She was a bit strange and her house smelled like cabbage. She almost always made him look at pictures of all the cats she had ever owned. There were a lot of them and Harry was starting to think they either ran away or Mrs Figg just really wasn’t any good at keeping them alive.
"Now what?" said Aunt Petunia, looking furiously at Harry as though he'd planned this. In their minds, he probably had. Harry knew he should to feel sorry that Mrs. Figg had broken her leg, but it wasn't easy when he reminded himself it would be a whole year before he had to look at Tibbles, Snowy, Mr Paws, and Tufty again.
"We could call Marge," Uncle Vernon suggested.
"Don't be silly, Vernon, she hates the boy."
The Dursleys often spoke about Harry like this, as though he wasn't there. They often acted like it too. To them, he was some stupid, nasty thing that had crawled into their lives and refused to leave, as if coming and going had even been a choice of his.
"What about that friend of yours? Yvonne was it?"
"On vacation in Majorca," Aunt Petunia said solemnly.
"You could just leave me here," Harry put in hopefully. He’d give anything for a few hours away from these people but Aunt Petunia looked as though she'd just swallowed a lemon.
"And come back and find the house in ruins?" she snarled.
"I won't blow up the house," said Harry, but they weren't listening.
"I suppose we could take him to the zoo," said Aunt Petunia slowly, "... and leave him in the car..."
"That car's new, he's not sitting in it alone..."
Dudley began to cry loudly. He wasn't really crying, it had been years since he'd really cried, but he knew that if he screwed up his face and wailed, his mother would give him anything he wanted.
"Dinky Duddydums, don't cry, Mummy won't let him spoil your special day!" she cried, flinging her arms around him.
"I... don't... want... him... t-t-to come!" Dudley yelled between huge, pretend sobs. "He always sp-spoils everything!" He shot Harry a nasty grin through the gap in his mother's arms. Harry just raised an eyebrow at him. Did he really think that whatever blame he placed on Harry, his parents hadn’t already?
Just then, the doorbell rang. "Oh, good Lord, they're here!" said Aunt Petunia frantically, and a moment later, Dudley's best friend, Piers Polkiss, walked in with his mother. Piers was a scrawny boy with a face like a rat. He was usually the one who held people's arms behind their backs while Dudley hit them. Dudley stopped pretending to cry at once. Half an hour later had Harry crammed into the back of the car between Piers and Dudley. He hadn’t ever been to the zoo before but the Dursleys could think of anything else to do with him. But before they had left, Uncle Vernon had taken Hary aside.
"I'm warning you now boy," he had said, putting his large purple face right up close to Harry's, "Any funny business, anything at all, and you'll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas."
"I'm not going to do anything," Harry tried. But Uncle Vernon didn't believe him, no one ever did. The problem was that strange things always seemed to happen around Harry and the Dursleys always found a way to blame him for it.
Once, Aunt Petunia, tired of Harry coming back from the barbers looking as though he hadn't been at all, had taken a pair of kitchen scissors and cut his hair so short he was almost bald except for his bangs, which she left ‘to hide most of that horribly scarred face’. Dudley had laughed himself silly at Harry, who spent a sleepless night imagining school the next day, where he was already laughed at for his baggy clothes and taped glasses. The next morning, however, he had gotten up to find his hair exactly as it had been before Aunt Petunia had sheared it off. He had been given a week in his cupboard for that, he thought there was no possible way for Harry to have done it.
Another time, Aunt Petunia had been trying to force him into a revolting old sweater of Dudley's (brown with orange puff balls). The harder she tried to pull it over his head, the smaller it seemed to become until it might have fitted a hand puppet, but certainly not Harry. Aunt Petunia had decided it must have shrunk in the wash and, to his great relief, Harry wasn't punished.
On the other hand, he'd gotten into terrible trouble for being found on the roof of the school kitchens. Dudley's gang had been chasing him as usual when, as much to Harry's surprise as anyone else's, there he was sitting on the chimney. The Dursleys had received a very angry letter from Harry's headmistress telling them Harry had been climbing school buildings. But all he'd tried to do was jump behind the big trash cans outside the kitchen doors. Harry supposed that the wind must have caught him in mid-jump.
But today, nothing was going to go wrong.
While he drove, Uncle Vernon complained to Aunt Petunia. He liked to complain about things: people at work, Harry, the council, Harry, the bank, and Harry were just a few of his favourite subjects. This morning, it was motorcycles.
"... roaring along like maniacs, the young hoodlums," he said, as a motorcycle overtook them.
"I had a dream about a motorcycle," said Harry, remembering suddenly. "It was flying."
Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front. He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Harry, his face like a gigantic beet with a moustache: "MOTORCYCLES DON'T FLY!"
Dudley and Piers sniggered.
"I know they don't," said Harry. "It was only a dream."
But he wished he hadn't said anything. If there was one thing the Dursleys hated even more than him asking questions, it was him talking about anything that is acting in a way it shouldn't, no matter if it was in a dream or even a cartoon. They seemed to think he might get dangerous ideas.
It was a very sunny Saturday and the zoo was crowded with families. The Dursleys bought Dudley and Piers large chocolate ice creams at the entrance and then, because the smiling lady in the van had asked Harry what he wanted before they could hurry him away, they bought him a cheap lemon ice pop. It wasn't bad, either, Harry thought, licking it as they watched a gorilla scratching its head who looked remarkably like Dudley, except that it wasn't blonde.
Harry had the best morning he'd ever had in a long time. He was careful to walk a little way apart from the Dursleys so that Dudley and Piers, who were starting to get bored with the animals by lunchtime, wouldn't fall back on their favourite hobby of hitting him. They ate in the zoo restaurant, and when Dudley had a tantrum because his knickerbocker glory didn't have enough ice cream on top, Uncle Vernon bought him another one and Harry was allowed to finish the first.
Harry knew that it was all too good to last.
After lunch, they went to the reptile house. It was cool and dark in there, with lit windows all along the walls. Behind the glass, all sorts of lizards and snakes were crawling and slithering over bits of wood and stone. Dudley and Piers wanted to see huge, poisonous cobras and thick, man-crushing pythons. Dudley quickly found the largest snake in the place. It could have wrapped its body twice around Uncle Vernon's car and crushed it into a trash can, but at the moment it didn't look in the mood. It seemed to be fast asleep but it was kind of difficult to tell seeing as it had no eyelids.
Dudley stood with his nose pressed against the glass, staring at the glistening brown coils.
"Make it move," he whined at his father. Uncle Vernon tapped on the glass, but the snake didn't budge.
"Do it again," Dudley ordered. Uncle Vernon rapped the glass smartly with his knuckles, but the snake just snoozed on.
"This is boring," Dudley moaned. He shuffled away.
Harry moved in front of the tank and looked intently at the snake. “Sorry about him,” he told it. “He doesn’t understand what it’s like to just lie there with nothing to do. Watching stupid people press their ugly faces in on you. I live in a cupboard not much bigger than this but at least I can leave it. You must feel trapped.”
Slowly, very slowly, the boa constrictor raised its head until it was at eye level with Harry. ‘You’re pretty smart.’
Harry gaped. He looked over his shoulder quickly to see if anyone was watching. They weren't. “Did you just talk?”
‘Of course I can talk. The real surprise here is that you can understand me and speak back. Not many of your kind anymore.’
“My kind?” Harry asked.
‘They think that anyone who can speak our tongue is evil.’
“And are they?”
The snake didn’t have shoulders so it couldn’t shrug, but it gave that impression. ‘I’ll admit that there is some connection.’
“I don’t want to be evil,” Harry admitted. It felt like this was just proving everything his aunt and uncle had ever said about him.
‘We don’t always get a choice. You’d have to push that part of yourself away to avoid it completely. But enough of that. I bet you have a few questions of your own. It’s not every day you speak to snakes.’
Harry didn’t want to let go of the conversation about him potentially being evil, but he knew his time here was limited and eventually settled on a question. “Where are you from?”
The snake just gestured to the info display sign in front of the tank.
Brazilian Rainbow Boa Constrictor
This snake is so named for the way that light reflects off its skin in multi-coloured hues. It can grow to about 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to 1.8 meters) in length and may live up to 20 years with human care. In the wild, their diet consists of rodents, birds and possibly some forms of aquatic life and lizards. Like other boas, the Brazilian rainbow boa is non-venomous. To capture and consume meals, they ambush and constrict their prey. This specimen was bred in the zoo and is fed on a diet of rats.
“I see. You’ve never been to Brazil.”
The snake shook its head and a deafening shout behind Harry made both of them jump. "Dudley! Mr Dursley! Come and look at the snake! You won't believe what it's doing!" Piers shouted.
Dudley came waddling toward them as fast as he could.
"Out of the way, you," he said, punching Harry in the ribs. Caught by surprise, Harry fell hard on the concrete floor. What came next happened so fast that no one saw how it happened. One second, Piers and Dudley were leaning right up close to the glass and the next, they had leapt back with howls of horror.
Harry sat up and gasped; the glass in front of the boa constrictor's tank had vanished. The great snake was uncoiling itself rapidly, slithering out onto the floor. People throughout the reptile house screamed and started running for the exits.
As the snake slid swiftly past him, Harry could have sworn a low, hissing voice said, 'Brazil, here I come... Thanks, amigo.'
The keeper of the reptile house was in shock. "But the glass," he kept saying, "where did the glass go?"
The zoo director himself made Aunt Petunia a cup of strong, sweet tea while he apologized over and over again. Piers and Dudley could only gibber. As far as Harry had seen, the snake hadn't done anything except snap playfully at their heels as it passed, but by the time they were all back in Uncle Vernon's car, Dudley was telling them how it had nearly bitten off his leg, while Piers was swearing it had tried to squeeze him to death. But worst of all, for Harry at least, was Piers calming down enough to say, "Harry was talking to it, weren't you, Harry?"
Uncle Vernon waited until Piers was safely out of the house before starting on Harry. He was so angry he could hardly speak. He managed to say, "Go! Cupboard! Stay! No meals!" before he collapsed into a chair, and Aunt Petunia had to run and get him a large brandy.
Harry lay in his dark cupboard much later, wishing he had a watch. He didn't know what time it was and he couldn't be sure the Dursleys were asleep yet. Until they were, he couldn't risk sneaking to the kitchen for some food.
He'd lived with the Dursleys for almost ten years as long as he could remember, ever since he'd been a baby and his parents had died in that car crash. He couldn't remember being in the car when his parents had died. Sometimes, when he strained his memory during long hours in his cupboard, he came up with a strange vision: a blinding flash of green light and a burning pain on his forehead. This, he supposed, was the crash, though he couldn't imagine where all the green light came from. He couldn't remember his parents at all. His aunt and uncle never spoke about them and he was forbidden to ask questions. There were no photographs of them in the house.
When he was younger, Harry had of some unknown relation coming to take him away. His mind had conjured up different people from a man with shaggy black hair to a tired man whose face was as scarred as Harry’s own. But no one came. The Dursleys were his only family. Yet sometimes he thought (or maybe hoped) that strangers in the street seemed to know him. Very strange strangers they were, too. A tiny man in a violet top hat had bowed to him once while out shopping with Aunt Petunia and Dudley. After asking Harry furiously if he knew the man, Aunt Petunia rushed them out of the shop without buying anything. A wild-looking old woman dressed all in green had waved merrily at him once on a bus. A bald man in a very long purple coat had shaken his hand in the street the other day and then walked away without a word. The weirdest thing about all these people was the way they seemed to vanish the second Harry tried to get a closer look. At school, Harry had no one. Everybody knew that Dudley's gang hated that odd Harry Potter in his baggy old clothes and broken glasses, and nobody liked to disagree with Dudley's gang.
Harry was left thinking about what that snake had said about evil and the only way to avoid it was to push it down. He had already been wishing that his strangeness would disappear for years now, but if it was the same thing, then hopefully it would work. Harry went to sleep that night having forgotten about sneaking out for food. There was a feeling of bubbling and curling in his stomach that made him feel sick. Harry ignored it, well used to it by now, and pushed it to the side as well.