Chapter Text
The boy was seven years old still, though he would only be for one more day. He was sure no one would take notice of him being one year older again, no one but himself. Like no one took notice of him now, in his cupboard, though not actually his, his uncles cupboard under the stairs in his uncles house, where the large man lived with his stick-like wife and a son that seemed to imitate his father already, at eight years old.
The boy lay unmoving on the thin mattress as he had every night in the past two months, since the second year of elementary school had let out into the summer holidays. Though now, his ribcage didn't hurt when he breathed and the muscles in his neck moved when commanded. The stillness seemed to have ingrained itself in him over the time he had to seek it to heal.
He kept himself busy fantasizing in his head what he might do to get out of this. Out of this cupboard, out of this house, out of this life. Of course, children can't really see the difference between a fantasy so close to reality and a plan. The boy had had many dreams in his short life, dreams of warmth and smiles, dreams of love, but they had been put to the grave now. Not this one. Not today.
Because the Dursleys had made a mistake, a dangerous one. This evening Aunt Petunia had fed the boy the ration he got when healing, when he was already fully healed. The boy knew he was dangerous, they told him all the time, and he knew he could make things happen sometimes, when he had enough energy to think it. Think it so very much, it came to be. So the boy got up, sat with his back straight, facing the thin door of the cupboard and looked for the energy in his muscles that the food had given him and he spoke to the lock.
Politeness gets you far with strangers he knew, and the lock had never been spoken to, so it opened. The boy didn't need a light, he knew the way to the kitchen, the way to the chairs. He knew how to carefully, silently, carry one to the counter. He knew the way to the stairs even in the pitch black darkness, and he knew which steps to avoid, for the squeaked. The metal in his hand glinted as he passed the window in the hall and the door to the master bedroom was so surprised by someone speaking to it, it even opened without a sound.
Blood is black in the darkness. The moon shining through the thick curtains rendered everything in gray-scale, but nothing was as black as the thick liquid slowly pulsing out of Uncle Vernon's chubby neck. The boy sat on the round chest and felt it heave upward one final time. He considered painting with the blood, or with the knife in the skin, but forgot about it, when he felt Aunt Petunia shift slightly next to him.
He shuffled over, angling the knife away as to not cut himself and rolled over a bit awkwardly to sit on her belly. Her neck was thinner, much longer too, and he briefly considered just cracking it, but thought back on the efficiency part of his idea, set the knife the the left of her neck and sliced fast and hard to the right, cutting the vocal cords. He had learned about those in the library, such a lovely place.
Aunt Petunias breath rattled a bit and she spit up blood the the boy only narrowly avoided. Like her husband had, she ripped open her eyes in agony, trying to get the air into her lungs, recognizing the little demon on their chest, but she too evened out eventually. The moon reflecting in her eyes was beautiful. Happy, that those eyes of hatred could still end in such beauty, the boy scrambled off the bed, fancy carving knife in hand, now unglinting but glittering, and set off to the second room leaving the door open.
Dudley Dursley was a heap amidst heaps of blankets, but would be a greater challenge than his parents had been. The boy had read about good and evil for a long time, but he knew now about choices. Choices are what good and evil mean, and Dudley Dursley still had many to make. The boy would need to be fast. Fast and very precise. So he talked to the knife in his hand as he set it to the thick left wrist of his cousin.
When Dudley Dursley began to scream, clutching the stump that was now his left arm, the boy was already out the back door. He climbed the low white picket fence without leaving any dark hand prints and set off down the street.
'I'm not sorry', he thought, 'someone see that- I'm not sorry'. He stumbled through the streets then to the left onto a field thinking these words, screaming them to the very air with all the energy he had left: 'someone see me, I'm not sorry'.
Lights ripped the darkness apart, an old long limousine held at him at neck breaking speed. Somehow the boy knew the air had listened to him so he stopped his chant and promptly passed out where he stood.