…4 Privet Dr., Surrey, England

Harry Potter was a freak, he was abnormal and weird. It was a self-realization that would have made his relatives quite happy if not for the confrontation the 7 year old boy had witnessed at the grocers earlier in that day.

His aunt had brought him to the store with her to introduce him to the layout and the manager so that she could send him to pick up what she needed when the occasion arose. As was typical to these lessons, she made sure to temper her insults toward him but not her cruelty.

She told anyone who would listen about her trouble-making nephew and that this new responsibility was to be yet another method to try and tame his unruliness. She would also happily bask in the unearned praise that her "tireless effort" and "patient spirit" afforded her.

At the end of their trip, as they were leaving the store, they passed a young woman who was dressed in a short mini dress with fishnet stockings and six inch heels. Harry would never forget the woman as she was taller than Vernon in her heals. Her long black hair had streaks of purple and gold in it and she was wearing a collar that reminded Harry of the jeweled collars that his Aunt Marge would put on her prized bulldogs.

The mini dress was dark red, bordering on black, and it was tight. Tight was likely an understatement as the fabric clung to her body like it was painted on. The woman's body was lean and the dress hugged every curve.

Harry remembered thinking that she had the type of shape that he knew his uncle would appreciate, if the magazines he found while cleaning were any indication. The dress was so short that Harry with his short stature caught a glimpse of her royal blue lace panties as she stepped up unto the curb. Her skin was very pale and she wore dark red lipstick that matched her dress.

It was jealousy that caused his aunt to react though it would be a time before Harry would be able to recognize his aunt's reactions that clearly. "What a freak" his aunt had murmured loud enough for Harry to hear and punctuated her comment by shooting him a look of disdain. The look was the same as the one she had been eyeing the passer by with.

His aunt, no doubt, expected Harry to be as devastated by the comparison as she would have been if she had been compared to such a person but Harry had no pre-set notions of propriety and instead only had a desire to belong and be loved. Up to this point he had thought that he was the only freak he would ever come in contact with as his Aunt and Uncle would only compare him to the freaks that were on TV before quickly turning the channel.

So for Harry, it was a seminal moment. In front of him was a freak like him and she was in public and he finally had a chance to see what one actually looked like. The repercussions of this moment were already ground breaking for the life of Harry Potter but the effects were magnified when the woman turned to look at his Aunt and spoke.

"Did you just call me a freak?" the women said in a tone Harry had never heard someone use against his aunt though he had had heard her use it with other people. To Harry's continued fascination he watched as the woman continued to speak to his aunt. "Looking at your pathetic normalcy, I should thank you. I am happily a freak if the alternative is to be as boring and forgettable as you."

With that, the woman looked at his Aunt in the same dismissive way his Aunt looked at him. Then the woman looked down at his shocked face, smiled, gave him a wink and entered the store. With an angry exclamation of "The nerve of that creature" his Aunt ushered him back to the car and drove them home.

His Aunt had taken her frustrations with the "freak at the market" out on the "freak in my home" and locked him in his cupboard almost immediately after they arrived back. In the long run, that had been a mistake. Harry spent the next few hours thinking about his experience that day and had found something.

First he realized that the woman was right. If his Aunt and Uncle were normal, who would want to be normal? The woman did not know all of what his Aunt and Uncle were but in a brief glimpse, had figured out that no one should want to be normal if his relatives were the representation of normal. The second think he figured out was that he was not alone in the world.

Being a freak did not have to mean he would be alone and unloved. More importantly he didn't have to be "normal" to be able to find friends. He only needed to find people like the woman at the market, but hopefully his own age.

For years he wanted to be normal because he thought only normal people existed in the real world and no one would love him if he was a freak. But now he had seen one walking into the market and, other than his Aunt, no one looked at her as if she was out of place, which to Harry meant that they had seen other freaks walking around.

The last realization was a recognition that she had winked at him. To Harry's young mind, that had meant that she had recognized that he, like her, was a freak and acknowledged his presence with a smile and a wink. He was a freak and for the first time in his life he was OK with that. More than OK. He was happy with it. Harry Potter was a freak.

…4 Privet Dr., Surrey, England [10 Days Later]

It had been over a week since their trip to the market and Petunia Dursley did not know what was happening but she didn't like it. Her freak nephew was still polite and still did as he was told but he had lost that look of longing for acceptance and loved that had typically been clear on his face and especially in his overly expressive eyes.

She would never admit it to herself but she had taken a perverse pleasure in seeing the cravings for love that would appear in his eyes every time he completed a task nor would she admit how much she enjoyed the dimming of those eyes every time that open desire for love and acceptance was denied him.

But now his eyes just shown bright through all that she ordered him to do. In fact the little freak seemed to brighten every time she insulted him recently. It angered her. Lily had that same brightness and it mocked her. She would never forget that no matter what insults Petunia threw at her, Lily eyes would sparkle because she knew she had magic and Petunia had nothing.

The notion that her sister's bastard son could be finding that same happiness even without any knowledge of magic grated on Petunia's nerves. Especially as her own Dudley seemed to never be fully happy or content no matter how many gifts she gave him or how much love she showed on him. And even though her son had inherited her blue eyes, they remained dim.

Her frustrations came to a head the night she butchered the brat's hair in preparation for the new school year. Internally, she cackled with glee thinking about how much he would die from shame and embarrassment and finally see himself for the freak he was.

She knew kids would be cruel and she was eager to see the boy brought low by their taunts. He was obviously unhappy with the job she did on his hair and she went to bed content that she had made his life miserable only to wake up and find that his hair had fixed itself.

"Magic!" the thought raged in her mind and her anger spiked. This is why he had been so happy, he had discovered magic. Her anger at a boiling point, she grabbed a cast iron frying pan and hit the boy over his head as hard as she could. It wasn't till she saw the blood pooling that she came back to herself and realized she might have gone too far.

She watched the blood spreading and as she debated with herself about what to do when the boy died, her kitchen door opened and her neighbor walked in. Acting quickly she feigned panic and screamed for the woman to call the ambulance as she announced the boy had "jumped off the counter".

…Emergency Room, St. Catherine's Hospital, Surrey, England

Harry woke up in the hospital confused about where he was and what was happening. The last thing he remembered was waking up and starting to cook breakfast, then hearing his Aunt's shriek, then pain. He looked around and saw a woman in a nurse's outfit standing over him. He followed along as he heard his Aunt explaining about him being an unruly child and climbing on the kitchen table before jumping off and hurting himself.

He was unsurprised by the story as he had heard them before, constructed to explain away his "accidents". What was surprising was that there was tension in the room. As a matter of survival he had learned to be perceptive about the mood of people in a room and it was clear to him that something unpleasant was building.

He looked at the nurse who was listening to the story and noticed that she didn't look like she fully believed his aunt. That was another surprise; typically people were always ready to believe his aunt's lies. Despite the hostility the woman was showing his aunt, the nurse smiled at him warmly. His surprise turned to confusion because that had never happened to him.

He looked her over perceptively and a smile came to his face when he figured out why she was being so receptive to him and hostile to his aunt. She was a freak like him. She was wearing a standard nurse's uniform but instead of the skin colored stockings of all the other nurses, his nurse was wearing black fishnets. Using his aunt's mutterings as a gauge, fishnet stockings were classic freak attire. His aunt had said many times that "no self-respecting woman" would ever wear them and that was confirmation enough for young Harry.

Looking at her again more carefully, he saw other telltale signs of her "freakiness". She was wearing blue lipstick and eyeliner for one. The clearest sign, however, was when she turned towards him and his eyes drifted lower and he saw that the top three buttons of her uniform was unbuttoned and he could see the wide expanse of cleavage that she was showing off.

He felt comforted that he was under the care of someone like himself. He believed that her warm smile was evidence that she recognized that he was a freak like her, just like the woman at the store. But more important to the young boy was what her presence meant for him. She was a freak and a nurse, Harry knew now that he could find a place in this world.

Over the next hour before he was released he noticed that his freak nurse was much happier than any of the other nurses. She was always smiling and the other normal nurses seemed to all have permanent scowls like his aunt. That was the final validation for Harry. He was happy to be a freak and would from then on try to live like one. Ignorance is truly bliss because in that moment he achieved an inner peace that many people spend their entire lives trying to find. Harry Potter was fully comfortable in his own skin.

Petunia, for her part, was an unhappy woman. It was obvious to her that the slutty nurse did not fully believe her story about what happened to her freak nephew. The smile on the boy's face suggested that he recognized he had found an ally and she resolved to talk to Vernon. The damned nurse had not directly accused her of anything but made it perfectly clear that she would not forget the boy and would be making "notations" in his file.

They could not keep treating the boy as they had because it would start to bring attention and the boy looked way to comfortable with the world to keep it secret for much longer. By the next morning she had moved him into Dudley's second bedroom. His chores, while remaining unfair in comparison to what his cousin was required to do, no longer had the unnecessary hint of danger that was previously part of his daily responsibilities.

For Harry his new situation just made him feel as if the appearance of freaks in his life had forced his Aunt and Uncle to treat him better and led him to the conclusion that even though they couldn't take him the freaks were making their presence known in order to change his relatives behavior and make his life better.