Author's Note: This is based on the idea that a child who represses their magic becomes the host to an obscurus, and what if Harry had gone down that road? It's a sort of vague and sad story because I was in a sad and vague mood. Whoops.
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Freak's real name is not Freak.
It's Harry James Potter, and he was born on a Thursday on July 31, 1980, to a mother and a father whose names he doesn't know and probably never will know. He is nine years old in exactly six months and three days, not that anyone will celebrate his birthday when it comes.
His schoolteachers always call him "Mister Potter" and peer down at him past their thick-rimmed spectacles, their mouths hard lines pinched in disapproval. Sometimes he almost wishes they would call him "Mister Dursley", just so he wouldn't be alone, anymore.
He knows the Dursleys are not-nice bad people, but no one else seems to think so, and they are so comfortingly normal. Not like Harry.
He only wants to not feel so isolated, in his own little bubble of weird and bad and freak. If he was a Dursley, he would have a family. He would have friends, maybe, even. Dudley has friends, and Piers Polkiss might be insufferable, but he's still another human being.
It isn't so hard these days for Harry to doubt that he himself is one of those.
"Mister Potter," a voice sings- the female teacher for the third year students. Her voice is high and almost happy to have caught the Freak doing something he's not meant to.
The boy looks up from his piece of paper (it's from a secondhand composition notebook that's already half-filled with Dudley's inane doodles), green eyes wide and trying to seem as innocent as possible.
The teacher's face does that funny thing that adults' faces do when they're not sure whether or not they're allowed to be mad at you.
"Pay attention in my class, Mister Potter," she says finally, and walks back down the aisles of desks, heels clicking harshly on the tiled floor.
He can hear the other children whispering and tittering amongst themselves at his expense, like they always do when he screws up. He's numb to it now, mostly, so he picks up his stubby little pencil before pressing it down into the paper so hard that the tip of it snaps.
It's okay, he thinks, even though it makes him a little bit sad and frustrated all at once. He'd drawn enough today, anyway.
The page of notebook paper is covered in angry little scribbles, tight blobs of graphite smeared across it in sporadic clusters.
They are nothing, they mean nothing.
The Freak doesn't mean anything, either, and it's probably a sign of how truly strange he is, that he finds himself relating to pencil drawings.
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The rest of the school day passes in a blur of boredom and clock-watching, with Harry and his Freakiness both quiet and unassuming. He's not done anything like that in a very long time, has kept all the fury and the injustice and the Bad tucked away deep inside himself.
He is still punished for it, though, because when the Dursleys are afraid of something it is easiest to blame Harry for its occurrence and then beat the abnormality out of him like if they hit him hard enough the weird will leak out his bones, never to be seen again.
"Dudders' favourite colouring book went missing today, Petunia."
"You don't suppose-?"
"Like there's another explanation."
Some days it is harder than others.
"My sister Marge is coming over tomorrow, Boy. Don't do anything," he shudders, pudgy face vaguely purple. "Freakish."
A funny sort of sickness came over him that day, when Marge kept saying horrid things about the parents he'd never met and he'd had to force a smile and pretend that he didn't want to rip her fat frame apart by the seams.
As promised, he hadn't done anything wrong, had kept silent for the good of them all, and pushed down the ugly Something that tried to rear its head in the depths of his gut and shoot out the tips of his fingers.
For once he had been good.
But all the Dursleys had done was regard him with wary relief and go on their separate ways like he'd not done anything at all (which, he supposes, he hadn't).
It still hurts sometimes.
Hurts enough to want to hurt someone else in return, make them feel and ache and suffer.
Harry tries his best to keep the hurting inside and nowhere else. He is a danger to himself and others. He is Nothing, and the only Something that he could possibly be is wrong.
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One day wishing away the Bad stops working.
It pools hot and promising in his stomach, sparking and hissing like wildfire. It thrums through his veins, coiling around his chest and resting, thick and heavy, in his heart. It is a black viper worming its way into his brain and whispering to do it you know you'll feel better if you just relax do it do it do it.
It seems like the kind of thing that ought to make him feel alive, but just makes him wish he were dead.
He is so very tired, and so sick of everything.
The reasonable thing would be to tell somebody. To get help.
But Harry is just a sad, strange little boy who no one really cares about and no one really wants.
Your parents took one look at you and offed themselves, 'cause they couldn't bear the thought of raising something that would turn out so utterly worthless.
He has no one to get help from.
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He gives in to the whispers.
His body doesn't know how to exist any longer. He is fury and injustice and BadBadBad. He is ash-colored smoke that somehow has the strength to crush buildings and tear picture-perfect houses up by the roots and rip them apart piece by piece.
He, for once, is not an observer.
He takes things for his own.
He breaks it all apart and rebuilds it on a whim.
He's completely mercury-brimmed mad and doesn't even care.
He is for once himself and no one can tell him to stop.
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Well.
Maybe not himself.
More like rage personified, concentrated down into such a powerful force that it's terrifying.
He is everything he's never wanted to be but the freedom almost makes it worth it.
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In the end, it isn't.
Worth it, that is.
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It isn't.
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