Chapter Text
Harry was five-and-a-half years old when he learned the concept of running away from home, and the words are like a beacon to him.
Five years old was a turning point in his short life. Before, there was only the Dursleys, and boy, and freak, and chores, and a cupboard. Attending school, he realized quickly that there was more to the world than what went on in Number 4 Privet Drive. For example, he was pretty sure that all the other kids had families who loved them, or at least more-or-less cared for their wellbeing. So either he was unique among children in being totally undeserving of such, or, and he liked this one better, the Dursleys were wrong.
But even armed with this new knowledge, that perhaps his treatment wasn’t normal and wasn’t right, he never really expected he could do anything about it. He had distant awareness that at some point a child becomes an adult and then nobody can control them anymore. But when he overheard the newscaster reporting on the telly about a runaway child who had been found, he was once again struck with a realization, that perhaps he could do something about his situation now.
Those hopes were complicated immediately by the rest of the news report.
Apparently the runaway child was not just found, but found dead, because it was December, and children do not do well on their own in freezing cold Britain in the middle of winter. A pity, that. So Harry resolved to learn, and to plan, and to table the issue of his escape for a later date upon which he would be more well-prepared. He fancied being free, but he didn’t fancy being dead. Then he got cuffed over the ear for his idleness and went back to work, his hands scrubbing the countertops with a renewed vigor, his mind far away.
The following years were a bit of a mixed bag for Harry. The upside was all the research and planning he was able to accomplish now that he had a goal in mind.
Harry began spending as much free time as he was allowed in the school library, and on a particularly good summer day when he was six he convinced Aunt Petunia to sign him up for a public library card, because if he was at the library then of course he couldn’t cause any mischief and wouldn’t the neighbors be so impressed to see him reading like a polite young man?
He read everything he could find that might help him in his plans. From the fiction section, he found a rather disturbingly large number of books whose young heroes had struck out on their own. Maybe his situation wasn’t so unique after all. From these books he learned a few useful things: You can trust a plucky band of children who all go by nicknames. You cannot trust adults, under any circumstances. Find a safe place to sleep, and if you can’t, keep moving, because people will try and send you back. Learn how to pick pockets. Don’t get caught.
While he loved his novels, the nonfiction section was really where the good stuff was. He read about camping and foraging and how to start a fire. He studied maps of England and plotted out the best way to get to London, which he decided would be his new home, because it was really big and had everything in the world inside it. He read about lock picking and escapology and Harry Houdini (his new hero). He learned about currency, and budgeting, and tried to estimate how many pounds he’d need to find every week in order to eat and ride the Tube.
On the most lazy of summer days, when it was too hot to go outside or pouring rain and Harry was nearly alone in the library, he hid himself back in the quietest corner and read the best – the most forbidden of books. The ones about magic. He was aware, of course, that these books were also part of the fiction section, and therefore might be exaggerated a little, or a lot. But unlike most people who would pick up one of these books, he was aware somewhere deep down in his soul that magic was real. He was fairly sure, in fact, that he could do some.
All his life, strange things had happened around Harry. Little things – like a toy shooting into his arms from halfway across the room when he really wanted it, a plate he had dropped hovering centimeters off the ground, there was even a time when Aunt Marge’s horrible dog Ripper chased him and he managed to jump eight feet in the air to the safety of a tree branch. Somehow Aunt Petunia always knew when these things happened, and despite him never doing it on purpose, she would punish Harry most severely. She would call him a freak and send him to his cupboard, and inevitably his uncle would come by later with his belt just to really get the message across.
When he first came across books on magic, his freaky incidents took on a new light. It was like a part of his soul that had hidden itself away was coming back to the forefront.
I am magic – yes.
They are not magic – yes.
They hate me because I can do what they cannot. They fear me – yes, boy, yes.
I can grow and control my magic, make it do what I want, make it help me – yes! yes! yes!
Thus began the second branch of Harry’s studying and plotting endeavors. Having something to practice on his own was very good, because while the library had become his new refuge, things at home had taken a turn for the worse. Harry wasn’t really sure why, exactly. The worst thing about his situation was that sometimes there was no why, there just was.
This was the downside of his next few years. Harry was spending more time in the cupboard than ever before, for stupid transgressions like not polishing the silver shiny enough or looking at Uncle Vernon funny or being five minutes past his library curfew. His Uncle had gotten more and more vicious with the belt, too, and his Aunt was less inclined than ever to feed him when he was locked away. It completely sucked. If he was his five-year-old self, he probably would have withdrawn into his mind from the harsh treatment. Harry was vaguely aware that things were starting to cross some sort of line from bad to downright unacceptable. What scared him the most, on those nights when he was locked up and gasping in pain, was that he didn't really know if it would ever stop escalating. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how polite and useful and invisible he could be, he was never good enough for his Aunt and Uncle. It hardened his resolve to make his plans and get out of there before it was too late. Therefore, even though it was highly forbidden in the Dursley house, doing freakishness - magic - was now an essential task.
Armed with the scientific method and a widely varying assortment of fantasy knowledge, Harry began to practice doing magic on purpose while he was inside his cupboard. It took weeks of trial and error to produce results of any kind. He basically had to work himself into a state of panic, which had triggered at least a few of his magic outbursts before, and then funnel all that panicked energy into making something happen.
This worked, although the results were unpredictable and a bit violent. For example, when he tried to make light, the resulting light was so bright he was seeing stars for ten minutes afterward, and when he tried to make his toy soldier float, it rocketed straight up into the floorboards with a thump. Like a good magic scientist, Harry observed a few things. First, this method was primitive and unreliable, but it was definitely magic. Second, he could channel the same emotional state into wildly different results by changing his intention. Third, at the precise moment the magic happened, there would be a faint tingling sensation in his right hand.
He hypothesized that the tingling sensation was connected to making the magic work. The next time he was locked in the cupboard, he used this for the basis of his experiment. He visualized a pool of tingly magic inside him, seeping through his pores and out of his skin. When he opened his eyes, his hand was tingling and buzzing harder than ever before, and it glowed. He quickly tried to come up with something to do with all this magic seeping out of his hand. Float, he thought, and the toy soldier floated. He willed it to move up and down and it did. Light, he thought, and a perfect ball of light appeared in his hand. He willed it to get brighter and dimmer, even to change colors, and it did. Harry was in awe of his new power and control. This must be the way. He watched the beautiful light, pulsing and dancing to his will, until blackness creeped around the edges of his vision and he passed out.
When he awoke the next day, he made one other important observation. Magic was bloody exhausting.
Harry’s magic experiments were, on the whole, a great success. He became very good at floating things and making things come to him when he wanted. He could summon anything that was in his cupboard directly into his hand, and he could call things outside his cupboard to him, though they would smack into the door if it was shut. He could conjure light and even make a light that stuck in place until he told it to stop. He could warm himself up a little bit, which was great in the wintertime because his cupboard had terrible insulation. He could change the color of things and make them bigger or smaller, though this was a temporary effect. He could even unlock his cupboard, because he knew exactly how the lock worked from all his reading and he could visualize exactly what needed to move in order to make it click open.
He did find some things he couldn’t do. He couldn’t make things appear from thin air, which was too bad, because it would have been great to conjure up some food. He couldn’t teleport, and he couldn’t breathe fire (and ok, that one was a long shot, but it would have been really cool).
He also found some new talents of his that worked differently from the magic he normally did. One was that he could talk to snakes, after an adder startled him in the garden with its hissing about ‘nasty two-leggers’ and he somehow understood it and talked back. Unfortunately, snakes were horrible conversationalists, and this talent was not at all useful.
Another was that he could change his appearance. He categorized this as a talent, not as his usual magic, because he didn’t feel the tingling effect at all when it happened. The first times this happened were fully on accident (and he was pleased to realize, after a year of magic practice, that he never did anything accidental anymore if he could do it on purpose).
He thought the first instance was probably his hair growing back overnight, after Aunt Petunia gave him the mother of all awful haircuts, buzzing his head nearly bald but somehow leaving his fringe(!!) to cover up his forehead scar. Magic was really his savior, he thought, when he woke up to a full head of hair the next day. Petunia was not amused. The second time, Dudley barged in on him in the bathroom, and his hair went bright pink in embarrassment. Of course, his embarrassing moment turned into the promise of punishment for doing something freakish, and the hair quickly faded back to black. Dudley had a field day with that one, and Aunt Petunia was livid.
Getting it under control was a bit tricky though. Making this particular talent work on command took nearly till Harry’s eighth birthday.
He realized that the key to success was that he had to believe, without a doubt, that his appearance was exactly the way he visualized it. Like with the tingly magic, once he figured out the method, the possibilities were nearly endless. He could easily change his hair now, to be longer or shorter, different colored (he giggled maniacally at himself as a blond one day when nobody was around to hear), he could even smooth out his wild curls to be perfectly straight and limp or pull them even smaller and tighter and close to his head. He could do eye color, and eventually skin color (and he had another grand laugh at making himself Dursley-white). He nicked some magazines and even figured out, with careful study, how to change the contours of his face, so he could widen his jaw or add back the baby fat he was always too underfed to keep.
Unlike the snake talent, he recognized how incredibly useful the appearance talent was. He could disguise himself as someone else and even if he was caught, nobody would ever be able to recognize him as Harry Potter, delinquent nephew of the Dursley family. He would be free from them, at the very least. “Appearance talent” was a bit of a mouthful, even though Harry kept his system of magic firmly in the mental realm, so he nicknamed it his Faces. He resolved to make whatever Face he needed in order to survive on the streets.
Finally, as August drew to a close, eight-year-old Harry decided to make his move. Every year before the start of classes, the Dursley family had to take Dudley for his annual checkup (It was suspicious, Harry thought, that he himself had never once had a checkup. Wasn’t the NHS around for a reason?). Inevitably, the doctor would do something to offend precious Dudders’ sensibilities, by giving him shots or informing him of how fat he was. Therefore, checkup day also resulted in going out to lunch, and seeing a film, and getting ice cream, which made it an hours-long rigamarole in which Harry was home all alone. Short enough that he didn’t need to go to Mrs. Figg’s house to be watched, but long enough to make his break.
Harry listened for the rumbling of the car turning out of the driveway. He waited with bated breath for five whole minutes in case they forgot anything and came back. Finally, it was time.
Click. Harry unlocked his cupboard and rushed out.
He swept up the stairs and pulled the cord to get the attic steps down. In the attic, he fumbled around for a few minutes before locating the box of camping supplies. Uncle Vernon had taken Dudley on one disastrous camping trip two years ago, and all the equipment remained in nearly pristine condition in the attic. While his shrinking ability would not last for any significant amount of time (making it impossible for him to take the tent, which would have been really nice), he was able to stuff a duffle bag with a plastic tarp, a nice raincoat Dudley outgrew years ago, a hooded sweatshirt that was way too big for him but looked warm, a Swiss Army knife (score!), and a box of matches.
After replacing the attic stairs, he stopped briefly in Dudley’s room to nick the fifty pounds he had in his piggy bank, which he felt no guilt whatsoever for. He then returned to the ground floor and filled what space remained in his bag with his cleanest clothes, the battered copy of The Hobbit that he found in the library donation bin the other day, and some protein bars. He made himself a sandwich and washed it down with the first glass of milk he’d drank in years. All that remained, before he made his grand escape, was his new Face.
He examined himself in the bathroom mirror. Harry Potter’s face was a recognizable one. With his tanned (Indian? Pakistani? His Aunt certainly wouldn’t tell him, even if he had the gall to ask) skin and wild, dark hair, he stuck out like a sore thumb in Little Whinging. His eyes were a shocking green, and his cheekbones were harsher and pointier than any child’s ought to be, and his forehead scar was shaped quite like a lightning bolt. He decided to give himself a Face he nicknamed Gregory Dursley. ‘Gregory’ had pasty skin and dishwater-blond hair and brown eyes, and his face was both rounder and somehow rabbitier than before. His scar remained, unfortunately, but it was a lot more hidden against pale white skin. He was a wholly unmemorable boy, like a proper Dursley cousin should be.
Harry – no, Gregory, getting in character is important – snuck out the back door into the garden. He hopped the fence of Number 2 Privet Drive and made his way towards the main road. From there it was a short trek to the train station, where he purchased one ticket to Paddington Station in London. He boasted to the station manager about how he was meeting his friend from school in London and how his mum let him take the train all on his own, which seemed to allay any suspicion as to why a child with a duffle bag was going to London unaccompanied.
The train arrived. Harry took his seat. The train departed. As the suburban monotony of Surrey passed by outside his window, Harry let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He was free.