Chapter Text
July, 1995.
Not long after the fateful night of Cedric’s death and someone else’s resurrection, Harry had begun feeling… weird.
Not ill, precisely. More like - itchy.
At first he’d attributed it to the beginnings of what Madam Pomfrey had patiently explained to his House back in second year - hair growing in places it hadn’t before did sound like an itchy experience - but when he looked at his armpits, or the juncture where his thighs met his torso, there wasn’t anything, just like there hadn’t been a year ago, when Harry had first started to think he was ‘developing’ rather late.
Well, if it wasn’t puberty, then the question remained: what was making him itchy? Harry pondered the matter over the first days of July, sweating under the sun in Number Four’s back garden. He caught himself scratching at his arms, his shoulders, his back; it was worse where his clothes were tighter to the skin, so he got some initial relief by tying Dudley’s baggy shorts looser at the waist, tucking his T-shirt into the waistband to hold it up, but it wasn’t a perfect solution. His arms, legs, and face, after all, had nothing on them, and they still itched, albeit to a lesser degree.
Was it the laundry detergent? He checked the container one afternoon, even comparing it against the empty one in the rubbish bin, but they were identical down to the ingredients list, and washing his clothes without detergent didn’t seem to make a difference either.
Ultimately, trying not to scratch his itchy skin proved a futile effort, and by the third day Harry gave in and indulged in dragging his work-blunted nails over the length of his legs, especially at night, chasing the fleeting satisfaction of the act until he fell asleep. He’d expected to find dried blood under his fingernails in the morning, and red scoring along his calves and ankles, or around his waist, where he’d itched the most - but examination upon awakening showed nothing of the sort, only that he felt better. The once-itchy patches might have been a little shinier, maybe, with the new skin exposed, but that was it, as far as he could see (which wasn’t far: it wasn’t as though his glasses’ prescription had been updated recently).
So he went for it, scratching the last itchy patches on his legs and over his belly. New places started to itch the day after: the nape of his neck, the back of his ears, the juncture of his neck and shoulders. On the fifth evening, while putting away the gardening tools in the Dursleys’ shed, Harry discovered that the shed’s unpainted brick interior walls made for an immensely satisfying scratching post, one which cleared up the itching on his shoulder with less than a few minutes of rubbing against it. Knowing the Dursleys wouldn’t come looking for him, he closed the shed door, stripped off his shirt, and spent a good half-hour relieving the itching on his shoulders and back.
As days became a week, he at last got a real itch on his arms, and that was when something much weirder became apparent.
The scars on his arms - the basilisk bite, the ugly slash from Wormtail’s dagger, the old stripes on his back from Vernon’s belt - were all disappearing once the itch was gone.
Okay, Harry thought, this has to be some kind of magic.
He emphatically was not complaining - not when he’d had to put so much work into hiding the scars on his back at Hogwarts, lest he be asked questions he didn’t want to answer. Harry gladly sanded away (in a sense) every last trace of his early life in Surrey, smiling at what he could see of his reflection in the cracked mirror hung in the back of his wardrobe, behind the piles of Dudley’s old toys. Part of him was a little annoyed to lose the basilisk bite scar - that one had had a cool story to it - but eh. Whatever.
The itching continued to move over the following days. It crept up his jaw, over his cheeks, across his nose, over his eyelids - and that last area proved the most bothersome: he’d found an old rag to rub at his eyelids with, but it took four nights to finally get the itch to go away. Only then, with the slight shine to his new skin reaching the top of his nose, over his eyebrows, did Harry begin to wonder what would happen to his scar. Would it, too, be polished away?
(Because it did feel like polishing, he’d decided - no better word for the lingering gleam to his skin wherever the urge to scratch had been satisfied. The parts of his face he’d polished almost glowed in the moonlight, making his reflection seem at once stranger and more familiar-)
Preemptive scratching, Harry had already learned, did nothing. He resolved to wait until it felt ready.
As if his body had sensed his impatience, though, the itching moved to unexpected places: the backs of his knees, his palms, his elbows, his bare feet. Harry had accidentally bleached his feet before, when he was much younger; there had been a burning sensation he’d suffered through, locked in the cupboard, while Petunia ignored his requests to be let out, and the next day, the rough bottoms had started to peel. This time, there were no chemical irritants, and Harry was fascinated to see the calluses come off in several large flakes, rather than the vaguely shiny dust he’d finally noticed accumulating against the bricks in the shed. Underneath was that same gleaming skin as he’d uncovered everywhere else, just slightly tougher than the fine, soft texture of his polished arms and legs. He got between his toes that night, and the next day attended to his cuticles and under his nails with the old rag, and only then, when the entire rest of his body had acquired the polished glimmer he was growing fond of, did Harry finally feel the welcome itch starting on his forehead, from his temples across his brow, and over his scar.
On the thirteenth day of Harry’s curious transformation, he awoke to the most awful sensation of his eyeballs itching. Blind groping about for some way to scratch that let him discover a tiny bit of unpolished skin in the outer corners of each eye, which, when he picked at it, seemed to - eugh - peel away at each eyeball. The relief was shortly followed by him retching into the bathroom sink - ignoring Petunia’s screeching from downstairs about him taking too long, hurry up and make breakfast, boy - and then discovering, to his utter fascination, that he could see.
As in, without his glasses.
“What the fuck,” Harry muttered under his breath, looking up into the bathroom mirror-
“What the fuck,” he repeated, more fervently, because with clear vision he could see what his blurred vision hadn’t: the real source of the ‘shine’ he’d thought he was seeing before.
He had scales.
Not just on his face - he had scales everywhere. They caught the light as seamless as satin, lending a nigh-unnatural smoothness to his face; Harry had the passing thought that he probably would never need to learn to shave. Thank Merlin my eyebrows didn’t disappear, he thought. Or my hair.
He gave a last swipe of the face towel across his forehead, gathering up the last patches of scales he’d missed yesterday, and worked up the nerve to see what had happened to his scar.
It was faded, but not completely gone, which would have been very confusing for his friends. Would have been very confusing for Harry, now he thought about it. He couldn’t imagine what he’d look like without it at this point in his life-
“Boy! Get down here this instant!”
“Ugh,” Harry grumbled, and made his way downstairs.