Disclaimer:
Harry Potter and all of its characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
I own nothing but the original characters I make.
“Dialogue”
‘Thoughts’
-Author notes-
A.N - Okay, so here is the first chapter of the new H.P fic. This one is about a young man from the real world who ended up inside a twisted version of Harry Potter.
Now, the story at the beginning may seem very sweet and wholesome, but let me warn you that it will get very dark.
This version of Harry Potter is not going to be quite as overpowering as my other ones, but he will get a few boons, so he can compete with the heavy hitters of this world.
I have not decided on the pairing yet; that is open for suggestions. -
Chapter 01 Wrong Bed, Wrong Cupboard
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
It wasn’t the sharp, clean sting of hospital disinfectant, the smell that had followed him through every waking hour for as long as he could remember.
It wasn’t the faint, sad scent of his own bedsheets, washed so many times they no longer held any smell at all.
No, this was different...this time, he could smell the scent of flowers. It was sweet and pleasant.
The second thing he noticed was the ceiling.
It was made of wooden planks, polished and varnished until they gleamed. A glass pendant lamp hung from the middle, catching the morning light and throwing tiny prisms across the walls. No flickering fluorescent tube. No water stain spreading like a map of a country he would never visit.
'Did I finally die?' he thought.
If this were the afterlife, the hospital chaplain had sold him a very poor story. Where were the clouds? The harps? The angels with their trumpets and their serene smiles? This looked like a bedroom. A nice bedroom.
Fancier than anything he had ever woken up to in his entire life.
He lay still for a long moment, the way you do when you’re not entirely sure you want to find out what’s waiting for you.
His brain felt thick and slow, like cold porridge left too long in the pan. He performed a slow, reluctant inventory of his situation, limb by limb, sense by sense.
He was lying on a comfortable bed that was far too large for him. His feet didn’t even come close to the footboard. A thick blanket covered him, soft as a cloud and smelling of lavender, and someone had tucked it around him with the kind of care that suggested they had done it a hundred times before.
He could hear a house waking up around him. Footsteps, the distant rattle of pipes, the creak of stairs settling. And somewhere below, the thin, rising whistle of a kettle beginning to boil.
Eventually, he chose to sit up.
“Wow,” he breathed.
The bedroom was enormous. Generously enormous, in the way that suggested it was either the master bedroom or simply the biggest room in a rather large house.
A desk stood against one wall, scattered with a few pencils and a half-finished drawing of what looked like a dragon.
A wardrobe stood against another, its doors slightly ajar. A bookshelf held a handful of books standing crookedly between two heavy ceramic
bookends shaped like owls.
A glass of water sat on the bedside table, still full, left there the night before by someone who had been thinking of him. The walls were painted a warm, creamy color. A football poster was stuck to the back of the door.
None of it was his.
“Where am I?” he whispered. “Huh?”
His voice came out wrong. Too light and high-pitched, like the voice of a child, with none of the rough edges he had grown used to hearing in his own throat.
He raised a hand to touch the top of his head and stopped.
He was shocked while staring at his own fingers as if they belonged to someone else.
Because in a very real and deeply unsettling sense, they did. They were too small. The hands of a child no older than ten, slight and bony, with nails that needed cutting and a faded ink stain on the side of the right index finger.
He turned them over, then back again, staring at them with disbelief.
Then he caught sight of himself in the mirror on the wardrobe door.
He gasped and went very still.
The face that looked back at him was not his face. It was narrow and pale, framed by a messy explosion of dark hair that seemed to have given up on any particular direction sometime around birth and never reconsidered.
Round glasses, slightly too large, sat crookedly on a small nose. And the eyes...the eyes were very green. Bright and strange and far too alert for a child just out of bed.
He knew that face.
He knew it the way you know the face of someone you have seen so many times across so many years that it has become almost like a face from your own memory.
He had seen it on book covers and film posters, on lunchboxes and pencil cases, and the battered paperbacks that made the rounds in the children’s ward of the hospital where he had basically grown up.
He had seen it drawn in the margins of exercise books by children who had never met him but who shared the same long, slow days. He had seen it reproduced in countless variations across fifteen years of cultural history.
He pressed two fingers to his forehead, just above and to the right.
The scar was there. Thin and pale, smooth and slightly raised, shaped unmistakably like a bolt of lightning.
“Okay,” he said aloud, to no one in particular. “I have to be dreaming. That’s the only explanation. I’m dreaming.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed that was not his bed, in the body that was not his body, in the largest bedroom of a house he had never been inside, and took a very long, very slow breath.
'Alright,' he thought. Let’s think about this. You are...were...a seventeen-year-old boy named Daniel.
You have spent more of your life in a hospital bed than out of it.
You have read the Harry Potter books seven times, watched the films twice as many, and spent countless hours arguing about wand woods and house points on internet forums.
And now you appear to be inside one of those books. Or inside the body of the boy who lives in them. One of the two.
The situation was beyond ridiculous. How could he be here?. It made no sense.
He found a school uniform in the wardrobe. Grey trousers, a white shirt, a jumper of soft blue wool that had been folded with care.
His shoes were by the door, neatly paired and polished to a dull shine.
Someone had put a glass of water by the bed. Someone had left the curtains partly open so the room wouldn’t be dark when he woke.
'Whoever these people are,' he thought, 'they’re looking after me. Looking after Harry.'
Which again made no sense either, because the Harry Potter he knew all so well was a lonely kid abused by his only remaining family.
He quietly got dressed, since he couldn't just stay in pajamas any longer. The clothes fit him perfectly.
He looked around the wardrobe and couldn't find any old and oversized clothes like the ones he would expect this boy to have.
In the stories, Harry had grown up skinny and neglected, wearing Dudley’s cast-offs and sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs.
These clothes, however, were clean and whole. No patches, no fraying cuffs. No signs of having been handed down through several less-careful owners.
That was another thing that didn’t fit.
He was still turning it over in his mind when, from somewhere below, the kettle finished its whistle, and a woman’s voice called up the stairs with a melodious whistle.
The hallway was carpeted in beige and smelled faintly of furniture polish and some kind of flowery scent he could not identify...lavender again, or perhaps lilac.
Framed photographs lined the walls in neat rows, and he slowed as he passed them, scanning each one with sharp, careful eyes.
He found himself in nearly all of them.
Not himself, not really, but Harry. A small, dark-haired, spectacled child, photographed across what appeared to be several years.
At Christmas, pulling a cracker with a large, moustached man. At what looked like a seaside holiday, squinting cheerfully against the sun with a bucket and spade in one hand. In a garden, sitting on the shoulders of that same large man and gripping the top of the man’s head for balance while both of them roared with laughter.
Family photographs. Happy memories.
But those were not his. None of this was his.
He stood in front of the garden photograph for a moment longer than the others. The man was unmistakably Vernon Dursley, large, broad, and pink-faced, exactly as the books had described him. But he was beaming. Not the tight, grudging smile of a man tolerating the presence of an unwanted child for the sake of appearances. No...this was a real smile. The smile of someone who was genuinely and without complication.
Something cold and heavy settled in the pit of his stomach.
This is wrong, he thought. This is all wrong.
A bit reluctant but also deeply curious to find out more, he continued down the hall.
He smelled the kitchen before he reached it. The scent of butter and toast and eggs, the deep and wholesome smell of a properly cooked breakfast that someone had taken the time and care to make properly.
It was the kind of smell that made you realise you were hungry, even if you hadn’t known it a moment before.
He stopped in the doorway.
The woman at the stove had her back to him. She was tall and thin, with a long neck and large, capable hands. She wore an apron printed with small yellow flowers, and she was humming to herself, a soft, old tune he didn’t recognise, while moving between the hob and the counter with the ease of someone entirely at home in the space.
Then she turned around.
His brain, which had been managing the impossible with admirable composure up until this point, performed a sudden and complete stop.
He knew that face.
He had not recognised it in the photographs because the angles had been wrong, the smiles frozen, the resolution of his memory imperfect. But face to face in a bright kitchen, with the morning sun streaming through the window and the smell of bacon fat in the air, there was absolutely no mistaking her.
The long neck, sharp features, the pale, thin-lipped mouth, and the eyes, green, just like the ones he had seen in the wardrobe mirror, just like the ones that had stared back at him from the pages of a dozen books and a dozen films.
This was Petunia Dursley. Also known as Harry Potter’s evil aunt.
So now he had seen the reflection of a boy who looked exactly like Harry Potter, a large man who looked exactly like Vernon Dursley, and someone who could not be mistaken by anyone for anyone other than Petunia Dursley.
If this were a dream, it was extremely detailed and realistic.
He raised his hand to his face and gave himself the hardest pinch he could muster.
“Ouch!”
“Harry?” She quickly turned around, her face filling with concern for a second before she spotted him standing in the doorway.
Petunia Dursley was looking at him with a warm smile, a spatula in one hand, and saying, “You’re up early, love. Are you feeling all right? You’ve gone very pale.”
The realisation did not arrive gently. It arrived all at once, like a door blown open by a gale-force wind.
Every single thing he had experienced for the past twenty minutes snapped into sudden, vivid focus.
The scar, the green eyes, the photographs...the name of the street, which he had not yet seen but knew with absolute certainty, would be Privet Drive.
This was not a dream. He was truly in the world of Harry Potter.
And if that was not enough, he was in the body of Harry Potter himself.
He opened his mouth and closed it again. No words came out. His throat felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool.
“Sit down, dear,” Petunia said, already turning back to the stove and reaching for a plate, doing the automatic, practised thing that people do when they have been looking after someone for long enough that care has become instinct. “Breakfast is nearly ready. You can tell me what’s wrong once you’ve eaten. Nothing ever seems quite as bad on a full stomach.”
He sat down at the kitchen table without thinking, his legs moving of their own accord. He watched Petunia finish preparing the food, moving between the hob and the counter with ease.
Not that any of this made sense to him in the first place, but… if this was the world of Harry Potter, and he was Harry himself, then why was Petunia being so nice to him? Where was the shouting? The cold stares? The cupboard under the stairs?
Where did the evil aunt go?.
Vernon Dursley was already at the table, hidden behind a newspaper, reading in the unhurried way of a man who had nowhere to be until nine o’clock and saw no reason to rush.
He had completely missed the man when he sat down because he had been completely focused on Petunia. But now the newspaper lowered, and a large, pink face peered over the top of it.
“All right, Harry?” said Vernon in a soft tone.
“Fine,” he responded simply, not wanting to attract more attention to himself than necessary.
'Keep your head down,' he told himself. 'Observe and don’t draw attention.'
Vernon made a noncommittal noise, something between a grunt and a hum, that managed to convey both “if you say so” and “I’m here if you’re not” without using any further words. Then he went back to his paper.
Dudley arrived a few minutes later, storming down the stairs. He was big for his age, not fat exactly, but solid, like a boy who ate well and played hard.
He dropped into the chair across from Harry, reached immediately for the toast rack, and said, through an already-full mouth: “Mum said we might go to the park later if it doesn’t rain.”
“Mm,” responded Harry.
“You could bring your books,” Dudley added, with the magnanimous air of someone offering a genuine concession. “I don’t mind.”
Petunia set a plate in front of Harry. Eggs, fried until the edges were just crisp. Two thick slices of toast, buttered and cut into triangles. A grilled tomato, still glistening. A glass of orange juice, fresh-squeezed, with little bits of pulp floating like tiny golden islands.
Then she gently touched his shoulder briefly as she passed.
“Come on, love,” she said. “Eat before it cools down.”
He looked down at the plate.
His mind was thinking about cupboards. About hand-me-down clothes with fraying cuffs. About meals that were always slightly smaller than everyone else’s. About a boy who grew up knowing, with absolute certainty, that he was not quite wanted.
This was not the Harry Potter tale he had read about or watched unfold on the big screen. This was something else entirely.
None of it was right. None of it was the world he knew.
And yet here he was. In Harry Potter’s body. In Harry Potter’s house. With Harry Potter’s family...a family that, in every way that mattered, was not the family from the books.
And yet, for some reason, this gave him a very bad feeling.
What kind of twisted reality did I end up in? he thought.