Chapter Text
Hadrian James Potter was a quiet boy.
This was not entirely unusual, as young Harry had witnessed the violent murder of his parents at the tender age of one, and that sort of thing does not often give a child an inclination to laughter – but it was unsettling nonetheless.
Especially because Harry’s quiet nature did not abate as he grew. In fact, by the time Harry was five, he had spoken a grand total of eighteen words in his life, twelve of which had been variations of ‘mum’ and ‘dad’. The other six had been compiled into a single sentence on the night of his parents’ death, unheard to anyone but the corpse of his mother on the floor who, unfortunately for Harry, had very little to say in response. Those six words would not leave Harry’s lips again for over a decade, and until that day, they would remain a secret to all but Harry himself.
Vernon and Petunia Dursley did not appreciate silence. Silence lead to all sorts of odd things, like creativity and imagination, and if there was anything the Dursleys hated, it was things that were odd. Perhaps this is why they hated little Harry from the day he was placed on their doorstep, just an infant, or perhaps it was something else altogether.
(For Petunia Dursley, it was a combination of several things: her sister’s eyes in an unfamiliar face; memories of strangeness and wickedness in the form of flowers blossoming in winter under her sister’s touch; and of course, that unnatural silence that was so awful and odd that it could cause hatred of even an innocent.)
(For Vernon Dursley, it was a lot of other things, involving a lot of words which should not be spoken in front of children, even silent ones.)
However, because of a very old man named Albus Dumbledore (and, indirectly, the imprisonment of a man named Sirius Black and the wild grief of a man named Remus Lupin), Hadrian James Potter had nowhere else to go after his parents’ deaths, and so he was placed with a man and a woman who hated him, and a child whose screeching almost made up for Harry’s silence – and there Harry stayed.
Perhaps if Harry had been raised in different circumstances, he would have grown up to be a very different man.
But he wasn’t, and so he didn’t.