Chapter 210: The Dream
When he was eleven, Lily Potter brought Harry to Diagon Alley ahead of time.
At Garrick Ollivander's shop, he was fitted with a specially crafted training wand.
After all—
as the son of the saviors of the British wizarding world, he was entitled to such privileges.
Every Wednesday at nine in the morning, Lily would take him to the trainee ward at St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries to observe healing magic.
In Ward Five, an elderly Auror always entertained him by conjuring transforming bandages that twisted and reshaped themselves into amusing forms.
Sometimes, James Potter would take Harry along to his Auror training sessions.
In the Ministry's combat chambers, Harry learned how to use simple spells—like the Levitation Charm—to counter dark wizards.
Everyone he met treated him with warmth and respect.
No one ever refused him anything.
Until that day.
James saw him off at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.
Harry boarded the train with ease, then turned and waved goodbye to his parents.
And then—
in the very next instant—
fire fell from the sky.
Raging. Twisted. Devouring.
Everything before his eyes shattered into ash.
The dream shifted.
Suddenly, he was back in the cupboard under the stairs at the Dursleys'.
A harsh knocking echoed outside.
When no answer came, the door was yanked open—
Petunia Dursley stood there, and the six o'clock morning sunlight stabbed straight into his eyes.
A crushed birthday cake box—flattened by Dudley Dursley—blocked the cupboard's vent.
Rotting cream, tangled with cobwebs, dripped slowly… landing on the fresh wounds along Harry's skin—
bruises left two days ago, when Dudley had lashed him with a bicycle chain.
"Dudders needs someone to clean his gym."
Vernon Dursley's booming laughter filled the air.
Harry was shoved forward, forced to his knees on the sticky floor, littered with bits of chewed gum.
And yet—
his fingers still remembered the feeling from the dream…
the way James had guided his grip on a broomstick.
"So… it was all just a dream…"
Harry murmured under his breath.
The Dursleys had a transparent storage box made specifically for Harry. Inside it were all his meager belongings—threadbare clothes, his glasses, and Dudley's discarded toys—locked away at all times, the key permanently hooked onto Vernon's belt.
Whenever Harry needed to change clothes, he had to stand in front of them and recite The Code of Normal Human Behavior, a fifty-page booklet written by Petunia. It included rules like "Do not maintain eye contact with birds for more than three seconds" and "Forks must be held strictly vertical."
They had also drawn up a Resident Management Charter for him, framed in gilt and hung at the bend of the staircase. Among its many harsh clauses was one that limited his time in the bathroom to exactly three minutes and fifteen seconds.
Dudley, on the other hand, had his own "Good Boy Points Card." Each bite of vegetables earned him more time on his game console. Harry had never been given anything like that.
Last week, Harry had picked up an eraser Dudley had thrown away—only to be accused of stealing it. He had barely managed two words of protest before being punished: he was made to clean every garbage bin along the entire street.
Whenever Marge Dursley came to visit, she conducted surprise inspections. If she found even a speck of dirt under his fingernails, Harry would be forced to scrub every crack between the garden tiles—with a toothbrush.
Vernon even designed a special gray hood for him. The brim was sewn with a thirty-centimeter veil, and Harry was required to wear it whenever he went outside.
"This is to prevent passersby from being frightened by that ugly scar of yours," Vernon would explain at neighborhood meetings, proudly displaying it. "Like putting a muzzle on a diseased stray dog."
Marge went even further—she had trained her Rottweiler to bare its teeth at Harry whenever he passed by, sometimes even lunging at him.
Sunday dinners were the Dursleys' weekly "Civility Assessment." Harry had to use a specially prepared set of utensils: a knife with no edge, a fork with gaps too wide to pick up food, and a spoon drilled through with holes at the bottom.
Vernon would suddenly yank his chair away mid-meal, calling it "balance training," forcing Harry to struggle to stay upright on an unstable stool.
Petunia had her own peculiar obsession. She collected the corn cobs Dudley had chewed clean, storing them in glass jars, and made Harry sand them down into uniform sticks.
"These will be decorations for the garden," she would say casually, wiping a cup. "The neighbors will admire how elegantly we reuse waste."
When Harry's fingers were pierced by splinters and he ruined one of the cobs, Vernon announced during a "family meeting" that his shower time that week would be reduced to two minutes.
At school parent meetings, Vernon provided teachers with a fabricated Record of Harry's Abnormal Behavior, listing hundreds of invented conditions, including claims that he required daily sedatives to control "antisocial tendencies." In reality, they gave him nothing but vitamin pills.
Whenever Harry tried to protest, Petunia would immediately produce carefully staged "home treatment videos," in which she appeared tearful, clutching psychology books, insisting they had never given up on saving him.
On Dudley's eleventh birthday, the Dursleys hosted a "Dudley Growth Exhibition," replacing Harry's baby photos with pictures of chimpanzees. At the center stood an enlarged copy of the letter Petunia had once sent to Lily to cut ties, with Marge Dursley having scrawled beside it in red marker: "Delusions of a mentally ill woman."
Whenever Harry tried to approach, Vernon would shove him away, often hurling insults at him.
Eventually, things grew even worse. Harry was locked inside the metal storage shed in the backyard. Rain seeped through rusted seams, soaking the small "Gryffindor" patch he had secretly stitched into his lining.
Vernon turned the television volume up to maximum, a BBC report about unusual owl migrations in Scotland blaring in the background. "Monsters belong in cages!" he shouted.
Petunia tossed half a moldy loaf of bread out the window, deliberately knocking over the tin Harry had set out to collect rainwater.
When lightning struck the fir tree in the yard, Harry thought he heard Lily calling his name through the storm. He pounded frantically against the metal walls, carving out distress signals the way he had once learned at Grimmauld Place.
But when morning came, the markings had somehow turned into crude red letters sprayed by Dudley: FREAK—DIE.
On his eleventh birthday, no owl came.
Harry curled up inside the stifling cupboard, sweat soaking through his clothes, his eyes fixed on the tally marks he had scratched into the wall with his fingernails. For years, only one thought had kept him going—that when he turned eleven, someone would come and take him away to the magical world. Without that hope, he might have already broken.
Dudley deliberately waved an ice cream in front of him, the slow drip of melting cream making Harry swallow hard.
Vernon tossed a stack of flyers into his face. "Next year you'll still be scrubbing floors here. Don't expect us to take you to the zoo."
At midnight, Harry pressed his ear to the cold floor. The sound of water rushing through the pipes almost resembled the roar of the Hogwarts Express. From Dudley's room next door, the noise of his video games echoed like coins clinking in Diagon Alley.
But in the end, no one came. No Rubeus Hagrid knocked on the door.