Work Text:
Harry thought his childhood was decently normal. Sure he was an orphan, which was little different than the people he knew, but plenty of kids were orphans so it didn’t make his childhood abnormal in his opinion. And, yeah, he was raised by his aunt and uncle because of that, but it made sense why he was when you take the whole “dead parents” thing into account.
His childhood was a little difficult, sure, but it was fine. Harry managed it fine, he came out of it fine, and, really, it’s hard to see anything terrible about the “before Hogwarts” years when he had some dude actively trying to kill him for most of his adolescence.
Sure, Harry was more terrified of his aunt and uncle and cousin than he was Voldemort, but that’s just because Tom was lame.
Powerful and scary, but nothing compared to his fear of Vernon and Dudley’s fists and aunt Petunia’s frying pan and cutting words.
But yeah, anyways, Harry thought his childhood was normal.
Not like anyone had ever told him it wasn’t.
“Why’d you have bars on your window, Harry?” Ron asks after both of them are lying down in Ron’s room, the sun just starting to peek out over the horizon with how late into the night it is.
“My aunt and uncle didn’t want me sending or receiving mail I think,” he shrugs, staring at the blurry image of Ron in the bed across from him, “I don’t really know, they didn’t explain it to me.”
“Have they done that before?”
“Put bars on my window?” He frowns, not really sure how to answer since this is technically the first time that he’s even had a window to put bars on, “not really.”
Ron doesn’t say anything for a while, so Harry closes his eyes to try and sleep thinking the conversation is done before his friend speaks up again.
“Mum and dad are worried about you, you know.”
It’s so quiet he almost doesn’t hear it, but he does from years of having to strain his hearing at risk of missing instructions, and Harry feels his chest tighten in anxiety at the idea anyone is worried about him.
“I don’t know why, this is all pretty normal for me.”
Harry opens his eyes and sees Ron already looking at him, a frown on his face.
“I think that’s why they’re worried about you, Harry.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that, so Harry just pretends he fell asleep and soon enough he hears Ron sigh and roll over.
It’s the first time anyone has ever said they were worried about him, and Harry didn’t understand why.
The first couple of weeks after summer ended and he returned to Hogwarts were always the most difficult eating wise since his stomach wasn’t used to it.
The amount, the richness and diversity of the food, and the multiple times of day set aside solely for eating where he was also allowed to partake? Yeah, no, after months where he often only ate once a day, if even that, and his diet was limited to primarily scraps and bland end slices of bread, he always struggled to eat for a while after returning.
He’d become a professional at pretending to eat a full plate for each meal until he can manage to make his body reused to eating again, so much so that his friends hardly even noticed anymore that Harry primarily just ate about half a plate worth of food total each day, slowly working his way up. Most of the time he’s eating three full meals by the Halloween feast and does so until the last month of school.
The last month is the hardest because he has to retrain his body to not eat as much, slowly working his way down from full plates to a couple of bites a day in preparation for the Dursleys.
But that is still months away and right now it is only late September, where he’s eating about a fourth of a plate every meal, and so Harry is happy and feeling pretty good.
“Eat this.”
Well, okay, his friends almost never noticed.
It’s in between classes; him, Hermione, and Ron walking to transfiguration from potions.
Harry blinks in confusion at the apple being held out to him, Hermione looking at him with a raised eyebrow and a look that tells him she’s not going to drop this until he not just takes but also eats the apple.
“I’m okay, ‘mione,” he tries, but she just rolls her eyes and holds it out more.
“I know you ate less today than yesterday and I don’t want you to get behind on getting used to eating,” she grabs his hand and places the apple in it, “so I grabbed this for you from lunch and I will be making sure you get the right amount of food for dinner today.”
Harry looks at the apple, “I didn’t realize you knew that’s what I was doing.”
She frowns, wrapping an arm around his shoulders as they walk.
“Course I do, you do it every time you return from…from your aunt and uncles,” her voice is slightly pinched at the end, face contorted in an expression that makes her look upset before it’s schooled over, “but no matter, you eat the apple.”
Harry smiles, “thanks ‘mione!”
Now that Harry and Draco aren’t at each other's throats anymore, they’ve found that they actually get along decently well. Sure, they aren’t best friends by any means, and there’s definitely still some animosity that will probably never go away given their history, but most of the time they can be friendly and even semi-enjoy each other's company.
Most of the time they spend together alone is limited to the eighth-year common room, specifically after everyone has gone to sleep after a night of all of them drinking and chatting and him and Draco are the last ones still down there. It’s during one of these nights, where the two of them are a couple drinks in and the air is relaxed, that Draco voices the question.
“Why do your fingers look like that?” Draco asks, eyebrows narrowed with a frown as he gestures vaguely with his bottle towards Harry’s hands. Harry looks down at his crooked and healed wrong fingers, shrugging.
“Broken bones that didn’t heal right.”
Draco’s frown deepens in confusion.
“Why didn’t the healer heal them right?” He asks, and Harry just shrugs again, bringing his own bottle to his lips to take a drink before answering.
“I grew up with muggles, remember?” Draco nods, one of those facts about Harry that he’s learned recently since they’ve been talking more, “my fingers were easy to break and my aunt and uncle didn’t want to waste money going to the doctor, which are muggle healers basically, so I’d just have to let them heal on their own and they often didn’t since I wasn’t allowed to actually care for them.”
Draco just looks more confused.
“What do you mean you ‘weren’t allowed to care for them’?”
“Oh, you know, like I wasn’t allowed to stop using my fingers even if they were broken so they weren’t able to actually heal, I think Madam Pomfrey healed a couple when I first got to Hogwarts after each summer since my cousin and uncle would often re-break them, but most just healed wrong so now they just…look like this,” he says, for the first time feeling a bit self-conscious about his fingers.
Draco’s face shifts between multiple expressions before he eventually settles on a vaguely confused but accepting expression, leaning back in his chair and taking a sip of his drink. His eyes flick between Harry’s face and his fingers for a while in consideration but eventually he just shrugs and looks away, obviously thinking about something.
Neither one talks again until Draco finishes the rest of his drink a few minutes later and gets up, bidding Harry a goodnight that he returns with a short hum of acknowledgement.
Harry stays down in the common room for a bit longer even after finishing his own drink, just staring down at the bottle held in his damaged and crooked fingers and thinking over the conversation without knowing what to really make of it.
Weird.
Theodore Nott was the greatest, but also most unexpected, thing about Harry’s life post-Voldemort.
Prior to their so-called “eighth year,” Harry barely knew Theo existed. He was a loner and therefore didn’t really hang around Draco and his lackeys in their younger Hogwarts years, so Harry had never had much of a chance to interact with him in any capacity. Theo was either by himself or occasionally with Blaise Zabini or Daphne Greengrass, two people Harry also didn’t know much about before this year since he was a little preoccupied avoiding death.
It started with the two being assigned as roommates, a matchup Harry had originally been iffy about but ended up working out perfectly for one very specific reason.
Theo didn’t give a shit about Harry defeating Voldemort.
Their dorm room became the one place where Harry didn’t have to act. He didn’t have to be the chosen one and, though he loves his friends dearly, it was the one place Harry wasn’t being bombarded with flashbacks of wartime because, well, he didn’t have any memories with Theo and therefore there were no negative associations with him.
It was freeing.
Theo left him alone and Harry got to feel like he wasn’t a celebrity, a win-win situation for both of them.
Until, of course, things started to shift.
Lingering glances when the other was changing, catching the other staring while the two were in the room reading or studying or just relaxing, and a growing tension everyone else could also feel.
They began talking, helping each other study, and sitting together instead of separately. Theo started seeking out Harry and Harry started feeling at home with Theo and somehow the two of them just blended into each other's lives seamlessly, almost like they’ve always been there.
It was during one of their quiet nights together, Harry tucked comfortably in Theo’s lap while the other boy read a book, that Harry first noticed them.
Their relationship was still new and so any intimacy was still mostly limited to fully clothed cuddling or making out. Which was fine, something they had previously talked about with a mutual agreement to wait, but it meant Harry hadn’t really ever seen most of his boyfriends body, his arms in particular, since Theo almost exclusively wore long sleeves when in front of people.
But a small bit of his wrists were exposed now, and Harry stiffened upon noticing the uniform, raised scars that covered his wrists.
Theo hummed a question upon Harry’s body stiffening up, looking over to him in worry and breathing out a short “oh” when he noticed what Harry was looking at.
“They’re from my father,” he says, dropping the book beside him and pulling up his right sleeve to reveal the scars going from the bottom of his wrist all the way to his elbow, “his… preferred method of training me was by hitting my arms or the back of my legs, mostly with a cane, but occasionally he’d use something else depending on the day.”
“My aunt would do that to me sometimes, but she’d use a metal ruler on the back of my hands or some kind of cooking utensil when I’d try and sneak food when I wasn’t allowed to eat,” Harry says without thinking, gently running his finger over Theo’s scars, “but those didn’t leave scars like this, I don’t think I have any scars from my childhood now that I think about it, it was mostly just a lot of bruises from my uncle and cousin.”
Theo stiffens at his words, and Harry wonders if he did something wrong before he hears Theo say something in a voice Harry has never heard but sounds like a whole host of questions just got answered for him and all the pieces of a puzzle were put in their correct places.
“You were abused.”
It’s the first time anyone has ever said those words to him directly. He knows people have alluded to them before, looking back he knows that’s what they were doing, but no one has ever been able to look Harry “boy-who-lived” Potter in the eyes and tell him he had been abused before now.
Before Theo.
“No, I…I mean my aunt and uncle weren’t great, sure, but it…it wasn’t that ,” Harry tries, though he’s not sure if he’s trying to convince Theo or himself more.
“Do you think it was abuse when my father hit me? When he’d tell me I was a worthless son and that he’d rather see me dead if I couldn’t be better?” Theo asks, and Harry sits up but doesn’t get far before Theo grabs his hands, holding him still but not tight enough that Harry couldn’t get away if he really tried.
“Well yeah, but it’s not the same,” Harry tells him, voice cracking as memories of his childhood flash through his mind and Theo’s claim repeats in his ear. Theo frowns, eyes softening in a way that makes Harry feel nauseous, turning to face away from his boyfriend to try and avoid the attention.
“Why is it abuse against me, but not when it was against you?”
See, that’s what Harry both loves and hates about Theo, the fact that he is so straightforward with him. There’s no tiptoeing, no avoiding the issue, just straightforward questions that get Harry thinking and make it impossible to just ignore his problems until they go away.
“It…it’s just different,” Harry says, and even he knows he sounds pathetic, but Theo’s expression does not waver as he gently tilts Harry’s head to be looking at him.
“It’s not different, but if you’re not ready then we don’t need to talk about it right now.”
There’s no anger in Theo’s voice, no accusations or underlying guilt tripping, but Harry still feels bad and like it’s a thing to be ashamed of that he doesn’t feel ready to talk about it right now. He shifts until he’s back curled up against Theo, tucking his head under Theo’s chin and bending his knees over his thighs. Theo’s arms wrap around Harry’s waist and he feels a kiss being placed against his head, fingers rubbing softly up and down his back. They sit together in silence, Theo not picking up his book again as the two of them just try and find comfort in each other's presence.
“Are you angry at me?”
“No,” Theo tells him, voice steady and holding no question, “I’m not angry with you.”
“I’m sorry I’m not…I’m sorry that I’m not ready to accept it, I guess.”
“It’s okay, it’s a difficult thing to accept…it took me many years to allow myself to think about it like that, I thought it was just…normal discipline, because for me it was my normal.”
“Yeah,” Harry curls up a little tighter, “it feels like it was just normal, but it…but it wasn’t.”
Theo nods, “yeah, people aren’t supposed to hurt you like that.”
“Oh.”
Maybe his childhood wasn’t as normal as he thought.