"You had your aunt and uncle…."
"You know what those people did to me!" Harry exploded suddenly, jumping to his feet and staring up at them both furiously. "You saw the marks on my body; you knew what they did to me during the summers. How dare you stand there and say that I had them to love me and care for me when you knew that they never did!"
"It was only for a few weeks, then you came to mine for the summer." Ron tried to tell him.
"You say that as if it's alright. Oh, you only have to put up with being beaten and starved for a few weeks, you can handle that, it's alright. It's not!" Harry shouted. "It's not alright, it has never been alright! How dare you try to diminish what they did to me! How dare you make light of it and say that it was only for a few weeks when you knew damn well that Dumbledore was going to keep me there all summer this year! It doesn't matter if it was for only one day, I never wanted to go back there and I'd see those people dead for what they did to me!"
Harry was panting like a wounded animal when he finished and his ears were ringing from his own shouts. He could feel his hammering heart in his throat and the blood rushing through his veins as he glared at the two people that he had trusted to always stand by his side. The two people who had just told him that he wasn't worthy of a loving home and had told him that they didn't want to be friends with him anymore just because he'd been adopted into a family that didn't treat him like a slave and a punching bag.
"If you don't leave now, I'll curse you until your own mothers can't recognise your faces." Draco promised coldly. "Harry?"
"Go. Now." He said in splintered fragments as he tried to regain his composure and bottle up all that cold, icy anger that had flared so quickly and so easily within him with the merest provocation.
"You three, leave too." Draco said to Daphne, Pansy, and Blaise a few moments later, after the compartment door had been slammed shut.
They didn't argue, they just got up and left, closing the door behind them again. Harry didn't see if they went the same way as Ron and Hermione or not, he didn't care right at that moment as he collapsed back into his seat.
"Beaten and starved?" Draco questioned him immediately, once the compartment door was closed again and they were alone. "Something that you forgot to mention to us, Potter?"
Harry averted his gaze, looking out of the window as he chewed on his lip. Draco moved to sit next to him and he physically turned Harry to face him.
"Do not make me tell father that you're keeping secrets, because he will get it out of you and it'll be better for you if you just tell me now, so that I can inform father and he can act accordingly, rather than having him get the information from you himself. Now, tell me, what did those filthy muggles do to you?"
Harry shook his head. "I can't believe I blurted it out like that, in front of so many people too, I was just so angry, so very angry and I couldn't control it. They knew what I would have to suffer through, and still they said that to me."
"What did they do?" Draco demanded, not letting Harry change the subject or avoid it.
Harry sighed. "I was left on their doorstep the night my parents were killed."
"You were left on a doorstep?!" Draco said aghast. "A year-old baby on a doorstep where anyone could snatch you?! Merlin, a passing fox could have mauled you to death!"
Harry nodded. "Allegedly, my aunt found me when she opened the front door to put out empty milk bottles."
"You were left there all night?!"
"As far as I know. But, from then on…my life was a sort of painful existence. It's all that I can remember, Draco. Everyone assumes that because I'm the Boy-Who-Lived, something I didn't even know about until I was eleven, when I also found out about magic for the first time I might add, that I was treated like some sort of prince, but I wasn't. They hated me because they hated magic. My aunt was jealous that my mother had magic and she didn't. My uncle hated anything that was out of the ordinary, he even hated dreams where things were acting out of the ordinary and, as I had magic and I did have accidents over the years…he hated me too." "So, he beat and starved you?"
Harry bit his lip and nodded. "He said that he could stamp the magic out of me and then, when that failed, he tried to keep me from going to Hogwarts, saying that he wouldn't pay for me to go, but I found out then that I had my own trust vault and that my full tuition had been paid for upon my birth by the Ministry. But coming to Hogwarts made everything worse. He got more deranged and more violent and instead of just a few missed meals here or there, he started leaving me for days without anything to eat. He even put bars over my window and locked me in a room that's smaller than the house-elf rooms at the manor and I'd be in there for days at a time without being let out and then I'd only be allowed out for half an hour or so and then I'd be locked back up again."
Draco looked grey when Harry finally got the courage to look at him and he seemed completely unnerved. "You suffered through that all this time and you said nothing?"
"As I shouted at Ron and Hermione, I begged Dumbledore not to make me go back…I actually begged him, Draco. I told him that I'd go anywhere else, but he always refused and sent me back to them. I told him about it and he did nothing, so I never told anyone again. Ron and Hermione knew, Ron and his brothers actually ripped the bars off of my window to get me out in my second year and they told their mother that I was being starved and she didn't do anything either. They saw the bruises and scars on my body, but nothing was ever said, nothing was done, so I stopped mentioning it. I sort of…I realised that nothing was ever going to be done and that I'd have to put up with it, it was like I was brainwashed into accepting their treatment of me instead of telling anyone and everyone or even doing something about it myself. I felt like I had to accept it and like it was right for them to treat me like that and I don't know where that mentality started or where it came from, but it's only since being with your family that I've realised how a real family should be like. Missus Weasley has always said that she saw me as a son, but she never treated me like one, she treated me like a brainless kid who was incapable of making decisions and…it's only been your family that has shown me what I'm missing. It's been you and your parents that have shown me what true families are like and I don't think I can go back to how it was before, Draco. Now that I've had a taste of it, I can't go back."
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