Ever After || Harry & Hermione

Chapter 1.1

Even miracles take a little time...

Harry still holds on to some hope as a small child. As long as he listens to Aunt Petunia properly, as long as he doesn't say anything to make Uncle Vernon angry, as long as he does all the menial tasks assigned to him obediently... maybe they will like him eventually. Maybe then he can be accepted into their family.

It's a sunny, bright day when that hope shatters. He comes back into the house from weeding the garden for hours, tired and sweaty and desperately in need of some water, only to find Dudley sitting at the kitchen table and guffawing at the television.

"Hey, you!" he yells at Harry in between mouthfuls of food. He never calls him Harry, it's always freak, or weirdo, or sissy.

"Look." Dudley motions to the television and Harry looks over to see a cartoon girl scrubbing the floor, wearing rags and wiping the soot on her face away with the back of her hand.

"This Cinders girl is just like you!" Dudley says excitedly, overjoyed at what he clearly considers to be a genius discovery. "Dressed in rags, does all the chores, always dirty, and no one wants her. Even her parents are dead!"

A sharp pain goes through Harry's chest and his hands tremble.

"I guess that makes you the ugly stepsister then, Diddykins." Harry retorts as calmly as he can and leaves the kitchen before his cousin can process what he said.

He hates the new nickname that his cousin takes to calling him, but his curiosity gets the better of him and he ends up borrowing a book of fairy tales from his primary school library.

He lies in bed and stares up at the dusty cobwebs on the cupboard ceiling after he's finished reading, blinking drowsily. His last thought before falling asleep is: If I'm Cinders, does that mean one day someone will come to save me too?

_____

His fairy godmother comes years later, once he's already given up all hope of escaping the Dursleys.

He is a giant man instead of a plump, motherly figure. He breaks down the door and carries a magical umbrella instead of a wand, and he asks Harry if he would like to go to Hogwarts—a school for witchcraft and wizardry—instead of a ball.

"Yer a wizard, Harry," Hagrid tells him and Harry wonders if Cinderella felt like this when she had been transformed by the spell.

Happy and excited, but so afraid. As if he could blink and everything would disappear and he would go back to being just Harry. The unwanted boy, dressed in oversized clothes, with an overactive imagination that he used to invent magic and cope with his pathetic life.