Luck of Nines

68

(An: final editing note, this might be Monday's update, I'm in for a chaotic few days and am on just over three hours of sleep right now,  flip side is I tend to write more in my free time when I'm busy so hey double productivity. -T.A.L.A.)

     He hadn't felt anything but pain that day, the deep, all consuming, nauseating pain that permeated his entire body.

       Not until those hands had touched him.  Then the chill had run through his entire body. Fear, fear like that he could not ever remember experiencing before. The type of fear against something so unimaginably terrible that you stood no hope fighting against. It was a vast sweeping hand of inescapable cold that chilled past any layers, skin, fur directly into the pits of bone. It was death. Death incarnate.

       He could feel it, the hands on him, dragging him up by his weighted down feeling arms so that he dangled, feet dragging limply behind him.

      Hands somehow both thin, emaciated with hunger and thick. 

     Thick and larger than he himself were.  He could feel the blows falling down on him, he could see them as he huddled pitifully in a hall upon the Dursley's floor.  He cried as he was swatted, harshly, for what he did not know.

        He was being beaten, by Vernon, the high-pitched haughty words of Petunia needling at him all the while. He was inside, but he was cold. So cold. Cold and so very, very hungry. He wished he'd gotten another chance to hunt, but even the thought of hunting with Chipped Fang, returning with the fresh kill to Chippy, was quickly swept aside and devoured by the void. By the aching, fearful, inescapable cold. It was not just fear, he wanted to scream but no scream would embody the pain he felt right now, no wound was great enough to amount to this torment.

       He ached, and despaired, and was cold. So cold and  hungry.

        He just wanted it to end, the misery and cold.

        Cold.

        He was so cold.

         Everything was damp, his eyes blurred and ears rung and the shackles were never taken off. It didn't matter he was just so hungry. He wanted to eat, to rip into nice, warm fresh- even the comforting thought of that was ripped away as simply as it came. He was left only with his misery once more. Cold. 

         So cold, so very cold and hungry.  So, so hungry.  So very hungry.

         The hands were on him, Vernon bellowing at the top of his lungs shouting insults as he was shaken.  "I will not have this thing in the house! It's the holidays! You can't expect me to ruin the holidays with this news when she was so happy to be visiting us and seeing her lovely nephew again! I'll have none of it! Not during the holidays!"

          Harry wanted none of it. He wanted out. He was groaned and moaned, howled and screamed. He was hungry, so cold and hungry. He wanted it to be over with. He didn't care who this Vernon was any longer, he only wanted them dead and out of his head for good. He was hungry. He wanted to eat.  He didn't care much.

          The ear tingling screeching echoed in his mind again.

          He was alone in the shed, small, swaddled carelessly only  in the filthy blanket he'd been left in. And hungry. So cold and so, so hungry. The wind rattled the shed, slipping between the many loose cracks and such. So hungry, so cold.

           There were times where he didn't know if he was back inside that snowy shed, an infant, or trapped, chained inside the cold, stone cell, wind screamed through its cracks and openings all the same and he was hungry, so cold, so hungry. So, so, so very cold and hungry.