Nobody Cared

Nov 10 to Nov 11

Trigger Warning: vague description of child sexual abuse. I did not go into detail but Harry has a nightmare from something he witnessed as a child. The emotion is what I wrote and that may be hard for some to read.

10 Nov 1991, Sunday

Harry woke in the early hours of Sunday from a simple nightmare. Well, none of them were simple, these days, but those nightmares he still had of the Dursleys were relegated to simple.

This was one of those not-so-simple nightmares. They were of his Uncle Vernon, and no one else, and if anything, these nightmares had a creepiness to them that was worse than those nightmares that made him relive memories of being harshly spanked, or beaten, or shouted at viciously.

The darkness of the dorm felt alive this night after the nightmare. Icky and too close. He started to slip his feet over the bed when he glanced down cautiously at the edge.

The dorm beds were large, old-fashioned frame beds that were high up off the floor and had posts that supported a canopy and heavy, velvet drapes. Both Harry and Draco had to literally climb up into their beds, and when they were finished studying, and just being silly before bed, they would have running-jump contests in which they would both run towards their beds and try to leap up onto them. Of course there were bumps and bruises, but nothing terrible, and Harry felt it was all right to get a little bit hurt if you were a kid who was just doing normal, stupid-kid stuff.

At night, though, the space under his bed had begun to unnerve him. It made him think of his cupboard at his relatives house and how, with the stairs above that defined his ceiling, nooks and crannies had been created that never saw light. When he had been very little, these shadowed places had scared Harry because his imagination went a little too wild. There were spiders, too, even though he was as meticulous as possible about getting rid of the spiders and sweeping away their webs.

Those fears that Harry thought he had left behind in the cupboard, had followed him to his Slytherin dorm and were settling into the dark space beneath his bed. As much as he tried to tell himself that there was nothing down there to grab his ankles, he still could not help himself when he woke at night and jumped off his bed, as far away from imaginary reaching claws, just to go to the bathroom.

Tonight, though, the monster under the bed wasn't some creature with lots of teeth and long claws, but his Uncle Vernon. Harry knew, from first hand experience, that as fat as his uncle was, he had a swift, and long reach.

Peering, still, over the edge of the bed, Harry slipped his wand off the night table and pointed it menacingly down towards the floor. "You stay put, Uncle Vernon," Harry whispered softly. "I've been practicing that Stinging Hex Draco showed me and I bet I could hit you in the eye with it."

At that moment an eerie whistle slithered into the dorm with a cold chill. Harry forgot, just for a second, that Draco always opened the window on his side of the dorm just a crack before they went to bed. That fact didn't matter. The scary, whistling moan was enough to impel the little boy like a shot off his bed and scampering towards the soft light of the bathroom.

Once bathed in the safety of the light in the bathroom, Harry grabbed his dressing gown from his hook on the back of the door. He wanted his slippers, too, but they were under his bed and there was no way he was going to get them now.

Taking a deep breath, Harry ducked out of the bathroom and trotted swiftly past his bed, and out of his dorm. Torchlight, gentle at this time of night, lit his path down the stairs and into the common room. He picked up his pace again, and soon he was through the portrait of Salazar Slytherin and running for his father's quarters.