Animal

39

December 25th, 1991 (Age: 3)

Christmas in the Styles household was just as merry as all their festive neighbours. Gemma bought gingerbread men instead of baking them. Anne actually made over a dozen fruit cakes. This year she had to make more though because her husband's business associate was coming over for a good ol' Christmas family dinner.
Des, her out-of-drug-rehab husband who insisted they put on a real show for this associate because he held Des' job in the palm of his hand, was out purchasing alcohol. Her son, Harry, was up to his usual nonsense upstairs in his attic/bedroom. She'd recently bought him a wooden train set as his age was appropriate for such toys.

Her hopes of changing his habit of plucking feathers out of pigeons was happily squashed by the three-year-old. Harry gave her an impressive frown that his therapist is very surprised about, and went right back to plucking from his latest sparrow victim.

Their dinner guest arrived at seven in an expensive suit, bearing a bottle of pricey wine. Harry just had his bath and felt no unease at walking around naked. Anne was horrified to see her son asking their guest something butt naked.

"Are you a alk-holic?" Harry asked, eyeing the green bottle as a drunkard would.

"No, son." The expensive man with a name Harry didn't care for knelt in front of him whilst stripping off his jacket.

Des was red in the face with anxiety, but Harry just crooked his smile and began his frown again when the stranger put his silk-leather jacket over his shoulders.

"Go get dressed, H." Des gestured towards the stairs with a stern look. His creepy son would not ruin this for him.

"I don't love him." Harry tells the stranger who was the only one within earshot.

Harry would trust an intelligent individual to understand what he said, in not so many words. His father was just out of rehab and he was still very prone to relapsing, or other worse circumstances. He looked into the associate's dull blue eyes and gives his father a hateful look.
He despises the nickname H, and now hates the look of blue eyes when they look at him like he's on display in a butchery.

Having had lost his manners at birth, Harry skips dinner and ignores everyone's calls for him to please come down to join them. He shakes his head with his hands wrist-deep in the dry soil pit he built using planks of clean wood.

His parents were confused Harry was not their's at one point, as he was nothing like them. He felt like he had an extra light chest with a hole instead of a heart.

"So Dylan-" Anne looked up from her plate of roasted meat and vegetables. "-how did you decide that technology was for you?"

Dylan, Des' associate who planned to employ him on the sole basis of his son's green eyes, sipped from his wine glass. The wine was crisp and tinged with sweetness.
He put on his most dazzling smile and let everyone at the table have a piece of it. His mind was about a dozen stairs away in the bedroom of Harry Styles.

It was a perfectly suited name, Dylan applauded Anne on the choice. He knows Des didn't have any part in it. Harry's electric green eyes were so filled with life, dimmed by self-control and disinterest in childish things. He was perfect. Even as a toddler, his facial structure was delectable and his skin looked so supple.

"Where is your bathroom?" He wiped his twitching hands on the napkin strewn across his lap.

Anne directed him and Dylan hurried away, while three members of the Styles family gossiped about him. He crept upstairs and found the only plain brown door slightly ajar. Peeping inside, he saw Harry's impeccable room and the owner himself seated on the bed reading a book.