Harry heard the belt before he saw it.
That soft, horrible sound of leather sliding through loops. The clink of metal. It always sounded too loud in the tiny kitchen.
He stood by the sink, hands in cold, greasy water that smelled of old bacon. His fingers ached from scrubbing. Petunia had sent him back three times already.
"You missed a spot," she'd said, even when he hadn't.
"BOY."
Uncle Vernon's voice was thick and low, the way it got before shouting. Harry stiffened, shoulders curling in on themselves out of habit.
He turned his head just enough to see.
Vernon was unthreading the belt from his trousers, face flushed red, eyes narrowed. Dudley hovered in the doorway, clutching a half-eaten slice of cake, excitement and triumph smeared on his face along with frosting. Petunia stood near the stove, lips thin, spine stiff, not looking at Harry at all.
Harry swallowed. His heart thudded against his ribs, fast and hollow.
"It was an accident," he said quickly. "The pan slipped, I didn't mean to—"
He hadn't even dropped it. It had just rattled a bit too loud when he set it down. Dudley had flinched dramatically. Vernon had decided that was "backchat."
"After all we've done for you," Vernon said, voice rising with every word. "Roof over your head, food in your mouth, and this is how you repay us? Ungrateful little freak."
Food. Harry's mind flashed to dinners where he'd watched Dudley take second and third helpings while he was told he'd "already eaten" when he hadn't. To nights locked in the cupboard with his stomach twisting, the smell of roast drifting through the cracks.
"Please, Uncle Vernon," Harry whispered. "I'll do better. I'll—"
His scar throbbed. A sharp, hot spike, as if a match had been struck under his skin.
He flinched, hand flying instinctively to his forehead. His fingers came away dry, but the ache remained, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
"Don't you dare touch yourself like that when I'm talkin' to you," Vernon snarled, taking a step forward. "You think you can hide from it? Think I'll go soft because today's your birthday?"
Harry had almost forgotten. Seven. It didn't feel different from six or five or four. Just more chores. More carefulness. More pretending he didn't exist.
Another memory slammed into him—Vernon's shout, the cupboard door slamming, the ceiling above his head shaking as Dudley jumped on it for fun. Petunia's voice, cold and sharp: If he makes any noise, you'll get it twice as bad.
Then another: Dudley and his friends chasing him down the schoolyard, shoving him into the mud while teachers looked away.
Then another: Petunia dumping perfectly good food into the bin rather than let him eat, saying, We're not running a charity.
Each memory hit like a fist from the inside, piling on top of the sick dread twisting in his stomach.
The kitchen blurred for a second. Harry blinked hard, trying to force everything back down where it belonged.
It didn't go.
Something else was growing with it.
He'd always thought of the empty place inside him as a cold, quiet hole. A space where "normal childhood" should have been. Now, that hole wasn't empty. It was filling—slowly at first, then faster—with something hot and thick, rising up his throat, burning behind his eyes.
Vernon doubled the belt in his hand, knuckles whitening. "You think you can talk back? You think you can break our things and answer me like that? We take you in and you act like a—"
A slave. The word formed in Harry's mind, sharp and bitter. They don't love me. They never loved me. I'm just…useful.
The hot feeling inside flared.
His scar burned.
The kitchen lights flickered, just a tiny stutter, but Harry felt it—like the whole room had taken a breath with him.
"Hold still," Vernon growled, stepping into Harry's space, beer and sweat sour in the air between them. "You move, you make a sound, you'll wish you hadn't."
Harry's body wanted to obey. Every beating had taught him stillness, silence, smallness. But under the fear, another feeling clawed its way up.
Rage.
Not a shouting, flailing rage. A deep, shaking one. Rage at every locked door. At every time they'd called him "boy" or "freak" but never Harry. At every birthday he hadn't had. At being worked like a servant and still called ungrateful.
He wasn't even sure when the thought formed, but when it did, it was like a stone dropping into a pond:
No.
The belt started down.
The world…shifted.
The wrongness he'd always half-noticed—the way lights buzzed when he was scared, the way haircuts grew back, the way he ended up on the roof—all of that flared into something huge. The air around him thickened, humming against his skin like static, like a storm about to break.
His scar exploded in pain.
Harry screamed. It tore out of him raw and high, ripped from somewhere deeper than his lungs.
The lightning bolt on his forehead seared white-hot, then split. A thin line opened along it, skin tearing as if something underneath was forcing its way out. Blood welled and ran down his face.
And with the blood came something else.
Darkness.
Not the absence of light: a thing in its own right. It poured out of his scar in a choking stream, thick and black and foul, twisting above his head like smoke that didn't want to disperse. It felt wrong, like cold fingers scraping against the inside of his skull.
It had always been there. He understood that in an instant. Coiled around his thoughts, heavy and foreign. He'd grown up with it like someone growing up with a stone in their shoe, never knowing that walking was supposed to not hurt.
Now it was being dragged out, and it fought.
A pressure built inside Harry's chest, then surged upward like a wave. All his anger, all his loneliness, all seven years of hurt boiled over and rushed after that darkness with terrible, blind focus.
The belt never landed.
Vernon's arm jerked back as if he'd grabbed a live wire. The leather strap flew from his hand, spinning uselessly away as a shock of invisible force snapped down his bones.
The air around Harry went white.
There were no words. No voice. Just force—vast and impersonal, like the moment before thunder. It gathered around him, drawn in by the crack that had opened in his scar, by the flood of feeling he couldn't contain.
He wasn't pulling it.
It was pulling him.
His magic, buried so deep he hadn't even known it was there, answered his rage and reached outward. The world answered back.
For a heartbeat, Harry felt everything.
The metal in the pipes under the floor humming. The glass in the windows vibrating. The nails in the walls, the wires in the ceiling, the water in the kettle, the tiny flicker of flame in the stove—threads in a pattern he'd never seen until now, all around him, all through him.
His power surged into those threads.
The darkness rising from his scar tried to cling to him, to sink back in.
Something in the rising magic recoiled from it with pure, instinctive disgust.
Not words. Not thoughts. Just no.
White force slammed into black rot.
The soul fragment shattered.
It broke like glass under a hammer—sharp, bright, final. A flurry of images burst through Harry's mind with the impact: a wand, a flash of green, a woman's outstretched arms, a baby crying, a man's high, cold laugh twisting in triumph and terror. None of it was his. All of it was wrong.
Then the blackness was gone.
The empty space it left behind was shocking.
There was no whisper at the back of his thoughts. No cold weight behind his eyes. His mind—used to that hidden pressure—reeled at the sudden absence.
Outside him, Privet Drive blew apart.
The force that had smashed the fragment didn't stop. Freed, it burst outward in a ring from Harry's small body.
The walls of number four jumped as if struck by a giant fist, then tore outward. Brick and plaster turned into a storm of debris, flung away from the center of the kitchen. The windows didn't just shatter; glass dissolved into glitter, whirling in the blast like deadly snow that somehow cut nothing it touched.
The ceiling heaved and went, tiles spinning into the air before breaking into dust. The floor cracked along spiderweb lines under Harry's bare feet.
Vernon flew backward, slammed into a wall that crumbled on impact. Petunia was hurled sideways, her scream cut off as the counter she clung to ripped away. Dudley and his chair lifted off the ground, tumbling through the air, present boxes bursting apart in a shower of paper and plastic before all of it was swallowed by the roiling force.
From the outside, it would look like the house had been hit by an invisible bomb—one that exploded outward instead of up, leaving a raw, smoking crater where neat brick walls and trimmed hedges had been seconds before.
At the center of it all, Harry hung for a second, not quite touching the broken floor.
The magic roaring through him wasn't a person. It didn't have a face or a voice. It felt like wind and sunlight and the deep, solid weight of the earth under his feet all at once—a presence older and wider than anything he could imagine, rushing through the empty places in him the way water rushes to fill a crack.
It burned, but it wasn't only burning.
Under the raw power, under the shock and terror, there was a new sensation: warmth. Like being dragged out of ice water and wrapped in a blanket heated by the sun. Like hands he couldn't see steadying him, even though there were no hands at all.
For the first time Harry could remember, he didn't feel alone inside his own skin.
The blast wave reached its limit and faded, debris crashing back to earth. Dust billowed up, shrouding the ruins.
The humming pressure around him eased, leaving a faint vibration in the air, the way sound lingers after a shout. The force that had flooded through him stayed, settling into him, not caged but coiled, as if it had found something it liked and meant to stay close.
Harry's feet touched the cracked floor. His knees buckled.
The last thing he felt before he crumpled was the strange, impossible contrast inside: on the outside, ruin and wreckage, his scar wet and sticky with blood; on the inside, a hollow where something malicious had been—and around that hollow, a steady, spreading warmth that seemed almost…glad.
Then darkness took him, and the world, still buzzing faintly with power, carried on without him.