Link of Hogwarts

Prologue

Link always known that he's strange and different. His relatives never forget to remind him of these facts every chance they get lest he forget. For one, he always has to wear that tight hat under another baggier hat to hide his deformation. Doctors have told his relatives that it was a body mutation that happened when he's in his mother's womb, to which his Aunt Petunia will always gleefully remind him as a pathetic human being who brings her family nothing but heart break and how he, Harry (though his mind will always remind him that he's Link), should always be grateful that she take him in from the "goodness of her heart" because no one with a right mind will take a freak like him in.

Uncle Vernon will always threaten to cut off his strange ears should he ever attempt to toe the tight line they drawn around him. He also always reminds him how his parents rather die than raise him because of how freakish he is every birthday like some twisted birthday greeting. Link had honestly thought that it's all very normal for him to be treated differently from his perfectly normal cousin Dudley. Normal kids get to have parents, normal kids get to eat cakes and enjoy cuddles. They are praised for being born normal and since Link's not, he does not deserve praise no matter how good he's at his finishing his endless chores.

But despite his silent acceptance, Link can't help the burning desire that there's more out there to discover. That he's not meant to be hidden in the darkness; that he's meant to chase the sun and the sky. So on days where they decided to leave him to his own outside; Link will run until his lungs burn. The restlessness in his bone will always force him to shake off his fatigue like cobwebs, forcing him to keep on moving. He don't know that children aren't supposed to just know how to climb walls, aren't supposed to know how to forage for edible plants and mushrooms when the hunger hit hard, aren't supposed to know how to hunt with nothing more than sticks and stones, or even half of the things that he just know will help him in the wild like a veteran ranger surviving the harshness of the wild.

But Link slowly understood, from watching at school, that children should scream and cringe at the sight of an animal being slaughtered, that children does not know how to differentiate poisonous plants from harmless herbs. That they don't know how to scale walls or trees without breaking a bone for their first tries. They also not supposed to know how to hunt, whether with stick and stones or with guns that they know proper hunters use. They are normal and Link's not.

When their art teacher asked them to draw about their dreams, Link will draw a castle shrouded in poisonous darkness or a beautiful flower that he just know glows from inner light. But after that he learned to draw more normal things; like a giant red bird that only he knew were gigantic in size or a train riding an endless track across a wide field of endless grass for as far as the eyes can see, a tall tower at the end barely a stick in the horizon. He also learned to keep his drawings with the stars in the hollow of a tall tree with his other treasures instead of taking them home to be torn to shreds.

Link has learned that any physical mark of his brilliant imagination will be destroyed upon discovery. They don't want to have anything abnormal linger at home, not even a picture drawn by Link. And Link doesn't blame them. His pictures tended to move after leaving class. That time he drew a picture of his most vivid memory from infancy was that of a flying motorbike silhouetted by the full moon as backdrop. That was his first art from his kindergarten; the teacher had loved his vivid imagination and had given two stars as compared to Dudley's crude stick figures of his family that received a very tiny star that was then taken away after the teacher recognized the black blob with a mop in the background being Link doing his chores.

The Dursleys weren't happy about the 'unfair treatment' and destroyed Link's picture, which Vernon then burned after the motorbike moved away from the tear. So Link hid all of his work that received praise from the teacher from the Dursley in his hideout. Dudley and his friends always lost him around the tree; Link scaled the tree as fast as a spider. But sometimes it wasn't Link, like that time his mean teacher's hair turned fluorescent blue, or that time he confusedly found himself on the canteen's rooftop when he turned the corner running from Dudley's favorite game of 'Harry Hunting'.

No, those weren't Link. Each time it happened, he's more frightened of it than even the Dursleys. The subsequent punishment that happens was wonderful distraction for Link. Knowing without learning he can handle, moving pictures he can still take it, because he know without understanding that he's the origin. He accepted that he's not normal but at least he knew that he's in control of the odd situation.

But when it comes to the sudden incidents that happened?

Link doesn't like not being in control of his freakishness; it felt like a horror from a forgotten past that scratched in the back of his head. He hated not knowing how he does it, because it felt like someone was using him without his permission. Being a person with little control of his own life choices, Link take what little control he have of himself very seriously. But even if the strange incidents frighten him, Link made it his young life's goal to take control of it rather than being frightened senseless.

There's something similar like the restlessness in his bones that urges him to keep moving but rather than his body it's more like it came from something deeper, like a primal part of him, to not succumb to fear. Like being afraid goes against everything that made him Link, against everything that made him Harry Potter. So he pushed forward despite the terror in his throat to move, to physically and mentally fight against it.

Like if he does succumb to his fear, he will die.