Harry Potter: Child of a Wolf

1

Number four Privet Drive was, as far as most people would tell you, a fairly ordinary house with a fairly ordinary - if not slightly wealthy - family dwelling within. The two-story home, comprised of three bedrooms upstairs and a sizeable entertaining space of a parlor and kitchen downstairs, was the residence of the Dursleys, a perfectly normal little family of three, and the orphaned child Harry Potter that they had taken in after the death of his parents, Petunia Dursley's sister and brother-in-law.

Vernon Dursley was, one could suppose, a prominent man in his field - he was the director of Grunnings, a firm which manufactured drills. He was a portly man, with quite a lot of meat to his bones, and a distinct redness to his face that led him to look, quite often actually, like he was being choked by the tie he wore daily. His upper lip was graced with a bushy moustache the color of mouse fur, though he'd insist it was more along the lines of gravy-coloured, if anyone bothered to ask him, and his hairline of the same color was receding quite prominently upon his round head. His wife, in contrast, was slim and tall, with blonde hair that she kept tightly wound into a bun most days and a larger nose that she was fond of looking down at people over. Their son, Dudley, was an odd mix of both of them - stout, like his father, with the dirty blonde hair of his mother and a spoilt look on his face from too many sweets and too little punishment as a child.

Harry Potter had very few kind things to say about the Dursleys as a whole, except that they had taken him in and, he supposed, raised him well enough - he had managed to live ten years or so in their company. If you happened to catch him outside of the home of his relatives and asked after them, he would tell you that they were living well. He never made mention of himself, and even when prompted, he would deflect the questions. He was always conflicted about how to answer them.

Vernon Dursley was a man who was not fond of his nephew in the slightest. Harry was a scrawny boy with unruly hair, sharply unsettling eyes, and a rather defiant streak to him at times that led the man to punishing him in an attempt to beat that awful attitude out of him. In Vernon's opinion, Harry cared only to make a fool out of himself and his household, which he absolutely refused to let happen. Harry certainly had no intention of doing so, but when he was clothed only in hand-me-downs from his overlarge cousin, which were at least three sizes too big (and that was being quite generous indeed, for it was more like five or six sizes too large), and hardly given more than table scraps to sustain himself, he couldn't help but be clumsy while performing household chores.

Dudley was turning into quite the miniature of his father, at least verbally, often sneering and belittling his younger cousin for even the smallest of mistakes when his father wasn't home. Thankfully, he refrained from using physical violence, in the home at least. When they were at school, and it was just he and Dudley, the older boy was much more violent with his attempts to correct Harry's actions and put him in his place. He was also often accompanied by a group of boys just as large and dumb as he was, so Harry took to avoiding them as much as he possibly could, and did his best not to stand out in the school either.

Petunia, his aunt, was the only family member Harry could claim even slightly to like. She was not overly kind or motherly towards him - that behavior was reserved for spoiling her 'Duddykins', as she called his cousin - but she was not neglectful of him either. While Vernon would intentionally lock him in the cupboard under the stairs, where his bedroom had been for as long as he could remember, and forget about him for days, Petunia would secretly let him out when Vernon was away from the home and let him perform household chores as punishment instead. She also snuck him food, and at times when he was sick, he had heard her sneak down in the dead of night to leave him medicine or read him a story to soothe him to sleep.

It was not, he supposed, a good life, to be hardly acknowledged by his 'family' while their own son was spoiled absolutely rotten by the finest things Vernon's Grunnings salary could provide, but it was still his life, and he hadn't known any different to mind it. He was always reminded that they had taken him in after his parents had died in a car accident, and that he should just be grateful for what he had, if he even so much as looked affronted by the way they treated him. So while all he had were too-large clothes, a little makeshift bed in the cupboard under the stairs, and a scant few broken toys and torn books that Dudley had long ago discarded, he was content enough with that. He could have nothing, as the Dursleys were fond of reminding him.