Chapter Text
His feet pounded against the asphalt and his breath was ragged in his ears. A glance behind him showed that Dudley and his friends were still chasing him. Harry ran harder, desperate to enter the school where he could seek refuge from his cousin.
Except, he remembered as he reached the locked door to the school, it was July and school wouldn't be in session until September. He rattled the door desperately, hoping it would open anyway. It didn't. He turned around but he didn't have time to even blink before he was knocked down.
His glasses had gone flying into a nearby shrub so Harry could only guess who it was that had shoved him to the ground. He squinted and determined it was too skinny to be Dudley. He thought it might've been Piers but didn't think too long about it.
The rest of Dudley's friends had arrived and jeered at him. Dudley, of course, would take a bit longer, as he was huffing and puffing his way through a weak jog to catch up to everyone. Not that this would help Harry much.
One of the boys nudged Harry roughly with a sneaker, looking disappointed. Or confused, it was a little hard to tell when he was this blurry.
"This is kind of boring," the boy muttered. "He was slow today, we didn't e en get out of my neighborhood."
The boys around him made noises of agreement. The first kid turned to Dudley, who had finally arrived, looking a little peaky.
"What do you reckon, can your cousin go another round?"
Dudley spluttered excuses but no one seemed particularly convinced. After a few more failed excuses, he relented. The boys all backed away from Harry and one made a shooing motion at Harry.
They didn't need to tell him twice.
He took off as cast as he could, aiming towards the library this time. Which, unlike the school, was open year round. The other boys sounded far off and he was rather pleased with the distance between them. Harry hunting was the worst part of summer break, in Harry's opinion. The library was getting larger and Harry felt a grin stretch across his face.
But then his sneaker caught on a deep crack in the pavement, that he hadn't been able to see without his glasses. For a minute, he was just confused and hurtling through the air. And then he landed with a sickening crunch.
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When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a cloud. It took him a second to remember that it was a clear day and that this cloud was too dark to belong there. As it began to grow, Harry realized that it was coming out of him.
Apparently, Dudley and his friends had also noticed, because they were running away from him and screaming. The dark cloud that was now dissipating into the clear summer sky was pretty weird, Harry concluded, but anything that sent Dudley away from him couldn't be all that bad.
He stayed outside the library a little longer before walking towards the school to find where his glasses had ended up. With a wave of disappointment, he realized that there was no way Aunt Petunia was going to believe that this wasn't his fault. He fished his glasses out of the sad looking shrub by the school and headed back to Privet Drive with reluctance.