1. Darkness:

'Ooohh! That one looks like a muffin…I wonder how it tastes like…'

Harry Potter thought, lying on the hard, cracked ground of the playground, seemingly unaffected by the excessive heat of the sun above.

He had been lying there for quite a while now with both his arms splayed on the sides as he looked at the multitude of irregularly shaped, cotton-like clouds floating freely in the wide sky, going wherever the breeze took them.

Those simple, fluffy, and white constructs of dust and moisture had something that he, a sentient, complex, living organism at the top of the food chain didn't have.

Freedom.

He would have envied their freedom, he would have been angered that he lacked it, but, he did know the futility of such emotions. After all, he had understood the hard way that emotions like envy and wrath, along with greed, gluttony, and pride didn't and should not matter to a person in his situation.

…Not unless he was prepared to pay the price of showing them which he honestly could not afford.

Also, he was too young to think about lust.

So, he did the only thing he was capable of doing at that moment; he admired them. He looked at them with scrutiny, trying to find the shape of various things among their irregularities.

This was one of his favourite past time, one of the very few that he could enjoy without them, his relatives, taking it away from him.

Owing to the duration he had been doing this, it wasn't a surprise that he had found a lot of things, from dogs to birds and cars to pen or a pan.

He scrunched his brows in thought. Including the muffin, the last few shapes he had found were of food for some reason he couldn't figure ou…

*growl*

…His stomach had answered his query, and with it, it had drawn his attention to the hunger he had subconsciously ignored till then.

It was like breathing to him, and who even needed to remember to breathe?

But, once again, similar to breathing, he couldn't ignore it anymore now that his attention had been drawn to it.

Two slices of bread with water didn't exactly make a filling breakfast, and he could tell that he wouldn't be getting lunch that day. Looking at the position of the sun, it was long past lunchtime, and the fact that he had not been summoned back to the house to cook lunch he knew for sure that the lunch wasn't being prepared.

'Now that I think about it, wasn't Uncle talking about paying a visit to Aunt Marge last night?'

Somehow…

No. He knew exactly why the hunger bothered him a lot less all of a sudden. He preferred hunger over having to meet that foul woman and her equally cruel dogs every time.

He sighed in relief about not having to meet her even as he faintly remembered his Aunt Petunia calling for his cousin Dudley and thus, putting an early end to the morning playing session.

That was another thing that gladdened him.

It wasn't that he disliked playing, but the game Dudley and his merry group of friends liked playing most of the time wasn't his cup of tea.

It could never be.

After all, it was named 'Harry Hunting', and as he had come to know a few years ago, his name wasn't Boy or Freak, it was Harry.

He was Harry, the game of the game.

Being hunted by a group of larger boys that didn't know restraint often left him sore, his clothes torn, and his body bruised. So much so that even an early end to the game made him not want to stand, and was the reason he was lying on the open ground despite the strong heat.

But, he had to get up.

He needed water to not only relieve his parched throat, but also to fill his empty stomach. That would at least let him feel the sensation of a full stomach.

So, with a groan, he forced his arms against the ground and pushed himself up to stand on his bare feet.

He staggered.

He didn't know whether it was due to hunger or pain, but it didn't matter. Both hunger and pain, were his companions, his loyal companions from as long as he could remember. He was used to them.

Once he was capable of standing stably, he made his way over to the other side of the playground, to where his footwear, Dudley's old shoes, slipped out of his feet while he ran from Dudley and his gang.

Old, torn, and too large as they were, they could still protect his feet from hot asphalt roads.

It took him about five minutes to collect his shoes, after which he dragged his feet towards the playground's exit.

He was kind of missing the company of another one of his companions, darkness, not the kind he was currently seeing at the corner of his eyes, but the cool darkness of his cupboard under the stairs in his house.

But he knew that if he wasn't already locked inside the said cupboard, then he was surely locked out of the house. It was what his Uncle could, and would do if only to torment him.

So now, the question was…

"Where do I go now?"