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ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm · 2 years

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Harry Potter Versus Vacuum Cleaners

i had to vacuum something today. this story is written for the @drarrymicrofic prompt oscillate. it deals with themes of childhood emotional abuse. also on a03

Wizards didn't even fucking have vacuum cleaners. There wasn't an enchanted version of one, not the way there were magically converted phones or kettles. It was one of Harry's favourite things about the magical world, how easy cleaning was. Not soundless, no - there was always the melodic hum of enchanted scrubbing brushes and sweeping brooms, of feather dusters tinkling across Mrs. Weasley's porcelain horses. It wasn't anything like a boy doing his best to remain invisible, to not gag on the sharp smell of oven cleaner. But it wasn't loud, never loud, never deafening and oppressive the way a plugged in Hoover was, or a washing machine stuffed full of sheets. The point is, he had forgotten about the concept, really, that cleaning could be loud. But then Teddy knocked a full bowl of Lucky Charms on the floor and Andromeda, instead of her usual tutting, perked up and went "Oh, the perfect time to use my birthday present!"

And Harry shrugged at Teddy, went to the counter to fix him a new bowl of cereal and then-

The sound was like getting all your teeth filed down at once on a descending airplane. It hit him the way jump scares do, right between the shoulder-blades, ice and shivers rapidly climbing up his neck only to settle into rigor in his arms. He hit his head on the open cabinet door, and, before he could turn, speak, do anything, he was in his living room.

He was, some distant uninvolved part of himself noted, still holding the cereal box.

The carpet in the living room was thick and vibrant, a pattern of moons and stars on blue that reminded him oddly of Dumbledore’s robes of choice, of his mystical sense of decor. His legs gave out - probably before he even apparated, but his body only just seemed to catch up, and he sank down onto it.

She called them inspections. It would always be a school night, just before the evening news, when the tungsten of lightbulbs really settles into your eyes and when you have to blink behind your eyes as well as with them. Harry would be doing his homework on his cot, trying to keep the numbers steady, keep the words from running off. And then the knock would come.

The knock made it worse, really. Petunia, for all her innate lack of class, simply didn't seem to have the wrists for force - so the knock was always firm but somehow polite. But politeness was tainted by the absence of choice - like a nurse smiling before a shot, and so it wasn't like Harry could have refused her entry. Kicked out against the door, like Dudley, who would turn his music up and shout go away! So the door would open, and Harry would - straighten up, always, as though poor posture was a tell of some greater misdeed, and Petunia would duck inside the cupboard.

There's a point when the fear caused by a trigger wears off enough to put you in mind of something amusing, makes you feel floaty. Harry wasn't there, quite yet, but he could feel it coming on. From his spot on the floor, he saw one of the sketchbooks Draco kept tucked around the house - this one under the yellow armchair by the floo. He tucked his fingers into one of his socks and pulled it halfway off. His ears were still ringing, made worse by the silence of Grimmauld Place.

The people Harry told about his childhood always seemed to resent Vernon most, because of the beatings. Dudley had been a close second, until he showed up at Harry's 20th birthday, bearing a brand new boxing glove in a gaudy gift bag, going "You're a man now, I thought you'd want to take a swing at me for once." Harry didn't, surprisingly, but Ron did - Hermione always says she'd never seen that look on his face before or since. But Big D was a good sport about it, and he seemed to like the firewhiskey they introduced him to soon after. Anyway, the point is: Petunia was always low, on the list of people Harry's loved ones would throttle in a pub. But Harry feared her most of all.

She wasn't like Umbridge - she didn't have a sickly smile plastered to her face while she did unspeakable things. She wasn't like Bellatrix, who was an agent of chaos and reassuring in it, in her unpredictability. No, Petunia was cruel because the pecking order in the house placed her just above Harry, and so her cruelty was the end result of a stream of shit that started somewhere deep into her childhood, and never once ran clear. And she would take it out on him.

It sounds stupid because it was. She would stand there and look around in complete silence, until the air charged and crackled. There was a roll of bin bags stuffed in her cardigan pocket. She would turn slowly and then pick something to focus on, guided by some inner intuition for hurt. A discarded pair of socks. An overfull drawer. Some of the expired vitamins Harry refused to take, hidden in a napkin. Harry didn't know how she found any of it. And then - "Look at this." She didn't speak, she nearly hissed. It reminded him of how Lucius spoke to Draco in public. As though her jaws were wired shut, as though she was too repulsed to move her lips. Her flushed, smooth hands would hold up whatever it was, right up to his face. And Harry would sit completely still, eyes fixed on her, as though if he didn't move, she would retreat.

"Look at it. Disgusting. This is how you live? In my house? Did you know, your father was just like this. Filthy."

"I see you in the kitchen, you know. I watch you, you think I don't but I see everything." She would almost inhale the last word, a breathy cadence that made Harry appreciate Voldemort's oddly human rasp, sometimes. "You think we're disgusting! The way you touch the plates, the way you pick up. I see your little nose turn up at us. At my cooking. I see the faces you make behind Miss Figg. You think you're better than all of us but then you live like this. In filth."

She would then usually start pulling things out of drawers, down from the built in shelf above his cot. "Look. Look at it. Mess. Hideous. And I give you time, you know, I say to myself maybe he'll clean up. Maybe this time he'll come to his senses and I won't have to- and again! Never! You never learn!"

Boxes would start crashing down on the floor, rulers and pens spilling across the little rug, rolling down the slight slope of the foundations. "This isn't normal. Not normal. Disgusting. To live in filth. Does this make you happy? Does it? Look at it. Filth. We give you all these things and this is what you do with them." Harry had long since learned not to twitch at the sounds. Twitching made it worse, made her say things like "Oh you're afraid of me? Am I scary? Are you scared?" So he just kept himself perfectly still, stomach muscles clenched, his whole body a single stream of current. "Is this how your little friends at school live? Do their mummies clean their shit up? Do you turn your nose up at them too? Huh, Harry?" And she would turn to look at him, then, would stare him right in the eyes. It was a cruel simulation of a lost, regular life: something adjacent to a telling off from eyes adjacent to his mother's.

"Huh, Harry? Do you? Answer me."

He never knew what the question was, but he would always say no, first croak it out quietly and then at her shouted louder, again and with his eyes pleading.

She would stare him down for a while, a big towering pillar of pale English skin in his small hovel, almost panting with it, almost a live-wire of some kind of unprompted senseless fury. And then one of the things she had dislodged would roll, or fall further, and she would rip at the door handle and yell "Out! Get out! To the hallway!"

There would be silence, for a few minutes, as he backed up against the wallpaper, the wall separating the hall from the living room. He could hear the sound of the mindless American sitcoms Vernon and Dudley watched, the laugh track sharp against the tension in his shoulders. He could hear Petunia moving, hear the sound of the cabinet under his little cot, hear the dragging and then -

The sound was like getting all your teeth filed at once on a descending airplane. With every small thing he heard zipping up the metal nozzle of the vacuum, his blood ran colder, he backed up further. Some sounds he had even learned to recognise - the little rocks he collected made a high sound. His toy soldiers went up with a dull thunk. Paper would sound like choking until it dislodged with a thud against the floorboards.

And all the while, the fucking television cackled, and the rest of the house was a void, a meter for his attention to flip from one end to the other until the wavelength of his tremors was so small he looked perfectly still. The sound felt like it implied so many things - like it outlined his uselessness, like it emphasised her presence, like it permeated every corner he had kept for himself.

After a while, after forever, the vacuum would cut off. He would hear Petunia moving, hear rustling, and then, at last, the door would swing open and she would emerge, loaded bin bag in hand (always loaded, no matter how few things he owned, no matter what he hid). Would smile at him, only once, only then, more a cold grimace than anything else, and say "We'll see how long it lasts this time."

And Harry would slide into the room, smoky with the scent of the vacuum engine, that specific suffocating air, and there wouldn't be anything, barely anything, all the toys he earned as rewards at school would be gone, replaced by neat stacks of homework and cleanly dusted beams. His bed would be made with fresh sheets, the kind that rustled, that scraped against dry skin, that made his neck roll. He still made Draco roll around their bed first on laundry day, couldn't stand it to this day.

And the worst part is that it felt like a relief, to have another one of these strange episodes be done. He was almost too relieved to have the noise gone to mourn his lost little friends, his drawings, the comfort of a bed that held his scent. He would sit, then, on the bed, neatly, barely touching it, would pull his little table up, hands and wrists sticky with disinfectant that never quite dried on the white MDF. In the background, the soft sound of the television, the beeping countdown for the evening news. Petunia laughing at something Vernon said. The smell of the cleaning product and the dust in the air ensconced hum fully, then, in that little space, and he allowed himself, just as he heard the news jingle blare to kick out, hard, against the little door under his cot that held the blasted Hoover. Then he would pick up whatever pencil she had left him, and get back to work.

Harry hadn't noticed that he wasn't alone on the floor. He had apparently at one point stretched out across the floor, cereal box pulled up to his chest, some marshmallows spilling out onto the carpet across his shoulder. Draco was lying next to him on his side, hair falling out of a messy bun, glasses skewed out of shape on the bridge of his pointy nose.

"Hello," he said, his voice light and dear, so dear it could have splintered Harry's heart. "Andy called me."

Draco had his left arm tucked under his head, the other resting gently on the untraveled, marshmallow specked terrain between their heads. Harry inclined his head towards it, and Draco's fingers slipped into his hair. "All these floors sure seem hungry today, huh?"

Harry snorted, causing a small marshmallow to roll across towards Draco, who scrunched his nose and said "I'm good, thanks!"

Then two of those long, lovely fingers made a little swirling motion just above his temples, and all the cereal disappeared off the floor. And then Draco inched closer, wormed his way into Harry's arms, warm and real in their quiet house. And when Harry inhaled, there was nothing there around him but the scent of air and home.

#drarry #joyful fic #drarry microfic #drarry fanfic

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