I met you in the toilet (Larry One Shots - book 5)

If You Build Yourself a Myth

From: http://archiveofourown.org/works/495355

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Rating: Mature

Warnings/tags: alternate universe - magical realism, unexplained powers

Word count: 12804 

Summary: Harry is six the first time he makes something change. (magical realism AU)

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Harry is six the first time he makes something change. He’s drawing at his little table in the playroom, page after page of planets and trees and stick people with too many legs. He’s got a lion drawn on the paper in front of him, and he’s showing it to his mum, telling her about the lion -- “See, his friends are all lost in the jungle and he has to go find them to save them, cos no one else knows where they went, but he does,” -- when he decides that actually, this lion should be blue. He’s already drawn it in yellow and brown, but it really ought to be blue, so he thinks for a minute, frowning a little, and then presses his fingertips against the paper and thinks, blue.

The lion turns blue. The grass the lion’s standing on turns blue. The trees and the sky and the sun and the clouds turn blue.

“Oh, Harry,” his mum says, and she sounds breathless. He looks up at her, and she’s got tears in her eyes, and Harry thinks maybe he’s done something bad, that he’s going to be punished and sent to his bedroom. Sometimes he does bad things without knowing it, and he doesn’t reallymean to, his mum says he just doesn’t always think.

But she’s smiling, now, and she pulls Harry in close to her chest, hugging him and smushing her face into his curls so hard he flails, trying to get away from her grip. “Stop it, mum, come on,” he protests.

“It’s very beautiful,” she says before she lets him squirm out of her grasp. “My favorite drawing you’ve done yet.”

“Can I go outside?” he asks, and he’s out the door with one arm shoved in his jumper before she can answer.

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He changes more things after that. He makes his milk turn chocolate one day and his mum scolds him, tells him he’s not allowed, but even then she smiles a little like he’s done something very clever.

He decides to make his hair red one day, just to see what it would be like, and his mum laughs herself silly until he puts it back, feeling slightly put out.

His mum puts up a poster of a tiger in his room, right next to his bed. The tiger is hiding in the jungle and you can just see his eyes, the start of his face, his mouth. Harry touches it at night and turns it into a pig, and a cow, and then a lion, which is how he leaves it, even though he read in a book that lions don’t actually live in the jungle. Later on, he puts in more lions, lots more until the whole poster is lions, little ones and big ones and ones with great huge manes and baby ones. His mum laughs, and says he should leave some empty space for the lions to run around, that it must get too crowded with so many of them, but Harry refuses, and leaves it like that -- all lions.

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When Harry is ten, he comes home from school and there are strangers in his sitting room with his mum, two grown ups and a boy about his age, maybe a little older, having tea.

“Harry,” his mum says, standing up to hug him, “come say hello. These are some friends of mine, they’re just in town for today and they’ve stopped by for tea.”

“H’lo,” Harry says, kicking at the carpet with his trainers. “Mum, can I go outside?” He holds his hand in his pocket and absently changes the piece of candy that he has in it, makes it go all melted before bringing it back.