Harry Potter Fanfic - two false starts

[aldersprig]

I have an idea, but these are the false starts on the way. Content warning on the second one: child abuse

All apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien

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Harry Potter lived in a hole. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing to sit down on or to eat. No, Harry Potter and his Aunt Petunia, his Uncle Vernon, and their son Dudley were currently living in the finest hole money could buy.

It was a very nice hole, with a large-screen TV, all the latest in video games, and three separate bedrooms, or, at least, bed-sections. It had food enough to last for several years, or, with Vernon and Dudley eating, three or four weeks.

It belonged, in title, to a co-worker of Vernon’s, and it was quite a ways out in the country, as such things went. The cooking in and of itself was an adventure, the place was large enough to have many places to look around, and it had no stairs and thus no cupboard under them in which to lock Harry.

If it hadn’t been for the letters, the letters that had been arriving every day, nay, every hour for the past week, Harry would have been quite content to live in this hole in the ground forever.

But the letters had stopped coming — perhaps the strange owls delivering them didn’t know how to get here, in the middle of nowhere, in a bunker underground, sealed in. Perhaps they were leaving the letters outside the vaultlike door. Perhaps…

At least here, Harry mused, there were no neighbors for Aunt Petunia to worry about.

——
Harry Potter — not that he knew that was his name; he had never been called anything but boy — lived in a hole. It was the most common sort of hole, a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing to sit down on or to eat, and a ladder that dropped down only when he was needed to do something.

He had lived in this hole as long as he could remember, and he had come to greatly enjoy The Real Boy’s tantrums, because those allowed him the longest time out of the hole, and those had the greatest chance of involving food. The Real Boy loved to throw food, and he loved to watch Harry eat it up — like a dog, he’d laugh, and although Harry had never seen a dog, he had seen a picture of one once, and supposed it was a fair comparison.

Comments

[clare_dragonfly]

::giggles a lot at the beginning::

The second one is very depressing.

[aldersprig]

Yeah, I know. <.< But neither are where I wanted to do, siiiigh.

[sauergeek]

I have no idea if underground nuclear shelters — or preppers with underground bunkers — are a thing anywhere but the US. My initial read is that this is probably a Seventh Age Tolkien/Potterverse crossover riffing on the US rather than Britain. If they're sealed in an underground shelter or bunker, how is Aunt Petunia fussing about neighbors?

The second one, based purely on "Real Boy", has me thinking of a Pinocchio/Potterverse crossover. But that would likely set up Uncle Vernon as the Geppetto equivalent, and Geppetto never struck me as that kind of jerk. Might be that the Geppetto equivalent has since died, and Pinocchio/Dudley ended up with Vernon or Petunia...

[aldersprig]

My husband recently sent me a link about bunkers becoming a booming business in Japan, so at least somewhere else..

and the Petunia thing was supposed to read “there were NO neighbors for Aunt Petunia to worry about....”