the first time

Harry Potter was locked inside of the cupboard under the stairs. Again. And this time he hadn't even done anything to deserve it. He had not dropped the pan of eggs while he made breakfast. He had not woken Dudley up a whole two minutes early while using the vacuum.

No, because today was the day Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon and greedy little four-year-old Dudley Dursley had decided they were long overdue for a good and proper family outing.

Of course, it went without saying – it always went without saying – that Harry would not be accompanying them. No sir, this was a Dursleys-only trip, and no good-for-nothing freeloading Potters were allowed to ruin this day.

Besides, it was a rather common practice to take place under the roof of Number Four, Privet Drive, neglecting this tiny black and green orphan. The family kept him locked away, and to pretend that they weren't abusive and awful relatives, they also fed him their table scraps. There were, of course, also the game nights spent in the immaculate sitting room, during which Petunia and Vernon both threw several rounds of Cluedo so their darling son Dudley never had to experience being a loser. Meanwhile, Harry looked in on the scene from the kitchen, where he was scrubbing the grout between the floor tiles with a toothbrush.

There were all the first days of school when Harry would be gifted with stretched jumpers and jeans, hand-me-downs from his older-by-a-month, bigger-by-six-sizes cousin.

And who could forget all the summer vacations they took, in which Harry was put into the care of his batty neighbor, Mrs. Figg, who had too many cats to count and seemed to enjoy a square of stale cake with her daily cup of tea.

So no, a family outing between the three Dursleys – who were perfectly happy to say that they were a perfectly normal family with no supernatural secrets whatsoever – and no one else was really not the hardest thing to believe. However, what had left Harry in a state of confusion and fear was being completely alone in that horrid home, all greys and beiges and dull floral patterns, locked inside of a tiny cupboard under the staircase. The Dursleys always left him with Figg, only today he had overheard his uncle telling his aunt that she had to take her seventeen cats to the vet for their annual check-up, and the appointment would run for the duration of the day.

Definitely not fair, in Harry's opinion.

Harry, in a state of frantic panic, had taken to poking his tiny, bony fingers through the grate on the door, wishing he knew magic so he could open the latch. However, as he was most definitely not a wizard or anything of the like, he was stuck – and stuck well.

He sniffed softly, pulling his hand back into the darkness of his room. From his tiny prison cell, he could see the clock Aunt Petunia had hung on the wall next to the doorway to the kitchen. Its hands were long and made of metal strips bent into decorative curls, and the face was the antique yellow colour of an old envelope. The poor kid wasn't all too great at reading clocks yet, especially not the circle kind, but he did know that the short hand had moved from the halfway between the eight and the nine all the way to right in front of the four during the time he'd spent locked up.

Harry was hungry and cramped, and afraid of all the spiders that kept climbing onto his socks. Almost subconsciously, his small fingers poked out through the bars again. He pressed his tiny forehead against a small patch of wood on the oddly-shaped door that had been rubbed smooth through this practice. A tear welled in his eye, trickled down his left cheek and clung to his quivering chin for a moment before landing on the rough floor of the cupboard with the tiniest of splashes.

Immediately accompanying the sound was a loud banging noise, and then a dull thud, coming from the kitchen. Harry, his resentment for his tiny cell all but forgotten, pressed his face up against the brass grate so hard there was sure to be lines running vertically down his face for a while after he peeled his head away.

"Ow!" a voice stated from the room at the end of the hallway, somehow managing to sound both whiny and matter-of-fact at the same time. Harry could hear the mysterious intruder roving, and probably knocking Aunt Petunia's neat arrangement of furniture around, if he were to judge by the clacking, scraping noise of wood on wood.

"Hello?" Harry called hesitantly, hoping the mysterious man in the house was kind. Maybe he could let Harry out of the cupboard.

The sound of something metallic being dropped could be heard, followed by a loud exclamation of, "AH!" The man came sprinting out into the hallway, his boots thudding on the polished floor.

Harry blinked at the intruder, who was odd looking – and on top of that, wearing what was quite possibly the strangest array of clothing he had ever seen. For one, the man was tall and thin and pale as milk. His hair was brown and floppy, and mussed from the weird, red, cylindrical-shaped hat sitting atop his head. He whipped a pair of large round glasses, rather like little Harry's own pair, only these weren't held together in the middle by Scotch tape, out of the inside pocket of his fitted tweed jacket and slid them onto his face.

"Yes!" he shouted, and shoved the spectacles back into his coat. The boy got a glance of a solid red suspender strap hidden beneath the coat over the man's crinkled white dress shirt. "Harry Potter, age four. I think. Tell me, is it 1984?"

Harry's eyes trailed over the man's too-short brown trousers and ankle boots, before landing on a stiff blue bowtie secured around his white neck. That type of clothing was definitely not the kind of thing people wore these days. Could this be a "time-traveler", like the ones he sometimes heard about when Dudley was watching telly? He nodded excitedly.

"Good, good! 1984, George Orwell, a great book and a great man! Tell me, what month is it? Is it August? Oh, I love Augusts!"

Harry stared at the strange man standing right in front of his cupboard with wide eyes. "It's November."

"Oh, well Novembers are fun, too. Harry, some of my most favorite adventures took place in November. Like when I had a fancy dinner with some Native Americans and some British explorers over in America. Food was terrible though, one of the colonists left the fish over the fire too long." At Harry's blank look, the strange man jumped tracks. "Anyway, I'm the Doctor, that's D-O-C, T-O-R, just the Doctor, and nothing but the Doctor. And you're Harry Potter, currently living with your mum's horrid sister and her walrus of a husband. Oh yes, and their terrible little son. Doody?" Harry giggled. The Doctor's eyes flicked up to Harry's forehead, where Harry knew was a sharp and angry looking cut. Nervously, the toddler flattened his bangs over it.

Harry pressed his face harder into the grate. "How did you know that?" he whispered in awe.

The Doctor grinned. "I know lots of things, Harry, I'm the cleverest man in the universe, and definitely the most fun!" He reached back inside his tweed coat, and shoved his hand in his pocket almost all the way up to the elbow. "Let's see here…" he said, rummaging around in the space. "No, nope – oh that's where my rubber duck went! I missed this!" With a happy smile, the Doctor pulled a large yellow duck almost as big as his head out of the tiny jacket pocket. He kissed both of its cheeks in some strange greeting, and patted it on the head lovingly. With that, he tossed it over his shoulder as though it were trash and thrust his hand back inside his jacket.

Harry watched in amazement as finally the strange man yelled, "Ha!", and proceeded to bring his left forefinger up to his lips to shush himself. He then muttered something and smacked his cheek with his right hand, which was now holding a long, metal tube with a strange looking claw and a little green bulb on the end.

"What's that?" Harry asked, looking at the device then man had begun to fiddle with.

"It's a sonic screwdriver. It lets me do stuff, like open doors and fix things, and it even makes cool noises if you put it on setting G4583."

He pressed a button on the side of the tube and the end lit up with a loud and much exaggerated BOING!

"Wow," Harry breathed, looking at the device in the man's hand. "Like a magic wand!"

The Doctor brushed off the awe with a knowing smile and a laid back, "I know." He then put the screwdriver back into his jacket pocket, and pulled something out instead. "Now, Harry, I forgot! I came to give this to you. I'm not supposed to say anything to you, so… Now that that rule's been broken, we can move on to more exciting things. I have something for you, something you can't lose no matter what. This is very important, Harry, understand. Don't lose this. It's going to come in handy a long time from now, during a time when you feel like nothing will ever be okay again. But that's alright, because I've seen it, and it will be, eventually. You're so young right now…" he trailed off, looking forlornly at the floor.

"I was young too, or at least younger than I am now. And I hated myself for it, and you probably will too. So Harry, whatever you do, don't you dare lose this, because you'll need it one day. I –" he cut off, froze, and then slowly turned to look at the clock. The small hand was now balancing between the four and the five, and the big hand was on the six. Harry listened as Uncle Vernon's silhouette on the other side of the front door pushed the house key into the lock.

The Doctor wasted no time pulling out the strange tube item from his pocket and pointed it at the door. The lock, which had been beginning to turn, slid back into position as the tumblers clicked the door back into place. Outside, Harry's grouchy and tired uncle swore and kicked the door so hard it rattled in its frame. With a hurried, "I'll be seeing you soon, Harry Potter," the Doctor pushed something small and hard and tinkly through the bars on his door. It fell to the floor, into the darkness, so Harry couldn't see what it was. He knelt down, hands sweeping the dusty floor for his gift. His fingers landed on it just as the front door swing open and slammed into the hallway wall with a massive bang.

Quickly, he shoved the mystery item into his trousers pocket and stood up.

"BOY!" Vernon thundered, as though the lock re-engaging had been Harry's fault. Harry peered around for the Doctor, fearing what his uncle would do to the strange man in the blue bowtie, only to discover he had vanished in the few extra seconds it had taken for Vernon Dursley to wrestle open the front door.

Needless to say, Harry was sentenced to a cold and rather unsatisfying dinner of turkey fat and old carrot stubs for his "trick with the lock", as his uncle put it. It wasn't until very late that night that Harry remembered the strange gift that the even-stranger visitor had bestowed upon him, and reached into his pocket, curious as to what could be so important.

He clutched it in his fist, peered through the grate on the door to make sure no one was awake, and then pulled the small string to turn on the light. The tiny bulb lit up his equally as small living space with a dim yellow glow.

One, he counted in his head. Two, three, and –! Harry opened his closed fingers and blinked at the trinket in his hand.

Lying in his palm was a small key, brilliantly shiny even in the dark, and with not a scratch on it. There was a small hole at the top, through which a stiff leather cord ran, making a necklace. It felt warm in his palm, and engraved along the side of the key was a string of words that sounded a rather lot like gibberish: Time and Relative Dimension in Space.

Harry tucked the key into a sock at the back of his drawer and grinned.

.

a.n: so, uh, not dead. Thought I should point that out. I can't remember the last time I was on FF, but it's been months. Life is busy right now – school is school, I did marching band last year and have been involved with this thing called FRC (look it up, it's amazing and basically my only output of friends and t-shirts and social outings) the past two years, and I also happen to be exceptionally good at making excuses, so thanks for sticking with me!

That being said, this is a compilation of six short one-shots, and all of them have ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN!, which means I'm sticking to a strict "once a week" posting schedule, and should not vary from that because I have no excuse now. Enjoy!

(extra a.n: there's a poll on my profile asking about what stories I should focus on next. Go check it out, browse the ideas I have planned out, and submit your input! Thanks!)