Summary: Harry's hands are splintered bones under painted skin. (The injuries of abuse from the eyes of a child who can heal within the day.)

AN: Apparently, I am really into writing about Harry's abuse. I've always gotten the impression that he was physically abused based on a few line and hints in the books and I feel like if J.K. Rowling meant to write it as such then she should've put more emphasis on his abuse. Either way, the books don't really show things from the perspective of an abused child in my opinion (even though Harry is most definitely abused) and, apparently, my muse wants to write a bunch of story's centered on Harry's abuse to combat this issue.

Poetic but not beautiful, because this is SAD. This stuff is not nice or sweet, it's messed up. The writing may be pretty, but this is twisted.

Rated for child abuse and gore.

Harry's hands are red. There is blood oozing out of pussy wounds and the water in the sink is a pale magenta. He thinks, fleetingly, that it looks like watercolors and he wishes he could paint with it.

His palms are tingling and there is yellow mixed in with the viscous liquid of his veins, but he focuses on the red and its brilliance. He thinks of vampires and roses and feels a numb kind of fascination with the blood that is dripping steadily into the sink.

The skin closes slowly as the bumpy burns smooth into his palm like they were never there at all. Only the trails of red and pink running down his forearm and flowing in the sink show he was ever wounded at all.

He wonders if it's a blessing to have hands that paint sunsets like his skin is the sky; paintings that fade to olive before the sun goes down.

(With it, he's cursed to keep receiving the paintings without knowing why and without any evidence that it ever happened at all.)

Harry's hands are purple, painted like a pretty picture but painful all the same. Harry's hands are one large bruise and he cradles them to his lithe frame.

He holds up his hands to the light flowing through the grate on the door and sighs when the purple fades to green, then yellow until his hands are just tan skin. Only a dull ache throbbing through his flesh lets him know that the canvas of his hands was ever a mottled ink splotch at all.

Harry's hands are black like charred bacon and the inky depths of the cupboard when Uncle Vernon takes the light out. They are flaked with dark brown scabs and burnt skin like he's never seen before. He wonders, faintly, if the scabs and charcoal will stay once the evening has turned the skin back to its typical olive, or if they'll cling like a leech to his unblemished skin as an itchy reminder of his blackened thumbs

It's curiously dark, he notes – the way his fingertips are peeling and the blood is clumped like the textural paintings he saw in the local library. He can even make out some faint blues beside the black and brown scars.

When he washes his hands, they seem somehow tanner than before and he frowns at the change, wondering if he's learning how to stain. He already knows how to clean them out, of course, and he thinks his hands can't be that much different than wood.

Harry's hands are scarlet and blazing with heat. They are warped figures of wax, melting white and red – twisting down his fingers into his forearms and dripping with agony. They aren't bloodied by open wounds, yet they are stinging as if his very soul was exposed to the elements.

They are like a pool of paint; two colors swimming on his palms waiting to be mixed into a dull flesh tone but separated by scars. He wants to mix them, to make the paint proper and even. And he watches, fascinated, as his skin ripples like water into the very color it was before it touched the stove top.

(He wonders if he'll ever be allowed a paintbrush.)

Harry's hands are pale white and blue, like frost and water mixing and yet, so very separate. They are cold and he thinks, absently, that he shouldn't have any blue left if he's frozen so. Because his hands feel like ice and ice isn't blue; it's clear like glass and the shards of broken mirrors and just as sharp and cutting.

He wonders how the water hasn't frozen yet.

He thinks the blue is edging on purple now and he wonders why it's changing the opposite way it usually does – why the picture on his palms is getting clearer rather than fading like a mirage he thinks he might've imagined. But, he looks and sees the pretty lines on his skin and thinks, 'this one's my favorite'.

It's blue and purple and white, and incandescent in a way that he doesn't think he could ever paint even if he were allowed a brush. His skin is so thin he thinks it may be translucent and he can see the colors fluttering underneath along the veins.

The cold has settled into his bones and he figures out why his hands aren't olive – the pain he had been feeling is gone and his hands feel numb and warm like he's holding them in front of a fire. If his hands aren't hurting, he finds no reason to scrape off the pretty colors on them. So, he stares idly at the appendages, surveying his purpling fingertips. Distantly, he recognizes this as bad, but the door is locked and he's supposed to sleep out here in the heavy and pristine whiteness of winter so he can't really do much about it.

He curls into himself and hopes that in the morning – even though these hands are especially pretty – they'll go back to being tan again.

Harry's hands are creamy and pale. They look like death and are wrapped up in violence. There is a thrum of magic that isn't his own skulking in his soul and his corpse-like body, possessing him and eating away at his flesh like a parasite.

If he looks hard enough, he can imagine the scales of a snake on his arm to fit with the monster invading his body. He can feel the slime of him on his skin and it casts a grisly shine on his rapidly decaying hand. He looks like a breathing cadaver and his bones feel hollowed out by the devil inside him.

When he wakes up in the hospital wing the next day, he tries to forget the state his hands were in the night previous. But, he still finds it harder to look at his hands than he ever has before.

Harry's hands are splintered bones under painted skin. Harry's skin is parchment – pretty pictures wrapped around. Harry's blood is paint and it bruises and blooms like wildflowers marking meadows on his arms. Harry's breath is rotting and his lungs are paper thin, folding in like origami and crumpling under his cage of ribs.

Harry's skin is olive, but paintings mar it pretty like a painful piece of art.

Harry's hands have broken so much that his mind mirrors their shattered bones.