This (eventually) takes place around three or four days after @pickyourpoisonflorist has been kidnapped.
Truth be told, Harry could have handled things better. But it was too late now.
The week had started badly. He’d broken his phone screen while playing soccer with some boys from school (a game he didn’t really enjoy, but he watched it and football with his dad sometimes, and he knew the other boys in his class loved it so it made him fit in) and both his parents had gone ballistic. It didn’t help that he’d only asked the night before if they could potentially adopt an animal from the shelter Maria (@hcldinghope) worked at. He could still hear his father’s voice ringing around his head, the look of disappointment evident in his eyes.
“If you can’t even look after a phone, how are we meant to trust you with an animal?”
It hurt, because the day before, they’d agreed to it almost too readily, happy to give him some responsibility and show them how grown up and grounded he could be. But no, every time Harry did something irresponsible, it was always evidence to them - evidence that he wasn’t normal, that despite all the progress he’d made (despite the occasional slip up), they still thought of him as an incompetent child who couldn’t tell fact from fiction. It wasn’t the first time. There had been countless incidents before where they’d treated him the same, building up and up in Harry’s memory that he always tried to push to the side. Because they just cared. It still hurt, more and more as he got older, but he’d huffed and shouted and gone up to his room, and that had been the end of it.
Or it should have been the end of it.
He couldn’t say what gave him the idea. Perhaps he was finally just reaching the rebellious stage of his teenage years. Perhaps it was the courage he’d found he had in himself when he met Paige (@hatterxtrick). Perhaps it was the thrill he’d felt when he stole those candy bars from the shop (and a book from the school library, and the can of soda from the convenience store; just little things, little acts of rebellion, little acts to remind him that he was growing older and bolder and better). But he was sure it would work.
If the papers had already been signed, if he paid the fee and the dog was already legally theirs... It was harder to give him back if the dog was already in their home. If Harry was already attached to him, right?
Lying to Maria was probably the worst part. She’d always been so good to him, so kind and caring that telling her his parents were fine with it, providing her with a letter to prove it (that he’d spent the whole night before forging signatures for) felt like a physical pain. But when he was walking home with his dog (his dog, his very own dog - Watson, he’d decided), it was euphoric. He’d done it again.
Maybe cheating was the way to get everything he wanted after all.
The result, however, had not been what he’d expected.
He’d gotten Watson into the house without his parents noticing. Set up a dog bowl and some water in his room, played gently with the almost-recovered dog and he’d hidden himself and his newly loyal companion upstairs when his parents came home.
What he hadn’t anticipated was Watson needing the bathroom at one in the morning. The dog had been anything but quiet about it, even if he’d been the best boy and woken Harry up to take him outside, but they couldn’t be quiet enough. Harry’s father had woken up and caught them halfway down the stairs.
The fight lasted for an hour. Watson had been shut away (after his bathroom break) in Harry’s room for the duration, so as not to stress the poor animal.
“We’re getting up and taking that damn dog back to the shelter, and you’re not going back!” had been his father’s parting shot when Harry stomped his way back upstairs, devastated. Deep down, he knew it had been a foolish idea, but he had so convinced himself that he could get away with it that he hadn’t thought things through entirely.
Now he was just angry. Angry, tired and hormonal wasn’t the best combination of states to be in when making decisions, and that was why Harry could be found at 3am, scrap metal in hand, backpack filled with clothes and his father’s credit cards (and dog toys), Watson’s leash tied to it as he walked the streets of Storybrooke. He just needed to get out of the house, away from his parents so they couldn’t take Watson away from him. Couldn’t ground him and keep him from his friends. Couldn’t treat him like the child that he wasn’t.
It had to have been the emotions running high through him that made his brain blank, but when he laid his eyes on an old yellow Volkswagen Beetle, Harry knew what he had to do.
Which was why he was cursing at a door lock on said yellow Beetle at three in the morning, trying to break into the vehicle with some paperclips and other assorted small metal objects he’d thought to pocket.
“Come on,” he grumbled, almost breaking a paperclip off in the lock (but he hadn’t - it was fine. He could keep trying). This was so much easier in the Youtube tutorials he’d found on his mother’s cell phone (which he’d also taken), and he wasn’t willing to try and look up how to hotwire a car until he’d actually gotten into the damn thing.
