When they came for him, they came for him together, almost as though they had not the strength to face him alone.
First, there was the oldest man he had ever seen, with blue eyes that twinkled like stars. Cloudy stars. Beside him, a woman with a worn face, and wrinkled skin that looked like it would break far too easily. He wondered if she was like him. If her skin knitted itself the way his did. If she cut herself over and over and over just to watch it happen in morbid fascination.
At last then, a dark man with dark eyes. He had never thought anyone could hate him more than his relatives did. Yet this man seemed to hate the very thought of him, of who he was, of how he was.
"How are you, Harry, my boy?"
He did not break the gaze of the dark man, even as the old man spoke. He knew he wasn't normal. He knew he was dulled. And yet even he wasn't capable of such insight into adults around him, not with just a stare.
Not yet.
The room was charged, he realised, with something beyond himself. It was charged with the thing that toyed with his arm. That thing connected their eyes in that moment, Harry's and the dark man's. For a moment, he could imagine that they felt as one, felt the hurt, the anger, the betrayal, as one.
"Severus, please."
And then it was over.
He blinked up at the old man, whose voice was a lonely tree. He wondered if he made the old man feel lonely, if his cupboard made the old man feel lonely.
"Albus, the boy is…"
"I know, Severus." The dark man look towards the old man, and the thing which knitted flesh passed between them. Harry wondered if it knitted minds also. Harry wondered if perhaps this thing was a great Knitter, which could knit any tear, in body, in soul, in the world even.
But he did not understand. All he knew was that his arm could mend, and that these three people were crying over him.
"Oh Harry." It was the woman, the one with paper skin. "What have they done to you?"
He did not know how to answer. He sat back in his cot in the cupboard, and feasted on the smell of blood in the wooden walls. How did one answer such a question? Was there even an answer at all?
Could the great Knitter knit him an answer?
"His magic is gone, Minerva. I do not know how." The old man paused in discomfort. "His mind was broken, somehow, and with it his very soul broke too."
Harry was not broken. He was dulled, in parts, and sharpened in others. But the Knitter always made sure he was not broken. This much he knew.
"What do we do, Albus?"
No one spoke, and for a moment, words were unborn.
...
In the end, they just left him. They left him with dead words like magic, and Lily, and prophecy.
Harry was young, but he understood.
His parents had died many years ago at the hands of a man who could undo the Knitter. His parents had come unravelled, because they chose to ask the Knitter to fix him, instead of them.
After that, he had come to live here.
They thought him to be weak, now. They thought him to be incapable of magic. They did not understand that what they did was not what the great Knitter did. He could not control the Knitter, but why would he need to? It was his friend, and it fixed him always.
That was enough.
Now, they had warned him away from seeking them out, from seeking out others who could supposedly work the Knitter to their will. They told him he would not be able to find them, anyway.
Their school was closed to him. Their lives were separate from his. Their battles were no longer his battles.
Harry liked all that just fine.
The old man had cast out from his mind with purpose, and knitted his relatives minds anew. They would not treat him the way they had, anymore. The old man told him thus, with his parting words. The old man told him that it was one last act of magic, that he could do for Harry.
And then, with naught but silence, the three left.
Harry knew that the old man had lied. He knew that magic did not exist. This world was not a world of magic. This world was a world of coldness, of calculation, and knowing and unknowing. Magic was dead, the world was dead, the whole universe was dead. Or perhaps none of it was ever alive.
All people, in the end, were the same. They all lived the same, and died the same. They all bled the same. Except for him. He had the Knitter, which hugged him close.
He would bring it to them also.
...
This then, was how he had chosen to be.
No one understood him. Not teachers, not students, not Doctors. They did not understand his quiet, his eyes, his dark, all of which were unnatural. They did not know why he was this way, because nothing that made him this way existed anymore. If it ever did.
His relatives minds had been changed. His skin had been stitched back together.
The past was only in his mind now. There was no other sign that it had ever been.
He might as well have dreamed it all. Perhaps he did.
A year passed, then five, then ten. School was the same. University was the same. And when time passed in sameness it passed unwritten.
At last, at 25, he became a Knitter too. One of the youngest ever. A prodigy. A genius. An eidetic memory and a fanatical devotion to the craft.
He felt no different. He was no different.
Yet the others thought he was, and so he let them.
He walked in silence to the OR, scrubbed in in silence, and then stood ready over the patient. The nurses triple checked everything. The music for the day was chosen. The smell of coffee from the anaesthetist mixed with the smell of disinfectant. He held out his hand patiently.
An 11 blade was placed there. He grasped it with reverence. His heart beat heavy, just once.
Then he reached down, and cut.
Hours later, he would knit this man back together, the way the Knitter did for him.
It was beautiful. It was poetic. It was everything that Harry dreamed for his life.
It was simply the way of things.
...
He should have known it could never last. But he never could have thought they would come back.
The old man, the paper woman, and the man with the dark eyes. They had not aged a single day.
But he had.
He let them into his apartment. He gave them no pretences. He did not pretend to laugh, or to talk.
He walked back inside, and they followed in silence. And then he simply sat, and waited for them.
For Albus Dumbledore, nothing could have been more unnerving.
"I've heard you're a healer now, Harry." It was a gentle beginning.
Harry Potter stared back, unblinking. He heard the old man clear his throat. He waited patiently for him to continue.
"I thought you might like to know how things have been progressing in our world, Harry. Some of these things concern you too." The old man went on to explain, as though a thousand versions of him had explained this to a thousand Harrys a thousand times.
The man who killed his parents had returned. The plots were contrived. Souls had been cracked. Intentionally kept from knitting back together.
All the pieces had been gathered. But Harry was the final piece of the puzzle.
To Harry, it made unbelievable, simple, sense.
They did not know how to ask the great Knitter. So they asked him.
They had sat in silence for minutes now, or perhaps hours, since the old man had lapsed from speech. Even he seemed unsure, at this point, the man who could answer anything.
Harry Potter smiled at them.
It was the smile he had when he was knitting a man together. A smile no one saw beneath the surgical mask.
To the three assembled guests, it was the smile of a madman.
"Yes." The dark man scowled.
"Yes to what, Potter?" He turned his eyes towards the dark man, and they joined together as they did years before. Like then, Severus Snape shuddered at a sudden chill which came upon him. The sort of chill normally only magic could bring. And yet, it was not possible, surely?
They had come only to take Potter away to his death, to his destiny.
"Yes. I will knit the unknitter for you."
The years had not been kind to Severus. He was beyond what little caring he once had had. So he laughed, loud and hard, and did not stop.
Their fate was in the hands of a muggle lunatic.
...
They took him away to a place in the forest. A clearing. He did not know where, and he did not care.
All he wanted to do was return to his knitting.
Along the way, the old man explained things to Harry. He didn't bother to listen. The Knitter told him the old man was manipulating him, that the truth was far away from this place.
But Harry knew something none of them did.
The old man assured him the unknitter would come. Harry was not sure how the old man knew this, but he was right.
The man who killed his parents did come.
Harry walked forward, even as people all around began to fight.
He walked forward and stared into the man's soul. It was beyond cracked, beyond frayed.
He was unsure whether it could be put back together.
Harry asked the Knitter, and the Knitter surged forward.
Across the clearing, Lord Voldemort's eyes widened as a spell emerged from the muggle before him. A spell he did not recognise. He placed his strongest shield before him, but somehow the spell passed right through.
It washed over him like a blanket. For a moment, he felt warmer than he ever had. And then, so very, very cold.
And then it was over.
The Knitter surged back towards Harry, and wrapped around him like a loved blanket. It had tried to fix the man. It had tried to tie the threads back together. But even the Knitter could not.
And so it broke the man down completely. It picked apart all the seams and absorbed them.
Later, it would begin to knit again.
All around, the fight had ended. Silence stared back at Harry, and for once, he felt uncomfortable.
He turned around to the old man, whose face had a great cut across it. He asked the Knitter, and eagerly it rushed out and stitched the flesh back together.
And then, tiredly, he spoke.
"I want to go back to my apartment now."
Albus Dumbledore was too shocked to do anything but comply.
...
The magical world celebrated the death of a tyrant. For his efforts in combating the Dark Lord over the past decades, Albus Dumbledore's status was renewed, as the greatest hero the magical world had known since the time of Merlin.
Only those who were there knew the truth. Harry Potter, the sometimes psychopathic, sometimes outright mad squib, had defeated Lord Voldemort once again. And once again, he had done so through means beyond the rest of humanity.
Still, though, the world lived on in peace, for now.
As for Harry, his days went on as they always did. He mended countless people, sewing them back together in ways that others never dreamt of. He won many awards for his work, and came to be known as a great innovator in medicine and surgery. It all meant nothing to Harry. His work was his life, and it was all that mattered.
The whole time, the Knitter held him close.