One Moment in New York
By ShostyScholar
Disclaimer: I don't own anything and will make no money.
A man - he looked more of a boy, really - stepped off the curb onto a busy New York street. Hundreds of other pedestrians moved with him in response to a tiny white light shaped like a man mounted on traffic pole. A great myriapod of humanity moving together, but each mind an island; each mind oblivious to the metaphor of its movement in the great flock of humanity.
Harry had thought he would find comfort in the anonymity of New York, that it would give him a place to forget. After a lifetime of being singled out, a lifetime of being special, he had been ready for a new country, a new name - even a failed attempt at hiding his accent, which he had quickly abandoned.
But try as he might, the faces in New York's great swarms of humanity didn't look anonymous to him. Out of the corner of his eyes he would find himself recognizing the faces of his old friends - the faces of those who had fallen, tortured and killed by the Dark Lord. Some who had survived the war only to die slowly, caving in on themselves, too destroyed by what they'd seen and who they'd lost to recover. Those ones might as well have been dead. Sometimes Harry wondered if he was one of those people. Maybe it was just impossible to recognize in himself, like standing too close to a painting and failing to see what's actually being depicted.
The school of New York pedestrians stopped, heeding another little illuminated man on the traffic pole - orange this time. The faces of friends long gone that Harry saw around him melted imperceptibly as he returned to the present, until again he was looking at the anonymous faces of unrecognizable Americans.
Comforted by this, Harry stepped off of the curb when the little man turned white and fluidly disappeared into the crowd.