Pain. Dark debris and dust. Pain. Nothing moved. Nothing ran.
He whimpered against the pain, the shock. The noise. Boom.
Clawing at his face, he struggled to keep his eyes open. What was happening? The eyes burned, and, though he could not see them himself, they glowed a fiery red.
Sixteen and a half years later, a boy walked to meet his death.
His eyes! What was happening? Frantically he rubbed his face on the ground, on the piles of hard rubble, instinctively trying to shut out the heat. He wanted to run, but there was nowhere to run. He heard a hissing sound as he tried to beat the fire out. Maybe it was working.
Then, just when he thought his eyes couldn't hurt any worse, it deepened. The fire had grown, burned hotter, farther into his skull! He hissed loudly in pain, more loudly than he had been hissing before. His flesh must be searing, his eyes must be on fire!
"Harry Potter," the high, cold voice said softly. "The Boy Who Lived."
Silence fell… two hard, long beats later, the pale face contorted with rage…
"Avada Kedavra!" the voice shouted, and a rush and a flash hit Harry Potter straight in the heart. He fell to the ground, crumpled, crunched. Finality hit him hard. Harry Potter was dead. Harry Potter would not get up.
He jumped, his body tense. He thought wildly of water, the wet stuff, and ran blindly. The fire, the burning, he couldn't stand it! What was happening?
He tried to run, but everywhere he ran headlong into hard, rocky stuff, the rubble of the ruined house piled in heaps everywhere. His heart raced. He needed to get to the wet stuff!
Lord Voldemort stood triumphant. Here lay his inexplicable threat… Well, he was dead now, like so many other 'threats'… They were all miniscule fleas, really. He did not bother to have any of his faithful go to check the body, whose eyes flicked apprehensively back to their master as though awaiting permission to celebrate.
And then the jubilation exploded. The clearing was alive with raucous cheering and shouts of celebration. There was a wailing, grieving sound like a wounded animal that competed to drown them all out, but it was overpowered. Hagrid and his pain didn't matter. Harry Potter was dead.
He frantically pawed at the debris, desperate… He needed out! The fire licked around his brain, a horrible, sick flame inside his head… It has to stop, make it stop!
And suddenly, it was gone.
He felt his legs grow weak and he collapsed.
The boy was dead, because Dumbledore had been wrong. In all his theories and speculation, he had only been able to do that: speculate. Theorize. He didn't know. And he had been wrong.
He had told Snape what he had known. It had all seemed so airtight, then, the old man brimming with confidence in his own guesswork that made up the foundation of it all. And so it was that he told the double agent that, to use his own words, "a fragment of Voldemort's soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsing building."
The pain was gone.
Cautiously, he stirred. He had collapsed, but now he stirred. What had happened?
Dumbledore had shown his ignorance in guessing, correctly, that the snake was a Horcrux without ever thinking twice about the principle of this in relation to other pieces of information. He was right that a fragment of Voldemort's soul had been dislodged that Halloween in Godric's Hollow, but it had found a different host, not a "soul," to latch on to.
Harry Potter was dead now because no part of Voldemort's soul had ever adulterated his body. He would not live another day.
Lying on the gritty foundational cement beneath him, he opened his eyes. The red disks cut through by their vertical pupils flicked back and forth.
Then it hit him. Just as suddenly as the pain had gone, the thoughts seemed to come at him. Violent. Cruel. He could sense the storm in his own brain.
While Lily and James lived, Dumbledore had never visited their house.
With an acute, horrible, stab of pain, the violent monster in his consciousness attacked him. It hurt so much that his muscles tightened – and then slackened. What was happening? He had coiled his muscles in self-defense, but here he was, his body seemingly relaxed. Relaxed… but he couldn't feel his limbs. What was happening? His fear grew, and he wanted to run, but again he couldn't. His legs didn't work.
The deep pain of a thought struck him again, and he jumped back mentally, submitting to the new monster's threat. He felt his body hiss in satisfaction. The monster was in control, now. It picked his body up off the dirty ground and looked about, glowing red eyes narrowed. The sun was rising.
Dumbledore hadn't known that the Potters had had a cat.
The small pink nose sniffed the air. VoldyCat wanted revenge.