Through the Looking-Glass
There was once a white room.
The white room was on a white floor. The white floor was in a white building. The white building had a white sign The Chepstow Institute for the Mentally Disabled and Unstable.
Back to the white room.
In the white room, everything was, naturally, white. The walls were white, scrubbed six times a day and repainted white every six months. In the center of the white floor was a metal table. It was a brittle table with rickety legs and a sheen iron tint about it. But the years had rubbed it to a color closer to white.
Maybe whitish-gray.
There was something else that wasn't white. On the left wall was a large mirror that was six feet long and one foot wide. Of course, it wasn't a real mirror. It was a one-way mirror for people to sneakily look through like a window. On the other side of the mirror was a dark room with two important-looking men. They stood there with their arms crossed in white labcoats, one adjusting and readjusting his horn-rimmed glasses importantly, the other crushing an empty soda can.
One man with neatly parted hair placed a pen into his left breast pocket and peered at a woman from the corner of his eyes with faint annoyance. The woman was a complete wreck. She was small and crouched and weeping, looking like a pitiful naked mole rat in a drab blue Sunday dress. She could have been decent-looking, if she hadn't been crying her eyes out for the past few hours.
"He won't recognize me," she sobbed, refolding her sopping handkerchief. "He looks at me as if I'm a complete stranger and asks me who I am, asks me why I'm here to see him—and—and—" She let out a wail.
"Mrs. ------," said the important-looking doctor with the neatly parted hair, for that's what he was. "Let me express my deepest condolences. Your son...is an interesting case."
"Screw the interesting case crap," said his partner, another doctor with messy hair and a slovenly, unshaven appearance. He slipped out a cigarette. "You mind if I have a smoke?"
The neat doctor frowned.
"Just tell her the truth and let's get it over with," said his partner, lighting his cigarette. "Her son's crazy."
"Your son," said the doctor, "is suffering from a severe case of schizophrenia. His symptoms—delusions, hallucinations, disorganized, abstract speech—are all signs schizophrenics display."
"But he's only sixteen years old!" the woman cried.
"Schizophrenia usually occurs during late adolescence for males and we believe this was caused by the malfunction of dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway in the brain. The dopaminergic effect, in other words."
The woman gaped like a dying goldfish.
"Lady," said the doctor with the messy hair, "what my socially-retarded friend's trying to say is that your son is living in his own world."
The woman slowly lowered her handkerchief from her trembling lips. "In his own world?"
The doctor stubbed his cigarette out on his can. "The boy thinks he's living in this magical world," he sighed, scratching his chin, "and that he's a student at this school with a hella weird name. I forgot what it was. Something related to pork..."
The three people turned to stare rather solemnly (the woman with red eyes and a sniffy nose) at the white room through the one-way mirror. Inside the white room was a boy.
The boy was waiting for something.
He waited and waited, clenching his fists, turning his knuckles white. He was sitting on one of those wretched beds with the white sheets and cold, iron bars.
Where am I? What am I doing here? What's happening?
The boy turned his head to the right. He saw white.
He turned his head to the left. White, again.
He stood up, walked over to the white wall, raised his arm, and then smashed it against the wall as hard as he could.
Crimson exploded in front of him. He shrieked as the delicate bones shattered like glass against the hard concrete. Pain danced from his hand and traveled up to his eyes, spurting tears. When he blinked the tears away, he saw white bone poking out through the raw, torn skin.
But the white was covered in rosy pink, blood red, muscles, nerves. He looked up and saw a beautiful red flower blooming on the wall, blood-beads trailing down and forming a new path. The blood soaked into the wall.
What a nice color.
The boy opened his mouth and then started to laugh. LAUGH. LAUGH HARD, LONG, LOUD. LAUGH SO THAT THEY CAN HEAR YOU, THOSE FUCKING BASTARDS.
Laughing prolongs your life.
The door opened with a hurried crash. A woman rushed in, her blond hair in disarray, the color draining from her shrunken cheeks.
"What are you doing?" she yelled. "What the hell are you doing!! My God, what did you do to your hand?!"
The boy turned and his lips lifted into an innocent smile of bliss. "Joanne," he said. "You're here."
The woman ran over and grabbed the boy, pushing back his pitch-black hair and wiping the blood off his cheeks, below his green eyes. She cupped his face in her bony hands.
"Don't you ever do that...Promise me that you'll never do that again. If you really wanted to hit the wall that much, you should have used the table or something. Why did you use your naked hand?"
"I don't like white," he said.
She ruffled his black hair, soothing him. "Tell me," she whispered. "Tell me your beautiful dream again. Your dream of your world."
"But it's not a dream, Joanne," the boy said. "It's real."
"Who's that woman?" The boy's mother stared at the blonde woman with wary eyes.
"Don't worry, Mrs. ------," the messy doctor said languidly. "She's just an average working mother who was chucked into this asylum because of severe depression."
The bespectacled doctor stared at the blond woman. She had an emaciated face with thin hands and hair the color of grayed hay interlaced with canary yellow.
"She's the only one," the messy doctor said, blowing his nose.
"I'll go enter the room right now," the neat doctor said, as he wiped his hands with a handkerchief.
When the clean doctor left the room, the boy's mother turned to the messy doctor. "What did you mean by 'she's the only one'?"
"I meant," he said, "she's the only one who'll listen to that boy's story."
"In dreams, we enter a world that's entirely our own."
Albus Dumbledore
The doctor entered the room.
The woman and the boy looked up. The boy was sitting in his bed, while the woman sat on her knees at the side, nursing his broken hand.
"We'll have to do something about that," the doctor said curtly, pointing at the boy's hand with his clipboard. "So, how are you doing?"
"I'm fine. My scar's not hurting much these days."
The doctor eyed the boy skeptically. "You don't have a scar."
"Yeah I do," the boysaid . "I got the scar on my forehead when I was baby when Voldemort killed my parents."
The doctor stared at the boy in disbelief. "Look at the mirror," the doctor said. "There is no scar on your forehead."
"Doctor, please..." the woman started.
"Joanne," the doctor snapped. "Will you please leave this room?"
"Don't make Joanne leave," the boy said abruptly. "She hasn't done anything wrong."
"She's a negative influence on you," the doctor said. "She's been encouraging you to spout those ridiculous fairy tales."
"It's not a fairy tale. It's real."
"If it is real, then why have I never seen this before? Why haven't I seen strange magical shops and schools and wizards?"
"Muggles like you can't see our world."
"What the hell are muggles now?!"
"They're people without an ounce of magic in their blood," the boy said, a flush creeping up to his cheeks. "That explains why—"
"That explains NOTHING!!" the doctor shouted, slamming his clipboard against the iron table. He clenched his teeth in frustration. "Why is it that you won't understand that your world is not real!? You're a SCHIZOPHRENIC! YOU'VE BEEN IMAGINING YOUR WORLD FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS!!"
"Doctor!" Joanne cried. "Doctor, please!"
"EVERYTHING! EVERYTHING IS FAKE! YOUR WORLD IS FAKE, YOUR FRIENDS ARE FAKE! YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS! HOW CAN YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHEN YOU'RE LIVING IN THIS ASYLUM?! THERE IS NO RON! THERE IS NO HERMIONE! THERE IS NO DUMBLEDORE! AND THERE IS NO HOGWARTS!!"
He stopped. The doctor stood there, panting. His hair was no longer parted neatly but was now in complete disarray. His tie was lopsided and his glasses were hanging off his nose. He had nearly smashed his clipboard in half while he had been whacking it against the table. Straightening his glasses, he took a deep breath.
The boy stared at him blankly. He had gone a deathly white, as white as the room. The emerald light in his eyes had shut off.
After a long, heavy silence, the boy shifted. "It was all a dream?" he said softly.
The doctor released a sigh of relief. "Yes. It was all a dream. A bad dream."
"If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
Sirius Black
Everything was a dream?
"No," the boy said in an undertone. "No, it couldn't have been a dream."
All of that. My whole life.
The doctor threw his clipboard to the ground with a resounding CRASH! "What do you not get? There's no evidence of your 'world'. Nothing!"
"I have my scar," the boy said, and his voice grew stronger. "This lightning-shaped scar. I have this. I had it all my life."
The doctor pulled the woman and thrust her forward. "You tell him. Tell him that he has no scar."
The woman looked back at the doctor with fearful, animal-like eyes.
The boy stared at the woman. "Joanne. You can see my scar, can't you? Right? Here. On my forehead. It's always hurting, it's—"
The woman's eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Harry," she said. "Harry, there is no scar."
The boy froze.
His hands fell limply to his sides. His mouth was partly open, as if he wanted to say something, as if unsure of what to say.
He stared at her, no longer recognizing the weak, pitiful woman who was sobbing in front of him. Dazed, he rose to his feet, pushing past the doctor, past the woman, and walked to stand next to the table.
His cold, long fingers slid tenderly across the iron table. Then without a warning, he grabbed hold of the table with both hands and flung it against the mirror with a strangled yell.
There were shrieks from the other side of the mirror where a small woman cowered, clutching onto her handkerchief, and a doctor with messy hair cried out, "Oh shit!" and jumped back as the table crashed to the floor and splinters of glass flew everywhere.
The blond woman gave a small peep. The doctor didn't dare to move.
The boy knelt down and picked up a large, jagged piece of glass, cradling it gently in his pale hands. He lifted the glass and positioned it at a careful angle in front of his forehead.
"No..." Joanne whispered. "Don't do it. Please don't do it, Harry..."
"Joanne," said the boy. He no longer had the tortured eyes. The pained look of suffering. He was happy now. "Joanne, I'm not crazy."
The woman laughed—half-laughed, half-cried. "No, Harry. You're not."
He closed his green eyes and plunged his hand forward.
"Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it."
Albus Dumbledore
Afterword
J.K. Rowling, otherwise known as Joanne Rowling, made a phenomenal debut with her Harry Potter fantasy series, which gained international attention, won multiple awards, and sold over 377 million copies worldwide. The first author to become a billionaire, Forbes named her the second richest woman entertainer in the world in 2006. Rowling assured that all the characters in her Harry Potter series are fictional.
Reflections
Uh, well. That's it.
I wrote this one a few years ago for some assignment, so I guess this would be considered my first ever fanfic.
I had fun with it :)