AN: Here I am, starting yet another fic. I hope you like it, though I'm not sure whether it'll get continued. Uni has a lovely way of sucking up all of my time as well as my soul.
In light of this election, I would just like to reach out to all the Americans out there. I don't usually talk politics, because it's not my place to tell people how to feel. However, feeling safe, welcomed, and accepted in your country, your home, is an inalienable right, regardless of your gender, ethnicity, religion, or orientation. It's not a privilege. Please don't ever feel alone.
Countries are only great for its people. Stand strong.
Much love,
Ev xx
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Terminal Velocity
I know what it's like to fall.
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John Watson remembers bleeding out under a hot Afghan sun.
It had been a beautiful day. A Tuesday. Nothing ever happened on Tuesdays. Jimmy Runnall, the gunner, had squinted his eyes at the sun and raised his sun-bruised red face into the light, thin and weak between the seams of the metal tunnel. "Good day," he proclaimed, looking back at all of them, nodding to himself as he put on his helmet. His hair flattened in a neat circle above his forehead. "Not a day for dying."
It's a silly thing to believe in, but in Afghanistan, superstition reigns beyond the facets of logic and truth. In the thick mist that wafts from far beyond the horizon and swaths the morning air, peeling back in thick, sticky strips in the afternoon like strips of unthawed, moistened gum, laws and rules fade beneath the smell of cordite and sweet, sickly putrescine. The safe parameters of civilization are but a hazy thought, and everyone collects knickknacks, trinkets to send home, to keep watch over their bodies when the crows come. Anders Bornik carries a small penknife and a piece of flint from his grandfather, who had fought in the second world war on the Germans' side. Sammy Weston carries a picture of his girlfriend, a serious looking girl immortalized in black and white. When they lie in trenches at night on patrol, he idly runs his left thumb over the corner, over and over until the paper softens and loses its sharpness. Harrison Xu carries a small, slim paperback in Chinese that he bought at the airport in San Francisco. He claims it's absolute trash, but he still thumbs through it on the days they're sent out, huddled over a Sterno. Because they share a tent, John sometimes hears him murmuring things in his native tongue, quiet and sad, and John thinks it's more of an ode to those he left behind than a repetition of the characters he carefully underlines with his finger. Seb White carries a cross on a chain with his dog tags, though they all know he's not Christian. When asked, he shrugs and says, "Makes good for stabbing eyes out."
Mondays are for fatalities and Fridays are for grieving. Tuesdays are supposed to be easy, as close to a respite as they get in this hell. But the bloodbath begins on Tuesday and by the time it dies into Wednesday, when the reinforcements finally break through to rescue them, what remained of his sanity had long evaporated. Later, when John is in the makeshift ward and drugged up to his ears, the corporal comes. Hands clasped firmly behind his back, a deep wrinkle between his eyes. Says, "Son, I'd like a report."
Report. Demoted to simple words on paper. Numbers. Something he lived through and wished he hadn't.
John reaches up with one shaking hand, slowly disengaging the breathing tube. His mouth tastes like metal and sand. Sammy's blood, splattering across his face when the sniper hits him from behind, shattering the skull and exploding through a wrecked eyeball. His blood. The picture of the girlfriend sits heavy in his pocket. It's soggy and misshapen. He was going to send it back to her, maybe search her up on a computer that won't explode when he's too close, but it would be cruel to see the blood of her lover painting her cheeks a lovely red.
"What's left t'say, corporal?" he says, feeling an overwhelming surge of disgust for the frail man in the grey uniform. Face milk white, likely never borne the brunt of the sun. Voice high and light, like a young boy's. His own voice grinds painfully. He wants to throw up. If he has enough aim he can probably do it all over the corporal's shiny leather shoes. "Therr waitn fer'us. Whoever gave you the intel lied and..."
The corporal fixes him with a slow, steady gaze, carefully neutral, exactly accusing. "It seems surprising, Captain, that you are the sole survivor."
John's fists curl into the starched bedsheets hard enough that the tendons on the back of his hand crease white. His throat constricts in rage.
"You—think I... I—you—"
Later on, he'll blame the morphine, but he seizes the nurse's clipboard from the side of the bed and hurls it at the corporal's oversized forehead. He doesn't realize he is standing up until the world is lurching beneath his feet, toes curling with cold, and he's loping after the man, bellowing something his own ears cannot hear, and doctors have burst in from nowhere to haul him back into bed, all while the corporal stands there, stern and solemn, a slow red weal blossoming on his forehead like a sniper's wound. Through the din the heart monitor shrieks, a long, shrill note of death.
Two days later, he gets honourably discharged and sent home from the army.
All of this has happened exactly so, and absolutely none of it is true.
But that's not how it begins.
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Change some names, rearrange some faces. Take away the anonymity of the situation and there's suddenly a scene much more familiar. It's not Afghanistan, but England. It's not the sun, but the rain, a manor far in the midst of nowhere. It was a Tuesday, and it was a Wednesday when he was rescued with the dead bodies of his team, but many fortnights had passed between them. Trade Harrison Xu for Hermione Granger, Sammy Weston for Ron Weasley. Harry Potter for John Watson.
He's never been to Afghanistan—never even been outside of England, actually. Never been shot. Not with bullets, at least; plenty of people have put holes through his body. But even so, he knows what it's like. That single moment before it hits and fractures there's no pain, only shock. Then it radiates from his fingers to his toes, curling and withering inside like poison. It's the drilling curse to the shoulder that left him with tremors in his left hand in a different manifestation. It was the one that weakened him enough to be captured. Most of the nerve damage was healed in St. Mungo's but it had been left too long. He doesn't care. It's real, even if it never happened.
"What are your plans, Mr. Potter?" they ask when he limps outdoors. "An Auror, perhaps?"
The thought sends another painful twist in his stomach. "No... no, I've had my fair share of fighting."
"What are you going to do with your life then?"
What they're really asking is, how do you break out of a freefall at five hundred kilometres per hour? What they're asking is, how long before you hit the ground, if the impact doesn't kill you first? What they're asking is, what will you say if you survive, and Harry finds that he has no answer to give.
"I don't know."
"Where do you see yourself in twenty years?" a reporter noses, edging his way to the front of the seething crowd.
With a brief flare of irritation, he says sharply, "Dead."
The Prophet eats it up. Any story is a good story, when it comes to him. He's painted as a broken, tragic hero. Witches Weekly publishes an article, calling for the one woman that will win his heart and repair him, like a grotesque parody of Sleeping Beauty. He gets hundreds of letters daily. Some are from appreciative families, old soldiers from Grindelwald's war. Others are from naive witches, some wizards, who think they're "his one," his perfect match. They all want their happily ever after. He doesn't know whether he wants to laugh or cry. Yes, his life is like a fairy tale. There's a prophecy, an adventure, and the good guys win.
But they don't know how the fairy tales go. The original ones. It never ends well, and neither will this.
He travels. Like many of his decisions, this one is made on a whim. He thinks he left a note for Hermione on his kitchen counter—maybe. Can't remember. Doesn't even know what it said if he actually did. Something simple, careless. Sorry. Will write, love Harry.
It wouldn't matter, anyway. Ron and Hermione are an item now, and it's not fair for them to constantly be worrying after him. When Hermione visits, she always hesitates before knocking because she's scared she'll find nothing but Harry's corpse greeting her in the living room. He knows they feel guilty that they're so in love they don't have time for him anymore. He knows he's selfish to actually feel hurt by it. He may be beyond repair, but they're not... they have each other. They were always the Golden Trio, but now three have combined to two and their parallel trajectory have sent Harry spinning into the unknown, out of their orbit and the light of the sun. Far, far away.
The tea is cold and bitter on his tongue. He swallows it.
His loneliness. He swallows that too.
Repressing is something he's good at, but he's so much better at lying. He lies with his smiles, he lies to everyone's relieved faces when they think he's getting better (he's not, he's only sinking deeper), and he lies to himself when he convinces himself that it will finally be over. He wants to shed his skin, his identity, like a cicada outgrowing a too-small shell, but since that's not possible, he settles for escaping England instead.
So he runs.
The first plane out of England is to France. It's not far enough to get his skin to stop crawling, like bugs replaced blood and nibble their way through his veins as they sweep through his heart, but he jams his fists deep into his pockets and pretends that the shaking is due to cold.
Somehow he ends up at the Louvre. The paintings fall flat. He doesn't know the history behind the pieces, any fancy techniques. He only remembers the pain. He remembers the statues, caught in the raptures of horror. He visits museums of gunpowder and cordite, and the tourists will stand around gawking at the wrong thing, because we are the living relics of war and this is only an approximation.
Restless, he moves on. Germany. Greece. India. Spain. Tanzania. China. Russia. Brazil. North America. Beautiful places, people of different cultures and backgrounds. Sometimes he will feel content; sometimes the emptiness will rush out of the void and gnaw through his veins. He's lived off adrenaline since he was eleven and now that it's gone, he doesn't know what to do with himself. Death's caress is the only lover he has ever known. And this whole scheme—this whole travelling the world shite— is nothing more than an attempt for him to outrun his mind, his nightmares.
He doesn't quite succeed.
Sometimes he wakes up with such a profound sense of terror, like something terrible is going to happen at that very second and there is nothing he can do. Sometimes he'll see something, hear something, and he's just not there anymore. He's not in control until the darkness clears. Once he visits China during one of the festivals, and when the fireworks start he curls up in the middle of the street and just shakes. Concerned bystanders babble in Mandarin. He shoves them off and hits the ground running. He only goes two blocks before he thinks of Jimmy Runnall's missing leg, chewed up at the stumpy hip, and a crippling surge of pain yanks his breath away and he spends the night there, in the rain, pressed against a dumpster, breathing in and out in quiet hysteria.
When he's in Brazil he follows the whispers off the beaten track and gets bitten by a large, venomous snake as thick as his waist in the thick of the rainforest. He spends three days frothing at the mouth and high on a fever. When he's lucid again he realizes he was found by a local tribe in the area. Their skin is nut-brown and painted with bright white stripes. A few have tied strips of Harry's shirt (which is now missing) on their biceps. The rest is bound to his leg.
They are wary of him at first, but when he saves one of their youth —sepsis, Hermione whispers, and he watches her clever fingers through a long, woven incantation— they let him travel with them. The kids lose their fear of his alien white skin and odd, wild hair. They take turns sniffing it, for some reason. They play with his fingers. One of them licks his ear, then bursts into giggles when Harry flinches.
His leg is fixed by the old shaman, who is ninety years old and wears a necklace of dried herbs, broken glass, and teeth, and the incongruity of it all is what first strikes Harry when they meet. When the sting goes away and the puncture on his knee is no longer all seven colours of the rainbow, Harry helps him pick herbs, grinds them up to make poultices. At night, he lights fires and throws sweet smelling herbs over it that causes everything to smoke. When Harry stares too much into it, he thinks he can make out blurry figures—protean beings that twist hazily into and out of view, making him vaguely nauseous.
The human body breaks in strange ways. Past death their very existence mutates; their faces swell forward, growing bigger and bigger, taking up space in the last way they know how. Their skin gorges tight to bursting, iridescent yellow and amber, shiny along the edges of the wounds. Perhaps artists can see something beautiful in death—perhaps they can see this scene and enact it into something worthy of the Louvre, but to Harry there are only memories and regrets.
After three months pass, he knows it's time to leave. The old shaman seems to know without Harry saying anything; just looks unnervingly into his eyes, almost looking through him, before blinking and wordlessly presenting him with a fragment of bone on a leather cord. On closer examination, it's a tooth of some sort, likely feline. He thanks him; he leaves. He will never see him again.
Three months in the rainforest have taught him that there is no running from the truth.
It's a bright, cold day when he returns to London.
Here's a story.
Voldemort kills a little boy because he's scared of death. He dies anyway. The boy grows up in a cupboard, unknowing of his fame, until he is introduced to a hidden society at eleven years old.
Voldemort kills him again when he is seventeen. He falls-floats-sinks into a vast, deep ocean, devoid of light and feeling and everything. And when that darkness cracks open like an egg and he is slammed back into the world of the living, he screams and plucks Voldemort's wand out of his fingers and plunges it through the screaming ghosts and hollowed hungry mouths and into the stuttering heart.
Later, when the Death Eaters are incarcerated, fleeing, or dead, and Hogwarts is still ablaze with fire, the boy saviour seizes the red-haired girl and drags her close and crushes their lips together. It's sloppy and messy and wet, but she responds enthusiastically, softening her body against his, her arms around his neck. He tries to lose himself in the feeling of her, tries to taste something other than blood on his tongue, and feel anything—anything at all.
Here's a story: Harry Potter is born. He dies. He lives again. But this time, not all of him comes back from the dead.
When Hermione writes, she says, you foolish, selfless cruel boy, don't you know we want you too? Harry won't tell her that he feels like an intruder. Everything about him is fake. His tears are hollow; his shoulders shake when he cries but his eyes remain dry. In the beginning it was like razor blades cutting up his insides but after a few days that blissfully faded into emptiness. But broken things ache with the remembrance of being whole, so he slowly builds himself into a pale approximation of what he once was. He's always been a good actor, and if there are any slips, people are too relieved to say anything. The only ones who could ever see through his disguises are gone.
When Molly Weasley sees him, she bursts into tears and grabs him in a hug. He stands stiffly and endures it. Of her brood, half are gone, or as good as. It's partly (all) his fault.
He doesn't tell George that the ghost of Fred follows him around like a lost puppy. He knows that if he did, there would be another ghost the next morning.
He watches Nymphadora Tonks weep and pass her hands uselessly through the body of her dead infant son.
He sees Severus Snape hovering by the place where he died. Waiting... just waiting. Lost.
He says, "I have failed you all."
They don't hear.
The living dead do not become incorporeal the same way spirits do, but in the same sense they stop living. That's the real reason he leaves England—because he will go mad if he won't.
Harry Potter will always be the boy who lived. He will never get the opportunity to become a man.
There's a memorial stone in the centre of Hogsmeade village. Two names on it do not belong.
He still sees them, even if their images are fuzzy around the edges.
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The gun is Aunt Petunia's, now his. It comes on a Thursday in a nondescript yellow envelope. There is no return address. (Number Four has been abandoned ever since the beginning of the war, and it's best that it stays that way.) Maybe she was hoping he'd off himself, and she'd no longer have to worry about him waltzing in one day in the future and ruining her perfectly normal life. Or maybe it was an act of mercy. Whatever the reasoning, he's always been one to appreciate his options. The Browning goes into the nightstand, partially obscured by a bottle of prescription sleeping pills (still full) and a stack of unopened letters.
A month later, he wakes up with the feeling of being watched and launched himself out of bed just in time to miss the sizzling red spell that tore a hole through the mattress. Someone tackles him around the chest. It's a blind fumble in the dark. Flash of a knife in a sliver of moonlight; duck under, jam his bad shoulder against the attacker's sternum to dislodge him. Somehow an intruder had gotten past his wards and the auror guard. His hand closes on the partially opened drawer as he hauls himself up.
The gun is warm and soft in his hand, like melting chocolate.
After that, it's just the squeeze of a trigger.
He'll later learn that he's a natural at it (at killing), and with a more precise weapon, can hit a moving target hundreds of meters away. A good eye for distances and details. Maybe it's from Quidditch. Or from years of practice dodging spells and cursing others with them. Regardless, it's good to use against wizards, who are so self assured in their ability to protect themselves until the bullet rips through their shields and slams into their chests. (Regardless of superiority, they all bleed the same.)
Reinforcements burst into the room to find Harry sitting calmly on his bed, cleaning the gun with a strip of the would-be assassin's shirt. Bits of skull are blown through the corner of the room, splattered over his glasses on the rebound. He looks up, flecked red and grey. "Late again," he says, and when he smiles it's not a happy thing.
Kingsley Shacklebolt, now the Minister of Magic, invites him to the Ministry for a cup of tea and a chat. Halfway through their inane chatter about the weather, how everyone has been, and other useless drivel that neither of them have time for, he sobers and puts his cup onto the saucer with a heavy clink.
"I'll be straight with you, Harry," Kingsley says, folding his hands together. "In the last month alone, we've intercepted no less than fourteen attempts on your life."
Harry doesn't so much as blink. "A shame, I'm sure."
"Going out of the wizarding world for a while would do you good. Until we can hunt down the remaining death eaters."
"And go where? Muggle London? In case you forgot, Kingsley, I disappeared from their records when I was eleven. I never attended high school. Even if I wanted to get out of here, I have no ways of getting a job or a flat."
Kingsley's face breaks into a rare, amused smile. He leans back in his plush wingback chair, crossing his arms over his chest. "You didn't honestly think we had no way of managing that, did you? Harry... many muggleborns choose to go back to the muggle world after their NEWTs. We —the Ministry of Magic, that is— have ties with the Muggle Government. Hogwarts is classified as a prestigious boarding school for gifted children. You will have to have a tutor and go through the material you missed, but it should not be much of a problem. You can spend a few years there, get a degree if you want. It may do you good."
"It's a good offer," Hermione says quietly from beside him, glancing askance at Ron, who hovers by their shoulders. Kingsley doesn't look in her direction. "If you ever decide that you don't want to be here anymore, you'll have something to fall back on while you still have the ministry's support in getting set up."
"It's not exactly hard to find me, regardless of whether I'm in the muggle world or the wizarding one."
"Which is why you wouldn't be going as Harry Potter." Kingsley reaches under his desk, opens a drawer, and pulls out a silver chain with a flat piece of metal dangling from it. "A runesmaster I met several years ago owed me a favour. I had this made." He slides it across the desk. Harry warily picks it up. The metal is smooth and cold on his palm. "Go on. Push your magic into it."
His fingertips tingle. The metal burnishes and warps before his eyes, becoming pitted and scratched.
HARRY J POTTER
5TH NORTH FUSIL.
42779-768837
O-
"What is this?" Harry says, then he startles. His voice is lower and throatier than usual. Kingsley angles his chin at the mirror in invitation, a satisfied expression on his face.
"Go on, have a look."
The reflection in the mirror is not him. It has fair blonde hair, a stocky stature, broad shoulders confidently drawn back, smile warm but eyes distant. His eyes are the blue of a cloudless sky, like that bright, cold day in London. The overall effect makes him look six or seven years older than he actually is.
He drops the metal. It clatters onto the floor.
Nothing happens.
"As long as your magic stays in that tag, you won't turn back." Careful pause. Scrutinizing eyes. "I had a backstory drawn up, if you're amenable."
"I—yeah. Okay."
Kingsley pulls out a sheet of paper and smooths it onto the desk with his palms. "Your name is yours to pick, but you're twenty-six years old, a recent vet from Afghanistan, discharged for a bullet wound to your... left shoulder." An awkward clearing of throat. "Your battalion was the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, which had been ambushed and all but wiped out one month ago. Because of your injury, you were honourably discharged, but your commanding officer noted that you were eligible to reapply at a later date if you passed all the assessments. You wanted to take some time to rest, maybe, or look into furthering your education, which is why you are back in England." Kingsley looks up. "I originally wanted to give you a civilian background, but I realized that it may be hard to explain some... things. If anyone were to look up the unit, they would find no discrepancies. Is that acceptable?"
Harry sits down, hard, and studies his hand. Broader, a splash of freckles against his palm, a slash of a white knife scar between his second and third knuckles. It's not him. "I..."
"John Watson," Hermione suddenly says again. She'd been so quiet he'd forgotten she was there, but he dutifully repeats it to Kingsley, whose eyes meet his, unwavering.
The metal burns beneath his thumb. He looks down to see a new line of text carved into it.
CPT. JOHN H WATSON
Wordlessly, he shows it to Kingsley, who nods and dips his quill into the inkwell.
"Very well. I'll see to it that the papers are mailed out today. Everything will be in order by Friday morning at the latest. You'll receive your new ID by owl."
Later, when they're walking out, Harry murmurs to Hermione, "Why John Watson?"
Her hand passes through his shoulder when she smiles. "John Watson was a psychologist," she says. "He taught children to fear. But you've never been one to fear anything, have you, Harry?"
Because he hates the feeling of blood on his hands, the look of bone jutting through a gaping wound on one's torso, of feeling powerless, he goes into medicine. He hates watching them bleed out in his nightmares, over and over, and even if muggle remedies are far below the efficacy of wizarding ones, he knows the dangers of being too reliant on magic far too personally to ever forget.
It takes him months to stop flinching every time he hears "Harry." It takes him years to control his nightmares enough to sleep more than three hours a night. He won't ever be able to stop responding violently every time someone surprises him from behind. He won't ever make close friends, because people who get too close to him always end up dying.
Hermione once said that if Harry truly applied himself, he could beat even her. He's never had that kind of motivation until now. He can now identify every single bone they broke in his body before Wednesday came. Every artery nicked, every metacarpal crushed, every muscle sliced away.
He finishes uni in three years instead of four. It doesn't hurt that he can look at a patient and diagnose them immediately with a single spell, and dissecting animals and cadavers doesn't make him squeamish like it does many others, not when he'd all but grown up with dead bodies. His backstory as a soldier is leaked after the breaks a kid's arm for trying to assault him in an alleyway. After that, he's left alone, regarded with a confusing mixture of wariness and pity. He doesn't care.
On the night of his graduation, he paces the length of his room, just big enough to allow four steps in either direction. His diploma sits heavily on his pocket, furled in a tight tube. He can go back. Whoever he's trying to prove himself to—he's done it already. There are still a few Death Eaters out there, but most had been caught and kissed already and Harry knows how to defend himself. Even Kingsley, who was the most outspoken about his safety, said it was fine to come home. But demons live closest to their breeding grounds, and as beautiful as magic has always been for him, it is irrevocably tainted with the remembrance of all that had happened.
He burns Kingsley's letter and applies for a job in the morgue of St. Bart's. The dead have never bothered him. It's the living that do, and here, surrounded by the whirr of refrigeration devices and the smell of preserving fluids, is the closest he will ever be to peace.
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Harry Potter has been falling for a long time. At this point, it is only a matter of time before he hits the ground. He only hopes that when he does —when the pressure finally grows to shattering— he will be far away and remote, so that no one will be witness to his last and final descent.
Then, on a Tuesday morning, he walks in on a man sawing the hand off a murder victim.
That is the first time he meets Sherlock Holmes, and unbeknownst to all, the gears of destiny start to shift.