Six Years, a harry potter fanfic

A/N: So this isn't your traditional fanfiction. It's rather short, to begin with (only 500 words) and has little to no plot. It's more of a headcanon actually. When I read Harry Potter, I always imagined that Harry had imagine all of Hogwarts, since abused children normally create worlds of their own to escape the horrible ones they live in. So enough of me rambling and filling the bottomless hole where my heart should be with my fictional universes. I present to thee, Six Years by yours truly.

Six years. That's how long he'd been gone. Six years of lost hope. Six years of moving on. Six years of getting over that poor boy that grew up in a cupboard under the stairs. After the fifth year of blank stares and incoherent mumbling, everybody had forgotten about the Boy-Who-Lived.

It had started innocently enough. A few complaints from disturbed teachers or worried guidance counselors here and there, but nothing more. But one day, he lost it. He dropped in the middle of class and started screaming his throat raw about evil wizards and a magical stone that could grant eternal youth.

Harry Potter had always been a bit odd. He'd never had many friends, and the few children who were brave enough to talk to him usually ran away screaming. It wasn't until his first day at the local secondary school, Stonewall High that things started to get really weird. He was constantly muttering about goblins and something called a Hogwarts and wizards and potions and ten-foot mountain trolls. There was even the occasional mad cackle in the middle of a spelling test, or the odd little smile at a joke that only he heard.

His aunt and uncle never liked him to begin with. When teachers started complaining… Well, you can imagine how upset they were. They almost immediately dumped him at the local mental institution and drove off. Harry, the freak, didn't even realize he had just been abandoned by the only family he'd ever had, if you could even call them that.

And so he sat quietly, drifting farther away from reality as the doctors diagnosed him with this and that. Post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, the list went on.

After six years, the doctors gave up. His aunt, uncle, and cousin had pretended that he'd never existed, his teachers and schoolmates forgot about him, and life went on as usual. He was just another tricky case in Saint Mary's Institution for Mentally Challenged Patients.

The doctors confirmed that he was schizophrenic when he turned twelve and started screaming in Latin, talking about a thing called a Snape, and hissing—actually hissing—in his trance-like state.

He disappeared when he was seventeen. The nurses swear to putting him in his room after another failed therapy session, but in the morning he was nowhere to be found. There was no sign of suicide, and nobody could understand how he escaped the padlock on the door (which was still intact when they found the empty concrete room in the morning). The security cameras showed nothing. No sign of Harry Potter was left at Saint Mary's after those six years.

Nineteen years later, Saint Mary's—or, at least, the structure of it—remains standing. Silly schoolchildren dare each other to spend a night in "Ghost Potter's" room. They all come out fine every morning.

The strange, schizophrenic boy that lived in Saint Mary's for six years left no trace, no remains, not even a note when he disappeared. He was just gone.

Almost like magic.