Disclaimer: nope. Still don't miraculously own Harry Potter.
A/N: while working on the latest chapters of By Moonlight and Splinters, the song 'What if the Storm Ends' by Snow Patrol started up on my playlist, and all I could think was, "ohh crap, I feel a random one-shot coming on."
So, uhm, yeah. enjoy?
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Lost
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Sometimes, Harry gets lost.
Walks to the shop on the corner of the street take hours, detours carrying him down side streets and curling, wandering alleyways until he turns up in parts of the city that he's never seen before.
Taking the tube ends with him standing, aimless in the centre of Kings Cross Station, an island in the centre of rushing, bustling bodies, sushi takeouts, pizza shops, burrito stands, a thousand smells overlaid on a thousand voices overlaid on a thousand faces, on the tiles, the escalators, the suitcases and signs and trains and queues and disposable coffee cups and screaming children and foreign languages, sunglasses blocking eyes, rain coats dripping, dropped food, angry guards, pushing, shoving, running, yelling, laughing, swearing, headphones in, tinny speakers blaring, arrivals, departures, delays…
Pet shops. Pet shops are another one, where he's drawn to the overcrowded birdcages, watching flitting wings, twitching heads, wide-blown eyes. They sing and shriek too high, they warble where they ought to coo. The birds in these places are too small and delicate, with bright, pastel colours and nervy, unhappy temperaments. Harry doesn't think he likes lovebirds, or canaries, or turtledoves, but they're still better than the reptiles. Harry never goes to the reptile sections.
He does go to coffee shops, buys pumpkin spiced lattes all autumn despite hating coffee and syrup. Is disappointed every time he tries it. He ends up with carrot juice; orange fanta; plain water. He gets bottles, or takeout cups, and he walks.
Since running away to London five years ago, Harry has explored taxidermy museums, grimy nightclubs, public parks, private gardens, high streets, back streets, restaurants, internet cafés, pawn brokers, boutiques, charity shops, gyms, Asian food markets, Camden market, Trafalgar Square, Hampstead Heath, the South end, the North side, the East, the West, the in-between…
And still he walks.
And still he is aimless, distracted, lost.
Something is missing, something huge.
It's in the blank stretch of his forehead, and his illogical claustrophobia. It's in wanting desperately to fly but having never been on an airplane. It's in his love for big dogs, and his desperate denial that his parents, Lily and James Potter, could have possibly died in something as plebeian, something as plain and simple as a car crash.
It's in every memory of his childhood with his Aunt Petunia and his Uncle Vernon treating him with any modicum of kindness. It's in them decorating his bedroom for doing well in year seven at Stonewall High, and in a photo album his aunt had given him as a thirteenth birthday present, with pictures of Lily and James dancing in a leaf-strewn square. It's in his cousin, Dudley, going from punching him in the stomach, to slapping him on his shoulder.
It's in his ability to walk down a street without being stopped.
It's in being invisible, lost in a crowd, one in a million.
Sometimes getting lost is good. Sometimes it's bad.
And then, there is this.
Every once in a while, a face jumps out at him, and he has to stop.
A dozen HD TVs in the back of an electronics supply store has him rooted to the spot. The televisions are muted, but there she is, scowl multiplied twelve times over. A dark skinned girl with wild brown curls, golden eyes and buckteeth protesting outside of Parliament for some cause (he can't hear; he doesn't care), being interviewed by a news reporter. She points emphatically at her knitted hat, drops her cardboard sign out of frame and swings her bag over her shoulder. Pulls out knotted scarves and misshapen mittens, battered badges, a bobble hat so wonky it ought to be comedic, waving it all obnoxiously at the camera.
Another time, it's outside Wembley Stadium. He can't afford tickets to get inside (doesn't care which teams might be playing, just wants to be in there more desperately than anything else in his life) and a family of redheads exit with the huge crowd at the end of the game. Harry's eyes burn and his heart pounds hard against his ribcage, and he can't move, can't stop watching until the family leaves, washed away in the tidal pull and surge of bodies. That night he cries so hard from loneliness that his head throbs and his eyes are still swollen the next morning.
Shortly after he ran away from the Dursleys on his sixteenth birthday, he stumbled into an elderly man just outside of an old fashioned sweet shop. Shining blue eyes caught Harry's, and he smiled around a mouthful of sweets. Harry stared up into the pale, wrinkled face as his head was patted and he was offered, "A sherbet lemon, my dear boy? Never mind, never mind, accidents like this can happen." He'd been in such a state for the rest of the day that he almost stepped out in the road, in front of a bus.
But none of those events, nothing, has such a huge ramification on Harry as this moment does.
Nothing could prepare him for whatever this is.
It's one in the morning, and he's walking. He has no set location, no aim of being anywhere, of going anywhere, just lets his feet carry him like that might fill in the constant, aching emptiness in his heart.
Rain batters into buildings, into the ink-black road, into Harry and his too-large t-shirt. A summer storm it may be, with arcing lightning and peeling thunder, but the fat, round drops soak into him, plastering his hair to his head and his clothes to his skin, and it's cold.
Shivering, Harry continues on, green eyes flitting over shuttered shop fronts, over floaded drains, over bus stops and the occasional car passing him in the street. He inhales damp earth, car fumes, something metallic; he exhales plumes of white breath.
The landlord of the scabby one-bed he's been renting for the last two years, since he picked up his jobs, sent him a notice earlier that day to let him know he's coming to the end of his contract, and that he wants Harry (and likely all his other tenants, though Harry doesn't know or care about them) gone. He's going to be homeless come Christmas, unless he starts searching for another place straight away, and sees if he can rig up a third job with better pay – whatever he can to get enough for a deposit and half a years worth of rent. He won't manage, though. Harry knows that already. London is expensive, and overcrowded, and it was pure blind luck that he found his current home. He is resigned to hostels on good nights, and street corners on bad. At least that much, he's used to. Prepared for, even.
For now though, he walks – works out whatever nervous energy he can. Slaps the palm of his hand against the wet, chilled pole of a streetlamp; runs his fingers over the metal railing outside the entrance to the underground; toes at a lump of pink gum that's been trodden into the pavement.
He watches a young couple, drunk enough that they have to hold each other up, stumbling out of a loud, brightly lit up pub, and he wraps his arms around himself to combat the cold. Moves on.
It's outside some kind of expensive apartment complex that it happens.
His feet are numb from the water soaking through the broken sole of his trainers by the time he finally he stops. He leans back onto the wall beside the front steps, despite the expensively dressed doorman glaring out at him from the nice, bright lobby. Harry doesn't care. He knows he looks like a bum (will be one again, in a few months), and he embraces it. Ratty shoes; baggy wet tee; ripped, trailing jeans; hands crammed in pockets; shoulders slumped; face sour and glare hard behind fogged up glasses and his thick, sopping fringe.
When a black cab pulls up, Harry watches with a petulant curl of his lip. Just watch, he thinks. It's going to be some rich, snobbish businessman who'll look down his nose at me as he walks past, without even thinking of me as a person. They never do; bums aren't worth being thought of as human. I'm just cluttering up the front of his building. Just watch.
The back door of the taxi swings open. And true enough, it is a businessman.
A businessman who swings long, suit-clad legs out of the doorway and steps up onto the curb in shining back shoe. As the man straightens up, brown leather suitcase in hand, Harry's eyes travel up.
Up, over the line ironed in the front of his trouser legs.
Up, over his silver-buckled belt, his deep green waistcoat and his thin waist.
Up, over the strong lines of his shoulders in his black jacket and the arch of his throat, emerging from a straight, dark collar.
Up, to a defined, clean-shaven jawline, full lips, sharp cheekbones, a straight nose, and those eyes.
Eyes, the same exact shade of the stormy night sky, staring across the wide pavement at him.
Heart pounding, Harry's legs go weak, and a sharp jolt of something like terror crashes into the seat of his spine. Something like recognition.
The slamming of the car door has him flinching, blinking hard against the rain that slips into his eyes from his fringe.
The man steps forward through the gloom, clicking footsteps accentuated by the crash of thunder behind the clouds. Sleek hair and a slow, predatory grace accentuated by a brief, glowing halo of lightning.
Step after step, the man draws closer, until Harry's head is craning back to meet those eyes, his glasses slipping down his nose and his breathing erratic.
Heat fills the small space between them, and a gust of warm breath washes over Harry's face. His toes curl in his shoes.
A hand rises up from the man's side, fingers that reach up to slowly – ever so slowly – push Harry's glasses back into place. Touching him. Wrong.
That thin, handsome face swims into focus as best it can through the blurring rain, and Harry begins to shake.
Dark, dark eyes. Human eyes. Dark, human eyes with pupils blown wide. Wrong.
Pupils blown wide and full lips parted, and fingers that linger like a brand on the bridge of Harry's nose before sliding up, sinking into his thick black fringe and pushing it back. Aside.
There's a lump in Harry's throat as those eyes skim over his unremarkable forehead, over the blankness, and the expression of shock falls from the man's face. His brow furrows, the delicate crows feet in the corner of his eyes deepen and his mouth thins.
Harry's stomach plummets as the stranger's expression shutters off and he steps back, and the terror shoots from his spine out into every nerve-ending, every extremity.
He recognised him. He'd looked at Harry across the pathway, and he'd known him, or maybe some part of Harry that had never existed. Some part of Harry that ought to have. That Harry had always felt lost without.
And now, seeing that Harry wasn't the right Harry, the businessman would step back, would look down his nose at this sodden, skinny, almost-homeless waste of space, and he'd leave.
He'd leave, and Harry would be alone again. Always alone.
No.
No.
"No!"
He can't help it.
His hands shoot out, fingers digging so hard into the man's lapels that his knuckles turn white. His eyes are welling up, his teeth grit, his breathing harsh.
Don't leave me, he thinks. Not if you can see any little bit of who I'm meant to be.
"Don't go," he says.
The man doesn't retreat. Not as Harry's fingers flex in the front of his jacket, nor as he claims back the space that the man gave up.
He just watches, face blank and back straight. No anger at Harry's presumption. Wrong.
"Do you… know me?" Harry's tongue is thick in his mouth, his throat suddenly dry. "Do you know who I am?"
Please, please, please.
"No," the man says. His voice is deep, smooth. Wrong. "I do not." Those dark eyes look off to one side, and Harry sees it.
It's a lie. As sure as Harry thinks he should know who the stranger is, this man knows him too.
Chin jutting, he says, "Your voice is too low, and your eyes are too normal, and you're meant to be cold, not warm." He swallows around a lump. "You're meant to be angry." And now Harry's feeling angry instead, and the tears are sliding down his cheeks, lost in the rain. "You can't touch me."
The man's jaw clenches as Harry speaks, and that shock is breaking down his face, until there's a snarl there instead, perfect white teeth in a perfect white face, twisted into something ugly. The dark eyes are clear. "You're insane. Get off of me, boy, before you do something you'll regret."
Harry doesn't. Instead he shakes the man, presses himself closer, chest-to-chest and breath mingling with the stranger's. "Make me."
The man makes a strangled sound. Drops his suitcase with a thump, lifts his hands, curls them around Harry's wrists as if he's going to tear them off of him. Short nails bite sharp crescents in to Harry's skin. "You should let go of me. Let go."
But he does not pull Harry off. Doesn't even tug him – just holds him there.
"No," Harry says. His voice is dead, choking in the back of his mouth. "No, I won't. You know me. You know me and you can't leave." His face scrunches up, and he can't help the sob the tears its way out of him. "Please."
And then there are hands on his face, finger digging into his scalp and his temples, and a thumb pressing into the curve of Harry's cheek, so that his tears roll over the back of a nail. There's hot breath on his ear. The hairs on Harry's nape stand on end, and his back arches at the brush of lips over the shell. "You have no idea what kind of game you're playing, boy."
Harry turns his face towards the voice, can't see through his tears, can barely stand for the weakness of his legs. He leans into the hard lines of the man's body, knows this is something wrong, wrong, wrong. But he doesn't care.
"Show me, then."
He imagines those dark eyes flickering crimson in next flash that lights up the street, and he turns his face towards the sight. Right.
As the thunder roars and the rain hammers into them, the man's mouth meets his, a clash of teeth, tongue, and heat.
All his life he's been lost, but that's okay.
He isn't lost anymore.
...
A/N: let me know what you think? :)