Written for The Houses Competition
Head of House Hufflepuff
Category: Drabble
Prompt: [Theme] Dreams
Additional Requirement: A sad occasion/moment/emotion
Word count: 420 (431 including epigraph)
Beta: MissBookworm1704
Wishes are dreams, and dreams are pretend...
~If I believed, Twisted
A boy locked in a cupboard dreams of the lives he could live. He overhears the tales told to his cousin via the television or his parents, the boy wishes sometimes that he could live in those tales. He thinks of the man that dresses as a bat and fights crime to fight his own fears. He wonders if he could be like that man. If the man afraid of bats was called Batman, the boy would probably be the Green Light or something, for that was what he feared. The nightmares that came almost every night featuring a woman's scream and the green light.
The boy is brought out of the cupboard by a giant of a man—one he later discovers is, in fact, a half-giant. He learns that his name is not Green Light, but the Boy-Who-Lived. Sometimes he thinks about the man hidden behind the mask and a mansion. That man had been smart, he was able to get away from the responsibilities being a hero placed on you. The boy wishes he had thought to separate Harry Potter and the Boy-Who-Lived before he had been dragged out of his cupboard.
A man stands above the still body of his enemy, finally defeated. If he had been wise, he would have now been able to put away the role of the Boy-Who-Lived and live simply as Harry Potter, the boy from the cupboard. But he hadn't known and hadn't been able to prepare. He had not been given a choice in the name he carried, it had been thrust upon him. Later, he will dream of the days before, when he was still trapped in a small cupboard. No one had known him in there and no one had expected anything from him. He could have stepped out and become anything.
The man stares out across the castle grounds he knew so well and thinks of how different his life might have been if he had known the little facts that had been hidden from him. He thinks of the dreams the boy in the cupboard had. He wishes that just one of those dreams had come true. The boy in the cupboard was used to the shadows and had been thrust into the light where he didn't belong. Silent righting of wrongs was what the boy had dreamed of, not having the world watch him for his next action as the paragon of the Light. The man knew that the boy's dreams would never come true.