My third piece for the 'Rubik's Cube Challenge' - Angels and Demons!AU.
Harry had been trapped in these dungeons for as long as he could remember.
He wasn't aware of his age. He wasn't aware of the date. He didn't know how long he'd been there- only that it was enough time that everything else had faded.
Everything else but the echo of his name and surety that there was a god, and that god was always with him.
He could feel him even now.
He wasn't sure why he was in this empty room with naught but a cot, a sink and a bucket that remained ever empty.
Three times a day a bland meal appeared in the corner of the room, and then the dishes disappeared a short while after.
He hadn't been visited.
His life had been silent save for the sound of water down the drain, the chewing of food and brush of feathers dragging across the room. He hadn't heard another voice- or even his own- in a very long time.
He wondered if he had gone crazy.
As the thought crossed his mind, and gentle pressure came from the section of his mind where his solid belief in god laid. These feelings only came rarely, but he knew that the presence was paying attention- this time was an indicator that he wasn't crazy. Not yet.
Maybe paying attention to that connection made him crazy, but he had to believe.
This period of being awake had started no different than the rest, but a change finally entered his life in the form of a door appearing on the left side of his room.
Bland, grey and solid it appeared slowly and then was suddenly just there like it had always been.
Not sure what to do with this new development, Harry simply watched from where he sat.
Nothing happened. Nothing happened for a good long time. Harry had approached the door only once and tried to open it to no avail.
The door remained closed as he ate. The door remained closed as he washed. The door remained closed as he slept.
The door still wasn't open the next time he awoke, or the next.
It was much later- a few years, though Harry didn't know that- when the door finally opened.
On the other side there was a woman with a mass of brown curls and a stern look on her face.
Sat on the grey bed again as he often was, Harry didn't move as she looked around his room.
She stepped into the room, and broke the long-held silence.
"Harry? Harry Potter?" Her voice was quiet as she stepped hesitantly into the room, her delicate wings pulling into the room behind her.
"I'm… not sure." Brown eyes narrowed in concern at the grainy reply and she moved closer, her eyes flickering up to his forehead.
"You are; you have the scar. Come on, Harry- we're getting you out of here."
Silently he stood and followed out of his room, his eyes glancing back at the only place he ever remembered as he finally left. Memory of why he was there or not, he had always known that it was a prison not a home. He had not been there by his choice.
As they weaved through the winding passages of the complex he had apparently been kept in, they passed many people with wings just like his. He said nothing, though Hermione occasionally stopped to speak to someone.
Finally they escaped into an open place he knew was outside- the sun burnt his eyes as he winced into the brightness. There was so much noise everywhere, so much light, so many new sensations all around him.
As his eyes adjusted he saw lines of grotesque, kneeling beings being held in shackles. They had the basic shape of a person, but their wings looked like burnt skin pulled over skeletal ridges. Their faces were mutated- their eyes looked too red, too large and too big. Few bared their fangs at the celestial beings surrounding them to prevent escape. Their backs were hunched and there were lumps in places on their forms which weren't in the right places.
"They are the fallen." The woman who had lead him out of the prison maze answered the unasked question, and then lead him away to a spot away from captured 'fallen'.
"I'm Hermione Granger. We've been looking for you for years, but we weren't certain you were still alive or a believer. We finally got a hold of news a year ago that you were, and that you were being held by the fallen we had not managed to capture or kill in the last war. Are you ready to come home?"
He considered the word. He couldn't remember the last home he had.
"Will I be with him?"
"Yes. And he will be with you- you are chosen." A smile graced his lips, pulling muscles in ways that hadn't happened in years.
"He is always with me. Nevertheless, I will go with you."