Written for The Houses Competition
Head of House Hufflepuff
Prompt: [Colour] Red
Beta: Aya Diefair
Warnings: Apathy towards life, fascination of blood.
There are times when young Harry Potter is thrust into his cupboard under the stairs after his family has decided he has done enough damage. Often, those times are accompanied by a reminder of the boy's place in the Dursley's household. With little to do, Harry would stare at the red fluid slowly oozing out of whatever injury he had just been given. It fascinated him. The blood was what kept him alive. And yet, his own family insists on trying to rid him of it by continuously causing injuries to his person.
Harry doesn't quite understand yet why his family are so determined to keep him downtrodden and making sure he never does anything better than Dudley, but he does know that if they continue to harm him, he will very soon die. He ponders that sometimes, wonders if perhaps death wouldn't be so bad. At least in death he wouldn't have to clean the Dursley's house or make their meals while he is given a bit of dry toast and maybe a glass of water.
But there's never any real way of making them stop and Harry has no intention to send himself into the afterlife. He will go if they make him but otherwise he will continue to live under their roof and be their little slave. He tries to make friends with the neighbourhood children hoping they would provide entertainment other than sitting in his cupboard and watching his body patch itself up. The plan, of course, didn't work as Dudley harassed anyone near Harry and scared the children off while his Aunt and Uncle warned the parents that Harry was a young delinquent that shouldn't be anywhere near their children.
He was the most feared child in all of Little Whinging even though he had done nothing to support that rumour. If anything, it should be Dudley who was the child everyone feared. But no, Dudley was an angel to all that mattered and bullied those that wouldn't stand up for themselves.
Harry Potter was eleven now. He was on a train to a school of magic and he wondered what that meant. He knew now why his family had been so hateful towards him his whole life. He knew that they were afraid of the magic he apparently possessed. He shared the train compartment with another boy, a redhead who offered to share his corn beef sandwiches. Harry refused the sandwich and instead shared the strange sweets he had bought from the trolley that had trundled down the carriage a few minutes ago.
He didn't know too much about money but he knew that there had been a lot in the vault in the Wizarding bank he had gone to that was all his so he figured he had enough to buy sweets. And besides, he had never been allowed sweets at the Dursley's so he was going to take advantage of it while he could. Soon though, he found that his stomach wasn't very happy with his decision and he let Ron demolish the rest of the sweets he had bought.
Harry stared into the mirror as Quirrell stood next to him, urging him to get the stone. Harry didn't know how to do that but as he watched, the reflection of him took a glittering red stone out of his pocket and put it back. He could feel a new weight in the same pocket and knew that somehow he had gained the famous philosopher's stone. His mind whirled but he tried to pay attention to what Quirrell and Voldemort were saying. He tried to lie about what he saw in the mirror but his mind was so confused and muddled that he couldn't fool the dark wizard. It was only by some weird quirk of magic that he managed to survive that day.
He pressed his hands to Quirrell's face and watched in horror as the man turned to stone before crumbling away, a dark shadow forming over the dust and streaming straight towards him. Harry could only yell in fright as the shade passed through him and away. He stumbled backwards, landing heavily on one of the stone steps that led into the round room that held the Mirror of Erised.
His hand was bleeding and he stared at it, He was used to blood, had seen it many times in the darkness of his cupboard. Now he watched it once more, prodding at the cuts tentatively as they continued to ooze the red liquid.
"Huh," he observed to himself. It was interesting to watch as the blood stopped flowing but could be forced to start again as he pressed the split folds of skin back together. It had always fascinated him and he had often passed the time in his cupboard by seeing how long it took for the blood to stop flowing as he pushed and prodded at whatever was bleeding. Harry could feel the lightheadedness start to creep up on him and gladly let himself fall into unconsciousness.
When he woke, it was to find himself completely healed with only a bandage on his hand to signify he had been injured at all. Harry felt a slight stab of disappointment at that. He somewhat missed the simplicity of watching his body healing while he had been at Hogwarts. He had hoped that he would be able to actually see the process of magical healing but it seemed he wouldn't. It was a pity, he thought, it had once been the only source of entertainment he could find.
Dumbledore was by his bed and he explained that it was due to his mother's sacrifice when he was a baby that Quirrell had crumbled to dust and rubble when Harry touched him. His mother had loved him, Harry realised. That was a strange thought to him, he hadn't had much experience with love. He wondered what it had been like.
It must have been nice, he thought. But it had also cost his mother her life and he wondered if she thought that had been a good thing. Was he worthy of her sacrifice? Harry Potter was a boy who cleaned his relatives house and was known as a delinquent in his neighborhood. He wasn't good at school because he had been taught since he was young to never do better than Dudley.
Still, what was done was done and he couldn't change that. He started prodding at the bandage on his hand when Dumbledore left. It was soft and scratchy, weird. He'd never had a bandage before, he wasn't good enough to deserve them. They were interesting, almost as much as blood was. The bandages kept blood in and helped the body heal itself by forcing inactivity in the place of the body that was harmed.
Harry thought he'd rather like to study them a bit more but then the two friends he had somehow made during the school year came bursting into the hospital wing and he was forced to leave it. It wouldn't do for his only friends to see how freaky he really was. Aunt Petunia had been horrified when she had caught him experimenting with a small cut he had accidently given himself one time in the garden. He had been pulling and pushing the skin together, watching how the small droplets of blood reacted and Aunt Petunia had declared him even more freaky than she had thought before sending him into his cupboard and out of her sight.
Harry had merely shrugged to himself as he lay on the tiny pallet that served as his bed. He had always been called a freak and there was nothing else to occupy his mind with. Perhaps if Aunt Petunia let him go to the local library and read the books there, he wouldn't have to play around with his own body and the various injuries he accumulated.
It was interesting how a small cut and a large one reacted. Bruises were cool too. There wasn't any blood on the surface leaking out but there was some under the skin, pooling together in one spot and discolouring the skin. His Uncle had given him plenty of times to examine the effects of bruises. Harry didn't mind too much though. Sure, they hurt, but they were interesting and staved off the boredom.
When Ron and Hermione were gone and the Healer had given him a disgusting potion to drink before going to bed, Harry slowly and carefully undid the bandage to see what lay beneath it. There was only a few thin lines left and Harry's eyebrows rose. He knew from his various calculations that it should take far longer than an afternoon for such wounds to heal. Magic, he thought, was quite wonderful. He only wished he had been able to see it in action.
A seventeen-year-old Harry Potter sat on the edge of the Astronomy Tower, legs dangling in the open air and staring down at the ground where Dumbledore had lain a year before. He wondered if Dumbledore was happy now and free. Or if he was off adventuring somewhere. He had said once that death was the next great adventure and Harry had to agree. There was nothing to be afraid of in death, it was merely a fact of life.
He remembered Voldemort. Tom Riddle had been so afraid of death that he had caused himself to go insane with the need to live forever. He had split apart his own soul into smaller and smaller pieces that he then scattered around. Harry snorted in disgust. Why anyone would be so afraid of death he didn't know. Death had been a reality for him ever since he was three years old. He knew that it would come, he was not afraid.
And it had come. But he had left it behind and some part of him wished he hadn't. He remembered the white Kings Cross Station with the train that would surely come in soon and take him onwards. But as he had looked back on the world he had left, Harry knew that he couldn't leave them all behind.
He knew that there were people there who hadn't accepted death as he had, he knew that they would prefer to live and truthfully, Harry couldn't understand them but he could perhaps see where they were coming from. After all, they had people waiting for them to come home. Harry had no one. Oh, he knew Ron and Hermione would have been sad if he had continued onwards but other than that, he wasn't all that important. He was just Harry, and that's all he wanted to be.
He sighed, letting the breath flow in and out of his somehow still alive body. For so many years he had been staring at the face of death and he knew it intimately. Now it was gone and Harry found he didn't know what to do with that. What was there for him to do now that there was no death there to spur him on?
The Boy-Who-Lived didn't know how to live. He knew how to follow orders. He knew how to fight to save others. He knew how to keep his head down and let others do the talking. He also knew that the world would be expecting him to stand up and lead them forward into a golden age of peace and prosperity. Harry couldn't stand that idea. He had no desire to lead. He had no real desire to do anything.
His whole life he had merely been doing as he was told. A caw from his left drew his attention and Harry turned to see a crow perching next to him on the bench of the Astronomy Tower's stone parapets.
"It's all right for you," he said to the bird. "You don't have anyone staring at you and waiting for your next move."
The crow cawed again. It seemed to be staring at him, urging him on to do something for himself. Harry shrugged slightly, he didn't have the faintest clue what to do, that was why he had decided to sit at the top of the Astronomy Tower in the first place. It was somewhere he was unlikely to be disturbed. The crow almost seemed to huff in irritation before spreading its wings and flying off the stone, joining the murder that was currently wheeling through the sky.
Harry watched them and wished he could join. He had always felt happy when he was in the sky. Up in the air, his freaky thoughts of blood and injuries and the human body vanished as it was all replaced by the rush of wind and the joy at defying gravity. He sat up suddenly, having to catch himself on the wall as his movement almost caused him to topple off.
He could join them! Maybe. If he learned how to be an Animagus and he had the form of a bird, he could fly in the air without the aid of a broomstick. He could fly anonymously without any fear that anyone would look to him for direction. He could just fly and live the life of a bird. Hadn't he just been thinking that there was nothing here for him to come back to? Why couldn't he learn to be an Animagus and just never change back?
Filled with an energy that he had been lacking since he had died, Harry rushed down to the deserted library and collected every book he could find on Animagi. He pushed them all into the small beaded handbag that Hermione had created and rushed out again, eager to start.
He stopped in the middle of a random hallway though, where could he go? He didn't want to bothered and he couldn't stay up in the Astronomy Tower all the time. He thought briefly of the Shrieking Shack but dismissed the idea almost immediately. There was the Chamber of Secrets but Ron could get inside and Harry didn't want to see anyone at the moment. His gaze drifted out of a nearby window and saw the distant village of Hogsmeade.
A sad smile appeared on his face as he thought of all the happy memories he had found there. Sirius had been there, in a cave, living off scraps during Harry's fourth year and the Triwizard Tournament. The cave! Of course! He doubted anyone would be looking for him in Hogsmeade and he could put wards up just as he had so many times before while he was hunting for Horcruxes.
He hurried to the statue that held the secret passage to Honeydukes and slipped down it. He had everything he needed on him, there was no reason to go to Gryffindor Tower and collect things. Everything was in the beaded bag that Hermione had pressed into his hand a few days ago, Harry wondered briefly if she had known he would want to vanish from the wizarding world. In the end it didn't matter if she knew or not, she had still given him a way to do it easily and with little fuss.
Once he had reached the cave and placed all the various wards he knew, Harry settled down with a cup of tea in Mr Weasley's tent and started reading. It would take time, he knew, but he had plenty of time to spare now. While the wizarding world frantically searched for the missing saviour, Harry would sit in Sirius' cave and learn the art of being an Animagus.
Two months later, the wards were taken down and a beaded bag was refilled. A northern cardinal grasped the small bag with their talons, grateful for the feather-light charm placed on it. The cardinal then launched itself into the sky and flew towards the castle that was still being repaired from the battle. The sun highlighted the red feathers as the bird typically only seen in America soared across the sky of Scotland. With a cry, it swooped down to the girl standing by the edge of the lake and perched on her shoulder.
She startled but upon seeing the familiar beaded bag that was almost bigger than the bird that carried it, smiled. "Hey Harry." Harry trilled and held out the leg that grasped the small bag. Hermione gently accepted it. "Will we ever see you again?"
That was a question Harry couldn't answer so he merely butted Hermione's cheek with his head and took off into the sky once more. Hermione watched as he flew over the Forbidden Forest and away from the human life that had taken so much from him. She hoped he would be happy. A bird's life was simple and she knew that was what her friend needed. One day, she might see him again and she would welcome him with open arms. Until then, she would remain content in the knowledge that she had helped her friend escape the world that demanded so much from him.
When the speck of red had finally vanished from sight, Hermione sighed and turned back to the castle of Hogwarts. The walls were almost completely rebuilt and the grounds had been landscaped so that the blast holes were filled in. She smiled and waved when she saw Ron walking towards her.
Ron grinned and nodded towards the beaded bag she held, "Seen Harry then? He okay?"
"He's just fine, we probably won't see him for awhile though."
"We expected that. As long as he's happy, that's all that matters."
Ron pulled Hermione into a one-armed hug and they stood together looking at the castle they had been steadily helping to rebuild. The sun was setting behind it and the walls looked to be bathed in red. There was a new life waiting for them in the castle, one without Voldemort and life-threatening adventures. It was going to be grand.