Title: Chasing Shadows
Author: Shadow Rebirth
Rating: K+
Warnings: vague spoilers
Word Count: 391
First Written: June 14, 2009
Last Edited: July 7, 2009
Posted: June 14, 2009
Summary: One-shot. Drabble. Post DH. He's scarred, his psychologist says. Traumatized. In the States they call what he has the "thousand yard stare". Harry thinks that's probably accurate; too often he catches himself staring at what isn't there, remembering.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. This work has not been endorsed by J.K. Rowling, Bloomsbury Publishing, Scholastic Publishing, Warner Bros., or any of the others holding copyright or license to the Harry Potter books, movies, and products. Other names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author receives no financial gain from its production or distribution.
A/N: Just a thought. This takes place a number of years post DH.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chasing Shadows
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harry makes ghosts out of the shadows on the wall. Hermione has been telling him so for years. Harry knows that it's true, but it doesn't stop his paranoia. It doesn't stop him from seeing things from the corners of his eyes or jumping at anything even remotely suspicious.
He's scarred, his psychologist says. Traumatized. In the States they call what he has the "thousand yard stare". Harry thinks that's probably accurate; too often he catches himself staring at what isn't there, remembering what's happened and wondering what could have been.
Sometimes Harry wonders about just how far Dumbledore's manipulation ran. The Dursleys, Sirius, the prophecy...How much of it was real and how much of it had been carefully disguised illusion? That scarred him more than anything else, he thought. He was always wondering about everything and everyone, questioning who he could trust—If he could even trust anything at all.
Once, Harry had looked into his mother's family. He'd had this niggling question at the back of his mind, wondering if his grandparents were still alive. He could easily see Dumbledore covering something like that up. Harry could have entire branches of his family that he didn't know about.
But...No matter where he looked or how much he dug, he could find nothing that indicating anything of the sort. His mother's parents had died in a car accident years before he was born. His father's parents had died from a heart attack and sclerosis, also before he was born.
It seemed so...ordinary. Surely, he thought, they'd been killed by Voldemort. Surely their deaths had been covered up, just like how Aunt Petunia used to tell him that his parents died in a car accident.
But when he stopped by the Dursleys to ask, Petunia just scoffed at him. When he asked McGonagall about the Potters, she just shook her head sadly and told him to let it go. But he didn't want to. He wanted to find some sort of proof that their lives had meant something, that they weren't just regular grandparents who he never had—and never would—met.
No family. He had no family left outside of the Dursleys. He knew this, but it didn't stop him from continuing to search for...something.
He was chasing shadows, just as he he'd always been.
And maybe he always would.