A/N: So I found this short story I had apparently written ages ago, and it was surprisingly good, at least at the beginning, though the ending is a bit rushed and goes downhill in my opinion - I probably didn't post it because I meant to lengthen it out, perhaps change the latter events or edit it a bit, but as it seems quite unlikely at this point here's the story as-is

Harry had been in his bedroom at the Dursleys, dreaming of Hogwarts. Voldemort was dead and no one had been killed. It was summer, the wind was soft and cool, the lake was bright and sparkling in the sun. Everyone was walking across the grass, his friends, his enemies—but it didn't matter. Today, nothing mattered, everything was perfect, there was nothing to worry about.

He was jerked out of his dream by a scream. He sat up, finding it was dark, and the room was unfamiliar. Harry reached for his wand, but it wasn't under his pillow. In fact, as far as Harry could tell, this was not only not his room, it wasn't even his bed. He swung his feet over the edge, landing silently on the cold floor. He was wearing strange white pajamas, but his feet were bare.

Is this another dream? Harry wondered, listening to the scream die out, to be replaced by utter silence. The moon shone through his barred window.

He looked around for his glasses and finally found him on the small white side table. He put them on, and the room came into focus—not that there was anything else to see.

Harry slipped over to the door of the room, and tried to open it, only to find it was locked. A horrible thought began to come into his mind. Was he in prison? He turned back to look at the barred window, the moon shining cold and as white as the room.

He had nothing to pick the lock with. There was nothing in the room to help him. Eventually Harry retreated back onto the bed, where he sat, curled up, eyes straining as if by pure will he could stare through the walls. He shivered.

The screams came again, every time he thought they might have ended for good. They always ended quickly enough. They all sounded different, as if they came from different places. A drop of sweat fell down Harry's forehead, as he sat, still shivering, in the darkness.

…

Harry woke up in the morning to find he was still in the strange room. A tall woman in a grey uniform opened his door and grunted for him to leave. Harry didn't want to stay in the room, it reminded him of his old cupboard, except that he'd always been able to get out of his cupboard, even if he was locked in.

He couldn't get out of this room unless they let him out.

He passed the woman, who gave him a wary glance as he did. Three more people were waiting out in the corridor, three more people in grey uniforms. They escorted him through the halls, waited outside the bathroom for him to get ready and put on the clothes they handed to him silently, and surrounded him as they walked down to another door. This one had a plaque on it, a plastic one, ugly and grey. The word looked as if it had been gouged out of the plastic, but it was too neat for that—neat, perfect. Sterile.

Office

The word said. There was nothing else.

There was a man sitting in the Office. He, unlike the others, didn't wear grey. He wore a tastefully cut tan suit, and his hair was short and brown. His eyes were the most arresting thing about him—hard and cold. They reminded Harry of Voldemort's eyes, but Voldemort's eyes had always had a mad life in them, something to tell you that there was something that lived in him, no matter how twisted or inhuman. This man had nothing.

Harry had never been afraid of Voldemort's eyes.

The man smiled; it was a tiny thing that didn't even try to pretend to be real. "Please, sit down," he said.

"Where am I?" Harry demanded. "Who are you? Why am I here?"

The man sighed, softly. "Very well. Your name is Harry Potter, correct?"

Harry nodded slightly. "Yes. And I want to know why you kidnapped me and took my wand," he growled.

The man put on a look of sympathy. Harry knew he wasn't sympathetic, the man put emotions on like clothes; none of them were real.

"Harry, it has come to our attention that you are under the delusion that you are a Wizard," the man said.

"What?" Harry asked. This man was a Muggle? Where—? How—?

The man stared at Harry calculatingly. "Harry, it really would be in your best interests to cooperate, we have treated many people here. This is a secure facility for people under your specific delusion. Many of our patients have gone on to be cured and have led successful lives in the real world."

The word cured, said by the man, made Harry shiver involuntarily.

"Let me go," Harry said calmly.

"No," the man said.

Harry sighed. "Look, I don't really believe I'm a wizard, you must be crazy if you believe that. Everyone knows magic isn't real."

"Oh?" the man said, raising an eyebrow. "In that case," he went to the panel on the back wall of the Office, and with the press of a button the walls lifted to reveal glass. Behind it were wands. Harry's mouth dropped open at how many there were.

"Do you see that?" the man said, and used a pointer to tap the glass in front of a wand which was horribly familiar to Harry. It was his own.

"Yes," he said, his mouth dry.

"Do you see how it is held?" the man asked.

Harry nodded.

"All I have to do is type in the right code, and the clamp that holds your wand up will close. As you can see, the clamp has unusually sharp edges. So unfortunately, your wand would be broken. Now, if you really don't believe you're a Wizard—" he reached out his hand to the desk, where a keypad was embedded into the metal.

"No!" Harry cried. The man's fingers paused above the buttons.

"No?" he asked, slowly.

"Don't press the button. Don't break it."

The man withdrew his hand, smiling lazily. "So you see Harry," he said, "You can't fool me. You won't be getting out of here until you let me break that little stick of yours. Such a pity, isn't it?"

Harry stared at the man murderously. The guards were outside the room. He could punch the man in the face; knock him out with that awful heavy sculpture that was on his desk. But he couldn't open the glass without using the keypad, and if he pressed the wrong ones, someone's wand might be destroyed. Maybe his.

Harry wished then, desperately, that he could do wandless magic. He should be able to, he was furious enough to, he kept telling it to do something!

But nothing happened.

The man went to the door and opened it. "Out you go, Harry," he said quietly. The Grey Guards stood outside the door.

Harry walked out.

…

The Grey Guards didn't take him back to the room he'd woken up in; instead, they took him through more of the building, down an elevator, and into a windowless room with glaring florescent lights, a thin and drab checkered rug on the floor, and a few bored looking people his own age sitting on behind desks and staring with blank, glazed expressions at the woman at the front of the room.

"As well as—" she was saying as he was pushed in. "Ah. What's your name, dear?" she asked him with a kind smile. Some of the people in the room turned and looked at him, but others seemed too tired to do even that.

"Ha-er-Tom," Harry said. For some reason he didn't want to tell this woman his real name. She looked harmless enough, but anyone who worked in this place was dangerous. The man with the cold eyes already knew his name; he didn't want anyone else to.

"Tom?" The woman nodded kindly. "Last name?"

Tom? Why had he said Tom? It must have been because he was thinking of Voldemort. The man with the cold eyes reminded him of Voldemort, but he was far scarier, because he was not mad. Not in the same way. And he had power over Harry, in the form of his wand. "Riddle," Harry said suddenly. Why not? "Tom Marvolo Riddle." He smiled at the strange thought that had come into his mind. He was stealing Voldemort's name, and nothing was happening. The woman nodded and wrote it on the whiteboard, the other students looked away, and nobody asked him to 'stop telling lies; tell me what your real name is.'

I must not tell lies, Harry thought, glancing at his hand. Well, he had never let Umbridge tell him what to do.

He sat in the only empty seat, one in the front row, next to a bored looking boy with long, pale hair.

The teacher began to speak again. She was talking about fantasy books and psychology and other things; her voice was strangely sing-songy. Harry soon felt himself tuning out.

Everyone had a notebook in front of them, and the boy beside Harry was drawing in his.

Harry looked over. There was a castle on the page, not one he recognized. In front of the castle was a cliff that led to the sea. Mermaids swam, wizards flew above the castle, riding on brooms, and a giant sat beside some trees with a bored look on his face. The boy began to draw the giant's face in more detail, and Harry realized with surprise and amusement that it was Harry's.

In front of the giant, the boy drew a little fly, talking and talking, with the caption, "Miss Perry," underneath.

Harry smothered a grin in his hand.

The boy turned to him with a raised eyebrow and a slight curve of the lips.

Harry raised his eyebrow back.

The boy pushed the page and the pen to him. Harry thought for a moment, then scribbled in some words. He didn't want to ruin the boy's drawing, he couldn't draw very well himself, but the boy seemed to think it was only a sketch anyway.

"There are no such thing as wizards, you know," he made the fly say. "They are a figment of the imagination."

Behind her, he drew a wizard holding a wand to her unsuspecting back.

The boy's smile widened. He took the pen back and drew a jet of light coming from it, with the letters 'A K' over it.

He drew the fly hitting the ground. Then he drew the giant yawning and falling asleep.

Harry wasn't sure what to think of this. He looked questioningly at the boy, who shrugged.

"She's very boring," he wrote to Harry explanatively.

"That's no reason to kill her," Harry wrote back.

"Ha ha," the boy wrote. "Says you, Mr. Tom Riddle."

"What do you mean?" Harry scribbled apprehensively.

"Do you think I didn't notice that 'Tom Marvolo Riddle' is an anagram of 'I Am Lord Voldemort'?" the boy wrote back in his neat, thin handwriting.

"You discovered that in how long?" Harry wrote in amazement.

"As soon as I heard you say it. The name sounded like it wasn't your own, the way you stumbled over it. So I got started on figuring out its possible significance. Of course, if it had been a personal meaning instead of an anagram like that, I might not have been able to figure it out," he went on.

"You have no idea how personal it is," Harry wrote back.

"Really?" the boy asked, but Harry didn't answer, only smiled at the boy again, who shrugged.

"Fine with me. Anyway, if I know what your name isn't, you should know the same for me. It's Paben Lossett Rux"

"Is that an anagram of something?" Harry asked with interest.

"Post Tenebras Lux. It's Latin. After darkness, Light."

"Oh," Harry wrote. "That's pretty cool."

"So is yours," Paben said.

…

When Miss Perry finally stopped speaking and said, "Class dismissed," everyone filtered out of the classroom. There were no guards there, and Harry asked Paben about it.

"They don't follow us around everywhere," he said. "This is a secure level, which means you can't get to any of the other levels without using an elevator, and you can't use an elevator without having a key. Only the Keepers have keys—"

"You mean the Grey Guards?" Harry asked.

Paben smiled slightly. "Yes, them."

"Paben," Harry said, moving closer to him, "Do you know—"

"They also listen to everything we say," Paben went on, as if he hadn't heard what Harry had begun to ask. "The Lower Floors are for the ones who need to be punished, and for the new arrivals. That's probably where you were last night," he said, and Harry recalled the screams.

"Punished?" What kind of punishment could cause people to scream like that?

Paben smiled grimly. "When they come back, they are always…cooperative."

They stopped in front of another door. "Now, I have to tell you," Paben said seriously, "Not all the classes are as nice as Miss Perry's. Some of them are a bit more instructive, if you get my drift." He paused. "This is one of them."

They all went through the doors. Harry could tell how the people around him became tense as they came through, putting on masks over the ones they already had. Whatever this class was, it couldn't be good.

…

"Paben," Harry asked, frowning thoughtfully. He was copying down logical arguments for 'Why Magic Can't Exist.'

"Yes?" Paben asked, looking up from his own. It had been two weeks since Harry had woken up in the strange white room. He was just as dedicated to escaping as ever, but he hadn't yet thought up a plan of how to do such a thing.

"I was thinking."

"Oh," Paben said. He sat up and wandered toward the corner of the room, and Harry followed. The Library was as bare and sterile as the rest of the building, but one thing it had which made it a marginally pleasant place was the windows that opened out on the east die of the building.

Another thing was that, if you sat in the alcove of one of the windows, and spoke in low voices, you could be neither heard nor seen by You Know Who and his Grey Guards, as Paben had taken to calling them. Harry found it ironically funny that while, in the rest of the Wizarding World feared to say Voldemort's name, here, the same appellation was used to refer to the man with the cold eyes. The only difference was that, here, no one knew what his name even was.

"What is it?" Paben asked.

"Why hasn't anyone tried to escape?" Harry asked.

"I told you, they have—"

"No, I mean a concentrated effort. All together."

"Well,' Paben said sarcastically, "Maybe it has something to do with the fact that everyone sleeps with a different roommate each night, or that you can get rewards for ratting people out to the Grey Guards, or that if the coup fails everyone's wands will be broken."

"Still," Harry said. "Surely someone has tried to get a resistance going?"

Paben sighed. "If you don't take to the 'friendly tactics' by the end of a year's time, you're moved to a different floor. There isn't anybody to have a resistance with."

"I still think it's possible," Harry aid. "Don't look at me like that, I've done something of the sort before—"

"But you had allies then," Paben said.

"Well, yes, that's the point," Harry said frustrated.

"You won't have allies here," Paben said. "No one will join you unless they think it's a sure thing, or that you have the support of everyone else. There is no loyalty, nothing to hold everyone together."

"I can change that," Harry said stubbornly.

Paben laughed quietly. "Before the year's up? Don't be a fool." He eyed Harry. "No, Tom, all you'll ever get are underlings—and most likely not even that."

Harry shook his head.

"Besides," Paben said. "You've forgotten the fact that everything that's said is monitored."

Harry thought. "A code," he said.

"A code?" Paben asked.

"Yes. You're good with codes, you can think of something," Harry said confidently.

Paben just smiled sadly. "You know my year is almost up, don't you?"

Harry froze. "How long?"

"Two months," Paben said softly.

Harry looked at Paben, who had closed his eyes, and was leaning against the glass.

"Two months." He tasted the words on his tongue. They tasted of ashes. Two months and Paben would be moved down.

"I won't let that happen," Harry said forcefully. Paben opened his eyes but said nothing, and for the first time there was no humor in them, only bleak despair.

"Don't bother," he said, and paused. "They all give in in the end, you know that?" he asked Harry quietly. "All of them."

…

Harry sat in the alcove. Paben had been taken away, with a smile on his lips and a laugh, a laugh that reminded him of the last time he had seen Sirius.

Paben had been right. No one had wanted to listen to the new boy's talk of working together. No one had seen what he could see, that it was possible. Not even Paben. Perhaps it wasn't possible.

Outside, in the real world, Voldemort was winning because Harry Potter could not stand against him. Inside, the man with the cold eyes was winning because no one would stand against him.

…

They all got to see the 'cured' before they were let go. Harry stood in a silent line with the others, all of them uncaring, having lost all hope. The person was brought out. Harry looked up, and his heart lodged in his throat. It was Paben.

He stared around him with an air of quiet disinterest. "You the Wizard people?" he asked.

Harry tried to meet his eyes. Paben saw him for a moment, and they stared at each other. Harry could see no recognition in his eyes.

…

Every day, when he got to go in the library, he sat in the window alcoves. He sat and he concentrated his magic. He sat and he concentrated until something happened, until he could control it with the finest precision. Because he had to. Because there was no second chance.

He made the pen write. "This is your doom," he wrote and wrote and wrote, the pen dancing, held only by his thoughts. When there was no more space on the page, he set it on fire.

It was time.

…

The boy was found on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, starving to death and delirious. He was brought into Hogwarts and when he awoke, three days later, the Wizarding World rejoiced.

Harry Potter was back. He would save them all.

Albus Dumbledore came to visit him at once. "Harry, my dear boy," he said kindly. "What has happened?"

Harry started a bit at the sound of his name and stared appraisingly at Dumbledore. "That's what I want to know," he said.

"You have been missing for a year."

"A year?" Harry asked, and grinned slightly, but there was no warmth in his eyes, only a mad light that danced and danced and danced.

.

.

.