A/N: Before you start reading this, know that this was never meant to be written. Harry's tragic suicide in the previous chapter is how his story was supposed to end, so take a moment to regret his sorry fate. Fortunately or unfortunately however, somebody made me an offer I could not refuse, and so Harry lives to have more depressing adventures.
Harry woke.
For one blissful moment, the implications of that simple fact did not dawn upon him. He was awake, as living things are for the entirety of their remembered lives.
Then it hit him.
He sprang up on his legs, and looked around himself.
He was standing on a hill of garbage. Above him the sky was clear and he could feel a sweet breeze, but that only made the dying things around him hot and even smellier than they otherwise would have been. There was no point in wondering whether this was the afterlife or not, as only worldly filth could ever produce such ugliness. He was definitely alive.
Dear god, he was alive.
And not just that. His legs were fine, he discovered. There were disgusting things smeared all over them, and his fur was a stained sticky mess, but he was fine. That car had rammed into his left side and he must have been thrown under it, and yet here he was, perfectly uninjured, wide awake, alive, in the middle of what appeared to be a landfill.
He felt no different than he had before, so he doubted he was a zombie. No, he was alive… or as alive as he had before. It dawned on him that he might be something far, far freakier than a sentient deer.
A long, despairing squawk made its way out of his throat.
He had to get out of there. He wasn't sure if he was at risk of being incinerated, he knew very little about landfills in general, and considering his circumstance he wasn't sure if being incinerated would really be a problem, but he had to get himself someplace calm so that he could think, so that he could figure things out.
And so, he very slowly started walking down from the garbage hill he had woken up on. It was uneven ground, to say the least. Empty boxes, plastic and spikey things, a chicken breast that had to have been thrown out because it had gotten bad, now a vaguely discoloured repulsive thing stinking in the sun -
He threw up.
(It says something about the oppressive black stench of the place that even Harry's hypersensitive nose couldn't sense the vomit.)
The twenty minutes it took to carefully stake out a path down to the world of living were beyond awful, as well as dangerous. One false step, and he might have broken a leg or cut himself. And yet, somehow, these were not the worst moments of his life. Somehow, the looming danger and the simple task of getting himself someplace safe felt… pleasant. He was so used to being heaved down by misery, by wondering what or why he was, that the simplicity of navigating a landfill was more to him than a new experience. It was a new concept.
He really needed to think.
Jumping the fence was easy, but when his legs at last made contact with solid cement he did not move. He simply stood, looking at the scene before him.
There were a few buildings that he assumed to be administrative scattered around the lot. They looked neglected. He wondered if anybody would care if the trash sea ever rose beyond its fence-ordained limits and swallowed them. Or even notice. Amidst them, a snake of a road carved out a path for garbage trucks to follow. He could hear the roar of engines, and even faint voices.
(It was an ugly and godforsaken place, yet he couldn't help but feel a sort of kinship with it. The filth of the world, awakened in filth… a place with no other purpose than to accept humanity's rejects, a homage to entropy. His eyes filled with tears, and it wasn't just because of the stench.)
No-one had spotted him yet. This was fortunate, because he wanted to get the hell out of there, before anyone could disturb him. Whatever he might truly be he looked just like what was commonly considered to be a delicacy, and this was no time to put the charity of strangers to the test.
So he ran.
Beyond the landfill, stretched out before him, the road he was on joined another, greater snake. That road was pretty much it as far as distinctive landmarks went, for everything else was fields. Fields and fields and fields of crops. Or grass. It was hard to tell. He was on the countryside.
Ironic, that his attempt to kill himself had led him to what looked just like a herbivore's Heaven. The landfill might even have been meant to be a type of garbage Purgatory.
And yet he doubted that this was the work of Provision.
Harry did not much care for the God of the old Testament, the one who would reach out with his divine hand and bless this man, curse the other, and meddle in neighbour quarrels. He was mundane. Humans had an entirely too human understanding of God, they wanted to see themselves in him. Harry wanted the divine. He wanted a God who was sentient omnipotence, a God who had weaved reality and scattered life across the universe like he had stars on the sky, a God who cared little for right or wrong and that did not hear your prayers. There was peace in that idea.
But Harry was not sure where it would put him.
He wanted God to be undiscriminating because then his torment would simply be a strange twist of fate, a thread on the divine weave that had gotten jammed in the wrong place. A God that operated on a level Harry could not grasp was impossible to hate. Unfortunately, he had created Harry, and then brought him back to life. Clearly there was some purpose he was meant to fulfil, some business he had left unfinished. God was not as neutral as Harry wanted him to be, and he would not be allowed to rest until he had accomplished whatever it was he was supposed to do.
The alternative was that God had nothing to do with this. That would absolve Harry of his divine purpose, and he would be free to make of his existence whatever he wanted. But if there was no outside influence then it was Harry who was special, Harry who had sentience and Harry who for whatever reason had risen from the dead… no. He did not want to think in such terms, and he justified this to himself with his own bastardised Pascal's Wager. For if God was real and Harry put his faith in him, then he would succeed in his life. If God was false, however, then Harry would have made a mistake and could deal with that later.
Going the religious route was really the only reasonable thing to do at this point.
And so he set out to follow God's Will as best as he could, which he figured had to be related to the Dursleys somehow. If God was real, then Harry had to have been placed with them for a reason.
The Dursleys were important somehow.
It took him all of three days to make his way back to Privet Drive. (Not because it was that far, but because he had struggled to find the right suburb. The number of them was appalling. Was this the fruit of human society?)
They were not happy to see him.
It couldn't be because of his appearance, because he had stumbled upon a lake and enjoyed the first bath of his life two days earlier. He was in fact cleaner than when he had left.
No, they were genuinely upset that he was back in good health. He would have been offended if he had expected anything at all from them beforehand. It was perhaps fortunate that he could not bring himself to care about their petty protests and Vernon's pitiful attempts to shoo him, not when he had died and come back again. He gave the man the coldest look he could muster, a look filled with all the contempt he held not only for the man himself, but for what he, fat and dim as he was, represented. He even bared his teeth, ever so slightly.
Vernon shut his mouth and stared, gobsmacked. Harry would have smirked at him if he could as he passed.
"Petunia…" he heard Vernon say behind him. Never mind the smirk, Harry wanted to laugh.
The garden had not been disturbed since he had left, so settling back into his grazing habit was the easiest thing in the world. Somehow, though, it felt different. He felt different.
His attempt to kill himself had failed, but it was an issue he was going to tackle. Even if he turned out to be wrong about God, he would still have a purpose. He was scared of it, of course, but coming back from the dead and the subsequent journey back home had revolutionized his world view. He was no longer the sheltered little madman lamenting in a sixteen square meter garden. He had grown. He had tangible proof that he was extraordinary.
He had bested death, and felt rather good about it.
A few days went by as Harry got to know his new and improved confident self, before he turned to figuring out his purpose. He decided to have some fun and be logical, piecing together God's will like Sherlock Holmes looking through clues to find a murderer.
He felt secure in guessing that he was not waiting to have some epiphany. God would have placed him in a meadow if it were so. No, it had to be related to his interactions with the outside world: why else place him in the midst of humans? Putting him in suburbia was nothing if not a sign that he was to interact with mankind.
The only question was what sort of interaction God had in mind.
Suburbia carry with them the stench of materialism, of aspiring middle class flocking together to fight for primitive goals like who has the nicer car and whose treacle tart recipe is the most savoury. Harry, as a profoundly philosophical deer, was the opposite of all that. It would not be unreasonable to presume that he was to lead the masses to salvation.
It was, in fact, the most reasonable explanation he could think of.
And yet it felt distinctly wrong. The idea of being a prophet felt- wasteful. And God had others. God had had Jesus preaching self-improvement. A variety of religions, philosophies and even political ideas had encouraged the liberation of self from earthly constraints throughout history and they had all, in turn, been trumped by human avarice. Greed, rooted in primitive self-preservation, will always win through, and so Harry could not perceive the quest to create an essentially communist utopia to be anything other than futile.
Why, then, would God want Harry join in this doomed endeavour? Harry found the idea of God caring about humanity's life choices to be naive, but assuming that the Almighty was human enough to love and patient enough to still be helping humanity help themselves, then the creation of a clever Lazarus deer would be a very inefficient way of accomplishing that. But assuming that God for whatever ineffable reason wanted Harry to be his new prophet, then he ought to have let him know. The Bible was full of exciting tales of how this and that holy man was chosen, or rather, how he had been informed that he had been chosen, and Jesus, the holiest of them all and God's very own son, appeared to have known all along.
(It could be argued that even Jesus was not quite as extraordinary as Harry. All of his miracles had been done with a blessing, by channelling the power of God: Peter proves this when he too walks upon water, and in the Old Testament there is even Elisha waking a child from the dead. Their miracles were truly those of God. Harry's were his own.)
Harry had no such innate knowledge, and angels had yet to descend from the skies to inform him of the will of God. It made no sense for Harry to have some kind grand reformist purpose. In fact, looking back at what the clues he had been given, it appeared that God had made him ignorant, but also given him the intellect to figure out why.
Which is why he turned towards the Dursleys.
At first glance, they were the most ordinary lot of middle class idiots anyone ever saw. Harry would not deny that he hated them for a lot of different reasons, but one of the big ones would be that they were so disgustingly, pathetically ordinary. They actively sought dullness, and Harry was only now realising just how extraordinary that was.
Somehow, in their small-mindedness, the Dursleys had transcended the human drive to diverge from their peers and make themselves memorable, and they had never looked back. (For a brief moment, Harry wondered if this divine experiment wasn't somehow about them, if a sentient, possibly immortal pet deer wasn't God's idea of a practical joke.)
And this is where Harry came to a stop.
What exactly was he supposed to do about the Dursleys?
His head fell towards the ground, and not because he wanted to eat grass.
(Though he did chew off a tuft now that he was in the area.)
And never mind God's effing ineffable will, what was it that Harry wanted out of life? This new him might be confident, and in a way he had surfaced from the madness and depression that had once consumed him, but he was not happy. He would even go so far as to say he was no less unhappy-
He shut those thoughts down almost immediately. No, he thought to himself, do not go down that road. It had claimed his life once before, and while there was a good chance that he would just come right back if he died again, his cheating of death was one miracle he did not want to know more about, not yet, no matter how integral it was to uncovering the truth about himself. He was not ready.
He was very much ignoring the elephant in his brain in not wanting to examine his deeper feelings on having to live. A lifetime of misery had left its imprint, it was like a sea. Just because he had been pulled onto land did not mean that he could not fall, or get pushed back in. The euphoria he had felt when he liberated himself had been lost to him ever since he woke up, and he did not want to look into whether anything could ever be worth that loss or no.
He was back to being his own prisoner.
He stood in the sun that day, not letting himself think about anything other than grass, avoiding the shadows.
Dudley came by the next day.
He stood there for a few seconds, simply staring. Harry stared back.
"We keep getting letters," Dudley informed him after a few seconds.
This was unprecedented.
All of the Dursleys, Dudley included, had always avoided Harry as well as they could. True, Dudley had had a phase when he put firecrackers in Harry's garden, but other than that he had been quite certain that his interest in them was entirely one-sided.
Apparently not.
He walked closer to Dudley, hoping to encourage what had, sad as that was, already become one of the greatest social events of his life.
It appeared to work, because Dudley continued. "Mum 'n Dad are pretty pissed," he said.
Harry was fascinated.
Not only was Dudley talking to him, but he had just uttered opposition to the other Dursleys. He had distinguished himself from them. And in words, no less, Harry had always perceived Dudley as being dim and violent, but if the boy could differentiate between himself and his parents, if he was capable of breaking out of the not-so-indivisible unit that was his family, if he could rebel… Perhaps this was God's sign.
Harry trotted around the boy and bopped his butt with his nose to see how the boy would react.
He yelped. "Don't be gay," he said, and Harry barked in the closest thing he had to laughter. Dudley was asking him not to be merry?
Dudley appeared to be slightly alarmed. "Uh, mate-" he said, before he corrected himself, "Hairy- um." He got no further.
Harry, on the other hand, had gotten very far.
Dudley had come into his garden as an independent being, and he had tried to connect with Harry. He did not realise yet, but the hand he had stretched out had been taken (latched on to) and Harry was starting to see the logic and symmetry of God's plan. He went to stand in front of Dudley, and tried to look like a friend. Dudley just stared at him, as if seeing him with new eyes.
Well, that feeling was mutual.
The boy patted Harry awkwardly on his forehead, and Harry would have soiled himself with fear at having his blind zone suddenly invaded if he hadn't been having such a profound divine revelation. "I'll just… go. Then. Dumb deer," Dudley said, before following through on his words.
And Harry could only bark, again, because Dudley was right. Harry was a very dumb deer.
God had placed the intelligent and artistic Harry with that destructive beast Dudley, and Harry realised now that this was symmetry. In the past he had wondered why he had no family, but now he knew that Dudley was the youth, the new generation, the witless savage that he, Harry, was to educate.
He heard the front door slam shut. For once, this was no symbolic exclusion. For once, he did not feel rejected.
If anything, it felt more like Dudley was attempting to protect himself from the intellectual revolution he was about to be treated to.
Harry had plans for him.
When the sun rose the next morning, Harry was waiting on the front porch.
He had a plan.
Dudley would have to come out sometime, and he was going to intercept him.
And lo and behold, at around nine he opened the door to pick up the mail. For whatever reason, the letter opening on the door seemed to be nailed shut.
Harry squawked at him. Quietly, so his parents wouldn't hear. They were co-conspirators now.
Dudley was not yet versed in the arts of subtlety, and exclaimed "Hairy!" quite loudly.
Harry shook his head at him.
Dudley whitened. "Hairy?" he said again, and this time his voice was barely above a whisper.
Oh Lord, this was it. Harry was finally being acknowledged, and it was because he was doing as God had wanted. There could be no mistaking this. He was on the right path.
He nodded, wishing he could smile.
Dudley stepped closer. Harry was oddly reminded of Persephone. Well, if eating Harry's fruit of knowledge could make him unable to return to his moron ways, then he was all for it. (And Petunia would do everything in her power to get her son back, but no plea could sway this deer)
"Do you understand what I'm saying?" the boy said, tentatively, and already Harry could see his good influence in the boy, for his watery blue eyes were alight with curiosity. Perhaps even awe.
Harry nodded.
"Blimey," Dudley breathed, looking ready to faint. He looked down at the letters he had picked up and up again at Harry.
"What the devil is going out there?" Vernon called. Dudley and Harry both jumped. (Of course they did. They were opposing sides of the same coin)
The dawn of a new age, Harry wanted to tell him.
The age of God.