Exercising My Right to Write: A Collection

by Gabriel Gatsby

This is a collection of prompt-inspired drabbles, with no particular focus or aim except to carry on writing. Each story will likely have a new focus, offering you a small slice of someone's life. [5/80 completed] (Warning: character death)

3. Fighting Immortality

Harry's eyes flew open as he bolted upright in bed. His green orbs flashed in the darkness, his heart fluttered erratically in his chest. It took him a moment to realise that the shout that had woken him had been his own. As he dragged ragged breaths in through dry lips, adrenaline forced bile to his throat and he curled forward around his painfully cramping stomach.

Pressing his head to the cool outside of the sheets, he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to focus on the darkness. It usually helped; the quiet, and the dark.

As the minutes ticked by, he slowly relaxed, and eventually he was able to force his scattered nerves back to some level of normalcy. Unclenching his fists, he took a deep breath, then opened his eyes and carefully eased himself back against the pillows.

It was the same. Always the same. Somehow, he had found himself in the Gryffindor tower, but the usually jovial room had been empty and still. Only the fire had been burning, and it cast out an eerie, ambient light. Deep shadows loomed at him, whispering dark things in his ears. And it had been there, lying on the hearth.

The Philosopher's Stone. Blood red, and glinting like the sharp edge of a sword, it had burned more fiercely than the fire beside it. And it had called to him. Always, he ached to reach out and grasp it. To take it up, and wield its awesome power. To live forever.

Unfailingly, he had had the same dream each night since the stone had brought him back, and unfailingly had fought it. It hurt to deny himself what he yearned for, it hurt to leave the stone where it lay. Sometimes he woke in cold sweats, others with a scream, but each time he forced himself down the same path.

Because even more than the pain, he feared the stone itself. He was afraid of what might happen if he picked it up. He was afraid of what it might do to him... What it already had done.

It had changed him, he knew. That night. There was something unnatural in being brought back from the dead, and it had altered a fundamental part of him. A part that made him good, and without it he was less than whole.

Yes, it hurt, but as he did every night when he sat in the dark after waking, he promised himself that tomorrow would be no different. Tomorrow he would deny himself again. Tomorrow he would wake again.

Never would he give in.