Buttercups: redux
mordacis
AN: This is a snippet of a fic I've just finished. The 'QuickEdit' thing murdered the original formatting and would. not. work. So for the full fic head over to my author page and the link's waiting for ya!
Hogwarts. Shit, he's still only in Hogwarts. He keeps expecting to wake up in that clearing. With the screams and the dying – drowning in blood that isn't his.
But it's been how long now? Harry can't even remember being brought to the infirmary, never mind what day it is. Time ebbs back and forth in his mind, slips out of his reach each time he tries to grasp it firmly enough for something, anything to make sense.
He's tried to tell someone. Tried to explain.
There's a shadow that creeps up on him, steals him away for hours or minutes. He can feel it gnawing at the back of his mind. An itch that won't go away and won't be scratched. Madness.
He's so very afraid.
But everyone else is saying stressshockdepressionposttraumaticwhatever, but Harry knows he's just plain broken.
Unfixable.
He doesn't quite know when this might have happened. Only that it was somewhere between the beginning of the final battle and now. He can't remember a lot of things, maybe it's better he doesn't.
Either way, no one has shipped him off to St. Mungo's. They probably should. Harry's too tired to fight; he wouldn't give them any trouble.
But the nurse putters around dosing him with potions. McGonagall has Harry on a schedule; she insists, almost desperately, that a structured routine will restore him to the way he was.
If Harry was speaking he would ask McGonagall what way she meant -- before his parent's were killed? Before Cedric, Sirius, Ron, or after?