Painkiller
By: Demonic Psycho
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling owns everything but the plot.
A bolt of white-hot pain seared in a lightning bolt across Harry's forehead, lancing through the prominent scar that marred the smooth, skinny forehead framed with a messy mop of tangled black hair. He looked around, shiftily shooting mad looks at the chest of drawers as if it'd jump up and attack him. No such misfortune was going to occur, he decided, so he sealed his door shut with a noisy squelch.
Harry heavily sighed with vast relief; then he carefully opened one of the drawers on his nightstand, the small drawer with chipped paint that he alone could open. It opened quietly, without protest, as if the complex charm protecting it was also a greasy lubricant that made the wheels turn more easily on the track. Inside of the drawer were several hollow cylinders of a translucent orange plastic with a white rubber cap closing each one. The containers were filled with large capsules of a long shape like a cylinder with rounded ends and full of a thick liquid. The labels on the bottles, yellowed and dusty, were still barely legible. In spidery writing, the labels said:
Morphine
Another bottle – a smaller bottle that's frosty white, filled with yellowish liquid and with an eyedropper attached – was magically charmed to be bottomless. The jet-black text was illegible, the white background blurred into various shades of grey where the edges of the black ink smeared into white paper. Harry knew what it said, and he used it often. The liquid was tranquilliser, the ancient shopkeeper's speciality, and stronger tenfold by a charm that he had learned. A translucent white syringe rolled next to it, sterilised needle gleaming dangerously.
Wordlessly, he took the syringe and, placing the needle into the liquid, sucked in the strong liquid. He wouldn't bother with the morphine at the moment; he wanted fast relief, a rush of surging adrenaline and drugs and then… nothing. Just a void of black nothingness that he could float, swim, obliviously in.
The syringe was full. Then he pierced the his left arm in the pale, tiny scar that he had poked at least a dozen times before with that syringe, and dug it deeper as swiftly as possible. He couldn't savour the pain. He needed the painkiller almost desperately, with an urgent need like animal lust, but deeper, stronger, raging in him, roaring in his ears…
The he plunged the syringe down, forcing the liquid into his bloodstream, and as the searing pain in his forehead and arm numbed, the crazed look in his fevered emerald-green eyes sputtered and died. Harry was free from pain, free from this world, free from Dumbledore, free from Voldemort. The spiritual manacles were cast aside, the shackles torn off, and he was simply free.
He had conquered his oppressors, temporarily, until the painkiller wore off…