Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all related persons/places/things belong to JKR.

Author's Notes: I was actually trying to write something completely different when I started this. Um? Yeah. Comment, please, it makes me happy.

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Dewy grass, slick under his paws trying to slow him down, the chilling damp soaking into his muddy, dirty fur. Tail slashing restlessly, hitting his heaving flanks with every other tortured, weary step. Paws pounding the hard ground, taking him on, constantly moving. Until he slips, rolls and slides down a hill, to lie panting at the bottom.

Shivers up his spine remind him that he's not really a dog, but a man in an animal's body. Dog because it's easier. Dog because it runs faster. Runs. Running, running, running, always running. He won't stop. Mustn't stop. Run, damn you. Sometimes he goes so fast, so far, he almost forgets why he's running. Then he collapses on the lonely heath, on a moor under glaring stars, by a dusty abandoned road, or in a dark alley in some tired little town, and he remembers. Remembers what it is he's trying to leave behind.

The cold. The dark. The voices in his head. The screams at night, feverish dreams and cold sweats as he listened to other people slowly dying, decaying even as they still writhed and moaned and relieved horrors of their own. The living hell he didn't deserve.

He got away, but it follows him, to the one place he can't escape no matter how far he goes -- his own head.

Always, just when he almost gives up and loses himself in nightmarish memories, something else flashes through his mind.

Bright, wide green eyes, searching in the dark. Her eyes. Pale, narrow face, determinedly set under tousled hair. Him. A teenage boy, standing alone and confused in the night. Theirs. The young man whose life he knows he must protect.

The image calls him from the blackness, drags him from the abyss, gives him a purpose. A dull spark in the midst of his endless dark. It gets him up to his feet again.

He keeps running.

Because someday, Harry might not save him.