Tony didn't go shopping with Harry and Pepper the next day, telling Harry that although he wanted to stay with him, he thought that the experience would be far more enjoyable if he wasn't being hounded by the reporters, fangirls, and gawkers that would follow them around if he was spotted in a shopping mall, particularly after the disaster that had been the press conference the week before. Harry had to agree, and he spent the day with Pepper, enjoying the anonymity that was being a blind muggle boy in a huge mall on the East coast of America.
For the first ten minutes or so he was unbelievably skittish – twisting this way and that to try and keep track of all the entrances and the hundreds of people bustling around the mall, cringing away from people who came too close – but nobody seemed particularly interested in him and Pepper, and they made their way around the stores.
Harry couldn't see the designs on the clothes he was buying, and would have been happy simply picking off colour and whether or not the material felt like sandpaper on his sensitive skin – really, who would want wool shirts – but Pepper seemed determined to provide him with matching outfits and accessories, as well as bedding, wash things, toys, and things for his new room, including a battery powered alarm clock that would speak the time, which admittedly was pretty cool, even if Jarvis could do the exact same thing at Tony's house.
Harry was just happy to have clothes that would fit him that weren't his Hogwarts uniform for the first time. He was also rather glad that he couldn't see the price tags on the things they were buying – the quantity of silk they had purchased in sheets and clothing alone was probably worth more than the Dursley's entire house and car.
Pepper, however, handed over her credit card at each shop without even batting an eye. Harry had tried explaining that he had been living in a cave for the past year, and before that had been reluctantly given his cousins cast-offs, so he hardly needed – or was used to – this level of luxury or affluence, but that just seemed to make the red-headed woman want to spoil him further, and he stopped protesting when she dropped over $100,000 on 4 tailored suits for him that he would probably never wear.
He did, however, draw the line at shoes, quietly explaining to Pepper that he was extremely likely to melt or set fire to any he had on, if he ever wore them anyway. Apart from anything, having not had anything on his feet for such a long time, the trainers given to him by the army rescuers in Afghanistan he was wearing around the shopping centre felt strange and restrictive, and he told Pepper in no uncertain terms that he would only ever put on any form of footwear when it was absolutely necessary.
Harry still ended up back in his new bedroom in the huge Malibu house with more stuff than he had ever owned in his entire life. Boxes and shopping bags were strewn across the floor, and he knew that more would be arriving over the next few days from the items that had been tailored or custom made, or simply too big and heavy to carry back with them.
He packed most of it away, placing clothes in the huge wardrobe or chest of drawers, games on the shelves next to the small selection of braille books. Tony had told him to get some decorations for the room, and Pepper had helped him select a few posters and canvases for the walls, but he had no way of putting them up, so Harry simply left the blur of colour in a pile in the corner of the room and collapsed onto the huge bed, sinking into the mattress and burying his head under the soft blankets to block out any light or sound.
The whole experience at the shopping centre had been unbearably overwhelming.
Harry had forgotten what that many people sounded like, packed into one place. He had vague memories of being able to filter out the worst of the unimportant noises and smells when he was at the Dursleys, but the mall had been filled with shouting children and ringing cell phones and music playing in very shop, not to mention the food stands selling churros and ice cream and sushi, each scent competing with people's perfume, deodorants and general body odour to be the most overpowering, smells and tastes and sounds mingling unpleasantly.
Harry had forced Pepper to stay on the opposite side of the complex to whichever store was selling an assortment of bath bombs and soaps, the sickly, cloying smells that floated down from the shop too much even with hundreds of people in between them and the offending shop. Harry could still smell traces of the products on his skin. It oddly reminded him of potions lessons, and the damp smell of the dungeons.
By the time they got home Harry had gone straight into his room and hidden under his covers, feeling like a child but needing to mute the sounds and the lights, the sensory overload too much to handle any longer. Even the faint buzzing of the electronics throughout the house was beginning to set his teeth on edge, and combined with the fire flowing through his veins the air under the duvet was beginning to get stuffy and suffocating.
In a rush Harry jumped off the bed, tossing the covers onto the floor as he scurried towards the large windows that made up one wall. He tore one open and leapt, closing his eyes as he fell for half a second before darting off towards the ocean.
He looped and soared through the air, narrowly avoiding the ground and the trees as he slowly remembered how to control his speed and direction, gradually gaining the grace and confidence he had once had on a broom. The air ruffled his hair and cooled his skin, and he let the spray from the ocean wash off the smells and feelings the shopping mall ad left clinging to him.
He had forgotten how much he loved flying.
Harry settled on the edge of a cliff, watching the sky turn orange as the sun began to set over the deep blue sea, swinging his feet absently.
Whilst they had been shopping, Pepper had chatted happily about why Harry might need swimming trunks or ski gloves or a three-piece suit and all the things he could do once the guardianship paperwork went through, and Harry had been content to tell her his favourite colour or book genre, but they had both avoided mentioning what Harry was actually going to do.
Harry couldn't go back to Hogwarts – he couldn't see and his wand had burned to ash, but he couldn't go to a normal muggle school, either. Realistically, living with Tony Stark he could probably learn more without going anyway, but Harry was still magical, and his magic still needed to be trained.
Even if he did go to school – muggle or magical – what would he do afterwards? He couldn't see, and had a tendency to spontaneously burst into flames when his was extremely emotional, so until he got that under control he couldn't even go into public without being arrested by either muggles wanting to experiment on him or wizards trying to enforce the statute of secrecy. Harry was happy living with Tony for now, but it was a short-term solution to get him away from the Dursleys until he was of age. Harry doubted the man would want him to hang around forever. He sighed in frustration.
Harry frowned slightly and stopped swinging his feet, peering at a dark mark on his left knee. There was a matching one on his left palm from where he had tripped and landed on the shards of a broken glass vase Dudley had knocked over when they were 5 or 6. He could have sworn the scar on his knee stretched further down his leg towards his shin and had been a darker colour. Harry couldn't see the marks clearly, but he could see the discolouration in his skin, and feel the raised lines of the jagged marks, and he had seen them in the mirror every day for years. Despite the phoenix tears in his blood, none of his old injuries from the Dursleys had been healed. Harry had just assumed that the tears had thought them part of his body and not in need of healing, as none of them were open wounds or causing him physical pain – they were just marks on his skin. Was it possible that they were slowly being healed?
Harry shook his head to get rid of the thought and stood up abruptly. That could only be wishful thinking. He had wanted to get rid of his scars the entire time he had had them – he was just tricking himself into thinking that just because he knew magic existed it was possible.
He took a running jump off the cliff and shot back towards the house through the fading light, putting fanciful wishes and impossible dreams out of his head. He was just grateful to be alive and away from the torture he had endured.