Peter woke up feeling sore. Not sore like ran around the forest all night with a werewolf, not sore like hit by a stray curse when Snivellus and Sirius duelled. Instead, it was what Peter imagined being pummeled to death by the Whomping Willow might feel like, except at least that would at some point have been over.

He opened his eyes to bright, bright walls painted with more stupid polka dots. He could feel there was something inside his arm again. These muggles with their barbaric muggle medicines, putting tubes and needles inside people! Peter peeled aside the tape and yanked it out.

Bloody buggering fuck it hurt. And it was bleeding. Oh gods, he was bleeding, what if someone took his blood and performed a binding ritual with it or something—

—oh, but muggles didn't have binding rituals.

Someone came in then, shouting as if it wasn't already loud enough in this stupid room—

At this point Peter realised he had been yelling for an indeterminate period of time.

The muggle healer was doing something, touching him, Harry hated being touched, and then Peter realised he should have been doing more breathing and less screaming.

Breathing was a lot harder than most people made it look.

The polka dots were still moving, growing bigger and bigger until they took up the whole room.

He blinked. Then, everything went black.

xoxox

When Peter woke to more polka dots he felt like he could cry. He watched them skitter across the walls like cockroaches, they reminded him of detentions spent turning the compost heaps in the greenhouses. He tried to wipe the sweat off his face.

This was when Peter realised he couldn't move his hands. He tore his gaze from the walls, blinking dizzily. It felt like the bed was lurching even though he knew it shouldn't be. Boats lurched and rocked, but beds were supposed to be still.

He found his hands by following the strange muggle tubing with his eyes. The plastic was all shiny in the too-bright light. Peter wriggled his fingers, watching them. Again, he tried to wipe the sweat off his face.

His hands were cuffed to the sides of the bed.

Peter screamed.

Strange people came in and tried to talk to him. He knew they were talking because he could see their lips moving and their arms waving about in frantic gestures.

But none of the words were reaching his ears. He could hear only himself: his rattling lungs, his staccato heart, and the screaming, gods, why wouldn't he stop screaming?

And then, suddenly, he calmed. It felt like his limbs were made of honey and the air around him was so heavy and soft.

No, that wasn't right. It was the air that was viscous like honey, and his limbs felt heavy and soft. He blinked, trying to hear what these strange people were saying, but they were speaking so quickly. It was alright, though. Peter was well-accustomed to not being able to keep up. The walls were dancing; it looked so funny that he laughed.

The people stopped trying to talk to him then. A familiar lady came in, her hair all crisp like a bobby's helmet. Peter reached out to touch it but he was still tied to the bed. She reminded him of McGonagall.

"Looook aatt meee," she was saying. She was holding something up, was it a rabbit?

Oh, Peter recognised this dream. He was supposed to transfigure the bunny into a pair of slippers. McGonagall was watching him sternly, all dissatisfied. Peter didn't want to disappoint her too.

He pulled at his magic and forced it into his wand—where was his wand?—and cast the spell.

McGonagall's hair turned blue.

Peter had failed. His vision blurred with his tears.

"Drink this Harry," someone murmured, tilting a vial of something slimy and truly disgusting into his mouth. "Swallow it all, there's a good boy."

Peter giggled, then did as he was told.

He opened his eyes to see his special teacher still sitting before him, presenting him with his plush Ratty. Her hair was all grey again. He had no idea what she wanted from him. Was he supposed to take Ratty? He was tied to the stupid bed.

The polka dots on the walls had stopped moving.

Ratty was pressed into Harry's hand—he sagged with relief. Somehow, it was easier to breathe now. "Thank you," he whispered.

"You're welcome," said not-McGonagall. "Will you be good now?"

She helped him sit up, unbuckling his wrists from the bed, but insisted he leave the tube inside his arm for now. Peter humoured her, quite happy to assemble and unassemble the puzzle on the tray before him. Ratty nestled beside him, keeping them safe.

Aunt Petunia came at some point and he made sure to look at her, to say "Hello," and "Please," and "Thank you." He wasn't sure why, but it seemed awfully important.

Later, a muggle healer came in. She gave him some sleeping potion while talking to Aunt Petunia and not-McGonagall as if he weren't right there, but Peter was used to that. He was too tired to protest to his wrists being buckled back in again.

Muggles didn't have Dreamless Sleep; Harry spent the night sweating through a series of nightmares. There was a man with skin that looked like it had been scraped off hot milk. The monster didn't say anything, he'd just laugh and laugh and laugh while Peter stumbled across a giant chessboard. There was a black dog figurine chasing him and no matter how fast Harry ran he couldn't move from the square grey tile that had melted around his feet.

The next days were slow. Peter kept Ratty held tight against his chest. The muggles removed the tube from his arm and shepherded him from one activity to the next. Breakfast, puzzles, lessons, lunch, drawing, walking outside, dinner. Petunia would visit, and he made sure to look at her as best he could, making his eyes wide and pleading in the hopes she'd take him home.

They had stopped tying Harry to the bed at night.

The ubiquitous polka dots haunted his dreams, floating around in a mockery of fairy lights as he watched his dead mother sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, red hair spilling across the floor while a great bat held her and wept.

On some level, Peter was aware of other children in the hospital with him, in the same way he was aware of the inedible food, and the monotony of the only three puzzles they had there. Mostly he noticed the brown leaves on the potted plants, the way the beds weren't properly lined up with the eklektricity sockets, and the fact the boy in the bed beside him was three times bigger than him and breathed through his mouth in a way that was utterly infuriating.

"Why am I here?" he asked not-McGonagall on Thursday. It was strange how she came to see him every day now; he was only really comfortable speaking to her on Thursdays.

"You had a fit and we were all very worried you might hurt yourself," she explained. Nowadays she seemed to make sure her hair was properly in place before meeting with Harry, and he appreciated that.

Harry looked at her. "If I promise to be good, can I go home?" There was something echoing in the back of his head about subjunctives and conditionals. What's a conditional, he asked the echo, but it didn't answer.

He made himself listen to what not-McGonagall was saying.

That wasn't true. He made himself look like he was listening to what not-McGonagall was saying. "Please can I go home?" he repeated once she'd stopped talking.

To his profound relief, she was smiling.

Petunia picked him up on Saturday morning, Dudley in tow. "They said at school that you're loony and that's why they put you in the loony bin," Dudley explained on the way down to the ground floor. "Mum says you're not loony, but they put you in the loony bin anyway."

There was an elderly couple in the lift with them. The woman had turned away and the man was scowling at their mismatched family.

"That's enough, Dudley," Aunt Petunia said. "Don't say things like that."

Petunia sounded tired, Harry realised suddenly. "I promise I'll be good, please can I go home?" People had liked when he'd said that in the past, so it seemed prudent to make sure.

"Come along, boys."

Peter let her hold his hand and followed along without fussing. He was working on being better at keeping his promises.

xoxox

Everything felt disjointed. There were moments when he didn't even know what disjointed meant but he knew it was the right word, the same way Harry knew the man with the milk-skin was bad and that Aunt Petunia was tired.

Time had bloomed into April, marked by Dudley's run around the garden hunting chocolate eggs. Peter had followed after he was done, meticulously finding the ones Dudley had missed.

He knew it was Thursday only because he was sitting in the Thursday room with not-McGonagall.

"How are you feeling today Harry? Can you tell me what you learnt this week?" she asked.

"I don't know who I am," Peter answered. "Harry died and Ratty died. I don't understand."

Not-McGonagall had gotten better at answering his existential questions. "Have you heard of phoenixes, Harry? When they die they burn up and are born again from the ashes."

That doesn't make any sense, Harry thought. Also, what's a Fawkes?

Fawkes is a phoenix, and the phoenix is a metaphor, the echo in his head explained.

"Am I an echo?" he asked, still confused.

Not-McGonagall was smiling. "I don't know who you are, Harry. Only you can determine that."

That didn't make any sense either, but Harry nodded anyway. He went back to looking for constellations in the wallpaper and found Pyxis next to Vela. It would have been easier if they'd both sailed off to the underworld, he couldn't help but think. His mum was there waiting for him—he pictured her perched on the cerberus' heads, one mum with green eyes and greying hair, the other blue-eyed and blooming with red life.

After school that day Harry watched Aunt Petunia hanging the laundry in the back garden. Mrs Number Six had hung up hers too, but the clothes looked strange, all blotchy and pink.

"Why?" Harry asked his aunt, entranced by a mottled t-shirt snapping in the wind.

"That's what happens when you don't separate your colours properly," Petunia explained. "It all blends unevenly. A single red sock can ruin everything." She sniffed, basket cocked against her hip. "And don't ask questions."

Harry marveled at the idea, staying outside to think on it. He certainly felt muddled, but was he the t-shirt or the sock?

After dinner he climbed over the fence and wished very hard for the shirt until it was suddenly clutched safely in his hands. Feeling inordinately proud, he hid his prize in his nest of covers under the stairs.

He'd forgotten Petunia vacuumed his cupboard with the rest of the house. She held his hand too tight as she rang the doorbell of number six, Privet Drive.

"I'm sorry," Harry whispered at Mrs Number Six's shoes, fingers reluctantly uncurling from the shirt.

"Why did you take it?" the woman asked, though she didn't seem half as mad as Aunt Petunia was.

"It's not ruined," Harry answered honestly. "It's beautiful."

Mrs Number Six laughed and pressed the shirt back into Harry's hand. "You could have asked, boy. I don't mind. Keep it."

Harry deposited his prize back in his nest feeling warm with contentment. Aunt Petunia scowled at him, but he didn't understand what he'd done to upset her.

Stealing is wrong, his mind echoed. You could have asked.

"Don't ask questions," Harry parroted back.

Petunia smiled at him then, though Harry couldn't read the wonder from her eyes. "Have you really been listening, Harry?"

"Not always," he admitted.

"If you're a good boy you can ask for things," Aunt Petunia said, and that was that.

xoxox

Peter tested the hypothesis the following Thursday. It was strange, because Dudley went around saying I want twenty times a day, but it had never occured to Peter that he could say it too.

"I want to see the stars," he announced.

"Tell me what you learnt today," not-McGonagall insisted.

"A-for-Apple, B-for-Ball, Jesus is the seventh letter of the alphabet," Harry said. "I want to see the stars."

"Almost," the woman agreed. "You keep trying and I'll see what I can do."

xoxox

Every night he'd dream stories of the deer-man, the dog-man and the wolf-man. He'd dream of being left behind, of feeling small and alone. But during the day Harry's teachers would give him books with pictures of the night sky in them, and those stories he could remember all on his own.

Taurus, the bull whose sacrifice marked the return of better times. Lupus, half man half beast, seemingly always a moment from death. Sirius, the dog star whose bright twinkling heralded trouble. Lepus, running, running, running from Orion's dogs.

And Aion, God of the Zodiac and the ages, who watched over them all.

Everything is vulnerable to time, the echoes agreed. Harry thought of pink t-shirts fading in the wash and knew he didn't want it any other way.

xoxox

One day when Harry was eight, Petunia made him move his things out of his cupboard. "Big boys need space to grow," she said.

This seemed like poor reasoning to Harry. If he was already big he wouldn't need to keep growing. And if he was small, then he could still fit in the cupboard just fine.

But he knew Petunia wasn't a woman of logic, she was a woman of metaphor. So Harry dutifully gathered his blankets and carried them to his new room with the window overlooking the back garden.

He had Dudley's old bed, with a nice dip already worn into the middle of the mattress. Harry arranged his blankets around himself into a perfect nest. If he sat up he could see Number Six's washing lines. Really, it was almost nice having a room all to himself.

Harry had been wrong.

He hated the room. It was close enough to the Dursleys that he could hear them snoring at night. The window always let in the light from Number Two's terrible choice in lawn ornaments. A different couple had moved into Number Six and they didn't hang their laundry the right way. Instead the man put the pegs on all haphazard-like, uncaring that it was wrong and made everything all wrinkly.

At first Aunt Petunia pretended not to notice when Harry kept crawling back into his cupboard every night. She made not-McGonagall explain to him that change could be a good thing, and talked about stars in his window like she knew nothing of light pollution.

It was awful. For a while Harry felt he was hardly sleeping at all.

Aunt Petunia's next tactic was to buy him blackout curtains and a pack of glow-in-the-dark stars. Harry convinced Dudley to help him carry the old mattress out of the cupboard so he could prop it against the wall next to his bed-nest.

Then, when all of his belongings were moved from the cupboard, Harry crawled to the very back where he pried aside the panelling behind a shelf.

He pulled out the cloak, the ring, the wand.

These were the Hallows. He remembered them like he remembered casting fairy lights, like he remembered his mother's body lying splayed out across carpeted floors.

Harry deposited them under a loose floorboard in his new room, but they wouldn't let him forget about them again. From the moment he'd touched them they haunted his dreams, always whispering and murmuring like a haunted lullaby.

He remembered how his Mam used to say he'd been born under a lucky star, and he really hoped that it was true. At night he'd stare up at his glow-in-the-dark rendition of Scorpio, wondering if it'd be enough to protect him.

In the corner under the floorboards, three Hallows sat, waiting.

xoxox

Life has been crazy busy. Take care, my lovely fellow humans. Be kind, be safe, happy holidays.