In death's dream kingdom
When Pomfrey gave Harry the choice of resting another day in bed instead of attending the leaving feast, he took the opportunity gladly. Together with Neville and Hermione, they sprawled across the hospital wing, having spread Harry's assorted gifts across an entire bed while the trio sat on another playing Exploding Snap.
Ronald returned later, a great bandage wrapped around his head.
"It was brilliant!" he said, voice booming through the room and bouncing off the arched ceiling. "We won the house cup!"
They were regaled with a blow-by-blow rendition of the leaving feast. Neville didn't even notice that his cards had burned to cinders in his hands.
Harry watched the others celebrate, not feeling the sense of heroism they were. The stone might have been in danger and they might have quadruple-handedly broken Slytherin's seven year house cup winning streak, but to him it was a hollow victory.
It hadn't been Mars in the sky, a bemused Sinistra had explained to him. Just a comet falling too close to earth, burning until it was nothing but ash in the atmosphere.
To Harry, it felt like circumstances had tricked him, betrayed him. It would take a lot more than a gratuitous house cup for him to trust that Dumbledore's strange plots weren't out to get him.
On his shoulder, Ratty nibbled at his hair. She couldn't make it look worse, so Harry let her. Perched on his bed, Harry watched his friends laughing along with Ronald.
Perhaps, if he stayed very still and didn't make a sound, they could pretend he didn't exist at all.
xoxox
Harry's muggle trainers squeaked on the worn, wet floors of King's Cross station. The Express had steamed its way through the speckled sun in the Scottish countryside, and by the time they were in London it was, unsurprisingly, raining.
"You've grown," Aunt Petunia greeted him.
Harry thought about it for a moment. His hair was longer and his robes were shorter on him. "Yes," he answered. Objectively, he'd grown.
"Harry," Hermione's voice interrupted his train of thought, "My parents."
While the Grangers and Dursleys exchanged pleasantries, Harry recalled Petunia's comment from back when he'd been eight. "Big boys need space to grow," she'd said, and given him a room of his own with a scorpion of stars for protection.
Harry spent the car ride back from King's Cross mulling quietly on it.
For all that had happened in his life so far, he was just a lump of flesh on a glorified rock hurtling through space. None of them would exist without space holding them in.
The roof of the astronomy tower was the closest he could get to the stars.
Returning to Privet Drive felt like stepping out of one dream and falling into another. He had grown, Harry realised, because space had allowed it. And now the familiar green door felt alien, the bathroom sink hung too low, his room was too quiet.
It was all exactly the same as it had been when he'd left ten months ago. The time frame it took to bring a being into this world...Harry felt like he'd been birthed like an idea, going from his magic-saturated castle to this cold, plastic world. His wand had already been confiscated by Aunt Petunia, leaving Harry naked.
He slept on top of his covers, unwilling to let this wrong world grab hold of him again. He was a foreigner here, and he always had been. The sense of wrongness was so strong that it gripped his chest like a vice.
It was almost pleasant, feeling the emotion holding him together.
Harry pinned up the photo calendar Neville had gotten him for Christmas, turning it to June. Sixty-two days, he counted.
In the next room, Dudley was playing his video game at full volume, yelling at the screen with tangible frustration.
Sixty-two days might as well have been an eternity.
xoxox
"You need a haircut," Vernon greeted Harry over breakfast the next morning.
Harry stared at the man, watched his moustache move as he chewed. Vernon's eyes were protruding beetle-like from his red face. "You've grown," Harry commented.
"Watch your—"
"Harry," Petunia cut in, "why don't you go to the park now."
Why? Because he hadn't finished his breakfast yet. "I'm not done eating."
Petunia sighed loudly, stopping Vernon's retort with a touch to his beefy arm. "It wasn't a suggestion, Harry."
It had literally been a question. Harry blinked at her, entirely confused. "Yes?" he hedged.
She made a shooing motion— that was obvious enough. Harry set down his plate beside the sink and grabbed his jacket, enjoying the sensation of the zipper snicking shut.
By the time Harry had made sense of her words it was too late, he'd already reached the small neighbourhood park. He plopped himself down on a lonely bench to pout.
The situation had him feeling out of sorts, not to mention monumentally stupid. At Hogwarts his teachers and friends had adapted to him over their time together. They'd learnt to choose their words in a way that he could easily understand. Petunia had done the same for him before, but she'd forgotten, and he'd forgotten, and he felt so bloody stupid.
Why didn't Aunt Petunia just say go outside when she wanted that, instead of hiding her meaning in a series boxes, or a russian nesting doll?
Harry retrieved Ratty from his space-expanded pocket, letting her run endlessly from one hand onto the next like an escalator in Harrods.
Petunia was a woman of metaphor, and Harry had forgotten.
Ratty stopped running, twitching her nose into the breeze. Harry cradled her, delighting in the tilt of her ears, the way she never failed to make him smile.
He remembered sitting in the Potters' kitchen, bouncing baby Harry on his lap while the world moved around him. They'd been apart from the rest, entirely separate. He felt like that now.
Harry didn't belong there, in that house in Surrey with the green door and the cultivated begonias.
He wanted very much to go home.
The only problem was, he didn't even know where home was.
xoxox
On the night of his twelfth birthday, Harry couldn't fall asleep. He lay in bed watching the stars above him spell out Scorpio. The Hallows, in their stubborn refusal to stay shoved under the floorboard in the corner, had magicked themselves onto his chest.
They sounded like they were whispering, the words muted and muffled so he couldn't make them out. Harry felt like he was listening to an orchestra warming up, a hundred instruments being tuned in preparation for the conductor to come out. Around him, the world was building in a great discordant crescendo that he couldn't make sense of.
Dudley's old wristwatch lay on his desk, the links of its metal wristband pooled over his Transfiguration essay.
Harry didn't need to look to know that it was midnight.
From one second to the next, everything fell still.
It was like time itself had halted. Even Vernon and Dudley's snores stopped, as if beholden to the moment.
Harry rustled his sheets just to make sure the world wasn't broken. It was alarming, after the constant accompaniment of the Hallows' whispers, to be surrounded by nothing at all.
The silence gaped, coupled with the sensation of balancing on a knife's edge. Harry reached out warily and let his hand brush against James' cloak.
The world turned black.
xoxox
On the morning of his twelfth birthday, Harry didn't wake up. Two owls had to let themselves in through his bedroom window. Later, when Aunt Petunia came by to bring him some breakfast, she screamed at the sight of the birds and hurriedly shut the door.
At precisely noon, green eyes opened, blinking groggily.
Everything in Harry's world was exactly the same: the patterned wallpaper, the wooden furniture, the soft sheets.
He felt like nothing could ever be the same again.
Harry reached out, touching the Hallows puddled on his lap. Cold shocked through him like a freezing spell, or like ice shoved down the back of his shirt. Oddly, Harry didn't mind, though he was just aware enough to know he probably should mind.
His body was shivering, he noticed in a strange, detached way. His bladder was full. It was his birthday, and two owls were waiting for his attention. The grumbling of his stomach protested its lack of food.
It took only a few seconds for the information to pass through his brain. I should get up, Harry thought to himself. He could picture it vividly, the actions he would need to take, the things that he would do to properly begin this day—or rather, whatever was left of it.
For some reason, he just couldn't find it in him to actually follow through, to move, to do...anything.
On his lap, the Hallows purred.
I've mastered Death, and so Death has claimed me, Harry realised, and laughed without a lick of humour.
His eyes traced over the paisley on his sheets, examined the way the light cast about his nest-like space.
He really did need to get up now, his bladder was becoming ever more insistent. With a sigh and an unusually great deal of effort, Harry took himself all the way to the bathroom, and then all the way back to bed.
The barn owl on his desk hooted for his attention. A speck of curiosity rose in Harry, just enough to wonder if it was a birthday gift, to wonder who might have sent a package.
Then that spark was gone, and Harry realised he didn't care anymore. He climbed into bed and lay back, watching Scorpio watch him, thinking about everything, nothing, and all the spaces in between.
xoxox
"Harry?"
As usual, Aunt Petunia let herself in immediately after knocking.
It used to bother him, that she knocked at all if she wasn't going to respect his 'come in'. At that moment, though, Harry wasn't feeling anything. He looked at her, seeing the wrinkles by her eyes and the beauty spot above her right brow. It was strange, he'd never really noticed her face properly before. "Yes?"
Aunt Petunia strode across the room, pulled his curtains apart, and opened the window farther. She turned back to him and stood there rather awkwardly. Harry hadn't stopped his examination of her face, and it seemed to be unnerving her.
He blinked.
"Are you alright, Harry?"
He blinked again. Flitwick had taught him how to check in with his own emotions, but he'd never said what Harry should do if he felt...absolutely nothing.
It was as if the world was cast in greys. He could only vaguely remember what colours had looked like, but this sieve-like nature of his memory was nothing new.
He could barely recall the face of his own mother. She must have stood above him just like Aunt Petunia was now, demanding something. He would have brushed her off in turn, holding intense love for her but not much patience.
The familiar grief when he thought of Mam was achingly absent.
"No," Harry realised. He was not fine, though he didn't feel a thing. "I'm broken."
Two years ago in autumn, a great storm had blown the weather vain on Number Five's roof crooked. Like a real cock with a broken neck, it had pointed consistently down, though it would shake and turn creakily with strong winds.
Aunt Petunia leaned in to feel his brow. "You're cold," she declared. "It's not a fever."
Under Harry's hands, the cloak puddled across his chest. Perhaps, if he set the Hallows aside, he'd feel warmer. He'd test the hypothesis later. Later, when he found the energy to move.
"It's Death," Harry explained, and as he said it he understood it was true. This was the opposite of living, after all.
Petunia swallowed uncomfortably. She looked away, which seemed ironic: all this time spent demanding he look at people, and now she wasn't even looking back.
Harry found he didn't care either way. He settled back to look again at the place the ceiling met the wallpaper. There was a crooked seam where the pattern didn't match up in the far corner, but for the first time since he'd noticed that mismatch, Harry didn't mind.
"The Masons will be here soon," Petunia said. "You are to remain quietly in your room." She set down a lump of cheese and half-loaf of bread for him.
"Alright."
Aunt Petunia's forehead was crinkled in confusion. "Alright," she echoed, and left.
Harry nibbled at the cheese as he continued to watch the ceiling. It was speckled off-white, almost homogenous but for the bits of stick-tape holding the stars up above his head.
When he'd been young, his mother had told him about the man on the moon who planted the stars in the sky every night and collected them again with the rising sun. "The sun will always rise in the morning," she'd said.
When he'd been young, his father had told him tales of three brothers who thought they could master Death, and how death came for them all in the end. "You must be careful what you wish for with all your heart, lest it come true," he'd said.
When he'd been young, his aunt had told him he had to be smart about how he did things, that it didn't matter how hard he worked when he couldn't ever find a sunset going eastward. "Life won't be easy for you," she'd promised. "Life isn't fair."
When he'd been young, he'd sat in the library reading about how the forces shaping the earth were measurable and could be used to forecast the weather, but nobody could calculate accurately beyond a week because something as insignificant as a rounding error would cause everything to change.
When he'd been young, he'd sat in Mrs Figg's garden watching the butterflies hovering amidst the foxglove.
When he'd been young, he'd died in a car crash, woken up in a room that was white as bone with a hooded figure standing before him. "YOU CAN GO BACK," it had said, laughing, "IF YOU WANT."
He wasn't young any more. Harry felt ancient, like his life had passed before his eyes so many times, every iteration catching his attention on some new detail. There had been a runty acromantula nesting on the ceiling of four Gryffindor boys' dorm room. There had been a mark on James' father's gravestone, a circle inside a triangle, bisected by a line.
Peter's father's gravestone had been simpler. Da had chosen the quote himself, told them all the words he wished his body to lie under forever.
The last enemy that shall be conquered is Death.
Three legendary artifacts sat on Harry's chest, almost crushing him with their gravity.
A CRACK punctured Harry's thoughts.
From one moment to the next, a house elf was perched on the end of his bed, yanking his thoughts back into the present.
Harry stared at it, and eyes as green as his own stared back. The colour had always unnerved him—it was the exact colour of death.
"Harry Potter," the house elf said, reverence in its voice.
"I suppose," Harry answered softly, mindful of the Masons being entertained downstairs. He let himself fall back against his pillows, somehow exhausted from the act of propping himself up.
"Harry Potter must not go back to Hogwarts," the elf said.
For a moment Harry imagined his life, if he were to stay there in his cousin's old bed forever. The Dursleys would grow old, perhaps they'd die or move out, the house would fall apart around him, the neighbourhood would fall to shambles, and he would lie in what was left. Unmoving, he'd watch the stars and wonder if he was as small as he always felt.
"I could do that," he said.
He imagined going to Diagon Alley, school shopping, the Hogwarts Express, another year of lessons, classes, drama. The very thought of it exhausted him, and yet he knew he didn't have a choice. "They won't let me, though. I can't stay here. What's your name?"
The elf went off on a rather long monologue about dangers and greatness, but Harry felt so tired, his limbs heavy and his mind nodding off. Dobby, he had already realised, was a talker.
"Will Harry Potter promise to not go back?"
"Hmm?" He hadn't been listening. Somehow, he'd run out of energy to even do that.
The elf didn't reply, and when Harry looked up the creature was gone. Strange, he thought to himself. He wiped his cold-sweaty hands on his covers.
After a few minutes, Dobby returned. "Harry Potter?" he asked, "Are you being unwell?"
"I think I died," Harry explained. "I suppose I had a genetic predisposition for it."
"There is great danger at Hogwarts." Now Dobby was sounding like a miswound cassette.
"I don't think it can be worse than this. I'm not afraid of dying."
It wasn't even bravery. All his life he'd wanted to feel the freedom of nothing mattering to him: not the opinions of others, not the approval of people he didn't owe a thing to, not even his own end should the Sister-Fates see it fit.
From the outside looking in, courage had never seemed so empty.
Deep, deep under his skin and muscles, fear was beating a tattoo on the inside of his bones. He didn't remember his mother's face, but he knew this wasn't how things were supposed to be, how he was supposed to feel.
What was happening to him?
"Maybe we should talk about this later," he said, trying his best to shape his face into a reassuring smile. "When I'm feeling better."
What if this numbness lasted forever?
He listened to the CRACK of Dobby's departure, to the sounds of the Dursleys' dinner party, and then later to their snores. Eventually, the man on the moon started collecting his stars again. The birds began their daily cacophony.
He couldn't sleep, but that didn't seem to matter either. Instinctively, Harry knew his exhaustion was not the kind that sleep could cure.
xoxox
I'm posting daily this December, bookmark me here and/or on ao3 for a variety of new and old stories averaging 2100 words a day. In the meantime, thank you for reading.