Strange how hard it rains now

Rows and rows of big dark clouds

Patty Griffin - "Rain"

"Look at what you've done, Harry," Fred accused, his expression uncharacteristically severe. "I'm dead because of you. I can never forgive you for this. My family will never forgive you for this. What do you think this has done to poor George?" He shook his head in disgust. "Becoming your friend was the worst decision I ever made.

There were other faces, familiar and unfamiliar all staring at him. Glaring. Crying. So many voices screaming at him.

"This is your fault!"

"None of this would have happened if you'd just died!"

"Some saviour you are!"

"You should have just stayed in your cupboard!"

Harry hunched in on himself, tears streaming down his face. They were right. They were all right. He knew the world would have been better off if he'd never survived that night when he was a baby. If the curse had killed him like it was supposed to, prophecy or not.

The world had always had Neville, anyway.

He knew everyone wished he would just disappear. He wished he would just disappear.

He clutched the cool, smooth silken fabric of the Cloak close to himself, shaking as he wrapped it around his sleight body. Instantly the colours became muted and one by one the crowd dispersed with nothing more to scream at.

Not soon enough, Harry was finally alone. He was numb here in the dark. Comfortable in the chrysalis he'd made for himself.

When Harry opened his eyes he squinted against the bright lights and their colours and instinctively reached for the cloak but it wasn't there.

This wasn't his house.

His body had been stolen; taken for a commodity and Harry wasn't even surprised. He had always been public property. His body had never really belonged to himself.

Now he was haunting an unfamiliar clinic as they tried to bring him back to the world of the living.

"The nurses said you refused to eat again this morning," said a stern-faced man in a white coat.

"I don't need to eat," Harry whispered, staring out of the window into the bright summer sunlight. He missed the garden window at Grimmauld place.

"Because you're a ghost?" the doctor prodded. Harry sighed.

"I'm dead. I don't feel hunger. I don't feel pain. I just feel… annoyed that you people keep pulling me back when I could be sleeping."

"Why is that?"

"Why do I feel annoyed? Wouldn't you be annoyed if people kept disturbing your afterlife?" Harry snapped weakly.

"Why do you believe that this is your afterlife?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "I died and now I'm here, ergo: afterlife."

The doctor jotted something into his notebook. "Tell me about how you died, Harry."

Harry looked back out the window. "Everyone knows how I died," he said because of course they did. He was Harry Potter. He was the boy who lived. There was no way this man had missed the news in the papers. They had always covered his life. Surely his death would be no different.

But the doctor shook his head, denying. "I don't. How did you die, Harry?"

Harry snorted. "Did you miss the papers? Don't you remember the war?"

The older man wrinkled his brow. "The war in the Middle East?" he asked and it was Harry's turn to shake his head in confusion.

"The Wizarding War," he explained. "Well, the second one. I don't know how much time has passed since I died. Maybe it's all fallen out of memory. Twenty-some years ago a dark wizard named Tom Riddle started a movement to take over the wizarding world. He called himself Voldemort, but his followers called him the Dark Lord. He killed my parents when I was a baby. Tried to kill me then but he failed. When I went away to school he tried to kill me again; over and over and over until there was a battle and I finally surrendered. There was a piece of him inside me. There's still a piece of him with me. Tom's ghost is bound to mine, you know. In order for him to be killed, I had to die as well. So here we are: both dead, and it's for the best. If it weren't for the two of us a lot of people would still be alive."

"You think you were killed by a wizard who killed your parents." he clarified and Harry nodded.

"Yes."

"And this… Voldemort… he's with you now?"

"No, Tom comes and goes as he pleases. Sometimes I think he only sticks with me to break me down. He wants us to be revived. Again."

"But you don't want to be."

"No. Dying was the best thing that's ever happened to me. With us gone people can finally move on."

"You said a lot of other people died as well. You believe their blood is on your hands?"

Harry shrugged, sinking into his seat, fingering the plastic nasogastric tube he wasn't able to remove. "If it weren't for me there wouldn't have been a second war. So many people died because of me. So many people died for me. My whole family and it's all my fault."

"I see... " The doctor said slowly, writing in his notebook. I'm going to start you on haloperidol and zucopenthixol. Hopefully these will make it easier for you to think clearly. Tomorrow, I want you to tell me more about this war. I think working through this trauma might help you gain some peace in this 'afterlife' of yours."

"You're not going to try to revive me?"

The doctor stood and opened the door for Harry, patting his thin shoulder as he passed through. "I think that's going to be up to you."

Sitting back down, Doctor Warren pushed his glasses up onto the top of his head, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. He'd never had a patient with such strong, detailed delusions before. He was tempted to believe Harry Potter was lying but he'd sounded genuinely distraught as he told his story. He wasn't sure the medication would be enough to counteract such a vivid second life, however.

"We need to talk," came a stranger's voice and Doctor Warren looked up to see another teenager, this one tall and fair, standing before his desk.

"Who are you?" Doctor Warren asked, knowing this was not one of his new patients. "How did you get in here?"

"I've been here the whole time. Look," the tall boy took the abandoned seat, sliding a pile of newspapers across the desk to him. "There are some things you need to know. Things you're going to be need to sworn to secrecy over. No one else can know about the things Harry Potter tells you."

"Harry Potter has a delusional disorder," Doctor Warren explained patiently, hoping to dissuade his convictions.

"Yes. Delusions that he's a ghost. The war, however, was very real." He tapped a long, manicured finger on the top of the stack of newspapers.

Doctor Warren looked down and startled back in surprise as the pictures on the front cover moved like printed videos. The headline read: "Fifty Dead at the Battle of Hogwarts! You-Know-Who Gone For Good!"

"This is impossible," Doctor Warren argued. "We would have heard about something like this."

The blond boy shook his head. "Not if it was deliberately kept a secret. A secret you're going to keep, or else." With that he pulled out a long stick Doctor Warren could only characterise as a magic wand and with a few short words, swore him to absolute secrecy.

The case of Harry Potter just got a lot more complicated.