AN: I do not own the Harry Potter franchise.
TW: Violence, gore, and all sorts of angsty and generally upsetting nonsense.
He had been trapped in the mirror for years by the time he realized what had happened.
Dumbledore was dead. "Dumbledore" had been a death eater using dark arts of the worst sort to wear the skin of Dumbledore, and then using their appearance as the headmaster to orchestrate their Lord's bidding. To make matters worse, the orders the death eater had been following were so close to the headmaster's usual schemes that nobody had noticed until it was too late and they all had nooses around their necks that they themselves had put there willingly.
And now, he was in a mirror. Rather ironic, considering what had happened with mirrors in his first year, but also insanity-inducing beyond anything he had ever experienced before. He was stuck in a room that barely allowed him space to curl up in a ball when he didn't have the energy to pound his fists on the glass and scream for someone, anyone, to help him. To make matters worse, the entire room was grey- the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everything. Hell, he could barely even tell what was a wall and what was the floor because of how dull and monotonous the space was, which only became even more monotonous when the one who wore Dumbledore's skin like a cloak put a sheet over the mirror's glass.
He was going insane.
He was insane.
And still, there was nothing to share his madness with but the grey walls, the glass that had been painted over with yet more grey, the grey ceiling that seemed so far away yet close enough to touch, and the grey floor that didn't even look scratched from his frantic shuffling. He could barely even tell which wall was once glass anymore. Death Eaters no longer paraded into the room he was stored in, as they had when their Lord had succeeded in taking over the Ministry, so he didn't even have those few mocking words and taunts to keep him company. It could have been years, days, or maybe even centuries, before something finally interrupted his small, monochromatic, existence.
"How the mighty have fallen. To think, you were once prophesized to defeat me! And yet, here you are. Trapped in a mirror. Have you anything to say before you're shattered?"
He didn't know why the voice would bother with that, and he didn't quite recognize the voice, but there wasn't a reason to say anything. He knew what was going to happen. He knew it would be pointless to offer any protests or attempt to convince the voice that he would be a perfectly good little mirror if only he wasn't harmed.
There was silence, for a time. Maybe the voice had just been a hallucination- after all, those had set in pretty early on. But then, there was agony.
Bone-crushing, soul-splintering, agony. He felt like he had been cleaved down the middle, beheaded, torn to shreds by a woodchipper, and pinned to a board like a bug.
He screamed. He screamed and screamed and screamed, for the pain, the injustice, the torture of his existence, he screamed.
When his vocal cords couldn't handle the never-ending abuse of screaming as loudly and terribly as he ever had anymore, he started to hear the laughing. He had been snapped and disjointed into tiny pieces, and his tormentor was laughing. But still, he couldn't do anything, he couldn't even bang on the glass of his prison.
"Your mirror will be melted down, and your shards will be buried. You will not exist in the minds of anyone, your mark on the world will be erased, and you will live forever with the weight of being forgotten resting upon your cracked shoulders. You'll never see a sunny day, hear a bird chirping, or even smell a flower again. You will not exist."
After that, the pieces of the mirror that once held the world's savior were spread throughout the continent, out of sight and out of everyone's obliviated minds.
Harry Potter didn't exist. The chipped paint of the shards of glass littering the world sometimes let an eye be seen, or maybe a hand, but Harry Potter didn't exist.
When the world was on fire, with a scaled man with red eyes looming over the destruction, practically eating the despair of his victims, nobody remembered the scrawny little boy they had placed all their hope in. They just remembered the day that Dumbledore's skin had melted off like a twisted interpretation of water and Voldemort had stepped from the corpse with a wand in hand and a vision of the magical world glistening in his eyes.
The world didn't know any saviors, they only knew their monarch.
Voldemort.
It could have been any amount of time later when a young hero was finally born, when someone was finally able to stand up to the world's tyrannical king. They knew that their pitiful amount of magic wouldn't be a match for the Dark King, but they knew that every good hero needs a weapon. With that thought in mind, they set off from their family and the dark, smoky world they had been crushed in and went on a journey to find the force the Dark King knew not.
They flew through clouds, and went on voyages throughout oceans, and still no force the Dark King hadn't mastered had made itself apparent to the young hero. Eventually, they ran out of what little money they had and were forced to settle down in a dark little village where the scent of burning flesh lingered, even with air-freshening charms. There, the burgeoning hero found an old, wise man who promised a force mightier than any other if only some specific things he had lost could be found.
That is what started their second journey throughout the world, looking for seven shards of glass that shone like no other. One was hidden in a cup banished to the bottom of a sea, another melted into a pendant, yet another was cracked and put back together again to be glued onto a book of curses, one was made into a tiara, another curled over itself like a ring, one was in the corpse of a snake, and the final one was found in their bag under a note from their mother. Each was covered in a thin layer of chipped, grey paint but each shard shone with the brilliance of a thousand suns.
Once his glass was returned to him, the wise man taught the young hero how to swing a sword and throw a dagger. It was hard, and the hero's muscles were in a constant state of achiness, but when they finally bested the wise man in a swordfight they were granted the force the Dark King knew not.
The wise man told the young hero a story about a brave boy made of glass and power being cut up and forgotten, of a madman stealing his pieces and forcing the world to forget he had ever existed, of changing bodies like changing robes. And then, the wise man took the glass he had made the hero collect and forged a sword that could pierce any flesh, and scar even the most resilient of beasts. Once his tale of tragedy and power had been spun, the man turned to ash and disappeared with the wind.
The young hero was distressed with the loss of their mentor, but that loss only made them swing their sword harder, calculate the force required to throw a dagger and pierce a heart more accurately, and put more effort into getting back home and to the Dark King's palace.
They were a hero, proved by prophecy and by the deed they were preparing to do- the murder they were about to commit. They had left their fear-scented town a young child, barely on the cusp of their destiny, and they were returning as a force that their enemies had never known.
They were ready.
The Dark King was an arrogant, prideful beast whose skin was scaled and whose eyes were crimson. And yet, when the hero raised their sword and the King saw a flash of green that could have once been an eye, the King knew fear. That momentary fear was just the advantage that the hero needed to win the duel, and so they lunged forward with their sword raised and determination blazing in their heart. When their sword made impact first with the King's cloak, then scales, and finally his ribs and heart, the hero knew they had finally done it. They had fulfilled the prophecy.
They had but a moment of pure joy where blood dripped from their sword and light left the King's eyes before they felt themselves become deeply, terribly tired. When they woke once more, they were in a multifaceted room of grey with cracks in every wall, across the floor and ceiling, with blood pouring over almost everything. When they stopped taking that in, they saw everyone else.
There was a man over in one corner, piled on top of many others with matching red hair and a collection of freckles who was sobbing and clawing at his face. And there, just a foot away from the pile of redheads, was a woman hunched over herself shaking and crying as she murmured nonsense to herself and pulled on her frizzy brown hair. And still, there were even more people piled onto each other in the cramped space as they screamed and cried or sometimes just stared at something nobody else could see in silence.
But there, hidden behind a pile of yet more people, was a boy. Barely past his teenage years, he had knobbly knees and a mess of hair that hid a scar on his brow and piercing green eyes. He was simultaneously the least and most sane-looking person in the cramped space. And yet, when the hero marched up to him, they saw the cracks and spots of grey paint adorning his body while it seemed that the boy saw nothing in front of him.
Eventually, when the hero had already fluttered around the room to bang on walls and scream for help, they heard someone say, "You swung the sword."
The hero didn't know what that meant back then, but once time had passed and they had seen people take the mythical sword and face their enemies with it, win with it, only to appear in the little grey room once they had achieved victory, they knew. The sword wasn't a blessing, some sort of magical weapon that allowed its wielder unlimited victory- it was a curse. They had swung the sword, they had fulfilled their prophecies, and now… Now, they were all trapped in the sword.
The white sparkle of the sword when its latest wielder (victim) held it in the light wasn't just the sun, it was the hero's blonde hair. The viridian sheen of the blade wasn't raw magic pulsing through the weapon, it was the cracked boy's eyes looking out into the world he had once been destined to save. And realizing that the weapon- the collection of glass- they had all been trapped in was never going to let them go was agonizing. Seeing more and more people appear, all of them going insane eventually, seeing the years pass outside of their prison even when the sword was shattered and hidden and put back together again and again by tyrants and kings and madmen and heroes was the worst pain they had felt in their life.
They had thought that they were prepared to do anything, to endure any form of torture to kill the Dark King, but they were wrong. It took less than a year for the torture of being held captive in a glass box that was in constant limbo between the periods when it was broken apart and forgotten and reforged with only the insane to keep them company to break them apart and put them back together with their sanity barely glued back on. After that, it took maybe a month for that little piece of sanity they had glued back on to fall off and for them to join the crowded piles of people raving about horcruxes, dark lords, powers the Dark Lord knows not, and various agonies they were all reliving.
Eventually, the hero watched the world burn yet again from their place in the pile of redheads. To think, their sacrifice to save their world from its tyrant had just been in vain in the end. To think, their sacrifice meant nothing. To think, everything they had ever done was just a waste because in the end it didn't change anything and the world was on fire anyways and there was a man standing over the world and throwing matches into it like confetti and people were on fire and children were dead in the streets and blood ran down the roads like water-
The world only knew chaos, and the heroes only knew agony.