Crisis
4. The Spirit Unseen
It was raining. Everything was grey. The young man looked around, bewildered, before focusing on the woman.
"This is the real world?"
She smiled cynically, but the rain water was already erasing the marks on her brows, and her dimples showed. "You recognize it?"
"This is where I grew up. Privet Drive -" and he pointed down the street, "Wisteria Walk."
He looked at her. One of the only changes was that the wand in her left hand had turned into a red fountain pen. She was still dressed in a shiny jacket, skirt, and leggings. The other changes were more subtle. She seemed taller, for one.
"What's going on?" He had begun to shake. "Why am I -" He swallowed. Felt his throat, looked at his hands. "Am I younger?"
There was a mist that was bordering on fog. Harry and the woman stood amidst the rain like statues in a graveyard.
"Answer me, damn you!" His voice cracked; there was no question to it. The boy felt the rings of the notebook cut into his fingers.
She took out a small mirror from her pocket, flipped it open, and held it in front of him. He stared. There was no scar on his forehead. Shaking, he took the mirror and held it up, examining his reflection carefully. Then he hurled it to the ground.
His face was slack, his eyes swimming; his hands clawed at nothing.
Finally she said quietly, "It's true, Harry. I have no magic here. For the last four years you've been living a story only in our minds."
Her voice was hardly louder than the rain. A passing car drowned it out momentarily, a streak of silver in this marble world. " - I would explain the world fully to you, and I will. In the real world - in this world - you go to the local school. You've been living here since your parents died in a car crash." Two strands of hair escaped her bun and rose like flags in the wind. "You have a few acquaintances but no real friends. You don't really care about anything. They've diagnosed you with mild depression, not enough for you to risk your life. But you can remedy that in the future."
The notebook was leaching heat from his right armpit through his sweatshirt. "So. I've been living -" His fingers contracted suddenly about the folded glasses in his hand. He gasped, a sucking, ragged sound.
" - in limbo," she completed.
"Like an Inferius," and he started to sob in earnest. Somewhere in the back of his head he wondered at the inherent ugliness of the sound, and the beauty of the tears. The cleansing, scouring emotion inside him was like bitter rain.
She turned; he thought she would walk away, but she just stood there with her back to him as he fell to his knees. The notebook dropped to the muddy ground. The rain and wind conspired to show him his life in erratically turning pages, in some places newly obliterated by water.
"So all those people... all those years... they weren't real? How... how can you just - you stand there, and you don't - Don't you know what I'm going through? Don't you even care that my life has been one big lie?"
The woman who stood beside him replied without turning around. "Get up."
He staggered to his feet, hair streaming water and pasted to his brow, clutching the notebook to his chest. "Don't you care?" he roared.
His hand grabbed her by the arm and tried to spin her around. She rocked stiffly, eyes wide.
"I can't," she said. She took a deep shuddering breath, her nostrils flaring. "I know how you're feeling, Harry. Believe me. But at least you had the benefit of ignorance."
Her face was pale, but Harry shook her, relentless. "How can you say that?"
"You don't know what it was like, killing myself. Over and over, all for the sake of this thing that had become more important than me, my life... anything." She looked at the telephone poles in the distance, shaking her head bitterly. "Hah. At least all your decisions were your own. You don't know, Harry, how hard it is, being God... At least you're real."
"But none of them were." He flung out an arm, looking down the length of it at the faint horizon. "All of them... Ron... Hermione, everyone... they were you?"
"They came from my mind," she said quietly, fiercely. "Yes. But the things you learned... the growing up you did... that was real. Your mind wouldn't be the same without the story."
The boy yanked sodden pages out from the notebook and held them up. "But it was just a story. Just this." He threw them with all his might; they blew sideways and stuck to a fence.
And the woman replied, "Do you think it was any easier for me?"
Review, or I shall read some of my poetry at you. (MTR)