When Harry opened his eyes the next morning he felt lighter. He was in no sense healed – there was still darkness pressing on his heart – but he could breathe easier. The emptiness he had been carrying with him had been replaced by pain, but it was a good pain that reminded him he was still alive. Perhaps, at last, he could finally begin to heal.
He had not deluded himself into thinking that all was well. There was still the threat of the whole Wizarding World after his head. Not to mention there was a coven of vampires and a small American town searching for him. It also didn't help that he was on the run, living in a tent, hiding at a muggle campsite.
What Harry hated the most about being on his own, was the lack of distraction from his thoughts. He had tried his best not to think about everything that was happening outside of his little campsite, but it was impossible. There was no ignoring the reality that he would one day have to face, but he didn't know how to confront it either.
He knew that something needed to be done for the Wizarding World. If what McGonagall said was true, there were people once again in danger. This Prestwick woman was growing to be a real problem, and having the invisibility cloak would only make her job easier. Harry didn't know what this woman had against him; she had never even met him before their run-in at St Mungo's. Would there ever be a day where someone didn't want him dead?
Harry didn't want to go back. It was that simple. He had made the choice to leave with the intention of never going back, at least for the foreseeable future. The remaining members of the Order could surely deal with Prestwick and her cronies. In Harry's opinion it was unfair that they kept relying on him to get them out of trouble. Needing a seventeen year old to solve their problems was embarrassing.
'Wait,' he thought, 'eighteen year old.' He had completely ignored his eighteenth birthday in July.
Harry could hear voices outside of the tent. Other people in the campground were starting to rise. Harry decided it was probably time to follow suit. Gathering his few bathroom items together, Harry crawled out of the tent into the crisp morning air.
After he had realised the Elder wand was missing, Harry had quickly regathered his thoughts. Stealing the wand meant one thing: someone was going to try to kill him. He was sure no one in Forks knew who he really was, except now the Cullens and Bella, but someone from the town had stolen the wand. His house was no longer safe. He had quickly gathered essentials and taken them with him in his rucksack along with the beaded bag which also still held the tent he had taken from his early days in Forks. The muggle repelling wards he placed around his house would hopefully keep the police and others from snooping around, at least for long enough that would let him get far away. He added a little extra ward he had picked up that he thought should keep the Cullens out too.
After that he had disapparated. And disapparated. And disapparated again. Never slowing, he would appear somewhere new, eye a place in the distance, and continue running. It hadn't taken him long to exhaust himself. Having supressed his magic for so long it had been far more taxing on his energy than apparating should have been. He had managed to use enough distance and other spells to make sure no one would be able to follow his tracks or even his scent. After a time he had stumbled across this campsite, filled with normal people he could hide among. That had been five days ago. Now, he was cold and alone, but he was free. Free of Forks. Free of high school. Free of expectations.
But he couldn't be free of those eyes.
Whenever Harry tried to sleep, he saw the last expression that had been on Carlisle's face when he left. The disappointment had been clear, and Harry knew it had been targeted at him. He couldn't work out when the doctor's acceptance had become so important to him, but Harry realised now that he couldn't bear the thought of having lost it. It had taken him a long time, but eventually he had realised that the man had always been trying to help. Giving up his Wednesday afternoons to put up with Harry at his most difficult would have been testing. And just like all good things in his life, Harry had to go and destroy it. Carlisle hadn't deserved to have Harry's extensive failures and horrific wrongdoings thrown in his face. It had been a moment of weakness and frustration that Harry had opened up about his inner darkness. How could he have thought a good man like Carlisle would be able to look at him again afterwards?
"Hey Mister!" A high pitched voice pulled Harry from his misery. "Can we share that tap?" A small boy of maybe five or six holding an empty bucket stood beside him, his bright eyes looking up at Harry from beneath his flaming red hair. He was struggling to hold the bucket due to the oversized sleeves of his jumper.
'Red hair, and hand-me down robes? You must be a –'
"Yeah, sure." Cutting off his mind's wandering, Harry shifted to allow the boy access to the tap.
"Why do you look so sad?" The boy asked.
"I'm not sad," Harry defended. The boy's head tilted as his bucket slowly filled.
"You look sad to me. Where's your Mommy and Daddy?"
"Haven't got any of them," Harry replied, smiling sadly.
"Where are your friends?" The boy frowned.
"Have none of those either." To Harry's great surprise, the boy laughed.
"Everyone has friends, silly!" He continued to laugh as he struggled to turn off the tap – his bucket was now overflowing. Harry helped him turn it. "I bet you have loads of friends who all care about you. Right?"
Harry's thoughts initially went to Carlisle. But did he still care? What about Bella? Or Edward? Had discovering what he was taken them away from him?
"I'm not really sure anymore," he said quietly.
"Why? Did you do something bad?" The boy whispered. Harry shrugged.
"Don't know. Kind of, I guess."
"So? If I'm bad, Mommy and Daddy still care about me. That's what people do if they care about you properly," he rolled his eyes dramatically. "You need to learn more about friends, I think." He groaned in effort as he tried to pick up the bucket, which must have weighed several kilograms now with all the water.
"Maybe I do," Harry mused. "Here," he picked up the bucket, "show me where we're taking this bucket." And together they began trudging back to the boy's tent.
"See, one time," the boy continued, seemingly happy to have someone to talk to, "I didn't clean my room like Mommy asked and she got real mad." He was bouncing with every step he took, free of the heavy bucket that was starting to make Harry's arm ache. "She didn't let me play with my new toys all day, but I said sorry and she still let me have my hot cocoa after dinner." He finished with a broad grin, looking proud of his story as though it had proven his point. Harry, panting from exertion, tried to smile back at him.
He wished it were that simple for him. Unfortunately not cleaning your bedroom was a rather menial crime compared to the dark magic Harry had performed. It would take more than a 'Sorry' to make up for what he had done. He didn't know what he had to do to make up for it all.
At last they made it to the boy's tent where a frantic looking man with the same flaming hair as the boy was waiting.
"Daddy!" The boy cried, running towards his father.
"Sprout!" The man said, scooping the young boy into his arms. "I thought I said we'd go get the water together. You couldn't carry the bucket by yourself."
"That's why the man helped me, Daddy!" he laughed, pointing at Harry. "I was teaching him about what friends are." The man gave Harry an exasperated but amused look.
"Thanks for the hand, son. What's your name?"
"Harry," he answered, seeing no reason to lie. An ordinary Muggle American wasn't going to report him anywhere.
"Dennis." He shook Harry's hand firmly.
"Harry says he has no friends, Daddy!" the boy cried sadly. Harry flushed in embarrassment. "But I told him that everybody has friends even if we do bad stuff!"
"Sprout," Dennis chastised. He looked apologetically at Harry. "Sorry about him."
Harry grinned awkwardly. Dennis put his son down and told him to go into the tent to find his mother. Instead, he launched himself at Harry, wrapping his small arms around the older boy's waist.
"Thanks Harry! I hope you find your friends soon!" As suddenly as they had wrapped him up, the arms were gone and the boy ran into his family's tent.
Harry looked back at Dennis who was watching him closely. Harry shifted his feet uncomfortably.
"You okay, son?" he asked, a concerned frown on his face.
"Yeah," Harry answered automatically. Dennis didn't look like he believed him, and he didn't say anything for a time. Finally, when Harry was about to break the awkward silence and say goodbye, the man spoke.
"I always say listen to what your brain says, then do what your heart says." And with that, he nodded once at Harry, and walked back into his tent, leaving Harry blinking in the morning frost.
Edward stood with his forehead pressed against the door in front of him. It was Carlisle's home office door, the same door behind which his father had been hiding since Harry's disappearance one week earlier.
Carlisle had not surfaced once in the past seven days. Not even the worried calls of Esme had managed to bring him out of his daze. With the silence from the room, it would have been conceivable that the man had run away, but a quiet, gentle breathing could be heard, reassuring them to his presence.
"Carlisle," Edward tried again, "please, you need to stop this."
The door was locked. Of course it would not have taken any one of them any effort to open the door, but the rule of the house had always been that a locked door should be respected. Edward knew that before long he or someone else in the family would break that code. They were all worried about Carlisle.
There was no response, of course. Edward tried to focus solely on Carlisle's thoughts, but they were worryingly blank. It was as though the man was not thinking at all, or else shielding himself somehow. There were only two people that Edward knew who could block him that completely though, and Carlisle was not one of them.
"We'll find Harry, Carlisle. I promise." They had each been making this promise every day. "Harry will come back. He trusts you too much to leave for good."
Suddenly Edward hissed in pain. It was as though his words had unlocked something in Carlisle's thoughts and noise exploded in his head. Edward's knees buckled under the intensity of thought after thought racing through his mind, each one more terrible than the last. Shame and guilt were paramount in his memories. Edward could scarcely breathe.
He was only vaguely aware of the office door opening in front of him. Strong hands grabbed his shoulders and hauled him up until he was staring directly into the black eyes of his father.
"Come with me, Edward."
And Carlisle ran.
Dragging himself to his feet, Edward sprinted out the front door after him leaving his confused family in his wake. For what seemed like hours Carlisle ran, Edward chasing behind dodging trees left right and centre. Deep into the forest they ran, until they were several dozens of miles from Forks when Carlisle came to an abrupt halt.
Edward stopped twenty paces behind him, watching the other vampire with wariness. He suspected that Carlisle had run so far partly to let off his pent up energy, but also because what he wanted to talk about needed privacy. And so Edward waited, watching his father very closely.
When Carlisle finally turned around, Edward could see the extent of what his week in exile had done to the man. Gone were the bright golden eyes, replaced by pits of black, accentuated by deep, dark shadows beneath them. His normally perfect hair was bedraggled, uncombed and having lost its shine. Edward stared at him in worry and in awe. This had been brought on by one young man.
"He cannot trust me, Edward." The whispered words carried easily in the dense forest. "He must not."
"Why?"
He received no answer. Edward watched on as Carlisle looked around himself at the trees.
"Can you truly not see why?" His father asked him, still looking at the canopy of leaves above.
"Your thoughts have been scattered, Carlisle. I've not been able to follow them," he admitted. "I kept seeing your father." Carlisle winced. They generally spoke very little of Carlisle's human life, mainly due to there being very little Carlisle could remember of it. But some memories had stuck, none of them pleasant.
"Yes, Edward, exactly," Carlisle beseeched. "Do you not understand? Have you forgotten the sort of man my father was? What he did?" His voice dropped off. "What I did?"
"The raids." Edward whispered, comprehension dawning.
Because it did suddenly make sense to Edward. Carlisle's guilt. The constant thoughts of his human life. Carlisle and his father had hunted vampires in London. But they had also hunted witches.
They had hunted people like Harry.
"Carlisle, that was over three centuries ago," Edward offered. He would not let this destroy his father's resolve. "The world was a different place."
"The world is the same place it has always been, Edward," Carlisle argued. "It is merely attitudes that have shifted."
"Exactly! People don't hunt witches anymore. It was all well before Harry's time." Had his father been letting this eat at his sanity for seven days?
Carlisle shook his head. "You think that matters? These were people like him. Innocent people, scorned for being different. And we hunted them like sport." He gave a humourless chuckle. "For more than three hundred years, Edward, I have let myself believe that the only beast we were hunting was vampires. That I had come to terms with. The rest I had accepted were innocent humans and us hunting them was a sin for which I will never repent. Now I know that there were real witches and wizards too, living in society. People like Harry. And we hunted them, too.
"I can no longer live under the illusion that witches did not exist. That it were only vampires we hunted and killed. How can I possibly look Harry in the eye with that in my past?" The pain in his father's eyes weakened Edward. He had not seen him so broken in all the years of knowing him, and he didn't know how to help him.
"Harry would under–"
"Would he?" Carlisle asked bitterly, striding forwards. "You know how vulnerable Harry is. How strongly his emotions affect him. Do you think he could just accept what I've done?"
This time it was Edward's turn to shake his head. "Harry respects you. That much is obvious."
"No," Carlisle said. "He fears me."
Edward frowned in confusion. His father went on, "Did you not see him when he came with Bella? He could not look at me, not after… and you think he would cope with this news?"
Edward didn't respond. In Carlisle's thoughts last Wednesday night, Edward had been able to hear what had transpired in Harry's weekly meeting with the man. Edward would have been lying if he said that what Harry had confessed hadn't concerned him. Adding those revelations to Harry's departing words, wishing those he left back home were dead, made an alarming tale a disturbing one.
In the days between that meeting and Harry's departure, Edward had unconsciously distanced himself from the English boy again. He knew Harry had noticed too, which frankly made the situation worse. They'd never had time to explain Edward's or the others' gifts. He hoped that Harry hadn't left thinking that Carlisle had betrayed his trust and revealed his secrets.
"You can't help Harry's past," he said after a long while of silence.
"I know that."
"Then don't dwell on it," Edward stressed. "Let him come back and tell him about your own. He will listen."
Edward knew he wasn't getting through. Carlisle simply shook his head, looking down at the ground forlornly.
"Let me be, Edward. I should hunt," he said submissively. He turned, ready to dash into the trees. "If Harry returns, so be it. But I should not have the right to take any further part in his life."
And he sprinted into the green, leaving Edward standing in his dust.
The lights were off, the walls lit only by the glowing of the screens surrounding her. The only sound was the hum of machines working, but she still listened carefully at the door. The hallway was quiet.
She was alone.
She worked quickly, not confident she would have any more than a few minutes. She hacked the software easily, searching through weeks of data, looking for what wasn't there.
Finding what she needed, she downloaded it. Saved it.
They thought they had wiped it, that no one would be able to find the evidence. On the screen in front of her, the file that had been buried deep in the dark recesses of the hard drive, she watched as the bespectacled boy vanished into thin air in his hospital room, screaming.
"This will bring your downfall, Harry Potter. You and Wizardkind."
Her face glowing in the screen light, she grinned.
