Chapter Text
Harry lies curled up on himself in bed, breathing raggedly his ribs hurting with every inhale. It feels like knives impaling his soft flesh, tearing him apart like the gnarly teeth of vultures, ripping his skin like paper.
(Maybe, if he tries hard enough, he’ll dream about his own death, instead of Cedric’s)
Everytime he closes his eyes, Vernon’s fingers drive around his throat like a necklace that is too tight, like a noose he didn’t hang himself, but his uncle condemned him to. A rope made of hands, tight, burning flesh into the gentle bones of his throat. It was only until Harry started choking and trashing that he was let go.
It’s his own fault, really. He should’ve mowed the lawn when Uncle Vernon had told him to three days ago. Harry just hadn’t felt like it. Preferring to stave through the summer confined to the comfortable dark of his room where he could be alone with his nightmares and the grief about Cedric. He really did deserve it.
His bed stands central with bad. It’s where he goes after a beating, a bad day, or where he stays after a nightmare. Harry’s world is built up in time-frames. Time before Hogwarts. Time after Hogwarts. Now; time before Cedric died, and time after Cedric died.
It’s the first time Harry truly realized the penalty of war. How it soaks the grass in metaphorical blood, how there are three pairs of hands besmirching him with death now; James, Lily, and now Cedric. All died for him, or because of him.
He doesn’t want anyone else to die for him, or because of him. He doesn’t want to be the Boy-Who-Lived. And he doesn’t want to be Harry Potter. He wants to be no one. Nothing. Be one with the dust coating the earth, or the salt on the bottom of the ocean. Maybe the raindrops that fall from the sky when the heavens thunder with lightning and storm. The gentle whispering of a summer breeze.
Perhaps he’s thinking himself too big. Harry Potter is little, and small. Like a child in the clothing of their parents. Or in his case, swimming in the clothes of his nephew.
Harry Potter has never had a shield. Nothing to protect him against the armada of bad that came his way. No one has ever protected him, and he’s sure no one ever will. He’s the ancient ruins of a body, haunting his own bones.
He shifts; incapable of keeping his groan out of his parted lips. It slips out unbidden, like these unwanted feelings crawl into his soul, where they settle like an old dog finally home, throbbing underneath his breastbone with a heartbeat all of their own.
Maybe he should cry. But his eyes are dryer than a desert. He is a man walking into his own tear ducts to come out thirsty, and unquenched. Truth is, he hasn’t cried in two weeks. Not since Dudley called him out for it. Not since his aunt laughed away his unrelenting grief when he told her in a flash of weakness, with a tittering, “Good, we could all deal with a freak less.”
He had thought…. Well, he doesn’t know what he had been thinking then. That maybe she’d soothe his tears, run his hand through his hair like she did with Dudley when he was sad. He had foolishly held on to that scarce hope she’d somehow want to mother him after she knew what he had been through.
No one else had done it, and maybe he wanted some arms to surround him. Maybe he had wanted the comfort of another being carrying all this weight with him, so he didn’t have to carry it all alone and all by himself. Scrap the maybe, he had definitely wanted it.
(Wanting is not the same as deserving. This is something Harry knows intimately)
This clear disregard to his emotional distress broke him in a way he can’t explain. It was like the center of his being broke in two like a twig underneath Hagrid’s foot. Something had died in his chest, rotted away like old fruit, leaving Harry like the hard seeds inside. Numb, like his skin felt after the bruise balm Hermione applied after the first task.
Now, though, now, now, now. He wants an ice compress. His ribs are definitely broken, and unfortunately, unlike madam Pomfrey, he does not have skele-gro in his inventory. He does have some cough-syrup, though he doubts that will do much against the pain.
He wants to sleep.
He doesn’t want to wake up.
He blinks at the dryness in his eyes, swallowing, wincing at the pain that it brings him. There’s a small sliver of moonlight falling through the slanted curtains, right onto his bed. Tonight he is the dead carcass of a deer Uncle Vernon accidentally hit in his road-rage once. It had laid there too, unmoving, its head at an unnatural angle. The moonlight had hit its lifeless eyes, glinting like a diamond in the rings of his aunt.
The moon has deemed them the same, he thinks. The same dead. Or maybe the same loss. He is nothing more than a dead animal in the street, anyway, isn't he? Harry Potter is small, like a house-elf. That which obeys under bloodied fists with a bow.
Not the first time in his life, Harry wonders what it’s like.
Dying, he means.
Does it…. Would it hurt?
(Maybe the fairest thing would be to be Avada Kedavra’d, like Cedric.)
Would it be easy, Avada Kedavra-ing himself? Can someone even Avada Kedavra themselves? Maybe he should summon Voldemort? Lord knows how easy it’d be.
Or maybe he should wait for Uncle Vernon to come back to complete the task. To peck out his eyes, his liver, like a true vulture. Like maggots crawling in and out of his skin like how it happened to the deer when he went back to see it a few days later. Would it not be poetic irony?
If he’s dead, he’d finally be rid of the guilt that churns underneath his skin like worms. He sees his parents like dead fireflies behind his eyes when he closes them. Each time when he dreams Cedric is already there with that accusing finger pointed at him.
(it is your fault I am dead. You couldn’t save me)
When he speaks to defend himself, Cedric morphs into Voldemort and he peeps right into his mouth, a wicked grin writhing on his face as if in pain, split from ear to ear.
(you killed him, you killed him. You couldn’t save him)
His laugh echoes through the graveyard, the death eaters joining in, until it is a bloody cacophony Harry cannot drown out.
(it is my fault he’s dead. I killed him. I couldn’t save him)
And he punishes himself. Because that’s what he deserves. Because before death, he should suffer. Maybe he could torture himself into death’s waiting arms. Would it greet him like an old friend? Or would he be dragged to hell to atone for his sins?
Harry has stacks of letters on his bed-side table. All unread. Harry hadn’t bothered. Too sad. Too low on energy. Everyone is worried, and everyone wants to pity him. But Harry doesn’t want pity. Harry wants them to be angry. To be furious, to be aflame with rage. Harry wants people to take the pity, and shove it back up their ass. He wants the backhands. He wants the pain and stick it between his bones. Hopes it cuts like his ribs against his flesh.
He wants a knife and plunge it in the open expanse of his skin, to peel back layer by layer and watch it bleed the darkness out of him. This time on his own accords. Not Pettigrew’s. Not Voldemort’s. Not Uncle Vernon’s.
His.
He wants the blood to drip out of him like paint from a canvas. He wants to bleed dry on Cedric’s body, wants to make him alive like he did to Voldemort. But he can’t. Cedric is dead, and no amount of time turners or potions or Harry’s warm blood can fix that.
Despite the pain, he rolls onto his back. His pillow wet from the blood that flew freely from his nose just a moment ago.
He thinks he wants to be a corpse. Still, and unwavering. Like the deer. Like Cedric.
A cadaver left out to rot in the street.
A body strewn out in a grassfield for people to weep over.
He wants to sleep, and he wants to never wake up.
...
Harry is twelve when he first cuts his arm with the glinting sharpness of a knife, slicing through soft skin like slicing through a mango.
Harry is fourteen, now. Crimson spills from wounds reopened. He rinses, binds, and repeats. He bleeds until he’s certain he’s raised a dozen Voldemorts. Maybe, if he bleeds enough, he can bring Cedric back.
There’s blood on the carpet, right next to an ink-stain. Just as infallible as the creaks of the house in the night. Just another memory that he once inhabited this room.
That he existed at all.
…
He’s mowing the lawn with a turtleneck sweater in the beating sun. It’s thirty-five degrees hot, and Harry is sweating like a whore in church under the wooly fabric. He’d wanted to put on a shirt, but Vernon had threatened him with even worse punishment if he dared. Harry understands why. They don’t want anyone to know what they did to their adopted nephew. Oh the way the neighbors would talk!
The bruises have been fading nicely, though, and Harry can speak again after a grueling week of soreness and hurt. He still can’t fully talk without rasping quite a little bit, but no one who was going to comment on that. His ribs are a different story, they still ache when he breathes and moves a certain way. Even with his advanced magical healing, there’s not much improvement.
Harry wipes his brow, staring up at the sky with squinted eyes. There’s no cloud anywhere in sight, and no signs of a flying Ford Anglia either. Just because he hasn’t been writing them back doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to see them.
He sighs, doing his best to narrowly avoid the prized flower beds.
Five more weeks until he’s gotta go back. Harry has never dreading it as much as he does now.
...
He stands on the roof. The starlight sets the silvery lines on his bare arms ablaze. He breathes in.
He breathes out.
The night is warm, but Harry’s hands are cold.
…
He presses down at his wrists.
…
Cedric is dead, he’s dead and it’s your fault. you deserve to die. you deserve to suffer. you deserve to be tortured. you deserve-
....
The scraps they do give him, he throws away. He doesn’t deserve to eat.
He has a body that he doesn’t own. It’s not his. He is a sickness inflicted upon the world, a virus that’s spreading. What if he infects Ron and Hermione? What if he loses them too? How would he cope?
So Harry, partly out of fear, and partly out of self-deprecation, cuts them off. Does not return any of their letters, and the one time he does, he writes he doesn’t want to see them anymore.
The letters become more and more frantic after that, and Harry just hides them where his uncle can see and snatch them up to destroy them in the fire for punishment, laughing gleefully at Harry where he stands in front of the fireplace, watching with this numb kind of feeling. Like ice-cold water trickling down his spine.
…
When the guilt ebbs away, the frigid numbness sets in. He lies in his bed and lets them ram on his magically locked door. Maybe he cries, he doesn’t remember. Just remembers wetness and an ache that could’ve split his entire being in two. He is no longer Harry. He is just the remains of someone that once housed it in full spirit.
His own body becomes a tomb he roams. Obsolete. His hands cause only pain, only rot. He is a carcass crawling with maggots and ants. He is disgusting, he is illness. Sick. When he looks in the mirror all he sees is a gaunt face and hollow eyes and stark bruises. He is as icy as the bottom of the Antarctic ocean. He is… Glacial. Like he's floating like a ghost.
He feels broken, like the vase he shattered when he was five. Aunt Petunia made him pick it up in his bony fingers, and didn't even treat his cut afterwards.
Blood had dripped down his hand then too. Into the white porcelain sink. Like red paint ruining the purity of white sheets. It's this endless cycle of pain and torture. Here, he feels weak, aches enough to want comfort, love. Aunt Petunia won't give it to him. Not then, not now. And he understands. Everyone who comes into contact with him dies.
His parents did. Cedric did.
Harry wouldn't want to love himself either.
He's toxic. Like Voldemort's snake. Or the dragon he had to fight. only misery comes from his hands. Only pain from his tongue.
He kills Aunt Petunia's favorite house-plant by overwatering it, and suddenly the grief is too big for him to carry. Like a big ball of clay in his chest, pressing against the sides of his ribcage until one day he will break.
And Harry has learned that you do not break, not in this house. Not in this world. Tears are seen as weakness, and if they know you are weak they will flock to your cage to rip off the tasty meat on your bones. They will want everything. They will lick him clean until he's a pile of dust, simmering in the sun like sand.
So Harry keeps his eyes dry. And does not break.
(he floats, instead. But is that a salvation? or a sin?)
…
Four weeks.
He writes letters to Cedric, and then taunts his uncle into tearing them apart.
(Ron once called him a, "bloody masochist, And Harry had laughed at the time. The notion was ridiculous. Who wants to experience pain?
But he stands there, unmoving as Vernon takes his silence and translates it into utter agony as he reads them out loud only to throw them into the fire.
The brief satisfaction hurts almost as good as the knife does, a brief high, a small interlude of pain, until it’s minutes later and the shame Harry feels is enough to drown him, choking around his throat like Uncle Vernon’s fingers. To set his nerves alight like the cruciatus curse.
He does it again. And again.
And again)
…
Dudley catches him in a game of Harry-Hunting, and Harry lets himself be dragged over the curb, allows them to kick his sides, and poke fun at him and try to remove his trousers. He lets them press his face down into the dirt, lets them. Lets them.
Lets them.
In the end, he dusts himself off, and he goes back home, taking the pain in stride because that is something he does deserve.
…
“Aunt Petunia?” He asks one summer-y afternoon as she takes a sip of tea in the kitchen.
She only hums to acknowledge his existence. She is dressed to the nineties, like always. Here in this pristine kitchen, Harry feels dirty with his dark soul, and the graveyard of dead skin on his arms.
“Do you ever think about death? Do you wonder where we would go?”
Aunt Petunia turns to him sharply. “What on earth kind of question is that, boy?” She demands, her beady eyes blaze with anger. Her shoulders tense like her muscles turned into a block of cement.
Harry shrugs gingerly, stares at his patchy socks. “I don’t know. I was just wondering about your stance on the matter.”
Aunt Petunia’s laugh is incredibly shrill, bouncing off the clean kitchen tiles like a dirty scream. “Well, I know exactly where you would be headed. You and that freak family of yours.”
“Do you believe in hell?” Harry asks then, not even getting mad about the comment. This is aunt Petunia, she spits venom from her fangs, and Harry’s been burnt too many times by it to still feel its sting.
His aunt cranes her neck, the bones sticking out starkly against her skin. He doesn’t shrink back at the blithering glare she shoots him. He used to, when he was little, but Harry isn’t five anymore. He’s fifteen and he’s lost all his hope.
She says. “I do.” And Harry knows she knows. That there is no God. Just an afterlife, but this is strategic. Meant to frighten him. Meant to hurt him, but it doesn’t. Harry is thick skin and bony spine. No one can hurt him more than he already does to himself.
…
Veins trickle behind his skin like icy rivers, stretching from the palm of his hand, all the way down to the crook of his elbow.
He traces it with his finger, runs it over with his finger nail. There’s no one that comes to his aid. There’s no one that stops him.
There is no one that wants him enough to live.
…
Vernon beats him black and blue, feet kicking into his barely healed ribs. Fingers clenching around his neck as he is slammed into a wall.
He is screaming about something Harry doesn’t care about hearing, just nods and yessirs’ until it’s over. There’s an odd sense of satisfaction in this, the tell-tale burning of his limbs, like a fire attacking his nerves. Here, he feels closer to Cedric than he’s ever been. Here he bleeds into the hallway, red smeared onto the gray walls Aunt Petunia will scrub at until her hands are blistered and raw.
Harry has no doubt she would scrub herself clean of him. Like Pontius Pilates washed himself clean from the guilt of Jesus’ death.
Would she keep anything of his? Would she want to remember that dark spot in her life? Harry thinks not. He’s fairly certain she would burn his clothes and tear out the soaked carpet and replace it with a wooden floor to destroy the memory of him. To repel him out of her life completely.
Sometimes, when Aunt Petunia comes to see what the racket is about, she sees Harry in his grip with pleading eyes and a please formed on his lips like a pre-written word. Then, she walks right out. Any hope he has of her gathering her wits and telling Vernon off, to take him in her arms afterwards like she does with Dudley when Vernon gives him the belt, dies with her long strides.
They never wanted him here anyway.
Besides, is it not what he deserves?
After, he picks himself back up and limps upstairs. His ankle had cracked weirdly when his uncle dragged him out of the garden and into the house. Harry inspects it. It’s swollen painfully, a bruise already forming on the expanse of milky skin between his ankle bone and the sole of his foot.
The tender flesh wrapped around his neck muscle aches when he runs a tentative hand over it.
Harry should cry. Throw a fit. Demand they treat him with respect.
He does not do any of those things, he just crawls onto his bed, and listens to his own heartbeat drumming in his ears in a staccato rhythm. Eventually, he just falls into an uneasy sleep, where he dreams Voldemort stands on his ankle and holds him by the throat.
It is a nice reprise from seeing Cedric lifeless eyes.
…
The Dursley’s always leave him alone after a night like this, and Harry has a whole day of pondering and tending to his injuries. Mostly he just leaves them, wills his magic to take at least some of the pain away and lies motionlessly on his bed.
…
“Dear God,” Petunia snaps one morning as he limps into the kitchen, “you stink.”
Harry just stands there in his tattered, unwashed clothes, and shrugs.
“When was the last time you took a bath?” She asks, looking away in disgust. “Get out, take a bath. You’re not to leave your room unless you’re proper.”
“But I have to cook breakfast, Uncle Vernon-”
“Uncle Vernon doesn’t want a little rat like you to touch his food,” Petunia tuts, “now get out of my clean kitchen.”
Harry turns on the balls of his heels and darts out of the kitchen. He does not go to the bathroom, he goes back to his bedroom.
…
That evening Vernon grabs him by the scruff and forces him underneath the cold tap with his clothes on and all.
“I won’t have you stinking up my damn house, boy,” He barks, and pours out an ungodly amount of shampoo on his half-dry, matted hair. “You better scrub until your skin is blistered,” he warns and stomps out of the bathroom.
Harry just stands there, shivering like a wet cat. Feeling like a snail without a shell to protect it. Eventually, he figures no one’s going to bother him about the amount of time he spends underneath the shower and he starts peeling off his wet clothes, hissing when the cold water runs over his painful bruises.
Then, he just continues to stand, waits until his hair is completely rinsed out and washed over his body before he turns off the cold tap. He towels himself dry. Yells a “I’m clean!” down the stairs and limps back into his room where they let him remain for the evening and the night.
…
Uncle Vernon finds out about the scars when Harry makes the mistake of rolling up his sleeves when he has to do the washing up after dinner.
“What the ruddy hell is this, boy?” Vernon demands, yanking his sleeve back.
“Scars.” Harry answers truthfully.
“If you don’t watch out boy,” Uncle Vernon grabs him by the upper arm, pinching down so hard Harry can feel his bones creaking, “You’ll end up like those no-good parents of yours.”
Harry swallows. “Dead?”
Vernon smiles deviously. “We’ll be so happy when you’re finally out of the picture,” he yanks on Harry’s arm, and Harry lets out a small squawk from pain, “and stop ruining our good name.”
“Don’t worry, Uncle Vernon.” Harry says. His organs pack it in. His heart beating slows. The thin veil between him and the world lowers itself between his eyes. “I think I will soon.”
His uncle lets go of him, regarding him with a weary look. “Don’t make a mess of it, boy.” He says and stalks out of the kitchen like a man with no conscience.
…
In the end, he does it in the bathtub. That way the evidence can be washed away easily, his blood down the drain. He’d leave the house in a body-bag, and the Dursley’s won’t ever have to see him again. A win-win scenario, right?
At least he has control over it this way. Voldemort wants him dead so badly, but wants to do it by his own design.
Harry has felt his sick desire to murder, his demented glee in torturing others and hurting them until they descent into madness when Voldemort touched his scar. His mind went to Harry’s mind. Their thoughts blended together like clouds, entangling like vines until Harry could no longer tell who was thinking so happily about bringing others misery.
The pain lasts for only a moment, and Harry just closes his eyes. Everything will be better this way. No one’s going to die for him anymore, and Harry will finally be absolved from his guilt like a baby baptized from sin.
He drifts off to sleep.
There are no bad dreams here, just blessed darkness.