The Eyes in the Dark
“There are eyes that do not see—only burn.”
Darkness.
It stretched around him — not just an absence of light, but a presence in itself. Suffocating. Endless. Harry turned and turned, trying to find something solid, something real, but each step felt wrong, like walking in thick air. The space around him twisted with every movement, and the more he walked, the more he stayed in place — or worse, drifted backwards.
Then he fell.
Endlessly.
Weightless and terrified, he dropped into nothing. His limbs flailed, but there was nothing to grab onto, nothing to break the fall. He tried to scream — but no sound came out. Not even the dream let him speak.
And just when he thought the fall would last forever, it stopped.
Hovering above him were eyes. Cold, silver-grey eyes that gleamed without light, without warmth. A smile formed beneath them — long, slow, and cruel. Not human. Not real.
Harry gasped — and woke up.
His chest rose and fell rapidly as he sucked in cold, dusty air. Sweat clung to his forehead, his sheets tangled tight around his legs. His heart hammered like a trapped bird against his ribs. For a few seconds, he couldn’t remember where he was — just the darkness, the falling, the eyes.
But then it came back.
All of it.
The stale scent of the room. The cracked ceiling above. The sounds of footsteps outside the dormitory.
And the aching, hollow memory of last night.
Harry blinked a few times, but his vision remained fuzzy, especially on the left side. That eye saw nothing but shadows. He reached for his glasses, his hands trembling slightly, and slipped them on. The world sharpened on one side, though it didn’t feel any clearer.
He rubbed his hands over his face and sat up slowly. His muscles were stiff. His body still carried the fear from the dream, but it was the cold weight in his chest that felt heavier.
Tante Pétunia had left him.
Just walked away in that diner, like he was someone else's problem.
No goodbye. No anger. Just quiet rejection.
The waitress had looked concerned, had called the police. He could still remember the way the officer had knelt beside him, gently asking questions, but Harry hadn’t known what to say. How do you explain being thrown away?
He looked around the room. It was early — the pale morning light filtered through the window blinds, striping the grey walls with white. Most of the beds were empty. Some kids were already up. The silence was broken only by distant footsteps and muffled voices down the hall.
Harry pushed the thin blanket aside and slid out of bed. The floor was cold against his bare feet, and he wrapped his arms around himself instinctively, as if he could make himself smaller, disappear into his own skin.
He didn’t want to go to the dining hall. He didn’t want to see the others, or hear their whispers, or feel their stares. But his stomach growled softly, and he knew he had no choice.
He moved slowly, silently, walking past the posters on the wall telling him to "Be Brave," and "Choose Kindness.” The words felt fake — too bright, too cheerful for a place like this.
The hallway smelled faintly of soap and old wood. As he approached the dining hall, the noise grew — metal trays clattering, low chatter, the occasional laugh. It felt like a world moving on without him.
He hesitated at the doorway, heart pounding again. He didn’t know where to sit. He didn’t know anyone. He didn’t want to be noticed.
“New kid.”
A boy about his age with messy dark curls looked at him from a nearby table. His tone wasn’t rude — just curious.
Harry didn’t respond. He just stared.
The boy raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and went back to his breakfast.
Harry found an empty spot near the window, far from the other kids, and picked up a tray. The food was plain — dry toast, watery porridge. He stared at it for a long moment before picking up a spoon.
Outside, the sky was overcast, thick grey clouds pressed low over the rooftops. It looked exactly how he felt — heavy, dull, and tired.
Maybe she never wanted me at all, he thought. Maybe no one ever did.
And in the back of his mind, behind the taste of cold porridge and the murmurs of other children, those grey eyes still watched him.
The day passed in a blur after breakfast.
Harry was summoned to the main office just before noon. A woman stood waiting, arms crossed, gaze sharp behind thin, gold-rimmed glasses. She wore a dark green cardigan buttoned to the neck and her grey hair was twisted tightly in a bun. Her nameplate on the door read: Mrs. Fawley – Director.
She didn’t smile when he walked in.
“So. Harry Potter,” she said, glancing down at a clipboard in her hands. “Eight years old, is that correct?”
Harry nodded, standing stiffly by the door.
She looked up at him then, slowly scanning him from head to toe. Her eyes paused — just briefly — on his thin arms, the sleeves of his too-big jumper, and the way his shoes didn’t quite fit. Something like disapproval passed over her face.
“You look younger,” she muttered, more to herself than to him. “Underfed.”
Harry didn’t answer. He kept his hands tucked behind his back, his posture instinctively small. He didn’t want her to look too closely. He didn’t want her to see him at all.
“Well,” she said briskly, setting the clipboard down. “This is how things work here.”
She gestured to the two chairs in front of her desk, but Harry remained standing. She didn’t press.
“You’ll have chores. Everyone does. Age-appropriate, of course. But you’re expected to do them — and to do them properly. You’ll be punished if you don’t. We all pull our weight here, and nothing is free.”
Harry gave the faintest nod. Nothing is free — that was nothing new. At the Dursleys', he’d learned that before he could even read.
“You’ll have three sets of clothes provided to you — used, but clean. You are to take care of them. Wash them yourself. No replacements unless they’re torn beyond repair, and even then, you’ll need to ask permission.”
Harry swallowed hard, staring at the wooden floor.
“You’ll make your bed every morning. If you don’t, you won’t sleep in it. Meals are served at strict times — if you’re late, you don’t eat. Breakfast is at 7 a.m. sharp. Lunch at noon. Dinner at six.”
She glanced up to see if he was still listening. He was.
“You’ll be tested to determine your school year placement. At eight, that should place you in Year 4.”
(Year 4, Harry repeated silently. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been in any proper school year at all.)
“You’ll start school next Monday. We’ll provide basic supplies — pencils, notebooks. You’ll take care of them. Lost items will not be replaced.”
She paused, letting the weight of her words settle.
“If you have questions, you come to me, or any of the staff. You do not wander around asking older children — is that clear?”
Harry gave a small nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Fawley’s eyes narrowed slightly. She leaned back in her chair, folding her hands.
“You’ve had rules before, haven’t you.”
It wasn’t really a question.
“Yes, ma’am,” Harry said quietly.
“Then I expect this won’t be too difficult for you.”
Her tone was dry, matter-of-fact. She didn’t ask what kind of rules. She didn’t ask why he looked like he hadn’t had a full meal in weeks. She just nodded once, stood up, and pointed to the door.
“Back to the common room. Someone will show you your assigned chores this evening. Dismissed.”
Harry turned to go. Before he reached the door, she added, without looking up:
“And welcome to Stonebridge Orphanage.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t feel welcome.
The day had ended, but Harry felt no closer to understanding where it had gone.
Time had not moved forward; it had dragged, thick and airless like the dust that clung to the high windows of Stonebridge Orphanage.
He sat on the edge of his new bed in a dormitory that didn’t belong to him. None of it did. Not the creaking bunk frame with chipped paint, not the faded blanket that smelled of soap and other children. Not the pillow — flat as a pressed flower — under his cheek.
Even the silence wasn’t his.
He’d spent the entire day floating through corridors, quiet as smoke, feeling eyes on his back.
But when he turned — always — there was no one. Just empty stairwells. Hallways that curved and vanished like they were holding secrets.
It made something coil up inside him. Something sharp and unnameable.
They're watching me, he thought more than once, but no one sees me.
Mrs. Baines, one of the staff members, had been the one to find him in the common room after dinner. Her voice was tight from long hours and tired shoes. “You’ll be going into town tomorrow,” she told him. “For school testing. Photos. Identification.”
Her mouth had twitched slightly at the last word — not a smile, but maybe the ghost of an attempt.
“New beginnings,” she added, and Harry didn’t respond.
New life.
It sounded like a curse.
He wished — prayed in the way children do, without gods or churches, just raw hope — that this one would be better than the last.
But that was a foolish hope.
And Harry Potter had learned, very young, that adults often lied with smiles.
Or promises.
The policewoman from yesterday — the one who had put her warm hand on his shoulder and said, “I’ll come see you tomorrow, okay? Just to check on you.”
She hadn’t come.
He’d known she wouldn’t.
Adults always said things like that.
And Harry had stopped believing them a long time ago.
They always leave. Or worse — they change.
He curled tighter under the blanket, the faint echo of children's laughter bouncing off the corridor outside.
His fingers brushed the bruises hidden beneath the sleeves of his jumper, like faded ink on an old page no one cared to read anymore.
The ceiling above him was cracked and water-stained, and he stared at it as if it might peel open and pull him away.
To another world. One that saw him.
Somewhere, a radio hummed low — jazz, or maybe something older, like bones creaking into a slow rhythm.
The wind outside whispered through the broken top pane of the dormitory window. It sounded like a song that wasn’t meant to be heard. The kind you only feel in your ribs.
---
The next morning came grey and slow. Rain tapped at the windows like it was too tired to fall properly.
Harry dressed quickly — clothes stiff and foreign on his skin — and met Mrs. Baines by the front doors.
She handed him a waterproof coat without a word, and they stepped into the morning together, her umbrella barely sheltering them both.
They walked to the bus stop in silence, past rows of buildings too old to care who lived in them.
Harry looked up once.
“Will it hurt?” he asked suddenly.
Mrs. Baines blinked. “What?”
“The test. For school. Will it hurt?”
Her expression softened a little. “No, sweetheart. It’s not that kind of test.”
He nodded, but didn’t seem reassured.
---
At the office downtown, he was led into a room that smelled of ink and disinfectant. The woman behind the desk — Ms. Sharpe — had the kind of tired kindness that looked like it had lost too many battles. She adjusted her glasses and handed Harry a pencil.
“We’re just going to see what you know, alright?” she said gently.
Harry didn’t answer.
He picked up the pencil and held it like a weapon.
He did the math problems. The reading comprehension. The spelling. All in silence.
At one point, Ms. Sharpe asked, “Do you remember what school you last attended?”
Harry paused. Then shook his head. “I didn’t.”
She blinked. “You… didn’t go to school?”
He gave her a look — not defiant, just tired.
“No.”
---
Photos came next.
A man with thinning hair and thick fingers adjusted the camera and said, “Stand still. Look straight.”
Harry stood still. He didn’t blink.
The flash came, and for a second, he vanished inside it — just light, and shadow, and a name.
---
Back at the orphanage that evening, he returned to his bed without speaking.
The test results would come later.
No one said he’d done well.
No one said he hadn’t.
He lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling again.
And for the first time in weeks, he let himself think about something he’d buried deep:
What if I don’t belong anywhere?
And then, deeper still, a whisper of a thought that felt like music pressed into skin:
What if I was never supposed to live like this?
He closed his eyes, the echo of Ms. Sharpe’s voice drifting back to him,
“We’re just going to see what you know.”
But she hadn’t asked what he felt.
What he feared.
What he remembered.
Maybe if she had, she would’ve seen it.
That Harry Potter — eight years old, small for his age, and silent as ash — knew things children weren’t meant to know.
Like how to disappear.
How to make himself forget hunger.
How to survive in a house where love was a myth and bruises were routine.
And he knew one other thing.
The darkest thing.
That beginnings were often just quieter endings in disguise.
---
He hoped this beginning was different.
He wasn’t sure it would be.
But for now — for tonight — he let the wind sing through the cracks in the walls.
Let the cold remind him he was still here.
Still waiting.
Still hoping, just a little.
Like the last note of a song that doesn’t want to end.
A Quiet Ache of Knowing
Inspired by the voice of Hozier songs — tender, raw, sacred in sorrow
---
The days began to slip past like water between fingers. Quiet, grey, and cold — not in temperature, but in soul.
Harry went to school.
It was a red-brick building, tall and unbothered by the children it swallowed each morning. Its windows blinked slowly under a sky that never really woke up, and the bell above the entrance sounded less like a summons and more like a warning. Inside, the halls smelled of bleach and old paper, the kind of scent that clung to your clothes, to your breath, to your memories.
He didn’t know the rules, not really, but he learned them quickly. Not from kindness — from glances. From the way children edged around others. From the look in a teacher’s eye when silence was broken too loudly, or a pencil rolled too far off a desk. They had rules here, unspoken and sharp-edged. They had systems. Duties. Homework, even for the young.
Harry didn’t do well.
But he didn’t do poorly, either.
He existed. He wrote when asked. Read aloud when told. But it was clear — painfully so — that he wasn’t like the others. Not just quiet. Not just new. Something else. Something unplaceable.
He never answered questions unless called upon directly. Never played at recess. Sat under the shadow of the schoolyard trees with his coat drawn tight and his hands folded in his lap like he might break the silence if he moved.
And his eyes — that was the thing.
He could barely see.
His left eye was all shadow and smudge; his right one not much better. The world shifted around him, out of reach, as though wrapped in gauze. He wore glasses — thick, round, perpetually smudged — but they were more suggestion than solution. Bent at one side. A scratch over the left lens that blurred anything too close.
He remembered where he’d gotten them.
From a cardboard box buried beneath moth-eaten scarves and tangled phone cords at the back of a charity shop. Aunt Petunia had snatched them up after he’d burned the toast again. The third time that week. Maybe the fourth.
“You’d see better if you weren’t always so careless,” she’d snapped, slapping the lenses into his hands as he cradled his wrist — red from the stove’s iron coil. “Be grateful. They were a pound.”
He had murmured thanks. Because not doing so earned more than burns.
And maybe that’s why he hated wearing them. Not because they didn’t help — but because they reminded him of the price of mistakes. How pain always came in small, forgettable packages. Like toast. Or broken glass. Or quiet.
The teachers didn’t like him much.
At first, they had been curious. Who was this boy with the bruises he didn’t talk about, with his clothes that didn’t fit and his books held too close to his face? But after the curiosity faded — and it always did — came something colder.
Disappointment.
“Pay attention, Harry.”
“Try harder.”
“You need to apply yourself.”
But no one asked him if he could see the blackboard. No one asked if the words blurred when the chalk scraped across it. They assumed — as adults so often did — that silence meant defiance.
And so, slowly, they forgot him.
He became another chair to count. Another mark on the roll call. Another paper turned in, half-correct, half-empty. Teachers stopped calling on him. Students stopped looking at him.
And maybe — maybe that was safer.
Because being seen had never done him much good.
Every night, he strained against the invisible chains, attempting a step forward. His foot would lift, hope sparking, only to have gravity—or something deeper—pull him down. The fall was endless, a slow descent through shadows that whispered secrets he couldn't grasp.
And then, amidst the abyss, they appeared.
Eyes, the color of storm clouds over a restless sea, watching him. Not with menace, but with an intensity that saw through the layers he'd built around himself. Below those eyes, a smile—enigmatic, knowing, as if privy to truths Harry had yet to uncover.
He'd wake, gasping, the orphanage's ceiling cracks sprawling like a map to nowhere. The room would be silent, save for the rhythmic breathing of other children, lost in dreams less haunting.
---
On the third week of school, a boy named Thomas sat beside him at lunch Just once..Harry thought the boy was in the same orphanage as him, he wasn't sure. His tray smelled of apples and pasta, and his voice was soft.
“Do you… wanna trade? I don’t like tomatoes.”
Harry blinked at the boy. Then down at his own tray — dry mashed potatoes and overcooked peas.
He didn’t answer.
Thomas tried again. “You don’t talk much, huh?”
Harry said nothing.
After a moment, the boy shrugged. “That’s alright. I don’t either.”
But the next day, he didn’t sit there.
No one ever did again.
---
Rain came again that Thursday. It hadn’t really stopped.
The walk back to the orphanage was long, and the waterproof coat Mrs. Baines had given him was losing its battle. Water soaked through the shoulders and sleeves, chilling his arms to the bone.
He trudged through puddles, the wind pressing against his back like hands trying to turn him around.
He thought about the test again.
Not the questions, but the after. The silence that followed. No one had said anything. Not good, not bad. Just paper passed, pencil dropped, and his name reduced to a string of black letters typed into a file.
Harry Potter. Male. Orphan. Age: 8.
---
Back in the dormitory, he crawled into bed with wet socks and a damp jumper. No one noticed.
The laughter down the hall was soft tonight. Almost gentle. He listened to it like it was a radio station tuned just beyond hearing.
The moon hung behind clouds like it was shy, and the ceiling stared back at him with its spiderweb of cracks.
He whispered, not really aloud, not really inside:
What if I’m not meant for this?
Not school. Not the orphanage. Not even this version of life — grey and shapeless and small.
He didn’t want His gift, not really. He didn’t dream of wands or dragons.
He wanted to be seen. Fully. The way no one had ever looked at him.
He wanted someone to hear the words he never said and know that he meant them.
---
And still, he waited.
Because waiting was the only thing Harry Potter had ever learned to do well.
He waited like a prayer held in breath.
Like a song humming through cracked glass.
Like something sacred and forgotten, hoping one day it would be remembered.
And in the silence, his heart beat steady.
One note at a time.
Each night, the same room. The same futile struggle. The same fall. But as days turned to weeks, nuances emerged. During his descent, he'd manage to tilt his head, glimpsing more than just the void.
Stars.
Not scattered randomly, but aligned, as if holding onto each other, refusing to be isolated. Each night, a new star would join the formation, drawing closer, bridging gaps.
He'd wake with his heart pounding, a cold sweat clinging to his skin. The weight of unseen eyes pressed on him, not just from the dream, but in the waking world. In the hallways, during lessons, at meals—he felt them.
Watching.
Waiting.
---
One evening, as rain tapped a mournful rhythm against the windowpanes, Harry sat by the dormitory's single, cracked window. The world outside was blurred—not just by his poor vision, but by the veil of rain and twilight.
A voice, soft and hesitant, broke the silence.
"Can't sleep either?"
Harry turned. It was Thomas, the boy who'd once offered a lunch trade. He hadn't approached Harry since.
Harry shrugged, turning back to the window.
Thomas shifted on his feet before sitting a cautious distance away. "I... I have dreams too. Not like yours, maybe. But... unsettling."
Harry's fingers tightened around the fraying edge of his blanket. "How do you know about my dreams?"
Thomas offered a small, sad smile. "You talk in your sleep. Sometimes, you call out. About stars. And eyes."
Heat rose to Harry's cheeks. Shame intertwined with the ever-present loneliness.
"It's okay," Thomas added quickly. "I just thought... if you ever wanted to talk about it."
Silence stretched between them, filled only by the rain's persistent melody.
Finally, Harry whispered, "Every night, it's the same. A room where I can't move. Then I fall. And there are these eyes, watching me. A smile that feels like it knows me."
Thomas nodded slowly. "Maybe... maybe it's a memory. Or something you're meant to remember."
Harry's brow furrowed. "But I've never seen those eyes before. Or that smile."
"Not yet," Thomas said, standing up. "But maybe you will."
As Thomas retreated to his own bed, Harry remained by the window, the rain's chill seeping into his bones.
He didn't know what was more unsettling—the dreams themselves or the possibility that they were glimpses of a destiny yet to unfold.
But for now, all he could do was wait.
Wait and hope that when the time came, he'd have the strength to face whatever—or whoever—awaited him in the shadows.