Chapter 16
It was dark.
It was never dark.
They knew he wasn’t scared of the dark, that he had spent too much time using it as a safe haven growing up for it to ever be a source of torture.
Why was it dark?
He moved his hands in front of him, surprised that they weren’t bound like it seemed they always were. It was better that he couldn’t attempt to fight back. They stopped, hands meeting rough wood above him.
He was- he was in a box.
No, a coffin.
They knew he wasn’t claustrophobic, so why?
He tried to remember what his last memory was, only he came up blank.
Nothing.
Couldn’t even remember if he was giving pain or taking it.
Did they want him to just sit here?
Did Alastair think this would hurt him?
He finally noticed that he had clothes. Strange. Usually they kept him naked, probably for some humiliation tactic, another way to break him. He had long gotten used to it.
No- it wasn’t just clothing. That- yes that’s leather and, he could feel the rough change from muggle leather to dragon hide. It was his jacket. Dean’s jacket.
Why?
A spark of hope shot through him and lifted his body up as high as he could and checked his back, yep holster with his Colt 1911, and- his thigh had his Barretta 72.
What if- No.
Don’t get your hopes up.
They’ve used that before.
He carefully tested the wood above him, it warped slightly under the pressure.
A weight on his right arm made him freeze. Making a rough movement, he felt his wand shoot out of a holster attached to his forearm.
“Merlin.”
He thought of the possibilities. He- he couldn’t be in hell, right? They wouldn’t have let him have this.
“Lumos.”
He waited for a second for the rush of warmth that would run from his heart, his magical core, to his hand and ultimately his wand.
Nothing.
A little more forcefully, he incanted again, “Lumos.”
Again, nothing.
Panic seized him. He closed his eyes, though it didn’t make much of a difference, and tried to find that spark inside himself that had always been there.
Nothing.
He began hyperventilating, before the realization came.
This was what Alastair was doing.
Trying to break him.
Well, fuck him.
He wasn’t just going to let that happen.
He carefully extracted his colt and pulled his arm back as far as he could, before thrusting it forward, piercing the wood above him and letting small pockets of dirt fall onto him. He repeated the action until a large enough hole was created, he gripped the edge of the wood and pulled, wood cracking and a flood of soil pouring into the airspace.
He pushed himself up digging through the dirt as calm as he could -It wouldn’t do to waste all the oxygen he had- pushing and pulling himself out. For a moment he thought he got stuck, the dirt no longer giving to his movements, then he felt another shift downward as more dirt began to fill the coffin below and he regained his momentum.
His hand breached the surface, and he felt cool, wet air. Nothing like the hot, dry air he was used to, nor was it the bitter cold or the moist, suffocatingly hot air Alastair had tried with him. Before confusion could set in, he pushed his other hand through and then, finally, pushed himself all the way out.
Blue. A true, actual, right in front of him blue sky. Green, moist grass a short distance away, stones- no graves all around him. This was- this was too elaborate for Hell. No matter what, he had always felt that sense of being dammed in Hell. He couldn’t feel it now.
Words- he pushed himself into standing, ignoring the dirt caking him as he made his eyes focus onto the gravestone he had crawled out of.
Here lies
Harry James Potter
1992 – 2006
Son, Friend, and Hero
The Boy-Who-Lived
He laughed.
Despite everything, the words ‘Boy-Who-Lived’ on his fucking tombstone was the thing that broke him.
He fell backwards onto his ass as giggles burst forth from his mouth without his consent.
He didn’t really ‘live’, now did he?
He stopped when the implications of him being here- being alive again, came to him.
No. They wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have. Would they?
What other way could he be here?
A soul for a soul.
-----
That one.
He ignored the guilt that had begun festering in his gut and started picking the back door’s lock. Finally getting into it and quietly making his way inside. Though there had been no car in the driveway, nor any light on in the house, he was reluctant to tempt fate by making a ruckus.
He ducked into the house’s bathroom and paused.
Under the layer of grime, he could see faint lines. He rushed to grab a towel and wet it, wiping away the dirt one brush at a time, shedding his clothes as needed. After four different towels he was done.
The expected scars were there, his right arm shredded from the dragon, the basilisk’s bite, the bullet wound, his ear, but there were more. So much more. All along his body lay the evidence of his death, claws and bites, places where the flesh simply tore, and sitting right on his throat front and center was a massive teeth mark. He remembered that one, desperately, illogically, gurgling blood pouring from his throat as he tried to scream. As he tried to breath. His face wasn’t spared, the most prominent one a claw mark running from just above his left eye to his right ear. It should have blinded him, gouged out his eyes. Whatever had healed him must have saved them.
Strangest of all, on his right hand lay a handprint bleached onto his skin, his palm matching that color as if he had gripped and been gripped in turn by a hand. Like he had been physically pulled from damnation. The color matched exactly the bleached white that surrounded the bullet hole in arm. Like the hand too had purged something from him.
He could have been sat staring for hours, or just a minute. Eventually he had to leave. He found a pair of clothes in the master bedroom that was just a little big on him, but he was used to rolling up his pants from years of using Dudley’s hand me downs. He put his jacket back on, along with his holsters and what they held, but then added a baseball cap and a puffy winter coat over it all. Even if he was thought to be dead, the Boy-Who-Lived was recognizable.
He made his way into the kitchen, hoping to find a small bite to eat as his stomach demanded, but he froze.
The calendar in front of him told him it had only been four months. Four months since he died.
That couldn’t be true. He knew he had spent forty-four years in Hell. Alastair had always made the anniversary a special event.
He put those feelings in a box and began searching the cupboards.
If Dean had taught him anything, it was how to shove his feelings in a box and forget about them.
-----
The entrance to Diagon Alley wouldn’t open.
He had slipped through the nearly empty Leaky Cauldron and into the small courtyard in the back, and with precise movements entered the pattern into the bricks to open them.
Nothing.
That emptiness in his heart told him why it wouldn’t.
He shoved that thought away for when he had the time to cry about it.
-----
He had to ask Tom the barkeep to open it for him, saying he had forgotten his wand at home. The concerned look Tom gave him made sense when he finally got a look at what was behind the brick wall.
Diagon Alley was even emptier than it had been last year. Small groups of people rushing by with non-descript robes being the only inhabitants. He almost gave into the temptation to leave, to escape through the Leaky Cauldron and never return, find some other way to get to his brothers. But he knew that was stupid.
The only way he was going to be able to catch a plane was with an invisibility cloak, and he had made sure to put it into his vault before he died. Specifying that it was only to be used in the case that the war returned in full.
With the look of the alley, that might have just happened.
He kept his head down and made the short walk to and into Gringotts.
Thanking whatever gods were listening, he darted to the only goblin he recognized.
“Sherkhole?”
She looked up from the paper she was examining, and gave him a thorough look, eyes widening in recognition and surprise.
“Heir Potter?”
Harry winced and looked around to make sure no one overheard them.
“Yes- I- I’m here to make a withdrawal.”
After a long, anxiety inducing moment, she spoke, “We would have to perform a blood test, considering the… circumstances of you attempting to access the Potter vaults.”
Harry winced, then considered the words he had to speak.
“Does a blood test require… magic?”
At the Goblin’s answering silence, he explained.
“Say, if I had… I don’t know, magically became a squib, would it work?”
Sherkhole looked down on him for a long moment, eyes squinted as if she could read his intentions just by looking at him.
“The process requires a magical core, yes.”
“Oh.”
-----
He had no money, no magic, and no way to see his family.
So, he went to the one place he could.
_____
Remus sat alone in one of the many sitting rooms of Grimmuald place. The silence of the house a breeding ground for the thoughts he was trying to avoid.
Mind going back to that day.
~~~~~
Dumbledore had requested a meeting with him, not too strange considering how he was a part of the order, the strange thing was that it was to happen at Hogwarts.
Dumbledore had always refused to house Order meetings in the school, citing both the security risk of students eavesdropping, and the risk to the students an attack targeting the Order would pose.
The second he left the fire he froze. Amelia Bones, the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement stood next to Mad Eye Moody. He felt out of place in his patched together robes next to their uniforms.
Dumbledore stood behind his desk and- he looked serious, and grief stricken, no sign of a twinkle.
“Who died?”
The headmaster looked straight at him and spoke the words Remus had never expected to hear, no matter how much grief, how much death was in his life.
“Yesterday evening, Harry Potter died.”
They needed him to smell the body, to know if it had been werewolves.
He was barely recognizable. Crimson and pieces of flesh interspersed with the remnants of clothes.
He threw up.
The only scent there was Harry himself.
~~~~~
The tea was cold in his hand.
He had been the one to tell Sirius.
Again.
And again.
And again.