Harry's Decision
Harry James Potter had just been hit with the killing curse and finished talking with Dumbledore, who vanished a little while ago.
He sat down on one of the benches, looking around, and then lying down on it, looking high up into the roof of the Kings Cross Train Station. His mind was empty, and now, when he is dead… people finally tell him things.
He could go back. He could get back with his friends and made family.
He could.
…
But the thing is, he doesn’t want to. What if there is another Dumbledore who will use him as some piece in a game? What if there were another Dark Lord people would expect him to defeat? What if…
“What if…
The silence in the white and very clean-looking Kings Cross station grew longer and louder.
“What if I didn’t…”
“What if I just died?” he asked from the empty area.
Then, some realisation hit him.
“I did just die. I am dead,” he said, and slowly, a strange sort of smile began creeping onto his features.
“I’m dead," he said, and some hysterical laugh escaped him.
He stuffed his hands in front of his mouth for a moment and stopped the sound leaking out.
But why? Why would he care now? He was dead. No one was around. No one could hear a thing about what was going on in his mind and how he reacted to it.
He turned sad when he thought about his friends, but they weren’t enough to bring him out of this moment, where he realised he didn’t want to return.
He had the choice.
He could go back, but the longer he thought of it. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to continue living. All this suffering would be over if he just died.
Yeah, he knew people would be sad…
He knew giving up wasn’t his thing.
But he didn’t think it was giving up.
It was his choice, and he never gave up.
Simply… after seeing Snape’s memories of his mother.
His mother had chosen death.
She had chosen death.
Would he see his mother now?
No. It wasn’t something he wished for, and he had just seen her…
They had all said dying was nice.
It had been simple. He didn’t feel all the expectations anymore.
He felt light when he entered that clearing.
It wasn’t defeat.
No.
He had won.
He wasn’t afraid of dying, and this was his current reality.
He was dead, but he could choose to live, but what if he chose another way to live?
Going back to the Wizarding World… didn’t sound appealing with how they had treated him from the start.
Loving, hating, loving, hating… it was terrible to deal with and going back to that felt less appealing every moment he thought about returning.
Sure, he would miss his friends, but no one else was waiting for him back there.
Ginny? The thought comes unbidden.
He thought about the girl. She was awesome… beautiful, and all things that attracted him, yet he found that he didn’t know her.
Yes, they had gotten together and close during his sixth year, but they separated for a reason. Even now, when he was deliberating… he found that even Ginny wasn’t enough reason to return to that world.
He had seen the ugly side of that world and thought that fighting a Dark Lord was actually easy compared to all the horrible political drama that would probably unfold later when all the battles were over.
He had zero interest in entangling himself with all of that, but… wherever he went, he might find himself in a new battle, just like this one.
At least, all that crap about him being some saviour would be over. The part where he was entangled with a prophecy. A part where they gave him honours he didn’t deserve. He could build his own life, however exciting or boring it would be. Ultimately, it would be his choice, and that was what he wanted. It was all he ever wanted.
Harry’s mind kept going in circles, and in the end, he murmured something and closed his eyes.
“I want to live, but somewhere else. I don’t want to be Harry Potter, the Hero, the boy who lived. I just wish to be a random kid with a random fate,” he sighed, closed his eyes, and darkness enveloped him. The last word was like a blow that swept him into the darkness.
He stayed in that darkness for a long while, waiting for Oblivion, Heaven, or Hell—just something more than simple darkness. It wasn’t what he thought it would be, and he definitely didn’t think he would still be conscious throughout the whole darkness.
Again, his thought drifted, but one thing was certain. He didn’t regret his decision. He simply wondered what the place would be. What sort of world would he be born into?
Eventually… he was born.
He would have loved to be born but not remember it. It would have been nicer. The feeling of being squished through a tiny hole wasn’t exactly new; just this one was a bit more disgusting than Apparating.
He waited quietly for his eyesight to clear out. He kept seeing blurred images of a woman with dark, maybe even black hair, her hair kept short.
His new life was a precise schedule. Everything was planned: when he would eat, when he would sleep, when he was on the ground, when he should roll over, when he should start crawling, and when he should start walking or talking.
His mother never spoke. Or rarely spoke.
Her voice was quiet, and she repeated a set of rules to him over and over every night.
“Don’t run, and don’t make a sound.”
He may have been about seven months old when he first cried and figured out why he shouldn’t make a sound. His mother, who had just passed out, not fallen asleep, she passed out, was up instantly, trying to soothe him, but it was too late.
The man comes. He had barely seen the man, and he felt how his mother swallowed hard, even though he had already stopped crying. He was taken from her lax hands; something was stuffed in his mouth roughly and thrown back to the small crib that was his bed. It hurt; his body hurt. He was tiny and weak.
He got a look at that man. He looked handsome with dark hair, pale skin, sharp dark eyes, a straight nose, and tight lips. But what actually scared him was the emotionless look in his eyes or his entire face. The other fact he got was he only had one working hand and leg. He limped out of the room, the wooden stick of a prosthetic leg clumping as he went. He wasn’t even slow. He moved well and fast but was still supported by a cane.
His name was Masaki, and he had never cried since then. Even when he saw horrible things being done to his mother, he saw everything: how the man treated the woman who gave birth to him. He saw how the woman was treated worse than a house elf in the Malfoy house.
When Masaki was about a year and maybe six months old, he didn’t want to sit still and look at the letters anymore, so he ran away from his mother.
He forgot and finally remembered why making a sound or running in the house was forbidden. That was the first time he felt the cane. It hurt so much, and he looked toward his mother, who was showing a belly already.
He knew what it meant but wished so badly that something went wrong, and it died because living in this place was even worse than his last life.
His mother, at the moment of his first hit and by the sound of his pain-filled cry, died inside. After that moment, she never reacted to anything anymore. She only moved to the orders the man gave her and nothing more.
He was beaten black and blue with the cane. He was dragged on the floor, thrown into another room and left there. He climbed under the blanket. The next morning, he was pulled out and made to clean it up while the man watched over his actions, and he got hit every time something was done wrong.
His mother was in the kitchen, placing dishes on the table. She never looked at him. She kept her eyes down, and so did he. The man took him to another room and made him do some things based on picture books. The man couldn’t show him with his injured body.
He would feel the cane whenever he moved wrong; even breathing wrong was punished.
He was three years old when the cane didn’t hurt as much anymore, and that was when that man introduced another method of pain for him. He cried but never let out a peep of sound.
Dislocation. It hurt like hell.
As for his mother, she was nursing another baby. The man didn’t even look at the child but reacted when the child made a noise like he had responded to him. He stuffed something in its mouth and tossed it back to her.
The child was like a sack of meat in his hands. He treated that child worse than he did him.
He tried not to think about it.
If his memory serves right, he was born on the same day as his last life. It was the day of his fourth birthday, and his father made him do Katas in the courtyard. He usually came this way to practice alone, but this time, he dragged the other child into the house with him.
The child had been caught ten months ago and made to go through the same sort of training. They were kept separate. They only shared meals, and Masaki could see the bruises and the tear stains. The child still cried, and Masaki could hear her every night.
He tried to distract the child. He whispered stories through the walls. He hadn’t known what to tell the child at first and made something up about the sun and the moon. But as nights grew longer and his made-up stories grew shorter, he began telling stories of three friends. It was almost like a reminder to himself of where he came from and what he had faced before.
He hadn’t even noticed that the man had struck him down so severely that he had forgotten who he was. It was worse than his first childhood, and now he finally remembers it. He will not let it happen again. The man might have beaten him down, but he can always stand up again and fight.
That had been his resolve before he saw the child take a step wrong. Masaki instinctively knew what was coming and cringed inwardly, but he hadn’t been the one to take the hit. The hit never landed on him. It was a strange shock.
His inside went cold when he saw the sight of the man, who was probably their father, hit a child with that cane one time, and then the second blow landed on the child. The blow was faster, sharper, stronger. He could see it was different from the previous hit. He could see it even from here. That’s when he heard it.
The crack of bone and the moment of quiet before the child howled in pain, and he stuffed that thing in the child's mouth. He still didn’t know what it was, but the next moment, he was there, pulling the thing out of the child's mouth and grabbing hold of the man's cane, yanking it back with every fibre of his being. His body moved precisely as it had been trained. Both hands grasping at the cane and smashing it back down against his head.
His eyes hurt. It wasn’t logical, but his eyes hurt. His mind drifted… maybe it was behind the eyes that hurt. It didn’t make sense. His vision was a little red. Perhaps it was all the blood gushing out of his head. He did something horrible.
He knew he did something terrible. He probably just killed a person. A person the whole world would think was his father. That man was not his father. He had never had a father.
He blinked at the sudden input of sound entering his ears.
Screaming, someone was screaming, but he could only react by sluggishly moving his head and locating the child. The small child whose leg was broken, and he wasn’t able to do anything to help. His consciousness was fading, but he could see the child. The child was crawling closer to him, crying all the while; he attempted to move his hand and make the sound, the sign to stay quiet. But no part of his body did as he wished.
He just saw the sun peak over the high wall of the courtyard.
The sun's brightness made him wonder if he was seeing the Light again. Was his life over now? That was it. He got randomly assigned and lived just four years.
Was that all he had? All the time, he got to live without anything more than a random person.
His eyes closed, and the darkness finally took him to the oblivion he had wished for but never received. Now, it was here, and he enjoyed the feeling.