Chapter 1
It had been a rough couple of months, years if Harry was being honest. Not that he ever was, but there's a first time for everything.
It was Harry's fifth year at Hogwarts and he had been back for nearly a month. He used to count the days excitedly waiting to return to the castle. His home. Where he wasn't locked away, beaten, or looked at as if his touch burned.
But this year was different. He couldn't help but crave the solitude of his cupboard, the harsh words, the shoves. They hurt less when he knew he didn't deserve what was being done to him, where he could blame anyone else for the pain he was put through.
He couldn't say the same about now. He deserved all he got and more.
If he thought being shunned for being believed to be the heir of Slytherin was bad, it was nothing compared to how the school was treating him for killing their beloved Cedric Diggory. He didn't directly kill Cedric but someone needed to be blamed for the loss and like usual it was him. No one cared who the person holding the wand was as long as they could punish someone.
As usual, that person was Harry.
The Hufflepuffs were mourning the loss of a friend, the Ravenclaws didn't believe his story, the Gryffindors thought he was even more of an attention seeker, and the Slytherins treated him no differently than every other year, which was like trash.
He wasn't new to the school hating him but he had always had at least one person who stuck with him. Until now that is. He had no one but he couldn't find it in himself to care.
His summer blurred together with long days spent in the sun doing whatever the Dursleys asked of him. He started feeling numb sometime around when he was about to go back to school and hadn't felt much since. He preferred it this way if he was honest.
Nothing could bother him if it didn’t touch him. He could drift through life as if he wasn't present like all the bad things that happened to him were suddenly unimportant.
He either felt nothing or everything. At least when it was nothing he could keep himself out of trouble. Sure, the ringing in his ears got deafening at points but it drowned out his thoughts, a feeling he welcomed. Besides it was impossible to hear others while you couldn't even hear yourself think.
He couldn't force himself out of bed most days when nothingness consumed him but it's not like anyone noticed, he was good at putting on a mask, pretending to be normal.
When everything got to be too much he often got into trouble for fighting, it was unpreventable.
Besides he was never the one to start fights, it wasn’t his fault he was apparently the only person who knew how to finish them. He couldn't bring himself to slow down long enough to think through his actions.
He never was quite able to outrun his thoughts. Maybe he just wasn't trying hard enough. If he ran fast or far enough one day they would finally quiet down enough for him to be able to sleep.
People often thought he was rude, short-tempered, or too good to bother talking to them. Their assumptions weren't remotely close to the truth but it was better than them knowing the real him, so he never bothered to correct them. Better they think he was just your average bad student or just another fuck-up who thought the rules never applied to them.
He got lost in the motions of each day losing hours to his mind but it didn't matter in the end. Each day was the same, he went to his classes, then skipped most meals since he couldn't bear the stares that came with going to the great hall, he didn't have an appetite anyway. Then he went back to his dorm and tried to do anything to forget his shit life for even a few minutes.
Then he did the same thing the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.
He spent all his time alone besides when the Weasley twins dropped by to keep him company which was more often than not these days. They were like the brothers he never had, they treated him like a person and not an object or hero like the rest of the world.
They brought food to his dorm but never forced him to eat it, they kept him company late at night when he couldn't sleep or the nightmares became too much. They patched him up after he gave into the darkness when his thoughts got too loud for him to ignore any longer.
They were always there when he needed them.
Ron and Hermione hadn't talked to him since the train ride to school saying they couldn't be friends with an attention-seeking liar, after all the trouble he had put them through. He had expected something like this with them from first year with Ron's constant jealousy and Hermione always favoring him over Harry. She hated things she couldn't immediately understand and it looks like Harry now fell into this category.
It's not like either of them talked to him during fourth year so them ending things with him wasn't a shock or much of an adjustment. The rest of the school seemed to take them leaving him as a sign he couldn't be trusted. They treated him worse than they ever had before, it hurt more than he expected.
He had been alone his entire life, and now that he knew what it was like to have someone their refusal felt worse. It felt far more personal than the Dursleys ever had. He should have never let himself get attached, he knew it would never last. Yet he had. Why shouldn’t he be able to have someone who cared for him unconditionally with no strings attached?
He tried to look on the bright side, if he didn't he would truly have nothing. Being alone was second nature to him by now, it's all he had ever really known so it was a comfort of sorts not needing to constantly be wearing a mask which he sported whenever he was around others. Blocking out what he felt in favor of showing what the world wanted to see.
Until this year that is when he stopped caring what people thought of him, if they thought he was crazy with his mask he would let it drop and show them crazy. It's not like they would notice anyways since when they weren't cursing him or calling him a liar they were far too busy pretending he didn't exist.
The courses he selected were Defence against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, Herbology, Astronomy, History of Magic, Arithmancy, and Ancient Ruins. He had seen how useless classes like divination were firsthand and now that he had no one to convince him not to, he was taking the classes he thought would be most beneficial.
He decided to stop hiding his smarts in favor of showing the world he wasn't a dense-headed Gryffindor, after all, he never really was a Gryffindor but that was for the world to figure out for themselves. Ravenclaw wasn't the only house that valued knowledge and the hat had always said he would have done great things in Slytherin.
He had consistently been receiving straight O's but never participated in class or answered questions when asked. It drove his professors mad, his sudden improvement in every subject, being top of all his classes but seemingly putting in no effort. It wasn't hard to ace all his classes when he had his textbooks memorized before he got to school. He spent many sleepless nights with nothing to do besides read both at Privet Drive and Hogwarts.
He thought it was funny, their questions and stares. All their attempts to get him to participate, even Snape gave it a go after a month of silence, but to no avail. However, the students didn't find his improvement in his studies to be as positive, most of them thought he was cheating which didn't help his reputation.
Hermione gave him dirty looks when the teachers mentioned him being top of his classes. She was finally being dethroned as the smartest in their year and it seems she wasn't taking it too well. Who could have guessed?
___
Harry was in his dorm, lying on his bed while Fred and George were working on a new item for their up-and-coming joke shop. They were talking about how Fred and Angelina had officially started dating after months of pinning over each other. Luckily none of Harry's dorm mates were in the room, they had been avoiding it as Harry had taken to spending most of his time there even if it was locked in his bed.
They soon fell into a comfortable silence, Harry didn't know what came over him maybe it was all the talk of romance but he blurted out something he was almost sure he would regret.
“I was dating Cedric all of last year, and I'm gay.” He had never said out loud before, that he was gay.
He knew the twins wouldn't care who he dated, and that they wouldn't tell anyone but if it got out he would be screwed. The prophet would go crazy if they knew he liked blokes, he could only imagine the stories Rita would make about him none of them being good.
He knew the wizarding world was not as against being gay as the muggle world, but even so, this would ruin what little he had left of his “the golden boy” persona people still saw him as and he wanted to hold onto that as long as possible.
Before the twins were able to respond Ron stormed into the room. Had he been there the whole time? How much has he heard? He looked mad, not just mad but disgusted.
He shoved Harry off the bed he was lying on up against the nearest wall. He began shouting in his face pushing his arm across Harry's neck. If contact with someone else in such proximity was not enough to stop Harry's breathing and make his skin crawl, the pressure against his neck certainly was.
Ron was screaming slurs, and how he was disgusted to have ever shared a room or even be seen with Harry. Harry wanted to push him away but he couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn’t do anything besides wait for Ron to pull away.
He could feel every inch of Ron's skin pressed against his, the itch of someone being this close to him becoming much too strong. All he could think about were all the times at the Dursleys when his uncle got too close or beat him senseless and just like now, all he could do was mindlessly stand there waiting for it to be over.
He was helpless to whatever Ron was going to do to him. He wasn't stopping, continuing to press harder on Harry's throat until it didn't even hurt anymore.
Sometime during the ordeal, Harry had closed his eyes and he didn't plan on re-opening them. He couldn't breathe or even think about trying to slow his heart rate down.
Until he heard voices, not just of the three people who had been in his dorm but of at least twenty. Did people hear the commotion and come up to his dorm to check what was going on? If that were the case Ron would spin the story to make Harry seem like the asshole.
He was busy thinking about all the ways Ron would use knowing he was gay to ruin his life until a hand touched his arm surprisingly gently. His eyes flew open as he stumbled back into a stone wall.
The Gryffindor dorms didn't have stone walls.