Truth and Trauma

Lucidity returned only in snatches, desperate moments within a mire of deep, unrelenting cold. Most of the time Harry was unaware that he was shivering, spread flat out on cold stone, eyes wide and unseeing as an endless stream of horrors replated themselves before his eyes. Those few moments when the dementors retreated allegedly far enough for the prisoners to snatch some sustenance of their own were no respite; Harry came somewhat back to himself only to feel a deathly chill gnawing at the marrow of his bones and a body so weak he could barely crawl to the bowl of slop that was somehow deposited into the cell.

It hardly mattered. He was in no state to eat, desperate screams ringing in his ears, and only a deep animal survival instinct occasionally roused enough to be terrified of his rapid downward spiral. If the periods of lucidity were days (he had no way of knowing when most of the time he was not even conscious enough to track whatever dim light lurked outside the barred window) then he was barely managing to get sustenance three times a week.

Hid mind quivered like jelly under the relentless assault of terror. Everything was too much; there was no respite, only screams and remembered horrors playing before his eyes.

Again and again, he saw them die. The only people in his life to ever show him unconditional love. His father’s voice, so abruptly cut off. Green light blasting away warm touches. His mother screaming-screaming-screaming for him – only for him. Not a single thought spared as to her own fate.

She should have stepped aside, he thought dizzily on one of the few times he recovered enough for thinking to be an option. Should have stepped aside, saved herself – saved them both a lot of pain. She had been loved, adored. She could have moved on. He… he loved her, he thought, but… what was love to a boy who had scarcely known a kind touch?

Also in those few snatches, he pieced together what must have happened. The red-robed wizards must have been aurors, although he had no clue how they had known to come to Privet Drive. Possibly related to how the dementors had come, but his mind was too fragmented to put the pieces together.

Not too fragmented to realise the consequences, however. Upon discovering his aunt and uncle’s soulless husks and him near-catatonic in the hallway, with him the only magical in the household, with the dementors long gone, he must have been accused of causing their state. Accused, and thrown into Azkaban without a trial.

It was not as if there was not precedent for innocents in Azkaban.

The Minister already had a history of it. Beyond blind condemnation of Sirius, even. Fudge had done it to Hagrid on a fifty-year-old accusation, to be ‘seen to be doing something.’

Now Harry had proved himself equally inconvenient to Fudge’s agenda. He had seen the papers – there were only two voices claiming Voldemort’s return, his and Dumbledores. Eliminating his was clearly the politic thing to do.

There was enough despair in that thought that the dementors let him keep it, even as they closed ranks once more to glut themselves on fresh misery.

Eventually, perhaps days, perhaps weeks after the assault began, he began to grasp onto the memories. His innocence was no anchor – he had not killed his relatives, but he sometimes wondered if it might have been more comfort if he had. If it had been his hand to finally stop the nightmare: Petunia’s verbal assaults, Vernon’s thick fists, Dudley’s relentless bullying.

Instead Harry clung to the memories that the dementors brought. Whilst it was agony to see and hear and feel them die, it could be considered a gift of a sort – he had not remembered their faces before encountering the black-robed demons. The memory was terrible, but it was still memory. At least he had some recollection of them. The frozen agony of loss thawed somewhat at the warm flow of knowing that he had had something to lose in the first place, the certainty that he had, once upon a time, been loved the way the boy alone in the cupboard had always dreamed of.

As soon as he found some shred of comfort, of course, it was ripped from him. The dementors grew bored of that deep pain the moment he found some balm in it, and whilst his mother and father’s dying screams still reverberated through his ears the visions turned to different horrors.

He had no shortage; his childhood had been a long struggle for survival; a gnawing lack of food or care; long days shut away and starving; quiet aches in covered places; watching a family and always always always wondering why he was shut out, why he was not enough. Shivers wracked his body both physical and in memory as he remembered long days spent trembling in darkness, soaked in sweat and ravaged by nausea, as he fought fevers shut away from a family whose only concern was that he might infect them.

Even Hogwarts played out in the darker nights, whispers and stares and silent judgement. The school shunning him for losing points or speaking to snakes. Quirrel crumbling beneath his hands as he became a murderer at eleven years old. A basilisk chased him through endless filthy pipes, death echoing in its hisses.

Harry never felt the bruises as he ran for his life, horrifyingly aware of the noise of his own footsteps, his heartbeat and desperate panting breaths. Even blinded, there had been no escaping the snake – his own body had told it exactly where to strike.

Then came the pain. Blinding, earth-shattering pain, acid in his veins as venom devoured him from the inside out. And Fawkes’s tears had burned, burned like the fire they came from, ravaging his body with ice and fire in turn as they turned his blood into a battleground. It had continued burning, albeit more faintly, for hours afterwards as a smiling Dumbledore sent Ginny and Ron and Lockhart off to the hospital wing and insisted Harry stay and verbalise the whole nightmare.

The agony of Sirius’s face, finally offering Harry some kind of true home, the bitterness of the knowledge of what came after. It skipped over that shining half hour where everything was going to be alright right to the point when the moon rose, the wolf howled and the dementors descended. When the concept of ‘godfather’ too was ripped from him.

The dementors feasted on the Triwizard tournament and all that came with it. Again his peers turned their backs whilst Harry was expected to face off against a rampaging mother dragon before he was even of age. Then the slow, creeping horror of the task under the lake, the fear of losing the friend he had only just regained as well as the only one who had always stuck with him.

Ultimately, they reached the graveyard. The horror and shame and guilt of knowing that his blood had contributed to the rising of the Dark Lord. Cedric’s death – they got a lot of mileage out of that one, “kill the spare” resounding almost as often as Lily’s screams.

Finally they reached the long, lonely summer afterwards. Alone, cut off, screaming every night when he could not stop reliving the graveyard. Refusing to scream the morning afterwards when Vernon or Dudley got fed up with it and tried to “teach him to keep his mouth shut.”

Remembering his summer nightmares felt odd to Harry. Now almost every moment was spent reliving real nightmares without respite, exhausting digging frozen teeth into the few moments of relative consciousness. In comparison the summer had not truly been so bad after all, its stifling heat a barely-remembered dream.

The memories never played in order, the dementors seeking whatever flashes would cause the most pain moment to moment and refusing to allow him to grow used to any one horror. In his few moments of lucidity Harry tried to put them that way, like some sort of morbid game. He did not want to lose the thread of his own life, tried to hang onto whatever sanity he could.

Eventually, he prayed, he would be out of there. He would be given a trial. Voldemort would rear his ugly head. Something.

Inevitably he then wondered how many times his godfather had had those same thoughts. Twelve years, and in the end no one had come. No one ever came. Hadn’t he learned that at the Dursleys?

Harry didn’t have twelve years. He knew it as an utter certainty. Already lucidity was harder and harder to grasp. His grip on any memory beyond pain became shakier every ‘day’. With no animagus form to shelter him from the true force of the demons he spent far more time unconscious than awake, and the few times he had managed to squint at his reflection in his murky water ration there had been blood crusting his nose.

He was dying. Unable to drag himself out of the visions for long enough to see to basic needs, his physical body was deteriorating nearly as fast as his mental state. He had always been affected by dementors more than most, and frankly at the moment he might welcome any end to it. He was utterly alone, after all; no one had bothered to send him so much as a single letter all of summer, his relatives had hated him even before their demise, wizarding Britain as a whole had spent months deriding him in their paper. He was in Azkaban. Would anyone even notice if he was gone?

Well, they would notice when they finally realised the truth of Voldemort’s return. The monster was far too much a showman to keep his reprise silent for long. When he reappeared the wizarding world would almost certainly look for their usual scapegoat and cart him back to Hogwarts, but Harry wasn’t nearly confident that he could survive until then. Especially not if Voldemort finally mustered the patience to seize the opportunity that had been handed to him, to let someone else finish him off so the insane supposed-genius could finally concentrate on his campaign of terror without teenage distractions.

But then came a change.

Slowly, he began to notice that his moments of lucidity were growing slightly longer. The memories were still awful, would always be awful, but after so many reruns in such a short period of time they were losing a little of their bite. They were taking his sanity with them, the dementors were having to work harder and harder for every meal, his mind so permanently tormented that there was not much good left to wring out of him. He thought he might actually be capable of doing the crime he was accused of in return for a single taste of chocolate.

In his longer periods of wakefulness, he could hear the prisoners around him. Not see them; they had given him that much mercy at least, since maximum security was mostly death eaters and he had little desire to experience their reaction to having the Boy Who Lived within their grasp.

Their ravings kept him an absurd sort of company. Yet he did wonder. He had whimpered in his own torturous visions, he knew that, but the raging, the screaming… dementors had never elicited that reaction from him, not once. Morbid curiosity sparked, and he found himself ruminating on it in a mostly-futile attempt to distract himself from the replaying memories.

One day, when he “woke” what seemed like slightly earlier than usual (he thought that the light, what little crawled through the tiny barred window, might be dimmer than in his blurry recollections), a thought drifted up from his subconsciousness.

Fight or flight… madness or catatonia. After being so consistently fed on by dementors, the mind likely naturally attempted to escape the continuous horrors either by retreating as deep into unconsciousness as possible or by practically throwing material – even made up material – at the demons to prevent them from digging deeper into reality.

It was an interesting concept, though the idea felt strange to Harry – as if it were not really his own. Or rather perhaps it was more his own than any before. It was difficult to say for sure when his mind was fracturing anyway.

Then the dementors pressed greedy hands closer, and Harry tipped back over the edge of oblivion.

Except…

A new sound had joined the familiar chorus of desperate screams. Lily’s death closed in once again. She stood, resolute, demanding a monster take her and not her child – but overlaid on her blurry image, red hair before a black shadow all washed in shades of death-green practically the only impressions remaining in an infant mind, was a somewhat sharper figure cast in flickering orange and grey.

Pain joined the desperation in the screams, a shrieking cacophony that had Harry subconsciously curling up and clasping hands over ears that felt as if they were bleeding. It was accompanied by a surge of all-encompassing terror, deeper than Harry could have felt as a child of less than two years scarcely aware of the danger that had come to his warm world. The emotion of a child who knew, who understood, what had happened to his mother.

The confusion was slow to manifest through the terror and the despair, but it did come. It seemed to perplex the dementors as well, because the conflicting images faded and were replaced by a run through the Dursley highlights. Yet here again the memories seemed confused.

Sunlight scorched through the roof of the cupboard as he shivered out his fever; leaves fringed the crack in the door as he stared at a family laughing; Marge’s dog Ripper grew larger and fiercer until a wolf snapped at the bottom of the tree he had taken refuge in.

Hissing framed childhood memories long before ten-year-old Harry set foot in a zoo. Dudley and his gang morphed into a pack of baying hunters on horseback who chased a barefoot child through the woodland. A surge of adrenaline and wild almost-glee drowned out any hint of panic, and then he dropped forwards onto four legs and became a streak of red fur as wildness claimed his soul.

For a moment, the boy in Azkaban was worried that he was finally losing his mind. These events had never happened to Harry – he could consciously recall only half of the memories spiralling around him. The events were familiar, but the backdrops were not.

Harry had been chased many times by Dudley and his gang of bullies, but for all her bitterness and reluctance to spend a penny on him Petunia would never have let him out of the house barefoot. What would the neighbours have thought? Likewise he had never met a snake before turning ten and yet the parseltongue twisting itself throughout his earliest memories had not seem strange at all as he relived them.

He quickly realised, however, that this could not be insanity. There were too many things wrong, recognisably wrong. If he had fallen off that particularly precipice he rather doubted that he would have remained capable of noting the discrepancies. Dementors took memories or overlaid them with despair, but they did not change them.

Then what?

Before Harry could contemplate further the demons closed in again, abhorring his sudden relief. This time they brought up Hogwarts, clearly searching for something to purge the confusion from grief and despair and terror, but this set of memories appeared to be perhaps even more mangled than the early ones.

He would recognise Hogwarts anywhere, his first and only true home, but all the same he was halfway convinced that his initial impression was wrong. Harry had never seen the castle like this, and the sight itself horrified him.

The castle was a ruin. The keep was broken down and stained in places with blood and soot, the sole visible tower in two pieces beside a murky lake. The basic layout remained but the walls were crumbling, wooden supports rotten, vines and weeds choking what should have been smooth grass and even trespassing inside the structure.

The memory put him in the middle of the mess, sheltering under one of very few intact roofs. Thunder rumbled overhead, threatening his concentration as he clamped one hand over his side, weaving his magic into stitches along a clean slice curving halfway down his back.

There was an arrow sending pulsing pain through his shoulder, likely poisoned, and exhaustion tinted the memory grey as the sky. Every heartbeat felt sluggish, each breath almost more effort than he could muster, and each bringing a complaint from a different part of his body. His wrists were chafed raw. His ribs prominent enough that he could see the clean break in two of them. Ice crept along the grass as the moon rose behind the clouds and the end rattled closer, audible in every laboured breath.

The night dragged, every minute agonisingly slow. A howl rang in the distance, wolves on the hunt or death on the wind.

He refused it. He had escaped; he was alive; and by the Mother he would stay that way.

Determination sparked magic, and monumental effort tugged the arrow free of his shoulder. A pained scream split the night but he choked it off, gritting sharp teeth as he dug nails into his own wound and blindly drew a rune in blood. Fire invaded his skin –

(the world briefly went dim, mould choking him, snake fangs flashing in fury. A wraith screamed. Then the Chamber faded and the ruin of Hogwarts returned)

- but when he drew his hand back there was purple-green fluid on his fingers. Triumph edged his bared teeth as the deadly growing weakness faded, leaving only overwhelming exhaustion and agony. Enough magic remained to send the poison up in flames and when it was gone a last surge of determination pressed that burning hand to the gaping arrow wound, sealing it and plunging him into sweet unconsciousness.

And back into Azkaban.

Dizzy, Harry shook his head as if to physically dislodge the memory. Ruins? Arrows? A stab wound?

For all the pain he had suffered in his life, those were injuries he had never had to endure. Besides, Hogwarts had stood proudly for centuries. Clever charmwork might make it appear a ruin to Muggle eyes but what Harry had just experienced was far from even that.

Was his imagination just running wild? Was this the beginning of mad ravings as his mind conjured up fantasies solely to satisfy the dementors?

Yet the memory had felt so real. Just as vivid and awful as his true memories, which were again playing on repeat almost in the background as his mind chewed this latest mystery.

A mother’s scream resounded in his head – two of them – younger and older – and before he could fully consider what he was doing Harry latched on. Concentrating perhaps harder than he ever had in his life, he directed the agony that was a dementors power. His own magic flared, a green corona around him, and then he was immersed in a memory longer and clearer than ever before.