Worse Things
A thunder erupts around them as the portkey spits them out.
He hears the applause, the bone-rattling reverb of the trombone at once on the inside of his skull, and yet very far away. Perhaps they’re underwater - he feels submerged, as though it is filling his lungs. The pressure of the deep keeps him rooted.
He has his face pressed against the soft fabric of Cedric’s shirt. He dares not move. Maybe, if he stays here long enough and waits patiently enough, he will start sensing movement in the chest resting beneath his brow.
The fragile moment passes in seconds and hours at once, and Dumbledore has a hand on his shoulder, prying him up. He fights it for as long as he can. Don’t move, Harry. Cedric will start breathing any second. Don’t look up.
Eventually, he obeys the request, which comes in the form of a hand pulling at his shoulder. Through the cracks in his glasses, he sees two pale, blue eyes staring down at him through nothingness. Harry looks up, hoping to see something fascinating. There must be something- why else would he be staring like that? He-
Dumbledore cranes his head back. Someone has a hand on his back to keep him upright. Harry tries to rasp something out through heaving breaths and has no idea what he might be saying - he must be saying something - he can’t hear himself.
He looks back down at Cedric, scrambles, digs his fingers into the yellow pattern of the shirt, trying to will him back to life.
“Harry! Harry!”
He squints toward the voice - his eyes have become strangely foggy like he's straining to peek through the dew that usually collects on the dorm windows in winter - and feels the wrinkled hand on his face.
“He’s back-” he forces himself to spit out, hearing it distantly. “Ced- he asked me to bring his body back.”
Body?
Yes, of course.
There’s wailing beside him, gut-wrenching enough to make his skin crawl, probably to keep it crawling for weeks. Dumbledore is saying something, and then there are new hands on him. A forceful, confident grip that leads him away from the noise, deeper into the nothingness. Beyond the green grounds, thick with evening fog, and through great valves made of cut, grey stone. A winding staircase blurs around him, and the faint moonlight cuts through the dim, stained glass and throws the hallway in deep shadows about them as they pass them by.
Mad-eye pushes Harry into the overfilled office. He finds himself staring at a picture, a figure ghastly white and dirty. A portrait of sweat-soaked hair and blood, a cut in the upper lip making a dark trail down his chin. A mirror. Harry stirs back into the now as Mad-eye prods at the drying cut in his arm - something is wrong, and Harry feels a stiffness in the air that shouldn’t be there.
“I told you to speak! What did you see?” Harry sees the wand pointed between his eyes, and there is a blinding, all-encompassing pain, so recent, so familiar, yet so unimaginably, horrifically new.
He writhes, tries in vain to escape it, claws at the stone floor until his fingers bleed, and wishes wholeheartedly for death. He dreams fleetingly of an exit he knows only exists when his body gives up.
And then, just as suddenly, the cruciatus curse ends, and all he can feel is the painful muscle spasms wracking through his body, the new, dull ache through his temple where he must have hit his head on the stone floor.
There’s movement; he sees the shoes running past through the nauseating haze to where he lies, and then he feels a curtain of dark hair dip into his view, a familiar crooked nose, blurry, out of focus but distinct.
“Potter?”
He distinguishes the drawl of Snape’s voice, but the tone sounds off. There’s a hand underneath the arm which he has rested on the floor, and Harry writhes. It hurts.
“Try to breathe. Keep your eyes open.”
Harry tries to follow orders, tries his hardest to match his breathing to the taps of Snape’s fingers on the floor, but manages only to hear Dumbledore shouting at not-Mad-eye.
“Severus! Veritaserum!”
Severus moves away from him with a small, awfully gentle pat on his upper arm, and another figure crouches close. He sees the glint of the glasses as she bows.
Harry tries to shut everything out. He does not want this, desperately wishes to be anywhere but here, doesn’t want to feel whatever is happening at this very instant, yearns to disappear and fall asleep. Perhaps he could, and maybe, if he were ever lucky, he’d escape ever having to wake up.
“Potter, look only at me. I need your help.”
McGonagall sounds like Harry has never heard her before - slight, uncertain. He tries to focus on the light timbre of her voice through the pain but can only hear the cackling of the stranger forced into some corner by Dumbledore and Snape. Harry tries to raise his hands to shield his ears. Through the pain, he manages to cover his one ear, but his strength fails him. He might as well be stopping his hearing with a sieve.
McGonagall nods, looking perturbed. “We need to leave, Harry.” There’s a hand on his elbow, and Harry protests against the touch, arches against the pain. Then he hears another screech from the corner, and his body seems to move out of its own volition. His limbs are like lead, and he drags them beneath himself, half crawling.
They make it a few slight paces outside the door before Harry folds. He wretches and heaves to the side, trying to find a ledge at the wall to hold on to. A hand rubs his back.
“I know,” McGonagall says, and then she says it anew. And again.
Harry dozes.
—-
Life is dull at Privet Drive.
He wakes sweaty, trembling, and cold under the blankets amidst the blazing heat. He glances and finds that the time is four pm. The light through the window hurts his head.
On second thought, just about everything hurts. Harry must have dreamt again because a heavy hand is banging at the door - the Dursleys have again taken to the multiple locks that are tedious to open.
“Shut the fuck up, Freak! I’m having friends over, so stop screaming for your fucking boyfriend already!”
Dudley’s always a delight. Harry finds he doesn’t mind the bolts on the door much at these particular moments - perhaps the bruises will manage to fade completely.
Harry gets a sudden urge to scream back and swallows it. If Dudley truly wanted to, he could open the damn door, and Harry certainly isn’t in any mood to tempt him.
Sighing, he folds over the side of the bed to reach a pile of clutter that he’s made beyond the bedside table. He palms at a book that’s been discarded and manages to get a grip on a corner of its front cover. A letter falls from where it had been lodged between its pages as he lifts it, and Harry sighs. It’s a letter he’d intended to send to Sirius but never got around to doing so. All the letters Harry had sent over the summer had been left unanswered. Sure, he’d gotten replies, but they were always dull word soups that he always found himself tossing in the bin.
Sending another one seemed rather pointless when the most he’d ever gotten out of the replies were apologies for being unable to say more. He’s found himself locked up in this house for the most of a month. He’d hoped that maybe one of the Weasleys would pick him up by the time July came around, but any anticipation of being out of this room had quickly extinguished after he’d sent his first few letters.
And now, it’s nearing his birthday, and he finds himself still stuck in this awful room without anything to do. Sure, he’s let out of it a few times per day to use the toilet and sometimes he even finds himself with enough time for a shower. Sometimes, he’s even let out of the house if Petunia and Vernon have somewhere else to be (They “don’t trust his sort in the house alone”). Harry can’t say he prefers this arrangement to the endless chores; it reminded him terribly of the summer after his first year at Hogwarts. Vernon, who had always hated him, expresses his displeasure for Harry’s existence with an unexpected, renewed vigour - he’d become much more blatantly brutal in his tactics. It showed in the way that Harry found himself with new bruises nearly every day, in the constant locks on the door, in his total opposition to ever seeing him anywhere near them. Harry wonders what has changed since last year
Worst of all, though, is the food. Although the cat flap through which Petunia usually slid Harry’s food is still in working order, it hasn’t found much use. He’s gotten a supper of an unopened can of Beans in Tomato Sauce (which he’d spent way more time and effort opening than it truthfully was worth) yesterday. But now, almost a full day later, his stomach growls more than Harry could ever remember it having. On top of this, he’s starting to get thirsty. He had a drink when he went to the bathroom in the morning, but his room seems to double as an impromptu sauna after middays, and Harry can feel the metallic taste on the roof of his mouth he’s come to associate with a parched throat.
His book, which he had just opened, has just as swiftly been forgotten, and instead, he settles for sliding off his bed to see if there might be anything to eat underneath that loose board on the floor. Fully in the know that it will be empty, - he’d eaten the last of the dry biscuits he stole from the downstairs pantry days ago - the familiar pang of disappointment strikes him, nonetheless.
Looking towards his discarded letter to Sirius still lying on the pile of clutter, he wonders if it was worth all the pity. Harry decides it is and sits down at his desk.
Can you send me something to eat?
/H.P
P.S. Have you done any of your summer homework yet? Do you know the answer to question five in the Potions Assignment? (The one about the dangers of Sulfur in Copper pots.)
After folding the short letter and addressing it to Ron, he puts it atop the pile of socks he’d left on his desk after finally starting the unpacking the other day. An all too familiar feeling of anger starts bubbling up. Who was he to care about Ron’s current happenings when no one seemed to care about him? Harry decides he has every right to be angry. Hopefully, Hedwig will return before he falls back asleep so he can send it before he changes his mind again.
Harry has found himself one blessing of his fourth summer back home, and it’s that the Dursleys haven’t boarded his window up, and Hedwig’s cage hasn’t been under lock and key once. Vernon hadn’t wanted another repeat of the Ford Anglia incident those years back.
Speaking of him, Harry can hear the voice of his surly uncle outside. The locks on the door juggle something terrible from outside, as Vernon seems to be in a right hurry to open it.
“You wretched freak!” Harry feels, rather than sees, as his uncle squeezes himself past the threshold, his big, looming steps cracking on the hardwood. Before Harry manages to react, there’s a firm grip around his throat, and he finds that he’d been planted against the back of his dresser so firmly that only the tips of his toes touch the ground.
Harry grips with one hand over Vernon’s and reaches with his other in a feeble attempt to claw, but a firm hit at his elbow diminishes his fight. His vision is starting to swim alarmingly, and it feels as though the bottom of his jaw might snap from the weight it’s carrying. Harry tries to plead with him, but only a gurgle escapes as he parts his lips.
Vernon finally lets go as dark spots begin to climb into his vision, and suddenly the world is upside down, and Harry is coughing and taking great, greedy breaths of air into lungs that at once seem the sizes of acorns. Harry can hear a great crash to the side of his head and realises the contents on his desk have been pushed to the side and off onto the floor in one big heap.
Before he can recognise that the world hasn’t unexpectedly turned entirely on its side, but that he’s lying on his floor, Harry’s torso has met Vernon’s boot twice. It causes the air to go out of him again like a balloon suddenly popped, and there is a resounding crack to the back of his head. He feels his neck snap backwards into the cabinet behind with the second contact.
“Keep that fucking noise down, boy, do you hear me?” Vernon is panting something mad, as though he had been the one who had taken a beating. Harry dares a look up through watering eyes. His uncle seems on the verge of saying something but apparently decides against it at the last minute and turns on his heel.
Then Harry can hear the chains rattling behind the door frame again, and he lays his brow back to rest against the floor.
There’s no food for him that day.