Meaning Nothing
Dear Harry,
Things are going well over at my place of hiding, both for me and Witherwings. I suspect he’s missing you. I imagine he’d taken a bit of a liking to you since your days back at school, though it can’t be much fun for him not being able to fly as he used to at Hagrid’s. How are things at yours? Are you holding up okay?
Congratulations, by the way! How does it feel to turn fifteen? I’m sorry we couldn’t see you on your birthday. I expect we’ll be meeting soon enough. We’ll throw a real party then, okay, pup?
Ronald mentioned you were asking for sweets for your birthday, so I’ve sent some along for you. I hope this message reaches you before July’s up. We can sit down and look through some of your remaining summer coursework if you’d like. Fair warning - Potions was never my speciality, but I’ve heard rumours I’m not half-bad at Transfiguration.
Best regards. I’ll see you soon.
Snuffles.
Harry sighs. He’s been gifted chocolate frogs and Bertie-botts beans from Sirius, which he’s only had the mind to disregard the urge to throw in the trash thanks to the unbearable pain in his stomach.
Besides the birthday wish, Sirius’ letter sounded the same as every other of his letters had so far. There were always vague pleasantries and promises of an upcoming reunion.
Only, this reunion had already been assured to Harry when they’d met at the start of the summer as being “any day now”, and yet August has finally come around without much of a change. Harry tries swallowing the forming, uncomfortable lump in his throat but finds it only hurting him differently. The bruise around his throat has taken on a deep purple over the days, and his tongue seems permanently stuck to the roof of his mouth from the swelling in his jaw. When he’d tried to mouth down a few of the colourful beans, his eyes had started watering unpleasantly.
He’s passed the morning opening the chocolate frogs and stuffing them unceremoniously into a little plastic bag for later, more intrigued by the cards. So far, he’s gotten two Dumbledores, who twinkle their eyes in his direction as if to taunt him with the phrase “I know I put you here”, not leaving their frames until Harry manages to crack their little paper smiles between the palms of his hands.
The other cards weren’t so bad; He’s decided to keep the bronze-embellished card of Cornelius Agrippa, which Harry knows with certainty that Ron has been dying to collect for years, and a card with a sour-looking woman named Bathilda Bagshot, which Harry was already familiar with from his studies. The other three he’s opened so far were already in his collection.
Harry pauses in his pointless musings, hearing the telltale clatter downstairs that always spoke of breakfast. He lays his head down on Sirius’ letter on his desk in a kind of silent prayer for a bit of proper food. Hell, even a cup of lukewarm tea sounds divine. He’s parched.
No such luck. When the little clock on Harry’s bedside strikes eleven, he crawls back into his bed atop his covers, hoping for some sleep. Of course, he rarely does much else but sleep, and as such, he wastes away looking at the ceiling for several hours until Hedwig returns with both Ron and Hermione’s letters and gifts in the afternoon.
Ron, whose letter also contains a short, pondering greeting from Mrs Weasley about his food intake, comes with a pouch of cheese bagels and biscuits. Hermione doesn’t say much of anything in her one-page, meandering note, but she’s sent along some of Honeyduke's chocolates from both of them.
There’s still no talk of any set date to come and get him out of this miserable room. Suddenly enraged anew, hearing Dudley’s persistent fighting with Petunia from downstairs about getting some money for his supposed snacks for friends, Harry chucks the bloody chocolates in the bin, hunger be damned. He kicks the table leg of his desk for good measure, but all that accomplishes is more fury and an aching foot.
Harry is tired. So very tired.
Time passes, and yet it does not pass. On what must be a new day, he is let out into the bathroom for half an hour for a much-needed shower, and he finds himself with half a can of chopped tomatoes stuffed in his hand (most likely residue from that day’s cooking) before there’s the commonplace turn of a lock.
Harry sleeps some more, tries reading a little, then paces back and forth the two and a half steps he can thread in there until Uncle Vernon slams on his door to “Stop that!”
Below the ever-feeling hopelessness, Harry finds the dormant anger simmer again, taking a new life of its own, like a monster waiting to crawl through his stomach and devour the house and everything within it. Harry wants so badly to be at the Burrow right this moment. He’s sure he’d be able to chop off one of his limbs with the serrated edge of the can lid if that was what it took to get out of here. Of course, that wouldn’t change anything, but Harry finds himself staring listlessly at its edge, dreaming of the brooms - a chase of tennis balls with Ginny in the air or playing chaser with Ron as a keeper between the tall trees in the orchard.
Harry shakes his head as if he’s swatting a very irritating fly and resumes pacing, even if only to feel a slither of triumph when he hears his uncle haul himself off the sofa downstairs in anger an hour later.
Eventually, when he sees the looming red of the sky outside, Harry lays himself down atop his covers and wills himself to some more sleep.
When he wakes again, it’s from the sound of the cat flap slamming back on its hinges. The tray seems to contain a warm plate of leftover Lasagna, and he finds that it is. He gulps the whole meal down very quickly. So quickly that afterwards, Harry worries he might be sick. He wills it to stay down, and after an hour, the uncomfortable feeling lessens, and his energy seems to spike.
Harry dares to hope that maybe this would be a bearable day. Perhaps even a good day.
Harry resumes his usual pacing for another couple of hours merely to have something to do, but Vernon does not get up to complain. After that, he sits back down on the side of his bed and stares at the floor for a good hour. Boredom is rising again with renewed vigour, and it’s a restlessness that almost makes his very bones feel itchy, but just as he is contemplating whether to jump out of the window and risk a sprained ankle and a later beating, he hears the rattle at the door.
“Out, boy. Me and Petunia are going out. Don’t want to see you set one of your feet on as much as the curb before we get back, you hear me?”
Harry, who had sprung up at once, starts searching for his trainers, which he knows are hidden somewhere under the wrappings. His wand is already in the back pocket of his jeans.
“You speak to me when prompted, you hear me?”
Harry whips around. The door is opening, and the light from the landing is blocked by Vernon's figure. A retort has passed his lips before he can stop it. “I’ll talk as much as I like, thanks.”
The crack rings through his ears before he feels it, and he senses the iron taste from the blood dripping down his nose.
“Don't talk.”
There is a tight grip around his upper arm, and Harry knows from the fierceness of Vernon’s hand that it will bruise. Vernon looks at his face carefully and seems to find what he is looking for because he gives a final little nod and a tight smirk before he lumbers out of the room ahead of Harry.
He stops quickly at the loo to take big, greedy gulps of water and bundles of paper to hold against his nose before rushing past the hallway. He feels overjoyed at the prospect of seeing anything but those four walls for a few hours.
The sun is pelting heat above him, and Harry, who can’t figure out what to do with all this sudden free time, walks along aimlessly under the feverish warmth. He eventually settles down in the shade at the park once he’s worked away the restlessness in his legs.
He breathes in and out. A stitch in his side has begun, but he hasn’t even been walking especially fast. His head hurts, and he can feel a tickle in his fingers like he’s recently held something very tight in them for many hours.
Harry finds himself painfully hungry despite the earlier, big meal. The ache still prickles his side when he breathes, and his parched throat seems to have swollen even more since the morning. He feels a total, absolute misery.
And then Dudley and his gang find him, and Harry’s just so angry. All his wand does to Dudley’s goons is to make them laugh, but it seems like the cousin might fall over just from the thought of Harry hexing him.
A quiet chill starts spreading, and it takes him over so quickly that Harry briefly wonders if he's been showered in ice-cold rainwater, and a sudden cloud swells in the distance that swallows up the last rays of sun peeking through the treetops. It turns abruptly dark as if in the early stages of an evening, and for a stupid, brief time, Harry wonders if it might be him who is starting an early winter.
But as he lowers his wand and a calm confusion washes over him, the frigidness comes in with steady waves, and the hair on the back of Harry’s neck starts prickling.
“Run, Dudley! Run!”
They do. Harry feels them before he sees them. There would not be long until they’re in their neighbourhood, not long until they can get behind the front door and -
Life is ending. There is a familiar scream somewhere in the depths of his mind, and cloaked figures are close - so very close, and Harry knows they will touch them any second. The aching sense of dread starts building from a central part somewhere in his torso, steadily until it feels all-consuming, so deep it's almost painful.
Harry calls for his patronus, he feverously starts searching for anything to conjure him forth even though his very bones ache in a plea to give up. He thinks of Ron and Hermione but sees nothing but anger. He recalls his parents as he’d seen them in the mirror of Erised, but then they make their visage back in the graveyard with the Priori Incantatem, and with it comes along the image of Cedric, with his glassy eyes, unmoving, unseeing before him.
Just when he thinks there’s no use, when he’s sure the kiss will take him, there is a final, blessed pull within him.
Just another day.
Prongs burst forth.
Harry breathes heavily as the stag lowers its head to nuzzle his cheek with its incorporeal, pale body, and there is another voice in the distance. It’s feminine - distantly, he can hear the rhythmic sound of slippers bouncing off the pavement. He knows that voice. It felt feels comforting, familiar.
He can’t muster the strength to lift his head off the blessedly cool pavement, for although he’d only seconds ago felt frozen to the marrow from the Dementors, he is suddenly feeling very hot.
The voice above him is spewing some ugly curses about someone named “Mundungus”, who supposedly was to guard Nr. 4 Privet Drive tonight.
He flinches when a hand brushes his shoulder, but the touch is frail and gentle. It’s Calming.
“Mrs Figg”, he breathes, both in wonder and alarm. He has to force his head to turn to its side and peel his heavy eyelids apart. “W- you doin’ here? Now?”
Her voice above him trembles. “Keep a steady grip on your wand, Harry. Can you get up? We need to help your cousin.”
He hears the retching behind him. Dudley seems to be alive. After what seems like many years, Harry manages to scrape himself off the sidewalk with some success. He feels an awful lot like putty.
When they eventually turn the corner, a mostly unresponsive Dudley over his arm and the rustle of Mrs Figg’s coat nagging Harry’s quickly dwindling patience, he sees the familiar car parked in the driveway in the distance.
Harry sighs. This day had decidedly not been a “good day.”