chapter four
It took time for Harry to adjust to his surroundings and become steady. It seemed as though he was in the hospital wing of Hogwarts, in one of the patient beds. He had been unconscious for a whole day after he’d been found by the third year classes which came to the herbology wing and found his unaware body, skull bleeding heavily. Harry was lucky to be alive. Ma’am Pomfrey told him that -had he been found any later- he’d be long dead but he knew better. That shard of- well he wasn’t sure who it was but that shard had kept him alive that long, without it he would’ve been dead before the medi-witch could do anything, long before he’d been found. He was grateful, yet disturbed. How could a shard of someone live inside of him? How had it saved him? Why was it there?
He had none of the answers to these questions.
As he laid in bed, contemplating the strange encounter with the shard, Draco came to visit him.
“What happened Harry?”, he asked, genuinely worried, “did Peeves drop something on you? I swear my father will get that poltergeist exorcized, he has been plaguing the school for way too long. This was the final straw, I can’t-”
“No”, Harry answered forcefully, “it wasn’t peeves, it was a student”
“A student? Who would dare do something like that, my father will see them expelled and-”
“No, Draco, listen, it was Dudley, my cousin. If he gets expelled, my relatives will force me to abandon Hogwarts. I can’t lose this”, he pleaded, “I can’t lose you, my first friend. It isn’t worth it”
“That damn mudblood”, Draco growled, his teeth gnashing against each other,“why do you even live with those damned muggles? It isn’t right for you to be stuck with them”
“I appreciate it but there is nothing you can do”, Harry’s gaze wandered downwards fixated on the sheets which he gripped tighter and tighter with his fingers.
“By merlin's socks, this can’t be”, Draco muttered under his breath, barely audible to Harry, “isn’t there anything… maybe there is?”
Before Harry could ask what his friend meant with that cryptic sentence, Draco ran away frantically, muttering something which Harry didn’t quite catch.
Over the next few days, more of his classmates came to his bedside, some bringing the notes from his classes, some simply wishing him a speedy recovery. When he was alone, he simply read. He read his books to get rid of the boredom of being alone, alone and yet not alone.
Whilst he was reading, Harry got visions, small memories which he viewed through a lens of red, like the eyes he’d seen in the darkness. Every now and then, he saw how someone did things, how they cast spells which Harry read about in his book, how they brewed potions under the watchful gaze of a professor who wasn’t snape, how that someone learned about their power to talk to snakes, how they discovered it was called parseltongue. With each passing memorie, he could remember more, do more. It was as if an entire life of witchcraft was pushed into his head, painfully slow. By the time he was allowed to rejoin the masses, he could feel a muscle memory not his own, which wished him to cast magic.