Chapter 20
“I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad
I miss the comfort in being sad
I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work.
Brooklyn’s too cold tonight
& all my friends are three years away.
My mother said I could be anything
I wanted -- but I chose to live.
the discomfort of healing.”
-- Tumlbr user fadedlovemp3, transscripted
.XoX.
Do you remember when you would break a cup as a child? A glass plate, a jar, a bowl -- something fragile that slips just past your fingers.
There’s a process about it, if you remember. If you dare to recall.
The initial push. Wide eyes and a parted mouth. A sharp gasp of anticipation.
The shattering is followed by a long stretch of silence. There is then the vocal realization that something is broken.
A tired, sadden exclamation: “Oh, no!” Maybe a ‘fuck!’, if you are old enough.
Oh, no. Yes. Harry Potter waking up from dying goes something like this.
.XoX.
Air is in his lungs, but his lungs, he thinks, are too greedy. Oxygen makes the flesh inside him itchy and itchy and itchy -- and there is nothing he can do about it.
Because having air in your lungs is unavoidable. It’s a part of being alive. And, yes. Thankfully, Harry is alive. (What an odd thought that is to have, after years of suicidal tendencies. He will have a lot of those in the following days -- months, years … -- odd thoughts.)
His skin, stretched strangely thin, feels odd, too. Numb. His head pounds painfully against his skull. His eyes, not yet open, are in a mountain of hurt.
He died. He’s woken up, alive, but… (something went wrong)... it’s like his pieces are all switched up.
Harry peeks open his eyes, squinting hard against the blinding light. His glasses are not against his face. Even so, he can tell clearly, whether it is from the familiar anesthetic scent of the place, or the faint, very faint, voice of Madame Pomfrey in the background, that this is the Hospital Wing.
Yes.
The Hospital Wing. He is not lost in a sea of sand -- or back at his parents’ house, wrapped up between them -- and Katherine… Katherine is just a story character. Rowena Ravenclaw…
Well, whatever. He’s not there with her, or with them, and he might have never been (though his mind can’t help but play around with the idea that it did happen; that Ravenclaw has laid puzzle pieces out for him and is just waiting for him to see the big picture) -- he’s at the Hospital Wing. The Ol’ Reliable.
He lets his eyes adjust to the light for a minute. Madame Pomfrey, he recognizes, is not alone. She’s talking to someone -- several someones -- but Harry can’t make out who they are. His ears feel as if they are filled with sand. This body rebuilt all wrong continues to fail him.
His face. He can feel his face clearly now.
There’s…
A bandage, wrapped around his head, right above his ears.
Oh. Yes. That. He should know where he got that. The circumstances of his death… he finds some memories do not want to be recalled.
He sits up slowly and quietly. Madame Pomfrey will notice that he’s up soon enough. He will be pounded with questions, concern. Will have to interact with people, for sure, but that is only when Madame Pomfrey notices he’s up and right now, she doesn’t.
Harry’s hand fumbles in its quest to paw at the bandages. He wants to peel them off, take a look at the damage, see if it can jog his memory. His hands shake too much and instead, his fingertips flitter across metal.
Harry’s eyebrows furrow.
Metal…
He concentrates. He maneuvers his hands -- cold chunks of flesh he considers barely attached to his body -- to the metal. It’s on both sides of his hhead… like a ring, around his head. What’s the word for that? There is a word for that.
Oh. Crown.
He’s wearing a crown.
He lifts it off his head gingerly. He turns it around so the front of it faces him, thinking idly that, no, it’s not just a crown, it’s… it’s a crown subset. Not a coronet. A tiara? No…
It’s a diadem. He remembers asking Luna to embroider one on the hem of his dress shirt. It was an out of character request, not that he thinks about it.
But that is a train of thought at the back of his head. His hands are covered with ash -- the diadem is covered in it -- but that, too, is secondary.
There is a crest, decorated, at the edges, with jewels, and it’s the crest that concerns him.
Ravenclaw’s crest.
Rowena Ravenclaw’s crest.
(A familiar voice.
“You cannot hide forever. Get up, Harry. To think about what I said you must first believe what I said.
“But not now.
“There are a few things… other things, we must get out of the way first.
“An apology, Harry. This is going to hurt.”)
And all of a sudden, like seeing this has just slapped him in the face, he remembers. He knows. The circumstances of his death have avoided him before but now they come rushing back full force. He remembers seeing Luna in danger. Rushing to save her and moving too quick yet not fast enough and then he was with his parents -- no.
No. Then he died.
And then he was with his parents, in his home, in his kitchen, in a field of sand that stretched as far as the eye could see. And it was real. Ravenclaw was real and their conversation was real and to that, he is gripped with a strong and unwarranted certainty.
He died and woke up and there are many things in between.
He remembers how he died. Harry wonders how he could ever forget.
And the pain. The pain of it all, of dying, of being forcibly resurrected -- the unfathomable, unbearable pain of it all. His chest overflows with the force of it all and he interrupts his shocked silence by unhinging his jaw.
He unhinges his jaw, then screams.
.XoX.
The next few days he spends rarely lucid and rarely alone. He is given potions and a ‘stay in bed’ order.
He is also given the story of how it happened: Luna sees him die. Luna grabs him up in her arms, comes running out of the forest, and the next two and a half hours are spent trying to resuscitate him.
At the end of the third, he is declared dead.
“It should be impossible,” Madame Pomfrey tells him, frowning. “My diagnostic spells are never wrong -- not that we aren’t glad you’re okay, of course.”
“Of course,” he echoes weakly.
She is of the opinion that he never died. Harry comes to the quick realization that it’s not a widely accepted one. Though his visitors are sorted through and allowed only when he is declared okay-enough to meet them in the moment, people, as Madame Pomfrey might say, talk.
He holds a Prophet newspaper in his hands. The headline ‘STUDENT DIED IN TRIWIZARD TOURNAMENT -- AND CAME BACK? GELLERT INVOLVEMENT SPECULATED’ screams out at him before the newspaper is torn out of his hand by Madame Pomfrey.
“Silly rumours,” she says, placing a tray of food in front of him. “Best to avoid the post for a while, I’d think.”
“What are they talking about?” he asks.
“Slow news day,” she suggests.
She’s lying. Harry does not buy it. “Those are serious accusations. What does Gellert have to do with anything? Is it -- is it the fact that I died? Is that it?”
She presses her lips together in a thin line. “They don’t know,” she says at last.
“More rumours,” he finishes.
“Yes. More rumours and just rumours -- best not to worry about them.” Harry sees the tenseness in her shoulders and thinks, soundly, that it’s something to ask around about. Maybe he’s ask Tom.
If Tom ever returns…
“That’s enough of that, now.” She pats his head. “Eat up. We’ll talk later.”
She walks off and Harry looks at the tray in front of him.
Food.
Right. Food. A sore subject as of late. He’d thought, after the time he hid away in the corridors of Hogwarts, starving himself, that his immediate response to trauma or stress would be restriction. His disorder is two sided and he was hoping for one to shine through.
Unfortunately, he takes to binging. EDNOS has never liked working in his favor. He eats everything Madame Pomfrey sets out from him and tells himself, firmly, that he won’t eat anything more. And then ten minutes later, he will crawl out of his bed, possessed by a man much more starving than he, and dig through the trash to find the very parcels he’d tossed out earlier.
He has always been a binger, one of the less glamorous parts of his disorder, but the amount he’s been eating lately has been absurd, even for him. He is constantly bloated and never fully hungry before he goes scouring for food again. He tries to purge and when he fails, he spends the rest of the day clutching his stomach in pain and ignores how Madame Pomfrey looks at him.
There is shame here. He hates it. He wants to retreat, take to his behaviours in private. He is not given the chance. Pomfrey does not know how long the healing process will take. “It’s been a while since I’ve treated a patient in such critical condition.”
Harry thinks she’s never treated a patient like him. And he, begrudgingly, allows her to do whatever magic she needs, despite its inconvenience. He does not know the effect dying will have on the body and, from the way he feels, it’s nothing good.
He mentions the discomfort to Madame Pomfrey one evening. “I don’t feel at home in my body,” he says. “Like incorrectly tailored clothes.” The pain, at least, has gone away. Harry attributes that to Pomfrey’s steady supply of pain potions than any real healing.
Pomfrey paused. “What?”
Harry stares up at her. She’s reapplying the guaze around his head. “Is that supposed to happen?” he asks.
“Is… is it a dissociation thing, Harry? I’m sorry. I wish I was a mind healer, Harry.” And she does. Something about her affection, her care, toward Harry is motherly. He would reject it. But he wants a mother he can’t allow himself to have, so he doesn’t.
Harry is quite sure it’s not a dissociation thing, the way air makes his blood irritated, the way his bones feel too rough for his joints. (He is feeling the mental side effects of dying, too, and they are nothing like this.) He’s also not quite sure what she’s supposed to do about it. Her treatment has helped the wound he sustained, sure. But anything else…
Anything else is like spitting on a grease fire. It’s a kind effort -- that he will welcome! Will allow! A lamination not rejected! -- as well as a useless one.
She shakes his head, looking back down at his lap. “It’s alright,” he says. “I’m sure it will pass.”
She secures the gauze. “Alright, Harry. I’m going to bed now. If you need anything, you know where my door is.”
“Alright,” Harry repeats softly. “Alright.”
He watches her retreat. Luna’s eyes, wide, frightened, come to mind.
He has died. It is hard on him. He cannot imagine how hard it is on Luna. He imagines her, scooping him up in her arms. Blood splattered on her face and on her clothing. Screaming, something guttural coming from her throat. Maybe she’d be sad. Sad that things -- rough, so rough -- between them and now, they’d never get a chance to fix them.
It’s hard for him and it’s hard, it’s gotta be, for Luna.
And it’s gotta be hard for her, too, Madame Pomfrey. Watching him self destruct after normal destruction with only her feeble damage control as comfort. “Pomfrey?” he calls out.
She pauses in the doorway. “Mhm?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, what he really wants to say choking up in his chest, “for ending up in here again. I said I wouldn’t.”
Pomfrey swallows. “In your defense,” she says, gently, “it’s not your fault.”
“Not this time, no.”
Pomfrey closes the door behind her. Harry was not able to say it. But he thinks she knows it anyway.
.xox.
Harry receives a lot of letters. Cedric tells him that he and Julian will come visit later, “whenever that hawk eyed Pomfrey starts letting people in.” Luna echos the sentiment and Harry winces.
There is no word from Marvolo.
There is also a letter from his parents. He stuffs it into the bottom of his trunk -- moved into the infirmary for this time being there for the sake of convenience -- and refuses to look at it. (His heart aches when he does so and he doesn’t think it’s a byproduct of the whole being dead thing.)
Luna. His parents. Ravenclaw. Tom. Dying, pain, death. He has been thinking about the same things lately, on loop. His despair -- around all the subjects -- threatens to consume him.
He does try his hand at being productive. Though Pomfrey assures him often that incomplete schoolwork will not be held against him, the pile of it is growing in his trunk. But he grows tired -- and weary -- of sitting with only his thoughts and self loathing for company, so he does try to complete it.
It’s just that… Whatever he is trying to do here, whatever is trying to be taught to him, slips off his mind like oil. He starts off his day trying to ignore how Tom still isn’t back and how that’ his fault and how he has traumatized Luna and his parents and how people think he’s evil because he’s still alive and how Rowena’s diadem sits in the desk of his drawer. He continues his day by picking up his quill to write an easy for Snape and ends it like he always does; huddling over his journal, writing.
It is one of the few things he can manage recently, writing is. It feels as easy as breathing once did, and he thinks how silly it is that dying is what pulled him from his writer’s slump.
He writes his main novel with an invigorated speed and a new outlook. He also writes poems, small pieces of prose, that spill out of him. A common topic of these are the one incident, a few days after waking up in the Hospital Wing, surrounded by worried friends and strangers and enemies alike, alongside the… You know. “Whole being dead thing.”
Pomfrey had been telling him, persistently, not to take the bandage off his head. Harry does not know when it needs to be removed, and when it does need to be removed, she’ll be the one to do it, thank you very much.
And Harry listens because Madame Pomfrey does know best and he has no reason not to allow her this.
But.
But he is curious. What it looks like. Because he can recall -- too vividly, perhaps -- what happened. A giant spike whose origins are still under investigation stabbing through his skull -- yes. He remembers. He’s just… never got a good look of it, is all.
He studies himself in the mirror, getting ready for bed. He ignores his pale, sickly (dead) skin. He ignores his eyes -- eyes that look fake fake fake, clear evidence that SOMETHING WENT WRONG -- and instead studies the bandage that stretches a loop across his forehead.
One look, he thinks. (A regretful thought. He’s made so many mistakes lately. He wants to take them all back and will instead be taking them to the grave.) One look couldn’t hurt, right? And long as he puts the bandage back as soon as he’s done.
One look couldn’t hurt.
He peels the gauze off slowly, watching his expression in the mirror. Will it be an angry red? Already scabbing? Will it look like an aggravated belly button? Harry snorts at the thought.
The gauze hangs limply in his hand. Harry turns his head to get a better look at the wound.
All laughter dies in his throat.
He can see through it. His head. He sees strands of flesh -- of brain -- stretch themselves out, working themselves back to completion. His mind is healing and he can still see through it. Like his head is full of cobwebs.
He raises a shaking hand and, without even realizing he is doing it, sticks a pinky into the hole. He feels strands of his brain spasm around the intrusion and work around it. Adapting.
That’s… That’s not normal. He should not be able to do that, to just do that. A Muggle would be dead and he bets every other wizard than him would be, too.
Madame Pomfrey’s healing skills are superb. But… they’re not superb like this. Madame Pomfrey, he tells himself, is an advanced witch. And Rowena Ravenclaw….
Well. She is, too.
.xox.
He wakes up one evening, maybe a week days after… after everything, and looks up at his nightstand. There is a black journal with the Weepers mark and Tom Riddle’s name on it.
“Huh,” he says, to himself. He wonders when Tom got back to him. He will celebrate it later -- hound it for answers, hound him with concern -- but right now, his head feels fuzzy. He wants to just go back to bed, to sleep forever, to see his mom and dad again…
“Recovering well, I hope?”
Harry’s eyes snap open, fully aware that wait, Tom is BACK and he’s sitting right here and-- and he flings himself into a sitting person--
Only to see Tom is not sitting in the chair beside his bed, but Dumbledore. Albus Dumbledore.
Harry slumps in his chair, staring at his Headmaster dully. Pomfrey is still prohibiting visitors -- especially so after hours -- but he supposes, in Hogwarts, Dumbledore is an exception wherever Dumbledore damn well pleases.
Dumbledore’s legs are crossed in the chair. His interlocked fingers rest on top of his knee. He is looking at Harry, but the expression is indechirable.
“You don’t look all too happy to see me,” notes Dumbledore. He tilts his chin toward the night table. “Almost, if I may presume to say so, as if you were expecting to see someone else.”
Harry sniffs. He reaches over to his glasses, slipping them on his face, careful to avoid brushing the still sore spots on his head. They have healed over well, but Harry suspects they will scar. He frowns at his forearms, determined not to look him in the eyes.
“It’s just that,” says Harry, frowning deeper at the weight he’s gained, “we don’t talk much, Headmaster.”
“No,” says Dumbledore. “We don’t, do we?”
Harry swallows. He thinks of the newspaper. My Death Has Something To Do With Gellert richoents through his mind and he asks anyway, “Why are you here?”
“Here to prep you for the onslaught of reporters trying to make their way in, if I had to put a word to action.” (He sounds like a liar.)
“Reporters?” Harry asks, dubious. People talk, thinks Harry.
The light catches on his spectacles. “I admit, I, too was curious when rumour came around. They’ve started calling you ‘The Boy Who Lived.’ It’s got a catch to it, don’t you think?”
“Curious,” he repeats blankly.
“And worried. Though, as I said, you seem to be recovering well.”
“But you’re not here for that,” says Harry, all of a sudden certain. “And -- and…” and Dumbledore sounds like a liar, he is one, “And I don’t think you’re here to prep me, either, for some interrogation. I think this… this is its own interrogation.”
Dumbledore stares at him a moment. “Maybe. I mean no offense.”
“Offenseful people hardly ever do.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Harry shrugs his shoulders. “So. What do you want to know?”
“I have,” says Dumbledore, “a professional curiosity, you might say, in you.”
“You never have before,” Harry counters.
“No. I never have before. You had not died before.”
“You’re believing that rubbish?” Harry says, scoffing.
“I do not believe that it’s rubbish,” says Dumbledore simply. “Say, Harry. Is there anything you would like to tell me? About your death?”
Harry swallows and he wants to say No. I am not dead, I do not die. I don’t know what you’re talking about. But he looks at Tom’s journal on the nightstand and knows that he will scarcely get a chance to talk about it.
Tom is nice but Harry is lonely, and Harry is lonely now.
“I saw something,” Harry says. His voice does not sound his own. But, then again, often it doesn’t.
Dumbledore tilts his head. “You saw something?”
“When I died. I saw something.” Maybe somethings and a few someones.
But he’s not sure why he’s telling this to Dumbledore. He’s, on second thought, one of the worst people to tell. He is a stranger. He is a stranger and a war general and war generals taking an interest in Harry has never ended well for him in the past.
“What did you see?” Eager. There is urgency in his voice. What does it matter that Harry died, what Harry saw? His professional curiosity is not, Harry thinks, with him.
It’s with death. And death (had a lot to do with Harry) has nothing to do with him.
“I saw nothing, Headmaster. And I think I’m going to go back to bed.”
He turns on his side, lying back down, bringing the blankets back up to his growing body. He closes his eyes and waits.
Dumbledore stares at the back of his form a moment before rising, taking the dismissal as it is. “Alright, then.” It is said serenely, but Harry’s no fool. There is no acceptance here. “And,” he adds, “tell your ghost Tom I said hi.”
.XoX.
“will you love me,
in the morning?
I am
filled
with deep despair.
I create poetry from my guts
and my heart beats too small to my chest
but,
still,
will you love me,
in the morning?
By the end of the Lord,
The world wept.
And the Lord wrote:
If we were made to live,
and die,
together
(and we were)
Then,
my friend.
We have succeeded.”
-- Harry Potter, “Four of Pentacles.”