Harry Potter wakes up alone.

He doesn't notice the eerie quiet of the house at first. He appreciates it once he does. He sleeps in just a little longer, working on summer homework as the locks on his door remain blissfully untouched.

It's calm. He's hungry, but that's fine, because he always is. He gets to lounge about and rest instead of gardening in the hot sun. 

He hadn't slept well because Cedric Diggory's body lies behind his closed eyes. So he's tired and hungry, but that's fine. He always is.

By noon worry is birthed. Not because he hadn't been dragged out of his room yet, but because he hadn't heard anything in the Dursely house. There is no video game bleeping from Dudley's room, no rustling in the kitchen to make lunch from Petunia. There is not anything.

The silence graduates from calming to deafening. He herds the courage to bang on his door and yell. I would like to use the bathroom, he screams. Please let me out, he says. He screeches until his throat is raw and his hands are bruised purple.

Night comes without change. It comes without noise. Harry resorts to pissing in the corner and the smell is terrible but not at all as terrible as the nagging feeling of abandonment engulfing him.

Day two is no different, and worry wraps his heart. He has never been left alone for this long. He tries to scream for help, again, this time out the window. His throat is parched and his mouth dry. He cannot scream loud. He's thirsty and he's so, so hungry.

On the third day, Harry chooses life. He places his hand to the locked door and weeps, magic coursing through him and his tears. Open, he demands. 

It does. 

He scrambles down the stairs and into the kitchen. He grabs a glass from the cabinet and fills it with water from the sink. He gulfs it down and immediately goes in for a second one. He moves onto the bread, cheese, and lunch meat and makes a sloppy sandwich to scarf down. He, even as he does this, is not distracted from the real issue: The fact that he was left for dead.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and grabs the house phone. Petunia, he decides. I'll call Petunia and figure out where they went. Because they must've left, quietly and late at night. They must have gone out on a trip, somewhere. It fits. God, he hopes it fits.

He dials her number and waits. And then he hears it, faintly, dimly, but there. Petunia's ringtone. Her phone. Upstairs, in her, room. She hadn't left. She knows better than to leave her phone unaccompanied. 

He walks the staircase with slow, hesitant steps, as if being silent would help undo what he thinks has been done.

Harry opens the door to Vernon and Petunia's bedroom. What hits him first is the smell -- like rot. Like rot, piss, and death. What hits him second is the fact that he had chosen life when he opened his door. Life that did not extend to them.

He grabs Petunia's still ringing phone off the nightstand and rejects his call. They must have died in their sleep. He wondered if it was painless. Wonders if any death at all is.

He places the back of his hand to Vernon's face. It's cold. It's cold and dead.

He removes his hand and walks out the room. He doesn't notice that Petunia's phone is still in his hand, but that's fine, too. She won't mind. She can't.

Harry walks into Dudley's room. It's the same situation there, too; a body that had been lifeless during sleep. Sunken in eyes and pale to purplish skin.

He grabs Dudely's 3DS. "You won't mind me taking this, will you?" he asks toward Dudley's corpse. It's not funny. He doesn't laugh, but he does take the game console.

Harry considers calling 911. He decides against it, though, because anything involving him is more a magic matter than a Muggle one. He grabs his wand, wondering if he'll get in trouble for underage magic for this, too, and decides to send it to the Minister. He wanted to send it to Dumbledore but.. But Dumbledore had said he'd be safe. 

"Huh--" he coughs. His throat works against him, sore from disuse. "Harry Potter here," he tries again. "My..." and he's hesitant, he realizes, to call them his family. He thinks of every session of Harry Hunting, every day he spent with the sun beating down on his back while working outside. Thinks of them calling his parents drunks. Lying to him for most of his life thus far. He's hesitant to call them family because they aren't, really. They never were. "My relatives are dead. I don't know what to do."

His Patronus is off and he sits on the curb while he waits.

He realizes he's crying. Why am I crying? he thinks. I didn't even like them. 

He didn't, that's true, but repeating that fact doesn't make the tears stop. He feels the familiar burden of abandonment heavy on his tongue; accusations of 'you left me here all alone,' making themself known. He's been abandoned again, so he cries.

His parents died for him, but his other relatives just died. It's not the same. It feels like it.

Fudge appears not a few minutes later with an array of Aurors and medi-witches. He is badgered with questions he can longer remember his answer to and checked over for injuries. Some woman hugs him and another looks at him as if he's a murderer.

 He asks Dumbledore later if it was Voldemort who killed his second family. Dumbledore doesn't look at him when he says "It couldn't have been, my boy."

Why won't you look at me? Why did I cry when I didn't even like them?

He moves in with the Weasley's and Co., at Grimmauld Place that evening. He does not eat much, or talk much. He moves about the dusty home like a ghost; like a walking skeleton. Sleep that had previously avoided him now trails him (like a ghost.) He sleeps all day.

Those few moments when he is awake, some treat him like he is glass; fragile, in constant danger of shattering. He truthfully cannot blame them. Fred and George play pranks on him, and he appreciates the effort. Appreciates that they try and act as if everything is fine, and normal, but he cries one evening after they trap him in a closet, because everything is not fine. Is not normal.

He sits on the stairs one night and feeds Hedwig treats with tired hands. He supresses a flinch when Hermione joins him, watching him with an ever observitive gaze. He thinks she'll ask what everyone else does and he will respond how he always does, which is to say, not at all. Are you okay? Do you need to talk? Can I get you something to eat? I'm sorry this all happened. I worry for you.

But Hermione is smart. She exceeds expectations and probably knows his answers before he moves to voice them. "Are you going to play Quidditch next year?" she asks. "I think the team won't be the same without you."

Harry had not thought about such trivial things in quite some time. He likes it, though. The change of pace. "I..." he starts. "I guess so."

"Really?" 

"Really." He pets Hedwig. "I don't want to abandon it for some... dumb mental stuff. I don't want to give up something I'm good at because of death."

If Hermione would anyone else, she might protest that what he is going through and feeling is not to be dismissed. It's not dumb. But Hermione is Hermione, so she says, "But you'll need energy to fly -- won't you?"

Harru stares at his bony hands and thinks of the guilt and stomach acid knawing at him and says, "Suppose so." He feels no need to eat when his head is filled with those two long days trapped alone, abandoned, when his mind is occupied by the stolen game console of the dead.

But for Quidditch. He could eat for Qudittich. 

His fifth year starts soon after that. He eats more, talks less, and finds himself practically dragging himself through classes. He sleeps at every desk he can and just sits and stares blankly in classes he can't. He tries to attend Quidditch matches but he's soon dropped from the team. He is exhausted and doesn't understand why -- he sleeps all the time, what's the issue here?

Teachers, for the most part do not punish him for his behaviour. They let him sleep and wake him up at the end of the period gently. They ask about his failing grades, offer tutors and advice, and only look at him with pity when he says nothing in response.

McGonagall is different, though. She pesters him about his schoolwork -- doesn't he know that OWLS are this year? -- and calls him into her office for tea and tells him stories about the parents he never got to meet that unsurprisingly only make him feel worse.

Snape is another who acts like everything is the same as before. He yells at Harry about impotence, arrogance, and his dead fucking father, and Harry is lucky enough to not comprehend most of it through his foggy head. But one evening he hears it -- every last, venom soaked word, dripping with undeserved hatred.

And he -- though he wishes he hadn't -- bursts into tears. Snape only sneers at him through narrowed eyes. "Your pity trickery has everyone else fooled, but not me. I see you for what you are, Potter," he says, and Harry wishes he would've asked what he saw, what Harry truly is, because he isn't sure he himself knows at all. But instead he just cries harder and even the Slytherins stop laughing at him.

Ron rubs his back comfortingly and Harry leans into the touch. He thinks about lonely nights trapped in his cupboard because James and Lily sacrificed themselves, thinks about barred windows on doors that shouldn't have been his -- and he wishes he could be angry that Snape thought it wise to disgrace the dead he oh so wishes were alive. He wishes he could be mad, and then isn't. 

"Please," he says through hiccups, "please leave me alone." 

"Fifty House points from Gyrffindor," is Snape's reply. 

Hermione stands up from her seat and shoots a stining hex at Snape. She gets two months detention but doesn't regret a thing. Harry has never been more grateful and only wishes he could express it better.

Dolores Umbridge is a bitch, but she is a bitch who lets him blank out in class. She tuts at his missed homework assignments and spouts ideals that Cedric's death disproves. She is horrible and cruel and terrible and all the rest -- but she does not bother him if he keeps his mouth shut. He lets his beliefs get drug through the mud because he is simply too tired to do anything else.

The other students are sometimes compassionate and other times vile -- not that it matters, though, because at some point they all start to blur.  At some point they stop beating a dead horse; stop trying to win at a game he isn't playing. His peers leave him alone eventually. They still talk about him behind his back, because he's Harry Potter. How could they not?

It does not get easier, the death. The feel of his Uncle's cold body under his fingertips haunts him. Those two days in his room without food or water wake him up at night. It does not get easier, but life goes on. It always does.

Harry burns the 3DS he stole in the commonroom's fireplace one night. "I can't return it to him," he says through tears to Ron and Hermione, who sit at his side. Why do I want to return it to him? "This -- this is the closest I can get."

Hermione wraps an arm around him  and tells him "Dudely would appreciate it." If he could.

Harry had thought a million times over now that he has cried so much, he should not have any more tears left to shed. He has proven himself wrong a million times over, too. "I don't even know who killed them," he says. "I don't even know if it matters."

"We -- we can help you look into it," said Ron, glancing at Hermione. "If it'd help."

And he almost takes the offer. Justice tastes sweet and would it not be deserved? 

But. "It wouldn't help," Harry says. "Thank you, though. I love you guys."

They huddle together until the fire turns to embers and sleep overcomes them.

Harry dreams that night of the Ministry through a snake's eyes -- he dreams of biting Arthor Weasley in the neck and leaving him for dead. He sees the blood and knows that there will be a corspe in its place very soon unless he gets help. 

He wakes with a shout and explains to McGonagall that a life is at stake. He knows what he saw, knows it was real. But he has woken too many times screaming and sobbing about one death or another, so they give him hot chocolate and tell him to go back to bed. He does not sleep and wrinkles his nose at every comfort Ron and Hermione try to give.

When Arthor Weasley is found dead in the morning, Harry is surprised to find himself angry and ranting, red in the face. He shouts that it is the fault of everyone who refused to believe him, of every student who convinced him not to go to the Ministry himself, of every fucking soul who chose disbelief.

He stops ranting and apologizes when Hermione starts to cry, but he does not feel like crying with her anymore. From then on, he's not sure the anger ever leaves. It's better than sadness, he tells himself. Unsure, though, if that's entirely true.

Arthor Weasley was close to a father for him -- the closest thing he'll ever have, and now he has exited the land of the living. 

Harry stops sleeping all the time. He talks more and eats less. He does his work and snaps at people in class. He gets detentions with Umbridge and almost fights Snape, because he does not take well to those who disgrace the dead. He stops saying I love you and is talked about to his face again.

McGonagall stops acting like everything is normal.

Dumbledore calls him to his office one evening and asks him to take Occlumency lessons from Professor Snape. Harry tells him to go to hell.

"Severus is not as bad as you think," argues Dumbledore. "And could you not use some friends at the moment?" He's noted, like everyone else has, that Harry does not hang out with Hermione or Ron anymore. 

"Tell Severus to apologize," hisses Harry, "and I might consider it. Stop acting like you care about my fucking personal life -- you hadn't for the first decade of my existence, so don't start now. To Harry Potter, the cupboard under the stairs, right?"

He storms out the office and does not receive an apology from Professor Snape.

Dumbldore leaves Hogwarts soon enough. Dolores takes over as Headmaster and makes his life a living hell. He does his best to return the favour.

When Harry gets a vision that Sirius Black is captured by Voldemort and being tortured, Harry does not even bother. He knows he won't be believed and knows he can't save him. Considers it another life lost. Another family member dead. Knows then that his tears have fixed nothing but his anger hasn't, either.

So instead of gathering a group of friends he no longer has and rushing to the rescue once again, he Stupefies Dolores Umbridge and locks everyone else in the exam hall. He floats her body to the top of the Astronomy tower. He is tired, he thinks, of anger and sadness. Of a growing graveyard behind his eyes. 

Death follows him like a small, incidious animal, and he is tired of it.

But if Harry is to go, he decides he will not go alone.

He stands on the edge of the Astronomy tower, watching Dolores Umbridge tumble to the ground. A voice beside him speaks, loud and comforting, "It's time that you go home."

He doesn't recognize it. Doesn't suppose he needs to. "Home," he affirms. He knows, for reasons he can't place, that his Aunt and Uncle are dead because of who stands beside him. Isn't bothered, he decides. He isn't bothered at all.

"Home," he echoes one last time, then steps off the edge.