Part 1.
Harry woke with his wand in his hand and the hard, choking certainty that he had died.
For one blind second there was no room, no bed, no morning. There was only ruin. Broken stone under his knees. Smoke so thick it clogged his throat. Green light flashing through it like something alive. A voice shrieking laughter that had no right to exist anymore. The taste of blood. The stench of spells burned into old walls. Someone screaming his name from very far away, or very near, or inside his own skull.
Then the dark thinned.
The ceiling came back first. Pale, cracked, ordinary. A thin seam in the plaster running from one corner to the other. Then the bed under him. The sheets twisted around his legs. The weak wash of dawn through the curtains. The room, small and familiar and still.
Still.
Harry lay there without moving. His heart was hammering so hard that every beat seemed to strike somewhere behind his eyes. He kept staring upward, waiting for the room to vanish again and the battlefield to rush back in over it. When it did not, he drew one careful breath, then another, and became aware of the ache in his shoulders, the soreness in his back, the dry, raw feel of his throat.
He had not died.
He was here.
That should have been a comfort. It was not.
His right hand was clenched so tightly around his wand that his fingers had gone white. He forced them to loosen one by one. The wood had dug deep crescents into his palm. He looked down, and the first small wrongness of the morning slid into place.
His knuckles were scraped.
Not bruised. Not lightly roughed. Scraped raw, with half-healed smears of dried red-brown across the skin.
Harry frowned and pushed himself up on one elbow. The sheet slipped away. His shirt was twisted around his body as if he had fought in it. One sleeve had torn at the cuff. There was dirt on the hem, actual dirt, dark against the fabric.
He sat up properly and stared.
He had gone to bed in clean clothes. He remembered that. He remembered tugging the curtains shut. He remembered telling himself, with tired irritation, that tonight he would sleep without dreams because he simply had to. He remembered sitting on the edge of the bed for a long time, staring at nothing, too exhausted to undress. Then nothing.
He did not remember going outside.
He did not remember falling.
He did not remember anything that explained the dirt under his nails and the way his whole body felt as though someone had beaten him with clubs while he slept.
"What the hell," he muttered.
His own voice startled him.
It was lower than usual, roughened in a way that did not sound like simple lack of sleep. He cleared his throat and winced. Even that hurt.
Harry swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. The room tilted at once.
He caught himself on the bedpost, eyes squeezing shut. A sharp pain stabbed through his ribs. Not unbearable, but clean and sudden enough to force the breath from him. He stayed there until the dizziness passed, his hand locked around the carved wood, then opened his eyes again.
The morning light pushing through the curtains was too bright.
That was the next wrongness.
It was not merely bright. It was intrusive. Hard-edged. He could see each thin strip of gold where it pressed between the cloth and the sill. He could hear things more. Too much. Footsteps in the corridor. The rattle of distant pipes. Someone coughing in another room. A bird outside, landing on the windowsill with a tiny scrape of claws that seemed far too loud for something so small.
Harry went completely still.
The sounds did not fade.
He swallowed, and even that seemed unnaturally clear to him.
A cold thread of unease pulled tight inside his stomach.
It was the war, he told himself at once. Aftershock. Shock did strange things to people. He had seen it in others. He had felt it in himself already. Startling at nothing. Waking in a sweat. Hearing sounds in the night and believing, for a few terrible seconds, that he was back there, that it was beginning again, that none of it had ended at all.
That was all this was.
It had to be.
He crossed to the washbasin, each step making the floorboards seem louder than they should have been. He splashed cold water over his face and held it there, palms pressed to his eyes until the chill bit into his skin. Then he lowered his hands and looked into the mirror.
He looked dreadful.
Not in the ordinary way people had looked dreadful for weeks now. Everyone was worn down. Everyone was pale. Everyone had shadows under their eyes and a kind of stunned, dazed hollowness around the mouth.
This was different.
His face looked strained. Tight. There was a feverish brightness in his eyes that made him look almost unfamiliar to himself. His skin was too pale, except where high color had burned across his cheekbones as if he were ill. His hair stood in every direction, but that was hardly new. What unsettled him was the expression underneath it all. He looked hunted.
"You're imagining it," he told his reflection quietly.
The boy in the mirror did not appear convinced.
Harry reached for the one thing that had always been solid, no matter how bad it got. Wand. Voice. Spell. Magic obeying because it was his and he knew how to use it.
"Lumos."
Nothing happened.
Harry blinked.
He shifted his grip and tried again, slower this time. "Lumos."
A dim bead of light sputtered out of the tip. It trembled there for one second, pathetic and weak, then gave a little spit and vanished.
His stomach dropped so sharply it felt like missing a stair.
No.
He stared at the wand, waiting for sense to return. It was only a simple charm. He had done it thousands of times. Half-asleep. Distracted. Injured. It was the kind of magic that happened almost before he thought it.
Harry took a breath and forced his voice steady.
"Lumos."
This time the light burst out in a savage white flare and slammed into the wall hard enough to crack the frame of a photograph hanging there. Glass shattered. The picture inside jerked sideways, the tiny moving figures still smiling idiotically as the frame fell and broke against the floor.
Harry jumped back.
"Bloody hell."
There was a knock at the door almost instantly.
"Harry?"
Hermione.
Of course.
He shut his eyes.
Only Hermione could hear a broken frame from half a corridor away and sound worried before he had even managed to swear properly.
"Harry," she called again, sharper now, "are you all right?"
He looked at the broken glass glittering across the floorboards, at the split frame, at the photograph inside with its waving figures too small and cheerful to understand anything at all.
"Yes," he said.
The lie came too quickly. He heard it himself.
A pause.
Then Hermione said through the door, very calmly, "That did not sound like yes."
Harry bent to pick up the picture frame and winced when pain cut through his side again. He set the frame on the table instead, annoyed at himself for even feeling the need to hide the damage.
"Just dropped something," he called.
"You broke something with Lumos."
He went still.
For a second he simply listened, all the strange sharpness of his hearing turned toward the door.
"How do you know that?" he asked.
"Because," Hermione said, and he could hear the patience in her voice, "I was on my way here before you cast it the second time."
NewChapt 2
"You were listening outside my door?"
"I was coming to check on you."
"There's a difference?"
"Yes," she said. "One is invasive. The other is what people do when their friend looks half-dead every time they see him."
Harry pressed the heel of his hand against one eye.
"I'm fine."
"No, you are not."
Something hot and ugly flashed through him.
So fast. So sudden. Like a spark landing in dry grass.
"Drop it, Hermione."
The words came out harsher than he meant them to. Not just sharp. Mean.
Silence fell on the other side of the door.
Harry stared at the wood, breathing too hard, anger draining from him as quickly as it had come, replaced at once by something worse. Shame. Confusion. The sick, disorienting feeling that the voice had been his and not quite his at the same time.
When Hermione spoke again, her tone had changed. Softer. More careful.
"That wasn't like you."
Harry looked down at his hands.
He had picked up a piece of broken glass without realizing it. The sharp edge had sunk into the base of his thumb. A bead of blood welled there, dark and round.
The smell hit him before the pain did.
Copper.
Warmth.
Salt.
His whole body reacted at once.
Every muscle locked. His breath caught. Something deep inside him seemed to surge toward that tiny bead of blood with an intensity so violent and immediate it made him feel sick.
He dropped the shard. It hit the floor with a small chiming sound that seemed impossibly loud.
Outside the door Hermione said, "Harry?"
He took one step backward.
The room was wrong again. Too bright. Too clear. The scent of blood from his own hand was everywhere now, drowning everything else. He could hear Hermione shift her weight in the corridor. Could hear cloth against skin. The faint click of her nails against the wood as she touched the door.
"Go away," he said.
Silence.
Then, "Open the door."
"Go away."
"What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Harry."
"Go away!"
The shout tore out of him ragged and strange. Not merely louder than he intended. Different. Rough enough that he barely recognized it as human.
He stumbled backward and struck the bedside table with his hip. The lamp toppled and crashed to the floor. Pain lanced down his spine so hard that the room flashed white.
His wand slipped from his grip and clattered away under the chair.
The handle rattled at once.
"Harry!"
He should have answered. He should have told her to get someone. He should have tried to think.
Instead he doubled over, one hand braced on the bed, the other clamped over the wound in his palm as if that could stop the smell from existing. Heat was rushing through him now. Not fever. Not exactly. Something more invasive. It felt as though his bones had begun to remember a shape they were never meant to have.
The lock snapped.
Hermione pushed the door open and stopped dead on the threshold.
For one long second neither of them moved.
Harry saw the room through a blur of pain and sharp light. Saw Hermione take in the broken lamp, the shattered frame, the cracked mirror over the washstand, the way he was bent over like an old man with one hand pressed to his ribs and the other bleeding onto the floorboards.
Then her eyes lifted to his face.
He saw the instant her expression changed.
Not fear.
Not yet.
Recognition that this was worse than she had thought.
"Close the door," Harry managed.
She did it at once, then whirled and cast three spells so fast he barely followed the movements. A muffling charm. A locking charm. A shield laid flat over the room like invisible glass.
Only after that did she look at him again.
"What happened?" she asked.
Harry laughed once under his breath, a dry, ugly little sound.
"If I knew that, I probably wouldn't be standing here like this."
She took a cautious step closer. Wand still up. Not because she was threatening him. Because she was thinking.
Always thinking.
"How long has this been happening?"
"I don't know."
"How long?"
"I said I don't know."
He heard himself snapping at her and hated it. Hermione heard it too. Her mouth tightened, but she did not step back.
"Your magic misfired."
"No kidding."
"Harry."
"What do you want me to say?"
"The truth would be a lovely start."
He opened his mouth to answer and nearly screamed instead.
Pain tore through his back with such force that he dropped to one knee. His fingers dug into the floorboards hard enough to scrape wood beneath his nails. He bent forward, panting, and watched in horror as the grain in the boards seemed to sharpen under his vision until he could make out every cut and line in it.
Hermione moved at once, dropping to one knee a few feet away from him, close enough to reach if she had to, not close enough to be reckless.
"Look at me," she said.
He could not.
His hearing had become unbearable. There was too much of everything. A cart rattling outside. Murmured voices on the grounds below. The flutter of wings somewhere near the window. Hermione's heartbeat, quick and steady. The blood moving under her skin.
Harry made a strangled sound and squeezed his eyes shut.
"Harry." Her voice was firmer now. "Look at me."
He forced his head up.
Hermione was pale, but her hand on the wand did not shake.
"What happened in the battle?" she asked.
He stared at her.
It was such a huge question that for one absurd second his mind offered him nonsense. Which part? Which death? Which near death? Which curse? Which scream? Which body? Which impossible thing that should have killed him and somehow had not?
"All of it," he said hoarsely.
"Did anything happen to you that you didn't tell anyone about?"
He almost said no.
Then another spasm seized his body and memory split open, quick and useless. Smoke. A flash of movement in the chaos. Teeth. Pain so brief he had dismissed it because there had been too much else at once. Then running, fighting, surviving, not stopping because there had been no time to stop.
Harry looked at Hermione.
Her eyes sharpened.
"What?"
He shook his head once, too hard. "Nothing."
"Harry."
"I said nothing."
He tried to stand. His legs nearly gave way. Hermione's hand shot out on instinct, but she stopped herself before touching him. He noticed that too. The pause. The caution. He could not even blame her for it, and that made anger flare again for reasons he could not explain.
"Don't," he said.
"I wasn't going to."
"Yes, you were."
"I was trying to keep you upright."
"Well, don't."
Something like hurt crossed her face and vanished so fast he might have imagined it.
"Fine," she said tightly. "Fall over on principle if that helps."
The edge in her voice should have grounded him. Usually it would have. Usually Hermione being annoyed with him had a way of cutting through nonsense and dragging him back into himself.
Not now.
Now the sound of her voice seemed to strike every raw nerve in him at once.
He smelled the blood on his hand again.
The world lurched.
His jaw clenched so hard it hurt. His teeth ached. Deep in his arms, his shoulders, his back, something seemed to pull and grind under the skin as if his body had become a machine forced against its gears.
"Hermione," he said, and heard panic in his own voice.
She forgot annoyance at once. "What?"
"Something's wrong."
"I know."
"No, I mean wrong."
"Harry, I gathered that from the exploding lamp."
He shook his head hard enough to blur his vision. "No. I can't think. I can hear everything. My magic's all over the place and I can smell..." He stopped.
Hermione went very still.
"You can smell what?"
He looked at his bleeding hand.
So did she.
Then, slowly, carefully, Hermione said, "Did something bite you?"