Chapter Text
“The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”
―
Harry was wracking his brain for a reason to cancel lunch with Hermione.
Unfortunately, work was slow. He and his partner, Lavender Brown, had spent most of the morning at Potage’s Cauldron Shop on Diagon Alley, questioning the shop owner, Deloris Potage, about the ten Galleons she’d claimed was missing from her register.
They’d interviewed her trembling employee, a tall and painfully skinny bloke by the name of Donnie who seemed utterly terrified of Deloris. Then they’d done a quick search of the premises only to discover that the Galleons in question had been placed in the Knut drawer by mistake. They’d left Deloris and Donnie to hash out who had caused the faux emergency (Harry’s money was on Deloris, but he wasn’t about to say that because she was rather terrifying, honestly.)
Since then, they’d been sitting here in the bullpen yapping and taking their sweet time writing up the report.
And beyond work, what excuse was there? It wasn’t as though Harry had other friends he might be seeing over his lunch break. Hermione was his only friend these days. Well, except for Lavender, but they saw each other all day, so he didn’t think bailing on Hermione to have lunch with Lavender would fly.
He glanced over at Ron and Seamus, who were rising from their desks, laughing and stretching, heading down to the Ministry cafeteria, no doubt. Not so long ago, Harry would have been going with them. Now, they didn’t spare a glance in his direction. That bridge had been burned months earlier, and Harry had since lost all hope of it ever being repaired.
As he headed out to meet Hermione at the pizza place on the corner, he told himself that he ought to be grateful to her for taking back up with him, even if it was only once a week. But the truth was, these lunches with her only made him feel worse than he did otherwise.
She said she had forgiven him, that she was over it, but it was clear she wasn’t, not really. She didn’t hate his guts like Ron and Seamus and Dean and Neville and, of course, Ginny and the rest of the Weasleys, but there was still something itching and unpleasant between them.
He wanted so badly for her to forgive him completely, for them to move beyond it all and just be fucking normal with one another again. But every moment of their lunches was a reminder that things weren’t normal, and might not ever be normal again. The painful awkwardness of it, the way they were so careful not to say anything that might make the other uncomfortable, was a brutal reminder of the fact that their friendship was no longer as effortless as breathing or comforting as a strong cup of tea. Instead, it was sad, and it was work, and it hurt.
“Are you sleeping any better, Harry?” Hermione asked, as she cut her slice of pizza into meticulously uniform bits.
He shrugged. “I ‘spose,” he said. No, he wasn’t. He slept less and less now, except for those nights when he upped his dosage of Dreamless. But he needed to stop doing that.
“That’s good,” she said, her big brown eyes flickering up towards his as she took a bite. “How’s Kreacher?”
“Oh, um. Didn’t I tell you? I sent him to Hogwarts.”
She frowned. “You did? Why?”
He’d done it because Kreacher wouldn’t stop bothering him about the Dreamless. Wouldn’t stop nagging at him to see a Healer about his sleeping, about his night sweats. Kreacher had been worried that something was physically wrong with Harry – an illness, perhaps, or a curse. Harry knew that wasn’t the problem, and finally, all the badgering and all the insults and the notes left in the kitchen with the phone numbers of private Healers was too much. “He’s getting too old,” Harry said. “He didn’t need to be taking care of an entire house.”
“How are you handling taking care of it on your own?” she asked.
He shrugged again. “I manage.” He took a bite of pizza and studied his thumbnail as he chewed. There was something black underneath it, and he scratched at it, and saw that it was actually a deep, oxidized red. “How is everyone?”
She shifted in the booth, looking uneasy. She always looked uneasy around Harry now. “Everybody’s fine,” she said, not looking at him. “Ron and Seamus just wrapped up the black-market love potion thing. But you probably already know that.”
“Yeah. They must’ve been happy to close that one. I know they were working long hours for a while there.”
“They were,” Hermione said. Neither one of them mentioned how strange it was that Harry knew all about it, since he worked literally four desks away from Seamus and five from Ron, but he’d never talked to either one of them directly about it. Because they didn’t talk anymore.
“Ginny’s…” she began, then stopped and looked down at her food for a moment before starting up again. “Have you talked to Ginny lately?”
Harry laughed, sort of. It sounded a little like a gasp. “Um, no.”
“Right,” Hermione said, rolling her straw between her fingers and staring into her tall, plastic glass before taking a sip of her Coke. “Well, she and Nev are engaged.”
It should hurt, shouldn’t it? Harry felt nothing. Well, other than tired. “Good for them,” he said. “That’s good. They’ll be good for each other. It’s really…good.”
Suddenly, her hand shot out and covered his. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched anyone, other than in the line of duty, if he had to check them for weapons or a wand, or during frenzied hookups with strangers. Certainly no one he knew had been touching him lately. “It’s okay if it’s not okay, you know,” Hermione said gently.
He stared at her, wishing he could say whatever it was he wanted to say. Only, he didn’t know what he wanted to say. Hermione, I think I’m losing my mind. Hermione, Death is stalking me. Or possibly Death’s pet tarantula.
Hermione, I’m scared of the dark.
“I’m okay,” he said, pulling his hand back. He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I promise.”
“Have you thought any more about dating?”
He wanted to laugh. Dating? The thought was absurd. It was hard enough to slog through work. Every so often, mostly to avoid his house and his bedroom and everything that came with it, he’d go out to a muggle pub or club by himself, get trashed, and let someone take him home. Guys, girls, he really didn’t care, so long as he had company for a couple of hours and got off. But it had been a month, probably, since he’d even done that. Maybe he should do that again. Maybe he could rouse himself and go out tonight. “No,” he said. “Not really. Not interested in anybody.”
“What about the girl I work with in Mysteries? Anna? You seemed to get along with her well enough last week when I introduced you.”
Harry remembered Anna. Pretty. Flirty. Wholesome. Probably smart, if she worked in Mysteries with Hermione. Not exactly what Harry was going for these days. “She was nice, yeah,” he said, vaguely, and something about his expression must’ve made her drop it.
She hugged him after lunch, and said she’d meet him again next week. “Same Bat time, same Bat channel,” he said as he pulled away.
She snorted. “Weirdo,” she said, squeezing his hand.
That night, Harry readied himself for bed. He was too tired to go out, even though he knew he’d probably sleep like shit anyway and it didn’t matter. He looked at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth and wondered what he had looked like when he’d been dead. Had he looked the same, except with his eyes closed? Had he looked pale and empty? He realized no one had ever told him.
It was common knowledge that Harry had died in the Forbidden Forest, of course. He’d explained what happened to the witch who was writing his authorized biography (as opposed to the dozen or so unauthorized versions, which were all complete dreck) and she’d included it in her book. It wasn’t something he loved to discuss, but he’d been honest, about the over-saturated version of King's Cross, his talk with Dumbledore, and choosing to go back.
He hadn’t been quite so forthcoming when it came to what happened after that.
Part of the problem was that he wasn’t exactly sure what happened, or whether it had been anything at all. It had all been so quick – a flash, an instant – that it was difficult to know what he’d even seen. And it wasn’t as though he’d had a way to categorize it, or name it, or understand it.
The truth was that it was easier to leave that part out. Easier to pretend it hadn't ever happened at all. And for a while, he forgot about it. It didn’t seem to matter in the aftermath of the war, when there was so much real suffering happening. As he trudged from funerals to the dedications of war memorials to fundraisers for orphans of the war, Harry’s mind was far from the dark thing he’d seen.
It was only later, after his breakup with Ginny and the onset of the nightmares, that he’d begun to think about it again. He could still remember it quite clearly: the dark splotch in the bright tunnel, scuttling closer and closer, his fear ramping up in concert with its nearness, until he sucked in a breath and heard Narcissa Malfoy’s frantically whispered words in his ear: Is Draco still alive?
He’d had the first nightmare three days after he and Ginny had their last fight. In it, he’d been back in the tunnel that had led him from King’s Cross to his waiting body. He’d been running along it, the bright rainbow lights circling him, only he’d been slow. He couldn’t make his feet go faster, no matter how he tried. And he knew, he knew, that something was chasing him. He saw it in flashes, a shape-shifter, a shadow. He’d nearly reached the end when he’d felt it grab him round the ankles, it’s heavy darkness swirling over him, surrounding him, suffocating and endless…
He’d awoken drenched in sweat. It had been mid-October, and the nights had been getting cold, and he’d had his flannel sheets on the bed, and his warm comforter, the one Molly Weasley had bought him the Christmas before. It all felt perfectly cozy as he’d drifted off to sleep, but when he woke, he was wet, his clothing soaked through, the sheets damp, his hair in sticky clumps. And his heart had been thumping painfully in his chest, and his breath had been coming in short, wheezing gasps, and his throat had hurt from screaming. Screaming what, he didn’t know.
He'd blinked around the room in terror, and something in his peripheral vision caught his eye, something blacker than black – something that was an absence of color, like a gash in the fabric of the world, a complete lack of anything.
The thing from the dream.
As he turned towards it, it seemed to scurry over the floorboards and under his dresser. And then Harry, who had stared down Voldemort’s wand without flinching, had found himself paralyzed by fear. He was a child again, a child in the cupboard, trying not to scream when he felt things creeping over his skin in the dark.
He’d pulled his blankets over his head, breathing in the sour smell of his own anxious sweat, and tried not to move. It was the horrible grownup version of that old childhood game: if he was still enough, if he made certain that none of his fingers or toes were poking out from beneath the covers, the thing wouldn’t see him. It would go away and leave him be.
And then the evolved part of his brain, the one that could separate the baser, animalistic instincts from rational thought (the one he didn’t listen to nearly often enough), had told him he was being ridiculous. He’d had a bad dream and was being a paranoid wanker. He needed to pull the blanket down and take a look under the dresser, and then he would see that nothing was there, and he could get on with his day.
And yet it had taken every ounce of his courage (which he had been told, previously, was quite a lot of courage) to pull that blanket down and face the room. Even more to sit up in bed and lean over the edge to look under the dresser. And sure enough, there was nothing there. Of course there was nothing there.
Still, the feeling of uneasiness had stayed with him all that day, through the long hours at work where he tried his damnedest to avoid Ron and Seamus. It was still with him as he’d cooked supper in Grimmauld Place’s grungy kitchen, as he took a soak in the mildew-plagued bathroom on the second floor. It was still there as he’d climbed back into his bed, resisting the urge to bury his head under the blankets again.
He’d left the light on that night, as he had every night since. Not a night light, not the light in the hall or the closet, but the bright overhead pendant lights that lit everything up like the sun.
Months later, and here he was, slipping into freshly washed sheets (they were always freshly washed, since he routinely soaked them through with his sweat), the room glowing like it was the middle of the day.
This was the worst part – the part where he’d get into bed, his eyes sore from keeping them open all day, his body aching from exhaustion, and tell himself he had to sleep. He had to sleep, because he didn’t sleep nearly enough, and it was so miserable to be so tired.
Only, he knew that when he slept, he would have the dream again unless he upped his dosage of Dreamless once more, and he knew that as he swam to consciousness (which took longer and longer the more Dreamless he drank down before bed), he’d see the thing. The hole. The lack. The emptiness made sentient.
The thing that he suspected had followed him out of his own death.
He slept, unable to stay awake despite the creeping fear that plagued him. He dreamt of the tunnel that led him back from King's Cross station, of the thing that lived there. Then, just before he woke, he struggled for a moment in the in-between, trying desperately to move but unable to, his mind alert but his body still under sleep’s spell. He was paralyzed, feeling the thing all around him, sniffing at him, crawling towards his insides.
And then he woke up completely, shivering in the coolness of the room, damp with sweat. He changed his sheets and rinsed his face and spent the rest of the night staring at the bright overhead lights of his room.
After work on Friday, he didn’t have the energy to make much for supper besides a sandwich. He was tired. He was always tired.
He looked at his bottle of Dreamless, contemplating his choices for the evening. One, choke down a bunch of it, sleep for a good chunk of hours so he’d feel better tomorrow (but have to face the thing in the in-between). Two, do some more near-death experience research, in hopes that he might discover something that explained his vision or his dreams. He had several books on loan from the nearby muggle library on the subject, as well as some articles from scientific journals that he’d copied the last time he was there.
Or three, he could go out to a muggle pub or club and get absolutely pissed.
Around him, the house seemed to have lost its usual echo. It was a big place, with lots of hardwood floors that had remained bare since he’d thrown out nearly all the musty, stained rugs that once covered them. But today, everything seemed strangely muffled, like the whole house was wrapped in smothering cotton. It was dark, too. He yanked open the curtains in the parlor and dusty, wan light came streaming in.
It was always too fucking dark in here.
The days were getting longer, at least, now that it was spring. Summer, when it came, might help – he found himself suddenly longing for the warmth, the sun, the longer days. Maybe summer would be what finally chased all this away. He leaned his head against the cool windowpane and closed his eyes.
He must’ve dozed there, on his feet, because all of a sudden, he was startling, knocking his head against the window as his body jerked, his heart a jackhammer in his chest. He collected himself for a moment, trying to shake the feeling that something was directly behind him, huffing over his shoulder, its breath muddy and thick.
He gathered his nerve and turned around. There was nothing there. He looked back towards the window, at the street outside. The sky was a little darker now, the shadows longer. Time had passed; he had definitely slept, somehow. His own face was reflected in the window, superimposed on the image of the street, warped by the old, wavy glass. It was like looking at a stranger.
Out, he decided. He needed to get out.