Chapter Text
Souls aren't meant to be splintered. They will always try and come home. Try and mend and heal. It takes very dark magic, not to split a soul but to anchor it somewhere else. To perverse the very order of nature.
Souls splinter with violence. They shatter with grief. They tear and rip with hurt and hate but always, always, a soul can heal. To revel in that hatred, to drown in sorrow and to choose to do so is what makes a Horcrux such horrible, maddening magic.
The shard of soul that reaches Harry Potter is a sad, shriveled, miserable scrap of a thing. Barely formed impressions, leftover dreams, scraps of wit and memory, left floating in the endless sea of nothing that drifts within and without reality.
It latches onto the first bit of warmth it finds. Lodges itself into the first light. Into a soul whole and pure, warm and full to bursting but clean like almost fresh canvas, painted only in simple joy and love. This child has known no pain, no grief, no hurt, and the soul shard, tattered and nearly festering before basks in its comfort.
As the child grows, as heartbreak after heartbreak shatters his soul, as the dark of his cupboard digs into the ice in his chest, the little shard finds itself sinking deeper and deeper. It falls into the shards, burrows deep into sharp edges that still stay so warm and bright and hopeful, and every time the soul heals, the shard heals along with it.
Souls can heal through a surprising amount of damage and a wizard's magic resides in his soul. Harry Potter grows to be so much more.
This changes things.
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Harry Potter.... feels. It takes him a long while to realize that it isn't like this for everyone. Nor does he realize that his... Perception of the world is much more than the barest imaginings of a curious child.
He doesn't realize he's privy to more than he should. That his aunt doesn't want him to know the messy tangle of fearloathinggriefjealousylovebitterness she feels at the site of his green eyes. That his uncle's disgusthatredfearinsecurity is a secret he would like to keep.
It's everywhere around him. The ebb and flow of children feeling anywhere between curiosity to boredom at school. Teachers exhausted and stressed but proud.
And through all that he feels this... Energy. This.... Life teeming in the world around him. There within a soaring bird, nestled with its heartbeats, sitting in between its ribcage. There with the slow inch of an ancient tree's unfurling branches, boughs heavy with ancient knowledge and the quiet whispers of things long past, as it reached up toward the sky, into the sun. There with every waking moment in every human, hiding behind their eyes and in every breath they take and dreams they have. Life that's in Harry as well, more than most, bubbling and bubbling like he's a fizzy drink capped too tight but continuously shaken.
Every blow to his being, emotional or not, shakes him so vigorously, his tightly bundled energy buzzing almost loudly in his mind, scratching up at the insides of his skull, begging to be let out. Begging to fix things. Begging to make the world right for him.
And it does. It fixes things. He's seen it. Seen it change a teacher's colors. Felt its warmth as it regrew his own hair. Watched it bubble and fizz into riotous energy before it let him dissolve into nothing for a moment before he's solid again elsewhere. And he has that, a capacity for that bottle within him like a ticking bomb ready to go off at a moment's notice.
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The letter is alive in the way nothing is in his dreary little cupboard, within dreary Number 4, in dreary Privet Drive. It is buzzing with the same golden energy Harry has come to associate with life. Buzzing and bubbly, there's traces of life in the letter, almost as much as there is in most people except perhaps Harry and Mrs. Figg who still has more than the average person but much much much less than the roaring ocean in Harry's heart most days.
So he sneaks the letter away. Slips it into the cupboard before his guardians could see. Just its very existence is... So much more than what his dreary uncle and dreary aunt would ever want in their equally dreary home.
And later, in the dead of night, illuminated by the golden glow in his heart, Harry reads. He reads and reads and hope blossoms in his chest again, healing the splinters and cracks that has become the norm for him. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Magic. He is magical. That is what the energy is. What he feels. A school for magicals. Where he won't be so... Alien. So bright and poignant in a world of dreary. Hope burns in his chest so thick he feels like can barely breathe.
A world where he wouldn't be boy or freak. Where he would be nothing more or less than who he is. Just Harry.
He dreams of peers and lessons and being given the same attention as everyone else for once. Of being given the same care and opportunities. The same expectations without the doubting, suspicious glares and tuts.
He dreams and for now it is enough.