Cold as Snow (A Harry Potter Fanfic)

The Little Things - Part 1

For one blissful moment, Harry was back at Hogwarts, slowly coming to awareness in the ruby four poster bed he'd come to know intimately in his 6 years there. It was the comfiest bed he'd ever known. Between the single at 4 Privet Drive, the mattress thin and misshapen from Dudley's prior use, and the tight packed earth beneath a tent that gave him a stiff neck no matter how he slept, there wasn't much competition.

But then he truly woke up. Eyes opened suddenly to take in what wasn't the Gryffindor dorms but a plain bedroom with the fuzzy outline of oak furniture and yellow walls and he felt his frenzied heart sink into the mattress below him. Harry breathed deeply, shakily, trying to gather himself like a viscous potion as he grabbed his glasses off the side table and put them on. The false hope that half consciousness often served him was so much worse than dreaming of happier times. Even when he stumbled across a thought or action during the daytime that transported him so vividly to a moment long gone, he still knew (on some level) what was real and what was fantasy. Dreams were worse because for one horrible, joyous moment, he couldn't tell the difference and the consequent landing into reality was almost enough to break every thread he'd wound tightly through his wavering sanity.

Propped up on an elbow, the soft dawning light underneath the opaque brown curtains caught his notice, he watched the curtains move slightly in an invisible breeze and how the weak light would swell to fill the shadowed space then fade away. The daylight felt like a betrayal. To watch the world carry on, even one he didn't know, while he'd lost more in his short twenty two years than others knew in their lifetime was exhausting to confront with every recurrent morning. He tilted his head upwards, mussed hair caressing his cheeks like a raven's wings and blinked harshly as he felt the familiar sting of grief. The shadowed view of the plain beige ceiling appeared to blur through the sudden upheaval of unshed tears that he knew wouldn't touch his cheeks, he rubbed his eyes anyway. He wanted to cry, to have that emotional release, Merlin he wanted to but the tears never transitioned from the primary burn and the frustration left him both taught and slack with unwound emotions, like the temperamental fishing rod Uncle Vernon used to own that never saw more than a pond. He hadn't cried since the day he left his two closest friends far away in the future.

He'd been so resolute when they'd finally succeeded, the Time Turner Hermione had kept ahold of for the many years of rebel life accompanied by desperate, hopeful tinkering, and then with the discovered knowledge that it would be a one way trip, he had been so sure of his decision as well as the consequences that came with it. Yet when he'd spun the golden trinket and the world shifted around him into one so familiar and foreign, he'd immediately tried to go back. He'd scrambled with the circled treasure, turning it and turning it forwards and forwards in the hope it would work it's bygone magic just one more time and he could get back to his friends because even if the life of fugitives is all he had to go back to it was still a life. A life with people Harry loved more fiercely and deeply with every friend they lost. What was the point in playing the hero? Now, for once in his life, he wanted to be selfish.

But the world didn't spin again and with a guttural yell of anguish he threw the cause of his grief violently at the cobbled pavement, as soon as it left his fingers he tried to catch it but it was too late. It broke. The glass shattered and the precious dust glittered in the sparkling winter sunlight before disappearing. He completely broke down, his knees giving out as he wept into his palms and screamed at the clouded sky until his voice grew hoarse and useless.

He didn't know how he'd pulled himself together, but he did; patting himself down to clutch at his old moleskine pouch and his flimsy wand (it was never the same after Hermione accidentally broke it during the fight at the burrow, the multiple attempts at repair all rushed and subpar), the only worldly possessions that he thought to bring and stubbornly clamoured to his feet, eyes sore and jeans mucky. Harry wandered through the quiet streets of endlessly joined houses that appeared to harbour no signs of life, a large white board on a final stretch of property suggested it to be an estate of empty dwellings. With no idea of where he was or where he was supposed to go he simply kept walking, pace brisk and shoulders coiled underneath his shoddy jacket because he knew if he stopped he'd stop for good.