you raise me up || harry potter

chapter 26

»»————-　song:　————-««

six

★ sleeping at last ★

❝ what would it feel like
to put this baggage down?

if i'm being honest,

i'm not sure i'd know how. ❞

♢ ♢ ♢

The first four days at Spinner's End were quiet and uneventful. But Harry Potter's life was anything but quiet and uneventful, and frankly he should have known all good things come to an end. 

It had been a good morning. He had a rare good dream, a wonderful one, in fact. He was soaring on his broomstick, up into the sky, higher and higher until the gray clouds around him became golden. A woman's soft voice sang a lullaby, somewhere. Harry was almost sorry he woke up.

Snape had eaten his lunch rather quickly, briskly pushing back his chair to deposit his dishes into the sink before leaving. Harry sat there a bit longer—his habit of scarfing down his meals had started to fade since arriving at Snape's house, since here there was no one to steal his food or yell at him to hurry up. Dudley's gluttony had left Harry with an empty plate a countless number of times, teaching him that if he did not hustle, he'd go hungry. Snape had stared at him during lunch that first day, muttering, "If you choke on your food, don't expect me to do the Heimlich."

Harry wiped his mouth and stood up as he grabbed his plate, fingers a bit greasy from the pigs in a blanket. He was thinking about doing some more reading, since there really wasn't anything more entertaining to do around here (Hermione would have had a field day), when he realized that he couldn't see. 

Not again, he thought, as he blacked out. 

His legs buckled, and his head filled with static. He barely registered his plate slipping from his hands as his knees hit the ground. He had forgotten to stand up slowly, the way he usually did. Snape would kill him for that plate... 

He's a wizard, a voice in his mind said through the buzzing. He can just Reparo it...

Harry's vision cleared agonizingly slowly, the black spots skittering back to the edges of his vision before he was once again cognizant of his surroundings. Well at least he hadn't hit his head—

Oh, no. The plate. It had shattered into three big pieces, with tiny, much finer pieces scattered all across the kitchen floor. Harry's heart rate sped up painfully fast. The last time Harry had dropped something and broken it was when he was doing the dishes at eight years old, trying to balance a large plate in one hand with a sponge in the other; it was too heavy and his hands were slippery from soap, and it had slid right out of them onto the floor. 

It had been the first and last time Harry would drop anything in that house. Petunia had clipped him on the side of the head with a still-hot frying pan, and it had burned a small but angry scar into his scalp and the tip of his left ear. It hurt for days afterward, especially without burn cream at his disposal. He did his best to cover it up with his hair since then.

He had to clean this up before Snape saw. He darted forward and started to collect the smaller pieces. They cut into his skin and his fingers bled a little.

"Potter, what in the devil was that noise—?" Snape began with a roar as the door of his potion lab banged open, but quickly seemed to realize something was amiss. "What happened here?"