Indifference Towards Difference || Harry Potter

20 | Even Heartless People Have Hearts

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

~~~

Harry's eyes creaked open, reluctant lids given an encouraging push by the sun's rays. He felt wonderfully fuzzy and woozy all over, the blur of his myopia making the world seem softer, hazier.

Everything felt that way, to be honest; the sensation of waking up like this had been lost to him. Harry yawned lazily, wallowing in the sun's warmth seeping through the small window by his desk. Having a lie-in was always a nice feeling—

A lie-in?

Harry shot up and stared at Dudley's old watch—

08:17

Reality hit him with an abrupt force— the vision, the mortification, the trickle of hope, the pools of blood, all cocooned together within the drifting seas of an eternal emotional nothingness— ultimately summarised with a roundabout "shit."

And on top of all that, he'd had a lie-in. He'd had a bloody fucking lie-in and it was a Thursday; Merlin, Snape was going to go bloody fucking ballistic— that was, if he wasn't already.

Muttering some rather unholy expletives under his breath, Harry leapt out of bed, the routine vertigo hitting him unexpectedly in his hurry. Nevertheless, he bore through it, before attempting to grab his wand and glasses from the bedside table. Attempting, being that Harry had suddenly noticed how his entire left arm was encased in some crusty brown rag— ah.

Well, that was just another one of his many problems, wasn't it? And yet his problems were his own, and he'd deal with them himself. As he'd always done.

With a roll of his eyes, the messy-haired teenager reached for his wand with his other hand, summoned some clothes— and Malfoy could stuff his colour co-ordination advice where the sun didn't shine— and stumbled into the en-suite.

***

The Dursleys had kept him in good practice with hasty morning runs to the bathroom, though today Harry stumbled out of the shower slightly later than per. On the other hand, his reasons were perfectly... well, reasonable.

Seeing his reflection had almost made Harry choke on his toothpaste. Had he not known it was him, he probably would've started hexing the mirror, caterwauling about an escaped Inferi.

He'd looked dreadful. The dark circles under his eyes had taken on a permanently bruised appearance, his scar still somewhat red and inflamed and the green of his eyes shockingly brighter now. All those features stood out in stark contrast against the ridiculous, ghostly pallor of his skin.

Harry had seen dead Flobberworms look more alive than him.

And then the rest of him— all knobbly knees and healed sunburns, slashes on his back that looked to be the work of some thin-taloned bird rather than a belt buckle, and ribs that had long since started to show, with a patchwork of half-healed green and yellow bruises painted across them, and sporadic splotches of purple and blue.

He looked like one of Dudley's nursery paintings.

Harry's session with the healing books had been maddeningly deficient. Though he'd discovered how to make the slashes on his back look less 'slash-ey', the tomes had blabbered on about his magic already working to heal him; there was only so much more of it he could channel to directly remedy his injuries. That was apparently why medi-wizards and witches existed.