Beautiful World ~ 𝑫𝑹𝑨𝑹𝑹𝒀

Chapter 9

Harry didn't go to class. What, really, was the point? If he didn't pass his fifth year, what did it matter? Nothing mattered anymore. Ironically, considering that not a week before he had decided that life was too hard and he wanted to die, Harry was furious. Achingly, blindingly enraged. How dare someone seek to take his life from him? The only thing that was truly and totally his? Well, apparently not. It had never been his at all, it had just been a loan from his mother.

He should have died all those years before and because he hadn't, he was being punished now. He wished he'd never been told, wished he'd just gone to sleep the night before he turned sixteen and never woken up. Then, at least, his last two months could have been spent in that same numb sort of daze the last week had been spent in, as opposed to this blind panic.

Then again, maybe that was the point. Maybe something, the same something that had appointed Draco Malfoy his guardian, had decided that Harry deserved to know he was dying so that he didn't spend his last two months that way. So that he didn't take them for granted. So that he realized he was lucky enough to have any time at all. Maybe not as much as most, but more than he was originally supposed to.

That he was wrong to want to die. Life wasn't nearly as hard as he'd thought, it was dying that was the hard part. Living when you knew for sure it wasn't forever. That was hard. Yesterday and all the days before? A piece of cake compared to this.

But Harry was too dazed and angry to think that way. To wonder if maybe he'd brought this on himself, wanting to die that way. Maybe it was that whole 'be careful what you wished for' shit giving him what he deserved. What he'd wished for.

Instead, the only thing Harry knew was that he was going to die, and it was because his mother had been too weak to save him.

He would never remember how he came to be sitting in the Gryffindor common room alone that afternoon. The morning passed in a reckless sort of aimless daze, and there he was, sitting on the floor, playing with a knife. A stupid thing, but it had seemed brilliant at the time. Pick up the knife that Dean used to sharpen his drawing pencils with (he claimed it worked better than any other form of sharpener), and pull out the blade, and play with it.

Because Harry was dying and Harry was scared and Harry wasn't quite sure he'd ever been living at all. If he had been meant to die when he was just a baby and only his mother's spell had kept him alive this long, wasn't that some magical form of life support? What if he wasn't living at all? What if his body had been tortured by Voldemort's spell, which had warred with his mother's until the only thing left in between was a twisted body and Harry lived in that body in some way of living that wasn't quite being alive, and this wasn't real? Because how could he be living if that life expired? Like yogurt or cheese. Bread, even. He was perishable. Limited shelf life. He'd never really been living at all and he certainly wasn't real.

How could this, this sudden mortality, be real?

It wasn't, and Harry would prove it.

He cut himself, a slash up his forearm, not his wrist (because he didn't want to die any longer, after all) but the other side.

He wouldn't bleed; he wasn't real. This wasn't real. He wouldn't bleed.

But he did.

It was warm and bright red, and ran down his arm like ribbons of silk. Almost like the ribbons that had tangled around his ankles in his dream. He touched it and brought his finger to his lips and it tasted salty, like copper salt.

Real, then. This was real. He was real, life was real, and this wasn't all some terrible dream.

He threw the knife across the room with the force of all his rage behind it, a ragged growl that was almost a sob hissing from his throat. The knife hit the stone wall, slashed a tapestry up a bit, and clattered to the floor; it was stained with his blood.

"Accio knife," he whispered, and the knife slid across the floor and into his waiting palm. He closed it and slipped it into his pocket, and then watched his blood running from the deep cut in his arm.

Eventually, it dried to a muddy brown colour and the cut stopped bleeding. Harry let the sleeve of his robe fall back over the blood, not bothering to clean it up. He wanted to be able to look at it if ever he started believing again that This Was Not Real. Because it was. As real as anything in his life had ever been, or even more so. Because for the first time in his life, someone had finally told Harry the truth. He wasn't meant to be here, and in two months, that error would be corrected.

Harry, the perishable, would cease to exist like he should have fourteen years before.