Devil's Due [h.s.]

Chapter 57

*** THIS IS A DOUBLE UPDATE (sort of considering this chapter is less than 1k words lmao). XO ***

Chapter 57

HARRY'S P.O.V.:

9 years earlier

Everything hurt.

My legs, my chest, my arms, my face, my head.

It all hurt.

With a small groan and a hiss of pain, I rolled over onto my back and assessed my surroundings. It was the ditch again. The same fucking ditch as it always was with a sky that loomed bright and blue above me, unbeknownst to the kid thousands of feet below it, wishing that he hadn't been able to open his eyes today to see it.

The field beside me was empty. Spanning for miles, maybe even forever, without another soul. Propping myself up onto my elbow, I tried not to glance down at the blood on my hands. On the blood that I knew I was probably covered in. Everything hurt, but it was bearable. It would become unbearable once I knew the severity of how I looked – the severity of just how much blood had been shed. How much blood I had shed.

Bile rose in my throat and I had to squeeze my eyes shut, attempting to think of even a single memory that didn't involve Damien, the fights, death, in order to keep my impending panic attack at bay. I nearly came up short, sucking in a sharp breath that had my body beginning to tremble, until I finally settled on one from a few years prior. Where I'd been at school, drawing something, and my teacher had told me how lovely it looked.

It had been an unprovoked compliment; one I hadn't had to earn through violence or death. My chest ached at the memory, wishing I was sat somewhere now drawing or painting, not having to talk myself down from a panic attack in a ditch at the side of the road where I'd been left yet again to find my own way home.

But if I'd been abandoned here, it meant I was alive. If I was here – lucid, with the beginnings of a headache that I knew only a certain substance could remedy – I was alive and somebody else was dead. Dead at my hand.

On instinct, my fingers trailed up to my neck, pressing deep into my flesh above my pulse point. A strong, rhythmic heartbeat was steady beneath my fingertips, calming me only briefly. I could never tell. I always felt so out of my body most days that I wasn't ever sure if I was even alive or simply just the last fragments of a soul wandering the planet, lost to a resting place because of all the sins I'd committed. Some days I wasn't even sure I wanted to feel that heartbeat beneath my fingers, grateful to take any end I'd be given, and it was the only thing that kept me from deciphering whether or not I was dreaming.

I didn't fight that bile that rose in my throat this time. I let it come out.

It'd be a fitting end, really. To die and be banished to haunt this place. This bloody fucking place that plagued my nightmares enough as it was. I wouldn't be surprised if this was my hell.

With a shuddering breath and knees that just about buckled when I stood up, I felt myself beginning to sweat as I stared down the long winding road before me. My stomach grumbled and I had to swallow a few times in order to dampen my tongue. When the last time I'd eaten or drank anything was, I had no idea. I didn't even have half a clue about what fucking time it currently was.

Everything hurt.

It always hurt.

Wincing against the ache of my feet, I took a step forward and started walking.