The Lost Prince of Olympus

Magic is forbidden/I am afraid of myself

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Magic was forbidden.

Magic was dangerous.

Magic was vicious.

He was freakish.

He was broken.

He was wrong.

The Dursleys called him names sometimes, when he lay at night awake in his cupboard, his eyes squinting as he traced the name etched into the walls and his ears reaching out, catching every echo, every footstep that passed by. They called him a freak, a burden, an unfixable mess. They said he did not belong and he found himself believing them. They would whisper, their eyes darting back and forth, their figures hunched over a kitchen table oddly menacing from the creak in his door.

The shadows walked with them, its arms brushing past them, attempting desperately to grab and pull them forward. Harry dreamed of the darkness winning, its tendrils oddly comforting as they lashed out, erasing all the pain and hurt and sadness that they had caused and would cause.

He dreamed of a world where people did not frown at the shadows that curled around him, and at the sea whose waves grew and lapped against the sand following him, at the lightning that rumbled in the dark blue sky as the rain pattered against his skin, the wet droplets hitting his hair and his face and his hands soothing him yet never soaking him.

He dreamed of a world where he did not hide, where the magic vibrating underneath his skin was not forced to be suppressed, where it did not build up in the pit of his stomach, a large angry fireball that screamed and raged demanding to be released, where he did not avoid the rain to avoid the questions and run from the beach and its soft sand and calm waves to feel normal, to feel anything other than fear for once in his life.

He dreamed of a world where the words on his pages did not rearrange and spin, where his hands could stop shaking and the necklace around his neck could fall and break and would not burn whenever he stepped into the sea and walked into a storm and hid into the shadows that whispered his name.

He dreamed of a world where he stared down at his hands and saw anything other than the scars marring it and felt anything other than fear at what they could do.

He dreamed of a world where he was free.

He dreamed of a life that was his.

The sea would call out to him, its waves would crash against his ankles and creatures would emerge from the conches buried in the sand and nip at his toes. They'd stare at him, their bodies twitching and soft murmurs coming from their mouths. They would talk to him, their murmurs would become louder and louder till they evolved to words, to hushes filled with prince and father and home, until his ears would ring and his head would throb when the necklace flared, his chest burning as he fell in agony.

They would not try to talk again.

Imagining his parents as ghosts never seemed logical, but he did. He imagined this was their doing. That they whispered in the creatures ears and were telling him, begging him to hold on, to live for them. Then he'd lay in agony and remember that parents were meant to love and people who loved did not cause this. They would not be pain.

He had long given up, since then, trying to decipher what it all truly meant.

When he was younger, he would return the next day to the beach, his feet in the same position, the sand crunching under his weight as he waited. The creatures would come again, their faces excited as they stared. They would bring friends and family and voices would fill his ears, the only words that registered and sounded in his brain always the same before he would collapse again, the water flowing beneath him almost frantic as it tried to sooth his pain. It never worked.