It doesn’t occur to Harry until then what a charmed life he’s led. His childhood was hardly blissful, what with his father being an asshole and the whole why-don’t-I-like-girls thing, but it wasn’t miserable, either. There were birthday parties with Pass the Parcel and his mother’s caterpillar cake (even if he found out later that she bought it from Marks & Spencer and rendered much of his childhood a lie). And there were summer holidays – Portugal with its crowded beaches and donkey rides and Cyprus with its all day breakfasts – places where the salt air made his hair frizz and the sun burnt his nose. But while the happier moments cancelled out the not so happy ones so it felt more like breaking even than winning, he still can’t say that he’s had a hard life, rather a disappointing one, if the last four years are anything to go by. And to think, when he graduated from Cambridge with youth and promise burning off him, he had the world at his feet and now he’s getting the shit kicked out of him in an empty stairwell.
So he realises that he must have led a charmed life because he’s never been in a fight before now and he’s never needed to be because he’s never had a problem that couldn’t be solved with a smile and a self-deprecating remark. If only he’d known. He would have kissed all those boys he was too scared to talk to and scratched his initials into every desk at Cambridge, every bench, every tree, every wall, left something behind everywhere he went. At least then he might be able to find his way back and he needs to because he’s so far gone that he doesn’t even know how he got here. That’s what shocks him, more than the first punch and the POP of pain that follows, the thought of why someone would want to hurt him. Charming, clumsy him, who apologises to furniture when he walks into it and has to stop if he sees a LOST CAT sign to look for it. That’s all he can think as he watches the skulls on the guy’s tie blur, the word knocking around in his skull like a pea in a whistle as he falls against the wall.
Why?
But he knows.
He knows.
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Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)
FanfictionBelieve none of what you hear and only half of what you see. That’s what his father always tells him with that smile of his, the one that says, I’ll tell you that much, but the rest will cost you. Harry never knew what he meant, but he gets it now t...
