To Fate They Fall || HP

CH: 4 - Freedom and Fleeing

The Night Before.

The sound of something big and rodent-like scuttling about stirred Harry from his pain-induced trance. It was a sound he heard often and had grown accustomed to while living in a steel cage, but he was dead.

Wasn't he?

How long had he been out of it? More importantly, where in Merlin's name was he?

He blinked rapidly in an attempt to ward away the nauseating blurriness that seemed set on plaguing his vision, and the surrounding area became somewhat sharper, enough so that Harry could observe his surroundings.

Harry carefully lifted off of the ground and brought himself into a sitting position -mindful of his battered body- turning his head left to right wearily while he did so.

The space around Harry was dark. Only a narrow shaft of moonlight was present, giving him barely just enough light to see. The air itself reeked of mildew and disrepair. Large crates and boxes lay strewn about the room without order, all large, worn, and practically coming apart, looking as if they've been here years. The walls were cold; dilapidated concrete, the floor underneath him, a gloomy shade of grey, raw and unused, freezing on his already shivering body.

His body shuddered violently from the chilled night temperature, and he wrapped his wounded and scarred arms around himself in a meager attempt to conserve what little body heat he had left.

If this was the afterlife, the gods sure were doing a right shite job. The place was chilly and unwelcoming and smelled terrible, and Harry's very bones felt achy and exhausted, and an ever-growing hunger gnawed continually at the back of Harry's mind.

Unless this was supposed to Hell, but if that was the case, wasn't it meant to be unbearably hot; where were the raging lakes of lava and demons who tortured the permanent residents?

Under any other circumstance, Harry might've found the situation mildly amusing, but not now, not when he felt hollow and void of emotion, and every inch of his body ached in protest to his every movement.

He couldn't be dead, and this wasn't the Afterlife or Hell, not when icy wind still bit at Harry's skin, and the moon was present in the sky, full and glowing brilliantly. Not when starvation mercilessly tormented him.

Harry hunkered further in on himself, a comforting, guarded position he often assumed when he'd lived with his relatives and when he spent weeks -months maybe- kept captive by The Dark Lord, Voldemort.

He rubbed his arms comfortingly in another attempt to warm himself, not that it did much considering his shortage of proper clothes and lack of insulating body fat, but he didn't stop, as it kept him from crying, for now.

After everything that had happened, he refused to cry and display himself as vulnerable and weak. Especially when it might not be safe yet; this could be another trick, Voldemort and his Death Eater's could be waiting outside for him to try and run away, to taunt and laugh at his despair.

Harry quivered again as small rivulets of tears made their way down his cold cheeks despite his efforts, the crying came anyways, and it took everything in Harry to keep harsh, ugly sobs from escaping him too.

He was supposed to be dead; Voldemort should've killed him.

Yet he was still breathing, and he couldn't fathom why, the truth was, he didn't want to be alive, not anymore. Not when each waking moment of his existence was nothing more than a painful haze, scarcely surviving, barely breathing, ever starving, always cold.

He'd rather be dead than spend another second in that cold cell that stank of acrid copper and depravity, damp decay oozing from small cracks on the stones that held it together. And the rats that scurried through metal bars in search of food and warmth that Harry could hardly remember existing.