Chapter Text
Traveling through the Veil is a bit like flying. It feels as if he's completely still, but he's getting that same sense of debilitating, exhilarating vertigo that comes with flying his broom above the clouds and diving down towards the Earth.
It's … disorienting .
So is the silence. No sound reaches Harry and he has no control over his body. He can't even open his mouth to scream.
He can't even open his eyes.
Maybe that's for the best.
Who knows what sort of creatures might be lurking in the Veil or what other strange and terrifying things he would’ve seen if he could open his eyes … yes, maybe it’s for the best that he can’t.
He doesn’t want to arrive in a new world traumatized, after all.
Or, rather, more traumatized than he already is.
Instead of thinking too hard about where he is, where he’s going, or how he’s getting there, he thinks about Sirius.
Just like the star he’s named after, Sirius is a beacon of light for Harry. He occupies the time thinking about nothing else but his godfather, wondering what Sirius’ life is like, what he’s doing, and hoping that the Veil will lead Harry to where Sirius is.
And while there’s a fair amount of research that says that the Veil is sentient, Harry hopes it’s not cruel enough to keep Harry away from his last living family. Perhaps he should have verbally beseeched the entrance of the Veil before climbing in. Told it that he wanted to find Sirius.
For all his research, for all the time spent thinking about the Veil and about Sirius, Harry had once again rushed into a situation without thinking.
He doesn’t regret it – not yet at least, but he hopes desperately that his lack of foresight won’t keep him from his godfather.
He hopes that the Veil is kind enough to take him where Sirius had ended up.
There’s no way of telling time in the Veil.
No way of knowing if days, months, or even years had passed.
Although the silence and the stillness are still rather unnerving, after a while, he’s thankful for the peace they bring. He doesn’t remain awake the entire time he’s in the Veil, but he doesn’t get tired. Instead, when he’s too bored with the darkness and the silence, he sleeps. It offers him little respite, because his naps never feel long or short, but he’s thankful for them anyway. His wand, his bag, and his clothing – some of Dudley’s old rags, because he wasn’t sure how his travels through the Veil would go and he didn’t want to mess up the few nice pieces of clothing he has, which were stowed away in his bag – remain on his person, which is good because he had no any contingency plans for if the Veil had ripped his material possessions from him.
The Veil is neither hot nor cold, but Harry wonders if that’s actually so, or if Harry has simply lost all sensation in his body. For all that Harry can’t move, can’t hear a thing, can’t open his eyes, it’s going considerably better than he thought it might. There’s no overwhelming sense of existential terror, as one theorist had postulated, but it really is rather boring.
He has no entertainment besides his own thoughts.
And after a while, even those betray him.
It begins with the musing that maybe, just maybe, Sirius wouldn’t want to see him.
Harry pushes the thought aside easy enough at the time, but after what feels like forever and a day in the Veil, with no solace but his own mind, Harry has learned to keep a running stream of conscious thought.
Its purpose is two-fold – it distracts him from the reality of where he is, but also provides him at least some amount of entertainment in a space where no sound enters and he can’t move a muscle.
So while he pushes the thought aside at the moment, the idea soon eats at him and he starts obsessing over it. Soon, he can’t think of anything else.
It consumes him.
What if Sirius hates him? What if Sirius blames him for being pushed into the Veil in the first place? What if Sirius blames him for Remus’ death? For his mom and dad’s death? What if Sirius takes one look at Harry and says he never wants to see him again?
He spends an eternity wondering if Sirius will even want to see him – if Sirius still even loves him – that it honestly doesn’t come as much surprise when he wakes from a nap and feels a familiar wetness upon his cheeks. His eyes are still closed, so the tears don’t blur his vision, but it’s still incredibly annoying to have that wetness on his cheek and not be able to brush it off.
If only to prevent more tears from falling, Harry pushes all the negative, heartbreaking, depressing thoughts to the side and stubbornly thinks of something else.
If Harry arrived and Sirius hated him, he would make it right. He would . He would beg for forgiveness if he had to.
(But hopefully he doesn’t.)
His trip through the Veil ends rather abruptly, all things considered. One moment, all round him is still. Silent.
The next, he can feel sunlight on his face, the way the slight breeze begins drying the tear tracks on his cheeks. He can hear birds chirping in the distance, but it’s not until he hears people talking and cars honking that he opens his eyes.
The sunlight burns.
Could he really be out of the Veil? Was this really where Sirius had ended up?
Curious, he raises his hands to observe them, feeling as if he’s a stranger to his own body, having not seen it in such a long time. His hands are shaking, but the Veil hadn’t aged him at all, like he had been worried it might. Because he had no way of knowing how long he was in the Veil, for a while, he had been worried that he might step out of it as old as Dumbledore once was.
But his hands looked the same – exactly the same, as Harry remembered he had gotten a hang nail on his right pointer finger that had torn and bled and that blood was still crusted under what was left of the nail – so Harry supposed it was reasonable to assume that the rest of him was the same too.
Good.
That was good. Sirius would recognize him then.
Draped across his chest, his bag is a comforting, nearly negligible, weight and though invisible, Harry can feel the holster strapped to his forearm. His clothes were all in one piece, ugly and baggy as they were. He’d change once he found someplace to stay.
For a moment, he just stands in the alleyway (or assumes it to be so? Harry’s not sure. His brain is still a bit fuzzy from being in the Veil), taking in his surroundings, the slightly sweet smell to the air, the warmth of the sunlight on his chilled flesh.
When he finally assures himself that this is real, that he’s really out of the Veil, he takes a step forward, blinking when that crushing sense of vertigo that was so familiar to him while he was in the Veil appears once more, causing him to trip. He rights himself easily, but notes with a wince that the Veil had left him with some rather unpleasant side-effects.
The vertigo and the shaking hands likely weren’t permanent. It’s unlikely that the ravenousness was either. And although he wanted desperately to hit the ground running searching for Sirius, he needed to find someplace to sleep, something to eat , before he contemplated anything else.
Placing a shaking hand against the brick wall for support, he makes his way out of the alley and onto the street. As Harry blinks the dark spots flitting across his range of vision (or at least tries to), he knows he has to get to a hotel or a motel or something , because he’s exhausted , dizzy, and so, so close to passing out.
Maybe it’s his desperation for a warm bed that causes him to cross the road without looking both ways.
Maybe it’s his exhaustion that causes him to ignore the shouting coming from the other side of the street, warning someone to be careful and to look out.
Either way, he doesn’t see the car until it’s too late.
He’s been hit by a car. Harry doesn’t think it’s too bad – it hurts, but not nearly as bad as the Cruciatus . There’s someone above him, with bright eyes and dark hair who looks really worried for Harry, who’s probably the same person cupping the nape of his neck and urging him to stay awake.
Harry tries, but the shock and pain of getting hit by a car had depleted the last of his energy. The dark spots get bigger and bigger and exhaustion is creeping up on Harry, fast .
He’s going to pass out. But he’ll be okay.
He’s survived worse.
The man doesn’t know that though. The man looks scared and worried, more so when it becomes apparent that Harry won’t be able to stay awake until the ambulance arrives. He says something that Harry can’t hear, griping the nape of Harry’s neck harder, and that’s when Harry knows he’s going to pass out in the next five seconds. Before he does so, he should probably reassure the man that he’s not going to die or that he’s not grievously injured, just tired beyond belief.
“’ll b’ f’ne,” Harry manages to get out, words nearly unintelligible. Harry doesn’t stay awake long enough to know if the man had understood him, because immediately after saying that, he falls into the first real sleep he’s had in what feels like an eternity.
They had just finished closing a case and Hank thought it at least warranted a cup of coffee, from the new shop downtown. Nick had balked at the prices – and rightfully so! Who pays sixteen dollars for a medium cup of coffee – but had ordered a small, black coffee when Hank, after watching Nick have a small crisis over the prices, offered to pay.
Hank was still laughing at Nick as they made their way back to the car. “Man, the look on your face. I should’ve taken a picture.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Nick retorts, trying and failing to keep an answering grin off of his face. “Laugh it up. I can’t believe you spent almost thirty dollars on two cups of coffee. I – “ And the grin falls off of his face completely as he spots a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, stumble out of an alley.
Beside him, Nick can feel Hank tense, knowing Nick hadn’t just lost his train of thought, that something was wrong , and he can see out of the corner of his eye that Hank just gets tenser once he realizes what Nick had spotted.
“We should probably go check that out,” Hank says, placing the coffees on the hood of their car, knowing that Nick wouldn’t be able to go back to work unless they made sure the kid was alright.
“Uh huh.” Nick verbalizes, too focused on tracking the kid’s stumbling, faltering movement.
They both see it at the same time. A car whips around the corner a little too fast, just as the kid starts crossing the street, looking dazed, exhausted, and possibly hurt.
“ HEY! Watch out!” Nick cups his hands around his mouth, unable to cross the street because of the cars speeding by him. Beside him, Nick can hear Hank yelling too, but he can’t any of the actual words with the blood roaring in his ears.
And then it happens.
The car hits the kid. Next to him, Hank curses and Nick turns to him, eyes a bit wild and dark. “Call 911. I’m going to go over there.”
Nick doesn’t wait for Hank’s reply. Hank’s a good, competent cop. Nick trusts him. He’ll know what to say to get an ambulance over the fastest. He crosses the street, ignoring the way a car honks at him – that stops fast enough when he flashes his badge – running towards the scene of the accident.
The driver’s car door is open and it doesn’t take a detective to figure out that the man is frantic and afraid. When he sees Nick’s badge, he starts babbling even faster about how the kid came out of nowhere, about how he didn’t mean to hurt the boy – Nick tunes him out after about two seconds.
“I’m going to need you to step aside, sir. I need to make sure the boy is okay. We’ll need your statement – once my partner is finished calling 911, he’ll take it.” And Nick looks back across the street to where Hank is finishing the 911 call, making eye-contact, and gesturing to the man that had hit the kid. Hank nods.
Nick turns back to the boy.
He’s sprawled across the asphalt, blood trickling down his face from what looks to be a cut on his forehead. There’s no other visible wounds on his body, but there could be more hiding under his clothing. Nick crouches down beside the boy, placing a hand on the back of his neck to prop him up a little bit.
This wakes the kid up and he stares blearily up at Nick, exhaustion clear on his face. He’s in pain too, that much is clear from his grimacing and the quiet groan that leaves his mouth as he wakes.
“I’m Detective Nick Burkhardt with the PPD. You were just hit by a car, could you tell me your name?” Nick says, trying to keep some level of calm in his voice, but any tranquility that he feels quickly leaves him as he sees the boy close his eyes once more. “Hey, hey! Stay awake. Don’t fall asleep on me.” Because while the boy just might be tired, it’s far more likely that he was injured – especially since he’d been hit by a car.
The boy wakes up again. “Hey, there,” Nick says as gently as he can. “Can you stay awake for me? Until the ambulance comes?” The kid shows no sign of understanding him. Was he really that far gone?
Nick leans over the boy further, scanning his face and any other visible skin for injuries. He sees none. The boy blinks rapidly and his head lolls in Nick’s grip.
He’s going to pass again.
Nick accidentally grips the boy’s neck harder, trying not to panic when the boy starts closing his eyes for longer and longer periods of time. “Stay awake – c’mon, you can do it. Just stay awake until the ambulance comes.”
The boy stares up at Nick, eyes only half-open and almost completely limp in Nick’s arms. “’ll b’ f’ne,” he mumbles and Nick can just make out what was said before the kid’s eyes close and he becomes dead-weight in Nick’s arms.