Chapter Text
A shrill cry tore through the thick haze of his confusion. For a second, his aunt and uncle’s living room got back into focus, all plush furniture and ravaged frills, gutted walls and quaint tapestries, before it dissolved again around him. He tried to hold on to the image but the pain made it impossible. It was worse than that time he’d slipped from the roof and hit his head, worse than the day Dudley decided to use a shovel as a weapon in his hunting game. Harry wanted to cry, but he could hardly breath, and he must have broken his glasses because everything looked shattered. Gray, and black and -
Red.
Harry braced himself against the stained porcelain as he heaved out another bit of his dinner. His head was pounding punishingly, and there was a sticky shiver running on his clammy skin. He was feeling like death warmed over, and he again wished bitterly that he could sleep like a normal person.
There were whispers at the edge of his perception, and he clenched his eyes as another spasm in his belly threatened more unpleasantness. But it settled, leaving him exhausted on the cold tiled floor.
The nightmares were getting worse, had been getting worse for months. There had always been bad sprees, episodes and relapses that would force him to call in sick, but he’d kind of managed well enough. He had balanced his sickness with his work life for months, going from odd jobs to odd jobs, but he always made it to the rent.
He got fired a lot in the beginning, before he figured out graveyard shifts would not only strike him higher wages, but also significantly reduce the chances he would freak out on the job. Less crowds, less families and crying children and overbearing parents. Definitely more weirdos but Harry could handle those.
But if he didn’t get a grip soon, even that would not cut it.
He took a deep breath and, feeling that his stomach had probably called it a day, rose to brush his teeth. His eyes instinctively avoided lingering on the mirror or the flickering of the shadows. He was tired to the marrow of his bones, but he really could not afford to skip work today. He had been on the line for weeks. He eyed the couch. There was still a little more than an hour before he was supposed to wake up, but he could feel under his skin that going back to bed would not help.
Resigned to crawling through another terrible day, he lit the kettle to brew himself some coffee, dosing it as strong as his stomach would take it. He drank the black tar with a silent prayer that his fraying nerves would hold just a little longer.
Taking it one day at a time.
It had been a slow night. Some night crew, some drunks and a few drifters.
There was a man, ashen blond and grovelling at his feet, and a woman with heavy dark curls whose high pitched shrieking grated on his nerves, but he barely registered it because the boy had just vanished again-
‘Kid!’
He twisted, a curse already on the tip of his wand…
‘Hey kid, you’re listening to me or what?’
Harry gasped, fury consuming him as the counter and flickering lights of the shabby coffee kiosk he was supposed to look after replaced the posh old room. He blinked and the foreign feeling broke away as his eyes focused on some grumpy old guy with greasy gray hair and a jacked that had seen better days. He shook away the remnant of his daydream and gave the man an owlish, apologetic smile.
‘Sir?’
The man threw him a suspicious look, before repeating his order, and Harry busied himself with the coffee and greasy pasty at speed. They were all sorts going through the station, but this guy stopped by regularly. Never to chat, always to go, but he was a familiar face.
Harry fancied the idea his coffee might not be the worst around.
He handed over the food and drink against a muttered -thank you- and was again left alone with the faulty neon and the sound of late night trains coming and going. Exhaustition taking its toll, he quickly started nodding off again. He fought it off, though he could not help his comatose mind from wandering back to his dream. He knew he’d conjured these characters before, in more horrifying scenarios. The blond man was one of the first to haunt his vivid dreams when they started a couple years ago. The mad woman came later on, but they got nastier after that.
He had looked into the possible significance of these patterns, but there was no reassuring explanation to the recurring scenes of carnage and torture that his brain seemed fond of conjuring. He had ignored the issue for a long time, figuring he did not need the help of a doctor to know he had trauma in spades to process. But he could not ignore the fits he had during his day, and the persistent headache that had taken residence between his temples. Again, he considered with a knot in his guts the fact he should probably get his head examined.
He didn’t want to. He knew he was not right.
The light above his head started flickering faster, and a high pitched tinnitus started ringing in his ear. Harry gripped the edge of the counter, breathing in and out like he’d practised from that book. There was a cold chill coming up his arms and he started shaking, his muscles spasming uncontrollably. He gave up and let himself slid to a crouch on the ground, a few sobs wrenching themselves from his chest. He thought he heard something break behind him but he did not bother to check what it was.
He always made a mess anyway.
In the end he just started chugging more aspirin.
It had been a strange day. He’d been wired up and restless like something nasty had been crawling under his skin the whole time.
Harry opened his letter box and sighed at the sight of a thick envelope he knew must contain another noise complaint from his neighbour. The walls in the old building were fairly thin so he was not exactly sure what he did that bothered his neighbour so much, but asking for clarification from a guy known for his short temper and punching habit did not seem like a clever move. He binned the letter and started climbing the narrow staircases, holding his breath against the pungent smell of burnt grass that permeated the stairway for the past few months. Harry had politely smiled when the old Chinese woman living on the second floor had tried to explain to him that a ghost was haunting him and they needed to exorcise the spirit. He had then tried to avoid getting caught in another conversation with the crazy old bat but it looked like she had taken upon herself to keep the evil at bay with or without Harry’s consent.
Harry finally got to his flat, all the way up under the roof, and collapsed on the shabby couch he had gotten from a charity. It was threadbare and stained, but comfortable enough that he must have slept there just as many times as in his bed. A migraine pulsed behind his eyelids and he tried to will it away.
To be entirely fair to Ms Huang, the building did suffer from a lot of inconvenient repairs. Two weeks ago an electrical problem had burst out all the lights. In January the temperature in the building had dropped to frigid levels, but the issue solved itself within a few hours without maintenance ever figuring out what had happened. It was just a lot of little odd things.
That added up.
His migraine pulsed and he moaned in frustration. He’d fought off nausea all night, his emotions rolling around like he was a bloody madman. Anger and furious frustration just came and went without proper cause and left him exhausted and confused. It spiked now, his heartbeat rising suddenly in an arrhythmic thunder against his rib cage, breaking a clammy sweat across his body.
Dawn was just breaking its first light. There was a dark haired boy in front of him. A dog dancing foolishly to the tune of a dead man.
A bright green light blasted from his wand, with a single target in mind.
There was a flash of gold. And green .
Harry woke up with a curling scream, firing up from the single most horrible pain he had ever felt tearing through his body. He turned and bit into the pillow, and continued screaming as it shredded him from limb to limb, and again. At some point he tasted blood.
The world around him shuddered.
After a while, the pain receded. He did not move for a while longer, too stunned to. Something sticky had gotten into his eyes. Eventually, he pushed against his screaming muscles to get out of bed and blindly feel his way to the bathroom where he carefully cleaned his face. He shuddered when the water ran red, and a peak at the mirror showed his burst, angry scare running blood all across his forehead.
He was towelling it off when the sirens started. Firefighters, probably right at the foot of the building by the sound of it. Cursing, Harry stepped out of his cramped bathroom, only to see the busted widow he had failed to notice earlier. With a sinking heart, he picked his way carefully over the hundreds of shards littering the carpet, to let his head through the window frame.
People were talking on the sidewalk, gesturing angrily at the facade. There was glass everywhere on the asphalt, from what looked like all the windows from the building, but also the one across the street and some of the cars parked below.
Harry quickly ducked back inside, and backed off as far as possible. He collapsed back on the floor, hugging himself tightly and trying to keep his breathing under control.
There always was a logical explanation. An earthquake perhaps. The firemen would know.
As he tried to convince himself everything would be fine, an icy draft blew from the destroyed window, fluttering the curtains and ruffling the leaves of his plants.
It set a chill under his skin.