Chapter Text
Harry Potter was done. Completely and utterly done.
His life, from the day Dumbledore abandoned an infant on one of the coldest nights of the year, had been nothing short of misery. Sure, there were a few happy moments. But not for a long, long time. He had long ago given up hope of happiness or love, focusing his efforts on surviving the hellhole of his childhood. And Harry, the ‘Savior of the Wizarding world,’ the ‘Golden Boy of Gryffindor,’ and the ‘Boy Who Lived,’ didn’t want to live anymore. He was tired of being forced to live and threatened to survive, yet scarcely managing to achieve either one. And most of all, he was tired of the heavy disappointment, of the grief tangled around his chest that seemed to only grow stronger, of the sorrow, of pretending that he was still devoted to the light, and of the pain that haunted him every damn moment of his existence.
Since Sirius had died in the Battle of The Department of Mysteries a few months ago, his last hopes of escaping the Dursley’s dwindled down to nothing. When Sirius fell through the veil, Harry had screamed until his throat split. The echo still scraped at the back of his mind sometimes, along with the scrabbling desperation of Lupin hands on his jacket, holding him back from following. Even now, if he closed his eyes too long, he could still feel the fabric bunch under Remus’s grip and the hollow air rushing past when Sirius fell. In that moment, Harry felt the last fragile bit of his childhood go with Sirius to the other side. It was so sudden it took his breath away, but he felt like he was still waiting to gain it back.
No one quite understood his unbreakable relationship with the falsely convicted man, but Sirius had become everything. He never knew his parents or any other of his relatives, aside the Dursley’s, but Sirius made all of the pain go away. Sirius’s laugh, loud, careless, and so alive, drowned out the Dursleys’ shouting in his head. Sirius was the closest thing to the father he never had, the arms that he cried in for the first time, and the only one who genuinely cared for his well-being. Not to use him like Dumbledore was fond of, not to blame him like the rest of the wizarding world, and not to manipulate him like Ron and later Hermione had. No, Sirius just cared for him because he chose to, and for Harry, being chosen because of genuine love was a highly foreign experience. One, he suspected, he might never feel again.
In fact, he would never forget the first time he saw fierce concern and worry ignite in the man’s dark eyes, completely extinguishing the ever-present mischievous sparkle when he looked into his shard of mirror for their near-nightly check in’s. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. The memories were all he truly had left. Harry had dropped his gaze immediately, not used to being seen so intensely. That night in particular, Harry had forgotten to weave his glamours, and every scar, bruise, and scratch was visible on his face. They both knew, even without saying anything, that it all came from his relatives. And they also both knew that what was on his face was nothing compared to the mass of scars, lightly oozing burns, scrapes, lashes, and mottled bruises that decorated most of the rest of his body. Though his godfather had rarely asked about his injuries, Harry knew he wasn’t stupid. Sirius was biding his time, hinting here and there to Harry that he was putting together a plan to get him out. It was that hope that Harry grasped onto like a lifeline, scrabbling at some weak, selfish reason to stay amongst the living.
That specific night Sirius had been absolutely furious at his relatives, seething hatred flashing in his eyes and settling into the tension in his jaw the way his godfather did before he was able to make another terribly rash decision. It had taken every persuasive bone in his body to convince the man to stay in whatever safe place he had been living in, and even then, something within Sirius had changed that day. Instead of the boyish, vaguely immature adult Harry was accustomed to seeing, Sirius, for the first time, looked like an adult. Some part of him wished he had just stayed silent and let the man try to take him away, but the guilt of his probable death would gnaw at him regardless.
Even when he was in hiding, they sent each other regular owls every few days and fire-called on the rare occasions when they could. It wasn’t ideal, but now, Harry would give up nearly anything to receive the hastily scrawled letters on bits of used parchment, old muggle receipts for the chemical-tasting pumpkin spice coffee creamer Sirius so liked, and muggle stationary with little dog stickers. In fact, he would give up his life without a second thought just to see him again and feel the strong arms hold him so tightly that for a brief second, Harry was able to imagine that things could get better. It was foolish, now, to think about, since as he well knew, it was a juvenile idea to believe that his home life in particular was capable of change.
Really, he missed everything about Sirius. Even the little things that used to annoy him, like Sirius’s terminal inability to wake up early and the way he burped loudly and proudly in public, bowed, and smirked to himself with a self-satisfied little grin. The world expected him to forget, to let grief fade into a polite, sanitized memory. But sometimes he caught himself tracing the curve of Sirius’s handwriting on an old letter until the ink smudged under his thumb— another painful reminder of his absence. He would never forget. Not until his last dying breath. How was it fair that Sirius was the one who died? The man that meant most to him had been taken, like everything else in his miserable existence.
They were going to live together, and they were supposed to have slow Sunday mornings where Sirius rolled out of bed at noon, complaining that Harry never woke him up with a distinctly canine yawn, and he was supposed to complain that Harry wasn’t a prankster and make fun of him for the lack of women he’d been with. They were going to go on muggle trips with the stupid peppy tour guides he saw on his uncle’s television and get drunk at some seedy resort when he was of age and do whatever stupid reckless activity Sirius wanted them to do just because they could. Harry swallowed thickly, digging the nubs of his fingernails as hard as he could into his palms. Normally it offered some sense of grounding, but everything had been feeling so out of control, it did nothing.
Sirius was also going to teach Harry how to become the perfect Lord Black when the time came. Though, he supposed, Sirius likely had a different idea of what made an “ideal lord” than Harry did. But the time was never supposed to come so soon. No one but the miscellaneous Black house elves knew it, but he was Heir Black, along with Heir Potter. Seeing as the man had never had children, he had passed his lordship to Harry in private when he turned thirteen, something Dumbledore never had the chance to meddle in. That alone was rare. The manipulative old coot seemed to know everything, so it was odd he wasn’t aware of something so highly relevant to his favorite pawn.
The memory itself was one of the happiest moments of Harry’s life, one he cherished deeply when things became unbearable. At that moment, Harry felt like he was almost whole again. Being recognized as an official member of the prestigious Black family felt like some sort of good omen.
Sirius, to his credit, had made the heirship a grand event, going as far to take them out to a late dinner at Harry’s favorite muggle creperie, presenting the document to him along with a slightly creased envelope that he told him to open later. It was evident that the man was worried about what Harry would say, fidgeting with the loose hair ties on his wrist, trying (and failing) to appear nonchalant. Harry had smiled into his crepe just to stop the ache in his throat. Sirius was, and always had been, a terrible liar.
Once Harry had, without a second thought, accepted his offer, Sirius had leaned across the table to throw his arms around him, a movement so joyous and full of life that the table shook, spilling his tea into its coaster. When he finally pulled back, his eyes were glistening. He blamed it on Harry’s hair getting into his eye, but they both knew better. Two lost people, one a boy and one a man, had finally found their home within each other.
Temporarily, as fate would have it.
And what a cruel fate it was, to never get their deserved happily-ever-after. Especially, he thought, for Sirius. The man had been condemned to trauma and loss to a degree most could never wrap their heads around. It just wasn’t fucking fair.
And, while Harry was thinking about it, he honestly couldn’t believe that he once had looked up to Dumbledore like he was the savior grandfather he never got to know, and trusted him absolutely. It was largely his fault, after all, that Sirius was dead. His and Harry’s. Harry’s hand clenched around the floating army figure until his knuckles went white, ignoring the way the little gun dug into his palm.
Harry had never considered himself to be a particularly violent person, but watching Sirius die had shaken something loose. All he did was lose, lose, and lose more. He wanted to take. To know what it felt like to be the one on top. He wanted it so deeply, it became a dark kind of craving that it, along with the pain coursing through his body, kept him awake at night. He knew, logically, they were thoughts he shouldn’t be having. But he knew exactly what he wanted to take first: Dumbledore’s pathetic lie of an existence.
The small mirror on his dresser cracked, splintering down until a shard embedded in the quaking wood. The faint metallic smell of an impending storm permeated the air, the metal frame of his window rattling. His eyes snapped into sharp focus on the small metallic green army figure floating in front of him, vibrating with such an angry energy it almost appeared to be possessed. Harry inhaled, forcing the mass of emotion back down his chest, watching through hooded eyes as his few belongings began to shake harder on the dusty dresser. His throat was thick with a mix of anger, sorrow, and pain, three strong emotions that nearly always ended in a disaster. Back, he had to push it back. He bit down sharply on his lip, absent mindedly chewing the skin off his lips. It was a good kind of sting, pain he was in control of, and enough to slightly clear the haze from his mind.
Magic, as he had come to discover, liked strong emotion. As a matter of fact, she thrived on it. Early on in Harry’s painful childhood this had been a particular problem, as he grew up without people to teach him magic control. It was never a good thing when his magic flared, as it most often resulted in a lengthy beating from the amount of noise or chaos it created. As a result, he repressed and bound back the majority of it to the best of his abilities, using the only kind of mental gymnastics a young child was capable of creating. It was a shock, honestly, that his barriers had held. Despite his almost natural repression, Harry grew up with a looser hold than most of his magic. Not because he couldn’t control it— that had never been the problem— but because he knew how much stronger and easier she was when he worked with her. Harry was all too familiar with what it felt like to be controlled and used, so even though he genuinely had no idea on just how sentient magic was, he never wanted to be the one to do that to an innocent being. Dust curled in the vaguely stale air as he stared blankly at the cramped walls. Here he was, nearly seventeen, yet somehow small enough to still fit back into the cupboard. Life always did, he supposed, have an ironic way of saying “fuck you.”