Drabble
I sat down and wrote a few paragraphs the other night. I know, I should be writing more. I've got stuff I WANT to write. Plenty of ideas. Just don't seem to have the attention span, energy, and TIME lately to actually write them. At least I ought to finish the ones I have started.
Anyhow, for your brief reading pleasure, here's a drabble I wrote. Unedited, undeveloped. Just a drabble, although I'll admit, I have a plot I want to use with it, and expand on it. But for now, enjoy!
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It had been a long time since Harry had let himself feel anything. The last time he’d let himself feel had been approximately two seconds before the green blast of an Avada Kedara curse had exploded from the end of his wand - two seconds before the first of his Death Eater victims had fallen lifeless before him. When he looked back on it, he knew that was the last time he had felt human. Somewhere in the brief moment between when he opened his mouth and when the curse struck the man in front of him, a small piece of him had broken, withered, and died. It left him numb. It left him cold. But it also left him hardened and sharp, and had kept him alive. He had to live; that simple fact which was taken for granted by every other person on the planet was his greatest defining trait. He was the Boy Who Lived. He was Harry Potter.
Nobody noticed much of a difference in him that they weren’t willing to explain away based on the harshness of war. It was convenient to explain things away. There were bigger worries. Besides, they had the best soldier the Light could want. They had Harry Potter. Nothing could stop him, they said. He was amazing. He was impervious to pain, to fear. He could make Death Eaters crumble with a stare. Those were the myths that kept people fighting. It was the legacy of Harry Potter.
The war came and went, and Harry was the hero everyone expected. His boyish face was the pride of the wizarding world, and graced the cover of the Daily Prophet, Witch Weekly, and even the Quibbler. Everyone hailed and lauded Harry Potter, the Boy Who Killed Voldemort. It was the fairy-tale ending the world had wanted. But, as in all fairy tales, most people never cared to ask what happened after “happily ever after”. It was enough that witches and wizards could go home at night in peace, and not fear for the lives of their loved ones. They could show their children the pictures the victorious hero in the Daily Prophet and tell the young ones that if they didn’t eat their vegetables, they would never grown up big and strong, like Harry Potter.
Nobody bothered to look carefully at the close-up pictures though. If they had, they would have noticed the tight lines around his mouth, the furrow between his eyebrows. They might have noticed the rigid posture of his shoulders, like an old bridge struggling to stand against too great a load. They might have noticed the deadened look in his eyes. But all that went unnoticed. Harry Potter was the icon of goodness, and, like Muggles, even witches and wizards fail to see what their minds don’t expect. Expectations fill in the blanks, smooth over the gaps, and turn assumptions into reality. Expectations that make it easy to overlook the things they don't want to see.
Thus, nobody ever noticed that since the day that first Death Eater had fallen dead at their hero’s feet, the young man had never once said, “I’m Harry Potter.”