Title: serendipity

Challenge/Prompt: Written for the Hunger Games: Fanfic Style Competition II (training; prompt #2, Write an AU).

Rating: T

Word Count: about 1460

Characters: Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore, Sirius Black

Disclaimer: This work of fiction is in no way connected to the author of Harry Potter, JK Rowling. Harry Potter is owned by her, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Warning(s): Muggle!AU, trigger warnings for suicidal thoughts and implied child abuse.

'It'd been some sort of paranoid disorder,' they had explained. Each person that had visited him held a trace of pity written in their eyes, the tilt of their heads, the way they sat or stood, their body language giving away just how they felt about Harry and his situation. And in response, he chose to stare blankly ahead, between them, through them, the casual shivers and sparks of uneasiness just another reason atop of another, a hill built of nothing but melancholy.

(It wasn't just that he felt it deep within him; it was that the loneliness was bleak and suffocating and dark enough to send him to an edge with which he was familiar, could taste in the very air he breathed, could vaguely hear abounding through the halls, vibrating in its intensity.)

Shrugging his shoulders at their constant streams of words in the shapes of questions and interrogative statements neither helped nor satisfied the individual groups of doctors and nurses and inspectors and teachers that invaded the small, Spartan space that acted as his room. His first real room.

'He'd not understood that he was, in fact, safe,' they had calmly explained. Harry just wanted them to leave, though speaking had become more a burden than a necessity in the past few years. No one ever listened when you were in need of aid, of a helping hand.

The power of the human voice was not, especially, a necessity. A power, it was not.

(He could recall the day he'd asked for that one hand, for that one person to help, but been brushed aside as being sensitive and silly and imaginative; covering up the bruises from his accidents from sight soon became unconscious habit.)

Gripping his sheets with his hands did little to deter them, even as his knuckles turned nearly the same startling shade as the stark medical white sheets. As if on the verge of destruction, of becoming broken, of losing their usefulness and being subsequently thrown away and replaced with the ease of necessity, with the ease of entendre and metaphors and similes and closely guarded smiles and hugs that never were. Even now, as he gritted his teeth at the reminders of a past he would rather sooner forget than live to remember.

A former teacher of his leaned in close to grip his shoulder in a transparent manner of comfort, a disconcerted expression slipping and sliding off her face with the delicacy of mud as he flinched back from the suddenness of the gesture, the subsequent slap to her hand forcing it away in shock. Harry felt a pinch of guilt squeeze his chest tightly as glared and barked his first word in what seemed to be weeks:

"Leave."

She hesitated briefly before letting loose a sigh and exiting the room, the tap-tap of her heels more present than the click of the door itself. Harry fell back on the pillows virtually bathed in a scent distinctly hospital and rolled over, pulling his legs up to his chest. He slowly felt the breath leave his lungs with the ease of comfort, of familiarity, of panic-inducing nostalgia, and inhaled when he felt the need to breathe once again. Not that he held any control over the contradicting fear and sickness and relief racing through his veins as he nearly collapsed from oxygen deprivation.

The days were unnervingly stretched beyond an incredibly infinite period; the only sounds the hustle and bustle just beyond the door, the exhaustive beat of his heart, and his own breathing. Days blurred into nights, minutes into hours, and Harry gradually registered a near, new constant to the darkness that lurked at the corners of his vision, his dreams, and even the damned food he managed to choke down without blinking twice at the texture or flavour.

That near constant gradually manifested in the form of a kindly elderly man with half-moon glasses set on the edge of his nose and a ridiculous amount of colour splashed across his shirt, tie, trousers, and matching jacket. Harry could've sworn he was like a beacon of light within the midst of a stormy night.

With the delicacy of a firecracker, he felt a peculiarly faint emotion take shape afterwards, one that caused a small smile to ghost upon his lips and removed some of the emptiness he knew must've been present in his eyes for a time.

Searching deep within, pulling the emotion apart for inspection, twisting it and turning it, caused a slow realisation to take place, one that bewildered him, for he hadn't had the insight to realise just what the meeting would evoke... contentment, it seemed to be. And just as suddenly, he was distinctly aware of the coming inevitability of the domino effect. A future that ran closer rather than farther away, the distance minimising with every second that blurred into a minute, with every meal that tasted of food and not just a bland hopelessness. He felt no need to rein in his overwhelming anticipation for the next conversation with that kindly elderly man.

Albus Dumbledore, he had called himself, the Headmaster of the private boarding school his late parents had attended many years ago. And with that, the upheaval of things he hadn't felt in ages; hope and bitterness and regret and guilt unwound and transformed and morphed into excitement and happiness and that damning feeling of contentment.

For this man had known his parents; the ones his aunt had always warned him away from asking about with sharp words and "taps" to the head; the ones his uncle -

(paranoid delusional; thought he was going to be killed by you one day; that you were a wizard of all things; that you could even inflict the pain he gave you tenfold, as if you even had the mental faculties to contemplate intentionally harming others for being as remotely "different" as Harry had been to the man)

- had been so sure were out to get him; the ones his cousin had brought up in school so many times, Harry had learned to just grin and bear it after being teased by those he couldn't even recall the faces, let alone the names of.

His parents. Lily and James Potter. The ones whose names he'd glanced over and stared at on the one day he'd been given a field trip form his cousin hadn't known about, the boy having had the misfortune of catching the Chicken Pox that year. Harry hadn't regretted not notifying his aunt -

(he could even remember, with vivid attention to detail, the texture of the paper, the fragility it held after being handled and folded and creased time upon time, the way he was sure the names themselves held an element of magic that nothing else could ever come close to)

- at all, that year.

And then Mister Dumbledore had revealed the secret bank account, the money and estate and titles he was set to inherit upon his eighteenth birthday, his parents' past.

And Harry was unsure if he was supposed to be joyful or irritated, nearly hateful, at and of his aunt. Or maybe she hadn't known. She'd certainly used the amount of money they had to use on him, instead of Dudley, against him often enough.

The days grew brighter than the sun, and the nights as dark as the shadows that still haunted his every waking moment. But determination and freedom sent those shadows away until he was capable of ignoring the twinges of his thighs and back, the lessening effects of the pain medication that he hardly noticed anymore, and the mirrors that only reflected what was and could be back at him.

And then came the day he was finally released under the care of one Sirius Black, a man who'd known his parents -

(known his parents known his parents KNOWN HIS PARENTS)

- and had just been recently released from prison on account of exonerating evidence. Evidence that linked his suspected crimes to a serial killer who still lay below the radar for years thereafter.

A man he soon came to love as an uncle, a guardian, a role model.

And as the days blurred together, once again, linked together in chains of grief and angst and love and romance and schoolwork and a life relatively unburdened by the secrets he kept locked behind closed doors and stuffed within near-to-bursting closets, Harry could feel it and taste it and smell it all around him.

Chance. Luck.

Serendipity.

Author's Note:

So, this was different :P I have no idea where this came from, or why my style is so mercurial, at that, but hey. This was fun to write :D