Warning: Schizophrenia, attempted murder, attempted suicide.

Genre: Horror/Drama

Summary: AU Non-BWL Harry. Harry's always been... that way. Ron tries to hide his best friend's growing insanity, until it's totally out of control. Schizophrenia, attempted suicide, attempted murder.

Infestation

artica's-ursula (FFN)

articas_ursula (AO3)

Written for FFN Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry (Challenges & Assignments) forum

Assignment 6, History Task 4

Hogwarts has a doxy infestation.

Of course, because pureblood families do not send their precious heirs to schools with infestations, Dumbledore paraphrases this in a short speech at dinner one evening as a temporary, minor pest problem.

In any case, the stench of doxy poison is making Harry sick. He's vomited twice this morning, head spinning and nauseous before and after both times as Ron hovers anxiously outside the bathroom.

"Is it that smell?" he asks cautiously while Harry flushes the toilet.

Washing his hands, Harry doesn't look up. "Yes."

"I can't smell it," Ron admits.

It's ripping Harry's insides apart.

No matter where he goes in the castle, that ghastly stench like a rotting corpse threatens to send Harry heaving once more; it makes his heart race, makes his mind—

What's more, no one else seems to notice.

The first time Harry wakes with the rough feeling of something like his school tie around his neck, he nearly falls from the stool he suddenly realizes he's standing on. He tries to step down, but the tie tightens alarmingly around his neck, squeezing the breath out of Harry, who claws hysterically at his neck, bewildered by what's happening. Two of his nails break off directly, leaving sharp stubs behind as his fingers move over something… not right.

A rope.

A noose is coiled around his neck.

Harry sobs, hands fumbling as he tries to clumsily undo the knot. A few broken seconds later, his neck slips free of the rope, and Harry falls to the ground on all fours, forgiving the bone-jolting pain of his knees as he crouches there, gagging and shaking.

Then he really wakes up.

In his and Ron's dormitory in Gryffindor tower, Harry is perfectly safe in bed. There isn't a dark ring around Harry's neck where the noose had cut into it, but there are horrible splotches of angry red color on both knees where bruises are going to soon appear.

Worse still: the room still reeks of death.

Harry is moving fast and reckless through the halls, hurtling around corner after grave-silent corner. He isn't sure what's happening—just that whatever's driving him forward is so urgent urgent urgent—

He comes to a messy stop in front of the sixth year boy's room and peels back skin clawing the door open. Blood seeps from beneath his mangled fingernail stubs as he begins tearing apart everything in the room in search of… but Harry doesn't care; he just wants, just needs—

"You're in a hurry tonight."

Harry swears, pivoting on the spot to face, well, himself.

It's a perfect copy of him, right down to the smallest flash of teeth that shows when he's curious about something but is still toying with how to ask directly. This Harry is settled on the edge of Ron's bed and watching the decline of his sanity with an air of amusement.

"I know, I know!" Harry wants to scream, sifting through papers and books before looking under his bed.

"What are you looking for?"

Harry pauses to stare disdainfully at the mirror where, inside, that dark presence always watches him. That Harry is staring at the ceiling now, nose scrunched at the unpleasant odor. "It never smells any better in here."

"Nothing I can do about that," Harry snarls, tearing the linins off his bed and feeling around before tossing them aside.

"I know what to do."

Harry pauses in his movements. He knows what he'll see but, like the sun rising, he can't not.

He turns.

His reflection has changed. It looks… nothing like him. Patches of hair are missing from his head, exposing raw scalp and irritated, ingrown hair follicles. The flesh around his bleeding fingernails—bitten cuticle-short—is ragged and dirty. Weeping wounds wind up the visible flesh of his arms and puffy red nail marks scratch their way up his neck.

His uniform is perfectly put-together.

"If it was me," this Harry continues calmly, "I'd hurt them."

Harry slams the drawer shut and stands abruptly, nearly toppling over as he staggers towards the door. He'd had this dream so many times; he's desperate to avoid the kitchen, but his feet lead him there anyway.

This Harry is there, his patchy hair and mutilated skin splashed with infected red in the moonlight filtering in. His fingers are wrapped around his own throat, and he's trying very, very hard to—

Harry realizes he's awake, and staring at the square ceiling panels.

The first time Harry's grip on sanity slipped, he'd been seven.

He thinks so, anyway. Sometimes he has dreams about it, though he isn't entirely sure the whole thing isn't born from a dream to start with.

His cousin Dudley's new pet rat, Niceies, twitched its whiskers at him from inside her cage, baring her sharp little teeth. Something in Harry bristled dangerously in answer.

He hated that rat.

Harder than that was pretending he didn't. It was a whole day of beady eyes glaring at him from the corner of the living room as Dudley pretended to adore his aunt, Marge. Aunt Marge had come to visit and had unexpectedly brought along the rat as a gift, much to Petunia's horror. Still, Dudley had liked the animal well enough, so she visible held herself back from refusing the creature.

If Harry could be sorry, he'd be sorry for this. Creeping down in the middle of the night but remembering as though he was watching someone else do it. Unlocking the cage; seizing the rat. And then—

The next morning was… awful. His cousin cried and screamed; his mother tried to calm him.

The rat was dead.

And Harry didn't know if he'd killed it or not.

He thought he remembered Aunt Petunia watching him as his cousin screamed hysterically; just watching, never saying. If only in his nightmarish dreams, Harry thought at least she knew how crazy he was. Those moments where some urge or obsession wormed its way into his mind were the worst, and this Harry would keen at him with his maimed skin and that neck with all the evidence that he'd tried to silence himself forever.

Once Aunt Marge had taken her leave, visibly shaken, Aunt Petunia took the entertaining tray—and the weird-smelling cheese that stunk like rot—with shaking hands and placed it in the kitchen sink.

She was terrified of him.

It's that place in the night where it's early and not late.

Ron wants to say that he doesn't watch Harry sometimes when he's sleeping. That he doesn't worry about him and that sometimes when it's so very late in the night he doesn't feel the tight, choking panic that catapults him halfway to the floor because he dreams Harry is standing over him—

None of it is true, though.

So when Ron realizes with stupid surprise that he's been awake and staring vacantly at the ceiling for the past two minutes, he gives a delayed start. His eyes automatically fly across the room—but Harry's bed sheets are tangled and spilling like sickness from his bed.

He's not there.

A nauseating panic threatens to pull him back to unconsciousness, but then Ron notices that, yes, Harry is out of bed: but he's only hovering by the opposite window.

Ron scrubs harshly at his dry and red-cracked eyes, dragging his legs over the edge of his bed and setting each down on the floor. Ron stumbles forward, bristling at the frigid air.

Harry looks ghost-like and fragile, and when Ron speaks up, it's quietly because really anything could break him.

"Harry," Ron pleads. Cold green eyes flick in Ron's general direction before resting again outside the window.

It's black.

Ron knows he should probably tell someone that his best friend is… this way. He just doesn't know how. When he'd met Harry on the train to Hogwarts, Harry had been eccentric. He learned that Harry's parents had been killed in the war a long time ago, though Ron didn't press for details. Whoever had brought him up since then had clearly left him more than a little socially stunted. Still, he was Ron's first friend that didn't hang out with him just because of proximity. Over the years, that eccentricity had turned deeply dark and troubled.

Ron refuses to give up on him.

"I'm going crazy," Harry admits.

"You don't mean it," Ron breathes, wrapping his arms around himself with shivering tightness. "You wouldn't do it, Harry."

"I can't stop thinking about it. It's the only dream I know how to make."

"It's a nightmare," Ron retorts vehemently.

"It's in my head." Harry's voice is sleepless; revolted. "I can feel it crawling around like a rat."

"You don't mean it," he repeats firmly.

"Do you really think that?" Harry asks. "You have a lot to lose, you know. We share a room, but one day you might not wake up to see it."

"…You wouldn't do it."

"I promise," Harry replies ironically, allowing the curtain to fall back into place.

An hour later with Harry's heavy sighs of sleep filling the room—Ron still doesn't know if it had been a promise to kill him or not.

Harry opens his eyes.

It's his dream; so real and vivid, thoughts thrumming inside his head.

He knows everything about this room; sees Ron sleeping fitfully on the opposite side of it and the small gap in the stone above his bed where the ceiling meets the wall, masked almost entirely by a Gryffindor banner.

He's been so patient; has waited so long to creep over to the stool sitting next to his desk and drag it quietly right beside his bed. Harry never does anything he doesn't mean, and he means it when he steps up onto it and puts his face right up against the stone's cracks, thrusting his eye into the dark space.

Hundreds of beady, shrunken black eyes and yellow, razor-sharp teeth flash at him in the crack of moonlight pushing its way into a different gap a little ways further along the wall. Chattering and little scrapes of sharp, ragged claws echo off the stone as Harry reaches in among them, brushing past thick hairy bodies which squeal in protest and dart away.

The doxies are crawling over his arm as he gropes in the darkness—picking one up by mistake and feeling vicious little teeth sink into his finger. He ignores the throbbing and vermin saliva in the wound as his fingers brush something new… It's a bowl that scraps across the rough stone as he pulls it hungrily towards himself, flicking irritably at the doxy inside that refuses to move from its feasting.

The doxy is dead.

He gags as the scent of putrid flesh fills his nostrils when the bowl comes down to cradle in his arms.

This is his poison.

This is their poison.

Harry nearly chokes in relief. He's thought of almost nothing else for so long; this one idea on repeat over and over—he can all but feel the strings of his sanity begin to strain.

"It'll let us go."

This Harry with his disfigured flesh and perfectly pressed Hogwarts uniform is right there with him, bleeding cuticles and cut fingers gripping Harry's forearm. He begs, voice high and miserable like a wounded animal: "It'll let us go if we just…"

Harry knows.

"Chaos for chaos. It's only fair."

Nothing's fair.

The next morning, Harry collects his books in a much better mood than normal. The tension in his head seems to have snapped overnight. The stench of death has nearly vanished from the room since he moved the poison and he hasn't felt this clear-headed in months.

Harry smiles a little while snapping his bag shut and exiting. But he doesn't even have a chance to turn around to close the door before Ron is skidding to a halt next to him out of absolutely thin air, wrapping his hands around Harry's shoulders and shaking him soundly.

"Where is it?" Ron says with a shaking voice, fingers nearly cutting off his air. "Where, Harry!?"

For a handful of seconds, Harry looks entirely stumped by the question. His eyes widen and lips gape while his brain rattles in his head under Ron's rising hysteria. His surprise is arresting.

"Pl—Please, Ron, I—I don't—"

"YES YOU DO KNOW, HARRY! THINK, FOR MERLIN'S SAKE! PLEASE!"

"I don't—Ron, you're hurting me!"

Suddenly, it's like he's floating rapidly to the surface of the ocean.

The sounds, which he's heard before, are no longer passively brushing his mind—they're hitting him like bullets. Everything's solid and here and real—and oh god, what has he done?

"I put… it in the water."

Ron drops him immediately and catapults himself to the door, wrenching it open and fleeing manically towards the Great Hall.

Harry can't move.

He remembers slipping out of bed. He remembers the doxy poison in the walls and the hundreds of beady little eyes glaring at him from the dark as he reaches in to take the deathly smell from them. He remembers getting to the empty kitchens and that awful feeling of wanting—needing—to do what Ron promised Harry wouldn't.

He put the doxy poison in the water supply.

He'd strangled Niceies to death.

Harry vomits violently on the floor.

Suddenly, there's a lot of sound. The only thing Harry knows for sure is that he's on his knees because he feels the cold, rough stone make bruising contact with them. He yanks on his hair, distressed sounds slipping from his throat.

He's crazy.

For the most part, the sound is content to whittle away at the back of his mind, providing annoying but not outright upsetting background noise. There are times such as these, though, where this is not the case. Like a cat with a bucket of ice water dumped on it, the noise spits and claws at the delicate strings sewing Harry's sanity together.

But somewhere along the line, one of those strings has snapped, and now he is staring down a man with large glasses and a mustache on the opposite side of a coffee table at Saint Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries in the psychiatric ward.

"Do you hate yourself, Harry?" the man asks unexpectedly.

"No… no, of course not."

"Really? Because there are nail marks around your neck, along with a rope mark like something's tried throttling you… there are patches of hair ripped from your scalp, Harry. Cuticles torn out, scars all along your arms—I want to help you, Harry."

Harry's eyes widen. "No, I—but I don't want to die!"

"Maybe not. When you're awake."