Life Is My Only Enemy

Life Is My Only Enemy

Harry's POW

Okay, how should I begin? I could start with the beginning, as many of you probably have pointed out to me already. That would be too simple, and, what I am about to tell you, is not simple at all. How do you explain to others how your life shattered and broke and nothing that you ever gained was ever enough?

Once, when I still saw the world through naïve eyes, I believed in simplicity. Foolishly so. I thought that if only you tried hard enough, and if you made your pleasures simple, you could have the kind of fairytale life. It was a matter of willpower, and nothing more. How wrong I was.

I have always been described as a stubborn boy. I fact, I was rather annoying in my determination - so if willpower was all I needed, then why didn't I succeed? Why was my life only a piece of a puzzle and nothing else?

Wars to fight, and roles appointed upon you. I had no choice; well, that's not true, but I couldn't choose not to fight. I couldn't choose to turn away and forget what had happened, for how could I live with myself? The answer is simple. I couldn't.

So I fought, did my duty, sacrificed until there was nothing left around me, and therefore there was nothing left to keep me from meeting him; no one that begged me to stay home, to come back alive, to survive and live and be happy. All I had were men of old age that invited me to sit in silence and gloom. I declined, and instead, I sat in an old and dungy hotel room, staring into a mirror, trying desperately to see if there was life behind my eyes, for I surely felt none.

Time passed shockingly quickly for one lost. I wandered the streets, worked, yet didn't, for the Ministry as I tracked down every goddamn Death Eater I could find. Why? Why not. I had become so bloody good at this, so talented at the killing, I doubted I could do anything else. I knew how to do this; I didn't have anything to lose either, so I did. I fought them down, one by one, ending up in the infantry time after time and I never gave in.

Dumbledore looked so old when I met him. He shook his head and told me that I could rest now, and I wanted to ask him if he didn't mean himself. Maybe he did, because he retired from the Headmaster position, though he lingered at Hogwarts still and when I visited him he had that look in his eyes as if he was waiting for something and he couldn't move on before he found it. I never asked what he wanted.

I killed Lucius Malfoy. It was simple really. I found him, looking nothing like the proud man he used to be, with dirtied robes and an expression in his face too many of St Mungus patients carry as well. He looked ill, and madness had taken hold of him now. He crawled at my knees, begging me to take the power. He told me that there were so much power out there, all waiting for someone who would be willing and brave enough to claim it.

I felt sick as he asked me. Power tastes of loneliness and death and a responsibility that I don't want, but Lucius never understood any of these things. He is dead now, by the flicker of my wand, and I wonder if he still doesn't understand it.

So I went about it, and my garden overgrew and the graves I hadn't seen took up the kind of weathered look they get after a long winter. Molly never called anymore, and no one ever cared. I still had tea with Dumbledore every Thursday, and I shaved and dressed and showered and looked like the young man I should have been.

I wonder if anyone is willing to give me a description of him. Maybe we could put up missing person notices, and then maybe I will find him and put him back into this body where he belongs. Secretly I think he is buried in the bloodstained earth of a field north of Hogwarts where once a boy saw those who defined him die and then passed away with them.

Dumbledore still had that haunted look in his eyes and I pretended it wasn't there. Nothing really changes anymore.

I fell in a coma. No one knows why. All they can say is that they found me after three weeks in a forest of some kind. I bore no recent wounds and no signs of being hurt. So they took me to Hogwarts for no one wanted to deal with me and there I lay for two whole weeks of deep sleep.

I wonder at times if nothing really happened at all, and I just lied down on the ground and fell into a comatose-sleep because sleep had eluded me for so long and my body was thinner than it had ever been.

I had only two visitors during my stay. One popped by every now and then, his face strangely more relaxed and his step lighter. We hardly spoke, but he drank obscene amounts of tea while I refused.

The other came every day, at seven pm with his hair framing his face and his sneers staying far away. He never said anything, and that was not what bothered me as I didn't speak to him either, but it was his look which lingered in the back of my mind and interrupted my thoughts. It was the look I could easily recognise, more so than happiness or sadness. I saw it every time a mirror was cruel enough to catch my eye.

He stayed for exactly three hours, from seven to ten pm, and then he would leave and I wouldn't look at him then either. He never passed outside the time limit, I never cared, and Dumbledore's step faltered again.

It took us three months of bed rest before I spoke my very first words to him since awkward discussions in the Order and brilliant fights in the halls. He had, of course, said things to me already, many things made no sense, and I never answered him. There were questions about how I was a bloody jerk for doing this, and I thought; you're exactly the same.

Dumbledore had been there earlier that day and he had given me something. I had not cared to investigate as gifts piled up around me and my house smelt sickening of flowers and paint. Not intending to look at it, I had anyway, and I ran.

The object was small and I easily understood what it was. I don't know how long I used it, but suddenly the chill of winter had settled all around and I realized the first snow had fallen and it was the thing I looked forward to the whole autumn, but I had forgotten.

I didn't ask for permission to leave, and no one gave it to me, nor did the healer stop me when I dressed in thick robes, and left the infantry and the gifts and a bed, which had been my home for the last months. My feet took a route they knew, and I remembered that I had always hated going up those stairs, because it would mean another brush with mortality and I didn't want mortality to become a part of my life. And people wondered how Voldemort's greatest desire was to become immortal.

The snow sparkled under the moon and it was thick like a blanket. I had been able to sit hours and hours on end without moving, just to watch the way the snow would shine and how people's eyes would shine with it, and it coloured everything and purified the grey zones.

He had come over the snow, waddling through and leaving an imperfect trail in his wake. It had scarred the snow like a lightning bolt on a boy's young face and I found I liked the way it sneaked up the hill and to the door.

He stopped, there, three meters from the stairs to the door, and looked at me with an expression I recognised too clearly. It hurt my eyes to see him like that, an image of death in the middle of a winter with deep blues and sparkling whites and his skin the perfect snow. I was close to him before either of us had breathed and I saw a snowflake on his eyelashes and the silver in his eyes.

He frowned as my hands touched his neck, where his pulse pooled beneath thin skin and inside fragile veins and I knew that Malfoy's skin bruised easily because I had seen it before. I didn't think of his lips, which were a bare breath apart, or that he was beautiful. I had long ago known these things and tonight the memories were settling back, like billions of snowflakes covering the weary earth and giving it the release of a long winter before spring again would return.

I knew that I had loved him for a long time and I had always known the fights and the battles were desperate searches of something real, which would wake us from the nightmare we were living in.

He shivered from my touch; I doubt it was my touch which made him tremble, but rather the coldness of it. He listened while I told him in details how I had killed his father and I listened while he told me how he hated me, and then he removed the expensive gloves from his hands and snuggled them onto my stiff ones, and, with a look at the castle, he took my hand and we followed the trail back the way he had come.

We fought, all the time, and I discovered that 'Draco Malfoy's didn't bruise as easily as others and that his veins were thicker and filled with red, hot blood, and he learned that golden boys were not always right, and that even The Boy Who Lived carried bruises, and was afraid.

Dumbledore passed away, in his bed that winter, with a smile lingering on his lips and Draco said that it was bloody typical that he should have to torment people in the after life with the same fucking smile he had always given us, and I had laughed. We both knew he knew a lot more than us.

Draco carries the small amulet with silvery dust inside it and I never look at it anymore. In the end I don't need it.