Chapter Text
Harry has the Philosopher’s Stone in his pocket, and his hands are full of ash. The thing that was Quirrell is screaming and cracking and burning, and Harry’s scar is trying to rip its way out of his skin. Together they are fixed in time, and Harry wishes he could see his parents one last time, see his family, before he dies. He wrenches his hands away with great effort, and as the body falls smoking to the ground he turns to look in the mirror. His mum is so young and so beautiful, his father smiles with sadness and love. Behind them there are others. Some, like Harry, like his dad, have the strange curve to their ear that Malfoy delights in pointing out. More a house elf than a saviour, Potter.
His eyes are growing dark, and Harry is not too young to know what that means. He reaches for the mirror, cold and clingy, like thickened water. There is a bright light beyond it, blinding as a star. He thinks, if he keeps stretching, he can touch it - be one with the sky, a new point in a constellation.
Then he is falling, out of space and out of time.
And it hurts.
—--
Harry had always been strange, as the Dursleys delighted in telling him. His hair was too wild, his eyes too green, his ears too sharp. He sang so sweetly that Petunia cried once, and hated him for it, and even a hum drew attention, and drawing attention was not something he was allowed to do. He enjoyed strumming the guitar and was (according to his Year 1 teacher) a natural at piano and he had a great love of the violin that he only played when the music room was empty at lunch. The Dursleys did not approve of musical prodigies, and neither did they like literary ones, so he only read in secret the books of poems the librarian was thrilled to find him. He took all of that focus and cleverness and curiosity and he used it to squash himself down into the most ordinary, most normal Harry he could be.
And then he went to magic school, rendering the entire exercise utterly pointless.
He'd always suspected he was magic. It was rather hard to miss. Quite young he’d realised that speaking to the birds and the cats and the trees wasn’t normal. He’d saved a girl from drowning in the river once, asked the water to just lift her right out, and then there were the things he did when his cousins and his friends were chasing him. He had asked, once. Uncle Vernon had insisted that magic didn't exist and there was no point arguing once he'd decided something, even if it was demonstrably untrue. So Harry tried to be less magic, and they held an uneasy truce (they turned a blind eye to the garden, always picture perfect. They liked getting one over on the neighbours more than they hated unnaturalness).
Of course even at Hogwarts he was rather odd, what with the dead parents and the murderous dark lord and having the audacity to still be alive. The plants in herbology sung in his hands (they would sing to Neville too, if he could hear them) and he flew like he was born on a broom, the rhythm of the wind a dance he knew the steps to. Just like your father people told him, and again he’d miss a man he never remembered meeting.
He didn’t mean to get into so much trouble, but he’d always had a curious mind and a knack for escaping and a wild streak a mile long. So maybe it wasn’t surprising he ended up falling through a magic mirror into a forest that may or may not be forbidden. He woke up on an accidental bed of twigs and flowers and scurrying insects, his face caked in the blood that poured from his scar. He had to scratch it away from his left eye to open it, flicking the dried red flecks into the dirt. His head still pounded, and his whole body ached. It felt like pins and needles in every limb and every organ, all the way down to his fingernails.
There was nothing he could hear around him, except for the usual sounds and songs. A curious squirrel had come to see him, and it chittered happily when it saw he still lived. Clearly it knew that Harry’s mouth was so dry he couldn’t speak, because it led him to a small stream when he finally dragged himself to his feet. There was a small gap in the canopy of trees above it. Harry looked up, and had a strange thought.
These were not his stars.
Harry knew them well. He’d had little chance to see them from his cupboard under the stairs, but sometimes Mrs Figg would take him out into the garden when she babysat him late. Harry and the cats would find a spot amongst the pots of half dead flowers, and listen as she told Greek stories of how the stars got their names. It prepared him well for Hogwarts; Astronomy was one of his favourite classes.
Despite that, he convinced himself he couldn’t be right. Maybe he was looking at them from a weird angle, or they were disrupted by some kind of space cloud or satellite. The stars were the stars no matter where you were. That was one of life’s few certainties (along with Dudley’s hunger).
Thirst smothered, headache conceding to recede ever so slightly, he tried to take stock of the situation. His wand was tucked in his trouser pocket, left there when he felt for the stone - which was still there as well, and he had no idea how he’d explain that when he got back to school. Luckily he had his leather rucksack, charmed weightless and smaller and slung over his back, so he could pull on his invisibility cloak and feel a semblance of safety.
There were a lot of trees. He walked for hours, he assumed, based on the rising and the setting of the sun. His habit of hoarding food came in handy, though even with Dursley style rationing it was not more than a week's worth of chocolate frogs and bruised fruit, with some sausages stolen from breakfast. He nibbled on one when his belly started to feel like it was eating itself, and stopped at another small stream to drink some water, cold and clear. His reflection stared back at him, prompting him to wipe more of the dirt and blood off his face. It didn’t stop him looking like a wild thing - hair tangled and decorated by the forest floor, scar red and weeping, lip split.
He walked until the night fell, and then walked further still. Finally, he reached the end of the trees, and saw only plains of grass. Turning back, just a little, he found a big tree where the roots would shelter him, and curled up under his cloak to sleep.
—--
A day turned into two, then three, if the sun was anything to go by. It was all trees and grass and hills, except for the midge filled marsh that he’d skirted around after almost losing a shoe. If it wasn’t for the warmth, forcing him to strip off his school robe and tie it around his waist to be able to suffer the weight of the invisibility cloak, he’d think he was still in Scotland, and if it wasn’t for how long he’d been walking, he’d think he’d somehow stumbled into the English countryside. But he’d yet to see another person, or a farm, or even one solitary cow. Just foxes and rabbits and birds. Shuffling in the night made him think of bigger things - badgers maybe? He was pretty sure all the lynxes were gone, and definitely all the wolves and bears. Cows were the most dangerous animal in Britain.
If, of course, he was still in Britain.
It wasn’t a thought he liked to entertain; he avoided looking up at night. Mostly because he has no idea what to do if it were true, and Harry wasn’t a boy who usually lacked for ideas. When his thoughts turned too grim he sat by a stream or a nice patch of flowers and read one of the school books in his bag, the only distraction available. Madame Pince would never forgive him for taking her library books on an impromptu trip abroad; that was an upside at least. If he wasn’t in Britain, he might be gone so long she’d forget.
Now and then he fiddled with the Philosopher’s Stone, and wondered what all the fuss was about. It was an interesting stone as stones went; darker reds and blood reds mixing together to form some kind of crystal, though it no longer had that black swirling inside. But Harry preferred the trees and the plants to stones, who had always been slow to speak. When he felt too lonely he talked to the meadow flowers, or the old oaks that sheltered him from summer rain.
Sometimes he wondered if it was all in his head - if it had always all been in his head. But mostly, he was pretty sure they talked back.
It wasn’t words really, so much as a feeling or a song that his mind translated into words. They’d always been that way for him - animals too, though only that snake talked to him properly, and that had just ended with days in the cupboard. Before they always felt happy to see him, which was maybe wishful thinking given that no one else ever was. Here, they seemed to have more to say in their rustling leaves and sweet songs. They told him to take cover before the darkening clouds caught his eye, nudging him in the direction of a blackberry bush full of dark ripe fruit; told him to hide when something came stumbling loudly past a thick hedgerow.
It was strange, but then Harry was strange, and here there was no one to mind.
Until he followed them too long, too trustingly, and found himself face to face with a man. It was too hot for the cloak now, hot enough that he could smell his own sweat in the humid air, and the lack of danger had made him complacent. He saw Harry immediately. He had tangled dark hair sticking out of a dark grey cloak, which blended well into the woods. More alarming, he had what Harry was pretty sure was an actual sword fixed to his hips, and a bow and arrow which he pointed directly in Harry’s face. For a second they both froze.
Then Harry was running. He was running and running, jumping over roots, forcing himself through thickets. The trees were alarmed and so were the birds and it only made him run faster and harder and further. Harry had always been a runner; he was small and lean and quidditch and a year of proper food had only made him better. He ducked under branches and dived between trunks and ignored the shouting that followed him.
He didn’t understand a word of it, but he understood perfectly well the sounds of an adult man who was angry.
He ran until he couldn't and then, hands shaking, he pulled out his cloak and huddled underneath it, grasping his wand in his hand and holding his own wrist to force it steady. He stayed like that for hours, his body stiff and aching, and ignored the trees when they tried to call him back. He had trusted them and now he was frightened. Harry hated being frightened. Much better to be angry instead.
—---
After that he was more careful, which was hard because his food was gone and he was hungry. He’d had practice at being hungry, more than he would like, and he forced down as much water as he could stomach to trick himself into thinking he was full. When he was really hungry he ate the grass, unless he could find things he knew better - dandelion and dock leaves, which he dug out at the root and crunched through, fruits he was sure weren’t poisonous.
He considered that he should try hunting. That was probably what the bow and arrow were for. Maybe they weren’t for Harry at all. Maybe he’d just surprised him, and then he’d run away like a little boy, and now he was starving to death in some idyllic foreign countryside that somehow no one had decided to build a housing estate on yet. He could probably do it with his wand. They’d not learnt that many useful spells yet, but levitating could help he supposed. And he had more than his first year books; after that thing in the forest he’d been afraid, and he didn’t like to be afraid. It made him feel small and useless and pathetic, and so he’d taken out some books from the library that would maybe help him fight a unicorn-murdering dark lord.
Unfortunately, he’d not had much chance to actually learn any of those spells. If he could, which Hermione was adamant he could not, and she was probably right. It just made him feel safer to have the possibility. So now he had a bag of useless books which he’d trade for a medieval weapon in an instant. Except that would break the Statute of Secrecy, as would using magic on some poor defenseless rabbit, so that was out the window. And there was no way he could eat the birds. They chattered to him daily, small colourful ones mostly, finches and tits and robins. Overhead he sometimes saw the bigger predator kinds, but they were only competition for the rabbits Harry wasn’t going to kill anyway.
So for want of anything else to do, Harry kept walking. His trainers, never quite fitting right and already worn down when he was given them, had started to get holes where the material met the rubber bottom. There were blisters on his feet that he really had to not think about. His trousers weren’t doing much better; they weren’t made to withstand trekking through the wilds. His robe was alright though, lot of good that did him for now. Madame Malkin had told him it was made with special magic thread, and clearly that was true, which he’d be really glad of when it wasn’t so bloody warm.
He tried not to stray too far from water, afraid he’d never find it again. When he looked into it his face was all sharp lines and shadows, worse than when he was living off bread crusts and mouldy cheese for a week at the Dursley’s, and tanned a warm gold from all the days walking in the sun. Maybe he’d actually rather be at the Dursley’s. At least there he knew it would end. Punishments only lasted a week or two, and he’d always known that one day he’d be sixteen and he’d walk out that door and never go back. Here he had no such certainty. He had no anything.
At that exact moment, an eagle dropped a rabbit carcass in his path without so much as a by-your-leave. He didn’t touch it for a while, eyeing it sceptically in case the eagle was saving it for later. He was in enough pain without getting stabbed by eagle claws. But it didn’t come back and Harry gingerly picked it up, feeling very sad and very grateful all at once. He found a sheltered spot behind some big rocks, piled up some sticks and was glad he had a wand. He’d seen how to make a fire on TV before, but he wasn’t sure exactly what kind of sticks he’d be rubbing together, or why that would work, and magic negated the need for any of that faff.
It was a relief to cast a spell, and a relief to find something, at least, came easy. Then he realised he couldn’t just hold the rabbit over the top, and had to put the fire out so he could make a structurally unsound stick tower to prop it on. Then he lit it again, risking burns to flop it over every now and then. At least cooking at Privet Drive meant he knew about food poisoning, and he cooked it until it was probably as tough as leather.
Then he remembered he didn’t have a knife, and the thought of biting through that charred fur made his stomach turn, and so did the thought of trying to cut it open with a sharp rock. He’d seen Professor Sprout use a cutting spell in the greenhouse before. They’d learn it properly next year in charms, but he knew the word and he was good at learning movements, and he spent half an hour shouting diffendo and waving his wand until he just sat and cried instead. He smacked his head back against the rock until he stopped crying and got angry and he spat the spell out one more time. The cut opened immediately, like it was afraid not to, and Harry peeled back the fur with hungry hands, and buried his face in the cooling meat.
—----
He went on like that for a while. He got quieter, more jumpy. And though he sometimes saw signs of people - hints of smoke in the distance, steps somewhere behind, even hints of men calling through the trees - he couldn’t bring himself to go to them. He was sure now that he was somewhere wrong, out of space or out of time, and whoever he found wouldn’t be a friendly Scottish local who’d take him to the pub and buy him a pie and call someone to take him home. It could be anyone. They could want anything. Harry knew more than most that adults weren’t often to be trusted.
There were ruins here and there. Hints of the kind of buildings they’d visit on school trips, except nothing like them in any way, aside from being old and faded. There was just something off about them, as if someone described a bit of a fort without any pictures and this was what the builder came up with. For that reason, initially he avoided them. They were eerie and kind of sad, a monument to a grander time. Harry didn’t want to know what broke them. He hoped it was a very long time ago, but this was a place where people carried literal swords so who was to say. The usual rules, he suspected, did not apply.
But his resolve faltered, eventually. It started to get colder at night, and Harry started to get bored. He couldn’t go on like this forever, living off scraps, sleeping a couple hours here and there, reading more than Hermione on a holiday. He consoled himself with the knowledge that Ron would probably have given himself up to that first man, then wondered why he took pride in being so unhelpfully stubborn. He could have been fed and sheltered by now. Or maybe murdered. Or molested, presuming pedophiles were universal. Slavery, that was another one to be worried about.
He put it off another few days.
It was a glorious sunrise, all orange and yellow, when he spied a ruin on top of a big hill. A really very incredibly large hill. Too large, maybe. Eiffel Tower large. It was probably windy up there, given it was so high, and he couldn’t see if it had a roof still, or if it was just a ring of stone. But he didn’t have anything else to do, and at least he’d finally know if there was some village nearby he kept managing to walk by or if he was really in the arse end of nowhere.
Halfway up his thighs began to burn, and he sat down looking out over the land. It was beautiful, objectively. If he knew he’d be fed and warm and safe he’d happily live in it. He’d rather Hogwarts, obviously, but there were worse places to end up. It could have been the Sahara desert. Or the Arctic. If Ron and Hermione were here he'd be content enough for a while. They weren’t though, which reminded him of the sick feeling of panic in his chest that he kept shoving away. Harry got by. That was what he did. Just carried on slogging away at life, even when it hated him.
Like this hill.
There was an end to the climb, and he managed. There were signs of old fires, some logs helpfully stacked to the side. He lit one for himself, then pulled the last of his food out of his rucksack. Three apples, a handful of damsons, and a very overcooked rat. Which he still felt bad about, even if it was a rat. He ate, and then he drank water from the ridiculous not-bucket he’d fashioned out of willow sticks and leaves and fur and bad transfiguration, which wasn’t entirely leak proof. Before he lost the light, he looked out from every side of the hill, and his heart skipped when he saw, far in the distance, the signs of a village. It was probably days away, and he thought it might have walls, which didn’t exactly bode well. But it gave him a direction. He could go, loiter outside, see how people looked.
It boosted his mood, which hadn’t been particularly jolly. He read the book on Wicked charms for the everyday wizard until his eyes began to feel heavy. He was too tired to put the fire out, and too warm to sleep under the cloak, so instead he put his book and wand away and wrapped his bag in the cloak, using it as an invisible pillow, and slept under his school robe instead.
For a couple hours he slept well. Then he discovered what a monumentally stupid idea this had been.
—
They woke him with a kick to his stomach, unnecessarily hard. He clutched himself, winded, and tried to see what attacked him. Very quickly, he wished he hadn’t.
Hideous was not quite sufficient. Disgusting? Repulsive? He knew he was panicking because his thoughts were stuck on that point, listing words - revolting? Repugnant? So many rs - as his eyes tried to skim past them and find a way to escape. His wand was not in his pocket. He never slept with it in his pocket in case he snapped it, and he didn’t put it nearby in case he just forgot it in the morning. Harry hadn’t been a wizard for so long that he didn’t worry about that.
In hindsight, they were lesser worries. If he’d known he had to be concerned about being attacked by monsters in the night he’d have put up with them. But he didn’t, and now he was being dragged to his feet, his robe-blanket falling off him, and he stumbled purposefully forward - not to escape, but because they’d not yet kicked over his bag and if it stayed hidden he could come back for it if he escaped.
But how would he escape without his wand? If they took it, at least it would be nearby.
It was already too late. They’d shoved him forward, onto his hands and knees. They laughed a laugh that was almost human, which was worse than if it had been some monstrous sound. Then they were pulling him up again, grasping at him like he was a rag doll, and he tried to shove them off and got a smack to his chin that knocked his whole head back.
A shout followed. Low voices, speaking words he couldn’t understand. Then a grimy, black finger reached out and stroked, almost tenderly, down over the slight point of his ear. It reminded him of Dudley and Piers, how they used to catch him and tug at his ears. Pointy eared freak. He snapped his teeth at the hand as it withdrew, sinking them into vile skin until the thing shrieked with the pain of it. The viciousness fuelled his anger, and he felt the heat of magic curling in his fingers, and shoved the monster back with a hand holding fire.
There was a searing pain to the back of his head. After that, nothing.