He hadn't bothered to sneak away; to take precautions about not being noticed. That had just happened naturally. Everybody was just so happy that Voldemort was gone and that it was the end of their seventh year that not a single person noticed Harry slip out the castle door with a bag over his shoulder. He had kept looking back to see if anybody followed, or had come looking for him, but after a few days he stopped, realizing that nobody really cared at all. His job was done and Voldemort was gone, and so long as they were all safe again, that was all that mattered to them. It was no matter that nobody had stopped to talk to Harry about what he had been feeling. It didn't matter that he felt hollowed and empty and suddenly unsure about what his purpose was. No, none of it mattered to them, so Harry continued down the only path he had ever known... that which he walked alone.

The night he had left during the end of year feast had been a little over a year ago. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Harry had simply vanished. Harry believed it himself most days: that he wasn't really there at all, trying to keep going day after day living a shallow imitation of existence. Maybe he was really a ghost and he just didn't know it yet... just hadn't accepted it. He had to pinch himself every morning to remind himself that he had to get up and eat, because that's what living souls did.

Harry never stayed in one place too long, never sure of where exactly he fit in, or where he was supposed to be. He lived from town to town, thicket to thicket, sometimes renting a room for a night or two, sometimes sleeping in a tent he shrank to fit in his pack in the daytime, and sometimes he slept in alleyways or under bridges. It wasn't that he didn't want to be found, it was that he didn't know his place. There really was no place for him now that the prophecy had been fulfilled and his reason to keep going was gone. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to drift back into society... to just show up one day and fit back in. But he didn't know how to do that anymore than he knew how to make himself feel alive.

He had seen Ron once in Dublin, talking to an old man in the street, showing him something on a piece of folded up paper, but Ron hadn't noticed Harry with the potion he drank whenever he wandered into public view. It kept him unnoticeable, and made it seem to people that saw him as if he were a stranger. He had stood there on the opposite side of the road, watching his old friend for long moments, wishing he would turn around and spot Harry and force him back into the world, but Ron never did, and Harry moved on, emptier inside than ever.

Harry supposed that he had just felt so much hurt and anguish in his lifetime that he could no longer take it, and so now his body felt nothing at all... no emotion, no real thought, no purpose. He wondered if he even still had a soul, or if it had been taken from him by Voldemort. He tried to get angry about it, but numbness overtook him. He tried to get angry about all of his friends that had died in the final battle, about how nobody cared at all about him, but he couldn't muster any emotion at all. He hadn't been able to shed a single tear over the deaths or about how ruined he felt since the day of the battle, and he supposed he should have felt guilt, but he couldn't gather any of that up either.

The one emotion that Harry did find himself having occasionally was surprise. Since he had killed Voldemort with his bare hands, literally sucking the life from the man, Harry had found himself with a variety of unexpected new powers. He would often awake to find himself floating a foot off the ground, or reach for something and have if fly across the room to him. He had seen himself in the mirror the day after the battle and had noticed his eyes had changed too... they were now a brighter, lighter color of green and yet seemed dulled by something he couldn't pin down.

And so it was that as a remnant of himself, walking a line between the edge and the unknown, Harry continued down his path, meandering wherever the wind took him, hands in his pockets and bag on his back. All hope was lost for Harry James Potter, the boy who had lost himself and who walked alone.