The Hospital wing at Hogwarts two weeks post-war, in May 1998, was dark and shadowy despite the season. Heavy clouds hovered over the castle since the morning, minimising the scarce amount of light filtering through the deeply set windows in the thick walls. The glass was further blurred from raindrops silently running down the uneven, slightly embossed square surfaces, making the room even gloomier.
Harry Potter, who was alone in the ward and who had been so the greatest part of the day, had not yet bothered to light the torches. He sat, fully clothed, on the edge of his made up bed, and studied his hands. After a fortnight in the hospital wing, even the callosities of his palms, built up during months of physical hardships when living as an outlaw in the forest, had begun to wane. Harry shook his head slightly. He was fine, really. What was he doing here, still?
The absolute silence of the room was awkward and unaccustomed - and a blessing at the same time. During nearly two weeks after the battle, the hospital wing had been crammed with people. Some only roughed up, others maimed and crippled, but all of them survivors. They had recovered in this room, until they were dispatched, one by one, either to St Mungo’s for further treatment, or were fetched home to their relatives’ care. The last patient had left with his family the same morning, and afterwards the blessed silence had reclaimed the ward.
All this time Harry felt out of place in the middle of the everyday hustle of caring and soothing, caught up in other people’s disconcerting compound of blatant grief over lost friends, and expressed joy over the end of the war. He felt guilty for occupying a bed when his injuries were limited to superficial scratches that had healed within days, not sure that his other condition warranted the amount of medical supervision that Mme Pomfrey and the all-too-respectful healers claimed that it did. Truth be told, he was embarrassed by the strange symptoms that no one seemed to understand and that had him confined to the hospital wing since the day Voldemort died.
Sometimes, in a harsh twinge of self-scrutiny, Harry wondered whether he did not provoke those symptoms on a subconscious level. It was so convenient after all that he should be able to hide within the thick walls of Hogwarts when the public wanted their hero available in the real world, and wanted him to appear in the press. Convenient to be coddled by Mme Pomfrey, convenient to be able to avoid meeting with certain people who would upset him too much.
Harry scowled sarcastically at himself. The suspicion added to a vague feeling of self-scorn that had settled in Harry’s mind since the end of the battle. He couldn’t say why he felt so impatient and disgusted with himself, but maybe it was in defence to the overwhelming and undeserving praise that he was drowned in for conquering Voldemort, who in Harry’s opinion, had only been hoist with his own petard.
Harry rose suddenly, stood for a short while, then glanced around uncertainly as if he had forgotten what made him move in the first place. He seemed to hesitate and to consider sitting down on the bed again, but decided to advance towards one of the windows.
The young wizard put both hands on the broad stone of the window sill and leant forward. Rain was streaming down steadily outside, but made no noise against the windows. It must be calm outside - a gentle torrential.
He could not say for how long he had been standing there, staring vacantly with unnervingly dry eyes at the blurred green scenery of the forest, idly tracing the path of a drop of water with a fingertip, as it ran across the window glass, when he noticed that he had lost feeling in both his hands. He should be able to perceive the cold of the glass, or at least feel the rough stone under his palm, but the skin was strangely numb. Carefully he took his weight from his flexed wrist and moved it slightly back and forth, but there was no tingling of the sort that one expects when pinching a nerve. Instead the numbness spread further up his arms and reached the elbows, causing his limbs to feel like strange, blunt clubs that did not belong to his body.
Harry awkwardly managed to manoeuvre himself without making use of his hands into a sitting position in the window sill, back to the stone, legs flexed and feet against the opposite wall. His numb hands lay limp in his lap. He closed his eyes and leant his head back, deliberately breathing in a calming way.
This was only a trifle compared to the full-blown attacks that he had experienced a couple of times over the past weeks. He was confident that it would pass, and although he found it vaguely uncomfortable not to be in contact with parts of his body, it did not make him anxious. He observed the symptoms with detached curiosity and waited patiently for them to fade away.
His mind drifted off to that first time it had hit him full force, when he had collapsed at Professor Snape’s feet. No one had been particularly surprised by then, because there were several circumstances to blame: the lack of sleep, the extreme mental and physical stress that he had been under for a long time, culminating at the point when he deliberately surrendered to Voldemort and resulting in the blowing off of a horcrux from his soul. Not to say the overwhelming surprise at finding out when everything was over that not only had he returned from the brink of the grave himself, but that Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape had actually resuscitated and come back from the dead!
What had been more surprising and alarming was that Harry’s collapse had not been an ordinary fainting spell, but that he had slid into an immediate and deep, life-threatening shock that had been extremely difficult for the healers to reverse, and that had kept him unconscious for two days.
Harry sighed and opened his eyes as he tentatively flexed his fingers. They felt a tiny bit less numb now, but on the other hand he seemed to have developed an insensitive spot on his chin, right under his lower lip. He pouted slightly, trying to stretch the area as if to awaken it, to no end. Resigned, Harry closed his eyes again. Rest and sleep were the only things that seemed to have a beneficial effect on the strange symptoms when they occurred on a low grade scale like this.
The fulminant shock reaction had reoccurred twice, and Harry knew that in the particular circumstances of those events lay the explanation. Those exact situations, or rather, the special pair of wizards who triggered it, one or both present on each time. Everything was connected with them. His former headmaster and his former teacher. Those two.
And yet, the second time, he had been prepared, he had been consenting and even eager, if a little nervous, to meet both of them. He really thought it would be okay. Even Mme Pomfrey had declared him recovered.
Ron and Hermione had explained everything about the Professors’ resurrections so that Harry would be privy to the circumstances and feel ready to accept the facts. Yet the moment Dumbledore and Snape stepped inside the hospital ward and advanced towards Harry’s bed, it was as if all the air was sucked out of Harry’s lungs and as if his whole being was suddenly wrapped up in silencing and suffocating charms. With a vague notion of how the other patients and their visitors acclaimed and applauded the distinguished war heroes, Harry’s sight dimmed fast and he honestly did not remember much of the encounter from there.
According to Ron and Hermione who witnessed the event and who told him later what happened, he had never let his extreme discomfort show, but stayed upright without swaying, eyes fixed upon the two wizards until they were close by his bed, at which point Harry, seemingly without warning, had silently passed out, shocking his visitors and his friends once again by the amount of resuscitative aid needed to stabilise him.
Professor Dumbledore had made one last attempt to approach Harry, unannounced and without Snape at his side this time, but with the same almost fatal result. Harry literally did not seem to support the presence of either of his former protectors. It was confusing and embarrassing at the same time. It was also highly impractical as it warranted that Harry be under constant medical surveillance, close to resuscitation facilities at all times until they knew what was wrong with him.
Between being unconscious and spending time recovering in the crowded ward, with a constant stream of visitors, Harry had not given the future much thought. Frankly, during the two weeks since Voldemort’s demise, reality had seemed dim and floating to Harry. It occurred to him that all his energy, when he was not unconscious, was spent trying to simply hang on with the state of things. Not infrequently, he found it hard to follow his friends’ conversations. More than once, when he asked questions to keep up, did they show their vexation by accusing him of being unreasonably absentminded - Why did he ask, when they had just told him that - did he not listen to them?
That was how he realised that several of his senses, taking turns, seemed to switch on and off. It was not that he did not pay attention to his friends, but his hearing actually did go dumb at times. In the same way, his skin, like now, would turn numb, and his muscles would become weak, before everything regressed to normal after a while. Harry could not bring himself to be upset or worried about these symptoms, not like Mme Pomfrey who hit the ceiling when he told her about them and fussed back and forth, consulting every possible healer at St Mungo’s she could get hold of.
Harry had more than once found himself surrounded by consulting health care professionals in Mme Pomfrey’s office, listening to them arguing above his head. They advanced a long row of hypothesis regarding Voldemort’s Avada Kedavra, regarding the horcrux, the survival and the post-traumatic repercussions on body and soul. Their voices would fade in and out. At the same time Harry’s sense of smell would be heightened to nauseating levels, as swirls of smoke, perfume or crude bodily odours from the visitors would reach and overwhelm him, only for the olfactory sense to mercifully shut off completely in the end.
Distracted, Harry would let them have their way, all while thinking with slight irritation that their efforts were ridiculous and in vain. They couldn’t possibly know! Of course they didn’t know! No one in the history of the Wizarding world had survived a killing curse, except Harry Potter. No one else had had a horcrux attached to their soul and then had it blown off. How could they express themselves with such confidence on diagnosis and prognosis?
This morning, when his last fellow patient left the ward, Harry finally put his foot down, cancelled the consultation planned for the day and explained firmly yet politely to Mme Pomfrey that he did not want to meet any other healers. Mme Pomfrey respected his decision, although slightly huffing and possibly resenting him for turning down her well-meant aid, because she promptly disappeared from the ward and only monitored her patient from a distance. That was how Harry had suddenly found himself alone for the first time since the end of the war, with abundance of time to think about his future.
Somehow the hours passed, however, Harry knew not how. His thoughts wandered aimlessly and he listened to the silence of the stone walls of the ward with almost rapt concentration. So quiet! Such blessed stillness! Reflecting on the matter for the first time, he realised that there was no threat left. The world was safe from Voldemort, and his own mind was free from another presence, finally tranquil. It was a thought that should thrill and delight him, but it only made him wondrous and strangely empty.
Similarly, he experienced the fine spring rain as if for the first time in life. It left him elated and saddened at the same time, making him feel like crying. So many tears had fallen around him the past few weeks, but Harry had not shed a single one himself. He sat by the window, he did not know for how long, until his stream of consciousness was interrupted.
”Mr Potter,” said a brisk voice. He opened his eyes and sat himself more upright as he observed Mme Pomfrey advance from the door to her office.
”Mrs Petunia Dursley is here to see you, Harry,” she proceeded more gently. Harry’s eyes widened as he raised his eyebrows at the unexpected statement. What on earth was his aunt doing at Hogwarts?