NOVEL NEXT Chapter 3: Echoes of Trauma
In Harry' latest letter to Dumbledore, delivered only two days ago, he had demanded not only to be released from his sentence at Azkaban as soon as possible, but also for the Headmaster to do something about the near-constant slander that was building in the press. Dumbledore had replied calmly that he had the situation under control, and that he would be removed from Privet Drive as soon as it was feasible.
Harry thought the Headmaster's idea of "under control" was ludicrous.
"What the bloody hell is he playing at, Hedwig?" he inquired bitterly. "There's a Dark Lord on the loose and he's not telling anyone!"
Hedwig had no answer, but barked sympathetically.
Harry had expected the wizarding world to acknowledge Voldemort's return almost immediately. Instead he found himself being blamed for Cedric Diggory's death and portrayed as a pathological liar. Trapped in his bedroom at Privet Drive, Harry wasn't sure how his situation could get much worse.
His bitter musings were interrupted by the sound of the Dursleys returning home from dinner. Harry could hear heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs, stopping in front of his room. His cat flap opened and a small white paper bag was shoved roughly through.
"Looks like it's dinner time, Hedwig," Harry sighed, opening the bag to find two small, hard dinner rolls. Obviously the Dursleys had pilfered them from a restaurant to fulfill their obligation to keep him alive.
So far this summer the Dursleys had seemed content to ignore his existence, and he didn't want to do anything to provoke them. Even the chores had been few and far between. Aunt Petunia insisted on feeding him through the cat flap again this summer—freaks like him didn't belong at the dinner table, after all—but he had yet to be locked into his room.
Harry took a bite out of one of the hard rolls and began ripping the other one apart for Hedwig.
"Bon appetit, girl."
July 11th, 1995 – Little Whinging, Surrey
Harry awoke with a start and looked at his clock. 5:47 AM. He had been dreaming of the graveyard again. Cedric's unseeing eyes. The look of pure malice on the face of the snake-like creature that had arisen from the cauldron. The sounds of terrified mirth coming from the ranks of the Death Eaters as Voldemort taunted him. The locked wands and the rush of power at the end of the fight.
Harry had been dreaming of the Dark Lord's rebirth almost every night for the past two weeks. It wasn't a nightmare, exactly. The dream wasn't accompanied by a sense of fear. Nor was it accompanied by very much guilt.
Harry was sorry for Cedric Diggory's death, but ultimately he knew he wasn't responsible for it. He had simply done a decent thing—proposed to share the Triwizard Cup—and it had backfired beyond anything he could have predicted.
Harry put down the recurring dream to his inability to understand what had happened there. He simply could not understand how he had survived the fight. By all rights he should be dead right now; he had known he was about to die when he stood up and shouted "Expelliarmus," a spell any second year would know, at that monster.
But he didn't die.
He was 14 years old and untrained, and had badly hurt a self-styled Dark Lord.
The question was how? Dumbledore had told him that his mother's protection enabled him to defeat Professor Quirrell at the end of his first year. But this situation was not at all similar. His wand had locked with Voldemort's, and then he had won a contest of wills that resulted in blinding pain and then overwhelming euphoria. It made no sense to him.
Neither did Professor Dumbledore's explanation. When Harry had finally been able to speak with him alone, Dumbledore explained that the wands had locked because they shared the same core—tail feathers from Fawkes. But that didn't explain the rush of power that had overwhelmed Harry at the end of the fight. The Headmaster had simply told him not to worry about it.
That sense of euphoria and power—like pure magic was literally pulsing through his veins—had lasted for another two days; he had awoken the morning of his third day in the hospital wing and that comforting feeling was gone, replaced with the cold realization that Voldemort was back and Cedric Diggory was dead.
His few remaining days at Hogwarts had done little to lift his mood. His classmates, especially the Hufflepuffs, seemed to blame him for Cedric's death, and no one from the Ministry had believed his story about Voldemort's rebirth. The real nightmare had only begun after he returned from the graveyard.