hackthis_archive | Potter-drabble of some kind or another

A Black and White Kind of Life
Notes: I can take no credit for I have ripped off Charles Dickens and should be repeatedly flogged. The opening gambit is taken from ‘David Copperfield’ and the rest is inspired by The Winter Guest (Sean Biggerstaff and Emma Thompson, directed by Alan Rickman).

Harry Potter will not be the hero of his own life.

At seventeen he knows this better than anyone else, and no matter how many times he tries to tell people this they don’t seem to listen. To the wizarding community at large, Harry represents triumph over evil and the perseverance of love against all odds. Harry doesn’t see it this way; nothing is ever that cut and dried.

His story, in Harry’s mind, has nothing to do with good and vindication and everything to do with stupid luck and heroics when none are required. Obviously he picked that trait up from somewhere otherwise his parents would be alive.

The same Harry Potter that is the poster boy for the Daily Prophet is the same Harry Potter who leaves bruises on Draco Malfoy at night. This icon for the side of good also likes pushing and shoving and being cruel for no reason at all. Some would say he’s not quite right. Harry is a million and three things and none of them are so simple as to be black and white.

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For the first eleven years of Harry’s life he lived in cupboard and shared his crumbs with spiders. He wore second-hand clothing and existed at the mercy of relatives that honestly didn’t care whether he lived or died. That was Harry’s life. He never believed in heroes, he never believed in another life. Life with the Dursleys was his lot and that was how it was going to be - end of story. Except that the Dursleys were mean and ignorant and cruel to him, but every now and then something happened and Harry knew otherwise. Uncle Vernon would overlook something particularly strange that Harry did or Dudley would look the other way when Harry told a lie. Yes, he wound up paying for it later on, but in those small displays of kindness Harry saw that there was something more than the life that he lead and he understood that things were never as simple as being an orphan and having a horrid lot in life. Harry could have had no one at all. He could have been physically abused instead of being ignored and verbally reviled.

No matter how bad things were, they could *always* have been worse. The Dursleys were never as evil as the evil that Harry has seen in himself as war approaches, now, and it’s an evil that’s almost black.

Maybe Voldemort was right.

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If Harry’s formative years were the colour black, then his time at Hogwarts was white. Shining and glistening purity that painted a stark contrast to his life in Surrey. A time filled with friends and Christmas presents, Quidditch matches and girls to fancy, and fame. There was plenty of fame, but fame, Harry has found, isn’t really pure at all. It’s far more stark and black like the lettering on the pages of Witches Weekly. Harry has fame for things he doesn’t remember, and things he hasn’t done, so he goes about trying to balance the scales and make things better. To make them right. But in order to be on the right side then Harry has to do wrong things. He has to lie and steal and cheat and really that’s not white at all. There’s no purity in boys dying and godfathers banished because the people in white just don’t understand or don’t want to understand that everything isn’t really as simply as it’s made out to be.

If Hogwarts is white then really it’s not very white at all, it darker and yellowish like the snow that’s been trampled by several hundred students as it blankets the ground. Harry is as pure as a white thing that was never white to begin with except for in the minds of people who can’t see the truth of the matter.

White is white except when it’s not white at all.

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The Dursleys are black and Hogwarts is white, and Harry’s mind is a mass of gray that maybe isn’t always right.

Harry doesn’t hate the Dursleys as he’s often told he should, and he doesn’t love Hogwarts as much as he might claim too. Yes, one is a haven and the other a kind of torment, but on some days it all goes pear-shaped and he’s not quite sure which is which. One is safe, the other is not, but there was a life before Harry knew he was a wizard, before he knew all the things that he knows now,; and Harry believes that somewhere in there’s a kind of ignorant bliss that he will never find again.

Good and bad, right and wrong, they’re all ideas on the same spectrum; they’re only shades of gray with more or less light. Harry knows this as surely as he knows that one morning he won’t wake up and see the sun; and he takes solace in this because Harry never asked to be anyone’s hero and really this isn’t his life to lead at all.