With the death of Cedric Diggory and the rebirth of Voldemort, Harry Potter's life was looking decidedly worse than it had been a year before, not that it had ever been unicorns and rainbows before. He was sinking more and more into a state of constant anxiety that left him unable to think clearly or have the desire to do anything at all. That didn't stop his relatives from piling so many chores on him that his fingers were raw and his shoulders were sore though. Nothing had ever stopped that.
Adding to the stress, Harry wasn't allowed a copy of the magical community's newspaper because Albus Dumbledore (headmaster, leader of the light, ridiculous amount of other titles...) had been worried Voldemort and his Death Eaters would try to track the owl, therefore he had no clue as to what was going on in the world besides what his active imagination could come up with, which was pretty bad.
It was a rare moment of rest that found Harry sitting in a swing at the playground close to his relatives' house on Privet Drive. Not his house, the Dursleys had made that abundantly clear his entire life.
Sitting still led to the anxiety catching up with him once more and Harry desperately tried to still his mind and calm the adrenaline that seemed to constantly be rushing through his veins these days. He assumed he was doing a type of meditation, but he figured he must not be doing it very well since it didn't seem to help any at all to his added frustration.
The meditation did help drown out what was going on around him, so it was only with a slight flicker of recognition that Harry even realized his cousin and the thugs he hung out with were talking to him, or more than likely insulting or taunting him. He really didn't care anymore. They could do their worst, and he couldn't bring himself to even process that he should feel anything. Eventually, Harry rose from the swing and walked zombie-like through the gang. This seemed to confuse the mocking teens who sulkily dispersed since he wasn't being any fun, leaving Dudley trailing along behind him and yelling out more insults along the way.
What finally brought Harry out of his stupor halfway back to the house was a shiver that ran up and down his spine as the temperature dropped from a boiling hot day to where he could see his breath in front of his face.
"Dementors!" He yelled out to a stunned Dudley behind him before he took off running towards the safety of the blood wards around the house.
His cousin apparently wasn't as stupid as he looked since he took off running as well, seeing that Harry was afraid of whatever was going on. He had to take back this generous thought, though, as one lone dementor glided into their path, blocking them from continuing to the safety of the wards. "Stop!" Harry called out to Dudley and pulled his wand, but Dudley continued racing forward until he tripped into Harry. Dudley crashed to the ground, effectively knocking himself unconscious as Harry's wand went flying.
Panicked, Harry scrambled to the ground to grab his wand, scratching up his hands and knees on the concrete. The tips of his fingers grazed the comforting wood of the wand as all hope was ripped away in the form of a skeletal hand that lifted him bodily from the ground and at a hopeless distance from the wand's protection.
Harry's life did not flash before his eyes. Instead, the faces of those he'd be leaving behind were brought to the front of his mind while the dementor took in a deep rattling breath.
"Sorry," he whispered out sadly into the world, not exactly sure what he was apologizing for, just as he felt his soul being ripped forcibly from his body.
A dementor's kiss is not painless. He'd read once that it was believed to be…well, they were dead wrong. It felt like every single cell in his body was being ripped apart, and he could feel each and every one of them. He screamed a horrifying scream out into the dark evening as he finally felt himself torn away from the body that used to house him.
Well…shit. Was the profound thought that crossed Harry's mind as he stared down at the body that used to be him lying on the pavement beside his unconscious cousin. Wait, why am I still here?
Harry felt like himself, only not…he seemed to be floating instead of standing. Maybe he was a ghost, he thought. The dementor was floating away from him into the night before turning back to the teen. One long, pale, and skeletal hand reached out from the tattered cloak and beckoned Harry to follow. Scoffing, Harry crossed his skeletal arms inside of his tattered robe to tell the dementor to bugger off. That was…until he realized he had skeletal arms inside of a tattered robe and he was floating above the ground instead of standing. Merlin's saggy balls! I'm a dementor! He exclaimed in this mind.
In trepidation, the new dementor reached up under its hood to feel what was there. Harry felt solid surprisingly. There was a mouth with chapped lips…lip balm, he could invest in lip balm. Now, up higher…he gasped when he felt no nose. Oh hell, I look like Voldemort. He mentally grumbled.
There was a moment when his thoughts stuttered and he thought he might pass out when he realized he also had no eyes. He was seeing though…how?...It was actually more like sensing he realized. He sensed the dementor in front of him and his body at his feet. He knew where they were and what they would look like, but he didn't actually see them. Frankly, he figured he actually saw a little better now than he did with his glasses, he thought with a humorless snort.
He opened his mouth to tell off the dementor, but only a long, haunting screech came out. For some reason, he knew that he'd actually said, "There's no way in hell I'm going with you, and you can very well bugger off, or I'll see if a dementor can suck another one's soul out!" All that just sounded like a combination of a bird of prey's screech and a death rattle, if that made any sense at all.
"Have it your way," wafted back to him in the form of a similar screech from the other dementor before it continued on its way as if it hadn't just destroyed someone's life. "We'll see you again, Harry Potter," drifted back to him ominously as the dementor faded from sight.
Dementor-Harry looked down once more at his body and tried to remember all he knew of what happened to someone after they were kissed. Well…they didn't die, was the first and only thing that was coming to mind. So, his body down there must still be alive. He reached down with his skeletal hand to take a hold of the tanned and calloused hand that he once called his own. He gasped a rattling breath as his hand went right through his old one.
Quickly he reached over and poked Dudley's hand. Nope, that was solid. So, it was only his old body then…maybe…Harry floated down to his old body and fell into it horizontally. It was one of the weirdest feelings he had ever experienced. It was like he was getting dressed up in an uncomfortable suit. It was painfully obvious he was no longer connected to this body and couldn't reconnect himself. However, when he moved the arms, they moved. He tried moving his facial features and then his legs. It all worked for him but felt completely wrong.
Finally, he stood, wearing his Harry-suit, and looked down at his unconscious cousin. There was no way he was going to be able to carry him home, so he nudged the larger teen with his foot. With a groan, Dudley shifted slightly. "Dudley, you fell. Can you stand on your own?" Harry asked him, testing out his voice. He sighed in relief when it was in English and not whatever dementor language he'd been speaking before.
He could do this…right? He'd just wear his Harry-suit and pretend that nothing happened. No one had to know. Dudley blinked and looked up at Harry with fear in his eyes and a scream in his lungs. Harry winced and felt his aura extending out around him and tried pulling it inside of himself. As Dudley passed back out, Harry grimaced. Guess I'll have to work on that.
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Harry's aunt and uncle were not amused. Dudley had finally woken up again and Harry had gotten them home. No one believed that Dudley had tripped and knocked himself out, which was ironic since he actually had done just that before the whole dementor drama. They all seemed too afraid of Harry to do much about it though. Harry couldn't really decide if that was a pro or a con, but was leaning decidedly towards pro...
He really was trying, and mostly succeeding, at keeping his dementor-aura in check. When the verbal abuse got too much and he started losing control of his emotions, it was hard to keep everything reigned in though. There were many less arguments in the Dursley household after a couple slips in his control. He wasn't proud of the fact that his relatives were terrified of him, but since he'd been afraid of them for well over a decade of his life, he wasn't letting the guilt overtake him too much.
As much as he now felt like the freak the Dursleys had always told him he was, he was also knocked out of his vicious cycle of anxiety over Voldemort. Now he had a new cycle of anxiety about turning into a dementor wearing a Harry-suit around and what his friends and the ministry would do when they found out. He tried to act as normally as possible, but he no longer needed to eat or sleep, and that was a little noticeable. After a little over a day, he came to the uncomfortable conclusion that he did have to make his human body eat, even if he had to force the food down, or his Harry-suit would die. The body had become more and more sluggish when he didn't feed it, and he realized that it still needed sustenance even if he didn't. As weird as he felt wearing himself around like clothes, he refused to carry around a smelly dead body.
As for sleep, he found out that if he left his body at night, then the natural state it would go into was one of sleep. So, he made sure to take off his body for at least six or seven hours each night to let the body sleep and stay healthy. Frankly, after a week of forcing down food and making his body sleep, the Harry-suit was looking much healthier than Harry did when he actually lived in it since he'd been having constant nightmares and had little appetite before everything happened.
While the Harry-suit slept, Dementor-Harry floated around the back garden trying to figure out if he had any new dementor powers. Besides flying, and presumably sucking out souls (which he wasn't ever going to try), he couldn't figure out anything else.
Flying was pretty awesome though. It was the one good thing about being sucked out of his body and becoming a horrifying monster. He felt free finally as he soared into the sky high over England and rode the air currents. It was a hundred times better than flying on his broom.
He wanted to test if he could still do wizard-magic, but that was a sure way to get expelled over the summer. He just hoped and prayed that when he went back to Hogwarts his wand would continue to work for him. Since he would be pulling the magic from the Harry-suit, theoretically, he believed it would still work…hopefully.
Now, explaining all this does seem like Harry was taking everything really well…he wasn't. Yes, he was keeping his new pet alive (what he started to think of his body as), and he was flying most nights, but he was also screaming into the clouds, cursing fate and the world and Voldemort and everyone, and crying real tears when he was back in his body and had tear ducts again.
He was also cold all the time and this made him even more miserable. He found that letting his dementor-aura go warmed him up as everything around him froze but pulling it in caused his body to feel like it was winter in the dungeons of Hogwarts instead of the middle of summer. His relatives probably thought he was insane, well they had already thought that for years, as he wore multiple layers of clothes while doing his chores in blazing heat.
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The Dursleys couldn't care less about Harry or his life, so any abnormalities or strangeness went largely unnoticed. The real test would be when Remus Lupin arrived to take him to wherever everyone was hiding out over the summer. He'd gotten a letter from Dumbledore on his birthday, which he'd completely forgotten about in his distress at turning into the monster from his nightmares, and which said that Remus would be by on August 2nd to pick him up for the rest of the summer. As August 2nd arrived much too quickly, Harry sat on his trunk in his room going over and over his new mantra of "Just act normal, don't scare the villagers, don't suck any souls out, and be Harry…not the monster. You're not the monster…" He didn't believe himself no matter how much as he told himself that.
When the front doorbell rang and Vernon grumbled an order up the stairs for him to get a move-on, Harry sighed and picked up Hedwig in her cage. "You ready girl?" He asked as she gave him a happy hoot. The only thing that kept him sane was that Hedwig hadn't abandoned him. He reasoned that if he were truly evil, then Hedwig would have left him the first chance she got. Instead, she flew with him at night and comforted him in both his human and dementor forms. There was no person in the world he loved as much as he loved his owl, and he made sure she knew that every chance he got with treats, words, head scratches, and generally treating her like the queen she was.
"Time to face the humans," he told her wryly as they made their way out of the room and down the stairs to see the very observant werewolf.
A/N: Thanks for reading and please vote and comment!
Cover by marina_swampert