Title: invisible

Archiving: just ask.

Rating: PG

Date: September 2003.

Summary: Harry.

Notes: This is just a little thing that I wrote spontaneously on the journal of watchful_enmity, in a 'fight fire with depressing drabbles' moment.

When Harry Potter was very young, he would play hide and seek with invisible friends. He only had one hiding place--the dark, smelly cupboard under his cousin's stairs. But it was a suitable enough place every time, because his invisible friends never managed to find him there anyway. Each time he would wait for hours, only to have them show up later, exhausted and telling stories of how they were waylaid by pirates and transported to an island where cannibals made them kings; of being whisked away just as they were about to open the cupboard door and find him by cackling witches on broomsticks to be broiled in wart stew; of opening the attic and discovering a portal through time, where they could journey back and see the days of Lucky Lindy, the Musketeers, or even Cleopatra.

They would entreat Harry to come upstairs with them, and travel with them--around the world, or even to the stars. But Harry would have to decline each time. But come back and tell me how you liked it, he would say, as politely as he could, lest he do something wrong and scare his friends away.

One day his cousin pounded on the door and said, "Who are you talking to, buttface?" Harry started to tell him, but his friends were gone--and with a start Harry realised that they had never been there at all.

At night sometimes Harry fishes out his wand and twirls it idly between his fingers. He thinks about trying to call back those old friends, about telling them where he is now, that he lives in a place full of more wonders than the mountains of Spain or the pyramids of Egypt. But instead when he closes his eyes he sees only green light, and knows that they will never return to him again.

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The lovely Biichan has done a beautiful remix of this fic: Invisible: the Shadow Box Remix. ♥