13.The quiet neighborhood of Privet Drive
Hadrian woke with a strangled scream, sweat streaming down his face like tears. His hand flew to his chest. No wound.
Only then did he breathe in relief.
It was just another nightmare.
Another damned nightmare—one that had grown alarmingly fond of repeating itself lately.
The bedroom was bathed in a bluish half-light, and the clock on the dresser read 5:17 a.m., its red digits bleeding through the darkness.
The Dursleys' house was silent, but not a peaceful silence—rather the heavy, suffocating kind, like dirty cotton stuffed up the nose, making it hard to breathe.
He clutched the golden-chained medallion around his neck; it was cold as ice. The runes carved into it had been etched by Dominus, a barrier against the invisible fingers of Mortavius, who never missed an opportunity to disturb his sleep and steal what little peace he had.
Hadrian had failed to learn Occlumency, so the medallion was his only protection.
Not that it was working…
The runes blocked external interference, but these nightmares—horrible as they were—were simply the fruit of his fractured mind. Mortavius had no hand in them.
Not entirely, anyway.
They were just his psychological wounds refusing to heal.
He got out of bed. Showering and changing out of his pajamas was a mechanical act. The cold water burned his skin, but he didn't complain. He preferred physical pain to the whirlwind of voices in his mind. He did it all without looking at the fogged mirror.
His reflection didn't mimic him.
The eyes in the mirror weren't green—they were blood-red.
And the mouth twisted into a smile Hadrian would never wear.
"Pretty funny, isn't it?" the image laughed. A sharp, glass-splinter laugh. "If you're so tired of life, why not give up and let me take over?"
Hadrian clenched his fists and ignored it.
He was convinced that if he ignored it long enough, his mind would return to normal.
After all, he wasn't crazy… was he?
Or maybe he had gone mad.
It wouldn't be surprising. With everything he had been through, it was only natural that his fragile sanity would simply collapse one day like a phone with a dead battery.
"You don't think I'm real?" the reflection tilted its head, as if reading his thoughts. "No? Then why are you shaking? Haven't you understood? I'm what's left…"
Hadrian covered his ears, and the reflection only smiled wider.
"Shut up," Hadrian said with anguish. "As if tormenting my nightmares wasn't enough—you have to toy with my sanity too?"
"Torment you?" the reflection scoffed. "I'm on your side. There's no one else on your side. Every time you come back from Hogwarts to this family that hates you, I keep you company—and still you think I'm not real…" it added in a wounded tone.
Hadrian's trembling hands could barely button his jacket; it was hard to shake certain thoughts from his head.
Ever since discovering he was a wizard at eleven, Hadrian Percival had faced challenges far beyond the struggles of an ordinary person.
His inner conflict was fed by a web of fear, guilt, and loneliness that had become unbearable after Sirius Black's death—his last link to a real family.
And worse still, the prophecy that bound him irrevocably to Mortavius—the greatest Dark wizard of their age and his sworn enemy—burdened the fifteen-year-old with a suffocating sense of hopelessness.
His days were numbered.
He wasn't foolish enough to deceive himself with the famous self-confidence people liked to preach about.
He had no chance of defeating Mortavius.
In the past few days, after returning from the holidays, he had taken to exercising to clear his mind.
Leaving his room, he descended the stairs silently, avoiding the fifth step that creaked.
"Where are you going?"
The reflection appeared again, sitting atop the fifth step.
"You really think running will erase what's inside you?" it whispered, the voice scraping like metal on glass.
Hadrian tied his shoelaces hard, the knots tightening around his fingers like nooses.
"Go away."
The reflection laughed—dry, humorless.
"You're pathetic," it spat.
When Hadrian's fingers touched the doorknob, memories of the dementor attack on him and Dudley surfaced with a sour twist in his stomach. He shrugged it off and yanked the door open.
The humid air of the cloudy dawn filled his lungs, carrying the scent of wet earth and garden soil.
He stood still for a moment, waiting for the familiar weight of invisible eyes.
Arabella Figg's house smelled of dried fish even from outside. On her porch, three cats—two white and one mottled—watched Hadrian with eyes that understood far too much.
Members of the Order of the Phoenix were hidden inside that house.
"Mundungus is probably drunk. Tonks… well, Tonks might be changing her hair color instead of watching."
Hadrian started running.
The sky was shaded in dark blue.
His pace was slow at first, each step echoing on the damp pavement. Privet Drive looked trapped under glass—perfectly still.
Not even a leaf stirred on the neatly trimmed trees aligned in militaristic precision beside the aggressively tidy houses.
Number 4, the Dursleys' home, was the epitome of this suffocating order: grass trimmed by the millimeter, curtains always drawn, and a silence broken only by his footsteps.
Passing the red-brick house of the Polkiss family—Piers's parents—Hadrian heard a soft scratching at the front door.
Tucki, their cocker spaniel trained for aristocratic manners, sniffed through a gap, tail wagging as if afraid to disturb the silence.
The Polkisses loved hosting Sunday barbecues where the meat was weighed in grams and the laughter measured.
Mr. Polkiss was an accountant specializing in tax optimizations bordering on stinginess. He and Uncle Vernon got along very well.
Like the Dursleys, the Polkiss family supported Manchester United—a club they deemed appropriate for gentlemen.
The Whittakers also supported Manchester United—or at least pretended to. Supporting the London club and voting Conservative was practically a religion in that neighborhood. Mr. Whittaker didn't care much for football, but he proudly displayed the club emblem so he wouldn't be the odd one out.
To the neighborhood, the sight of a boy running before sunrise was unacceptable—like seeing a ghost or a thief. If anyone had spotted him, they would have said that the "disturbed boy from number 4" was haunting the street again.
Hadrian was the oddball, the outcast—the target of every disdainful term the neighborhood could muster.
Neighbors crossed the pavement to avoid him, as if dodging a plague. They blamed even the bad weather on his "bad influence."
And to be fair, there was that story involving a priest, holy water, and a fire in the chapel…
But no one was quite sure of the details, and it was safer just to avoid him.
Mrs. Polkiss even locked Tucki inside whenever Hadrian walked by, afraid of contamination by "vermin" or something of the sort.
The myth crafted by the Dursleys was a carefully woven narrative portraying Hadrian as a mentally unstable delinquent—a dangerous sort of person.
Very dangerous.
And no one questioned it. The Dursleys were the model of respectability, and Hadrian was a mistake to be swept under the rug.
The neighborhood was a parody—its residents meticulously ordinary, tediously predictable, bound by an unspoken pact of conformity.
When the alarm clocks rang at seven, their farce of a peaceful life would begin again on its well-programmed routine.
And Hadrian didn't care what they thought of him.
He reached the park, slightly breathless.
It was empty.
The park.
Hadrian sped up, legs burning, running as if he could outrun his trauma and pain.
Invasive thoughts bubbled to the surface.
"Running is useless…"
A voice whispered in his mind.
Two weeks had passed since Sirius's death.
Five days without contact with his friends.
All his connections to the magical world had been cut under the excuse of keeping him safe.
To Hadrian, the Dursleys' house had always been a symbol of rejection.
After Sirius's death, the contrast between the love he lost and the coldness of his "relatives" turned the isolation into torture.
While friends like the Weasleys found comfort in family, he was trapped in a place where his physical and emotional scars were ignored.
The prophecy that condemned him to a mortal duel now seemed secondary to the pain of knowing Sirius would never return.
And that he was alone.
---