The Boy Who Could Not Die

Wanda: And here it finally is! The idea I got when I decided that Harry being a horcrux made no frigging sense to me. You guys have been waiting for this one for a while and here it finally is! I do not own Harry Potter.

Prologue

It was a ghastly wreck.

The car had fallen from the raised highway several stories before smashing onto the abandoned road below. The front if it had caved in, crumpling the entire vehicle like an accordion. All the windows had shattered completely, leaving glass littered several feet around. The engine had been destroyed, the leaking gasoline igniting and setting part of the old car on fire.

It was a late night on New Years Eve, hence why there wasn't anyone else around on this particular stretch of road. It was far from a big city and close to a small town; either there weren't any decent bars to go to or everyone was staying in one place for their celebration. The only reason that this car had been out and about was because they were coming back from a failed exorcism. The family had been afraid that magic was going to ruin their holiday, and the man of the house had sworn that it would not happen and that he would fix it once and for all.

The accident had been simple. Someone had been travelling for a magic show, but their trunk had been overstuffed. One of the things that had been barely fitting in was an anvil to pin down one of the particularly tough traps. Thanks to both the speed and its own weight, the bungee cord snapped and the anvil tumbled out on the road, the oblivious drivers moving on.

Truth was stranger, and sometimes more disturbing, then fiction. Once it was eventually discovered, it would be plastered all over the news in the surrounding area. People would flock to it and gape in horror or disgust as the forensic men worked, people would talk about or exploit the tragedy for the sake of appearing on the news and getting a few minutes of fame. The family would enjoy the fame for longer, but once the accident was forgotten so were they.

The accident, in another world, wasn't meant to happen. But in most worlds, people rarely do what you expect them to.

It was dark when the van containing two members of the Dursley family came rushing down the road, so the driver didn't see the hulking black shape of the fallen anvil until he was right in front of it. Perhaps with light he wouldn't have seen it either, he had been directing a furious rant to his nephew over how the day had been wasted and nothing had changed.

Once he had seen it, he tried to swerve, but the car struck it anyhow, sending it flipping over and over until it smashed through the iron guardrails and fell to the ground below.

There had been no one on the road to call the police. Either way, it wouldn't have changed the outcome.

One of the side doors creaked suddenly. A body hammered against it several times, forcing it to open just slightly in spite of the dangers, of the metal was white hot and the sharp glass fragments were sticking out in all directions.

Slowly, the door widened just enough for a small figure to squeeze through and fall to the ground with a thud. He lay there for a moment before, in a moment that should have been impossible, he started to move.

Turning over slowly, he tossed aside his ruined glasses, leaving him with a blurred dark sky. His vision, while not utterly blind, was not great though he could make out general shapes and directions without his glasses. It was somewhat of a necessity, because his cousin who enjoyed making life very difficult for him liked to punch and break them, when they had never been that strong to begin with.

Slowly and uncertainly, the boy pushed himself up on his elbows and stared blankly at the wreck. Not fully comprehending what had just happened, he remained there for a moment, waiting for his uncle to come and join him.

Minutes ticked by. The fire spread slowly, and his uncle never appeared.

The boy takes a few deep breaths and gathers himself to his feat slowly. His baggy shirt is ripped open at the back, exposing his scrawny form and the bones in his back, which you could count through his skin. He's small for his age, battered but entirely unharmed. He hadn't been crushed by the fall, burned by the fire, or cut by the glass. In fact, the only thing that had received any damage had been his already worn and second hand clothes.

The only real scar was a curious one on his forehead, but that had existed from long before this.

Unmarked by fire, glass or blood, the boy walked over to the car wreck.

His torn shoe splashes into a thick red puddle.

The boy blinked and looked down at it. It took the dazed young boy a few minutes to realize what it was; then he turned away and staggered over to the side of the road.

He was standing in blood. Next to his shoe was a chunky pink fragment, sloppy and smashed as though it had been flung a distance.

Collapsing on his hands and knees, he vomited twice (not that there was much in his stomach to loose), the hideous scene burned into his eyes.

Yet morbid shock caused him to turn his head back and look at what remained.

A pair of dim green eyes are raised until they look at where the car seat had been. A pink cloud had splattered all over the inside of the windshield. A fat, floppy arm lay a few feet to the right not far from him, an ugly white bone sticking out of where it had connected to the elbow socket. The fingers were jerked in a silent scream, nails digging into the palm.

The boy yanked his eyes away from the arm, not wanting to see more, but instead he found himself faced with something much more twisted.

Just inside the wreck – it was hard to see distinctly, but the man in question had been large enough to see either way – was a shattered mess of flesh and bone, distorted and broken apart in ways the boy had never imagined. Blood splattered all over the inside of the car. Intestines hung out of the broken windshield. The skull had imploded, the eyes knocked inward by the force of the impact and the back of the head broken open. The spine was sticking out of the back of the neck.

What a mess.

For a long time, Harry Potter stood there, staring at the remains of the man who had terrorized him ever since he was tiny, uncertain and afraid of the lack of emotion in his chest.

Uncle Vernon was dead. He was not.

It was this fact that Harry was trying to wrap his head around.

Why? Uncle Vernon was big and strong. He could throw Harry into that pitch black cupboard, where it looked like the shadows would swallow him whole and spiders made their nests in his hair. He could throw an entire bucket of cleaning liquid whenever Harry didn't clean the patio, even though it had been clean before Dudley and his gang stormed back into the house after playing violently in the park.

And yet here he was, bloody paste while Harry was standing tall and free.

Uncle Vernon was dead. Uncle Vernon was dead. Uncle Vernon was dead!

Harry felt something that only unlucky children felt at that moment. Right then, when this sank in, he was elated. Vernon was gone, the shouting and the curses and the threats that he shouldn't be alive and that the mistake should be rectified would never be spoken again. Vernon was GONE!

Basking in this feeling, Harry quickly felt shame, and then fear. Vernon was gone...but he was still alive?

The young boy looked back at the wreck. He didn't understand everything – there was only so much of the world he had even been allowed to understand, though he didn't know that at the time – but he knew that a crash like that should have killed him.

It should have killed him and ended the life that his Aunt Petunia didn't think was worth hot water for baths or the scraps that her son left behind after he'd torn through three servings like a hog. It should have snuffed out the little boy that no one wanted to be friends with, the burden that two alcoholics hadn't cared about enough to keep themselves and him safe, the unwanted trash that had to be kept, the freak that had no place in this world.

Freak.

The word came back to him.

It haunted his sleep. Shadows hissed it at him when he was alone. Dudley and his gang shouted it at him from the playground. His aunt shrieked it at him whenever something strange happened. His uncle bellowed it whenever he did something wrong.

Freak.

Harry kept staring at the mess of blood and bone, the word echoing in his head, taunting him.

He was a freak...how else could he be alive while Uncle Vernon was dead? His uncle, completely destroyed, ruined by this crash...while... while...

Harry looked down at himself, tugging at his sleeves.

There was nothing wrong with him. No wounds. No blood. No burns. Not even bruises or small cuts from the glass. Just dirt.

Freak. He could hear Petunia screech it as though she was right next to him.

And she was right. Oh dear god in his heaven, she was right. Harry's shoulders started to shake as the fact hit home. All the terrible memories he tried to suppress just to get from one day to the next started to pour forward before his waking eyes.

Alone in the dark, a small chuckle broke the silence. Slowly, that chuckle turned into a laugh, which escalated until it thundered above the crackling of the fire, a hysterical, frightened, mad noise that was terrible to listen to. It was the laugh of someone who had accepted a terrible truth.

/

Harry was there for a while, watching blood drip down from the car as the fire raged on.

He was on his knees, a seven year old with blood washing up against his hands and his mind completely lost in what he knew and what he had just experienced. But eventually, the boy's mind started functioning again and he stood up, gave the wreck one last look, and fled down the highway.

The reason for this? Well...he was a seven year old boy who discovered he wasn't entirely human. He was panicking, he was upset, and most of all he didn't want to remain at the car to be discovered alive instead of his uncle Vernon.

God alone knew what Petunia would say to that.

Harry had a faint idea, and it scared him. And even if he wasn't afraid of her – even if she couldn't kill him, like the crash – he didn't want to go back to her.

So Harry ran. And he ran. And he ran.

The sun rose and then fell.

After a while, his throat began to burn from lack of water but he could still move, still run, so he didn't stop.

Another day went by and he was still running.

His vision was foggy and the pain in his throat was hard to ignore, but instead of dropping dead or his legs giving out, he was still strong and able so he kept moving.

He would have run all the way through the third night as well but it was at that point he found a stream. Collapsing next to it, Harry drank and drank, the cool water soothing him. When he blinked his eyes, he found himself seeing more clearly then he had before, and his head had become less foggy.

Why didn't it hurt? Why didn't anything hurt?

Harry couldn't answer the question. So he kept running. He would continue to run, as far as he could, until he began to discover the truth.

End Prologue

Hah! Sorry, I always get a twinge of satisfaction whenever I kill off one of the Dursleys. A-n-y-how, here begins Harry's journey into partial insanity and total lack of self-regard that will involve jumping in front of trains for shits and giggles. And much fun was had by all.

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