Chapter Nineteen: A Price to Pay
When Harry finally awoke, his entire body was sore and strained in protest at his every command. He was still in the
center of his cell, laying upon the cold stone where they had left him. Light from the morning Sun peered through his
sole window.
"Ungh," Harry groaned as he rolled onto his back. He lifted his hands to his eyes, examining his split and now scabbed knuckles. He opened and closed his fists several times trying to judge if it was broken. It hurt like hell, but everything still felt in one piece.
He brought his fingers to his face, touching it gently. It was tender and sore, his eyes and lips swollen, his nose crooked, but nothing he hadn't been through before. It would heal. He grunted loudly as he popped his nose back into place.
Harry let his hands fall back to the ground as he just laid there, staring at the ceiling. His mind started wandering, replaying the fights within his head, his opponents busted faces and broken limbs and bodies. 'I'm becoming an animal. I am an animal,' Harry shuttered.
And then that's we he saw him, just in his peripheral. "Koca..?"
His mentor was laying slumped against the wall, not at all in his normal, erect posture. "Koca?" Harry rasped to him as he crawled over onto his hands and knees. Something was not right.
Something indeed. Harry stopped short. Koca's eyes were open, looking away into nothing, seeing nothing. Harry's eyes trailed down to the man's chest where a large ring of nearly black-red painted the old man's shirt. The handle of a shank was sticking out from the center of it.
"Koca... NO!" a hideous sob croaked out from somewhere deep in Harry's soul. "Koca!" Harry scrambled to the old man. "Koca... Koca, no!" he repeated over and over again as he felt tears begin to spill down his cheeks. He ran his hands over the still, stiff man in a panic. He gripped as the handle but it would not budge easily and Harry left it, pulling the man instead into his arms as he wept over his only friend in this hell. So much death.
Everything came pouring out of him. Hate. Fear. Desperation. Everything had been taken from him in his life. Everyone close to him. Everything near him was destroyed. Everything. Always. Harry hated himself. A hate that was dark and black and whole and unforgiving. Koca...
No one came for Harry that day. They left him in his cell to torment over and dwell upon the fate that awaited him. It was a warning. He was no longer welcome here, but there was only one way to leave this place.
They came for him the following morning. Harry was in a daze, lost to that happening around him. He held the shank that had been stabbed into Koca's chest in his hands now, fantansizing of plunging it into his own, ending this dark nightmare.
They came in with their rifles raised, trained on him, but Harry did not so much as flinch as the barked at him. It appeared as if he did not even notice them as he cradled his dead mentor to his chest.
With two rifles aimed at him, a third guard wrenched Koca from Harry's arms and the shank from his hands. He drug him to his feet. Like that of an Inferi, dead to the world, a slumped and defeated Harry allowed them to push him out into the cell block.
Instead of leading him to join the others for a day in the quarry, his guards took him to the showers. They left him there, unwatched, which was an odd thing, but went missed to the lost Harry. They never left him unguarded outside his cell.
Harry just stood there for the longest time, his mind only seeing the slumped and dead Koca before him. So much death...
What could have been hours, maybe only minutes, Harry slowly became aware of the blood stains trailed down him and he frowned. Looking to a shower head, Harry shuffled towards it, readied to wash it all away.
He didn't think to bother with removing his pants. He jerked the knob mindlessly and the cold water, their only water, rained down upon him, shocking him awake. Harry leaned into the wall, soaking it all up. The groan of the rusted pipes and the splatter of the water drowned out the turmoil ripping him apart from the inside out... and the approaching steps filing into the shower room behind him.
But Harry did not have to hear them. He could sense them all the same. A gang of thugs sent by the guards to take revenge for their humiliating losses, to kill him, just as they had Koca. Harry intended to just let what happened, happen. Let them end this nightmare for him. Harry did not bother to move nor show any sign he knew they were there as they closed in around him.
Why go on? What was the point? More days in the quarry, having to struggle to live. More fights in the Jhagaraes, hurting others he did not want to fight until one finally did best him. What was the point? Let them end this all now...
In the moments it took for the one nearest him to raise his lead pipe into the air to bring down upon his head, Harry's whole life seemed to flash before his eyes. His parents sacrifice for him. Cedric's sacrifice. Sirius's sacrifice. Dumbledore's sacrifice for him. Snape's, Lupin's, Tonk's, Creevey's. Koca's... Koca's wide, dead eyes staring back at him.
"No," Harry breathed as he turned and caught the lead pipe with his hand. His attacker froze, shocked. "No!" Harry put his foot into the man's chest, sending him tumbling across the shower room. Harry was now the owner of the lead pipe.
"NO!" Harry screamed murderously as he wielded the baton, opening the next closest man's skull, dropping him to the ground.
"NO!" he parried anothers wooden club with the pipe and struck him savagely in the ribs, cracking them as he sent him reeling to the stone floor.
"NO!" he laid waste to a third, before they came swarming about him like a hive of angry wasps, swallowing him and stinging him all over.
Harry wielded his stolen pipe mercilessly, dropping one after the other, but there were just too many of them. He felt a sharp pain in his side. Harry caught the man's wrist and brought the lead pipe down upon him.
Harry's grip was left on the handle of a shank stuck into him, just below the ribs. A blow now caught him in his own head, sending him to his knees.
The attack was gruesome. The world slowed to a bloody haze and throb. The room itself began to spin. His limbs now moved of their own accord, trying to shield his head from the coming blows, but they were unrelenting.
His hands and legs moved of their own accord, he no longer able to wield them. He caught one of his attackers legs and pulled them out from under him as the blows kept raining down. Another sharp stab in his upper chest. Harry grabbed the man by the arm, reigning him in before he struck him in the face with his fist.
And then everything started going black as blow and blood poured down upon him. It was slipping from him. Koca's killers were going to win. He felt that surge of hate and spite boil of inside him. A sleeping dragon... The anger and the fury came swelling up inside him like bile. Their was a sharp crackle of electricity, and then a booming, blinding explosion.
Blood. So much blood. With his last ounce of consciousness, Harry scratched against the wall of the shower room as he used it to pull himself back to his feet. No other was left standing. Blood was spilling from an untold number of wounds, but something inside of Harry kept him pushing, holding back the darkness trying to consume him and bring him down. Koca... He tripped across and out of the shower room.
Everything was moved so slow and as a blur before him. He saw doubles and triples of everything. The guards were waiting in the hallway. They themselves were just recovering from the shock-wave of the explosion that had just rippled out of the shower room. Harry charged them as they raised their rifles and opened fire. He felt several sharp stings bite him in his chest and shoulders, but then... but then they too were laid sprawled out, unconscious upon the floor. More blood...
How or where his legs were carrying him, he did not know, but he gripped and clawed at the walls to stay on his feet. There was no conscious thought, no plan, just a guiding hand leading him along. A pull. Something was calling him.
Left, then right he stumbled forth. Hallways, corridors, he could not stop to think. He collapsed into a locked door and the bolt was blown from its socket.
More twists and turns. More long corridors. More fallen guards. More locked doors that didn't stand a chance. More blood. So much blood.
And then he was there. Where? He did not know. A short, squat man gawked back at him from a mesh screen, evident shock and a sickening disgust at the battered prisoner before him. There was a small hole though at the base of it atop the counter and Harry unknowingly stuck his hand through. The words just came.
"A-accio... Accio wand!"
He felt something hit his hand, and then that all too familiar blackness consumed him once again.