Often, he thought surely that he had been spawned in the darkness of that small cupboard beneath the stairs.

He was almost sure that he'd never been out of it before, except when social services came, or when it was time to do some chore. Even when he was barely out of diapers, there were chores to be done.

He could cook by the time he was five. He knew the differences between flowers and weeds by six. And he was grateful for the time spent outside of the cupboard by then, and for the sunshine that chores gained him.

He hated school.

He did neither well nor poorly. He was only average. Part of this was because the class was too slow for him, or he too bright for it. His pig of a cousin was in it, however, and so there was no moving away from it or out of it to a better one.

And there was darkness.

Quiet, silence, dust and darkness, joined by spiders and little scuttling hard-shelled bugs. They didn't bother him. He'd been told often enough that he was evil, spawn of the devil, and he lived a great deal of time thinking it must be so. Otherwise, he'd have parents instead of bugs for company.

Social services brought him glasses when he was ten.

His cousin broke them three weeks later. Life was certainly unchanging, staid, never ending.

He wanted sometimes for it to end, until that letter came -- one and then a flood. All of them. Parchment and green ink, sealed with wax and flying through the chimney above. It was mad to think he was a wizard, that he was famous, that people *knew* him, and suddenly he was a person, the Boy Who Lived instead of the boy-in-the-cupboard.

It was quite odd.

The first wizard boy he ever met gave him chills. He hated him at first sight, but then, his cousin had trained him to do that, hadn't he? No one was safe, even if it was a pale boy standing idly by and mouthing useless prejudiced phrases like some sort of tape recording.

He decided that he was going to hate people like that for always.

Later, he made friends of many and enemies of few, and still that childish perception did not change. He was eleven and then twelve and then fifteen and then seventeen, and still that first meeting clung to his mind, and the second, and that first offer filled him with anger. He still thought he knew the right sort for himself. Appearances were not deceiving, not when it came to *that* boy, and even once graduation had come and gone, he didn't change his mind.

It seemed so purely *grim*, and they were grown, and there was still the darkness of the cupboard in him. Darkness seemed to be a good thing to hold within an Auror, the ability to do one's job and keep doing it even though it couldn't be borne, even though the cries of boy-children his own age dying at his feet or adults old enough to be his grandfather rang in his ears as he marched into battle and back out of it again.

Some nights, he crawled into the cupboard in his small apartment and sang himself to sleep there, surrounded by the little bugs and spiders and the deep, musty smell of dust and damp mops and rat droppings. It made it better, then, what he did, perhaps even what he didn't do, and sometimes he thought about that boy he hated, and he wished and he wanted and he dreamed.

Sometimes, he did even more than that.

There were weddings and funerals and babes born and died and he was godfather, as his own had been, and the little wriggling thing was a wonder made up of red hair and freckles and fragile white skin. It only made him think about the things that he dreamt in the cupboard. He was glad to give it back, fearful that the darkness in him would tinge that sweet, translucent epidermis.

The last battle with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was on the plains, and even the muggles couldn't ignore it. It was maddening, full of lightning strikes and tornadoes, wisps of darkness turned to flesh-eating demons and the madness of those with the mark falling, those without it crumpling atop them in exhaustion or death. It seemed like that time of the cupboard, as if it was a hell without cessation and that it wouldn't end.

That it was, perhaps, *incapable* of ending.

The last strike was given to creamy, pellucid skin and silver-blond hair that tumbled slowly out of black hooded robe, slim body falling to the earth with a little sound that screamed of relief, and the world turned upside down and became the cupboard of dreams and wants and wishes, and perhaps even more than that.

The whole of the field lay bloody, and it ran beneath his knees, but he knelt all the same, whispering frantic spells meant to negate the last one he'd given, one that sang of death and pain and blood and the stench of mortality.

None of them did any good.

Bloodstained lips tilted, tottered, staggered in a stilted motion. "It's all right." Even the sound of that voice was different, soft and tired and terrified. "Greater Good is supposed to win."

"Be quiet," he whispered, shaking fingers wiping the blood from those lips, smearing them along the softness of that skin, still frantically whispering spells. He wished he had taken more in-depth courses than the simple field-aid ones. He wished he knew how to fix whatever he had broken, so deep that the blood burbling up seemed black and rich with oxygen.

"Hurts..." It had to hurt, with so much blood spilling out, didn't it? Dream, wish, need, want, more, eyes closed, the tips of blond lashes laying quietly upon cheeks no longer rounded with baby-fat. "Wish I'd never been taken out of the attic. It was good there. It wasn't like what father's made me do..."

And he was quiet. What else could he be? He understood, suddenly, aberrant kinship breaking free of childish animosity and shattering everything around him with an almost audible clatter. He couldn't help what he did, then, leaned forward, pressed his clean lips to bloody ones and *wished*.

If wishes were horses....