The Boy Failure

The stranger with the dark brown eyes jacked Harry’s arse further into the air. A grunt from the man, and an artificially enthusiastic “oh baby” from Harry and it was over. The wildly thrusting first timer had lasted a record of fifteen minutes, including the walk to the room and haggling for the price. Harry sighed inwardly, “good thing I don’t charge by the fucking hour,” he thought to himself, but he couldn’t really complain, at least the man had been relatively gentle. When one attracts perverts and pedophiles for a living one learns to appreciate the small mercies. He attracted a lot of the latter; as of last year Harry was eighteen, but he looked much younger, resulting in a lot of requests for school uniforms.
The new client had yet to get up from the bed. Harry sighed again and rose to begin reassembling his barely-there ensemble onto his sticky overheated body. “Leaving so soon?” The stranger asked in what he must have suspected was a sexy voice. “Sorry baby, got lots to do tonight, and you’ve had your turn.” He passed a glance over the drunk man, “plus, your in no shape to keep up with an appetite like mine.” At the last his voice reverted to that of a petulant preteen, the come hither tone he’d used to bag the new trick.
The man laughed darkly, causing Harry to tense and discreetly put his hand on the switchblade hidden in his boot under the guise of zipping the knee-length monstrosities. He heard the sheets on the bed rustle, and the tell-tale padding of feet across the cheap motel carpet. In an expert motion Harry slid the switchblade into his sleeve, half of the handle still resting in his palm. The man was making Harry nervous and he wanted to be ready, but he also didn’t want to scare off a potential regular if he was just being paranoid. He looked up into dark eyes that were suddenly much too close and screaming of alcohol and violence. “Oh, I think I got what you need,” the stranger moved his hand to his crotch. “I know you liked it the first time,” he blatantly began stroking his cock, “and the second time your ‘gonna love it, whore. And the third, and the fourth, and however many more I decide you want.” A slight smirk at the last. He rushed forward and grabbed Harry by the neck forcing him back against a wall. Harry’s eyes stayed flat and businesslike as the knife made a sudden appearance in his hand, and in a motion too swift for the inebriated man to follow the knife was against his throat. Since both his hands were concentrated on Harry’s neck he had left both of Harry’s hands and his own neck open for attack.
“You will put me down,” Harry could talk now that the hold on his neck was loosened. His feet abruptly hit the ground and, seemingly unfazed, he continued, “You will pay me, now, and you will take three large steps back.” He smiled as he gave his orders amongst an uninspired string of curses liberally involving forms of the words fuck and whore. “Now I am going to walk out of this room and you are not going to follow me.” Harry thought for a moment, and then added: “and my rate has just tripled, cash only.” The man didn’t move, just motioned toward the wallet lying on the floor near the man’s discarded pants. Harry took everything inside, roughly three hundred euros, and quickly exited the motel room. Once outside he replaced his trusty switchblade in his boot with nothing more than a slight tremor in his hands.
The black-clad whore took his customary post underneath the yellow glow of an Amsterdam streetlight, face hidden in shadow, and took a long drag on a freshly lit cigarette. Back to work.

~

Severus Snape hadn’t slept a full eight hours for just over a year. There were nightmares, of course, and nightmares he could handle. It was the guilt that kept his bloodshot eyes open and fixed on the silver clock on his bedside table. Guilt for what he’d done in the war, what he’d done as a death eater, hell, anything from his seventeenth year forward was enough to keep any normal person awake and screaming. Severus Snape did not scream. None of the wounds were so fresh, however, as what they had done to Harry Potter. True, he’d never even liked the boy until his seventh year, when they’d developed a working relationship with the young man. He was appalled by the preferential treatment the insufferable brat had received at school, but everything had changed that night:


They had been fighting for over an hour now and no one had even penetrated Voldemort’s outer guard. A myraid of color lit the field from the curses and hexes flying with reckless abandon through the humid air. Soldiers of the Light and Dark fell in equal number and at an equally rapid pace. A cacophony of screams and the death rattles of the fallen were the only noise. No one spoke, but they all felt in the air that this was the final battle, that tonight everything, whether bad or good, would be decided. It was the unspoken expectation that this decision would be made by the seventeen-year-old boy fighting in their midst. Harry Potter, who had never before set foot on a battlefield, was to make the final stand for the entire wizarding world on this single acre of blood soaked grass. He was on the front lines now, shouting a curse with each drawn breath, and his foes fell before him as if they knew and accepted that they were not going to be the ones to end the Boy Who Lived on this night. The soldiers of the Light, including Dumbledore and Snape himself instinctively fell to the boy’s back, intending to protect him long enough for him to fulfill the glorious prophecy and set them all free of the fear and the pain that Voldemort’s rule had brought upon the entire wizard community.
Then suddenly in a violent spray of blood Harry Potter was brought to his knees by an unseen attacker. It was almost as if the battle stopped all together to watch the Golden Boy try to draw breath through the gaping hole at the base of his neck. His face showed more surprise than alarm. Snape had watched as the boy put his hands to his neck in a vain attempt to staunch the blood flow, but it was no use as his face was growing steadily pale. No soldier approached, from the side of the Light or Dark, to aid or end him. Harry Potter’s face grew panicked in the last moment before he fell face forward into the dirt. He had failed.
After the fall of the wizarding world’s last hope all hell broke loose. The battlefield was filled with the pitiful screams of the soldiers of the Light as they tried to flee. They were cut down in their tracks, and very few made it off the field alive. Severus and the headmaster were two of the few; no one remembers taking Harry Potter’s body from where it had fallen. And it was never certain if taking him back was any better than letting him bleed to death on the gore-soaked earth
In Dumbledore’s office two weeks later the teachers convened to discuss the disappearance of the boy. The Daily Prophet had run what must have been the hundredth story on The Boy Who Lived To Be A Disappointment. They named his failures one after the other, fabricated or not, the greatest of which, and the cause of all the slander, was his inability to destroy the dark lord. Like it was easy. Severus had listened from the corner of the office as the rest of the faculty made halfhearted plans to find the boy. He wasn’t fooled, he knew that the attitude of the paper, and the rest of the wizard community for that matter, was contagious, and these people were not immune. The dark lord lived and their last hope was gone, he couldn’t really blame them for making him the scapegoat.
Yet another two weeks later the searches had been called off, the boy was gone. The prophet stories were growing steadily worse (Boy Failure Takes to Hiding!), and Severus’ nightmares began.


The night of the meeting in Dumbledore’s office had given Severus his first glimpse of the enormous pressure they’d put on a boy of only seventeen. He never changed his opinion of the special treatment that the boy received in school, but he realized that it was merely a cover for their true intentions. After all, why not let the boy have his way if he breaks the rules a few times, he’s going to save the world Severus shook his head. It wasn’t fair. On the eve of his first battle Harry Potter was to kill a wizard that no one else in the free world had been able to touch, all because one prophecy had said he should. Then, when the boy had been injured they had cast him out. Now he could blame them, and himself, for they were all equally responsible for the boy’s disappearance. He shook his head again, not for the last time, and made a decision. He was going to find their would-be savior; shame is a powerful motivator.
“It is merely a service from one outcast to another,” Severus’ mind supplied. No one deserved the scorn of their people, especially since he had been trying to save all of their scared selfish asses at the time. If nothing else, maybe if he checked on the boy the nightmares would recede.