"Romeo, away, be gone!

The citizens are up, and Tybalt slain.

Stand not amazed.

The Prince will doom thee death

If thou art taken.

Hence, be gone, away!"

"Oh, I am fortune's fool!"

"Why dost thou stay?"

I don't own Harry Potter.


Fortune's Fool

Shpadana Zizais

These are dark times,

Horrible times,

Stand in the rain and

Let it wash away my pain.

You broke my heart,

But I'm walking away,

You tore me apart,

But they say tomorrow's a new day.

I'm not mad that you sold me out,

Even though it's so fucked up,

I guess that's what it's all about,

I guess you'd call it

Growing up.

"Growing Up", by me.


June 17, 1998

The man in prison cell #3549687 sits unmoving against the frigid granite wall. Prison cell #3549687 is not special in itself – quite the opposite, in fact. It's gray walls are every bit as constricting as #3549688, and it's piss-hole, quite as foul-smelling. It is not the cell but rather the man in it who makes it extraordinary.

The grime of the ages smears his face, full of blood and vomit and other equally unmentionable things. His clothes, once respectable, like their owner, are torn to shreds, forced into a color so opposite their previous scarlet existence. A battered crest sits in a corner, cast there by an uncaring, insensible hand long before. It bears the shape of a lion in dusty red and gold.

A hand twitches, the only motion of his inert form. The nails are ragged and bitten to the quick, bloodied as the man scraped his clawed fingers over the stone like a madman, counting the days of his imprisonment. The tallies have long since ceased, the blood long since clotted and dried.

Cold, glass-green eyes stare widely at the cranny opposite him, competing with the hard rock for deadness, yet he balances at the peak of an enormous wave, waiting for the water to curl and crash down on itself, for insanity to swallow him up, consume him. His yearning for such oblivion is palpable in 3549687. What was once a buried hope has reared its ugly head and surged to the front of his – well, it could hardly be called consciousness.

His mind has turned itself inside out, and he no longer lives, but relives. The cold swell of fear and nausea, in which he seems to always be immersed, fluctuates constantly, determining his level of awareness. At this particular point in time, the man who is to be our hero has sunk to the very bottom of his soul. He who deliberates his vengeance has swum to the surface of his being, as the chilly surge of the Dementors, Dark creatures harnessed by what we know as the Light, intensifies.

There. His eyes flicker. His head swivels to face the doorway as the heavy bolts are lifted. A morsel of hope sparks, but as it has every day since he has been incarcerated, it dies when a bowl of slop is pushed through the open hatch. For the first time his mark is revealed, that hateful, damning blight on the short times of happiness he was able to snatch during his equally short childhood. The sign of his misery and the heartbreakingly tragic betrayal that he endured. A bolt of lightening, red in his pale, pale countenance, mars what could have been a handsome, laughing face.

Now it is twisted into a painful, glaring skull that grins and laughs with hysteric abandon.

Is he mad? Most certainly.

He is fortune's fool.

He is Harry Potter.


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