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Harry had never meant for it to become a habit. It wasn’t as if skulking around the castle under his father’s invisibility cloak held any particular meaning, it did not result from any pointed desire. He had just started one day, and he had yet to stop.
There was a peace to it. Walking without interruption, without stares aimed at him, words exchanged from behind lifted hands, as if their whispers could be blocked so easily, sound absorbed by their spread, peeking fingers.
He could walk past the long connecting halls he had been forced to rush by so often, able to look out the great, arched windows and linger. Harry could slide out from under his bed covers and escape into a dampened Hogwarts, not so much lessened, not without life, but softer, trickles of moonlight and hushed footsteps his company instead of a timer in the sky, shadows increasing with each passing second, students rushing to beat it, rushing to class.
Harry wouldn’t say he enjoyed solitude, but he had become accustomed to it; his first years were irrevocably marked by it, he grew to understand it intimately. If Harry was to look at the grass of the Quidditch Field, turn his head to Slytherin’s banners, look up in the mirror and stare at his eyes, he would understand what he was seeing was the color green. There was no way to remove this gut reaction, to blind himself to green, the visual and the concept. In the same way, he could never rid himself of solitude, of the urge to seek it out, to manufacture it. It was inherent.
Though, it was different now. There was no cupboard to retreat to when life increased in volume, when the expectations upon his shoulders grew so heavy he could barely stand. No palliative punishment to undergo.
He had the Invisibility Cloak; he had stolen moments, carved like scraps off the ham Aunt Petunia had never let him eat, only let him help cook.
He had Ron and Hermione, he had his great friendships, he had his poor ones. He had finicky relationships marked by hesitance on both sides, he had glimpsed at figments of people in which their interactions barely qualified as genuine, much less reliable. He’d exchanged kind and mean words with passerby's, had smiled and frowned at strangers. He had killed.
Life at Hogwarts had given Harry range, depth to his understanding of the world. It had added on to him, meat onto bone, but it would never be able to remove who he was, what he had started as.
So, when he felt like it, when he could, he would grab the Invisibility Cloak, and he would wander, aimless only in direction, never in intent.
Somewhere in the Forbidden Forest, under the thick, never-ending foliage, buried by dirt and twigs and feces, by berries and leaves and Flobberworms, rested the Resurrection Stone. On the dab of land in the Great Lake, in Albus Dumbledore’s carefully curled fingers, the Elder Wand could be found.
Harry could feel the Hallows, could see translucent tethers tugging him toward them in the way he could see stars if he fell off his broom hard enough, if he closed his eyes long enough, pinpricks of non-existent light exploding on his lids.
Not tonight, he managed, looking away, closing himself off to their insistent temptation, Not tonight.
Passing the gargoyles, he headed up the stairs to the Headmaster’s office. There was no need to whisper a password, no need to acknowledge the way floo powder had been refreshed recently, a new jar sitting primly on the fireplace mantle.
Harry grabbed a handful, watching a few stray grains slip through his fingers, land on the Invisibility Cloak. They shimmered there, giving him away, but not a single portrait spoke, called out the intruder in their midst.
Quietly, routinely, he stepped into the fire, he stepped back to Twelve Grimmauld Place; he stepped into Harry Potter, the Man Who Conquered.