Harry gets on the bike and soars.
The smoke tastes gritty on his tongue, but he can't stop panting. A shout loosens itself from his lips, vanishes into the brilliant sky. His glasses aren't enough to protect him from the sharp stinging of the wind, but he obstinately blinks black the tears. He doesn't want anything to blur his view of this – of this great expanse –
There are a few wisps of clouds – tendrils – but it's mostly very clean. The sky, it wears its bright blue like a statement, and he's half in love with it.
He feels like Sirius. For this one, precious hour, he feels like Sirius. Like James. Like those madcap, fierce Gryffindor boys…whom he has met, and loved, and known through the filtered reminisces of their friends.
But now he feels them – he feels like them. He can hear them in the roar of the engine. See them in the bike's bold metallic shine…
He is crying when he lands. He wants to feel them longer.
'They're proud of me, though,' he tells Ginny later that day. 'I think they really are.'
Her eyes shine with tears when she says 'Oh Harry, how could they not be?'
(He gives the bike to his eldest son on his seventeenth birthday. Another wild-haired, wild-eyed Gryffindor boy. Harry sees them sometimes, in the set of his son's jaw and the flash of his son's grin, but Ginny looks at her son and sees only her husband)