disclaimer: nothing you recognize is mine.
(happy anniversary of the final battle.)
shadows settle on the place that you left
our minds are troubled by the emptiness
x
The nightmares are worse today. They are always worse today. He wakes up with his heart in his throat and his mind lost in a battlefield of twenty years ago, the drumbeats of war pounding throughout his body. The air in his bedroom smells of fire and fear, too corrupted to breathe.
Ginny is still asleep, seemingly soundly, so he takes care not to disturb her when he slides out of their bed and pads out to their balcony. It takes him an extra minute than it normally would to remember to put his shirt on, and two more to realize that it's four in the morning and it's far too dark to be awake and far too cold to be outside.
He gives himself a moment to inhale what feels like a mouthful of smoke and death, and then he apparates away before he can even think of where he wants to go. When the sensation fades, he finds himself on a beach surrounded by wild grass and the scent of seawater. The only light he has are the moon and the stars, but that's enough for him to spot the small gravestone standing in the sand.
Here lies Dobby, a free elf.
Harry wants to laugh, but he chokes instead.
x
At four-thirty in the morning, he feels something warm appear by his side. His eyes had been closed against the slow descent of the moon, but he opens them to see who's joined him. The world seems a little clearer now, a little less tainted, and he finds himself able to breathe easier at Dobby's grave.
"Hi, Uncle Harry," says a voice too small to belong to his fourteen-year-old niece, and yet, that's exactly who it belongs to. Victoire looks terribly tiny against the backdrop of the ocean, despite how tall and elegant she appears normally. Her hair is almost more windblown than his, and it looks so much like Lily's after a nap that his first instinct is to smooth it down.
"Hi, Victoire," he says instead, surprised at his own ability to formulate coherent sentences. "What are you doing out here?"
She settles down next to him, curling her knees up to her chest and hugging them. The action makes her appear even smaller to the point where he has a flashback of a seven-year-old Victoire sitting here on a sunnier morning seven years ago and asking him excitedly what her birthday present was.
"I couldn't sleep," she tells him. "It's too weird being back in my old room. It's so much more crowded than my dorm, and I just – "
"I know," he says quietly, because sleeping in his old bed at the Burrow after camping out in the wood for months had been one of the strangest parts of returning to normalcy, and Victoire falls silent with a sigh of wistfulness.
"Are you okay?" she asks, her voice getting lost in the wind for a second before he processes her question. She sounds more lost than curious, more lonely than lovely, which is unusual for Victoire.
"I will be," he tells her, tilting his head to look at her properly. "Will you?"
She props her head on her knees and stares out past Dobby's grave, her eyes finding the ocean she had spent half her childhood playing in. "How do you do it?" she asks instead of answering. "How do you live with those memories? I don't know how to be that strong."
Harry hesitates, trying to understand what she's really asking, and what the answer to her question actually is. "I don't think it's a matter of strength, Torie," he tells her slowly, the words rolling around in his head before he speaks them. "I think it's a matter of honoring their memories. They would have wanted us to live and work for a better world. And we did."
"But it must hurt," she says, dropping her hands down to her side and clenching a fistful of sand in each. The grains trickle out of her fingers eternally slow. "They're not here to see it. And they should be. And – and we're left, but we're not them."
Her words come out a bit muddled, though she's speaking straight to the seas. Harry doesn't speak for a moment, instead reaches over to take her hand in his.
"Your uncle would have loved you," he tells her softly, "and so would Teddy's parents. Everybody would have loved you – all of you. You're everything we were fighting for."
The words provide him more clarity than they do her, he suspects. Voicing the dormant thoughts inside him seem to make them more real, somehow, as if he hadn't understood before that Victoire, that Teddy, that all his children and nieces and nephews, were the embodiment of why he had fought, and why he had died, and why he had lived.
She looks up at him, and her eyes seem a bit bluer in the moonlight. "Are the nightmares bad?" she asks quietly, and he almost smiles.
"The nightmares are always bad," he admits, "but I think reality makes up for it. Are you happy, Torie?"
"I am," and she gives an incredulous sort of giggle. "Are you?"
"Yeah," he says slowly, looking at the words he had engraved upon Dobby's headstone all those years ago. He had been so lost that day, so young and so broken, older than Victoire but even more confused. Fifteen years ago, he hadn't had half of what he had now, had nothing, in fact, beyond two best friends and a scar on his forehead.
"I love you," Victoire says, burying her head in his shoulder, her voice sweeter in the morning starlight. "Thanks, Uncle Harry."
He presses a kiss into her hair while the first hints of honey-gold sunlight appear over the horizon. "Happy birthday, Victoire," he says as May 2nd dawns.
x
and if you're still breathing you're the lucky ones
'cause most of us are breathing through corrupted lungs
(i know i know cliche song choice oh well.) please drop me a review if you read this far to let me know what you think?
and DON'T favorite without reviewing, please and thank you.