Broken.
We're all just fucking broken.
"Ha," he cries to the sky one cold desolate night, "ha, ha, ha."
His laughter is as cold and dark as the nightmares haunting your dreams. Creeping into your subconscious and planting their poisonous seeds. Even when you awake you can't escape them, can you dream when you're dead? Sometimes you just feel like finding out.
"The war had changed him", that was clear enough to know. The boyish spark in his eyes had long since extinguished, no one could complain – wasn't it supposed to die the very night he was orphaned or slowly dulled by the years of abusive guardians? Of magic-squashing muggles who'd rather beat Harry than feed him.
Sometimes all you need when you're damaged is just another damaged body lying next to you, "it could be worse" you think to yourself most nights, "he could be hitting you." You were grateful for that, no matter how manic he got – no matter how many times he'd run his hands through his hair or smash mirrors, he'd never smashed you.
And it would be easy, to pick you up and break you – sometimes you wonder why you never do it yourself. Fragile objects make shattered shards. Pick yourself up just to throw yourself down. End the nights of confusion finally, let's see if the dead really do meet up after it all.
"Ginny, Ginny, Ginny Weasley", the wind seems to whistle through the trees, how did it ever learn your name? These questions are meant with no answers, and no explanation, "Ginny, Ginny, Ginny Weasley."
You've never really been yourself since you lost Fred, well really it's since the world lost Fred – because everyone's all mourning together. Isn't it supposed to be a comfort? To mourn and cry together, but sometimes you just want to be alone with things. Sometimes you need to rip off the band-aid to let it heal, and so far nobody's letting you do that, nobody's giving you air.
So you blame that for when your chest heaves in the night, when your fingers turn to claws scratching your own arm because you feel like you can't breathe. You're suffocating in the largest bedroom galleons can buy. Claustrophobic in the emptiest of spaces. How pathetic can a girl get.
When he finds you huddled in the corner, your legs brought so close to your chest it looks like this is how you were made, he just sits next to you and watches. He enjoys seeing minds slowly fracturing, he gets off on the sound of mourning because the knowledge that other people are in pain as well helps him.
Repairing isn't the same for everyone and you begin to think that in a way he wants to be scarred. He wants Voldermort's name imprinted on his soul, just like Umbridge imprinted upon his flesh. I must not tell lies, he brandishes it every time, and in the nights where you both feel like you're missing another half and so you search within another, his scars make the trail - the breadcrumbs back home.
Never coming back, never coming back: it's your mantra. Or was it never turn back to the past? But what's the point in that everywhere you look the past is there, staring straight at you. Pushing memorials and remembrance ceremonies into your head and it's getting so full of these memories that it feels like it could burst.
But it already is, slowly you can feel yourself coming undone at the seams. The sewing is falling apart and everybody is noticing, not like before – but in a new way. A way that makes you want to hide from the world, a way where their stares are full of misunderstanding than pity.
Maybe you prefer it this way, maybe you don't.
Nothing's really sure anymore.
So you stay with your solace, you wrap your arms and legs around him in the hope that maybe this simple action with make you feel better, but it doesn't. It never does. Broken pictures make pretty memories. These things were never supposed to be forgotten. Maybe one day you'll look back on it and smile, until now you just shake.
Shake with the weight of the mourning; "my arms are heavy with your memory tonight" you tell Fred in your dreams. It's his birthday but nobody's celebrating. Tonight George will again drink himself to sleep clutching onto the false hope that the hallucination from the fire whiskey really is Fred visiting from behind the veil. He's there so much its barely real. But nothing is real anymore. Imagination and reality have crossed over into the most intricate weave, never separating – our minds are torn between a dream and truth, but what's to say that dreams aren't true? And when you say this to Harry he just closes his eyes and crashes the chair into the glass cabinet.
Reflective surfaces never do help in a time like this for some reason.
And all the talk of dreams and hopes and wishes just hinders his healing more and more. You don't know why, nobody knows why. Harry Potter has become so much of a mystery to you as he did when he first rescued you from Tom. Sometimes you like that game, you like the fact that nobody really knows who he is; the whole dark, mysterious stranger deal.
But then comes the times when you'd just need a fucking break, and need him to realize that the façade of being the post-war tragic damaged thing doesn't help a goddamn bit when it comes to life. No matter how much you just piss time away by sitting in the corner and crying your eyes out, or drinking so much you don't know how many days have gone by, you can't ignore the fact that time is something you've always been scared of.
"He's holding you back, and it's time to realize it." Your mind tells you just before you truly fall into the sleep-world, "He's holding you back, and it's time to let go."
You won't though, because time makes fools of all of us, and no matter how long it may take, one day he'll turn around and be your Harry again.
You won't let that chance go, so you'll wait. You'll wait for the church bells to ring signifying another memorial over; you'll wait for the spark to come back in his eyes. You'll wait for the shell to be slowly filled from toe to crown of Harry Potter-ness.
And when the time comes that everyone's just healed. You'll spend nights together wondering why it took so fucking long.