AN: Written for myjilyromance on Tumblr, who gave me the song prompt 'Night Terrors' by Wild Sweet Orange. It's a beautiful song; thank you, Amy! :-)


The house is small. He realizes that now.

Not enough places to hide, not many places to go to when on some morning you realize you just hate the second floor landing. You hate your room. You hate that small nondescript corner behind the open bedroom door.

He wakes up and rolls over to his side, the world blurry and small and trapped in the dusty window panes. Insignificant. Uninteresting.

He closes his eyes, pretends she's wrapping an arm around him and whispering good morning.

It's noon and his glasses are still on the bedside table, fogged up and untouched.


There's a window seat downstairs.

It's as unbearable as everything else, but... but god help him it still smells like her—stale tea left lukewarm into the late afternoon, broken-spined book, autumn breeze-ruffled curtains—when he sits there long enough and closes his eyes tight enough. It's worth the pain, he would think, smiling morbidly on his own through the black keys, the sharps and flats of their memories, finding out time and again that he hasn't forgotten the curve of her lips or the tinkling trill of her laugh. He doesn't want to think of the inevitable. That one day he'd look out the window, past the cracked glass and the unkempt yard, and find nothing—not her nimble fingers, not the scar on her neck, not the forest in her eyes. It's hard to breathe on midnights, after nightmares that last till dawn, when it takes a while to scour though the mess in the deepest crevices of his brain for the lullaby she used to hum to send Harry to sleep. He's terrified that one day her voice would blur itself onto the indistinct throbbing din of the High Street on a rainy Monday; terrified that the rhythm of her footsteps be lost in the nameless, faceless crowd in his head. So for now he twists the pain out of him like wringing a blood-soaked frock, yellow like the one she wore on their first date, again and again, always while he still can. Except he never dries up. He just keeps wringing. Keeps walking around the house in a pocket universe, lost in a timeline he's not even sure was ever real or not. He keeps watching his son laugh. He keeps putting an arm around his wife's waist and kissing her neck. He keeps walking down the stairs to the smell of breakfast. He ignores the charred carpet, the chips on the baluster, the blasted wreck behind the open bedroom door. He ignores the pulsing green glow on the edges of every shifting scene, threatening to spill any moment and take everything away from him. (Again.)

He's nothing but scarlet hands and ashen knuckles these days.

And he thinks… no, he promises—he promises, Lily, he promises—that someday he's going to be able to leave the window seat, to leave burnt wood and melted wax and musty carpet. He promises to someday be able and willing to walk out of this house—

Too small, Lily, this house is too small, isn't it? Why did we come here? Why did it have to be us? Harry? Why did you have to go?

—to someday be able to walk past the front gate and hear it rasp—

'Goodbye, I love you, you're going to be okay, don't forget me.'

—and not—

'Come back. Don't leave. The house is small, but we're going to be fine. When the war's over, we're going to be a proper family. Remember those beautiful wall-climbing yellow roses at the manor? We'd have that. A swing set for Harry. A patio. Ice cream date by the fountain in the park. Harry will fly. We'll be fine. Do you trust me? We'll be fine, as long as you're with me…'

Someday.

Someday, Lily; he promises.