Albatross
pt.1
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us [...] As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities."
~Charles Darwin
after, she notices that things are mostly just the same.
molly keeps making them sweaters every christmas.
when ron is angry, his cheeks flush like he has drunk too much. he is always the one who walks away from the fight, with an expression that says he has once again been defeated. like he always has something to prove. but when he kisses her, he still smells clean as soap and he smiles crookedly when he pulls away and says, "sometimes, i'm not sure you know how lucky i am." so, of course, a part of her feels like he has a knot inside of her and he pulls her back. like a dog on a chain.
she still reads voraciously.
at night, the dreams still come. when she wakes, her body stings like someone has shook her mercilessly. like someone has carved something on her. she sits up in bed, rubs her arms. ron wakes, tries to offer her hot tea and cold biscuits that molly sends to them in brightly colored tins. he kisses the small of her neck, and she says that she feels better. but the dreams keep coming. those sort of things don't go away. you can't feel better. she wants to tell ron that, make him understand. she dunks her biscuits in the tea and watches as he turns his back to her in bed. his skin is pale where his hair meets his neck.
"ron?" she whispers. then louder: "ron?"
but he can't hear her. he has disappeared.
her biscuit gets soggy and she throws it in the wastebasket. she goes into the kitchen, pours the tea out. over the kitchen sink, there is a window and it is full of moon.
somewhere out there, there is a moon over the sky full of people. she closes her eyes, and sees a tangle of black hair, his back turned to the same kind of red hair that litters her own bed.
after, he hasn't changed, as far as she can tell. she always thought things would change for him. for
the both of them. but the truth is that things are much the same and she knows that. there are things that attach to you like a lining buried in your skin.
the truth is that after all those battles and all those years of blood and skin and fear have stitched themselves to her insides and no matter how many cups of tea and no matter how many cold biscuits, she can't scrub it away. it has become a part of her. she wonders if maybe she has dissolved into it, like a grain of salt in the sea.
after, how can things change when everything is stitched into the sinew? she asks the moon-filtered night this, but really she asks the person who lays underneath it with his eyes unglassed and the same sort of dreams about to settle in his head like roots in the ground.
after, he realizes it's never really over. you can kill one, you can kill the one, but there's always another. and then another. the job is never really done.
the fact is, no matter what he does, will ever do, people still want to believe in evil.
but everyone wants to believe there is a respite. even ginny, who combs her hair next to him in bed every night. he finds red hair tangled around every single one of his buttons. she kisses him with a love so clean he can see right through it.
after, he won't marry her. she wants him to, he gets that feeling in the way she shows things that they should share. meals first, every night. then, a closet full of her clothes at his place. now,
she starts bringing in furniture piece by piece; an end table, a chest of drawers. it's like she awaiting another important person to walk through the front door.
sometimes he wonders if she's waiting for that other part of him to walk through the door. waiting for the boy who lived. the one she fell in love with. he wonders where that person went.
but, it's all right, he tells himself. nothing's really changed. he can still laugh when they put on otis redding and ginny dances in her sweatpants that used to belong to ron. he starts watching tv. not the news. never the news. but sitcoms. muggle things.
it's all right.
but the dreams never die, because the fact is that there's always another and he knows that. not everything wraps up nicely like in a half-hour comedy.
this isn't fiction.
this is real life.
things don't always end well in real life.
he doesn't know if he can feel this way, the way they seem to do in the tv shows. if he should. but he tries, learns to cook, make phone calls, starts jogging in the mornings. the best way to move on is to just move on. he can't feel this way, not when ginny is running her hands up and down his back like she wants to light him up like a match. he can't feel this way, he tells himself.
just marry her, he tells himself.
but then the letter comes, the one in a handwriting he knows well. her handwriting. and it changes everything.
this is the part no one will know about, he tells himself in his head. this isn't the stuff they write stories about. people will want to forget this part.
he is right.
the letter. she cannot believe that she sent it. she owls it out and finds that her hands shaking. she tries to scrub them under cold water. she sits on them. but it doesn't change what she has done, and she has done it.
part of her feels like she has done something very wrong, like she has just ended both of them in a couple simple paragraphs. in a way, she has. she doesn't know it yet, but something ends in the moment that letter goes out.
but she must go back to where it started, not when it ends.
here is the thing about after: most things that seem real are only illusions. when she hears people talking about peace, she thinks of a flickering candle always about to go out. there are people in the parks, children going to school, but people are still scared of harry when he parts his hair that covers his forehead and they still won't name the one that she helped destroy. she doesn't fear like other people do. she doesn't fear like those who wake up and wash their faces and go to work and hope and push down and hope and ignore the itch of fear that scratches deep inside of them. no, she fears with a fear so real and raw she feels like she is always on guard. her fear is constantly vigilant, her fear never sleeps.
and the fact is that her fear is the real fear. that is why the dreams come and why she knows she will never be rid of them. you can't wash that fear away. it's a stain, and it covers all of her.
and it's also, because after, no one wants to admit it, but there are people on the other team. they do not like her, hermione granger. but most of all, they hate what she is all about, about her need to stand for things that are... right. there is no other way to put it. she knows that. for things that are good to their core.
and maybe that's why she sends the letter.
but she must go back to where it started, not where it ends.
it is sunday. the rain pours down her windows in long gray streaks. she is sorting through the mail. there is always mail, not all of them happy. because there is another team, she knows that. the charms that surround her and ron's house are so strong that sometimes ron wanders into them and she has to retrieve him from wandering around the yard, him mumbling, "i don't think that i know where my toes are. are my toes here? hermione, i can't feel my lips."
the man, she doesn't know who he is. his head is shaved to the scalp but his eyebrows are white and bushy. he doesn't say anything when she answers the door, and when he is already inside, hermione can only murmur, "how in the bloody hell did you get past... everything?"
the man never announces his name, but merely stands in her kitchen, wiping off the rain from his three piece suit that looks fashionably muggle. when she comes into the kitchen, staring at him wide-eyed and with her hand in her pocket, fingers clutched around her wand, she says, "ron isn't here. i won't talk. i won't tell you where harry potter is." without thinking, she rolls her sleeve up to expose the etching in her arm that has turned scartissue pink. she wonders if it speaks for itself, if it says there is no depth or breadth of evil that hermione granger has not seen.
the man bows his head. he sits down at her kitchen table, lights a cigarette. there is something about him that eases her. but if there's one thing hermione knows, it's that you can never know enough. she trusts few, especially after.
he takes a long pull on his cigarette, says, "you can release your grip on your wand, miss granger." his voice is tinted with an accent that she can't put her finger on. it's as crisp as an american, but there's a gentleness that speaks of something completely foreign. every time she tries to understand it, the voice slides away from her, like she has lost the voice in a fog. he pulls up a coffee cup that is sitting on the table and tilts his cigarette ash into it. "i mean you absolutely no harm. not in the immediate sense. no, not at all. i mean only to show you the truth, for there are people who want to hide it from you."
she stands in the middle of her kitchen and doesn't know what to do. the man in front of her has perused through the charms strong enough to liquefy the brains of any half-way intelligent wizard or witch. the fact is that there is nothing to do now. if the man wants to end her, he will end her. this is not the first time that she has been in this situation before.
the man, when she looks at him, looks familiar from some place. like a face from a dream. smoke falls like water out of his mouth when he says after a long period of silence, "yes, it's true. you know me. it's hard to explain, because it doesn't work with logical thought. but you, hermione granger, will understand it better than harry potter. who needs to know too."
the room is quiet. ron has left to visit his cousins who live down the road. they are watching a quidditch game later this weekend but he has left his jersey that he had so desperately wanted to wear. the whole house feels full of him, but she can't help but feel like she slips through the cracks.
the man smiles, halfly. "you don't need an explanation, i see. because there's a part of you, hermione granger, that knows very explicitly that you don't belong here. not in this world. not in the after."
his words hurt her, to the core. because they are true, and because she doesn't want them to be true. all that fighting, all that blood, the blood that still covered her like a blanket in her dreams, wasn't this what they were fighting for? for a quiet life that were only full of rainy nights holding clammy hands, and eating out for lunch, and office jobs, and christmases where children (her children? she shivers at the thought) don't have to be hushed and they sent christmas cards to their grandparents who they knew were alive. but she falls through this life. she suddenly realizes, quite suddenly, that this is why everything has changed. because now she doesn't quite fit. not at all.
the man stands up. he extinguishes his cigarette in the coffee cup and it sizzles dead. he walks to her, stands right in front of her. when he looks right in her eyes, she sees for the first time that they are bright green. his state takes her aback, like he has grabbed her by the throat. she can't breathe. from here, so close to the man, she can see that his eyebrows are speckled with ebony black hair. her throat feels small and tiny in the house, which feels so big, so impossibly big.
"you know, hermione granger. you know quite well that the lies are aplenty during peace. because peace doesn't exist. not really. not for people... like us." the man smells like nicotine and something else. something like her own body, like the cleanness of soap and that distinctly musky sent of... she cannot place it. but it reminds her of study halls and tents in the wilderness. tangled hair through her fingers. black hair wrapped around one of her sweater buttons.
the man says nothing else, not much. he gives her some paperwork, tells her that its charmed to burn in twenty hours.
"it's yours to choose what you must and should do. but you know," the man says. he is smoking another cigarette, holding it loosely through his top and bottom lip. it bobs buoy-like between the two. "but you do know that peace is only an illusion that is possible because there are always people fighting. there must be constant soldiering. vigilance. only the ones who know this must can fight for it, because they are the ones that see past the veil. see past the illusion."
she watches him leave from her spot near the parlor window. he cuts through the fog like a knife through butter. the charms seemed to melt around him- she watches as they glimmer awake at the possibility of movement, but when they reach out to touch him with their spidery arms, they shrink like wool in the wash. like he doesn't belong here. like he doesn't fit.
maybe this is what makes her trust him when he disappears from the house. his letter shakes in her hands. she reads it with a ferocity that she reads everything with, with acute attention to the detail, to the implications of it.
what is says isn't easy. she know this from the seconds she reads the couple of lines that say, "the war is never over, it is a battle that can never stop. the duality of our existence is in each of us. but you, hermione granger, are quite literally torn in two. there are two of you warring inside. luckily, both of you are good. unluckily, this means that you cannot fit easily anywhere. unluckily, this means, at the present, you are living a lie. and, unluckily, you know that you are not the only one of your kind. you are quite aware of this."
she is. she is aware of it everywhere she goes, when she tries to laugh some days and finds that the part of her that wants to just can't. it hurts in her chest like a hallow cough. but she had hoped to hold this pain, this ever present pain of missing, in her like a cancer that kills slowly but cannot be spread. but when she meets his face, in those moments of expected goodness, when the three of them are drunk and in a pub and eating chips out of a greasy envelope of butcher paper or when they go for rides in mr. weasley's muggle car, in these great moments, she meets his eyes one at a time. and she sees it, the same sort of pain. the cancer that eats her alive. when she realizes that the war made her aware of who she really was: not a bookish prude with the ability for a good laugh and a quick wit, but someone constantly on guard for the presence of goodness and evil and the way those two weave themselves through the very fabric of everything.
you know that you are not the only one of your kind.
it takes a couple of days to write the letter. ron comes home from the quidditch match and he's "bloody pissed" he says when he picks up his hanging jersey. "blood pissed i forgot this. can't believe it." he doesn't ask her how her day was and she offers nothing.
they eat spaghetti for dinner. at night, he curls like a question mark against her body and she only stares at the ceiling thinking of the charred papers in the downstairs wastebasket, knowing what she must do, what she has no choice but to do.
the next day when ron leaves to get some groceries, she sits down and writes: dear harry, it is my greatest regret to inform you that our lives will change unforgivably. but again, this is no choice of ours. has it ever been? will it ever be?
she puts her quill down, takes a sip of tea. she continues writing.
it began with a letter, he thinks. that letter than told him what he was. you're a wizard, harry james potter. so, he thinks, it only seems right that it should end in a letter.
he receives it on a day so cold the birds are silent. the owl comes to his window covered in a flurry of snow which he shakes from his feathers with a look of true annoyance. he brings him inside, sets him by the fire and says, "i know what it's like to be cold as piss, old boy. i'm sorry."
at first, he's a little annoyed at whoever has sent the letter; he watches the owl lick the ice off the tip of his taloned feet. but, when he sees the name on the return address, he immediately knows that something was about to change.
hermione granger, steely-faced hermione jane granger, with her stubborn expressions and ice-clean spirit, would only ever send an owl for the most serious of reasons. there are things like e-mails now, now that there is an after. but an owl means only the gravest of matters.
he reads the note. for a while the house is so quiet, he can hear the sandpapery tongue of the owl scrape across his icy talons. the note sits still in his fist and he finds he is holding it delicately, like one might a child, one just born.
he will be honest to himself, he thinks. i will be honest to myself about the note. about the stillness of the house, the stillness of the house before ginny awakes. sometimes, he thinks he hears a hike in her breathing, like she has just awoke. he sits quietly in his kitchen and thinks of how he will be honest to himself.
honesty, something that has been pushed away like dust in a corner after. after it all. honesty about the life where everyone tip-toes around like life is normal, that it will remain this way now that the one is dead. but there is not just one, that is honesty. honesty is hard and it hurts going down, and he was sure that he was the only one who shared in this feeling, this feeling that all is not well.
he goes into the living room, turns on the television. it is still muted from last night when ginny turned the volume down so she could talk at him, saying, don't you see, harry? don't you see... your eyes. i see it in your eyes. like you're crumbling. crumbling in between my fingers like sand. aren't you... happy? this is what you always wanted. what we fought for. his hands had been folded in front of his lap. he hadn't been able to look her in the eye.
on the screen, it is a nature documentary, one of those with soothing narration. a blue sky opens up like a blanket. then, in slow motion, a huge white bird, wings stretching from tip of screen to tip of screen enters the frame. it swoops into the air like it is hung there by some great invisible string. a second later, another bird follows, its great webbed feet translucent in the warm blue sky. they are together soon, wing stroke matching wing stroke.
he watches, transfixed. the owl next to him is quiet, as if it is watching too. and it's strange, in this moment, or at least he thinks so, that in this moment that seems to belong to the great white birds, that he hears hermione's voice. it is definitely her voice, smooth and calm and steady. she recites her letter, saying, harry, i know that this will ruin our lives. but then again, we always knew that. this was never really our world, us orphans in this world that we were not born into. but we have been adopted into it in the cruelest way, and this makes us more aware than them all. then ron. then ginny. oh harry, i am sorry, but that is just how it is. we are soldiers of a constant vigilance and our awareness makes it so we can never sleep, not in the ignorance that they desire of us. again, i am sorry. for you more than me, but for myself as well. do you see an alternative? i do not.
he doesn't either. this isn't one of those sorts of things, he thinks. there is no other option.
tomorrow he will leave. to say goodbye. he hears someone padding down the hallway. the breathing has stopped, the deep sleep sort of breathing coming from his bedroom. she is awake and soon she will be here. her figure will be standing in the door frame so soon he realizes that he is holding his breathe.
he will not marry her, he knows this now. what use are goodbyes now?
inside the letter, there is a small watch, a leather wrist watch. he already knows what it is, can see the small shimmer of magic glimmering at the very corner of his eye. the footsteps are almost there, he can feel them shaking the floor under his feet.
he grips the watch and feels the pull in his belly button, like a fish on a hook. the fringes of his vision is vignetted with the swirling blackness of the portkey. but the last thing he sees is the great white bird drift the sky like it will never fall, like it can't, even though it must eventually.