Disclaimer: Don't own it. Don't sue.
A/N: This is a continuation/ missing moment from Playing House. Harry's PoV, post-Hogwarts, and there's just a dab of HarryGinny. Oh and some hero angst. Please read, enjoy and let me know what you think.
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Harry walks.
He walks partially because there is nothing else to do but mostly because he's afraid if he stays in that house all day the dust will swallow him whole. And that in turn makes him wonder if maybe he hasn't gone a little bit mad, just like all the papers suggest, but then he figures lunatics don't recognize their own insanity, so surely that's the case with him.
Sometimes he wishes it were.
It would be a nice excuse, the way he sees it, a way out of a thousand and one uncertainties that now follow him night and day.
During the war life pended solely on the moment. Finding their next meal, ensuring they weren't being followed, finding shelter and destroying the next Horcrux. Each moment was its own and nothing could be seen ahead aside from dreams. But here, now, all he finds is a sense of endlessness, something dull and lack luster as life falls into monotonous patterns that bleed into one another in his mind. Every night like the night before, him walking the halls of the house they now share, seventeen steps from his door to hers and then four more to Ron's and then six more to the landing at the top of the stairs. Every morning like the last, her face pale and drawn despite everything, eyes at times glassy and wide as though she walks in a haze of half-dreaming reality. Ron's face set with worry lines as stubborn as their owner, a tall lanky frame that carries itself as though waiting for the defeating blow.
So he walks; the pressure of her eyes on the back of his neck even after he turns the corner and a tart taste in his mouth. He walks without thought, only the persisting idea that he must get away, away from the house and the dust and her pale face. Away from Ron's hope and his own displacement, away from the stack of letters he's shoved on the top shelf of his empty closet and the boxes he can't open. Can't, won't, it doesn't really matter anymore. Maybe it never did.
Each step takes him further and further and he passes the play park that is always empty and the lamp post and the houses, all hunched and grey like their own, walks until he reaches the place where the little grey neighborhood falls into a bustling street that smells of petrol and contains far too much noise.
He stops here and thinks another step will end it; will allow him clemency and cleansing and all those things tragic heroes crave after their story has been deemed finished. Because he does, he craves it, craves something that will allow him some form of peace, the peace that had remained illusive for so much of his life and continues to do so now even though the battle has long since ended and their side rose from the metaphorical smoke victorious. It's typical and predictable and he thinks that if Ginny ever knew she would arch a brow and call it cliché or perhaps dull.
But Ginny doesn't know and he thinks that once he gets back— because he always goes back—that he might write her and tell her, about the house and the dust and the empty closet and how sometimes he walks past Ron's room and sees Hermione lying in there with him. Maybe he'll tell her about how at night he can't ever sleep, how sometimes he can't remember what colour her hair was and how he thinks he might have forgotten what she sounded like, he hasn't heard her in so long.
He doesn't.
Because surely her only response would be reproachful for taking so long, and then she would be hurt or mad or, perhaps worst of all, amused that he frets over such things as her hair colour when there's so many more things he ought to be preoccupied with. He is sure she will ask whether he's contacted Remus or Hagrid or what exactly it is he plans to do for the rest of his life. 'Hiding'—because he remembers she called it hiding—'isn't a plan.'
And all these thoughts flood him with all the fury of the street before him and he turns. Back down the grey streets, past the slumping house fronts. Back, back, back, until he spies the house they share, the house he has never felt inclined to call home and them. One pale and watchful, the other clinging to hope and the third perhaps a little bit mad, the three of them making an odd set in an equally odd house which even after months and months, still holds stacks of boxes.
And in the evenings there is silence, and sometimes they might sit out front and other times in the barren living room and other times still, all divided in their respective rooms. Sometimes he lies down on the camp bed in the corner and stares at the closet door and thinks it could be little more than seven steps and a stretch to bring the letters down. Instead he stays still until the world itself goes quiet and then he rises, eleven steps to his door then seventeen to Hermione's and only four more to Ron's. Again and again until morning comes. Nothing is so terrible in the morning light, though nothing is ever fixed either.
Then he walks again, with her eyes on the back of his head and the look of dwindling hope in Ron's eyes and the thought that perhaps today is the day when he will walk one step further and into the labyrinth of colour and noise and away from everything else that might still remember him and be remembered in turn.
But today proves to be nothing more than yesterday, which was really only the day before that. And he knows he will not write today, knows he will not sleep. He knows that today he will not call their house a home.
'Perhaps tomorrow.' He thinks and walks back.
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End
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