Genre: Angst/Romance/Drama
Pairings: mainly Harry/Hermione, others TBA
Summary: After all is said and done, what is next? Year Seven is full of uncertainties for all, including the Golden Trio, who try to redefine themselves in relation to others. Post HBP.
A/N: So this is a bit of a departure for me. I don't usually write multi-part things, but this is going to keep bothering me if I don't keep writing it. I have little if no expectations for it. Read it or not, I'll try to keep this going. But don't get me wrong, I like reviews.
It's more of a mood piece, meaning it isn't really based on plot, kind of like a Wong Kar-Wai film. Which, if you haven't seen, go now!
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Because he needs her like he needs medicine
She forgets to write him anyway
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His memory was a funny, fickle thing.
Everything considered, the selective amnesia might just have been the most normal thing to happen to him.
Harry Potter didn't quite remember the details of the last battle with Voldemort, even though he had fought for his life in the last instances of that dark wizard's existence. It should have been more dramatic in his mind's eye: he'd heard people talk about the slow motion you experienced when fighting for your life (it's killed or be killed, they also said); the flashes of memories everyone claimed to see before a certain death ensued in a sick cliché.
Instead, it was relegated to a blur of incomprehensible movements and distorted words and some missing scenes. A censored film of recollection, broken and battered.
Inwardly, he always glad not to evoke those exact moments.
And perhaps, they might have just been lying the whole time about near death experiences. He was already an unwitting expert in that area. Still, he wasn't sure how to rationalize it to himself, much less anyone else. Then again, he was never sure how he was expected to explain those horrible moments to another.
But the morning after - he could recall that quite vividly.
While he was barely coming to grips with the events of the darkest night he'd ever experienced, Hermione Granger held onto him with a desperate grip, as if afraid to lose him to the long night's shadows. In the small cot they shared from some room, he could barely recall how he'd arrived there. Even years later, he sometimes wondered if she did.
No doubt she was trying the register what had happened and make sense of incoherent thoughts and fresh blurry memories, as though barely woken from the single worst nightmare of her life. He could feel the loud pulsing of her heartbeat against his shoulder blade.
Those early morning rays of the dawning sun peeking through the tiny, wretched window only filled the room with definitive shadows growing blacker against the incoming light. He meant to smile knowing she was there, hanging on with the remnants of a broken heart and little else.
For the first time, she'd been able to mourn over all the things and people they had lost along the way, when it was finally over. She felt the collective loss of sacrificed lives to achieve that end. And while they had ultimately won, it felt like the end of the world in some respects.
She grieved openly in the early dawn of that new, uncertain day.
Despite the exhaustion that seemed to penetrate into their very bones, neither one was able to sleep.
He dumbly noted that she cried when he couldn't. That she still could only showed her capacity to still deal with things as they came, even if it was remorse made the corners of his mouth twitch. It was not a smile, merely an impulse of his face to her presence. She still felt, which was far more than he could have mustered at the present state.
He didn't comfort her, knowing it wouldn't work and his heart wasn't into telling her reassuring things that he wouldn't believe himself. He didn't think he was very good at convincing others anyway. The words would no doubt come out clumsy and poorly thought out, perhaps too detached or insulting or soft but ultimately insincere. He didn't dare be the cause to another bout of her laments to add into the already endless night.
It was the darkest hour they were getting through and he couldn't believe he was still alive. By all accounts, he shouldn't have been. It was too much coincidence to be hunted down year after year and always being narrowly missed. He figured luck had narrowly managed to snatch him from another sure death. Either that or was he was supposed to expect a very gruesome demise to replace the one where he should have perished.
It was more than he could hope for at the moment. Another day to live, how strange . . .
Her scalding tears bled freely on the collar of his shirt, eventually soaking through the cotton fabric not drenched in dried blood and hours old sweat. It burned his skin.
She held onto him fiercely, one arm hooked under his and tightly gripped his shoulder, dull nails marking him despite the layers of clothes. Her other arm was wound around his neck and joined her other hand in digging her fingers into his collar. She didn't pay mind to his injuries (not that he had been complaining anyway) and hadn't bothered with keeping a strong appearance, even for his sake. She could not, and would not bother trying to keep it together.
All she needed was to know that it was not some perverse dream taunting her if she fell asleep and would up waking to a cold, empty spot in the sheets beside her.
So she damned the considerate part of her mind and didn't bother letting go, even if he was bleeding and sore and tired. He would have to tough it out like her, as she was bleeding and sore and tired too.
They had one thing in common as they reeled in sorrow - hers tangible in silent tears, his in heavy brooding.
The warm mist of her breath between sobs only reminded him of what this war had already cost them. Ron had been hit with something and neither one could reach him in the midst of flying curses. Neither one had seen him since sunset. That had been the day before - a lifetime ago - as they irrevocably aged a few lifetimes overnight.
They're gone. They're really gone.
Several faces flashed before him, followed by the lights trailing after curses. He saw Sirius, Cedric, Dumbledore between the threads of the worn pillowcase.
Red, yellow, and the occasional green lights passing by them – haunting colors. Unforgivables – a fitting name.
He supposed they would have made a pretty light display to an ordinary Muggle, if they were simply a fireworks exhibition on some holiday. That is, if such lights weren't meant to kill.
He had stopped being one more Muggle at the age of ten (eleven, his mind corrected, that voice in his mind sounding very much like Hermione), when he was introduced to the wizarding world. Even though drowning in sorrow, he wondered what it would have been like to have been completely ordinary; and most of all, an anonymous bloke. The Dursleys weren't difficult to endure. Nothing at all like the difficulties he had been expected to face, to overcome, for the sake of others.
For all the damage they'd endured, he had no idea world would be like from then on. Emptier, he knew, and not just as a cause of losing those who had defended him.
He would recall the light of a candle under the door being slowly eclipsed by the stronger light of the arriving sun.
When he finally regained his sense of immediacy, it was Hermione's tears that reminded him of rain on a hot summer day as they fell on his skin. Right as rain, she'd told him once as they hunted horcruxes. Everything will be right as rain, Harry.
He wondered if her smile that day was supposed to be another isolated memory to contemplate in his solitude or prophetic in its hopefulness. A romantic idea, the latter. Silly really, considering the situation.
His eyes stung, though he was unsure if it was because it was due to the sunlight prickling his tired eyes, or the feeling of tightness in his throat as he choked on a surge of emotions when the sound of her crying finally broke through the numbness he'd barricaded himself behind, and exposed the desolation he desperately wanted to ignore.
At the moment, all he wanted to know what she said on that summer afternoon was true. If it would be true one day. He found himself nostalgic over the spontaneous shower that had fallen unexpectedly on the three once upon a time.
Three. Once upon a time, there were three.
And then there were two.
But for the moment, there was the silence, that odd peace that allowed the proverbial dust to settle.
So he reached for her hand, and wouldn't let go as he waited to know if everything would be right for a change. And although he had been able to stand hours (ages?) before, just holding her fingers seemed to take the last vestiges of strength.
She was warm and better yet alive meaning he was not being left to bear with the burden of being completely devastated and utterly abandoned. That alone allowed him to breathe a little easier. He didn't quite catch the quieting of her sobs at the small action and squeezed a little harder, just to make sure he wasn't delusional. I'm not alone.
The shaky exhale that followed was painful. His lungs hurt. Oddly enough, he was able to recall chasing after her on some random afternoon until it hurt to breathe as it did then. She laughed that time, more for his benefit than her actual feelings at the moment. He would appreciate it more than the foolish accolades he'd collect in the time that would follow.
His face burrowed into the pillow, trying to figure out if it was really that easy not to breathe any longer. It wasn't.
The pain in his chest didn't subside at all, even with a weak heartbeat that kick started with a vengeful rhythm when he was forced to inhale deeply.
Gradually, one of her hands had loosened her hold on his shoulder to knot itself in his hair. He was cold despite the thick blankets that did nothing to warm his limbs, but he felt her feverish fingers when they singed his scalp slightly.
Stay.
Stay with me.
He didn't look back, remembering another time when she used a story-telling voice, clear and a little authoritative. She explained the myth of Orpheus, who ventured heartbroken into the underworld to take his Eurydice back. And while he gained Hades' sympathy, he lost her for a second time, of course, as all great tragedies go. For Harry, whose life was forever marked by misfortune, the irony was not lost on him.
His fingers dug into her sleeve more than necessary.
You're bound to lose her, a voice warned. Clinical. Detached. Matter-of-fact.
Please.
She was still breathing against his neck, so he chose to ignore the warning.
Exhaustion took its toll, gradually weighing him down. His bones sank a little more into the mattress. The springs poked at him through the worn material. His eyes closed slowly, surrendering to the vague idea that maybe everything might eventually be all right.
What he didn't notice was that she lingered on a bit longer, almost drowned in grief, but followed afterward, like everything she did that concerned him.
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Whatever was left of summer holiday was spent on constant security and an increasing sense of isolation from everyone in general. His safety wasn't what concerned him after being dubbed The-Boy-Who-Live-To-Tell-About-It by seven different publications. Instead, he felt an absence from the cold part of the bed and the unmistakable feeling of a hardcover book lacking under the pillow.
Half empty.
Harry Potter was ever the pessimist.
The increasing concern was over the lack of owls coming through the window in the mornings. Ronald Weasley, who slept until noon, didn't pay the slightest attention to his growing exasperation in the early hours of the day.
Two weeks and no word of her.
She had fled like a stray leaf in the wind, out there somewhere. It didn't help when Ginny blew white fluffy dandelions after playing Quidditch. While he'd been a little happy at the win, the sight of flying featherlike pedals crushed it under its non-existing weight.
While he was far from lonely during his stay at the Burrow, there was a nagging sense of loneliness that ate away slowly at whatever remained from the war – well wishers, sanity, whatever. The only thing that didn't end was the incessant interview requests.
But she. She hadn't even said goodbye.
He never thought she'd wind up on the list of people who promptly vanished from sight. But he was proven wrong, yet again. This time the loyal brunette had turned her back on him.
It had been a Thursday since he's last seen her. The calendar told him it was Monday.
Two and a half weeks. Give or take a day. He was never very good at math.
Nowhere to reach her. No way to know how she was doing.
Hedwig ruffled her feathers.
He exhaled a bit forcefully.
At least she had upheld her promise, like a deal they'd shook hands on, except that the thought of him as an obligation didn't settle very well on his stomach. She was free and taking the opportunity to do as she pleased. She was free. She was without him.
He cracked his knuckles.
The parchment on top of the school trunk stared at him.
Somehow the quill got between his fingers.
Before he knew it, he started to write. And then hesitated.
An H appeared on the paper. H. As in Her. H-e-r.
He scratched it out.
The parchment, once flat and smooth was wrinkly and balled up in his fist. He tossed it across the room. It made a hollow sound and hid under the bed.
Worn curtains and bleary eyes. The sun was too strong when he'd woken up. He remembered that much. She didn't let go. She held on to his hand. Even when they'd determined that they were in one piece and largely uninjured, she hadn't let go.
He still felt the sharp edges of the parchment on his palm. It wasn't soft.
He shook his head, wanted to collect himself. But things never worked that way for him. Just as he willed himself to forget, a little bit at least, he looked through the window to see a carefully planned accident unfold. Dandelion petals and laughter. Ginny picking the flowers outside. Weeds, corrected his memory, sounding like her. It always sounded like her. Her. H-e-r.
He couldn't scratch this one.
Another clean piece of parchment appeared.
I don't know where you are . . .
He paused. And wished he knew.
His hand twitched, wanting to crumple something other than the poor excuse of a letter. Looking down, it didn't even qualify as a proper note.
His hand met his forehead. And despite feeling wounded, he couldn't call up any angry feelings. He wished her well. Really, he did. Except for the greedy little corner in his heart that tugged relentlessly at the slightest reminder of her. It wouldn't leave him alone. Not when she had.
Dandelion pedals swirled in the air, just outside the window, out of his reach. It'd be crushed if he tried to hold on to it. No doubt about it. They drifted off somewhere, weightlessly away from his destructive, clumsy hands, deciding on where to land. Always, with as much distance away from him. He tried not to think about it.
A corner of his mouth twitched. A half-hearted grimace. A half-empty smile.
His wrist moved.
The feather tickled the side of his face. It was soft and lacked warmth. A little too fleeting for his taste, he wound up scratching his cheek lightly in annoyance.
When he looked down, something else appeared on the parchment.
I hope you come back soon.
With quill still in hand, he omitted one part.
To me.
He wanted it so.