A short, Harry-centric drabble showing that nobody is the same after war. Read, review, and enjoy~
"My eyes aren't glistening with the ghosts of my past!" Who knew that Rita Skeeter could tell the future?
Because, suddenly, all Harry could see were ghosts. Around corners and behind banisters and peering out of doors and lying on the steps and under beds and in the cupboards and yes, he knew ghosts existed, but these were different.
They were his ghosts.
Little Colin Creevey told him he could take pictures with his mind, and would he like to see Cho Chang in the showers, and Cedric sometimes whispered the password to the Prefects' bathroom.
Fred Weasley told him jokes and insisted that blowing up the Potions classroom was a good idea, and Tonks yelled "Wotcher, Harry!" whenever he happened to walk round the wrong corner, always causing him to stumble and her to laugh. Snape sometimes commented on his terrible duelling technique and Remus played peek-a-boo with Teddy.
He had taken to carrying around sherbet lemons and owl treats, and his socks never matched.
And Hermione saw this, in Harry's eyes. She saw the ghosts that Hogwarts gave him, the past that glistened in the surface of the Black Lake and the Mirror of Erised and even in broken shard of a mirror that once held both Sirius and Aberforth's faces.
"You know, Hermione," Ron whispered once as Harry tripped over the umbrella stand, "I really hate martyrs." Hermione couldn't agree more.
"Harry," she said softly, after he cursed a Sneakoscope for reminding him of Mad-Eye Moody, "go home."
He went to the Burrow, and didn't complete even his first term of his revised seventh year, but the ghosts of his past never left. Harry blamed Rita Skeeter, because it was her, or himself.