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Dedicated to Paige (echoing noise). Happy Birthday!

Found

All was well.

It was such a tiny, all-encompassing phrase, far too simple for what it represented. Harry winced every time he saw them, in the years after Voldemot's defeat, paraded across the cover of the Daily Prophet and every other trashy tabloid, forever accompanied by his own face, with its famous lightning scar.

All was well.

It made his head spin, those words, those three small words that tried to wipe away all the horrors of his life, that tried to make it all okay.

But he was okay, wasn't he? At last, he had the normal, ordinary life he'd always dreamed of living. He was a father now, and a husband, a part of a huge, close-knit family that, come the holidays, could hardly fit into the kitchen of the Burrow. He was happy now, and he reckoned he deserved that, deserved the days when his biggest problem was keeping James and Albus from killing each other. Harry Potter was not the lonely orphan boy who had been left alone at the train station, not knowing where he was headed, in so many ways… a lost little boy.

He'd grown up a lot, since then, moved on from it. He was a little boy no longer, but there were times – both painfully hard and achingly familiar – when he still got lost. Three little words ( all – was – well) couldn't erase all the things he'd seen, couldn't blot out the first eighteen years of his, couldn't get rid of all the hardship, the struggle, the pain.

Sometimes, he woke up in the middle of night, unable to remember where he was or how he'd got there, unable to move, to call out. There were moments, in that unfathomable darkness, when he believed that Lord Voldemort was still alive, believed that he was standing not a foot away, in the pitch-black nothingness just beyond Harry's reach. Sometimes, too, he grew convinced that the nightmares he had just awoken from were real again… as they had been before.

Other times, it was not the darkness that frightened him, but the light, the flashing of color before his eyes… The paparazzi often ambushed him, especially in those early years after the war. There were times when the brief flash of a camera was all it took for him to lose himself within his own body, to be brought backwards in time. His infant years, his childhood, his teenage years… the struggles within them were always there, impossible to forget. He could not regret them, could not cast them away any more than one of his own limbs, but he did wish they weren't so accessible, so ever-present.

And there were times too, he wandered off the path for no reason at all, his mind seeming to forget what was real now, and center only what had been real then. He'd scream and cry out, clutching the scar that had not pained him since the second of May, 1998, the scar that was little more than a phantom now.

He hated all those moments – in the light, in the darkness, in the wandering, broken forests of his mind – for every obvious reason, but most of all for how infinite they seemed, how endless. In those terrifying seconds, he truly believed that nothing had changed, that everything was how it had once been, again.

But it wasn't. For Ginny would wake up, next to him, to whisper in back to sleep, or else, in the streets, someone – Luna, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, George – was there to grab his hand or his shoulder, pulling him away from all the flashes, or else, his children were there, reminding him, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy…."

He did not lead the charmed, perfect live all the tabloids painted, and all was not perfect, not ideal – but maybe the Daily Prophet had gotten it right anyhow. Perhaps all was well, if only because the moments he got lost could never define him, for they – his family, his friends, the people he loved - were always there to find him again.