Albatross

pt.2

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

~ Charles Darwin

when he comes to, he finds the portkey was made quickly, in haste, in distraction. he has landed sloppily. a sharp pain flows up from his elbow and when he reaches to his forehead he finds the warm stream flowing down his head is his own.

his vision is shaky at best, but he is used to this. he is the one who lived after all, and he has lived because he has learned to adapt quickly. he sits up, squints when he finds that his glasses are scratched from the fall. but he can see.

his surroundings are rocky, green. somewhere in the distance, there is the crashing of waves against a rock littered coastline. he cannot see water.

he sits there for awhile. he knows that his wand is in his back pocket, but for some reason he is not alarmed. something inside of him tells him to wait, and so he does. the distant roar of a tide never ceases and it starts to match the pulse in his hands, in the wound on his head. he takes out his wand, looks around before mumbling a quick charm to his forehead. he feels the skin knitting itself hastily together but he knows now that he will have a scar, another.

he waits. the sun gets lower in the sky, but it burns into his skin like a fired knife. sweat falls in a thin blade down his back, but he waits. while he waits, a lizard the size of his arm rumbles out onto the black rock he is lying on. its tongue slithers out at him and the two of them stare at each other. he thinks to that tongue, that same tongue, that came for him years before. he sees blood and darkness and smells that dank must of death and hears her voice screaming and he tries to feel her pulse and he sees red hair wrapped like a knot around the end of his wand. but that is only for a moment, and suddenly all he can see in the darkness of the lizard's eye, the scales of his flesh. for a second, the sun is setting and it sounds as if the tide is coming in and the lizard is becoming silhouetted in the sky turning blood red. it seems to him that he too is only a silhouette. for once, in a long time, he feels the heart in the temple of his forehead slow and steady. it is a feeling he has not felt in a long time.

the lizard moves on, lumbering past him. he still waits.

right before the sun sets, a figure mounts the mound of rock where he sits. he doesn't know who it is, but it is male. he is bald. there's a cigarette in his mouth, and smoke makes red halos over his head against the horizon. he wears a perfectly ironed suit. when he is about three feet away from him, he pauses. the cigarette hangs precariously from his bottom lip.

when the stranger speaks, his voice is un-accented, "you're a patient man, harry potter."

he looks at the man and feels as if he might know him. he tries to place him but the connection alludes him like sand through a closed fist. his eyes look at him with a genuine pensiveness; in the darkness of twilight, he cannot place the color.

he shrugs, but never strays his eyes away from the stranger's gaze. he says, "i've had a fair share of waiting in my life. i've gotten used to it."

the stranger shakes his head up and down, cracks a smile around the limp cigarette in his mouth. "i'd say you have, mr. potter. you may call me roger. for now, i suppose that's a good enough of a name as any, right?"

he doesn't question this, because there is something about this man that he cannot place, like he is merely a heat wave, a hallucination. you don't name things like this. roger it is. roger it will be. it's as good as any for something that may or may not exist.

he finally stands. his legs are coated in a thin layer of what feels like sea salt and the salt of his own body. the back of his shirt is glued like skin to the back of his shoulder blades. after wipes his hands on his slacks, he says, "well. i am patient, but i suppose this is the time where you tell me why i am here."

the man laughs. "ah, yes, you would think that, mr. potter. for sure, it is fair to think that. but time is a tricky lady. she bends where she pleases. and we'll have to leave it at that for now at the very least."

again, he finds that no questions arise in his brain. a part of him half-way doesn't believe that he is actually experiencing this, that perhaps the heat and the constant pattering of the waves has lead him to sleep. but the gash in his head still feels like a non-bleeding knot and the skin there hurts like it has been harshly zippered undone. the other scar on his forehead does not hurt.

roger starts walking and he follows him. his legs are lead-stiff and full of blood-needles. the air, even though it is bringing in a cool water breeze, feels like a hot blanket. this is not cool, sad england. he is far from that, and suddenly he is aware that this is his first steps off of that small chunk of land in the freezing atlantic. it smells different here, like a different ocean, different trees. the land feels different, newer, like it has just arisen from the sea.

the world is getting dark, but roger's steps are full of authority, as if he has walked here his entire life. he has to keep him eye on roger's cigarette's orange ember to know where he is going.

they climb through a bramble of small dense trees for awhile. the ground is a black rock full of things that scramble to and fro. some are hairy, petite, other are slick and scaly. the world around him is alive and so separated from the place that he used to inhabit that he wonders how he never thought of that: that the rest of the world might have never known him, never known of the boy who lived and who continues to live in a sort of way. they may have never named the one who must not be named not because of fear or superstition, but they didn't know of him. they would not utter his name because they never know it. a little piece of him settles when he thinks of this, that the rest of the world may have been gifted the gift of ignorance.

some people knew not of the great war. they know not of the after. his heart stills for a second, and then beats with due vigilance.

it feels like hours but they finally break out of the thick brush. they are on the edge of a cliff, a small cliff that descends before lowering and flattening to a startling white beach. the sea in front of them is pearly in the white of the moon. the beach itself is littered with small black dots that move slowly and bark like dogs.

"seals," he murmurs and roger turns to him and smiles.

lighting a cigarette, roger says, "they're cute buggers, but they'll eat your face if given the choice. do be careful, mr. potter."

they stand for a few minutes on the edge of the cliff, watching for something. he doesn't know what it might be, but they wait none the less. the smell of roger's cigarette drifts through the air and mixes with the salty brine of the sea. off in the distance, a seal. the sea here is quiet, only crashing into carpet soft sand. to the far left of where they are standing, a large outcropping of rock raises like a giant black finger into the sky.

then it happens, what they've been waiting for. a dark figure comes from the distance, near the giant rock. it moves with a brisk pace, like it knows where it must go. but suddenly it stops, looks directly at them.

the features of obscure, black and silhouetted in the lowering sun, in the darkening night, but he knows who it is. he knows instantly, and with that, he realizes why he is there. roger will explain later, he knows that, but he knows that she is here, she is alone, and he knows that it's all over now. there's no going back.

"you expected miss granger?" roger asks. he is staring darkly into the side of his face.

he shakes his head, says, "perhaps, always. i should always expect her."

they descend the cliff. it takes more skill than what he might have expected. but when they finally reach the beach, he can see her in the distance, standing stiff as a board. she is now looking the sea. he walks towards her, hesitantly, like he doesn't know her, or as if he has no idea what to say. like he might never know what to say, especially since now that they both know.

when he reaches her, she is still looking out into the distance, towards the sea. the tide has started descend again, but it still laps against her nude toes that are dirty around the edges and unpolished.

he examines her for a few brief seconds. her hair is cut short, the ends tickling the lobes of her ears. she is smaller, lost weight, and he realizes he has too. most days he finds that he has gone all day thinking of nothing but the after, and only at the end of the day does he realize that he has forgotten to eat. she is wearing a sweater, a pair of shorts that expose her long white legs that gleam in the moonlight. in her left hands, she is clutching a large bottle of wine and half of it is empty; her lips are dark and purple-y and suddenly he is aware that hermione, ironically, is a bit of a lush.

finally, he says, "funny meeting you here," and instantly he feels so silly, like he is eleven again and he doesn't know what to say to the outgoing, pushy bushy-haired girl who has just opened the door to his train cabin.

but she laughs, lifts the wine bottle to her lips and takes a large gulp. she passes it to him. she has still not looked at him, not even remotely. her eyes are locked out in the distance where the water breaks on some outlying invisible rocks in a wrath of white frothiness.

he takes the wine bottle and tilts it back. the wine is bad and cheap and it burns as it goes down his throat. he realizes that he has not eaten in a long time and the wine will go quickly to his head. but he doesn't care, and after he's had a couple of swigs, he swings towards her direction and asks, "do you trust him?" he tosses his head towards roger, who is standing back near the rocks that line the edge of the beach. his cigarette glows in the light.

she still doesn't look at him. instead, she shakes her head and says, "do you?"

he thinks back to roger's figure on the horizon, the way that he talked. finally, he takes a swig of wine, says, "i shouldn't. i mean, i shouldn't trust anyone, not really. but think that i do. i do trust him. but do you, hermione?"

it's the first time that he's said her name, and it seems to catch her off-guard. she straightens, as if hearing her name has snapped her out of her drunken silence. she folds her arms across the front of her chest and turns to him. her eyes are dark in the night, and she meets his gaze right on, directly ahead. her lips are in a straight line as she says, "the only person i trust is you, harry."

she grabs the wine and starts heading up the beach. raising up the bottle in the air, she yells back, "but what choice do we have? what choice do we have but to trust him?"

her figure starts to disappear, and as it becomes small and black, he closes his eyes, knowing what she has said is true, knowing that it is so very true, it hurts inside of him.

she arrives a day before him, here to this little strip of land out in the middle of pacific. roger (as he later named himself), shows her to a cabin that lay in the copse of low-laying trees. inside, there is a bed, a nightstand. piled high in the corner of the cabin is a stack of old dusty books.

"so, you heard i like to read?" she asks coyly. she holds a backpack of hastily packed clothes and several toothbrushes.

roger, always smoking, smiles over his cigarette. "these books are not necessarily for pleasure. we're going to need hermione granger the brightest student of hogwarts to make an re-appearance."

she frowns, starts flipping through the books, "who's to say that she ever left?"

roger laughs and before he exits, he says, "then read carefully, miss granger. you never know what you might find."

the books are old, older than any she had gone through even at hogwarts. some pages literally crumble when she turns them. some of the dialect is old, in an ancient version of english that she has to cross-reference with the newer books to decipher. she sits for hours, her feet folded in front of her, writing hastily in a notebook.

the question that she asks over and over again: is it possible? is it possible?

she has no answer, even after hours and hours of researching loops of information. so when roger comes back with a bottle of wine, she grabs it from him, and with the end of a pen pops the cork into the wine before taking a long, deep swig.

"so, i suppose that you haven't had much luck?" roger asks. he smells of the sea and sweat. his lips are curled in a half-concerned, half-amused grin. he looks around the room and she's sure that he sees the chaos of the cabin for what it truly looks like: a slew of books half-opened, some stacked, some seemingly carelessly opened and stacks of notebook paper scrawled on, full of arrows and calculations and messy lines of notes.

she throws a deadly stare at him, takes another drink. "it's a rather shit job that you've given me, roger."

roger laughs and then they are quiet. they both stare at the pile of papers sitting on the ground, of the books tossed every which way. the outside sounds of the island fill the room and for a second those sounds almost consume them.

finally, after a very long sober moment, she whispers, to her hands that are folded in front of her, "is it possible? it it even possible to do what you told me about in the letter?"

when she looks up at roger, his eyebrows are creased and he isn't smoking. it dawns on her that there is something in his eyes that she hasn't seen before. she cannot place it, but for once it makes a piece of her stir, like she hasn't felt in a long time.

"you know..." she mumbles, looking at him intensely. "you know how to do it."

he frowns, quickly wiping the expression from his face. he looks up and out into the distance and says, "it doesn't work like that, miss granger. this isn't the time or place."

standing, she almost loses her footing. the wine is sloshing in her brain, but the words that come out of her mouth are true to her real emotion, "you keep mentioning time like it something quite understandable, quite readable. like it's a good book that you read once. but i don't know if i believe that. because who knows about those sorts of things? what if the time is never right or wrong. it just... is."

roger says nothing. he simply lights a cigarette, leaves while saying, "potter will be here tomorrow, granger. i'm sorry."

when he leaves, she doesn't return to the books. instead, she walks to the beach, takes off her clothes. the water is warm and the moon glows against the pale of her england skin. she floats easily in the salty sea and she watches as the full moon rises overhead. she closes her eyes and instead of seeing the moon she thinks back. back past the way red hair once littered her house, back past the days and days of interviews and pictures of her when everything seemed for a few brief seconds that it might be okay. back past when her hair was long and bushy and she still cared more for her grades than her life. she remembers another body of water as dark and smooth as the ocean she drifts on, remembers the cool night air when a young boy who had no business becoming a man did spells that he shouldn't have known how to do. she remembers the ghostly white of a patronus, strong and full. white, like the moon above her them, above her now. the patronus, as solid and good as the boy by the lake. both, a part of him. both, a version of him, one the growing manchild, one the external version of what was already inside of him- courage, virtue, a determination so solid it hurt to look at. she shielded her eyes, turning her face away, like she had seen a part of him so naked she had no right to gaze upon it. each part, in that moment, whole in part. each a piece of each other, perfect in their own form.

her eyes open quickly. above her, the moon looks like it has been perfectly cut from a cloth of navy silk. the night makes her mind so clear it shocks her, like she has jumped into a pool of cold water. she is in her body and yet out of it. her fingers move over her bare stomach just to make sure that she's really here, in this moment. for in this moment, she understands the partition between who she is and who she knows she could be. the essence and the body. she lifts her hand, spreads her fingers and traces the circle of the moon. for a second she thinks she could almost take it from the sky.

"so cleanly cut," she mumbles to herself. "a cleanly cut copy."

and suddenly she knows that it's possible. she doesn't know how she will do it, but she has seen it in one form and she knows that it can happen in another. she knows it because she is hermione granger, and this is what she was raised for, what the war has bred into her. she has found the last resource available to her, because this is why she is alive right now, here in the after.

she knows that he will arrive tomorrow. she knows what she must do.

she knows what they must do, now that they have no choice.

she dries herself on the beach, watching the moon ripple on the water. the horizon stretches for miles and she thinks that somewhere on it he is sitting tonight with his hands draped around a woman who's red hair shines in a halo of light. that woman will turn to him and tell him that she's so glad it's over, that all of it's over. in part, she is right. in part, she is wrong, because it's just beginning but she just doesn't know it yet. and, in a way, she will never know, not if it's done right, not if it's truly possible.

"it is possible," she says to the sky, which is perfectly separated into sky and moon, perfectly separated like all things are, like hermione granger and harry potter are.