"He's going to be late," Fred whispers as they sit on the floor of the living room, building multi-coloured Lego castles with Teddy only to have the energetic toddler knock them back down again as he cackles gleefully. "Should we tell him?"
"I think he wants to be late," Hermione admits. "Sort of as if he wants to sabotage himself. I might go up to talk to him, though, if you're right with Teddy."
Fred grins at her, speaking loudly and animatedly and focusing on the boy. "Am I alright with Teddy? More like, will you be alright without him? We'll be fine if Auntie Mione goes upstairs to talk to Uncle Harry for a bit, won't we, Teddy-boy?"
Teddy nods, too busy rebuilding the castle to bother replying. She ruffles his hair as she passes him, sharing a sad smile with Fred over the top of his head. It hurts, sometimes, to see him play like this and know that Remus and Tonks never got the chance to do so, but it's hard to stay melancholy for long around him or else they'd shake themselves out of it only to find that he's gone off and found something dangerous to do in that special, innocent way that toddlers seem to excel at.
"Harry? Can I come in?"
The lock unclicks, and Harry's voice replies warily, "If you want to."
Upon entry, mayhem meets her eyes. Clothes and pieces of balled-up parchment are strewn across the bed and floor, various drawers are hanging open as if the place was ransacked, and Harry is sitting in his desk chair looking shaken and close to tears. As she takes in the room, he lays his wand back down on the desk next to him, instead picking up a stress ball they'd been given at a promotional event they'd had to attend and tossing it around ceaselessly. She knows it's a show for her to convince her he's struggling to find something to wear but is fine – he often tries and fails at juggling for Teddy's amusement, so he's been practicing lately so he can get it and teach his godson how to do it one day – but it looks too mechanical, too unfeeling, for it to work the way he wants it to. Instead, it draws even more attention to the sense of hollowness he's unknowingly projecting.
"Harry, are you alright?"
"Yeah; I've got this."
"I like the redecorating, then," she jokes. "What influences did you draw on? Abstract art?"
He puffs out air in dull, half-hearted amusement. "If anyone could view this as anything other than a mess, I'd be surprised."
He falls silent again, and, this time, she waits him out. They've both grown comfortable with silence over the past few years; at this point, it's the sort of thing you're either at ease with or haunted by. And, after all, it's significantly better than loud crowds and bright lights, and the terrors they bring. As she watches him, she realises that, maybe, silences aren't as soothing for him as he's made them out to be; he treats it as a friend, but maybe its allure is more of the self-flagellating nature.
"This feels like a betrayal," he eventually says.
"Your date with Bree? Harry, it's been a really long time. Ginny wouldn't expect or even want – "
"We were supposed to wait for one another," he cuts in. "Until the war was over. We were going to pick things back up again after the war. We were going to wait."
"She wouldn't want you to wait forever," she points out. Seeing that it hasn't gotten through to him, she adds, "Fred is here. If he were bothered by this, if he thought you were betraying Ginny by this, I assure you he'd have let both of us know it in no uncertain terms."
"He would, wouldn't he?" Harry murmurs, mostly to himself now. "He would do something so I'd start babbling or feeling sick during the date or something."
"Come on," Hermione says. "Let's get you ready."