Title: Strangers All Along
Author: Piper Mackenzie (e-mail: eurydice2584@yahoo.com)
Summary: After falling out at the end of their seventh year at Hogwarts, Harry and Ron rebuild their relationship when they are reunited by a tragedy in Harry's life.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I am but a poor, lowly college student to whom nothing of the wonderful world of Harry Potter belongs. I am making no money off of my work. It is all of J.K. Rowling's creation.
Category: Drama, Angst
Warnings: Character death (it happened in the past relative to the story, though). Mild slash and pre-slash (HP/RW as well as a bit of HP/DM in the past tense).
Notes: This story was inspired by the song "Wall of Silence" by October Project. Also, don't run away or anything but this is my first effort in this particular area of the fan fiction world. Any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Enjoy!
~*~*~*~
"I thought of us,
Hard to talk these days.
Did we change or were we strangers all along?
Tell me what caused us to turn away."
~*~*~*~
Public drunkenness wasn't Harry's thing. Hell, drunkenness of any kind wasn't Harry's thing. The guy couldn't handle his alcohol to save his life. There had been a few incidents early in our experimentation with such illicit substances (for fifteen year olds anyway) that had ended in some very ugly ways. He had yet to live down any of the times he had randomly punched someone, puked on his own shoes and burst into tears (in that order) and so, unlike the rest of us, had learned early on that the uses of alcohol simply weren't for him. Either that or if he had an appropriate reason to get good and sloshed, like we all did from time to time, he was going to do it in private.
Today was one of those occasions, except I didn't know that because I hadn't seen Harry in a good seven or eight years and had, up until one Hermione Granger had unceremoniously dumped him in my lap, never planned on seeing him again. So all of the quirks I had gotten to know him for over the years got stuffed into some far away corner of my mind, where they gathered dust, undisturbed. It was only now, in our sixth week alone together in Hermione's house while she was off on some three-month long business trip, that I was seeing some of those old quirks resurface at the same time I was getting to know some new ones. The new ones annoyed me because they were nothing more than a result of what had split us apart in the first place. The others I felt a certain sentimentality for. The way he moved his lips when he was reading something he couldn't quite grasp. The way he peered over the rim of his glasses at you when he thought you were being stupid. The way he put his hands in his pockets when he was telling a bit of a fib (the more spectacular lies, I remembered, were often accompanied by a nervous tapping of his foot or compulsive nodding of his head).
The way he didn't get drunk in front of other people.
So when he went missing suddenly that bright, late fall morning, the possibility that he had gone off somewhere by himself with an entire bottle of some pretty hard liquor didn't occur to me right away. I wandered everywhere looking for him, too and grew more worried with each hour that passed. I went into town and asked around to see if any of the people I had gotten to know while staying with Harry at Hermione's had seen him. No. I wandered through the park that I had found him at on more than one occasion to see if he might have gone there. Nothing. I even, out of desperation, searched the small shoebox of a house top to bottom, checking everywhere from cupboards (I had found him in one once after a particularly devastating loss in the war against Voledmort) to under beds (he had mentioned in passing that he often hid under them as a child when he knew his uncle was unhappy with him) to behind large pieces of furniture. Still nothing.
Finally, I had taken to wandering in the woods behind Hermione's house, calling his name. I had gotten pretty far and was just about to turn back when a voice from practically right beside me slurred whiningly,
"Would you quit it already? You're giving me a headache."
I looked to the location of the voice and saw Harry sitting against a tree, staring up at me petulantly with glazed-over eyes, swaying back and forth ever so slightly. As he stared, he took a long swig from the bottle in his hands, which wasn't even half empty.
"Jesus, you scared me!" I said. "What the hell are you doing out here?"
He shrugged. "Needed to be alone," he said, making the effort to make his speech a little more clear so that I wouldn't mistake how he felt about my interrupting what appeared to be a rather elaborate self-pity fest.
"In the middle of the woods?" I said. "With a bottle of alcohol?"
"Yup," he said. "Just me and my bottle."
But I got the sense that it was more than that. It was like there were ghosts around here and I knew exactly whose ghost it was.
I had to ask anyway.
"Why?"
He peered up at me again. "Why?" he repeated.
"Yeah," I said. "Why are you out here?"
"Why do you care?" he snapped back.
Oh great. We were already in the misplaced anger phase and the bottle was only about a quarter gone.
Still, it was a hard question to answer.
"Old habits die hard," I said finally.
"I'll drink to that," he said, taking another long swig and wincing as it went down. "Have a seat, Ron," he added, patting a patch of mud right beside him.
Surprised that he had even extended the invitation, I opted to sit on the other side where it was a bit drier, which annoyed him somewhat.
"Take a sip," he said anyway, offering me the bottle.
I took it from him, at first intending just to hold it and not give it back until I had heard some good explanations. Yeah, that wouldn't last long.
"So why are you out here?" I asked.
He stayed silent, furrowing his eyebrows as though he were wondering this himself. As he thought, he tugged a little bit at the wedding ring he wore, at first pulling it halfway off and then pushing it the rest of the way down hurriedly, as though he wanted nothing more than to rip it off and fling it away but chickened out at the last second every time.
Finally, he spoke.
"I can't go back there," he said. Once again, his voice was relatively clear but it was heavy and subdued at the same time. He glanced over at me to gage my reaction to what he must have known in the back of his mind was not a logical answer to my question before looking away again, toward a tree that sat right in front of us some feet away.
"Can't go back where?" I asked. "Hermione's?"
He hesitated. "That too," he said.
"Where else?" I asked when no further elaboration seemed to be forthcoming.
"France," he said finally, his voice shaking.
"What's in France?" I asked.
"Our home."
This was when I decided it would be a good time to take a chug from the bottle he had handed me. When I was finished, he reached out his hand and I gave it to him. He took his own sip before setting it down thoughtfully.
"You lived in France?" I said finally, having not been made privy to such details. Hermione hadn't exactly had the time to fill me in on the history of Harry's life between past and present other than the more important parts that were necessary to know if I was going to be spending some time with him while she was gone. Then again, maybe she didn't know any more than I did because it was obvious that Harry wasn't talking about it.
Until now.
"Yeah," he said. "Near Nantes."
"Oh," I said, having no idea where in France Nantes would be.
"We bought a house there," he said, hiccupping a little, "about six months after graduation. It was the first thing we owned together." His eyes filled with tears more suddenly than I was prepared for. "And I can't go back there."
No need to ask why, really. The other half of the "we" to which Harry referred was Draco Malfoy, who had passed away a few months before of.well, it must have been something pretty traumatic because of the way Harry fell to pieces afterwards. Luckily, it hadn't taken him long to see the extent of the damage he was doing to himself and he had contacted Hermione after seven years of silence which she hadn't deserved intending only to hear a familiar voice. In the end, Hermione, being her usual overly generous self, had invited him to come live with her for a while and had, more or less, taken care of him since. I had been called in after a long-awaited job promotion had led to a three month long business trip. Probably not the best idea but Harry, she insisted, still wasn't up to being by himself. So there it was and here we were.
"There's so many memories," he went on and I reached for the bottle again, taking a healthy swallow. There was a long pause and I thought hopefully that this would be the end of it. That we could walk back to the house together, being our usual surly, silent selves and I would never have to hear another detail of Harry's life with Malfoy. Instead, he went on, "We were married in that house."
I nearly spewed the mouthful of alcohol I had on a nearby squirrel.
"Oh?" I said, recovering as quickly as possible.
He nodded, beginning to play with his wedding ring again. "In the bathroom on our first night there," he said. "Eight years ago today."
Oh. Well that explained a hell of a lot.
"Why the bathroom?" I asked because I knew he wanted me to.
"Because it was the only room done at the time," he said, smiling a little at the idea of it. "It wasn't an official ceremony, obviously. We were never officially married. Did you know that?"
"No," I said, honestly shocked.
"Well, we weren't," he said, a little bitterly. "His parents wouldn't allow it."
Even without him elaborating on that, I knew that it was most likely the understatement of the century. It was probably more along the lines of Malfoy's parents had threatened bodily harm and worse to both he and Harry if they so much as thought about putting rings on each other's fingers. Which was probably, when I thought about it, the reason they had disappeared to France for all those years in the first place. Lucius Malfoy, though not the devoted Death Eater everyone thought he was, was still a right bastard when you got down to it. And he hated Harry, as did his wife. The reasons behind it were vague but, the few times I had talked to the man, I got the feeling it might have had something to do with the amount of sacrifice they felt they had gone through in order to keep Harry alive with very little gratitude on Harry's part. Marrying Malfoy would have been more like the final insult than a worthy repayment in their eyes.
"I wasn't allowed to go to the funeral either," he added softly, almost talking to himself. "And I was the one who was with him the entire time he was ill. Me! He died right in our bedroom on the second floor of that house and I was right beside him the entire time. They wanted nothing to do with him until his body was good and cold. Practically stole him right out from under me. Buried him in the family cemetery."
He paused to take a long, angry swallow from the bottle, seeming to enjoy the pain as it went down and exploded in his belly.
"He wanted to be buried on our land, Ron," he said. "Our land. But they wouldn't listen to me! They wouldn't listen!"
I put my arm around him because I didn't know what else to do. I had never seen Harry like this before, not even on other occasions where he was in his cups. Not that it wasn't an understandable state to be in under the circumstances but the absolute anger and even hatred underlying his words, hidden though they were in his drunken desperation, were just not things I associated with Harry Potter. They were more things I associated with Draco Malfoy.
"They wouldn't listen," he said again, calming somewhat. "And I was the one who was with him. Right up until he died."
I hesitated on my next question, but my curiosity got the better of me.
"If you don't mind me asking, what did he die from?" I asked.
"A lot of things," he said, back to slurring. "Happy as we were being together, he was miserable being separated from the wizarding world and wanted so much to be a part of rebuilding it. But we couldn't go back. For so many reasons, we couldn't go back. That was my fault."
"How do you figure?" I asked before thinking of the guilt trip I was about to send him on.
"I was the reason his parents hated him," he said. "And they were the number one reason he couldn't go back. They even told him one time that if he left me behind and never saw me again, they'd welcome him back into the family with open arms. He never did."
Because he loved you, I wanted to say but it would have hurt too much.
"He also stayed because I was a coward," he said. "I was afraid that if I stayed around too long, people would begin to realize that all that death and destruction in the war was ultimately because of me."
It wouldn't have happened. Despite the fact that he had more or less disappeared off the face of the earth shortly after the war had ended, Harry was still hailed as the young hero of the wizarding world who had single-handedly defeated Voldemort. With a whole army of wizards who just happened to be behind him at the time, of which I had been a part for the last days of what I thought of as my own youth. Barely twenty-five and what I had gone through-what everyone had gone through-in that war still made me feel so old.
"I had no reason to go back," he concluded and when he said it, it stung. But I didn't make any attempt at arguing because I was the last person who should have started naming reasons for why Harry should have come back when I had been a major factor in what had chased him away in the first place.
"Ultimately, though," he went on with a sigh and a swig, "it was a terminal illness that got him. I forget the name of it. Long and complicated. Starts with an 's' I think." He hiccupped. "He wasn't actually sick for a long time. Gave up pretty easily in the end."
His expression was puzzled as he said this, slowly melting into guilt, his shoulders sagging with the weight of it.
"Felt like forever," he continued, handing the bottle to me. I took a sip and wiped my mouth on my sleeve before handing it back to him. He gazed up at the sky, which was clear and blue for once, a few white clouds floating lazily by as we sat and talked. "Isn't that a horrible thing to say?"
"No," I said, but I didn't really know. I was just trying to make him feel better.
"He was in so much pain and I was so tired," he said his eyes filling with tears again. "I thought it would never come and yet there was nothing I was afraid of more. I didn't sleep because I was afraid if I did, he'd be dead when I woke up. And yet whenever he slept-and he slept all the time in the end-I secretly hoped that he wouldn't wake up because then it would be over. I wanted it to be over." He buried his face in his hands. "God, I'm a horrible person."
Impulsively, I hugged him closer to me and he finally let go of the tears he had been holding back, letting them erupt in sloppy, drunken sobs which I let play out because something told me that this was the first time he had taken the time to do this since Malfoy had died. It felt good to hold him close again and I couldn't bring myself to let go even as his wracking cries faded quickly into pitiful whimpers.
"I miss him," he said finally, burying his face in my shoulder. "There was so much we never did. He wanted kids, did you know that?"
"No," I said, surprised at the prospect. I guess I had just never imagined someone like Draco Malfoy wanting to be a father.
"Right before he got sick, he told me that," Harry said. "I said no."
"Why?" I asked curiously.
"Look at me, Ron," he said, looking up at me. "Look at the house I grew up in, the people I lived with. Look at how I go around screwing up all my important relationships. Look at how I lost you. How could someone like me possibly hope to bring up a child and not damage it psychologically in some way? I don't think it's possible."
"You would have made a great parent, Harry," I said.
He stared at me for a long time after I said that but I got the feeling he wasn't exactly absorbing the wisdom of my baseless statement. Instead, his drunken mind had taken him on a completely different route.
"How did I lose you?" he asked as though it weren't obvious to anyone who had been there to witness the drama of it at the time. Let alone the two of us.
Our seventh year in Hogwarts, just as the intensity of the war was coming to a peak, I had, quite inconveniently, realized that I was in love with my best friend. So one day, not long before graduation when I was sure I was going to walk off into the battlefields of that war and not come back, I got up the courage to confess my feelings. Okay, so it was more like I had blurted them out to him randomly at the most inconvenient time imaginable. Shocked, his knee-jerk reaction was to tell me, in the least gentle way possible aside from laughing at me outright, that he didn't feel the same way. When I had demanded to know why, he confessed everything to me about the passionate, albeit secret, relationship that he and Malfoy had been sharing for quite some time. The situation could have been fixed easily enough with an embarrassed smile or two but I, being the hormonally driven irrational teenager that I was, had decided instead to hand my friend an ultimatum. Me or Malfoy. There was no other way. I gave him until graduation to decide. Actually, he had only stayed after graduation long enough to tell me his decision-which really hadn't required as much thought as I had hoped-before throwing himself full-fledged into the war for the first time. The war had ended a few months later and he had disappeared off the face of the earth. I didn't see him for seven whole years.
"We were so good together," he said. "How could I have lost you?"
"We weren't that good together, Harry," I said.
It was true. Fourth year had marked the beginning of a pattern that had come to be set between us. In fifth year, we fought intermittently and had long periods where we didn't talk to each other. Those were all petty fights and I hated to think of them, even now. Sixth year had brought us closer together again because of the way the war was going but the time we had spent apart the year before had sent us in two fairly different directions. Even as we drew closer together, we were drifting apart which makes the fact that I fell in love with him even weirder. Of course, the stresses that were on him to keep his relationship with Malfoy a secret didn't help. He often disappeared without telling me where he was going and I was never invited to join him, which rankled. Then it was seventh year and I got caught up in all the special little joys that came with being one of the oldest kids in the school. It was a way of escaping for me which he didn't understand in the least. He insisted that this was a time for seriousness but serious was the last thing I wanted to be. I tried often to talk him into having fun with me in what was probably the last year it would even be possible. And he had played along gamely on a few occasions but often he became angry with me afterwards for talking him into what he saw as shirking his responsibilities. People were dying all around us, he reminded me at least once a day. Why can't you ever be serious about that?
But I was in a way that he would never understand.
"We were pretty good," he insisted now. I didn't try to refute it because it was nice that he thought so. "But I screwed it up."
"No," I said. "I think that one can be blamed entirely on me."
"It wasn't your fault that you felt the way you did," he said. "I should have been more sensitive."
I decided not to point out that sensitivity and teenaged boys were not generally things that were put together in the same sentence.
"I could have picked a better place to tell you than right in the middle of Potions with Snape standing right there," I said. And Malfoy at the front of the room, trying to act as indifferent as ever.
"Yeah," he said. "That was pretty embarrassing. But I shouldn't have kept our relationship a secret from you for so long. You above all people I should have trusted with that one."
There was a short pause.
"I didn't have to hand you that ultimatum," I said, looking down at my own hands now.
"And I didn't have to take you up on it instead of sitting down with you and Draco and talking it out," he said.
Another pause and I felt myself smile a little.
"You're good at this," I said.
"What?" he asked, bringing the bottle to his lips again.
"This whole finding ways of blaming yourself for things that aren't your fault thing," I said.
"I'm a very guilty person," he said. "But I'll concede this one and say that our falling out was both our faults. Does this satisfy you?"
"I guess," I said uncomfortably.
"Excellent," he said and leaned closer in to me. "Hey Ron?"
"Yes, Harry?" I asked.
"Are you still in love with me?"
And there it was. The question that had been hanging over our heads the entire time I had been staying with him. Alcohol was a good means for occasionally forgetting things that you didn't want to remember or making yourself feel better on the eighth anniversary of yours and your dead husband's unofficial marriage, but the courage it gave someone like Harry was unnerving.
I took the bottle from him, took a healthy swig, set it down and, getting up my own courage, gave an honest answer:
"Yeah," I said, having not realized it until right then.
A moment of silence passed before he said, "I thought maybe you were." Matter-of-fact. Just like that. Like it was no big deal to him. That stung a little bit. He moved closer to me and reached for my hand. "Maybe someday, okay? If I'm ever ready to feel that way again." He yawned hugely.
I didn't answer only because, sweet gesture though it was, I couldn't help but wonder if it was one he would forget all about when he was sick and hung over in the morning.
But I would hold that moment in my heart forever.
He buried his face in my shoulder suddenly. "What am I going to do?" he said, desperate once more. "I can't go back there."
And with that, we were back to square one.
"I can't stay here," he whispered.
I sighed, knowing it was time that I finally buried the seed I had been sent with. I hesitated, unsure of how he would react to what I was about to suggest. I didn't want to ruin the first open moment that we had had since I had been there.
"There is another option, you know," I said. "Besides going back to France or staying here, I mean."
He looked up and peered at me questioningly.
"There is?" he said. God, he was like a little kid when he was drunk.
"Yeah," I said.
"What?" He moved away from me a little and I thought maybe he had sensed what it was I was about to bring up. Instead he just sat in a more comfortable position and stared at me imploringly, begging me to give him another choice.
"You could come back to Hogwarts," I said. "With me."
After the war had officially ended, I had spent a year with a large team of wizards and witches tying up some loose ends before returning home to idleness and boredom. Albus Dumbledore had saved me from a life of perpetual uselessness a year later by offering me the once-again vacant position of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. It had taken some doing to convince me, but I had eventually taken the job and so had become a legend in my own right for staying on more than a year. I hadn't thought I would but I really did love my job and I loved the kids. Well, most of them anyway. Some were just a little too familiar for my tastes. Still, there was little that could have made my job better. Except maybe one thing.
"To teach," I added quickly, seeing the confused look in his eyes and hoping he hadn't taken me the wrong way. "Dumbledore wants you to teach."
He sat up straight now, sobered somewhat. He stared at me straight in the eyes, searching for a joke or some other way that I was trying to make fun of him. Seeing nothing, he said,
"He does?"
"Yeah," I said. "Despite what you may think, the wizarding world misses you, Harry. It needs you. You're an integral part of its history and there's so much you could teach those kids. So much good you could do."
He took a moment to mull this over. I could tell by the look on his face what he was thinking and so headed him off before he could say it.
"You wouldn't have to start right way," I said. "Dumbledore told me to tell you that he doesn't want to force you into anything. He just wants to give you something to think about until you're ready to move on."
He nodded his understanding and said,
"What position?" It wasn't an acceptance of the offer. Not yet.
"Well, there's a number of choices depending on how long you want to wait," I said. "And they're all open to you."
"Tell me," he said, unable to hide his curiosity.
So I listed for him the positions that were currently available or would become so in the near future, taking the time to explain to him why the professor of each course was leaving so he didn't get the wrong idea. As I talked, he nodded and asked questions, becoming more intrigued as I went along. Honestly, it thrilled me to see that.
"How does that sound?" I finished.
"Good," he said with a wistful sigh. "Really good. Except."
"Yeah?" I said, flinching already.
"Except I have one question," he said.
"Yeah?"
"Is Snape still there?"
I almost laughed from relief.
"Yeah, he is," I said. "And he's still as greasy a git as ever, in case you were wondering. Just the other day I said something in front of him that he didn't like and he tried to take fifty points from Gryffindor. You should have seen his face when I reminded him that I wasn't a student anymore."
Harry laughed outright at that and it was a beautiful sound. The laughter was loud and long as though he was clinging to it, basking in the feeling. I began to laugh with him, glad that I could make him feel good even in such a sad time. It had been far too long since it had been like this between us. When finally he calmed, he wiped the tears from his eyes and settled back against the tree.
"What are you thinking?" I asked.
"I was just thinking how good it will be to be back," he said a little sadly, as though he had never thought he would say those words. I knew it would be hard for him to let go and move on, but was confident that he would pull through when it came time to do so. And I would be there to help him if he needed me. We would be together again. My best friend and me.
Happily after all.
~*~*~*~
"I've seen that life touches us with pain
And we change,
Becoming strangers to ourselves.
Tell me what happens along the way.
How did I lose you along the way?" --October Project, "Wall of Silence"
~*~*~*~
So what did you think? Should there be a sequel or should it stay open- ended?
Author: Piper Mackenzie (e-mail: eurydice2584@yahoo.com)
Summary: After falling out at the end of their seventh year at Hogwarts, Harry and Ron rebuild their relationship when they are reunited by a tragedy in Harry's life.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I am but a poor, lowly college student to whom nothing of the wonderful world of Harry Potter belongs. I am making no money off of my work. It is all of J.K. Rowling's creation.
Category: Drama, Angst
Warnings: Character death (it happened in the past relative to the story, though). Mild slash and pre-slash (HP/RW as well as a bit of HP/DM in the past tense).
Notes: This story was inspired by the song "Wall of Silence" by October Project. Also, don't run away or anything but this is my first effort in this particular area of the fan fiction world. Any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Enjoy!
~*~*~*~
"I thought of us,
Hard to talk these days.
Did we change or were we strangers all along?
Tell me what caused us to turn away."
~*~*~*~
Public drunkenness wasn't Harry's thing. Hell, drunkenness of any kind wasn't Harry's thing. The guy couldn't handle his alcohol to save his life. There had been a few incidents early in our experimentation with such illicit substances (for fifteen year olds anyway) that had ended in some very ugly ways. He had yet to live down any of the times he had randomly punched someone, puked on his own shoes and burst into tears (in that order) and so, unlike the rest of us, had learned early on that the uses of alcohol simply weren't for him. Either that or if he had an appropriate reason to get good and sloshed, like we all did from time to time, he was going to do it in private.
Today was one of those occasions, except I didn't know that because I hadn't seen Harry in a good seven or eight years and had, up until one Hermione Granger had unceremoniously dumped him in my lap, never planned on seeing him again. So all of the quirks I had gotten to know him for over the years got stuffed into some far away corner of my mind, where they gathered dust, undisturbed. It was only now, in our sixth week alone together in Hermione's house while she was off on some three-month long business trip, that I was seeing some of those old quirks resurface at the same time I was getting to know some new ones. The new ones annoyed me because they were nothing more than a result of what had split us apart in the first place. The others I felt a certain sentimentality for. The way he moved his lips when he was reading something he couldn't quite grasp. The way he peered over the rim of his glasses at you when he thought you were being stupid. The way he put his hands in his pockets when he was telling a bit of a fib (the more spectacular lies, I remembered, were often accompanied by a nervous tapping of his foot or compulsive nodding of his head).
The way he didn't get drunk in front of other people.
So when he went missing suddenly that bright, late fall morning, the possibility that he had gone off somewhere by himself with an entire bottle of some pretty hard liquor didn't occur to me right away. I wandered everywhere looking for him, too and grew more worried with each hour that passed. I went into town and asked around to see if any of the people I had gotten to know while staying with Harry at Hermione's had seen him. No. I wandered through the park that I had found him at on more than one occasion to see if he might have gone there. Nothing. I even, out of desperation, searched the small shoebox of a house top to bottom, checking everywhere from cupboards (I had found him in one once after a particularly devastating loss in the war against Voledmort) to under beds (he had mentioned in passing that he often hid under them as a child when he knew his uncle was unhappy with him) to behind large pieces of furniture. Still nothing.
Finally, I had taken to wandering in the woods behind Hermione's house, calling his name. I had gotten pretty far and was just about to turn back when a voice from practically right beside me slurred whiningly,
"Would you quit it already? You're giving me a headache."
I looked to the location of the voice and saw Harry sitting against a tree, staring up at me petulantly with glazed-over eyes, swaying back and forth ever so slightly. As he stared, he took a long swig from the bottle in his hands, which wasn't even half empty.
"Jesus, you scared me!" I said. "What the hell are you doing out here?"
He shrugged. "Needed to be alone," he said, making the effort to make his speech a little more clear so that I wouldn't mistake how he felt about my interrupting what appeared to be a rather elaborate self-pity fest.
"In the middle of the woods?" I said. "With a bottle of alcohol?"
"Yup," he said. "Just me and my bottle."
But I got the sense that it was more than that. It was like there were ghosts around here and I knew exactly whose ghost it was.
I had to ask anyway.
"Why?"
He peered up at me again. "Why?" he repeated.
"Yeah," I said. "Why are you out here?"
"Why do you care?" he snapped back.
Oh great. We were already in the misplaced anger phase and the bottle was only about a quarter gone.
Still, it was a hard question to answer.
"Old habits die hard," I said finally.
"I'll drink to that," he said, taking another long swig and wincing as it went down. "Have a seat, Ron," he added, patting a patch of mud right beside him.
Surprised that he had even extended the invitation, I opted to sit on the other side where it was a bit drier, which annoyed him somewhat.
"Take a sip," he said anyway, offering me the bottle.
I took it from him, at first intending just to hold it and not give it back until I had heard some good explanations. Yeah, that wouldn't last long.
"So why are you out here?" I asked.
He stayed silent, furrowing his eyebrows as though he were wondering this himself. As he thought, he tugged a little bit at the wedding ring he wore, at first pulling it halfway off and then pushing it the rest of the way down hurriedly, as though he wanted nothing more than to rip it off and fling it away but chickened out at the last second every time.
Finally, he spoke.
"I can't go back there," he said. Once again, his voice was relatively clear but it was heavy and subdued at the same time. He glanced over at me to gage my reaction to what he must have known in the back of his mind was not a logical answer to my question before looking away again, toward a tree that sat right in front of us some feet away.
"Can't go back where?" I asked. "Hermione's?"
He hesitated. "That too," he said.
"Where else?" I asked when no further elaboration seemed to be forthcoming.
"France," he said finally, his voice shaking.
"What's in France?" I asked.
"Our home."
This was when I decided it would be a good time to take a chug from the bottle he had handed me. When I was finished, he reached out his hand and I gave it to him. He took his own sip before setting it down thoughtfully.
"You lived in France?" I said finally, having not been made privy to such details. Hermione hadn't exactly had the time to fill me in on the history of Harry's life between past and present other than the more important parts that were necessary to know if I was going to be spending some time with him while she was gone. Then again, maybe she didn't know any more than I did because it was obvious that Harry wasn't talking about it.
Until now.
"Yeah," he said. "Near Nantes."
"Oh," I said, having no idea where in France Nantes would be.
"We bought a house there," he said, hiccupping a little, "about six months after graduation. It was the first thing we owned together." His eyes filled with tears more suddenly than I was prepared for. "And I can't go back there."
No need to ask why, really. The other half of the "we" to which Harry referred was Draco Malfoy, who had passed away a few months before of.well, it must have been something pretty traumatic because of the way Harry fell to pieces afterwards. Luckily, it hadn't taken him long to see the extent of the damage he was doing to himself and he had contacted Hermione after seven years of silence which she hadn't deserved intending only to hear a familiar voice. In the end, Hermione, being her usual overly generous self, had invited him to come live with her for a while and had, more or less, taken care of him since. I had been called in after a long-awaited job promotion had led to a three month long business trip. Probably not the best idea but Harry, she insisted, still wasn't up to being by himself. So there it was and here we were.
"There's so many memories," he went on and I reached for the bottle again, taking a healthy swallow. There was a long pause and I thought hopefully that this would be the end of it. That we could walk back to the house together, being our usual surly, silent selves and I would never have to hear another detail of Harry's life with Malfoy. Instead, he went on, "We were married in that house."
I nearly spewed the mouthful of alcohol I had on a nearby squirrel.
"Oh?" I said, recovering as quickly as possible.
He nodded, beginning to play with his wedding ring again. "In the bathroom on our first night there," he said. "Eight years ago today."
Oh. Well that explained a hell of a lot.
"Why the bathroom?" I asked because I knew he wanted me to.
"Because it was the only room done at the time," he said, smiling a little at the idea of it. "It wasn't an official ceremony, obviously. We were never officially married. Did you know that?"
"No," I said, honestly shocked.
"Well, we weren't," he said, a little bitterly. "His parents wouldn't allow it."
Even without him elaborating on that, I knew that it was most likely the understatement of the century. It was probably more along the lines of Malfoy's parents had threatened bodily harm and worse to both he and Harry if they so much as thought about putting rings on each other's fingers. Which was probably, when I thought about it, the reason they had disappeared to France for all those years in the first place. Lucius Malfoy, though not the devoted Death Eater everyone thought he was, was still a right bastard when you got down to it. And he hated Harry, as did his wife. The reasons behind it were vague but, the few times I had talked to the man, I got the feeling it might have had something to do with the amount of sacrifice they felt they had gone through in order to keep Harry alive with very little gratitude on Harry's part. Marrying Malfoy would have been more like the final insult than a worthy repayment in their eyes.
"I wasn't allowed to go to the funeral either," he added softly, almost talking to himself. "And I was the one who was with him the entire time he was ill. Me! He died right in our bedroom on the second floor of that house and I was right beside him the entire time. They wanted nothing to do with him until his body was good and cold. Practically stole him right out from under me. Buried him in the family cemetery."
He paused to take a long, angry swallow from the bottle, seeming to enjoy the pain as it went down and exploded in his belly.
"He wanted to be buried on our land, Ron," he said. "Our land. But they wouldn't listen to me! They wouldn't listen!"
I put my arm around him because I didn't know what else to do. I had never seen Harry like this before, not even on other occasions where he was in his cups. Not that it wasn't an understandable state to be in under the circumstances but the absolute anger and even hatred underlying his words, hidden though they were in his drunken desperation, were just not things I associated with Harry Potter. They were more things I associated with Draco Malfoy.
"They wouldn't listen," he said again, calming somewhat. "And I was the one who was with him. Right up until he died."
I hesitated on my next question, but my curiosity got the better of me.
"If you don't mind me asking, what did he die from?" I asked.
"A lot of things," he said, back to slurring. "Happy as we were being together, he was miserable being separated from the wizarding world and wanted so much to be a part of rebuilding it. But we couldn't go back. For so many reasons, we couldn't go back. That was my fault."
"How do you figure?" I asked before thinking of the guilt trip I was about to send him on.
"I was the reason his parents hated him," he said. "And they were the number one reason he couldn't go back. They even told him one time that if he left me behind and never saw me again, they'd welcome him back into the family with open arms. He never did."
Because he loved you, I wanted to say but it would have hurt too much.
"He also stayed because I was a coward," he said. "I was afraid that if I stayed around too long, people would begin to realize that all that death and destruction in the war was ultimately because of me."
It wouldn't have happened. Despite the fact that he had more or less disappeared off the face of the earth shortly after the war had ended, Harry was still hailed as the young hero of the wizarding world who had single-handedly defeated Voldemort. With a whole army of wizards who just happened to be behind him at the time, of which I had been a part for the last days of what I thought of as my own youth. Barely twenty-five and what I had gone through-what everyone had gone through-in that war still made me feel so old.
"I had no reason to go back," he concluded and when he said it, it stung. But I didn't make any attempt at arguing because I was the last person who should have started naming reasons for why Harry should have come back when I had been a major factor in what had chased him away in the first place.
"Ultimately, though," he went on with a sigh and a swig, "it was a terminal illness that got him. I forget the name of it. Long and complicated. Starts with an 's' I think." He hiccupped. "He wasn't actually sick for a long time. Gave up pretty easily in the end."
His expression was puzzled as he said this, slowly melting into guilt, his shoulders sagging with the weight of it.
"Felt like forever," he continued, handing the bottle to me. I took a sip and wiped my mouth on my sleeve before handing it back to him. He gazed up at the sky, which was clear and blue for once, a few white clouds floating lazily by as we sat and talked. "Isn't that a horrible thing to say?"
"No," I said, but I didn't really know. I was just trying to make him feel better.
"He was in so much pain and I was so tired," he said his eyes filling with tears again. "I thought it would never come and yet there was nothing I was afraid of more. I didn't sleep because I was afraid if I did, he'd be dead when I woke up. And yet whenever he slept-and he slept all the time in the end-I secretly hoped that he wouldn't wake up because then it would be over. I wanted it to be over." He buried his face in his hands. "God, I'm a horrible person."
Impulsively, I hugged him closer to me and he finally let go of the tears he had been holding back, letting them erupt in sloppy, drunken sobs which I let play out because something told me that this was the first time he had taken the time to do this since Malfoy had died. It felt good to hold him close again and I couldn't bring myself to let go even as his wracking cries faded quickly into pitiful whimpers.
"I miss him," he said finally, burying his face in my shoulder. "There was so much we never did. He wanted kids, did you know that?"
"No," I said, surprised at the prospect. I guess I had just never imagined someone like Draco Malfoy wanting to be a father.
"Right before he got sick, he told me that," Harry said. "I said no."
"Why?" I asked curiously.
"Look at me, Ron," he said, looking up at me. "Look at the house I grew up in, the people I lived with. Look at how I go around screwing up all my important relationships. Look at how I lost you. How could someone like me possibly hope to bring up a child and not damage it psychologically in some way? I don't think it's possible."
"You would have made a great parent, Harry," I said.
He stared at me for a long time after I said that but I got the feeling he wasn't exactly absorbing the wisdom of my baseless statement. Instead, his drunken mind had taken him on a completely different route.
"How did I lose you?" he asked as though it weren't obvious to anyone who had been there to witness the drama of it at the time. Let alone the two of us.
Our seventh year in Hogwarts, just as the intensity of the war was coming to a peak, I had, quite inconveniently, realized that I was in love with my best friend. So one day, not long before graduation when I was sure I was going to walk off into the battlefields of that war and not come back, I got up the courage to confess my feelings. Okay, so it was more like I had blurted them out to him randomly at the most inconvenient time imaginable. Shocked, his knee-jerk reaction was to tell me, in the least gentle way possible aside from laughing at me outright, that he didn't feel the same way. When I had demanded to know why, he confessed everything to me about the passionate, albeit secret, relationship that he and Malfoy had been sharing for quite some time. The situation could have been fixed easily enough with an embarrassed smile or two but I, being the hormonally driven irrational teenager that I was, had decided instead to hand my friend an ultimatum. Me or Malfoy. There was no other way. I gave him until graduation to decide. Actually, he had only stayed after graduation long enough to tell me his decision-which really hadn't required as much thought as I had hoped-before throwing himself full-fledged into the war for the first time. The war had ended a few months later and he had disappeared off the face of the earth. I didn't see him for seven whole years.
"We were so good together," he said. "How could I have lost you?"
"We weren't that good together, Harry," I said.
It was true. Fourth year had marked the beginning of a pattern that had come to be set between us. In fifth year, we fought intermittently and had long periods where we didn't talk to each other. Those were all petty fights and I hated to think of them, even now. Sixth year had brought us closer together again because of the way the war was going but the time we had spent apart the year before had sent us in two fairly different directions. Even as we drew closer together, we were drifting apart which makes the fact that I fell in love with him even weirder. Of course, the stresses that were on him to keep his relationship with Malfoy a secret didn't help. He often disappeared without telling me where he was going and I was never invited to join him, which rankled. Then it was seventh year and I got caught up in all the special little joys that came with being one of the oldest kids in the school. It was a way of escaping for me which he didn't understand in the least. He insisted that this was a time for seriousness but serious was the last thing I wanted to be. I tried often to talk him into having fun with me in what was probably the last year it would even be possible. And he had played along gamely on a few occasions but often he became angry with me afterwards for talking him into what he saw as shirking his responsibilities. People were dying all around us, he reminded me at least once a day. Why can't you ever be serious about that?
But I was in a way that he would never understand.
"We were pretty good," he insisted now. I didn't try to refute it because it was nice that he thought so. "But I screwed it up."
"No," I said. "I think that one can be blamed entirely on me."
"It wasn't your fault that you felt the way you did," he said. "I should have been more sensitive."
I decided not to point out that sensitivity and teenaged boys were not generally things that were put together in the same sentence.
"I could have picked a better place to tell you than right in the middle of Potions with Snape standing right there," I said. And Malfoy at the front of the room, trying to act as indifferent as ever.
"Yeah," he said. "That was pretty embarrassing. But I shouldn't have kept our relationship a secret from you for so long. You above all people I should have trusted with that one."
There was a short pause.
"I didn't have to hand you that ultimatum," I said, looking down at my own hands now.
"And I didn't have to take you up on it instead of sitting down with you and Draco and talking it out," he said.
Another pause and I felt myself smile a little.
"You're good at this," I said.
"What?" he asked, bringing the bottle to his lips again.
"This whole finding ways of blaming yourself for things that aren't your fault thing," I said.
"I'm a very guilty person," he said. "But I'll concede this one and say that our falling out was both our faults. Does this satisfy you?"
"I guess," I said uncomfortably.
"Excellent," he said and leaned closer in to me. "Hey Ron?"
"Yes, Harry?" I asked.
"Are you still in love with me?"
And there it was. The question that had been hanging over our heads the entire time I had been staying with him. Alcohol was a good means for occasionally forgetting things that you didn't want to remember or making yourself feel better on the eighth anniversary of yours and your dead husband's unofficial marriage, but the courage it gave someone like Harry was unnerving.
I took the bottle from him, took a healthy swig, set it down and, getting up my own courage, gave an honest answer:
"Yeah," I said, having not realized it until right then.
A moment of silence passed before he said, "I thought maybe you were." Matter-of-fact. Just like that. Like it was no big deal to him. That stung a little bit. He moved closer to me and reached for my hand. "Maybe someday, okay? If I'm ever ready to feel that way again." He yawned hugely.
I didn't answer only because, sweet gesture though it was, I couldn't help but wonder if it was one he would forget all about when he was sick and hung over in the morning.
But I would hold that moment in my heart forever.
He buried his face in my shoulder suddenly. "What am I going to do?" he said, desperate once more. "I can't go back there."
And with that, we were back to square one.
"I can't stay here," he whispered.
I sighed, knowing it was time that I finally buried the seed I had been sent with. I hesitated, unsure of how he would react to what I was about to suggest. I didn't want to ruin the first open moment that we had had since I had been there.
"There is another option, you know," I said. "Besides going back to France or staying here, I mean."
He looked up and peered at me questioningly.
"There is?" he said. God, he was like a little kid when he was drunk.
"Yeah," I said.
"What?" He moved away from me a little and I thought maybe he had sensed what it was I was about to bring up. Instead he just sat in a more comfortable position and stared at me imploringly, begging me to give him another choice.
"You could come back to Hogwarts," I said. "With me."
After the war had officially ended, I had spent a year with a large team of wizards and witches tying up some loose ends before returning home to idleness and boredom. Albus Dumbledore had saved me from a life of perpetual uselessness a year later by offering me the once-again vacant position of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. It had taken some doing to convince me, but I had eventually taken the job and so had become a legend in my own right for staying on more than a year. I hadn't thought I would but I really did love my job and I loved the kids. Well, most of them anyway. Some were just a little too familiar for my tastes. Still, there was little that could have made my job better. Except maybe one thing.
"To teach," I added quickly, seeing the confused look in his eyes and hoping he hadn't taken me the wrong way. "Dumbledore wants you to teach."
He sat up straight now, sobered somewhat. He stared at me straight in the eyes, searching for a joke or some other way that I was trying to make fun of him. Seeing nothing, he said,
"He does?"
"Yeah," I said. "Despite what you may think, the wizarding world misses you, Harry. It needs you. You're an integral part of its history and there's so much you could teach those kids. So much good you could do."
He took a moment to mull this over. I could tell by the look on his face what he was thinking and so headed him off before he could say it.
"You wouldn't have to start right way," I said. "Dumbledore told me to tell you that he doesn't want to force you into anything. He just wants to give you something to think about until you're ready to move on."
He nodded his understanding and said,
"What position?" It wasn't an acceptance of the offer. Not yet.
"Well, there's a number of choices depending on how long you want to wait," I said. "And they're all open to you."
"Tell me," he said, unable to hide his curiosity.
So I listed for him the positions that were currently available or would become so in the near future, taking the time to explain to him why the professor of each course was leaving so he didn't get the wrong idea. As I talked, he nodded and asked questions, becoming more intrigued as I went along. Honestly, it thrilled me to see that.
"How does that sound?" I finished.
"Good," he said with a wistful sigh. "Really good. Except."
"Yeah?" I said, flinching already.
"Except I have one question," he said.
"Yeah?"
"Is Snape still there?"
I almost laughed from relief.
"Yeah, he is," I said. "And he's still as greasy a git as ever, in case you were wondering. Just the other day I said something in front of him that he didn't like and he tried to take fifty points from Gryffindor. You should have seen his face when I reminded him that I wasn't a student anymore."
Harry laughed outright at that and it was a beautiful sound. The laughter was loud and long as though he was clinging to it, basking in the feeling. I began to laugh with him, glad that I could make him feel good even in such a sad time. It had been far too long since it had been like this between us. When finally he calmed, he wiped the tears from his eyes and settled back against the tree.
"What are you thinking?" I asked.
"I was just thinking how good it will be to be back," he said a little sadly, as though he had never thought he would say those words. I knew it would be hard for him to let go and move on, but was confident that he would pull through when it came time to do so. And I would be there to help him if he needed me. We would be together again. My best friend and me.
Happily after all.
~*~*~*~
"I've seen that life touches us with pain
And we change,
Becoming strangers to ourselves.
Tell me what happens along the way.
How did I lose you along the way?" --October Project, "Wall of Silence"
~*~*~*~
So what did you think? Should there be a sequel or should it stay open- ended?