Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter
Can be considered a continuation to the one-shot Harry, which can be found in my profile. Can also be considered a stand-alone.
Stranger
—
He has black hair and green eyes and a scar on his forehead that she refuses to let them get rid of, even though everyone else agrees that he wouldn't want to spend the rest of eternity with it on display.
She did not have a say in the life of Harry Potter, but she is all over his death. And nobody, not even her own mum, has the nerve to go against her now.
—
The sun is bright and alive, and she hates it with everything she has left.
Which isn't much.
On the way over, she keeps her eyes glued to the tightly fisted hands that sit in her lap. She looks up from her white knuckles only once, and upon seeing those small children playing outside in the streets that he made safe for them, she is almost swallowed up by the jealousy she feels toward the little ones who have never loved and lost.
And if she had any energy left, she would grab the steering wheel of this stupid Muggle car and do them the biggest favour or all – she would run them down before they got the chance to know this sort of pain.
—
She feels like a widow, and maybe, given a little more time, she could have been.
—
She is dressed in the blackest robes she could find anywhere, to remind them all that although thousands upon thousands of people are at this funeral to mourn, she is mourning the hardest.
She loved him her whole life, and it isn't fair to think that her love and pain and hate should be blurred in with the rest of them. It is not insignificant. But those idiots holding signs and crying even though their lives were never really touched by him … they are insignificant.
Why are they here?
She wishes the Minister would have respected her family's wishes and made this a private event.
It's selfish and it makes her a bad person, but she doesn't care. It's not as though there is anyone left for her to impress, anyway.
—
Bill, Charlie, Lupin, George, Moody, her dad, McGonagall, Hagrid, Dean … they're all gone. And she missed their funerals, but she is at this one because she knows she will hate herself later if she skips it.
Kingsley got out of St Mungo's yesterday, and Tonks should probably still be there herself, but she refuses to miss this as well.
Tonks' hair is black today, and it matches the younger girl's insides.
—
She wants to get up and leave, but she is in the front row and doesn't need her picture on the front page of tomorrow's Daily Prophet with an article about how she walked out.
She wonders why she ever thought coming to his funeral would be a good idea.
She should have stayed in bed, where she has been for the past five days. Five days isn't enough time to prepare for this.
How can she look at him, lying stiff and cold in his casket, and say goodbye?
She wishes it was her in that stupid box.
—
They get up, one by one, and speak about all the things they'll always remember about this wonderful, heroic man.
Mrs Weasley sobs incoherently for several long moments before taking a deep breath and sitting back down.
Fred says that he was a giving person, that he was the reason Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes got off the ground.
Ron's voice cracks as he says things like he was my brother and I'll never forget him.
Hermione looks up at the sky when she speaks, as if he is there looking down at her, and for someone so brilliant, she seems terribly foolish and pathetic.
People he wasn't even all that close with have more to say about him than she does, and it is because they know more about the person he was than she ever did.
People she hadn't even realized he knew, stories about things she never realized he was involved in.
She feels as though she is hearing about Harry for the first time, as though he is a stranger that she has passed several times on the street and has acknowledged, but with whom she has never spoken.
Is it possible to love a person without ever really knowing them?
At the end of the ceremony, when they ask if she would like to get up and say anything, she shakes her head and remains in her seat.
—
She replays everyone's stories over in her mind and wonders why she doesn't remember any of them, wonders why she was never allowed to accompany him on these adventures or, at the very least, why he never told her about them afterward.
She hates him then, more than she has ever hated anyone before, because he'd said he wanted her in his life but never made any effort to let her know anything about his bloody life.
She wonders about all the things he told her, and about all the things he never told her.
Did he mean to always keep her at arm's length?
—
He always kept everything inside, and she knew it.
But as she sits alone at the reception and sips her drink, she wonders why she never pressed him for information.
She never thought to ask him what his favourite colour was, or what he thought about when he sat alone on the grass and stared off into distance.
And now, she'll never know.
—
She has almost always been kept in the dark, whether it be about what was on the third floor corridor, or what the prophecy said, or what a Horcrux really was and why they needed to leave everything behind to go destroy the rest of them.
She has spent most of her life trying to find the answers to the millions of questions that are always running through her mind.
So why does she deliberately keep herself in the dark when it comes to so many things?
—
In the end, he was just Harry to her, but he started out as Harry Potter, Boy Who Lived, and that image is more difficult to erase than she expected. She realizes that although she has almost always been able to distinguish between Harry and Harry Potter, she has never been able to completely separate the two in her mind.
—
She thought she loved him, and maybe she did. Maybe she still does.
But it is easier to let herself think she was in love with the hero that the Daily Prophet wrote about, and not the boy who spent his summers at her house, hanging out with her dorky brother.
It is easier to believe that she has always been just another fan, and the only difference is that her admiration was not done from afar.
And how convenient is it for a boy to date his best mate's sister? It's the perfect little fairytale, and maybe that was what went through his head when he decided to kiss her and date her and "fall in love" with her.
She spent so much time fawning after him. And maybe she really had been over him when it happened. But it was easier to kiss him back and say yes when he asked her out and "fall in love" with him, as well.
When they found each other … was he merely resigning himself to a life of convenience?
Was she?
—
She remembers the way the corner of his mouth used to turn upward when someone said something funny, and how one couldn't find him without finding Ron and Hermione, too.
She remembers how he never complained about anything, how he was always warm and kind and friendly.
But that isn't true. He complained about plenty of things. And he was often found brooding in the corner, acting like an arsehole to everyone.
Why doesn't she seem to remember the bad things?
It is as if he was ruled by two separate people.
And truthfully, she only ever liked one of them.
—
Maybe none of this has ever been real.
Maybe he was just a dream.
(Or a nightmare.)
—
She wonders what he would think if he could see her now, alone and miserable and all but denying that anything they ever felt for one another was real.
But then she remembers that he is dead and she isn't, and it doesn't really matter what he would think, because it is all hypothetical anyway.
—
He left her, and she won't ever forgive him for that.
And to help herself get over this, she will tell herself whatever she has to.
She needs to forget that she ever knew his name, let alone held his hand and let him call her his.
—
He has black hair, but it doesn't stick up in the back.
His green eyes are too light, and they aren't on display behind a pair of broken glasses.
And his forehead is smooth and totally unmarked by scars lightening bolt-shaped or otherwise, and although she thinks it's just the most horrible thing in the world, she also thinks that maybe she likes it better this way.
She can learn to like it better this way.
He smiles at her immediately upon laying his (not green enough) eyes on her. And he comes over to her and asks her name, running his hand (that doesn't say 'I will not tell lies' on it) through his (neat and combed) hair.
Ginny, she says, and when he asks her if she was close with the hero in the casket, she tells him the truth. Actually, she says, I hardly knew him.
—