I made a mistake while uploading, and had forgotten to post this chapter. It's new as of 24 Jan 2022.

"Fascinating," Hermione was saying.

It wasn't unusual for her to talk quietly to herself, so Harry was happy to ignore her as he made them some sandwiches, except—

"Yes, Missy Grangy." Except, there was a voice talking back.

Harry dropped the butter knife and hurried towards the living room.

He found Hermione sitting cross-legged on the floor, Dobby mirroring her but with bigger, droopier ears.

"Dobby," Harry greeted him. "You came back."

The elf squeaked. "Master Harry must not return to Hogwarts."

Not this again.

"Why's that?" Hermione said, unknowing of how house elves were steadfast in their delusions.

"There is a great danger…"

Harry stopped listening, he'd heard it all before. He went back to the kitchen and made up an extra plate for their guest.

After an extensive discussion over lunch, Dobby agreed that Harry returning to Hogwarts was the sensible thing, and Hermione agreed that they needed to start an elvish liberation front.

"You mustn't call it 'Spew', Missy Grangy."

They were still working out the details. Leaving them to it, Harry collected the dishes and went to do the washing up.

xoxox

Their final Sunday morning spent together had been decidedly rainy, as if to echo Harry's disappointment at having to return to the Dursleys for another three weeks. It was still overcast, but at least the showers had stopped in time for a last walk to the park. Harry wiped the water off the swing's seat before settling onto it, immediately kicking into a slow spin.

Hermione claimed the swing beside him, moving with care. She chose her every action deliberately, or at least that was what it looked like to Harry. Her hands wrapped neatly around the chains and she executed a perfect fore-and-back. Still, Harry's melancholy had seemed to catch her too, draping itself over their shoulders like a shroud.

Harry continued to spin, first one way, then the other. He always appreciated how her company was inundated with comfortable silence, and speckled with conversation.

"I don't know how you do it," she said. She still spoke like every other word was a battle between her and her own tongue. Harry didn't mind, he had time, but he hated seeing her so frustrated. "They say mean things about you, and not even behind your back. But you keep being yourself without letting it get to you."

The squeak of metal against metal punctuated the silence between them as Harry looked for the right words.

"I never said it doesn't bother me, the way I'm some kind of spectacle to them. The boy-who-lived." He crinkled his nose at the name. "They think they're owed my time, or even that they own me just because I'm accidentally a public figure. Of course it gets to me."

"I know you, Harry," Hermione said.

She did. She'd spent almost a year watching him, just as he'd watched her. The past weeks had only brought them closer, so that he hardly needed to say things for her to understand what he was feeling. Sometimes he thought of her like a weather vane, the barometer to help him interpret his own state-of-being.

With a mind as brilliant and bright as hers, he was lucky she hadn't yet accused him of being a rat.

Harry lifted his feet, letting the swing spin him round and round before jerking him the other way and then back into place. The world danced before him, his brain not yet caught up to the fact his body had stopped moving. Bodies and brains were strange in the way they talked to each other, all too fast—too slow.

"It doesn't bother me as much as it bothers you because I know I'm never going to be who they want. My starting point is disappointing everyone."

"That's awful." Hermione said.

It was, in a way. But to Harry, it was comforting. "They're never going to understand me. I hate how everyone I meet already thinks they know everything about me, and it's—all of it—it's lies. You're right about it being awful, but I can't change them. I can only change me, or my perspective." He thought of death, of life, of chessboards repeating black-and-white-and-black.

He'd let Ronald make that stupid self-sacrificing move back in May, and he still wasn't sure he could forgive himself for it.

They sat in quiet thought for a while after that. The lumbering clouds shifted, letting a handful of sunbeams pass.

Harry twisted himself gently from side to side, watching the dappled light. Hermione was still sitting very properly on her swing, hands gripping firmly. He imagined Aunt Petunia would get along well with Hermione, what with his friend's strong penchant for rule-following. All the things Harry found dull, boring—like a never ending chain of followed instructions—came naturally to her.

"I'm sorry people stare at you," Harry finally said. "It's not fair."

She spoke into the sun dappled across her face. "Life's not fair." Hermione shrugged.

Harry wished he had something better to say in return. He felt so helpless, useless. What kind of a friend was he anyway, when all he had to offer was his company and his own confusion in return? "That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I just don't know how." The swings continued their exhausted groaning. "Sometimes," Harry continued quietly, "I wish I could be the hero they all want me to be. Somebody stronger, and braver. More Gryffindor. I wish I were the kind of person who always did the right thing, without question. I wish I were less of a mess."

In Harry's pocket the ring felt like it had its own gravity, sucking his words in. The cloak rustled, whispering sweet nothings in affection.

"I'm still scared of bathrooms," Hermione whispered back.

"Huh?"

"After the accident, with the troll. I would get these fits every time I tried to go to the bathroom, as if my heart would beat its way out my chest. I could never get enough air to breathe." Her face was flushed.

"How did you...you know, go?"

"Madam Pomfrey taught me a specialised spell," Hermione said, almost too quiet to hear. "It's meant for invalids."

Harry scraped at the inside of his skull, mining for the right words, ones that could comfort her. "There's nothing wrong with having weaknesses," Harry said. "I used to wet myself a lot; at least you had a spell." And now he was vulnerable to his own mind, weak to Finite Incantatem, and dependent on Cheering Charms so that he could feel anything at all.

She gave a wobbly laugh. "I'm almost thirteen, Harry. That's different."

"Maybe." Harry shrugged again. They could have whole conversations just by shrugging, probably. All that was missing were the stars and it'd be just like back then, in the first days of their friendship. "My teachers always said it's okay to be different. The children on the playground didn't see it that way, but they were idiots, the lot of them."

Harry planted his feet so he could watch her properly, studying her face. "They point and stare at you because you have a massive scar, and they whisper about me because they think I'm stupid."

"I don't think you're stupid," she interrupted, feet kicking into the mud as she stopped her swing, too.

Harry smiled, fondness and sadness welling equally inside him. "That's not the point. We're always going to be different than them. Separate...alone." He thought of the familiar door of Number 4, the alien sensation of the world hurtling through space-time while he felt stuck in his apart -ness.

It felt like his whole life, all he'd ever wanted was to belong.

Hermione reached out, squeezing his hand. "Not alone," she said quietly.

xoxox

Harry had to take part in his own school shopping when the time came. Aunt Petunia dragged him along by his tightly-held hand, Madam Malkin cooed at him to hold still as she pinned the hems of his robes. The lady in the apothecary insisted they take a ready-packed ingredients kit instead of letting him pick out his own. In Flourish and Blotts, Aunt Petunia gave Harry a time limit and a budget, then promised him ice cream for the way home.

It had been a while since Harry had felt so infantilised. In a way it made things easier, a series of simple decisions for his overstimulated, worn-out mind to face.

"I'm twelve," he wanted to say, "or I might even be thirty-something. I can do my own shopping."

But he knew that, should Aunt Petunia have let him, he likely would not have been able to do his own shopping, beginning with his irrational fear of taking the bus and ending with the comfort he drew from her hand held tight in his own, like a tether that prevented him from floating away. "I'm over thirty and I can't even do my own shopping," he did not want to admit, not even to himself.

Aunt Petunia seemed content to treat him like everything was perfectly normal, like he was a part of the family just as he'd been a year ago.

But he saw her looking at him, from the corner of her eye, with something puckered in her expression. He felt the sweat on her palm where it met his own. He heard the pitch in her voice that she only had when talking to those neighbours that made her feel uncomfortable.

Harry knew he'd outgrown his place in her home, like he'd outgrown the cupboard under the stairs when he was eight.

She was a woman of metaphor, and he was ripe for some good old-fashioned nest-leaving.

September first couldn't come soon enough.

xoxox