"Your lips are stained with fiction."
-Keep You, by Duumuu (feat. Sundial)
Harry lies. A lot. It's habitual, automatic, reflexive. He knows the truth hurts, that it's undesirable. People don't want the truth, they want what fits their view of the world, whatever makes them most comfortable. So he lies.
They don't actually care, Harry learns the Summer after First Year. Ron tells Mrs. Weasley that there were bars on his bedroom window. The proof is still attached to the back of the Ford Anglia. And she does nothing, except scold them and send them off to bed.
It's a relief. For a frightening, exhilarating moment, Harry wonders if she might actually do something. Call up Dumbledore, and demand that Harry be allowed to live with the Weasleys from now on, or at least be moved somewhere more suitable. Instead, she just occasionally tells him that he needs to eat more.
They don't care for the truth, won't ask for it, so Harry won't speak it.
This isn't friendship, Harry realizes one jarring evening. It's Fifth Year, one of the few days he doesn't have detention with Umbridge. He, Hermione, and Ron are sitting around a table in the Gryffindor Common Room. His fingers are subconsciously brushing over the words carved into his right hand (I shall not tell lies? What a joke).
Friends know almost everything about each other. At least, that's what he's read in the books. And he's not like how Hermione used to be, believing everything that's written on a page (including things that are absolutely ridiculous, like those dumb Harry Potter storybooks). But it's a recurring enough theme that it makes Harry question his own relationships.
They… Know nearly nothing about each other. Oh, sure, they've picked up some things here and there, like the fact that Hermione likes lighter shades of blue, or Ron is a diehard Chudley Cannons fan (although anyone who's ever met the redhead would know that within five minutes of talking to him). And they knew each other's biggest fears, as a result of Lupin's lesson with the Boggart (actually, neither Ron nor Hermione had ever seen his Boggart turn into a Dementor, had they? And he couldn't remember if he'd ever told them). But what about the deeper stuff? Hopes, aspirations? Fears aside from the one that influenced a Boggart?
Ron and Hermione certainly didn't know much about him, and his past. Or, they weren't very interested in knowing. They'd pieced together that it was concerning, and appeared to decide they didn't much care for the whole picture, so Harry spared them the sob story.
They'd risked their lives for each other, so didn't that mean they were friends? Then again, Hermione frequently lamented his saving-people-thing, so that wasn't really a good measure of friendship, since Harry would apparently do that for anyone he saw in peril.
The truth is, Ron and Hermione aren't really Harry's friends, are they?
He ponders that for a moment. Acknowledges the veracity. And lies to himself.
They are my friends. I'm just being crazy.
This isn't love, he knows, staring at his wife one sunny day. There's a toddler in her arms and a baby in her belly. Little James Sirius Potter, his first son, was making babbling noises, as children do, and looking around at the hustle and bustle of Diagon Alley.
Ginny's six months pregnant, and positively glowing. She's gorgeous, her hair's like fire in the afternoon sun. Motherhood has both aged her and given her a youthful air, somehow. Harry isn't quite sure about the specifics of it, all he knows is that she's even more beautiful than the day he married her.
But she doesn't love him. How can she, when she knows nothing about him? When she doesn't really know about the struggles that shaped him, that broke him, that turned him into the shattered facsimile of a man he is today? She's gotten some secondhand accounts of his misadventures from Ron and Hermione, but she rarely asks him about his past. And when she does, he's reluctant to tell her, scared of getting lost in reminiscences, hesitant to dig up old hurts. It's not that important, he tells her, and she lets him lie to her face, uninterested in his angst-filled anecdotes.
Her head's been filled with those fake tales since she was a child, when Molly would read them to her as bedtime stories. All those fables of him riding dragons and defeating Dark Lords with the power of friendship. She already has her truth- she doesn't want his.
"What?" Ginny asks, taking notice of his staring. She angles herself towards him, dips her chin behind her shoulder a bit, acting coy. A playful smile dances across her lips.
"I love you," Harry lies, because there's nothing else he can do.
Bitter as dark chocolate. Was in the mood to write some sad boi shit.
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