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Time didn't behave, at first. It was sluggish, sticking to Harry like treacle, slowing him down – only to speed up the next moment and leave his head ringing. The memories of the days that followed the battle were like ice floes on a dark ocean, occasionally colliding and cracking apart. Their order was lost: Harry didn't know, for instance, if the press conference he gave together with Kingsley and professor McGonagall in the rubble of the Great Hall had really taken place only a day after Voldemort had been defeated, but that was how he remembered it. He couldn't recall much of what anyone said, let alone what he said, but he remembered the flash bulbs on the cameras, going off like spells being fired; his legs were weak, afterwards, and Kingsley took him to the Headmaster's office, told him to sit down and poured him a double shot of Firewhiskey.
“You've carried the whole world on your shoulders, Harry,” Kingsley said, “just hold it up for a little bit longer, and I promise you will be able to put it down and take a rest.”
The whiskey burned a hole through Harry's body; he couldn't speak. His tongue was on fire, his skin pulled back from his muscles, leaving him naked and weak.
“Harry?” Kingsley's worried face swam in and out of focus. “Harry?”
The next moment, he was sleeping, with no idea of how he had got to his bed: his dreams were sticky, like old blood.
#
It got better as the days crawled by, but the feeling of being pulled down at the shoulders by a massive weight lingered.
To Harry's shame, the funeral services that were held at Hogwarts ran together in his mind. Certain things stood out, like splinters: the way Ron held Hermione's hand, so tight the knuckles were white; the line of Ginny's neck, her head tipped forward so her hair hid her face; Andromeda Tonks handing Harry Teddy and correcting his hold on the tiny head. He tried to focus, but felt like he was sleepwalking, like he was watching everyone from behind a screen that filtered out the meaning in what they were saying to him.
Hermione kept asking him if he was okay, until she stopped; Harry thought it was likely that Ron had told her to ease off. They kept close to him most of the time, with a quiet sort of resolve, as if they were looking to protect him from something. He was too tired to tell them to stop, that there was no need to protect him anymore.
He wanted to be there, to be at the forefront; he'd never got round to imagining this part, the part after, but now that it was here he was so angry at the the fact that he couldn't seem to fulfil the role Kingsley had clearly expected him to take: talking to the press, rallying the population for the restoration, joining forces with the Minister and Auror office to track down the scattering Death Eaters. He tried: he sat in on meetings in the Headmaster's office, met with the Head of the Auror Department, gave the Aurors again and again the information they needed on the Death Eaters. He weighed in whenever anyone asked his opinion; he had one, often, but it wasn't always easy to formulate. At times when his fatigue caught up with him it was like watching himself: being on the other side of an invisible divide, and watching his body operate without commands from his brain.
When the restoration began in earnest, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley decided it was time to take their family home. When Harry tried saying goodbye, Mrs. Weasley frowned at him. “Nonsense, Harry,” she said, “where would you go? You're coming with us.”
“But I think Kingsley –” Harry said.
Mr. Weasley put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it lightly. “It's all right, Harry. Kingsley told us to take you home. He'll be in touch when he needs you.”
There was more relief in that than he would have expected. Harry found he didn't have the heart to fight Mr. and Mrs. Weasley on it. He didn't say that the Burrow wasn't home, that it could have been, but that it wasn't; he didn't say his throat screwed shut at the thought of being with the Weasleys in their home, reduced in number as they were.
He went with them. In the Ministry car he sat between Ron and Hermione, who would be staying at the Burrow too until Kingsley could spare a few of his Aurors to escort her safely to Australia to retrieve her parents. His friends bracketed Harry a little more closely than was strictly necessary; their upper arms were warm against his in the May warmth. He was grateful for it now, the way they closed ranks around him. As they drove away towards Hogsmeade, Harry looked back at Hogwarts through the rear window: smoke was still rising, and the Astronomy tower had partly collapsed, making Gryffindor tower the tallest. It looked oddly lop-sided. The castle was like a wounded animal, crouching, nursing its wounds.
Ginny, on Hermione's other side, caught his eye when he looked back in front, and gave him a small smile. He answered it, hoping it looked more natural than it felt.
It was eight days since the battle had ended. Harry felt … he felt old, he realised; he felt like the past eight days had stretched across years, years of fighting and struggling, years of no healing, of slipping from sleeping nightmares into waking ones and back again. He tipped his head back against the leather seating of the car, and closed his eyes to feign sleep so he wouldn't have to talk to anyone. Soon enough, the hypnotic buzzing of the car put him to sleep for real.
#
Then, stumbling into the familiar wood-magic smell of the Burrow, vision spotting, avoiding looking at the clock. Up up up the stairs to Ron's bedroom, Ron's hand catching his elbow, Ron saying quietly: “Hey, mate, try not to fall asleep before you're actually in bed –” And the creak of the camp bed, the odd quiet breathing that meant that Ron was not sleeping; Harry's brain whispering that they were back in the tent, and wondering, half-worried, where Hermione had got to. Sleep, menacing and thick, clogging his throat, not knowing where he was, and noise. So much noise, falling and picking up, the dead wailing, trying to press back through the thin divide, not understanding why they couldn't get in.
#
Again he woke, weak with sleep in the orange shock of Ron's bedroom. Bright light streamed through the roof window, showing Ron's bed empty. Harry had to pause in his effort to get up; his legs felt immensely heavy. He pressed his palms hard against his eyes, trying to dispel the fog in his brain. Why was he still so tired? It felt like he'd done almost nothing but sleep since the battle had ended.
Birdsong filtered through the window, and an unintelligible hum of voices; for some reason he felt like they were Ron and Hermione's. An abrupt feeling of discomfort came over him as he pictured them outside: talking about him, in all likelihood, or about what they were all going to be doing next. He didn't feel much like facing that conversation – but staying in bed was just as unappealing, so finally he made himself get up.
Mrs. Weasley was in the kitchen when he came in, looking out the window, holding a teacup and a dishcloth. She jumped slightly at his entrance, but then she smiled.
“Oh, Harry, you're up. I was beginning to wonder if I needed to come up and check on you. You've been sleeping for a long time.” She looked down at the cup and frowned a little, as if wondering why she was holding it. She put it down.
He tried to smile back at her; the muscles in his face felt stiff. “Thanks, Mrs. Weasley.”
She gave him one of her one-overs that always made him feel uncomfortably as if she could see on the inside of him. “Feel a bit better now?”
“Yes,” he lied.
She nodded, seeming satisfied. “That's it. You just rest up here. Take your time to recover.”
“I will,” he said quickly. “Um, Mrs. Weasley, do you know where –”
“They're in the garden, over at the pond,” she said, and picked the teacup back up. “They saved you some toast. We'll have lunch in an hour or so.”
“Thanks,” he said, more genuinely this time, and walked over to the back door. He glanced back as he opened it; she had turned to the window again, her expression shuttered, once more holding the empty teacup in her hands.
#
His stomach protested after two pieces of toast. Ron and Hermione didn't comment, but leisurely ate the rest, hands wonderfully in sync as they broke off pieces in turn. It was pleasant in the shade, dappled as they were by little specks of sunlight. It could hardly be believed, that they were really here now, after the year they'd had, the running, the fighting, the hardly sleeping and barely eating. Harry looked at his friends, swallowing around a peculiar, sharp feeling in his throat. The air, buzzing with dragonflies, was so warm it felt more like summer than spring. Ron's nose was already sunburnt. Hermione had her feet in the pond; the edges of her rolled-up jeans were wet.
“Kingsley couldn't stop the Prophet from printing this anymore, looks like,” Ron said after they'd finished eating, handing Harry the paper.
Harry glanced at the front page. HOW HE DID IT: A RECONSTRUCTION OF HARRY POTTER'S FINAL FIGHT AGAINST THE DARK LORD, the headline blared. A smaller subtitle announced, excitedly, Chosen One confirmed as Master of Death!
He blew out a breath, and flipped the paper over so he wouldn't have to look at the picture of himself at the press conference, gaunt as a ghost, eyes blinking sluggishly in the camera lights. The back page, a bit surreally, was a cross word puzzle. “Well, that had to happen at some point. Kingsley did promise them the exclusive if they kept it quiet for a little bit longer so I could get away from Hogwarts.”
“Aren't you going to read it?” Hermione asked, giving him a curious look.
“No.” He'd given the interview. It wasn't like he needed to read the article to remember what had happened, or what he'd chosen to say. “Did you?”
“Yeah,” Ron said.
“Did they get it right?”
Ron smiled a little – it was a small, sad smile Harry had never seen on him before. “Sounds like it, but I dunno, mate. I wasn't there.”
Harry settled back on his elbows. “Right.” He squinted up at the sky, at its outrageous creamy blue. “It almost feels like I wasn't, either.”
There was a long silence. A breeze rustled through the willows, making the warm golden light trickling down through the leaves shift across the three of them.
“Are you all right, Harry?” Hermione asked quietly.
He closed his eyes. The sunlight lit up the back of his eyelids in little splashes of colour. “I'm fine,” he mumbled. “I'm fine, yeah.” It wasn't even a lie, in that moment. He felt like he could sleep, here, with Ron and Hermione close by, the sun guarding over him. His dreams were – well, when they weren't all-out nightmares they tended to be even worse: without the decency to even be dreams, really, but often just feelings that pervaded the night and that lasted out of sleep into wakefulness; they were feelings of drowning, of being crushed beneath a huge weight, of his lungs being filled up with the sweet, organic stench of death: his own, it was always his own death that he was witnessing, the moment just before. It was like the recurrent dream he used to have as a child, before he knew what had happened to his parents: the green flash, being blinded and submerged in panic, being powerless. It was like that, it was the moment when he had had to accept that there was nothing he could do anymore, that he had lost all control, and that he could save no one, not even himself.
He started when someone touched his arm. It was Ron, leaning over him. “Hey, come on, we're worried about you, mate,” he said; it took Harry a moment to return to the conversation they'd been having.
He sighed and sat himself up, rubbing his eyes. “No need,” he said. “I think I'm doing fine, considering. I'm tired and I have dreams, but what's new?”
“Do you – Harry, do you even remember what you did last night?” Hermione asked.
He turned towards her. “What? What are you talking about?”
“You, er – shouted a lot,” Ron said, looking unhappy.
Harry looked between them, found only sincerity and worry in their faces. “But how,” he sputtered, “how could I have been shouting without waking up?”
“I thought you had woken up,” Ron said. “You were sort of … thrashing about … screaming … yeah.” He caught Harry's expression and added, completely insincerely: “It wasn't that bad.”
Harry groaned. He dropped his torso back down, pressed his hands against his eyes. “And – don't tell me. Everyone heard?”
“Yes,” Hermione said in a small voice. “I'm afraid so.”
“Oh, great,” he muttered. When he removed his hands from his eyes the bright sky overhead seemed suddenly like it was mocking him.
“Harry, can't you – try to remember what it was you dreamt about?” Hermione leaned into his line of vision.
He shook his head. “I don't remember,” he said, which was only half-true.
“But maybe it's important,” she pressed. “There are still people out there who are after you, it's not because Voldemort is dead that we shouldn't still be really careful –”
Harry looked up at her, but said nothing; he felt wearily resistant to having this conversation. Why was this still necessary? They'd won; why couldn't he just feel happy, why couldn't it all just be over the way he'd thought it would be?
“He doesn't have to talk about it, Hermione,” Ron said suddenly.
She gave him a betrayed look that told Harry they'd discussed this before. “I never said he did. But I thought we agreed that not saying anything and just pretending that nothing happened isn't good, either.”
“Yeah, but you don't need to hound him –”
“Ron, I'm not!” she exclaimed.
“Don't start,” Harry said, rather acidly, sitting up again. “I'm really not in the mood.”
They sat in silence for a long moment, Hermione plucking angrily at the seam of her jeans. The sun played in the branches of the trees, scattering flighty coins of light over the water, dappling Ron and Hermione's faces. Harry, gritting his teeth, wished they would just let him be – stay with him, at the edge of the water, but not speak to him.
“Sorry, Hermione, you're right.” Ron sounded a bit stiff. “I know we agreed. Harry –” he turned to Harry. “You don't like talking about this, I get it, but – you can, if you want. That's all we wanted you to know.”
Harry watched as a mollified Hermione took Ron's hand and gave him a small sideways smile. “Yeah,” he said curtly. “I'll keep that in mind.” They both looked at him; immediately he felt bad at their expressions. “Thanks,” he added, in an attempt to soften his tone.
Hermione reached out and patted his knee. “Harry, Ginny asked me to tell you she'd be over at Luna's, but that she's coming back after lunch.” She gave him a smile that was so overtly sympathetic it was hard to bear. “I think she wants to talk to you.”
He nodded briefly, avoiding Ron's eye.
There was another long silence, filled by clear birdsong and the lazy sloshing of the water in the reeds.
“I'm not going back to Hogwarts,” Harry finally said, and instead of looking at Ron or Hermione, he looked out across the pond: at the weeds stretching their long ghostly fingers, the sharp sun slashing the surface of the water, glinting off the silvery backs of the foraging fish.
He could picture, in uncomfortable detail, the look they were giving each other behind his back, but they said nothing, and he said nothing either.
#
He picked up the discarded newspaper, later, thinking that he'd do the cross word puzzle; he dropped it again when he caught, flipping through it, the articles on the outbreaks of violence in Dublin, explosions in the London Underground, five bodies and counting in Diagon Alley altercations. HOW LONG BEFORE WE ARE SAFE? the Prophet asked, and with a little shiver of something that went beyond fear, Harry kicked it into the pond.
#
Ginny plopped down unceremoniously next to him on the grass. He started a little; he'd been caught up in his thoughts and hadn't heard her coming.
“Hi,” she said, and gave him a smile.
“Hullo.” He smiled back automatically. “I was wondering where you were.”
“Yes, I know, sorry,” she said. “I'd agreed to meet Luna around noon, and you weren't up yet.”
“That's okay.” He looked at her; it eased something in his chest. She settled back on her hands, angling up her face towards the light and stretching out her long, freckled legs.
“Sleep well?” she asked, her eyes closed.
He hummed non-committally, not really feeling like going into it.
There was a silence. Harry wasn't sure if it was comfortable or not; at any rate, Ginny opened her eyes after a while and looked at him. “Are you feeling all right, Harry?”
He tried not to sigh. As much as he sometimes felt like he needed to talk, like there were words sitting in his throat that were fighting to get out – whenever he tried, he found that he didn't know what he wanted to say. And there was so much Ginny didn't know yet, things that had happened in the tent, at Hogwarts; he felt exhausted just thinking about everything he would have to explain. “Yeah,” he said. “You?”
She shrugged. Her hair was vivid in the sunlight. “Luna and her dad have asked me to come on a trip.”
“Oh yeah?” he said. “Where to?”
“Well, her dad's got a cabin up in the Swiss mountains. They go there to hike in summer.” She smiled a little. “Luna says the moon is larger there. Good for healing, she says.”
“That sounds nice.” Harry tried to think about himself in Switzerland, hiking under a large moon. Healing. The image wouldn't form – it was as if it belonged to another world.
“I told her I'd have to talk to you first,” Ginny said, and gave him a soft look.
“You don't need my permission to go anywhere.”
Ginny sat up, pulling up her legs. “I know that. It's not your permission I want. It's just… it seems…” She paused, smoothing a hand over the grass next to her. “It seems a bit soon to leave you. Like I'd be… abandoning you, or something. Is it too soon?”
“No,” Harry said, and when she seemed a little taken aback he realised he'd said it too decisively. “I mean, you should – do what you want. What you need.”
She leaned closer and put her hand over his, resting on his thigh. “What do you need?”
He looked down at their hands, the difference in their skin tones. “I don't know,” he said. He really didn't. It felt like he was split off from himself: as if he could observe the talking, moving thing that was his body without being truly in it. And he didn't know how to tell her that talking to her, to nearly anyone, really, made him feel nothing except for a desire to start running and not stop.
“You'll figure it out.” She slid her fingers through the gaps between his and clasped his palm with her fingertips. He said nothing: couldn't think of anything. After a few moments, she let go of his hand; he realised he hadn't squeezed back.
“Yeah,” he said, and smiled at her, hoping it looked more natural than it felt. “You should go with Luna, if that's what you want. Take advantage of the extra free time before term starts again.”
“Suppose so,” she said. She wrapped her arms around her knees, closing herself off.
“Is it safe?” he asked, almost as an afterthought.
“Should be,” she said. “And anyway, Luna's dad will be with us, and dad says he's about the best guardian you could have.”
Harry thought about Luna for a moment: her painted ceiling, the way she'd helped him with Dobby. He wanted, suddenly, to write to her. “Okay. That's good, then.”
They sat for another while, the sun splashing them with warmth. “I'd better go help mum,” Ginny finally said. “See you in a bit?”
“Sure,” Harry said.
She hesitated for a moment, then nodded, and got to her feet. He listened to the sound of her walking away, the sound of the porch door opening and closing. He was aware that that could have gone better.
“Harry!” came Ron's voice from behind him, and Harry twisted around. He could see Ron's fiery head poking out of the shed. “You wanna practise some Quidditch?”
“Yeah!” Harry called back, immediately feeling better at the thought. “Let me just go get my Firebolt!”
#
The next day, Ron took them into the apple orchard, where Harry and Hermione sat on the grass between the old trees with their gnarled, discontented air. Ron was busy a while off, swearing occasionally as he tried to reattach the old swing to one of the branches. The tree seemed to be fighting the intentions of his wand.
“No, Ron,” Hermione called to him, “make your movement rounder – yes, that's it, that's a lot better –” Harry saw the fondness blooming in her smile, and looked away from it, feeling almost caught out at witnessing it. Quite abruptly, she turned to him. “Harry – about Hogwarts.”
Harry took a breath. “I know what you're going to say, Hermione, but I don't think I can go back.”
“I know,” she said. “We're not going either.”
He blinked. “What?”
“You heard me.” She looked at him, oddly defiantly. “And don't – give me that look, all right? Ron's already had the row with his Mum. It wasn't pretty, but it's fine now. George said he can help out in the shop if he wants, so that's him settled for the time being.”
“What? When did all this happen?”
“This morning, when you were still asleep. And I've written to Professor McGonagall; I already have her response. I can get my NEWTS with a self-study owl post programme.”
“You didn't.” He gaped at her, profoundly surprised. “Hermione, are you serious? You, of all people, not go back for your final year? You?”
She pricked him hard in the bicep with her finger. “Frankly, I'm offended,” she said, a bit shrilly, “that you don't think that I know that there are more important things than school, after everything that we've done together the past year!”
“Hermione, for Merlin's sake, the past year was – the past year! There's no war now, why wouldn't you go back?”
“Because I'm tired of sitting at school waiting for life to start,” she snapped. “The whole wizarding world is so utterly rotten, and – I know I've got something to offer it. I'm not waiting another year to do that. If there's one thing I've learnt from you, it's that school has its limits. School is very important, but –” She made an expansive gesture. “At some point, you learn that life is out there, and it's got things to teach you that you can't learn at school.”
Harry looked at her. “That's – Hermione –” He didn't know what to say. Her expression was the familiar, half-desperate determination that he'd seen so often the past year.
“Oh, don't,” she said, and ran a palm over her eyes; he only realised then that her eyes were wet. “I'm all right, I just don't think I can handle right now you having a go at me because I've made what was, frankly, a really hard decision –”
“I'm sorry,” he said, “I wasn't having a go at you, I just…” He shook his head, speechless.
“I know, I know.” She flapped a hand, and sniffed. “You don't want us to do this for you.”
He blinked; realised that she was right, that that was why he'd snapped at her, despite the fact that every time he'd thought about them going back to Hogwarts without him, his stomach had seemed to turn to lead.
“That's not why we're doing this. I mean, it's a factor that you're not going, of course.” She gave him a complicated look, dark eyes shiny. “But we're doing it for ourselves, too. Ron…” She gazed out at Ron, who was now doggedly fastening the ropes by hand. “He doesn't show it much, but you know he's absolutely knotted up over Fred, and I don't think he can bear to go away from everyone for a year. Especially not without you.”
Harry followed her look and watched Ron struggling with the swing, his throat tightening. He hadn't … he hadn't even really considered …
“And I'll go absolutely spare if I have to sit through a year of going to classes and reading the Prophet and not being able to do anything about what's happening on the ground. And I know I definitely can't do it if you two aren't there to stop me from losing my mind. So.” She looked back at him, gave him a little, brave smile. “We're not going either.”
Harry pulled out a fistful of grass. He felt dazed. “Okay,” was the best he could manage.
Ron came back over towards them, pulling off his sweat-darkened shirt and using it to wipe his face. He plopped down beside Hermione. “Bloody trees! I dunno why Mum wanted me to fix that old thing now, anyway,” he grumbled. “It'll at least be another three years before Bill and Fleur's kid will be old enough to play with it.” He looked at Harry and Hermione, and then seemed to catch onto the atmosphere. “Er, what did I miss?”
“I just told Harry that we're not planning on going back to Hogwarts,” Hermione said briskly.
“Oh, right,” Ron said. He peered around Hermione at Harry, his expression hard to read. “At least you seem to be taking it better than Mum is, mate.”
Harry managed a smile. “Why, what'd she say?”
“Oh, she went through most of her repertoire,” Ron said lightly, though his eyes weren't smiling. “She did the whole 'your father is working day and night to get everything back to normal and you've decided his efforts aren't worth it', she covered most of 'I'm your mother and I don't care you're of age', and she ended on 'you're throwing away your entire future'.” He grimaced at Harry.
“She was fine in the end, though,” Hermione said, quietly. “You know why she was that way, Ron. In the end she just wants you to be happy.”
“Hm.” Ron swept his damp hair off his forehead and looked away, narrowing his eyes against the sun. The sunburnt skin on his nose was flaking a little. A pleasant breeze played across the three of them, making strands of Hermione's hair dance across her face; Harry caught the familiar scent of Ron's new sweat, still fresh and light.
“Hey.” Hermione leaned into Ron's bare torso and smiled up at him warmly. “You're not throwing away your future. Your future is going to be lovely.”
Ron wrapped his arm around her. “Yeah, well, as long as you're in it,” he said quietly, but not so quietly that Harry didn't hear.
He looked away as they kissed, feeling oddly embarrassed; he still wasn't used to it. But soon enough Hermione slipped her hand around his elbow and pulled him in a little so their sides touched. He glanced sideways and saw that she was holding Ron the same way. For a while, none of them spoke; they just sat, arm in arm, watching the trees as the sun travelled up the sky.