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Harry comes to with a start.
Images from his dreams seem to cling to his eyelashes; bursts of green light, people falling, screaming and crying, three red-headed men buried beneath rubble, the shadow of a last smile, friends sleeping beneath the Great Hall’s starry ceiling and never waking up. His first instinct is to get up and run, go back to fighting, because he can’t let any more people die, so why on earth is he lying down, they’re at war, and where is his wand?
It takes several moments of heavy breathing and panicked grasping around for reality to catch up with him. Harry grabs fistfuls of damp bedding and tries to calm his erratically beating heart.
They won the war. Voldemort is dead. He’s in his old four-poster bed in Gryffindor tower and the nightmares were to be expected, really.
He should feel relieved, Harry thinks, because there is no real threat left to fight anymore, he’s safe for the first time in what feels like forever, but there is a strange sinking feeling in his chest, and Harry realizes that he has no idea what to do now. There was always a plan, a task, a challenge, to defeat Voldemort and bring peace to his world, but now that he finally managed it, after so many throwbacks and delays and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, he finds that he never gave a thought to what would happen after, because he never really thought he’d live to see this day.
There’s a small sound, the tiniest shuffling, and Harry, his senses heightened after months on the run, goes rigid in his bed. He strains his ears, listening for more sounds, but none come. There might be others sleeping in here, Harry thinks, Ron or Neville, Dean and Seamus, maybe even Hermione. After all, he wasn’t the only one to get no sleep the night before. He has half a mind to check the Marauder’s Map, to find out who’s in here with him, just to make sure, but he has no idea where he put it. Harry rubs the sleep out of his eyes and sits up as quietly as possible, pulling the bed hangings apart just far enough to make a gap he can squint through.
It’s rather dark, surely the middle of the night, and Harry can only make out blurry shapes without his glasses, but something is off about the otherwise so familiar surroundings. He pulls the hangings further apart and gropes on his bedside table for his glasses. The moonlit room comes into sharp focus and Harry blinks at the peculiar sight he’s presented with.
On the other side of the room, the wall and ground got blasted apart, most probably by a stray curse from the battle, forming a hole right between Neville’s and Seamus’s old beds. It opens into the mild spring night, a stretch of star-strewn sky visible above the grounds, white-washed by moonlight. Harry saw it before, of course, when he first came up after the battle, but he mostly ignored it in favour of his bed and the sandwich Kreacher brought him.
A small figure is sitting there on the floor, right at the edge of the hole, silhouetted against the clear night sky outside, legs dangling into the dormitory below. A foreign feeling of calmness floods Harry at the sight of long, fiery red hair. He heaves himself up and walks over on socked feet.
“Hey,” he says quietly, voice hoarse from lack of use. “Mind if I join you?”
Ginny shifts a little, but keeps her eyes determinedly on the sky. “Sure, yeah. Be careful, though. Wouldn’t do for the saviour of the wizarding world to come back from the dead only to break his neck falling through a hole.”
Her joke falls flat with the numbness of her voice. Her face is no longer blotchy, but carefully blank and void of all emotion. Harry lowers himself down next to her, risking a glance into the dormitory below them. He can just see a bedside table and the corner of a bed, both littered with debris. It’s a good ten feet drop, but just one step forward and he won’t just fall down one floor, but the whole length of Gryffindor Tower. He dangles his legs along with hers anyway.
“Interesting choice of seat,” Harry comments, gazing across the ground to the distant treetops of the Forbidden Forest.
“You know I like to live dangerously,” Ginny says in a robot-like imitation of her usual bright, sassy self, and Harry realizes with a pang just how much of themselves they have lost.
“What time is it?” he asks, because it’s the only save question he can think of.
“’Bout one o’clock in the morning. You were asleep for a really long time.”
“What’d I miss? Where’d everyone go?”
Ginny frowns. “Almost everybody stayed in the Great Hall. People coming and going all afternoon, y’know… bringing news, celebrating or, uh. Looking for family members. McGonagall said everybody could stay as long as they needed to and should head home once they felt ready. She wants to wait a few weeks until things have calmed down and then everyone who wants to can come back and help rebuilt the school.”
Ginny clears her throat and keeps talking, never once looking up at Harry.
“The houses elves made dinner and McGonagall tried to get people to go to bed. Some of the students went back to their dormitories like you did, but almost everyone else just stayed put. Neville and Luna conjured a bunch of sleeping bags, so now most of the D.A. is camping out in a corner of the Great Hall. The Order’s still around, too… what’s left of it anyways. And, uh, Ron and Hermione are downstairs in the common room. They came to check on you and now they’re asleep on one of the sofas, so I guess we’re okay on that front, at least.”
A bunch of emotions wash over Harry in a jumble while he listens to his ex-girlfriend speak, but he doesn’t stop to examine any of them. Instead he reaches over and covers Ginny’s hand with his. Anything to try and give her some comfort.
„I’m rather cross with you, you know?“ Ginny says next, but she doesn’t sound cross. She doesn’t sound anything, expect tired.
“Have you slept?” Harry finds himself asking, though the bags under Ginny’s eyes are answer enough.
“No. I’ve been drinking coffee all day. The house elves make it in batches for everyone down in the Great Hall.”
Silence stretches between them. Harry doesn’t have to ask why she chose caffeine over sleep. Now that he’s awake, he already dreads going back to sleep.
“Why are you cross with me, then?” he asks instead, desperate for something to distract him form the green flashes that still burst across his eyes every few second, burned into the back of them like when you look into the sun for too long.
Ginny huffs, with a hint of indignation that Harry is weirdly glad for. “You tried to make me stay in the Room of Requirement while everyone went off to fight. I did not appreciate that.”
“That wasn’t just me,” Harry defends automatically, and manages only just to keep himself from following up with, and I just wanted to keep you safe. Something tells him that she would appreciate that even less. “And it’s not like we succeeded for very long.”
“You told me I had to get out,” Ginny points out wearily, sounding like she knows exactly what Harry nearly said.
“But you wouldn’t have stayed anyway.”
“No. I don’t know how much Neville told you before, about this past year, but it wasn’t just your fight, Harry.”
Her voice is as flat and numb as it was before, but he can still hear the horrors lurking beneath her words; horrors quite different from the ones he went through in the past months, but surely no less dreadful. He does not look forward to hearing about them, if she ever decides to share them with him. Looking at her now, the moonlight highlighting the paleness of her cheeks, Harry has no doubt whatsoever that Ginny went through a battle of her own and is far from the girl he kissed in that sunlit room on his birthday a lifetime ago.
“Then there’s the whole dying thing, of course,” Ginny continues, pulling him out of his thoughts. “Didn’t appreciate that, either,” she clarifies and Harry realized that she’s still listing reasons to be cross with him. Somehow, it draws a smile from his lips.
“Sorry,” he says, but Ginny shakes her head.
“When I saw you… when Hagrid carried you up to the castle and I thought… you, too… Merlin, Harry, you have a lot to make up to me.”
She tags on a sarcastic sort of laugh, but it doesn’t mask the subject she just brushed on. With a pang, Harry sees again the shadow of a last laugh. He has to force himself to focus back on Ginny.
“Can I, though?”
“Can you what?”
“Make it up to you,” Harry says, and they both know he’s not only talking about dying and coming back.
For the first time since he came to join her, Ginny turns her head to him. Her brown eyes are small with tiredness, her lips taut with endless grief, but he still drinks in her face with greed, really seeing her for the first time in months. The intensity of how much he missed her slams into him like a Bludger.
“You left me behind,” she says.
“I had to, Gin.”
“I know.”
It takes a long time for Ginny to speak up again, so they sit in silence with their feet dangling into the dormitory below, watching the moonlit grounds.
“When you went into the forest… did you walk past me?”
He thinks back to that walk into the forest, the way his heart pounded in his chest, clinging to life, while he left everyone he loved behind in the Great Hall. He feels kind of detached from it, what with everything that happened after, but Harry still swallows heavily when he remembers Ginny crouching on the front steps, and the way her voice broke.
“Yeah.”
“I thought I heard something,” Ginny nods.
“…It was brave of you. To stay with that girl.”
Ginny shakes her head at once. “No, it wasn’t. I just… couldn’t stay there. In the Great Hall, with everyone and the… the bodies. I ran out. Found her on the stairs,” she furrows her eyebrows. “She died. In my arms. I guess that’s what you get for trying to run out on your grieving family.”
Harry’s heart clenches painfully. “Don’t say that, Ginny. Please. You’re so…” He loses his track watching more tears collecting in her eyes, but she doesn’t seem to have heard him anyway.
“But I did it again, didn’t I? Earlier, after they brought away Fred’s… Fred’s body.” Ginny’s knuckles go white with how hard she grips the jagged edge of the floor, and then the tears spill over. “I just left. I don’t even know where they took him. I don’t know where the rest of my family is. I just ran and ended up here and I’ve been sitting here for an hour because I know nobody will come and bother you. Fuck,” she gasps in the end and then she starts crying in earnest.
Seeing Ginny give in to tears is worse than anybody else because of how rarely she does it. Harry’s entire body aches as he reaches over and takes Ginny into his arms. She leans into his side at once, taking deep, gulping breathes of air, and Harry is just glad that she doesn’t push him away. Even though she’s still crying, terrible sobs wrecking through her body every few seconds, even though he knows he should be the one consoling her, nothing brings him more comfort than holding her close again.
“Dammit. I’m sorry,” she croaks into his shoulder.
“Don’t be,” he says, “I’m sorry.”
She heaves an exasperated sigh that seems to at least distract her from her tears. “Harry. You literally saved us all. You died for us. I’ve told you this before: you really need to stop blaming yourself for everything.”
Harry is so relieved to hear that familiar tone of voice, the one she uses to defend him against himself, that he doesn’t bother arguing. He uses his free hand to stroke some wayward hair off her face, and Ginny begins to rigorously wipe her eyes with her shirtsleeve.
“Fuck,” she says again, angry with herself, “I’ve been trying to be strong all day, for Mum and for George and for you. I can’t do it. I can’t be strong anymore.”
Harry breathes in the ever-flowery scent of her hair. “You don’t have to be strong for me. We can just be strong together.”
“We’ll have to be,” Ginny whispers, “the next weeks aren’t going to be easy.”
Harry thinks about all the explaining he’ll have to do, all the public attention he’ll have to deal with, the clean-up and rebuilding of their society, the decisions he’ll have to make, and above all, the countless funerals to attend, countless friends to grieve, family to say goodbye to.
“No,” he agrees quietly, “and I don’t think I’ll be able to make it through them without you.”
Ginny takes her head of Harry’s shoulder and looks at him for a long moment. Her face is tear-stained and puffy, her eyes are red and full of so much grief and sorrow that Harry can feel her hurting, but somewhere in their depth, Harry sees a shadow of the same hard, blazing look she gave him before their first kiss.
“You won’t have to,” she says forcefully, sounding much more like herself now. She takes hold of his hand and squeezes once. “You won’t.”
A tiny part of the constant heaviness on his heart seems to lift and Harry wraps his arm tighter around her. Her head falls back onto his shoulder.
“I missed you,” he whispers and presses a kiss to her hair.
Ginny squeezes his hand again. “I missed you, too.”
“When I said I was sorry before… I didn’t just mean the battle. I’m sorry I left you.”
“I know. It’s okay.” Harry feels her give the smallest of smiles against his shoulder. “Just don’t do it again.”
Despite sleeping all afternoon and half the night, Harry still feels bone-tried. The endeavours of the past two days – riding a dragon for hours after escaping from Gringotts, battling through the night, dying – have left his body aching all over. The familiar Hogwarts grounds, stretching out below him, are littered with heaps of rubble and wreckage, and Harry can feel the mental traumata on the edges of his consciousness, threatening to spill over and drag him into depression.
But the Great Hall is full of life, Ron and Hermione are asleep just down the stairs and Ginny, with her sweet-smelling, fiery red hair tickling his cheek, is right here. They’ll have to talk more, of course, figure things out without the heaviness of recent loss hanging over them, but her brightness and her strength, no matter how dim and fragile right now, are left to remind him of all the good things he might be able to have.
“I won’t. I promise.”
The moon travels across the glittering night sky, lighting up their faces steadily and silvery, and Harry smiles. Somehow, they’ll be okay.