Chapter Text
It’s quiet as the snow perches softly on the monument and the bare cypress branches around it.
It’s quiet in Harry’s head too. Her mountainscape is silent and cooling, her pyramid and Egyptian city crumbling away without their pharaoh to rule over them. She has not visited either for a long time.
Aldon Rosier would understand, she thinks. But Aldon Rosier is a name carved onto the solemn black rectangle that stands in front of her.
So are Lily Potter, James Potter, and Sirius Black.
In remembrance of their sacrifices for a better world, the monument says.
Hermione Granger, Pansy Parkinson, Ron Weasley.
Severus Snape. Leo Hurst. So many names, each one tearing into Harry’s heart.
(Draco isn’t there, but he’s gone from Harry’s life anyway.)
Harry can’t even cry. Her eyes are as frozen and cold as the snow wafting from the grey sky. She has cried for them all before, for all the names that were once people, but she cannot summon the tears anymore.
There’s a barely audible sniff from next to her. Unlike Harry, Archie’s eyes can always draw up more tears, like there is an endless reservoir where those salty trails of water come from.
Harry links her arm with Archie’s. There isn’t a need to speak out loud in this glassy space.
They stand there for a little while longer, snow gathering gentle and delicate on their winter robes and hats. Harry spins her wand (holly and phoenix feather, unusual) and a bouquet of white poppies and light, breathy purple lavender flowers bring themselves to settle before the monument. Then she tucks her wand away and she and Archie depart with steps sunk in the snow.
Godric’s Hollow rises from the misty landscape, the twinkling cottages and warm yellow lights blooming from the soft white surroundings. The people there are happy, surrounded by family and friends. Their children will go to Hogwarts no matter their blood type.
Archie stops suddenly and turns to Harry. His eyes are beautiful, still, but the sparkle has been gone for three years. Gone since they were fourteen, and young, and happy. This Archie has been a rare smiler.
“Would you do it again?” He asks.
Harry’s hand wanders up to her forehead, where a jagged scar lies from the failed Killing Curse Voldemort cast what seemed like decades ago. She remembers the Dark Defense Disk shattering, pieces splintering in the air, when the curse tried to extinguish her life.
Would she do it again? The fateful moment of decision when she was eleven. The years of being Rigel Black, smiling her way through bigotry and insults, spinning lies and feeding them to everyone she loved and the whole world, because halfbloods could not go to Hogwarts.
The years where she had real friends, where she ran towards a glowing dream of a life of Potions, where her mind was a place to relax and have tea, where her wand came out to cast classwork and not to deflect Entrails-Expelling curses or draw the bloody wounds of a friend closed.
The years where she had her parents and adults that loved her unconditionally, and she had not deserved their love.
Harry realizes that she does have tears after all, because they’re streaking hot down her face in the wake of what she knows she will say.
“Yes.”
And she both hates and loves it.