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It never took him long to find her. His eyes were drawn to her little labelled dot as if it were glowing. He watched her in her classes and hoped that she was managing to focus better than he was. He watched her in the common room and noticed that sometimes she sat with Neville and swung rapidly between relief and irrational fear. He watched her in her dorm room late at night and wondered if he cropped up in her dreams just as she cropped up in his. If he stared at it long enough perhaps some occlumency miracle would occur and she would hear him.
Sometimes he would stare so long at the map that he would end up thinking about who had made it. It had always had that special meaning for him, of course, that spark of excitement and pride that his father and godfather had been the makers, and Remus too (he always managed to forget Peter). But with the hours of contemplation he gave it in an attempt to distract himself from the crushing loneliness and fear, so much like grief, he found himself giving it more significance than he ever had done before.
He would like to, if he ever saw him again, ask Remus more about how they had made it. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but somewhere along the line he had picked up that his father was good at transfiguration, so perhaps that had been useful in the creation. His cloak, too, would have been essential in the discovery of all those secret passages and corridors. Maybe, he even thought desperately, trying to convince himself that what he was doing wasn’t creepy or pathetic, his father might have even looked at a dot that had once said ‘Lily Evans’ and felt something like the pain he did.
But it’s entire conception, especially that it was possible to watch people like that, seemed to him to be very like Sirius – his godfather had always been practical but adventurous like that. The useful knife he had given him, and (he remembered with a punching jolt of pain), the two way mirror. Perhaps it had been his idea to include people on it, tracking everyone like that, looking out for teachers and Peeves and anyone else they might want to avoid.
But it was so accurate too, and somehow Harry thought this must have been Remus, that he must have been the one to ensure it was all correctly to scale and so perfectly detailed. He had watched Ginny’s dot go from Gryffindor Tower to the Great Hall and he knew it was perfectly timed, exactly right. That really was what she was doing at that moment, and it helped him picture it with devastating longing.
There was something about simply staring at her name that made the missing ache in his stomach for her grow and surge and twist into some kind of animal that wanted to howl out for her. He could see the way her hair would bounce slightly around her as she hurried down the marble staircase, could see her hand softly brushing along the bannister, her slight laugh, perhaps, as someone spoke to her. All those little things that he hadn’t realised he had ever noticed so clearly but now wanted more than anything. That he would give anything to turn that little black dot into those real images, that no matter how much he stared at her name and the shape of the letters, it would not work: she would not come and sit beside him, she would not take his hand, she would not grin wickedly at him.
Because he was out here, feeling more alone than ever, loitering at the edge of a veil and delaying the inevitable, staring pathetically at a dot and grieving for a life that could never have been his.
The best cartographers in the world couldn’t map everything that dot meant.