Chapter Text
1998
The dittany stung worse than the cut had.
Harry sat on the edge of a cot near the top of the Hall with his shirt dragged down off one shoulder and his teeth set together, telling himself he would not flinch, and then flinching anyway when Madam Pomfrey dabbed the next bead of it into the gash over his collarbone.
"Hold still," she said, not looking up. There was a smear of soot across her forehead and her cap was gone and her hands, when they touched him, were perfectly steady. "I have mended a good deal worse than this tonight, Potter, and I shall mend worse before the sun's up, so you'll forgive me if I don't stop to hold your hand."
"I am holding still."
"You are twitching like a Puffskein in a bath." She pressed a fresh square of gauze to his shoulder and pinned it with a flick of her wand, and the sting dulled all at once to a deep warm ache. "There. Keep it dry. Don't pick at it. And if you tell me you feel perfectly all right, I shall have you flat on your back with a Sleeping Draught before you can say another foolish word, do you understand me?"
"Yeah," said Harry.
"Good." And then, more quietly, in a voice that didn't match the brisk one at all, she put two fingers briefly against the side of his jaw and tipped his face up towards the light and looked at him, properly, the way you'd look at a thing you'd been afraid you wouldn't see again. "There you are," she said, and let him go, and moved off down the row of cots without another word.
Harry sat where she'd left him and went back to counting.
He couldn't have said when he'd started. Somewhere in the last hour, he thought — somewhere after the shouting had died down and the great roaring blur of it had settled into this, into people moving quietly up and down the Hall with lanterns, into the low murmur of a hundred conversations all happening at once, into the smell of dust and smoke and blood and, underneath it, absurdly, breakfast, because someone had got the kitchens working and there were house-elves carrying trays of tea between the cots. Somewhere in there his eyes had begun going round the room on their own, ticking off faces, and once they'd started they wouldn't stop, and every time he lost sight of someone his chest did a horrible slow lurch until he found them again.
Ron. Halfway down the Hall, sitting on the end of a bench with his elbows on his knees, being talked at by a small witch in Healer's green who was trying to get him to drink something. Ginger head bowed. There. Ticked off. Hermione — beside Ron, of course she was, she'd got hold of a roll of parchment from somewhere and was writing on her knee, and even now, even here, the sight of Hermione writing something down made a small ridiculous part of Harry feel that the world could not be entirely over. There. Ginny —
He couldn't see Ginny.
He'd had her a minute ago. She'd been over by the far doors with her mother — no, that wasn't right either, that was earlier — and now the space where she'd been was full of people he didn't know, and his heart gave the lurch, and he was already up off the cot with one foot under him before a hand came down flat on his good shoulder and pushed him, without any particular gentleness, straight back down.
"And where," said Sirius, "do you think you're going?"
Harry hadn't heard him come back. He was standing over the cot with a mug of tea in each hand and his hair full of stone-dust and a long shallow scratch down one cheekbone that he plainly hadn't let anyone near, and he was grinning — that reckless, infuriating grin, the one that had got him into a hundred years of trouble — but his eyes weren't grinning at all. His eyes were doing exactly what Harry's were doing. Harry recognised it at once.
"Ginny," said Harry. "I can't see —"
"Ginny is fine. Ginny is over there, giving Minerva McGonagall her considered opinion on where the injured ought to be sorted to, and McGonagall is losing, which tells you everything you need to know about how fine she is." Sirius pushed one of the mugs into Harry's hands and folded himself down onto the cot beside him, close, shoulder to shoulder, in a way that was not accidental. "Drink that. Marlene's orders. I'd argue with her but she gets a look."
"I don't want tea."
"Nobody wants tea. That's not the point of tea." Sirius took a mouthful of his own and grimaced. "God, that's foul. Drink it anyway."
Harry drank it. It was too sweet and too milky and it was the best thing he'd ever tasted, and he hated that, and he drank all of it.
Over by the doors, a red head detached itself from a knot of people and turned, and it was Ginny after all — of course it was Ginny — and she caught his eye across the whole length of the ruined Hall and lifted her chin at him, just slightly, all right?, and Harry lifted his chin back, and something in his chest that had been screwed tight for what felt like a year came loose by about a quarter-turn. There. Ticked off. He could breathe.
For about four seconds.
Then his eyes went round the room again, because they had to, because there were still gaps.
"You're doing it again," said a voice on his other side.
He hadn't heard her come, either. Marlene McKinnon had a way of simply being there that Harry had never got used to in four years of living in her house — you never saw her arrive, you only ever discovered she'd already arrived, usually holding something you were about to be made to eat. She'd sat down on the edge of the next cot and pulled it round to face them and she was watching him with her arms folded and an expression that gave nothing away and saw everything.
"Doing what," said Harry.
"Counting us." Marlene reached out and took the empty mug out of his hands before he'd noticed he was still gripping it, and turned it over, and set it down. "You've been at it since Poppy sat you down. Round and round. I've watched you find Ron four times." She said it flatly, no softness in it at all, and then she leaned in and took his chin — the second person to do it in ten minutes; his family, it seemed, had collectively decided he was not to be trusted to keep his own head up — and she said, "We're here, Harry. Every one of us that walked in with you walked out. Do you hear me? Look at me and hear it."
"Some of you didn't walk out," said Harry.
It came out of him before he could stop it, flat and hollow, and he watched something move behind Marlene's eyes and then get put firmly away, the way she put everything away, into the deep still place where she kept the things she was carrying so that everyone else could go on believing she wasn't carrying anything.
"No," she agreed. "Some of us got carried. That's not the same as not coming out, and you know it, or you'd know it if you weren't running on fumes and grief and half a mug of tea." She let his chin go. "Fred's in the hospital wing. Alive. He's been in and out but they're hopeful. Remus and Tonks are up there too and they'll do. And Lilah's got a cracked head and a wrecked ankle and a temper on her like a scalded cat because they won't let her out of bed, so she's not too happy about it. Say they're alive Harry."
Harry looked at her.
"Say it back to me," said Marlene.
"They're alive," said Harry.
"All of them."
"All of them."
"Right." She sat back. "Now stop counting the ones you can't see. You'll drive yourself into the ground and then I'll have two of you in that wing, and I've quite enough on."
He tried. He honestly tried. But the trouble with a thing your body had decided to do without asking you was that you couldn't simply decide to stop, and every time a lantern crossed the Hall his eyes chased it, hunting, and every gap where a face wasn't opened up under him like a stair that wasn't there in the dark.
He didn't realise he'd half-risen again until Sirius's arm came round the front of him — not a shove this time, just laid across, a bar, an arm across a boy on a swing.
"Steady," said Sirius, very quietly, right by his ear, all the grin gone out of his voice now. "Steady. I've got you. Where were you off to?"
"The hospital wing," said Harry. "I have to — I need to see —"
"I know."
"I can't just sit here, Sirius, I can't sit here counting people while Fred's —"
"I know." Sirius's arm tightened, and for a moment he pressed the side of his head against the side of Harry's, hard, and Harry felt him breathe out, long and shaking, the breath of a man who had spent the whole night doing precisely the same arithmetic and had only just been allowed to stop. "You think I don't? I have been sitting on this cot for one hour keeping myself from running up there every ninety seconds. But they won't let the walking wounded up yet, they've barely got room to move, and Poppy will hex me down the stairs, and — Harry. Harry, look at me. She would not have let you go if it was bad. Marlene. She'd never have left your side for it. Look at her — does she look like a woman who's had bad news?"
Harry looked.
Marlene had got up and was, of all things, straightening the blanket on the empty cot and squaring the corners, because there was nothing left in the immediate vicinity that needed doing and she was a person who could not sit still while there was a task to be found, even a task she had to invent. She caught them both watching her and raised one eyebrow.
"What," she said.
"Nothing," said Sirius. "You're a comfort, that's all. Like being reassured by a hatstand."
"I'll reassure you in a minute," said Marlene, and something that was almost a laugh, a hoarse and unpractised thing, cracked its way out of Harry before he could stop it, and Sirius's arm went loose around him at the sound of it, relieved, and the two of them sat there, shoulder to shoulder, breathing.
"Where's Stella?" Harry asked, when he could. It was the next number on the list. She had been the very first name, in fact, the whole night — a three-year-old, nowhere near any of this, and still the fear had found room for her.
"Home," said Marlene, and her voice changed on the word, went low and sure, the one certainty she'd let herself keep. "With Andromeda's neighbour, the Tonks lot arranged it days ago. Fast asleep in her own bed with no notion anything's happened and a great deal of trouble waiting for whoever has to explain to her in the morning why her father looks like he's been down a chimney." A pause. "She's safe, Harry. That one I never had to count. I put her somewhere I couldn't reach and I've known where she was every minute. It's the only reason I've had a head left over to spend on the rest of you."
"Ron! Harry!"
Hermione was picking her way up the Hall towards them with Ron a half-step behind, and she had a look on her face that Harry knew — the look she got when she had decided a great many things needed organising and had appointed herself to organise them — but underneath it her face was blotched and her eyes were red-rimmed and when she reached the cot she stopped and simply looked at Harry as though checking he was really still there, and then she burst into tears and sat down hard on the floor at his feet.
"Oh, don't," said Ron, alarmed, dropping down beside her. "Don't, Hermione, he's fine, look, he's — Harry, tell her you're fine—"
"I'm fine," said Harry.
"He's lying," said Madam Pomfrey's voice from three cots down, without breaking stride.
"I'm mostly fine," Harry amended.
"I'm not crying because — I know you're fine—" Hermione scrubbed furiously at her face with the heel of her hand, which did nothing except spread the dirt around. "I'm crying because you're fine, that's the — oh, it doesn't make any sense, I know it doesn't, I've been perfectly all right for an hour and now I've just — I keep looking at everyone and they're all here and I can't —" She gave up and put her face in her hands, and Ron put his arm around her, ginger head bent to hers, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and Harry understood then that he wasn't the only one who'd been counting. They'd all been counting. The whole Hall had been counting all night. That was what the low murmur was, under everything — a thousand people going round and round their own small lists, finding each other, and finding each other, and not being able to believe it.
"You should be lying down," Hermione managed, into her hands, because even destroyed, even sitting on the floor of a wrecked castle at whatever hour of the morning this was, she could not entirely stop being Hermione. "You've been — Harry, you actually died, you—"
"Let's not," said Sirius, pleasantly, in a voice with an edge under the pleasantness that could have cut stone. "Let's very much not, tonight. There's a good girl. We'll have all of it, in the morning, in daylight, over a great deal of breakfast, and I shall want to hear every word and then I shall probably need to sit down in a dark room. But not tonight." His hand had found the back of Harry's neck without seeming to, warm and heavy and steadying, and it stayed there. "Tonight we're just going to be relieved. Everyone's allowed to be relieved. It's practically compulsory."
"He's right," said Ron, muffled, from somewhere near Hermione's hair. "For once. Write it down."
"I have a list," said Hermione, thickly, and lifted her tear-blotched, dirt-streaked, absolutely wretched face to glare at all of them, "of everyone who's safe, and everyone who's in the wing, and everyone who's been sent home, and I've checked it four times, and I'll thank you all not to make fun of the list, the list is the only thing keeping me—"
"Nobody's making fun of the list," said Marlene at once, and sat down on the floor beside her — Marlene McKinnon, who Harry had never in his life seen sit on a floor — and held out her hand for it. "Give it here. I want to see it. Read it to me. We'll go through it together, name by name, and I'll tell you which ones I've laid eyes on myself." And Hermione, with the desperate gratitude of someone handed the one thing in the world that could help, gave her the parchment, and the two of them bent over it, and Marlene began, in her flat steady voice, to read out the living.
"Weasley, Arthur — safe, I've seen him. Weasley, Molly — safe, up in the wing with Fred. Weasley, William — safe. Weasley, Charles —"
"You've all been counting," said a mild voice, and Luna Lovegood was standing at the end of the cot.
Harry had no idea how long she'd been there. She had a graze along one cheekbone and a smear of something silver in her fair hair, and she was holding, cupped in both hands as though it were a small bird, a single scuffed trainer.
"Everyone's doing it," she went on, serenely, as though continuing a conversation they'd all been having for hours. "Round and round. I've been doing it too, only I count differently — I count the ones I can hear. You can't lose someone you can hear, you see. That's Ron laughing at something, over there, so I never have to look at Ron. And that's Ginny not laughing, which is also very Ginny, so I don't have to look at Ginny either." She tilted her head at Harry. "You count with your eyes. That's why it's tiring you out so. Eyes have to keep being pointed at things. Ears just get on with it."
"...Right," said Harry, who found, as he generally did with Luna, that this was at once completely mad and exactly correct.
"I found your shoe." She held the trainer out to him. "It was on the stairs up to the Owlery, which is a very long way from anywhere you're likely to have been, so it must have had quite an adventure without you. I thought you'd want it back. It looked lonely, being only the one."
Harry took it. It was, in fact, his — he had genuinely not been aware, until this precise moment, that he'd lost a shoe at all. He looked down at the single scuffed trainer in his hands, and quite without warning felt his throat close up all over again, for no reason he could possibly have explained, over a trainer.
"Thanks, Luna," he managed.
"You're welcome." She smiled at him, entirely unbothered, entirely kind. "You can stop now, I think. The counting. Everyone's here — I've heard all of them tonight, every one." And she drifted away down the Hall towards Ginny, humming something with no tune to it, and left Harry sitting there holding his own shoe.
Marlene watched her go. Then she cleared her throat and picked the list back up where she'd left it. "Weasley, Charles — safe," she said. "Weasley, Percival — safe, and insufferable, up in the wing where he belongs. Weasley, George — won't leave his brother's bed, which is precisely where I'd have expected to find him —"
Harry stopped listening to the names and listened instead to the sound of them, the low even roll of Marlene reading survival off a page, name after name after name, each one a small door closing gently in his chest, and slowly — so slowly he didn't feel it happen — his eyes stopped chasing the lanterns. He didn't need to count any more. Someone else was counting. Someone he trusted was reading the whole list aloud and every name on it was safe, and he let himself, for the first time since the shouting stopped, simply be still.
"You've stopped," said Sirius, low, watching him. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah," said Harry.
"Good." The hand on the back of his neck squeezed once, and Sirius blew out a long breath and let his own head drop back against the wall, eyes closing, and Harry saw for the first time how grey he was under the dust, how far past the end of himself, how much this was costing the man beside him to keep grinning and keep steady and keep saying drink your tea when what he plainly wanted to do was pull Harry into his arms and hold on and not let go for a week. He didn't do it. Not here, not with the Hall full and half the wizarding world watching for the Boy Who Lived to break. He just kept his hand on the back of Harry's neck, and kept Harry's shoulder against his own, and stayed.
"Sirius," said Harry.
"Mm."
"You're really here."
Sirius opened one eye. "Where else would I be?"
And it was such a stupid answer, such a Sirius answer, so entirely beside the enormous point of it, that Harry felt the whole night rise up in his throat all at once, and he had to look hard at his own knees and blink several times and get it back down, and Sirius — who missed nothing, who had missed nothing where Harry was concerned since the moment he'd met him — pretended, generously, not to have seen.
"I'm here," he said, quietly, to the ceiling. "I'm not going anywhere. None of us are. That's rather the whole miracle of it, isn't it. Against every reasonable expectation — here we all still are."
Footsteps came up the Hall, quick and light, and Harry knew them before he looked. He always knew them.
Ginny dropped down onto the cot on his free side — the side away from Sirius, the side away from the shoulder Pomfrey had strapped, she'd clocked the injury in a single glance without being told, the way she clocked everything about him — and she didn't say are you all right and she didn't cry and she didn't make him talk. She just leaned her whole weary weight against him, her head against the good shoulder, her hand finding his and holding on, and let out a breath that seemed to go on for a very long time.
"Mum's coming down in a bit," she said, to their joined hands. "From the wing. Fred's was awake for a few seconds which she says is the best news she's had all night. Dad's up there. Percy's up there being all — you know. Percy. George won't leave the bed. And Lilah's told the Healers exactly what she thinks of them and is threatening to discharge herself, so they've put her ankle in a splint she can't undo and she's furious about it." A pause. "So that's — that's everyone. On our side. Everyone's accounted for."
"I know," said Harry.
"Do you." She lifted her head and looked at him, and there was the fierce thing in her face that he loved, undimmed even now, even exhausted, even at the ragged end of the worst night of both their lives. "Because you've got the look. The counting look. Ron gets it too. You've been up there in your own head doing the register."
"I've stopped," said Harry.
"He has," said Sirius, from the other side, eyes still shut. "Marlene read him the list. Works better than a Sleeping Draught and doesn't leave a taste."
Ginny looked past Harry at Marlene, who was still on the floor beside Hermione, still reading, still steady, Longbottom, Neville — safe, off finding the ones who got lost in the towers, I've seen him twice, and something in Ginny's face went soft in a way it very rarely did.
"Right," she said, and settled her head back down on Harry's shoulder, and closed her eyes. "Then I'm going to sit here and be one of the names on somebody else's list for a while, and you're going to sit here with me, and neither of us is going to be brave or clever or noble about anything at all for at least an hour. Agreed?"
"Agreed," said Harry.