light years.
Silence resides like an unwelcome guest in the Burrow. On the days he doesn’t go to the Ministry, Harry mostly sits at the table in the Burrow’s kitchen, picking the skin on his lips. New post-war commodity at the Burrow: dirty dishes populating the a sink that has always been spic and span. A glass of water on the table that he never drinks. Harry Potter, saviour of the Wizarding World, rotting in the kitchen of a crooked, sun-bathed house. Out of the corner of his eyes, past the kitchen window, there is a blur of red and ivory. Sometimes he watches this blur flit back and forth between the frame of the window, sometimes he puts his head on the table, closes his eyes. Wills himself to remember her skin on his, the smell of her on his jaws. She feels a lifetime away. Centuries pass before he lifts his head back up again. The slant of the sun lengthens on the table. Near the edge, G.W is inscribed on the wood, below it, the initials of her brothers. These words belong to another time, when pain came from breaking elbows in the yard, gnome biting their toes, bee stings from the hives sticking to the trees. These days, pain comes from things they shouldn’t have even experienced.
“Your childhood was robbed from you,” Kingsley told Harry one time when they were repairing the greenhouses at Hogwarts. Amid the havoc of the war, green plants shot up regardless.
So much more than just his childhood was robbed from him, Harry wanted to tell the Minister. His life was almost snatched from him. His future, his people, all the love he could’ve had. He didn’t say anything, just shrugged. After, as he stood near the lake smoking a cigarette, squirrels scampered away from him. Like they knew this life he had, was more tinted with death than any eighteen year old life should be.
/
Now, the sounds from outside populate the silence of the Burrow. With Ron and Hermione in Australia, Mrs. Weasley at the Shell Cottage, and the others at the Ministry, the house seems to be an extension of the aching loneliness he feels. Lately, he is consumed by the need to do something, anything except attend hearings at the Ministry and helping at Hogwarts. There is a constant restlessness between his ribs. In bed sometimes, he cannot feel his body anymore, feels like he is becoming more and more unmoored from this plane of existence. In the bathroom that mostly smells of shampoo that Mrs. Weasley makes from the flowers from the Burrow’s orchard, he looks at the reflection in the cracked mirror above the sink, and is unable to locate himself.
Ginny, he observes, embodies his restlessness. She is wild that summer, Ginny. He sees it. She prowls around the Burrow at night, lithe and haunting. A ghost. In daylight, she is as fleeting as an afterthought. She is gone before he’s up, and thinks no one notices how she is beginning to disappear, parts of her falling off and getting lost. Untended grief settling in those empty spaces. Harry becomes increasingly concerned, but no one has taught him how to prevent another person from disappearing into darkness. Framed in the window of his room in the attic, he too, looks ghastly. If it weren’t for the throb of pain in his open wounds, the sting of summer on his red burns, he wouldn’t be able to tell if he were human, Harry thinks.
He remembers their days at Hogwarts, how she’d demand he sit against the trees and watch her fly. Eyes glinting, and a wicked grin on her face, she’d deftly braid her hair into a plait. Broom between her legs, she’d say, “Top this, Potter.”
And he watched, because how could he not. After everything he’d seen in his sixteen years of life, she was a miracle. Later, he’d unbraid her hair, lips on the column of her neck, tasting the wind on her skin.
These days, the only forms of interaction between them are: their dirty cups stacked on top of each other, strands of hair she sometimes leaves in the bathroom sink, her clothes and his tangled in the laundry hamper.
/
It happens on an ordinary afternoon. He stops a few feet away from the Burrow, near the chicken coup to smoke a cigarette. Today, he met Kingsley at the Ministry. He offered Harry a spot in the Auror Department.
They sat opposite each other at the table in the Minister of Magic’s office. He told the Minister, “I have to think about it.”
“Yes, Harry. Take your time. Maybe wait till Ron and Hermione are back.”
“Ron and Hermione, yeah,” he said. It dawned on him that he’d never taken an important decision without them by his side. He was so wholly inadequate without the two of them.
The birds chirp in the orchard now, the breeze heavy with humidity. Dragonflies buzz over his head. Hermione once told him, when she was little, she’d look out the window of her bedroom in the hopes of seeing dragonflies.
“Dragonflies mean heavy rain!” her Mum used to tell her. In his last letter, Ron wrote Mrs. Granger’s memory was proving difficult to be restored. She was still unable to remember Hermione.
It sure feels like heavy rain today. He blows the smoke out, slowly. Taps his finger against the cigarette and watches the column of ash fall away.
“What’s that?”
He turns around to see Ginny, broom against her hip, standing where the orchard gives away to tall and wide grass blades. Her voice sounds different, rusty from the lack of use.
“Cigarette,” he tells her.
“What?”
“Muggle shit.”
She just lifts her eyebrows, her mouth perched on the brink of laughter. Her hair is wild, sweat shining on her face. For a few seconds they look at each other. He is afraid to look away.
“Want to try?” he asks her.
She shrugs and steps forward. He covers the distance between them in three long strides.
/
The floating foliage of the leaves makes shadow patterns on their bodies. The sunlight feels old, slightly muted. She he likes the way the yellow light catches the tiny hairs on his arms, bringing out the dark butterscotch of his emerald pupils, makes his face look unbelievably beautiful. They pass a cigarette back and forth, the both of them lying on a patch of asymmetrical sunlight, the dew from the grass wetting the back of their thin shirts. He blows the smoke from the corner of his mouth, so that the left side of his face disappears momentarily in this white smoke, then reappears in the very next instant. She can smell the scent of her own hair, like wildflowers, and wishes he smells it, too, over the smell of his cigarette.
He doesn't speak much, nor does she. But his lingering looks burn into her skin, make her feel more than a wound that won’t scab, not even at the edges. Yesterday she took him to the pond, and they sat near the edge, with their feet in the water. Green weeds curled around their calves. Their shoulders were touching.
He said, “I thought about you, a lot. You know, when I was away.”
She blinked at him and wondered if it was too early to tell him about hurting in his dorm, seeing his face every time they shot a Cruciatus at her, willing to die than divulge any information that might be used against him.
“Oh.” She touched her chest with her palm. She looked out at the pond, listened to the croaking of the frogs on the green pads of leaves bigger than the sun in the sky. She wanted to give him her heart, knew he’d cradle it in his rough palms delicately, with the kind of tenderness that touches you once in twelve million light years.
“I stole your jumper,” she told him. “Wore it to bed.” Every night.
She turned to look at him the same moment he looked away. She caught the shy upturn of his smile sideways, for a fleeting moment, and revelled in it for the entire night.
She turns to him now, props herself on her elbows. He looks up at her. There are a million things she wants to tell him. The most important of which, perhaps, is that she loves him. Wants them to heal together.
“Harry.”
He stubs his cigarette in one quick motion. The contours of his lips, the wetness of his tongue are painfully familiar. Beautifully so.
