He was well aware there was a vague sense of middle-aged cliché surrounding the whole thing.
Harry was thirty-five. It was not an age he’d expected himself to make at eighteen, or really at any point growing up. When one doubted whether or not they would reach the very next day, to worry over the fate of himself in two decades’ time would be a complete waste of energy.
He’d been sort of dimly aware that Sirius had been this age when Harry had known him, but he himself had been frozen in time by incarceration, at once twenty and two-hundred, and so time held no great direction for him either. Lupin would’ve been the same age too, though time did seem to move at a different speed around that man, with the weight of the world upon his shoulders.
And so no, Harry had not entered into the beginnings of early middle age with any sort of map for what that might look like when successful, and it seemed that chance had finally caught up with him. Twenty-five had brought with it a divorce, inevitable and sort of necessary by the end as it was, and had come with the ending of any sort of traction of progress in his professional career.
There was an aspect to it, of course, that was him being a victim of his own success, being that when one became the youngest person to do everything one set to do, eventually one ran out of things to do. He became, as banal as it would seem, Alexander, his eyes weeping for the misery of his own greatness. His hubris would deliver him momentary brilliance, and yet half a lifetime of disappointment, living in the memory of the man he’d been, and then doomed to live to be the man he was then.
And was that not, as he then learned, the very nature of adulthood? Of ageing , of not-youth? That one then existed in comparison , that one recalled their vision of the world at eighteen, seeing the world as infinite and theirs to be taken and held and improved, and then suddenly you are older, and the world is still so big and yet your hands are too small to hold or take or improve anything at all?
That there is this tunnel vision that is forced upon you, by age, by time. The very cruelty of it, that as you live for more moments, moments forever mean less and less for you, and that you could only accept that as time never ceased; time never gave way, and only offered brief respites out of the tunnel, when he could half-lift his head away from work papers or routine drinks with friends and think of the things he’d never even had time to think to do. That he’d not picked up a broom in years or that he’d never really studied any aspect of magic he’d been truly fascinated by, his own learning forever pragmatic, forever bestowed by others, never charting his own path.
And he’d never been one for sensuality, either, and yet he could not help, in his alone times with the glasses of firewhiskey one after another, or the occasional cigarette on a night out, about the women he might well’ve adored had he allowed himself the chance to, that he knew he’d never be truly comfortable in being with someone he did not truly, utterly love, and yet what was comfort in the face of utter beauty? What were absolutes and hindrances in the face of existential joy? Where did that leave him, at thirty-five, with less than ten lovers, and the joys of the body forever tainted by the cold pain of the feeling of dying love?
And that was what lingered with him most of all, in the times he found himself alone in his home, in the world that was entirely his own making; that he’d never made anything truly good in the world. He brought about good things, and he was not myopic enough to rid himself of that goodness by his mind’s twistings, but this life of his was not good; it was not a pretty one. There was no beauty about his life. No big family, a home bought but not made, a son that would soon leave. A cat. The cat was lovely.
He knew that he was beginning to stick out in the pictures, in the glances people cast around parties during moments of delight and happiness, their eyes would pass over him, or would stick upon him as if to say that he did not fit. That Ron and Hermione had a full life, a beautiful creative life with children and success and progress and love and all of the joy they could hope to have, and it was not that he did not have that or even some of that, or that he was terribly awfully miserable, but that he was not complete; that he did not even profess to be moving towards completion. That truly, in his movement, he was static, that if he was not careful, he would never move again.
It all came to a head one Saturday afternoon that he’d been spending with Gabrielle, no longer Gabi nor the once-tried Gab, but Gabrielle. They’d been good friends for years and years, hindered in times by their relationships; by the people they’d attempted relationships with, but otherwise a happy little friendship.
They were in the French countryside that day, at her house. Harry thought it to be a very beautiful place, but perhaps not in the right sort of way to live in. Every feature looked priceless, and he walked around every room worried for what he might break next, and was that not just ageing again?
Gabrielle was beautiful, forever beautiful, but thankfully not in the way that made him yearn, and she came with wine and with food he’d grown a palette to understand and like, but most of all on that day she came with a ring on her finger.
“Congratulations!” Harry had said, his voice not quite as excited as it ought to be, but still very excited, especially with the warmth that filled her blue eyes. “How did he propose?”
And then Gabrielle told him about it all, about the holiday to Greece, and then the meal and the string quartet he’d hired and that he’d gotten down on one knee, and that she’d seen the ring in his pocket in the afternoon at the beach and that she’d been worried he’d gotten cold feet, and that by the time he’d asked she’d been filled with such utter relief that yes had jumped from her mouth faster than no could ever think to cross her mind.
“So how do you feel now?” Harry asked, at the end of her telling. He could well enough guess with the glow of her, of the way she didn’t worry about damaging this house of hers, that she smiled easily. “What is it like, to know you’re with your one?”
But Gabrielle didn’t respond quickly, she took her time to look at him and hear the words in her head as earnestly as he spoke them, and the strangest thing happened; the thing that brought him into this state.
And as he watched her watch him, in her eyes he could see himself age through the years. That in her eyes first he was the thought, the idea, and then he was the fourteen-year-old that must’ve seemed worldly and ancient to her, circumstance placing him as some saviour god for her mind to spin looms with, and then he was the boy in the stories her sister told her about England and her new life here, the one with all the horror and mystery around, and then the one who was really quite ordinary, and then the one who lingered on the age of that family, as Fleur did.
And the world snapped back into some reality at her sister’s wedding, where they saw one another, and she was the teenager and he some meagre form of adult, head old enough for war but not for what came next, or not really old enough at all, but old enough to know that if not him then who?
They were proper friends when they were both in their twenties, and so she’d watched him think himself in love with Ginny, but more with that life, with that family, with that small version of the real world that living with them offered, inoculated from complexity, from the deeper joys, from the richness of near-isolation. She’d suffered his self-delusion, worked to allow him to break free of it himself, to allow himself the honesty of admitting that he was not happy, that his mind had warped joy into just appeasing and warming others. And Gabrielle was most of why he did not do that anymore, with her kindness and her compassion but most of all her weariness, for the only truly un-beautiful part to Gabrielle was the shortness, the brutishness of her patience when it came to him, that she grew mean and sharp when faced with his own truest failings, but in that he loved her for it.
And so she’d watched him morph through his many guises, and she looked at him then with the guise of each and every one of them, the good few, the bad many, the mediocre several, and she’d smiled again when she’d stopped, and then she’d at last spoke, now that she truly knew she was speaking to a person whom would actually hear.
Serendipity, it was then, the sliding doors of love, deep and true platonic love, and a voice that held worth and ears that would listen.
“It is not that you’re a different person with it. You’re you, and that is quite suddenly a good thing. You see, as you do now, all the faults you possess; they do not disappear. They just pale in comparison to the greatness of the love you are then capable of,” Gabrielle told him, and at thirty she was like him equal parts youth and old. “ And the love is different; do not let anyone else trick you into thinking otherwise. The Gods do make souls in pairs, I am sure of it now. I have known love; I have not, before now, before Yoann, known what it is like to feel my complete self matched to one another. That is entirely special. The soul is made to love everyone; it is paired to only one.”
And the spark was born then ; how could it not be?
How was that not something to chase, something to dedicate the solace of his heart and spirit toward? That Gabrielle, his dearest Gabrielle, who had suffered love, loss, and the breakings of engagements, who had watched his divorce and her sister’s divorce, who had watched her loved ones suffer the war, who had such ease in companionship, had taken to looking deeper, to searching deeper?
After it all, there were no words Harry would trust more than hers. That such pure words could be spoken so purely at such an age as they were was not something he could ignore.
Hermione had been keen to sing a song while on the run, under her breath mostly but on some nights when the locket was on and weight made her neck sore and her skin raw, she would sing it loud enough for him to hear. If all you young men, she would sing, were like hares on the mountain, how many young girls would take guns and go hunting , and her voice was, like much about her, something of hidden beauty, shown to few but unforgettably lovely once revealed.
The words rang through his ears many a night, and his dreams would be with him a hare, chased for a moment, and then left alone, or they’d get to him stretching his legs, into a half of a full trot, and then suddenly he’d be awake, and the words would be in his ears for nights to come. If all you young men were like fish in the water, how many young girls would undress and dive after, was the next bit Hermione had sang, a blushing young girl she’d been then, and he a blushing boy, red by the notion of being naked with one another, even if only realised through the thought that the other might think it.
They’d kissed a time or two, but he’d not been her hare; Ron had been the one she’d been kissing, the one she’d chased, the one she’d sunk beneath the waves for, the one she’d let herself drift beneath the water with, knowing that she would be lifted by him would she need to be. And they chased one another and sank with one another still.
It was a song her parents had sung to her, Hermione had said ten or so years later after he’d made himself brave enough to ask about it, and then her eyes were sad, with thoughts of those parents, and the realisation that your worst fears were never quite so bad as the fears you never had the bravery to think about, and that the true hell was not the absence of love, because that left room for other love to come, but instead that your parents weren’t in love at all, and that they were planning to separate when you turned eighteen, and that they’d lived in faux-marital bliss for your whole life, and that you’d not been paying close enough attention to notice, and that the love you’d based your life, your goals, your hopes around, was as dispensable and as combustible as the very next thing, that no matter how good a thing looked, it was always truly worse than it appeared; that everything, no matter how beautiful, was a veneer for something ugly.
But Hermione had grown past that, had grown beyond the chaser and the chased, the hare and the grenadier; had believed in the love that pushed beyond the boundaries of the flesh, the very boundaries she moored herself with, to live a happy life, or at least as Harry imagined it. He liked to imagine that he was still the person she’d tell if things were not good, but he could truly never know. He loved her though, and loved her enough to know about the pragmatist that lived inside of her, that took the controls when the path grew difficult, and that perhaps she’d ration herself her children’s happiness rather than talk, but he did not know, he liked to think his friends had grown more than his stunted self, that they were beyond the false economies his mind nearly exclusively dealt with.
But was this — this new obsession! — this new desire, this new fire that Gabrielle had sparked, not just yet another hare’s chase, the hare of two heads and two hearts chasing its own two tails, the grenadier watching it all? Could he ever be sure that this chase, this new chase, was not to end with the hare dead?
And was this worry age, was it time, was it the gut’s intuition or the cloudy eyes of the cataract? How could one ever know what to call these things that stirred inside of him, when they’d not once led him right? How could one ever think themselves worthy of big choices when they were not then happy, and then how could one not be taken away by those happy moments? How could the tunnel not dig itself, when the only thing one could see was the dot in the distance?
But no, this was the cruelty of his mind, was that he knew himself to hold something special, a tiny fraction of something wonderful, a little spark of fatality, a magic all in itself, a fingertip on the loom.
And yet he knew himself completely ordinary too, that he was born the same as everyone, as he should be, and so he knew that whatever he could do, he did not deserve, and yet he was forced, by his own power, his own ability, by the Alexander that lingered on his shoulder and the tears on his cheeks that would not dry, that he was duty forced and bound to be that man, to force himself into progress, whatever progress may look like and be, and push on, that he could not be still, not when he knew now, by Gabrielle’s beautiful love, what stillness looked like.
Yet where did direction go when undirected? Did it turn itself in circles? Did it go forward, north to its truest pole, or did it stand still until the direction appeared?
Teddy was there when he found out, back home for the Easter holidays, Good Friday it might well have been, easter eggs around because the chocolate tasted special to Teddy’s palette, even at seventeen, and Harry did still get true joy from seeing his son happy in that giddy way that soft hearts were allowed to be.
But then Teddy brought up the future. “I’m thinking of joining the Aurors,” he said, a mug of hot chocolate in his hands, hair a dark black. He was wearing a hoodie he’d found somewhere in their house, one Harry had forgotten he’d owned. “And I don’t expect you to put me ahead of anyone with this, but you should know that it’s what I want and you can’t persuade me otherwise.”
And Harry had tried of course. “Is that really something you want to do with your life?” Harry asked, the words an echo of what Hermione had asked him when Harry had been a teenager, two or three lifetimes ago. “The pay’s dreadful, you work longer than you should and you never get paid on time, and they don’t pay overtime. You’re years before you do anything more than paperwork and guarding the streets, and to be honest, you’ll have a target on your back being my son, won’t you?”
“But I want to be challenged, Dad,” Teddy said. “Academics are challenging, they’re difficult, but there’s not a competition there; I’m fighting my own mind, and it’ll only drive me to madness like it does everyone. And before you say something, I’m not good enough at Quidditch to go professional, and even if I did I’d not be good enough to fight the rumours that I’m only there because of you.”
“And you think the rumours wouldn’t be there at the Aurors?”
“I’d be able to show it wasn’t true there,” Teddy said, “and I’d genuinely be tested there; it’d be my life or theirs, against the most dangerous people on the planet.”
“You’d be years before you were in a real fight.”
“You weren’t.”
“Things were different when I was your age.”
“You mean you were special?” Teddy asked. Harry scoffed. “I know who you are Dad, you don’t have to pretend like you’re not famous like when I was a kid. I don’t care if I have to wait — if I have to earn it. This is what I’m supposed to do. I’ve known it forever. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but this is what I’m doing.”
“The world isn’t what it used to be,” Harry said, searching. “There’s not a new dark lord popping up every week like how we used to have it. People have grown up a bit; they’ve realised you get more done in peace through politics. Go into that, instead.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we have magic. If you have magic and you decide to spend your life sitting in a darkened room telling lies to impress people you hate, you’ve failed magic.”
And these words, direct and crass as they were, were the words of his son, of the one whom he knew to be most alike himself. Harry knew the words to exist in Teddy’s own infinity, in their shared infinity, that they were true and honest and earnest, that he’d not come by them falsely.
“I’m not lying at all in what I say. It’s awful work.”
“But it’s work I want to do. Allow me that.”
The hot chocolate wasn’t hot anymore but with a wave of a wand it was, and then Harry sagged into the soft pillows on his chair and spoke again, his lips tingling with the odd taste of magical heat.
“This might not mean much to you now, I mean for heaven’s sake you’re not eighteen yet, but one day there’ll come a time where you’re going to fall in love with someone, and they’re going to worry about whether or not you’re going to come home alive every night, and it’ll be a weight you’re going to force them to wear. I just hope you know that.”
“I know Dad. But sometimes you just know what to do,” Teddy said. He cleared his throat. “Is — Is that what happened with you and Ginny?”
Harry spoke quickly. “Maybe in the beginning, but not really for the rest.” But he was lying, of course he was, that was exactly it; it was all that their marriage ended up being.
And perhaps that was the pain of it all, that they could shoot holes into one another with enough force to puncture, and that was all they could do, that their relationship was just the memory of what being alone was, and the slight soothing that familiarity offered. That the little morsel of love his heart had for everyone, for others, was in Ginny’s case warped only into tiny fragments of shrapnel.
He would complain over her never being home, and she would do the same, and she would complain that he was not taking their marriage seriously, and then he would do the same, but their minds, kind and lost things, would see the slight joys too, and bring them big. Would recall the smiles, the flowers, the dates, the warmth, dear God in heaven the warmth, and brush away the shrapnel, fight away the grenadier, chase down the hare, dive beneath the freezing water, until they couldn’t anymore.
“So is there anyone?” Harry asked.
“Yeah, there is.” Teddy raised up his hands, parts surrender and parts halting. “It’s not like that anyway, it’s just — I don’t know if I can feel that, the way that everyone else feels for the people they love -love.”
“That’s okay,” Harry said, voice soft. “You’re allowed to feel however you want, so long as you’re happy with what you’re doing.”
Teddy nodded. “I just— don’t. I love my friends, but I don’t have that other little thing everyone else seems to”— he laughed quietly —“it just confuses me a bit, honestly. It’s all anyone ever talks about at school, it’s all the books are about, it’s all the songs are about. I don’t get it at all.”
“Then you don’t need to,” Harry said. “You’re you. Do whatever you want. I’m always going to be on your side, so long as I know what you are doing is making it in your genuine best interest. Be whoever you want to be.”
“Even an Auror.”
“Maybe,” Harry said, a hand through his hair. “Now tell me about this person; you never mention anyone in your letters other than the Weasley’s.”
Teddy laughed. “She’s— well, I don’t think she even knows what she is, but she’s a Weasley, technically. It’s Victoire. She’s just sort of the person I care most about?” His hair cycled through colours . “It’s—it’s just really difficult to say in words. It’s not like I want to buy her flowers or anything, I don’t care that she’s dating Turpin at the minute, they make her really happy which makes me happy, but she’s like, my best friend, but times a billion.”
“And she supports you in becoming an Auror?”
“We can call her on the floo now and ask her,” Teddy said, jumping from his seat. “She knows how happy it would make me, yeah. Definitely.”
“And you promise this is something you want to do? Not just something you feel obligated to do?”
Teddy reached over to grab Harry’s hand; he gave a reassuring squeeze, and what a horrid moment that was to be reassured by one’s own child . “I was born to be an Auror.”
Harry smiled.
“Then you have my full blessing,” Harry said. “And I’m going to ring Fleur anyway. It’s been ages since we last spoke, and I ought to meet Victoire as your best friend, rather than your…friend.”
Then there was a smile to Teddy’s face, a joy, a complete joy that made all the thoughts Harry had before it feel at once completely selfish and ridiculous, that anything could ever matter nearly as much as the smile on Teddy’s face. A face he’d watched grow from birthing pink to hale and tanned then, had ventured through every shade and every form of adolescence until then. It was the beauty of his gift, the ever-change of it, was that, in its openness, it offered the clearest view into the vision within, and so on that lovely face of his son’s, he’d seen it all.
The words of Dumbledore rattled within the mires of Harry’s own then, and that his greatest gift was love, and yet then, it seemed no more a gift than oxygen and sunlight, for how could one not see their family, their children, and love them absolutely? How could one not be enthralled by their success, for that love was so absolutely boundless, and of course it was better than the success of the self, as that was a brief thrill, a tiny dance upon the senses and the stilled forever, where the joy felt through others was ignited every time one saw the other.
But then what became when the paths of loved ones never crossed again? Was life only the dance of the senses, the chase, the reflection on the water, the warmth warmth warmth warmth warmth
What else could Harry do then, when he was forgotten? And he was being forgotten, slow as time, but he was slowly being forgotten, both to time and to people, as everyone was, that the people he loved would remember him, but there were few of them now, fewer in the years, and Teddy would be the only one in the end, telling tales of him, and he would become a tale, no longer the man, no longer the hare even, just the tail .
And that deep urge to love, to create, to grow this list of loved ones came along, and yet it was cheap then, dirtied by his ego, his weakness, that the miracle of love and birth was to be little more than blinding the fear of the tunnel darkening, well that was the worst of it, that to be so selfish with something to utterly beautiful was the worst of him yet, the worst of him by far. He’d surrendered his twenties to the masking of fear, the head in the sand, arms folded, the loom locked away, and truly, was he not a better man than that? Could he not then, ever but then, and finally but then, allow himself that? Allow himself the virtue of belief, that he was worthy of Gabrielle’s ideas, that they did exist in the same spheres, that her Paradise was his too . And that perhaps the frenzied light she bathed in was one that could land upon his skin too ; that the love that she turned the sun with could turn his stars .
So he moved, as he did, as it goes, as he goes, on and on, and he went, went to the fire and rang Fleur, found her shocked with his appearance, her face not even reaching the fire but at the edge of it, the still starlight silver locks of her hair dangling just where Harry could see.
And he asked her quite immediately whether or not she and Victoire would like to join him and Teddy for dinner tomorrow evening, and she said yes too, a smattering of shock with the words, but Harry did not know her well enough to say what it meant, but there was shock he was sure, but that wasn’t important as she said yes, and she was coming over tomorrow evening and that she would bring wine, and that Victoire was allowed to drink wine with meals, just so that he knew, and that when Teddy had been over he’d been allowed too, and Harry had said the same of the same, and so they went, on to the rest of the lives, but crossing again tomorrow evening, a spring evening it would be, probably raining, and yet with Spring, was there just not the possibility for something beautiful?
The drama of his worry, his sadness, was reminded to him then as the immediate world appeared to him, and he felt so very silly — and age, was it not just the most miserable sin? — for all of the times he’d been sad, and thought sadness was something that was pervasive and never-ending. But was that not the cruelty of joy too, that it mocked sadness, that those peaks promised valleys to never appear again, its voice lovely enough that you were forced to believe it, the head in the clouds blind to all else, the thin air asphyxiating, the descent looming.
But the climb was looming too, and the peaks were not always there, and perhaps this would be the time that the descent did not loom again either, the cycle broken, and perhaps he was more than this, perhaps he existed beyond the cycles, the circles, perhaps this was the difference. Perhaps the loom was better off broken, discarded in a dark corner, broken apart for kindling. And was this him, was this his purpose, that perhaps the next occasion was better, that the peak did not happen, that he could be happy in the middle, the sun warming him still, the air thin but enough, the rocks beneath not meeting his skin ?
Nothing was quite going right for the next day either, and suddenly he could feel the lungs tighten, the cat was looking at him strangely. Teddy had decided to return to Hogwarts early to study for his exams; Harry could not begrudge him this and took him there himself, told as he got there by Professor McGonagall that he’d just missed the Delacours, in fact, that Victoire was hidden away in the Hufflepuff dorms waiting for Teddy, and that no, Fleur ha d not mentioned anything about the evening, and so Harry was forced to go about his day, as though nothing at all had been there, as though the tapestry he could see dangling off of the loom was not there at all, as though the silk that passed through his fingertips was, what, smoke and whispers?
But that was all he could do, and so he forced himself to dwell within the mires of professional life for a moment, dimly aware that his job was being performed well, that his job was dull, that its dullness was a good thing, and that he should be happy for its dullness. He read the paper; the cannons were doing quite well. They were making something of a European Cup run; the good Latvian team would likely win, but it was something to think about. Miracles happened, they say, and miracles so regularly occurring and so banal in nature ought not to hold the same description as the immortal soul inside the wretched self, and yet the paper was still talking about the European Quidditch Cup.
Apparently , an ex-pro said that the new manager was a good man-manager , and Harry had to read the words several times to make sure it was not a mistake in typing, but that was exactly what it said. He had new ideas about the game, that he was making them take it seriously, their jobs seriously, that he’d really made his players grow up under him. And Harry then, pondered how on Earth this related to the game of Quidditch, and what made a Quidditch fan care about this sort of thing enough to read about it in the paper.
He could understand the tactical reviews, the systemic analysis of that; he could even understand the player profiles. Not because of what they said about the best players in the world, but seeing how they reacted to the same questions every time, each person the same questions, offered a litmus test, Harry believed; it soothed the question that everyone seemed to have about everyone famous: were they someone you’d enjoy having round for tea.
Harry knew he wasn’t.
He could nearly hear the conversation in the staff room; they were talking about where they’d gone on the weekend, which pubs were good, which ones had been taken over by new management, which ones they’d go to a meal at and the ones they’d only go to if they were desperate, and Harry wished they were talking about something more interesting.
There was a very small part of him that wanted to open the door to his office and join their conversation, to wade through the misty looks in their eyes and ask them about their days and pretend to punish them for talking and not working but instead let them leave early, or whatever Dumbledore would’ve done, likely that, he thought. But he never got the chance to, with a meeting coming up in the time he’d spent reading about man-management , and so he walked past the staffroom, the conversation dulling at the sound of his footsteps, and he left his department to climb into the lift and fire himself down into one of the meeting chambers there; the one they always used, the one nowhere near the courts so that the reporters didn’t see them congregating, not that they needed to be anywhere near the room to know what was being said.
He got in the room and he said his hellos to everyone, Hermione first , of course, a hug and a look, the same look forever the same look, the I love you I wish we weren’t here I wish I’d not been such a swot in school this wasn’t the reward twelve-year-old Hermione thought it was please can we just one day be young again there’s a version of me not doing this and I’ve never wanted to be someone more than I want to be them now, look . H e gave her a similar one back .
She was just about the best person he knew; the thought, the realisation that seemed to dawn endlessly on him, dawned once more.
And then Minister Greengrass, yes that Greengrass, went on and on about maintaining campaign promises as though they were the ones that campaigned for her, and Harry wished he’d brought the paper. Hermione was nodding and making notes, but he knew she wasn’t quite there, and he looked at her then, and she was lovely as ever, and he wanted it to be just the two of them too. Not for any particular reason, but he might’ve asked her about her opinion about his struggles, and gotten her to tell him about going back to therapy, or maybe she’d tell him to go into the muggle world as if lying was his solution. He might do it for her.
But he knew that she’d want to be at home with Rose and Hugo tonight, and asking whether or not he could pop over would only bring about some conflict within her, as he knew that there was still a part of her, the part that said they were both still young and they were best friends and that their friendship was still something to be prioritised against all reason ; that part would want him to come around and stay for dinner, and that she enjoyed having another person to make food for, or order food for, or that the diversion of her time away from her children was in some way a good thing, and so he knew he couldn’t do that.
Greengrass was then talking about her wanting to uphold traditional values but not at the expense of progress, and Harry wondered how many people did that phrase go through before it took its absolute form of that, how many people spent day and night toiling away with ink and parchment to craft what was the very middle of the middle of the middle of the road, how proud she had been to come upon the phrase that would say so very little with so many syllables, that would make everyone hear it be reminded of how lovely silence was; how perhaps it was time to book that week off that the admin department had been mentioning wouldn’t be carried into next year and go into nature, maybe see the Isle of Skye, or the middle of a very, very deep forest.
There was a rush to her talking, as though she had somewhere to be, as though there was something governing her actions other than herself, as though this was not the most pressing thing in her life at that moment. Greengrass didn’t wait to listen to questions, she just went about her words, glancing every so often to the others in the room, never making eye contact, and then going on, and soon the meeting ended, but Hermione was the first out of the room because it was her last appointment of the day, and her children were at home.
But she did look over her shoulder at him as she left, at his haste-less form, and she did meet his eyes, and it was within that look, in the kaleidoscope of age, of eleven and eighteen and twenty and thirty and thirty-five and the forever that would come, and the love oh God the love she had for him, it was more than he could ever bear, and that was love, was it not? The weight of it was on him for a moment, and he couldn’t bear it, God imagine if she left him? He couldn’t bear to exist without her, how on Earth would he survive, what would life be without Hermione, and how was this always there, this feeling was always just lingering beneath the surface, this ache that would not soothe, how could this feeling always linger, how could it ever disappear?
But this was what familial love was, he knew, as he’d asked her. This was agape, that unconditional meant unconditional, that it came upon you within no conditions, that it was the safest embrace he’d ever known, and then one day he would be fine and then suddenly he would be reminded of the beauty of what he had, the Venus carved in the marble. And he would not be reminded by the statue, by the finery of its detail, but by the thought of never seeing it again; by knowing about it and not living with it, by the rubble that would be left when it was broken.
Teddy’s feelings made absolute sense to him then; he’d found the sort of friend that would form these feelings, and so how could he not be fascinated? How could a young mind not find the peaks and valleys he’d experienced brilliant enough to occupy hi mself ? And perhaps he would grow up and live a life beyond the scope of Gabrielle’s, and he supposed Harry’s own, ideation, and that he truly was not one that required romance to live happily, and Harry would be thrilled for him; within it he would lose nothing, he knew, as there was not possibly a way in which his heart could fill more so than it did then as he looked at Hermione.
But there was no dignity to his feeling, and she was gone, and Harry left too without a word to anyone else, pretending not to hear their voices asking for him, forgetting to nod at the people he passed, until he got to his office again and poured himself a tea, and sat still, sublimely still, until it felt like the world had forgotten that he was a living thing, and only then did it feel like he could breathe again.
He wanted to write Hermione a letter and say that , exactly that, exactly his thoughts, and yet his hand did not permit him to reach for the parchment, and his fingers did not permit him to grip his quill, and his mind did not volunteer the words a second time, the feeling fleeting too with the settling of the pounding of his heart, and suddenly the words felt false too, and that, perhaps committing them to paper in this new state made them fake, that they could only be recorded in the right moment, or they would be doomed.
So he didn’t write down a word at all, but he did find something in his office that required his attention, a parchment or two to read and sign, and that became sufficient for what was to be the remainder of his working day, and so he left the office after, exhausted, awfully exhausted, with a deep yearning for a bath and to wrap himself in his blankets until sleep took him.
And so he walked and kept walking out of his office again, walking to the fireplaces at the back corner of the department that he came and left through every day, and then he walked into the fire, and walked out of his own fire, and walked through his living room, and into his kitchen, and then into the hallway, and then up the stairs, and then he hung his robes on the coat-rack on his door, and then he walked into his bedroom, and then he pulled off his tie, and then he undid the top button of his shirt, and then he kicked away his shoes, and then he heard a knock upon the door downstairs, and then he walked out of his bedroom, and then he walked down the stairs, and then he walked along the corridor, and then he opened the door
And Fleur was there.
Fleur .
“Hello,” she said with a wave, a bottle of wine in her hand. “I know the children are at Hogwarts, but I thought it would be nice if we still had dinner. I hope that’s okay?” She tugged at the scarf wrapped around her neck. “I know I ought to have rung ahead, but I didn’t find the time.”
Harry nodded. “Of course,” he said, letting her walk in, walking with her to the kitchen. “I’ve only just gotten home so nothing’s ready.”
“More time to catch up, then,” Fleur said, laughing softly. “It feels like it has been forever.”
“It does.” Harry sighed, the stiffness of his shoulders shifting away with the sigh. “Feels like every conversation I have these days begins like this too.”
“I know what you mean,” Fleur said, nodding quite assertively. “Time — it just seems to disappear, and I am just left here, watching it go, stupidly .”
Harry was pouring wine. “I wish I could stop it,” he said. “Or I don’t know, go back and not waste so much of it when it didn’t seem to be moving quite so quickly.”
That made Fleur’s eyes shoot to his.
Not a word was said for a while. One could hear the burgundy oxidise .
“It’s just all…it’s all it is, isn’t it?” Fleur said quietly. “I don’t see anyone, and then when I do, I’m reminded of all of the very stupid ways I’ve spent my time, and that thought makes me so sad that I miss the next moment to see you, or to see anyone, and I’m just skimming along.”
They both took a seat at the island in the middle of Harry’s kitchen; the seats next to one another. Their knees ; a shift of motion away from touching.
“I’m so glad you said that,” Harry said, perhaps louder than Fleur had expected, “because I just hate the way that people think it’s helpful to tell me to remember the happiness I felt about it. I’m not happy about it now.”
“And was that brief happiness any use to us at all, really?” Fleur said, and in her eyes Harry could see a spark of something. “That happiness was clearly a lie because of what became of it.” She shook her head, her eyes pinching closed. “I don’t think I can do it anymore. I simply can’t think about it anymore; not because of the hurt, but because of the misery that being so…weak brings about in me.”
And Harry could not tell why he did so, as they were not words he would ever otherwise have said, but he looked into Fleur’s eyes, knees touching, a bottle of wine shared between their glasses, and said.
“I know exactly how you feel. I feel the same way.”
And a look passed between the two of them. His mind did not have the words to speak a description into existence for it.
“I’ve thought about you quite a lot, Harry,” Fleur said. “It is this strange thing to me; I don’t know quite what to make of it. But I see the times we’ve talked to one another, and the things you’ve said, or the way you’ve made me feel, and I just; I cannot think of another person who has made me wish to continue to spend time with them as completely as I do you. And I will be honest, I have been terrified of that feeling. It is so unerringly strange when everyone else is so…dwindling. I was not enough of a…person, I suppose, to truly take it in.”
She laughed. Heavens above, her laugh.
“I suppose I just needed to know you twenty years before I could make sense of it all, if what I’m saying makes any sense at all,” Fleur said. “Just — do you remember the Christmas you and Teddy spent with my family, it would have been eight years ago?”
Harry nodded.
“It was the first Christmas for me after the divorce, and I just did not have a clue what I was doing, and I felt so guilty, because…well because my parents had given me a full childhood of Christmases with a full family, and I felt like I’d robbed Victoire of what she deserved growing up. You found me crying in my parent’s library.” She shook her head, starlight silver-blonde hair dancing through the air. “And you said to me—“
“—that you’d not taken anything from Victoire,” Harry said, the words appearing in his mind, spun out by the fates, “that she has exactly what you had, your parents, your sister, but she has more. She has you, too, and that’s better than anything else she could possibly have.”
“I’ve turned those words over in my head so many times I’d begun to think they were imagined.” Fleur’s eyes were misty and so very pretty. “Thank you.”
“It’s only the truth .” The touch did not end.
“You made a very difficult day much better for me, and I do not think I can ever thank you enough for doing that,” Fleur said. “And I cannot tell if this is something…special for you and for me, or if this is simply how you experience the world, but to me, that day will be written upon myself for as long as I draw breath.”
“It’s not.” Harry’s breath caught. “It’s — this is special for me, too.”
Fleur’s smile might well have been a miracle; a miracle he wanted to see over and over again. “Then, I suppose I am here to ask if maybe, we can see what becomes of us?”
And all that he could think of it , then, was that, perhaps, love was not new; it was not discovery. It was not revelation .
And that perhaps Gabrielle was correct in what she said, in that you would know exactly what you were feeling when you were with that person, but perhaps, perhaps time was not just simply motion; that it was transformation.
And that perhaps the man he was at twenty might have failed here, but he knew himself, then, that he could only say;
“Yes.”
And the look in her eyes then felt like something, too. The way she smiled softly, the way she placed the pads of her fingertips on top of his, the silk-softness of her skin, the fire that was the warmth of her touch, all of it. Committed to his mind.
And in that moment, his soul felt boundless; that at last, he was free of the body that encased him, his soul infinite. That perhaps there was something to him, something within him that would linger about forever, that his imprint would last; that he would last.
And that, with Fleur then, was the closest he’d felt to another soul in his entire life.