'Tread Softly', Gen, Harry, Weasleys, 12+
Title: Tread Softly
Characters/Ships: Harry, the Weasleys, Hermione; (Harry/Ginny)
Summary: He doesn't think it can ever go back to the way it was.
Rating: 12+
Word Count: 4563
Disclaimer: JKR's. Not mine.
Notes: Many, many thanks, as usual, to
pumpkinpastyfor the read-through and the hand-holding. Title and excerpt come from W. B. Yeats' 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven'.
Further Notes (14th April 08): I have re-uploaded this because the last draft was rather messy, but only the absolute necessaries have been changed. This was written before the release of Deathly Hallows but some of its details are very similar to what happened in the book. Blame my psychic powers.
Tread Softly
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams ...
~ W. B. Yeats
I.
During the cold, damp, lonely and boring nights of the war, dreams of Ginny Weasley had kept Harry alive, but when the very last fight is over, he finds that something between them has changed.
He probably should have expected it, given everything that happened, but … but he didn’t really expect this. He had hoped - he had assumed, as he lay in a bed in St Mungo’s, that she would come and sit with him, as Ron and Hermione were doing: smiling at him when he was awake and giving him glasses of water and letting him forget what had happened. He had hoped that she would come and hold his hand and give him that tired smile that had suddenly become a Weasley trademark, but nevertheless tell him that everything was going to be all right - and, perhaps, he could have said the same back to her.
Now, that dream reminds him of the previous dreams, the wartime fantasies: the wild, drunken parties at his and Ron’s new flat; the colourful, noisy Quidditch matches, wherein they laughed at Ron and the Cannons and she sat on his shoulders and cheered on the opposing team; the endless beds, ponds and airing cupboards.
He had felt the change the first time he had seen her after it was all over. A funeral, with she on the other side of the room. Funnily enough, it was one of the situations he had envisioned - but never quite like that.
His dreams - they belonged to the universe of (already, too soon to have a before and an after) - the world of Hogwarts and sunshine. A world of embarrassing inexperience and sliding his foot up her calf during dinner and spending hours agonising over how to break up with her.
He doesn’t think it can ever go back to the way it was.
During the war, he had never been able to tell whether his fantasies were saving him from madness, or driving him towards it.
In the end, they turned out to be worthless.
Dreams of Ginny had kept Harry alive, but the real Ginny was nothing to live for.
II.
Harry, despite what some people (and papers) say, is not stupid, and he’d always had a penchant for seeing things done whole-heartedly. He had realised that for any of his fantasies to come true he would actually have to speak to Ginny first. And so, the fantasies had always started with some form of meeting. Sometimes, as he plotted intensely complex and impressive strategies at Grimmauld Place, as Kingsley nodded slowly and Ron stuck pins into a map, she would suddenly burst through the door, shaking with fear and soaked through with rain, and he would crush her to his chest and kiss her passionately. Sometimes they were standing on a charred and bloody Quidditch pitch, and slowly, their eyes locked over a smoking carcass. Sometimes, they would be paying their respects to the dead, and she would slip her comforting hand into his.
When it finally happened, it wasn’t quite like that.
Standing on the other side of that dank Ministry hall, he made her out among the sea of red hair, just before they sat down.
There had been no room for he and Hermione on the first bench.
Her hair was like fire; her expression was blank. Running up to someone, sweeping them off their feet and kissing them -
Some things you only get to do once.
He wanted to go to her, take her hand in the way she took his on the night of Dumbledore’s death, but there was something in her expression - her moulded, carefully composed, but nevertheless alarmingly Ginny-like expression - that stopped him.
The ceremony started to the vaguely inappropriate accompaniment of a trumpet. Various people got up and made speeches. As Harry had expected, there was a lot of talk about hope, self-sacrifice, the price they had paid; he had not expected that there would be so little said about the person they were mourning. The one thing said was the usual about ‘living life to the full’.
It had only happened a week ago and Harry was already sick of hearing it.
He almost burst into a peal of inappropriate laughter - as inappropriate as the trumpet - at Ginny’s lack of tears. Hermione’s sobs tore themselves out of her body and all over his shoulder, he could see Ron’s tears from across the room, falling freely down a hardened, stony face - but Ginny’s cheeks remained dry.
He ended up keeping his eyes trained on her throughout the whole ceremony - although perhaps it was only so that he wouldn’t have to look at George.
III.
Now, he spends a lot of time in the Burrow’s garden. It is the best way of avoiding the family.
Besides, he quite likes tramping through the thick, wet grass, squelching through dew, worms and mud, roaming round and round in circles. The weather they’ve been having lately is bad for May, but good for the plants. A far cry from the drought of three years ago.
He isn’t gardening. He knows nothing about plants, cares nothing about plants. He does not foresee a career in Herbology. He is mainly out here for the walking, for somewhere to clear his head, for somewhere to think things through.
It does not work very well. He spends more time dwelling on the flowers than on his life.
He knows it’s stupid: spending all this time thinking isn’t helping him live his life. Planning his every move belongs to before. Now is the time for action - now is the time for living. Now is the time for picking yourself up and getting on with it. This situation is what he has: he has to do something with it.
Nevertheless, he spends more time in the garden than is probably healthy.
Inside, he makes the effort, as does most of the family: with him, with each other, with themselves. He loses himself in old Quidditch books; he sets the table; he attempts to help his best friend with stabs at letters to his still-estranged older brother. He tries to stop his reflexive wince at Charlie’s sudden, extreme brashness, but is guilty himself of laughing too loudly at Ron’s jokes.
If Ginny makes any effort at all, it is in the work of keeping herself blank.
This carefully balanced world is precarious. When Harry hears that George is shutting the shop and moving back home, it takes all of his strength not to ask Hermione if he can come and stay with her and her blissfully unaware parents.
He doesn’t ask her. He bites his tongue and stays with Ginny.
IV.
When Harry spoke to Ginny at the funeral’s reception, it was the first time they had actually talked, living and breathing, face to face, in a year. Harry’s initial, pre-Final Battle fears that it would be awkward had been crushed under the weight of what had happened. He had assumed that this kind of grief - this amount of grief - would overwhelm any awkwardness.
He was wrong.
He grit his teeth and went up to her when she was alone by the refreshments table, surrounded by a sea of vol-au-vents, militantly prepared by hundreds of great-aunts, who Harry, devoid of an extended family, was just starting to realise were the kind of relatives who are only ever seen at weddings and funerals. She looked just as she had in the ceremony - perhaps a little bit more tired. If she noticed his approach, she did not show it.
Reaching the table, he stopped and put his hands in his pockets.
“Hey, Ginny.” It didn’t sound the way it had when he’d practiced.
She met his gaze unflinchingly. “Hello.” Harry wondered why he had been expecting a flinch.
He scuffed his toe on the floor. “You OK?”
He glanced up just in time to catch the sardonic smile. “Yes, I’m fine.” When he opened his mouth to protest, to apologise, to commiserate, she spoke first: “No, it’s all right.” She gave him a practiced smile. “I’m doing the best I can.”
Harry’s throat felt dry. “Well. Er. Great then. Ginny, you know I -”
“It’s all right.” She gave him the smile again.
“I -” He stopped. Her smile unnerved him.
“I’ll see you later, Harry,” she said, and walked off.
And with that, he knew it was over.
V.
He often wonders what he’s doing here. His relationship with Ginny has fallen apart. With every day, he feels more of an intruder in the house.
Funny. He thought that after the war, the opposite would happen.
Wandering around the garden, hands in his pockets, he wonders why he didn’t go with his first instinct after moving back - buy a flat and get Ron out. He feels an odd desire to airlift him to safety - remove him from the stifling atmosphere and put him somewhere else, anywhere else - even the slow, painfully recovering Diagon Alley would be better than this.
As he kicks the trunk of the gnarled old yew tree, he realises what he’s known all along: he is waiting for Ginny.
Ironic, that he should now be the one waiting.
Actually, it’s not bloody well ironic, he thinks as he kicks a gnome out of his way. He’s spent his whole life waiting! Waiting for Voldemort to try and finish him off, waiting to be old enough to go and end it himself, giving up the wait and going off only to find more waiting - because that’s what it was: the occasional hunt for some ugly jewellery interspersed with periods of interminable waiting - and now, here he is. This limbo of a house.
Waiting for the little sister of his broken best friend, waiting for a girl who’s broken - no, not broken, because broken implies can be fixed … waiting for a girl who’s been shattered.
There’s no use being poetic about it. He hasn’t had an English lesson since he was eleven years old - he’s got no fucking idea what irony is anyway.
Some days, it seems that he can’t keep it inside himself, and he wants to storm around the garden and smash things and shout and be fifteen again - why does everyone he care about have to die? Some days he wants to rage at her - shake her by the shoulders and scream in her face. Look at the people who are still alive: me and you and Ron and Hermione - you have everything to be thankful for. But somehow (and this is what angers him the most) he knows it wouldn’t affect her.
So of course, he does nothing.
He is starting to detest the new, quiet him.
VI.
Slowly, he can feel himself falling apart. When Hermione tries talking to him, he says little. When, two months after everything, he finds Ron hunched up in a corner of his room with a pack of Exploding Snap cards, he cannot think of anything to say. When, another month later, Hermione bursts into tears and confides that she can’t take Ron like this anymore, Harry can offer no sympathy.
In fact, he finds himself envying her.
VII.
In August, it rains; Ron, who has taken to playing a lot of Quidditch (sometimes, George joins him), grumbles about being confined to the house. Hermione challenges him to a game of chess, and within half an hour, it looks as if she is going to beat him. The look on Ron’s face is worth even the drizzliest summer weather, and to Harry, the laughing Weasleys surrounding the game - Bill even places a bet - is worth a thunderstorm.
He sees Ginny shoot them all a disgusted look, and stomp off to her bedroom.
The rain brings other consequences: it is this month that Harry starts gardening, a bit - just weeding. He likes to crouch, in the violent, drenching downpour that releases the soggy smell of fresh earth, but somehow manages to leaves the air still foggy and humid, and cut at the ugly sprouts, daring to disrupt the Weasleys’ already shambolic garden. Within seconds after leaving the house, his hair will be flat against his head, and he has to charm his glasses with the spell Hermione taught him, so long ago, but he does it anyway - he finds that there is nothing better than ripping out dandelions from their roots, plunging his hands into wet soil, and if he’s lucky, a bit of mud, and pretending that he’s doing something vaguely productive.
As the rain gets lighter, he starts to become aware of being watched. Faces, lingering, at windows; sometimes, a head hanging out of a window, just staring. They let him get on with it.
One day, when the sun is just starting to peek out from behind the clouds, Mr Weasley comes outside. Harry has ripped out the brambles for more than half the garden, now, and today he is working in a particularly tough corner. Mr Weasley stays a respectful distance away; Harry appreciates this. Mr Weasley spends about half an hour drinking a mug of tea and watching Harry, and then he goes inside.
VIII.
September rolls around, but Ginny doesn’t go back to school. Harry doesn’t know what this means, and he is too scared to ask. Everybody else has just taken it as a given.
IX.
A week into September, Mrs Weasley brings him daffodil bulbs and a trowel. “Here you are,” she says. “I haven’t planted these in years.”
He kneels down and starts to dig. He can feel her watching him, and he is very self-conscious of the fact that he is probably not doing it right. “I like daffodils,” he says. “They’re really ... yellow. Cheerful, and stuff.”
He cringes.
“Technically,” she says quietly, “a daffodil is a 'narcissus'.”
“Really?” He tucks the first bulb into the little soil bed he’s made it.
“Yes, that’s the proper name,” she says briskly, and he finds her kneeling down next to him. “It’s supposed to come from the Greek god Narcissus, who looked into a pool, saw his reflection, and fell in love with himself.”
“What happened?”
“Harry, dear, they have to be much deeper than that - three times the height of the bulb,” she says, and with the trowel, capable Molly Weasley undoes his hard work, digging a tunnel so deep he is afraid the daffodil will never find its way out. She nestles the bulb down at the bottom, and handing the trowel back to Harry - “Now you try” - watches him attempt to a dig a tunnel for the next one.
“Narcissus,” she says after a second, “ended up stabbing himself when he realised the truth - that the reflection wasn’t another person, but himself. If I remember correctly, there was a suitor who he spurned - a boy, you know,” she adds with a twinkle, and Harry is uncomfortably reminded of her daughter and her twins and her Ron and his Dumbledore, “and the boy cursed him, wishing that he would one day know what unrequited love felt like.”
Harry finishes his tunnel, and she hands him another bulb. “Very good,” she says. “Now, ‘daffodil’ comes from ‘asphodel'.”
But no story seems forthcoming on this one. After a second, she gets to her feet, brushing off her knees. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” she says, and turns and walks back to the house.
He sticks his hands down the sides of his tunnel, patting the earth into place. Narcissus, he thinks. He likes planting real flowers. It’s more productive than kicking gnomes, at any rate. He reaches for another bulb, a vision of a bright yellow daffodil army swarming into the Burrow and climbing the up stairs before his eyes. He wonders if he can plant some different flowers - he hopes Mrs Weasley has some other seeds. He feels an odd urge to get some of his own, to go to a shop and select them carefully. This is probably what it feels like to be Neville.
He starts digging another little tunnel. Maybe he should plant some lilies. Maybe he should plant some petunias.
X.
It is mid-October, and Harry is planting hyacinths - “A Persian Muggle once said, ‘Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul’,” Mrs Weasley had informed him as she handed the bulbs over - when Ginny comes outside to watch him.
She is the last member of her family to make this rite of passage, now. Charlie likes to bring him food, and George has done a bit of weeding. Ron and Percy had been out here for hours, one day, on one of Percy’s infrequent visits.
She stands behind him, and he keeps digging.
“So,” she says. “What happened?”
He wipes his hands on his knees, and shuffles around to look up at her. “What?”
“You know. With Voldemort. How did it happen?”
She is looking over his shoulder as she speaks.
“You don’t have to ask if you don’t want to,” he says.
She shrugs, half in be like that, then, but the bigger half in relief, and she turns and walks back to the house.
XI.
It is November, and it is cold, and Harry needs a coat. Mrs Weasley notices this before he has to ask, and she gives him an old Muggle one, built for a shorter, stockier person. Harry doesn’t ask if it belonged to someone who can no longer use it, and Mrs Weasley does not mention it.
That she is willing to give away his clothes, Harry takes as a good sign. He still doesn’t really want to wear it, though.
Then, one day, Lupin spends a few hours planting tulips with him - these, apparently, need cold weather to root - and Harry mentions that the coat he’s wearing isn’t his. Lupin stops digging, looks at him, and says, “I’ve been meaning to give you something - it might come in handy, now.”
The next day, he turns up with a big, black overcoat, which is ridiculously broad for Harry and finishes somewhere around his knees. “It was Sirius’ when he was your age,” Lupin explains. “He wore it everywhere - I think it used to belong to his uncle.”
Ron, Charlie, George and Bill laugh themselves into hysterics at Harry, standing in the middle of the kitchen, drowning in the dark, heavyweight material, while Hermione tucks a Gryffindor scarf around his neck in an attempt to make it look presentable.
It smells of Sirius.
Harry wonders why it is that he feels so differently about the old clothing of two very dead people.
As Mr Weasley mumbles something about a camera and Harry tries to hide, Mrs Weasley smiles at him fondly, and folding the other coat carefully, puts it away in a box.
XII.
Six months ago, a group of Order members had been hiding in Little Hangleton, Harry, Ron and Hermione included, concocting a distant and faintly ridiculous plan of somehow managing to kidnap Nagini. They had received word that a small number of Death Eaters were congregating in the village graveyard, and Harry had slipped off to go and find Snape.
When he had sneaked away that night under his Invisibility Cloak, he had had no idea what he would find when he came back.
'A warning', the note had said.
Three days later, kneeling by the side of Voldemort’s lifeless body, Harry had actually been surprised when Fred didn’t come back to life.
XIII.
Christmas is all right - better than Harry had expected. Ron gets him “A flower book, you pansy,” and Harry hits him over the head with it.
It’s an amazing book, though, a broad, square hardback, with cream-coloured pages and crisp, vivid illustrations. There are instructions on where and how to plant, when to prune, and which potions the flowers are useful in. It’s second-hand, of course - the name inscribed at the front reads Ignatius Starkey - but there are no scribblings in the margins. Harry takes comfort from the fact that the book’s previous owner was also male.
When he finds Ron crying in his room on Boxing Day, Harry feels able to give him a hug. He hopes this is progress.
XIV.
In late February, Harry goes into Mr Weasley’s shed in search of a shovel, and finds Ginny going through the small cardboard boxes that line the shelves. As he walks in, she is returning one to its place and reaching for the almost identical one next to it.
On his entrance, she looks up at him, and then goes back to her quest: pulling out a small, metal implement, she examines it, disregards it, and throws it back into the box.
“What are you looking for?” he asks, eyeing the cluttered room and wondering where he might find a spade of some kind.
“Potato peeler,” she says, not looking up from her rummaging. “Mum wants to charm it.”
He pauses. She moves on to another box.
“Are you OK?” he asks, slowly and deliberately. Painful reminders of the funeral collide into each other at the forefront of his mind.
“I’m fine,” she says brusquely, abandoning her current box and reaching for the next one on the shelf. Then, suddenly, she stills, and turns around to stare at him harshly.
He looks back, uncertain.
“You expect me to be over it by now, don’t you?” she demands.
“No! Don’t be stup -”
“I know it’s been time and I know - I know that in wartime, things like this happen, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to move on -” Her hand goes to the shelf and her knuckles whiten. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to leave this … behind …”
Harry stares at the dust motes, their slow, unstoppable rise highlighted by the pale winter sunshine filtering through the dirty window. He knows she hasn’t finished speaking, and he fears that she is going to say what he doesn’t want her to - what no one has said in the last nine months.
But he is afraid to move. He is afraid he’ll upset the balance: Ginny, speaking; the precarious boxes, balanced on the shelves; the silver dust, disturbed for the first time in a year, twice in one day.
“It’s funny,” she says at last. “When Luna died, it was as though ... I would forget it, and then suddenly I would remember, and it would hit me ... but this - I can’t forget this. He’s everywhere I look.” She lets out a shaking, slightly hysterical laugh. “I can’t look at any of my brothers! I can’t -”
“Me?”
“What?”
“You can’t -” He desperately tries to make sense because he can feel the importance of this conversation. “You can’t look at me.”
He doesn’t think he should have said that. The question he’s really asking hangs in the air - he knows what it is, and she knows too -
Her eyes lift to meet his. “Yes,” she says. “Yes.”
“But -”
“I never asked for proof,” she spits out. “I never asked for proof that you cared more about Snape than us, but -”
“Cared more about Snape -”
“Cared more about finishing him,” she says quietly. “And now I’ve got proof. I could have been happy without it, I could have - I don’t know - gone on and got on with life, but I can’t ignore it. I can’t ignore what happened, what you did -”
Harry opens his mouth, but he’s known for too long now that he has nothing to say.
“So ... I can’t look at you ... because there’s a part of him in you.”
XV.
It is a Sunday afternoon in April, and they are sitting at the kitchen table. Mrs Weasley is cooking and her children are scrounging for sections of the Sunday Prophet: Ron has claimed the news, George has the Sport, and Ginny, eating a yoghurt, is trying to read over George’s shoulder. Harry is paging through his flower book. Over the rustle of the pages and the slurping of Ginny’s spoon, the noise of metal clinking on metal can be heard from the shed, accompanied by Mr Weasley’s occasional muttered swearword.
“Molly,” asks Harry, “can I plant some foxgloves?”
Ron groans.
“Oh, I don’t know, dear,” she says distractedly, “they’re notoriously hard to grow.”
“But I want some,” says Harry stubbornly. “They’re pretty.”
Ron snorts.
“Piss off,” Harry mutters. He would throw something at him, but his book has still got a dent from the last time he hit Ron with it.
“I might just do that,” says Ron, and Harry sees that he’s moved on from the news and into the housing adverts. “I’m thinking of moving out. How d’you think I’d get on in Knockturn Alley?”
“With what money?” asks Ginny.
“Well, there is that problem,” Ron admits unconcernedly. “Hence the Knockturn Alley plan. Hermione’s got a job now, though. I could steal some of hers.”
“What?”
“Yep, in Flourish and Blotts.”
It is George’s turn to snort. “Is she allowed to read on the job, then?”
Ron grins. “She’s only been there two days, and from what I hear that’s already causing problems.” He turns another page. “It’s only for the summer, though ... she’s talking about going back to Hogwarts in September.”
“You can do that?” asks Ginny.
Ron shrugs. “If McGonagall lets anyone back in, it’ll be her.”
Mrs Weasley seems to be keeping herself deliberately silent. Ginny is staring at Ron, scepticism etched on her face. “Are you going with her?”
“I dunno.” Ron shrugs and turns another page of the paper. “I’ll take it as it comes, yeah?”
Harry turns a page of his own book. Dog Rose. “I can’t believe Hermione started earning real money before you did,” he says.
“Hermione does everything before Ron,” says George, not raising his eyes from the Sport. “It’s an undeniable truth of the universe.”
“I can’t believe Hermione’s working in a shop,” says Ginny.
“To be honest,” says Ron, “I can’t believe it took her so long. Kind of throws our life of leisure into the light, doesn’t it?”
“At least I earn my keep,” says Harry. Papaver rhoeas: ‘Cedric Morris’.
“Sorry, mate,” says Ron, “but I don’t see a queue of people paying money to get in and have a look at the garden.”
“We should put signs up,” mutters George vacantly, turning a page. “‘Boy-Who-Lived planted this daffodil'.”
Ginny giggles.
Harry’s head snaps up. She’s grinning at George, and as Harry looks at her, her eyes dart to his. She looks tired, but her beam has momentarily banished her habitual bitterness.
There is yoghurt on the end of her nose; for the first time in months, his stomach twists.
“‘Chosen One touched this watering can',” snorts Ron, and she jolts a little - just a tiny bit. Turning back to George, she says, “George, go on, you’ve had a read, give the paper here -”
He shakes his head. “I think not, little Miss Weasley -”
She lunges for it, but he waves it out of her grasp, laughing. Ron sighs in a long-suffering way, and continues paging through the adverts of flats to rent.
Harry turns another page. Buddleia Guinevere.
He smiles. Maybe there’s hope for them, after all.
- THE END -
Notes: Thanks are due to Wikipedia's probably incorrect information on daffodils, Narcissus and hyacinths; credit is also due to greenfingers.com and bbc.co.uk/gardening. My apologies for any heinous gardening mistakes.
My vision of Sirius' coat is here.
A billion points to the house of your choice if you got the bare smidge of a Sound of Music reference.
eta: For further stories in this universe, click the dreams only tag or go to the masterlist.
Characters/Ships: Harry, the Weasleys, Hermione; (Harry/Ginny)
Summary: He doesn't think it can ever go back to the way it was.
Rating: 12+
Word Count: 4563
Disclaimer: JKR's. Not mine.
Notes: Many, many thanks, as usual, to
pumpkinpastyfor the read-through and the hand-holding. Title and excerpt come from W. B. Yeats' 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven'.
Further Notes (14th April 08): I have re-uploaded this because the last draft was rather messy, but only the absolute necessaries have been changed. This was written before the release of Deathly Hallows but some of its details are very similar to what happened in the book. Blame my psychic powers.
Tread Softly
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams ...
~ W. B. Yeats
I.
During the cold, damp, lonely and boring nights of the war, dreams of Ginny Weasley had kept Harry alive, but when the very last fight is over, he finds that something between them has changed.
He probably should have expected it, given everything that happened, but … but he didn’t really expect this. He had hoped - he had assumed, as he lay in a bed in St Mungo’s, that she would come and sit with him, as Ron and Hermione were doing: smiling at him when he was awake and giving him glasses of water and letting him forget what had happened. He had hoped that she would come and hold his hand and give him that tired smile that had suddenly become a Weasley trademark, but nevertheless tell him that everything was going to be all right - and, perhaps, he could have said the same back to her.
Now, that dream reminds him of the previous dreams, the wartime fantasies: the wild, drunken parties at his and Ron’s new flat; the colourful, noisy Quidditch matches, wherein they laughed at Ron and the Cannons and she sat on his shoulders and cheered on the opposing team; the endless beds, ponds and airing cupboards.
He had felt the change the first time he had seen her after it was all over. A funeral, with she on the other side of the room. Funnily enough, it was one of the situations he had envisioned - but never quite like that.
His dreams - they belonged to the universe of (already, too soon to have a before and an after) - the world of Hogwarts and sunshine. A world of embarrassing inexperience and sliding his foot up her calf during dinner and spending hours agonising over how to break up with her.
He doesn’t think it can ever go back to the way it was.
During the war, he had never been able to tell whether his fantasies were saving him from madness, or driving him towards it.
In the end, they turned out to be worthless.
Dreams of Ginny had kept Harry alive, but the real Ginny was nothing to live for.
II.
Harry, despite what some people (and papers) say, is not stupid, and he’d always had a penchant for seeing things done whole-heartedly. He had realised that for any of his fantasies to come true he would actually have to speak to Ginny first. And so, the fantasies had always started with some form of meeting. Sometimes, as he plotted intensely complex and impressive strategies at Grimmauld Place, as Kingsley nodded slowly and Ron stuck pins into a map, she would suddenly burst through the door, shaking with fear and soaked through with rain, and he would crush her to his chest and kiss her passionately. Sometimes they were standing on a charred and bloody Quidditch pitch, and slowly, their eyes locked over a smoking carcass. Sometimes, they would be paying their respects to the dead, and she would slip her comforting hand into his.
When it finally happened, it wasn’t quite like that.
Standing on the other side of that dank Ministry hall, he made her out among the sea of red hair, just before they sat down.
There had been no room for he and Hermione on the first bench.
Her hair was like fire; her expression was blank. Running up to someone, sweeping them off their feet and kissing them -
Some things you only get to do once.
He wanted to go to her, take her hand in the way she took his on the night of Dumbledore’s death, but there was something in her expression - her moulded, carefully composed, but nevertheless alarmingly Ginny-like expression - that stopped him.
The ceremony started to the vaguely inappropriate accompaniment of a trumpet. Various people got up and made speeches. As Harry had expected, there was a lot of talk about hope, self-sacrifice, the price they had paid; he had not expected that there would be so little said about the person they were mourning. The one thing said was the usual about ‘living life to the full’.
It had only happened a week ago and Harry was already sick of hearing it.
He almost burst into a peal of inappropriate laughter - as inappropriate as the trumpet - at Ginny’s lack of tears. Hermione’s sobs tore themselves out of her body and all over his shoulder, he could see Ron’s tears from across the room, falling freely down a hardened, stony face - but Ginny’s cheeks remained dry.
He ended up keeping his eyes trained on her throughout the whole ceremony - although perhaps it was only so that he wouldn’t have to look at George.
III.
Now, he spends a lot of time in the Burrow’s garden. It is the best way of avoiding the family.
Besides, he quite likes tramping through the thick, wet grass, squelching through dew, worms and mud, roaming round and round in circles. The weather they’ve been having lately is bad for May, but good for the plants. A far cry from the drought of three years ago.
He isn’t gardening. He knows nothing about plants, cares nothing about plants. He does not foresee a career in Herbology. He is mainly out here for the walking, for somewhere to clear his head, for somewhere to think things through.
It does not work very well. He spends more time dwelling on the flowers than on his life.
He knows it’s stupid: spending all this time thinking isn’t helping him live his life. Planning his every move belongs to before. Now is the time for action - now is the time for living. Now is the time for picking yourself up and getting on with it. This situation is what he has: he has to do something with it.
Nevertheless, he spends more time in the garden than is probably healthy.
Inside, he makes the effort, as does most of the family: with him, with each other, with themselves. He loses himself in old Quidditch books; he sets the table; he attempts to help his best friend with stabs at letters to his still-estranged older brother. He tries to stop his reflexive wince at Charlie’s sudden, extreme brashness, but is guilty himself of laughing too loudly at Ron’s jokes.
If Ginny makes any effort at all, it is in the work of keeping herself blank.
This carefully balanced world is precarious. When Harry hears that George is shutting the shop and moving back home, it takes all of his strength not to ask Hermione if he can come and stay with her and her blissfully unaware parents.
He doesn’t ask her. He bites his tongue and stays with Ginny.
IV.
When Harry spoke to Ginny at the funeral’s reception, it was the first time they had actually talked, living and breathing, face to face, in a year. Harry’s initial, pre-Final Battle fears that it would be awkward had been crushed under the weight of what had happened. He had assumed that this kind of grief - this amount of grief - would overwhelm any awkwardness.
He was wrong.
He grit his teeth and went up to her when she was alone by the refreshments table, surrounded by a sea of vol-au-vents, militantly prepared by hundreds of great-aunts, who Harry, devoid of an extended family, was just starting to realise were the kind of relatives who are only ever seen at weddings and funerals. She looked just as she had in the ceremony - perhaps a little bit more tired. If she noticed his approach, she did not show it.
Reaching the table, he stopped and put his hands in his pockets.
“Hey, Ginny.” It didn’t sound the way it had when he’d practiced.
She met his gaze unflinchingly. “Hello.” Harry wondered why he had been expecting a flinch.
He scuffed his toe on the floor. “You OK?”
He glanced up just in time to catch the sardonic smile. “Yes, I’m fine.” When he opened his mouth to protest, to apologise, to commiserate, she spoke first: “No, it’s all right.” She gave him a practiced smile. “I’m doing the best I can.”
Harry’s throat felt dry. “Well. Er. Great then. Ginny, you know I -”
“It’s all right.” She gave him the smile again.
“I -” He stopped. Her smile unnerved him.
“I’ll see you later, Harry,” she said, and walked off.
And with that, he knew it was over.
V.
He often wonders what he’s doing here. His relationship with Ginny has fallen apart. With every day, he feels more of an intruder in the house.
Funny. He thought that after the war, the opposite would happen.
Wandering around the garden, hands in his pockets, he wonders why he didn’t go with his first instinct after moving back - buy a flat and get Ron out. He feels an odd desire to airlift him to safety - remove him from the stifling atmosphere and put him somewhere else, anywhere else - even the slow, painfully recovering Diagon Alley would be better than this.
As he kicks the trunk of the gnarled old yew tree, he realises what he’s known all along: he is waiting for Ginny.
Ironic, that he should now be the one waiting.
Actually, it’s not bloody well ironic, he thinks as he kicks a gnome out of his way. He’s spent his whole life waiting! Waiting for Voldemort to try and finish him off, waiting to be old enough to go and end it himself, giving up the wait and going off only to find more waiting - because that’s what it was: the occasional hunt for some ugly jewellery interspersed with periods of interminable waiting - and now, here he is. This limbo of a house.
Waiting for the little sister of his broken best friend, waiting for a girl who’s broken - no, not broken, because broken implies can be fixed … waiting for a girl who’s been shattered.
There’s no use being poetic about it. He hasn’t had an English lesson since he was eleven years old - he’s got no fucking idea what irony is anyway.
Some days, it seems that he can’t keep it inside himself, and he wants to storm around the garden and smash things and shout and be fifteen again - why does everyone he care about have to die? Some days he wants to rage at her - shake her by the shoulders and scream in her face. Look at the people who are still alive: me and you and Ron and Hermione - you have everything to be thankful for. But somehow (and this is what angers him the most) he knows it wouldn’t affect her.
So of course, he does nothing.
He is starting to detest the new, quiet him.
VI.
Slowly, he can feel himself falling apart. When Hermione tries talking to him, he says little. When, two months after everything, he finds Ron hunched up in a corner of his room with a pack of Exploding Snap cards, he cannot think of anything to say. When, another month later, Hermione bursts into tears and confides that she can’t take Ron like this anymore, Harry can offer no sympathy.
In fact, he finds himself envying her.
VII.
In August, it rains; Ron, who has taken to playing a lot of Quidditch (sometimes, George joins him), grumbles about being confined to the house. Hermione challenges him to a game of chess, and within half an hour, it looks as if she is going to beat him. The look on Ron’s face is worth even the drizzliest summer weather, and to Harry, the laughing Weasleys surrounding the game - Bill even places a bet - is worth a thunderstorm.
He sees Ginny shoot them all a disgusted look, and stomp off to her bedroom.
The rain brings other consequences: it is this month that Harry starts gardening, a bit - just weeding. He likes to crouch, in the violent, drenching downpour that releases the soggy smell of fresh earth, but somehow manages to leaves the air still foggy and humid, and cut at the ugly sprouts, daring to disrupt the Weasleys’ already shambolic garden. Within seconds after leaving the house, his hair will be flat against his head, and he has to charm his glasses with the spell Hermione taught him, so long ago, but he does it anyway - he finds that there is nothing better than ripping out dandelions from their roots, plunging his hands into wet soil, and if he’s lucky, a bit of mud, and pretending that he’s doing something vaguely productive.
As the rain gets lighter, he starts to become aware of being watched. Faces, lingering, at windows; sometimes, a head hanging out of a window, just staring. They let him get on with it.
One day, when the sun is just starting to peek out from behind the clouds, Mr Weasley comes outside. Harry has ripped out the brambles for more than half the garden, now, and today he is working in a particularly tough corner. Mr Weasley stays a respectful distance away; Harry appreciates this. Mr Weasley spends about half an hour drinking a mug of tea and watching Harry, and then he goes inside.
VIII.
September rolls around, but Ginny doesn’t go back to school. Harry doesn’t know what this means, and he is too scared to ask. Everybody else has just taken it as a given.
IX.
A week into September, Mrs Weasley brings him daffodil bulbs and a trowel. “Here you are,” she says. “I haven’t planted these in years.”
He kneels down and starts to dig. He can feel her watching him, and he is very self-conscious of the fact that he is probably not doing it right. “I like daffodils,” he says. “They’re really ... yellow. Cheerful, and stuff.”
He cringes.
“Technically,” she says quietly, “a daffodil is a 'narcissus'.”
“Really?” He tucks the first bulb into the little soil bed he’s made it.
“Yes, that’s the proper name,” she says briskly, and he finds her kneeling down next to him. “It’s supposed to come from the Greek god Narcissus, who looked into a pool, saw his reflection, and fell in love with himself.”
“What happened?”
“Harry, dear, they have to be much deeper than that - three times the height of the bulb,” she says, and with the trowel, capable Molly Weasley undoes his hard work, digging a tunnel so deep he is afraid the daffodil will never find its way out. She nestles the bulb down at the bottom, and handing the trowel back to Harry - “Now you try” - watches him attempt to a dig a tunnel for the next one.
“Narcissus,” she says after a second, “ended up stabbing himself when he realised the truth - that the reflection wasn’t another person, but himself. If I remember correctly, there was a suitor who he spurned - a boy, you know,” she adds with a twinkle, and Harry is uncomfortably reminded of her daughter and her twins and her Ron and his Dumbledore, “and the boy cursed him, wishing that he would one day know what unrequited love felt like.”
Harry finishes his tunnel, and she hands him another bulb. “Very good,” she says. “Now, ‘daffodil’ comes from ‘asphodel'.”
But no story seems forthcoming on this one. After a second, she gets to her feet, brushing off her knees. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” she says, and turns and walks back to the house.
He sticks his hands down the sides of his tunnel, patting the earth into place. Narcissus, he thinks. He likes planting real flowers. It’s more productive than kicking gnomes, at any rate. He reaches for another bulb, a vision of a bright yellow daffodil army swarming into the Burrow and climbing the up stairs before his eyes. He wonders if he can plant some different flowers - he hopes Mrs Weasley has some other seeds. He feels an odd urge to get some of his own, to go to a shop and select them carefully. This is probably what it feels like to be Neville.
He starts digging another little tunnel. Maybe he should plant some lilies. Maybe he should plant some petunias.
X.
It is mid-October, and Harry is planting hyacinths - “A Persian Muggle once said, ‘Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul’,” Mrs Weasley had informed him as she handed the bulbs over - when Ginny comes outside to watch him.
She is the last member of her family to make this rite of passage, now. Charlie likes to bring him food, and George has done a bit of weeding. Ron and Percy had been out here for hours, one day, on one of Percy’s infrequent visits.
She stands behind him, and he keeps digging.
“So,” she says. “What happened?”
He wipes his hands on his knees, and shuffles around to look up at her. “What?”
“You know. With Voldemort. How did it happen?”
She is looking over his shoulder as she speaks.
“You don’t have to ask if you don’t want to,” he says.
She shrugs, half in be like that, then, but the bigger half in relief, and she turns and walks back to the house.
XI.
It is November, and it is cold, and Harry needs a coat. Mrs Weasley notices this before he has to ask, and she gives him an old Muggle one, built for a shorter, stockier person. Harry doesn’t ask if it belonged to someone who can no longer use it, and Mrs Weasley does not mention it.
That she is willing to give away his clothes, Harry takes as a good sign. He still doesn’t really want to wear it, though.
Then, one day, Lupin spends a few hours planting tulips with him - these, apparently, need cold weather to root - and Harry mentions that the coat he’s wearing isn’t his. Lupin stops digging, looks at him, and says, “I’ve been meaning to give you something - it might come in handy, now.”
The next day, he turns up with a big, black overcoat, which is ridiculously broad for Harry and finishes somewhere around his knees. “It was Sirius’ when he was your age,” Lupin explains. “He wore it everywhere - I think it used to belong to his uncle.”
Ron, Charlie, George and Bill laugh themselves into hysterics at Harry, standing in the middle of the kitchen, drowning in the dark, heavyweight material, while Hermione tucks a Gryffindor scarf around his neck in an attempt to make it look presentable.
It smells of Sirius.
Harry wonders why it is that he feels so differently about the old clothing of two very dead people.
As Mr Weasley mumbles something about a camera and Harry tries to hide, Mrs Weasley smiles at him fondly, and folding the other coat carefully, puts it away in a box.
XII.
Six months ago, a group of Order members had been hiding in Little Hangleton, Harry, Ron and Hermione included, concocting a distant and faintly ridiculous plan of somehow managing to kidnap Nagini. They had received word that a small number of Death Eaters were congregating in the village graveyard, and Harry had slipped off to go and find Snape.
When he had sneaked away that night under his Invisibility Cloak, he had had no idea what he would find when he came back.
'A warning', the note had said.
Three days later, kneeling by the side of Voldemort’s lifeless body, Harry had actually been surprised when Fred didn’t come back to life.
XIII.
Christmas is all right - better than Harry had expected. Ron gets him “A flower book, you pansy,” and Harry hits him over the head with it.
It’s an amazing book, though, a broad, square hardback, with cream-coloured pages and crisp, vivid illustrations. There are instructions on where and how to plant, when to prune, and which potions the flowers are useful in. It’s second-hand, of course - the name inscribed at the front reads Ignatius Starkey - but there are no scribblings in the margins. Harry takes comfort from the fact that the book’s previous owner was also male.
When he finds Ron crying in his room on Boxing Day, Harry feels able to give him a hug. He hopes this is progress.
XIV.
In late February, Harry goes into Mr Weasley’s shed in search of a shovel, and finds Ginny going through the small cardboard boxes that line the shelves. As he walks in, she is returning one to its place and reaching for the almost identical one next to it.
On his entrance, she looks up at him, and then goes back to her quest: pulling out a small, metal implement, she examines it, disregards it, and throws it back into the box.
“What are you looking for?” he asks, eyeing the cluttered room and wondering where he might find a spade of some kind.
“Potato peeler,” she says, not looking up from her rummaging. “Mum wants to charm it.”
He pauses. She moves on to another box.
“Are you OK?” he asks, slowly and deliberately. Painful reminders of the funeral collide into each other at the forefront of his mind.
“I’m fine,” she says brusquely, abandoning her current box and reaching for the next one on the shelf. Then, suddenly, she stills, and turns around to stare at him harshly.
He looks back, uncertain.
“You expect me to be over it by now, don’t you?” she demands.
“No! Don’t be stup -”
“I know it’s been time and I know - I know that in wartime, things like this happen, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to move on -” Her hand goes to the shelf and her knuckles whiten. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to leave this … behind …”
Harry stares at the dust motes, their slow, unstoppable rise highlighted by the pale winter sunshine filtering through the dirty window. He knows she hasn’t finished speaking, and he fears that she is going to say what he doesn’t want her to - what no one has said in the last nine months.
But he is afraid to move. He is afraid he’ll upset the balance: Ginny, speaking; the precarious boxes, balanced on the shelves; the silver dust, disturbed for the first time in a year, twice in one day.
“It’s funny,” she says at last. “When Luna died, it was as though ... I would forget it, and then suddenly I would remember, and it would hit me ... but this - I can’t forget this. He’s everywhere I look.” She lets out a shaking, slightly hysterical laugh. “I can’t look at any of my brothers! I can’t -”
“Me?”
“What?”
“You can’t -” He desperately tries to make sense because he can feel the importance of this conversation. “You can’t look at me.”
He doesn’t think he should have said that. The question he’s really asking hangs in the air - he knows what it is, and she knows too -
Her eyes lift to meet his. “Yes,” she says. “Yes.”
“But -”
“I never asked for proof,” she spits out. “I never asked for proof that you cared more about Snape than us, but -”
“Cared more about Snape -”
“Cared more about finishing him,” she says quietly. “And now I’ve got proof. I could have been happy without it, I could have - I don’t know - gone on and got on with life, but I can’t ignore it. I can’t ignore what happened, what you did -”
Harry opens his mouth, but he’s known for too long now that he has nothing to say.
“So ... I can’t look at you ... because there’s a part of him in you.”
XV.
It is a Sunday afternoon in April, and they are sitting at the kitchen table. Mrs Weasley is cooking and her children are scrounging for sections of the Sunday Prophet: Ron has claimed the news, George has the Sport, and Ginny, eating a yoghurt, is trying to read over George’s shoulder. Harry is paging through his flower book. Over the rustle of the pages and the slurping of Ginny’s spoon, the noise of metal clinking on metal can be heard from the shed, accompanied by Mr Weasley’s occasional muttered swearword.
“Molly,” asks Harry, “can I plant some foxgloves?”
Ron groans.
“Oh, I don’t know, dear,” she says distractedly, “they’re notoriously hard to grow.”
“But I want some,” says Harry stubbornly. “They’re pretty.”
Ron snorts.
“Piss off,” Harry mutters. He would throw something at him, but his book has still got a dent from the last time he hit Ron with it.
“I might just do that,” says Ron, and Harry sees that he’s moved on from the news and into the housing adverts. “I’m thinking of moving out. How d’you think I’d get on in Knockturn Alley?”
“With what money?” asks Ginny.
“Well, there is that problem,” Ron admits unconcernedly. “Hence the Knockturn Alley plan. Hermione’s got a job now, though. I could steal some of hers.”
“What?”
“Yep, in Flourish and Blotts.”
It is George’s turn to snort. “Is she allowed to read on the job, then?”
Ron grins. “She’s only been there two days, and from what I hear that’s already causing problems.” He turns another page. “It’s only for the summer, though ... she’s talking about going back to Hogwarts in September.”
“You can do that?” asks Ginny.
Ron shrugs. “If McGonagall lets anyone back in, it’ll be her.”
Mrs Weasley seems to be keeping herself deliberately silent. Ginny is staring at Ron, scepticism etched on her face. “Are you going with her?”
“I dunno.” Ron shrugs and turns another page of the paper. “I’ll take it as it comes, yeah?”
Harry turns a page of his own book. Dog Rose. “I can’t believe Hermione started earning real money before you did,” he says.
“Hermione does everything before Ron,” says George, not raising his eyes from the Sport. “It’s an undeniable truth of the universe.”
“I can’t believe Hermione’s working in a shop,” says Ginny.
“To be honest,” says Ron, “I can’t believe it took her so long. Kind of throws our life of leisure into the light, doesn’t it?”
“At least I earn my keep,” says Harry. Papaver rhoeas: ‘Cedric Morris’.
“Sorry, mate,” says Ron, “but I don’t see a queue of people paying money to get in and have a look at the garden.”
“We should put signs up,” mutters George vacantly, turning a page. “‘Boy-Who-Lived planted this daffodil'.”
Ginny giggles.
Harry’s head snaps up. She’s grinning at George, and as Harry looks at her, her eyes dart to his. She looks tired, but her beam has momentarily banished her habitual bitterness.
There is yoghurt on the end of her nose; for the first time in months, his stomach twists.
“‘Chosen One touched this watering can',” snorts Ron, and she jolts a little - just a tiny bit. Turning back to George, she says, “George, go on, you’ve had a read, give the paper here -”
He shakes his head. “I think not, little Miss Weasley -”
She lunges for it, but he waves it out of her grasp, laughing. Ron sighs in a long-suffering way, and continues paging through the adverts of flats to rent.
Harry turns another page. Buddleia Guinevere.
He smiles. Maybe there’s hope for them, after all.
- THE END -
Notes: Thanks are due to Wikipedia's probably incorrect information on daffodils, Narcissus and hyacinths; credit is also due to greenfingers.com and bbc.co.uk/gardening. My apologies for any heinous gardening mistakes.
My vision of Sirius' coat is here.
A billion points to the house of your choice if you got the bare smidge of a Sound of Music reference.
eta: For further stories in this universe, click the dreams only tag or go to the masterlist.