The Kitchen

Ginny was reporting on the Quidditch World Cup in India and the port-lag is too much for her to come home, even at weekends. Besides, it's good for her to stay with the team, to be on site in case of any breaking news. The kids miss her, but Harry's fine with it, really, and besides, by the time they've had dinner with each of their extended family and twice with Mrs Weasley it's nearly time for Ginny to come back home. It's Monday, the second Monday of her trip, and she will be home early on Wednesday.

Harry is making dinner. He's good in the kitchen, the Dursleys taught him that much, though the kids don't really like the stodgy, traditional British meals that Vernon favoured, all pastry and pies and potatoes. Ginny can conjure curries and noodle soup and tangy dumplings that all three fall upon like starving creatures when she has time to cook.

Tonight Harry is making steak and kidney pudding. James and Lily have already turned their noses up at it as he made up the pastry at the counter. They are in the garden tossing a Quaffle back and forth.

Albus, who hates flying and Quidditch and physical activity in general, leans on the kitchen table and watches as Harry rolls out the pasty. Harry places a dinner plate on the dough and Al leans forward to pass him a blunt kitchen knife. Harry cuts out the circle of pasty and lays it carefully on the top of the dish.

"When's Mum back?" Albus asks, even though he knows perfectly well.

Harry doesn't answer. Instead, he idly gathers up the remaining pasty. He rolls it into a ball and splits it in two, re-rolling one half into a ball again and then splitting the second ball in half again. He flattens the two pieces and starts to shape them.

"Dad," Al begins, then stops for a moment. "Dad, do you mind that I'm not on the Quidditch team?"

"Course not Al," Harry answers automatically. "Go play outside, okay? Dinner in an hour."

Al makes a face at the thought of Harry's cooking, then runs outside. Carefully, Harry attaches the two wings to the pastry snitch and balances it on his hand for a moment. After a second, the wings begin to flutter lightly. Harry smiles wistfully. The children are really beyond such novelties now, for all that it amused them when they were younger.

He goes to put the snitch on top of the dish but the small lift provided by the pastry wings sends it sliding off his hand and under the kitchen cupboards. Harry freezes, looking at the dark foreboding gap. Oh, he knows what's in there, he knows what curls up beneath things, always hiding in the shadows, in the dark.

Ashamed of such weakness, he slams the dish in the oven and shuts the door firmly. He stands at the kitchen sink washing up and catching glimpses of his children moving back and forth past the small slice of the garden he can see. James and Lily are flying, swooping up and down and occasionally speeding into sight, low to the ground and focused. Albus is playing alone, still enjoying those childlike games that he liked before he went to Hogwarts. Ginny sometimes tries to find out what it is he is imagining, but Harry doesn't ever ask. Because of that, Harry thinks, Al has told him a few of the games he plays.

Sometimes I'm playing with a life-sized chess set, he told Harry one night as Harry tucked the boys in. He whispered the words in Harry's ear, so James wouldn't hear.

Sometimes I'm Merlin, I'm trying to tell Arthur what to do, he told Harry when the two of them were sitting on the grass and watching the other three play Quidditch. But he doesn't believe in magic, so I have to prove it to him,

"You can be yourself, Al," Harry had said.

"I am most of the time," Al had replied with a shrug, his eyes watching Lily as she dove for the snitch.

Sometimes I'm Dumbledore, fighting Grindleward, Albus whispered in a noisy bookshop last week. Sometimes I'm fighting Voldemort. Sometimes I'm you.

Harry had looked at his own face on the front of James's DADA textbook for next year and swallowed back all the words threatening to spill out.

Looking out of the window now he can see Al looking at the sky, his wand dangling in one hand. James and Lily never carried theirs around in the holidays. They had to take James's away, because he wouldn't stop casting spells and Lily didn't bother because it got in her way.

Albus always carried his, though he'd never, to Harry's knowledge, used it outside of Hogwarts. He would pretend, Harry supposed, watching him pointing his wand upwards, then to the side, them at the ground. He laughs - or maybe shouts, Harry can't hear him - and flings his wand away and dives in the other direction, out of Harry's view. A few moments later he comes back into sight, running towards the window, his dark hair messy and his green eyes sparkling. Harry smiles at him, but he doesn't smile back and Harry thinks he's too lost in his game until Albus comes charging in through the back door and into the kitchen.

"Dad," he shouts, like he'd been shouting it over and over. "James fell off his broom, oh, come on!" He runs back out again, looking behind him to check Harry is following, which he is, running and overtaking Al, his heart pounding in his ears wondering how he hadn't heard anything.

"I'm all right," James grumbles when Harry appears, brushing leaves out of his hair. "Lily knocked me off my broom!"

"Oh Merlin, it's Quidditch. You get knocked off your broom loads at school!"

Harry frowns. "You get knocked off your broom at school?"

"Yeah, he's rubbish, they only keep him on cause he's your son - "

James leaps at Lily with a shout and Harry has to pull them both apart before things escalate. "Stop it!" He holds a hand out to stop James leaping again while Lily leans on her broom and smirks.

"I suppose you'll be better," James spits at her.

"Course I will! I knocked you off, not that that's a challenge," she snorts. "I can't wait to try out. I'm going to be the best Beater ever!"

Harry looks over at Lily quickly. "You want to be a Beater?"

"Well, yeah."

"Oh I - I didn't know."

Lily rolls her eyes but doesn't say anything. James is back on his feet, brushing grass off his trousers.

"Wanna play Keeper-Chaser?" Lily offers, which James seems to take as a peace offering. They grab their brooms and spin off into the sky. Harry really doesn't understand his oldest son and youngest daughter, but they seemed to like each other, most of the time. He'd once been concerned at how often they fight, but Ginny never had been worried, so Harry had pretended he wasn't either.

Harry looks around for Al, sees him whispering over a bush and shakes his head. God, he has weird kids, he thinks. With a glance upwards to see Lily sailing a Quaffle past James, Harry goes back inside to lay the table.

Platform 10

Harry is eleven and he is lost. The train station is huge, full of echoing, static leaden announcements and rushing people. He's pushing through a crowd of businessmen and women who are going in the opposite direction. They keep pushing elbows and briefcases into his stomach and face until Harry feels like he can't breathe. He's starting to panic. He's supposed to be somewhere or to be with someone, but he can't remember who or where.

Harry pushes and pushes and pushes until he emerges into a relatively open space between platforms nine and ten. He leans against the wall between the platforms to catch he breath and fold the long sleeves of Dudley's old jumper up again. He presses his face into his hands and when he looks up again he can see someone sitting on a bench on platform ten. He knows them, so he moves towards them. They keep blinking out of sight as people and trolleys pass between them but Harry reaches the man - he can see now that it's a man - who is sitting on the bench and looking up at the sky through the glass ceiling.

"What a thing!" The man says, not looking at Harry. "To sit indoors and be able to see the sky outside!"

Harry looks up and then back at the man, confused and concerned. He's never thought that it was particularly strange, but maybe he's never looked properly. Eventually the man turns to look at him and he smiles through his long white beard and his blue eyes twinkle behind his glasses.

"Hello child. Are you lost?"

Harry takes a step back, because he doesn't know this man, he realises. Not yet, he brain supplies.

"Take my arm, dear boy."

Harry knows about stranger danger and what he should do when he's lost. He should scream, run, find a police officer or a person who works here or a nice woman with small children. But the man smiles and his eyes twinkle. Harry reaches up, because it's easier to do as he's told. Take my arm. He smiles shakily and takes the old man's arm. His stomach drops and spins, but it's only nerves.

"Do you play chess?" The man asks, as they walk along the platform. "I consider myself a master at the game. It takes skill to see the whole battle, forwards and backwards for so many moves, so see all the possibilities that lie ahead."

Harry shakes his head. He looks about with interest. They are further along the platform than anyone else. The plastic benches look newer, less worn and the floor looks dirtier. Harry can see the end, where the platform slopes down to the ground.

"I'll teach you," Dumbledore says, at the end of the platform. "I'll show you what to do."

"Please," Harry breathes. "Please show me, I don't know - "

There's the rushing sound of a train approaching, and Harry realises Dumbledore has led him onto the train tracks and he can see the Hogwarts Express racing towards them. Dumbledore is watching it with a curious expression and Harry thinks he should run, but - Dumbledore said take my arm, he said, you brave boy, you wonderful man, he said, Voldemort must be the one to kill him, he must going willingly, so Harry stays on the train tracks and looks at speeding train ahead of them and holds onto Dumbledore's arm.

Harry wakes in his cupboard, staring at the dark underside of the stairs. His scar aches and there is a sliver of light beneath the door. Harry panics, because it's morning and he should be up, he should be cooking breakfast, Aunt Petunia will be so mad -

Harry wakes in his bed and has rolled upright and placed his feet on the floor before Ginny places a warm hand on his back. "Harry," she mumbles sleepily. "What is it, did the kids - "

"No," Harry tells her. "They're fine, I just - toilet," he explains. She nods trustingly and goes back to sleep.

Harry uses the toilet and splashes water on his face. He checks on the kids. Albus is asleep, but James' expectant eyes blink at him in the dark. He starts to sit up, but Harry smiles and mouths 'not yet.' James lies back with a frown and crossed arms.

Lily is fast asleep, still buried deep in tight in her blankets, the way Harry tucked her in. The sliver of light from the corridor doesn't startle her awake. He finds Lily's collection of Chocolate Frog cards on her desk and slips one out of the box and into the pocket of his dressing gown.

At the bottom of the stairs Harry's old trunk is packed with James's things. Harry sits on the top, running his hand along the metal edgings. Harry remembers how he couldn't sleep the night before he started Hogwarts - the tension, the worry, the excitement. How he clenched his hand around the ticket Hagrid gave him, the ticket that seemed like his only hope of escape, the ticket that foolishly, ridiculously seemed like the worst kind of joke.

James's excitement is for other, different reasons, both worse and better. They've had such different childhoods up to this moment but Harry thinks, once James is at Hogwarts, Harry might finally start to understand him.

In the garden he stands and stares at the sky as it lightens into the dawn and his keeps his hand in his dressing gown pocket, clenched around the stolen card. The dew dampened grass chills his bare feet. He waits until the sun is high and bright, the light washing the colours of the world away. When he finally pulls it out, the cards is bent and creased. He unfolds it reluctantly, but once he has smoothed it out the frame is empty.

The Bathroom

Harry is awake at three in the morning scrubbing the bathroom. Ginny can never understand how he can wear the same socks until she physically takes them off his feet but take up to hour to scrub the kitchen every night and always makes sure the bathroom is spotless before he leaves for work. Ginny is not a particularly tidy person and when they first moved in together Harry had to readjust a lot of ideas of home that he didn't even know he had. The tension between them sometimes seemed insurmountable. Harry had no idea how to even begin to fix it.

Harry's worked at it, they both have. They've listened and compromised. Things are better, but Harry still can't explain everything to her and at some point they are going to have to have a conversation about hand-me-down clothes and endless chores and the cupboard under the stairs. He rehearses it in his head, but he can't start the conversation right knowing Ginny like he does, knowing that she would jump in, would try to make him feel better. Her room at the Burrow wasn't much bigger than his cupboard and, like all her brothers, had to make do with hand-me-down everything.

Harry doesn't know the words to make his childhood different from hers, to make it so much less than the sum of its parts.

Harry finishes on the wall above the length of the tub and turns his attention to the taps. He selects a new bottle of cleaner and a new cloth and scrubs around base until his fingertips turn red.

Or maybe he does know the words, maybe he jut can't say them out loud because then they would become real, become solid, become a burden of blame that he would eventually have to lay down on someone before it crushed him.

Harry scrubs and scrubs until he can make out his own face in the taps, distorted as it is. He pauses for a moment and just reflects. When a shape appears in the surface behind him it makes him jump.

"Hey."

Harry stands awkwardly. He's inside the tub still, looking at Ginny where she leans on the door frame. Ginny drops her eyes to the cleaning supplies but looks back at him with a tired smile. (This is compromise.)

"Did the baby wake up?"

Ginny shakes her head and holds out her hands for Harry to take as he steps gingerly out of the tub. When he has both feet on solid ground he tugs her towards him and she steps easily into his embrace. They stay for a moment and in the silence of their own house, Harry feels his muscles relax, his mind start to drift.

"Did you - " Ginny starts, then stops. She steps back and Harry sits down on the side of the tub.

"Not yet."

"Harry," Ginny starts, "the ceremony's tomorrow, we can't put it back again..."

Whatever she wants to say next is interrupted by the baby crying, followed by James. Ginny sighs and rubs her eyes.

"I'll get the baby," Harry tells her, sliding past.

"He needs a name Harry," Ginny calls after him.

Harry rocks his new son back to sleep and stands for a long time with this small life tucked against his chest. He can hear James and Ginny next door and smiles. They talked about names of course, when James was born, and then again when the light on the end of Ginny's wand glowed green for a second time. Some Wizarding traditions are buried deep, even amongst the Weasleys, and while Ron and Hermione find a compromise on this point, Ginny wants Harry to name their children.

He can see the names he would chose every time he closes his eyes, trapped in flashes of memories. His parents, dancing in the autumn leaves. Sirius, sliding into Padfoot; Snape, the first time he spoke to Lily. Dumbledore, the first time Harry remembers seeing him, shouting nonsense words with a sly, teasing smile.

James was simple enough to name. He slid out fast and easy, eager to see the world, desperate to be a part of it. Of course he'd be named after two of the fathers Harry had, and grow into those names; brave and foolish, and so unlike Harry that he wonders if he'll ever understand his oldest son.

His second child, whoever he will turn out to be, is more difficult to name.

Or rather, his name is harder to say out loud.

That night he dreams that he's back in his cupboard, curled up into a ball in the dark. Broken Lego men that he rescued from the bin dance a delicate pattern across hand, their sharp feet leaving tiny indentations in the fleshy part of his thumb. The Dursleys are out, he remembers, and they locked him in here not to keep him safe but so the house would be.

The Lego man with no legs reached up his arms, a parody of a hug.

When he looks sideways he can see Snape in the opposite corner, slumped where the two walls meet. He looks young, as young as Harry. He's still bleeding, like he always is in Harry's dreams, the sticky memories spilling out of his shredded skin and on to the floor with no one left to catch them.

Harry wonders what Snape has done, to get left behind in the darkness. He tries not to look, in case the other boy starts to talk, want to tell him things Harry isn't ready to know yet.

Harry can hear something else in the dark, under his bed. He draws his feet up to protect them from the monsters he imagines in the shadows.

He hears the Dursleys come back, but it's not Vernon who opens the door. Dumbledore's blue eyes twinkle and his glasses glint. He doesn't look at the shadows under the bed, doesn't look at Snape, he just places a hand on Harry's chest to push him back onto the bed and says you have to stay here, just for now. It's not just for your own good.

There's something small and lost crying, distantly.

When he wakes up, just after dawn, he can hear the baby whimpering quietly. He collects his son and goes back to the bathroom. The rest of the house is still dark behind closed curtains, but the sun shines brightly through the bathroom window, bouncing and gleaming off all the clean white tiles. Harry holds the baby against his chest as he opens the window - he needs fresh air, needs daylight, needs to look at the sun until all he can see is the light, the white space, the certainty that all will be well.

Harry concentrates on the name his chosen, letting it fill his head until it's all he can see. He finds his mouth, chanting it like a charm. Why not? A spell is just words after all, words and meaning, and not so different from a name. In his arms, the baby's mouth moves too, his eyes bright and watching Harry.

Everyone arrives a few hours later. There's noise and laughter and a house full of light. James toddles unsteadily around the room, running before he can walk. Harry holds the baby, as is tradition, and carries him the garden. There's no other words, no spell or charm or ceremony. Ginny stands next to him, Molly and Arthur behind her. Hermione holds James on her knee, hands clasped tight around his tummy. The garden is quiet and bright in the noon sun. Harry can imagine his parents doing this, once, just like this.

"Albus," he says, passing the baby to Ginny at last. "Albus Severus." The name sits heavily on his tongue for a moment in the silence.

"A fine name," Arthur comments, his throat sounding choked. "A fine, fine name."

Spinner's End

The new year bursts into a existence with a shower of bright lights from the Muggle world. Harry Potter, covered in a dark cloak, dodges around a group of teenagers who are sitting on a wall and swinging their legs while drinking from a glass bottle they are passing around. Further down the dark street a black cat streaks out from between two cars, near-invisible in the dark.

He should be at home. Everyone there is celebrating, doubly so - a new year and a new baby. As large as the Weasley family becomes, a new baby always draws them back together. His house, their house is filled with light and laughter, all shadows banished for one night. The noise, the light - it was hard to think, hard to focus on anything except the immediate.

But Harry slipped out and the small, creased slip of paper with Petunia's neat cursive leads him here.

13 Spinner's End stands empty and abandoned. The few small steps to the main door are cracked and covered with the weeds that grow inexplicably on top, beside and beneath the concrete. A broken window opens into a dark room beyond. Harry enters from the back of the house. A concrete yard houses weeds up to his knees and the back door gives with only the smallest press against it. The lock splinters. The house seems to groan and creak with the effort of entrance after so long.

The door leads immediately into a small kitchen. The lights don't work, but Harry pulls out his wand and need only whisper 'lumos' to create a small ball of white light that floats above his head. The shadows retreat, darken, gather in the corners. Harry hears them whisper and plot, licking up at the light - he strengthens his focus and stays in the circle of light created by his own magic. Snape would have put curses and spells, protection for this miserable place, but Harry will not be caught out. The 'lumos' keeps him safe.

There is nothing here, and Harry in unsurprised. The cupboards are empty. The fridge is warm and dark and hollow. The barren table creaks as Harry brushes against it and takes in the room. There are stairs in the kitchen, leading up into the dark. The weight of the rooms upstairs seem heavy. Somewhere up there is the bed where Snape slept, as a child, as a teenager, as an adult. Harry can only picture some place small and cramped and dark, the only place that would breed someone like Snape.

Somewhere like a cupboard. A remarkably familiar sneer passes through his mind. Harry pushes it away. Instead he focuses on his new house, him and Ginny and now James, a light, bright house, a happy house where there are no places for shadows and no cupboards large enough to hide a person in.

He ignores the deep darkness of the stairs and moves through the half-open door, to a room walled with books.

It seems the books themselves must hold up the house. Harry finds a small stack on the table by the soft armchair, the only thing he's seen that looks like it was once used. The top book of the pile is still spread open, it's words pushing towards the light. Harry moves closer. In the small rush of air from the movement of his cloak a scrap of parchment skitters out of the book. He leans, carefully, to rescue it from the dark floor.

Colvotus charm,

the spidery writing reads, the tangled letters familiar as an old friend.

related to the cormandos charm, an early prototype of the cruciatus? Perhaps

The end of the 's' is heavier, darker, as if the quill had rested here a moment. Had he been lost in thought? Or had he been interrupted? Perhaps, Harry thinks, perhaps this is the last thing he ever wrote.

Bent over, curled around that scrap of parchment, the ball of light has started to dim. The shadows of the books lengthen, reaching over Harry's feet, sliding up and over the edge of Harry's robe. He panics, he drops the parchment and it slides along the floor and under the armchair, into darkness, the spidery black ink lost forever in the night. Harry skitters in the other direction, tripping, falling, the shadows chasing him as the light above his head fades and fades and puffs out completely.

He can hear it louder now, the thin wail that started when James was born and is stuck, rattling around his head, desperate to escape. It echoes in the same empty part of his mind that Dumbledore's voice sometimes gets stuck in. Harry wonders if there is a crack in his mind, some place where all the darkness keeps getting in.

Harry is lost in shadow. His back is against a bookcase, the unevenly shelved books on the very bottom shelf gorging hollows in the skin of his back. The thing is screaming now, screaming inside him. Harry bites down on his lip until he can feel the blood dripping off his chin. He turns his face and rubs his chin against the rough wool of his cloak.

Harry doesn't know what to do. He wants someone to tell him, someone to rescue him. He wants to be transported back to sixth year when he just had to do as Dumbeldore told him, when he had the spidery writing in his textbook to follow, when he could play the good little solider and not have to make impossible, life-altering (life-ending) decisions.

It's been years but sometimes Harry still dreams of Snape, his blood thick and heavy across Harry's palms, coating his skin, trickling down his wrist and arms, somehow shining in that dark room, and Snape muttering seventeen drops of dew, not twenty or fourteen spoonfuls of dragon hide reduced to ash by its own breath or simmer over phoenix fire which can destroy everything, even itself.

Harry will stand up soon, his mind forced clear in exhaustion and the quiet echo of the Prince's familliar voice. He will walk quickly and quietly out the front door, leaving it swinging on its hinges, the dark shadows chasing him into the orange glow of the nearest street light. He will contact Hogwarts and arrange for the books to be moved to Hogwarts library and some years or decades later he will find out that the staff cleared the rest of the house too, stacking clothes and photos and the few remaining artifacts of Snape's childhood into boxes and storing them in one of the many empty rooms at the school.

Harry will tell himself that one day he will sit and look through those boxes, but some part of him already knows what he will find.

The Living Room

After the war the Dursleys had settled back into 4 Privet Drive with a minimum of fuss, but when Harry finally goes back the For Sale sign outside makes him pause.

"Oh yes," Petunia answers when he asks, "Vernon got a marvellous promotion, we're moving as soon as we can. We've put an offer in on a lovely house - a four bedroom detached in a lovely village..." she trails off as if she suddenly remembers who she is talking to.

It's strange to be drinking tea in the sitting room he was never allowed to sit in, opposite the fireplace where the Weasleys came to fetch him, in the chair where he watched Dumbledore attempt to speak politely to his family who stared, ridged and afraid and so full of hate. The room is bright and light. Harry thinks it should be full of shadows.

Harry dressed smartly for the occasion, hoping it would help, and picked a workday so Vernon would be out. They sip their tea in silence, Harry's new wedding ring clinking awkwardly against the cup. Petunia appears to be contemplating the colours of the walls, and Harry wonders if she is mentally decorating the four-bedroomed village home he will never, ever set foot in.

"It's over then?" Petunia asks suddenly but politely, as though she is enquiring about his health. "I mean - the... the business with - everything."

Harry tries not to laugh, to hear it reduced so, as if the war and everything around it was something you might read in a newspaper, before it was folded away and thrown away.

"Yes," he tells her seriously. "It's over."

"And you - you won," she twists the words out, awkward, hesitant, hating every syllable.

"If I hadn't I would be dead by now," he replies, seriously, omitting the small, minuscule fact that he died anyway.

"Oh. I see." Petunia sips her tea. Harry turns his cup in his hand. "Was it terrible?"

"What?"

"I mean - was it - Lily used to write to me sometimes, before - " Petunia clenches her teacup too hard. "She said it was terrible, sometimes, even when she told me she was getting married, when she said she was pregnant, she would say all these terrible things were happening and then she would tell me that she had felt the baby kick and I would think how could she, when it was so terrible, how could she have a baby when it was all like... like that, but then I was pregnant too, and those terrible things were still happening and I wouldn't have know if she hadn't - "

Harry has stopped listening. She had felt the baby kick, Petunia had said, and has his aunt really forgotten who he is? His heart is trapped in his throat and he puts his teacup down so hard that lukewarm tea splashes out over his hand. Petunia stops speaking.

"She wrote to you?" Harry manages to squeeze out, "she wrote about me?" Oh, he sounds hungry, he sounds desperate. Petunia looks at him like he is a barely-caged monster, which was basically how she had looked at him his whole life, and it makes him want to laugh, and cry, and howl.

"I didn't keep them," she tells him defensively. "Why would I? Vernon would have been so cross, and he would have been right - I didn't want anything to do with it! And then she - and we were left with you! She was so careless, she was always so - so foolish!" There are two bright spots of red on Petunia's cheeks and she looks away sharply to cover the bright glisten in her eyes.

Irrationally, Harry wants to hug her. She never loved him, she didn't raise him, but she did keep him. He wants to hug her because she loved his mother once, and because suddenly he can see all the ways that they look like sisters - the angle of their jaws, the long, narrow fingers, the light in their eyes. He wants to hug her because he remembers being four, (and five, and seven,) and wanting to be hugged so desperately his stomach ached, curled in the dark shadows of his cupboard and listening to the muffled sound of the TV and family outside, stifling rough sobs because he knew how cross they would be if he made a sound.

He remembers that feeling suddenly, feeling sick and watery and choked, and desperately, hopelessly, unspeakably alone. He remembers standing in the damp, dark forest, reaching out in hope to feel only air and his approaching death.

"Do you - do you remember Severus Snape?" Harry didn't know what he was going to say until the words were out of his mouth, and they hang heavy and solid in the air between them. Petunia's forehead creases into a tiny frown.

"The Snape boy? Yes, I - why?"

"He died," Harry tells her. "He loved her, he loved my mother his whole life, he spent his whole life protecting me, because he loved her. And he died, protecting me."

Petunia looks pale.

"Where did you live, back then?"

"Oh - in Yorkshire."

"Where?" Harry presses. "I mean, what was the address, where was it?"

Petunia stands and leaves the room and Harry doesn't know if she is coming back. He twists his wedding band around his finger and then reaches a shaking hand to pick up his teacup but he only sloshes more cold tea over his hand. He wipes it on his jumper and stands up, feeling too tall and large for this room. It seems so small now, the frilly decorations, the mantelpiece of frozen photographs that he'd never found a place on. It seems so far from his life, from this new life he is trying, clumsily, to build.

Standing in the corridor he can hear his aunt upstairs. He glances at the clock - he promised Ginny he'd be home early to go to her parents for dinner. Harry has a good idea why she has arranged this gathering and he's trying not to be terrified.

Harry turns his head at a small frail sound. It sounds like its coming from the stairs, or rather, under them. As if drawn by an accio he finds himself in front of the little cupboard door. He turns the handle experimently and the door still sticks in the bottom left corner, like it always did. With the door ajar, he looks guilty upwards, like his aunt is going to catch him escaping, sneaking out into the real world.

Harry has to stoop over to even look though the door, though he's quite short, relatively speaking. Inside the room is completely, jarringly different from his memories. There's a hoover and a collection of winter coats and what looks like Vernon's toolbox. Harry can't remember where all this stuff was kept when he lived in here. Harry leans in further. There are small slithers of light falling between the stairs but most the cupboard is in darkness. He lived in the shadows, he remembers. He played with the thrown away toys he had saved by touch alone. In the furthest, darkest corner he can hear it, can see it, waving its arms in wild desperation, sobbing a rough, deep cry. It sounds hungry, desperate. It sounds like a barely-caged monster.

He's opening the front door when Petunia comes down the stairs in a rush, heading back towards the sitting room. She looks up as the wind rushes through the open door.

"Oh! Oh - here, I found the address - I - " She shoves the paper at him and draws herself up right (and there, a flash, the memory of his mother as a prefect) "you'd best leave, Vernon will be home soon. We're moving soon. I expect you'll be able to find us, though we won't give you the address." She sniffs contemptuously.

"I won't," Harry promises. "I don't - " He doesn't want them, he doesn't want the sight or the shape their new home anywhere in his memories, he doesn't care. They could move to Mars, for all he cared. He strides out the front door without saying goodbye.

The Forbidden Forest
Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

...

Harry stared down at Voldemort's body where it lay apart from the other dead. He barely even looked human any more and Harry was amazed that he would die like one. Except -

except -

oh.

He looked like a man, after all, Tom Riddle's face shining beneath Voldemort's features. Harry leaned down, knelt beside the body. He wanted to touch it, but it didn't seem solid enough. He looked like a man, like a boy, like a crying, bloody baby that Dumbledore wouldn't even touch or look at or even speak of.

Harry couldn't breathe. He tried to slide his hands beneath Voldemort's body but the shifting perspective made it difficult. He could distantly hear people coming towards him. Hermione's voice rang clearest -

leave it Harry, someone will deal with it later, it's fine, come on, sit down

- but he shakes her off. Sick to his stomach, he struggles with the cold, clammy body. He readjusts his grip and walks towards the main door. Behind him he knows the others are following, unsure, not willing to touch the dead body, not wanting Harry to be touching it. It's fine though, heavy, solid, just a human body, not a monster. At the doors he stumbles a little and he has to dig his fingers into the body's upper arms and thighs to stop it sliding to the floor, heavier than a small crying thing should be.

He saw the thing for the second time the first time he held James. Ginny tucked the little boy into his arms, mere minutes old, and the baby screwed up his face and screamed. Harry saw the thing in James's place, and he felt sick and shaky. He forced a smile for Ginny though. He was just tired, it was fine, everything was fine.

He saw it again after Albus was born. After Lily was born, he saw it all the time, under chairs, under beds, under benches. Under a bus once. Always under things, in the shadows, in the dark.

He walks past the ruined castles and the people sitting in the sunlight. He walks to the forest, still holding the body. He can feel wetness dripping off his chin and onto the collar of his t-shirt. He worries that he's bleeding, but when he awkwardly rubs his face against his shoulder, he realises he's crying. There's no one following him any more.

He walks and walks and walks until the forest is thick and dark. He finds a spot surrounded by old dark trees, and a single beam of sunlight struggling bravely through the canopy. He places the body carefully on the floor.

Every time he saw the thing he wanted to reach down and pick it up, to slide his arms around it and rock it to sleep. It felt like a part of him, they way the children did. He wanted to rock it and sing it to sleep. He wanted it to grow up, to grow old, to grow wise and die somewhere, quiet and peacefully.

In the forest he digs a shallow pit, just long enough for an adult body. The damp dirt gathers beneath his nails. He can feel the white light from above spreading over him, clean and pure. He can almost hear Dumbledore's voice. You brave boy. You wonderful man. He finds he's still crying as he digs. He feels locked away from his own emotions, his body going through this strange cathartic experience without him.

He lifts the body again, and it barely weighs a thing, so much less than an adult man would weigh.

(One day, far in the future, Harry will take a job at Hogwarts, to the annoyance of his grandchildren. After three years, he'll muse aloud to Hermione that cannot remember where exactly he buried Voldemort. Hermione will look at him strangely. Harry, she'll say, there was no body. Voldemort... he turned to ash. He just disintegrated. There wasn't much left of him that was human, I guess.)

The body fits neatly in the grave, Voldemort and Riddle and Baby like nesting Russian dolls. Arms aching, Harry uses his hands to push piles of damp earth back over the body. He starts with the feet, they way he wrapped Lily up in bed with blankets when she was tired and scared of the monsters. Up to the neck and Harry takes a moment to catch his breath, to stare into that face once more. Red-Brown-Green-Blue eyes stare back. Harry reaches out a shaking hand and closes the delicate skin of the eyelids down.

(No, Harry will say, there was - a body. He'll remember how the body changed and shifted in his hands, heavy and clammy; how everything around him was changing, moving, becoming different and brighter. I think you're remembering it wrong. He remembers how the delicate skin of the eyelids was almost soft, like worn paper, and how frightened he was to stand up and walk back to the castle.

Hermione looks doubtful, but she doesn't argue. Harry closes his eyes and remembers her voice - leave him, Harry - and how he felt so alone and scared when he should have been happier than everyone.)

He goes back to the castle. The sunset seems so bright it blinds him. He tilts his head back and laughs, scrubbing away tears with dirty hands. Hermione and Ron are waiting for him at the edge of the forest, sat on a log and wrapped around each other.

"I'm so tired," Harry tells them as he approaches, smiling.

They smile back. Ron stands and stretches "Reckon we deserve a nap," he says and they are both smiling and smiling. "What do you say 'Mione?" Ron drapes an arm around Harry's shoulder and Hermione links her arm through his. As they walk back to the castle Harry can somehow see Ginny sat on the broken steps leading to the entrance hall, her red hair shining in the sunlight, her face turning towards them.

...