Chapter Text
There’s a niche in his chest
where a heart would fit perfectly
— Richard Siken
Some days, Harry forgets to breathe.
He’s always had the inkling that he came back wrong, that fateful day in May. Things pass him by in a rush—and while he’s always been a tad unobservant, he admits, it’s never been so bad as to literally not remember months at a time. All of a sudden he blinks and comes to, and the calendar says February 2002 and not October 2001, when the last thing he remembers is setting out some candy for the rare children that think to trek all the way to the end of the hallway with the blinking yellow light where his flat is.
It isn’t just that, either. Hermione and Ron still look at him with a concern that his terribly honest friends aren’t able to mask, and which irritates him to no end. Frankly, feeling that irritation can be half-considered a miracle; perhaps another symptom of his false-life, Harry feels as though his heart has grown callouses. He goes through Death Eater trial after Death Eater trial and is barely able to summon some hint of the anger or disgust he used to so viscerally feel. He breaks up with Ginny permanently, and while they do so amicably, there isn’t even a tug at his chest when he sees her eyes twitch and build with tears. Hermione and Ron get engaged, and he’s happy, he swears, but he knows his smile doesn’t reach his eyes and that his friends are wondering where the friend they’d live and die for, the one they’ve known for practically half their lives, went.
Funeral after funeral happens; weddings and birthday parties are thrown; Hogwarts is, brick by brick, slowly being rebuilt, and Harry’s presence is expected at every single happening—he is the proverbial black hole, the sinking ship, the thunderstorm cloud in the corner. A dark blot on what would otherwise have been a cheerful—or an appropriately mournful—affair. And, for some reason, everyone insists he be a permanent fixture at them, despite how he’s such obviously terrible company.
With that, he—ironically—forgets to breathe sometimes, for minutes or hours on end. Perhaps, he thinks, that is how he’s managed to still get on every single guest list despite always being the dead elephant in the room: After a while, you forget he’s even there. That’s always been a talent of his—disappearing.
Hermione thinks he has post-traumatic stress disorder. Ron agrees. She tells him to see a shrink, magical or not, whichever helps. Ron agrees, to a lesser degree. To that, he adds, “Or you could talk to us.”
That’s another thing. Harry hasn’t really talked about that day, not really. He doesn’t talk much of anything at all, really. Doesn’t see a reason to. Everyone lost someone or some part of themselves in the war, and internally, everyone is still rebuilding. Harry’s still collecting the wood, still waiting to patch up that giant hole Voldemort had blasted through. And while all that is still happening, Harry has nothing to say.
Well. To most people.
To an unmarked stone grave within the passage of the Whomping Willow and at the edge of Hogsmeade, there’s plenty Harry has said, every week when he replenishes the flower vase with fresh lilies. Unlike every other time, this is the one ritual that he, without fail, remembers. And, unlike every other moment of every other day in his life, he breathes easy.
∞
It started a few days after the war’s end.
They were counting the dead, making sure that every body is accounted for, that every story of every life lost will be, in some way, honoured in the eulogy that was to be given during the nationwide memorial. Harry remembers very little of that day, but he can still vividly feel the frigidity of every hand he held as he came by to give his prayers.
(He isn’t religious, not by a long stretch. The most he believes in is the 9 ¾ platform cast in white, Albus Dumbledore waiting by the train doors. But, faced with all the lives he failed to save, he can’t help but hope that they hear his thanks and sorries before they’re finally laid to rest.)
In the chaos of the aftermath, it was easy to forget. Deep in the haze of everyone’s grief—so, so much grief—it’s even easier, almost tempting, to. Therein lies the problem: He can’t. He won’t allow himself to.
Amidst the growing numbness, Harry realises—as he scans the bodies lying in the Great Hall, all with families and partners to stay with them—with a jolt, that there’s one body missing.
He runs to the Shrieking Shack.
∞
“Where’ve you been,” is Hermione’s greeting as Harry unlocks the door to his dilapidated flat.
“Good to see you too, Herm,” Harry replies, grimacing at her pinched expression. He nods at Ron, who’s taken to his shitty grey armchair, and is probing at the cotton leaking out of the tear at its side. “Careful, mate.”
“Not to worry, repairing it will be a charm,” Ron says cheerfully, now pulling lightly at the tuft of white. “Quite literally. You should know it, we learned it when we were fourteen.”
Harry’s lips quirk up. “Good to see you, Ron.”
Ron smiles, one of the more genuine ones he’s given Harry lately. “You too, mate. Been a while.”
“Has it,” Harry asks distractedly, throwing his coat on the wooden table by the couch and rummaging with his keys by the drawer. “We met up for Sunday roast—”
“Yes, three Sundays ago,” Hermione interjects, her brows furrowed and her mouth in a tight line. She’s in her blindingly green Healer robes, and her hair—usually in a tight, clean bun—is falling in loose waves around her face. She must have come from her shift immediately to his flat. “And we haven’t heard from you since.”
Harry grimaces. It happens all the time—Harry forgets, Hermione scolds, Ron agrees. He figures they’ll grow tired of the clockwork soon, and his regret gnaws at him, chewing through the debris his heart seems to have been buried in since May 1998. Sorry won’t cut it, he knows. But there is nothing else he can say. “I’m sorry,” he starts, every word feeling like pulling teeth. “It’s… it’s just difficult. I’m sorry.”
“We understand, Harry, I promise, we do,” Hermione pleads, grasping his hands. Harry barely holds in his flinch, but Hermione sees it anyway. Her eyes fill with tears. “But it shouldn’t have to be,” she whispers. “Difficult, I mean. It always is, at the start. And you’ve let this all fester, and—oh, Harry, you’ve had to deal with this alone for so long… but we’re here, you know? We’re always here, and it can be so much more helpful if you’ve the space to process it all with a trained pro—”
“Hermione,” Harry begins gently, pulling his hands away from her tight grip and slowly laying it over hers. He’s stopped breathing again, as though assuring a frightened animal that he isn’t a threat. “I love you, I don’t want to hear this.”
“But Harry—!”
“It’s been three Sundays,” Harry says. “Tell me about the other days.”
Hermione glances at Ron desperately, who only shakes his head. She seems to give up, then, and goes to take a seat on the couch. “Right, the other days,” she begins, her voice shaky. Harry can feel her heart break as his shoulders finally relax, and he thinks he’s a terrible person.
And he thinks of rotting wood. Like the abandoned, unbuilt thing he is, it’s just another dull ache that echoes through the wreckage that used to be his heart.
∞
Dried lilies vanish wordlessly as fresh ones replace them, their scent filling the room.
Harry takes his usual spot in front of the slab of stone he put up a few years ago. There is a large dark stain in the floorboards where the blood had soaked through, from when it was all that was left when he’d come rushing back to the Shack expecting the worst. He had stayed there, kneeling in the tarlike remains of his biggest regret, past the bleeding and darkening of the sky.
Unlike many things these days, the time he spends in the Shack are his clearest ones. He remembers lugging over a stone from the Forest through the passageway, the hours it took to find one he thinks he’d be happy with, and the feeling of déjà vu at the task. How, for a moment, he briefly smelled salt and iron as he nudged the rock in place—the reminder of another friend lost. He shudders, looking upon the stain, knowing the moment he’d decided against Vanishing the last remaining evidence of his life. His eyes trail over to the open window right above the stone and the stain, and he can easily recall the time he had pried the boards that caused the room to lie in perpetual darkness, allowing the light to finally pour in.
Closing his eyes, he allows his mind to wander. The scent of lilies invade his senses, and he feels something inside him start to beat, and break.
Severus Snape never got to be buried, and his name lies among many in the giant Memorial that honours those who had lost their lives to the War.
Harry had tried—for weeks, and with Minerva’s insistent assistance—to locate his body. Felt terrible that his own life had been saved countless times by the man, only for Harry to abandon him to rot out in the elements. And yet, no matter how hard he or McGonagall had looked, they couldn’t find him. Someone with a grudge had probably gotten there first—Death Eater or someone on the Light’s side, they’d completely removed every trace of the body.
“Let it go, Po—Harry,” Minerva had said. “We have to let it go. He would want us to let it go, let him have his peace.”
He’d wanted to, at the very least, give the man a proper funeral. After everything the man had been through, after all he’d done and sacrificed for the cause, a single, inch-tall line of text is all he was given.
Harry opens his eyes, and kneels closer to the stone, taking care not to crush the flowers. He rests his forehead on the cool, rough surface, and takes a deep breath. He feels his lungs expand with the force and the relief of it. Feels his heart thump rhythmically in his chest, like it’s supposed to. He forgets, sometimes, to breathe—and it is in this room, scented with lilies, now, instead of blood and dust, that he remembers to.
“I’m thinking of leaving, soon,” he whispers, feeling his chest crack open with relief. “Sorry, not really a good way to start a conversation. Hi, how are you, hope you’re doing well wherever the train took you. Whatever, you never cared for that. I doubt you would now.”
He exhales deeply. Leaning back from where he was desperately clinging on, he sits on the ground to face the stone. A part of him focuses resolutely on the grey, rough surface of the rock; a quieter part of him, meanwhile, tries to picture the face of the man the grave is meant to honour. A blackbird lands on the windowsill, and Harry’s lips turn up slightly.
“I wonder how it is, where you are,” Harry says conversationally. All the tension he’s been carrying falls apart, and he feels a little more like he used to be. “To think, I was supposed to join you. I’m sure you’re glad that isn’t the case, finally freed from this idiotic boy.” He chuckles, the image of the man’s sneer so clear in his mind. He could almost hear the scathing remark, the derisive scoff. The bird clucks, and Harry takes it as a confirmation.
“It’s sad, though, isn’t it? We could’ve finally understood each other, in the end. I’d like to think that.”
Harry closes his eyes again, seeing white and Dumbledore and the steaming engine of the train behind the old man. Could he be standing there, by the platform, listening to Harry? “I know you’re sick of hearing this, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry you died for this stupid boy. This stupid boy who keeps living, who won’t fucking die.
“You could have had a better life, after the war,” he says, picking at the skin around his nails. “I think about the last time I saw you, before you died, when I still thought you were a traitor. When I confronted you in the Great Hall. You looked tired. You were angry, and I think you were hurt, too. Of all the people, you probably thought. Of all the people to accuse.
“Maybe… maybe, you would have retired, after it all. Left Britain and all the grief it gave you. Where would you have liked…” Harry wonders aloud, now tapping his nails on the floorboards. “Somewhere peaceful, surely. Away from civilisation, most likely.” He snickers. Hugs his knees close to his chest, resting his chin on his bones, and hums. “Maybe somewhere by the sea?” The bird whistles a little, before flying away.
He bites his bottom lip, worries it with his teeth. Feels the bruise start to form, and lets it all go.
“I’m sorry. I wish you were alive, instead of me.”
He sits with Snape’s makeshift tombstone for the remainder of the afternoon in silence.
∞
Ron, Hermione—
I love you both. I’m sorry, but I hope both of you’ll understand. I’m doing what you’ve told me to do, see. I’m going to leave get help. Heal, process, recover, the like.
Please, don’t look for me. We can still meet write. But I want to meet you both when I’m better. Neither of you deserve to put up with me while I’m broken damaged dead like this for longer.
Be well, get married. Live your lives. Don’t wait for me.
Don’t wait for me.
Give all my love to the rest.
— H
The Boy-Who-Vanished: Saviour Remains Unseen, Whereabouts Still Unknown
Rita Skeeter, The Daily Prophet
Second Wizarding War Hero Harry Potter continues to incite worry across Wizarding Britain amidst the third month of his unexplainable disappearance from public eye.
Associates of the Boy-Who-Lived report his last public appearance to be at the annual Memorial held at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. According to witnesses, Potter was last seen near the groundskeeper’s hut shortly after the Memorial speeches concluded.
Rumours began to circulate after Potter’s curious absence at the Ministry fundraisers held shortly thereafter, which he was known to be a regular attendee of.
The lingering question in everyone’s minds for over three months: Where is Harry Potter? Could the Boy-Who-Lived-Through-It-All, truly cease to be?
Rubeus Hagrid, 72, current Groundskeeper of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is one of many that have expressed worry over the Saviour’s elusive retreat: “Harry [is] so missed.”
Close associates and fellow war heroes Hermione Granger and Ronald Weasley have declined to comment.
Harry,
We miss you. We love you. Come back soon, doesn’t matter if you think you aren’t better. We love you all the same, we’ll help you like we always have.
Haven’t seen you in 56 Sundays. You haven’t written in 30.
Please, come back for one. I won’t fight you if you miss three Sundays after.
Sending you all the love in the world,
Hermione and Ron
A folded piece of paper, left by an unmarked stone over stained floorboards, reads:
For Professor Snape—
If death is in forgetting, I promise you will never die.
An ink blot after the last word mars the paper. Beside the note, wisteria shimmers under a preserving charm.
∞
Harry turns twenty-three by the coast of the Atlantic. Sand in his worn trainers and the sea breeze whistling in the night, he watches the push and pull of the waves and inhales deeply. He holds the breath in his chest as though to exhale would be to deflate, soul petering out with every bit of carbon that escapes through his mouth.
A few ways away from Coney Island, the beach is so rarely empty. It reminds Harry a little of the silence during their camps; the space so expansive and oppressive he can’t help but be reminded of his insignificance. Of a disappearance. Where it had been unnerving, in those days, he finds an odd sense of calm in it, now. It reminds him of the Shack, a little: A retreat, where no one would suspect him to be there at all.
He thinks of the dust that has probably piled up. The Shrieking Shack, returned to its haunted obscurity.
He thinks of the stone grave, and the lilies, and the note he left in case someone were to stumble upon it, and mistakenly think to remove all the evidence that a man had died there. Not for the first time since he’s left it all behind, he thinks of Snape, and wishes.
He didn’t think he’d find himself alone again; that he’d seek out loneliness, yearning for the isolation only his cupboard could have given him. Wind whistling in his ears, his cupboard expanded to include the sky and the sea, he whispers his age-old tradition: “Happy birthday, Harry.”
A near-silent pop, and he disappears, again.
∞
As promised, Harry leaves. He arrives in many different places, then leaves just as fleetingly. Never there long enough to be fully present, never allowing himself to fully thaw out.
It’s better this way, he thinks. Better to flit around before anyone begins to recognise him, to know him as the people he’d loved’ve known him.
He’s arrived at many different conclusions, over the years—and this is one of them: Just as the mark that lingers faintly on his forehead, his existence carries along with him a curse. His parents, dead. Plenty of his friends, dead. All his father figures, dead. His familiar, dead. So many more, dead. All because of him.
Another conclusion he’s come to realise: He can’t bear to move on, lest he begin to forget. And he couldn’t—not when they’ve paid the ultimate price for his survival. They loved him so much they died. He loves them so much, he can’t let them die a second time.
He’s a walking death sentence. He can’t help but try to save everyone else from it.
Appearing somewhere in Manhattan, Harry quickly scopes out a place to stay for the night. He’s been staying in different parts of New York for a little longer than he usually does, but he can’t help but feel attached to the place. It feels almost like muggle London when he was younger, with the level of anonymity he’s given. When he ventured there again after the war, there were too many undercover witches and wizards still in hiding for any inch of Britain to ever feel safe. Drowning in the perpetual noise of New York, spared from Voldemort’s spectre, for the first time in a long while, he feels like he’s Just Harry, again.
Not a saviour, not a curse. Not Harry Potter. Here, he’s just another boy.
He hasn’t found where the Wizarding area of New York is; doesn’t care to, really. There have been hints of it—a shimmering storefront hinting at a glamour; little nooks that look a tad too abandoned for such a busy city; once, a street vendor with a levitating samovar. Strings! he’d exclaimed, waving his hands at a boy pointing at the urn.
Harry glances at a flickering motel sign in his periphery, and heads towards it. He’s greeted by the bored receptionist who doesn’t ask him many questions, and he gives the boy a rare smile that goes unnoticed.
Sitting on his rented bed in a rented room in a country that isn’t his, Harry closes his eyes. For so long, the world had seemed so small—he’d only known Diagon Alley, then Hogwarts, before they’d camped all around Great Britain. Even then, it was all woods and shrubbery. Not really much of a world, outside of the bubble Dumbledore crafted for him in his gold-tinged adolescence. In a year, he’d manage to see all kinds of sights, all sorts of folks, all walks of life. A world so vibrant, so chaotic, so beautiful; one he’d almost never known if it all ended in May, or if he’d never left the borders of Britain. He feels it all: the fuzz of the carpet under his feet; the softness of the bed; the wood of the frame. Hears it all: the stomping of children’s feet in the hotel hallways; the horns and engines of the cars and buses; the echo of the television through thin walls; the chatter of the people outside, living their lives; somewhere, the rush of the ocean lingers in his ears.
Harry breathes it all in: the stale air coming from the air conditioning; the faint powdery scent of the sheets; the salt of the sea; the fragrance of lilies and wisteria slightly muffled with permanent dust.
(Something vaguely medicinal; an almost stench of herbs stuck to fabric. Something metallic; and it overwhelms his senses, and this activity stops being fun and healing.)
His lungs ache with its expansion—so unused he’s grown to taking proper breaths. Perhaps, if he focuses on absorbing all the life around him, he could recover it back. One inhale, exhale, touch, and sound at a time.
An inhale. An exhale. He drags his hands across the sheets, and feels the cold linen. A pop.
He opens his eyes.
The sky has lightened, with the sun barely peeking out above the line of the ocean. Everything is quiet—the waves, even the birds are asleep, still. It’s just Harry, and the wind.
He begins breathing again: Feels the salt air rush in his lungs, the smell of seaweed and traces of lingering bird shit piercing through him, and he smiles involuntarily. Its pungency is a welcome reprieve from the iron that almost overwhelmed him back in the hotel room. He gulps down the air almost hungrily, fearing that if he stopped, he would be stuck remembering, again.
At his exhale, he hears a truly terrible sound—it echoes through the empty beach, somehow overpowering even the roaring of the waves. He crumples, feeling that horrible cry get yanked out from inside him.
For all the shit he’s been through, Harry can count the number of times he’s cried on one hand. It was a response beat out of him by the Dursleys, who didn’t take well to hearing the wails of a little child come from the cupboard under their stairs, since they were reminded of their moral bankruptcy. He learned how to be quiet—how to disappear.
When Sirius died, the pain was so unbearable he’d returned to wailing like the abandoned child he always was. Gone was the need to disappear; he needed to be seen, to be heard, to—perhaps—be loved. Sirius couldn’t die, because Sirius wasn’t done loving him. If he cried hard enough, screamed loud enough, maybe Sirius would come back through the veil.
On an empty beach in Coney Island, at barely three in the morning, half a decade after the war, Harry Potter finally cries. He cries, and screams, and chokes on pleas.
Sirius, come back through the veil. Remus, come back to Grimmauld Place, and we’ll work it out. Dumbledore, come back, stand right back up, offer a sweet. Mum, Dad, come through the mirror, the wand, the stone. Hedwig, fly back home. Fred, Tonks, Colin, Dobby, Cedric—wake up, smile, make us laugh, again.
Snape—you shouldn’t have died that way, and I shouldn’t have just watched. You saved my life more times than I could count, and I thought of you as a traitor. Where are you? I’m sorry. I looked for you, I’m still looking for you. Come back, arsehole, I’m sorry. Come back, maybe we could talk. I’m sorry, a thousand times over. Thank you, a thousand more. I’m sorry, a few more times. Just come back, from the woodwork of that terrible Shack.
Every plea he has is a lashing in his chest, like taking an axe to the wood he’s been collecting in the hopes that he could be rebuilt. Harry cries, and cries, so much so he feels like he’s shrinking. Like prying apart the leftover wooden floorboards, cracking the hull wide open. Like there’s less of him now. Like he’s fifteen, instead of twenty-three. Hopes he was sixteen, wishing he could still cling to the Half Blood Prince’s Potions textbook as if it held the secrets of the world. Knowing its author, he probably did.
He remembers—all he does these days is remember—obsidian eyes filled with tears, and how he’d never thought those eyes—which were filled with so much grief, and pain—were capable of carrying anything other than hatred. He remembers the edges of the world falling apart, seeing this once-unbreakable, unshakeable man crumpled and bleeding out on the floor. He remembers the rasp of his once-despised, once-terrifying voice, as he pleaded, “Look at me.”
He remembers coming out from the Pensieve in Dumbledore’s old office and seeing Snape leave through the door and wishes that he could’ve ran after him. Remembers the silver doe in the forest, and wishes that he’d looked for the caster. Remembers the shack, again, and wishes that he’d cried, so that in Snape’s final moments, the man could have seen someone grieve for him. He could have died knowing someone would miss him, and remember him—not as the bastard professor, nor as a reviled Death Eater, but as a man. They were just two lonely boys, at some point in time. Harry sees that now. And Harry wishes, and wishes, and wishes.
The windows in the Shrieking Shack were boarded up when Snape died. Harry hurts a little more, wishing that Snape could have at least seen one final sunrise before he’d died.
All his regrets and what ifs come back like a whip across his back, chest, hands. Harry couldn’t breathe. Almost six thousand kilometers away from home, and it all catches up to him like a violent recoil, blasting him to shreds again and again and again. Harry couldn’t escape, no matter how far he fled. And he wasn’t just escaping the life he’d had—that half-life, filled with people who’d almost died for him, who he died for—he was escaping the living. Every city, every town; every kind smile and greeting he was offered, he couldn’t stomach it. Couldn’t fathom that after all that death and destruction he’s witnessed, that life persists. That he can—should persist.
He wasn’t just escaping the dead, either—he was escaping Severus Snape, and all the other mistakes he made, the bullheaded boy that he was. Is. Britain is one giant graveyard to Harry—and, despite that, Harry is the lone ghost, stuck in the aftermath of May 1998, reliving that day over and over and over.
He’s trying to escape his grief, until this moment, when he realises it all catches up, eventually. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. He can do his vanishing act every single day in every single city but the irrefutable and undeniable truth is that he is still anchored to the place where he’d died—like Myrtle and her bathroom, the Baron and the Lady, Nearly Headless Nick and his Headless Hunt. Harry and the War.
Briefly, he’s grateful there is no trace of Snape left in the Shack; that his soul isn’t tethered to that terrible place. In a sick twist of fate, the man is well and truly free, finally.
Perhaps, Harry will soon be, too.
The sun has fully risen. Harry heaves out a final sigh; all emptied out. He stands up, shaky and dizzy, and stares out into the waves, which have finally calmed down. The ocean is still. Sunlight glints from the ripples of the water, and the spots of light make rainbows dance across Harry’s tear-smudged glasses.
He can’t help it. He smiles—at this beautiful world, at the absurdity of it all—leftover tears spilling over his cheeks. For the first time in a terribly long time, he feels the itch to fly.