The Day After
The clock struck two o’clock. Three. Four. Five. It was now Sunday morning, and outside the sky was a soft lavender and the sun was just barely starting to rise. The earliest birds were already starting their morning singing. Harry, of course, saw and heard none of that, alone, immobilized as if by Body-Bind Curse, sitting in front of the empty fireplace in the basement of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.
Six o’clock. Seven. Eight. A seventeen-year-old boy was sitting in a soft armchair with his mouth hanging open, dozing lightly. Meanwhile, the air was warming fast outside. The new residents of Number Thirteen were just waking up, feeling the July humidity entering in through the window. They had had the fan on all night, but Harry had not needed it in the cool, dark, cellar of his reverie.
Nine. Ten. Eleven. The hours were passing faster and faster now, slipping away like sand in an hourglass. Anyone passing by the empty patch of brick between Number Eleven and Number Thirteen would have heard a loud crack break the silence of the vacant street. An unseen door opened and closed. A pair of shoes creaked heavily over the floorboards, turning at the end of the hallway and descending into the darkness below. “Harry?” came a familiar voice, unheard by the solitary dormant occupant of the house.
---
Harry Potter awoke ten minutes later to an unexpected sizzling sound in his vicinity, accompanied by a few whistled notes, barely distinguishable. What followed was a pleasant fragrance reaching his nose, filling his entire body with warmth. He opened his eyes and turned around.
What? No. It was all wrong.
“Ron?” said Harry, his voice raspy and groggy from the few hours of sleep he had gotten. “What are you doing here?”
Ron stopped whistling and turned around, seeing that his host was finally awake. He was wearing a checkered beige apron Harry recognized as a rather old one of Mrs Weasley’s.
“I thought I’d come over and check in on you,” he said. “And lucky I did, innit? What happened, mate, you all right?”
Harry was grateful when his best friend turned his back and continued preparing the bacon and waffles. He felt embarrassed and didn’t particularly want to be seen. Still, Ron was there, and it was more than he had been hoping for.
“Er,” he began awkwardly. “I dunno. I just…” His voice trailed off. What did he have to say for himself? That this house was like a plague to him? Or worse yet, that the real plague was inside him?
Ron pushed a steaming stack of waffles in front of him. “Eat.” Harry didn’t obey. “Eat,” said Ron, fixing him with an imploring stare with those jarring blue eyes. Harry reluctantly began picking at the topmost waffle.
“Hermione left already, then?” asked Harry, nibbling idly at a miniscule piece.
“Yeah,” said Ron, filling two cups of tea and passing one across the table. “She left pretty early. Went to the Ministry, of course, that’s the only place you can access the International Floo Network from.”
“Ron,” said Harry, watching his best mate take a seat across the table from him and rest his feet lazily on the table. “You didn’t need to come – I mean, it’s not what it looks like –”
Ron raised his eyebrows, clearly not convinced in the slightest. But to Harry’s relief, he didn’t press the subject. “Well, I reckoned I didn’t feel much like spending the whole day with Mum and Dad, did I? Especially now that Gin and George are gone. Didn’t want to be the only egg left in the dragon nest. I needed a change of scenery, anyway.”
Upon hearing Ginny’s name, Harry lost his train of thought. Something was bothering him about her, and deep down he knew it wasn’t because they had mutually agreed to remain on their hiatus for a while. Ginny generally got on fairly well with her parents, at least usually more than her siblings. So the fact that her relationship with Mrs Weasley had soured so quickly meant something serious.
Ron, who was the only one to have witnessed one of their arguments, continued to believe that it was because Ginny had refused to return to Hogwarts to finish her education. While Harry agreed this was probably half of the issue, he couldn’t help but wonder if there was more to the story.
Ron stayed for the whole morning, busying himself with various cleaning tasks and preparing lunch for the two of them. Harry found himself following him around like a lost child in need of company, sitting outside the bathroom as Ron scrubbed the ancient sink and toilet until they were clean again, humming along to some of the records Hermione had let them borrow while she was away.
After lunch, when Harry continued to show no interest in finding a hobby or anything to keep himself occupied, Ron looked at him across the table with an expression that was difficult to read. He hadn’t complained at all about the chores he had been doing all morning and afternoon, which was unlike him; was he now going to tell Harry off for being useless and dependent?
Ron, however, said nothing of the sort. “Hey – mate,” he said, “I just remembered – it’s Sunday!”
“Yeah,” said Harry. “And what?”
“Well, don’t you want to go visit Tonks’s Mum? She said she’d be happy to have you over again some time.”
This had not occurred to Harry: It was a week exactly since his first visit. Suddenly he was filled with a desire, not to see Andromeda again, but to see his godson. Maybe, if he was lucky, he would even be awake this time. Would he have started walking and talking by now? Harry knew very little about babies, now that he thought about it. Visiting them was a good idea, too: Harry had only experienced a few hours of living alone and he had been nearly petrified; he could only imagine how it was for Andromeda, who had lost a husband, a daughter, a son-in-law, and even a sister, however estranged, in just a few months.
---
In the end, Harry took Ron up on his suggestion to visit the Tonks residence once again. His belly full once again, he was already in brighter spirits than he had been since he had moved in. He offered for Ron to come with him, but he politely declined, saying he should go back to the Burrow to see Ginny off before her trip to Romania. With that, the two boys parted ways, Ron stepping out onto the street to Apparate back to the Burrow, Harry spinning through a blur of green flames to arrive at the home of Andromeda Tonks.
Harry could see Andromeda out in the back garden when he arrived, taking in the hot sun with Teddy sitting in a chair way too big for him just a few feet away. She was wearing a long floral skirt and a beige cardigan, her frizzy graying hair flying out of her bun messily. Teddy was once again sporting his mother’s preferred pink hair and was chewing pensively on a small plastic watering can. Harry’s heart rose at the prospect of finally meeting his godson for the first time.
They spent the rest of the afternoon there, just the three of them. After getting little Teddy ready for a mid-afternoon nap in a patch of sunlight on the patio, Andromeda walked Harry through her fairly recent collection of Muggle films in DVD format, a new phenomenon Harry himself had not yet been familiarized with. He had never heard of most of the films, having been largely confined to his cupboard during childhood, and wondered why she would be so interested in them, seeing as pure-blood wizards generally found Muggle culture mundane and unworthy. Andromeda, of course, considered herself somewhat of a Muggle connoisseur. Harry thought to himself that her near-encyclopedic knowledge of Muggle tools and their uses could have put even Vernon Dursley to shame.
This time, she didn’t bring up Tonks or Lupin or Harry’s parents, for which Harry was grateful.
After returning from a long stroll down by the river, during which Teddy’s attention had been absolutely captivated by the ducks gliding across the water, it was getting late and Harry decided it was time to part ways. Andromeda refused to let him go without a tray of homemade fig cookies, and after a crushing embrace and a kiss on the cheek, Harry stepped once more into the fireplace.
---
The ambience of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, had wasted no time in reverting back to its old, bitter, unwelcoming silence while Harry was away. It was as if Ron had not been there at all. Cold. Dark. Empty. Silent. So full of ghosts. The fire looked as if it hadn’t been lit in years. The corners of door frames were dusty and full of cobwebs. It was as if several years had passed in the span of a few hours.
Harry found himself breathing faster than he expected, and it was just from the dizzying passage through the fireplace he had taken. Something was very wrong. Though it was still well before sunset outside, Harry had to light his wand and carry it with him as he patrolled the house. Whoever or whatever it was that had broken into the house was in for a nasty shock.
The ground floor was as empty and dusty as ever. Harry took great care not to brush the painting of Sirius’s mother as he walked by.
The door to Sirius’s brother Regulus’s room was located on the first landing above the ground floor. It creaked ominously as Harry opened.
“Harry Potter…”
He jumped and slammed the door shut. His wand light had been snuffed out as if it were a candle, and now he was standing in complete pitch-darkness, panting as if he had just run a mile.
And that was when he heard it. A quiet, continuous scraping sound, emerging not from the closed room behind him but from the ground floor below. Harry stood with his back to Regulus Arcturus Black’s door, waiting, watching and waiting and listening to the cyclic, repetitive scrape of some unwelcome intruder…
But what was he thinking? He still had his wand on him, so at least he wasn’t defenseless. If only he hadn’t let Hermione borrow the Invisibility Cloak… But there was no time to worry about that. He had to act now. He cast a Muffling Charm on his shoes, the same one he’d used in the Auror tests over a week ago, and began to descend the stairs.
The noise was emerging from behind the bathroom door. Harry suppressed the urge to run out the front door and Disapparate as fast as he could. Gathering all the courage he could muster, he slammed the door and saw – Hermione’s record player, spinning endlessly without music. It was as ominous now as it had been when Harry had not known the origin of that scraping noise. Perhaps it had malfunctioned or gone haywire. After all, it had been ages since Harry had been confronted with the need to use Muggle technology.
It was only now, since his fight or flight response was subsiding, that Harry realized how much energy the last few minutes had cost him. He felt as though he had just spent hours running from some hidden enemy. It was a tiredness in the muscles, an aching discomfort that went all the way down to the bone. He let himself fall into a sitting position on the floor of the bathroom next to the record player, feeling the cold tiles against his skin. He ran his fingers over the grooves on the record, realizing as he did so that his fingers were trembling, his whole body was shivering as if from cold.
Not bothering to look at the titles on the record, he lifted the needle and set it into the grooves, letting the music out loud and clear. It was a song he’d never heard before; the deep echoes of the piano and guitar, bouncing off the frigid walls of the shadowed bathroom, surrounded him and enveloped him.
The vocals had come in now, a rich, soulful voice, as if the singer – whatever her name was – was in the very room with him, no, as if he was watching her from the back of an expansive concert hall… There was such grief, such longing, such regret…
He told me sweet lies of sweet loves
Heavy with the burden of the truth
And he spoke of his dreams
Broken by the burden
Broken by the burden of his youth
He was alerted by a wet splash on the cold tiles below that tears were running down his face… He barely had time to acknowledge feebly that Hermione had strange taste in music before he crawled over to the toilet and lost his lunch in it, along with a fair few homemade fig cookies.
Fourteen years, he said
I couldn’t look into the sun
She saw him laying at the end of my gun
Hungry for life
And thirsty for the distant river
There was nothing he could do to stop himself vomiting. He was ill, very ill. This was where it would end, alone in the house of his godfather, who knew when he would be found…
I remember his hands
And the way the mountains looked
The light shot diamonds from his eyes
Hungry for life
And thirsty for the distant river
Images were flashing in front of Harry’s eyes now, like George was sitting next to him watching a television program. Only, it wasn’t like a television program at all… Barty Crouch’s son was sobbing and pleading for mercy as he was dragged away by dementors… Neville Longbottom was accepting a Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum wrapper from his mother… Draco Malfoy was standing on top of the lightning-struck tower, his wand shaking in his hand… Hermione was lying on the floor of Malfoy Manor, a mess of blood and tears… Ron was clutching Fred’s dead body, still holding on… Percy was there, too… Little Teddy Lupin was dozing calmly in Harry’s arms, not a care in the world… Despite the fact that it was mid-July, and an exceptionally humid day at that, Harry felt an icy chill down his spine as if someone had just dumped a bucket of water on him.
Like the scar of age
Written all over my face
The war is still raging inside of me
Harry could hear movement outside now. Someone had opened and closed the front door, there were footsteps and a voice calling out… Harry replied with a robust retch into the toilet.
I still feel the chill
As I reveal my shame to you
I wear it like a tattoo
I wear it like a tattoo
I wear it like a tattoo…
The last echoes of the song died out as the record player came to a stop. Someone had opened the bathroom door. Harry was aware of himself being lifted to his feet and led blindly up a set of stairs, which were now creaking in full volume once again. He felt himself sink into a soft bed… All he could see now was the ceiling of the room in which he had stayed the summer before his fifth year… The summer after Cedric had died. It was Cedric’s face that he saw now in front of him, his eyes staring blankly into the sky, his arms and legs spread out at odd angles on the wet grass.
Cedric’s lifeless face morphed into a different, living one, one he knew very well, one densely covered with freckles and topped with flaming red fringe. Ron had come back for him. A pair of heavy blankets were laid over him, fully snapping him back into reality. A piping hot cup of tea was forced into his hands. Ron was sitting at the foot of Harry’s bed, looking into his eyes with an almost pitiful expression. Harry felt wretched.
“Is this what it was like?” said Harry suddenly. “When you… you know…”
“When I left you?” Ron finished for him. He cocked his head to the side for a moment, considering this. “More or less. I reckon you have it worse than I did, though.”
“I reckon you weren’t losing your lunch in Bill and Fleur’s outhouse, though.”
Ron let out a dry laugh. “You weren’t there.”
Harry had nothing to say to this; he had never given much thought to how Ron had felt during those two months of absence. Harry himself vividly remembered barely speaking to Hermione for weeks on end, turning quickly away whenever she showed signs of breaking down crying again. All the same, the guilt Ron had felt then couldn’t possibly have compared to the guilt he, Harry, was feeling now. His thoughts turned suddenly and unexpectedly to Professor Dumbledore’s blood-curdling screams in the underground lake that night, just over a year ago now.
Harry’s silence seemed to give Ron an excuse to continue fussing over him in a most Mrs Weasley-ish manner. Presently he disappeared for a few minutes only to return with a cloth bag of hot water, which he placed under Harry’s heavy blankets, and the tray of fig cookies he had left downstairs. These remained untouched, as Harry found he didn’t have much of an appetite at all.
Harry began to drift off as Ron continued to bustle around the room, busying himself with some unknown task, and before long he must have fallen into an uneasy, dreamless sleep, for he knew no more for a while.
---
Someone was screaming; it took Harry several seconds, or perhaps hours, or even entire days, to realize it was him. The uneasy, dreamless sleep had not taken very long to convert into sickening, nightmarish sleep. He had been swimming with great difficulty across an expansive, mirror-like black lake; a ghostly apparition of Cedric Diggory had been yelling at him to swim faster, that he was swimming too slowly and he needed to hurry up if he wanted to reach his body and the cup in time, but hands were grabbing at him from all sides, pulling him under. He couldn’t breathe, he was sure he was going to drown, those sickly hands were holding him in a vice-like grip…
Harry’s scream died in his throat as he ran out of breath. It was pitch-dark in the room now, except for a tiny sliver of morose street light sneaking in through the crack in the window. It had to be past midnight by now.
Something was stirring in the next bed over. He saw a long, lanky silhouette emerge from beneath a few light sheets. Seconds later, he felt Ron’s body sink in next to Harry. Harry tensed for a moment, then relaxed and let himself nestle into his best mate’s side, letting go of some of his excess body temperature into his cool skin. Ron tucked his arm around Harry’s shoulder in a protective position. It did not take very long for the rhythmic sound of his breathing and the rise and fall of his chest to put him right back to sleep.
---
Over nine thousand miles away, on an enormous island where everyone lived eleven hours in the future, a young girl named Jean Morgan Wilkins Harrison had just finished her detention, writing lines. After she had finally finished scribbling down the last iteration of “I must not be so opinionated,” she ran to her teacher and slammed the paper on his desk.
“I hope you’ve taken that message to heart, Jean,” he said. “You’re free to go now.” But she was already darting for the door, sprinting off as fast as her small legs could carry her. It was lunch hour, but instead of turning right toward the cacophonous cafeteria where her friends were enjoying their free time together, she turned left and made a bee-line for the library. A few minutes later, she had settled into a secluded corner with a tall stack of books on the table beside her, waiting to be read. She, however, had eyes only for the ancient, dusty encyclopedia that the school librarian had said was far too thick for any ten-year-old to be reading through.
---
Several hours later, when the sun had risen over a much smaller and more rainy island off the northern coast of France, Harry awoke alone in his bed in Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. He still felt sick, though his situation appeared to have improved at least a little since yesterday. He sat up slowly, taking in the sunlight that was now drifting in and highlighting the tiny flecks of dust floating lazily through the air. Crookshanks jumped onto Harry’s legs. Harry kicked him off, causing him to traipse out of the room moodily.
Harry pulled on his pyjamas, which were lying at the end of the bed. Ron was not there. Why was he always gone in the morning? What a sorry excuse for a friend. Then the more sensible part of Harry’s brain began to wake up. Of course; it was Monday morning (Was it even still morning?) and he must be at the Auror office already.
He walked slowly down to the basement kitchen and found a jar of fresh jam from the farmer’s market sitting next to a plate of cool toast. Ignoring this, Harry slouched into a chair on the opposite side of the table; his eye was caught by a piece of newspaper sitting within reach. It was open to the Quidditch section, a table recounting the scores of the most recent matches in the Quidditch World Cup. The headline, in bold letters, read: “HISTORIC UPSET: ALGERIA & CHILE Advance To Round Of Sixteen, Previous Favourites NORWAY & BENIN Eliminated.”
The article that followed detailed a play-by-play of each of the six matches that had taken place between the four teams of Group G. Harry was particularly interested in the game of Algeria vs. Norway that had taken place two days ago and lasted ten hours: Norway, one of the favorites to win the entire World Cup, had suffered a humiliating defeat; the underdog Algerians had decisively won with 410 – 180. Harry grinned, remembering how he had been supporting Algeria in the previous World Cup until their close defeat by Poland in the group stages.
Harry flipped a few pages, skipping past a descriptive article about the new brooms the Chilean team were using this time around and how they were personalized to play to each member’s strengths and –
There he was. Gliding between two opposing players, with his arm outstretched, now dodging a Bludger, now closing in on the Snitch. The caption below the photo read, “Omar Merabet, 24, Seeker of the Algerian National Team, reaches out to catch the Snitch in his second ever Quidditch World Cup.”
Harry vividly remembered the first time he had seen that face grinning up at him from the Daily Prophet. He, Ron, and Hermione had been sitting in the common room one muddy evening in early June. Hermione had been rifling through a copy of the weekly newspaper she had borrowed from Parvati Patil when Ron suddenly grabbed it from her.
“Blimey, look, I’d nearly forgotten!” he had said excitedly, and Hermione’s reproachful glare had died for a second in surprise. “It’s the Quidditch World Cup starting soon! Who’ll you two be supporting? Looks like Romania’s been qualified, maybe I’ll support them for Charlie – Oh and there’s Armenia, too, their Keeper’s really promising –”
But Harry and Hermione, who had both grown up in Muggle households, were in unknown territory. Hermione, Harry remembered, had scoffed and snatched for the Prophet back, but Ron had already pulled it out of her reach and passed it to him to look at. And that was when he had seen him. Looking up out of the paper, standing next to his fellow players, was a young man with curly black hair just like his dad’s, brown skin and deep, dark eyes just like his dad’s, even a grin that resembled his dad’s from those pictures in the album Hagrid had given him. Harry had taken a long look at him – the resemblance was uncanny, after all – before saying in a small voice, “I think I’ll support Algeria, what d’you reckon?”
At which point Ron had paused for a moment, considering, before saying, “Well, they’ll have an uphill battle ahead of them, but their Seeker’s quite good…”
Now Harry was looking down at the picture of the twenty-four-year-old Seeker, and where he had once seen a resemblance with his father, he now also saw a resemblance with himself.
Something else about that photo momentarily captured his attention: In the background, far behind the Algerian Seeker and the Norwegian players he was perpetually avoiding, there was another crowd of other people mounted on broomsticks hovering well above the stands. However, they weren’t players… After a few seconds he managed to identify an emblem on their chests indicating they were security wizards. This was unprecedented; he had never seen a Quidditch match so heavily guarded. Of course. These must be the new security measures put in place since what happened at the last Quidditch World Cup. That ominous, glowing, grinning skull hovered for a moment in front of his eyes, and then was gone. He suddenly felt quite sick to his stomach and closed the newspaper quickly.
---
Ron did not return all day, of course; in protest of this absence, Harry did not move a muscle until he opened the front door that evening. When he did return, he came burdened with several bulging bags and a strange odor that, for some reason, reminded Harry of Professor Snape’s classroom in the dungeons.
“I’ve been to Diagon Alley,” said Ron breathlessly, hauling in the ponderous bags, “to get some ingredients at the Apothecary. George says hullo, by the way. He’s just reopened his shop today, and it was packed! I guess people have been waiting for it to make a comeback.”
Harry did not ask why Ron had bothered to visit the Apothecary of all places, nor did he send his greetings to George. He stayed quite still while Ron unpacked several eerie-looking jars and stored them in a cupboard. When he had finished, he turned back to face Harry with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Had a good day, have we?” said Ron. “I notice you haven’t had the toast I left out for you. Have you actually eaten anything?”
Harry once again said nothing. How could it possibly be Ron’s business what he had or had not eaten? It was his house, after all. However, when the plate of toast was once again shoved in front of him, he reluctantly began to nibble away at it.
Once Ron was slightly more satisfied with Harry’s attempts at finishing the toast, he pulled him out of his chair and led him to the shower. It wasn’t being naked in front of Ron that embarrassed him; they had lived together for years, it was hardly the first time they had seen each other like that. Nor was it the fact that Ron stripped down and joined him, scrubbing Harry’s body gently until it was clean again and lathering his thick black hair with shampoo and Gilderoy Lockhart’s Optimal Conditioner for Volume and Softness. It was the fact that Harry was very much capable of doing these things himself, he knew he could, but why couldn’t he? Why was he frozen for hours at a time, staring into the middle distance like the ghosts that haunted this godforsaken house? He was nearly unrecognizable from the boy who had walked down to the Forbidden Forest to accept his fate that night two months ago. What had gone wrong? Had he lost all his nerve when he had died?
He continued pondering these questions as Ron dried him and dressed him in a new change of clothes before doing the same for himself.