Chapter Text
Harry looks bored.
Merlin knows how he could possibly be bored, but there he sits, eyes glazed under his glasses.
He’s tapping a rhythm she hasn’t heard before on the desk with his slender fingers, laden with rings which leave slight green bands on his skin as they slide up and down. One of them is shaped like a skull, slightly lopsided and impossibly gaudy. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth.
“Can I smoke in here?” he asks, already lighting one with nimble fingers. His tone is lazy, and he bites down on the filter with crooked front teeth, a flash of something strange passing across his face.
It’s a mockery of manners, but it’s the best she’s going to get, so she allows it with a slight nod.
“Nice place you’ve got here.” He continues, in a way that couldn’t be taunting, not as they sit in a dead man’s office.
He picks at the fraying cuff of his jumper, almost absent minded, pressing and twisting the thread so it splays into hundreds of tiny fibres. She focuses on that, her breathing slightly stilted. He pulls on it slightly harder, and it comes undone, pulling a whole row of stitches with it.
There’s something off about this whole thing, something which makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
She’s always had good instincts. Cat-like, even. She just can’t figure out what this is. Can’t figure what about this is sending tingles of panic down her spine.
Harry puffs out a cloud of musty smoke, sighing softly.
“What can I do for you?”
The smoke swirls upwards, almost serpent like in the air. Harry doesn’t even acknowledge it.
“Why do you assume that I’m asking you to do something?”
“That’s all you fuckers have been doing since I got here.” He bites back, with none of its usual venom. In fact, he just sounds tired.
“Albus Dumbledore is dead.” She says. Perhaps if she says it again then it will begin to feel real. Perhaps this whole thing will stop feeling like an ill concocted nightmare.
“Yep.” He pops the P, “Contrary to popular opinion, I can actually read.”
Then he shudders, just slightly, his throat rippling.
She narrows her eyes at him.
Considering.
And then, something softens. He clears his throat, evidently uncomfortable.
“I- uh- I’m sorry for your loss.” He says, in a way which seems more than a little out of character. “That’s what you say, when people die, isn’t it?”
It strikes her strangely, that in all of hustle and bustle, and panic, and frenzy to war, no one has taken that moment. The moment to be sorry for her loss. Her loss of a friend, a confidant. It’s ironic that Harry Evans is the first to extend that empathy to her.
“Thank you.” She replies, and she means it.
It reminds her of the fact that while Harry is a difficult person, an abrasive person, he isn’t a bad person. He’s a product of his circumstance, and the blame for his circumstance partially rests upon her own shoulders.
“What happened to him?” he asks, almost delicately, “Wait, shit, you’re not supposed to ask that, are you? None of my business and all that shit.” He scratches the back of his neck, sheepishly.
“We’re still trying to work it out.” She isn’t like Albus in this respect. He saw admitting to not knowing something, not knowing everything, as a weakness, whereas she sees a strange sort of strength in the humility.
“Well.” Says Harry, evenly. “I hope you do.” He draws in smoke, long and slow. The end of his cigarette burns a hole in the air. His eyes bore into her, hot and hollow.
The silence stretches out between them, insurmountable.
Ever since they found Harry Evans, everything had become worse. It wasn’t as if she could blame him for that, at least not directly, but his complicated presence was a turning point. The last glimmer of hope snuffed out, perhaps.
Or maybe that hope died with Albus.
She isn’t all the way sure, but hope increasingly seems like a currency of the old times.
“What now?” asks Harry, flicking his glowing cigarette butt away. It never hits the ground.
“We fight.”
Harry stares at her, seeming to consider it, for a long, painful moment.
He has old eyes, already creased and complicated, despite his youth. She wishes that she could glean what he was thinking, to any capacity. Wishes she could understand, because that might just mean that she could help.
She only wants to help.
And then, he shocks her again, with a sideways smirk, one which is painfully familiar. “Let’s hope we win then, because I am a piss poor loser.”
Ron is scared.
He sort of doesn’t want to admit it, because so far he’s done a pretty good job of keeping it together, pretending that everything is normal, and he’s going to do his NEWTs, and get decent scores, somewhere in between Percy’s and Charlie’s, and get a nice normal job, which he hasn’t quite settled on yet, because he isn’t hugely passionate about anything, and get his own house, so that he can live out from under his family’s feet, and just live an average, unremarkable life.
But if he admits that he’s scared, then he reckons that his nice normal fantasy might just crumble into dust.
He doesn’t understand war, not like someone whose lived it, but he knows that it’s going to be bad. He knows that awful things happen in wartime, even if it’s just in the abstract. He knows that awful things might happen to him, to his family, to the people that he loves. He knows that the awful things have already started to happen.
And he doesn’t know how to stop it.
But when Hermione Granger, objectively the smartest, and bravest, person he knows, bursts into tears in the mostly empty common room, as the embers fizzle in the fireplace, it all suddenly becomes very real.
He opens his arms, because he doesn’t really know what else to do, and she presses her face, which is already wet with an off-putting combination of snot and tears, into his slightly musty jumper, emblazoned with a lopsided ‘R’. He hugs her so tightly that it probably hurts. He isn’t sure if he really wants to let go.
“He’s dead.” She mumbles.
“I know. I know. It’ll be okay though.” Ron lies, because he isn’t really sure what else to say. He rubs circles on her back, like his mother used to do, when he was sick. He feels sick now, something which is unfamiliar. Most of his childhood ‘ailments’ had been little more than grabs for attention.
“No it won’t.” Hermione replies, between choked sobs. He’s not seen her cry like this since some time way back in Third Year, when everything was simple. It makes him more than a little uncomfortable, the way she clings to him like he’s a life-raft, when he feels like he may be drowning as well.
“There’s going to be a war.” She tacks on, matter of fact, and Ron is reminded of the fact that she always has to be right, regardless of the occasion.
He finds himself thinking, ‘Stupid know-it-all’, something he’d mumble under his breath in First Year in almost every class, although on this occasion its twinged with fondness, and fear, and regret.
“We’ll win it.” Ron says, with a lot more bravado than he feels.
Inside he feels like he’s falling, like the pit of his stomach has dropped, and is going to be descending for the foreseeable future.
“We’ve got you on our side.” He’s only half joking. Hermione is wicked clever, and clever people win wars, he knows that for a fact. “You’ll take them all down.”
She’s the best of them, and he’s grown out of the phase where that made him jealous, now it just makes him proud.
She laughs, like someone trying to convince themselves that something is funny.
Nothing is funny. Not anymore. Not since the whole world came crashing down around them, and it all became suddenly, painfully, real.
“They’ll come for me.” She says, with a finality in her tone, as if she’s painfully resigned to her fate.
“I won’t let them.” He doesn’t hesitate, not even for a moment.
He really means it.
He can feel her smile, just slightly, into his shoulder.
They stay there, frozen, for an indeterminate amount of time, because letting go feels like a beginning.
Ron tries to blink away the wetness in his own eyes. He tries to be brave.
He has to be.
“Did we do the right thing?” Sirius asks, hesitantly.
“Of course we did.” Remus replies, not even looking up from his soup. It’s supposed to be leek and potato, although Sirius, dependably unable to do anything by halves, added more than half of the spice cabinet to the pot while Remus wasn’t looking. The result is interesting, although not more interesting than the question at hand. “He didn’t mean to.”
“But we meant to.”
Remus looks up, finally.
Sirius is pale, more so than usual, a sort of nervous energy vibrating through him. He’s practically chewed a hole in his lower lip, which is red-black and swollen, stark against his gaunt face.
He never used to be the nervous one.
“We did what we had to do.” Remus rationalises, carefully, maybe partly for his own benefit as well. “We did the right thing.”
That just seems to incense Sirius further, as he shakes his head stubbornly, hair flopping from side to side. “So we decide now, do we? We decide what’s right and wrong?” His voice rises up in his throat, and Remus can feel him teetering on the edge of hysteria. An edge which has become all the more serrated since Azkaban.
He wants to say, ‘Well someone has to.’
But he knows that Sirius doesn’t believe that they can. Doesn’t believe that they should. He knows that Sirius hasn’t trusted himself in years, has always thought that there’s some broken, dark, evil part of himself which makes him incapable of true mortality. He knows that as much as Sirius blames others for what happened, he blames himself. He came into the world marked for darkness, after all. Remus hates it. He wishes that Sirius could see what he saw.
So Remus chooses his next words carefully. “That’s what Dumbledore was doing for years.”
Sirius deflates.
Remus puts his spoon down, gets up, and closes the gap between them.
Sirius practically collapses into his arms, slotting against him perfectly, a mess of limbs meshing into one.
He smells like wet dog, and Remus breaths it in, like he’s running out of air.
This part is familiar.
The comfort. God knows they both need this.
“Yeah?” Remus whispers, into the top of Sirius’ head.
He doesn’t want to let go.
“Yeah. I know you’re right, it’s just-“ Sirius pauses, his breath catching in his throat. Remus can feel him shuddering against his chest. “The sort of thing she’d do.”
Remus doesn’t have to ask who he’s talking about. The slashed remains of the portrait still hang in the hallway, tattered from an occasion where the oily outline of Walburga took it too far.
And maybe he’s right. Maybe Walburga would’ve let some innocent fall for a crime someone she loved committed (Remus isn’t all the way convinced that she was capable of anything like love, but the point remains). But they are not Walburga Black, and Snape is no innocent. And Harry didn’t mean to?
But Sirius knows that. Of course he knows that.
He just spends too long, staring in the mirror, searching for a hint of his mother in his eyes.
“We did it with much more style.”
Sirius shoves him backwards, lightly, untangling himself. Remus mourns the loss of contact. Sirius rolls his eyes, a shadowy smile playing on his lips.
“Now. Shall we attend to our guest?”