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mindPeople found it easy to forget your first year at Hogwarts. Perhaps that’s not right, perhaps “easier” is the term instead. You also found it easy, not least due to how much of it is stolen memories, blackouts. The few moments you can remember, you usually have blood on your hands - and those you only remember in dreams.
But you can remember Harry. You remember waking up somewhere you didn’t know, and it was as if from a deep sleep, as if your head had been held underwater for months, and he was there, an anchor, a life-ring, pulling you back to the air.
It was only when you got to Egypt that you felt warm again. Your brothers - well, Bill and Charlie, who weren’t there and who don’t feel quite as guilty - treat you like a human, and don’t flinch whenever you laugh. The first year you forget, but this summer you hold onto for years to come: a reminder that laughing and sunlight in the face of the worst of times is a way you can survive.
Your second year becomes a blur of catch-up, the darkness of dementors, Luna, and finally getting to know the girls in your dormitory. They’re good people, all of them, and unlike all the people in the castle you’re related to, don’t treat you as though you’re made of glass. You start to enjoy Hogwarts - perhaps even to love it. You relearn the place, sealing up every half-memory of darkness and fear with a new one of light and love. You become known amongst Gryffindor, not as the girl who was cursed but as a girl who can curse, and will, and this reputation grows amongst the houses as you grow in confidence and age.
You know early on that you’ll never let yourself be weak again. You find your superpower - your words - and you use it, pulling people towards you and hurting the ones who try to ruin you with a flick of your tongue. You have allies and friends, and by the time it comes to Dumbledore’s Army, you already have a foundation of offensive spells at your disposal. You thrive in a battle, putting your fear to use, and you weren’t expecting one before you were sixteen but when the call comes, you answer.
At some point amongst this, you fall in love. With yourself, first and foremost, but with other people too - Eleanor, Dean, and of course,
Harry. But no matter how much they love you, and no matter how much you love them, your mind remains your own.
bodyYou’d started, not all that late on, to define yourself by what your body could do. It began when you were young, learning how to fly in secret, and it returned in sixth year, when it seemed the Carrows were fascinated by the same thing, and it became a game that you could play with them. How many curses before you scream? You can do one more, come on, you know it - one more, and then one more, and then one more. The others stopped counting scars at some point, you don’t remember exactly when, but you never can. Every mark is a victory, a reminder that you didn’t scream. You’ve got a big mouth, Alecto grins, why don’t you use it? But you never scream.
When you move out of the Gryffindor dorm for what you think then is the last time, curl up on your hammock in your first moment alone, you don’t cry. You wrap your arms around your knees and you count your fingers and your toes and you’re grateful, more than anything else, that you can count the breaths and you can feel every limb of your body. They ache, but they’re still there, and they do what you tell them.
It takes months for you to let him touch you again. It’s not quite years, but it could have been. You’ve spent so long reclaiming yourself, nerve ending by nerve ending, breath by breath, that it takes all you have to let him (let anyone) have any influence over you at all. And you know he understands, but you know that everyone else is watching you and thinking “how dare she, when he’s been through so much”, even if they don’t know. You feel like they know.
You don’t really know why it takes you so long to realise what will help. You’re at home, again, but you can’t handle the house, again, so you’re outside. The lock on the cupboard is long gone, but you still remember the feeling of that first time you used your magic to make it open. You laugh, and then it turns into a sob, and then you open it and you grab your dead-older-brother’s broom before you can think about it, and you
fly. It is perfect, and it’s freeing, and you’re in control and out of it all rolled into one, and hours later you call him and you go over and you can kiss him again, can be kissed, and it’s okay and it’s okay and it’s okay.
You bring yourself back with this, finding your body again and your self deep inside it. Quidditch saves you, as it always would, and it doesn’t take long before it’s your life. No one can touch you up here, and a bludger is nothing after a year of crucios.
You get married. It’s obvious, everyone can see it, and why shouldn’t your love be a fuck you to everyone? It’s as small as you can convince your mum to let it be, because let’s face it, this wedding exists for no one except him. You can see it in him, how much he needs to be a part of a family, and how much he wants to be connected to you and yours, and you love him almost as much as life itself, so how could you deny him this? And when your hands are bound together and your eyes meet, it feels worth living through all that to feel your heart explode in your chest like this. He’s the only one who can knock you out of control, which is a good job really, because he’s the only one whom you don’t mind doing it.
And then? And then. You’re not trying, you’re really not, no matter how much your mother and the press and your colleagues and your friends keep thinking and asking and hoping that you are. You’ve talked to him about it, of course you have, but always in the hypothetical, never moving beyond the vague comments and the “when we’s” and the “you’d be”. You know he wants children, of course he does, he yearns for it, and you know him too well not to notice. But he knows that you need this time first, and so he doesn’t push.
But then it happens anyway. You notice early on - it’s your body, after all, your weapon and your tool - you can feel the shift in the way your broom moves as you kick off the ground, and you know. You know it sounds strange, but you know. You keep it a secret for a week, maybe, and then you tell him, and he is alight with happiness, and maybe it’ll be alright.
Your first pregnancy is as awful as you thought it would be. This thing inside you - this thing that will become James, a rare point of joy so bright it’s painful, but that isn’t James yet - takes over your body and makes you sick, endlessly so, and any thoughts you might’ve had of keeping on playing for a month longer are abandoned. You become a child again yourself, an invalid, an alien creature of swollen limbs and empty organs (all empty except one), and all around you swirls the endless coverage and thoughts and opinions from it seems everyone in the wizarding world and beyond, all wanting to know about the “Potter” baby and the “Potter” mother, all desperate for pictures and a site of your insides, and you want to scream that it’s still you, in there, but it doesn’t feel like it is at all.
soulYou’d loved Harry Potter for a very long time, by the time you fall in love again, and you hadn’t really thought it was possible. But when the baby-boy-bundle is handed to you and James’ tiny hand grabs your hair, your heart cracks open and triples in size and it’s overwhelming, how ready you are to fight to the death to save this tiny life.
You thought you were ready, when it came to Albus, that you knew how this worked now. You were used to the constant low-level fear like you hadn’t (before) felt in years, that no matter where your son was or what you were in the middle of (including Quidditch matches) your heart was with him. You’d started to understand your mother’s clock. But Albus is a new story, less of a breaking than a deepening, as if someone had shown you a lake inside your own heart that had somehow always been there.
And then a daughter. Your mother cries uncontrollably when she sees Lily for the first time. Apparently she looks just like you. Lily is the one who most of all, you feel hopeful for. Your little flower, already roaring ferociously, and you are determinedly sure that she will have the world, the childhood, that Tom Riddle ripped from you. She already has the spark and the thoughtfulness of her namesakes, and you vow then that you will never let her down.
Your life slowly brightens - and you realise that it’s been happening for years - from one characterised by fear and relief to one of love and laughter. You’ve built a life from the rubble the war left behind, and it’s a life that’s good. You live in a house that smells like your husbands’ cooking, and it’s always full of children and chaos and accidental magic. At night you wrap your arms around him and you start to feel like it all might have been enough.
You’re sure that the two of you did talk about Quidditch. You must have done. You don’t remember the conversations though - you remember the agonising. He was in the office more and more, even at that stage (Lily was 2, and just getting too old to be taken to training, and James was 6 and you’d felt guilty about leaving him with your mum for years), and you’d been writing freelance long enough that you knew you could pull in the jobs if you needed to.
You start to understand your mother more and more as the years go on. And your sisters, as you think of them, all four, all balancing scars and night terrors and the passing of years with teething and heigh charts and temper tantrums. There is joy, of course there is joy, and there is joy even in the darkness itself. You still see ghosts everywhere, and rarely more than in your children: it’s so strange but so perfect that your brother, your friends, your mentor, live on in these tiny people who never met them. You’ve grown into a person and a life that commemorates them, but you grow new memories every day.
And then James goes to Hogwarts and Harry’s nightmares get worse and you’re asked back to the Harpies, all in the same week. Of course you don’t take their offer. Of course you can’t, not now, not when he’s never been more distant, when you’ve never felt so alone, but it weighs on you, it’s always there, every night when you wake up sweating to cries that he won’t let you help with. You start going back home every day, scooping up the very unscoopable Albus and Lily, just so you can sleep for two hours and know that they’re safe.
He drifts from you. You don’t feel like you know him any more. You spend embarrassing agonising hours with Hermione and Ron, hoping against hope that they know something you don’t, but the three of you know that it’s not true - that wherever he’s gone, he’s gone there alone.
You can’t tell how much the children know. When Albus leaves for Hogwarts, you don’t know if it’s normal nerves or how much he’s picking up on it. But after he’s gone you know better than to doubt Lily. In two years you’ve moved from a family of five to a team of two, and you feel yourself clinging to her, desperate not to lose her, to be left alone.
And then, of course, she does go, taking the last of her cousins with her. And so does Harry. You’ve figured it out by now, of course, that this isn’t new, that this has always been there, that the responsible instincts had been the only things stopping it, and that he hasn’t felt responsible for you for years.
Even after this, you’re surprised when it happens. You’re in Hogsmeade - the anniversary was the next day and you wanted time to acclimatise, so it doesn’t take you long to respond to the patronus and get back to the castle. Every single thing that could have happened to your children has played double speed in your head, and when you get there, when she tells you, when you sink to your knees, soul suddenly cold, you realise you hadn’t even thought to worry about him.
They say it was an accident, but you know better. You’ve seen him fly, and you’ve flown with the best, and he knew Hogwarts better than anyone since Tom Riddle. The worst part, you think, feeling someones arms wrap around you, ready to dry tears that won’t come, is that you hadn’t realised you’d had so much hope until suddenly it was gone.
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