Harry was very aware of footsteps. He had to be.
He’d needed the skill to determine which of his relatives had come to wake him up every morning.
He’d needed to know if he’d receive dust coming down from the stairs as his cousin jumped up and down obnoxiously above.
Or perhaps the rapid knocking of his Aunt Petunia. Forever impatient with Harry’s groggy morning tendencies.
Or, worse still, Uncle Vernon’s lazy opening of the cupboard door. A mumbled “Get up,” as he shuffled off to the kitchen.
Harry had come to know Sirius’s steps as well. They were quiet. Years of sneaking around after hours and running from the Ministry had left him a master of going audibly unnoticed.
Though, when Harry caught it, it was always his heels that gave him away. Scraping on the floor as the man trudged down the many flights of stairs in his childhood home. His old prison regaining its title for caging the pride of Sirius Black.
That knowledge held within Harry’s mind was worthless now, however. Because as the June sun beat down on his tired skin, Harry knew that he’d never hear those footsteps again.
He’d never hear that lazy slide of a heel. Not from Sirius, anyway.
Because those footsteps were lost. Tumbling back behind a veil Harry no longer cared to understand.
It should’ve been Bellatrix, or Wormtail, or anyone other than the one man who had stood up for him. Who had reached through the darkness of Harry’s mind and pulled him to safer, warmer shores.
It wasn’t fair. None of this was. The prophecy, the war, the scars on the back of his hand.
It wasn’t fair to his friends, who had grown attached to a boy doomed to become a murderer, or die in his refusal to do so.
It wasn’t fair to his parents, who had sacrificed their lives for a chance at destroying a shell of a man too afraid to let the inevitable claim his wounded soul.
Harry’s eyes are closed. The light and colour of the world shuttered behind the impenetrable red glow of the back of his eyelids. His back pressed against a tree that had lost so much of its comfort in light of the memory of a boy tormenting his classmate. Of friends and future loves saying things only his nightmares could’ve imagined.
He didn’t care about that now, however. All he thought now was that Sirius had once sat here. His eyes alight with mischief and life. Something Harry had only seen glimpses of. Like a ghost at the end of an unending corridor.
The ebb and flow of the shallow waves from the lake kept his mind at bay. It’s murky depths maintaining his sanity. Letting them hold him up.
He hears footsteps, then. Grass getting pressed into the ground under determined steps. Twigs cracking and bending to the sheer will of whoever was coming.
Harry releases a pained sigh. The tranquility of the moment slipping away with each impending step.
They are neither graceful nor clumsy. Each fall is deliberate, understanding. They’re light, which means it isn’t one of the boys, unless Colin Creevey had come looking for an autograph.
It isn’t Hermione, who marched anywhere she went, while somehow managing to be delicate and hesitant.
Then, as the steps near his place, seated against a tree, they stop. He hears the rumple of robes, and the staticky sound of thousands of strands of grass being folded down under the weight of someone sitting down.
Harry’s irritation swells in his chest. He’d came here to be alone. To sink in his despair and let the world take hold of him. He’d made himself very clear without saying a word to his friends. They’d understood. He’d seen it in Ron’s eyes and Hermione’s frown.
He hears the creak of leather bindings, and the ruffle of pages. Then, the unfamiliar click of a muggle pen. A sound he hadn’t heard in years, really. Save for Mr. Weasley’s incessant questions on the things over the summer.
His throat dry, his voice harsh, Harry says, “I don’t want to talk,”
There’s no immediate response. Just the sound of someone scribbling away on parchment.
“I know,” his mysterious companion mumbled. Her voice like a song in the breeze. He shouldn’t be surprised now, after a year full of them, that it was Ginny Weasley.
She continues to write, and Harry keeps his eyes shut. He can feel the tickle of hair dancing on his right arm. The wind blowing it onto his bicep.
“What are you writing?” he asks as the dull scratching becomes a monotone ringing in his ears.
“I thought you said you didn’t want to talk?” Ginny’s writing stops, and Harry feels his lips quirk upward slightly.
He doesn’t respond. Instead choosing to shift his legs into a more comfortable position. Giving his knees a break and letting the blood move through them.
“I’m writing a story,” she explains after a long silence filled with the distant cheers of simpler lives and waves rolling up a gravelly shore.
“What’s it about?” Harry asks, his voice lighter this time.
Ginny huffs a quiet laugh. “You don’t get the details. You can read it once it’s finished,”
Harry unwinds his arms and let’s them fall comfortably into his lap. “Will I get a free copy?”
“Maybe,” is Ginny’s shrewd response.
Again a silence lapses between them. Harry’s chest rises and falls with every breath.
Every breath he is still here, on one side of a veil.
“It’s about a girl,” Ginny says eventually. He swears he can see her tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Her freckled nose twitching in the breeze. “She’s awake and she knows what she wants. She’s happy,”
Harry nods slowly, his eyes stay shut.
“I hope you let me read it some time,”
“Maybe,”
And for hours there was nothing but silent writing, and Harry’s thoughts strayed from Sirius, from the prophecy, and from his parents.
He wanted to know about the girl who knew what she wanted. Who was happy.
