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Chapter Text

The ballroom was all marble and gold.

Veins of white and cream streaked across the surface like an apology no one meant. Gilded archways and candle brackets, soft enough to look expensive, but never warm. The floor gleamed. It was polished so thoroughly that Harry could see his reflection between the cracks.

He looked down now and saw only the outline of a man.
Something suit-shaped and spectral, fractured between the tiles.

He’d arrived alone, of course. Kingsley had offered to send a Ministry escort, but that felt like turning himself in. Hermione and Ron had owled to say that Rose had a cold, so they wouldn’t be able to come, but he knew that was a lie born of mercy. They hadn’t attended one of these victory parades in years.

Ten years since the Battle of Hogwarts. Ten years since the light side had won. That’s what tonight was supposed to be for.

Supposed to be.

Harry had lost track of how many times they’d celebrated it. How many commemorative nights, glittering speeches, war-themed hors d'oeuvres. He used to count. Used to hope they would eventually stop asking him to remember. Now he just showed up on time and left early, like a ghost clocking in for his haunting.

These events weren’t for the dead. Or for peace. Instead, they asked him to dress up his grief in formalwear and perform it on command. Parade out the war hero to remember the ghosts.

The same donors, the same articles, the same champagne, and the same questions. Harry had been doing this since he was seventeen.

His glass trembled slightly in his hand, though he hadn’t drunk a drop. As soon as he’d entered, an attendant had handed it to him with a quiet, “Thank you for your service, Mr. Potter.” He never touched the rim. Just held it. Let it catch the light like he was part of the decoration.

Just the nerves, he told himself. Or the cold. Marble looked strong, but it was brittle underneath. Easy to fracture if struck the right way.

He shifted toward the edge of the room, nearing the reporters’ platform. The sooner he answered their questions, the sooner he could go home. As he glided up the stairs, practiced smile in place, he placed his hand in his pants pocket to project an air of easy confidence. It’s what they wanted after all. He knew how to play it. Stand straight. Make a joke at your own expense. Speak just enough to sound interesting, but never real. He’d mastered the art of saying “Yes, I’m honored” while wondering how many more minutes he would be forced to speak.

Cameras flashed every few seconds, illuminating the blur of glittering gowns and the sharp edges of lapel pins. His nails dug into his palm in anticipation of the oncoming assault. Or maybe just to remind him that no one could hurt him more than himself.

“Harry, over here!”

Harry blinked and turned, nodding politely at a sea of waving microphones.

“Harry, darling, love the suit! New designer?”

He gave her the smallest nod. A few chuckles fluttered in the crowd.

Another leaned over the barrier, voice slick and eager. “Ten years since You-Know-Who — does it feel like yesterday, or does it feel like forever?”

“Both,” Harry said. Always both.

A third voice chimed in, from a young reporter he didn’t recognize. “Some say you’ve been quiet lately. Taking a step back. Is the Boy Who Lived tired of being seen?”

“I’m just… living.”

And even that felt generous. Most days, he didn’t live so much as exist between appearances.

“And how’s the single life treating you? Still waiting on that engagement announcement? Or are you just keeping someone secret?”

Harry gave a practiced smile, the kind that said absolutely nothing. They would simply pick a name tomorrow and spread the rumors of his newest engagement whether he supplied them with one or not. They always did.

Another reporter, older, polished, and practiced, leaned forward from The Daily Prophet. “And what about your parents, Mr. Potter? Lily and James! Symbols of resistance, of love, of sacrifice. What do you think they’d make of this legacy you’ve carried? Would they be proud?”

The question was offered so casually. Like it wasn’t personal. Like it wasn’t sacred. Like it didn’t strike him in exactly the right way… Like they hadn’t already asked it a hundred times, dressed up in different fonts and feigned empathy.

The press tittered, that soft, smug laugh of people who thought they were being clever. As if it were touching. As if it were a tribute.

Harry’s lips didn’t move. Not yet.

He stood still, the laughter and camera flashes falling away, his breath sounding too loud in his own ears. Not angry. Not exactly sad. Just…
Empty.

They didn’t know what they were asking. They never did.

Would his parents be proud?

If they’d lived, would they be paraded about like this? Would they have worn tailored suits and dazzling dresses to galas hosted in rooms they couldn’t leave, shaking hands with people who only cared about what they represented?

Would they have smiled like Harry had learned to? Like nothing touched them, like legacy made up for absence?

He wasn’t even sure what they sounded like. What their laugh felt like in a quiet kitchen. Whether his mother hummed when she cooked, or if his father liked his eggs soft or runny.

He didn’t know if they danced while getting ready in the morning.. If they would have read the paper together on the porch, or argued gently over whose turn it was to start the washing up.

He had no memories of being tucked in, or of warm hands brushing through his hair, or of anyone ever calling him “love” without it costing something. Costing everything.

All he had were borrowed images—photographs that didn’t move and stories that didn’t belong to him. Secondhand echoes of a life he never got to live.

They were marble now. Statues in stories. His memories of them were borrowed, quotes and photos with the edges worn bare from how often he handled them.

He remembered less about his father than he did about his own press statements. A ghost of a grin and the brush of affectionate lips against his cheek. Hands that were always gentle.

And his mother? Her voice only came to him in screams. Final, desperate, begging. Dying. He tried to build something from that, some mosaic of love, but the pieces never held.

And still, the way other people said their names with reverence…
And Harry? He was the same. Cold. Shined up. Put on display.

A monument, not a man.

He had been mourning for ten years in formalwear.

Not just the war. Not just the people they lost. But the childhood he never got to have. The parents he barely remembers. The softness he was never allowed to reach out and take.

He was born already burdened. A prophecy waiting to be fulfilled. A funeral already planned.

By the time he could walk, the people meant to love him had already been murdered, and the people meant to raise him had already decided he wasn’t worth the effort.

He didn’t learn warmth. He learned survival.
Silence. Compliance. Bravery on command.

And when it was over, when the dust settled, when the world declared him safe and whole, no one stopped to ask who he was beneath the scars.

They just handed him a designer suit and told him to smile.
Shake hands. Pose for pictures. Say something noble.

Be inspiring. Be grateful.

Be brave.

Be fine.

But he wasn’t fine.

He flinched at loud noises.
Portkeys made his stomach twist with nausea and fear.
He couldn’t stand to be held down, not even in jest.
He startled at kindness. Avoided it, even.
Because if someone touched him gently, he might unravel completely.

He still woke up crying for Sirius.
Still saw Cedric in every sweet-faced boy who smiled too easily.
He couldn’t look at a house-elf without seeing Dobby’s last breath.
Every loss had etched itself into his skin. He was still bleeding.
He had never left the battlefield.

Even the people he still had, he kept at a distance because loving them meant fearing their loss. Because he couldn’t survive that again.

Everyone else had moved on.
Built lives. Had children. Laughed.

But Harry?
He had stayed behind.
Stuck in time. A living monument.
A ghost dressed in hero’s clothing, walking through his own life like a shadow.

And no one had noticed.

He looked at the reporter who had asked the question. Would they be proud of you?

Looked through him, really—past the polished smile, the angled pen, the polite cruelty of curiosity dressed up as reverence.

And then, quietly, like he was already halfway gone, Harry said:
“This is all I’ll ever be to you, isn’t it? Just gilded marble.”

A statue. Something beautiful and lifeless. Made to be stared at. Not understood. Polished, but hollow.

The silence that followed wasn’t shocked. It was practiced. Painless. The kind of silence people gave to things they didn’t plan to carry home.

No one stopped him as he stepped down from the dais. No one followed.

And when someone finally called his name, soft, uncertain, already reaching for spin…
Harry kept walking.

Because in that moment, he wasn’t storming off. He wasn’t making a statement.
He was burying something.
Finally laying to rest the boy they’d all imagined. The one who smiled and waved and made it look easy.

He left that ghost behind in the ballroom.
Let them toast to him.

He had nothing left to give them.

And he didn’t mourn it.

Chapter Text

He arrived with a quiet pop.
Even the sound of his escape was polite. Repressed. Controlled. Like everything else in his life.

The flat greeted him with silence. Not peace. Not comfort. Just the mechanical hum of the refrigerator, the distant tick of the old radiator in the wall, and the creak of warped floorboards beneath his too tight dress shoes. The lights were off. He never left them on, but the moonlight spilling in through the half-drawn blinds sliced the room into pale silver bars, like the whole place was behind bars with him.

He didn’t move at first. Just stood by the door, fingertips grazing the keys still tucked in his pocket. He hadn’t meant to bring them. He had no intention of using them again. But some part of him still held on out of habit, like a phantom limb refusing to accept the loss.

His coat hung on the hook beside the door, still damp from last night’s rain. Hedwig’s old perch sat in the corner, untouched for years. He should’ve thrown it away or donated it. He couldn’t. He found it difficult to let go of the past.

He stepped fully into the front room. It was technically the sitting room—what estate agents liked to call “charming”—but there was no charm in it. Just a worn sofa, a bar cart with a shelf below for the half empty bottles, and a bookshelf more curated for appearances than interest. Hefty, informative tomes like the kind Hermione read in school. He didn’t read much anymore. Couldn’t focus long enough.

On the bar cart, a single glistening glass waited like it had known he would come back. Like it was part of the ritual. One drink to dull the edge. Another to make it bearable. A third so he could sleep without dreams. He picked it up, poured firewhiskey to the halfway mark, and sat on the edge of the couch. The glass trembled slightly in his hand.

Not from anger. Not from fear.
He placed the cool rim against his forehead, eyes closed.

He was just so tired.

The cushions barely sank beneath him. He’d never broken this couch in. Never spent a lazy Sunday curled up with someone here. Never fallen asleep watching a film, legs tangled with someone else’s. The flat had never been lived in—it had just been occupied. Like him.

Ten years of existing, and that was all.

Maybe when he killed Voldemort, a part of him—more than just the Horcrux—had died too. Maybe the part that could want things, dream things, believe in things. Maybe that boy was gone. 

He rose and wandered into the hallway, running his palm across the chipped paint of the wall. There was no art or pictures hung with care. His footsteps echoed louder here. The hall was narrow, claustrophobic. Like the inside of a throat.

First door on the left: the bathroom. Pristine. Bare. His toothbrush and razor were the only personal touches. No bath mat. No scent of soap or skin or steam. He kept it clean so no one could ever say he was falling apart. It wasn’t hard because there was no one to share it with. It was just Harry, alone in this flat. The mirror over the sink was spotless. Still, he couldn’t bear to look into it for long. Couldn't bear to see.

Next, his bedroom.

The door creaked when he pushed it open, even though he’d oiled the hinges dozens of times. The bed was made, tight hospital corners and a throw folded perfectly across the end. It looked like a hotel. Or a waiting room. The closet was neat. Shirts hung in a single color palette, trousers pressed into sharp lines. But there was no clutter. No dirty socks tossed haphazardly on the floor. No dog-eared books on the bedside table waiting to be read. No half dead flowers in a vase. No cup of tea cooling by the window. No softness. No sign of life at all.

He didn’t sleep here most nights. He lay here. Stared at the ceiling. Waited for morning.

He walked to the second bedroom—the spare. 26 steps from the door, as always. The counting didn’t stop the ache, but it kept him from wanting to turn away.
This was the only room that felt real.

The door stuck slightly in the frame, as if the flat itself didn’t want him to go in. As if it knew what this room meant.

He entered anyway.

It smelled faintly of parchment and dust and something softer, like the scent of someone who had once visited and left their coat behind. The curtains were thinner here, and the moonlight washed the desk in a cold, muted glow.

This was where he kept the pieces of himself he couldn’t throw away, but couldn’t bear to live with either. They hovered between memory and memorial. His old school trunk. A battered box of letters, most of them unopened, all addressed to The-Boy-Who-Lived. The Gryffindor scarf Hermione had repaired three times just because he used to love to wear it when he flew. The broken frames of his first pair of glasses. The round ones that made everyone tell him he looked just like his dad. A snitch with a faint crack down one side.

And the photo.
The only one he kept framed.

Harry, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, Neville, and Luna—lined up outside the Burrow, shoulders brushing. Taken just weeks after the war. They looked older than they should have been. Young, still, but weary. Smiling because they were supposed to. The sun glowed behind them, and no one looked warmed by it.

He remembered that day clearly. Not the exact words spoken or what they'd eaten, but the way he’d felt. Like the worst was over. Like maybe, just maybe, he could become someone new. Not The Chosen One. Not a symbol. Just a person. A real person with a quiet life and a future he could choose.

He used to believe in that. In becoming. In choosing to stay even when it was hard. In not boarding the train to the next great adventure.

He wasn’t sure when he’d stopped trying. When surviving had replaced striving. When the idea of wanting more had started to feel selfish, or childish, or simply impossible.

Beneath the photo, tucked into the frame, a folded clipping of The Daily Prophet. He pulled it free.

POTTER FOR MINISTER? The Boy Who Lived, the Man We Need?
He had kept it because Hermione said it would be "historically relevant someday." She’d meant it as a joke.

It didn’t feel like a joke now. It felt like another prophecy, the sword of Damacles swinging ever closer to his neck. A eulogy written in advance.

They didn’t want Harry. They wanted the image. The idea. The impossible hero. The chosen one. The statue with the plaque.

He set the photo down hard enough that the table shook. He hadn’t meant to, but the glass cracked. His hands shook with something he couldn't name.

Folded the clipping in half, then again, and again until it was thick enough to fight back when he tore it. The sound was crisp and final.
He placed the two torn halves beside the photo like burial offerings.

Next came the drawer in the console table. The smallest one. He opened it slowly. Inside, nestled in cloths that looked better fit for wiping counters, sat his Order of Merlin, First Class. Kingsley had pressed it into his hand after the ceremony, eyes soft and tired. They would have been so proud of you, he had said.

Harry had smiled without hesitation. Said thank you.
But what was pride in the face of the loss of everything you had ever known? Ever wanted? Where was love in the would-have-beens?

He placed the medal on top of the photo and the torn headline.
Three artifacts. Three pieces of the armour he kept putting on to face each day when all he really wanted was to be someone else.

He returned to the sitting room and knelt beside the bookshelf, opening the lower cabinet. Inside: a locked safe. His wand made quick work of the enchantments. From within, he pulled a folder of galleons, Muggle currency, emergency documents, and a smaller envelope of photos —photos of Sirius, of Remus, of Dobby, of Hogwarts under winter snow.

Tucked between the photos, barely visible beneath a folded bit of parchment, lay a thin silver ring on a red string.

Harry paused, fingers hovering.

The parchment still held the faint outline of Fred’s handwriting, smudged at the corners. Just a stupid joke—something about dragons and snogging and “wear this and I’m yours.”

Harry didn’t wear it anymore. He couldn’t.
But he hadn’t thrown it away either. 

He closed the safe. Shut the cabinet.

No note. No explanation.
He took only what he needed. His wand. His bag. The contents of his safe.
A few ounces of paper and pain. A thin band of silver and the ghost of a laugh he missed hearing every day.
Some things weren’t meant to be left behind.

He stood in the doorway a final time and looked around.
The bar cart. The too-perfect couch. The empty kitchen. The hollow bedroom. The haunted spare room.
It wasn’t a home. It was a mausoleum.

A monument to a life that never fit.

He set the key on the stoop.

Let this be the day the Boy Who Lived died.
They could keep the legend.
He didn’t want it anymore.

He wasn’t a symbol.
He wasn’t a sacrifice.
He wasn’t a fucking monument to other people’s hope.

He was a man buried alive in a life built for someone else.
And if he had to claw his way out with bloodied fingers—
If he had to scream just to remember the sound of his own voice—
Then so be it.

Let it hurt. Let it scar. Let it bleed.

Numbness was a coffin, too.
And he was done playing dead.

He didn’t know who Harry was.
Not yet.
But he’d find him.
Even if it tore him open.
Even if it ruined him.

Even if it was the last thing he did.

Chapter Text

He arrived on the worn stone floor of a quiet alley in Rome. The apparition cracked in the cool morning air, too loud for the hour, but no one came. A cat lifted its head from a windowsill and blinked at him once before curling back into a soft doze.

Rome smelled of bread and car fumes and cigarette smoke. Harry breathed it in, not because it comforted him, but because it was different. It didn’t smell like blood or antiseptic or burning wood. Not like Hogwarts had. That was good. He didn’t want the scent of memory. But the silence still made his skin itch. 

He walked for a long time. The formal shoes were too loud on the cobbled streets, and by midmorning, he’d swapped them at a market for something cheaper and softer. Trainers, nondescript and worn, the kind no one looked twice at. He found a hoodie in the same market, pale grey with no logos, and a too-thin T-shirt that fit a little loose. He kept his wand in the pocket of his new jeans just like he used to. He left his formalwear sitting on a bench with 10 Euros tucked into the coat pocket at the top of the pile. Maybe someone would buy themselves lunch as they slid into what was left of his old life.

By the time he stopped moving, he was sitting on a stone bench outside a closed bookstore. The shutters were drawn. The lettering on the glass was chipped gold. He couldn’t read the name, but it didn’t matter. He sat there anyway, staring at the outline of the shelves, trying to imagine what warmth might be inside. What worlds tucked away in the stacks just waiting to be found. He used to love to read when he was small. When the library was the only place Dudley wouldn't try to find him and he could just disappear.

A woman passed with a leash in hand to guide her poodle, and she nodded to him like he belonged. Harry nodded back, though the gesture felt borrowed, like he was impersonating someone else. He didn’t know how to be seen without shrinking. His fingernails dug into his forearms as his breath came out staccato. She turned the corner, and he felt relief.

He spent the next few days without a pattern.

He didn’t choose a flat or make any long-term plans.

He woke up early and wandered until his legs ached.

Sunburned himself at a café. Watched pigeons fight over crumbs.

A violinist played nearby. He didn’t smile, but he listened.

The pain was more comforting than the beautiful.

Sometimes he followed crowds of tourists without knowing where they were going. That was how he found the Trevi Fountain. It looked different than he expected. Bigger, louder, too many people taking photos. But the water was a color he hadn’t seen before. Bright blue and so clear with an edge of froth as the water rained down into the pool. He stared for a long time and wondered how it was supposed to make him feel. Everyone around him was smiling and laughing. He stared at the water and didn’t feel anything at all.

A flashbulb went off beside him, and for just a second, he imagined a young voice narrating the scene—frantic, proud, too eager by half. Harry turned his head quickly. It wasn’t him, of course. Couldn’t be. But it was enough to leave him cold and shaking.

He sat on the edge of the fountain, hands in his lap, and listened to coins plinking against stone. He didn’t throw one in. No matter how long he sat, he couldn’t figure out anything to wish for.

That night, he slept at a hostel above a butcher shop. The room smelled of meat and salt and sweat, but it was quiet. Someone was snoring in the bunk across from him. He stared at the ceiling, trying to name the new sounds in his head. None of them were war. None of them were peace. He thought about finding somewhere to get a few drinks so he could just sleep. He’d decided he wasn’t going to do that anymore, but the quiet was unnerving and just laying there made him feel like he was drifting out of his body. A few drinks would take the edge off, and he was just so tired…

Then his roommate jolted in his sleep.

Harry’s body tensed instantly. His breath caught. Every nerve went sharp with alertness.
Adrenaline spiked up his spine. He clutched his wand tight and ran through a silent checklist of defensive spells, muscles locked, waiting—for an attack, for a scream, for something.

But nothing came.

Just the rise and fall of someone else’s breathing. Just the dark.

By the time the tension ebbed enough to let him move again, the idea of going back out had vanished. He rolled to face the wall, pressed his forehead to the cool plaster, and closed his eyes.

He didn’t expect sleep.

The nights were the worst. Too quiet. Too full.

Silence didn’t soothe him—it scraped.

Shadows moved wrong. Light pooled like something waiting. He kept expecting faces to form in the patterns on the wall. Sometimes he reached for his wand just to feel it in his palm. A tether to something solid, something real.

He thought about reaching out to someone. Hermione. Ron. Anyone.

But what would he even say?

That he still couldn’t breathe without flinching? That the dark kept swallowing him whole and he wasn’t even fighting it anymore? They’d moved on. Made lives. Made peace. He was proud of them, really, he was, but they felt like sunlit things now, warm and far away. And he… he was sinking. He was made of silence and shadow and everything you leave behind on a battlefield. Blood and bones and dust. So he stayed quiet. Let the dark rise up around him like a tide. It was cold, and it was cruel, but at least it felt like his.

On his third day, he walked toward the Colosseum just after sunrise, keeping to the edges of the crowd. The ruins loomed massive in the distance, ancient and dipped in the golden glow of early light. He watched birds wheel overhead and stood in a shaded spot until the noise became too much. He didn’t go inside.

As he lingered near the entry, a little boy tugged on his father’s sleeve and asked, “Daddy! Daddy! Do gladiators still fight somewhere in the world?”

His father chuckled, warm and certain. “No, son. Not anymore.”

Their voices hit like a trigger pulled. Harry flinched. His vision narrowed. His breath vanished.

His hand twitched toward his wand, the way it always had—muscle memory now.

He scanned the street for threats, for snatchers, for traps he knew weren’t there.

But his body didn’t believe him yet. By the time he’d managed to breathe, the boy and his father had already walked on. The words weren’t meant for him, but they sliced anyway.

He’d read about gladiators once. They were slaves forced to fight for the crowd’s amusement. Turned into legends by the same people who watched them bleed. They weren’t supposed to survive. That was the whole point. They were thrown to lions, drowned in man-made seas, pitted against monsters no man could beat. The crowd didn’t want victory. They wanted blood and a spectacle. A death they could clap for.

Maybe Harry was a gladiator. A gladiator that lived. That was his only real rebellion. But some days, even that felt like a fluke. Like he’d broken the rules of the story by crawling off the field instead of dying on it. And no one quite knew what to do with him afterward.

They’d given him a wand instead of a sword. Sent him into battle before he was old enough to expect better. Told him it was for love, for peace, for the greater good. And when it was over, they handed him a medal and told him to smile for the cameras.

As if that could stitch him back together.

But he hadn’t fought for glory. He’d fought because he was a child and no one else would. Because if he didn’t, everyone he loved would die. And the crowd had cheered anyway.

Now, the war was over, but the fight hadn’t left his body. It still lived in his nightmares, in the pressure behind his ribs, in the silence he couldn’t seem to shake.

They said gladiators didn’t exist anymore.

Harry knew better.

They just stopped calling them that. Changed the name, shifted the setting. But someone’s throat still had to get cut.

That evening, he passed a narrow stall tucked between two shuttered cafés, its table piled with leather-bound journals and travel-worn satchels. Most were too new or too polished, but one caught his eye. A soft brown notebook, slightly scuffed, with a crooked spine and a pale indent slashed across the cover. It looked like it had survived something.

He stopped without meaning to. His fingers hovered over the journal, inches from the worn leather, like it had called out to him in a voice too quiet to hear. It wasn’t beautiful. Not really. But it looked honest . Like it would keep secrets without needing to understand them.

The shopkeeper said nothing at first, just nodded once and named a price that was too high. Harry didn’t argue. He reached for the money and paid without asking for change.

He took the journal gently, like it might bruise. The leather was warm from the sun but still cool beneath his palm, pliant but solid, worn just enough to feel lived-in but not broken. It smelled faintly of dust and something he couldn’t place—maybe cedar, maybe ink, maybe memory. Maybe magic.

He didn’t know what he was going to write. Or if he’d write at all.

But he pressed it to his chest, closed his eyes, and let the weight of it settle there.

Something in him exhaled. For some reason, he felt a little less angry.

Outside, the sky was shifting. Dusk had begun to fall, all rose-gold and lavender streaks over stone.

Harry didn’t go far. He found a quiet bench tucked behind a florist’s stall, where the air smelled like wet petals and earth. He opened the journal once and shut it again. His hands shook slightly. He tried to breathe through it.

A boy ran past, laughing as he tugged his older brother’s hand. The older boy stumbled, swatted him with a half-hearted “Oi,” and kept walking, mock-annoyed but smiling. Harry’s chest tightened.

Fred.

Just for a second, he saw him in the chaos. In the grin, the mischief, and the way joy never waited for permission. It hit him hard, like being winded. He stood frozen as the noise of the street carried on around him.

Fred had always known how to live without hesitation. He found the joke, the light, the spark, even when things were awful. He pulled Harry into that energy like it was easy. Like it was obvious. And Harry, who had never known how to want things for himself, had wanted that.

Harry had packed the ring. He didn’t wear it. Couldn’t. But he’d taken it with him anyway, because leaving it behind would’ve felt like forgetting.

Fred had made him feel like life could be more than duty. Like he was allowed to want things just for himself. Like he could laugh without apology. Be touched. Be chosen. Be happy.

And then Fred had died.

Not in some grand, cinematic way. Just gone. Too soon, too suddenly. Like the world had played a cruel trick and expected everyone to carry on pretending it hadn’t.

Fred would’ve hated this version of Harry. The silence. The guilt. The years of shrinking himself into something survivable. He never had it in him to want Harry to suffer, not even in grief.

He would’ve told him to live. To stop waiting for the right time. To stop clinging to broken things just because they used to shine.

But he wouldn’t have told him to throw the ring out.
He would’ve told him to tuck it somewhere safe, then go find something new to love.
Something loud. Something wild. Something that made him believe in mornings again.

Harry didn’t know if he could do that yet.

But he knew he should try.

So he took a breath. He stood up straighter. And he decided that trying mattered. Even if it was messy. Even if it hurt. Even if it didn’t work right away.

He stayed on that bench until the florist packed up and turned off the lights. His legs were stiff by the time he rose.

That night was one of the harder ones.

The room he’d rented above a tailor’s shop was narrow and sloped, with a rust-speckled fan rattling overhead and a window that wouldn’t quite shut. The floor creaked when he moved. The mattress sagged. There was a cracked teacup on the dresser with a single wilted carnation inside, left behind by someone else.

He lay on the bed fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. The silence wasn’t peaceful. It pressed in on him like water. He thought of all the sounds he used to fall asleep to—Ron snoring, Hermione turning pages, the soft hoot of Hedwig in the dark. The way Ginny used to hum while brushing her hair. How Mrs. Weasley would set the kettle on without a word.

Here, there was nothing but the hollow groan of an old building breathing around him.

At some point, he got up. Not because he wanted to, but because lying still had started to feel like drowning. He turned on the lamp—flickering, yellow—and sat at the desk.

The journal waited.
He opened it.

This time, he touched the page longer than before. Then, slowly, he began to write.

May 5 -

Soft leather. Smells like something remembered. Bought it from a man who didn’t ask questions. Paid too much. Didn’t care.

Saw a boy pull his brother’s hand. Thought of Fred. Couldn’t breathe for a second. It passed. I’m tired.

Everyone here talks so quickly. I like listening. It doesn’t matter if I understand.

I miss… something. Not sure what. Just know it’s not here. Not yet.

He stared at the words for a long time. They looked strange in his handwriting. Like someone else had written them. Someone braver.

He didn’t close the journal. Just pushed it to the side and let his head fall to his folded arms. His eyes burned.

Outside, someone shouted across the alley. A dog barked once. A car sputtered to life and rumbled down a too-narrow street.

Harry listened like it might save him.

The next day, he did it again.

He got up. He walked. He breathed. He bought bread he didn’t eat and coffee he barely sipped. He followed a group of children giggling toward a fountain and stopped short when one of them lifted a camera. He flinched before he realized it was only for a keepsake. Only a child. But still, he turned away.

Colin. God, Colin. Always so eager. Always asking, “Harry, just one more?” with that wide, sweet grin like he couldn’t see the danger.

Harry didn’t know how to carry that face. He hadn’t known how to carry any of them.

He walked faster. Past the fountain. Past the cluster of children. Past the elderly woman feeding crumbs to a line of pigeons—each peck and flutter echoing too loud in his ears.

He ducked into an alley without thinking and leaned against the cool stone wall. His breath came sharp. The sweat at his temples cooled too fast, and he shivered despite the heat.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not here. Not in Rome.

He slid down until he was sitting, back pressed to the stone, knees drawn up.

“I’m not ready,” he whispered.

It wasn’t clear who he was talking to.

That night, he didn’t go back to the tailor’s. He found a park bench and sat there until well after midnight, watching the way lamplight moved across the leaves, catching on edges and slipping away. He didn’t feel safe, exactly, but he didn’t feel hunted either.

And maybe that was the best he could ask for right now.

A man walked by around 2 a.m., whistling softly. The tune was unfamiliar. It reminded Harry of someone, but he couldn’t place who. Maybe his father. Maybe Remus. Maybe no one at all.

The bench was hard. His coat didn’t do much to keep the cold from seeping into his back. He reached into the inner pocket and took out the journal.

He opened to the last page and added:

May 7 –
Too much today. Still tried. That has to count.

He didn’t sleep that night. He only closed his eyes and listened to Rome breathe.

By morning, he’d moved again—this time to a quiet room above a secondhand shop that sold postcards and prayer candles. The woman who ran it didn’t ask his name. She handed him the key and a chipped cup of water, and that was all.

It was quieter there. The walls were thick. The windows opened to a view of laundry lines strung across buildings. A red shirt flapped lazily beside a pair of white socks.

He stood at the window and let the sun warm the side of his face.

A moment. Just that. One warm moment.

He didn’t stay long in any one place. That became the pattern. If someone looked at him too long, if a newspaper seemed too available, if the wrong name floated through the air nearby, he moved.

Sometimes he told himself it was temporary. That he’d settle soon. That he just needed to be ready first.

But he didn’t know what ready looked like. Would he even know if he felt it?

Each night, he wrote a little. Not much. Just phrases. Senses. Hints of memory.

May 8 –

Garlic and lemons in the air today. Watched a dog bark at a balloon and felt something almost like laughter.

May 9 –

A man kissed his wife’s hand while she cried. Didn’t stare. Just noticed. It hurt.

May 10 –

Woke up missing Ron’s snoring. Never thought I’d say that.

The pages began to fill. Slowly. Unevenly.

He’d flip back through sometimes and read the words like they belonged to someone else. Some softer version of himself he couldn’t quite access yet.

But he wanted to.

The feeling of being unknown was really starting to fade.

Not all at once, but more like in glimmers. A teenager stared at him too long outside the Pantheon, their eyes flicking between Harry’s face and a glossy tabloid clutched in one hand. A man in a narrow bookshop picked up a folded paper, scanned the front page, then glanced at Harry over the rim of his glasses. Just a flicker of recognition. Small things.

But Harry had built his whole life on small things. On shifts in tone and posture. On reading a room before it could turn against him. It was how he had survived. It was exhausting.

That night, he didn’t sleep. He drank. He sat in the window of a cramped room above a tailor’s shop, watching the yellow lamplight stretch shadows across the cobbled street. He didn’t write. He didn’t turn on the light. He just sat in the stillness, and drank until he forgot how to feel afraid.

He left just after dawn.

There was a pizzeria down the street he hadn’t tried, a narrow place with tiled walls and garlic strings drooping above the counter. He didn’t expect much from it; he just didn’t want to be in his room. Didn’t want to hear himself think.

The place smelled warm and clean, flour and spice and something just slightly sweet. He chose a seat near the back. Ordered simply. A slice with mushrooms and olives, water with lemon.

When the plate came, he let it sit for a while, untouched. The crust steamed faintly. The melted cheese tugged at the edges like it had something to prove.

He lifted a bite slowly to his lips and chewed. The flavors were rich and yeasty. A little too salty. But the heat settled in his chest like comfort. He blinked down at the plate, then opened the journal he still hadn’t written much in.

The page stared back at him. He pressed the pen to the paper.

May 6-
Mushroom. Pizza. The salt stings in just the right way.

He paused, pen hovering above the page. Maybe he would write more. Maybe—

“Sei… sei Harry Potter?”

The voice was soft. Curious. It barely rose above the clatter of dishes or the hiss of the espresso machine. But it cut through everything.

Harry froze.

A boy, nine or ten at most, stood at the edge of his table, a folded newspaper under one arm. He clutched it tightly, like it might explain what he was seeing. His eyes were wide, not accusing, not threatening, just full of a wonder Harry didn’t have the strength to meet.

The pen slipped in Harry’s hand. He didn’t look up. He didn’t answer.

The boy waited a beat longer, then clutched the paper tighter, shifting from foot to foot. The pages rustled. There might’ve been a photo. Harry didn’t want to know which one.

His throat closed up. Panic pressed cold and wet against his spine.

The journal closed with a soft thud. He stood, carefully, and tucked it inside his coat. The plate was still half full. He didn’t touch it again.

He shoved too many coins onto the table. Didn’t count, didn’t care. Just needed to move. The warmth of the moment shattered, and all he could hear was blood rushing in his ears as he pushed through the door and into the street.

Behind him, the boy whispered something in Italian to the man behind the counter.

Harry didn’t look back.

The sun outside had sharpened. It glared off the pavement and burned against his neck. The air smelled of smoke and wet concrete. Every voice sounded like it might say his name.

Every laugh curled like suspicion.

He ducked into a narrow side street and didn’t stop walking. A market stall spilled lemons and tomatoes onto the cobblestones, too bright, too alive. A church bell tolled from somewhere he couldn’t see. He didn’t know the time. He didn’t care. His hands were sweating. His wand pressed too sharply against his ribs beneath his coat.

He reached a fountain—small, tucked between buildings—and leaned over it, breathing hard. His reflection shimmered in the water. Older than he remembered. Thinner. Less like himself.

He sat on the stone rim and pressed his palms to his thighs. Tried to slow his breath. Tried not to think about how fast the boy’s whisper might travel, or whether that photo had been the one from the graveyard, or the one from Dumbledore’s funeral, or the one where he was just seventeen and covered in blood and Hagrid's tears.

He’d come here to disappear.

To be no one.

But they kept trying to find him—kept pulling him back into the myth. The Boy Who Lived. The Man Who Won. The Ghost in the Photographs.

He couldn’t do it again.

He wouldn’t.

He reached into his coat and touched the spine of the journal. Solid. Real. A choice he had made.

But even that felt fragile now. Contaminated.

He stood.

He walked.

Not back to the hostel. Not toward the pizzeria. Just away.

By the time the sun dipped behind the rooftops and the air cooled to a softer hush, he'd summoned whatever he felt he needed.

The journal. The wand. Money. The barest essentials.

He left everything else behind.

No note. No goodbye.

Rome, like London, would forget him eventually. Or worse, remember him wrong. Turn him into a story again. Something distant. Digestible.

He had come here to disappear. To feel quiet in a way that wasn’t hollow. To find a moment, just one, where he could exist without flinching.

But even here, the world found him. Peeled him open. Prodded at the softest part.

Pried open his still-healing ribs and reached inside like it had a right.

He couldn’t bear to be seen like this, newly-born and gasping.

So he ran.
Not with his feet. With magic.

He turned on instinct, shoulders hunched, breath sharp.

And he Disapparated.

No destination. No anchor. Just the jagged, blind need to be anywhere else.

The magic caught wrong. Too fast. Too hard. It tore through him like a blade with no handle.

He felt it the moment it went wrong—
A wrenching behind his ribs.
A crack.
The breath leaving his lungs like he’d been punched from the inside out.

When he slammed into earth again, it wasn’t pavement.
It was dirt. Leaves. Cold.

The trees above him spun. Or maybe that was his head.

His fingers were wet.

He didn’t know if it was sweat or blood.

Didn’t check.

Just curled onto his side, dizzy and shaking, and let the blackness come.

Let it take him.

At least the pain had a shape now.

At least no one could see him here.

Chapter Text

He woke to the taste of copper.

It coated his tongue, thick and sour. The air around him smelled like earth and pine and the iron tang of blood. His chest felt too tight. His vision swam. He blinked up at tree branches swaying in uncertain focus.

His hands scrabbled against the mossy ground. Cold. Unfamiliar.

His first thought wasn’t where am I?
It was what did I do?

Pain bloomed hot in his thigh as he shifted. He gasped—loud, sharp. Instinct made him reach for his wand before memory kicked in: The hangover, the Apparition. The panic. The fleeing. The fact that he hadn’t aimed anywhere. Just pulled magic into his gut and ripped.

He blinked hard and forced himself to look.

Pain pulsed through his leg like a warning. When he moved, it caught fire. He hissed, jaw clenched, breath shallow. His wand was still near his hand, thank Merlin, and with fumbling fingers he tugged it closer. The spell he managed was shaky and sharp around the edges, but it held. The bleeding slowed.

The wound wasn’t clean. A ragged bite torn out of his upper thigh, pink and red and glistening at the edges. Splinched. A part of himself just left behind somewhere. He could see the muscle beneath, pulsing like it was embarrassed to be exposed. Not life-threatening, but bad enough. Bad enough to make a point.

He lay back and stared at the sky until his vision stopped swimming.

Then he vomited.

Not from the pain, not entirely. From the knowledge. From the weight of what it meant.

Because he’d promised himself he was done running. Done numbing.

And then he drank. And then he panicked. And then he split himself open on the inside and the outside trying to disappear again.

He closed his eyes.

The silence of the forest wasn’t peaceful now. It was accusing. Not cruel, but clear.

You did this. You let this happen.

He sat up slowly, leg throbbing, stomach turning. No idea where he’d landed. Just trees, just damp earth and a sky that threatened rain. Somewhere north. Somewhere green and old.

He would live. As usual.

He stood.

He limped forward.

And this time, it wasn’t just escape. It was shame. It was starting over. Again. 

May 8 -
Hungover. Hurt.

Splinched myself bad enough that I could’ve bled out.
Tried to outrun the world and nearly tore myself in half.

No more drinking. Not like that.
Not if it makes me forget the part of me
That wants to stay alive.

He didn’t mean to arrive in a charming little German town. Not really.

But after the splinching, after the taste of blood and the panic and the long night spent curled under the trees, he had to move.

He limped toward the sound of water and followed a stream until it curved near a road. Then came the slow, patchwork travel: a ride in the back of a hay cart, a shared bunk in a train car headed east, a handful of half-conversations and quiet gestures in borrowed languages.

Florence. Nice. Lyon.

He moved like a ghost. Slept in shifts. Ate only when pressed. One hand curled around his wand, the other pressed to his chest like he might hold himself together that way.

Even in the calmest moments, something buzzed under his skin. Not the sharpness of war; he knew that feeling too intimately to mistake it. No, this was a quieter ache. A reflexive tension in his spine. The sense of being seen.

Not watched. He was always watched. This was the possibility of being recognized. And all the ugly, eager things that followed.

Eventually, the trains grew slower. The air got cooler. He arrived in a quiet town pressed against the edge of the Black Forest. The sky above it was a thick, dappled grey, pierced now and then by sunlight that looked like it didn’t quite belong.

The moment he stepped off the platform, he smelled pine and soil and something older than time. It was wet and green and faintly electric, like the pause before a storm.

Better than that, no one looked twice at him.

So he decided to stay.

The pain in his leg flared each morning like a reminder. He’d done what healing he could in the forest, just enough to keep walking, to stop the bleeding, but the spell had been hasty and half-formed. It hadn’t sealed right. Now, it pulled when he moved and ached when he rested, like his body was holding a grudge. He left it alone. Let it heal the rest of the way without magic. He figured he deserved at least that much discomfort, and it’s not like he knew enough healing spells to do better.

And the drinking? He meant it this time. No more running, no more fog. The cravings didn’t vanish, but he met them differently. When the old urge crept in, the itch behind his teeth, the hollow in his chest…he followed patterns. Made tea. Went walking. Wrote in his journal even if the words didn’t make sense. Sometimes he just breathed through it, one minute at a time, until the want dulled to a hum.

He found a room above a bakery.

It smelled like flour and sweet yeast, like mornings that started too early and ended with aching feet. The space was small and uneven, the kind of room meant for people passing through—borrowed, not owned, but willing to keep a secret. The bed dipped in the middle like it had stories to tell, like it had held other people trying to forget who they were. The wallpaper peeled in slow, satisfied curls, yellowed in the corners like old parchment. The kettle rattled on the stovetop just before it boiled, and the single mug in the cupboard had a chipped rim shaped like a crescent moon. It was a good place to rest.

The woman who ran the place didn’t ask for a name. She had thick silver hair pinned with tortoiseshell combs and eyes that had long since given up on curiosity. She handed him the key, took his folded bills without comment, and the next morning left a jar of dark plum jam outside his door with a note that simply read, Frisch. The handwriting was careful, each letter shaped like it wanted to be understood. The jam was thick, almost black, and tasted like fruit that had fought to ripen.

His days stretched long and soft, slow in a way that felt like healing or atrophy. He wasn’t sure which. The world moved differently here. There were no headlines or handlers. No footsteps outside his door that made his breath catch. No one was looking, and no one seemed to see. There was just the ticking of the clock in the bakery below and the scent of rising bread drifting through the floorboards each morning.

It was quiet. Safe. Warm.
But it didn’t reach all the way in.
It dulled the noise, softened the edges, but something stayed curled tight inside him, unmoved, untouched, waiting. Like this place couldn’t be enough.

Some nights, he startled awake for no reason at all. No dreams he could remember, no sound he could name. Just a thudding in his chest and the raw certainty that something had followed him here. He would sit upright, wand in hand, breath sawing through his teeth, until the silence convinced him it wasn’t true.

He woke with the sun and boiled water for tea in his chipped moon-mug, padding barefoot across the slanted wooden floor. The floor creaked in a rhythm he began to memorize: one groan near the window, two near the stove, a sigh near the door. He learned which boards complained and which ones kept his secrets. Learned how long the kettle took to boil and that if he added just a pinch of dried rosemary to his tea, it tasted like memory. He began to line the windowsill with little found objects—smooth stones, a feather, a bead of glass—like talismans for a version of himself still trying to form. It became a kind of company.

Some mornings, he sat on the windowsill with his knees pulled up and just watched the quiet town unfurl. A boy walked a dog down the same path every day. A woman in a red head-scarf clipped laundry to a line that ran from her kitchen to the trees. The ordinary routines of people who had never been asked to die. He watched them with quiet envy, wondering if they knew how lucky they were. Or if it only looked that way from the outside. Maybe their lives were full of tiny deaths too. Griefs that didn’t make the papers. Some days he was so angry he couldn’t see straight, so he just went back to bed.

When he felt up to it, he wandered.

The trails that twisted out from the edge of the town were mostly overgrown, but they welcomed him all the same. At first, he stuck to them cautiously, careful not to veer too far, careful not to forget his way back. But after a few days, he let his feet carry him wherever they liked. Over moss damp and cool as river stone. Through tall grass that kissed his knees. Past puddles still enough to reflect pieces of sky like mirrors that didn’t ask anything from him. This place didn’t welcome him, but it didn’t ask him to leave.

The forest reminded him of the Forbidden Forest but softer. Stripped of its menace. Left only with its mystery. There was magic in the ordinary there.

The smell of burning wood sometimes sent his heart racing. He’d sit at the windowsill and taste ash on the back of his tongue. His leg still ached with every step, a dull pull that reminded him he wasn’t invincible. Some days he limped farther than others. But the pain kept him present. It kept him moving forward.

Sometimes, he felt like the trees knew him—recognized the shadow he cast and didn’t mind. But other times, the quiet made his skin crawl. Like the stillness wasn’t peace, but pause. Like the woods were just waiting for him to realize he didn’t belong.

He wandered narrow trails through pine trees and caught sight of deer through the mist. He picked wild flowers from the edges of the trail and walked until his mind softened. The journal stayed in his coat pocket now, more often than not. 

The wound in his leg throbbed when he pushed too hard, and though the worst of it had closed, it still pulled tight when he knelt or twisted wrong. He was trying to learn how to take it slow. So when he went back to his morning workouts, he started small. Stretches in the morning. Light movement. A quiet sort of strength-building he never named but always did. The body, he’d learned, didn’t forget what it survived, but it could be taught how to come back together.

May 25-
A man with a camera on the path today.
Not pointed at me, but I stepped into the trees anyway.
Just in case.
I felt my heart race when the camera clicked.

The next morning, he took a different trail. Just to be safe. Just to be sure. One that wound through the edge of the woods and opened to a field thick with sun. That was where he found them. Wild strawberries, growing in unexpected clusters, pressed low to the ground like secrets. They were small and misshapen and impossibly sweet. He allowed himself to want them, and he allowed himself to taste. He ate them with his fingers, juice warm and sticky, staining the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. 

May 26-
Red berries. Warm from the sun. Stained my fingers. Didn’t use magic to clean them.

Sometimes birds startled him with their calls. Sharp bursts of sound that cracked through the stillness. One call in particular sounded exactly like a child laughing. He stopped cold the first time he heard it, his whole body tensed as if he might bolt. His heart clenched so tightly he thought he’d choke on it.

But he didn’t run.

Not this time.

He just stood there, listening.

And later, back in his room, he wrote it down.

May 28-
Some birds sound like children laughing. It startled me.
I didn’t run. Sometimes I’m scared,
But I’m trying not to leave.

He woke twice that week with his wand in his hand. It was like his mind just wanted to forget. There were no dreams. Just darkness and a thundering in his chest, his muscles rigid with an instinct that didn’t need a reason. The second time, he got out of bed and paced barefoot until sunrise, letting the creaking floorboards count the steps for him. He made tea and didn’t drink it. He opened the window and breathed until the chill sank into his bones and made everything quieter. He did pushups until his thigh was burning and his sweat was dripping on the floor. When his body collapsed, his anxiety went a little more quiet. Finally.

Eventually, the journal stopped leaving the hiding place in his coat. Sometimes he carried it openly, tucked under his arm as he wandered. Other times, he let it rest beside him while he sat on a stump and scribbled half-formed thoughts or sketches that weren’t very good but felt true. His fingers smudged the pencil lines. He wasn’t a very good artist, but it felt good to draw, so he kept doing it.

He drew what he saw:
A bent tree like a question mark.
A spoon resting.
A moth that landed on his wrist and refused to leave for nearly five minutes—long enough that Harry gave it a name. Asa, he wrote beneath the tiny sketch. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was just fun to give something a life.

One morning, a boy passed him on the trail with mud-crusted boots and a stick in his hand. The boy waved the stick dramatically and shouted something in German—nonsense words, maybe. Harry didn’t understand.

Still, he smiled.

Not out of politeness. Not out of habit. Just because he felt like it.

That night, on his walk back from the hills, he passed a quiet shop tucked between a flower stall and a seamstress’s shop. The windows were fogged from the inside, and warm yellow light spilled onto the cobbles. He stepped through the door, and a small bell gave a sharp, birdlike chime.

Behind the counter stood a woman with her brunette hair tied back in a knot. She looked up and greeted him with a single word. “Hallo.” Not unkind, not expectant, but a practiced greeting worn smooth by repetition. The greeting surprised him. He was spoken to so little these days.

Harry didn’t speak more than a few words of German. She didn’t speak English. But they managed. He pointed to a loaf of rye behind the glass. She repeated its name, slow and lilting. He nodded. “Danke.”

When she placed the loaf in paper and handed it over, she paused and then reached under the counter. From a small clay dish, she retrieved a pat of pale homemade butter and wrapped it in waxed parchment. “Butter,” she said, smiling, tapping the edge gently. “Need.”

Harry blinked. “Thank you,” he murmured, almost breathless.

He tried to hand over too many coins, but she waved them away with efficiency. 

In the market the next morning, he nodded more than he spoke. He learned the rhythm of small exchanges. The weight of a bouquet of fresh flowers, the way to gesture for a half-dozen eggs, the subtle difference between being polite and being invisible.

He stacked crates without being asked. Held open doors. Smiled when people were talking even though he wasn’t part of the conversation. He tried reaching out towards the world with open hands.

But no one ever reached back. Not really.

Not unkind, just distant. As if everyone here had already decided what their lives could hold, and he wasn’t part of it. If anyone knew who he was, they didn’t say. Or maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they only saw a man trying to live quietly.

Still, his mouth pulled into a smile too quickly when a stranger said, “Wie geht’s?” How are you?

His reply was automatic. “Good,” or “Fine,” or sometimes just a nod. A brittle smile pasted over something rotting.

The smile cracked every time, but he kept trying.

The woods called louder each day. The edge of the village blurred into green, and the trails curled into thickets of ferns and moss. He began walking deeper, past the tidy path markers, past the point where the birds fell silent and the air cooled.

He sat on stones and watched ants crawl between his boots. Listened to his own heartbeat and how it calmed when he wasn’t being asked to do anything. To be anyone.

He opened the journal more now. It was getting easier to have his own thoughts. To write them down like they had some value.

May 30
First full night of sleep in… maybe years?
Still woke up sweating. No dream. Just noise.

He kept sketching.

The sag of curtains in the midday heat. The curve of a woman’s wrist as she handed over change. A dog napping under a bench, limbs stretched, belly skyward. Open for affection.

He bought a book to learn bout local flowers. It was the first book he'd bought in a long time that he actually planned to read. He pressed flowers between the pages. Snowdrops, wood sorrel, trillium. Wrote names next to them when he could find them. Drew quiet lines beside them when he couldn’t.

June  2
Pressed a white flower today. Trillium, I think.
It smells like the feeling of spring giving way to summer.

He didn’t speak much. But the silence didn’t feel empty here. Sometimes he found himself wondering if healing was more about quiet moments than loud ones.

The nights were still the hardest. The village quieted. Lights dimmed. The darkness pressed too close to the window. He lay curled in bed, the journal resting on the table beside him like a hand not yet taken. He felt loneliness creep in, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He’d hold a pillow close until he fell asleep wondering when he would feel safe enough to get close to someone again.

Sometimes he woke up and thought of Fred.

How he laughed. How he threw an arm around his shoulders and was never afraid to touch.
How they used to fly together and it felt like anything was possible. How they used to kiss in the air and again as soon as they touched down on the ground. How they would grin afterwards. 

He remembered how Fred would yell Harry’s name from across the Burrow like it was a punchline, how he’d nudge his ribs at breakfast just to steal a bite of toast, how he’d show up in the common room wearing something ridiculous and act like Harry was the crazy one for noticing. Sometimes he missed the kisses, but mostly he missed the easy affection. The way Fred brought out the best of him without even asking.  The way love had arrived without fear or ceremony, like it had always been meant for them. How they were friends before they were anything else. They were easy together, and he missed that.

He didn’t want Fred back. He wanted Fred to rest. But he hated that letting Fred rest felt like moving forward without him. Like finally letting him go.

Still, he wanted to live in the world Fred had made possible.
A world where joy didn’t have to be earned.
Where love wasn’t something you proved by surviving.
Where it was safe to be soft, to be silly, to be held.

But even wanting that felt like betrayal sometimes.
Like reaching for something new meant letting go of what was.
Like moving forward might mean leaving Fred behind.
And Harry didn’t want to leave him. Not really.
He just didn’t want to be alone anymore.

He wanted to laugh until his stomach hurt.
To wake up with something to look forward to.
To make someone snort tea through their nose.
To be ridiculous. To be chosen. To be seen.
To hold his arms out and trust—
not hope, not guess, but trust—
that someone would be there to fill them.

But trust wasn’t something he knew how to hold onto. It fluttered in his chest for a little while—like a moth he was afraid to crush—and then it slipped away again. Hope was heavy like that. Hard to carry when your hands were full of memory and loneliness.

So he got up.

Stretched out his bad leg. Did some exercises until his body felt more awake.

Let the ache settle back in. He kept reaching out to the world with open arms. Waiting. Hoping for more.

–

He tried to hold onto the wanting. The feeling that he could get through each day if he just kept trying. That he could make connections and make a life and maybe even, one day, be happy. Some days it was very hard. This was one such day.

By dusk, the ache in his leg had flared again. A dull, persistent throb that matched the tension in his chest.
He limped back toward town, the quiet now feeling heavier than before. Too still. Too empty. He passed the bakery. The seamstress’s shop. He should have gone home. Done some of his rituals. Sat with the ache like he had all week.

But something in him cracked.

Just a hairline fracture from too many days of silence, too many hours of carrying hope alone.
He turned. Stepped through the door of the small tavern he’d passed a dozen times but never entered. It was dim and warm inside. People were talking. Laughing. It felt like life was still happening here—even if he was only skimming the edges of it.

He told himself it was just one beer. Just something cold. Just a way to pretend, for a few minutes, that he belonged to something. A beer wasn’t the same thing as 3 glasses of firewhiskey.

He didn’t sit long. Twenty minutes maybe. Long enough to finish half the drink and feel it settle like a mistake in his gut.

A man approached him. Older than him by a few years, maybe. Light hair, plain shirt, kind eyes. Asked if the seat beside him was taken.

Harry said no.

He didn’t want to talk. But silence felt heavier now than it had before. So he answered when it was easier than staying quiet. The man, Nico, switched to English after hearing Harry stumble through German. Asked what brought him here.

“Traveling,” Harry said. “Resting. Trying to find something, but I'm not sure what it is yet.”

Nico nodded like he understood. Didn’t pry. Just offered his name and a gentle smile, then sipped his drink in the way people do when they’re deciding if they’re brave enough to ask for something more.

They left at the same time. Walked toward the same corner.
Harry hadn’t said much. But maybe he hadn’t needed to. Maybe loneliness shows up in the curve of your shoulders, in the way your voice catches on small words. Maybe it's easy for other lonely people to recognize.

At the seamstress’s shop, Nico paused.

“It’s probably too forward,” he said, voice careful, “but you look like someone who hasn’t been kissed in a long time.”

Then he leaned in and kissed him.

Harry didn’t move. Didn’t kiss back.
Just let it happen. Because some part of him wanted it to mean something.
Wanted anything to mean something. Wanted to feel that connection again like he had when he was soaring through the air knowing a kiss would be waiting for him on the ground.

Nico pulled away quickly, brow furrowed. “Sorry,” he murmured. “That was—sorry.”

Harry shook his head. “It’s fine.”

But it wasn’t. Not really.

It wasn’t disgust. Not even surprise. It was worse than that.
It was the ache of feeling nothing at all.
Not desire. Not warmth. Not even guilt.

Just the sharp, echoing reminder that being wanted isn’t the same as being loved.
And being touched doesn’t always make you feel less alone. Sometimes, a kiss just reveals that you aren’t ready for more.

He stopped on the bench outside the bakery and just sat. Hands limp in his lap. Eyes unfocused. He didn’t want to bring this feeling upstairs, not until he’d given it somewhere to land.

The door to his room creaked when he pushed it open. His landlady had been by. A small jar of jam, homemade, judging by the uneven label, sat beside the teacup he’d left out that morning. There was a note beneath it in looping, careful handwriting.
For bread. The strawberry came early this year.

He touched the lid gently. Set it back down.

The flat was dim and quiet. The windows were cracked open, letting in the softest breeze. A few pages of his journal lay splayed open on the table where he’d been sorting thoughts earlier.

He picked it up and began to write.

June 7 –
One beer.
That’s all it took to forget why I stopped.
Let a stranger kiss me outside the seamstress’s shop.
He was kind.
He wasn’t him.
He wasn’t anyone.
I didn’t flinch. Didn’t want it. Didn’t care.

It meant nothing.
Maybe that’s worse.

Maybe numb is its own kind of damage.
I don’t want to be touched out of pity.
I don’t want to be kissed just because I look lonely.
I want to want something again.
I want to feel like I still know how.

But tonight, I just feel hollow.
Like my skin remembered something my heart didn’t.

No more drinks.
Not even one.

He closed the journal gently. It felt like his only friend.

It wasn’t the kiss that had broken him open. Not really.
It was the silence after. The way no one laughed.
The way no one nudged his ribs and said, “Well, that’s one way to get free bread, mate.” They way they didn't know one another at all, and a kiss didn't mean they ever would.

He slept fitfully that night. Dreamed of open windows and empty hallways. Of flying, sometimes, but never landing. Of reaching for someone in the dark and feeling nothing but wind.

When he woke, the ache hadn’t gone.
But something had shifted.

This town was kind. Gentle, even. But it didn’t see him. Not the real him.
He could disappear here—quietly, slowly, with no one the wiser.
And maybe that had been nice for a while. Quiet. Even healing.
But now he needed more.

He got dressed slowly. Made breakfast. Let it go cold.
Then sat by the window and watched the mist roll over the trees.

He could stay. Could try harder. Could hope the ache softened.

But then the letter found him and It felt like the final nail in this coffin.

The handwriting unmistakable.

Hermione.

For a long moment, he didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Just stared at the weight of it. The fact of it.
Of course she’d written. Of course she’d found him. She always managed to find him at his lowest. The address on the envelope was neat. Certain. She hadn’t guessed. She had known .

He picked it up. Turned it over. Broke the seal.

Harry,
When you were gone a few days, we didn’t worry.
When it turned into weeks, we figured you just needed time.
Harry, it’s been over a month.

It’s time to come home.
We’re done waiting. Please don’t make us come and get you.

He folded the letter and slid it between the pages of the journal, spine-worn and full of pieces of him cobbled together from sunshine and strain.

And then, quietly, he wrote:

June 8 –
They think I needed time.
But I needed silence. I needed out.
This was never about them. It was about me—
About standing still long enough to hear myself think.

And I did.
Sometimes.
I watched the shutters flicker with morning light.
I smiled at the shopkeeper who gave me a kind word.
I walked.
I tasted wild things.
I let pain bite at my leg and called it penance.
I drew things that weren't art.
I listened to birds and forgot to be afraid.

I didn’t disappear here.
Not completely.
This place gave me something gentle.
A soft landing.
A place to sit with the pieces without being asked to make them whole.

But peace isn’t the same as belonging.
Anonymity isn’t the same as freedom.
And stillness isn’t the same as healing.

I wanted to be reborn.
But maybe rebirth starts with rest.
Maybe this was just step one.
I almost belonged here.
But not quite.
And that’s okay.

Some places aren’t meant to keep you.
Just hold you for a little while.
Like a breath before the plunge.

I think I’m ready to move again.
Not to vanish—
But to reach.

He made one last trip to the market and stopped at a crooked wire stand of battered postcards—half-faded scenes of rooftops, lakes, cobbled streets and quiet fields. Some were glossy, some bent at the edges, a few curling with age. Most were German or French, but tucked in the middle were a handful stamped in Cyrillic.

One showed a village pressed into the shoulder of a mountain, pale mist rising from the trees like breath.

He held it longer than he meant to, thumb brushing the edge. It reminded him of someone.

To most people, Viktor Krum was all sharp turns and narrowed eyes. Quidditch glory, grit, and impossible precision. A star.

But Harry saw more. Couldn’t see less after that night in the hospital wing. After everything had gone wrong.

Cedric was gone. The graveyard still echoed behind Harry’s eyes.

Krum had been two beds away, pale from the curse, a gash above his brow still red and raw.

Both of them had been used. Bent to someone else’s will and left to live with what was taken. Their scars ran in opposite directions, but they came from the same place. Unforgivable.

They didn’t speak at first. Just lay there, silent and scraped thin, while the castle held its breath.

At some point near dawn, Viktor had spoken. Not loud, not soft, just sure.
“You should come to Bulgaria sometime. Is peaceful. The mountains... they are good for thinking.”

Harry didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His throat was thick with things he hadn’t said to anyone. But he looked at Viktor then, and something passed between them.

Krum didn’t try again. Just gave a small, barely-there nod like he hadn’t expected a reply anyway. Like he knew what it was to run out of words and feel bad about having nothing to offer but silence.

It hadn’t felt like comfort. Or pity.
More like recognition.

Like he understood, in his own way, what it meant to come out of something changed.

Harry had meant to write. Just to say thank you. Or maybe to ask what Bulgaria was really like.
But it had felt impossible. Viktor had Quidditch and quiet and a country that called him hero.
Harry had violence. A prophecy. A name the world already twisted into lies.

They hadn’t spoken again.

But standing there now, fingers curled around that postcard, Harry thought about that moment.
About the steadiness in Viktor’s voice. The ache beneath it.
About how rare it was to be seen and not asked to perform.

Maybe it was time to see the kind of place someone like that came from.
Not because of Viktor.
Just because it sounded decent.
And kind.

He walked deeper into the woods that evening.
Past the stone path. Past the trees with names carved into them. Past the place where the birds stopped singing and the moss grew too thick to brush away.

No one knew where he’d gone.
And no one would follow.

June 9 –
I told myself I wouldn’t run.
That I’d stay in one place long enough to grow into it.
And I did try.
But this isn’t a place for that.
Not anymore.

This quiet life—I wanted to want it.
But I think it wants someone else.
And maybe that’s the answer.

This time, I’ll go somewhere
that makes me speak differently.
Somewhere
I have to earn my place with new hands, new words.

Somewhere I can try again—
not to forget,
but to begin.

Chapter Text

He landed on the outskirts of a mountain village at dawn, cloak damp from the early mist. The postcard hadn’t lied. There was a lake so still it mirrored the sky, broken only by the ripple of a breeze and the buzz of insects beginning their work.

The town was small. Stone buildings, sun-warmed and low to the ground. Wooden fences leaning under their own weight. Chickens. Laundry lines. It didn’t look like much.

He stayed on the edge of things for the first few days. Slept rough in the woods. Hiked part of the way up the mountain. Picked flowers for his journal. Took deep breaths, worked his body hard, and counted when he felt the need.

He found a sign posted near the village center. A slip of parchment pinned beneath an old flyer for a tractor sale. Scrawled handwriting. Looking for help. Bees. Woodwork. Maintenance. Will trade lodging. 

Harry went to the address listed. A squat house nestled behind rows of lavender and white clover. A man with a thick silver beard met him at the door, nodded at his wand, and pointed to the broken hinge of the gate.

The man looked up, squinted once. “You build or mend?”

“I can try.”

That was all he said.

The man nodded. “You stay. Name?”

Harry hesitated. “...Just Harry.”

Another nod. “Good.”

The lean-to beside the shed was crooked but dry. The window had a crack running diagonally across it, and the floor dipped slightly toward the door, but it smelled of wax and sun-warmed wood. Like something that remembered light even in shadow.

Todor, the beekeeper, didn’t ask where Harry had come from, and didn’t seem surprised when a wand slid from his sleeve instead of a screwdriver. He just pointed to a box of tools, a pail of wax scrap, and said, “Start there.”

Harry set his things down slowly. No one had ever made space for him like this before—not without fear or question or deep expectation. He kept waiting for Todor to change his mind, to look closer.

But the old man only passed him a folded wool blanket and said, “Nights are sharp. Magic helps, but it doesn’t love your bones the way wool does.”

That night, Harry cast some wards. A soft alarm perimeter, a simple proximity hex at the threshold. A tracing charm along the inner seams of the lean-to, marked with wax on his fingertip. It wasn’t that he feared being found. It was that the act of protecting himself was a kind of ritual. A way to say: I am here. I get to stay. He hadn’t bothered in Germany where his presence felt more like a burden than a promise. 

He fell asleep to the sound of hives humming in the dark. Their song lulled him to sleep even when his mind wanted to keep working. 

The next morning, he found a letter waiting at the edge of the lean-to, balanced on his cloak like it had been placed with care. No owl in sight. Just his name in Hermione’s tidy handwriting—neat, but underlined like she couldn’t help herself.

He didn’t open it right away. Just looked at it while the kettle boiled, while the stove warmed the corner of the shed, while the bees began to stir outside.

When he did open it, the parchment crackled.

Harry,

This is the third letter I’ve sent since Germany. You don’t have to answer, but please let me know you’re alive. Even a single word. Even a spell on parchment. Anything.

I’m trying to understand why you left. I don’t blame you for needing space. I just want you to remember that running isn’t healing. You’ve been gone for over a month. Ron is worried in his own way, which you know means he’s pretending not to be. But I see it. He checks the window every time a bird flies by.

Please write. Please don’t make me guess where you are.

Love,
Hermione

P.S. I know the Ministry sent someone to look for you. I told them to leave it alone. You’re not missing. But Harry… if you disappear entirely, I can’t protect your peace much longer.

He folded the letter slowly, pressed his thumb along the crease. The parchment still smelled faintly of lavender and ink. It ached like the cupboard under the stairs.

He didn’t write back.

Not because he didn’t care.
But because the thought of England made his lungs go tight. Because the version of himself they remembered—the one who smiled politely, who carried everything and said he was fine—felt like a stranger now.

He loved Hermione. But she loved someone he wasn’t sure he could be anymore.

How do you explain that?
How do you say, “If I go back there, I’ll drown.”
“If I let you pull me in, I won’t survive it.”

He didn't know how to talk to them anymore, so he left the letter folded on the table. He breathed deep. And he went outside instead.

Each morning began with the mountains now.

He woke early, dressed in light layers, and made his way up the narrow trail behind the house. Some days he walked. Some days he Apparated, leaping halfway up and trekking the rest on foot. It wasn’t for the view, though the view was always there—vast and clean, like a sky that had been wrung out and hung to dry.

It was the stillness.

The mountains didn’t demand answers. They didn’t expect gratitude. They just stood and listened.

That, Harry was learning to do too.

Sometimes he brought his journal. Sometimes he didn’t. He would sit on a sun-warmed stone and watch clouds gather against the ridges like they were deciding whether to stay. Think about nothing. Or think about everything. Think about drinking. Think about how he could never drink again. He did a lot of thinking.

What if he’d grown up somewhere like this? Somewhere that didn’t demand sacrifice to prove your worth. Where children learned levitation alongside cooking. Where people offered what they had without asking for your scars in return. Was this the life his parents would have given him?

What if healing wasn’t something earned at all? What if it was given , in pieces, by places like this?

He thought about grief, and how much of it he still carried, not just for the people he’d lost, but for the person he might have been. The boy who he never got to become.

Up here, it didn’t feel shameful to grieve that. In England, it felt shameful to grieve anything at all.

He sat a while longer, breathing in the cool air, watching the sky shift above the ridgeline. Somewhere below, a bird called once, then again. A breeze picked up, carrying the scent of pine and something sweet.

Eventually, he stood, stretched out his legs, and started the walk back down.

Back at the lean-to, the days followed rhythm.

He lit the stove with a flick of his wand and cracked eggs into a dented tin pan. Added rosemary or sage from Todor’s drying rack. Burned the edges sometimes. Ate it anyway.

Todor gave him quiet tasks: rethreading frames, sealing cracked wood with wax, carrying pails down to the lower hives. He never hovered. Just watched Harry’s hands and, if they hesitated, offered a short nod.

“You work like someone who’s trying not to break anything,” Todor said once.

Harry flushed. “Don’t want to ruin it.”

“Some things are meant to be remade. Don’t worry so much. You are magic.”

That night, Harry whispered a small mending charm into the wooden floor where it warped beneath his mat. The boards didn’t smooth entirely, but they shifted under his palm, softened just slightly with the heat of the spell. He fixed the crack in the window. He added some insulation charms to the walls and floor.

He sat back on his heels, hand still resting there. For once, the quiet didn’t press. It settled.

It stayed with him.

The next morning, he woke before the sun and shuffled outside, barefoot and bleary. The stone threshold was damp and sharp with cold. He hissed as dew licked up his arches and muttered half a curse, blinking hard against the dawn.

A bee landed on his wrist.

He froze.

It didn’t sting. Just stepped forward once, then again—like it was considering him—before lifting off and vanishing into the light.

Harry laughed.

It came out raw. Small and startled and real.

Not borrowed. Not performative. Not even permissioned.

Just his. A sound he hadn’t heard from himself in years, free and full of nothing but the moment. He honestly thought he had forgotten how to laugh.

He stood there for a long time, watching the trees burn gold in the rising light, his feet gone numb and his skin still tingling.

That night, he wrote:

June 3 –
A bee landed on my wrist.
No fear. No sting.
Just sunlight and legs and the brush of something wild.
And then it was gone.
And I laughed—really laughed.

Like the kind of laugh that doesn’t check first
to see if the world is safe.
It felt like joy.
Real. Small. Enough to hold in two hands.

—

The village was a short walk down the slope—stone paths, stacked houses, stairwells carved into hillsides. It looked like it had been tucked into the land, not built on top of it.

It was bright. Unashamedly so. Orange and blue buildings leaned against one another like old friends. Laundry flapped from balconies in bursts of floral cotton, linen striped in gold. A painted sign swung from a shop window with letters Harry didn’t recognize but still tried to sound out in his head.

Magic floated through the streets like perfume. A basket of cherries hovered above a stall while the vendor rearranged apricots. A floating brush painted lettering onto a café sign in perfect strokes while a man played violin nearby.

Music drifted from open windows. A violin. A radio. Once, a group of children laughing their way through a terrible song in three languages at once.

Tucked into the bend of a narrow street, half-shaded by an awning of faded stripes, was a shop no bigger than a broom cupboard. Inside, wooden shelves bowed under the weight of small bottles and tins. There were calming balms and muscle rubs, jars labeled in looping Cyrillic, trays of clay masks, and rose-scented lotion that glittered faintly when turned toward the light.

Harry picked out a small jar for sore joints—he’d been pushing himself hard—and brought it to the counter. The woman behind it glanced at the label, then at him. Her eyes softened.

He offered his coins. She accepted them without fuss.

Then, as he tucked the jar into his pouch, she turned and began selecting items from the shelves without a word.

A tin with a sleep symbol. A small sachet labeled with something that looked like an eye, circled twice. A bottle of something pale and viscous that smelled faintly floral.

“For rest,” she said, setting them down beside him. “For sleep. For eyes.” Then, after another look, “For hair.”

Harry blinked.

She hesitated, then added one more: a wrapped bar of something solid and greenish. “For eating. Stir in tea. Just little. Help you eat more.”

He opened his mouth to object, but she was already bundling them into a simple cloth bag. “Samples. You try. If good, you come back. Buy more.”

There was no sales pitch. No pressure. Just a quiet certainty that he could take what he needed. That maybe he didn’t yet know all the ways he was still hurting—but she saw them.

He took the bag with both hands. “Thank you.”

She smiled, and for just a second, he felt something uncoil in his chest.

Not pity. Not curiosity.

Just kindness.

It was becoming a pattern.

No one asked who he was. No one demanded why he was there. But they offered . Fruit. Time. A bench to rest on. And—later that week—a carved whistle from a boy Harry had never met.

It was late in the afternoon, the light slanting low across the square, when it happened. Harry was standing near a fountain, chewing sunflower seeds and watching pigeons try to bully a cat off a windowsill, when a boy appeared beside him.

No older than seven. Bright eyes. Barefoot. He held something small and wooden in his palm.

He offered it silently.

Harry crouched to take it—a carved whistle, smooth at the edges, shaped like a bird.

Before Harry could ask, the boy pointed skyward. A flock of swallows twisted overhead.

Harry raised the whistle to his lips and blew.

The sound was low, breathy, like wind through trees. Like the space between notes. Like the feeling in his chest the moment before a broom lifted off the ground.

The boy beamed.

Harry reached for a coin, fumbling in his pocket.

But the boy only bowed, grinning, and ran off across the square, trailing laughter behind him like ribbon.

Harry stood frozen. Whistle in one hand. The other curled around the moment like it might fly away too.

He thought of the war. Of what it had taken. And suddenly, he thought what it had been for . 

So that children could give things freely. So that joy could be dropped into someone’s life like a seed and left there to grow.

He wrote about it that night.

June 6 –
The whistle sounds like sky.
Like flying free.
Bread tastes like salt and summer.
A child gave me joy without needing my name.
They give without asking here.

He began flying again on June 9.

He’d found the broom in a junk shop tucked between a fruit seller and a wand repair stand. It was half-rotted with age and wrapped in cloth like a secret. The bristles were brittle, tangled with dry grass. The handle was warped and scuffed to the point of splintering.

The shopkeeper had waved it off. Said it had belonged to a cousin who never quite got the hang of it—more sentimental than useful. Offered it for nearly nothing. Harry handed over the coin without hesitation.

He wasn’t sure why. He hadn’t flown in over a year. His Firebolt was long gone. This broom wasn’t a relic; it was ruin. But when he touched it, something hummed. Not magic exactly. Just… a pull. A reminder of what it once could do.

He carried it back to the lean-to and set it down on the bench beside the shed. Unwrapped it. Looked at it in full daylight and winced.

The shaft was bent. The tail binding frayed. The runes were faded almost past recognition. The end of the handle had a gouge that looked like a bite. It was so broken he didn’t even know where to start.

It would have been easier to leave it.

Instead, he got to work.

He started by trimming the bristles. A few disintegrated in his hands. The rest he pressed flat between boards and weighed down with rocks. Then he turned to the handle. He used a stripping spell to pull the varnish away—slowly, patchy. A bit of the wood split under heat, and he cursed, tapping it with his wand, trying to ease the fibers back together. He had never restored a broom, so a lot of what he did was trial and error.

The second day, he tried softening the shaft with warmed oil and slow, steady heat. Coaxing it back to shape an inch at a time. His left hand cramped. His wand slipped and scorched the wood near the grip.

He tried again. Slower.

Each spell had to be coaxed. Nothing obeyed him cleanly. But slowly, the broom began to respond. Not with strength, but with quiet compliance. Like something starting to trust. Maybe brooms were like wands. Maybe they had to connect and choose one another in order to really work.

He sealed the shaft with beeswax from Todor’s shed, rubbing it in until the wood dulled into a soft, matte sheen. Then he re-bound the tail with twisted cord, using a stiffening charm to hold it.

It wasn’t elegant. The lines weren’t straight. But it looked solid. Held together.

He ran a hand down the length of the shaft and didn’t get a splinter.

 Every night, he slept with aching shoulders and sap-stained fingers. It felt like building something alive. He talked to it at night too, feeling silly but hopeful.

“You’re a good broom, you know. I think you have what it takes to fly. Just because you needed a little care doesn’t mean you can’t do what you were made to do.”

He kept working on it. He kept talking to it. He still felt a little crazy for talking to a broom, but he didn’t think was imagining the warmth he felt now when he bruised against the bristles or polished the wood.

When he thought it was ready, he carried it up the mountain before dawn. The air was cool and sharp in his lungs. The stars were still out, faint against the deep blue edge of morning. Not a soul stirred below, not even the bees.

The broom felt unfamiliar in his hands. Lighter than he expected. Smoother. It fit beneath his arm like it belonged there, like it remembered him.

He stood at the ridge and waited until the light touched the horizon.

Then mounted.

Then paused.

His fingers clenched just slightly at the handle, and for a breath, he didn’t move.

It was stupid. He’d flown hundreds, maybe even thoudands, of times. Fought in the air. Escaped. Dived. Dodged curses mid-spin. And still—his stomach fluttered.

Hedwig. That night of running. The blast behind him. The weightlessness that came before the crash.

Flight had always meant movement. But somewhere along the way, it had stopped meaning freedom.

He exhaled through his nose. Touched his heels to the ground. And pushed off.

Not high. Not far. Just enough to rise.

The broom lifted beneath him like it had been waiting. The wind curled around his knees. Cold fingers, gentle and insistent.

His stomach dropped.

For a flickering moment, panic tried to rise. It licked the edges of his chest like it always did, ready to swallow his breath before he could name it.

But then something steadied.

And he remembered.

Not the war. Not the loss.

But first year. The moment he’d first left the ground. The gasp in his throat. The rush of air as he kicked off from the ground. The way the world had stretched out below him and finally felt right. The sound of wind in his ears and someone cheering in the distance. A house that claimed him. A sky that let him go.

It hadn’t been safe.

But it had been his. One of the very first pieces of himself that felt like his. 

He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Gripped the broom tighter. Leaned into the breeze.

And something broke open.

Because this wasn’t escape. He wasn’t being chased. He wasn’t flying to fight or flee or carry bad news. He was just… flying.

The ground fell away.

And Harry grinned. 

He tilted into a soft arc, let the current carry him along the curve of the ridge. The broom obeyed like it understood something about him. Like it didn’t need to be told what he was trying to feel.

He moved like breath, easy, light.

He didn’t need to prove anything. He didn’t need to win. He didn’t need to be the boy who survived, or the one who left.

He just needed to let the wind touch him and not flinch.

When he finally landed, it was with dirt on his boots and sweat on his brow. His arms shook. His chest heaved.

But the pounding didn’t feel like panic.

Just flight.

Just breath.

Just life.

June 9 –
I flew.
Didn’t break. Didn’t fall.
Didn’t grieve.
I just flew.

Two days later, he went up again.

He left before sunrise, hiking higher this time—past the upper ridge, where pine and rock gave way to the open sky. The broom slung across his shoulder felt lighter than before, like it had shed something along with him.

This time, he didn’t wait. He mounted near the edge of the outcrop, kicked off hard, and let the air take him.

The cold bit at his face. His knuckles ached where they gripped the handle. But the moment the current caught, he forgot.

He climbed higher. Let the broom rise into the thinning air until the village below was just color and smoke. The mountain wind tugged at his sleeves, sharper than the forest breeze, but steadier too, like it wanted him there.

The light broke across his face as he soared, and for a few long seconds, everything else fell away.

He banked once, tight and clean. His shoulder dipped. His knees leaned in. The broom seemed to anticipate his every command.

He thought of Fred. Of Ginny. Of Charlie, wild-haired and grinning on a borrowed broom. He thought of how they flew—fast, fearless, all heart and heat and chaos. Ron too, shouting from the Keeper’s post, eyes wide. They all worked as a team with a single minded goal to win.

He loved them. Missed them.

But that wasn’t the kind of flying he needed now.

He needed stillness. Solitude. He needed to feel the air hold him without asking why he’d come.

And for some reason, it was Viktor he thought of.

Not in the obvious way. Not because of the World Cup or the headlines. But because of how he flew back at Hogwarts: quiet, exact. No wasted movement. No bravado. Just someone who knew the sky might drop you—but trusted it anyway.

It had never been about flash with Viktor. Not back then. Not even now, as far as Harry knew. 

It was about listening. Letting go. Letting the wind carry what you couldn’t say.

And maybe—Harry thought—it was also about joy.

Not performance. Not duty. Not a match or a win or a cause.

Just the feeling of it. The way flight could strip everything else away. How the body remembered what the mind forgot. How the sky always made room.

He pulled up just before the trees, heart pounding, the scent of pine sharp in his nose. His hair whipped back, his eyes watered. The broom hummed beneath him like it wanted to keep going. But he turned toward the clearing.

He wondered, briefly, if Viktor ever struggled to love flying the way he used to. If the injuries and the expectations, the pressure and the press—if they ever made it hard to remember the joy.

Harry had almost lost it too. But recently, it had come back. Quiet and sudden. Like a laugh from a place he’d thought long gone.

When he landed, it was in knee-high grass scattered with wildflowers. Lavender and bloodroot, thistles and bees. The air buzzed with heat and the faintest sound of birdsong.

Harry stepped off the broom slowly. He ran a hand along the shaft, still solid, still holding. Stronger than it felt the last time he inspected it.

He stood there for a while, not thinking of anything in particular.

The wind tugged at his sleeves again. It felt like a long lost friend.

—

Harry,

Still nothing from you.

Hermione keeps saying you’ll come around. I’m not so sure. Maybe that just helps her sleep at night.

It’s been a long time, mate. We’ve given you space. We’ve kept quiet. But at some point, it stops feeling like you needed time and starts feeling like you just didn’t want us anymore.

I don’t know what you’re doing or where you are, and I’m starting to wonder if you care that we’re still here. Still waiting. Still trying to believe this isn’t what it looks like.

You left us, Harry.

Not just England.

Us.

—Ron

Harry stared at the last line for a long time.
You left us.

It rang like accusation. Like Ron had never said cruel things before. Like he hadn’t walked away once, too—when the Horcrux got too heavy, when the hunger and fear and silence got to be too much. And even then, Harry forgave him.

But this? This felt different.

Not because it hurt more, but because it sounded like Ron expected Harry to carry that hurt alone.

Still here, he said.

Still together, Harry thought.

Still building lives. Still showing up for each other. Still calling it loyalty while demanding things Harry never offered. Still pretending they hadn’t watched him unravel for years and done nothing until he finally left.

They were still there.

And he wasn’t.

He’d stayed behind in the ruin. Haunted the places he’d bled. Let everything good slip through his fingers until he wasn’t sure if he’d survived the war or just outlasted it.

And now—when he was finally doing something just for himself, when he was finally trying to feel like someone again—they wanted him back.

He folded the letter with shaking hands. Pressed it flat. Shoved it behind the others in his journal.

Not out of sight. But out of reach.

He didn’t throw it away. He didn’t curse Ron’s name. But he didn’t forgive him either.

Not yet.

Because love like that—loud, clumsy, assuming—had always cost Harry more than he could afford.

That night, he sat up long after the bees had gone quiet, the journal closed at his side. He thought of Ron’s letter. Of Hermione’s. Of the way they’d stared at him for years like he was someone they didn’t recognize, and now wrote to him like nothing had changed.

He missed them. God, he missed them.
The inside jokes. The tea in worn mugs. The weight of Ron’s hand on his shoulder. The way Hermione used to mutter spells in her sleep.

Part of him wanted to write back. To say, I’m still me. I still love you.
To prove it hadn’t all unraveled.

But the truth was, it had. 

And he wasn’t sure proving anything was worth the cost anymore.

Because if he went back—if he returned to the life they kept calling him home to—he would have to fold himself small again. Tuck away all this growth, all this healing, just to fit back into the shape they remembered. The good soldier. The quiet friend. The man who never needed anything for himself.

He’d lived that way for years. It had nearly killed him.

This was the first time he had ever left them.
But they had both left him before.

Ron, when Harry's name came out of the Goblet. When he got jealous or scared.
Hermione, when she went to get her parents. When she moved in with Ron and wrote less and less.
And Harry had forgiven them. Hadn’t even asked them to explain.

But now—now that it was his turn to step away—they were asking for answers. For guarantees. For return.

He closed his eyes and pressed the heels of his hands to his brow.

He wasn’t angry. But he was done apologizing for what he needed.

This place had changed him. Was still changing him. And if he went back now—if he let their fear dictate his healing—he’d lose it all. Not just the village. Not just the quiet.

Himself.

He needed this. He needed the solitude, the bees, the wind in his sleeves, the spoon in a child’s hand, the whistle tucked in his pocket. He needed mornings that didn’t ache and nights that didn’t burn.

And maybe someday, when the foundation felt stronger, when his bones stopped humming like broken spells, he’d find his way back.

But not now.
Not yet.

Even if it hurt them.
Even if it broke something he didn’t yet know how to fix.
He had to keep choosing himself.
And he couldn't be sorry.

—

On June 12, he found the honey shop.

It sat near the back of the square, tucked beneath an overhang of climbing roses and painted tiles. The air smelled of sugar and smoke. Inside, jars lined the shelves in every shade from ivory to amber to deep molasses. They caught the light like small constellations.

The man behind the counter had eyes like birch bark and fingers stained with pollen. He said little, only uncorked a jar of the lightest kind—acacia—and offered Harry a taste on a wooden spoon.

It was silk on his tongue. Sunlight in syrup form. It settled somewhere deep in his chest, warm and steady, like a memory he hadn’t known he’d lost.

He blinked, breath catching. “What is it?”

The man smiled, slow and knowing. “Акация,” he said. Acacia.

“It’s…” Harry struggled for the word. “Clean.”

“Is for healing,” the man said, nodding toward the shelf. “Good for sore throat. Or… for soul.”

Harry swallowed again. The sweetness didn’t fade. It lingered, warm and quiet, not cloying.

“Sweet,” Harry said, a little hoarse.

“Yes.” The man tapped the counter. “But not loud. Not greedy.”

Harry nodded slowly. The words hit something unguarded in him.

He bought the smallest jar.

That night, he ate it with fresh pears and warm bread by lantern light.

June 12 –
Acacia honey.
Light as gold and quiet on the tongue.
It doesn’t shout.

It spreads.

Simple, but it took a long time to make—
the bees, the blooms, the work.
It tastes like something that was never in a rush.
The kind of sweetness that wants nothing back.

Just to be shared .
Just to be held.

Some evenings, Harry shelled peas on a sun-warmed porch with an old woman named Lora.

They hadn’t exactly met. Not in the traditional sense. He had paused near her fence one afternoon to admire the rows of tomatoes staked with twigs, and she had waved him over with a brisk flap of her hand like she’d been expecting him all along.

She handed him a bowl of peas and pointed to a second chair.

That was it. That was how it started.

She spoke no English, but she hummed while she worked, soft and tuneless. Sometimes she sang, her voice like gravel and smoke, and when she caught him listening, she’d tap the rim of her glass and say, “Чай.” It sounded like chai and meant tea. It was an easy language lesson.

The tea wasn’t quite the same as the British version. Her iced tea was steeped with mint and lemon and served in squat glasses that sweated in the heat. When she poured him a glass, she always added a sugar cube, then made him tap the rim before drinking.

A small ritual. A shared moment. One of many.

By the end of the week, she had taught him “добро утро” —good morning, and he had learned to point to pears at the market and say “круши” with just enough confidence to earn a wink from the fruit vendor.

He didn’t realize when it had stopped feeling like mimicry and started feeling like things he just knew.

Words came to him like small treasures: “душа” (dusha—soul), “дом” (dom—home), “баба” (baba—grandmother). He learned their sounds first, then their shapes. When he didn’t know what they meant, he asked Lora, who would point to her chest, to the sky, to the flowers in her garden. When he didn’t totally understand what she meant, he would add the word, or at least the sounds of it, to his journal. Then he looked it up at the library.

He wrote all the things she taught him in his journal —the same journal where he pressed dried leaves, tucked in stamps and wrappers, smudged ink with the edge of his thumb. Cyrillic letters curled beside English ones like vines twining up the same trellis. He didn’t always remember the definitions, but he remembered how the words felt when they were given to him.

Like little offerings.

One afternoon, they sat together on the porch, snapping beans and swatting at the occasional fly. Harry flipped to a page in his journal where he had attempted to write something new. A word she had said earlier that morning. He pointed to it.

She leaned over, peering through her glasses, then took the pencil from his hand and gently corrected it. Beneath his crooked letters, she wrote the word again in her careful hand.

“Хари,” she said, tapping the page. Then she tapped his chest. “Your name.”

Harry stared. His breath caught just slightly.

“Хари,” he repeated softly. The sound was unfamiliar, but not wrong. Just different. Just new.

She smiled, pleased, and returned to her beans. 

—

The porch became a ritual of its own. A place to sit and learn the language of things not easily translated.

Lora called him things besides his name—words he didn’t know at first, but which settled warmly in his chest.

“Скъпи мой,” she’d say once when he fetched her dropped cane. My dear.

“Глупаво момче,” when he burned the stew. Silly boy.

“Слънце мое,” when he brought her a basket of wildflowers. My sunshine.

He started collecting those too. Not just in the journal, but in his body. The way her voice softened when she said them. The way it felt to be spoken to like someone beloved, even if only in passing.

One evening, she invited him inside.

He hesitated—uncertain, unused to being welcomed. But she ushered him in with a firm hand at his back and a sharp “Хайде, хайде”—Come on, come on.

The kitchen was small and cluttered, smelling of onion and vinegar and something faintly floral. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling in bunches. She motioned for him to wash his hands, then set him to work kneading dough at the table while she diced peppers with the speed of someone who had done it a thousand times.

She pointed at each ingredient and named it slowly. “Брашно” (brasno—flour). “Сирене” (sirene— a white cheese). “Мента” (menta—mint).

When he got the words wrong, she rapped his knuckles gently and said it again.

They made banitsa that night with layers of pastry and eggs and sirene. She showed him how to layer it like sheets of parchment, folding the corners in like secrets.

After they slid it into the oven, she poured him tea and sat beside him at the kitchen table, the room humming with warmth.

Harry looked around, blinking at the sheer lived-in comfort of it. The ticking clock, the chipped mugs, the dog-eared cookbook held together by string.

It felt like a home.

He wondered what his grandmother would have been like. If she would’ve taught him to cook. If she would’ve used endearments, not because he earned them, but because he existed.

He didn’t ask Lora if she had grandchildren of her own.

It didn’t matter. In those moments, she felt like his.

—

One afternoon, he brought her a jar of honey. Acacia—the light kind. He’d written the word for it beside a pressed wildflower in his journal.

She opened it, dipped in a spoon, and made a pleased noise.

“Това е добро,” she said. This is good.

Harry tried to say it back. Fumbled it. She corrected him three times, then laughed and patted his cheek.

He laughed too.

Sometimes they didn’t need words.

—

It was quiet, this friendship. Gentle.

Not once did she ask where he’d come from. Not once did she press him for details. She just accepted him as he was: a quiet man who shelled peas, broke beans, practiced Cyrillic, and smiled more than he used to.

And in return, Harry brought her herbs from the mountain trail. Bought her hand creme from the store in town that was supposed to help with arthritis. Translated a line from a poem into English and read it aloud one night, his voice low in the gathering dusk:

“Love is not loud,” he said. “But it stays.”

She nodded once, her eyes shining.

And he thought—if he’d grown up with moments like this, he would’ve known sooner what it felt like to be safe.

To be seen.

To be someone’s sunshine, even if only in the evening light.

—

Another day, a man showed him how to carve a spoon from cherry wood.

They didn’t share a language, but it didn’t seem to matter. The man—his name was Mitko—simply patted the bench beside him and handed Harry a block of wood, a small blade, and a look that said watch first, talk later.

Mitko was missing two fingers on his left hand. The index and middle. But he moved like he didn’t need them. His knife flicked and turned with practiced grace, shavings curling at his feet like woodsmoke. His hands were scarred but steady. His grip sure. His laugh, when it came, was bright and full-bodied—like something that started in the chest and pulled the whole body in to help carry it.

Harry watched carefully. When he mimicked the movement, Mitko corrected his angle with a nudge. Not scolding. Just adjusting. There was no sense of impatience. No hurry. No need to prove anything.

Harry’s first few cuts were clumsy. His thumbs ached from holding the blade too tight. The spoon began to take shape, rough and crooked, the bowl too shallow, the handle too long, but still, something . Something from nothing. Not perfect, but his.

Mitko grinned when it finally resembled the right shape. Slapped his shoulder once and held up his own spoon, which looked like it belonged in a gallery by comparison.

“Добре,” he said. Harry knew that one. It meant good.

Harry turned the spoon over in his hands. The wood was warm from his grip. The handle curved where his fingers had slipped, but the flaw made it easier to hold. His thumb rested there, like the mistake had been made just for him.

It was a small thing. Unimportant in the grand scale. But Harry stared at it like it was evidence. Not of skill, but of effort. Of time. Of care. It felt the same as when he repaired the broom or broke beans on the porch with Lora.

The feeling of giving shape to something that had none.

He started to tuck the spoon into his pocket, but a sudden wail across the square drew his eye.

A child, maybe four or five, sat on the curb, sobbing into their hands. Their father crouched nearby, holding the child’s wrist gently, murmuring in Bulgarian.

Harry caught sight of the scrape, bloody and angry-looking on the heel of the child’s palm.

Without thinking, he crossed the square. Knelt beside the child. The father looked up but didn’t stop him.

Harry held out the spoon.

The child was still sniffling, red-faced and stubborn, one foot scuffing the dirt. But they looked up when Harry crouched and offered it, handle-first.

“This is for you,” he said, voice quiet. “It’s not perfect. But it’s yours.”

Small fingers reached out, uncertain at first, then steady. The child turned the spoon over once, then again—examining the grain, the crooked edges, the little flower Harry had tried to etch into the side. They clutched it to their chest like it meant something.

Their father blinked. Then, softly:
“Благодаря.”
Harry shook his head. “Няма защо.” No need. You’re welcome.

The words felt easy on his tongue. Not like something he’d studied. Like something he meant.

When he returned to the bench, Mitko gave a single nod of approval. A clap on the back, solid and warm.

“Добро сърце,” he said. Good heart.

Harry flushed. Sat. Looked down at his empty hands.

He hadn’t planned to give the spoon away. He’d only just finished it, his first one. His fingers still ached from carving the edges. The shape was awkward, uneven, but it had been his.

And yet… he didn’t miss it.

Not even a little.

He stared at the curls of wood on the ground, and something settled in his chest. Giving hadn’t taken anything from him. Not this time. No hollow feeling, no sudden grief. Just... warmth.

For years, it had felt like everyone wanted a piece of him. His story. His strength. His guilt. And he’d given it, over and over, until he couldn’t remember what it meant to keep something for himself.

But this was different.

No one had asked. No one had taken. He’d simply seen a child in pain and offered what he had.

It felt like reclaiming something he'd forgotten was his.

Not sacrifice or survival.

Just care.

Freely given. Freely kept.

And as he sat, empty-handed but full in a way that startled him, he found himself wondering, when had it started to feel like this again?

When had the hurting stopped taking up all the space in his mind?

Later that evening, he passed a bench where an old man was squinting at a newspaper. Harry tapped the paper, murmured the name of the village, and gently corrected the man’s pronunciation when he tried to say it in English. They both laughed. They shared a piece of roasted corn from a food stall. No names exchanged.

Another night, he left a jar of honey on a doorstep after overhearing someone coughing in the market. No note. Just sweetness in a place that needed it. Honey was good for a sore throat, after all.

He didn’t expect anything in return.

And somehow, that made it feel fuller. 

He wrote about it that night, the page still faintly sticky from where his thumb had touched the honey jar.

June 15 –
I gave something today.
Not because it was asked.
Not because it hurt.
Just because it felt like mine to give.

They give too
not just bread and plums,
but space.
Laughter.
A kind of family.

I'm not whole.
But I’m shaping.
Like the things I make.
Like the person I’m letting myself become.

He hadn’t meant to stay this long.

But the days blurred gently, folding into one another like linen sheets left in the sun. The village asked nothing of him. The people gave what they could. And slowly, almost without noticing, Harry began to breathe easier. Laugh more. Sleep longer.

He still had hard days.
Some mornings, the urge to drink curled at the edge of his thoughts like smoke. But it passed more easily here. Got quieter, somehow. He’d bake instead. Or fly. Or sit with Lora and shell beans until his hands stopped shaking.
The nightmares didn’t vanish. But the sky no longer felt like it was pressing down on him.

He gave when he could. Repaired a step, propped up a drooping flower, left bread where it might be needed. Not because anyone asked. Because it made him feel steady. Helped him remember that not everything was pain.

Once, he left a jar of plum preserves on Lora’s porch. She caught his wrist before he could leave and smiled up at him.
“Ти си добро момче,” she said, patting his cheek. You are a good boy.
Harry blinked, throat tight. “Благодаря,” he whispered. Thank you.

Later that week, he found a sprig of lavender tied to his door handle with twine. He didn’t know who had left it. But he tucked it into the rafters above his bed, and that night, he slept through until morning.

Journal – June 17

ти си добро момче
(You are a good boy)

He kept thinking about how easy kindness seemed here. He hadn’t known how much he needed that. To be seen and left alone. Cared for without questions. Something about it made him wonder.

He took the postcard from his bedside drawer. The one with the mountains that brought him here. The ink had faded a little from where his thumb always pressed the corner. He flipped it over and scribbled two lines:

Thanks for the recommendation. I like it here.

He hesitated. Then, after a second’s pause, he added a small mark in the corner.
A snitch, barely more than a curve and two wings.
Nothing obvious. Nothing signed.
But it was something.

A piece of himself, left like a breadcrumb.
Just in case Viktor ever thought of that moment, too. 

He tied it to the owl’s leg and watched it vanish into the sky.

Chapter Text

The next night, the ache surprised him.

It wasn’t just sore shoulders or the sting in his palms from sanding too long without gloves. It was under his skin. It was his skin, tight, ill-fitting, like it belonged to someone else. His shirt clung to him wrong. The collar scratched his neck. The waistband of his trousers felt too tight, then too loose, then wrong in a way he couldn’t name. He wanted to rip them off. He wanted to stand barefoot in a stream until the cold burned the feeling out of him. He wanted to crawl into a small dark space and pretend he didn’t exist.

The sunburn on his neck throbbed beneath every breeze. The inside of his mouth felt too dry, then too wet. His knuckles ached. His hands shook when he cast cleaning charms. The usual rhythm of things—warm tea, mountain air, the scent of beeswax—offered nothing. His rituals and exercises suddenly felt like nothing in the face of this feeling of wrongness.

He’d woken up off-tempo, and everything since had scraped like steel-wool against a wound.

Still, he tried to be useful.

He hauled pails down to the lower hives, and when he caught his boot on a stone and sent a bucket sprawling, Todor didn’t shout. He just gave a one-shouldered shrug and kept working. But Harry felt the shame bloom hot behind his ribs anyway. He said “Sorry” once. Then again. Then, quietly, a third time.

Later, on Lora’s porch, he sat stiff in his chair, trying to settle. The light was golden. The tea was sweet. Lora hummed a low, wandering tune that usually soothed him. But tonight it caught on his nerves like static. The bowl of peas felt sharp in his lap. He snapped one too hard, and juice sprayed across her skirt.

He flinched like he’d shouted at her.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted. Too loud. Then again, quieter. “Sorry. Съжалявам. I—не исках— I didn’t mean to—”

The words tangled in his mouth, English and Bulgarian bleeding together. He wasn’t sure which language his thoughts were in. He just wanted to stop getting it wrong .

Lora chuckled softly, like nothing had happened. She wiped her hands on her apron and reached over to pat his knee. “Глупаво момче,” she said, voice warm. Silly boy.

He tried to smile. Tried to laugh with her.

But the smile felt like it was hooked through his cheeks. Tight. Forced. The laugh scraped on its way out, thin and tinny. Not real. Not right. It echoed wrong in his ears and made his stomach twist.

He felt like a child again— trying too hard, taking up too much space, ruining a good thing without meaning to .

Because when he was small, getting it wrong had consequences. Not just scolding or a disappointed look. Punishment. Shouted at for speaking out of turn. Hit for spilling water. Locked away for asking questions. A list of failures carved into his skin by people who claimed it was just the cost of raising someone else’s child.

He hadn’t called it abuse. Not then. Not for a long time. It was just life. Just how things were .

But now—

Now he was in a village where people didn’t yell. Where Todor shrugged when he made mistakes. Where Lora just patted his hand and offered tea. Where no one punished him for being clumsy or tired or human.

And still, his body waited for it.

The tightening. The voice. The moment safety shifted into danger.

Everyone was kind.

But kindness didn’t help when the fault was inside you.

When you’d spent your whole life believing that love was something earned by being useful, by being small, by never needing too much.

He hadn’t known how deep that belief went. Not until now. Not until kindness didn’t fix it. Not until a warm summer porch and a bowl of peas left him feeling like he was about to shatter. It's funny how things like this came back to him as soon as he felt warm. He could be happy one day and still wake up feeling wrong the next.

The grief didn’t roar. It whispered.
Soft as a lullaby. Familiar as breath.

No one ever warned him about that.

The way kindness scraped when you didn’t know how to hold it.
The way safety felt too quiet when your whole life had been sirens.
The way healing made you ache in places you’d trained yourself to ignore.

He left Lora’s porch early, the warmth still clinging to his shirt like a question he didn’t know how to answer.
His stomach churned. His skin itched. His throat felt tight in a way that had nothing to do with illness.
The journal stayed shut. The lean-to felt too small.

He wandered without meaning to. And found himself standing at the edge of the square.

The pub glowed down the road—golden windows, rising laughter, a flash of glass behind the bar.

A single step forward. That was all it would take.
No one would blame him. He’d earned it, hadn’t he? One sip to steady his hands.
One drink to forget how small he still felt. How lost.
How loud the silence was when the world stopped asking him to bleed.

He could picture it. The burn down his throat. The way his pulse would slow. The way his skin would settle. The way his hands would finally stop shaking.
He'd smile. Laugh at something someone said.
He wouldn’t think about England. Or Ron’s letter. Or the fact that sometimes, even now, he flinched when someone raised their hand too fast.

He stood there, swaying slightly, his body already leaning toward the door.

It would be so easy.
It would be so easy.

But then—
He remembered what silence cost when it came after the storm.
What it meant to name something, instead of letting it fester.
What it meant to choose himself. Not survival. Himself.
He remembered a promise made while bleeding in the woods.
No more.

He closed his eyes. Inhaled through his nose.
The wind carried beeswax and bread. Not firewhisky.

He whispered the truth into the night.
“I will always want a drink.”
It hung there, raw and real.
Then: “But I want to want something else more.”

His voice didn’t shake. His hands still did.

He turned away. 

Because he had to.

Because if he didn’t, he’d lose the version of himself he was only just starting to meet.
Because burying the ache would mean forgetting what it was trying to teach him.
Because silence and a refusal to name something frightening had already stolen enough from him.

His boots scraped softly over the stones, his steps uneven, unfocused. He wasn’t sure where he meant to go—only that it couldn’t be the pub. Not tonight. Not again.

The wind had picked up, restless against his neck, stirring the ends of his hair and sending a shiver down his spine that had nothing to do with cold. His jaw ached from clenching. His tongue felt too thick in his mouth, like he’d forgotten how to speak. The collar of his shirt was damp with sweat that hadn’t dried, and every sound—the tap of his boots, the crackle of leaves, even the faint clang of cutlery from a nearby window—seemed sharper than it should’ve been. Too close. Too much. His stomach rolled uneasily, but he couldn’t tell if it was hunger or dread. His fingers wouldn’t stop moving, curling in his pockets like they didn’t know what else to do.

Then came the scent of cheese, butter, and something sharp and herbal curling at the edges. Thyme, maybe. Or marjoram. Sweet, savory, deeply human. It caught him off guard. He slowed.

There was light spilling from the kitchen window just ahead. Warm, golden, flickering against the dark. A woman stood in the doorway, framed like something out of a painting, bowl tucked in her arm, wooden spoon in her hand. Laughter floated from behind her. Not big or performative. Just content. Familiar.

She caught sight of him. Smiled. Tipped her head slightly, like she was asking a question he could answer however he liked.

Harry stopped in his tracks.

He didn’t move. Didn’t wave. Just stood there with his hands jammed in his pockets, trying to breathe through the panic rising like a tide in his throat.

He wanted to go inside. But—

What if he ruined it?

What if he walked in and the laughter stopped? What if he got in the way, knocked something over, misunderstood a gesture, said the wrong word? What if all this kindness was fragile, just an illusion that would vanish the moment he asked too much of it?

He remembered the cupboard. The meals that weren’t offered. The rules he couldn’t follow because they were never explained until he broke them. He remembered the fear that came with noise, with joy, with anything that took up space.

Even now, years later, he flinched at the memory of slammed doors. Of chores done wrong. Of kindness offered only when he was quiet enough, useful enough, obedient enough.

He dug his fingers deeper into his pockets. His shoulders were drawn tight. Every part of him said: don’t go in. Stay out of the way. Be invisible. Safe.

But he wasn’t that child anymore. And being alone hadn’t saved him—not in England, not in Grimmauld Place, not even in Germany. And more than anything, he was lonely.

He’d come here to heal. And maybe this—walking toward warmth instead of away from it—was part of that.

He forced a breath through his nose. Took one step forward. Then another.

The woman’s smile didn’t falter. She shifted to the side, still holding the bowl, leaving space at the threshold.

And Harry crossed it.

The kitchen was warm and alive. Counters crowded with bowls and herbs. A wand stirred soup midair. A cat batted a fallen ball of dough across the floor like it owned the place. Someone hummed with the crackling radio. Another shaped pastries with quick, sure fingers.

Someone handed Harry a tray and nodded toward the stack of phyllo sheets.

He didn’t need to ask what they were making.

Banitsa.

He’d made it with Lora. Folded butter and cheese into pastry, laughed when he tore the dough and she’d slapped his hand in mock offense. But this was different. Louder. Messier. Communal. No one watching. No one correcting. Just a rhythm moving through the room with hands brushing flour, passing bowls, trading smiles without words.

The woman from the doorway caught his eye. “Good,” she said in slow English. “You make.”

He smiled. “I know how.”

She grinned. “You help.”

So he did. No performance. No pressure. Just the easy pace of shared work.

His first fold was too tight. The next, too loose. He overfilled one section and had to pinch the edges closed with buttery fingers. Someone beside him, older, maybe seventy, clicked her tongue once, then took the tray gently, refolded the dough with a practiced flick, and handed it back with a wink.

No scolding. No sharp tone. Just help.

Later, he layered two sheets instead of one, and a boy to his left quietly slid a single sheet onto his tray without a word.

It felt like friendship.

Like they’d all been new to this once. Like the mistakes didn’t count against you.

Harry’s shoulders dropped. His breath came easier.

He moved slowly. Careful. Let his hands remember what care felt like. The smell drifted up, cheese and butter and crisping pastry, comfort curling in his chest like steam from the oven.

No one expected perfection here. They only expected him to be .

And they welcomed that.

It stirred a memory.

The Yule Ball.

He’d been tired, uncomfortable, and alone. Parvati had gone off to dance with someone flashier. Someone who didn’t step on her toes. Ron was sulking. And Harry had barely touched his plate.

He’d ended up back at the Champions’ table, not quite ready to leave, not quite sure where to go. Viktor had already returned, sitting straight-backed and still in his formal robes. Hermione was gone; off to find dessert, or air, or maybe just space. She’d looked flustered earlier. Harry hadn’t asked.

He slid into his seat with a sigh and muttered, “You’re full of surprises.”

Viktor glanced at him. “Am I?”

“Hermione,” Harry said. “Didn’t expect that.”

Viktor tilted his head, like he was considering it. “People think they know me,” he said at last, “because they know my name. I am not who they say.”

Harry shrugged, unsure what else to say.

“She doesn’t even like Quidditch.”

“She tells me this,” Viktor replied. Then, he smiled. “I like that.”

A moment later, the table shimmered in invitation. Dinner had begun. Harry tapped his plate and asked for something familiar. Mashed potatoes. Roast beef. A bit of Yorkshire pudding. The food appeared, neat and warm, but he didn’t reach for it.

Viktor didn’t tap his plate. He tapped the table instead and murmured something low in Bulgarian. Food appeared slowly—soup, bread, roasted aubergine, lamb with red pepper, and something golden and flaking that looked a little like a pasty, if you squinted.

Banitsa.

Harry hadn't know that at the time, but it was clear now.

Viktor had cut a piece and set it on Harry’s plate without asking.

“You didn’t eat much,” he said. “Try this.”

Harry froze, one hand hovering over his fork. “I’m not—”

“It is good,” Viktor said, soft. “I promise.”

He didn’t push. Didn’t guilt. Just placed the food in front of him like it was a natural thing to do. Like Harry’s hunger, whether he admitted it or not, was worth noticing.

It shouldn’t have meant anything. But it did.

Harry wasn’t used to that kind of care. Not without cost. He’d grown up hiding food, hoarding it when he could, flinching when a cupboard door creaked open behind him. At Privet Drive, food had always been about power. A reward if he behaved. A punishment if he didn’t. A system of rules he could never quite predict.

Even at Hogwarts, the feast had never truly felt like his. There were too many eyes. Too much noise. At the Burrow, meals came with warmth and laughter—but also a quiet pressure to be good, to be grateful, to take up as little space as possible in a house already full of love not made for him. The meals were heavy, and not just because of the ingredients.

So he learned to keep his plate neat. To ask for little. To pretend he wasn’t hungry even when he was.

Sometimes, especially when the world felt too heavy, he didn’t eat at all.

But Viktor… Viktor didn’t make it a thing. He didn’t ask what was wrong. Didn’t make a joke. He just saw that Harry hadn’t eaten and gave him something good.

Like he understood. Without needing it explained.

That startled Harry more than the food.

He took a bite, tentative.

Flaky dough. Salty cheese. A whisper of herbs. It melted on his tongue and filled the spaces he hadn’t realized were still hollow. It was rich. Indulgent. Comforting.

It tasted like something he wasn’t sure he deserved.

Across the table, Viktor ate quietly, unrushed. He didn’t seem to expect anything in return.

“Food is not just for hunger,” he said, almost absently. “It is for soul too. For remembering you are still human.”

Harry hadn’t known what to say.

He still didn’t.

But now, years later, with dough under his fingernails and the scent of browning butter curling around him like an embrace, he thought maybe he understood.

Harry let the memory settle. Not sharp. Not painful. Just something real. Something good.

A boy leaned over and pointed at the last fold.

The woman beside him smiled. “Пожелание,” she said. Wish.

“You put wish in last fold.”

Harry blinked. “A wish?”

She nodded. “Make one. Quiet. Fold. Then done.”

He looked down. The last layer of dough was buttered and ready. Steam curled from the oven, warm and steady.

His hands hesitated.

He thought of the spoon. The whistle in his coat. The journal page where he’d written ти си добро момче. The scent of lavender above his bed. Lora’s voice calling him миличък. The way Viktor had once ordered enough food to share without making it a thing. Just a gesture. Just kindness.

He thought of all the pieces that had been offered to him lately. Not asked for. Not earned. Just… given.

And he thought of how long it had been since he believed something could last.

The wish rose unformed—barely language at all. Not a plea. Not a hope with neat edges. But a feeling that pressed against the inside of his ribs and asked to be held.

He didn’t wish for peace. He didn’t trust that word.
Not happiness, either. That felt conditional. Fleeting.
And not love. Not exactly. That felt too big. Too sharp.

But maybe...

Let someone want the real parts. The ones I don’t show unless it’s safe. Let them stay, even then.

That was it, or close enough. Not spoken. Not written. Just folded in, soft and sticky, into the last layer of dough.

A wish not for something new, but for something true.

He folded the final layer. And he wished.

—

They ate the banitsa hot from the oven, cheese bubbling at the edges. Someone passed him quince jam and dense bread, a glass of dark cherry juice and a plate of pickled vegetables. Everything rich, fragrant, and deeply alive.

He sat at the table like someone who belonged there.

A girl across from him, barefoot and freckled, watched as he reached for the jam.

“Хари,” she said softly, already knowing his name.

He glanced up.

She tapped her chest, then pointed to him. “Добре дошъл, Хари.” Welcome, Harry.

Her accent was thick, but her smile made the meaning clear.

Harry returned it genuine and unguarded. The name didn’t feel foreign anymore. It didn’t feel borrowed. It felt like it had grown roots.

When he stood to leave, the woman who’d handed him the tray wiped her hands on her apron and stepped close. She pressed something into his palm, paper still warm from the kitchen air, ink slightly smudged.

The words were carefully printed in Cyrillic with English underneath:

Ти си винаги добре дошъл тук.
You are always welcome here.

Harry read it once, then again.

There was something about the way the letters looped. A gentleness to it. 

He looked up, throat thick.

She smiled. Then reached up to touch his cheek, warm palm steady. “Ти си наш… но още не си готов.”
You are ours…but you are not finished yet.

Her words landed like the fold of phyllo before the wish.

Unrushed. Certain. A kindness that did not cling.

Harry blinked fast, nodded once.

She tapped the paper still in his hand. “Може пак да дойдеш.”
You can come again.

Then, with the same quiet finality she had used to stir the eggs, she kissed his cheek.

Outside, the breeze smelled like cheese and dill and a little bit like smoke. His hands were sticky with butter and joy. They didn’t shake anymore.

He lingered on the step, the paper still clutched in his hand. He’d been seen here. Welcomed. Not fixed, not cleaned up, just… let in. It made something deep in his chest ache in a way he didn’t have words for.

Mи си наш… но още не си готов.
You are ours… but you are not finished yet.

She was right.
There were still shadows under the surface. Fury he hadn’t spent. Old griefs that hadn’t been named. Wounds he’d covered too quickly, too neatly. He’d come here to heal, but there were pieces of him too jagged for gentleness. 

He only wrote about it that night, slow and careful, after tucking the name slip into the back of his journal beside the dried spoon flower and the boy’s whistle.

June 19 –
I already knew how to make banitsa.
But tonight, no one corrected me.
They just handed me a tray and trusted me to begin.

I folded in a wish.
Didn’t say it out loud.
Didn’t need to.

Viktor once said food feeds the soul.
I think he was right.
It doesn’t just fill you.
It roots you. Reminds you that you exist.
That you’re still here. Still human.
Even when you don’t feel like it.

Some days I still want to drink.
Some days I feel like I ruin everything I touch.
Like I’m made wrong—burned in, too sharp at the edges.
But other days, I laugh.
I eat.
I fly.
I let people help me.
I help them back.

And sometimes—
just sometimes—
I find parts of myself I didn’t know were missing.

The war did damage.
But it wasn’t the only thing that did.
There’s older pain here too.
Quieter. Harder to name.
And I think I’m finally strong enough to look at it.

This place doesn’t deserve my anger.
So I’ll take it somewhere else, when the time comes.

But they told me I can come back.

And I want to.

—

The letters had started arriving more frequently.

He hadn’t read all of them.
Some were still tucked in his pack, unopened. Others sat in a stack on his desk, their envelopes soft at the edges from being handled but never broken. He kept telling himself he’d read them eventually.

But most days, he didn’t want to.
They all said the same thing in the end—questions, concerns, veiled demands. Worry disguised as love. Love disguised as control.
Not one of them said what he really needed to hear.

He opened the newest one because the handwriting was Hermione’s, and it felt cruel not to at least try.

Letter from Hermione – June 20
Harry,
We’re getting worried. Not just Ron and me—everyone. Kingsley stopped by the house yesterday. He’s trying to be respectful of your space, but there’s talk. About where you are. What you’re doing. Whether you’re okay.

I keep thinking about that night back in April. You said you needed to leave, and I told you I understood. But I didn’t. Not really. I was distracted. I didn't pay enough attention. I thought you meant a holiday, time away from the press, from people. I didn’t know you meant… this.

Ron says I shouldn’t write so much. But I don’t know what else to do.

You haven’t written back. You haven’t even sent a word to let us know you’re alive.

Are you eating? Are you safe? Are you even still—

Just… write back. Please.
You don’t have to come home. But don’t disappear.

Love,
Hermione

He folded the letter with careful hands. Not harshly. Not resentfully. Just tired. The guilt of it hung behind his ribs like a bruise.

Then he saw Ron’s handwriting on the next envelope and opened it before he could talk himself out of it.

Letter from Ron – June 21
Mate,
I’m not good at this. You know that.

But Hermione’s a wreck, and I’m… not much better.

We don’t want to pull you back if you’re finally doing something for yourself. But it’s hard not to feel like you’re just slipping away. You’ve always done that, even when we were kids. Just—checked out. Vanished into your own head. We used to joke about it. “Harry’s gone again.”

Only now it’s not funny.

We need you, you know. Still. Even if you don’t need us. Or even if you think you don’t. That’s what this feels like. Like you’ve decided we’re not part of who you are anymore.

And that… hurts. I won’t lie.

You always say you’re not good at staying still. But the truth is, we never learned how to let you go.

At least tell us you’re all right.
—Ron

Harry stared at the parchment. Two letters. Twenty worries. A hundred assumptions.

They were worried. He didn’t blame them for that. But worry wasn’t the same as understanding. They still saw him as someone who had cracked under pressure. Someone who had snapped and fled.

They didn’t see how long he’d been unraveling. How long he’d been disappearing in plain sight.

It wasn’t just the war. It wasn’t even the press, the fans, the never-ending expectations.

It was the years of being someone for everyone else, and never being allowed to just… be.

They wanted him to come home. But they didn’t understand what home had become to him. How tightly it hurt. How loud. How much of him it scraped away.

He didn’t want to disappear.

But he couldn’t go back to being a ghost just to make them feel better.

That evening, near the edge of the square, Harry found himself pulled into a gathering.

It started with music, sharp strings, something fast and minor that made his pulse quicken, and then came the laughter. A few men had set up a makeshift table beneath an overhang of ivy and grapevine. There were plates of roasted peppers, long curls of sausage, olives steeped in oil and garlic. Someone passed him a bowl of cucumber salad dressed in vinegar and dill.

He didn’t know if it was a celebration or just a Tuesday.

One of the men, dark-haired with a chipped front tooth and laugh lines like seams down his face, clapped Harry on the back and handed him a shot glass brimming with rakia. Others followed, raising theirs in unison.

“Наздраве!”

Nazdrave. To your health.

The word rang out like a spell, bright and ceremonial. The glass in his hand caught the last slant of evening light. It smelled like fire. Like endings.

They waited.

Harry smiled, sheepish, and shook his head. “No thanks.”

The man blinked. “Only sip,” he said, tapping his chest. “Warm the bones.”

Harry hesitated. The air smelled like char and sugar. The glass was small. The ache was not. He could almost taste the burn already, feel it sweeping the corners of his mind clean.

But he didn’t.

“Can’t — Не мога,” he said quietly, more to himself than anyone.

There was a pause. A beat.

Then the man nodded and took the glass from Harry’s hand without fuss. He downed the shot in one go, winked, and gestured for someone to bring mugs instead.

Beer was poured. A jug of dark juice was added to the table without comment. When Harry reached for it, no one looked twice.

Someone clinked a mug to his. “Наздраве, приятел.”

Nazdrave, friend.

And that was it.

No questions. No pity. Just a space held open like a chair pulled out at supper.

The music kept playing. The food kept coming. Laughter rose again, a little louder this time.

Harry bowed his head and mouthed the words back. He let the toast hang in the air between them like an unspoken spell, a promise not for him, but for them.

He watched them drink. The burn of it turned their cheeks pink. Their laughter grew louder. A bowl of peppers passed his way again, and this time, he took two.

He didn’t drink anything but his juice. This time, the world made room for him just as he was.

—

Journal - June 23 

Nazdrave means “to your health.”

They raised their glasses tonight. I didn’t.
Not because I didn’t want to.
But because I did.

Because I know what it takes from me now—
how it turns the volume up on every doubt,
how it makes me forget who I’m trying to become.

I said no.
And they let me. No questions. No sideways glances.
A different drink. A clink of mugs all the same.

It wasn’t envy I felt watching them.

Longing, maybe. For that ease.
For the way they let themselves be happy without needing permission.
For how they offered joy like bread at a table—
freely, abundantly,
And with no fear of running out.

—

At the edge of the village library, tucked into the foreign periodicals section, Harry spotted a boy flipping through a worn English copy of Quidditch Weekly .

The cover showed a seeker midair in deep red, not posing, just caught in motion. Windblown. A little off-balance. His hair was longer now. His face sharper. Tired, maybe. There was a jagged scar across one eyebrow that hadn’t been there before.

Legend or Liability? Debate Surrounds Krum’s Return

Harry didn’t reach for the magazine. He didn’t need to. The headline said enough.

He’d seen headlines like that before. About himself. About others. The language was always the same: concern wrapped in condescension, respect edged with doubt.

There were plenty of comments wrapped up in what they didn’t say.
Too old. Too slow. Past his peak. Time to make room.

He swallowed, gaze snagged on the image. A crease ran through Viktor’s face, splitting his brow. 

Did he see the postcard?

Harry looked away before he could read the rest. But the image stayed.

He didn’t see a headline. He saw Viktor. The man who flew like the sky had always belonged to him, whether anyone watched or not. The boy who’d caught the Snitch when it meant losing because that had been the right call. Because someone had to end it.

Harry had used to wonder about that choice.

But now, with the ache of old bruises still healing and a quiet kitchen still warm in his memory, he thought he understood it.

It wasn’t about winning.

It was about integrity. About knowing when something was already broken and choosing to land anyway.

A quiet defiance. A final say.

And now, years later, the press and the fans were talking about Viktor like a cautionary tale.
As if he’d already missed his window. As if talent had an expiration date and Viktor’s had finally come.

Harry exhaled, slow and tight.

He’d seen that expression before. The one Viktor wore on the cover. That half-lost, half-defiant tilt to the mouth. He remembered seeing it in the mirror once, right before everything cracked open and he walked off that podium.

No one had asked if he was all right back then. No one had looked past the headlines or the exhaustion. Not even his friends.
They’d just assumed he’d be fine. Because he always had been.

Fine. Always fine.

And now… now he saw something in Viktor’s face that made him ache. Not pity. Not guilt. Just a quiet, startled recognition.

Viktor Krum. Still standing. Still trying. Still wanting .

Harry pressed a hand to the journal in his coat pocket. His fingers grazed the spine like it might ground him.

He didn’t want to say much. Didn’t want to force open something fragile.
But maybe, just maybe, it would mean something, to get a letter.
To know someone saw you. That someone had noticed.

It would have meant something to him.

There was a man in town, Kiril, who bred messenger owls for the mountain post. He had arms like tree trunks and a beard like a bird’s nest, but he was kind, and his birds were terrifyingly efficient.

Harry approached him carefully, unsure how to ask.

“Long trip?” Kiril asked, eyeing the folded parchment in Harry’s hands.

“Probably,” Harry said.

Kiril squinted at him. “Girlfriend?”

Harry shook his head. “No. A friend.”

Kiril grunted thoughtfully. “Writing is good,” he said after a pause. “Means you still want to be known.”

He tilted his head toward the loft. “Pick one. Not the fat one. He’s lazy.”

Harry chose a sharp-eyed brown owl with a streak of gold under its wing. He tied the letter gently to its leg, no name on the envelope, just Viktor’s name whispered into the owl’s feathers.

The bird looked at him once, solemn, as if it understood more than it should, and then it launched into the evening sky without hesitation.

Harry didn’t watch it go. He stayed a moment, hands in his pockets, heart ticking strangely in his chest.

Somewhere out there, Viktor might read his words.

He turned toward the slope, already thinking about what needed doing next. The day hadn’t stopped just because he’d reached for something.

It never did.

Viktor,

Do you remember what you said to me after the Third Task?
You told me I should come to Bulgaria. That the mountains were good for thinking.

I don’t know if you meant it or if it was just something to say. You were kind to me that night, and not many people were. I’ve thought about it more times than I can count.

I came. Years late, I know—but I came.
And you were right. The mountains help. They don’t fix anything, but they make it quieter. Easier to hear myself.

I saw the article. You looked tired. Or maybe I just recognized something in your face that I’ve seen in mine.
Anyway, I thought I’d write. I didn’t think I would, but I kept thinking about that night. About what it meant to be told I could come here. What it meant that someone saw I needed to get away—even before I knew it myself.

So—thank you.
For saying it.
For meaning it, if you did.
I’m glad I came.

—Harry

And next to his name, he drew a little snitch.