He Nearly Killed the Cat
The Unasked Question
By Anne B. Walsh
Author Notes:
I disclaim the first line.
"I've had enough trouble for a lifetime."
The words, in his own voice, hummed inside Harry Potter's head as he slowly awakened, opening his eyes to stare up at the blurry but familiar view of burgundy-red canopy and curtains.
My canopy and curtains. My bed. The same one I collapsed into the night I was Sorted, the night it was finally real that I had a place where I belonged. We came back to Hogwarts to finish it—
He rolled onto his side, reaching for his glasses. And we did finish it, all of us. It's over. Voldemort is gone. I don't have to run, I don't have to hide, I don't have to deal with having a destiny ever again…
The dorm came into focus around him, looking bafflingly, almost terrifyingly normal after everything that had happened. All five beds were occupied, though a gleam of silver and a flash of red from Neville's direction told Harry his friend wasn't yet over the astonishment of having pulled the Sword of Gryffindor out of the Sorting Hat the night before.
Or was it two nights ago? Harry sat up and peered at the window, trying to establish the time from the direction of the light. I think it must've been, because the last thing I remember is Kreacher bringing me those sandwiches about the middle of the morning, and now it's dawn again. The first day—or the second day, really, I slept through most of the first one—of the rest of my life.
Vaguely he wondered why he wasn't more excited. He'd been dreaming of this day since he was old enough to understand about the scar on his forehead, the whispers of "The Boy Who Lived" as he passed. Shouldn't he be feeling something akin to the wild surge of joy which had possessed him as the Hogwarts Express pulled out of platform nine and three-quarters for the first time with him on board?
I'm not eleven anymore, he decided after a few moments waiting uncertainly for something other than tired acceptance (and a few pangs of hunger) to make itself known. I can't expect to feel the same way I did then.
And besides, nobody had to die for me to go to Hogwarts…
Rather than think too much further about that, Harry swung his feet out of bed and opened his wardrobe. Kreacher had clearly been through here as well, since what greeted him was not a row of empty hooks or a rush of moths but a neat line of clean, pressed robes hanging up against the back wall and a selection of T-shirts and trousers on the shelves below. The drawers still further down, when he bent to look, contained socks, underwear, and a piece of folded parchment with his name written across the back in a clear, feminine handwriting.
Harry sat down on the floor before he fell, staring at the note. Slowly, as though they belonged to somebody else, his hands reached out and unfolded it.
Want to go for a walk with me? I'll bring breakfast. Meet me in the common room.
There was no signature, but none was needed. The light, sweet scent of flowers that hung about the parchment had been haunting Harry's dreams for almost a year. A real, unforced smile came to his face for the first time since…
Since I don't remember when. Which means it's been too long.
Picking out what he needed from the open drawer, he got quickly to his feet.
It was impolite to keep a lady waiting.
Harry rounded the last curve of the spiral staircase and looked down into the round, stone-walled common room. He'd seen it literally thousands of times from this same vantage point, with its tapestry-hung walls, its shabby overstuffed armchairs, its squashy and sagging couches—
Its beautiful red-haired witches sitting by the fireplace.
"Good morning," Ginny said from her spot on the hearthrug, her voice quiet but carrying clearly to Harry's ears. "Did you sleep well?"
"Very well, thank you." Harry descended the final few stairs and came to sit across from Ginny. "Is one of those for me?"
"Yes, whichever one you'd like better." Ginny poked at the two fat rolls of flatbread which lay on a plate on the hearth. "Kreacher put them together for me—this one is ham and cheese, I think, and that should make this one bacon and eggs. And here." She shook a covered flask, and liquid sloshed within. "Pumpkin juice with Mum's special mix of spices in it. For a special day."
"A special day," Harry repeated, shaking his head. "Ginny, I—" A great many contradictory things all tried to get out of his mouth at once. He looked at her helplessly, tongue-tied, hoping she would understand.
"You're here, and you're alive." Ginny reached across the space between them and took his hand. "So are an awful lot of other people, and that's because of you. Wouldn't you say that makes today special?"
"It… doesn't feel like enough," Harry managed after a few moments. "People still died. People got hurt. And it isn't over yet. There will be Death Eaters who get off, who weren't here or who ran away before we won, and some people will probably get into trouble for doing things they had no choice about doing." He had a momentary vision of the Malfoy family, sitting in a tense cluster in one corner of the celebratory Great Hall the day before, looking about with fearful eyes as though waiting for the blow to fall on one or another of them. "It's never really going to be over, is it?"
"Not if you expect perfection, it's not." Ginny picked up the bacon-and-eggs flatbread roll with her free hand and held it out to him. "Come and walk with me?"
Harry looked from her to the bread and back to her, then accepted it and got to his feet. Ginny did the same, tucking the flask of pumpkin juice into one of her robe's capacious pockets and picking up the ham-and-cheese roll on the way. In silence they climbed out of the portrait hole and descended the endless flights of steps which kept Gryffindors and Ravenclaws alike in excellent shape through their years at Hogwarts. The staircases grew gradually wider and grander until they reached the sweeping marble edifice which led down into the entrance hall, which had been cleared, Harry was glad to note, of all the debris of battle.
Ginny took a bite from her roll as Harry pushed open the huge, carved oak doors. "Mmm," she said indistinctly, catching a bit of ham as it fell from the bitten edge. "Oh, this is good. How's yours?"
"I don't know yet." Harry sniffed at the flatbread, then bit off the top end of the roll. The bacon crunched satisfactorily between his teeth, and Kreacher had scrambled the eggs with little bits of onion and sweet pepper in them. "Very good," he said around his mouthful.
Ginny laughed, stepping out onto the stone steps which led down to the long sweep of Hogwarts' lawn. "You sound like Ron. Which would make me Hermione, wouldn't it?"
"Merlin's robes, I hope not." Harry followed Ginny's lead down the outdoor stairs. "I love Hermione, but she's not the person I want today."
"You've had enough of her for a little while?" Ginny's tone made the question light, non-threatening, almost teasing, but at the same time hinted that she'd like an answer.
"I've had enough of… everything." Harry switched the roll into his left hand and dipped into Ginny's pocket with his right, liberating the flask of pumpkin juice. "Open this for me?"
Using her free hand, Ginny undid the cap on the flask, and Harry took a long drink, enjoying the cool, sweet spiciness. "Thanks," he said when his mouth was clear. "Want some?"
"Yes, please." Ginny accepted the flask and drank deeply, then held it out for Harry to cap before sliding it back into her pocket. "Enough of everything?"
"I don't mean it in a bad way." Harry took another, smaller bite of his breakfast and thought while he chewed. "Or maybe I do, but you'd have to define 'bad' first. Is it bad to… to not know what to do next? To be uncertain about… well, everything?"
"No, Harry." Ginny smiled gently at him, tucking her hair behind one ear. "That's called being normal."
"No wonder I don't recognize it." Harry loaded his words with sarcasm, and Ginny laughed aloud. "But it's a real question, and it's something I have to deal with now. What does the hero do once the villain's dead?"
"Live happily ever after?" Ginny suggested.
"Nice work if you can get it." Harry bit into the roll moodily. "What does it mean, though?"
"What do you want it to mean?"
Harry was about to toss off some light, foolish answer, but a note of tension in Ginny's question warned him to look around at her. She had stopped walking and was facing him, her brown eyes level and unwavering.
"That's a real question too," she said quietly. "And it's not one I think anyone's ever asked you. So I'm going to start. What do you want, Harry? Not what do you think you ought to have, or what can you have. Not what should 'The Boy Who Lived' or 'The Chosen One' get for fulfilling his great and glorious destiny." Even inside Harry's own mind, those two titles had never been imbued with such a withering load of irony. "What do you, Harry James Potter, really and truly want?"
"I…" Harry swallowed in a movement that had nothing to do with breakfast. "I don't know."
"I think you do, somewhere in there." Ginny laid her delicate fingers gently against Harry's temple. "Only you've had to bury it so very deep to finish what you had to do that it's going to be hard to find." Her hand dropped to his shoulder. "Will you let me help you?"
A long, long moment passed before Harry felt himself slowly nodding.
"Thank you." Ginny squeezed his shoulder once, as though she were wishing him good luck on the Quidditch pitch, then turned to look in the direction of the Forbidden Forest. "Let's walk that way," she suggested. "I feel like breaking the rules today."
"Please," Harry said in a voice which sounded almost like his own. "When don't you feel like breaking the rules?"
"When I agree with them." Ginny tossed her hair over her shoulder and grinned at him. "Or when I made them up in the first place."
"Are you going to make some up for me, then?" Harry took another bite of roll, pulling one of the pieces of bacon free in the process.
"Yes, I think I will." Ginny tapped the fingers of her free hand with her own roll in order. "Rule number one, you have to tell the truth. You can say that you don't want to talk about something, but no lying, all right?"
"All right," mumbled Harry through a mouthful of bacon.
"Rule number two. No thinking about what can and can't happen." Ginny peeled off a piece of flatbread and tossed it into the underbrush at the edge of the Forest. "This is about what you want, not what's possible or realistic. We'll get to all that later."
"Right." Harry glanced at the place where Ginny's flatbread had landed and was just in time to see an orange-and-black paw batting away a pointed muzzle of brown. He froze, half-hearing voices, one male, one female, both as familiar as his own, dearly missed and eagerly longed for—
Imagining things. He gave his head a shake. I'm imagining things, trying to figure out where Ginny's going with all of this.
"And rule number three." Ginny reached a clearing a few feet into the Forest and perched herself on a handy rock, peeling back the wrapping of her roll a bit farther. "No thinking about what you should or shouldn't have either, what you deserve or ought to have. Like I said—"
"This is about what I want," Harry finished, sitting down on a fallen log. "I get that."
"Well, then, start us rolling." Ginny pointed her flatbread at him like a wand. "What do you want, Harry? What is it you've always wanted the most, out of all the world, Muggle or magical?"
"Can I have a minute to think about it?"
"Certainly." Ginny spread her hands expansively. "Take all the time you need."
Harry sat back on the log and pulled another strip of bacon out of the middle of his roll, sucking eggs off it as he considered. What do I want… what do I want…
A flash of white feathers caught his eye as a snowy owl settled into a tree at the edge of the clearing, a branch or two down from what looked like a hawk, though it had its head under its wing so Harry couldn't be sure. "Must be post time at the castle," he murmured, feeling a moment's stab of grief for Hedwig. She'd been the first real birthday present he'd ever received, not only an owl but a friend, given to him by another—
And then it came to him, all at once, stunningly perfect in its simplicity.
"I know why I can't answer your question," he said, looking back at Ginny. "You're asking it wrong."
"How can I ask it right, then?" Ginny tore the last of her flatbread into small pieces and scattered them beside her rock. "What's the matter with it?"
"Nothing too big. You just need to change the first word." Harry felt a smile, his second real one of the day, working its way onto his face. "Or maybe I need to answer the question you did ask, and then you need to ask the new one that comes out of the answer."
"I'm listening." Ginny was beginning to smile as well.
"I want…" Harry stopped. "Maybe I should start with what I don't want. I know that better."
Ginny waggled two fingers in a signal for him to continue.
"I don't want yesterday to keep happening over and over for the rest of my life." Harry put his hands over his ears, grimacing. "I don't want to keep being 'The Chosen One', or, Merlin help us all, 'The Boy Who Lived', for as long as I live. Professor Dumbledore was always saying that it was our choices that mattered, not our abilities, but fighting Voldemort isn't anything I chose to do. I mean, I did, but only because not choosing it would have meant I forfeited and he won. So now I have the rest of my life to make choices in—but is everyone always just going to see me as the boy who killed You-Know-Who, or will they take the time to look at my life and really see me in it?"
"I will," Ginny said softly.
"I know you will." Harry nodded. "Which is why the answer to your question is, I want people. The people who look at me and only see me, not a hero or a scar or a destiny. The people who want to be around me not to pick up some reflected glory or brag to their friends later, but because they're my friends and they like spending time with me. The people who would think to ask me this kind of a question." He smiled at her. "Which I guess means I have to start with you."
"Remember the rules." Ginny pressed the flask of pumpkin juice against her cheeks, but her ears were busily turning a rosy pink. "You don't have to do anything. It's all about—"
"What I want, yes, I remember," Harry interrupted. "But what I want isn't what I want at all. It's who. And who I want, Ginny, is you." It came out more easily than he thought it would. "You, Ron and Hermione, Neville and Luna. My friends, my real friends, the ones who matter."
He paused, recalling the flash of memory he'd had in the common room. "After that, if your rules were true," he said slowly, "if there weren't any limits on magic, if it did absolutely everything the way Muggles think it does… I think there are some people I'd like to give second chances. To see what would happen to them if they got the opportunity to make something of themselves."
"Like who?" Ginny uncapped the pumpkin juice and drank, then shook the flask in Harry's direction.
"Yes, please." Harry caught the recapped flask handily, opened it, and drained it. "Like Malfoy, for one. Dumbledore was right about him, he isn't a killer, he's just weak—he even tried to help us, the night we got caught by the Snatchers, it's not his fault it didn't work. He was born on the wrong side of the war, and never had a chance to get out of it." He put the cap back on the flask and set it down beside his log. "He might've been an interesting person to know if he had."
"So he might." Ginny tapped her fingertips together, a smile playing around the corners of her mouth. "Anyone else?"
"Snape," Harry said promptly. "He made a load of mistakes, but he never learned the right lessons from them. I'd like to see what would've happened to him if he had."
"How do you mean, 'learned the right lessons'?" Ginny propped one foot up on the rock beside her.
"Well, compare him with Ron." Harry held out his hands like the balance pans of a Potions scale. "Ron's done some things that hurt me, hurt you, hurt Hermione. I'm sure you can think of a few." He let one of his hands drop, as though a weight had been put in that pan. "But afterwards, when he'd had time to cool off, he came back. He said he was sorry, and—this is the important part—he backed it up with what he did." He brought his hands back to the level. "Like dragging me out of a half-frozen pond and saving my life."
"Yes, that sounds fairly important," Ginny said, laughing. "I like you much better alive."
"Thanks for that." Harry grinned at her. "But like I was saying, after Snape hurt my mum, he tried telling her he was sorry, but everything he was still doing told her he wasn't. So she wouldn't listen to him, she cut him off, and he took that as final. He didn't think to stop doing the things that were hurting her, and that's how this whole mess got started in the first place." He shrugged. "Maybe he deserved what he got, but I'd like to see who he could've been if he'd made the other choice. If what he said and what he did had lined up a little better."
"That might have changed a lot of things, you realize." Ginny turned to watch as a yearling doe, delicate and graceful on long legs, stepped hesitantly out of the Forest to nose at the fragments of bread she'd scattered. "It might even have meant your parents never died. Would you want that too?"
"Now that, I honestly don't know." Harry squinted at a patch of air beside one of the doe's hooves, but couldn't decide if the blurring he saw was really there or just a smudge on his glasses. "How can I? I never knew them. I know it sounds awful, but…"
"Remember, no should or shouldn't," Ginny interjected. "It's in the rules."
"Right, right, the rules." Harry sighed. "Playing by the rules, then, what I'd really want more than anything…" He swallowed against a suddenly tight throat. "Sirius," he said quietly. "I'd want Sirius back again. But not exactly like he was—not that I wasn't happy to have him any way at all, but if I can have whatever I want, I'd want him the way he ought to have been. The way he would have been, if not for Azkaban. I'd want him to have all the chances he missed because of that, to do all the things he never had time for. Maybe even fall in love, get married, have a kid of his own." He found a smile from somewhere. "Then I'd have a godmother to go with my godfather, and a little godsister—though is that even a word?"
"It is now." Ginny plucked a spray of leaves from a nearby tree and held them out to the doe, who took them daintily from her hand. "And I'm sure she would have been a dreadful pest, too."
The doe paused in her chewing to look down her long nose at Ginny.
"It seems so wrong, to want my godfather more than my own parents." Harry turned to lean his back against a nearby tree, staring off into the Forest, letting his imagination shape a bear-like head, a long shaggy back, four broad canine paws out of the shadows. "And don't start again with the rules. If I'm allowed to have whatever I want, I should be allowed to say whatever I think!"
"You are allowed. I'm just allowed to smack you if you start getting silly." Ginny dusted her hands off. "And it only seems wrong if you're thinking about it like a bard's tale. In the real world, well, you said it yourself—it isn't that you don't care about your parents, but you never knew your parents, and you did know Sirius." She stopped for a moment, then went on softly. "You loved him, Harry. You loved him very dearly, and it hurt you terribly when he died. Didn't it?"
"More than I knew how to say." Harry thought for one moment that he saw a thestral standing guard over the shadowy Grim, wings arched protectively, but the sun chose that instant to emerge from behind the clouds and beam directly into his eyes. He pulled his glasses off and pressed his hands against his face, grateful beyond words for the obvious answer to why a pair of tears were now making their way down his cheeks.
"It helped a little when Professor Lupin was alive," he said when he had blinked away most of the sunspots. "He was like a link back to them, to Sirius, to my parents. I felt like, when he was around, everything wasn't gone yet. If that makes any sense." He put his glasses back on, settling them into place. "Not to mention how much we all learned from him. He was the best Defense teacher we ever had, werewolf or not."
"Is that your way of working around to saying you'd want him too?" Ginny inquired.
"I hadn't thought of it that way yet, but yes, it is, and I would." Harry picked up the empty pumpkin juice flask and idly tossed it from hand to hand. "I'd want him to find his own happiness earlier than he did, though. Not that Tonks was bad for him, but he spent a lot of years alone." The flask dropped into the leaves at his feet. "I know what it's like to be alone."
"I know you do." Ginny sat up straighter as the doe lay down beside her rock. "But you aren't anymore, Harry. And if I have my way, you never will be again. Not like that." Her words seemed to reverberate through the clearing, as though she had sworn an Unbreakable Vow.
"Thanks." Harry pulled his feet up under him. "That means a lot, coming from you."
Author Notes:
I gave people most of the news in the last chapter of this and in the new Surpassing Danger chapter, but I may as well recap in short form.
Original novel called A Widow in Waiting, first draft done, waiting on a legal question to revise and publish on Amazon. Personal anthology of feline-based fantasy and sci-fi called Cat Tales, will include the story I mentioned here last time called "Killdeer", writing in progress, will be published on Amazon when complete. Fan fiction updating as it comes clear to me.
Did you know that you don't need an e-reader to read an e-book? It's true! There are free apps for most major e-book file types which will allow you to read them on your computer, so even if you don't have a Kindle or a Nook or anything else of that type, you can still read my originals!
Next time: Harry finds out where all these questions have been leading, we hear from the critters, and the Mysterious Bad Guy makes his appearance… stay tuned!