Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. He is the wonderful creation of J.K. Rowling. I'm just playing here.
A/N: First things first. I wanted to send two big thanks out to a couple people. First to Petronilla, who saved me from giving up on fanfics. I hate speaking ill of other people, but when I first discovered fanfics, the first several I read (on another site) were so badly written, I almost gave up completely on reading any more of them. That was until I found her story Secrets From The Past. It was she who also introduced me to the wonderful world of Portkey. If you check out her story and like it, she is hard at work on the sequel, Secrets From The Future.
Second, but by no mean any less, is to my beta, MapleMountain. Without running on and on about how much I love his story Keeping a Promise, I wanted to say thank you for innocently suggesting to me that I write my own story. It may not seem like much, but it honestly had never occurred to me before to do so. THANK YOU, to both of you.
Finally, just a couple quick notes about the story itself. The first two chapters deal with Harry's handling of Sirius's death. Certainly not "light" reading. In fact, there are only six words spoken in the two chapters combined. After that, however, things will pick up as Harry rejoins the land of the living.
Second, this story is about them getting together. It's how Harry goes from no obvious romantic feelings for Hermione at the end of Book 5 to where we all want them to be. One of my reviewers used the term "slow burn" to describe this. I like that. This is definitely a slow burn of a story. It takes him fifteen chapters just to realize his feelings. I wanted to see how he got there.
Chapter 1. This is Going to be a Looonnnnng Holiday.
Harry Potter's sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had started out OK, at least as good as could be expected after losing one's godfather. The holiday before said school year was another story altogether.
To make a long story short, Harry had been tricked by his mortal enemy, the evil Lord Voldemort, into falling into a trap at the Ministry of Magic, in the Department of Mysteries, with five of his friends. The purpose of this trap was to obtain a small spun-glass sphere that was stored there, a record made sixteen years earlier of a prophecy describing the birth of one who would have the power to defeat Voldemort: Harry.
After escaping the trap, Harry and his friends were joined by members of the Order of the Phoenix. Harry's godfather, Sirius Black was among them. In the fierce battle that ensued, Sirius was knocked back by a spell and fell through the Veil of Death, a stone archway with a mysterious veil that, for all intents and purposes, separated this world from the next. Just like that, Sirius was gone.
And so it was that Harry's holiday that followed had threatened to become totally consumed by anger, guilt, and grief. Harry was being battered by profound waves of grief over the loss of his godfather. He could feel terrible pangs of guilt weighing down his stomach over the injuries sustained by the five friends who had accompanied him there on that fateful night. But holding all of it in check was his anger.
His anger was like a tightly focused beam of light, like that of an old fashioned lighthouse that swept out into the night and kept at bay the inky blackness of his grief and guilt. He was angry at himself for allowing it all to happen. He felt... he knew... that he could have... should have... been able to prevent it. If only he'd tried harder to learn Occlumency to block Voldemort from entering his mind. If only he'd believed Hermione when she'd suggested it might just be a trick to lure him there. If only he hadn't let his friends follow him there. If only...
Every single night, his sleep was plagued by dreams, nightmares in which he was forced to relive those horrifying memories. Many nights, he watched Sirius fall in slow motion through the Veil of Death. He could clearly see the look of surprise on his face as he fell backwards.
When Harry's mind felt like tormenting him even more, Sirius would turn his head and look directly at Harry as he fell, the look of surprise seeming to ask, "How did this happen, Harry?" And Harry always knew the answer: because he didn't prevent it. Occasionally, Harry even chased after Sirius as he fell, but he always seemed to wake up right as got close enough to touch the Sirius or the veil.
Sometimes, instead of watching Sirius fall, he would watch his friends being injured, one by one, in their battle at the DOM... Luna lying unconscious on the floor after being thrown against a desk, Ginny lying unconscious with her broken ankle, Neville screaming in agony as Bellatrix Lestrange, one of Voldemort's most faithful Death Eaters, used the Cruciatus Curse on him.
As bad as it was to see them hurt, it was even worse watching what happened to his two best friends, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. During the battle, Ron had been hit by something that made him laugh at everything. When they were in a room containing a tank filled with what looked like brains, he (thinking it'd be funny) summoned one of them to him. When he touched it, the tentacles of thought that had been trailing behind it started to wrap around him, threatening to suffocate him.
And then there was Hermione. He would watch her fall as the purple flame of Dolohov's curse struck her. Even now, he could still feel the warmth in her shoulder after he had dropped to her side, though at the time it hadn't really registered because of the sheer sense of panic that enveloped him as he thought, Don't let her be dead, don't let her be dead, it's my fault if she's dead...
Those words had become as ingrained in his mind as if he had screamed them aloud with all his strength. Of course since this was a nightmare, his mind always conveniently neglected to include the part where Neville told him that she still had a pulse and the overwhelming sense of relief that followed.
All of their injuries, all of their pain... it was all because of Harry. The odd thing about these dreams however, was that deep down Harry knew that Voldemort had nothing to do with these dreams. He could feel it. Even more, he didn't know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Whatever Voldemort was doing (probably trying to figure out what to do after the arrest of so many Death Eaters that night), he had more important things to do that torture Harry by forcing him to relive those moments again and again. No, these dreams were coming up all on their own. Why would Voldemort need to torture Harry when he was perfectly able to do it himself?
About a week into Harry's annual exile to number four, Privet Drive, each of his friends who had accompanied him to the Department of Mysteries that night sent Harry a letter. They all thanked him for saving their lives by teaching them how to fight and defend themselves during their D.A. meetings. They all swore that they would have followed him there no matter what, and it was only because of him that they were still alive today.
While the letters did nothing to make him feel better, they also did nothing to make him feel worse. Harry had already decided that their injuries were his fault, so their reminders that they were with him, that they had been injured while they were with him, really didn't make him feel any worse that he already was. It merely confirmed to him that he deserved what he was feeling.
The five letters had arrived over the course of two days. The only thing he did feel in regards to their letters was a slight amusement in seeing how different yet similar they were. Reading them, he was quite sure that they had not told each other that they were writing to him. It wasn't that they were keeping it secret from each other; Harry just somehow knew that it was something that each of them had all decided to do on his or her own, without discussing it with the others. And yet, each of his friends in their letters had said almost exactly the same things, each in their own way.
Ron's letter was so Ron, short on emotion, with a few Quidditch references here and there. Ginny's was full of the same fiery determination and spirit he'd come to expect from her as well as from the Weasley family matriarch.
The letter from Neville had to be the perfect embodiment of him. There was so much untapped potential lurking in his words that he could quite possibly become a phenomenal writer with the proper encouragement. It also, unfortunately, demonstrated his dreadful memory, as the letter started to wander a bit on near the end; he actually repeated a couple of things twice.
Luna's letter was probably the strangest thing he'd ever read in his entire life, even stranger than some of the more colorful articles in The Quibbler. And yet, buried within with her entirely unrelated analogies and references to the Crumple-Horned Snorkack was the same thanks and praise he had read in the first three letters.
As he read her letter a second time (seeing as how the first time he had to stop after each sentence to figure out what she was saying), Harry thought briefly back to "That Night" (as he had taken to calling it) and was actually... not unhappy... that she, of all people, was there with the others.
Harry recalled the night of the end-of-term feast when he ran into Luna posting signs asking for the return of the things people had taken from her. She had told him about the death of her mother and how she wasn't worried about never seeing her again. She referred to the voices that Harry was sure he had also heard coming from just behind the veil.
If Sirius was now one of those voices behind the veil, maybe Harry would find him there waiting for him when he... He remembered how though he had no desire to talk about Sirius at the time, he didn't seem to mind her talking about him. Perhaps it was because that she too had seen death, in her case the death of her mother. Even now, he again felt a tiny bit better simply remembering how back then he'd felt slightly better after considering what Luna said and the possibilities it suggested.
But alas, Harry's storm of anger and despair soon returned after Luna's letter joined the other three in his dresser drawer. Considering how everyone else had sent him a letter, he was sure there was bound to be a fifth letter anytime now.
Although Hedwig had gone out hunting, he realized he would not at all be surprised if she somehow came back with a letter attached to her leg in addition to a frog in her beak. This would be the letter he was most and least looking forward to: Hermione's letter.
Harry was actually looking forward to Hermione's letter because he knew that she always seemed to know exactly what to say to make him feel better or help understand whatever it was he was trying to figure out. By the same token though, it was also the letter he was least looking forward to because if there was any one person in the world who would be able to convince him to talk about Sirius, it was her. And right now, he felt that he was just not yet ready to talk about that... with anyone.
Sure enough, a few hours later right after sunset, Hedwig returned with something small and furry dangling from her beak and a piece of parchment tied to her leg. Even from across the room, as Hedwig stood on his desk waiting expectantly for him to remove his delivery so she could enjoy her dinner, he could see his name written on the parchment; he instantly recognized the handwriting.
As he started untying it, he could already start reading the letter in his mind. He knew exactly what she was going to say before he even opened it. There was even one sentence that, word for word, was exactly how he expected it.
To his great surprise however, he was wrong about one thing. Hermione made no mention of Sirius. As Harry wondered why Hermione hadn't brought up Sirius, it soon dawned on him that neither had any of the others (he went back through everyone's letters just to be sure).
Not a single one of them mentioned Sirius or anything about what had happened in the Death Chamber in their letters. He'd half expected each of them to mention Sirius one way or another in their letters. It puzzled him that he didn't notice that they hadn't mentioned Sirius until he saw that it wasn't where he most expected it to be.
After reading Hermione's letter two more times just to check for words or phrases that Harry thought might be secret code for "Let's talk about Sirius" (he found none), he went to put her letter away with the rest.
As he set Hermione's letter down on top of the others, his mind again flashed back to That Night. He could see with great clarity how she fought that night, how at several points the two of them were practically side by side casting spells at the Death Eaters pursuing them.
He knew that if he ever had to pick just one person to stand at his side in a fight, someone he knew he would feel completely secure about trusting his life with, it was her. For all the talk of Albus Dumbledore being the greatest sorcerer alive (he himself had said something to that effect once or twice), Harry just no longer felt the same about him anymore.
The way in which Dumbledore and Harry's last meeting had ended, the way in which Dumbledore himself admitted he'd made mistakes, it all deeply shook Harry's confidence in his aged Headmaster. In a nutshell, it was simply that Dumbledore was no longer his most favorite person in the world. Now, Hermione was.
Yeahhhh, Harry thought to himself dryly, THAT didn't come out the way it was supposed to. It wasn't that Harry ever worried that Dumbledore would betray him in a fight or anything like that. It was just simply a matter of Dumbledore being knocked down a few pegs and no longer being the first person Harry thought of when it came to matters of trust. Much better, Harry thought, feeling a little more secure with that statement.
Harry was most displeased at how much vital information the Headmaster had withheld from him, information that most certainly would have made a difference in the way a great many things played out that year. Then, of course, there was the maelstrom that was the prophecy.
Honestly! Harry practically shouted in his mind. The timing of Dumbledore's revealing of the contents just plain sucked, for lack of a better word. Less than half an hour after losing one of your last ties to your long-ago murdered parents was NOT the ideal time to also learn that it was your destiny to either be the murderer or victim of one of the most evil wizards in history.
Harry remembered asking Dumbledore if it was what the prophecy meant. Now, it was no longer a question. One of us has got to kill the other one ... in the end. Now, it was a statement, a truth. Destiny. Fate, Harry thought. Those were words that now had meaning to him, something that most witches, wizards, and Muggles could never truly understand.
Once he finally set Hermione's letter down, he looked for a moment at the stack of five letters now in the dresser drawer. The pile was not stacked perfectly straight; he could see all five of them sitting at slightly different angles. Harry remembered back to when the six of them were arguing over who was and wasn't going with Harry to the Ministry.
He recalled that at the time, he thought that if he'd had the chance ahead of time to choose who would accompany himself, Hermione, and Ron, he would've never chosen Neville, Ginny, and Luna. Now, he couldn't imagine anyone else he'd rather have had with him than them... if he had to have someone with him, that is... since they'd insisted on following him, of course.
And then, that was it. As fast as those thoughts had appeared, they subsided just as quickly. As soon as the dresser drawer was closed and the letters out of sight, his previous mood returned. Since all five of them had let the matter of Sirius go unaddressed, Harry did too. He went back over to his bed, laid down, and returned to doing what had been doing before the letters arrived, which turned out to be very little of anything.
Several days later, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, Mr. and Mrs. Granger, Mr. Lovegood, and Neville's grandmother all sent Harry letters similarly thanking him like their children had. Again, he knew each family had not talked to the others.
This time though, he could tell that the parents had discussed it with their children and had read the letters they sent him. And again, despite their words, the letters did little to change Harry's mood. With little fanfare, the four new letters joined the five other tucked away in his dresser drawer.
Finally, after putting off writing replies to those letters for about another week, Harry received one more letter, a rather long one from Hermione. He had intended to write replies, if only to be polite, but he just seemed to never get around to it (not that he was doing anything else at the time).
Expecting yet another round of encouragement and praise, Harry was (very) briefly tempted to not even read it. However, seeing as how it was quite a bit longer than any of the others, he decided the least he could do was read it. He could always choose to ignore it later if he felt he needed to.
As he read, his anticipated sense of unfeeling indifference slowly changed to confusion as he tried to figure out exactly what she was saying... where her letter was going. Finally, it rapidly changed to anger once he realized exactly what she was saying. The entire letter was about Sirius, about Harry needing to deal with his godfather's death.