Disclaimer: See Part 1
Author's Note: Part 3 of 4. Enjoy!
Searching for Destiny
Part 3
False Dream
Less than two weeks later, an absolutely horrible thing happened.
Harry fell out of love.
Not that he realized that at the time-but something was different.
One day, he was in love and blissfully anticipating the next day when Ashley would return from a fashion convention held in Paris of the latest designs in clothing and he would get to see her again.
The next, he did see her again as they met up for dinner, according to their plans-and… And something just wasn't quite right.
He was… he was restless, somehow. For the first time since he could remember meeting Ashley, he found himself not completely enthralled with what she was saying and how she looked but, instead, he was distracted. Bored.
Yes, that was the only word for it.
Harry was bored.
That was it; he was just… bored.
And something about Ashley's smiles and laughs just didn't seem quite as lovely and fascinating as he'd always thought until now.
Something about her conversation just failed to interest him, which he'd never really noticed before.
And was it his imagination or was she a little distracted, not quite as easy and friendly as she usually was, too?
Surely she couldn't-she hadn't-sensed that he was bored and beginning to question just what had drawn him to her in the first place.
No, of course not, he assured himself. She had never exhibited an ability to read his thoughts without his having said anything-not like Hermione, who had somehow always been able to.
She must simply be tired from traveling and being out of town for a week. That was all it was.
And he was… just having a bad day. He was tired. There was something wrong. It was only a fluke of the day and his mood, something, that made him find Ashley not quite as perfect, he told himself. It had to be.
Of course Ashley was perfect. She was pretty, smart, nice, kind, fun to be with; she liked Quidditch… Of course she was exactly what he was looking for in a witch, his ideal.
That was all it was…
A brief, not-very-comfortable silence had fallen while Harry tried to pretend that he found every word Ashley had said to be as fascinating as he'd found her before.
"Um, Harry?"
Harry looked up to meet Ashley's eyes and managed a smile. "Yeah?"
She hesitated, looking a bit uncertain, Harry thought with a flicker of nervousness, and then looked down at the table with a sigh as she muttered, more to herself than to him, "Mon Dieu, this is so hard."
Oh no… Harry couldn't imagine what Ashley was going to say but there was no way it was going to be good.
"What is it? You know you can trust me," he said gently.
She looked back up at him with a feeble smile on her lips that faded after a moment. "I- I don't quite know how to say this but… Harry, do you-fancy me?" she blurted out, flushing and not quite meeting his eyes.
Harry stared. "I- er…" he began but then stopped, at a complete loss as to what to say. What could one say to such a question? Especially when he wasn't at all sure of the answer. He would have been, just a few hours ago; he would have been completely certain that the answer was an emphatic yes. Now… now he found he suddenly didn't know… And he couldn't say yes when he didn't know. "I- I'm not sure," he finally said, lamely, and then hurried to add, in a vain attempt to make his answer sound like less of a rejection, "We haven't known each other very long."
"I know and I really like you, Harry..."
Harry tensed, waiting for the 'but…' which was just trembling on her lips waiting to be said, after a statement like that.
And then it came.
"But I- I've met someone," Ashley confessed, her voice so low he had to strain to hear it.
"Oh," was all Harry could think to say, lamely. He was almost dizzy with confusion and uncertainty, unsure of what he was feeling or anything.
"I- we met at the convention and- and we just- clicked, you know how that happens sometimes," Ashley continued, still not quite meeting his eyes. "And I really do like you, Harry, but I- I think we'd be better as just friends… I- David- he asked me out and I- I'd like to go out with him but I felt I owed it to you to talk to you first. I'm sorry…"
"That's okay," Harry smiled reassuringly. "I'm not hurt. I hope you and David do well together and we can still be friends."
Ashley let out a breath of relief, finally meeting his eyes tentatively, a hopeful expression in her eyes. "You're not hurt, really?"
"No, I'm not."
She smiled. "I'm glad. I mean, I feel terrible about this, Harry, because I really do like you so much and I'd hate to think I'd hurt you in any way."
"It's fine. Don't worry about it."
And somehow, his smile and his words eased the awkwardness of the atmosphere and they fell back into easy conversation.
Harry walked Ashley to the Apparition point and brushed his lips against her cheek and gave her a quick smile. "So, friends, then?"
"Friends," she smiled.
And that was that, Harry reflected.
Some time later, he sat back on the sofa in the living room of his flat, staring thoughtfully at his bottle of butterbeer.
He still wasn't sure what he was feeling.
Ashley had met someone else.
He had thought she was his ideal witch, had thought he was in love with her-until today.
He prodded at his feelings, cautiously, as if it were a sore spot, testing to see if he felt any pain at the contact.
He felt… what?
Shouldn't he be feeling- something? Perhaps not heartbreak, exactly, since he had begun to question if he could really be in love with Ashley. But- surely, he must be feeling something?
Disappointment. Hurt. Regret.
Something…
And yet… He wasn't. He didn't feel those things, not really.
He felt…
Was it-could it possibly be… relief?
He felt… relieved that he hadn't had to try discouraging Ashley or going back on his pursuit. Relieved that, after all, he hadn't had to be the one to confess that he suddenly wasn't sure he really loved her or fancied her.
He hadn't been in love with her.
That was glaringly obvious now. He had liked her, fancied her at first, been infatuated even, but it had never been love.
Love would have been… more… somehow…
He wasn't sure how he knew this or why he believed this, considering he'd never, aside from Ashley, even imagined he might be in love with anyone before, but he somehow knew.
Love would be… everything… Not so much about excitement, or even about passion (although, yes, he knew there would be passion) but it would also be… comforting. It would be about sharing, about understanding… It would be about the silences, as much as it was about talking and laughing together. It would be about simply knowing that when he was with that person, he was where he belonged…
And he hadn't, never had, loved Ashley.
He looked back, tried to remember a time when they had really laughed together over something, when she had really seemed to understand him, when he had had the feeling that more than any one else in the world, she truly knew him…
And he couldn't.
He couldn't remember a time when they had really shared laughter or simply understood the other in comfortable silence.
They had talked and learned more about each other, yes; they both liked Quidditch but beyond that, there was… nothing.
Ashley's world had basically revolved around her work and clothes; having gone to Beauxbatons, she hadn't really experienced any of the war at all and her interest in it was minimal, really. She just wanted to move on, live her life and be happy; she had no real sympathy for his lingering, occasional nightmares (not that he mentioned them to her) or of what he'd been through in that last year of the war.
And while he had, at first, been charmed by that cheerfulness, now he realized it might get a little… tiring to be with someone who simply did not understand and did not know all that he had been through. Someone who didn't understand that Harry found it hard to take happiness and safety for granted.
He didn't know what it said about him; maybe it spoke of some morbid tendencies or something. He supposed he should be only too glad to move on and leave the memories from the war behind him, dismiss it as being a past that would never be repeated (he hoped)-but he couldn't do that, he realized. Yes, he wanted to move on with his life and so he had-but he also wanted to remember. He didn't want to become complacent. And he knew now, in hindsight, that hard as it had been, his experiences in the war had changed him; they had made him who he was.
And Ashley hadn't seemed to understand that he couldn't escape his past so easily.
In hindsight, he wondered how he could think he had been in love with someone with whom he wasn't comfortable sharing what had been such a huge part of his life. He had never brought up the war, had never liked to talk about it-but, he thought now, if he had loved her, he should have felt free to talk to her about everything, good or bad. And he hadn't.
He could almost hear Hermione's voice in his head, saying that it was part of his protective, being-a-hero streak, that he never liked to burden people with talk about what had been such a dark time, that he still felt he needed to protect people from the harshness of some of what he had endured.
He supposed it was true-no, he knew it was true.
He had felt that way about Ginny, for all that he knew she was aware of and involved in the war, through her family and knowing about the Order, but he had never wanted her to actively fight in it, never wanted her to be a part of it all. It had been a large part of why he had broken up with her at the end of sixth year, because he had known he needed to find and destroy the horcruxes and he hadn't wanted her to be a part of that. He had wanted her to be the one part of his life that wasn't tied up in the war and Voldemort, the one part of his life that was only normal… And that she had let him go had, in the end, become part of why nothing had ever happened between them again, even after the war was over.
He had changed too much and she hadn't been a part of it all.
After it had all been over, there had been too large a distance between them, a distance of experiences and of time and of maturity, a chasm that had been too deep to cross.
He sighed and tossed back more butterbeer, savoring the feeling of warmth in his chest as it went down.
No, he wasn't heartbroken. Or even hurt.
He was, however, he realized, just disappointed.
Not because Ashley had met someone else; it wasn't specific to Ashley at all.
It was more, he thought now, a general, vague feeling of discontent. With… with having to be alone again. Once more, single, the most eligible bachelor in the wizarding world and all that rot.
He was tired of it.
Ron still enjoyed it, Harry knew, had been on more dates than Harry cared to try to count in the past three years since the war had ended. Ron had thoroughly enjoyed the reputation he had gotten as the best friend of the Boy Who Lived, the fact that because of his fame, Ron was consistently in the top 15 list of Most Eligible Bachelors of the wizarding world as well. (Of course, nowadays it also helped that Ron had made a name for himself as the up-and-coming latest Quidditch talent in playing as the Keeper for the Chudley Cannons.)
But Harry was tired of it.
He wanted to feel like he belonged with someone, like there was someone special for him.
He hadn't been in love with Ashley-but he had, he thought, been very much been in love with the idea of being in love, if that made any sense.
Harry frowned a little, tilting his head to one side.
Well, the thought of being in love with being in love made sense to him and since he was the one thinking it, that was all that mattered, right?
Clearly, he'd lost his mind.
The events of the evening had unhinged him from being bored and distracted when Ashley spoke to realizing he hadn't really loved her to hearing her say she'd met someone else.
But the fact remained that he had wanted to believe he was in love with Ashley. He had wanted to believe it, had wanted to have that special someone to think of, to dream about, to make him happy…
He still did.
He wanted to find that one person he could love, the one person he could imagine himself with forever. That one person who would make him feel at home, like he was exactly where he belonged when he was with her… That person to be the most important person in his life, the one he always turned to first whenever anything good or bad or funny or interesting happened…
He had been deluding himself to think that he'd found that person in Ashley.
But at least, thinking he loved Ashley had made him realize that he wanted to find love.
He would just need to keep looking…