Disclaimer: They belong to JKR, I'm only playing. Apologies also to Aime Cesare for the poem I've butchered below.
A/N: Thank you for sticking by. To try and make an honest writer (or something) out of me I suppose, without thieving others' characters, I'm going to concentrate on my own scribbles for a while. They're different from this stuff here (or perhaps not, depending on who you ask) so it's going to be hard for me to flip back and forth. Which means I'll be very quiet on this front for a while. But if the mood strikes, you'll know; I do love doing this HHr thing.
***
I inhabit a sacred wound
I inhabit imaginary ancestors
I inhabit an obscure will
I inhabit a long silence
…I inhabit an abandoned cult
…I inhabit from time to time one of my wounds
each minute I change apartments
and any peace frightens me.
Aime Cesare; from Lagoonal Calendar
--Epilogue--
Where it was frozen and immovable before, the air's become translucent with moisture; a membrane behind which you could sense the giddiness of buds and leaves on their way back for the year. Harry wheels the bike out of its new rooftop home. To avoid the need for levitation, which might not be possible soon anyway, they've made a kind of shed for the bike up against the chimney. Everyone agrees that it's really quite ugly. They're waiting to see if the house would seethe, but so far all seems well. No 12 is emptying out of hospital beds but filling up with various other purposes; an incipient library, an extension of the Auror department and headquarters to the re-birthing Order. No one says it out loud but everyone nurses a lopsided affection for this house they never consciously considered home, yet always was exactly what they needed at the right time. A House of Requirement.
Hermione follows Harry up to the roof. She pauses at the trapdoor, eyeing a loose panel and hinge. This will take some time to get used to, this second-guessing, this constant worry about wasting. She's caught Harry do this several times, more often than anyone else--stand and stare, frowning, with veiled, confused sadness, before reaching for his wand or simply reaching with his hands to fix something with magic. Magic gave him life, this life. She keeps wondering how frightened he must have felt when he was suddenly caught short in the middle of the fire. She keeps wondering, because in true Harry fashion, he doesn't seem to want to talk about the things that hurt the most.
But she knows, and he lets her.
He's already on the bike, on the lip of the roof. She joins him, links her arms around his waist, close and tight, and kisses the side of his neck.
He twists around to look, pleased.
"Mind the traffic," she teases, nodding at the flush of starlings into air.
He grins. His hands curl around the handlebars, but he doesn't seem in a hurry to move.
"Hermione," he begins thoughtfully. "You never told me how you knew where I found the bike. How did you know it was stashed where that old statue was?"
She hooks her chin over his shoulder. The starlings pool into the sky, above the city which still walks stiff, peering over its shoulder.
"It's that talisman you've got there. It's called Janus, Harry. He's the god of two faces, one looking backward, the other forward."
His fingers move to the wooden face.
"January is named after him because January is like that. On the edge, you know, always hedging, the coldest and most miserable month of the year, and yet the first of a new year. Not quite an end nor a beginning, or perhaps both. Sirius must have named the bike Janus. Maybe…" she trails away, blinking into the light.
"Maybe what?"
"Oh, well, I just like to think that the first trip Sirius took on this bike was to your Dad's house, when he went there to stay. You know, when he'd had enough of the Blacks. A beginning for him." Rubbing her cheek against his shirt, she thinks she could sit here all day, shrugged around him. "Hagrid took you to the Dursleys on this bike as well."
He doesn't say anything.
"When Hagrid returned it after taking you to the Dursleys, Dumbledore would've hidden it in the castle, transfigured to the Janus statue. That's how I figured it out."
Down below, through the morning smog, a red traffic light blinks green. Pressed along his spine, her ear and skin find his heartbeat on the other side. Eyes closed, she smiles; the other side, as if they've emerged from somewhere underground, brushed off darkness and looked around for each other. When they finally lift off, enclosed in a frail invisibility charm, she's still holding on fast, cheek to shoulder.
*
Standing in the lane in front of the house, he demurs. A hand shielding her eyes from the sun, she raises an eyebrow. His fingers grip her other wrist. The bike's shining fender winks from behind the shaggy fence.
"I don't know if you're going to like it. I mean, I…really liked it when I saw it first, but you know, if you don't, we can always find somewhere else."
She's about to tease him, but there's something so life and death about the way he's got her halted in front of the rickety gate.
He loves this one.
When he finally lets her through, across the weedy garden, past the broken bird bath and four stormy aspens, she knows why. Out of all the houses they've looked at so far, this is the gloomiest. Hermione's not at all surprised; she's long sensed a theme. She's been to No 4, Privet Drive once and seen both Harry's room and the cupboard under the stairs. Hogwarts wasn't given to light and airy conditions much of the year either. And of course Grimmauld Place bred darkness after darkness.
She walks slowly through the cool rooms. After trailing her for a while, he goes out into the garden as if unable to bear it anymore. It's a spacious, solid house with worn window-seats and a stained glass front door. There are cobwebs about, and the remains of an ants' nest in the kitchen. A shoddy paint-job hides a child's mural on a wall. A trellis of some heady, unrestrained creeper softens the light in the lounge and two more rooms on the north side. A chestnut at the ivy-smothered back wall takes care of other rooms, upstairs and down. Standing at a window in the room she's already decided will be her study, she strains her eyes to see, beyond the broad, aspen-shouldered garden and down a hidden cliff, the sea far away. The garden has gone on as if nothing's changed after the previous owners left, and the sea's never paused.
It's as if we've walked right into the middle of something.
Hands in her pockets, she drifts downstairs. She's had enough of beginnings for a while--a long uninterrupted middle would make her very happy.
It's a lie of course; there never are any middles. Harry's plan seems to be in order so far; the Wizengamot listened to both Sally and Harry, then went away to deliberate. Scrimgeour, tight-lipped and stiff-jawed, shook hands with Harry. Later, Scrimgeour had a meeting with the Muggle prime minister and Kingsley reported that both were impeccably behaved. All well and good, but no one's fooled--magic isn't going to last. Being of both worlds, she and Harry would be all right for the most part, but they've already seen the terror on Mrs Weasley's face when her cleaning spells wouldn't work, and Ron's despair at himself when neither his body nor magic would oblige. She feels as if she's settling into a seat in a hushed arena to watch a brutal fight already tipped one way. Their world's losing its limbs, one by one. There never are any middles, but an end in sight, an unknown beginning in tow.
Still, one can pretend. Enfolded in this house with its pale green light and dog-eared edges it would be possible to spend some afternoons with the world too far to be felt.
She finds him in the backyard, inspecting a patch of ambitious herbs.
"Okay."
He stares across a jumble of watercress and mint. It takes some time.
"Okay?"
"Yeah."
"Really?"
It's hard to look at him when he glows like this, but it kills to look away.
"Yes, really. It'll take a decent bit of scrubbing, and, um, trimming, but…yes."
Suddenly, the air's full of crushed thyme. She laughs into his mouth, but soon grows quiet. Eyes full of him and drifting shut, body lost to his warmth, she makes a discovery she plans to repeat in the future. When they're absolutely silent like this but for each other, and the aspens that quiver in the slightest wind are still, she can hear the far off sea lean into the warm arm of the sand, over and over.
--end--