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SIYE Time:3:47 on 19th March 2024
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The Lost Boy
By wrongnametag

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Category: Post-HBP
Characters:Harry/Ginny, Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood, Other, Ron Weasley
Genres: Drama, Fluff, General
Warnings: None
Story is Complete
Rating: PG
Reviews: 5
Summary: Loneliness changes from person to person, but sometimes all you can hope is that your loneliness isn't shared. Instead, you help. You love.
Hitcount: Story Total: 3748







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Loneliness is a burden taken on by the everyday person. Loneliness traps itself in the fingertips of Potions Masters brewing ways to forget the past. Loneliness breeds in let down hair to remind Headmistresses that it was never where they were meant to be. Loneliness waits in the shadows of empty, antique mansions, portraits screaming, “HE WAS NEVER MY SON.” Loneliness takes up the empty space in king-size bed when he tosses his legs in nightmares that only she could heal.

Loneliness teases the nape of the neck of a boy with jet-black hair, massaging the stubborn spots where once only she touched, and keeping his eyes open to focus in on the lazy flames blazing in the fireplace.

He breathed in deep, collecting ages of dust and spells gone awry and family history that had died long ago, and gave in to loneliness–he gave in to dreams that reminded him of warm days with her hand in his, tree trunks that they rested against, and the brilliance of her features when she was determined to do something.

Harry accepted the fact that in dreams was where he’d find her.

-|-


Ron was picking through the refrigerator, bare feet visible underneath the door as he swung it back and forth on its ancient hinge. “Bloody hell, we haven’t got any more than rotten cheese in here. I thought Hermione was going to the Shoppe for some food.”

Harry rolled his eyes, staring down at the parchment in front of him. “Hermione told you to go if you wanted anything. I think she’s out to send an owl to someone.” The ink was bleeding across the pages, a sloppy mess of dates and places.

“It sounds like something she’d do to me,” Ron mumbled, pulling out the chair next to Harry and folding his large limbs into it as well as he could. His ashy hands (he had spent the morning attempting to fix Hermione’s fireplace from blowing the smoke into the room) smudged the edges of pages of parchment. “You can’t even make any sense of this.”

There was a time when Ron and Harry could make sense of broken words and obscure places, when Hermione would solve the mystery. They would be on the problem as soon as it was presented, and there were no foolish games. Nothing existed but their accomplishments and awards, their House Points and schedules drawn up so they could pass their exams.

Now they sat, decoding letters from twenty years ago. It had been three months of tedium inside a house where the portraits whispered and the doors didn’t obey masters with tainted blood.

Hermione particularly had an inopportune time of the place, waking to Kreacher leaning over her bed, fixing the sheets above her shoulders where he would most like it. (Since that time, Ron had taken to sleeping in her room, though it was something Harry wasn’t supposed to know.)

Minutes passed by, papers shuffled, and Ron’s chair creaked every time he lifted his foot, tapped twice against the leg of the table, and settled again. An hour went by, every few minute a symphony of shuffle, creak, tap tap, creak, shuffle, creak, tap tap, creak

“Have you any idea what you’re doing?” Harry dropped two pages to the end of the table (illegible except for the words ‘Master shouldn’t read’ painted by Kreacher in brown filth).

“What?” Ron dropped his foot, creak, tapped it twice against the edge of the table, tap tap, and then moved it back to rest against his knee–creak.

Harry blinked furiously, ran his hands along his clothing, and said, “That! With the table. You’ve been doing it for over an hour.”

“Oh. Right. That. It’s just–” Ron winced and moved to sit up straight in his chair, creak, and looked at Harry seriously. “It’s just that it’s been boring here.” A fleeting thought of Not this again passed through Harry’s mind, but there was nothing to do but grit his teeth and bear it. “We’ve been going over these papers for three months–and nothing. I don’t mind looking and helping, of course,” Ron rushed to say, “but the last time we’ve been out of the house was for Bill’s wedding. And that was over five weeks ago.”

It was the same thing Harry had heard before, how light never shone through into this house, how Kreacher tore apart their belongings, how the words would never be read, how there was nothing to find inside the old mansion and it was better to step outside and try out there. He’d heard how Godric’s Hollow had offered nothing but forgotten memories (though Hermione would never say any of this out loud, and Ron tried to put it in better ways), and how nothing was ever going to change. “I didn’t ask you to come.”

Ron sighed and wrestled himself from his chair. Only three months had passed, but Harry could see how his friend had changed. He wasn’t as eager to smile. His height had diminished in the way that his shoulders hunched from pouring over useless parchment. He had been trying–he was trying–to be as best as he could. “That wasn’t what I meant.” He rested his weight on the back of the chair, closed his eyes so all there was to focus on was freckles, and drummed his long fingers along the back of the chair. “We should just try something new.”

-|-


“Ron, this isn’t new. It’s the same thing we’ve always done.” The countryside was bright in summertime, rain made the going slick, and the stones going up the small pathway to The Burrow were broken in half as if hit by lightning or tragedy. Luckily, neither had happened here–yet.

“Oh, Harry, it’s only for a few days. It’ll be good for us–for you.” Hermione was nestled by Ron’s side, in a way that didn’t bring attention to it, as if it was only natural that their hands were woven together and that their elbows knocked bones when they walked, as if to remind the world that they were there. They did it in such a way to not remind Harry that he was visiting the place where the puzzle piece to his empty side lived, trying to not remind Harry that his pace could match someone else’s like Ron and Hermione’s did when they walked. “We haven’t been here for a long time and Mrs. Weasley always invites us for dinner.”

They were stepping on the lopsided stones, looking at one another sideways, and Harry was about to give an answer (something along the lines of, “I know, but we’ve got work to do”), when the front door to The Burrow burst open. Mrs. Weasley stood in the middle of the door, covered in flour mixed with potato peels and smiles, and clapped her hands together.

“Oh! Ron! Harry! Hermione!” she fussed, rushing on her short legs to grab them each around their neck in hugs that only mothers give. She kissed the top of their foreheads in the way that two of them hadn’t felt in weeks, and one of them had only felt when visiting a house of friends that felt like family. Sometime between the hugs and kisses, Ron and Hermione dropped hands. “Oh, it’s so good to see you all,” Mrs. Weasley smiled, her hand resting protectively on the shoulder of her youngest son. Stubborn tears pricked the corners of her eyes until she waved her hands and ushered them inside with a quick, “In you go, everyone else is here. We’ve been waiting for you three before we went out back to eat.”

They were pushed through the door and into a crowded living room where they shook hands with werewolves and people who never showed their real faces, where they clapped the backs of brothers and old professors, where they hugged a girl with a box full of trinkets and bottlecaps around her neck, where they shared a laugh with a man with his coat filled to burst with stolen items. Harry smiled as much as he could, shook hands until his wrist would snap in two, and was passed around as a novelty.

It wasn’t until he stumbled into the far end of the room–where Ginny stood with surprised etched into the creases around worried eyes and happiness dropping out of her ponytail in the forms of loose red hair–that Harry realized one thing: Every time Ron and Hermione, every time he, walked into this room after weeks dragging by without a single owl, everyone would send a little spark to the sky. A little spark, not of warning, but of celebration, that the end hadn’t come yet.

“Hey.” Harry stuffed his hands in the pockets of his robes, and Ginny did the same. “How have you been?” The question felt so empty, marching off his tongue and through the air, filling the warm room with routine questions. It was a question you might ask of someone who you wished would say, ‘Lonely.’

Instead, Ginny shrugged her shoulders, which sent a ripple to her smile so that it wavered when she said, “Good.”

-|-


“It’s so good to see you all,” Mrs. Weasley was saying from the center of the table. She was smiling at everyone, her food untouched. The whole meal had been spent fussing over people, running along the table and spooning third and fourth helpings onto empty plates. She held her husbands hand, and beamed at everyone as she patted it gently. “Isn’t it so good, Arthur?”

Harry was dazed. Ginny was stuffed between Fred and George, and Harry on the other end. Moody was only a few seats down, talking to Remus and Tonks. Everyone was holding hands under the table when Harry looked down–Remus and Tonks’ between their plates, and Hermione and Ron’s were resting on their knees. The hidden feelings kept for no reasons–or good reasons, as Harry glanced toward Ginny.

“Do you want it?” Luna said.

She held a box of trinkets in her lap, turned toward Harry, her eyes bright and sparkling. “She said it was for you,” Luna said.

His eyes blinked, staring at a mess of oddly shapped pins, Chocolate Frog cards, a heavy silver locket and the thumble Luna was picking up. Harry didn’t understand what she was saying to him, cleared his throat and looked at her as he had since the day he met her: with a mixture of curiousity and confusion. “What?”

“Ginny!” She looked eager, picked the thimble out from the center of things and waved it in front of Harry’s face. “She said she wanted you to have it. It means a kiss.”

Luna pushed it in his hand, smiling in a way that made her awkwardness shine like pearls under water–a little too bright, but impossible to look away from.

“Ginny… Ginny said she wanted me to have this?” Harry fingered the thimble in his hand, looked at it closely, stared at the creases. He looked at it from every angle, and ran his fingers along the creases in the way he’d run his hands through her hair once. A kiss in a thimble seemed like such a funny thing, but a reckless sort of hope that only lovers had was swinging to the sky and over inside Harry’s heart.

Hopefully, he glanced up at Ginny across the table, to find her staring back at him. When their eyes collided, Harry’s mind went blank. He rolled the thimble between his fingers, and when she smiled at him, he knew that after dinner he would walk over to her. He knew that he would walk over to her, and their elbows would rattle together when they went inside the house, and he knew that loneliness could be shared with a red headed girl who walked with breezes and who could hex better than anyone he knew. Harry knew that they’d spend days at The Burrow out in the fields, playing Quidditch or games that didn’t need spectators.

And Harry knew that when they left, it would be Ron and Hermione letting their fingers weave again, and Ginny would be holding his hand all the way back to London.

-|-


Lonel iness is a burden taken on by the everyday person. Loneliness tackles the hearts of werewolves who want to save their humanity. Loneliness wrestles with daughters without mothers and aunts to look up to anymore. Loneliness battles with young women who know that to grow up is to give up dreams, and help others find theirs.

Loneliness rested on the bookshelf of one Luna Lovegood, trapped between Muggle novels where people scribbled lies to make the lonely feel better about themselves.

Luna picked up her favorite, turned to page one, and began to read about a boy who never wanted to grow up and bear the responsibility of the world. She read about a girl who loved that boy, and gave him a kiss within a thimble.
Reviews 5
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