Stop All the Clocks (This Is the Last Time I'm Leaving Without You)

chapter 35

It doesn’t feel like it did when anyone else died. It wasn’t like this for Remus, or Tonks. Not for Hedwig, not Fred, not Lavender, not Colin, not Cedric. And it wasn’t like this for Sirius. Harry remembers pain, and anger, and a great gaping hole behind his ribs, like someone had reached in and yanked out a part of him and made it disappear like a magic trick. But this… this is nothing. He feels nothing.

“They’ve said you can go home now, Harry,” Hermione tells him, and Harry half-turns his head in her direction. Everything feels murky, like a dream, like being underwater. He shakes his head slightly. “Harry?” Her voice seems to be coming from very far away.

“I don’t…” he begins, but trails off because he doesn’t know. They made him take a Calming Draught and it’s made it very hard for him to think, and he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know.

Hermione sighs. “Come on, Harry. Let’s get you home.”

She takes him by the arm and tugs him to his feet, and he doesn’t resist. She leads him out of his small white room and out into the hallway and then Ron is there too.

“Did they find…?” Hermione starts, but leaves her question incomplete as she darts an uncertain glance at Harry.

Ron shakes his head curtly and puts his arm around Harry’s shoulders. “There’s reporters in the lobby, but I’ve talked one of the Senior Healers into letting us use her private Floo.”

Together they get him into the Healer’s office and she watches him with dark, solemn eyes but doesn’t say anything to him, for which he is grateful. Ron and Hermione bundle him into the Floo and he exits into his living room in a small cloud of black dust and ash. He turns on the lights with a swish of his wand.

The house feels strange. It shouldn’t feel strange, because it’s his house and it’s as familiar to him as his face in the mirror. It’s not even that it’s empty, because he’s been in the house alone before, but this time he knows that Draco isn’t coming home and somehow that makes it look different. Harry stares around the room. It all seems so strange, exactly the same and at the same time so different.

He’s still just standing there when Ron exits the Floo and stumbles right into him. “Sorry,” he says, and lets Ron tug him away from the hearth to make room for Hermione.

They try to talk to him, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. They want to stay the night, but he doesn’t want them here. There’s only one thing he wants, and he can’t have it. And if he can’t have that, then he just wants to be left alone.

Hermione insists on putting him to bed, and he feels faintly relieved for it. He feels lost and overwhelmed and still fuzzy and fumbling from the Calming Draught, and it’s nice to have someone tell him what to do. She turns down the bed for him while he disappears into the bathroom with instructions to brush his teeth and change into his pyjamas, and when he comes back out he finds her stationed by the bedside with a small flask in hand.

“Drink this,” she tells him. “Please. You need to sleep.” He starts to protest, but she continues, “Draco would want you to sleep, Harry.”

He takes two swallows without further complaint, and she pushes the cork back into the mouth of the flask and sets it next to his glasses on his bedside table for later, if he needs it. She arranges the blankets over him and smoothes the hair back from his forehead as she leans down and kisses his cheek, and her own cheek is damp where it brushes against the corner of his mouth. He tastes salt. She strokes her hand through his hair one more time, then crosses the room and turns out the light.

“Hermione?” he calls just as she’s easing the door shut behind her, and she pauses, and the frizzy wisps of hair that have escaped from the confines of her ponytail form a faint halo around her head, backlit from the light in the hall. Harry’s reminded of the golden circles around the heads of saints in the stained glass windows of churches. Hermione, his own Saviour. He’d be so lost without her. “Will you sit with me?”

His voice sounds very small to his own ears and he’s almost ashamed to hear it, but he doesn’t want to fall asleep alone, and then Hermione comes back across the room and perches on the edge of the mattress beside him, the soft curve of her backside pressed warm against his hip. Her fingers go back to his hair and she combs through it. It feels nice. Harry lets his eyes close, and for a moment he can almost pretend that it’s a different set of fingers in his hair.

The Dreamless Sleep is spreading a pleasant warmth through his belly and he feels heavy and numb. It’s a siren’s call, an anchor that he gladly ties himself to and lets it drag him under to drown in the welcome black depths of sleep.

“It was true,” he murmurs.

“What?”

“This is the last time I’m leaving without you,” Harry says, soft and sleepy. “That’s the very last thing I said to him. It’s what I always told him when I had to leave him in danger, when we were in the field. Every time, I told him, and it never was. Until this time. Except… except this time, he left without me.”

“Oh, Harry,” she says, and her voice breaks.

For a moment, her hand in his hair falters, but then it moves again, stroking, stroking, stroking, soothing and familiar, and then he slips under and even that is gone too.