There was silence for a moment, the grind, click and spark of the lighter, but the light only flickered and died in the dusk again. It felt, Fabian thought, like a metaphor that was better left unexplored. “You’re right,” he declared after a moment, nose wrinkling as he rolled his head towards her to regard Lily carefully, too young and too old and too tired for the body she existed in, examining the bitterness that strained her laugh and wondering just what time had gone and done to them both. “Yours is weirder.”
Fabian snorted, because laughter was the only way to approach the things that made him uncomfortable, and took another sip from his bottle. He was lucky, he supposed, in that regard; Fabian was just another faceless war hero, who’s face and legacy had been lost to time and history and the select few who’d lived to remember him. Nobody would be stopping him in the street to thank him for his service to the world.
“He seems like a good kid,” he offered after a moment, staring hard at the mechanism of the lighter in his hands like maybe if he understood it better it would somehow just work. “Harry,” he clarified unnecessarily, “I can understand why Molls thinks the world of him. They all seem like good kids, really.”
Ron and Ginny and George and .. and even Hermione, who seemed entirely too serious for a girl of her age. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? They weren’t kids. They had fought in another war, one that came after the one that he and Lily had fought to end. They’d been through enough suffering to last a lifetime.
The sounds of the party inside rose suddenly, uproariously, and Fabian huddled down into the base of the tree, breathing in sharply and blinking up at the first glittering stars emerging in the sky. “I can’t blame them, really, I barely have any idea what to do with myself. The way Molly looks at me sometimes — I feel like I belong in a museum. Or a zoo.” Or six feet under.
Oh good, she wins. A rather grim contest to win, but it was something, at least. A mute cheers to the man as he gave her the crown of weirdness. Her hand dropped with a flinch as he started talking about him. “I would say thank you, but it’s not like I really had any hand in making him in to a good kid, so...” That was usually what the compliment went towards, right. ‘They’re a good kid, you did a good job raising them’. How much could you really raise a fifteen-month-old? How much of that short time had shaped the man Harry was now? “I should probably be thanking Molly, if anything.”
From what little she’d gathered, Petunia hadn’t . . . done the best job. There was another can of worms she was avoiding. Her sister. Had anyone told her? Thought to tell her? Should she reach out? Was she allowed to? Her stomach twisted, and she took a gulp of wine to try and settle it.
“But they all are good kids.” In some sense of the word. Kids, not good. Kids in the same way she’d been a kid, she supposed. Too old too fast, world weary, weighted down by the ravages of a war she shouldn’t have had to fight on her own behalf, should have been protected from. But war didn’t care about things like age or childhood. Or that someone had already fought it once to try and secure those things. Fat lot that had done for them, hadn’t it? Maybe it would hurt less if in dying and leaving Harry, she would have actually saved him from having to go through everything she’d fought to protect him from.
At least he was alive now. That wasn’t as comforting as she thought it ought to be.
Her head rolled to the side as she frowned at him. “You’re really shit with that,” she told him flatly, putting a demanding hand out for the lighter. “No one shown you how to do it?” was the slightly softer guess. Pureblood family. Would any of them even know how to use a lighter, all mechanics and Muggle invention wrapped up in a package even smaller than a wand? Doubtful. Or if they did, would they think to share the knowledge as anything more than a curiosity, ‘the Muggle way, isn’t it quaint?’
She shouldn’t think like that too much, else old bitterness might resurface. At least, resurface faster than was necessary.
