So they cried to the LORD for help: "Please, LORD, don't let us die for taking this man's life. Don't hold us responsible for the death of an innocent man, because you, LORD, do whatever you want."
— Jonah 1:14 | God's Word Translation (GWT)
The Holy Bible, GOD’S WORD® Translation Copyright 1995 by God’s Word to the Nations. All rights reserved.
Cross References: Deuteronomy 21:8; Psalm 107:28; Psalm 115:3; Psalm 135:6; Daniel 4:34-35; Jonah 1:13
“It becomes a part of who you are”, Harry says, some sort of clarity coming to him. “Death, I mean. Grief. It doesn’t have to swallow you whole, but there is a little bit of it in every part of you.”
Impossible, is the only thing Harry can stand to think. That there is still sunlight in the world after everything.
Still, it pours out over the Burrow’s kitchen table in bright, luminous yellow, warming the veined wood. Harry and the Weasleys watch it creep over the tabletop, sitting elbow-to-elbow. Molly and Arthur are touching shoulders and brushing through hair as they pass around steaming mugs of tea, as they pour milk and stir in spoonfuls of sugar, the bags under their eyes swollen and purple like figs.
When Harry tries to open his mouth, to offer help, Molly quickly shakes her head at him; pleading. Like she wouldn’t know what else to do with herself.
So Harry stays, cramped between George and Ginny, and lets her place her palm on his back as she places his tea in front of him. Through the open window, a sweet-smelling breeze comes pouring in, the smell of warm soil and flowers and summer rapidly approaching, which seems impossible, too.
Tomorrow morning, they’re going to get out of bed and make breakfast. They’re going to feed the chicken in the yard, do the dishes and read the newspaper. Still, the sun is going to come up.
For a moment, he catches Ron’s gaze; Ron, whose face is oddly contorted and whose eyes are glassy and bright red. Harry can’t bear the sight of it: he stares at the old mug in his hands, examining the faded red dots, hand-painted. Anything that soothes.
Poppies, he realises. On the inside, near a chip at the rim, he can make out the small letters spelling out Ottery St. Catchpole, and below that, half-drowning in sweet tea: Flea Market, 1988.
A memory, then. One he wasn’t a part of, but one he can envision, anyway, the bright red summer day, the bustling and shuffling of the little village, the shrieking of children, strawberry ice cream rapidly melting and dripping on bare knees; a younger, happier Ron –
The scraping of a chair yanks him back, as Ginny abruptly gets to her feet and walks out without a word. No one tries to stop her, and the small, pathetic sound of her bedroom door closing from atop the stairs sounds down to them as though she slammed it.
After that, only silence. No pots stir in the kitchen sink, no footsteps thunder from several floors above, and no chatter, no yelling, no laughter holds the walls of the house together. No explosions sound from the twins’ room.
Death is an awfully quiet affair.
One by one, as the stripes on the tabletop grow long and orange, the Weasleys crawl into their hiding places. Harry knows he’s intruding, so he wanders outside, following the soft clucking of the chicken pecking away at the dirt behind their wooden fence, the only things alive and making a sound.
The solitude is a relief: he has never wished to flee the walls of the Burrow so desperately, only stayed long enough to change out of the black funeral robes and into an old Quidditch jumper. Then he pushed Ron’s bedroom door open far enough to slip out and disappear, and mercifully, Ron didn’t try to stop him, either.
The jumper is Ron’s, technically. It feels like being held, Gryffindor red and worn and entirely too large for Harry. Somehow that only makes him feel worse.
The Weasleys did not hesitate to take him home with them after the battle, because that was their way. They put up the old camp bed in Ron’s violently orange bedroom like they always had, and Ron silently handed him a pile of hand-me-downs so Harry would have something to wear other than the clothes that still reeked of the tent, of sweat and of blood.
Harry props his elbows up on the weathered fence and buries his face in the soft sleeves, breathing deeply. For a while, he simply listens as the hens, who do not know or care about anything, cluck away happily, as the urge to slip under the invisibility cloak, to disappear and never make a sound again, keeps on rushing over him.
“Hi.”
His heart jumps painfully into his throat at the quiet greeting and the sound of footsteps on dry grass that preceded it, and when he turns around to face it, he’s looking at Ginny. She’s changed out of her black dress robes, too, back into worn-out denim dungarees and a striped t-shirt. Scarlet and yellow. Her hair has come out of the braid from earlier and falls wildly to her collarbones again, no longer to her belly button, like it used to.
“I couldn’t stand the silence anymore”, she says, voice oddly throaty.
Harry wants to say, you don’t have to explain, but before he can, she pushes out: “And then I was in my room and it was just as fucking quiet, and I just – I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
She looks older, Harry thinks wildly. He hasn’t let himself look at her, not really, doesn’t even know why, just that he’s been avoiding her most of all. Ever since May 2nd, the quiet between them has stretched and stretched over miles and oceans and continents of wasteland. Harry knows it’s his fault, that he should say something, but he has no words, no words at all.
The first morning after the battle, when he came stumbling into the common room and found her there, they just held each other, and he had no words then, either. There was sunlight there, too, he remembers suddenly, poking through the shattered windows and lighting up every particle of dust floating around the empty room.
“Can we go somewhere else?”, she asks, pulling him out of his thoughts. “Anywhere else?”
Harry nods, mouth dry. For a moment, her eyes seem to linger on him, but then she turns away without another word, and he follows her lead without question or objection. They don’t speak again until they reach the old broomshed, and Ginny suddenly turns to look at him again, face unreadable.
“Any chance you wanna go for a fly?”
“Wh-What?”
She shrugs. “Do you?”
It’s a strange time capsule, the shed. Ginny pushes the wooden door open and sends flurries of dust into the air, catching sunlight; Harry, who is standing behind her, catches a glimpse of Arthur’s old Muggle trinkets and the old brooms lined up against the wall. Ron and Ginny’s are closest to the door; the twins’ brooms are up on a shelf opposite the square window.
For a moment, Ginny is perfectly still, and Harry knows she is looking at them, too. Then she reaches for her broom and silently pushes past him. Harry grabs Ron’s and closes the door of the shed behind him, and together they wander away from the Burrow, over the hills that surround it, where wild poppies are peeking through the unkempt grass and weeds.
Harry thinks he knows where she’s going: their makeshift Quidditch pitch hidden between gnarly old trees from summers long lost, where they used to chuck apples and tennis balls at each other, during all those afternoons spent playing Quidditch two against two.
Tall, sweet-smelling yarrow brushes along their bare shins as they walk, and pink clover, the soft heads bending back to the earth under the weight of bumblebees passing by, thick dandelion leaves spread all across the ground amidst the weeds; and everywhere poppies, peeking through the tall grass, the paper-thin petals fluttering in the breeze.
Tucked behind another hill, Harry remembers, a few minutes on foot further north, is the lake where they whiled away happier summer afternoons than this. The image comes to his mind in bright, sunny colours, Ginny’s wide, toothy grin as she sneaks up on Ron, the thundering splash and Hermione’s piercing shriek, and Ron, emerging, spluttering and yelling, his sopping hair plastered to his face.
But that was centuries ago, and their full-bellied laughter seems miles and countries away already. Here, only silence. Harry wants to ask, are you okay?, or say, it’s going to be alright, but what good would it do?
The poppies are early: they’re not supposed to bloom for another month. There’s no end to them, no matter how far they walk, a sea of red stretching out all over the soft hills. Harry can’t tear his eyes away until the first beech trees they used to climb, black pines and yews throw cool shadows over their heads.
Strange, that it looks the same. The leaves up above their heads rustle softly as they mount their brooms, and Ginny shoots into the air, a quiet cannon. For the better part of an hour, they zoom in circles through the rapidly cooling air, chucking an old Quaffle back and forth at each other. Ginny’s throws are hard and unrelenting: they’re not keeping score, but she’s playing like it’s the last game of the season, like the House Cup depends on it, so Harry lets her exhaust herself. By the time they sink back to the ground, the sky over the meadow is dotted in shades of pink and red.
Ginny hits the ground with such force her knees buckle under the impact and hit the dry grass. Harry gasps, but she is already getting up again, brushing off the dirt without comment.
They find a spot at the outer edge of the pitch and slump into the tall grass with their backs leaning against an oak tree, where they can see the sunset falling on the soft hills and the Burrow in the distance, bright red like poppies. Ginny’s hands are uselessly holding her ribs, her warm eyes staring off into nothing.
“Feel any better?”, Harry asks after a while.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She shifts next to him, tucking her scraped knees to her chest. They look like she’s spent all summer climbing trees and rolling down the grassy hills around the Burrow and crashing her broomstick into her brothers in a spectacular grab for the Quaffle.
“At least I feel a little less like I was buried with him”, she mutters.
I’m sorry, Harry wants to say, but that seems useless, too.
“I wanted to leave, too”, he says finally. “It was so quiet in there.”
“I hate it”, Ginny says softly. “It doesn’t feel anything like home when it’s like this.”
“I’m sorry”, he says despite himself, for what feels like the thousandth time since everything. “I shouldn’t be here.”
Ginny's brows furrow slightly, as if to say, yes, you should. “If you weren’t, I’d still be shut up in my room right now. Going mad, probably.”
After a short pause, she adds: “I wouldn’t know who to talk to.”
It strikes Harry like lightning: she was looking for him.
She looks over at him as though searching for something. Her brown eyes glow golden in the warm light, like honey, her whole face painted in reds and oranges and pinks.
“How do you do it?”, she asks finally, voice quiet, but steady, as the soft breeze continues to rush through the trees. “How do you lose everyone you’ve lost – and go on living? How do you live with the dead?”
Harry looks at her, the way she sits cross-legged and hunched over in the grass next to him, arms hugged to herself, and it sinks in, what she’s searching for, what she’s asking of him.
“It’s not the same”, he says softly.
She scoffs quietly. “How is that not the same?”
Harry looks around their hiding place. Maybe it’s the creaking of old branches around them, almost a murmur, the smell of the trees, that brings them back: his parents in the Forbidden Forest, walking towards him, Sirius’ bright grin, Dumbledore at King’s Cross Station.
The thought of them cuts through him, every beat of his heart sharp and stinging as they remain dead and he does not.
“Your speech”, he says finally, and watches her jaw clench. “I couldn’t have said anything like that about my parents – or Sirius …”
“I can’t believe I wrote him a fucking eulogy”, Ginny mutters, staring at the weeds to her feet, the patches of moss creeping across the earth under the wild, entangled grass. “It makes it feel so fucking final.”
“You did really well”, Harry says. “It was beautiful.”
She merely shrugs, and he doesn’t blame her.
“I’m glad I got to say something, I think”, she says after another stretch of silence. “But, Merlin, he was walking and talking and making jokes just a week ago, and now he’s six feet underground and I’ve written a double-sided page on how sorely he’ll be missed.”
She wipes her nose on the back of her sleeve.
“Up until today, I really thought he might jump up and laugh it off and make fun of us for falling for it.”
You made it feel like that today, he wants to say, but doesn’t.
“I’m so sorry, Ginny.”
She read it out with a completely steady voice, both fists clutching the slip of paper in her hand. She did not bother to find a silver lining this time, or to look for meaning at all; but every word seemed to bring Fred back to life a little, even earning a few teary chuckles from the other Weasleys. Every anecdote and every prank she recounted was a testament to the fact that Fred Weasley had been alive, that he had mattered, that he had left an impact on her, on all of them.
“You know my Mum had brothers”, Ginny says suddenly, looking over at Harry’s hands. “Fabian and Gideon Prewett.”
She points, and Harry realises what she’s really looking at: Fabian Prewett’s battered old watch on his arm.
“They died in the first war. Bill, Charlie and Percy say they remember them a little, but the rest of us just grew up hearing stories.”
She picks at the shallow wound on her knee, where droplets of bright red blood have pushed to the surface through the cracks in her freckled skin. “It’s why Fred and George are named after them. A little bit, anyway – you know, Fred and George … Fabian and Gideon … Mum was pregnant when they died.”
Harry swallows. “I didn’t know.”
Ginny smiles sadly. “I liked the idea that they got to live on in the twins a little. I never thought to ask Fred and George how they felt about it, actually. I can’t imagine … how Mum feels.”
Harry watches her wrap her arms around her legs, watches the strawberry blond hairs on her shins stand on end as the air cools around them. She looks tired, but her eyes are dry.
Even over the rustling of the trees, the chirping and creaking all around them, he can hear her clearly, her voice steady, unwavering.
“Do you miss him?”
“Yes.”
She looks around at him. “Do you not miss your parents?”
“I don’t know how”, Harry mutters. “Your speech … it was full of memories.”
She doesn’t respond, understanding silently. Then: “What about Sirius?”
Harry shrugs. “He never really got to be my godfather, did he? Not the way he was supposed to, anyway … there wasn’t time. And I don’t remember when my parents were alive – I’ve never known anything else.”
He looks at her, the way she’s quietly watching. “I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you were hoping to hear.”
Ginny dismisses it with a half-hearted gesture, lost in thoughts somewhere else.
“Do you think grieving someone is the same thing as missing them, then?”
“No … do you?”
She seems to consider it for a moment, then shakes her head.
“I just – I just want to talk to him and tell him what’s going on, and I think about how long it’s been since I’ve talked to him and how much I wish he were here and how I’m not gonna get to talk to him –”
She pauses mid-sentence, as though looking for words, and doesn’t find any.
“And then I think about the fact that he’s dead. That his life is over. And that I helped bury him today. And they’re both – awful, but it’s different, I guess.”
Harry nods, more to himself than to Ginny this time.
“And now, I just – I need to know what to do. So it doesn’t swallow me whole.”
Harry is still watching them walk towards him before his inner eye, his parents in the Forbidden Forest, his mother’s hungry face.
“I forget, sometimes”, he says. “For a moment, I think I forget they’re gone. Or I’m – I don’t know, distracted, and I’m not thinking about it – it slips away, and then it hits me again.”
Ginny’s teeth dig into her bottom lip. “I … honestly can’t fathom it right now.”
Harry looks over at her, the way she sits next to him, curled into herself, her hands still uselessly holding her ribs. Like it is physically hurting her.
“I dunno. Maybe forgetting is the wrong word. But when it happens, it always feels like it’s happening to someone else, like I am someone else.”
Ginny watches him intently as he stumbles to the end of his sentence: it feels pathetic already, having said it out loud like that.
“Like you are who you would’ve been if they hadn’t died?”, she asks, in that quietly remarkable way of hers, where she doesn’t treat him like something delicate, but she doesn’t ask for more than he can give, either.
“Yeah, I reckon. But I don’t recognise him at all.”
Ginny hums in understanding. She leans back against the bark of the tree and pulls her knees to herself again. “You would’ve been happier, anyway.”
Harry turns away at that, suddenly not trusting himself to speak.
“I know it doesn’t make sense or anything –”
“No, it does, Harry.”
“I mean, I know they couldn’t have lived. Everything would have to be different. We probably wouldn’t be here.”
Ginny sits in silence for a while.
“Do you ever wonder?”, she asks finally. “What you would’ve been like?”
“I guess … more like them. In ways I can recognise, anyway.”
He gestures helplessly at nothing, and Ginny takes that as a sign to push no further.
“I don’t recognise Ginny a week ago, either”, he hears her say, and the muffled sound of her voice tells him she’s wiping her nose on her sleeve again. “Every time something terrible happened, I guess I didn’t. It’s like remembering an old friend. One whose address you lost or something.”
“It becomes a part of who you are”, Harry says, some sort of clarity coming to him. “Death, I mean. Grief. It doesn’t have to swallow you whole, but there is a little bit of it in every part of you.”
“Cheery”, Ginny says in a hollow voice.
“It gets less all-consuming”, he says softly.
“Good”, she mutters. “Right now it’s pretty fucking all-consuming. It’s there when I wake up in the morning, and it’s – in my tea, and on all my clothes, and it’s in everyone I talk to and everything I say.”
Harry stares at the sky overhead, the red rapidly paling. Still, there is that whispering in the treetops, the feeling of being transported back into the Forbidden Forest. Still, his parents, reaching out for him.
“I’m sorry”, he says truthfully. “That’s all I’ve got.”
Ginny shakes her head. “It’s all I needed.”
He watches her tug at a poppy near her feet, struck by how long he’s managed to stay away from her, when her company is so comforting. The resolution comes to him all on its own, that he’s going to tell her everything. The Forbidden Forest. King’s Cross Station.
“Do you want to head back yet?”
Ginny looks at him, and she seems calmer somehow. For the first time since they got here, she doesn’t seem to be searching for anything – just looking.
“In a little while”, she says.
Harry looks back at her, really looks at her, and for a long time, neither of them speak, having arrived at some quiet understanding. Still, there’s a murmur in the trees around them, but they pay it no mind, and they don’t turn to look.
Psalm 88:1-2 (NKJV) -
O LORD, God of my salvation,
I have cried out day and night before You.
Let my prayer come before You;
Incline Your ear to my cry.
Matthew 20:31 (NKJV) -
Then the multitude warned them that they should be quiet; but they cried out all the more, saying, “Have mercy on us, O Lord, Son of David!”
