Work Text:
Harry wasn't going to take it back; only see it. Only to make sure it was hidden underneath the decaying leaves or camouflaged by the grey and white pebbles scattered around here and there, like defeated chessmen knocked off the board. Only to say goodbye, really.
And he wanted his Snitch back, broken or not. Not a trophy, but maybe a souvenir...maybe a memento. (He couldn't decide what it was a memento of.) It was golden and it was lying in pieces somewhere in the wet grass, and he wanted to collect each piece like Ron had once collected Chocolate Frog cards. When he found the last piece—an opalescent wing, slick feathers shining like a soap bubble—it only took a gentle brush with the holly wand for the gold fragments to reunite. The cracks glowed yellow, and then pink, and then they were gone, for the Snitch was whole again and the wings fluttered with excitement at his touch.
As a small child, his few toys had recognized him, had known him this way too. There had been a nutcracker soldier that Dudley had thrown away from a Christmas gift basket, three green army men that had fallen into a space underneath the sofa only Harry could reach, and a stick figure made of pom-poms and pipe cleaners that he made at school. For a few months, there had been a spotted porcelain cat Mrs. Figg gave him for good behaviour, but Aunt Petunia took it away. One time, in the darkness of the cupboard, Harry had been reaching blindly for his nutcracker, and he couldn't find it, and he was getting worried that Dudley might have stolen it, when he felt the furry wisps of beard at his fingertips. And then a tiny, gruff voice had whispered, "Use the glow stick." (Harry had forgotten the pilfered glow-in-the-dark necklace was hidden under his blanket.) So he knew, as he pressed the dew-cooled metal of the Snitch against his cheek, that it wouldn't fly too far away when he let go of it.
(There was a part of him that still wanted his toys back. Strange, wasn't it, how many versions of Harry there were, all stacked up inside him, like Lego?)
He had a little fever, probably because of some infection picked up on the God-Awfullest Camping Trip Of All Time (the GACTOAT, to those in the know), and the Snitch was soothing against his skin. He let it go, and it flew around for a while, probably excited at the freedom. When the Snitch returned and hovered above his shoulder like an anxious little hummingbird, he walked into the forest.
The cool and dark enveloped him. Harry glanced up; the canopy was a patchwork quilt of greens and browns, some little bits translucent with sunlight, but most opaque. Like a first-year, like a fool, he closed his eyes. Now the little crinkles, hoots and buzzes defined themselves to his ears. They weren't saying hello, or get out, or even is that really you again? The creatures were only trying to get by, scramble for food, feed their young, watch out for hungry owls and make it through another day. Harry respected that.
The place was Forbidden—it was in the name—that's why he knew he had to return. Story of my life isn't, it? He never got to choose, not really. One day, you're a kid with broken glasses and a cupboard for a bedroom, and the next, you're a wizard with statues for parents, and then two days later, you've got a broken mirror in your trunk to protect you, and a prophecy set in motion before you were born. There's a kind of tired you get when you don't even remember how to tell your own story, and Harry was nearly there. It's just that he had a few more things to do, first.
The stone was easy to find without looking; it was only seeking the stone that was damn-near impossible. Harry just walked, and his shoes pressed imprints into the leaf cover, bedraggled shoelaces dragging behind him, and then it was there. The white pebbles were prettier, whereas the black stone was broken. He leaned over, then stopped, and corrected his posture. Not to pick up. Only to look.
His breathing suddenly felt quite loud, loud enough to disrupt the fragile peace, and he tried to quiet himself, but then he felt strangled, so he breathed louder, and it was only when he decided to let himself hyperventilate out of an absence of alternatives that Harry realized he hadn't really been hyperventilating at all. Just thinking about it. But thinking about things could be powerful, too; thinking was action, it was the keystone of magic. Maybe that's what he learned at Hogwarts; it was just about the only thing he could remember, at the moment.
An indescribable tingling at the base of his neck told him he was being watched. Harry had not brought the Invisibility Cloak with him, for he didn't want to be in close proximity to all three Hallows at once. (Some trios weren't meant to be forever.) He looked up slowly, scanning the perimeter, and saw two big grey eyes and a round, freckled nose dappled with light filtering down from the canopy.
"Hi," he breathed, not knowing what else to say to the little foal. It was impossible to know if the toddling centaur was a colt or a filly, for they all had shoulder-length hair, naked chests with rounded bellies and four impossibly skinny legs. The foal looked scared, but also curious, which meant that Harry was a kindred soul. He wondered briefly what the foal saw when it looked at him; wizard or person, adult or child. The Boy Who Lived, or the boy who would never stop wandering into places unwelcome to examine objects that weren't his. The foal stuck two dirty fingers into its mouth, sucking absentmindedly.
A female centaur approached, her shiny tail swishing away flies. "Olamor," she called out, sounding exasperated, and the foal blinked once more at Harry before racing off to rejoin its mother. She was clearly aggravated, but she embraced the foal when they reconnected, and then the pair took off into the dark green depths. He heard the baby centaur call "Mama!", the sound muffled by distance.
The cry wrenched at him; he nearly bent over from nauseated longing. The Lego Harry at the bottom of the stack must have unsnapped itself, for something infantile moved through him, and he felt a lump in his throat the size of an apricot. Harry kicked at a clump of leaves, trying to shake off the stupid, childish urge. Magic was convenient for instant travel, and an excellent alternative to remote controls and microwave ovens, but you couldn't conjure a meal or a mother, and Harry was hungry in a way he could never explain to Ron.
It was a hunger he could satisfy not by eating, but by being fed. To be spoon-fed once more, to be cradled like a precious, fragile egg and patted, soothed, wrapped and carried all the way...he couldn't remember a time in his life when it had been like that, but surely there had been, for he had spent over a year in the abundance of his mother's cradled arms. Even if he couldn't remember it. Everyone comes from somewhere, Harry knew, though it was hard to imagine the green army men were ever a trio of green army boys.
And there was the stone. The object of the game was to not pick up the stone, and the twist was that every little Lego block of his heart had been snapped off the solid foundation that lay inside the stone. He had come out to the Forest to say goodbye to the stone, which he would never touch again, except that the stone was nourishment, care, guidance, a warm embrace, sound advice, protection from harm and a Niffler-shaped night light with a cartoon smile; his erised. So he ought to just rip off the plaster and be done with it, or he'd never leave.
"Bye," whispered Harry, who had never been all that eloquent about these types of things. Maybe Hermione or Luna would have said something more appropriate to the occasion, but Harry knew the stone would understand. He had travelled a very long way to get here—not from the castle, but from the broken glasses and the nutcracker and the army men in the cupboard—and he couldn't speak much more. Harry placed a molding leaf gently above the stone, as though he were tucking it into bed, and stepped backward.
Goodnight stone, goodnight air...goodnight cupboard under the stair... He knew the rhyme from a far-off memory of Aunt Petunia's muffled voice through a door Harry would press his ear against when he lay on the hallway carpet.
A owl hooted, somewhere in the distance. Harry pinched the fluttering Snitch from the air beside him, and rolled it in his hand. The metal wasn't cold anymore. He would probably need some medicine, and a cup of tea; those things would be waiting for him back in the castle, but something kept him rooted to the Forest, a scrawny, leafless tree among many. Some of the trees had lost branches to errant spells, or had partially burned in the fight. Harry might not ever return; he thought he should probably leave a tribute, something to mark the spot where he'd walked amongst four people who would never again light his path.
"Bende," he murmured, raising his wand to a sickly, half-burnt tree before him, and a tattered ribbon emerged from his wand, wrapping itself twice around the trunk before tying itself off with a scraggly bow. He wasn't the greatest at conjuring, but it would have to do. Harry stepped closer to the tree, and released the Snitch before it; the Snitch flapped about the tree, fluttering up between the branches and back down, circumnavigating the trunk like a curious butterfly. He imagined a familiar hand snatching it back, just in the nick of time, only to let go of the Snitch once again. Harry had always thought the game at which James excelled was a test of reflexes; but now he wondered if his father's talent was in letting go, every time. But he thought he was entitled to keep one thing, after relinquishing so many others, so he pocketed the Snitch.
(He would own many other pieces of sports equipment in future, but the toy soldiers were gone, the pom-pom man chewed by a dog, the nutcracker repurposed for more practical uses, and the Snitch was his very last toy.)
Harry turned around. One foot in front of the other; then the sun-dapples on his twig-scratched forearms grew bigger, and more frequent, and he was on the outskirts of the forest. It was high noon. The sun pinned him to the threshold where grass met pine needles. Hermione and Ron were waiting for him by Hagrid's hut, leaning against the wattle-and-daub wall. Hermione waved to him, and Ron squinted against the sun. The gingery blur at his feet was Crookshanks, asleep and unbothered by the cataclysm they'd been through days before.
"We all need haircuts," said Hermione briskly, as Harry rejoined them.
"And probably a change of clothes," Ron remarked, eyeing the uppers of his own shoes, which had partially detached from the soles. Hermione's hand fluttered to her moth-eaten cardigan self-consciously.
"My wand's fixed, though," said Harry, trailing said wand through the air haphazardly. A few colourful sparks crackled forth from the tip. "Look."
Ron nodded, looking impressed, but Hermione plucked the holly wand from Harry' hand.
"You've got to clean it now and then, you know," she said, and polished it with her cardigan. "It's filthy."
"Yeah, OK," Harry said, wearily. He had suddenly become aware of how cloudy the lenses of his glasses were, but the effort involved in wiping them like an insurmountable challenge at the moment. Surely, it made no difference; life was pretty murky either way.
"Here," said Hermione, returning his wand. Harry noticed a few threads of silver in her frizzy ponytail for the first time. She looked down to check the battered watch on Harry's wrist, which had once belonged to Fabian Prewett, and the silver turned to gold in the dazzling sunlight.
"It's after twelve, already," she pronounced.
"Neville found a place on the other side of the lake that was pretty quiet," offered Ron. "Hermione brought sandwiches. We could go there."
"Good," said Harry, who was, for once, content not to know his destination. "You lead the way."
All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
All your reindeer armies are all going home...
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it's all over now, baby blue
Bob Dylan