By the time the war is done, the rubble settled, the bodies gone cold, the world has already begun t

By the time the war is done, the rubble settled, the bodies gone cold, the world has already begun to shift.

Then again, Harry thinks, looking down at the stone-strewn courtyard, the world always shifts.

It’s not until weeks later, after Harry and Ron and Hermione have had time to hole up at the Burrow and pretend they’re safe from all the world that Harry realises: he’s changed too.

This is more than throwing an Unforgivable at a Death Eater, more than the fragment of soul out of his scar, this is all of the adrenaline and fear of Voldemort’s looming shadow at his back finally being able to fade.

When all you’ve known for years is terror, to suddenly be free of it is…

Harry finds it very strange to walk downstairs, open the door, and breathe in a full breath in full confidence he’ll be able to take the next.

Around him, he starts to notice, everyone else is changing too. When Dean and Seamus come to visit, they walk close, shoulders bumping together. They’ve always walked like this, always smiled at each other and made comments that only they seem to fully understand, but without the veil of fear over his eyes he can see the way they lean into each other, the way they briefly glance to each other, realigning themselves after a war apart, to ask, “You sure you’re ok, Harry?”

He notices Ginny, standing tall, hair aflame in the summer sunlight. In the weeks of peace he’s been reading some of Dumbledore’s books, as advised by Dumbledore’s portrait. He knows the spells he senses, when he walks past Ginny’s door, are for silence and muffled noise. When he asks Hermione if she can feel the same magic at the door as in the room, she nods.

“Sometimes the spells don’t hold,” Ginny tells him one morning. It’s early, the sun just rising over the fields, burning the mist off. Around their feet the hens peck for the crumbs of his toast. “I still get nightmares of it. First Year. Tom just-” She’s not pale, not shaking. She swallows, blinks. “Having someone in your head,” she says. “It’s horrible.” She leans towards him briefly, bumps her shoulder against his. “You ever need someone to talk to about it, you know where to find me.”

Harry starts looking closer. Knowing, now, how Molly lost her brothers makes the way she clings to and cares for her family fall into stark relief - he’s made glad once more by the fact that she so readily and obviously considers him a part of it. Ron’s face lights up when Hermione walks into the room, some hidden tension vanishing from his shoulders. If Harry isn’t careful his mind drifts back, alights on the moments in Malfoy Manor’s dungeons. Now he knows just how much his two best friends care about each other, he can’t imagine how it was for Ron. 

Hermione’s hands tremble sometimes. Not in fear - these days, Voldemort and Bellatrix most definitely dead, Hermione doesn’t just seem fearless, she is. She’s survived a battle where a whole side wanted her dead or worse, seen it’s leaders most utterly and assuredly gone. It’s not fear of what is that makes her hands tremble.

But Harry sees her fingers tracing the scar on the neck, just as his fingers trace the scars on his hand. It’s not fear, not that. It’s pain, and distrust, and hating the unknown, illogical hatred aimed at you that makes Hermione tremble.

Hermione, he knows, is going to do everything she can to end that illogical hatred.

For Harry… he doesn’t look too much at his own responses. For too long he’s locked his fears up inside himself, let adrenaline carry him to the next thing and the next and the next. Let the fear of Voldemort, looming at his back, prevent him from thinking too long on his personal terrors and nightmares.

In the weeks of peace, in the weeks of settling into this strange knowledge that he most definitely has a future, that Voldemort is gone…

Harry realises he really hates quills.

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