Scattered: Brief Lives

Moody and Hagrid refuse to let him stand watch, so one of them is always awake while Harry gets the luxury of sleeping straight through the night. He's tried to argue, but frankly, when you're trying to debate a half-giant and a one-legged, one-eyed Auror, you're just spitting in the wind, really. So the least he can do, he figures, is get a good night's sleep -- out of gratitude, if nothing else.

But he doesn't. Instead, Harry lies awake: he stares at the black sky above, knowing he should be sleeping, but he can't seem to even close his eyes. He doesn't read the stars or watch the dark clouds roll by; he doesn't have visions or prophetic waking dreams. He simply can't stop thinking.

In the first weeks, after they've destroyed the locket, all of his thoughts are about the horcruxes that remain. Cup, quill, snake. Cup, quill, snake. Or really, cup and quill, snake and Voldemort, for Nagini never leaves Voldemort's side.

But the weeks turn into months and Harry starts thinking about other things. About Dumbledore, and about Sirius. About Hogwarts. About his friends. About Ron, and so he finally convinces Moody to let him send Pig back to his owner with a message. Pig doesn't return, so that means Ron is okay, right? It doesn't mean Hermione is okay, though, or Ginny. Eventually he gets word: they are safe. It's okay that he's out here without them, that he went off on his own. He hasn't left them behind, not while they're in trouble, anyhow. He hasn't let them down. He sleeps a little, then, and Hagrid beams.

They tell him about Ginny, and Hermione, and Ron. They even assure him that Remus is fine. But they don't mention anyone else, and he's not fool enough to think that the casualty list is empty. He knows there has to have been losses. He wonders who is dead, who is missing. Late at night, he thinks about when he last saw Fred Weasley, or what Parvati Patil was wearing the last time they spoke, or what he'd learned in Sprout's class last year, or where he was the last time he saw Kingsley Shacklebolt. He runs through all of them, every friend and student and teacher and Auror he can think of, and he tries hard to remember them. Just that, and just in case.

And when the months have added up, one plus another plus another, his thoughts turn back again... cup, quill, snake. He lies awake and stares at the sky, just as before. But there is a difference. The cup is gone, and now it's just the quill, and then he will finally go home. Not to any of the places he's called home over the past seventeen years -- not Godric's Hollow, or Privet Drive, or Hogwarts, or the Burrow, or Grimmauld Place. He doesn't know where he'll be going, actually. But home, so they say, is where the heart is. He doesn't know anymore what face his heart wears, what remains of the home he left behind. But he knows in his heart that it waits for him, and if he closes his eyes now, he can almost see it.