Hollow

Hollow

It's barely past noon when they get there. The bushes and brambles press against their hands and Harry can hear a lullaby twisting in the whisper of the wind. He draws a deep breath and hushes; the only sound is Ron and Hermione on the early-fallen leaves and dried-out twigs as they slow their footfalls and stop just behind him.

Ron's hand is on his shoulder, and Harry can feel the press of flesh, of chilly autumn fingers on the back of his neck beneath his scarf.

Hermione tips her head towards the frame of a house singed and left to settle. She says nothing.

They wait. Harry wants to go further, but he doesn't want them with him. Not now, not when his mind is playing a record of a children's song and the image of his mother's arms and he doesn't know if it's reality brought back by same place years later or just a dreamy remnant of what might have been. They aren't there, but they're here - shadows and ghosts and footprints long grown over with weeds - and he can't reach through with outstretched hands and press against that reality.

So he stands, and he stays, and he waits. The sun slips behind a cloud and out again, at a slightly lower angle where the glare catches in his eyes and the world glows afire and he can't see.

His mother's voice is singing to him, his father's laughing, Naptime.

"This is it, then," comes a voice, but it's not his father's. There's not the low echo and the high laugh, and the timbre that hits him in the gut and calls to him of what is his, and his alone.

"That's it, Ron," he says in short breaths, and tries not to be angry. Because this is Ron here. Ron who's come this far with him, who tracked the locket off of Mundungus in Manchester and who cast away four Boggarts outside of Edinburgh when all Harry could see was a flash of green-over-red set against his mother's scream.

But he's taken her voice now and called him back to this moment, when he can only stare at dust and ashes. Harry knows they're dead now, dead and gone, and what was home is charring and rubble. He holds back against the brambles and nods once again, because there's nothing else to say.

"You going to go, Harry?" says Hermione, and she's not pushing him forward, not really. But her hands are on him, and they're pressing and he doesn't want to go, not yet. He doesn't want to stand ankle-deep in debris when he knows he'll find nothing at all.

"Yeah," he says, "I'm going to."

Another few minutes pass; Harry's watch is clicking past the seconds. They grow longer every few ticks, but just by a split-second, and he's transfixed by the ruins and doesn't care what time it is anyway.

"You ought to wind it," says Hermione, as she shifts her weight once from side to side and wraps her scarf once more, tightly, around her neck.

Harry says nothing. He starts to count the awkward ticks and tocks and wonders how long he can make them stand here with him, and how long his mother made Voldemort wait before he raised his wand against her.

The sun is skirting the topmost branches - the barest ones - when Hermione asks if they're going to do anything. Her voice goes high on the last stretch of sound, but it's not a question. Her hair is blowing in her eyes, the sun is casting yellow-orange down on all of them, and she's angry.

"I'm thinking," he hisses back at her, and he is. He's thinking about the quiet moments; he's building the cottage back together in his mind. The wallpaper is pale green, tiny clover on eggshell white, and he thinks that must've seemed good luck behind secret walls in awful times. His spoon was a tarnished silver, he thinks, and he wonders if he'll find it there, in the ruins and the half-cracked, half-crocked memories.

He steps forward slightly, and he knows that Ron and Hermione are behind him. But there's a muffle, a mumble in the wind, and they're stopping.

"There's something wrong here," says Ron, like it's some brilliant idea. Harry turns back to them.

"Of course there's something wrong. He killed them."

Framed by the bushes, Ron and Hermione look like a portrait in frame, like a still life and he wishes they'd just damn stay there. He turns back towards them, his steps going slow and deliberate; he's not looking where he's going.

"I need to find something," he says.

"I know," says Ron, like Harry's made a joke, like something's funny because Ron's smiling as the branch-pricked sun gets in his eyes.

"No!" says Harry. "I need to find something alone." His voice is hard, he's shouting and he wants to hear the echo back, wants to hear his voice turned inwards because, no, he shouldn't be shouting at them. Not them, not now, but he's in the shadow of the warped wood frame now and he can't bear to see them there with him.

Hermione is grabbing Ron's arm like she understands, like she knows to pull him away. But she doesn't understand, not really, because her lips are pursed and she's looking at Harry like she's prompting him to say something, something more. "Send up sparks if you need anything," she says, and then they're gone.

He says nothing, and steps into the ruins.

His shoes land on dirt and ashes and he wonders if he was expecting something. A portkey, or a revelation. But the memory is still a moment hiding in his mind, a fabric that's tearing away, and he doesn't see it here. He's alone, or alone enough, and the song is fractured in his mind, the record skipping. And his mother's voice, so soft and sweet in bedtime stories, fades to screams, to flame.

He closes his eyes and imagines for himself: his father. Forehead smooth and eyes deep, laughing brown, as he pulls open a newspaper three months late because there is no outside now. They're locked in tight, in hiding and in family three. He's reading the Quidditch scores out loud and it will always be Holyhead 250, Puddlemere 110. He's telling Harry about his days as a chaser, and saying how Harry will grow up with Quidditch in his blood. And Lily Potter feeds her son porridge, blown cool between pressed-red lips, out of a tiny silver spoon that, though tarnished, glimmers softly in the torchlight in his mind.

Harry walks the rooms, three wide, one deep, and stops beside one half-burned board and a few round posts that he determines was a table. He drops to his knees and dips his fingers in the ashes. It's dirty on his fingers, and it itches and cakes between his fingernails, but he's digging deep, he's feeling for the memory and for the one tarnished spoon.

It's real, he's telling himself as he presses a finger to rotting wood and takes a breath. It's real. He's feeling and he's digging and he's in the dirt to his knees, and it's blowing in his face, and he has to stop and wipe his glasses.

It happened here. It all happened. One moment, one morsel: his fingers are furious to find it until he feels the rocks and dirt, the splinters, and nothing.

He stops.

It happened. He can hear his own voice now, crying to the blue October sky.

"Of course it did," comes a voice, and it's familiar. It's willing him to settle, to sleep, but it's tinged with the screams of death, grown old with time. He rises onto his knees, looks up, and hears laughter.

"Holyhead 250, Puddlemere 110," Harry hears, said as if it's some hysterical joke punctuated by unreal laughter. "Your mother was always fond of the Harpies."

"My darling boy," says the woman, and he stands and looks in his mother's eyes. They're decayed by years, but he can still see the green in them, beneath the cloudy corona. Her hair is red, but maybe it's only the sunlight, rapidly receding beneath the overgrown weeds and autumn leaves that hang by dying stems and empty branches.

They're walking towards him, and he wants to pull them close, to hold them. But this is not real, it's not, and besides, he ought to rip them to shreds. In his father's laughter, his mother's eyes, there's death, and there's Him there.

"It's all a lie," he screams and he wonders if Ron and Hermione can hear him.

"Don't call for your friends," says his father, biting on the chapped and greying edge of his bottom lip. "They won't come for you."

"Besides," says his mother, her hands cold and sticky-dry on his wrist, "you never asked if they could stay for dinner."

Harry pulls his wrist free, though she's dug a nail into it, a tiny cut but bleeding one red trickle. He looks her in the eyes and yells. "This isn't it, this isn't how it's supposed to be."

"How was it, then?" she says, and he can hear the undercurrent to her voice, see the crimson in her eyes, and he wants to grab her, wants to hold her mouth open and tug her eyes wide and tell him to come get him, because he will take this and then he will take anything.

The ash is on his fingers, from digging for memories that never ever were. The record is scratching, and it's only the wind in the trees anyway. He reaches for her, his hands are on her neck. There's no pulse point, no life, and he tugs and he tugs, and her hair is flying as they fall to the ground and James is laughing.

She doesn't give in, she doesn't stop; there's no breath on her tongue, just vile words and the greenish stink of rot. He reaches out, to her green-green eyes and wonders if Voldemort can see through them, see him now. He'll show him, he knows, and he takes one fingertip, one nail ash-caked and torn and ragged, and sticks it against her flesh.

When he was a child, Dudley had told him that eyeballs popped; they don't, though. They simply bleed. Not red-blue and lively, but a slow ooze, a gasp and a gush and a bubble, and it's cloudy-white and faded. He does it again, and stands, and watches her crawl blinded, hair flying in the wind. He reminds her of Bellatrix Lestrange, with the long tangled hair and the ravings and he knows, for sure now, with the green eyes gone and bleeding greyish, that this is His creature.

Just when he thinks he can destroy her, there's arms locked in his elbows, and he's kicking out, and she's falling down and back up again. His father's hands, thick and soft yet callused as he'd always imagined them - but cold, so cold - are around his neck and tugging. And, he thinks, if he could only get to his wand, he could end it. Could set the whole thing ablaze, himself and the memories and the childhood made up in some twisted mind.

His fingers stretch downwards, and when he feels it tight within his fingers, his mother's crawling ghost tears it away. He kicks outward, and she falls to the ground, and crunches against a bed of leaves.

"No," he screams, and he remembers mornings when the cupboard door fell off, and when Dudley's toys exploded in his hands. He scrunches his eyes and curls his toes and concentrates. It's not an explosion, not really, but his chest is wet where his father's hands were grabbing him, and there's no hands now, just clumsy, weeping stumps.

But his father keeps coming, keeps stepping on the leaves and the ash and the memories, and it occurs to him now that the dust should have blown away. That memories and monuments do not stay, preserved against the wind.

"You're not my dad, you're not my dad," he's saying over and over again, as he tackles the inferius to the ground. He's caked in blood, in dirt, and leaves and tumbles. But his nails scratch and he grabs his father by the ears, pulls him, tugs him. One ear falls loose, and then another, and there's tears in Harry's eyes, cold against the wind, as he's digging fingernails into cheeks, into neck. He pounds on his father's chest and it makes a loud, violent, hollow sound, but does nothing. The pace slows, and everything slows, and Harry has to remember to keep going.

He turns, and he sees his mother's face, greyed and destroyed, and he pulls his wand from her fingers. Her finger half comes with it, and he has to hold his stomach down, has to hold his wand tight.

"Incendio," he cries. It's the first thing that comes to mind, as he lies in the shadow of the burned-out rafters. Somewhere, Hermione's voice is echoing hollow in his mind, saying fire, fire, fire.

His mother's hair goes up first, then the leaves. They're encircled, and his father comes still, still smiling, still laughing, but broken in pieces. His mother is screaming, and he wonders if this is how she screamed in life, when she died for him, or when she burned her fingers on the kettle.

The flames are catching on his robes now, and hot on his forehead. It's the colours of the sunset, rising from the ground, and he wonders if this is all he'll ever remember. For a moment, he thinks that he hears the metallic chords of a music box, and he thinks that he hears screaming.

The moment passes, blown over by windswept flame and his own heavy breathing. Don't believe it, don't believe it, he repeats to himself and the melody fades.

He hears Hermione now, and sees her face, her scarf flapping against Ron's shoulder in the wind. "Send up sparks," she'd said, and, as Harry inclines his head backwards, the firelight warm on his clammy skin, he supposes that he has.