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Title: And First an Hour (Part 2 of 2)
Author: Eugenides
Author Email: shishkabob147@wmconnect.com
Author Website: http://www.geocities.com/gavrochevies/main.html
Category: not quite fluff, not quite angst
Spoilers: any reader should have read all four books simply for understanding
Rating: PG (nothing bad, but certainly not Disney)
Summary: Harry's POV, a counterpart to Part 1.
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

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It shocks me that I am standing here now. How I found my way to a train ticket I will never know, let alone how I boarded and traveled here to Hogwarts while remembering nothing.

Mrs. Fields, and even Clara Lupin when they saw me before I left said nothing. They probably thought that I was grieving and best left undisturbed. Which was true, but not in the way they drew their conclusion. I was reminded fiercely of a certain stormy ride to   in the hour before I left, and it triggered something. Were I the boy I was seven years ago I would have summoned my Firebolt and been off in a flash, but time does take its eternal toll. So instead I found myself stepping off the Express in a wild rush for my senses that had been lost days back. At first I questioned the train in the first place before recalling with an ancient homelike echo where I was. And of course that explained the humming train underneath my feet-- no Apparating into Hogwarts, as I had been reminded so many times in ages past.

First of all I need to explain myself; I'm jumping ahead too fast. I'll straighten a few facts out to begin with.

I was not there when Ginny died. I was off in Coniston on a whim I took at first to be entirely subjective. I should have been wiser to my own intentions, but I find that my heart has a way of its own.

So there I was, water ruffling before me. I stared out at the island in some sort of reverie. I knew my father had been to Coniston often as a child, but I never really thought of it much. However it rather shook me this time. There was a boat cutting through the sunset-- not a modern one, but one of those droll things out of Ransome, sails billowed, halyard strung out almost to the tiller. Some shadow on board tacked sharply and the boom swung out, topping a small figure out over the other side with a resounding plunk. I did not ever strain my eyes to know that the dark shadows silhouetted against the setting sky were children. The dunked one surfaced and their laughter came to me even sitting on the promontory.

I was thinking, oddly enough, not of Ginny but of Hermione, and the books we used to read together as children. She would send me thick novels, musty old copies she had dug up somewhere, full of Dickens and Nesbit and the like. I believe I stopped reading them sometime in the fall when I was fourteen. Although, I cannot remember to this day whether I stopped reading them first or she stopped slipping them into my book bag. Strange that in such a beautiful setting my thoughts would wander in the direction of Hermione and not my fiancée? To some.

I have always known Hermione, really. The first time I saw her I felt as if she was my one desperate link to the life I understood-- Mugglehood. As the years passed I think I realized slowly that that bond we had immediately felt was not just one of displacement: Hermione had never really had friends before, and neither had I, but it was something more like a meeting of two persons, carved out of the same stuff of earth. She and Ron were all I had to love in the world. Ron and his family were the relations I never had, Ron a brother and best friend for me to love and laugh with. And Hermione-- well, I always used to try and think of her as a friend, then a sister, then just an irreplaceable addition to my life as it was. In later years I needed a girl to love, to fit in my missing hole. In the beginning there was Cho Chang, and later Ginny, but I could never set Hermione into that mold-- we were just too comfortable together. Now I see it was because Hermione is not my sister, nor just a friend, and she isn't even an adolescent love-interest. She is simply everything that is me-- "more my self than I am," to borrow words. And so I need her. But sorrow takes me because I know there is no hope for me - and yet I have come.
I am skipping ahead of myself again.

There I sat, chewing slowly on the side of my thumb, thoughts consumed with Hermione, when I saw a dark form flitting amongst the clouds above the Old Man of Coniston, a hill jutting sharply up in the west. It came steadily nearer, and I recognized Tad with a jolt. Hedwig's son, whom I had presented to Sirius all those years back, was recognizable to be just by the way he flew, winging from gust to visible gust. He lighted on my outstretched arm and I seized the letter attached to his leg. It was Sirius, of course. But I'd instructed him not to owl me on my last vacation as a bachelor. Ginny and I were to be married the coming summer.

My anger vanished into a vague mist in my mind. Sirius wrote several cryptic sentences that, regardless of their severity, would change my life forever.

"Harry. You must come at once. Ginny has been killed. -Sirius"

I rose to my feet somehow. The shock was all over me, my only emotion. And I remembered Ginny.

She arrived when I was twelve and in my youth I did not notice her. Until she crossed paths with Tom Riddle, and Ron and I went to save her at all costs-- after that incident she became slightly more of a fixture in my life. She blossomed, as only a Weasley can, out of her awkward skinny frame into a rosy, jolly, beautiful thing, with hair of fire. It must have been sometime in my sixth year, after Percy's death, that I lifted my somber eyes from Hermione's slouched and tearful form on the Common Room couch to see Ginny, gazing at me starry-eyed, begging for my comfort over the flicker of the fireplace-and I knew that because she was in love with me I loved her back. Didn't a part of my heart stall and then rupture at her presence? Oh, yes, I was in love.

I do not want to think about the time after. Ginny's life I can dwell on-- truly I still love her in a way, and I am glad that her last few years were happy. But I look back with eyes so recently uncovered, and see and feel and know every emotion Hermione felt at our every touch, every meet of the eyes, every beat of my heart so soft and heavy, full with a deep rhythm, day and night--

I killed her, I know, just as I was offering my all to what was not meant to be mine. I've never had quite the sensible mind like she did-- for so long I was enchanted by my eyes, my heart, my body, and not my soul. It kills me, because I know I can never have her now. I shattered the honest and natural trust that created the basis for our love and friendship. I have broken her. And just because I am broken with my realization does not mean she can ever trust me with her heart again.

With that in mind, how did I arrive here? Why am I here to seek the impossible? I have stepped off the train now and I am already halfway across the grounds. Headed where? To Hermione. I can see her sprawled on the fresh spring lawn. I can bear her rejection, I can endure her spittle on my check, I can follow my feet and tell her all of me because she is all. And no matter what she must know. Thoughts of Ginny vanish behind me-- I speed my steps through the dewy grass. Because all barricades aside, she is before me, I am reaching her. She is here, and I have come.

And first an hour of mournful musing
And then a gush of bitter tears
And then a dreary calm diffusing
Its deadly mist o'er joys and cares
And then a throb and then a lightening
And then a breathing from above
And then a star in heaven brightening
The star the glorious star of love

-Emily Brontë

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