Harry and Hermione go for a walk every day. Erasmus wouldn’t care, but Mrs Granger insists that he goes too. “Fresh air and exercise,” she orders, and Harry laughs and says there isn’t any fresh air to be had walking car-driven streets. Mrs Granger laughs back at him and shoos him out the door. Erasmus doesn’t get that. How can they laugh when they do know about the bad stuff?
Those first days Harry and Hermione always walked ahead of him, hand in hand, with Erasmus stumping along behind, not interested in joining them. They’re too wrapped up in each other, they don’t need him, don’t want him. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t like it, doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t know this place, he doesn’t remember anything about it, he doesn’t know if it’s safe. Half the people in his shattered memories tried to kill him. It’s not safe to be outside, he knows it’s not safe. But he’s here and this is what he has to do because he’s not going to have anyone look at him with pity, so he never complains, he never tells them he’s scared, never refuses to go for a walk. It’s better to keep his fear to himself, because he’s not safe anywhere so why does it matter where he is?
But now he’s been walking with the other two long enough to see different things. He looks at their joined hands and realises that their fingers are clenched so tightly around each other that their knuckles are white. And then he looks at their faces, tense and watchful, and he realises that they’re scared too. They’re terrified. And they’re like that every day but they grit their teeth and they go out there anyway.
Only when Mr Granger comes walking with them on the weekends are they not scared. They walk one on either side of him, Hermione holding his hand and Harry just walking close, and they’re not scared when he’s there. The rest of the time they’re terrified.
Erasmus finds that somehow it’s better being scared when other people are scared with him. It‘s no less scary, but it doesn’t hurt so much.
-
“We never talk about it,” Hermione points out. There is only one ‘it’.
“What’s there to say?” Harry asks. “We were both there, we know what happened.”
“I suppose.” Her acknowledgement is reluctant.
Harry holds out for all of a minute before he sighs. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. He doesn’t like talking about it. Talking about it means thinking about it and he’d rather not think about it unless he has no other choice (nightmares, reminders, drifting thoughts... He thinks about it too often already).
Hermione is very quiet. Harry looks across the couch at her, watches the frown scrunch up her nose and the blankness creep into her eyes. Then she looks at him and he knows what the answer is. She doesn’t want to talk. But she needs to. “Sometimes I wake up and I think I’ll find that this was all a Cruciatus dream and I’m really still lying on the ground with a wand pointed at me and screaming. How do I know I’m not just gone mad? That’s what the Cruciatus does, it drives you mad.”
“I’m not a dream,” he tells her. He can’t give her any reassurance other than that because he’s no surer of his reality than she is. How does he know if this is real? What if this is one of Voldemort’s tricks? But he can’t live like that, so he tries not to. “I’m not a dream and this has to be real.”
“That’s what a dream would say,” she says. Her giggle hiccoughs into a sob and Harry wraps his arms around her.
“It’s okay. It’s over.”
“It’ll never be over,” she says and he knows she’s right. Even though he’s pretty sure this isn’t a dream and that it’s real, some part of them will always be trapped back there in that graveyard.
-
Boys his age stand over him, laughing. Erasmus is on the ground, pushing himself upright, putting his sleeve to his mouth to catch the blood.
“Gonna go crying to Mummy?” someone taunts and he knows with complete, hopeless certainty that no, he isn’t, because his mum doesn’t care, his mum never cared, and if he went crying to her she’d just cuff him over the head and send him away. He wants to be angry but all he feels is despair.
“Aw, poor baby doesn’t have a mummy.” This speaker is a woman, white face, black hair, maniacal eyes. “Poor itty bitty baby.” She laughs.
Then one of the boys is right in his face. “No one wants you.” The other boys laugh, the madwoman cackles. “Nobody wants you.”
And as Erasmus wakes with a start he realises the boy is Harry.
“It’s all right,” someone says gently. “It’s just a dream.”
“M-Mizz Granger?”
She sits on his bed, her hand on his shoulder as if she’s been shaking him, and Erasmus stares up at her. “Yes, only me. Are you awake now?” Her hand drifts to his cheek, lingers there a moment.
His mum never cared.
He knows it’s true. Doesn’t remember details, doesn’t remember even what she looked like, but knows it’s true. Tears prick at his eyes and he fights them back. No tears, no weakness, he won’t be weak. Suddenly he hates Hermione because she has parents who love her and no one ever cared about him. He jerks away from Mrs Granger’s touch, too angry, too desperately longing for it, to bear it any longer.
“Oh, Erasmus.” His name is a sigh. “Just let it out, you’ll feel better if you let it out.” Her hand on his shoulder burns through the fabric of his pyjamas and he tries to wriggle away, to hide his face. “It’s okay, Harry’s not here. Just me. Let go, Erasmus. Let it all go.”
The pillow receives his first tears. But then Mrs Granger pulls him into her lap and rubs his back and holds him tight. Erasmus bawls into her embrace like a baby because it’s all too much. He’s so tired and so scared and he doesn’t want to know that his mum never cared about him. He wants to believe that she loves him, that she’s searching for him frantically. That she’s the one who’s holding him now, rocking him back and forth, murmuring into his hair, not hating him for waking her in the middle of the night. He wants to believe it, but he knows, somewhere in the back of his fractured memory, that she’s dead and she never would have held him anyway.
But Mrs Granger is holding him. He can pretend, just for a few minutes, that someone cares about him. He wants to pretend. He wants to believe.
-
“It amazes me the three of you are as well-adjusted as you are,” Mrs Carter says with the simple frankness Harry has learned to expect from her. As someone who has been lied to by most of his authority figures, Harry respects that, even when she says things that make him angry. “From the little you have told me,” she shoots him a look and Harry shrugs half-apologetically, aware that their common disinclination to talk about their experiences combined with the need to not give away the existence of magic makes them frustratingly tight-lipped, “I wouldn’t be surprised to find you all gibbering under your beds every time I visit.”
Harry shrugs again. “There’s only so long you can be afraid for,” he says truthfully. “After that you’re just too tired to keep going. So we only gibber every other day.”
She smiles. “At least you’ve kept your sense of humour.”
He rubs a thumb over the scars on his palms. “Only sometimes.”
She’s wise enough not to push it. “How is Erasmus doing?”
“Good, I think. Well, better anyway. For what that’s worth. Sometimes he actually talks now, I guess that’s good. I mean, he doesn’t like us much, but he likes us better than his other options and I think he not-likes us less now.”
Mrs Carter pulls a face. “You mean he’s coming around, liking you better?” she tries to translate.
“Yeah.” ‘Like’ is too strong a word, but close enough.
“Well, that’s something, at least.”
He shrugs again. Small victories are all he has these days. He clings to his small victories. “Hermione and I went shopping the day before yesterday.” And wasn’t that terrifying. The trip on the bus surrounded by adults, not magical adults but so very many of them, the going into places where they didn’t know all the exits and potential hiding places. The library is okay, because they know the library (Mr Granger took them the first couple of times, so they could be safe). New places are dangerous.
“Well done,” she says simply, but with sincerity. She has some idea how big a step that is. “You mean you went into clothes shops?” She looks impressed.
Harry actually laughs. “Me and Hermione? No. Bookstores, all the way.”
“All the way?”
“Well, maybe a couple of other shops too. But not clothes shops.” No way. There are a lot of ways in which Harry is not normal, but that is not one of them.
It’s something of a relief to know that.
-
There is anger in the way he snaps the taps shut, anger in the way he yanks at the buttons on his shirt. Erasmus doesn’t know why he’s angry – at least, no specific why. He’s just angry. He’s always angry. It’s better to be angry than to be scared.
The bath water laps at his skin with flaming tongues as he lowers himself in, scalding in its heat. He doesn’t care. He welcomes it. Too-hot water flickers over his skin like the too-hot anger flickering along his bones. As he sinks down, the water sloshes and the level rises, little waves gulping at the white enamel and trying to climb out onto the floor but never quite succeeding. He glares at them and sinks lower and lower, going further and further under, sliding down under the water so that it engulfs him entirely. The gloing-gloing-gloing of water in his ears makes his scowl deepen but he welcomes the distance it brings to sounds, the strangely dislocated, far-away quality it gives to the footsteps walking past outside the door.
He watches bubbles rise up towards the distorting surface, letting out his breath in tiny bursts. And the dislocation doesn’t just extend to the sounds that reach him, it digs into his soul and wraps around him, distancing him from everything. Including himself.
And he wonders, watching the bubbles rise, he wonders why he doesn’t let out all his breath. Why he should worry about ever breathing again. It’s more peaceful just to lie here and never move again. He lets out more bubbles, a stream of shiny wobbling amorphous pockets of air soaring up towards the surface. It would be so easy. It would all be over, all be done; no more worry, fear, pain, loss...
So easy.
Erasmus lets out the last of his breath.
So very easy.
His lungs are burning, the pressure in his chest just like the pressure that always follows him, that unending pressure of things undone and things to be done and promises broken. If he just breathes in he can be done with it all. Just be done.
He breathes in.