((Author’s Note: My deepest thanks go out to Fresca (alias Colores) for her thorough beta job and superb insight into style.

‘Fragmentary Blue,’ a poem by Robert Frost, inspired me to write this story, which is named in its honor. It is also heavily influenced by the song ‘Your Heart is an Empty Room’ by the excellent Death Cab for Cutie. All characters belong to J.K. Rowling, to whom I owe almost every word I’ve ever written.))

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Fragmentary Blue

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Summer

The first months of peace explode in Harry’s face with the ferocity, the devastation, of a long dormant bomb. Merriment and parties and laughter, smiling and hand-shaking and medal-receiving, he drifts through all of it in a relief-induced haze, lighter than he can ever remember feeling. The weightlessness makes him dizzy, and for months he knows nothing but a soft, gentle sort of unconcern for everyone and everything around him.

The redness of Ron’s hair, a caricature of colour, momentarily pierces the haze of his thoughts, and Harry focuses for a few minutes on the other boy’s voice. The redhead is speaking quickly, excitedly: something about going back to Hogwarts and getting married and buying his own flat somewhere nice, near the ocean, somewhere like Bill’s place, and maybe he’s talking loudly and maybe he isn’t even talking at all, because Harry can’t hear him. When the elated expression on Ron’s face flickers, begins to falter, Harry snaps out of his stupor and manages to mutter something appropriately cheerful. Hermione, her arm wrapped around Ron, frowns imperceptibly.

The whole world has gone crazy, tipped on its side, changes happening so quickly that Harry can’t keep track of them all. He isn’t at the centre of it anymore �“ he’s drifting peacefully somewhere on the very outer rim, and he likes it this way, and he never wants to go back.

He has a dream one night. Soft hands lift him out of his bed. He opens his eyes and their faces are like maps of a country he’s never been to but has always wanted to go. They say they’ll take him to a place where all he has to is breathe.

He says okay.

Fall

Autumn is his favourite time of year, because it means going home.

The face of Hogwarts has aged. What once seemed a perfect fortress, an impenetrable sanctuary, is a shell of what it was. The exterior has been repaired, of course, and it gleams more regally than ever as he stands looking up at it from Hogsmeade station. First-years swarm around him, vying for a place on the boats, faces alight with pleasure and awe. Harry is standing stock still in the centre of the station. Superimposed over the bright, restored version of the castle is another image, an image of a broken, hollowed building, bent pitifully to the will of those who once invaded it.

But it is fixed now. Someone has put it right.

For a moment, the promise of reconciliation spreads before him, vast and inviting. He imagines that he will step through those doors again free from worry or dread. He thinks about languid days spent lounging by the lake, thinks about the feast waiting for him in the Great Hall, thinks about losing himself blissfully in the triviality of classes. He thinks about petty house rivalries and the warm, intimate security of the Gryffindor common room, about Quidditch and Hagrid and everything he’s ever wanted or known or loved. And for one moment it’s in his grasp; he merely has to walk through the doors and he’s there, wherever there really is, flung back into a childhood he lost somewhere between the conception and the reality.

But suddenly he understands that there is no going back. His childhood can’t be put back together, can’t be made right again. Whatever Hogwarts once meant to him, whatever it represented, that’s gone now. That era is dead to him, dead with Voldemort and innocence and war, folded in on itself like a dream too concentrated, too intent, to hold itself afloat.

He turns against the stream of bodies. The children press instinctively toward the castle, as if it is their last hope. He was among them once, secure in the belief that as soon as he passed through those gates, nothing could touch him.

He turns away and knows, with a terrible certainty, that he will never look back.

Winter

She comes to him sometimes on cold nights, all softness and fragility and reticent ease. The war has made her too thin, he notes, as he traces freckles down her spine like a map of the night sky, buries his face in her vibrant red hair. If he knows only one thing it’s that he loves her, all of her, her hair and skin and laughter but mostly her eyes. When he looks into her eyes they say, quite simply, “Welcome to the rest of your life.”

And yet he knows that this is the rest of his life; it started the day the war ended and extends indefinitely into the future.

An entire life, all to himself.

Shouldn’t that make him happy? He is, after all, incredibly lucky to be alive. Twice he’s been saved inexplicably from death, and he can’t shake the feeling that he’s living on borrowed time. From day one he’s been living off of somebody else’s time, snatching a little here, stealing a little there, desperate to stay alive for another hour, minute, second. Now he has more time than he knows what to do with.

The sad truth is this. Life, minus raging dragons, breathless heists, and legendary quests, isn’t everything he thought it would be.

He’s ungrateful and knows it, but he can’t help wanting, waiting, for something more, for the next explosion, for the pure rush of adrenaline he has come to expect, if not love. He’s lived his entire life as a hero and now he’s just a person and the transition is harder than he ever could have imagined. Even lying in Ginny’s arms he’s restless, restless and guilty for his ingratitude.

Time passes. Icy days blur into one another.

Snow falls softly over the barren landscape, as if in consideration for the dead. Light plays like an eulogy along the windowsill of Harry’s room at the Burrow, resting finally on the forehead of the baby in his arms. He wonders idly if he will ever be able to look Teddy Lupin in the eye.

Spring

May, it seems, arrives washed out.

Greyish blue, it blends into solemn April and smears into garish June, eschewing its own identity entirely.

How long has it been raining? Months, it seems, without even a glimmer of spring. April is always like that, Harry notes: just when he believes winter has ended, it comes back more ferocious than ever, tearing at what sparse vegetation survived the first onslaught.

One year to the day, he reminds himself. One year ago, the war ended.

After emotion comes the absence of emotion �“ a huge, terrifying void where something else ought to be. He’s missing whole parts of his life and he admits finally that he will never get them back, just as Teddy will never get back his mother and father. People like Remus and Tonks die every day and the world moves on. The world moves on without ever acknowledging who they were or how they lived or what they sacrificed.

And he can remember. Yes, he can remember. But eventually that’s all he can do.

He stands looking out at the ocean, a bright startling blue despite the greyness of the sky above. Maybe this is how acceptance begins. Quietly.

He jumps slightly as gentle arms slide around his waist, but relaxes almost instantly. It gets easier every day and he knows Ginny has noticed the difference in him. He doesn’t jump at sudden sounds anymore, or go for his wand at the slightest provocation. Nightmares, when they do devour him, dissipate instantly at her touch.

“Do you like it?” she whispers.

“Like what?”

“The house, I mean. I know it’s small, but it’ll be beautiful once I fix it up, give it a proper paint job . . .”

Her hand moves up to his face, traces its contours with utmost care, like she’s putting the finishing touches on her magnum opus.

“Blue,” Harry interjects suddenly. “We should paint it blue.”

He smiles into her hand, the first spontaneous smile he has given anyone in a long time. Delighted, she agrees quickly.

“It’s hard to imagine what it will be like, living here,” she says tentatively. “It’s so empty. I’ve only lived in one house my whole life . . .”

Harry turns to her, smiling in earnest now. His smile is different than she remembers. It is spare, undiluted, as if it has been stripped of unnecessary arrogance or audacity. He tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “We’ll fill it up,” he assures her, words touched with a hint of his long-dormant confidence. “That much, I promise you.”

She knows, then, that someday he will be okay.