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you are not alone
laying in the light
put out the fire in your head
and lay with me tonight
- patty griffin, “not alone”
i.
When she comes to, everything is quiet, very quiet, in a still, snuffed sort of way, and there is a horrible moment in which she wonders if everyone has died. And she can barely feel her own body, she thinks, so perhaps she has died too, and the afterlife looks like Hogwarts, with toppled statues and walls caved in and scorched, but then her body is tingling, and she can feel blood, and it hurts, and she knows this is too much feeling to be dead, and anyway, wouldn’t you know, if you’d died? Wouldn’t there be a sign, or something (although Professor Binns had been dead for decades and never seemed to notice so perhaps it did get a little dodgy somewhere along the line) – and here is her mind babbling which it certainly wouldn’t do if she were dead and she realises that she is thinking very, very hard because in a moment the world is going to come back and she doesn’t want it to and –
It does, and there is a millstone in her stomach, and it is dropping, and she is afraid.
(Have we won, or have we lost?
Remus, where are you?)
She doesn’t know where she is going, so she stumbles blindly along a half-lit hall, and there is rubble and there are bodies, and she cannot look at them, and some of them are small, and oh God they are children and she cannot look.
(I am not resigned I am not resigned I am not resigned Remus where are you)
It is Ginny who finds her, when she has given up ever finding her way out of these halls, with the walls fallen in and all of the turns she remembers twisted round, and she has slumped against the wall and begun to weep because she does not know anything and she is tired in her bones and those were children. And there is a sudden shriek of “Tonks!”, startlingly human, and she looks up a little dimly, and there is a girl with long red banner hair, running down a hallway towards her, and when they are face to face and she is standing it is as if a wall has broken and suddenly she is not alone anymore and the silence is not so still. Ginny says “Tonks!” and flings her arms around her and buries her face in her shoulder. “We thought you were dead, we looked and looked, oh thank God,” and she is crying, hot sudden tears, and Tonks thinks vaguely that perhaps she should be crying too, or saying something, or feeling something, but it is as though she is caught in amber, suspended in a stillness. When her mouth finally works, it says, “Remus. Where is Remus?”
Ginny’s eyes are all dark spaces in a white face. “He’s back – with Mum, and Harry, and the others – come on, I’ll take you,” and she slips a hand into Tonks’ and tugs gently, and they go.
There, in the dimness, he is lying on an awkwardly conjured cot, and his body is all wrong-angled, and he is so pale, and there is blood at one corner of his mouth, and for a moment she is afraid he is dead and Ginny hadn’t been able to tell her, and it feels as though something has clawed out her throat. But then she sees that his chest is rising and descending, and she can breathe again, though raggedly, as if breath is coming from a long way away. She isn’t thinking about anything else, and she supposes she ought to be – have we won or have we lost? would we be here like this if Voldemort were gone? – but Remus fills all of her vision and all of her head and she does not know how it is she got to be beside him but now she does not think she can ever move again, and she takes his hand – it is cold but there is a thin warmth behind the coldness – and then her head droops to his chest and she is weeping, and weeping, but inside her something is stirring: she is beginning to feel human again.
After a while (she doesn’t know how long), she feels his hand, warm on the back of her neck, and she lifts her head, and he murmurs, “Hullo, Dora,” and something a little like a smile flickers on his face.
“Wotcher,” she says, and she would be smiling if it didn’t hurt so much.
“Dora,” he says, “Dora, it’s all over, he did it, Harry did it, the war’s over.”
She is laughing, and then she is crying, and she says, “We can go home, we can go home,” and she is crying again, and she holds him, and she cries.
“Oh, Dora,” he says. “There is so much – death,” and he shudders, and she closes her eyes, and tries to stop thinking and time in the darkness and the warmth of him. They can go home, they can go home, and Teddy is waiting, and her mother, oh Teddy, and she cannot think about death, or the black black wound that is the absence of her father, and she thinks, who else is dead, who else? and now she does not know if she is holding Remus or if he is holding her, and he shivers in her arms, and she says “hush, hush”, and she rocks him gently.
If she shuts her eyes, if his arm is round her, if her face is in the crook of his neck, she can shut the darkness out. And she wants to be a screen, or a sun, and take his darkness, too.
ii.
One night she has been walking the floors of their flat with Teddy who will not sleep, and he has finally fallen asleep on her shoulder, so she slips back to put him into bed, and when she steps under the doorway Remus is half sitting up, and the look on his face, blank with a horrible brightness behind it, frightens her. She wants to say something, but the words hover at the base of her throat and cannot come out. And he does not see her, he is looking at the ceiling or at some phantoms invisible to her, and there is a candle on the table beside him, and the flickering light does odd things to his face.
“Remus,” she says at last. “Remus, I’m right here.”
He comes back from wherever he was – mostly. There is still that brightness, that horrible turmoil of brightness, somewhere behind his eyes. He does not speak, but he is travelling her face with his eyes.
She goes to her side of the bed and bends to set Teddy in his cradle, and then she slides onto the bed, comes in close, burrowing under the bedspread and finding the warmth of him, trying to fit into it. She says, “What are you thinking of?”
He looks at her, but his gaze seems to slide off, or straight through. “Things,” he says. “Everything. Oh God, I don’t like what’s in my head, and I can’t get rid of it. Dora, so many people are dead.”
There is a memorial inside of her head, a glistening expanse of stone lined over with names and, in the way of mind things, with faces to which she never learnt the names. A child, black-haired and open-mouthed, motionless in a Hogwarts corridor; a woman, whose last name was Wiggins, whom she used to pass by in halls and lifts at work. Her father (but she cannot think of him, of her father and death; to think of this is to approach the edge of a precipice, beneath which is a great and violent burning).
“Yes,” she says, and it does not seem right that she should sound so hollow when she is meant to be the comforter. “Oh yes.” And she wishes that with some part of her body or her soul she could align herself to fit into his gaps and chasms, and perhaps they would fit together like clasped hands and he would be the fullness for her empty spaces as well.
“Dora,” he says a little wildly, “They’re all gone,” and she doesn’t know if he is speaking of the boys he grew up with or the family she never knew or the scattered bodies in a smoking school, but she comes in closer anyway (oh, his empty spaces gape so much deeper than hers), so close that their hearts beat in tandem, and she can’t fill the holes inside of him but she can fill his arms, give the angles of his body no room to be empty.
“Hush,” she croons, as she does to Teddy, “hush, stop thinking, sleep.” And she holds him, and she hums an old lullaby to which she has forgotten the words. “You are not alone,” she says, “I’m here; sleep.”
After a long while, his head droops with sleep, and he lays beside her, tangled with her, and she holds him and listens to him breathe and tries to breathe herself.
When morning comes, pale behind the screen of clouds, when she opens her eyes in the still grey-gold of the room, he is watching her, and he smiles.