Gen Fic: The Bitter In The Sweet

[clovenbuttercup]

Title: The Bitter In The Sweet
Character(s): Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger
Pairing: None (Gen fic)
Rating: T
Setting: Post-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Disclaimer: Characters you recognise belong to J. K. Rowling.
Summary: More often than we'd like, there's bitter in the sweet.

It’s a funny thing, life.

It takes longer than they'd thought it would before they can make real progress at living again, to take the time to process their emotions about what’s happened – the War is over – and mourn the cost of so many lives. They discover it’s almost impossible to decide what hurts more: the fact people they care for are dead – or the fact they themselves are here, still alive, instead of them.

Ron, through Fred’s death, has a more personal understanding of what it is to be Harry now than he had ever wanted. Hermione has flashbacks to the skirmish at Malfoy Manor and nightmares where her mind breaks under Bellatrix’s Cruciatus, and because of it finds herself unable to look Neville in the eye.

Time and its passing seem to lose any conscious meaning. Days go by that feel like weeks; weeks go by that feel like days.

It’s only when somebody notices the gibbous moon hanging in the sky above them, soon to be the first full moon since the War, that a bittersweet fact occurs to them. This will be the first time since Greyback’s bite decades ago that Remus Lupin won’t suffer through a full moon. Yet all three of them would do anything to have him, and Tonks, with them alive and happy. They try not to think of how Teddy’s circumstances mirror Harry’s, and Harry vows that Teddy’s childhood will be full of the laughter, love, and happiness that were missing from his own.

Harry will be the godfather to Teddy that Sirius never had the chance to be for Harry.

It’s funny, sometimes, how things work out.