you raise me up || harry potter

chapter 33

»»————-　song:　————-««

lemon boy

★ by cavetown ★

❝ there once was a bitter sweet man 
and they called him Lemon Boy...

he was growing in my garden 
and i pulled him out by his hair,
like a weed

but like weeds do, 
he only came and grew back again...

so i figured this time i might as well let him be. ❞

♢ ♢ ♢

The kitchen would have been deafeningly silent if it weren't for the humming of the refrigerator. Harry stared at the swirling pattern of the wooden table in front of him for what seemed like an eternity, one hand fiddling with the toy army man out of sight.

Snape finally cleared his throat. "You... have questions." 

Of course Harry had questions. Millions of them, zig-zagging through his mind. Try as he might, he couldn't commit the entire conversation (Argument? One sided screaming match?) to memory, and only jagged fragments of the whole incident cut through his brain occasionally. They were horrible and confusing and bitter. 

Which one to ask first? What could Harry possibly say?

Suddenly, something jerked at Harry's gut. It was such a strong feeling of dread that it almost hurt, and it was then that Harry realized: 

He did not want to know. 

He didn't want to hear what Snape had to say, under any circumstances. He was afraid of what he would hear, of what he would learn. His parents lived in the idyllic part of his mind, where he imagined them falling in love and laughing and loving as Harry grew up. He did not want to shatter that. It was all he had left of them.

What Snape and Petunia said in that living room, the awful things they said to each other... it only then occurred to Harry that his parents had lives before he was born. They had a past. There were things that Harry would never, ever know about them. He didn't want to know them. It cast a shadow on them, over the one that Voldemort had already cast. 

I buried my sister and where were you? Where were you when your precious Lily died?

The implications of that was too much for Harry to bear. He had never thought about who held the funeral for his parents; it must have been Petunia, the only living relative. He refused to think about the second question, what it could mean.

You were all she could talk about—Sev this, Sev that—until that Potter boy came along. And then you weren't even second best anymore, you were nothing. You were nothing to her. Stopped mentioning you, as if you'd disappeared.

Harry stopped breathing. He stopped thinking. 

He refused to think ill of his parents.

"No, sir," he said. "I don't have questions."

Snape stared. "You don't... have questions," he repeated slowly, eyes clouded with disbelief.

Harry shook his head. He pushed back his chair and slowly made his way to the stairs.

Snape didn't stop him.

♢

Harry wouldn't have thought it possible initially, but it was actually not very difficult to move past what had occurred at Number 4. Not as difficult as he thought, anyway. It was simple: if Harry stopped thinking about it, pretended like it had never happened and didn't matter at all, the memory soon faded away until it was just, perhaps, a wisp of a dream.