The 3am Kitchen

The dream was always the same: a great hall full of bodies, and him walking between them, and the worst part was never the ones he didn't recognize — it was the ones he did. Harry sat up in Ron's old room with his heart doing something terrible in his chest and his glasses halfway across the nightstand. Three months. Three months since the war ended and the nightmares had not once had the decency to let him sleep past three. He pulled on a jumper and went downstairs. The Burrow at night was a different creature than the Burrow in daylight. Without the noise — the de-gnomings and the Celestina Warbeck and Ginny's laugh coming in from the yard — it was just a house. Old timber and the smell of something that had been cooking since 1987. Harry had always loved it. Tonight it felt like it might hold him together. The kitchen light was on. Molly Weasley stood at the stove in her dressing gown, her back to him, and Harry had enough sense left to feel guilty about the hour before she turned around and looked at him with absolutely no surprise. "Sit down, love," she said. He sat. He watched her move around the kitchen with the efficiency of someone who had spent thirty years feeding large numbers of people in various states of emergency. A saucepan. Milk from the cold box. Something dark from a tin. Her hands never stopped moving. "You don't have to—" "I know I don't have to." She set a mug in front of him. The cocoa was thick and too sweet and perfect. "Drink it while it's warm." Harry wrapped both hands around the mug and breathed the steam in for a moment. Across from him, Molly settled into her chair with her own cup, and for a long time neither of them said anything. On the dresser behind her, Fred's Hogwarts photograph was propped between a potted herb and an old recipe book. Seven-year-old Fred, frozen in time, grinning at something outside the frame that Harry could never see. He'd noticed it the first night he came downstairs. He hadn't said anything. He didn't know what to say. "He used to do this too," Molly said, without looking at the photograph. "Come down in the night. Not nightmares — Fred never seemed to have nightmares, which I always thought must be a gift. He just couldn't sleep. Said his brain wouldn't stop." A pause. "He'd sit right where you're sitting and eat everything I had to offer and talk until nearly dawn." Harry stared into his cocoa. "What did you talk about?" "Everything. Nothing. Jokes, mostly. He was always trying out new ones." Her voice was steady in the way that took practice. "Some of them were very bad." "Yeah," Harry said. His throat felt strange. "Yeah, he told me one about a Hufflepuff and a broomstick in fourth year. I still don't understand the punchline." Something crossed Molly's face — grief and love so tangled together they'd become their own thing. "That one's intentional. He always said the confusion was the joke." Harry laughed. It surprised him — a small, startled sound — and then his eyes burned and he pressed the back of his wrist against them and Molly let him, didn't move, didn't reach for him, just sat there with her cup and was present in the way that was harder than anything. "I keep seeing them," he said. "In the dreams. Fred and Lupin and Tonks and — everyone. And I keep thinking I should have been faster, or smarter, or—" "Harry." Her voice was gentle and absolute. "Stop." He stopped. "You were seventeen years old," she said. "You did what no one else on earth could do. The people who are gone — they knew the risk. They made their choices." She looked at him over her mug. "Fred made his. I've had to learn to hold that." A log shifted in the old stove. Outside, an owl called once and went silent. "Does it get easier?" Harry asked. Molly considered this honestly. "It gets different," she said at last. "The shape of it changes. Some days it's just a weight you carry. Some days it catches you off guard and you're crying in the middle of buying onions and the greengrocer looks terrified." She smiled, small and tired. "But yes. Easier, eventually." Harry nodded. He believed her — not because it made him feel better but because she'd earned the authority to say it. They sat there a while longer, finishing their cocoa. Molly conjured biscuits. Harry ate four of them without noticing. At some point the talking tapered into comfortable quiet, and the quiet turned into the particular warmth of a kitchen that had held a lot of lives. When Harry finally went back upstairs, he slept without dreaming until eight. He didn't know if it was the cocoa. He thought it might have been the light.