It’s Sunday dinner at the Burrow that night, and after a few minutes’ consideration Harry decides to go. He doesn’t, some weeks. He’s got a standing invite—they all do—but it’s a casual thing, very much a e if you can and don’t worry if not” sort ofmitment, and, well.

It was different when Harry was with Ginny. Back then he felt like—oh, he doesn’t know. Like he’d finally earned his place at the Weasley’s table, maybe, however freely they’d offered it to him years before. He knows that’s a little fucked up. He knows they all, Molly especially, Ginny especially, would be horrified to hear that the reason he doesn’te to dinner every week is that he’s not sure, anymore, that it’s his place to be there. But he isn’t sure, and there’s always this voice in the back of his head when he goes too often, like when he eats too many meals in a row at Ron and Hermione’s. It says: nobody wants you here, Harry. It says: run along back to your cupboard.

Tonight, though, it’s been three weeks since his last one, so he figures he’s probably safe. He makes a side dish with broli and cheese and breadcrumbs—Molly never lets him cook anything once he actually arrives—and Apparates onto their front stoop moments after he pulls it out of the oven.

“Harry, dear!” Molly cries when she opens the door, beaming at him. She wraps him up in a hug the minute Arthur takes the steaming dish out of his hands, then pulls back, still holding onto Harry’s upper arms, to give him a critical once-over. “You’re too thin.”

“You always say that,” Harry says, laughing and extricating himself from her, unwinding his scarf.

“That’s because it’s always true,” Molly chides. She casts a Summoning Charm and a scone zooms into her hand. “Eat this,” she says, handing it to him, “and—oh, Ge, not the armchair!”

She’s gone in the blink of an eye, over to where Ge is snickering down at a chair that, while once a lovely shade of burgundy, seems to havee over all yellow and striped, and sprouted a pair of apparently flightless wings. Harry shakes his head, takes a bite of his scone, and goes to find Ron and Hermione.

It’s a nice night; he’s glad he came. Bill and Fleur have made an appearance—not unheard of, but rare—and little Victoire is a spitfire at five, happily running around in the back garden and poking curiously at her cousin Rose. Ge is here too, and Angelina, and Percy’s wife Penelope but not Percy himself, who is apparently chained to his desk until quarterly reportse out in April. Neville’s not shown up this week, but Ginny has, and Harry smiles at her from across the room; she smiles back.

The meal is as wonderful as always, the conversation raucous and hard to follow, and over dessert Harry remembers Malfoy’s crazy rant about Wizarding houses. And it’s not like Harry really believed any of it or anything, but, well. Malfoy did say to ask anyone, even Weasley. He figures asking the whole lot of them won’t hurt.

“Hey, Arthur,” Harry says casually, as they’re all milling around refilling their drinks and clearing plates, “you ever think about changing the floorplan of the house, now that it’s just you and Molly?”

Arthur smiles, releases a considering hum. “Oh, sure. Sure we have. Maybe we even will one of these days, but…” He throws Molly a loaded little look, exasperation and fondness all wrapped up together. “To be honest with you, Harry, we like the old place the way it is. And it does always seem such a lot of work, doing the maths and things to get the proportions right.”

“I don’t think it would be that hard,” Harry says. He looks out into the living room thoughtfully. “Just knock out that wall, maybe, and push into the room behind it, and then…”

He trails off, because every Weasley in the entire house is staring daggers at him.

“Harry,” Molly says, faintly, at last. “What a perfectly awful thing to say.”

“Er,” says Harry.

“It’s not his fault,” Arthur says hastily. “The lad was raised Muggle, they do that sort of thing all the time. Remolding, they call it.”

“Remodeling,” Hermione corrects, in the long-suffering tones of a woman who has had probably a thousand conversations about electricity with her father-in-law.

“Sure, sure,” says Arthur. “Remodeling, yes. Anyway, apparently it’s perfectly normal, verymon. I’ve heard that some Muggles will even buy a house just to knock it down and build another on the very same spot!”

“What?” says Ron.

“But that’s barbaric!” says Ginny.

“Even I wouldn’t go that far,” says Ge. “Charm the walls to ooze slime, sure, that’s hilarious, but knock them down? Knock a whole place down? Don’t know how you could do it and not feel like a murderer.”

“I guess, if the house didn’t have any magic,” Bill starts, and stops, shuddering. “Eurgh. No, I still don’t think I could stomach it.”

“This is a very disturbing discussion to 'ave in front of my child, 'Arry,” Fleur tells him. “I 'ope we will not 'ear such 'orrible things from you in the future.”

Harry stares at them all, boggled. Angelina and Penelope, who were both raised at least partially Muggle, look like they have some sympathy for him, but Hermione—who, of all people, should understand—is giving him a look just as stern as the rest of them.

“You could have avoided that entire unpleasant experience if you’d just read Hogwarts, A History, that’s all I’m saying,” she tells him primly a few minutes later, when she, Harry and Ron have settled into chairs by the fire. Harry, who is still catching horrified glances from the now slightly more subdued Weasley clan, has taken the one Ge altered as an act of unspoken penance. Every few minutes the cushion seems to swell a bit under his bottom; he thinks he has maybe six minutes left before it lets out a truly enormous fart. “There’s a whole chapter about the nature of magical structures. Did you know—”

“That any magic that’s been around long enough develops a personality?” Harry says. He takes a long sip of his wine. “Yeah, you know, I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.”

“Well, yes, of course, but it’s not just that,” Hermione says. “It’s—with magical dwellings, it all gets a bitplicated. Generations of wizards and witches live in them, feeding their magic, feeding off their magic; eventually, it all bes kind of an amalgam, not just of the house’s magic and personality, but of everyone who’s lived there before.”

“Look, it’s like this,” Ron says, correctly interpreting Harry’s look of blank confusion. “In my old bedroom on the second floor there’s that window that sticks, right?”

“Sure,” says Harry cautiously, not sure where this is going.

“Well,” Ron says, “that’s because when I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep with the window shut, because SOMEBODY,” he raises his voice pointedly, “told me that I’d suck all the air out of the room in my sleep and suffocate.”

“Sorry,” says Bill, in passing, handing Rose over to Ron and not sounding apologetic at all. “You snored really loud. You needed to pay.”

“Your uncle was a terrible brother,” Ron tells Rose in a sing-song voice. “The most terrible brother of all.”

“Hey!” calls Ge, sounding wounded. “That’s an insult to me! That’s an insult to Fred’s memory! Take it back or apologize to the great Fred in the sky!”

Ron groans; apologizing to the great Fred in the sky is a more involved and humiliating process every time Ge makes someone do it, but nobody argues, both because it seems like pretty fitting tribute and because they all like to imagine that, somewhere, Fred’s really enjoying it. “Fine. You were all terrible brothers, does that make you happy?”

“Ickle Ronniekins, you do love me,” Ge sighs, and goes out into the back garden with Victoire and Bill to build snowmen.

“Anyway,” Ron says, shifting Rose on his lap. “I had to keep the window cracked, so for ages I’d just sort of use stuff to prop it up, sticks and rocks and things, whatever I could find. But after a while the house got the idea, and after that the window was always cracked. Even when it was freezing, or pouring rain, it would stay open—but the old girl wouldn’t let any cold air or water or nasty bugs or anything in, just the noise from outside.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Hermione says. She throws Ron an approving smile, and Ron winks at her before he busies himself with entertaining their daughter. “Because the thing is, Harry, in a hundred years that window will still be open all the time, just letting sound in, and whoever lives here then won’t know about Ron or the trick his brothers played on him or anything else. They’ll just know the house has a weird quirk where it doesn’t like to shut that window, and that’ll be what’s true. And for every magical structure there’s hundreds or even thousands of little things like that—they’re all greater than the sum of their parts, and that’s especially true the older they get, and the more people who’ve lived in them.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Harry says, keeping his voice low to avoid triggering another round of Weasley wrath. “I mean, if that were true, then—I mean, for god’s sake, Hogwarts—”

“Would have a personality so well developed it could choose sides and fight in a war?” Hermione says pointedly, and Harry’s mouth snaps shut.

He thinks about Grimmauld Place, sitting cold and shuttered after housing centuries upon centuries of Blacks, just Kreacher and that mad old painting of Walburga rattling around inside. He thinks about Sirius—the last of his line—finallying home, and of the way he’d hated the place, treated it like a prison, let Buckbeak piss and shit in it, wished he were anywhere else. He thinks about how even that must have been better for the old pile than Harry, not an ounce of the family blood in him, moping around and feeling sick, defeated, empty; feeling like he’d gladly trade every last brick and floorboard for just a minute more with any one of the people he’d lost who had, at one point or another, walked those dusty halls.

Harry thought, when he sold Grimmauld

本站無廣告，永久域名（fanyan.cc）