Who: Harry & Lily (canon) What: coping with James being gone. When: Wednesday. Where: Lily and James's room Warnings: saddddd.
There was a very large part of Harry that, as awful as it would be for him, wished his mum had gone home with his dad. She hadn't liked being separated from him by city, and his dad had been miserable without her here; he didn't want his mum to have to endure the same thing. But his mother seemed determined to stay for him, which was making him feel very guilty, but was also impossibly hard to argue with.
He had known that having them here wouldn't last, any more than it had lasted when he'd seen them in the Mirror of Erised, or in the graveyard, or in the forest. It wasn't any better for him to try to hold onto them now than it was when he'd masochistically let the dementor affect him just to hear them again. If they left now, he'd miss them, but the truth was that he was accustomed to missing them. The fact that he'd had them here at all, actually gotten to meet them, gotten a nickname from his dad, gotten to play Quidditch with his dad and dance around the kitchen and learn brewing from his mum, that was more time than he ever should have had with them. It was still wrong, on some level, for them to be spending time here together at all.
And yes, when they went back, they only had a few years left before they died. But there were good things waiting for them, too. Their wedding, for one. Their chance to meet Harry in the right order, as a baby. Other chances to live and love before everything fell apart, chances Harry was sure they'd taken, even if he didn't quite know what they were.
There were always reasons to leave this place and reasons to want to stay. That was what he had told Abigail, and he meant it. More and more lately, Harry's reasons to stay were about people needing him here and also about wanting to fix this place. He had tried to get into Alpha on the hope that he might be able to do whatever it was they were trying to use this place for, if there even was a larger reason, and then send everyone else home. Even if everyone he knew left him here, that reason to stay would still be there. He had no intention of leaving until he'd found out how to make this place right.
If anything, having the people he loved here was probably distracting him from that purpose, but he was never going to wish them gone for his sake. It was his mother's sake, and the others', that really mattered.
He tried the door to his mum's room, hoping it was unlocked. It was, and he stepped inside, moving towards her immediately to pull her into a hug. It hurt his arms, but he didn't care; he wasn't paying a single ounce of attention to his injuries right now. "Mum."