C'est Ce Qui Reste

"Are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?"
(William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.7, ln. 106-107)

There are flower petals on the ground. Scattered and white.

Is it summer? Spring? It feels like winter.

There are flower petals on the ground, white remnants of something once perfect, strewn, forgotten, left to blow in the wind. You can feel the petals under your fingertips even though your hands are in your pockets, clutched around a wand and a dry piece of parchment. They are cool and soft, like satin at first touch on a cold day. You can smell them, something faint and far away, magnolias or gardenias perhaps, echoing of the sweet smoke left by pleasant, jaded memories.

That's all you have left. Smoke and dry parchment and fallen flower petals.

The sun is breaking over the horizon, casting a white light over the fading night, molding like alabaster around two long, gray shadows.

"Draco?"

"Harry?"

His side has just lost the war, but he doesn't sound upset.

"What will you do after this?" You see his shadow shrug. "You can come home with me."

He laughs, and you wonder if you've ever heard him laugh before. Like this, meaning. Open and unrestrained, without any worries or fears. The flower petals seem to laugh along with him.

"I don't think that's going to be possible," he says, and you can hear the smile in his words.

You don't ask him why not.

He says quietly, "I'd like to stay just here, I think. Just like this."

Your eyes close.

There's a moment of silence, where it's just you and him and the morning light. His arm brushes yours, and his skin is smooth and warm. So impossibly warm. The scent of flower petals makes your head spin, but in a good way. In such a good way. You sigh and he takes a breath, hesitating as if to say something, but he only exhales the next second.

The flower petals that are not really under your fingertips are warmer now. Softer.

A light breeze blows, disrupting the gently sleeping flower petals, and it dawns on you, suddenly, that you never want this moment to end.

But it already has.

Your eyes open, and there is only one shadow.

Your hands clench, extinguishing the soft feel of the flower petals. The parchment in your pockets crinkles loudly and the wand threatens to snap. Frowning, you remove both items from your pockets. The parchment is dry and stained, words blotted out by black spots. The wand is holly, eleven inches. Not yours.

And you remember.

The crumbled parchment falls from your hands, and you remember.

The garden. The faint smell of flowers. The instructions, written on a piece of dry parchment that only you are meant to see. The struggle. The flash of green in the darkness. The silence.

Harry Potter.

You look at the flower petals, scattered, but exactly as they were.

Harry Potter.

Slowly, you stoop down and grasp a single, white petal. It feels just as you knew it would. Cool and smooth, and even a little wet. Like-- No, not like anything. The feeling of flower petals under your skin is like nothing else you can image. You grasp another, and then another, and then another.

You gather the flower petals from the ground because you have won the war.

You gather the flower petals from the ground because Harry Potter is dead and you were the one to kill him, in a garden at night in a snowfall of white petals.

You gather the flower petals from the ground because they were once perfect, and because Harry Potter is never coming home with you, and because this is all you have left, smoke and dry parchment and these fallen flower petals.

Finis