And Sometimes When You Fall, You Fly

He felt so very tired. Leaning his head back against the cold stone, Harry stared at the ceiling blankly. It had been a long time since he'd had a decent night's sleep and the hours of running on empty had worn him ragged.

The lack of sleep wasn't the real problem, being secondary to emotional void. He couldn't close his eyes without seeing the dead and the dying anyway. There were so many.

Sirius had only been a prologue.

Hermoine was the next to fall. The feeling of helplessness had possessed Harry at that point and never let go, mo matter how many others he'd saved.

Lupin and the Weasley twins were among the first to die in Death Eater attacks. Tonks too. Snape, revealed as a traitor, had been butchered violently at a colossal Death Eater meeting; the Enemy had strewn pictures charmed to speak and depicting his bloody death all over Diagon Alley before the Order could confiscate them. Wizards and Witches! The Dark Lord, honor to his name, has finally come to liberate Our People from the disease of Muggles, who for too long have taken what is Ours. In the Year of the Snake Our Lord will reign and glory shall anoint His victory. Let this be a lesson to all who oppose the salvation of the Wizarding Race! Severus Snape, traitor to His cause and informer to the Enemy, executed for treason on today, January 24^th, Year of the Snake...And oh Merlin, the screams that came after that. Another sound effect for Harry's nightmare-scape.

And the list of the dead went.

The obituaries got longer and longer. Harry had checked daily for familiar faces, and far too often found them.

Anthony Goldstein, recently orphaned, the Brocklehurst family, and about twelve others at a Floo Hub, killed in an ambush as they tried to escape the hell British Wizarding World had become.

Dean, Seamus, the Creeveys along with about fifty others at a Cannons-Harpies match. The Daily Prophet had run pictures of the Dark Mark floating over the pitch, stunning the wizard population and finally sinking home the idea that the second war had truly begun.

The Wire buzzed constantly, international news as bad as local. Western and Eastern Europe, Egypt, Turkey, even America reported attacks daily. Ten dead and twenty wounded. Fifteen dead, five wounded. Thirty dead, no survivors. And on.

Then the battles started in earnest. Their side won as often as the other. Temporary stalemate was no comfort. It only meant they weren't winning, and what was Harry alive for, if not winning?

Seventeen years old. He fought like someone twice his age, and became an icon, a legend in the ranks.

The skies turned dark with magical energy, seeping like poison through the atmosphere. Muggle news talked on and on about volcanic ash, terrorist attacks, and meteorite sightings, tactfully ignoring the more disturbing facts. Like a small town in Wales had gone missing entirely, down to the last sheep. Or the 'bio-terrorist attack' on the Tube that killed fifty people. Footage was filmed (yet never run on the air) depicting victims with bubbling green burns on ninety percent of their bodies, shrieking in pain.

Harry had talked to Charlie Weasley, who had been one of the Order to arrive moments after the Tube incident. The hollow look in his blue eyes as he tried to tell Harry how he'd found a baby lying on the tracks-still breathing-could have made it-could have...

Too much death. Too much pain. It numbed Harry. Each death was just another death. Keep fighting. Don't think. Don't think.

Until Ron.

Ron had hurt the most.

They were fighting side by side on a field outside Malfoy Manor-one of the strongholds for the Enemy. He had fallen next to Harry, hit by a rebounding Unforgivable, hand clutching his chest in agony as he dropped to his knees. Harry had taken his head into his lap and begged him to hold on, cried out promises of salvation if he would just hold on, goddammit. Ron had opened his eyes, and Harry had looked at him desperately, recklessly hopeful.

"You'll be alright," he had choked, squeezing Ron's hand tightly.

Ron had shaken his head slightly and smiled once, glints of sunshine breaking through his clouded eyes ever so briefly. His freckled hand had squeezed Harry's back in a gesture that spoke more words about love and loyalty than his blue-tinged lips could manage.

A half sob had torn its way from his lips as Ron had gasped, and lay still in Harry's arms.

Eyes blurred with tears, Harry had stumbled to his feet, wand in hand. Anyone who had fought beside Godric Gryffindor would have recognized the look in his green eyes. Rage that should have made him sloppy was funneled and molded into skilled determination that would have shattered the enemy's ranks like delicate china. And it had, for a brief while, and victory had seemed feasible.

Feasible. Tantalizing. And ultimately, a lie.

The Order was grossly outnumbered, even though their ranks had swelled in recent months. It had taken far too long for the reality of war to force their side to action, whereas the Enemy had been working late and furious for decades. Dumbledore had said as much before slipping off, like Ron, in Harry's arms. It's not your fault, and he'd patted Harry's hand comfortingly.

But it was. My fault, Harry mouthed over and over, my fault, my fault. It was a mantra to pass the hours by. At last alone, in a cell that was dark but for one window. Locked in a tower, on an island, far away from anyone left who could conceivably save him and deny the Dark Lord his prize.

Not that there was anyone left to do the saving.

It was a relief, in a way. No one left with expectations. No one left alive to remember his broken promises. No one except himself, that is.

And the pain? It was there, it was always there. He'd been hurting for so long he couldn't remember what it felt like to not have the dull ache pounding his chest in two.

Time didn't heal. It made natural what was unnatural, and somewhere in the back of his mind Harry thought it was terribly ironic, the whole thing. So many times he'd been told love was enough. He was alive, after all, wasn't he?

It wasn't enough. It would never have been enough, and he was vaguely angry at the fact that no one had warned him, not once.

Love. Hate. Sometimes the same thing.

In the middle of a fierce battle, curses and countercurses flying around him, Harry had spun around to come face to face with Draco Malfoy. The bane of his schoolyard existence, that sneering mouth and cold gray eyes looked blankly at him for a moment before recognition made his eyes fly wide open in shock. They froze, wands suspended, close enough to touch. The battlefield stripped away and they were back on the grassy lawn at Hogwarts, children again for a brief instant before jerking back to reality.

For some reason-Harry never could figure out just exactly why-they turned back around again, mutually ignoring the other's presence under the pretense of fighting something else more urgent. Maybe it was because petty dislikes didn't belong here-the only casualties in their mini-war had been dignity and more often, pride. Fists had been replaced by wands and blows by Killing Curses, and instead of a schoolboys' hate dark magic crackled like lightening around them and it all seemed wrong somehow. Enemies before, they couldn't be enemies here.

Whatever it was, the moment to consummate their nearly seven yearlong fight was passed over without incident.

Harry had found Draco's name among the dead the next week, someone else having done what he was unable or unwilling to do.

Remembering was like swimming through dark waters shrouded in fog. Nothing was logical, it seemed, and if all that had happened held some form of logic, Harry wanted none of it.

Blinking to clear his head, Harry stood up in his cell and moved to the window that looked over the ocean. He leaned out, gazing out over the water. The wind blew the hair back from his face and flushed his sallow cheeks rosy. His glasses, charmed never to break or fall off, reflected the setting rose-red sun in duplicate as it slowly dipped closer and closer to the sparkling line of the horizon.

The light hurt his eyes. He felt so very tired and so very heavy. His arms felt like lead weights at his sides, his head drooping despite his very best efforts to hold it up. He felt detached, no longer a boy-man with memories and a past. Merely a ghost of a person, something that once was but is no more. He didn't care that he didn't care, a complete absence of feeling.

The first attempt to lift himself onto the narrow ledge was sloppy and he slid back down, dirty fingernails scrabbling on the weathered-smooth stone. He fared better second time around, stiff muscles aching under the sudden use.

Balancing carefully, Harry inched onto the outer ledge and then stood, pressing his palms against the wall to keep from plummeting the five? No, six stories to the rocks below.

He inhaled. Fresh, sweet salty air that would have reminded him of holidays at the sea and therefore have hurt him, if he could remember and feel at the same time.

Pain and fear and death seemed ages behind him whilst he stood there, eyes trained on the blazing horizon. The dying sun burned everything but the wind, sky, and water out of his mind.

Harry clung to the wall, wedging his fingertips between the cracks as the wind tried to dislodge him in whistling gusts, making his shirt flap sharply and trousers cling to his frame.

Wind. Memory.

He remembered a windy fall day when he had ridden his Firebolt over the Lake, flying so low he was skimming the water with his finger tips, face turned up to the wind, eyes shut, not having to see or hear or think. Just being, raw and free and happy.

He was too numb to be raw, and doubted he'd ever be happy again. But free...

Freedom.

Harry smiled and shut his eyes. Let go of the wall.

And fell.