Lights Passing in the Darkness

The world comes back slowly, in little fits and starts. Whistling noises, half heard and half felt, brush past the edge of your consciousness. Bursts of warmth, flashes of light, increasing in intensity with every passing second. You've been floating in an oh-so-pleasant haze for so long that it feels like forever. So whence are these feelings coming?

What...?

You can feel something now, a suffuse chill across your chest, your arms. It is a rigid, unforgiving cold that that does not ebb and flow like the other distant sensations in your mind.

Where...?

They begin to coalesce, all of these feelings and images and sounds and touches. And as the sensations return, you begin to realise: you aren't dreaming anymore. This is life. This is the nightmare. That's when the pain begins.

Oh, Merlin, it hurts....

Slowly, despite the agony, you start to collect yourself, reaching out in your mind to feel arms, legs, fingers, and toes, trying to decide by sensation alone how severely you've been injured. Of course, that's inconclusive. Half of you seems to burn with pain, and the rest is numb.

Numb...why can't I feel my chest? What's happened to me?

With a supreme effort, you open an eyelid, millimetre by millimetre, wincing as the shocking brightness of the twilight adds a whole new source of pain. Since all you can discern is a brownish blur, you repeat the process with the other eye. The blur coalesces into, of all things, a small branch, its small leaves browned and twisted. Beyond it, everything else is blurred into an indistinct mishmash, but it's enough, like a candle flaring to light in your mind.

Of course....

Now you understand. In a flash, you remember how this came to be.

Apparating with the rest to the Hogwarts gates, you were so frightened that you would have sworn that your stomach was twisted sideways, and yet you straightened up and did What Had To Be Done. After all, you knew this was to be the decisive moment, the battle to end the war once and for all, one way or another. No-one could face that without a shudder.

Can one ever escape the shadow of one's parents, one's role models? It's hardly the sort of question that brooks trying to answer when times are so dire, when life and death are separated by the width of a wand's core.

Nonetheless, it's the only thing you can think about, even as the enemy began to Apparate around you, and the battle was joined. But for your parents, and the cause in which they were swept up, your life could have been completely different. Many times, alone at night, you've imagined what could have been, what might have changed for the better.

Some people are fortunate enough to have lots of parental figures in their life, watching out for them, being there to help them make the most difficult decisions, just being a shoulder on which to lean. Not you, though. You've only had one father figure who was really present in your life, and he was wrenched away from you, one more casualty of this unremitting war.

Despite your love, there are times that you feel such fury, hating him for abandoning you. If you were willing to be honest with yourself, you hate him the most for what his death did to you - for his death inexorably sealed the path along which you now trod. The pain of that burns worse even than the sharpest pains from your scar.

And your mother did her best to protect you, too - in the end she even sacrificed her life for you. But that means that she's gone now, and she can't protect you any more.

No one can.

You're dimly aware of occasional shouts and bangs in the distance, but not far away, somehow. The battle is clearly not over yet. But wait, that's not right, because...

Voldemort. Voldemort is dead. Of course he was, you were standing not three feet away and staring straight at him. Another sharp shake of your head to try to clear the cobwebs. You'll just have to ignore the pain; you need to think clearly, and that's more important than a headache.

Voldemort is dead. Then, it's over. All of it. The infamous prophecy about which The Daily Prophet couldn't shut up, the terror of what he could do to the ones you loved, all of it, it's finished. The sounds are fading into the distance.

Now you can remember. Staring at Voldemort as the green curse slammed straight into his chest. He didn't just fall, though. Someone that evil, you suppose, doesn't even die like everyone else. He was still for a moment, and then a...a...what?

An explosion. That was it. It must have been like the curse Wormtail used to blow away that street full of Muggles. You remember now, the sudden heat on your face, the sudden weightlessness, your limbs flailing in thin air, and everything going into slow motion as the ground and tree roots came rushing toward you. You almost remember a crunch at the end, and then everything went black. The next thing you remember is slowly coming back to the present.

I was unconscious. Damn, that probably means a concussion. How long have I been out?

Long enough, you decide, hence the numbness: the ground is cold, unforgiving, as one would expect for this time of year. You roll up onto your side, rub your face. Long enough for a bloody nose to dry.

Great, just great. What else might be damaged?

Of course, that's of secondary importance right now, because Voldemort is gone, but you're pretty sure he's not. Of course, what's a petty schoolboy rivalry when you've both watched the Darkest wizard in the modern history of the Wizard World incinerate, but still. You have to move, at least. You gather your legs under you, pushing up with your knees. OH GODS! That's almost more pain than you can take. But it doesn't matter. He's still out there, and somehow you know.

Then you look up, and see a figure. Your vision is mostly clear, so that's something. Definitely a person. There's a lot of smoke, mist, fog, you're not really sure what it is, but there's definitely a person in the middle of it. No, it can't be, not already, not now.

It is. Of course it is. No more time for remonstrations.

'Malfoy!'

'Potter...' You realize the trademark Malfoy sneer isn't there. Just the shaken hiss of someone who's seen far too much death, and knows it. A Malfoy who's staring at the one living person who knows the torment of that sixth year task that nearly killed him.

The figure is now charging over, ignoring anyone and anything else, because the schoolboy rivalry does still matter, somehow, all the rage of it, the knowledge of what transpired on the Astronomy Tower that night with Dumbledore (even the thought of his name makes your chest constrict) the Death Eaters and Snape, now dead. In the heat of all of that emotion, even after the elimination of Voldemort, Malfoy is all that the Saviour of the Wizarding World, as the papers are sure to put it, can think about.

He's close now, the figure, and you see the tangled wreckage of hair singed by a dozen hexes, robes torn half to shreds by combat crouches, dirt, blood, Merlin only knows what else all over them. His wand is upraised.

Wand. Wand. Where's my....

Damn. It's still on the ground. You have to find...

Too late.

Suddenly everything else seems still, as if you've fallen out of space and time. Nothing else but this, staring into the face of the person whom you suppose is your deepest enemy left, now probably just two metres away.

Too late. The irony is bitter; you survived the death of Voldemort, the Dark Lord himself, and now you're completely unarmed against someone who, like you, is little more than a boy. Defenseless.

Those eyes, at once cold and full of fire, bore into your face. You can see the rage at what you took from him, what you destroyed in his life.

There's more than that in those eyes, you realize, another set of emotions dueling with the hatred. His head cocks slightly, almost...contemplative, perhaps? Remembering the events of the last six years, wondering what might have been different, if that extended hand had been grasped. Regrets, perhaps, and remembrances of those moments when you saw each other truly vulnerable, in the Forbidden Forest, in Myrtle's bathroom, tears shed and words unsaid.

For an insane instant, you consider it too. No one could deny he's attractive, in a completely-unlike-you sort of way. And you both swing the same way, if the rumours are true. And you've certainly spent enough time chasing each other, both on the Quidditch pitch and in the halls. In some ways, you've been each other's best motivators. And in the deepest recesses of your mind, you recall moments that you looked at him, really looked at him, for just a moment longer than absolutely necessary. You can see the dreams, deeper than any nightmare, that you never revealed, even to your closest friends. You let yourself say it for the first time: He's beautiful, despite the war, despite everything.

In a flash, it occurs to you: you're both pawns. Fine, you've both done raids, played key roles in the Inner Circles of Dark and Light, but you're both tools of the movement. At the heart of it, you're just boys, fighting and dying at the behest of leaders now dead. His parents, my parents, they're all gone. We've both watched friends die.... A realisation strips away all of the bluster and years of assumptions and pent-up rage: We're the same. Dark Marks or lightning-bolt scars, you've both been seared by the magic of the most vicious wizard in the history of the British Isles. You can see it in his eyes, there, beneath everything: the war-weary look of someone who's seen too much; damaged goods. I'm damaged, too, and you astound yourself by admitting just how flawed and hurt you are, and just how much you need someone to understand, to help you. You never want to admit to needing help.

All of this runs through your mind in the veritable blink of an eye, not that you're blinking, but rather staring into eyes whose sheer depth you've never really contemplated. The gaze bearing down on you softens slightly, and is it possible that he's considering.... Does he see it too? If you look beyond everything you've assumed about what he does and why he does it, then everything suddenly has a new slant: smiles, glares, postures, barbs, you can see more, the body of the cruel experiences of life shaping those moments. The fog in your head seems to vanish as you consider it; it's amazing how life-and-death events, moments of Lumos-wanded wizards passing along the dark roads of life, focus the mind. Despite everything, I could forgive him. The thought slips in unbidden, and for an instant, it echoes in the face of the boy facing you.

And then it's gone. The pity, the regrets, sink into the background, and up comes the wand, now pointed directly between your eyes. His hand is shaking oh-so-slightly, you can see, but the eyes are now quite steady, burning again.

Say something! Do something! but you don't know what and now there's no time and it's too late and -

A sharp breath escapes his lips, a vicious hiss of feelings made physical, and you know there's nothing more to say, and that he has nothing to say either.

Try something, anything, channel the inner Slytherin that you know is there! Find a way, tell him....

'AVADA -'

'Harry, please -'

'-- KEDAVRA!'

And suddenly there's a noise, and everything is bright green, but all you can see is the green of those eyes, and for a fraction of an instant you can see a tear there, and -

Finis.

Author's notes: For the truly curious, here are a couple of details that inform the back story of the plot, but weren't given more than an oblique reference in the text so as to preserve the ambiguity that drives the story. The last battle takes place during the winter of what would have been Harry's seventh year, after the Horcruxes have been disposed of. Lucius Malfoy remained a loyal Death Eater, and was killed on a kidnapping attempt against Harry Potter. Unfortunately, he killed Ron Weasley first. Lucius's death was the first time that Harry used the Avada Kedavra. Narcissa Malfoy, whose mothering side we saw for the first time in HBP, was killed thereafter by Death Eaters after attempting to find a way to protect Draco from having to fight in the war. Guilt about failing Draco and killing Dumbledore pushed Severus Snape to suicide during the summer.