Giving Dirt and Water

GIVING DIRT AND WATER

The dank, musty smell ill-befitted the grandeur of the Hall.

Black, tattered cloak slowly swishing, he made his way, slowly and purposefully, towards the front of the hall where he would have sat with them.

They, of course, had stayed back to tend to Dumbledore, who had suffered minor injuries in the accident. Those shallow wounds were hardly enough to prevent the old man from going today, but the truth, much more than his cuts and bruises, was far too difficult for him to bear. It was the truth that kept old Dumbledore at home.

Looking up at the ceiling, the man in the tattered cloak saw the sky shedding more misty rain, like that which he carried in his own right hand. It took a great effort not to imagine all that sharp wetness falling through his robes onto his skin, rewetting the burns and cuts, and making him ache as he had ached when he had awakened after the accident.

Perhaps the Hogwarts Express had not been the best means of escape. In retrospect, the tattered man cursed himself over and over for suggesting the use of the train for escape. It was far too visible, far too unprotected. Far too easy for someone to curse the railroad tracks and send the steaming scarlet train into a shallow gully.

It was from the gully that he had taken the handful of fertile soil that he now carried with him.

As he heard a muffled clang accompanying what must have been the closing of the great doors, his mind raced. Was he locked in? Fate had caught him at last, perhaps?

Danger, Fate.

Not that any of it mattered any more.

The man with the tattered soul looked up again, searching for the moon, but it wasn't there; the rain was still misting down from the dense cloud-cover.

A niggling thought half-hid in the heavy shadows of his mind. A quote that seemed long forgotten, yet it had only been a few months since he had been asked to choose a graduation quote.

"Reach for the moon. If you fall short, you will end up among the stars."

Graduation. Being surrounded by friends and then setting off to find a place for himself in the grand wizarding world.

It would have been today, were it not for the circumstances that had transpired to require him to do this painful duty.

He returned his gaze to the contents of his hands. The earth and the collected rain. He slowly realized that his graduation quote was a lie; if you fall short, you're body and spirit are broken from the fall back to earth, just as Ron and Hermione's spirits had been broken by the countless days and nights of fear and uncertainty.

At last reaching what once was the front teachers' table in the Great Hall, his head throbbed and his poor tattered spirit sustained another painful tear to the coarse material of which it was composed.

Slowly, reluctantly, painfully, Harry Potter bowed low to the all-too-familiar serpentine figure of Lord Voldemort.

"We of the wizarding world present you with dirt and water.

"We surrender."