Dulce Et Decorum Est

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hands of the other for neither can live while the other survives..."

Prologue

Once upon a time, there was a prophecy. It was housed with all the world's other prophecies, in a room filled with rows upon rows of shelves. The room was a direct contradiction of the room which lay opposite, home to the mystery of fate. So long as the two rooms existed, there would be no reconciling their individual mysteries, and therefore they would remain unsolved.

This particular prophecy was only one of many mysteries, kept in the Ministry of Magic's specific department for such inexplicabilities; it was an unfathomable thing, born of Sibyll Trelawney. As she was so often without merit or magical inspiration, Sibyll's prophecy came unannounced. It involved two young boys not yet much past their first birthdays, and decided in one late and dusky evening both their fates and their futures. The same half-opacity and half-translucence of an insect's wing, the prophecy - like all prophecies - had no specifics.

Like all prophecies, it fell upon unexpected ears, cursing those who heard it with too little knowledge and too much destruction.

The elder of the two boys - by one day - was a remarkably large baby, sandy-haired and blue-eyed and delightfully good-natured. His name was Neville Longbottom. His cheeks were pink, his wrists pudgy, his laughter infectious, and his parents, Frank and Alice Longbottom, loved him without parallel. For a long time - as long as Neville had been alive, in fact - his grandmother had affectionately compared his head to a pumpkin. This comparison was always followed by chucking him under his double-chin and cooing as he wriggled delightedly to the attention.

The younger of the two boys was born on July 31^st to James and Lily Potter, formerly Lily Evans. Of average weight and head size, Harry gave his mother no further pain or trouble after demanding to be born during the first course at an expensive restaurant. Immediately, his parents fell in love with him, and from the moment he arrived home they began to spoil him. They did so with the help of James' best friend Sirius Black, with the amusement of James' other best friend Peter Pettigrew, and with the occasionally interested awkwardness of James' third best friend, Remus Lupin.

Harry was born with green eyes and a tuft of black hair, squinting and silent.

"Watch out," Sirius had told the beaming father, "he has your hair."

"Your son, we regret to inform you," Remus had added, "should be considered armed and dangerous." His smile was relieved.

The prophecy did not implicate directly either of the two. It did, however, insinuate. There was no part of the prophecy, either, that even pretended to be indicative of one boy more than the other. It fell to luck, then, that Neville Longbottom was chosen.

All plans had been made to protect young Harry Potter and his family, for the Potter bloodline was far more impressive than the Longbottom. Unexpected and sudden, the Longbottom household was attacked. It was the action of a man, who went those days by the name Voldemort. Wrought of much madness and warped vision, he believed it would turn the tides of war in his favor. Reckless, convinced and uninformed, as after all it was a plan brought about by prophecy, Voldemort succeeded in killing Alice and Frank. But when he turned his wand on their child his curse backfired. Before she was killed, Alice Longbottom had refused to move from protecting her child. Her death was for love of her boy, and it was not in vain.

Neville Longbottom lived.

Voldemort disappeared. He left behind him no more than a legacy of shadows, a legion of ruined followers, and a scar in the shape of a half moon, for tracing the line of Neville's jaw was a cut from the splintering of Voldemort's wand. All the pieces were never found.

Shocked, saddened and ultimately relieved, James, Lily and their son resumed their normal lives. The rest of the Wizarding World rejoiced the death of a threat that had been growing steadily more powerful and therefore indestructible for almost ten years. Peace was restored. Barely sixteen months of age, Neville Longbottom was famous, his name becoming a household utterance, that of a hero. 'The Boy Who Lived,' The Daily Prophet called him, heralding his story as both tragic and miraculous. Condolence cards and congratulations came by the thousands, leaving Neville's grandmother, now his guardian, no time to grieve over the loss of her son and daughter in law. For three months afterwards, no witch, wizard or squib spoke of anything but the Boy Who Lived, a title which was both catchy and unforgettable.

At last, the excitement died down. No one believed that Voldemort was a threat in their lives any longer. Important Ministry officials paid their respects and moved on with their lives. They tried and imprisoned those of Voldemort's followers who had been caught in the days following Voldemort's death. The vast majority were imprisoned in Azkaban, while the rest were presumed as dead as Voldemort himself. Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, spent a week at the Longbottom household, and left at last with a spring in his step too sprightly for even a man fifty years his junior.

"A time of tragedy has been averted," he told his teachers and his students alike one night at dinner. He added afterwards, "A time of further tragedy, as we have now come to realize it."

Brothers, sisters, husbands and wives; sons, daughters, friends and enemies - too many had been lost to a war that poisoned even places of safety and sanctuary. It had turned family against family, and, internally, it had turned families against themselves. Losses were immeasurable. Truly, it was only after the war had ended that most learned the extent of the damage it had caused. People went about their lives in disbelief, brought on by too many years of ignorance, and the blessed selfishness intrinsic to human nature - that they, themselves, and their loved ones, were now safe.

Though they had lost many good friends to the fight against Voldemort, the Potters considered themselves lucky, their son unscarred. They took up residence once more at Godric's Hollow, where James spent an unutterable amount of money on buying his family a bigger house, while Sirius moved into their old one. Just down the road, Remus and Peter, both of them of significantly less wealthy houses than those of Potter and Black, shared a small cottage whose cost had barely been manageable with both their resources pooled.

Always able to live happy lives, no matter what the circumstances, James and Sirius became just as inseparable as in their recent schooldays. Together, they taught young Harry as he grew each and every trick and secret of "the trade," as they called it. Lily returned to doting on her son and frowning in James' and Sirius' directions often.

"There's nothing can be done about it, I'm afraid," Remus told her one evening with a friendly shrug.

"And you should know, of course," Lily replied. She sipped her after dinner coffee thoughtfully to the sound of James and Sirius howling with laughter, from the direction of the living room.

"Because, believe me," Remus added, speaking behind that morning's edition of the Daily Prophet, "I have tried."

Harry Potter grew into a strong boy, well-fed but slim as his father. His hair, like his father's, was wholly unmanageable. His eyes, like his mother's, were as green as they had been the day he was born and, unlike his mother's, as totally uninterested. He learned easily that pranks were best when pulled off perfectly, that tricking someone was interesting only if that someone's face turned red and his mouth worked like a fish's did out of water. Harry spent a lot of time aiding his father in falling down the stairs. He showed many signs of magical promise. He was quick to learn and even quicker to apply his learning to real life situations.

Unfortunately, he was as ordinary as oatmeal, and as unoriginal and uninspiring as a blank slate.

His parents did not seem to notice; or, if they did, they loved him no less for it. Sirius did not seem to notice, pleased by his resemblance to his father and his willingness to play the perfect pupil. Peter did not mention noticing, though he did notice the boy himself, spending time with Harry when James and Sirius were not monopolizing his attentions. Remus, who noticed everything whether he wanted to or not, noticed, but would never have dreamed of alerting anyone to it. Harry was obviously a smart boy, Remus always told himself, smart and gifted. He told himself this always to combat the feeling, ever dormant inside him, that something about James and Lily's son was off. The boy was unnerving. At the same time, he was painfully plain.

Despite this nagging feeling of Remus's, which over the years he learned valiantly to ignore, all was well at Godric's Hollow. Ten years of Harry's life passed by there, the first one in ignorance, the other nine without worry.

Elsewhere, Neville grew up under the loving but stern hand of his grandmother. He did not often go out. Most of his time he spent indoors, finding places to hide within the house. It was hard work. He had to keep a list of hiding places, as he often forgot their locations, but he often lost the lists themselves, which defeated the purpose.

His grandmother, unfortunately, frequently had visitors. "At tea time," he told her once, at the age of five, "you can show the newspapers so I don't have to be there." First stunned and then angry, for she was unable to fathom her grandson's reasoning, Mrs. Longbottom burned all her old newspapers, even her son's and daughter in law's obituaries. Neville found himself locked in his room until dinnertime. It was all of three hours that he spent alone, presumably to think about what he'd done.

As he was so young, and so perplexed, he couldn't see that he'd done anything at all, much less wrong or right. He'd only made a sensible suggestion. At last he stopped trying to figure his grandmother out and instead explored tentatively the possibilities of monsters lurking in the shadows beneath his bed.

To say he was poorly socialized would have been a vast understatement.

The injustices of the childhood world were made no less regular and no less acute, for all that Neville had been declared from the Halloween after his first birthday a prodigal hero.

As Neville grew older he became more and more aware of the weight placed upon his shoulders, both real and imagined. For a while, he tended to forget everything, in order to forget himself. He didn't put the sugar in his grandmother's tea. He didn't come back in from the garden for dinner until half past seven instead of half past six. He spent an awful lot of time getting in trouble and an awful lot of time cringing because of it.

When Albus Dumbledore met with Neville upon his seventh birthday, he found that the boy was unhappy, sensitive, scatterbrained, and without any magical endowments worth mentioning.

"I like the garden," Neville told him nervously over tea.

"I think your grandson will be wonderful at Herbology," Albus told Mrs. Longbottom.

It worried Albus that the boy who had saved the Wizarding World ate too many crumpets, compulsively said please and thank you nicely, did not like lemon candies, never looked at someone else when speaking to him or her, was obviously terrified of his grandmother, and had a significant amount of lint in his hair.

"Have you been under a bed recently?" Albus asked him before leaving. Neville had blushed, and had not said goodbye.

Later, Dumbledore paid a visit to the Hogwarts Library. 'The difference,' one book read, 'between prophecy and fate is that the former is made of light and sound, ephemeral and ever changing. The latter was set in stone before you shall ever read it, and will be set in stone still once your eyes can read no more. They both are subject to the future, all fact and no fiction. It is closer than the trembling of an eyelash, and further than the sun's horizon.' The introductory paragraph was followed by chapters and chapters of utterly unreadable philosophizing, filled with both dry, historical sentences as well as purple prose. It was an old book. All that Albus had wanted to reaffirm was in that first paragraph, but philosophy was never presented so succinctly. Thus, philosophers found the distinct need to follow their ideas with babble.

"Do you suppose," Albus said, late one evening, "that there was the possibility Voldemort chose incorrectly?" Minerva McGonagall, who was used to such questions, did not blanch. Instead, she pursed her lips into an even tighter line.

"Voldemort is dead," she answered. "There aren't many more ways to choose incorrectly, are there, Albus?"

"I think I want to pay a visit to Godric's Hollow," Albus decided aloud.

"If you must," Minerva replied. If Albus wished to do something, then Albus did it. There was no dissuading him.

The next morning he sent an owl to James and Lily Potter and received an invitation to dinner by the time he had sat down to lunch. Pleased, Albus traveled from Hogwarts to Godric's Hollow and arrived at the Potter residence promptly at six p.m. He was not surprised to find Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew and Remus Lupin - the latter looking most apologetic, as he always had when a prefect, Albus noted - also in attendance. Like Neville, young Harry was also just seven. However, he did not look as if he ate too many crumpets. He did not say please or thank you at all, much less nicely. When Albus offered him a lemon candy, he ate it soberly, as a true connoisseur. He had no grandmother, and could not therefore be frightened of her. His hair, while wild, was jet black and had absolutely no discernible trace of lint.

After dinner, Albus watched Sirius and James play with Harry. He watched Peter watch Sirius and James play with Harry. He watched Lily look disapproving, and later, when he migrated to the kitchen, he watched Remus grow very involved in his newspaper. Albus leaned across the table to where Remus sat, and asked very casually, "Have you ever spoken to the Longbottom boy?"

Remus blinked.

"I saw him once, just after." The Order of the Phoenix, to which all of the adults in the house had belonged, was sent the night of Voldemort's disappearance to protect the baby boy. Remus had been the one carrying Neville.

"Was he as plump then?" Albus asked, casually.

"Well, yes." Remus' smile had lines at the corners. It caused a line also to furrow between his eyebrows. Albus and Remus then spent some time watching one another, as the conversation was lacking. Albus's blue eyes were bright and piercing beneath the white shag of his eyebrows. From the living room, Remus heard the sound of a crash, and then the familiar roar of Sirius's laughter. Sometimes, Remus allowed himself to wonder if Sirius was bored often, or if it was simply in his nature to always cause a bit of a fuss. Sometimes, Remus wondered if it was just James' prolonged influence. Sometimes, Remus wondered if any of them were ever going to grow up, or if Harry would mature faster than his father and his father's friends.

"Well then," Albus said abruptly, "I'd best be going."

"Oh," Remus said, then, "wait, but do you mind if I asked you--" He faltered. "Ah, something about next year's curriculum," he finished lamely.

"Send an owl, in regards to the curriculum," Albus instructed. "Good evening, Remus." His blue eyes were less piercing now, and more apologetic. He was already halfway through the door. It puzzled Remus later as to how a man his age, wearing always such heavy robes, could move with such alarming alacrity. Remus stood and followed him quickly into the living room, where he had already said his goodbyes to the others.

"Must you leave so soon?" Lily was asking, politely.

"Stay for a while longer, Harry's just learned this fantastic trick," James was saying, looking so proud he might burst something vital.

"I tell you, the boy's brilliant," Sirius was saying, looking just as proud as James.

Peter was saying nothing.

"Don't you think," Remus was saying, "that perhaps I might just speak to you for a moment, Albus--" But Lily had already shown Albus to the door. The catch clicked shut but a moment later.

"What a night," Sirius said, throwing himself back against the couch. "Here, Harry, show Remus what it is you've learned."

Outside, Albus paused to look back at the bright windows, to listen to the sound of laughter from within. It was not comforting to him. He did not want to put his back to it.

Albus Dumbledore spent the next three years worrying practically, or, rather, only when he had the spare time to worry. He often read that passage over to himself, wondering at two of the Ministry's most quintessential mysteries. Once, he went to visit the Department of Mysteries, watched the futile struggle of the bird in the bell jar, listened to the whispers beyond the veil, and at last made his way into the room of prophecies. He remembered the prophecy, himself; he had been there, with Sibyll, that night he had thought they were all alone. Now, he needed only to look at it, to remember its nature. Made of light and sound, indeed. Ephemeral and ever changing, indeed.

Albus went next into the room of fate, searching for the clues to an answer. Marble slabs reminiscent of gravestones lined the walls. The sound of carving, invisible tools and invisible hands dancing on the musty air, echoed off the high dome ceiling.

The two rooms converged at one end upon the room of luck, which Albus had visited many times before. It was a long dark hallway more than it was a room. A pair of dice with too many sides danced across the smooth floor. Every few moments the dice would stop, tremble, bounce, a number or an image or a letter or a blank facing upwards. Then, pulled by invisible strings, they twitched on in incremental seizures.

At the other end the two rooms converged upon a white doorway. The doorknob was ivory. From underneath the door a slim stream of slow, soft light shot like a beacon or a warning. Always pragmatic, the Ministry officials in charge of this Department had written upon the door:

THE FUTURE

Please be considerate.

(Do not open.)