Save One Thing

Save One Thing

Chapter One

The letters come out of eggs and down the chimney. They slither in through the mail slot and pile up in the drawers of your dad's desk until the wood begins to creak and swell. Outside, they fall from the sky like snow, and Harry closes his eyes and presses his forehead against the window, and you wonder if he'll be able to make glass disappear again so he can run out and catch them as they drift through the air. But the glass stays where it is, and so does Harry, and so do you.

You feel a smile tugging at your lips, because your dad is walking up behind him, and he doesn't even notice. One of his hands is pressed flat against the window pane, and his breath fogs over the glass. He still hasn't opened his eyes.

"What do you think you're doing, boy?" your dad shouts, but Harry doesn't turn around. It's only when your dad pulls the shade down, nearly slamming his head with it that he moves at all. "You're to stop this nonsense, understand?"

Harry looks up at him, as if he's just woken from a strange dream or as if he thinks this might be a dream and he's waiting for it to end. Normally, the sound of your dad's voice makes him jump nearly out of his skin, but this time it's different. This time a lot of things are different.

You flop down onto the sofa and try to watch the television, but you can't concentrate. The voices are full of static. They fade and blend together, and the pictures are dull and blurry so that you have to squint to see anything properly. You think you might want to know what the letters to Harry say. You think you might want that more than you ever wanted anything before.

It's getting hot by the time you sit down for breakfast, and everything feels itchy and uncomfortable. The eggs Harry cooks are rubbery and tasteless. There's sweat collecting in back of you knees, and whole house smells like owls. You eat fast, and your mum makes Harry put down his toast to clear your place when you've finished.

In the hallway, the letters are spread out on end tables and overflowing from the waste bin as even more begin to sprout up like weeds in the cracks between floorboards. You grab a few and shove them into your pockets before running up the stairs and shutting yourself in your room.

Your hands are damp and shaking as they hold paper thicker than any you've ever seen before. It's crumpled and smudged with your fingerprints, which shouldn't matter to you, because you were never good at keeping things from breaking or tearing or falling apart completely.

There are six altogether that you managed to take-- only six but six more than Harry has, and you lay them carefully out on your bed in a neat row before flopping down yourself, causing a loud snap as one of the support boards beneath you breaks.

The letters, Harry's letters, seem to straighten themselves before your eyes. The wrinkles become smooth, and the grease stains fade back into sharp white. This is when you first look at the address. Mr. H. Potter, they say,

Mr. H. Potter
Second Floor
Smallest bedroom
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

And then you touch the first letter. You can feel your heart beating faster as the name melts away and reshapes itself, and then it's not Mr. H. Potter anymore. It's Dudley Dursley-- your name right beneath your fingers in cool green ink. You open it, ripping the paper rather than breaking the seal, and it's your name again--

Dudley Dursley,
This letter is not for you.

Your stomach drops. It's not signed, at least not where you can see it. You touch the second letter.

Dudley Dursley
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

And you look inside.

You should not be opening other people's mail.

And the third.

Dudley Dursley
Second floor
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

You would do well to mind your own business.

And the forth.

Dudley Dursley
Second floor
Largest Bedroom
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

This is your last warning.

And then the fifth, without pause to think or even catch your breath.

Dudley Dursley
Second floor
Largest Bedroom
Broken bed
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

This letter is for your cousin, Mr. Potter. It was meant to be seen by him alone, and the truths it contains are not for the eyes of fat, spoiled, muggle children. You see, Dudley, Your cousin is rather extraordinary. Gifted, I believe, is the word your schools use for it, and while he far surpasses your abilities in reading and maths, it is not those subjects where his true talents lie. You see, Mr. Potter is a wizard, and he will soon be the greatest wizard of the age.

No matter how your parents try to stop him, he will come to Hogwarts School to learn magic. He will do things and see things a boy like you could never dream of, and when he finishes, Dudley, he will be able to destroy you with a word, though, I expect we'll find some use for you yet. It would be wise to mind yourself around him.

~Albus Dumbledore,
Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

You put the sixth letter in a shoebox, and you put the shoebox in the bottom drawer of your dresser. You promise yourself you won't open it or look at it or even think about it. Then you sit carefully back down on your bed, and your mind fights to stop your hands from shaking.

The television is on, and the computer is on, making little bleep-bleep noises, and the mobile phone you keep in your room starts ringing. You turn the volume on your play-station up, and you try for a few rounds of Mega Mutilation, but you're too dizzy and hot to stay still and too weak to move, and you drop the handset to the floor and stand up and close your eyes, and the electronic roar of the game gets louder, but all you can hear are the hundreds of wing-beats that fill the outside sky.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Voldemort stands in a fairy circle in a clearing just past the center of the forbidden forest. He's chanting something in Parseltongue, something to make use of the power bound in mushrooms and dead grass. Harry crouches behind a tree with Ron hunched up next to him and Hermione a few feet away weaving complicated shielding charms. She finishes her murmuring, and the air around them shimmers golden.

"You okay?" Ron asks. "That should have taken longer."

"The magic," she whispers. "It's getting stronger. It's like the spells are doing themselves. I hardly have to concentrate at all."

"Works for me," Neville mumbles from the branches above them. "I need all the help I can get." There's a sharp rustling of leaves as Ginny maneuvers herself to give the back of his head a light slap.

"Stop it, Neville!"

Ron cranes his neck to look up at them. "Stop it, both of you." He rubs his hands over the scars on his arms. "I don't like this. If it's easier for us, it has to be easier for them too."

Harry can't say anything. He can scarcely let himself think anything. He's by no means proficient at Occlumency, and what he can manage takes all of his concentration. He presses his back flat against the base of the tree and tries to sharpen his focus as the forest floor around him starts to shake. Seconds later, Luna Lovegood appears in sight, followed by Grawp and a disgruntled looking Zacharias Smith.

"Hermy?" Grawp asks, and Harry shuts his eyes briefly to center his thoughts and points to Hermione.

He hears Ginny's voice above him saying, "What on earth is that?" followed by Neville's stammered answer of, "I-I think it's a giant,"

Luna looks up at Grawp and then back to the rest of them. "Oh yes," she says. "He wanted to come along."

"Well I didn't," says Smith. "I was just looking for a lost quaffle, and Loony here dragged me into the forest."

"Grawp help," Grawp announces proudly.

Smith sneers, and his eyes shift over to the giant. "Not much, you don't."

Luna smiles dreamily. "He's really quite brilliant, you know. We were just discussing whether the decline of the nargle population in Scotland is what's making it so exceedingly warm. We also think it may have something to do with changing magical patterns, don't we, Grawp?"

Grawp grunts.

"Oh, Merlin," Ron mutters, and Harry has to close his eyes and bite his lip to keep from laughing.

Hermione silently moves closer to the main crowd. "Quiet, all of you!"

"You okay there, Harry?" Ron asks, but Harry isn't okay anymore. His concentration is slipping away, and Voldemort is at once in his head laughing, and outside continuing to hiss his spells.

"He knows," Harry says. "It's all my fault. He knows."

"What?" Hermione and Ron say at the same time.

"He knows I'm here." Harry takes a deep breath and opens his eyes. "He knows all of us are here."

"Close your mind, Harry!" Ron nearly screams.

"Weren't you listening? It won't do any good. He knows. We have to--"

"Close it," Ron says, eyes shining strangely, and Harry struggles to comply, but the doorway in is damaged and the battering ram of Voldemort's thoughts continues to attack at its weakest points. He manages to shut his mind again, and when he hears Ron's voice it sounds like it's coming from very far away. "Harry's right, everyone, we have to attack, but V-Vold-he doesn't have to know which way we're coming from."

Harry clenches his teeth, and he feels the muscles in his neck straining. "Hurry up, Ron."

"Right, right," Ron nods and quickly turns to Luna and Smith. "You . . ." He hesitates briefly, looking up at Grawp. "You three circle around we don't want any stray Death Eaters getting us in the back." They all nod and head off along the outer perimeter of the clearing. Then Ron knocks a fist on the trunk of the tree, and there's an answering of snapping twigs from above. "Ginny," he says. "We both know mum's going to kill me for this, but I want you and Neville up on your brooms cursing anything wearing a mask."

"B-brooms?" Harry hears Neville whisper, and whatever Ginny says to calm him, he can't make out, but seconds later he can see two small silhouettes rising above the treetops. Then Ron turns to him.

"Harry, you know there's something he won't . . ."

"Expect."

"Plan for. . ."

And because talking is too difficult, the rest of the conversation is held without words.

'No hiding.'

'No deceptions.'

'A straight on attack.'

"Yeah," Harry whispers. "Yeah, I know."

Hermione puts one hand on his shoulder and awkwardly pats Ron's back with the other. "We're with you."

"But the shields--"

She shakes her head, and her cloud of hair brushes his face. "The shields don't matter now."

Blood is welling up in Harry's scar, but the tears that blur his vision have little to do with the pain it causes. "He's trying to get in again. I can feel him."

"It's worse now?" Hermione asks.

"Stronger," he says. "Like you said before, everything's stronger."

Ron stands up and nods his head once. "So are we."

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It started with you saving Harry's letter, and you wouldn't have kept it if you'd known better, but back then, you thought saving one thing couldn't hurt, even if it was a freak thing. You didn't think about it often, it just stayed where you put it and slowly became a permanent mark on the hidden landscape of your room along with the failed history exams under your bed and the dirty magazines Denis gave you in your closet and the cigarettes hidden practically everywhere.

The next year it was a feather you ripped from the wing of Harry's owl that joined the letter in the shoebox in the bottom drawer of your dresser. Then it was twigs from the broom he said could fly and a jar labeled armadillo bile and a page of magical newspaper with moving pictures of a band called the Weird Sisters on it. And you thought, maybe it was the letter that made you do it all. Maybe you save one thing, and you have to save another and another until saving things becomes a habit you can't break

It's only natural that after saving so much for yourself you should have to give something in return, but you never thought like that before, and you never thought that the fifth letter really meant everything it said. And it's not the chill of the air that hurts-- it's knowing nothing will be warm again-- ever. And you start to repeat you own name over and over, because at any moment, you could forget what it is and who you are and why you're on the ground in the alley by Magnolia Crescent freezing and unable to move.

You see yourself running from a huge snake and cowering at the feet of a giant. You watch your face turn purple as you choke on your own tongue, and you watch you arms flailing as you drown in a sea of letters, and you watch as everything gets dull and dark, and there's nothing left to see. And then suddenly, there's light and sound and Harry standing over you, and the first thing you remember when your awareness comes back all in a rush is that you hate him. You hate more than you ever hated anything before in your life.

You wondered, later, if it was because you made fun of Harry's nightmares that he made you see those things that would make you never want to sleep again, and you wondered if it had to do with the warning in the fifth letter, because your mum got a freak letter that same night, and it yelled at her in a horrible, screeching voice, but your head was too foggy to make out the words.

She seemed to understand it more than you did. There were some freak things called Dementors that only freak people like Harry could see, but you could feel them, somehow, even though you didn't think you were supposed to, and somehow, you couldn't stop feeling them even when they were gone.

Magic began to follow you around like an invisible cloud of fine mist, and it never did anything more than flash in the corners of your eyes just to remind you what was capable of-- power and control and all the things you could never stand against, and even so, you refused to concede, refused to admit that being normal made you weak. And if that was all you could hope for, then you would make it a victory.

So you stopped smoking and hoped things would start tasting right again, but they never did, so you ate more to make up for it. And they kicked you off the boxing team when your marks went down, but it wasn't your fault that test paper seemed too thin, and the sky was always full of owls. And now you're scared of shadows and the cold. And you slide the palms of your hands over walls when you walk to make sure there's always something solid nearby to grab onto. And you hope you're heavy enough to stay in place when the world starts slipping away.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Harry's lucky.

Hermione and Ron were with him the entire way, ahead of him even, but by some incredible chance, his foot was the first to touch down onto the dried grass of the circle, and Voldemort had turned the very ground into a portkey. It shouldn't have been possible, but magic is getting stronger.

There are huge rips and tears along the sides of Harry's jumper from where his friends tried to grab on and go with him. He has marks from Hermione's fingernails lining his right forearm, and he's pretty sure Ron's left with the clump of hair he grabbed trying to hold him in place, but the dull ache in the back of his head is nothing compared to the dizziness that always comes with portkey travel and the overwhelming nausea that always comes with standing face to face with Voldemort and having Voldemort's laughter ringing in his ears.

They're in a graveyard-- the same one they were in fourth year, standing in a circle of grey rocks, probably chipped from the crumbling headstones. Harry thinks he may have broken his ankle on the landing. He falls to the ground and fumbles through his pockets for his wand, and he's lucky. He's about to die, but he can't keep himself from smiling, because wherever they are, and for however long will last, his friends are safe. He's keeping them safe. And he couldn't be more lucky.

There are Death Eaters all around, but Harry sets up a shield, and he doesn't even have to think to maintain it. Voldemort's curses are powerful, but they seem to come at him in slow motion. Everything is more vivid, and Harry can tell just from the bend of his wand what he'll need to do to block them.

Harry keeps himself so busy with defense that it takes a while for him to realize he can actually win. The knowledge makes his heart beat faster still, and warms him from the inside like hot butterbeer. In his head, the laughter stops. And something else changes then. He stops thinking about his friends back in the forest, and he doesn't pay any mind to the Death Eaters who have started to inch closer towards him. The world becomes smaller-- all that's in it are him and Voldemort, and all that matters to him is that Voldemort be destroyed.

The curses come faster after that, but Harry fires back with equal speed, and his ankle is still strong enough for him to run on when he needs to dodge the hexes his shields miss.

In the end, all it takes is expelliarmus. The spell sends Voldemort soaring ten feet backwards and delivers his wand directly to Harry's outstretched hand. Voldemort's eyes burn a brighter red for a second then flicker out and fade to dark blue, as if realizing he can die has made him almost human.

He puts his own wand safely in his pocket and holds Voldemort's with both hands. This is how it has to be, Harry thinks to himself. Then he closes his eyes and snaps the wand in two and whispers, "I'm sorry," even though he's not sure who he's saying it to or if he really means it at all.

As the two halves of the broken wand fall to the ground, he's struck by the sudden, horrible knowledge that the only true power is in sacrifice, and things like this always come at a price that no one should have to pay.

The magic that kept Voldemort alive for decades fizzles in the air for a few seconds before dissipating. As it goes, the colors of the world around him become duller, and his shields fall away, and he stumbles over his ankle, which can no longer support his weight. He looks up to the masked faces of the Death Eaters from the center of the stone circle, and he smiles as they draw their wands.

He never finds out what spells they were planning to use on him. Before he has the chance, he feels a sharp tug right beneath his navel and lands back in the dry grass of the clearing just past the center of the forbidden forest with his friends standing all around him. They all look slightly singed. Ginny's arm is bent in a way that shouldn't be possible and Luna's sporting a very impressive black eye, but she doesn't seem at all bothered by it.

"I did it," he whispers. "He's gone."

"Of course he is," Hermione says. "We wouldn't have been able to call you back unless you somehow managed to break the connection."

"We also wouldn't have been able to if I hadn't taken some of your hair," Ron adds, and Hermione rolls her eyes.

"Well, that was hardly planned, and you certainly didn't have to grab so much of it."

"Sorry if I was the one who wasn't thinking clearly when I was running right at bloody Vol--Volde-- bloody you know who."

"Honestly, Ron," Hermione says with a sigh. "He's dead now, and it was only ever a name."

Harry watches Ron's face hardening and quickly decides to change the subject. "You're all okay?" he asks without getting up.

Hermione nods. "Quite good, considering, Neville had a bit of a time taking down Bellatrix Lestrange, and Smith got a little too enthusiastic with his Incendios and almost burned his own foot off."

"There were Death Eaters here too?" Harry asks, looking over at Neville, who blushes bright red.

"Loads," Ron says. "You should have seen what Ginny did to Macnair. It was brutal."

There's a loud clearing of a throat, and a deep voice from behind him says, "Grawp help."

"Indeed," Hermione says, and Harry watches as she fights to keep a straight face. "Grawp here stepped on Pettigrew."

Ron gives a nasty smile and holds up what looks like a tiny, silver claw. "It was brilliant."

Luna looks down at Harry and then back in the direction of Hogwarts. "Your foot's broken, you know. You're not going to be able to walk."

"Yeah," Harry says. "I kind of figured that."

She nods at him, then grabs the broom from Neville's hand and flies up so she can whisper something in Grawp's ear. Harry lets his head fall back on the ground and smiles.

As it turned out, being carried by a giant wasn't nearly as unpleasant as he would have expected, and though she had a bit of trouble with the spell, Madame Pomfrey was able to fully mend his broken bone, leaving only a thin, barley noticeable scar running the length of his ankle.

Back in the common room, Ron prods the bare patch on the back of Harry's head with a long finger. "I thought you said you could re-grow your hair when you were younger."

"I could."

Ron laughs and flops down on the sofa beside him. "Can't anymore, mate. I thought I would be the one to go bald, what with my dad and Bill."

Hermione's head snaps up her from her book. "Not Bill," she gasps, blushing slightly.

"Yeah," Ron says, looking mildly offended, "He's hideous now, and he's keeping the ponytail, which just makes it worse. No offence to you, Harry."

"It's your fault," Harry mutters.

Ron throws a pillow at him. "It's your fault for being so bloody short that your hair was all I could reach."

"Don't worry," Hermione says. "I'll ask Dobby to give you one of his hats. He has dozens, you know."

He rolls his eyes and crosses his arms over his chest. "Aren't I lucky?"

"Yes," Hermione and Ron answer together, and Harry knows better than to argue.

Two days later, Hermione nervously flicks the end of her quill against her wrist and swears she can no longer see the runes in her books.

Five days later, Ron passes out after performing a simple starching spell on the dress robes his parents sent him for the leaving ball.

One week later, Harry can barely summon sparks.

It's a muggle train, not the Hogwarts Express that takes them back to King's Cross Station. The ride seems much longer. It's too quiet, and Harry doesn't know what to think. Halfway through, Neville, Ginny, Luna and Zacharias Smith manage to squeeze themselves into the compartment he shares with Ron and Hermione, but no one talks. When he thinks about it, he begins to realize that there's nothing left to say.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~