Rating:
PG-13
House:
Astronomy Tower
Characters:
Harry Potter
Genres:
Angst Romance
Era:
Multiple Eras
Spoilers:
Philosopher's Stone Chamber of Secrets Prizoner of Azkaban Goblet of Fire Order of the Phoenix Quidditch Through the Ages Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Stats:
Published: 08/22/2005
Updated: 08/22/2005
Words: 1,002
Chapters: 1
Hits: 342

Love?

Morbid Fascination

Story Summary:
In her eyes he saw his soul. This is the story of the shattering of the last horcrux.

Posted:
08/22/2005
Hits:
342
Author's Note:
Not what you think...


Love?

Harry held the photograph carefully, the sepia edges curling in upon themselves, the people forever immortal in their era of still lives. He felt as though he stood in the presence of giants, just standing in their sitting room, holding a photograph, the only image left, from their long ago wedding day.

The house was not really a house anymore; it was something in the middle of hostel and palace. Where Harry stood, forlorn, in the middle of a classic parlor, he could feel the cutting wind from the shattered window. A window that's exploded not ten minutes before, cutting his cheeks and slicing through his eyebrow, and the battle that had followed had not been what the storytellers were hoping for.

It had been a rather prolonged scuffle, book pages flying haphazardly, curses muffled, knocking more books over as they missed, someone screamed, but after very little time (though at that point it felt much longer) two bodies lie entwined on the faded carpeting, books scattered around them, wands broken, eyes glassed and empty, but sincere expressions of a matching emotion etched on their faces.

That, Harry thought, was a very strange last battle. Then it subsequently dawned on him that that had been the last battle. How very odd to think that it was all over and he was alive, alone, and staring at the photograph clasped in his trembling hands.

Blinking tears out of his eyes he looked from the couple in the photograph to the lifeless bodies on the floor at his feet, they looked as though they hadn't aged a day, as though they were dancing on the lip of a miracle of timelessness, very much like something from history.

To think those two had lived history, and they had created it, they were history.

Harry shook his head, that kind of twisted thinking made his head throb strangely. Instead of thinking anymore, he looked to the picture. He had crunched the frame under his foot as he sifted though the ruble looking for...something...anything to...to do what he wasn't entirely sure, he was just hoping that his eyes had been deceiving him.

But they hadn't been lying, everything had been real, all the events of the past year and a half, since Hermione's disappearance had been real. When he turned eighteen they destroyed what was thought to be the last horcrux, but in reality, the last one had been in a place he'd never dared look, never dared suspect.

Green eyes drifted to the girl in the photograph, dour looking and cold for her wedding day. She looked, for lack of lesser used cliché, like an artic princess, one of the walking dead. Her pale skin glowed under a gown of nightmare silk that floated over her chest and down a hopelessly thin waist, over glass slippers and to the floor. The eyes that shot out from under her sharply cut brown bangs dug into Harry's gut, gagging him slightly.

Those eyes were too familiar, too hurtful, that scared him on the inside out.

From looking at the couple, man with his arm slug around his new wife, pulling her to him, it appeared the woman shone with a power and brilliance unrivaled by him as he stood slightly behind her dressed in black robes with a crimson tie nonchalantly around his neck, his own ebony locks long but dashing, and a ruby wedding band on his thumb, such a strange place, but it matched the blood stone in his wives.

Had Harry not just murdered both the man and the woman he would have thought the woman the darkness on the horizon, but in reality, she was the man's last weakness, coming from some forty years before his time.

She was both the past and the future.

Letting the photograph float to the floor Harry walked to the woman and turned her over gently, holding her head on his lap, her hair framing her head like a macabre halo, stained as it was with blood. Harry smoothed her hair and stared into her eyes, but they weren't hers, from her eyes shone her husband's soul, or what remained of it anyway.

Phrases he wanted to scream at the woman, hardly nineteen, danced though Harry's head. 'Look behind you and remember you too are mortal.' But Harry didn't say anything as he held the shattered body of the last horcrux, her destroyed shell would never walk again, in her time or in his, the remains of a broken time-turner dangled from a fine chain on her neck.

It too was in her wedding photo, broken as her soul even then. Harry supposed it must be her second hourglass; she'd given back her first one when they were thirteen, after all.

If his life had been a fairytale Harry would have kissed her and she would have blinked blearily and woken up, but as he removed his lips from hers, he knew this was really not a child's bedtime tale. Shutter at the thought of any other child ever have to hear of such a saga, he would certainly never repeat what he had seen, let posterity think more of the witch in his lap, she was the most amazing of two ages.

Groaning at the misfortune and at the answers he had received from this final battle of a war that had raged far too long for reasons that would begin to start a new war, for generations of the next millennium, tomorrow.

Shaking away tears Harry folded the fallen photograph into his back pocket, the last memory of the best and the worst in the world. The parlor around him was in shambles, the owners of this hostel mansion now immortal sleepers. Smiling sadly Harry walked away, Tom and Hermione lying next to each other.

He was soulless and in her he found his solace, or he hid his soul.

But as Harry left he rather fancied he like the romanticized version, whichever that was.


Author notes: Hope you understoof that. Please review.