Meant To

It's not fair, because Harry was born to die.

Everyone thinks of him as The Boy Who Lived, but he knows better. He's The Boy Who Was Always Meant To Die. It is a much longer and more unpleasant title, so he allows everyone to call him whatever they'd like, to believe what they want about him. His world will come to an early and it will be painful, agonizing, actually.

And he will be the last, he will watch as his best friends in the world, and the boy he wasn't meant to love but does, die, and he will have to wash their blood from his hands and clothes, slowly and carefully, wishing he was there in time to do more than just hold them as their souls left their bodies. He won't cry because tears won't mean anything anymore, but he will yell and scream at inanimate objects like his Firebolt, quills, walls, his bed, the floor. He will wish that he never met any of them, that he had stayed with the Dursleys and lived a life of complete and utter misery, because at least then he wouldn't have any happy moments to compare it to.

The air will smell like death and suicide, and when he wakes up in the morning it will not be to sunshine but to darkness. There will be no food and he will grow thinner and thinner, weaker as he watches his classmates drop like flies. When he goes to sit outside and think back on his life, the grass beneath him will be gray and brown and dying, and there will be no trees or flowers anywhere around him.

He won't miss his friends, though, not really, because he will know that soon, so very soon, he will join them.

He will remember them like a book he once read, vague and distantly, a bit blurry. He won't miss Hagrid's hugs, Ron's loyalty, Hermione's intelligence, or how it used to feel when Draco would stare at him like no one else in the world mattered.

Then he will go and face Evil and he will win, but he won't make it through anyway. Evil will accomplish what it wanted most, more than being alive again and more than ruling the wizard world.

But it's not fair because he will only be eighteen and most eighteen year olds don't know that they have a expiration date, like a stupid, bloody carton of milk.

It's not fair because he wants to do what other teenagers get to do, and then he wants to grow up and do what most adults get to do, and he didn't even have all that many years of good times before his moment in the world was up.

But it's meant to be, has always meant to end this way, so he will go and he will fight, and he will be brave.

And then it will end.