One Last Time

Everything was perfect.

Looking at her face, still glowing, smiling; makes me remember so many things. All around us, people watch with tears in their eyes. Silence, from everyone. I look down my formal dress robes, and back to her white ones. She looks like an angel. Sunshine pours down on the green fields, and everything seems to give off the most beautiful aura that had been seen. Everything was perfect.

Except for the fact that Ginny Weasley was in a coffin.

Ginny's eyes were closed, peacefully. A thin smile played upon her chilled lips, the one she'd worn when I'd first seen her at the station all those years ago. When I saw her, my sixth year, as more than Ron's sister. When we shared our first kiss. When we broke up, and got back together. When she wrote to me. When her life ended.

I miss her already.

Shuffling, a hand on my shoulder... I know I must have been standing here for so long. Remus behind me, trying to comfort, but I know I'll never recover.

They sing a song, Amazing Grace. All eyes on her. Tears in my eyes. Blurry, I watch her body get placed on the pedestal. And I watch as Arthur moves past me, to her body, and raises his wand. Hopeless to do anything, I simply take a step to him. He hesitates. Then turns to me, and nods.

I lean over and kiss her cold lips, one last time.

And I bring forth my own wand, and call flames to the pedestal. I watch, as the flames take the only person I've ever loved, and rip her away from me.

So ended the day of the end of the war.

***

People cheered that night, and the night after, and the night after that. They cheered on and on, each and every night, not ceasing in intensity.

Years later, the cheering had faded. People stopped going outside to cheer every night. People began to move on with their lives. People began to forget.

And many years later, no one cheered anymore. Nights were quiet. Everyone was at peace. What had happened- it was all a story, now, in the history books.

***

The years went by, and I watched as those people I loved left the world. I watched as the people I'd known all these years faded, leaving me.

I lived on- as the prophecy said I would. '...and either must die at the hand of the other neither can live while the other survives'.

How blind had I been?

I brought the end to the Dark Lord.

And then I began to live.

As I will continue doing.

Never stopping.

Perhaps Dumbledore had seen it before he died. And of course he would never have told me. Why would he? All it would have meant was that I would never have gone to battle that day. Or maybe I would have, and gotten myself killed on purpose. I'm no coward, by any means- but immortality is something that I fear more than anything, even though I hold it.

Immortality. What the Dark Lord sought. What he would have gained had he defeated me.

His search for immortality led him to his defeat.

***

It had been years, too many to count, when it happened. When the world ended.

Perhaps the prophecies had been wrong or perhaps the end just came sooner than they expected. But the apocalypse came one day, a warm day in mid-summer, and ended everything. It was a quiet end, nothing drastic- just a virus strain that they couldn't control. That killed everyone in the world quickly, within a matter of days. Peacefully.

Ironic, that the end of all things came with the winds, and was quiet.

***

I'd stopped eating years ago, stopped drinking, stopped traveling the world in a vain attempt at finding a way to end my life. I simply sat, day into night and onward, on the small patch of land that Ginny was buried on and created a life.

I began to form lives in my head; I lived them out minute for minute, even when we would all sleep. The four of us; Ron, Hermione, Ginny and I, all lived together. Not forever, because I'd begun to realize what forever really entails. We all lived there and had real lives. I actually went through each of them in the real time, until our deaths. Hundreds of years I'd lived, simply sitting there staring into the blackened sky, imagining lives for us and living them in my mind.

When the last person died in my mind, I looked down. For the first time in over five hundred years, I looked down.

The world hadn't changed at all.

***

I don't know how I ended up there, in the Department of Mysteries, after some ten thousand years since the apocalypse.

All that mattered is that I was there.

The veil fluttered before me, still on the raised dais. Some things never changed.

Looking at it from afar, I saw the same thing as before. An archway, tattered and old, that led to the heavens.

I pushed aside the tattered curtains slowly, and looked at the darkness that had over the years overtaken the archway. No longer could you see through it. It was more a portal now than anything, a portal to the one place I wanted to go.

I raised a hand and touched the darkness.

It felt like glass beneath my hand, cool to the touch and smooth as anything.

I was feeling death.

I slowly pulled back from the veil and backed away.

As I walked out, voices filled the room behind me. Voices I hadn't heard in any recognizable time.

But I knew that I couldn't turn back.

***

I'd often waited for insanity to set it, but I never had the luxury.

So I decided that I would go back there, to the one place I had been too afraid to go to since the end of the war.

Perhaps, if nothing else, the sight would bring me the welcomed insanity.

***

Hogwarts was the only thing that hadn't changed in the hundreds of thousands of years since it had been abandoned.

The hallways were the same, and as I walked through them I could almost see the faces of students racing by, hurrying to their next class or being yelled at by the old professors.

I longed to find even a ghost there, but I knew that even they had faded from the world, having no attachments after the end. There was nothing.

I opened the doors to the Great Hall slowly, and smiled for the first time I could remember.

Someone, ghost or human, had known.

All around the room were portraits and books, enough to keep one entertained and interested for hundreds of years; mindless things that had no true meaning but entertainment. They had known, and had done this for me.

But the one thing that he did put there with meaning was the one thing that caught my eye.

The one thing that scared me so much.

Why had they brought that here?

***

I never left the Great Hall. There was no need. There was nothing else out there. And as much as the object in the center of the room scared me, I knew that someday I would open it.

Time didn't matter anymore, and so I took it. Memorized every book in Hogwarts and completed learning every spell known to the former mankind before I thought about it again.

***

I removed the cloth from the object slowly, terrified of something for the first time since I was truly alive.

The mirror stood as proud and as tall as it did the day I'd first found it in my first year at Hogwarts all those years ago.

And like before, not only did the reflection of a twenty-year-old me show, but another reflection.

All around me were people.

And next to me was Ginny.

I closed my eyes and stood there, oblivious to time. It was almost as if I could feel her arm on my shoulder. If I tried hard enough I could be there, with them.

Deep inside my soul I knew that they really were there with me, relics of the past.

Each person began to come close and do something- Ron gave me the thumb's up, Dad nodded, on and on. Even the Dark Lord looked at me and stared, before nodding slowly and mouthing the words 'thank-you'.

But all the time Ginny held me, never letting go.

***

It only occurred to me one moment after standing there too long; whomever they had been, they had left the mirror here for me to be happy. They had known all along what would happen to me. Dumbledore's words from my first year drifted back before a peaceful cloud settled over my mind.

He told me, long ago, that the mirror could drive any man into insanity.