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Dust motes dance in the weak sunlight pouring through the partially drawn curtains. For a moment, I’m back in the tent, my body alert to all sounds, my muscles tight with the ever-present tension.
Then everything hits me and it’s all I can do to hold back the sob.
It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.
It’s all I can think for a moment. My brain is frozen, that single thought running on repeat.
Then other thoughts begin to break through. My first thought is of Ron. Images of him flash through my mind—the grief on his face as he stared down at his brother, lying cold and motionless on the floor of the Great Hall. The fierce determination blazing from his eyes as we fought and searched and struggled in the battle. The wonder on his face when he kissed me.
It seems impossible for a thread of happiness to be woven in so tightly with the agony of loss.
Then I think of Harry and another twisted strand winds its way through me, this one of relief. Harry’s alive, sleeping in Percy’s old room. My best friend, my one constant companion of the last year. The sight of his limp, apparently dead body had crushed my heart.
But he wasn’t dead. Isn’t dead. He’s alive and he’s the survivor of a duel to the death.
I wonder how he feels. Wonder what it’s like for him, knowing that it’s finally over.
I know he feels the same pain I do. So many dead. So much lost. So much terror endured for so long. So much loneliness and hopelessness.
And yet we’ve come away from the war physically unscathed. A miracle if I’ve ever heard of one. A part of me wants to rejoice, but how can I? The war is over, but the aftermath is just beginning. I can’t help but feel that what is coming may be just as unbearable as what has already passed.
There is so much work to be done. Our world has been torn asunder and will have to be painstakingly put back together. It will never be the same, I know this. Too many pieces are missing, gone forever, for the puzzle to be reassembled into the picture it once was. But I can hope that the new picture will eventually be brighter and better.
I have to have hope. I simply have to.
Hope for a lasting peace. Hope for the pain to dull. Hope for the grief to one day ease. Hope that my future will be lived in a world different than the one that has crumbled around me.
Hope that I can restore my parents’ memories so I have a family again.
I miss them. I’ve always missed them when I’ve been away at school. But knowing they were there, waiting for me at home, made it bearable—and I was so busy, so wrapped up in my life at Hogwarts, it never bothered me overmuch. I knew they were thinking of me, missing me, too. But the fact that they don’t even remember who I am to them, don’t know they have a daughter out there who has been fighting for her life and her world…there’s a void inside of me. One I’ve kept hidden from the others, but one that has never left me in all this time. They aren’t dead, so I can’t grieve for them in the usual sense, but it hurts so much to know I don’t exist to them. To know they don’t miss me as much as I miss them because I’m no one to them.
I’m not the only person missing loved ones. I suppose I’m lucky—my parents are alive and I have hope of reuniting with them. The Weasleys will never have Fred with them again. Teddy will never know his parents. So many others have lost sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. I feel selfish wallowing in my own loss, when mine will hopefully one day be washed away in a flood of happy tears, and theirs will only know tears of sorrow.
I’m not sure when I started crying, but cold wetness trickles down my cheek and onto my pillow. There is simply too much to hold inside.
But I have to be strong. I have to shoulder the burden of the survivor and do what I can to comfort those left behind and accept the work that lies ahead. I have to remember there is hope.
*~*
The rage is draining away, leaving me empty and numb.
I prefer the rage.
My trunk is upended, the lid cracked, and clothes lay strewn across the floor. Remnants of Cannons posters hang limply from the walls and ceiling, with shredded paper—bits of orange and white and black—littering every surface in the room. White feathers are everywhere and dust floats in the air, evidence of an exploded pillow or two. My figure of Victor Krum from the Quidditch World Cup, its tiny head snapped from its body, lies on top of a book with half its pages ripped out. Unfogging the Future. I wonder randomly if I had taken Divination more seriously, could I have seen this coming?
I’m breathing heavily, wand clenched in my right fist. It’s shaking.
The last bit of time is a blur. I don’t even remember getting out of bed, much less turning my wand on my possessions. I remember lying in bed, unable to sleep, unable to see anything but Fred’s slack face and closed eyes in my mind. Fred’s face isn’t supposed to be still. It’s supposed to be full of life.
Now I see him alive, grinning at me, mouth opening to tease me about my temper tantrum. If only he would walk into the room and do just that.
It was easier last night. I thought at the time that nothing could be harder, but I hadn’t realised that disbelief and numbness were such cushions against the sharp edges of pain.
And now those cushions are gone.
Fred is dead.
My brother is dead.
I regret every time I told him to shut up. Every shove I gave him. What I wouldn’t give to hear him laugh again, even if he was laughing at me.
I’ll never see him bashing Bludgers again. Never get a stitch in my side from laughing at some prank he’s pulled. Never see the light in his eyes as he tells some crazy story. Never wonder which brother he is when I see George from behind.
Because I’ll know it can only be George. Not Fred. Never Fred again.
Merlin, it hurts. It hurts. How can anything hurt this much? How does someone survive hurting this much?
And if it hurts me, what is it doing to George? He’s lost half of himself. He’ll never be whole again.
And Mum and Dad. I’ve never seen my father cry. Never seen my mother completely fall apart. I’ll never get the sight of her sobbing as she clutched Fred’s body out of my mind. Never. They’d had to sedate her, give her a potion when she’d started hyperventilating.
And George. I’ll never forget his face as he sat there holding his twin’s hand, eyes fixed on Fred’s lifeless face, staring and staring and staring. Looking as though he could will Fred into breathing again.
I escaped last night. Escaped with Harry and Hermione. Left my family and death and the awful, tearing grief behind for a few blessed hours. Listening to Harry’s story as we walked to see Dumbledore’s portrait had taken me away from the reality that my family was now smaller. Listening to him talk to Dumbledore, hearing him describe how he walked into the forest to sacrifice himself, how he died and came back, his idea of returning the Elder Wand to Dumbledore’s grave so it could never be mastered again—it had taken me out of myself. I’d been fascinated despite the horror of what awaited me in the Great Hall lurking in the back of my mind.
And I’d felt guilty for wishing, just for a moment, that it had been Fred who’d come back from the dead instead of Harry.
I’m glad Harry is alive. Of course I am. Seeing him in Hagrid’s arms, still and looking so very dead, had destroyed something inside me. Holding Hermione and listening to her sob had torn me apart. I’d thought my best friend dead. I’d thought everything was over. That we’d lost. That everything had been for naught, that You-Know-Who had actually won.
But he hadn’t been dead. Harry is alive and he has won.
But we have all lost.
I don’t know what to do. I’m so tired. My entire body hurts. I feel heavy and dull and empty. I’m so tired.
And the sun is just now rising. There’s a long day ahead. I want to bury myself under the ripped sheets and sleep until everything goes away and this horrible dream I’m living ends.
But it’s not a dream and I’m already awake.
Fred will never be awake again.
The next time I see him, he’ll be lying in a casket, cold and gone, waiting to be put into the ground, and then I’ll never see him again. Except I will every time I look at George. How can I look at George and not see Fred? How will George ever look in a mirror again and not be reminded that he no longer has Fred?
I can’t do this. I can’t. I lived in fear for my life for months, lived with dread and terror and worry and desperation. I knew my family was at risk. I knew there was the chance that all of us might not survive. But I could have never imagined how horrible it would feel when that fear became reality.
I don’t know how to get through this. But I know I will. I have Mum and Dad and Ginny and my other brothers. I have Harry. I have Hermione. She’s the brightest spot in the darkness.
She is my hope.
There is destruction all around me, not only in my room, but in the world. I helped halt the ruin by hunting and destroying Horcruxes, by fighting, by not giving in to my fear. I know I did the right thing. I know what I did was important. I know I should be relieved and happy that the war is finally over.
Maybe one of these days I will be.
But it won’t be today. Because today is the first day of the rest of my life without my brother. Today the reality of life after war begins.
*~*
It didn’t really start to sink in until just now when I woke up. I’d slept like the dead, despite not being able to fall asleep for ages once I finally made it to bed at the Burrow. My mind just wouldn’t turn off. There was too much to think about, too many emotions to feel—nothing seemed real.
But here I am now, having slept in a real bed for the first time in…I don’t even know when. Sleeping in a house. Staying somewhere I hadn’t known I would ever return to again, staying in a place where I am actually welcome, that is actually safe. After spending so many months on the run, having the constant spectre of danger and death looming over my shoulder every moment of every day, it’s more than a bit surreal.
My first good night’s rest in ages has cleared the fog from my mind, however, and now it feels all too real.
Voldemort is dead.
I killed him.
It’s over.
But it’s not really over. Just the main event, so to speak. The main task. My ultimate duty. The one I died to carry out.
I died.
It’s too much to wrap my mind around, really. I can see the brilliant green of the Killing Curse, hear the rushing sound, feel the indescribable sensation of finally coming face-to-face with my own mortality. The fear—it had been…all-consuming. It had swallowed my entire being, until all I could feel was the pounding of my heart and my last few breaths strangling in my throat.
And then there had been King’s Cross. Had I really experienced that? Had I really had that conversation with Dumbledore? Had I really turned away from going on and chosen to return and face death again?
Well, I’m here, so I obviously did. If any of it had been real to begin with. But I know it was real. I had died, voluntarily given up my life, and then returned to it. Alone. For the first time since I survived the unsurvivable curse as a baby, my mind and my body are all my own. I’m not sharing myself with another’s soul.
I shudder.
My hand creeps up to my scar of its own volition. I can feel it there, just as it’s always been. As a child, it was the only thing I really liked about my appearance. If I had known then what I know now…
Will it forever be benign now? Will it really never hurt again?
It shouldn’t. The Horcrux is gone, destroyed by its maker. And its maker was destroyed by me.
That makes me a killer and I’m not sure how to feel about that. I didn’t cast a typically fatal curse. I didn’t use the spell that should have killed me twice. I suppose it’s ironic that the fourth time Voldemort cast the Killing Curse at me, it rebounded for a second time—yet another impossibility in my impossibility-filled life—and actually killed him this time.
But I killed him. I have fulfilled the prophecy. There is relief in knowing this. But the relief is buried under so many other enervating emotions that I only know it’s there after digging several painful layers deep.
I never let myself dwell on the fact that if I wanted to live, I’d have to commit murder. I was aware of it, of course. It sometimes bothered me that knowing I had to take a life in order to survive didn’t bother me very much. I suppose I never really considered Voldemort to be truly human. Is it murder if you kill a mostly-soulless, not-fully-human monster?
I’m not sure. And I’m not sure that it matters. What matters is that he’s gone. The creature that committed true murder—the murder of my parents and so many others—is dead.
And so is Fred Weasley. And Remus Lupin. And Tonks. And Moody. And Hedwig.
Is it wrong that Hedwig’s death stings as much as the loss of people I knew and cared for and respected?
I ache inside. There are no words adequate to describe the grief squeezing my heart. More recent deaths have simply piled upon the older, more dulled pain of earlier losses: Dumbledore. Sirius. My parents.
How can they all be gone? How is it possible I’ll never see Fred, his head together with George’s, plotting some prank or joke? That Remus is gone and I’ve lost my last link to my parents?
The tears are inside me but I cannot release them. Not yet. There’s too much pressure in my chest, locking them inside.
How do I move forward? What do I do now? How do I face this day, this first day of peace? You think of peace as white and clean. But this peace is drenched in blood, stained and dark. You think of the end of war as a time of celebration. But how can I celebrate when so much has been lost?
I think of the people in this house. Ron. Mr and Mrs Weasley. George. Ginny. If sorrow is drowning me, what is it doing to them? How do I comfort people who have lost a son and a brother? It’s just another impossibility. There is no comfort for that kind of pain. I know that all too well.
But I have to start somehow. I have to have hope. I have to get out of this bed and face the day. Face the grief and the anger and the suffering. Face the fact that I’m alive when I really shouldn’t be and that so many others who should be living are not.
Guilt rears up so suddenly, it takes my breath away.
This isn’t the time for guilt, I tell myself. Guilt is an indulgence. Something I know I’ll keep hidden forever, coping with as best I can when I’m alone and can tear myself apart with it when no one is watching.
It’s time to get up. It’s time to take the first step forward. It’s time to take the first faltering steps towards acceptance.
I hope my feet can carry me.
*~*