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Hogwarts. 2 May 2018.
Voldemort had, in true super villain fashion, started monologuing. Harry Potter was dead, he claimed, and the Dark Side had triumphed. The Dark Lord was benevolent and would welcome any who had opposed him if they wanted to switch sides, blah, blah, blah. And so on, and so forth. Typical stuff really. But the truth was, in fact, that Harry Potter was not dead. Not anymore anyway. I mean, I had been dead at one point. It was kind of necessary, what with the horcrux shard stuck in my head and whatnot. I had to let him kill me…
“And how did that make you feel?”
Harry blinked, looking up from where his gaze had fallen to the floor. His vision turned inward at the memories as he recounted his story. How did that make him feel? “Not good,” he replied testily. The support group had been the idea of a muggleborn Harry hadn’t met before. A way to deal with the “aftermath”—a nice, tidy way of explaining not only the war against Voldemort and his Death Eaters, but also what muggles were calling The Snap. So here they were, about three months later, sitting in their fourth weekly session.
“Can you elaborate on what that means to you?” The group leader, another muggleborn—former Hogwarts alum—who had some counselling experience, asked.
Harry wanted to scoff. How did it make him feel?
Bloody brilliant. Harry crossed his arms. Before the group leader could say, again, that this was a safe space, he replied. “It made me feel terrible. I mean, the man whose memory I’d respected had pretty much set me up as cannon fodder; the wanker who’d bullied me because of a childhood grudge match suddenly cared about what happened to me, and had apparently been helping me all along, literally just died; and now I had to do my duty and die to save everyone. I felt horrible. And scared. But I got over it. The people I cared most about were going to survive and I was finally going to see my parents and Sirius again. I was going to be fine. Everything was going to be fine. Then, surprise! I get to live because of some insane loophole thanks to the damned horcrux in my head. Great. I can still help make sure my friends, my family, survives this war. We can survive together…” Harry’s voice cracked as he choked back a sob that was dangerously close to escaping.
“But…?” The group leader prompted.
Harry’s head dropped into his hands. His eyes burned and his chest tightened, solid. As though he might be incapable of drawing air into his lungs. His throat closed up and he forced the air shakily in and out through his nose.
“But it didn’t exactly work out like that, did it?”
“No. It didn’t. I mean, yeah, all the horcruxes were destroyed. We were so close. So close, to ending it all. We were going to win… And for a moment, I thought we had… I thought… when he’d… I mean, he was gone. He was gone. It was over. We’d won… we’d won…”
Harry stared into memory, at a loss for words. At a loss to explain. But he didn’t have to. When Voldemort’s body had… disintegrated… he’d been relieved. The Dark Lord, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, You-Know-Who… he was gone… But then, so was Neville. And Luna. And some Death Eater Harry didn’t recognize. Students, Order members, other Death Eaters, and then…
“Harry?” His eyes had met the scared and confused gaze of Ron. The first kid his own age to ever be his friend. Harry reached for him, and Hermione beside him. Only to have his hands pass through empty air…
—30—