Chapter Text
Ash hung heavily in the air, swirling as Harry made his way through it. The buildings here had been crumbling for a while—although it was evident that people had been living there for a while—and had only been further wrecked by the earlier battle.
Harry hadn't participated in this battle because, despite being their best solider, he was only fifteen and his job was to search through the rubble for survivors.
They'd learnt their lessons with war. No mercy because offering mercy was almost always fatal. Those that survived the battle were picked out and killed by the winners; those that didn't were dragged into a mass grave and buried.
Nobody liked the term murderer, but they all were. There was a street's worth of blood on their hands and then some.
The Order of the Phoenix was not what it once was.
"Hello?" he called out, choking on a mouthful of dust as he levitated another broken wall out the way. "Is anybody there?"
There was silence—but not an empty silence; the silence of someone trying not to breathe.
"I know you're there," he added, "I'm not going to hurt you." A lie. Even if he wouldn't, someone would.
There was a muffled thud, emitting a cloud of dust. Someone had thrown a stone.
Harry scanned the area, trying to figure out where the stone had come from. It would be on the remains of the second floor—and he was right. There was a small door, grey and coated in the same remnants everything else was covered in, blending in with the rock. "I'm coming in," he said, "Please don't hurt me."
Navigating over to the door would've been difficult if he couldn't simply resize his broomstick and fly over; it was no wonder that they had believed they were safe. The way up was so secluded Harry had yet to find it—whoever it was would likely reveal their passage by trying to flee, regardless.
The door was locked, because of course it was.
"Alohamora." The lock popped open, and he shoved his shoulder into the door.
The survivor was a child.
She was wearing a dress with faded pink and white stripes, and her blonde hair was pinned back in a plait with a blue ribbon, wisps of hair framing her terrified, dirt-covered face. She was barefoot, her feet equally grimy, albeit more battered, and her hands had long, shallow cuts down them.
He couldn't kill her. The words were on the tip of his tongue—"Avada Kedavra," and it would all be over—but he couldn't.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "I promise."
The girl didn't believe him, hands sliding up to grip the hole in the wall, no doubt injuring herself further. There seemed to be a passageway into the walls, lined with jagged objects and only large enough for a child to travel through.
No wonder Harry hadn't been able to find it.
"What's your name?"
She blinked at him, wiping a hand over watery blue eyes, and whispered, "Miriam."
Harry knelt down to her level, keeping his hands up by his head. "My name is Harry," he said. "Hello, Miriam. I'm going to keep you safe."
"I don't believe you." Her lip quivered. "Mummy told me not to talk to strangers, and that if they had a stick they were bad."
"Your mother—" The words caught in his throat, and he nearly choked on the lie. "Your mother was wrong. We've offered her alternate accommodation, and she asked if we could come and get you."
"Okay," she said, taking the offered hand, her handspan barely even covering his palm. "Can you fly? On a broomstick?"
"I can, yeah," he replied. "Do you want to fly too?"
"Yeah!" Miriam seemed so excited. His heart hurt.
He wiped away some of the grime on her face, smiling at her. "Wrap this around you so you don't get cold."
She took the proffered invisibility cloak, covering most of her then curling around like a blanket.
It should prevent her being killed on sight, anyway, he thought, hefting her up in front of him on the broomstick and flying out of a hole in the roof. It was safer this way.
He should've known it was a lie.
The safest thing for him to do would've been to tell her to run far, far away from this to the ocean and beyond. To tell her that anyone with a wand was a threat, and most of those without.
To tell Miriam that she needed to get away from the blood and destruction.
Once they were far enough away from the site, he hopped off the broom and apparated them both to the headquarters, heading in through one of the old structures that was covered with wards.
"Close your eyes for this," Harry said, making sure all of her was covered by the cloak. "And ignore all your thoughts for a minute."
"Okay," Miriam agreed, with the childlike naivety. She couldn't be more than five or six.
Underneath, the hidden tunnel lead to a complex of heavily guarded bunkers and underground trenches. He guided her down to the one with the kitchen—where the main members of the Order would be waiting for his report. He'd have to talk them 'round to letting him keep a child.
He could handle a girl like Miriam, who was used to following instructions and would take to this life like a fish to water.
"Potter," Moody said, as he entered the kitchen. "All clear?"
"All clear," he agreed, before clearing his throat. "Um. One thing." He gently pulled the cloak off Miriam, revealing her to the Order. "She's the last survivor."
"Hello," she said, blinking. "Harry said that mummy was here."
"Did he, now?" Tonks said, smiling at her. "We need to have a quick adult discussion, if you don't mind?"
"Okay!"
"Who is this?" Moody snapped. "We don't bring people back, Potter. You know this."
Harry stood his ground. "She's a child, Moody. I couldn't kill her."
"You should've been able to. Getting soft on us now?"
"No. But I know mercy when it's necessary."
"When will it hit you, Potter?" Moody slammed his stick down, causing Miriam to jump. Her lip wobbled like she was about to cry. "This is war. There is no mercy."
"There is for children."
"There isn't," Moody replied, drawing his wand. "Avada Kedavra."
Miriam fell to the ground—not that there was far to fall, she was tiny, and barely reached Harry's hip—hard, limbs loose and flopping around her, expression frozen in one of shock and fear.
Harry had failed her, and now her body lay limp on the ground.
"In the kitchen!" Molly said, aghast. "You could at least have done it outside!"
Every breath was a sharp, stabbing pain, like thorns had grown up inside his lungs with the express purpose of hurting him. He had brought Miriam here—he had condemned her to death. There were so many things he could've done—he could've fought Moody; could've hidden her, could've had her flee as far as she could.
But he didn't, and now he had to face the consequences: a corpse of a scared child lying on the kitchen floor, a life cut down to a short five or six years, future laughter dead and buried.
Moody scoffed. "Don't worry so much, Mrs. Weasley," he said. "We can vanish the corpse and all its germs."
"I'll do it," Harry said, tears stinging his eyes. "I'll vanish her."
"Why?" Moody challenged. "Going to show her some more mercy?"
"What mercy is there left to give? Miriam is dead."
Moody grunted, relenting, letting Harry cradle her corpse as he pulled her into a side room.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, running a hand through her hair. "You deserved better." He closed her eyelids as gently as he could—he was not burying her, could not run the risk of someone raising Inferi from the ground, but he could respect her all the same—and pulled the blue ribbon from her hair, tying it around his own wrist. A reminder of his failure.
Her hair came out of its plait in waves and Harry brushed it down as smooth as he could. She deserved a better life.
"I'm so sorry," he said again. "Goodbye, Miriam."
He raised his wand, barely mouthing the spell, and then she was gone.
The only trace of her entire existence was the ribbon on his wrist, and if anyone saw it when he returned, they said nothing.
*
"It's only a minor battle," Hermione said, her hair pulled back with a single band. How she held that many curls like that Harry had no idea, but it seemed to work. "We're allowed to fight."
"Finally," Ron said with a roll of his eyes. "Scouting around the rubble gets boring after a while. And it doesn't help your morality one bit."
"You still kill people in a battle," Harry pointed out, despite agreeing with him. Nothing matched up to killing defenceless, usually injured, people in hiding from him. Nothing else would ever feel like that.
"It's not the same."
Casting the killing curse on a woman curled up in the corner, sobbing, or a young boy unable to walk because a rock had pierced his leg, set a thick, cold, sticky feeling to settle in his stomach, a block of guilt he was never quite able to swallow.
It was war. People died.
Sure, it was a fucking war, but the no mercy on those that had never done anything other than flee and look for somewhere to hide was not the same as being in the heat of battle, moves powered by adrenaline, thoughts consumed by survival, everyone that fell under his wand or his hand attacking him either way. In a battle, nobody was innocent. In a battle, killing was nothing wrong.
In the rubble left behind, it wasn't removing an enemy. It was murder.
In a whirl and a crack, they apparated onto the edges of the battlefield. 'Field' was a loose term, though; rubble stuck up through the middle, a block of flats disintegrating through the blood and the haze of destruction.
There was no fear, in war, no anger, just the calm determination and the hot pulse of something buried deep inside his bones, throwing him out there, ducking in and out of the framed and crumbling concrete, throwing spells he could hardly remember the names of. There were corpses, bleeding and ugly and crippled, bowels giving out and emitting a pungent scent of something far too foul for the human nose to comprehend, littering the floor in between him and the man with the gun—that didn't matter, though. It never did.
He made eye contact with Tonks, then shut his eyes, waiting for the inevitable blossom of pain. It struck a second after the explosion; his head smacked back onto a loose brick, and he was out.
"Can you hear me?"
When Harry blinked open his eyes, sometime later, his chest was throbbing, and Ginny had shoved a Lumos in his eyes. "Yes, unfortunately. Can I go back to sleep?"
"Not with that head wound you can't." She turned to Colin. "Do you think I could just Accio it out?"
"I wouldn't risk it," he said, frowning. "It might not come out the hole. And Harry doesn't need more holes."
"Speak for yourself," Ginny said. "I think he deserves a few more for that feat of stupidity."
"I'm alive, aren't I?" Harry protested. "Tonks blew him up."
"You could've, I don't know, moved?"
He shrugged, only to discover how awful an idea that was with a groan of pain. "Semantics."
"I'm going to let you fucking die." She punctuated this by stabbing the wound with some kind of blade; if Harry had been more conscious and less in several shades of shock, he could probably have identified it. As it was, he just knew that Ginny was stabbing him a bit.
"How does that feel?" she asked, aware that there was nothing to numb it and she didn't know any numbing spells. "Sorry about this, by the way, but I'm not letting a fucking bullet turned septic take you out. I like you too much to let that happen, even if you piss me off."
"Stings a little," Harry said blearily. "It's fine. I'd rather not die."
"Stings a little?" Ginny uttered incredulously under her breath. "Men."
He blinked. "I'm probably still in shock."
"No shit."
Harry reached up with his other arm to touch the back of his head, startled to find it wet and staring at the blood on his fingers. "Oh."
"Please don't move," Colin said, anxiously, as Ginny held up the bullet triumphantly. "All your wounds look nasty."
"Is my nose bleeding?" Harry asked.
"I think so."
"Why?"
"You probably got kicked in the face after you went down. Sorry."
"I doubt it was you, Colin," he said, drily. "No need to apologise." He glanced back down at his chest—it may've been more of a shoulder wound, but he was lucky to be alive, and he could deal with blurry vision. He wondered how much worse it would get if he took off his glasses—to see Ginny aggressively running stitches through it and cursing it out.
"Luckily for you," Ginny said, pulling out her wand. "I know the sterilisation spell."
"That's a relief," Harry replied. "I might pass out."
"Wait—Harry, no!"
Harry opened his eyes for a second time in the makeshift hospital wing back at base, the scratchy white sheets rubbing up against his skin through the rips in his trousers. Now the shock had worn off, his legs felt like they were going through a blender, and they must be covered in cuts and scrapes from the explosion and the subsequent fall. His face had been cleaned up, and his glasses and jacket set to one side, and there was a bandage wrapped around his skull.
"Harry!" Hermione exclaimed, throwing her arms around him only for him to yelp in pain as the bullet wound made itself very, very noticeable. Fucking bullets, man. Ow. "We weren't sure you were going to pull through."
"What was your kill count?" he asked, groggily. "Mine was seventeen, even if I did get blown up."
"Fourteen," Ron said. "You remain undefeated."
Hermione tossed her head, smugly. "Speak for yourself. I got nineteen."
"Fuck!"
They laughed until a piercing bell rang, and they clambered to their feet. "To the cafeteria, then."
"Bye, Harry. I'm sure the nurse here won't let you starve."
"Cheers, mate."
*
When he finally persuaded the nurse to let him go, with some minor healing spells applied to the bullet wound—it healed most of the damage, but it would still be sore—he shrugged on his jacket, hissing in pain as he aggravated the injury, he stuck his hand in his pocket and felt the ribbon.
Her ribbon. Miriam's ribbon.
He pulled it out, watched it flop limply over his hand. It was slightly more singed, now, like the jacket, and smelt of blood, adding a coppery tang to it, the last thing left of Miriam in the entire world.
At least he would never have to fight her as Inferi. At least he would never have to face her corpse again.
He had been trying to find a bright side to Miriam's death, but all he'd found so far was that she never had to face the gruel they called food. It was not much of a bright side, and held its own bitter edge, but he still clung to it stubbornly, like a child to their mother's hand.
He wondered who had killed Miriam's mother, and if her corpse had been vanished to the same place as Miriam's.
He headed back up to his dorm, a tiny, cramped room with two bunk beds in it; one for him and Ron, and the other for the two boys that shared it with them. Accommodations were tight, and he was lucky to get the little space he had.
A bare bulb hung from the ceiling, although the floor was dirt, illuminating the narrow space enough for Harry to shove his hand under his bed and close his hand around the Invisibility Cloak, Elder Wand, and Resurrection Stone. Treasures were far and few between, now, but having these three was a stroke of luck.
He tied Miriam's ribbon around the ring the Stone was set in, then turned it three times.
As always, his parents were there, Sirius, too, and now Miriam.
"You tried so hard, baby," Lily said, stretching out a ghostly hand to Harry's head.
"It's not your fault," James added, smiling at him.
Sirius gave him a lopsided grin. "There was nothing you could do."
But Miriam—Miriam—blinked at him, quietly. "The green light," she asked. "What was it? Was it magic?"
"I'm sorry," Harry said. "Miriam, I'm so goddamn sorry, please believe me—"
"Harry?" Seamus called. "You alright? Heard you were in the hospital wing."
Harry dropped the ring and ribbon, nudging them back under the bunk. "Uh, yeah," he said. "Just a gunshot wound. Nothing new."
"Still hurts like hell, though," Seamus said drily. "Don't go running back into action straight away."
"'Course not."
He side-eyed him. "You're going right back out again, aren't you?"
"Yep."
Harry rolled into bed, not changing out of his no doubt grimy clothes, listening to the sounds of Seamus getting ready for bed.
They were still fighting a war despite no Death Eaters having been seen for two years. The last sighting was Rabastan Lestrange, and everyone knew how that went: Dumbledore, dead on the ground, Snape, brain dead, and Harry himself badly injured. He still had the scars on his back to prove it, long and arching, thick cuts with burn marks where they'd tried to cauterise it.
Since then, not a single Death Eater had been sighted.
Mad-Eye had taken over, a lot more brutal than Dumbledore, introducing the kill all policy that Dumbledore had been debating before his death. He took no prisoners, left no survivors, and no corpses, either. No running the risk of Inferi attacking them all if they destroyed all the corpses.
People said that he only knew war and wouldn't know how to start fixing things. Harry didn't think Voldemort would, either, but that's not what people were saying—they were saying that Rabastan's last attack had been after witnessing Voldemort's death, and a final, desperate hope to win the war.
There was no winning in war. Only losing, and a greater loss.
Not in a war like this, anyway.
None of the others had reappeared, though. Not the Malfoys, and their son, the same age as Harry, not the rest of the Lestranges, or Crouch's son. None of the vile purebloods had stepped forward to announce defeat.
It was like they'd disappeared overnight.
It was then, in the darkness of that night, that Harry made a choice.
He'd find out what happened that night, or he'd die trying.