Chapter Text
Harry staggered to his feet and confronted Riddle in the Great Hall. Everything around them had frozen, as if time itself had stopped as the two sworn enemies faced each other in a final confrontation. “As you can see, Tom, the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.” He lifted his wand and cast a reducto at the man, at the same time that Voldemort threw an overpowered bombarda at the brunet. The elder wand in the Dark Lord’s hand bucked and fought, ripping itself away from the snakelike man and flying toward Harry as soon as the spell light left the wand. The combination of both concussive spells blew Riddle’s head apart, eliciting screams from several people as they were covered with blood, bone and brain.
The rest of the battle was quickly won, and nearly all the Death Eaters were on the floor, dead or dying, which included both Malfoy parents. “Why did you do that, Ron?” Harry asked the redhead angrily. “Narcissa Malfoy lied out in the forest and saved my life. Lucius is a bastard, but he hasn’t been able to work against us since the incident at the Department of Mysteries.” Emerald eyes scanned his surroundings, looking frantically for someone who was missing. Turning to Hermione, he asked, “Where is he? Where is Draco?”
“I’m sorry, Harry, but he was killed out on the lawn,” she told her friend flatly. “We caught him using the cruciatus on Susan Bones.”
“No,” the raven haired teen whispered in horror. “Draco wouldn’t do that. He didn’t have the stomach for torture or killing. You’re wrong.” By the end of his rant, Potter was screaming as he fled the Great Hall, charging out onto Hogwarts’ blood-soaked lawn to look for his fiancé. He had no direction in mind; he just charged in between the bodies splayed out everywhere until he finally found what was left of Draco Malfoy. The blond was on his back, silver eyes staring sightlessly into the sky and a gash to his neck that had nearly taken off his head. Harry fell to his knees, keening softly as the tears fell. He rocked back and forth, ignoring the groans of agony that surrounded him as others struggled to survive the Battle of Hogwarts. He was buried so deeply in his own anguish that he never heard the footsteps approaching him until a voice startled him out of his grief spiral.
“I’m sorry, Harry,” Neville apologized as he watched his friend grab Malfoy’s lifeless hand, crushing it in a bone-breaking grip as the emerald eyed eighteen year old fought to tamp down his rage. “Luna and I tried to protect him, but Seamus Finnegan distracted us long enough for Hermione, Ron and Ginny to separate Draco from the others and kill him.”
“Why?” Harry nearly wailed, desperate for a sensible answer. “Why would they do this to him? To me?”
“Because they believe that you only belong with Ginny Weasley,” Luna told the teen as she stopped behind him. She crouched down and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him back into her body in an effort to ease the overwhelming sadness she could feel coming off of him in waves. “They were never your friends, Harry,” she continued to give him some harsh truths. “They were convinced by the headmaster to keep you focused on your purpose for living. They were to make sure that there was nothing to distract you from your fated destiny. Draco was a distraction that they wouldn’t allow to exist.”
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The floo flared at Grimmauld Place and Ron, Hermione, Ginny and Seamus stepped out of the fireplace, spreading out and staring at the inconsolable raven haired teen who was curled up on a couch. “Come on, Harry,” Ginny barked with exasperation. “You can’t keep ignoring your friends, or the people who want to honor you. You need to get over whatever’s wrong with you and go on with life.”
“You’re what’s wrong with me,” he growled out lowly. “It’s because of you that I no longer have anything to which to look forward now. It’s your fault that the only person I loved; that I could ever love is buried between his parents in the Malfoy cemetery. If you think I’ll ever do anything for you again; give you anything again, you’ve got another think coming. I want you out of my house, and I never want to see any of you ever again.”
“Sectumsempra,” came from the teen’s right, and Harry looked over in enough time to see the virulent red light leave Hermione’s wand. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she told him, not sounding apologetic at all as the curse took him in the neck. Blood sprayed everywhere, and there was a smile on the nineteen year old’s face, knowing that he was going to finally be with his parents and his beloved once again. “We can’t let you continue to ignore us. We’ll say that you were killed trying to mop up the last of the Death Eaters; that we couldn’t protect you in time before we finished the job. Happy birthday.”
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The funeral was epic. Everyone from all corners of the wizarding world came to Harry Potter’s funeral, which was so grand that it had to be held at the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia. There weren’t any spaces in wizarding Great Britain to hold all the people who wanted to attend, so the Ministry made arrangements with the muggle German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, telling him that Harry was a beloved celebrity. Of course, the German government never heard of the young man, but the magical community of Berlifurt had heard of him, and by virtue of word of mouth, the news of the lad’s importance had reached the government, and they were only too happy to appease their constituents.
Harry’s fair-weather friends were front and center as they cried crocodile tears for a boy who had come to the magical world desperate for anyone to acknowledge his existence. That he’d gotten a twisted version of that wish was secondary; he finally had people who really cared about him, and he wasn’t about to let them go. Over the years, though, things started to shift, beginning with a quiet conversation in second year, whilst Harry was convalescing in the hospital wing after his confrontation with Riddle’s shade and a thousand year old basilisk. Draco had crept in under the dark of night, and the pair spent most of that time building the beginnings of a relationship that would rival that of Merlin and Nimue.
From that moment, Harry was welcomed to Malfoy Manor every summer, so that he could remain safely protected from the muggles who abused him and the magicals who required their pound of flesh from the beleaguered boy. Dumbledore was understandably angry and confused that his puppet slipped his leash so cleanly, and because both boys felt the need to keep their growing relationship under wraps for the foreseeable future, they had the summers to deepen their friendship. It wasn’t until one night in fifth year, after Harry had been tortured in what Umbridge laughingly called a detention that Draco finally made the first real move to deepen their camaraderie into something more. Unfortunately, since Hermione and Ron had frequently broken into Harry’s trunk to steal the map and the cloak, the young men were unaware of the Gryffindors, spying on their meeting, and it was the first kiss the pair had exchanged that created the chasm that would widen between the ‘Golden Trio’, permanently severing the closeness they once had.
The headmaster had put his foot down and demanded that Harry cease any and all assignations with the Malfoy heir; even going so far as to threaten the boy with involuntary imprisonment in the castle if the old man wasn’t obeyed. Having a pretty good idea who had ratted him out, Harry took to carrying the cloak and the map with him at all times, effectively ending Dumbledore’s efforts to control the brunet’s life through his erstwhile friends. The rift between the three grew ever wider, encouraged by Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood, until the three were barely civil with each other. The horcrux hunt at the end of their sixth year widened the split until it was a chasm that no one could cross.
A letter, left to Granger by the now-deceased headmaster, outlined what Ron and she needed to do to ensure that Harry follow the script to the letter, and in it he encouraged the Gryffindors to eliminate all the roadblocks between the end of Voldemort and the safety of their world. So they cold-bloodedly murdered the only family and support Harry had ever had in his life, making sure he was very aware of what they’d done before they eliminated him to protect all of their secrets. It was unfortunate for those concerned that the only being on the planet who truly knew the Deathly Hallows and their potential was gone, and wouldn’t be there to protect the young man’s betrayers from the hell that would descend upon them.
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July 31, 1999 dawned foggy and cool, with a heaviness in the air that spoke of omens and portents yet to come. It was the first anniversary of the death of the Boy Who Lived, and the Ministry had been making preparations for the celebrations that would fill the streets, and it would be opening the secluded, private and protected cemetery in which Harry was buried, alongside his parents. Neville and Luna had both petitioned the DMLE quite rigorously to ensure that Draco was buried beside his fiancé, and in the very last bit of kindness Kingsley ever showed, he granted the petition and had Malfoy buried in an unmarked grave between Harry and James Potter.
The blond’s parents’ bodies had been carried into the center of Diagon Alley after the end of the battle, where a funeral pyre had been set up. There, with jeers and catcalls interspersed with cheering, the people, as one, cast the incendio at the bodies, watching with vicious satisfaction as they were reduced to ashes. Once the fires had finally burned out, the remains were swept up and hauled away to a muggle dump, where they were buried under mountains of muggle trash; a fitting end to people who had poisoned their Savior and turned him away from those who had deserved his loyalty. As if in answer to the unjust treachery that the wizarding world had dealt one of Magic’s own, the skies unleashed lightning and heavy rains, drenching the spectators and making them scurry to shelter and safety. A stray bolt of lightning came down from the sky and struck the new statue that had been erected at the entrance to Diagon Alley, the intense heat nearly instantly melting the sculpture to slag.
It was of a young man, similarly shaped scar upon his forehead, who was standing tall, strong and proud as his gaze overlooked the alley, almost as if he was offering those who frequented the shopping center a sort of protection from evil. The features were slightly exaggerated, so that the young man looked slightly manic as a nasty sneer curled his lips. His arm pointed to Gringotts and the goblins, whose obvious neutrality in the war had nearly cost them everything. It was almost as if the Ministry was saying, through the statue of Potter, that they were watching, and that they would rain hell down upon the goblins’ heads if they stepped one toe out of line.
This day, one year later, seemed to be an almost exact mirror of that fateful day, when Harry Potter was betrayed in the most profound of ways, by people he’d thought he could trust; by people he’d once loved as if they were family. No one wanted to venture out into the downpour; too afraid that they’d be struck by lightning if they dared to defy the great Lady herself. For this was no normal storm, if the magical currents that ran through it were any indication, and more than a few people were terrified of what this day would bring.
In a secluded, hidden cemetery deep within an unknown Potter property, the earth started to shift and move, as if someone or something was trying to escape its confines. After the first few times that rabid fans had tried to raid the cemetery in Godric’s Hollow, hoping to have just a piece of their Savior, Neville and Luna had all four graves moved to a Potter property that had been long forgotten. It was where Harry intended to marry Draco and settle down, far away from the hue and cry of the wizarding world, and unfortunately, he got his wish, only not in the way that he’d expected. The ground heaved again, and the lid of a casket forced its way out of the wet, softened mud, the occupant sitting up and looking around with dazed, blank emerald eyes as he fought to remember who he was, where he was, and why he was there. On the branch of a yew tree overlooking the graves, a crow cawed in the early morning light, almost as if it was calling to the young man to wake up; that there were things that needed to be done.