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I. Hermione
She searches for her parents, first,
and finds them living quiet, happy lives in Australia,
unaware of the daughter they left behind.
She reverses the spell.
And things are not the same,
because she is a stranger in their own home.
So, she leaves. She does not cry when she does, but she does not return, either.
Instead, she folds herself into bookshelves, rearranging broken spines like the fractures in her own.
The Ministry halls are too sterile, too bright—she prefers the archives, dust rising like ghosts when she turns a page.
Some days, she dreams of burning, always burning, skin crawling with the scent of blood and the quiet sob of a friend she could not save.
Some days, she reaches for the time-turner that isn’t there.
She chooses to rewrite history in the margins, a softer version where they do not bleed so young.
II. Ron
There are days he cannot look in the mirror.
The freckles are the same, the hair the same, but the boy inside is missing.
He laughs in the shop with George, an empty thing, like a joke with no punchline.
He should have done more. He should have done less. He should have—
He is tired of being afraid.
He spent his youth running—toward, away, through—
and now, when he stands still, the fear creeps back.
He grips his wand tighter than necessary, knuckles white, because there was a moment in the battle where he thought—
If I drop this, I die.
Some nights, he still dreams he’s dropped it.
III. Harry
He sleeps with the lights on.
Ginny does not comment on it, does not mention the way his hands twitch in the dark.
Some part of him still waits for the scream, the flash of green, the end that never came.
Some nights, he stands outside and listens for an owl that will never come.
He shakes hands with strangers who call him hero and wonders if they would flinch
if they saw how much blood is under his fingernails.
Teddy calls him Uncle Harry, asks him what his father was like.
He doesn’t know how to say, I was too busy trying not to die to remember how he lived.
IV. Neville
His hands are steady now, the tremor in his wand gone.
Hogwarts rebuilt itself around him, stone by stone, trusting him to care for its roots.
The soil does not ask him to be brave,
it only asks him to be patient.
The greenhouses are quiet, full of things that bloom—
He names each bloom after those they lost.
He learns the names of plants that heal instead of harm.
He tells his students to listen carefully,
to the hum of the leaves, the whisper of growing things.
No one listened when he was a child.
Now, he makes sure they do.
V. Luna
She still sees them.
The wrackspurts, the thestrals,
the way grief lingers like dust in the corners of rooms.
She still hears them in the walls.
The ghosts, the echoes, the memories too stubborn to fade.
She hums back, soft and sweet,
tucks flowers into the cracks, offers them something beautiful to hold onto.
People tell her she has not changed, that she is still strange.
She smiles, does not say: I have seen things that should not exist, and they have seen me too.
She draws portraits of those who are gone,
not as they were in death, but as they should have been in life.
VI. George
Sometimes, he sets two plates at dinner, forgetting.
Just for a moment.
Laughs too loudly, turns to his side, expects a joke that never comes.
Sometimes, he speaks and it sounds like Fred.
Sometimes, he wakes up and the weight of one half of his soul being missing
is enough to crush him.
The shop stays open. The fireworks still explode in color.
He never removes the “We” from the sign.
Because someone has to remind them—
that once, before the war, before the blood, before the grief—
they were alive.
VII. Ginny
She does not cry in front of them.
She keeps her fists tight, her voice sharp, her fire burning.
She plays Quidditch like she is outrunning something,
flying higher, higher, higher—
as if war cannot reach her there.
She loves Harry with a quiet kind of ferocity,
but she knows:
this war did not end in a castle, and she is still learning how to win it.
VIII. Draco
The name Malfoy tastes like ash in his mouth.
His name is a stain he cannot scrub clean, and so he stops trying.
He steps carefully in rooms where people still look at him with old anger.
He understands. He does not ask for forgiveness.
After the war, he does not know what to be.
He does not return to the Manor.
His mother does not ask him to.
He brews potions in a quiet shop, hands steady, breath slow—
healing, for once, instead of destroying.
There are days when he looks at his reflection and thinks,
This is not the boy I was meant to be.
Some nights, he dreams of a burning room and a hand reaching out for his.
Some mornings, he wakes up gasping.
And then he breathes,
and lets himself be something else.
IX. Hogwarts
The castle hums with memory.
It sings lullabies to those who return,
a promise that the stones remember who they carried,
who they lost.
In the Great Hall, they still set an extra place at the Gryffindor table,
for the boy who never got to be just a boy.
Somewhere, in the Forbidden Forest, a stone lies buried, untouched,
and the earth does not forget the hands that once held it.
X. The War
It does not end with victory.
It lingers in the spaces between heartbeats,
in the way they flinch at sparks of light,
in the names they do not say aloud.
It lives on,
not in the grand retellings of battles won,
but in the survival of those who stayed and
those who were carved into stone.
Life continued—because it had to.