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She looks at the Dark Lord kneeling in front of her, bound and beaten and so, so broken. His hood is yanked back and a gasp of horror, of confusion and shock and grief ripples through the room. Hermione stumbles back.
His eyes were green once, vivid green, bright bright bright emerald green the exact color of the killing curse and maybe he was always marked for this, she thinks, trying to choke back the sob building in her throat, maybe this had always been the fate he was spiraling inexorably toward. Hermione feels the weight of her years pressing in on her and she is so, so tired. But him—
He still looks seventeen.
He’d look the same as he did the night of the battle, too thin and too wary, waiting for the shouts, the fight, the flash of green light around the corner, for something she still doesn’t understand, only his eyes aren’t green anymore. They’re red. The wine-dark red of a Dark Lord.
“You?” she gasps, because he disappeared twenty years ago and half the country thinks he’s dead and she did, too—why else would he have stopped writing, stopped coming by without even a word of goodbye? She never would have guessed this. She wonders what the papers will make of it. The Boy Who Lived. The Dark Lord. The Chosen One. The killer.
“You killed so, so many,” she whispers to the broken thing before her. “Why, Harry? Why? ”
He meets her gaze slowly. “I died, Hermione,” he rasps. “I gave my life for you, for all of you, don’t you see?”
She looks at him helplessly, desperately, because she doesn’t understand . “Harry—”
“Don’t call me that,” he snarls, and the people assembled around her flinch back. Even now, wandless and bound by runes and rituals and all the magic they could summon, they fear him. She doesn’t blame him. He’s been murdering his way across the country for years now, unstoppable—until now. “Harry Potter—he was a lie , Hermione, he was a myth, a sacrificial lamb, he died at one year old and he never lived . I was never just Harry , don’t you get it? When I killed Tom Riddle I killed myself.” He shakes his head, laughing. A crazed, broken sound. “I died twice, Hermione, half my bloody soul is gone. I’m trying—I’m trying to fix it —”
Hermione wants to sink to her knees and sob, but she gathers her nerve. “You’ve killed more than Voldemort ever did,” she tells him, and readies herself for what comes next. He just looks at her with those red, red eyes, silent, and her heart cracks.
Somewhere inside him, she knows, is the boy she loved, the boy she fought for, the boy who only ever wanted to protect people. She can see it inside of him, buried deep but it’s there—
Here he is, forty five but frozen forever at seventeen and murdering his way across the country, trying to strike a bargain with Death—but let’s rewind, let’s rewind. Now his eyes are green again, Avada Kedavra green and he’s standing over a fallen Dark Lord and there are cheers and shouts and he’s so, so tired . Now he’s walking quietly into a forest to die only he gives up so much more than his life, and there they are shivering in the tent together, tired and hungry and lost but he won’t give up, he’ll never give up—press the back button again and now, look, he is sixteen and watching Dumbledore plummet over the side of the Astronomy tower, shaking and grieving and burning but that’s not the first time he’s grieved, is it? There’s a scream caught in his throat as Sirius falls through the Veil and Harry thinks he’ll bleed to death with the pain of it, go back just a bit and he’s fifteen and reckless and runs to the Department of Mysteries to save his godfather and there’s so much love in him that it overflows, and here he is, red faced and furious and refusing to back down or tell lies but now he is fourteen and terrified in a graveyard watching Voldemort rise—but no, rewind again and he’s laughing, his head thrown back and there’s so much life in him, so much goddamn life — And now he’s thirteen and looking into Sirius’s sunken eyes and for the first time he can dream of a better future, now he’s chasing Ron into a tree and here he is hunting down his parents’ betrayer. Now he’s twelve and goes after Ginny in the Chamber of Secrets—go back a bit and he’s swooping on his broomstick, wind in his hair and he’s grinning as he catches the snitch. And he’s eleven now, fixated on the Stone, but let’s go back further and now the hat is yelling GRYFFINDOR! and there he is on the Hogwarts Express, all of these Harrys layered like a pearl within him— But let’s skip back a decade and get to the seed, the grain of sand. He is one year old and the green light is flashing— But no. A bit further. Yes— there . Pause. Before his mother falls, before the scar, to the last point in his life when his soul was his . Not a horcrux, not mutilated, just Harry , whole and clean and pure , and it’s inside him, Hermione knows it, that little toddler grasping at smoke, her friend, her best friend, but she looks at the man before her and she knows that no matter what she does, she won’t be killing Harry. He killed himself a long, long time ago.
“Harry,” she says again, only she can’t go on. “I’m sorry,” she whispers finally, and she can’t keep the tears festering from spilling down her cheeks now.
For the third time in his life, the green light flashes.