Chapter Text
The stone was still warm.
Harry didn’t know how long he’d been staring at it. A chunk of collapsed wall near the far end of the Hall, unremarkable except for the scorch mark running across its face. Around him, people moved and wept and held one another, their voices a low, continuous sound that he couldn’t quite resolve into words. He stood apart from all of it, his arms at his sides, and stared at the rubble.
It was over.
He told himself this carefully, testing the words for weight. It’s over. Voldemort is dead. You watched him fall. It’s done.
His eyes moved without his permission to the nearest doorway.
Nothing there. Of course nothing. He looked back at the stone.
Except the Death Eaters who had fled — and there had been dozens of them, he’d seen them running, and not all of them had been caught, he knew that, and some of them would be loyal enough or desperate enough to come back, to try and recover —
Stop.
He stopped. Breathed. Looked at the scorch mark.
It was over.
His gaze drifted to the high windows. First rays of the morning sun were reaching inside the castle, or the last one maybe. He’d lost track of what hour it was, what the sky was doing. The werewolves. Greyback’s pack, or whatever remained of it. The castle was enormous and half of it was rubble now, gaps and collapsed passages where a person could move through unseen, where a student who’d wandered off looking for a parent, or a younger kid who didn’t understand yet that they were supposed to stay close —
It’s over.
But his hand had found his wand.
He looked down at it, surprised to find it already in his grip, his knuckles white around the hawthorn. He didn’t remember reaching for it.
Slowly, he loosened his fingers. The wand stayed where it was.
Around him, someone laughed — a short, disbelieving sound, more like a cough — and somewhere closer a woman was crying steadily, quietly, in a way that said she’d been doing it for a long time and intended to continue. The smell of smoke and cold stone hung over everything.
Harry looked at the doorway again.
Still nothing.
He looked at the rubble.
Then he felt a bit of pressure on his right shoulder.
The touch was light, barely there, and Harry turned expecting red hair or brown.
It was Luna.
She was watching him with those wide, silvery eyes. Gentle and completely unguarded, without the awkwardness that other people brought to the words are you alright. She didn’t say them. She just looked at him, her dirigible plum earrings gone, one of her sleeves torn at the shoulder.
"You’ve been twitching," she said simply. "Your wand hand. For quite a while now."
"I’m fine," Harry said.
"I know you probably feel like you have to be."
He opened his mouth and then closed it again. There was a kindness in what she’d said, a truthfulness, that on another night, in a different skin, he might have been able to hold onto. But the words kept dissolving before he could grasp them, and anyway he was facing the Hall now.
He hadn’t been, before. The rubble had been easier.
They were still bringing them in. He watched a pair of older students he didn’t recognise carry someone through the main doors, carefully, slowly, held between them like a thing still precious, and set them down in the row nearest the wall. Someone had started to arrange them properly at some point. He didn’t know when. The rows were not quite straight.
Luna was still speaking. He caught fragments: her father, the ceiling, her voice unhurried and soft at his side. He tried to hold her words in his head and found he couldn’t.
His eyes moved along the rows.
He needed to find Ginny. He’d thought it distantly, several times, in the underwater way he’d been thinking everything since — since. He needed to see her. He would look away from the bodies and find her face in the crowd and that would be enough, that would do what he needed it to do, he was sure of it.
He tried to look away.
His eyes stayed where they were.
They moved instead along the row, from one still face to the next, with a horrible, mechanical patience that didn’t feel like his own. He recognised some of them. He looked anyway. He couldn’t explain it and he couldn’t stop it and distantly he understood that this was a thing he would think about later, this exact moment, the way his gaze refused the instruction —
He found her by accident.
She was on the floor, some distance from the rows, slightly apart from the people moving around her as though a space had opened without anyone meaning it to. She was kneeling. Her head was bent. Both her hands were wrapped around someone else’s, and she was holding on with a stillness that had nothing left in it, the grip of a person who will not let go of what is already gone.
The hand she was holding was Fred’s.
Harry stopped breathing for a moment.
George was beside her, sitting rather than kneeling, his back against a broken piece of bench, looking at nothing. Percy was there too, standing slightly behind them both, very upright, his face doing a thing it didn’t seem built to do.
Luna had gone quiet.
"Sorry," Harry said, though he wasn’t sure what he was apologising for. He wasn’t sure he’d said it aloud.
Then Luna hugged him.
It was sudden enough that he didn’t react at first. Her arms around him, her face pressed into his shoulder, her whole frame shaking in small, silent waves. He stood there for a moment with his arms at his sides, wrong-footed, and then a crack ran through his chest very quietly and he put his arms around her and held on.
She didn’t make a sound. He could feel her crying rather than hear it, the dampness spreading into his shirt, her breathing uneven and held tight. Harry stared over the top of her head at nothing and thought about Malfoy Manor. About a voice screaming from somewhere below the floor. About how she’d come back from it as though she’d simply decided to.
He thought about Mr. Lovegood standing in the doorway of his own house, his face grey and terrible, trying to hand his daughter’s friends to the people who had taken her.
He held on tighter.
They stood there without speaking and it was enough, somehow — more than enough. He didn’t need to ask what had broken or when. It was all there in her shoulders, the months of it, everything she’d absorbed with that eerie, unembarrassed calm and simply carried. The dungeon. The loneliness of it. All the people she’d known her whole life and had now to look at differently, to locate in rows or in crowds, counting.
He didn’t know how long they stood there. Long enough that his arm began to ache faintly where the old curse-damage was.
Eventually he said, "It’s over now."
He meant it as a comfort. It landed flat, even to his own ears.
Luna pulled back slightly. She looked up at him and her face was wet and very honest, the way it always was, unafraid of being seen.
"Yes," she said. Exhausted, generous, understanding that he didn’t quite believe it either and choosing not to hold that against him.
Harry didn’t say anything else.
Luna looked at him for a moment longer, really looked, in that way of hers that always made him feel slightly transparent, and then she wiped her face once with the back of her hand, straightened, and said, "Thank you, Harry. For all of it."
Before he could answer she had already turned and was making her way unhurriedly across the Hall, stepping around people and debris with an odd, drifting grace, until she reached the place where Neville was sitting and settled herself beside him without a word.
He watched as Luna started comforting Neville and then his feet were moving.
He hadn’t decided this. He was aware of the decision only distantly, the way you’re aware of current in water — not as a choice but as a fact about where you’re going. He moved through the Hall, around clusters of people, past overturned benches and the remains of things he didn’t look at directly. The Weasleys grew closer with each step.
Ginny hadn’t moved. Still kneeling, still holding that cold hand in both of hers. George still against the bench, looking at nothing. Molly was there now too, he could see, her broad back curved over, one hand on Ginny’s shoulder and one on George’s, holding them both together by an instinct older than anything she’d ever had to learn.
He was nearly there.
He was going to say what needed saying to Molly. He was going to put his hand on her arm and look at her and say that he was sorry, that Fred had been brilliant, that if there had been any other way he would have found it, he swore to her, he would have found it. He was going to look at Arthur, steady and ruined beside his wife, and take whatever was in his eyes. He was going to find George’s face and not look away from it.
He was going to find Ginny.
He walked past them.
He didn’t stop. His legs simply didn’t stop. He was aware, with a strange and distant horror, that he was still moving, that the red hair was behind him now, that George’s profile had come and gone at the edge of his vision, and still he walked, around a collapsed section of the ceiling, through a gap between two groups of people he didn’t register, and then out through the doors of the Great Hall and into the corridor beyond.
The noise fell away behind him like a dropped cloak.
He walked up the first staircase he found, not knowing where he was going, not asking. The castle was quiet here, and broken. Chunks of masonry on the stairs, a portrait hanging crooked on a cracked wall, the painted occupant gone. His footsteps were very loud.
He found himself in a first floor bathroom. He didn’t remember choosing it.
One of the windows was blown out and the cold May air came through in a thin, steady stream. Most of the mirrors had come off the wall entirely. One remained, hanging at an angle, a crack running diagonally across its face. It showed him a fragment of himself: the left side of his jaw, the corner of his glasses, a bit of dried blood near his hairline that he hadn’t known was there.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he turned to the nearest basin and reached for the tap.
Nothing. He twisted it further. The pipes gave a low, hollow groan somewhere behind the wall and then went silent. He stood there with his hand on the cold metal and breathed.
He straightened and looked back at the fragment of the mirror.
The face that looked back at him was not his.
It was pale and still, the way Fred had been pale and still on the floor of the Great Hall, and there were burn marks along the jaw and temple, and the eyes were open and very clear. They looked at Harry with an expression that was not quite Fred’s. Flatter, missing the irreverence that had always lived behind Fred’s eyes — and the mouth opened.
"It was your fault, Potter."
The words arrived without sound, or perhaps Harry simply couldn’t hear anything anymore over the noise his own blood was making.
He stood very still.
The tear reached his chin before he felt it.
What came after was not crying. Lower than that, starting in his chest and tearing out of him like an animal, a sound he didn’t recognise as his own, raw and ragged, pressed through clenched teeth. He bent at the shoulders with the force of it, both hands gripping the edge of the basin, his knuckles white against the porcelain. It lasted only a moment. It felt much longer.
Voldemort was dead.
Fred was dead.
Lupin was dead. Tonks. Colin Creevey, who had come back when he shouldn’t have, because that was the sort of boy he’d been. Fifty others whose names Harry knew and a number he didn’t and every single one of them had come because of him, had stood where they stood and died where they died because of the shape of his life and what it had required of everyone inside it.
Voldemort was dead.
He stayed bent over the basin for a moment more. Then he straightened. Breathed carefully in through the nose and out through the mouth, the way he’d learnt to in the tent, in the long empty months of it, when there had been nothing else to do. His reflection watched him, patient, waiting.
He looked at it one last time.
Just Harry. Glasses cracked at the corner, blood drying on his face, seventeen years old. Just Harry.
He turned and walked back through the broken corridor, down the stairs, and through the doors of the Great Hall.
The Weasleys had shifted. Ginny was on her feet now, and Percy and Molly, and they had arranged themselves near the far wall where Kingsley Shacklebolt stood talking to Arthur in a low, rapid voice, his head bent, one hand moving in a short decisive way that meant Ministry business, or what passed for it now. Arthur’s face was grey but his posture was straight, listening. Taking it in. Harry watched him nod once, twice, and then Kingsley gripped his arm and they both turned and Disapparated with two sounds like a pair of muffled firecrackers.
Harry looked away from where they’d been and saw Ron and Hermione.
They hadn’t moved far from where he’d left them, relatively speaking. Ron was standing very still, big and rigid, his arms locked at his sides, his eyes red. Hermione’s hand was through his arm, gripping it with both of hers, pressed against him from elbow to shoulder. She was not crying. She looked like a person who had been crying for a long time and had simply run dry.
Harry walked towards them. He had no idea what he was going to say. He was opening his mouth anyway when arms hit him hard from behind, wrapping around him with a force that drove the air from his lungs, a face pressed fiercely into the back of his shoulder.
He knew before he turned.
He didn’t turn.
He just stood there and let Ginny hold on.
Then Molly was there.
She came from the side and folded herself around him from the front with a completeness that left no argument, both arms wrapped around his shoulders, her chin somewhere near his forehead. She smelled of wool and smoke and underneath both of those things a smell that Harry could not have named but knew immediately, the way you know a room you grew up in by its air alone.
"Oh, Harry." She said it into his hair, soft and certain. "Oh, you wonderful, brave boy."
She started talking. He wasn’t sure she was entirely aware of it; the words came the way water comes when a dam finds a crack, unstoppable and almost impersonal, carrying everything along with them. She was so glad he was alive, she said. She had known, she had believed, but there had been moments, dark hours, and now here he was and everything was going to be alright, it really was, she could feel it. She talked about the Burrow and a proper bedroom and meals that weren’t whatever they’d been surviving on, she talked about Ginny in a way that involved no question at all, as though this had simply been settled in her mind and she saw no reason to tiptoe around it, she talked about jumpers — colours, whether he was still a fan of maroon, she’d always thought a deep blue might suit him better — her voice moving through one thing and onto the next with a warmth so steady that it took Harry a moment to understand what she was not saying.
She didn’t mention Fred.
Not once. Not around the edges of a sentence, not in the spaces between thoughts. The absence was so careful, so deliberate, that it had its own weight.
Harry said nothing. This was Molly Weasley doing what Molly Weasley had always done: choosing, in the moments that required it, to hold the living very tightly and deal with everything else later.
He let her talk.
Ginny hadn’t let go. She was still behind him, her arms locked around his middle, her forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. Still. Her breathing had slowed.
Harry stood between them and felt a thing happen to him that was so unfamiliar he needed a moment to identify it.
It was the war that had started all of this. The prophecy, Dumbledore, the Horcruxes, seven years of a weight bearing down on him from a direction he couldn’t defend against, the constant low-grade certainty that he was running out of time. He had lived inside it for so long that he had stopped noticing it was there.
It wasn’t there.
For the first time — not since the war started, he realised, but perhaps for longer than that, perhaps since a cupboard under the stairs and a scar he couldn’t explain and the dawning understanding that the world was not ordinary and neither was he — for the first time in a very long time, Harry felt happy.
Quietly. With a bewildered gratitude that had nothing to do with everything still broken around him.
Just happy.
The light through the high windows had turned amber by the time someone thought to light the candles.
Harry hadn’t noticed the sun moving. He’d been only distantly aware of the Hall reorganising itself around him over the course of the afternoon. The quiet, purposeful activity of people who needed a task, the living drawing together by unspoken agreement towards the Gryffindor end while the other end of the Hall was left to its own stillness. A few of the longer tables had been cleared or pushed aside. What remained of one of them — three legs and most of the surface, the fourth corner resting on a pile of rubble — had become theirs by default.
Ron was sitting on the edge of it, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Hermione sat beside him with her knees drawn up, her head resting against his shoulder in a way that said she’d stopped asking herself whether she should.
"I’ll have to go," Hermione said. She said it to the table, not to any of them specifically. "Sooner rather than later. They’re in Australia, I’m almost certain. I put enough thought into the cover story that I think — I know they’re safe, I know that, but I need to see them."
"I’ll come," said Ron immediately.
Hermione lifted her head and looked at him.
"I just mean —" Ron’s ears went slightly pink. "You might need help. With the memory modification. Reversing it."
"That’s not really how it —"
"Or apparating. Long distances. Or just." He stopped. "I’ll come."
Hermione looked at him for a moment longer with an expression that had several things in it, and then she put her head back on his shoulder. "Alright," she said quietly.
Harry watched this from the other side of the table and felt a distant, uncomplicated gladness. Then Ginny’s shoulder pressed more firmly against his and he turned.
She was already looking at him. She’d been doing that on and off for the past hour, in short careful glances, checking that he was still solid and present and where she’d left him. He didn’t mind it.
"I keep seeing it," she said. Not quietly — just normally, saying what was true. "Hagrid carrying you. I knew — I thought I knew you were dead and I still can’t —" She stopped herself. Tried a different approach. "You were dead, Harry."
"I wasn’t, technically."
"Don’t," she said.
"Sorry."
She looked at him steadily. "How long did you know? That you were going to have to — that you’d have to let him —"
"Not long before." Which was true, as far as it went.
Ginny was quiet for a moment. The amber light moved across the table between them.
"There are still Death Eaters out there," she said. It wasn’t a question.
"Yes." No point dressing that up.
"Which means it isn’t really — it doesn’t just stop. Does it."
"No," Harry said. "Not all at once."
Ginny absorbed this. Then her expression shifted, just slightly, the ghost of what would have been a grin on any other day.
"Well," she said. "I suppose that’s convenient."
He looked at her. "How is that convenient?"
"For you." She tilted her head. "Didn’t you tell me once, back in fifth year, that you wanted to be an Auror? The Ministry’s going to need about a hundred of them, by my count." She glanced sideways at him. "You’d practically be overqualified at this point."
Harry opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He looked down at the table.
"I hadn’t thought about that," he said honestly.
"No, you’d been a bit busy," Ginny agreed.
Across the table, Ron had apparently been listening with half an ear. "She’s not wrong, mate," he said, without lifting his head from where it had come to rest on top of Hermione’s. "I reckon You-Know-Who on your CV probably counts for something."
"Don’t call him that," Harry said, almost automatically. "And it’s not a CV."
"It’s absolutely a CV."
"Right," said Ginny, sitting up slightly, scenting an opening. "So while Harry’s off catching Dark wizards, what exactly are you planning to do with yourself, Ronald?"
Ron lifted his head. "I’ll find something."
"Find something," Ginny repeated. "Very specific. Very ambitious. Mum will be thrilled."
"I’m not the one who —"
"Because you didn’t finish your N.E.W.T.s, is the thing." Ginny said this pleasantly, as though pointing out a mildly interesting fact about the weather. "Or your O.W.L.s, technically. Or most of seventh year."
"Neither did Harry."
"Harry defeated the most dangerous Dark wizard in a century, so Harry gets to skip the exams." Ginny looked across at Harry. "You get to skip the exams."
"Cheers," said Harry.
"I also fought in the battle," Ron said, somewhat loudly.
"We all fought in the battle, Ron."
"I destroyed a Horcrux."
"You’re going to be telling that story until you’re eighty and we both know it."
"It was a very good story —"
"I’ll help him," Hermione said, with such brisk and genuine conviction that Ron stopped mid-sentence. She seemed to realise a moment later what she’d implied, because she added, more carefully, "With the exams. He’s perfectly capable, he just needs to actually study this time."
"I do study."
"Ron."
"Sometimes."
Harry looked at the remains of the table and attempted to keep his expression neutral. Failed. "Well," he said, "I suppose you’ll be alright, since Hermione will probably earn enough for the both of you. And the children."
The silence was immediate.
Ron went puce from the collar up. Hermione made a small, involuntary sound and developed a sudden intense interest in a fixed point somewhere near the floor, her face a colour that clashed badly with the amber candlelight.
"Blimey, Harry," said Ron.
"How many are we saying," Ginny asked. "Hypothetically."
"I said children," Harry said, "I didn’t say how many."
"Six," said Ginny.
"I didn’t say six —"
"I’m going to go and find some water," Hermione announced, to no one in particular, standing up with great dignity.
"There’s no running water," Harry said.
She sat back down. The colour in her face was, if anything, deepening.
Ron cleared his throat. He was still quite pink, but his mouth was fighting a losing battle with a grin. He looked at Harry and shook his head slowly, appalled and reluctantly impressed in equal measure.
Then he put his arm around Hermione, very casually, as though he’d been doing it all his life.
Hermione looked down at the table. But she didn’t move away.
The candlelight shifted. Harry found Ginny’s hand under the table and she let him take it, her fingers lacing through his without ceremony, and for a little while none of them said anything and that was its own kind of ease, the four of them in the amber quiet of the evening, not yet ready to think about tomorrow.
The cracks echoed between the rubble without warning.
Twin flashes of light at the far end of the Hall, then a third, then half a dozen more in quick succession, the sharp, efficient sound of Ministry Apparition, nothing like the softer pops that people had been making all afternoon. Six or seven witches and wizards in dark robes fanned out with the practised coordination of people following a procedure. One of them produced a clipboard.
They had come to the far end of the Hall, near the door, the end that the living had been leaving to its stillness. They arranged themselves in a loose perimeter, talking quickly in low voices that didn’t carry, and the one with the clipboard looked down and then looked up and pointed, and the others turned.
Towards the body of Voldemort.
The laughter had left the table entirely. Harry watched them move closer, watched one of them crouch and produce a wand and begin what looked like a series of clinical, diagnostic spells, the light from them a pale and businesslike blue.
Nobody had told him they were coming.
He wasn’t sure why he’d expected they would.
"How did they even get in here?" Harry said, watching the Ministry wizard with the clipboard consult with another one over the body. "The castle’s supposed to be — there are enchantments, you can’t just —"
"Harry." Ron said it with the patience of a man who had been sitting on this information for a while. "The enchantments are gone."
Harry turned.
"The defences. All of it." Ron gestured vaguely at the ceiling, the walls, the castle as a whole. "The initial attack took most of it down. You couldn’t Apparate onto the grounds before tonight. Now you can just —" He clicked his fingers. "Straight in."
Harry looked back at the Ministry wizards.
"So anyone could —"
"Yes."
"Including Death Eaters who might want to —"
"Yes, Harry, we’d thought of that."
Harry closed his mouth. He looked at the clipboard again and felt the old vigilance move through him like a cold current, quiet and familiar and entirely unwilling to accept that it was no longer necessary.
"They’ll need to do something with him," Hermione said, after a moment.
No one asked who she meant.
"Buried," said Ron. "Somewhere far away. Unnamed."
"They can’t bury him with everyone else," Ginny said flatly. "With — with other people. People’s families."
"No," Harry agreed.
"And if they mark the grave," Hermione continued, thinking it through as she said it, "it becomes a site. People will go there. The wrong sort of people, the ones who —"
"A shrine," said Harry.
"Yes."
"So no marker," said Ron.
"No marker means someone will eventually claim they know where it is regardless," Hermione said. "True or not. That’s almost worse, because then you can’t —"
"Could burn him," Ron offered.
Hermione hesitated in a way that suggested this wasn’t as easily dismissed as it might have been yesterday.
They looked at the Ministry wizards crouched over the body, pale spell-light playing over what had been, until this morning, the most feared dark wizard in a century, and nobody seemed to have an answer that fully worked.
"Somewhere secret," Harry said finally. "Somewhere without a name. That’s all I know."
"Very helpful," said Ginny. But she said it against his shoulder, which softened it considerably.
He might have said more, had a larger set of footsteps not arrived all at once.
Molly came first. She had about her the energy of a woman who has found the next necessary thing and means to see it done. Bill was just behind her, his scarred face carrying a deliberate, exhausted calm, and Fleur at his side, one hand through his arm. Charlie, broad-shouldered and quiet, with a cut above his left eye that someone had bandaged neatly. Percy, still very upright, his glasses repaired crookedly. George last.
Harry looked at George and then looked at the table.
"Right," said Molly, with great firmness, as though firmness were the thing required. "It’s time to go home."
"Shell Cottage," Bill said, to no one in particular. "We’ll take the night. Come to the Burrow tomorrow."
Fleur nodded and said something in a low voice that Harry didn’t catch, and Bill covered her hand with his without looking down.
"Everyone’s coming back to the Burrow," Molly continued, her eyes moving over Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny, conducting a headcount, finding it satisfactory. "Beds, food, a proper roof. We’ll sort everything else in the morning."
"I’ll come," said Hermione, immediately and quietly.
"Me too," said Ginny.
Harry glanced at Ron, who was already nodding. Then he looked at Molly.
"I can’t," he said.
She looked at him.
"Not tonight." He tried to put it properly. "I need to go back to Grimmauld Place. Make sure it’s — there are things there, and I need to check it’s all as it was. I’ll come tomorrow, I promise."
The look on Molly’s face moved through several things in quick succession. For a moment he thought she was going to argue, or pull him into another hug and simply refuse to release him until he’d agreed. Instead she reached out and cupped his face in her hand, briefly, the pressure saying what she didn’t.
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow," Harry agreed.
She held his gaze for a moment longer, then nodded once and turned to marshal the others.
Ginny appeared at his elbow. She looked up at him. Not quite worry. More precise than that, more knowing.
"You’ll be alright on your own tonight?"
"I’ll be fine."
"Harry."
"I’ll be fine, Ginny."
She looked at him for another second, and then she reached up and took hold of the front of his robes briefly, not a kiss, just that, her eyes very direct, and let go.
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow."
The sound of Disapparition faded and Harry was alone.
Not truly alone. The Hall was still full, would be full for hours yet. But the aloneness of having your people leave is its own thing, and he felt it. He stood beside the broken table and didn’t move for a moment.
He became aware, gradually, that the quality of the sound around him had changed.
It had been grief, before. Grief and shock and the heavy silence of people who didn’t yet know what to do with themselves. That was still there, at the edges, in the quieter corners. But over the course of the evening a new sound had risen up through it, building so slowly he hadn’t noticed until now.
People were laughing.
Not the hollow, disbelieving laughter from earlier. Real laughter, the kind with air in it. Someone near the Hufflepuff table was crying and laughing at the same time, arms around two others, all three of them leaning into each other at precarious angles. A group of older witches he didn’t recognise had conjured drink and were raising it to one another, unmistakably celebrating. Even the exhausted ones, the ones sitting in silence on the floor. Their faces were different now. Looser. Unlocked.
Harry watched them.
The Ministry witches and wizards had their backs to him. They had produced a long, dark cloth, and what had been on the floor near the doors was no longer visible beneath it. As Harry watched, two of them took up positions at either end and with a coordinated gesture, levitated it. The clipboard was tucked away. They moved towards the doors at a pace that suggested they had somewhere specific and already decided upon to be.
Harry watched them go.
He should follow. He should know where they were taking it, where it was going to end up, whether they would do this properly. He, more than anyone in the room, had reason to make sure.
The thought dissolved before he could act on it.
He was so tired.
And perhaps that was alright. Perhaps there were things he had earned the right to put down. He had carried the weight of that name, that fear, for seven years. Longer, if you counted the scar and the story that came with it. He had done what needed doing. Whatever the Ministry did now with what remained of Tom Riddle was Ministry business, and he would check, he would follow up, but not tonight.
He let them go.
He turned back to the Hall one last time.
It was ordinary in its joy, was the thing. That was what struck him. Not triumphant, not grand. Just people, dozens of them, tired and battered and alive, finding each other in the candlelight. The most feared dark wizard of all time was dead in a box being carried by someone with a clipboard, and in the Hall where it had ended, somebody was laughing so hard they’d had to sit down on the floor.
Harry looked at it all for a long moment.
Then he turned away, found a clear space, and Disapparated.