Afterlife

A/N: This was written for the ficathon at www.livejournal.com/community/hhr_serendipity, in response to the prompt, ‘Harry and Hermione, after Harry comes back from the final battle against Voldemort’. Please bear in mind the PG 13 rating is for some blood and violence (Which is not my usual fare…)

A million thanks to dearest littlecreek, victoria_tonks and my precious beta miconic for convincing me to post this. *heart*

Enjoy!

*

Afterlife

Your friends now ghosts are screaming
Bury us, they said…

“Pretend you’re alive”

Lovedrug

**

In the end it’s not he who kills Voldemort.

Not really.

Beyond the edge of the cliff the sea moans. Beneath its grey-green lip is the cave where they found the fake Horcrux, where the end began for Dumbledore.

He clamps his jaw. The memory retreats.

His wand hand is shaking. His fingers are numb, his palm damp. But his eyes never waver from the figure before him, a red-eyed wound against the sedate yellow sky.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Every time he imagined this moment he was facing an opponent stronger than he, if not equal. But fury would guide his hand. Love would help him kill.

At least that’s what Dumbledore said.

No one ever said anything about this, the last sliver of Voldemort’s hacked soul.

There is no face, only the slit eyes in a misshapen ball of skin. His skin’s wrinkled like a newborn’s, his bones shrivelled and spine hunched. The eyes seem also to have shrunk, two fetid lesions embedded in a bag of skin. In his hand, the wand looks like a piece of wood caught in a spiderweb.

Dumbledore said it would be easy, once the Horcruxes were destroyed.

There would be terror and anger and resolve but not pity. Never pity.

Come on, Harry.

His mouth is parched. The curse burns on his tongue. He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for. The wind has no direction, whipping itself into maddened loops, then bursting apart over the sea. His scar screams. All his blood seem to have converged there, livid for a way out.

Do it, Harry, do it.

Mum and Dad. Sirius. Dumbledore. Hagrid. All those nameless, faceless people--dead, tortured, forgotten. Do it for them.

Another pale streak of green light shoots from Voldemort’s wand. It labours in the air between them for a moment and Harry thinks that this time it might just touch him.

But it doesn’t. It dissolves in midair like all the others, the echo of the Killing Curse no more than a sigh.

He doesn’t know what to do. He’s standing in front of Voldemort who’s weaker than he’s ever been, and he doesn’t know what to do. This is wrong, he thinks for the hundredth time, this is wrong. I can’t kill him--I can’t kill this…thing. Deformed and defenceless, like a baby gone all wrong--I can’t kill this thing.

But he must. He must.

A gull swoops low and disappears into a cleft in the stone. He grits his teeth, trying to block out the pain in his forehead, scrabbling for the last dregs of his resolve. The moment is tightening around him, a twisting funnel out of which there’s only one way out. He takes a deep breath and raises his wand.

And at that moment the cliff erupts.

Red hair and blonde hair. A scream, a scuffle, a curse deflected.

A wand whips through air and rattles down the cliff-face. In its wake, two bodies.

“NO!”

Salty air slams a fist in his lungs. Suddenly, it’s all over.

“AVADA KEDAVRA!”

The curse twists razor-sharp through his terror and confusion. And rage, mostly rage. It’s as if the last five minutes of hesitation and revulsion and pity never existed.

You waited you fool why the fuck did you wait he’s done it again and this time it’s Ron.

It’s Ron.

And in a crevice of his mind moist with things he doesn’t dare examine, shame-faced relief breaks out in deeply coloured buds.

It’s Ron.

Not--not Hermione.

*

In the end she doesn’t need her wand.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he growls, spittle flying. His greasy hair whips around in the wind. Her head clamours so loudly that she can’t hear him. She doesn’t listen anyway. Doesn’t want to. Words will get in the way.

She looks for fear in his face, but there’s none, no other emotion except enraged contempt and impatience. He has no idea, doesn’t see it coming, the glass hidden at her back, the tight gleam in her eye. After all, who would expect this from Hermione Granger?

“Get off me!”

He tries to shake her off, but she digs her knees harder into his chest. She’s got his hands clamped beneath her feet. Her knees are trembling. She can’t hold him much longer, he’s much stronger than she is. She clutches the shard of glass so tightly that blood drips from her hand.

Do it do it do it. Now.

The wind quickens. Loose pebbles rattle down the cliff face.

She looks for a vein. Her lip bleeds. How do people do this? What works best? Where do you drive the knife?

Suddenly he wrenches one of his hands from under her foot. She screams. Her hand flies out from behind her back and the glass slams down on his neck.

Her clamouring mind goes silent.

He’s screaming, there’s blood spurting everywhere, all down her front, its metallic smell thick in her lungs. The amber glass glistens with it. Wind clamps hands over her ears. She drives the shard down his throat again. And again. His flesh opens up in screaming colours. White tissue and blue veins and blood. Red, endless blood. He twitches horribly and she swallows her bile over and over. Or maybe that’s her heart, the bitter, sour, shrunken ball rising up her throat.

At least, she thinks, this feels right. Killing feels right this way, bloody, ghastly, flailing--not a stainless death on the end of two quick words. This feels like life.

Proper, human, blood and bone life, dying.

*

His mind is blank. Not clear, but blank. And beneath its tight lid his memories are collapsing in one mangled heap, conversations, dreams, thoughts, faces. Quidditch scores. Spells. Nursery rhymes from a million years ago.

There was a crooked man
Who walked a crooked mile.

His feet scuff the sand, grains sliding inside his sneakers. His scar is open. Blood drips in a thick rope, writhing, blinding. But his steps are steady. Left right left. Right. Left. Before, after. Dead, alive. This life, the life before this.

Harry, Harry who killed.

Ron, Ron who’s dead.

No no no please don’t let him--

He found a crooked sixpence
Against a crooked stile.

Ron, in the train. Ron, grinning from ear to ear at the chess-board. Ron blocking the Quidditch hoop. Ron, cowering under Hermione’s glare.

He bought a crooked cat
Which caught a crooked mouse,

Hermione, where was Hermione?

And they all lived together

In a crooked little house.

*

These are not her feet, stumbling down the cliff face, sending stones flying.

These are not her eyes, burning, the spreadeagled figure down below etched into them.

And this is not her heart, dying a million deaths in anticipation of green eyes molten with pain.

“Harry!” she calls, her voice choked, but he doesn’t turn around. Much more agile than she is, he descends the cliff face in quick strides. They’re descending on the shallow side of the cliff, the sharp end where Ron and Malfoy hurled off rising on their left.

Her head spins. The sea arches its sickly green belly and flips over, frothing. All she wants to do is drop to the ground and scream until the knot in her heart loosens and lets her breathe.

But she can’t. She must remain on her feet, for there he is, falling to pieces next to Ron’s lifeless form.

*

“There’s no pulse, Hermione,” he whispers, not looking at her.

“Harry--”

“Look.” He takes her hand and places it at the pulse point at Ron’s neck. Both their hands are shaking, but beneath them, Ron is utterly still.

He’s trying so hard to hold back the sob stabbing his throat. The sand pulls at him like a living thing.

“Harry, look at me--”

“We have to get him out of here, I think together we can apparate him back to--”

“Harry will you please look at me!”

“Maybe we can still--”

“No Harry, there’s nothing we can do now--”

“Don’t say it! Don’t you dare say it--”

“Harry, please--”

He pulls his arm out of her grasp and buries his face in his hands, his knees drawn up to his chest.

“Oh god it was my fucking fault--”

“No, that’s not true--”

“Did you see him? Did you see Voldemort?”

“No--I--”

“He looked like a goddamn baby and I couldn’t--I didn’t kill him quick enough--”

Sea and sky and sand all fall away. Pressed by emptiness from all sides, he aches for her hands that are always there, the walls of his world.

“Harry, it wasn’t your fault. You have to believe me. I saw what happened, Harry. Ron must have thought Draco was after you. You couldn’t have stopped him. Harry, you have to believe me. ”

He falls and she holds him and he heaves great gasps of breath to fill himself with her, to drown in, to ebb away. It was my fault, my fault, he whispers over and over into her neck, wanting to hear her deny it, hear her say, no, Harry, trust me, it wasn’t, as many times as it takes him to believe her.

Because when she tells him, he believes.

*

The sun is beginning to set in a colourless band at the far end of the stolid sky. Her chest is aching, but she clutches him tighter, harder. He’s quieter now, his breath a little more even. This is easier, she thinks, this is easier than having to look at him and see the cracks in his eyes. This way I can hold him whole.

The wind lifts her hair. She’s trying so hard to not look at Ron, who looks peaceful, untouched, as if he’s waiting patiently for life to begin again. A few feet away, half-hidden by a rocky outcrop is Draco, blood congealing darkly against his white hair.

Harry stirs. She loosens her arms. Her breath is twisting painfully in her gut, and she doesn’t know what to do about it.

He’s looking around for his glasses, but she doubts he knows what he’s doing. The blood from his scar is beginning to dry up, ugly rust-coloured marks on his cheeks. She gets up and walks to the edge of the sea on wobbly legs. She tears a strip off her shirt and dips it in the shallow salty water and returns to him.

He seems to have given up the search for his glasses.

She kneels next to him and turns his face towards her. “Here.”

She starts at his forehead, at the scar, the cloth getting soiled straightaway. She moves over his cheeks, and her hands begin to tremble all over again.

“Hermione--”

His hand comes up to hold her wrist. She shakes her head, not looking at him.

“Hermione, later--I can clean up later.” She doesn’t know how he does it but his voice is commanding. “We have to get Ron out of here.”

She doesn’t answer.

“Hermione look at me, please, look at me--we have to--”

“Just shut up, Harry! Just shut up and let me do this!”

He drops her wrist.

“Yes, we have to get Ron out of here! Yes, we have to get Malfoy out of here! Yes, we have to see if that inhuman scum is really dead--yes, yes!”

He looks so stunned and worried and she wants to stop shouting, but she can’t.

“But you’re alive, Harry. You’realive. I can’t think of anything else now. For fuck’s sake, don’t you get it? I just can’t think of anything else!”

She meets his eyes through a blur. Her entire world stares back at her.

He knows he knows he’s always known.

Just as I have.

They grab each other at the same moment, his bloodied lips and her aching mouth, and she pushes and pushes, trying to wipe the blood and get to him, his taste. And somewhere in her mind she knows it’s futile, untrue, impossible, because the rage and sorrow pitching through his blood and warm on her lips, <i>are</i> him. Just as the needy fingers digging her bones, the palms trying to be gentle inspite of himself, the drowning breath, the blistering tears are also him. This is all of him, right here. She will never forget this, never, her first taste of him, a bloodied kiss on the sands of a wailing sea.

Gulls scream. Sea spray rockets off the cliff-face and stings their faces.

“You’re covered in blood,” he gasps, “I, I’m sorry, I’ve drenched you.”

She sits back, hands still clutching his shirt.

His fingers reach out to the congealing stains on her skin. She stops him.

“It’s not your blood.”

The wind rips through the waves. His hands push hers away and reach in again.

“Oh my god, are you hurt? Hermione--”

She can’t look at him. But she can’t turn away, hide, they’re too close.

“It’s Snape’s blood. I killed him.”

She shakes his hands off hers and slides her palms under the sand. The grains are smooth, still warm. She begins to shake.

“I had to. He was going to get to you. I had to. Had to.”

He grabs her upper arms and pulls her into him.

“And you know what? It was easier than saying the words. I couldn’t say the Killing Curse. So I--there was a broken beer bottle down the road.”

Her voice gutters like a candle left out in a storm. He’s no longer breathing.

“I killed him. It’s his blood. I killed, Harry. I killed.”

He feels himself sink into the sand. His arms are knots around her waist. But he sinks and sinks, his anchor adrift and helpless, the grey sea roaring.

*

I’m here, he screams.

I’m here I’m here I’m here.

But he knows he’s not. For things are much clearer now, the light much deeper, and growing. He can see them both so vividly, feel them, their sorrow, their rage, their love. Their love.

I’m here.

And Hermione, you’re wrong for once.

Draco wasn’t after Harry. He was after Voldemort.

That’s why.

You see, I wanted Harry to have his chance. His right to kill.

That’s why.

**