Leaving Home

Argh! I know I said I'd post the last two parts together, but they've both been mostly done for months now and I can't seem to make myself finish them both at once. So have made myself finish part 5, and will post part 6 tomorrow - because if I don't post this now, I'll never get 6 done. So slow!

Rating is staying the same. I thought it would go up due to sex scene but that turned out to be much less graphic than I anticipated. But be warned, this is very, very dark H/Hr. Character-death dark. Epilogue to be posted tomorrow much more hopeful - remember the potion that Snape saves from the wreckage before slating me in advance for endless misery, LOL.

Leaving Home (5/6)

Which pain is worse, the physical or the emotional? Up until now, I would have said the latter, for that suffering I have come to know well over the past two years, and it is inescapable in its intensity. And yet, never before have I suffered a curse like this one, flung at me in grief and rage. Perhaps the physical can be as bad, because there seems to be no end of it.

When the end does come I am dazed, and the stone is cool beneath my cheek. I do not think I can rise and everything is dark around me. My throat is dry, and I can't seem to talk, although I would very much like to ask for water. Have I been screaming so much? Dimly, I recognise that Harry no longer has his wand, and I do not have the strength to wonder just who it is that took it off him, and who it is that crouches over me, their hand on my forehead. I try to move, and an echo of pain flashes through me. Someone is helping me to sit up, and I lean on them, almost falling. I can't hold myself up.

Voices flash and hover around me like birds, and I can't seem to make sense of them. I think I hear Harry, but what I hear of him shatters into fragments, cuts into the air like glass. I don't know whether the shattering comes from him or me. He sounds almost lost.

I know what it feels like to be lost.

“I didn't… I didn't mean to…deserved it. …she alright? I can't… happened? Deserved it.”

It swirls in my head like oil on water, and I don't know what has happened either, except that I know that I am not the only one to know pain so enormous it can't be borne without crippling the bearer.

The voices swim above me again. I hear “family” and “child” in a lower, whispered tone. There is a blur of movement, a small one, as a bowed shape before me lurches briefly towards the door, and in a rush of fear I know that Harry has been given back his wand.

Fear and pain overcome what scruples I have, what weakness. I can forgive the pain he has caused me because I know I have hurt him far more, but I cannot reconcile the child I knew with the man he has become, and I cannot risk the hurt of that man being taken out on a tangible reminder of my betrayal. Adrenalin forces me to my feet, fear making me move where agony does not and, reeling, I force him into focus and shove weakly at his chest. Anger, hurt flare briefly in his eyes but he steps back. It is not my strength that forces him to do so, but what I believe is an unwillingness to touch me. It doesn't matter. The brief pause allows me to get to the door before he does, to turn and bar the way against this person I used to trust more than any.

“You stay away from my baby!” I hurl at him, uselessly so, stupidly so. For I do not have the strength to fight him and he could easily shoulder me aside if he wanted to do so. But I do not trust this man, and his capacity for violence, and even if I fuelled him I do not trust him in his agony - and in my own - enough to risk my brother.

My head is spinning and I can barely stand but he'll have to kill me if he wants to get through this door.

And as my vision clears I can see his do the same, see the clear green of the child I knew emerge from the wreck of what he is becoming, the shadow of a monster. He is staring at me as if looking far into the past, and his wand clatters hard to the floor. He looks confused, and sick, and wounded.

“I wouldn't,” he said. “Not a baby, I… I couldn't.”

An in the roaring of my ears I can hear the horror in his voice, a bleak dismay that comes from the gap where he could have said “Not yet,” for we both know the gap is there. Had I not left him would he have avoided turning into this, into what he has to fight? Had I stayed, would I have become the same?

I am lead out of the room, and I realise it is Neville I am leaning on, Neville who takes me only a few paces from the door before my legs fail me, Neville whose robe I retch onto like I am vomiting up the horror of the world.

Scant feet away, I can hear Harry do the same, hear him weep; hear his sorrow, his regret. What have we come to, he and I?

Days later and I cannot leave. Most are still pretending that I'm not here. I don't know whether this is wishful thinking on their part, an attempt to give some privacy, or if they're simply so exhausted that they no longer care. Even Ben only gets a few token glances. Snape, of course, has no such compunction. He's at a large table set up in a dim corner, with the remnants of his potion-making equipment spread over it. His dungeon must have collapsed if he's up here, but I can't bring myself to be terribly sympathetic, even though the time I spent in said dungeon suddenly seems happier and more precious than it actually was. I don't have the energy to feel much sympathy for anyone but myself at the moment.

I'm completely unsurprised to see that he has rifled through my bag, and has apparently found the potion I've been trying to make for the past two years. Deft hands unscrew the vial, and he extracts a drop. The lid is replaced and the vial carefully stowed before he turns to the droplet, and it only takes a few small touches, as he holds it to the light of the nearest lamp, for him to understand what it is. He drops it immediately, and there is disgust in his eyes.

But Snape is not the only one who has grown inured over the years. I ignore his glare and drop down on a nearby chair. It's a relief to put Ben down - he is sleeping, and the strain of holding him for hours ebbs as I make a nest for him on the table, folding the blankets about him. It's not ideal, but I'm here and he won't fall off. If anything, Snape looks more affronted than ever.

“Yes,” I say tartly. “It's a baby. Get used to it.”

“I don't know where you picked up that thing, Miss Granger,” he says, under his breath, and I can hear the disdain in his voice. “But perhaps if you'd spent your time studying instead of-”

Instead of fucking, I can almost hear him finish, and of all the liberties I will allow Snape to take today, that is not one of them. “He's not mine,” I say, a little defensively - but only a little, for now he is more mine than anyone's, and no-one else has any claim on him. I wouldn't give him to them if they did.

“I'm not blind,” Snape says. “Obviously he is not your get, Miss Granger. There's not a spark of magic in him. Anyone with half a brain could see that.”

I don't know whether to be offended or relieved on Ben's behalf. “There's more to life than magic, Severus,” I say, and note with a twinge of evil pleasure the spark of anger in his eyes that I would dare to use his first name, as if we were equals. And yet it is almost justified - I am no longer a child or a student, but equals we certainly are not. I nod towards the discarded drop. “I can't get it to work.”

“I am not in the least surprised,” said Snape. “I am, however, astounded that someone with your gifts would waste them on frivolities. Fiddling while Hogwarts burned, were you, Miss Granger?”

That goes home, as he knew it would. “I need you to help me fix it,” I say, and try to keep the desperation form my voice. My desperation, my salvation.

He leans back in his chair, fingers steepled, and his face in the shadows. “Why?”

“I need it,” and, despite myself, my voice wavers. It is bad enough to come back here, my past and future destroyed, to ask favours from a man I should detest. He shouldn't get to hear why, especially as we both know “why” in the first place.

“For what?” he says, merciless. “Of all the spells in all the books I wasted upon you, you had to go and pick the most inappropriate of the lot. A complete waste of your not inconsiderable talents, I might add.” I look up in surprise, not expecting even that small kindness. Has Snape actually learnt mercy in the last two years? “I expect you've laboured the entire time away on this, with nothing else to show for it,” he says.

No. There is no mercy within him. It is almost comforting that there is no change in him, that his logic is as cutting as it ever was. As much as he detests me, it must have been difficult when I left. I have grown past false modesty, and know that no-one remained who could have matched me as his student, and no professor that could have expected more from me. What a teacher he could have been, if only…

“There is nothing else,” I say, and I meet his gaze. He gave me comfort when I left this place, and he didn't have to. He gave me his tools, and if I refused to use them that is my fault and not his. I haven't come back as any sort of saviour, and his small gesture of faith was wasted - in his eyes at least. But there is more than one type of betrayal, and those other spells… in my worst moments I could have made them, but I could never have used them.

“Why?” he says again. “Why do you want this potion?” - and I know he deserves the simple truth.

“It would make me feel better,” I said, as plainly as I could.

And he smiles at me, a humourless grin that is as cold as any I have ever seen. “There is nothing that can do that, Miss Granger. You'll just have to live with it. Like the rest of us.” The last is said under his breath, and I know that he is speaking from experience.

Harry's curiosity is not so easily put off, but unlike Snape, he has no interest in what my failed potion can do - and more in my other acquisition.

He has no interest in Ben, and I do my best to keep them apart. If that shows a lack of faith I can live with it, but I prefer to think that it's sensitivity on my part, to keep Harry from having to confront the life I had when I left him.

I find it nerve-wracking being around him, in this swirling mixture of guilt and anger and fascination that draws us together, to try and pick out the children that we were in the remnants of the old lives that remain to us. I spend my days alternately trying to get through to him and avoid him, and it is in one of the former times that I mistakenly tell him just what it is that my stolen device does.

The interest that leaps to his eyes unnerves me, and I am grateful that in my grief I stole the one thing that absolutely could not work in Hogwarts. For all my purported genius, it escaped me that electrical objects cannot work in magical environments, and the irony is almost funny. The two things I brought as redemption are both useless, and there is only myself left.

Harry wants to know if there is a way around it, and I know that he would use what I have brought if he could. The thought is horrifying to me - in these quiet, awkward days I have had time to consider more than one type of betrayal, and have come to the conclusion that, if I intended in a fury to use what I have brought, it would have been more Unforgivable than any thing I ever could have done to Harry.

Better I die before that betrayal. Better he die before he lowers what is left of himself to actually do it either.

We argue in silences. Words would fall into the chasm between us, and neither could stand the extra loneliness that echo would give. So we argue in glances, in avoidance, in the ways that are least like us.

In the end, we argue in sex.

It's painful, consciously so. When I drag my nails down his back I mean to draw blood, to make him bleed. Does he not deserve it for losing himself so? And when he thrusts into my body the brutality makes me bite down on my lip so hard the blood runs down both our bodies - and he means for me to bleed. Do I not deserve it, for my betrayal and loss of faith? Words are meaningless between us now; we cannot seem to find the right key to make the other really hear what we have to say. The only way we can speak is with our bodies. And if at times it is gentle, if I cry into his neck in grief and he promises faith that he doesn't have the strength for then we do not speak of it, or acknowledge it, for that is more than either of us can bear. For though these moments are benediction they are not forgiveness, and the next time we come together it will be blood and pain again, until the next small grace.

It is only when the times he leaves my bed that I can truly acknowledge how much I have missed him, and how much I cannot say.

When the wards fail and the war comes, I stay - and Ben stays - for there is nowhere else for us to go. The part of me that is responsible for my brother says that I should run as far as I can, but I do not yet have the strength to break away again. What good would it do? This world is coming to an end whether I go or not - and so is Harry. Why should I stay to see it?

Perhaps because I brought one end with me, and stay to see that it is not used. Perhaps this is a cruelty on my part - to bring the hope that is not hope for a war that cannot be won and a man who cannot win it unless he damns himself. Knowing that that choice is one he would welcome, do I stay to make sure that choice is no longer his? Do I take away his redemption, or, in taking it away, do I let him stand redeemed?

I cannot cope with the choices any longer. The mazes of my mind are tangled, and there is darkness in all of them. There no longer seems any point to staying or going, and it is only in Harry's promise that he will not use what I brought him that I can find any hope, a hope sprung out of death. For using it brings death, and abstaining means death. Should I leave, I am who am at the centre of it?

And yet I find myself torn. Ben's life, Harry's redemption. Who has the greater claim? Two years ago I made a choice between families that saved one, and could not save another. I am under no illusion that my remaining here now undoes that choice, for I know that I have not chosen. I am only at the castle because I haven't yet decided whether to stay or go. A pretty limbo, that balances need with need and claim with claim.

And so I stay in indecision until the war comes to make my choice for me. A coward's conclusion, I know it, but… I thought I had longer. I had not realised how desperate things had become, had thought I had more time to balance the claims upon me, to reason out my new betrayal. Or is it the old? Perhaps this is my punishment, to have to choose and choose again through all eternity. Will it stop, I wonder, if I choose rightly this time?

But what is rightly? There is no petty fight, no girl to insult and no boy to turn away to bridge this divide and make the decision for me, and I have felt no moment since coming to the castle that comes close to that knife-edge of choice. Perhaps I stay to experience that moment, to find the crucible that will allow me to make the choice that I can most live with.

I am under no illusions. In my indecision I may have damned them both.

And when the castle falls, and the enemy swarm over it like the dark stain of madness my life has become, I find my crucible.

It does not come in fighting, in the familiar feel of the wand in my hand, and the curses that come too quickly to my lips. It does not come in the realisation that magic is my home but that my magic is now less than those who remained. For what is surprising about that? How could I have learned the same ruthlessness, whose best weapon is to strike at the heart of those that love me instead of the heads of those that don't?

It comes in the Great Hall, in the heart of what remains of my childhood, in the knowledge that I cannot save them both. When I have bound the man who would have killed me - even now, I cannot bring myself to do the same to him - and turn to see two others.

Neither of them are aiming at me.

I have heard that in times of great import, that time slows down and the senses fade, that there is a silence that can swallow worlds and shine upon darkness, revealing all. I do not feel it. There is no silence in the screams of the few survivors, no dilation of time in the realisation that one Death Eater aims at Harry, Harry who cannot see his danger because of his duel with Voldemort, a duel of such viciousness that it hurts to watch, to know what Harry is capable of, that he will not hesitate to kill. The other stands listening, his head on one side, and I know that he hears the screams of Ben, hidden in the only place I could think to shelter him, behind Snape's table, which is upturned on the floor, its heavy surface sheltering the remains of the Potion Master's efforts, the potion I failed at, the device I stole and refused to use, and my infant brother.

There is no silence, and time does not stand still - and my so efficient brain calculates faster than it ever has, and knows that I can only save one. One.

And in this crucible this choice that is no choice is burned clean, and I am moving before I realise my movement, before I have even finished reasoning - for it is not reason that moves me, but instinct.

He is five steps away, and in the time it takes for me to think `Forgive me not, Lord, for I know exactly what I do' I am crashing into him with all the strength in my body, and his shot runs awry.

It smashes the table, sends pieces shattering through the air and articles scattering along the floor. To my right I can hear a piece knock Neville down, send him fall, bleeding, to the floor. Behind me, I hear the sound of the other Death Eater send his curse, and hear the impact as it hits Harry, sends him crashing into Voldemort, sending both of them to the floor, and both their wands scatter. I can hear everything, but I can only see Ben.

Forgive me, Harry, but he is just a baby. His life is only beginning, and yours will be over soon enough. I should never have brought him back. His life should not pay for my redemption - or for yours. And then I am on him, the warm, small body pressed against mine, and I sob in relief at his screaming, too grateful to process the fact that as I turn, I can see that Harry, by some miracle, is still alive. Alive, but badly injured, the blood streaming from his head. It obscures his scar, and our eyes meet.

Silence.

Reason tells me that there is no silence now, that the crumbling of walls and the screams of the dying are echoing through the broken spaces of the castle, but the last thing I hear before it all stops within me is the quiet, metallic clinks of the device I stole from my second life as it rolls across the floor, spins in dizzy circles across the room. There is something about the noise that, for a moment, makes everyone stop - perhaps knowledge of the future isn't as silly as I imagined it, because what I have brought into this place is something that never should have been, so why shouldn't people know of it?

I know that Harry knows it, and that I know it - and when he looks at me from across the room, from across the death that I have brought and turned away from at the last, there is silence, and I see betrayal in his face. My betrayal - my second betrayal, with the baby in my arms that I chose over him. And his betrayal, that I had never hoped to see but will bargain away for Ben's life.

And there is silence, and the world does stop, and he and I understand each other at last. I know what he is about to do, and that his promise was a lie made out of kindness, to spare me the agony of his own decision.

For what links us now is betrayal, and the acceptance of it in its many forms - and the knowledge that, for everyone, there is something they cannot betray. I was able to leave Harry, to choose my family above him not once but twice, to let the knowledge of my choice twist and destroy the remains of the faith he had in himself - but I am not able to betray more than that because in doing so I would betray myself. That is my true Unforgivable, I think - not the betrayal of others, but the betrayal of self.

For Harry, the Unforgivable is different. He would never betray his friends, but will not stop at betraying himself, at performing the worst thing in the world if it will save others. It is a different kind of betrayal, for there are some things it is worth dying for to avoid doing - an evil which Voldemort himself would not hesitate to perform if only he could unbend enough to know that Muggles could be more powerful than he, but an evil where good intentions do not mitigate desecration, and will not stave off damnation.

In saving others, Harry will let himself become worse than Voldemort will ever be. In saving myself from that same fate, I will let him do it.

And in that single moment, as we stare into each other's eyes for the last time, we are able to forgive each other for what would be Unforgivable in ourselves. Amidst the wreck of my loyalty and his morality enough remains of the children we once were to understand that in each other's place we would do differently, and it would not be alright, but it would be Forgivable. Not to ourselves, but to each other. I would betray him over and over and he would let me go without protest, without betraying me in turn - and he can forgive me for it where he could not forgive himself. He is about to do, without a second thought, what I would damn the entire world before doing - and yet his betrayal stirs nothing in me but love. And pity, that he should be so driven.

Perhaps at the end, that pity is all we have. Pity as it was once understood to be - not the insulting condescension with which it is known today, but the well-spring of a love so all-encompassing that it can sympathise with anything, forgive anything.

And when he smiles at me, as he did the first time that I left him, on the grass outside the castle I can see the boy that was, the love he felt for me then and the remains of it now - remains which are still stronger than anything that Voldemort could do. At the last, it is that love which will be enough, which will be forgiveness at last.

And so, for the final time I run from him, stumble towards the entrance, towards Neville, Ben screaming on my shoulder like the end of days.

The last thing I see is Harry, running from Voldemort for the last time, running towards his wand with blood fountaining from his head and onto his hands. Stumbling, tripping. Raising his wand with himself - straight and unflinching in his betrayal, as he points towards the metal container and begins to mouth the spell that will implode it in on itself in a convulsion of energy, of Mudblood energy that even those poised between life and death, as Voldemort is, could never survive.

How ironic that, at the end, it was not to be magic that destroyed him. That destroyed either of them.

The last thing I comprehend is that Snape has also realised what is to happen, and I wonder if he saw it all along, the potential in the boy spoilt by both Voldemort and Dumbledore, a spoiling that Snape surely would have helped along in the knowledge of what was to come, and the weapon that boy needed to become. I see his dark shadow stoop and snatch a rolling vial, feel him come up to grip my arm to drag me forward, see his other hand reach for Neville, and then we are spinning away in the worst side-along Apparition I have ever been unfortunate enough to experience.

Everything is dark, and it seems to go on forever. I can barely feel the baby in my arms, or the grip of the former Potions Master on my robe, or the tears on my cheeks turned cold and frozen by the wind. Everything is dark, and despair presses upon me, the same choking pressure that paralysed me as it did when I first left Hogwarts, when my parents and I travelled across the world to escape a greater darkness, and when the light of warm sunlight on a golden lemon tree began to bring me back to life.

I think I see it now, but this light is bigger, brighter - the sun and not the mirror. The four of us fall onto a hillside far above Hogwarts and the light that burns there amidst the rising cloud flashes brighter, sharper - and even when it ends I am blinded by it, can still feel it searing my face.

For I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

And I can only think of Harry. Harry, and the light that has ended it all. The light.

The light.

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