Leaving Home

Hi all, last part, so thanks for reading. I still don't own anything. A few people have commented that they didn't like the transition from anger to sex. I do. Well, I don't like it exactly, but I it happens. It's a way to connect when all else fails, and if you think people don't sometimes have sex to fuck each other off, or in a desperate effort to connect, well… it'll happen some day, I promise you.

Oh, and if anyone else doesn't recognise the “destroyer of worlds” quote - look it up! It's important!

But then, I'm from an anti-nuke country. They're the ultimate evil, as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, and one more thing - I'm wanting to work this into a wider story, so will be taking this story down a couple of weeks from now. If anyone wants to save a copy for their own personal use they're welcome, please don't post it anywhere else.

Epilogue (6/6).

Before I left, when I had hope that good would prevail entirely, when I believed that right and wrong existed within their separate boxes and could be kept there through sheer force of will, I pictured this scene. It was not quite the same. I used to see, in my mind's eye, the three of us here at Hogwarts, after the war was over. Ron, Harry, and me - pureblood, half-blood, and mudblood. (Why should I not say it? It gives me now pain to admit; cannot touch me like it did when I was younger… I feel shame now in so many ways, but I will never again feel shame at that.)

Part of me is gratified to see that, with Voldemort finally gone, the mixture remains. There is still pureblood, half-blood, and mudblood here, at the end of all things. It is only the players that have changed. Neville, Snape, and myself. I suppose that I am now the common factor. I had always thought that that role would be Harry's.

The castle is gone, this place where my childhood burned away has itself been burnt, the heart scoured out of it. Only shadows remain - the shattered rocks, the charred blasted soil, the dim shapes burnt into the stone - shadows of their former selves, the only reminder that once life existed within these walls, instead of painted onto it. In this death, I come across these twisted figures and cannot tell who was who. They are blurred on the rock - was this one someone I knew? An enemy, a friend?

Neither has survived. That magic - good and evil - which was once contained within the walls of what used to be has been blown away by the science of my heritage, the very ground beneath it extirpated, sterilised of all life. I once blamed Harry for fighting Voldemort on his own terms, little realising that one day I would have to fight him on mine - the terms not of a witch but of a Muggle-born, with all the wonderful, terrible tradition of that mass of humanity behind me.

I wonder if Voldemort ever expected that we could be worse than he. I wonder if I ever expected that we could be better.

Perhaps in the end we are the same. The same capacity, the same ability to choose whether to love or to betray, or to crucify ourselves between the two. I have done both, and can no longer tell them apart. Was my betrayal born of love, or did, at the end, love come from my betrayal? Would I, could I, choose another way?

Can anything ever be done to make up for this destruction, this horrible, necessary cleansing? For I have come to see that it is indeed a cleansing, although not one that I would have ever welcomed. The fire and shadow that I brought into this valley has left it charred and unclean, but within me something has burned away, and it will never be rekindled. It is better that way, and I can say that now from a purely personal perspective, the product of months of sickness and self-loathing.

Snape helped. Or rather, he helped clarify the burning inside me, to focus that wild explosion into a fire that would harden and purify. It wasn't pleasant. I'm certain he enjoyed it. Had I to do the last few years over again, I do not believe that I could - and part of me mourns that loss. The gain has been so much greater than I anticipated, although not more than I must have hoped, silently in the dark - a hope that, unacknowledged, infused through my being. A hope that I allowed to be betrayed at the end… but a hope that could not have come to fruition without the bitter water of that betrayal.

Was this what Harry felt at the last? Was this how he felt? Did he value that feeling as I have come to value it?

For as he destroyed Voldemort, so that project that kept me sane throughout the long years of my betrayal, that unforgivable exile, has come to birth out of the burning within me to salvage the burning without.

The months since the end have done more than reconcile me to myself. Or rather, it is that reconciliation that has done more, given more. Again, it was Snape that was the catalyst, Snape that dragged me from myself into the reflected light of polished glassware and flickering burners, Snape who forced me to finish the potion that I once believed I could not finish. Perhaps the self that could not make that potion was burned away in the fire of all fires, and the strength and precision that remains - the knowledge of self that now permeates my being - was what was needed to make me capable.

Perhaps this is a potion that no child could make.

But I have left childhood behind me now, with all its illusions and the expectations of happy endings that come because that is what endings are for. When I left for the first time, I thought I had given up my childhood, with its expectation of the happy ending, but now I know that childhood doesn't end there. It ends, as mine ended after I left for the second time, with the knowledge that happy endings are possible if you make them for yourself, even if you have to make them in the midst of a midst of a darkness so enormous that no fire can put it out.

And so, when I chose to come out of that darkness, I brought something with me, and it gleamed like the end of night, small drops in a tiny vial, the product of months of a purification, of a distillation that was mostly my own. I don't know why I chose this, back in the time when sunshine on a lemon tree and the knowledge of the family I hadn't betrayed was enough to skim me over the surface of self-loathing like a stone, but not enough to prevent me from knowing that what I was doing was ultimately useless.

I have spent so long with science, and I believe that potion-making is a science in itself. The blending of ingredients, the heat and the timing of it. Yet it wasn't science or logic that made me fixate on this potion. It may have been salvation.

When my hands unscrew the lid on the little vial they do not tremble. But when I pour the small, silvery drops onto the empty grave, breath rushes through me like a sigh, like a living wind bringing life to a desert.

And that wind came, and there was life.

It doesn't show at first, the dark, scarred soil quiescent, devastated from what I have done to it - from what Harry chose to do to it. This betrayal was ours, the last thing we accomplished together, and it was death. But death is not the end - and slowly, gently, the blackness of the earth began to seem less the blackness of charring and sterilisation, and more the richness of growth. With the change, green haze began to settle over the ground. It starts in the centre of the grave; then tendrils began to reach over the cracked and broken stone, past the seared shadows and the strewn rubble. It reaches up across the hills, and a faint scent of heather came wafting back. Green tendrils reach down into the dry bowl of the lake, and a blue mist begins to roll over the bed, and to condense in the air, trickle down the dusty sides, and well up like cleansing.

There are buds pushing from the broken earth, gentle green spreading over the ruins, unfurling ivy swings from the walls, and rosemary, the flower of regret, pushes through the heather. Violets. Forget-me-nots. The air freshens, and leaves opens in the breeze. Hogwarts is gone forever, the castle blown into steaming fragments and the glen vaporised into dust… it is gone, but not dead. That damage, that betrayal, is the one I can undo.

For it is my responsibility to undo it - for Harry and for myself and for the child that grows within me and the world she will grow up into. I believe it is a girl, although I am less than certain of her status. Perhaps she will be like her uncle, perhaps she will be like her father. Perhaps she will turn her back on whatever world she inherits if she finds joy in that which comes from the other - a Muggle who studies potions-making, a witch who studies Shakespeare. I think I would like that best.

A flower opens on Harry's grave. It is small and white, petals uncurling in the slow rain like benediction, and as I turn from it I see that salvation is not a dream, because the ruin that I made of Harry's death is overshadowed here by life. For all that died in this place, there will be no rebuilding, no magical return. There are some things even my new knowledge cannot encompass.

But there will be a garden. There will be peace.

And so I leave Harry, for the last time, with lilies on his grave that are sending tendrils out into the ruined remains of Hogwarts, into the garden that will be. Once I found relief in colour, in the bright shades that reminded me of the essential vitality of life, but these tiny blossoms, with their pale petals and their soft buds have a release of their own: the tenderness of renewal, and the creeping season of hope.

I can live with his betrayal, and my own. There is a burgeoning sense of peace in that, a small still place within me that will find expression in this place - in the rehabilitation of evil, in the bringing of life and the prospect of future growth, and in the apotheosis of hope as I use the long months before the baby's birth to write, at last, the final chapter of Hogwarts: A History.

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