AN: This is just a little drabble that I wrote about Harry after seeing Snape's memories in The Deathly Hallows. I am fascinated with the concept of death and the idealism of it. It's kinda dark, but I think it turned out good.
Disclaimer: Not J.K. Rowling. I own nothing… er, except for the book. ;)
Death wasn't something that Harry Potter had ever really contemplated. Sure, by the age of seventeen, he'd been in more than his fair share of life or death situations, what with his constant confrontations with Voldemort, but somehow, he'd always managed to make it out alive.
Every time he found himself staring into those cold, unforgiving red eyes he'd be busy desperately racking his brain for a plan to escape. He'd be so occupied with trying to keep his heart being for a few more moments to really even consider the other alternative- that maybe, this time, he wouldn't survive.
And every time afterwards, the fallout from their meeting and the relief would push all of the dark thoughts on death to the back of his mind where he would forcibly lock them away. When Harry woke up in the hospital wing at the end of his first year at Hogwarts, he made the mistake of thinking.
What if he'd never come out of the room?
What if… Voldemort had killed him?
Harry was eleven years old when he realized something that many grown witches and wizards hadn't. Of course, everyone had been told it at one point in their life but no one ever truly accepted it. They had never been in a position to understand it. To them, it was just a couple of words strung together; words used to describe other people- people on the news or distant relatives, perhaps, but surely not themselves.
When Harry was eleven years old, he realized that someday he was going to die. It was on that day that Harry first created the book.
He gathered every thought he had on his mortality and the knowledge of his own death and he bound them in the book, which he then locked and hid in the darkest recesses of his mind. There the book would remain, untouched. He opened it only four times after that. Each time the book would rebel and it would become more and more difficult to close.
And now, with the images from Snape's memories burned on the back of his retinas and Dumbledore's words echoing in his ears, the book burst from its restraints, freed for the first time in six long years, during which time it had gathered enough suppressed knowledge to cause insanity in even the most discerning of men.
Harry's worst fear was upon him. After the uncertainty and mistaken hopefulness of seven years, he finally knew his fate.
Harry was assuredly and undoubtedly going to die.
The last thing he heard was a roaring in his ears as page after page of the book swam before his vision, filling his head relentlessly with the taboo words written on the pages. Until…
Nothing.
Harry blinked, bracing himself for another inevitable onslaught of suffering, but it never came. It was there, lying on the floor of Dumbledore's office, that Harry was hit with a sudden and intense revelation. All of those years, Harry had been hiding from death, tormented and haunted by it, when all it would have taken for him to find peace was to embrace it.
It was there that Harry realized that he was going to die. And he wasn't afraid.