The death of William Wallace

There was the librarian Pince, and the auror Garrett, and the werewolf Katie Bell.

There was the turncoat Theodore Nott, who had slain his own father, and with him there was the house elf Gander. There was the warlock Adam Hyerall, and there was Penelope Clearwater with one arm and half a leg, and there was the spy Rita Skeeter.

There was mad Arthur Weasley, who had buried his children one by one, the mad Muggle-lover who'd long ago discarded his wand for an enchanted rusting Tommy Gun. There was no-nosed Neville Longbottom, with the serpent-and-skull etched in scarry green across his face. With him there was the beautiful Hermione Granger, his wife and lover, upon whose shoulder he now slumped.

There was the American Jasper Mull, millionaire-turned-mercenary, and the near-squib Samuel Delaney, who had made a living as a Muggle street magician. There was scarlet-clad Susan Bones, who in every engagement had never once taken cover but had walked away from each without a scratch.

And then there was Luna Lovegood, to whom he had pledged his heart and magic and soul.

Ensconced in the gloom of Number 12 Grimmauld Place, these were all those that Harry Potter had left.

A day before there had been the twins Patil, but they were dead, and with them Dean Thomas who'd fought with two wands at once, and Nymphadora Tonks so full of life. There had been the Scotsman MacColl and the Slytherin Marcus Flint and loyal Hannah Abbot who had been blown to pieces, before the boy-who-still-lived had led them to their deaths.

So many dead had marched from the war that they had abandoned any real ceremony long ago. In the parlor – these days permanently black – their eulogist Irma Pince recited a brief piece about each of their fallen comrades. How they'd lived, how they'd died.

Harry stood there among them without expression. "I have no tears left to cry, Hermione," he had told his friend that morning. She'd frowned for a second, as if to scold him for using a cliché she no doubt found loathsome, but instead she clutched him to her in a crushing hug.

"I am sorry for all this, Harry," she had said. "I really am."

"I'm…" He trailed off. "I'm sorry about Neville. I know he hasn't been the same since Bellatrix…."

She'd cut him off with a shake of her head and pulled him even tighter. "We're with you to the death, Harry. Both of us."

To the death.

"Thank you," he'd replied stiffly, and shrugged her off of him.

"Thank you," he said again, to all those assembled, after Pince finished her recitations. "You all fought well."

Harry had never been one for speeches.

That night he held Luna Lovegood close to him. He felt himself fill with want for her, want anchored not in lust but in desire for union and for wholeness. She alone among them was without anger, was without malice. Arthur had been that way once, the gentlest man he knew, before Ginny. But Luna remained constant, as her friends and father fell around her, as the world of wizarding Britain crumbled to wrack, as she fought and killed and maimed beside him.

"You're a good man, Harry Potter," she said, snuggling closer. And in the dark, Harry smiled.

The crowd at breakfast was no crowd at all. Skeeter had returned to her game, Weasely hardly left his room anymore, Granger and Pince and Longbottom had locked themselves away in the library. Theodore Nott, the most marked man in England after Potter, sat with dour-faced Weed Garrett as they picked at a stack of toast. In the beginning there were so many of them there that there'd been grumbling about the close quarters but it wasn't like that now.

Sam Delaney intercepted him before he could sit. He had a kind face, though not a handsome one. It was broad but with an angular jaw, and pockmarks checkered it about. "We don't blame you, Harry," the tall man said. "You couldn't have known."

"Thank you, Sam," Harry replied, and he meant it, though it seemed to him that it was all he still knew how to say.

Harry had once been wary of the man, for he had sat out the First Wizarding War. "There was no one to follow then," he'd said, by way of explanation. "There was no hope then, no… hero."

But Luna was the only one who still dealt in hope, though at times he saw Hermione try for Neville. There had been plenty in the first days. Doddering Jamey MacColl would call him Sir William after the hero of Falkirk. Hermione had brooded about Wallace's fate from the first but the others had cheered the ancient man. To Harry it seemed odd talk from a man whose entire family had died on the Somme, but Jamey bore that Tommy gallant spirit. And Jamey was dead and now they all brooded.

Harry wasn't so sure there was a hero now, either. A hero didn't kill, he gave life, and he had the blood of so many on his wand. He wished Dumbledore were still there to guide him, or Professor McGonnagal. "It's just Minerva, now, Harry," she'd said the night Hogwarts fell. But Draco Malfoy had slain Dumbledore that night on the Astronomy Tower, and Thorfinn Rowle had done for Minerva at Leeds.

Gunfire tore through his reflections. More rounds in the walls.

Sam frowned. "Poor Arthur. It's been hard on him."

The two men had been friends before the war, Harry knew.

"I should examine his ears for a wrackspurt infestation," said Luna with gravity as she came up behind. "They couldn't be doing him much good."

She winked and the two men grinned.

"Not until he shoots Mrs. Black," said Harry, pointing to the portrait of the dozing hag, and they laughed.

Arthur, truly, needed care. But they couldn't take him to St. Mungo's; it would be simpler to hand him directly to Voldemort for all the hospital would protect him.

So instead they joked about it, and was that so wrong?

Family

Harry James Potter was about to kill the only Death Eater he might have once trusted with his life.

It could have been simpler. Skeeter had said his target would be breaking his fast at the Floppy Flounder, a dubious Muggle pub on the outskirts of Edinburgh. For all the scorn his kind had for the non-magical world, the man had apparently taken a liking to the establishment's greasy morning fare.

Anyone else, and he'd have had four men in place to dispose of him quickly.

Instead, he had staked out the place himself, invisible beneath his cloak, waiting for his mark to arrive.

"Just kill the slimy cunt, Potter," Jasper Mull had rumbled at council. "Back of the head, nice and quiet. If you're going to be so fucking formal about it I'll do him myself. When I was in the Congo…."

"I owe the man an honorable death," he'd insisted, but Jasper saw things differently. A Death Eater was a Death Eater. "If it's stinks like Crookshanks and if it's as goddamn ugly as Crookshanks, then what the fuck could it be but Crookshanks?"

"I wonder what this slimy fellow would do if hewere Harry," Luna had replied absently. "Oh dear, that would be confusing now, wouldn't it? We'd have two Harries then." She whistled a few innocuous notes, and Jasper had just grunted and like a storm stormed away.

Harry had learned a long time ago how well Luna could manipulate those with whom she disagreed.

"I don't want to kill him," he'd told Hermione before he'd apparated away. "He's the only of them that's any good."

"I know, Harry. " She'd looked wretched, like she hadn't slept in weeks. Not that she'd be able to tell, though, since Neville had blown apart every mirror in the house. "But Jasper…."

But Jasper.

This was it, then. The door jangled closed.

Harry removed his cloak, and put his wand at the Death Eater's throat.

"Harry," he said. Calm, like a hurricane's velvet eye.

"I challenge you to a duel. No seconds. To the death."

He nodded his acquiescence, and Harry lowered his wand.

They chatted amicably as they paced out the boundaries for the duel on the green across the way. Children were playing there, chattering and running, all glee, playing cops-and-robbers and Orange-and-Lemons and World War II, bold and happy and unafraid. Glasgow and Manchester hadn't happened here, not yet.

"How is Luna, then?" the Death Eater asked. Sparks were sent up, and the children scattered screaming. He gestured with his hand. "The Muggles learn quickly."

"She's good as ever," said Harry, and Lee grinned somewhat kindly.

"I'm truly sorry about this, you know," Lee said as they moved to take their positions. "I always thought you were a good wee little egg." It was true. Friends for so long at Hogwarts, and before its fall, he had sought out Harry and apologized for standing against him in the coming battle.

"It's not too late to join us, Lee. There's Nott…."

The Death Eater shook his head. "My father has chosen our loyalties. And I will be loyal to him." He lowered his voice. "He's a good man, you know. He took me in. He fed me and he clothed me."

Harry wondered briefly what it was like to have a parent to love and follow. "On three, then?"

"On three."

"One." Harry gripped his wand tighter. He'd never had love, the Dursleys had seen to that. When Augusta had butchered them like the swine they were, a tearful Hermione had remarked that she would have given anything for Harry to have had a real childhood. Luna had looked aghast at this. "We'd have a different Harry," she'd said. "And I like this one the way it is."

Ten paces from death. You win, Jasper.

"Two." He whipped his wand down. "Avada Kedavra."

The green light took him in the throat. It didn't kill him immediately; there wasn't enough hatred in it. Lee staggered back a few steps, surprised. "Good luck, Harry," he said, and then he crumpled back and died.

Green was the grass, but white was his face and red was the blood that guzzled from his mouth. Harry James Potter, murderer. But there was no point in taking chances on honor. He was not the Leader of the Light like they said, not when he was just clawing his way from the dark, not when he had no light left but Luna and even the moon is sometimes dim.

An interlude for lovers

"I killed him."

She paused as if this were an odd statement, and creased her brow. "I know," she said, her radish earrings dangling. "You wouldn't be here if you hadn't."

"On two. I killed him on two."

"Oh? Lots of things happen in twos. Like love," she said, and she kissed him and drew him close. A squeeze. Another kiss. A whisper: "We do what we must to survive. You're still a good man, Harry Potter."

He cried into her shoulder, long and free.

"Thy face coins then, and thy stamp they bear," she said, as if to herself. A Squib poet writing to his Muggle lover. A metaphysical. "And by this mintage they are something worth."

A change of plans

The reprisal came bursting like the hammers beneath the Thames. Ten thousand Muggle dead in Edinburgh and half the city burned, the work of the corpse-maker Augusta Nott. They were a different sort, Nott and Lee.

Sam had heard it over the radio, and Harry broke the news at dinner that night. Arthur Weasely was inconsolable. "Their cars," he sobbed red-eyed. "Their radios. Their microwaves."

"And the people themselves," Sam said, not unkindly. "Come, friend."

But Arthur had broken down completely, like he'd found Ginny all over again. When war came, sons were for sacrificing. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It is a sweet and beautiful thing to die for one's Harry. The father had seemed to accept this when Ron fell, and then one-by-one the others. "Die, Weasel," Crabbe was shouting. Blood everywhere. Molly screaming. Crabbe blubbering for mummy as Harry twisted Godric Gryffindor's sword into his gut. But his only daughter? It had ruined him.

They had dated briefly, before the war, but then she'd confessed that she didn't fancy boys that way and that had been that. Their relations had been strained at first, because Harry loved her like a maddened youth, but in that last glorious summer before the horcruxes they'd come together again.

"Friends?"

"Family," she said, and she kissed him light on either cheek.

And they'd fallen into an easy camaraderie, much easier than they'd ever had before.

Voldemort destroyed her like he did Britain. She'd been designated an especial target, Rita said, for in Tom Riddle's world there was as little room for sexual deviants as there was for blood traitors or friends of Harry Potter. So the dementors had sucked her dry, her and her lover Gabby 'lacour, and the Lord had kept her soulless shell as a plaything for his men.

Harry clenched up. Whose doing but mine? He wanted to rise and comfort Arthur, but the older man was already fleeing up the stairs. Like a child throwing a tantrum.

"His rifle?" Neville asked.

Sam fiddled with his fork, staring down at his potatoes. "Locked away. Had to wrestle it away from him. Told him we didn't want any more accidents."

The day before, a round of cursed bullets had punctured through the reinforcing charms placed on Arthur's bedroom walls. One had grazed Neville's thigh: Gander had stitched it up, but Neville had gained one more scar.

An uncomfortable pause. I dine with the mad and the broken.

"It's clear that Voldemort is sending us a message," Garrett said, his words slashing silence. "We strike at him, and innocents will die."

"Like Edom O'Gordon," said Luna, and in that second Harry felt his love swell, for from all the puzzled looks it seemed to Harry that the reference had gone over even Hermione's head. Who else could boggle the witch Albus Dumbledore had called the brightest of their generation?

"We will choose our targets more selectively from now on," Harry said. Time to lead and stumble.

"Not before I add matricide to my list of crimes," Theodore Nott cut in quietly. "What's one more parent, hmm?"

Another pitiful attempt at humor, but they were smiling and laughing all and Susan Bones practically cackling. ("She's almost as mad as Mr. Weasley, Harry," Hermione's voice came unbidden to him. Neville is too, if you would only see.) Jasper Mull looked like he was about to bust his tattooed gut as he slapped Theodore across the back.

"Good man, Nott, good man," he said guffawing.

If Luna held any man in contempt, though Harry didn't think her capable, it would be this one. He was crude and coarse and merciless. But he's the best wand we have, and he can tell an Imperius by a man's eyes. A savage heart, but a good one.

He hated him most days, but he thought he loved him now because he'd made him kill and in the act of killing there lay such desperate beautiful joy. A muse, a muse, on red bloody waves.

"We will give Augusta a lot of work," Harry said when the man had finished his convulsion. It would have been a callous thing to say if he had not just murdered. Luna, though, her eyes flickered sadly. "But not yet."

"Meaning?" growled Katie Bell, grim since Greyback turned her.

"Tomorrow." Breath. "We destroy the last Horcrux."

Murmurs. When the hunt had gone cold, and when Hogwarts had fallen, and when everyone had turned to him, Harry had so willingly abandoned the Horcruxes to oppose the Lord's resurgence. Book and ring and locket, he'd got. Skull and grave and wand, too. No diadem nor chalice; for all Voldemort's ambitions they were forever lost. Now just statue and scar and the Lord could die and never rise again.

It had been the wrong decision. He'd known it from the beginning. Am I so afraid to die? He saw all the living faces there and all the specters of the dead, all those his own hand had as good as maimed and killed because he had so much fear.

"Do we have new info, then?" Mull demanded. "Because you've told us there was none to find. Pince, you find something in that reading of yours at last?"

I lied, you stupid bastard.

"It would seem that knowledge of horcruxes was suppressed by the Ministry in the late eighteenth century," Irma Pince said, stiffening at the informal address. "Minister Lord Owlet Childers. Wizards obliviated, texts that so much as referred to their existence burned." She'd sniffed primly. "Frankly I can understand why." An expectant pause. "But it does make information scarce." A huff, as if exasperated that she had to fill in the blanks for such simpletons.

Harry had grown to trust the stuffy woman who had so often thwarted his school-time exploits, but he remained in fear of her. Before passing out after one too many drinks one night, he'd told her about the times he and Ron and Hermione had snuck into the library after-hours.

"A month's detention with Mr. Filch, Potter," she'd replied coolly.

Harry had been afraid to look her in the eyes the next morning when he remembered. Argus Filch had been dead a year then – buried beneath the ruins of Hogwarts with all the rest – but Harry thought that with her piercing glare she might find a way to bring him back. Reanimated custodian eats brains of Boy-Who-Lived, the headlines in the Daily Prophet would read if there had been astaff left to publish it.

But she didn't intimidate Jasper Mull, and his profane protests echoed off the walls of Number 12 Grimmauld Place. They'd known this all already.

The librarian snorted as she hefted a battered blue book from her robes. Its center was burned through, where Harry had plunged a serpent's tooth. "You'll note, Jasper, that I never said we were without leads."