One-shot set thirty years after the Battle of Hogwarts from George Weasley's point of view. Reasonably dark and occasional swearing.
Not Even Human
I can feel them here. In the stone and the wood, smiles lighting the candles in the Great Hall. Tears filling the Black Lake to the brim. The whisper of wind in a dungeon corridor and the rustling murmur of paper deep in the bowels of the library. I feel you here. Do you feel me too?
Colin Creevey, blinding camera flashes in the dark. I know you're there Colin, but I can't reach you. I can't bring you back. If I could I probably wouldn't bother, there's nothing left to live for anyway.
Remus Lupin, the Shrieking Shack is silent now, the Whomping Willow now an arthritic old woman, dead limbs frozen in their attempt to touch the sky. Dead in all but memory. Just like you. I can't bring you back Professor, but that is for the best. You'd have no one to care for.
The Entrance Courtyard isn't welcoming me, it is saying farewell. All I see is a world bathed in red, the blood of all that perished there, torn apart by war.
Sometimes when I listen I can feel him, he's buried in the floor boards, slithering round the corridors. I dream that he leaks through the cracks of his tomb and fills me with his dark power and I'm not me anymore, I'm him and it so wrong yet so freeing that I want to cry.
I get the feeling that I'm not normal, that after thirty years we are meant to have moved on. I'm stuck though.
I stole your name and gave it to my child.
I stole your girl and knocked her up.
I sold our dreams to the first bidder.
I pissed and shit on all the memories I have of you.
What's worse is that I don't care.
I don't care that I have actively destroyed everything about you in my quest to forget.
Including myself.
I don't care that every night my wife hugs herself tightly and tries in vain to sob silently. Either way I still come for her.
I'm not the man I once was.
I don't care that my son despises me.
After all you would as well.
In the end the only thing that matters is that as warped as I have become, I still can't erase you. All the Obliviate charms in the world couldn't take away the loss and the cold and the thrill.
The loss of you and your smile and your fucking optimism.
The cold, biting sense that half of my identity has been ripped away.
The thrill that I don't have to live in your shadow anymore.
An image of you is forcing its way into my brain, scarring my retinas with its perfection. That's what you were, perfect, always knowing what to say. I was the inferior copy wasn't I?
We spent many hours in the forest, exploring, being the intrepid explorers. You leader, I the faithful follower.
Not anymore.
I am nothing more than an enraged beast and I blame you.
The Forbidden Forest smiles at what it sees in me, the darkness and the rage and the loss.
Not even human.
The twins are dead.
I walk into the embrace of darkness.
