'Tis strange that death should sing. I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan who chants a doleful hymn to his own death, and from the organ-pipe of frailty sings his soul and body to their lasting rest.
(William Shakespeare, from King John)
Somewhere, something was burning.
He knew it because he could taste it's embers in the wind, could feel the acidity of the smoke brushing over his skin in all the wrong ways, making tiny, invisible hairs stand on his arm like hackles.
The fog of it hung in the air, cool and wispy in the sickly gray light.
It was the kind of fire that tasted like ashes, and now he couldn't get the taste out of his mouth.
Harry was walking in the chaos of ruins, the rubble in his mind just as crumbled and forlorn as the broken stones. His skin was turning to dust, and he wished for the hard, sweet taste of rain to wash everything over again, but it didn't come. His eyes stung, dazed and raw.
How dead, how very dead everything was.
And he wandered in the bones of a castle, a vile of silver sheening blue clutched in his fingers. He wanted to scrub away the sounds from his ears - Fred Weasley dying, laughing, Ron's moans and Hermione's strange, wild tones, he wanted to weep but water, withheld from the sky, was withheld from his face, too, nothing to rush from his gritty eyes. He wanted to breathe, he wanted to run (nowhere to run from this).
That's right, Harry…come on, think of something happy…
But this time, he couldn't.
He reeled it all inward, and it wasn't hard, for his mind to go stony. He had a job to do, and nothing would be finished until he did it, nothing was over until it was. He hasn't let himself get distracted all this time, and he doesn't let himself think of anything else now.
Seeking anyone's presence felt like a crude, outrageous audacity, so he walked alone, and before he knew it, he had reached a staircase, and his feet were suddenly firm.
It was the the familiarity of it that drew him, to seek out a refuge of that place still thick with the memories that soaked it's walls. Dumbledore's office, so long after the man himself had lived there, the stately order, the subtle humor, the vague eccentricity lingered, though the room itself was empty and bits and pieces of a grim sort of magic still hung in the air - remnants of a darker, more conflicted presence.
Here was his escape. Anything was better, for a few minutes, anything would be a rest from the images of flame and bodies that flitted with unrelenting pressure through his thoughts. Any mind was better than his own - even Snape's.
Snape. Harry had thought of him often enough, staring into the empty space of a tent musty with darkness and old papers and unwashed clothes. There had to be more to him.
It had taken a long time for the rage to burn down before his natural inclination to believe the best of people kicked in, and even then, he wasn't so sure he trusted the leanings of his mind. He wasn't even sure what he wasn't trusting himself about.
Snape had killed Dumbledore, that was the fact, the burning fact. Harry had seen him. Flashes through his mind of dewy grass and sizzling spells, the distant, sharp crackle of laughter and a roaring sound in his ears as he zeroed in on one lone black figure, his robes flying out behind like they always had, and the very familiarity of it incensed him.
No, there was no doubt the man was a murderer (but then again, so was Harry, wasn't he?). He wanted to hate the man - he did hate the man, but he had always wondered, afterward, about something flickering in Snape's eyes that night, something that Harry couldn't have processed over his own wild, angry rush of grief. But on countless creaking night in woods and on hills and cliffs, he had pondered.
Snape and Dumbledore had always had some strange, shadowed sort of understanding, the kind where nameless, wordless things fly in the air between them, right over the heads of everyone standing by, their eyes a bitter, silent, sharp communication. A lonely night on a dark tower of that beam of hissing, flashing electric green couldn't have been the end of everything they had.
Was Snape on the side of light, then? No; after drawing that slim wand and casting that inescapable, unforgivable curse on the leader of the embodiment of light? No. Snape had killed a wizard older and gooder than anything on this earth. There was no coming back from that. But could that have been how they ended? No, Harry couldn't accept that either. Something niggled away, not making sense.
And now he was gone. Just another body to add to the ground, and not one that many would grieve over, either. Harry would, though he wasn't sure why.
But in that moment when Snape had fallen, breath suddenly quick and shallow, obsidian eyes suddenly shuddering with pain, and blood, so much blood, gushing from the fanged holes in his neck, he was just another man. Nothing else. Just a man, whom Harry knew, who was dying in front of him.
He hadn't even been thinking when he stepped quietly into the room and shoved his hand to staunch the flow, thinking no, no, no. Feeling the warm, thick liquid spurt between his fingers only made him press harder in desperation instead of recoiling.
He knew Snape was dying and he knew there was nothing he could do, and he didn't know if he would do more even if he could, but somehow that had helped. This, this was what Snape had given him, his gift for the offering of Harry's grim, numbed presence, kneeling, doing nothing, nothing but holding.
Harry had to admit he was curious. Was this the answer to the enigma that was the man who had walked so carefully in gray areas his whole life, teetering to one dangerous edge, then the other? Was it some sort of message passed on from someone else? What could Snape possible have wanted him to have? What explanations could he provide? It wouldn't be personal…possibly some secret strategy, then, or a last minute regret.
Whether Snape had this plan all along, or whether the end of his life had turned him toward remorse, whatever had prompted this unexpected gift, Harry was sure it was something important, something that would help.
And right now, he needed that. More pictures flitted through his mind. They all needed that. Maybe this would be enough for that final push.
At this point, Harry was more than willing to find out. he watched the silver blue shimmer trickle into the stone basin, and then, with a brash, brutal push of desperation, he shoved his head in and fell. He fell into sunlight.
When Harry pulled away, it was reflex, a jerky, gasping recoil, and he sank, sank away from it, hands feeling for the floor as he went down, down, trying to find a center for the spinning of his world. The first sounds of his mother's laughter still sat in his ears, and that was what he grasped onto. He'd had her screams since he was thirteen, but now, now he knows her laughter. Whatever Snape has stuck of his personal memories there, a vindication or an explanation, perhaps even a little bit of I'm sorry, Harry's mind wasn't on Snape now. Honestly, it refused to stay on anything, darting and reeling and whirring like some drunk insect, buzzing incessantly something that sounded like words. Might be words. If he could be bothered to stop and catch them, but he couldn't.
Something was clawing up his windpipe. It was frantic, panic and understanding and air, he needed air, like his very lungs were shell-shocked with the rest of him, can't breathe, can't breathe. He pulled himself up and stumbled to the window and creaked open the clasped, shoved it wide, thrust his head out.
Slowly, the chaos calmed. Slowly, the shattered sky put him back together. He stood there in the window, in the dying light, and he swallowed the wind, his throat pulsing with it, ripples and shivers running up and down his arms and back, teasing the nape of his neck. His body, dark against the illuminated horizon, a silhouette. He was seventeen, and he was dying. All the little pieces of himself, like ashes floating away and soaking into everything around him.
A laugh broke from his mouth like sharp shards of glass, because it all suddenly was very, very simple.
"So the boy must die?"
So the boy must die.
It must end.
And Harry was ready, oh so ready for it to end.
The quest had been complicated. Dumbledore's grand plan, as ambiguous and enigmatic as the man himself. Harry had given himself to it, this whole year, to cold flames and - and running. To obsession and searching and desperation.
Finding the horcruxes. Trying to figure out what they were (they could be anything, Ron said. No, it'll be something of significance, something in common with the others, said Hermione. It'll be something that whispers, Harry thought). Where they were (where does it make sense, here I feel a pull, let's go back, let's go way back, let's go back to roots and blood and premonitions and ugly secrets).
Horcruxes on his mind. In his mind.
He was seventeen, and he was dying.
Ironic, how relieved he felt now. How utterly everything and every thought dropped away from him, because he had just one thing left he needed to do, and it wasn't anything he prepared himself for because somewhere in the very remote, far-flung edges of his mind even he thought of himself as the-boy-who-lived.
And now he was back to what he was all over in the beginning; Harry. Just Harry. And Harry was not invincible, not deathless, he didn't always bounce back - this time he sure as hell had better not.
Because it was simple, and Harry didn't have to think about the lidded, living eyes of a snake who's name preys his dreams, he didn't have to think about blood and the way it was spattered all over this castle that used to be home. He didn't have to think about bodies and tiny, innocent children all alone, or a wizarding world without half the people who fill it. The rest of his life was suddenly a lot less complicated.
He just had to think about how to put one foot in front of the other, all the way to a dark forest that never was named forbidden to him. He just had to think about dying. And how it would feel to go dark, and how feet will probably acne on his body. He could almost feel them already, stomping, laughing feet, and when he lifted up his hands, they were shaking, and he smiled a strange little thing. I'm afraid, he though, and it puzzled him a little, because he shouldn't have been afraid. He should have been soothed. After all, he only had one thing left to do.
And it was simple. He walked, and he walked, and he didn't look back. Warm breath, cold wind, air shuddering. It seemed against thought that light could be so cold, the last flames of it tracing his skin through the trees, wan and earthy and final, pale and cool as it brushed against his skin, the forest damp and loamy underneath him. He was seventeen, and he was walking.
"So the boy must die?"
So the boy must die.
He heard his name distantly and cries of why from the voice that first brought him into the wizarding world, but his mind is too tunneled to pay attention. He spoke quietly, and then not at all, and he was silent as Tom Riddle had his moment of victory nearly twenty years in coming.
It was a strange feeling for Harry not to fight that, not to put his chin up in defiance and spit every burning word that Voldemort was wrong, they would win, he would never surrender to him, and it was a strange feeling, because that was exactly what he was doing. There was the poke of his twig of wood in the back of his pocket, and Riddle's crowing voice. Dancing feet, thought Harry. Yes. Yes, Tom would make a spectacle of Harry when he's gone. He didn't let that thought stay too long because it made it hard to swallow, made it hard to steady his body, to think of Riddle screaming victory to the whole world, and the world accepting defeat, the Weasley's still flaming and hopelessly defiant.
He was seventeen, and dying. The rushing and roaring of blank noise back for a moment, and then it all went out. The trees were still, and the death eaters were too, frozen around their commander as if afraid.
Afraid for Voldemort? Of him? Or of this moment, this last culmination, they all knew it was the last, the balance of a world shuddering and quivering in balance, in that moment where lights would crash and wands would touch and only one would go out. But there wasn't. No confrontation, no battle, no bantering words or wands, no proclamation, no two cold hearts facing off.
There was only Harry, just Harry, with his arms spread and a flash of green light that had haunted his dreams for so long.
There was only Harry.
And then, there wasn't.