Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. The End.
Author's note: This has not been Beta-read and English is not my first language. I wrote this as part of a challenge.
No Country for Young Men
"It is important to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then can evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated."
But what if you know that fighting will be useless? That you simply know that you are not strong enough to fight the darkness and keep it at bay? What will you do then? Simply run in head first and die needlessly?
I shake my head, the cold air continuing to sting my ears and the exposed parts of my face as I wrap my scarf a little tighter around my neck.
No, I've seen too many die like that already. And for what? Their deaths tipped the scale in Voldemort's favour rather than ours. The noose is tightening around our necks with every ally, friend, and family member we lose. And it's not the older ones that die the fastest… No, it's the young ones like Ron, Hermione, Neville, Luna, and I. Our generation is dying the fastest. Not the older ones, but ours.
For a while now, as I had to watch again and again as those I knew best died around me, I wondered as to why we were suffering the most casualties. Is it because we fight at the front of this war, against enemies that are older, more experienced, more… powerful than us that we are losing. Is victory truly but a distant dream or a mere childish delusion?
"The prophecy, huh?" I grumble to myself as I stare down, past the metal of the bridge, down at the pitch black water; an invisible abyss in this moonless night.
The prophecy. My bare hands tighten their hold on the cold steel railing of the bridge as I think about it.
"One has to die at the hands of the other…" But the way things are right now, it looks like I'm going to be one ending up in a shallow grave.
Let's face it: what in the world can I, Harry Potter, a young man just entering his second decade in life, do against a Dark Lord who is three or even four times my age and has about ten times more experience fighting then I have.
The Harry Potter standing here, on a bridge in Muggle London by himself in the middle of the night, is too weak and inexperienced to do anything to change the course of this war. I will fail miserably.
That is why I have decided to leave this country. This is no country for young men. In this country young men will die.
People here will hate me, sure, or be disappointed in me, their "saviour". However, I never asked to be their saviour. It was something that was thrust upon my shoulders without so much as a "but". I know I might sound selfish, but expecting a young man—no, a boy to save you from someone that has even adults cowering in fear at the mere uttering of his name is just… just… foolish.
I can't save anyone. Not Hermione, or Ron, or Luna, or Neville, or the Weasleys. No one.
I climb over the railing, and I can hear by passers starting to shout, telling me not to do it. But before anyone can do anything I release my hold on the railing and let myself fall down.
Good bye everyone, I think to myself as I twist my body and disappear with a soft pop, just before I hit the surface of the black abyss of water.
I wish things could have been different, that I could have been the saviour everyone wanted me to be. But I am not. I cannot do anything to save them. All I can do is…
Run away…
