At Sea
by Bil!
K+ - Angst – HP – Complete
Summary: One last birthday. Harry's never had that much luck with birthdays. Warning: Character death.
Disclaimer: All hail JKR.
A/N: Response to a long ago birthday challenge on the Panic Parables Yahoo!group. The story had to be angst, include someone's birthday, be written in 41.2 minutes, and contain the words: tumbleweed, occlumency, gigantic birthday cake.
"Happy birthday to me, Happy birthday to me..." An old man's voice sang tremulously soft, the words whipped away by the wind swirling briskly about the clifftop. There was no one else to sing him the song, so he sang it to himself.
No one else, because they were all dead.
He had never thought it would end this way; he'd always imagined himself going out in a bright blaze of defiance – sometimes he hadn't even expected to reach his seventeenth birthday. And yet somehow here he was, a ridiculous two hundred and three years old, with no one to share his birthday with. Rather like in the beginning, really. He hadn't had a birthday party until he turned seventeen, when his friends had gotten together a big surprise party (and very nearly been hexed for their troubles, since it was a bad idea to spring surprises on people who have had to learn paranoia). He still remembered the gigantic birthday cake, and how Ron had managed to fall into it and had come up dripping icing and crumbs. It had been one of the best days of his entire life.
And now he was here, alone on a wind-swept cliff in the most isolated stretch of Scottish coast he could find. He'd always loved Scotland; once simply because it was where Hogwarts was, but now just for itself. For its gloomy, cloudy days and its rare sudden bright mornings. For rambling moors hiding many secrets and cold seas lashing against hard rocks. For the fact that no one here expected anything of him.
Once, he had been Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, a wide-eyed child thrust into a strange new world where they hailed him as their saviour. Then he had been Sir Harry Potter, Voldemort's Bane, the man who defeated Voldemort a second time. Now he was simply an old man lost in memories of a time that should never have left without him.
Many of his friends had been lost in the Second Voldemort War; idealistic children who would never grow up or adults who had survived one war only to be sacrificed to a second. But even after all the losses he still had some of his chosen family: Remus, Hermione, Tonks, Luna, Arthur, Minerva, Hestia, Aberforth, Draco... So few, but so loved. For a while it had seemed that everything was perfect. After the ludicrous medals and titles and celebrations were over they had forged themselves a new set of lives, learned to look forward and see what might come next in a world without a black blade hovering over them, ready to fall.
They had learnt to hope again.
Then Aberforth had died. Simply from old age; one hundred and seventy nine was a venerable age for a wizard. Minerva followed him, then Remus (werewolves didn't live long, they tore themselves apart from inside). And then suddenly – before, it seemed, Harry had time to blink – they were all gone and he was all alone. Alone in a world that only saw him as a hero, not a person; in a world that was so awed by him that people cringed when he frowned and yet mobbed him in the streets just trying to touch him. To touch him, for Gandalf's sake! As if it could heal them or bring them luck. Wasn't it obvious it couldn't when all those close to him were dead and gone? At times only the calm of his hard-learnt Occlumency had kept him from striking out at them.
It only reinforced a theory he'd begun to develop back in second year: People were idiots.
So he'd left. Simple as that, just walked out of his house and never looked back. He'd taken nothing with him but what he wore and he'd vanished from public view. Which, somehow, made people love him even more. He was the Elvis Presley of the wizarding world – there were sightings of him everywhere from Zimbabwe to New Zealand to Taiwan. Since Harry had never in his life set foot outside of Britain, it just made him laugh. Sadly, though. Always sadly. Perhaps there was just something fundamentally wrong with the wiring of human brains. Surely they had better things to do with their lives than fuss about some old wizard who'd never been as powerful as they thought?
His legs tiring, as they were more and more wont to do these days, he took up seat on a rock near the edge of the clifftop and stared down at the waves dashing themselves to pieces on the sharp, angry rocks below, watching the seagulls darting in and out of the spray. Seals played further out and he smiled, recognising the games of the selkie clan he had befriended down in the dunes. Glancing that way, he saw only the empty sand stretching out toward the horizon, the strange dune plants he called tumbleweeds bouncing along the beach as they raced the wind.
No one knew that on this day, his birthday, the day of more celebration in the wizarding world than any other day of the year, Harry Potter stood alone on the edge of a cliff and waited for it to end. Around the world witches and wizards had a day off and toasted the man who had saved the world. A man who knew himself to be nothing more than an old man lost out of his time and counting down the days until he could join his family again.
Perhaps Fate looked down at that lonely figure and felt a rare tear form in his eye. Perhaps Destiny decided that she had asked enough of her child. Perhaps someone, somewhere, decided that Harry deserved one last birthday present.
The selkies, who only came up to the cliff because of their strange human friend, the one who spoke to them as equals and mangled their tongue with his atrocious accent, found him later, slumped against the rocks with a slight smile on his lips and a forehead finally free of scarring. They chattered cheerfully to each other and carried him down the beach where they had first met him, and there they gave him the greatest honour they could think of.
Harry Potter, unwilling hero, saviour of a world, was quietly and without fanfare buried at sea.
Fin.