On Living
By: QDT
Disclaimer: I am a sad, pathetic person who steals copyrighted work for my own profit. Or not.
After Dumbledore's death, Harry threw himself into the search for Horcruxes. The diary…the ring…the locket…the cup…the snake…Ravenclaw's wand…They were gone, as Voldemort discovered seconds before he died. And then, for a year, Harry was lost. He ate little and said nothing. Then, he disappeared without a trace. Another year later, on the second anniversary of the Final Battle, he came to a memorial service, proposed to Ginny Weasley, and they lived happily ever after with three children and a pet crup. They both died of old age, discovered one morning in their bed, wrapped in an eternal embrace. For all eighty-three years of their marriage, a list hung by their kitchen window.
Ronald Weasley…George Weasley…Hannah Abbot…Cormac McLaggen…Filius Flitwick…Samuel Perkins…Colin Creevey…Orpheus Ollivander…Padma Patil…Rubeus Hagrid…Mundungus Fletcher…Lucius Malfoy…Leroy MacNair…Bellatrix Lestrange…Peter Pettigrew…The list went on. Hundreds dead, hundreds crippled, hundreds mourning. Thousands celebrating. Most, lost in the memories of those who were betrayed by their own minds. All on the Potters' list; all on a marble statue in the center of a graveyard. All had families, friends, and feelings. All of them gone forever.
But more lived. More survived to live and laugh and learn. To graduate, get married, have kids. To be happy with what they were dealt. Some didn't. Some retreated into recesses in their heads, happy to live in figments of a fragmented imagination. Some made their homes a sort of hermitage, unable to face others. Some were tortured to insanity; others merely couldn't handle the reality of war. But mostly, the survivors learned to live their lives.
Fred Weasley closed his shop for a while, and people could sometimes see him in the windows, a ghost of his former self. He lived like that for a while, until Hermione Granger blasted down the door and brought reality in with her. Slowly, they healed together. Eventually, they reopened the shop. Four years after that, they married. They died in a car accident on the way to visit grandchildren.
Some people couldn't cope with all the death and killed themselves. Some former servants of the Dark Lord participated in raids even after the war was officially after. Eventually, society healed. Gradually, people stopped talking about the war. Slowly, it passed out of living memory and was only talked about in history classes. Voldemort became nothing more than a nightmare. Harry Potter was a storybook hero. They became legend, examples in essays about the eternal struggle between good and evil.
Ten years after the war, a new wand-making company began. Malfoy International outlived everything else associated with the time period. This, no doubt, provides no end of amusement to its founder, wherever he is now. But eventually, that too faded from memory. After a very, very long time, the entire thing was forgotten. It was lost in the midst of other struggles, other conflicts, other wars. New dark lords and evil genii came and went. Maybe some were as terrible as, or worse than, Voldemort. But now, no one knows. Because no matter what people do to ensure that things won't happen again, they always do. History will continue on repeating itself forever. The most anyone can do is to live their life, one day at a time. The only thing you can do is to keep on living. The past will always be there, no matter what. All anyone can do is live, and hope for the future.
Because, after all, life is for the living.
finis