A/N: Written for the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizadry (Assignments and Challenges) forum.
Subject/Task: Muggle Music - Task 9: Write about someone looking forward to the future (I Just Can't Wait To Be King - Lion King)
Word count: 472
The war was an end for so many people. Lives snuffed out just as they had begun, bodies no more than empty shells of the souls they had once contained. It was hard, in all this death and destruction, for the survivors to believe that there was a future after all of this to look forward to. Time felt strange, like they were floating with no real purpose, days passing and blurring into nothing, the future becoming the past.
But, much as they didn't believe it at first, there was something beyond the war that was worth looking forward to. Something beyond the haze of grief and sorrow that they had locked themselves behind. And, one by one, they began to forge the keys to let them out into the future that was waiting for them.
Harry's key came in the shape of his friends. They were there for him - just as he was for them - through all of it, the good and the bad, and they reminded him that they were all still alive to fight another day. They helped each other through their individual and shared grief and learnt how to look once more to the future instead of wishing for the past.
Harry remembered when they were bright-eyed eleven year olds, just starting Hogwarts and looking forward to learning the impossible. He'd been so excited because, for the first time in his short life, he had friends and he was away from the Dursleys and he was magic. He'd thought that he could finally see a future where he was more than anything he'd ever dreamed and he'd wanted it so much. He'd looked forward to the day he would leave Hogwarts, wand in hand, ready to face the world. Been certain of it. He almost hated himself for how naive he'd been.
He'd held onto that dream of a future for a long time - too long perhaps. He never really let go until Dumbledore died and he'd realised that to stay would be to give up on everything they'd fought for since Quirrell and the Philosopher's Stone. When he looked forward to the future then, all he saw was a blank nothingness. He didn't know what would happen, nor where he would end up, and that scared him.
After the war, after he climbed out of the pit he'd let himself fall into, Harry looked to the future once more. It didn't seem so uncertain anymore, not in the way it had in the days it took to deal with all of the dead. He wasn't sure what would happen, but he knew his friends would be there with him, and he knew that, whatever the future held, it was worth the fight it took to win it.
Perhaps, then, it was a future worth looking forward to.
A/N: I don't think I interpreted that prompt correctly at all. Ah well. Please leave a review if you have a moment. Bye!