A/N: Written for the Ring of Fire challenge, AS – prompt: finite incantartem.


Finite Incantartem

Not all spells could be easily reversed.

It was nice to imagine oneself as a first year where all the jinxes and hexes they learnt could be so quickly and efficiently nullified – and in second year as well. Unless they were people like Harry Potter, who were attacked by a great many other forms of magic, the sort that couldn't be finished by a little finite incantartem. Like the magic that sealed the Chamber, kept the victims of said Chamber asleep. Like the magic that dragged little Ginny Weasley to almost her death, and that called Fawkes forth – but if that had been so easily broken, Harry knew he wouldn't have been alive afterwards to think so.

And then there was whatever magic brought a memory into physical form – and then destroyed it. Though he hadn't had his wand then. Maybe it was possible to finish it off with a simple finite incantartem. He hadn't been able to try. Though it would have been pretty ironic, now that he knew the true nature of those events. One of those hocruxes that stopped Voldermort from being killed by his own killing curse so many years ago, finished off by a simple reversal spell that every first year learnt.

But then things like the avadra kedavra could be nullified by such magic as well. He'd be able to get his parents back, and a good number of others who fell in the wars. Not Dobby though. That wasn't magic, but a knife. No reversing spell was going to save them. But Cedric. Sirius. Fred. Remus and Tonks. So many people killed by magic. So many people they could revive.

But that was just a child's dream. Nothing more. The dead could not be resurrected by a simple finite incantartem.

And a great many other things could not be reversed either.