Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
This has been sitting in my drive for ages, waiting for me to use it in something. That's not gonna happen anytime soon though, so I figured I'd post it now, as a stand-alone.
Harry Potter was born to die. Camden Potter was not.
Maybe in another universe, a kinder one, Camden would have been the Girl-Who-Lived. The world would have seen the Dark Lord's death and believed it was brought upon by a baby girl. They would have lauded her as a hero, put her onto a pedestal and simply hoped she wouldn't fall. This was not that world.
Camden Potter was not the Girl-Who-Lived. After all, how could a girl defeat You-Know-Who? It made much more sense for James Potter to be the one. After all, if the world believed in a one-year-old more than Lily—powerful, adept Lily, the brightest witch of her age—it made sense that they wouldn't believe her daughter could do such a task.
Camden was Harry, and Harry was Camden. Same parents, same world, same everything else. The world was cold to them, and they gave back warmth.
Harry Potter defeated the Dark Lord and became a hero. Camden Potter defeated the Dark Lord and became yet another girl to keep out of the battlefield.
It was almost funny, how gender could make such a difference. How the lack of a living symbol could make a war that much more brutal.
Harry knew pain. He knew horcruxes and death and dementors. He was fourteen, tied to a gravestone and looking into the glassy eyes of a friend.
Cam didn't know pain—she was pain. She was stitching up bleeding cuts with muggle needles on the field and mass graves and not needing a magical beast to unearth her greatest fears. She was cradling the bodies of her friends close to her chest as she desperately fought to save them.
Harry was the Boy-Who-Lived—but it was Camden who was the soldier.
The world didn't need another soldier—it needed another Harry. It needed someone so kind it hurt, someone good and real and willing to give up everything to make things right. But Camden was not the Girl-Who-Lived, not the symbol, not the champion. She fought her way to victory not because of people's expectations of her, but despite them.
Cam was a Gryffindor, and Gryffindors were brave. Gryffindors fought and won and made the world so much warmer just by existing.
As Cam stood in front of Voldemort, the bodies of the rest of the Order sprawled around her, she didn't feel like a Gryffindor. She felt like a scared, lost little girl, finally letting herself feel the pain of everything life had thrown at her.
Camden was Harry, and Harry gave out warmth. She may not have known who Harry Potter was, but she knew how she was supposed to act.
She was tired of giving kindness to a world that would spit back hatred and intolerance. She was tired of burying friends. She was tired of fighting, of hurting, of killing. She felt her exhaustion deep in her bones, felt it weigh her down, ready to swallow her up at any moment.
"Camden Potter," Voldemort said. "Come to die."
She took a deep, shuddering breath. She was the only one left. "Yes," she said. "But I'm not planning to go easy."
He smiled, a grotesque twist of his face that made her want to vomit. She shuddered, unable to muster up the strength to hold it back, and his smile widened.
He raised his wand. She raised hers. The duel began.
There was a certain irony in the knowledge that the only person who believed Cam survived the killing curse was the monster who cast it.
There was quite a lot of irony in the fact that Camden Potter—the freak, the outcast, the girl among men—was the last person standing. Except—no. No, no, no.
She was not Camden Potter, daughter of Lily and James, here. She was not the girl who survived the killing curse, the girl who killed a basilisk, the girl who had scars carved into her skin for simply doing the right thing.
She was Cam, the girl whose hair would get tangled into that of her best friend when they hugged. She was the girl who always struggled to tie her necktie, because no one ever taught her how. She was the girl whose first kiss was taken suspended forty feet above the ground in the middle of a Quidditch match. She was the girl who laughed and cried and loved and lived.
Cam was not a symbol. She was an eighteen-year-old girl, a friend, a lover—and she was the one who was going to kill the Dark Lord Voldemort.
She knew that, she believed it, and she held great faith in it, for no other reason than not doing so wasn't an option. She was the only one left. The task fell on her shoulders, and she would not shirk her duty.
Knowing that didn't make it any easier. Voldemort was the monster who took everything from her—he could just as easily take everything else.
A curse flew by her ear as she dodged to her side, sickly yellow and faster than she could blink. She sent back deep purple, the intent behind her casting taking the place of verbal command.
He was laughing, she noticed, like he was having the time of his life. Like he wasn't facing the end of a decades-long war, like he wasn't exchanging spell fire with the very person who took him out the first time.
She iced the floor below him. He sent out a shockwave of fire, melting the ice and leaving yellow dancing behind her eyelids.
Maybe he was laughing because it was the end. If he beat her, he won. There was no one else to oppose him.
A red spell nicked her arm, and pain overtook her being. She recognized it, snapped out the countercurse, and sent an Unforgivable his way.
"Avada Kedavra," he yelled. Their spells met in the middle, and the world lit up in a red and green glow.
(A snapshot in time. The entire world seems to pause as a body drops down beside Camden. She screams, scared and lost and so, so angry. She raises her wand, and the sky lights up in a blazing wildfire.)
"Why do you keep fighting, Potter? What is waiting for you, if you win?" Voldemort yelled, voice just on the edge of mocking.
"Screw you!" Cam screamed back.
The spell light pulsed with their words, shifting back and forth like a particularly indecisive ocean tide.
"You have nothing, Camden Potter, you are nothing. You really think you can defeat me, that a prophecy is going to win this war for you?" His hand held firm on the wand. The light inched toward her.
Her left hand rose to join her right as she clutched desperately to her only defense. "You seemed to believe in that prophecy quite a bit eighteen years ago," she said, voice dry and cracking. "Besides," she shook back her hair and closed her eyes for a brief moment before opening them again. "It's not the prophecy child who's going to defeat you."
He laughed again. "And who, if not you, Potter, is going to defeat me?"
She was crying. "The name's Cam, you bloody bastard. And you're going to die today."
The light shot towards his wand. The force of the impact nearly sent him flying off his feet. He grabbed onto the wand with both hands.
The thought of letting this drag on, of bringing forth the spirits of her comrades back to the mortal realm—she didn't even consider it. Instead, she jerked her wand upward, breaking the connection.
"Avada Kedavra," she screamed, the force of the spell bringing her to her knees.
The world seemed to slow down to a crawl as Cam watched the Unforgivable splice through the air to its target.
The spell connected. Voldemort fell to the floor, Cam following right after. She was spared a single moment to finally let herself break apart before the world imploded around her.
Comments are much appreciated.