Disclaimer: I shall own the series the moment winged pigs land upon the frozen plains of Hell. Please hold.

Special Thanks To: Diamond D for beta-reading.

Goodbye Blue Sky

Did you ever wonder why we

Had to run for shelter when the

Promise of a brave, new world

Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?

'Goodbye Blue Sky' by Pink Floyd

There was a fine, reverberating chime just on the edge of hearing and his skin tingled when something much like electricity surged through him. Hot splashes of neon light shot against his closed eyelids as the magic slowly, grudgingly drained away from his body and into the ground. He was weightless, incorporeal almost; he could not see it but he was shaking.

The war was over. It was all over.

As magic was leaving him, he reclaimed his senses. It was silent and the air against his face felt moist and somewhat stiff. Gradually and unhurriedly, his injuries began to ache, sure to cause full-blown misery later; a space in his chest where something else used to be was curiously vacant now, a cluster of pressurized air. It was where Tom's soul had hid, he thought; calling him Voldemort or Dark Lord now seemed unnecessary, even childishly spiteful. Tom… Harry used to be wary of calling him that and now he knew why. The name humanized him, removed the bloodied fangs, pointed horns and other tokens of any arch-villain. No matter how he tried and wished to hate the monster for all the unknown innocents he slaughtered, he could not. Maybe objectively, but never personally. He didn't know or miss those people. Even his brilliant and adoring mother, his father or Sirius, whom he had known for much too short a time. After all is said and done, Harry and Tom were not unlike. Harry even liked to think that by killing the symbolic demon that was Voldemort, he liberated them both.

Harry looked at his arms, which were covered in grey soot, then gingerly brought his palms closer to examine and barely stifled a sneeze. Was this all? Before his feet lay an ordinary black robe, ashes around it mixing with the mud into unidentifiable mess. He looked up.

He was in a field pressed deep into the thick bulk of the Forbidden Forest, ancient trees looming over, creating twilight even on a summer's afternoon. The only sign of Hogwarts was a dark puff of smoke somewhere left of him; it could as well have been a tangible object, so motionless it was in the still air. And the field itself… only small islands of green remained in the marshy ground. Earth was so viscous he thought it might be clay – it had the same reddish hue as bricks. Black blots that he knew to be bodies riddled the field. It was so quiet he could have almost called the scenery serene.

Involuntarily he stepped forward, not even noticing how the unwilling ground chomped under his feet. Harry felt distant from his body, secure. He glided between hummocks of green and black for some time, peering at them through his own eyes. They were all alike, motionless swellings, mercifully concealed by folds and creases of their robes. Their hair was soaking in mud and blood, leaking in and out of their ears and mouths. The occasional outstretched limb looked stark white against the ground. Then, struck by some fleeting, fretful feeling, he stopped. A blue-eyed young boy, no more than fourteen, lay sprawled on his back. Harry knew that no one underage was allowed to stay in Hogwarts and battle, but there he was, that boy. The yellow-black crest on his robe revealed him as a Hufflepuff and Harry smiled softly. Those loyal and hardworking badgers.

The boy was plump, his features further softened by lingering baby fat. He was tanned but all colours were draining away from him, turning his lips pale pink. There were no visible signs of injury and he seemed relaxed. Harry followed the boy's gaze up and above until it slammed into the low, cold blue sky. It was cloudless and stagnant, just like the Forest. There was something about that boy that made Harry kneel beside him, take his cool arm in his and try for a pulse. It was useless, of course, but reaching for his neck, Harry noticed it – his eyes weren't blue! They were pallid grey, with flecks of yellow and green. It was the sky looming over the field, over them all, staring into the eyes of a dead boy that made them such a bright, cool shade of blue.

Cold crept up his trousers and along his body from the puddle where he still knelt but Harry remained frozen. He felt an overwhelming need for something - an epiphany, some explanation, an urgent reason why. Why was it this way? Why would the victory feel so... so meaningless, so lonely?

"Hello?" he cried. Not waiting for an answer, he cried again, "Hello? Anyone?"

Almost slipping, he scrambled on his feet and looked around. There was no sound, not even a bird's cry. But it would be very hard to discern movement if someone tried to answer but was too badly wounded to do so. Maybe they were unconscious?

"It's Harry, we've won! It's all okay now," he shouted, aiming to reassure. "It's all over now! Someone! Please!"

He thought he saw someone on the edge of the field, closer to the woods, faintly raise their hand but then it fell back down.

Harry vehemently rushed forward, blindly maneuvering between bodies on his way, all so he wouldn't lose eye contact with whoever had gestured. Student, teacher, even a Death Eater – it couldn't have been less relevant to Harry so long as they were alive!

His shoe got ensnared in a small hole he didn't notice in his rush. Harry growled in frustration and violently jerked and pulled but his foot remained trapped. Finally, he managed to wriggle out of the shoe and sprinted towards his goal.

"It's okay," he said, settling near the body. It was laying on its side, one arm buried under its chest and another flung backwards and suspended in the air, hand tightly holding onto a wand and forcing its tip into the ground; it was at least one third way down, Harry estimated. The body was facing the forest, its head turned away from him, and Harry gently raised and cradled it on his lap. He was rewarded with an unseeing look of Colin Creevey's blue eyes.

Harry frantically pushed it off and the boy's head helplessly lolled and halted some forty-five degrees to his neck. His tongue fell out.

"I'm sorry," managed Harry, looking away forcefully.

He then carefully examined the nearby body, hoping that he just lost sign of whomever had gestured him earlier. He went from a body to a body, found a Slytherin girl and two Ravenclaw students. One hour any many corpses later, he still hoped, even as his brain was close to overload with all the familiar dead faces.

Surely it was impossible for them all to be dead! Some must have been Stunned, Petrified, tied up or passed out. How could this be?

Harry unabashedly turned over every corpse, all but kicking them, so delirious he forgot which ones he'd already checked and did it all over again. He tripped over them, falling face first into the mud, several times. He was still calling out to someone, so engrossed he didn't hear his answer.

"Harry!" he heard and abruptly turned around, away from a girl that used to be Lavender Brown.

Harry squirmed through his dirty glasses but although the figure was just some hundred yards away, he couldn't quite make out who it was. But that voice…

"Oh God Harry, is that you?"

A sudden wide grin threatening to split his face, he ran forwards with all his remaining strength. As if waiting for this cue, the other person followed suit. They've met somewhere halfway, out of breath and panting, hands viciously hugging and tugging at each other to make sure of something.

"Oh Harry," she breathed out. "It's all over now, Harry."

" 'Mione" he finally croaked out and let go of her but stayed close, just a breath away. She smiled gently in response.

"I'm surprised you'd recognize anyone in these!"

Too fast for him to protest, she gently removed his glasses, leaving him to blink helplessly.

"Look at you, you're all covered in dirt!" she chided, her delicate fingers lightly caressed his temples and then his vision was back. Impatiently, Harry perched the glasses on the bridge of his nose and surveyed his best friend.

Hermione looked exhausted, purple bags under her eyes being the brightest feature on her waxen face. A deep, nauseatingly fleshy gash ran from the forehead and into her soggy hair. She was barely any tidier than him. Still, it was Hermione Granger.

"I thought you were dead," she said with small sniffle. "We all thought you were."

He hugged her again. They could have stayed like that forever, content, but Harry pulled away.

"We? You said 'we', Hermione?"

"We?" she repeated, frowning. "The battle was over long ago. Maybe yesterday. We've moved all the injured to Hogwarts, where Madame Pomfrey had setup a temporary hospice. There aren't many of us left and we haven't managed to contact St. Mungo's yet but still… We've combed this field at least twice but you were just gone, vanished!"

"I… I thought you were all… and Colin and I didn't know what…" Harry babbled. He finished with the abrupt, "Riddle is dead."

"He is?" Hermione's smile was so wide Harry noticed that some of her teeth were missing. "But that's great! We've won, Harry, we've finally won!"

Harry looked away uncomfortably, mortified at how misplaced her joy felt. Not here, in this silent field, within the earshot of all the dead that lay here. Not anywhere under this cold blue sky will he ever be able to say that they'd won anything at all.

"Hermione…" he wasn't sure how to start and paused. Hermione's brown eyes found his and he gestured around them weakly. "It's… this is not… it just isn't it, Hemione. It's all wrong."

Hermione followed his gaze.

"There are victims, Harry. There always are in a war!" she pleaded. She attempted to say something else but just swallowed. Harry's need to explain intensified as he struggled to articulate himself clearly.

"I… Tom is dead. But the war was not about this. It was about how it used to be, but this is not it! We were protecting what was ours but it just slipped away, even before this battle and we all failed to even notice! It will never, it can never be the same. There is no victory!"

He bit his lip and watched Hermione. Now, he knew the answer, he knew all the answers. There could be no victory, not in this war. They were fighting to preserve an institution, an order of things which was already gone. The very conditions of victory invalidated that which they most cherished – a carefree, agreeable existence where you didn't have to look over your shoulder at the slightest provocation. Innocent children of the old world were the left in this field, their eyes like windows of a house where nobody lives. Hardhearted, resilient soldiers have won this battle. Them, teenaged veterans of war.

Hermione reached out and gently squeezed Harry's hand. He was relieved to see she understood, or tried to.

"This field used to be green. It isn't anymore," he said finally.