((This short fic was inspired by Circular Reasoning by Swimdraconian. It's a brilliant but brutal story, and for those who haven't read it, it starts out in the trenches so to speak, in the ruins of London after war broke out between wizards and spread into the muggle world. It's an open POV, can be anyone you want.))
He wondered if they could pinpoint one moment in time that led to all this. If they'd ever be able to look back and say 'yeah, this is where things went wrong'. They couldn't though – it wasn't just one thing, or if it was then it was so quiet, so unnoticed and innocuous that they'd never know. One action, one decision perhaps, that changed the fate of them all and led to all of this.
Honestly, he thought it was a long series of fuck-ups that put them deeper and deeper into this shit storm, when they thought it couldn't ever get any worse. It can always get worse. A motto he'd taken to heart fairly early in his life and had never led him astray. Things could always get worse, so much worse that it changed the way you looked at any situation. Suddenly 'impossible' became 'normal', one day you're looking out the window thinking 'that's suicide' and two days later everything has gone so wrong that it's your best bet, the best chance you have of getting out alive.
It's all about framing, he thought. When you have something worse to compare it to, suddenly something doesn't seem so terrible any more.
They used to worry about grades, and friends, or parents coming home early and finding you'd had a party and destroyed the tv. About what sort of future you'd make for yourself – what career you'd pick or who you'd marry. Now they worried about whether they'd die quickly or not, whether it'd matter if they ran out of food or whether there'd be no one left to eat it by the time it all went stale. Priorities changed, went from finding food to fill your empty belly, to running before you were eviscerated.
They had no hope any more. It'd died a long time ago, after the first two years and everyone realised that there was no fixing this. There was no coming back from this – the world they'd known, that they'd grown up in, was gone and not coming back. And there was no point committing suicide because it was selfish – there were plenty of other people out there, happy to end your life, the least you could fucking do was go out protecting someone who wanted to live more than you did.
He remembered the days when he could cook hot food that didn't taste like shit. When he didn't have to scavenge through someone else's ruined home to find food, and eating it even though it was years out of date and he knew it would make him sick but the only choice was to eat it or starve. When he could eat fresh fruit, or drink something other than foul water, hot chocolate fuck he'd loved the stuff when it was still readily-available but now that it wasn't he'd sell what was left of his right kidney just for a taste of that ambrosia.
As you can probably guess, everything went to hell some time ago now. It started out as just a disagreement of opinions, a small civil war following that, but it bred and bred like nobody could believe. At first they'd just been dealing with a budding ideal – and as with all disagreements it quickly spread and sparked conflict. This ideal took root though, as all did when they came down to superiority, some people being better than others for whatever reason, but it really took off the day that they gained a leader, someone to spearhead them and push them from a small aggressive group and into the realm of terrorism.
You should note that fear does things to people, it changes them, just like power can. Just as the newly formed terrorists enjoyed the highs of displaying their superiority over those deemed inferior to them, the heady feeling of power overtaking their senses, fear motivated those threatened by such displays, even those who weren't in opposition, weren't in the way. The day that the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency, it definitely heralded the beginning of the end. Not because it was unwarranted, though it was certainly unhelpful, but because the first thing he did with martial law in place was make things worse, so much worse. He tried to segregate the people, separate them into their classifications, sending the muggleborns to special camps, the half bloods to others, and being a pureblood himself of course they were exempt, once they were tested to ensure their purity, at least.
London had been his home for three years before the war broke out, and it'd been eight years since then. The city, once full to the brim and filled with activity, sound and colour, was now drab and grey and dead. It alternated between utter silence, and a haunting, screaming wind as it howled through empty streets. The city smelt dusty and dead, like rotting dead things long abandoned and old fires long burned out.
That was another thing that'd contributed to the horrific state they were now in; another act driven from fear, that such a small number of people could wreak such destruction on such a large scale. It was estimated that less than a dozen people were behind the fire the wrought London to ashes in an attempt to burn out those few who hid within the great city.
When he was a boy, first stepping into the magical world, few had liked to speak of the dark times that cast its shadow over their generation. Whispering about it and mentioning it in oblique references like it was the worst thing in the world, they had no idea what was to come. What they had lived through had been terrible but also minor in comparison. It'd been terrorism, pure and simple, but this, this was war. It was destruction and the end of all things, the loss of future, of hope, of life.
He'd once asked one of the older generation, a few years into the true war, how it compared to what they'd lived through before. The old man had laughed in his face, long and hard and without true amusement in the way that all laughter seemed to be now, and told him no, this was so, so much worse. At least before they had their homes, their wives and their children. They had more to fear, because they had more to lose, but now they had lost almost everything anyway. Now they lived in squalor and death, their numbers whittling down more and more every day as they were lost to death eaters and muggles alike, even other pockets of survivors like themselves who simply were too paranoid, too used to being betrayed to trust that anyone they left alive wouldn't come after them later, for food if nothing else.
There were so few people left on the isles, but all the survivors seemed to be doing was killing eachother.
They were trapped though; the wards around the island prevented any travel in or out, as the surrounding countries turned their attention away in the hopes that the problem took care of itself. Eight years of things steadily getting worse, as segregation turned to genocide, and it was any wonder that no other country wanted anything to do with them. None were fit for 'normal' society any more, too used to the death and the darkness within themselves, the desperation that forced them to do things that were inexcusable. They'd all killed, they'd all left their comrades behind to die so that they wouldn't, they'd all done things they wished they'd never have to. There was no coming back from all this, no matter how much they hoped and prayed. There was no fixing it.
This was life now, for the survivors of Britain, for whoever much longer they'd manage to last. Eight years was a miracle considering the lack of food and other supplies, the attacks from all sides as muggles and wizards alike slaughtered each other. Somehow they survived and carried on, wondering why the whole time. There was nothing here for them, no reason to carry on but sheer will or stubbornness, or in most cases, simple habit and instinct. This was his life, the life of every other survivor trapped and struggling to carry on in the ruins of a once prosperous land.