Threshold of the Future
By BenRG
Disclaimer
Harry Potter and the characters, locations and situations of the Harry Potter universe are the property of J. K. Rowling. This is a non-profit fan work for free distribution through the world-wide web.
Author's Notes
This is a sort of amalgam of some various widowed and orphaned bits of several HP stories I have written (but never finished) over the years. I was walking home today when I realised that these particular three bits fit together quite well.
This is essentially an alternate ending and epilogue for the story. There are elements of canon in this but it will also go significantly AU in places.
My thanks to Jo for allowing fans (and critics) to play in the sandbox she built for our own amusement.
Censor: T – Mentions of premarital sexual relationships (and their consequences) and also description of violence
Chapter 1 – The Day of Destiny
"You may have destroyed my Horacruxes, boy but you lack the will to destroy me! You are too weak to kill." Harry glared at the inhuman thing that was all that remained of Tom Riddle… No; Ginny was right. Tom Riddle Jnr. died when he had the basilisk kill Myrtle and used the act to create the first Horacrux. This truly was the Dark Lord Voldemort – The Speaker of Death.
Harry consciously filtered out the Heir of Slytherin's taunts; he was only biding his time after all. So far, he had been able to block everything Voldemort had thrown his way but had not tried to press his advantage. In any case, as Dumbledore had warned, Harry was no where near the Dark Lord's equal in terms of magical knowledge and could not to hope to beat him. However, he was more than able to hold him to a stalemate. Snape's reports had indicated that Voldemort was warded against almost every possible kind of attack; even if Harry had been confident of his ability to successfully cast the Killing Curse, it was not certain that even that would affect his enemy. Instead, Harry planned on turning the madman's undoubted power against himself. Now, everything depended on that weird hypothetical Light Arts spell that Hermione had found in a long-forgotten academic text.
"Well, Tommy, if you are so strong, then why don't you finish this?" Harry flourished his holly and phoenix feather wand. "Just to make it easier…" Harry made a show of holstering his wand, the brother of that bonded to Voldemort's and, therefore, a certain way of disrupting any attack, into the belt of his basilisk hide fighting armour. Harry folded his arms and made a show of being impatient. His wand wasn't really of much use anyway. The 'brother wand' effect meant that it was as useless against Voldemort as that inhuman thing's yew and phoenix feather wand was against him.
Voldemort scowled at the 17-year-old young wizard thoughtfully. He had not survived in the Dark Wizard game as long as he had by taking the bait when it was offered so explicitly. Instead, he fired a herbology charm that caused vines to grow around Harry, trapping his arms and legs. He then followed up with a detector charm that revealed no hidden traps or magical items. His Legimancy probe detected nothing unusual. "So be it, boy!" He pointed his wand at Harry. "Now I shall be supreme! AVADA KADAVRA!"
Harry was already moving. The young man had worked his father's wand out of its recessed holster in the dragon-hide bracer on his left forearm. Diffendo he cast silently; the cutting spell sliced the vines off of his body as if they were made of wet paper. Then he pointed his father's wand at the man who murdered him sixteen and a half years ago and cast with all of his will and might: "Vitaeus Luxos!"
The poison green beam of the Killing Curse shot towards Harry and met a sudden flaring blue-white bubble that was suddenly surrounding The Boy Who Lived. The beam struck the shield and the unstoppable curse, the 'un-blockable curse'… was blocked. Harry held onto his father's wand with both hands; sweat broke out all over his body as he kept up the shield by force of will.
"The Light of Life is only a theory Harry," Hermione explained. "It is postulated that the Killing Curse works by cancelling out its victim's life energies. However, if you were to actively energise your life force with your magic and project it in the path of the attack, then the Killing Curse would tangled up in the projected life energy, its energy dampened down by being caught up with its opposite."
"So it would be dissipated? That's great, 'Mione!" Harry gave his super-smart best friend a hug that made her blush brightly.
"No, Harry, not dissipated, only trapped. It would continue to try to burn through to its target and, as the shield is formed by an combination of the caster's will and magical core, eventually it would fail and the curse would get through."
Harry looked into his best friend's worried amber-coloured eyes for a moment before he smiled in a way that showed he was definitely channelling his 'Inner Slytherin', to use Ron's way of describing it. "Well then, we will just have to make sure that it doesn't come to that…"
Harry held on tightly to his father's wand with both hands and tried to keep his mind completely focussed. On the other side of the shield, Voldemort was doing nothing to stop him from doing so. Seeing what he had always supposed to be the epitome of Dark Magic blocked had stunned him to silence.
Harry focussed his will on his shield. He had practised this (although not with the Killing Curse involved) several times in the Room of Requirement and had generally got it to work. However, that was under controlled conditions. Right now, having fought his way through over a dozen Death Eaters and innumerable Dark Creatures and then having to have duelled one of the most accomplished Dark Wizards in history for over a quarter of an hour, Harry wasn't exactly at peak condition. However, as Hermione had repeatedly reminded him, the shield was an extension of Harry himself and was his to command.
So, instead of a true sphere, there would be an extension, like a spike, on the shield facing towards Voldemort; a 'rampart' of energy would appear on the shield around its circumference and then contracting towards the spike, pushing the energy of the curse towards it…
The green energy of the Killing Curse had been rotating endlessly around Harry's shield bubble, trying to get through to its target. Now, however, it was spinning around the geometric discontinuity on the shield, unable to cross the raised 'rampart' becoming more and more focussed as it was constricted closer and closer to the apex of the spike. Then, at the moment it reached the apex, Harry collapsed the spike back into the body of the shield and the poison green beam of energy shot directly towards its astonished caster.
Harry remembered Remus's lessons on the Unforgivable Curses. The Killing Curse worked on intent – the desire to kill, the hatred one feels for the victim and the pleasure that the caster would experience upon the victim's death. He also remembered the lessons that Professor Dumbledore had given him on Voldemort's personality and nature:
"Despite everything, Harry, despite all the efforts that Tom has made to avoid death and despite his immensely narcissistic ego, there is truly only one person that he hates to that degree. There is only one person whose continued existence so revolts him and who he wishes with all his heart to be dead. There is only one death that would grant him that level of pleasure." And it was so: truly, Voldemort hated himself with the same passion that he loved himself. It was a paradox but so was so much of magic.
The killing curse impacted in the centre of Voldemort's chest and the curse did its work, destroying the one being who Voldemort hated above all others: the mudblood child of a worthless Muggle and the insane squib daughter of the tramp who, by some joke, was the last heir of Slytherin. The power that Voldemort had put behind the curse burned through all its caster's many layers of wards and shields and then shredded and cancelled out the tattered rag that was the last 1/128th of Voldemort's soul. Thus, the most powerful and feared Dark Lord of the modern era fell to his own suborned weapon, his reptilian face suddenly filled with a peace and rest that he had never known in life.
Harry lowered his father's wand, allowing his Life Shield to collapse back inward and drew in a deep breath, suddenly feeling the entire last seven years all in one moment. Then he realised that the corpse of Voldemort was glowing.
The body that the last fragment of the Dark Lord's soul had been inhabiting for three years now was no natural body. It was little better than a homunculus, an artificial product of a dark necromantic ritual that was entirely shaped and sustained by its occupier's dark magic. Without a guiding soul to direct it, that magical power now flashed outwards to rejoin the universal ether in a tremendous outpouring of raw magic that disintegrated the lifeless body it had occupied. The flash lit up the darkened grounds of Hogwarts for miles in every direction and every window in the castle and nearby Hogsmeade was blown inwards. The release was so great that distant Muggle machines in London briefly reported a low-yield nuclear explosion in Scotland.
"Harry! Oh, Harry! Please!" Harry was awoken by the sobbing voice. He blinked up at the brown blur above him. After a few moments, the blur resolved itself into the dirt- and tears-smeared face of his best friend, Hermione Granger.
"'Mione…" he murmured and thanked the Goddess that he knew how to cast a Protego force shield charm wandlessly.
"Oh Harry! You're okay!" Hermione hugged her best friend with all of her strength.
Harry smiled as he felt his friend's body press against his own. He had kept it secret; after all, Hermione was already a target for just being his friend, let alone what would have happened if it was known that she was his fiancée! During the weeks hiding at Grimmauld Place, he had realised that he couldn't deny the feelings he had; he loved her – not just as a friend, not just as a sister but more. One of the reasons that his sixth year had been so bad was their estrangement over Snape's old potions book. He realised that, without her, he was only half a person, maybe less. Now he took the greatest joy from her soft body, so warm, curved and comforting, even through her body armour.
"W'rk'd 'Mione," he mumbled into her thick brown hair. "Y'did it."
Hermione leaned back and blushed at the reaction of her body to such sustained close contact with the young man who had been the focus of her affection for so long. "You did it, Harry. All I did was find the text. You were the one powerful and skilled enough to make it work."
Harry grinned up at Hermione and reached out to stroke his hand along the back of her cheek (noting with displeasure a cut running along her jaw-line). "Let's call it a team effort then."
Hermione laughed, a most beautiful sound, sat back on her heels (she had been kneeling at Harry's side) and offered him her hand to help him rise from where he was lying on one edge of a 200-foot wide crater.
Unseen to both the young ones, a figure in black robes wearing a bone white mask, had worked his way over the other lip of the crater. Somehow, he had been able to stay conscious despite the agony in his left arm when Voldemort died. Now, as he glared with a thin-lipped sneer at the Potter spawn and his mudblood slut, he realised that everything could now be gained. The boy was strong, but after that display against the late, unlamented Dark Lord, he would be too weak to pull any more tricks. He lined up his wand and began the incantation of the Killing Curse…
"Harry! Look out!" There was more than a voice, there was also a warning in Harry's mind. Operating more on instinct than anything else, Harry reached out and, wandlessly and wordlessly, summoned the Sword of Gryffindor from where it was still buried in Rockwood's chest and banished it towards the Death Eater casting the killing curse. The sword struck home like a harpoon, the blade punching right through the man's chest and knocking him from his feet, his wand jerked upward, sending the Killing Curse shooting uselessly up into the clouds before his wand tumbled from his grasp.
Harry looked over his shoulder and saw Ginny Weasley and Luna Lovegood standing not five yards away. The fiery redhead and the spacey blonde looked like an odd sort of twin sisters in their identical armour (made, like that of all of Harry's friends, from the hide of the Beast of Slytherin). He smiled when he saw them, relieved that they were both alive and unharmed after the titanic battle that had raged all morning on the grounds of Hogwarts.
Ginny forced herself to relax and move her hand away from her chest where she had been trying to stop her heart from jumping from her chest in fear when she saw that Death Eater line up on Harry from behind. "All of the Death Eaters collapsed just before that explosion, Harry. Most of the Dark Creatures were killed. Where… where's Tom?"
"He's gone," Harry replied. "That explosion was his death knell."
"Turning the Killing Curse back on itself worked," Hermione added, sounding justly proud of the fruits her research had borne.
"Only one full of light could have made the light bright enough," Luna contributed. Hermione shot the blonde girl an odd look. The two had their disagreements but one area in which they were united was that there was something special about Harry. The young woman (a True Seer, Trewlaney still insisted) turned to look at the crumpled form impaled on the Sword of Gryffindor, her unfocused blue eyes suddenly filled with sadness. "But the darkness proved too great for some we have known."
"That's someone we know?" Harry blurted, only now really looking at his fallen assailant.
"Let's see who!" Ginny said and, with her usual impetuous forthrightness, ran over to the fallen Death Eater. Without any ceremony, she pulled off the dark wizard's mask and then took a step back, her face filled with horror.
Harry, Hermione and Luna jogged over to her and joined her in looking down at the man. "No! Why…?" Hermione gasped.
"Snape!" Ginny said quietly. "So he was Tom's man after all!"
Luna shook her head. "A man can walk more than one path, if he chooses," she commented her usual airy voice turning grim and sorrowful. "However, he can only reach the end of one."
"He helped me remove the Horacrux from my scar!" Harry blurted. "I thought that I was wrong about him…!" The fallen ex-Potions Master groaned; somehow, he was still alive. "Traitorous bastard," Harry growled. "You told me that you hated Voldemort!"
Snape looked up at the four irritations and tried to hex them before he realised that his wand was no longer in his hand. "Of course… I hated… that… inhuman… beast," he hissed, each breath an agony around the sword embedded in his left lung. "I hated… you… even… more…!" Snape knew that he had little time left; knowing it was his last chance, he opened his Occulmency shields and let the dull-witted Gryffindor see his thoughts.
Harry saw something in the former teacher's mind and seized it. Yes, Snape hated Voldemort and wanted the Dark Lord dead, so he aided Harry to do what he could not. However, that was only the first step. He had realised that the Dark Lord's death would cause the Dark Mark to inflict agonising pain and even death on those whom it bound to Voldemort's life force and managed to brew a topical potion that would block the worst effects. Guessing that Harry would be vulnerable after the effort needed to defeat Voldemort, he kept close to their duel; He planned to finish off the boy he hated in the period of weakness that would inevitably follow such a confrontation. The wizard who slew the vanquisher of Voldemort would surely be the greatest Dark Lord of all time.
"You are a true Slytherin," Harry said at last. "Loyal to none but yourself, aiming only to increase your own power. It might have even worked but you forgot the same thing that Voldemort forgot: I am stronger than I would be on my own thanks to my friends."
Snape was shuddering in agony now, blood beginning to bubble up from between his lips as his lungs filled with his life-blood. "Lily… mine…! You… not… her…!"
Harry felt sick at what his Legimancy revealed. "That was why? For my mother? You wanted Voldemort to kill my father so you could have her for yourself?" Harry couldn't help but shudder as Snape's delirious, dying mind described all the humiliations and depravities that he had been planning to inflict on Lily; her delivery to him was his price for joining the Death Eater movement. "You'll be glad to know that he kept his word," Harry said, sarcasm filling his words. "He tried to get her out of the line of fire before trying to kill me."
Hermione and Ginny surrounded Harry from both sides, hugging him and trying to comfort him. "You were always thinking about yourself and planning for yourself," Luna explained to the shuddering ex-teacher. "Now, at the end, you should only blame yourself."
Snape's black eyes burned with hatred and he spat a gob of bloody sputum at Harry that dropped at the young man's feet. Harry sucked in his breath and realised that he did not have sufficient cruelty to let Snape to die slowly and painfully from his wounds. He reached out, seized the Sword of Gryffindor and yanked it out of Snape's chest. This tore open Snape's lung and severed his aorta. Blood fountained out from the wound; Snape convulsed once and was dead in less than five seconds. Before he died, his eyes conveyed one last message, one that did not surprise Harry in the least: I hate you, Potter.
"Goodbye, Snivellus," Harry hissed. He wiped the bloodied blade on the black-haired man's robes and sheathed it in its over-the-back scabbard before turning his back on one of the most pathetic creatures that he had ever known.
Harry looked at his three friends and looked towards Hogwarts. The magical black clouds that Voldemort had conjured to allow his Dark Creatures to all fight in the daytime had almost all faded away and it was a sunny, warm day in March that promised a blazing hot summer to come. Only the fires, the piles of corpses and the curse burns on the mighty millennium-old walls remained to tell the tale of the defining magical battle of this age.
"Come on," Harry said, "let's get out of here."
Without a backward glance to the mortal remains of a bitter, frustrated and hate-filled man who had never once known true happiness, the four friends set off towards Hogwarts Castle and a future free from the dark.
To be continued…