DISCLAIMER: I am not J.K. Rowling and am only using her characters for play.
Everlasting limbo embraced Harry Potter. Life after the final battle was an odd one. The dead had been buried and mourned, the soiled grounds stained crimson and blackened with ash had been washed clean by nature's loving hand, people married their true loves and some married their one night stands either way the ceremonies were attended with great reverence and hope. Life in essence was the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes of itself and its fellows. Everyone was moving on except for one, Harry Potter.
As a child he had always been captivated with tales of heroes who sweep in and save the day. Those tales though that had so astonished him left him, as he grew older, feeling empty. For no tale described the heroes' life after the evil was defeated and the happy ever after had been called. Now as man of twenty he wondered on those tales, those happily ever afters and just who they were actually for. Most seemed to think, or perhaps wanted to hope, that those three words encased the hero who above all deserved lifelong happiness but Harry was beginning to know differently. The happily ever afters were for the ones who were saved, the ones the hero was so willing to sacrifice himself for because no happiness can penetrate a darkness as deep as the despair within his heart.
In the following years since the great battle he had went to many funerals and watched with weary happiness and a slight wistful air about him as those funerals turned slowly into weddings and as those weddings turned more quickly into births. New life had been created by the war's children. That was what they called his generation fore they had been born in war and their most formative years had been spent fighting in the war. He had comforted the wounded, had healed the sick, had dried the tears both happy and sad. He had done many great things that left him feeling something akin to happiness but it was not happiness itself.
His friends had worried at first when he began declining their get together invitations. He simply shook off their worry by saying he was simply to busy with the post war dramatics. They didn't seem to notice that as the events post war began settling down that he still refused to meet up with them as often as one, who should be enveloped in happiness such as theirs, should. Perhaps that was because their invitations became less and less and only came at all in the last year or so when a big event such as a marriage, birthday, or another birth was about to occur. His friends though he would steadfastly assure anyone who might have the inclination to ask had not abandoned him instead he had left them and they had simply moved on with their lives, as all people must. Life is not meant to be lived on hold and a life on hold is a walking death in disguise and it was that type of life that Harry Potter now lived.
He would wake long before the sun and he would sit out on his porch in a rocking chair with a black cup of coffee in one hand and a snitch in the other and he would rock. He found a muted joy in watching the sun rise in hues of red and gold and cast its light on the trees that surrounded his cottage. He lived in the middle of a forest with no discernable way in or out through the trees, a river ran softly to the side of his house and the quiet calls of the wildlife were his only companions. He would sit there for minutes or hours he wasn't ever quite sure as time had lost its meaning and any time telling instruments had long been disposed of. Sometimes in the dead of the night when he had retired to his bed he would talk out loud about nonsensical things and for a moment a soft smile would cross features and a part him that was not numb, that was not so enclosed within the blackness of his soul and the nightmares of his mind would relish the sound of a voice other then that of animal. If any had seen the hero then they would have said with unwavering acceptance and tear laden eyes that he was lonely and alone. That he resembled that of a boy not the young man he was.
They would understand how alone it was at the top and how lonely it was a the bottom. Harry Potter had never known the middle, he had only known the extremes. Growing up he had either been hated or loved their was no medium, no steady presence, no one to ground him in reality. The hero had done his duty he had saved the day but none them that he had saved thought to think about how such a duty had affected him. They never asked about nightmares once his scar hurt no more because the dreams he had were no longer important. No one had taught him how to deal with bad dreams and so he was left to deal with them as he always had, by himself locked up and alone.
He thought he finally understood why those fairy tales ended the way they did. They were meant to inspire hope to show that good always triumphs over evil and that with enough imagination one can believe that everyone gets a happy ever after. No one wanted to know about a scarred hero who flinched at his own shadow and who's body was littered with scars, the only physical evidence left that his body had been ravaged by war. No one wanted to think of their hero as human, as flesh and blood and bone and therefore mortal because if he was mortal then what stopped him from being just like them and they new that they themselves could be beaten, frightened, and killed.
That's why the fairy tales ended where they did because of one simple little fact that no one was comfortable with mentioning. That while good defeats bad, and hope is always available to those who wish to believe in it their in no happy ending. There will come a time when a new hero will be needed as he had been needed and he will have to bear that ungodly weight as if it is no weight at all. Then when his task is finished as he had finished his the hero will watch from the shadows as life goes forward and with it all the friends he knew. He will be left in the damage that the war caused, the damage to himself. The hero, Harry Potter knew, did not get a happy ending. That was truth no one wanted to acknowledge because everyone loves a hero but the hero never gets to love anyone back.