Disclaimer: "Harry Potter" is the property of J.K. Rowling. This is written entirely for fun and I am not making any profit.

Rating: I would say a T

Read and, if you can spare a minute and a little piece of advice, review.

Like Toy Soldiers

Here they are - the man and the woman - watching the world breaking in half.

"Do you think we'll ever return?"

He rips his gaze away from the phantasmagorical show of flames that burns through everything he's ever known and fixes those impossibly ashen, impossibly perceptive eyes on her. She watches the same performance of the macabre as he did, with furrowed brows and pressed-lips, with her wandless hand twitching slightly, with her clothes burnt and with her arms bruised and with her mind eaten by the knowledge that everything is out of her control. She watches it as he did and still, she doesn't, for where he saw only familiarity she sees family and while he was emptied of feeling and staring with the glassy expression of a doll, she's fuller than ever with emotion and with spirit and is staring like a woman possessed and like a woman defeated.

Honestly, he doesn't and will never have what to come back for, but deep down, under layers of selfishness and self-preservation, deep down where he likes to pretend it's just an empty hole pulsing in void, deep down where he has a heart that seems to work like it should only around her, there he also understands her question on an altogether different level. And he knows what she wants to hear.

"If you want to."

But she, he had learned long ago, even longer than he has cared for her or than he had stopped hating her, she is not a being for simple, coddling answers, and fragile as she may seem, prefers to be stabbed by hard truths. So naturally, she corrects him, without even taking her eyes off the scene of Hogwarts crumbling, without even letting her nervousness betray her know-it-all instincts.

"If there is still something to come back to, you mean."

Her voice is not harsh, but there is something behind it, like sadness laced with steel, a determination, he realizes, that it's both endearing and frustrating and that makes him want to take care of her and shake her at the same time. That big heart of hers, he knows, still struggles with this clinical approach.

"It's out of our hands now, dove. We played his part long enough."

She knows he's right and she hates it, hates his ability of shutting down his care for the world. She can't stop wishing she could do more, even when she did more than enough, even when she gave more than was hers to give. She still wants to take another part of his burden, feels the compulsion of protecting him until the very end, that boy with the bright green eyes and messy hair that has been her friend for so long.

But she can't stop him from facing reality now, not when she fought this war in his place for so long. It's their battle from here on, of the people who stayed safely between the walls of their castle while she destroyed pieces of soul and fell in love with traitors of the Dark. It's their war to win and their victory to take while she - both the general and lone soldier of so many campaigns of their cause – has to lay down her arms and turn her back on them. It's time. Their time. Her time.

She turns her head towards him, takes in his blond hair caked with blood and his swollen eyes and his lips curved in that so loved cynical smile. It's his time also, of the man who grew up to be much more than she could have dared to hope.

"You're right. Out part is done." She takes his hand and he squeezes her fingers gently. "Let's go."

In the dawn of the last battle, in the dawn of what's to be the final day, a man and a woman turn their back on the world that it's breaking in half. And while Harry Potter puts an end to the War and makes himself a hero, Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy, with the Dark Lord's blood on their hands, disappear into nothingness.