A/N: Written for Round 9 of the Houses Competition forum for Slytherin House as a drabble.
Prompt: 9. He/She/They should not have buried it in the woods.
Word Count: 497
He should not have buried it in the woods.
The war had just ended, and he realized he was missing it. The Resurrection Stone.
It wasn't as if he was really going to do anything with the Stone. It was just that he'd felt that he needed to hold it. He thought it would provide him with… closure, maybe, to be able to know where it was.
How wrong he was.
So, it had been easy to remember exactly where he'd left it, discarding the only connection, as unnatural as it was, to his parents. And two days after Voldemort's downfall, he went and buried the thing, even leaving a big, fat X on top.
Now the war had been over for twenty-three years, two months, and twenty-nine days. And he found his mind drifting to the mound of dirt that held his last connection to the dead.
It was futile to resist. He'd resisted the Stone's pull for two months after his latest excursion into the past. Now it was time to answer the call. He exhaled and shook his head. Closure, indeed.
He apparated to Hogsmeade and walked toward the forest, noticing the still-abandoned Shrieking Shack. He entered into the silent trees. How many times had the Marauders romped through the brush, young, carefree, and vibrant?
He stopped. Between his feet, which had taken him to the burial ground on autopilot, was a small lump of earth. The X had long since been trampled over, but that had only been a formality.
Harry reached the Stone quickly. It remained luminescent and clean against his dirty hands and fingernails, untouched by the soil. He turned the Stone thrice in his hand. And they appeared.
His mother smiled, the same as he'd seen her on Halloween, yet sadness permeated her gaze. His father was also the same, looking like a seventeen-year-old Harry. Padfoot and Moony smiled at him as well, cheerful and buoyant as they must have been in their youth; oddly, death seemed to have been good to them. Harry was painfully aware that he was visibly older than any of them had ever been.
"We know why you're here," Sirius said.
"We'll always be with you," James told him, "whether we're as tangible as we are now, or just whispers in your conscious."
"You won't find what you're looking for with us, pup," Remus said gently. "Your place is with the living, with your family."
"I just… didn't want the last time I saw you to be on… on Halloween."
"We understand," Lily whispered. She held his face in her hands. He leaned into the cold touch. "But now you must leave us, my son. Go."
Slowly, they faded, one by one. Harry walked to the edge of the forest. Digging his nails into his palm, with his other arm, he chucked the Stone into the Black Lake. Immediately after, lest he lose his nerve, he walked away, into the woods.
And he never came back.
