xii. Promises
In years to come Harry could only remember bits and pieces of the next hour: coming out of the Room of Requirement, seeing the look on Moody's face that said, so so clearly, I don't bloody believe it; watching Mad-Eye fumble his wand to the floor for what had to be the first time in a half century; then the deafening shouts of acclaim, dozens of students throwing things into the air, whatever was handy; Lavender Brown looking intensively around for something to toss, finally seizing the indignantly protesting bust of some former professor and heaving it at the rafters; then the sound wave retreating and the throwing of things ceasing as it became clear what had happened to Ginny; being pushed and pulled towards the Hospital Wing through a crowd half eager to help him get there and half frantic to touch him, pat him, hug him; Pomfrey looking over his hand and then, with next to nothing left in the way of potion supplies, anaesthetizing him with good old Muggle chloroform.
Harry missed a good deal while he was under. The reflective wards were all down now that Voldemort was no more, the forces of the Ministry and the Order were out and about, and-- once the news of the Dark Lord's death was confirmed-- the skeleton occupation forces around Britain couldn't surrender fast enough. All Fred and George had to do to retake their area of Hogsmeade for the forces of Light was walk down the street in Harry Potter masks, the eyes charmed to send out "laser beams" with accompanying sound effects drawn from Muggle video games. Families took broom or Floo or Apparated into Hogsmeade, then rushed the gates of Hogwarts, often to discover that they and their children had just passed one another coming and going, then the owls alerting one another "I'm coming back, stay where you are!" passed one another coming and going... but it all worked out in the end, as these things do. One picture that every visitor to Hogwarts had to take was of themselves in front of the Quidditch scoreboard, which now read:
HARRY POTTER CATCHES THE SoNofabITCH, WAR OVER.
Harry awakened suffering from a chloroform hangover and missing his left hand. He assured Ron, Hermione and Neville that he could live with that just fine, whether or not a magical replacement was possible. He did not say, though he felt it, that there was something satisfying about the loss, as a partial self-punishment, a kind of down-payment on an account he didn't think he would ever get squared. Hermione, he was certain, would either explode at him or start crying if he did say it. He was glad to see Hagrid again, to see Dumbledore again, he was relieved to find that Cho, Angelina, Katie and the other recent graduates he knew, many of whom were now part of his magical family, had made it through OK.
He desperately did not want to see Arthur and Molly just now, but they just as desperately pleaded to see him. His military authority was gone now so the decision was Pomfrey's, and she decided to classify the visit as a medical necessity. When the Weasleys came into the room Harry felt such panic at the thought of looking at their faces and seeing how they were looking at him, he turned and buried his head in a pillow, ashamed of being so like a four-year-old but finding the alternative just impossible.
"Harry, look at us," Molly said softly. He shook his pillowed head.
"Harry," Arthur said, "Hermione told us you would think we hated you. Do you believe that?"
"No," he croaked out. He realized the pillow was ridiculous, he could just keep his eyes shut, so he put the pillow down. "No I don't think you would hate me, Mr. Weasley. I just... I can't really explain it."
"All right, dear," Molly assured him. "I expect you're thinking about whether we forgive you or go on blaming you, and there's probably nothing we can say now that will convince you there's nothing that needs forgiving. That will just have to come in time. But for now-- Harry, please open your eyes, for our sakes, it's very distressing to talk like this."
He could hardly refuse that request. Harry saw two red-eyed parents who were still trying to comfort him, and felt so guilty at that he wanted to pull away again, but Molly wouldn't let him.
"What do you want to happen now, son?" asked Mr. Weasley.
It was obvious that Harry was puzzled by the question, so Arthur rephrased it. "The wizarding world wants to give you anything you want now, Harry, anything. Make a wish. What do you wish for?"
The answer was suddenly obvious. "I want to go away, forget... maybe Professor Bandhit could turn me into an animal and leave me that way for a while."
Arthur and Molly both nodded as if this was exactly the response they expected. "And that," Molly said, "is one thing you can't have."
"Why not?"
"Do you remember the pledges we all took at your birthday, Harry? That we would never -- never -- allow each other to slip out of sight and mind? People often think of that as the easiest or least important part of the pledge, but it isn't. We aren't a family if we can drop out of it whenever taking part in each other's sorrow is too painful."
Harry felt the truth of this.
"So this is what you are going to do, dear. You are going to come with us to Ginny's funeral--" the sobs and tears stopped Molly from talking for a minute; she made no effort to hold them back or excuse herself for them. Finally she continued. "And stand with the rest of us, with your family, in mourning her. We all stand up together in our best robes, and we say thank you to everyone who comes to console us for losing our loved one. Nobody gets to run away from that, sweetheart, you understand?"
Harry cried and nodded, cried and nodded. "Yeah, I understand," he finally said, "I'm glad you came now," and felt a flash of deja vu. He told himself to remember to listen to Mr. and Mrs. Weasley: they had never let him down.
"Now there's time for you to get dressed," Arthur said. "Madame Pomfrey says you're released now, so we can go down together to the Great Hall."
Harry was a little slow in following this change of topic, though he was glad to be released. "Go down for what?"
"There's going to be a graduation ceremony, don't you remember?"
"Oh, yeah." Hermione's promise, of course. Well, this was doable. He knew Hermione and many others were really looking forward to it and was glad for her, for them, that they would finally have it, but as for himself, Harry tried to think of it just as a kind of practice in standing in large crowds and being looked at.
The question of students' academic status was still in the air. The "graduates" weren't technically real graduates of course, since there had been no course work and no NEWTs, but the A.F.F. would probably have started a new war if Hermione's wish had not been granted. Amazingly, given how little time there had been to put it together, the graduation ceremony was quite intact: the teachers, the flowers, the banners, the certificates. There were no long speeches, and Harry certainly didn't miss them. In the wake of everything they had just been through he would have physically recoiled at the string of cliches customary to such things, about working hard and following dreams and so on. But the traditional graduation song, which had closed the ceremony every year since the first class graduated Hogwarts in the Founders' time, was still on the agenda. Harry liked the tune; it was a familiar one, having been adapted by Muggles as the Welsh National Anthem, Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau ("Land of Our Fathers"). But the lyrics, despite their antiquity -- and they were so old they still payed tribute to the Goddess of the old matriarchal religion as the source of all magic-- had always struck him as...
"How would you say it, Hermione, what I don't like about the lyrics is that I find them... what?"
"Stridently romanticized?" Hermione suggested. They were sitting together, of course, with Ron and Neville, Dean and Seamus, Parvati and Lavender. "Maybe they are, a bit," Hermione conceded. "But I think a little romanticism is more than tolerable on these occasions." Harry wasn't sure whether by 'these occasions' she meant the end of schooling, or the end of a war, or both. "And it makes a big difference if you're singing too, not just sitting and listening to other people sing." Usually the song was sung only by the seventh years; for this class, it was thought, there was no separating one group from the rest, either by year or by house, and so the entire student body was invited to sing.
The signal was given for the music to play, and the impromptu chorus of students began:
When witches and wizards first came to our shore
The seas rolled with magic, the mountains held more
And when nations and kingdoms have faded and gone
That magic will flow on and on.
Rise! Rise! Take up your part in Her song;
To Her gifts you were born,
To Her lore you have come,
To Her people you'll always belong.
...and singing that line for the first time, in a group of the people he belonged with, belonged to, he felt a surge of something despite all his pre-set resistance. When he looked up at Ron and Hermione and Neville as they were singing that line, and they beamed back at him, he felt more of it.
Rise! Rise! Take up the calling devout;
For the Light that brings you here,
Is the Light that you bring
The Light that will never go out!
Harry had never heard a satisfactory explanation for how "the light that brings you" could be identical to "the Light that you bring"; he was generally told "It's a mystery." Well, thanks. The last line, though...
The usual practice was to put out the candles (it was always an evening ceremony) and have the graduates raise their wands and cast Lumos, the only spell they could all do sub-verbally so as not to interrupt the flow of the singing. It was actually a very impressive effect, Harry conceded, as the singers strove to keep up their illumination spells and their last notes, together, as long as they could. Now, he looked around the Great Hall and saw the light was coming from another source: one after another, students as young as twelve were casting their Patronus into the darkness. Everybody felt that the first singing of the last stanza didn't do justice to the marvel of this moment, didn't give it enough of a chance to shine, so they all sang it again, each vowel stretched to its vocal limit...
Thaaaaaaa Liiiiiiiiiiiiight...
...to give as many as possible a chance to invoke this show of joy and light, a show that everybody understood as a conclusive act of defiance against their months of exposure to cruelty and fear...
...thaaaaaaat willllllllllll NE-VERRRRRRR...
Even the students who had cast already, whose Patronus had emerged and flown and finally faded away, saw they had time for another, the notes were being held so long, and in this supercharged atmosphere, everybody on a giddy high at what they were already doing, it became doubly easy to do it again...
gooooooooooooo ouououououououout!
Harry took a breath of hope from this infectious air and cried "Expecto Patronum!" for the first time since the duel, and there she was again: the lioness hadn't been there only to defeat Riddle, she was still there for him also. She was only the slightest shadow or echo of what he had lost, but having that was still something. I can't keep calling you 'the lioness,' Harry thought. I think I'll call you 'Gryffa,' like the feminine of 'Gryffindor.' And almost a kind of echo of--
As these thoughts ran through Harry's mind, he noticed that all the singing had stopped, replaced by gasps and silent stares. Of the hundreds of people in the Hall, only four had ever seen a full color Patronus. "That's Gryffa," Harry said. "She's quite special, isn't she?" Gryffa flew once more around the hall, and it was the students who broke out in roars. The lioness regally accepted the tribute, returned to Harry and faded out.
Harry gave Hermione a hug and a kiss on the cheek. "Good idea, having this ceremony," he said. She looked flabbergasted, and Harry was puzzled. "What, I've never complimented you before?"
"Not that way you haven't, mate," Ron said. "And believe me, I've been keeping watch for about five years for anything like that."
"Ron!"
"Oh come on, Hermione, Harry knows I'm just joking. Don't you?"
Harry had finally realized what he'd done and was not, in fact, completely sure that Ron was joking. He began blushing and was about to plead temporary insanity brought on by overexposure to Patronus, when Hermione put a finger across his lips.
"Honi soit qui mal y pense, Harry." Harry nodded gratefully.
"That's right, Harry," Ron added, putting an arm around his friend's shoulder. "Honey, soak the muddy pants."
----------
There was one task Harry wanted urgently to perform before the Army of the Forbidden Forest went their separate ways, but he thought he'd better go over his idea first with Ron, Hermione and Neville, since they were likely to be the toughest audience for it.
"I'd like to release everybody from their promise to me, that you always come to my rescue, as long as we're alive."
Harry wasn't too surprised at how much anger was generated by this notion. "You can't toss a magical promise away after you think it's served its purpose," Ron said.
"I don't mean dissolve it for the whole group," Harry explained, "just don't apply it to me. I don't want to be saved like that again, I couldn't take it, Ron. You have to understand that."
"Yeah, I understand that my sister died. But she died saving all of us, did you think it was only for you, Harry? Even if she hadn't loved you, even if there hadn't been a pledge, or a prophecy or anything, there was still a dark wizard who was going to come after everybody else in that room once he finished you, and nobody else could have survived a duel with him. Her brother was in that room too, and two of her best friends, not just you; did you remember that? Was she going to let all of us die to buy another five minutes of life?"
Harry wanted to say "I could have beaten him," but he realized that was something he could never really know. If it just came down to calculations of magical strength, he had to concede that Prongs could not have stood up against the complete magical energies of four wizards, plus Voldemort, all focused into one curse. But it wasn't just a matter of strength, what about his luck? Wouldn't the Powers have been just, wouldn't Fortune have favored the brave and true, somehow?
Yet even if the Powers or Fortune or Fate could tell him what they would have done to make sure he won, he knew he wouldn't want to hear it. It would be like finding out that Ginny had died for no reason, and he didn't think he could live with that kind of knowledge.
So Harry answered Ron from a different direction, but still (he thought) a legitimate one. "It wasn't just Ginny," he said, "it was Mum and Dad and Sirius and Colin. It's enough now. I've been given enough extra chances. I don't want to go on sucking up other people's lives to extend my own."
"You aren't 'sucking up' life, Harry, that's a sick way of looking at it," Hermione said. "Your friends love you, and they would come to your rescue even if there weren't an oath binding them to do so."
"I know how to stop them. That was what I was going to tell them in the meeting. I can cast the spell, Si moreas pro me, moreatur ipse."
"Translation?" Ron asked.
" 'If anyone should die for me, let me die myself.' If I tell everybody, then they know there's no point in anybody putting their life before mine, because it won't save me anyway, I'm magically required to die if you do."
"Harry," Hermione said tearfully, "you're going back to Grimmauld Place again, not wanting to live through it when other people die--"
"No, Hermione, this is different," Harry insisted. "What I did in sixth year, that wouldn't have done anything to bring Dennis back, but this is a way of preventing other people from dying."
"Why don't people have the right to choose for themselves, Harry, if they want to sacrifice themselves for you?" Hermione asked, and Harry struggled for the words to get it across to her, finally saying:
"Look, if you were a millionaire, and some poor man kept insisting on donating to you... If you could do it, wouldn't you ask the bank to please block all these deposits, not to accept any checks from this man? Would you really say 'well, it's his right to give me his money'? I'm a millionaire, Hermione. I'm a millionaire many times over. I don't hate that money, I think it's... extraodinary money. I'm not throwing mine away. But I don't want anybody else's. I won't take anybody else's, even they want to give it to me."
Ron, Hermione and Neville were quiet for a long time after that, and Harry thought he had finally won an argument. But then Neville broke the silence:
"I'm sorry, Harry, but even if you want to, and even if it's the right thing for you, you can't. You're still the captain. You're still the one we all look up to. If you told the others you were going to give up the protection, they wouldn't feel right keeping it for themselves. They would all want to prove they could take the same chances you're taking, and we'd all lose it. You don't want to do that."
And Harry finally had to concede, he couldn't do that.
----------
Harry accepted the invitation to move into the Burrow. Hermione was with her parents, Neville with his grandmother, so Harry and Ron had lots of time together. One afternoon in the course of their customary chess match Ron picked up his king-side knight to move it into a position for a knight sacrifice, and heard it say "there are other pieces who could serve that purpose better than me!"
Harry had nightmares for years about the look that came over Ron's face that moment.
Ron put the protesting pieces back in their box and walked away from Harry. Harry waited for him to calm down and walk back. He finally did, but still looked away from Harry.
"You knew I was going to do it," Ron said.
"Yeah, I knew."
"And you told Hermione about it beforehand, so she would stop me?"
"'course not," Harry said. "If I had told her about the sacrifice move, she would have done it first herself."
"Oh yeah, right."
"I just told her to make sure you didn't slip up and come off the platform."
Ron considered things for a moment. "What am I supposed to do about something like that?" he asked. "Thank you? Curse you?"
"I hope... neither, really. 'Cause I had to do it."
"You were the captain, Harry. The sacrifice was the right tactic, and I was ready to do it--"
"You were my brother, Ron. I swore I'd never use my family as pawns, or knights, and I wasn't going to let you be one."
After a few seconds' silence, Ron said "Yeah. OK."
"I was just too stupid," Harry said, "to think about, that she--"
"Yeah. I know. She was getting really damn good, she was going to be better than me next year earliest, probably way better."
----------
A couple of weeks later, Ron picked up another topic with Harry.
"I'm going to talk to you now as your best mate," he said, "not as Ginny's brother. No, scratch that, as Ginny's brother too, because I'm sure she'd agree with me."
"That would be a first," Harry said, and the two smiled.
"Yeah, ha, ha. Anyway, in case it matters to you what I think about this sort of thing, I'm not going to feel bad when you start seeing other girls--"
"No, Ron."
"Not tomorrow; maybe in, six months, a year, two years..."
"No. That's not going to happen."
"Don't be a martyr, Harry, you don't have the look for it."
"Nope, now you've got the wrong idea. I'm not punishing myself, it's just that I made a promise. The day it happened. First -- only time I kissed her, and after it I said... Whether I live or die, this is the last girl I'll ever kiss like that."
"Did you make it magically binding? Tell me you didn't make it binding!"
"Does that matter?"
"How can it not matter, Harry?"
"Because I meant it just as much at the time. If I'd thought of it, I would have done the spell. If I'd been asked to do it, I would have done the spell. It's like what Luna said about keeping our promise to the prisoners. If Ginny and I had both lived and gotten married, I would have said, for the rest of my life, that from that moment I'd promised myself to her, no matter what, and she would have believed me, that would have been the truth. That's something I've got to hold on to. And if there was ever some situation, I don't know, where you could only succeed at some task if you had made a real binding love-pledge, a 'no matter what' kind of love-pledge, I would have stepped forward, and it would have worked for me. So I can't pretend now that I never made it or I meant something else by it, cause then it's like I've lost it all. I want to keep it."
Ron paused and looked thoughtful.
"You've really thought about this."
"Yeah."
"Hard thing to ask of yourself."
"People do it, Ron."
"You mean, like monks?"
"Well, yeah," Harry said. Ron considered further.
"I guess it's less problem for your hip this way," he finally said.
"Ha, ha." The friends smiled and went back to their books.
----------
31 July 1998
Albus Dumbledore stepped to an improvised podium in the Great Hall of Hogwarts. Behind him were almost a hundred teenagers and some dozen Ministry officials, in front of him were hundreds of parents and other spectators, to his right was a recording wizard from WWN radio making certain the ceremony about to begin would be carried not only throughout Britain and Ireland but to dozens of wizarding settlements around the world. Dumbledore began.
"Witches and wizards, members of the Ministry, honored guests. Ten months ago, dark forces employed a marvelously clever spell for a twisted goal..."
Dumbledore summarized the story of their entrapment, and then of his reaction on receiving the message from Sir Nicholas that the students were fighting on their own:
"...we members of the Order naturally took up the question with one another: what will happen to the students of Hogwarts? What chance do they have of holding out until we wise and powerful adults can come to their rescue? And I said to my friends, No rational man can believe that these children can hold out for very long against the full powers of Lord Voldemort and his armies. I was therefore very glad, I said, that I had never been a rational man."
The audience laughed appreciatively, and Dumbledore smiled back and continued. "That was the reaction of my colleagues also. But the laughter died very quickly, and every morning, for the next terrible months, we all awoke half expecting that this would be the day when we learned the walls had been broken, the students all captured, or worse. As for the idea that they could not only hold out against the Dark Army but break it... I have been called a foolish optimist-- and of all the insults which have been bestowed on my through the years, I think that is the one of which I am fondest-- but I must admit I did not dare give myself hope of that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, obviously my critics were mistaken: my failing was not being too foolish, but rather not being all the fool that I should have been, all the fool I had the potential for. I will strive in the future to correct this fault. For as you can see, standing behind me now awaiting the moment when we wise and powerful adults express our poor and inadequate tokens of appreciation for coming to our rescue, are the students who defeated the darkness. Please rise and join with me in saluting, in humbly thanking, The Army of the Forbidden Forest: average age, fifteen years and ten months. Hannah Abbott..."
After the roll call and the bestowing of awards was over, and the cheers had finally subsided, Professor Dumbledore called upon the captain of the A.F.F. to speak on their behalf. Harry limped quickly to the podium, nervously cleared this throat, and began:
"Thank you, Professor, and thank you to everybody here, especially to the members of our families here now; I want you to know that you were with us all the time.
"When we made the decision to stay and fight, we sealed it by making a magically-binding pledge to each other. It's mostly Ron and Hermione's, they put it together, and it was really brilliant. It went like this: We swear, on our lives, never to let a comrade down; that whenever there is hope for them, we will never to fail to come to their aid or their rescue; We swear, on our magic, that if any of us dies, they will always be remembered, and their story will be told; And we swear, on our magic, that those of us who make it through this war will always continue to remember, to support and to rescue one another after the war, for as long as we live.
"And that's what held us together. None of us ever broke any of those promises. And we're still under oath now, all of us. And we always will be. I didn't even notice at the time, but I see it more clearly now, that the last promise there sounds a lot like the last vow the bride and groom take in a Muggle marriage ceremony, and that's right, because in a way we are all married to each other.
"Well, not in all ways, obviously, don't want you getting the wrong idea. Yeah, I see some parents looking relieved at that.
"But the point is that, if any of us is ever in trouble, they know they have all the rest of us ready to get them out of it, no matter what the cost, whether it's tomorrow or a hundred years from now. I mean, assuming we can all still hold our wands then. So if anybody who's listening, anybody who's heard all our names, gets the idea that they can gain some reputation from taking one of us on: it wouldn't be very smart of you to try. There wouldn't be much left of you. And that applies to other things besides picking a duel in a pub. It wouldn't be a good idea to try playing any kind of power game with any of us."
That had been the least ominous way Harry could think of to get across the idea: we're not going to be under anybody's control, you'll all have to pay very serious, respectful attention to us, both as individuals and in whatever causes we take up.
"We all lived by these pledges to each other, and seven of us died in keeping them.
"Part of the pledge was that we would never forget those who died. It may not literally have been stated, or magically required, but we've all agreed that one way to do that is by saying that the friends, the families of the ones who died, we want you to call on us, we want you to think of us as friends and family also.
"I ask you now to rise in remembrance of those seven loved ones: Ernie Macmillan, Sarah Murphy, Terry Boot, Anne Fairleigh, Colin Creevey, Luna Lovegood and G-- Ginny Weasley."
Harry had taken the strongest Calming potion he could get before coming out, to prevent breaking down at this point and failing his duty to announce the names clearly and respectfully. It almost wasn't enough.
----------
Half a century went by with remarkable speed, and then...
----------
The Daily Prophet, November 1, 2050
POTTER DIES FIGHTING DRAGON
Harry James Potter, the wizarding world's most revered living icon, died yesterday at the age of seventy from wounds he suffered leading a mission to stop a rogue dragon that had been terrorizing Pembroke. The dragon was eventually put down by other members of the team...
Potter first gained fame as the infant Hercules who had crushed a serpent. At the age of one and a half he rid the world (or so it was thought at the time) of Tom Riddle, "Lord Voldemort," the most powerful and malignant dark wizard in the modern era, when Riddle attempted to slay the child prophesied to be the one who would vanquish him. He grew up unaware of this feat, of the prophecy, or of the very existence of magic. Having lost his parents to Riddle's attack, Potter lived for the next nine years with his Muggle relatives, in conditions of neglect bordering on abuse, until receiving his Hogwarts letter.
For each of the next seven years as a mere schoolboy Potter produced a series of achievements any of which would have been the highlight of virtually any adult wizard's lifetime. In many of these exploits he was accompanied by inseparable friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger (later Hermione Granger Weasley), now Head Auror and Chancellor of Mysteries, respectively... He later grew very close as well to yearmate Neville Longbottom (British Minister of Magic 2010-2013, European Minister 2016-2019)...
Potter will always be best remembered, though, for the events of his seventh year. In what is still considered the most miraculous outcome in the history of magical conflict he led a force made up of seventy two fellow students, some as young as fourteen, to victory over Lord Voldemort's dark army of dementors, dragons, giants, and hundreds of adult wizards. Potter finally destroyed Voldemort himself, a wizard whose power was thought to be unmatchable, in a one-on-one duel. In doing so he almost certainly rescued not only the wizarding world but the Muggle world from what would have been their most terrible Dark Age...
During one battle Potter's hip was shattered, and in the aftermath of the duel his left hand had to be amputated. A replacement hand was eventually grafted, but the hip could not be completely repaired and to the end of his life Potter walked with a discernible limp. More crucially, in the course of the conflict he lost two of his closest friends: Luna Lovegood of Ravenclaw and Ginevra Molly ("Ginny") Weasley, Ron's sister and (according to many friends) Harry's last school flame...
For almost the entirety of the twenty-first century Potter was the unofficial but universally acknowledged leader of the wizarding world. He was never Minister of Magic, but every British Minister since 2002 was elected either with Potter's implicit approval or at his explicit urging. In that year Arthur Weasley, father of Potter's closest friend and a near-father to Potter himself (he lived in "The Burrow," the Weasley home, from the time he left Hogwarts until his death), took the post, which he held for eight years. The most radical changes in wizarding culture of those years, overturning hundreds of years of fixed attitudes and practices towards Muggles, werewolves, goblins and house elves, were always supported and in many cases (it was thought) originated by Potter, or by his friend Hermione Granger Weasley. Every British Minister since then, from Neville Longbottom to current Minister Anthony Goldstein, has been a former member of Potter's legendary Army of the Forbidden Forest, and all have tread very carefully around their former commander. Potter has been credited, or blamed, with bringing down the Longbottom Ministry because of its moves at re-integrating Slytherins into wizarding society. The political dispute, Potter and Longbottom insisted, did not cause a breach in the pair's close friendship.
Potter's official title since 2004 was "General Ombudsman," a post created specifically for him and one which will most probably die with him. The position carried no formal authority, and when asked to describe its duties Potter would typically reply "I read the paper and look at my mail." A less diffident description, offered by former Minister Padma Patil, was that "Harry is the last resort for every witch or wizard who has a problem which the Ministry is either ignoring or contributing to." Not all political figures spoke so good-humoredly about Potter's unwritten and unaccountable power; some spoke of a tendency not only to correct injustices but to take up crusades and look for enemies. Even Patil conceded that Potter could sometimes make life difficult for her by "refus[ing to understand why some things couldn't be done his way, right now." In addition to these battles in the political arena Potter often aided personally in rescue or emergency operations, such as the one that took his life...
Potter never married and left no descendants, thus ending one of the longest-standing of wizarding bloodlines. He was, however, godfather to seven children: "the full Weasley," as he put it. All of those godchildren describe him as a man who cared deeply for them and inspired devotion in return, but some thought he found himself at times "out of his depth," in the words of his first godson Rupert Weasley, when it came to dealing with children or adolescents. According to Rupert, "Harry was accustomed to two kinds of relationships in his life: scornful neglect and intense, to-the-death comradeship. He found it difficult to learn other ways of connecting to people."... Potter was rumored to have been in relationships with a number of witches (including both Minister Patil and her sister Parvati), but the witches in question always either refused to answer questions or denied any romantic involvement. In later years Potter and former Minister Longbottom, another lifelong bachelor, were very often seen in one another's company...
At his request, Potter will be buried in the Weasley family plot, next to Ginevra Molly.
----------
As was wizarding custom, a "funeral book" was put together with photographs and memorabilia of the deceased, and statements and memories from those closest to him. Hermione was in charge of putting the funeral book together, and she placed on the cover some lines from the Old English poem, Beowulf, with only a few small emendations required:
Thus, man and boy, he bore himself with valour;
he was formidable in battle yet behaved with honour
and took no advantage; never turned upon
a comrade in violence or a friend in spite
and, warrior that he was, watched and controlled
his God-sent strength and his outstanding
natural powers. He had been poorly regarded
for a long time, was taken by his folk
for less than he was worth: and some great lords too
had never much esteemed him in their halls.
They firmly believed that he lacked force,
that the prince was a weakling; but presently
they found out otherwise, facing that arm;
all the old wrongs were payed for in full.
At the service, the eldest were given the privilege of being first to offer respects. Professor Bandhit, at 119, was still able to make his way to the coffin without assistance (as were Arthur and Molly right behind him). Bandhit gave the ancient Asian gesture of respect-- palms placed flat together, head lowered, fingers pointed towards the forehead-- then placed a hand on his late pupil's shoulder and spoke a few words in his native language. Those might be translated into English as:
"Just a short rest for you, I think. Then it's back to the air, old bird."
END
A/N: To everyone who read, bookmarked, reviewed: thank you very much. I appreciated every notice.
The passage from Beowulf is based on Seamus Heaney's translation of lines 2177-2189. Only a few lines had to be altered.