Disclaimer: As always, JK owns all...I merely speculate on the possibilties.
My thanks to everyone reading and most especially who have taken the time to leave a comment. I hope I manage to do the end justice. It has had about 183 different versions, though the events have always been the same.
Here is the first part of two.
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Epilogue Part One
A Significant Death
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William Tisker's body was never found. His heartbroken mother was still searching for him when she died in 1968.
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Lady Apollonia Malfoy died in suspicious circumstances after openly opposing her brother's involvement with the Death Eaters.
She was found dead in 1952, aged twenty five, in the grounds of the Malfoy family estate, which she had solely inherited after her widowed mother excluded Abraxas from her will, for his affiliation with the Dark Arts.
She was laid to rest in the grounds. Her ghost is said to wander the house at night, searching for her twin brother.
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Lucy Louisa Rosier became Mrs Malfoy when she finally married Abraxas in 1953, a year after he took over the Malfoy estate. Their only child, a boy, Lucius, was born two years later.
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Evan Rosier pledged his alliegance to the Dark Arts, and it is rumoured widely that he remained Tom Riddle's faithful acolyte until his death upon resisting arrest by Auror Alastor Moody, in 1982.
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Elodie Prince was also killed in battle fighting for the resistance that wiped out the remainder of Grindelwald's mob. Grindelwald himself was defeated by none other than Albus Dumbledore, in 1945. Elodie was survived by her younger sister, Eileen, who campaigned vehemently as her sister did, for Muggle Protection.
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Amy Benson's body was washed up on a beach in Devonshire in October,1949. She had been battered and raped. Nobody knew exactly what had caused her death and nobody was ever brought to trial. The case remains unsolved to this day.
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Myrtle Miles survived just six weeks after our story ends, killed in a girls bathroom by a monster unleashed when a third year boy allegedly opened Salazar Slytherin's legendary Chamber Of Secrets. Rubeus Hagrid was named as the culprit, and expelled.
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Tom Marvolo Riddle was made Head Boy of Hogwarts in 1944. He achieved the top grade in every examination he took, but did not go on to join the Ministry for Magic, as his Head Of House, Horace Slughorn, had predicted.
He went to work in Borgin and Burkes, a notorious Dark Artefact shop in Knockturn Alley. He spent three years at the shop, and then disappeared, in 1948, aged 21, after a call on an elderly client, who was later found dead.
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Aster Ames died suddenly in December, 1943, three months after his missing daughter came of age. She inherited all the Ames property, including the farm.
Some days after Aster's death, a scruffy raven, bearing a scroll, flew across Muggle London, and began to tap at the attic window of the young maid's quarters at the East Vauxhall Road Bakery………………waking her with a start from a dream about a tall boy, and a black-haired child that kept running and running through a dark forest... and she couldn't catch up, no matter how fast she ran...
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Joliens, France
31st December, 1950.
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The late December night was lit by a clear moon, not quite full, but large enough to leave long shadows along the gravel paths and the dark trees surrounding the old Ames farm. The air was freezing, the temperature falling for the first time in a hundred years below minus five, though there seemed to be no scientific explanation for the sudden drop in temperature.
If there had been a casual, or even not so casual observer, they would have seen a speck of black, almost invisible to the eye against the dark sky, soar down further and further until it took on the distinct shape of a huge, black bird.
There was nothing at all to disturb this bird's graceful descent to the assortment of tumbledown buildings that stood some three hundred yards downhill from a large, mean looking house that stood above a cove, behind a copse of thick yew trees. Down in the cove ,the sea stood still almost as if it too, could have frozen, and even the haunting cries of the crowing sea birds were silenced, as the creatures fled from the cold.
The huge, black bird circled once, twice, over the largest of the outbuildings, before quite suddenly taking a sharp downward dive. It swooped through a rough hole in the roof of the largest outbuilding, and dropped the package it clutched in its long, black talons into the outstretched hand of a woman wearing a tattered and dirty blue velvet cloak. The owner of the farm, who lived there quite alone.
The good ladies in the village whispered about the odd young woman who had returned to the farm when the dark old man who had previously owned it had died in the middle of the Second World War, but none of them would ever venture up to the farm.There was something about it, they would say. Something about it that somehow, made you want to stay away.
In the barn, her breath coming out in white clouds in the icy air, the young woman petted the raven affectionately, yet briefly, on the side of it's enormous beak, before turning her attention back to the injured unicorn that lay on the clean straw, its head in the crook of her arm in utter trust of its quiet, dark-haired owner. She opened the package, it contents revealed to be a small, silver jar. Unscrewing the cap, she applied some to the leg wound of the creature, before rising to her feet.
The unicorn whinnied softly, and she patted its luminescent white muzzle with love.
"Goodnight,"she whispered. "I'll see you at sunrise."
Tweny-four year old Laura Ames drew the latch across the stable door and locked it, heading back up the hill to the house in the darkness of that cold night.
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Seven years had passed since the raven had delivered the letter, seven years since Laura had packed up her scant personal belongings in the night, while the widowed owner of the Muggle bakery and her sons slept, and headed home at last.
Her hair was longer, wilder and even more unkempt, and her grey eyes larger and sadder than they used to be, though dry from tears for many years now : Laura lived alone, separate from the world, on her own side...the safe side, or so she thought.
She had left Hogwarts, and come of age whilst working at the only place she could think of that might let her have bed and board.
The woman at the East Vauxhall Road Bakery was grateful for Laura's help...the girl had, she used to say, an almost magical knack of being able to quieten the boys while she minded the shop, and she could get the place clean quicker than anyone she knew. For Laura's part, the bakery owner had the quality of never questioning anything that anyone did, and Laura found this restful; her ever-looser clothing not being commented on as long as the boys were happy and the floor was spick and span. And it always was.
As Laura walked, she pulled her worn cloak tighter around narrow shoulders against the biting wind that tugged at the gorse on the edge of the cliff top and whipped at the loose strands of her hair. In her pocket bristled another piece of post, a letter yet to be replied to, brought some days ago, by a bird she recognized as one of the owls from her old school, Hogwarts. The letter was from the new Headmaster, one Albus Dumbledore, who Laura recalled as the Transfiguration master and Head of Gryffindor House. The letter enquired if she would mind if he called at Ames Farm for an informal chat at her convenience. Laura did not know what Professor Dumbledore might want with an old student.Perhaps it was to reprimand her about her abrupt departure from his school, but she found it odd that he would wait so many years, and in any case, Dumbledore had always seemed so nice...despite all the nasty things that Tom used to say...
Tom.
Laura's memory swam back in time as she trudged up the muddy path to the house, her boots making a dull thud on the freezing ground.
She remembered another New Year's Eve,a New Years Eve so many years ago, when there had been kisses and forbidden embraces in the darkness of deserted school halls, and more..in the quiet of a dormitory where she should never have been, and of the boy with the black hair and the fathomless eyes who was born on the darkest day of the year. The boy who had held her, and told her she'd always be his, at any price. Tom Riddle.
Laura wondered what had become of the tall, beautiful boy she once loved, once kissed and laughed with in summer along this very path, down in the cove.
For a moment, she paused, and looked out to sea like they once had done together, one enchanted evening, and she imagined what it might have been like if she had accepted his offer. They might have been together, he would have been waiting for her in the warm living room, when she returned, she would kiss him and tell him she loved him and he would tell her back. She would be holding a child, maybe expecting another. They would be married...
Laura Ames had never married. She was alone in the world. So alone, she believed, that she did not even look up, as she approached the house and drew her wand to unlock the back door, crossed the threshold, and entered the high ceilinged kitchen.
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If Laura had looked, on that dark night, she might have noticed the flickering glow of a fire that she had not lit, glowing around the sides of the thick, velvet drapes not drawn by her.
As it was, she did not, and Laura had shut and locked the kitchen door behind her long before she realised that she was not alone.
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In the once dusty, dilapidated kitchen, the mantel had been cleaned, and the tarnished photograph frames that once faced the wall had been replaced and now looked out into the room, three brave brothers, a young woman in a wedding dress on the arm of a much younger Aster Ames, a baby girl standing shakily alongside a golden baby unicorn. Laura stepped past them, her long, shabby blue cloak making a small noise as it trailed damp on the mended quarry tiles.
The lounge door was ajar. She could just make out faint static from a radio, but it was not tuned to any station she had ever heard of.
The fire in the room had indeed been lit, and burned low, suggesting that whoever had lit it... had been waiting for some time.
Waiting for her.
It was all Laura could do to summon up Gryffindor courage as she raised her voice at last.
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"Who's there? What do you want?" she called out sharply, drawing an old light wood wand from inside her sleeve.
And suddenly, a tall figure stepped out of the shadows and turned to face her.
A sharp-taloned hand closed around Laura's heart, and her blood turned as cold as the air across the black sea outside.
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The man that stood before her was taller than the boy she remembered. He wore all-black; robes and a long cloak over his slim shoulders. His skin was paler too, the colour, almost the texture, of marble.
His hair was a stark contrast to his pallor. Once wavy and short, it was now long and tied in a single glossy black ponytail that hung over one shoulder.
He smiled, the movement of flesh only, a strained and unreal thing; it did not reach his empty eyes. And when he spoke, his voice was cold. He stepped forward, and Laura recoiled instinctively as he reached out a freezing, long-fingered hand.
"Hello, Laura." he said. " Can it really have been seven years?"
Her wand clattered to the floor.
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Down in the village, the church clock began to strike twelve.
And despite the flash of green light that filled the windows up at the farm, the faint sound of the Muggle radio station continued, playing Auld Lang Syne, because it was a New Year.
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Laura Ames body was found by the French Auror squad. It was, they said, a terrible tragedy. A sign of the times.
All the villagers gossiped with a macabre relish about the suicide of the odd, lonely young woman who lived on the old farm on the cliff top.
No relatives came forward. Indeed, appeared that Miss Ames had been entirely alone in the world. No note nor will was found, strange for a suicide, they said, but thought no more of it, with the lack of other evidence, and the fact that the killing curse was cast by her own wand.
Her personal possessions and estate were sold at auction to a wealthy, unnamed buyer in Wiltshire, England.
Rather curiously, the Ravenclaw comb had disappeared.
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Epilogue Two