Disclaimer: As I am a simple person who does not own tons and tons of money, I must admit to being a plain American girl, and not JK Rowling. Therefore, I do not own Harry Potter and the connected involved characters. Oh, well...

My god. I think that this is my most depressing to-date. Poor Harry...


Peace

It was over.

A thin young man, no older than eighteen at the most, fell back against a cracked rock, brushing wisps of black hair out of his eyes.

As he shifted, the fading light of the setting sun managed to catch the shadows in his young-old face, reflecting scars and drawing clear lines between white skin and black soot.

Green eyes, eyes that had once been so strong, so full of life, stared emptily out at the destroyed field. In his right hand, a wand; in his left hand, his twisted and bent glasses.

A gust of air caught the young man's unruly hair, and ruffled it gently, dancing across the empty-yet-full field. Blades of solitary and lonely grass twitched. Clothing that hung onto fallen bodies shifted. Hair that clung to the corpses they belonged to lifted into the air briefly, before resettling on the ground.

"Peace…" the young man whispered. Indeed, as one's eyes wandered from the cracked rock at which he sat, to the ruins of a castle a few short feet away, one could feel the peace. Quiet. Nothingness.

"It is… peace…" His voice was almost questioning as he gazed blankly at what had once been a place full of wildness, full of life.

There was a young woman, her vibrant pink hair at odds with the paleness of her face and the starkness of her spilled blood.

There was another, barely more than a girl, her fiery locks splayed out like a wave of lava as her body shielded the body of another.

There was a young man, his face forever a mask of torment, his forehead forever wrinkled with constant thoughts of new strategy.

There was a boy, his new clean uniform dirtied with the brown-rust-red color of dried blood, his young blue eyes forever stopped in their tracks – he was too young to die, the living man thinks.

And there… there is a scorch mark, no body, no blood. Only a scorch mark to show the place where the last of four brothers once stood. One traitor, one murdered, one stolen away, and now…

Dead. A sacrifice, the living one thinks bitterly. It is stunning, the power of a willingly given life; the power of the magic of a lost, lonely man.

"Peace…" the word is swept away by the breeze, but there is no answer. Bitterness fills the green eyes that once had so many different ways of shining.

The living man stands, pushing his hair out of his face. He jams the broken spectacles on his face.

A twisted expression, not-quite-smile, not-quite-frown, warps the man's face. He stares through the broken lenses, and a shaky laugh that distinctly resembles a sob falls from his lips.

"So this is peace…" he says it with a bitter amusement, speaking to someone who is not there.

"If this is peace," he whispers, "Then I would prefer the war."

But there is nobody left to answer him, and there never will be.

Never again.

FIN