Kismet: Destiny; fate.

May 2, 1998

The sunset cast a fiery light once more over the grounds. Harry stopped where he was, halfway between the lake and the castle, feeling the light on his face, the breeze in his hair. Spots of light reflecting off the water danced blindingly in his eyes, and he could smell smoke in the air. If he squinted, seeing everything in that burnished glow, it was like he was back in that moment of dawn. The déjà vu swelled up suddenly, feeling like an undertow trapping him back in that second, and he snapped his eyes open lest he be stuck there forever.

He took a deep breath and moved on, heading back for the half-crumbled front steps. All the casualties had been collected, but Harry still saw bodies among the heaps of rubble. His breath came unevenly.

"Thought you were passed out upstairs."

The voice made Harry jump because he'd been walking with his eyes nearly closed and hadn't seen the figure huddled on the bottom step. Neville looked up at him, pale and much younger-looking than he had been that morning. The Sword of Gryffindor glittered beside him. Harry shrugged at him.

"Something I had to do."

"There always is."

Harry thought there might have been bitterness in Neville's voice. He looked down at the ground, hands in his pockets. He felt like he should apologize, but he could feel the place where the killing curse had hit aching with each breath and thought that should be enough. Or maybe that was exactly what Neville was bitter about.

"I'm sorry," Harry said, and it wasn't exactly an apology so much as a fact.

He dropped heavily to the step beside Neville.

"You fixed the grave," Neville said, eyes wandering across the grounds in the direction Harry had come from. "I saw it before the battle started, Dumbledore's grave. It was cracked. It's not anymore."

Harry nodded. He didn't mention that he'd replaced the elder wand, nor that he'd been sick after he'd fixed the marble. He could feel the ice cold softness of the hands he'd slipped the wand into and felt the urge to be sick again, but there was nothing left to come up.

"Where were you all this year?" Neville asked, still gazing into the distance.

"Can't tell you," Harry said tiredly.

"Figured," Neville muttered, and there was definitely bitterness there.

Harry thought about protesting, about saying it wasn't about trust or Dumbledore's orders or keeping secrets. It was that he really didn't know where he'd been or what he'd been doing. It was that he was too exhausted to relive it all right now, and Neville wouldn't want to hear it anyway. But he couldn't even muster up the energy for that.

"Did you know you were giving yourself up when you saw me?" Neville asked. Harry just nodded. "Figured." There was silence, then, "If you were just going to hand yourself over anyway, why did you wait until half of us were dead?" The words rushed out into a choked-off sob, but the look Neville had turned on him was sharp and accusing. Harry could see the ghosts of all the people Neville had risked his neck to protect all year only to see their bodies pile up in the Great Hall.

"I didn't know I had to give myself up," Harry tried to explain, choking himself on the defense he didn't believe. "I didn't know anything," he added, and his own ghosts rose up around him.

Neville didn't say anything for a long time. But then – "It wasn't your fault."

"Do you really believe that?" Harry asked, rocking forward to hug his knees.

"I guess I do," Neville sighed after a moment. "We put too much on your shoulders. I did. When it got really terrible, and it seemed like there was nothing we could do, I'd just tell myself everything would be okay in the end because you'd save us. It wasn't fair, and it's not your fault you couldn't save us all. It was just… fate."

"No."

Neville looked around at the vehemence that had suddenly suffused Harry's previously lethargic voice. "No what? Harry, I was there. If I couldn't, if McGonagall couldn't, if Kingsley and Lupin and everyone else couldn't stop all of that, how could you have?"

But Harry kept shaking his head. "No, it wasn't fate," he said. He was thinking of the prophecy, of how he'd come to realize that it was not his destiny that drove him forward to finish this fight, and what had happened in the Great Hall was not a fulfillment of his fate.

"Fate's a copout. Nothing ever happens because it's meant to. People just say that because it makes them feel better, entitled to the good things and blameless for the bad. But those kids – people – weren't born to die. Their lives were leading somewhere else. Good or bad, they weren't meant to be wasted here. They chose to stay because they were brave or martyrs or just wanted this to end, I don't know. They're dead because of choices they made and choices the rest of us made, but it's an insult to say this was all they were ever headed towards."

Neville just stared at him, at the sudden ferocity that was melting out of him as quickly as it had come.

"Yeah," he said eventually. "They weren't meant to end here."

And somehow, it seemed, that was enough to dissolve the bitterness. They sat side by side and watched the sun set over the battlefield, knowing they were mourning the same things.

A/N: Um… hi. Not quite fall break yet, but I've finally come to a strange lull in my workload, and I thought I'd be productive. This isn't the 2012 word of the day for May 2, it's the 2000 one, but this year's word have produced a shallow angle on this rather important date. Any other day I would have loved to use it, but not for May 2.

I was also partially inspired to write this by 'Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness'. It's a well-written story, so full of raw emotion it will reduce even the strongest to a blubbering heap, and powerful enough to your writing ego down a notch because it's so well-constructed, but it's… not realistic. I take issue with the way it portrays Hogwarts and Neville in that time, as well as how Harry comes off in it, but I won't bore you with the long and impassioned argument I bored my friends with. I mean, if you're interested, I could send it to you (it turned into a 4,000 + word email to my friend), but you probably aren't. Just thought I'd sort of let you know where the motivation for this came from.

You know, I sometimes wonder if half the word count for this story is me blogging in my A/N's, mostly about why I suck at updating. Sorry about that. I'll try to stop. Thanks for reading if you stuck with me this long! Fall Break's a couple weeks away and I'll be swamped until then, but maybe I'll get a couple more chapters out after that. Reviews are GREATLY appreciated! Please? If I could get 1,000 before the end of the year, that would be amazing, you know, in case the whole 2012 thing is real…. Blogging again, sorry :/