Nothing is mine.

Time for a short trip to Belgium.

The Smallest Hand

A low sun sank toward the horizon, bleeding red and yellow and orange across the shreds of cloud drifting through the sky; it dipped toward the endless ripple of sapphire waves rolling over the coiled shadow of Marzanna and breaking in soft crashes of white foam upon the beach.

'The wards are gone,' Daphne murmured. 'The Walküren will strike at the Duforts, to ensure they do not come to the aid of the British in Belgium.'

Ginny. She started all of this again for me. The storm stirred, no more than a murmur of yearning tugging at Harry's heart. Taking so many dreams away wherever she went.

'You can take your group there,' Astoria chimed in. 'What do you call yourselves?'

'We don't have a name,' Harry replied. 'It doesn't matter.'

'But it's part of the fun.' She snickered. 'You should pick something fun and ridiculous.'

'I think I'd rather go to Belgium.' Harry tore his eyes away from the setting sun and glanced back up the beach.

Charlie and the Carrow twins waited together on the white sand among Bella's crumbling sandcastles and butterfly sketches.

'Which part of Belgium?'

'Go right for the throat, Mithras,' Astoria said. 'Novimagus is where Ginevra Weasley and her aurors are. Everyone else has fled and the entire small island in the river is hidden from the muggles, so you're free to do anything you want.'

'Don't destroy the whole place like Azkaban.' Daphne folded her arms. 'It would be a waste.'

'I've never been...'

Astoria pulled out an ice cream stick and her wand. 'Portus.' She sniggered and handed it across. 'The phrase is lemon sorbet. Daph's favourite.'

A quiet sigh escaped Daphne.

'Time to go then.' Harry gestured at Charlie and the Carrows. 'Come on.'

'Let's go.' Charlie led the Carrows down the beach as Daphne and Astoria disapparated with a loud crack.

Harry passed the ice cream stick to Charlie. 'If you take us there and sort out the wards, I'll do the rest.'

Hestia and Flora exchanged a short look.

'What about us?' Hestia asked.

'Help Charlie with the wards. It's Ginevra Weasley and her aurors we're after.'

'That bitch,' Flora hissed. 'Amelia Bones's rabid dog.'

Hestia's pale green eyes flashed.

'They will all die fighting for the same thing as us, if we die,' Harry murmured. 'And their sacrifice will help us create a world where everyone has a chance to dream. Imagine its coming dawn, like liquid gold spilling across a gentle, good, green world, giving just one wish for everyone, making it just perfect enough. Something so beautiful that every moment of hurt we've endured will feel worth it.'

'And I can go home,' Charlie whispered.

'We can live free,' Flora muttered.

Hestia grabbed her sister's hand and clutched it tight. 'Away from fucking Britain.'

You will go home, Charlie. Harry smothered a twist of fierce raw guilt. I'm going to take away all the dreams I once saved after what Ginny's done, but Molly Weasley's son, I'll give back. Just one dream is perfect enough.

Marzanna rose from beneath the sea, stalking forward up the beach to lay her head in the sand at Harry's feet; the poisonous yellow magic in her eyes shone bright as flickering candle flames.

He rested one foot on her neck and slipped his wand from his sleeve. 'Ready, Charlie?'

'Ready.'

The white sands, rippling blue sea and sunset whirled away in a blur of colour and with a series of deafening cracks, a low mutter, and a groan, they dropped onto a crumbling wooden pier at the bank of a vast, broad river.

Marzanna crunched through the beams and splashed into the water, thrashing free from the current and leaping aloft from the shallows.

'Ward the whole island.' Harry pointed his wand at the low town sitting upon the long mound rising from the waters. 'Set up the wards to prevent their escape, then make your way across after I break their wards.'

'What about Ginevra Weasley?' Flora demanded.

'She'll be busy.' He apparated atop Marzanna, grabbing one of the long dark spines upon her back as she circled low over the island.

Where are you?

Cold, empty buildings of red brick and marble sat atop the long island, spreading from the broad square at the centre along the roads to the severed bridge ends at the riverbanks. The wind rushed through Harry's hair and stung his bare fingers, pressing the amber mask against his cheeks as he scanned the town.

I suppose you'll come out when I come in.

Harry wrenched the world back past him, crushing the wards flat beneath his magic and stepping out at the centre of the square.

A series of cracks rang out.

Ginny pointed her wand at his heart from before a loose semi-circle of red-jacketed, reflective-visored aurors. 'You're Mithras.' The bronze sun badge gleamed on her lapel as she strode forward across the worn marble and stared at him with fierce brown eyes. 'I can't tell if it's you beneath all that.'

A shimmer of wards fell across the island and the aurors discarded their reflective masks one by one.

Cormac McLaggen, Seamus Finnigan, Lee Jordan, Leanne Asham, Terry Boot, Eloise Midgen, Su Li, and Lavender Brown.

'It doesn't matter who I am, only what I do.' Harry spun his wand in his fingers. 'If there are any among you who aren't fighting for hope of a better magical world, you should throw down your wands.' A bitter little smile curved the corner of his mouth. 'No mercy, remember?'

Ginny's eyes narrowed. 'If it is you, Charlie, I'm still going to kill you. You've betrayed everything our family bled for!'

Spells flashed from the wands of her aurors. Harry swatted them back, his arm a blur, the streaks of blue and orange and yellow bursting against the marble, leaving smoking craters. He slipped his own spells in, shattering Su Li's shield and smashing her skull like an egg.

The marble columns shivered beneath Ginny's wand, uncurling into crude serpents and slithering toward him, their stone scales scraping across the square.

A shadow passed across the aurors.

'Holy fuck,' Cormac McLaggen yelled. 'Watch out above!'

Marzanna smashed the marble serpents into the wall, shattering them like glass and scattering the pieces in a cloud of white dust.

'Kill the dragon first,' Ginny snapped, stepping toward Harry and firing a stream of glimmering green spells. 'Don't hold back, my brother might have warded the dead scale layer.'

A storm of spells hailed Marzanna, bursting on her black scales like drops of water against a window pane, but the marble beneath her sprouted long spikes, punching through her belly and neck, tearing through her wings. Conjured iron spears hissed across the square, bristling through the sickly yellow magic wreathing Marzanna like rose thorns and thick, dark red dragon blood trickled down, dripping onto the pale marble and pooling in the cracks and dips.

Harry deflected Ginny's spells away, sending them flashing back at her aurors. They burst through Cormac McLaggen and hurled him down the road, melting foot-deep holes into the ground and walls around his smoking corpse.

'I knew it was you, Charlie.' Ginny said. 'You might have gotten good enough at duelling to have a chance of beating me now, but you're out of dragons and there are more of us.'

Her aurors turned their wands back on Harry.

Marzanna dragged herself forward, snapping the marble spikes off with a sharp crack and shaking them loose, wreathed in an eerie flickering yellow glow as the gaping holes in her black-scaled throat and belly crept closer and her dark wings knitted themselves back together like torn silk.

'What the fuck?' Lavender Brown shrieked. 'How—'

Marzanna lunged, biting her in half with a brutal crunch and whirled, sweeping her spear-impaled tail through the line of aurors. Terry Boot swung from a cluster of the metal poles sticking from her tail, screaming and thrashing as she pounced on the fleeing aurors one by one, ripping them apart with her wingclaws and fangs.

Harry forced his magic into the air and ripped the iron poles free, sweeping them and a moaning, gasping Terry Boot into the bleeding heap of corpses. Marzanna spread her wings over the top of them, thrusting one wingclaw through Terry Boot's belly and crushing the twitching Eloise Midgen in her claws.

'I'm not your brother,' Harry said. 'He's here, but he's not me.'

Ginny watched crimson pour through the cracks in the marble past her boots, a furious glare on her face. 'We made Britain strong again and neither you nor Grindelwald will destroy what we suffered to rebuild. We are the pinnacle of the magical world.' She drew herself up. 'The sun will never set.'

Oh yes it will, Ginny. A bitter laugh bubbled up, bursting from Harry's lips. And then it will rise again. Greater and more beautiful than before. Just not for me.

He spun the marble square back past him, snatching the back of her tight red jacket, stepping onto Marzanna's back, and wrenching twice at the world. Harry shoved Ginny into the dirt and jumped down off Marzanna into waist high brown heather.

She rolled to her feet and twisted around, unleashing a trio of green spells, but he swatted them back with a flick of his wrist. They streaked out across the Black Lake and faded away before the castle silhouetted before the setting red sun.

'Hogwarts.' Ginny froze. 'How did you get through the wards?' She jabbed her wand at him. 'Accio.'

Harry shook his head. 'This mask is made from my magic and the last piece of a willow tree; you can't summon it so easily.'

'You are British,' she hissed. 'Amelia or Susan gave you a way through the wards, so you're one of us!'

You all never treated me like I was one of you. You put me on a pedestal, tore me down to nothing, then demanded I die for your dreams despite it. Harry stared into her blazing brown eyes, waiting for the cold fury to close its fist about his heart, but his thoughts brimmed with memories of the thin freckled girl sticking her elbow in the butter dish, and lying still and pale upon the stone floor of the Chamber of Secrets. But we were all wrong. We're all the same. Just chasing dreams until it destroys us.

'No more secrets,' he whispered beneath his breath.

'What?' Ginny demanded. 'What did you say?'

'You've known me by many names.' Harry summoned the iron ring of Lemon Sorbet from his pocket onto his open left palm. 'In America, I led you to find poor little Roxie and to destroy New Amsterdam.'

'Tom Gaunt.' She raised her wand. 'Trai—'

'And before that, you knew me as a colour,' Harry said, summoning Violette's ring. 'On Sint Maarten, with all those bloody trolls you kept throwing at me.'

'You were Neville's French contact. He snuck you in to be an Unspeakable, I knew that name and story were bullshit. Bill said the Gaunts have been dead for decades.' Raw bitter rage burnt in her brown eyes. 'And that means you're Henri Delacour. The one that French whore fucked off with barely a year after—'

A flash of icy fury flooded Harry's veins. 'Shut up.'

Ginny growled and slashed her wand, conjuring a stream of thick, dark bats around her in a swirling demi-sphere, firing rupturing and piercing hexes through them, transfiguring them into bright bronze knives and banishing them up the slope.

She learnt it all from us, didn't she, Tom? And she used it to take so many dreams away. Just like we did. The storm seized Harry's heart, swept it away into a swirling searing scream of razor-sharp need. And now it hurts. Because we took our own dream away too.

Ginny's spells shattered against a single spark of golden light, the bronze knives and fluttering bats unravelled into nothing like morning mist before the bright dawn, and the tip of her wand crumbled away.

She stared at the gleaming silver hair dangling from the end, wide-eyed and trembling.

'You interrupted me,' Harry murmured, dropping the rings back into his pocket.

Ginny's lip curled and she opened her mouth.

Harry snapped it shut with a flick of his wand. 'Before you knew me as Mithras, Violette, or Lemon Sorbet or any other stupid names, you knew me by my own name.' He lifted the amber mask from his face, staring down into the flickering golden motes of magic within. 'And when Tom turned all your dreams to dust down in the Chamber of Secrets, when he swallowed you up, I came to save you.'

'No.'

'No?'

'No, I told you that in America. You're lying. That face is just good transfiguration. Harry died. He gave his life for Britain. For us.'

'I died for Fleur,' he murmured. 'I had already lost, but I couldn't let her die, so I died for her. But I didn't; I was anchored, like Tom and his diary. And Tom, Tom didn't believe in dreams anymore, they were just dust, dandelion seeds drifting—'

'Out to sea on a cold wind,' Ginny whispered, the colour draining from her cheeks. 'Oh…'

A small sad smile crept across Harry's face. 'I think I swallowed him up just how he tried to swallow up you. He didn't believe in dreams, but deep down he still wished he did, so we dreamt the same dream together, and when we came back, we were me. We had everything we had ever wished for. Fleur. Family. Our beautiful baby girl. It was perfect enough. And then…'

'Me.' She lowered the stub of her wand to her side and the glowing strand of silver unicorn hair slipped out, floating down into the dirt. 'The Resplendent Sun.'

'The sun never sets. No mercy to anyone in the way of your dream. And then we needed a perfect miracle to save any of it.' Harry reached out and touched the tip of his wand to her chest, clawing up the last of that cold hate. 'But perfect wishes like that, they don't come true... Cor exaruit.'

Little black veins crept up Ginny's face. 'I would do it all again.' She shoved his wand away from her. 'You showed me what was needed. I just didn't know it was you in our way.'

'Of course you would. Because wishes are made. And we all do whatever it takes to have them.' Harry swept her legs out from under her with a flick of his wand and sat down beside her in the cold damp heather. 'But there are no dreams left now for either of us, Ginny, so let's watch the sunset together, shall we?'

Ginny wrapped her arms around her knees and pulled them up to her chest, staring out past the castle's dark silhouette at the vivid wash of red and pink and orange flooding across the sky. 'Nearly all the hands on the family clock have stopped now. I kept telling mum that it wasn't all for nothing, that we'd made Britain great again, even after Bill and Percy, but you're going to tear it all down, aren't you?' All the fire faded from her brown eyes as she watched the last sliver of the sun sink behind Hogwarts and the horizon. 'It was all for nothing in the end.'

'No, you were right,' Harry whispered. 'Nothing lasts forever. Not sunsets. Not wishes. Not dreams. And when all the light is gone, it hurts. But when the sun rises again, it will be on a world perfect enough that all this stops. And it will all have been worth it.'

'I'm sorry, Harry.' Ginny tugged the bronze sun off her jacket and cupped it in her hands; thick black veins snaked across her face, writhing beneath her skin as her breathing turned to short fast gasps. 'I'd do it all again just the same… but if I'd known, it was you… I'd have been sorry to do it all to you.'

'I know.'

She slumped back into the heather, her shallow breathing fading away into one last soft sigh.

Harry reached across and brushed her black-veined eyes closed. 'I'm sorry too, Ginny.'

AN: And we're all out of Weasleys... Follow the linktree to find us on Discord for more chapters, all my many other pieces of writing, my original stuff, and how to support me to make sure there's more!

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