Emma Potter; Going to War

122: Together

Finally, the truth.  Lying with my face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where we had once thought we were learning the secrets of victory, I understood at last that we were not supposed to survive. 

Our job was to walk calmly into Death's welcoming arms. Along the way, we were to dispose of Voldemort's remaining links to life, so that when at last we flung ourselves across Voldemort's path, and did not raise a wand to defend ourselves, the end would be clean, and the job that ought to have been done in Godric's Hollow would be finished: Neither would live, neither could survive.

I felt my heart pounding fiercely in my chest. How strange that in my dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping me alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as I rose and walked through the castle for the last time, out into the grounds and into the forest?

Terror washed over me as I lay on the floor, with that funeral drum pounding inside me. Would it hurt to die? All those times I had thought that it was about to happen and escaped, I had never really thought of the thing itself: My will to live had always been so much stronger than my fear of death. Yet it did not occur to me now to try to escape, to outrun Voldemort. It was over, I knew it, and all that was left was the thing itself: dying.

As it should be. 

What good have you been to anyone alive?

 If I could only have died on that summer's night when he had left number four, Privet Drive, for the last time, when the noble phoenix-feather wand had saved me! If I could only have died like Hedwig, so quickly I would not have known it had happened! Or if I could have launched myself in front of a wand to save someone I loved. . . . I envied even my parents' deaths now. This cold-blooded walk to my own destruction would require a different kind of bravery.

 I felt my fingers trembling slightly and made an effort to control them, although no one could see me; the portraits on the walls were all empty. Slowly, very slowly, we sat up, and as we did so I felt more alive and more aware of my own living body than ever before. Why had I never appreciated what a miracle it was, brain and nerve and bounding heart? 

It would all be gone . . . or at least, I would be gone from it. My breath came slow and deep, and my mouth and throat were completely dry, but so were his eyes. Dumbledore's betrayal was almost nothing. Of course there had been a bigger plan; I had simply been too foolish to see it, we realized that now. We had never questioned our own assumption that Dumbledore wanted us alive. Now I saw that my life span had always been determined by how long it took to eliminate all the Horcruxes. 

Dumbledore had passed the job of destroying them to us, and obediently we had continued to chip away at the bonds tying not only Voldemort, but ourselves, to life! How neat, how elegant, not to waste any more lives, but to give the dangerous task to the boy and girl who had already been marked for slaughter, and whose death would not be a calamity, but another blow against Voldemort. 

 And Dumbledore had known that Harry and I would not duck out, that we would keep going to the end, even though it was out end, because he had taken trouble to get to know us, hadn't he? Dumbledore knew, as Voldemort knew, that Harry and I would not let anyone else die for us now that he had discovered it was in our power to stop it. 

The images of Fred, Lupin, and Tonks lying dead in the Great Hall forced their way back into my mind's eye, and for a moment I could hardly breathe: Death was impatient. . . . But Dumbledore had overestimated us. We had failed: The snake survived. One Horcrux remained to bind Voldemort to the earth, even after Harry and I had been killed. True, that would mean an easier job for somebody. I wondered who would do it. . . . Zoe, Ron and Hermione would know what needed to be done, of course. . . .