I'm Coming For You, Draco Malfoy!

Epilogue: Graduation Day

The end of our final year at Hogwarts approached fast in a frenzy of revision and related anxiety. But, more blissfully than anything, there were no more incidents.

As I sat in the Great Hall at Hogwarts at the end of my final theory paper on Ancient Runes with Theo and then Harry sitting at the desks behind me, I couldn't help looking up at the great ceiling. My gaze lost focus as I stared into the endless sky above us. All through exam week, it was enchanted to a soft and cloudless spring blue that emitted an atmosphere of calm and quiet. Occasionally, a bird would flit silently across the vast expanse, dipping and swerving on an unfelt breeze. I was going to miss this despite the associations of a tormented past. As I looked around at the high stained-glass windows and the wall-sconces, the great fireplace and the staff dais, the stone columns and the ribbed wooden vaults of the ceiling which disappeared into nothingness, there was the impression that everything was as it had always been. Sometimes it felt as if nothing had changed.

However, if one looked closely and for those who sought them, the wounds of the war were there. We could not escape them; a scorched area of stone, a spell-damaged column, a broken sculpture. Sometimes I imagined I saw the seared shadow of my aunt moving across the stonework but it was a trick of the shadows and the candlelight. And with those scars came the hint of change or difference and you could see that everything had shifted subtly on its axis.

The huge Gothic panel window that Severus had broken just before the battle had been replaced. The same frame had been repaired with strong stone mullions still reached to the heavens but within the frame there was a stained-glass requiem captured in colour for the fallen staff and students of Hogwarts whose strength had moved heaven and earth for the safety of our future. It was easy to lose oneself in that window. To feel the losses, to seek and find the struggle of that I'd been a part of, of that which had made me weak by those significant matters of time and fate. But it was also in that window that I saw the change I'd sought in Azkaban and I understood that I had a new path now. As the sunlight broke through that huge window in prisms of bright colours, I saw a future that was equally strong of heart and strong in will, only made possible by the struggles of the past. A Muggle poet once wrote, 'that which we are, we are—one equal temper of heroic hearts'. The war had shown me that. Harry had shown me that. The survivors had shown me that too. My friends had shown me that. And above all, I understood, that my strength meant I would, as the same poet said, not yield. There may be times when I falter but I would not give up as I strived to be a better person.

Yes, everything was different now.

After we'd sat our N.E.W.T.s, life consisted of little more than inter-house gatherings under one of the giant oak trees in the grounds of the school and swimming in the Black Lake; pink gin and lazy picnics; secret parties in the Room of Requirement; helping the Snakelets revise for their end of year tests; and glorious sex with Harry. This was what Hogwarts should always have been like for all of us (apart from the sex with Harry—that was for me alone). And our behaviour certainly influenced the lower years too. The inter-house rivalry diminished entirely to no more than fever-pitch excitement during Quidditch matches. I'm not saying there weren't disagreements or people who didn't get on but, on the most part, it was a harmonious school full of laughter. And that was substantially different to where it had been eighteen-months earlier under Severus's headship and with the threat of Voldemort looming over our heads.

There were days when Harry disappeared off to the Ministry—at least I assumed it was the Ministry, sometimes he didn't say. There were days when Blaise had to complete a photography shoot. There were days when Blaise and Harry had to disappear off together to complete a photography shoot together. And Blaise always let me have a copy of my favourite image, I was building quite an album. On those days, Pansy and I would moan to each other about our missing boyfriends and indulge in too much pink gin while she re-dyed my hair.