𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞 | 𝐡. 𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫

𝟏𝟔𝟏 - 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠

WARNING: strong themes of death and descriptions of (attempted) suicide, descriptions of unliving thoughts and everything along those lines, graphic descriptions of violence and injury, please take caution proceeding.

AN: so this is the ultimate end to the "canon" side of things, from here on out we're following my imagination of what would happen with the story I've been leading, all the foreshadowing, all the suggestions, all the teasers have finally led to this. I hope you have enjoyed it, it took literal months of re-writes and double-checking that it was following the same tale.

I was inspired by a few things, but ultimately it was female rage, as a woman I always was told to keep mine in check, to always turn the other cheek and always consider the other person before myself, and I usually do or I try to at least, but sometimes, I say fuck that.

This is Ophelia's fuck that moment.

Songs I listened to while writing this.

Christmas Kids, Roar. Cold Little Heart, Michael Kiwanuka. Enter Sandman, Metallica. Rolling in the Deep, Adele. Skyfall, Adele. Hayloft II, Mother Mother. WHERE ARE THEY NOW???, emily jeffri. help_urself, Ezekiel. Everlong, Foo Fighters. Brutus (Instrumental), the Buttress, Girl with one Eye, Florence and the Machine.

The quote that inspired this chapter.

"I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine, the rage the likes of which you would not believe, if I cannot satisfy the one I will indulge the other." -- Frankenstein's Monster (Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film adaptation of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley).

With that said, please enjoy the fruits of my labour.

Love you all.

Finally, the truth.

Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.

His job was to walk calmly into Death's welcoming arms. Death disguised as the one person he loved the most in the world.

He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as he rose and walked through the castle for the last time, to find her?

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

This cold-blooded walk to his own destruction would require a different kind of bravery. He felt his fingers trembling slightly and made an effort to control them, although no one could see him; the portraits on the walls were all empty.

Slowly, very slowly, he sat up, and as he did so he felt more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before. Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart? It would all be gone . . . or at least, he would be gone from it. His breath came slow and deep, and his mouth and throat were completely dry, but his eyes weren't.

Ophelia.

Her sleepless nights, how he struggled to comfort her from a destiny he didn't know.

Harry walked out into the Grand Staircase, the same one he'd seen Ophelia descend from in her magnificent dress that night at the Yule Ball, now, she was alone, surrounded by rubble, curled into herself looking so irrefutably small in comparison to her vast surroundings.