The After Life

The Fallen Leavers

The morning was quiet, unnaturally still. Hogwarts was never like this. There was always some sort of sound. The chattering of students and portraits, the clinking of pots and pans, the grating of the ancient staircases as they moved of their own accord. There was always something. But not today. If a mouse farted in the dungeons, it would have echoed to the top of the Astronomy Tower.

It was as though the great, shattered castle stood in reverence of the absent dead.

Harry walked though the grounds, his mind blank and dazed. His feet were moving but he hardly knew where he was going. He'd thought about the owlery. At least there was some hint of life there. Life which wouldn't intrude on him too much. But there was painful death there, too. Poor Hedwig. She had called the place home, as much as Harry had done his dorm room. Now they belonged nowhere.

And part of Harry wished he, too, was sleeping soundly under the earth, as his once-beloved owl now surely was.

Without realising, Harry found himself approaching Hagrid's cabin. His step faltered. There was the threat of company there. Harry wouldn't be able to avoid it if Hagrid spotted him. The crushing silence was here too. No booming barks, no crashes from inside the hut. Harry's eyes were drawn, magnetically, to the little mound of earth off to one side of the cabin. Grass was starting to grow over it already, life blooming where death's inevitability had been observed.

There was, of course, nothing little about Fang's grave. The boarhound had been anything but little. But soon the flora would cover the disturbed earth and only the ring of memorial stones Hagrid had laid there would be any reminder that this wasn't just another overgrown, anonymous patch of land.

Harry's heart lodged in his throat at the sight.

In fact, it had become a frequent resident there, choking him, quickening his breath in the worst sorts of ways. Not from nerves like at Quidditch, not from excitement at intimacy with girls, just the grim realisation of the darkness that had permeated his life. It was as if Voldemort's presence had served as a sort of shroud, hiding his misdeeds as Harry expected worse to come. Deaths of his friends, death of himself. Now that he was gone, all the horrors of the Dark Lord's actions were coming home to him.

And the brutal murder of beloved pets was only an entryway into this catalogue of heinous deeds.

Harry's decision was made. He unclenched the fist that was a moment away from knocking on Hagrid's door and veered away from the gamekeeper's cabin. It wasn't a morning for chit-chat. The Great Lake loomed large, deserted and ideal, off to the left. Harry struck out for it, following the sloping lawns down to the water's edge. The surface of the lake was like fresh-cut glass; smooth, flat, totally unbroken. And still that silence. Harry felt deaf enveloped by it. It pressed on him, sound taken from his world and thrown somewhere else. Somewhere it could be enjoyed, somewhere it wouldn't be taken for granted, for Harry felt a selfish guilt that that's all he'd ever done with it.

The morning sunlight fell on the surface of the Lake, gilding the unmoving water. Harry looked at it, marvelled at its prettiness, cautiously welcoming the warmth which accompanied it. It would be Summer soon. There would be light, and life, and Harry wondered vaguely if he would be in any state to enjoy it. If his anguishing mind might by then have started to settle on this new idea of the world. A world with a future.

He couldn't rightly conceptualise that.

For what was life without Voldemort? Without his ever-pervading threat? How was Harry supposed to go about picking up the pieces of a broken life? Did he even know how to live, without the shadow of Voldemort stalking just behind him? Harry wasn't sure he did. People would just go back to normal. Life would return to the way it was, free from the prowling presence that had plagued the Wizarding World. They would all celebrate the Dark Lord's demise, cherish the victory, revel in the freedom Harry had given them.