The After Life

Earlier

Three Months Earlier....

The Gryffindor Boys dorm was quiet. It was as if the castle had let out a long, baited breath to mark the defeat of Lord Voldemort twelve hours earlier. Only to find horror in the exhale. The air itself had no life, the atmosphere still and unmoving. The world had changed. It was in the fabric of every wave and particle. Though there was no charge to any of it. A void of new uncertainty had replaced the fear, confusion and wariness where there had once been a palpable density, easy to define.

Harry was drowning in it, swallowing and gagging against the dark depths of the new world. Of his new world. He sat hugging his hunched legs, looking out of the shattered tower, letting the swirl of an icy breeze encircle him. His cheeks were sodden with tears he had no idea how to stop. They'd been coming for hours now. He didn't know what to do. And he was utterly alone.

He knew he'd better get used to it.

He didn't know how to do that, either. So he simply sat, and wept, and watched the pale dawn light filter over the Scottish highlands framed against the cloudy sky in the distance. The magnitude of the view belittled him as the reality of his life crashed in around his mind. Visions of horror chased memories of suffering around his battered psyche. It was as if the death of Voldemort had burst a dam that Harry had been holding back for years.

And now he was powerless to stop the torrent.

It flew at him in angry waves, broke as tears from his swollen eyes and burned hot against his dirty skin. And not one of the other fuckers, who had been celebrating well into the night around Hogwarts, had the faintest clue what was going on. Harry resented almost all of them. It was lucky they had given him a wide berth. His shifting moods were making him volatile.

But he had never felt so alone.

He was angry also. It was an alien anger, a fluid sensation directed fully at Ginny Weasley. Once the source of so much hope and joy, he felt a hollow acidity at the very thought of her. She had tried to throw herself at him before they'd even stowed Voldemort's dead body away from the other corpses. She was mindless of his physical pain, of his exhaustion. Of anything he'd been through. She wanted only for herself and Harry saw a plainly different vision of her than he was used to. A veil had been lifted. She'd never understand him. There would be no getting back with her. Harry would sooner be alone.

And after what he'd seen with Ron and Hermione he knew he surely would be.

They'd kissed. Finally gotten together it would seem, after all the skirting around each other. Harry felt a gut-lurching emptiness at the thought. There would be no more of the so-called Golden Trio. Harry would not play third wheel to them. They would have happiness, but Harry knew innately that he wouldn't share it. Though he couldn't rightly articulate why. He felt an immense sense of loss, like losing a limb or a loved one. The image implanted on his retinas and he urged it away, but it gnawed at him.

Why? He always knew that it was likely to happen, but he now felt he'd filed it away with the Death of Voldemort in not knowing how he'd deal with it when it did. Both were concepts too incorporeal to truly imagine. Both would be foundation-smashing to the very core of his life. Voldemort - his nemesis, his enemy, but at the same time an ever-present, purpose defining force. Ron and Hermione - best friends, now broken away as something else. Breaking their connection, breaking him. Leaving him behind.

Both things had happened at the same time.

Harry wasn't sure he would be able to cope. He was slightly panicked at the idea of losing his mind. He quite literally had no-one now. His enemy was dead. His best friends would be closer to each other now than him. There was nobody else for Harry. The idea terrified him. He was so alone, so completely solitary. He had nowhere to turn.