When does life begin again?



After the fallout, when you wake up, when you realize that you are still alive. Do you shake out your bones, do you memorize the pulses of your blood? Do you ever stop feeling like you're still in it, like you'll never get out of it?



        Maybe you hide from it. Maybe you keep it hidden under your skin, because it's easier than facing it, because facing it is acknowledging what you have lost to get there. Maybe you throw it away, because you're afraid, and it might kill you or restore you, but you don't know. You can't know.

                Maybe it starts when the smoke begins to clear from a battle, when dawn lights up the faces of her side. Maybe it's when Draco wakes up in a hospital bed instead of never waking up at all. When Harry finds that he no longer has to be a hero because he has finished what he was born to do. When George flips the sign to Open on his and his brother's shop, when Lavender climbs her mountain in Asia.



     Life is a circle. It is a war. It builds, climaxes, ebbs out of the fallout, and then builds again. Every night someone goes to sleep to the end of the world, but one morning, they wake up. They shake out their bones, they realize they have survived. They begin again, that human struggle for peace, that desperate reach for happiness. 

              Hermione thinks it begins now. Draco's fingers twisted in the fabric at the back of her shirt, as they stand there like the last solid structure in the entire world. She knows that the world can never be a place that finds true peace - but she can, they can. The war is over, and they have won. Life stretches out before them, waiting for them to make it worth it. Some elusive happiness there to overwhelm them.

         And Hermione knows, with the Burrow waiting for them, and Draco's cold nose against her cheek, his breath warm on her neck, that this is the beginning.



 - the fallout, everydaythursday