A World Fit For Heroes

All right, so we won. So what. I am still powerless and lonely. At least before the war, I had my lover at my side, but the damned war took him from me and I am emptier of purpose than I have ever been before. I gave up teaching, gave up feeling, gave up living when he died. I merely exist now.

I can still hear the screams ten years later, the orders to leave him be and carry on with the fight are screamed at me, but all the fight has gone from me now as I hold his lifeless body and hexes and curses fly around me. Through glazed eyes I take in the rest of the battlefield.

To my immediate left, Minerva lies, her mouth drawn into the rictus of violent death. Poor woman, only three years left until she was due to retire, an admirable woman and an excellent colleague. To my right, the Granger girl and the youngest Weasley lie in each other’s arms, together forever now. Kingsley, a fine man, splayed in the obscenity of death. He never trusted me.

A little further away, a mask has been partially ripped from a face, but only to identify the body. One look at the long platinum hair and I know that my ex-lover of long past and now enemy lies dead. I can feel the weariness seep into my bones. We have been fighting for hours and all that are left are exhausted. Even the dratted Golden Boy is showing signs of acute fatigue. He has tried to get close enough to his prophesied nemesis to get in the killing shot but the devious bastard just apparates around the field just out of reach.

I simply give up and fall across the prone form of my beloved. I care not who sees us now. The gossip mill can do what it likes, it cannot touch either of us again. I am vaguely aware of the green light as it shoots towards me from the tip of a wand, but I don’t even try to get out of the way. I just have time to close my lover’s eyes and feel the curse hit me as I cover him with my body. I hope they bury us together but I doubt it, we will all be interred in a large pit, no doubt, with some sort of memorial stone with all our names inscribed upon it raised over the site, any relationships between us ignored except for the most important one. We all died together.

****

Except that I didn’t. I recall nothing of the finale and I hear the details second-hand as people move about around me. I lie very still and am completely ignored. I am on a cot somewhere and it is very dark. As some sort of consciousness returns I am aware that my eyes are bound and that I am in a tent or something. Poppy’s fieldstation. I hear that Voldemort finally met his end and that Potter is lying gravely injured and not expected to last the night. Someone, whose voice I do not recognise, is taking a roll-call of the dead and injured. I hear my name read out then I lose consciousness again.

****

A year later and my eyesight is still lacking. I can see but the retinas and lenses were burned by the curse that was supposed to be the death of me. I now wear glasses to correct my vision with dark lenses to keep out too much light. I did not attend the memorial service held at the time the stone was erected on the spot where Voldemort fell. In recognition of my services to the Order, I am granted an Order of Merlin, second class. I don’t bother to go to the awards ceremony and they Owl me the medal. It currently sits at the back of the junk drawer in my small kitchen along with bits of string, money off coupons and spare lumps of candle.

Potter survived. Potter disappeared. He was awarded a first class OoM. He didn’t collect his either, according to the article in the Prophet. I don’t blame him. It was a hollow victory for the supposed side of the Light. What was the point of winning when so many lost so much.

My hands shake now, some sort of neurological damage inflicted by that last curse. As such, I can no longer teach, so they found me a sinecure at the Ministry that goes under the name of ‘research’. This is an excuse to give me a small lab of my own in the bowels of the Ministry and leave me to rot on a small monthly stipend. No-one checks my work, no-one ever ventures down here. I sit in my mini-dungeon and read the papers, Muggle and Magical. I clock in. I clock out. I go home, although I could probably move in here full-time and no-one would notice. I am not old enough to draw my pension nor sick enough to be on benefits, so here I am and this is my life.

Every day I read the obituaries. Every day someone else I knew has either died or succumbed to the madness that is the aftermath of war. Suicides abound. Only last month, they found the youngest Weasley boy hanging from the rafters in the family broom shed. He ostensibly had everything to live for but he didn’t seem to think so. There was no note. He was buried in what is now the family plot in a corner of their land. There is one twin left and the eldest brother, Charlie? Bill? I forget which now.

****

And so the years pass and gradually the world seems to right itself. Hogwarts re-opened five years after the battle with an entirely new staff. Most of the rest of us are dead or maimed. Dumbledore and Minerva I know are dead as are Aurora and Pomona. Poppy left the Magical world after her breakdown and I believe she was able to retire early on health grounds. Some health. She poisoned herself two years ago. Then there was Remus and then there was me. I watched my love die before my eyes and managed to close his before the curse hit me.

The one person I have ever loved, he came to me in his despair after the mutt died and we found comfort in each other. Two sad alienated men who still had enough humanity to reach out. That is all gone now. I am the only one left. My office has no name on the door just the function. Potions Research. There was a desk tag with my name on it that I was issued when I took over this office and lab but it has long since disappeared under the pile of detritus that teeters in a large heap on my desk. The only one left.

‘Severus Snape’.

****

On the anniversaries of the so-called liberation of the Wizarding world, the obits increase on the day following. There is no celebration here, not for those who fought. It matters not on whose side. Sides are immaterial now. This morning’s Prophet has a small article hidden inside. Draco Malfoy was fished out of the lake on the family property. The papers are calling it death by drowning, an accidental death. Don’t make me laugh. He lost Blaise to madness and suicide eighteen months ago. A single gunshot fired through the roof of his mouth ended it for him once he learned that he would never feel below the waist again, never walk, never fuck. He chose a swift oblivion over the slow rot.

****

The Wizarding world marks the tenth year since..... I scan the papers as usual. I have been keeping my own lists in a small notebook that goes everywhere with me. This war robbed the Wizarding world of a whole generation, much like World War 1 did for the Muggles. A whole age group of sons and daughters. A gap created that can never be filled. While the grass grows neglected around the feet of the memorial and the rest of the world attempts to carry on, the casualties mount. I read that Lavender West nee Brown killed her three young kiddies then opened her veins after she caught her husband cheating and Pansy Parkinson threw herself from Beachy Head into the Channel, her young baby clutched to her chest. The child had been born with congenital defects caused by the injuries and dark magic that she sustained in the war.

A day later and the headlines are screaming, ‘Harry Potter Found’, then the following day, ‘Harry Potter Dead’, the so-called Golden Boy betrayed by his own kind. He was found in a men’s hostel, a hopeless alcoholic, a drug addict. He was found with a needle in his arm, a lethal dose of pure heroin in his veins. Accidental, they called it, but the children of the War know better. Just another casualty of the madness. More than Voldemort died that night. It spelled a slow death for all of us.

At least it gets me brewing a Potion again. I steady my palsied hands as I chop and grind, sipping a constant supply of whisky that I can no longer seem to do without. I concentrate as the cauldron simmers, the Potion just a thin layer at the bottom. I don’t need much of this, just a little to add to brandy. I clear my desk of all the mess, loading it into bin bags that I neatly tie and leave outside my office door. I sweep and clean my lab and office once I have decanted the Potion and look around my now empty office as I turn out the lights and head home.

I spend the night spring-cleaning my room in the run-down house full of small dingy bedsits that is the only accommodation I can afford on my meagre wage. I burn everything in the grate. When I set out for work, my flat is ready to re-rent. No signs of the previous occupant remain. The only thing I remove is the medal. An empty piece of pressed tin that means nothing to me.

I clock in as usual, a half-bottle of brandy thudding against my hip as I unlock my office door. I have half of the bottle for breakfast and tip the cooled potion into it. The alcohol releases the active ingredients and I drink it all down. It burns my throat. I fold my cloak neatly and lay it on my, now, empty desk. I stand my name-tag up at the front and lay down behind it my head pillowed on my cloak. The only other things placed on the wood are my Order of Merlin and my battered notebook. It doesn’t take long and I close my eyes.

I’m coming to join you love, I hope you are waiting for me.

****

The stench finally drove someone, a lackey, to investigate. As the door of the subterranean office was broached, the smell knocked the poor lad back, “Oh my god, I think he’s dead”, he called for reinforcements. The body was swiftly removed. Then a tidy-up team was moved in to disinfect the place. This would be an ideal place for the expansion of the records offices once the stench was scrubbed out. One of the clean-up team spotted the notebook and thumbed through it, but the writing was too small and untidy for anyone to read. It was tossed into a rubbish bag along with everything else that was left in the rooms, the pathetic little tin badge was thrown in after it. The team reported to their superiors that the space was now clean.

The man was unceremoniously cremated and his ashes languished on a shelf somewhere and were never collected. Sometime during the next major sort-out, they were quietly removed and disposed of as garbage.

There was no obituary.

A world fit for heroes indeed.

The End


Written Oct 2006