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The characters aren't mine. Yes, I used quotes from the books. Let's get to the good stuff.
In the town of Godric's Hollow, Harry had known that it wouldn't end well.
Deep down, he knew, he had hoped that by coming here he would be able to unlock the answers to questions he hadn’t even thought to ask yet. He wanted to solve all the mysteries of the universe, or at least have his parents solve them all for him.
But instead all there was was a big rock with some words carved on it. It was almost funny.
Once again, instead of finding solace, he found nothing. It was really quite depressing.
“We’ll give you some time,” said Remus. Harry could hear the others walk away. Not even Ron protested.
Harry sat down in front of the grave. Just then, he noticed, for the first time, what was carved at the top of the massive headstone: a pair of antlers cradling a lily.
“Mum?” he whispered. “Dad? I don't know what I'm doing here. It's not like there's anything here but a big rock. I just... I kept thinking that maybe there'd be some help for me, here. Like maybe you could fix this.
“I know that's stupid. You can't fix anything. I'll just have to do it myself, I guess. I just wish...”
Harry never to the time to tell his parents what he wished, because that was the precise moment a brightly colored brochure was blown by a freak gust of wind into the antlers cradling the lily. He reached out and picked up the brochure, hesitantly.
It was the kid of thing that would be given to tourists – a brochure full of wizard pictures of Godric's Hollow. And there, on the second page, was the line, “Godric's Lane is especially interesting to visitors interestd in history – only those who are confirmed to be descendants of Godric Gryffindor himself may live there.”
Harry was struck by the thought that his had been the only house on the entire street, as far as he could see.
It wasn't until they had returned to Hogwarts that Harry realized that he should have thought of it sooner. He had been reading that clue about Gryffindor's possessions being so greater than any one thing when he realized that Dumbledore had tried to tell him all the way back in his second year.
“If you want proof, Harry, that you belong in Gryffindor, I suggest you look more closely at this.”
Dumbledore reached across McGonagall's desk, picked up the blood-stained silver sword, and handed it to Harry. Dully, Hary turned it over, the rubies blazing in the firelight. And then he saw the name engraved just below the hilt.
Godric Gryffindor.
“Only a true Gryffindor could have pulled that out of the hat, Harry.”
Voldemort had held a clue too, when he tried to steal the Philosopher's stone.
“Your mother needn't have died. She was trying to protect you.”
Harry had been forced to wonder why it was that Voldemort was so adamant about killing him in the first place, and not Neville. Of course, some of it was so obvious he wondered why Dumbledore hadn't thought of it himself.
“You can speak Parseltongue, Harry, because Lord Voldemort – who is the last remaining descendant of Salazar Slytherin – can speak Parseltongue. Unless I'm much mistaken, he transferred some of his own powers to you the night he gave you that scar.”
When Nagini was killed in the battle, Harry realized that Voldemort would never have sent a Horcrux into a battle. That meant that there was still one more Horcrux out there.
Research into his own ancestry in the library after Susan Bones had talked to him about genealogy had revealed that not only was he a descendant of Godric Gryffindor, he was the last descendant of Godric Gryffindor that could be proven. Harry realized at that point what the book meant about Gryffindor's possessions – the only thing left was his family. Harry. When he had told Dumbledore's portrait that three Horcruxes still remained, he had already known – there was no way that this was going to turn out well for him.
“Just wondering,” replied Harry. “What's that?” he asked, pointing to the letter in Ron's hand.
“It's just a brochure. McGonagall gave it to me. It's about coaching Quidditch.”
“That would be perfect for you after graduation. You should go for it, mate.”
Ron looked doubtful. “What about being Aurors?”
Harry shrugged. He would never survive the end of the war, and he knew that if he wasn't going to be an Auror, Ron wouldn't be an Auror. “You should do what you want, Ron. This war won't go on forever, and then...won't you want out of it?”
“How can I get out of it? It always finds us.”
“Yeah,” said Harry, thinking, No, Ron, it always finds me. “Still, if it stopped finding us...what would you want?”
“I suppose,” said Ron slowly, “That I'd want to play Quidditch.”
Harry was quite sure that Ron would remember this conversation after the war was over. He couldn't begrudge Ron his life.“Then you should,” said Harry.
“What about you?” asked Ron. “Have you had a meeting with McGonagall about this yet?”
Harry shook his head. “It's scheduled for next week.” He felt the need to change the subject, and made a mental note to cancel his meeting with McGonagall.
Harry had spent weeks reading about curses in the library before he found the information he was looking for. He knew, by then, that he couldn't work up the hate to cast the Killing Curse, but maybe he wouldn't have to. Some of his reading indicated that he could use the curse Voldemort had used on him as a baby – the Avada Kedavra that had failed to kill him.
All the steps were located in a book on fighting with brother wands. It seemed that only wands that shared cores, as Harry's and Voldemorts did, could trigger old spells that had never been completed, placing the effect on both the wandholders at the same time.
The plan was to link Harry's wand with Voldemort's and then speak the incantation written in the book. When that was done, if Harry was concentrating on the spell he wanted to use, Voldemort would be forced to perform the curse again, this time completing the spell on both of them. The spell would kill both Harry and Voldemort at the same time, eradicating the last two pieces of Voldemort's soul.
Harry felt sure that Voldemort's original plan had been to kill all that remained of the Gryffindor line and use one of their deaths to make a horcrux of the other's body. Baby Harry would have been buried, and no one would ever have thought that cremating the body would have been enough to destroy the fragment of soul. It was the one thing that Voldemort had never expected.
Instead of that happening, however, Harry had survived. And because of that fact, Voldemort was now wary of killing him.
Harry was sitting in the library, reading the ancient tome. He was still forced to look up what seemed like every other word, but his talk with Dumbledore's portrait had calmed him somewhat, and he was making progress. Very slow progress.
Finally, after hours of transcribing the book into something resembling modern English, Harry was left with a working translation. He read through the parchment, and for the first time paid careful attention to the incantation he would have to speak if he was going to end the war once and for all. The incantation that would save his friends, his family, but not himself.
He had to suppress a laugh, remembering his thought when he had first arrived at Hogwarts that there was more to magic than waving your wand and saying a few funny words. The spell on the parchment in front of him made that thought particularly ironic, and Harry laughed out loud.
“Abracadabra,” he chuckled to himself.
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