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I didn't create any of this. JKR can have it all if I can just! Finish! This! Story!
The battle raged around him, but Harry did not notice it. The only thing he could see was the monster in front of him who had once been a man. Voldemort. Tom Riddle.
His mental shields were up, and he was determined that Voldemort was unable to break into his mind. He could have no idea what Harry was planning.
It would be so easy to just run away. No one would blame him. After all, he had faced Voldemort four times. He knew just what Voldemort could do. The sane thing would definitely be to run, but that was not what Dumbledore had taught him. He would walk into the arena with his head held high, and if he lost no one would be able to say that he lacked courage. That was, after all, Gryffindor's main trait.
Voldemort raised his wand and prepared to speak an incantation. Probably the Killing Curse. After all, Voldemort had probably had enough of Harry. But Harry wasn't quite done with Voldemort.
“Tom,” he said, remembering Dumbledore's refusal to use Voldemort's chosen name, “did you ever think to ask me what the rest of that prophecy said? I think it might interest you.”
Voldemort's face registered shock, but it was quickly hidden. “That Muggle-loving fool would never have told you,” he said. “You were to be protected, and coddled.”
“No,” said Harry, “he told me. The prophecy says that you have to mark me as your equal. Well, not me. You had to choose between me and Neville.”
“I planned to kill you both,” replied Voldemort, who was now squinting with concentration, trying to peer into Harry's mind. “You were just the first one I got to.”
Harry decided to let Voldemort in on some of what he knew.
“The diary was destroyed first. But then, you knew about that.”
The expression on Voldemort's face was one of mild panic.
“Did you know about the ring? Professor Dumbledore got that one. I don't know how.”
Voldemort was now trembling. It was slight, but it was definite trembling.
“The locket... that was tricky. Did you know Regulus Black had stolen it? You didn't, did you? Don't ask me how he did it, but he did – he stole the locket, replaced it with another locket, and hid it in his own mother's house.”
“You are lying,” said Voldemort. “You cannot have found -”
Harry cut him off. “Did you even bother to check the Riddle House and see if the cup was still a Horcrux? Sloppy, Tom. Dumbledore would have expected better. He would have been so disappointed in you.”
For a split second, Voldemort looked terrified. But then it turned to anger, and his eyes seemed to get even redder. “It cannot be true,” he said.
“It can,” said Harry. “It is. I didn't have to lift a finger to get the Ravenclaw key – it was hit by a stray curse.”
Voldemort laughed. It was a cruel sound, as harsh as nails on a blackboard. “But you will never destroy the last one,” he told Harry. “There are some things that no one can do – and you will never find it in you to stop me.”
It would be easy, Harry knew, to turn away now. No one would be overly angry about it – only four living people knew what Harry's role was, and only three of them would be listened to, not that they would say anything.
“You can't kill me,” Harry told Voldemort. “One Killing Curse, and it would be all over for you.”
Voldemort's eyes widened in fear.
HPHPHPHPHP
The world around Harry was on fire, with curses and hexes flying everywhere as the Order and the Death Eaters battled on the castle grounds. From where he stood on the hill, Harry could see Ron fighting a pair of wizards – and winning, Hermione Banishing Death Eaters into the lake, where the Giant Squid was grabbing them and holding them in the water, and Ginny, going wand to wand with none other than Rodolphus Lestrange.
As he watched the battle, it seemed that the world slowed down, until, finally, it barely moved at all. For a second, Harry thought someone was messing with time again, but he knew it was all him. Somehow, he was thinking faster than he ever had before.
Voldemort was raising his wand, but Harry was quicker. He snapped his wand up, and at the same time they each spoke an incantation. Voldemort's “Stupefy!” and Harry's “Incarcerous!” met in mid air, and, as they had three years before, they created a golden line between the two wands.
Harry was about to speak the spell that would effectively end his life.
In his mind, he played over all the good times that he had had. He could see, as if in a haze, the first time he had met Ron on the train to Hogwarts, the first time he had met Hermione, the first time he had met all the Weasleys. His family.
He recalled the joy he had felt when a mountain troll collapsed in the girls' bathroom in his first year, and that Christmas when he got his first real present. His parents waved at him from inside a mirror, and he was rescued from the Dursleys by Ron in a flying car in the dead of night. Pixies were set loose in his classroom and Dobby smiled at Harry, holding a slimy sock. Harry remembered his first ever birthday card, the discovery that Sirius was innocent, and the Quidditch World Cup.
Sirius was singing Christmas carols at Grimmauld Place. Harry had his first real birthday party. He and Ginny bonded in the summer, playing Quidditch and joking around. Dumbldore's visit to the Dursleys the year before played out in perfect detail, enchanted glasses of mead and all. Suddenly, he was kissing Ginny in the common room, and they were walking around the lake.
Harry had never realized before this moment how much he remembered of those days just before Dumbledore died, when he and Ginny had been together. What he had told her by the broom shed had been true – he did love her, and he would give anything to tell her one more time. He would let Voldemort live, just to have the chance for one more birthday like the last one had been, or even, he admitted, to live his life a bit. Was it so crazy to want to have the things that his parents had never had a chance to have? All Harry wanted right then was his future.
He hesitated to speak the word that would end it all.
And then it occurred to him that Cedric Diggory had never had a future. And then Dumbledore's words from after Cedric's death came back to him:
“Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort.”
Too many people had strayed across Voldemort's path already. Without Voldemort, Dumbledore would still be there. If Voldemort had never come to power, all the witches and wizards and muggles who had died in this war would be alive. If Voldemort had never existed, or if his life had been just a little different, Harry wouldn't have had a reason to go to the Ministry the day Sirius died, and Sirius would never have had to follow him. Cedric would be alive, and so would Bertha Jorkins. Sirius never would have gone to Azkaban in the first place. Peter Pettigrew would never have betrayed his friends. Ginny would have been spared the whole ordeal in the Chamber. And Harry's parents would still be alive.
Harry couldn't change what had happened. But he could stop it from happening again. He could fix all of this, so easily, for everyone that Voldemort was planning on hurting.
One little word.
Around him, Harry could see that Ron, Hermione, and Ginny were all staring at the two of them, moving toward them. Slowly
His eyes met Ginny's and for a second it seemed that he could see right into her soul. He saw her lips move, forming the words, “I love you.”
It was too bad, Harry thought, that Voldemort had never known love. Maybe the whole thing could have been avoided. Harry remembered one act of selfless love that had been given to him, and he focused on that, knowing that that was the key to winning this battle.
“Not Harry! Not Harry! Please – I'll do anything -”
“Stand aside. Stand aside, girl!”
“No!”
“Avada Kedavra!”
It was time.
“Abracadabra,” whispered Harry. He focused all his memory on the curse that had bound him to Voldemort for the last sixteen years.
The connection between their wands turned green, and then the world winked out.
HPHPHPHPHPHPHP
Ginny was the first to realize what Harry was about to do. It was like a window had opened, and she could see right into his soul. There was no happy ending in store for them.
Until that point, Ginny had believed that when the battle was over, they would get back together. Maybe someday get married, and do all the things that went along with that – have a house, a family, jobs. Now, she knew, it was not going to happen.
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but she was sure that when she whispered, “I love you,” he heard her from twenty feet away. He said something she couldn't hear, and the light connecting him to Voldemort turned blinding green, until she couldn't see either of them.
HPHPHPHPHP
The hilltop was covered with smoke, and Hermione's eyes were unable to penetrate it. She ran into the mist, screaming Harry's name, but she knew, deep down, that it was too late. How could she not have known?
It was a good ten minutes of searching the dense fog before she found the body of Voldemort – or was it? As the smoke thinned a bit, she saw the body of a handsome man, sixty or so years old, who was wearing the same robe Voldemort had been. He was clearly dead.
HPHPHPHPHP
Ron saw Hermione charge into the mist and chased after her. As he approached, he realized that it was extremely dense. Hermione had already disapeared inside, and he couldn't see her. He pulled out his wand and pointed it at the mist, using a Charm he had learned during the year to slowly thin it out until it vanished.
At the edge of the mist, about where Harry had been standing, was... nothing. No Harry standing victorious, no body. Nothing at all.
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