Chapter Text
Harry and Hermione are drunk on exhilaration and power when they kiss the first time. They soar away from Gringotts on the back of a dragon as they tangle, hands and lips grabbing hungrily as they kiss.
The comfort and safety they had found in each other on this cursed quest had grown and changed, somewhere along the line friendship had morphed into true love and affection. Along with just a tiny seed of guilt when they think of Ron and Ginny.
They visit Godric’s Hollow on the trail of Horcruxes and Hallows and stumble into a trap.
Nagini springs from Bathilda Bagshot’s mutilated corpse and Harry manages to hit the damned snake with the darkest spell he could find in the Black Family Library.
“Anima Fugatrix:” the description had read, “For enemies, a fate worse than death.”
Harry’s rudimentary understanding of Latin, borne from years of spell-casting and listening to Hermione tells him that it's called the soul banisher.
Nagini and Harry are both writhing in agony, the energy rolling off of them shaking the house and the town to rubble, when Hermione sweeps in, nailing the snake with a bone-exploding curse and apparating them away.
The snake and the Horcrux inside of it die then.
But their success is not without cost. Harry slips into a magical coma in the aftermath of the soul banisher. For three days he doesn’t wake up, lying deathly still and freezing cold.
Hermione panics, searching every book they have, every note she’s ever taken, for a reason and finding nothing.
Harry wakes up on the third day to a face-full of bushy hair and a sobbing witch on his chest. As he strokes her hair and whispers comforting promises Harry can feel the changes dark magic has wrought on his core. His magic pulses, darkly and malignantly unlike the multicolored splendor of its past.
He presses soft kisses to the side of Hermione’s head, trying to enjoy her embrace and ignore the widening pit in his stomach.
Pettigrew dies next.
The Dark Lord’s name still holds the taboo on it. That enchantment that draws the snatchers right to them when Harry’s tongue slips proves their downfall as they get captured, but not without a fight.
They are tossed into the dungeon of Malfoy Manor, covered in blood and magic. Hermione gets dragged away and Harry is locked away, unable to do anything but listen to her screams as Bellatrix tortures her.
His shouts echo from the dank walls as he calls her name, throat hoarse and wrecked.
His anger simmers and boils.
The second Peter throws open the door to drag him upstairs Harry lets go.
He sinks into the anger, falls into the rage that surges to the surface, and lets it fuel his magic.
Harry throws out his hand and lets pure unadulterated magic flow.
There is no incantation. No wand for focus, no spell on his lips. There is only rage and power. Hate for the man who betrayed his parents. Hate for the man who put his dogfather in Azkaban.
Harry’s hand bucks as magic surges out and he watches in grim satisfaction, a snarl on his face, as Pettigrew’s flesh melts off his bones.
Bellatrix dies soon after.
Harry storms his way upstairs to where she is torturing Hermione, the room rattling as power pours off of him. An aura forms around him, his magic made visible with the sheer volume of it. With his eyes glowing green and a hazy red shine around him, he looks like an angel of vengeance to Hermione.
The vengeance part is right, but Harry is not an angel, he’s something more sinister.
Harry raises the wand he had taken from Wormtail and calmly incants the fateful word that had started him on his journey into darkness.
“Crucio.”
His tone could almost be mistaken as apathetic, but the screams coming from Bellatrix prove that he was anything but.
The waves of power rolling off Harry are shaking the building so hard that the ceiling is slowly crumbling apart, the floor cracking at his feet.
He scoops up Hermione and they flee the collapsing manor, leaving Bellatrix behind in a state similar to the Longbottoms.
“No one could have survived that,” Harry tells Hermione as they watch the roof collapse in and the manor fall to ruins.
His shoulders are tense, hunched, and defensive as he waits for her to lay into him, to castigate him for his cruelty.
“Good,” Hermione says instead, her tone laced with grim satisfaction.
Harry can’t help but think that past Harry and Hermione would be horrified with what they’d become.
As they rest and recover in the wizarding tent that has become their safe haven, Hermione overhears Harry mutter a quote.
“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”
His voice is soft, almost quiet enough that she doesn't hear it, but it strikes Hermione like a bludger to the ribs.
“I didn't know you've read Sylvia Plath,” she comments with false lightness, her heart hammering in her chest, “It's not like you.”
“Mrs. Figg used to have books on poetry on her coffee table I could read when she babysat me,” Harry explains. Not that was a basis for a literature education, he thinks.
He knows what she’s concerned about, so he tells her.
He doesn't like the changes that dark magic is making in him, but it feels so viscerally necessary that he doesn't think he can stop.
Hermione knows, but she also has faith in him. So she lets him know, lets him know that his "saving people thing" and reasons for fighting proves that even though he might use morally questionable methods he is still a good person.
Harry remembers the exhilaration he felt when slaughtering the goblins, scrubs phantom blood from his pale hands, and isn't sure he agrees, but he doesn't say anything.
The Cup and Locket die next.
Hermione realizes that the soul banisher can be used to destroy the Horcruxes housed in Slytherin’s locket and Hufflepuff’s cup and goes to use it.
Harry stops her. He insists that he performs the curse.
He can still feel how casting it on Nagini had affected him and wants to spare her from that same fate.
He does what he’s always tried to do for those he loves. Protect them.
The soul portions in the artifacts of the founders die almost anticlimactically. The housings shudder slightly as darkness vanishes from them, and that’s it.
The curse’s effect on Harry, however, is visible.
His skin grows paler and colder. Out of the corner of their eyes he seems to be wreathed in shadows and flickering as if his tether to life is thin.
Harry and Hermione both say nothing of these changes.
Out of all the great wizards who have fought Voldemort, Harry has an advantage none of them had.
He knows Tom Riddle, he’s seen inside his head. Harry knows him like he knows those pale white hands he’s seen in visions of Voldemort’s atrocities.
Harry knows how he thinks. He knows that both he and Tom share something, that Hogwarts is their home. He knows somewhere deep in his gut that the Dark Lord must have hidden his last Horcrux at Hogwarts.
So Harry and Hermione pack up their tent, kiss gently, and make their way to Hogsmeade.
They arrive in the picturesque town and immediately set off the Caterwauling charm.
Dread and horror fill them both as the effects of dementors wash over them as the wraiths swarm the town.
Harry manages to conjure up a shaky Patronus and is glad that he still has the happy memories left. They try to hide, to pass off the Patronus as someone else’s but nearly every townsperson has fled the country rather than fight what they considered a losing war, so there is no one to take the blame for it.
The Death Eaters realize Harry is there and call back the Dementors before swarming them themselves.
Harry and Hermione are quickly besieged by Death Eaters with more coming in every minute. They fight side by side, weaving in and out of alleyways and taking down Death Eaters left and right.
They cut their way to the courtyard in front of the Three Broomsticks, tired of the fight and wearing down. Magic is practically tangible in the air, the acrid taste of ozone and power as wave after wave of spells crash into the Death Eaters. Harry conducts death like a master, spell after spell killing wherever they land in the crowd in front of him while Hermione guards his back, taking on those sneaking around the sides.
Harry is mid-spell when something slams into his back and sends him sprawling. He turns, curses on his lips, in time to see Hermione smiling at him sadly. He barely has time to see her mouth, “I love you,” at him as the sickly green of a killing curse strikes her in the side.
Hermione dies then.
Harry breaks.
All of time seems to freeze, spells and rubble hanging silently in the air as Harry takes in what had happened.
Hermione is dead. She had taken the Avada Kedavra meant for him.
The Death Eaters watch warily as Harry stands up.
A pulsing red aura, a visible manifestation of his magic and rage, forms around him as he turns, eyes glowing a brighter green than any killing curse.
Through the pounding in his ears and the red haze in his vision, Harry says the incantation to one of the most destructive pieces of magic he knows.
“Fiendfyre,” he hisses, sounding scarily familiar to the Dark Lord for the Death Eaters that could hear him.
Cursed flame explodes as hell comes to earth.
The Death Eaters try to run from the chimeras, dragons, and basilisks formed by the cursed fire but the raging flames raze them and Hogsmeade alive.
After what seems like hours the cursed flame sputters out just as quickly as it had formed.
A figure could be seen kneeling amidst the carnage, untouched by the flames and sobbing.
Harry had lost another one of his loves and he didn’t know how much more he could take. He stands up, shakes off his anguish, and stumbles his way towards the Hogwarts gates.
He has a job to do.
He has one more Horcrux to kill.
Harry sneaks into the school under his invisibility cloak. Dodges the Carrows and some of the meaner Slytherins as he makes his way to the Room of Requirement. Everyone hiding there cheers when he walked in and Seamus immediately gets on the wizarding wireless, calling in the remains of the Order of The Phoenix and D.A.
Harry asks about Ravenclaw’s artifacts and he and Luna dash to the Ravenclaw common room. The Carrows are there and so is McGonnagal, but he drops the Death Eater twins without a word. A dark cutting curse to their throat earns a look from McGonnagal, but she nods instead of saying anything.
The Headmistress purses her lips and calls for the evacuation of the younger children.
Instead of confining all of the Slytherins to the dungeons, Harry insists that they be able to fight for their home because not everyone could be a Death Eater in that house.
He warns them, however, with flashing green eyes and a threatening look, that any who turn on the defenders will be put down with great prejudice.
The diadem dies next.
As he makes his way through the Room of Hidden Things towards the bust of the wizard he had hidden the Half-Blood Prince’s book on what felt like so long ago, Harry steels himself for the reality that he would have to die for Voldemort to be killed. He’ll be damned if he doesn't take as many Death Eaters as he could with him, however.
Harry performs the Animus Fugatrix on the diadem and as he leaves the room those who had seen a dementor would find the air around him eerily similar, Dark and cold like the absence of life.
Harry finds Neville and makes the other child of prophecy swear to kill Voldemort if anything happens to him.
He watches as the formerly shy boy’s shoulders straighten and determination firms on his face.
Harry knows that Neville can do it. He has faith in his remaining friends.
The battle rages and so many more die.
Harry himself kills Dolohov after the Death Eater strikes down Remus and Tonks, arriving just a moment too late to save them.
He hits Pius Thickness and Mulciber with entrail expelling curses as they end the Weasley line.
He slaughters Crabbe and Goyle as they try to curse the defenders of Hogwarts in the back, leaving nothing but smears on the pavement in his wake.
Harry fights in a haze of dark curses and hexes till he finds himself standing in the courtyard, ankle-deep in blood and body parts with no one else to turn his wand on.
Harry walks into the Great Hall and sees the gathered bodies of those he loved. Remus, Tonks, Flitwick, Lavender, the Patil twins. Molly, Arthur, Gred, and Forge lay dead with only Percy left mourning them, sobbing over dead family and unrepaired bonds. Bill and Fleur died slaying Fenrir Greyback, their bodies marred with the scars only a werewolf could make, hands clasped tightly together in a deathly embrace.
All these people died fighting to keep their world, their home from falling to tyranny and darkness, a darkness Harry feels himself falling further and further into with no control. They were fighting to protect the ones they loved and for a better tomorrow. There is almost no one left for tomorrow at this point.
Voldemort issues his ultimatum and Harry sneaks his way to the Forbidden Forest.
As he goes he makes eye contact with Neville and Luna, their grim nods of acknowledgment show that even those freest of spirit know that sacrifices are needed in a war.
He whispers at the snitch Dumbledore willed him.
“I am about to die,” And it opens at the close. The resurrection stone falls out but he has no temptation to use it, he knows why he has to die and goes without reservation, scared of what would become of him if he lived and the destruction Voldemort would reap upon the world. He pockets the second Hallow and continues on his way.
The duel between Harry and Voldemort in the forest clearing rivals the one of Voldemort and Dumbledore at the ministry after Sirius’ death. Dark magic flows back and forth like a raging river. There’s no priori-incantantem effect to bind their wands this time so curses that are deflected careen behind the two combatants. Harry notices that some of his deflected curses are hitting the Death Eaters around Voldemort and starts slipping in area-of-effect curses into the devastating chains of spellfire he’s pouring at Tom and that the Dark Lord is deflecting so easily.
For all the power Harry possesses the Dark Lord has decades more experience with dark magic, he knows this is a fight he can’t win. But he is going to exploit the Dark Lord’s carelessness to its fullest as the spells hit the surrounding Death Eaters. Eventually, after what feels like hours of the blinding flares of green, red, purple, yellow, and blue spells one finally connects with Harry and he drops to his knees. The fire whip that Voldemort has wrapped around his chest goes out.
“The boy who lived, come to die,” the Dark Lord says mockingly as he casts a spell the same color as the vibrant green eyes staring at him hatefully.
His vision fades and Harry sees nothing but white.
After his meeting with Dumbledore at the Kings Cross afterlife station, Harry wakes up in Hagrid’s arms.
Neville defies the Dark Lord and is brutally beheaded with a dark cutting-curse as he tries to stab Voldemort with the sword of Gryffindor. During the confusion, Harry slips out of Hagrid's grasp and casts the organ-summoner on the surrounding Death Eaters in retaliation for Neville’s death. In his rage at the loss of nearly all of his followers, Voldemort begins throwing exploding curses at the rapidly dwindling defenders of Hogwarts before Harry steps in and engages him in a duel. What can only be described as a clashing of titans ends abruptly when Harry slips the same dark cutter used to kill Neville through the Dark Lord's defenses, severing his wand hand. Harry quickly summons the wand that had passed its ownership from Grindelwald to Dumbledore to Riddle and finally ends its journey, coming to rest in Harry’s hand.
With a malicious smile on his face, Harry tells the man who was once Tom Riddle, “This is for all those deaths that you’ve caused, for all the pain and torture and grief. This is for my parents and my friends. This is to avenge all those harmed by you.”
Magic pools at the tip of the Elder Wand.
“Animus fugatrix.”
As those who were left alive watch, tortured screams rip from Voldemort’s throat as the Dark Lord’s soul is slowly ripped from his body. The courtyard begins shaking itself apart from the magical energy being expended.
Harry stands in the midst of the chaos, robes flaring around him and hair flying in the wind. His glowing green eyes are shockingly visible through the shadows that envelope him. The bystanders can feel all the warmth and life being leached from the surroundings as the two powerful magical cores rage against each other, one resisting the spell and one urging it to completion. With one last roar of frustration, Harry pushes, and the spell comes to its end. A shockwave of magic and destruction rushes out from where he stands, flattening everything around him.
When the dust and rubble settle, the Man-Who-Conquered stands as a solitary figure in the courtyard. No one else had survived the spell and resulting explosion. He is alone.
Everyone is dead now.
Harry searches the grounds for anyone left alive. He comes upon Hagrid, his first friend, bleeding from enough wounds to kill a normal man, just as he breathes his last. He sees the bodies of McGonagall and Sprout where they had tried to protect the remaining students with their lives. He sees the remains of Tracey Davis and Daphne Greengrass where they fell defending their school, proving that Slytherins were not all bad. He sees Luna lying peacefully next to Neville's body, her butterbeer cork necklace and radish earrings immaculate amongst the carnage, a look of peace upon her face, she could have been sleeping. He sees the house-elves and Firenze crushed by the fallen roof of the Great hall. He sees so much death and destruction that he and Voldemort had caused. Harry makes his way through the beloved halls of his tarnished school to the astronomy tower, to watch the sun set on that bloody day.
The Master of Death sitss on top of the astronomy tower, gazing out upon the carnage that used to be magical Britain, strewn across the grounds of his first true home, Hogwarts. The Elder Wand is in his pocket, the Cloak of Invisibility around his shoulders, and the Resurrection Stone in his hand. Turning it over absentmindedly Harry is surprised when Hermione’s ghostly figure appears next to him.
“It’s okay,” she tells him, “You did what you had to, none of us blame you.”
Her message doesn’t stop Harry from blaming himself, however.
“We love you, Harry, I love you. Come to us when it's your time and we’ll welcome you with open arms,” the ghostly thing that is not quite Hermione says.
Harry can feel the dark energies racing inside himself, the temptation to continue building upon the rage and slaughter the Dark Arts had tempted him on. Ron was right so long ago, Dark magic really does corrupt.
Harry is tired. Tired of the killing and the anger. Tired of the battles and the war, as exhilarating as they can be. But most of all he is tired of losing people, even though he had no one left to lose. He refuses to go on the killing spree he could feel the darkness tempting him on.
He is done.
The Master of Death, the Boy-Who-Lived, the Man-Who-Conquered, the Triwizard champion, and the person he will always be at his core, just plain old Harry Potter; stands up and walks to the edge of the tallest tower of Hogwarts.
There's only one thing left for Harry to do, so he steps out into the night.
As he falls it feels more like flying, there's a wide smile on his face as he greets death like an old friend and they depart as equals.
And so Death claims the first and last Master of Death, the final descendent of the third brother, for his own.
And so Harry dies last.
And so Harry falls.