Title: Recriminations

Author: mithborien

Word Count: 582

Rating: G

Characters: Harry

Note: Written for jamie2109 AWDT prompt except I kinda deliberately misinterpreted the prompt.

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I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but your son…

Your daughter sacrificed her life but it was not…

It is with my heartfelt condolences…

Harry throws the quill across the room and when that doesn’t seem enough he sends the ink pot flying after it. The sound the lamp makes when it crashes into the wall after he finally hurls it is the most satisfying though. It is old, an antique really and the deeply stained wood and polished brass make the most delightful thump against the plaster. The crack in the table that it causes when it falls to the ground afterwards is a perfect counterpoint.

There was nothing I could do…

I tried to save him…

She died defending others…

His heart hasn’t stopped pounding since the moment he laid down his wand at the end of the war. The moment that he realised that while Voldemort was destroyed completely, there was also scores of dead bodies around him. Classmates and friends, allies and comrades, people whose faces he didn’t recognise but who fought anyway because they knew his face. They fought because of him. They fought because he asked them to and he got them all killed.

He died bravely and with honour…

She died quickly and painlessly…

I couldn’t get to them before the enemy tore them apart…

He hasn’t used magic since the end. Not even for a simple Lumos or to warm up the coffee he has every night. The dark liquid keeps him awake past midnight, when the worst of the nightmares always seem to happen and it makes him jittery enough so that he can’t dream when he closes his eyes to doze. The press have stopped trying to cajole him for interviews and people have stopped trying to shake his hand on the rare occasions that he ventures out.

I avenged your sister’s death…

Your brother’s murderer has been sentenced…

Some escaped…

It doesn’t matter that Ron and Hermione are still alive. That Ginny still makes a point to visit him every week. The fact that the Weasley clan is still intact doesn’t make him happy. He should be glad that werewolves aren’t discriminated against by law anymore and that Remus has managed to pull a life together for himself. He should be thankful that McGonagall is still the headmaster of Hogwarts and the Order still functions. But no matter how much he has left, it doesn’t matter because he can’t get rid of the unbearable guilt for the ones who didn’t make it. Because everyone says he is a hero but since when do heroes cause massacres?

I don’t know what else to say…

He will be remembered…

I won’t forget…

The floor of his room is covered in torn up letters that he has never sent. There aren’t enough words in the world to convey the remorse and sadness that he feels but he tries. He knows that nothing will ever make it better for the families of loved ones lost but he still tries. He wishes he had found another way, another way to defeat Voldemort that didn’t involve leaving a trail of innocents behind him. He wishes that he had died in that battle, quickly and painlessly and maybe with honour instead of slowly dying each day, suffocating from the guilt and pain that he can’t let go.

But he knows that if he had died then Voldemort would have lived.

I’m sorry he’s dead.