"I had a dream again yesterday."

"Oh?"

"Yeah."

"Was it a bad one?"

"Yeah."

"How bad?"

"Everybody died."

There was blood dripping from the ceiling. That was odd, mostly because it was a stone ceiling inside of a castle. So much of it must have puddled up on the next floor that it was finally seeping through.

Harry found that the idea didn't bother him quite so much. Not much bothered him anymore. It was as though he had just gone... numb.

They had never stood a chance. With the Ministry's foot-dragging and whining, what little Dumbledore and his vigilantes could do was but too little, too late.

Too late for anything.

Death Eaters could be quite ruthless when they wanted to be.

A hissing, rattling sound drew Harry's attention from the blood puddling at his feet. He looked down the corridor at the figure standing there. Tall and pale, the woman seemed to give off an ephemeral glow as she gazed at him. Her simple white gown covered her from shoulders to toes, but never seemed to touch the floor. Golden hair flying in a nonexistent wind, she raised an arm and beckoned him forward.

Was it a trick? A Death Eater trick? The thought made him pause, hesitate for a fraction of a second. And then the idea was discarded. So what it if it was? It didn't matter anymore.

He walked over to the apparition. She smiled at him, and he could almost swear that he could see right through her for a moment. Then she floated over to the window and gestured for him to join her.

His blood-soaked boots squishing as he stepped across the grimy stones, he quietly joined her and looked out across the expansive Hogwarts lawn.

What used to be the expansive Hogwarts lawn. A long time ago. It had since then served as a boot camp, a field hospital, a battle field, and, now, a mortuary.

What had once been a field of dreams -- dreams of quidditch and studies and O.W.Ls -- had now been metamorphosed into a field of death. Not one person still stood upon that lawn, Death Eater or otherwise. Students lay sprawled about, some on top of each other, some alone in puddles of their own blood. Some simply lay on the ground, the horror-struck look of a Killing-Curse victim clearly upon their face. Others, torn to shreds. Some were missing body parts, others simply burnt, charred husks. There was an Order member, his torso turned inside-out by a dark curse. Alongside him lay a death eater with half of a face.

And some... some simply looked as though they had laid down and gone to sleep.

He turned to the apparition, confusion on his face. "What happened?" he asked, somewhat surprised at the roughness of his voice. "Who won?"

She smiled at his, a cold, unfeeling smile. "Nobody won," came the response. It seemed to float about them, coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once. The apparition's lips did not move, yet it seemed that it was her.

Harry frowned and glanced back out at the carnage. A peaceful stillness seemed to have settled upon everything. The world was deathly quiet. No birds, no animals. No breathing. Even the blood dripping down the hall seemed to have since ceased. It seemed to be getting warmer, so unbearably warm and no breeze to cool him down.

Something was not right. "What's going on?" he asked. "How could nobody win?"

"Nobody won," the response echoed back, "Because nobody is left to win."

Harry's eyes widened at the realization. "But the reserves!" he exclaimed, in a rare moment of passion. "The others, in the Bunkers--"

"Dead. Dead." The apparition's smile seemed to grow wider. "Dead and gone. There's no-one left but you, Harry Potter."

"No-one left..." he whispered and slumped against the stones. It couldn't possibly be... "The muggles?"

"Dead and gone. Dead and gone."

He closed his eyes and took a breath. The air seemed thicker, somehow. Heavier. Less clean. He opened his eyes again. "What's going on?"

The woman's gown seemed to flutter in the nonexistant breeze once more. "We're starting over now. First we must destroy the old to make room for the new." She smiled again, this time showing her teeth. "Doesn't your sun look better closer up?"

The sun did seem to be noticeably larger. The apparition started to fade.

"Wait!" Harry called out, stretching a hand out as if to touch her. "Who are you?"

The lady smiled and faded. The sun grew larger and larger. The world twisted and melted and caught fire and died.

And Death smiled.

"Was it a possibility?"

"No. I don't know. I don't think so. It looked pretty certain to me."

"When will it happen?"

"Soon. But in a while. The people..."

"Yes?"

"... I know them. But I don't. I think I met them in my dreams."

Hermione was the first to die. Snape killed her. And then Ron killed Snape. But not until Snape killed Ron. But it hadn't really been Snape, but Mulciber under Polyjuice, so Snape wasn't really dead but everybody thought he was. It was all very confusing. Especially when Snape showed up at Grimmauld place.

Harry simply stared at him and offered him a butterbeer.

Sometimes it just got to be too much, and one horror blended into another. Hermione had taken days to die. Days of torture and pain. It had simply become too much for her body to handle and she just died. Blood-loss, suffocation, heart failure. Something. It had been hell identifying her body. It had been even worse trying to find all the pieces.

Ron, on the other hand, seemed to go mad with grief. For a week he was inconsolable, sobbing and, later after the tears were all dried up, sitting and rocking back and forth, making small keening noises like a wounded puppy. And then, he seemed to snap out of it, but not fully. He would laugh, cackle really, at random times, arguing with himself. He sounded a bit like Kreacher. When he began to refer to himself in the third person and become inordinately interested in the Black family silverware, the Order tried to confine him, calm him.

It didn't work. Two nights later, Ron stole two butcher knives from the kitchen, hunted down Snape-who-was-not-Snape and butchered him. Fake-Snape managed to hit him with a Burning Blood Curse at some point during the turmoil. Fake-Snape died from a knife to the head. Ron slit his body open from stomach to sternum and giggled as the burning blood flowed out of his body and he died amongst the flames.

And Harry had watched him burn and had reflected on how very fragile life really was.

When Snape showed up at Grimmauld Place, Harry had handed him a butterbeer and offered him a chair. Snape didn't seem to know what the think about the situation. Harry didn't rightly care. Sometimes he wondered if he himself was alright in the head.

"Potter."

Harry didn't answer. He sipped his butterbeer and thought about Ron and Hermione and their adventure on McGonagal's giant chess set.

"Are you going to ignore me, Potter?"

His mind was wandering. Did he have company? Did he care? It was just like that time, when he and Hermione and Ron were watching Buckbeak's 'execution'...

"Do you believe that you know what I'm going to tell you? So arrogant -- just like your father."

Hmmm... yes... his father. People said he looked like his father. And he did. Just like that time when he was with Ron and they were looking into the Mirror of Erised...

Silence. Harry thought about his parents standing proudly, silently, over his shoulder in the reflection in the mirror. The reflection that could have been but never would be.

Then, quietly: "The Dark Lord is coming, Potter. To Hogwarts. He wants to kill the children, the unworthy ones."

More silence. Harry poked at his butterbeer and it fizzed at him. Fizzing. It reminded him of Lockhart's lesson, the one with the pixies....

And then, even more quietly: "I don't like you, Potter, but there's no one else to turn to. I fear that it's too late now."

They sat in silence. The butterbeer fizzed. Snape stood and left.

The unsaid words echoed silently -- Are you still sane?

"It didn't take very long."

"What did?"

"The killing. It started... and then... it stopped."

"Was it gruesome? Gory?"

"At first. And then it was peaceful. They just... died."

Harry saw Snape again a week later. The few Ministry Aurors that were left had caught him, stripped him, tied him to a tree, and tortured him. Harry had been in Hogsmeade that day, checking up on the defenses, when he had seen the odd exodus out of the Forbidden Forest. Curiosity warring with his concern, he waited for the Aurors to pass him before following their trail back into the woods.

It wasn't very hard to find the place -- little clearing off of the footpath with a single young oak tree growing in the middle.

Harry had untied his wrists and held the wounded man in his arms as he died.

There was little else he could do.

"Do you believe in angels?"

"Excuse me?"

"Angels. People who have died and gone Beyond."

"Like ghosts?"

"No, ghosts don't make it Beyond. I mean angels."

"Why do you ask?"

"Because the angels were there."

"There?"

"At the killing place. They killed them."

"Who?"

"All of them."

Times like this, Harry wondered how magical folks could ever not believe in God.

With the disintegration of the Ministry, law and order had fallen upon the wayside. Every small-time criminal saw the opportunity to become a big-time crook. Petty thieves turned to arson, smugglers turned to murder. Murderers -- they turned to massacre.

'Angel of death', one self-styled anti-hero called himself. Men were but angels fallen from grace, waiting to redeem themselves in their Creator's eye. If men were angels, then they truly must be killer angels.

Diagon Alley went up in a pillar of fire. The flames grew and spread and ate at everything, past the Leaky Cauldron, spilling out into muggle London. London burned and the killer angels rejoiced in the destruction as they perished.

Times like this, Harry wondered how anybody could ever believe in God.

"Let's talk about something happier. What do you say, Harry?"

"If you say so."

"Unless you want to talk about the Dream..."

"It doesn't matter. It'll happen anyway."

"Right. Well, your file tells me it's your birthday. How old are you today, Harry?"

"Eleven."

"Your relatives have a party planned for you later today then?

"I don't like parties, Doctor. May I go now?"

Harry Potter looked up when somebody entered his compartment. He smiled genially at the red-haired boy. "Hello there," he said. "My name's Harry. What's yours?"

He stretched out a hand. The boy -- Ron, his subconscious whispered, Ron Weasley -- grasped it and introduced himself: "Ron Weasley."

Something flashed through Harry's mind, a memory of something that had never happened. Blood and pain, the flash of a knife, an unearthly scream. His eyes flickered and he smiled back at the other boy. "It's a pleasure. Want to sit with me?"

And they sat together for the rest of the train ride.