# Meanwhile, in the World Left Behind
The morning after the Battle of Hogwarts dawned grey and somber over a wizarding world that believed it had lost its savior along with its greatest threat. The official proclamation from the Ministry of Magic was brief, clinical in its devastating finality: "Harry James Potter and Tom Marvolo Riddle, known as Lord Voldemort, died simultaneously during the final confrontation. Both magical signatures vanished completely at 11:47 PM on May 2nd, 1998."
What the Ministry didn't understand—what no one could have understood without Luna Lovegood's peculiar gift for seeing beyond the veil of ordinary reality—was that vanished didn't necessarily mean dead.
In a small flat above Flourish and Blotts that Hermione had purchased with her war reparations, five witches sat around a table that bore the remnants of what had once been afternoon tea but had devolved into cold cups and untouched biscuits as grief settled over them like London fog. The afternoon light filtering through charmed windows did nothing to warm the chill that had taken residence in their hearts three weeks ago.
Hermione Granger sat at the head of the table, her usually immaculate appearance disheveled in ways that would have horrified her Hogwarts self. Her bushy hair had been pulled back in what might charitably be called a bun, though several escaped curls framed a face that looked as though she hadn't properly slept since receiving the news. Dark circles shadowed eyes that had once blazed with intellectual curiosity but now held only the dull ache of loss. Stacks of books towered around her chair like fortress walls—ancient texts on dimensional magic, theoretical treatises on the nature of death, everything the Hogwarts library, the Restricted Section, and her considerable personal collection could provide about magical disappearances and unexplained vanishings.
"The magical signature readings are conclusive," she said for what had to be the fifteenth time that afternoon, her voice carrying that particular tone of someone trying to convince herself of something she desperately didn't want to believe. She gestured sharply at the Ministry report spread before them, her movements precise despite the tremor in her hands. "Complete dispersal, no residual traces, no indication of transportation or transfiguration or any conceivable magical explanation except..." Her voice cracked slightly. "Except death."
"Except death," Daphne Greengrass repeated quietly, her aristocratic composure intact but showing stress fractures like fine porcelain subjected to too much pressure. Even in grief, she maintained the effortless elegance that had made her the unofficial queen of Slytherin social circles, her platinum blonde hair perfectly coiffed, her robes impeccably tailored. But her silver-green eyes—eyes that had watched Harry Potter from across the Great Hall for seven years without ever finding the courage to bridge the house divide—held depths of pain that no amount of pureblood training could disguise. "Such a clinical word for the end of everything that mattered."
She lifted her teacup with steady hands, a small act of rebellion against the chaos threatening to consume her carefully ordered world. "Though I suppose the Ministry would prefer clinical to 'catastrophic loss of the only person who made any of this worthwhile.'"
Susan Bones sat with her hands folded in her lap, the picture of proper young ladyhood except for the way her shoulders shook with barely suppressed sobs. Her usually warm demeanor had been replaced by the sort of hollow devastation that came from losing everyone you cared about piece by piece until even hope felt like a luxury you couldn't afford. First her parents to Death Eater violence during her third year, then her aunt Amelia—brilliant, brave Amelia who'd died protecting the very Ministry that now couldn't be bothered to properly mourn their savior.
"The Prophet," she said with bitter irony that sat strangely on someone known for her gentle optimism, "is calling him 'The Boy Who Lived Twice and Died Once.' They've already commissioned a statue. Apparently, heroic sacrifice sells more papers than ongoing grief." Her voice gained strength as anger kindled beneath the sorrow. "Twenty-four hours of mourning, then it's back to business as usual. As if Harry was just... just a particularly useful weapon that finally broke after too much use."
Padma Patil looked up from the letter she'd been writing and abandoning for the past two hours—another attempt to explain to her parents why she couldn't simply return to her normal life, why the world felt fundamentally different now that Harry Potter was gone. Her dark eyes, usually bright with curiosity and ambition, now held the distant confusion of someone trying to process the impossible.
"My parents sent a Howler this morning," she said, her cultured voice carrying undertones of exhaustion that spoke to sleepless nights and endless circular thoughts. "They're... displeased with my failure to return home immediately. Mother seems to think I should view Harry's death as an opportunity—one less distraction from finding a suitable husband and settling into proper married life."
Her laugh held no humor whatsoever. "Father suggested I consider it a learning experience about the dangers of associating with 'inappropriate persons.' As if Harry was some sort of social climbing exercise that simply didn't work out rather than..." She gestured helplessly. "Rather than the most important person in our world dying to save people who've already decided to forget what he sacrificed."
"He wouldn't want us to mourn forever," Daphne observed with the sort of practical wisdom that had served Slytherin house well for centuries, though her voice carried undertones that suggested she was trying to convince herself as much as the others. "Harry always believed in moving forward, in building something better rather than dwelling on what was lost. He'd want us to live, to find happiness, to make something meaningful from whatever time we have left."
Her composure cracked slightly, revealing the girl beneath the perfect pureblood facade. "Though I confess I'm having difficulty understanding how one builds meaning from rubble. How do you create something beautiful when the cornerstone of everything you believed in has been torn away?"
"That's exactly the problem, isn't it?" Hermione said with growing frustration, her brilliant mind applying itself to an equation that refused to balance no matter how many times she worked through the variables. "All our plans, all our hopes for what the world could become after Voldemort fell—they all assumed Harry would be here to see them through. Without him..."
She gestured at the newspapers scattered across the table, their headlines chronicling the wizarding world's attempts to return to normalcy with unseemly haste. "Look at this rubbish. 'MINISTRY ANNOUNCES RETURN TO TRADITIONAL POLICIES.' 'WEREWOLF REGISTRATION BILL REINTRODUCED.' 'HOUSE-ELF WELFARE COMMISSION DISSOLVED DUE TO FUNDING CONCERNS.'"
Her voice rose with each headline, years of frustration with wizarding society's willful ignorance finally finding outlet. "They're dismantling everything we fought for! Everything Harry died for! And they're doing it while his body isn't even cold because they know perfectly well that without him here to remind them why change matters, they can go back to all their comfortable prejudices and pretend the war was just an unfortunate interruption in business as usual!"
"Hermione," Susan said gently, recognizing the signs of her friend spiraling into the sort of rage-fueled despair that had been consuming all of them in different ways since the news broke. "You'll make yourself sick carrying all this anger."
"Good," Hermione snapped, then immediately looked contrite. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to take this out on you. It's just... how are we supposed to honor his memory when the entire wizarding world seems determined to waste everything he gave them? What's the point of his sacrifice if we just let them slide back into the same patterns that made Voldemort possible in the first place?"
It was Luna Lovegood who finally broke through the spiral of grief and fury that had been consuming them all. She'd been sitting by the window in characteristic silence, her silver-blonde hair catching what little afternoon sunlight managed to penetrate London's perpetual clouds. Her protuberant eyes had been focused on something the others couldn't see, her dreamy expression more distant than usual.
"He's not dead," she said with the sort of matter-of-fact certainty that had marked her most accurate predictions throughout their years at Hogwarts, her ethereal voice carrying undertones of absolute conviction that made everyone else stop talking and pay attention.
The silence that followed was profound—not the grief-heavy quiet they'd been maintaining, but the shocked stillness of people processing information that challenged everything they thought they understood about reality.
"Luna," Hermione said carefully, her logical mind immediately beginning to catalog all the reasons why such a statement couldn't possibly be accurate, "I know this is difficult for all of us, but denial isn't going to help anyone process—"
"I'm not in denial," Luna interrupted with gentle firmness, her strange eyes holding depths of knowledge that seemed to come from sources beyond ordinary education or experience. "I know what the Ministry reports say. I know what the magical signature readings indicate. I also know they're wrong."
She turned away from the window to face her friends directly, her expression taking on the sort of focused intensity that had once helped her navigate the Department of Mysteries and locate crucial prophecies when the fate of the wizarding world hung in the balance.
"Harry isn't dead, Hermione. He's lost, separated from us by barriers that most people would consider absolute, but not dead. I can see him."
"See him?" Daphne's aristocratic composure couldn't quite hide her desperate hope. "Luna, what exactly do you mean by 'see him'?"
"I mean I can perceive him across dimensional boundaries," Luna replied as if the ability to observe people in alternate realities was perfectly ordinary rather than the sort of thing that would revolutionize magical theory if properly understood. "Not clearly, not completely, but enough to know he's alive and whole and building something new in a place where winter lasts for years and honor still means something to the people in power."
"Dimensional boundaries," Hermione repeated, her scholarly instincts warring with desperate hope as she tried to process concepts that challenged her fundamental understanding of magical theory. "Luna, that's... that's not how magic works. Dimensional travel is purely theoretical. Even the most advanced research suggests—"
"Suggests that our understanding of magic is limited by our assumptions about what's possible," Luna finished calmly. "The same assumptions that told us a mother's love couldn't protect her child from the killing curse, or that Horcruxes were impossible to destroy, or that teenage students couldn't possibly defeat trained adult wizards in combat."
She smiled with the sort of serene confidence that had once maddened professors and enemies alike. "We've spent the last seven years proving that impossible things happen when you need them badly enough and love someone desperately enough to make them work."
"But dimensional barriers..." Hermione protested weakly, her brilliant mind struggling to accept possibilities that violated everything she'd learned about the nature of magical reality.
"Are exactly as real and exactly as permeable as we believe them to be," Luna said with growing conviction, as if the act of speaking about her visions was making them clearer and more detailed. "Magic responds to will, to need, to love. Always has. The only difference between what we call possible and what we call impossible is usually just a matter of how desperately we want it to be true."
"What else can you see?" Susan asked quietly, her practical nature accepting Luna's extraordinary claims with the sort of weary hope that came from having nothing left to lose. "If Harry's truly alive in some other world, what's his life like there? Is he... is he happy?"
Luna's expression softened with genuine affection as she shared what her peculiar gift had revealed. "He's not alone. There are people with him—good people, strong people, people who value the same things he's always fought to protect. A lord who understands honor, children who look at him like he hung the stars, friends who appreciate both his power and his humanity."
Her smile took on a quality that suggested she was seeing something beautiful. "And there's someone else. Someone special who makes him happy in ways he hasn't been since Fleur died."
The words hit the room like a physical blow. Daphne's teacup rattled against its saucer as her hands trembled. Susan's face crumpled with fresh grief. Padma dropped her quill, ink spattering across her abandoned letter.
"Someone else?" Daphne's voice carried a note of complexity that suggested happiness for Harry's potential joy warring with personal heartbreak that she'd never had the chance to discover whether she could have been that person for him.
"Someone who loves him the way he deserves to be loved," Luna confirmed with the sort of gentle wisdom that acknowledged the pain her revelation might cause while remaining committed to honesty about what she'd observed. "Someone who sees all of him—the hero and the man, the legend and the person who just wants to build something good in a world that's given him too much darkness."
"That's wonderful," Hermione said, and she genuinely meant it despite the way her heart felt like it was being squeezed by invisible hands. "He deserves that kind of love, that kind of peace. After everything he's been through, after all the loss and pain and impossible choices..." Her voice grew stronger as intellectual honesty overrode personal disappointment. "If he's found someone who can make him truly happy, then that's exactly what should have happened."
"Is it wrong," Susan asked quietly, "that I'm jealous of someone I've never met in a world I can't reach for giving Harry something I always dreamed of offering him myself?"
"It's human," Daphne replied with characteristic directness, setting down her teacup with precise movements that spoke to someone maintaining control through rigid adherence to social forms. "We all harbored feelings for him that we never had the courage to express. Now we're faced with the reality that those opportunities are gone forever, replaced by his happiness with someone who had the chance we never did."
"I should have told him," Padma said suddenly, her voice thick with regret that had been building for weeks. "During the war, any time in the last few years when I had the opportunity. I should have found the courage to let him know that he meant more to me than friendship or admiration."
"What would have been the point?" Hermione asked, though not unkindly. "Harry was completely devoted to Fleur. Even before they were together, it was obvious to anyone who paid attention that she was the only person he saw in that way. We could have declared our feelings from the top of Gryffindor Tower and it wouldn't have changed anything."
"At least we would have been honest," Susan observed. "At least he would have known that people cared about him as more than just the Boy Who Lived or the Chosen One. That there were people who saw him as Harry first and the hero second."
"He knew we cared," Luna said with certainty that brooked no argument. "Maybe not in the specific romantic sense, but he understood that we valued him for who he was rather than what he represented. That mattered to him more than you might think."
"But it doesn't help us now," Padma pointed out with practical honesty that cut through sentiment to address their actual situation. "Even if Harry is alive, even if he's found love and happiness in some impossible other world, we're still here dealing with a reality where our savior is considered dead and our future feels empty without him in it."
"Does it have to be empty?" Luna asked quietly, her voice taking on the sort of determined conviction that had once convinced them all to break into the Department of Mysteries on nothing more than dreams and desperate hope.
The question hung in the air between them like a challenge, heavy with implications that none of them could easily dismiss or embrace.
"What exactly are you suggesting, Luna?" Daphne asked with the careful precision of someone who sensed they were approaching conversational territory that might require decisions she wasn't prepared to make.
"I'm suggesting," Luna said with growing confidence, "that if Harry can cross the barriers between worlds, so can we. If love is strong enough to survive dimensional separation, it's strong enough to guide us to where we belong."
"Luna," Hermione began with the careful tone of someone about to explain why a cherished belief couldn't possibly be accurate, "even assuming dimensional travel is theoretically possible—which violates everything we understand about the fundamental nature of magical reality—we have no way of knowing where Harry ended up, no method for targeting a specific dimensional destination, no means of ensuring we'd arrive alive or intact or even in the same world—"
"The Veil," Luna interrupted with the sort of calm certainty that suggested she'd already worked through all the practical details while the rest of them had been drowning in grief and impossibility.
The words sent a collective shiver through the group. Everyone present had been at the Battle of the Department of Mysteries during their fifth year, had seen Sirius Black fall through that ancient archway, had heard the whispers and voices that seemed to call from the other side of reality itself.
"You're talking about suicide," Susan said bluntly, her voice carrying the kind of stark honesty that came from having lost too many people to be comfortable with euphemisms or gentle evasions. "Walking into the Veil isn't dimensional travel—it's death, permanent and irreversible."
"Is it?" Luna asked with the sort of philosophical challenge that had once helped them solve the mystery of Ravenclaw's diadem and understand the true nature of magical artifacts. "Or is that just what we've assumed because no one who's gone through has ever come back to tell us what they found on the other side?"
She stood up from her position by the window, moving with the sort of decisive grace that marked someone who'd moved beyond theoretical discussion to practical planning and immediate action.
"Think about it," she continued, addressing the obvious skepticism she could read in their faces. "What do we actually know about the Veil? That it's ancient, that it calls to people, that those who enter don't return. But we've never had someone go through who was looking for something specific, hoping for something particular, loving someone desperately enough to find their way to where they needed to be."
"That's an enormous assumption," Hermione protested, her logical mind recoiling from the casual way Luna was discussing what amounted to organized suicide based on little more than wishful thinking. "You're essentially proposing that we gamble our lives on the possibility that death is actually a transportation method that depends on the traveler's emotional state and specific intentions."
"I'm proposing," Luna said with patient clarity, "that we consider the possibility that magic responds to will, to need, to love in ways that our current understanding doesn't account for. The same way it responded when Harry survived the killing curse, when we destroyed Horcruxes, when we accomplished impossible things because we needed them to work."
"This is different," Daphne said quietly, though her tone suggested she was trying to convince herself as much as arguing with Luna. "This is talking about leaving our entire world behind, abandoning everyone who depends on us, all the work that still needs to be done to rebuild after the war."
"What work?" Hermione asked with bitter accuracy, gesturing again toward the newspaper headlines that had been chronicling the wizarding world's systematic dismantling of wartime progress. "The Ministry's already reinstating the same policies that created the conditions for Voldemort's rise. The purebloods are quietly consolidating power again, the magical creatures are being pushed back to the margins, and everyone's pretending the war was just an unfortunate interruption rather than proof that the entire system needs fundamental change."
Her voice rose with each word, intellectual frustration combining with personal grief to create something approaching fury. "They're erasing Harry's legacy before his body is even cold! Everything he fought for, everything he died for—they're systematically undoing it because it's easier to return to comfortable prejudices than maintain the difficult work of actually building something better."
"Without Harry here to remind them why change matters," Padma added with growing anger at the willful blindness she'd observed in the weeks since Voldemort's defeat, "without his example to inspire them toward something greater, they're just sliding back into all the same patterns that made the war inevitable in the first place."
"Exactly," Luna said with approval, though her expression carried the sort of patient sadness that came from having foreseen these exact developments while hoping she might be wrong. "So what exactly are we accomplishing by staying? What are we building here that's worth abandoning the possibility of reunion with the person who made all our efforts meaningful?"
"Our families," Susan said quietly, though her voice lacked conviction. "Our responsibilities. The people who care about us."
"Do they?" Luna asked with gentle honesty. "Susan, your remaining family consists of distant cousins who've spent the last three weeks suggesting you 'move on' and 'find closure.' Padma's parents want her to pretend Harry never existed so she can focus on marriage prospects. Hermione's parents are Muggles who don't understand what she's lost. Daphne's father is already negotiating advantageous marriages to restore the family's political position after their... neutral stance during the war."
Each observation landed like a physical blow, not because they were cruel, but because they were accurate.
"We're alone here," Luna continued with devastating honesty. "Alone in our grief, alone in our determination to honor Harry's memory, alone in our refusal to accept that his death should be treated as a convenient excuse to abandon everything he stood for."
"But if we follow him..." Hermione said slowly, her brilliant mind working through possibilities that both terrified and exhilarated her. "If we somehow manage to find our way to whatever world he's ended up in, what then? He's found happiness with someone else. He's building a new life. What right do we have to disrupt that by arriving uninvited from a past he might prefer to forget?"
"The right of people who love him enough to risk everything for the chance to help him build something worthy of his dreams," Luna replied with quiet conviction. "The right of friends who refuse to accept that death—or dimensional separation—should be the end of our commitment to supporting the best person any of us have ever known."
"Besides," Daphne added with the sort of practical calculation that had served her well in navigating Slytherin politics, "if Harry's truly as happy as Luna suggests, our arrival would be a gift rather than a burden. More people to help with whatever he's building, more support for whatever challenges he's facing, more evidence that the bonds he formed in this world were strong enough to transcend impossible barriers."
"And if we're wrong?" Susan asked with the practical caution that had kept her alive through years of Death Eater violence. "If the Veil really is just death, if we're deluding ourselves about the nature of dimensional travel, if we end up destroying ourselves for nothing more than romantic fantasy about reunion with someone who might not even want us to follow him?"
"Then we die together," Luna said simply, "doing something brave and stupid and romantic in pursuit of the person who taught us that some things are worth dying for. Which seems like a better ending than spending the rest of our lives in a world that doesn't understand what it lost when Harry Potter disappeared."
The silence that followed was different from anything they'd shared before—not the heavy quiet of grief or the shocked pause of processing impossible information, but the contemplative stillness of people weighing decisions that would change everything about their understanding of life, death, and the nature of love itself.
"I'm in," Hermione said finally, her voice carrying the sort of determined clarity that had marked her most important decisions throughout their friendship with Harry. "I've spent three weeks trying to figure out how to live in a world without him, and I can't. I won't. If there's even the slightest possibility that we could be reunited, if love really can transcend dimensional barriers and guide us to where we belong, then that's a risk worth taking."
She looked around at her friends with something approaching her old confidence. "Besides, what's the worst that could happen? We die? We're already dead inside. At least this way we'd be dying for something meaningful."
"Me too," Susan added with growing conviction, her gentle nature transforming into something harder and more focused as she contemplated the possibility of escape from a world that seemed determined to waste everything they'd fought to achieve. "I've lost everything that mattered to me except you lot. My parents, Auntie Amelia, and now Harry. If there's a chance to be reunited with him, to be part of whatever he's building in this other world, then I'd rather die trying than live safely with emptiness."
"And me," Padma said quietly, setting aside her letter to parents who would never understand why their dutiful daughter had chosen cosmic impossibility over conventional happiness. "I never told him how I felt, never found the courage to let him know that he meant more to me than friendship or admiration. If there's a chance to fix that, to be honest about feelings I was too cowardly to express, then I'd rather risk everything than live with regrets I can never address."
All eyes turned to Daphne, who sat in contemplative silence as she worked through the implications of what they were proposing. As the most politically astute member of their group, she understood better than the others what they'd be abandoning—the influence they could wield, the changes they might eventually accomplish, the responsibilities they had to their families and the pureblood community that had shaped them.
"You know what the most pathetic part is?" she said finally, her voice carrying a note of resigned laughter that spoke to someone who'd reached the end of their ability to find rational reasons for irrational decisions. "The most pathetic part is that this actually makes more sense than anything else we could do with our lives."
She stood up with the sort of decisive movement that marked someone who'd moved from consideration to commitment, her aristocratic bearing transformed by purpose that transcended social expectations and conventional wisdom.
"I'm in," she declared with the sort of fierce determination that had once helped her navigate the impossible political position of being a Slytherin opposed to Voldemort's ideology during the war. "Because staying here means watching them systematically destroy everything Harry died for while pretending it's for the greater good. Because leaving means there's at least a chance we could be part of something better, something worthy of the person we all loved more than we ever had the courage to admit."
Luna smiled with the sort of radiant joy that transformed her entire face, as if she'd been carrying the weight of this possibility alone and was finally able to share it with people who understood the difference between reasonable caution and necessary risk.
"Then we go tonight," she said with practical efficiency that suggested she'd already worked through all the logistical details while waiting for the others to reach their own conclusions. "The Department of Mysteries will be minimally staffed, most of the Aurors are still dealing with Death Eater trials and cleanup operations, and the Veil itself is more active after midnight—the voices are clearer, the barrier between worlds is thinner."
"Tonight," Hermione repeated, her brilliant mind already shifting from theoretical consideration to practical planning as she contemplated the immediate steps required to implement what might be the most important decision of their lives. "That gives us perhaps six hours to prepare. We'll need to consider what to bring, how to access the Department of Mysteries without triggering security alerts, contingency plans if we're discovered..."
"What contingency plans?" Luna interrupted gently. "What preparations are actually necessary for walking through a doorway that will either kill us or transport us to another world entirely? The most important thing we can bring is our determination to find Harry and our willingness to help him build something worthy of the sacrifices we've all made."
"Letters," Susan said suddenly, her practical nature asserting itself as she considered the people they'd be leaving behind without explanation or farewell. "We should leave letters explaining what we've done and why, so our families don't spend the rest of their lives wondering what happened to us. They deserve that much closure, even if they'll never understand our reasoning."
"Agreed," Daphne nodded approvingly at the suggestion, her political instincts recognizing the importance of managing the aftermath of their departure even if they wouldn't be present to deal with the consequences directly. "Brief, honest, apologetic but not regretful. We're not abandoning our responsibilities—we're pursuing a different kind of duty in a place where our efforts might actually accomplish something meaningful."
As afternoon faded into evening and they began making their final preparations, each woman found herself thinking about Harry Potter and the impossible love that had brought them to this moment. The love they'd never had the courage to express, the devotion they'd hidden behind friendship and house loyalties, the bone-deep certainty that he was the best person any of them had ever known and losing him had broken something fundamental in their understanding of what life could be.
"You know," Hermione observed as she sealed the letter to her parents with hands that remained perfectly steady despite the magnitude of what they were about to attempt, "if this works, if we actually manage to find Harry in whatever world he's ended up in, he's going to be absolutely furious with us for doing something this dangerous just to follow him across dimensional barriers."
"Good," Luna replied with the sort of serene confidence that suggested she was looking forward to that particular confrontation. "He's been taking care of everyone else for so long that he's forgotten what it feels like to have people willing to take risks for his sake. It'll be good for him to remember that love works both ways, that sometimes the people who care about you get to be stupidly brave and romantically impractical too."
"Besides," Daphne added with a slight smirk that recalled her old Slytherin confidence, "I'm rather curious to meet this mysterious woman who's captured his heart. Professional interest in the competition, you understand. I want to see what sort of person was worthy of Harry Potter's devotion when the rest of us apparently weren't."
"That's a terrible attitude," Susan protested, though she was smiling for the first time in weeks. "We should be happy that he's found love, not treating it like a competition we lost."
"Can't it be both?" Padma asked with the sort of philosophical observation that had marked her Ravenclaw tendencies throughout school. "Happy for his sake, curious about her qualities, and perhaps just slightly competitive about proving we would have been equally worthy if circumstances had been different?"
"Definitely both," Hermione agreed with growing excitement that had nothing to do with intellectual curiosity and everything to do with the possibility of seeing Harry again. "Though I suspect we're going to find that she's exactly the sort of person we'd choose for him ourselves if we were being completely honest about what he needs and deserves."
As midnight approached and they made their way through London's sleeping streets toward the Ministry of Magic, five witches walked in companionable silence that felt like coming home after years of exile. For the first time since Harry Potter had vanished from their world, they were moving toward hope rather than away from it, toward possibility rather than resignation, toward a future that might actually be worth the sacrifices they'd all made in the name of building something better.
The night was clear and cold, stars visible overhead in ways they rarely were in the city, as if the universe itself was providing illumination for their journey into the unknown. They moved with purpose and determination, young women who'd survived a war and emerged with their capacity for hope intact, now prepared to risk everything for the chance to reunite with the person who'd taught them that some things were worth dying for.
Behind them, they left a world that was already beginning to forget the lessons of the war, already sliding back into patterns of prejudice and complacency that would eventually require another hero to challenge the system and inspire change. Ahead of them lay uncertainty, impossible choices, and the cosmic gamble that love could guide them across barriers that rational magic considered absolute.
But for the first time in weeks, they weren't alone in their grief or their determination to honor Harry's memory in ways that mattered. They had each other, they had purpose, and they had the bone-deep certainty that some bonds really were stronger than death itself.
The Veil was waiting.
And on the other side, in ways they couldn't imagine and a world they'd never dreamed of, destiny was preparing to reunite them with the person who'd made their understanding of heroism, love, and the possibility of redemption feel real rather than merely theoretical.
The greatest test of that theory was about to begin.
---
*Later that night, in various corners of Essos and Westeros...*
In the opulent chambers of Magister Illyrio Mopatis's manse in Pentos, Daenerys Targaryen woke from dreams of silver-green eyes and ancient English manors to find herself remembering tea parties with imaginary friends, the weight of family expectations that felt like chains, and the peculiar sting of being sorted into Slytherin when every instinct screamed that she belonged somewhere else entirely.
*Daphne,* she thought with crystalline clarity that cut through the disorientation of awakening with someone else's memories, *I was Daphne Greengrass, and I loved a boy with impossible green eyes who saved the world and disappeared into myth.*
---
In the gardens of Highgarden, Margaery Tyrell was discussing roses with her grandmother when the world suddenly tilted sideways and she found herself remembering books—thousands of books, read voraciously and remembered perfectly, knowledge accumulated like armor against a world that thought clever girls were threats to be contained rather than resources to be treasured.
She fainted quite gracefully onto the perfectly manicured grass, her last conscious thought being: *Hermione. I was Hermione Granger, and I would have followed him anywhere if he'd asked.*
---
In Dorne, Arianne Martell set down her wine cup with trembling hands as memories of another desert flooded her consciousness—not the red sands of her homeland, but the endless expanses she'd read about in books written by people who'd never seen such places, stories of distant lands filtered through the safety of Hogwarts' library where a girl with dark eyes and careful ambitions had dreamed of adventure beyond anything Westeros could provide.
*Padma,* she whispered to the desert wind that suddenly smelled of parchment and possibility, *I was Padma Patil, and I never told him how I felt because I was too afraid of rejection to risk everything for love.*
---
In her chamber at Winterfell, Susan Bones dropped the comb she'd been running through her hair as phantom pain lanced through her chest—not a wound of flesh, but the soul-deep agony of losing everyone who mattered, one by one, until survival itself felt like the cruelest punishment imaginable. Parents. Aunt Amelia. Friends. And finally, the boy who had made heroism feel possible, not just something from old stories.
She pressed her face into her hands, shoulders shaking. Fifteen years old in this world, yet carrying the grief of someone who had learned far too young that love was inseparable from loss.
*Harry*, she sobbed, curling into herself on the furs. *I was Susan Bones, and I followed you into death because living without you wasn't really living at all.*
---
In Qarth, the mysterious woman known as Quaithe removed her golden mask with hands that suddenly remembered the weight of spectacles and the particular way butterbeer tasted on winter mornings when Hogwarts felt like home rather than merely school.
*Luna,* she said to her reflection in the polished bronze mirror, her voice carrying the same dreamy certainty that had once helped five friends navigate impossible odds in service of love that transcended dimensional barriers, *I was Luna Lovegood, and I could see him across the spaces between worlds because some visions are too important to be obscured by things like death or distance.*
The cosmic gamble had succeeded beyond their wildest hopes.
In five different bodies, in five different kingdoms, five souls had found their way across impossible barriers to a world where winter was coming and honor still meant something to the people in power.
Somewhere to the north, in a castle called Winterfell where ancient stones remembered eight thousand years of history, a young lord with emerald eyes and a phoenix companion was about to discover that love really could conquer death, dimensional barriers, and the sort of cosmic separation that should have been permanent.
The reunion was complete, though none of them knew it yet.
Some stories, it seemed, really did have happy endings.
Even the impossible ones.
*Especially* the impossible ones.
---
Hey fellow fanfic enthusiasts!
I hope you're enjoying the fanfiction so far! I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Whether you loved it, hated it, or have some constructive criticism, your feedback is super important to me. Feel free to drop a comment or send me a message with your thoughts. Can't wait to hear from you!
If you're passionate about fanfiction and love discussing stories, characters, and plot twists, then you're in the right place! I've created a Discord (HHHwRsB6wd) server dedicated to diving deep into the world of fanfiction, especially my own stories. Whether you're a reader, a writer, or just someone who enjoys a good tale, I welcome you to join us for lively discussions, feedback sessions, and maybe even some sneak peeks into upcoming chapters, along with artwork related to the stories. Let's nerd out together over our favorite fandoms and explore the endless possibilities of storytelling!
Can't wait to see you there!