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Tweak says, "I saw it with my own eye."

Harry Potter (ab_harry) wrote in hogwarts_dawn,
@ 2021-05-02 21:03:00

Entry tags:

character: harry potter, character: james s. potter, character: lily evans potter, character: padma patil, character: parvati patil, character: remus lupin

RP: The Memorial
Who: Open
When: 10am 2nd of May
Where: In the cloister of the courtyard
What: It's Remembrance Day

Harry had been present to every ceremony since the end of the war. Each year, no matter how much he hated it, he had insisted on reading the names of the fifty-three witches and wizards that had fallen in the Battle of Hogwarts. It had been his one condition if Kingsley wanted him to show up. Each name had been an admission of guilt for Harry, another way he had failed, a reminder that if he had done better, maybe some of those people would be alive.

This time it was different. Even the weather was cold and rainy, a complete change from the last ceremony he'd attended.

"For the past five years, I've read the names of the dead. Fifty-three people that we mourned. I don't need the Ministry to give me that list. I know every name by heart, but if I were to read it today, there would be only fifty-one names. Remus Lupin and Severus Snape are two names I wouldn't have read, but for the past five years, we've also forgotten all of the other people who died in a war that lasted for decades." He couldn't help looking at his parents when he said that.

"That was that killed so many people ended decades ago and for the younger generation, some of whom are here today and older than us," he said with a small smile, "it was just history. They couldn't understand what all of us suffered. All the losses and sacrifices we made. Today, we're here, in a future marked by more losses and these affect all of us. So today, instead of remembering those fifty-one people, we take a day to remember all of the people who died, because their own government failed them. We take the time to honour them and tomorrow we keep living for us and for them and we make sure that a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again."

He looked around the cloister and realized how much tougher this speech would have been if his friends and his family weren't here. "And hopefully we also get to enjoy this second chance at life. So please join me for a minute of silence in honour of the dead and then I hope that you join us for a pint at the Styx."

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Jamie

curseseeker
2021-05-02 06:31 pm UTC (link)

Jamie stood near his siblings, as he had for their entire lives, and listened to Harry Potter talk about sacrifice and remembering the lost. They had just 'celebrated' the thirtieth anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts a couple months before he and Al appeared outside Hagrid's hut. It was the oddest feeling to realize that he had attended more of these memorials on this day than Harry Potter himself, now. It was even stranger to realize their positions were reversed.

His father, too young by decades and yet still the father from Jamie's earliest memories, spoke of how Jamie's generation didn't understand the loss of the war. Then, in the next breath talked about losses that only truly seemed to affect those present who were of Jamie's generation. The older generations thought of the wars. Despite the nod to the end of the world, this memorial was mostly about the war. None of them had come from a time when they even knew the world that had been lost.

But, Jamie did. Al and Lilu did. Scorpius and Savannah and Roxanne did.

Folding his arms as he listened, Jamie tried to push down the feeling of wrongness. Somehow, it felt wrong to have the destruction of their world tied to Remembrance Day and the war. It felt...dismissive...of what his generation had lost because their parents and grandparents had tried to kill each other off entirely and then panicked when they realized what that meant. Maybe they didn't understand the war, but he thought they understood this current immediate loss far better. For thirty years his father had read the names he felt guilty for. Today the only two names spoken were for those who were alive. Jamie supposed it was because for his father and the older generations, it was as much 'just history' as the war was to the younger generation.

But, for the younger generation, those dead had names. They were his cousins, aunts, and uncles. His mother. His classmates and coworkers. They were his parents friends, the other members of the DA.

In a way, it was Jamie's father, too. For all that Harry was standing right in front of him, it would never be the same. He would never be the man who had taught Jamie how to fly, how to cast the patronus. Harry might have been impressed with the stag that first night, -- Jamie wasn't actually sure of that -- but Jamie's father had actually been there, for a rare moment he'd been present and emotionally connected when he'd said he was proud of Jamie for casting it so well, when he'd seemed pleased to have the stag run in the family. No matter what, if any, relationship he found with this younger version, Jamie was never going to earn the affection of the man who was supposed to have been there to put a plaster on his skinned knees or for Jamie to talk to when he started to realize he might not be quite as straight as he'd always believed. That man was gone, even if Harry Potter lived to be a hundred and fifty, Jamie's father was gone.

It was almost funny. His father had grown up without his parents. Jamie had, in theory, grown up with both his parents. And, yet, the one thing they had in common was not knowing much about them. Maybe it was time for Jamie to admit defeat, admit he was never going to get that father-son relationship, and just be happy that his father, at least, was getting the chance they both had wanted.

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