“The castle told me,” the Headmistress said as she sat by the deathbed of her oldest and dearest friend, holding his ancient hand in her own. It wouldn’t be long now. “You knew it would though, didn’t you. It’s not the sort of secret Hogwarts could keep forever. I wish–“
She rubbed away angry tears.
“I wish you’d let them remember. Mom, dad, anyone. You had decades to go back and undo things, to make it right before it was too late. There’s no one left to mourn them now- I don’t want to think you planned it, but maybe you did. Maybe you outlived them all because you couldn’t bear not to.”
She could feel his heartbeat fade, his breath softening into little more than a whisper.
“I hate you, Uncle Harry, just a little. Because you made me be the one to tell them.”
When he died, his spell died with him, and Rose Weasley-Granger wiped her eyes and picked up the burden he’d left her with.
Hogwarts had been defended by an army of children because there’d been no other choice, that much was true. What wasn’t true, because Harry hadn’t let it be, was that the army had been small. That some children had died, because war is never kind, but that the vast majority had lived and thrived.
It made sense because he’d needed to, why Hogwarts was so empty in the years Harry attended. It was Voldemort and the Death Eaters’ fault, it couldn’t be anything else, but not in the way that everyone remembered.
Harry was a child, a powerful, heartbroken child fed by the magic of hundreds of dead and dying children– and he made a wish the castle couldn’t help but grant.
Make it not so.
Hogwarts couldn’t bring them back to life, but it could erase their deaths. The spell went out, powered by blood magic so strong it reached every corner of the globe.
The children were forgotten, completely and utterly erased from memory, and thus had never died.
As long as Harry was around to believe.
Tonight the wizarding world would mourn a loss they couldn’t understand– and tomorrow Rose would tell them why.