You Fade
Title: You Fade
Rating: PG
Word Count: 206 (not counting quoted poem)
Characters: Seamus.
Challenge: April 2005
Summary: Seamus doesn't like the way the story ends.
Notes: I did it! This was inspired by veracity's response Home. Doesn't exactly fit the bill of the challenge, but... close enough. I'm not very good with angst, as you can see :) Totally un-beta'd. Sorry.

You Fade

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade - as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.
~ The Dark Hills by E.A.R

You don’t like the way the story ends.

You don’t like the way it ends, so you rewrite the middle, sitting on a warm, flat stone, watching the sun burn yellow-red across the horizon.

There never was a Second War.

You never stood side by side with Neville on a grim-gray dawn, dark wands fisted in your hands, eyes tight and dry and unblinking.

You never lost three years of your life.

You never threw up blood, never huddled, pale and shaky, in the shadows of a ruined castle, never killed a man with a jagged sliver of glass.

You never thought you’d rather die than fight, because there wasn’t anything left to fight for.

Ginny never grinned at you, wide and macabre and empty, in the autumn light. You never had to bury her - or Dean, or Terry, or Millicent, or - in the dense, rock-packed earth. And you never had to clutch Ron’s hand with white fingers when he refused to cry. You never cried.

None of that is in the story you write.

In the story, there is nothing but Ireland and warm air and solid breaths, and shades of green bright for miles ‘til they hit the blue break of sky.