Current music:	The Mermaid Purse - "Tonight"
Entry tags:	drabble, fanfiction, harry potter, writing

Tonight is apparently going to be the night
A drabble that took about ten minutes to write.

Title: Feeling Useless
Rating: 12+, PG, K+
Ship: none
Word count: Upwards of 300, but not by much
Warnings: HBP spoilers
Disclaimer: Characters and situations belong to JK Rowling. Lyrics at the beginning and end are from The Mermaid Purse's "Tonight". Lyrics are not capitolized on purpose.
Summary: 'Feeling useless, Hermione says, is not a bad thing.'

Feeling Useless

don’t you know
I gave my whole life



Feeling useless, Hermione says, is not a bad thing.

It’s not his fault. He tried. He still tries.

He always will try.

But trying isn’t enough. Harry knows that just trying won’t defeat Voldemort. His mother tried. His father tried. The Order tried. Sirius tried. Dumbledore tried.

It’s sad that it would be easy to mistake that group of names as part of the obituaries.

Destiny, Ron says, doesn’t fancy the bad guys victorious. At least not in storybooks.

But this war isn’t a storybook.

Not many wars are. Because in war, there is always a loser.

There are losers in fairy tales, but they’re evil, they’re always evil. In war, it’s usually a lot harder to tell who’s evil. Is there a line that one crosses, from good to evil? Voldemort must surely be evil, but others… could Draco Malfoy truly be evil?

He wouldn’t have killed Dumbledore.

Or maybe he would have. No one would know now.

The end, Lupin says, will come in time.

He knows this is true. There will be a day when he and Voldemort will fight.

All because Snape told his master of the prophecy, and his master tried to prevent it. It is a paradox, one that Harry finds himself thinking about this more and more.

But there will be an end to this. Maybe Voldemort will win, maybe Harry will. He cannot determine this. He can only fight, for Dumbledore, for his parents, for Sirius. He can only fight, and wait for that one day to come, and eventually, everything will come to an end. He can’t control it. But Harry will fight, he will fight to the end, and this is stability enough. There will be an end.

Feeling useless, as Hermione says, is not a bad thing.



tonight
it's gonna be the night


-----


Okay, and on a different subject...

I don't know how people juggle so many fics at one time. One of my favorite authors does, and Lily Evans on HPFF does, but I can't do it. Believe me, I've tried, but I think one WIP being posted at a time is good for me. Or at least a large WIP. If I've worked ahead and gotten a decent chunk of the fics done, then it's different, but I just can't deal with the pressure of it all. Constantly updating... well, it takes too much to do that for so many fics. That's me, but I like to focus on one or two ideas at a time, with the occasional drabble or one-shot to write something different.

Any thoughts?