[I think literally only 2 people said they were interested in the sad-ending epilogue, but that's enough for me! So: here is the incomplete, Very Very Sad epilogue that I might have finished if I hadn't changed the ending. It's not polished at all and the last part is just a list of scenes I had planned to write. Anyway, I hope it's at least interesting! And thank you again for reading!]

Epilogue – History

[during the priori incantatum scene, fill it in later] The smokey figure of Nita stood complete, apart from Voldemort's wand now. "Harry, could you… I don't know who would want it, but would you bring my body back? I'd like to be buried properly."

"I will," he promised.

She smiled approvingly and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "Give him hell for me." She turned aside, but then paused. "And Harry? It wasn't your fault."

Intense relief filled him, but already…. [the duel goes on as per canon, don't want to lift too much straight out of the book]

-o-

Sudden cheering and shouting alerted Viktor that someone had arrived back at the front of the maze, and he jerked to his feet, startling the nurse back from her ministrations to his concussion. If people were cheering at this volume, it had to mean someone had won. All his years of Quidditch had taught him that. And it would be Nita, of course it would be. Delacour had left the task very early, and Potter was merely 14, despite what people said about him defeating a Dark Lord.

The front of the maze was lit up with four blazing spot-lights, and in the centre of the little open area in front of the entrance to it, two figures laid sprawled a small distance apart, with the shining Cup on its side nearby. Two figures? he wondered as he pelted closer, ignoring the twinge in his knee that came from his mad-dash escape from the enormous fire-scorpion in the maze. One of the figures was Potter—they had perhaps tied?—and he was getting to his hands and knees, looking around with intense fear, confusion and hope. And then Potter's eyes fell on the second figure, the one bundled on her side, the one with blonde hair who hadn't moved yet, unconscious.

Nita.

Viktor did not follow any particular religion, but he prayed in that moment that she would let him explain, and understand that what he had done had not happened by his own will. Something else had been controlling him, directing his willpower, forcing him to commit this crime against his heart.

Viktor fell to his knees at Nita's side, pulling her arm, shaking her a little to wake her up, but there was something strange about her body…. She was too limp for unconsciousness, her skin was chilly and waxy and when she rolled on her back he saw her eyes were open and staring blindly. She did not breathe. Her pulse did not beat under her skin.

The knowledge was like slow poison in his blood.

"No," he said, his throat rough like sandpaper. The crowded stands had gone quiet, no longer cheering as they became aware as well.

Dead.

A short, bitter word that beat on him harder than anything his body had ever undergone in training. He stared down at her. Her blonde hair like a dandelion. Her hazel green eyes that used to dance when she was happy. Her hands, bony and thin, but strong when they held onto him. Under her shirt, the burn she hid, hated, and feared. He knew her so little, hardly a piece of what he wanted, what he thought he would have with her until scant seconds ago. Until this impossible thing happened.

"No…" he repeated, he was not sure to whom. "I was not myself… it was something… I never… I love her… I did not want… She was too… She can't… Shit… Shit… Shit…" He squatted next to her body, face in his hand, shoulders shaking. No one dared come close.

-o-

Potter safe. Crouch apprehended. Moody rescued. Her duties fulfilled.

Minerva strode down the corridor towards the Trophy Room, her heart pumping fury and grief. Childless herself, she sometimes chose… not favorites exactly, but particular students she paid a little more attention to than others. Sirius Black had been one in his day. Harry Potter another. Was it the tragedy of these people she responded to? Was it that she admired their strength? Or was it that something in her liked being unable to help them?

She entered the Trophy Room and found him as she had expected. Ludo Bagman held a large canvas sack in one hand, hastily stuffing golden plaques and awards into it with the other. He was muttering to himself, and from that she caught the gist. The goblins wouldn't accept Nita's death as Potter's victory.

It had been a well-known secret that Bagman was betting on the Tournament, and when he'd disappeared she knew he'd be after some way of paying the goblins he'd lost to.

She cleared her throat loudly and Bagman leapt nearly a foot in the air, simultaneously trying to whirl around to see who had shocked him. In his vibrant silk robes, he resembled a portly, unskillful ballerina. "M-minerva!" His voice broke in the middle, which he tried to cover with a shrill nervous laugh. "You startled me! What, what are you, ah, can I help you?" He held the sack behind his back, like a child caught stealing sweets trying to appear innocent.

His lack of shame made her blood boil. "Put them back immediately, Ludo," she said icily.

His wide-eyed innocence faltered. "Put…?"

"Obey before I knock you out and do it myself."

Shock overwhelmed his last denial and he wordlessly complied, replacing the trophies he'd stolen. Their conversation at the Yule Ball echoed in her head, when she'd first confronted him about his paternity and made the firm suggestion that he admit the relation he had to Nita. He had scoffed at the time, saying "The girl is nothing but a Muggle-born bristle-chaser, just look at how she's hanging on Krum. I have nothing but respect for you, but kindly keep your absurd speculation to yourself in the future."

She watched him shuffle between pedestals and plinths, fishing out each award, and abruptly fell to her rage.

"That girl deserved so much better than you." Her voice was steel and flint.

"Well what do you want me to do now?" he tore out, whirling on her. "Fix it up with the mother and try again? Not likely. I shacked up with her for two nights after we won the British Isles Championship in nineteen-seventy-six and never saw her again! How was I supposed to know there even was a… a you know…"

"A daughter?" Minerva asked coldly. "A little girl raised by a mother who couldn't remember your name but hated you? A mother so opposed to the idea of magic that she threw her eleven year old child out of the house when she went to Hogwarts?" Shame clawed through her. She'd heard the mother say that very thing, but had assumed she and Nita worked out an arrangement when the girl showed up at Hogwarts after all. Talking with Madam Malkin and Mr Bigby and Tom—who were even now grieving somewhere in the castle—and learning that Nita had instead been living in the Alley, eating handouts and sleeping on the floor for nearly seven years, had made her nearly too ashamed to look her in the eye. "A girl so fierce and determined and strong that she never once asked for help from anyone? Is that who you mean?"

Bagman was staring at her, confounded by the strength of her emotion and clearly at a loss for anything to say. His careful hairdo was coming loose from its moorings of gel and starting to stick up like a sunrise. His hair was the same golden colour as Nita's, which was one of the first things that made her suspect the truth, but she had never seen it out of its carefully coiffed and controlled shape. It seemed he also shared her hair's propensity to stick out in every conceivable direction. This detail made her throat ache.

"Get out of here, Ludo," she said quietly.

"Where am I meant to go?" he asked, spreading his hands and indicating the empty sack he still held. "The goblins will have my hide if I don't pay them off."

"You seem to think that your poor decisions are somehow my problem."

Chastised, he went, and when the sound of his slow footsteps had faded from her hearing, she finally let herself sink onto the floor and cry for this girl who deserved so much better than her life had given her.

-o-

Mary was dozing when the doorbell rang. She cursed and grumbled getting up, thinking it was probably Mr Ronden come to argue with her about her leaky tub that was ruining his ceiling. She was still a little drunk from the previous night and had been looking forward to a day of just her and a bottle of wine, to ward off a hangover, since it was her day off, after all.

She staggered down the short hallway, leaning on walls when she had to and trying to force her eyes to focus. The doorknob felt weird and ghostly in her hand as she pulled the door open. But the person on the other side of the door wasn't Mr Ronden. It was a tall woman in long, dark green clothes and a pointy hat like storybook witches and rectangle glasses. And she recognized her. It took a moment, but she did.

"You're the professor," she mumbled. "The one who took Nita."

"Mz Linese," the professor said. "May I come in?"

Mary swayed for a moment, then turned from the doorway and stumbled back to the sitting room and her sofa and her bottle. She heard the professor follow her inside and close the door. Mary was not an imaginative person, but it was obvious that the professor was here about Nita again. Why else would she come?

"So what'd she do?" Mary asked, taking her place on the sofa and reaching for a cig. "She must've done something. No one ever had good news about Nita."

The professor clasped her hands in front of her and swallowed. "Mz Linese, it is my duty to inform you that your daughter Nita Linese was killed two days ago on the twenty-fourth of June. We have taken the liberty of making funeral arrangements. Here are the details." She pulled a slip of stiff paper out from her sleeve and held it out to Mary, but Mary felt frozen.

"Killed?" she repeated.

"She was participating in a, a tournament at the school and was caught in larger conflict involving another student." It sounded like the professor had rocks in her throat, she spoke so roughly. "It was quick. She wouldn't have felt anything." She was still holding the paper out, but Mary didn't want it.

"Was she… was she afraid?"

The professor ducked her head and took a long time to answer. "I don't know. But I never knew her to be afraid of anything, so I like to think not." For a moment neither woman spoke. "Please take the paper."

"I don't deserve it."

"No, but you're her mother."

"I was a bad mum though," Mary said desperately. After so many years of guilt, she wanted someone to understand, even this strange woman who once took her daughter. She wanted to confess. "I never wanted her, I only kept her because I hoped it would bring her father back, and I hurt her, her chest, did you ever see? it was an accident but I hurt her so baldy…" Her throat choked off and large goopy tears started pouring down her face.

The professor looked down on her with pity and revulsion. "If it helps, I believe she was happy these last seven years at school. She worked hard and accomplished much and made friends and had such a bright… future." Her voice broke and her hands became trembling fists as her face twisted, showing her fight for control. When she finally achieved it, she placed the slip of paper she still held (it was now slightly crumpled) on the side table and drew a deep breath. "You should be there. I'll show myself out."

Mary didn't move as the professor hurried down the short passageway and let herself into the corridor outside. Then, shaking, she reached for the paper.

-o-

The graveyard was very small, and the day was overcast and sour. Kay passed through the iron gate, fearful of being in the wrong place even though she had followed McGonagall's instructions. It was her first time Apparating such a long distance, and she was proud of herself for succeeding, but then ashamed to feel anything but somber grief on this day.

She wended her way through the snaggletooth tombstones, making for the little knot of people she saw towards the back wall of the cemetery. She recognized about half of them. Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, and Professor Babbling stood in a cluster speaking quietly among themselves. McGonagall nodded to Kay as she came close. She also knew Madam Malkin from Diagon Alley, and Tom from the Leaky Cauldron. Viktor Krum stood by himself close to the open grave, cradling Nita's pet ferret, Edward was it? Edwin? She didn't like to look at him ('Anymore,' the guilty part of her whispered). His grief for Nita at the end of the third task had been so visceral that she felt nearly sick from the empathic echoes of it. The way he'd just folded into himself like that… Truth be told, Kay had been just as mystified as the rest of the student body by the relationship between Nita and the Bulgarian Quidditch star, but there was no question now that he cared for her deeply.

Madam Malkin stood with Madam Pomfrey and a stout bald man who was completely covered in tattoos. He ignored the talk going on around him, staring at the grave in the same way as Viktor. As though it weren't quite real and soon he'd wake up. Two women in their mid-twenties stood together, speaking quietly, leaning their heads against each others' for comfort. There were two others: a very fat man with a russet beard with a soft black velvet cap that exaggerated his round red cheeks. With him was another young woman, a little plump with dark hair and glasses that suited her face. They stood slightly apart, as though they didn't know any of the others.

The crowd of them was eclectic, Kay thought. None of them knew all of the rest, it seemed. She wondered if that meant they all only knew pieces of Nita. She knew that was certainly true of herself.

As the minutes passed, one other person arrived, another woman. Short and crumpled-looking, she huddled in her coat as though trying to be as small as possible. Her hair was dark brown and whispy and her face had split veins like roads on a map and she smelled like wine, but something about her made Kay sure that this was Nita's mother. Pity filled her, for both of them, but as she watched, the short burly man stirred himself and shuffled over to Nita's mum and mumbled something to her. To Kay, several meters distant, it sounded like, "Knew your little girl, ma'am." There was more after that, but the wind gusted in the wrong direction and took the words away. Whatever they were, they made Nita's mum let out an ugly, keening sob, and she buried her face in her hands and wept unashamedly. The man, whoever he was, stood with his hands in his pockets for a moment, then turned and went back to Madam Malkin. Kay wasn't sure what she'd seen between them, but it made her throat ache and she looked away.

—The rest of the funeral: Sirius is there in his dog form, though of course Kay doesn't recognize him; Edgar jumps out of Viktor's arms and dies on the casket as they're burying her; the headstone reads,

Nita Linese
June 10th 1977-June 24th 1995
~beloved and grieved~

Kay says some words: "I always really admired you, Nita. No matter how mean any of… us… were to you, you never cared, and you were so strong… I wish we had been friends… I know it's worthless to stand here and say this now, because if none of this had happened, I would have gone right on admiring and wishing, but I guess I just want to say 'I'm sorry'. And I hope you can forgive us."

—Directly after the funeral, Bigby tattoos himself with her name, opposite his Marigold shoulder. Her name waved on a proudly flapping banner, a ferret curled around the pole, a dandelion sprouting next to it.

—Her Yule Ball dress lives in Madam Malkin's display window. Maybe three years afterwards, some pureblood woman (maybe Mrs Greengrass, doesn't really matter) tries to buy it for her daughter's debut, and Madam Malkin refuses. It's from the fancy lady's point of view, so Madam Malkin's grief is only clear to readers.

—If I really want to twist the knife, I can do a scene of Budge being sad several years down the line. Like he bites people now rather than cuddling, etc. My poor muffin.

—Bigby has a picture of his wedding on his corkboard in his shop, and a customer notices it while he's waiting for Bigby to finish a tattoo design.
Customer: "Is this a picture of your wedding?"
Bigby: "Yes."
"Who's the girl?"
"My daughter."
"Pretty. How old is she now?"
"She would have been twenty-eight in June."

A/N

Aaaand that would have been that. I was only 50/50 on finishing and posting this even when I was still planning on killing her because after a while it started feeling like what I called 'grief porn'. So fortunately, this isn't, uh, 'canon' anymore, and we don't have to worry about it :)

In fact, all of a sudden I could do a sequel if I wanted! I don't have any ideas for one, and moving away from Hogwarts and the Triwizard Tournament structure would mean coming up with a wholly original plot idea, but it's not out of the realm of possibility! I do have a pretty solid idea of how her and Viktor's lives go from here on out, so it would be a matter of turning some part of that into a self-contained thing. Anyway.

Thank you again to everyone who read and reviewed, and I hope the 2 of you who were interested in this epilogue found it… I don't know if 'enjoyable' is the right word here, but you know what I mean. :P

E.I. signing out