All a Dream

The End

Harry sunk down onto his horrible-smelling mattress in the Temperance cabin. He'd had a long day at Auror training camp, and now just wanted to sleep.

The camp was an old muggle camp that had been abandoned decades ago. It had fallen into disrepair, but then been fixed up by the Ministry of Magic, though only marginally. The purpose of this particular camp was to train the future Aurors how to live in very nasty conditions; and what nasty conditions they were. Rats, starving rats, ate away at everything. The rations the students were given had to be kept close at hand all the time, or they would undoubtedly be stolen. The roofs of all the cabins had leaks, and Cabin Diligence (all the cabins were named after the seven virtues) had started with no roof at all. One of the first classes had been on how to fend for yourself - starting with fixing the roofs.

But now that Harry and the rest of his classmates had been here for a month, they'd managed to fix up the place a little. Harry had filled many, many pages of the notebook his parents had given him with the things he'd learned in the last month. Devon, a half-blood who had lived in near-poverty for the better part of his life, knew a spell to ward off the rats and most other vermin. And Jenkins' mum had run a housecleaning service, so he knew some spells to make the cabins smell tolerable (though some of the smells, like the ones emanating from the mattresses, were just too deep to be destroyed). There were people from all walks of life in this Auror camp, some who had been through events unimaginable to Harry. One young fellow in Cabin Charity had almost been killed by his own teddy bear. Anna, one of Harry's bunkmates, had lived on the street for two years without a wand. Looking back on his life, or what he thought his life had been, he'd always portrayed himself as something of a martyr. Compared to a lot of these people, he'd been living a life of paradise. A dream life.

Practically the second he'd met his bunkmates, Harry had realized just how lucky he had been. Never once in the last year had he thought about what a very fortunate person he was, to have become a balanced person, to not have really had so much pressure on his shoulders. To have awoken.

Lying down on his broken bed, Harry had never felt more complete.

A/N: Well, there we go. I think it's done.

Oh! And I'm probably going to do some work on the first four or five chapters. Like, shove them all together into one chapter that will be labelled Chapters 1-5.

I would like to thank everyone for reading, reviewing, alerting and favouriting, but there are some specific people I would like to thank: Amelie de Lorraine for reviewing lo these many chapters; pandagurl and Someone aka Me for latching onto this story so late in it's production; Alan for letting me bounce ideas off him; and siriuslives394 for reading over and fixing this last bit (and also for tricking me into singing "Fish and Chips and Vinegar". That was funny).

The End