A/N: Firstly this story is an early christmas present for my good friend Inwitari (thanks for everything) and secondly I own only the plot, Harry Potter is not mine.

By the second week even Hermione was coughing as she desperately clutched the hand of a pale-faced Ron. Harry would have comforted her but his voice was long gone, carried away with whispered condolences and wracking coughs he attempted to muffle. Besides, Hermione was a smart girl, she and he both knew there was nothing he could say.

Ron had fallen silent too but the beads of sweat clinging to a forehead creased with pain proved he was further along in the Illness than Harry.

That wasn't unusual. One of the few patterns the healers had found was that purebloods tended to die first and looking at the red-head Harry could tell that Ron, no matter how fiercely Hermione clung to his hand, would be dead in hours.

Harry got up slowly, trying to ignore the dizziness that standing brought as he walked to the door. Hermione looked up and began to protest but Harry's determined gaze stopped her before the coughs could. Mouthing thank you in-between splutters, she turned back to Ron as Harry left the transfiguration classroom.

Harry wandered through the corridors wearily. Every time she put his foot down he wasn't sure he would ever pick it up again. He would return to the classroom eventually but not yet.

Hermione deserved some time to say goodbye to the man she loved.

Besides, Harry wanted to say goodbye to the castle, to say goodbye to home and a world of magic that was being irrevocably changed by muggles.

He avoided the busiest corridors easily, his knowledge of secret passages ensured that he could tread paths undisturbed by the cries of the dying and the corpses of the dead.

But the stench. The stench he could not escape from. It pervaded inch of the castle, every hallway, classroom, turret and tower until you wondered if Hogwarts had ever smelled another way. The stench and his throbbing head ensured that he could never forget the Illness.

The Illness was all they ever called it. They didn't have another name for it and privately Harry thought they never would.

He wasn't the only one.

Many people had begun to doubt if the wizarding world would survive this, if it could survive this.

Exiting the passage, he stepped over a Death Eater's mask without blinking. It wasn't that uncommon a sight.

Disease it seemed, was the greatest of equalisers.

The parts of Harry's brain not given over to coping with immense pain still found it ironic that it had taken death by muggle to make the purebloods understand that the muggleborns were truly magical too.

Purebloods, halfbloods, muggleborns. All magical. All dying.

Bloodlines weren't so important anymore, just like money and power. They couldn't save you. Nobody could save you. Not Voldemort. Not Dumbledore. Not even the great Harry Potter.

Harry heard the screams as he was turning left and cursing, realised in his musings he had wandered far too close to the Hospital Wing. A good man would have continued, would have tried to help but he couldn't face the entreating arms of the people lying in the hallway or look at the bodies piling up.

He wasn't that strong.

But life had never been easy for Harry and braving the gauntlet for one corridor would mean freedom from the confining walls of Hogwarts. It would mean a cool wind to steal his temperature and fresh air to replace the scent of disease.

The hall was horrendous, far worse than anything he could ever have imagined. And this was Hogwarts. St. Mungo's was said to be a million times worse and Harry wasn't sure that was possible. This was already Hell, how could anything ever be worse?

What could beat a din that burst your eardrums, pleas and prayers in a thousand languages as healers and anyone who could still walk rushed around swapping useless potions and pointless charms. Most of them looked worse than the patients they were treating but they refused to stop as they strove to save lives or to at least make the passing peaceful.

A futile struggle, Harry thought, but a noble one. A sign of greatness perhaps.

He only recognised one person from the multitude but he was sure he would have known more if the Illness had not made them unrecognisable. Not even the Illness however, could hide the unmistakable blond sheen of Malfoy's hair.

Despite a forehead dripping with sweat and angry indents on cultured palms where he'd obviously clawed skin rather than let out a scream, Draco Malfoy continued his attempt to save people who could not be saved, fighting a disease that could not be fought by magic because it was made by muggles.

Harry passed through the corridor easily, almost entirely unnoticed amidst the frantic rushing and the mist of pain. It was the first time Harry had gone anywhere in the wizarding world without some form of recognition and Harry wished he could go back to that more innocent age when people still believed he was their saviour.

His dizziness increased as he stumbled out of the castle and he could barely see the lake glistening in the distance, beckoning like a mirage. The distance between them seemed impossible and Harry had to call on reserves Voldemort never tested to make his way to the shore.

When he reached them, he was on the point of collapse but darkness refused to welcome him as he sank to his knees. Harry, it seemed, was to be denied the bliss of ignorance.

Dumbledore had it. Harry could see his tomb from where he sat, white marble shining in a sun that knew not what horrors it illuminated.

Harry was glad Dumbledore didn't know. Glad but angry.

Dumbledore hadn't prepared him for this. He'd made it sound so simple. Good versus Evil. The Order versus the Death Eaters. Harry versus Voldemort. He hadn't told them there would be another side. He never knew. No one did.

Not even the muggleborns realised how capable muggles could be. How they could wield weapons that did not require magic, weapons that magic could not defeat.

The Death Eaters thought muggles were simple animals. Dumbledore treated them like bumbling children. Even Mr Weasley in his innocent enthusiasm has patronised them, praising them for their ingenuity is managing without magic. None of them understood that muggles didn't need magic, that they had science and that muggle science beat wizard magic.

Hands down.

Easily.

Every time.

The Illness had already killed hundreds when they found out it was made by muggles. The healers had denied it at first. They could not comprehend how such a perfect, killing disease could be created by muggles. If magic could not do it, how by Merlin could they?

It was Snape who discovered the answer.

Waking up in a cold, concrete cell with no wand had limited his options and when the pretty girl with brown hair had started explaining to him all he could do was broadcast the images to the headquarters.

And even that took every bit of his immense magical power.

Apparently the muggles called it biological warfare.

At least that's what the petite brunette said. She sat on the other side of the cell bars regaling Snape with information that made him sick to the stomach as he in turn sent it to Phoenix Headquarters.

It started, according to her, as a defence against extraterrestrial invasion. A War of the World situation she joked with a friendly smile so at odds with the words she was spewing. But when people started turning up dead with no rational, non-magical reason responsible for the deaths, MI9 had ordered that the project be reassigned and retargeted. She actually sounded quite excited as she spoke about test to ensure that the virus was fatal and experiments to make sure that it only attacked the systems of beings with gene MMS2, the gene for magic.

As she talked both Harry and Snape could see the reflection of another person, a young boy with greasy, black hair who also found his joy in death. Except the death he sowed was not so widespread.

Not even the darkest magic could do what this muggle described.

Harry had been there when the images had reached Headquarters and when he watched them, even he couldn't see any hatred in the girl's eyes.

For a messenger of death, she was surprisingly free of malice.

There was just an emptiness almost masked by hard work and determination. She appeared to have the numbness of someone who had hurt to much too deeply to truly feel it anymore. If she did, she would probably go mad. As it was when Snape used Legilimency on her, all he found were memories of men in black robes, flashes of green light, screams and a building burning in front of horrified eyes.

Looking at that, Harry could understand why she, why any of them did what they did. Why they created the Illness and targeted it at users of magic, any users of magic. It wasn't an excuse but perhaps it was an explanation.

After all what had magic ever done for them. All it had done was hurt them. The Death Eaters killed thousands of muggles, they'd raped, pillaged and murdered their way through the country and while the Order may have regretted their deaths, they never did anything to stop them from dying.

Even in the eyes of the good the muggles had never been as important as the people with magic. They were just too different, too remote. They were harder to care for.

They were innocent bystanders to a war they could not comprehend in a world they knew nothing of. Could they be blamed for fighting back?

Harry didn't know. He wasn't really in a position to answer as the numbness crept up his legs, a welcome relief from the fiery pains of before even if the symptom did herald the quickening encroachment of death.

Harry had accepted death a long time ago but he thought it would be in some immensely important battle with Voldemort over the future of the wizarding world. That was how it was meant to go after he had destroyed all the horcruxes. The Illness was not part of the plan. This was not how it was supposed to go.

Harry derived some small comfort from knowing that Voldemort would die with him but any warmth sparked by such a thought was soon doused by the knowledge of the bitter irony that Dumbledore's ultimate dream of unity had only been achieved by the rapidly approaching, complete annihilation of the British wizarding population.

This was the end. The end of everything. There would be no magical Eden for the future muggleborns to find, if indeed they ever knew that they could look.

Darkness had almost claimed Harry now but in his last few moments of consciousness he could hear the droning of engines and see the black outlines of warplanes in the sky.

He was dead before the bombs fell.