Epilogue
Many years passed happily at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, anyone would tell you. The school, so revered by all, was the highest institution of learning in all of Wizarding society, under the greatest Headmaster the school had ever had.
Old Albus Dumbledore, cunning, sweet man that he was, died on the night after the Battle for Hogwarts, sitting at his desk with the Order, Ministry officials, and Professors gathered around him. Many swore they saw him the morning afterward, coming down from the Headmaster’s turret in his stained lime green robes, cheerfully walking the school and bidding those who had a chance to see him a happy day.
When they buried him, many remarked that they could see the happy curve of his mouth.
Soon after they cast a vote for the Headmaster position after Minerva McGonagall turned it down, and to the shock of only one person, the vote was totally unanimous by all.
He was known as the greatest wizard of their age, The Boy Who Lived To Become The Man Who Defeated Voldemort. He was the Merlin of his people, kind and generous, strict and law abiding, and he, above everyone else, was listened to and respected by all.
Harry lived at Hogwarts for the rest of his days, with his Potions Master at his side and in his bed. Professor Snape, who was still hated, who had passed on his potions professorship to his former tyro Mistress Shacklebolt, who was still the bane of every first year’s existence, finally moved out of the dungeons at the tender age of sixty four with hair that had turned stark white over one particularly stressful summer (he refused to admit a potion had gone to hell) to live in the Headmaster’s turret with Harry. He’d mellowed in his dotage as Hermione had predicted would happen, though he absolutely refused to say so.
Harry himself thought that love looked good on Severus, and as one of the world's leading Alchemists, he needed all the love and patience he could afford, if he was to keep from strangling his idiotic colleagues.
Through it all Harry wore his time with a smile on his face, a bounce in his limped step, and a twinkle in his eye under the silver spectacles that sat on his nose through war, famine, death and tribulations, no matter the changing times.
When asked one morning by his young colleagues, over waffles and kippers, why he wouldn’t get new ones to fit the changing times, he just smiled, tipped a graying head, and scratched his beard gently under his flowing magenta sleep cap. "Someone once told me to wear them, so I might see better. They’re better than black ones with tape holding them together, anyway."
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