Blood Moon | Harry Styles

Epilogue: Sunrise

It's still dark when your eyes open grudgingly. It's starting to become a thing, waking up at night.

Your body refuses to move. Your head pounds so hard it feels as though there's a hammer beating at your skull from the inside. So hard that it feels like your eyes are pulsing in their sockets. Your throat is sore. Your neck hurts and so do your legs. You cough into the air and cry at the way your ribs strain.

There's a rustling not too far away from you. You pick your head up just enough to look over the yard to where Harry is kneeling, his hands clasped in his lap. His eyes lower when you meet his gaze.

You tip your head back against the ground as you muster enough strength to sit up. You groan, breathing heavily when you're finally upright. Tears pool at the corners of your eyes with all the aches and pains, like needles raking your skin.

Harry's eyes finally find yours in the dark. He stays where he is as he speaks. "This isn' how it was s'posed to happen," he says softly.

"Yeah," you answer. Your voice is raw in your swollen throat. "Killing off billions of people was supposed to be more gentle, right?"

"No." Harry shakes his head vigorously. "I didn' know, Y/N. Tha's not what I thought he was gonna do."

"I don't believe you."

"I don' blame yeh."

You watch Harry warily as he crawls toward you. He stops a foot away. There are dark circles beneath his eyes, leaves stuck in his hair. He licks his lips slowly.

"There's really no reason for yeh to believe anythin' I say anymore. But I didn' want yeh to get hurt. I didn' want anyone to get hurt." He pauses and his eyes scan your bare skin. "Will yeh let me fix yeh up?"

You swallow, lowering your gaze to your cut up legs. You give him a tentative nod.

Harry starts with the gash on the bottom of your foot, clamping his hand down around its arch. His eyes glow, back to their familiar shade, and you wince when magic sears through the wound. He holds you in place by your ankle.

In silence, Harry's fingertips trace up your legs, tickling and stinging the small cuts that he finds. He grasps your hand, dried blood chipping off into his palm, and then he stares at your neck while his eyes fade from their glow.

"Remember when you told me that vampires weren't real?" you whisper.

Harry gives you the briefest of smiles. He scrubs at his lips with the back of his wrist. His hand curves around the side of your throat. You watch him focus and then close your eyes when the punctures heat under his touch.

"'M sorry," Harry whispers as his hand falls away.

"Who was he?"

"My four times great uncle."

Even with your cuts healed, your muscles and bones and head still ache as you laugh drily. "And you thought Henry was going to what? Solve world hunger? End wars forever?"

Harry shifts backward to sits down. He bends his knees, resting his arms over them. "I just knew that he was workin' on ways to make witches safer, make it easier to do magic."

"You think witches need to be kept safer? Harry, he was trying to kill off every single person who didn't have magic in their blood."

"I know, I know that now." He runs his fingers through his mussed curls, peeling leaves out and dropping them to the ground. "But don' forget that we were bein' burned on pyres an' drowned just a few centuries ago. M'mum told me about Henry but I don' think she knew what he was tryin' to do either. He was a big figure in our family legacy, did a lot of work to develop magic an' protect witches. An' yeh can only raise the dead when a blood moon falls on All Hallows' Eve. Tha' doesn't happen every day. So, I just..."