Ivy, if you don't know buffy, you'll have to have someone explain this, but your comment cries out:

We didn't end with any real sense of victory, and we didn't get a normalizing scene there to show us how things proceed directly after all this

And the Buffyesque response is, "the battle's done, and we kinda won, but we walk alone in fear...where do we go from here"?

Brilliant story. Best ever. I am in terrible, awful, awsome, head-over-heels love with Harry as I never have been before.