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lomonaaerenTitle: The Possibility of Evil
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Mentions of James/Lily, otherwise gen
Content Notes: AU (Harry grows up with his parents), violence, angst, horror, gore, murder, minor character death, unhappy ending
Rating: : PG-13
Summary: In a world where Harry lives with his parents, James and Lily, and grew up happy and loved, he begins to sense that something is wrong. He has horrific dreams that predict he will become a violent killer, and someone seems to be watching him at every moment of the day. But even as he acts to protect himself, Harry cannot predict what the final result will be.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” short stories and one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. This is the story specifically for Halloween. The title is taken from a great Shirley Jackson short story, which I do urge you to read, but which doesn’t have any particular connection to this story’s plot.
The Possibility of Evil
“Harry, dear! Breakfast is on the table!”
Harry rolled out of bed with a little shudder and put his head in his hands. He had had another of those stupid nightmares last night, the ones he didn’t want to talk about because it would worry his parents so much. But it was getting to the point that he no longer thought he could hide them.
“Harry!”
Right. Mum. Breakfast. A sun-streaked day when Harry raised his head to look out the window, bright with early July weather.
He was home for the summer hols from Hogwarts and he would be sixteen in a week. He was—a good person, not like the violent one he’d seen in his dreams.
“Coming, Mum,” he called back, and stood up.
*
Mum and Dad shot him glances over breakfast, but Harry just kept his head down and ate. He wasn’t going to discuss the dreams unless they forced him to. What would he say? I know that neither of you believe in Divination, but it seems like I’m destined to become a psychopath who goes around using the Cruciatus on people?
“Are you all right, Harry?”
“Sure, Dad. Just, uh, not sleeping properly.”
“Are you sure? Because we heard you screaming last night.”
Harry jerked his head up and stared wide-eyed at his parents. Mum was holding Dad’s hand down by the side of the table, and her knuckles were white. Harry swallowed a little. “Uh, sorry? I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
“But what caused it, Harry?” Dad looked as if he had gone a little greyer than he already had been because of the screaming. “What kind of dreams did you have?”
“Some kind.”
“Harry, you know you can tell us,” Mum whispered.
Harry nodded and swallowed his toast. He knew that. He really did. He also just—felt as if Mum and Dad would be disappointed in him if they heard what kind of person he became in the dreams.
Which is also ridiculous.
“I was dreaming of the future,” Harry whispered. His parents both leaned forwards. “Or what seemed like the future. I was older, and I had—well, I didn’t have the wand I had now.” He swallowed and worked his hands back and forth under the table. Mum would know what he was doing, but he didn’t want to do it in front of them. “I was torturing people. Killing them.”
Mum and Dad exchanged glances. Then Dad said, in the calm tones Harry had once heard him use to talk down a Dark wizard with a bared wand inside Flourish and Blotts, “You know you’re not a bad person, don’t you, Harry? And that dreams never predict the future for anyone but true Seers? And you would have shown the gift by now if you were a true Seer?”
Harry nodded feebly in response to each sentence. Of course he did. He knew all that. It wasn’t possible to develop some Seer gift in the middle of his life, and especially not one that focused on such a strange future.
“They were just so intense,” he said weakly. “The dreams, I mean. They were really more like memories.”
“Why do you say that, Harry?” Mum let go of Dad’s hand and came around the table to caress his hair back from his forehead.
Something about the gesture felt strange to Harry, as if he had never had her touch him there before. But that was ridiculous.
He tried to shove that particular sensation away and concentrate on the one from the dreams instead. “You know that time you showed me the memory of Uncle Peter’s death in the Pensieve?”
“You did what, James?” Mum snapped.
Oops.
“He was old enough that he needed to know, Lily—”
“We agreed—”
“If he’s going to become an Auror someday, he’s going to see more traumatic things—”
“Not until he’s older—”
Harry took a deep, hurt breath. It was a tactic he had sometimes used before when they argued, and it worked this time like it had all the other times. Mum whirled towards him and placed her hands on his shoulders.
“I’m not angry at you, darling.”
Harry nodded and leaned against her for a second, shaking his head at Dad when he opened his mouth. Dad had already caused enough trouble, although Harry was the one who had revealed the secret. “Anyway. That’s how I know what a Pensieve memory feels like. And this was what these dreams felt like, too. Like memories that I was watching in a Pensieve. Except—except they’re mine. They were in my own head.”
Mum knelt down in front of Harry, smiling comfortingly at him. Her eyes were as green as his, but surrounded by a fine sea of laugh lines. Harry clung to the sight of her. She would keep him safe. She always had.
“I understand how you might feel because of these dreams,” she said soothingly, rubbing a circle on Harry’s back with one hand. “But you could never do anything like that. And even if you do become an Auror, you know that you don’t have to use violent spells, right?”
Harry nodded and bit his lip. “I could use prank spells, like Uncle Sirius.”
“Exactly. Or other spells,” Mum said, rolling her eyes a little. “But just having these dreams doesn’t make you a bad person. And you didn’t cause your nightmares because of something you did. They happened because your brain just sorted through the pieces of your worries and thoughts and assembled them that way. Or maybe because of something someone else did.” She short Dad a dark look.
Harry nodded and smiled weakly, then swallowed the last of his toast and snatched up the bowl of sliced apples tMum had put by his plate. “Is it all right if I take this upstairs? I could try to get some sleep after I eat.” He wanted to be out of the room when his parents fought.
“Of course, dear. Your father and I have some things to discuss.”
Harry shook his head as he left the room at a quick jog. Honestly, he wasn’t sure why his parents had got married in the first place or stayed married, they fought so much. He hoped that when his time came to get married, he would choose someone he got along with better.
Someone laughed.
Harry spun around, staring. Of course there was no one on the stairs with him. There was no one in the house except him and Mum and Dad. Mum had put her foot down when it came to having house-elves, and Uncle Sirius lived with Uncle Remus in Grimmauld Place.
Uncle Peter would have been over all the time once, but. Well.
Harry shook his head. He was imagining things. Maybe Mum was right and seeing the memory of Uncle Peter’s death, justified as it had been, had affected him more than he’d realized. He would go up and try to take a nap, the way he’d told Mum he would.
*
Harry came out of sleep screaming.
He rolled over and clutched his pillow, head bowed. Then he realized what the clench in his stomach meant, and barely got out of bed in time to dry-heave into the loo, clutching the sides and gasping.
That particular nightmare had been—it hadn’t been gory, like some of the ones he’d had last night. It hadn’t shown him torturing people.
But it had shown him perhaps a year older, standing over rounded stones that to Harry indicated graves and crying so much that Harry could feel the echo of that heartbreak now.
He pulled himself back from the loo and wiped his mouth with one hand. The sorrow, the ripping grief, still raked claws up and down the middle of his stomach, but at least he didn’t have anything left to throw up.
He turned around and walked part to his bedroom, and then stumbled to a halt.
Something that hadn’t been there before sat on the table beside his bed. Harry knew it hadn’t been there before. Mum cast Cleaning Charms on his bedroom when he was at Hogwarts and didn’t do anything else, because she always wanted him to feel like he could just walk right in when he came back and find everything where he left it.
This thing was strange. It would have been strange even if his parents had been in the habit of messing up his room and leaving things behind.
Harry stared at it. It sat there and didn’t do anything. Of course it didn’t. It was a small stone.
Granted, a stone that looked blacker than Harry thought a stone had any right to look, and when he took a step closer, he could see an etching on the front. A rune? But no, Harry was pretty sure that runes didn’t include circles, only straight lines, since they’d been designed originally to be carved on stone that didn’t accept curves.
He picked it up and stared at it.
A triangle, a circle, a line. Harry was abruptly sure that he’d seen that picture before, but he didn’t know—
In your dream.
Yes. That was it. Harry’s hand closed harder over the stone as he thought about it. There was a sense that that sign had been in his dream, even though, from what Harry could remember, it wasn’t carved on the tombstones that he had stood crying over. But it was there. Somehow. Nonetheless.
Harry swallowed back sickness and bile and stared down at the stone in his hand.
Mum and Dad could say all they liked about how of course his dreams weren’t real or predictions of the future, but what did it mean that he’d found a real-life representation of this symbol in them?
Harry shivered and turned towards his bedroom door. He needed to talk to them, now.
*
“Harry. My dear boy, how are you?”
Harry gave Headmaster Dumbledore a nervous smile. He had never really spent much time talking to the man, even at the parties that his parents sometimes dragged him to that commemorated the end of the Dark wizard uprising Dumbledore and his parents had helped put down. And this was worse, given how pale Mum had turned when she saw that symbol.
“Um, I’m all right, Headmaster.”
“Despite the series of strange dreams that your parents reported to me?”
“Um. Yeah.” Harry bit his lip and shifted around as he took the stone out of his robe pocket. Dumbledore’s eyes fastened on it at once. “I found this on the table next to my bed after one of the dreams. I’m sure not entirely sure of what it is.”
“May I see it?”
Harry didn’t really like touching the stone—it felt too cold and too slick—but it was still a struggle to drop it into Dumbledore’s extended hand, for some reason.
Dumbledore gave him a piercing glance, the sort that always made Harry feel the Headmaster could read his mind, and then turned his eyes to the stone. He caught his breath as he tilted it back and forth. The light of the fire flashed off it, but weirdly, Harry thought. Really, the light sank into it.
The black swallows it.
Harry heard the words inside his head, but he was also sure that he heard them, the way that he had heard the laughter on the stairs the other day. He sprinted to his feet, wand in his hand, and spun around.
“Harry?”
Harry swallowed and faced Dumbledore again. “I’m sorry, sir. I feel like I must be going mad.”
“And why is that? After all, this stone suddenly appearing proves that your dreams are not mere dreams.”
“No, sir. But—I can also hear a voice speaking to me at times. It sounds like it’s inside my head but also as if someone is standing in the same room as me.” Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s pretty mental, right?”
Dumbledore drew his wand and cast a silent spell at the far corners of the room. They flushed blue and glowed for a moment, then faded.
“Sir?”
“A charm to show that no one else is present in the room.” Dumbledore holstered his wand with a solemn face that made some of Harry’s hopes wither and turn to ashes. “I do not think you are mad, Harry. And I think that your dreams are harbingers of far worse to come than your parents do.”
Harry swallowed through a throat that felt stuck. Wasn’t the Headmaster supposed to reassure him? “What makes you think that, sir?”
Dumbledore held up the stone. Harry’s gaze fastened on it and he found it incredibly hard to look away. “Because this is the Resurrection Stone, one of the Deathly Hallows. And what it means that you have it…I fear for the future.”
*
Harry opened his eyes, shuddering. He hadn’t dreamed this time, but it had been such sheer darkness in his head that he hadn’t been sure he would open his eyes to the sunlight again. He turned his head and lifted it, face tilted, towards his window.
And almost screamed.
The Resurrection Stone sat on the table beside his bed, even though he knew—he was sure—that Dumbledore had taken it away to imprison it in a Gringotts vault.
Harry sat up, trembling, and reached out for the stone. It felt the same, cold and slick, and it had the same symbol on the front, which Dumbledore had talked about in more detail when explaining the legend of the Hallows. Of course Mum and Dad had read Harry the story of the Three Brothers when he was a kid, but it had been a long time since he’d thought about the details, and he’d certainly never believed the Hallows were real.
But this time, when he touched it, a loud chuckle rang through the room.
Harry sprang up and turned around, aware that the sheet wasn’t covering him any longer, and that the Stone had clung to his palm and come with him. None of it mattered in the face of—
A tall figure, draped in a long, black cloak. Harry couldn’t see its face, but he was somehow sure that a smile of delight resided there.
A rictus smile of delight, maybe.
“Soon,” said the figure, and sighed in a way that made Harry feel as if his bones were soaking in cold water. “It won’t be long now.”
Harry snatched up his wand and sent a curse at the figure. It whirled apart into dark motes, and his curse did nothing but damage the wall.
“So impulsive. That is one of many things you will forsake.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“You know the answer.”
The figure disappeared, and Harry shivered, staring at the wall. He knew what he thought, even though both Dumbledore and his parents had told him it wasn’t possible. He looked at his hand, which he’d been waving around, and which the Stone still clung to.
Harry thought he was dreaming of Death, and that Death wanted him to take its place.
*
“It’s not possible.”
“I’m afraid it is very possible, James.”
Harry had known that Dumbledore was supposed to get there later this afternoon, but he’d heard the Floo rush a few minutes ago, and so he’d come down the stairs as soon as he could. He wanted to tell Dumbledore about the confrontation with Death, but he also wanted to listen to their conversation. He thought they might say some things they would never tell him.
His parents had wanted to keep him safe all his life. Harry loved them for that, but it also meant they kept lots of secrets from him, like what exactly they’d done to put down the Dark wizard rebellion.
Now, Harry clutched the Stone and thought, Keep me from being heard or seen.
There was a ball of cold in his stomach immediately. It flooded out to cover his fingers and toes and arms and legs more slowly. Harry took a deep breath and then leaned against the door.
Wards that Dumbledore must have set crawled across his skin, then recoiled. Harry smiled a little. He was still worried as hell about what the appearance of that dark figure meant and where the Stone had come from in the first place, but at least the bloody thing was good for something.
“But the Tale of the Three Brothers is just a story,” Mum was whispering.
“I am afraid it is not.” There was a slight clunk, as though Dumbledore had laid something on the table. Mum and Dad both gasped. “Yes, I have removed the glamour that keeps its true nature hidden. This is the Elder Wand.”
Harry jerked. He had never even heard rumors that Professor Dumbledore carried the Elder Wand, and he was friends with a few of the most knowledgeable people in school, Hermione Granger included.
“Albus…”
“How long has the Potter Cloak of Invisibility lasted, James?”
Harry’s breath hitched. He had the Cloak with him at school sometimes, but Dad often owled him asking him to return the Cloak for a while so he could use it in his Auror work. Harry had never thought about how long it had lasted, but hadn’t Hermione got a weird expression on her face once when he’d said something about it being passed down from father to son in the Potter family?
Ordinary Cloaks probably don’t last that long.
“This is—stupid, Albus. There’s no way that something like this is true.”
“I am afraid it is. I am afraid that the Hallows have chosen the next, the true, Master of Death, and it is young Harry.”
Harry’s breathing stopped.
On his palm, the Resurrection Stone pulsed like a second heart.
Harry listened to the rest of the conversation, but it was little that he hadn’t already heard. His head and feet were both numb with more than the Stone’s lingering cold by the time that he trudged back to bed and lay down.
Why would he become the Master of Death? He was a sixteen-year-old Hogwarts student whose greatest accomplishments were being the Gryffindor Seeker and getting a good mark on his Defense OWL. If the forces that controlled the Deathly Hallows wanted to choose someone, why not someone like Dumbledore, who was famous for discovering all sorts of things? Or even Hermione, who was so smart?
No choice.
Those words, Harry was suddenly sure, came from the Stone. He clamped his hand over it with a shudder.
And he went back to bed, and dreamed.
This dream didn’t make much sense, but was horrifying in its own right. As the first dream had shown him casting the Cruciatus on someone who had flailed and screamed and flopped, this one showed him casting the Imperius. Harry woke up shivering and crying and hugging himself.
He wasn’t evil. He wasn’t. He would never become that. He couldn’t become that.
Could he?
*
When Harry woke, the Elder Wand was on his table next to the Resurrection Stone.
Harry shrank away from it, his breath coming so fast that he began to cough and choke after a moment. Then he stood up and ran down the stairs, flying into the kitchen, where Mum and Dad were sitting and discussing something in low voices.
“Harry!”
Mum got up to hug him, but Harry just slid to a stop and said in a voice that he knew was hysterical, “Dumbledore’s wand is on the table upstairs!”
Mum and Dad gave each other fleeting glances before they sprang into action. Mum went upstairs with Harry to cast spells on the wand and confirm that it was the one Dumbledore had shown them the other day, while Dad went to Floo the Headmaster.
Harry knew that the glances they’d exchanged had been panicked, even if they’d managed to act calm and adult afterwards, and he stood with his hands clenched and his heart thumping hard and painfully.
“How did you know that this was Dumbledore’s wand, Harry?” Mum asked, after she’d cast a few spells.
“I listened to you discussing it yesterday,” Harry had to admit. “And if the Stone showed up, the Elder Wand wouldn’t be far behind, right?”
Mum gave him a disappointed look, but then she took a quick breath and hugged him. “Of course you would want to listen to a conversation having to do with you,” she whispered. “Of course. I understand. But, Harry, you should trust us to tell you the truth next time. We’ve never hidden it from you, have we?”
“How Uncle Peter died—”
“That was because of the gory nature of the death, not that we killed him.”
“How you put down the Dark wizard rebellion—”
Mum pulled back, shuddering. “It was—there are certain things you don’t need to know—”
And then there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and Dad and Dumbledore pounded into the room. Dumbledore’s face was grave as he looked back and forth between Harry and his wand, and he started casting diagnostic charms with another wand that he apparently kept on hand. When he lowered that one, Harry stirred uneasily, but the Headmaster didn’t speak.
“Albus? What is it?” Dad asked.
“The Elder Wand’s magic feels muted,” Dumbledore said softly. “I can no longer touch it or wield it. It is not mine to command.”
Harry caught his breath, feeling himself shudder with more revulsion. “I don’t want it!” he said hastily. “Can’t you duel me and take it from me?”
“No longer.” Dumbledore’s face was old and set in grave lines, older than Harry had ever seen him look. “And more than that. The wand’s magic indicates that it was recently used to cast the Imperius Curse, even though I have never used it for such a spell.”
Harry put his hands over his face.
*
Harry dreamed that night, not of violence this time, but of a starry void stretching around him.
The void had always existed. Harry didn’t know how he knew that, but the knowledge was there, pressing into his chest and heart and mind with talons of bone. It was wider than deserts and vaster than time. It was there.
A voice whispered, You have always known this.
Harry was without body, without breath or air. He drifted, and there were stars arcing past him. He knew he would be alive until the death of the universe. He knew there would be no one to harm him, but also no one to hug him, or kiss him, or punch him, or clap his shoulder in congratulations when he snatched the Snitch at the last moment—
The cold voice chuckled. Imagine thinking of Quidditch here. There is no Quidditch.
Yes, I can see that, Harry tried to snap back. He tried to turn, too, so that he could see the creature, or the being, behind him. He wasn’t sure which one Death counted as. I know there’s no Quidditch here, but I could go where there is!
There was a pause long enough that Harry thought the being might have left, and, likewise, left him to drift. Then laughter erupted in his head, high and cold. It reminded him of something, but the memory fled before he could grasp it.
How could you go where there is? Do you not know what has happened?
Harry tore himself out of the dream before he could be forced to answer the question. He sat up, his hands pressed to his chest, and shuddered. The cold that the Resurrection Stone had granted to him so he could eavesdrop on his parents’ conversation with the Headmaster was everywhere in him now.
He glanced at the table beside the bed, and froze more strongly than the cold would have done to him. He couldn’t see the Wand or the Stone, because they were concealed beneath a familiar drape of shimmering, silvery cloth.
The Invisibility Cloak. Of course Harry had used it before, but.
It still felt momentous that it was here now.
Harry picked it up numbly and draped it over his shoulders. It made him invisible, and revealed the Stone and Wand that had been beneath it, but it also filled him with the cold of the void.
Why had Death shown him that, if the being who had sent the dreams in the first place was Death?
Harry bowed his head. He needed to ask some questions, and he reckoned that Mum and Dad and Dumbledore were the only ones who could answer them.
*
“Can you please show me the memory of Uncle Peter’s death again?”
Dad stared at the table in the silence that followed. Harry wondered if he was the only one who could hear echoes in that silence, or if Dad and Mum also heard all the questions that Harry wasn’t asking, the ones he hadn’t asked before now.
Dad swallowed and looked up pleadingly at Harry. “Do I have to show it to you? It’s one of the worst memories of my life.”
Harry hesitated, not because he really intended to say Dad didn’t have to, but because an odd intuition had come to him.
It shouldn’t be one of his worst memories. The worst one should be—
But Harry shook his head, because he didn’t know what would be the worst memory of Dad’s life if not this. He sat down at the table and leaned forwards as Dad Summoned the Pensieve.
He held his wand to his temple for a long, silent moment before silvery strands began to emerge. Harry felt bad for forcing him to do this.
But not bad enough to tell him he didn’t have to.
Dad finally dropped the memory in the Pensieve’s bowl, and stood up and walked away. Harry didn’t blame him. He wasn’t looking forward to watching this, either, but he had to. There were just some things that didn’t make sense.
And one of them was that the Deathly Hallows themselves were evidently whispering to him that he needed to watch it. But at this point, he wasn’t about to go against that. He was so bewildered that it was good to have a clear direction to follow, even one that came from incomprehensibly powerful artifacts.
He lowered his head to the surface of the memory.
*
He arrived in the front room of the cottage at Godric’s Hollow where they had used to live, a room that he could just barely remember for himself. Dad was standing by a large couch with an awful floral pattern that Uncle Sirius had charmed that way for a prank and then never been able to turn back to normal.
He was laughing with Uncle Remus, Uncle Sirius, and Uncle Peter. Harry couldn’t really remember Uncle Peter, either. But right now, he looked a lot like the rat Harry knew had been his Animagus form, chuckling uneasily.
None of the rest of the Marauders seemed to notice it was uneasy, but then, they were mostly drunk.
“And look what happens when I try to change when I’m drunk!” Dad waved his Firewhisky bottle and then set it down on the floor before he tried to change shape. The antlers that sprouted above his eyes were lower than they should have been, and his face expanded in a muzzle before it froze and got stuck. Uncle Sirius hooted with laughter, slapping his chest so hard that he fell over.
Uncle Peter smiled, but his eyes were sharp. Uncle Remus glanced back and forth between Dad and Uncle Sirius and chuckled.
“I have something to tell you,” Uncle Peter said abruptly.
Uncle Remus glanced at him, but neither Dad nor Sirius noticed at first, still caught up in their drunken laughter. It took a sharp motion from Uncle Remus to make them pay attention. Dad sat up, wiping his mouth and shaking his head. “What is it, Peter?” he asked.
Uncle Peter took a deep breath and touched his left arm for a minute. Harry blinked. He’d seen that the first time he saw the memory, too, hadn’t he?
Yes, of course. Dad hadn’t altered the memory, Harry was sure.
But now he wondered why that gesture was there, because Uncle Peter hadn’t been wounded on the left arm, and the brand he drew back his robes to show them was on his chest. Of course it was. It was where the Dark wizard rebellion had branded their followers. And of course the mark was a rough black depiction of a dragon.
Of course it was.
Why did I think it should be a snake? And why did he touch his left arm if nothing was there?
“You—you joined them?” Uncle Sirius almost yelped the words, his eyes fixed on Peter’s chest.
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Why, Peter?” That sounded like Uncle Remus’s heartbroken tone when he’d found out that he couldn’t afford the new Wolfsbane that would make his transformation totally painless. “Why?”
“Because I like the Dark Arts, and I agree that the Ministry can’t even define them half the time.” Peter shrugged, but he was tense, vibrating. Harry wondered why he hadn’t changed his shape and run away. It seemed like something it would have occurred to him to do. “And because they came and recruited me, and offered me the sort of praise that the lot of you haven’t since we left Hogwarts.”
“What?” Dad whispered. He had straightened and had his wand dangling from his hand, gaping at Peter. Harry knew what was coming next, and braced himself.
“You’ve just made me a butt of your jokes, since we left Hogwarts.” Pettigrew’s voice was tight. “You’ve told me that I shouldn’t even bother trying to be an Auror, and then you pranked me during my studying so that I couldn’t pass the exams. You’ve treated me like someone lesser for years now. Well, these people don’t.”
“They kill others!”
“You do the same thing, James. Or did you think that I didn’t know how Snape died?”
Harry swallowed. He hadn’t paid attention to the name when he saw the memory for the first time, but now it clanged in his head like an urgent bell.
Why? Is this someone important to the Deathly Hallows? Why?
“You know that was an accident!”
“Yeah? You think it was an accident when you hunted him down and fed him—”
Dad sprang forwards and jabbed with his head. And the antlers he had grown for a joke and then hadn’t reabsorbed into his skin went straight through Pettigrew’s chest.
Wormtail staggered back, his gaze rising to the ceiling, as he choked and let out a single bubble of blood and air. Then he fell over, and his blood stained the carpet.
Harry clasped his hands in front of him. He wasn’t feeling the emotions he had expected to, which were shock and disgust and fear. Instead, he felt—as though this was something deserved? As though Wormtail had died the way he was supposed to?
What is wrong with me?
“Holy Merlin, James, you killed him!” Uncle Sirius blurted a second later.
“We have to—we have to get rid of the body.” Dad was breathing hard, staring around with blurry eyes. Harry had been shocked the first time he’d watched the memory, but this time, he just nodded. Yes, they should Transfigure the body into a log and leave it somewhere. That was what—someone had done.
“Chop it,” Uncle Sirius said, his eyes aflame with madness in a way that was unfamiliar and familiar.
“What?” Uncle Remus had his hands clamped across his mouth.
“Chop it up and burn the pieces. It’s the only way to be sure that someone isn’t going to find it and ask us about it. Unless you think you could Apparate to the Acromantula Colony in the Forbidden Forest right now.”
“No,” Remus whispered. “I’ve had too much to drink.”
“Then we chop it up,” Sirius said, and aimed his wand at the body. There was a flash of blue light, a Severing Charm overpowered in the way that Harry knew Firewhisky could do to magic, and Wormtail’s left arm flew off his body.
“Sirius!”
Remus was horrified, but he wasn’t stopping them. Dad was nodding frantically, and he started chopping up Wormtail along with Sirius.
Harry watched with frightened eyes, but in his head, a cold part of him whispered, He was right. They didn’t think much of him. They were leaving him behind, treating him as lesser. Otherwise, they wouldn’t treat his body like this. Otherwise, they would have been more horrified about killing him, accidentally or no.
Harry swallowed. That wasn’t him. He was the one who admired his parents, who had grown up with them, who knew—
Who knew that his father had killed someone else, someone with a name that seemed significant to him somehow, and who hadn’t even retained that from the first time he had watched the memory. Any more than he had retained the memory of Wormtail touching his left arm.
What’s happening to me?
*
Harry stepped out of the Pensieve, taking a deep breath, and turned towards the sitting room. He really needed to speak with his mum, and learn more details about what she had done to put down that Dark wizard rebellion. He was wondering now what he would learn that he’d ignored before.
Or just never heard. Unlike Dad, Mum had never volunteered to show him memories of anything violent that she’d done.
He walked into the sitting room, and paused. His mother was huddled on the chair in front of the fireplace, weeping.
“Mum?” Harry asked. His voice was harsh and cold and didn’t sound like him. He tried to control it, but he sounded the same way when he said, “I have to talk to you.”
“Harry,” she whispered.
Her voice was unfamiliar. Harry tried to make himself believe it was just because she was on the edge of crying, but—surely it wouldn’t sound that different. As if he had only recently started hearing it again after a prolonged absence.
She opened her mouth, and Harry was so sure that she was going to say, “Not Harry, not Harry,” that he had to concentrate to hear the words she did speak instead.
“So now you know.”
“I already knew that Dad killed Wormtail, Mum.”
Mum hesitated, blinked. Her eyes were green like his. He had his mother’s eyes. That was something everyone said to him.
Wait. No, it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. What am I thinking? Sometimes people talked about how alike Harry and his mum looked, but no one made a special comment on his eyes.
“No,” Mum whispered. Her throat worked, and Hary tried to get past his impression that she should be screaming, not speaking. “Severus Snape, my best friend before Hogwarts. Your father didn’t like it that he was—always around when James tried to ask me out. So he killed him.”
Harry blinked at her and said, “No. He lived. He served the Dark Lord.”
What Dark Lord? Grindelwald died in that duel with Dumbledore ages and ages ago, and he was the last one.
“What are you talking about, Harry?”
“You stood in front of me and saved me from the Killing Curse.”
Mum started to her feet, reached for him, then pulled her hand back. “Baby, you’re scaring me.”
“It’s the way it was,” Harry continued, while the voice coming out of his throat grew stronger and colder and more ruthless, “and it is the way it is.” The Elder Wand was in his hand, he didn’t know how it got there, he didn’t know why it was there, but he aimed it at her and spoke the words he had to, because someone had to. “Avada Kedavra.”
The spell didn’t hit her. She didn’t scream. The room tore into the darkness of the starry void, and Harry drifted among those stars, the Cloak draped over his shoulders, the Wand in his right hand, the Stone blazing in his left.
And he remembered.
As he always did.
He had created the dream world, woken it into existence with the incomprehensible power of the Elder Wand. He had created a fantasy life for himself, with people real enough to live and suffer and laugh and eat and drink and die, the way that he might have grown up with his parents.
But it never lasted. It always tore, like this. And earlier and earlier. The one before this had lasted until his seventeenth birthday.
When would the time come that he couldn’t create even the barest of worlds, that he would lift the Wand and not leave the void?
No. No, that will not happen.
The cold voice in his head, which had once been part of Death and was now simply the most realistic part of him, whispered, It will. You cannot flee your past or your reality. You can make yourself forget for a little while, but never for that long. And the Hallows are increasingly unwilling to let you flee. So far, you can overrule them and create your dreamworlds, but for how much longer?
No. No!
You create worlds that make the people in them suffer. They all suffer, in the end. You make them dance like your puppets again and again. And for what?
I’m not listening to you.
Accept it. You are the Master of Death. You have outlived your world, its people, its plants, its animals. You have outlived the universe where you began. This is what you are.
Harry raised the Elder Wand with a scream and called forth the memories of people he knew and who would live because he willed them to, who would shelter him and keep him from the realization that awaited him if he remembered—the other things.
The cold voice sighed in the moment before Harry overruled the Wand’s will with his own and the dream spread around him.
You are eternity. In the end, you will have no choice but to surrender to it.
*
“Look at him, Lily. Isn’t he the cutest baby that you’ve ever seen?”
Harry looked up at the faces of his parents, gazing down lovingly at him, and smiled.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Mentions of James/Lily, otherwise gen
Content Notes: AU (Harry grows up with his parents), violence, angst, horror, gore, murder, minor character death, unhappy ending
Rating: : PG-13
Summary: In a world where Harry lives with his parents, James and Lily, and grew up happy and loved, he begins to sense that something is wrong. He has horrific dreams that predict he will become a violent killer, and someone seems to be watching him at every moment of the day. But even as he acts to protect himself, Harry cannot predict what the final result will be.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” short stories and one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. This is the story specifically for Halloween. The title is taken from a great Shirley Jackson short story, which I do urge you to read, but which doesn’t have any particular connection to this story’s plot.
The Possibility of Evil
“Harry, dear! Breakfast is on the table!”
Harry rolled out of bed with a little shudder and put his head in his hands. He had had another of those stupid nightmares last night, the ones he didn’t want to talk about because it would worry his parents so much. But it was getting to the point that he no longer thought he could hide them.
“Harry!”
Right. Mum. Breakfast. A sun-streaked day when Harry raised his head to look out the window, bright with early July weather.
He was home for the summer hols from Hogwarts and he would be sixteen in a week. He was—a good person, not like the violent one he’d seen in his dreams.
“Coming, Mum,” he called back, and stood up.
*
Mum and Dad shot him glances over breakfast, but Harry just kept his head down and ate. He wasn’t going to discuss the dreams unless they forced him to. What would he say? I know that neither of you believe in Divination, but it seems like I’m destined to become a psychopath who goes around using the Cruciatus on people?
“Are you all right, Harry?”
“Sure, Dad. Just, uh, not sleeping properly.”
“Are you sure? Because we heard you screaming last night.”
Harry jerked his head up and stared wide-eyed at his parents. Mum was holding Dad’s hand down by the side of the table, and her knuckles were white. Harry swallowed a little. “Uh, sorry? I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
“But what caused it, Harry?” Dad looked as if he had gone a little greyer than he already had been because of the screaming. “What kind of dreams did you have?”
“Some kind.”
“Harry, you know you can tell us,” Mum whispered.
Harry nodded and swallowed his toast. He knew that. He really did. He also just—felt as if Mum and Dad would be disappointed in him if they heard what kind of person he became in the dreams.
Which is also ridiculous.
“I was dreaming of the future,” Harry whispered. His parents both leaned forwards. “Or what seemed like the future. I was older, and I had—well, I didn’t have the wand I had now.” He swallowed and worked his hands back and forth under the table. Mum would know what he was doing, but he didn’t want to do it in front of them. “I was torturing people. Killing them.”
Mum and Dad exchanged glances. Then Dad said, in the calm tones Harry had once heard him use to talk down a Dark wizard with a bared wand inside Flourish and Blotts, “You know you’re not a bad person, don’t you, Harry? And that dreams never predict the future for anyone but true Seers? And you would have shown the gift by now if you were a true Seer?”
Harry nodded feebly in response to each sentence. Of course he did. He knew all that. It wasn’t possible to develop some Seer gift in the middle of his life, and especially not one that focused on such a strange future.
“They were just so intense,” he said weakly. “The dreams, I mean. They were really more like memories.”
“Why do you say that, Harry?” Mum let go of Dad’s hand and came around the table to caress his hair back from his forehead.
Something about the gesture felt strange to Harry, as if he had never had her touch him there before. But that was ridiculous.
He tried to shove that particular sensation away and concentrate on the one from the dreams instead. “You know that time you showed me the memory of Uncle Peter’s death in the Pensieve?”
“You did what, James?” Mum snapped.
Oops.
“He was old enough that he needed to know, Lily—”
“We agreed—”
“If he’s going to become an Auror someday, he’s going to see more traumatic things—”
“Not until he’s older—”
Harry took a deep, hurt breath. It was a tactic he had sometimes used before when they argued, and it worked this time like it had all the other times. Mum whirled towards him and placed her hands on his shoulders.
“I’m not angry at you, darling.”
Harry nodded and leaned against her for a second, shaking his head at Dad when he opened his mouth. Dad had already caused enough trouble, although Harry was the one who had revealed the secret. “Anyway. That’s how I know what a Pensieve memory feels like. And this was what these dreams felt like, too. Like memories that I was watching in a Pensieve. Except—except they’re mine. They were in my own head.”
Mum knelt down in front of Harry, smiling comfortingly at him. Her eyes were as green as his, but surrounded by a fine sea of laugh lines. Harry clung to the sight of her. She would keep him safe. She always had.
“I understand how you might feel because of these dreams,” she said soothingly, rubbing a circle on Harry’s back with one hand. “But you could never do anything like that. And even if you do become an Auror, you know that you don’t have to use violent spells, right?”
Harry nodded and bit his lip. “I could use prank spells, like Uncle Sirius.”
“Exactly. Or other spells,” Mum said, rolling her eyes a little. “But just having these dreams doesn’t make you a bad person. And you didn’t cause your nightmares because of something you did. They happened because your brain just sorted through the pieces of your worries and thoughts and assembled them that way. Or maybe because of something someone else did.” She short Dad a dark look.
Harry nodded and smiled weakly, then swallowed the last of his toast and snatched up the bowl of sliced apples tMum had put by his plate. “Is it all right if I take this upstairs? I could try to get some sleep after I eat.” He wanted to be out of the room when his parents fought.
“Of course, dear. Your father and I have some things to discuss.”
Harry shook his head as he left the room at a quick jog. Honestly, he wasn’t sure why his parents had got married in the first place or stayed married, they fought so much. He hoped that when his time came to get married, he would choose someone he got along with better.
Someone laughed.
Harry spun around, staring. Of course there was no one on the stairs with him. There was no one in the house except him and Mum and Dad. Mum had put her foot down when it came to having house-elves, and Uncle Sirius lived with Uncle Remus in Grimmauld Place.
Uncle Peter would have been over all the time once, but. Well.
Harry shook his head. He was imagining things. Maybe Mum was right and seeing the memory of Uncle Peter’s death, justified as it had been, had affected him more than he’d realized. He would go up and try to take a nap, the way he’d told Mum he would.
*
Harry came out of sleep screaming.
He rolled over and clutched his pillow, head bowed. Then he realized what the clench in his stomach meant, and barely got out of bed in time to dry-heave into the loo, clutching the sides and gasping.
That particular nightmare had been—it hadn’t been gory, like some of the ones he’d had last night. It hadn’t shown him torturing people.
But it had shown him perhaps a year older, standing over rounded stones that to Harry indicated graves and crying so much that Harry could feel the echo of that heartbreak now.
He pulled himself back from the loo and wiped his mouth with one hand. The sorrow, the ripping grief, still raked claws up and down the middle of his stomach, but at least he didn’t have anything left to throw up.
He turned around and walked part to his bedroom, and then stumbled to a halt.
Something that hadn’t been there before sat on the table beside his bed. Harry knew it hadn’t been there before. Mum cast Cleaning Charms on his bedroom when he was at Hogwarts and didn’t do anything else, because she always wanted him to feel like he could just walk right in when he came back and find everything where he left it.
This thing was strange. It would have been strange even if his parents had been in the habit of messing up his room and leaving things behind.
Harry stared at it. It sat there and didn’t do anything. Of course it didn’t. It was a small stone.
Granted, a stone that looked blacker than Harry thought a stone had any right to look, and when he took a step closer, he could see an etching on the front. A rune? But no, Harry was pretty sure that runes didn’t include circles, only straight lines, since they’d been designed originally to be carved on stone that didn’t accept curves.
He picked it up and stared at it.
A triangle, a circle, a line. Harry was abruptly sure that he’d seen that picture before, but he didn’t know—
In your dream.
Yes. That was it. Harry’s hand closed harder over the stone as he thought about it. There was a sense that that sign had been in his dream, even though, from what Harry could remember, it wasn’t carved on the tombstones that he had stood crying over. But it was there. Somehow. Nonetheless.
Harry swallowed back sickness and bile and stared down at the stone in his hand.
Mum and Dad could say all they liked about how of course his dreams weren’t real or predictions of the future, but what did it mean that he’d found a real-life representation of this symbol in them?
Harry shivered and turned towards his bedroom door. He needed to talk to them, now.
*
“Harry. My dear boy, how are you?”
Harry gave Headmaster Dumbledore a nervous smile. He had never really spent much time talking to the man, even at the parties that his parents sometimes dragged him to that commemorated the end of the Dark wizard uprising Dumbledore and his parents had helped put down. And this was worse, given how pale Mum had turned when she saw that symbol.
“Um, I’m all right, Headmaster.”
“Despite the series of strange dreams that your parents reported to me?”
“Um. Yeah.” Harry bit his lip and shifted around as he took the stone out of his robe pocket. Dumbledore’s eyes fastened on it at once. “I found this on the table next to my bed after one of the dreams. I’m sure not entirely sure of what it is.”
“May I see it?”
Harry didn’t really like touching the stone—it felt too cold and too slick—but it was still a struggle to drop it into Dumbledore’s extended hand, for some reason.
Dumbledore gave him a piercing glance, the sort that always made Harry feel the Headmaster could read his mind, and then turned his eyes to the stone. He caught his breath as he tilted it back and forth. The light of the fire flashed off it, but weirdly, Harry thought. Really, the light sank into it.
The black swallows it.
Harry heard the words inside his head, but he was also sure that he heard them, the way that he had heard the laughter on the stairs the other day. He sprinted to his feet, wand in his hand, and spun around.
“Harry?”
Harry swallowed and faced Dumbledore again. “I’m sorry, sir. I feel like I must be going mad.”
“And why is that? After all, this stone suddenly appearing proves that your dreams are not mere dreams.”
“No, sir. But—I can also hear a voice speaking to me at times. It sounds like it’s inside my head but also as if someone is standing in the same room as me.” Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s pretty mental, right?”
Dumbledore drew his wand and cast a silent spell at the far corners of the room. They flushed blue and glowed for a moment, then faded.
“Sir?”
“A charm to show that no one else is present in the room.” Dumbledore holstered his wand with a solemn face that made some of Harry’s hopes wither and turn to ashes. “I do not think you are mad, Harry. And I think that your dreams are harbingers of far worse to come than your parents do.”
Harry swallowed through a throat that felt stuck. Wasn’t the Headmaster supposed to reassure him? “What makes you think that, sir?”
Dumbledore held up the stone. Harry’s gaze fastened on it and he found it incredibly hard to look away. “Because this is the Resurrection Stone, one of the Deathly Hallows. And what it means that you have it…I fear for the future.”
*
Harry opened his eyes, shuddering. He hadn’t dreamed this time, but it had been such sheer darkness in his head that he hadn’t been sure he would open his eyes to the sunlight again. He turned his head and lifted it, face tilted, towards his window.
And almost screamed.
The Resurrection Stone sat on the table beside his bed, even though he knew—he was sure—that Dumbledore had taken it away to imprison it in a Gringotts vault.
Harry sat up, trembling, and reached out for the stone. It felt the same, cold and slick, and it had the same symbol on the front, which Dumbledore had talked about in more detail when explaining the legend of the Hallows. Of course Mum and Dad had read Harry the story of the Three Brothers when he was a kid, but it had been a long time since he’d thought about the details, and he’d certainly never believed the Hallows were real.
But this time, when he touched it, a loud chuckle rang through the room.
Harry sprang up and turned around, aware that the sheet wasn’t covering him any longer, and that the Stone had clung to his palm and come with him. None of it mattered in the face of—
A tall figure, draped in a long, black cloak. Harry couldn’t see its face, but he was somehow sure that a smile of delight resided there.
A rictus smile of delight, maybe.
“Soon,” said the figure, and sighed in a way that made Harry feel as if his bones were soaking in cold water. “It won’t be long now.”
Harry snatched up his wand and sent a curse at the figure. It whirled apart into dark motes, and his curse did nothing but damage the wall.
“So impulsive. That is one of many things you will forsake.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“You know the answer.”
The figure disappeared, and Harry shivered, staring at the wall. He knew what he thought, even though both Dumbledore and his parents had told him it wasn’t possible. He looked at his hand, which he’d been waving around, and which the Stone still clung to.
Harry thought he was dreaming of Death, and that Death wanted him to take its place.
*
“It’s not possible.”
“I’m afraid it is very possible, James.”
Harry had known that Dumbledore was supposed to get there later this afternoon, but he’d heard the Floo rush a few minutes ago, and so he’d come down the stairs as soon as he could. He wanted to tell Dumbledore about the confrontation with Death, but he also wanted to listen to their conversation. He thought they might say some things they would never tell him.
His parents had wanted to keep him safe all his life. Harry loved them for that, but it also meant they kept lots of secrets from him, like what exactly they’d done to put down the Dark wizard rebellion.
Now, Harry clutched the Stone and thought, Keep me from being heard or seen.
There was a ball of cold in his stomach immediately. It flooded out to cover his fingers and toes and arms and legs more slowly. Harry took a deep breath and then leaned against the door.
Wards that Dumbledore must have set crawled across his skin, then recoiled. Harry smiled a little. He was still worried as hell about what the appearance of that dark figure meant and where the Stone had come from in the first place, but at least the bloody thing was good for something.
“But the Tale of the Three Brothers is just a story,” Mum was whispering.
“I am afraid it is not.” There was a slight clunk, as though Dumbledore had laid something on the table. Mum and Dad both gasped. “Yes, I have removed the glamour that keeps its true nature hidden. This is the Elder Wand.”
Harry jerked. He had never even heard rumors that Professor Dumbledore carried the Elder Wand, and he was friends with a few of the most knowledgeable people in school, Hermione Granger included.
“Albus…”
“How long has the Potter Cloak of Invisibility lasted, James?”
Harry’s breath hitched. He had the Cloak with him at school sometimes, but Dad often owled him asking him to return the Cloak for a while so he could use it in his Auror work. Harry had never thought about how long it had lasted, but hadn’t Hermione got a weird expression on her face once when he’d said something about it being passed down from father to son in the Potter family?
Ordinary Cloaks probably don’t last that long.
“This is—stupid, Albus. There’s no way that something like this is true.”
“I am afraid it is. I am afraid that the Hallows have chosen the next, the true, Master of Death, and it is young Harry.”
Harry’s breathing stopped.
On his palm, the Resurrection Stone pulsed like a second heart.
Harry listened to the rest of the conversation, but it was little that he hadn’t already heard. His head and feet were both numb with more than the Stone’s lingering cold by the time that he trudged back to bed and lay down.
Why would he become the Master of Death? He was a sixteen-year-old Hogwarts student whose greatest accomplishments were being the Gryffindor Seeker and getting a good mark on his Defense OWL. If the forces that controlled the Deathly Hallows wanted to choose someone, why not someone like Dumbledore, who was famous for discovering all sorts of things? Or even Hermione, who was so smart?
No choice.
Those words, Harry was suddenly sure, came from the Stone. He clamped his hand over it with a shudder.
And he went back to bed, and dreamed.
This dream didn’t make much sense, but was horrifying in its own right. As the first dream had shown him casting the Cruciatus on someone who had flailed and screamed and flopped, this one showed him casting the Imperius. Harry woke up shivering and crying and hugging himself.
He wasn’t evil. He wasn’t. He would never become that. He couldn’t become that.
Could he?
*
When Harry woke, the Elder Wand was on his table next to the Resurrection Stone.
Harry shrank away from it, his breath coming so fast that he began to cough and choke after a moment. Then he stood up and ran down the stairs, flying into the kitchen, where Mum and Dad were sitting and discussing something in low voices.
“Harry!”
Mum got up to hug him, but Harry just slid to a stop and said in a voice that he knew was hysterical, “Dumbledore’s wand is on the table upstairs!”
Mum and Dad gave each other fleeting glances before they sprang into action. Mum went upstairs with Harry to cast spells on the wand and confirm that it was the one Dumbledore had shown them the other day, while Dad went to Floo the Headmaster.
Harry knew that the glances they’d exchanged had been panicked, even if they’d managed to act calm and adult afterwards, and he stood with his hands clenched and his heart thumping hard and painfully.
“How did you know that this was Dumbledore’s wand, Harry?” Mum asked, after she’d cast a few spells.
“I listened to you discussing it yesterday,” Harry had to admit. “And if the Stone showed up, the Elder Wand wouldn’t be far behind, right?”
Mum gave him a disappointed look, but then she took a quick breath and hugged him. “Of course you would want to listen to a conversation having to do with you,” she whispered. “Of course. I understand. But, Harry, you should trust us to tell you the truth next time. We’ve never hidden it from you, have we?”
“How Uncle Peter died—”
“That was because of the gory nature of the death, not that we killed him.”
“How you put down the Dark wizard rebellion—”
Mum pulled back, shuddering. “It was—there are certain things you don’t need to know—”
And then there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and Dad and Dumbledore pounded into the room. Dumbledore’s face was grave as he looked back and forth between Harry and his wand, and he started casting diagnostic charms with another wand that he apparently kept on hand. When he lowered that one, Harry stirred uneasily, but the Headmaster didn’t speak.
“Albus? What is it?” Dad asked.
“The Elder Wand’s magic feels muted,” Dumbledore said softly. “I can no longer touch it or wield it. It is not mine to command.”
Harry caught his breath, feeling himself shudder with more revulsion. “I don’t want it!” he said hastily. “Can’t you duel me and take it from me?”
“No longer.” Dumbledore’s face was old and set in grave lines, older than Harry had ever seen him look. “And more than that. The wand’s magic indicates that it was recently used to cast the Imperius Curse, even though I have never used it for such a spell.”
Harry put his hands over his face.
*
Harry dreamed that night, not of violence this time, but of a starry void stretching around him.
The void had always existed. Harry didn’t know how he knew that, but the knowledge was there, pressing into his chest and heart and mind with talons of bone. It was wider than deserts and vaster than time. It was there.
A voice whispered, You have always known this.
Harry was without body, without breath or air. He drifted, and there were stars arcing past him. He knew he would be alive until the death of the universe. He knew there would be no one to harm him, but also no one to hug him, or kiss him, or punch him, or clap his shoulder in congratulations when he snatched the Snitch at the last moment—
The cold voice chuckled. Imagine thinking of Quidditch here. There is no Quidditch.
Yes, I can see that, Harry tried to snap back. He tried to turn, too, so that he could see the creature, or the being, behind him. He wasn’t sure which one Death counted as. I know there’s no Quidditch here, but I could go where there is!
There was a pause long enough that Harry thought the being might have left, and, likewise, left him to drift. Then laughter erupted in his head, high and cold. It reminded him of something, but the memory fled before he could grasp it.
How could you go where there is? Do you not know what has happened?
Harry tore himself out of the dream before he could be forced to answer the question. He sat up, his hands pressed to his chest, and shuddered. The cold that the Resurrection Stone had granted to him so he could eavesdrop on his parents’ conversation with the Headmaster was everywhere in him now.
He glanced at the table beside the bed, and froze more strongly than the cold would have done to him. He couldn’t see the Wand or the Stone, because they were concealed beneath a familiar drape of shimmering, silvery cloth.
The Invisibility Cloak. Of course Harry had used it before, but.
It still felt momentous that it was here now.
Harry picked it up numbly and draped it over his shoulders. It made him invisible, and revealed the Stone and Wand that had been beneath it, but it also filled him with the cold of the void.
Why had Death shown him that, if the being who had sent the dreams in the first place was Death?
Harry bowed his head. He needed to ask some questions, and he reckoned that Mum and Dad and Dumbledore were the only ones who could answer them.
*
“Can you please show me the memory of Uncle Peter’s death again?”
Dad stared at the table in the silence that followed. Harry wondered if he was the only one who could hear echoes in that silence, or if Dad and Mum also heard all the questions that Harry wasn’t asking, the ones he hadn’t asked before now.
Dad swallowed and looked up pleadingly at Harry. “Do I have to show it to you? It’s one of the worst memories of my life.”
Harry hesitated, not because he really intended to say Dad didn’t have to, but because an odd intuition had come to him.
It shouldn’t be one of his worst memories. The worst one should be—
But Harry shook his head, because he didn’t know what would be the worst memory of Dad’s life if not this. He sat down at the table and leaned forwards as Dad Summoned the Pensieve.
He held his wand to his temple for a long, silent moment before silvery strands began to emerge. Harry felt bad for forcing him to do this.
But not bad enough to tell him he didn’t have to.
Dad finally dropped the memory in the Pensieve’s bowl, and stood up and walked away. Harry didn’t blame him. He wasn’t looking forward to watching this, either, but he had to. There were just some things that didn’t make sense.
And one of them was that the Deathly Hallows themselves were evidently whispering to him that he needed to watch it. But at this point, he wasn’t about to go against that. He was so bewildered that it was good to have a clear direction to follow, even one that came from incomprehensibly powerful artifacts.
He lowered his head to the surface of the memory.
*
He arrived in the front room of the cottage at Godric’s Hollow where they had used to live, a room that he could just barely remember for himself. Dad was standing by a large couch with an awful floral pattern that Uncle Sirius had charmed that way for a prank and then never been able to turn back to normal.
He was laughing with Uncle Remus, Uncle Sirius, and Uncle Peter. Harry couldn’t really remember Uncle Peter, either. But right now, he looked a lot like the rat Harry knew had been his Animagus form, chuckling uneasily.
None of the rest of the Marauders seemed to notice it was uneasy, but then, they were mostly drunk.
“And look what happens when I try to change when I’m drunk!” Dad waved his Firewhisky bottle and then set it down on the floor before he tried to change shape. The antlers that sprouted above his eyes were lower than they should have been, and his face expanded in a muzzle before it froze and got stuck. Uncle Sirius hooted with laughter, slapping his chest so hard that he fell over.
Uncle Peter smiled, but his eyes were sharp. Uncle Remus glanced back and forth between Dad and Uncle Sirius and chuckled.
“I have something to tell you,” Uncle Peter said abruptly.
Uncle Remus glanced at him, but neither Dad nor Sirius noticed at first, still caught up in their drunken laughter. It took a sharp motion from Uncle Remus to make them pay attention. Dad sat up, wiping his mouth and shaking his head. “What is it, Peter?” he asked.
Uncle Peter took a deep breath and touched his left arm for a minute. Harry blinked. He’d seen that the first time he saw the memory, too, hadn’t he?
Yes, of course. Dad hadn’t altered the memory, Harry was sure.
But now he wondered why that gesture was there, because Uncle Peter hadn’t been wounded on the left arm, and the brand he drew back his robes to show them was on his chest. Of course it was. It was where the Dark wizard rebellion had branded their followers. And of course the mark was a rough black depiction of a dragon.
Of course it was.
Why did I think it should be a snake? And why did he touch his left arm if nothing was there?
“You—you joined them?” Uncle Sirius almost yelped the words, his eyes fixed on Peter’s chest.
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Why, Peter?” That sounded like Uncle Remus’s heartbroken tone when he’d found out that he couldn’t afford the new Wolfsbane that would make his transformation totally painless. “Why?”
“Because I like the Dark Arts, and I agree that the Ministry can’t even define them half the time.” Peter shrugged, but he was tense, vibrating. Harry wondered why he hadn’t changed his shape and run away. It seemed like something it would have occurred to him to do. “And because they came and recruited me, and offered me the sort of praise that the lot of you haven’t since we left Hogwarts.”
“What?” Dad whispered. He had straightened and had his wand dangling from his hand, gaping at Peter. Harry knew what was coming next, and braced himself.
“You’ve just made me a butt of your jokes, since we left Hogwarts.” Pettigrew’s voice was tight. “You’ve told me that I shouldn’t even bother trying to be an Auror, and then you pranked me during my studying so that I couldn’t pass the exams. You’ve treated me like someone lesser for years now. Well, these people don’t.”
“They kill others!”
“You do the same thing, James. Or did you think that I didn’t know how Snape died?”
Harry swallowed. He hadn’t paid attention to the name when he saw the memory for the first time, but now it clanged in his head like an urgent bell.
Why? Is this someone important to the Deathly Hallows? Why?
“You know that was an accident!”
“Yeah? You think it was an accident when you hunted him down and fed him—”
Dad sprang forwards and jabbed with his head. And the antlers he had grown for a joke and then hadn’t reabsorbed into his skin went straight through Pettigrew’s chest.
Wormtail staggered back, his gaze rising to the ceiling, as he choked and let out a single bubble of blood and air. Then he fell over, and his blood stained the carpet.
Harry clasped his hands in front of him. He wasn’t feeling the emotions he had expected to, which were shock and disgust and fear. Instead, he felt—as though this was something deserved? As though Wormtail had died the way he was supposed to?
What is wrong with me?
“Holy Merlin, James, you killed him!” Uncle Sirius blurted a second later.
“We have to—we have to get rid of the body.” Dad was breathing hard, staring around with blurry eyes. Harry had been shocked the first time he’d watched the memory, but this time, he just nodded. Yes, they should Transfigure the body into a log and leave it somewhere. That was what—someone had done.
“Chop it,” Uncle Sirius said, his eyes aflame with madness in a way that was unfamiliar and familiar.
“What?” Uncle Remus had his hands clamped across his mouth.
“Chop it up and burn the pieces. It’s the only way to be sure that someone isn’t going to find it and ask us about it. Unless you think you could Apparate to the Acromantula Colony in the Forbidden Forest right now.”
“No,” Remus whispered. “I’ve had too much to drink.”
“Then we chop it up,” Sirius said, and aimed his wand at the body. There was a flash of blue light, a Severing Charm overpowered in the way that Harry knew Firewhisky could do to magic, and Wormtail’s left arm flew off his body.
“Sirius!”
Remus was horrified, but he wasn’t stopping them. Dad was nodding frantically, and he started chopping up Wormtail along with Sirius.
Harry watched with frightened eyes, but in his head, a cold part of him whispered, He was right. They didn’t think much of him. They were leaving him behind, treating him as lesser. Otherwise, they wouldn’t treat his body like this. Otherwise, they would have been more horrified about killing him, accidentally or no.
Harry swallowed. That wasn’t him. He was the one who admired his parents, who had grown up with them, who knew—
Who knew that his father had killed someone else, someone with a name that seemed significant to him somehow, and who hadn’t even retained that from the first time he had watched the memory. Any more than he had retained the memory of Wormtail touching his left arm.
What’s happening to me?
*
Harry stepped out of the Pensieve, taking a deep breath, and turned towards the sitting room. He really needed to speak with his mum, and learn more details about what she had done to put down that Dark wizard rebellion. He was wondering now what he would learn that he’d ignored before.
Or just never heard. Unlike Dad, Mum had never volunteered to show him memories of anything violent that she’d done.
He walked into the sitting room, and paused. His mother was huddled on the chair in front of the fireplace, weeping.
“Mum?” Harry asked. His voice was harsh and cold and didn’t sound like him. He tried to control it, but he sounded the same way when he said, “I have to talk to you.”
“Harry,” she whispered.
Her voice was unfamiliar. Harry tried to make himself believe it was just because she was on the edge of crying, but—surely it wouldn’t sound that different. As if he had only recently started hearing it again after a prolonged absence.
She opened her mouth, and Harry was so sure that she was going to say, “Not Harry, not Harry,” that he had to concentrate to hear the words she did speak instead.
“So now you know.”
“I already knew that Dad killed Wormtail, Mum.”
Mum hesitated, blinked. Her eyes were green like his. He had his mother’s eyes. That was something everyone said to him.
Wait. No, it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. What am I thinking? Sometimes people talked about how alike Harry and his mum looked, but no one made a special comment on his eyes.
“No,” Mum whispered. Her throat worked, and Hary tried to get past his impression that she should be screaming, not speaking. “Severus Snape, my best friend before Hogwarts. Your father didn’t like it that he was—always around when James tried to ask me out. So he killed him.”
Harry blinked at her and said, “No. He lived. He served the Dark Lord.”
What Dark Lord? Grindelwald died in that duel with Dumbledore ages and ages ago, and he was the last one.
“What are you talking about, Harry?”
“You stood in front of me and saved me from the Killing Curse.”
Mum started to her feet, reached for him, then pulled her hand back. “Baby, you’re scaring me.”
“It’s the way it was,” Harry continued, while the voice coming out of his throat grew stronger and colder and more ruthless, “and it is the way it is.” The Elder Wand was in his hand, he didn’t know how it got there, he didn’t know why it was there, but he aimed it at her and spoke the words he had to, because someone had to. “Avada Kedavra.”
The spell didn’t hit her. She didn’t scream. The room tore into the darkness of the starry void, and Harry drifted among those stars, the Cloak draped over his shoulders, the Wand in his right hand, the Stone blazing in his left.
And he remembered.
As he always did.
He had created the dream world, woken it into existence with the incomprehensible power of the Elder Wand. He had created a fantasy life for himself, with people real enough to live and suffer and laugh and eat and drink and die, the way that he might have grown up with his parents.
But it never lasted. It always tore, like this. And earlier and earlier. The one before this had lasted until his seventeenth birthday.
When would the time come that he couldn’t create even the barest of worlds, that he would lift the Wand and not leave the void?
No. No, that will not happen.
The cold voice in his head, which had once been part of Death and was now simply the most realistic part of him, whispered, It will. You cannot flee your past or your reality. You can make yourself forget for a little while, but never for that long. And the Hallows are increasingly unwilling to let you flee. So far, you can overrule them and create your dreamworlds, but for how much longer?
No. No!
You create worlds that make the people in them suffer. They all suffer, in the end. You make them dance like your puppets again and again. And for what?
I’m not listening to you.
Accept it. You are the Master of Death. You have outlived your world, its people, its plants, its animals. You have outlived the universe where you began. This is what you are.
Harry raised the Elder Wand with a scream and called forth the memories of people he knew and who would live because he willed them to, who would shelter him and keep him from the realization that awaited him if he remembered—the other things.
The cold voice sighed in the moment before Harry overruled the Wand’s will with his own and the dream spread around him.
You are eternity. In the end, you will have no choice but to surrender to it.
*
“Look at him, Lily. Isn’t he the cutest baby that you’ve ever seen?”
Harry looked up at the faces of his parents, gazing down lovingly at him, and smiled.
The End.
We are feasting tonight!
Date: 2024-10-31 11:54 pm (UTC)Even more than that, this solstice season is starting out with a bang! We received three(!) updates tonight and I could not be happier.