Come Back to Me

Author's Notes:

This was written in October 2005 for a ficathon at the LiveJournal community, wizard_trauma. My prompt was: "Session 3, #85: Character A finds him/herself in the position of deciding whether his or her parent, spouse, or child should be kept alive by mechanical or magical means."

This is an attempt to explore the idea of mercy-killing and assisted suicide. As you might be able to tell from the prompt, this deals with issues of life vs. death, and so I ask readers to be open to either outcome with respect to the story content.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to jamc91 who did an exceptionally thorough job in beta-reading and who has been an invaluable source of support and encouragement.

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The Sunday Prophet - Letters to the Editor
8th April, 2001

A famous American pioneer is credited as saying, "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government."

Indeed, the Ministry of Magic counts itself a part of our government; which, while not American, should also name the self-same ideals in its aims and purpose. No wizard or witch deserves to have their life stopped, not if we - by magic or otherwise - may help it. Not least Harry Potter, who saved us all from impending darkness four years ago. It is our duty to help him in what ways we can. We owe him that much.

- Susan Bones


Medical reports tell us that as a result of extensive injuries sustained from his final battle with the Dark Lord, the brain of Harry Potter has been reduced to nothing more than spinal fluid. He is incapable of fulfilling even the most basic of bodily functions himself.

Clearly this raises the issue of the quality of life versus the inviolability of life. I do not dispute that each life is not precious, but where is the quality in such a life as this? It is a lack of compassion within us that stops us from ending Mr. Potter's misery.

- Anthony Goldstein




1. Letters From Hell.

You don't read the Daily Prophet to Harry these days. He never bothered with the news anyway, and with the end of the war, the paper has returned to reporting the mundane realities of life. Ten dead in Hogsmeade Manticore attack, fifty-seven injured - Black flu outbreak in southern England - Draco Malfoy acquitted of all Death Eater charges...

No. The Prophet has never been the bearer of good tidings, and it has never been very kind to Harry Potter either.

You stick to the Quibbler, because you hope stories like those about Crumpled-Horned Snorkacks or Sirius Black the Singing Sensation will bring back to him memories of youth and innocence, and maybe make him smile. Each day you come back, reading a new story and a new headline; hoping you'll see that lopsided grin, praying that you'll find laughter in those blank emerald eyes. Then maybe the sun will shine again.



//




We can't let him die... not when there's still hope in me heart that we'll have him back again.
- Rubeus Hagrid



2. Burn Out Bright.



Your relationship with Hermione never really took off, even after the war. It couldn't have, not when Harry was lingering dangerously on the threshold of death. The last battle had taken too much out of him, and the Healers could barely keep him alive - much less conscious.

But Hermione's never been the sort to sit on her laurels as an idle spectator. She jumped into the fray with the best Healers and most prestigious medical journals by her side and helped pioneer a new age of Healing.

Harry Potter did not die as the Dark Lord did; he was saved by Muggle medicine... After a fashion. That is why your most recent memories of Harry are filled by images of a sterile room in St. Mungo's where a young man with messy, greying hair and empty green eyes lies connected to tubes over tubes over tubes.

Thousands of Galleons are spent each year to sustain the cocktails of potions and spell-wards that keep him alive. An unthinkable cost if it were any other person, never mind the tragedy, but this is Harry Potter, Hero of the Wars. For a while, there was little doubt about keeping him alive, by all means.

It took only two years for his legacy to fade, and for the debates to start.

But the public cannot complain about the Galleons (and they do not, for it is Harry's life they argue about), for the money is coming out of Harry's coffers, and not theirs. And when the gold does run out, it is not wizarding society you will worry about.

It is something the Healers have told you that you cannot get out of your mind it haunts you always and that is the fact that while MediHealing can re-grow bones and cure the most potent of poisons, it cannot fix a broken mind.

You are scared by this. Hermione, however, does not show any signs of fear amidst her stubbornness. She just carries on with her medical research. Her eyes are bloodshot when she comes to visit Harry and she is dangerously thin. You don't need Luna Lovegood to tell you that Hermione locks herself up in the library of Paracelsus College, the secret wizarding branch of prestigious Cambridge University. Hermione has always found her answers in the pages of books, and you don't think she'll ever change.

She has always been the cleverest of the lot, but you think that even Hermione will not find an answer. Because you remember, better than her it seems, that even magic cannot fix a broken mind. That is why Frank and Alice Longbottom still languish in delirium in their ward next door, together with the overly mellifluous Gilderoy Lockhart.

It is, in fact, the reason why the likes of Sirius Black never really escaped Azkaban.



//



I've known Harry for almost ten years, now. And this is not Harry. We knew, coming into this war... that we would lose people. And we have lost Harry. It is... time for us to let go.
- Minerva McGonagall



3. The Advocate's Devil.



You do not like the strange angle at which Harry's head hangs limply on his chest. His face seems to have taken a yellow tinge lately, and it is clear that his body never really recovered from the armada of Dark curses that incapacitated him. Nonetheless, it is in better shape than his mind. The Healers have assured you that the rest of his innards will not waste away, and that the potions and spells will keep them healthy.

You can't help but wonder, however, how useful taut limbs and muscles could be to a broken mind.

It is a question you know has Remus Lupin has struggled with as well. He comes in to visit with Tonks - or Nymphadora, rather, for that is what she has been calling herself, ever since her mother's murder by Bellatrix Lestrange - every Sunday, and it seems to you that nothing much has changed with him. His robes are still getting shabbier by the week for the age-old prejudice still reigns, and he carries himself with the same quiet equanimity as always.

This same gravitas seems to put a word on the tip of his tongue every time he comes by, though of course he will never admit it. Dignity. The self-same mantra that stops Remus Lupin from accepting a friend's charity in spite of his own needs, the philosophy that makes him upset to see Harry-the-living-corpse.

He's a scholar like Hermione, but you note the lack of hope Hermione's hope in his face whenever he reads the medical reports.

Non-cognitive. Persistently unaware of surroundings. Brain necrosis assured.

The diagnoses are usually the same, and while Hermione doesn't see doesn't want to see the bleakness of Harry's situation, Lupin clearly does. And you cannot help but agree with him.

Harry has many visitors, but they can't do much when they come around. You, and everyone else, used to hope that if you kept talking to him, he'd shown some sign of awareness. Prove it to the Healers that he was inexplicably catatonic, and not brain-dead.

It was a long time before you were cured of that affliction.

Remus Lupin, however, never seemed to have your hope. You often wonder if it is the weight of his years that has made him jaded. Tonks tells you he has little happiness in his life, and that marriage is helping a little. Not enough, you think. Because he'll never wholly be a man or wolf; never here nor there. He's been stuck in limbo for far too long.

Limbo... a little place between life and death. Perhaps that is the world of a werewolf, because that is what Remus Lupin thinks when he sees Harry's strangely angled form. He will never say as much, but you have become more perceptive; you finally grew up many years ago, after Dumbledore's death. You notice things, now.

The papers share Remus Lupin's conflict; Harry Potter: Life vs. Death has been in the newspapers everyday for the past year-and-a-half. To your outrage, there are photographs of Harry. They are horrible to look at, and it is wrong to you that the legacy of the wizarding world's salvation, your best mate, should be reduced to a withered, seemingly unthinking corpse in the eyes of those he saved.

You struggle to remember him as he used to be. All you can see now is how limply his head hangs on his chest, and the yellow tinge on his skin that seems to reach his once-bright eyes. A blank stare by dull green irises, forever scarring your memory.



//




Harry's a fighter, like his parents. He's gonna keep on fighting. There's a fire in the lad that won't let him give up. Never.
- Alastor Moody



4. A Love Restrained.



Between the two of you, Ginny has always been the stronger one. It is, admittedly, something that you have taken a while to realise and accept. She is, after all, your little sister. But then, she had always been feisty to your mellow; always so tenacious and spirited.

Once, she punched you because you had been teasing her about her crush on Harry. Nine years later, and you still have a bit of a bruise on your abdomen.

She used to help Hermione with the medical research at Paracelsus College... back when everybody still had high hopes for Harry's recovery. These days though, she seems to do little else but spend her time at St. Mungo's. It's as if she has the luxury of time, now, because unlike you, she does not work. Although the MediWitches tell you that sometimes she helps out at the hospital.

Mostly, she just sits quietly by Harry's bedside.

She doesn't speak to him - no one does these days, not after the Healers said it didn't matter. Back then, a twitch of his lips was hope for a smile. Now, you know better: the twitch of his fingers when you pat his hand is nothing more than reflex action. Ginny doesn't bother trying anymore, she just wordlessly wipes his glasses the only part of him that is not of the flesh for she is past hoping.

Hermione wonders if the legal battles have broken her. It was a trying time for even the best of you; for once the after-war repairs were done the public debates began to rage. But you have been through worse, and so has Ginny. You believe - you want to keep believing - that it takes more than the interference of the Ministry of Magic to do that (for that is what it was, their insistence to leave Harry's fate in the hands of committees that did not even know him and could hardly pass judgment on what Harry would have wanted), to break Ginny.

But she never did get over him. You realise, then, that it is Harry who has broken her. It is this Harry who lies on the bed connected to tubes over tubes over tubes, his head angled strangely and his eyes blank, blank and unceasingly blank.

She has not stopped wearing her black veil, even after three long years. You realise she will mourn always, as a widow is wont to do, though she is not married and never will be.

You can tell that she is past watching Harry now; she doesn't see the tubes of potions and fluids that mar his broken body or the life-sign contraptions stacked all around him.

You suspect that she speaks instead to shadows in the dark, when night falls and she is the only one left in this closed ward at St. Mungo's.



//




He's been through so much. Let him be at peace. For all that he's done for us... we can give him that much.
- Neville Longbottom



5. Blindly To The Light.



There is a silver needle, attached to a glass flute, on the table by Harry's bedside. It is one of the various magical devices that keeps track of Harry's life-signs, and it taps lightly on a little black disc, every second of every day. It reminds you of a Muggle contraption your father once had, though that was much bigger and was supposed to make music.

Taptap. Taptap. Taptap.

This one doesn't make music, but it will keep on tapping till Harry's heart stops beating.

There are other medical equipment that crowds the room, quills that write in health charts and wards that glow, all working silently. You don't know what they mean or do but Hermione does; the only thing that matters is the silver needle that taps.

It is background noise, now, though sometimes it becomes more erratic than usual. You are supposed to make sure it doesn't get too fast Taptap Taptap; because, such a thing, they tell you, means that Harry's heart is going too fast. And it will wear itself out while the needle goes Taptap Taptaaaaaaaaaap -

It seems that you are expecting to hear that, these days. Hoping, maybe. But you can't stand the idea of Harry dying by wastage, just because his heart caught up with his stagnant brain. It is as repulsive as the act of stopping a dead corpse from receiving peace.

You have taken to watching the tubes of potions that are the most vital to sustaining Harry. There are three tubes; in particular, that transport the most important fluids down Harry's throat. They are, ironically, also the most vulnerable to damage. The points of weakness. A second without them and the spell-wards will begin to break. The magic that performs the most basic of his bodily functions for will fail to the path of no return.

You finger the tubes lightly, marveling at their smooth, slender touch. The potions they transport are green as emeralds... the irony.

It doesn't remind you of Harry, though. You turn instead to a picture on Harry's bed-stand and note the evergreen warmth in the eyes of a red-haired angel; for that is what motherhood does to a person. There's a man next to her, such a spitting image of Harry that it is almost painful. You have seen this many times before; you can always remember telling Harry in first year that you would have liked to meet his parents. You recognise the man next to them, the pictures supposed are supposed to move, but they seem so oddly subdued. A handsome man of barely twenty-one not unlike yourself. A man whose own story is easily as tragic as Harry's.

You like to think he is in a better place now, with Professor Dumbledore now, in a far green country where grace and joy abound with the dulcet music that mingles in the sweet air; the sounds of sun-kissed water in the breeze, the foaming waves in the crashing sea...

Perhaps your final gift to Harry, then, is to give him back to the others who loved and died for him.

But you don't presume to know what Harry would want. You don't even presume to know what he is feeling, right now. The Healers do that for you. They believe he is in no pain, because his brain is not even capable of processing that, anymore.

Maybe that's supposed to be good enough for you, knowing that Harry is not suffering.

But you have never presumed to know anything about what Harry is going through.

All you know is that there can be another way, a better way.

There is another way. The better way.

You could be sent to Azkaban for this. Hearts will be broken. Hermione might just kill you. Ginny will definitely kill you.

Or maybe she won't...

Taptap. Taptap. Taptap.

You're crying now, but your tears have tilted the world back into focus.

Taptap. Taptap. Taptap.

You can taste the salty tang of your tears when they stream down your cheeks and over your lips, as your hand closes tightly over the tubes.

Taptap. Taptap. Taptaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap -