Giver and Receiver

'I pray you in your letters

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate

Speak of me as I am: nothing exenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice...'

~ Shakespeare, Othello

You see, memory is indeed the most powerful tool that the Dark side can turn and manipulate to its own use. I believe Tom Riddle knew this, but he forgot it.

I have a fondness for Muggle literature that is rather less well-known than my fondness for Muggle sweets, although I still maintain that the two go together; what could be more delightful than eating cubes of Rowntrees' jelly straight from the packet while reading one of the classics? (Yes, I do know you are meant to add hot water and leave them to set, but I prefer the jelly that way.) Anyway, the Muggle books I have read almost uniformly display far greater imagination than wizarding novels, perhaps because it does require so much more imagination to be a Muggle than to be a wizard, and one particular novel was very revealing on the subject of memory.

If you control memories - individual and collective - you can rewrite the past, and therefore the future, was the idea in a nutshell, and it was an unsettling thought coupled with what we wizards have at our disposal. In a world where we can discover others' deepest fears simply by waving a Boggart in front of them, where we can control their worst memories with a single Dementor and where Memory Charms allow us to alter and reshape memory as we wish, what does stop the Dark side - or indeed, our side - from reshaping people to its own will? It was a thought that confronted me immediately on finishing the novel, and quite distracted me from the glorious concoction of milk and a powdered substance sold in packets - I believe the Muggles call it Angel Delight - which I was eating at the time. I could only put the failure to use this tactic down to a lack of imagination. Let us hope the Dark Lord never reads 1984.

But I digress too far, and must return to the subject at hand, the subject which I am wasting all these sheets of hideously embossed parchment for - the subject for which I opened my Pensieve. The memories I see now in the silver in front of me are not true recordings of events, but my memories of them, no more and no less, a biased and partial view. I must remember this fact, as I put the facts together. It is a pity that Tom did not.

Yes, my story begins with a Pensieve, and Tom Riddle's lack of foresight. It took me a short while to discover how he had managed to produce that diary - a brilliant piece of work, as I said at the time, and hear myself saying again as the memory of that event replays in my Pensieve, seeing myself bend over the burnt and dripping pages. If Harry hadn't made such a good job of destroying it, I might have discovered the nature of the spell Tom worked sooner. When I did finally pinpoint it, I have to admit that even I was surprised. Tom, you see, had quite simply transferred all his memories of the first sixteen years of his life to the diary, leaving him only two years remaining, as he must have made the diary at the end of his time at Hogwarts. Others will puzzle about this, but I believe that it was a complete transfer - that he was simply left with no vestige of - what's that I'm saying now? I peer closer to the Pensieve. Ah, yes - 'the clever, handsome boy who was once Head Boy here.'

But clearly Tom was not stupid enough to completely divest himself of sixteen years of vital memories, so I assumed that he must have performed some sort of transfer before completing the spell in the diary. A Pensieve - a receiver of memory - was the only instrument he could have used to regain his memories after the diary had been created. So you see, what Tom Riddle - or rather, Voldemort - now received back was a biased, partial version of his own childhood. Biased along his own views, stamped with his own belief of himself. And as Tom believed that he was distinctive, special, quite above the rest of us - in other words, not human - that was what he regained. So he lost his humanity when he had completed those two transfers, and with it, the ability to truly die. Then, of course, he went away to murder his father.

I know all this because I taught him, but I could not see the answer at the time, although I had long puzzled over how he became the Dark Lord. I know more, now, about how the ways we are portrayed can cover our true selves. To take a light-hearted example; I shudder to think how many people must think of me because of several articles of Rita Skeeter's. A marvel of slander, she really was. I laughed enough to frighten the portraits when I found that she had dug up that old story about Aberforth and his goat charms - and laughed even more when I realised she was trying to implicate me with the Nanny Hex. What a lucky thing that Aberforth is now respectably installed as the proprietor of the Hogs' Head, hexing pigs instead, and I no longer have to worry about his effect on my reputation. Though the comparison is an odd one, I admit, Tom remade himself as Voldemort in a similar way - or more correctly, the Dark Lord, for reasons I will come to later.

And so the Dark Lord, divested of humanity, came to try and kill Harry Potter, and he failed. The reason for this is one that I have made clear; Harry was protected by his mother's love for him. I am thankful that Harry has never asked if no-one else's parents died for them, then; if no other mother was capable of loving that strongly, for I would not be able to answer him. The truth is that Lily Potter was born with a certain ability to transfer protection, amongst other things, to another person, if they had the same ability to give and to receive. This ability is a close cousin to Legilimency and Occlumency, although it cannot be learnt. It is not well-known these days, although wizards still instinctively respond and remember the signs of this power when they see it. Of course, it is made manifest in the eyes - and while Lily's eyes were certainly a most unusual shade of green, they would not have been so memorable if not for this power she also possessed. This power that enabled her, at the moment of the Dark Lord's attack, to transfer the love and protection she felt for Harry as a palpable thing into his blood - unconsciously, of course - and so repel the Dark Lord, who has no humanity left.

And Harry has his mother's eyes, you see.

I have reached this point in my reasoning, and perhaps I should not try to speculate any further, for I can be sure of nothing beyond this. In fact, many would think I have relied too much on speculation already. However, there are a few pieces of evidence that console me that I am moving in the right direction. I admit to feeling premature triumph a year ago when Harry told me of the transfer of blood that the Dark Lord has used to regain his body. I look at the scene in the Pensieve now, and yes, I do appear rather smug, don't I? I hoped then that that might be enough to restore the Dark Lord's humanity and mortality, but it seems not. However, it has proved to me that he is open to a transfer. He does not possess the ancient power that Lily and Harry do, but his lack of humanity, of the true Tom Riddle, leaves him open. Tom saw humanity as a weakness, but if he had it now, it could become his strength. He could not possess Harry in the Department of Mysteries because he lacked it. In fact, possession was another of my clues that there was a distinct difference between Tom and the Dark Lord, for Tom could and did possess Ginny Weasley.

Therefore, in the spell he cast at eighteen years old, the Dark Lord set down the method of his defeat.

I will set down the reasons behind my use of names, before I continue to the final part of my theory - the means by which the Dark Lord could be defeated. I believe the correct term for Voldemort is indeed 'the Dark Lord', as he was named in Professor Trelawney's two prophecies, and as he is called by Severus Snape. Voldemort - 'I am Lord Voldemort' - you see, implies that the Dark Lord could manipulate the pieces of Tom Marvolo Riddle as he wished, remake himself as he wanted to. We know he could not. Therefore, the Dark Lord is the correct title, and I believe that Severus Snape knows this, although he has not been kind enough to discuss it with me yet.

I call him Voldemort openly, of course, not to cause undue panic - the other sounds too much like Death Eater terminology. Rita Skeeter - when she is reinstated - would have a field day. I have to admit, I have been sorely tempted to let it slip at times, just to hear a dramatic account of my sordid past, devotion to the Dark side and later control by Imperius.

And yet, in the Department of Mysteries - I bring the memory to the surface - I called him Tom. A deliberate impulse. I had wondered, as I have said already, if the humanity transferred to the Dark Lord by Harry's blood had been enough to make him mortal again, but it seems not to be the case. I called him Tom to try and stir his memories, reawaken - but it did not work. I think I must accept that this errant student has been away too long.

And so, the only way I can see him being defeated is by another transfer. Harry - who has the powers as his mother did - must transfer some sort of humanity back to Voldemort, perhaps even in the form of his memories. Of course that might kill Harry, or erase him completely. Yet it must be an unconscious transfer, and so I cannot tell him, and I cannot warn him. I cannot even take any steps to protect him, for then I would be working against the rest of the world.

A long memory, and methods of preserving it, are not such a blessing, you see, after all.

I turn to my Pensieve. Inside it, I am saying to the Dark Lord, "Merely taking your life would not satisfy me, I admit - "

Indeed it would not. I cannot kill him. Only Harry can do that.