You Can't Lose

    After I found out about the prophecy, and about my whole point in life, I didn’t want to tell anyone.

    I think I might have told Sirius if he’d still been alive. He would have wanted to know, and anyway, he wouldn’t have treated me different, acting like I was some hero. For a while, when people told me how great and good I was, I’d stick to my old thing - “I got famous because Voldemort killed my parents but couldn’t kill me. Who wants to be famous for that?”

    But after a while people started to notice something different in me. A few said I was bitter, and one or two said I was losing it again, and then people starting breaking into arguments over me. But they were both right - right in two.

    I was bitter, but not for the reason people thought. They always assumed it was the loss of Sirius. And believe me, it was. But there was another reason too.

    I’m not sure what I expected, but a few weeks into the summer it finally hit me - came smashing down on my little insignificant head - I had to be a murderer. Or be murdered. I think I lot of people would say that it wasn’t any big deal, having to kill Voldemort. I should be proud, and honored, to be able to do such an important thing.

    Well let me tell you - that sure looks a lot nicer on your side of the glass. Who wants to grow up to be a murderer, even if your only victim is Voldemort?

    I didn’t.

    But the other people, the ones who argued that I was going mad, they were right too. I was losing it, falling into some darkness that couldn’t be explained. Like the mystery of why the hell it had to be me with the scar, me with the powers, me with the bloody “honor”.

    When everyone else found out about the prophecy, and about my whole point in life, they wanted to tell everyone.

    It became the only topic of conversation. Still is, in fact. No one seemed to think that there was the smallest chance that I wouldn’t come through for them. Everyone was so stuck on me being their savior that they never bothered to remember that I was still human.

    Even Ron and Hermione. They treated me different after I told them. Hermione has done practically every single one of my homework assignments this year. I asked her why and she said, “You have something big to do one day. You need to rest.”

    You need to rest!? It’s not some big pop-quiz, you know! It’s my life, for God’s sake! You really think sleeping is going to help me fight Voldemort?

    Not likely.

    Ron got me out of trouble every time I stepped into it. Every time. One time Snape caught me with some girl in the dead of night. Ron got me out of it…prefect’s word and all that crap.

    She was expelled.

    It’s not like it hurt me that much. The ‘relationship’ consisted of that one night. I don’t even remember her name.

    And yet, Ron got a girl expelled because I got caught knocking her up. Nothing he told Dumbledore was true, except the part about me hitting her up. He said she used the Imperius Curse on me.

    I didn’t argue.

    I told a few people, only those closest to me, of course, about my doubts - my doubts about defeating Voldemort.

    I heard the same thing over and over again - “You can’t lose.” “You can’t lose, Harry.”

    I don’t know if they meant it in the sense that they thought I was too good to actually fail them, or in the sense that they wanted me to know that I had to win, had to defeat Voldemort. But either way, it made me mad.

    I wanted someone to pity me. Someone to come to me and say that they felt really horrible about what I had to do. I didn’t want people to be jealous of me, telling me how much honor I had and whatnot. I wanted them to feel sorry for me.

    There were sleepless nights - hundreds of them - where I would climb up to the Astronomy tower and just sit. Sit and watch the moon.

    Sometimes, when the moon was just a sliver or not even visible, I’d watch the Dog Star. It wasn’t like the other stars, that had a steady light that was always there. The Dog Star had a flickering light, almost like it was winking. And sometimes it wasn’t there at all. I’d spend hours searching for it, but it was like that star - just that one - had been covered in some black veil that made it disappear to me.

    Like Sirius had.

    Like Sirius had.

    When I couldn’t find it I’d go back to staring at the moon. Sometimes - when it was particularly bright - I’d wonder where Lupin was, and what he was doing, and how he was feeling. When it was full I could never bring myself to watch it. Instead I’d stare out at the grounds, at the Whomping Willow and the lake. I’d remember when I’d seen my Patronus galloping back to me and I’d realized “Prongs”. I’d imagine my dad being that stag and racing around the grounds and in the forest with a shaggy black dog and wolf. There was a rat, too, but it was always just something the wolf had killed in my dreams.

    The last summer, the one between fifth year and sixth year, was horrible. I couldn’t stand being at the Dursleys’ house, but I didn’t have a place to go to. The headquarters for the Order were still 12 Grimmauld Place, but what good was that? I wasn’t about to leave the Dursleys’ to visit a place like that.

    I did once during the summer, you know. But it was different. The tiny light that had filtered through the house when Sirius was there was gone. No one there seemed too bothered with it. I only stayed for a week, but no one was there except for the Weasleys, Hermione, and Snape. Tonks and Mad-Eye dropped in for a bit, but neither said anything to me. Lupin wasn’t there at all save two days. He came by so we could go to the reading of Sirius’s will.

    The only people that went were me, Lupin, and Dumbledore. Fudge read the will right after a formal clearing of Sirius’s name. Most of the things at the start of the will were for my dad and Lupin, but gradually my name started turning up more.

     Halfway through the list he stopped, staring at the paper.

    After about five minutes of gazing open mouthed at the paper he finally said, “To the Weasley family - 300,000 Galleons.”

    My mouth dropped open too - Ron was rich. I’d had no idea even Sirius had that kind of money.

    I’d suffered despondently through the rest of the summer, and most of the school year afterward.

    There was pain, but I found ways to cancel it out. Long, slow spells that cleared my mind for hours on end. Memory charms I put on myself. I never messed them up.

    I practiced them, perfecting them, nearly every night. Different people every night, subjected to near flawless charms. Different girls that I made forget.

    I turned into my own vision of Draco Malfoy. Cold, shadowed, uncaring. Sleeping with a different girl from a different house every night. Making them forget. If word got out - and it would - that Harry Potter, hero of Men, leader of Light, beacon of Hope, slept around…well, I might have done what I’m about to do sooner.

    There were empty nights, where there was no one, not a soul, and I retired to my old ways. It was always cold on top of the Astronomy Tower, and I had to pass what felt like hundreds of couples making out - and making love - before reaching this alcove, a little bit of peace among the pain.

    Summer. I learned to sit on the roof there, too, unnoticed. Sometimes the heat lightening would flash so violently across the sky that the stars would disappear for seconds.

    The Dog Star bothered me. It shone with bluish light, first weak, then strong, then almost invisible. It winked down at me, like an old friend I had once shared a secret with. I smiled at it sometimes, and sometimes I cried.

    I remember trying to stare it down, and win. I remember thinking that maybe, somehow, I could see Sirius in it. I never did.

    There are moments in every life, I know, that are wrong. Where everything is backwards and pain overtakes pleasure.

    I laugh now at that. Moments. Moments for me lasted whole summers, whole months, whole years.

    I used to sort through Sirius’ belongings every night, organizing them and studying them and just touching them, sometimes. I found a journal, and a photo album, and a stack of poems written on faded parchment.

    I never knew. I never knew that Sirius wrote that sort of thing; long, eloquent poetry that seemed branded into my heart - or was it my soul? - every time I read them.

    There was, in an almost square box, a dagger wrapped in a washed out piece of paper. There was a poem on it, a short one, that reminded me of Sirius. I think he wrote it like that, to remind himself who he was.

    Maybe I’ll show it to you sometime.

    There was one poem, a brief one, called You Can’t Lose, that I loved. I don’t remember all of it, but it went something like this:

When there is

Pain everywhere,

When hope has died

And virtue faded,

Will you brave the odds

Or will you stay and

Hide?

Will you know how not to

Lose,

Or will you fear the truth?

When hope has died

And virtue faded,

Will you know

How

Not to lose?

~

    Hermione lifted the long roll of parchment off the ground. The words were written in Harry’s hand; scrawling and messy in places. She could only guess who they were written to, and part of her didn’t want to.

    She looked at Harry, lying on the floor of the alcove, a tangle of tall grass of flowering wild roses sprawling out of a pot at his feet. His eyes gazed up, blank and staring at the Dog Star. Her eyes followed his arms to his wrists, where matching slim slits were surrounded by already caking blood. Claret stripes, long and shiny and poignant, and beautiful in a horrid way, stood out like rubies against diamonds on his pale, numb skin. There was a dagger on the floor beside him; a stout silver blade with a handle of emeralds. She turned the knife over to see a single ruby set on one side, and noticed that the tip of the blade was gold.

    She smiled through her tears, reaching for a scrap of worn parchment at his feet. A poem, in a different hand, was written there.

One ruby amid the emeralds

Like a drop of blood

On grass.

One gilded lily amid

The solid silver

Glass.

One age-old lineage

Shattered.

Toujours Pur,

Toujours Pur.

One ruby amid the emeralds

Like a drop of blood

On grass.

    Her hand brushed the leaves of the rosebush at his feet as she put the poem back. Red blood spattered off and hit her hands.

    “Like a drop of blood…on grass,” she said, fingers slippery with his blood. “He let the first drops fall in the grass.”

    She smiled slightly in memory of Harry, adding fondly, “Always the hero. Always melodramatic.”

    She stood and left as a gust of wind shot into the niche. Turning to take one last affectionate look at his ruined body, she saw the poem blow away, sailing off the balcony, and disappear into the night.