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In the daytime, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was majestic, standing tall and proud. But at night, under the cold moonshine and clouds, it looked like a shadow of itself, hidden almost from view in the darkness and the mist rising from the lake. The lights in the castle were out, and the air around it was so still that nothing could be heard. It was impossible to think that anyone would be awake now, in the dead of night, except the hooting owls in the owlery and the occasional one out to hunt.

But the owls weren't the only things awake. Far up in the castle, one boy was having trouble sleeping. Everyone had stayed up late, one last night before the Hogwarts Express left the next day, and the noise that had filled the castle in the various common rooms was something deafening, Gryffindor included. It was only when the others in the house had gone to sleep that Harry Potter was able to hear himself think, and when Harry began thinking, turning events over in his mind, he couldn't sleep anymore.

The night wasn't particularly cold, and as he sat up in bed and listened to the gentle sounds of sleep coming from the other beds, he wondered what their occupants were dreaming about. He knew that he could never share those dreams because while they slept, he couldn't. At this time of night, he was more apt to be found sitting on the window seat, looking out across the lake, or in front of the mirror, staring at his reflection in it.

Staring into the mirror was something Harry did a lot now. He would always sit in front of the large gilt frame, and peer into the silvery depths, his face thrown into sharp relief from the moonlight that filtered in through the window, ignoring the quiet muttering that the mirror gave out. He had watched himself grow, not through pictures but through mirrors, always pausing to look at himself when Aunt Petunia wasn't looking when he was at the Dursleys' and in here, in the Gryffindor dormitory when the other boys were asleep.

He took in his appearance, following the lines of his profile with a single finger then letting his hand drop back down as his eyes took over.

The untidy black hair that had become his trademark had become even worse as of late; pretty soon he'd be able to slick it back like that git Draco usually did, or perhaps tie it into a ponytail like Bill. The thought amused him and brought a small smile to his lips, a smile that died away as soon as he spotted it. The smile looked odd on his lips; lips that were too familiar, a face that he'd never been quite comfortable with once he'd been told how much he looked like James. James Potter, his dead father. How much he acted like him, how good he was at quidditch. The thing was, Harry didn't agree. As of late, the pride he had once felt when his father was mentioned had been fading, replaced by a serious lack of understanding when it came to the subject.

The album Hagrid had given him of wizard photographs, from which his father would wave at him, was at this moment right at the bottom of his trunk. He had thrown it out of the window a day before. Upset at having to look at them and see the dead faces looking back out at him, he thought that by getting rid of it he wouldn't have to confront that hungry pain right in pit of his stomach when he realized that he'd never, never ever, be able to talk to them, and to know what they had really been like. He could only rely on others' accounts, and it was getting to him because of the different views everyone had had. Ron had rescued it and left it on his pillow with a note telling him to stop being a stupid git and to snap out of this funk. Harry had replied by slamming the dorm door in his face and dumping the book into his trunk and throwing his invisibility cloak over it.

The voices in his head arose, like some distant dream...

"He's not a child!" said Sirius impatiently.
"He's not an adult either!" said Mrs. Weasley, the color rising in her cheeks. "He's not James, Sirius!"
"I'm perfectly clear who he is, thanks, Molly," said Sirius coldly.
"I'm not sure you are!" said Mrs. Weasley. "Sometimes, the way you talk about him, it's as thought you think you've got your best friend back!"
"What's wrong with that?" said Harry.
"What's wrong, Harry, is that you are not your father, however much you might look like him!" said Mrs. Weasley...

Ron's snoring came to Harry's ears, and for a second, it broke his train of thought and instead made him think of another friend, now gone. Sirius had been one of his father's closest friends; the best man at his wedding. He knew Ron played a similar role in his own life, and cold icy feeling that accompanied the thought was something that made him want to hide somewhere and forget about who he was. Sirius had been his father's best friend. His father had died, and Sirius was now dead. It was like everyone he loved was being taken from him, and there was nothing he could do about it because the more he did... the more he lost. What kind of hero was he who couldn't even try to stop that horrible wizard... that creature whose name died away on most people's lips, that evil power that had snatched away his family and his life was still out there, and he, Harry, couldn't even avenge his father's death.

The waves of anger that ran through him were nothing, though, compared to that feeling that he had failed his father. Again, the voices ran through his head, telling him how much he was like him. And when he looked up at the mirror, it was like seeing James Potter staring back at him, a sad, defeated look on his face because his son could never be like him.

No, that's not Dad. That's me. It's just Harry. He shook his head, seeing his face come back into focus in the mirror. And I don't want to be like him, I don't, he thought to himself, because there was this whole new side to James Potter that he had never known... well, not until he had taken a look into Snape's thoughts, that is.

Harry had tried, he had tried so hard, but there was no way he could ever be so perfect, the way he had been told his father was perfect. There was no way of being what everyone wanted him to be. But it was easier to try and be perfect... Than to be a total moron, Harry thought to himself as the image of a young Snape, suspended upside down and the sound of his dad laughing crossed his mind.

He was tired of being his father. Because his father was no longer the person he had thought him to be. Everything had changed so much that Harry wasn't even sure what to take as being real anymore.

People didn't understand, though. There was so much more to being his father's son than just looking like him; and that's where no one understood that Harry was a different person. He was not James; he could be like James, but he couldn't be James, not now, not ever. He wondered what his father would have wanted of him. Would he have had faith in him? How was he supposed to follow in the footsteps of a man who he had never even known, how was he supposed to walk in those shoes his father had left for him to fill? Who was going to show him how to be his father?

Did he really want to be his father? Which side of James was real? because there was no way both of them were the same person. The idea itself numbed him, that he wasn't able to do this. He wanted to be that person that Sirius had always seen in him, but he couldn't make himself forget what he had seen in the pensieve, he couldn't stop sympathizing with Snape, but at the same time he just wanted to go back to hating him as he had always done. It had been so much easier to hate Snape when the only image of his father he had was a good one, and that Snape had been unjustly jealous over all that James had. It was so much harder now that he knew the truth.

"Why did you have to do this to me?" Harry whispered to the mirror, leaning forward until his forehead pressed against it. The shadows moved over the moon, and Harry closed his eyes, imagined that the cold surface of the mirror was skin, that he was face to face to his father. "Why does everyone think that I'm just like you... even if I'm not? Snape hates me because he thinks I'm going to turn out just like you... and I don't blame him," he sighed. He never thought the day would come when he'd actually feel anything less than the most venomous hatred for Snape.

Everything he did seemed to be wrong. That's not what your father would have done, the words came back to him. The time he had told Hagrid he was giving up, that he wanted to leave this fight to those who could fight it. Would it have been so bad, really, letting Voldemort win... maybe he'd be able to see his parents; maybe he could see Sirius again and tell him how sorry he was. And Hagrid had shaken him so hard that he could feel his teeth rattling long after he had stopped shaking and told him that if he did, he'd never be worthy of being called his father's son. Maybe it was just the shock of losing Sirius, maybe it was the words he had always told himself coming from Hagrid's mouth, but now he felt totally disgraced. It was as if his eyes had been opened to the enormity of the task in front of him, and at the same time, the comforting presence he had felt when thinking of his father had gone, only to be replaced by an uneasiness, as if the spirit of his father was now breathing down his neck to make sure that this son of his was exactly like he had been. In Hagrid's eyes, James had been a hero, but behind that idea there was so much more that Harry didn't understand at all... he wasn't sure he wanted to understand...

He felt totally overshadowed by the impact of his dead father on his life.

Again he opened his eyes. Stared at the reflection in the mirror, moving from his sitting position to one where he was standing, where he could see his profile better. In the dark, he looked even more like his father, the shadows hiding the sharp angles on his fifteen-year-old body and making lines appear on his face so that now he was really looking like his father.

He was suffocating under the comparisons, being smothered by the expectations of everyone. He was supposed to be the one who would deliver the wizarding world - and indeed, the world as a whole - from evil, like a God of some sort. Instead, his whole life was falling apart, with everyone watching. It was as if everything he did was another mistake, another blemish, another insult to his father's name. Even if he did something right, he couldn't help but think that it meant so little. Every second he sat there, another passing agony. His father stared back at him from the mirror, and for a second Harry was tempted to smash it in because he couldn't take it anymore. He couldn't look into the mirror and watch the face there because it kept on changing, one minute it was dead serious and the next, it was laughing at him, laughing at his dilemma between the two different sides of James that Harry could see, two sides that didn't seem like they could ever be reconciled, that never could have belonged to the same person.

He didn't want to be his father any more. He just wanted to be himself. Like the time he had first met Hagrid, and told him that he was 'just Harry.' He wanted to be just Harry. Not Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, not Harry Potter, son of the great James Potter who had died protecting his family from the evil Lord Voldemort... the same James Potter who had found it fun to bully a certain youngster because he had nothing better to do.

He just wanted to be Harry. It was like the more he tried to be like his father, the less he became. And the feeling boiled up, and the image in the mirror became even more blurry, now it was going from James Potter to Snape, struggling to get away from James, to Sirius Black, Sirius mocking Snape, who suddenly became Bellatrix and was pointing her wand directly at Sirius, to his mother, berating James for being such a bully in one sentence and screaming for him the next, back to his father, a disappointed look on his face, to Lord Voldemort, the red eyes and the flat face, telling him that he was all alone now... the room began to spin and the mirror dissolved in front of him, the moonlight began to hurt his eyes and his scar seemed to be burning with such an intensity that his head would split in two. And the faces flashed in front of him, Lily, Sirius, Voldemort, James, Snape, Bellatrix, Lily, Voldemort, Bellatrix, Sirius, James, Snape, Sirius as he looked when he had escaped from Azkaban, the haunted look in his eyes now in James' face, then himself, disappointed, his father's body on the floor... the look on his face one of failure because he knew that Voldemort was going after his wife next, and he hadn't been able to stop him, that same failed look on Lily's face, Sirius falling backwards and disappearing through the arch, the green light bouncing off gold and the words blasting through his brain, Avada Kedavra! And then...

Clarity. The world stopped spinning, the green light that always followed the flashbacks fading away as Harry found himself on the floor, curled up in a fetal position and his fingernails digging into the palms of his hands. He had bitten his lip and the metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth. He spat out at the floor, trying to clear the taste in his mouth. He was shaking so violently that even when he tried to stand, he found himself unable to and instead slumped against the frame of the mirror, and closing his eyes, tried to figure out the scenes he had just seen. Most of it wasn't new, he was used to the flashbacks. So what was it that was making his heart hammer away and his eyes burn with the feeling of tears that weren't really meant to be there?

That image. The door had been open when Voldemort had struck his father down, and Harry, in his mother's arms, had seen the look on his face. It had been buried down deep somewhere all these years, and only now, with Harry confronted by his own feelings of inadequacy, had it surfaced. Out of all the times James had failed, that one time was what changed everything. And Lily had known that the price for that failure would be her life. And after all this time, Harry finally realized that, he didn't have to be like his father, because even though he had once thought that his father was perfect...

He hadn't been. And while everyone expected Harry to be perfect...

He didn't have to be. Everyone had faults; he had just seen his father's. The inability to accept, to believe, had been written all over his face.

Harry turned so that he could see the mirror now. The clouds had shifted away from the moon, and he was looking at himself again.

And he smiled, because he could see his father in the reflection in the mirror, telling him that he was alright. Harry was exactly what James would have wanted him to be. Himself. It wasn't much comfort, but it was better than being lost and not knowing what to do, the rushing anger ebbing away. He might not have everything his father had... but he had a lot of things that made up for it, that made Harry uniquely himself, even if he was often placed in his father's shadow to see if he could fit.

And he smiled, because he wasn't so numb anymore.