Adeste Fidelis

Disclaimer: All characters, places, and environments belong to JK Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Press, and Warner Bros., Inc. No copyright infringement is intended, and no money is being made from this story. For entertainment only.

This was written for the Christmas Carol Challenge on LJ.

The soft strains of the hymn came to him from the church across the moor, carried with surprising delicacy by the December wind. The church was Anglican, all angles and Roman arches and ageless brownstone, and on fogless, clear days, he could see the top of its ostentatious spire poking the sky like a haughty finger. It might have been beautiful once, but the years and the ceaseless British rain had not been kind, and its façade was pocked and gouged. Even the gargoyles were in sorry disrepair, their snarling faces blighted by moldering lesions.

But the music was something else altogether, and every Sunday he found himself seated by the window with a tumbler of Firewhiskey and a crackling fire in the hearth. He sipped the whiskey and stretched his feet toward the flames and listened to the distant refrain. It soothed him, and it was a respite from days he spent peering out at the adoring masses huddled on his lawn from cold, grey dawn to rheumy, yellow dusk. It was the hour of his anonymity.

And here it was, right on schedule. Soft and mellifluous, and even from this distance and with the wind whipping around the eaves of his manor with the sharp, remorseless snap of an unfurling tarpaulin, he caught snatches of melody, fragments of words. Grave and reverent and properly obeisant. He took a sip from the tumbler in his hand and grimaced at the bitterness on his tongue and the bloom of fire in his chest.

Adeste Fidelis...

It sounded like a spell, an incantation taught to google-eyed first-years by the ever-buoyant Professor Flitwick, who wore joyful effervescence like a second skin, and whom Harry had never heard utter a rebuke. His obliging mind conjured the memory of the professor's merry, high-pitched squeak, and a moment later, the professor himself came into view through the long lens of memory, a diminutive, dewy-eyed man with a bizarre predilection for velvet and ruffles, perched atop his swaying pile of books and exuding an incontrovertible, quiet authority.

Wands at the ready, class, cried the Flitwick of years past. Now repeat after me-"Adeste Fidelis!" And remember, swish and flick.

The image was so vivid that he smiled around the cold rim of his tumbler. It was almost enough to make him laugh, but the laughter died in his throat when he remembered that Filius Flitwick was ten years moldering in his tomb, the jovial gospel of swish and flick forever silenced by a well-aimed Bonebreaker Hex from Augustus Rookwood. He had resembled nothing so much as a child's broken doll in Hagrid's arms as he was carried to the castle, nestled in the dusty, tattered sanctuary of the groundskeeper's moleskin coat. Hagrid had been inconsolable, and he had wept as he buried the fallen professor among the school cabbages. Time and circumstance had allowed for no more fitting an end.

Harry smothered the unpleasant memory with a prodigious swallow of Firewhiskey. He did not want to think of that today. Or any day, for that matter, but what he wanted seldom mattered, and his mind could not be dissuaded from its course.

You couldn't save them all. You tried-oh, how you tried because you wanted to make your dearly departed father proud-but they slipped through your grasping fingers like so much dust. Cedric Diggory and Sirius and Professor Flitwick-all cut down in spite of the legendary hero. For all his hubris, the Boy Who Lived made a lousy deus ex machina. They died no matter how much you flailed and bellowed, and as much as you despised that greasy bastard, Snape, he was right in the end. You were an empty hope.

He most definitely did not want to consider Snape. The War and its aftermath had not softened his hatred in the slightest. It was still bright and potent as ever, glass and saltpeter in his heart, and so he downed the rest of his whiskey in a long, desperate swallow and strained his ears for the sound of the hymn. Yes, there it was, faint and mournful against the icy windowpane.

"Doesn't matter anyway," he told the empty room as he reached for the bottle of Ogden's beside his chair. "It's not a Charm. It's a Muggle hymn."

The fire popped in defiance, and so he began to sing. "O, come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant..." The words wavered in the warm air, soft and oddly dissonant, and he fell silent, hand cupped around the neck of the whiskey bottle.

He poured himself another tumbler and set the bottle down with a gentle thump. He could tell the parishioners a thing or two about the coming of the faithful. Indeed, he fancied himself quite the expert in that regard. His faithful came every day for their daily devotional, to stand outside the wrought-iron gates to his estate, fingers curled around the metal and wistful faces pressed between the bars in the hope of seeing him on an afternoon ramble, their eyes alight with the knowledge of Eden.

He had tried to go down to them in the early days, when the wreckage still smoldered and the ground was still damp with blood. He had gone, not as a victorious messiah in search of worship, but as a battered, dazed survivor who needed simple communion and commiseration. And he had wanted their absolution from the untenable burden he had shouldered for so long. His ears had ached hear the blessed words, "Well done, thy good and faithful servant. End thy toil and go in peace."

In place of peace, he had found bedlam, a seething throng of outstretched hands and clutching fingers. They had surged against the gates until the hinges groaned, and children were pushed mercilessly against the unyielding iron while their parents trod heedlessly forward. The air was redolent with the stink of too much flesh in too little space, and of dirt and unwashed wool and old smoke and rot and fanatical hope. Young girls swooned and were trampled, and those who remained upright bared their breasts in lewd invitation.

He would never forget the woman who had pushed a bundle of rags through the bars and into his unsuspecting arms.

"'Ere's my baby, Mr. Potter. Can't you heal him?"

Her eyes had been fever bright and too round inside her hollow face, and for just a moment as the child was being passed over, her fingers had grazed his forearm, full of a sickly, suppurating heat and twisted into a carrion crow's claws. The bewildered smile on his face had frozen into a rictus, and it had taken all of his will not to recoil from the touch.

Heal her child, the sardonic keeper of his archives sneered. As if you were a saint with the powers of God within your hands. She made her request with the unwavering surety of the faithful, and what could you do but stand there with the child in your arms? She would not countenance refusal, nor would she believe that what she asked was beyond your ken. After all, he who had saved the world could save the one.

And so you did the only thing you could. You shifted the receiving blankets aside and stared into that tiny, wrinkled face. A face that was cold and blue and lifeless as marble, with a livid red scar in the shape of a lightning bolt carved above one small brow. To this day, you sometimes wonder what she used-a needle, the tip of a pair of sewing scissors, or did she use something as bulky and crude as the kitchen cutlery, tearing at the delicate flesh as she stood humming at counter and remade her child in the image of her Lord and Savior? You can see it all so clearly, and it makes you want to laugh and weep and scream.

"Ain't he pretty," she had said, a beatific smile on her wasted face. "'E's the spittin' image of you, he is."

He still didn't remember what happened after that, not completely. He could recall his gorge rising, the acid sweet and sharp in his suddenly constricted throat, and the stupefied, Novacaine numbness that had suddenly suffused his arms. He had said something-precisely what had thankfully been blotted from the mental record-and then he had turned on legs gone to wooden stilts and scissored up the path to his blessed cloister on the moor. The woman's despairing wail had hounded his steps, and not even the slamming of his front door and the glottal gurgle of his retching could drown it out completely.

That had been his first and last visit to his faithful, but his absence did nothing to deter them. They still assembled at his gates every morning and took their greedy chisels to the masonry in search of a holy relic to carry away with them. He imagined crumbling bits of his outer walls enshrined in glass and surrounded by votive candles, the macabre centerpiece of the family table. That, my child, is a magical brick from St. Potter's house, and it has the power to heal the sick and the lame.

Can't you heal him?

"No, but my bricks can," he muttered, and tittered as he took a ginger sip of Firewhiskey.

So, yes, he could have told the Muggle choir across the moor about the faithful. Not only did they huddle outside his gates, but they followed him on those rare occasions when he dared venture out, a somnolent, shuffling retinue conspicuous by their pained unobtrusiveness. He could spot them lingering behind upraised copies of the Daily Prophet with grim determination, sneaking surreptitious glances over the edge of the pages as they crept in his wake. Some gazed at him from beneath the brims of tattered bowler hats, ghosts of Fudges past, and as the weight of their gazes settled over his shoulders and in the small of his back and danced across his sensitive nape like prying fingers, he quickened his pace, tucked his chin against his chest, and thanked Merlin and his father for his untidy, black fringe.

They dogged his every step, avid fetches all. The pub. The greengrocer. The meat market. Even his twice-yearly pilgrimages to Godric's Hollow found them on the periphery of his vision, flitting shades that never quite came into focus. Occasionally, someone profaned his introspection with a shrill, "I love you, Harry," and his fingers would itch for the heft of his wand against his palm and the illicit ambrosia of a Curse on his tongue. Instead, he pretended not to hear and studied the bronze plaque and the twin marble headstones the Ministry had erected to his parents after Voldemort's ashes had been buried beneath the decaying foundations of the Riddle house in Little Hangleton. It was a monument twenty-five years too late, and he suspected that it was not so much a memorial to his parents as a tribute to a martyr not yet interred.

The wind roared, and the window rattled in the pane, and for an instant, the hymn that coiled its tendrils around the eaves and cornices was muffled, but then it resurfaced with renewed gusto, determined to reach his ears and the heavens. They were on a verse he didn't recognize-Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had never been ones for caroling, and when they had sung, they had never made it past the first verse-but the melody was the same, and so that was all right.

He could also, he thought as he rolled a mouthful of the sour-sweet whiskey on his tongue, teach them a great deal concerning the fickleness of fate. Or the Fates, as most educated wizards preferred. The very people who clustered at the edges of his property in the hope of seeing his sacred flesh had once derided him as an attention-seeking lunatic, and before that, they had lauded him as the be-nappied child-king who had dethroned the darkness. The pendulum was ever swinging, and a year from now, one of the voices offering hosannas to the Most High might be lifted in furious lament while grim-faced police officers scraped brain and teeth from beneath the wheels of a runaway lorry. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, as the old saying went, and so it was with faith.

There were few he counted as true believers, and none of them was numbered among the waiting coterie outside. One was whiling away the scant remaining years of his life in the highest eyrie of Hogwarts, lost in a haze of sedatives that kept the worst of the pain at bay. Necrotic lesions were an agonizing, rotten way to die, and much as he had been manipulated by the old bastard, he deserved an easier death. No doubt he would be expected to put in an appearance, perhaps even say a few words. The press would be pleased. His first public appearance in years.

McGonagall would make a fine Headmistress. If Snape didn't poison her first.

Hermione was in Africa, conducting socio-anthropological research on a newly discovered species of house elves, elves never ensnared beneath the yoke of wizardry. From the sound of her letters, she was having a marvelous time. Indeed, she hardly seemed to notice the spectacular implosion of her three-year romance with Justin Finch-Fletchley. He couldn't begrudge her happiness, but he missed her, and there was a small, cancerous part of him that resented her for her freedom and her pragmatic, unflappable, equanimity. She was free to travel the world upon the merest whim, and if she had nightmares, they did not rule her. In her last owl, sent from the interior of the Congo and smelling of green and earth and a hint of her lemongrass perfume, she had blithely mentioned that she had stopped taking the sedatives prescribed by the Mediwizards at St. Mungo's after the War.

Lucky bint, snarled an uncharitable voice inside his head, and though a faint frown creased his brow, he drank to the ugly sentiment anyway. He doubted he and his sedatives would ever part company.

And then there was Ron, chiefest among his faithful, who had sacrificed everything to his cause. Who had been his second when no one else dared step forward, and who had offered up his family and his right arm in the name of the End. He was the last of the Weasleys; even Percy was gone, gutted by a stiletto while trying to broker peace between the Ministry and the Death Eaters. Molly was alive, but mad, mothering Gilderoy Lockhart on the closed ward.

Because he was faithful, he refused to let his family's memory fade. He became the caretaker of the Weasleys No Longer. He lived in the Burrow, which was sagging in upon itself without the family magic to hold it up. He and the attic ghoul shared its lonely, dusty spaces, surrounded by mementos and yellowing afghans Molly would never finish.

Once, Harry had found an untidy snarl of pink yarn wadded on the sofa like an aborted fetus. Ron had taken up knitting in memory of his mother, and though the blob resembled no garment he had ever seen, Harry hadn't the heart to criticize it, nor could he bring himself to decline when Ron had offered to knit him a pullover. Instead, he had turned the clot of yarn in his hands, muttered noncommittally, and shoved it into the oven. It was likely still there. Ron's faithfulness had never translated into an abiding sense of tidiness.

Speaking of which, today was their weekly chess match. Ron would be here with the setting of the sun, threading his way through the envious throng with a bottle of his cherished rye in hand and his frayed Gryffindor scarf around his neck. He would come, and Harry would be glad, and for a little while, the walls would not press so closely around him. He would laugh and play chess, and that result, of course, would be unchanged. Of all the things his friend had lost to the War, his chess game was not one of them.

Ron would drink too much, and the liquid heat of the rye would suffuse his face and accentuate the brand of broken capillaries on the bridge of his nose, and as the night wore on and the drink grew stronger, he would speak of his family with slurry, adamant fondness.

"Remember how my da' liked Muggles, 'arry?" he would mumble, his eyes owlish and overbright as he surveyed the patient pieces of the chessboard. "I was read'n in the p'per about som'Muggle gadget that op'ns tins jus' like tha'. I bet da' would like one of those for Christmas. Still dunno what to get Mum, though." A bleary glance at the board. "Kni' to E-5," would come the call, and Harry's pawn would topple.

For his part, Harry would nod and smile, and the knobbly, hideous beige pullover Ron had knitted for him would chafe his skin. He would nod and think of Arthur Weasley's worn coats moldering in the wardrobe because Ron could not bear to do away with them. He would think of Charlie's dragonhide boots, brittle for want of polishing, and he would think of Ginny's faded jumper, no longer on the cat, but folded haphazardly over a chair in her room. He would think of these things and smile against the lump in his throat, but he would say nothing. If anyone in this world deserved a beloved delusion, it was Ronald Weasley, and he would be damned if he would snatch it from him. Not after he had cost him so much.

He put the tumbler of Firewhiskey on the table. He shouldn't drink any more. It wouldn't do to be drunk before Ron got there. He would be rubbish at chess if he were, and he didn't want to ruin Ron's fun. Outside, the hymn had died away, and in his mind's eye, he saw the parishioners fanning out across the snow, bent against the wind and cursing the God whom they had so heartily praised moments before. And on the wind would come the shrill whistle of a pendulum's arc.

His hand hesitated over the tumbler, and then he picked it up again and refilled it. He shouldn't, but even a savior had the right to a vice.

He raised the tumbler to his lips and waited for the coming of his faithful.