The Two Who Lived

The walk was short, and the moon was still in the eastern sky (though a bit higher) when Hermione pulled Harry, still by the hand, into the familiar corridors of Hogwarts Castle, now empty due to the summer holidays.

Any number of memories passed by him unbidden as they walked—flying his old Nimbus... Malfoy being turned into a ferret... discovering he was the Heir of Gryffindor... the final group trek down the hall to the graduation ceremony, not long before everything had been shot completely to...

"It doesn't seem that long ago," Harry said quietly, as they passed a window looking out on the old Quidditch pitch, now cast silver in the moonlight—but otherwise unchanged from his final House championship, a hard-won Gryffindor victory.

"It wasn't," Hermione said simply, then stopped at an engraving in a stone pillar in the wall, frowning.  "I think it was here... let me see..."

She spent several moments with her finger roaming over the various circles and curlicues in the engraving, none of which looked remarkable to Harry, and he wondered just what Hermione was getting at with this. "Hermione—" he began—

She pressed on a circle in the wall carving, and the section of wall fell away.  Hermione smiled triumphantly.  "See?"

Harry stared.  Though he’d had enough experience to know things were seldom all they seemed—it looked purely like an empty tunnel to him, and judging by Hermione’s reaction a moment later, he’d (without thinking) apparently said so.

She shook her head and muttered something like, "like Ron... completely misses the point..." but Harry said nothing, simply allowing her to lead him down the passageway, the entry to which abruptly shut behind them.  The passageway was dim but wall-mounted sconces on either side of the downwardly spiraling path seemed to light up just ahead of them as they walked, just enough for them to see just in front of them but no further.

"What on earth were you doing down here?" Harry whispered.

"You’d be amazed at some of the things that’ve been found in the reconstruction," she said, referring to the restoration the school had been undergoing after its razing in the final fight against Voldemort; Harry distantly noted she’d not really answered his question and filed it away for later reference. "I came here to... to see it," she went on, Harry also taking note of her odd little pause. And she calls me a bad liar, he thought with a bit of an inward smile.

"It was fortunate I found this before anyone else apparently had. Even during the school year, though, not much traffic is in this section."

The sconces disappeared after a few hundred meters, and the passageway seemed to get dimmer and dimmer as they walked—Harry thought momentarily to take his wand and whisper "Lumos," but Hermione still continued on, unheeding of the darkness, so he did as well. As it finally became dark enough he could barely see the outline of her hair in front of him, she suddenly stopped. Harry could make out a large recess in the right-side wall, and in the middle of it—

"Alohomora," Hermione chanted, a few tiny blue sparks coming from her wand and opening a sealed door in the recess, which swung open before them.

"I think maybe I was meant to find this now," she said, letting go of Harry’s hand and walking forward into the room, almost as dark as the corridor itself. Harry caught a silvery glint reflected in the corner—or so he thought, for when he looked, there was nothing. "It’s not logical of me, I know—but even I have to admit that... that finding this, while not even looking for it, is an... odd enough coincidence. Light up your wand," she directed him. Almost in unison they spoke the word "Lumos," the light from both their wands filling an area about four meters in a circle around them with a dim gold glow. Harry definitely saw the silver glint this time, and he turned back to the corner.

His mouth fell slightly open, his wand coming down slightly, and completely of their own accord his feet began walking him towards the thing in the corner, the silvery glint off of it, as he neared it, seeming to become a pale ghost of a glow coming off its smooth, liquid surface.

"I’d hoped it would still be here," Hermione said from behind him. "I thought it might be good for us—for you—to see it."

Harry didn’t speak for a moment, running his fingertips along the intricate gold frame, the inscription along the bottom, apparently untouched in the seven years since he’d last seen it. Never mind that at that time he had been fighting for his life against the disembodied evil that had claimed his family—this thing was so much more than that.

"I heard you and Ron talk about it so much those years ago. It made me—wonder what I would have seen in it."

A swirl of images so jumbled it made his head hurt flashed across the mirror; he tried to sort out just one of them. The first thought that went through his mind was it can’t be, but that was stupid, because obviously, it was there in front of him. And just like it had seven years prior, the Mirror of Erised showed Harry Potter as a young boy, not at all unlike the eleven-year-old who’d first stared into it and seen his dead family. Hermione was still beside him, but she was young too. And close beside her, just as young as Hermione and Harry—

Harry quickly turned away from the mirror, drawing in a sigh, pressing two fingers in the spot between his eyebrows. Desire must be a neat, tidy, six-letter way of saying painful-as-hell, he decided.

What was it Dumbledore said? That human beings have a knack for wanting what’s worst for them?

Perhaps the Mirror of Erised should have been named the Mirror of... Yrekcom instead, he decided; the things you most longed for were always the things that most eluded you—and this mirror always lobbed it right back in your face, giving that desire its own face to mock you with.

Fleeting images. Ron. His parents. Dudley in obvious discomfort on a Stairmaster. Himself after a Quidditch game, being lifted up on the shoulders of his friends, including Ron—

And there was something else too. It remained there, a faded ghost superimposed over the stronger images that flitted across the mirror... it remained there even as other ones quickly passed it by, and Harry could only barely make it out. He thought he saw himself, but something (or someone, he didn’t know) else as well, ... he only knew for sure he wanted to see it, but no matter how he himself focused, the image refused to.

Then came Ron again, waving and smiling at him, and Harry tried to turn his gaze away, feeling as if he’d severed his optic nerves doing so.

Voldemort killed him. He’s gone forever, and Ron’s blood is on his hands. Not yours.

He repeated the last two words to himself, but they didn’t seem to take much root beyond a thin surface layer.

Not yours.

The first weeks after it had happened, Harry was certain that if he could change things, he’d have gone back and saved Ron if he could. Even if it meant dying himself.

Hell, this wasn’t right. He could feel it, as strongly as any pain in his scar had ever been. Ron wasn’t the one Voldemort had wanted. He wasn’t the one that had the grudge with Voldemort. Voldemort wanted Harry dead because he was the distant descendant of a tradition that had built itself on destroying his ancestors. But Ron? He was just the friend of that descendant. (Albeit a damned good one.) Harry was supposed to be the one who got big things thrown in his path; it was what he’d done all his life... he was the one who, it seemed, was supposed to take the brunt of those things.

Even if that brunt included dying.

Even now, part of Harry was telling himself that he still wanted to go back and change things. But the mirror still didn’t show anything remotely resembling that, and he felt a little disoriented knowing that one of his "safety" beliefs was discredited. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that, somehow, it had been his fate, his alone, to die that day. Hermione would call it Harry taking too much on himself again, and a grain of truth to that though there may have been, it was far from the root cause. He’d been marked for death almost since his birth, and in surviving Voldemort it felt—illogically—that he’d somehow been cheated of something he’d been destined for his entire life.

(Before then, even, if the prophecies about Gryffindor’s Heir defeating Slytherin’s at his own sacrifice were to be believed—but somehow that had wound up only partly fulfilled. Hermione had surmised that perhaps some sort of preservational balance overrode the original prophecy—that only one Heir was supposed to die; the fate of the wizarding world backing on whether it was to be the Light or Dark one. But what was Ron in that equation, then—nothing? Harry didn’t like that. Or believe it for a moment.)

Some part of him had always been prepared, almost as if it had been specifically bred in him, to die against Voldemort. And that part remained unresolved, useless in him like an infected, sore appendix.

But the image of Ron continued to smile. It refused to change to fit Harry’s feelings of guilt, which ran so deep in places it blurred interminably with desire.

Except, it seemed, to the mirror.

In not so many words it was saying what Hermione had been saying all along.

He turned away from the mirror’s line of sight fully this time, and he felt certain that some part of his eyeballs still hovered in space where they’d fought against the movement of his body and succeeded. For once Harry was grateful for his unkempt hair; it managed to block the corner of his vision from the sight of the mirror’s reflection. He started to say something to Hermione, but the sight of her brought him up short.

Hermione, still staring straight into the mirror, tightened her lips at something—he resisted the urge to look and try to see, reminding himself he’d not see what she was anyway. But as he watched, those same lips began to tremble slightly, and she walked forward to the mirror and knelt before it. He momentarily forgot his own vision, and the sight of Hermione at that moment filled his mind. He watched his friend’s actions, watched as she reached out a somewhat unsteady hand to touch the silvery surface—Harry almost spoke out; forgetting for a half-mad instant he’d touched the mirror himself before, not knowing if there was something against doing it. But Hermione seemed to be unaffected, but for that a wall seemed to come up before her brown eyes.

The look in Hermione’s eyes was very disturbing to Harry, the way she stared so fixedly at the mirror; this was not his solid, strong Hermione. He remembered what Dumbledore had told him, about those so mesmerized by what they saw in the mirror they wasted away before it...

The wall in her eyes flickered slightly and desire for a moment shone painfully clear from them, and he thought he saw her silently mouth a syllable—a name? She sat there unmoving; Harry had no idea what, if anything, he should do—

Hermione suddenly closed her eyes. "Take me away from here, Harry," she whispered, even so still making Harry want to jump. "I’m through here. Let’s leave."

Harry reached out to take hold of her shoulder, but Hermione turned away and stood on her own, and he drew it away.

She looked up at him, her once-open expression suddenly unreadable—there, but still unreadable—but at least the wall had gone from her eyes. "Aren’t you going to ask me what I saw?"

Seeing her reaction to whatever she’d seen, honestly, was more than enough for Harry. But maybe she wanted to tell him?

"Do you want me to ask?" he said quietly.

She shook her head, sighing. "Not really. And it’s perfectly fine if you want to keep yours to yourself, too."

Silence for a moment, both glancing almost unwillingly towards the mirror again.

"I know why you brought me here, Hermione," he said, quietly. "But why did you look yourself? You said yourself you didn’t see it very long ago."

She didn’t answer.

He glanced back at the mirror, quickly enough to avoid another vision from it. "Dumbledore told me something when I came back to find the mirror one time," he paused, and Hermione nodded ever so slightly for him to continue. "He said the happiest man on earth would look into this mirror, and he’d see himself in it exactly as he was, like it was a normal mirror."

"You believe it?"

Harry quirked up a corner of his mouth. "I don’t disbelieve something simply because I’ve never seen evidence to prove it."

She pursed her lips, running her tongue along them for a moment. "You remember those six-foot-long essays we were always required to do in History of Magic class," she said—"All too well," Harry muttered—"Well," she continued, "you know that every time we turned one in, we’d get it back, telling us what mistakes we needed to correct in the rewrite. You’d try to fix them, then you’d come back and turn it in again, hoping—"

Harry thought he understood. "That when you looked again, they would be fixed."

"Gone," she murmured, starting to turn towards the mirror again; this time Harry took a single step sideways, blocking her direct view of it.

"I said I accepted what happened to Ron, Harry," she said quietly, "but I never said I’d completely overcome it."

"You didn’t find the mirror by coincidence, then—not that you or I believe in things like that," he added hastily.

She managed a wan smile. "Would you believe me if I told you a little ghost told me?"

If it’s a tall ghost with red hair and a sarcastic smirk... Harry thought, the last cryptic pieces coming together in his mind.

He put a hand on her shoulder, and for just the smallest moment, her eyes were so clear he swore he saw himself in them. Both their faces, together in one image... her mirroring himself back exactly as he was.

Stifling the (very strong) urge to shake his head, he inclined his head to the door. "Come on, Hermione. Let’s get out of here."

But Hermione was staring at the mirror again.

"Hermione?"

She jerked slightly, her eyes clearing once more as if she’d awoken from a trance. She glanced at the mirror, then looked guiltily at Harry, then the mirror again—her smile widened, just noticeably.

Harry moved his hand so his arm was around both shoulders, this time, and he began steering her towards the entry. As he did so, they turned back towards the mirror again—and for a flash saw something he’d never expected to see.

Their own unaltered reflection.

"The happiest man on earth would be able to use the Mirror of Erised like a normal mirror... look into it and see himself exactly as he is. Does that help?"

Harry thought about this. Would it show exactly what was there if exactly what the person wanted most at that momentwas already there?

He thought about Ron, and the flash was gone; Hermione squeezed his hand once, and the look in her eyes was—

"You saw it, too. The moment you put your hand on my shoulder, I saw it..."

His eyes widened. He hoped she didn’t mean that, because that would have been... well, considering they’d stayed a certain way for eight years and showed no sign, no desire to be otherwise...

"You know what I mean, Harry," she sighed in exasperation, catching and correctly translating the look on his face. "Leave it to a bloke to jump to the most-gutter-minded conclusion straightaway. Though I can’t decide whether to be insulted by your reaction or not," she added, a tiny grin flitting across her face.

When he just blinked at her, Hermione shook her head and waved her hand in a just-forget-I-even-said-it sort of way.

He blinked at the mirror. The image it showed to him was the same as it had been for Harry a minute ago. He and Hermione had stared back from the mirror... looking exactly the way they did now.

But behind them in the reflection Harry caught the vague outline of a tall, skinny human form... it was fading even as he watched, and though Harry could never confirm it he would always swear he saw the moon catch a dying, tiny glint of flaming red on it, near the top.

It should have hit him like the Hogwarts Express on full speed ahead, but perhaps because he’d been resisting it for a long enough time, it didn’t.

He wanted to get over Ron’s death. The mirror showed him what he’d not let himself or even Hermione tell him, at the same time showing him he already had something he wanted. As if to punctuate it she reached up and tilted his head onto her shoulder, letting him feel it for a minute. It felt... good. Nothing passionate, nothing that would embarrass either of them, just... there, and warm and steady.

He had a friend there with him. No more, no less, and the mirror showed just that.

Harry reached out and touched the mirror, and it was Hermione who finally had to gently tug him away. He looked back one last time and suddenly smiled warmly, and even Hermione might not have understood why.

They left the room behind.

And somewhere in the room behind them, a tired spirit was freed.

"Stay with each other," he murmured, freezing in his mind the image of Harry’s face that first time they’d really met on the Hogwarts Express, and the smell of Hermione’s hair against his cheek during their first kiss. "But even think of those little broom closet fantasies, Harry, and I’ll haunt you for eternity."

Holding the images in his mind as if in a perfect diamond case, he walked through the mirror and away beyond the perceptions of all things Muggle or wizard.

* * * * *

Aww, isn’t friendship grand?

Honest critiques, please. :-)

For platonic H/Hr-ers, this fic ends here. But I’m undecided. Whether to do a continuation and delve more towards a romance with H/Hr, or leave them be. I’d been thinking to do a continuation with Harry and Hermione still very close but still platonic, and I do like the idea, but the idea of a ‘shippy fic’s also been gnawing at my ankles too, rather persistently.

 

Thanks to Caitlyn Allyana, Fallen Darkness, Ebonyink, Tabitha82, FirenzieFrenzy, JediGinny, MrsScrags, Cassandra Claire, Lily Vance, Eric Oppen, and fairy queen 225 for your wonderful reviews on the first chapter. They do make this little author’s day. Aside from being a tidy little ego-booster to boot. ;-)