Walking Shadow

Where am I? she asks.

The Queen looks concerned. In the ballroom of our palace, my darling. It's your sixteenth birthday, don't you remember? You have to pick a husband. All the eligible men of the kingdom have assembled.

Cinderella stands up, and the orchestra stops playing. There is an unnatural weight on her head, and with a start, she realises it is a crown. And the Prince?

Prince? The King laughs. What Prince? You're our only daughter, my love; the only Prince is the one you shall choose tonight.

The doors of the ballroom fling open, and a man dressed in a white suit with silver spangles on the edges walks into the room (the Prince, she realises, with a start-- but now he is not the Prince). His hair is done in perfect, angelic curls, but underneath it all lingers the smell of burning cinders. He turns his bright eyes on hers, and for a moment, it seems like the Princess is going to ask him to dance.

In this story, she shakes her head and walks right past him, the beginnings of cruelty on her lips. I will have no Prince, Cinderella says, signaling for the orchestra to play on. I am the Princess, and I walk alone.

V.

( "On the first day of classes in 1997, Potter's belongings had been owled to Dumbledore's office; there was no accompanying message or note, no clue as to what might have happened to the young wizard. Concerned that bodily harm had befallen Potter, the Headmaster had sent Black and Lupin out to investigate. In a few days' time, they returned with Harry in tow--a frightened, struggling boy, who appeared to not know his own Godfather, who seemed unable to recognize any of the castle's surroundings.

It was not a pleasant sight. Potter had to be physically restrained by Black and Lupin, locked between their arms, while alternately screaming and sobbing, his face red and tear-streaked. He had been dirty and smelly, his glasses gone, his body trembling. The most disquieting thing, however, had been the boy's refusal to open his eyes; whenever he did squint one open, he let out a fresh yelp, as if the sight of their concerned faces was the very thing driving him mad.

"What's been done to him?" Black had demanded, looking quite ill. Dumbledore ignored Black and instead spoke to Potter, saying his name--Harry?...Harry?--over and over again, as if trying to penetrate the terror the boy was fully engulfed in.

"I don't know," Dumbledore finally admitted, only after touching the boy's fiery brow once then immediately pulling back, as if he'd just received a burn. "But it would appear that...nothing's been done to him."

"How can you say that?" Black had cried, outraged...

After much argument about how to next proceed, Dumbledore finally hushed them all with a single glance. He pulled the traumatised boy aside, and out of earshot, spoke very softly with him for several long minutes. None of them could be sure what was being said, but it seemed as if Potter answered his headmaster at least once, and after doing so, Dumbledore let him be, returning to them with a grim expression upon his ancient face.

That one expression had said it all; Snape knew at once, without asking, that Harry Potter's looking-glass persona had finally been shattered. He didn't know how, or what had happened, but the boy must have found reason to look within himself...and had retreated fully when he saw that there was nothing looking back at him." )

That is one story.

In this story, Harry Potter nodded as Albus Dumbledore placed a hand on his shoulder, cast a quick Sober-Up Spell (the same sort they will use on Hermione in a month), and talked to him about glory and what is right.

'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,' he said, Petunia and Vernon Dursley having educated him at least that much.

Dumbledore shook his head, his blue eyes intense. "You won't die, Harry," he pronounced. "Don't you see? You're the Boy Who Lived. You can never leave this behind: it's become part of you now. The magic is part of you."

No, I'm part of the magic, he wanted to say, but didn't.

"This is your world, and you are its hero."

Harry nodded dumbly and even smiled a little before Dumbledore Obliviated him and sent him back to classes with a sherbet lemon and a story about missing the Hogwarts Express.

When Sirius looked at him, Dumbledore looked back gravely. "It is for the best," he said. "It must be."

VI.

The crown grows heavier on her head, pinching into her skin, and soon she bleeds. She fastens royal fingers around the gold band and tries to pull it off. She did not place the crown upon her head and so she cannot lift it either.

Hers are the consequences (not the act) to enjoy and endure.

Fate, my darling, her fairy godmother whispers into her ear at night when she whimpers.

In the morning, however, there is always a beautiful new dress and a pure white cloth, softer than baby's skin, to wipe her blood with, and the Princess believes she is happy.

*

PART THREE: FEAR

*

"If Dreams are like Memories..."

(evening)

And he talks to the river of lost love and dedication

And silent replies that swirl invitation

Flow dark and troubled to an oily sea

A grim intimation of what is to be

I.

( in my dreams I'm dying all the time )

There is a mountain in his dream, and he is standing at the bottom.

There is blood dripping from his lip and a gash above his right eye. His glasses lie in a twisted up, glittering heap behind him, abandoned to their fate. He holds his wand tightly, so tightly that his fingernails turn a chalky death-white.

There is a faint breeze, which pushes his sweaty hair from his face and allows a shining scar to be seen.

(the moment is picture-perfect, set in a grey-red Universe where Kubrick is God)

There is a black-haired young man with greenish eyes and a hardened expression standing at the pinnacle, his eyes locked with Harry's. His robes flutter ever so slightly, dispelling the illusion that he is just a statue.

"Tom Marvolo Riddle," Harry breathes, and his words solidify, forming scarlet letters in the air.

They float there like a ghostly personification of the alphabet before silently forming:

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT

The figure opens his mouth and laughs silently.

Harry takes a step closer, brittle ground crunching underneath his boots, and Tom Marvolo Riddle's skin whitens.

He takes another step:

( squish )

Tom Marvolo Riddle's eyes glow faintly red.

He takes another step:

( crunch )

Tom Marvolo Riddle's hair begins to fall in withered tufts.

He takes another step:

( squish )

Tom Marvolo Riddle's mouth is eaten away by the cold flesh of his face.

He takes another step:

( crunch )

Tom Marvolo Riddle's nose widens and flattens, slowly, like a bad shadow-fade effect in a Muggle film.

He takes another step:

( squish )

Tom Marvolo Riddle's body bends and then elongates, stretching skin like nylon over jagged bones that gleam moistly.

One more step and he will be at the top.

He lifts one leg and raises his wand and begins to mouth the words--

And Tom Marvolo Riddle does the same, raising his wand with a semi-smile and echoing the spell that Harry has begun to cast--

Avada Kedavra.

Harry's leg hits the ground:

Tom Marvolo Riddle turns into Voldemort.

Harry's eyes widen as the jet of green light hits him squarely in the chest, and he stumbles forward into the arms of his enemy only to find--

There is the cold, hard glass pressing between their embrace.

( Mirror, mirror, on the wall... )

Harry allows a hand that he knows is long and sinuous and whiter than a lily to drop his wand and gasps as he feels cold air enter through his slit-like nose.

His lifeless body hits the crumbling ground that is made of soil that was once people, and he wakes.

II.

There are other dreams, too.

The one where he sees his own name spelled out magically in the air, just like Voldemort's, and slowly four letters pull away from the rest and begin to glow, leaving his own name bereft and broken up...

H O

A R R Y J A M S P T T E

E R

A R R Y J A M S P T T E

And then the word 'hero' grows larger and larger, so big and so bright that he can't see his own name for its radiance.

Then there's the dream in which his mother's voice says 'destiny' over and over again, like she's calling out for a lover, and then she's real and beside him, all flesh and bone. She has a smell, like a perfume that Gabrielle used to wear (back in those days when he could bury his face in her hair and hold her too-soft hands and--).

"You killed me," she says, her lips thinning into a scowl. "You killed me, Harry Potter..." On the last syllable of his name, her face thins and stretches, her nose lengthening into avian hook. Her voice changes, hair lightens (red to silver). "You left me," Gabrielle Delacour says, her young eyes filmy with tears. "How could you leave me? You were supposed to save me."

Those words are like a cue, and a thousand ghostly forms rise up from the ground and stretch out their arms. "Save me," they cry, their phantom voices merging and coalescing.

Harry takes a step back, and another, as they press closer to him, and he is falling backwards...

Thump.

He lands on a chessboard, and the red queen bears down upon him with a murderous look in her eye. He stumbles back only to find that he is the white king, standing upright behind a line of pawns, knights, bishops, who all have their sabres drawn at the ready to defend him.

He cannot feel his own mouth as it opens and orders a line of pawns to go forward, and before he can gather his bearings, the board is a whirl of white attacking red and wood chips flying. To his left, a white bishop falls, but he can do nothing.

He is caught in the squares and in the motions that he is allowed to perform.

The rules bind him like ropes.

Soon, there are no more red pieces except for the queen. The bishop brings down his sword on her head, and her scream is pure, echoing forever in his ears, drowning out the 'no' that doesn't issue from his lips but just reverberates in his head.

As her crown falls to the ground, the red wood chips suddenly reform the pawns that were destroyed, and the white king mumbles a spell that casts the illusion that they were never broken in the first place.

III.

Though...

The worst nightmares are the ones that are real.

Harry remembered the feeling of standing in a circle twenty-seven years ago on this day (like he could forget it, even otherwise), arms linked with strangers and friends with the same intense feelings on their faces. Power flowed between them, so tangible that the air in the room was thick and glittery. Magic so old and great that it transcended wands and words and reached deep inside the wizard.

If he remembered everything, he would have to remember the sick feeling creeping up his spine, a chill that never quite dissipated. He knew what it felt like to be Tom Marvolo Riddle when he ripped his soul from its casing and vomited it into the pages of a diary.

But he is not in the business of accuracy, he is trying to assuage guilt, so he tries hard not to remember, and he succeeds (he's been practicing a long time).

"You call everything you can't understand Dark--" Ginny Weasley, well acquainted with darkness, had told him once.

If that was true, then this was Dark Magic at its worst, because he didn't understand it...

Or maybe he did?

(Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.)

Did he truly want to admit he knew the consequences of pressing the silver blade into his hands and drawing a circle of blood around them?

(Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

But where are the warts? And where is Macbeth? But they too call to Hecate, like the witches in the play. Dressed in black, like Death Eaters)

Dean's eyes found Harry's for a moment, but he looked away just as quickly.

If Harry wanted to remember everything, he would remember the frightened look on Dean's Mudblood face, which was replaced by determination.

"She to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself!"

And after that, the strangest sense of having nothing within his body, of being able to float on his toes as magic flowed between them and from them. The pounding of blood in his ears, like maddened music, and the salty taste of lips and skin. Magic so old it called on nonexistent gods and was forged in flesh and blood and passion--