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"Sir," said Harry tentatively, "Can I ask you another question about the Pensieve?"
Dumbledore hummed and did not look up, which Harry took as permission to continue.
“Well, the people in the Pensieve - not Karkaroff or Lestrange or Mr Bagman, the other people in the audience - I couldn’t see their faces. I could see the shapes of their bodies, but when I tried to look closer, it was all blurred. How come I could see Professor Moody and Mr Crouch so clearly but not anyone on the other side of the room?”
Dumbledore smiled. "All memories are fallible, Harry. I won’t deny the fact that my brainpower is better than most, but I'm afraid to say even I cannot recall everyone in attendance after all these years."
"You mean I didn’t see them because you don't remember who was there?”
"Very good, Harry."
Harry was rather astonished that Dumbledore had remembered so much after such a long time.
“But sir, doesn't that mean that the memories you put in the Pensieve would be biased?”
“Indeed it does, Harry. Wizards who do not understand the workings of the Pensieve have often sought it as a way to remember an event more clearly, to prove facts or settle a dispute.” Regret suddenly flashed across Dumbledore’s face. “But I can tell you, Harry, from personal experience: the memories we place in the Pensieve reflect our own biases. It is impossible to discover the truth by examining memories.”
Harry privately thought that that made the Pensieve seem quite useless. He wondered what Dumbledore had tried to prove with the Pensieve, but dared not ask. Instead, he said, “So you couldn’t use it to prove someone innocent in a crime?” He had rather hoped that Sirius might use it to clear his name.
“Unfortunately, no. The Wizengamot does not accept evidence only in the form of memories.” Dumbledore got to his feet and walked to the office door. “Better hurry to your next lesson, Harry. Professor Mcgonagall would not appreciate you being late.”
One year later, Harry stood in the bright sunlight outside the Great Hall and listened to his father and his friends talking.
“One: he’s sitting on my chair. Two: he’s wearing my clothes. Three: his name’s Remus Lupin.” Remus said, laughing, and hang on, wasn’t this Snape’s memory?
Harry wondered at how much Snape had known, or suspected, about Lupin before The Prank. He turned to look at Snape, but he still seemed to be poring over the DADA paper. If his father and his friends had had conversations like this in front of known enemies, Harry thought it was a miracle that the secret hadn’t slipped out eventually.
Was it possible that Snape hadn’t overheard it at all? Perhaps he had revisited the memory after finding out, and had guessed at the conversation. Harry resolved to ask Sirius and Lupin about it the next time he saw them, but somewhere between Snape calling his mother a mudblood and throwing a jar of cockroaches at him, the thought flew from his mind.
Standing in Slughorn’s office, listening to Tom Riddle ask about Horcruxes, Harry read the list of ingredients on a jar of crystallised pineapple and thought, wow. He’s got his priorities in the right place.
After it all ends, after Voldemort’s dead and they’ve rounded up the Death Eaters in the castle, Harry sits on a chair in front of the Headmaster’s desk and tries to Obliviate himself.
Slughorn did it, he reasons. How else could he have altered the memory he gave to Dumbledore? The thought of that brings up the painful image of Dumbledore in the cave, of Dumbledore clutching his head and screaming and Merlin, Harry wants to be rid of this. He wants to forget the sound of Sirius’s laughter before he fell, the taste of the Firewhiskey the night they’d lost Mad-Eye, the sight of Fred’s, Tonks’s, Lupin’s bodies…
Dumbledore’s portrait is not longer in pride of place behind the Headmaster’s chair, but Harry ignores Snape and waits for Dumbledore to speak. To say anything to dissuade him, or to explain about memories as he had done three years prior. But Dumbledore doesn't say anything. He just looks at Harry serenely, piercing him with his blue eyes.
The gaze becoming unbearable, Harry turns to face away from Dumbledore. He raises his wand to his temple, but pauses.
It would be doing them a disservice, he thinks. To forget their sacrifices and their bravery. To just… throw out all the ways that their loss had affected him. Made him better.
What had Dumbledore once said to him? Harry turns the chair to face Dumbledore’s portrait again. Dumbledore had said that Harry was protected by his ability to love. He remained pure of heart, untarnished and whole because of the losses he had borne.
The Pensieve is still lying on the Headmaster’s desk, full of Snape’s memories. Harry siphons them carefully back into the phial Snape had given him and looks at the Pensieve without really seeing it, remembering the first time he had used it. Dumbledore had told him then that the Pensieve preserved what the user thought was important. Well, thinks Harry. If they aren’t important, then I don’t know what is.
He had thought back then that biased memories would serve little purpose. He understood now, finally. The Pensieve could be used to make connections between thoughts but also to preserve them. He could save the memories of the people he had loved and lost, exactly as he saw them, to remember and reflect. Instead of pretending they had not existed, he could put away their final moments, tinted as they are with his love for them, to revisit later. In the later months, he will dream up a million ways he could have acted to save each of them, and mourn their loss, but this way, he will never forget the way they were.
The Dumbledore in the portrait smiles as Harry raises his wand to his temple again.