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“To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.” – Carl Jung.
“What do you want, Harry Potter?”
Harry knows Tom Riddle.
Of course he knows him: to know him is to acknowledge a part of himself. A part that was hidden and pushed back for the most of his early years. A part that was rejected and neglected for the greater good Dumbledore prayed on. The darkness and the ugliness on his heart. His shadow.
Once the war is over, Tom appears soft to Harry. He’s no longer the rumble assaulting his peace – he’s now the peace taming the riot.
On Harry’s mind, he’s the great Moses parting seas of blood for him to walk.
He comes to him on waves of memories when Harry stands alone on the precipice after defeating conjuring a deathly curse. He talks to him indulgently, with the voice in the shape of a simple boy that Harry recognizes as his own. He watches closely into his mind, walks between the dead and the survivors – there’s little of them left. Pain lies uncomfortably on the front of his mind, deep and sharp. Harry, who might’ve just turned twenty-eight but is still a child at heart, feels it carving on his chest.
“You did this.” Harry points out. He’s resented. He doesn’t break Voldemort’s wand on the half. He keeps it to himself.
His words never leave him, just dance around the walls and fall back into his arms.
“You did this.” Tom says, gently pushing the words into his mind. It doesn’t feel like an invasion. It feels like a lover’s stroke or a mother’s brush.
When Harry visits Hermione, the voice on the back of his mind floats to the front. Nothing unsettles Harry the way the loss of Hermione did. She never talks, just sits quietly and tries to acknowledge Harry. Malfoy’s name is carved on her chest. She doesn’t move, just waits for someone that won’t come.
“You did this.” Harry points out. He suffers on her best friend’s name. The brightest witch of her age. She has been reduced to nothing.
Tom’s an echo. “You did this.” He answers.
It makes Harry sob like a little boy who has lost himself on the playground. He pities himself.
“I don’t know what changed.” He had spent so many hours recalling the events that took him towards defeat. “We were winning. We were on a good run. Then… we lost.”
Someone died. The tactician, he recalled vaguely. Ron. The chessboard fell to pieces.
Mrs. Weasley couldn’t endure his son’s death so shortly after his husband’s dead. To her, Arthur had been a leg. Something to walk with, someone to rely on when life got too harsh. To lose another son and not have his best confident on her side was unbearable. Her remaining children did their best to cheer her up, but their life seemed to become a deadly remark of the persons she could not protect.
Charlie was the first. He was caught on a mission in Romania. The Order never found his body but one morning, his hand on the Weasley Clock was gone. Arthur dug a hole on the Burrow’s backyard and put an empty coffin on it. For years, there was not a day in which Charlie wasn’t given some flowers. When the death-eaters attacked the Burrow in 1999, the demoniac fire destroyed Charlie’s altar. The family moved out to a safe house and left his empty grave behind.
The twins followed him. George was badly injured on the battlefield when combat healers were all indisposed. George's blood quickly thickened and clogged his veins. He ran out of heartbeats and blowed up. Fred got a deadly curse not much after. The Weasleys made a grave for two in the Dean Forest, but only Fred’s body got to be buried. George’s remains could only be wiped out of the battlefield ground with a fregotego.
Then Arthur died. It wasn’t even his mission. He had to replace someone who got chicken pox. It just went wrong. So wrong. Lestrange had done something. The Resistance’s apprentices had been lackadaisical. Too young to fight. The one who announced Arthur’s death to Kingsley was just growing his first beard. Ginny refused to leave her mother alone for the first days. Harry was still hearing Mrs. Weasley silent sobs on the safe house’s kitchen weeks later.
Ron retreated into himself. Harry would hardly ever have him around or know of him at all out of the Grimmauld Place’s War Room. If he ever tried to follow Ron and confront him after any of the Order’s meeting, Ron would find a way to sneak out. On time, he took his best friend’s silence as a penance for Mr. Weasley’s death. It grew into a deep and sharp pain pulsating inside his chest. The personal remark of his body count. The blood on his hands, the casualties on his cause.
There had barely been a month after Arthur’s death when they lost Ron.
But Harry couldn’t understand what happened after that. He lost himself somewhere in the middle.
“I lost.” Harry said.
He had lost. It had been his fight from the very beginning. Harry knew it. He hadn’t chosen to carry that weight, but it had been given to him and only him, so he had to make something out of it and he chose to grow his personal quarrel with the monster that took away his parents and the life he deserved – the life in which he was loved.
He made love both his weapon and his weak point. He was late to find out that love kills no monster. They feast upon it.
“Everyone kept dying. Just… the muggles have a saying – to die like flies. They can be killed so fast, so easy. To watch them agonize makes you realize of how strong you are. The power you hold. Before I got my Hogwarts letter, the Dursleys locked me on my cupboard when they wanted to punish me over something. It was a small place and there wasn’t much to do. But it was close to the kitchen. If I was lucky enough, I would find a fly on the door’s rack.”
Harry paused, carefully looking at the picture that the mirror was returning to him. The man looking back into him was grieving no loved one.
“I still remember all the ways in that I can kill a fly. Looking back, I might’ve been just too scared to accept that you and I are just the same.”
On time, Harry murders Hermione. It’s a merciful death. It’s the death she deserved. When he carries her body all the way to the Malfoy Manor’s personal cemetery, there’s already a grave waiting on Hermione’s name. She lies beside Draco Malfoy. White roses open their chests and cry blood on the lovers’ graves.
Harry contemplates the picture with funerary reverence. He did this.
He once knew of a love so intimate, too. She used to hold his hand and keep him close in the darkness. He still keeps a picture of her red flaming hair waving on the blue sky after glory. She won the game. In Harry’s aftermath, she also won a man who stood tall and proud on her side and gave her five kids. Most of them were named after the dead.
Harry longs after a life that was never his to cherish. A life that flew away from his hands even before he could think of it.
The soul-pierced man on his head learns to make something out of it. He leads the path. When Harry finally sits on the chair Dumbledore possessed during so many years, something is quietly burning inside his chest.
Remus sits in front of him on the fiftieth anniversary of Voldemort’s defeat. He’s been on his own for the most of his days. How pitiful, Harry can’t help but to think. To survive two wars and lose everyone you love. To stand alone on victory.
“You did this.” Tom reminds him.
Harry already carries that truth like a cross. He knows its weight. He knows how to make it lighter.
Remus pasts away short after. His death is announced on the Daily Prophet, but only Harry attends his funeral. He stands on his grave with somewhat pride. It is certainly not easy to murder a werewolf, not even an old and quite decrepit one.
He asks back.
“What do you want, Harry Potter?”
His voice echoes on his head, the words stumble through his cranium’s cavities, trying to land somewhere. It eventually does, softly touching ground like a leaf on the first days of August.
Harry is eighty-nine years old. He has fought against something for most of his days. The lines on his face can tell just as much as history books do. He has no family. He once dreamed of one.
“I want to be loved.” He finally answers, after days of pondering the words.
“We monsters are not to be loved”.
Harry takes the words between his tongue and indulges himself with them.
The splintered man knows more than he’ll ever know. He’s the guardian of his mind just as Harry’s the keeper of his soul.