Title: Seven White Lies Told for the Greater Good
Author: Claire
Rating: K+ (I'm not too sure about ratings… I don't find the explanation page very useful. If anyone thinks I should change this please let me know.)
Pairings: None
Genre: Angst (I guess… I don't really have a feel for genres yet either)
Warnings: Spoilers for all books, a bit of 'light-bashing' (anyone get the pun?) and… lying
This is epilogue-compliant.
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to JKR. No matter how many birthday candles I blow out or how many fortune cookies I get saying 'Your biggest wish is coming true' or something like that.
I'd also like to say that I love all of these characters. I'm just using them as my personal playground of 'what if they weren't such fantastic people'.
...
One
Hagrid didn't get the dragon while drunk. He actually can't get drunk – the giant blood doesn't let alcohol affect his brain. He just wanted the dragon, so he acted drunk, told the stranger whatever he could, to get that egg. To this day he fears that someone – Harry – will discover that he willingly told Voldemort how to get past Fluffy. But what makes him feel even worse, is knowing that Harry will forgive him.
...
Two
Ginny remembers each and every thing she did under Tom's will. She remembers consenting to it. Tom convinced her it was right to kill the Muggleborns, so she did. It was only when he started targeting Harry that she began to resist. It was only when he took her soul that she realised he was wrong at all. She'll never tell anyone, lest it get back to Harry. Because she's kept the secret for so long now, and Harry has told her everything – he'd be disgusted that she tried to kill Muggleborns: was so easily corrupted. Harry, who was (is) so noble.
...
Three
Sirius killed the twelve Muggles. It wasn't Peter – little snivelling Peter wouldn't have known the spell. Instead what happened was while Peter was transforming Sirius launched a powerful (Dark) spell at him. It missed and hit the street behind, killing the Muggles. Sirius never told anyone – after all, it wasn't his fault, not really. And the major part of his sentence was betraying Lily and James and killing Peter. The ministry didn't care so much about the Muggles. Peter never told because it helped his reputation to have killed the Muggles. And perhaps he thought his own accidental magic had caused it. Sirius never truly knew. All he knew was that he would never, ever, tell anyone. Because if Harry knew, Harry would be disappointed in him. Just like James would have been. To his dying day, Harry's words haunted him: 'I don't think my Dad would have wanted his best friends to become murderers'…
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Four
Ron was the one to come up with the idea for the 'Potter Stinks' badges. Well, he didn't come up with the whole thing – just the 'Potter Stinks' part. He saw a Ravenclaw seventh year wearing one early in the day and suggested it to them. The seventh year didn't know Ron's name, but spread the idea to his friends and eventually it got to Draco Malfoy. Malfoy never knew that it was Ron's idea, just like Ron never knew for sure if Draco got the idea from him. But it was the fact that Draco Malfoy was using his idea to hurt Harry that made him realise that he would rather be with Harry than Draco Malfoy. He didn't truly believe Harry until he came back from the third task – not even when Harry saved him in the second. So now, Ron will never tell anyone – not his wife, not his best friend – that he was the one who came up with the idea for 'Potter Stinks'. Because Harry would be hurt, but laugh it off like it didn't matter anymore while it tore him apart inside. Harry would ask him, Ron, if he felt OK when he broke down and told him, never mind that Harry's own feelings would be crushed. Harry would pretend to be OK. And Ron couldn't, can't, stand any more pretence.
...
Five
Hermione hated Harry through fifth year. Not the whole time – he and Ron were her best friends, but sometimes she wished he wasn't. Like when she didn't write to him in the summer because she thought he was blowing the whole Cedric thing out of proportion… And until she went to live in the Order's headquarters, maybe she didn't quite believe him. When he shouted at her, at the world, she knew in her mind that he wasn't angry at her. But it made her angry at him, making her sick inside. Sometimes she wished she wasn't Harry's friend and Professor Umbridge would treat her like the rest of the teachers did. At the end of the year, Hermione wished she wasn't Harry's friend so that she wouldn't become so distracted when he screamed during the History of Magic Exam. She hated him when, instead of just letting her be a normal teenage girl he had to drag her off to play the hero… and all for nothing. She resented him for making her lie to a teacher. She felt sick from the ten potions shoved down her throat each day because of him. She hated how his own stupidity caused the one person he thought of as a parent to die and how sad that made him and if he had only listened to her…
Hermione hated having Harry as a friend. Because Harry was so good, and noble and ready to sacrifice everything at the drop of a hat to save the world… and sometimes she hated him, still.
Hermione will never tell anybody, least of all Harry, about the sick feeling inside her, knowing she could despise something so wonderful.
...
Six
Dumbledore was a powerful man who did many things for the greater good. He lied, manipulated, and though he tried to forget it he had caused death. He never outright told anyone this, but he made no huge effort to hide it. He was ashamed that he had been forced to do them, not that he had done the things. What he never told anyone, never got a chance to tell anyone, was what he hadn't done for the greater good.
Towards the end, Dumbledore liked to tell himself that the world was better off without him manipulating the events, telling everyone what to do, leading Harry by the hand. He liked to think that Harry would grow up to be better without him around. But as he died, pleading for Severus to kill him, Dumbledore allowed himself to realise his own selfish reasons for it. He could have dodged Draco's spell, using the next second to stun him. He could have forced his magic to save himself wandlessly. It would have strained him, but he needn't have died. He could have given a signal to Severus, even, and the spy would have killed every Death Eater on the tower.
Dumbledore knew he hadn't needed to die.
But he had wanted to.
Dumbledore was an old man – he had given up on living. He had seen a lot in his 115 years. He had been through three wars, although the first he had played no major role, the second he had won and the third he had been a major leader in. He had seen so much, done so much and he wanted no part in a fourth war.
Dumbledore took the coward's way out.
Dumbledore never had the chance to tell anyone about this realisation. He was dead as he made it. But even if he had the chance, he would never have told anyone. This was one thing Dumbledore never had to lie about. But it felt like a lie to watch from the land of the dead and see Harry, so young and brave, sacrifice everything for his friends and even the people he couldn't stand so they could have lives and to know that he, Dumbledore, had told him to do it.
When Dumbledore himself had made the same choice, but for his own selfish reasons.
His only solace was that while he had lied to himself and everyone around him through those last weeks of his life, at least that had given them hope and had been, hopefully, for the greater good.
...
Seven
Harry knew what everyone thought about him: he was Harry Potter, the boy who lived, the hero, the saviour. He was noble, self-sacrificing and would do anything to help someone, no matter the consequences.
What they didn't know was that it was all a vicious, vicious lie.
Harry Potter was no hero. Harry was just Harry. No one else, no pumped-up saviour, there for the rest of the world to pick on, to blame when something went wrong and to celebrate when he got them out of their own sticky mess.
Harry just wanted to live.
That's all he was: a survivor.
In it for himself, all the way.
Harry knew it was the Slytherin in him – using any means, resourceful and determined as he was, to go on living. He rather thought it was the influence of Voldemort's soul in him.
Merlin knows survival was Voldemort's main goal in his immortality.
It had started, as far as he could remember, at the Dursley's. He had to fight every minute to get the food he needed to live. To make sure he didn't overstep his boundaries.
But after his induction into the Wizarding World he had realised his fight for survival had begun the Halloween after his first birthday.
At first magic had seemed surreal to him. It felt like he could do anything with this amazing new power. But eventually, at the end of his fifth year, he finally learnt his lesson that really: magic couldn't solve everything.
After that year, after hearing the prophecy, he had attempted to focus his attentions on learning what he needed to do to take revenge on his parents' killer. What he needed to learn in order to survive.
Wasn't that what the prophecy said:
Either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives…
Harry had taken that to mean that once Voldemort died he'd be able to live without constantly fearing for his life – without having that urge in the back of his mind (or perhaps scar) to live no matter the consequences.
The walk into the forest had been… There were no words for that.
Harry had been so scared. Harry didn't want to die.
But what could he have done? Either he could walk into the forest and die, or he could have run away and Voldemort would have hunted him down and killed him anyway.
Harry hadn't even graduated – Voldemort wouldn't find him that hard to kill.
But Harry had come back to life.
He'd thought that with Voldemort's soul gone he would be able to live in peace. That his need to survive would be gone with his ability to speak parsletongue.
That perhaps, over the years his scar would fade.
When Harry finally killed Voldemort, he didn't shoot out an Avada Kedavra: sacrificing his morals to kill the evil man and save the world. Harry had had enough with sacrificing.
Instead, Harry had defended himself from the killing curse.
Harry hadn't wanted to die. He had wanted to live.
People saw him as their hero; their saviour. Even Hagrid, even Ginny, even every one of the Weasley's, even his best friends, even Sirius and Dumbledore before they died saw him as a noble, forgiving, self-sacrificing hero.
They thought he was perfect.
Just like they thought his scar was fading while every morning he religiously covered it in a glamour, some muggle make-up and a potion.
Just like they thought he could no longer speak parsletongue while he avoided everything remotely reptilian rather than slip up and have someone hear his whispered hissing.
Just like they thought the way he rubbed his scar when stressed was a remembrance of times when such annoyances were the cause of migraines, while Harry tried to stop himself from crying at the loss of the comforting presence that had been with him since he was a baby, it's absence so obvious in his state of worry.
Harry smiled at the newspaper in front of him as he took a minute to relax before rushing off to work. He had made the front page again: apparently someone had caught wind of his upcoming promotion to Head Auror.
Harry Potter was a lie and the world loved him for it.
In the end, Harry didn't mind that everyone loved him for the lie he was.
After all, it was for his own Greater Good.
...
Just a little one-shot-not-exactly-a-story thing I came up with. This is my first post on fanfiction – or anywhere on the Internet. I know this is very short, but it's the first time I've actually finished everything. I'm hoping that now that I've actually posted something I'll magically start to actually write stories with chapters long enough for me to consider posting them, but I somehow doubt it.
I'd love to know what the people reading this think of it… And now am starting to feel sympathy for those poor first-time authors begging for readers to hit the wonderful 'review' button.