A/N: Just an extremely short one-shot I thought of when reading All Too Human again.
Antidotes
Truth - No one now dies of fatal truths: there are far too many antidotes to them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It started small. When he was... falsely... accused of being self-centered, or egomaniacal, or any of a myriad of things, he would reject them outright. They didn't know who he was, how he had lived, they were just spiteful, they were jealous. Any of a number of simple tonics any normal person takes daily.
Time went on. His problems - his fatal truths - grew, and the antidotes for his conscience became more potent to compensate. When Cedric died, it wasn't his fault. He had been tricked by the imposter Moody - and hadn't he suffered, too? He had been forced to battle the Dark Lord, and a score of his Death Eaters. And he had still risked life and limb to return Cedric's body. It wasn't his fault at all.
His godfather died. The last hope he had for any kind of normalcy faded, thrust through a veil. But it still wasn't his fault. Of course not. Snape and Dumbledore, they hadn't tried very hard to teach him Occlumency, hadn't even told him why he was supposed to study it. Bellatrix and Voldemort, they'd killed Sirius, and tricked everyone to go to the ministry office. He had only been trying to help, to save his godfather. To save his last chance.
Dumbledore died. Struck down by a man he trusted. It still, of course, wasn't his fault. Dumbledore had made him promise not to do anything, and had enforced the promise with magic. No one had listened to him about Malfoy and Snape. He had tried to tell them all, and he was ignored. He had given his friends a luck potion to help them fault. What more could he do? It wasn't his fault.
His friends died. He had told them he wanted to go alone, but they'd insisted. They had just kept pestering him until he gave in. He'd tried to teach them all he knew, tried to teach them how to combat the evil they had chosen to face. They'd chosen - he was the one being forced to fight the dark. He was the one still suffering for it. Knowing this, how could someone accuse him? It obviously wasn't his fault.
Voldemort won. He had tried to stop the Dark Lord. But no one had tried to help him, after his friends. They expected him to defeat the most powerful wizard in recent history, alone. They'd abandoned him to a hopeless task they had to know he couldn't do. Not without help. He had been deserted. It wasn't his fault.
He died. Voldemort had choked the life from the world, after he gained control. Harry had been all alone. He was tired, he hurt, and he wanted to go back to those he called friends, and the family he had never known. He had held the wand to his head, and then cast the spell. He made sure to hold it right over the scar, where there was already a chink in his armor - just in case someone else decided to die for him. But it wasn't his fault.
With each fatal truth, his mind ached. And with each ached, he quaffed another metaphorical antidote.
If there was a greater unconscious, or gods, or demons, or some form of higher power, they would wonder, for a great many years, what had happened. Had Harry Potter, The-Boy-Who-Lived, been killed by fatal truths? Or had it been his antidote that ended up being fatal?