The challenge for this fic was "How radically can I reinterpret canon without breaking it?" The answer, of course, is modified Solipsism. The problem that arises is whether I've effectively negated all of canon by introducing solipsism. My solution is to look the other way and whistle innocently, and I suggest you do the same after writing me lots of reviews.
More chapters may be forthcoming. I have more ideas, but I have less time. /gripe
-Gonzalez
A man sat in a marble chamber, staring at a game board. It was expected of him, for if the boy had turned his thoughts to this chamber, he would have imagined it exactly as it was—indeed, on some unconscious level, the boy already did.
People often thought of life in terms of a game board, or so the boy believed. They apparently saw in it objectives, rules, moves, strategies by the handful or none at all. The man was expected to have a sense of humor, and so he chuckled at the idea. It was the thing that people did in his situation, and he laughed at that too. He considered his moves, knowing the game was both immaterial and all-important.
The boy had learned at some point that humans had the chance to play a last game with Death in exchange for their life. That was why he was staring at a chessboard hosting an exciting game that was nevertheless stalled for the present. It was symbolic. Something about a chessboard gave authors a small kick and let them feel intelligent because they were using meaningful imagery. The boy had internalized this, it seemed—well, here they were.
The man and the boy sat across from each other in front of the game board. The boy looked away, not seeing his surroundings, only occasionally glancing at the board (was there some metaphorical, poetic significance there?), and hadn't made a move in a long while. But time was ever moving forward—assuming for the sake of argument a linear universe, and one where cause and effect applied.
People were perhaps more perceptive than their blundering attempts at metaphor conveyed. The Game played with Death was called Life. The rules were complicated, but they were learnt as one went along. Well, in theory.
"Normal people" did these things. The boy expected this of "normal people." Indeed, even as he walked into the Platform Nine and Three-Quarters that shouldn't even have existed, he was redefining "normal" but still holding basic assumptions about human nature constant. "Human nature." The man laughed again.
Harry Potter spent ten years in a broom cupboard and even now was managing to instantly connect with someone he considered his peer. A world in which social skills could be picked up instantly after ten years' abuse? He didn't consider this at all noteworthy, having his basic assumptions of the world drastically reworked in the past few days. Well, whose fault was that?
Really, an interesting point. Ultimately it was Harry who had decided lizard ought to talk back to him, that the glass ought to vanish, that a strange and giant man create a new world for him. And Fate had delivered.
Harry boarded the train. Harry tentatively grasped a pawn and slid it forward, the sound echoing in the marble chamber he inhabited and was unaware of even as he continued its existence in his subconscious. Harry stared into the gaze of Fate and looked away again, and Fate considered the board and considered his moves. There were many, and the Game Harry was playing against the world could take any possible turn. There was really any conclusion, too, from a certain point of view. Harry would have appreciated the thought, Fate felt, even if the actual fact of his learning its existence would prompt a subtle change in the world, annihilating its existence in the first place. Time, though Harry experienced it linearly, was often drastically reworked by his subconscious perceptions. Ever since he had declared enough is enough and felt the necessity of receiving a messenger owl, Fate had needed to rework the existing fundamental structure of Britain and thrown a few outlying constructs into the world at large for depth. Since three days ago, Hogwarts had existed for a thousand years. Fate's task was difficult at times, to be sure.
Perhaps there were no stakes to the game. Harry certainly didn't know, and Fate could not force himself to wonder. He existed to play the Game, and nothing else.
The rules were simple, a commandment from on high so distant or perhaps so visceral that Fate could not remember if they were instinct or instruction: CREATE. And Harry's orders were perfectly reciprocal: LIVE.
Neither can win while the other survives, thought Fate, and the phrase warped around his thoughts and was cast into the new world. Instantly, Harry's wand had a twin purchased years ago by a Dark Wizard who, why not, had attacked and killed Harry's real parents—Fate amended history: Vernon and Petunia were Aunt and Uncle, Harry coming from Vernon's side, no, wait, Petunia was a better choice—and the wizard who sold Harry his wand warned him about said Wizard. Good enough.
In the past, relatively soon after Harry's birth, a Dark Wizard—no time for a good name now, just leave it as You-Know-Who—slew the child's parents. Laughing, he turned on the child. The spell backfired. Ten years in the future, Harry was accosted by everyone who recognized him (no good, give him a scar, easily recognizable) and had a mysterious past. Fate looked at the chessboard and drew a sharp breath: Harry had made another move and Fate's move had been automatically taken for him. The result of his change?
All the boy had to do was look through him once—just once. That would be checkmate. Fate had assumed he would have to kill Harry to win. Various opportunities had presented themselves, and failed. Harry probably had experienced similar opportunities to win and likewise failed. If there was a Supreme Being, one who ordered to CREATE and LIVE, whose side was He on? Or was He playing both of them against each other because He was indecisive?
The move Fate just made had You-Know-Who using a Killing Curse on an infant, making it backfire. Yet, it was his move. Examining the board, he saw that Harry's king was in no danger and had not been. His own king, however, had just been protected from check. Was he protecting Harry's life with every move he made to take it? Likewise, was Harry protecting his creation with every move to discover a flaw in it?
Fate saw no more moves would be forthcoming, and withdraw from his marble chamber. "Withdrew" is perhaps not the best descriptive term, as Fate was not originally physically present in what was ultimately a metaphorical position to begin with. Nevertheless, the marble chamber ceased to be important and Fate was at once two personalities sitting in a train with Harry Potter, on his way to a magical school that had existed for a thousand years as of a few days ago, in order to LIVE in a way he had decided was best down at the level of his subconscious, forcing Fate to CREATE a few steps ahead of him.
An endless cycle, thought Fate, an intelligent, brown-haired girl taken straight from Harry's subconscious file of archetypes and sitting across from him on the train. The king may be put in check, but nothing in the rules say the kings may not circle each other for eternity.
But it was not the kings that mattered. Until they danced forever, they would only be a weakness. A weakness in a war of false perceptions and false reality . . .
What mattered now was the array of other pieces. Fate moved a pawn up one square, two squares, past Harry's defense, standing boldly in the extended center.
(Dark Wizard becomes Voldemort becomes You-Know-Who once more, for the wizarding world now fears to speak his name. Voldemort now has, had followers. One of those followers now belongs to a self-styled 'noble' bloodline and sends his son Draco to Hogwarts. Harry has now met Draco in Diagon Alley; they meet again on the train).
Harry has a pawn in position next to it. The move puts him in danger from Fate's other pawns, but he moves anyways, sliding his pawn diagonally behind the advancing pawn.
En passant—the only move in chess that can capture a piece without moving onto its square. The opponent tried to slip past his enemy's lines, took advantage of an opportunity, and was denied. The defender stood his ground and stepped smartly behind the victim, and it was over. He might as well have never tried to escape at all.
En passant—a seeming violation of the rules, a counter to an exception, taking the opponent unprepared. Risking, in this case, a possibility of stalemate—Fate wasn't sure what happened if they tied, and could not find force himself to wonder—throwing the attacker at the mercy of Fate's other pawns, but stopping his unstoppable rush. A gamble. A sacrifice.
En passant—the checkmate didn't really matter, did it, with no goal in mind and no reason to achieve one if there were. An ongoing process. LIVE. CREATE. Back and forth, no victory and no future. When the end didn't matter, all that could be valued was how they played the game. Fate and Harry Potter. The universe and its inhabitant.
Harry removed the upstart pawn from the board. Harry crossed the Hogwarts lake in a fleet of boats, his giant guardian leading the way.
Fate could feel Harry's need to be amazed. The boy obviously felt the desire to experience, and now to be amazed. So amaze he would do.
CREATE.
A Great Hall sprung up, with long tables, ancient banners, a cloud of floating candles and a ceiling painted like the sky. Even better: make the ceiling a living picture. There were no limits to this new world of magic.
A centuries-old Sorting ceremony was instituted a split second after, followed immediately after by the character of the four houses. Gryffindor: Bravery, Ravenclaw: Wisdom, Slytherin: uh, Deceit? (try Ambition instead, Fate thought, but the connotation stuck), and Hufflepuff:
Hufflepuff. Just Hufflepuff. Fate was out of ideas for the moment.
Harry was staring in wonder, but Fate felt that he would reach some limit soon. He blinked, was staring at the Board. There was a hidden danger there. A knight? A bishop? It was a bishop, hiding behind another pawn. Did it symbolize some aspect of the soul in Harry's nebulous fantasy?
Perhaps it would be well to create some comic relief. Fate was the Sorting Hat, and he burst into song, ludicrous as he could achieve ad hoc. And ad hoc was his modus operandi, defined and refined by practice, practice, practice.
Harry watched some students be "Sorted," and Fate played another pawn as Harry tried on the hat. Do you want a choice? thought Fate. We'll see how you deal with it.
"Not Slytherin," said Harry, voice echoing throughout the marble chamber, and played a pawn of his own.
"Do not try me, boy: you cannot play games with Fate. There will be no more choices for you."
Fate captured the pawn with his bishop and the hat roared "Gryffindor!"
The game was looking to be interesting. Fate couldn't remember when the game had started. He supposed he could have recreated the earliest moves, but he needed to make sure he focused on the game ahead.
No end in forethought. No beginning in memory. An eternal game, back and forth, Life, Death, and endless Creation. Who knew what, if anything, lay at stake? Who knew how the game could finally cease to roll onward?
A universe (a game) without meaning, shaped by the thoughts of a boy whose thoughts came from what he called the outside world but was actually a part of himself. A universe within a universe, layers of meaning, layers of thought, of ideas, with no one process causing any other but each drawing heavily upon all of them. And in such a machine, where was the boy sitting in front of a Fate generated by his own conception but still playing a metaphorical game with him—another layer of simulation in an infinitely regressing chain.
The board looked different than Fate remembered, but the memory passed, leaving no memorial, and he reexamined the board. Was there a new piece on the board? Which pieces were his, again? Black and white seemed to him confused, until he blinked and saw that either all were black, or all white, but all the same. Color lost all meaning. Whose pieces were whose? Was Life the logical extension of Creation? Was there any meaning whatsoever in the pieces?
Fate moved again, not sure whose piece he had moved to a new position, but Harry did not notice. Harry stared at the ceiling, not moving.
(A box containing a Cloak of Invisibility was marked for shipment to Harry's dorm room).
Was a Game with Death really so great a metaphor? Suppose Creation did not oppose Life. Would an adversarial metaphor accurately express the dance that Harry Potter performed with Fate? Life and Death, Creation and Destruction—two opposing forces, each force of itself an expression of opposing forces. You would need at least a four-way chessboard, or a five-dimensional one. Fate examined the board he was playing on currently, and found he could not count the squares.
The board changes, he thought. The game changes.
Creation had no purpose, except inasmuch as it was an end of itself. Life, however, was held by the boy to have some sort of inherent meaning. Fate would watch him Live, and see what meaning he could bring to bear on his own existence.
No. The processes were too distinct. He would learn nothing. Harry Potter would continue on with life, oblivious, teaching nothing.
He must destroy Harry Potter. He could not do this in the past. He must turn his powers toward killing the boy on the other side of the table, who played the meaningless game with him.
It would be too easy to try something drastic, but Harry would see through that, and the game would be lost. Instead, he must warp this world into his killing machine. He played a knight: Voldemort lived again. He played a pawn: a dangerous artifact was hidden in a certain corridor.
No end in forethought. No beginning in memory. The game began its final stages.
CREATE. LIVE. CREATE. LIVE. CREATELIVECREATELIVE—
KILL.
DESTROY.
Harry moved a pawn two spaces forward. Fate slid his pawn behind it on a diagonal.
En passant. The doctrine of eternity.
The end was in sight.