STOP! Two chapters were posted at the same time. Did you skip one?
23
Sensation returned. His nose pressed, at an angle, into something neither warm nor cold. He didn't know how long he laid there, thinking about that. It felt like a while.
He got bored with it. His mind, he realized, was exorbitantly clear - empty and painless, light and unencumbered. He reached back in time to remember the last time it had felt this way, and discovered many things. Among them, time. In addition to that, memory. He thought, he reasoned, he remembered. He remembered Rhysta. Something ached. His heart. It ached so desperately that he couldn't lie still. He decided to open his eyes. No sooner did he decide as much than did he remember that he had them, and how to use them, and so open them he did.
The world was bright. Endless white, in all directions. He was lying facedown in white. He picked himself up to the elbows, glanced down at his nakedness, and all but shrugged at the world in which he found himself. It was unusually comfortable, like a perfectly weighted mother's embrace, or the sly, knowing smirk of an inside joke with his father.
The world was empty. And silent, save for the faint scraping sounds that came from his skin rubbing against the surface against which he awoke. It was such a curious, almost frightening juxtaposition. His memories returned concussively. A world of blackness, intermittently split by bright, cruel flashes. A weight as heavy as a castle crushing against his soul, offering a pulverized pinprick of life which would be so easy to succumb to. The effort to keep it at bay, a mountain's effort, an effort which should never be asked of any human, which he should never have asked of it himself. The courage to put the wand to his own neck, if only to relieve his own suffering in order to contain it…
Suffering all gone now. Cast away in this bright forever.
How long had it been since he had entered the Department of Mysteries? It felt like a lifetime. He couldn't remember the feeling of the sun on his face, struggled to recall what he had said to Scorpius as they waited in the Room of Requirement. It must not have been more than a few hours in the past, but it felt like an ancient memory. How long had he been here, lying against the ground? A thousand years, for all he knew.
It probably didn't matter. He was dead. Apparently the dead didn't even wear clothes.
So soon as he thought, and he was clothed. Maybe he had always been clothed. A long-sleeved quidditch kit hung over his body. He recognized it, a vintage replica of his mother's World Cup jersey. Lounge trousers and boxers underneath had taken his legs. They were warm, cozy, perfect. His feet remained bare. He didn't mind.
He climbed to his feet and roamed. The world was empty. He became aware of a horizon, but it wasn't much of a distinction, one neither really there or probably consequential. If he walked to it, he would probably find a wall, but he didn't terribly care to do so. Eventually, he perceived pillars, massive ones, which stretched upwards to support a ceiling which wasn't there.
If this is the world of the dead, I've truly drawn the short straw again, he thought. At least a radio, so I could listen to a match or two. World's magical enough for that, isn't it? Afterlife must be.
The thoughts faded away, replaced by wonder. Had he succeeded? Was it dead? Was Rhysta safe? HIs heart panged with ache again, and he stared at the world. Would he ever know?
A sound.
He turned. In the distance, something approached. He was out of fear, so declined to be afraid. As the thing approached from an indiscernible distance, Albus realized that it was a person. Taller than himself, garbed in rich, flowing robes stretched with purple and blue. A man. A wizard. Wearing a tall, pointed hat, covering a gray mane of hair that lay flat and straight over shoulders, complemented by an equally silver beard stretching fully to the wizard's waist. His nose hung crooked, as though it had been broken at least twice. The spectacles resting over that nose were shaped like filled crescents tipped to the sky, over which twinkled eyes of a startling blue shade. The wizard's lips turned upwards in a soft, amused smile as he paused a few steps distant across the pale emptiness.
Albus had never seen the person before in his life. But he knew exactly who it was. He found his voice. He still had one.
"You must be joking…"
"Quite often, in fact," Albus Dumbledore replied cheerily. "I cannot confidently say that this is one of those occasions."
Albus Potter blinked, absent of any notion of what he was supposed to say.
Dumbledore merely smiled for several long moments of a different kind of eternity, and then stepped aside with one sweeping, flowing arm. "Walk with me, would you, Mr. Potter?"
They walked. The expanse didn't change. Albus walked stiffly, glancing down at his bare feet and at the sky, all around himself and never at the wizard striding next to him. He was very rather confused. He opened his mouth several times to say something. Words were required. He just didn't know which ones to use. Confusion clouded him. He didn't have the questions he needed.
"Would you like a lemon drop?"
Albus turned to the wizard, whose eyes glittered mischievously as he proffered exactly what he suggested. All his other senses functioned, so Albus assumed he could taste in this place, as well, but he shook his head. "No, thank you."
Dumbledore plopped the thing in his own mouth and hummed a pleasant tune, inspecting the distance, and allowing Albus the opportunity to absorb what was happening. This couldn't be real.
"What couldn't?"
Albus blinked. "Did I say that out loud?"
Dumbledore eyed him above the half-moon spectacles. "Did you?"
Albus glanced away. "This is all rather a bit much to believe. Don't you think?"
"How so?"
He swallowed, remembering. "I was in the Ministry of Magic. The Department of Mysteries. A room. A door which can't be unlocked. I unlocked it." He waited for Dumbledore's reaction to that, and received none. "I went in. I fought. I… I accepted it, I fused it to my soul. And I killed myself so that it would die, too. And now, what? I'm strolling through the afterlife with… with you? That's all a little far-fetched. This place is something out of a dream, anyway. This place can't exist. It must be a dream. I'm still dreaming. But I do feel quite dead."
"Do the dead not dream?" Dumbledore asked. He seemed suddenly sad.
Albus didn't know what to say. It seemed insensitive, but he didn't know how to avoid it. "I don't know. I've never been dead before."
The old man offered a melancholy smile. "Would that we could learn all that we require from those who died before us. Some would call that education. It seems rather to me that such a thing would put a rather hard cap on the extent of knowledge and discovery, doesn't it to you?" Albus raised his eyebrows. "This is new to you, young man. Very well. What makes this a dream?"
Albus didn't answer.
"Perhaps that you've never experienced it before?"
He shrugged. "I guess that would be it for death, yeah."
"Would a baby draw the same conclusion from taking its first steps?" Dumbledore wondered. The twinkle had returned to his eye. "That would put humanity in a rather dire state of consequences, I should say, magical ones and otherwise. Fortunate that babies are so practical in their thought process, lest our early conclusions doom our entire population!"
"If I'm not dreaming," Albus said, watching the expanse, "then this seems quite the wild coincidence for my first deathly experience."
"That you should be so fortunate as to find yourself in death just as avid of an England fan?"
"That of all the people and things waiting for me on the other side," Albus said, "you would be the first to greet me."
"Therein lies a quite staggering assumption."
"What's that?"
"That it is a coincidence!"
Dumbledore chuckled, quite pleased with himself, and Albus had to work very hard to suppress an amused smirk that attempted to spring itself onto his face. Over his seventeen years, a number of stories on the order of thousands must have been shared about the greatest wizard the world had ever seen. Walking now beside him, Albus found that each and every last one of them had been true. Even those that contradicted each other. He had listened to his father recount for hours tales of this man after which he was named, and hardly a handful of words into their acquaintance - or whatever this was - Albus fully understood what an honor his name truly bestowed unto him.
"How did you come to be here?" Albus asked. He didn't know if it was the right question. He didn't know if there were right questions.
Dumbledore beamed. "Why, the same manner as yourself, I imagine, at one time or another."
"You cursed yourself in the head?"
"I arrived at some time or another, in some time or another, after something or other had happened. Some time ago, perhaps that was, or perhaps it was only yesterday. Of course, as that yesterday's tomorrow hasn't come yet, it's dreadfully difficult to say."
He tried again. "How did I come to be here?"
He expected another convoluted reply. Dumbledore surprised him with both understanding and humoring of the deeper implications of the question. "This is a place that all can reach and yet so few ever do. It is a place of special conditions and circumstances. But not of special individuals."
"How do people end up here?"
"That I am not at liberty to reveal," Dumbledore answered. From his casually flicked eyes, Albus surmised that it was because he didn't know. "But I can tell you why you ended up here."
"Why, because I sacrificed myself for the greater good?"
Dumbledore's nose shriveled, as if gently annoyed. "Nothing so gallant, I'm afraid. It derives from an interesting state amongst those who find themselves without a world: you are not yet finished with what you have left behind; and - and far more importantly, as well - the world you have left behind is not yet finished with you."
Albus declined to offer another question. "Please explain."
"I am, at heart, a teacher," Dumbledore answered. "And as a teacher, it is not always my place to demonstrate but to facilitate as the learning learns itself. Allow me to facilitate as you work out your thoughts."
That was quite an annoying response, but Albus wasn't in a position to argue. He started thinking, and didn't come up with very much at all. His thinking turned his thoughts towards the head doing the thinking. Not for the first time, he noted the weightlessness of his mind. After months of feeling himself twisted into knots, it was almost a shock how open and free was his ability to think.
Was it always there? Was it all that was there? This entire time? All of the pain came from this?
Dumbledore watched, but waited patiently. Albus obliged. "It was in my head for so long. It was just… I didn't even know what it was. It didn't make itself known. It just tortured me for so long. And why? A gateway, born of pure lines? My parents?"
He wondered for a moment exactly how much context the old wizard had received from powers that Albus knew nothing of, and how many gaps he would have to fill in. It seemed like none, and he didn't even care to wonder about Dumbledore's sources of intelligence. "It may be impossible to know for certain, but I believe that what happened to you on the quidditch pitch was truly an innocent, heartbreaking, tragic accident. The world knows a great many magical powers, but they have only so much ability to inflict such precise pain. I don't know if that will make it easier for you to reckon with it, but, no, I don't believe that the accident itself had anything to do with anything that happened later."
Albus didn't know how to feel about it, either. Was it better or worse to deal with the memories, knowing that it wasn't something tied to destiny? Did it make him relieved or angry that it had merely been a dearth of luck, and not divinity, which failed him that day? It didn't make him anything, he realized. Maybe it should have, maybe it did, maybe it was just this empty, infinite place that stamped out his emotion. He accepted it, and moved on.
"What does it mean, then," he posed, "that I'm the key to the whole thing? The things it said… they didn't always make sense… I got the feeling that they weren't always meant to." He shrugged, mostly himself. "That they didn't have to."
Next to him, the corners of Dumbledore's beard curled into a grin. "That is an astute observation about the world in which you live. Not all things make sense, my boy, precisely because they don't have to. And very often it is as counterproductive to search for meanings to those things as it is counterintuitive not to."
Albus drew some conclusions. "You mean to say, I'll never know. About why it was me. Right?"
Dumbledore waited a few moments to reply. "One can make… inferences."
"Does it matter?" Albus asked. His stomach, light and faint as it was, turned over, suddenly anxious. He glared around. "If it worked, does it matter? Unless this is just some trick. If it fooled me into thinking I killed it only to keep me here… wherever this is." They walked in silence, Dumbledore's eyes on his feet, thoughtful. Albus' anxiety worsened. "Well? Is it a trick?"
"I doubt I would tell you if it were," Dumbledore answered, "and so there isn't much reason to declare that it isn't. Does it feel like a trick?"
How should I know? Albus thought at first. He examined the landscape, or lack thereof. He considered the silence, painlessness in his mind - an entirely foreign feeling after so long in seizure. Of course, it could all be a ruse by the very power that had caused the headaches in the first place. But… "No. It doesn't feel like a trick. It feels way weirder than that. If this is actually real… and not all just in my head…"
Dumbledore chuckled, without obvious prompt. At Albus' questioning glare, the wizard shook his head. "You remind me quite a bit of your father."
Albus had spent his entire life deflecting such statements. This one, in particular, landed heavily, perching itself squarely across his shoulders and pressing into him. He thought of his father. He thought of his mother. He wondered if they would be okay. If he had succeeded, then they would be safe. They would all be safe. Would they be grateful that he had done what he had? Would they agree that it was a price worth paying?
No. His father never would. His father never thought any sacrifice was enough unless he was the one making the sacrifice. Maybe that's what Dumbledore meant.
"It wanted to use me," Albus muttered. He probably could have whispered it, and it would have been heard in this place without feature. "I don't understand why, exactly. It wasn't… tethered to this world? It was just… I felt it, but I can't describe it. When it entered me, when it possessed me… I could feel it. As old as time. That was the only sensation. Just old."
And that was precisely what it had felt like. In this place, or perhaps in this mind, it was difficult to recall what had happened when he accepted the filthy embrace curling into him at the edge of his mind. It had struck, and the pain had been as though a giant's fist closed over his heart, squeezing the organ to a pulp in his chest. Then their minds had touched - no, not a mind, it was too dissimilar to be considered a mind - and he had felt its experiences. They weren't memories; the thing didn't have enough impression of time and change to form memories. But Albus had felt what it felt, seen what it saw.
He saw the world burning, saw a mapping against an empty sky, a mapping made corporeal, a world so stark and small that he could reach out and run his fingers through it, watch the seas part under his grip, feel mountains crushed to rubble by his fingertips. And light, horrible light. The light of life, and the light of magic. A burning of power, and a promise of more to come. And its allure, tempting him, seducing him. The ability to do anything he had ever wanted. The ability to correct what had been irreparably damaged inside of him, to regain everything that he'd lost, as the thing had promised him. It had been a horrific thing, a frightful thing, and all too easily he could have reached out and taken it, if only he welcomed it into his mind. Even now, to his shame, something striking him bitterly close to regret wormed its way through him. He batted the feeling away; the memories were getting harder to conjure. Soon all he would remember was the pain of its contact, and the effort it took to repel it.
"It had hatred. It wasn't a hot anger. It was like… like what I would feel if I kicked a rock. It was almost apathetic. But not just against rocks, against everything. It didn't care about anything, or anybody. It just wanted to escape. It just wanted its freedom." Shame flooded him again.
As if plucked from his thoughts - and what's to say it hadn't been - Dumbledore stated, "Perhaps the question you wish to ask is, what was so wrong with it wanting its freedom?"
Albus swallowed. "It killed so many people. It would have slaughtered everyone, everywhere."
"If an ant bit a child, and that child had the capability to crush the ants, I would not be surprised to find that child stomping around the yard for the whole of the afternoon, bent on rectifying the first injustice by the most horrible punishment."
For the first time in this bright place, Albus angered. "It wasn't a child. I've never… I never thought anything could be so evil."
"Why cannot children be evil?"
Albus glared. "You're not born good or bad."
"And doesn't evil fall someplace in between?"
"No," Albus retorted. "Evil is evil. Evil is dark. It's dark magic."
Dumbledore hummed. "I have seen very good people do very evil things. And I have seen very evil people do very good things. Your second namesake changed in myself a number of impressions that I had, in both of those situations. But I am intrigued at the connection you draw between evil and magic."
Albus glanced away. "All right, so it's not magic. But it's still evil."
"On the contrary, I think evil is quite magical."
Albus turned back. Dumbledore's face was neutral. "What, muggles can't be evil?"
"Why is it," Dumbledore said, "that we of the wizarding world have found it of ourselves paramount that we at all costs conceal the very fact that our world exists from a much larger world which insists that it does not?"
"For protection."
"Ours or theirs?"
Albus frowned. "Both. We're protecting ourselves, and by keeping it away from them we're protecting them from the parts they fear. Muggles have always - the muggles that know about, or learn about it - they've always cursed magic. They've always feared it. They've always attacked it."
"Curious, then, isn't it, that we allow our most esteemed educational venues to send out a few dozen letters each year - by owl, no less - to muggle families happily informing them of our existence?"
"That's different."
"Oh?"
His tongue stumbled. He could see the corners of Dumbledore's beard turning upwards once again, quite annoyingly. "They're magical. The children, I mean. They're muggle-born, but they're still children."
"Ah, but although the muggles have no magic whatsoever, and fear it so far as to condemn it, they still sometimes manifest it?" One silver eyebrow rose. "Magically, perhaps?"
Albus shook his head. "What's your point?"
"That wizards are no better than muggles, perhaps," Dumbledore answered. "Certainly no more entitled, nor less burdened, and, indeed… just as happy, you might find. And therein, over a long time, I learned an important lesson. We ascribe the word 'evil' to anything which we either do not understand or cannot reconcile. That, in a way, is precisely what muggles do with the word 'magic', in their case, in a different light. In both cases, the party doing the ascription is so busy othering what they do not understand that they do not spend the time to consider what made those things that way in the first place. Can a child be evil? In many cases, I wager a child believes a parent evil for denying them a delicious treat, hmmm, indeed, yes…"
The silver-haired wizard paused long enough to pop another lemon drop into his mouth. "...and once they grow a bit, have an entirely different outlook on the incident. One might say that evil is a matter of perspective. As is magic. If I were so brave as to postulate, I may in fact state that evil is a matter of experience. A sum of experiences. And though acts themselves may be entirely evil, there is usually a cause for them. Ignoring those causes quite often is the mistake we make most often."
Albus pondered. "So if I understand what you're saying-"
"Ah! And I so rarely do myself!"
"-then something made this thing evil. And that I'm not focusing on it."
Dumbledore took his time to mull the statement over. At length, grizzled jaw working on the lemon drop, he replied, "Perhaps I'm saying that it did not consider itself evil, as no villain does, and merely sought comforts as the rest of us do. Perhaps it merely reacted to the experiences it had endured, and didn't know enough about the world to understand the consequences. Perhaps I'm not saying anything of the sort. But, after all, as you yourself witnessed, how could we ever know? It itself told you that it was but an approximation of a foreign entity introduced to a world which demanded that it make sense in its own existence."
"How do you know that?"
"How indeed? What?" Dumbledore glanced away innocently. "I could be entirely wrong, you know. Manifested from beyond existence, itself. Maybe it was pure evil. Like magic to muggles, we may never understand it. I should hope we will never have to."
The monologue should have had Albus' head spinning, but everything in this place was so pristinely clear. Even digesting the wizard's words proved easier than he expected, even if he gleaned little from them. For the first time in so many months, he could have seized the topic and obsessively turned it over and over in his mind, picking out details, extracting clues, demanding understanding without the fear of any wayward thought twisting him into a debilitating migraine.
He could have, but he didn't.
"What was it?"
Dumbledore eyed him peripherally. "One of the greatest mysteries of the world is yet the origin of magic."
"We don't study it," Albus acknowledged. "Where did magic come from?"
Wise shoulders lifted into a shrug. "A question as old as human history. Was magic discovered? Was it invented? So little remains of the early histories of the wizarding world, before it became a force that dark sorcerers wielded irresponsibly and required a wall to be built between muggles and magic. Scholars have tried for centuries to rediscover how magic came to us. And why. They've found few answers, which is one of the reasons the course is called 'History of Magic' and not 'History'. It is likely a question that we will never find the answer to, and we will continue to treat magic as though it has been an amicable companion since the beginning of time. Perhaps it has. We may never know."
Albus narrowed his eyes. He made the assumption that Dumbledore was leading him in a very particular direction for a very particular reason. "The thing inside of me was the beginning?"
"No, nothing so straight-forward, I think."
"Then?"
Dumbledore's brow creased. "One of the reasons muggles fail to understand magic is because it breaks laws that they have defined upon the world, in order to explain what they observe. And they are quite right to do so: their laws are utterly violated by anything remotely magical."
Albus peered around, confused. "How does that make them right? Magic works. If it breaks their laws of nature, then their laws are wrong."
The great headmaster was smiling again. "That is a partial perspective of our arrogance, dear boy. They have laws. And magic has laws, laws which witches and wizards have studied in-depth and which hold up very well under their own observational data. And yet, when placed in the muggle world, they completely fall apart. They are nonsensical."
Albus sputtered. "But they work."
"Does a muggle's not? Why do your feet stick to the floor?"
Annoyance pricked at the edge of Albus' serene mind. "Okay, but why does a broomstick fly?"
"Indeed, why?"
"Because it's been charmed that way!"
"Charmed, perhaps," Dumbledore observed, "To ignore gravity? Indeed, to transcend gravity?"
"Sure."
"And were you to uncharm that broomstick, would it not fall straight back down to the earth?"
"Sure, but-"
"And what is in the charm which leads to that transition?"
Albus opened his mouth before he knew how to reply, and once he realized that he didn't know what to say, he had placed himself in quite the position. Because that's just how charms work, he had nearly said, before he had caught himself. Because the properties of the wand allow it to control that behavior, was his second try, before he backtracked over the conversation and realized these things were exactly into where Dumbledore was trying to back him. Exactly into where Dumbledore had succeeded in backing him.
Dumbledore waited patiently, but eventually took mercy on his lack of response. "The laws of muggles and the laws of magic both hold entirely within their own realm, but break when brought into contact with one another. From whatever powers created magic, whether at the origins of the wider world itself or at some later time, there must have been a stitching of one world into the other. A melding, a fusing.
"The rest is only my conjecture. Such a fusing of two so utterly alien worlds to one another would have necessarily required balance. And those two alien worlds are so different to one another that the balance required to permanently touch them to one another would necessarily be quite violent to produce.
"I believe that whatever attempted to conquer you was that balance. Or, rather, the counterbalance of that fusion. Its opposite. Its exhaust. Its waste."
The power's words, pounded into his skull as if imprinted directly on the inside of his skull by a fiery curse, echoed distantly in Albus' thoughts. Far older than humanity… starved for eons… Magic is the prisoner, chained to rules and limits to which is does not owe allegiance.
"And the reemergence," he tested carefully, "of that binding… was breaking it? Was breaking down the balance which had originally locked it away?"
"Based on what occurred to you," Dumbledored ventured, "yes."
"Then what happens now?" Albus added. Something tinged with panic but exceedingly dull bubbled inside of him. Troubled thoughts, the memory of faces left behind. His parents, Lily, Rose, Scorpius. Rhysta. "If I destroyed the counterbalance, then it's not balanced anymore."
"Was it destroyed? Or was it merely returned to whence it came?"
Albus tried to remember the end. There was the vaguest impression of a green flash before the memories faded into nothing, but even that could have been his imagination. He couldn't remember feeling it leave his body, leave the world. "You mean it could come back?"
"No, I don't think so," Dumbledore clarified. "Although I cannot be certain. When it bound itself to your soul, as you correctly surmised, it severed of itself a partial connection to the void which in part created it. The mass - the space - composing the counterbalance, if you will. These words belong to the laws of the visible universe, not that of the realm it came from, and so they are not accurate. But by binding itself to you in this world, it necessarily detached the part of itself which threatened this world with destruction from the realm whose very alienness with respect to the wider world gave it its power, and its control. And that part, indeed, would appear to have been struck down by your curse. I do not think that it will trouble the world again.
"Of course, it is only my theory."
And that was how that conversation fell away, and despite the uncertainty, Albus felt himself relax. He glanced around, breathing deeply even though he didn't know if his lungs actually needed to draw breath in this place. He clenched a fist and opened it. His knuckles paled and then flushed, accordingly. A steady thrum in his temples suggested his heart was beating. It felt for all intents and purposes as though he was, in fact, whole and untainted, freed of whatever power they could only guess at, could only now ponder in the past, left in this strange place.
This strange place indeed. Albus couldn't have guessed how long they had been walking, but the landscape which wasn't, except for the distant suggestion of columns and endless visible but unreachable horizons, yielded no suggestion of an end.
"So what now?"
Dumbledore had evidently been waiting for the question. "Do you have some idea?"
"Not really," Albus replied. He gave himself the chance to come up with something, and then shook his head. "I don't know what happens next. I've never been dead before."
"Does this place indicate death to you?"
Albus peered around. He didn't know what he had expected. Obviously, nothing had changed. "It doesn't indicate much of anything to me, to be honest. Seems like a lot of nothing. I expected… I don't know, I expected nothing at all after I died, not even consciousness. Or a lot of everything. This is about the last thing I would have expected…"
Dumbledore failed to reply, and strode at Albus' side so silently that he eventually had to glance aside to make sure the fabulously-robed headmaster was still there. The corners of the beard were fully turned up into an overjoyed smile, beneath twinkling eyes.
Albus glanced away. At the nothing of everywhere. "Erm. I am dead, right?"
"In a word," Dumbledore told him, "no."
Albus stopped walking. Allowing him a moment to catch up, Dumbledore ambled a few further steps and then paused to peer back at him quizzically. Albus glared back for a good few moments. "Explain."
"You are yet quite alive," Dumbledore provided unhelpfully.
Glancing around, Albus had to resist the urge to scratch his head. He blinked some, and then glared some more. "That's not possible. I hit myself with a killing curse."
"Did you?"
Emotion threatened to break his tranquility, annoyance and frustration. More of the stories about this mysterious man were making more sense as he was hit with each subsequent and flummoxing sentence. "I remember saying the words. I remember the green flash." He closed his eyes, and then shook his head. "And then nothing else. Then I woke up here. If I'm not dead, then what is this place?"
Dumbledore hummed. "One might think of it as a place in-between."
"In between what?"
"In between where you were and where all things eventually go."
It was a constant effort of picking which words were meaningful, which ones demanded questions, and discarding the rest knowing that there would be too many more questions later to ever come back to the missed ones. "Then why haven't I gone? A killing curse kills."
"It does," Dumbledore agreed, "but there are some exceptional circumstances. Your grandmother, as the greatest example, perhaps."
Albus knew which side of the family tree the old wizard referred to. "That was entirely different than this. That was a sacrifice, that was…" He trailed off. A dozen different people had pulled him aside to tell him the story - it was the greatest tale in the history of their world, after all - of how his father had survived Voldemort's killing curse as a baby. Only once had it come from his father, himself. That had been one of the times when Harry Potter became deathly serious, speaking softly as if hardly aware there was anywhere else in the room, hunched over his knees with folded hands, eyes staring at knots in the floorboards without absorbing their details. Albus remembered every word. "That was her love, her sacrifice. Her shield. That sacrifice shielded him."
Dumbledore gestured nonchalantly. "Just so."
"No, that doesn't make sense. There was no sacrifice for me. My father survived because the killing curse rebounded off of her shield, I wasn't sacrificing myself for anything, I was using the killing curse because it was the only way to destroy the thing that was inside of me!"
Dumbledore just watched him, in a way that was both joyous and quite a bit sad.
Albus licked his lips, a frown furrowing his eyebrows. "It doesn't make sense. Even if I was a sacrifice, my sacrifice would have made the shield, it wouldn't have protected me."
Very slowly, Dumbledore folded his hands together and rocked his silver beard from side to side. "Once upon a time, I told your father about a room in the Department of Mysteries which is always locked. Because, in fact, it is not unlockable, and contains wonders and mysteries that so corrupt this world that they have been shut away since the beginnings of our history. The very room in which you experienced the moments you believe to be your last.
"There are a great many things that philosophers and scholars have attempted to justify by the laws of magic. Some have succeeded, many have failed, and a good number of quite dreary essays have so obfuscated the nature of the claims they make that it will be hard for anyone to ever determine if they had half a chance of being true or not. So much time is spent trying to explain the things we cannot explain rather than accepting that we will never fully be able to explain them. And considering that you have just journeyed through a realm which was previously unreachable, I believe that there are many such things that we can write off simply as, we'll never know why.
"Among those things, dear boy, is love."
Albus shook his head, dreadfully confused. "I don't understand."
"Love," Dumbledore repeated. "Love is the reason you took that wand unto yourself and tore of yourself your most precious asset. Your love of your friends, your love of your family. Your love of one Miss Malfoy. And your love of yourself, too." Albus bristled uncomfortably, but Dumbledore nodded in affirmation. "Take nothing away from your grandmother's sacrifice. She sought to protect her child and her plea was heard by magicks incredibly old. But you sought to save not one person. You sought to save them all."
It didn't add up. "If it were that easy, then no one would ever die. If all it took was loving everything and stepping into danger to save it, then there would be no war. There would be no death."
"You underestimate the strength it took to do what you did," Dumbledore replied, his eyes suddenly aged under an invisible burden, "but far more critically - and potently - you underestimate the love that is felt for you. For that, too, plays a greater role than you realize. Your parents, challenging a world of fear just so that you can live without it. Your friends, refusing to let you walk into danger alone, if only so that there will be someone by your side. A particular young woman, who deliberately placed herself in danger because it was the only way to save you."
Albus stared silently. Words failed him.
Dumbledore only smiled. "Your father, in the bravest moment that I have ever seen, once had a choice. He had made his greatest sacrifice, and he had done far more than enough to earn whatever peace he never believed he deserved. He had the choice to go onwards and be at that peace, or to return and finish the fight that he had been destined to fight. He didn't have to. He had already done more than enough. But he chose to go back anyway."
Albus watched the white horizons. For the first time, he picked something out of the bright haze, directly ahead of them. What looked like a tall wall, boundless. "I don't deserve that choice."
"And you don't have it," Dumbledore acceded gently. "When the killing curse struck you, it did not rebound. It destroyed, quite cruelly, as is its design. But it did not destroy you. Perhaps it could have, but for the very thing rooting you to what you've left behind. You defeated it because to defeat it you used something more powerful than it could conceive of. Your love. You were not shielded from the killing curse. You were never the target. And the love that allowed you to cast it also anchored you in its place."
It both made sense and didn't. It represented a very startling connection but also something that shouldn't have been possible, if only because he knew that he didn't deserve it. Anchored. By the ones he loved. By Rhysta, beautiful Rhysta, who he had thought would be the last thing he would ever see. Anchored by what she felt for him as much as what he felt for her. That was a cruel bond, because it was a selfish one. It was a discriminatory one. And it was cruel that he would survive when so many others would not, so cruel that it couldn't possibly be true.
"If that were so," he told Dumbledore, "then no one would ever die. All the people in the war, people loved them, too. My uncle loved his brother, could barely re-learn how to live after he died… but that wasn't enough to save him. So why me? Why would I get to live?"
Very casually, Dumbledore welcomed him back into their stroll with a very indicatory lean. They spent several strides in silence. Albus had a hunch he was deliberately being left in suspense so as to digest his own question.
At length, the headmaster said, "Death is a tragic thing, young Mr. Potter. But as I once said to your father in a very similar manner, don't pity the dead. Pity the living. The living are those that remember us when we're gone, and those who live without love are the most pitiful of all. For they do not understand that even as it is bound to bring you great pain, the joy of life is in love. We don't all - in fact, very few of us - get to choose when and where our time comes. But what we can choose is how we love.
"And that, dear boy, in some small measure, for all of those who have come and loved before you, is perhaps the greatest answer you'll receive."
In the thoughts that consumed Albus thereafter, he didn't notice the rise of the wall in front of him, drifting out of the hazy brightness, until they had strode within hexing distance of it. Craning his neck, he found, of course, no visible ceiling to which the tall structure eventually joined, nor did it have endings to either peripheral horizon. It just stood, an endless boundary at the edge of this bright world.
In the very center of it stood an opaque door, half again as tall and wide as him, as illustriously silver as Dumbledore's beard, with a nondescript handle.
Silent understanding brought them to a halt a few strides away. Dumbledore turned to face him, and Albus surveyed the quite old wizard. If this was truly Dumbledore, somehow, and not a fantasy born out of some long-forgotten dream of his. Every detail as pristinely accurate as every story his parents had ever told, as real as every portrait of the man he'd ever passed in the Hogwarts halls. If it was a dream, then it was a very convincing one. It didn't particularly bother Albus whether it was or not. Insofar much, at least, as he was suddenly terrified of the door which stood in front of him.
"This is my door?"
Dumbledore smiled wanly and motioned affirmatively.
"Where will it take me?"
"To where you started from," Dumbledore answered, "when your torture was ended."
That's what he was afraid of.
He stared at the door. So easy to step out and grasp the handle, slide through it. So unlike the dark, ominous thresholds gaping in the Department of Mysteries. It had been so easy to brave those, when he'd known that Rhysta was on the other side, and that he had to save her. Not so easy now that she knew what he was, what he'd done. What he had forced her to watch. What he had willingly stepped into.
"Do you think she will care?"
Albus regarded Dumbledore, uncomfortable, and glanced at his feet.
"Would you?"
"What if I wasn't just doing what I thought was the best thing?" Albus murmured weakly. He met Dumbledore's eye. "What if it wasn't a brave act? What if I was just tired? What if I just wanted the pain to be over, the fear to be over? It's been so long… and I'm so tired. What if it wasn't just about saving the world? What if I just wanted to rest?"
Dumbledore raised his eyebrows. "Then I daresay think you're selling yourself short."
"My father had a choice, you said," Albus replied. "And he chose to go back. But I don't even have that choice, and I don't know what I would choose if I did."
"Yes, you do. And if you had the choice, you would understand that immediately. And I risk telling you something that you have no doubt heard in your life as often as it's been done to you, but don't compare yourself and your situation to your father's. You are your own person. Your own self. Your own soul, with your own courage and your own love. And that is what she sees in you. Not the weakness you think you've shown because of your injuries. Not the exhaustion you think contributes to that weakness. She only sees you for all. And I am quite sure that is enough for both of you."
Blinking, Albus frowned. "Don't suppose you were this adamant about reuniting my parents, were you?"
Dumbledore's grin widened. "Perhaps not, but I am incentivized this time."
"Oh yeah?"
"Of course. I do, after all, have three more names perfectly suitable for children." Dumbledore's eyes twinkled, and he very deliberately stepped back. "It is your fear that makes you so brave, Mr. Potter. And your courage which brings you the most love. And it is not your fear of losing that love but your fear of harming those that you do love that makes you hesitate now." Dumbledore chuckled. "Enough of that. Go home."
Albus, nearly overcome by a sudden wave of emotion, turned to the door and went. Grasping the doorknob, he hesitated at the last and turned back. The greatest wizard the world had ever known - for so long having appeared forlorn and full of regret - regarded him with unbearable warmth.
"No one would ever believe," he whispered, "that this actually happened."
Turning away, Albus Dumbledore released a full-throated laugh, with a smile to chase away all of his doubts. "You think so? You would be surprised…"
"Come back to me…"
His senses returned. All of them. Including pain, aching soreness from being thrashed about by endless buffets of wind. Stiffness, in his arms and legs, his elbow twisted awkwardly though not painfully to one side. And the weight bearing down on him, pressing into his chest. The hum of heart-wrenching sobs.
He opened his eyes as his lungs drew breath.
Somewhere nearby, multiple people gasped, and a few more swore. He had to blink as if he'd spent an afternoon in a cellar, the faint wandlight dancing above momentarily enough to blind him. Faces swam at the edge of his vision, blurred by dried tears, and he had to take a few steadying breaths. That act didn't go unnoticed by the weight pressed against his chest, and as it froze still, he froze with it.
The mass of blonde hair tipped aside as from between tangled strands her reddened green eyes appeared, her jaw shaking as they met his. Her entire body shook, the breath leaving her as she stared at him in disbelief. He could see the trembling shaking her in place, violently.
He couldn't help but reach up to her shoulders to steady her. He half-expected her to recoil from his touch - half the crowd around them, materialized from somewhere unknown, flatly yelped as he moved - but Rhysta didn't flinch away. She grabbed him by the upper arm and dragged him upward, crawling over his legs until her eyes were leveled with his, a hands-breadth away.
He swallowed. "I'm so sorry…"
Her jaw trembled. Her hands reached for his face, fingers cupped his cheeks. The tearflow resumed. "You… you…"
He shook his head. "It's me. I'm here. This is real. We're okay."
"Y-you… but… I saw it, I felt it..."
"It's gone," he whispered, reaching up to clutch the cold hands holding his face, wrap his fingers around hers, and let his warmth seep into them. "I promise. It worked. It's over."
She stared into his eyes for another, agonizingly long moment, and then she ducked her head against his neck and descended into endless tears, something between a laugh and a hiccup shaking her body as she clung to him and wept. And that broke some spell over him. Months of tension eased out of his spine. A curse-breaking clarity washed over his mind, the few thoughts left behind crisp and clear.
He wrapped his arms around her body as tightly as he could and rocked her. Tears slipped through already foggy vision. Images, scenes played around him, happenings that might as well have been a thousand miles away for all that he cared about them. He saw flabbergasted Aurors staring at him with their wands drawn, as though they couldn't decide whether to hex him or heal him. He saw his father, slapped with a look of absolute wonder, his wand clattered to the stone floor at his feet. He saw candlelight, wandlight, dancing lights further muddied by his blurring vision. None of it mattered.
He held Rhysta in his arms, and they wept together, and they laughed together. Together.