A/N: you know that the comparison of Harry and his father is just an angst fic begging to be written. Of course, it could also just happen when you're under pressure to be like your own father... *shrugs*
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, James Potter, Sirius Black, Lord Voldemort, Molly Weasley... alright, I don't own anyone mentioned in this fic, or the locations... they all belong to J.K. Rowling and I humbly applaud her creations which have inspired me.
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In the daytime, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was majestic,
standing tall and proud. But at night, under the cold moonshine and clouds, it
looked like a shadow of itself, hidden almost from view in the darkness and the
mist rising from the lake. The lights in the castle were out, and the air around
it was so still that nothing could be heard. It was impossible to think that
anyone would be awake now, in the dead of night, except the hooting owls in the
owlery and the occasional one out to hunt.
But the owls weren't the only things awake. Far up in the castle, one boy was
having trouble sleeping. Everyone had stayed up late, one last night before the
Hogwarts Express left the next day, and the noise that had filled the castle in
the various common rooms was something deafening, Gryffindor included. It was
only when the others in the house had gone to sleep that Harry Potter was able
to hear himself think, and when Harry began thinking, turning events over in his
mind, he couldn't sleep anymore.
The night wasn't particularly cold, and as he sat up in bed and listened to the
gentle sounds of sleep coming from the other beds, he wondered what their
occupants were dreaming about. He knew that he could never share those dreams
because while they slept, he couldn't. At this time of night, he was more apt to
be found sitting on the window seat, looking out across the lake, or in front of
the mirror, staring at his reflection in it.
Staring into the mirror was something Harry did a lot now. He would always sit
in front of the large gilt frame, and peer into the silvery depths, his face
thrown into sharp relief from the moonlight that filtered in through the window,
ignoring the quiet muttering that the mirror gave out. He had watched himself
grow, not through pictures but through mirrors, always pausing to look at
himself when Aunt Petunia wasn't looking when he was at the Dursleys' and in
here, in the Gryffindor dormitory when the other boys were asleep.
He took in his appearance, following the lines of his profile with a single
finger then letting his hand drop back down as his eyes took over.
The untidy black hair that had become his trademark had become even worse as of
late; pretty soon he'd be able to slick it back like that git Draco usually did,
or perhaps tie it into a ponytail like Bill. The thought amused him and brought
a small smile to his lips, a smile that died away as soon as he spotted it. The
smile looked odd on his lips; lips that were too familiar, a face that he'd
never been quite comfortable with once he'd been told how much he looked like
James. James Potter, his dead father. How much he acted like him, how good he
was at quidditch. The thing was, Harry didn't agree. As of late, the pride he
had once felt when his father was mentioned had been fading, replaced by a
serious lack of understanding when it came to the subject.
The album Hagrid had given him of wizard photographs, from which his father
would wave at him, was at this moment right at the bottom of his trunk. He had
thrown it out of the window a day before. Upset at having to look at them and
see the dead faces looking back out at him, he thought that by getting rid of it
he wouldn't have to confront that hungry pain right in pit of his stomach when
he realized that he'd never, never ever, be able to talk to them, and to know
what they had really been like. He could only rely on others' accounts, and it
was getting to him because of the different views everyone had had. Ron had
rescued it and left it on his pillow with a note telling him to stop being a
stupid git and to snap out of this funk. Harry had replied by slamming the dorm
door in his face and dumping the book into his trunk and throwing his
invisibility cloak over it.
The voices in his head arose, like some distant dream...
"He's not a child!" said Sirius impatiently.
"He's not an adult either!" said Mrs. Weasley, the color rising in her
cheeks. "He's not James, Sirius!"
"I'm perfectly clear who he is, thanks, Molly," said Sirius coldly.
"I'm not sure you are!" said Mrs. Weasley. "Sometimes, the way
you talk about him, it's as thought you think you've got your best friend
back!"
"What's wrong with that?" said Harry.
"What's wrong, Harry, is that you are not your father,
however much you might look like him!" said Mrs. Weasley...
Ron's snoring came to Harry's ears, and for a second, it broke his train of
thought and instead made him think of another friend, now gone. Sirius had been
one of his father's closest friends; the best man at his wedding. He knew Ron
played a similar role in his own life, and cold icy feeling that accompanied the
thought was something that made him want to hide somewhere and forget about who
he was. Sirius had been his father's best friend. His father had died, and
Sirius was now dead. It was like everyone he loved was being taken from him, and
there was nothing he could do about it because the more he did... the more he
lost. What kind of hero was he who couldn't even try to stop that horrible
wizard... that creature whose name died away on most people's lips, that evil
power that had snatched away his family and his life was still out there, and
he, Harry, couldn't even avenge his father's death.
The waves of anger that ran through him were nothing, though, compared to that
feeling that he had failed his father. Again, the voices ran through his head,
telling him how much he was like him. And when he looked up at the mirror, it
was like seeing James Potter staring back at him, a sad, defeated look on his
face because his son could never be like him.
No, that's not Dad. That's me. It's just Harry. He shook his head, seeing
his face come back into focus in the mirror. And I don't want to be like him,
I don't, he thought to himself, because there was this whole new side to
James Potter that he had never known... well, not until he had taken a look into
Snape's thoughts, that is.
Harry had tried, he had tried so hard, but there was no way he could ever be so
perfect, the way he had been told his father was perfect. There was no way of
being what everyone wanted him to be. But it was easier to try and be perfect...
Than to be a total moron, Harry thought to himself as the image of a
young Snape, suspended upside down and the sound of his dad laughing crossed his
mind.
He was tired of being his father. Because his father was no longer the person he
had thought him to be. Everything had changed so much that Harry wasn't even
sure what to take as being real anymore.
People didn't understand, though. There was so much more to being his father's
son than just looking like him; and that's where no one understood that Harry
was a different person. He was not James; he could be like James, but he
couldn't be James, not now, not ever. He wondered what his father would
have wanted of him. Would he have had faith in him? How was he supposed to
follow in the footsteps of a man who he had never even known, how was he
supposed to walk in those shoes his father had left for him to fill? Who was
going to show him how to be his father?
Did he really want to be his father? Which side of James was real? because there
was no way both of them were the same person. The idea itself numbed him, that
he wasn't able to do this. He wanted to be that person that Sirius had always
seen in him, but he couldn't make himself forget what he had seen in the
pensieve, he couldn't stop sympathizing with Snape, but at the same time he just
wanted to go back to hating him as he had always done. It had been so much
easier to hate Snape when the only image of his father he had was a good one,
and that Snape had been unjustly jealous over all that James had. It was so much
harder now that he knew the truth.
"Why did you have to do this to me?" Harry whispered to the mirror,
leaning forward until his forehead pressed against it. The shadows moved over
the moon, and Harry closed his eyes, imagined that the cold surface of the
mirror was skin, that he was face to face to his father. "Why does everyone
think that I'm just like you... even if I'm not? Snape hates me because he
thinks I'm going to turn out just like you... and I don't blame him," he
sighed. He never thought the day would come when he'd actually feel anything
less than the most venomous hatred for Snape.
Everything he did seemed to be wrong. That's not what your father would have
done, the words came back to him. The time he had told Hagrid he was giving
up, that he wanted to leave this fight to those who could fight it. Would it
have been so bad, really, letting Voldemort win... maybe he'd be able to see his
parents; maybe he could see Sirius again and tell him how sorry he was. And
Hagrid had shaken him so hard that he could feel his teeth rattling long after
he had stopped shaking and told him that if he did, he'd never be worthy of
being called his father's son. Maybe it was just the shock of losing Sirius,
maybe it was the words he had always told himself coming from Hagrid's mouth,
but now he felt totally disgraced. It was as if his eyes had been opened to the
enormity of the task in front of him, and at the same time, the comforting
presence he had felt when thinking of his father had gone, only to be replaced
by an uneasiness, as if the spirit of his father was now breathing down his neck
to make sure that this son of his was exactly like he had been. In Hagrid's
eyes, James had been a hero, but behind that idea there was so much more that
Harry didn't understand at all... he wasn't sure he wanted to understand...
He felt totally overshadowed by the impact of his dead father on his life.
Again he opened his eyes. Stared at the reflection in the mirror, moving from
his sitting position to one where he was standing, where he could see his
profile better. In the dark, he looked even more like his father, the shadows
hiding the sharp angles on his fifteen-year-old body and making lines appear on
his face so that now he was really looking like his father.
He was suffocating under the comparisons, being smothered by the expectations of
everyone. He was supposed to be the one who would deliver the wizarding world -
and indeed, the world as a whole - from evil, like a God of some sort. Instead,
his whole life was falling apart, with everyone watching. It was as if
everything he did was another mistake, another blemish, another insult to his
father's name. Even if he did something right, he couldn't help but think that
it meant so little. Every second he sat there, another passing agony. His father
stared back at him from the mirror, and for a second Harry was tempted to smash
it in because he couldn't take it anymore. He couldn't look into the mirror and
watch the face there because it kept on changing, one minute it was dead serious
and the next, it was laughing at him, laughing at his dilemma between the two
different sides of James that Harry could see, two sides that didn't seem like
they could ever be reconciled, that never could have belonged to the same
person.
He didn't want to be his father any more. He just wanted to be himself. Like the
time he had first met Hagrid, and told him that he was 'just Harry.' He wanted
to be just Harry. Not Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, not Harry Potter, son of
the great James Potter who had died protecting his family from the evil Lord
Voldemort... the same James Potter who had found it fun to bully a certain
youngster because he had nothing better to do.
He just wanted to be Harry. It was like the more he tried to be like his father,
the less he became. And the feeling boiled up, and the image in the mirror
became even more blurry, now it was going from James Potter to Snape, struggling
to get away from James, to Sirius Black, Sirius mocking Snape, who suddenly
became Bellatrix and was pointing her wand directly at Sirius, to his mother,
berating James for being such a bully in one sentence and screaming for him the
next, back to his father, a disappointed look on his face, to Lord Voldemort,
the red eyes and the flat face, telling him that he was all alone now... the
room began to spin and the mirror dissolved in front of him, the moonlight began
to hurt his eyes and his scar seemed to be burning with such an intensity that
his head would split in two. And the faces flashed in front of him, Lily,
Sirius, Voldemort, James, Snape, Bellatrix, Lily, Voldemort, Bellatrix, Sirius,
James, Snape, Sirius as he looked when he had escaped from Azkaban, the haunted
look in his eyes now in James' face, then himself, disappointed, his father's
body on the floor... the look on his face one of failure because he knew that
Voldemort was going after his wife next, and he hadn't been able to stop him,
that same failed look on Lily's face, Sirius falling backwards and disappearing
through the arch, the green light bouncing off gold and the words blasting
through his brain, Avada Kedavra! And then...
Clarity. The world stopped spinning, the green light that always followed the
flashbacks fading away as Harry found himself on the floor, curled up in a fetal
position and his fingernails digging into the palms of his hands. He had bitten
his lip and the metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth. He spat out at the
floor, trying to clear the taste in his mouth. He was shaking so violently that
even when he tried to stand, he found himself unable to and instead slumped
against the frame of the mirror, and closing his eyes, tried to figure out the
scenes he had just seen. Most of it wasn't new, he was used to the flashbacks.
So what was it that was making his heart hammer away and his eyes burn with the
feeling of tears that weren't really meant to be there?
That image. The door had been open when Voldemort had struck his father down,
and Harry, in his mother's arms, had seen the look on his face. It had been
buried down deep somewhere all these years, and only now, with Harry confronted
by his own feelings of inadequacy, had it surfaced. Out of all the times James
had failed, that one time was what changed everything. And Lily had known that
the price for that failure would be her life. And after all this time, Harry
finally realized that, he didn't have to be like his father, because even though
he had once thought that his father was perfect...
He hadn't been. And while everyone expected Harry to be perfect...
He didn't have to be. Everyone had faults; he had just seen his father's. The
inability to accept, to believe, had been written all over his face.
Harry turned so that he could see the mirror now. The clouds had shifted away
from the moon, and he was looking at himself again.
And he smiled, because he could see his father in the reflection in the mirror,
telling him that he was alright. Harry was exactly what James would have wanted
him to be. Himself. It wasn't much comfort, but it was better than being lost
and not knowing what to do, the rushing anger ebbing away. He might not have
everything his father had... but he had a lot of things that made up for it,
that made Harry uniquely himself, even if he was often placed in his father's
shadow to see if he could fit.
And he smiled, because he wasn't so numb anymore.
*
fin
*
