Chapter Eleven—Practical Applications
That evening found the Gryffindors in the common room, having returned full-force to the drill of nightly homework. Only Link was left with nothing to do, as Zelda had disappeared along with Hermione and Ginny, and he was getting restless.
"Hey," he said, dropping onto the arm of Harry's chair, "do you know where the girls went?"
"Library, I think," Harry replied distractedly.
"Where's that?"
"Well…it's kind of hard to explain…"
"I have to go there now anyway, to grab a book of Hermione's," Ron spoke up, closing a Transfiguration textbook. "I'll show you."
"Great, thanks," Link said.
Harry closed his book and stood up as well, not wanting to be the only one left behind. "I'll come, too."
As they made their way through the halls, Ron asked curiously, "So are you and Zelda going to learn to use magic the way we do, for this fight against Ganondorf and You-Know-Who?"
"I don't think so," Link replied, frowning thoughtfully. "Frankly, I think we'd do better without it. We've been fighting our way for so long, it's like instinct. Why change it? Some of your things are pretty neat, though," he admitted. "I mean, the Astronomy and stuff is neat, and Care of Magical Creatures, things like that…"
"And Quidditch," Harry put in, grinning.
"And…what?" and Link, bewildered.
"Quidditch," Harry repeated. "You've… We haven't told you about Quidditch?"
Link shook his head slowly. "What is it?"
"It's this game we play, everybody knows about it," Harry explained. "Me, Ron and Ginny are all on the Gryffindor Quidditch team—"
"Harry's the captain," Ron put in.
"Yeah, I am," Harry agreed. "Anyway, there's seven players on each team, and four balls in play, and we fly on broomsticks—"
"You can fly?" Link interrupted eagerly. "You have to show me how to do that!"
Harry and Ron both laughed.
"You'll be a big Gryffindor fan," Ron decided, nodding. "I can just picture you leading everyone else in screaming for us."
"I will make it my personal mission to be the loudest, most obnoxious fan in the crowd," Link promised seriously. "Shouldn't be much of a challenge," he added as an afterthought. "Not for someone who, as Zelda will be the first to tell you, is usually loud and obnoxious without trying."
"Yeah, the Gryffindor side will have no trouble drowning out the Slytherins," Harry agreed, laughing slightly at the mental image of Link as an enthusiastic Quidditch fan. "Go! Go! Gryffindor!"
"Lions for the cup!" Ron added.
"Lions, huh?" Link said with a smirk.
"Yeah, like on our uniforms," Harry told him, slightly confused. "Why?"
In explanation, Link cleared his throat, took a deep breath and bared his teeth in a vicious, bestial grimace. From the back of his throat came a low, rolling growl that sounded convincingly like a big cat. After this warm up, he took another breath…
…And let out a deafening, almighty roar that Harry wouldn't have thought a human being capable of. But, of course, Link wasn't exactly a human being.
"Whoa," Ron said disbelievingly. "That was—"
"What is that unearthly din?" came a voice of icy fury from just behind them.
"Din?" asked Link, completely thrown by the mention of one of his goddesses. "What about Din?"
The three of them turned to see the one professor who was least likely to have any tolerance at all for Gryffindor cheers in the halls.
"Potter," Snape said coldly, looking them over, "and, of course, Weasley, and…Sir Hero, our distinguished guest."
"Wait, don't tell me," Link said, holding up a hand and screwing up his face in concentration. "You're Severus Snape, right?" he guessed.
Apparently the Potions master was incapable of not curling his lips in disgust, even in front of important visitors. "Yes," he said mildly. "And are you the one responsible for that…caterwauling?"
Link grinned. "Uh-huh. You pick up those sorts of things growing up in the forest. I mean, there were no lions in the place where I lived, but still."
"Indeed," Snape commented stiffly. "Raised by wolves and wild dogs, were we?" he added.
Harry felt a stab of annoyance at the mention of those two animals, of all the possibilities he could have come up with…
Link, of course, didn't notice anything. He simply shrugged and said, "Not quite, just some very hyperactive little children. Anyway, we were just on our way up to the library, so we'll keep going—"
"More quietly, I would hope."
"Oh," said Link, apparently understanding only now why Snape had bothered to stop them. "Yes, of course." He smiled in his usual friendly way, but of course his charm was lost on the ice cold Potions master, who had no discernable soul that Harry had yet managed to find. Except for the one time he had slipped into the Pensieve—but he didn't want to remember that any more than Snape himself did.
"We're just going," he said shortly, turning on his heel to head to the library without waiting for anyone to speak further. Link and Ron hesitated, both apparently looking for someone to formally end the conversation, but decided simply to catch up with Harry before he got too far away.
"So…you and Snape aren't the best of friends?" Link asked mildly.
Harry grunted in answer. "He hated my dad, and now he hates me."
Link nodded, apparently knowing when to not ask.
When they reached the library, it didn't take them long to find Hermione, Ginny and Zelda at the table by the windows which many Gryffindors usually chose as a homework spot. The two students were busily scribbling away in silence, as the Hylian queen sat by a stack of volumes that looked like ones Harry and Ron would expect to see Hermione joined at the hip with, flipping through the pages and scanning the words. Her eyes, again like Hermione's, could turn into blurs when she read quickly.
"Hey," said Harry, to announce their presence.
"Hi," answered all three girls in the same vague tone, none of them looking up from their occupations. Harry and Ron were fine with this, as they both had homework to do anyway, and each took a seat at the table; the former opened his work and began to reread what he had written so far for Herbology, while the latter reached for the few books Hermione had before her. Link, clearly still bored but opting against further whining, simply read over Zelda's shoulder.
When Ron had scanned everything Hermione had before her, he asked, "What happened to that book you had for Defence Against the Dark Arts? Something about…rising forces…"
"Rising to Fight the Forces," Hermione corrected without looking up. "I finished with it, so I put it back." Frowning at her essay, she added, "I thought I was finished with it, anyway. But I need a reference."
"Good, 'cause I need it, too."
They both rose from their seats and headed off to wander between the shelves and recover the misplaced book.
"Hey, Harry," Link spoke up suddenly, "are there any books in here about that Quidditch game you were mentioning?"
"Sure, tons. Read Quidditch through the Ages, that should tell you everything."
Zelda frowned at Link, who looked back at her. Harry could tell, again, that they were communicating telepathically. It was strange to see, because he had never realized how much of a conversation was obvious outside of the spoken words. They both left as well, presumably to locate the aforementioned text.
Leaving him with Ginny.
He wished fervently for some telepathy of his own, so he could tell Link and Zelda exactly what he thought of their not-so-subtle plan. But all he could do was give a faint sigh of frustration.
"What?" asked Ginny, looking up for the first time.
"Nothing," he muttered.
Raising an eyebrow, Ginny dropped her quill and leaned her chin into her elbow with a determined look on her face. "You and I both know that it is never a good idea for you to lie about that sort of thing."
She was right. But this really was nothing.
Wasn't it?
Oh, how could he even think that! Of course it was nothing! It would only be something if there was any possibility at all that Link and Zelda were right and he really did think of Ginny as anything other than Ron's sister and a semi-close friend. Which he didn't. At all. Never had, never would. That would be ridiculous.
Wouldn't it?
He shook his head sharply, willing the devil's advocate in his mind to go away.
"Come on, Harry," Ginny pressed, now leaning back in her chair with her arms folded and a scowl on her face. "Don't be stupid and stubborn. That's the problem with boys, they never want to talk about how they really feel." She rolled her eyes.
So, if it was nothing, then why did it bother him that she had just now compared him to every other boy in the world? Why did he expect for some reason that she should have thought of him differently?
"Yeah…well…it's just no big deal, that's all," he told her casually. "Nothing earth-shattering, just…some stuff that me and Link and Zelda were talking about the other day."
"About how they think you and me would be a cute couple?"
Harry's heart stopped in his chest, out of shock more than for any other reason. He realized too late that his wide-eyed horror had destroyed any chance of lying about this, and Ginny must have noticed the same thing, because laughter was shining in her eyes as she waited for him to speak.
"I don't…What are you talking about?" he asked helplessly.
Ginny laughed. "Don't bother, Harry. Girls do talk about how they feel. And Zelda told me how she felt about you and me."
"Which was?" Harry asked darkly.
"Just what I said, that we'd be cute together." She shrugged. "I dunno, frankly I think it'd be weird."
Bewildered by this, Harry pointed out, "But didn't you used to…?"
"Have a crush on you? Sure, before I got to know you. No offence, but… Now you're my friend, it'd just be too weird."
Harry opened his mouth to say what he really thought, that being friends first was better, like Ron and Hermione, but stopped himself when he realized he would just be arguing with her over something that they both felt the same about: that they were in no way inclined towards being a couple. So he simply closed his mouth and said, "I guess."
"You guess?" Ginny repeated. "What, you mean you actually think that maybe we—?"
"No, I don't, of course I don't," Harry cut her off quickly. "I just think that…I dunno…friends who start dating, it might not be such a bad thing."
Ginny considered this. It was a moment before she spoke again.
"Maybe," she finally said slowly. "I mean, look at us. I don't mean us as a couple, I mean the relationships we had before. You and Cho. Me and Michael. And me and Dean."
"And then look at Ron and Hermione," Harry finished.
Again, Ginny didn't answer right away. "But then look and Link and Zelda."
"What do you mean? They're not a couple."
"Exactly. They're just friends, and it works for them. So sometimes being friends first just means that…you're really good friends."
Harry thought about this. Then he smirked.
"What?" Ginny asked.
"Well, another reason why Link and Zelda are just friends is that…they aren't. They're cousins."
"Oh, yeah," Ginny laughed. "That would kind of get in the way of the romance, wouldn't it?"
"I'll say."
"But I still think that even if they weren't related, they'd be better off like this, you know? With other people, not each other."
"Probably," Harry agreed. "But you never know, do you? Everything about them might be different if they weren't who they are now."
Ginny nodded thoughtfully, staring off into space. "Yeah…" she mused, possibly talking to herself. "If people came from different places, if they met each other differently and everything…you never know what might have happened."
Ginny's words were still echoing in Harry's mind when he woke up the next morning, after a sleep that had been rough because they were echoing through it all night. They rang true on so many levels, about every person he had ever met. If his parents had lived when Voldemort fell, for example, every relationship he ever had with everyone in his life would have been completely different.
Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley wouldn't have been his family; his mum and dad and Sirius and Remus would have been instead. His life would have been happy and peaceful, with Voldemort merely a distant memory.
There were more complicated details to consider, though. Like how he would have come to Hogwarts like any other little wizard boy, and he and Ron wouldn't have been so fascinated with each other. Ron himself would have even been a little bit different, because he would have neither a hand-me-down pet rat as the only living thing he could always depend on nor a morbid fear of both the name "Voldemort" and the man himself. Of course, Ron and Harry still would have met, being in the same year and the same house, but they probably wouldn't have filled the voids in each other's lives. And so they wouldn't have been united against Hermione, and never would have reconciled with her to become the indivisible trio they currently were. And he and Hermione wouldn't have become pseudo-Weasleys, welcome in the Burrow at any time, close enough to know his parents and his brothers and sisters personally.
And if Ginny hadn't been Ron's sister first…
Blinking at his reflection in the mirror as he attempted (without much hope) to brush his hair, Harry firmly fixed his mind on something else. He remembered out of the blue that he had meant to take a moment before the hectic schedule of school resumed in order to fine tune the exact words he wanted Link to deliver to his family. Sure, he had the gist of it, but he wanted to make sure he phrased it exactly right. Well, now the hectic schedule of school had returned, but he still wanted to take the time.
Today's classes would be much more uneventful than yesterday, because Zelda said that Dumbledore had given her and Link a few things to do. Maybe this was specifically to keep them out of the classroom, although Harry couldn't really see why he would want to do that; they just wanted to learn, like everyone else. So whatever he had assigned them to must have been genuinely important.
They weren't around when Harry, Ron and Hermione went down to breakfast, or to their first lessons, but whether they were still in bed or somewhere else was impossible to say. Besides, Harry did have other things to think about.
He walked through that day in a fog, half because of how little sleep he'd gotten the night before—well, since Link and Zelda's arrival, really—and partly because he was lost in thought about what he'd done in lieu of sleep on the night of the full moon, less than a week ago… Had it really only been a few days? It felt like months. When Hermione hissed at him to focus for the sixth time that day ("Harry, will you please pay attention? I don't want to have to give you McGonagall's lecture tonight!"), he was therefore rather short with her.
"I'm trying to figure out the first things I'll ever say to my mum and dad," he told her with a growl in his voice. "And since I won't be the one doing the actual speaking, I'd like to at least get the wording right."
Hermione stared at his as she had done two and a half years ago, when he'd told her he thought he'd seen his father casting a Patronus, as though she was worried that he wasn't entirely sane.
"Harry—"
"Don't ask, I'll explain later. If you don't listen, how will either of us get our homework done?"
They both looked over at Ron, on Hermione's left, who looked as glazed over as Harry felt, with his head propped up in his hand, his eyes unfocused, and his mouth hanging slightly open. Hermione let out a sigh that anyone who didn't know her would have taken for genuine annoyance.
"Good point," she admitted, her tone again sounding bitter to the untrained ear, but she cast her boyfriend a faint wistful smile.
After their last lesson, Harry, Ron and Hermione retreated to the library. Harry was still mildly curious as to what Link and Zelda had done with their day, but he was sure he would find out anything that mattered. Just as he was settling down, determined to focus once and for all, Hermione asked him, "So…what were you talking about in Transfiguration that you said you'd explain later?"
"Huh?" asked Harry and Ron in unison.
"Harry, you said you were trying to determine what you were going to say to your parents," Hermione reminded him patiently. "I'm a little bit curious, and I think you can understand why."
Harry noticed that Ron was now listening at attention; his quill had dropped out of his hand and his eyes were wide.
"Oh… Okay," Harry began awkwardly, "well, first, just so you know I'm not going mad, I'm not going to see or talk to my parents."
Ron and Hermione relaxed visibly.
"But I am getting a chance to give them a message. Sirius, too."
Ron and Hermione exchanged a look, tense once more.
"Harry…" Ron began slowly, "that doesn't make sense."
"Yes, it does," Harry retorted quickly. "Think about it. What do Dementors do?"
Looking startled by the apparently random question, Hermione tried to stammer an answer, but Harry got there first.
"They suck out your soul. And what are ghosts made of?"
"I don't—"
"Souls," Harry cut in. "And what are Link and Zelda?"
"Sou—"
"Souls! Yes! And what part of you dies?"
Now he let them answer. They gave each other the sort of he's-finally-lost-it glance that would normally have driven Harry up the wall, but at the moment he didn't care.
Ron answered uncertainly, "Your soul?"
"No!" Harry countered, snapping his fingers as though Ron had just revealed the meaning of life. "Your body dies, but your soul is immortal! So what happens to it? Some people take steps to hold a part of their soul here, and they become ghosts, but most people don't, including Mum and Dad and Sirius. Their souls are somewhere else, and Link knows where. He told me."
And Harry was spilling out everything he and Link had talked about that night. By the time he had finished, Ron and Hermione's faces had melted into identical expressions of blank shock.
"Oh, Harry!" gasped Hermione. "That's wonderful!"
"Blimey," muttered Ron in a weak voice. "He really is like Sirius, now you mention it, isn't he?"
"He's so sweet!" Hermione said, looking on the verge of tears. "This settles it, Link is absolutely the most considerate man in the history of the world."
Ron opened his mouth to say something, giving her a slightly bitter look out of the corner of his eye; however, he didn't get a chance.
"I don't know what I did to deserve such lavish praise, but I'm afraid I have to correct it…I believe I predate the history of your world, kid."
Hermione positively jumped in her seat as Link clapped his hand on her shoulder. Harry smirked as she turned scarlet, and Ron looked placated as well by her embarrassment. Link dropped into a nearby vacant chair, tossing a book onto the table in front of him. Apparently whatever assignment he and Zelda had to do required some research.
"Harry was just telling us what you're gonna do for him, about his parents," Ron explained. "Hermione seems to think you should be knighted for it."
Link let out a short laugh. "Well, sorry, but you're too late. Sir Link Hero I, remember? I've already got every military title there is, Fairy Girl, give or take a million."
He blinked.
"Did I just say what I think I just said?"
"Er…yeah," Harry confirmed, glancing at Ron to see his reaction to the unexpected pet name; he looked more confused than anything else.
"Weird," Link muttered, shaking his head slightly. That's what I used to call my oldest daughter, Saria. I guess it just slipped out." He sighed heavily. "You remind me of her. Same spirit. One in a million people really have that sort of…brightness."
For a moment he simply looked at Hermione thoughtfully, seeing past her bemused expression to the spirit he said she possessed. Then, abruptly, he stood up and walked away with his book.
"What was that?" Ron muttered, watching as Link strolled past the shelves of books on Divination, absently sliding the one he carried back into its place.
Hermione gave a small, sad sigh. "He misses his family, of course. He spent so much of his life without anyone who loved him, and he's always been in the spotlight as a hero, and now—"
She stopped hastily, and Harry felt her eyes upon him though he was looking intently at the Charms essay before him.
"Anyway, Ron, you were asking me something about the establishment of democracy in South Africa?"
Harry could practically see the pointed expression on her face that said "drop it," and wondered why it bothered him.
"Oh…yeah…" came Ron's answer. "So…what's democracy in South Africa?"
That night in the common room, it was Link and Zelda who were working hardest. They had found a quiet corner and were sitting on the floor with their heads together, flipping through papers and books. For the two hours that Harry had been watching, they hadn't said a word to each other, but yet they were obviously working together on something. Occasionally he also thought he saw a short flash like an electrical shock pass between them, and this generally elicited a small jerk from whoever was on the receiving end, but he couldn't figure out what they were doing…
Then he felt stupid.
"They're speaking telepathically," he said finally; this was something he had of course seen them do, but not for any sustained length of time, so it had never occurred to him that they could hold an entire evening's intense conversation that way. Still, the revelation seemed obvious as soon as he said it.
He was speaking to himself more than Ron and Hermione, who were too busy snuggling over a game of chess which wasn't occupying much of their concentration.
"Check," said Ron when he placed his queen before Hermione's king, which according to their rules meant that he got a kiss. Hermione laughed slightly as she gave it, sliding her knight along its next move.
When their lips parted, she told him with a grin, "Checkmate."
Ron looked down at the board and saw that she was right.
"Hey!"
"It's good for you to lose once in a while," she told him airily, leaning back in her seat.
"Wanna play another game?"
"You just want to capture more pieces and get more kisses."
"What's your point?"
Hermione leaned in towards him and closed her eyes, but just as her lips brushed Ron's, she pulled away and stood up to leave the game. He let out a frustrated groan.
"You just like to torture me," he complained, flopping limp in his chair and dropping his head back.
"Oh, come on, we can't just spend all night snogging over a chess board," Hermione scolded.
"You're right. We should get rid of the chessboard."
Hermione laughed, but didn't give in. "I just think you should go do some work." She deposited herself in the chair next to Harry's and added quietly, as Crookshanks hopped up to her lap, "But I do like to torture him."
Harry disguised his laughter as a coughing fit, an old trick Ron frequented in Divination classes with Trelawney.
"Harry," came Zelda's voice suddenly. She didn't sound like she was calling for him, simply stating his name, but why else would she speak aloud?
"Yeah?" he answered.
"Here."
"Sounds like you're needed at a Council of the Elders meeting," Ron observed.
Harry crossed the room and looked down and Link and Zelda, who were both staring at a photo that jolted his stomach. There, dressed in black graduation robes with green trim and a silver-tasselled mortarboard, smiling his charming smile across his handsome face, was Tom Riddle, age eighteen.
"Do you know this guy?" Link asked, not sounding at all as if he realized that he was looking into the eyes of the last man in whose veins ran the blood of his own eternal arch-nemesis. Harry raised his eyebrows.
"Don't you?" he asked, trying to remain calm.
"His name is Tom Marvolo Riddle, class of 1944, disappeared the following year," Zelda recited.
"Looks a bit like you, doesn't he?" Link added as a casual observation, cocking his head.
"No, he doesn't," Harry said vehemently, snatching up the photo and resisting—barely—the urge to rip it up and throw it in the fire.
Zelda and Link looked at each other in the way that Ron and Hermione so often did, as if they suspected something was wrong with Harry, and in the back of his mind, Harry wondered if this was a telepathy thing that only he wasn't in on.
"Harry, who is he?" Zelda asked softly.
At first, Harry fidgeted uneasily, running his fingers though his hair and casting around the room for something. Perhaps for the words to explain what was running through his mind in a fury of mixed emotions, mostly centred around anger. Then he folded his arms and forced out, in a voice that sounded far more strained that he would have liked it to, "Why don't you know?"
He would have liked them to answer on Dumbledore's behalf, because he knew the Headmaster wouldn't have left out such a detail as the first eighteen years of Voldemort's life by accident. Why was he forcing Harry to relive the unloved childhood of his nemesis, to twist the knife of their mutual hatred in his own chest?
"I'm sorry," Zelda said softly, "but Dumbledore just told us to ask you if we had any questions about these things…" She waved towards the documents strewn between herself and Link.
Angrily, his temper directed more than anything else at the fact that there was no one he could fairly blame, Harry made a noise of fury, dropped down next to them and snarled, "Fine. I'll tell you."
As he told the story, from when Tom Riddle, Sr., abandoned his pregnant wife to the day Tom Riddle, Jr., dropped off the face of the planet to sink into the Dark Arts and emerge as Lord Voldemort, he marvelled grudgingly that Dumbledore had managed not to relate any of this. Even more, he marvelled that he himself hadn't noticed the massive omission.
When he had talked himself into silence, Link was the first to speak.
"Dumbledore said you fought the young Voldemort in the Chamber of Secrets with the Master Sword. That was Tom Riddle, wasn't it?"
"Yes," Harry said, his voice harsh, "and he was just as bad then. Why do you need to know this all of a sudden?" He knew the question was rather out of place, but he needed an answer.
"Dumbledore gave us some things to learn about," Link told him. "And like Zel said, he told us to ask you if we had any questions."
"What is there besides…Tom Riddle?"
Zelda ruffled through a stack of papers and pulled out a list in what looked like Dumbledore's loopy handwriting. "Well, there's Polyjuice Potion."
"Figures."
"And Aurors."
"Good to know."
"Some more names…Bartemius Crouch, Sr. and Jr."
"Scum."
"And Rabastan, Radolphus and Bellatrix Lestrange."
"Don't ask me about her," Harry said shortly. "Just…don't do it. Don't ask."
"Er…okay," Zelda agreed gently. "There's also some spells. Imperius—"
"Cruciatus, and Avada Kedavra?"
"You know them?"
Harry flipped up his fringe. "I'm rather intimate with them," he explained darkly. "Particularly the last one. Anyway, what else?"
"Memory Charms."
"Ask Lockhart about that," Ron spoke up, and Hermione couldn't conceal a small smile; apparently they had both been listening.
"Impediment Jinx, Stunning, Disarming."
"Basic and useful."
"And he wants up to have some basic history of the Dark Arts and your government. The Ministry of Magic, is that right?"
"Yeah… Geez, doesn't ask much, does he? Why do you need to know all this? What kind of plan does he have?"
"We wondered that ourselves," Link admitted.
"But we think he's just covering all his bases to make sure we know everything we could possibly need to," Zelda explained.
"And killing time," Link added, in his usual direct way.
"Until what?" asked Harry apprehensively.
With a weary sigh, Zelda replied, "Until Ganon and Voldemort start something."
Harry gaped. Then he said bluntly, "I'm going to talk to him. That plan is mad."
"He won't change his mind for you, Harry," called Ron.
"That's not all I want to talk to him about."
Five minutes later, Harry was pounding on the Headmaster's office door.
"Come in," came Dumbledore's voice.
Harry started on his rant even as he opened the door.
"You planned it so I would have to tell them all about Riddle when you could have just explained it to them yourself, and I'm gonna tell you what I told them, there's no way I'm talking about Bellatrix other than to wish her the most horrible death possible, and I don't know why you're sending them on this information wild goose chase anyway when we should be getting ready to fight instead of reading up on history! Link's got his damn sword, let him hack Ganon to bits if he has to and then pass it on to me, and I'll…"
He stopped. He hadn't planned on getting this far without an interruption and he didn't know where he was going with that train of thought.
"You'll do what, Harry?" Dumbledore asked calmly, curiously. He was sitting in his maddeningly serene way behind his desk, his fingers laced, almost as though he had been expecting this invasion.
"I'll…I'll kill Voldemort!" he blurted, for lack of a better idea. "Everything will be over, once and for all! Come on, we can do it tonight, right now!" He knew as he spoke that this plan would be, for one reason or another, impossible. And sure enough…
"That can't happen, Harry."
"Why not?"
"Many reasons. Shall I address them in the order you brought them up?"
Harry dropped defiantly into the chair opposite Dumbledore's desk that was beginning to feel like his. "I've got time."
"Very well. First, then, the matter of Tom Riddle. Why I made you tell his story."
"You admit it?" Harry said viciously.
"I do. You needed to tell that story, for yourself, to make him into a human."
Harry blinked. "What?"
"Voldemort has always been, to you as to most people, nothing more than a monster. Iconic. This image was subconsciously burned onto your brain when you were an infant. Voldemort equals evil—"
"But that's true!"
"Nothing is ever that simple. Does anyone represent the incarnation of good?"
Knowing where this was going, and determined to fight it all the way, Harry defiantly answered, "Yes. Sirius did."
Dumbledore gave a sad smile. "You know what his youth was like."
Harry couldn't deny this. The image of his father and godfather torturing Snape continued to lurk in the back of his mind. "Okay…Zelda, then. And Link."
Dumbledore shook his head. "Like anyone else, they have their flaws. They were both well-known, for example, for their stubborn tempers and refusal to compromise. When they fought each other, there was no peace in Hyrule Castle."
Opting not to acknowledge the fact that this was in no way a stretch of the imagination to picture, Harry said bitterly, "Fine. So no one represents true good. Happy?" Link had told him this before, of course, but he hadn't been willing to accept it then. He still didn't know that he could.
"If that is the case, then how can anyone embody evil?" Dumbledore continued.
"He's incapable of love," Harry retorted in aggressive triumph. "You told me so yourself."
"I told you that he does not love and does not understand love."
"Same thing."
"Harry, when you were eight years old, were you capable of using magic?"
"Yes," he replied mutinously, again knowing what Dumbledore was aiming at.
"But did you? And did you understand it?"
There is no true good, there is no true evil…
Harry didn't answer. Dumbledore moved on.
"Voldemort is physically not the man he once was. He is corrupted. He is mutilated. He borders on deranged."
"He is deranged."
"His plots are too intelligent to be so easily dismissed, as well you know," Dumbledore countered gently. "Regardless, the point I am trying to prove is that he is, in his purest essence, diluted to its most elemental, a human. And you don't know it, or don't want to admit it. But you must know it, for it is your destiny to fight him—to kill him or die at his hands—and you must know what you are fighting. Not a monster, but a sentient being, composed of the same elements as anyone else."
"But…if I think of him as a human…won't that make it harder to kill him?"
"Possibly. Probably. In fact, I would hope so."
"Then—why—why make it hard?"
"You must make the choice, when the time comes, with your eyes and your mind open, knowing what your options are. You must know that you are taking a human life."
A suspicion was creeping up Harry's spine. Narrowing his eyes in doubt, he asked carefully, "Don't you…want me to kill him?"
Dumbledore watched him intensely and said, "No."
Something exploded inside Harry's core. "How can you—?!"
"I don't condone taking anyone's life," Dumbledore interrupted swiftly. "If I believed in such rough justice, I would have ended this struggle years ago. Less than a year ago, could I not have felled him? There were openings."
"Why didn't you take them?!" Harry burst out uncontrollably, with such force that he startled even himself. "Why didn't you end this years ago? Didn't you think during those openings that it would be worth a little rough justice or whatever the hell you called it to save lives? My mum! My dad! Sirius! I wouldn't be walking around with all the pain of having lost three parents eating me alive from the inside out! The Longbottoms! Wouldn't they have wanted to see their son grow up? Sirius' brother, the weak idiot, but maybe he could've been okay if he'd lived! The Crouch family, all of them! Voldemort ripped them apart and then killed them! I don't even know how many more people I could name that he did that to! You probably don't know how many more! And neither of us knows how many more are gonna die before this is over! I don't know it I can take losing any more people I care about! Hermione nearly died last time, what if it's her?! What if it's Ron?! What if it's Remus?! What if it's Hagrid?! What if it's you?! You said yourself, he'll come after you to get to me! Are you gonna care about justice and humanity when you're dying?!"
He found he was on his feet, screaming in Dumbledore's face so hard he was actually spitting, blood thundering through his body so hard it made him dizzy; he was charged with rage, his fists clenched as though he were about to strike Dumbledore with them as hard as he could now that he had run out of words with which to do so.
"Do I seem so heartless to you that you think I never thought of those names and those people over the course of the years that I have spent struggling with this?" Dumbledore asked in an even voice.
"Before now, I would never have said yes," Harry growled, choking down his emotions with difficulty.
"Please, Harry, I have not yet explained myself," Dumbledore said, still speaking quietly, gently. "I have reasons for my actions. Had I killed Voldemort, yes, the lives of the people you and I love would have been saved. But then what?"
"What do you mean, then what? Then we all could have lived normal, happy, long lives."
"Would there have been peace forever?"
Harry didn't answer.
"If Voldemort had not caused pain to so many, someone else would have risen to cause pain to many more. If we had simply cut him out of the world's history, we would never have learned from him, and if we are to ever make the world a truly good place, we must earn it. The goddesses granted us the gifts to feel not only love, but loss, so that we can understand and appreciate joy and not live our lives behind a shelter of naïveté. This is why you need to understand that Voldemort is a human—So that you know, when the time comes that you may hold his life in your hands, that anyone could have become what he has. You could have."
Feeling dizzy and weak, Harry slid into his chair again.
"But…no, I mean…Ganon and Voldemort, they both just want the Triforce of Power, but I…I use it for Courage, for good things…"
"There is a reason that the Triforce has three pieces," Dumbledore said. "None is omnipotent on its own, and none is more valuable than any other. It takes more than simply Din's Power to rule the world, and more than simply Farore's Courage to fight for it."
"It takes more than Nayru's Wisdom, too," Harry countered.
"It does," Dumbledore agreed, nodding. "It takes all three. Courage and Wisdom, in equilibrium with Power, can all support each other. That is why the legends told that it only one whose heart held all the elements in balance could harness the power of the goddesses and turn the world into a paradise."
…There's only Power, Courage, Wisdom—and what you do with them.
Harry couldn't speak for a moment. Just when he thought he understood things, Dumbledore always added a layer of confusion that was far too significant for him to ignore. Sinking back into his chair, he asked, to remove attention from his own tangled emotions, "What would you like to see happen to Voldemort? What would you like to do to him if you could?"
Dumbledore sighed thoughtfully. "I would like to show him the emotions he locks out. I would like him to know what it is to love unreservedly to the depths of his being, then know what it is to lose the person you so deeply love. I would like him to feel pride in an accomplishment and feel respected and loved for it. All he has ever felt is feared, to the point where he cannot even hold any respect for himself. His confidence is a carefully constructed illusion maintained by his followers. I would like for him to experience all the emotions which he has forced onto others, and then I would like him to live. With the full knowledge, with the true understanding, of what he has done to hundreds of innocent people."
All this sounded noble and just to Harry, who was sure that the right thing to do was probably to agree with Dumbledore and wish for the same thing. But it wasn't what he desired.
"I want him to feel pain," said Harry in a low voice, not meeting Dumbledore's eyes. "The pain of all his victims. And then I want to be the one to kill him."
This was, without a doubt, the most coldhearted and aggressive thing he had ever said. He had thought it to himself, in the unreal darkness of night, more times than he could count. Saying it aloud was different, and it sent a chill up his spine to hear his own words. But it was still true.
The two of them sat in silence for a long moment, as Harry's thoughts pounded in his mind along with his heartbeat. When Dumbledore spoke again, his tone was comparatively mild.
"What else did you come here to protest?"
At first, Harry couldn't remember. He blinked and frowned. Then, when the memory struck him, he said, "Research. All that useless research you're having Link and Zelda do when we could be setting up to fight Voldemort and Ganon. Or did you explain the reason for that just now in your cryptic little speech?" he added, feeling a pang of regret at the bitterness of his words even as he spoke them.
Inclining his head, Dumbledore asked curiously, "Do you really think all that research is useless?"
"Well…yeah! The history of the Ministry of Magic? Come on, I copy Hermione's notes on that stuff for tests, it's not important."
Dumbledore chuckled before adding seriously, "Is it useless for them to know the Unforgivable Curses?"
"Probably not," Harry muttered reluctantly.
"So you do understand the purpose of at least some of the research. And as for that which is less obviously relevant, some is because I don't know exactly what we will be facing, and I would like them to be adequately prepared for any challenge…"
Zelda had guessed that.
"…or simply to give them something to do. They have nothing but spare time, and this is a school, so they would do well to learn."
Link had guessed that.
"Why, though?" Harry asked. "Why can't we go fight? Why do we have to wait for them to make the first move?"
Dumbledore sighed and tented his fingers. "Harry, I wish I could give you a simple and definitive answer to that question, but there isn't one. Many small factors inhibit us. First of all, we are not ready. Link and Zelda have been here only a few days, and they are not yet prepared to go into combat."
Harry gave a disbelieving laugh. "You didn't see them in Defence Against the Dark Arts class," he countered.
With a small smile, Dumbledore said, "I will admit that their militaristic skills are not lacking, but they need more than that, as we just discussed. There is also the fact that we don't know exactly what Voldemort and Ganondorf are planning, a situation we in the Order are actively working to remedy. There are more minor details to consider, such as our own numbers compared to theirs, our resources, locations, timing, politics… War is quite simply not something we can charge into blindly, counting on the sheer strength of our weapons and our prayers to carry us through to victory."
Harry closed his eyes and dropped his face into his hands with a low groan. There was that confusion again. The complication that couldn't just let him live his life, that couldn't just let him understand exactly what he was supposed to do and give him the freedom to do it.
"Fine," he finally said in a dull voice, speaking into his hands. Lifting his face up to be more articulate, he repeated, "Fine. You're right. About everything."
"Not always."
Of course not. That would be too simple. And there were never simple answers to any hard questions.
"Yeah, well. I knew that," Harry countered. "You don't have the Triforce of Wisdom yet, do you?"
"No, I do not," Dumbledore agreed.
As always when he spoke with Dumbledore, Harry could tell instinctively that the conversation was over now.
He and the Headmaster said goodbye as Harry rose to leave; his hand was on the doorknob when Dumbledore called back, "Harry…"
Without a word, he looked back.
"Link told me about the conversation you had, the first night he came here," Dumbledore said softly, looking at Harry with those piercing blue eyes. "And I must say…it speaks volumes about Sirius' character that he is so clearly reflected in a man such as Link."
"You see it, too?" asked Harry, feeling relieved at this confirmation that he was not simply experiencing a grief-induced hallucination.
"I do," Dumbledore said with a nod. "Yourself, your father, Sirius, Link… You are all different incarnations of the same spirit."
Harry didn't quite no what to say. "Soon…" He choked, swallowed hard, and tried again. "Soon it'll just be me. Link will go, and it'll just be me…"
Shaking his head, Dumbledore corrected him, "They will all live on forever, in the ways in which they have touched the world. Just as you will do. It will never just be you, Harry. Never."
Despite himself, for no reason he could determine, Harry couldn't help cracking a smile at this. Maybe he was just going crazy. Or maybe somehow, in a way he couldn't possibly understand, things were starting to make sense.
Dumbledore smiled back, and Harry thought the Headmaster looked as if he could see into his mind. Maybe things were starting to make sense to him, too.