Disclaimer: As always I own nothing, but a couple of extremely annoying plot kitties, and an awesome beta! Who, I think of as my personal little magic fairy of literary and orthographic magic.
My thinkerbell of sorts isn't feeling so well this week… so boys and girls, readers around the world, if you believe in the wonderful, magical world of fanfiction, and awe-inspiring betas, clap your hands and send some strength and smiles to my beta: raven!
A/N: you do realize that, 75 reviews is ridiculous right? If you take into account the number of people who have this story on chapter alert, there's only like 5% of people who read this fanfic, reviewing. And that's just sad… yes it makes me very sad, and when I'm sad, I like to make other people sad too! Meaning taking my time with my updates if you get my drift…XD
Lol, I'm kidding! I'll always update as fast as I possibly can! Review if you would like some spoilers for the next chapters and/or just to tell how much you love/hate any character/scene!
The award to best reviewer of this week is going to be shared by two of my splendid reviewers:
1. the dark euphie
-because she proves my theory that if you're going to click the old alert button you can also leave a tiny, tiny review saying you like the story, you know? Just so I know you read it and didn't think it was complete crap…
2. Emriel
-because you got exactly what I meant for the relationships between the characters to be, and there's no greater reward for an author than knowing your readers are getting the meaning of your story, the little subliminal messages you send. Thank you Emriel, for understanding and letting me know your opinion, it means the world to me.
Let's begin…
Chapter 7 The Value Of A Memory
An entire tunnel of torches was now in front of him, and stretched for as far as he could see…
He took the first step down the passageway…
This was going to be tough…
At first Lord Voldemort just waked ahead, one step at the time, being under the obvious illusion that the fastest way across Potter's mind would be in a straight line…
Which was quite a silly illusion to have, perhaps this could be a logic belief in the real world, outside, but inside the boy's head not so much. After all directions such as north or south, right or left, and straight ahead, are rather silly when you're not actually walking, but merely projecting the idea of walking inside one's mind. For each step you take forth, the mind around you will also move the length of a step forth, just to accompany you...
Not very logical no, but quite possible and obvious… simply because the ways of the mind as the ways of the heart have no logic.
Eventually, Voldemort became aware of this discrepancy. He was walking around in circles.
Crap, what now? He thought, there must be a way in, that assuming that there is something inside his head, besides endless dark corridors.
He then stopped and just looked around up and down then endless walls, trying to discern a difference, some inconsistency… that was when he heard them…
The whispers… the soft murmur all around him, so soft in fact that it became a sort of auditory breeze, and as a breeze passed unseen or unheard, until you searched for it. He was stunned, how had he failed to notice them before?
He tried to assert the origins of the sounds, but found it impossible since it came from all around him, all over the walls… the walls… he moved closer to the wall to his right, and was once again stunned.
It wasn't a typical wall, it was indeed dark and gloomy and it had the same texture all over, but this texture was not of stone or wood or any such common material. No, all around him there were walls of books, not on shelves or anything of the sort, they were simply there, like some enchanted wall paper, and the books were obvious the sources of the low sounds.
As he got even closer to the wall, he touched one of the books with the tip of his finger…
I wonder how many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear what they said?...
"What?" said Voldemort. And then he touched another book…
You know… I think obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died… maybe something horrifying or wickedly fun or...
He immediately took his hand off the book and the voice become nothing more than a whisper again. Weird… he was pretty sure it was Potter's voice, wait!
He lift his had and touched a book to his left…
There's no worse feeling than that millisecond you're sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far…
Were this is… he touched another book, over his head this time, and the voice began again:
I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired. Is it just me or isn't that kind of sad? and depressive? And slightly suicidal? And…
Crap… they were. Somehow, in some weird way… These were Harry Potter's thoughts!
It is common belief that a wizard can know another wizard's thoughts, with truth serums and Legimancy and such. But that was not so, the only thing you could get was memories of events, dreams and sometimes one fleeting thought in a very disorganized mind. Thought are the very foundations of the mind, and normally kept at the very core of a person's psyche, and extremely difficult to know simply because you wouldn't even know how to begin looking for them… what could you do to search a wizard's mind for a thought, think of a word and search any thoughts that may contain it? (a/n: just as an apart… define google…) Ridiculous, it would never end, and it would make little to no sense.
But somehow, Harry seemed to have bypassed that problem, by simply storing his thought in these… books of sorts… he looked around… and speculated that once outside potter's mind this little information would be of no utility to him, since all books appeared exactly the same, it would prove impossible to actually find one in particular… like a thought.
He wondered for a moment if it would be like this with the all of Potter's mind, so far everything seemed incredibly organized if kind of depressive. In an odd way, it reminded him of his own mind.
The mind was a rather fascinating study, he had always thought so, and he had discovered that just as everyone was different everyone's mind was also organized in a rather different manner. Everyone's brain was unique and that made it all so much more complicated, that was the major reason, very few spell's interfered with one's mind, simply because very few wizards dare to enter such a field, while something could work for you and your mind, the possibility of it working in someone else's was abysmally small to say the least.
But, there's nothing wrong with trying, right? He himself had a rather strange mind, whenever he needed to find something, he would just…
"Look here… I don't have all day, I need to find some sort of door to your memories."
Without delay the entire tunnel shifted and as he looked around again, he was in exactly the same place but now, for was far as he could see, along the walls, there were doors.
All kind of doors, in different shapes and sizes, big doors, small doors, black doors, white doors, doors in wood and others in stone, some were just of air! Compacted to stay in a door shape!
Voldemort smirked. That was better, he was a step closer to finding the memory he was looking for, but still, very far. There were way too many doors for him to search one by one. In his mind he would just ask and his mind would select the information he was looking for, and so far it had worked her, but what now? He was looking for a specific memory, but he didn't know exactly what memory!
He couldn't simply say: show me only the door to this memory, because he didn't know what memory it was.
He was looking for THE memory, the one thing that had for certain made Harry choose sides. That one particular moment, in which he declared Voldemort as his nemesis, and accepted the fact that he would one day kill him, or be killed by him. That was the memory.
Once found and erased, it would end his problem, he knew that Harry had been raised to hate him and what he represented from the tender age of eleven, he remembered it, in that chamber in Hogwarts when he had tried through Quirrel to obtain the Philosopher's stone, Harry had already been persuaded to believe him as the bringer of all evils, but it wasn't for certain, he had been far too young to really make up his mind about it, Voldemort was sure of that.
At that time he had chose the wrong approach with the obvious results, but if he could change that?... no, it would never work, Harry was far too young then, and young was good, meant easily influenced, but too young was not, it meant annoying and with pre conceived notions of good and evil, write and wrong. Children think life is like in the fairytales: there the good guys and the bad guys.
No, he need the right memory, and that would only come after the boy had stopped being a child and left his childlike views of the world behind. When he began wondering about the good and evil in people, wondering about the light side and the dark side, trying to find reasons, and if possible when he thought about…
"Show me in which time, if any, you thought about switching sides."
And as he turned to his right, the wall moved really fast, it literally flew by and he found himself in front of a door of stone, not too big, not too small. It opened before he could touch it, and he entered.
He found himself in a room full of clocks, the invariable tick-tack; although low enough, was like a steady torture, like that Chinese torture of water drops.
"Very funny" he said "I get it there are a lot of 'times'… still this is not what I meant… I want the moment, the memory you have of it," The room pushed him out and the door closed with a band and he was again in the corridor. There were a lot of door again, but the space between the doors was now bigger.
Voldemort got the message… "Ok, just start with the first."
He opened the door nearest to him, a simple door of dark wood that looked a lot like a Hogwarts door. He looked inside but didn't enter.
There was no need. He already knew that one; it was the chamber that contained the Philosopher's stone. That he had ruled out already. He closed the door and moved down the corridor.
He opened the next one, this time it was a stones door with serpents engraved in it. There were some marks of humidity around the round corners of the door. He made a face, he knew that door…
The chamber of Secrets, Salazar's chamber, but why the hell… He observed the figures ahead, was that him? And potter? He was explaining to the boy who he was, with that nifty spell to write the letters in his name and switch them.
Hum… this one wouldn't do either, the boy was only a year older, and that… wasn't him, sure he called himself Voldemort back then, but 17 year old him didn't come even close to him now, not to his power level and not to what he expected of his followers. It wouldn't do. Still it was nice to know the boy associated him with his younger counterpart...
He closed that door and was going to try the next when he thought, why the hell… he was going about this the wrong way… or at least the long way…
Fine… "Listen carefully, I want the door to the memory in which you, Harry James Potter, decided for certain, I was evil and needed to die, and that you were going to do it, if there is such a memory." He added the last part as an afterthought, he needn't have bothered…
The doors flew away, like the trees flow by when you're flying on your broomstick at high speed. And only one stood right there in front of him, mocking him, with the knowledge he could have simply asked for what he wanted from the beginning.
Evil door…
The door was made of grass and it was plain huge. Actually it looked very little like a door and very much like a bush.
As he looked for a way to open it, it simply slid aside, and he walked in.
Or out… He was on the outside... on a cemetery.
His cemetery, the one where he had regained his body and came back from the dead.
He stepped right in the middle of the scene, the boy had just managed to run off after the incident with their wands, as for him, the weird spirit things were distracting him.
Voldemort looked down at the body of the other boy, in the ground, lifeless blue eyes stared at him… Harry had just managed to escape the spells from his death eaters, and summoned the Tournament's cup, and had fell on his knees right in front of him, he grabbed the death body, and as the cup flew to his out stretched hand he looked back, at the death Eaters, the fight, to the him, the Voldemort of then… And the Voldemort of now looked into perfectly tormented green eyes and knew…
He knew Harry would never sleep peacefully another night.
He knew Harry would never forget that encounter. Or that boy's death and what iy represented. That was the death of all the innocents yet to come, of all the people who would die for him, in his place, because of him.
He knew this was that moment.
He knew Harry had just made an undying vow, to kill him and all that he stood for.
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He looked around the memory, concentrated in the imaginary wall around him, pushed it back, until when he had first entered the room and Harry was running towards the body. He focused on the procedures Snape had described for him, what he had to do… He then spoke: "Stop!"
Everything froze.
"Memoriam non grata fin… ne plus ultra" (1)
And he was back in reality, once more.
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A/N: (1) memoriam non grata means "an unwelcome memory" fin means end.
And part two: ne plus ultra "no more beyond"
And please remember this is internet Latin, I've no actual knowledge of Latin, if it wrong, well then it's wrong. Who cares? Harry lost all his memories from that time on, either way, he never really decided to kill Voldemort, although he still wants to, he never felt like he had to do it, like it was his mission or duty or something. That memory is gone and so his everything forward, or beyond that moment. Cool, hum? =)
More like finally! Now I can finally start to write, amnesic!Harry and manipulative!Voldemort.
Hurray! And if you want to read about those faster… well you just have to review!
+scalvim+