"Okay, here it goes" Harry told her as he prepared himself to tell his story.

He took a long breath as if to calm down and then looked at Jemma. Her face was lit up in anticipation to hear about the wonders of the magical world and the adventures of the Boy-Who-Lived as any little kid would be.

But she had no idea just how dark his story actually was. Maybe he could lighten it up in parts, make it more children friendly.

"So you want to hear the watered down version or the long drawn out version?" Harry asked her to prolong the inevitable.

Jemma just gave him a little smile and said, "You really do not want to tell me, do you?"

"It is just that for me, now, what happened in my life feels like a very painful story from a time long past gone. I can think of it as the life that someone else had lived. I do not want to revisit that life I had before coming here. Telling you about it would make that life very much a part of my reality."

Harry was trying to keep a smiling face but the hurt he felt must have been clearly shown on his face because Jemma got up from her chair, came up to him and gave him a hug.

"I am sorry," she told him after releasing from the hug.

Harry smiled at her and said, "That's the first time that you hugged me. I had forgotten what it felt like. It's nice."

Jemma smiled back at him and said, "It's okay if you do not want to tell me. But bottling it up won't do you any good. It would be good to talk about it to someone else."

For the first time, since she had met him, Jemma's eyes were completely open to a realization about her friend. She had always thought of him as a happy and easy go person, who had fallen into a very a bad set of circumstances that had led him here. Now she could see the truth.

Standing before her was a broken man. He just was very good at hiding it.

She didn't know exactly what had happened in his life, but she could hazard a guess from the little things that she knew about him. After all, he himself had told her that he had tried to kill himself, the very first time that she had met him.

She was brought out of her muse when Harry started to talk again.

"For the last three months, I have been living a very bizarre life. For the longest time, my deepest wish was to not get noticed by people, and now that wish had come true in the cruelest way."

Harry stopped himself to try and compose himself.

"What kind of life is this?"

The question wasn't directed at her, but Jemma still felt compelled to speak.

"It is not that bad is it?" Jemma asked him.

Maybe that was the wrong thing to say because Harry just started laughing. But he was not laughing in joy or amusement. This was the hollow laugh of a person who had been beaten down at every turn in his life. This was the laugh the of a person who had tried to escape the pain that was his life by ending it only to find out that he still lived like a cosmic joke. This was the laugh of a man who had reached the limit.

"Not that bad Jemma?" Harry asked her.

"Look at me Jemma. I do not even have a body and the only bloody person who can see me, are you."

That came out as an outburst rather than an explanation and Harry regretted it immediately. Jemma reeled back from him in shock at the outburst.

"I am sorry, that was uncalled for," Harry told her.

Harry sat down on the floor, his head hung low partly in regret and partly in pain.

"It is okay Harry. I'm your friend aren't I?" Jemma told him.

"I didn't ask you tell me about your life just to help you get a physical body." Jemma continued.

"I know that some terrible things have happened to you, and you have lost people. But keeping it all in like that is not good for you. It is going to blow you up from the inside and you are going to lash out like you did just now. And right now I'm the only person that you can talk to."

Jemma slowly approached him and sat down on the floor facing him.

She took his hand and told him, "You can talk to me."

Harry stayed there with his head hung low for a moment before he faced Jemma and said, "Thank you."

Jemma gave him a genuine smile at that.

"Although, I think I should be talking to a real therapist about my problems," Harry told her jokingly.

Her grin got wider as she said, "One must make do with what one has."

"And what makes you think that I cannot be a good therapist. I am good at listening, I can give good advice, and I good at solving problems. I could do this for a living."

Harry gave a light chuckle at that, "You might be missing a few points there."

"So will you talk?" Jemma asked him.

"You don't need to tell me about the bad stuff, we can just talk about the good things."

"Well, the good and bad in my life are so intertwined that you can't talk about one without talking about the other" Harry told her.

"Okay," Jemma said. "What are you willing to share with me then?" she asked.

"How about I answer your original question, about the how and why I fell through the veil," Harry said.

"Then tell me about it."

"The truth is I didn't just fall through the veil," Harry told her, "I jumped through it."

"You have already told me that Harry" Jemma told him.

"Then you remember what I told you about it. I jumped through it because I wanted to die. I felt like there was nothing left for me, so I took a way out. What I didn't tell you is that it wasn't the first time I had tried to end my life."

This was news to Jemma.

"What happened that was so dreadful that you felt like you had nothing left?"

"I lost everyone I cared about. That's what's happened" Harry replied her.

Jemma didn't say anything. She just patted his shoulder encouraging him to go on.

"You already know that I am a wizard and there are communities of wizards and witches from where I come from. But I left a little detail out when I told you about it."

"What is it?" Jemma asked him.

"I was kind of a celebrity over there."

"Are you serious?" she asked him.

Jemma hadn't expected that to be the tiny little detail that he left out.

"Yeah, and before you ask it wasn't for something that I actually did that I became famous."

Harry continued, "Before I was born, there was a really bad wizard who had risen up and gave himself the moniker of Dark Lord."

"Who was this dark wizard?" she asked him.

"His name was Tom Riddle, but he later changed it. He gave himself a new name that people were even afraid to speak of that they just called him You-Know-Who."

"What did he want?" Jemma asked.

"Well, he wanted what every super villain would want. World domination, but he portrayed himself as the one to purify the race to his followers."

"Purify the race?"

"You have heard of it before haven't you? This is a tagline that has been used by many leaders in the past, often to cover their own faults and to push their own agenda to the world."

"Well, Voldemort was one of those leaders."

"Voldemort? Who is Voldemort?" Jemma asked him.

"Voldemort was the name Tom Riddle gave himself when he became a Dark Lord. But he had been using that name since he was a teenager. He just disappeared from the world's eye once he graduated. When he resurfaced again, no one could recognize him as Tom Riddle."

"I have already told you that he wanted to purify the race as he called it, he wanted to purge those who were not worthy in his eyes."

"By purge, you mean?" Jemma trailed off.

"Genocide, that's what he wanted. He wanted to rid the world of everyone who was not of pure blood."

Jemma was horrified. But then a realization came upon her.

"Why are you telling me about this man Harry? How do you know so much about him?"

"I am getting to that" Harry told her.

"A few months before I was born, a prophecy was made."

Jemma really wanted to make a comment about prophecies, but she kept her tongue.

"This prophecy stated that Voldemort would be defeated by someone who was not yet born."

"It was you, wasn't it?" Jemma asked him.

"Yes, the prophecy talked about me. One of Voldemort's followers had overheard it when it was given and it eventually reached back to him."

"My parents went into hiding when they realized that I would be targeted. But we were found out eventually. When I was a year old, Voldemort came into my home and killed my parents."

Jemma gasped at that. It was horrible for anyone to live through something like that.

"How did you escape?" Jemma asked him.

"That's the funny thing Jemma. I didn't escape. Voldemort had used the killing curse on my parents. There is no way to block it. But he failed when he tried to do the same thing to me. All I got was a scar on my forehead, whereas he was destroyed."

"How did you survive?" she asked.

Harry's eyes were getting a little wet as he answered her.

"My mother sacrificed herself for me. That's how I survived."

"I am sorry," Jemma said.

"There were these creatures called Dementors back in my world. They make you relive the worst memory of your life. They would show me the night my parents got murdered. I would see my mother begging for my life with her killer, offering to die herself in exchange for my life."

"I didn't know what my mother looked like till I was 13, and I only got a glimpse of her because the Dementors made me relive my worst memory. For some time then I fancied paying a visit to the Dementors voluntarily just so I could hear her voice again. I have no other memory of either of them."

A single tear rolled down Harry's face. He traced his fingers on his face and took the drop of tear and looked at it.

"I can still produce tears," he said.

Jemma was crying a little too. Guessing about the things that have happened and actually hearing about it were two different things. Harry was right. She was not ready for this. But she had to support him through this if there was any hope for fixing him.

"That is terrible," Jemma said. "I am sorry you had to go through all that."

"It is painful to talk about it, but that is not the worst part of my story" Harry sighed.

"The worst was the war that broke out after Voldemort came back."

"What?" Jemma said, "I thought you said he died."

"We are talking about wizards here Jemma, and Voldemort was a very powerful and intelligent wizard. He knew of ways to cheat death and he didn't have the morals or the humanity to stray him away from that path."

"Anyway," Harry continued, "Voldemort had been nursing a grudge against me for thirteen years and when he came back, I became the target number one. Of course, I didn't know about the prophecy back then. I was always the number one enemy in his eyes."

Jemma was listening to his words with rapt attention now.

"It was a mess. The government didn't believe me when I said he was back. They orcatrized me, called me a liar and did everything possible to put me down. On top of that Voldemort lured me into a trap that got my godfather killed."

Harry took a moment before speaking again, "Maybe he isn't dead. Sirius might still be around somewhere."

Jemma knew where this conversation was going. They had already talked about this, but Harry had a hard time letting his godfather go. Considering all the things that she had heard now, she couldn't blame him.

"Maybe he is," she told Harry, "nothing is certain."

Harry had a small smile on his face as he said, "I know it is a false hope to think that Sirius might still be alive somewhere. But I wouldn't wish for him to be stuck like me."

"Anyway," Harry continued on with his story, "Eventually the government fell under Voldemort's attack. I got the tag of 'Undesirable Number One' and for a whole year I was hunted across the country along with my friends, fighting for our lives."

"You were on the run for a whole year?" Jemma asked.

"Yes," Harry replied.

"But eventually we stopped running and fought back."

"What happened?" she asked him.

"I killed Voldemort."

Jemma was astonished.

"You actually managed to kill him?" she asked.

"Sounds crazy, I know," Harry said.

"I was a seventeen-year-old average wizard, and he was the most powerful wizard of his time. And yet, I won."

Here Harry trailed off, trying to find the right words.

Jemma had noticed Harry's expression darken so she asked, "That's a good thing, right. You won against him."

"You would think so," Harry said.

"You bring down the leader of the terrorist group, and the order falls apart. For a little while there I had thought the war was over and I could finally rest. But his followers knew what awaited them now that their leader was dead. They were like rabid dogs. They didn't surrender. They just went on a rampage."

Jemma could sense the foreboding when Harry spoke of the war.

She almost regretted asking him the question, but ask him she did.

"What did they do?"

"They killed my friends, they killed my family, and they killed my godson."

It was like the floodgates to the dam had opened as Harry let out everything that he had been holding inside. He was openly crying now, for the loved ones he had lost.

Jemma went ahead and wrapped him up in a hug and let him cry on her shoulder. It looked like he had been holding that in for a long time, and talking about it just made it all the more real.

Finally, he composed himself and swiped the tear tracks from his face and said, "I am sorry I cried all over you. I don't usually do that."

He said it with a hint of a smile, trying to bring some cheer back into the conversation.

"It's okay," Jemma told him.

"You are surprisingly short for a seventeen-year-old."

"Blame that on genetics and malnutrition," Harry told her jokingly.

"You can guess what happened next. I was in despair and I wanted the pain to end. The veil sounded like a good solution at the time."

Harry said it with a sense of finality, but Jemma could see that he was still hiding parts of the story from her. But she didn't push him for the rest. He must have a good reason to keep it to himself. He had finally opened up to her and she didn't want to push him further than she had done now.

"Harry, you don't need to think of this life as a waste," Jemma told him.

"We can still figure out a way to give you a physical body. You can start a new life here. You do not need to forget about your past, but you can start to move on from it."

"You are not eleven years old," Harry told her.

"Either you are an alien in disguise or a time-traveling superhero to come with stuff like that. Considering where I come from, both of those theories look entirely feasible."

Jemma gave a slight chuckle at Harry's feeble attempt to lighten the mood by joking around.

"This is about you, Harry. I am not an alien specimen or a time- traveler so you can put those theories on hold."

Harry smiled back at her.

"Just remember this Harry" Jemma told him.

"The dark part of your life is over. This is a new chance. This is the part where the light comes to push back the darkness."

"That sounds really corny, but I will take that."

Harry wrapped the little kid in a hug and said, "Thank you."

"You're welcome."