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Harry sat up in bed. He did it slowly. He wrung the sleep from his eyes and got a drink of water. Then he hit the showers and soaped himself off. When he entered the Ravenclaw dormitory he found Luna sitting by the fire. Harry walked over to her.
"Something caught your attention?" He asked. He let the words drip from hi slips. She blinked at him for a moment. Staring past and through him.
"Deep waters surround you," she breathed. "I can hardly stand to look at you."
He frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Thinking about you is like stepping into an undercurrent. It threatens to sweep me away to far away times. You, Dumbledore, Grindelwald. Even you-know-who."
"I see," he nodded. "You are threatened to be swept away. Is it difficult to stay in the present?"
"Yes," she breathed. "The future beckons to me. I try to stay in my body in these times with these eyes but I am adrift. I have no anchor. There is nothing so strong."
"Have you practiced mindfulness?" He asked her.
She blinked at him. He elaborated.
"Being present. Its critical to Occlumency. I can teach you some therapeutic grounding techniques. They could help."
"Pain grounds me," she dismissed.
"Even still," he mustreed on. "Try focusing on five things you can see in the present. Four things you can touch. Three things you can hear. Two things you can smell. And one thing you can taste."
"I taste nothing," she murmured.
"Tea?" He offered. "Or coffee?"
"Coffee," she decided. Then she got up. She followed him through winding staircases past the paintings down to the great hall.
He watched her pou rth ecoffe e with a little cream. He watched her add sugar. She sipped at it gently. Then she sighed. "I can see you. I see the chandeliers. I see the paintings. I see the slytherins. I see the gryffindors."
"And?" He pressed. "Four things you can touch?"
"I can touch the table. The bench. You're close enough to touch. I can touch my silverware and the muffin."
"Very good. Three things you can hear?"
"Laughter." She smiled. "I hear your voice. I hear my voice."
"Go on."
"I smell the eggs and toast."
"And taste?"
"Coffee. Its nice and strong."
"Very good. There are other grounding techniques I can teach you. They could help. They are designed to help with dissociation but they may help ground you in the representation. They are designed to force you back into your body when you are psychotic."
"I can see how that could help…"
"We can try it. It couldn't hurt," he advised with a smile.
"Thank you, Harry." SHe beamed. "It means a lot to have someone who cares. SOmeone who knows. Someone who knows and cares. I…"
She hesitated. Her eyes went distant.
"What? What is it?" He hammered her.
"The child shall be born of your other and his. She shall outstrip you, under your guidance. In the end you will lose what you love most. In exchange you shall have…"
"Have what?" He pressed to hear the end of the prophecy.
"Me. If you want."
"I am not sure…" he trailed off.
"I know I'm not much to look at," she blushed.
"That's not true. You're good looking. I just have someone else."
"I know…" she breathed once more. "I know," she repeated softer the second time. "You took and took and took from everything. Then you cast it all aside and said 'not you.'"
"Not you what?" He wondered.
"Not me. You look after me. You look after everyone. You care. Its hard. It must be so hard to care so much. You would even save the girl in the crib from everyone."
He didn't know what that meant. "What girl?"
"The other's daughter," she explained with finality. As though that explained everything. It didn't. He was lost.
"We'll try another grounding technique sometime." He decided. He took a bite of eggs and toast. He didn't eat much. His stomach felt small looking at Luna. The sight was surely no one's blessing. And for a heartbeat he thought that he could see forever. He couldn't. He didn't. He thumbed Dumbledore's elder wand in his pocket. The wood felt smooth under his thumb. It was a wall so tall and thick he couldn't ever get through. Not on his own. But he wasn't alone. He had his friends and Dumbledore. He had a family for once. But that cut both ways. He had things he could lose. There were things which could be stolen from him. There were subtle contradictions in his world. There were things which couldn';t have happened. There were memories which denied themselves.
Harry thought for a moment about the nature of thought. It felt for a moment like he understood. He was neither the mechanism nor the animal. He didn't really have a center. It was all sensory data without end. It felt like God was assaulting him. He had no middle. It was awareness and the sensation of awareness. Thought without end would be a curse. That was why sleep existed. TOo give him rest and a break. But wasn't sleep just death being shy? It was a lot like death in many ways. What was the purpose of sleep? DId it have one or was it just a remnant from before light could light up the night. It was too dark. Everything more sophisticated than an earthworm slept. Why? For what purpose? To what end?
Thoughts were strange. Even for someone who explored them so easily and dived deep and thought often he couldn't put it down. He couldn't nail it. All thoughts were different. All minds were unique. But how? The stream of consciousness in his head didn't have a middle. Conscious him, for all tha the appeared conscious, didn't really exist. He looked at the brown toast. Brown was strange. Why was brown? How was brown? It was just wavelengths of light but then how did it become the sensation of brown. The experience of something brown. How did qualia become? How does food taste? When he took a bite of toast he tasted toast. But how? Why did that happen? How come he didn't just experience chemical information? Why did it become the sensation of toast? No one really knew. No one even in the mind arts had the beginning of an answer. The singular problem of the mind was unique. Except perhaps the soul.
He knew other people's minds but he interpreted them through his own. He could never step outside himself and know another. He couldn't ever experience objective reality with no filter. And why? Did he want to or would it be awful to try.
He pressed for a moment before giving up. The hard problem of consciousness was beyond him. He could never know. And he was trapped for lack of a better word within his own mind. Within his own experiences. Why the fuck was brown? He knew Daphne but could he ever really experience her? Could he ever know her mode of thought? He interpreted it on his own without experiencing it. He felt painfully alone. He felt like a bird on the wind looking at a mountain. He could feel the sunshine but he couldn't communicate it. He was alone. The presence of a sunset. The present sunset was forever out of reach. In the world of ideals there was the quintessential. Here was the thing beyond all meaning. Here was the dream dreams have. But that wasn't enough.
If the greatest mystery in all of history was hiding anywhere else but within our own minds we would never stop talking about it. But because it was so close and unique to all of us we hardly ever discuss it. On the wing of wind and will he could almost parse it into a sentence but no matter how he worked his tongue no words came and no thoughts finished. The more he tried the mor eit felt like describing color with sounds. Consciousness was something everyone knew what it was but couldn't be put into words. It went beyond such things. It was better than them. It went above the mind's ability to comprehend. To wherever souls go when they aren't here with us. There were ghosts which indicated they could linger but a raw soul was a powerful thing. Not these subtle powerless imprints left behind by a body and mind and soul all together. Ghosts were less than something. They were the quintessentially nothing of something. They were a shallow curse. They were what was left when body and soul were stripped away and the mind was set to linger by a remnant of the magic which once inhabited a body.
They were without form. They were beyond this place. They couldn't be reached in many of the same ways the soul couldn't be reached. They weren't even really minds left behind. Not really at least. They lacked the essential ingredients to become something. They were Petra. These hungry ghosts which starved and wanted to consume. They couldn't be saved and nor would they want to be. They didn't want to move on. To whatever came next.
Harry rose from the table. He ate little but that was alright. Just a single piece of toast with some scrambled eggs on top. It wasn't much ut it would do. He had his magic to sustain him. As he rose he was struck by deja vu… he saw…
He was getting up from the table and the first year girl flinched away from him. He wasn't sure why. He never hurt magicals. Not yet at least. The magi were special and sacred. They had the power to rise above. He ignored the girl and pressed on. What he really wanted was to see Albus. He couldn't though. He touched his fingers to his lips. He missed kissing and being kissed.
He liked to believe Albus was hurting back in England. It wasn't cruel or unkind. It just showed what they were willing to do for one another. Food was a problem. It was scarce at the moment. For all his power there was nothing he could do about it. Women with wheelbarrows of money couldn't afford bread. The inflation was out of control. They needed a standard like gold. Like the magi had. It prevented the government from wildly printing money. Of course the war indemnities were crushing Germany.
There was nothing he could do. He didn't have the power to reshape the economy of the world. He felt so powerless. He knew he could lead. But I didn't know where to yet. He needed a mouth piece. A figurehead. Someone to stand within and behind. To muster the muggles into a united front.
It had been impossible for Germany to win the first world war. Outright impossible. The allies had too many, well, allies. And now the people of Germany were being crushed. The economic devastation was everywhere. Homeless and starving children lined the streets. And above it all was an overall sense of betrayal and dread. One could taste it.
It was a myth that they had been stabbed in the back by the Kaiser's generals. It was a useful and believable myth. During the war the people had suffered so much. They starved. They spent less and rode less. It was hard to believe it was all for nothing. But it had been. And now the French were crushing them with these payments.
He wondered if the Russian immigrants had the right of it. They had revolted and revealed the imperialists claims of the Tzar's government. When they led their lightning coup during those October months the machine gunners had backed them. The soldiers backed them against Karensky's government. The whole thing had been a house of cards. Grindelwald wasn't sure he had ever heard of a government with less sure footing than Karensky's. They had support from neither the left who hated the war nor the right after the Kornilov affair. Now the soviet's reigned supreme. They crushed the whites. In a way it was beautiful but it was also very threatening. Grindelwald's conservative instincts roared. When the left came to Germany they had been crushed. There was no place for them here.
The soviet's believed they were at the forefront of a global revolution and were to sit on the side of a hill overlooking the great battle. But the revolution never came to Germany. Instead it was the right which was rising here in Germany. Stabbed in the back and betrayed, the people wanted bread and so they leaned back into conservative instincts. The people in Germany were more advanced than those of Russia. Grindelwald had read theory. Two revolutions. One for the bourgeois and another for the proletariat. He despised the model but it certainly carried some weight. But the proletarian revolution never came.
He had space to test his ideas. He had space to incorporate the things he wanted to teach muggles. He could bring these people food, water, and shelter. He could bring them war and peace. He could bring rain to their crops and food to their tables. He just needed that little nudge. He needed to dream up a solution to the problem of the statute of secrecy. He needed to break the system. It wouldn't be done at all at once. It needed time and patience. With the right figurehead he could devise a new government. Something conservative and strong. Stronger than Kaiserism which the allies had broken. But to do that he needed to dream. He needed Albus. He couldn't destroy it all on his own. He would command a great and terrible power.
Harry blinked. Harry knew the history. Grindelwald had found his figurehead. Adolf Hitler. He led the black hundreds against the left. Harry didn't lean into political theory. He didn't understand the doctrine of two revolutions. He never read anything of the sort. He was surprised to learn conservative Grindelwald had. He would need to learn more. More about politics and about himself. He was in the process of becoming something between that of his forefathers. He wasn't Voldemort. He wasn't Grindelwald. He wasn't Dumbledore. But he was. He had the best claim on those identities besides the men in question.
Chop down a tree. Burn it to ash. Make a table or chair out of it. Identity would not seem to be maintained. But plant a tree and replace every molecule in it with another and identity seemed to be maintained. Plant an acorn and that acorn would have its own identity even though it was once a part of a previous tree. It had the best claim on the identity of the previous tree but it was singular. It was largely the same with people. Identity was maintained at times but in the right light it fell apart. It was a convincing illusion if it was an illusion. Though if it was an illusion then it hardly mattered since no one could be around to do the doubting. Harry thought therefore he was. Or at least something was thinking. It may be that he was just the observer of these thoughts and was a passenger in his body. So we push the line back. Where do we exist? We don't choose the things we like or dislike. We may not even choose our actions. What were we really? Were we anything at all? Was Harry? He was drowning in solipsism for an impossible moment. It felt a bit like stepping into Sirius Black. Then he reached out to Daphne. Instinctively he caressed her mind and heard her sigh across the Great Hall. He had Daphne. Without that he would drown in his own loneliness. He was proud of his ability to be alone but no man was an island. His home was a castle but it shouldn't have to be a fortress. He was in this with her and she saw him and loved him. Sure she belonged to him but so did he belong to her. He thought so at least. He needed her. He relied on her.
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-WG