Nothing More or Less
Harry closed the door slowly behind himself as he stood in Dumbledore’s quarters. He had felt most uncomfortable ever since he had received the letter from his ex-Transfigurations professor saying that Dumbledore had requested he come to his quarters. And now, standing here, he wondered what on earth Dumbledore had asked for him for... Didn't Dumbledore have kin? He remembered, vaguely, the mention of a brother... Dumbledore had talked about him in Harry's fourth year. Something about goats and illiteracy. He struggled to place the conversation, but, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember where or why the subject had come up.
It was two years ago, and he couldn’t remember it. Maybe he’d ask…
And then the blood froze in his veins.
He couldn’t ask Dumbledore, because Dumbledore was dead.
Murdered.
By Snape.
Snape.
The name brushed across his mind like a caress of the wind, and his hands tightened into fists. Gritting his teeth, he fought to restrain his anger…
Glittering eyes like endless black tunnels, greasy, long hair whirling around an enraged, apoplectic face…
There came the noise of an explosion and the soft tinkling of falling glass, and Harry opened his eyes, blinking at the realization that he had closed them in the first place.
Against the red carpet lining the floor in front of him glittered thousands of tiny crystals. He knelt slowly, picking one up, and looked around for the source. And there it was… a bookcase directly opposite him, with the bottom half of a broken vase sitting on it. There were lilies and petunias in the vase, he noticed, snorting at the irony… and they were wilted.
They were dead, too.
A torch was bracketed on the wall above the waist-high mahogany bookcase, and it looked as if it hadn’t been lit in weeks. To his left was a pair of those chintz armchairs Dumbledore loved “ had loved, he corrected himself “ with a half-filled, stagnant glass of what looked like Muggle whiskey next to the largest one. And dropped in the glass was a lemon drop.
For the first time since the day of Dumbledore’s funeral, he smiled.
Rubbing absently at his shoulder, he glanced around the rest of the room. On the wall by the door to Dumbledore’s office hung a large and blank black tapestry. Next to it was a small end-table, on which a notebook full of seemingly blank pages sat. There was another perch for Fawkes opposite the table, and a few stray feathers rested on the tray below it. Sighing sadly, Harry pocketed one of the feathers, brushing his fingers across it as his thoughts turned to the missing phoenix and his painful song of mourning.
A shine caught his eye and he turned back to the tapestry, seeing for the first time the single section of silver thread among the black. Suspicion growing, he raised his wand and touched it lightly to the strand.
The silver spread, blossoming until it formed into letters, and then words, row after endless row.
Names, he realized, of the members of the Order of the Phoenix.
Biting back a triumphant shout, he glanced down at the notebook and saw, to his shock, that all of the names were appearing on its pages.
And then he saw The Name.
Severus Snape.
Eyes narrowing, he touched his wand to the name and turned to look at the notebook.
'Severus Snape
Location Unknown
In Danger'
'Good,' he thought bitterly.
Spinning around angrily, his breaths coming in short, erratic bursts, Harry crossed to the opposite side of the room. There, against the wall, was a single desk, and on it sat a leather book.
Across its spine were the letters “HJP”.
Swallowing, Harry reached out a shaky hand and picked it up.
A minute later, his knees gave out, and he stumbled over to one of the armchairs, a hand against his throat.
The diary fell open in his hand as he stared at the wall, and through the open window came a burst of wind. The pages fluttered and then the wind died, and he looked down to see that the diary had passed twenty pages.
'It truly is sad, the way some people live their lives. The things they want. Humankind wants exactly what is worst for itself. Like Aberforth. His ultimate goal is to be rich. And his best friend, Davis, who desires so much to be Minister of Magic. To have acclaim. Wealth.
Material items, whose value will fade so quickly that they’ll never understand what happened.
I don’t understand why people desire material things. They are so easy to come by and so easy to lose.
Myself, what I want is much harder to achieve.
I want my mother back. I want her to knit me thick woollen socks again, like she used to do every Christmas. I want her to lecture me about my health. I want her to sit me on her knee and tell me that every stitch is filled with her love and respect for me.
I want a wife. I want someone to love me despite all my faults.
I want someone to lean on.
Alas, that’s the one thing I can never let myself have again.'
As he read the short passage, Harry’s breathing slowed. Tears gathered in his eyes, and his anger and pain faded.
'I want someone to lean on.'
'I want someone to love me despite all my faults.'
And then, the next resounding thought sounded:
'Ginny.'
Placing the diary gently on the end table, he moved back toward the desk, found a piece of parchment and a quill, and wrote the hardest letter he would ever write. Clicking his tongue, he watched as Hedwig soared in through the window, where she had perched upon their arrival. Hooting happily at him, Hedwig rubbed her head against his cheek and soared out into the open air, the letter clenched between her talons. Harry watched her go for a moment, smiling absently at the perfect blue sky. Then, picking the diary back up and tucking it into his pockets, he left the tower and strode down to the clearing in the Forbidden Forest where Dumbledore’s tomb stood.
It had been moved the week before. He remembered the frantic letter from Professor McGonagall, begging him to come to Hogwarts. She’d needed his influence, it had said. He’d left Grimmauld Place, which he, Ron and Hermione had taken over immediately after the close of school, immediately upon receiving that letter, leaving Ron and Hermione to “watch the Muggles”, whom they had kidnapped for the summer to bring ‘home’ to Harry. When he’d arrived, he’d found the Minister of Magic standing on the steps of Hogwarts, shouting angrily.
Hogwarts had sealed itself to him.
Smirking happily inside, Harry had cheerfully offered assistance, and the doors had immediately opened themselves for him.
The dear Minister had not been pleased.
Harry himself had been much less pleased when they had arrived in McGonagall’s office and Scrimgeour had demanded that Dumbledore’s tomb be removed from school grounds.
McGonagall had summoned Harry, apparently to play ‘mediator’. Under the guise of reason, he had calmly talked Scrimgeour into allowing Dumbledore’s tomb to be moved to a clearing just inside the forest.
He’d been sweating all the while.
Crossing the grounds, his robes billowed behind him; the expensive, shimmering robes Hermione had forced him to buy two weeks earlier. He made it into the forest and stepped carefully over every branch littering the ground, watching all the while for dark creatures. As he walked, his mind turned to the talk he’d had with the centaurs just three days earlier, one of the most nerve-wracking conversations he had ever had.
They had summoned him a week after Dumbledore’s death, insisting they speak to him. Harry didn’t quite know the whole story, but what he did know was that Flitwick and McGonagall had tried to speak with them to no avail. Without Dumbledore, who had somehow earned the respect of the centaurs, they had lost all regard for the school.
According to Flitwick, Harry remembered with a grin, the centaurs had been very impressed by McGonagall’s hatred of Umbridge, but even that had not swayed them.
And so they had summoned Harry, the one who, Magorian said, Dumbledore had spoken of quite fondly, “despite the foolishness of your youth”, the lead centaur had said solemnly.
Harry had gone into the conversation with Ron and Hermione either side of him, silently willing Hermione to keep her mouth shut “ he was certain the centaurs remembered her from the year before. But luckily, she had known to keep silent, and the centaurs had not spoken a word of her errors.
It had been three hours of speaking, of exchanging histories, terms and concerns. And in the end, the centaurs had declared themselves.
They would not help the wizards, Magorian had said. But neither would they, by inaction, allow wizard-kind to come to harm.
“I am not as foolish as you think me, Harry Potter,” Magorian had said softly. “I know this Voldemort will not be content to conquer merely your kind.”
All in all, Harry thought that talk had gone fairly well. And his dislike for the centaurs had been killed, he admitted to himself with a sigh, when the youngest one, standing near the back of the crowd, cried at the mention of Dumbledore’s name.
Even in death, the man was trying to unite the world.
Behind him came the sound of breaking twigs, renting through his thoughts, and he spun quickly, only to let out a sigh of relief as Bane and Ronan fell in behind him.
“Hello, Bane,” he said, nodding once. “Hello, Ronan."
“Harry Potter,” Ronan said slowly. “You go to visit the Tomb?”
“Yes,” he agreed, touching the diary in his pocket. “I do.”
“We will stand guard,” Bane said softly, lifting his head and straightening his spine.
Smiling, Harry nodded again. “Thank you,” he said quietly, and the two centaurs melted into the shadows.
Two more minutes of travel, and there, ahead of him, was the gleaming white tomb.
His throat tightened, and Harry moved forward, brushing a hand around the border of the tomb.
'I miss you,' he thought brokenly, and the tears slipped down his face.
Raising his wand, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and murmured an incantation which Hermione had found the week before while searching for a cleaning spell.
When he opened his eyes, bright, colorful socks formed a border around the white tomb’s surface.
A smile touched his lips.
“I’m sorry, Albus,” he said slowly. “If I had known what you really wanted… Well, I should have told you. You had it all along.” And then, with a sad smile and misty eyes, he turned and walked away. Just outside the school grounds, he spun and, with a swish of his cloak, disappeared.
His feet touched down in front of the Burrow, and the door opened immediately, Ginny racing out, a letter clutched in her hand and her face streaked with tears. He stayed where he stood, smiling quietly at her, and she let out a strangled sound and launched herself at him.
Glancing over her shoulder, Harry arched a brow at Arthur Weasley, who stood leaning against the doorway with his arms folded. He smiled and nodded, and, bending to whisper something in Ginny’s ear, they disappeared.
Still smiling absently, Arthur turned to speak to his wife, cringing at the thought of the firestorm that would follow.
♠
No one ever really knew why there were colorful socks decorating the rim of Albus Dumbledore’s tomb. For many years afterward, witches and wizards of varying degrees of power tried to remove them, stating that such an image was entirely inappropriate for a fallen wizard of Dumbledore’s caliber. When news of this reached Harry, he simply shrugged it off. No one else understood. He wouldn’t expect them to.
The story spread across the nation that someone had enchanted Dumbledore’s tomb, and soon, though Harry never knew how, the entire Wizarding world learned that it had been Harry who had done so. For this, he was grateful; it confirmed the public consensus that Harry had gone crazy, which kept all but his friends and allies far away from him. No one gawked at him when he traveled to Diagon Alley or tried to give him special discounts. The only thing that remained was Rita Skeeter and her tendency to stalk him in public places, desperate for something about Harry to make a headline.
Years after Harry died, his eldest daughter discovered Dumbledore’s journal in the attic. She flipped through it absently before stopping on a specific, tattered page. Her eyes misting over, she rose and quickly left the house, Dissapparating instantly to the section of the Forbidden Forest where Dumbledore’s tomb lay next to her father’s.
She stopped for a minute to run her hands over the small, colorful socks carved around the edges of Dumbledore’s tomb. The bright and cheery border seemed to soften the blow of seeing the very place where the man Harry had loved as a father lay to rest for the final time. Then, with a soft smile, she turned to her father’s tomb and raised her wand.
She gave her father socks.