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// 15058
//== Taboo Tradeoffs, Aftermath 3, Distance
// 15059
//__This chapter received a major, significiant revision on December 16th,
//2012. The main revision starts about halfway through - search on the word
//“trivial” to find it.__
// 15060
//Slow and hard, the long stairway that led to the peak of Ravenclaw. From the
//inside, the stairway seemed like a straight upward slope, though from the
//outside you could see that it logically had to be a spiral. You could only get
//to the top of the Ravenclaw tower by making that long climb without shortcuts,
//stone step by stone step; passing beneath Harry’s shoes, pushed down by his
//wearying legs.
// 15061
//Harry had seen Hermione safely off to bed.
// 15062
//He had lingered in the Ravenclaw common room long enough to collect a few
//signatures that might be useful to Hermione later. Not many students had
//signed; wizards hadn’t been trained to think in the put-up-or-shut-up,
//stick-your-neck-out-and-make-a-prediction-or-stop-pretending-to-believe-in-your-theory
//rules of Muggle science. Most of them hadn’t seen anything __incongruent__
//about being too nervous to sign an agreement saying that Hermione got to hold
//it over them for the rest of their lives if they were wrong, while acting
//outwardly confident that she was guilty. But just having demanded the
//signatures would make the point after the truth came out, if anyone ever again
//suspected Hermione of anything Dark. She wouldn’t have to go through this
//__twice,__ at least.
// 15063
//After that Harry had left the common room quickly, because all the kindly
//forgiving sentiments he’d reasoned out were getting harder and harder to
//remember. Sometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn’t
//anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the
//altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and
//angry Harry In The Moment.
// 15064
//The circular platform at the top of the Ravenclaw tower wasn’t the tallest
//place in Hogwarts, but the Ravenclaw tower jutted out from the main body of the
//castle, so you couldn’t see down into the top platform from the Astronomy
//tower. A quiet place to think, if you had an awful lot to think about. A place
//where few other students ever came - there were easier niches of privacy, if
//privacy was all you wanted.
// 15065
//The night-lit torches of Hogwarts were far below. The platform itself offered
//few obstructions; the stairs emerged from an uncovered gap in the floor, rather
//than an upright door. From this place, then, the stars were as visible as they
//ever were on Earth.
// 15066
//The boy lay down in the center of the platform, heedless of his robes that
//might be dirtied, dropping his head to rest upon the rock-tiled floor; so that,
//except for a few half-seen crenellations of stone at vision’s edge, and a
//sliver of crescent moon, reality became starlight.
// 15067
//The pinpoints of light in dark velvet twinkled, wavering and returning, a
//different kind of beauty from their steady brilliance in the Silent Night.
// 15068
//Harry gazed out abstractly, his mind on other things.
// 15069
//__This day your war against Voldemort has begun…__
// 15070
//Dumbledore had said that, after the Incident with Rescuing Bellatrix from
//Azkaban. That had been a false alarm, but the phrase expressed the sentiment
//well.
// 15071
//Two nights ago his war had begun, and Harry didn’t know with __who__.
// 15072
//Dumbledore thought it was Lord Voldemort, returned from the dead, making his
//first move against the boy who had defeated him last time.
// 15073
//Professor Quirrell had put detection wards on Draco, fearing that Hogwarts’s
//mad Headmaster would try to frame Harry for the death of Lucius’s son.
// 15074
//Or Professor Quirrell had set up the entire thing, and __that__ was how
//he’d known where to find Draco. Severus Snape thought the Hogwarts Defense
//Professor was an obvious suspect, even __the__ obvious suspect.
// 15075
//And Severus Snape himself might or might not be even remotely trustworthy.
// 15076
//__Someone__ had declared war against Harry, their first strike had been
//meant to take out Draco and Hermione both, and it was only by the barest of
//margins that Harry had saved Hermione.
// 15077
//You couldn’t call it victory. Draco had been removed from Hogwarts, and if that
//wasn’t death, it wasn’t clear how it could be undone, or what shape Draco might
//be in when he got back. The country of magical Britain now thought Hermione an
//attempted-murderer, which might or might not make her decide to do the sane
//thing and leave. Harry had sacrificed his entire fortune to undo his loss, and
//that card could only be played once.
// 15078
//Some unknown power had struck at him, and if that blow had been partially
//deflected, it had still hit __really hard.__
// 15079
//At least his dark side hadn’t asked anything of him in exchange for saving
//Hermione. Maybe because his dark side __wasn’t__ an imaginary voice like
//Hufflepuff; Harry might __imagine__ his Hufflepuff part as wanting
//different things from himself, but his dark side wasn’t like that. His “dark
//side”, so far as Harry could tell, was a different way that Harry sometimes
//__was__. Right now, Harry wasn’t angry; and trying to ask what “dark
//Harry” wanted was a phone ringing unanswered. The thought even seemed a little
//strange; could you owe something to a different way you sometimes were?
// 15080
//Harry stared up at the random stars, the scattered twinkling lights that human
//brains couldn’t help but pattern-match into imaginary constellations.
// 15081
//And then there was that promise Harry had sworn.
// 15082
//Draco to help Harry reform Slytherin House. And Harry to take as an enemy
//whomever Harry believed, in his best judgment as a rationalist, to have killed
//Narcissa Malfoy. If Narcissa had never gotten her own hands dirty, if indeed
//she’d been burned alive, if the killer hadn’t been tricked - those were all the
//conditions Harry could remember making. He probably should’ve written it down,
//or better yet, never made a promise requiring that many caveats in the first
//place.
// 15083
//There were plausible outs, for the sort of person who’d let themselves
//rationalize an out. Dumbledore hadn’t __actually__ confessed. He hadn’t
//come right out and said he’d done it. There were plausible reasons for an
//actually-guilty Dumbledore to behave that way. But it was __also__ what
//you’d expect to see, if someone else had burned Narcissa, and Dumbledore had
//taken credit.
// 15084
//Harry shook his head, flattening one side of his hair and then another against
//the stone-tiled floor. There was still a final out, Draco could still release
//him from the oath at any time. He could, at least, describe the situation to
//Draco, and talk about options with him, when they met again. It didn’t seem
//like a very likely prospect for release - but the idea of talking something
//over honestly was enough to satisfy the part of himself that demanded adherence
//to oaths. Even if it only meant delaying, it was better than taking a good man
//as an enemy.
// 15085
//__But__ is __Dumbledore a good man?__ asked the voice of Hufflepuff.
//__If Dumbledore burned someone alive - wasn’t the whole point that good
//people may kill, but never kill with suffering?__
// 15086
//__Maybe he killed her instantly,__ said Slytherin, __and then lied
//to Lucius about the burning-alive part. But… if there was__ any
//__possibility of the Death Eaters magically verifying how Narcissa died…
//and if being caught in a lie would’ve endangered Light-side families…__
// 15087
//__Be careful what we cleverly rationalize,__ warned Gryffindor.
// 15088
//__You have to expect reputational effects on how other people treat you,__
//said Hufflepuff. __If you decide there’s sufficient reason to burn a
//woman alive, one of the predictable side effects is that good people decide
//you’ve crossed the line and have to be stopped. Dumbledore should’ve expected
//that. He’s got no right to complain.__
// 15089
//__Or maybe he expects us to be smarter,__ said Slytherin. __Now that
//we know this much of the truth - no matter the exact details of the full story
//- can we really believe that Dumbledore is a terrible, terrible person who
//ought to be our enemy? In the middle of a horrible bloody war, Dumbledore set__
//one __enemy civilian on fire? That’s only bad by the standards of comic
//books, not by any sort of realistic historical standard.__
// 15090
//Harry stared up at the night sky, remembering history.
// 15091
//In real life, in real wars…
// 15092
//During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear
//weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the
//possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the
//discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator.
//Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of
//science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi
//had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so,
//years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was
//deuterium.
// 15093
//The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in
//occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a
//total of twenty-four civilian deaths.
// 15094
//The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a
//civilian Norwegian ferry, the __SS Hydro.__
// 15095
//Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of
//the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid
//had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had
//let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would
//have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the
//civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead
//Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. Some of the
//Norwegian rescuers of the ship had thought the German soldiers present should
//be left to drown, but this view had not prevailed, and the German survivors had
//been rescued. And that had been the end of the Nazi nuclear weapons program.
// 15096
//Which was to say that Knut Haukelid had killed innocent people. One of whom,
//the night watchman of the ship, had been a __good__ person. Someone who’d
//gone out of his way to help Haukelid, at risk to himself; from the kindness of
//his heart, for the highest moral reasons; and been sent to drown in turn.
//Afterward, in the cold light of history, it had looked like the Nazis had never
//been close to getting nuclear weapons after all.
// 15097
//And Harry had never read anything suggesting that Haukelid had acted wrongly.
// 15098
//That was war in real life. In terms of total damage and who’d gotten hit, what
//Haukelid had done was considerably __worse__ than what Dumbledore might
//have done to Narcissa Malfoy, or what Dumbledore had possibly done to leak the
//prophecy to Lord Voldemort to get him to attack Harry’s parents.
// 15099
//If Haukelid had been a comic-book superhero, he’d have somehow gotten all the
//civilians off the ferry, he would’ve attacked the German soldiers directly…
// 15100
//…rather than let a single innocent person die…
// 15101
//…but Knut Haukelid hadn’t been a superhero.
// 15102
//And neither had been Albus Dumbledore.
// 15103
//Harry closed his eyes, swallowing hard a few times against the sudden choking
//sensation. It was abruptly very clear that while Harry was going around trying
//to live the ideals of the Enlightenment, Dumbledore was the one who’d actually
//__fought in a war__. Nonviolent ideals were cheap to hold if you were a
//scientist, living inside the __Protego__ bubble cast by the police
//officers and soldiers whose actions you had the luxury to question. Albus
//Dumbledore seemed to have started out with ideals at least as strong as Harry’s
//own, if not stronger; and Dumbledore hadn’t gotten through his war without
//killing enemies and sacrificing friends.
// 15104
//__Are you so much better than Haukelid and Dumbledore, Harry Potter, that
//you’ll be able to fight without a single casualty? Even in the world of comic
//books, the only reason a superhero like Batman even__ looks __successful
//is that the comic-book readers only notice when Important Named Characters die,
//not when the Joker shoots some random nameless bystander to show off his
//villainy. Batman is a murderer no less than the Joker, for all the lives the
//Joker took that Batman could’ve saved by killing him. That’s what the man named
//Alastor was trying to tell Dumbledore, and afterward Dumbledore regretted
//having taken so long to change his mind. Are you really going to try to follow
//the path of the superhero, and never sacrifice a single piece or kill a single
//enemy?__
// 15105
//Fatigued, Harry turned his attention away from the dilemma for a moment, opened
//his eyes again to regard the hemisphere of night, which required no decisions
//from him.
// 15106
//Near the edge of his vision, the pale white crescent of the Moon, the light
//from which had left one-and-a-quarter seconds ago, around 375,000 kilometers of
//distance in Earth’s space of simultaneity.
// 15107
//Above and to the side, Polaris, the North Star; the first star Harry had
//learned to identify in the sky, by following the edge of the Big Dipper. That
//was actually a five-star system with a brilliant central supergiant, 434
//light-years from Earth. It was the first ‘star’ whose name Harry had ever
//learned from his father, so long ago that he couldn’t have guessed how old he’d
//been.
// 15108
//The dim fog that was the Milky Way, so many billions of distant stars that they
//became an indistinct river, the plane of a galaxy that stretched 100,000
//light-years across. If Harry had experienced any sense of wonder when he’d
//__first__ been told that, he’d been too young for him to remember now that
//first time, across a few years’ distance.
// 15109
//In the center of the constellation Andromeda, the star Andromeda, which was
//really the Andromeda Galaxy. The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, 2.4 million
//light-years away, containing an estimated trillion stars.
// 15110
//Numbers like those made ‘infinity’ pale by comparison, because ‘infinity’ was
//just featureless and blank. Thinking that the stars were ‘infinitely’ distant
//was a lot less scary than trying to work out what 2.4 million light-years
//amounted to in meters. 2.4 million light-years, times 31 million seconds in a
//year, times a photon moving at 300,000,000 meters per second…
// 15111
//It was strange to think that such distances might __not__ be unreachably
//far away. Magic was loose in the universe, things like Time-Turners and
//broomsticks. Had any wizard ever tried to measure the speed of a portkey, or a
//phoenix?
// 15112
//And the human understanding of magic couldn’t possibly be anywhere
//__near__ the underlying laws. What would you be able to do with magic if
//you __really__ understood it?
// 15113
//A year ago, Dad had gone to the Australian National University in Canberra for
//a conference where he’d been an invited speaker, and he’d taken Mum and Harry
//along. And they’d all visited the National Museum of Australia, because, it had
//turned out, there was basically nothing else to do in Canberra. The glass
//display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines -
//like giant wooden shoehorns, they’d looked, but smoothed and carved and
//ornamented with painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern
//humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the
//bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how __non-obvious__ was the
//idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important,
//if all your history’s heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead
//of Thomas Edison? How could anyone have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower
//with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and
//nuclear energy?
// 15114
//Could you have looked up into the sky, at the brilliant light of the Sun, and
//deduced that the universe contained greater sources of power than mere fire?
//Would you have realized that if the fundamental physical laws permitted it,
//someday humans would tap the same energies as the Sun? Even if nothing you
//could imagine doing with rock-throwers or woven pouches - no pattern of running
//across the savannah and nothing you could obtain by hunting animals - would
//accomplish that even in imagination?
// 15115
//It wasn’t like modern-day Muggles had gotten anywhere near the limits of what
//Muggle physics said was possible. And yet like hunter-gatherers conceptually
//bound to their rock-throwers, most Muggles lived in a world defined by the
//limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle
//physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the
//Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that
//away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history
//books, well away from their personal realities: __Long ago and far away,
//ever so long ago.__ No surprise, then, that the wizarding world lived in a
//conceptual universe bounded - not by fundamental laws of magic that nobody even
//knew - but just by the surface rules of known Charms and enchantments. You
//couldn’t observe the way magic was practiced nowadays and __not__ be
//reminded of the National Museum of Australia, once you realized what you were
//seeing. Even if Harry’s first guess had been mistaken, one way or another it
//was still inconceivable that the __fundamental__ laws of the universe
//contained a special case for human lips shaping the phrase ‘Wingardium
//Leviosa’. And yet even that fumbling grasp of magic was enough to do things
//that Muggle physics said should be __forever impossible: __the
//Time-Turner, water conjured out of nothingness by __Aguamenti.__ What were
//the __ultimate__ possibilities of invention, if the underlying laws of the
//universe permitted an eleven-year-old with a stick to violate almost every
//constraint in the Muggle version of physics?
// 15116
//Like a hunter-gatherer trying to look up at the Sun, and guess that the
//universe had to be shaped in a way that allowed for nuclear energy…
// 15117
//It made you wonder if maybe twenty thousand million million million meters
//wasn’t so much distance, after all.
// 15118
//There was a step beyond Abstract Reasoning Harry which he could take, given
//time enough to compose himself and the right surroundings; something beyond
//Abstract Reasoning Harry, as that was beyond Harry In The Moment. Looking up at
//the stars, you could try to imagine what the distant descendants of humanity
//would think of your dilemma - in a hundred million years, when the stars would
//have spun through great galactic movements into entirely new positions, every
//constellation scattered. It was an elementary theorem of probability that if
//you knew what your answer would be after updating on future evidence, you ought
//to adopt that answer right now. If you __knew__ your destination, you were
//already there. And by analogy, if not quite by theorem, if you could guess what
//the descendants of humanity would think of something, you ought to go ahead and
//take that as your own best guess.
// 15119
//From that vantage point the idea of killing off two-thirds of the Wizengamot
//seemed a lot less appealing than it had a few hours earlier. Even if you
//__had__ to do it, even if you knew for a solid fact that it would be the
//best thing for magical Britain and that the complete Story of Time would look
//worse if you didn’t do it… even as a necessity, the deaths of sentient beings
//would still be a tragedy. One more element of the sorrows of Earth; the Most
//Ancient Earth from which everything had begun, long ago and far away, ever so
//long ago.
// 15120
//__He is not like Grindelwald__. __There is nothing human left in
//him. Him you must destroy. Save your fury for that, and that alone -__
// 15121
//Harry shook his head slightly, tilting the stars a little in his vision, as he
//lay on the stone floor looking upward and outward and forward in time. Even if
//Dumbledore was right, and the true enemy was utterly mad and evil… in a hundred
//million years the organic lifeform known as Lord Voldemort probably wouldn’t
//seem much different from all the other bewildered children of Ancient Earth.
//Whatever Lord Voldemort had done to himself, whatever Dark rituals seemed so
//horribly irrevocable on a merely human scale, it wouldn’t be beyond curing with
//the technology of a hundred million years. Killing him, even if you
//__had__ to do it to save the lives of others, would be just one more death
//for future sentient beings to be sad about. How could you look up at the stars,
//and believe anything else?
// 15122
//Harry stared up at the twinkling lights of Eternity and wondered what the
//children’s children’s children would think of what Dumbledore had maybe-done to
//Narcissa.
// 15123
//But even if you tried framing the question that way, asking what humanity’s
//descendants would think, it still drew only on your own knowledge, not theirs.
//The answer still came from inside yourself, and it could still be mistaken. If
//you didn’t know the hundredth decimal digit of pi yourself, then you didn’t
//know how the children’s children’s children would calculate it, for all that
//the fact was trivial.
// 15124
//Slowly - he’d been lying there, looking at the stars, for longer than he’d
//planned - Harry sat up from the ground. Pushing himself to his feet, the
//muscles protesting, he walked over to the edge of the stone platform at the
//height of the Ravenclaw tower. The stone crenellations surrounding the edge of
//the tower weren’t high, not high enough to be safe. They were markers, clearly,
//rather than railings. Harry didn’t approach too close to the edge; there was no
//point in taking chances. Looking down at the Hogwarts grounds below, he was
//predictably feeling a sense of dizziness, the wobbly affliction called vertigo.
//His brain was alarmed, it seemed, because the ground below was so
//__distant__. It might have been fully 50 meters away.
// 15125
//The lesson, it seemed, was that things had to be __incredibly__ close by
//before your brain could comprehend them well enough to feel fear.
// 15126
//It was a rare brain that could feel strongly about anything, if it wasn’t close
//in space, close in time, near at hand, within easy reach…
// 15127
//Before, Harry had imagined that going to Azkaban would require planning and
//cooperation from a grownup confederate. Portkeys, broomsticks, invisibility
//spells. Some way of getting to the bottom levels without the Aurors noticing,
//so he could carve his way into the central pit where the shadows of Death
//waited.
// 15128
//And that had been enough to put the prospect away, into the future, safely
//apart from the __now__.
// 15129
//He hadn’t realized until today that it might be as simple as finding Fawkes and
//telling the phoenix that it was time.
// 15130
//Memories were rising up again, memories that Harry could never manage to forget
//for long. Though the stones beneath his feet were not smooth like metal, though
//the moonlit sky stretched all around him, somehow it was very easy to imagine
//himself trapped in a long metal corridor lit by dim orange light.
// 15131
//The night was quiet, quiet enough for memories to be clearly audible.
// 15132
//__No, I didn’t mean it, please don’t die!__
// 15133
//__No, I didn’t mean it, please don’t die!__
// 15134
//__Don’t take it away, don’t don’t don’t -__
// 15135
//The world blurred, and Harry wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
// 15136
//If __Hermione__ had been the one behind that door -
// 15137
//If Hermione had been put in Azkaban, Harry would have called the phoenix and
//gone there and burned away every last Dementor and it wouldn’t have made a
//single difference how crazy it was or what else he’d wanted to do with his
//life. That was just - that was - that was just how it was.
// 15138
//And the woman who __was__ behind that door - wasn’t there someone,
//somewhere, to whom she too was precious? Wasn’t it only Harry’s distance from
//her life that was preventing his brain from being driven to Azkaban to
//__save her no matter what?__ What would it have taken to compel him? Would
//he have needed to know her face? Her name? Her favorite color? Would he have
//been driven to Azkaban to save Tracey Davis? Would he have been compelled there
//to save Professor McGonagall? Mum and Dad - there wasn’t even any question. And
//that woman had said she was someone’s mother. How many people had wished for
//the power to break Azkaban? How many prisoners of Azkaban dreamed nightly of
//such a miraculous rescue?
// 15139
//__None. It’s a happy thought.__
// 15140
//Maybe he __should__ harrow Azkaban. All he had to do was find Fawkes and
//tell him it was time. Visualize the center of the Dementor’s pit as he’d seen
//it from the broomstick, and let the phoenix take him there. Cast the True
//Patronus Charm at point-blank range and to hell with what came after.
// 15141
//All he had to do was go find Fawkes.
// 15142
//It might be as simple as thinking of the flame, calling for the fire-bird in
//his heart -
// 15143
//A star flashed in the night.
// 15144
//By the time Harry’s eyes had jumped with a reflex action trained on meteor
//showers, another part of him was surprised that the astronomical phenomenon was
//still there; a faint star whose brightness was slowly visibly waxing. There was
//a startled moment when Harry wondered whether he was seeing, not a meteor, but
//a nova or supernova - could you __see__ them getting brighter like that?
//Was the first stage of a nova supposed to be that yellow-orange color?
// 15145
//Then the new star moved again, and seemed to grow as well as brightening. It
//looked __closer__ suddenly, no longer so far away that distance became
//moot. Like what you thought was a star, turning out to be an airplane, a
//lighted form whose shape you could actually see…
// 15146
//…no, not a plane…
// 15147
//The realization seemed to spread out from Harry’s chest in a wave of prickling,
//sweat preparing to break out.
// 15148
//…a bird.
// 15149
//A piercing cry split the night, echoing from the rooftops of Hogwarts.
// 15150
//The approaching creature trailed fire as it flew, shedding golden flames like
//sparks from its feathers as the mighty wings beat and beat again. Even as it
//swooped up in a great curve to hover a few paces away from Harry, even as the
//flames surrounding its passage diminished, the creature seemed no dimmer, no
//less bright; as though some unseen Sun shone upon it and illuminated it.
// 15151
//Great shining wings red like a sunset, and eyes like incandescent pearls,
//blazing with golden fire and determination.
// 15152
//The phoenix’s beak opened, and let out a great caw that Harry understood as
//though it had been a spoken word:
// 15153
//__COME!__
// 15154
//Not even realizing, the boy stumbled back from the edge of the rooftop, eyes
//still locked on the phoenix, his whole body trembling and tensed, his fists
//clutching and releasing at his side; stepping back, stepping away.
// 15155
//The phoenix cawed again, a desperate, pleading, sound. It didn’t come through
//in words, this time, but it came through in feelings, an echo of everything
//that Harry had ever felt about Azkaban and every temptation to __action,__
//to just __do__ something about it, the desperate need to do something
//__now__ and not delay any longer, all spoken in the cry of a bird.
// 15156
//__Let’s go. It’s time.__ The voice that spoke came from inside Harry, not
//from the phoenix; from so deep inside it couldn’t be given a separate name like
//‘Gryffindor’.
// 15157
//All he had to do was step forward and touch the phoenix’s talons, and it would
//take him where he needed to be, where he kept thinking he ought to be, down
//into the central pit of Azkaban. Harry could see the image in his mind, shining
//with unbearable clarity, the image of himself suddenly smiling with joyous
//release as he threw all his fears away and __chose__ -
// 15158
//“But I -” Harry whispered, not even aware of what he was saying. Harry lifted
//his shaking hands to wipe at his eyes from which tears had sprung, as the
//phoenix hovered before him with great wing-sweeps. “But I - there’s other
//people I also have to save, other things I have to do -”
// 15159
//The fire-bird let out a piercing scream, and the boy flinched back as though
//from a blow. It wasn’t a command, it wasn’t an objection, it was the
//__knowledge -__
// 15160
//The corridors lit by dim orange light.
// 15161
//It felt like a tightening compulsion in Harry’s chest, the desire to just
//__do __it and get it over with. He might die, but if he didn’t die he
//could feel __clean__ again. Have principles that were more than excuses
//for inaction. It was __his__ life. His to spend, if he chose. He could do
//it any time he wanted…
// 15162
//…if he wasn’t a good person.
// 15163
//The boy stood there on the rooftop, his own eyes locked with two points of
//fire. The stars might have had time to shift in their constellations while he
//stood there, agonizing over the decision…
// 15164
//…that wouldn’t…
// 15165
//…change.
// 15166
//The boy’s eyes flickered once to the stars above; and then he looked at the
//phoenix.
// 15167
//“Not yet,” the boy said in a voice hardly audible. “Not yet. There’s too much
//else I have to do. Please come back later, when I’ve found others who can cast
//the True Patronus - in six months, maybe -”
// 15168
//Without word, without sound, a sphere of fire surrounded the bird’s form,
//crackling and blazing with white and crimson veins as though it meant to
//consume that which lay within; and when the fire dispersed into grey smoke, no
//phoenix remained.
// 15169
//There was silence on the top of the Ravenclaw tower. The boy gradually lowered
//his hands from his ears, pausing only to wipe at his wet cheeks.
// 15170
//Slowly, the boy turned -
// 15171
//Then cried out and leapt back and almost fell off the Ravenclaw tower; though
//the misstep would hardly have mattered, with that other wizard standing there.
// 15172
//“And so it was done,” Albus Dumbledore said, almost in a whisper. “So it was
//done.” Fawkes was on his shoulder, staring at where the other phoenix had been
//with an indecipherable avian gaze.
// 15173
//“__What are you doing here?__”
// 15174
//“Ah?” said the ancient man standing on the roof-platform’s opposite corner. “I
//felt the presence of a creature Hogwarts did not know, and came to see, of
//course.” Slowly the old wizard’s shaking hand came up to remove the half-moon
//glasses, his other hand wiped at his eyes and forehead with his robe’s sleeve.
//“I dared - I dared not speak - I knew, I knew this choice above all choices
//must be your own -”
// 15175
//A strange apprehension was beginning to fill Harry, welling up in him like a
//sick feeling in his stomach.
// 15176
//“That everything depended on this,” Albus Dumbledore said, still in that
//almost-whisper, “that much I knew. But which choice led into darkness, that I
//could not guess. At least the choice was your own.”
// 15177
//“I don’t -” Harry said, and then his voice stopped.
// 15178
//A terrible hypothesis, rising in credibility…
// 15179
//“The phoenix comes,” said the old wizard. “To those who would fight, to those
//would act even at cost of their lives, the phoenix comes. Phoenixes are not
//wise, Harry, they know no means to judge us, save witnessing the choice. I
//thought it was to my death I went, when the phoenix took me to fight
//Grindelwald. I did not know that Fawkes would sustain me, and heal me, and stay
//by my side -” The old wizard’s voice quavered, for a moment. “It is not spoken
//of - you should realize, Harry, why it is never spoken of - if the one knew,
//the phoenix could not judge. But to you, Harry, I may say it now, for the
//phoenix comes only once.”
// 15180
//The old wizard walked across the top of the Ravenclaw tower to where a boy
//stood rooted in dawning horror, in dawning and utter horror.
// 15181
//__In my duel with Grindelwald I could not win, only fight him for long
//hours until he collapsed in exhaustion; and I would have died of it afterward,
//if not for Fawkes -__
// 15182
//Harry didn’t even know he was speaking, until the whisper had escaped him -
// 15183
//“Then I __could__ have -”
// 15184
//“Could you have?” said the ancient wizard, his voice sounding far older than
//his normal tones. “Three times, now, a phoenix has come for my student. One did
//send hers away, and the grief of it broke her, I think. And the last was cousin
//to your young friend Lavender Brown, and he -” The old wizard’s voice cracked.
//“He did not return, did poor John, and he saved none of those he meant to save.
//It is said, among the few scholars of phoenix-lore, that not one in four
//returns from their ordeal. And even if you did survive - for the life you must
//lead, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres - the choices you must make and the path
//you must walk - to always hear the phoenix’s cries - who is to say it would not
//have driven you mad?” The old wizard raised his sleeve again, drawing it once
//more across his face. “I had more joy of Fawkes’s companionship, in the days
//before I fought Voldemort.”
// 15185
//The boy did not seem to be listening, all his eyes were on the red-gold bird on
//the ancient wizard’s shoulder. “Fawkes?” the boy said in shaking voice. “Why
//won’t you look at me, Fawkes?”
// 15186
//Fawkes craned his head to peer at the boy curiously, then turned back and
//resumed gazing at his master.
// 15187
//“See?” said the old wizard. “He does not reject you. Fawkes may not be
//interested in you in quite that way, now; and he knows -” the wizard smiled
//wryly, “- that you are not exactly loyal to his master. But one to whom the
//phoenix comes at all - cannot be one whom a phoenix would dislike.” The
//wizard’s voice fell to a whisper again. “There never was a bird seen on Godric
//Gryffindor’s shoulder. Though it is not written even in his secrets, I think he
//must have sent his phoenix away, before he chose the red and gold for his
//colors. Perhaps the guilt of it urged him to greater lengths than he ever would
//have dared otherwise. Or it might have taught him humility, and respect for
//human frailty, and failure…” The wizard bowed his head. “I truly do not know if
//your choice was wise. I truly do not know if it was the right thing, or the
//wrong thing. If I knew, Harry, I would have spoken. But I -” Dumbledore’s voice
//broke, then. “I am nothing but a foolish young boy who has become a foolish old
//man, and I have no wisdom.”
// 15188
//Harry couldn’t breathe, the nausea seeming to fill and overflow his whole body,
//stomach locked solid. He was suddenly and terribly certain that he had failed,
//in some final sense failed, failed this very night -
// 15189
//The boy whirled and ran out to the curb of the Ravenclaw rooftop. “Come back!”
//His voice cracked, rising to a shriek. __“Come back!__”
// 15190
//__Final Aftermath:__
// 15191
//She came awake with a gasp of horror, she woke with an unvoiced scream on her
//lips and no words came forth, she could not understand what she had seen,
//__she could not understand what she had seen__ -
// 15192
//“What time is it?” she whispered.
// 15193
//Her golden jeweled alarm clock whispered back, “Around eleven at night. Go back
//to sleep.”
// 15194
//Her sheets were soaked in sweat, her nightclothes soaked in sweat, she took her
//wand from beside the pillow and cleaned herself up before she tried to go back
//to sleep and eventually succeeded.
// 15195
//Sybill Trelawney went back to sleep.
// 15196
//In the Forbidden Forest, a centaur woken by a nameless apprehension ceased
//scanning the night sky, having found only questions there and no answers; and
//with a folding of his many legs, Firenze went back to sleep.
// 15197
//In the distant lands of magical Asia, an ancient witch named Fan Tong, sleeping
//the tired days away, told her anxious great-great-grandson that she was fine,
//it had only been a nightmare, and went back to sleep.
// 15198
//In a land where Muggleborns received no letters of any kind, a girl-child too
//young to have a name of her own was rocked in the arms of her annoyed but
//loving mother until she stopped crying and went back to sleep.
// 15199
//None of them slept well.