Betaed and edited by rambkowalczyk.
No spoilers, because this is totally AU as of HPB.
Chapter 26 - The Maze
When Harry woke up again, he thought that something must have gone wrong with the ritual because nothing at all seemed to have happened. He still felt the slight vertigo and disorientation from the incense, and he was still dizzy, but he didn't feel dead in the least.
But he had a strong sensation that something was wrong. Harry felt as if he had forgotten a very important thing, but he couldn't remember what it was. It was an uncomfortable feeling like an indistinct hunger or thirst, but not for food or for water.
And then something else occurred to him. The floor he was lying on was not the stone of the dais anymore.
Harry opened his eyes and saw a white ceiling. He was definitely not in the Department of Mysteries anymore. He straightened his glasses and turned his head to the side where he saw a few pictures on a white wall. Beneath a mantelpiece cluttered with all sorts of hideous little porcelain figures was a boarded-up fireplace with a fake coal fire plugged in front of it. Harry's eyes widened in recognition and he quickly sat up.
Harry couldn't explain this, but somehow he had ended up in the Dursley's living room. But hadn't Death Eaters and even Voldemort himself broken into the house on Number 4, Privet Drive a few days ago? Why would anyone bring him here and leave him alone? Then he had another idea: what if he was already behind the Veil? He had no idea what the place beyond the Veil was supposed to be like. It was supposed to be hell and the Dursley's living room certainly wasn't one of Harry's favourite places.
He sat there a long time, unsure what he should do. Usually Harry didn't hesitate a lot but he seemed unable to make a decision. He felt insecure. What if he did something wrong? The nagging feeling that wasn't quite hunger nor thirst grew stronger. He felt like he was missing an important part of himself. The loneliness and fear and vulnerability, grew in intensity all together at once. Harry shivered.
But finally he made up his mind and got to his feet. It was then that he first discovered the wound in his chest. A ghostly knife was sticking out of his chest. It was translucent and grey and when he touched it gingerly his hands went through it and it felt like frosty air. It was the knife Aberforth had used to stab him, but it didn't bleed or hurt.
Shrugging, he went to the door and opened it. But to his surprise, the door didn’t go into the Dursley's hall, but into what looked like the narrow underground passage that led from the Whomping Willow to the Shrieking Shack. Roots were sticking out of the walls.
"Alright," Harry said glumly to himself. "This is definitely not the real world." His voice sounded strangely lost in the passage. The fear and longing in his chest grew even stronger. Harry wanted, no he needed to be with people, to talk to someone, to be reassured in his plans.
He stepped into the passage, and as soon as his hand left the Dursley's door, it fell shut, leaving him in the dark. Feeling for the wall with his hands, he stumbled forward. The narrow corridor was warmer than he remembered from 3rd year and smelled of earth and animals. He thought he heard the sound of steps, and hushed laughter from far away and his heart longed to be with those noises.
After a long time of stumbling and crawling in the dark, the passage came to an end, but it wasn't a trapdoor that led out of it but another door with a handle. Harry opened it and was blinded by the sudden brightness. The room he stepped into was the small bedroom at Godric's Hollow that Lupin had shown him, the room where Voldemort had killed his mother.
Harry looked around with some apprehension. The last time he had been here he had felt very uncomfortable and there had been a painful sensation in his scar. But now he felt nothing. The room looked only bright and peaceful.
Harry turned around and looked at the door that had quietly fell shut behind him. He wondered briefly whether it lead back to the tunnel but something told him to expect that behind it would be another room that shouldn't be there. 'This place makes no sense,' he thought. 'And I wonder why there aren't any people around here.'
But there was any chance at finding Sirius he would have to go on. As he put his hand onto the handle of the door, he suddenly felt a stinging pain going from his chest down to his navel and a cold shiver ran down his spine, making him gasp in surprise. The pain subsided after a second and when he looked down at himself, the ghostly knife was gone, leaving only the wound that didn't bleed. Harry closed his eyes for a second. This was all too much. He didn't know what he was doing or what might happen to him and he felt so very lost. He felt, more than ever, the need not to be alone and he reached for the door.
The next door led him to the tiny cupboard under the stair at the Dursley's where he had spent most of his childhood. The cupboard under the stairs was followed by the Prefects' bathroom at Hogwarts, a room above the Leaky Cauldron where he had once slept before his third year, one of the carriages that usually brought students from the Hogwarts Express to the school (but it was empty when Harry walked through it) and the Men's Room at the Three Broomsticks.
Room after room followed. Some weren't even real rooms, but wardrobes or broom sheds and once even the inside of Mr Dursley's car. They had nothing in common except that Harry had seen them all before. Sometimes Harry heard distant noises but he never saw any people. Slowly he became less attentive and excited. He just walked through the rooms, looking for the next door, growing more and more tired until he was almost sleep-walking through this mysterious cabinet of rooms.
He had been walking for what seemed like hours (but in some rooms it was night while it was daytime in others) when he climbed through the Slytherin portrait hole and found himself suddenly in the maze that had been the Third Task of the Triwizard Tournament.
The dark green hedges loomed high around him and he heard the distant cheer of a crowd. Harry felt a thrill of fear and he searched for his wand, but he couldn't find it. Had he lost it?
The portrait hole behind him was gone. Slowly Harry walked straight ahead until he came to a corner. A blast-ended skrewt lay crumpled in the grass; Harry was grateful that it appeared lifeless. At last he saw the first person since he had woken up.
It was Cedric, standing on the other side of the skrewt. His face was pale and damp from sweat, his blond hair plastered to his forehead. Harry was surprised to notice that Cedric didn't seem as tall as he remembered him. Was Cedric a ghost, or only a figment of his imagination?
"Cedric?" Harry called tentatively, for Cedric didn't seem to have noticed him.
Cedric looked up and squinted at him then his face suddenly broke into an exhausted smile. But his smile fell as quickly as it had come as he limped closer to Harry.
"I hoped you had gotten away somehow," he sighed, avoiding Harry's eyes.
Harry knew immediately what Cedric meant. His chest became painfully tight when he realised that now he would have to tell Cedric that he was the reason why Cedric had been killed.
"I… have," Harry said, but it was barely more than a hoarse whisper. "I did escape from the graveyard that day."
Cedric looked up, a gleam of hope in his eyes, but it vanished as quickly as his smile. "But you're dead now. You're here… wherever here is. Well, I guess it’s suppose to be the afterlife but it's a pretty strange place."
And then it hit Harry. Cedric was here! Cedric was beyond the Veil! But that couldn't be true, because Cedric had died in the graveyard. He wasn't supposed to be here at all. Cedric seemed to notice the shock on Harry's face, because he said: "Er… you did know that you were dead, didn't you? I'm sorry if you didn't, I guess I should have said it a little more… you know, politely."
Harry shook his head, trying to sort out his confused thoughts. "No, I did know, I mean I know I'm not dead. I'm here because… it's rather complicated. You see, I'm here because I need to find someone who's dead… but you're not supposed to be here at all, because you didn't go through the Veil!"
Cedric raised his eyebrows. "Sounds rather complicated to me, too. Perhaps we should go somewhere a little bit nicer, though. For starters, I'd like to know what exactly happened when we touched the cup…"
And Cedric laid a hand on Harry's shoulder and gently led him past the dead skrewt and around another corner and suddenly Harry saw one of the entrances to the maze. They went through it and found themselves in a nice little kitchen. It looked a bit like Mrs Weasley's kitchen, but it was tidier and not quite as crammed full with things. Warm afternoon light fell through square windows. A small oval picture on one wall showed the portrait of a snoring man who bore a certain resemblance to Cedric's father. It smelled of tea and caramel bonbons. A bit of the longing and loneliness in Harry was soothed by it and he felt safe at once.
"My Granny's house," Cedric said and took two glasses out of a drawer and filled them with pumpkin juice from a brown mug.
He and Harry settled down on the small table in the cosy kitchen and drank their juice. It tasted delicious and not in the least bit unreal. It filled Harry with warmth and strength like a pepper-up potion.
And then Harry started to tell Cedric everything. Cedric had died because of Harry's connection with Voldemort and he felt that he owed him the truth about everything. He told him about Moody and Crouch Jr., about Voldemort, Wormtail (and when he got to Wormtail, he also had to tell Cedric about the other Marauders and Sirius, who wasn't really a murderer) and the graveyard and about the Priori Incantatem effect that had saved his life. Cedric could not remember coming out of Voldemort's wand as a ghost, and so they agreed that these ghosts had not been real people but only echoes of the spells that had been performed with Voldemort's wand. Then he told Cedric about Grimmauld Place and the Order of the Phoenix, about Umbridge and the DA and finally he even confessed about dating Cho.
"But you see," he said nervously, "she really just wanted to talk about you. I think she, um, loved you a lot."
Cedric smiled. "It's okay, Harry. It's not as if I expected her to never date anybody else if I died – well, I didn't expect to die, but you know what I mean. It's totally okay for her to go on with her life," he said and sounded very honest about it.
Harry couldn't bring himself to tell Cedric that Cho hadn't managed to 'go on with her life' during their fifth year. And so he went on about his dreams of the mysterious door and the failed rescue mission to the Department of Mysteries.
It was the first time that Harry told anybody about the moment when Sirius' fell through the Veil. He still felt a sharp guilt over his death and that his grief would never end but he also felt a little relieved. Everything else he had to say wouldn't be quite as hard.
Finally he told Cedric about the prophecy and what Hermione had said about the place beyond the Veil and how he had managed to get through the Veil without dying.
"That's pretty… impressive," Cedric said carefully. "It probably sucks for you though - I mean if I knew I had to defeat You-Know-Who, wow, I wouldn't know what I would do. I'd probably try to run away and hide somewhere."
Harry stared unhappily at his empty glass and the cracks in the white table. "That's pretty much what I've been doing. Running away and hiding, I mean. I've been hidden away at the Dursleys' all my life – they're my Aunt and Uncle – and lately I've had to hide in Hogwarts under Dumbledore's protection. I need a guard wherever I go."
Harry felt unusually hopeless. Normally he didn't worry too much about Voldemort. He had so many other problems and every time he'd had to face Voldemort things had just happened and somehow he had come out alive. He just knew what to do in such situations, he couldn't quite explain how or why. But now this ability seemed to have left him.
Cedric looked uncomfortable when Harry said this. He probably didn't like hearing that the only hope of the wizarding world wasn't confident about defeating Voldemort. "You shouldn't lose any time finding your godfather," he suggested.
"But how? I've been wandering around for hours and you were the first person I met. How could I find Sirius when I don't even know what's going to be behind the next door?"
Cedric frowned and brushed a strand of hair out of his face. "I've been here for a while now and I've met some people who have been here longer than I. I've heard that this place isn't the final place – it's only like the first part of a long journey, but no one knows where it goes. They say that somewhere there's a river you have to cross – but if your godfather died only recently he's probably still here. Only the people who manage to let go of their lives can cross the river."
He looked bemused for a second. Then he went on.
" You said that your friend Hermione Granger had read that this place would be like Hell – but it's not. I've been to a lot of nice places here and I've met my Granny who's not a bad person at all. So your godfather could be anywhere. But maybe there are some places that mean more to him than others?"
Harry nodded, still not quite convinced.
" You'll find him in some place where he has been in his life. If you think very hard of the place you want to go, the next door is likely to bring you there. If you're feeling bad, the next place is going to be a bad place. If there are two doors in a room, always choose the one that looks to you as if it might lead you to the place you want to go. This place isn't real, Harry. It's created through our memories and feelings, I think. You can influence it."
Harry looked at his glass again. "Thanks. I would never have figured that out on my own."
Cedric smiled. "You should go now. There's nothing else to do for you here."
"And you?" Harry asked. Cedric shrugged.
"I don't know. I feel a lot better now that I know why I died and that everyone else is okay – my parents, Cho, you. If you get back, could you tell them that I'm okay and I love them? If you could just write them a short letter –"
"Of course!" Harry said. "I'll explain everything."
"Thanks. Now that I know this… maybe I'll try to find that river and cross it. I'm pretty curious what's next."
Silence fell over the kitchen and Harry knew that it was time to go on with his search. Cedric still smiled at him. It reminded him of Dumbledore, very calm, almost serene. It gave him peace and confidence and stilled some of the strange hunger he felt.
Harry got up and after a second, he reached out awkwardly and they shook hands. "I'll tell them," Harry promised. "As soon as I return."
Cedric nodded and then gestured towards the door. Harry looked at it very hard and put his hand on the door-handle. 'Think of Sirius,' he thought. 'Think of the things he liked…'
But there weren't very many things, Harry discovered as he thought about it, which he knew Sirius liked. Sirius liked him and Remus and Tonks, but they were all still alive. Then there were James and Lily, but Harry was sure that his parents weren't here anymore. But what else was there that Sirius might like? Harry didn't know. There were so many things he didn't know about Sirius.
These things were on his mind as he pressed down the handle and walked through the door. The first place he came to was the Shrieking Shack, where he had first met Sirius. But the room with its broken furniture and boarded windows was empty. The next door he stumbled through lead into the cave near Hogsmeade where Sirius had once stayed with Buckbeak. It was also empty. Harry walked through the mouth of the cave, but it didn't lead him outside. Instead he unexpectedly walked into an umbrella stand in a gloomy hallway. There was barely any light and what little there was reflected eerily on the dusty glass of old gas-lamps and a very old chandelier. The umbrella stand toppled and rolled across the floor; with a bang it hit the opposite wall.
Without thinking Harry looked up at the portrait that would have surely started yelling, for he had recognised the place as Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. But nothing happened. Where Mrs Black's portrait had once hung was now an empty space. Otherwise the place looked as Harry remembered it – derelict and depressing.
He sighed. This was the place where he had least wanted to go. If Sirius was here, he had to be in a bad state. Only Azkaban could have been worse.
…
When Harry woke up again, he thought that something must have gone wrong with the ritual, because nothing at all seemed to have happened. He still felt the slight vertigo and disorientation from the incense, and he was still incredibly tired, but he didn't feel dead in the slightest. In fact he felt more alive than he had in a long time.
He could also still feel the cold stone beneath his back and the slight fluttering breeze from the Veil. And he heard voices, more than one and sounding rather excited. Someone was grasping his arm with warm fingers and someone else said his name in an anxious tone – he smiled when he recognised Ron's voice.
'That's strange', he thought dizzily. 'It felt as if I really smiled. But I can't control my body…'
And then he suddenly bolted upright. Ron in the Ministry? He opened his eyes and there they were: Ron and Hermione, standing close by with frightened but relieved expressions. It was Hermione who had touched his arm. Harry was glad to see them and even relieved that the ritual hadn't worked.
"Harry, mate," Ron said in a shaky voice. "We thought you were dead!"
"Are you okay?" Hermione asked. But something wasn't right. When he sat up, they moved back a bit, almost as if they were frightened. Just a step behind them stood Professor Dumbledore, and to Harry's right, Aberforth Dumbledore stood with the knife in his hand.
There was a strange expression on Professor Dumbledore's usually kind face, one that Harry had seen there before but he remember when: When had Dumbledore looked at him like that with doubt and wariness, even mistrust? Suddenly Harry felt cold as distant memories came back to him, of a younger Dumbledore with auburn hair and the same mistrustful look in his eyes as he looked at Harry... suddenly Harry was angry at Dumbledore, a lot angrier than he had been after Sirius fell through the Veil. Then he remembered Dumbledore fighting Voldemort in...
Voldemort. His skin is white as bones in the mirror. His new laughter sounds strange, high-pitched and alien…
A cold high laughter. His mother crying, pleading for his life. Green light, terrible pain – he clutched his forehead at the memory, but the pain was only in his memory, there was no pain now...
Harry stared at his hands and felt like he was going mad. He distinctly remembered his fingers being longer, his skin being paler – but these hands that he was looking at had been his hands all his life.
He looked up at Dumbledore once more and saw that the mistrust had grown worse, that the old headmaster now looked almost... dangerous. Their eyes locked and everything within Harry screamed 'danger!' He immediately concentrated, raised his mental shields with customary ease, felt Dumbledore's Legilimency being deflected and saw the disbelief in the old man's eyes.
"No," Harry whispered, hugging himself. "No… I can't… I didn't…"
Suddenly his mind was crammed full with memories and knowledge he couldn't place. Everything made infinitely more and less sense. He could read the runes drawn with chalk on the floor. He could name all the herbs in the incense and where they grew and when you had to pick them and what their properties were. He knew that the knife in Aberforth's hand was made of ivory and obsidian, not black glass.
"Make it stop," he pleaded.
His eyes suddenly fell on Ron and Hermione. He blinked. They were just Ron and Hermione, his friends.
"I think something's wrong with me," Harry said weakly and was startled by his own voice. For a second he had expected a different voice, lower and with another accent.
Dumbledore rounded the dais, walking in front of his friends as if to protect them from Harry. His face was stern and he looked very much in control.
"Do you know where you are?" he asked.
"The Department of Mysteries," Harry said, thinking that this was a rather strange question. And then he remembered more…
…he'd been here before, secretly, had studied the fascinating instruments in the time room, the motion of planets, the wonders of thought and memory, the room full of shelves with orbs you couldn't touch or you'd go mad, rooms full of artefacts from everywhere in the world, magical devices – how he'd longed to steal them all...
"Do you remember what happened?" Dumbledore asked.
"I was going to find Sirius," Harry replied and suddenly he felt the pang of grief again at the thought of his godfather, rage at the injustice of it all. He thought of Sirius, falling gracefully through the Veil, a look of surprise on his face... his face... another memory mixed with the images of Sirius and suddenly he had a name for this remarkably similar face. Alphard. But there was no boy named Alphard going to school with Harry – for a moment he felt the old relief at having left school behind, at being free – and Alphard was a grown-up and so was he…
He'd killed this man.
Harry's face twisted. "Something's wrong," he choked.
... he had finally finished it all, finally he was immortal but it hadn't worked properly, he was caught in a body he couldn't control...
Dumbledore tried to look him straight in the eyes. "What is your name?"
... then there was the prophecy and the Secret Keeper and the parents of the child…
Harry wanted to open his mouth and answer but he only managed a strangled groan.
"What is your name?" Dumbledore repeated.
Harry remembered Wormtail, cowering on the floor of a dark room and sobbing, Wormtail who had betrayed his parents to Lord Voldemort. But something wasn't right, because Wormtail looked so much younger and this wasn't the Shrieking Shack, this was Godric's Hollow…
... and he stepped over the man's body on the stairs...
... it wasn't his Dad who conjured the Patronus and defeated the dementors, it was him, Harry...
... she was sobbing over the baby, a pretty, foolish witch and she asked him to spare the boy's life, to take her instead...
... when he saw his parents in the Mirror of Erised he wanted to sit there and look at them all night. They were smiling and waving and he knew that they loved him...
He screamed, he didn't know why, but he screamed and then he broke down, wanting nothing so much as to crawl out of his body which wasn't his own and to forget, to cease to exist.
*
*
Dumbledore straightened and for a moment, he remained unable to hide the mixture of dread and pity he felt at the sight of Harry – who obviously wasn't Harry at all – crumbling on the ground and losing his mind. A decision had to be made and quickly.
He turned to Ollivander. "So it is indeed Voldemort's soul that occupies his body now?" he asked the wand-maker for confirmation. Ollivander inclined his head in a wordless nod.
Dumbledore glanced at the boy on the ground. This was a most uncharacteristic reaction for Voldemort, to show such vulnerability. And for the first few moments after waking up, he had behaved just like Harry…
"Can Harry be brought back, now that the knife has been pulled?" he asked, turning to Aberforth.
"The boy's soul would have returned when I pulled the knife, if his body had not been inhabited by a second soul. As it was, pulling the knife only wakened up Voldemort's soul," Aberforth explained impassively. "To get Potter back, you'd have to get Voldemort out of him and then stab him again. If you pulled the knife after doing that, Potter would return."
Dumbledore was angry with both of them, for risking such things only to awaken a part of Voldemort that promised to be less than helpful, but there was no time for this. Right now, he had to minimize the damage.
"Open a portal to my office," he told Aberforth quietly. Then Dumbledore looked at his two other students. Ron and Hermione both looked sick with worry and fear.
"I promise to do my best to save Harry," he said, trying to be confident for their sake. It seemed to work for them and he wished he could say the same for himself. "Right now, you cannot help and I must ask you to try and stay calm – and not to talk to anyone about this, not even to your parents or members of the Order."
They nodded. Aberforth frowned and a massive oak door appeared in front of them, hovering eerily in the quiet room. He opened it and they could see the warm light of the Headmaster's office at Hogwarts.
Dumbledore bent down and seized Harry's shoulder. It seemed ridiculous to think of him as Voldemort but he had to try and not be deceived by the familiar face. Even if this was only a broken part of Voldemort, he could still be dangerous.
They all went through the portal and it closed behind them, vanishing as if it had never been there. Ron and Hermione left reluctantly, leaving him with Ollivander, his brother and the shivering boy. A cold silence filled the room between them. Ollivander's gaze was level as usual, but his younger brother looked defiant. Finally Aberforth straightened and said in a harsh tone: "We've done what we could to help you. We'll be in the Hog's Head if you need us."
He strode away and after a moment, Ollivander followed him.
Dumbledore looked at Voldemort in Harry's body. He had put him into a chair, where he now sat in a trembling heap. His face was wet from sweat and tears and his mouth a thin, painful slash in his face. Whatever it was that had made him break down like this still seemed to haunt him behind his closed eyes.
What should he do with him? He had given up on Voldemort as a person many years ago. Rounding his desk and sitting down, Dumbledore eyed him thoughtfully. Of course what he saw was only Harry looking quite horrible, but beneath that was Voldemort, his very soul. Was he a broken piece, or a changed man, as Ollivander had suggested?
He had given up on Tom Riddle too early, when there was perhaps still hope to change the boy he was, and ever since he had made a point of giving people second chances, of trusting where others doubted.
And if he was given a second chance with Voldemort – so be it.