Chapter 35 -- King's Cross
In which Harry is mostly dead, Voldemort's soul is ignored for no particular reason, and Albus Dumbledore Lies About It All To You.
Note: This is from the British edition. Readers of the American edition may notice some differences in the text.
Chapter Thirty-Five -- King’s Cross
He lay facedown, listening to the silence.
You know, I never thought of Harry as an Ingmar Bergman fan.
He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there.
Most people would conclude that being "perfectly alone" (as opposed to what? Imperfectly alone? Alone is alone, man!) meant that "nobody else was there." Harry James Potter, however, is not one of them.
He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself.
I, on the other hand, am absolutely certain that Harry is not all there.
A long time later, or maybe no time at all,
Or maybe in the not too distant future/ somewhere in time and space.
it came to him that he must exist,must be more than disembodied thought, because he was lying, definitely lying, on some surface.
Descartes! Harry: "Cubito ergo sum. I lie down often. Therefore, I am."
Therefore he had a sense of touch, and the thing against which he lay existed too.
Presumably, therefore, if Harry were to be put in a sensory deprivation chamber and felt nothing, not even his own body, he would disbelieve himself out of existence.
Almost as soon as he had reached this conclusion, Harry became conscious that he was naked.
NOT MY FAULT, LJ. TAKE IT UP WITH THE AUTHOR.
Convinced as he was of his total solitude,
There is no such thing as total solitude, because there is no such thing as partial solitude. Either you're alone or you're not.
this did not concern him, but it did intrigue him slightly.
Notice the progression of thought:
"Hey, I exist!"
"Oooh, I'm naked!"
"Hmm, the possibilities are intriguing."
He wondered whether, as he could feel, he would be able to see. In opening them, he discovered that he had eyes.
It's Harry's solemn, careful, plodding concentration on matters that gets to me. "I have a body. Hmm, I wonder if I have eyes? Oh, what to do, what to do? Wait, I have a brilliant idea! I shall OPEN them. And if I can open them and I can see, then I have eyes!"
Honestly, Harry. Just open your eyes and stop making such a production number out of it. Please. If he were alive, even Busby Berkeley, king of huge production numbers, would thank you.
He lay in a bright mist, though it was not like mist he had ever experienced before.
Because all the mist he'd experienced before had been a lovely shade of chartreuse.
His surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapor; rather the cloudy vapor had not yet formed into surroundings.
This is what we in New England call "a pea-souper fog."
The floor on which he lay seemed to be white, neither warm nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be.
So he's lying on white linoleum. Got it.
He sat up. His body appeared unscathed.
Though with all this cloudy vapor not forming into surroundings, he couldn't really tell...
He touched his face. He was not wearing glasses anymore.
Possibly because his soul doesn't wear glasses, d'ya think?
Then a noise reached him through the unformed nothingness that surrounded him: the small soft thumpings of something that flapped, flailed, and struggled.
I have to admit that the first thing I thought was, "Okay. Not only isn't Harry alone, whoever else is there is wanking off." And the next sentence just supported this idea:
It was a pitiful noise, yet also slightly indecent.
I cannot make this stuff up, folks.
After seven years of dorm life, Harry knows what a guy jerking off sounds like, so he's embarrassed. Well, the text actually says that Harry thought the noise was "furtive" and "shameful," but you get it and I get it.
He also wishes that he had clothes, and clothes, in the form of robes, appear somewhere unspecified in the nonexistent surroundings. Great, Rowling. That brings the entire scene to life for me. Harry puts the robes on and then starts wondering if he's gone to the Great Room of Requirement in the Sky.
No, really. It says that.
He stood up, looking around. Was he in some great Room of Requirement?
Harry then starts telling us a little about what the place looks like:
A great domed glass roof glittered high above him in sunlight. Perhaps it was a palace.
Or maybe it was King's Cross Station. You'd think that Harry would recognize it instantly, since he's only ever been to and from one train station in his entire life. But Rowling is being coy, alas, so Harry can't do anything half so sensible.
At this point, Harry spots the thing making those noises. It's a small child, as naked as Harry was a few minutes ago, and badly wounded-its skin has all but been flayed off. It's lying under a seat in the train station, weak, abandoned, sobbing and struggling to keep breathing.
Harry is scared of the kid, even repulsed by it. He doesn't want to go near it, so naturally he forces himself to go near it, for no reason that I can discern. He also gets close enough to put out a finger and touch if he wanted to, but he most emphatically doesn't want to. The book tells that he feels "like a coward," and I heartily agree. I mean, the kid has faced a three-headed dog, zombies, soul-sucking demons, Death Eaters and an insane undead snake-man hybrid...and now he's scared of a wee kidlet?
Although it's never specifically stated in this chapter, the wounded toddler is, apparently, Voldemort's soul, or at least the fragment of it that was attached to Harry's scar. Where the other fragments attached to the other Horcruxes/Horcruces are, I have no clue. Everyone talks about Harry "destroying" those fragments, but since Old Dumb and Dumber also refers to THIS fragment of soul being destroyed when it is quite manifestly here and in a great deal of pain, I think we can ignore the notion of piecemeal soul destruction. When canon contradicts itself, no one is under any obligation to believe it.
At this point, Dumbles walks in, looking absolutely fabulous, darling, in "sweeping robes of midnight blue." Nice to know that death hasn't overcome his keen fashion sense. He tells Harry that he, Harry, can't help Voldybaby. Since this is precisely what Harry wants to hear, he immediately abandons any attempt to show kindness and compassion to an immature and wounded soul, and starts talking to Dumb and Dumber without once wondering what any sane person would: "Hey, did he see me naked?"
Dumbledore calls Harry a wonderful boy and a brave, brave man, probably because Harry ended up dead. Personally, I won't be convinced until Harry ends up dead and STAYS dead. It's not really a case of "giving his life to save others" if the mortal hero suddenly acquires a "get out of death free" card.
Harry and the Dumb One sit down. Harry stares at Dumbledore, because we might have forgotten from last chapter that the Dumbledores have white hair and white beards and blue eyes...you know, your basic Generic Fantasy Wizard. It's going to be absolutely vital that the Dumb One had eyes that twinkled. Nod nod.
Anyway, Harry, being Harry, states something insanely obvious--"You're dead." Not content with that, Harry wants to know if he's dead, too.
Well, gee, Harry, what do you think? You've just been hit with something called the Killing Curse. Do you really think that was conducive to your continued health?
Dumb and Dumber tells Harry that he doesn't think Harry is dead. At least, not on the whole. Like Miracle Max, the Dumb One distinguishes between mostly dead and all dead.
Harry doesn't get this. At all. Frankly, I'm with him.
He then does something that makes no sense...which is par for the course in these books.
Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there.
Riiiight. He can feel the existence of the scar. Good grief, it's a flat, black, jagged line on his forehead. Keloid scarring isn't involved.
Harry then says that he deliberately let Voldemort kill him. Which I maintain is stupid. All Voldemort has to do is toss the semi-corpse to his minions to bury alive, order all of Harry 's supporters into the Great Hall, and then take them all out with a Blasting Curse or two. What could Harry do about that at the moment? Even if he did come back from the dead, he'd return to a world irrevocably changed.
Dumbles, however, thinks that Harry letting Voldemort kill him was the best thing since sliced bread. He also goes all Mysterious Mentor Guy, insisting that Harry tell him what he says Harry already knows. Since Harry normally doesn't even know facts that he has been bloody well hit over the head with year after year after year, I have good reason to believe that Harry knows bugger-all.
However, to cut to the chase, this is how things break down, according to Dumbles:
1) Harry let Voldemort kill him.
2) In killing Harry, Voldemort killed the part of his soul that was attached to Harry's scar.
3) Harry's soul and the bit of Voldemort's soul are now separated.
4) Because of the resurrection potion that used Harry's blood, Voldemort and Harry are now bound by blood. Voldemort, in essence, is Harry's life support system, giving the dead boy's soul a back door into life.
This last bit annoys me beyond the telling of it. I mean, I had every drop of blood in my body replaced when I was in hospital. It didn't end up binding me to my blood donors. But somehow, it bound Harry and Voldemort. Because it's maaaaaaaaaaaagic. God, I hate that as an excuse.
Dumbledore gets all excited by this:
Your blood in his veins, Harry, Lily’s protection inside both of you!
That doesn't make any sense to me at all, and it never has. Lily died for her son, not his blood. The spell should attach to him, not to various body parts.
“I live . . . while he lives? But I thought . . . I thought it was the other way around! I thought we both had to die? Or is it the same thing?”
I rather doubt it's the same thing, Harry. After all, you're dead and he ISN'T. That would seem to disprove Trelawney's prophecy, wouldn't it?
During all this, Harry keeps noticing the wounded child-soul and wanting to help...though not enough to get off his fat arse and actually do anything. Double-D is of no use whatsoever, telling Harry that the injured soul is beyond the help of either of them, and that there is no help possible for it. Yes, Dumbledore, that's the way. Stifle a motivation to help that extends beyond Harry himself or his friends. I knew I could count on you to do the wrong thing.
Dumbles continues his monologue telling Harry that Voldemort's soul was unstable because he'd ripped it apart so much-"so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child." All I can say is that Rowling must never have read any true-crime books by FBI profilers if she's having DD think that a simple, clean killing that involves no torture, mutilation or pain is the worst thing EVER. I'm not saying that the murders of James and Lily were good, but honestly, I don't think they even count in the top fifty where ultimate evil is concerned.
He left part of himself latched to you, the would-be victim who had survived.
No! Harry would only be the "would-be victim" if he had wanted to be Voldie's victim. Since he didn't want anything of the sort, the correct way to phrase this would be "Voldemort's intended victim who had survived."
Dumb and Dumber then continues to babble about how Voldemort doesn't value certain things-like fairy tales or house elves--so he doesn't bother to understand them.
This would be fine if Harry ever had tried to understand either. However, it was Hermione who kept reading the fairy tale book, thinking that it might contain some valuable clue, and it was also Hermione who pointed out to Harry for three books that being nice to Kreacher might be a good idea. Harry only started considering Kreacher and the fairy tale book of potential value when he began to think in terms of what he could get from either-information and Mundungus in the first case, and the Deathly Hallows in the second. I'm pretty sure that Voldemort knows all about that level of selfishness.
Harry's all, "Wait a second-you knew this? You ALWAYS knew this?" And Dumbles is all false modesty and "Well, I've always been a good guesser."
Harry then asks him why his wand broke Voldemort's borrowed wand. After six paragraphs--one of which asks a question, three of which are mostly filler, one of which rehashes the Voldemort-used-your-blood-and-got-Lily's-protection-as-a-side-effect issue, and the last of which talks about Voldie attacking Harry in the cemetery of Little Hangleton-Dumb and Dumber finally gets down to cases. Sort of. According to the Dumb One, who wasn't there, Harry was unspeakably brave the night that Voldemort attacked him, because he "had accepted, even embraced, the possibility of death, something Lord Voldemort has never been able to do."
Uh, yeah. Seems to me that I recall Harry dodging behind a tombstone or two, hiding, trembling and wishing that he was safely back at Hogwarts. That doesn't sound like "embracing death" to me. Oh, wait! We can ignore that! It's ONLY canon!
Your courage won, your wand overpowered his.
No. That's not what happened. The Lexicon states what did:
"When two wands are forced to duel that have core material from the same single creature, the result will be 'Priori Incantatem,' a display in sequence of the last spells one of the wands cast. Which wand will show the spell effect depends on the willpower of the two wizards involved."
Both of their wands had cores from the tailfeathers of Fawkes the phoenix. As the two wizards tried to harm each other, a golden beam filled with little golden droplets connected their wands. After that, the battle was rather like a video game-namely, who could get a droplet into his enemy's wandtip first? Courage had nothing to do with which wand defeated the other. Will power, alertness, concentration, good hand-eye coordination...those, I'll buy. Courage, no.
The Dumb One then starts practicing his favorite form of exercise...jumping to conclusions.
“I believe that your wand imbibed some of the power and qualities of Voldemort’s wand that night, which is to say that it contained a little of Voldemort himself.
I repeat what I said in HBP. What you BELIEVE, Dumbledore, is not necessarily true.
Furthermore, we've seen evidence that wizards can and do use other wizards' wands. Depending on the wizard, this can work very well, fairly, or not well at all-and this despite the idea, vaunted in this book, that a wizard who overcomes another wizard's wand MUST become the master of that wand.
But the powers of a wizard's magic are not in the wand, as Dumbledore seems to be saying. A wizard or witch is born with the ability to do magic, and manifests magic as a child, before acquiring his or her first wand. A wand is a tool for focusing magic-and some wizards, especially the older ones, don't even use that.
So basically the notion that Harry's wand could have vampirically drained Voldemort of some of his magical abilities is utter rubbish.
So your wand recognized him when he pursued you, recognized a man who was both kin and mortal enemy,
Harry's wand and Voldemort's wand have been described as "brothers" because they both had cores from Fawkes, but I really doubt whether Harry's wand considered Lord Voldemort a relative.
and it regurgitated some of his own magic against him,
It was so disgusted by the author's ignorance of her own canon that it had no choice but to throw up magic all over Voldemort.
magic much more powerful than anything Lucius’s wand had ever performed.
Translation: Lucius's' wand couldn't clean up the magical vomit, because cleaning was strictly for house elves.
Harry asks a Most Excellent Question-if his wand was all that and a bag of chips, how come Hermione smashed it?
“My dear boy, its remarkable effects were directed only at Voldemort, who had tampered so ill-advisedly with the deepest laws of magic.
Say what? Potterverse has laws of magic now? Did Rowling read a Dresden Files novel between HBP and DH and decide belatedly that having laws of magic would be a good idea?
And once again, Rowling is trying to eat her cake and have it, too. Harry's wand is a perfectly ordinary wand--except when it deals with Voldemort, and then it totally isn't.
Harry, Master of the Obvious, then tells DD that Voldie killled him (Harry) with his (Dumbledore's) wand. Dumbledore hastens to tell Harry that Voldemort failed to kill him, which is idiotic, because Harry is demonstrably dead. He is going to come back to life, certainly, because Voldemort is still alive...but the thing is, you can't come BACK to life if you haven't been un-alive first.
Harry asks Double-D where they are. Dumbledore, who seems to be striving to get on my nerves, asks Harry where he thinks they are. Harry says that they're at King's Cross. Dumbles gets all "good heavens, is it, I had no idea!" Even Harry thinks that DD is being infuriating, and immediately asks him about the Hallows. This is enough to wipe the smirk off of Dumbles' face and make him look like a very old, guilty and worried child with his hand stuck in the cookie jar.
“Can you forgive me for not trusting you? For not telling you?
If Harry were a normal, believable teenager, the answers to those questions would be "No" and "No."
Harry, I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes.
Which was, it seems, an accurate assessment of Harry. As soon as he found out about the Hallows, he lost all interest in the Horcruxes.
Then Dumbledore really lays on the bullshit:
I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man.”
Well, if by "better" you mean selfish, reckless, stupid and passive to the point of inactivity. Seriously, name me one heroic thing the brat has done in this book. And anything rash that endangers other people does not count. (That would include Harry's death, by the way. )
Harry, not unnaturally, wants to know what the fuck the Dumb One is talking about. The Dumb One, of course, can't say straight out "I wanted the power of the Hallows and completely messed up my life and the lives of everyone around me." That would involve honesty, and Albus Dumbledore could not possibly be honest-either with other people or with himself. He must always present himself in the best possible light. If he can't present himself as being kind, he'll claim to be wise, and he can't be wise, he'll put on a great act of being humble.
So instead, he blathers on about the Hallows being “A desperate man’s dream!” and “Real, and dangerous, and a lure for fools. And I was such a fool. He also tells Harry that Harry already knows all of his secrets. Because telling Harry that he already knows everything and doesn't need to think about a man whom Harry cannot bear to admit is flawed is going to encourage deep philosophical contemplation. Of course it is.
Dumbles then asks Harry if he, Dumbledore, was better than Voldy-cakes.
“Of course - how can you ask that? You never killed if you could avoid it!”
*coughARIANAcough*
Dumbles says that he tried overcoming death too. Harry feels that having and using Hallows is a lot better than having and using Horcruxes.
We then begin Another Dumbledore Monologue. Yawn.
Okay, so Gellert Grindelwald wanted the Hallows too, according to Dumbles. Forget their passionate devotion to world domination and each other that everyone and his brother has mentioned-nope, the main thing young Gellert and young Albus had in common was an obsession with the Hallows. Grindy only came to Godric's Hollow because his Great-Aunt Bathilda invited him after his expulsion from Durmstrang of the grave of Ignotus Peverell. He wanted to explore the place the third brother had died.” And Ignotus Peverell was the ancestor of James Potter, which is how Jamie-boy got the Cloak in the first place.
Also, according to Dumbledore, Harry was born in Godric's Hollow, which strikes me as unlikely. Supposedly the Potters only moved there a week before their deaths, and Harry was a LOT more than a week old when his parents died.
Dumbles tells Harry that he knows Harry has guessed why he had James' Cloak, and then proceeds to tell Harry what Harry hasn't even speculated about until now. Basically, James brought his Cloak to DD a few days before he died, and Dumbledore hung onto it, even though it wasn't his. Harry says that the Cloak couldn't have helped James and Lily survive. Apparently he's forgotten all the times that he, Ron and Hermione concealed themselves beneath the Cloak and saved their necks.
If Dumbledore hadn't greedily glomped onto the Cloak, James would have had it when he needed it. Harry might still have parents.
The Dumb One then proceeds to tell Harry about Ariana. First he tells Harry that he should despise him. Way ahead of you there, Dumb and Dumber. Second, he rehashes a bit of what Aberforth said, because Rowling will never say something once if she can say it four times. Third, he admits that he resented having to take care of his sister:
“I was gifted, I was brilliant.
...I was intelligent, smart, bright, superb, magnificent, Einsteinian, a veritable genius. Someone take away this woman's thesaurus!
I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory.
*covers the annoying old fool with Turtle Wax and proceeds to polish him* There. Now you can shine.
*tosses him a DVD copy of Glory as well*
Then the self-justifications start. Oy, do they ever start.
I loved my parents, I loved my brother and my sister, but I was selfish, Harry, more selfish than you, who are a remarkably selfless person, could possibly imagine.
Harry, a remarkably selfless person? HARRY?
*nearly chokes on her own laughter*
...what do you mean, that wasn't a joke?
Then he begins talking about Grindelwald:
You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.
He's omitting the fact that he was writing advice to Grindelwald on enslaving the Muggle population, rather than killing them. And that it was all for the greater good. In fact, he's making it sound like everything bad was Grindelwald's idea, and he was just caught up in the moment. Coward. Liar.
It would all be for the greater good, and any harm done would be repaid a hundredfold in benefits for wizards.
Because only wizards count, y'know. Muggles aren't really people. They don't bleed if you kill them.
He also says that the Deathly Hallows were at the center of their plans for political power. Yeah, I know that every politician I've ever heard of builds his ambitions on legendary objects whose existence can't be confirmed. Personally, I suspect that Grindelwald wanted power, and hey, if he could get the Hallows as well, that would be great. Dumbledore is the one who seems fixated on the Hallows themselves...to the point where, when one came into his hands accidentally, he couldn't let it go.
The unbeatable wand, the weapon that would lead us to power!
Okay, that is just stupid. Only one person at a time can be the owner of a wand, and only one person at a time can wield it. So I don't see how both of them could use the Elder Wand. Were they planning on becoming conjoined twins?
The Resurrection Stone - to him, though I pretended not to know it, it meant an army of Inferi!
If Dumbledore knows that the Stone can create Inferi, why does he say later that Voldemort didn't know what the Stone was? He certainly created Inferi. A whole lake of them.
To me, I confess, it meant the return of my parents, and the lifting of all responsibility from my shoulders.
"Hi, Mum! Hi, Dad! Listen, I'm just going to summon you back from the dead so that you can take care of my crazy sister, not me! You don't mind giving up Heaven for that, do you?"
After admitting that neither of them thought much about the Cloak beyond "we need it to complete the set, and once one of us has it, he'll be invincible," Dumbles starts talking about Ariana's death. The way he puts it is interesting. He doesn't say Grindelwald killed his sister. But he sure tries to give that impression.
Grindelwald lost control. That which I had always sensed in him, though I pretended not to, now sprang into terrible being.
This fits what Aberforth said about Grindelwald suddenly starting to torture him. I would say that getting into an argument and torturing your opponent constitutes losing control. Especially when the penalty is a one-way ticket to Azkaban.
And Ariana...after all my mother’s care and caution...lay dead upon the floor.”
It's a strangely passive way of putting it. Aberforth described a much more active scene. He was being tortured; Grindelwald was doing the torturing; Albus wasn't trying very hard to stop the torture; and Ariana just wanted it all to end, because it was upsetting her.
And he and Aberforth have already said that Albus Dumbledore had good reason for wanting Ariana dead and gone.
But telling the truth isn't important to Dumbledore. It's all about him and his public, even though right now, he only has a public of one.
The Dumb One continues to try to blame Grindelwald without exactly saying that Grindy killed Ariana.
He vanished, with his plans for seizing power, and his schemes for Muggle torture, and his dreams of the Deathly Hallows, dreams in which I had encouraged him and helped him.
Schemes for Muggle TORTURE. Which Dumbledore had encouraged, and helped him plan. Here's a clue, Harry-slavers and torturers are not generally considered heroes!
Dumbledore then claims that over the years, someone-or-other-just who is not clear-offered him the position of Ministry of Magic several times over. Dumbles claims that he turned it down because, in his own words, that :
I was not to be trusted with power.”
Uh, yeah. Let's see how many positions of power the man held, shall we?
1. Advisor to the Minister of Magic
2. Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot (temporarily demoted, also later restored)
3. Founder and Secret Keeper, Order of the Phoenix (both the original and revived organisation)
4. Grand Sorcerer
5. Headmaster of Hogwarts
6. Order of Merlin, First Class
7. Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards (temporarily voted out, later restored)
Harry, of course, argues that Dumbledore would have been a much better Minister of Magic than the previous two whom, by some strange coincidence, Harry didn't like. Dumbles reiterates that power was too much of a temptation, and says that Harry is a better leader because he had leadership thrust on him, blah blah blah.
“I was safer at Hogwarts. I think I was a good teacher -”
“You were the best ---”
Oh, shut up, Harry. You never HAD Dumbledore as a professor. By the time you came along, he was administration, not staff. Do try to remember some facts, will you?
The Dumb One then tells Harry that he was afraid of Grindelwald. Not because the Grinch could kill him, or because of the horrific curses he might plague the Dumb One with. No. Something a lot more basic.
You see, I never knew which of us, in that last, horrific fight, had actually cast the curse that killed my sister.
There were three of you. One was torturing. One was being tortured. And one was you. Who do you think did it?
I dreaded beyond all things the knowledge that it had been I who brought about her death, not merely through my arrogance and stupidity, but that I actually struck the blow that snuffed out her life.
Oh, sweet Jesus! YOU MURDERED HER. At least have the guts to own up to it!
Dumbledore tells Harry that he was scared of meeting Grindy because he "thought" that Grindy knew what scared him. Frankly, I think it was more a question of Grindelwald knowing damned well what had happened, and Dumbles not being able to face it. Gellert Grindelwald, after all, was under no obligation to preserve Albus Dumbledore's' bubble reputation.
Scared of having the truth come out and being disgraced, the Dumb One stalled for very nearly the whole of World War II.
Think about that.
This is how he puts it:
I delayed meeting him until finally, it would have been too shameful to resist any longer.
Because just waiting for Grindelwald and his ideas to go away while millions died wasn't shameful at ALL.
People were dying
See?
and he seemed unstoppable, and I had to do what I could.
Translation: "It got to the point where he was so powerful, people were wondering why I didn't do anything. And I had to try or look like the complete chickenshit that I am."
Dumb and Dumber says that he won the fight AND the wand. Because that's really the point for him-acquiring a Hallow. Not saving human lives. By the way, how did he manage to win the fight when Grindelwald was wielding a wand that couldn't be beaten by any other wand?
Harry, of course, is still busy proving that denial is not just a river in Egypt:
Harry did not ask whether Dumbledore had ever found out who struck Ariana dead. He did not want to know, and even less did he want Dumbledore to have to tell him.
Why doesn't he want to know? Why can't he face it? It's not as if he and Dumbledore associated much before sixth year, and every time Harry asked Dumbledore a question or disagreed with him during sixth year, Dumbles threw a snit fit. God forbid anyone should disagree with the great and glorious Dumbledore!
Harry's reacting like an erotomanic who's being forced to confront reality. He's got this whole relationship with Dumbledore built up in in his mind, and the truth is, they were never that close. And now that he's seeing that Dumbledore isn't this perfect, idealized figure that he wants Dumbles to be, and he can't stand it.
There's a term for this. Cognitive dissonance.
At last he knew what Dumbledore would have seen when he looked in the mirror of Erised,
His dead parents alive again to take care of Ariana? His sister, dead but forgiving him for her murder? The Hallows themselves?
Harry-who is finding it easier and easier to ignore the wounded soul of Voldemort-tells DD that Grindelwald lied to Voldemort about the Elder Wand. Apparently Grindy was the old guy who kept showing up in Harry's Voldie-Vision in Chapter 23, the one who told Voldemort that he didn't know where the Elder Wand was, and who told Voldemort that he'd never own the Elder Wand, anyway. Since the old guy is never named in that vision, and since I never knew who the hell he was aside from a random dude that Voldemort murdered, I'm relying on the Lexicon to identify him. Dumbles gets all weepy about the possibility of Grindelwald feeling remorse and being redeemed. It's a Hallmark Moment.
Harry mentions that the Dumb One tried to use the Resurrection Stone, which leads to Dumb and Dumber seguing into yet another weepy monologue. This time he talks about how, having just found a Horcrux, he forgot that the ring WAS a Horcrux. This is a special level of stupid even for a wizard, but I think we're all agreed that Dumbles is more than capable of such idiocy. He's the wizarding world's Dubya, after all.
Anyway, according to him: I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry, I was. . . .
Which probably isn't very sorry. I mean, he's still grasping at straws of justification here. To quote Margaret Mitchell, "I think that you're like a thief who isn't a bit sorry that he's stolen but who's very sorry indeed that he's been caught."
Dumbles then tells Harry that he, Dumbledore, was unworthy to unite the Hallows, or some damned thing, because while he won the Elder Wand while saving his reputation others, he grabbed the Cloak out of what I call greed and what he calls "vain curiosity," and he wanted to use the stone to, y'know, RESURRECT people, rather than committing suicide by Dark Lord. Dumbles insists that because of the reasons that he united the Hallows, they wouldn't have worked properly. Apparently the Hallows care deeply about the morals of the people who bring them together.
Harry can't figure out why he should stay mad at Dumbledore-though I'm perfectly willing to give him a list. He also asks the Dumb One why he had to make this so bloody hard. After telling Harry that he hoped Hermione would slow Harry down, he makes another speech. Bottom line is that he was scared that if Harry got hold of the Hallows, he might want them too badly and go after them for the wrong reasons. This begs the question about why DD told Harry about the Hallows at all. He also claims that Voldemort didn't know what the Resurrection Stone was. I repeat what I said before-Inferi. Gellert Grindelwald wanted to make an Inferi army with the Stone. Voldemort DID make an Inferi army. I think we can conclude that Voldemort knew what the hell the Stone was.
Blah blah your wand beat his in the cemetery blah blah he borrowed Lucius Malfoy's wand blah blah this didn't work blah blah you are far superior to Voldemort blah blah WE HAVE HEARD ALL THIS BEFORE, ROWLING.
Oh, and the Dumb One planned to make Snape the master of the Elder Wand by letting Snape kill him, but that didn't work.
Harry finally figures out that he has to go back to the world of the living. Dumbledore says that he has a choice between that and boarding a train-which will take Harry, as he says, "on."
Now, this is very interesting. Harry can go on to the afterlife. Dumbledore, however, appears to be stuck at King's Cross, along with the mutilated soul of Voldemort.
Here's my theory, for what it's worth.
I think they're each other's hell. Like in Sartre's No Exit. Because take a look at the situation. Voldemort is the one who never knew what love was, and now he's there in the form of a helpless, wounded, damaged child. Shades of Ariana.
And the only person who can take care of him is his old nemesis, who murdered such a child for being inconvenient. And only by loving that child, and teaching it how to love, can they both be redeemed...
At this point, however, Dumbledore hasn't figured this out. He's still, "Oh, nothing can be done for Voldemort's soul. There is no help! Ignore it!"
This is probably far too subtle for Rowling, but I like the idea. So that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Harry and Dumbles are still discussing whether or not Harry should come back. Harry is not thrilled by the idea. Voldie has the Elder Wand, after all.
“I think,” said Dumbledore, “that if you choose to return, there is a chance that he may be finished for good. I cannot promise it.
And a chance that he won't be finished for good. And a chance that nothing will happen at all. Because Dumb and Dumber can't promise anything.
Harry looks at the sobbing, whimpering soul of Voldemort. This doesn't please the Dumb One, who begins to lecture. AGAIN. Merlin's beard, can we sew this man's mouth shut? Please?
““Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love.
Uh...that would be Voldemort, wouldn't it?
“By returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart.
"Then again, you may not. Who knows? Who cares? I'm pontificating here!"
And this is the point at which Harry Potter turns into either Jesus Christ or Buffy the Vampire Slayer , because he consciously decides to return from the peaceful world of the dead to a world full of pain and the fear of loss for The Good Of All. (Well, Buffy didn't actually decide this, but once she was back in Sunnydale, she had to decide to live all over again.)
Before Harry returns, he wants to know if this is real or imaginary. Dumbledore answers, one last time, with the cryptic. God, how I hate the cryptic.
““Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?”
So somehow the Killing Curse never killed Harry at all. It just knocked him out and gave him a happy hallucination. Good to know, Rowling. Really good to know.
Note: This is from the British edition. Readers of the American edition may notice some differences in the text.
Chapter Thirty-Five -- King’s Cross
He lay facedown, listening to the silence.
You know, I never thought of Harry as an Ingmar Bergman fan.
He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there.
Most people would conclude that being "perfectly alone" (as opposed to what? Imperfectly alone? Alone is alone, man!) meant that "nobody else was there." Harry James Potter, however, is not one of them.
He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself.
I, on the other hand, am absolutely certain that Harry is not all there.
A long time later, or maybe no time at all,
Or maybe in the not too distant future/ somewhere in time and space.
it came to him that he must exist,must be more than disembodied thought, because he was lying, definitely lying, on some surface.
Descartes! Harry: "Cubito ergo sum. I lie down often. Therefore, I am."
Therefore he had a sense of touch, and the thing against which he lay existed too.
Presumably, therefore, if Harry were to be put in a sensory deprivation chamber and felt nothing, not even his own body, he would disbelieve himself out of existence.
Almost as soon as he had reached this conclusion, Harry became conscious that he was naked.
NOT MY FAULT, LJ. TAKE IT UP WITH THE AUTHOR.
Convinced as he was of his total solitude,
There is no such thing as total solitude, because there is no such thing as partial solitude. Either you're alone or you're not.
this did not concern him, but it did intrigue him slightly.
Notice the progression of thought:
"Hey, I exist!"
"Oooh, I'm naked!"
"Hmm, the possibilities are intriguing."
He wondered whether, as he could feel, he would be able to see. In opening them, he discovered that he had eyes.
It's Harry's solemn, careful, plodding concentration on matters that gets to me. "I have a body. Hmm, I wonder if I have eyes? Oh, what to do, what to do? Wait, I have a brilliant idea! I shall OPEN them. And if I can open them and I can see, then I have eyes!"
Honestly, Harry. Just open your eyes and stop making such a production number out of it. Please. If he were alive, even Busby Berkeley, king of huge production numbers, would thank you.
He lay in a bright mist, though it was not like mist he had ever experienced before.
Because all the mist he'd experienced before had been a lovely shade of chartreuse.
His surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapor; rather the cloudy vapor had not yet formed into surroundings.
This is what we in New England call "a pea-souper fog."
The floor on which he lay seemed to be white, neither warm nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be.
So he's lying on white linoleum. Got it.
He sat up. His body appeared unscathed.
Though with all this cloudy vapor not forming into surroundings, he couldn't really tell...
He touched his face. He was not wearing glasses anymore.
Possibly because his soul doesn't wear glasses, d'ya think?
Then a noise reached him through the unformed nothingness that surrounded him: the small soft thumpings of something that flapped, flailed, and struggled.
I have to admit that the first thing I thought was, "Okay. Not only isn't Harry alone, whoever else is there is wanking off." And the next sentence just supported this idea:
It was a pitiful noise, yet also slightly indecent.
I cannot make this stuff up, folks.
After seven years of dorm life, Harry knows what a guy jerking off sounds like, so he's embarrassed. Well, the text actually says that Harry thought the noise was "furtive" and "shameful," but you get it and I get it.
He also wishes that he had clothes, and clothes, in the form of robes, appear somewhere unspecified in the nonexistent surroundings. Great, Rowling. That brings the entire scene to life for me. Harry puts the robes on and then starts wondering if he's gone to the Great Room of Requirement in the Sky.
No, really. It says that.
He stood up, looking around. Was he in some great Room of Requirement?
Harry then starts telling us a little about what the place looks like:
A great domed glass roof glittered high above him in sunlight. Perhaps it was a palace.
Or maybe it was King's Cross Station. You'd think that Harry would recognize it instantly, since he's only ever been to and from one train station in his entire life. But Rowling is being coy, alas, so Harry can't do anything half so sensible.
At this point, Harry spots the thing making those noises. It's a small child, as naked as Harry was a few minutes ago, and badly wounded-its skin has all but been flayed off. It's lying under a seat in the train station, weak, abandoned, sobbing and struggling to keep breathing.
Harry is scared of the kid, even repulsed by it. He doesn't want to go near it, so naturally he forces himself to go near it, for no reason that I can discern. He also gets close enough to put out a finger and touch if he wanted to, but he most emphatically doesn't want to. The book tells that he feels "like a coward," and I heartily agree. I mean, the kid has faced a three-headed dog, zombies, soul-sucking demons, Death Eaters and an insane undead snake-man hybrid...and now he's scared of a wee kidlet?
Although it's never specifically stated in this chapter, the wounded toddler is, apparently, Voldemort's soul, or at least the fragment of it that was attached to Harry's scar. Where the other fragments attached to the other Horcruxes/Horcruces are, I have no clue. Everyone talks about Harry "destroying" those fragments, but since Old Dumb and Dumber also refers to THIS fragment of soul being destroyed when it is quite manifestly here and in a great deal of pain, I think we can ignore the notion of piecemeal soul destruction. When canon contradicts itself, no one is under any obligation to believe it.
At this point, Dumbles walks in, looking absolutely fabulous, darling, in "sweeping robes of midnight blue." Nice to know that death hasn't overcome his keen fashion sense. He tells Harry that he, Harry, can't help Voldybaby. Since this is precisely what Harry wants to hear, he immediately abandons any attempt to show kindness and compassion to an immature and wounded soul, and starts talking to Dumb and Dumber without once wondering what any sane person would: "Hey, did he see me naked?"
Dumbledore calls Harry a wonderful boy and a brave, brave man, probably because Harry ended up dead. Personally, I won't be convinced until Harry ends up dead and STAYS dead. It's not really a case of "giving his life to save others" if the mortal hero suddenly acquires a "get out of death free" card.
Harry and the Dumb One sit down. Harry stares at Dumbledore, because we might have forgotten from last chapter that the Dumbledores have white hair and white beards and blue eyes...you know, your basic Generic Fantasy Wizard. It's going to be absolutely vital that the Dumb One had eyes that twinkled. Nod nod.
Anyway, Harry, being Harry, states something insanely obvious--"You're dead." Not content with that, Harry wants to know if he's dead, too.
Well, gee, Harry, what do you think? You've just been hit with something called the Killing Curse. Do you really think that was conducive to your continued health?
Dumb and Dumber tells Harry that he doesn't think Harry is dead. At least, not on the whole. Like Miracle Max, the Dumb One distinguishes between mostly dead and all dead.
Harry doesn't get this. At all. Frankly, I'm with him.
He then does something that makes no sense...which is par for the course in these books.
Harry raised his hand instinctively toward the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there.
Riiiight. He can feel the existence of the scar. Good grief, it's a flat, black, jagged line on his forehead. Keloid scarring isn't involved.
Harry then says that he deliberately let Voldemort kill him. Which I maintain is stupid. All Voldemort has to do is toss the semi-corpse to his minions to bury alive, order all of Harry 's supporters into the Great Hall, and then take them all out with a Blasting Curse or two. What could Harry do about that at the moment? Even if he did come back from the dead, he'd return to a world irrevocably changed.
Dumbles, however, thinks that Harry letting Voldemort kill him was the best thing since sliced bread. He also goes all Mysterious Mentor Guy, insisting that Harry tell him what he says Harry already knows. Since Harry normally doesn't even know facts that he has been bloody well hit over the head with year after year after year, I have good reason to believe that Harry knows bugger-all.
However, to cut to the chase, this is how things break down, according to Dumbles:
1) Harry let Voldemort kill him.
2) In killing Harry, Voldemort killed the part of his soul that was attached to Harry's scar.
3) Harry's soul and the bit of Voldemort's soul are now separated.
4) Because of the resurrection potion that used Harry's blood, Voldemort and Harry are now bound by blood. Voldemort, in essence, is Harry's life support system, giving the dead boy's soul a back door into life.
This last bit annoys me beyond the telling of it. I mean, I had every drop of blood in my body replaced when I was in hospital. It didn't end up binding me to my blood donors. But somehow, it bound Harry and Voldemort. Because it's maaaaaaaaaaaagic. God, I hate that as an excuse.
Dumbledore gets all excited by this:
Your blood in his veins, Harry, Lily’s protection inside both of you!
That doesn't make any sense to me at all, and it never has. Lily died for her son, not his blood. The spell should attach to him, not to various body parts.
“I live . . . while he lives? But I thought . . . I thought it was the other way around! I thought we both had to die? Or is it the same thing?”
I rather doubt it's the same thing, Harry. After all, you're dead and he ISN'T. That would seem to disprove Trelawney's prophecy, wouldn't it?
During all this, Harry keeps noticing the wounded child-soul and wanting to help...though not enough to get off his fat arse and actually do anything. Double-D is of no use whatsoever, telling Harry that the injured soul is beyond the help of either of them, and that there is no help possible for it. Yes, Dumbledore, that's the way. Stifle a motivation to help that extends beyond Harry himself or his friends. I knew I could count on you to do the wrong thing.
Dumbles continues his monologue telling Harry that Voldemort's soul was unstable because he'd ripped it apart so much-"so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child." All I can say is that Rowling must never have read any true-crime books by FBI profilers if she's having DD think that a simple, clean killing that involves no torture, mutilation or pain is the worst thing EVER. I'm not saying that the murders of James and Lily were good, but honestly, I don't think they even count in the top fifty where ultimate evil is concerned.
He left part of himself latched to you, the would-be victim who had survived.
No! Harry would only be the "would-be victim" if he had wanted to be Voldie's victim. Since he didn't want anything of the sort, the correct way to phrase this would be "Voldemort's intended victim who had survived."
Dumb and Dumber then continues to babble about how Voldemort doesn't value certain things-like fairy tales or house elves--so he doesn't bother to understand them.
This would be fine if Harry ever had tried to understand either. However, it was Hermione who kept reading the fairy tale book, thinking that it might contain some valuable clue, and it was also Hermione who pointed out to Harry for three books that being nice to Kreacher might be a good idea. Harry only started considering Kreacher and the fairy tale book of potential value when he began to think in terms of what he could get from either-information and Mundungus in the first case, and the Deathly Hallows in the second. I'm pretty sure that Voldemort knows all about that level of selfishness.
Harry's all, "Wait a second-you knew this? You ALWAYS knew this?" And Dumbles is all false modesty and "Well, I've always been a good guesser."
Harry then asks him why his wand broke Voldemort's borrowed wand. After six paragraphs--one of which asks a question, three of which are mostly filler, one of which rehashes the Voldemort-used-your-blood-and-got-Lily's-protection-as-a-side-effect issue, and the last of which talks about Voldie attacking Harry in the cemetery of Little Hangleton-Dumb and Dumber finally gets down to cases. Sort of. According to the Dumb One, who wasn't there, Harry was unspeakably brave the night that Voldemort attacked him, because he "had accepted, even embraced, the possibility of death, something Lord Voldemort has never been able to do."
Uh, yeah. Seems to me that I recall Harry dodging behind a tombstone or two, hiding, trembling and wishing that he was safely back at Hogwarts. That doesn't sound like "embracing death" to me. Oh, wait! We can ignore that! It's ONLY canon!
Your courage won, your wand overpowered his.
No. That's not what happened. The Lexicon states what did:
"When two wands are forced to duel that have core material from the same single creature, the result will be 'Priori Incantatem,' a display in sequence of the last spells one of the wands cast. Which wand will show the spell effect depends on the willpower of the two wizards involved."
Both of their wands had cores from the tailfeathers of Fawkes the phoenix. As the two wizards tried to harm each other, a golden beam filled with little golden droplets connected their wands. After that, the battle was rather like a video game-namely, who could get a droplet into his enemy's wandtip first? Courage had nothing to do with which wand defeated the other. Will power, alertness, concentration, good hand-eye coordination...those, I'll buy. Courage, no.
The Dumb One then starts practicing his favorite form of exercise...jumping to conclusions.
“I believe that your wand imbibed some of the power and qualities of Voldemort’s wand that night, which is to say that it contained a little of Voldemort himself.
I repeat what I said in HBP. What you BELIEVE, Dumbledore, is not necessarily true.
Furthermore, we've seen evidence that wizards can and do use other wizards' wands. Depending on the wizard, this can work very well, fairly, or not well at all-and this despite the idea, vaunted in this book, that a wizard who overcomes another wizard's wand MUST become the master of that wand.
But the powers of a wizard's magic are not in the wand, as Dumbledore seems to be saying. A wizard or witch is born with the ability to do magic, and manifests magic as a child, before acquiring his or her first wand. A wand is a tool for focusing magic-and some wizards, especially the older ones, don't even use that.
So basically the notion that Harry's wand could have vampirically drained Voldemort of some of his magical abilities is utter rubbish.
So your wand recognized him when he pursued you, recognized a man who was both kin and mortal enemy,
Harry's wand and Voldemort's wand have been described as "brothers" because they both had cores from Fawkes, but I really doubt whether Harry's wand considered Lord Voldemort a relative.
and it regurgitated some of his own magic against him,
It was so disgusted by the author's ignorance of her own canon that it had no choice but to throw up magic all over Voldemort.
magic much more powerful than anything Lucius’s wand had ever performed.
Translation: Lucius's' wand couldn't clean up the magical vomit, because cleaning was strictly for house elves.
Harry asks a Most Excellent Question-if his wand was all that and a bag of chips, how come Hermione smashed it?
“My dear boy, its remarkable effects were directed only at Voldemort, who had tampered so ill-advisedly with the deepest laws of magic.
Say what? Potterverse has laws of magic now? Did Rowling read a Dresden Files novel between HBP and DH and decide belatedly that having laws of magic would be a good idea?
And once again, Rowling is trying to eat her cake and have it, too. Harry's wand is a perfectly ordinary wand--except when it deals with Voldemort, and then it totally isn't.
Harry, Master of the Obvious, then tells DD that Voldie killled him (Harry) with his (Dumbledore's) wand. Dumbledore hastens to tell Harry that Voldemort failed to kill him, which is idiotic, because Harry is demonstrably dead. He is going to come back to life, certainly, because Voldemort is still alive...but the thing is, you can't come BACK to life if you haven't been un-alive first.
Harry asks Double-D where they are. Dumbledore, who seems to be striving to get on my nerves, asks Harry where he thinks they are. Harry says that they're at King's Cross. Dumbles gets all "good heavens, is it, I had no idea!" Even Harry thinks that DD is being infuriating, and immediately asks him about the Hallows. This is enough to wipe the smirk off of Dumbles' face and make him look like a very old, guilty and worried child with his hand stuck in the cookie jar.
“Can you forgive me for not trusting you? For not telling you?
If Harry were a normal, believable teenager, the answers to those questions would be "No" and "No."
Harry, I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes.
Which was, it seems, an accurate assessment of Harry. As soon as he found out about the Hallows, he lost all interest in the Horcruxes.
Then Dumbledore really lays on the bullshit:
I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man.”
Well, if by "better" you mean selfish, reckless, stupid and passive to the point of inactivity. Seriously, name me one heroic thing the brat has done in this book. And anything rash that endangers other people does not count. (That would include Harry's death, by the way. )
Harry, not unnaturally, wants to know what the fuck the Dumb One is talking about. The Dumb One, of course, can't say straight out "I wanted the power of the Hallows and completely messed up my life and the lives of everyone around me." That would involve honesty, and Albus Dumbledore could not possibly be honest-either with other people or with himself. He must always present himself in the best possible light. If he can't present himself as being kind, he'll claim to be wise, and he can't be wise, he'll put on a great act of being humble.
So instead, he blathers on about the Hallows being “A desperate man’s dream!” and “Real, and dangerous, and a lure for fools. And I was such a fool. He also tells Harry that Harry already knows all of his secrets. Because telling Harry that he already knows everything and doesn't need to think about a man whom Harry cannot bear to admit is flawed is going to encourage deep philosophical contemplation. Of course it is.
Dumbles then asks Harry if he, Dumbledore, was better than Voldy-cakes.
“Of course - how can you ask that? You never killed if you could avoid it!”
*coughARIANAcough*
Dumbles says that he tried overcoming death too. Harry feels that having and using Hallows is a lot better than having and using Horcruxes.
We then begin Another Dumbledore Monologue. Yawn.
Okay, so Gellert Grindelwald wanted the Hallows too, according to Dumbles. Forget their passionate devotion to world domination and each other that everyone and his brother has mentioned-nope, the main thing young Gellert and young Albus had in common was an obsession with the Hallows. Grindy only came to Godric's Hollow because his Great-Aunt Bathilda invited him after his expulsion from Durmstrang of the grave of Ignotus Peverell. He wanted to explore the place the third brother had died.” And Ignotus Peverell was the ancestor of James Potter, which is how Jamie-boy got the Cloak in the first place.
Also, according to Dumbledore, Harry was born in Godric's Hollow, which strikes me as unlikely. Supposedly the Potters only moved there a week before their deaths, and Harry was a LOT more than a week old when his parents died.
Dumbles tells Harry that he knows Harry has guessed why he had James' Cloak, and then proceeds to tell Harry what Harry hasn't even speculated about until now. Basically, James brought his Cloak to DD a few days before he died, and Dumbledore hung onto it, even though it wasn't his. Harry says that the Cloak couldn't have helped James and Lily survive. Apparently he's forgotten all the times that he, Ron and Hermione concealed themselves beneath the Cloak and saved their necks.
If Dumbledore hadn't greedily glomped onto the Cloak, James would have had it when he needed it. Harry might still have parents.
The Dumb One then proceeds to tell Harry about Ariana. First he tells Harry that he should despise him. Way ahead of you there, Dumb and Dumber. Second, he rehashes a bit of what Aberforth said, because Rowling will never say something once if she can say it four times. Third, he admits that he resented having to take care of his sister:
“I was gifted, I was brilliant.
...I was intelligent, smart, bright, superb, magnificent, Einsteinian, a veritable genius. Someone take away this woman's thesaurus!
I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory.
*covers the annoying old fool with Turtle Wax and proceeds to polish him* There. Now you can shine.
*tosses him a DVD copy of Glory as well*
Then the self-justifications start. Oy, do they ever start.
I loved my parents, I loved my brother and my sister, but I was selfish, Harry, more selfish than you, who are a remarkably selfless person, could possibly imagine.
Harry, a remarkably selfless person? HARRY?
*nearly chokes on her own laughter*
...what do you mean, that wasn't a joke?
Then he begins talking about Grindelwald:
You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.
He's omitting the fact that he was writing advice to Grindelwald on enslaving the Muggle population, rather than killing them. And that it was all for the greater good. In fact, he's making it sound like everything bad was Grindelwald's idea, and he was just caught up in the moment. Coward. Liar.
It would all be for the greater good, and any harm done would be repaid a hundredfold in benefits for wizards.
Because only wizards count, y'know. Muggles aren't really people. They don't bleed if you kill them.
He also says that the Deathly Hallows were at the center of their plans for political power. Yeah, I know that every politician I've ever heard of builds his ambitions on legendary objects whose existence can't be confirmed. Personally, I suspect that Grindelwald wanted power, and hey, if he could get the Hallows as well, that would be great. Dumbledore is the one who seems fixated on the Hallows themselves...to the point where, when one came into his hands accidentally, he couldn't let it go.
The unbeatable wand, the weapon that would lead us to power!
Okay, that is just stupid. Only one person at a time can be the owner of a wand, and only one person at a time can wield it. So I don't see how both of them could use the Elder Wand. Were they planning on becoming conjoined twins?
The Resurrection Stone - to him, though I pretended not to know it, it meant an army of Inferi!
If Dumbledore knows that the Stone can create Inferi, why does he say later that Voldemort didn't know what the Stone was? He certainly created Inferi. A whole lake of them.
To me, I confess, it meant the return of my parents, and the lifting of all responsibility from my shoulders.
"Hi, Mum! Hi, Dad! Listen, I'm just going to summon you back from the dead so that you can take care of my crazy sister, not me! You don't mind giving up Heaven for that, do you?"
After admitting that neither of them thought much about the Cloak beyond "we need it to complete the set, and once one of us has it, he'll be invincible," Dumbles starts talking about Ariana's death. The way he puts it is interesting. He doesn't say Grindelwald killed his sister. But he sure tries to give that impression.
Grindelwald lost control. That which I had always sensed in him, though I pretended not to, now sprang into terrible being.
This fits what Aberforth said about Grindelwald suddenly starting to torture him. I would say that getting into an argument and torturing your opponent constitutes losing control. Especially when the penalty is a one-way ticket to Azkaban.
And Ariana...after all my mother’s care and caution...lay dead upon the floor.”
It's a strangely passive way of putting it. Aberforth described a much more active scene. He was being tortured; Grindelwald was doing the torturing; Albus wasn't trying very hard to stop the torture; and Ariana just wanted it all to end, because it was upsetting her.
And he and Aberforth have already said that Albus Dumbledore had good reason for wanting Ariana dead and gone.
But telling the truth isn't important to Dumbledore. It's all about him and his public, even though right now, he only has a public of one.
The Dumb One continues to try to blame Grindelwald without exactly saying that Grindy killed Ariana.
He vanished, with his plans for seizing power, and his schemes for Muggle torture, and his dreams of the Deathly Hallows, dreams in which I had encouraged him and helped him.
Schemes for Muggle TORTURE. Which Dumbledore had encouraged, and helped him plan. Here's a clue, Harry-slavers and torturers are not generally considered heroes!
Dumbledore then claims that over the years, someone-or-other-just who is not clear-offered him the position of Ministry of Magic several times over. Dumbles claims that he turned it down because, in his own words, that :
I was not to be trusted with power.”
Uh, yeah. Let's see how many positions of power the man held, shall we?
1. Advisor to the Minister of Magic
2. Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot (temporarily demoted, also later restored)
3. Founder and Secret Keeper, Order of the Phoenix (both the original and revived organisation)
4. Grand Sorcerer
5. Headmaster of Hogwarts
6. Order of Merlin, First Class
7. Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards (temporarily voted out, later restored)
Harry, of course, argues that Dumbledore would have been a much better Minister of Magic than the previous two whom, by some strange coincidence, Harry didn't like. Dumbles reiterates that power was too much of a temptation, and says that Harry is a better leader because he had leadership thrust on him, blah blah blah.
“I was safer at Hogwarts. I think I was a good teacher -”
“You were the best ---”
Oh, shut up, Harry. You never HAD Dumbledore as a professor. By the time you came along, he was administration, not staff. Do try to remember some facts, will you?
The Dumb One then tells Harry that he was afraid of Grindelwald. Not because the Grinch could kill him, or because of the horrific curses he might plague the Dumb One with. No. Something a lot more basic.
You see, I never knew which of us, in that last, horrific fight, had actually cast the curse that killed my sister.
There were three of you. One was torturing. One was being tortured. And one was you. Who do you think did it?
I dreaded beyond all things the knowledge that it had been I who brought about her death, not merely through my arrogance and stupidity, but that I actually struck the blow that snuffed out her life.
Oh, sweet Jesus! YOU MURDERED HER. At least have the guts to own up to it!
Dumbledore tells Harry that he was scared of meeting Grindy because he "thought" that Grindy knew what scared him. Frankly, I think it was more a question of Grindelwald knowing damned well what had happened, and Dumbles not being able to face it. Gellert Grindelwald, after all, was under no obligation to preserve Albus Dumbledore's' bubble reputation.
Scared of having the truth come out and being disgraced, the Dumb One stalled for very nearly the whole of World War II.
Think about that.
This is how he puts it:
I delayed meeting him until finally, it would have been too shameful to resist any longer.
Because just waiting for Grindelwald and his ideas to go away while millions died wasn't shameful at ALL.
People were dying
See?
and he seemed unstoppable, and I had to do what I could.
Translation: "It got to the point where he was so powerful, people were wondering why I didn't do anything. And I had to try or look like the complete chickenshit that I am."
Dumb and Dumber says that he won the fight AND the wand. Because that's really the point for him-acquiring a Hallow. Not saving human lives. By the way, how did he manage to win the fight when Grindelwald was wielding a wand that couldn't be beaten by any other wand?
Harry, of course, is still busy proving that denial is not just a river in Egypt:
Harry did not ask whether Dumbledore had ever found out who struck Ariana dead. He did not want to know, and even less did he want Dumbledore to have to tell him.
Why doesn't he want to know? Why can't he face it? It's not as if he and Dumbledore associated much before sixth year, and every time Harry asked Dumbledore a question or disagreed with him during sixth year, Dumbles threw a snit fit. God forbid anyone should disagree with the great and glorious Dumbledore!
Harry's reacting like an erotomanic who's being forced to confront reality. He's got this whole relationship with Dumbledore built up in in his mind, and the truth is, they were never that close. And now that he's seeing that Dumbledore isn't this perfect, idealized figure that he wants Dumbles to be, and he can't stand it.
There's a term for this. Cognitive dissonance.
At last he knew what Dumbledore would have seen when he looked in the mirror of Erised,
His dead parents alive again to take care of Ariana? His sister, dead but forgiving him for her murder? The Hallows themselves?
Harry-who is finding it easier and easier to ignore the wounded soul of Voldemort-tells DD that Grindelwald lied to Voldemort about the Elder Wand. Apparently Grindy was the old guy who kept showing up in Harry's Voldie-Vision in Chapter 23, the one who told Voldemort that he didn't know where the Elder Wand was, and who told Voldemort that he'd never own the Elder Wand, anyway. Since the old guy is never named in that vision, and since I never knew who the hell he was aside from a random dude that Voldemort murdered, I'm relying on the Lexicon to identify him. Dumbles gets all weepy about the possibility of Grindelwald feeling remorse and being redeemed. It's a Hallmark Moment.
Harry mentions that the Dumb One tried to use the Resurrection Stone, which leads to Dumb and Dumber seguing into yet another weepy monologue. This time he talks about how, having just found a Horcrux, he forgot that the ring WAS a Horcrux. This is a special level of stupid even for a wizard, but I think we're all agreed that Dumbles is more than capable of such idiocy. He's the wizarding world's Dubya, after all.
Anyway, according to him: I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry, I was. . . .
Which probably isn't very sorry. I mean, he's still grasping at straws of justification here. To quote Margaret Mitchell, "I think that you're like a thief who isn't a bit sorry that he's stolen but who's very sorry indeed that he's been caught."
Dumbles then tells Harry that he, Dumbledore, was unworthy to unite the Hallows, or some damned thing, because while he won the Elder Wand while saving his reputation others, he grabbed the Cloak out of what I call greed and what he calls "vain curiosity," and he wanted to use the stone to, y'know, RESURRECT people, rather than committing suicide by Dark Lord. Dumbles insists that because of the reasons that he united the Hallows, they wouldn't have worked properly. Apparently the Hallows care deeply about the morals of the people who bring them together.
Harry can't figure out why he should stay mad at Dumbledore-though I'm perfectly willing to give him a list. He also asks the Dumb One why he had to make this so bloody hard. After telling Harry that he hoped Hermione would slow Harry down, he makes another speech. Bottom line is that he was scared that if Harry got hold of the Hallows, he might want them too badly and go after them for the wrong reasons. This begs the question about why DD told Harry about the Hallows at all. He also claims that Voldemort didn't know what the Resurrection Stone was. I repeat what I said before-Inferi. Gellert Grindelwald wanted to make an Inferi army with the Stone. Voldemort DID make an Inferi army. I think we can conclude that Voldemort knew what the hell the Stone was.
Blah blah your wand beat his in the cemetery blah blah he borrowed Lucius Malfoy's wand blah blah this didn't work blah blah you are far superior to Voldemort blah blah WE HAVE HEARD ALL THIS BEFORE, ROWLING.
Oh, and the Dumb One planned to make Snape the master of the Elder Wand by letting Snape kill him, but that didn't work.
Harry finally figures out that he has to go back to the world of the living. Dumbledore says that he has a choice between that and boarding a train-which will take Harry, as he says, "on."
Now, this is very interesting. Harry can go on to the afterlife. Dumbledore, however, appears to be stuck at King's Cross, along with the mutilated soul of Voldemort.
Here's my theory, for what it's worth.
I think they're each other's hell. Like in Sartre's No Exit. Because take a look at the situation. Voldemort is the one who never knew what love was, and now he's there in the form of a helpless, wounded, damaged child. Shades of Ariana.
And the only person who can take care of him is his old nemesis, who murdered such a child for being inconvenient. And only by loving that child, and teaching it how to love, can they both be redeemed...
At this point, however, Dumbledore hasn't figured this out. He's still, "Oh, nothing can be done for Voldemort's soul. There is no help! Ignore it!"
This is probably far too subtle for Rowling, but I like the idea. So that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Harry and Dumbles are still discussing whether or not Harry should come back. Harry is not thrilled by the idea. Voldie has the Elder Wand, after all.
“I think,” said Dumbledore, “that if you choose to return, there is a chance that he may be finished for good. I cannot promise it.
And a chance that he won't be finished for good. And a chance that nothing will happen at all. Because Dumb and Dumber can't promise anything.
Harry looks at the sobbing, whimpering soul of Voldemort. This doesn't please the Dumb One, who begins to lecture. AGAIN. Merlin's beard, can we sew this man's mouth shut? Please?
““Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love.
Uh...that would be Voldemort, wouldn't it?
“By returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart.
"Then again, you may not. Who knows? Who cares? I'm pontificating here!"
And this is the point at which Harry Potter turns into either Jesus Christ or Buffy the Vampire Slayer , because he consciously decides to return from the peaceful world of the dead to a world full of pain and the fear of loss for The Good Of All. (Well, Buffy didn't actually decide this, but once she was back in Sunnydale, she had to decide to live all over again.)
Before Harry returns, he wants to know if this is real or imaginary. Dumbledore answers, one last time, with the cryptic. God, how I hate the cryptic.
““Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?”
So somehow the Killing Curse never killed Harry at all. It just knocked him out and gave him a happy hallucination. Good to know, Rowling. Really good to know.