Like Flesh in Flame: Tom's Avoidance of Harry's Mind

[terri_testing]

The Twinkly One very kindly explained to Severus (and Jo to the inquiring reader) why Tom, after the debacle at the Ministry at the end of OotP, would never again voluntarily open his mental connection to Harry.

“…. Do not think I underestimate the constant danger in which you place yourself, Severus. To give Voldemort what appears to be

Comments

[oneandthetruth]

That’s our Twinkles! Offering Severus trust and praise with one phrase, damnation with the next.

As you're probably aware, that's known variously as double bind, impossible bind, and crazy making speech. I go into that subject in great detail in chapter 33, part 2. This conversation is one of the ones I examine.

And the veiled accusation worked. Severus instantly refuted that he objected to Albus’s gross betrayal only because he had transferred his “greedy” interest in Lily to her son:

“For him? ” shouted Snape. “Expecto Patronum!”

But Snape apparently accepted that any further protest would count as a petty insistence on his personal feelings (his obsession with Lily, if not her son), not a principled objection to deliberately twisting an unprotected child’s love and trust into a willingness to suicide on order.

And so Albus turned Snape’s moment of clear moral superiority into an opportunity to condemn Severus, yet again, for indecent selfishness.

Not necessarily. It may be that Severus had finally reached the point where he said, "Screw it. It's obvious no matter what I say to this lying, manipulative old shit, or what I do for him, it'll never be enough to win his approval. So I'm finished with that. I'll let him think what he wants about my putative devotion to a dead girl. That keeps him placated about my loyalty and submission to him. Meanwhile, I've got my own plans about how to survive this war that I'm not telling anybody about." Snape isn't head of Slytherin for nothing. ;D

That Harry. The one Jo wrote.

Killer. Torturer. Thief. Cheat. Bully.

I’m sorry, but I think that Tom Riddle’s soul would have been entirely comfortable with that level of purity.

LOL! Thanks for my laugh for the day.

On another subject: Wow! Harry and Hermione really are OTP!

Now I'm imagining a fanfic in which Harry and Hermione get married after the war and turn their criminal tendencies to running the British wizarding world like a Mafia empire. It would start out subtly, with them using their heroic status to cover up their nefarious activities as they lay the groundwork for their empire. Within a few years, every business--and everybody they didn't like--would be paying them protection money. Anybody who resisted would end up like Marietta--if they were lucky. Others would just "disappear." Sure, the official story would be that they'd left the country, or gone to live with muggles, but the rumors would say something much uglier.

As for your theory about why Tom avoided Harry's soul, I think it makes excellent sense. In fact, it's inspired.

I don't think Albus gave a rat's butt about the purity of anyone's soul, though, including his own. I think he just told whoever his audience was whatever he thought he needed to in that moment to manipulate them for his own ends. The evidence that he is anything other than a narcissistic psychopath is just not there.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Whether or not Albus cared about his soul depends very much on how the wizarding afterlife 'works'. If the purity of one's soul determined one's 'next adventure' he would care very much. Maybe even obsess about it.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Wouldn't obsessing about his own soul lead Dumbles to prefer death by Severus over carrying poison on his person? (That's in addition to plotting to get Severus killed, of course.)

[oneandthetruth]

Not necessarily. You seem to be assuming magical culture has a prohibition against suicide. We don't have any info on that one way or the other. They certainly aren't religious in any conventional sense. Unless you're assuming self-murder rips one's soul the same way murdering another person does.

In any case, Scummy did commit suicide. He browbeat someone else into killing him, but Severus wouldn't have done it if Scummy hadn't been controlling him. That's only "murder" in the most technical of senses. That would have to be one enormously screwed up universe in which Severus's soul gets ripped for that, but Scummy's doesn't. Of course, we are talking about the Potterverse, so screwedupness is assumed. :D

You're probably right Scummy would care about his soul if its purity affected his afterlife. However, despite his rationalizations, his soul is filthy no matter how he dies. As I point out in the next chapter, he committed so many crimes against so many people, if he was showing remorse in the cave, it's impossible to know what he was showing it about. A complete list of his crimes, of both omission and commission, would be about as long as that list of his lies you and Terri came up with.

[oryx_leucoryx]

I'm not assuming religion in any sense. I'm assuming magical 'science' and theory. We know that in the Potterverse an afterlife of some sort exists (even for Muggles, if the shades that came from Riddle's wand are derived from the true souls of his victims). We also know souls are quite physical things that can be torn, ripped, eaten by dementors (and knit into sweaters, as sister_magpie once phrased it). We know from Horace that having one's soul intact was significant in some way, but we aren't quite certain how. We see murderers such as Karkarov and Travers acting like more-or-less functional people. It doesn't seem as though Peter got any worse after killing Cedric. So I don't think the effect of having a ripped soul had a significant effect on the living. But perhaps wizards expect it to matter in the afterlife. Now, despite ghosts, portraits and wand-shades, they lack direct knowledge of what actually happens in the afterlife - unless the Unspeakables managed to actually decipher the sounds from beyond the veil and get proper answers (who says the dead want to share such information?) because ghosts become such before getting past some in-between state (probably equivalent to King's Cross in Harry's experience) - according to Nick, and portraits seem to only be aware of what their persona learned in this world, whether before or after death. So perhaps it is all unevidenced speculation. And Twinkly is the type to convince himself that he could avoid the travails of those of ripped-souls in the afterlife if he had someone else actually pull the trigger on him, even if he arranged it.

As for what exactly causes the soul to rip - this is one of the big open questions (because Rowling doesn't care). Horace says *murder*, not mere killing is what rips the soul. But what kind of killing is considered murder varies among societies. There are societies that don't consider self-defense as justification, and they'd consider Harry's killing of Quirrell the same as Tom's killing of Charity Burbage. I don't see how wizards would know what kind of acts ripped souls, because other than Horcruxes we have no way of telling that a soul was ripped. The fact that a Horcrux can be created demonstrates that at least some murders result in the murderer's soul being ripped, but we don't know if that is the only way. IOW I think wizards believe all sorts of things based on speculation, but the factual evidence for them remains thin. But they will act on those beliefs if they expected the consequences to matter.

[dracasadiablo]

Well, we know that the Bloody Baron committed murder and suicide both.
And, as far as we know, his ghost is not "mutilated" in some you-soul-is-damaged way. Not that it makes any sense. If JKR really wanted to make "murder rips the soul" a fact he should have shown as different then the other ghosts.

But then noting in the last books makes any sense.

Btw, Anybody have any idea as to how (and why) did Bloody Baron and Gray Lady end up on Hogwarts anyway? Is Hogwarts supposed to be some kind of Purgatory for ww ghosts?

[nx74defiant]

--But Snape apparently accepted that any further protest would count as a petty insistence on his personal feelings (his obsession with Lily, if not her son), not a principled objection to deliberately twisting an unprotected child’s love and trust into a willingness to suicide on order.--

Also I wonder if Snape has come to realize in all the time he has seen Dumbledore in action as Headmaster (first as a student, than as a child) that Dumbledore has never done something to help or protect a student if it wasn't a student that Dumbledore liked. Had Dumbledore ever acted to help a student because it was the right thing to do or because it was his responsiblity as Headmaster? Or is it only because the student is one of his favorites?

[wolf_willow31]

In contrast, while Dumbles did nothing to protect young Tom Riddle, he did nothing to try to change him, either. What could he have been thinking? Did he want to create a new Dark Lord for them to defeat?

[oneandthetruth]

Maybe he did. After his own history with Gellert, both as an incipient teen Dark Lord and a spineless passivist (not a principled pacifist, just someone too weak to stand up to him) during WWII, maybe he was hoping for a new DL to take everyone's mind off his own previous failings. He may have thought, "Hmmm. If I promptly and effectively defeat a new DL, everyone will think I'm so heroic they'll forget all about that stuff I did decades ago. Sure, somebody'll probably have to die for that to happen, but hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." He obviously didn't anticipate Tom's going the multi-Horcrux route.

[wolf_willow31]

I was thinking about that. I figured that Dumbles probably wanted to be the Great War Leader who saved the Wizarding World (the British one, anyway) not once, but twice! It would get him a better Chocolate Frog card, you know. It hadn't occurred to me that he would want to distract everyone from his past as well.

I briefly wondered if Dumbles thought that the emergence of a new Dark Lord would unite Wizarding Britain, but quickly rejected that idea. There's no way he would have wanted that. He actually worked hard to keep them divided and fighting against one another. And indeed, they never did unite. The DL was defeated by a handful of school kids (and teachers), using some newly revealed notions of "blood magic" (AKA human sacrifice) and bizarre "wand ownership" nonsense. And afterward everything continued exactly as it always had. Long live the status quo!

[nx74defiant]

He actually worked hard to keep them divided and fighting against one another.

It was while Dumbledore was Headmaster that Slytherin became Voldemort's recruiting ground. Both Lily and Sirius considered the Slytherins just Death Eaters in training.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Well, before Dumbles became headmaster Voldemort wasn't recruiting. But it doesn't seem like Albus was making any effort to discourage such recruitment.