(no subject)
(Transcribed from audiobook - note that I put it in one chunk for convenience. Line breaks signal a new cup of potion.)
“I don’t want… Don’t make me… Don’t like… want to stop…
No… I don’t want to, I don’t want to… Let me go… Make it stop… Make it stop…
No, no, no, no… I can’t… I can’t… Don’t make me… I don’t want to…
It’s all my fault, all my fault… Please make it stop… I know I did wrong… Oh please, make it stop, and I’ll never, never again…
Don’t hurt them, don’t hurt them, please, please… it’s my fault… Hurt me instead…
Please, please, please, please no, not that, not that… I’ll do anything…
No more, please… no more…
I want to die… I want to die… Make it stop… make it stop… I want to die…
KILL ME!”
All the while, he’s sobbing and screaming and flailing, and at one point he starts “cowering, as if invisible tormentors surrounded him”.
And now for the utterly non-canon crack. We're kind of making a big assumption (given the bizarre things Voldemort can do), namely that these are the words of Albus Dumbledore. I mean, yes, they're coming out of his mouth. But Harry does this crazy thing in his Voldemort-visions when he refers to Voldemort's words as "his" and, after his Godric's Hollow vision, worries that he might have "screamed curses like Voldemort, cried like the baby in the crib". So doesn't it stand to reason that you could reenact the actions of someone in a memory when in a trance that makes you live out that memory from that person's POV?
Yeah. All right, LJ has developed a fetish for kicking me out and having me have to restart from the "worries that he might have" part (well, I've had this open for days and have had to relogin several times due to only brief periods of internet contact), so let me stop trying to do dramatic buildup and just admit that I have a crack-theory that Albus is reliving Ariana's last memories after the duel "set her off" and before she hit the floor. My only evidence for this over the traditional interpretation is that "Don't like" seems too childish even for a severely stressed Dumbledore and that the "cowering, as if invisible tormentors surrounded [Albus]" sounds more IC for Ariana hallucinating than Albus cowering from hallucination!Gellert (as, to misquote gehayi on hbpspork, even Albus could figure out Gellert "isn't plural")... eh, just crack.
Under this theory, she's begging with her magic not to "make" her hurt/not hurt the three duelers (Aberforth, Albus, and Gellert). "I know I did wrong" refers to... I'll remind readers that Ariana killed Kendra about two months before. I can't really think of where this explanation would have a hole, except that she'd have to be babbling and flailing for a pretty long time before she shouts "KILL ME!" and her magic grants her wish. And the duelists would have heard. So... just a bit of (in my opinion) interesting crack-theorizing. WHY Albus would relive ARIANA'S memory, I dunno. Maybe her ghost gave it to a young-adult Voldemort when asked - Kreacher didn't go into details of WHAT he saw. Maybe it's just an effect of the potion. Who knows? (If asked, I can justify all of the above lines from an Ariana POV. As for the ambiguity as to whether the magic would "make" her hurt them or "hurt them"... it was a bit ambiguous in Aberforth's tale as well, so maybe it was a bit of both.)
And the "insides burning" would be *ahem* a bit of that "magic turn[ing] inward", and the nasty aftereffects (the dehydration and general extremely poor health) would be from Albus's magic also replaying the events of the memory and thus taking a grand tour of his insides. *cringes*
As a note for AUs:
The Potion/Basin of Living Memory
The Potion of Living Memory, which regenerates in the Basin of Living Memory over the day or so after a full use, is made with a variety of difficult-to-obtain ingredients (such as human brains), the KEY one being a single vivid memory. (The Basin's purpose is to hold the Potion and regenerate it as necessary.) For all intents and purposes, it is that memory put into physical, liquid form. When someone has ingested about a third of the Potion (it was designed that way to give the drinker a chance to back out), it puts the drinker into a trance, and the drinker relives the memory as if they were the person from whom the memory was originally taken. As such, it requires one person to feed the drinker the potion, as the drinker will not be downing the Potion on their own after they settle into the trance. As more of the Potion is ingested, the memory progresses; when the Potion is exhausted, the memory ends.
As the Potion is a "physical memory", it cannot be Transfigured, affected by almost any non-mental-magic spell, etc. As it is a physical object, it's quite hard to use Legilimency or Memory Charms on it. So, if you want to get it out of the Basin, you have to drink it. (If the drinker is made to regurgitate what of the Potion they have drunk before finishing it, it regenerates in the Basin instantly, as the Basin holds it together and it's really just one object. ...It's kind of complicated.)
The Potion, in case anyone was wondering, glows bright green.
...After you read the above crack-theory, I think you can guess how I came up with this Potion, yeah? :D;;