Chapter Eighty-Five of IAATB: Ave Atque Vale
Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
The title of this chapter comes from a poem by the Roman poet Catullus, whose brother died as a soldier and was buried far from Rome; Catullus composed it on visiting his grave. The last line of the poem reads, “atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale” (And now forever, brother, hail and farewell).
Chapter Eighty-Five: Ave Atque Vale
Harry walked slowly along the shore.
Waves rushed up to his feet and lapped down again. They no longer looked silver, as they had in his madness, but merely gray. Harry halted and spent a moment staring east. On Midsummer Day, the sun would come up and stretch its rays over the waters, and for the first time in centuries, there would be no Potters to greet it, no possibility of such a greeting even if they simply chose not to come.
Harry sat down on the wet sand, ignoring the fact that it crusted his robes with heavy slime; that was what cleaning charms were for. He propped his knees up, looped his arms around them, leaned his chin on his right knee, and watched the sunrise. Now and then a flake of foam glinted from the spray, reminding him of unicorns, but no unicorns swam out of the morning to greet him. Harry would have refused the greeting if they had.
It was not unicorns he had come here to speak to.
“Parvati told me a bit about the wedding ritual,” he said, “what you told her. I remember the tadpoles. I remember that Lily trained me and made me hide the training from you, yes, but I also remember them.” He shut his eyes and sat with them shut, until the closing in his throat lessened and he was ready to continue.
“I loved you, and it was woven under the training, and would have existed without it. Lily couldn’t have built a regard into me that wasn’t already there. We were twins, Connor. You were always with me. I suppose other children learn to think of themselves as separate because there’s always a gap of experience between them; they know their siblings know things they don’t, or they can remember a time without their siblings, or they see their parents treat them differently. I can’t ask Draco, since he doesn’t have a brother. But I can’t remember a time without you, and the things that you didn’t know and I did-they weren’t that important, they were always in service to purity and innocence. So I learned to value your wisdom more than mine, while also being sure I had to know what I did to protect you, and that the separation was equally inevitable and irrelevant.
“The love might have been forced at first, but if it remained that way, it would have died at the end of third year with Sirius, when I finally let the scales drop from my eyes. Instead, we wound apart from each other for a long time, and then began a slow journey back towards each other again. You accepted your new position with strength and with grace, and strove not to be a burden on me.”
Harry opened his eyes, and watched the water washing to his feet. “No one else ever understood how good that was of you, I don’t think. Even I didn’t at the time, because I didn’t notice. And Snape and Draco think of it as-as redressing some sort of cosmic balance, as if, since I considered myself ordinary compared to you for twelve years, it was only right that you should think the same thing now.
“That’s stupid, Connor. There isn’t justice like that. If there were, Medusa Rosier-Henlin wouldn’t have been raped, and Narcissa Malfoy would have lived, and Regulus wouldn’t have endured years of suffering and lost his life at the end. What is that redress for? What crimes did they have to make up?” Harry shook his head wildly enough to send his hair whipping into his eyes. “No. I can’t accept that. There’s no one keeping a tally of all our actions and measuring out the grace we deserve and the punishment we merit. That’s why the justice and mercy we make are so important. They’re the only kind we can actually depend on.
“No. You were you, and you managed to transform yourself because you thought you had to. And you were something that none of the others were to me, because the others pushed me to be more human or thought of me as a savior or were convinced I could do better, be more, exist on a higher plane. You showed me all the grace ordinary human life has. You don’t have to be a Lord-level wizard to matter. The same surname isn’t the only way people connect. You don’t have to be a perfect specimen of maturity and adulthood for someone to take you seriously.
“There were things about you that drove me mad-the way you constantly bickered with Draco, for instance.” Harry closed his eyes, and sat until the memories of what Draco had told him about Voldemort’s burrow, the way the Light had come to take Connor’s soul away and what it showed him, had subsided into gentleness. Then he opened his eyes, and winced as the sun caught, glinting, on the edge of his glasses. “And without them, you wouldn’t have been my brother, and I wouldn’t have loved you nearly as much.
“You looked into the future, and saw what you would be giving up, when you died. I can’t imagine it. To realize you could have everything you wanted, and lay your life down. Peter wanted to die because he thought he had nothing to lose, no one to miss him. Snape punishes himself for past sins. Draco wouldn’t have thought of giving his life up unless he saw no way for me to survive; then he might have deemed it worthwhile, to spare my suffering with his own. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I preferred your life to the suffering of everyone else, and refused to look closely at what I was doing.
“You saw everything, and knew what it would mean, and you still died.”
Harry reached down, picked up a handful of wet sand, and spent a moment shaping it into a tiny tower that rose from the beach. The next wave rolled in and destroyed it.
“I could say I’m not worthy of such a gift,” he said. “But that would still be hiding from what you did, whinging and punishing myself the way Snape does. I think he’s finally learned better, now, but he spent years hiding from the world and sneering at it because he assumed everyone would sneer at him. His son or not, that’s one trait of his I don’t want to inherit.
“Draco would think it only as much as he deserves, especially since he didn’t like you that much while you were alive. And-I love Draco, I do, but I’m not him, either. People don’t owe me anything. They can make the decision to give me gifts, but I don’t somehow deserve them by virtue of my existence.
“Your perspective is the one I want to adopt, Connor, because you saw everything and you sacrificed it because you thought I could still do more good than would happen if you were alive and I were dead. I want that vision. I want that future you saw. And the best way, right now, is for me to live and work towards it. If something changes, if I can make more of a difference by pulling back and not engaging as much, say, I hope I have the sense to see it.”
Harry pulled his glasses off. The rising sun had risen now, and its glory was all the world.
“I want to see. I want to know what is happening and what might happen, not just what happened and what will.” Harry smiled a bit. “I remember Lily saying once that the saddest words in English are ‘might have been.’ If that’s true, I think the gladdest words are ‘might’ and ‘may.’ You don’t know if your dearest wish is going to come true, but you can hope until it happens.”
He rose to his feet, put his glasses back on, and bowed his head, extending his hands to the sea. The sun rolled and glinted. The waves shone and sang.
“I’ll honor your sacrifice,” Harry said softly. “But I can’t let it define my life. I can’t mourn you forever. I can’t sink into permanent depression because you’re gone. I want to mingle your vision with my own, and let it become part of me, rather than the whole.
“The recovery will be long, but I don’t care how long it takes. It was for this you died, Connor, for the sake of a world where healing is still possible. For that, take my blessing, my thanks, my hail-“ Harry drew in a deep breath “-and my farewell. Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.”
The waves rolled in without answering. The sun shone. The beach sand beneath Harry’s feet crunched as he walked back towards his Apparition point.
It was a fair morning in June, and there was no need to hurry.