What I Must Ask You To Do

A/N I did take lines directly from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, chapter 34 "The Forest Again". I think that chapter was so perfect and it is probably one of my favourites in the series.

Finally the truth.

Finally Harry understood why Professor Dumbledore had told him before that his own Phoenix wand would be more than sufficient for what was coming. He wasn’t even going to have to use it. He didn’t need to do anything more than exist and place himself in Lord Voldemort’s path. The rest would be done for him; to him. The wand he had been fond of ever since it had chosen him in Ollivander’s shop, currently clutched tightly in his hand, could remain with him like an old friend until the very end. But it wouldn’t save him. That had never been part of the plan.

Harry stared out his open bedroom window and felt the warm breeze on his face. As his breath came slow and deep and he thought about how much he loved everything about his home and how he had never worried about whether his time there was running short. His mouth and throat were completely dry, but so were his eyes. Dumbledore’s betrayal was almost nothing. Of course there had been a bigger plan: Harry had simply been too foolish to see it, he realized that now. But then again, his fathers had been just the same. Their naive desire to protect him had caused them to overlook the signs that now seemed obvious to Harry. And he felt a pang in his heart for them both. What were they going to say when they learned? What would they do?

Slowly, very slowly, Harry stood up from his bed, and as he did so he felt more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before. Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart? His fingers were trembling slightly and he made an effort to control them. Tucking Professor Dumbledore’s letter into his pocket and then pulling out the top drawer of his dresser where he kept his Invisibility Cloak and the Marauders Map.

He would go to Hogwarts now. He could not possibly live another day, now that he knew how to end things before more people were hurt. Willing his body to cooperate, he slipped the cloak over himself and took a couple of steps towards the door out to the hallway before he hesitated. He didn’t want to go downstairs. He didn’t trust himself to be able to look at Hagrid, his first friend, and then find the strength to walk away without a word of explanation. Ron and Hermione would be even worse. They’d try to stop him. Or they’d offer to come along. He hoped they’d all understand why he hadn’t said goodbye. It was better this way.

Though how to leave the manor undetected stumped him for a moment. Everyone would notice if he opened the front door or tried to use the floo. He couldn’t apparate inside the boundaries of the Fidelius Charm and with his broomstick downstairs he couldn’t fly out his window either. Briefly Harry entertained the idea of attempting to walk on the air like he had learned to walk on the water, but it seemed too foolish an endeavor to risk when a fall would alert the entire household to his escape attempt. Professor McGonagall might be understanding because it had been she who had delivered the letter to him in the first place, but Harry knew that Lupin was taking the responsibility of making him stay put quite seriously. He would have to think of something else.

Ripping off the cloak impatiently but keeping it bunched under one arm, Harry pointed his wand at the Marauders Map and spoke the words in a voice he didn’t think sounded like his, “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”

He watched as the world of Hogwarts appeared looking suspiciously empty without its usual abundance of names moving about. Voldemort wasn't there yet, but it was easy to spot ‘Sirius Black’ and ‘Severus Snape’ on the map inside the Headmaster’s tower. They appeared to be the only two people left in the castle and Harry was grateful that they were together. It meant that he would only have to explain himself once because it never had occurred to him to walk away from them without warning. Nagini still needed to be killed and so did the part of Voldemort still remaining inside his body. Sirius and Snape would have to understand Harry's role before they'd be able to fulfill their own destinies. Harry's resolve was firmly set as the letter in his pocket suddenly burned hot with want of attention.

He took it out, realizing that Dumbledore must have planned for even that. Trying to ignore the pang in his heart as he was reminded of Hermione’s clever trick with the fake galleons that would heat up when the date and time for DA meetings was changed during their fifth year. Did she and Ron know how much their friendship meant to him? Had he made that obvious enough? He hadn't been exactly kind to them tonight after everything had gone down with Bill's arrival and Snape and Sirius’s departure. Harry had lashed out at Hermione for holding him back and then at Ron for siding with Hermione. He regretted that now - he was thankful for the people who'd wanted only to keep him safe despite the impracticality of such an endeavor. Who'd been willing to invite him into their lives despite the considerable risks to themselves and their families.

He hoped they would know how much he loved them as he unfolded the letter and trusted that it would reveal more than it had a few minutes ago. Not disappointed when he discovered that the Gryffindor emblem of a lion over a red and gold shield had appeared next to Dumbledore’s signature. The mark of courage that Harry was currently calling on with everything he had. He touched it without hesitation and closed his eyes as he was pulled away from his home, as he’d suspected he would be. Unsure about whether he was being transported directly to Voldemort before he could reconsider his selfless sacrifice, but when he opened his eyes it was with relief that he found himself in the Headmaster’s study instead.

“Lumus,” Harry whispered, as his wand glowed with light and he shone it around the eerily quiet office. The portraits were all empty, with none of the former Headmasters and Headmistresses of Hogwarts seeming to have any incentive to hang around when school was not in session and their assistance not required. Even Dumbledore wasn’t there to greet him and for that Harry was almost thankful. He didn’t know what he would say to Dumbledore right now. He wasn't angry with him, and yet he was.

Shivering from the cold that he felt piercing deeply into even his bones now, Harry doubted that it was from any change in weather. As he spied the sword of Gryffindor on the desk while he passed it to walk up the stone steps into the circular living room with his wand held out in front of him. Taking in another empty room but knowing that they were nearby because the map had shown them to be here. Harry entered the bedroom to the left and discovered them both looking far too content in sleep, not knowing that their world and family had just been blown apart.

They lay on their sides facing one another, as if they’d drifted off in the middle of a conversation. Sirius’s hand was resting on Snape’s wrist. For a brief instant, Harry forgot about Dumbledore’s letter and the horrible truth that marked him just as surely as the scar on his forehead. He couldn't bear the thought of waking them and disrupting the peace that would end abruptly anyway once Voldemort arrived to check on his Horcrux.

His confidence in his ability to be brave and walk freely to his own destruction wavering suddenly, Harry dropped his cloak and his map by their feet, and didn’t hesitate to crawl onto the bed to lay between them. Slipping his wand up his sleeve but still clutching Dumbledore’s letter closely to himself, Harry rested his head just beneath their touching hands and wished to never move again.

Indulging in the childish fantasy that your parents' bed could be a safe place where nothing bad could ever reach you because the monsters wouldn't follow you there. Why had so much time been wasted? Why couldn’t Snape have loved him when he was eleven? Why had Sirius gone to prison and missed out on twelve years when Harry had desperately needed him? It all seemed so sad now: the life he had lost, the life soon to be taken. He’d been so afraid of losing them, but now he knew that he was the one who really had to go.

"Harry, when did you get here?" Snape whispered, opening his eyes and not looking at all angry or surprised to discover that he had turned up at some point during the night, when before he’d expressly forbidden Harry to leave the house. It seemed that a lot had changed in just a few short hours.

“I don’t know,” Harry replied, his voice sounding raw to him. The first lights of daybreak had begun to appear outside the bedroom window and he’d been lying there for however long admiring the changes in the sky and contemplating the wondrous creation of the world and his place in it. Surely there was more to come somewhere beyond that he would soon discover. Ceasing to exist entirely seemed a much more frightening prospect than the actual act of dying. Though he believed there would be more, he had decided.

“Harry…” Sirius spoke his name with great concern when he was roused as well. Sitting up a bit higher in the bed and brokenly attempting to ask the thing that none of them really wanted an answer to. “Dumbledore -”

It was all Harry could do to nod. He couldn’t tell them. He couldn’t speak the words he had read in Dumbledore’s elegant script or even look at them right now. He pressed his face into Sirius’s chest, reaching his arm around to offer the letter up to Snape because it needed to be shared. He had already delayed the inevitable more than he ethically should have but he still didn’t move as he felt Sirius’s hand cup around his head and Snape’s begin rubbing against his back as he read aloud:

XXX

Harry,

You wonderful boy. You brave, brave man. What I must ask you to do next brings me great sorrow, but at last I am able to tell you exactly what happened that night in Godric’s Hollow:

At last, I can tell you that when Lord Voldemort tried to kill you and your mother cast her own life in front of you as a shield, the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort’s soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in your house.

This means that part of Lord Voldemort lives inside you, and it is that which gives you the power of speech with snakes, and a connection with Lord Voldemort’s mind that I know you have never properly understood. We have journeyed together through the course of destroying Horcruxes, with myself knowing all along that the final and unintended Horcrux had always been you. And while that fragment of soul, unmissed by Voldemort, remains attached to and protected by yourself, Lord Voldemort cannot die.

Harry, you know what I must ask you to do. When you are ready…when you are prepared…

It is my hope that when you set out to meet your death, it will truly mean the end of Voldemort. It will mean that your eternal soul is whole and completely your own. Do not fear death, Harry. Do not pity the dead. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love.

Albus Dumbledore

XXX

Harry’s face still burrowed against Sirius, he could feel the increase in the speed of Sirius’s beating heart and the shallowness of his breath as the letter had been read by Snape in a calm and strangely unemotional voice. It was like Snape had been reading a science paper instead of a decree sentencing his son to death. Though Harry had noticed how Snape hadn’t hesitated or fumbled over the speaking of Voldemort’s name this time. It seemed that the enlightenment to the worst fear that any parent could ever have, had made the name become only that - just a name.

Harry listened to the crinkle of parchment being folded and then the creak of a bedspring as Snape laid back down beside him so that he was being held by both of them. Nobody was speaking. There was no denying…no bargaining…or anything emanating through the air right now besides acceptance and sorrow. Harry’s job was to walk calmly into Death’s welcoming arms. Along the way, he had helped to dispose of Voldemort’s remaining links to life, so that when at last he flung himself across Voldemort’s path, and did not raise a wand to defend himself, the end would be clean, and the job that ought to have been done in Godric’s Hollow would be finished. Neither could live, neither could survive.

“Sev -” Sirius’s voice cracked. They had laid there for what felt like both a long time and no time at all, when Snape abruptly stood up and Harry felt his whole body go rigid from fear.

“There’s something,” Snape muttered.

Harry pushed back from Sirius to sit up and began to search himself for the will to stand and put one foot in front of the other. Believing he was to follow, but becoming confused when he saw that Snape had left the room without waiting for him. He leaned against Sirius and felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon, and he was grateful that neither of them had denied or disregarded this terrible truth. It would be so much worse if they fought it and it would not change what would be done.

“Harry, I’d forgotten,” Snape said, coming back into the room with his hands holding a small velvet bag of deep plum. “Professor Dumbledore left something else and said it was to be opened when we were preparing to confront Voldemort together. I think we should see what it is. It might be the answer.”

He looked almost hopeful as he sat down on the bed across from Harry and Sirius and held the bag out. As if perhaps Dumbledore had left a solution in a magic bag that would cast the honesty in his letter largely obsolete. Harry slipped his hand inside and brushed his fingers against something small, hard, and smooth. Grasping it tightly, he pulled it out to reveal a black stone and saw Snape’s face shift into a frown as he stared at it dumbfoundedly.

“A rock?” Sirius half-whimpered, half-laughed. “Did Dumbledore at least carve an explanation on the side?”

But Harry had straightened up eagerly at this discovery. Remembering immediately what Dumbledore had shared with him a few months ago. “I know what to do,” he said. “We have to all hold it together.”

He didn’t warn them about what was going to happen. Not quite sure how they’d react if they knew the full power of the stone held out flat on Harry’s palm right now. Though to his immense relief they immediately did what he asked without question, positioning their hands over the stone so that it was touched evenly by all three of them. As Harry closed his eyes in anticipation of the haunting magic that Dumbledore had warned him about in regards to the Deathly Hallow that had caused his own personal undoing. Dumbledore had said that the dead didn’t belong back in this world but that wasn’t what Harry was using the Resurrection Stone for. He wasn’t fetching them, they would be fetching him.

It didn’t take long and he knew it had happened because he heard slight movements around him that suggested frail bodies shifting their footing. A gasp from Sirius and a startled flinch from Snape. Harry opened his eyes and looked into the smiling faces of Lily and James Potter.

They were neither ghost nor truly flesh, he could see that. They resembled most closely the Riddle that had escaped from the diary so long ago, and he had been memory made nearly solid. Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts. Harry hastened off of the bed to meet them, while Snape and Sirius both seemed temporarily frozen with shock.

James was exactly the same height as Harry. He was wearing the clothes in which he had died, and his hair was untidy and ruffled, and his glasses were a little lopsided like Mr. Weasley’s. Lily pushed her long hair back as she drew closer to him, and her green eyes, so like his, searched his face hungrily, as though she would never be able to look at him enough.

“You’ve been so brave,” she whispered.

Harry could not speak. His eyes feasted on her, and he thought that he would like to stand and look at her forever, and that would be enough.

“You are nearly there,” said James. “Very close. We are…so proud of you.”

Then James looked over Harry’s shoulder at Snape and his smile grew. “Thank you.”

Snape didn’t say anything back. Perhaps he had nodded or given some form of acknowledgement, but Harry could not bring himself to look away from Lily and James to check. Sirius had gotten off of the bed now though.

“Are you a ghost?” he asked James, his breath shuddering with longing.

“No, I’m still just me,” James replied, reaching out for him in a way that Harry wasn’t sure could be felt in a physical sense, though that hardly seemed to matter. Reunited they stood, just the way that Harry believed he would be with Ron and Hermione someday.

“Oh, James," Sirius murmured, as tears filled his eyes. "Lily..."

“It's okay," James gave him a smile. "I'm right here. We're here together. And Harry..."

“Does it hurt?” The childish question had fallen from Harry’s lips before he could stop it. James shared a look with Lily who shook her head.

“It’s just like falling asleep after an exhausting day,” James explained, turning back to his son. “Your mother and I will be right there beside you.”

Harry turned to Lily. “You won’t leave me?”

“I never left,” his mother replied, drawing nearer to Snape and addressing him now as well. “You could have felt me in your heart all this time if you hadn’t been working overtime to shut me out all these years…”

“What else could I do?” Snape whispered.

“Let me back in,” Lily said, her green eyes sparkling lovingly, speaking as though it were the most simple and obvious of things. "I've been waiting. You're so hard to reach, Sev."

Under her persistent gaze, Snape rose to his feet and Harry noticed that he was shaking all over as he stared back at her. It was like he expected to be yelled at or cursed. Or even worse, told that he didn’t belong. As Harry instinctively stepped back to him and reached for his hand. With his eyes still on his mother, knowing that there was nothing to fear and that Lily wanted nothing more than to make the hurt go away.

“Don't you know what I've done?” Snape stammered.

“Yes and everything you've done since,” said Lily. “Severus, all is forgiven. All is fine. Can't you believe me?”

Snape seemed not to know what to say. Which was better than arguing the case for his own guilt, as Harry had almost been expecting him to do. He squeezed his hand more tightly and glanced at James, who looked happy to see them all together. With the past being the past, and the lessons learned in the hardest of ways. Standing in a room full of love, with Harry at its core. It was greater than Voldemort and it was more powerful than death.

“You’ll have to call him,” James told Snape, “take the credit before he can claim it himself.”

“It will be alright,” Lily said. "It's the only way this can end."

Harry knew what they were saying. They wanted Snape to deliver him to Voldemort. Play the part of faithful servant just a little bit longer by bringing the Dark Lord’s mortal enemy, and own undoing, to him to destroy. Just like he’d killed Dumbledore and harmed his soul to repair what he hadn’t broken, now Snape would give up Harry. What Severus and Harry had both been asked to do was exceedingly cruel but it was the price that needed to be paid. James and Lily understood this and now they all did too - and it would all be well in the end because death really was nothing to fear. It was just moving onward, still keeping hold to all the love in your heart.