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Rating:
✿ Mature

✿ Archive Warning:
✿ Show warnings
Category:
✿ M/M

Fandom:
✿ Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling

Relationships:
✿ Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort , ✿
Harry Potter/Voldemort

Characters:
✿ Harry Potter , ✿ Ron Weasley , ✿
Hermione Granger , ✿ Albus Dumbledore ,
✿ Death (Harry Potter)

Additional Tags:
✿ Post-War , ✿ Grief/Mourning , ✿ Master
of Death Harry Potter , ✿ The Deathly
Hallows , ✿ Resurrection Stone (Harry
Potter) , ✿ Dreams , ✿ Suicidal Thoughts ,
✿ If You Squint - Freeform , ✿ Time Travel ,
✿ ScarCrux | The Piece of Voldemort's Soul in
Harry Potter's Scar , ✿ Harry Potter is Not a
Horcrux , ✿ and he's sad about it , ✿ not a
sad ending

Language:
English
Series:
Part 1 of ✿ How to Bear the Weight ●
✿ Next Work →
Collections:
✿ Magical Menagerie Members
Stats:
PUBLISHED: 2024-07-01 Words: 7,360
Chapters: 1/1 COMMENTS: 97 Kudos: 889
Bookmarks: ✿ 112 Hits: 7,288

WHEN THE
WEIGHT IS
GONE
marrythemonsters
Summary:
In the quiet after the
war is over, Harry feels
the empty space in his
soul like a missing limb.
Eventually, his grief and
longing come to a head
when Death offers him a
choice: to move on for
good, or go back and do
it over again.

Notes:
beta read by the
incomparable
chaos_bear

(See the end of the work for

more notes and other works
inspired by this one.)

How to bear the weight, with

every

flake of bone pressed in. Then,

how to bear when

the weight is gone, the way a

woman

whose neck has been coiled with

brass

can no longer hold it up alone.

- Ellen Bass, “Marriage”

The first few weeks after the battle are all

celebration and relief. Harry has done the
impossible, and even more impossible, he’s survived
it. He spends a few days at the Burrow with
Hermione and the Weasleys, then, when Molly
Weasley’s alternating ebullience and grief gets to be
too much for him, retreats back to No. 12
Grimmauld Place with his war veteran of a house
elf.

There are ravenous well-wishers and disgruntled

Death Eaters on the loose, so Harry doesn’t go out
much. Diagon Alley, the one time he’d attempted it,
had been a disaster. So Kreacher does the shopping,
and Harry nests. It all feels very cozy at first.

Kingsley wants him to testify at the trials of all the

bad guys they’ve been rounding up, but the longer
Harry stays safe under the renewed Fidelius at
Grimmauld, the less he feels like leaving. In the end,
he writes a statement of support for Draco and
Narcissa Malfoy and leaves the rest for other heroes
to bear witness to.

As the summer wears on, his friends start to make

plans for the future, now that they have one again.
Harry tells them he still needs time to breathe, and
no one questions it. It has only been a few months
since the battle, since his death and resurrection
saved the whole Wizarding world. Harry is entitled
to do a bit of nothing.

Still, Ron refuses to start Auror training without

him, so he’ll be working with George in the joke
shop for now. Hermione is neck-deep in research to
try to restore her parents’ memories. Neville will be
apprenticing with Professor Sprout in the fall, and
Ginny and Luna are returning for their final year at
Hogwarts, along with Dean Thomas and some of
the other Muggleborns who’d spent their seventh
year imprisoned or on the run.

McGonagall had encouraged Harry, Ron, and

Hermione to come back as well, saying they could
help set the tone of post-war rebuilding, but the
three agree they have grown beyond Hogwarts.
Hermione will sit her NEWTS at the end of the
year after revising independently. Harry and Ron
have resisted committing to this, or any other
course of study, but Hermione feels she can wear
them down eventually.

The thing is, Harry already feels worn down. Too

worn down to think about NEWTS or Auror
training. His life’s purpose had been fulfilled at
seventeen. What else is there for him?

The blaze of possibility that had filled him in the

immediate aftermath of the battle has burnt down
to little more than ashes in the months that
followed. It wasn’t so bad when he’d kept busy at
first, but the longer he is alone and quiet, the more
he notices it. He feels empty and wrong, like
something has been scooped out of him, leaving
behind an abscess. Or maybe it’s more like an
amputation. Harry thinks of Wormtail cutting off his
own hand to do what was demanded of him. If
Voldemort had never replaced it with that
treachery-detecting prosthetic, would Wormtail
have sometimes felt the tingling of the phantom
limb? Would he have reached for his hand, only to
remember with renewed despair that he no longer
was as he had been?

Months pass. Hermione comes back from Australia,

miserable with her success. She and Ron get
together, break up, and get together again. Kingsley
offers Harry and Ron a place with the Aurors,
NEWTS or no NEWTS. Ron takes it. Harry does
not.

Harry lets Ron coax him over to the Burrow for

Christmas and immediately regrets it. It’s too loud,
too warm, too full. He doesn’t belong there. He
makes his excuses right after presents.

Ron pulls him aside. “Is it Ginny and Dean? I know

we all thought…”

“It’s not Ginny and Dean. It’s just…I’ve got used to

the quiet, that’s all.”

“You’re going to just stay in there forever? Is that

the plan?”

“The plan was for me to die with Voldemort, so at

this point, I am definitely just winging it.”

“Do you wish you had?” Ron asks quietly.

Harry looks away. It’s answer enough.

“Blimey, mate. Fuck. Okay. We can get through this.

We can get through anything. You just have to let us
help you.”

Harry isn’t sure he wants help. He isn’t sure he

doesn’t. “How?”

“Maybe we could try getting you out of the house.

Little things. A pub night, maybe. Some quiet Muggle
place where no one knows your name.”

“I don’t know if I’m up to that yet.”

“We’ll come over, then. Just Hermione and me. You

need to interact with someone more than that
blasted elf.”

“Kreacher’s alright.”

“I mean, sure, compared to Voldemort.”

Harry doesn’t laugh. “You can come over. Next

week sometime.”

“Okay. Good. We’ll bring food.”

“Kreacher can cook. You bring the drinks. All he

ever serves is fancy-arse Black wine and hundred-
year-old spirits.”

Ron relaxes his shoulders. “Deal.”

So Harry returns to his cold and empty house and

immediately feels like he can breathe again. When
he sleeps, he dreams that he’s sharing the house not
with Kreacher but with Voldemort. White skin, red
eyes, black robes on an impossibly tall and skeletal
frame, just gliding around his kitchen like he belongs
there. The man pours a glass of blood-red wine and
holds it out to Harry, hissing something that Harry
knows is language. He cannot understand it.

He wakes with tears on his face and a hollowness in

his chest.

Something has to change, he knows this. He can’t

keep haunting Grimmauld like his own ghost. He
owes something to the world, right? If not the world
—he has already died for it, after all—then to his
friends. What can he say to them? Sorry, guys, turns
out I feel like I just cut out a piece of my own soul, and
now I might be regretting the systematic murder of the
matching bits. He was a bastard, but he was mine, and
now he’s gone, and maybe so am I.

So Harry starts making an effort. Ron and

Hermione come over for dinner every Friday. It
falters when they break up again, and for a few
weeks they take turns, but for Harry’s sake they
push through the awkwardness, and soon enough
the three of them are back to almost normal. Harry
almost likes it better this way, though he’d never say
it aloud. It’s more like it was that last year, the three
of them together against the world.

Eventually, they coax him out to that Muggle pub

Ron had threatened, and it’s not so bad. It’s crowded
and loud, but no one is looking at them. No one
knows how close the world had come to ending last
year. No one falls all over themselves to thank
Harry for being a hero. So he keeps going back,
week after week, and it gets easier every time.

Diagon Alley is still too much, but he and Ron meet

Neville in Hogsmeade one weekend in March. Harry
is restless and tense, but he doesn’t leave early, and
that feels like a victory.

The dreams get worse, but that’s a comfort too, in

its way. It’s the only thing left.

He dreams of the horcrux baby he’d seen in King’s

Cross. It’s still there, still shivering under a bench in
the empty white space of his limbo. Harry tries to
pick it up, but his hands go right through it. It’s no
longer his. He’s made sure of that.

McGonagall asks them all to speak at graduation,

which is being held on the one-year anniversary of
the battle. Harry won’t speak, but he lets himself be
persuaded into going.

The ceremony is difficult. He’d known it would be.

But it feels necessary to endure, like it had felt
necessary to walk down to the forest to die a year
ago. It helps that no one can reach him up here on
the platform.

Afterwards, he tries, he really does, but the pressing

crowd becomes too much and he panics. One look
and Ron sees it at once. He and Hermione close
ranks, giving Harry space to slip away behind the
makeshift stage and throw on his invisibility cloak.

He finds himself wandering down by the lake. By the

time his heart rate subsides to normal, he’s at
Dumbledore’s tomb. Something about it is drawing
him. Is it just the craving for a wise old man to tell
him what to do? Surely not. Dumbledore has been
the villain of his dreams as often as not these days.

You cannot help.

He rests a hand on the smooth marble, cool despite

the bright May sun. Is he imagining the hum he feels
under his hand?

Harry steps back. He has no interest in doing any

accidental necromancy today. He runs back to his
friends, trying to put the tomb out of his mind.

He can’t put the tomb out of his mind.

That night, he dreams that he’s in King’s Cross again,

standing across from Dumbledore, who holds the
Elder Wand in his clasped hands.

That’s mine, says Harry.

No, Harry. You cannot help.

The next day, Harry makes plans to visit Neville,

who’s living at Hogwarts over the summer to take
care of the greenhouses. He doesn’t tell Ron and
Hermione.

He goes up a week later. Neville packs a picnic lunch

for them, and they eat behind the greenhouses.
Harry can see Dumbledore’s tomb from where he’s
sitting, white marble shining in the noon sun. After
lunch, Neville gives him a tour of the greenhouses
and explains some of what he’s been working on
with Sprout. Harry is glad to see his friend
blooming.

He bids Neville goodbye and walks down towards

the gate. When he’s out of sight, he puts the
invisibility cloak on and walks back up to the tomb.
He feels the pull even more strongly now.
Something in there is calling to him, and Harry is
pretty sure he knows what it is.

Harry knows that if he went to McGonagall, or even

Kingsley, and explained that he needed to exhume
Dumbledore’s body, for any reason, they would let
him do it. They’d let him do just about anything at
this point. The goodwill he’s won from last year’s
heroism has not yet run dry. But something in him
shrinks back at the thought of anyone knowing what
he’s about to do, so he decides to wait for nightfall.
It will just be a few hours now.

He sits down in the shade of the tomb to wait, but

it’s not long before he gets restless. He gets up to
walk, with no destination in mind, just an itch in his
feet. He finds himself walking down into the forest.
It’s the same trail he took last year, but it looks
different in the afternoon sun. There’s no death in
the air today, just a heavy stillness, like the forest is
waiting for something.

He follows the path down to the clearing where he

died. It looks much the same as he remembers. He’d
stood here, and Voldemort was just over there by
that fallen log. If he closes his eyes, Harry can almost
feel him. For a moment, he imagines making a
different choice that night. What if he had taken the
revelation he’d just suffered and offered it up? I am
the very thing I have hunted. Destroy me, and you
destroy yourself.

Would he have found mercy? Would the world have

been remade into something he could live with?
Harry thinks he might be able to live with quite a
lot, at this point, if he could undo the emptiness of
his soul.

But no, it had already been too late by the time

Harry had gotten to the Forest. What trust could
ever have lived between them? What leverage
would he have had to save his friends?

Harry turns away. There is nothing left in the Forest

for him. Just dreams.

The slanting sun flashes off something in the

undergrowth, just over there. Harry goes over to
pick it up.

It is the Resurrection Stone.

He is tempted to use it now, but he is afraid of what

he would hear from the man he has been mourning.
Later, in the middle of the night, alone in his drafty
old room, he knows he will give in to the
temptation because anything is better than all this
nothing. But he has one more thing to do before he
goes home.

Harry clutches the Stone in his fist and walks back

up to Dumbledore’s tomb. He sits invisible in its
shadow and waits for night to fall.

When the darkness has settled over Hogwarts like

a concealing cloak, Harry draws his holly wand and
casts the same privacy charms Hermione used to
keep them alive in the Forest of Dean last year. Still,
he feels too exposed to use a Lumos. The moon is
bright enough for what he has to do.

Harry is the one who re-entombed the Elder Wand

after the battle. No one else knew. He was the one
to set the wards on the tomb, so it is easy work to
undo them now. That done, he levitates the heavy
lid up and to the side, just the width of two fingers.

He doesn’t even have to think the word Accio. The

intention is enough. The Elder Wand wants to be in
his hand. It comes flying out of the tomb. Harry
snatches it out of the air, and for a thunderous
moment he feels whole again. Wand. Stone. Cloak.
It’s not what it was before, but it’s something.

The feeling fades as soon as it had come, and Harry

is left feeling like a grave-robbed tomb. He sinks to
his knees before the marble and weeps.

He covers his face with his hands. I should have

stayed dead, he thinks.

Nothing happens. Heavily, Harry walks down to the

gates and apparates back to Grimmauld.

He lasts three days before giving in to the

temptation sitting on his bedside table. It’s a dream
that does it, one of the good ones, where
Voldemort survived, and so did he, prophecies be
damned. In the dream, Harry is back at Hogwarts
for the remembrance day, except now it’s
Voldemort leading it, not McGonagall. He’s giving a
speech about moving past the folly of the past to
build a better future for the whole of the wizarding
world, and dream-Harry never once questions it. At
the end, Voldemort has Harry stand so everyone
can thank him for sealing the alliance that has
brought peace back to their world, whatever that
means. The whole assembly applauds.

Looking out over the crowd, Harry sees Bellatrix

Lestrange standing next to Narcissa Malfoy and a
stiff-backed Andromeda Tonks. A blue-haired baby
sleeps on Draco’s shoulder. Across the aisle,
Kingsley Shacklebolt exchanges a solemn nod with
Lucius Malfoy. Lavender Brown stands with Neville
and Hagrid, who is openly weeping. Harry blinks in
the flash of a camera from the graduates’ rows:
there is Colin Creevey, snapping away, happy and
alive.

Harry locks eyes with Voldemort. They are the

familiar eyes of the monster who killed him, red slits
in a white face, yet they wear an expression Harry
has never seen in them before. Voldemort holds out
a hand for Harry to join him at the podium. Harry
goes to meet him at once, as if he belongs there.

He wakes up a second before their hands touch.

The warm, glowing feeling inside him fades to
memory, leaving him heavy with loss. The good
dreams are almost worse than the nightmares.
Worse to wake up from, anyway. This one was more
absurd than usual. More often, Harry finds himself
Voldemort’s prisoner, sometimes coddled,
sometimes tormented, but always cut off from the
world around him. It feels particularly desperate of
his subconscious to conjure up this image of some
impossible alternate future where everybody lives
and nobody suffers.

Harry checks the time. It’s 3:02 in the morning. As

the empty space in his chest expands again, he
reaches for the Stone on his nightstand. Three times
he turns it, thinking of Voldemort.

Nothing happens.

He tries again, focusing this time on Tom Riddle, the

boy he was before he ripped his soul apart. Before he
was mine, something dark in Harry protests, but he
ignores it.

There is still no answer.

Harry lies awake for a long time that night.

At their next pub night, Hermione asks Harry again

what he’s going to do with himself. She and Ron
have gotten less hesitant about getting in Harry’s
face about things. He finds it bracing, sometimes.
Sometimes it makes him want to leave early and
bury himself somewhere in his big empty house,
Hallows in hand, trying to make something happen.

Tonight, it’s okay.

“You tell me, Hermione. What should I do with

myself?”

It’s Ron who answers. “You should join up, mate.

Kingsley was just saying the other day, at the
ceremony, how much he’d still love to have you. You
could do some good with the Aurors. The place is
kind of a mess. Lots of old-school guys doing things
their own way. They need folks like us shaking it up.”

“I don’t know, Ron. I’m tired of fighting.”

“You’re tired of everything,” Hermione says quietly.

“Maybe you just need to pick something and try it.”

“Fake it till I make it?”

“Surely it can’t be worse than sitting around

Grimmauld until you become one with the
furniture.”

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

He tries not to think about it. It feels like it takes all

of his reserves of energy and will just to make it to
pub nights, to keep up the limited correspondence
he’s managed to strike up with Neville and Luna. He
even makes it to the Burrow for dinner once every
month or two now. He’s making progress, he tells
himself.

He still doesn’t feel alive, of course, and it’s this that

Ron and Hermione have picked up on. Maybe he
should just pick a direction and start walking. If he’s
just pretending anyway, he might as well be doing it
at the Ministry as at Grimmauld.

Briefly, Harry thinks about Healer training instead.

He thinks it might be nice to put things back
together for a change. But he never had the grades
for it—too busy surviving, even if he’d had the
temperament, which he probably doesn’t—and he
feels more suited to active work, anyway. Well, that’s
a lie. At the moment, he doesn’t feel suited to much
of anything, let alone activity. But maybe his friends
are right, and that’s why the Aurors would be good
for him. Get him out of his head a bit.

Hermione is big on the career thing. Ron would love

to have Harry on the force with him, but he has
another idea to jumpstart Harry’s will to live. One
weekend, they go out alone, just the two of them,
and instead of one of their cozy Muggle pubs, Ron
takes Harry to a trendy bar over in Hackney. When
he and Hermione broke up, Ron started coming
here to pick up girls.

“Does wonders for the ego. Even if you never go

home with anyone, it can feel good just to flirt a bit.
You know, just to remember that you can.”

Harry isn’t sure there’s anything to remember in

that department. It’d be generous to describe
anything that happened with Cho or even Ginny as
flirting. But tonight is a good night, and he feels game
to try. The beer flows freely, Ron’s spirits are high,
and Harry finds himself able to get swept up in it all,
enough that he finds himself sitting at the bar
chatting with a pretty blonde a few years older than
he is.

She’s a uni student, some sort of computer thing.

Harry can’t follow much of what she says about it,
but it doesn’t feel like he’s expected to. She asks
what he does and he says he’s thinking about joining
the police.

“You must be so brave!” she says, laying a hand on

his arm. It takes everything he has not to flinch away.

Suddenly the room is too small, the girl is too close,

everything is too much too now too weird too fast.

“Excuse me,” Harry manages. He disapparates in the

loo.

That night he dreams of cold skin against his, clawed

hands digging into his hips, a forked tongue licking
shivers on his neck. Burning red eyes fill his vision.

He wakes with bile in his throat and sheets sticky

with his own spend.

Harry doesn’t go back to the posh bars with Ron,

but he does join the Aurors. So does Malfoy, who’s
just gotten through his probation. Everyone expects
them to fight, but Harry can barely remember what
it felt like to hate Voldemort, let alone his childhood
rival.

Malfoy is subdued, too. Maybe he’s just on his best

behavior because he knows one misstep could get
him kicked out of training, or worse. Maybe he’s
tired of fighting, too.

Sometimes Harry feels Malfoy watching him, an itch

on his skin. But when he looks up, Malfoy is always
looking down again, pretending at an aloofness that
Harry is more and more certain is a defense
mechanism.

Sometimes Harry imagines reaching out across the

silence that separates them. In another world, if
Harry hadn’t been so undone by the end of the war
and the severing of his soul, maybe he and Malfoy
would become friends. As it is, Harry barely feels
equal to the few friends he does have. He exchanges
cordial nods with Malfoy when they pass in the halls,
but little more.

Auror training consists primarily of practical

learning, but there are some lecture classes too, in
the beginning. Harry’s dreams are of Hogwarts,
more often than not.

There’s Dueling Club, but instead of Lockhart, it’s

Quirrel. He’s not stammering; he’s correcting
Harry’s stance with sure hands and ready words. His
eyes flash crimson when no one but Harry is
looking.

There’s the Room of Hidden Things, but instead of

just the Diadem glistening atop a cabinet, Harry
keeps walking past the other Horcruxes too. There’s
the Cup, perched precariously atop a stack of old
chairs. The Locket swings from the handlebars of a
Muggle bicycle. The Diary hides among a pile of
forgotten books. Harry walks the aisles hunting for
the Ring, but he can’t find it.

What he does find is Nagini, slithering among the

flotsam and jetsam of generations of Hogwarts
students. “You won’t find it,” she says in barely-
accented English.

“Why not?” Harry replies.

“I ate it.”

“Oh, that’s alright, then.”

One night he dreams that he’s in class with Alastor

Moody. He’s trying to decide if it’s the fake Moody
or the real one when a Dementor floats into the
room right after Moody demonstrates the killing
curse on an enlarged spider. Harry sees the flash of
green again in his mind’s eye as the Dementor draws
near, but he doesn’t hear his mother’s screams. This
time, the green light is for him.

The Dementor sucks out Moody’s soul as Harry

relives the moment he died in the forest. Fake
Moody, then. Probably.

Harry tries the Stone again every few weeks. It

never works. Not for Voldemort, anyway.

One night he comes home all blurry at the edges

from too many beers at pub night. Sometimes, the
drinks paper over the emptiness inside him, not
enough to forget it’s there, but enough not to care
so much. Tonight, it just makes it worse, the void
throbbing in time with his heart.

He stumbles through the library Floo sometime

after midnight—Hermione wouldn’t let him
apparate if he couldn’t walk a straight line, and, well,
he’d passed that point hours ago—and barely
catches himself on the back of an armchair. He has
to rummage in the bottom of the wardrobe to find
the Stone from where he’d thrown in it a fit of
frustration the last time.

He’s trying to summon Voldemort, but his thoughts

are even more scattered than usual, and the specific
image in his head as he turns the Stone three times
is heavenly Dumbledore telling him, You cannot help.

So, of course, it’s Dumbledore who shows up.

“Harry, my boy.”

“Did you know this would happen?”

Dumbledore looks confused. “As I told you when

we last met, Harry, I did not know anything. I hoped,
certainly. I hoped you would survive.”

“Is that what this is?” Harry laughs bitterly.

“You are in pain.”

Harry waves a hand. “I’m just drunk.”

Dumbledore watches him for a minute. “I confess I

was not sure whether you would keep the Stone. It
is your right, of course, having collected the Hallows,
but…you must take care not to lose yourself in it.
Do you remember what I told you about the Mirror
of Erised your first year?”

“I’m not addicted to the Resurrection Stone, I

promise. This is the first time I’ve even used it, and
that was an accident. Because I’m drunk .” Harry can
hear the whine in his voice, but he’s too out of it to
stop it. Why does he always feel the need to justify
himself to Albus Dumbledore?

“There is more than one way to forget to live, my

dear boy.”

“Yeah? Forgetting sounds kind of nice right now, I’d

say.” Harry hurls the Stone across the room. He
hears it ricochet off the wall somewhere and slide
under his bed. A problem for sober-Harry to handle
some other day.

Harry still uses the Cloak, sometimes. He’s gotten

used to the crowds of people in the Ministry when
he goes in for training, but he’s not a novelty there
anymore, and they’ve all got their own jobs to do.
That time he let Ron cajole him out to Diagon to
see the joke shop, he got swarmed. Thank Merlin
that Ron had smelled the ozone in the air before
some awful outburst of accidental magic landed
Harry in the papers for the next three weeks
straight.

“Give the man some breathing room, folks! Don’t

you lot have lives of your own to live?”

Harry had ducked around a corner and apparated

back to Grimmauld, heart pounding like prey. Next
time, he takes the Cloak to Diagon.

The Elder Wand lives in the drawer of his bedside

table. The Stone should probably be there too, but
Harry hasn’t bothered to dig it out from under his
bed or wherever he tossed it after he drunk-dialed
Dumbledore.

It stays there until the next night he comes home

feeling desolate and adrift after pub night again, but
he’s not drunk this time, not really.

He’s at the bar with Hermione, waiting for Ron to

show up, when Hermione points out a good-looking
Muggle at the other end of the bar who can’t stop
looking over at Harry. Harry accidentally catches
the other boy’s eye, and the next thing he knows,
the boy is buying him a drink and perching next to
him on what’s always been Ron’s stool. When Ron
finally does show, he and Hermione get a booth,
abandoning Harry to the Muggle.

It’s not that Harry minds, exactly. There’s nothing

wrong with the boy. Harry is quite enjoying talking
to him, actually. The tentative small talk easing into
friendly banter, the give-and-take of it all…it feels
good. Normal.

It’s just that there is something familiar about the

boy that Harry can’t quite put his finger on. He is
tall and fair, with dark hair falling just over his ears in
an artful wave. The whole time they talk, Harry
keeps trying to place him. He knows he’s probably
coming off a bit creepy, staring so intensely, but he’s
just trying to figure out who the guy reminds him
of.

“Hey, do you want to get out of here?” the boy says

after they’ve shared their second drink. “My
flatmates are out for the night.”

Harry’s face flames red as he realizes what the boy

intends. And then it hits him, all at once, like a
bombarda to the face. It’s Tom Riddle, who this boy
reminds him of. Tall, pale, dark-haired Tom Riddle,
the handsomest boy he’s ever seen. Harry scrambles
to his feet and backs away unconsciously.

The boy’s face falls. “Sorry, I thought you were gay.”

“I don’t know what I am,” Harry said a little

helplessly. Absolutely mental, that’s what, pining after a
dead psychopath.

The boy scrawls a number on a napkin and hands it

to Harry. “If you ever want to find out, give me a
call, yeah?”

Harry takes the napkin, staring down at it numbly as

the other boy retreats.

When he gets home that night, he gets ready for

bed in a bit of a daze. He sits on the edge of his bed
and heaves a sigh. With barely a thought, the Stone
comes rattling out from under the bed and flies into
his open hand.

He doesn’t try Voldemort tonight, and certainly not

Tom Riddle. He couldn’t bear it if it worked. He
means to call Sirius, get some godfatherly advice, but
then he’s trying to think of any dead guys who he
knows were gay, and next thing he knows, he’s
blinking up at the golden shimmer of Albus
Dumbledore’s shade again.

“Pub night again, Harry?”

“Erm, no. Well, I mean, yeah, but I’m not drunk this
time, I swear.”

“Ah. I’m glad to hear it. Did you meet anyone

interesting?” Harry swears the man’s eyes just
twinkled.

“Just how much do you see up there? Are you

watching my life play out on some sort of cosmic
TV? Can you…can you see my thoughts ?”

“It is less like going to the theater and more like

receiving faint impressions of your emotions here
and there. You are the Master of Death, Harry, and
you have summoned me once already. I am
merely…listening for your call.”

“Great. So I’ve just got rid of one meddlesome old

man in my head, only to replace him with another.”

“A poor trade, am I not?”

Harry looks away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Dumbledore sits insubstantially on the armchair

across from Harry’s bed, smoothing his robes out
over his knees. “Why did you call me tonight,
Harry?”

Well, this is all a bit mortifying, but the man is

already here. “I suppose I wanted to ask you a series
of invasive questions.”

Dumbledore chuckles. “By all means. It is about time

for me to be on the other end of it, I think.”

“Alright then. Were you in love with Grindelwald?”

“I…yes. I cared about him, very much. He cared for

me too, in his way. Not enough, of course, to make
any difference.”

“Did you already know you liked men? Or was it,

you know, just him?”

Dumbledore blinks. “Oh, I thought this was going to

be more of a Dark Lord conversation.”

“I mean, it kind of is.” Harry drags his hands over his

face. “It’s so fucked up. But I remembered the
rumors about you, and I was sort of hoping that if
anyone would get it, maybe you would.”

“Oh, Harry. Tell me what is troubling you.”

It’s tempting, to unburden himself of the whole

sordid thing. To speak aloud the wretched, aching
hollow in his chest. But Harry can’t quite bring
himself to confess that he wishes he still had
Voldemort’s horcrux entwined around his own soul.
Not to the man who orchestrated his death and
resurrection for the good of the wizarding world.
Not to the man who’d told him there was no help
for the shivering thing he’d found in his mind on the
threshold of death.

Harry settles for a partial truth because he’s going

to go mad if he doesn’t start to untangle some of
these knots. “A boy tried to pick me up at the pub
tonight.”

“You were not interested?”

“What I was interested in was how much he

reminded me of Tom Riddle.”

“Ah. So you are unsure if your attraction is to men

in general, or only to Tom, with whom you shared
much in common, even his very soul.”

Harry squirms uncomfortably. Trust Dumbledore to

land very near the heart of it anyway. “Something
like that.”

“Well, I will tell you my own story. You will have to

decide how much it helps you.”

What follows is a tragic tale of passionate young

men whose idealism drew them first together, then
apart. Harry pities Dumbledore even as he admires
him for his fortitude. But he is relieved to find that
there are few similarities between their situations.
There was no prophecy, no soul-sharing, no brother
wands or mental connection between Dumbledore
and Grindelwald. They made a blood pact, but one
was never resurrected with the other’s blood, nor
either killed at the other’s hand. Harry’s history with
Voldemort was both more brutal and more
intimate, in a way, even though they had never been
lovers.

In the end, the only thing that Harry can take from
Dumbledore’s history is this. “There was never
anyone else, of course. Gellert was the first and the
last. I suppose it felt like an irrelevant question,
whether I was gay. I was made to love Gellert.”

“And to be his undoing.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to dredge all this up for you.”

“Not at all, my boy. It’s quite alright now, you know.”

“Is he…there?”

“We have spoken, yes.”

“And it’s…okay?”

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner
of things shall be well.” Dumbledore smiles to
himself. “Ah, don’t tell the church, but Julian of
Norwich was one of ours. A Seer, you know.”

Harry doesn’t know what that means, but it sure

sounds good. He thanks Dumbledore for everything
and sets the Stone down in the drawer with the
Elder Wand. Yet as he goes to sleep, he can’t help
thinking that all is not well for Voldemort, whose
soul is inaccessible even to the Resurrection Stone.
All is not well for Harry himself, splintered and
alone. All manner of things are not well.

Harry doesn’t so much quit the Aurors as he just

stops going in.

It all starts when he’s processing a box of

confiscated dark artifacts and accidentally gets
cursed by some sort of medallion. Apparently, the
thing was activated by blood and happened to have
deceptively sharp edges. St. Mungo’s has him right as
rain by the evening, but the Aurors still put him on
leave for a few days.

The trouble is that once he’s back at Grimmauld,

the old inertia settles back in his bones and it’s hard
to imagine ever leaving again. The trouble is that the
three hours he spent with deadly dark magic tearing
through his veins was the closest he’s felt to normal
in nearly two years. The trouble is that he’s getting
tired of pretending.

He closes off the Floo and tweaks the wards to

rebuff even the most urgent of owls. He spends two
days straight in bed, drinking the water Kreacher
brings but refusing food. He feels like some cord has
finally snapped, untethering him from this present
reality.

He dreams he’s back in King’s Cross. He’s peering

under the bench at the horcrux that was cleaved
from his soul. Some things are beyond help, says
Dumbledore.

Yes, replies Harry. They are.

He climbs under the bench and curls into the fetal

position in a mirror image of the horcrux. Their
elbows and knees are touching.

When Harry wakes, it’s the middle of the night on

the third day. He is sitting straight up in bed with the
Hallows in hand. The Cloak is draped over his arms.
His right hand clutches the Elder Wand, and his left
is fiddling with the Stone.

I should never have come back. It’s not the first time
he’s thought it, but it’s the most conscious. He’s
tired of fighting it. He tries it aloud. “I wish I were
dead.”

“That can certainly be arranged.”

Harry starts. He looks up to see a deeper shadow

framed against the darkness of his dark room. It is in
the figure of a man, but too tall to be human. For a
second Harry thinks it might be Voldemort, even
though the voice is all wrong, because in his
experience, impossibly tall men in sweeping black
robes who offer him death have all had something
to do with Voldemort. But this is weirder than that.
Harry can sense it in his bones. It’s in the thrum of
the Stone in his hand and the vibration of the Elder
Wand.

“Are you here to take me?”

“If that is your wish.”

“It feels like it wouldn’t be allowed, somehow.”

“And to whom do you answer, little one? Not even

to me, now. Not truly.”

“I…I didn’t mean to die, I don’t think. But I don’t

know how I can live like this.” Harry’s voice breaks.

The shadow holds out an arm. “The choice is

yours.”

Harry stares up at him. If this had happened last

week, he might have felt like he was abandoning his
post. But he’s already abandoned his post, hasn’t he?
Harry has spent the last year and a half trying to live
with half a soul, and he’s tired. Hasn’t he earned the
right to rest?

He thinks of Ron and Hermione. He thinks of the

Muggle he’ll never call. He thinks of Albus
Dumbledore’s ghost.

He thinks of the little flayed piece of Voldemort’s

soul, and the empty place in his own that it came
from.

Harry stands and takes Death’s proffered arm.

The night dissolves around them into swirling gray

mist. As the mist blows away, everything is clean and
white and bright. It might be another dream, except
for the cold and solid feeling of Death’s arm under
Harry’s hand. He’s also never had the Hallows in his
dreams before. Not all three.

“What happens now?” Harry asks, his voice

sounding very small in the open space. “Do I take a
train?”

“If you like. The choice is yours.”

Harry steps towards the trains that have appeared,

before a small sound stops him. He looks around.
There, under a bench, is the horcrux he’d left here a
year ago. Every now and then it convulses as if in
pain, but does not cry, like a baby that’s learned that
no one is coming for him.

“Has it been here all this time?”

“It is only a shard. There is nowhere for it to go.”

Harry feels himself weeping angry tears. “Are you

going to tell me it can’t be helped?”

“The choice is, as always, yours.”

Something floods through Harry’s veins now and it’s

not just anger. It hurts more than that. It’s hope. He
runs over to the bench and crouches down beside
it. Carefully, tenderly, he takes the broken thing into
his arms. He sits down right there on the ground
and clutches it to his chest.

Death’s Cloak doesn’t make him invisible here—it’s

more of a clear, shimmery veil—but the fabric is soft
and soothing, so Harry draws it over the horcrux,
murmuring all the while, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so
sorry I left you here.”

Death sits on the bench above them and watches

Harry and the horcrux without speaking. The soul
piece is stirring now in Harry’s arms. It lets out a
wretched, whimpering wail, a sound so miserable it
would break Harry’s heart if he weren’t so relieved
to see it coming back to life from that awful stillness.
He holds it tight and tries to soothe it. “It’s alright,
I’ve got you. I won’t leave you again.”

The little creature turns its head into Harry’s chest

like a baby burrowing for comfort or food. It makes
Harry feel quite helpless.

“What can I do for it?”

“The choice is—”

“Mine, yeah. But what does that mean ? What are

the choices available to me? I don’t understand.”

“You could go back.”

“Not alone.”

“No. Not if you choose not to.”

Harry looks down at the horcrux in his arms. Could

it really be that simple? Just walk right back into his
life with the missing piece of his (their) soul
restored? He could try the Aurors again or be a
teacher with Neville. He could follow Hermione
into the Ministry or Ginny into professional
Quidditch. The world stretches out before him.

But it hadn’t only been the horcrux he’d been

mourning, had it? He could take this piece of
Voldemort back into his life, knowing it was the only
one to survive him. Harry can admit, here at least, in
the expanse of the in-between, that he will still be
mourning if he returns.

“Okay, I could go back. What else?”

“You could go on.”

“I could bring him with me?”

“If you choose.”

Harry thought about it. He could board a train, the

two of them like this, and go on to wherever his
parents were. They might be a bit confused about
the baby Voldemort in his arms, but they’d be fine
with it. He could see Sirius again. Remus and Tonks.
Fred Weasley.

“Is Voldemort there? The rest of him, I mean.”

“He shattered himself. The only piece of him to

survive is this one you nourished with your own
soul, even unknowing as you were. The rest of him
is like ash on the wind.”

Harry’s heart sinks. “Is that it, then? Go on, or go

back?” He looks down at the horcrux.

“How many trains do you see?”

Harry looks over his shoulder. There is one train on

each side of the platform, each pointing an opposite
way. On, and back, he supposes. But beyond the
platform, a third engine waits on a turntable.

“There are three. But what’s the last one for?”

“Time works differently when you are no longer

quite mortal. This place is a gateway between the
life that you know and the life that lies beyond it.
But it can also be a gateway to other places and
times, if you will it. The choice will always be yours.”

“You mean…I could go back in time? Before the

battle?”

“Before any of it, if you choose.”

“I…yes. That. I choose that.”

Death inclines its head. “Then board the far train.”

The horcrux still held tight in his arms, Harry makes

his way to the far side of the platform and finds a
passenger car just behind the engine. As he climbs
the stairs, he looks back and waves to Death, feeling
a bit silly about it. For a moment, he thinks Death is
waving back, then feels even sillier when he realizes
that the gesture has simply set the turntable in
motion to change out the engines.

Harry makes his way to a seat as the red engine is

swapped for a black one. He sits and looks down at
the horcrux lying wrapped in the folds of his Cloak.
“We’re going to go back. Back to where it’ll actually
make a difference, I think.”

The horcrux blinks, and Harry catches a glimpse of

bright red eyes.

“I’m not sure exactly where we’re going.” A whistle

blows, and the train starts moving. “Maybe I should
have asked more questions when I had the chance.”

The horcrux opens its eyes fully now and fixes them
on Harry. Harry can’t help but smile. For the first
time in years, he feels like everything might actually
work out okay.

Notes:
This is the first
installment of a series.
Each subsequent work
could be considered a
direct sequel to this
story, sort of a choose-
your-own-adventure
time travel series. Each
sequel will jump back to
a different point in
Harry's past, like the
graveyard resurrection
ritual or Harry's first trip
to Diagon Alley. If this is
something you want to
follow, please subscribe
to the *series* - this
individual fic is complete
and will not be updated.

Let me know in
comments if there is any
particular scene you'd
like to see time travel
Harry end up in! I have
a few I'm drafting now
but I am definitely open
to suggestions.

Series this work

belongs to:
Part 1 of How to Bear the
Weight ● Next Work →

Works inspired by
this one:
Put To Use In My Old
Griefs by Anna_Hopkins

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