Seeking the Star

If I owned any of these characters, I doubt I\'d be writing fanfic about them. If I didn\'t respect Rowling greatly, I wouldn\'t be writing a story based on her characters.

Thankyous to my beta, IGToW. Chapter has been edited due to beta-ing, and has improved some in the meantime, methinks.

Both the name of this story and the future chapter names are derived from the Ancestral Path Tarot Deck, created by Julie Cuccia-Watts and Tracey Hoover. The meanings of the cards will be in a note at the end of the chapters, and are copied out of the booklet that accompanies the deck. If you like tarot, I highly recommend this deck.


Ch.1.

Things had changed a lot over the past three months, which was why Harry was standing in the doorway of the Potions master\'s office, clutching the Pensieve to his chest and feeling suddenly nervous. Snape didn\'t seem to notice him, and he couldn\'t seem to make his left hand release the Pensieve and knock on the door frame. Memories of the summer swirled through his brain like the thick brew of thoughts in the Pensieve as he forced himself to remember why it was so important to do this.

***

Dumbledore\'s confession of fallibility had shaken him to his very core, and he went back to the Dursleys feeling betrayed by everyone. In fact, he had been deeply angry at just about everyone and everything. The Dursleys were only slightly cowed by the threats of the members of the Order, and while they had stopped with the overt abuse, they still worked him to the bone and fed him little. As he got angrier, his nightmares got worse, until he had basically stopped sleeping at all. A few weeks into the summer, it had all come to a head.

He had stopped sleeping, and everything he ate came right back up into the toilet. His hands hadn\'t stopped shaking at any point in the past five days, and he was starting to drop things. His whole body ached with the anger he directed at the entire universe. And then he almost broke his wand.

It was the sign Harry needed that it was too much. And that day, when he had almost broken his wand between his maniacally twitching hands out of sheer hate for Dumbledore and Sirius and the Weasleys and Hermione, who had all abandoned him, he stopped. He stopped and looked at himself, Harry James Potter, the Boy Who Bloody Kept Living, nearly sixteen and about to break the object most strongly tying him to what he truly was. And then he heard a little voice in his head, the one that sometimes sounded remarkably like Hermione but today was his own voice, soft but utterly sure.

“Maybe, Harry, that\'s just want he wants. Maybe he wants you to be angry, to eat yourself from the inside. Maybe a is is his tool.
Maybe, Harry, you need to stop just being angry and start figuring out why these things are.”

And he sat there, in utter stillness, contemplating himself. Maybe it was true, he was too angry, and that anger was unproductive. But, how to resolve it? He was angry at Dumbledore for betraying him, for making his life utterly miserable, but most for shattering his faith in the invincibility of the old wizard. He had revealed weakness to Harry, destroying the possibility that everything could come out right solely through his actions. Dumbledore could be blinded, and the knowledge was a crushing blow to Harry\'s faith.

“But,” he thought, “all men make mistakes. I definitely have, and my mistakes...my mistakes kill people. He may be the most powerful wizard in the world, but he\'s only a man. And he wasng wng what he thought best. And he loves me. If nothing else, his mistakes prove that. He hurt me because he wanted to protect me. And he wanted to protect me because he loves me.” And with that realization, suddenly the anger towards Albus Dumbledore abated, then vanished entirely.

He sat on his hard mattress for hours, naming each person he was angry at and picking apart his reasons. It was an entirely new experience for him, to analyze his own motives and emotions. He found that reasoning out his anger made it slowly dissipate, and the less angry he was, the easier it was to let go of it. As he became calmer and more focused on his task, he found he could feel something deep within himself that he had never found before. When he closed his eyes and felt for it, it congealed into a very solid appearance before him. He was looking inside himself at a complex web of colored threads, but not threads so much as light, or magic, made solid suddenly nd hnd his eyelids. As he peered deeper into the web, it rushed up to meet him in painstaking detail. It was somewhere between a spiderweb, a tapestry, and a great knot, and every thread reverberated with something that uniquely pulsed \'Harry Potter\'. He stared at it, puzzling out the meanings of the threads, many of which seemed to extend out of him and into a distance he couldn\'t fathom. It all slowly began to fall into place for him, and as he understood his tapestry, some threads immediately became more apparent than others. They had not changed, precisely, just become somehow more obvious. The threads were poisonous yellow, but as he gently touched one, stroking it with his fingertips, it made a sonorous noise and slowly changed to a deep green. He smiled in pleasure. That was himself. He had been angry at himself, and it was gone now. It was bliss.

These threads emanating from his center were the most magical things he had ever touched. They were him, and yet not him. They were his connections to the universe, but something more as well. And as he touched them, he changed them, and when he did, all of the negativity they had carried evaporated. Each string he fingered connected his anger to someone else. There was Dumbledore, and Ron, Hermione, Sirius, Remus. Everyone had a thread of his anger, it seemed. As he went to touch the threads, to undo them as he had undone his anger against himself, there was some resistance. He looked closer at each thread, and saw, faintly, that each of his threads were surrounded by others, that were not his own. He moved them closer, enlarging them until he could put fingers on each thread. As he did, he was filled with sudden meanings. Each thread was a flood of feelings and rationales that he absorbed, somehow, without any words at all. He just felt his way through.

Each time, Harry found once he had felt every thread, he understood each person\'s feelings toward him very deeply, and once their motives were apparent, he could not have negative feelings toward them anymore. Then his own thread would come into focus, and he could change it from the poisoning anger into the calm healthy green.

It took time to go through each thread individually. Some were harder than others. Dumbledore\'s was surprisingly easy, Sirius\' heartbreakingly h But But the most surprising thread by far belonged to none other than Severus Snape.

Snape had more threads wound to Harry\'s than he would have imagined, almost as many as Dumbledore. They were a confusing mess, winding around each other and snagging over each other. He had to come in very close to the threads to make out how they all interacted. The \'reading\' process was becoming easier for him, and aided by touch and a newfound patience born of fascination, he picked gently through Snape\'s threads. What he read there was almost shocking, and once he was finished, he had a profound respect for the bristly Potions master. The th bet between them, when Harry changed it, was so deep a green it was near black. From far away, he heard a knocking, and he pulled his attention away from the web before him. It seemed to zoom away very quickly, disappearing into his chest. As he came back to himself, he realized he was humming a steady note that seemed to vibrate through everything in the room.

“Boy, your aunt has called you three times to dinner! What are you doing in there?” Uncle Vernon sounded purple-d ond on the other side of the door, and Harry made to jump towards the door, only to find it was twilight and his legs were stiff from sitting so still for hours. He limped to the door quickly as he could and followed his annoyed but confused uncle down to dinner.

****

In the middle of a very serious meeting at Grimmauld Place, Albus Dumbledore stopped speaking in mid-sentence, and sat back and smiled one of his smiles. He steepled his fingers in front of his nose, and the other members of the Order of the Phoenix were fairly sure he even chuckled.

(a/n)
ten of swords-going a long way to make a short point. overkill. blowing of a situation out of proportion. the drama of victimization, maintaining the victim\'s role as an excuse for not getting on with one\'s life.