The question hung in the still, heavy air between them: Do you want to go inside?
Ariana asked it with no hint of expectation in her voice. Her periwinkle eyes were clear, steady, and full of a quiet, patient empathy. She had brought him to this threshold, this physical epicenter of his entire life's trauma and identity. But she would not, could not, force him to cross it. The choice had to be his.
Harry stared at the ruined house, the ivy-choked walls a monument to a sacrifice he was only just beginning to comprehend. Part of him recoiled from it, a deep, instinctual fear of the pain that lay within those broken walls. The thought of stepping inside, of walking on the same floors where his parents had drawn their last breaths, was terrifying. It felt like willingly stepping into an open wound.
But another, stronger part of him felt an undeniable pull. This was not just a place of death. It was a place of love. This was the house where his mother had soothed him to sleep, where his father had likely made him laugh, where they had lived as a family, however briefly. The photo album Ariana had given him had shown him their lives. This place would show him the reality of their love, a love so powerful it had shattered a dark lord and left an echo strong enough to protect him even now.
Ariana had not mentioned the Dementors or the coming year. She had simply brought him here. But as Harry looked at her serene, intelligent face, he understood her deeper strategy. This was not just a pilgrimage of grief. It was a preemptive strike. An inoculation. She was giving him the opportunity to confront his own ghosts on his own terms, in a place of memory rather than a moment of terror. By facing the source of the echo now, he might be able to withstand its power later.
He looked from the broken doorway to Ariana's patient face. He saw not a powerful witch or a brilliant strategist, but a friend. A friend who had respected his grief, who had armed him with knowledge, and who was now trusting him with his own healing. She was offering him control over his own narrative.
He took a deep, shaky breath, the cool, damp air filling his lungs. He made his decision.
"Yes," he said, his voice quiet but firm, a single word that carried the weight of a lifetime. "I do." A small, almost imperceptible nod was Ariana's only response. There was no praise, no encouragement. There was only a profound, silent approval. She had presented him with a variable, and he had chosen the more difficult but ultimately more rewarding path.
She pushed open the rickety wooden gate, which groaned in protest. Together, they walked up the overgrown path, past the sign covered in messages of love and support from a world that knew the legend but not the boy. They stepped over the threshold, leaving the sunlit world behind and entering the shadowed, silent heart of the past.
The inside of the house was a wreck, open to the sky. Dust motes danced in the beams of light that pierced the collapsed roof. The furniture was overturned and broken, a testament to the violence of that night. But beneath the destruction, there were still faint traces of a home. A faded patch of wallpaper with tiny, winged Snitches. A child's height chart penciled on a doorframe. A broken rocking chair by a cold, dark hearth.
They didn't speak. There were no words for a place like this. Harry walked through the downstairs rooms slowly, touching the dusty surfaces, his mind painting pictures from the photographs he had memorized. This was where they had lived. This was where they had been happy.
The true test, he knew, was upstairs. He looked at the staircase, its banister splintered and broken. He hesitated for only a moment before beginning to climb. Ariana followed a few paces behind, her presence a silent, steady anchor.
The upstairs hallway was dark. The door to his parents' bedroom was blasted off its hinges. But it was the door at the end of the hall, his old nursery, that held the true horror. It stood slightly ajar.
He pushed it open.
The room was almost empty. A broken cot lay on its side against one wall. And on the floor, directly in the center of the room, was a dark, indelible scorch mark, a permanent scar on the floorboards where the Killing Curse had struck his mother down.
He stood in the doorway, and for the first time, the memory came to him not as a vague, terrifying sound, but as a fleeting, phantom image in his mind's eye. A flash of brilliant, sickening green. A woman's high, pleading voice—"Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry!"—and then a final, desperate scream.
Tears streamed down his face, hot and silent. He didn't try to stop them. He let the grief wash over him, the pure, undiluted pain of a son who had just witnessed the echo of his mother's murder. He sank to his knees, his hand pressed against the doorframe, his body shaking with sobs he had held back for thirteen years.
Ariana did not move to comfort him. She did not offer platitudes or gentle words. She understood that this was a crucible, a pain he had to pass through alone. To interfere would be to diminish the importance of the moment. She simply stood watch, her presence a silent testament that he was not, in the end, truly alone. She was guarding the perimeter of his grief, allowing him the space and safety to finally feel it all.
He knelt there for a long time, the tears cleansing him, the pain lancing the wound that had festered in his soul for so long. And when the sobs finally subsided, leaving him hollowed out and exhausted but strangely… lighter, he slowly got to his feet.
He looked around the ruined nursery one last time. He saw not just a place of death, but the place where his mother had performed the ultimate act of love. This room was not a tomb. It was an altar.
He turned and walked out of the room, out of the house, and back into the sunlight. He felt changed. The vague, shadowy horror that had lived inside him had been replaced by a sharp, clear memory. It was a terrible memory, but it was his. It was real. He had faced it.
Ariana was waiting for him by the gate. She looked at his tear-streaked but resolute face and knew he had made the right choice. He was stronger now. More whole. The Dementors would come, and they would still be a terror. But they would no longer hold the same power over him. He had faced his worst memory, and he had survived it.
"Are you ready to go?" she asked softly.
Harry nodded, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "Yes," he said, his voice hoarse but clear. "I'm ready."
He took one last look at the ruined house, a place of sorrow and of a love so powerful it had defied death itself. He had arrived a boy haunted by a legend. He was leaving a young man who was finally beginning to understand the truth of his own story.