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deathtocapslockMore thoughts inspired by C....
Twinkles wasn’t just indulging and flattering Harry to make the boy like him back, though manipulation was a part of his calculations. Yes, it served Twinkles well that the Boy-Who-Was-to-Die should be reckless, impulsive, driven by his emotions, unreflective, blindly trusting in his mentor while bristling with hostility at any other authority figure or attempt to assert authority.
But the uncalculated part was, in indulging Harry Albus was indulging his own guilty conscience. He knew he’d treated Harry abominably—in consigning him to the Dursleys, in making him the WW’s (unmerited) celebrity, and most of all in his secret scheme to have the boy suicide as soon as he came of age. And Twinkles’ notion of compensating for all that was to give the child extra sweeties and let him stay up past bedtime. Every day for six years.
He explained exactly how he thinks one best expresses “caring about someone” at the end of OotP:
“I cared about you too much,” said Dumbledore simply. “I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects fools who love to act.”
“Is there a defense? I defy anyone who has watched you as I have… not to want to save you more pain than you had already suffered. What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy?... My only defense is this: I have watched you struggling under more burdens than any student who has ever passed through this school, and I could not bring myself to add another—the greatest one of all.”
…. “You may, perhaps, have wondered why I never chose you as a prefect? I must confess… that I rather thought… you had enough responsibility to be going on with.” [Cries.]
So there you have it. To Albus, love equals lying. And allowing the loved one to evade responsibility and reality. If you tell someone the truth or expect them to act responsibly, you’re showing that you don’t care for them.
Interestingly, this is exactly the same way the Dursleys show they care about Dudders. No wonder Harry accepted Twinkles as his mentor rather than Snape!
But what did Twinkles say about the Dursleys’ treatment of their son? Oh, yes, that they had inflicted “appalling damage” upon the “unfortunate boy.”
See, if you know someone has to die (and, er, who doesn’t, in the end?), there’s two ways of looking at the issue (assuming that you assign the matter high importance): make sure the doomed person is indulged as much as possible, to make up to them for the impending death.
Or tell them, “This night shalt thy soul be required of thee.” Prepare!
If Christian, prepare to meet thy maker; but if not, still prepare. Set your affairs in order, comfort those you will leave behind, make amends to those you’ve wronged, make a final difference if you can. You’ll leave an impression behind you in the world, so take your last opportunity to make it a good one.
The first is a perfectly reasonable reaction to a doomed fifteen-month-old: oh, the poor widdle thing! Register with the “Make a Wish” foundation! A trip to Disney World, riding a pony, enough ice-cream to choke a cow? What do you want, sweetie? Bring it on! Have a racing broom and a House Cup—have two!
And if rampant overindulgence isn’t actually very good for a child’s long-term moral development or physical well-being or social adjustment, if it won’t make the child grow up mens sana in corpore sano or able to make friends or good at facing life’s challenges, well, what does that matter? It’s not like the kid has a long-term.
And that seems to be Albus’s attitude to Harry.
But I’d be insulted if offering me infinite ice cream was someone’s reaction to MY diagnosis with pancreatic cancer or Dark-Lord-itis or whatever.
Another possible response is, this teen has only a limited time left to grow up into a decent human being. And he has a LONG way to go; right now he’s acting like a spoiled and malicious toddler—better get cracking!
Whether one thinks becoming a decent adult matters because God only lets the decent ones into Heaven.
Or because one thinks Lily would want her son to be someone she could respect and like, not just (presumably) love.
Or because, perhaps, one fears that the spoiled toddler might possibly, before his eventual death, endure the horrific experience of discovering that his heedless and selfish actions have destroyed people that he actually loves. Like, y’know, “one” did.
Or even just because one thinks it’s a better thing to be a responsible adult than a whiny brat, and one wouldn’t wish, oneself, to die as less, and one wouldn’t see someone one cares for live and die as less if one could prevent it.
*
But Albus didn’t see it that way. He only cared that the boy he abused should have some transient pleasure to make up for the abuse.
Moreover, as long as the boy ultimately did what Dumbledore demanded of him, that he should suicide upon request, Albus didn’t see that it should matter why the boy did it. That’s why Albus deliberately fanned the flame of vengeance (while lauding Harry’s “purity” and “capacity for love”) in HBP, and that’s why Twinkles gave Harry the Suicide Stone.
As long as the boy eventually gave himself to Tom, what did it matter why?
In fact, Dumbledore generously gave the boy the traditional three choices. Or rather, he gave the boy a choice among three reasons to fulfill the destiny Albus had programmed him for. Harry could die in blind obedience to his master’s word, Dumbledore’s man through and through. He could kill himself in order to destroy his hated enemy, out of a furious lust for vengeance. Proud to die, so long as he died facing his enemy. Or, if he resisted, he could be driven to suicide by the compulsion of the noxious shades evoked by that Stone.
It’s all good, it’s all the same to Albus.
Only it wasn’t all the same to Severus, when he eventually worked things out.
Severus had already tried lust for vengeance, pride, compulsion, and blind obedience, and he knew where they all led. To that dark and savage wood that Dante described. Where one looks around, belatedly, to find oneself utterly lost. In so terrible a place that death itself could hardly be more bitter. That passing though the very gates of Hell, traversing its every circle, is manifestly a better choice than standing still.
That’s why Severus gave Harry the memories he did. It was his final moral lesson to the boy: the record of his own journey. He didn’t just want to be known to the boy—he wanted to teach by his own example.
To offer the boy a fourth choice, after Albus’s three.
Not a different choice of what to do; Severus didn’t see any alternative to the boy’s death. But he could offer Harry a different choice about why to do it, a different reason.
His own.
And unlike his earlier lessons which Harry shrugged off, this one Harry apparently absorbed (at least until Albus got hold of him again).
Reread the chapter that came after “The Prince’s Tale.” Harry didn’t walk to that clearing gloating over how he was tricking Tom into killing his own soul-fragment. In fact, he didn’t once think about vengeance on that walk. (Nor did he try at all to emulate Sirius’s cockiness in the face of death.) He didn’t require the suicide cheerleader-squad to compel him. And, once past the first shock and pain of learning of his lifelong betrayal (less than one page of the fourteen), Harry stopped obsessing about whether Dumbledore really loved him or congratulating himself on his perfect obedience toGod’s Will Dumbledore’s clever plans.
No, Harry walked out of Hogwarts and into the forest feeling his fear fully, and thinking about his friends.
“… he could not see any of the people he loved, no Hermione, Ron, Ginny, or any of the other Weasleys, no Luna. He felt he would have given all the time remaining to him for just one last look at them….”
Until he met the Dementors, and used the Stone Albus had so thoughtfully provided for him, after which “The dead who walked beside him through the forest were much more real to him now that the living back at the castle: Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and all the others were the ones who felt like ghosts…”
But once he’d dropped the Stone and escaped its influence, Harry returned to his own motivations; Hagrid’s grief was real to him, and Harry’s last thought was of Ginny.
Now, Harry imagined that it was Dumbledore who had called him to sacrifice himself to save those he loved. Indeed, he probably could not have accepted the choice to do so if he’d perceived it to be Snape’s last gift and lesson.
Harry told himself, “Dumbledore knew, as Voldemort knew, that Harry would not let anyone else die for him now that he had discovered it was in his power to stop it.”
Except. Dumbledore manifestly did not know, or believe, or act upon, any such thing. Instead, in HBP (“Horcruxes”) after multiple one-on-one “lessons” with the boy, after close observation of Harry’s reactions and actions all through sixth year, Albus was convinced that the best way to get Harry’s commitment (under false pretenses) tokill-Voldemort-or- die was by appealing to Harry’s “furious desire for revenge” for Tom’s murder of Harry’s father.
Hmm—never noticed before that Albus specified the murder of Harry’s father as what must have imparted that “furious desire” in Harry. Not mother, not both parents. Twinkles was deliberately, then, invoking James the arrogantly—suicidally—brave , while excluding from his conversation Lily, said (by him) to have been the source of ultimate love and effective protective sacrifice rather than furious (and pointless) courage.
Only, see, Albus was almost certainly correct. Then.
This was the great Legilimens, after all, who had looked into Severus’s eyes and seen exactly what to offer him to gain an ultimate commitment. Why should we expect him to have gotten it all wrong with Harry?
That was the right tack to take with the Harry of Book 6 (as it had never been with Severus).
It had absolutely the desired effect. We witnessed Harry’s reaction to Dumble’s manipulation, and it was inspiring:
He thought of his mother, his father, and Sirius. He thought of Cedric Diggory. He thought of all the terrible deeds he knew Lord Voldemort had done. A flame seemed to leap inside him, searing his throat.
“I’d want him finished,” Harry said quietly. “And I’d want to do it.”
“Of course you would!” cried Dumbledore. “…. He will continue to hunt you… which makes it certain, really, that—”
“That one of us is going to end up killing the other,” said Harry. “Yes.”
But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two, but Dumbledore knew—and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents—that there was all the difference in the world.
So. Dumbledore was successful. Harry was utterly willing to die to try to “finish” Tom, and was proud of himself for being so. Dumbledore’s pep talk left Harry self-inflated with warrior pride and with a “searing” desire to “finish” Voldemort himself.
And Harry’s feelings were further validated by his belief that his parents had felt just the same.
Vengeful Harry. Prideful Harry. Hateful Harry. And convinced that his hatred was love.
Then as his backup plan Twinkles bequeathed Harry the Suicide Stone, which would if used separate him emotionally from the living people he loved!
And then Albus’s final living encounter with Harry was an outing designed as a test of Harry’s obedience.
But none of that, in the end, is what ultimately moved Harry to walk into the forest that night.
Because Severus intervened, giving Harry one final lesson.
For Severus, too,“had taken trouble to get to know” Harry.
Severus was, one might say, deeply acquainted with many of the boy’s flaws. Intimately, even.
The boy was reckless, prickly, obstinate. Fatally hot-tempered; incapable of holding his tongue when provoked, cost what it may. Cherishing revenge fantasies against his enemies, spying on them, ultimately using Dark Magic against them. Incapable of acknowledging where the path he was on would likely lead him. Responsible for the death of someone he loved by accident, out of sheer stubborn refusal to heed the (obvious!) consequences of his actions.
Who utterly refused to reflect. Who allowed himself to be—hell, who insisted on being!—blinded by his own fury and hatred and pride.
Yet who was also deeply motivated by a “saving-people thing.” Who, however great his capacity for hatred, was also capable of devotion. Of loyalty and love.
So Snape gave Harry, in his memories, one last gift beyond the information that Albus had required Severus to impart.
Not an order to be blindly obeyed. The very last memory Snape gave to Harry showed Severus disagreeing with Albus over his refusal to share information, and made it absolutely clear that, while Severus was still adhering in general to Albus’s plans, by then he was following his own judgment. In fact, Severus was now withholding information from Albus when he saw fit to do so.
Not a further incitement to vengeance. Though had Snape imagined that to be helpful to Harry, no doubt he’d dozens of memories of the Dark Lord in storage that could have proved, ah, provocative.
And not a Stone instead of bread.
No. Snape’s final gift to Harry, his final lesson, was the knowledge of himself. His own journey through life. Tracing the path that a flawed, impulsive, passionate boy—a nasty boy, even—had taken. Where he’d gone wrong, what he had destroyed in doing so, where he’d finally gone right.
And that he’d thereafter held to that path.
Despite its great cost. Despite his own continued flaws and missteps.
Despite even his guide’s betrayal.
Follow the Prince, would you, boy? Then follow where he went right, not just where he went wrong.
What Severus gave Harry, ultimately, was a model. One that the boy could recognize himself in, enough to believe that he could follow if he would. No inflated standards, no false appeals to fearlessness or to supposed flawless purity. Or to glory; acknowledgement by others didn’t matter. What mattered, was what was.
“Lately, only those whom I could not save…. Expecto patronum!”
A modest enough claim. I love, and I act from love. The lesser love, and the greater.
Always.
The fourth choice, the one that Albus never offered Harry. To sacrifice himself in full knowledge, and for the right reasons.
“Out of love, and because it needs doing.” (Emma Bull, Bone Dance)
And Harry took the choice that Severus gave him.
Twinkles wasn’t just indulging and flattering Harry to make the boy like him back, though manipulation was a part of his calculations. Yes, it served Twinkles well that the Boy-Who-Was-to-Die should be reckless, impulsive, driven by his emotions, unreflective, blindly trusting in his mentor while bristling with hostility at any other authority figure or attempt to assert authority.
But the uncalculated part was, in indulging Harry Albus was indulging his own guilty conscience. He knew he’d treated Harry abominably—in consigning him to the Dursleys, in making him the WW’s (unmerited) celebrity, and most of all in his secret scheme to have the boy suicide as soon as he came of age. And Twinkles’ notion of compensating for all that was to give the child extra sweeties and let him stay up past bedtime. Every day for six years.
He explained exactly how he thinks one best expresses “caring about someone” at the end of OotP:
“I cared about you too much,” said Dumbledore simply. “I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects fools who love to act.”
“Is there a defense? I defy anyone who has watched you as I have… not to want to save you more pain than you had already suffered. What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy?... My only defense is this: I have watched you struggling under more burdens than any student who has ever passed through this school, and I could not bring myself to add another—the greatest one of all.”
…. “You may, perhaps, have wondered why I never chose you as a prefect? I must confess… that I rather thought… you had enough responsibility to be going on with.” [Cries.]
So there you have it. To Albus, love equals lying. And allowing the loved one to evade responsibility and reality. If you tell someone the truth or expect them to act responsibly, you’re showing that you don’t care for them.
Interestingly, this is exactly the same way the Dursleys show they care about Dudders. No wonder Harry accepted Twinkles as his mentor rather than Snape!
But what did Twinkles say about the Dursleys’ treatment of their son? Oh, yes, that they had inflicted “appalling damage” upon the “unfortunate boy.”
See, if you know someone has to die (and, er, who doesn’t, in the end?), there’s two ways of looking at the issue (assuming that you assign the matter high importance): make sure the doomed person is indulged as much as possible, to make up to them for the impending death.
Or tell them, “This night shalt thy soul be required of thee.” Prepare!
If Christian, prepare to meet thy maker; but if not, still prepare. Set your affairs in order, comfort those you will leave behind, make amends to those you’ve wronged, make a final difference if you can. You’ll leave an impression behind you in the world, so take your last opportunity to make it a good one.
The first is a perfectly reasonable reaction to a doomed fifteen-month-old: oh, the poor widdle thing! Register with the “Make a Wish” foundation! A trip to Disney World, riding a pony, enough ice-cream to choke a cow? What do you want, sweetie? Bring it on! Have a racing broom and a House Cup—have two!
And if rampant overindulgence isn’t actually very good for a child’s long-term moral development or physical well-being or social adjustment, if it won’t make the child grow up mens sana in corpore sano or able to make friends or good at facing life’s challenges, well, what does that matter? It’s not like the kid has a long-term.
And that seems to be Albus’s attitude to Harry.
But I’d be insulted if offering me infinite ice cream was someone’s reaction to MY diagnosis with pancreatic cancer or Dark-Lord-itis or whatever.
Another possible response is, this teen has only a limited time left to grow up into a decent human being. And he has a LONG way to go; right now he’s acting like a spoiled and malicious toddler—better get cracking!
Whether one thinks becoming a decent adult matters because God only lets the decent ones into Heaven.
Or because one thinks Lily would want her son to be someone she could respect and like, not just (presumably) love.
Or because, perhaps, one fears that the spoiled toddler might possibly, before his eventual death, endure the horrific experience of discovering that his heedless and selfish actions have destroyed people that he actually loves. Like, y’know, “one” did.
Or even just because one thinks it’s a better thing to be a responsible adult than a whiny brat, and one wouldn’t wish, oneself, to die as less, and one wouldn’t see someone one cares for live and die as less if one could prevent it.
*
But Albus didn’t see it that way. He only cared that the boy he abused should have some transient pleasure to make up for the abuse.
Moreover, as long as the boy ultimately did what Dumbledore demanded of him, that he should suicide upon request, Albus didn’t see that it should matter why the boy did it. That’s why Albus deliberately fanned the flame of vengeance (while lauding Harry’s “purity” and “capacity for love”) in HBP, and that’s why Twinkles gave Harry the Suicide Stone.
As long as the boy eventually gave himself to Tom, what did it matter why?
In fact, Dumbledore generously gave the boy the traditional three choices. Or rather, he gave the boy a choice among three reasons to fulfill the destiny Albus had programmed him for. Harry could die in blind obedience to his master’s word, Dumbledore’s man through and through. He could kill himself in order to destroy his hated enemy, out of a furious lust for vengeance. Proud to die, so long as he died facing his enemy. Or, if he resisted, he could be driven to suicide by the compulsion of the noxious shades evoked by that Stone.
It’s all good, it’s all the same to Albus.
Only it wasn’t all the same to Severus, when he eventually worked things out.
Severus had already tried lust for vengeance, pride, compulsion, and blind obedience, and he knew where they all led. To that dark and savage wood that Dante described. Where one looks around, belatedly, to find oneself utterly lost. In so terrible a place that death itself could hardly be more bitter. That passing though the very gates of Hell, traversing its every circle, is manifestly a better choice than standing still.
That’s why Severus gave Harry the memories he did. It was his final moral lesson to the boy: the record of his own journey. He didn’t just want to be known to the boy—he wanted to teach by his own example.
To offer the boy a fourth choice, after Albus’s three.
Not a different choice of what to do; Severus didn’t see any alternative to the boy’s death. But he could offer Harry a different choice about why to do it, a different reason.
His own.
And unlike his earlier lessons which Harry shrugged off, this one Harry apparently absorbed (at least until Albus got hold of him again).
Reread the chapter that came after “The Prince’s Tale.” Harry didn’t walk to that clearing gloating over how he was tricking Tom into killing his own soul-fragment. In fact, he didn’t once think about vengeance on that walk. (Nor did he try at all to emulate Sirius’s cockiness in the face of death.) He didn’t require the suicide cheerleader-squad to compel him. And, once past the first shock and pain of learning of his lifelong betrayal (less than one page of the fourteen), Harry stopped obsessing about whether Dumbledore really loved him or congratulating himself on his perfect obedience to
No, Harry walked out of Hogwarts and into the forest feeling his fear fully, and thinking about his friends.
“… he could not see any of the people he loved, no Hermione, Ron, Ginny, or any of the other Weasleys, no Luna. He felt he would have given all the time remaining to him for just one last look at them….”
Until he met the Dementors, and used the Stone Albus had so thoughtfully provided for him, after which “The dead who walked beside him through the forest were much more real to him now that the living back at the castle: Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and all the others were the ones who felt like ghosts…”
But once he’d dropped the Stone and escaped its influence, Harry returned to his own motivations; Hagrid’s grief was real to him, and Harry’s last thought was of Ginny.
Now, Harry imagined that it was Dumbledore who had called him to sacrifice himself to save those he loved. Indeed, he probably could not have accepted the choice to do so if he’d perceived it to be Snape’s last gift and lesson.
Harry told himself, “Dumbledore knew, as Voldemort knew, that Harry would not let anyone else die for him now that he had discovered it was in his power to stop it.”
Except. Dumbledore manifestly did not know, or believe, or act upon, any such thing. Instead, in HBP (“Horcruxes”) after multiple one-on-one “lessons” with the boy, after close observation of Harry’s reactions and actions all through sixth year, Albus was convinced that the best way to get Harry’s commitment (under false pretenses) to
Hmm—never noticed before that Albus specified the murder of Harry’s father as what must have imparted that “furious desire” in Harry. Not mother, not both parents. Twinkles was deliberately, then, invoking James the arrogantly—suicidally—brave , while excluding from his conversation Lily, said (by him) to have been the source of ultimate love and effective protective sacrifice rather than furious (and pointless) courage.
Only, see, Albus was almost certainly correct. Then.
This was the great Legilimens, after all, who had looked into Severus’s eyes and seen exactly what to offer him to gain an ultimate commitment. Why should we expect him to have gotten it all wrong with Harry?
That was the right tack to take with the Harry of Book 6 (as it had never been with Severus).
It had absolutely the desired effect. We witnessed Harry’s reaction to Dumble’s manipulation, and it was inspiring:
He thought of his mother, his father, and Sirius. He thought of Cedric Diggory. He thought of all the terrible deeds he knew Lord Voldemort had done. A flame seemed to leap inside him, searing his throat.
“I’d want him finished,” Harry said quietly. “And I’d want to do it.”
“Of course you would!” cried Dumbledore. “…. He will continue to hunt you… which makes it certain, really, that—”
“That one of us is going to end up killing the other,” said Harry. “Yes.”
But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two, but Dumbledore knew—and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents—that there was all the difference in the world.
So. Dumbledore was successful. Harry was utterly willing to die to try to “finish” Tom, and was proud of himself for being so. Dumbledore’s pep talk left Harry self-inflated with warrior pride and with a “searing” desire to “finish” Voldemort himself.
And Harry’s feelings were further validated by his belief that his parents had felt just the same.
Vengeful Harry. Prideful Harry. Hateful Harry. And convinced that his hatred was love.
Then as his backup plan Twinkles bequeathed Harry the Suicide Stone, which would if used separate him emotionally from the living people he loved!
And then Albus’s final living encounter with Harry was an outing designed as a test of Harry’s obedience.
But none of that, in the end, is what ultimately moved Harry to walk into the forest that night.
Because Severus intervened, giving Harry one final lesson.
For Severus, too,“had taken trouble to get to know” Harry.
Severus was, one might say, deeply acquainted with many of the boy’s flaws. Intimately, even.
The boy was reckless, prickly, obstinate. Fatally hot-tempered; incapable of holding his tongue when provoked, cost what it may. Cherishing revenge fantasies against his enemies, spying on them, ultimately using Dark Magic against them. Incapable of acknowledging where the path he was on would likely lead him. Responsible for the death of someone he loved by accident, out of sheer stubborn refusal to heed the (obvious!) consequences of his actions.
Who utterly refused to reflect. Who allowed himself to be—hell, who insisted on being!—blinded by his own fury and hatred and pride.
Yet who was also deeply motivated by a “saving-people thing.” Who, however great his capacity for hatred, was also capable of devotion. Of loyalty and love.
So Snape gave Harry, in his memories, one last gift beyond the information that Albus had required Severus to impart.
Not an order to be blindly obeyed. The very last memory Snape gave to Harry showed Severus disagreeing with Albus over his refusal to share information, and made it absolutely clear that, while Severus was still adhering in general to Albus’s plans, by then he was following his own judgment. In fact, Severus was now withholding information from Albus when he saw fit to do so.
Not a further incitement to vengeance. Though had Snape imagined that to be helpful to Harry, no doubt he’d dozens of memories of the Dark Lord in storage that could have proved, ah, provocative.
And not a Stone instead of bread.
No. Snape’s final gift to Harry, his final lesson, was the knowledge of himself. His own journey through life. Tracing the path that a flawed, impulsive, passionate boy—a nasty boy, even—had taken. Where he’d gone wrong, what he had destroyed in doing so, where he’d finally gone right.
And that he’d thereafter held to that path.
Despite its great cost. Despite his own continued flaws and missteps.
Despite even his guide’s betrayal.
Follow the Prince, would you, boy? Then follow where he went right, not just where he went wrong.
What Severus gave Harry, ultimately, was a model. One that the boy could recognize himself in, enough to believe that he could follow if he would. No inflated standards, no false appeals to fearlessness or to supposed flawless purity. Or to glory; acknowledgement by others didn’t matter. What mattered, was what was.
“Lately, only those whom I could not save…. Expecto patronum!”
A modest enough claim. I love, and I act from love. The lesser love, and the greater.
Always.
The fourth choice, the one that Albus never offered Harry. To sacrifice himself in full knowledge, and for the right reasons.
“Out of love, and because it needs doing.” (Emma Bull, Bone Dance)
And Harry took the choice that Severus gave him.
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Date: 2015-08-24 02:09 pm (UTC)And then when he dies, that luck should be passed on to someone--er, perhaps several someones, yes--to whom Harry feels affection, someone he's willing to die for. Someone who might need that luck to kill Voldemort once and for all, which of course is what Dumbledore wants. Of course. So it's all for the Greater Good.
Of course Dumbledore is trying to do this very mechanically--instill luck, get luck back--when it doesn't quite work that way. Or at least, just dying isn't enough; it has to be a trade, "Me instead of them." Lily had the good fortune to have a chance to live, and offered her life in trade for Harry's out of love, and the fates accepted. The Year King had life, health, abundant food, and comfort, and the trade was explicitly that he lose all those things if his people could gain them. Harry... wouldn't have been offering a trade if he'd gone there thinking of vengeance. Dumbledore's plan would have failed.
Or rather, Dumbledore's conscious plan would have failed. The unconscious one, well.... I mean, it doesn't take a genius to wonder whether mechanical, dutiful suicide or furious vengeance will actually suffice to invoke sacrificial love magic. Dumbledore isn't stupid. A strong unconscious desire for Harry to fail, and to give Harry what he would like and what will be useful to him for other reasons, might, er, influence him to overlook certain nuances while telling himself he's thought of everything and one just must take risks, after all.
But Snape intervened with his memories, and then Harry could say legitimately, "I did what my mother did." (I wonder if everyone who was at Hogwarts that day found themselves able to get away with breaking all kinds of rules from then on?)