Blindness

Chapter 21: White Shadows Among Dark Stars

Harry stood looking at himself observing himself. It was a tricky thing, to view a memory inside a pensieve of himself viewing a memory inside a pensieve; like peeking through the layers of an onion.

He hadn't tried until that afternoon; the last time he had checked himself over for outside influences had been with Hermione beside him, looking year-by-year for any sign the horcrux had tainted him.

This was different. This was, somehow, worse.

Harry watched as his own green soul stood on a street, fire burning still on the edges of the memory, the inferi scattered about upon the ground like fragments of broken triangles.

He watched himself watch himself kneel, fingers of light reaching for what he now knew was the Resurrection Stone. Saw his fingers gently pick it up, turn it over, place it in his pocket. Nothing changed, yet.

The memory flickered again. Harry was alone, in Grimmauld Place, sitting in a wooden chair, pulling the ring out, trying to change it, trying to explain its impossibility to himself.

Harry looked at himself in the memory within a memory, then looked at himself looking at that memory. It was as close to a mirror as he had ever come; and in this way he could see far more clearly if anything changed.

His past self placed the ring upon his finger, and Harry watched it happen, so slight he never would have seen it without observing his two self's side-by-side.

A slight shift in the humanity of his pattern; a sphere angling slightly into a cone here; a box becoming more of a prism there. Such a little change, a slight angle in his pattern, nothing he ever would have noticed.

The growing chill in his stomach deepened, hardened. Harry changed the memory again, as he had four times before now, because he could see that that slight change was nothing. Nothing compared to what he saw when he examined himself three years ago to himself now.

Harry watched himself unwrap the package that was around the Cloak of Invisibility. Saw that the pattern upon the Stone shifted in either agitation or excitement; saw his own pattern shift with it, so very excited at finding another pattern he could not explain.

Then the memory-self flung the pattern of stars and shadows around him and vanished into its light with a laugh he hadn't realized he had uttered.

When the Cloak was pulled away, the damage was done. It wasn't so slight, now. More cones and prisms, the green of his own soul and the human pattern of his body both changed irrevocably. As if what made him human was becoming more like what made the Stone and the Cloak, sharp angles and sloping curves.

And scattered about his color dark green shadows glimmered, mirrored by lighter pinpricks of palest green darkness.

Which made no sense, that shadows could shine and light could cast such darkness.

He hadn't seen it, but then again, he hadn't viewed many memories of his current self. Hermione would not notice the difference in his light, overwhelmed as she was by all the other portions of his sight. They had both focused too much on his face, on the bloody horcrux, to see the smallest changes being wrought elsewhere.

More memories flickered by, all that he could remember of himself actually wearing the Cloak, the Stone a constant presence on his finger.

Every time another angle sharpened, though the effect was not as dramatic as the first initial experience. Every time there was another prism here, another cone there, more contrast in his color, more stars and shadows, such tiny little things even he would only notice on close observation over a long period of time. And with each change, he saw his own pattern responding to the activity in the Stone and Cloak; or perhaps they merely were responding to him.