They meet, in all places and wholly unexpectedly, on the Burren.

He looks for all the world as nothing but a boy, knelt as he is, head tilted toward a white sky, eyes closed.

Harry Potter.

While almost a man, he is still young to the point of pain; this instrument of war, this child soldier. His name, grown so large over the years, but in his body lies the barest of truths: small and still soft with youth.

His entourage, masked Death Eater scouts, brace upon approach, but Harry remains where he is upon the wind beaten stones of Ireland's karst. His eyes open, and they meet finally for the first time in many, many years.

"Albus Dumbledore."

Albus tilts his chin in polite acknowledgement. He of course has heard tale of the infamous temperament of the Dark Lord's most fearsome and only child, the screaming hysterics, the writhing fits of rage. He is braced for it, even.

But Harry before him now is gentle, serene. No baring of the enmity within. Where is the wrath?

"You are here I assume to seek the Burren for ancient magics. And I am here to purge this land of the Order."

"You look so much like your parents," is the first thing Albus says to him, quite against his own will.

Beside him, Alistar Moody grunts in disbelief.

Harry himself reveals no reaction, only rolls to his feet, brushing the dust from his knees. Albus smells burning embers.

It is true, in a way. There are traces of Lily and James in Harry's form, hazy and deformed behind the mutilations of Lord Voldemort. Bottle green behind the flicker of secondary clear, serpentine eyelids and slit pupils. With every gust of wind upon the glaciated plain, Albus notes a flare of the nostrils, an animal tilt of the head. The boy breathes through his mouth as though tasting the air.

"I have but one parent. He is me, and I am He."

"An immeasurable burden on your spirit, surely."

Harry considers him, chin dipping, a mock of his earlier manners, and Albus sees the shimmer of barely discernible scales under the flesh of his youthful cheek. What has been done to him, Albus wonders. What manner of creature is he?

"Not at all."

Albus pities in the face of such certainty; cannot help it but.

"Albus, this is pointless. We knew there was no saving Harry long ago," Remus Lupin whispers, though it clearly pains the poor man to utter it.

But Albus wishes to feel the full form of Harry's devotion, finger it for cracks, weaknesses. Surely a boy is still a boy; lonely and insecure. Wanting for approval and affection, for happiness.

"Then you are intimately familiar with his cruelty. His darkness. His inability," and Albus watches Harry's face carefully, a boy with so much capacity for loyalty and adoration, "to love."

Alistar makes the smallest of scoffs, but Albus pays him no heed.

But Harry smiles then, undaunted.

"I have known His cruelty most fervently, yes... I think you mean to convince me of His malevolence, Dumbledore, but you needn't waste the effort. It is well known to me; He is a wrathful God."

"What is a god that can be killed? No god at all."

"Albus..." Alistar growls.

"You mean the Prophecy," Harry says, eyes glittering, and Albus is… surprised. "Yes, I know of it. Either must die at the hand of the Other, for Neither shall live while the Other survives. It resides among many other records and is no secret. But surely it is not that which has stayed your hand all these years?"

Is it? Has Albus miscalculated? Has he built his strategy upon the wrong foundation? Is it hewn with cracks like the ones upon which he stands now?

Harry steps forward, dust trailing from his closed fist to disappear in the wind.

"I believe I should gift you a mercy. A boon. There is no Either or Other. We are One. I am born of His essence, and He of mine. My being of Him, is not a feeling. It is not poetry or prophecy! It is the circumference of the earth, the waning and waxing of the moon, the set of the sun. Physical, celestial, and unchanging Truth."

Harry shares this with the impartiality of the frost that crawls on the dead rocks around them, cold and grey as far as the eye can see. Without pride or pleasure. It is worse for this.

"And this you would allow to consume the Earth?" he asks because he must know it.

"Albus Dumbledore," Harry laughs. "Should He condemn the world whole, I would destroy it. Should He then condemn me, I'd destroy myself twice over. Your only hope of victory is to kill us both... I'll leave you to your quest now. I'm not in the dancing mood."

Harry turns his back to Albus and Remus and Alistar, his servants draw their wands.

"How will you live without him, I wonder?" Albus calls over the distance, and Harry stops.

"Do not make that fatal mistake, Dumbledore. Should you become capable of it, kill me first."

Harry turns to face him once more, and he is not so calm now.

"You see, you are wrong about My Lord. He is capable of so much love. He has many: The war, the intrigue, the miasma of his own power, even His innumerable, little lambs that flock about Him! Even if I die, He will have his games and fancies. His rage. He may even recreate me in some terrible fashion. I'm sure he is capable of it."

"But for me, Dumbledore. There are no amusements. No fancies. There is only Him. Destroy Him, and there will be no man, no creature, no manner of Being, and no universe within which for them to spin that I will not raze! I will unravel this world with such a storm of unfathomable annihilation never before seen, that no wink of a trace will twinkle. No single atom left vibrating. Not a ripple of its mark, nor an echo. There will be infinite Nothing, and nothing to stop it!"

He does leave then, in a deafening crack of lightning that carves the rocky Burren in two.

"Merlin save us," Remus gasps.

They descend the cliffs shortly after, mission abandoned and deeply unsettled. They return to the village of Corofin and find only smouldering ash, and will find only ash for the village beside, and the village beyond that too. Lisdoonvarna, Kinvara, Tubber. They smudge the horizon with black, a bleak painting. Only the sudden rain stops the fires.

Albus thinks of a smoggy London morning in 1938, when he'd looked into the eyes of a young Tom Riddle. He'd intuited a great darkness then. It seems so strange now to curse a child in such a way, to mark him with such impressions. He thinks of the boy he's just met, the one Tom Riddle has so carelessly created, and feels in the chill of his bones he has encountered someone, some Thing, far more sinister in nature.

It seems he has found Harry's wrath.