The One and the Other

K+ – HP – Angst – Complete

Summary: If no one knows you exist, are you just a figment of your own imagination? Or: Why is Harry so normal? Oneshot.

Disclaimer: As ever, all belongs to J.K. Rowlings. Except for the sorry excuse for sanity; that is all mine.

A/N: Harry always strikes me as being surprisingly normal for someone who grew up in a cupboard and universally hated. Random musings on that subject mutated into this fic, which is very bizarre. This was first written a long time ago, way before HBP (maybe even OotP), but still relevant. Actually, it might even fit with the horcrux theory; how's that for foresight? Regarding the personality synopses, I could have done more of them but I thought that would be over the top; I wanted to do more – there are way too many interesting characters in this world JKR's created.

I hope this makes sense to someone who doesn't live in my head. Frankly, it all went a bit metaphysical on me.

They had never known him, never understood him. Sometimes it felt as if he didn't exist, like some kind of philosophy question: If no one knows you exist, are you just a figment of your own imagination? No one would ever know him. He was hidden by the Other, unseen and unacknowledged, and sometimes he cried out for the pain of being all alone and knowing that when he died that would be the end of him because there would be no one to remember him and if there was no one to remember him then there would be nothing left.

Those moments of pain were rare, though, because it was better this way. They shouldn't know him and even in his dreams he knew that. Because he knew them, he knew their secret hopes and their guilty little desires, the spark of darkness that lived within them all and the touch of godhead owned by even those who seemed full of darkness. He understood them in ways that they would never understand themselves, and so they could never know him. He was too powerful, knew too much. If they knew him they would fear him, and he didn't think he could bear their fear. They enthralled him, these creatures balanced between the god and the devil, and he didn't want them to fear him. That was, after all, why he had created the Other.

Or had the Other created him?

Sometimes it seemed that way, seemed that he had been born in a blinding flash of green light, born Not Like Them to shoulder the burden that was too heavy for a child to bear. And yet he remembered before then, remembered his mother singing to him and his father pulling faces and the others, all crowding around him and laughing and teasing and playing and…

He remembered being born. The warmth and then the pain – he remembered his mother's cries. He had felt her tears, felt her anguish, feared with inchoate thought that he was killing the warmth that had created him – and then there had been light, cold air on his naked skin, and warm arms and crooning voices. Even then he had known what they were, these bright creatures who had lived on the knife's edge, and he had wondered… Even then he had known he was Not Like Them.

No, the Other had not created him and he had not created the Other. They had been born one soul, born one being. Then the green light had torn them apart and they had become two, two souls in one body. One to understand, the other to conceal. He envied the Other, for the Other didn't even know he had a task. The Other lived as a child, loved as a child, felt as a child. The Other was allowed to be Like Them; the Other had been given the chance to be human for this breath of time. The Other was what everyone else saw.

For that he loved the Other and wrapped around the Other's mind, shielding and protecting him, allowing the Other to be the child that they could not have been had they not been split. For they had never been fated to be a child, they had been fated to be the touch of the Different, the touch of the Holy, to balance a soul that had cast out its godhead and welcomed the dark. But the Dark One had split them, and so he would allow the Other the childhood that they should not have had.

And perhaps one day they would merge again and he would know what it was to walk that knife edge.

But for now he was alone; the hidden, the depth, the unknown. He was the one who accepted the dark things, so that the Other might live free of the worst of the pain, so that the Other might be the child that they should never have had the chance to be. For the Other he would sacrifice everything he had.

And through the Other's eyes, he watched. These people fascinated him, strange little lives walking so close to the edge.

The aunt, stabbed with jealousy and pain, whose secret dream was to have magic of her own, who wanted her sister back so that she could hate her in peace, who hated the child who wore his mother's eyes. Then to the other extreme, loving her husband and son so sincerely, so fiercely, that she could see no fault in them.

The redhead who hated his best friend even as he loved him, who dreamed of greatness even as he watched it tear his friend's life apart. He loved his family with all the fire within him yet resented them for the shadows they cast, never content because he was always reaching for something more but never believed himself capable of gaining it.

The bushy-haired girl who was driven by secret fears of inadequacy, who found the entire world in a potion or an equation and let herself be pushed to dizzying heights by her thirst for knowledge and the beautiful, painful understanding that she could never understand all the universe in one lifetime and so there would always be more to learn.

The white-haired boy who was caged but didn't complain because he had everything he could want except freedom, and he believed freedom was a lie and no one is truly free, so he chose the cage that gave him strength and power and ignored the pain that came because deep inside he wanted more.

The Potions Master, a soul trapped in the past, who couldn't grow up from the lanky teenager who had been tormented by the father of one of his students, who dwelt in bitterness and regret and couldn't see beyond it, who sought refuge in the beauty of a boiling cauldron but never found it.

The Headmaster, whose twinkling eyes hid guilt and fear, who sometimes seemed to see beyond the Other. Doing what he thought was right, he never found out until too late if he had saved or destroyed; forced to play games with people's lives, he found solace in the games of children.

The woman-who-becomes-a-cat, with her pride; her bright, unwavering fierceness; and her refusal to regret, who held herself aloof from those around her because she had learnt too well the lesson that becoming close to others leads to hurt.

These and more, many more, he watched through the Other's eyes. He lived with them and he knew them and he understood them and he loved them.

He loved them all, almost as much as he loved the Other; he loved them with all the fierce power that burned through him, all the great Difference that made him Not Like Them. Because they were bright and alive and shrieked defiant existence against Entropy and the powers of destruction. Because they were everything he would never be and he loved them all the more for it. But most of all he loved the Other, the other half of him, the innocent, the free.

So for love he sacrificed himself and took the Dark One with him. And he smiled as he fell into the brightness, knowing that the Other would go on and live the life that they should not have lived, knowing that one of them had cheated fate. Knowing that all those strange little lives would continue, always balancing so close to the edge…

Fin.

2007