Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

There was a pause, and then Professor Quirrell's voice came in reply, openly icy with danger no longer veiled. "It seems you still cannot bring yourself to lose, Mr. Potter."

Darkness stared out of Harry's eyes without flinching, the Defense Professor himself reduced to a mortal thing within them. "Oh, and are you pondering now, whether you should pretend to lose to me, and pretend to humble yourself before my own anger, in order to preserve your own plans? Did the thought of a calculated false apology even cross your mind? Me neither, Professor Quirrell."

The Defense Professor laughed, low and humorless, emptier than the void between the stars, dangerous as any vacuum filled with hard radiation. "No, Mr. Potter, you have not learned your lesson, not at all."

"I thought of losing many times, in Azkaban," said the boy, his voice level. "That I ought to simply give up, and turn myself over to the Aurors. Losing would have been the sensible thing to do. I heard your voice saying it to me, in my mind; and I would have done it, if I had been there by myself. But I could not bring myself to lose you ."

There was silence, then, for a time; as though even the Defense Professor could not quite think of what to say to that.

"I am curious," said Professor Quirrell at last. "What do you think that I should apologize for, precisely? I gave you explicit instructions in the event of a fight. You were to stay down, stay out of the way, cast no magic. You violated those instructions and brought down the mission."

"I made no decision," the boy said evenly, "there was no choice in it, only a wish that the Auror should not die, and my Patronus was there. For that wish to have never occurred, you should have warned me that you might bluff using a Killing Curse. By default, I assume that if you point your wand at someone and say Avada Kedavra, it is because you want them dead. Shouldn't that be the first rule of Unforgivable Curse Safety?"

"Rules are for duels," said the Defense Professor. Some of the coldness had returned to his voice. "And dueling is a sport, not a branch of Battle Magic. In a real fight, a curse which cannot be blocked and must be dodged is an indispensable tactic. I would have thought this obvious to you, but it seems I misjudged your intellect."

"It also seems to me imprudent," said the boy, continuing as though the other had not spoken, "to not tell me that my casting any spell on you might kill us both. What if you had suffered some mishap, and I had tried an Innervate, or a Hover Charm? That ignorance, which you permitted for purposes I cannot guess, played also some part in this catastrophe."

There was another silence. The Defense Professor's eyes had narrowed, and there was a faintly puzzled look on his face, as though he had encountered some completely unfamiliar situation; and still the man spoke no word.

"Well," said the boy. His eyes had not wavered from the Defense Professor's. "I certainly regret hurting you, Professor. But I do not think the situation calls for me to submit to you. I never really did understand the concept of apology, still less as it applies to a situation like this; if you have my regrets, but not my submission, does that count as saying sorry?"

Again that cold, cold laugh, darker than the void between the stars.

"I wouldn't know," said the Defense Professor, "I, too, never understood the concept of apology. That ploy would be futile between us, it seems, with both of us knowing it for a lie. Let us speak no more of it, then. Debts will be settled between us in time."

There was silence for a time.

"By the way," said the boy. "Hermione Granger would never have built Azkaban, no matter who was going to be put in it. And she'd die before she hurt an innocent. Just mentioning that, since you said before that all wizards are like You-Know-Who inside, and that's just false as a point of simple fact. Would've realized it earlier if I hadn't been," the boy gave a brief grim smile, "stressed out."

The Defense Professor's eyes were half-lidded, his expression distant. "People's insides are not always like their outsides, Mr. Potter. Perhaps she simply wishes others to think of her as a good girl. She cannot use the Patronus Charm -"

"Hah," said the boy; his smile seemed realer now, warmer. "She's having trouble for exactly the same reason I did. There's enough light in her to destroy Dementors, I'm sure. She wouldn't be able to stop herself from destroying Dementors, even at the cost of her own life..." The boy trailed off, and then his voice resumed. " I might not be such a good person, maybe; but they do exist, and she's one of them."

Dryly. "She is young, and to make a show of kindness costs her little."

There was a pause at this. Then the boy said, "Professor, I have to ask, when you see something all dark and gloomy, doesn't it ever occur to you to try and improve it somehow? Like, yes, something goes terribly wrong in people's heads that makes them think it's great to torture criminals, but that doesn't mean they're truly evil inside; and maybe if you taught them the right things, showed them what they were doing wrong, you could change -"

Professor Quirrell laughed, then, and not with the emptiness of before. "Ah, Mr. Potter, sometimes I do forget how very young you are. Sooner you could change the color of the sky." Another chuckle, this one colder. "And the reason it is easy for you to forgive such fools and think well of them, Mr. Potter, is that you yourself have not been sorely hurt. You will think less fondly of commonplace idiots after the first time their folly costs you something dear. Such as a hundred Galleons from your own pocket, perhaps, rather than the agonizing deaths of a hundred strangers." The Defense Professor was smiling thinly. He took a pocket-watch out of his robes, looked at it. "Let us depart now, if there is nothing more to say between us."

"You don't have any questions about the impossible things I did to get us out of Azkaban?"

"No," said the Defense Professor. "I believe I have solved most of them already. As for the rest, it is too rare that I find a person whom I cannot see through immediately, be they friend or foe. I shall unravel the puzzles about you for myself, in due time."

The Defense Professor shoved himself up, pushing back on the wall with both hands and rising to his feet, smoothly if too slowly. The boy, less gracefully, did the same.

And the boy blurted out the last most terrible question which he had earlier been unable to ask; as though to say it aloud would make it real, and as though it were not, already, vastly obvious.

"Why am I not like the other children my own age?"

In a deserted side-road of Diagon Alley, where scraps of un-Vanished trash could be seen lodged into the edges of the brick street and the blank brick building-sides that surrounded it, along with scattered dirt and other signs of neglect, an ancient wizard and his phoenix Apparated into existence.

The wizard was already reaching within his robes for his hourglass when, in habit, his eyes jumped to a random spot between the road and the wall, to memorize it -

And the old wizard blinked in surprise; there was a scrap of parchment in that spot.

A frown crossed Albus Dumbledore's face as he took a step forward and took the crumpled scrap, unfolding it.

On it was the single word "NO", and nothing more.

Slowly the wizard let it flutter from his fingers. Absently he reached down to the pavement, and picked up the nearest scrap of parchment, which looked remarkably similar to the one he had just taken; he touched it with his wand, and a moment later it was inscribed with the same word "NO", in the same handwriting, which was his own.

The old wizard had planned to go back three hours to when Harry Potter first arrived in Diagon Alley. He had already watched, upon his instruments, the boy leaving Hogwarts, and that could not be undone (his one attempt to fool his own instruments, and so control Time without altering its appearance to himself, had ended in sufficient disaster to convince him to never again try such trickery). He had hoped to retrieve the boy at the first possible moment after his arrival, and take him to another safe location, if not Hogwarts (for his instruments had not shown the boy's return). But now -