Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

It would be an ethically justified use of the Cruciatus Curse, if that were the only way to stop Voldemort permanently. It would be justice, balance, it would show that the Joker’s life wasn’t worth more than his meanest henchman…

All Harry needed to do was cast the Patronus Charm, send it to… Alastor Moody?… and tell him to come here. Well, no, it was a pretty good guess the Patronus Charm wouldn’t work if it was cast with that intent. Maybe just resolve to tell Moody that, and use his Time-Turner once he was out of range of Voldemort’s wards.

And then Voldemort could be Crucioed into permanent insanity.

It wasn’t even the least merciful fate. That would have been throwing

Voldemort’s wand into the pit at Azkaban, if the wand stayed connected to Voldemort’s life and magic no matter where his ghost tried to flee.

Harry turned to face where Voldemort lay. He walked forward, and continued to control his breathing, ignoring the burning feeling in his throat. Some part of him knew that Voldemort was also Professor Quirrell, even though his body now was different. Even though the shift of personality had been perfect and that meant that Professor Quirrell had been just another mask…

Though Voldemort hadn’t planned to kill Harry painfully. Hadn’t thought to strike Harry with his followers’ Cruciatus, when Harry was being annoying before. That meant something, when your opponent was Voldemort. Maybe he’d had some remaining shred of fellow-feeling for the other Tom Riddle after all.

…it would be wrong to take that into account.

Wouldn’t it?

Harry looked back up at the stars. Here below the atmosphere the stars twinkled, they were embedded in the false dome of the night sky, stretched out across the wash of the Milky Way that glowed like a long ribbon, as if they were all close enough that you could fly up to them on a broomstick and touch them.

What would they want him to do now at this juncture, the children’s children’s children?

The answer to that also felt obvious, if it wasn’t just the part of Harry that still cared about Professor Quirrell doing the real talking.

Harry had needed to do the thing he’d done, it had prevented greater evils, Harry couldn’t have stopped Voldemort if the Death Eaters had fired first. But that thing Harry had done wasn’t something that could be balanced by a not-necessary tragedy happening to one more sentient being, even if that being was Voldemort. It would just be one more element of the sorrows of ancient Earth so long ago.

The past was past. You did what you had to do, and you didn’t do one scrap of harm more than that. Not even to balance things out, and make it all symmetrical.

The children’s children’s children wouldn’t want Voldemort to die, even if his minions had. They wouldn’t want Voldemort to hurt, if it didn’t accomplish anything compared to him not hurting.

Harry breathed deeply, and let go of—not his hate—not quite his hate—he hadn’t been able to hate his creator even at the very end—but even so, Harry let go of something . Of the sense that he ought to hate Voldemort, that it was a hate he was obligated to feel, for the endless list of crimes that Voldemort had committed for no good reason, not even his own happiness…

It’s all right, the stars whispered down at him. It’s all right not to hate him. It doesn’t make you a bad person.

In the end, there was only one option he would take, and since Harry already knew that, there was no point agonizing about it. Whether it was the best option, only time would tell.

Harry breathed deeply, building up the magic inside himself. The spell he was going to cast didn’t need to be precise, but it was still one of the most powerful spells he’d mastered.

Harry thought again of how unjust it was that Voldemort could not die with his followers, felt the slight trace of coldness in his blood that came with thoughts of ruthlessness. And then Harry let it go, let it all drain away beneath the starlight, because his dark side had never been anything except an inherited pattern of cognition, just one more bad habit of thinking to break.

Instead Harry looked at Hermione’s breathing form atop the altar, and let the tears finally start from his eyes. What would become of Hermione now, what path she would choose after this, Harry couldn’t guess; but she would be there to have a choice, their friendship wouldn’t have destroyed her existence. He hadn’t realised how shaky his hope had been, until he’d noticed how surprised he’d been after the hope had come true.

Sometimes things did go better than expected.

And Harry took that thought, too, and put it into the magic he was building.

The power he was storing up was vibrating in him, like his whole body was part of his wand, either Harry’s eyes were blurring or there was a luminous white quiver running over the holly. And Harry thought the shape of the spell he would cast, he didn’t have much fine control but the pattern he needed was simple, it just needed to include—

Everything, forget everything, Tom Riddle, Professor Quirrell, forget your whole life, forget your entire episodic memory, forget the disappointment and the bitterness and the wrong decisions, forget Voldemort—

And at the last moment before Harry cast the spell, he had one final thought, a note of grace—

But if you ever had any truly happy memories, not hurting people or laughing at their pain, but the warm feeling of helping someone or being helped, there won’t be many, maybe just when you were a child, but if you had any truly happy memories then keep only those—

Something bright in him unfolded at the decision, knowing he’d made the right choice, and Harry pushed that too into his wand—

“ OBLIVIATE!”

And it all poured out of Harry into the spell.

Harry fell over on his side, dropping his wand, gritted screams coming from his throat, his hands going helplessly to his scar, even as the sudden blast of pain in his head began to fade. Only dimly did his eyes see that the air was filled with glowing snowflakes, drifting motes of silver light like tiny specks of Patronus Charm.

Only a moment the silver light lasted, and then it was gone.

Professor Quirrell was gone.

Nothing left but a remnant.

And that spirit, what remained of it, wouldn’t be so different now from Harry’s own.

The Prophecy was complete.

They had each remade the other in their own image.

Harry started sobbing, then, from where he was curled up in the dirt.

He cried for a while.

And then eventually Harry staggered to his feet and picked up his wand again, because this day’s work wasn’t quite done.

Harry laid his wand directly on Voldemort’s wrist-stump; it made his scar throb with an ongoing pain, but neither of them exploded.

And Harry began a Transfiguration.

Slowly—though faster than Harry had been able to Transfigure Hermione’s body, last time—the stunned form of the snake-man changed, reshaped itself. As the Transfiguration progressed, especially as the snakeman’s head began to turn glassy and shrunken, the pain in Harry’s scar faded.

It would be a spell to maintain whether Harry was waking or sleeping; and later, when Harry was older and more powerful and maybe had some help, he would un-Transfigure the mindwiped Tom Riddle and heal his body with the power of the Stone. After future-Harry had figured out what to do with an almost-completely-amnesiac wizard who still had some bad habits of thought and some highly negative emotional patterns—a dark side, as ’twere—plus a great deal of declarative and procedural knowledge about powerful magic. Harry had tried his best not to Obliviate that part, because he might need it, someday.