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Personal Journal Entry – Harry James Potter
I am not long for this world. The flesh of my arm rots steadily under ancient curses that no counterspell can hold back for long, and my magic flares at odd times now, no longer answering to any discipline or control I once forced upon it.
Behind me in this remote highland refuge, my wife lies sleeping in restless fits despite the thick wards we layered over the stone, and every so often her body twitches with the phantom ache of the limb she no longer possesses.
There is no glamour left here, no curtain I can draw back in search of some buried innocence, because I know exactly what I have done and I remember every act with a clarity that borders on cruelty. Every cut I made, every flicker of ritual flame that rose around me.
And still I would do it all again.
I would walk through that same fire blindfolded and smiling if it meant unmaking them, if it meant seeing Susan smile without that permanent edge of caution, if it meant she could look into a mirror without searching for the piece the war carved out of her face.
I write these words not for legacy or vindication, but as an obituary for the man I used to be and a warning for the one I must become again.
They took everything from me.
Though never in one clean sweep that might have made it easier to see. Instead they carved it away in careful slivers, a memory here, a fragment of raw power there, always hidden beneath the comfortable robes of friendship and the smooth rhetoric of the greater good. It began long before I ever set foot in Hogwarts, before I held a wand, before I understood that I had been shaped into nothing more than a tool for someone else’s war. And through all those early years I kept smiling and offering my thanks because I genuinely believed I was lucky to have friends at all.
I thought Dumbledore was kind in the way a grandfather should be, I thought Ron’s loyalty ran as deep as the Weasley family itself, I thought Hermione’s brilliance was simply her own unmatched gift, and I thought Ginny loved me without complication… I thought wrong on every count, and the weight of that realization still sits heavy in my blood even now as the wind moves through the highland grasses outside these stone walls and carries the faint scent of peat and cold water into the refuge.
The first clear memory returned during a soul-mapping ritual I attempted alone deep in the silent bowels of the Department of Mysteries. I had spent years chasing the theory that Obliviation did more than erase memories, that it left actual damage in the soul itself. I never expected the ritual to tear loose a splinter of my own self that had been trapped screaming wordlessly inside my core, a voice I barely recognized as mine. When that fragment finally broke free I collapsed hard among the glowing runes with blood pouring from my nose, my ears, and my mouth while my magic surged and nearly imploded around me.
But I saw it all.
I saw a room I had never remembered entering. I saw Dumbledore’s hands pressing down firmly on my chest as he whispered an incantation in a dialect older than the castle stones themselves. I saw Hermione standing beside him, her eyes wide with a mixture of excitement and worship. I watched my own young body twitch under the spellwork while a thin golden thread of light twisted slowly away from my skull and sank deep into hers, carrying away a piece of my memory, my mind, my natural gift.
Years later I remembered her casual words spoken with such easy confidence, that her memory had always been her greatest asset, the very reason she rose to become the youngest Minister in history, and how she had laughed softly while reminding me that I had always been a little forgetful, hadn’t I? As if it were some harmless quirk rather than the theft that helped build her entire career.
It did not end with that single theft. There was another ritual hidden in the quiet hours of my childhood, a channeling performed in the dead of night while I slept curled inside the cupboard under the stairs with nothing but a thin blanket between me and the hard wood. Dumbledore’s magic threaded carefully into my small frame while Ron stood nearby, his expression blank but expectant. I saw the glowing tether stretching between my core and his like a living parasite that fed on my raw magical potential and twinned itself to everything I produced before yanking back more than half of it toward a gleeful Ron. I saw the precise moment when my untrained and wild gift for Parseltongue was deliberately mutilated and cut away. They took the part that could speak to dragons.
You read that right.
Salazar Slytherin’s legacy in my bloodline ran deeper than they ever allowed me to understand. They judged it too dangerous, too unstable, too “dark” for a child to bear. So they carved it out like an infection. But that power wasn’t malignant. It was mine by right of birth.
I might have found some way to accept the losses if they had only been honest with me from the beginning, if they had sat me down and explained what they believed needed to be done for the greater good. Instead they offered friendship that tasted like poisoned honey and trained me to trust their hands even while those same hands pressed ritual scars into my soul that I could not see or feel until it was far too late. I became the Boy Who Lived, then the Man Who Endured, and finally the Weapon Who Served, always smiling, always grateful, always fooled by the people I had chosen to love.
Then there was Ginny, my wife in name only and a liar in every truth that mattered between us. She brewed potions in secret, not the kind meant to cause open harm because that would have been too easy to detect, but contraceptives slipped quietly into my tea, my soup, my water over the course of years while I drank them without suspicion and slowly came to believe that something inside me had been broken by the war. That I was simply sterile and would never father children. I had wanted them badly, the chance to build something clean and new after all the deaths, yet she wanted only trophies and the rising fame that came with her place in the Quidditch leagues, the face of Britain’s post-war pride.
Motherhood would have risked wrinkles in press photographs or delays in sponsorships that she refused to accept. She could not bring herself to tell me the truth outright, so she stole the choice from me in silence just as the others had stolen pieces of my mind and power.
I left without theatrics or public scenes. I filed for a quiet magical annulment under clause 4A for uninformed consensual deception. She tried to twist the story for the press afterward but it no longer mattered because by then I had already begun the work that would take back what belonged to me.
The reclamation ritual had never appeared in any modern tome I could find, so I built it myself over two long years as a hybrid of ancient blood rites fused with temporal echoes and soul resonance drawn from ruined sites and half-forgotten family grimoires. I performed it on the summer solstice when the barriers between one version of the self and another grew thinnest. I drugged Ron and Hermione first, stunned them in their own home, and laid their bodies carefully inside a ritual circle drawn with silver powder and ground thestral bone. I still remember the smell of that night clearly, sharp and metallic with an undercurrent of old stone and burning herbs.
When I finally pulled the stolen magic back from them it was not violent or explosive but surgical, the focus and memory and raw spell power flowing into me again like water returning to its proper source after years of diversion.
Hermione began to unravel almost immediately. And even if she remained Minister for a time, her once effortless competence frayed under the ordinary pressures of governance now that the unfair advantage of my stolen mind no longer supported her. Ron collapsed more dramatically, like a puppet whose strings had been severed in one clean cut, his dueling skill vanishing overnight and his core starved of the borrowed strength that had sustained him, leaving his magic reduced to a weak whisper barely capable of lifting a quill let alone holding a defensive line in the field.
Molly Weasley noticed the changes almost at once because she had been present the night Ron received his illicit gift. She recognized the signs of withdrawal immediately. Her howler never reached me because the wards around my refuge burned it to ash before it could touch my hands, but I still heard the whispers that followed and saw the renewed meetings of what remained of the Order of the Phoenix gathering in shadowed rooms, not to plan any new revolution or face a dark lord but simply to protect their comfortable illusion of moral superiority and to convince themselves that everything they had done had been necessary and justified for the good of all.
They feared what I might do next, so I took my distance and let the silence stretch between us. I met Susan again during a routine assignment back in the Department of Mysteries where she had already risen to Head of the DMLE, still young and respected despite the scars she carried, resolute in a way that spoke of quiet strength earned through fire. We started healing together in the careful spaces between our words. Daphne entered our lives not long afterward like a blade slipping cleanly through velvet, entirely unbothered by the heavy mythology that still clung to the name Harry Potter. At a Ministry gala of all places she asked me the one question no one else had ever voiced aloud: “Do you like being the one everyone owes?”
The three of us became indivisible after that, aligned in purpose and refusal to remain broken by the system that had tried to shape us. Each of us had lost something to the same machine and each of us was determined to reclaim what we could, and together we felt strong in a way none of us had managed alone.
But strength of that kind always breeds fear in those who prefer control. Hermione, grown desperate and visibly addicted to the power she had once possessed without earning it, began a campaign of slow suffocating retaliation using every scrap of ministerial authority still available to her. I was locked out of offices I had every right to enter. Susan was reassigned to lesser duties far from the ministry. Daphne faced fabricated charges of conduct unbecoming a Lady of the Wizengamot. All of it built from lies yet delivered with the smooth efficiency of long practice.
We chose exile rather than submit, and from that moment we were hunted across borders and through hidden safe houses. Daphne lost her leg in France to a severing curse cast by Fred Weasley whose twin had fallen in the earlier war, and I ended him where he stood without hesitation or regret. Susan lost an eye in the same long brutal conflict, and I lost the use of my dominant arm. The fighting stretched on for years and it ended only when every last traitor who had once called themselves friend lay dead at our hands.
Decades continued to pass afterward and we did not so much grow old as simply burned down to the bare coals of who we had become through survival.
There was love in that shared exhaustion, not the clean romantic fantasy sold in storybooks or glowing headlines but a quiet bloodstained truth that burned hotter precisely because the world had tried so hard and so often to extinguish it. We built a life among the ashes that remained, nothing glamorous and nothing fair by any ordinary measure, yet it belonged to us completely.
The wider world moved on without us and we let it go its own way while we laughed together in the quiet hours, bickered over small domestic things, and came together physically with the urgent honesty of people who understood that the end might arrive at any moment.
None of us expected to live long. The curses we carried continued to take their toll, the long fight had hollowed out our magical cores and frayed the edges of our remaining time, yet we held on because the fire we shared still felt worth every scar.
Then one heavy evening Daphne brought out the old tome she had kept hidden for years, the kind of ancient volume bound in faded leather and dragonhide that made magic books dangerous simply by existing. It was a Greengrass heirloom she admitted she had discovered long ago but had never dared open until that night. We had been sitting over tea while the aches in our bodies made every movement painful and the soul felt too tired to argue with itself.
She asked me directly whether I would go back if given the chance. I answered without hesitation that I would not, because undoing the pain would also mean losing her and losing Susan, and the path however cruel had still led us to this version of ourselves and to the love we had forged in the fire. She looked at me for a long moment before replying that perhaps we did not have to lose each other this time.
The ritual she described afterward was not theoretical but complete madness.
It involved temporal convergence anchored by soul resonance and powered by the willing death of all participants together with the tears of a timeless being whose name no map would ever record. The ingredients were absurd and dangerously unethical, yet in that moment ethics felt irrelevant beside the possibility, and after the first nervous laughter faded we stopped laughing altogether because the question remained: what if it actually worked?
We could return not as helpless children but as adults inside younger bodies, carrying every scrap of knowledge, strength, and bitter experience with us, along with a plan this time to prevent the manipulations before they took root, to build real power early, to reshape the alliances that had failed us, and to burn out the rot while it was still small.
It was not only about vengeance. It was about true reclamation of the lives that should have been ours.
We spent the next eight years preparing with meticulous care, gathering the shattered sands of a destroyed Time Turner, securing the pure willingly shed blood of a unicorn given freely by a creature too ancient to carry any name on any map, a forest journey that nearly cost Susan her life and left me with fresh claw marks still visible across my ribs.
The final component ? Death. Delivered by three ritual knives pressed simultaneously into each of our hearts by our own willing hands at the exact moment the circle aligned with the equinox and the unicorn’s essence caught flame. It had to be simultaneous, it had to be pure, and it had to come from absolute consent.
We were ready. There was no fear visible in Daphne’s steady eyes or audible in Susan’s calm voice as we stood together inside the completed circle wearing robes stitched with precise runes, our scarred hands remaining perfectly still because we had already lived through hell and this final act felt like mercy rather than sacrifice.
If this journal reaches anyone, know this:
I am not the boy who defeated Voldemort.
I am not the hero of Britain.
I am not the savior they built shrines to.
I am Harry James Potter, son of James and Lily, husband of Susan and Daphne, and the only living soul who remembers the crimes that were scrubbed clean by history.
They will not see me coming this time.
Let them pray they never look me in the eyes.
Because I remember everything.
And I’m already awake.