The Heart of Gryffindor
by SJR0301
Epilogue
For once, London was quiet and Bones had been able to leave the Yard at a nearly normal working hour. He leaned back on the couch and wrapped his arm around Fay and lazily flipped through the channels on the remote. BBC1 had the news on, and as it had been for the last weeks since Riddle's death, no train had derailed, no mass murder had been attempted and the headlines were all about the Queen's visit to America. He flicked the remote again and by-passed an old movie, a re-run of Coronation Street and sighed because the Fawlty Towers re-run was just over. He nearly passed by the next one, but stopped because the picture showed a girl with masses of wavy hair, round artless eyes and a thousand-watt smile.
"This was actually the very first production Annie O'Hara was ever in," the announcer said. "It was here on the set of a summer stock production of Hamlet that she met her husband and stepped on the stage into stardom."
"I can't imagine her as Ophelia," Fay murmured sleepily.
"Nor I," Bones said.
The girl was cute and delightful in her sitcom, but he couldn't see her in Shakespeare. He would have changed the channel again, but another face made him sit up and stare. A young Hamlet stepped out on the open-air stage with all the lean grace and waiting fury of a half-grown panther. His black mane was, as always untidy, and the green eyes were brilliant with sorrow and rage.
"That's him," Fay said. "That's our Harry. What on earth was he doing there?" She watched with fascination, her blue eyes intent, and added, "Did you know he could act?" Bones shook his head and let the glorious words wash over him, and in the back of his mind, a niggling little bit of a puzzle tried to work its way into place.
"He isn't really acting," Bones said, as much to himself as to his partner. "That's him saying the words, that's his own life he's talking about, isn't it?" They watched, mesmerized, until the very end, until the death of the brave prince, and Bones could not but feel a strange chill run down his spine when they lifted the boy on a pallet with a sword clapsed in his hands.
The credits rolled and the names of the actors scrolled by. They had given Annie O'Hara top billing, though as Ophelia, she was a minor figure in the play. And Hamlet was listed as James Black, an unknown young boy, the announcer commented, with a promising talent.
"That's it," Bones said. "James Black! It was him, that devil Crowley was protecting. That's why Riddle went there to that pub and killed him. James Black, the sixteen-year-old runaway who told fortunes. He was really Harry Potter!"
"But what was he doing there running around London, working a con in a pub and acting in plays?" Fay asked.
Bones thought and said, "Looking for freedom, then, wasn't he? Escape from those awful relatives and from Death Eaters and from Riddle."
He smiled to himself as he thought of the sudden gleam of the green eyes at the mention of flying and said, "The only thing is, he couldn't escape from himself, could he? He ran away and found himself when he tried to lose himself."
He shook his head again and one of those magic phrases from the play echoed in his head, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery…” It was all a mystery, he thought, a thing great, and powerful, and unknowable, the mystery of the human heart – the triumph of the Heart of Gryffindor.
