Harry Potter and the Cursed Child arrived in 2016, offering a second generation of heroes to take the classic journey. The play itself is giant and complex, with plenty of plot for both generations.
Cynics have suggested the decision to split the play into two parts rather than one smacks of commercial exploitation, echoing the way the final book was broken in two on screen. But Cursed Child could only be told over the five hours that splitting it into two allows. It’s a fiendishly complex narrative, and moves at a lick; the first two years of Albus‘s time at Hogwarts are told in the first fifteen minutes. Considering each of the books covers the course of a single year, this marks a radical change of approach.75
While the published version of the play is a bit sparse of description, the live version has plenty of special effects. “There are magic tricks, surprise reveals, quick-change transformations and an intricate set, built to look like layered iron railway arches. Stand-alone staircases spin around to replicate the magical building at Hogwarts; actors float on wires to simulate swimming; and the somersaults of one fight scene are aided by a large cast of almost-invisible, black-clad assistants whirling the protagonists about.”76
In the first act, Albus and Scorpius bond on the train, paralleling Harry and Ron – with the alluring teen Delphi introduced later as the third in their trio. At the same time, the boys’ membership in Slytherin makes this an anti-Ron and Harry story, the tale of the heroes of Slytherin and how they help mend the dark reputation of their house. For certainly, this is Albus and Scorpius’s adventure:
It’s the younger cast that steal the show, especially Sam Clemmett as Albus and Anthony Boyle as Scorpius. The self-described pair of “losers” are recognizably human and distinct from their family traits; Clemmett captures the frustration of the delicate and troubled Albus, and Boyle is both hilarious and heartbreaking as his bumbling, devoted friend Scorpius, whose blond thatch is the only sign of his Malfoy heritage.”77
Harry Potter NextGen fanfiction, which sprang up after book seven, focused especially on Albus and Scorpius…often friends and sometimes lovers. The risk, of course, with so little information in canon, was to make the characters their fathers all over again. As critic Emily Roach explains in her essay on post-Epilogue fanfiction, “There is a danger that the popular Albus Severus/Scorpius pairing becomes too like Harry/Draco, but for the most part, established writers of this pairing shy away from that approach, wanting to explore more interesting dynamics.”78 The play likewise gives the boys new personalities.
Albus shares the heroism (and also bad choices) of his namesakes Albus and Severus. The names mean “white” and “severe.” Thus, he’s a white wizard fighting for goodness, but is also quite severe on his father, actually carrying on a similar animosity to the one Harry shared with Snape. As many fans observed when book seven was published, his initials are ASP, a snake, pointing him already towards Slytherin. His last name, Potter, marks him as the heir to James, Sr. and Harry, but there’s more to him than the impulsive heroism that has him travel back in time. Albus Dumbledore carried much guilt for the past – Grindelwald’s actions more than his own, just as young Albus is consumed by Harry’s legacy. Severus Snape was a spare in James and Lily’s relationship, always an outsider to the tight Gryffindor friendships, and Albus feels like the unnecessary child of the family, one who doesn’t fit in.
Scorpio, in Greek myth, was the scorpion sent by the gods to stop a great hunter – Orion – who had planned to kill all life on earth. Scorpius parallels this as the nemesis sent to stop Delphi, and a chosen one as Harry is. Scorpions were guardians, meant to keep villains away from treasure and to preserve the natural order – another Scorpius and Delphi parallel. In Zodiac symbology, Scorpio as an immature form is a conniving serpent, but he is also a shapechanger. As he achieves higher thought, he transforms into an eagle, suggesting Scorpius’s nerdy love of knowledge that he shares with the Ravenclaw students. Scorpio as a Zodiac sign, “corresponds to that period of the span of a man’s life which lies under the threat of death.”79 Obviously, he faces death in the story and grows through the challenge.
It’s unusual for a pair of characters to both undergo the hero’s journey – often one does, or each becomes more like the other, but most stories don’t split between protagonists…especially in Harry Potter’s world. Albus seems framed as the story’s main character, but an entire quarter of the book erases him from existence, leaving Scorpius to carry the adventure and discover his own hidden talents. Their friendship maintains a living existence as each boy learns and teaches the other. Nonetheless, the characters, including the adults, take turns in the spotlight.
Albus doesn’t fit, as he feels disconnected with his larger-than-life father and impressive brother, but sets off for Hogwarts nonetheless. Hero’s journey scholar Joseph Campbell explains, “In the first stage of this kind of adventure, the hero leaves the realm of the familiar, over which he has some measure of control, and comes to a threshold.”80 Even for a boy who’s grown up with magic, Hogwarts with its train represents the magical world journey. Immediately, Albus befriends Scorpius, thus rejecting much of what his father stands for and yet valuing the deepest lesson of the original series – true, unprejudiced friendship. It’s no wonder that the Sorting Hat promptly places him in Slytherin, emphasizing his different choices from Harry’s. There, Albus steals James’s invisibility cloak to dodge school bullies.81 Symbolically, he’s trying to be his father and brother, even climbing into their clothes. Nonetheless, bullying continues.
Then there’s Scorpius, who quickly loses his mother and detaches from his father. Young adult critic Leila Sales explains, “Dead parents are so much a part of middle-grade and teen fiction at this point, it’s not even the ‘in’ thing…It’s just an accepted fact: kids in books are parentless.”82 This makes the child’s leaving home much easier, without the emotional baggage. At the same time, for the boy, Campbell emphasizes finding a new role model. “The boy has to disengage himself from his mother, get his energy into himself, and then start forth,”83 seeking his father figure and his identity as a grown adult.
Both boys grow up surrounded by baggage, as they realize each year at the train station. Back at the Ministry, Voldemort’s legacy continues, thanks to the lingering time turners in their reality. These time turners symbolize a universe where no one can move on – where they’re all still students on some level, battling a monster who’s long been killed.
By his third year, Albus is growing ever more distant from his father, to the point of their fateful quarrel. Having this conflict just as he starts out on his epic quest is perfectly normal. As Campbell describes it:
What’s running the show is what’s coming from way down below. The period when one begins to realize that one isn’t running the show is called adolescence, when a whole new system of requirements begins announcing itself from the body. The adolescent hasn’t the slightest idea how to handle all this, and cannot but wonder what it is that’s pushing him—or even more mysteriously, pushing her.84
When Albus fights with his father, he becomes desperate to prove himself. Then comes a prompting from outside. Campbell scholar Christopher Vogler explains, “The hero is presented with a problem, challenge, or adventure to undertake. Once presented with a Call to Adventure, she can no longer remain indefinitely in the comfort of the Ordinary World.”85
Upon overhearing the alluring Delphi’s pain at Cedric Diggory’s loss, he’s prompted, like many gallant knights, to rescue the endangered innocent and fix the mistakes of the past. However, he’s still channeling a great deal of his father. Albus tells Scorpius, “Everyone talks about all the brave things Dad did. But he made some mistakes too. Some big mistakes, in fact. I want to set one of those mistakes right. I want us to save Cedric.”86 He sees himself in lost Cedric, another teen boy heroic Harry didn’t value enough and allowed to be lost in the currents of fate. Harry lied to Amos Diggory about having a time turner, and he’s lied to Albus “because he doesn’t care,” Albus insists.87 For Albus, saving Cedric means saving himself.
As Farah Mendlesohn notes in Rhetorics of Fantasy, “portal fantasies [such as Alice’s journey through a rabbit hole or Dorothy’s to Oz] lead us gradually to the point where the protagonist knows his or her world enough to change it and to enter into that world’s destiny.”88 The problem is that these boys don’t truly understand their parents or the past of decades before. Thus when they time-travel, they make clumsy mistakes and destroy all that holds their world together, before they learn enough about their loved ones to recreate it.
A mission of saving Cedric suggests fixing the classic Potter stories. The three new friends polyjuice themselves into the original trio, emphasizing how this generation will embark on similar adventures. Readers revisit the Triwizarding Tournament, cheating to change the winners and losers. “Just like my dad did,” Albus says of gillyweed.89 But there’s also the time turners, Dumbledore’s Army, Lily’s patronus. The show even revives Dumbledore and Snape. Most of all, the alternate worlds ask the big “What ifs” – what if the book four Yule Ball had gone differently? What if Neville hadn’t survived to the Battle of Hogwarts? Fans get their wish list with a Snape-Umbridge duel and with Dumbledore confessing his love for Harry. Meanwhile, Harry’s stalling on paperwork and Hermione’s prodding him – just like when they were in school. The story may revisit the best moments of the Potterverse, but Albus and Scorpius feel obligated to fix their parents’ mistakes, while Delphi bears a similar burden. None of their lives are their own. Thus the creators “have chosen spectacle over story, nostalgia over novelty and motion over emotion.”90
Using alternate-universe versions of the original settings gives these plays the air of high-quality fan fiction. Potter fans are one of the largest fan communities online and have written every permutation of love interest and plot twist into the world built by J K Rowling. Going back into Hogwarts in the 1990s is what they do. The use of time travel will also remind the more hardcore fans how much the world has moved on since the books were first published.91
This repeating cycle affects the older generation as much as the younger. “My son is fighting battles for us just as I had to for you,” Harry tells Dumbledore’s portrait. “And I have proved as bad a father to him as you were to me.”92 His is the midlife crisis quest, struggling to connect with the adolescent son who’s rejected him. There’s the balance of work and family, the spectrum of voices demanding attention. Hermione has a similar disconnect, telling Harry, “You know, Ron says he thinks I see more of my secretary, Ethel, than him. Do you think there’s a point where we made a choice – parent of the year or Ministry official of the year?”93
When the epilogue to book seven was published, followed by Rowling’s interviews in which she listed everyone’s marriages, jobs, and children, there was plenty of fannish backlash.
All the characters conformed to heteronormative social convention, as even wacky Luna Lovegood marries Rolf Scamander and has babies. Not a single character is identified as homosexual except the now-dead Dumbledore. Charlie Weasley is one of the very few characters who doesn’t marry, though Rowling insists this is only because Charlie is “more interested in studying dragons than forming a romantic attachment.”94
The epilogue is not only problematic from a queer perspective. It continues the prejudice born out of house rivalries and both marginalizes and limits the agency of the female characters through the affirmation of “traditional gender roles.” … It is unfortunate that through the epilogue we see these traditional gender roles assumed by Harry’s generation with all of the key characters married with children. Hermione at least does seem to have a career, but despite demonstrating academic brilliance during her time at Hogwarts, the epilogue Hermione is a wife and mother, the next generation Molly Weasley, and in the secondary canon of Rowling’s interviews, Rowling tells us she is simply “pretty high up” in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.95
Compared to Rowling’s statement that “Harry and Ron utterly revolutionized the Auror Department…They are now the experts. It doesn’t matter how old they are or what else they’ve done,”96 Hermione loses out.
Notably, Cursed Child repairs this a bit – everyone’s in a classic nuclear family, but Ron mostly stays home with the kids, while Hermione has been promoted to Minister of Magic. Ron is still a goofball, preferring the quiet life to their fast-paced environment, as Rowling’s Quidditch story on Pottermore explains. Slanted journalist Rita Skeeter says of his history:
In the immediate aftermath of the battle [of Hogwarts] Weasley, whose famous ginger hair appears to be thinning slightly, entered into employment with the Ministry of Magic alongside Potter, but left only two years later to co-manage the highly successful wizarding joke emporium Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. Was he, as he stated at the time, ‘delighted to assist my brother George with a business I’ve always loved’? Or had he had his fill of standing in Potter’s shadow? Was the work of the Auror Department too much for a man who has admitted that the destruction of He Who Could Not Be Named’s Horcruxes ‘took its toll’ on him? He shows no obvious signs of mental illness from a distance, but the public is not allowed close enough to make a proper assessment. Is this suspicious?97
“Hermione and Ron (Noma Dumezweni and Paul Thornley) are afforded more opportunities by the narrative to have fun, and garner some of the biggest laughs of the plays.”98
Meanwhile, Harry’s having nightmares of Voldemort, and denying to Ginny that anything’s wrong. The guilt of the past is returning as Amos Diggory remonstrates him for Cedric’s death, and for not changing time to fix it. In this plot, his son is a shadow for him, acting on Harry’s secret desires and struggling to save Cedric, something mature Harry knows is an impossible task. At the same time, Harry can’t understand Albus, and finally blows up at him:
It’s telling that the biggest gasp in Part One came not from a twist of the plot or a moment of magic but during a blazing argument between Harry and Albus where the father firmly crosses a line. In these scenes between father and son, Jamie Parker as Harry captures a sort of tortured celebrity anxiety, suggesting his concerns about Albus‘s shortcomings are in part driven by ego, and in part an orphan’s struggle to connect with his child.99
Draco tells Harry, “I think you have to make a choice – at a certain point – of the man you want to be. And I tell you that at that time you need a parent or a friend. And if you’ve learnt to hate your parent by then and have no friends…then you’re all alone. And being alone – that’s so hard. I was alone. And it sent me to a truly dark place. For a long time. Tom Riddle was also a lonely child. You may not understand that Harry but I do—and I think Ginny does too.”100 In book six, Snape was Draco’s only support, and that only barely. There and in book seven he’s seen crying alone or paralyzed with doubt, uncertain what kind of man to become. Rowling provides a bit of Draco’s background on Pottermore:
My British editor questioned the fact that Draco was so accomplished at Occlumency, which Harry (for all his ability in producing a Patronus so young) never mastered. I argued that it was perfectly consistent with Draco’s character that he would find it easy to shut down emotion, to compartmentalise, and to deny essential parts of himself. Dumbledore tells Harry, at the end of Order of the Phoenix, that it is an essential part of his humanity that he can feel such pain; with Draco, I was attempting to show that the denial of pain and the suppression of inner conflict can only lead to a damaged person (who is much more likely to inflict damage on other people).101
Now he, like Harry, wants to be a good parent and leave his son with a trusted friend. It seems he’s truly grown from the angry teen at Hogwarts. Rowling concludes:
I imagine that Draco grew up to lead a modified version of his father’s existence; independently wealthy, without any need to work, Draco inhabits Malfoy Manor with his wife and son. I see in his hobbies further confirmation of his dual nature. The collection of Dark artefacts harks back to family history, even though he keeps them in glass cases and does not use them. However, his strange interest in alchemical manuscripts, from which he never attempts to make a Philosopher’s Stone, hints at a wish for something other than wealth, perhaps even the wish to be a better man. I have high hopes that he will raise Scorpius to be a much kinder and more tolerant Malfoy than he was in his own youth.102
In fact, their sons’ friendship throws Harry and Draco into conflict, insecure as they both are about their failures as parents. The two find themselves dueling in Harry’s kitchen, enraged at their own flaws, seen so clearly reflected in the other man.
Of course, Draco and Scorpius are also disconnected after the death of Scorpius’s mother Astoria. After finishing her series, Rowling commented, “Scorpius has a lot going against him, not least that name. However, I think Scorpius would be an improvement on his father, whom misfortune has sobered!”103
Boyle’s scenes with father Draco, portrayed by Alex Price as a swaggering cockney, mirror those between Albus and Harry, and build to their own moving conclusion. Just as Rowling‘s novels captured some of the challenges and joys of growing up, this story is about the bond between parents and their children--appropriate, perhaps, now that the novels’ original readers are themselves becoming parents.104
Like Harry, Draco quests to physically find his son and also to connect with him so they can rejoin as a family. However, both their sons are lost on their trip through time, ironically to the days of their fathers at Hogwarts.
“One of the most stunning effects is the simplest: when time shifts, the lighting wobbles to make the set tremble like a sub-woofer.”105 Thus the world is shaken, literally as well as figuratively. The entire story involves the journey to several alternate realities, worlds that mirror the “real” one. This is fitting as the hero’s journey centers on facing the unexplored sides of the self one has always hidden away rather than nurtured. As Campbell notes:
The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors and deluding images up into the mind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unexpected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.106
The shadow, in psychology, is “aspects of oneself which are considered by the ego to be undesirable or not useful and are therefore relegated to the dark.”107 Memorably, Tom Riddle is much like orphaned, half-Muggle Harry, if Harry had made far different choices with his life.
Albus is trapped with Harry and James as his antagonists and also the ideal selves he can never become – foils always emphasizing his own flaws. Then he transfers into the first shadow world, where a sterner Harry forbids him to see Scorpius. The alternate Albus is a Gryffindor and conformist, so he gets to see what that life is like. However, he has no new friendships, no unexpected delights. He and his father still disagree. Hermione is an angry shrew of a teacher, her children have vanished, and this world is harsher, colder, without the friendship that sustains him.
As he shuts Scorpius out, then Scorpius convinces him they need each other, it’s much more Albus’s story than his friend’s. Scorpius’s language is all about his friend as he insists: “He will always be Harry Potter, you know that, right? And you will always be his son. And I know it’s hard, and the other kids are awful, but you have to learn to be okay with that, because – there are worse things, okay?”108
Together, the boys turn their weakness into strength. Albus says, “You’re right – we are losers. We’re brilliant at losing and so we should be using our own knowledge here. Our own powers. Losers are taught to be losers. And there’s only one way to teach a loser—we know that better than anyone—humiliation.”109 They humiliate Cedric in an attempt to repair the changes they’ve made.
In fact, Albus gets his wish fulfilment in the next world – a world where he makes Harry Potter no longer exist. Of course, this makes him vanish as well and leads to a world of terrors. Voldemort won the Battle for Hogwarts, with a rage-filled Cedric Diggory by his side. Neville Longbottom, the smallest hero of the original books, died, and thus never killed Nagini. This was the linchpin of everything.
With Albus vanished, the quest transfers to Scorpius and gives him his own chance to shine. Here he faces a strange shadow in the universe where Voldemort rules – his overachieving self. In the dark world he’s skilled at Quidditch – transformed from geek to athlete. All the students stand in awe of him and reverentially call him the Scorpion King. Girls, especially Polly Chapman, line up to escort him to the ball. The cool kids want to spend time with him. This suggests all the possibilities that exist inside him – his whole life he’s been accused of being Voldemort’s son, a monster, so he’s held back. But if he were confident, the “Scorpion King” from a family of winners, he could score at Quidditch and get the girls. However, this road not taken is one of selfishness, one where he not only would participate in genocide but set himself above his peers and intimidate them into doing his homework. Scorpius definitively rejects the world where he’s a king, noting, “The world changes and we change with it. I am better off in this world. But the world is not better. And I don’t want that.”110
At the same time, he’s disturbed by his dark world father’s cruelty. This, he suspects, has always been part of Draco. “The ‘Mudblood’ death camps, the torture, the burning alive of those who oppose him. How much of that is you?” he demands.111 His image of his father shatters as he realizes Draco doesn’t resist evil in the dark world but embraces it, and has made himself Head of Magical Law Enforcement. When Draco pins him to the table he’s truly frightened.
The questing young hero often finds his father is a force for evil (famously in Star Wars, though this also occurs in other tales). This signals that he must cut ties with his childhood hero and make his own path. Here, Snape is the one to act as mentor, advising Scorpius on how to fix the past and insisting on traveling with him. He also introduces Scorpius to dark world Hermione and Ron, rebels on the run. Outside and surrounded by Dementors, Snape tells Scorpius how to resist them and persuades him to think of his love for his friend. Though they’re both on the edge of death, Snape manages to pass on the lesson he learned from loving Lily. At last, Snape sacrifices himself to save Scorpius, and also provides a Patronus to guide him. “Thank you for being my light in the darkness” is all Scorpius can say.112
When he returns to his own world, he’s contrite but also much braver. “Ever since being in the scariest place imaginable I’m pretty much good with fear,” he asserts.113 Later, he even asks out Rose Granger-Weasley, and she calls him Scorpion King. As he considers Quidditch tryouts, he prepares to become the man he once only imagined. Still, Scorpius sees himself as the weak, unloved shadow, compared with the mighty Scorpion King. “I discovered another Scorpius, you know? Entitled, angry, mean—people were frightened of me. It feels like we were all tested and we all—failed.”114
Granted, there are elements of the antihero’s story here. Through their incompetent and arrogant bumbling, as McGonagall observes, the boys ensure Hermione and Ron’s children never existed and then kill off Harry Potter and thousands of wizards and Muggles, ushering in an age of true darkness. They fix their mistakes, but this is a story of world-shaking hubris, brought low. Further, heroic Harry never trusted the villains in his own story – not Voldemort/Quirrell, not his many devotees, and not even borderline characters Snape, Draco, and Slughorn. Like Ginny did with Tom Riddle’s diary, Albus trusts Delphi and hands her the key to all of existence.
Delphi is his inspiration, bringing him the quest, then offering him kisses on his cheeks before they embark, making him blush. However, she turns out to be a femme fatale. Her apparent kindness conceals a dark agenda. This too is typical of the journey.
Shapeshifting lovers are common figures in myth, from swan maidens to frog princes. “We have all experienced relationships in which our partner is fickle, two-faced, bewilderingly changeable,” Vogler explains (65). The hero’s or heroine’s lover is incomprehensible, shifting moods and desires faster than the protagonist can comprehend. The task is to penetrate these shapes and barriers, to find the true self within. Only then can a pair fully commit.115
The delphinium flower, Delphi’s namesake, relates to the throat chakra, which is associated with self-expression and communication. Imbalances are caused by being unfaithful to oneself or others, not being heard, or not being able to express who one is, feeling afraid to talk about things, or having a lack of honesty. None of these are truly Delphi’s problem, but all are issues Albus and Scorpius deal with. Thus she’s a catalyst to help them communicate with their fathers.
Another catalyst is Slytherin House itself. Rowling adds on the subject of colors:
The four Hogwarts houses have a loose association with the four elements, and their colours were chosen accordingly. Gryffindor (red and gold) is connected to fire; Slytherin (green and silver) to water; Hufflepuff (yellow and black, representing wheat and soil) to earth; and Ravenclaw (blue and bronze; sky and eagle feathers) to air. (Rowling, “Colours”)
Harry embarked on a journey of courage and warfare, mastering his love and passionate anger, dueling with his enemies. By contrast, the Slytherins teach care and discipline, thought before action. This is a lesson heedless Albus must learn. Albus tells Harry, “Green is a soothing color, isn’t it? I mean, the Gryffindor rooms are all well and good but the trouble with red is – it is said to send you a little mad—not that I’m casting aspersions” (202). Like him, Scorpius joins Slytherin, and there manages to find some peace.
Together the boys resolve to destroy the time-turner, but this plunges them into a new level of betrayal as Delphi turns on them both, taking them prisoner and forcing them back to the third Triwizarding challenge. There, she plans to humiliate Cedric and turn him into a Death Eater once more. Bindings carry the extra symbolism of being “bound to the world,” emphasizing the boys’ responsibility to save their universe.116 This represents a new test for both boys. As she taunts Albus. “What on earth do you think you can do? A worldwide disappointment? A sore on your family name? A spare? You want to stop me hurting your only friend? Then do what you’re told.”117
It’s no coincidence they’re in the labyrinth, symbolizing the boys’ confusion. A maze is a place of “initiation into sanctity, immortality, and absolute reality,” preparing the heroes for the ultimate battle to come, in Goblet of Fire and here.118 A labyrinth symbolizes being lost from higher thought, and needing to find one’s way out, to reach the spirit. In the boys’ case, they have both started doubting themselves and their rightness of purpose, even before Delphi derides them. This labyrinth endangers their entire universe, if Delphi can use it to turn the world evil again. However, since Delphi’s name references the Oracle, this is her place of power – the tangle of confusion and despair teaming with monsters.
This is their moment of trial. “You wanted a test, Albus, this is it and we’re going to pass it,” Scorpio tells him determinedly. They agree to die to stop her. Campbell explains that in classic tales, “the hero is swallowed and taken into the abyss to be later resurrected – a variant of the death-and-resurrection theme.”119 This moment of facing death or actually dying (as Harry does in each book) represents crossing a threshold and accepting adult maturity.
Of course, Cedric intervenes, the shining hero who’s like both boys’ shadows – the perfect paragon they never were. They face him and offer him the one thing they’d like for themselves – a little message of love from their fathers. The universal truth here is that the good hero, representing the perfect ideal of love and heroism, must be sacrificed. All the boys have is their own messy families, ones with whom they will need to go back and live. Thus with their freedom, they find a new mission – stopping Delphi and allowing Cedric to die.
“No one can go through an experience at the edge of death without being changed in some way,” warns Vogler.120 Even for ordinary humans, after a near-death experience, “colors seem sharper, family and friends are more important, and time is more precious. The nearness of death makes life more real.”121
Back in the normal world, waiting for Delphi to change their existence forever, the adults make their peace. All stand together before the Ministry and admit their hubris and flaws – even Draco. Dumbledore too comes to Harry and apologizes for the past, acknowledging that he should have offered his protégé love. Finally, Draco and Harry talk and Draco bares his soul – Scorpius’s birth, his wife’s death and his own secret hoarding of a time-turner. Significantly, Harry says, “Love blinds. We have both tried to give our sons, not what they needed, but what we needed. We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we’ve blighted their present.”122
Draco too comes to a catharsis. “It is exceptionally lonely, being Draco Malfoy,” explains the adult left a widower and then an empty nester.123 He has no friends, no siblings or cousins (except, apparently, Delphi herself). By contrast, the famous trio are seen visiting each other, their children becoming close, and Ginny elevated to part of the team. It must seem on some level as if they’re taking his only child from him. Nonetheless, through the story, Draco comes to accept his son’s choices and, more to the point, face the choices he once made himself. As the Ministry browbeats Hermione, he joins her on the platform where she addresses the crowd. “Hermione and Harry have done nothing wrong but try and protect us all. If they’re guilty, then I am too,” he announces.124
With his son lost, Harry finally confides his survivors’ guilt in Ginny. “The Boy Who Lived. How many people have to die for the Boy who Lived?”125 They start communicating better, with their despair broken up by a message from Albus, sent only because he knows his father so well, and knows where he will go on All Hallow’s Eve.
After, Albus and Scorpius call for help from the past, with Albus asserting, “We get a message to my dad, he’ll find a way to get back here. Even if he has to build a time-turner himself.”126 They send it through his baby blanket, which represents the comfort and security of a grown-up protecting a child. This imagery continues – when the cavalry comes, Albus curls up on a pew and goes to sleep in St. Jerome’s church in the Sanctuary. Ginny, watching over her son, tells Harry that sometimes kids don’t need the big gestures but the kindness of someone playing exploding snap with them. Thus Harry is reminded of the simplicity and purity of supportive love.
Traveling back to Godric’s Hollow the night James and Lily were killed, Ron and Hermione make their own peace with Draco. Draco responds with “I’m being bossed around by Hermione Granger… And I’m mildly enjoying it.”127 Ron and Hermione also make peace with each other, reaffirming their commitment as they decide to renew their vows. Now reunited, the famous trio have no hesitation in including Draco in taking down Delphi. However, there is a further descent required.
To stop her, Harry must face his greatest demon – the fact that he could have been Voldemort, that he is on some level just as big a destroyer. “I – I know what it is to feel – like him. I know what it is to be him. It has to be me.”128 To face this, he transfigures into Voldemort, speaks Parseltongue, channels the monster’s memories. In so doing, he turns his nightmares into a weapon against the enemy, using them instead of being used by them. After, he tells Albus, “The part of me that was Voldemort died a long time ago, but it wasn’t enough to be physically rid of him – I had to be mentally rid of him. And that – is a lot to learn for a forty-year-old man.”129
He has Delphi fooled until Harry’s disguise cracks and she attacks. Here, tiny Albus is needed to clamber through the crawlspace and let their family in so they can all defeat Voldemort together. He is the gentler part of Harry, childish and small but still heroic and resourceful. “I’ve never fought alone, you see. And I never will,” Harry says triumphantly as he takes Delphi down.130 Ginny and Albus stand with him as they watch Voldemort kill Harry’s parents and let the natural cycle continue.
On their quest through Slytherin House, learning from the Parseltongue Delphi, Albus and Scorpius actually discover the lesson of the snake – that the life cycle must continue without hindrance, that people can die, like the snake shedding its skin, but new growth and birth will always follow. “The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again.”131 Now they have the wisdom to allow life and death to take their course without interfering again.