I took the soggy handkerchief from her hand. "Perhaps you could tell me again, Mrs. P, how exactly Harry got his scar-?"
The Serpent and the Mirror
is a Harry Potter fanfiction by Paimpont. Dr Dumbledore has a new patient, one Harry Potter, brought by his loving but concerned parents, due to Harry's withdrawal into vivid hallucinations. His psyche has spun a fascinating tale of an imaginary world where he is a wizard, but what does the shadowy figure of Voldemort represent? What are the Potters hiding? And how did Harry really get his scar?
This story contains examples of:
- But You Were There, and You, and You: Many of the characters in Harry's world are based on real people he knows. When Dr Dumbledore finally meets the real Snape, he's heard so much about Professor Snape that he initially half-expects him to pull out a wand.
- Dark Secret: It quickly becomes clear to the doctor that there is something in Harry's past that he has covered up even from himself, and that his parents know more than they are telling. He was a conjoined twin, and to save him, Doctor Snape had to intentionally kill Tom, cutting far enough into their fused brain that Tom could not survive — because without that, they both would have died. But there was no particular reason it had to be Harry who survived and Tom who died, rather than the other way around.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Doctor Snape killed Tom to save Harry, because if he had done nothing, both twins would have died.
- Split Personality: Within Harry's world, Doctor Dumbledore sees many characters as representations of different aspects of the same person, such as Hermione representing Harry's own intellect, the Marauders representing different aspects of his father (James the idealised father, Remus the mentor who becomes a monster, Peter the betrayer...), Lily and Petunia and Narcissa as different views of his mother, and even Umbridge as another take on her.
