Cedric and Pettigrew (was Re: Faking Sirius' Death)

[annemehr]

No: HPFGUIDX 91824

Phil:
> Kneasy has generated some keen responses on this thread
> and done a grand job of linking them together in post #91809.
<snip>
> What IF Hagrid rescues Harry, and Harry isn't just Harry, but Harry!
> Mort,rather like Quirrel!Mort. After all, Harry is the only living 
> thing left in the house.
> This may better explain Harry's mental connection to LV and skills
> like Parcelmouth.
> The "Missing 24 Hours" could be DD or St Mungo's or Madam Pomfrey 
> separating LV from Harry. Hagrid watches the separation and sees LV 
> escape in vapour form, as from Quirrel. Hagrid was not supposed to 
> tell even McGonagall that Harry was to live at Privet Drive, but 
> seeing LV vapoured would be far too much for Hagrid to keep quiet.

Annemehr:
Whoa!  I never thought of that before, but why not?  Voldemort finds
himself vaporised and wandless, but with one power left to him: that
he can possess the bodies of others.

But is there a catch?  All our information comes from GoF, where LV is
telling his DEs how he'd survived and come back.  Some quotes from ch.
33, "The Death Eaters":

"His mother died in the attempt to save him -- and unwittingly
provided him with a protection I admit I had not foreseen....I could
not touch the boy."

"I remember only forcing myself, sleeplessly, endlessly, second by
second, to exist....I settled in a faraway place, in a forest, and I
waited...."

"Only one power remained to me.  I could possess the bodies of others.
 But I dared not go where other humans were plentiful, for I knew that
the Aurors were still abroad and serching for me."

Voldemort finds himself bodiless and helpless, near his
fifteen-month-old enemy.  Would possessing him give him any more power
than being in vapor form?  A fifteen-month-old can certainly hold a
wand.  Alternatively, LV might have hoped to have just killed Harry
outright, since those he possesses do tend to die.

But this is Harry Potter, whom he cannot touch.  If he risked trying
to possess him, wouldn't it be possible that he'd be comletely
destroyed by Harry's mother's protection?  Could he possibly assume
that Lily's sacrifice had done what it could, and that he'd be
invulnerable in his vapor form?

The second quote suggests that LV was perhaps a bit disoriented at
first -- perhaps he didn't know he had the power of possession right
away, and the third quote suggests that possessing Harry might be
dangerous in that he could be discovered by Aurors.

It's a very interesting possibility that LV may have tried to possess
Harry at Godric's Hollow, but I'm thinking he may not have dared to.

Off the point, but interesting to me, in the third quote LV says that
the power of possession *remained* to him.  Who'd he been possessing
before he was vaporised, then?  It does imply that LV'd been
possessing people when he still had a body, so when he did it to Harry
in the MoM, I guess that was another instance of the same.  I still
wonder how he does that, and what he's doing with his own body at the
time he's possessing Harry's.

Annemehr
who's really hoping to have time for Chat today, but it's not looking
good  :-(