Chapter Four of 'Wolf's Choice'- Scars
Chapter Three.
Title: Wolf’s Choice (4/60)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Main story is gen, a few GoF canon pairings mentioned
Content Notes: AU of GoF, angst, gore, violence, torture, present tense, minor character death
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU of GoF. Harry begins his summer with horrific visions that come true much faster than he was expecting. He’ll have to rely on his circle of friends, both his guardians, and all his allies to cope with the results.
Author’s Notes: This is a long fic that is a sequel to my fic Other People’s Choices. Make sure you read that first before you start this one.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four-Scars
“I want to know what you paid the Mind-Healer.”
Severus tightens his hand on the rim of the cauldron before he turns to face Harry. He did not anticipate this particular problem, but of course he should have. Harry is glaring at him with brilliant, forthright eyes.
“I am your guardian. The price is not your concern.”
“Yes, it is. I know you don’t earn that much. And Dumbledore is probably trying not to pay you as much, too, right? Because he would be upset that you became my guardian even though he didn’t want you to.”
Severus blinks. He is absolutely sure that no one who knew about that would have told Harry. That makes it a guess as brilliant as his eyes.
“You have already used your money to permit me to purchase this house when you should not have had to. I have private stores of money that Albus does not know about. I never use them at Hogwarts, because I don’t want him to grow suspicious,” Severus adds, because he knows where Harry’s next question will come from. “But I have them, I assure you. The pay for Healer Lyndell comes from them.”
“How did you get them?”
“That is a rude question, Harry.”
“I don’t care.”
Severus steps away from the cauldron. “You will care,” he says. “You will care, because I will not allow you to become rude in your desperation, justified though that desperation might be.”
Harry might not have heard. He doesn’t move; he doesn’t look away from Severus. Severus finally sighs in despair and murmurs, “I sometimes brew potions on the side, potions that I have no ability to brew for the hospital wing at Hogwarts or that Albus would disapprove of. The money came from that.”
Harry goes quiet for a second. Then he asks, “Could you get in trouble for using Hogwarts supplies to brew those potions?”
Severus chuckles in surprise. He wishes Harry would relax and concentrate as much on his healing as on his efforts to defeat Voldemort, but he has to admit that Harry’s mind has stretched and grown in the last year. “I could indeed, assuming that I was using Hogwarts supplies.” He watches as Harry tilts his head to the side, his eyes darting to the cauldron Severus was working on for a minute.
“Oh,” Harry says quietly. “You bring your own cauldron and use your own supplies.”
Severus nods. “It’s never yet been a problem, but it might end up being that way, the more Albus questions me.” He touches the rim of the cauldron again, this time to keep it from trembling as the potion inside begins its complex reaction. “Now. Are you satisfied that I can pay for your Mind-Healer and I’m not going to beggar myself for it?”
“Yes,” Harry says, but he still frowns. “There must be something I can do to repay you, though. I think she’s really going to help.”
Severus feels, for a moment, as if the room is filled with the light of a second sun. “Listen to her,” he says, with a shrug as casual as he can make it, when he feels like this. “Consider what she says to you. Do it critically,” he has to add. He of course met with Healer Lyndell before he had her meet with Harry, and there were some things she said, mostly about Severus himself, that he did not agree with. “But do listen.”
“Okay.” Harry shifts his balance slowly. “Do you think…”
“Yes?”
“That you could teach me how to brew some of those potions that you can’t make for the hospital wing at Hogwarts?”
The sunlight still seems to be here. “You must know that none of these potions are useful in battle,” Severus warns him. “Healing and slow revenge, that is all that most of them are good for.”
“I don’t-I want to learn.”
Severus turns to get out another cauldron, comforted by the fact that the Mind-Healer has already wrought one miracle as far as he’s concerned.
*
“Again, Greyback.”
Harry writhes in pain as he feels Voldemort’s rage race through him. The scene in his head makes no sense. At least Voldemort and Greyback aren’t hunting people this time, but they are in the middle of another moonlit clearing, casting spells at a huge cauldron.
Greyback stands there, trembling with the exertion of so much magic. Then he casts the spell again. Harry recognizes the incantation, or part of the incantation. It seems to be a Confundus Charm.
Which doesn’t explain why they’re casting the charms on a cauldron, of all things.
For a second, the huge bronze cauldron wobbles back and forth on what seems to be a loose bundle of twigs, and then a blue flame bursts out of it. Voldemort begins to laugh. The sound makes Harry’s chest ache.
“When the time comes, then, you will be ready.”
“Thank you, my Lord.” Greyback is panting with his head down, his hands on his knees. Harry might feel sorry for him if he hadn’t seen him slaughter so many people so Voldemort could use parts of their bodies.
“And now to your other task...”
Harry wakes up gasping. For a second, he thinks he’s drowning in the moonlight, and then his senses return. He sits up and pushes his hands through his hair. Blaise is standing in the doorway, staring at him.
“I’m all right,” Harry whispers to him. “Go back to sleep.”
“Not this time,” Blaise says, sounding determined, and walks over to stand in front of Harry. “I know that I probably can’t make your nightmares stop, since I’m not a Potions brewer or a Mind-Healer. But at least we can talk and get your mind off them.”
“Um,” Harry says, and wraps his arms around his knees. He wants to shiver, even though the summer night is so warm that his window is open (behind a wall of shimmering wards, of course). “What did you want to talk about?”
“God, chatting with you is difficult,” Blaise mutters. “All right. You know that my mother has been sending me owls demanding that I come back? Or I think the owls say that, anyway. Professor Snape’s wards turn them all back, so I’ve never been sure.”
Harry winces. “Of course. Sorry I didn’t ask about it before, Blaise.”
“I’m only going to keep talking about it if you don’t use this conversation as an excuse to martyr yourself.”
“I don’t-yes, all right. What about them?”
“Professor Snape thinks that I ought to let one owl through. He’d remove the dangerous curses and compulsions that my mother might have put on the letter, and any potions she might have soaked it in. Then he thinks I should read it through and reply. I’m fourteen now. I can’t hide forever.”
“Hypocrite,” Harry mutters, thinking of the way that Snape keeps telling him almost-fourteen is still a child and he doesn’t need to grow up and face all the things that Harry knows he’s going to have to face.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Not you. Professor Snape.”
“It’s reasonable that he should feel differently about you than he does about me. I mean, you’re his ward.”
“But you’re one of his Slytherins! He should want to protect you. He shouldn’t be encouraging you to write back to your mother yet.”
Blaise rolls his eyes a little. “And you think that would work forever? No, I think what he says makes sense. But not until one of her letters has been thoroughly taken apart and made to be just a letter, of course.”
“I’m glad that we could offer you a home here,” Harry tells Blaise softly. “I wish there was more we could do.”
“Like what?”
“Like-make your mother stop using her Gift. Your life would probably be better if she wasn’t always marrying her boyfriends and then murdering them, right?”
“Honestly, I think it would be pretty much the same thing for me,” Blaise says, after he thinks about for a while. “I mean, I would never be affected that much by them. They’re just annoying. But she watches me all the time. She wants to control my post and my thoughts and what I do with my free time. If she knew that I’d inherited her Gift, she would be going even more mental than she is now.”
“How long do you think you can keep that from her?”
“Until I’m of age. That’s the only thing I need to do. She used to tell me over and over that her Gift came of age when she did. I ought to be powerful enough to protect myself by then, and she can’t make any more legal challenges to claim back custody of me when I’m seventeen, either.”
“Well,” Harry says, and then he can’t think of anything else. “If there’s something else we can do, then let me know. I know Professor Snape would want to help keep you safe, too, so it’s not like I need to ask his permission.”
Blaise gives him a strange, dull smile. “I know that Professor Snape would want to keep me safe because I’m a Slytherin, but mostly because you asked him.”
The strangeness of that response, and the way that Blaise is so certain when he says it, keeps Harry awake long after Blaise goes back to his own bedroom.
*
“What’s wrong, Remus?”
Part of what’s wrong is what’s always wrong, that Remus still can’t decide whether he’s on Albus’s side or not, but he shakes his head and forces a smile for Sirius. “There’s a storm coming in. A heavy one. But I can’t tell yet if it’s going to actually rain, or just grumble and spit lightning the way the last one did.”
And it’s true there’s a storm coming. Remus can sense that much, his skin prickling and itching the way it does when fur grows through. But the full moon is two weeks past or away, depending on how you think about time, so he knows it can’t be that.
He just doesn’t know what else is wrong.
Remus prowls restlessly around the house until Sirius, who’s trying to practice at getting some of his skills with battle spells back, irritably tells him to go outside. It does feel a bit better when Remus is there. At least he has more room to move.
“Remus?”
Remus blinks and turns around. Harry is leaning against the side of the house, staring at him with narrowed eyes. It still hurts, sometimes, to see someone with Lily’s eyes looking at him like that, but it’s not like Remus has done anything to deserve more. He nods at Harry, says, “I didn’t mean to bother you,” and starts to walk away through the wild, tangled garden that Sirius has essentially uncovered. It turns out that the grounds of Grimmauld Place are a lot bigger than even Sirius knew when he was a kid, stretched and accommodated by wizard space.
“No, I mean, it’s okay,” Harry says hesitantly. “If you want to stay with me and don’t mind seeing snakes crawling around.”
Remus turns back, secretly pleased. He’s wanted to see some serpent magic ever since he learned Harry would be getting lessons, but Sirius doesn’t. “Is this where you practice what you learned from the Speakers?”
“Yeah. I used to practice it just at Professor Snape’s house, but Rizzen said I had to do it more often than that, or I wouldn’t be good at it. Prick.”
Remus is startled into laughing, even though Harry looks mortified seconds later at swearing in front of an adult. “You don’t like Rizzen?”
“He thought it would be a good move to try to force me into coming to live with the Speakers. I haven’t forgotten about that.”
Remus shivers a little, more from Harry’s tone than from the heaviness in the air. “Oh. Um. Well, I’d still like to watch you conjure a snake.”
Harry nods, and then speaks in Parseltongue. Remus jumps as an adder falls to the ground. “You did that without using your wand!” he says, delighted.
“Of course. I’m pretty good at that now, and that’s the kind of serpent magic the Speakers are teaching me.” Harry smiles at Remus and turns to the snake, hissing out a request. The snake promptly curves into the air and freezes into an S, the way the serpent on the Slytherin crest does. Then Harry puts the adder through its paces, making it lie down on the ground and twist into a ring and crawl into the grass.
Remus is still watching when the wind shifts. For a second, he thinks that he’s smelling the approaching storm; it’s heavy and almost greasy-
Then his heart shudders in his chest. He knows that scent.
“Harry! Get back inside the house, now!”
Harry looks up, startled, and it’s already too late. Fenrir Greyback bursts out of the tangled woods at the edge of the Black garden and gallops straight at Harry, his mouth open and too full of teeth. He’s making a noise that might be a laugh and might be a snarl.
Remus hits him from the side, but he doesn’t manage to bowl him completely off his feet Greyback struggles past him for a second, claw-like nails scrabbling at the grass, his mouth open and champing-
And Harry screams as Greyback’s claws rake down his face.
The whole world vanishes for Remus in a wash of scarlet. He slams into Greyback again, and this time, he does knock him over. They roll and struggle, Greyback snapping his teeth as if he’s going to fight like a wolf even in human form, Remus trying to get his hands around Greyback’s throat so he can strangle him.
Greyback locks his feet in the grass and arches his back, throwing Remus’s hold off enough that he loses his grip on the bastard’s throat. Then Greyback laughs at him and turns back to Harry as if he’s going to finish him off.
Remus reaches out and tears into Greyback’s flesh, seeking his spine.
He’s never before dared to use his lycanthropic strength like this. It would mean becoming too close to the kind of creature Greyback is, accepting the wolf as a natural part of himself. But this time, he’s desperate to save Harry, and it works. Remus’s hand punches straight through skin and muscles into the monster’s back, and for a second, his fingers close around vertebrae. Greyback howls in agony.
He whips around, and Remus loses his grip. Then he snaps one more time and bolts to the edge of the garden, leaping and vanishing into the thickets that line it.
Remus raises some defensive wards as fast as he can, swearing under his breath because those wards weren’t there already. Then he turns around and runs back to Harry. Harry is holding his hands over his face, but Remus can see the blood oozing between his fingers.
Remus takes a breath to steady himself. The only consolation here is that Harry isn’t going to become a werewolf. It would take Greyback biting him under the full moon for that. But Remus is an expert on how badly scarred Greyback can make someone anyway. “Let me see, Harry.”
Slowly, Harry lowers his hands.
It’s terrible. At least Harry still has both eyes, but three long scratches cut down the left side of his face, jagged and tearing, swerving close to his eye and then ending a centimeter or so short of his lip. Remus imagines what they’ll look like when they scar over, and winces.
“Why did he do that?” Harry whispers, his voice as dry as autumn. “I would understand why if he bit me and I was a werewolf, but…”
“To make you more untrustworthy in the public’s eyes,” Remus tells him softly. “There are people who would never give a werewolf the time of day, and even when they learn that you’re not one, they’ll still flinch from the reminder that there are people like Greyback in the world. You-Know-Who wants-he wants you not to be able to use your fame the way you could if you didn’t have those scars.”
“There’s no cure for them?”
Remus shakes his head slowly. “Any marks inflicted by a werewolf are permanent.” He can’t take heart from the fact that those marks are now going to include the ones he left on Greyback. It doesn’t pay for what happened to Harry.
Sirius bursts out of the house, swearing. “What the fuck-the wards said nothing was wrong, but-” He stops when he sees Harry. He looks like death. Or like he’s going to make death come for someone soon. “What? Who did this?” He’s whispering.
“Fenrir Greyback.” Remus is tired now, all the effort he expanded crashing into him at once. “What do you think, Sirius? How in the world did he get through the wards?” He realizes that he’s shouting and tries to stop himself. It isn’t Sirius’s fault that he didn’t know this.
Even though it feels like it really should be.
Sirius waves his wand, checking the wards with the sort of delicacy that Remus can’t imagine exerting, given that he doesn’t have a family home like this. Then his face pales. “My parents-they put an exception into the wards for anyone with a Dark Mark on his arm. I didn’t even think to look for it. My father never put any exceptions for anyone not of Black blood. I mean, none that he ever told me about.” He begins waving his wand again, and for a second, a heaviness that has nothing to do with the storm presses down on Remus. “There. Now the bloody thing is removed.”
He turns back to Harry, and his face crumples. “Shit. Shit, pup, I’m so sorry. Can you forgive me?”
Harry just nods limply. His eyes are starting to glaze, and Remus knows what that means. Greyback might have put some kind of fucking poison on his nails, Remus wouldn’t put it past him, and even if he didn’t, the shock of being hurt by a werewolf can send people unconscious. “We need to get him to St. Mungo’s. Do that, Sirius.”
“What are you going to be doing?” Sirius asks, even as he gathers Harry up in his arms.
“Contacting Severus,” Remus tells him. “He can bring the potions we’ll need, and better-brewed than the Healers can make them.”
“If he even wants to be near Harry after this, with that pathological fear he has of werewolves,” Sirius mutters, running for the Floo.
Remus says nothing. But he disagrees. He thinks Severus is going to be fiercely protective of Harry, enough that they might be lucky to see the boy again if they leave him alone with Severus at St. Mungo’s. His fear of werewolves, though, is just going to drive him harder in the direction of vengeance.
Remus only hopes none of that vengeance falls on him. He has a wolf to hunt down.
Chapter Five.
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