Chapter Thirty-Eight of 'Made of Common Clay'- Athwart the Tempest
Chapter Thirty-Seven.
Title: Made of Common Clay (38/48)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Minor mentions of Ron/Hermione, Molly/Arthur, Neville/Hannah, Luna/Rolf, and past Harry/Ginny; otherwise, this fic is gen and will remain so.
Content Notes: Angst, violence, torture, politics, present tense, cynical Harry
Rating: R (for violence)
Summary: Harry has reached a very bitter and jaded thirty. His efforts to reform the Ministry haven’t lessened the corruption or pure-blood bigotry one bit. That’s when he finds out that he’s apparently a part of a pure-blood nobility he’s never heard of before; he’s Lord Potter and Lord Black. Unfortunately, that revelation’s come too late for him to be a reformer. All Harry wants to do is tear the system down and salt the earth. And with a double Lordship, he just might have the power to do that.
Author’s Notes: This fic is partially a parody of some of the tropes common in Lord Potter/Lord Black fics. The title and most of the chapter titles come from one of Oscar Wilde’s poems: “Sweet I blame you not for mine the fault was, had I not been made of common clay/I had climbed the higher heights unclimbed yet, seen the fuller air, the larger day.” I don’t yet know how long this fic will be, but it will get pretty dark.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Eight-Athwart the Tempest
There is nothing like the way that Harry’s consciousness spreads out and overlaps the wizarding world. Nothing has ever prepared him for this, and nothing will ever be the same again.
Then again, if he had to do this a second time, something would have gone really wrong with the first. Harry is just as glad to know this will be the only time.
He is a bouncing, bounding, tumbling pebble in the storm, washing out over the wizarding world and falling down into minds with the cascade of the magic. He lands in Neville’s first, but he knows the leading edge of the wildfire has already gone past him. He’s probably here because he knows Neville and he’s Harry’s friend, so it makes sense he’d be drawn to him.
Neville falls to the ground as though a hammer blow has taken him in the head. Hannah is groaning next to him, and Susan is unconscious.
“Wow,” Neville says a second later. Harry can feel the fire burning in his head, cauterizing the wounds as it goes. “I never realized that I distrust goblins that much.”
“For me it was centaurs.” Hannah rolls over and reaches a hand out that Neville clasps. “I listened to all those stories as a child that they’re mindless beasts and don’t really know what they’re doing. And now I think back to how Firenze could be a professor if that was true and it doesn’t make sense. I...what was I even thinking?”
“Just things that are gone now.” Neville kisses her hand. “I know I thought that goblins are sneaky and untrustworthy and would take all our money if they could, but it’s just something that used to be true. It’s not true now.”
Hannah smiles at him and then glances over at Susan in concern. “Why do you think she fell unconscious?”
“More to burn through, love.”
“But she’s never been prejudiced.” Hannah crawls over and picks up Susan’s head to cradle it in her lap. Harry’s glad. He doesn’t feel the same animosity towards Susan that he did, which argues that’s one of the things the fire burned away. “Why?”
“I-thought it was my duty to help take care of Muggleborns.”
Hannah yelps, but at least doesn’t let Susan’s head fall back on the floor. In fact, she tries to hold her down as Susan brushes her hair out of her face and gently sits up, shaking her head at Hannah. Her breathing is hoarse, but doesn’t sound terrible.
“I thought that Muggleborns were completely ignorant when they came into the wizarding world, and it was my duty to help them.” At least Susan’s voice is gentle now. She reaches out and holds Hannah’s wrists, staring into her eyes as if determined to make her understand. Well, she probably is. Harry would be in her place. “Because I was a pure-blood and someone who was from a family on the right side of the war. So that made me-”
“Patronizing,” Neville quietly guesses.
Susan nods and smiles sadly at him. “I could have changed. I could have realized that Muggleborns like Hermione can make their own way in the world, and if they can’t, then just having one pure-blood who’s offering to give them advice won’t change things. I could have asked Muggleborns what they needed instead of assuming I knew.”
She takes a deep breath. “But I didn’t. And so I was carrying this conviction of their inferiority with me, even if it wasn’t as bad some of the other people in the Sun Chamber.”
Hannah tries to speak. Susan shakes her head. “That’s gone now. Now I realize that Muggleborns are people like me. So I could still offer to help them, but it would have to be without the condescending pity. I have to learn to listen to them.”
She glances at Neville. “Does that mean that you’re not going to use whatever that stone was above your door that recorded my magical signature?”
Neville laughs. “That was part of a plan Harry and I had if we had to destroy the Sun Chamber before he managed to unleash the Elder Wand. But no, I don’t think so, unless we need to smear reputations now.”
“What exactly were you going to do with them?”
“Watch,” Neville says, and raises his wand. For a second, the room around them blinks, and Harry finds himself impressed by how smoothly the stored magic flows. It’s just another sign of how powerful Neville really is, and how silly his pure-blood family was to disdain him when he was a child for not being exactly like his father.
Power and honesty and everything else that’s valuable don’t belong to pure blood.
Then the stone above Neville’s door glows and releases a tight burst of radiance that becomes a branching tree. On every branch is a name, and at the base of the trunk are the names of the Sun Chamber members who let their magical signatures filter into Neville’s keystone. There’s also a spiral of colors, mostly green and blue but sometimes other shades, seated next to the names.
“This is...” Susan looks at a loss for words as she stares at it. “I know this is the family tree of most families, but what were you going to use it for? And what are the spirals?”
“Representations of their magical signatures,” Neville says promptly. “They include a lot of information, like weaknesses and vulnerabilities in their shields if you look closely enough. And the family trees include Muggle names.”
Susan’s mouth falls open in a breathless little laugh as she looks it over. “Or Muggleborn, or-ew, two Selwyn siblings got married?”
“Yes, a few generations back.” Neville waves his wand again, and the light is sucked back into the stone. “It would have been a multi-purpose weapon. Attacking their reputations, giving us information we could have used to succeed in duels against them if needed, and also releasing a focused blast of their magic that would have weakened them if they sealed themselves behind impenetrable wards.”
Susan bows her head so Harry can’t see the expression on her face, but both the tenor of her thoughts and her words are clear. “So-Harry really planned for everything.”
“Yes,” Neville answers, and Harry feels himself drifting away. The fire is flooding on, has already flooded on, and he has to follow it and see what’s happening elsewhere. His friends will be fine. Susan will be a better person for being shed of that patronizing mindset, and-
The fire sparks around him, and he hears distant voices, singing or shouting. He supposes they might be the voices of humans or of magic itself. No way to tell from this distance, this strange and floating place.
The next room he opens his eyes in is Arthur’s office.
Arthur is sitting with his head in his hands. One of the Aurors Harry doesn’t know is standing next to him, anxiously holding out a vial. “A headache potion, sir,” he whispers, darting his gaze around as if someone else will hear him offering that kind of potion and think it’s heresy for a high-ranking Ministry official to have human weaknesses.
Arthur takes a slow, deep breath, and reaches out a hand that shakes a little. The potion at least goes down his throat instead of down his front. Harry is glad, if only for the sake of his robes.
“What happened, sir?” the Auror asks, hovering over Arthur now as if he doesn’t know what to do with the potion gone. “Do you need another potion?”
“You don’t know what happened?” Arthur stares up with dull eyes. “You didn’t feel the magic burning your mind?”
“I felt some pain,” the Auror says. “Not a lot of burning, sir. I think I distrust goblins less than I did. Should I have noticed something else?”
“I never knew that I distrusted Muggleborns that much,” Arthur mutters, in a sort of answer. “Never knew that I…I fought to protect their rights in the war! How could I have had that much for this magic to burn?” He rubs at his head again, but not as if it hurts. Harry thinks he’s touching to see if it’s still there.
“Oh. Um. Well, one of my friends suffered that, and I think I know the answer, sir. I mean, if you want to hear it.”
Arthur looks up. Harry can see the gleam of the old curiosity in his eyes. “Of course I want to hear the answer.”
The Auror clears his throat officiously. Harry wonders if he can see, and the magic obeys his command, taking him over to the side. Yes, he was right. The Auror is still a trainee. That would explain a lot about the way he’s acting. “Well, sir, he realized that he never thought Muggleborns belonged. Not really. Not completely. He thought of them as strangers and outsiders. Not in a bad way. But that they would always be a little alien, and they needed pure-bloods to guide them.”
“Yes,” Arthur whispers. “Yes, I see. I did think like that. But how could I avoid it? Muggle contraptions are…” He trails off.
Harry finds himself holding his breath, as much as there is a him right now to hold it. This is the part that he wanted to work, but he’s not sure would, because they had no magic to bind them into the system the Elder Wand was creating the way the others did.
“I thought of Muggles as funny little people inventing funny little things to get by,” Arthur says. “But now I don’t think of them that way anymore.”
“Um, how do you think of them, sir? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Just as, people,” Arthur says, with a big pause between the words. “Some of them can be funny, but others-aren’t. They’re just like the people that I pass in Diagon Alley every day.”
“Um, but they don’t have magic, sir.”
“I know that. I didn’t mean they were identical. I meant they’re just as worthy of having attention paid to them and their inventions respected. Amazing.”
Arthur sounds as if he’ll be preoccupied by the discovery for some time. Harry lets the fire roll him away and feels his attention sharpen as he blows through the door of a very familiar house. Ron and Hermione had better be all right.
Not that either of them would have let him hold back even if they thought they wouldn’t be, of course. They were committed to this all along.
No matter how mental they thought Harry was, Harry thinks fondly as he enters the room where Ron is rubbing his head and Hermione is calmly drinking a cup of tea. At first, Harry does believe he’s right and Hermione wasn’t affected.
But then Hermione turns around, and Harry sees the bruise on her forehead. He would wince if he had a body to wince with. She probably fell and hit her head like he did, then, when the burning took her.
“I don’t understand what the fire could possibly take from you, though,” Ron mutters, staring into his own cup of tea. He has a bigger knot on the back of his head. Harry makes a private vow that he’ll cast the healing charm himself, as soon as he finds out if he can cast any magic at all. “I mean, you weren’t prejudiced against Muggleborns or goblins or werewolves.”
“No, but I’d picked up a bit of the wizarding superiority to Muggles without realizing what I was doing.” Hermione sounds rueful. “And I thought goblins should be educated and then they would get along with wizards, and werewolves should try harder and not run off and seclude themselves in the woods. And I was just thinking, right before the fire struck, that house-elves who chose to bargain for wages with their former owners probably didn’t know their own minds.”
Ron doesn’t speak for a long moment. His voice is gentle when he does, though. “Lots of wizards had lots worse prejudices, Hermione.”
“But those were mine. And I still had them. And I didn’t want them. And I didn’t even know I had them.”
“It’s the same thing for me, though.” Ron holds her hand and leans over the table to kiss her. “It’s not as though anyone is perfect. I think probably only really young children won’t have them.”
Hermione nods, her eyes still lowered, and then Harry’s vision fractures and spins out on the fire.
It’s difficult for him to keep track of individuals after that. He’s seeing through thousands of eyes, watching as people sit with their heads in their hands and puzzle over how stupid old arguments seem to them now, watching as pure-bloods stare down at pages filled with genealogies and don’t feel the shame of having some Muggle or Muggleborn ancestors, watching as Weston laughs and laughs because she’s free of an inferiority complex she didn’t know she had.
And then he descends into the forest where he negotiated with the werewolves, and watches them trying to convince themselves, emptily, that wizards are still their enemies. It doesn’t work.
There are some people, a few, who have large blank spaces in their minds and stumble around, hands stretched out as if searching for a guiding rope that’s no longer there. Among them are members of the Sun Chamber. Harry watches them without pity. They met people who told them the truth. They could have looked around the wizarding world and seen the truth at any time. They could have accepted that their time was past and a secret government was immoral.
They had all these chances and took none of them. They can live with their loss of power.
Or not, Harry concludes as he sees a few of them take their lives. He sees that without flinching, either. The fire is spreading further and further, eddying back from the borders of Britain but pouncing on minds that it may have missed the first time. There is too much for him to feel connected to any particular loss.
Especially when those losses are of people he only knows because they were eager to call him Lord Potter, Lord Black, or both.
He does feel sorry for Honeywell as she sits staring at the wall, her hands shredding pieces of paper. They have genealogies and magical formulas on them, ones that, as Harry sees when he hovers over one torn only in half, are supposed to work for people of “pure blood” and no one else. Honeywell knows they’re useless now. She knows that she spent money on more than half the books in her library for nothing.
Yes, Harry can be sorry. He can’t change his mind, and he won’t. He is changing theirs.
One of the most interesting things is what happens to the Muggleborn Mirror that Shafiq at one point planned on using. The glass dissolves into a shrieking mess, reminding Harry of Walburga Black’s portrait in Grimmauld Place. Then it cracks, and the bits fall apart, piece by piece, until a whole blizzard of tiny shards lie under the huge frame.
Harry grins. He didn’t realize that magical items whose very existence relied on blood prejudice would also be affected, but he can’t say that he isn’t grateful-or happy.
The wave rolls on, and touches unconscious minds, and sleeping ones. Dreams alter, and suddenly the ones that depend on triumphing over someone because of blood or crushing a werewolf underfoot or abusing a house-elf are gone, are vague tatters and scraps of images. Minds flail and then adopt new shapes.
Kingsley, still safely under the Draught of Living Death in Harry’s safehouse, sighs and rolls over. Harry knows he would get different advice from him now if he was awake and they had traveled back in time to the moment Harry revealed the Sun Chamber to the press.
Rita Skeeter makes aimless doodles with her quill on the parchment in front of her. Like others, Harry knows, she will have awakened from what seems a dream, and although she can still remember the facts of the stories she used to write, they won’t make sense to her now.
“What was I thinking?” Harry hears her whisper to herself, and sees her stand and go over to a cabinet to remove a bottle of Firewhisky.
The goblins are having a serious, animated discussion that Harry can’t understand because it’s in Gobbledegook, but he gets the sense of it, welling up from his link with the fire reshaping Britain. They have policies on the books about not trusting wizards, about charging Muggleborns more for certain loans, about giving pure-blood families access to vaults that they might not technically own as long as the price is right. Now they’re debating new ways to make money without charging Muggleborns more and the like.
Because, now, that acceptance of blood prejudice is gone, and goblins didn’t share it as much as they relied on it to benefit them. Now they have to find something else.
Just like so many people, Harry thinks. He’s feeling drowsy, which the fire expresses by burning less brightly. He can feel stone under his hands again, and knows he’s returning to his body that lies in the Department of Mysteries.
He still has to wake up and get out of there before someone in the Ministry tries to arrest him for something that’s not blood prejudice. The reverence for his defunct Lordships won’t protect him now.
Everything is different.
As he opens his eyes, Harry rejoices that he’s able to think that sentence.
Chapter Thirty-Nine.
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