[From Litha to Lammas]: Powers of Dawn and Dusk, gen, PG-13, 2/2
Part One.
Title: Powers of Dawn and Dusk (2/2)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: None, gen
Content Notes: Transformation, massive AU (Harry raised by a transformed Walburga Black), angst, canonical character deaths.
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 4800
Summary: Her husband and one son dead, her other son in prison, Walburga Black sees the end of her family line coming for her, and part of her is grateful. But another part rages and calls out to the powers that exist in the world, powers that are neither of Dark nor Light-and one answers her. A chance to matter remains to her still, if she sheds her bodily form and raises a child powerful enough to defeat the Dark Lord.
Author's Notes: The first in "From Litha to Lammas," a series of fics I'll be posting from the summer solstice to the first of August. It will have one more part.
Thank you for the reviews!
Part Two
In the end, the way to get Sirius out was absurdly simple, but Walburga did need to convince the other powers to help her. It wasn’t something they would have done ordinarily, interceding in human justice-or injustice-for the sake of someone who didn’t belong to them.
But their hatred of Dementors helped, and so did the fact that it was Walburga who was asking, for the son of her human body. The other powers felt a sort of proprietary interest in him, and they went along with it when Walburga explained the plan.
Walburga materialized quickly this time, and reached out a hand. One of the coyotes slipped through the bars and spent a moment walking around Sirius, who was asleep. He woke up a second later and stared at her first and then the coyote. Walburga disapproved. She had taught him better than that, and he ought to have paid attention to the threat closest to him first.
“Mother?” Sirius asked weakly, clasping his hands around his knees. Walburga wondered if he had thought his previous vision of her only a dream.
“I was raising up the ability to get you out,” Walburga told him, and eyed the coyote critically. “Whatever you’re going to do, get on with it!”
The coyote bared its teeth, but it did manage to transform itself into a shadow-copy of Sirius. Only this one was dead and lay there with its eyes bugging out and its teeth clenched in a soundless scream. Sirius recoiled. “You’re going to leave that here?”
“Yes. It’ll remain until it’s buried, and then it will change back into shadow and come back to us.” Walburga held out her hand. “Come with me. You’ll have to change with me for the flight. It’ll feel disorienting, but it’ll be better when we’re back in Grimmauld Place and you can be human once more.”
“How-aren’t they going to feel that it isn’t solid when they touch the body?”
“We can take solid form, you silly boy. What do you think I’m doing by helping to pull you through the bars, or when I hold Harry at night and read stories to him?”
Sirius shook a little as he stood up and tottered forwards. “You weren’t lying. You do have him with you.”
“Yes.”
Sirius took her hand, and in the moment before Walburga turned him to smoke and sunset to pass with her in flight, he looked her in the face and murmured, “You’re not really my mother anymore, either.”
Walburga had no answer to that, but the powers of dawn and dusk didn’t demand one, and Sirius blended into them as they flew. In seconds, they were out of the dark walls of Azkaban, and in flight.
*
Walburga didn’t let Sirius see Harry until he had spent some time alone in a room, meditating, to get his dark memories from Azkaban under control. Then she also insisted that he have a bath and eat a regular meal. When he raged at her and tried to demand that he see his godson right away, Walburga locked him in his room with two coyotes and two crows to watch him. Sirius honestly couldn’t do much without a wand, and he also couldn’t hurt animals who could dissolve into mist the minute he tried to strike them.
Sirius stood silently on the stairs and looked blank when he finally saw Harry. Harry was chasing shadows around the sitting room where once important visitors had sat. The important visitors were dim to Walburga’s memory now when she thought about them. What had they done to be so honored by her?
Nothing, most of the time. Their blood meant nothing, not when she didn’t even wear the body she had been born with anymore.
“How can he be raised-normally, like this?” Sirius asked quietly, as he watched Harry grabbing the tail of a cat that rolled over and changed into a rat. The rat jumped up on Harry’s shoulder and nuzzled his face. Sirius twitched violently at that.
Walburga knew why. She moved so that she could block her son’s way into the sitting room if he tried to do something about the rat, and replied calmly, “Dumbledore left him with a normal Muggle family. I rescued him from it. Harry will grow up as he should.”
“But he needs human playmates.”
“You can be one of those playmates as soon as you’ve proven that I can trust you.”
Sirius shot her a look of betrayal. “How would you know? You’re not even human anymore.”
“I’m the one who’s raised Harry for the last year,” Walburga replied, refusing to be baited. Sirius eyed her as if that made her less trustworthy, not more. “Sirius. Listen to me. You can be a good playmate for him, but not if you go charging in there with some idea that you’re going to rescue him from an awful fate. Believe me, he’s not going to agree with you, and then things will be a lot worse.”
Sirius looked longingly back at Harry, but finally nodded. “Fine. You’re probably right that I need more than one bath and one meal to bond with him.” He hesitated. “But everyone thinks I’m dead. How am I going to improve my life and go out in public?”
Walburga smiled at him. “That’s where illusions are going to come in handy.”
*
“This is brilliant.”
Sirius kept his voice hushed as they walked through Diagon Alley, wrapped in shadows that made them look dark of hair and eye and utterly unmemorable. Walburga would only risk such disguises on cloudy days and near sunset, when the powers were at their strongest, but just getting out of the house seemed to be enough for Sirius.
As for Harry, he was turning in circles and goggling at the shops of Diagon Alley as though he had been transported to another planet. Just the sight of people in cloaks and robes and pointy hats seemed to be healing some of the damage those Muggles had inflicted. Walburga smiled at him and tightened her grip on his hand.
They ate ices at Fortescue’s and went to Madam Malkin’s to set up an order for robes in specific sizes, since they wouldn’t have much time to spend in the shop before it closed. Sirius was quiet as Walburga handled the order, and then sighed a little as they emerged. Walburga glanced at him. She understood her son better, in some ways, as a part of the powers than she ever had as a human, but she didn’t understand the expression of melancholy on his face now.
“What is it, Sirius?” she asked, when they had Apparated back to Grimmauld Place.
“I-well, I know that you did this to get the Black family back in power.” Sirius sat on a spindly chair and swung his legs, even though they could easily reach the floor, as they watched Harry fall contentedly asleep in front of the fire. “But what if Harry doesn’t want to do that?” He turned to her, his muscles tightening. “What if I don’t want to do that?”
“Put the Black family back in power?”
“Yes.”
Walburga shrugged a little. “I rescued you because I think you could help Harry and because the powers hate Dementors. You don’t have to do anything about the Black family in particular. Someday, it might be possible for us to find Pettigrew and clear your name, but with you having feigned death, it wouldn’t be possible for you to rejoin wizarding society as yourself. Perhaps having you pose as an illegitimate relative would be a better tactic.”
“But what about Harry? Are you going to make him behave like a Black if he doesn’t want to?”
Walburga blinked at Sirius. “I’m telling him stories and teaching him. I’m not doing anything to influence his free will other than that.”
“But what if he-what if he rejects the family like I did?”
“I made mistakes with you. I’m sorry. But if I don’t make the mistakes with Harry, then he shouldn’t have much of a reason to reject the family the way you did. He’ll want to help and protect it, instead.”
“I still worry about what you may do if he decides otherwise.”
“Then I will change my behavior and try not to make the same mistakes.”
Sirius looked at her, then away. “I prefer you like this,” he said. “When you’re not human, and actually joined with the powers of dawn and dusk. I don’t know how to feel about that.”
“I wasn’t a very nice person as a human, and I know niceness matters to your species,” Walburga said thoughtfully. “So that’s probably the reason. I don’t blame you for preferring me like this. That only seems sensible to me.”
Sirius gaped at her. “You-well, I suppose if you’re not human you don’t have as much of a concept of taking offense either, right?” he said weakly after a minute when the gaping had filled the whole of it.
“Why would I take offense at it?” Walburga asked, and watched, baffled, as Sirius buried his head in his hands and began almost to bark with breathless laughter.
*
“You made a mistake when you brought Harry Potter here under the intention that he would resurrect the Black family.”
Walburga paused and regarded the portrait with interest. It wasn’t one she’d previously paid much attention to. Phineas Nigellus Black seemed to spend most of his time sneering at his descendants, and he had nothing interesting to say about his family, so he played no part, as some of the portraits did, in Harry’s education.
“Why?” she asked. Walburga valued other perspectives more now than she ever had as a human. The powers of dawn and dusk were built on them. They had to absorb what threats loomed to the survival of their own and what they could do to avoid them, the same way the species they favored did. And it was always possible that someone outside them had a new perspective.
“Because the boy is a Potter, not a Black. And a half-blood besides.”
“I am no longer a pure-blood. My human body is gone,” Walburga added as she saw Phineas start to draw in a breath. “And I disowned my son, and that was wrong.”
“Sirius is good to have back,” the portrait admitted, shifting a little and folding his arms so that his green robes swayed. “But the boy is still a Potter.”
“So?”
“That means he will never be loyal to us.”
“But why not?” Walburga asked. She thought the portrait was wrong, but the powers knew something about the Muggle science of genetics, since it was important to survival. Maybe Phineas did, too, and there was something he could tell her about Harry’s Potter blood winning out, even though Walburga didn’t think there was.
Phineas just glared at her. “Because he is a Potter.”
“Do you have any arguments that aren’t circular?”
Phineas glared harder, and then vanished from the portrait. Walburga went from painting to painting around the house, to see where his other frame was, but she couldn’t find it. He must come out somewhere else.
Sirius looked alarmed when she told him that at dinner that night. “Old Phineas Nigellus was Headmaster of Hogwarts, Mother,” he said slowly. “He’s probably there right now, telling Dumbledore all about me.”
At least her son no longer called Dumbledore by his first name. Walburga didn’t hate the man any more than the rest of the powers of dawn and dusk did, but she thought him annoying. She shrugged and said, “There are counters to him doing anything. For example, if Dumbledore spreads the word of your survival and escape, then we would find Pettigrew, and he would also have a hard time arguing that you deserved to stay imprisoned.”
Sirius looked at her with his mournful eyes for a long time before he nodded. “Thank you.”
“Pettigrew is a bad man!” Harry announced from the other side of the table. “He’s an enmee of the Blacks!”
“And you,” Sirius said, leaning over to kiss Harry on the forehead, “are a little genius.”
“Bad!” Harry enthused.
*
Walburga sighed a little as she looked at the man standing in her drawing room. She had known Sirius was doing something behind her back, but it hadn’t concerned her greatly. The powers of dawn and dusk were stronger than him, and if he really did turn against her for some reason, they could withdraw their protection and he would die.
But it didn’t prevent Sirius from being a nuisance. And the man in her drawing room was a case in point.
“It’s not right for Harry to be raised by shadows and animals!” Remus Lupin groused, folding his arms.
“He’s not,” Walburga thought she had to point out, since the man was clearly not paying attention. “He is being raised by the House of Black.”
“You can’t claim that.”
“Yes, I can,” Walburga said. She smoothed her hands over the robes her human body wore at the moment and studied Remus Lupin critically. “I don’t believe that being a werewolf automatically makes someone deranged, but what is your excuse if not the lycanthropy?”
Lupin stared at her with his mouth open. Then he spun around and snarled at Sirius, “You told me that she wasn’t prejudiced anymore since she had turned into this-thing!”
“I didn’t think she was!”
“I am only asking what your excuse is, Mr. Lupin,” Walburga interrupted, calm and sighing and gesturing the cats that started to form on the edges of the shadows back into hiding. “I am not prejudiced against werewolves. But I wanted to know why you are acting mental, as I believe my son would say.”
Lupin glared again. “Because Harry isn’t growing up normally!”
“Dumbledore wanted him to grow up with Muggles who hated them. That was the main other option. Why is that more normal?” Walburga asked, curious.
Lupin rubbed his hands through his hair and paced in a circle. “It’s not normal to grow up in a house full of shadows and semi-divine powers and with someone that everyone thinks is dead!” he said, pointing at Sirius.
“Why not?”
Lupin flung himself back in a stained chair and growled at the ceiling. “I couldn’t take Harry,” he said, maybe because Sirius’s mouth was opening and he knew what argument her son was going to make. “It wouldn’t have been normal or right for him to grow up with a werewolf, either.”
“But for better or worse, normality ended for him when James and Lily died, Moony.” Sirius’s voice was still low when he spoke of Harry’s blood parents, his mouth pinched, but he didn’t look as stricken by grief as Walburga had seen when she rescued him from Azkaban. She thought that being away from the Dementors had a lot to do with that. “He wouldn’t get to grow up quietly anywhere else in the wizarding world.”
“Leaving him with his aunt and uncle-”
“Would have condemned him to growing up away from magic and without the truth of his heritage,” Walburga said, shaking her head when Lupin turned to her as if he wanted to argue. She spoke only truth. “They were glad enough to surrender him to the first wizard who showed up.”
“They didn’t even ask your name?”
“I gave them my name. But they didn’t ask about my relation to him or my right to take him. They just assumed that it was better for him to go with me.”
“Why?”
“They wanted to get rid of him.”
Lupin stared at her with his mouth open. Then he gulped and whispered, “That can’t be right. I mean-Lily sometimes said things about how horrible her sister was, but her parents were good people. I can’t believe her sister would turn Harry away.”
Walburga shrugged. It honestly didn’t matter much to her if Lupin believed her or not. Any attempt he made to take Harry away would be foiled by the powers of dawn and dusk, and anything else, she could deal with. “Then you could go and ask her. I’d go in disguise, though. She wouldn’t want to deal with you once she realized you were a wizard.”
“Padfoot, you have to realize how insane this is,” Lupin then tried appealing to Sirius.
“It is kind of insane,” Sirius agreed, with a deep gulp of air. “But it’s the only way that I can be involved in taking care of Harry, and that’s the way I want to be, Remus.”
“I-if Dumbledore knew about this…”
“He might,” Walburga said. Lupin could go and talk to Dumbledore, too, for all she cared, but she thought Sirius looked as if his heart would break, and she wanted to spare the son of her human body pain. “He still can’t do anything.”
“But Harry has to leave the house sometimes!”
“Of course he does,” Walburga said, puzzled. Sirius had once told her that Lupin made good marks. That had meant she’d thought of him as intelligent. He wasn’t acting like it now. “He goes to Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade on a regular basis. Just in disguise.”
“That’s no life for a child!”
“Why would being mistreated by Muggles be one?”
Lupin looked as if he wanted to tear his hair out. Walburga watched in interest. It was probably impossible for one of the dusk and dawn to become bald, so this might be her one chance to see it.
“Sirius, do something.” Lupin didn’t tear out his hair, somewhat to Walburga’s disappointment, but turned to her son and waved his hands around in vague gestures.
“Harry is happy here,” Sirius said quietly. “He’s learning to fly from the crows, and he can already write his name. He knows his colors and some of his numbers and he loves the stories. And he’s learning magic.”
“When does he have the time to be a child?”
“You think learning makes people not children?” Walburga interrupted. The more she heard about this strange world-view of Lupin’s, the more she wondered about it. He seemed to have a perspective that was very different from any human’s she had ever heard of, but he wouldn’t accept it if she said it was the lycanthropy influencing him. “Did your parents teach you that?”
Lupin actually did yank on his hair. Walburga frowned. She wasn’t sure if Harry should be around someone as unstable as this.
“Just calm down, Moony,” Sirius said, rolling his eyes at his friend and at her at once. Walburga smiled. Her son was doing better and better the more time he spent away from Azkaban. “Talk to Harry and see if he’s unhappy here.”
“He’s only a child, he can’t know,” Lupin snapped.
“And yet, it seems as though you think you do,” Walburga said. “Tell me, where did you get your omniscience?”
She could not understand why Lupin began to tear at his head again.
*
“Are you happy here?” Lupin asked Harry, bending down near him and giving a grimace that he probably thought was a smile.
“Yeah,” Harry said, distracted. He was trying to throw a ball in some direction that a coyote couldn’t immediately catch it. Walburga knew that eventually he would use his magic to make the ball fly and float, but he hadn’t reached that point yet.
He hurled the ball with a twisting motion. It deflected off the nearest corner, and the coyote stood up on its hind legs and caught it as the ball soared towards it. Harry scowled and stomped his small feet. “Not fair!”
The coyote only spat the ball on the floor, neatly, so that it rolled back to Harry’s feet. Walburga smiled as he hefted it again with a look of determination. Until he reached the point where he would use his magic, it was also good training for his muscles and hand-eye coordination.
“No, Harry, listen to me.” Lupin got in front of Harry and took the ball away. Harry eyed him, then the toy. “I want to know if you’re happy here. Don’t you miss your mum and dad?”
“Mamma’s there,” Harry said, and pointed a finger at Walburga. Then he grabbed the ball back from Lupin and threw it again. The coyote snapped it up before it flew two feet. Harry’s scowl spread as if it would split his face in half.
“She’s not your mama. Your mum and dad died. Don’t you miss them?”
Harry thought about that. He knew something about death, more than most children his age, because neither Walburga nor the other powers would conceal it from him, and he had to understand why they valued life. “If they’re dead,” Harry said slowly, reasoning it out, “they don’t come back.”
“Yes,” Lupin whispered, ducking his head.
“Then they’re not here,” Harry said, and shrugged, and grabbed for the ball again.
Lupin let him have it, but glared at Walburga, and crossed over to her side to complain in a whisper. “You’re the one who did this to him?”
“What did you expect him to do, Lupin? Spend the rest of his life mourning parents he can’t remember?” Walburga shook her head. “Mourning mistakes that he can’t change? I understand that that is the way you have chosen to spend your own life, and perhaps it has value, but I cannot see that kind of value for someone who will be a great wizard.”
“You only want him because of what he can be!”
“And for what he is,” Walburga said as slowly as Harry had, because this time she thought she was the one who didn’t understand. “Is there some other reason you would want him?”
Lupin gave her a look of despair. “I want him to grow up and have a normal childhood!”
Walburga studied him. It was odd to realize that perhaps her immediate dismissal of him when she first heard about him had been right, but the reasons wrong. Lupin was not an incompetent because he was a werewolf, but because he would not allow himself to be more. “You think that he’s going to have that with his fame and that scar on his forehead? I am giving him a childhood that will allow him to survive, at the very least.”
Lupin looked away again.
Harry abruptly cried out. Walburga turned towards him immediately, and relaxed when she realized that he had finally used his magic to stop the coyote from catching the ball. Instead, it hovered between them, and Harry laughed and pointed at it and said, “Look, Mamma! Look!”
“He shouldn’t be using magic that young, either,” Lupin muttered between his fingers.
Walburga had decided that she was going to ignore Remus Lupin. She went over and scooped up her child, the child of the powers of dawn and dusk, and kissed him beneath the chin. Harry squirmed, giggling, and then got out of her arms and chased the ball around the room.
When she looked again, Lupin was gone.
*
“I thought-I thought Moony was different.”
Walburga shook her head at Sirius. They were sitting in the drawing room while Harry slept across her lap, a crow perched on his shoulder. “He didn’t do any harm. Dumbledore already knew Harry was here, and the Wizengamot won’t grant him any rights over the boy. Lupin can come back as long as he doesn’t decide to kidnap Harry.”
Sirius sighed and dropped his hands from his face. “I still didn’t think Moony would go straight to Hogwarts and tell him.”
Walburga shrugged and shifted. It was sunset, which meant that the powers were at their strongest, and her body was the most solid, but the position Harry had managed to get himself into was still a little uncomfortable to sit beneath. “Why wouldn’t he be loyal to Dumbledore? The man gave him an education when he was probably the only werewolf student in the country to get one for fifty years. It’s going to take more than that to break him free of those chains.”
Sirius was silent. Walburga looked up to see him staring at her in awe. “What?”
“Sometimes I still can’t believe how different you are.”
Walburga smiled at him and massaged Harry’s back, making him sigh in his sleep. “I am not human, and I cannot remember the reasons that I would have wanted to blast you off the tapestry or declare that you aren’t my son. Why would I retain that prejudice against werewolves? I don’t find Lupin engaging company, but he was your friend. If you can talk to him again in the future and get him to listen to you, then feel free to do so.”
She and Harry almost spilled onto the floor as Sirius tackled her around the waist. Walburga retained her seat and patted his shoulder gingerly, while Harry complained groggily about people crushing him.
“You’re so different,” Sirius declared, pulling free. “I love it.” He hesitated. “Moony said that he didn’t tell Dumbledore about any possible weaknesses the powers have, but it’s possible Dumbledore could have read it out of his mind anyway because Moony isn’t great at Occlumency. What do we do if he starts attacking us?”
“Oh, there’s no problem about that,” Walburga said comfortably, arranging Harry on her lap again and letting him snuggle into her shoulder. “One of the other powers went with Lupin. It’ll form a shadow mask behind his eyes and guard his thoughts that way. If Lupin decides to betray it on his own, we’ll handle it.”
Sirius tilted his head. “You aren’t worried about this, either.”
Walburga let the smile widen across her face in response. “The resurgent House of Black can handle anything.”
*
“Are you ready, Sirius?”
“I’m the one who’s going to be under an illusion,” Sirius said, shaking his head. “I’ll look like any other nameless Black wizard and blend into the background. You and Harry are the ones who are going to be the focus of attention.”
“But we are ready, and I know it.” Walburga had a hard time keeping a hold on Harry’s hand, in fact, he was so bouncing and impatient to walk around Diagon Alley for the first time without a shadowy disguise. “I am asking about you.”
Sirius took a deep breath and nodded. The powers whirled around him as he stood there, forerunners of sunset that made his black hair deepen in color, his grey eyes acquire a touch of blue, and his face look utterly different in the shape and content of the shadows it threw. “Yeah, I am.”
Walburga gave him a smile and tossed Floo powder into the fire. So far, no attack had been launched on them, and so she assumed that Lupin had chosen to stay true to Sirius and the shadow behind his eyes had done its job of protecting his mind.
Harry was three now, and he could speak prepared words well and he was proficient in magic and Black history, a strong, growing child. Walburga had a reputation to retrieve, one that didn’t involve being a recluse or a shrieking harpy. Dumbledore’s best efforts to get the Wizengamot to take an interest in Harry’s case had fallen apart the minute they heard he was living somewhere in the wizarding world instead of with Muggles (Dumbledore hadn’t told them where). It was time.
When they stepped out of the Floo in the Leaky Cauldron, not many people glanced at them at first. Then Walburga saw a few people start to recognize her, and jaws dropping. Then a few more looked at Harry and saw the scar, and gasps spread throughout the room.
Sirius was right. No one paid attention to him as he came through the Floo behind them and paused at her shoulder, although Walburga had all the tales ready about a long-last Black relative when attention did begin.
“This is my adopted son, Harry Potter, also Harry Black when he wants to claim the name,” Walburga announced. “It’s time to introduce him to the wizarding world again.”
Harry bowed grandly from the waist. “Hello,” he said.
The questions began after that, the shouts and the photographs and the desperate attempts at handshakes, but Walburga would always remember the silence that spread in front of them for a moment, a tribute greater than any other to how much power their names and faces commanded.
The House of Black will rise again.
And if it did so with shadowy rats watching from the corner, ready for any eventuality, and crows that only Walburga could feel circling above the roof of the pub, then that was only proof of how much more it deserved to rise.
The End.
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