Chapter One Hundred and Forty-Six of 'A Brother to Basilisks'- Night of Shattered Mirrors
Chapter One Hundred and Forty-Five.
Title: A Brother to Basilisks (146/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual Harry/Draco and Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Angst, violence, some gore, AU from Prisoner of Azkaban onwards
Rating: R
Summary: AU of PoA. Harry wakes in the night to a voice calling him from somewhere in the castle-and when he follows it, everything changes. Updated every Friday.
Author’s Notes: This is a canon-divergent AU that starts after Chapter 7 of Prisoner of Azkaban. It will probably run to at least the mid-point of The Half-Blood Prince. It will also be long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter One Hundred and Forty-Six-Night of Shattered Mirrors
Harry woke gasping and so certain that something was wrong that he reached out his hand and found the Elder Wand in it. He sat up in bed, staring around and trying to see what lurked in the shadows outside his closed curtains.
But nothing moved. Now and then he heard one of his roommates sigh and turn over, but they were all hidden behind their bed-curtains, and they should have felt safe anyway. No reason that he should have awakened...
You don’t ask the snake who’s connected to your mind and has senses keener than any human if he has any advice, of course. Of course not.
Harry jumped. He’d been so on edge that even Dash’s voice in his head was enough to sound like a tolling bell. He controlled his emotions with an effort and managed to murmur, “Do you sense anything?”
I do, but the threat is coming from within your mind, not from outside it.
Harry grimaced. He didn’t need to ask if it was Voldemort, because of course it was Voldemort. He settled back against his pillows and closed his eyes to concentrate on Dash’s voice and his Occlumency. Do you know what he’s doing? Is he about to snatch me away from my body like he did on the night of the new moon?
Silence for long moments. Harry could feel Dash swaying back and forth, sending out rippling inquiries into the distance. He forced himself to wait even though he wanted to jump up and down and shout. His roommates’ breathing continued, steady and soft.
Voldemort’s mind is closed to me, Dash said. Even the link that usually exists between you because of your Horcrux is shut. I didn’t know that he could do that.
Harry tensed up. Dash’s voice was slow and casual, but Harry could sense the worry throbbing under it the way he had been able to sense Dash swaying. Do you think that means that he knows-well, everything we’ve been trying to keep from him?
No. Dash’s response was quick enough to be reassuring. He would have to open it wider to sense that, and we would have been able to grab hold of him in return. He can’t read your mind right now because of how tightly the link’s shut. It’s the opposite of what he would have to do to have access to it.
Harry bit his lip and nodded. Then what about the danger I felt? How can that come through if there’s nothing that links us? Or, I mean, if the link isn’t open right now? he added, because he knew Dash would say that the link still existed.
I think-
Harry screamed as the link abruptly tore wide open once more. The Elder Wand throbbed and bounded in his hand, and Harry saw the Invisibility Cloak flapping up over the side of the bed like a huge bird. Somewhere, the Resurrection Stone was tingling and spinning. And someone yelled his name in a concerned voice that sounded like Ron’s.
None of it mattered. Harry was spinning faster and faster down a dark tunnel that abruptly swallowed him up.
*
Ron clapped his hand over his face as the wall abruptly exploded in front of him.
Dash’s head came through the stone, looping back and forth around the beds, aimed straight for Harry’s. Ron shouted for people to be calm, even as a curse blasted from Seamus’s wand and scorched the curtains on Neville’s bed. It was easy to forget how big Dash was when you didn’t see him in the flesh for a while.
“Hold up, Seamus! He’s trying to help Harry!”
“How can you tell?” Seamus was aiming his wand in a shaking hand. “It’s not like you can speak Parseltongue, and it sure looks like he’s going to swallow someone to me!”
Ron couldn’t get his breath before Dash tore open the curtains on Harry’s bed and coiled around him, his tongue flickering out. His eyes were still shielded by his eyelids, or they would all be dead or Petrified, Ron knew, but Dash’s eyelids quivered as though they would lift any second.
It took all of Ron’s courage to march up to him and ask, “Is there anything we could do?” But he reminded himself that he was still Harry’s best friend, and Harry would be upset with Dash if he paralyzed or killed Ron.
Dash turned his neck and stared down at Ron with motionless eyelids this time. Then he shook his head in a gesture that was weirdly human and wrapped most of his body around Harry, staring motionlessly at the wall.
Ron hesitated. For all that Dash was still right now, he had the impression there was a huge struggle going on, one that might be bigger than Dash himself.
“I want you to tell me if we can help,” he said, and ignored the way that his throat dried out with the command. “I mean, if there’s something that can keep Harry comfortable. Or help you save him. Or something.”
There was a long, long moment when nothing happened, and Seamus caught his breath and muttered something about ungrateful snakes. Then Dash’s tail moved a little, before some kind of spell caught the curtains of Harry’s bed and slammed them shut. Ron was sure that they would be as immovable as a wall if he went over and tried to open them.
He herded the others down to the common room, looking over his shoulder. Dash was still looped over the broken rubble of the wall and into the room. Neville said something anxious about the cold air of the night hurting the plant on his bedside table, but from what Ron could see, Dash was blocking that hole so effectively that no night air would come in.
I just hope Harry is all right, Ron thought, and sat in the common room with the other blokes, trying to talk calmly, and wishing for Hermione.
*
“I have decided that it is time to free myself from you, Harry Potter.”
Harry turned around, breathing shallowly. He didn’t seem to be in the mindscape that Voldemort had pulled him into before, or the “ground” between their minds that he had seen when Voldemort created the Horcrux. Instead, he was in a black sky, speckled with stars except for a shining shaft of light near him. Voldemort stood within the shaft of light.
He was smiling in a way that made Harry flinch. Voldemort laughed, presumably at the sight of the flinch, and shook his head. “You could have had so much more if you had joined me than you have now.”
Harry didn’t bother responding. He was too busy analyzing things. Voldemort must be confident if he wasn’t attacking immediately. That wasn’t the way Harry had thought he would react after Harry and Dash had foiled his rite on the new moon. Had he found some other deadly potion or spell like the one he had used to attack Josephine’s pack?
Harry reached for Dash. And yes, the connection was gone. Blocked. He swallowed and focused on Voldemort.
“Does your silence mean you agree with me, Harry Potter?” Voldemort taunted, and lifted his yew wand, or maybe a simulacrum of it. Harry didn’t move or speak. Voldemort narrowed his eyes. “Do you really believe that you can break free of me now?”
Harry still said nothing, concentrating on reaching out to Dash. He’d thought he felt an odd trembling, as though the blockage on their bond was pulling aside like a curtain. And then he felt something else.
A weight in his left hand. A weight in his right hand. A weight on his shoulders.
“What are those?”
Harry didn’t have to look down. He knew that he now held the Elder Wand and the Resurrection Stone, and the Cloak was draped over his shoulders, although he didn’t seem to be going invisible here. He steadied his breathing. If it came to a clash of power, he still wasn’t as strong as Voldemort, but he might manage to hold him off for a while.
“Who are you?”
The Parseltongue made the “air” around Harry throb, and he found himself walking a step forwards without willing it. Voldemort reached out a long-nailed hand, his fingers moving and uncoiling like worms wriggling in the air. His smile now was something out of nightmares, or the night that he had made the last Horcrux and tied Harry to his soul in the first place.
“You have no choice now.”
Harry was drifting, nearly to Voldemort, when he felt the twitch in the back of the bond again, someone reaching for, lunging for him. But the person needed him to reach back, and that meant breaking the tug that Voldemort had on him. Harry managed it, leaning back, not physically but with his will, the way he resisted the Imperius Curse, and yearning, calling, speaking…
“Dash, come through!”
Voldemort laughed when the words simply died in the “air” around them, and shook his head. “I told you that I have blocked your connection to me. No one can oppose me when I choose to make myself the ultimate power, as I have made myself here.”
Harry felt a sharp throb from his right hand, and then it was rising in front of him, dragged along by a greater force even as another such force propelled him towards Voldemort. The Elder Wand was shining like phoenix fire.
“I find that I am annoyed by your toys,” Voldemort said in English. He reached out with a negligent hand, towards the wand. Harry saw the shadow of his hand coming from some great distance, reflected by something that hadn’t been there a second before. It hovered behind Voldemort like a silvered mirror.
The reflective light grew closer and closer, and, staring at it, Harry almost neglected to pay attention to the Elder Wand. Voldemort’s hand closed on it.
And then he screamed in fury and pain, and the flames that raced up his arms were dancing in a splendid orange color that Harry hadn’t even seen when Fawkes burned.
The fires coiled around Voldemort’s hands and face, and he spat orders to them to stop-in Parseltongue. Harry found himself laughing without knowing he would, slightly hysterically, unable to stop. Did Voldemort think that the fire was some form of serpent magic? And why? Simply because he thought that he had to be able to control everything?
The mirror was growing brighter and closer, and then it broke open. Dash’s head slid through, and he was between Voldemort and Harry in seconds, swaying his vast bulk back and forth like a cobra.
“You cannot! I closed the connection! You cannot!”
“You forget who holds part of my soul,” Dash hissed, and then he turned and seemed to commune with the Elder Wand for a second. The only thing Harry knew for sure was that Dash wasn’t communing any extra with him. Then they began to back up cautiously, Dash twined around the air in front of Harry.
“I am master here!”
It seemed to be with an enormous effort, but Voldemort put the flames out. Then he advanced again, his hand beckoning, and Harry felt the pull urging him towards Voldemort. He wanted to resist, but he had finally realized that this wasn’t like the Imperius Curse, an imposition from outside. This was inside, from the Horcrux, pulling on the bond of souls that joined them.
Dash spoke to Harry down the bond, his voice dim and echoing. He’s right. He’s master here, because he created this place by closing his mind to you in the first place. And we have to do something else to break free.
Harry took a deep breath and flung open all the doors of his soul down to the lowest, letting Dash see all his desperation and power. Do whatever you need to do. Take whatever strength you need from me. I’m willing to do whatever I have to do.
Including becoming the Master of Death?
Harry blinked, and found that he was almost to Voldemort, around Dash’s bulk. What do you mean? I thought I already was, with the Hallows choosing me.
No. To be the true Master of Death, you must embrace that power and use it with intent to kill.
And Harry understood the difference, then. He felt a spasm of old pain that might have been his or Dash’s, but his hand was tightening around the Elder Wand, and the Cloak fluttered on his back in a wind no one could feel, and the Stone was blazing in the palm of his left hand, the one not locked around the Wand.
“What are you doing?” Voldemort’s eyes were abruptly wide, and Harry could see them gleaming in a way that might have been rage or fear. “Stop! Go back! Do not bring that near me!”
But Harry was already most of the way to him, and the Elder Wand leaped yearningly from his hand as if it considered itself a guard and then-
It stabbed Voldemort in the left eye. Followed by the Stone, which whirred to the right and embedded itself there.
The night crazed around them with Voldemort’s scream, and Harry wondered only then what might happen because he was in a mental world that Voldemort had designed, when he got hurt by something like this-
Dash surged forwards and wrapped around Harry as the night began to crack again. “We have to go,” he hissed urgently.
“The Hallows-”
“Can take care of themselves!”
Harry still found himself staring over his shoulder as Dash dragged him quickly and brutally through the cracks and over them, towards something that Harry supposed was the waking world. Voldemort had one hand on the Wand now and one hand on the Stone, and Harry swallowed nervously. He hoped that didn’t mean that Voldemort was about to become the Master of the Hallows.
“Think you that we claim so lightly?” a voice asked Harry in his mental ear, a voice like snowfall. Harry started, disliking the sensation of a voice where only Dash usually spoke to him, but then relaxed when he realized it must be the Cloak.
“Of course it is, Master.”
There was a slight sneering tone to the remark that Harry didn’t like, but then, there wasn’t much that he did like about being the Master of Death. He closed his eyes and held still as Dash dragged him through one of the cracks and he found himself back in the waking world, gasping, his eyes twitching open.
“Harry!”
*
In the end, Ron hadn’t been able to help himself, despite knowing there would probably be nothing to see while Dash was helping Harry. He’d gone back to the fifth-year boys’ bedroom, and was in time to see Harry look up and at him, his face dazed.
Dash was off to the side of the bed now, his head hanging a little as if he was exhausted. Ron glanced at him as he reached over to hug Harry. Dash only bobbed his neck and then went back to what might have been sleep.
“Are you all right? What happened?” Ron asked, and then bit his lip and fell silent over the other questions he would have liked to ask. Harry looked overwhelmed enough trying to answer those two.
“Voldemort somehow created a connection between our minds that was open to me but excluded Dash,” Harry said, after a glance at Dash himself as if to make sure that he was understanding this right. Ron nodded. “He was going to consume me-kill me. And it was also closed to any harm I could have done him.”
“Shit, mate,” Ron said weakly, sitting down on the bed beside Harry. He knew why Harry didn’t want to talk about what had happened in more detail, not wanting to say the word “Horcrux” aloud in a place that might not be secure, but Ron was still shivering imagining what might have happened. “How did Dash get to you?”
Dash said nothing, and neither did Harry for a moment, his eyes going slightly glazed the way they did when he was in mental communion with Dash. Then he shook his head. “I think Voldemort must not have closed all the entrances that our bond can make,” he said.
It sounded like bollocks to Ron, but it was the only answer he suspected he was going to get. He nodded again. “Then how did you get away?”
“The Deathly Hallows showed up and attacked Voldemort.”
Ron stared at him in silence, and Harry got red in the face for a second. “What, don’t you believe me?” he demanded, with a hiss to his voice that told Ron how strongly he was resisting the temptation to speak in Parseltongue.
“Of course I do.” Ron shook his head. “I’m just thinking that nobody else could speak that sentence and have it make sense in their life.”
Harry laughed weakly and leaned back on his pillow. “Well, I didn’t ask them to do that. And I still don’t understand everything that went on completely. But-I think this is the last time that Voldemort is going to do something like this.”
Ron narrowed his eyes. “Are you all right, Harry?”
“Shaken. Still in pain from some of the things he did. Why?”
“Because there’s something you’re not telling me.”
Harry took a deep breath and exchanged a glance with Dash for a second, although how he could when Dash’s eyes were hidden behind hid eyelids was something Ron had never understood. Then Harry murmured, “This is the last time that Voldemort’s going to do something like this, I told you.”
“Yes?”
“The Deathly Hallows attacked his eyes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s blind, Ron. And he hates me so much now that-that it means the next strike is going to be the last one.”
Ron stared at him. Then he said, “Can I go tell people that my best mate blinded You-Know-Who? I think I have bragging rights.”
“Ron.”
Harry sounded annoyed enough to be on the edge of Parseltongue, and Ron raised his hands. “All right. But that’s pretty brilliant, you have to admit.”
Harry rolled his eyes and snuggled further back into the blankets on the bed. “I don’t have to admit anything. I just have to say that this is going to make things harder, and not in a way that we really anticipated.”
“All right.” Ron reached out to touch Harry’s arm, after a glance at Dash to make sure he could. Dash only watched him calmly, with what looked like perfectly ordinary closed eyelids. “But I’m proud of you anyway.”
“Be proud of Dash and the Hallows. They were the ones who came to get me out of there.”
Ron would have said more, but the Hallows manifested over Harry’s bed at that moment in a rain of light and glory, and he never got the chance.
Ron heard gasps from the ones who had followed him back up the stairs, Neville and Dean and Seamus alike, as the Wand and the Stone drifted down to rest on Harry’s bed, one on either side of him. The Cloak appeared at the same time, draped over Harry’s pillow but not turning it invisible, and glowing with the same radiant gold-green that had marked the initial appearance of the Hallows. Harry gaped at them before turning resigned eyes towards their other roommates.
Neville was smiling. Dean looked awed. Seamus had put his wand away, but was glaring at the Wand and the Stone as if he thought they had shown up on purpose like that to disrupt his sleep. Not that anyone had been asleep, Ron thought, and that was what he was going to say if Seamus brought it up later like the git he looked like at the moment.
“And that’s torn it,” Harry muttered, so low that Ron thought he was the only one who heard him. Well, and Dash, of course. And maybe Neville.
“Torn what?” Seamus demanded, which proved that apparently everyone had been near enough to hear it. “What are you actually saying that you’re in charge of, Potter? What is that second wand lying next to you?”
“The Elder Wand,” Ron said, because the secret was going to come out anyway and he thought it would sound more impressive when he said it. Or maybe not, he reflected in irritation as Seamus simply stared at him blankly. “The Deathstick. You know, from the Tale of the Three Brothers? The one that doomed Antioch Peverell?”
Seamus snorted. “Right. Like I’m going to believe that. From now on, leave me out of any adventures you lot have, all right?” And he stalked dramatically across the bedroom, and flung open the curtains of his bed dramatically, and climbed in and lay down, muttering under his breath.
Ron looked at Harry, who had an eyebrow raised. Harry shrugged. Ron sighed. Of course Harry wasn’t going to claim even the portion of glory that was due to him. That just wasn’t the way he was made.
“Is it really?” Neville breathed, and Ron saw that he had drawn closer and was staring at the glowing Wand and Stone with starry eyes.
“Is it what?” Dean asked. “I’ve never heard of the Tale of the Three Brothers.”
Ron smiled and began to tell it, glancing at Harry from the corner of his eye in case he objected. But Harry had lost his glare, and his eyes were fluttering shut. Even as Ron looked at him, he began to snore.
Ron nodded in satisfaction. That was as it should be, and in the meantime, he could get on with spreading the story.
Harry might not like it that much, but he might need it, when it came to getting allies for the war.
Chapter One Hundred and Forty-Seven.
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