Chapter Fifty of 'Wolf's Choice'- All Fire and Light
Chapter Forty-Nine.
Title: Wolf’s Choice (50/60)
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 Fifty-All Light and Fire
This is the night when all choices end, Lucius Malfoy is thinking as he watches his lord clothe himself with skin, and blood, and flesh, taken from the Potter child. Lucius’s job is to renew each body part as soon as it is taken, so that Potter will not die and end the ritual too soon.
His wife was under the mistaken impression that he had a choice other than to obey the Dark Lord. His son thought that he could follow Potter and make some sort of-name for himself that way. Lucius is skeptical of what exactly Draco thought he was doing, but then, he doesn’t need to worry about it any longer, or the justifications that his son might come up with.
This ends. Potter dies this night, when the Dark Lord has been fully restored, and Draco will learn to obey.
Lucius looks at the boy with a critical eye, trying to find any sign of why he might have been worth following, in those last moments when he does have to consider Draco’s justifications. But there’s nothing. Potter is a shivering mess, blood-smeared to the point that he looks like he’s been dipped in mud, although since Lucius keeps closing his wounds before he can bleed out, one might not realize that it was all his. His eyes are glazed, filled with pain.
Lucius shakes his head. He would have killed himself before letting his body be used for renewal this way. Potter is weak, his Mudblood mother’s taint coming through.
“Lucius.”
Lucius turns at once, sinking to one knee. “My lord.”
Lord Voldemort gives a low laugh. He is standing on two legs again, Lucius is glad to see, and the skin that envelops him is soft and pale, a few shades off from Potter’s-probably the shade Potter’s is when not exposed to the sun. His eyes are bright and burning red, but then, he’s consumed none of Potter’s vitreous humor. He has a mounded nose, more like a snake’s snout than anything else, and his tongue is visibly forked, but to Lucius, those are only signs of how different his Lord is from mortal men, and how proud he is to serve such a one.
“I think I have little need of Mr. Potter now.” The Dark Lord feels for a moment at his face, touches his fingers with his tongue, and then turns his head dismissively. “Well. I would like to have his tongue, to give myself the choice to assume a more normal human shape when required. Take it before we proceed to the sacrifice.”
Lucius nods. The altar, which he constructed of wood and deer antlers because the Dark Lord has spent the most time creating his body of those creatures before now, is waiting on the other side of a row of hemlock trees. He draws his wand.
At that moment, two things happen.
The sky turns red and gold, so brilliant with light that Lucius leans back and stares upwards. It looks as if someone has cast the False Sunrise Charm, but ten times more strongly than Lucius has ever heard of it being required, even when defeating an entire covey of vampires.
And at the same moment, Harry Potter cries, “Chaos, no!”
Lucius finds himself turning to look apprehensively up into the sky. Who is Chaos? There were rumors about someone named that at the school, he thinks now, but it seems a ridiculous name even for a pure-blood Gryffindor student, and-
His brain is stumbling so badly from the complicated spells he’s cast that he doesn’t understand until she appears above him.
And even then, it takes him a long moment to realize that the glittering figure made of red sparks and floating pieces of flesh heading down towards him is a dragon.
*
Harry watches the sky, heartbroken. He knew the minute Chaos appeared that she has somehow used her magic to turn herself into an adult. And maybe even more than that. She looks as if she’s made of pure light, like Fawkes when he came to help Harry in the Chamber of Secrets.
She’s sacrificed herself or murdered herself, or something. And all for nothing. Because Voldemort is going to kill her, and that was the one thing Harry was comforting himself with, that all of his friends were too far away to be hurt.
“Lucius!” Voldemort snaps, and aims his wand. Malfoy is already standing up, his face turned towards Chaos and his mouth open. Harry doesn’t know what he’s going to say. Another spell, he thinks, he’s going to hurt her.
And that infuriates Harry. Of all the things that they could do, they’re not going to hurt her.
He breaks out of the haze of despair and totters forwards. He can’t stand. His muscles are whole, barely, after the healing spells that Malfoy keeps casting on him, but he can’t walk.
Fury replaces magic, or feeds it, as Harry clenches his hands and calls all the wandless magic he’s practiced to himself.
The air blazes and hammers around him, and Voldemort spins to face him, staring. Harry doesn’t bother hesitating. He doesn’t bother telling himself that this is impossible, even though he thinks that maybe it is. He screams with the effort as his magic leaps out of him, and a recently-opened wound on his chest starts bleeding again.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except that they aren’t going to hurt her.
Voldemort’s wand rips out of his hand and flies straight to Harry. Harry stands up-he doesn’t know how, a moment ago he couldn’t-and stomps down his foot. That shouldn’t work, either, except maybe to keep the wand from flying back to Voldemort if he knows wandless magic, too.
But it does. Power is surging through Harry’s body, his muscles quivering in outrage at the way Voldemort has stolen from him, the way he’s going to keep stealing, and Harry hates it, and it’s not going to happen-
Voldemort’s wand shatters in two.
Voldemort lets out a shriek at the same time, the way he was prone to doing when Harry dreamed about him. Harry, meanwhile, drops to an exhausted kneel. Maybe he isn’t going to be able to get away. Maybe he’ll die here.
But he already thought he was going to do that. He turns his head, wondering if he’ll have to Summon Malfoy’s wand.
*
Lucius does not understand exactly what he is looking at. A dragon, but one made of fire and light, like a phoenix? Is this an illusion that someone has sent to distract him and his lord while they sneak in to rescue Potter?
But Lucius is confident that no one except him and his lord knows where Potter is, and that means-
That means that this dragon is real.
Lucius rolls back out of the way as the beast lands in front of him, making the trees around her sway and bend, but not exactly in the way they would have if she was made of honest flesh. That much, Lucius keeps repeating to himself, in order to hold at bay the terror that is starting to yammer in the back of his mind.
The dragon turns and faces him. It is like being close to a wildfire, as she bends down a long golden neck, but there are ways to defeat a wildfire. Lucius lowers his wand and spreads his hands, as if surrendering, while he reaches slowly into his robe pocket for a potion that he brewed against the chance that the Headmistress would manage to track the Portkey that brought Potter to them.
The dragon stares at him. Her eyes are pure flames, no iris and no pupil, But Lucius thinks that she must understand human gestures thanks to living around humans, and she hasn’t attacked yet. He sighs.
“Good dragon, good girl,” he murmurs.
The dragon sniffs, once. Then she turns, flowing through the air, and arranges her not exactly solid bulk between him and Potter. Lucius doesn’t care, because the potion is going to buy him a chance to get away and continue to serve his lord, and the boy is going to die here in this forest clearing no matter what happens.
“Good girl,” Lucius repeats, and manages to uncork the potion flask. There is poison seething inside that is of a potency only a little less than a basilisk’s. He raises the flask, expecting to see those flaming eyes follow it. Dragons are predators, and predators are attracted to motion, of course. Except for pure-bloods, who know better.
The dragon tilts her head as if intrigued by the smell of the poison. Then she unhinges her jaws like a snake. Lucius finds himself wondering if perhaps she might be subject to the Dark Lord, who can speak to serpents. He has never heard of a dragon who was, but on the other hand, his Lord is also unprecedented in the world.
The dragon breathes.
It is a moment of searing agony, a subjective, smeared pinpoint of blazing infinity, as her fire vaporizes Lucius Malfoy’s body.
*
Harry watches Malfoy die with grief in his heart. He’s mourning for Chaos, who had to do this. He’s mourning for himself and the sight that will be in front of his eyes for the rest of his life.
But most of all, he’s mourning for Draco, because if Harry does live past this night, he’s going to have to tell him what part Chaos played in his father’s end.
“Potter.”
It’s Voldemort. Harry turns around, shuffling in a crouch this time, and Chaos moves with him. She’s stepping delicately, her fire tamed in some way Harry can’t understand so it doesn’t burn the grass or trees, but still so half-solid that she can bend around obstacles like flames do.
“You will not get away with this,” Voldemort says, and his tongue flickers out between his lips, from the snake-like snout his face projects forwards into. Harry stares at him dispassionately, so far beyond fear that all he can think is Voldemort won’t take Harry’s tongue now the way he planned on. “You will die tonight.”
Whether or not Chaos really understands Parseltongue, she understands the threatening tone. She coughs out a blaze of fire, and Harry watches it surround Voldemort, licking and dancing along his skin.
Voldemort throws back his head and laughs. “She cannot harm me, Potter! She wishes not to harm you, and my flesh is yours! Anything that you are invulnerable to, I am!”
Harry just nods, not because he knew that, but because it would have been too lucky a solution for Voldemort to die like that. He stands up and braces a hand, flinching, on Chaos’s side. But it feels like nothing more than the particularly warm side of a stone bath he might feel at home.
Home. Harry wishes, fiercely, in that moment, for Severus’s house, or Sirius and Remus’s. For his guardians, holding him and coddling him like he’s just a normal child. Home.
Chaos turns and loops her neck down so that they’re eye-to-eye, or eye-to-flame. Harry stares at them and projects the image as hard as he can. He doesn’t know if she can understand him this way. Hell, he doesn’t know exactly what she did to herself, or why. But this is what he wants, so he thinks it.
Chaos turns and extends a long foreleg. Harry begins to crawl up it, hesitantly. Chaos, meanwhile, turns and bares her fangs at Voldemort-which are really flashes of white flame that manifest like teeth around her tongue-when he starts to follow Harry.
“You will not survive!” Voldemort proclaims, and raises a hand. Harry braces himself for the wave of wandless magic he’s sure is coming.
And maybe it does, but if so, Chaos’s glowing black-and-red neck and horns are in the way. She sets all four legs and lets her tail swish and roars, a sound so loud that it’s like being in a huge tunnel with a train coming through. Then she breathes.
Harry wonders for a moment why, since she already knows that she can’t hurt Voldemort that way and she’s not that dumb. But then he sees the cracked pieces of Voldemort’s wand go up in flames, and nods as he makes it to a broad place on Chaos’s back, a dip between her shoulder blades, and crouches down. Chaos’s wings rise to shield him.
“You cannot stop me!”
Harry’s plans at the moment don’t include stopping Voldemort, they just include surviving. But he remembers Severus teaching him once not to slow down and say something like that in a desperate situation, so he just continues to cling to Chaos’s part-fire-part-flesh shoulder, and then she rises from a standing position.
She couldn’t do that a day ago. She couldn’t fly at all a day ago. Harry lowers his head and buries his face against her neck, already afire himself with the idea of what he’ll be losing.
“Potter!”
The voice fades away beneath them as they soar. Harry continues to cling to Chaos and feels numbness sweep over him. He faced everything that he did tonight, everything, and nothing prepared him for it.
That he’s alive is something like a miracle. A dragon miracle.
*
Chaos swoops down to land outside the great gates of the school, on the road to Hogsmeade. Harry knows why, or foresees why, and he slowly slides down her leg, continuing to hold onto her for as long as he can. His breath fills his own ears, and he turns to her and swallows, speaking in Parseltongue even though she won’t understand that any better than she really does English.
“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?”
Chaos bows her head, her tongue flickering out into the air. Harry feels a swift little burn, like a bite, on his cheek. He suspects that she’s already losing her ability to not hurt him. What she did-
He doesn’t know the name for it, or what it costs, not like Charlie would. But he’s sure that she can’t come back from it. She did something desperate, and there’s a price that has to be paid for that.
“I wish there was something I could do,” he whispers, and his eyes fill with tears that he’s glad no one is there to see. It’s not his pride. It just feels too private to share with anyone at the moment.
Chaos steps back and, for a moment, seems to concentrate on the grass in front of her. Harry is wise enough to move back again when she breathes for the third time that night, a pinpoint line of white light that looks like a Muggle laser and Harry has to hide his eyes from. When Harry can look again, there’s something as bright as the fire lying in the grass.
Chaos gives a low rumble that seems to start in the far corners of the world and race towards them. Harry slowly leans in and extends his hand. The light continues, but the heat has faded from whatever it is.
“For me?” he whispers.
Chaos gives an impatient twitch of her tail, and Harry bends down and picks the thing up. It’s a tiny crystal globe, faceted like the geode he remembers a Muggle primary school teacher showing him once. There are flickers of scarlet and gold in the center, looking more like Fawkes than like Chaos’s fire.
“What is it meant to do?” Harry asks. He’s never seen anything that looked like this before, except maybe a crystal ball, but he’s pretty sure that isn’t what this is.
Chaos gestures with one claw, and Harry imitates her without thinking much about it. The crystal rests against his chest for a second, and he realizes that the warmth beaming from it is like the warmth from Chaos when she rests against his side on his bed.
She’s giving me this because she’s never going to lie like this with me again.
Harry blinks steadily, until he can actually see Chaos, and he reaches out and lets his hand hover just above her leg. He’s already sure that he shouldn’t touch her, with her fire growing worse and worse. “Thank you. I-I’m going to miss you. Good-bye, Chaos.”
Chaos snorts once, catching him in a gust of gentle breath, and drapes her neck and wings over him in high arches without actually touching him. Then she backs away, and lifts straight up from the ground the way she did when they were standing in the forest.
Harry watches her go, clutching his crystal. She doesn’t whirl and fly away towards the distant dragon preserve he assumes is waiting for her. Instead, she bursts apart into an enormous wheel of light that spreads out like a firework, glowing white and gold, from horizon to horizon.
Harry sinks to his knees. She’s gone. Not just flown away or changed so that she can’t stay with him, but gone entirely, to the same place that light travels when it fades into darkness, to the place that fire goes when it goes out.
The grief thunders through him, and it’s worse than the pain he felt after Lucius had finished skinning him and restoring him, and his insides feel like they’re melting into black goo. He doesn’t even know if he’s crying. He just kneels there, and then he stands up and totters towards Hogwarts.
It seems very important to go towards it on two feet, for some reason. If he falls over, then someone will think him weak. It’s important to Harry that other people think him strong, even though he can’t remember the reason.
*
Severus was moving towards the gates even before he saw that corona of light expand across the sky. And now he’s running faster, because he can see a point of light on the path to Hogsmeade, and it’s moving and bobbing towards them. That’s good enough for Severus, even though it’s a much harsher white than a Lumos Charm, rather like all the brilliance of a star condensed down to a point.
Harry hobbles into sight, and Severus casts a Feather-Light Charm with one hand and scoops him up with the other arm. Harry’s legs keep moving for a second, as though he doesn’t realize that he’s been picked up. Then he turns his head.
Severus recoils from just a glimpse of the dark place Harry has gone-has gone to and survived.
“She gave up her fire for me,” Harry whispers.
And then he begins to cry, as hard as though his nerves are burning, and Severus turns and strides towards the hospital wing.
Chapter Fifty-One.
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