[From Litha to Lammas]: Blood of the Wolf, sequel to Instruments of Shadow, gen, 3/3
Part Two.
Title: Blood of the Wolf (3/3)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: None, gen
Content Notes: Major AU (Fleamont Potter lives), angst, violence, torture, gore
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 4400
Summary: AU, sequel to “Instruments of Shadow.” Fleamont Potter goes on protecting his grandson Harry Potter from all sorts of threats, even unexpected ones that show up in the form of old friends and seemingly hopeless infections.
Author’s Notes: This fic, as requested by many people, is part of a series including “Fruit of the Golden Tree” and “Instruments of Shadow,” and so won’t make sense without your having read those first. This is also one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August this year, and will have three parts to be posted over the next few days.
Thank you again for the reviews! This is the end of the story, but it will continue at some point in the future with another story.
Part Three
“No. Not him. Anyone but him.”
Fleamont nodded to Snape as the house-elf took his cloak, and glanced over his shoulder at Sirius. “Do you want your friend to get better or not?”
Sirius shut his mouth with a snap and looked away sullenly. Fleamont had been relentless with him since he had sent the owl to Snape and received an affirmative reply. He’d told Sirius the truth, told him that there was no way for Lupin to survive without a second Potions expert, and that Snape was his choice. Secrets already bound them, secrets that would work better to guarantee Harry’s safety during the process than any amount of Galleons.
Sirius had blurted out the whole sorry tale of how he and Lupin had nearly killed Snape during their fifth year, but Fleamont had just nodded. That was actually another security; Snape would welcome either a means of paying back the debt or a chance to have his two would-be murderers in his debt.
“Fine,” Sirius said, and slouched out of the room.
“Is he going to be a problem?” Snape’s eyes were dark as he watched Sirius go.
Fleamont shook his head. “No more than my grandson. Both of them know to stay out of the potions lab, and I have wards up that will prevent the fumes from leaking out and making them dizzy or sick.” He nodded towards the lab. “Let’s enter, and you can tell me if it’s up to your standards or if you need something else.”
Snape gave him one more suspicious look and then a stiff nod, apparently taking the word of a Potter as it was for once. He walked around the lab with a slow step, his frown increasing as he peered at the cauldrons and the shelves and the vials and the ingredients that Fleamont had waiting, but he made only one specific suggestion when he had come to the end of that walk.
“You will have to add a crystal cauldron.”
“Damn,” Fleamont said softly, the reason why unfolding in his head like the wings of a butterfly. Crystal would chill and slow the first potion that he needed until it was ready, the moment before the other one. “You’re right.” He turned and scribbled down a note to himself so he wouldn’t forget.
“How great is your skill?”
Fleamont glanced at him, then flicked his wand. The wall that separated the lab from the library thinned and vanished for a moment, and Fleamont nodded to the nearest shelf, covered with his hand-bound journals. “I filled those with my notes from the time I left Hogwarts to the time I was in my thirties. The ones on the other side are from my thirties to my sixties.”
Snape was quiet for a moment as Fleamont let the wall come back. “Name one potion you invented beyond that silly hair potion.”
Fleamont smiled a little. “The Blood-Replenisher.”
“But.” Snape appeared on the verge of stuttering for a moment, and then drew himself up. “That was invented by Master Tielhard of the Guild of Potioneers centuries ago.”
Fleamont shook his head. “The reference to the potion in older books is to one that would thicken the blood, make it less likely to bleed out completely when someone had a wound. That was usually given to hemophiliacs. I invented the kind that would introduce new blood into the body.” He looked at the cauldrons. “I’ve unfortunately never tried to clean up after a Blood-Devourer, but what expertise I do have should give us somewhat of an advantage.”
“Why are you not as famous for that as you are for the hair potion?”
Fleamont snorted. “The hair potion was one that would make me money without people deciding I was selfish to keep the secret of brewing it for myself. The Blood-Replenisher is an essential health potion. I would have been an object of suspicion and envy if I hadn’t told others how to brew it, so I released the recipe.”
Snape appeared to be listening to something other than his voice for a moment. Then he nodded .”You know that I’m the one who spread the prophecy about your grandson to the enemy. The Dark Lord.”
Fleamont held his breath for a moment, then nodded back. “I was aware. I didn’t expect you to admit it.” Dumbledore’s mind had been a treasure trove of information, now that Fleamont was holding him on a magical leash.
“Why are you working with me? Why are you allowing me to be around her child, when I’m guilty of that?”
Fleamont stared into Snape’s black eyes and decided they would have to get past this crisis before the man would be of use to him in brewing. “Several reasons. First, I do have need of your expertise. Second, you’re a much better choice than other people who might try to spread the secret around, because you’re already bound to me by the secret of the Dursleys’ murder and your own feelings for Lily. Third, because I wanted you to see the protections around Harry so that you know if you attempt to harm him again, you’ll die.”
“You’ll kill me if you perceive me as a threat to him. You would already have killed me, or done whatever you’ve done to Dumbledore.”
Fleamont concealed a frown. He didn’t want Dumbledore’s changed behavior making other people look in his direction. He would have to question Snape on what he had noticed, and whether it would be visible to other people who hadn’t been as close to the Headmaster. “Yes, I would have.”
“But instead of a threat, I’m-”
“An asset who could also be a threat. Much the way I view Remus Lupin.” Fleamont chuckled at seeing the disgusted expression that crossed Snape’s face. “Come, being compared to the werewolf we’re going to cure shouldn’t be such a terrible experience.”
“Cure.” Snape frowned at him again and looked around the lab. “No one has managed to cure lycanthropy despite centuries of trying.”
“Perhaps they were not who we are.”
*
“Grand?”
Fleamont opened his eyes with a small yawn. He’d fallen asleep in the lab last night, watching over one of the first stages of the potion that would have to be completed first. He turned and smiled at Harry as he came up to the warded door of the lab, Monster pacing behind him. “Hullo, Harry. I’ll join you at breakfast in a moment.”
“Grand, who’s the scary man?”
For a moment, Fleamont thought Remus had somehow got into the house, but then Harry would have been talking about the dead man, either from Monster’s claws or from the wards Fleamont had set up to react to the presence of a Blood-Devourer. He stood up. “His name is Severus Snape. He came with me when we took you from the Muggles. He was a friend of your mother’s.” And an enemy of your father’s. But honestly, Fleamont didn’t see the need to mention that.
Harry nibbled his lip. “He said I had my mum’s eyes.”
“You do.” Fleamont stepped out of the lab and secured the wards with a flick of his wrist just to make sure that they would stand up to repeated magical poking should Harry or Sirius get curious. “I can only tell you a little about her. I’m sorry. Sirius is the one who knows most.”
“Would the scary man know more?”’
“You should call him Mr. Snape, Harry. You wouldn’t want someone to go around calling you the Boy-Who-Lived, after all.”
Harry made a face. He did hate that. “All right,” he said. “But would he know more?”
“He might. I don’t know if he would want to share the stories. But you can ask him.”
“Thanks, Grand.” Harry ran ahead of him down the corridor for a second, Monster traveling up the wall like an extension of Harry’s own shadow. But before they entered the dining room, Harry paused and turned back with a solemn face. “Are you going to cure Mr. Lupin?”
“We’re trying. It’s part of the reason Mr. Snape is here.”
“He-Sirius said that he visited Mr. Lupin in the storage shed yesterday, and Mr. Lupin thinks he’s going to die and shouldn’t be cured. He said that maybe it would be better for everyone if he died.”
Fleamont half-closed his eyes. Yes, it was a good thing that he hadn’t wasted time trying to find out what Lupin’s brewing skills were like. “Well, we’re going to try, Harry. What Mr. Lupin thinks about it is-not irrelevant, but we’re not going to leave him to die just because he wants to.”
“Why would he want to die, Grand?” Harry stopped with his hand on the doorknob of the dining room. “I never wanted to die. Even when I lived with the horrible Muggles, I just wanted someone to come and rescue me from them.”
Fleamont knelt down in front of Harry, gently touching his cheek. “Some people get so sad and sick and upset that they can’t see any other way out of their situation, Harry. Mr. Lupin has gone most of his life thinking that he has to suffer from being a werewolf and that he can’t have friends or live a good life because of it. You have to make some allowances for that. But he’s not going to just die.”
Harry chewed his lip hard enough to make it look like he was pain, but he nodded and opened the door. “Okay.”
Snape was seated on the other side of the dining room table from Sirius, who was glaring at him. But Snape only had eyes for Harry as he walked in and sat down in his usual chair. Harry smiled at him a little and then glanced away.
“Will you tell me about my mum?”
Sirius opened his mouth, then closed it again, although that was because Fleamont was glaring at him over Harry’s head. Snape, meanwhile, nodded and made a noise as if he was swallowing down shards of broken glass.
“Yes, Mr. Potter, I will.”
*
“I thought Monster wouldn’t let me in the house. But I have to be in the house for the final stages of the cleansing?”
Lupin’s face was more sunken than ever, and most of his visible skin had turned grey. Fleamont held his gaze as he waved his wand in a spell that made Lupin’s skin turn translucent. It looked like the Blood-Devourer wasn’t progressing any faster. Lupin must be in horrendous pain, but he bore it without compliant, which was at least one admirable trait. “When that time comes, Monster and Harry and Sirius will be in another house entirely.”
Lupin lowered his head and mumbled something Fleamont couldn’t hear. Fleamont holstered his wand and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“I don’t know why you would ever allow me in Harry’s life at all. I should have refused to listen to Sirius when he found me in Knockturn Alley. I should have refused to come here and endanger Harry.”
“I am now confident that I can find a cure for your Blood-Devourer crisis.” Fleamont folded his arms and stared down at Lupin’s bowed head. “However, I will require you to find a cure for this as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your addiction to self-loathing.”
Lupin recoiled away from him on the bed. “You don’t-you don’t know how hard it’s been-”
“I know a few werewolves, although admittedly many of them have more money than you do.” Fleamont watched Lupin’s left hand, which was creeping along the side of the bed towards him like a vine. “But what worries me more is that you simply collapse into helplessness and idiocy, the way you did when you thought the Blood-Devourer a cure. I had to explain your suicidal impulses to Harry the other day. I would appreciate not having to do that again.”
“I-no one would give me Mind-Healing because-”
“I know. But you won’t have that obstacle any more after we clean the Blood-Devourer out of you. I want you to promise me that you’ll go to Mind-Healing, and that you’ll do your best not to make Harry worry that you’re going to kill yourself.”
Lupin looked away from him. “The legacy of those years as a werewolf is going to be very hard to live with, even if I’m completely cured,” he whispered.
Fleamont nodded. He actually respected Lupin more for not saying that he would be consumed by joy if he was completely cured of his lycanthropy. He knew himself well enough to realize that wasn’t true. “I know. But you’ll still need Mind-Healing.”
Lupin fidgeted on the bed. “I don’t want pity.”
“Then go to a Mind-Healer,” Fleamont said coldly. “Because, I promise, if you remain here and act as you have been, pity is all you’re ever going to get.”
*
“And this-will work?”
Fleamont glanced up from the spellbook he’d been reading. Snape was staring at the crystal cauldron that glimmered and roiled gently with the Stasis Potion he’d just added more powdered Amanita to. It looked like grey sludge, though Fleamont knew it would be as crystal as the cauldron by the end of the final stage.
“Yes,” Fleamont said, snapping his book shut. He needed to practice the wand movements and incantations now, and reading about it would do him no more good. “I know of no other reason why it should not. Do you?”
“No. Reading about the theory makes it sound…sound.” Snape’s lips crimped as if he despised himself for his involuntary pun. “I simply wonder why, if it can be worked out this way, no one ever tried it before to cure a werewolf.”
Fleamont shrugged. “Probably no one had the combination of sympathy for a werewolf, a werewolf with a different deadly blood-borne disease, and the Potions skills that we do before. After all, my spell is hardly one that you would usually cast if you had sympathy for a werewolf.”
“Or anyone,” Snape said, eyeing him sideways.
Fleamont raised his eyebrows. “Are you surprised to find me casting Dark Arts? I believe that your impression of the Potter family as one that takes care of itself is one that you must have had confirmed numerous times by my son.”
Snape sneered. “All James Potter cared for when I knew him was himself.”
Fleamont nodded, unsurprised. “He was a spoiled adolescent. He was born long after Euphemia and I had given up thinking we would have children.” Sadness blew through him like a gentle breeze at the thought of Euphemia. He glanced again at his own cauldron and noticed the sullen red glow coming from it. He went over and added more marigold petals, shredding them in with the ease of long practice. “Not that that excuses some of the actions he must have taken, but I would have protected him in the same way.”
“He never used Dark Arts that I knew of. He despised me for doing so.”
Fleamont shook his head. “He wasn’t going to use them in front of you, perhaps, but he did use them. I suspect that some of the protections on the house in Godric’s Hollow were Dark Arts.”
“You couldn’t check?” Snape’s left hand clenched and wrung. Fleamont suspected the Mark on the arm was bothering him.
“By the time I got there, six years had passed. There were no traces recent enough to check.”
Snape closed his eyes and nodded. Then he faced the cauldrons again. “Perhaps two more days, and they should be ready.”
“Yes,” Fleamont said, and returned to shredding marigold petals. If this was the end of the heart-to-heart conversations he had with Snape, he wouldn’t be displeased.
*
“What you want to do is insane.”
Fleamont studied Sirius, more worried about his low, thick tone of voice than he would have been if Sirius was screaming and shouting. “I explained to you how this is going to work, Sirius. We have no other choice if we want to save Remus. Otherwise, he’ll simply have toxic sludge for blood, and die within a week. I’ve left it as long as I could to give the potions time to mature, and to see if there was some problem with the solution that would come to my attention. Nothing has.”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.” Sirius stood up, trembling. They were in the sitting room where Fleamont and Harry had been when Sirius burst in to give them the news about Lupin, but Sirius hadn’t removed his eyes from Fleamont. “Except for the part where you’re going to kill my best friend.”
“I thought James was your best friend.”
Sirius flinched and turned away to stare out the window. There was a fine evening out there, with only a light rain and plenty of moonbeams, but Sirius wrapped his arms around himself as though he was back in Azkaban. “Don’t throw that in my face.”
“Then don’t act as though I’m killing Remus, Sirius. You know very well I’m doing no such thing.”
“There has to be something else we could do.”
“Perhaps he could have simply lived as a normal werewolf with your company on full moon nights if he hadn’t been so stupid as to get himself infected with a Blood-Devourer.”
“It wasn’t stupidity! It was desperation!”
“Then believe that this is as well,” Fleamont snapped. “I wouldn’t do it if I thought it couldn’t work, Sirius. And I wouldn’t do it if Remus was someone random. But he’s your friend, and he’s someone who could be an important person in Harry’s life.”
Sirius blinked and turned around. “You know, I don’t believe that?”
“That he could be an important person in Harry’s life?” Fleamont arched his eyebrows. “Well, you know your own friend best, but I did think-”
“That you’re doing it for that reason.” Sirius folded his arms. “I think you’re doing it for Harry, not me, and because Remus is dangerous as he is now. You’re afraid that Harry might somehow get around Monster, or Remus would find a way to scratch him. You wouldn’t care at all if Remus was my friend but didn’t want to be a sort of honorary uncle to Harry.”
Fleamont waited a moment, to see if anything else would come out, and then nodded. “You’re right. I wouldn’t.”
“What happened to compassion? What happened to-”
Fleamont laughed, and Sirius shut up, with a flinch that was subtle but which Fleamont had no trouble seeing. “Yes, of course, bemoan the disappearance of virtues that you never practiced yourself, Sirius,” he said. “You certainly never bestowed compassion on anyone at Hogwarts who wasn’t a friend of yours, or anyone doing something you disapproved of. My son was the same way for too many years. But he didn’t know it, and when he did realize it, he grew up. I, on the other hand, have never pretended to be anything other than what I am. I don’t love anyone other than my grandson, and those who want to come near him come under my protection, but it’s for Harry’s sake, not because I’m some benevolent charity.”
“You don’t feel anything for the burden Remus lived with for so many years?”
“Not when it’s combined with his cowardice.”
Sirius didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Fleamont turned away.
*
“You can’t really be ready,” Lupin whispered.
Fleamont closed his eyes, concentrating on the movements of the spell and the sound of the second potion within its cauldron. It was rose-red now, but swelling closer and closer to the true crimson that it needed to be. He could hear Snape shifting his balance near his own cauldron, the one that would create the stasis.
“Where are Sirius and Harry?”
“Elsewhere,” Fleamont murmured. “You don’t need to concern yourself with them.” He had sent them to Godric’s Hollow, and placed a ward on Sirius that would make it impossible for him to Apparate back to Potter Place or cross the boundaries of the grounds in his Animagus form. Sirius didn’t need to know it was there unless he tried to sneak back. Fleamont hoped he wouldn’t have to contend with it.
“I wish they could be here.”
“Shut up, Lupin, for the love of Merlin,” Snape snarled.
Fleamont opened his eyes. The half-full moon was shining in through the window. The first cauldron gleamed with crystal, the second perfect blood-red.
It was time.
Fleamont whipped in a complete circle, seeing, from the corner of his eye, Snape floating his own cauldron with the crystal potion into the air. Fleamont’s wand danced at ease in his hands, and he roared, “Exsanguinere!”
As his wand came down, all the blood burst out of Remus Lupin’s body in a cloud of glittering red mist.
Snape’s glittering crystal potion draped Lupin’s body in a waterfall less than a second later.
Lupin froze, in agony and screaming and dying and everything else. Fleamont stepped back with a long breath and then turned to face the ball of red in the air that held the Blood-Devourer. He lifted his wand and said softly, “Obcido.”
There was a long screaming moment when the ball seemed to be trying to head towards him, or towards Snape, but the spell gripped it and choked it and crumpled up in a great grey fist, and then the blood and the Blood-Devourer were gone.
Fleamont faced his own cauldron and conducted his potion into the air with careful flips of his wand. He could see Snape watching him avidly. Probably taking notes in his head, Fleamont thought. Well, if he ever did this in the future, or something similar, he would want to know how to do it.
Fleamont arranged the blood around the crystal potion containing Lupin and took a moment to rest. Then he nodded to Snape.
Snape said a single, flat, “Finite,” and the crystal potion melted away and released Lupin. And Fleamont slammed the Blood Replacement Potion into him before he could die from lack of blood.
Lupin screamed and screamed. Fleamont had expected that, and it was another reason to be glad that he had sent Sirius and Harry away. He watched coolly, aware that Snape was throwing up at his side, as the blood sped through Lupin’s body, catching up his organs, curling around his brain, interacting with his heart and lungs.
Lupin almost died three times, twice from his heart stopping and once because all his veins tried to collapse and force the blood back out. Fleamont ruthlessly started his heart again, and forced the Blood Replacement Potion back in, and cast healing charms in a battle with the deep exhaustion he could feel creeping up in him.
It didn’t matter. He refused to give in to it, the same way that he refused to let Lupin die.
At last, Lupin lay on the floor, breathing on his own, his eyes still shut. Fleamont hit him with a monitoring charm that would tell him if Lupin started to die again, and one that would keep his bodily processes going until Fleamont could respond to the charm, one sometimes used to keep Dementor victims alive after the shock of the Kiss. Then he fell back on the couch and stared out the window.
There was no longer a moon visible there.
Snape cleared his throat. “Do you want me to cast the Diagnostic Charm?”
Fleamont nodded. He was no longer capable of it, and suspected Snape knew that, but from the cautious look he gave Fleamont as he drew his own wand, the bastard wouldn’t take advantage of it. He had to know that Fleamont’s revenge would be far worse than any minute satisfaction he might get in striking back at a Potter.
The diagnostic washed from Snape’s wand and across Lupin like a soft wave of blue light. And it remained blue, tracing the length of Lupin’s body and fading from sight.
“Merlin,” Snape said simply.
Lupin registered as completely human. He was no longer a werewolf.
*
“I am going to leave Britain tomorrow.”
Fleamont nodded without taking his eyes from the window. On the wide grounds, Lupin was teaching Harry simple spells that involved protection from Dark creatures. Monster lounged next to the foot of Lupin’s chair, completely unconcerned. Sirius was watching them both with a grin that seemed likely to connect with itself on the other side of his head. “You must do as you think best.”
“Would I be-allowed to return again?”
Fleamont glanced over his shoulder. “As long as you can do so safely and with no intent to harm Harry. Come and visit him and tell him stories of his mother.”
“I meant,” Snape said, and stared out the window himself for a moment, “to collaborate on a cure for lycanthropy.”
Fleamont turned slowly. Snape had his hands clenched on top of each other, his head bowed so that it would have been hard to meet his eyes even if he was inclined to let that happen. Fleamont considered him long enough for Snape’s shoulders to tense.
But Fleamont only said, “I had not anticipated you would want to do such a thing. I was led to believe that you hated werewolves in general, not just Remus Lupin.”
For a moment, Snape’s head jerked up, as though he was about to spit some insult. Then he stared at the floor and said, “The reasons I had to hate him have changed. And he has become a cringing thing it is difficult to do anything but feel disgust for.”
“And werewolves in general?”
“If I could drive the disease away forever,” Snape said, and finally met Fleamont’s eyes, “what reason would I have to fear?”
Fleamont smiled a little. Working to destroy a nightmare, he could understand. It was essentially what he had done when he had sacrificed Pettigrew. “Very well. Leave me some means to contact you that would be more secure than an owl, and we will consider that.”
The door of the drawing room banged open as Snape nodded. Fleamont turned around in time to receive a whirlwind of arms and legs. He went down to hug Harry, and Snape slipped out of the room behind Harry’s shoulder.
“Grand! Grand! Did you see it? I stole Remus’s wand from him!”
Fleamont laughed and complimented his grandson, but he also bowed his head so that he could close his eyes and feel the beating of Harry’s strong, uncorrupted heart against his arms.
He had won, again. And for Harry’s sake, for Harry’s enjoyment, for Harry’s continued safety, he would burn far more of the world than a Blood-Devourer.
The End.