Chapter Twelve of 'Leopard's Choice'- Destroying
Chapter Eleven.
Chapter One.
Title: Leopard’s Choice (12/60)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Mentions of canon background pairings, otherwise gen
Content Notes: Angst, AU (Harry Sorted into Slytherin at the end of second year), violence, gore, torture, present tense
Rating: R (for violence)
Summary: Sequel to Wolf’s Choice. Harry enters his fifth year with the Ministry demanding he retract his stories of Voldemort’s return, his allies demanding sacrifices he may not want to make, and the world becoming sharper with every breath.
Author’s Notes: This is the sequel to Other People’s Choices and Wolf’s Choice, and the third part of the Choices series. Seriously, don’t try to read this without having read the other stories first. I anticipate this being 60 chapters, like the others in the series. Also, please take the violence warning seriously. Like OoTP, this fic will get considerably darker than the others.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twelve-Destroying
“I don’t-don’t know how it happened. I thought I’d secured the wards against Peter entering.”
Harry starts to reach out to Sirius from the couch he and Theo are sitting in the drawing room, hating to see him in such pain, but Theo nudges him sharply in the ribs. Harry glares at him. Theo shakes his head.
Theo is probably doing it because he thinks that Sirius doesn’t deserve sympathy, but there’s something to be said about letting him get everything out first. Harry settles back with a sigh, and Sirius goes stumbling on through his confession.
“I was sure I had everything right. The Black wards would prevent everyone except family members and people who were our allies and friends from coming in. But then that happened with Bellatrix, and they weren’t strong enough to withstand Voldemort, and it turned out that I had to revoke the permission for allies and friends specifically. My father invited Peter here one summer. That’s why he could enter.” Sirius takes a deep breath and focuses on Harry, his hands shaking slightly. “I’m sorry. I took back the permission. Please don’t tell Snape.”
Harry has been opening his mouth, but he closes it now and looks closely at Sirius. Sirius seems to have more sweat on his forehead than he should. Harry shakes his head a little. “But I have to tell Professor Snape.”
“I’m afraid he would prevent you from coming back to Grimmauld Place-”
“And maybe he should, with the amount of intruders you’ve had.” Theo’s voice is precise and cold. “Stop telling my friend to not tell one of his guardians about something, Black. I would have told Professor Snape myself if Harry did make that absurd promise.”
Harry frowns at Theo. “I thought you liked Sirius better than that. He’s the one tutoring you in your Animagus training.”
“Unlike you,” Theo says, with a single glance at Harry that makes Harry wince from how cutting it is, “I’m capable of thinking people that I associate with are dangerous when they make dangerous mistakes.”
“What do you want to not tell Snape, Nott?”
Theo and Harry both stare at Sirius, this time. He looks grim, but also as if he assumes that Theo is going to agree. Harry finds his voice first. “I already said I was going to tell him, Sirius!”
“And I think you shouldn’t.” Sirius tries to give him a cocky grin, but it dies in the face of Harry’s incredulous stare. He leans back with a sigh against the couch behind him. “Come on, Harry, it isn’t going to change a lot, is it? Whatever Peter was looking for here, he didn’t find it. We’re going to make sure he doesn’t come back. He was more of a danger to Nott than you, given that Nott was the only one who came into contact with him.”
“Harry is going to tell Professor Snape.” Theo’s voice is as distant and cold as Harry thinks Sirius’s void magic must feel.
Sirius glances at him. “It’s not your decision. It’s Harry’s. And I already told you that I was prepared to offer you certain things so that you wouldn’t.”
“It’s Harry’s decision,” Theo agrees. “And mine.”
Sirius shakes his head. “And you don’t care at all about Harry being separated from me? From Lupin?” He pauses, as if he’s struggling against something choking him, and then adds, “You don’t care at all about giving up on your Animagus training?”
“I care more about Harry being safe.”
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here.”
Harry didn’t know his voice would go that deep, and he can’t blame them when they both start and look at him. He holds his breath for a long second, and then exhales and says, “It’s my decision, yeah. And I’m going to tell Severus. But I’m going to tell him in a way that he’ll let me come back to Grimmauld Place.”
Sirius laughs briefly, sounding for a moment the way he did when he was newly-escaped from Azkaban. “There’s no way to do that.”
“Watch me,” Harry retorts, and stands. Theo moves with him at once, smoothly, and Harry doesn’t miss the fact that Theo is stepping so that he shields Harry’s back from anyone who would strike at him there, like Sirius is in a position to do.
Harry turns his head to glare at Theo, good and hard.
Theo only smiles faintly back at him, his gaze clear and proud. Harry doesn’t even want to know why he’s proud. They go upstairs to pack.
*
Severus does not know how he’s remembering to breathe. Some part of him turned cold and crystalline the moment he heard Harry’s story about Pettigrew, and nothing can unfreeze it. He sits there with his hands clenching and then opening, and he’s not telling them to do so. It’s involuntary.
“Severus.”
Harry’s voice is calm, and he puts a hand on Severus’s knee as if he thinks that he’s going to have to stop him from springing up and going through the Floo to murder Sirius Black. There is no danger of that. Severus would wait until Harry was firmly asleep, preferably with a potion of some sort in his system.
And he will have to wait until his body calms down.
“Sirius didn’t mean to,” Harry says calmly. “He forgot that his father gave permission for Pettigrew to be there. It was a mistake, not something he did because he was trying to prove I was a Gryffindor or something.”
“Do you think that matters?” Severus whispers. “How much would that comfort me if his mistake meant you died?”
“But I didn’t.” Harry leans back on his stool to survey Severus critically. “Come on, you’re smarter than this,” he adds, so unexpectedly that Severus can only stare at him. “You know that you can’t blame someone for things they didn’t do. Sirius is sorry.” Harry starts to add something else, then shakes his head. “And he’s sorry for exposing me to Pettigrew at all. But he didn’t get near me. He didn’t harm me.”
“Not for lack of trying, or because Black stood in his way.” Severus sits up, trying to look more like an adult and less like someone who might need to be put in the Janus Thickey Ward. “From what you told me, young Mr. Nott is the one who interfered.”
“Does that matter, as long as someone stood in the way?” Harry gives him a long, calm look. “Sirius is going to put the same wards on the house that you’ll put up, the ones that respond to rats specifically.”
“How did you know that I was going to put those up?” Severus demands. It’s an inane question, which he knows the minute he asks it. But it’s also true that he said nothing about that. He hasn’t said much since they began this conversation, honestly.
“It’s the natural next step, and unless they’re up, then you can’t be sure the house is much safer than Grimmauld Place.” Harry raises an eyebrow at him. “And because you and Sirius have this weird competitive streak over keeping me safe…”
“This is the second time in less than a week that you’ve been in danger at his house!”
Harry sighs and nods. “Yes. And it’s not going to happen again.”
“Unless he discovers another hole in the wards. Which he’s probably going to, at this rate.” Severus closes his eyes and tries desperately to get himself under control. At least his hands have stopped trembling.
“Sirius wants to go through the wards thoroughly and make sure no more weaknesses exist that our enemies could use. That’s one of the reasons that he’s agreed I’ll stay here for a week and won’t come to his house for a while…”
“He agreed, did he? How gracious.”
“Listen,” Harry says, and he sounds weary enough that Severus opens his eyes and focuses on his ward. Harry is giving him an unimpressed glance. “He made a mistake. So did you, before I was Sorted into Slytherin, and even afterwards. I’m not interested in holding either of you responsible for them to the point of screaming at you. So could you stop sounding as though you think Sirius did this on purpose?”
Severus wrestles his emotions back under control, although mostly because he knows he’s contributing to Harry’s distress if he doesn’t. In the end, he nods.
And at least Harry will be home for a week and safe from whatever stupid plan Black thinks up next. It won’t prevent Severus from screaming at him through the Floo, but he doesn’t need to make the mutt sorry he exists.
“Good.” Harry stands up and comes over to hug Severus, briefly enough that he’s just sitting there in surprise by the time Harry moves back again. “And you should probably talk to Theo before he explodes.”
“Because of what?” Severus works his tongue and teeth around the words, managing to force out the ones he wants. It takes far more effort than it should, but that’s not something that he intends to reveal to anyone.
“Because Sirius tried to bribe him not to tell you, and Theo doesn’t think I should be anywhere near Sirius or Grimmauld Place.” Harry rolls his eyes slightly. “I don’t know if it’s the effect of that spell you worked to link our dreams together or what, but he’s really bloody protective.”
Harry has walked to the far side of the room before Severus can get his mind back on track. “You timed that revelation on purpose,” he says, and Harry stops, but doesn’t turn around to look at him for a second. “You told me about Black doing that only after you’d-hugged me.”
He mutters the last words like a child, something he’s not proud of, but the look Harry tosses him over his shoulder is childish, too. But at least a sparkling, mischievous kind of childishness, which is something he’s seen so rarely on Harry’s face that he’s stunned into silence again.
“After two years in Slytherin, I suppose that I’ve learned something,” Harry says, and winks, and departs with a swagger to his walk that Severus can’t bring himself to regret.
*
“Concentrate on the image of the snake that we talked about.”
Harry nods and doesn’t open his eyes. He’ll have to learn how to do this with his eyes open in battle, as Lyassa has forcefully told him more than once, but it doesn’t mean that he can do it right now. And he needs more practice.
“Do you see it? How deep the red of its scales is? How deep the black outlines of the scales?”
Harry nods again, slowly. The image appears clearer and sharper as he concentrates, and he is concentrating hard. Sweat slips down his forehead, and his breathing has sped up to the point that it sounds harsh and hoarse in his own ears.
“Good. Now I want you to let the image of the snake go as hard as you can.”
Harry whips towards the center of the rug near the hearth where he and Lyassa have been practicing the fiercer magic that comes from the Speakers’ knowledge of Parseltongue. Harry’s got very good at the spell to repair it.
Not that he’s needed the repair charm much for the aftereffects of this spell. He still hasn’t mastered it-
But then that doesn’t matter, as he watches the sharp image of black-and-red fire burst into being in the center of the rug. It only burns there for a moment, shearing the air apart, transforming the rug into a maelstrom of fiery serpent. Then Harry loses his grip on it, and the fire winks out, and the rug is smoldering and Harry is sitting on the floor, even though he doesn’t remember dropping.
“You made one like me!”
Lion is bouncing in place on Harry’s shoulder, his wings fanning the air. Harry strokes his side for a second, and yawns, weariness sweeping through his body. “Not like you. It didn’t have wings.”
“But it’s real! It blazed in the world! Like me!”
Harry stares at Lion, and then turns back to Lyassa, who’s in her half-human form, swaying quietly as she looks down at the burn in the rug with a slight smile on her face. “What does he mean? I thought the serpents that you’ve been teaching me to conjure were all real?”
Lyassa looks up at him, her tail rustling for a moment and making the usual rasping noise it does on the stone floor not covered by the rug. “He means that you were creating a possible permanent effect. The serpents you conjure come from nothing and go back to nothing when you’re done with them. The serpent that you’re learning to form now, when you’re more adept at it, will transform anyone and anything it touches into a fiery serpent, and it will last. You can take them as pets, or put them out with water if you want, but they will not simply fade when you have no more need of them, any more than Lion does.”
Harry opens his mouth, then closes it. He thought he was learning to fling fire, which he didn’t mind, because it’s a pretty good battle tactic. He didn’t know that what he was learning was essentially a form of wandless battle Transfiguration.
“So I can turn people into fiery snakes with this?” he demands, ignoring the disappointed way Lyassa looks at him for lapsing into English. “Not just-set them on fire?”
“Yes, if that is what you want to do.”
“But it just burns a hole in the rug. It doesn’t turn the rug into anything.”
“It will, once you have learned to hold the serpent in the world.” Lyassa slithers towards him and bends down, studying him carefully, looking into first one eye and then the other. “Are you quite well? You sound as though you are dazed and have hit your head on something. Do you need a glass of water?”
“I’m really bloody tired.” Harry flops back on the floor and stares at the ceiling for a second. No, he didn’t think that he was doing something that complicated.
A red blur appears in front of his eyes, and Harry blinks and adjusts his glasses so that he’s looking through them. It’s a piece of meat that looks almost raw. He glares at Lyassa.
“I took it from the sandwich you didn’t eat earlier,” Lyassa says. “It’s cooked. Eat. You’ve been exhausting yourself, and I thought you were braced for the amount of effort required and had decided you didn’t need the food, but I was wrong.”
Harry scowls, but it’s true that she was wrong, and only because he didn’t understand what he was doing. He picks up the piece of meat and bites into it. The minute it touches his tongue, he starts devouring it, and only nods his thanks when Lyassa brings over the entire plate of sandwiches.
“Why did you not eat earlier?”
Harry shrugs and inhales most of the next sandwich before he replies. “I didn’t know it was wandless Transfiguration and would take this much energy.”
“But you have neglected to eat before. This is not the first time it has happened in our training.”
Harry blinks at her over the heel of something that might be an apple. He’s honestly chewing it too fast to tell. “It’s the first time that I fell back on the floor from doing a spell. And I would have been more prepared if you’d told me it was wandless Transfiguration.”
“But you have burned up reserves that did not allow you to keep standing on your feet. You staggered and reached for support.”
Lyassa doesn’t even follow that up with her usual paean to why it’s a good thing to have a serpent tail instead of legs, which worries Harry. He frowns as he slows down and manages to taste the fruit he’s eating. Yes, it’s an apple. “And you think I need more than that in order to use this magic in battle.”
“Do you want to die a stupid death because you ran out of strength in the middle of a fight?”
Harry sighs and spends a few more minutes eating, at least until the hole in his stomach no longer feels as if the rest of his body is intending to collapse into it. He leans back, stares up at the ceiling, and intones, “No.”
“Then pace yourself. Do not stay up so late at night studying. Do not try to learn so many battle techniques in a day.”
Harry clenches his fists. “It was only sheer luck that Voldemort didn’t kill me or Sirius when he attacked Grimmauld Place. I need to train.”
“Not this intensely.”
“The worry that comes when I don’t would kill me more effectively than exhaustion.” Harry snaps.
“I don’t think you mean effectively. I think you mean efficiently. In the end, no matter if something kills you more slowly than other things, it will kill you.”
Harry lets out the kind of shrill laugh that he doesn’t utter much anymore in the presence of the Speakers. He buries his head in his hands, and Lyassa reaches out and touches his shoulder with her hand that feels like small scales or beads are buried underneath the skin. Her nails scratch gently at him for a moment.
“You are not dead yet,” she says in English, which Harry knows is a concession. “You can afford to rest and eat and trust in your guardians and us to protect you enough to do both those things.”
Harry breathes out slowly. It’s-hard to do that, but easier than it would have been before he saw Sirius’s void magic. He does trust that some of the people he loves can protect themselves more effectively than he thought they could.
Effective, rather than efficient.
Maybe this is enough to destroy part of his conviction that he’s the only one who can protect the people around him. Harry knows himself well enough to suspect that it hasn’t gone completely.
“All right,” he says quietly.
Chapter Thirteen.