[From Litha to Lammas]: Iron and Sapphires, Harry/Tom Riddle, R, 3/6
Part Two.
Part One.
Title: Iron and Sapphires (3/6)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Tom Riddle, background Lily/James
Content Notes: Massive AU, angst, depression, unreliable narrator, past child death, suicidal thoughts, passive suicide attempt, dysfunctional relationships, child abuse, mindfuck, mental instability, dubious consent, past minor character deaths, violence, gore, Dark Arts, disturbing content.
Wordcount: This part 6100
Rating: R
Summary: After what he did to his brother when he was ten years old, Harry has devoted himself to atoning for it and to doing whatever he can for his younger sister, Amara. When she asks him to steal an artifact for her from the powerful Lord Gaunt, Harry agrees. He doesn’t know what’s waiting for him, or how thoroughly it will end his world.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August this year. It should have four parts. Please look at the warnings; this is an extremely dark and disturbing fic.
Thank you again for all the reviews! I believe this story will need six parts to tell the complete story that I now have in my head.
Part Three
Harry opened his eyes in a bedroom so intensely green that for a moment, he felt as if he was lying in the middle of a forest clearing. The bed was bigger than his, and shifted softly under him, which made him frown. It wasn’t like he could have accidentally strayed into a different bedroom at home-
Gaunt!
Harry leaped out of bed, a little surprised as he landed and found nothing restricting his movements. The bracelet shifted and buzzed softly on his wrist, but Harry ignored it. He was too busy racing to the door.
The knob turned in his hand, but a lashing line of light appeared next to it and stung Harry when he tried to open the door.
“Ouch!”
Harry snatched his hand back, sucking on his fingers and glaring at the door. The line of light had vanished the moment he stopped touching it. Now the door looked ordinary. And even though Harry could sometimes sense concentrations of magic, he could feel nothing now. The Locking Charm was completely invisible until you triggered it, he supposed.
I can’t stay here.
That was the simple truth. It didn’t matter what spells Gaunt used to confine him. It didn’t matter how much of a right he might have to be upset because Harry had broken into his house. His family needed him. Sirius was waiting for him. His mother was waiting for his body as her main ingredient in the potion to bring Brandon back.
All of them were waiting for Brandon.
Harry paced around the room, glaring at the walls. There was a window, but one glance showed it was an illusion, nothing but a pane of illuminated glass that didn’t even touch the walls and must not be meant to look realistic. It showed a picture of an impossibly sunlit garden that didn’t resemble the ones Harry had come through last night in the least.
If I can’t open the door, I still might be able to break it down.
Harry glanced around the room again, this time looking for a weapon. The bedposts were made of thick mahogany, and he stepped up to them, eyeballing them and wondering if they were magically joined. He smiled in triumph when he saw that they weren’t. He unscrewed one of them and hefted it like a Beater’s bat as he made his way back to the door.
When he was in range, he swung at the knob, and the lock, with all his might.
The part of the bedpost that crashed into the door dented it, but the part that hit the knob-
Well, there was a flash of blue-white light and a smell of burning wood, and a sharp tingle raced up Harry’s arm. He jumped back with a shout.
Nothing. The lock looked completely undamaged. The bedpost…
It had been vaporized. There weren’t even ashes on the carpet.
Harry swore, and then froze as he heard the door rattle. He backed up a little, settling himself as best as he could with his swirling anger and rapidly beating heart. He would jump whoever came in and kick them in the head, or the chest, or the groin, depending on if it was Gaunt or a house-elf.
It turned out to be Gaunt, who came in accompanied by a tray that floated on the air and seemed to be made of pure porcelain. Harry stared at him, so surprised he’d lost his chance for an ambush, and then at the bowls on the tray. They steamed pleasantly, and were all full of food that smelled delicious and which he didn’t recognize, although the tops of them were ornamented with chopped herbs and vegetables.
“Good morning, Harry.”
Harry turned to face Gaunt. The bastard was smiling at him as if this was all perfectly normal, and they were old friends, and Harry had stayed over at his house because he was recovering from being drunk or something.
“It is not,” Harry hissed. “Let me go, you prick.”
Gaunt sighed a little. “Do you know how long it’s been since someone dared to call me a prick?”
“I know that you’re at least seventy years old,” Harry said. “I’m sure it was much less often than you deserved. I don’t care. Let me out of here.”
“Why should I? You’re unique, which means you’re interesting.” Gaunt gestured with his wand, and the porcelain tray floated over to the table beside the bed, a delicate one that didn’t look as if it could bear the weight, with its spindly carved legs. “I have as much right to keep you here and study you as any wizard.”
“I didn’t take anything. Let me go.”
Harry started as a fat purple spark broke from his bracelet, welling for a second in a whirlwind and lunging towards Gaunt. Gaunt stared with wide eyes, and then blinked and looked back at Harry as the spark faded.
“That hasn’t happened before, I take it?”
“I-it couldn’t have happened.” Harry stared at the bracelet. The runes still weren’t all black, and he did trust the date that had appeared in his dreams. He had until then. He had to have until then. He had to be able to keep his promises and die when he was supposed to and offer his body to bring Brandon back.
“Well, clearly it did.” Gaunt smiled at him as if Harry was a child who had done something clever. “And that purple color is the one I saw in the image of your power I pulled up yesterday. I wonder what it means?”
Harry shook his head. He didn’t care what it meant. He just cared that it seemed like his power was becoming more and more dangerous.
“Let me go,” he said quietly, not looking at Gaunt this time. “You don’t-you don’t know how important it is that I be able to die and fulfill my purpose in living.”
Gaunt snorted. Harry looked at him and saw him sweeping his wand back and forth, casting spells that had no visible effect. Harry wouldn’t be surprised if they were meant to make it harder for him to escape, though. “I know that I’m doing a good deed, in many ways. Stopping a brainwashed prisoner from going back to his captors-”
“They’re my family, you arse.”
Gaunt froze in mid-motion and stared at him for a long moment. Then he shook his head slowly. “I’m sure they’re like family to you, yes, or at least they’ve convinced you of that-”
“My mother, my father, my sister, my honorary uncle.” Harry stalked towards the man, taking in the paling of his face with satisfaction. Maybe this was the information that would finally make Gaunt release him. “The people I took my younger brother away from. The ones I need to repay for that loss. This is the way I do it.” He paused and folded his arms when Gaunt continued to say nothing. “Not what you expected to hear, is it?”
*
I’ve never seen someone more brainwashed. Perhaps the martyr complex is not entirely his fault.
Tom studied Harry as he stood facing him with his arms still crossed and his face shining with what seemed to be pride in his ridiculousness. He truly felt that he had committed a crime he needed to pay for, Tom thought. Even though Harry radiated nothing like the anger Tom had felt when he was a child at Wool’s, when he could have killed someone at an even younger age than Harry had.
“Did your family put that manacle on you, then?” Tom asked quietly.
“Yes,” Harry said. His stomach rumbled, but he ignored it, as he had ignored the tray Tom had brought other than one quick glance. He was as tense as if he thought he could leap from the floor and fly away. “My father worked with me to design it. It’s bound with some of my magic. I put it on for the first time when I was ten, but it would only have worked to calm my magic a little then. By the time I was twelve, it was complete, and I haven’t used magic since then.” He said that as if it was something to be proud of.
Tom felt nauseated on someone else’s behalf for the first time in-how long? Perhaps his life.
But commenting on that wouldn’t get through to Harry, as oblivious as he was. Instead, Tom shook his head a little. “But you have.”
“What?” The pride slid off Harry’s face.
“You have used magic.” Tom wanted to purr at seeing the fire spring to life in those green eyes. “It expresses itself in whatever way it can, and the manacle is only meant to stop visible displays of it, those with some effect on the physical world. You can still use Parseltongue and the gift that makes magical creatures like you, and you used both of those last night when you sneaked into my gardens.”
Harry sank slowly back onto his bed, staring down at his hands. He shook his head and murmured, “But the bracelet was supposed to prevent all of it…”
Tom shrugged. “I doubt that you had these gifts when you first put on the manacle. They developed as your magic sought any escape it could.”
“Stop calling it the manacle! It’s a bracelet!”
“The book I found them in called them manacles. That’s what they are, a chain and a drag on your magic.”
“You have no idea what I did to my brother. You have no idea why I needed to be stopped!”
“No, I don’t.” Tom smiled at him. “Why don’t you tell me? Make it as awful as you can. I like stories with a bit of character.”
Harry stared at him and then turned away with a shake of his head. “Let me go,” he whispered, his voice as dull as before, although his chest heaved a little faster and he seemed content to look at the tray of food instead of Tom now.
“No. I meant it when I said I’ll be keeping you.”
“As what? A pet to show off to your guests?”
Tom sighed, especially since even that insult was weak and Harry didn’t bother to look at him. “No. Someone who can eventually become a true partner to me, someone I can teach magic to, and work with as a Parselmouth. There are so few around that I’ve never met a British one before. You don’t know how much I’ve longed-”
“Listen.” Harry spun to face him. “I’m on a deadline.”
Tom snorted. “Are your family really going to admit that you came here with the intention of stealing something from me? No. They’ll come privately and beg me to give you back. And I won’t, because it would be giving you back to be slaughtered.” Tom privately enjoyed the picture of himself as a do-gooder, but Harry ruined it by speaking again.
“The bracelet told me through a dream the other night. I only have until August 23rd of this year. I’ll die then. And my-my family deserves to have me around as much as they can until then. So they can say goody-bye if they want, and make memories if they want.” Harry’s fingers were shoving and pushing at his robes.
Tom stared at him. “Oneiromancy,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Oneiromancy,” Tom repeated, full of wonder. “One of the colors I couldn’t identify expressing magical gifts must belong to that one. It’s the ability to see the future through dreams,” he added, because Harry was still gaping at him as if he didn’t make sense. “It’s probably the gold-green one, because the purple spark that escaped your manacle earlier indicates your purple shade is some kind of offensive magic.” Tom chuckled a little, feeling as if someone had attached wings to his back. “I haven’t heard of a true oneiromancer in Britain in centuries, either.”
“But lots of people can see the future through dreams. Or, I thought lots of people could.”
“Oneiromancy is notoriously unreliable,” Tom said, shaking his head a little. If those parents of his had kept Harry away from Hogwarts, they could at least have ensured him a real education.
Or did they see no need to do so, since they had intended him to be a sacrifice from the time he was ten?
Tom put the thought out of his mind, because it made him irritable to think that the Potters would have wasted something so precious as Harry’s magi. “One who could foretell accurately from their dreams would have a great gift.”
“Well, it won’t matter after August 23rd, anyway.”
“Yes, it will.”
Harry clenched his fists on his knees and stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“It’s true that removing the manacle-”
“Bracelet.”
“Right away would cause the kind of fatal explosion you talked about, from all the pent-up magic. But there are ways to do it that can safely contain the magic and ensure that you return to your full potential. The manacle-”
“Bracelet.”
“You try my patience, Harry,” Tom said in Parseltongue.
“Then let me go home, and you won’t have to be bothered with me anymore!”
Harry didn’t even seem to notice that he’d responded in the same language, one of his magical gifts expressing itself. Tom smiled at him. Harry might not realize it, but when his eyes shone like that, it showed that he was more committed to life than he thought he was.
And if Tom was right about the properties of the altered manacle, there was another, very good, reason that Harry hadn’t tried to do much but resign himself to this ridiculous sacrifice as “atonement.”
“You’ll stay here until I can safely set up a ritual circle to release the manacle.”
Harry opened his mouth as if he wanted to correct Tom on the name of the thing again, but shut it when Tom tilted his head at him. He glanced at the meal, then away. “You can take it. I don’t want whatever potions you’ve put into the food.”
“There’s no need for me to do that. Your manacle is all the potion you need.”
Harry squinted at him, suspicious. “I’m still not eating it.”
“Then you’ll grow weaker, and perhaps you’ll die of starvation. You’d certainly do that long before the twenty-third of August. What will happen to the grand sacrifice that you plan to make for your little brother then?”
Harry stiffened in startled outrage, eyes locked on Tom. Tom wanted to laugh, but he managed to refrain, especially when Harry turned towards the tray and reached for a hot square of bread. Everything on the tray was charmed to stay as warm as it originally had been when the house-elf had placed it there, so Tom wasn’t worried about Harry eating it cold.
He wanted to show Harry how very well he took care of what was his, so that Harry would have even less temptation to go back to that wasteful family of his once the manacle came off.
“I need to prepare the warded space for the removal of the manacle,” Tom said, and dipped his head a little in a bow that was not precisely mocking. “Do enjoy your meal. I’ll talk to you later.”
*
Harry did eat, partially because he had no idea what the food was and all of it smelled delicious. Once he was done with about half the bowls on the tray, he got up and paced around the inside of the room again.
He had to do something.
Sirius must be going out of his mind with worry by now, and Amara must be, too. Amara would know what he’d gone after, but not what had happened to him once he was inside. And Sirius had the wrong idea entirely, because he thought Harry had changed his mind about the bracelet. He’d probably go back home with the news that Harry was missing and then yell at Mum and Father when he found out Harry had lied to him.
Harry sighed. May he only be angry at me, not them. They had nothing to do with this.
He had to get out of here, especially before Lord Gaunt managed to prepare this warded space, whatever it was. Father had told Harry again and again that no one could remove the bracelet because his own magic and will to keep wearing it powered it, but Lord Gaunt was a genius. He’d probably manage to do something, and even if he only damaged the bracelet and didn’t remove it…
Harry closed his eyes. A wave of self-loathing crashed and crested through him.
This had to work. He had to bring Brandon back. It was his own hatred and jealousy that had murdered his brother in the first place. Nothing but his life and his magic would work as sacrifices to atone for that.
Harry forced himself to sit down on the bed and think. He doubted any of Gaunt’s house-elves would help him, and while Nyx and Erebus had seemed sympathetic, that would have ended the minute Gaunt told them that Harry was a thief. And they were out in the gardens instead of in the house, anyway.
Harry swallowed and opened his eyes to look down at the bracelet.
It was going to have to be his magic. What little of it seemed to be leaking past the bracelet’s control.
Carefully, Harry reached out and splayed his hand over the runes, something he hadn’t done since his twelfth birthday when they’d finished feeding all the necessary magic into it, and it had completed the circle that would someday drain his life from him and let him atone. The sapphires buzzed at him much the way the locking charm on the door had, but Harry ignored that and tried, clumsily, to reach deeper.
You knew how to do this once. Remember how much magic you accessed the day you killed Brandon?
Harry closed his eyes against the memory and focused entirely on the feeling of the magic. It was there. He just needed to grasp it. He reached, and he reached, and he reached, and the cool metal of the bracelet began to heat beneath the touch of his palm.
There!
Something flickered against his touch. It felt like the tail of a snake that slithered immediately out of reach-and Harry had to concentrate so he wouldn’t think about how much he hated snakes right now-but Harry grasped it and drew it towards him, and it came with a feeling that was almost one of surprise.
I haven’t wanted it for so long, probably.
That thought brought an absurd feeling that was like guilt, but Harry ignored it. He was doing this because ultimately, it would help him help his family and Brandon. He would use this magic for just this one thing.
He stood up, slowly, without opening his eyes, and inched sideways until he was right up next to the door. The bracelet was almost ringing around his wrist now, and it seemed to be tightening and relaxing. Harry ignored his worry that this would cause his death early or something like that, before he could get back to offer his body to Mum, and touched the bracelet and his magic to the Locking Charm on the door at the same time.
There was an enormous wrenching noise, as if the bedpost had come back into existence and slammed into the door, and Harry opened his eyes in time to see a flash of lightning and the door falling away in front of him. Mouth open, he watched it crash down to lie flat on the carpet, and swallowed.
“Holy Merlin,” he muttered.
A pop sounded from in front of him, and Harry looked up sharply to see a house-elf standing there. It wore a dark blue towel around its waist, and stared at him with enormous, woebegone eyes for a moment before it popped away.
Run.
Harry turned and hurtled down a corridor of closed doors, seeking the one that would let him outside.
*
Tom moved slowly away from the warded circle, examined it, and then nodded in satisfaction.
It was a steel circle that he had laid years ago, and interwoven with runes carved in the floor that he could fill with water, or weaves of another metal, or pure magic, as necessary. This time, Tom had chosen silver. A metal that represented purity would work the best when confronted with Harry’s purely wild magic and his pure desire to atone for what he’d done to his brother.
Whatever that is.
Tom had to admit he was curious to know.
He glanced up as an elf popped in at his side. It was Misty, one of the older elves Tom had taken with the property. She bowed to him and said in a soft, squeaky voice, “Master Lord Gaunt’s guest is being leaving, Master Lord Gaunt.”
Tom stared at her, not sure what he was hearing. Then he snarled, “How in the world did that happen? Why didn’t you tell me?” He snatched up his wand and ran out of the ritual room, up towards the bedroom where he’d put Harry.
“Master Lord Gaunt is not wanting to be disturbed while he is working with warded space.”
Tom grimaced as he surged on and on, for once cursing his house’s extensive wards that meant not only couldn’t he Apparate, but neither could a house-elf holding onto a human. He noticed Misty hadn’t answered the first question, but she never did when she didn’t know the right answer.
It only made the greedy possessiveness that had snapped shut like a trap in the center of his chest at the sight of Harry’s magical gifts clench some more.
He’s mine. I want him to be mine. His family doesn’t value him, he doesn’t value himself. Why shouldn’t he be mine?
*
Harry had finally found what he thought were the front doors, if only because they were bigger than all the rest and carved of stone with snakes on them. He tried to open them, and they didn’t move. He hissed softly at them, and the snakes stirred, one turning its head to look at him.
What do you want?
“It’s urgent,” Harry hissed back. “I need to go and fetch some help for Lord Gaunt! He needs a Healer, and I don’t know how to get through the Floo.”
Luckily, it turned out to be much easier to trick carved snakes than it was to trick Lord Gaunt. The carving turned in place, swirling as though dancing, and a smaller, human-sized hole appeared at the base of the gigantic doors. Harry gasped out a thanks and ran through into the front garden, which did indeed look a lot different than the view out the enchanted window in his cell.
But it also looked different from the garden he’d crossed in the dark last night. Harry paused, disoriented. He’d gone through a small window to try and get to the sanctum where Gaunt kept his treasures. He didn’t know what direction the ward boundaries were from here, or whether they would be the same one he’d crossed before.
A shout erupted behind him.
Harry started running, on the basis that any direction that was away from that shout was a good thing.
*
Tom hadn’t wasted the time to look at the bedroom, as much as he’d wanted to discover exactly how Harry had got out. He’d seen a nip of a robe around a corner, and followed, keeping silent until he saw that Harry had managed to get one of the snakes to open the doors.
Now that he knows he has Parseltongue, of course he doesn’t hesitate to use it.
Tom shouted in sheer frustration, and Harry promptly tried to redouble his speed. But although Tom was panting from the run, he didn’t need his breath to cast spells. He raised his wand, aimed it carefully at Harry’s fleeing form, and silently incanted, Incarcerous.
Ropes sprang up from the ground, reaching for Harry.
Harry turned in place, spinning with the speed of desperation, and aimed his bracelet at the ropes.
They fell as if cut. Harry took off again like a deer, at least if a deer could wear robes and have a stumble entering its step. Tom swore again and then stamped on the ground, a vibration that Nyx would feel through the bond that linked him to her.
Nyx! he called as their bond came alive in his mind. Catch the fleeing mortal. Do not kill or injure him.
The basilisk hissed acknowledgment, and the next thing Tom felt was a quaking of the earth as she slid in Harry’s direction.
Tom stood where he was to collect his breath and his dignity for some moments. Harry was making him have new experiences, no one could deny that, but Tom would have preferred to have new magical ones.
*
Harry leaned for a second against a tree and panted. The ward boundary still hadn’t appeared, and he had no idea how large the gardens were in this direction. But backtracking when he didn’t know that the boundary was nearer that way would also be a stupid idea.
At least he hadn’t seen any sign of Gaunt’s magical creatures so far-
“Why are you fleeing, little one? Was my lord not accommodating?”
Great. Harry held back an exhausted groan and straightened, despite the pain pulling at his ribs. He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t hiss, and he was standing in the shade of a fairly smelly tree. Maybe the basilisk--
"There you are."
Harry lurched away, eyes shut, and leaped on instinct, going over something that hissed underneath him and might have been the basilisk’s tail. He landed and stumbled for a second on stone, but he regained his balance and kept going, pounding along as hard as he could. He heard the sound of Nyx pursuing him, in what was probably a leisurely way for her.
“Where are we going?” she asked after a moment.
Harry just ran on, not even bothering to shake his head. It wasn’t as if she would leave him alone or let him get away, and this was more about pride now than anything else. But he wasn’t simply going to surrender and let Gaunt have him.
“I ask only because you’re heading further into the gardens, and I had the impression you wanted to leave.”
Harry stopped abruptly and bowed his head, shuddering. Nyx coiled next to him and touched his feet with some part of her body. It might have been her tail, or her neck. Harry still wasn’t going to open his eyes, so he didn’t know which.
“You can stay with Tom. He is most accommodating when other people do what he wants, but he can be persuaded to offer different kinds of friendship, too.”
“I can’t stay,” Harry told her. His despair was swelling in his head like a cloud of smoke from Mum’s necromancy cauldron. “I have to-I have to get back to my friends. My family. They need me to return to them.”
It was a desperate plea for sympathy, and it didn’t seem to have worked. Nyx just sounded interested instead of kind. “Why?”
“They need me to die on time, and they need my body.”
Nyx was silent for a long moment, long enough that Harry got his breath back and glanced around beneath lowered eyelids, wondering if there was a way for him to get to the edge of the wards in another direction. But no matter where he looked, he saw only gleaming purple-black scales. It seemed as if the basilisk had coiled herself all the way around him, although so delicately that Harry hadn’t felt a touch from her.
“Why do they need your body?”
Harry licked his lips and made one last plan. No one had ever said outright that Lord Gaunt practiced necromancy, although they had plenty of things to say about the other Dark magic he could do. Maybe that kind of magic would be beyond the pale for him, and Nyx would know it, and let him go so as not to have her lord tainted.
“They’re going to use it in a necromancy ritual to bring my brother back.”
Nyx moved, and Harry half-opened his eyes, hoping that he could spot a path to freedom. But instead, he found a pair of sparkling green scales right in front of him, a different color than the rest of Nyx’s body, and shining like mirrors with a light focused on them.
They were…kind of pretty…
Harry slumped over, and barely felt the basilisk scooping him up in one coil and leading him back towards Lord Gaunt’s grand house.
*
“You must help him.”
Tom glanced up from stroking Harry’s hair. He was intriguing, laid out like this, so different from when he was awake. He looked guileless now, not defiant, but Tom knowing that his body was the repository of such power added a delicious thrill even to his unconsciousness.
“What do you mean, Nyx?”
“He said that his family need his body so that they may use it in a necromancy ritual to restore his brother to life.”
Tom stared at her, then down at Harry. He continued to breathe evenly, as if he hadn’t just made Tom feel as if the world had broken around his ears.
“He is…more damaged than I thought,” Tom said at last. “I knew there was damage from his family making him wear the manacle, but I did not anticipate this level of it. And certainly not that they were using necromancy.”
“I smelled him closely. He was not lying.”
“No,” Tom murmured, coming to a decision. He had thought he would wait a few days and try to talk Harry around, but his words wouldn’t make it through a lifetime of conditioning for Harry to see his life as only valuable because it could serve his family’s mad designs. “I will bring him into the warding room and break the manacle.”
“That will be best.”
*
Harry opened his eyes and immediately tried to stand, but he fell back. This time, he saw, he wasn’t on a comfortable bed, although the stone beneath him didn’t hurt, in a way that probably meant Gaunt had treated it with a Cushioning Charm. But he was chained hand and foot across a ritual circle. Another chain wrapped around the bracelet.
Harry pushed off with his heels as hard as he could, trying to break the chains. Gaunt couldn’t sacrifice him! He was supposed to die of the bracelet draining his magic and his mum was supposed to cut his body up for ingredients!
“There you are, Harry.”
Harry turned his head to glare at the man who stood on the outside of the circle. There was a chain of silver and copper around his neck, and another winding its way up his arm, twined together like a snake eating its own tail. Gaunt hummed under his breath as he examined the design of the circle on the floor, which seemed to have both silver and steel mixed into it.
“We’ll have you clear of the manacle in just a moment.” Gaunt’s grey eyes darted back and forth between Harry and the design, and then he nodded and stepped back. There was a low hum, and silver light sheeted across the circle, joined by a softer grey illumination from the steel part of it.
“Wait-Gaunt, don’t sacrifice me. Please.” Harry was trying to keep a level voice and a clear head, but terror was drumming in him like a running rabbit. “Please. You don’t understand what it will mean to my family if they can just have me die the death I was meant to. And if I can-if you return my body to them.” It had to be the death and the body, both, Harry knew. Otherwise, Mum would have to start over again with another type of ritual. They might even have to wait another full thirteen years for Brandon.
Gaunt shot him a dark look. “I know that you intend to offer yourself as a sacrifice for the imaginary sin of your brother’s death.”
“It was murder!”
“I haven’t seen the memory, but I highly doubt that.”
“Yes, it was!”
Harry was so busy arguing with Gaunt that he hadn’t paid attention to the light in the circle, and it skipped and darted around him, gleaming like the coils of a huge snake, and then wrapped him and squeezed tight. Harry gasped, and in the same moment, he heard a warning buzz from the bracelet.
“Gaunt! You’re going to break it open!”
“That’s the idea, Harry.” Gaunt closed his eyes and seemed to be drifting into a trance.
Harry held still despite his instincts, because he had been around his mum often enough when she was practicing parts of the ritual to know that interrupting a trance was the last thing he wanted to do. Maybe-maybe the ritual would kill him but leave enough of his body that Mum wouldn’t have to start the whole thing all over. Maybe she could bring Brandon part of the way back and then use something else as a sacrifice for his last steps on the path.
A chime rang through the circle, and it seemed to sound at some secret frequency that Harry’s bones and heart shared. Harry shivered, and kept on shivering. His body lit up from within, and he looked down to find a pattern of colors swimming through him. They looked like the same ones that Gaunt had lit up in that image yesterday, with dark blue predominating.
“Libero!”
The magic struck through Harry like lightning and a wave and the shine off Nyx’s green scales, and he screamed as it hit him. It wasn’t painful, but he could feel it changing him, reaching into him and twisting and-
There was a resistance, a black knot in the center of his chest. Harry grabbed it, thinking it might end the ritual if he could dissolve it. He shoved it with all his power, all his will.
It sat there.
“Libero!”
The magic struck a second time, and Harry grabbed the knot in its wake and shook it. He felt part of it snap a little, part of it weak and fall apart.
“Libero!”
Harry grabbed the magic as it washed through him this time, not just the knot. He brought them together as if he was smashing a delicate china cup into a wooden table.
And.
And the knot broke.
The bracelet felt apart in the same moment, with a clap of thunder.
Harry reached out, faltering hand groping towards his wrist, and then the change took him over. He rolled onto his knees, dry-heaving, the truth cutting through his mind like a rope unwinding from a heavy spool in freefall.
He remembered, not just how Brandon’s death had happened, but how he had started to change after he put on the manacle. He hadn’t wanted to. He’d been upset and grief-stricken and he’d wanted to do something to make up for Brandon’s death, but he’d balked at the idea that he would have to die to make up for it, especially since-
It was an accident.
Oh, Merlin, Sirius was right. It was an accident.
Harry put his hands over his face. He knew he was crying, and he didn’t want to cry in front of Gaunt, but that realization was a distant one in the back of his mind. He couldn’t stop crying, because any attempt to keep this emotion in-
It tore through his skin, in a wave of color, as his magic stretched its wings for the first time in more than a decade, and Harry sobbed as he realized that he had become convinced he’d murdered Brandon and it was his duty to die for his brother and be chained up so his magic couldn’t hurt anyone else after he had put on the manacle.
He could remember it so clearly, now. How his life had been split into two parts, one before the manacle and one after, and how the whole world had upended itself and turned into-
He was aware that the chains were gone, had probably fallen to pieces with the manacle, and he was aware that someone had their arms around him, and he was aware that that person was probably Gaunt, but he couldn’t care. Oh, Merlin, he couldn’t-he couldn’t-
He knelt there, and he sobbed, for the destruction of two lives.
Part Four.