Chapter Thirty-Three of 'A Brother to Basilisks'- Pushing Makes Power
Chapter Thirty-Two.
Title: A Brother to Basilisks (33/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual Harry/Draco and Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Angst, violence, some gore, AU from Prisoner of Azkaban onwards
Rating: R
Summary: AU of PoA. Harry wakes in the night to a voice calling him from somewhere in the castle-and when he follows it, everything changes. Updated every Friday.
Author’s Notes: This is a canon-divergent AU that starts after Chapter 7 of Prisoner of Azkaban. It will probably run to at least the mid-point of The Half-Blood Prince. It will also be long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Three-Pushing Makes Power
“Not that way.” It was all Snape said, but from it, Harry knew the depths of his failure.
Harry raised his head and stared silently at the far wall of the classroom, the one with the glowing green crack. He listened to Dash, who had chased a rat out into the corridor. He counted to ten. Then he finally turned back to Snape and said, “Why? I pushed the chair into the wall. That’s what I was trying to do.”
Snape shook his head and moved towards him, wand flicking once. The chair slid back to the center of the room. “Didn’t you feel how your magic spilled out around the chair, and the others started rattling?”
Harry blinked. “No. I was busy.”
“Well, it did.” Snape gestured with one hand towards the other chairs he had assembled out of splinters and dust, his intent gaze on Harry. “Wandless magic isn’t practiced much because most wizards do receive adequate help from their wands. But there’s another reason. When you cast a spell with a wand, it’s focused, tight as a knot, except perhaps in the case of first-years.”
“Is that why you don’t let people use their wands in Potions?” Harry interrupted, because suddenly it made sense to him.
He wondered if he should have done that a second later, but aside from tightening and hunching up like a vulture for a minute, Snape didn’t do anything bad. In fact, he nodded and muttered, “One of the reasons. Now.
“Wandless magic is not focused, at least not without practice. It spills and sloshes. It can alert anyone in the immediate area to the presence of a wizard, and does not make a good surprise technique. More, it cannot achieve the precise results of a spell. Try to clean a pot with a spell, and the dirt and grease vanishes. Try to clean it using wandless magic, and the pot might explode.” He tilted his head and fixed a glittering eye on Harry. “You understand? That is why I wanted you to practice concentration first.”
“But I was doing well on that,” Harry complained. “You said I had it down right last time, and since this is the third time I’m here, I could practice the magic.”
“You should hold the state of concentration you perfected in your mind at the same time as you are pushing with your magic.”
Harry shook his head. “But I can’t do both.”
“Yes, you can.” Snape moved a step away from him and considered him with one finger on his lip, as though Harry had disappointed him in some intangible way. Harry straightened his back and tried not to feel offended. “That is why I taught you the theory of holding yourself back from your emotions first. Summon and control the emotions while you float.”
“You said that was emotions, not magic.”
“It applies to both.”
Harry glared at Snape. It seemed that professors were always telling him things that they should have explained first later, like they were obvious. It wasn’t obvious, and they should have been able to tell that.
But he supposed Snape had talked about floating in the midst of his emotions and using the emotions to power his magic. Grumbling, Harry focused on the chair again, and thought about how he wanted it to go away. Then he flung his magic at it again.
This time, while the chair skidded to the side, it didn’t fly all the way to the wall, and Snape shook his head. “You’re still slopping your power around.”
“I know that!” Harry kicked at the floor, and felt Dash pause outside the door. It’s okay, you don’t need to come in, he told Dash, and focused all his attention on Snape again. “I just don’t know how to float in the middle of the emotions and use the power at the same time!”
“The way we discussed the day before yesterday.” At least Snape had a calming voice, when he wanted to use it, Harry thought grudgingly. “You focus the emotions the way you did when you used anger to banish Black. Then you concentrate on floating in them. And you push the emotions and the magic in the same direction.”
“Well, you didn’t say that before,” Harry muttered. “That makes more sense.” He glared at the chair and thought of how much he’d like to see it fly into the opposite wall. Then he focused on the image of the green Lullaby Dots orbiting Snape’s head. Snape didn’t conjure them anymore, but they were still the image that Harry liked the most.
He slipped into the calm, and felt the anger at the chair rushing past him. And then he gathered up the magic and pushed it along the same “current” as the anger, as if it was all a river where he could pour his power.
The chair skidded backwards and into the wall. And then it vanished. Harry staggered, gasping, to his knees. He had thought of the chair Apparating, but he hadn’t known that it would actually do it!
“Very well done.”
Harry stopped panting and gasping and wondering what had happened for a whole thirty seconds. There was a note in Snape’s voice that he had never heard before. It was like-pride. Harry looked up at Snape, and Snape knelt down in front of him and gave him a tiny smile that Harry would have traded the whole world for.
Even me?
Well, not you, Harry told Dash, and Dash went back to hunting in the corridor, reassured.
“There,” said Snape, with a slight nod, and hauled Harry to his feet. “It is always easier to do something with wandless magic that you have already done once before.” He continued as Harry opened his mouth, “With controlled wandless magic that you have already done once before with uncontrolled power.”
Harry relaxed. At least that answered his question about why he hadn’t been able to banish the chair right away when he’d been able to banish Sirius.
“We will try something different now,” said Snape. His eyes were intense, and Harry found it hard to breathe as he watched Snape assemble yet another chair out of wood and splinters from the floor. It was made of silvery wood, though, which Harry supposed was a spell Snape had cast to make the chair easier to distinguish from the others. He set it up in a row with two other chairs and cocked his head. “Can you make three different things happen to them?”
Harry hesitated. “What else would I want to happen to them?”
“You might banish one,” said Snape, and his eyebrows rose for a moment. “To an agreed-upon destination. I expect to find the chair that you Apparated in my office, as we agreed.”
Harry nodded. Snape looked from him to the chairs, and kept his eyes on them as he spoke again. “As for another, you might topple it over. And the third, you might send skidding into the wall as you already did.” He smiled once, and his eyes darted over to Harry as if he was daring him to report the smile to someone. “But on purpose, this time.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“That is why you will practice.” Snape stepped back and leaned on the wall with a patient expression that Harry almost hated. It meant he would be here until he’d done it. “Well? I’m waiting.”
Harry licked his lips and focused on the chairs. “Does it-does it matter which one I do which to?” he asked.
“Banish the silvery chair. The others, I don’t care.” Snape’s voice lowered. “And you’re stalling.”
It’s not very polite of him to notice that, is it? Dash asked from the other side of the wall.
Harry closed his eyes and plunged himself into the vision of the green Lullaby Dots again, concentrating until he felt a headache growing between his eyes. Then he summoned the magic and the emotion again, and pushed it at the chairs, trying to imagine all the things that Snape had talked about happening at once.
The silvery chair vanished. The chair in the middle spun in a circle and then fell over. And the one on the end…
The one on the end burst into flames.
Harry gasped in shock, and then drew his wand. But Snape had already waved his lazily, once, with a murmur that sounded like “Aguamenti,” and a cascade of water descended on the flames and put them out. Harry sat down and shook a little.
“What are you thinking of?” Snape asked softly. He hadn’t come over to Harry the way he had the last time Harry managed the magic.
Well, Harry supposed he hadn’t really managed it this time. He put his hands over his face. “What would happen if I lit someone on fire?” he asked. He supposed, sometimes, that he wanted to light Voldemort on fire, and he had wanted to do that with Pettigrew for a few minutes, but now that he’d seen it happen, it was horrible. He would never wish for it again.
“That is another reason to practice and gain control of your magic,” said Snape. He walked over to Harry now, picked up the fallen chair, and sat down on it. His gaze had never wavered from Harry’s, at least. “To make sure that you don’t hurt someone when you don’t mean to.”
Harry stared at him. “But what if you mean to? Have you meant to?”
“I have,” said Snape. He leaned forwards and studied Harry. “And I fear that you may have to as well, if you intend to fight the Dark Lord.”
Harry looked off into the distance. He spent a moment debating with himself. He wanted to tell someone, but he didn’t know if Snape was the best person.
There is no best person, said Dash impatiently from the corridor. If you are waiting for another adult to help you, I fear you will wait. There was a lash in his mental voice on those last words as though he had snapped and coiled his tail. And as much as your friends have proven their worth, they cannot help you with this.
Harry turned back to Snape. “Sirius said something about a prophecy that says I have to defeat Voldemort.”
Snape closed his eyes. Harry shifted around for a second, and then said the only thing that made sense to him. “You knew about it, too.”
He wasn’t sure why his voice was more hollow, or he felt more upset, than he had felt when he was speaking with Sirius. He just knew that he was standing there and there was a ringing inside him, like a coin that Dudley used to like to drop in front of Harry to see if he would snatch at it.
The ringing would stop in a little while. He was sure of it.
But maybe it would take longer than he thought.
*
I am going to have to do something about this.
Severus grimaced. He had thought this part of the truth would wait, or perhaps Harry would learn the truth from some other source and then confront him with it. But he had not thought of it as Harry learning the partial truth, or the prophecy. It seemed to him that Dumbledore had gone out of his way to keep the prophecy from Harry.
Now, though, when it was tell him the truth or lose him? This was the only way he could do it.
“I was a servant of the Dark Lord during the first war,” Severus began, opening his eyes. He looked at Harry, and that was surprisingly easier than looking off into the distance or at the stained and scarred walls of the classroom would have been. “I was the one who had the task of following and spying on several people, and one of them was, at times, Dumbledore. I overheard part of the prophecy, and I was the one who took it back to him.”
Harry’s hands became white. That was the only word for it, as though all the blood had fled. And he looked like a ghost, and the basilisk, who had apparently trusted Severus enough to leave him alone with Harry all the morning, came boiling into the room and wrapped around Harry’s legs and one of his arms, rearing up as though he would form a barrier between Harry and Severus’s words.
But Severus was determined to finish this, and he still took it as an excellent sign that the basilisk hadn’t attacked him yet. “I overheard only part of the prophecy. It said that a child born as the seventh month dies, born to parents who had thrice defied him, would have the power to defeat the Dark Lord.”
Harry licked his lips. They looked as if they needed it. “Then you…”
It was a question with many answers. Severus gave the ones he thought Harry required. “I went to the Dark Lord and begged for Lily’s life, after I was caught and thrown out. But he didn’t spare her, in the end. He killed her and your father, and he turned to you.”
“Why did I survive?”
Severus closed his eyes. Harry didn’t think he would be able to provide the answer, from the way he’d cried out. It was a simply a cry it was impossible not to give.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Dumbledore thinks that your mother’s love for you had something to do with it. It may be that the Dark Lord made some sort of magical mistake that day, and that combined with your mother’s love is the answer. I would give you the real reason if I had it. Harry, I do not know.”
There was a long, strained silence. Severus heard the soft and steady hissing that he thought marked the basilisk talking in Parseltongue to Harry. When he could look again, Harry was standing with his free arm wrapped around himself and the basilisk wrapped around the rest of him.
“That’s not what Sirius said,” Harry whispered at last.
Severus did not freeze, because he did not allow himself to do so. “What do you mean?”
“Sirius told me the rest of the prophecy,” said Harry, and stared at him. “The part about the power that the Dark Lord knows not-”
Severus moved his hand a little. Harry fell silent, but didn’t move his stare away, or ask a question. Severus ducked his head and massaged his temples with his fingers.
He was not unwilling to hear the rest of the prophecy. He knew that Albus had repeated it to him once, or offered to, but at the time, Severus had been in such a haze of grief over Lily that he honestly didn’t remember if he had heard the whole thing or not. But that Albus would have told Black, who possessed no Oclcumency to defend his mind from the Dark Lord and the tendency to charge recklessly into danger which could certainly see him captured…
Severus did not understand many of the Headmaster’s decisions of late. This was only the hardest one, he reminded himself, and focused on Harry again. Harry was the one who needed reassurance here.
“Then you know it,” he said, and added, “You may share it with me.”
Harry sounded a little confused as he repeated it, which Severus didn’t blame him for. Then again, no one had ever said prophecies were supposed to be easy to interpret, or easy to make come true.
And is Albus trying to make this one come true?
The only answer that came to Severus as he stared at Harry’s dazed and blinking eyes was, Most definitely. But that didn’t tell Severus how or why Albus had decided to use Black to do it.
“So you know all of it, now.” Harry seemed to make a little shoving gesture with one hand, the same one he made when he was concentrating on his magic to forcibly Apparate a thing or person. Severus thought idly that he would have to break him of that habit; the whole point of wandless magic was that it was supposed to be a surprise and hard to counter, and that gesture would tell the enemy too much of Harry’s intentions. “What are you going to do about it? What do you think of it?”
Severus met his eyes. “I think that you do have to kill him. And that you will not be able to without more practice.”
Harry blinked once. “I don’t think I could ever be a soldier. I mean, I could fight to save my friends, but to just go out and kill someone would be-hard.”
“I think you will have the chance to protect your friends,” said Severus, as gently as he could, and despite his vast reluctance to do anything that might serve to shove Harry along the path that Albus wanted him to follow. “And that might give you the anger even as-as Black gave you the anger to banish him once before.”
“Then why teach me about all this concentration and things other than anger?” Harry used his hand to make a wide circle around the room. The basilisk had relaxed and was no longer clutching him as hard as he had before.
“Because I want you to survive past the initial strike,” said Severus simply, and watched as Harry shuddered under that hard truth, and bowed his head under it for a minute.
And then accepted it. He nodded and looked up. “What do you think I can do to keep things from catching randomly on fire?”
*
“I believe it would be best, considering how volatile the situation is, to wait for an invitation from Mr. Black himself, Draco.”
Draco leaned back in his seat and folded his hands in his lap. He wouldn’t fold them on the table. Such a mistake would just make his father bored and irritated with Draco, and bad things happened when his father was irritated.
“I don’t think that Mr. Black will ever invite me to visit Harry, Father,” said Draco, as calmly as he could. “He’s convinced that Slytherins are evil.”
Father raised one eyebrow. He was reading a letter that he had read several times before, Draco thought. All he knew was that it had a silver and green seal, and plenty of former Slytherins sent letters like that. “Why would he think that?”
“He and Professor Snape were enemies in school,” said Draco promptly. Father lowered the letter and stared at him, and Draco nodded solemnly. “And I know he was uneasy about Harry being a Parselmouth. I don’t think that he would ever invite a Slytherin friend of Harry’s to visit no matter how close we were.”
And I have other reasons for wanting to visit. To see Harry’s wandless magic practice and to make sure that Harry wasn’t suffering from living with Black were only two of them.
Father looked off into the distance for a moment, eyes so cold that Draco thought he was thinking about the letter. Then he nodded and glanced at Draco. “You may write to Mr. Potter and ask about a visit. But if Black disapproves, then you may only invite Mr. Potter to meet us in Diagon Alley.”
“Yes, Father,” said Draco, and slipped out of the dining room. But he didn’t go upstairs right away, even though he kept his ink and parchment in his rooms. He lingered, because his mother had glanced at him across the table.
His mother was with him in moments, her gown whispering around her. Draco followed her into the library. She didn’t look back at him the entire time. Draco swallowed and started frantically thinking about all the things he had done and not done in the last fortnight.
When they were in the library, his mother went over to the window and stood with her back to him, looking down into the gardens where Father’s peacocks roamed. “You are sure that Black hates Slytherins?”
Draco frowned, not understanding the tone of his mother’s voice. “Yes, Mother. He certainly seems to.”
“Well.” Mother turned around and laid one of her hands on the windowsill. She was wearing a necklace of pale sapphires that went well with her blue gown. Draco thought she looked particularly lovely this morning. “Then you shall carry a letter with you, either to Mr. Potter’s house or when you meet him in Diagon Alley.”
“You want to write to Harry, Mother?” Other than a few questions when the abuse story first broke, his mother hadn’t seemed interested in Harry.
“I have some questions for his guardian,” said his mother, and there was a strange smile on her face. “From one Black to another.”
“Er,” said Draco. He knew that his mother was a Black, of course he knew that. He had to know all the genealogies of most of the wizarding families before his father would be satisfied. But it had never occurred to him that his mother would want to talk to Sirius Black. “Even though I can’t know if Mr. Black will take it.”
“You don’t have to call him Mr. Black in front of me, Draco,” said his mother calmly. “You can call him whatever Mr. Potter calls him. After all, you are related.”
“Er,” Draco said again. He was puzzled. His father wanted him to keep away from Black and not annoy him, but his mother was doing something that seemed like it would annoy him. Draco’s parents had never contradicted each other before.
His mother’s face softened, and she reached out to smooth one hand over his hair in the special way she had that made Draco feel as if they were the only two people that existed. “It won’t cause harm to you, my precious son. I’m sure of that, or I would never do it.”
Draco nodded, reassured. He knew his mother loved him. It had been the first thing he was ever sure of, even before he was sure about his father.
“And it won’t make sense to anyone but another Black,” his mother continued. “So you don’t have to worry about Mr. Potter reading the letter and being offended on behalf of his guardian, either.” The strange smile came back, and she looked out the window again. She usually couldn’t stand looking at Father’s peacocks for that long; she said they were ridiculous, puffed-up things. “I only need to talk to my dear cousin about something that we argued over long ago.”
Draco hesitated one more time, but after all, what was the worst that could happen? Sirius Black would probably just rip up the letter without reading it. “All right, Mother.”
“Excellent,” his mother said softly, and continued looking out the window, even after Draco went upstairs to write the letter to Harry.
Draco managed to shrug it off while he was writing. Parents are weird.
Chapter Thirty-Four.
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