Chapter Six of 'An Urn For Her Ashes'- Houses of Darkness
Chapter Five.
Title: An Urn For Her Ashes (6/8)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Eventual Snarry, Lily/James and past unrequited Severus/Lily
Warnings: Major AU, violence
Rating: R
Summary: AU. When Voldemort inflicted the Horcrux on baby Harry, his mother’s love manifested by wrapping around it to protect him-giving Harry some personality traits and memories of Lily’s. Dumbledore takes personal charge of Harry, helping him cope with the memories and train to defeat Voldemort. Severus meets him for the first time when Harry is seventeen years old.
Author’s Notes: So, as should be obvious from the summary, this is a major AU. There will probably be six or seven chapters, updated every seventeen days.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Six-Houses of Darkness
“You’ll need to keep behind me as we go in.”
Severus bristled. He didn’t say anything about his anger right away, because they were picking their way through a bristling maze of spells that would lash out at them if they made too many sounds.
Harry could see the spells perfectly, he had claimed, while Severus could only see them out of the corner of his eye, as a flicker and dance of light that resembled Muggle wire fences. But it was simple enough to follow Harry. Severus only needed to walk where he walked, step where he stepped.
For eighty or so steps, that was what he did. Then they came out on a faint path that led around a mighty tree. Severus looked in silence at the dusty green leaves on the tree and shook his wand into his hand. He could feel the stiff thrum of wards surely as well as Harry could.
Harry stood still, turning his head from side to side. His hands rested on the air for a second, bouncing as though testing the strength of yet another fence. Then he nodded and drew his wand. “We can talk now,” he murmured.
“Thank Merlin,” Severus snapped. Harry chuckled without looking at him, and began to pick his way through a stand of nettles. “Where are we going?”
“This is the place that Voldemort’s family used to live,” Harry explained.
Or didn’t explain. Severus caught up with him and murmured, “That does not tell me where.”
“Near the village of Little Hangleton,” said Harry. “His mother’s family, the Gaunts, lived in a wretched little shack we’ll visit now. His father’s family, the Riddles, lived in a house on the hill.” He nodded upwards, and Severus looked instinctively, but he couldn’t see anything. More trees and the mounds that made up the side of the hill blocked his view. “The house is almost abandoned now. Voldemort came back when he was a teenager and killed his father and grandparents.”
Severus felt as though Nagini was crawling up his spine. “And the shack?” he demanded, catching up to Harry. “I suppose the hiding place of one of his Horcruxes will be abandoned, and we can simply walk in?”
“It’s not undefended. But it is abandoned, yes.”
Severus spent some time glaring at the back of Harry’s head for his distinction between those particular terms. Harry didn’t seem to notice. He was bending down to examine each meter of space in front of them, and his wand would regularly sweep to the side as he murmured charms or countercurses. Half the time, Severus knew there had been magic there only when he saw a puff of red or green smoke rise up from an ordinary-looking stone or clump of thorns.
“Is this what you trained for?” he asked, when they had paused so that Harry could work on an apparently difficult knot of charms around a stone. He added internally, And if Albus could train you to do this, why couldn’t he do it himself?
Harry gave him a quick smile over his shoulder. He seemed to have gone beyond what Severus had thought he would, into a world where he was a predator. His gestures were shorter than before, he rose more on the balls of his feet, and he turned around as if he could see through the trees into what they sheltered. Severus watched him and thought that he had never seen him look so alive.
“Not specifically for this. How could we know all the details about the places that he hid the Horcruxes? But for a lot of similar things.”
And then Harry abruptly spun around and threw his arm out in front of him, and Severus halted at the same time and stopped breathing. Harry cocked his head with exquisite slowness to the side. Severus became aware of how furiously his own heart was drumming, and wished there was a way to slow it down without damaging it.
“Now,” Harry said, in a soft, sleepy voice.
There was a blaze and a shimmer in the air around Severus, and he leaped back, swearing. Then he leaped forwards again, because that shimmer had coalesced into a pack of lean, angular wolves around Harry, and he was fighting.
At least they aren’t werewolves. But they were furiously quick, and there were long strands of hair around their paws that seemed to leap up and tangle around each other in the air like tentacles. One of them landed on Harry’s arm, and he grimaced in pain.
But he didn’t slow down and stop swinging his wand. The magic that leaped out and fried one of the wolves was a spell Severus was utterly unfamiliar with. Harry fought without sound, ducking beneath a pair of snapping jaws, rolling under a wolf’s belly and gutting it, jabbing a punch into furry ribs that broke some of them, from the noise. That wolf gave a yelp like a drowning sailor’s cry and whirled.
Severus had finally come close enough to help. The wolf slammed into a cage that Severus conjured around it. Then Severus swirled his wand, and the cage grew smaller and smaller and crushed the wolf into bloody pulp.
By the time he turned around, the other members of the pack were dead. Harry stood up and shook blood from his arm. He examined the wound from the tentacle with his head still cocked on one head, but grunted dismissively when Severus reached for it.
“It’s nothing important,” he said.
“You will allow me to be the judge of that.”
Harry looked up once, then smiled a little. “If you want to.” He tilted his arm so Severus could make out the wound.
It looked like the row of grasping suckers Severus would have expected to see from a venomous sea-creature. He grimaced and hissed under his breath. Harry watched him with a tolerant expression that was very annoying.
“Do you know if this is poisonous?” Severus asked. He cast a charm of his own that should tell him, but it faded out into an inconclusive little puff of green smoke. Probably because the wolves were conjured creatures instead of natural ones.
“I don’t think so,” said Harry, shaking his head. “Albus had me work with some of the venoms that Voldemort liked to use during the first war. Almost all of them came from snakes. I would recognize the symptoms of them.”
Severus went still. Then he forced himself to unlimber his arms and put his wand away. “Because you took them.”
“That was part of the training, yes.” Harry looked him in the eye, then away. “Albus thought I should know the touch of death as well as life. Otherwise, I wouldn’t properly understand the sacrifice demanded of me.” He rubbed one hand on Severus’s shoulder for a second, as if he was trying to soothe a growling dog. “Shall we go?”
He moved down the side of the hill, with Severus coming behind him, glance devouring him. It was no wonder that Harry fought like a hardened soldier and seized lovemaking and sleep and the chance to survive like someone who had been through a war. His upbringing had been that way.
When did Albus change that much?
But he had had charge of Harry for sixteen years. And Severus had experienced the way that Albus could detach himself from a situation when he decided that he couldn’t help someone any more than he already had. He had done that with Severus when he told him that he could get him a pardon for his Death Eater activities, but not permission to leave the country. He was sorry for Severus, but he wouldn’t spend more time worrying about it.
At least I was an adult. At least I’d had the chance to commit my own crimes and taste the pleasures of Death Eater life, few though they might have been.
*
Harry stepped back from the small circle he’d drawn in the dirt on the floor of the shack, and shook his hand as though it hurt, although as far as Severus could see, all his hand had done was hold his wand as he drew the circle and cast the spell. “There.”
Severus craned forwards. In the center of the circle lay the ring that Harry said was the Horcrux they’d come to fetch. Harry had concocted a simple bracelet of his own hair and smeared it with a drop of his blood and some green liquid from the wound on his arm. Severus had stood up when that liquid came flowing out, but Harry had turned and looked at him.
Severus could read that look-what are you going to do about it here, when you’re far from your lab and potions?-and he reluctantly stood down again.
But now he could ask. “You did the ritual to prevent the Dark Lord from finding out that you’d removed a Horcrux?”
“Yes.” Harry nodded and stepped back from the circle, casting a few more spells. One of them banished the circle altogether; the other sent the bracelet of blood and hair and pus whizzing into the tiny metal box that had contained the ring. “Come on, we need to get back to Hogwarts as soon as we can. Severus?”
Severus found himself staring at the ring Harry had levitated into the air. There was no good reason to touch it, Harry had said.
But the ring had a grey stone in it that shone like oil, and kept drawing Severus’s eye.
“What is that?” Severus whispered. “I never felt drawn to the Horcrux inside you like that…unless I have, and that is why I find you attractive…” He tried to look at the scar on Harry’s forehead and see if it affected him the same way, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the stone.
“The stone is something else,” said Harry sharply. At least, Severus thought his voice was sharp. It was hard to be sure behind the dim, muffling waves that seemed to beat on his ears. Had they Apparated to the sea and he hadn’t noticed? “Not a Horcrux. It feels like-”
An explosion abruptly shook the earth around Severus, and he found himself lying on his side, panting, his gaze disconnected so hard from the stone that it felt as though someone had snapped him free of a splint. He grimaced and lifted a hand to touch his head. Yes, he knew now that he had been behaving unnaturally, but he couldn’t remember what natural behavior would feel like.
“It’s all right,” said Harry, low and close in his ear, one hand gripping his side above the ribs. Severus concentrated for a second on the sight of the puckered wound on Harry’s arm, and used it to keep himself grounded. “I had to use a sudden spell to tear you free of the fascination. The explosion was mental. Can you sit up?”
Severus grimaced, nodded, and did so. He tried to make sure that he kept his face turned away from the stone in Harry’s ring-no, the Dark Lord’s ring. He had to shudder a little as he did it. What kind of artifact was powerful enough to batter down his Occlumency shields and take control of him like that?
“I’m not sure why it’s affecting you so much more powerfully than it is me,” said Harry in a doubtful tone. “Maybe the Horcrux in my scar protects me against it somehow, I don’t know. In the meantime, we need to get back. I can’t be sure that the Dark Lord might not send Death Eaters after me if he knows I’m out of Hogwarts.” He touched Severus one more time, then withdrew. “Can you stand?”
Severus could, although he knew it was pride more than physical strength aiding him. Harry had sealed the Horcrux away in a box that was meant to transport it, but Severus avoided looking even at that, glancing at the wound Harry bore instead. “You will allow me to cleanse that as soon as we get back to Hogwarts.”
“I think Dumbledore will want us to report to him first…”
“You will allow it, or I will resist the Apparition.”
Harry stared at him. This time, Severus saw no trace of Lily in the green eyes that looked at him. “What? Do you mean that you’d Splinch yourself for that?”
“You are worth a Splinching.”
And that made Harry grin, even if he turned his head away to try and hide the expression. Severus gave his own thin smile. The more Harry felt as if he had a reason to try and live, the stronger his resistance to Dumbledore would be.
Severus wished to be free of both his masters. He had never entertained that hope, knowing how fragile even the hope that he could be free of one necessarily was.
But Harry encouraged him to dare the pain, to fix his eyes on Harry’s back as they strode along the path that led out of here and Harry cleft some more traps with a whisking pass of his wand. Harry was a symbol of hope for Severus in a way that Albus had never intended.
It was-a good thing, in a world where Severus had almost forgotten that those existed.
*
“I don’t think there is any remaining infection.”
“Thank you,” Harry said, as Severus tied off the bandage that surrounded the puckered mark. He was already looking away from Severus, though, towards the box that contained the ring. “Now. I want to try something before Dumbledore gets hold of the box and me. But I think I need you to go into another room.”
Severus stared at him. He waited for Harry to look up, meet his eyes, and understand how outrageous his request was, but Harry didn’t; he was turning the box over in his hands now, as though the riddle was how to open it instead of how to destroy the Horcrux and survive the destruction of his own. “Why?” Severus asked finally.
Harry glanced at him, but it was only a passing, melting look, and one that Severus wanted to make him repeat. “Because the stone affected you so badly last time. Until we know why, I think it’s best to keep you far away from its influence.”
“And your life and sanity, of course, are worthless.”
“I didn’t say they were. Just that my freedom is worth more to me than they are, and I’m willing to take risks to get that freedom back. You shouldn’t have to take the same risks.” Harry glanced at him again.
Severus seized his chin and held his face still. “You would send me out of the room to protect me?”
“Yes. Why are you staring at me like that? It isn’t like this is some great secret of the universe or hard to understand.” Harry adopted a sudden look of enlightenment. “Oh, wait, do you think it’ll take too long and we have to report to Albus soon? Don’t worry. I’ll tell him that I was experimenting a bit with the Horcrux to figure out how to destroy it. He’ll believe anything I tell him about that.”
Severus stared at him some more, and then let Harry’s chin go and turned to enter the bedroom. “I will be here when you are done,” he said over his shoulder.
He didn’t know that he could tell Harry what being protected meant to him, because frankly he didn’t know himself.
*
“We have the first Horcrux.” Harry set the ring down in the middle of the table. Severus saw the way the Order’s eyes fixed on it, but none of them were caught as his had been. Of course, Harry had prudently removed that stone before he showed the ring to anyone else. “We can start setting the first trap for Voldemort.”
There was a rustle of commentary among the Order, including some words from Granger that wouldn’t have been worth listening to even if Severus could have heard them clearly. He reserved his eyes and ears for Albus, though, who leaned close to Harry and asked, “Do you not mean the final trap, dear Harry?”
“That is what I meant,” Harry said, glancing at him with a puzzled expression. “The first part of the final trap.”
“Ah.” Albus settled back in his chair. “You left the word ‘part’ out of your sentence. I wondered if you had decided to change your plan without telling me.”
His eyes were sharp enough that Severus felt a sharp drop in his stomach, before he shook the delusion out of his head. Yes, he might know, that’s true, but it’s equally likely that he’s jumping on small “clues” in hopes that he can trick something out of Harry. We can’t let our paranoia rule us.
“It looks like there was supposed to be a stone on the ring,” Granger remarked, leaning forwards. “Did you take it out, Harry?”
She addresses him so easily by his first name, when she is also willing to condemn him to death, Severus thought, staring at the far wall over Granger’s head. I wonder if her trust in Albus is as blind as all that, or if she simply doesn’t allow herself to grasp the implications?
“The ring was like that when I found it,” Harry said, and winced and rubbed the side of his arm that held the wound Severus had treated. “I thought the same thing you did, though, and I touched it carelessly, without looking with magic. There was a trap there instead.”
“Ouch,” said Granger, but since she didn’t look up from the ring, Severus didn’t think much of her supposed empathy.
“Are you all right, my boy?” Albus asked Harry then, and Harry nodded to him with a little smile.
Such concern for the physical health of the Horcrux you are going to kill. Then again, for all Severus knew, Harry did have to be in good physical health if the ritual to destroy the Dark Lord was going to work.
“Good,” Albus said, and then leaned nearer. Only because he was watching with all the desperation he needed to conceal did Severus make out what he said next. “Could I talk to Lily for a moment?”
Harry blinked for what seemed to Severus an extraordinarily long time, and then his head drooped abruptly forwards and his breathing became more like snoring. The other Order members were discussing the ring, or maybe just thought that Albus needing to have a private conversation with Harry was normal. Severus continued to stare forwards. Albus had put up no spells against eavesdropping, and Severus could hear more than well enough.
“Good. Lily,” said Albus. “I know you don’t like using spells that are close to Dark. But Harry is too young to have the magical strength to use the Lighter ones, and he might not have the time to memorize the ritual. Will you lend him your magical strength for the Dark spells and your memory for the ritual?”
He really does think there’s some of her spirit surviving in Harry. The hardest thing Severus had ever done was keep his eyes facing forwards and his tongue still. And that she’s a separate person he can ask things of.
Severus did jump when a soft, feminine voice began to speak from Harry’s lips. “Yes. Albus. Although…are you certain this is necessary? Did I fight so hard for my son only to have him die after all?”
Severus breathed carefully. He would have thought that Harry had been wrong or lying after all, in his desperate attempt to find help, and Lily was still alive, except for one thing.
He had revisited his Pensieve memories again and again throughout the last sixteen years, spending time with every shred of Lily he could find. He knew her voice as he knew no one else’s. The voice coming from Harry’s lips was not hers.
“Ah, Lily.” Albus put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and Severus felt himself shiver, once. He was sure, in Albus’s mind, that the person he was touching was older, more battle-hardened, with hair an even brighter red. “Your concern for your son does you credit. But thanks you to, he did live sixteen extra years. That will have to be enough.”
Severus turned his head then. He didn’t think Albus would notice, but truthfully, that wasn’t his motivation for not keeping still. He simply couldn’t stand there and not look for some sign that Harry realized how strange this was, that he wasn’t the mindless servant Albus counted on.
And he saw it. Harry’s nostrils flared a little before he used his fake voice to say, “I understand, Albus.”
“Excellent.” Albus stepped back and beamed at everyone around the table. “We should discuss where we intend to gather the Horcruxes and lure Voldemort.” It didn’t seem to matter to him that most of the Order members flinched at the name.
Harry “came back to himself” with a shake and a blink, and stood there blandly smiling. Severus had to work to make out the banked fires of disgust burning in the back of his eyes.
He is my Harry.
*
This time, Harry didn’t bother knocking on Severus’s door. He came through the wall like a specter, and Severus was flinging a Blasting Curse at him before he even realized what his instincts had urged him to do. Harry stepped easily enough around the curse, which reduced a chair to splinters instead. Then he collapsed into another chair and spat.
Severus Summoned a glass and a Calming Draught without taking his eyes off Harry. Harry poured the potion into the glass, sipped at it, and then snorted.
“No, thanks,” he said, and Transfigured the potion into Firewhisky.
Severus blinked once. He had never heard of that spell. Then again, he thought as he watched Harry drink his way through the glass, he had never heard of the potion that Harry had invented to free himself, either.
Harry was introducing him to many aspects of life that Severus would never have realized existed.
Harry finished his drink and slammed it down on the table, shaking his head. “I hate it when he does that,” he whispered. “I spent years thinking that I was stupid for pretending to be my mum, because she must really be in me somewhere and she was the one he wanted to talk to. But she’s not there.” He sat back and stared at Severus. “You believe me, don’t you?”
Severus nodded and moved towards him. “Not only that,” he said, as he touched Harry’s hair and spent a moment merely sliding his hand across it, “she would never have agreed to this if she was alive. Albus sees and hears only what he wants to, always.”
“I’m glad someone agrees with me,” Harry sighed, and stretched his neck upwards. Despite the awkward angle, Severus bent down. Their lips stung, first from the angle and then because Harry was mashing them so hard together. Severus put a hand behind Harry’s neck to better control the pain.
Harry drew back at last and tossed his head a little, as if he wanted to make his hair gleam even more in Severus’s eyes. “Fuck me?” he suggested.
Severus felt as if he was the one who had drunk Firewhisky. He dragged Harry-and only Harry, with no ghost of Lily hanging around him, inside or out-into the bedroom.
The last thing Severus had thought of, on the brink of war and the final battle that would probably leave one of his masters triumphant, was to get something he had wanted. But this was it, Harry’s straining chest and swearing mouth and kicking legs and inviting body.
If I have it, then I can protect it. And I do not need Albus’s permission to do so.
Chapter Seven.
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