Chapter Thirty-Seven of 'The Art of Self-Fashioning'- Moment of Triumph
Chapter Thirty-Six.
Title: The Art of Self-Fashioning (37/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings/Content notes: Angst, canonical child abuse, animal harm in the first chapter, AU, violence, gore, torture, gen (no pairings)
Rating: R (for violence)
Subject: In a world where Neville is the Boy-Who-Lived, Harry still grows up with the Dursleys, but he learns to be more private about what matters to him. When McGonagall comes to give him his letter, she also unwittingly gives Harry both a new quest and a new passion: Transfiguration. But while Harry deliberately hides his growing skills, Minerva worries more and more about the mysterious, brilliant student writing to her who may be venturing into dangerous magical territory. Ravenclaw!Harry, Mentor!Minerva.
Author’s Notes: This is going to be a fairly long story that will update every Thursday. The first few chapters will take place in Harry’s childhood and first year; then it will skip ahead to his fifth year. It’s heavy on the angst and gore, but heavier on the magical theory.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Seven-Moment of Triumph
“Why are you outside Severus’s lab, Harry?”
Harry turned around and nodded to Black. He had thought there were probably protective spells to summon Black whenever someone got too close to the lab door. That might even include Snape, from the other side. Harry hoped it did, and that Snape got stung whenever he thought about being a pain in the arse. “I did something remarkable with Bellatrix’s Dark Mark. I was hoping you would let me do the same thing with Snape’s.” He gave Black a smile he hoped was winning.
Black went still, instead. Harry sighed a little. Well, there were probably no words he could have used to make that argument sound reasonable.
“What did you do?” Black whispered. “Why were you touching her Dark Mark, of all things?”
“Because I had to,” Harry explained. “I was experimenting with the Wild around her body, and I noticed that the Wild around the Dark Mark was strange. I couldn’t tell if it was a Transfiguration or something else. I probed it with my magic, and defeated the guard that Lord Dudders had put on it.”
“Guard?” Black sounded faint, and he kept shaking his head as though something was stinging him and he wanted it to stop. “Do I want to know?”
“I could explain it.”
Black sighed. “Don’t bother.” He looked at the lab door again. “It already took me some time to get Severus’s hand back in shape after your eagle crushed it. I don’t want to have you do something else that might impair his ability to brew for us.”
“What do we need more, a few potions that might help or a way to defeat Lord Dudders forever?” Harry asked, and once again had the satisfaction of seeing Black’s mouth work open and then shut.
“I didn’t think you cared about defeating the Dark Lord. Or only if you could help your friends do so. You care about healing your parents.” Black abruptly knelt down in front of him and stared into his eyes, although he did that so often Harry no longer had any idea what he was looking for. “You can’t tell me you’ve changed your mind so suddenly after years of obsession.”
Harry shook his head a little. “I haven’t changed my mind,” he said, as calmly as he could when he thought answers might be on the other side of the door. “I just thought that offering you something you want might make you more likely to help me.”
Black snorted breathlessly, and ended up covering his mouth with one hand. Harry blinked at him. “Are you-laughing?” he finally asked. It seemed strange, but Black didn’t deny it.
“I suppose I am,” said Black happily, and stood up and reached out to the lab door while Harry still eyed him. “I’ll let you touch Severus’s Dark Mark as long as you promise not to hurt him with it.”
“I don’t know what I was doing to Bellatrix. I think some of it hurt her, but that was when I was only manipulating the Wild.”
“I told you before, Harry, I didn’t like it when you had plans to hurt my cousins.”
“You told me that. I don’t know why. They’re prisoners, and they’re not even doing something useful for us, like Snape is. I didn’t know you loved them that much.”
Black shook his head. He looked old again, and he’d let his hand fall away from the door. “It wasn’t because I was worried about them, or not much. It was because I was worried about you. Torture…warps people. I saw that with the Dark Lord, and too many of the Death Eaters, and even my parents. I don’t want you to walk down the same path, when you’re already struggling to turn aside from the feral one.”
Harry nodded his slow understanding. And it was slow. He had to think hard to remember the glimpse Black had shown him of the golden-eyed woman chained to her bed. Everything had changed and faded under the fact that he might be able to heal his parents.
“Okay,” he said at last. “But I didn’t know what I was doing when I was trying to use the Wild on Bellatrix. I think I do on Snape. I want to see if I can make something come out of his Dark Mark and attack me.”
“That sounds extremely safe.”
“I defeated the one that came from Bellatrix’s Mark when I had no idea what it was or that it would do that,” Harry said, and tilted his head back to stare unblinking at Black.
Black sighed again, but it sounded resigned. “I shouldn’t bet against you, Harry. I’ll stand guard. I’ll help you if something comes out of Severus’s Mark to attack you, and I’ll intervene if I think he’s suffering too much. All right?”
Harry knew it was the best deal he was going to get, so he nodded agreeably. He’d put up with lots of bargains that were a lot more unfair at the Dursleys’. He watched in interest now as Black laid his wand and his hand on the door and did something with a jolt of magic that opened it.
The lab door swung in. Harry couldn’t see Snape at first, and craned his neck. It looked like Snape was standing behind a huge cauldron, scrubbing it by hand.
Of course he has to, since we took his wand away. Harry found himself smirking without really meaning to. Snape had to do chores now like the detentions that he had assigned the Gryffindors so often. Wasn’t that justice?
Snape looked up and saw them at once, of course. He said nothing, but his body went tense like Cross’s did when he thought Harry was going to make a new mouse and then forbid him to chase it.
“Severus,” said Black, in a voice that he probably thought was friendly. “If you cooperate with what we want to do, then you won’t be hurt.”
Snape blurred to the left, rolling under a table that stood next to the cauldron. Harry turned his head, tracking his motion, and then leaped into the air. For a moment, the table was beneath him, and he thought he would come down in the middle of it and kick it to pieces-
Then he saw the floor on the far side of the table, where Snape was coming back to his feet, and he knew he’d judged his leap right after all. He landed beside Snape and kicked him precisely in the back of the knees, then watched him fall.
Snape snarled up at him from the floor. Harry watched him, unimpressed. He could do a better snarl than that in the middle of second year.
“Did you have to kick him to the floor?” Black complained, drifting around to the side and spending a moment contemplating Snape. “Now he’s going to be harder than ever to deal with, you know.”
“I had to,” Harry answered, “because he’s also going to have to be lying down for this. Bellatrix was.”
It was entertaining to watch the way Snape’s face went so pale, so fast. Harry wondered if he could mimic the effect with Transfiguration. “You said that you wouldn’t let him hurt me, Black. You promised.”
“How often did you keep your promises to the people you hurt during the war?”
“Harry,” said Black. “And I did mean it, Severus. Harry discovered something interesting about my beloved cousin’s Dark Mark this morning. I want to see if he can make the same thing happen to yours.”
Snape looked so wild that Harry thought he would bite if Harry came much nearer. He conjured a daisy and Transfigured it into a gag. Then he nodded to Black, who reluctantly strapped it into Snape’s mouth. He was still writhing. Harry ignored that for the moment and sat on the floor.
His eyes closed almost at once. It was easy to close them when he was getting ready for something that required concentration and power like this, he thought. His hand reached out and found Snape’s Dark Mark without having to look for it. That strange combination of void and Wild was easy to locate once Harry had found it once.
This time, he didn’t bother with trying to actually Transfigure it. He sent his will and magic into the Mark, and felt the same savage awakening of the guardian beast inside it that he had with Bellatrix’s. Harry prepared to roll back out of the way.
But either Voldemort’s magic, even separated into different pieces, could learn new things, or he had defended each Death Eater’s Dark Mark a different way. There was a sharp, warning tingle up Harry’s arm, not enough to let him move out of the way in time, and then power slammed up his arm, heading for his heart.
Harry bowed his head, ignoring the way that Black shouted at him. He was probably telling Harry not to hurt Snape, anyway. But Snape was lying on the floor and staring up at Harry, a glimpse that Harry saw in the moment before he closed his eyes again.
He wrestled with the power in silence, forcing it back and forth through his veins. It wanted to reach his heart, and Harry didn’t let it. It was hard to say how he fought it. It was a contest of wills, though. The Dark power wanted to reach his heart and stop it.
Harry didn’t want it to.
There was a constant shifting and bounding in his veins, and Harry could feel his head aching. It didn’t matter. He had endured more pain than this. He thought of Vernon killing the kitten that had been his for so short a time, and he lashed more magic into the fight with the flood of cold black water.
Claws touched his shoulder, and he nearly snapped and threw the thing off before he realized it was Spellmaker. She bent down and fed strength into him, somehow, through a connection that felt oddly like he was holding a wand in his hand.
Harry nearly smiled when he remembered that she had come from a wand. Maybe that was all he needed.
He used the extra magic to wall in and push the black water, and it snarled, but retreated. Harry didn’t leave it any option. He forced it down again to the end of his arm, and felt the taint it had tried to leave in him conquered and pushed out, too.
He unfolded his hand, and opened his eyes. There was something pulsing and glittering like obsidian in the center of his palm. Harry blew sharply on it, and it dissolved.
Snape was lying in the center of the floor staring at him. Harry stared back. He had no idea what to say. He didn't think he'd done with this power exactly what he'd done with Bellatrix's, but he couldn't be sure until he saw the Dark Mark, so he cocked his head to see.
There was no different space of Transfiguration in the center of Snape's Mark, because there was no Mark. It was gone.
"What did you..." Snape sounded bewildered, in a way Harry would have liked to hear from him at least once in front of a classroom. "What did you do?"
Harry thought about it, and then at last had an answer. "Last time, I simply attacked the force," he said. "This time, I banished it." He closed his eyes and bowed his head, thinking, searching in his mind. Yes, now that he thought about it, the dark water had been like threads, too, boiling threads that he had forced back down his arm and into his hand.
"I undid the threads of Lord Dudders's magic," he finally concluded. "I stripped them from your arm. So they're gone."
"Lord Dudders?"
"What I call my cousin. Voldemort is like my cousin. A bully."
Snape turned his head away. Harry had no idea what he was feeling, and found that he didn't really care. The important thing was that he had done something that he could take and turn around. He rose and looked at Black.
"I think I need to be familiar with a person's magic," he told Black. "I couldn't do that the first time with Bellatrix's Mark, because I didn't know much about Lord Dudders and his magic. Being around Neville and his curse scar wasn't enough. This time, I knew more about it, and I could force it."
Black was staring at him as if he was a revelation. "What did you do to it?"
"Willed it to go away. It went."
"It should not have," Snape whispered, in a low voice that still had no emotion in it. "There is no wizard more powerful than the Dark Lord. There is no way that an untrained teenager could do this, and I think you know it, Black." He rolled back over and his eyes were dark with hatred. Harry watched in interest. It meant that stripping away someone's magic from someone else wouldn't change the personality of the person you freed. That ought to mean he could take Bellatrix's magic from his mum and dad and they would be the same people they'd always been. "What did you do? What spell did you cast to conceal the Mark?"
"An untrained teenager, no," said Black, and his eyes glistened. "But think of something else, Severus. Other than the snakes that the Dark Lord charms with Parseltongue, have you ever seen his magic succeed on an animal?"
Snape paused. "He tormented some animals when I first joined the ranks of the Death Eaters," he said doubtfully. Harry walked towards the door. This wasn't interesting. "It used to be part of the initiation rites for those who valued their pets, to make them kill them or torture them to show they valued the Dark Lord more."
"But that was Death Eaters' magic. What about his?"
"Are you suggesting he could not stop an eagle like the one that crushed my hand? Because that's delusional, Black."
"I'm saying that I don't think he's ever practiced a lot of controlling magic on animals, other than snakes. No doubt he could defend himself from one, but he's not specialized in them. And when his magic meets a mind divided between human and animal, the mind of a boy who's partially transformed himself as well as spent years digging into ways to create permanent Transfigured animal companions..."
"That's still impossible."
"Is it? How would we know? I doubt he's even seen someone with Lycaon's Syndrome, let alone the kind of advanced magic Harry has. And you know as well as I do that he never even tried his magic on werewolves. I wonder if he was too cautious about what would happen if he failed to control them in front of us."
It was getting boring. Harry interrupted. "Can you open the lab door now, Black? I need to go make Bellatrix use some magic on something so I can practice unwinding hers."
"Why would you do that, Potter? You cannot think she will cast against you again now that she's your prisoner."
"No, just like you. But I need to know what her magic is like so I can pull the strands of her Cruciatus off Mum and Dad and heal them."
Snape choked. Harry glanced back at him, thinking Black had cast some sort of charm, but now, Snape was kneeling in the middle of his pallet and simply staring at Harry as if he had said something amazing.
"You cannot do that," Snape whispered.
"There are lots of things people tell me I can't do. I do them anyway."
"I do think you'll need to practice more before you try to heal your parents," Black said, looking down at Harry with a considering frown. "Just because you succeeded once against a Dark Mark doesn't mean you can against other kinds of curses. Especially one that old."
"Her Mark and Snape's were older than the torture curses cast on my parents," Harry explained patiently. "So I think I can at least try."
"I know, but I'm saying practice. Not just charge off straight away and try to do something. And I think your parents were marked more deeply by the Cruciatus than Bellatrix or Severus was marked by the Dark Lord."
"I never intended to charge straight away and do something," Harry said with what dignity he could when he thought Black was being ridiculous. "I'm only going to do something that makes sense, and I'm going to take my time because I have to. Did you really think I would do something right now? Tonight?"
"I thought you might do something--"
"You are not going to hurt Lily."
Harry looked at Snape in some astonishment. He hadn't thought Snape would say anything; he’d looked too stunned to do it. But now he was sitting up, and his mouth was firm the way it got when he was lecturing Neville. Harry wanted to sigh. I suppose it was too much to hope that being transformed like that might make him different.
"No, I'm not," Harry said. "I'm going to save her."
Snape acted like he wanted to struggle to his feet, but he kept on wavering and toppling, maybe because he was more affected by the magic Harry had pulled from the Mark than he let on. "You can't--you won't touch her."
Harry tilted his head. "What right do you have to say what happens to my mother?" For the first time, he was wondering if Snape hadn't tried to ambush him outside his parents' hospital room just because he knew it was the best place to get Harry to show up.
“I knew her of old. I know what it would do to me if something went wrong.” Snape put his hands on the pallet beneath him and tried to push himself up, but he fell back again. Harry smiled a little. He wasn’t surprised about that. It was hard to recover from magic so intense when you were as weak as Snape. “You’re going to leave her alone.”
Harry stood with his arms folded, a little distracted from his purpose by how amusing Snape was. “Was he always this arrogant?” he asked Black.
“I think he’s got worse with the years. When he was a Death Eater, he didn’t always think he was smarter than the rest of us.”
“You can’t allow him,” said Snape, and turned his head to look at Black. “You’re an adult. His guardian? You can keep him from doing this.”
Black began to laugh, and had to hold a fist against his gut as if he thought that his intestines would come spilling out. Harry shook his head. “What Black means to say,” he told Snape, “is that he isn’t my guardian. The Dursleys are still my guardians. But he knows he can’t prevent me from doing anything I want to do.”
“I would try if I thought it was really important,” Black said then, his voice still hoarse with laughter. “But I know that I would be stupid to try for something that isn’t.”
“You don’t care that he’ll damage his parents?”
“I know that he’ll take precautions because he cares about his parents more than anyone else.” Black turned and looked at Harry. “You know that just because you can overcome the Dark Lord’s magic doesn’t mean that you can overcome Bellatrix’s? They are different people. And he’s so specialized in Dark Arts that it’s not surprising he can’t stand against Transfiguration based on the Wild. But Bellatrix is good at other branches of magic, too.”
“Why do you think I want to practice unraveling some of her spells before I try to cure my parents?” Harry sighed. It seemed that no adults ever listened. “Where’s Rabastan’s wand?”
“You would be best-advised to use Bellatrix’s,” said Snape. He was sitting now with his head hanging, not focusing on Harry. He seemed committed to ignoring him. “If you truly meant to carry forward with this insane plan.”
“I turned Bellatrix’s wand into this cat, so I can’t,” said Harry, and rubbed Spellmaker’s head as she bumped it against his fingers and purred. He turned back to Black. “So I can use Rabastan’s?”
“If you promise to practice for days, weeks, even months if you need to,” said Black. “You only just discovered this-ability to manipulate the Wild. Or unravel the magic. Whatever it is.”
“A combination, I think,” said Harry, with a shrug. It was simple to him. “And I will practice with it. But even if Rabastan’s wand isn’t a perfect match for Bellatrix, I can still have her use it to cast some curses.”
“On you?”
That was Snape again. Harry had to wonder what he thought he was doing, interfering. “Only if I can’t find a target,” he said. “And I think I can conjure targets that look like me and convince her that she’s really cursing me well enough.”
“There are certain things you won’t do,” said Black, leading Harry towards the door. “Unbind both of her hands. Be alone in the room with her. Go without the kinds of warning spells I put on the door to the room where she is now…”
Harry listened and nodded calmly. He could appreciate a lot of what Black had done for him, including making him more patient. If he had discovered this way of using the Wild last summer, he would have just dashed ahead and done anything he could to save his parents as fast as he could. Now he could wait, and admit he needed to practice, and he was far from perfect at this yet.
But Black still acted as though Harry was stupid. Maybe that would last until Harry was his own age.
Not that I’ll need him to try and protect me when my parents are back to normal.
Harry shivered a little as he thought about that. What he wouldn’t give for that, someone who was interested in him for what he was, and not because he was interesting, or amusing, or a prodigy at Transfiguration, or for any of the reasons that Black and Professor McGonagall cared about him.
But that was all the more reason to practice and get it right. Because he didn’t want back crippled shadows of his parents the way he would have got if he had tried to Transfigure their brains.
*
Severus traced his fingers again and again over the bare skin on his arm where the Dark Mark had been.
He did not know what to think, what to do. Of course he had tested the protective spells on the door the moment Black and Potter left, but Black had renewed them as always.
Severus let his head fall into his hands. He had never planned on joining the Dark Lord, not really. He had only taken advantage of the man’s desire to punish Neville Longbottom so that he could protect Lily and take Potter prisoner.
But now he was free of him, through no desire or stratagem of his own.
Owing his freedom to Potter’s son was worse than owing his life to James Potter.
Severus shuddered. The calm green eyes that had stared back at him might have an animal’s spirit behind them, as Black had insisted, but Severus had recognized something else in them, something that didn’t have such a benign name.
Inhuman.
More inhuman than the Dark Lord, Severus thought. The Dark Lord had become what he was through the pursuit of power, and he had not done it with full knowledge of the consequences. But Potter had changed himself of his own free will, and even if he was trying to become more human now, he had obviously decided to retain some of his advantages.
The calm spirit behind those eyes was too much for a fifteen-year-old. If any teenager had the right to that kind of confidence, it would have been Neville Longbottom, who had received specialized training from the time he was a boy.
But instead, Longbottom was a bumbling child, and Potter was…that.
Severus shuddered profoundly and traced the side of his arm again. Potter hadn’t planned on freeing him. Severus was an experiment to the boy, nothing more. His freedom was a side-effect.
Severus’s throat burned, and he swallowed several times.
He could not tolerate such disrespect.
He would make Potter regret ever treating him like a mere nothing.
Chapter Thirty-Eight.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/873994.html. Comment wherever you like.