Chapter Sixty of 'The Art of Self-Fashioning'- The Inspiration of Mourning
Chapter Fifty-Nine.
Title: The Art of Self-Fashioning (60/64)
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 Sixty-The Inspiration of Mourning
“Hello, Mum, Dad.”
Harry sat down at the far end of his parents’ room and waited for a time, watching their chests rise and fall. He thought of the stories he’d heard about them, the things Professor McGonagall and Regulus had been able to tell him. His father’s pranks, his mother’s skill at Potions, how fiercely they fought against Lord Dudders.
How much they loved him.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring you back the way I wanted to,” he told them. They continued to stare at the ceiling. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to be the son you wanted.” They breathed. “I have some ideas, but-the idea might only work to bring one of you back at first. Then I’ll have to wait on the other one.”
They blinked.
Harry stood up. “But one thing I’m sure of,” he said, and paused, because he was alive and hearing his own words even if no one else in the room was. “I’m sure that I’m going to defeat Lord Dudders. He’ll die. And when you come back into this world, whether it’s right away or not for years, it’ll be a world without him. I promise.”
They lay there.
Cross rubbed against Harry’s legs. Harry bent down and petted him for a time, then stood and left the room without a word. His mind was already turning in slow circles, thinking about what he needed to do, and what he would tell to which person. He could certainly tell them all about destroying the cup Horcrux. Neville’s would be on a more need-to-know basis, unless he was willing to take a Killing Curse from Harry instead of one from Lord Dudders to try and destroy it. At this point, Harry had utterly no doubt that he could cast it.
And what he would do to weaken Lord Dudders before they attacked him…
That, no one needed to know but himself.
*
Lucius came awake with a gasp and a moan. It felt as if he had spent months, maybe years, drifting in a half-waking coma. He imagined it was what being under the influence of the Draught of Living Death would feel like. Or the Imperius, if it had ever affected him.
Potter was sitting on the other side of the room. His legs were folded beneath him, those cat-like eyes gleaming straight at Lucius. Lucius found himself lying still with his hands clenched in his chains. Potter nodded after a second and reached down for something next to him, something that glittered sharply as he turned it around.
It was a scalpel.
Lucius stared at it and thought he had never understood how subtle terror could be before. Fear for his family, fear of dying, fear of failing his Lord, were all blunt and hard. This flowed through him, soft and cold.
“I’m going to release you.”
Lucius’s eyes snapped up. “Why?”
“I promised your son that I would if he delivered a message to Lord Dudders,” Potter said. He picked up the scalpel and walked towards Lucius, ignoring the way his legs jerked. “He has. I’m sure of that. My spies told me that he met with Lord Dudders. I couldn’t hear what he said, but that hardly mattered.” He knelt down next to Lucius, holding the scalpel out as if judging the edge. He nodded after a second and moved in towards his arm.
“If you’re going to release me,” Lucius said, and hated how high his voice sounded, “why are you acting as if you’re going to cut my arm off?”
“I said that you’d be released. I said nothing about unharmed, first of all,” Potter said, his voice uninflected. “And second, I need what’s left of your Dark Mark.”
Lucius tried to form one hand into a fist and hit Potter in the face with it, despite how undignified that was, but Potter bound his arm to the floor of the cell with a simple flick of his arm. Then he began to cut into Lucius’s muscles. Lucius turned his head away and tried not to cry out.
Honestly, it was easier than he’d expected. The scalpel cut so deeply and was so sharp that Lucius didn’t feel any pain until several moments after the blood had begun to run down his arm. And then the stinging agony spread along his limbs, but it wasn’t as bad as a Cruciatus Curse. Potter finally stepped back and cast a spell that stopped the bleeding.
Lucius, panting, looked. It was always better to know the worst at once. Potter was depositing a bloody, black lump of flesh in a bag he held, and Lucius’s arm was a mess of open, carved flesh. He heavily suppressed the urge to gag.
“I have no more need of you,” Potter said. “I’ll escort you to the edge of the wards and let you go.”
“With my wand?”
Potter only stared at him.
Lucius licked his lips and sat up. His arm twinged, but he could use it. Move it. And he knew he wouldn’t bleed to death, either. It looked as if Potter had frozen the blood all along the edges of his muscles, rather than making it clot.
It was not something Lucius would have preferred to leave with, but as it stood, he could hardly complain. He remained silent as Potter led him swiftly and efficiently through a series of connected cellars, up one staircase, and out into the night.
He did pause when Potter waved him to go on, and turned his head back. “You realize that I do not owe you a life-debt because you let me go? That is not the same as saving my life. I will have the ability to fight against you if we meet again.”
Potter stared at him, and then smiled. Lucius recoiled hard enough that he fell against a tree. Five seconds later, he was still clinging to it, shaking, staring at what looked back at him through Potter’s eyes.
“Then I look forward to our next meeting, Lucius,” Potter said, and glided back into the house.
Lucius shivered and concentrated all his skill and power on wandless Apparition. Even when he had arrived back at the Manor, he had to stand and spend some time tucking his emotions away before he could enter the house where he knew he would find his wife, his son, and his master.
Perhaps he would…arrange to stay near the back of the lines of Death Eaters battling Potter. Just perhaps. If he could come up with a way to do it that would not shame him or make his Lord think him a coward.
*
Minerva sat up from her bed with a stifled cry of alarm. She had dreamed that more Death Eaters were trying to break through the wards, and this time Harry didn’t have the protective animals that had spared them the last time. But when she looked around her room, it was quiet and dark, and nothing had intruded.
Still, she felt unable to go back to sleep after the imagined sensation of the Cruciatus Curse plaguing her. She chose to throw a shawl over the top of her bedrobe and go down to the kitchen for a mug of tea.
When she arrived in the kitchen, she paused. There was already a light burning there, one she hadn’t left on, and the slight, subtle thrum of something in the air that made her wonder if one of the children had been cooking. Then she shook her head. No, it wasn’t a scent. It was something subtler than that, something that made all the hair on her arms stand on end.
The Wild.
Yes, that was it. Minerva had felt that occasionally when she was around another wizard’s Transfigurations, especially powerful, temporary ones that Albus had sometimes made use of in battle.
But she was unaware of anything Harry could be doing right now that would be either wise or something he could do safely by himself. Wand in hand, Minerva strode towards the entrance of the cellar and opened the door. It swung easily under her hand. From below, the sense of the rising Wild came more strongly.
And so did a scent that Minerva had learned to identify after years spent at least occasionally in cat form. The scent of blood.
Minerva braced herself in mind and body, and descended.
*
Harry stepped away from Rodolphus Lestrange and considered the pile of cut-out Dark Marks on the floor. In some cases, he had taken only the flesh of the person’s arm that used to bear the Mark, if he had substantially altered it. While that wouldn’t be as potent as the Mark itself, it would still bear some of Lord Dudders’s tainted magic.
And the connection to Lord Dudders was what he needed.
He laid the Lestranges’ piles of bloody flesh in a separate corner, however. He had another plan in mind for them.
“Why?”
Harry glanced up, his eyebrow raising. Chains, Stunners, and in some cases bites from his spiders had proven able to subdue most of the Death Eaters well enough for him to cut the Marks out without rebellion. But Rodolphus was awake, his hands flexing uselessly against the floor as he stared at Harry.
“Because I need them,” Harry said. Honestly, that was an answer Rodolphus could have thought of on his own. It only confirmed Harry’s initial impression that most of the Death Eaters weren’t very smart.
“You won’t succeed in taking down our Lord.”
Harry said nothing, and instead went about freezing the edges of Rodolphus’s wound as he had the others’. They were no good to him if they died now, even though he wouldn’t release them the way he had Lucius.
Rodolphus was very obvious about tensing in his chains, acting as if he wouldn’t move, and then lunging at Harry. Harry kicked him in the face and sent him back into unconsciousness. This time, he had Spellmaker sit on the man’s chest and watch him. He was more resilient than most of the others, and Harry couldn’t have him causing a problem later.
Harry considered the pile of stained, dripping pieces of flesh in front of him, and nodded. Seventeen, counting all the ones he’d taken from the Death Eaters he’d captured during Lucius’s attack and along the way. It ought to be enough. Harry sat down on the floor of the cellar and closed his eyes.
He had been thinking, dreaming, about what he would do all along, and he knew the Wild had been hovering in the air around him, collected and called by someone who paid attention to it. Harry no longer thought someone had to be a master of Transfiguration to use the Wild. One had to notice it.
It was like the way anyone could have created ants and mice to spy on their enemies, but they didn’t because they didn’t pay attention to little animals. Harry had to despair of human stupidity sometimes.
Luckily I’m not completely human.
Harry smoothed his mind into meditation, paring aside all the layers. There was the grief for Regulus that had threatened to crack through. He skinned it and laid it in a different corner of his mind like he’d laid the Dark Marks on the floor.
His grief for Terry, and his worries for his parents, and his concern for what would happen when they tried to destroy the Horcrux in Neville, and his squirming hesitancy to tell Professor McGonagall what he was doing, all joined it. Now his mind was pure and gleaming, crystalline.
That was his rage at Lord Dudders.
Harry raised his wand. “Commuto stigmatem cacoethes,” he breathed.
The magic leaped and crackled from him, far more obedient than when he had tried to create it before. Then again, he thought as he narrowed his eyes and focused on the miniature lightning bolts dancing around the cut-off Dark Marks, this time he had a better focus for the magic than Nagini.
And a lot more hatred.
The lightning stopped dancing slowly, reducing itself to one crackling bolt every few seconds. Harry finally felt ready to stand and approach the Dark Mark on top of the pile, which he thought had come from a Death Eater by the name of Travers. He stretched his hand out and let his palm hover flat over the mark of the snake and skull.
He smiled. Yes, this time the incantation had worked. The life he had created, born of his imagination and rage twinned with Lord Dudders’s corrupted Wild, seethed in the flesh, imprisoned. It would stay there until the moment that it came in contact with Lord Dudders, which meant the less desperate of Harry’s two plans would work.
He gently Levitated the piece of flesh off to the side and settled down in front of the next one in the pile, ready to descend to the right level of his mind and cast the spell again.
Normally he would have waited. Normally he would have been staggering with exhaustion, having invoked that much power of the Wild even once.
But normally, he wasn’t alive with so much loathing that it made him feel as if he were made of light.
*
Minerva staggered back with her hand over her mouth as she watched Harry enchant another piece of flesh. And a third, and a fourth. Each time, he stood and walked over to conduct some test invisible to her that seemed to prove to him that the magic had worked. And then he walked over and sat down again and summoned up his power and cast.
She understood the Latin. She knew what he was doing.
She slid gently down the wall and stared at him in silence. She wondered for a moment why he hadn’t simply left the Marks on the Death Eaters’ arms and filled them with the Wild that way, but she thought she could guess. The Death Eaters would struggle more than a pile of-of chopped-up pieces of their arms did, and there was the chance of ruining the magic.
Minerva sat and watched, the whole of it. She mourned inwardly the passing of the child who could have been, the child of James and Lily Potter who could have grown up with his parents and learned to love Transfiguration and animals and yet been incapable of doing anything like this.
Then again, the chance for Harry to be that child had died the night his parents were tortured into insanity. Or, at least, it hadn’t survived contact with the Dursleys.
And the least Minerva could do now was make sure that Harry had someone who would not turn away from him no matter how Dark he grew.
Harry finished enchanting the last Dark Mark, and slumped against the wall. His eyes were shut. Minerva wondered if it was finished, and if she might be permitted to take him up to bed now.
But Harry’s eyes opened the minute she shifted her weight, and he glanced into the shadows at her. “Will you help me?”
“Do you need help to climb the stairs?” Minerva murmured, and came over to crouch beside him. The smell of blood was so strong that even someone who didn’t transform into a predator could have noticed it, and the Wild made her teeth buzz.
“No, not help with that. I’m not done yet. Will you help me reintegrate the Dark Marks with their arms?”
Minerva clenched one hand on her wand. Then she said, “You want me to-use Transfiguration? Not simple healing?”
“The Dark Marks don’t need to go back to the original arms they came off. I didn’t always make the cuts even enough for that to happen, anyway. They can go anywhere. But yeah, it’ll take Transfiguration around the edges of the wounds. And then I need to Obliviate them so they don’t have the slightest suspicion about what I tried to do.”
Minerva felt her gorge rising. On the one hand, it felt like so much…horror that she didn’t know if she could do it.
But Harry’s eyes were serene and clear as they watched her, and she knew, once again, that he would not be this way if everyone had not failed him. If she had ever thought to check up on how James and Lily’s child was being raised, since she knew James had no wizarding relatives left. If she had tried harder to convince Remus to take him.
“I’ll do it,” she whispered.
“Thanks, Professor McGonagall. You’re brilliant.”
Minerva asked a question she hadn’t meant to ask as she climbed to her feet, but it burst from her lips, giving her something to distract herself from her grisly task. “Why do you always call me by my title? You came to refer to Regulus by his first name at the last.”
Harry glanced at her, his eyebrows rising. “Because I respect you so much.”
“I would prefer my first name. Your respect is noted.” Minerva kept her eyes on Harry as she gestured around the bloody cellar. “I do believe you respect me, or you wouldn’t have asked for my help with…this.”
Harry looked at her in silence for so long that Minerva thought he might disinvite her from helping him. And as much as she wasn’t looking forward to repairing Death Eaters’ arms into something like usability, she didn’t want him to do that. She looked at him, holding her wand loosely in front of her, with no attempt to defend herself, and waited.
“All right,” Harry finally whispered. “Minerva.” And he turned and dragged the first Death Eater forwards with a flick of his wand and no sign of tiredness.
Minerva bowed her head, and prepared to shut her conscience up in a box for a time.
*
“I don’t understand. What are they talking about?”
Neville swallowed as he looked at the story splayed across the front page of the Daily Prophet in Hermione’s hands. Of all the times for Hogwarts to finally decide they couldn’t hide the story of Dumbledore’s death anymore, it had to be today.
Of course, Ron and Hermione had had that spell performed on them, and after a few minutes of arguing and debating about the paper and who would be stupid enough to make up a story like that, they put it down and it slid from their minds. Neville snatched it himself when they were arguing about Ron’s table manners and hastily skimmed the story.
There wasn’t much. It just said that Dumbledore was dead, and that he had been killed by poison of some kind. Neville supposed wasp stings did contain venom. The Hogwarts staff had kept the news from the public to avoid panic. At the moment, they didn’t know who had done it, but they suspected it was Death Eaters.
Not Voldemort. They’re not going to say Voldemort. People would really panic if they thought Voldemort could just stroll inside the school.
Neville put the paper down and spent a second thinking. He didn’t know if the news might make Harry want to speed up using the Killing Curse to-get rid of the Horcrux in him, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
He looked up when Harry walked into the kitchen. He glanced at the Prophet and stopped for a minute, but he didn’t seem all that interested in it. He looked at Neville and asked softly, “Would you be interested in helping me to Apparate some Obliviated Death Eaters away from the house later?”
“I can’t Apparate on my own yet,” Neville said, a little shocked.
“Minerva will be helping us.” Harry cocked his head. His eyes glinted. And Neville understood why Harry might want to get him, Neville, and Professor McGonagall all alone in one place.
Once the Death Eaters were gone…
Neville had a huge lump in his throat. He swallowed it back and nodded. It helped that Dapple came prancing into the kitchen then, and ended up curled and purring in his lap.
And it helped, strangely, that Harry nodded to him and strode off without a backward glance. He didn’t think of this as a big deal, only as something that had to happen.
That helped to increase Neville’s confidence that he would survive. Harry would be more concerned if he thought Neville was going to die. Surely.
I hope.
Chapter Sixty-One.
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