Chapter Sixty-Three of 'The Art of Self-Fashioning'- Untwisting the Wild
Chapter Sixty-Two.
Title: The Art of Self-Fashioning (63/64)
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-Three-Untwisting the Wild
“But-you were the one who defeated Voldemort. You’re the one who should be receiving all this.”
Harry stood in the door of the dining room, regarding the pile of overflowing letters on the table. Neville was almost buried in them, as well as the larger boxes that contained gifts of clothes, food, books, priceless artifacts, invitations to the Ministry and every shop opening in existence, and anything else people could think of to honor the Boy-Who-Lived. “Because you have so much joy of it.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.” Neville pushed away a box of Chocolate Frogs that kept trying to climb his face. “It’s just that I feel like a fraud.”
“You did the bravest thing. You stood there in front of a Killing Curse and let me aim it at you.”
“That’s not what I mean either.”
Harry snorted and padded over to the counter of the kitchen to fix himself some tea, Cross padding behind him. Spellmaker had remained in the cellar keeping watch over the Lestranges. Since she had been Bellatrix’s wand, she still made the best choice to anticipate the witch’s movements if she broke free. “Well, I don’t want the credit. You’re the Boy-Who-Lived, and they bought that ridiculous story about your mother’s love burning Lord Dudders and Nagini to death. You earned it. Enjoy.”
“But-you should get the credit. I can’t believe you don’t want the credit.” Neville managed to Levitate an enormous stack of invitations out of the way just before they would have cascaded on his head.
Harry turned around to stare at him. “Neville, the ‘credit’ isn’t my friends and it isn’t my animals and it isn’t my parents and it isn’t my revenge. Why would I care about it?”
Neville went quiet for a second, studying him. Then he said, “You really mean that.”
“Of course I do.” Harry tossed a bit of ham down to Cross, who was mewing and rubbing against his legs. “I know Minerva was disappointed, but she understands why it has to be you. And why you’ll handle this with a lot more grace than I would.”
“Um-I will?”
“You have Ron and Hermione on your side.” Harry sipped his tea. Neville’s friends hadn’t been pleased at being left out of proceedings, but on the other hand, they were brilliant at explaining how they’d always believed in their friend, and Hermione handled the correspondence well most of the time. This must be the latest bunch she hadn’t got around to yet. “And you’re naturally modest and calm when they ask you for interviews. Meanwhile, imagine what would happen if they knew what I’d done, and they came and asked me for an interview when I wanted to be left alone.”
Neville’s wince said he could imagine the torn faces of the reporters all too well. “Well, all right.” He hesitated, then added, “Gran told me that she doesn’t understand why I don’t come home.”
“To Longbottom Manor, she means?”
“Yeah.”
Harry nodded as he bit into a biscuit. “And did you tell her that it was her own damn fault?”
“Harry. I am not going to say something like that to my grandmother.”
“But it is her fault that you won’t go back there. Because she wants you to do all sorts of interviews and meetings and balls and galas and dinners that you don’t want to do.”
Neville stared at his hands. “Yeah.” As Harry watched, Dapple came hurrying into the kitchen, probably alerted by Neville’s distress, and leaped up to stand on his shoulder, purring and butting Neville’s chin with his head. Neville smiled a little as he began to stroke him.
“Then tell her as much as you feel comfortable saying in a letter,” Harry said, and shrugged. He couldn’t imagine having a grandmother like Neville’s, mostly because he would have handled her before she got to that stage. “And go home when you feel like it. I don’t want you to feel trapped here, either.”
Neville studied him intently for a minute. “Where are you going to go?”
“Why would I go anywhere?” Harry asked, a little baffled. “I inherited the house. And I need to stay here until my parents are healed and can take care of themselves again. That’s going to take a long, long time.”
“I know! I just mean…what about your OWLS? And things like that?”
“I believe I’ve listed what I cared about. Were the OWLS on there? No.”
“But-you can’t stay here and take care of your parents all your life. Or try to heal them.”
“It’s still going to take me a long time.” Harry smiled a little at Neville, and wondered distantly if Neville appreciated how much more human Harry was for him than anyone else. Maybe he did. The earnest expression on his face said so. “And, Neville, I’m not normal. I’m not human. Maybe someday I’ll find something I care as much about as the other things. But for right now, I can’t think of it. And I’m never going to go out and become a Healer, or an Enchanter, or any of the other things that someone with a skill in Transfiguration might do. I don’t care enough about other people.”
Neville sighed and sat slowly back. “Okay. Okay, Harry. And I suppose it’s true that you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing any time soon, since Regulus left you all the Black money.”
Harry nodded. “And Hogwarts is in disarray. They want Minerva to come back, but they don’t understand what really happened, and they haven’t liked what she’s told them. So maybe she’ll go back to being a professor there, and maybe she won’t. You know. Just in case you don’t like to leave me without ‘adult supervision.’”
Neville flushed. “It was Hermione who said that, not me.”
“But you were thinking it.”
“I know, I know.” Neville sighed in dismay as another three owls soared through the window, one of them holding something that looked like a diadem. “Harry? Can you at least help me with this post?”
“Sorry, Boy-Who-Lived,” Harry said, and ghosted back into the cellars. He was working on a particularly tricky aspect of the ritual he wanted to use to heal his parents, and he was afraid it might cost him Spellmaker. He didn’t want to give her up, but on the other hand, she was a part of Bellatrix’s magic and had been for years.
He would need to get rid of all the Lestranges’ magic if he wanted to heal his parents.
“Who would send me this?”
Another advantage to not being the hero, Harry thought, and shut the door behind him, and settled into the dark ritual circle waiting for him with a rush and relaxation of breath.
*
I suppose it is typical of me, Minerva thought, as she cast a few spells to make sure that Harry wasn’t in the middle of something it would be deadly to interrupt, that I can’t go a few days after You-Know-Who’s death before finding something new to worry about.
But, for whatever reason, she was worrying about it. And she had only a limited amount of time to speak to Harry.
When she descended the steps into the cellars, she found herself blinking. Her most prominent memory of the area before was when she had helped Harry cut the Dark Marks from the arms of the Death Eaters and prepare them for the disease that had taken their lives. Now it seemed incredibly bright in comparison. Torches flared on the walls, glittering with white fire that Minerva strongly suspected was the result of a specific spell. Harry sat in the middle of a circle that he might have put there or which might be a traditional Black circle for all Minerva knew, his eyes closed. The circle was made of irregular dark rocks set into the stone floor of the cellar. Minerva moved slowly closer, and waited for Harry to notice her.
It took a long time. He sat there with his eyes closed and a cat perched on either knee, his hands moving slowly back and forth. Now and then Minerva caught a glimpse of his claws. All around him breathed the heavy, pulsing Wild, but unlike when he had created the disease to fill the Death Eaters with, it didn’t seem to have much direction.
Harry finally made a violent, spinning motion with one hand, so hard that Minerva winced in anticipation of delicate wrist bones breaking. But nothing happened except that some of the Wild hanging in the air dissipated, and Harry opened his eyes with a sigh and a shake of his head.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing for it,” he said. Minerva thought for a second he was talking to her, and was impressed that he’d been able to sense her through his concentration. But then she saw the hand he ran down the grey cat’s spine, and how he leaned over to stare into her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m going to miss you.”
The cat-Spellmaker-leaned towards Harry and nuzzled him gently. Then she turned her head. Harry followed her gaze, and blinked at Minerva. “Yes?”
“Can I sit down?” Minerva saw no chairs in the cellar, but Harry nodded and didn’t object to her Transfiguring a bit of dust into one. Minerva smoothed her robes around her and looked at Harry. “I’ll get straight to the point. Have you thought about the consequences of waking your parents?”
“I know they’ll be weak for a long time,” Harry said calmly. “They’ve spent years in bed. They’ll have to be retrained how to walk and care for themselves. And I don’t know if all their memories will be intact, which would include memories of skills and language. They might have difficulty speaking as well.”
Minerva blinked a little. That-hadn’t been what she meant at all, but it was an interesting consideration. “And you’re prepared to take care of them? Sacrifice years of your own life to this?”
Harry only stared at her as if he didn’t understand. But when he spoke, it became obvious he thought she didn’t. “How many years of their lives have they given up? And what purpose do I have but this?”
That brought her closer to what she’d come here to talk about. Minerva clenched her fists and said, “They may not be the people you remember.”
“I don’t remember them at all.”
“I mean-they may not be the people you hope they would be. Good parents to you. Understanding.” Minerva licked her lips. “Of course I cannot say what they would be like now, but the James and Lily I knew would have hated most of what you’ve done. Modifying your body. Creating disease. Killing without remorse. They would-they would certainly hate you for killing Dumbledore.”
“I know that.”
Minerva paused again. “You do?”
“Of course. I don’t have memories of them, but I’ve heard people talk about my parents, and I did read some of the old newspapers where they’re mentioned.” Harry faced the front of the circle of irregular stones again, and spent a moment stroking Spellmaker. Cross had leaped down and wandered away, probably in search of food, if Minerva could read a cat’s body language. “And plenty of people I do know are uneasy about me.”
“Then-what will happen if you’re enraged and disappointed at them when they wake up?”
Harry gave her a faint smile. “I don’t think, now that Lord Dudders is dead, that I’ll get enraged at anyone again. Unless someone tries to kill the ones I care for, of course.”
“That is not what I meant, Harry!”
“I know.” Unexpectedly, Harry spun around to face her, without moving his hand or his knee from Spellmaker. The cat had her eyes closed, purring as if it needed concentration. “But I don’t know anything about them until I wake them. They could be wonderful. They could be terrified of me. They could want nothing to do with me. They could be incredibly awkward.” Harry shrugged. “But leaving them lying in bed isn’t an option for me, either, now that I know how to heal them.”
“You do?”
“Yes, of course.” Harry stood up and walked towards the stairs from the cellars. “Here, let me show you.”
After a second, Minerva followed. She wondered if there was a better way to convey her concerns to Harry, but honestly, she couldn’t think of it.
*
Harry glanced back at Minerva and smiled a little as they halted next to his parents’ beds. Honestly, she was worried for him. He appreciated the worry. But he was not going to turn back, any more than her worry had turned him back when he was preparing to kill Lord Dudders. This was the way things were, the way they would remain.
“Look here,” he said, and flicked his wand to cast a spell he had learned in one of the Black library’s books. It made the Wild visible. Harry had never needed it on his own because he could sense that well enough, but he had thought it would work better for Minerva and Neville than just taking his word.
The strands of gleaming blue and black and gold and red and purple-so many colors, Harry didn’t know how to categorize them all-exploded into being around his parents’ heads. Harry looked at them calmly. He didn’t know if their presence around Lily and James’s skulls was on purpose, because the Lestranges had concentrated their torture there, or if it had simply accumulated in that one place.
Considering what he was going to do to the Lestranges, he supposed it hardly mattered. The most complete revenge he could imagine would be taken either way.
“What is that?”
Harry glanced sideways at Minerva. She was gaping at his parents. “The Wild.”
“But-there is no spell to reveal it. It wouldn’t be such a matter of controversy if everyone knew it really existed.” Minerva almost hissed the words, as if she was partially transformed, staring.
“I don’t think the spell is widely-known.” Harry thought about the book he’d found the spell in in the Black library, and then added, “Or maybe widely-used. It said that there could be terrible consequences if you cast it.”
“Harry.”
“Only for someone who wasn’t used to working with the Wild, though,” Harry assured her calmly. “Someone who wasn’t used to taking it into their own body. I can’t imagine someone who would be safer than I am.”
Minerva gave him a suspicious look, and then looked down on James and Lily’s bodies with a twitching hand. “What does the spell tell you about the Wild that’s wound around them?”
Harry cast another spell, and the purple and black strands leaped up and began to shine even harder. “See those? That’s the imprint of the Lestranges’ Wild on them. I don’t know if it would work with a lesser spell, but this is an Unforgivable, and a spell that caused permanent damage, and the Lestranges were full of hatred. So the Wild is still there.”
Minerva walked around the beds and looked down, then looked away. Harry watched her patiently. He knew it probably hurt her to look at his parents, in a way it didn’t hurt him. He didn’t have those memories of what they used to be.
Minerva finally cleared her throat and asked quietly, “So? What does it matter that the Wild from the curse is still on their bodies?”
“What would happen if I unwound that foreign Wild from their bodies?” Harry asked calmly in return. “All of it? If it reached out and unbound the strands? I can’t cut through them. There’s too much of my parents tangled up in them. But if I undid all the knots, pulled it free strand by strand…”
Minerva turned and stared at him. “You’d have to have somewhere for it to go. I’m unaware of any procedure for tucking the Wild back into the bodies it came from. And would it even work since you turned Bellatrix’s wand into a cat?”
“I think I’ll have to get rid of Spellmaker,” Harry said, and looked down at the grey cat that had followed them upstairs, and then away. “But I’ll unwind all their Wild. All the magic that gives them life. The Wild I unwind from my parents will simply join it.”
“You’re going to make the Lestranges cease to exist,” Minerva whispered.
“It would be hard to do that,” Harry reassured her, since she sounded horrified by the idea. “No, I’m going to take the Wild and turn them into something fairly large but easy to contain. Probably a swarm of beetles. Then I’ll crush the beetles.”
Minerva audibly swallowed. “I don’t think you’ve ever done human Transfiguration before.”
“Not in the usual sense.”
“And not-not in this sense before, either?”
Harry glanced up at her. “No.” He turned back to his parents and stretched his hand out, gently caressing his mother’s blanketed feet. She looked up at the ceiling and breathed and blinked. She had spent the past fourteen years doing that, since the Lestranges.
But anger would help nothing. He needed a clear head for the level of magic and concentration this ritual would require.
“Would you mind making sure that the others leave me alone?” he murmured.
Minerva nodded, and then pressed a firm hand against his back. Harry leaned in to it and closed his eyes.
“If you ever need help or to talk to someone,” Minerva whispered. “If it doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to…I’ll be the one you can talk to.”
“All right,” Harry said. As a matter of fact, he thought it likely that the unwinding of the Wild would work exactly the way he wanted it to. But he knew she was talking about his parents, and it mattered a great deal to her. Harry reached back and patted her hand. “I promise I’ll let you know.”
He looked back at the beds, contemplating the shimmering strands of the Wild, and didn’t notice Minerva was gone until later. That was probably for the best, he thought. She had gone somewhere else to mourn-he didn’t know what, maybe his chances for a normal life or something, and he was alone to sharpen his mind and stroke Spellmaker in farewell.
*
Harry stood up and moved a slow step back, studying the ritual circle of black stones that he had moved from the cellars one more time for any flaws. Then he nodded and swept his wand down, canceling the spells that kept the Lestranges unconscious in the center of the circle.
Bellatrix sat up, screaming. Harry looked calmly at her, and then looked at Rabastan and Rodolphus, who were struggling like a rabbit after Yar had pierced its brain but before it knew it was dead.
Bellatrix was the one who noticed that they were next to his parents’ beds now. “Ooh, brought us here for a bit of fun, pretty Potty?” she crooned at him, and put out her hand as if she would touch one of the sheets, watching him all the while.
The sharp spark that jumped up from the circle of black stones to shock her made her scream again. But Harry was tired of watching them. He cast the spell that made the strands of the Wild around his parents appear again, and then he picked up Spellmaker and touched her back one last time.
“Good-bye,” he whispered, before he reached down and grasped the Wild, manipulating it out of the fabric of her body.
Spellmaker dissolved into floating grey specks, and a glimpse of a wand that remained imprinted on the air for a moment like an afterimage. Then Harry turned, using the feel of the Wild around him to pick out the strands of Bellatrix’s magic wound about his parents’ brains and bodies, and began to pull.
It became its own demanding rhythm, that flood of power pouring past him, winding around the body of the screaming, thrashing woman in the middle of the ritual circle. Now and then Harry glanced at her, to see her eyes widening and her cheeks bulging.
The Lestranges were chained down so they couldn’t interfere with each other, but Harry supposed he could have left them unconscious. He did not.
He watched as the magic unrolled, strand by knot by tangle by thread by cord, away from his parents, and then Bellatrix’s body trembled and began to go fuzzy at the edges. She was probably screaming obscenities at him by then, but the muffled, roaring pounding of the Wild was so loud in his ears that Harry couldn’t hear them. He continued staring as he watched her eyes turn into white specks, and the Wild into colors and power, and the colors and power into nothingness-except a hammering, hovering pressure in his ears and all around him, against his arms and his eardrums and his eyelids.
Harry took a deep breath and pushed the Wild out in front of him with a sweep of his wand. It trembled and pushed back at him, but Harry was already concentrating, and chanting. “Commuto potentiam examinem!”
The Wild twisted and became visible as swarming black beetles, trapped by the boundaries of the circle. Harry bent over, holding his knees, holding his grief for Spellmaker, burying it.
“What are you?” whispered one of the Lestranges. Rabastan or Rodolphus, Harry couldn’t look up and make sure which one of them it was right now.
“If you don’t know that by now, I can’t help you learn,” Harry said, and he reached out and began to delicately pull the strands of Rodolphus’s magic that coiled around his father’s brain.
*
It took a long time. So long.
But at last all the strands of the Wild that were not his parents’ were unwound from their bodies, and all that remained of the Lestranges were the swarms of beetles running around inside the stones of the circle, bound and trapped. Harry rested until he could feel his feet again, then turned and stepped into the circle.
Unlike the other tasks he had undergone to heal his parents, this was pure pleasure. He leaped up and down, kicking with his legs when he could, stomping and dancing and laughing for pure joy as he destroyed them. Caught by the stones of the ritual, the beetles could not retreat far, and the few who tried to climb him had no mandibles to bite him with. Harry flicked them off and killed them and laughed breathlessly again.
By the time he was worn out again, the beetles were dead. Harry climbed out of the circle, careful not to disturb either the rocks or the small corpses. He would call house-elves to clean them up in the end.
James stirred and mumbled something.
Harry felt himself go as still as a cat hunting a butterfly, and then he turned and bounded over to the beds. His father’s eyes were open. And staring at the ceiling. And shifting slowly to him.
“Who are you?” James murmured, his voice slurring a little, as if he didn’t quite remember what words were for.
From the other bed, Lily asked, “James?”
Something soft and powerful tore through Harry, and he sank down onto the floor, his hands still on the bed, his gaze locked on his father’s face.
Not perfect. But. Aware. Awake. Sane.
Chapter Sixty-Four.
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