Chapter Sixty-Four of 'The Art of Self-Fashioning'- The Stormy Sky
Chapter Sixty-Three.
Title: The Art of Self-Fashioning (64/65)
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! Since the last chapter of the story wanted to be enormously long, I’m splitting it into two; the next part will be posted next week, and then The Art of Self-Fashioning will be finished.
Chapter Sixty-Four-The Stormy Sky
“I can’t believe what you’re telling me.”
Minerva sighed and set down her teacup, then reached across the table to take Lily’s hands. “Yes, you do,” she said. “Otherwise, I don’t think you’d be sitting there with your face as pale as it is.”
Lily took one hand away to put it across that face. “That our son could have become that monster,” she breathed.
“Put the blame where it belongs,” Minerva said, with a strength in her voice that made Lily jump and stare at her. “The Dursleys raised him in a way that made him believe he had absolutely no one to depend on, and I think part of the reason Harry fixated on healing you is that he spent so long believing you were dead. But if there was a chance you were alive, then you might care for him. He wouldn’t have done that if they’d loved him.”
“But other children are raised with abuse. Take Neville…”
“He had other people,” Minerva said softly. “More than Harry did. He had friends, close ones, all his years at Hogwarts. Harry had Terry Boot for six months at most. Neville had an extended family who obviously couldn’t overpower his grandmother, who weren’t all great, but who did spend time with him and make him realize there was a wider world. He knew about magic from the time he was a toddler. I’m not saying he didn’t have unfair pressure put on him, but he had other people to lean on. Harry had no one.”
Lily reached out to the lily flower on the table. There was a fresh one every day. Harry brought it in himself and put it there. Minerva didn’t know where he was getting them all, but she knew they didn’t all grow in the Black gardens.
Now, Lily spun the stem between her fingers and whispered, “You’re saying that he didn’t find any support in the wizarding world, either.”
“By the time he entered it at eleven, it was-I won’t say too late to make a difference, but too late for it to make the kind of difference that it made for Neville,” Minerva said gently. “And I wasn’t supportive enough of him at first. Albus was an enemy. He didn’t find Regulus until he was fifteen. Neville was his friend, but not close until nearly the end of the war. Do you understand, Lily? Imagine being that alone.”
“I never was,” Lily said quietly. “I had my sister and parents and Severus and then plenty of friends in Gryffindor.” She shuddered and looked up. “And Harry killed him, too.”
“Severus was-unrecognizable. I don’t think he ever got over your torture, Lily. He ambushed Harry near your hospital room, or tried. There was nothing but a bitter shell left by the time Harry sent him back to Voldemort. I think his death might have come as a relief.”
“I wish I could have been there,” Lily said, and her eyes shimmered bright with tears. “I wish I could have been there! Oh, I could have done something-”
Minerva came around the table to hold Lily as she cried. Both of Harry’s parents were prone to tears, which Minerva thought might be a side-effect of their healing.
But, of course, they’d also woken to find the world completely changed, themselves fourteen years older, and the war they’d thought they were enduring ended, by the claws of their son.
I’ll let her take as long as she needs to heal, Minerva thought, while Lily clung to hear and wept. But I won’t let them call Harry a monster. I will make them see him as he is, and why.
*
“I want to see you on a broom.”
That was the excuse James had made for dragging Harry outside the house. Harry didn’t quite understand it. James didn’t act comfortable with him. Harry thought he would have preferred a quiet talk at first, or to meet some of Harry’s animals, or to talk with Minerva about more of the history he’d missed. It had only been two days. She must have a lot to tell him still.
But no, instead he wanted to see Harry fly. So Harry nodded and slung his leg over the broom. “Is there anything in particular you want to see me do?”
James blinked. He was sitting in a chair with his legs up on a stool, and the Black house-elves had been assigned to bring him anything he wanted. He was still shaky with walking. “Just what you can do. Don’t try to attempt anything just to impress me.”
Harry smiled a little as he aimed the broom at the sky. He wouldn’t do that anyway. His parents still didn’t understand that.
But honestly, he didn’t care. They would understand it, or they wouldn’t. There was a chance of it happening now, where there never had been before.
He soared up, straight up at first, and Yar flew alongside him, her wings and his bristles striving for height. Then Harry rolled over and over, along the broom and backwards over the bristles-with the broom coming with him, of course-and to the side when he nearly smashed into another bird. Then he dived back towards the ground. Then he straightened out so he was sitting upright and let the wind blow through his hair.
“Harry!”
Harry looked down. James was waving frantically at him. Harry reckoned that he must want to stand up and use the loo, and didn’t trust the house-elves to take him. He dropped back down, slowing his pace when he was a few meters up and hopping off easily onto the ground.
But instead of immediately lunging out to take his hand, James sat there gaping at him. Harry raised his eyebrows. “Are you all right?”
“That was-I thought you were going to drop to your death,” James whispered. He was pale and his brow was covered with sweat. Harry looked up and strengthened the charms that protected the Black gardens from the sun. “How can you fly like that?”
“I take the broom up into the air,” Harry said. He was feeling more puzzled by the minute. He had expected his parents not to take his part over things like preferring animals to humans and killing Dumbledore. But this was so minor that it made him wonder if he would ever understand them.
“No, I mean-you fly like a professional Quidditch player. Hell, I don’t think I was flying like that in fifth year!” James gasped and leaned back on the chair, shaking his head. “Didn’t you play for the-Ravenclaw team?”
His parents always hesitated before naming the House he’d been Sorted into. Well, Harry agreed with that. It wasn’t his fault the Sorting Hat had absolutely refused to send him to Gryffindor, where he’d wanted to go.
“No. What’s the point?”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s the point of me being on a Quidditch team?” Harry repeated, shaking his head. “It wouldn’t have helped me with anything I wanted to do.”
James suddenly looked incredibly sad. “Do you-only think about certain goals?”
“Yes,” Harry said, studying his father’s face. James was still puzzling to him. Lily was a little easier to understand, but part of that was because she cried often. “I thought about healing you, and how to change myself so I would survive. And then about how to get rid of Lord Dudders and his Death Eaters when that needed to happen.”
James choked for a second. “Minerva said that you-called him Lord Dudders because of your cousin?”
Harry nodded. “Dudders and Lord Dudders both thought they were the most important people in the world. I showed them they weren’t.”
James hesitated for a long moment. Then he said, “Are you going to-kill other people like that now?”
“Not unless I need to.” Harry couldn’t make any promises when the Malfoys might act stupidly, or when Death Eaters he’d overlooked might attack him. “Not unless they get in my way or try to kill me or you or Lily or Minerva or Neville. Or one of my animals.”
James sagged back in his chair a little. “I’d prefer that you didn’t.”
“Why not? Would you prefer to die?” Harry would try to be patient. This was the same kind of stupidity that Weasley and Granger had talked about, he thought, but his parents had to be smarter than they were.
“Because-Lily and I both believe that it’s immoral if you can avoid it.” James dragged himself more upright against the back of the chair. “It’s better to give your enemies a chance to change their minds and become-better people.”
Harry thought about that, his head cocked as his mind trotted in circles. On the one hand, he didn’t think most of his enemies could become better people. Dumbledore had thought he was right until the end of his life. Lord Dudders would never have surrendered or changed his mind. Severus Snape was going to blame Harry and attack him until the end of his life.
On the other hand, it was his father asking.
“All right,” he said. “But if you think that you’re really in danger, you would defend yourself, right? You wouldn’t hold back because you’re thinking too much about your enemies being better people?”
“I would defend myself as well as I could.”
Harry nodded. “Then that’s fine. As long as you’re not going to be stupid about it, then I reckon I can trust you to only have a few animals with you when you go outside the house. A few mice and spiders,” he clarified, because James was glancing at Yar. “An eagle would be too conspicuous, of course.”
“Harry.” James cleared his throat. “Normal people don’t have spiders and mice running alongside them when they go to Diagon Alley.”
“That’s okay. They can ride in your pockets.”
“Normal people don’t do it at all, Harry.”
“Normal people don’t spend fourteen years in a coma, either.”
James looked at him. Harry looked back. He didn’t want his parents to be concerned about normality. That was what the Dursleys thought about. And if Harry was all right being abnormal, then why should they be worried about it? Harry kept having the feeling they worried more about him than themselves, which was nonsense.
“All right,” James echoed, and his smile was a little helpless. “We’ll have spiders and mice with us when we go to Diagon Alley to retrieve our wands. I suppose-Gringotts was able to confirm that they were placed in our vaults?”
Harry nodded. Gringotts had refused to write back to “James and Lily Potter,” obviously believing they were imposters, until after they saw them face-to-face. “That’s what they said. Though the goblins still think that they’ll be giving them to me as some kind of inheritance.”
“Well.” Now James was smiling more the way he had in the photographs. “Then I think we should plan a trip to Diagon Alley soon, to surprise them.”
*
Neville sighed and stepped back near Gran, glad that that interview was finally done. The reporter hadn’t been as bad as Rita Skeeter, but she had insisted on asking him all sorts of questions that he had no answers for. He didn’t know who he wanted to get married to! He was fifteen!
“She was rather rude, wasn’t she?” Hermione observed, but she didn’t stay around to hear what he said before she was pointing ahead of them and saying, “Look at that!”
Neville gladly did, since he’d felt Gran’s hand tighten on his elbow, and he knew she wanted to say something about Hermione’s rudeness. Gran always thought the interviews and reporters and stares and marriage proposals were a good thing. She thought they were giving Neville the kind of attention that would force him to grow up.
But then Neville saw who was walking down the middle of Diagon Alley, and he was gaping. He’d known-of course he’d known that Harry had succeeded in reviving his parents, but that was only a few days ago! Now they were here.
“James and Lily Potter.” Gran’s voice was very low, her words precise, her eyes huge. “That’s-I can’t believe he did it.”
Harry was striding in front of them, and Professor McGonagall walked behind. Neville wondered for a second if that was to keep them from falling, but he didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. They were heading straight for Gringotts, and if he wanted to talk to them before they vanished inside, he’d have to be quick.
“Harry!” he called out, and ran towards him, waving a hand.
Harry spun around, one hand rising, before he obviously recognized Neville’s voice and relaxed. He smiled. “Hello. How are you? And you, Mrs. Longbottom? And Granger and Weasley,” he said, with a nod.
The Potters were squinting at all of them, as if they were suddenly bathed in strong light, and them Mr. Potter grinned. “You are a Weasley, with that ginger hair. Gryffindor, right? Which one of Arthur and Molly’s children?”
“Ron,” said Ron, and he was smiling. “You’re Mr. Potter, right? James Potter? My dad-he’s talked about you a lot.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Potter, and then he was talking to Ron, while Lily Potter engaged Hermione. She kept stammering, and Neville didn’t know if that was because she thought of Lily as a heroine of the first war, or if because she was stunned to see her up and walking around.
Meanwhile, Harry was standing off to one side, silently watching. There was a faint smile on his lips, though, which meant more than Neville could have put into words.
Gran came up then, and after scanning them thoroughly, she turned to Harry. “You do amazing things when you want to, Mr. Potter.”
Harry looked up. “When I want to,” he agreed.
Gran frowned as if she wasn’t entirely satisfied with that answer, but luckily, she started talking to Professor McGonagall then, and Neville felt he could go up to Harry and have a real conversation.
“Are you doing all right?” he whispered to Harry, while James told some story that made Ron whoop with laughter and Lily asked Hermione how she’d got into Gryffindor with that love of books.
“Yes.” Harry gave him a tilted-head look. A mouse ran up his shoulder and sat next to his ear, grooming his hair with small motions of its paws. “They’re up and walking around. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I just mean-what do they think about what you did to end the war? And things like that?” Neville wasn’t about to say anything too incriminating in the middle of Diagon Alley, especially since people were beginning to look at them.
“Oh. They’re not happy about it.”
“And-you’re okay with that?”
“They’ll either change their minds or they won’t.” Harry blinked at him. “I can’t lie about it. They’ll have to be the ones to decide if they can accept it or not.”
Neville supposed that was that, at least for Harry. Honestly, he should have expected it, he thought, as he watched Harry move towards his father when Mr. Potter listed a little to the side. Harry was incredibly honest, in some ways. He didn’t see the point of lying most of the time. If he wanted to conceal something, he just didn’t tell anybody about it, and then went ahead and did it anyway.
Mr. and Mrs. Potter went into Gringotts with Harry. Professor McGonagall smiled at him and said one more soft thing to Gran, and then she followed them, ignoring the voices of a few people who’d recognized her and were calling out to her.
“Baffling,” Gran said.
Neville tilted his head back to look at her. “What do you mean?”
Gran was frowning after Harry, one hand patting at her white hair as if it had fallen out from under her hat in the last few minutes. “He defeated You-Know-Who and raised his parents essentially from the dead. And he doesn’t want anyone to know about it. I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you tell someone?”
Neville just shook his head a little, and then sighed as the next classmate from Hogwarts recognized him and came up to claim his attention. Gran would never understand Harry at all, that was certain.
He just hoped Mr. and Mrs. Potter would.
*
“Harry. Can you please tell me what your Aunt Petunia was like?”
Harry studied Lily critically. She was sitting in front of him with a stiff little smile and her hands clasped together. Her voice was soft and she looked as if she didn’t want to be there.
“Just her, or the other Dursleys, too?” They were in the kitchen, and the others weren’t here right now. Harry set his teacup aside and dropped one hand to give a piece of bacon to Cross. “Because it’s hard to talk about them separately.”
Lily exhaled slowly. She had the lily he brought in every day in her hand. “Just my sister. She was the one who-she used to be my best friend, until I found out I was a witch. And then she hated me, and called me-”
“A freak. I know. She used the same word on me.”
Lily only held his stare for a second. Then her eyes fell back to the table, and she whispered, “Will you tell me, please?”
So Harry did. He talked about how Aunt Petunia ignored him a lot of the time. How she called him a freak. How she made him do chores. How she was the one who woke him in the morning, most of the time he lived in the cupboard.
Lily broke the flower’s stem when he told her about the cupboard. A little later, when he was talking about how his aunt completely ignored him when Uncle Vernon killed his kitten, she put her hands over her face and began to cry. It was quiet, though. Harry could only see her shoulders shaking to really know she was doing it.
He looked the other way so she wouldn’t be embarrassed, and kept talking. She had wanted to know. He would tell her.
He talked about how Aunt Petunia taught him to cook, but didn’t usually let him have the food. How she spoiled Dudley, and nothing was good enough for her Dudders. How she was the one to tell Harry, over and over, that his parents were drunks who had died, and that he had never doubted her until Professor McGonagall brought the letter to his door. How she was afraid of his animals, and he had taken some joy in showing them to her when he thought she wouldn’t be able to retaliate against him.
Lily cried through most of it. Towards the end, though, Harry ran out of things to say about Petunia, and Lily lowered her hands from her face. She reached out towards him. After a minute of not realizing what she wanted, Harry took her hand.
It was strange, to sit there holding her hand. For ten years he’d thought she was dead. For four years he’d never known if she would be aware enough someday to hold his hand back.
“My poor, poor boy,” Lily whispered. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there.”
Harry shook his head. “It was the Lestranges’ fault that you weren’t there. Don’t worry about it.”
“Minerva told me that you did something to them, but not what.” Lily looked straight at him. “I’m ready to hear it. How did you revive us, exactly?”
“Are you sure you’re ready to hear it?” Harry asked gently. She looked like Neville when he was trying to get ready to stand in front of the Killing Curse. “It might be worse for you than hearing about Aunt Petunia.”
“I want to hear, Harry. I want to understand everything about you.”
Harry had to smile. She was just like Minerva in one way: they both thought they could understand him. When he wasn’t really human, and his soul was the soul of a predatory bird.
But he told her about the Wild, and how he’d learned to manipulate it, and then how he’d unwound the Wild from their bodies and turned the Lestranges into collections of beetles and stomped them to death. He watched her face get paler and paler, and about halfway through, she pulled her hand back from his. Harry watched her stand up when he was done and walk out of the room. She didn’t glance back at him or say anything.
Harry sighed a little and fed the last piece of his bacon to Cross. Then he went to read more about great cats. Immolator and Formido had come back and were playing in the gardens, but he thought that he needed to make more prey for them to really be comfortable. He would see what kind of antelopes or goats or other animals the books recommended.
*
“How could someone do that? How could he do that?”
Minerva handed a sandwich to Lily and sat down beside her on the stairs. It had taken hours for her to come and seek Minerva out, and explain that she knew about how Harry had brought her and James back to sanity. Now she was shivering with shock and what Minerva thought was hunger.
Minerva put a hand on Lily’s shoulder. “He doesn’t let things stop him,” she said softly. “That’s what you need to understand. When he realized Voldemort was immortal, he came up with a way to defeat him. When he realized that you were alive but insane, he came up with a way to heal you. Obstacles exist for him solely as things to be got around.”
Lily thickly swallowed a bite of the sandwich. “But-but how can we make him accept some limitations? How can we make him into our little boy again?”
Minerva closed her eyes and spoke with infinite pity. “You can’t.”
Lily continued eating, but her shoulders were hunched, and Minerva had the feeling that she was staring rebelliously at the wall.
“Harry is what he is. I hope that you can come to accept him as he is, rather than trying to force him into a mold he is unsuited for.”
Lily said nothing, although that might have been because her mouth was full. Minerva sighed and turned to her.
“Harry worked and fought for years until he figured out how to heal you,” she said softly. “No one else believed it could be done. Don’t you owe him a little consideration for that, at least? Or would you rather have spent the rest of your life on the far side of sanity?”
“I would rather my son wasn’t a killer.”
“But he is.”
“Why can you accept him?” Lily drew back and stared at her. “At least some of the people he killed were your friends, too.”
“Albus would have killed me,” Minerva reminded her. “I already told you what I think about Severus. There’s no one else Harry killed-they were mostly Death Eaters-I would have counted as a friend. I don’t believe Harry would have harmed someone who wasn’t an enemy, at least not directly. He fought back against people who’d tortured his parents, who were trying to kill him, who thought he was insane and wanted to destroy him. It’s the same thing you did in the war, Lily.”
“We weren’t at war.” Lily was trailing her hand over the step, and Minerva could hardly hear the difference between one sound and another.
“Now, you mean? Yes, we were. No one had officially declared it this time, but with Voldemort back, it was only a matter of carrying the battle to him instead of holding back the way we did in the first war.”
Lily said nothing for so long that Minerva nearly left her. But then she looked up. “Give me time, Minerva. Give me time to realize that-my son can’t be tamed.”
Minerva squeezed her arm. “If you realize that already, if you can come to terms with it, then you’ll be a good mother. The one he needs, not the one that either of you might have wanted to pretend you are.”
*
“I can’t believe that they’re gone.” James sat on the doorstep and stared over the trees that crowded the back edge of the Black gardens. “That Sirius is dead, and Peter is dead-and he was a traitor, how did that happen? And Remus…”
“Lupin is still alive,” Harry said, wondering if someone had told his father otherwise. Well, no, Minerva wouldn’t be that careless, and his parents had no way to communicate with his animals. James had probably just assumed it was so because everyone else was.
James turned eagerly around, and almost wavered and fell off the step. Harry raised a warning hand, but James managed to stop spinning in time. “Then where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
“I didn’t want to invite him because he and I don’t get along,” Harry said, with a shrug. “And I didn’t know if I would be able to heal you. But if you want to invite him, then you should. This is your house, too.”
James looked at him, and his face softened. “You’re so damn adult. When did you get so damn adult?”
Harry blinked. “I don’t know,” he admitted, after giving it some consideration. Cross came stalking out and sat on the step beside him, but that didn’t help him remember. “I can’t remember ever being a child, really.”
“Of course not. Bloody Dursleys.” James sighed. “Yes. Please. Write a letter to Remus. I don’t think I can grip a quill reliably yet, or I’d do it.”
“Of course.” Harry stood up to go back inside the house, but James held his hand out before he could. Harry turned and looked at him inquiringly.
“Thank you,” James said, his voice hoarse. “I’m-not used to this yet, but you’re doing right. And give your mum some time. She’ll come around.”
“Of course,” Harry said, and bobbed his head, and went into the house. He knew James was doing right, too. He knew he was trying. Even Lily was trying, although she’d been more overwhelmed by the news of what Harry had done to keep them safe and bring them back to life.
He wouldn’t say that he would accept it and not be hurt if neither of them could really be his parents. It would hurt them.
He had focused on healing them. Not what came afterwards. And he had done that. Now it was up to all of them to find their lives as best they could. If it wasn’t with him, that was the way it would be.
Harry already knew they would be distressed if he said that, if not exactly why.
Chapter Sixty-Five.
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