Chapter 13: Justice
Chapter 13: Justice
1. Suddenly, Harry heard a voice in his head: Sam Bell's voice. Accidental or not, a person was still dead. The spell I cast was to blame. It wasn't the killing curse, but it still killed. That was all that mattered.
And Harry knows what happened to Sam, although he did confess, so that was why he didn't have a trial. And Sam's story was foreshadowed still earlier by the story Sirius told Harry at the ceilidh, about the MacGregor and the clan Lamont man who'd killed his son, though at the time the emphasis was more on forgiveness than on accidentally killing with the Disarming Charm.
2. He remembered when Ron was only twelve, seeing him lying on McGonagall's giant chessboard after letting himself be taken; he remembered him sprawled on the bed in the Shrieking Shack, in agony from his broken leg, telling Sirius Black, whom he thought was a Death Eater and a murderer, that if he killed Harry, he would have to kill him and Hermione too. He remembered reentering his body after Ron had put the Cruciatus Curse on him, his best friend looking down at him and saying simply, "You back?" in that tone of voice that told simultaneously told Harry, I knew you'd be okay, and You should have known all along that I'm with you. I'm your best friend, and I always will be.
The flip side of this is that Harry will remember the years of Draco being his friend in THIS life when he's back in the other one, and will also behave accordingly.
3. Longbottom shook his hand off. "This doesn't concern you, old man! Get out of our way!"
Dumbledore drew himself up, no longer bent over. He put his wand to his nose, muttering, "Finite Incantatem," and he pulled half-moon spectacles from his pocket, putting them on. Longbottom barely blinked, but Harry did see him swallow as he stared at the face of Albus Dumbledore.
"This concerns me a great deal, Longbottom," Dumbledore informed him in that dangerous voice that Harry remembered.
One reason I enjoyed having Dumbledore go about in disguise in the earlier part of the fic is that it let me do this reveal here, for the benefit of the Longbottoms. ;)
4. "Don't you think we'd know our son's best friend? This can't possibly be him; he would never be involved in such a thing. We need to take this person back to the Ministry and find out who took Polyjui-that is, a potion to make themselves look like him, especially as he's dead. It's likely to be his murderer; that's probably why he was killed, so that someone could assume his identity."
I know that this part was very frustrating to a lot of people, but I was pulling out all the stops to make Harry's situation as dire as possible, so if you want sweetness and light, this is definitely the wrong chapter to read!
5. "Harry--I know you did what you had to. I'll be by your side through all this. You know that, don't you?"
Harry stared at him in amazement. He was kneeling here, silent tears running down his face, holding his wife's cold body, telling the person responsible for her death that he was going to be by his side...
I know this is miles away from canon Snape, but I had to give Harry some small hope at this moment! Not that it'll last for long, of course.
6. Finally, his dad looked down at him sadly, and the fatherly hug he gave Harry went to his heart as nothing else had. We'll get through this, Harry thought. And then I'll fix it so you won't have to remember losing a wife or a son...
Except that Harry puts some memories of this life in his Pensieve and lets Snape see them. Still not the same as living them, but not exactly seeing to it that he doesn't remember.
7. Ginny is not going to have a child. She never was.
Just another way in which Harry's actions seem incredibly futile to him now. Ron came out of hiding to throttle him for getting Ginny pregnant--but she never was. And now Lily is dead because of that.
8. Sometimes they sent him spiraling down into depression, reliving his parents' murders from his old life, or Dudley's funeral, or Simon's, and he also had relived, dozens of times over, putting the Disarming Charm on his mother, seeing her fly backwards...
At other times he felt an irrational anger grip him, and he punched and kicked whatever he could get his hands on in the tiny cell, screaming in fury until his throat wouldn't produce any more noise, feeling like there was no one left on earth who could possibly hear him. He would sink to the floor, exhausted, and eventually, transfigure himself into a griffin and curl up in the corner to sleep...
This seemed like a somewhat logical rollercoaster of emotion for Harry to go through, under the circumstances. Poor kid--I was so mean to him!
9. He'd tried to remember the twists and turns on the way in, but when he turned to look behind him as he walked, he discovered that a doorway through which he'd just come had mysteriously disappeared. The corridors seemed to spontaneously mutate while one was walking through them. He knew that that was just one of the reasons why escape from here would have been impossible.
If the staircases at Hogwarts can move around, it seemed logical to me that in an environment where you want people to be confused, this should happen. (Seriously, though--I still don't get the point of purposefully making kids get lost on the way to their lessons. I think it just tickled JKR's funny bone.)
10. There is nothing good about this. Too much that we have built and worked for will be jeopardized by this trial. I must ask you to reconsider and let me help you to escape.
Harry read this and frowned. He took the quill back and wrote:
I won't tell about Dad or the others. I'll leave them out of it. I can work around some of these issues, but if I run, I'll look guilty.
Dumbledore, of course, having tried and failed to convince Harry, concocts his own plan in response. That's something that really pissed off a lot of people--Dumbledore's seeming to turn on him during the trial.
11. "And who are you to decide that, Harry? Would you feel the same if your mother hadn't died? She was why you did what you did, correct? What makes this world any less valid a reality than the other life you knew? This has been the world for the rest of us for over fifteen years; we have known no other. Think of the lives you’ll be snuffing out, to change such a thing..."
This is the question, isn't it? Just because Harry played God to change the timelines before, does that give him the right to do it again, to restore the original timeline by preventing his other time-traveling self from interfering with the original sequence of events? Do two wrongs really make a right? Not usually, in Dumbledore's experience, hence his objections.
12. Why were most of them women? he wondered, but not for long. Mothers, he thought. I'll bet all the witches are mothers.
He'd had no say in choosing the jury. He had no advocate, no one to speak for him. If his stepfather hadn't visited him to work out his trial strategy, he would be mounting his defense all by himself, a sixteen-year-old wizard charged with murder. As far as Harry knew, no allowances were made for age. The wizarding world was still far behind the Muggles in terms of fairness for someone accused of a crime, and Harry had found this to be a good thing when someone he knew was guilty was in the chair, when it was Lucius Malfoy. But now...
That's the thing, isn't it? Having a justice system that skews toward the state, rather than a system in which the accused is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt can SEEM like a good thing until YOU'RE the one on trial.
13. "After that, Harry definitely treated me differently. I'm his godfather, and his sister's godfather, and we've always had a good relationship. Somehow he decided to take his stepfather's side in this, instead of being glad that his mother was happy. But in a way, he didn't really take his stepfather's side; I mean, like I said, Severus wasn't thrilled, but he'd accepted our relationship. They were staying married to maintain a stable family life for the children, and because of the twins' illness."
Crouch turned a gimlet eye on Harry, who felt utterly unable to keep his distress from showing on his face. Bloody hell, he thought. Are they implying that I wanted my mother myself or that I wanted her for my stepfather?
I had some fun turning one of the fandom critiques of H/G on its head here, by having Ron and Sirius both subtly imply that Harry did in fact have an Oedipus complex and that was why he was pursuing Ginny. Which is, of course, ridiculous. But it looked very damning in the trial.
14. Crouch turned to eye Harry suspiciously again. "Interesting, isn't it, Mr. Potter, that when you are confronted with a boggart, it turns into a dementor. Even more interesting, though, is that you already took the pains to learn how to fight it..."
I was SO tickled when JKR had Harry defending his conjuring a Patronus in a court of law in OotP! She also put him on trial far sooner than I did, though I had him as a fugitive on the run sooner than she did. (Since I did both of those in his sixth year, and he was on trial in his fifth year but on the run during what would have been his seventh.) Both seemed inevitable to me, though, so I'm not surprised that she both put him on trial and had Harry fleeing across the country from a variety of pursuers.
15. Draco smiled ruefully and nodded. "Harry--I had no idea. Why would Weasley lie that way? And the Longbottoms went along with the story."
"Dumbledore," Harry said simply.
"Dumbledore? But--"
"He--he was afraid I'd jeopardize the other operatives. I swore I wouldn't. But--he didn't want to take any chances."
There is in fact a correlation with canon here--when we learn that Snape only prevented the deaths of people he could help without blowing his own cover, those who died were effectively sacrificed by Dumbledore for the sake of his still having Snape for his agent. A spymaster has to be more than a bit cold-blooded at times.
16. He slept as a griffin at first, but changed back to his human form and curled his fingers around the amulet. He closed his eyes, finally feeling some peace, and he saw in his mind's eye Ginny sitting in the dark at a castle window, gazing at the stars, her arms wrapped around her legs, a tear gliding down her cheek. He saw his sister approach her and sit next to her, an arm around her shoulder. Jamie was crying too, and the two friends leaned on each other, crying softly. Harry yearned after them; they seemed near enough to touch. Will I ever actually see them in person again? he wondered.
Unfortunately, not in this life. I am glad that I created the amulet, though, for Harry to have some comfort after I pretty much pulled the rug out from under him. ;)
17. "The press loves a scandal," Harry said feebly.
"Right. And what do we have here? Accidental murder, sex, a reluctant Death Eater, unexplained disappearances... Oddly enough, according to Draco, the only person who turned out looking good in the article was you. Pity she’s not on the jury."
"She?"
"Some reporter called Rita Skeeter."
I enjoyed making Rita Harry's fan here. After all, Rita always did like being contrary.
18. "And I know that there are probably loyal Death Eaters who have already told Voldemort that I was never his true servant. I am a target now. But that is not what is important. If we each did only what was expedient, did what was necessary to save ourselves, the world would be..."
He stopped and looked around the quiet chamber. The world would be as this world is, he realized. A world that resulted from his telling his mother to be selfish, instead of letting her do what she knew to be necessary: sacrificing herself.
I believe that one possible thing that Dumbledore was referring to when he talked about the choice between doing what was right and what was easy was Lily's sacrifice. It would have been easier to capitulate; she did what was hard. And it made all the difference.
19. "Barty Crouch, Junior."
Under his straw-colored hair the younger Crouch paled, but his father did not notice. The Minister went vivid purple. "How dare you--" he struggled to say, shaking and quivering in his rage. The room had erupted in chaos; voices bounced off the stone walls, everyone was talking and shouting at once. It was complete mayhem. Crouch went to the door leading to the cells. "Guard! Come here and bring support!" He strode back to Harry and leaned over him. "He'll get what he deserves from me, if he won't get it from the jury!"
Harry was definitely not expecting Crouch to set dementors on him in open court. But then, Crouch wasn't expecting Harry to name his own son as a Death Eater.
20. Harry squeezed his eyes shut and his mouth; he would have closed his nostrils against the reek of the unearthly creatures if he knew how. There was a roaring in his ears of people in agony-his mother, his father, Cedric Diggory--even louder than the roaring of the unruly crowd in the chamber, and suddenly, above the cacophony, he heard a familiar voice, a powerful voice that cried with authority, "EXPECTO PATRONUM!"
Harry opened his eyes, seeing the dementor alarmingly close to him, and then he saw, emerging from his stepfather’s wand and moving swiftly toward the dementors a silvery shape. A number of silvery shapes, actually, but functioning as one creature, driving the dementors back, sending them out of the room, away from Harry.
His dad's Patronus was a flock of bats.
I have to say, one thing I didn't expect in DH was to have Snape's Patronus save Harry! Of course, the "saving" is different here (and my version of Snape's Patronus is a direct reference to the "Snape is a vampire" thing), since the Patronus is actually doing what they are usually conjured for, protection against dementors. I also wasn't particularly a fan of the whole Patronus-changing-according-to-who-you-love thing. I didn't see a particular point to Tonks' changing to a wolf (whatever it had been before) and I'm not sure why Lily's had to be a doe to match James' stag. At least Snape's being a doe in honor of Lily gives us one instance of the Patronus form of a male character changing because of a female character, rather than the other way around.
21. "Handle it right, and it won't hurt you," his dad said to Crouch softly. "Do what you just did-fly off the handle--and the Ministry will be in chaos. We won’t have a magical government any more. We all need you to keep your head about you right now. Can you do that?"
Crouch stared at the man he knew only as the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts. He didn't know Severus Snape had recruited his son to be a Death Eater when they were both still teenagers. He didn't know this man had been a spy for over fifteen years. But he evidently did know sense when he heard it.
In his other life, Crouch convicted his son of Death Eater activity, probably mainly to save his own career (which kind of went down the toilet anyway). It seems plausible that he would feel it expedient to do the same thing here if also presented with solid evidence of his son's crimes.
22. Harry groaned and put his tray on his mattress and went to the door, yelling irritably through the opening, "Shut up, Buttercup! Can't a person eat breakfast in peace around here?"
Suddenly, it was quiet, and Harry breathed a sigh of relief, sitting down to eat again.
Without warning, a speaking voice was heard saying, "About time."
Harry hesitated. Is that who I think it is?
"What's about time?" he finally answered.
"About time you called me by name. I told you as soon as you arrived."
I enjoyed both putting various cryptic messages into this part of the chapter through my choice of Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics, and having Harry converse with Buttercup, who becomes an important part of the next fic.
23. Dear Harry,
I don't know how to say this, so I'll just do it straight out. Jamie and Ginny have both been killed and Simon is in St. Mungo's....
I am going to try to find a safe place to go with Draco and Charlie; they are the only ones I trust now, and Charlie is as appalled with his brother’s trial testimony as I was. We will probably not be able to get away immediately, but we will do it soon. It may be difficult to continue to write to you for a while.
This is where all of the shit hit the fan. Harry was not only in prison, but most of the people he loved were dead or might as well have been dead. Now, he could have decided to run off with his dad, Draco and Charlie after escaping, but instead he kept to the plan of fixing the timelines. (That other is an AU fic I don't ever plan to write, a rather weird Four Musketeers!)
24. The sun was gilding the horizontal, scudding clouds that drifted in the pinkish sky, and in the distance, Harry thought he saw a greenish-purplish line on the horizon that could be the Scottish coast. It was now or never. He felt he would probably never again get up the nerve to do this, and if he waited too long, he wouldn't be able to find Draco.
Spreading his wings, he leapt off the cliff and fell for a few moments before moving his wings back and forth, back and forth, rising through the chilly sea air and building momentum. As he moved forward, he kept his griffin’s eyes on the dark line on the horizon that was the northeast coast of Scotland and flew toward the setting sun.
This was meant to be a hopeful ending! But in a way it was still a cliff-hanger. (Almost literally, except that Harry jumped OFF a cliff, rather than hanging from one!)