Chapter Thirty-Two of 'A Brother to Basilisks'- Practice Makes Perfect
Chapter Thirty-One.
Title: A Brother to Basilisks (32/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual Harry/Draco and Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Angst, violence, some gore, AU from Prisoner of Azkaban onwards
Rating: R
Summary: AU of PoA. Harry wakes in the night to a voice calling him from somewhere in the castle-and when he follows it, everything changes. Updated every Friday.
Author’s Notes: This is a canon-divergent AU that starts after Chapter 7 of Prisoner of Azkaban. It will probably run to at least the mid-point of The Half-Blood Prince. It will also be long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Two-Practice Makes Perfect
Hello, Harry. You would tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you? was the first line of Hermione’s letter, and it made Harry sigh and lean back on his pillow. He wanted to have a happy summer. How could he when people were constantly asking him if something was wrong?
Perhaps you should have put the smelly dog-man in his place. Then people would ask you that less often.
Harry reached out a hand to idly stroke Dash, who was beside him and occupying more than half the bed, although he’d said that was okay because part of the space he was occupying was on top of Harry. I have no idea if it’s just about Sirius. Sirius being fairer to me wouldn’t make the abuse go away, or the Dursleys. Or the people who think I’m wrong for being abused.
All you have to do is shrink me and let me ride the owls back. I’m certain I could manage the magic to grow again on my own.
Harry snorted. No. But he knew it was no good denying that the option was an attractive one, because Dash was in his head and could hear him.
And it was exasperating to get Howlers from people who were mainly concerned that he wasn’t “strong” enough and that meant he might not be able to defend them from Voldemort. Especially because Harry was starting to get worried they might be right.
Shrink me. Dash lifted his head and parted his jaws, sagging them sideways, in a yawn that he deliberately exaggerated whenever Sirius was around. Put me in the Headmaster’s food if you are not going to send me to the distant people who bother you.
I’m not going to do that to anybody. Harry sat up, a thought coming together that had been bothering him for a little while. But I can make sure that I’m strong and ready to take on Voldemort.
That should not be the only thing you do with your life.
Harry looked down at the heavy coil lying on his hand, as if Dash was trying to prevent him from reaching for a fire. Even if there’s a prophecy that says I’m the only one who can defeat him?
Dash turned and stared at him, wreathing his head sideways. Harry snorted again. Of course, he already knew what Dash thought about the prophecy. He had made it abundantly clear.
“I want to get stronger,” Harry said aloud. That felt less intimate and more what he needed at the moment. “And I don’t want to reply to Hermione’s letter right now.” Ron’s he would reply to today, maybe. Ron was talking about how Bill had been promoted by the goblins and was going to be able to pay for a second trip to Egypt for the whole family, and they might also be able to visit his other older brother, Charlie, in Romania. Nice things, fun things. “So I’m going to start training my wandless magic.”
Dash waved his tongue around as though scenting delicious prey. I can help you with that!
How? Harry stood up and looked at Dash in interest. He had thought Dash might agree to sometimes be Apparated or a target of his wandless spells, but other than that, he didn’t know what Dash could do to help him.
By giving you some of my magic. Dash curved his neck around in a way that was definitely meant to be cute. I am just learning to do that.
When were you going to tell me? Harry grumbled, but he couldn’t feel too bad about it. Dash hadn’t told him about being able to speak with Harry’s voice or summon snakes out of shadows, either, but those had been useful at the time.
Just now, said Dash, unhelpfully, and poured himself off the bed. Let us go up to Hogwarts and find Professor Snape.
Harry hesitated. He hadn’t asked permission to go to Hogwarts so far, because Sirius was so touchy about Snape and it was only a couple of days into the summer.
Dash turned his head around patiently. Do you want the smelly dog-man to find out that you are practicing banishing things? And there is little private space in this house. There are plenty of private and protected spaces in Hogwarts.
That was true, at least. And Harry had to admit that Snape would probably know where all of them were, at least if they were in the dungeons. Fine. But he was going to tell Sirius where they were going before they left.
If you think he will not try to stop you.
Harry rolled his eyes, because he didn’t actually need Dash’s permission, and bolted down the stairs. Sirius was in the drawing room reading a book, and now and then chuckling at something one of the moving pictures apparently did. He looked up at Harry, and his face became a little more drawn and white.
That is not your fault. Dash had a little singsong intonation to the thought that he’d perfected, although Harry had never worked out who he thought he was imitating.
Harry ignored him and asked, “Do you think I can go to Hogwarts and visit Snape for a while?” That he wasn’t going to talk about the wandless magic was a given, as far as he was concerned. Sirius would probably want to be his teacher, and Harry didn’t trust him enough for that.
That is the smartest thing you have said today.
Harry waited, petting Dash a little while he coiled most of himself around Harry’s chest and shoulders, and Sirius finally said, “Oh, all right. But make sure that you’re back by dinner. And if Snape tries to give you any potions, refuse them. You don’t know what kind of revenge he’d try to take on you.”
Harry blinked. “Why would he want to take revenge on me?” If anyone, he had thought Snape would be aiming for Sirius.
“Because you’re so much like your dad.” Sirius’s face softened, and he looked Harry up and down as if even his feet reminded Sirius of his dad. “Snape and your dad didn’t get along, you know that. I think James would be rolling in his grave to know you’re spending this much time around him.”
Harry had found that the best response was silence. So he waited again, and Sirius nodded and sighed and muttered, “I just wish I knew how to help you more.”
“You help me a lot,” Harry said, and escaped out the back door while Sirius was still grinning at him. It always helped to leave on a good note if he could.
You are learning how to manipulate him, Dash said, as he dropped down from Harry’s shoulder to investigate an interesting squeak in the grass. Harry was also learning how to compensate for the intense flood of hunting interest and vertigo in his mind, and he only shook his head and kept walking. Snape will approve.
I don’t intend to tell Snape about it.
What a shame, said Dash, but in that absent voice that meant he had spotted an actual mouse, and Harry wasn’t surprised when his head jolted forwards and he snatched something up, swallowing it whole. He doubted Dash would remember this or push him to tell Snape.
Dash flowed on both sides of him as he went up to Hogwarts, finding several other mice and one small frog, and Harry only urged him onto his shoulders again when they got into the vicinity of the school, where Dumbledore might see.
*
Severus was deep enough in brewing that he might not have heard the knock he was sure Harry gave at his door. But there was an alarm set up on the edge of his cauldron that would flash when Harry came into the school, and he managed to add the last few ingredients in a hurry, levering the Skin-Growing Potion out of the cauldron with a ladle and looking critically at it. The color would win no awards, but he knew the slight difference in shade wouldn’t affect the use.
He corked the vial, put it aside, and stepped from the lab into the drawing room where he usually entertained his few visitors. It felt as though he had put on dress robes over his old and shabby ones. The lab was where he both lived and worked, the heart of his existence. The drawing room was there for those who thought one should live in different places.
He opened the door as Harry was raising his hand, probably for the second knock. The basilisk was entwined around his ankles and legs. Severus nodded to him and looked up to meet Harry’s eyes. “Are you well?”
Harry blinked, interrupted in his first words as he had been in his knock. Then he smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “And you sound like Hermione.”
Severus wanted to say that he had never waved his hand around in class until the professors grew tired of looking at it, but he only stepped back and waved Harry into his quarters. “What have you come to ask me?”
Harry didn’t protest, the way that, say, Albus, would have, and pretend he had come for a purely social visit. He turned around and locked his elbows against his sides as if pushing off against his ribs. Severus raised his eyebrows and waited.
Harry finally blurted, “I need a place where I can practice wandless magic. Draco thought it might be a good way to get ready to use it as a weapon against people who would try to hurt me.”
Why can you not practice it in a secure room in Black’s house? were the first words that sprang to Severus’s mind. But he would not be so stupid as to speak them when he knew the answer. He considered for a moment, then nodded. “Very well. There are a few dungeon classrooms that might serve. They were once used for Potions, but they were ruined by explosions.”
Harry’s mouth opened a little. “Doesn’t that mean they’re dangerous, sir?” The basilisk lifted his head a little higher and flicked his tongue out, as if scenting for threats or dangers to his ward.
“No,” said Severus. “They have stains on the floor and walls and cracks in the floor, but those are easy to dodge if you know what you’re doing.”
Harry was looking oddly thoughtful. Severus glared at him. “Do not pull these classrooms into your usual list of places to go to take risks.”
“I don’t take risks,” Harry muttered as he followed Severus down the corridor towards the first of the classrooms he had mentioned. “Risks find me.”
Severus didn’t answer. He was thinking. While wandless magic was not part of the usual course offerings in Defense the Dark Arts, it might be the only chance he would ever get to teach his favorite subject.
And if it was to Harry, and Harry was learning things that Black would disapprove of…
Severus smiled contentedly. It would serve Black right for caring more about the ghosts of his past than about the living boy who had needed his help.
*
Harry looked around the classroom in wonder. Snape was right, it didn’t look that dangerous. Yes, there was a crack in one wall, but it had magic glowing around it like Floo powder, and Harry didn’t think it would suddenly collapse. And there were splinters that might have come from exploded tables, but Harry wouldn’t get hurt unless he stepped on those. He wouldn’t be so stupid.
The really impressive thing was the stains, though.
There were green ones like stars all around the crack in the wall. And there were some hanging like the strokes of giant white claws down from the ceiling all the way to the floor. And there was a gigantic hand-shaped purple bruise in the center of the floor, the most impressive one, which pattered away into smaller handprints near the ends of the splotch.
“What happened with that?” Harry asked, pointing at the purple stain. “Why don’t you ever teach us to make potions that do that?”
Dash looked up at him through his closed eyelids, but Harry couldn’t really tell what he was thinking. For a second, his tail swished, and then he slid away from Harry and seemed content to explore the outside of the purple stain, his tongue lashing as though he could pick up the scents of the ancient explosion.
Snape turned around, and for a second, he was stiff and stern as if Harry asking questions was the bad thing Uncle Vernon had always told him it was. Harry was about to shrink back and apologize, when Snape sighed and muttered, “That was an intense accident. An almost perfectly brewed Draught of Living Death was emptied into the cauldron of an early version of Wolfsbane. This was the result.” He swept out one hand that included most of the classroom, to Harry’s way of thinking. “There is no way you would cause a stain this large unless you were working with those potions both at once, which you won’t. Not even if you take NEWT Potions.”
Harry cocked his head. “Then why were students working with them in here? Sir,” he added swiftly, when he saw the way Snape was looking at him.
But Snape only shook his head a little, as though it actually irritated him to be called by a title, and said, “It was not students. Shall we begin?” He waved his wand, and several of the splinters flew together. When he snapped his wand down again, there was an actual chair there, more impressive than most things Harry had seen people do with Transfiguration. “Do you want to learn to banish things and people, or do something else with your magic?”
“Was it you, sir?” Harry found that he couldn’t let the idea of the stain go. And hadn’t someone said something about Snape working to improve Wolfsbane? Although Harry couldn’t remember if it was something someone had said around the school or an article he’d read in the paper.
Snape took a sharp breath and answered, “Yes, it was. It taught me not to mix those two potions in the same vicinity. Shall we begin?”
He isn’t angry, said Dash, who was investigating a corner in which, he told Harry, there was a high possibility a rat was living. Just irritated with himself for past mistakes.
“Angry” and “irritated” sounded like the same thing to Harry, but he only nodded and said, “Yes, sir. I want to learn how to banish things. I think that would be the best defense.”
“Good,” said Snape, and paused. “How are your marks in Defense, Harry?”
It’s not strange when he calls you Harry, Dash said, and wriggled most of his blunt nose into the corner. Don’t think it is.
I can think it is all I want, as long as I don’t actually say that to his face, Harry argued back, while knowing he sounded petulant, and then faced Snape and said, “As good as they can be when only one of the teachers was decent, sir.”
Snape nodded as if he’d expected that. “Very well. Then I will assume you have not learned some of the basic theory. When you banished Black to his rooms,” and there was a twitch of Snape’s lips as though he was holding back a smile, “what emotion were you primarily feeling?”
“Anger. Desperation.” Harry shuddered a little, and finally mentioned the fear he had that had bubbled in the back of his mind like a cauldron since he’d talked to Draco. “What am I going to do if anger is the only emotion I can use for wandless magic? I can’t get angry at a chair or a desk the way I could at a person. And I don’t want to be angry all the time, either.”
“There are other emotions you can use,” Snape said, and his voice slid into a tone Harry had never heard him use before. Maybe this is how he lectures when he thinks all his students aren’t dunderheads. “What is important is feeling them and thinking them at the same time.”
Harry blinked. That was probably a part of the Defense theory Snape had said he didn’t know, which made him feel a little stupid. “I don’t know what that means, sir.”
“You feel them, but you allow the passion to pour through you and over you,” Snape explained. “Like swimming. The emotions are the water, but you are not. You are within the water, and you keep your thinking mind free of their influence. Most magic is powered by emotions, in one way or another, if only the desire to see the spell completed. You felt the sharpest edge of that desire when you banished Black.”
Harry nodded, still unsure where this was going. He understood what Snape was saying, but he had no idea how to just let the emotions pour over him in a torrent.
“You feel them, and you think about them,” Snape said, and raised his wand. A small pattern of green lights began to rotate around his head. Harry blinked and tried to focus on them. He wondered if it was only coincidence that Dash turned around and lifted his neck at the same time. “You concentrate on something else first,” Snape continued, his voice soft and lulling. “Your trick your mind into focusing on that thing. Then you summon the emotion, and pour it like thick water all around the thing you are already concentrating on.”
“But if you know what you’re doing, how can you trick your mind?” Harry strained his eyes to look at the little green things. They looked like stars sometimes, and flowers others, but then the points would vanish back into the dots of light, and he wasn’t sure. “I would keep thinking about tricking my mind instead.”
“I did not say it was easy.” Snape’s voice was gentle now, not lulling. “But I believe it is a trick that will allow you to practice better wandless magic than not using it would.”
Harry swallowed, nodded, and said, “You want me to focus on the green things?”
“The Lullaby Dots. They are a spell sometimes used by mothers to soothe their children to sleep,” Snape said. “Yes. I think they are a good choice. They are what I learned to focus on when I was teaching myself a different branch of magic.”
Harry blinked. What branch of magic is that? It seemed strange Snape was trying to teach him this way if he didn’t know about wandless magic himself.
But his tactics, or theory, or whatever they were, still sounded good, so Harry focused on the dots and tried to think about how green they were, how bright they were, how strange they looked spinning around Snape’s head.
That is not the way to do it, said Dash in a bossy voice. You’ll only fall asleep like the children Snape mentions if you do it that way. Here, let me.
Harry thought he was going to create some sort of other distraction for Harry to focus on, but instead he reached into Harry’s mind and touched something there. It felt like a spring that had been holding thoughts back. Harry winced and touched his forehead, which was aching and hot, as if he had a fever.
What did you do? Harry asked Dash at the same moment as Snape said, “Harry?” in a rapid voice.
I gave you the ability to focus on something like the Lullaby Dots without falling asleep, said Dash, and wriggled more of his body into the crack in the corner. Thank me later. This smell is really fascinating and strong down here.
“I’m all right, sir,” said Harry, when he realized Snape was still scowling at him in concern. And it was strange to know that he could distinguish the concerned scowl from the merely annoyed one. “Dash improved things somehow. He said I would just fall asleep before, but now I should be able to concentrate on the Lullaby Dots.”
Snape’s eyebrows went up, and stayed there. “Then he can exercise a familiar bond to interfere with your thoughts?” he asked. “I would not have thought that a bond with a basilisk would have that ability.”
Harry shrugged, unable to say what he really thought. But Snape was still waiting for an answer, so Harry finally said, “I don’t think anyone knows what a bond with a basilisk is supposed to be like, do they? They’re making up their own theories and hoping they work.”
Snape gave him an actual smile. “I suspect you are right. Now, concentrate. What I am teaching you can be the basis of dueling as well as wandless magic.”
Dueling sounded interesting, despite Harry’s disappointing experience of it against Draco. He concentrated.
*
It can also be the basis of Occlumency.
But Severus would not tell Harry that, not yet. It could be that he would show no talent in the mind arts, or have no intention of learning them. It could be that he would never be good enough at them to hide secrets from Dumbledore, and that would mean the Headmaster would only grow more suspicious and determined to pry into Harry’s mind. It could be that Harry would not have the discretion-he was only thirteen-to use them wisely, and would cause legal problems for himself.
He is only thirteen, and threatened by so many enemies.
Severus breathed a little. Yes, he was. And he could deal with the darkness that stirred up in the back of his mind.
Deal with it, and move on.
Then give him the weapons to defend himself.
Chapter Thirty-Three.
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