Chapter Twenty-Six of 'The Art of Self-Fashioning'- Soonest Begun, Soonest Mended
Chapter Twenty-Five.
Title: The Art of Self-Fashioning (26/?)
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 Twenty-Six-Soonest Begun, Soonest Mended
“If I’d known the way you’d take it, I’d have found some other way to break the news to you.”
Harry forced his eyes open. He was deep in some mound of soft cloth, and after turning over a few times, he identified it as blankets. He’d never wanted blankets this thick on his own bed in Ravenclaw Tower. He tried to sit up.
The world spun at once, and the room, and the walls, and even Black, reaching out a restraining hand. Harry let himself be laid back, but he gritted his teeth as he did so and shook his head a little, even when it made the spinning worse. He would have to come up with some way he could change himself to reduce dizziness. It was stupid to be incapacitated by something so simple.
“The mental confusion and shock,” Black continued. “And then someone tried to find you by scrying, and the wards prevented them at the same time. But it’s always disorienting to be the focus of a scrying that breaks.”
“How could someone scry for me if they aren’t a Seer?” Professor Trelawney was the only Seer Harry knew, and he didn’t think she was all that reliable.
“There are potions that could work their way around most magical defenses. Except the ones my ancestors were strong and paranoid enough to put on this house.” Black looked sour and satisfied, like Aunt Petunia when she’d just heard something bad about one of the neighbors. “It was probably Severus.”
“Professor Snape?” Harry leaned slowly back against the pillows. He could feel warmth against his side where the cats lay and the small bulges along his neck that were the mice, and Yar was on a perch across the room. At least Black hadn’t separated him from his animals. “Why would he care about where I went?”
“Probably because Dumbledore does.” Black grinned at him. “I prefer you still dazed and recovering, I think. You’re positively open with your questions.”
That made Harry shake his head. He didn’t want to be open. He would get over the shock and go back to being close-mouthed and stubborn.
Black only smiled as if he’d heard that vow and didn’t think much of it, and then reached out and scooped up something from a table that stood behind him, out of Harry’s sight. “This soup has a lot of salt in it,” he said, peering into it. “And tomatoes. My mother swore by it when I was sick.”
“You want me to eat something made by a woman who thought Muggles should be hunted down?”
“Well, Muggles. Not Muggleborns. And she never went as far as Cousin Araminta and tried to get it legalized.” Black shook his head. “Besides, my mother is years dead. I made this.”
“But she came up with the recipe,” Harry muttered, and still reached for the bowl. He knew eating the soup was probably just a way to put off confronting what Black had told him. That he had no way to really heal his parents, that he might make them into mindless walking things that did what they were told.
It made his hands sweat and his skin cold to think about it even now.
So he wouldn’t think about it until he had to. He would rest and eat, like an animal, and get stronger. Animals had the right idea. It really wasn’t bad to be wild, the way Black kept calling him.
“Do you know something animals can’t do?” Black said aloud, suddenly. Harry looked up. “They can’t read. They can’t look up arcane knowledge in books and improve what they know about Healing or Transfiguration or Charms, because they don’t know anything at all. They can’t recover from mistakes the way humans do.” Black leaned back in his chair and watched Harry with eyes as huge as Sirius’s in some of the photos. “Because one mistake in the wild usually means you’re dead.”
“That’s not true for cats and dogs.” Harry found it hard to recognize his own voice.
Black blinked in an exaggerated fashion and then bowed from his chair. “Forgive me. I had the comparison wrong. I was thinking of you as a wild animal. I didn’t know you meant to be tame.”
Harry bowed his head and let the outrage that Black was trying to stir up pass through him and like a hot, bright light over his head and into the distance. “How can you help me if you’re always joking?” he whispered.
“Joking seems like a reasonable response to someone who won’t answer me anyway,” said Black. “I can either try to save you and amuse myself at the same time, and sometimes get you to question me or answer me, or I can try to save you and have you sit there like a chunk of rock.”
“I would respond if you were serious.”
“Would you?” Black looked at him, cocking his head. “The most response I’ve seen out of you since you battled Bellatrix was when I told you that I knew the truth about you wanting to heal your parents. Why keep that a secret, by the way?” he added. “I know the Healers might have been useless to you, if they’re so set in their ways they won’t try something new, but Professor McGonagall would have helped you.”
Bitterness welled out of Harry, thick as the syrup he’d sometimes seen Dudley use. “No, she wouldn’t,” he said. “She would have told me it was dangerous, and stopped me. The same way you did.”
“Ah,” said Black, with a sigh that seemed more like the puff of air from a grave than anything else. He leaned back in his chair and studied Harry intently. “So you want to be left alone to destroy your life, and anyone who keeps you from doing that isn’t someone you count as an ally.”
“I want to be left alone to risk my life as I see fit.” Harry had thought it would hurt, putting some of these thoughts into words. It didn’t, although he thought it just as likely that Black wouldn’t understand him no matter what he said. “My life is a tool. I grew up not having parents. If I die trying to heal them, then it won’t change anything anyway.”
Black shut his eyes for a long time. Harry wondered if he was thinking about something else, maybe his own boredom with trying to help Harry. It would be ideal if he was, so Harry sat there and waited for something to happen instead of reminding him of his presence. He had a lot of practice doing that, anyway. Mostly in cupboards.
Black at last opened his eyes. They looked a little dazed, and had something in the corners that made Harry tense. He didn’t think it was good news for him.
“Merlin,” Black whispered. “I didn’t realize-I didn’t know you were that damaged.”
“I survived. I learned.” Harry felt Cross open an eye beside him. He wasn’t as fast as Yar, but he was the closest of Harry’s animals to Black at the moment. He would spring over the blankets and rake Black with his claws if Harry gave him the nod.
“But you didn’t survive in the way your parents would have wanted. They would have died for you like Longbottom’s parents did, wouldn’t they? There’s no doubt in my mind. They got tortured in the first place because they didn’t simply run away and leave you there.”
“They would never leave me alone.” Harry felt his mouth drying out with hatred at the thought.
“Right.” Black nodded. “That’s what I mean. And they’d want you to survive now. They wouldn’t mind if you took some risks, but you don’t care about destroying yourself…that’s horrible, Harry. It really is. They would want you to live, and if you can’t heal them, they would want you to make a life for yourself in a different way. Maybe as a Transfiguration master. But to live.”
Harry found it hard to shake his head. It was like his neck was frozen. “You don’t know that about them,” he said. “Not really.”
“I know they loved you. I know they wished you to live. That was something Sirius talked about all the time.”
“I thought you didn’t have any contact with him the last few years he was alive,” Harry said, glad to know that he could spot the lies and tricks even when he was lying on his back in bed.
Black gave a faint snort. “Not contact. He wrote me letters all the time. I think he was trying to convince me how good his life was and how stupid I was for staying behind to be our parents’ heir.” For an instant, a shadow crossed his face, but it was gone before Harry could think of a good way to use it as a weapon. “He just never actually answered the ones I sent. But he talked constantly about you after you were born, and how much your parents loved you.” Black looked directly at him. “How much he loved you. He did die trying to get vengeance for your parents, and you. If you don’t think you’d dishonor your parents by becoming a mindless, snarling wreck, then think about dishonoring my brother. Maybe your sense of duty to the dead is stronger.”
Harry shook his head to clear it. Black could fill it with dangerous, seductive lies. Now he regretted asking the man to speak more seriously. When he did, he tried to lure Harry away from his goals. “I won’t become a mindless, snarling wreck.”
Black studied him for a second, and then he turned and held up his wand. “Accio Uncle Cgynus’s globe.”
The thing that came flying to Black’s hands perhaps a minute later was a heavy crystal ball of the kind Harry had seen Divination students using. But this one didn’t have a base, and there was a large rune inscribed on the top that Harry couldn’t read at this angle. Black rubbed the crystal clear with one sleeve and then tapped his wand on the rune, murmuring something that sounded like the Black family motto.
The crystal took on a soft glow, white and gold. Black turned it around so Harry could see into it.
The image that took form showed a huge room, one with airy windows and a bed like the one Harry was lying in. It didn’t look familiar enough to actually be this room, but Harry would have bet that it was somewhere in Grimmauld Place or the Dark Manse.
There was a woman chained to the bed. She scrambled around the room on all fours, sniffing the carpets and tearing at them with her fingers. She had dark hair that hung around her face, but when she turned her head to look “out” of the globe, Harry could see her eyes were yellow and glowed like a wolf’s.
She had other differences, too, Harry noted slowly. She had short, thick claws instead of fingernails. Her hair was grey and shaggy, and in a few other places where the torn robes parted, Harry could see more fur. When she sat back and panted, her tongue rolled out of her jaws more freely than a human tongue did.
“Who is she?” Harry asked quietly, not looking away from the globe. He wouldn’t frighten easily, if Black was trying to frighten him.
“Druella Rosier,” said Black easily. “Well, Druella Black, really. She was my uncle Cygnus’s wife. The mother of Bellatrix. She was interested in werewolves, and experimented on a number of them.”
Harry’s claws shot out. Black shook his head. “Of course you’re angrier about threats to people who spend part of their time as animals than you are to genuine human beings.”
“Werewolves are genuine human beings,” said Harry. “And I don’t think she was a werewolf.”
“No. But she became convinced that lycanthropes were stronger and better than humans without the curse. She thought she could gain the strength of the wolf by Transfiguring herself into one, bit by bit, without the trauma and boredom of getting bitten and changing at each full moon.”
“And she became that,” said Harry, staring at the woman in the globe. The yellow eyes flashed as she took one of the bed-curtains in her mouth and started shaking it back and forth. Harry tried to watch her and think of her movements as having a purpose. He tried to think that she would turn around in a minute and tear at the chain, or curl up and pretend she was harmless so someone would come and get her out.
“Yes,” said Black. He touched his wand to the rune on top of the globe again, and swirling mists filled it, then melted. Now it just looked like ordinary crystal or glass, the way it had before he touched it. “Now you see what can happen when someone goes too far into the world of the animal, whether in an attempt to gain the animal’s power or with a greater goal the way you have.” He leaned back and studied Harry again.
“You could have shown me that before.”
“You gave me no indication you would listen.”
Harry shifted back and forth in the bed and stared down at the soup in front of him. “My parents are still more important than me,” he said.
“But they wouldn’t think so,” said Black quietly. “You don’t know what they’re like now. Or, rather, you could say they’re not like anything. They don’t have the power to think about things like you putting your life in danger and make a choice. On the other hand, you know what they were like. If you bring their minds back and it turns out they don’t have an opinion, you’ll know you’ve just created a pair of mindless copies who do what you tell them. If they do have an opinion, then you have your parents back, but you’ve caused them more pain.”
Harry tried and tried to think of a way out of that logic trap. His claws shredded the blankets as he thought about it. Cross crept up to his shoulder, purring, and the mice got out of his pockets and crowded around his neck. Even Yar stretched her wings as if she would fly to him and reassure him.
But there was no way. He wanted his real parents back, and hearing they’d loved him and would do anything for him was good, because that was the way he wanted to be loved.
But those people wouldn’t want him if he changed himself too much. Or if he changed them too much. Or they would be horrified, and his mother would weep, and the last thing Harry wanted was to see her weep.
He stared up at Black. “I don’t want to cause them more pain,” he whispered.
Black nodded to him. “I didn’t think you did. And I don’t think you’ve gone too far, you know. You’ve achieved some remarkable things. You’re not so feral that you can’t turn back to being human. You’ve already talked to me and put more thought into what you said today than you did for three whole days before that.”
“I could have done more if you would have done more.” Some anger was coming back, Harry thought, along with his ability to speak. This time, his claws shredded the top of the bowl that Black had served him the soup in. “You just joked. I don’t-react well to that kind of humor.”
Black looked away and nodded once. “I understand that now. I didn’t then. I told you the truth when I said I’m bored and I’ve been alone for a long time. I think joking is the best way to relate to people because at least it makes them listen to me and try to figure me out.” He flexed his hand as if he had claws of his own. “I’m-sorry.”
Harry blinked some more. He hadn’t ever expected an apology. He touched the blankets again, but this time only to touch them, not to shred them with his claws. “Then-you’ve changed your mind?”
“Yes.” Black put his chin in his palm and considered Harry again. “I’ll do what I can to help you. But not just to achieve your goal of healing your parents or killing my cousin. I’m sorry, destroying her.” His mouth twisted, and Harry saw a glimpse of the grin that was probably always going to be there, lurking beneath any serious façade he adopted. “I’ll try to help you become more human, and find a safer way of healing your parents than sacrificing yourself.”
“What if nothing will work except that sacrifice?” Harry asked, because he had always thought that was true.
“Then I’ll try to make sure you know the full value of that sacrifice.” Black looked as if he was laughing at some private hilarity, although without letting Harry know what it was. “What good would it do to give up something you don’t value?”
Harry rubbed the back of his neck. Again he thought there was something he was missing here, but Black was being honest, as far as he could tell. “You want me to feel bad about doing it, if I do it.”
“Yes.”
Harry considered him again. “That sounded like it wasn’t a joke.”
“I’ll try to keep that tendency in check from now on.”
Harry hesitated again, but he thought this was one of the best offers he would get. At least Black hadn’t reacted the way Professor McGonagall probably would have, by crying over him and trying to lock him up in St. Mungo’s in the Janus Thickey Ward with his parents. And he did have knowledge that Harry could learn from. Sometimes he had acquired things in classes at school that had been useful, even if they would never matter to him as much as Transfiguration.
“I’m not a child,” he said.
“Only legally, and in some kinds of knowledge.” Black shrugged. “You don’t research well. I noticed that when you were reading through my libraries. You don’t know how to track down things that might help you unless they’re obvious from the title of the book. And there’s some Dark Arts you’ll have to learn, to reverse the effects of the Transfigurations you’ve done on yourself. And you could do things with Charms and Healing magic that you could never do with Transfiguration, when it comes to your parents…”
He was off, talking as fast as he’d sometimes done when he was purely joking, but differently this time. Harry began to slowly eat the soup, although he had Cross and the mice both sniff it for potions that might drug him. When his animals didn’t find them, Harry relaxed enough to eat most of it.
Black cast a Warming Charm on it without being asked. Harry nodded at him. They could work together when they understood each other. Just not when one of them was joking all the time and the other was serious.
*
“I must have knowledge of some kind about Harry Potter, Severus.”
Severus bowed before the Dark Lord and spoke the only plan he had. It wasn’t one he rejoiced in, but on the other hand, he was still alive and wanted to remain that way, and this could not hurt Lily worse than being without her mind in St. Mungo’s did. “Longbottom’s mind reveals that the boy is obsessed with his parents, my Lord-”
“That is not news. You told me so when I first asked about him.”
Severus breathed carefully. He would have to if he wanted to survive. “But Longbottom confirmed it. I believe making a threat to his parents would be enough to bring the boy to the hospital, where we could capture him at our leisure.”
The Dark Lord brought his head up and studied him from a distance so close that Severus felt sweat break out on his skin. He was telling the truth and knew he was telling the truth, but he still had the impulse to lock down his mind even more tightly than it already was.
“Did you know that Bellatrix has disappeared as well?” the Dark Lord asked conversationally. “Along with the Lestranges. That means we cannot make the threat to Potter’s parents as credible as we could if we had them.”
Severus blinked, and connected the scrying wards that had held him out with the disappearance of the Lestranges. It seemed Potter had found a powerful ally after all.
But at the same time, he tucked that knowledge in the back of his mind. He had not yet decided how he wanted to use it.
“Perhaps not,” Severus said, after a pause that he could only hope the Dark Lord would take the right way. “But we can use other Death Eaters.” He paused again, and a smile stretched his mouth. “I would be happy to be one of them.”
“Because you cared for the Mudblood.”
“The Lily Evans I know is gone,” said Severus with perfect truth. It was their shared memories and Lily’s bright glow of personality he had loved, and madness had erased them both. “But I would enjoy seeing the Potter boy brought to hand.”
And that was true no matter what master he ultimately served or how he ultimately decided to use that knowledge.
“Very well, then,” said the Dark Lord, and leaned slowly back on his throne. “Then you have six days to execute this, Severus.”
Severus bowed and took his leave. His mind was already burning with thoughts of what he could do and what he might have once he had done it.
The boy would be brought to hand to and to heel, sooner or later. And Severus would see into his mind beyond the thoughts of his parents.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
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