Chapter Eighty-Four of 'A Brother to Baslisks'- Breaking the Bonds
Chapter Eighty-Three.
Title: A Brother to Basilisks (84/?)
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 Eighty-Four-Breaking the Bonds
“Hello, Harry.”
Dumbledore’s face had that kind of empty smile on it that Harry had learned not to trust. Of course, he had no idea if this was actually Dumbledore. Maybe someone posing as him again. They’d never learned who that person had been.
“Professor,” said Harry, mostly to buy time. He flicked one more glance around the cavern. No, it was barren on the walls. He didn’t see any stones he could pick up and throw, or corners to hide behind.
“I do apologize for bringing you here, dear boy.” Dumbledore gestured at the walls himself. “But it was necessary to free you of your preoccupations.”
“You mean Dash, I suppose.”
Dumbledore frowned a little. Harry supposed he would have preferred it if Harry had played around and joked and pretended not to know what he was talking about. Professor Snape had told him that Dumbledore always wanted to be a good person. Harry probably made that harder by not letting him hide from the truth.
But Harry was feeling so sick at the moment that he had no room to care about whether Dumbledore would be upset.
“Yes, I do mean that, my boy.” Dumbledore bent down and looked into his eyes. Harry promptly slammed down his Occlumency as tight as he could and then looked away. “Do you remember Voldemort, Harry?”
“Of course I do.” Harry was starting to wonder if this was the real Dumbledore, but senile. “How am I going to forget him?” He almost glared forwards again in outrage, but remembered himself in time, and kept his head turned away.
“I haven’t heard you mention him in some time,” Dumbledore continued gravely. “I know that you had dreams about him once, and you often talked about him as though you were preparing to fight him. But you had not in a long while by the time I was forced to leave.”
“Why would I?” Harry demanded. “He wasn’t threatening me right then! You were the one threatening me right then!”
“But he is always waiting for you to acknowledge him, Harry,” said Dumbledore quietly. “Ready to demand his due and try to kill you.” He sighed. “The reason you have not concentrated on him, or the war that we all know is coming, is because of the basilisk. I believe now that he will not harm you, although he will harm others whether or not you command him to. But he does distract you. He does keep you from acknowledging the enemy you have, the enemy who will not rest until you are dead.”
“Dash is the reason I’m still bloody alive! Voldemort tried to kill me in my dreams, and Dash was the one who defended me, and he fought Voldemort’s snake at the Yule Ball-”
“But those are the most minor of attacks compared to what Tom is capable of,” Dumbledore interrupted, regarding Harry sternly. “We need to unbind you from the basilisk. I think we can put the bond back after the war-if you still want it by that point. I think you’ll find that your mind is clearer when it isn’t consumed as much by the thoughts of a gigantic predator.”
Harry flinched all over his body and reached as hard as he could along the bond. Dash! Dash, help!
He felt nothing but determination from him, though. He realized drearily that Dash couldn’t Apparate to him, or he would have done it by now. But maybe the bond was a little less stretched than before.
“I am confident we can remove the bond and restore it,” Dumbledore said quietly, in response to the question that Harry hadn’t asked. “So. I will ask you to gift me with some of your blood. I will have to take it if you don’t want to, but it pains me to cause you any pain.”
Harry stared at him wide-eyed, and then gave a little laugh he knew he was choked. “What’s this we stuff? I’m not giving you any blood!”
“I am helping Albus.”
The voice sounded unhappy and quavering, old. Harry snapped his head to the side. A man with a white beard and deep-sunken eyes stood in the corner of the cavern, staring at him. He looked away when Harry met his gaze, though.
“Who are you?” Harry whispered.
“Nicholas Flamel.”
“The designer of the alchemy that can remove a bond between a dangerous snake and its master, and restore it later, good as new,” said Dumbledore soothingly. “Most potions and rituals would be useless, and most alchemists aren’t able to practice at such a high level. But my friend is.”
“You told me Nicholas Flamel was dead,” Harry said, and his voice was choked and his senses reeling. “You said the Stone had been destroyed, and he couldn’t live without the Stone!”
“It was hardly my right to destroy a Stone that my friend depended on,” said Dumbledore. He sounded even calmer than he had when he was explaining about taking Harry’s bond with Dash away. “I gave it back to him, and Nicholas and Perenelle pretended they had died and kept out of sight. They rarely went out anyway, and they ceased to publish on alchemical discoveries some time ago. No one missed them. And Nicholas remained ready to help me when I needed him.”
“Then why tell me it was destroyed?”
“So you would stop worrying,” said Dumbledore, peering at Harry over his glasses, as if he thought Harry was a little dim. “And so that you would not become a conduit to anyone else, including perhaps professors who might take the Defense Against the Dark Arts position in the future, of secrets it was not their right to know.”
Harry, fury and shock impaling him like a lance, still managed to say something. “He was the one impersonating you, wasn’t he? When you were impersonating Moody.” He had thought that something was off with that Dumbledore even before he realized the real one was playing Moody. He was hesitant about making decisions that the real Headmaster would have made without anyone else’s help.
“He was,” said Dumbledore, with a serious nod. “But that does not mean that he has any bad motives, Harry. Again, I asked Nicholas to help me, and he obliged, much as he had earlier obliged me when I asked him to let me hide the Stone in the school.”
Harry finally did what he probably should have done from the first, but his shock had been too great. He fired a Stunner at Dumbledore and ran wildly towards the entrance of the cavern, or what he thought was the entrance. He couldn’t actually see it, but the cave was a little lighter in that direction.
Ropes shot out of the stone and coiled around him, hair and shoulders and arms and legs. Harry fought, twisting and shouting, and lost. He lay on the stone at last, shivering, and not just because Dumbledore had come up and taken his wand away. It felt wrong for something to be wrapped around him like that when the thing that was stood no chance of being Dash.
Dumbledore crouched down beside him and gave him a look rich with concern. “I’m sorry, my boy,” he whispered. “It was never my intention to hurt you.”
“Sod off,” said Harry, and tried to roll over and find a sharp stone to rub the ropes against. But Dumbledore raised him in the air with an easy motion of his wand, and guided Harry, floating, towards what looked like a pool of bright green or blue water on the floor of the cave, its surface surging with electricity.
“I never wanted to hurt you,” Dumbledore repeated. “It’s why I never made a motion to sever your bond with the basilisk before now. I didn’t know a safe way to do it, or one that could be restored later. But now that I know of an alchemical means to do it…”
Harry began to shake his head. Or maybe just shake. He couldn’t stop. His hands reached up and tore at the bonds Dumbledore had tied around him. Or they came up as much as they could. It wasn’t long before the rope creaked warningly, and then he was more tangled up than before. Flamel came over and arranged his arms to rest more comfortably with hands that trembled.
Dumbledore was doing something on the other side of the room. Flamel shot him a wary look, then leaned over and whispered to Harry. “I’m sorry about this. I didn’t want to do things this way. But I played Albus, and he-I saw how dangerous the basilisk was.”
“I’ll die without him,” Harry whispered back. He had no idea if it was true, but it felt true. “Do you understand that? Dash and I are bonded so deeply that we can use each other’s senses. What do you think will happen without him? I’ll die! Or go mad.”
Flamel hesitated, frowning, but Dumbledore looked up, and the frown changed into a trembling smile. “I made the calculations myself,” Flamel told Harry, bending over him as if he thought hearing the bad news from closer to would make a difference. “Designed the ritual myself. You have nothing to worry about. Even as the pool transmutes you and makes you into something new, someone without the bond to your basilisk, it will protect your mind.”
Harry tried to thrash even harder. He hadn’t really studied alchemy, but transmute sounded similar to transfigure, and he had listened to enough of Professor McGonagall’s lectures about human Transfiguration and what happened to people stuck in their Animagus forms. He was going to end up a different person.
The person Dumbledore wants me to be, or thinks I should be, instead of the person I’m growing up to be.
“This won’t hurt, Harry.” Dumbledore this time, coming over and looking down at Harry with the gentle gaze he remembered from second year, after the Chamber of Secrets. Why can he only do that when he thinks I’ve been wounded by a basilisk? Harry wondered in a daze, staring back. “I would never do that. It’s the main reason I waited so long. I really, really didn’t want to hurt you.” He sighed. “If there was more time-I still think I could have found a way to persuade you to sever the bond on your own. But we don’t have time. Not now. Not with what I’ve learned about Voldemort.”
Harry knew, somewhere outside the pounding haze of his terror, that those words were meant as a hook to make him ask what Dumbledore had learned about Voldemort. But he frankly didn’t care. His throat hurt, and he tried to scream. Dumbledore leaned over and gently pinched his lips shut.
“It won’t hurt,” he said. “I promise that.”
He thinks he’s doing the right thing. I won’t be able to persuade him, either. He thinks he’s really doing the right thing. He’s not torturing me, the way he thinks. He’s not trying to hurt me.
Dumbledore raised his wand slowly, and Harry rose from the floor of the cavern, ropes and all, on a pillar of warm air. He twisted around and then floated towards the pool of gleaming blue water, or whatever it was. Small droplets leaped from the side, and then larger sprays rose, and turned into frozen, gleaming shapes like stalagmites. Harry twisted his head to the side and screamed as loudly as he could.
“Dash!”
But there was no one there to hear him, and he continued his descent towards the pool of blue.
At least, he did until something flashed blindingly through the cavern, silver, bouncing from the walls and, oddly, from his chest. Harry thought he heard voices, and the sound of spells.
At the same time, something inside him was twisting, tearing loose. A bolt of agony shot up his chest towards his mouth, and Harry opened it to scream again, thinking Dumbledore had managed to start the alchemical ritual after all.
But when he shaped his lips around his teeth, he felt something new there. Something that was quickly turning non-painful, natural, and he realized he’d grown fangs.
*
Severus had ignored the children once he got them into the ritual space, other than telling them to stay close but out of the way so that he could conduct the ritual without worrying about bumping into them. He chanted quickly and quietly, one hand resting above his heart. The words of the chant themselves weren’t important; what was important was that they focused his mind on Harry and got him into the right mood.
He had chosen the Latin words for “shield,” “heart,” and “war,” over and over, because those were the most prominent things he was thinking about right now.
The shield Harry wore should protect him. It must.
But that did not mean it would hold up against whatever evil the Dark Lord had dreamed up, or Dark magic as strong and vile as he was likely to use…
Severus shook his worries out of his head, where they were clouding his concentration, and renewed the chant. He knew without looking that Granger had started to ask a question and Draco had hushed her violently enough to make her frown.
In fact, his perspective was starting to spread outside his own head, widening around the room like a flowing puddle of water. His fast breathing made him light-headed. So did his own heartbeat, which staggered and leaped in a way that corresponded to something else.
Something that reached into his chest and squeezed.
That is the rhythm of Harry’s heart.
For it to beat so fast could suggest a number of things, including fear or excitement, but being a Potions master, Severus’s mind leaped straight to poison. He sped the chant, and felt the skin on his chest stir.
It would be any moment now, at least if the ritual and the spell worked as designed. Severus motioned the children towards him with the hand that didn’t form the small fist above his heart. They came stumbling in their eagerness, Draco standing on his left and Granger and Weasley on his right.
Severus tilted his head back. The ceiling above him was starting to grow transparent, and a long tunnel of light reached down towards him out of it, rippling and glinting. Severus held out his hand, and felt the children clutch his robes. Draco must have told the Gryffindors what they needed to do.
The chant was building to a height now, and Severus couldn’t have stopped himself for a vault full of Galleons. His will was yearning outside his body; it seemed someone else’s that worked his lips and tongue and spoke the words.
The clutch on his robes was tighter and tighter, but far more potent was the clutch of Harry’s heartbeat, pulling him along to where he needed to go. Severus bowed his head and felt his tongue work once more on his teeth.
Then he was gone, and where he flashed through space, he pulled the children with him. When he landed, it was on stone, and he felt them rolling away from him. Severus grimaced. He had had no time to cushion the landing, but he was still sorry for the hurt he might have caused them.
He rose and drew his wand barely in time. Albus had a spell streaking towards him that was churning orange and green, and which Severus knew promised nothing good to anyone except the caster.
Albus.
Only Severus’s battle training, which he had acquired in part because he had been a Death Eater, enabled him to keep functioning through his shock. He took in the pool of blue alchemical light-Flamel was here-Harry was bound above it and screaming, but the shield on his chest seemed to have prevented anything permanent from happening-
And then Harry was sawing through the ropes, somehow, and the children scrambled past Severus towards him, and Severus and Albus were left to the fight.
*
Harry bit through the ropes with his fangs.
He knew even as he did it that that wasn’t what they were meant for, and his stomach squirmed and he wanted to vomit, but when he tried, he found venom in his mouth. His ordinary teeth ached.
He knew he had drawn the fangs from Dash somehow. Dash was lending them to him. He was supposed to use them to destroy his enemies.
But all Harry could think was that he had to get away, and even if Dumbledore was occupied right now with Snape and the others, Flamel was still there and might try to dunk him in the alchemical pool.
“What are you doing?”
In fact, Flamel was speaking right into his ear. The only thing on Harry’s mind now was defense. He slashed at Flamel with his fangs, and Flamel cried out and leaped backwards. Harry tried to crawl, his hands slapping into the ground, one foot trailing for a moment in the puddle of blue flame.
It was nothingness. It felt like nothingness. But Harry could also feel something else pulling and tugging at his muscles and veins in that leg, and he rolled further and further away, curling up like a wounded beast for a moment.
Or a snake.
It helped if he could think of himself as a snake. It made him feel less powerless. He raised his head and then got to his feet, bracing himself as he swayed drunkenly against the wall. When he lifted his head, he saw the duel.
Ron and Hermione, led by a Draco whose face was so pale it reflected the spells like a mirror, were trying to get to him. But they had to get around the periphery of the fight between Snape and Dumbledore, and that was incredibly hard. Harry saw the way they edged along, now and then staring nervously at him or Flamel or the blue pool, but mostly staring at the spells.
Spells Harry had never seen before crackled across the walls and the floor. There were ones that seemed to send small figurines or fleeting shadows hurtling through the air, although those always dissipated before they could pierce through the shields that Dumbledore or Snape had up in front of them. There were others that looked as though they were made of lightning, of storms, of wings, of ice, of acid. They filled the cavern with light so brilliant that Harry ducked his head and closed his eyes.
But he heard footsteps, and he whirled to his feet. No matter what it took, even if he had to bite someone, he wasn’t going to let Flamel or Dumbledore take him back and put him into the alchemical pool.
“Harry.”
That was a voice he could trust, though, and he would probably trust it even if he thought someone had Draco under the Imperius Curse. Harry gave a low sob and leaped into Draco’s arms. Draco hugged him and stroked his back, holding him a little awkwardly to the side so that there was no chance Harry’s fangs would pierce his skin.
“Draco,” Harry whispered, and then held out his hands so he could touch Ron and Hermione at the same time. They were coming up on either side of Draco. They stared at his mouth in fascinated horror, and then looked away. Hermione was already talking briskly about the bonds between Parselmouths and basilisks, and how she should have suspected this could happen.
“How are we going to get out of here?” Ron whispered.
“We should leave now,” Draco said. “No one’s guarding the entrance.” He nodded towards the part of the cave that sloped upwards and had some light coming through it.
“You shouldn’t leave. You should-you should understand that Albus only wants the best for you, Harry.”
At once Draco and Ron and Hermione stood in a triangle, so Harry was in the center of them. Harry, his jaw still aching from the transformation, blinked once and then again as he watched Flamel stand in front of them, his wand aimed uncertainly at them.
“I know he only wants the best,” said Flamel, although his eyes were wide and he looked back and forth between the side of the cave and Harry as if he assumed that he would be able to hold him there somehow. “He explained it to me. It might not seem that way. But he does.”
“And will you believe him all the time?” Hermione was the one who moved forwards fearlessly to confront Flamel, which Harry had to admit he hadn’t expected. She had her arms folded so tightly that she looked cold, or hurt. She glared at Flamel, though, and he actually lowered his wand to stare at her. “Are you just incapable of admitting that Professor Dumbledore doesn’t know what’s best?”
“Albus has been my friend for a long time,” said Flamel, and gave the duel a glance before he turned back to them. “He’s guided the Ministry and the wizarding world through some of the worst crises they’ve ever seen. I promise you, he has a reason for this, no matter how well-hidden it is.”
“But it’s not hidden,” Harry said, and coughed. He could feel the venom pooling in his throat, and he wanted to spit it out, even though he knew it must not be able to harm him, since Dash had given Harry his fangs. “He told me. He just said that he doesn’t think someone who is destined to defeat the Dark Lord should be a Parselmouth and bonded to a basilisk. He thinks I act too much like a Slytherin.”
“If you understand, then…” Flamel looked at him hopefully. “You know that’s true! We can’t have someone who’s a Parselmouth trying to bring Voldemort back instead of fighting him.”
“Why would I want to bring him back?” Harry shouted, and coughed again. The fangs were cutting into his lips when he tried to talk. He wanted to be out of here and have this over with. He wished that stupid Flamel would back down like he so obviously wanted to do and let them go. “He killed my parents! I hate him!”
“You called him the Dark Lord a minute ago.”
“Habit from being around my guardian,” Harry snapped. Snape didn’t like him calling Voldemort by name. But it didn’t really matter, did it? Harry thought viciously, as he watched Flamel’s eyes cloud with doubt. Some people would always assume that the smallest things were a sign of evil, because it made them more comfortable to be able to judge Harry.
“I think you should stay and listen to Albus. If he explains it one more time and you still disagree, then I’ll ask him to let you go.”
Flamel was raising spells Harry didn’t recognize with a flash of his wand. Draco and Hermione were yelling at him to stop, and Ron was actually trying to cast something, his face a picture of concentration, but it didn’t matter. Flamel was going to trap them here, and nothing they could do would stop it, Harry thought with a surge of despair.
He turned around, watching the duel, and saw the way Snape was falling back. He was trying, of course he was, but Dumbledore simply had too much power. He was going to win, and there was nothing anyone could do about any of it.
And then a dark shape stirred at the edge of Harry’s awareness, and the bond he’d almost been ignoring, because Dash was too far away, snapped into life. Harry shouted as he watched Dash slice through the spells Flamel had been trying to raise. Flamel started and dropped his wand.
Harry watched Dash’s neck twist. His fangs were missing, because he’d grown them from Harry’s mouth, and for a second Harry had a flashing understanding of how deeply he and Dash must be connected, if Dash could do that-
But the flash led to something deeper and more important, something else Harry understood, and he screamed, “Professor Snape! Down!”
Even though it meant that he took a long burn on his shoulder from Dumbledore’s latest spell, Snape obeyed him. He turned and dived straight down to the floor, rolling back into a corner of the cavern. That meant Dumbledore turned immediately to face Dash, another curse boiling on his wand.
At the same moment, Dash opened his eyes, gazing straight at Dumbledore.
Chapter Eighty-Five.
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