Chapter Twenty-Nine of 'Made of Common Clay'- Being a Distraction

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

Title: Made of Common Clay (29/48)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Minor mentions of Ron/Hermione, Molly/Arthur, Neville/Hannah, Luna/Rolf, and past Harry/Ginny; otherwise, this fic is gen and will remain so.
Content Notes: Angst, violence, torture, politics, present tense, cynical Harry
Rating: R (for violence)
Summary: Harry has reached a very bitter and jaded thirty. His efforts to reform the Ministry haven’t lessened the corruption or pure-blood bigotry one bit. That’s when he finds out that he’s apparently a part of a pure-blood nobility he’s never heard of before; he’s Lord Potter and Lord Black. Unfortunately, that revelation’s come too late for him to be a reformer. All Harry wants to do is tear the system down and salt the earth. And with a double Lordship, he just might have the power to do that.
Author’s Notes: This fic is partially a parody of some of the tropes common in Lord Potter/Lord Black fics. The title and most of the chapter titles come from one of Oscar Wilde’s poems: “Sweet I blame you not for mine the fault was, had I not been made of common clay/I had climbed the higher heights unclimbed yet, seen the fuller air, the larger day.” I don’t yet know how long this fic will be, but it will get pretty dark.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Nine—Being a Distraction

Harry cocks his neck so he can see around the corner. He arrived at the Apparition spot in Diagon Alley a few minutes ago, and he’s spent the time casting glamours on his robes and cloak. Not on his face, though. The whole point is to have someone recognize him. Or lots of someones.

And he has to admit: this part of the plan, he’s looking forward to.

“Ready, mate?” Ron whispers behind his head as he adjusts his own cloak and robes. He looks resigned. They have to pretend to be enemies for right now, or at least Ron has to act as though he’s ambivalent about what Harry is doing.

Harry squeezes Ron’s arm silently. He knows this is harder for Ron than some of the other planning they’ve done, which is technically more dangerous. Then he nods and looks at the Alley expectantly.

Ron sighs. “See you back at the safehouse,” he mutters, and walks out of the little alley they’ve been standing in, a side one to the actual Apparition point.

Harry counts five minutes under his breath, during which time two wizards fortunately arrive at the Apparition point and walk out. That will lessen rumors that he must have somehow followed or conspired with Ron. Some people will believe those anyway, of course—Ron is too close a friend not to fall under suspicion—but at least he won’t make Ron’s life terrible instead of hard.

Then Harry walks out into Diagon Alley, looking neither right nor left.

It actually takes a surprisingly long minute for anyone to turn around and stare at him. And that’s with the glamours of darkness on his cloak, trailing behind him and casting a magical shadow on the stones, and the ones on his robes that make them look as if he’s dripping blood and entrails to the ground.

Then someone screams, “It’s Lord Potter!” and the chaos that Harry was hoping for infects the alley.

Harry grins and springs to the top of a small stone wall around the front of someone’s door, then does his best maniacal laugh. He revised some of his memories of Voldemort yesterday so that he could do it right. He thinks he’s much better at it than Voldemort, really. He knows when to stop and pose dramatically, whereas Voldemort kept it up long past the point when it intimidated people. Harry has been able to see things that he never noticed before in those memories, like Death Eaters rolling their eyes at each other.

Then he springs to the ground and begins to cast “curses” into the air. In reality, they’re harmless hexes and jinxes that resemble curses, mostly in their color. All of them hit the stones of the walls around him or fly harmlessly into the sky, not that people notice. They scream and scatter and duck, and Harry does his practiced laugh again and turns around, swirling his cloak of ultimate darkness behind him.

“Who dares oppose the Dark Lord Harry Potter?” he cries, and dances in place when someone who looked as if he was reaching for his wand turns around and runs instead.

Sharp cracks of Apparition sound behind him. Harry smiles and looks over his shoulder. Behind him are several Aurors, including Weston. Good. She arranged to be on duty today, but they didn’t know if she would get a chance to be among the first responders to his “reign of terror.” This ought to help repair any of her credibility that got damaged with the other Aurors when she “accidentally” cast that overpowered Lumos in the Ministry that let Harry escape.

“Put down your wand, your monster,” growls one of the young Aurors who looks as if he’s waited all his life to deliver that line.

“Come along quietly, and maybe you won’t get life in Azkaban,” Weston adds. Her voice is quivering. Harry meets her eyes and has to look away. He just hopes that other people will take that shake in her voice to be terror instead of the bubbling laughter that it is.

“Why should I?” Harry strikes a pose with one hand on his hip and the other one resting behind his head. “I rather like it here.”

One of the more impatient Aurors casts a Stunner at him. Harry turns his wandless left hand upright and uses some of the magic burning in him to deflect that without casting a Shield Charm. That makes a ripple of gasps travel down the Alley.

“You dare to oppose the Dark Lord Harry Potter.” Harry repeats his grandiose words from below, shaking his head. “Then you will become smears of blood on the ground!” He whips out his wand with a flourish and jumps at them.

It’s a struggle to keep the flashy battle that ensues from becoming a rout immediately. Harry has the same training that these Aurors do, although admittedly more experience than most of them. The problem is that they’re just so slow. Harry can dive and roll and be out of the way of most of their spells before they’ve totally left the idiots’ wands. And most of them have no idea of strategy, such as lifting Shield Charms around them that don’t impede their wands’ ability to cast curses.

Maybe Harry shouldn’t blame them, though. None of them had the experience of fighting for their life on a regular basis before they turned seventeen, either, and although Hogwarts has had the same Defense professor for a while now, many of these Aurors had at least a few terrible ones.

But he does blame them all he likes when he deflects a Stunner that actually drops two Aurors—the one who cast it and the one who ran towards him as if he thought that he could somehow tackle Harry with his bare hands. Harry stares at the Aurors lying stupefied on the ground and has to fight not to cover his eyes and groan.

“This is the best that wizarding Britain dares send against the Dark Lord Harry Potter?” he asks, and manages to make his voice a roar instead of a sigh of disgust. “This is pathetic!” He doesn’t need to feign the revulsion in his tone at all.

Weston leaps forwards to challenge him, seizing the initiative the way she does sometimes in their rebellion meetings. “I challenge you to a duel, Dark Lord Potter!” she declares, and shakes her wand at him in a way that makes sparks scatter around. It looks very impressive if you don’t know how simple the spell is. “Just you and me, not any other Aurors! Do you think you can take a Muggleborn witch who doesn’t stand with you?”

That brings the crowd back instead of chasing them away. Harry grins as he hears more pops of Apparition. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement ought to be almost empty soon, which will give Hermione a great deal more time to search desks and files while her Polyjuice disguise lasts. “Yes, Auror! If you dare to challenge me!”

“I dare!”

Harry spends a great deal of time stalking back and forth, stomping and muttering, looking at the ground, before drawing his wand and also drawing a dueling circle. The new Aurors who have arrived try to protest, but Weston’s groaning comrades—the ones still conscious—shut them up with chatter about dueling protocol. Harry turns around and plants another thundercloud on his face.

Weston is red in the cheeks and still struggling with laughter. Harry mouths at her, Shut the hell up.

Weston gasps, but manages to get back into the game instead of spoiling it. “A duel, Dark Lord Potter! To the death!”

Harry manages to cringe, and then he says, “No! To first blood!”

“Are you sure, Dark Lord Potter?”

“Of course I’m sure! It’s more challenging that way. It gives you a smidgen of a chance, instead of a particle.”

Weston sneers. Harry sneers back. They hold their wands up and stand opposed for a moment, giving the photographers at the Daily Prophet enough time to take an iconic picture (hopefully). Then they fly into it hammer and tongs.

Weston is using all sorts of actually dangerous spells, while Harry is using the flashy ones. Harry appreciates that she fell into that kind of wand-wielding without his having to say a word. They did discuss it as a tactic at the meeting, but so much of this is up to chance, including the fact that Weston was free to face him in the alley today instead of being assigned a different case.

Although, judging from the press of grim-faced Aurors along the edges of the dueling circle, even the ones on different cases have probably been pulled off them so that they can be present here to try and arrest him when the duel is finished.

Important word being “try,” of course, Harry thinks, as he spins out of the way of a Cutting Curse and sends back a Rolling Firework Spell at Weston, like the one Ron used to gain people’s attention back at the last meeting.

Weston leaps over that, her robes flaring extremely dramatically, and casts a variation on Sectumsempra that Harry made safer and taught his fellow Aurors. Harry grins a little. There are people who will call that poetic justice, he thinks as he twists and lets his own cloak flare—and makes it appear that he’s just a little too slow as he comes out of the spin and the spell catches him.

Nice one, he mouths to Weston as he sinks to the ground, gasping and waving his hands around. “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dyyyyyying...” he says, and lets his voice trail off and his head loll as his blood spreads across the cobbles.

For an instant, Weston looks dismayed in a fashion that might tell anyone the game was up if they saw it. Harry narrows his eyes. Weston wipes that off and looks triumphant instead.

With a side of constipated, of course. It wouldn’t be an Auror expression if she didn’t.

“I have triumphed over the Dark Lord Potter!” she roars, and shakes her hands at the sky.

Harry groans and places a hand over the cut on his chest, which is burning and bleeding freely. This version of Sectumsempra doesn’t cause the endless bleeding or irreversible scarring that the other did, but it does hurt. That’s okay, though. Harry drives himself deep into the pain and even enjoys it when he sees the Aurors marching towards him in lockstep.

“You’re coming with us, Auror—Lord Potter,” one of them says, correcting himself at a nudge from the woman beside him.

Harry looks up and blinks as if dazed, then he whispers, “What?”

“You’re coming with us.” This time the Auror puts a growl into it, in a way Harry approves of. He reaches down and grabs Harry under the arms, hauling him to his feet, even though he flails and squeaks pathetically (and does a pretty good job of it, if he does say so himself).

“I am?” Harry lets his head tip back and forth, the pain pushed to one side of his mind. This is the only kind of Occlumency that he ever mastered easily, the kind that lets him concentrate on the world around him and ignore what’s happening to his body. His hand rises, wavering, and lands on the button halfway down his dramatic glamoured robes.

“You are—”

Harry ducks forwards, as if slumping, and they curse and chase him. But his hand is already on the Portkey that Hermione made the button into long ago.

“I don’t think I am,” Harry tells their incredulous face as they watch him blur and swirl and burn away. “Bye-bye.”

*

“Please tell me you got what you needed,” Harry requests of Hermione as he leans back on the chair in the safehouse—this one is in the south of Cornwall—and lets Kreacher bandage him. Kreacher won’t use magic when Harry’s been wounded, but his bandages are the best Harry’s ever found to keep things from leaking out that shouldn’t. And it’s a cheap price to pay to keep him from complaining constantly.

“I did—what happened to you?”

“Aurors.”

“Yes, I know that! Did you let one of them wound you on purpose? Harry.”

“I had to! It had to look authentic. And it was Weston, so now she’s in good with her fellow Aurors who might have suspected her of helping me escape again.”

Hermione puts her head in her hands. “And for that, it’s worth having your chest all bloody and cut to shit,” she says, which makes Harry blink at her. He and Ron swear all the time when they’re talking about things the Ministry has done, even Luna sometimes goes at it when it affects the unicorns or other innocent creatures, but Hermione doesn’t usually indulge.

Then Harry sees her hands shaking. He reaches out and holds one. “I’ll be okay,” he says softly. “What did you find in the Ministry to upset you so much?”

Hermione wipes her eyes and sits up. “What, I can’t just be upset that you got hurt?”

“You would be, of course. But this is more than that, isn’t it?”

Hermione hesitates, then nods reluctantly. “Harry, some of those files I copied.” She stops. Harry waits. Then Hermione continues, quietly, “I thought I would just find that they gave lesser penalties to pure-bloods and the heaviest possible ones to Muggleborns. I thought—I was prepared for that.”

“What else did you find?” Harry asks softly. This is the reason why the Elder Wand and the spell it’s going to cast is necessary. There’s never a fucking bottom to the stupidity that the Ministry gets up to where bigotry and racism is concerned.

“I found—I found that they also arranged to give heavier penalties to people who were part-goblin and Veela. And a bunch of werewolves never even got trials at all!” Hermione bursts out. “Some of them were just executed by the Kiss. And on the line where they had to write the reason for requesting the Kiss, they just put Werewolf.” She slumps forwards and begins to weep. Harry gets up and gingerly hugs her close.

Hermione cries for long enough that Kreacher brings tea and holds it demandingly, silently, next to Harry. Harry ends up putting it on the table next to them, because Hermione can’t stop sobbing yet. Finally, she sits back and dries her tears, sniffling. Harry touches her shoulder and then leans forwards to embrace her again.

“Are you okay?”

Hermione nods and sniffles some more. “I just—I can’t understand it. Why do they hate them so much?”

Harry can only give her the answers that he figured out for himself when he first began learning the history of how much the Ministry has discriminated in the past against anyone who wasn’t a rich pure-blood. “Because they fear them. And they’re lazy. They don’t want to learn. It would take too much effort to learn about the Muggle world, or how to keep werewolves and other people safe on the night of the full moon. So they just condemn them.”

Hermione’s hand reaches out. Harry conjures a handkerchief and hands it to her, but she grips his arm instead, staring at him. “But you worked for ten years to try and improve things. And then you went and found a way to change them.”

“Yes?” Harry says it cautiously. Sometimes, he can’t always follow Hermione’s mind when she’s springing that fast along some of the roads she takes.

Hermione says, “You weren’t lazy. You weren’t afraid. Thank you.”

Harry just says nothing, and holds her. Ron and Hermione have always stood by him, even when the path turned dark and dangerous. The greatest gift he can give them is to let them do what they need to do to maintain that strength.

Hermione finally pulls away with an exhausted little hiccough. “Luna has the Quibbler’s presses ready to go.”

Harry isn’t sure that Hermione has finished working out all her feelings yet, but he also knows that she won’t say anything more about it right now. So he nods and accepts the change of subject. “How big does she think that she’ll be able to make this edition?”

“Big enough to accommodate everything I found.”

“Right, I shouldn’t have doubted Luna.” Harry hesitates. “She’ll have to go into hiding herself, once this edition comes out. And probably Rolf.”

“She’s already put her house under the Fidelius,” Hermione says softly. “She made me the Secret-Keeper. I’ll tell you and Ron the secret later tonight.”

“Just us?”

“After the way some of them behaved in the meeting the other day?”

Harry nods. He didn’t mean to trust the secret to Londer anyway, but he does think they could give it to Bill and Fleur. That’s about what Luna’s comfortable with, though. He doesn’t want to put any unnecessary strain on her. “All right. Then I’ll go open the safehouse in France, and you lot can work on putting the Quibbler together.”

“The one in France? The one you told me was filled to the brim with Dark artifacts the Blacks removed from the other houses they owned?”

“That’s the one.” Harry grins. As horrible as this is, as much better as the Ministry should have been in the past, he’s rather looking forward to unleashing some of the surprises that are waiting there.