lomonaaeren

Chapter Thirty-Six.

Title: Made of Common Clay (37/48)
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 Thirty-Seven—Death Comes At Last

“Well, because I was under the impression that they were my Hallows, not yours. That’s one reason.” Harry stands and brushes off his robes. There’s something that feels like a torn muscle in the center of his chest—no, the center of his magic. He wants to sigh. Yes, Apparating through the Department’s wards so soon after magically exhausting himself wasn’t the best idea. Damn Susan, anyway. “Are you taking them back?”

Death stares at him. The sight of it is flickering, shifting. Harry isn’t sure if that’s because it’s Death and it’s making itself visible in different ways, or if it’s another side-effect of his exhaustion.

“You would die if you were to try to set off the spell now, while I am here.”

Harry nods. “But there’s something you’re overlooking if you think that’ll stop me.”

“What?” The walls of the Department of Mysteries echo back the loud, supernatural hiss.

“I can still perform the spell if I use my life as the fuel.”

Death snaps back into view again as a robed, hooded figure, and its long fingers, which look more like branches than human digits, tighten on the Elder Wand. “You do not fear death at all.”

Harry shakes his head. “I would regret it. But that’s not the same thing. And I know there are multiple curses on the Hallows, but they all depend on the same fuel, don’t they? The Master’s fear of death.” He pauses, then adds, “It was kind of stupid to use the same source for all of them, you know.”

Death seems to grow. Its swaying shadow falls across Harry. Harry watches it, utterly unafraid. He meant what he said. He passed beyond fear of death long ago. Hermione wept the first time he told her that, blaming the Dursleys and Dumbledore and the whole wizarding world that insisted Harry save them when he was a teenager. And maybe they are to blame in that sense. But Harry would rather have this fearlessness. It’s allowed him to accomplish so much.

“I could stop you,” Death whispers. This time, the shadows form into snakes that ripple towards Harry’s feet, looking as though some invisible fire is casting them.

And they scatter at Harry’s laughter. Love isn’t behind Harry’s laughter, but that lack of fear that defeats Death.

“If it was as simple as that,” Harry says, looking the figure straight in the hood, “you would have interfered the moment you knew I was likely to destroy the Resurrection Stone. But the Hallows bind you, too, at least as an interfering force. You are a powerful force, yes, but people thwart you every day. You can’t send my friends to early deaths, which would be the only effective threat. They’re still going to live out the spans they would anyway and die when they usually would. You can take them, but you can’t hasten their paths to you. In fact, I doubt you can hasten anyone’s path. You can whisper in their ears, maybe lure someone considering suicide closer to it, but that’s it. If I’m right, you were more powerful centuries ago, but then you created the Hallows, and the minute they passed into human hands, you were bound to stop trying to take people on your own.” He pauses, then adds softly, “Poor, pathetic Death, undone by its own game.”

The shadows strike at Harry, and for a moment he is choking, drowning, burning, collapsing from magical exhaustion. His bones are snapping, and he’s having a heart attack, and he’s being beaten by Dudley and his gang—

Harry laughs.

The sensations are gone as though they’ve never been, and Death is staring at him with what is probably a burning gaze, even though Harry can’t see it.

“Poor, pathetic Death,” Harry repeats tauntingly. “Making me live through different means of dying loses its edge when I’ve experienced all of them.”

The chamber fills with the rattle of a drawn breath. Harry knows it’s not his. Then again, Death doesn’t have to breathe, either, so this is just another means of trying to intimidate him. He stands there and raises his eyebrows, and Death says in a voice as soft as the shadows stretching away from the walls, “You cannot know that I am cursed.”

“It isn’t something written down,” Harry agrees. “But I researched the Hallows and I asked my friend Hermione, and then I did something else that you should have anticipated.”

He stands there, and the cloaked figure turns slowly to face him. The long, twig-like fingers are no longer gripping the Elder Wand as hard. Death sounds physically pained when it finally breathes out, “What?”

“I asked the Hallows.” Harry laughs when Death’s arm jerks as if it’s going to throw the Wand. “If you didn’t want people to ask them about whether or not they were cursed and the best way to break that curse, you shouldn’t have given them voices, should you?”

“What have you done?”

The voice echoes from any directions, including ones that shouldn’t be possible. Harry shakes his head. “Just confirmed with the Hallows that they all bear a curse, a curse of such power that it should have overcome every protection. Because that was the way you wanted it, when you turned them loose into the world to create havoc. The Wand kills its owners by attracting those who want ultimate power—both the owners and the ones who challenge them for possession of it. The Resurrection Stone drives its owners mad. The Cloak…”

“Yes,” Death says, and sighs, vanishing from one side of the chamber to another. The Elder Wand goes with it, but no matter: Harry can still feel his connection to the Wand thrumming, bright and strong, in the back of his head. “Do tell me how the Cloak, which permitted Ignotus Peverell to hide from me and has hidden so many of your own ancestors, is cursed.”

“I looked up the actual lifespans of the Cloak’s owners. The Tale of the Three Brothers says that Ignotus lived to old age. He lived into his seventies.”

Death is silent.

“Long for a Muggle, especially of his time,” Harry says calmly into that silence. “Not long for a wizard. And many of the others—it was the same thing. They died in their sixties, or their seventies, or they lost their lives early. The Cloak didn’t betray them, not directly. But where it should have been, it was not.”

Death is silent.

“It wasn’t with my father when he confronted Voldemort and died. He couldn’t hide under it. That was the thing that made me suspicious in the first place, you know.”

“What?”

“My father possessed a Deathly Hallow. And yet he died.”

“Death comes for all, Harry Potter. As you should well know.”

The voice snarls and snaps this time. Harry still looks into the corner where he feels the strongest pull from the Elder Wand and doesn’t bother blanching. “I know death comes for everyone. But my father isn’t the only Potter who’s died that way. We die young, Death. We don’t get in duels for power or grieve ourselves into suicide over people we can’t touch. The Cloak is subtle. But it’s there.”

Silence, again. Harry sits down on the stone floor. It’s easier to do that right now to recover magically, and of course the longer he spends sitting, the better he feels. He wonders if Death knows that or if it’s delaying the end of the confrontation for another reason. Has it summoned the Unspeakables?

And yet, for some reason, Harry can’t really see Death interfering in that way. It would do something else, something it’s convinced is subtle or natural.

It can’t see the natural conclusion of Harry’s research. Harry is a little surprised, but then, he knows very well how easily wizards can fool themselves. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised that that truth extends to an immortal entity.

Who made itself mortal, and more of an entity than a force, by catching itself in the curse of the Deathly Hallows.

“I suppose,” Death said at last, “that you think getting rid of the Hallows will keep you from death. Or keep you from this curse.”

Harry smiles a little. “I don’t think the first one at all. I know I’m mortal, and glad to be so. But I have broken the curse, yes.”

“One cannot be glad to be mortal.”

Harry grins fiercely, and watches as a few of the odder glass contraptions along the walls reflect the grin back. It seems to him that they do so reluctantly. “And that is what the Cloak told me. The final hint.”

“You make no sense.”

The shifting darkness in front of him manifests as Death. This time, it has decided to wear a white cloak, and the hand that grips the Wand looks much more human. It even flings the hood back and regards him with a face that might have been sculpted in marble, the face of an angel on a monument. Harry grins wider.

“Being Master of Death honestly made no sense to me the first time I heard the title,” Harry says simply. “It’s why most of the wizarding world doesn’t believe the Tale of the Three Brothers, either. Death is a force. Death is a law of nature. How can you be master of that? It would be like being master of gravity, or inertia.”

Death is silent.

“But when the Cloak told me that, yes, Death chose to cast the Hallows into the world and interfere with the fate of the Peverells, then it made sense to me. Master of Death doesn’t mean master of the force. I don’t have the ability to stop people from dying or make myself immortal. I’m master of the entity that created itself by getting entangled in the fate of humans. The minute you—a corner of the force, a capricious spark of a greater mindless thing—chose to break a strict neutrality and try to kill the Peverells out of malice, you became less than you had been. Personal. Vulnerable. Subject to that curse.” Harry pauses and adds softly, “Mortal.”

Death hisses. The sound is no word in Parseltongue, but an overwhelming cascade of despair, of the kind that Dementors used to be able to create. Harry laughs in its face and shouts, “You created a curse! Curses have to have a loophole! Curses have to be able to be broken! Is it my fault that you never anticipated someone who did not actually fear you?”

Silence, again. The white-cloaked figure has vanished. But Harry can feel the Wand, and he knows the entity hasn’t gone far away.

“You thought that there would never be a person who doesn’t fear death, someone who at the same time doesn’t long for power, but might collect and use the Hallows anyway. You never thought there might be someone who could use the Hallows for another purpose than you invented them for. And destroy them. And destroy you with them.”

Death moves.

Harry feels the current of cold coming for him, and he knows that he can’t avoid it. But he’s also certain about what he understood, what he asked the Hallows about, and proved when he used the Resurrection Stone to accomplish a feat of great magic and Death didn’t stop him. He braces himself, and waits.

The current of cold halts well short of him. The breathless hissing returns, encircling him, trying to stir up the terror that would enable Death to master him instead.

Harry is not afraid.

“Your malice is over,” he says. “You can’t harm me or stop me from doing what I want to do, or you would have done it when I destroyed the Resurrection Stone. I’m taking the magic you stored in them a long time ago and using it to meet my goals, instead. And you’ll cease to exist. You’ll return to what you should be, just part of the great force that has no personal goals and snuffs out lives without care. No more malicious deaths because you came to consciousness and wanted them. This is the end, Death.” He adds, as the face forms floating in front of him again, “No wonder you hate me.”

“A Master of Death cannot exist,” Death whispers. Its voice shakes now, though. Something that came to life enough to have emotions, to feel hatred, also feels fear.

“You thought it couldn’t because you couldn’t conceive someone not being afraid of the end, someone who would walk to their death willingly,” Harry answers. “Not when that person would also have to master the Hallows and not use them the way they always were used before and went on risking his life enough to develop no fear of you later. It was a series of chances and manipulations and terrors that made me this way. But I’ve done it. And when the Wand’s power is expended, then your force is expended as well.”

Not silence this time. Instead, Death forms into the image of a small child, kneeling before Harry and raising its hands in supplication.

Harry snickers. Death hasn’t paid enough attention to humans down the millennia, despite hating them, for it to be able to create a face that a human expression can actually form on.

“Nice try,” Harry says, standing. “But I’m still not afraid. That includes not being afraid of the consequences.” He turns, and he lifts his hand.

The Elder Wand answers, tearing into sight and flying into his palm. It trembles. Harry understands it well. At one and the same time it fears him, hates him, does not want to cease to exist any more than the entity holding it does, and yet it knows that it will work the most powerful spell it has ever cast.

“You could have anything you want,” Death breathes. “Your parents back. Your godfather back. Your childhood lived over again in peace. Name it, and it’s yours.”

“Well, congratulations on not offering me gold or power. At least you learned that much,” Harry says wryly, and then he lifts the Wand on high. “This is what I want.”

He brings the wand down, and it’s so much easier than he thought it would be when he believed he might need to use his life as fuel for the spell. He won’t even need the neat little devices that George and Luna were working on. Not now that he understands the full extent of the Hallows’ power and his power over them, and the Wand is going to move to change the world the way the Cloak and Stone already did.

His voice fills the room with power and silence and the warning of crackling flames.

“Burn it down.”

The glass contraptions along the walls that reflected his grin a moment ago now shimmer with flames that aren’t there. Red and gold twist, filled with sparks of blue and white, and race away from him. Harry laughs as he feels the first sensation of heat in his head. And he goes on laughing as he watches the form of Death fade from sight, and the Wand dissolve into a shower of sparks.

The explosion in his brain is utterly silent, almost the way Harry feels it would imagine to have a stroke. It throws him to the floor. He rolls back and forth, silently gasping. His fingers wreathe around his eyes for a second, and then he pulls his hands back from his face and stares at them.

The golden light that surrounds them might not be there, but it seems to be. And then it reaches up and fills the room before splitting into line after line of fire, multiplying far too fast for Harry to keep track of them.

There are as many lines of fire as there are wizards in the British wizarding world. Or perhaps Harry should say that there are as many lines as there are prejudiced wizards in their nation. There must be some people who contain no bigotry at all. Hermione is probably one of them.

And Harry is, now that the fire has swept through him.

Harry kneels there, watching as the golden lines take on the form of a sunburst on the edge of a wave, rearing above him and growing taller and taller without ever appearing to break through the ceiling of the Department of Mysteries. By the time the lines turn into burning arrows and streak away, he’s laughing hoarsely, not caring that he’s had to drop back on his side to rest again.

The fire is traveling, the wave of the Elder Wand’s magic, sweeping across the world.

Harry smiles.

One of the questions Percy asked him was why he could be so sure things would change, and there wouldn’t just be a few pure-bloods of Shafiq’s caliber sacrificed to appease the public before the old politics would resume.

Harry explained that he can be sure because he’s going to make sure of it.

And he is, now. Those flames are traveling on their path to burn out every single prejudice that dwells in any wizard’s mind, as long as they’re within Britain’s borders. Harry will set the hatred of Muggleborns and goblins and Muggles and werewolves and centaurs and house-elves and anything else on fire.

They didn’t change their minds despite numerous chances and centuries of struggle. They’ll change them now. They have no choice. The Elder Wand will burn their bigotry and cauterize the wounds.

And fuck the idea of free will. When they used that free will to spend centuries crushing people down and murdering them, Harry has no sympathy left for them.

He closes his eyes, expecting to do nothing more than lie in darkness for a while, since the Unspeakables are going to be a bit busy with their burning thoughts just like everyone else—

And instead, he finds himself on high, traveling with the wildfire tsunami of the Elder Wand’s spell, filtering through minds and watching as his change happens. Perhaps this is the last punishment the Hallows could think of.

It’s no punishment. Harry smiles. He watches.