[From Samhain to the Solstice]: A Black Hound at Death's Right Hand, PG-13, Harry/Sirius, 2/3

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you for all the reviews! This is now going to have three parts, as it grew longer than I expected.

Part Two

“Where do you go during the summers?”

Harry stretched and leaned back. It was his third year, and although he’d warned Tom that he’d disappear for several weeks—and he didn’t think ghosts had the same sense of time as humans, anyway—the ghost had been asking him questions non-stop since he got back.

Well, why not? Harry needed to take a break from scribbling all these runes on the parchment spread out in the middle of the chamber anyway, and Sirius wasn’t here right now. He seemed to spend a lot of time away from Harry when he was working on the portal into Death’s realm, as if he assumed that showing he had no interest in Harry changing things would mean Harry would lose interest in it, too.

Harry never would. He thought of the way Sirius’s eyes had darkened to true, shining grey on the last full moon night they’d shared, and shivered.

“Potter, are you paying attention to me?”

Right, Tom Riddle hated to be ignored. Harry shrugged. “I live in the Muggle world, with my mother’s sister and her family.”

“I had no idea your mother was a Mudblood.”

“And I had no idea you were an idiot.”

Tom gaped at him. Harry rolled his eyes and went back to drawing his runes. He didn’t look up when the ghost disappeared in a fit of pique, either. He had far too much on his mind to worry about Tom’s anger.

*

“I think I need to show you more of what I do for Death.”

Sirius’s voice was carefully controlled. Harry smiled up at him. It was the second full moon of his third year, and they had spent the first one just sitting cuddled together in the Shrieking Shack, Sirius whispering his favorite fairy stories from when he was young to Harry. They all had bittersweet endings, where someone accomplished a great feat of magic and then died, or two people fell in love and then died.

Harry knew full well that Sirius was trying to tell him something. He just didn’t know why Sirius thought it would work. If those were really Sirius’s favorite stories, it only proved how much he and Harry belonged together.

“All right,” Harry agreed easily as he stepped out of the tunnel into the Shack with Sirius walking beside him. “I’d like to see it.”

Sirius paused, his eyes flashing once. “I wondered why you haven’t approached Remus this year, since he’s teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts. I know you know who he is.”

“Why hasn’t he approached me?” Harry asked softly. “He just watches me with wistful eyes. And the one time I did tell him that I’d like to talk to him privately, he made all sorts of excuses.”

Sirius blew out a slow breath. “I think Remus thinks he’s protecting you. Keeping you safe from his lycanthropy.”

Harry laughed. “He ought to know from the questions I ask in class that I love dangerous things.”

“Not love, Harry. You mustn’t say that.”

“Why not?”

Sirius’s eyes were desperate as he smiled, but no less loving for all that. Harry sat there on the bed in the Shack, drinking it in. God, there was no one else in the world who loved him. His parents were dead. Luna was a good friend, but not close enough for Harry to trust her with the inner secrets of his soul. Remus had already proven he would hold himself at a distance. Harry didn’t think Tom would know what love was if it rent his ghost form in two.

And the less said about the Dursleys, the better.

“Death granted me the right to come to you on full moon nights, and in a ghostly form the rest of the time,” Sirius whispered. “Because of my love for you. But if she thought that you loved me in the way you’re saying you do…”

“She?” Harry perked up. That was the first time Sirius had ever used a pronoun for Death other than it. “What’s she like?”

“She granted me leave to show you. Because she doesn’t want you dying during the ritual the way Tom did. It would—” Sirius’s eyes quickly flickered, lashes down and then over his eyes. “It would sadden me enough that I might grieve myself into non-existence, and then she would lose her servant.”

She doesn’t want me opening a door into her realm, because she thinks I might succeed.

Harry smiled a little, and didn’t say it. “All right. I really do want to see what you do for her. But I wanted to ask you one question first.”

“Yes, kiddo?” Sirius smiled, but his eyes were anxious.

“You do love me, right? It’s not just that you loved me when I was a kid and you made that bargain, but you love me now?”

Sirius’s mouth dropped open a little and he leaned over to grab Harry into a tight hug. Harry leaned close and shut his eyes to feel the shifting of cloth against him. Sirius always wore black robes with silver accents when he was like this, the robes he had worn the night Harry’s parents died. And he smelled like sweat and human, instead of hound.

“Of course,” Sirius whispered, his voice hushed. “You’re the center of my life, kiddo. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. There’s no risk I wouldn’t take. I just want you to understand me a little better, so you can see the risks you shouldn’t take.”

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Which meant, when Harry succeeded, Sirius would love him the way he wanted to be loved.

Harry smiled. “Then I want to see.”

*

Long after Sirius had returned him to the school, Harry lay alone in his bed in the Ravenclaw third year boys’ bedroom, turning the precious images over and over in his mind. Sirius had warned him they would be hard to understand, and it would be more like Harry’s mind translating the reality of Death’s realm into images than seeing it. But Harry didn’t care. He had been there, and now he had an idea of what he was looking for when he opened the door in the ritual circle.

Sirius had taken him to a cold and freezing dark moor. The brightest thing had been the snowflakes glowing on the ground like shards of crystal, lit from within by rotten light.

Sirius had transformed into a dog the minute he set Harry in the middle of a circle of snow and took a step away. He had thrown his head back and howled, a lingering, echoing sound that bounced back from invisible walls.

And thousands of other howls answered him.

Harry saw—he didn’t see—he saw and he thought he understood—

Even in his bed afterwards, the vision trembled and snapped like the surface of a bubble, ready to pop. Harry held still, not even shaking his head, because that would make the vision flee and dissipate. He breathed shallowly, and he watched.

And he saw the Hunt.

The Hunt had been black hounds coursing after the souls that Death took. Harry had vaguely thought that Death would simply reach out and snatch someone she wanted to take, or maybe inflict death as a punishment on someone like Tom, who had tried to win immortality. But no, it was a Hunt. Souls were run down and condemned to pant with terror like animals.

Why? Because Death wanted it that way.

Harry watched, and he saw that Sirius led them, and that he was the largest, proudest, darkest hound of all. His fur rippled around him, not in motion but with long grooves of motion carved into it like black ice, and he charged, and his eyes turned red like glowing coals, and he was at Death’s right hand as she coursed the souls with her pack. Death was a woman, was not a woman, snapping and flickering in and out of Harry’s comprehension.

But the hounds, the hounds were real.

Harry saw one soul go down trapped and screaming in Sirius’s jaws. Sirius flung his head back and snapped his neck up and then down, breaking something far more essential in the soul than its back. Then he turned and offered the prey with a soft, glittering mouth to Death, who took it and examined it.

Sirius turned a second later and grasped Harry’s eyes with his own. Words, stronger than words, pressed into Harry’s mind and worked themselves into something more like a lather.

The first soul I did that to was Wormtail. I became her servant to save you, but I also became her servant because she promised to let me do that.

Harry shivered, and he knew. Sirius was a monster. He wasn’t just the ghostly hound who watched over Harry. Visions avalanched down into Harry’s head, moving like the snow here couldn’t, and he knew.

Sirius had the Grim Animagus form for a reason. He hunted people down. He enjoyed the work. He had loved appearing to the girls who had tormented Luna, and he had marked their souls for his own personal prey when they died. There was no one who would be spared this fear, except Sirius and others like him who had become hounds, and that was only because they would never truly die.

Sirius was looking forward even to hunting Harry, when he died and his soul passed into Death’s realm.

The terror of that swirled around and around Harry like a cascade of water meant to drown him. Sirius wanted to rend him, terrify him, hold him, shake him.

Possess him.

And Harry opened his eyes, and lay undrowned, basking in that miracle, for a long time.

*

“If even half of what you told me is true, why are you pursuing this ritual?”

Harry tilted his head back and watched Tom for a second. The ghost had been fascinated by what Harry had told him of Death’s realm, but had fixated on the part about the hounds, asking question after question over and over again. At first, Harry had thought it was because Tom thought he could somehow escape his ghostly state and slip back into existence, Horcrux intact, if he asked enough questions about the actions of the hounds with souls before they passed over.

Now, though, Harry thought Tom’s ghost probably didn’t remember being hunted by the hounds, or had only faint memories and was trying to reconcile what Harry had told him with what he knew. Harry had no idea how ghosts worked with the Hunt. Were they perhaps torn scraps of the souls the hounds brought to Death? Or allowed to partially return to the world to amuse her?

Then again, Harry didn’t really care. He wasn’t a ghost and wasn’t about to become one.

“I want to be with Sirius,” Harry said, in simple answer to Tom’s question, and went back to carving the rune on the stone.

“But he’s a—monster. You said that he thinks that himself.”

“Yes,” Harry agreed.

“How can you want to be with him?”

“He was the only one who was there. He was the only one who gave a damn that I was living in a cupboard under the stairs. And I love him,” Harry said, ignoring the way that the ghost scoffed at him. Tom, it had become rapidly clear, didn’t believe in love. He believed in power.

He could. But as Harry was prone to think, look where that belief had got him.

“You could do so much with the amount of skill and magic that you have,” Tom whispered, prowling around the circle of rune-carved stones Harry had established. “And you choose to waste it looking for a door into Death’s realm and reaching out to a man who has warned you away from him.”

Harry half-smiled as he finished the carving on the Sowilo rune and set it aside. He hadn’t told Tom about the possessiveness roaring through the vision Sirius had shared with him, because that only belonged to Harry. But he knew Sirius felt the same way he did, knew that if Sirius had wanted to chase him away forever, he could have chosen harsh words that would have butchered Harry’s heart.

But he hadn’t.

“Why are you wasting it?”

Harry tossed his hair out of his eyes as he looked up at Tom. “You’re the only one here who thinks that,” he said. “And you’re welcome to go elsewhere if you don’t want to help me with what you knew I was going to do.”

Tom vanished with a sharp pop that sounded like Apparition. Harry shook his head and turned back to survey the runes. He thought the circle could be improved in a few ways, but it was as close to good as he could make it.

Which meant he had to turn his attention to the other, and more difficult part, of establishing a doorway: envisioning Death’s realm the way he wanted it to be when he stepped through.

*

“Stay after class, please, Mr. Potter.”

Professor Lupin sounded as though he was finally going to be open to a private conversation, Harry thought. He turned around and stood next to the door as the other Ravenclaws filed out, then waited as the professor locked the door and lifted a few anti-eavesdropping charms.

Sirius appeared next to him, head cocked wistfully at Lupin. He seemed to have given up on the idea that Harry and Lupin could establish a close, friendly relationship, but Harry wasn’t surprised he wanted to be here for this conversation. Harry let his hand hover in the air, and smiled as Sirius’s ghostly form brushed against his fingers.

“Mr. Potter,” said Professor Lupin, and then hesitated again.

Harry sighed to himself. He didn’t hate Lupin, and he understood why the man hadn’t been able to take care of him after his parents had died. But he did dislike the man’s indecisiveness, and how even now, he didn’t appear to want to say anything about his past with Harry’s father and Sirius.

“Did you know,” Professor Lupin began at last, slowly, “that you reek of Dark Arts?”

Huh. I didn’t know a werewolf’s nose could smell those. Harry ignored the way that Sirius’s ears had flattened to his head, and instead gave Professor Lupin the most innocent smile he could muster. “No, I didn’t. Sorry if it bothered you, sir.”

“Why do you reek of Dark Arts?” Professor Lupin persisted, and shifted a little to the side. He hadn’t drawn his wand, Harry saw, but he was in a position that meant he could easily do so. “Give me the truth, child.”

“I don’t think I will,” Harry said. Even Sirius’s old friend would probably disapprove of Harry’s desire to get Sirius out of Death’s realm, the way Tom did. No one who hadn’t been there for Harry’s childhood could possibly understand.

“What?” Lupin stared at Harry as if that was the last thing he had expected. Then he shook his head and sighed sadly. “I’m sorry, Harry, but I think that the Dark Arts you’ve been using must have driven you mad. I’ll need to report you to the Headmaster.”

“Do that and I’ll tell everyone that you’re a werewolf.”

Lupin’s face went far paler than he had so far. He swayed. Sirius shifted next to Harry, and Harry glanced at him. But Sirius wasn’t pawing at him or stepping in to defend Lupin with his shadowy form. He stayed where he was, tail held curved between his back legs as he stared at Lupin.

“How—how did you know?” Lupin finally whispered.

“You were one of my dad’s best friends. Why wouldn’t I know?” Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t really want to do this, you know. I don’t think it’s fair that you can’t hold a job just because you’re a werewolf, and I don’t really want to see you sacked. But you’re not going to report me to the Headmaster.”

Lupin licked his lips. “What if I said that he already knew about me?”

“It’s not him I would be telling, is it?” Harry smiled at Lupin, and he knew it was a mean smile. That had been one thing he was more than glad to take lessons in from Tom. “I wonder how much damage it would do to any future you might have in magical Britain, for the news to get out that the Headmaster had permitted a werewolf to be in the same classroom as precious pureblood children.”

Sirius leaned a little towards Harry, and still made no move to defend Lupin. Harry had been about ninety percent sure that he wouldn’t, but he was glad to see it nonetheless.

Sirius had chosen his side, and he stood where he always had since the night he had become Death’s hound: with Harry.

“You’re so different from the way I thought you were,” Lupin whispered finally, his eyes fixed on Harry and his nose twitching as if that stink of Dark Arts still bothered him.

“You gave up any chance you had to make a difference. You didn’t even tell me the truth this year. So it’s a little late to be acting like you care about me now.”

Lupin looked off to the side, flinched, and nodded.

He was always flinching, Harry thought as he looked at the werewolf and recalled some of Sirius’s stories. He always held back when they played their best pranks, but then he wanted to claim credit and pretend he was a true friend with all the rest of them. Or if he really thought what they were doing was wrong, he should have stood up against them and told them so.

But he never made a decision. He just huddled in the background and hoped not to be noticed.

At least Harry had made a fucking decision as to what he wanted, and what he needed, and what he would do.

*

“The nargles are always around you now.”

Harry glanced up at Luna with a smile as she came to sit next to him in a corner of the Ravenclaw common room. She was always the only one. Although most of Harry’s Housemates had been content to ignore him once they found out he didn’t make friends, they had started actively avoiding him this year.

Harry wondered if it had to do with the stink of Dark Arts that Lupin had mentioned. He wished he could do something about that if so, so he wouldn’t get found out as easily. But he knew the only way to get rid of it would probably be to stop completely.

“They are?” he asked Luna. “Can they sense that I’m getting near my goal?”

Luna stared at him with great, solemn eyes. Harry reached out and tweaked a strand of her hair in response. He didn’t like to see her looking so solemn.

“Have you considered what could happen if it goes wrong?” Luna whispered.

Harry nodded. “Then I think I’ll probably be dead.”

“And that doesn’t matter to you? It doesn’t matter to the Hound?”

“It matters,” Harry said, glancing off to the side, where Sirius lay next to the couch and dozed in the firelight. He had said he couldn’t feel the heat, but that light was sort of the same thing for someone in the form that he was in. “But not as much as being with him does.”

Luna tilted her head. “Has anyone tried to stop you? The nargles are swarming around you so thickly that I thought someone tried.”

“A few people have told me they don’t think it’s a good idea,” Harry said, his mind going to Professor Lupin. “But they don’t really know what I’m doing. They just have these vague ideas about what’s good for me.”

“Talk to someone whose ideas aren’t vague.”

“Don’t you count?” Harry tried to tease her, although he thought it fell a little flat.

“Oh, no,” said Luna, and shook her head. “My ideas are very vague. They’ve been vague since my mother died.” She sighed. “Sometimes I miss her.”

Harry reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Should I talk to her if I see her? Tell her that you miss her?”

“Oh, no,” Luna repeated, looking shocked. “The living and the dead aren’t meant to mix. Unless someone can do it by becoming half-dead themselves.” She pulled a small blue book out of her pocket and dropped it into Harry’s hands. “You should read this. I know you like old stories. These were written by an ancestor of mine.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this book in the library,” Harry said, as he flicked through the pages. And he knew it would have if it was there. He’d sought out every possible book that had magical fairy tales in it.

“No, it was privately printed. Most people didn’t like the way my ancestor thought.” Luna stood up and touched Harry on the ear. “I wish you good luck. You should bathe your earlobe in water on a full moon night.”

Sirius raised his head and gave Luna a wary look, but Harry didn’t think they had anything to worry about. Luna was just Luna, and someone who obviously didn’t mind that Harry reeked of Dark Arts, if she could even smell it.

“All right,” Harry said. “Thanks, Luna.”

She smiled at him and wandered upstairs. Harry picked up the blue book and began to read.

*

Harry could see why the stories the way Luna’s ancestor had told them had never found favor with the public. Most of them were versions of stories Harry already knew, like the “Tale of the Three Brothers,” but they all ended with darkness and death, or someone losing a hand, or vengeful dragons burning out someone’s eyes.

Then again, that was no darker than some versions of Muggle stories Harry had read. Or then the story that Sirius had told him over and over since before Harry was capable of understanding the words.

The ending of this version of “The Three Brothers” was intriguing, however. It showed Death as a woman who had come to claim her cloak back from Ignotus Peverell, but he had begged to keep something of hers with him because he had grown so used to her cold touch, swearing to make a bargain with her and offer her whatever she wanted. Death had laughed.

“And then she led him into a room in which candles burned, so many candles for so many lives, and told him that she needed nothing from him, not when she had all the lives of the world in her keeping. And Ignotus Peverell stole a cold silver candlestick from her and ran back into the world. And Death could not find him, because he hid under her cloak.”

But in the end, of course, she had found him, when he was dying of old age. Ignotus Peverell held out the silver candlestick to her.

“He told her, with his dying breath, that it was worth it, to have had something of her cold glory with him all his life. And when her hounds ended him, Death was so moved that she took his soul up with her and made it her coal-black horse, which she rides to this day.”

Harry shut the book when he was done and looked thoughtfully into the common room fire. He hadn’t seen a horse in the vision that Sirius had shown him, but then again, he had known what he was seeing wasn’t exactly reality.

It was worth thinking of. And since he would have little to do when he went back to the Dursleys the next day other than think, he continued turning the story over in his mind.

*

“I ought to have given this back to you long since, my dear boy. I hope you’ll forgive an old man his forgetfulness.”

Harry smiled. “It’s all right, sir. I appreciate you giving it back now.”

He stroked the Invisibility Cloak that Dumbledore had handed across the desk. At least, once the man had remembered, he didn’t hesitate to give it back. This was the first night of Harry’s fourth year, and he’d immediately been summoned to the man’s office to receive the gift. Sirius sat up beside him with his tail trembling back and forth. He’d told Harry stories about James Potter’s cloak, but he hadn’t known where it was.

I deserve some luck for once, what with all the bad luck that my life has been plagued with so far.

“Harry, my dear boy, may I ask you something?”

Harry looked up and blinked. “Sure, sir.” He folded up the Cloak—it was as soft and flexible as Sirius had always said it was—and tucked it carefully into one of his robe pockets.

“One of the professors reported to me that you appeared to be getting into Dark Arts.” Dumbledore’s face was grave, and he folded his hands on top of the desk. “I told him not to be ridiculous, but on second thought, I could not dismiss his words without further consideration.”

Professor Lupin, right. The man was gone now, maybe because Harry’s threat to reveal his curse bothered him too much. And he never had actually told Harry of his own free will that he’d been a friend of Harry’s parents.

Harry arranged his face in a careful expression of sorrow. “That was Professor Lupin, right, sir?” He waited until the Headmaster had nodded, and went on, “I think it was honestly just his own guilt catching up with him.”

“His own guilt?”

Harry nodded. “I know that he wanted to take care of me after my parents died. But he decided it was best if I wasn’t raised by a werewolf. And then I think he wanted to tell me that he was friends with my mum and dad when he was here, but he never did. He kept stepping back and hesitating, and even when he asked me to stay after class near the end of the year, he didn’t actually talk to me about what it was like for him to be friends with them. He felt guilty, but he probably thought he was protecting me.”

“Why would that make him think that you were practicing Dark Arts?”

Harry sighed and stared at the Headmaster for a moment. “Because he wasn’t there to protect me. And so that must have meant I was getting into Dark Arts, without a proper Marauder to watch over me. And since I’m not in Gryffindor.”

Even though there was a proper Marauder to watch over me all along.

“Well,” the Headmaster said, and frowned a little. “He did wait until the summer to owl me…”

Harry nodded. He’d reckoned that, or Dumbledore would have called him up to talk to him at the end of last year. “And he didn’t say that he knew I was practicing Dark Arts and I’d better be careful. He just offered this vague warning that really had nothing to do with anything.” Harry sighed. “I understand why he couldn’t raise me. But I don’t want his guilt complex making him spread lies, either.”

“It does seem odd that he never openly told you he was friends with your parents,” the Headmaster conceded. “Very well, Mr. Potter, just be careful about your visits to the odd corners of the library.” He smiled benevolently at Harry. “And enjoy your Cloak.”

“Yes, sir,” Harry said, and slipped out of the office with Sirius at his heels, his hand dipping into his robe pocket to touch his Cloak again.

He knew the stories about cloaks, and he also knew that this one had been around at least since his great-grandfather’s time, from what Sirius had said. Invisibility Cloaks didn’t normally last that long, no matter how well they were taken care of.

Harry couldn’t stop smiling. I think I’ve found something that Death will be willing to bargain with me over.

The book Luna had given him never did say that Death got back her original cloak, after all.