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

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for the reviews! This is the last chapter of this story, and I hope you enjoy it.

Part Three

“Have you heard about the Triwizard Tournament?”

Harry nodded vaguely in response to Tom’s question. “Yeah, they’re holding it because they want to show that the three most prominent European magical schools have close ties, or something. They apparently had quarrels between the Headmasters and Headmistresses in the past.” He squinted down at the circle of grey stones in front of him.

Something was wrong, but he didn’t know what it was. He had to figure it out before he went to bed, though, no matter that he was currently drooping with exhaustion. Otherwise, his worries wouldn’t let him sleep.

“Are you going to compete?”

That question startled Harry enough to make him turn his head and stare at Tom. Tom floated on air, folded his arms, and stared back in the way he had when he thought Harry’s answer to a question was immensely important, whether or not he had explained to Harry why that was.

“Of course not. Why would I?”

“You have an immense amount of magical power.” Tom vanished and reappeared near the small window on the far side of the room, where Harry had first seen him. He uncrossed his arms and frowned at Harry for a moment. “And you could use the money that the tournament would pay the champion to buy books that aren’t in Hogwarts.”

Harry shook his head. “Even if they hadn’t restricted the tournament to of-age students, I don’t need the books. I’ve chosen my path and I’m near enough to stepping onto it.”

“What?”

Tom’s voice was high-pitched enough that Harry winced. But he nodded and drew out the parchment with his notes on it. “I have an idea about what to do once I’m in Death’s realm.”

Tom twisted upside-down to read what he’d written, while Harry went back to contemplating the circle. He squinted until his eyes ached in the Lumos light coming from his wand. And then he glanced back at the notes that Tom was still studying, and his eyes widened.

Of course.

If he was really going to do what he wanted to do once he reached Death’s realm, then he had to make sure that all the steps along the way were conducted in the same manner. In the same light.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the candles that he normally kept beside his bed to read by after his roommates had gone to bed. He ended up having to cast a Sticking Charm to keep it wedged upright between the chinks of the flagstones, but he managed in the end, and sprawled on his belly beside the circle of stones, staring at it in the candlelight.

Yes. There. Of course. The stones that were supposed to guide him on his way to Death’s realm were out of order. Harry sighed and reordered them, shaking his head at himself. That was an obvious mistake that he should have seen right away.

But he couldn’t have, because it was literally in the wrong light.

Harry smiled smugly. That was the best proof he had acquired yet for his theories about Death’s realm being right.

“You’re intending to shape her realm to your vision.”

Harry rolled over on his side to look at Tom. Tom was still hovering above the parchment, but he was staring at Harry instead of it, and his brow was furrowed.

Harry nodded. “Everyone who goes into Death’s realm sees something different, and Sirius told me that no one sees what’s actually there, except Death herself. I might as well work with what I think is true, and she’ll bend herself into the forms and employ them if she finds them useful or amusing enough.”

“And once you’re through the door into her realm, what then?”

“Then I make the bargain with her,” Harry breathed. He looked again at the candle, and then at the stones. They cast shadows that writhed and danced back and forth with the flickering light, in a way that they never had when his charm was the only illumination.

Harry smiled. Who would want to participate in a tournament when they had a chance to enter Death’s realm and survive?

He glanced across the circle at Sirius, who had been asleep for most of the evening, and smiled to see that his godfather had his head raised and was staring straight at Harry. And there was no warning in his eyes, and his tail was drumming on the floor, although of course without raising a sound.

Instead, his eyes blazed with hope.

*

“Harry, I can’t believe it.” Sirius’s voice was reverent as he examined Harry’s notes and then turned the Cloak back and forth in his hands. “You might actually have a chance to enter Death’s door…”

He trailed off. Harry leaned towards him and soaked in Sirius’s warmth all along his side. It was the third full moon night of his fourth year, and he had gathered the only ingredient he was missing for his ritual, ashes from dragonfire, earlier that evening. No one had noticed someone sneaking back to the area of the First Task once it was done and the dragons were gone.

“You could really do it,” Sirius breathed, and his voice broke.

Harry leaned against him harder, and Sirius turned to look down at him. They were in a deserted classroom not that far from Tom’s chamber. Harry didn’t want to share his rare moments with Sirius even with a ghost.

“I know that I haven’t asked you for this before, Sirius,” Harry said. “But I’d like to have it.”

“What’s that, Harry?” Sirius’s hand lingered on his head, as if he was going to pet Harry the way Harry petted him when he was in dog form.

“I want a kiss.”

Sirius stared at him, his eyes widening more and more into pools of dark, intense grey in the light of the candles they nearly always met by now. Harry waited in patient silence. It was possible that Sirius didn’t think of Harry the way Harry thought of him, but Harry actually doubted that, based on the feeling he remembered Sirius giving him during that vision of the Hunt.

It was much more likely that he just didn’t want to admit it.

“Your mum and dad,” Sirius said. “They wouldn’t like it—”

“They’re dead, and you’re here,” Harry said. “You gave so much for me, Sirius, including your freedom and your life. Or your existence as a human,” he corrected himself, when he saw Sirius open his mouth to explain, again, how he wasn’t exactly a ghost. Harry didn’t want to get caught up and dragged off-track by weird explanations. “They wouldn’t begrudge you this.”

“And you—want it?” Sirius licked his lips, looking between Harry’s mouth and his eyes.

“You don’t know how much I want it. Unless you can take your own wanting as a guide to it.”

Sirius closed his eyes, but he didn’t deny that he wanted Harry, and he didn’t pull away. Harry just waited, snuggled close to Sirius, staring up at him, and a flash of his old childhood musings on Sirius returned to him.

He really is the most handsome man in the world.

Sirius’s hand rose, and his fingers tangled slowly in Harry’s hair. Harry shivered as he felt how tight Sirius’s hand curled. He’d never done that before, even when he messed up Harry’s hair. It was always more casual or faster than this.

Sirius opened his eyes and muttered something that sounded like, “And I’m Death’s Hound,” before he bent his head.

Harry tilted his head further up, and their lips met. Sirius shuddered as though someone had dumped boiling water into his veins. Harry was afraid he would pull back for a second.

But Sirius clasped the back of his head, palm cradling it as if he was holding Harry’s beating heart in his hands. Harry pressed closer, and closer, and tried to show that he would give that up if Sirius wanted it. Whatever Sirius wanted, whatever he needed—

And then the pressure against Harry’s lips melted away, and he opened his eyes to see that Sirius had turned back into his ghostly hound form. Which meant the full moon, outside the castle walls, had set.

Sirius turned and loped through the wall, but not before he gave Harry the look of endless longing that Harry had seen in his own reflection’s eyes whenever he stared into a mirror and thought about Sirius. Which was all the time, because it seemed wrong for his own reflected face to be there by itself. Sirius’s should have been beside it, grinning, healthy and strong.

Harry collapsed back against the wall with a silly smile.

This is going to work. It really is.

*

“Would you go away with the Grim and leave me behind?”

Harry sighed a little as he looked at Luna. They were sitting beside the lake after the Second Task. Harry had come out to watch it because he had thought vaguely that, since the First Task had given him an ingredient he needed, the Second Task might give him one he didn’t know he needed.

But in the end, it hadn’t. And it had been a bit of a disappointment, taking place under the surface of the lake and without a clue what was going on until the surface of the water began to churn and the Champions brought their hostages back.

“Yes,” Harry said. “I’m trying to make sure I can stay here with the Grim instead, but I would go through the gate and give up my life in a second, if that was the only way we could be together.”

Luna bit her lip and looked sad for a second. Then she brightened. “It’s still beautiful.”

“What’s beautiful?”

“That you were my friend. That doesn’t stop being real just because it ends. Like the way my mum didn’t stop being my mum just because she’s dead.”

Harry reached out and entwined his fingers with Luna’s, and she leaned against his shoulder. Harry thought for a second that, if he could, he would find Luna’s mother’s spirit in Death’s realm and bring it back with him.

But he would be lucky for Death to accept his bargain and let him escape with Sirius. Harry couldn’t risk everything he had fought so hard for to please someone else, no matter how close a friend they were or how much Luna missed her mum.

Sirius was all Harry wanted.

*

“I’m concerned about you, Mr. Potter.”

Harry blinked at Professor Flitwick. In the three and a half years he’d been in Ravenclaw, he couldn’t remember the professor ever saying something like that, or even speaking to him except about Charms class and about being a little more social with his peers. Since he hadn’t forced Harry to be social like that, Harry hadn’t really paid him any mind.

Maybe I should now, Harry thought, as he blinked again at the little professor. He was standing in front of his desk, where he had asked Harry to stay after class, and almost wringing his hands. “Why, sir?” Harry asked.

“You spend so much time by yourself, Mr. Potter. And Madam Pince has told me that you’ve been checking out Dark Arts books much too advanced for your age and studies.”

Despite himself, Harry laughed. “If I’d been checking out Dark Arts books at my reading level, would you be concerned, sir?”

Professor Flitwick didn’t smile back. “I hoped we could handle this in the House, Mr. Potter. I know my Ravenclaws get up to all sorts of research projects. But it is increasingly looking like we can’t.”

Sirius materialized beside them, staring intently at Flitwick in a way that made Harry wince. He shook his head at both of them. “It’s nothing that’s going to hurt anything, Professor Flitwick, I promise.”

“Or anyone?”

Harry hesitated, and realized he’d already lost the game not to lie when he saw Flitwick tense slightly. “Maybe me,” he admitted. “But, really, no one else, sir.”

“Harm to yourself is unacceptable, Mr. Potter.” Professor Flitwick looked more tired than Harry had ever seen him. “I did not know that you were actively suicidal.”

“I’m not,” Harry said, lifting his chin up. He was taller than his Head of House, and he tried to use that stand as confidently as he could while he explained. “I think this will work. It has at least a fifty percent chance of working.”

“And you won’t tell me what it is? So I can help?”

Necromancy was illegal in Britain, as Harry had discovered during his first year. He closed his lips stubbornly.

“Mr. Potter,” said Flitwick softly. “If you do not tell me what you are doing, then I am going to have to put you in detention.”

Harry felt sheer desperation welling up in him. He opened his mouth to say something, to complain or yell, he didn’t know which, but then was silenced as Sirius’s ghostly form bounded up in front of him, to stand between him and Flitwick.

“What are you going to do?” Harry breathed.

Flitwick seemed to mistake that as a question for him and started to answer, but Sirius flung his mouth open and gave a great, sudden, silent howl, his head tilted back the way Harry had seen it in the vision of the Hunt Sirius had shown him.

Professor Flitwick blinked and put his hand to his head. “Mr. Potter. What were we talking about?”

Harry swallowed and said, “Ah. You were concerned that some of the books I was getting out of the library were too advanced for me, sir.”

The professor chuckled. “Ah, yes, Madam Pince does sometimes decide that students shouldn’t be reading certain texts and tries to get me to take them out of my eagles’ hands.” He wagged his finger at Harry. “Best to make sure that she doesn’t see you taking them out from now on, don’t you think?”

Harry nodded, hardly able to believe his luck. “Thank you, sir.”

But it wasn’t luck, was it? It was Sirius.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Potter.” Professor Flitwick beamed at him and winked. “And do remember you can come to me for help with your projects! My door is always open.”

Harry stumbled out, in a daze, and reached down to touch Padfoot. He didn’t think he was imagining the slight cool brush of fur against his fingers.

“Wow, Sirius,” he whispered. “What did you do?”

Sirius glanced up at him, and his form seemed to waver and strain, as if he was trying to disappear the way that Tom often did when he was in ghostly form. Then he grew a human mouth where his dog one would be, and spoke aloud.

“I commanded his memories of you to die.”

A second later, Sirius snapped back into his normal dog form, and lay down as if he had exhausted himself. Harry crouched down next to him and arranged his arms as best as he could in a hug. He also ignored a few Slytherin students who walked past and muttered about how mental Harry was to be hugging air.

This was—beyond what Harry had known Sirius could do. Beyond what he had ever expected Sirius to risk for him.

Beyond.

It was the best word to describe everything, Harry decided.

*

“How close do you think you are?”

Tom was hovering at Harry’s shoulder again as he worked on the circle. This time, he was sure that it was almost complete. He had the runes that would open the door to Death’s realm, the candles that would shape his perception of the circle and thus shape the place that waited beyond the door, the dragonfire ash and the grave dirt and other mementoes of being left behind that would anchor his intent, and a piece of both Padfoot’s fur and Sirius’s human skin to point him towards his goal.

“Pretty close, I think.” Harry rose to his feet and stretched. His fifth year had begun with a scramble from all the professors to get them to pay attention to their OWLS, but Harry hadn’t really cared. As if OWLS mattered next to what he was going to do.

If he succeeded, then he would worry about it if Sirius wanted him to. He might want. Harry wasn’t sure.

Is that even something Sirius will care about? Harry wondered, and then shrugged. The full moon was tomorrow—not the one when he would try the ritual, but the one before. He could ask Sirius if he really wanted Harry to concentrate on his studies after Sirius was back among the living.

“Good.”

Tom’s voice was soft and dark. Harry tilted his head towards the circle and smiled. If Tom wanted to think it was a smile of satisfaction at being so close to completing his labors, then let him.

Harry didn’t think he would ever be a genius like the boy who had written that diary full of rituals and come close to succeeding at creating a Horcrux, but when it came to death, he knew a lot of things.

“What’s the biggest missing piece?” Tom asked.

“Finding a way to hold the door open,” Harry said simply. “I know very well how to open it. But to maintain the connection so that Sirius and I can escape after I bargain with Death?” He shook his head. “That’s a hard thing to do.”

He had never said that he didn’t know how to do it. And if Tom missed that, well.

“The sacrifice of a living being is required in the Horcrux ritual.”

Harry nodded. “And so I think that I’ll give up part of my own life to Lady Death. It’s probably going to be required as part of the bargain, anyway. I don’t think she’ll want me living as long as I normally would have.”

Tom eyed him askance. Then again, for a boy who had once risked his very existence for immortality—and failed—the thought of giving up part of his life was probably pretty alien, Harry thought.

For him, it wasn’t. He had wanted nothing more than Sirius since he had first fully understood that the man who visited him on full moon nights and the dog who watched over him from the sidelines were the same person.

And soon, now, he would have what he wanted.

*

“No one was ever like you.”

Harry pressed closer to Sirius. They were in their deserted classroom, not far from the top of the Astronomy Tower. Harry could probably see stars if he tilted his head back, maybe even the Dog Star that Sirius was named for.

“You were,” he breathed into Sirius’s neck. “You gave up your normal human existence and everything else to save me. And I’m going to get you back. To show you that your sacrifice hasn’t gone unappreciated.”

“I never thought it was.” Sirius’s heavy, solid hand, lit by the rays of the full moon shining through a gap between the stones, stroked his hair. “Oh, Harry, I would love you even if you couldn’t do this. Even if it failed. Even if you died.”

Harry smiled at him. That was one reason he really wasn’t afraid of death, aside from the fact that he’d been around Sirius all his life. “I know that. I’ll be with you even if I fail.”

“Running from my jaws in the Hunt.”

“There is nowhere I would rather be,” Harry said, and the fact that he meant it, he knew, was what made Sirius kiss him again.

*

“Goodbye, Luna.”

Luna’s eyes were full of tears as she took Harry’s hand between hers. Harry smiled down at her. Although he was still short, courtesy of the Dursleys’ treatment in his childhood, he was taller than Luna, who stared up at him with shimmering eyes from near his shoulder.

“Are you going to die?” Luna whispered.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I might. Or I might get Sirius back. It’ll depend on the kind of bargain that Lady Death wants.” Sirius didn’t call her Lady Death most of the time, just Death, but Harry thought it was right to be respectful on the night that would basically involve him breaking into her house.

Luna nodded. It seemed she couldn’t speak. Harry wrapped his arms around her and hugged her, and Luna clung to him with a little sob.

It made him think of the sounds that Sirius had sometimes been able to make even in ghostly hound form, and hold her tighter.

And then, it really was time to go.

*

Harry didn’t have to do some big, complicated chant to open the door. He just laid out the circle in the right order, lit the candles around it, and cast another spell to light the ash and the grave dirt and the old bones on fire.

And as the candlelight and the fire crossed over the circle, Harry stared at the emptiness in the center of the circle and willed.

The air quivered. The door, a glinting, heavy iron-starlight thing, swung open.

Tom attacked him.

Harry smiled, turning into it, having expected it. Tom was too interested in the ritual, in the fact that Harry was going to step through into Death’s realm—the way a Horcrux shard of soul would have to pass through the door. Harry had thought at first that he just wanted to see how Harry would use his notes, but he had also decided, long since, that Tom probably thought he could somehow change the ritual to complete it as a Horcrux sacrifice for himself and win his place among the living back.

As Tom crossed into the circle and became solid, Harry sliding sideways in existence at the same time and becoming the less-mortal form of a ghost, Harry grabbed him and dragged him towards the door.

And braced Tom Riddle’s immortal soul there, sticking it open.

Tom screamed horribly as Harry wove the runes with motions of his hands in the air, the runes that formed the containment circle, the runes that held whatever they wanted. And Harry’s will pressed down on Tom, and crushed him, and held him there, a ghost so stubborn he had survived the backlash of a ritual that should have destroyed him.

It would do.

Harry turned, and stepped into Death’s realm.

*

It blazed, a silvery room full of candles in brilliant candle-holders, the flames flickering and jumping back and forth and creating drifting shadows. But the shadows were in the same patterns as the ones across his ritual circle, and Harry had no trouble deciphering them.

Lady Death was waiting for him.

She had taken the form of a woman with long, smooth white hair, around a face that was like—

Like nothing. Like the dark of the moon.

Harry didn’t try to look at her face. He looked, instead, at the black hound sitting at her feet. Sirius’s eyes were brilliant, and his body was trembling all over, as if he wanted to wag his tail but didn’t quite dare.

“You came to bargain with me, Harry Potter.” Lady Death’s voice was low and distant and howling, the sound of the black hounds howling on the Hunt that Harry had heard.

Harry nodded and still didn’t manage to look up, but he took the Cloak from his pocket. Lady Death stirred, and all the shadows raced around the room once before calming down into the pattern Harry knew, had sung into his soul.

“Ah.”

“I want to give this back,” Harry said. “And I want to give you Tom Riddle’s soul, the bit of it that escaped. From what I read in the notes he gave me, making a Horcrux is something that you take personally.” He actually didn’t know that for sure, was spinning outrageously on a slim guess, but the chuckle that sounded like someone choking was a good indication that he was right.

“Indeed. But three gifts I lost to the world, Harry Potter, and you have returned only one of them to me, plus a soul that might stand in for my lost Stone. Where is the third that stands for the Wand?”

Harry turned, and his will struck out from like a spear. There was love for Sirius, and there was desire, and there was bitter obsession, and there were memories from the days he had spent as a child in the cupboard with only Sirius to make his life bearable, and there was a faint, shredding memory of seeing his mother die.

All of that allowed him to point straight to the shining candle, only a little burned, that bore his own name on the base in letters that slashed through shadow and space.

“Half my own life,” he said. “I want to light Sirius’s candle from mine.”

Sirius stared at him, body tense and shivering. Harry looked down at him, and half-expected Sirius to tell him that he shouldn’t do this, that Sirius didn’t want Harry to die young.

Sirius shivered, and didn’t say it.

“An interesting offer,” Lady Death said, her voice this time like the noiseless hush of waves on a distant shore. “But my hound’s candle is no ordinary one. When you light it—”

Her hands moved, or something close down by her side that might have been her hands moved, and Sirius’s candle hovered abruptly in front of her. Harry choked and stared. He had known that it would look like a candle, because that was the form he had chosen to cast lives in this realm in, but he hadn’t known it would alternate forms constantly, darting back and forth between a stark white candle lit and burning all along the shaft, and a pile of grey ash.

“How do you expect to light his candle from yours?” Lady Death asked softly.

“Full moon nights,” Harry said, and looked at her face while something screeched and ripped bloody claws through his brain. “On full moon nights, he’ll become the hound again, and lead the Hunt. And I will be the Hunt’s prey.”

There was utter silence all around him. Harry stood there, and looked at her, and more and more of him died.

“No necromancer has ever made such an offer,” Lady Death said, and because of the human mode Harry had cast her in, her voice was human enough to hold wonder.

“From what I’ve read about necromancers, they usually don’t love very hard,” Harry said. “I do.”

There was a silence long enough to sting Harry’s soul. But he continued watching Sirius, and the hem of Lady Death’s robe, stirring from the flicker of winds that blew around the candles and the shadows.

Sirius looked at him, and in Sirius’s eyes were the Grim and the man and the Hunt and the road.

“You would have lived ninety years,” Lady Death said abruptly. “You will now live only forty-five. And a third of that has gone by. Is that the bargain you want to make?”

“Your Cloak, and Tom Riddle’s soul, and half my life, and my presence and Sirius’s in the Hunt on every full moon night for the rest of my life, for his freedom as a man in the living world every day and night except the nights of the full moon, until I die,” Harry said. “Yes. I do.”

Sirius gave a single, high whine, and for a moment, Lady Death’s hand fell to rest on his head. Her fingers moved in what might have been a stroke of his ears.

“I accept.”

*

There was a long moment of endless noise. Harry heard Tom Riddle’s soul scream as it disappeared into the endless dark roads of the Hunt, to be pursued and torn apart by the black hounds over and over again. And there was his own screaming as Lady Death ripped away half his life to light Sirius’s candle.

And there was the high, joyous howling that became a cry as they tumbled to the floor.

They were in the chamber that had housed Tom, amid the stones of the scattered rune circle, Harry’s arms wrapped around Sirius, who was lying on his chest, clad in a dark, tattered black robe. It might have been ripped from Lady Death’s robe, for all Harry knew.

Sirius lifted his head and stared around the room. He touched the floor with a trembling hand.

And he wept.

Harry held him still and covered his face with kisses, and Sirius finally stopped crying and began to respond to him. They lay there, holding each other, meeting lip to lip until Sirius drew slowly back.

“It might make me a monster,” he whispered, “that I don’t mind you sacrificing half your life and making us run the Hunt every full moon night. As long as I get to be human again.”

“You enjoyed being her hound,” Harry said quietly. “You enjoyed the Hunt. You dreamed about having me in your teeth someday, when I died. How could I take that away from you? Why would wanting to keep it make you more monstrous than me?”

Sirius stared at him, eyes wide. “Normal people don’t want those things,” he whispered.

“Normal people don’t want to sacrifice someone else’s soul to get their godfather back, either.” Harry shrugged as best as he could when he was still holding Sirius hard enough to give his godfather trouble with breathing. “But I’m not normal. And I’ll enjoy it, Sirius, when you tear me apart. I’ll love everything you ever do to me. I always have.”

Sirius embraced him fiercely, then, and Harry held him back, his chin lying on his godfather’s collarbone. He thought it possible they might have to leave Hogwarts, because no one would understand Sirius suddenly appearing. And come the next full moon, there would be the Hunt, and the road, and the sensation of dying beneath the teeth of hounds.

But Harry had braved the end of the fairy tale, had won his Prince Charming. For the next thirty years, there would be the life he had wanted.

After that…

Why could the Hunt not continue?

Harry lifted his head, and kissed the man he loved, and the shadows laughed in what might have been Lady Death’s voice, mixed with the howl of a hunting hound.

The End.