[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Pariahs, gen, R, 1/6

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Two

The day he decides to go searching for the source of extra blankets is the best day of Harry’s life.

He does have a room off the hospital wing, and he has a bed. But he wants extra blankets, and Madam Pomfrey—who never looks at him, shying away from him as if she thinks that he’s going to leap on her and erase her mark—says stiffly that she doesn’t have any extra ones to offer him.

“Where can I get some, then?”

That startled the mediwitch into looking at him. She looks away immediately, clutching her right arm, where Harry supposes her soul-mark is, but Harry feels a little satisfaction. At least he got someone to pay attention to him. “I—I suppose that you should ask the house-elves.”

Harry hasn’t heard anyone mention house-elves. He stares at her in interest, while Bast prowls around his ankles, looking at Madam Pomfrey as if calculating how high she’d need to leap to scratch her face. “What are house-elves?”

Madam Pomfrey’s nose wrinkles. “Dirty little creatures. Markless, you know.” She flinches then, maybe from Harry’s presence, and goes on in a more subdued voice. “But useful enough as servants.”

Harry already wants to meet them. “Where can I find some?”

“The kitchens, Mr. Potter.”

It takes a bit more coaxing and prying, but Harry finally gets directions to the kitchens out of her, and goes down the stairs with Bast running at his heels. He thinks that she can sense how much better his mood suddenly is.

Markless people. Like him.

He tickles the pear the way Madam Pomfrey told him to, and the painting opens. Harry steps through into a sudden silence, and finds himself the focus of at least fifty pairs of eyes.

House-elves turn out to be creatures with brilliant green skin and eyes, floppy ears, and clad in towels, almost the only people Harry has met in the castle who are shorter than him. They continue staring at him, and Harry stares back.

Then one of them squeaks, “It is being Mr. Harry Potter!”

Harry crosses his arms, expecting them to flinch back from him the way everyone else has. Instead, a low murmur goes through them, but it doesn’t sound like a hostile one. The nearest elf walks towards him and stares up at him. Harry stares back, and thinks it’s a she. The tea towel she wears looks a little more like a dress than a loincloth, anyway.

“Mr. Harry Potter is coming to visit the elves?” she whispers.

Harry smiles. “Yes. I came to find out if you could give me some blankets, too, but I mostly wanted to visit you and see what you were like. I’d never heard of house-elves before I came here, you see.”

That makes some more murmuring sway back and forth, although Harry’s not sure why. Surely some of the Muggleborns could say the same thing? But for some reason, it makes the elf in front of him straighten up.

“My name is being Misty,” she says. “And Mr. Harry Potter can be having some blankets, but he will be coming and sitting and eating first.”

“I’d love that,” Harry admits. Meals in the Great Hall are always uncomfortable, with people at the Slytherin table edging away from him and others staring at him but then averting their eyes the minute he looks back. “Can I have some hot chocolate? Can I ask you what your lives are like?”

Misty seems overwhelmed, but she nods and leads him to a bench. It looks like there’s just a single table in the kitchens, but a very long one, and Harry sits down near the end of it. Other house-elves go back to cutting and dicing and waving their hands over kettles and soup bowls in a way that makes them steam and boil.

Harry stares at them in wonder. He wishes he could learn that kind of magic, and use it during the summers. It would make the chores that the Dursleys were hinting at the end of summer they wanted him to do when the holidays start again a breeze.

Misty comes back with a cup of hot chocolate and hovers for a second near the bench on the other side of the table. Harry nods to it encouragingly, and she finally sits down and folds her hands in front of her.

“You are being sure you wants to know what house-elves’ lives are like?” she whispers, and wrings her hands. “Wizards, they not be asking.”

“Most of them seem to consider themselves superior to everyone else in existence,” Harry says dryly. “Goblins and house-elves—and me.” He leans forwards. “I don’t have a mark, either. How do you stand it? How do you put up with it?”

Misty catches her breath sharply. She eyes him, and Harry wonders why. They must know that he doesn’t have a mark, right? That has to be why they reacted to his name the way they did.

Misty clears her throat, but her voice is still raspy when she says, “Wizards and witches is hating house-elves and calling them dirty. At least, the purebloods, they’s like that. Muggleborns ignore us.”

“They might not know about you,” Harry murmurs, but at the moment, he’s not really inclined to excuse Muggleborns, either. There are none in Slytherin that he knows of, but the ones in Gryffindor and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw avoid his eyes and act like he’s too impure to tolerate, too. “I’d like to know more about what you do. How do you do magic without wands?”

Misty makes a little choking sound, and a few of the elves pause in their preparations for dinner. But when Harry keeps sitting there and looks interested, Misty spreads her hands and begins to talk.

*

Harry goes to bed that night with the extra blankets that he wanted, but also with satisfaction and anger burning in his belly.

The house-elves’ lives are like a combination of the lives he lived with the Dursleys and the one he lives here at Hogwarts, except worse. They get berated endlessly, with everyone around them ignoring the berating or supporting it in a way that the neighbors on Privet Drive never did with the Dursleys’ hatred of Harry. They get told, over and over, that they’re dirty because they don’t have marks, that they deserve to be slaves because of it.

Even though they’re powerfully magical. Even though, when Harry asked the question, Misty told him that house-elves don’t have trouble having children or finding other elves to love without soul-marks being involved.

Harry smiles viciously up at the ceiling in his private room as Bast leaps onto the bed and circles once, before lying down beside him. Before, he just assumed that the nonsense about soul-marks was right and he would never be able to find someone to love or marry because the soul-mark dictated that kind of thing.

Now he thinks it’s just that, nonsense. People might believe that they can only love one person ever, they might be punished if they tried to get divorced or date someone who doesn’t have their mark, but it’s not impossible for them to do it.

Which means that Harry isn’t condemned to a lonely life because he’s markless, either. And he can find allies.

He already found the elves. And they suggested something very interesting to him that Harry really should have thought about before, and some people he can write to.

Harry goes to sleep smiling.

*

Minerva sighs as she looks up from her desk at Harry Potter, sitting near the back of her Slytherin-Ravenclaw class. He is diligently practicing the mouse-snuffbox transformation. She knows he’ll achieve it, the way he’s achieved all the other tasks she’s set them, ahead of some of those in the class and behind others.

She wishes she understood him. She wishes she thought that her classes benefited him.

Mr. Potter is polite to her, or at least politer than he is to some of the other professors. (Severus complains continuously that Potter refuses to call him anything, including “professor” or “sir.”) He does his work. He makes an effort and takes notes in class.

He ignores the glares and the mutters from his Housemates and the Hufflepuffs. Zacharias Smith seems to have decided that Mr. Potter is too far beneath him to acknowledge as existing, but the others stare at him with fear and fascination at least once a class. Minerva spends a lot of time recalling their wandering attention.

Minerva was indignant when she heard that Mr. Potter’s roommates required him to move into a room off the hospital wing, but Severus smugly said that Lucius Malfoy requested it, and no one’s had the power to defy Malfoy in the last ten years. Horace certainly cringes in front of him.

Minerva just wishes…

Well, she wishes lots of things, including that James and Lily had survived and that Mr. Potter carried a soul-mark of his own. But she admits, privately, that she’s baffled by Mr. Potter’s attitude, and what exactly lies behind it.

She expected more longing. Furtive glances of his own in the direction of those who have soul-marks, and the few acknowledged pairs among his fellow first-years who have found each other already and walk about with entwined fingers and enamored eyes. More time spent trying to join the groups of popular Slytherins and win over friends. It’s certainly what his father would have done had he been condemned to existence without a soul-mark.

Instead, Mr. Potter dedicates his time to study, to the point that Minerva wonders why the Hat didn’t consider Ravenclaw for him. And he keeps himself to himself, barely speaking except in response to something a professor asks him.

How? Why? How did Lily and James’s son end up like this?

As little as Minerva likes to consider it, she does have to wonder if the loss of his mark damaged Mr. Potter’s mind. There have been reports of Muggles, or people who defied their soul-marked match, or people who lost their soulmates to death early on, acting with complete unpredictability and pretending not to care about anyone else.

Can Mr. Potter not have friends, either, because he was denied his fated match? Can he not have mentors? Minerva has tried to offer him some welcoming warmth, since Merlin knows Severus never will, but Mr. Potter just smiles at her politely and answers her questions and goes off to his next class.

Of course, there is the matter of the post that comes to Mr. Potter in the Great Hall. Aurora has mentioned seeing Mr. Potter walking to the Owlery. He must be writing to someone, getting letters from someone, but Minerva has no idea who. And from the reactions he’s had to questions in the past, she doubts it’s his Muggle family.

What can she do to help him? What can she do to show him that while many people express their ignorance and fear, there are good people in the wizarding world it would do him good to befriend?

Minerva even has a few friend candidates in mind. Miss Granger is Muggleborn, and comes from a Muggle family, which practically guarantees that she has a more open view of marks. Mr. Weasley comes from a pureblood family who don’t throw fits when their marks match those of Muggleborns, which has happened more than once in other families. And, frankly, they’re in danger of getting too wrapped up in each other. They need more friends themselves, more ways to relate to the world outside their bond.

But Mr. Potter simply listened with calm silence when Minerva tried to describe them to him, and then looked her in the eye and said, “They flinch away from me in Potions and refuse to help me or partner with me.”

Well, then. Minerva supposes that was a definitive rejection.

She cannot help hoping, wishing…

But it seems that nothing is destined to change, and that Mr. Potter will always be as alone as his erased mark has left him.

Minerva sighs, and turns away to where Miss Bones of Hufflepuff has created a snuffbox with teeth that is trying to bite her.

*

“Thank you for coming to meet me.”

“We were interested in meeting a human who thinks of us as people.”

Harry smiles a little, and draws the hooded cloak the house-elves were able to obtain for him further over his head. They’re in the Forbidden Forest, and Harry would be a little nervous about being here, but he knows powerful runic wards are blazing away around them, frightening back the giant spiders and others who might have tried to intrude on this meeting.

Goblins have their own magic without wands or soul-marks, either. And the one in front of him, Griphook, is the same one who looked at him with curiosity and interest in the bank. Harry doesn’t know how he traveled here, if he Apparated or something else, and it doesn’t matter much. They have business to talk about.

“Why do wizards and witches act as if house-elves should be slaves because they don’t have marks, but say nothing about you?” Harry asks. “Or did they try to enslave you at some point in your history?” He supposes that would make sense. The History professor is always going on about goblin rebellions, and he’s overheard other Slytherins talking about how there used to be a half-goblin Charms professor, but he got sacked by the Board of Governors a few years ago.

Griphook gives a laugh that seems to bubble ash and cracked pieces of glass in the back of his throat. Harry would like to learn how to laugh like that. “Because they know that our magic is too powerful to permit us to be bound as house-elves are bound. And because we handle their money. We are convenient to them in a way, and they are too wary of us to press further and try to change that relationship.”

“But no one ever seems to notice the contradictions between saying one markless species is dirty servants and another is—”

“Surely you must have noticed by now, Potter,” Griphook drawls, flexing his left hand and shooting his claws out, “that very few wizards and witches ever think logically. Even the Muggleborns usually stop the habit once they enter the magical world.”

Harry nods slowly. “How are the house-elves bound?”

Griphook’s eyes sharpen. “Ah,” he breathes. “That is a question.”

“You don’t know?”

Griphook shakes his head. “We know that the elves were originally fae creatures, of the brownie type, which means that a bargain should have been irresistible to them. We think the roots of the binding were in a bargain: they would be provided something they wanted, which in free brownies is usually something like milk or praise, in exchange for work. But it has changed and warped beyond recognition. The abuse they receive, the lack of praise, the lack of food that they do not make themselves, should have set the house-elves free. Yet it has not.”

That lights another coal in Harry’s chest. He is going to figure this out. He is going to provide the house-elves the freedom they want, or soul-marks, if they want that, although Harry is rapidly coming to believe that soul-marks are overrated.

They’re like him. They’re treated even worse, though.

And it will drive the purebloods who rely on their slave labor mad if they’re set free. There’s that advantage, too.

But for now, he has to confirm the bargain that will provide Griphook and the other goblins with something they want. “I don’t have as much money in my vault as paying for research into this would take. But is there something else I can offer you that would pay for research into the binding on house-elves? And that would help work towards overthrowing the purebloods?”

Griphook stares at him long enough that Harry thinks, once again, that he’s done something wrong, the way he thought he did in the bank. But he doesn’t want to apologize without knowing what he would be apologizing for. So he stares back.

Griphook draws his breath in through his teeth. “You want to overthrow them.”

“Yes.” Harry isn’t going to hide that. Maybe the goblins have a problem with that. They have a lot of money from purebloods in their bank, after all, and their previous rebellions didn’t aim to overthrow the entire system, or at least Harry doesn’t think they did. But this is what he wants. If the goblins won’t help him, he’ll get help somewhere else.

He bets house-elves can be brilliant allies when they’re properly motivated.

Griphook finally says, softly, “I have never heard anyone who was not a goblin say that.”

Harry grins a little and shrugs. “Haven’t you heard? According to the other people here, I might as well not be human. I wouldn’t presume to claim a place as a goblin, but I’m not one of them. And I want them—I want to be revenged on them.” Harry was about to say he wants them dead, but honestly, he doesn’t know if he does want that, or if he wants to see them weeping, grieving, broken.

Griphook gives another cackle. “Your commitment will begin to pay for the research. There is another thing you can do for us.”

“Yes?”

“Win us the right to use wands.”

Harry frowns. “Wouldn’t that involve politics? I don’t know how good I could be at playing those with people who don’t think I’m human and who I want to see broken.” “Broken” is the best word, he thinks. It could cover both living, weeping enemies and dead ones.

“No.” Griphook grins and leans towards him a little. “Goblins can use the wands of wizards and witches who have been defeated in duels. The wand switches its allegiance in that case, but if the winner of the duel rejects the allegiance…”

“The goblin can bond with it. Brilliant.” Harry grins. “Looks like I have some duels to get to, then.”

*

Draco is beginning to regret, a little, agreeing to the duel with Potter. His father might approve of it, but on the other hand, he might see it as giving Potter too much importance. Draco can’t decide.

But he also didn’t want to ask his father about the decision before he made it, for fear of seeming weak. And Potter issued the challenge in public, so Draco didn’t have the time to reflect and owl Father anyway.

It’s going to be all right, Draco reassures himself as he draws his wand and walks ten paces apart from Potter in the wide-eyed, eager Slytherin common room. You know that he’s inferior to you in every way.

That reminder steadies Draco. Potter is so much less than pure that it’s not even funny. Never mind his Mudblood mother, he has no mark. Draco has known since he was six that his potential soulmate was secure. That was when Father told him, in confidence, that his mark matched little Astoria Greengrass’s. Draco can’t be open about that until Astoria, who’s two years younger than they are, comes to Hogwarts, but so what? He has someone who is perfect for him, who will love him in every way possible.

Potter has no one.

Draco smiles and raises his wand. He thinks he’ll start with Serpensortia. That’s always good to scare people who aren’t Slytherins, and there’s no way that Potter is a real Slytherin, markless as he is.

“Frangere ossa!”

Potter’s spell catapults towards Draco, and he blinks a little, not sure what it is, not sure how to shield—

It hits him. And his left arm breaks.

Draco screams. Nothing has ever hurt so much in his life. He crumples to his knees, his right arm cradling his left, and continues to scream.

In the silence that surrounds them, other than his cries, Potter crosses the distance between them and takes away his wand.

“Thanks for this, Draco.” He gives Draco a sweet little smile and turns away, sliding Draco’s stolen wand into his robe pocket.

One of the older Slytherins steps towards Potter, but he spins and reaches out towards her with his bare hand. Fawley recoils in terror, and Potter strolls out of the common room and away towards his room in the hospital wing.

Draco kneels there, and hurts, and bleeds, and wonders what in the world Father will say about his wand being stolen by Harry Potter.

And Draco losing the first duel he ever fought in his life.

*

“Are you out of your mind?”

Potter simply stares evenly at Severus. Apparently he doesn’t care that he broke Draco Malfoy’s arm and stole his wand and caused Lucius Malfoy to have an extended conniption fit at Severus through the Floo.

“Why did you—why did you do this?” Severus paces back and forth in the private space of his office, barely resisting the temptation to tear at his hair. But that would show Potter too much of his impact on Severus. “Are you in the slightest bit aware of what having the enmity of a powerful man like Lucius Malfoy could do to you?”

“What’s he going to do to me?” Potter sneers slightly at him. “I made the challenge to the duel in public. Malfoy accepted. He also didn’t set any limits on what kinds of spells we could use in the duel, even though that was his right as the challenged and he had twenty-four hours to do so. And taking someone’s wand is a natural consequence of a public duel that the challenged person hasn’t set any limits on.”

Severus stares at him. That is perfectly true. Those have been the dueling rules among adults for decades, and in the last ten years, they have been written into the Hogwarts school rules as well. People like Lucius assumed that their pureblood, soul-marked children would easily win any duels that came their way.

What stumps Severus is how Potter learned about that.

Then something else occurs to Severus, and his nostrils flare. “You are still subject to legal prosecution. Duels that shed blood when that has not been agreed upon by either participant—”

Potter laughs at him. “I didn’t shed any blood, did I? Just broke his arm.”

Severus fights the temptation to bury his head in his hands. That is perfectly true. He saw Draco’s broken arm before it was healed by Madam Pomfrey. While it looked undoubtedly painful, the broken bone did not pierce the skin, and no blood was shed.

“Why are you doing this?” he settles for whispering to Potter. “Why—you could make your point to the purebloods and earn their respect in other ways. Why go for the most violent one?”

Potter gives him what seems to be a genuinely surprised look. “You think I want their respect?” He shakes his head and leaves the office before Severus can say anything else.

Left alone in the silence, Severus finds himself pulling up his left sleeve, as he often does, to stare at the two marks he bears. The skull and snake of the Dark Mark cut across the shining blue-and-silver vision of a flying horse constellation against the background of space.

The same mark Lily carried.

But she turned away from him after what he said in a moment of weakness and somehow found her own match in James Potter, who carried the same bloody mark. Severus still sometimes wakes shaking from the horrible dreams of a reality where Potter saw his mark first and determined Severus was his soulmate.

And so Severus joined the Dark Lord, who promised freedom from the restrictions of pureblood society for those whose matches had not worked out, who were men matched to men or women matched to women and knew they would never be accepted, who knew the quiet reality of soul-marks as not unique and not immutable.

The Dark Mark cuts across his soul-mark, but it still blazes brightly, and the Dark Mark is faded and grey.

Severus feels doubly a fool.

*

“Our thanks, Harry Potter.” Griphook sounds breathless as he nods to him in the gloom of the Forbidden Forest. “The wand matched with the third goblin to try it. My niece, named Stonegrinder.”

Harry smiles. “Good. I can win others, but I’ll need some time, or people will just start refusing challenges to duels from me.”

“That is more than enough.” Griphook shakes his head. “It is simply astonishing to me that a wizard would keep their word to one of my kind.” He hesitates, then extends his hand. “I look forward to our future cooperation.”

Harry still doesn’t know as much about goblins as he’d like, since the books don’t seem to exist and the house-elves don’t serve in their homes and don’t know that much about them, but one thing Misty told him is that goblins think of shaking hands as a big deal and don’t offer it to just anyone. So he takes Griphook’s hand and looks him right in the eye as he shakes.

“So do I, sir. So do I.”

*

“Happy Christmas, Harry Potter!”

Harry smiles as he steps into the kitchen and sees the house-elves waiting for him. They’ve made an enormous feast, and although they won’t share it with him—it’s some restriction that bloody binding puts on them—they’ll talk with him, and eat the rest of it after he’s gone.

And honestly? After years of near-starvation at the Dursleys’, a Christmas feast with chocolate and cheese and mugs of something called butterbeer and corned beef and treacle tart feels like enough of a gift for Harry.

Harry eats himself sick, and talks with Misty, and learns some more about the school rules that are going to let him do things like duel purebloods and take their wands perfectly legally in the future, and laughs as some of the elves, who can apparently drink in a human’s presence, perform a leaping, tumbling pyramid of bodies along the back wall of the kitchen. It’s the best he’s felt in a long, long time.

Then Misty sets a package in front of him, and Harry sits up.

“I didn’t get anything for you,” he says, and he is genuinely upset. The elves are his friends, the only people who treat him like he’s human—well, a person.

“This package is not being from Misty,” Misty says, shaking her head. “It be delivered to us by a wizard.”

Harry stares at the slim package with narrowed eyes. It looks small and soft enough that he can’t imagine it contains much that would hurt him, but you never know. “And you cast the detection spells on it?”

“Of course we’s doing, Harry Potter.”

Misty looks a little offended, so Harry reaches out and opens the package to show that there’s no harm meant by it. He gasps as he sees the thing inside, a glimmering silvery cloak that makes his hand disappear when he touches it. One of the elves told him a story about Invisibility Cloaks, but he didn’t think he would ever hold one.

“Oh, Merlin,” he whispers. “Who is it from?”

“There is a card, Harry Potter.”

Harry smiles at Misty—he’s glad that he won the battle to stop her from calling him “Master”—and picks it up.

It has neat handwriting on it, and as Harry stares it, this becomes the second best day in his life, after the one where he met the elves.

I dare not hope you have heard of me, but I felt bound to return your father’s Cloak to you, Mr. Potter. It was in my possession when he died, as he feared that some of his enemies, who opposed his research into soul-marks, would try to steal it. I would have returned it to you long since, but I feared you could not keep it a secret in a Muggle house. And, well, forgive me, but I wanted to save it for Christmas since I was feared that you had not had many gifts, either.

Please know that you are welcome to correspond with me, Mr. Potter, and that I would be most interested in hearing what you have to say.

Best wishes, and Happy Christmas,
Albus Dumbledore.