lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Seven

Albus has to admit he’s skeptical of Hermione Granger at first. The girl seems intelligent and passionate about the causes of injustice—once Harry has her swear a few stringent oaths and has explained the matter to her—but she also bears a soul-mark and visibly winces on hearing that Harry means to destroy all soul-marks.

“I mean,” she says, as they sit in the Hogwarts kitchens with the elves. Granger might not know it, but she has fifteen or seventeen pairs of elf eyes on her, and those are just the ones Albus can see. The elves aren’t going to let her talk Harry out of ending their slavery. “Couldn’t we just—explain to people? Wouldn’t they be horrified and want to free elves when they realize it?”

Harry laughs like a wolf, leaning over the end of the table. He often sits there with Misty on a stool beside him now. Viktor sits a few seats away, eating a mince pie and looking back and forth between Harry, Albus, Hermione, and the elves as if they’re playing a game. He’s a very quiet young man.

“And you think that? Really? The same people who made my life a horror? Who made Albus’s life one? Who are absolutely sure that it’s better to change their children’s soul-marks than let them match with someone who might not be a pureblood?”

“I just think—we’re condemning society to mass chaos if we just destroy them.”

“Good.”

“What?” Hermione’s face is pale as she turns towards Harry. “No, Harry, you don’t understand. There has to be something to replace—there has to be a support structure—”

“There is one now, and people still beat the elves to death. Treat them like slaves.” Harry’s head lowers, and his eyes flash. “They treat goblins like shit, too, despite the fact that they trust them to handle their money. How does it make sense to do that and yet also talk about how markless and inferior and dirty they are? I don’t know.” Harry shrugs. “But they’ll need to figure out how to do their own chores, and treat goblins politely.”

“I didn’t mean that! I mean that marriages might break up, and people’s sense of identity would shatter, and there might be—”

“That is happening now,” Viktor interrupts, in the kind of quiet, deep voice that means they all turn towards him. Albus has the feeling Viktor knows exactly what he’s doing when he does that, given that he would have had to speak to fans often. “There are people who are shunned for having the wrong marks. Squibs who are being exiled or treated badly. There is being an entire hospital in Bulgaria to treat Mark-Wasting Disease.”

“What is that?”

“It is people who are trying to change their marks and being caught,” Viktor says succinctly. “Or people who are trying to be with someone whose mark they are not bearing. They are declared ill and sent there. They are not being released, except some who are saying they will marry the person they match with.” He folds his arms and shrugs when Hermione stares at him in horror. “Lives, they are being shattered every day. But they were not your lives, so you were not caring.”

“Of course I care!” Hermione clenches her hands, and her eyes glitter with something that might be anger and might be tears. “But I don’t see the point in making more people unhappy than we have to—”

“You don’t think of house-elves and goblins as people.”

Harry’s caustic words make Hermione flush all the deeper. “I just—there has to be some other solution!”

“The binding would remain if there was so much as a single undisturbed soul-mark,” Albus says calmly, taking the burden of saying those words from Harry. He doesn’t want Hermione to run away because she’s having conflicts with Harry, and she seems to trust Albus more because he probably seems like an authority figure to her. “It may be that we can build support structures and encourage modes of thought that will ease the transition to a markless state, Miss Granger. But we cannot compromise and allow human people to keep their marks at the expensive of elven people.”

He watches her chew on that for a moment. Hermione didn’t know about house-elves, and while she obviously does care that they are enslaved, Albus is sure that she’s having some of the same problems he did with seeing their needs as equally important to humans’.

“Could I work on that?” Hermione whispers. “Helping people get ready for the transition?”

“If you want to.” Harry’s tone shows how little interest he has in this. Albus looks at him and understands.

Harry doesn’t want the people who ostracized him and bullied him and declared him lesser dead, but he wants them to suffer. And he wants the people he cares about unharmed and free. That matters a lot more to him than marked humans’ psychological comfort.

And Albus has to admit he feels much the same way. He simply has more hurdles than Harry does over identifying with members of other species.

“How are you going to destroy the marks?” Hermione asks.

Harry grins. “I’m working on that with the goblins. It’s going to take a long time. But we can use other methods, too.” He leans forwards. “What do you think about publishing excerpts of that journal you read?”

*

“Greetings, Harry.”

Harry half-bows with a closed fist to his heart, the way that Griphook told him was appropriate once the goblins fully accepted him. They didn’t have a way that was appropriate for a human friend to bow to them because they didn’t have human friends. Harry uses goblin ways, which he likes. A lot. “Greetings, Silverblade.”

Silverblade is a goblin high up in the hierarchy, and the only thing Harry knows about her for sure is that she’s been involved in wand production and transferring wands to the centaurs and some of the merfolk. She has intensely silver eyes that probably contributed to her name, and the white teeth and dark grey skin of an old goblin. She nods to the chair in front of her desk, and Harry takes it.

Silverblade examines him in silence. Harry sits back, content to let the silence press on. It no longer unnerves him. He’s spent so much time around elves who were silent as they worked or read the books that Harry brought them or thought.

“Why did you agree to help us get wands?” Silverblade asks abruptly.

“Because Griphook told me that was part of the price for your people’s alliance.”

Silverblade’s eyes narrow a little. She looks faintly exasperated. “My question was not meant in that sense. Why did you do it when goblins are not human, and you had never met one of us before you were eleven years old?”

“Because you were worse off than I was,” Harry says. “And I had already met the elves, and it was obvious that something I could do to help them would also help you. And I bloody hate the way the stupid human society is built on marks and considering them so all-important that I was deemed dirty for not having one, and the house-elves were enslaved, and your own clients couldn’t bother to be polite to you.”

Heat enters his voice on the last words, and Griphook did warn him not to argue with Silverblade. But, on the other hand, he also said to be absolutely honest, so Harry is going with what he thinks is the best tactic.

“You are human. Not a goblin or elf.”

Harry shrugs. “Physically, sure,” he agrees. “But goblins are the only people I met who’ve considered me that way. The centaurs outright told me they don’t see someone as human who doesn’t have a soul-mark. And the elves were my friends before that.”

“And we let you into the center of one of our most sacred rituals, and we did the research that means you know how to free your elven friends. Why should we do more research, when you are not a goblin?”

Harry leans forwards a little. “Because of that.” He nods at the silvery wood wand resting on the desk not far from Silverblade’s hand, which he vaguely remembers taking from a Spanish kid in one of the dueling tournaments. “And because I want revenge, and there’ll be no better revenge on the people who’ve mistreated you than watching their goddamn society fall apart around their ears.”

Silverblade considers him with hooded eyes for a long moment. Harry just waits. He doesn’t know what to say to her, not for certain, but he’s honest. And while he assumes she could make trouble for him if she took against him, he also doesn’t think the rest of the goblins would simply agree to stop making wands or researching how to destroy soul-marks. They’re too involved in this, now.

Silverblade abruptly smiles at him. “You are an interesting person,” she says. “And I agree with the centaurs. You are not human. Being human, at least as we know it, has come to be so defined by soul-marks that it is not possible to separate humanity from that.” She pauses. “You grew up among Muggles, who do not have marks. Why did you not decide that you were human because of them?”

Harry bares his teeth. “They considered me non-human, too. But because of my magic, not because of the way I looked.”

Silverblade’s eyes flare with interest. “And you have done nothing to have revenge on them?”

“My current guardian let them know exactly what he thinks of them. But if I had done something to them, he would have known. And he would be disappointed in me.” Harry hesitates, struggling a moment. His compassion for anyone human has spent a long time weakened and lying on the floor. “My cousin was a kid the same age as I was. It might have been wrong to end his life because of what they did.”

Silverblade nods slowly. “If we find something that would not kill them or your cousin, but would cause them to suffer the same despair and loss as the humans we know would suffer from the loss of their soul-marks?”

“That would be perfect.”

“Then this is my price for allowing the research right now to proceed, Harry. You will grant me the right to come up with and enact vengeance on your relatives.”

Harry gives her a hard smile. “We have a bargain.”

*

It’s the winter holiday in the middle of his fifth year, and Harry once again stands with the goblins in the middle of a ritual circle.

It’s different, this time. For one thing, they’re in a huge room with a number of ritual circles sketched out on the stone floor, made of silver and iron and copper and gold and other things that Harry can’t be sure of. Seven circles, each one with seven goblins standing in it, and they all cluster around a pentagram of iron, bronze, copper, silver, and gold in the middle, where Harry stands. It forms an eighth circle, a fiftieth person.

That’s the point of the ritual. Last time, they needed seven, the most magical number, for balance.

This time, they are working specifically to bring imbalance.

Harry smiles, and tilts his head back as the chant begins to rise around him.

He got the idea from Viktor’s mark. The goblins did some tests that weren’t painful but that made Viktor’s face tighten as they waved their wands over his mark, and confirmed that it is a weak point in the binding. Squibs’ marks will be as well, and so will the marks of other people like Viktor who had them added.

When Harry asked if changed marks might also be, the goblins cackled, and this idea was born.

In other ritual rooms, Harry thinks clinically as the chant begins to split into seven different languages—English, Gobbledegook, Latin, the high screaming of Mermish, and others he’s not sure of—Viktor, Hermione’s friend Astoria Greengrass, and Albus stand. Someone with a weak mark, someone with a changed mark, and someone who specifically rejected his mark. They all provide different points of weakness, different ways to attack the binding.

They can’t bring the whole thing down tonight, more’s the pity. It’s going to take more than one try to pierce so powerful a binding. But they’re going to weaken it, and establish the first connection to different kinds of marks in the future, resting on different people’s skins.

The ceremony they do next year will involve Hermione, someone with an unchanged mark and who still hasn’t unequivocally rejected the bond it would “establish.” The year after that, they’ll need an enemy, someone who still embraces the marks.

Harry smiles. He has a surfeit of choices for that, and he’s looking forward to them very much.

The chant pauses abruptly. Harry draws his wand, Bast purring on his shoulder, and into the silence, he hurls his magic.

It’s a blast of coordinated fury. As it dives into the crack, it drags behind it the emotions of the others, which Harry can suddenly feel blazing in his head.

Viktor’s long search for someone like him, his stubborn determination, his willful hope.

Astoria’s hopelessness, her despair, her hatred of what has been done to her.

Albus’s own long-simmering rage and desire to destroy the soul-marks without knowing how to do that.

All of it flows along the conduit that Harry is creating, until the moment when he can’t hold the rage anymore and has to step back, panting. The goblins’ chant resumes at once, while Bast purrs wildly and rubs her head against Harry’s chin.

Harry glances down. The gold arm of the pentagram has turned to rust.

Harry smiles grimly, and listens for the next pause in the chant, rocking slightly from foot to foot, reaching out to his allies. Their minds gleam and fluoresce in his mind’s eye, and images come to him, the next round he’ll need. The next time the chant pauses, he braids all those pictures together and thinks as hard as he can into the silence.

Viktor staring at his parents as they explain the alchemical ritual that made his mark to him, and his numb thought that they expect him to be grateful.

Astoria staring at Malfoy’s face and realizing she’ll never find it attractive.

Albus twisting around another man on the battlefield, his wand flashing and pulsing with power, while the other man laughs and calls to him in a voice still laden with yearning, sleeve flapping to show a mark nearly the twin of Albus’s own.

Harry sitting in the Hogwarts kitchens and learning who the house-elves were and how there were people out there even worse off than he is, his determination to help them.

The silver arm of the pentagon becomes tarnished, and the chant resumes.

Harry reaches into his pocket and draws out a tangle of items. He holds them until the silence roars back, and then tosses them into the air as hard as he can.

Viktor’s fingernail is bound up with a curl of Astoria’s flowing blonde hair. A scrap of Albus’s skin floats to the floor, and a drop of blood from Harry joins it as the glass vial it’s in breaks and the pieces scatter harmlessly, bound by the ritual magic from interfering.

The copper arm of the pentagon explodes into small shards, and the chant resumes.

The magic bears down on Harry. It’s becoming harder to breathe, to stand, to think. Harry doesn’t care. He takes the next objects from his other robe pocket, and holds them until the chant crashes to a halt once more. Then he drops them and grinds them under his heel.

A holly wood shaving from his own wand joins the ash of Viktor’s and the hawthorn of Astoria’s, and an elder shaving from Albus’s. Albus gave it to him reluctantly when Harry explained why he needed it, his eyes shadowed. There’s a story there, one Harry doesn’t know.

It doesn’t matter. The wood shavings become mingled, unnaturally quickly, to the point where he can’t tell them apart, and the bronze arm of the pentagram acquires a distinct sheen of verdigris. The chant resumes.

Harry bends down on one knee, because this last one is the hardest one. Emotions, mind, body, magic, they’ve bound all of themselves to this circle. But there’s a fifth arm to the pentagram, without a fifth aspect of a wizard or witch’s being to bind.

Technically.

Harry waits patiently as Bast jumps off his shoulder and stands on the floor in front of him. They haven’t practiced this, because they can’t, really. It needs the exact surroundings of the ritual and the heavy magic in the air tonight to ensure that it won’t be fatal. But Harry trusts Bast more than anyone alive.

He unbuttons his shirt and draws it back from his chest. He didn’t need to wear robes tonight, and it would have got in the way.

Bast rears, and waits for the next silence. Then she rakes her claws straight down his chest.

Harry screams as those claws dig deeper than they should, than they would on any night but this, the night of the winter solstice, the night of the heaviest magic. They dig, and they seek, and they find his heart.

Harry’s heart leaps from his chest, and he stares at it hanging in the air, dripping blood, spinning in place to scatter that blood, binding his heart into this endeavor as it’s been bound from the day he first met Misty.

There’s a long shudder, as reality shakes back and forth around him, and his death is averted by the silence and the presence of his familiar and the dark of the longest night and the whole ritual itself. Then Harry’s heart jumps back into his chest, and he drops to both knees, bleeding profusely, but not dying.

And he hears the impressive, enormous crack that rings through the air.

A crack in the reality. A crack in the binding.

Harry’s eyes fall on the iron arm of the pentagram before he passes out, and he can’t help smiling. That bar is completely vaporized.

*

Minerva pulls her sleeve back from her arm and stares uneasily at her mark. For some reason, it burns and tingles and itches somewhat in the last few months. She doesn’t know why.

And it almost seems to have changed. But that can’t be true. Minerva just hasn’t looked at it much since Elphinstone died, that’s all. Every curve of it brings painful memories to mind, and it’s no wonder that she’s tried to bury those painful memories and move on from them.

The colors aren’t less bright. There doesn’t seem to be a sense of stilled movement whereas before, dancing movement always flickered under the surface like rainbows moving in light.

There isn’t.

Minerva shakes her head. She knows as well as anyone else that marks can’t change, that once they’re there and you’re matched, you’re matched, and there’s an end of it, no matter what people have been saying recently.

Just as you know, a nasty voice seems to whisper in the back of her head, that no two people without the matching marks can ever have children? And yet your mother rejected her match and chose a Muggle, and had a child with him.

Minerva closes her eyes. No one now alive is aware of that except Albus, and she cannot account for it, why the pregnancy worked or why her mother found true love with someone not her soulmate. It’s entirely possible that her mother worked some spell she never told Minerva about.

The bell rings. Minerva stands and makes her way to her next class, to the children who need her to be settled and calm.

*

There is a crack in the Dark Mark.

Severus stares at it so long in silence that one of his students starts to stand from a desk in the middle of the room. Severus shoots her a murderous glare, and she sits down, her head bowing, long curls falling around it.

Severus lets his sleeve fall back, and ignores his own trembling hands. He has enough self-control not to look at his mark amid teenagers. It will wait.

Especially disturbed teenagers, it has to be said. Ever since someone stole what has to be an ancestral pureblood journal and sent extracts to the Daily Prophet with names removed, many of his students have been jumping and starting at shadows. There’s more paranoia around marks than ever before, and more duels, on a near-daily basis.

Severus prowls among the desks and criticizes their potions, driving more than one person to tears. Frankly, they deserve it. Little fools, living in a world they always thought was so safe and warm and bright. They can damn well live with reality.

When the little fools have gone, Severus locks the door—it’s his last class of the day—and pulls his sleeve up again, with trembling fingers.

He was right. The Dark Mark is cracked like glass, a long, jagged furrow cutting across the mouth of the skull up to the head of the snake. Underneath it, his mark, the one that was Lily’s and also James’s, is dim. Severus knows the mark well enough to notice that some of the color has drained out of it.

Severus touches his own skin before pulling his hand back. He has to admit the phenomenon baffles him. With some people, something like this could be a sign of psychological distress, but he was not affected as badly by the extracts in the Prophet as many others were. He always knew that the marks were more magical objects given social currency than a declaration from the universe of who he was meant to be with.

He touches the Dark Mark, though, with some awe. Whatever this was, it was powerful enough to sever a binding that Severus believed would always tie him to the Dark Lord, and compel him to return to the madman’s side, if necessary, when he rose again.

Now, Severus has to wonder if he will rise again.

*

“I just don’t know, Draco. And you know that now that our marks have shifted, they’re not identical anymore.”

Draco stares at Astoria and feels as if he’s standing on a balcony that’s crumbling away beneath his feet.

A few months ago, he knew who he was. He knew who his future bride was. He knew he was a pureblood, wealthy, revered by all, having known who his soulmate mark and match were since he was very young. He felt as though no ill fortune could ever touch him.

Now he knows…

Nothing. Astoria is right that their marks have shifted. Some of the color has gone from hers, which means they’re no longer identical. Draco doesn’t know what that means, but marks aren’t supposed to be able to change.

Except that that damn Prophet article says they can. And Draco isn’t as good at reading people as his mother is, but he can, in fact, tell the difference between people telling the truth and people who say they believe something but are lying.

The older Slytherin students are scared out of their minds. The younger ones are torn between terror, fascination, and trying to speculate what happens to their future marriages if their marks change.

And Astoria is looking at him with bright, fearless eyes, her hand lingering on her sleeve so she can lift it and only Draco can see a corner of her mark. She’s right that the colors have dulled, and an odd lattice pattern has appeared in hers, which Draco certainly doesn’t have.

The change in her has shaken Draco more than the stupid articles in the Prophet or the nonsense about marks changing. Was Astoria fearful before? Was her natural quietude fear around him, despair? Did she not want to be married to him?

It’s driving Draco slowly but surely mad that he doesn’t know. And he can’t ask. This new Astoria is almost a stranger to him. He doesn’t want to ask, and doesn’t want to know, if she ever loved him at all.

Even though that’s all he can think about.

He finally swallows and nods. “If you want me to contact Father and tell him to put the betrothal on hold until we can see if our marks switch back, then I’m not opposed.”

“Thank you, Draco.” Astoria steps up to him, but where she would kiss his cheek before, she shakes his hand now. Then she smiles at him and goes skipping up the stairs to the third-year Slytherin girls’ bedrooms.

Draco’s gaze follows her helplessly. She’s all he wants. She’s so bright and beautiful that he thinks he might have fallen in love with her even if they didn’t have matching marks.

Even though…would he have looked her way once if they didn’t have matching marks?

No. No, of course he wouldn’t have. Draco ducks his head and closes his eyes and takes a long breath.

When he opens his eyes, he’s being stared at by Theodore Nott, whose mark is so small that rumors went around for months in their first year that he didn’t have one at all, like Potter. Eventually a group of older Slytherin students held him down and cut his sleeve open and looked. They had to admit it was there, but Nott has been as close to an outcast in their House as anyone with a mark can come ever since.

Nott stares some more, enough that Draco is sure the loner isn’t looking in his direction by mistake, and then gives him a mean little smile.

Draco’s hands shake as he turns away. He has to—he will—he has to—

He has to find some way to bind Astoria back to him, to make her love him. Her love is all he wants in the world.

And he will find out who wrote that article for the Prophet and make them pay. They won’t be done paying until he uses the Cruciatus on them.

Draco stops dead in the middle of the stairs as something obvious occurs to him. He forces himself to keep going, to step into his room and lie down in the middle of his bed, but his heart is still beating with frantic wonder.

Of course. Of course. The sort of person who would spread lies about soul-marks and maybe even find some magic powerful enough to change them. Everyone hates him, but no one has failed to acknowledge that he’s powerful.

Harry Potter.

Draco smiles, and begins plotting how to catch Potter alone.