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lomonaaeren ([personal profile] lomonaaeren) wrote2021-12-13 09:57 pm

[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Pariahs, gen, R, 8/9



Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Eight

Hermione is glad that Astoria’s eyes are brighter now and she has begun to laugh for the first time since Hermione has known her.

She’s glad that other people are exchanging looks and whispering about soul-marks, and some people in their year who were crushed because they hadn’t met their soulmates yet have begun to walk taller and stronger.

She’s not glad for the effects on Ron.

“It’s nonsense, though,” Ron insists, waving his hand over the Prophet edition that’s published the latest extract from Leda Greengrass’s diary that Hermione sent them. “No evidence for it whatsoever.” He looks around the Gryffindor table, trying to gather other people up with his eyes, to make them agree with him. “I don’t know why the publish it. It’s just nonsense. So what if someone claims this journal is real? It’s probably just lies that someone made up because they’re markless.”

Hermione breathes out slowly next to her. Ron isn’t suggesting violence or anything, but she looks back on her own insistence that people would be glad to see the truth printed and scalds with shame.

She’s just glad that Harry and Albus left this part to her. Neither one of them would have wanted to do it. Or Harry might have, but he would have done it with a lot more glee and probably would have published Leda Greengrass’s name without caring about the effect on Astoria.

Hermione is friends, or at least allies, with Harry, but she can readily admit that Harry scares her.

“If it’s nonsense, why do they print it?” Parvati Patil insists, leaning around Lavender’s shoulder. Hermione is a little surprised that Parvati speaks like this; she’s so intensely romantic that Hermione thought for sure she would insist on believing that soul-marks are destiny’s way of finding you a spouse. But it seems Parvati is also romantic enough to think free choice is better. “Why do they go on printing it? They might have just printed it for the shock value at first, but they’ve had plenty of chances to find out if it’s fake.”

Hermione sips from her cup of pumpkin juice and keeps her face as serene as she can, even though she wants to sneer. The Daily Prophet really is printing it for the shock value, and because they want people to read. If they found something more shocking, they’d print that instead. Hermione has known that for years, but it was really clarified for her when she met Rita Skeeter.

Of course, it also means they’d probably print a defense of soul-marks if someone came up with one. But no one has been able to write one with the historical details or realism they need yet. Just a few shocked interviews with people who are shocked about someone attacking soul-marks, and shocked about someone questioning societal standards, and just generally shocked.

“What do you think, Hermione?”

Hermione blinks and glances up. This is the first time Ron has asked her what she thinks about the journal extracts instead of ranting about them in general.

“I think they need to find the truth,” she says quietly. “If this is lies, someone needs to prove it. If it’s not, then they need to stop spreading around the idea that your soul-mark can never change and people who don’t have them or have small ones are inferior.”

“But they are!” Ron’s voice wavers and breaks. “They are worse than people without soul-marks! You don’t think Potter’s a better person than I am, do you?” He shoots a venomous glare at the Slytherin table, even though Harry isn’t actually there. He eats most of his meals in the kitchens.

Hermione stares at him. Ron’s not a bad person, she knows, but right now, he seems almost in despair.

I wonder how much of the soul-mark system worked because it gave people someone to look down on?

Ron, from one of the poorer families at the school, Sorted into Gryffindor just like every other Weasley, one of the younger siblings and not the only girl, desperately wants something to be proud of. And finding his soulmate on the train to Hogwarts—and being able to look down on people like Harry—is it.

Hermione reaches out and lays her hand on his arm. Ron calms down and looks at her.

“He’s not a better person than you are,” Hermione tells him, truthfully.

Harry scares her. He’s so obsessed with vengeance and breaking things down and doing whatever he needs to do to accomplish extreme ends. Ron is kinder and more compassionate than he is.

But Ron is also more close-minded, and caught up in a system that he’s been immersed in since birth. Privately, Hermione thinks that Harry’s Muggle upbringing has done more for his ability to sympathize with goblins and elves than being markless, but it’s true that the goblins and elves trust Harry more because of his bare arms.

“Thanks, Hermione.” Ron casts another glare at the Slytherin table and stands. “Come on, we have to get to Charms.”

He stomps out of the Great Hall. Hermione sighs and stands up. They’re still close enough that people will think it’s odd if she doesn’t follow him or seem concerned about him, when she’s his soulmate.

It’s possible they might still get married. Soul-marks can point up a range of good partners for you, Albus believes, and Hermione does, too. They just don’t find you the one, right, “destined” one.

But a lot will depend on what happens when Ron finds out that soul-marks aren’t real. Or when they go away.

If Harry can accomplish that…

Then everyone will have no choice but to look outside their little worlds and accept that there’s a wider one waiting for them.

*

Astoria firms her shoulders and walks into her parents’ sitting room.

“Darling, are you all right?” Her mother, Deirdre, immediately stands up and walks over to her, and looks down at her. She doesn’t touch her. Astoria curls her lip a little. Her parents are the strict kind of purebloods, the one who thinks that you really shouldn’t touch many people in your life except your soulmate.

“I need to talk to you about something. You, too, Father,” Astoria says, her eyes going to where he’s putting down the Daily Prophet. Astoria notices with quiet satisfaction that he seems to be reading the article that’s an extract from her ancestor’s journal. Not that he could admit it if he recognizes it.

“Of course.” Earnest Greengrass is smooth-faced, always. Astoria only saw him get angry once, when Daphne shredded an expensive robe with accidental magic.

Astoria sits down in a chair in front of her father’s desk, and her mother goes back to the couch where she was sitting. Astoria folds her hands in her lap. She’s a proper pureblood girl, has been taught and schooled in the kind of decorum that she hates until she could scream.

Except screaming would be against decorum, of course.

Then again, this whole conversation is going to be.

When her parents both seem to be comfortable and are both looking at her, Astoria asks quietly, “Why did you change my mark to match Draco’s?”

Mother sucks in her breath until Astoria thinks she might faint. And Father—

Astoria’s eyes are on him the most, and so she sees him get angry for the second time in her life.

“Who told you that?” he hisses, and rises to his feet to stalk around the table, coming to a stop in front of Astoria with his fists clenched and his eyes too bright. “I insist on knowing who told you that right now. Because it is not true.

Astoria looks up at him. Her heart is fluttering wildly, but she isn’t crumpling in the face of his anger the way she thinks she would have before she met Hermione. “It’s something that’s perfectly obvious,” she says calmly. “Especially since the articles are saying that changing marks is possible, and mine doesn’t look like his anymore.”

Her belly squirms. She does want to tell them that it’s also obvious because she likes girls and a benevolent force that made soul-marks wouldn’t have matched her to a boy, so they must have changed it.

But she isn’t ready for that yet. She thinks Father might react to that with physical violence. It’s not sure. But he might.

Astoria knows she’s not brave, not like a Gryffindor. The Sorting Hat did see into the heart of her, if her soul-mark didn’t. So for now she just sits there and stares at her father, and he backs away from her, spins around, swears, and kicks the side of his desk hard enough to splinter the wood.

“Earnest!” Mother cries.

Father strokes his hair flat and paces back and forth for a second, then spins around to look at Astoria. “You cannot tell Daphne, if we tell you.”

A bargain. They want to make a bargain with her, a girl who’s just finished her third year at Hogwarts. Feeling dizzy with power, Astoria opens her eyes as wide as they’ll go. “Why? Did you change hers, too?”

Father’s face is sour. “We made sure hers was larger than it was. She was born with a mark so small she would have been taunted for it. And I want to make sure that neither of my daughters is subjected to teasing or bullying.”

Except from their parents.

Astoria takes a deep breath and sits up straighter. “And what did you think would happen if we found out? Or if I married Draco and we weren’t happy?” That’s as close as she can come right now to telling her parents that she would have been unhappy.

“The boy is gone on you,” Mother murmurs, tilting her head so that her long brown hair spills down, and giving Father a soft smile. “The way I was gone on your father, years and decades ago. You would have been fine.”

“Even if I wasn’t gone on him?”

Mother gives her a perplexed glance. “But he treated you well.”

“Every time he squeezed my hand, I wanted to cut it off,” Astoria says tartly.

Mother gapes at her. Father stops pacing and turns to her with his head half-lowered, as if he were looking at her over the glasses that he hasn’t worn in a few years. Astoria keeps her hands braided together in her lap, but her heart pounds anxiously, wondering if they’ll manage to guess the deeper secret from the shallower one.

Mother and Father exchange glances. Then Father clears his throat. “Perhaps we should have made a different choice for you, then.”

“Why think you could make the choice at all?” Astoria demands. They’ve basically already admitted to changing her mark, so she wants the reason why they did it. “And if you thought you could, then why go around telling me and Daphne that the marks make the choices and we just have to live with it?”

Father sighs gustily and sits down. He shakes his head a little. “Astoria, what do you think would happen if your mark matched you to a Muggleborn?”

“I would have a chance at being happy, wouldn’t I?”

“You would be disgraced,” Mother stresses, leaning forwards. “Think of trying to live with someone who hasn’t grown up with our ways, darling. It would be impossible.”

“The ways that are based on lies?”

Father slaps his hand flat on a book sitting on a table next to the couch. Astoria starts a little, but doesn’t feel the fear that she would have before. Her parents wanted to make a bargain with her, she reminds herself. She is the one in control here.

“Growing up in the Muggle world means they’re surrounded by filth all their lives,” Father snarls. “It’s normal for them. They just rub up against it or wallow in it and never even notice. We keep our blood and our souls pure.”

“I still don’t know what you mean, Father, when the marks are lies.”

“We don’t just rut with anyone like the Muggles do! We only touch one person our entire lives. That’s what we were trying to preserve for you, the purity of knowing one person’s love and body and soul.”

Ah. Astoria relaxes a little. She didn’t guess this, but she should have. There really is too much pressure put on only dating or sharing a bed with—she blushes a little—your supposed soulmate. If someone thought that was so important and purebloods should only do that, it makes more sense of the determination to hang onto the marks.

It’s bright, in a way. Pure. Clean.

And cold. Astoria has lost track of the times that she woke shaking from a bad dream and would have welcomed a hug from her parents, but their worldviews say hugs are only for soulmates.

“Now that my mark has changed back,” Astoria asks quietly, “what will you do?”

“I suppose that Draco isn’t an option.”

Astoria looks at her mother, and her mother looks down with a little sigh.

“We will find the person who has done this,” Father says, gesturing to the paper. It’s clear that if he does realize that the extracts in the paper come from the journal of a Greengrass ancestor, he isn’t about to admit it in front of Astoria. “And we will make sure that they pay, and whatever magic they have worked to change our marks is worked to change them back.”

Our marks. Astoria tries her best not to grin, but it’s hard. They’ve as much as admitted that their marks changed, too.

“All right,” Astoria says, with a little shrug of her shoulders. “But I’m not going to marry Draco no matter what happens.”

“If your marks go back to being the same—”

“As a result of magic? When they were only the same in the first place because you changed them?”

There’s silence, and then her father makes a little gesture with his hand in a way that Astoria has seen him gesture to dueling opponents. She stands up, and half-bows her head, and walks out of the library. No matter what happens, she’s at least sure that they aren’t going to force her to marry Draco. They must have seen the sheer determination in her eyes.

And…

Astoria grins. For all that they wanted to make a bargain with her, they forgot to actually hold her to the terms of it. She guessed that her mark had been changed without them admitting it,, and they didn’t make her swear not to tell Daphne.

Which means that she’ll tell her sister, as soon as she can, without betraying the promises of secrecy that she made Hermione.

But she can still try to prepare Daphne as best as she can for what’s coming.

*

Draco punches his pillow with a soft curse. He catches Nott’s eye across the room and turns away, face burning.

He’s done his best, for the end of fifth year and the beginning of sixth, to catch Potter alone. At home during the summer, he plotted more ways to do it, and avoided asking his parents if they had changed his mark to match Astoria’s. It’s clear that neither of them wants to answer questions about it.

And, well…

It’s all lies anyway, isn’t it? Draco’s mark might have changed, but he still loves Astoria, with the pure and burning, worshipful kind of love that he knows only soulmates experience. If their marks got changed, then they stumbled on love by chance, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Any less beautiful.

Does Astoria feel that way?

Draco buries the thought as soon as he has it. It doesn’t matter, he tells himself sternly. Astoria will see the truth in the end, and come back to him. Probably the changes in her mark now are influenced by the same person who keeps publishing lies in the paper and causing the ripples of doubt across the whole country.

Harry Potter.

Draco reaches under his pillow and brings out the book of spells he stole from the darkest corner of his father’s library. He pages slowly through it, looking, looking.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He does know that he’ll recognize it when he finds it.

And he does, almost three-quarters of the way through the book. Draco sits up and hisses through his teeth. Not only does it look like a ritual that’s Dark and powerful enough to do what he wants, but it has annotations in his father’s hand all over it.

Draco reads along eagerly, nodding as he reads about the requirements. He grimaces at some of them. It’s going to be hard to get a hair from a unicorn’s tail and a vial of phoenix tears. In fact, it’ll probably take a lot of time.

But what hurry does he have? Sure, Potter is working to destroy their society and change everyone’s soul-marks, but they’re both still young. Potter can’t do that much more than he already has in a hurry, Draco thinks, or he would have done it already. He probably damaged and changed some people’s marks, but now he has to go work whatever foul, disgusting magic he found again, or gather ingredients for a ritual like Draco’s, and he’ll have a long time before he can actually work on erasing them.

Reflexively, Draco pulls up his sleeve and stares at his mark.

No. Some of the color has drained out of it, but it’s still there.

And it always will be, Draco tells himself, disgusted that he’s started to believe Potter’s lies. I’m just getting paranoid.

He waits until Nott leaves the room, then leans back. “Dobby!” he calls.

The quietest of his family’s house-elves appears in front of him. According to Father, Dobby used to be much more vocal before a few years ago, but that doesn’t matter. Draco actually thinks Dobby’s silence is perfect for what he’s going to ask the elf to do.

“I need you to find these ingredients for me.” Draco fishes a scrap of parchment from under his bed and scribbles down what the ritual needs, all but the common ingredients that he already has in his own Potions stores or can get from any apothecary. “Take as much time as you need. Ignore all other orders. This is your primary mission for now.”

Dobby takes the list and looks it over. Draco waits to see if he has questions, but Dobby vanishes as silently as he came.

Dirty little things are good for something, Draco thinks idly, and lies down, rubbing his fingers together. He nearly touched Dobby, but luckily, Dobby is a well-trained house-elf and pulled his hand out of the way just in time.

He drifts off to sleep dreaming of vengeance on Potter.

*

“Harry Potter!”

Harry rolls out of bed in an instant, his wand in his hand and his body flexed and ready to cast magic. He lands in a crouch and holds out his wand stiffly towards the little elf in the corner, who’s wide-eyed and shaking.

All right, maybe that was overkill, Harry thinks as he stands and lights his wand, but then he recognizes the elf as the one Lucius Malfoy sent to kill him all those years ago and thinks his reflexes are actually pretty good.

“What are you doing here?” he demands.

“Dobby—Dobby is coming to find you,” Dobby gasps, holding his hands up in front of his face as if to shield it.

Harry peers closely at him while pulling back on his magic. It’s true that Dobby doesn’t feel hostile, the way he did when he came to kill Harry, and the sparks that were there last time aren’t raining from his fingers.

On the other hand, Harry doesn’t know why he’s here, in Harry’s room off the hospital wing, this time, either.

“Why did you want to find me?” he finally asks.

“You was doing Dobby a great favor, years ago,” Dobby whispers, creeping towards him. “Dobby is repaying it.”

Harry remembers trying to sever Dobby’s binding, but he can’t believe that it actually worked in any capacity. With what he now understands about the binding and the way it’s rooted in soul-marks, it couldn’t have. This is a spell spread all over the world and touching the life of every house-elf, not the set of individual nets he once pictured.

“How can I have done you a favor when you never came back to tell me about it? I thought maybe I’d killed you.”

Dobby promptly flushes and clears his throat. “Dobby is sorry about that, Harry Potter.”

“Fine. Why are you here now? And what did happen when I tried to sever the binding on you?”

“Dobby became partially free.” There’s a wistful look on Dobby’s face now. “Dobby was trying to resist masters’ commands, but he could not be doing that always. But Dobby managed to have a little freedom, by not speaking often, and being able to tell others masters’ secrets, and being able to think for himself.”

Harry relaxes and smiles. It’s pretty brilliant to think that his magic managed to give Dobby that much. “Great. Why are you here now?”

“Master Draco Malfoy is gathering ingredients for a very bad ritual!” Dobby cries, suddenly so agitated that Harry feels his magic and his pulse jump again. “It is taking him a long time, but it is very bad!” He whips a piece of parchment out of nowhere and holds it out, bouncing a little on his toes.

Harry reads through it with a frown. It’s just the list of ingredients, not the description of the ritual itself, but the ingredients make him whistle softly. Albus has taught him a lot more about Potions than Snape ever did, and a lot about magic in general, too, plus Harry has been studying ritual-craft more since he started researching with the goblins on how to break the binding. This will add up to the kind of ritual that’s meant to turn someone into a shell of themselves, break their will and steal their magic.

Then Harry’s eyes reach the end of the list of ingredients, and he swears aloud.

Scratch that. This ritual is even worse than Harry thought at first. Venom from the tail of a manticore is usually only used in rituals involving the soul.

Harry puts down the list and looks at Dobby. “Malfoy wants you to gather these things?”

Dobby nods and wrings his hands, tears filling his eyes.

“Well, pretend that you are. Stall as long as you can. If you don’t mind,” Harry adds hastily. He tries to avoid giving orders to the elves, just in case they do feel like they have to obey. He doesn’t want that. They’re his friends. “I think he expects you to take a long time to find them anyway, right?” When Dobby nods, Harry smiles and give him the list back. “Thanks. Now that I know about him, I’ll be able to defend against him and keep him from doing anything to me.”

“But what is Harry Potter going to do?”

“I’m conducting a little ritual next year, Dobby,” Harry says, stretching his arms over his head and looking at Bast, who is making soft, sleepy complaining noises about being woken up in the middle of the night. “I need an enemy for it, someone who’s soul-marked and fully committed to the power of the mark. I think my enemy’s just chosen himself.”

Dobby looks up with his eyes shining. Any trace of tears is gone.

“Harry Potter is being a great wizard,” he whispers reverently.

“And Dobby is being a great house-elf.” Harry reaches out and gently tugs one of Dobby’s ears, a friendly gesture that elves use with each other since they don’t really have hair. He would tell Dobby about the ritual to break the bindings, but he’s not entirely sure if Dobby’s partial freedom would mean he’d have to listen to Malfoy if they insisted that he tell them the truth. “Don’t worry. I’ll know how to protect myself, thanks to you telling me, and we’ll get rid of Malfoy.”

Dobby bobs his head, eyes still bright, and vanishes. Harry lies down again. It’s only a few weeks until the next winter solstice ritual when he and the goblins will institute the next crack in the binding.

Personally, Harry can’t wait.

*

“You’re going to feel a drain on your energy. Try not to panic about that. It’s normal, because this is a ritual that needs someone with a full soul-mark, and it’s also a ritual that’s meant to help us destroy those.”

Hermione nods, her heart racing in her ears. She personally finds ritual magic fascinating, and immediately accepted when Harry told her he wanted her to participate in the second one.

But Viktor and Albus and Astoria all talked about the ritual they participated in, and Hermione assumed she would be in a room like they were, outside of the main ritual circle. Instead of right in the middle of it, with Harry moving around her in another circle within the iron ring, Bast balanced on his shoulder.

Just outside the circle stand five goblins, evenly spaced, marking what Hermione thinks are the points of a pentagram. And they’re carrying staffs and softly chanting, but there’s no huge gathering of paraphernalia the way there was in the stories Albus told her about the last one. The room is pretty small, too, a tight chamber with walls and a ceiling that bend in. Hermione thinks it’s almost egg-shaped.

As she watches, though, something begins to happen, as if magic is coalescing in the air from the goblins’ chants and Harry’s movements and Bast’s purring. Hermione blinks as she watches patterns of red and orange light stretch around her, stretching from her wrists to her shoulders, from her shoulders to the floor, from the hem of her robes to the top of her trainers. And many other places, she’s sure. Standing in the middle of them, Hermione can’t see them all or be sure of where they all go.

They remind her somewhat of the patterns that Arithmantic equations make when you plot them on a graph, but not closely.

Hermione opens her mouth to ask what they are, but Harry gives her a savage look. Hermione hurriedly closes it again. Don’t disrupt the ritual, right.

Besides, Hermione knows what they are when she thinks about it some more. They show the binding that’s around her all the time, tied to the house-elves and the soul-mark on her arm and those on other people’s. It’s an intricate, beautiful, sickening thing.

Hermione stands there in the net while Harry does some more circling and the goblins do some more chanting. They didn’t say she had to keep her mind focused on the ritual or anything, so she lets it wander, coming up with more questions that she’ll ask when this is over and she doesn’t stand a chance of messing it up.

Then Harry tosses his head back and abruptly lifts his arms. At the same time, he brings his foot down on the stone.

It seems to take a long time to travel the short distance, but lands at the same moment as the goblins all speak a distinctive, long, growling word simultaneously.

The binding around Hermione—

Fractures.

It’s like being inside a church with stained glass windows, looking out, and suddenly something hits them. Hermione tries to gasp as she watches cracks race all through them, but something has stolen the sound from her throat. She raises her hand to it and clutches it, breathing faster, as she watches the cracks race away in all directions.

For a moment, she can’t imagine what this will accomplish. It might weaken her own connection to the slavery of the house-elves or erase her mark, but she’s only one person.

Then she sees how the fractures are racing outwards, not staying confined within the patterns the binding makes around her. They radiate and take a hundred crazed paths, and some of them leap out of sight above her head or beneath the floor or somewhere into a space that Hermione suspects she can’t follow with her eyes.

Of course. They’ll follow the path of the binding, the connections that tie her mark to others—they are all connected, or the binding would only be a bunch of individual little bindings—and crack them further.

Hermione sinks to the floor, exhausted, as the patterns of light vanish and the chant stops. Harry gently catches her shoulder.

“You all right?” he asks in a hoarse voice.

Hermione nods. Her head feels as if it weighs a thousand pounds. She could collapse and sleep right there.

But the goblins aren’t going to let a human other than Harry stay in their ritual room, so she manages to force herself back to her feet. “What price did you pay?”

Harry blinks at her, his blinks slow and exaggerated. He’s fatigued, too.

“Your—” Hermione breaks off with a yawn, but manages to keep going. “Your letter talking about this said that you had to pay something for every ritual. I know it was blood last time. What was it this time?”

“A year of my life,” Harry says.

What?”

Hermione knows she’s staring at him, but Harry just smiles gently and shakes his head a little. “The binding extends through time, Hermione. The twisting that hid it twisted time, too. We had to make sure that the fracturing could extend through space by conquering the binding’s dominion over time. And for that, we needed a year I would have otherwise lived.”

Hermione licks her lips. She doesn’t know what to say. A goblin barks something, and she and Harry are led to a lift, although they came down stairs, Bast pattering behind them.

Hermione leans on the wall in the lift, and finally manages to say, “You really want the binding on the house-elves gone, huh?”

Harry glances at her. “My commitment to their freedom is pretty deep.”

Hermione shuts her mouth again, and doesn’t say a word, because the light in Harry’s eyes is everything that made her decide to follow him in the first place.

And everything that terrifies her.


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