Chapter Ten of 'Natural Selection'- The Darkest Art

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Ten—The Darkest Art

It was time.

Harry closed his eyes and shivered. He had been trying not to panic all day while his classes marched past, plus NEWT study, plus study with Hermione on spellcrafting and a few other people on NEWT Defense. All the time, the day had aimed straight as an arrow towards his parents and the confrontation with them.

Conversation. Not a confrontation. Don’t call it that. If you do, there’s the chance that you’ll never make it there at all.

“Are you ready, Harry?”

Tom was standing in the doorway, as the other students who had been using the old Defense classroom from about ten years ago filed past Harry. Harry tried to smile at him, and failed. Tom came forwards to put a hand on his shoulder.

“You realize that nothing they could tell me about you would frighten me away or make me think less of you?”

“I know.” Harry licked his lips and reached down to touch Esmeralda’s back. She’d curled up in a corner of the room while Harry did his “boring” study with his classmates. Now she wrapped up one of his legs to the point where he would have trouble walking until she moved. “That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

“Then what is it?”

“Once this happens—one way or the other, we can’t go back. This is it. They’ll change their minds and then things will be—they’ll expect things to be like they were before I was thirteen—”

“They will never be that way,” Tom said harshly, and took his shoulders. “You can make a place in your life for them if they sincerely apologize and you want to do it. But they cannot rewind the past.”

Harry blinked at him for a minute, surprised he was using such a Muggle metaphor, until he remembered that Time-Turners also wound and it might be from that.

And his mind was trying to distract him again. Harry swallowed and said, “They won’t like that. They’ll want everything to be wiped clean again and forgiven. It’s the Gryffindor way.”

“Spoken like someone who isn’t a Gryffindor.”

“The Hat did offer me Slytherin,” Harry admitted. “And I didn’t even have the Parseltongue then. It was just that it saw in me a desire to do great things, and said I would have the power to do them and pursue them if I wanted. But I refused it, and I don’t think I’ve been unhappy in my House.”

“Just your house,” Tom said, and somehow the distinction between capital and small letters carried over even in Parseltongue.

Harry nodded. “But either they expect that, or this is the final rupture and there’s no going back. And I’d lose access to at least Brian, even if Angela could keep seeing me during the time she’s at Hogwarts. This is one of the reasons I was going to leave,” he added softly, and trained his eyes on the floor. Tom probably wouldn’t like to be reminded that Harry had so nearly fled Britain instead of revealing his Parseltongue. “I couldn’t see any way that this could work out, and I didn’t see how I could keep hiding my Parseltongue from my siblings forever.”

“Your godfather supports you. Would he sneak your brother off for visits so that you could still see him?”

“Yes, but…Brian would have to keep it a secret. I wouldn’t want to do that to him.”

“Perhaps let him decide what he wants, if matters even take that turn,” Tom informed him, and then glanced at the large golden watch hanging from a fob on his robe. “And it is time.”

Harry straightened his shoulders and breathed out. Tom stepped up beside him and they walked side-by-side out the door, Nagini and Esmeralda slithering behind.

“Just remember,” Tom murmured, “I am with you.”

Harry’s hand found Tom’s wrist, and hung on.

*

“Why are they here?”

The look on Lily Potter’s face as she stared at the snakes behind them made Tom sure that whatever had happened to her, it did involve snakes, if perhaps conjured ones instead of real ones. But he only raised an eyebrow and said, “They are our familiars. They come where we go.”

“They shouldn’t be here.” James Potter was refusing to look at them, too, but the source of his trauma, Tom understood. “They’re—you shouldn’t be here, either. We should only be talking to our son.”

Harry tensed beside Tom in a way that was unbearable, especially because he had thought Harry understood how strongly Tom was committed to him. But then again, it could be hard to overcome the effects of thinking you were all alone in the world, with no one to stand beside you. Merlin knew Tom had been much the same before he met Nagini.

So he simply leaned harder into Harry and said, “We will not leave. We are here to discuss your frankly childish action of sending your adult son a Howler in the middle of the Great Hall.”

“You heard it,” Lily said, staring at him. “You understood what we had a grievance against him for. Unless you have suddenly lost the ability to comprehend English because you’ve spent so much time speaking Parseltongue?”

Harry tensed in what felt like shock, this time. Tom simply raised an eyebrow and said, “Harry used a spell I taught him to destroy that foul thing before it could blurt out whatever you wanted it to say. So no, I don’t know what it said. But that doesn’t change my opinion of how childish it was.”

“He’s been corrupting our daughter!” Lily snapped. “Turning her against us!”

“I didn’t corrupt her!” Harry snarled, and Tom was glad to hear real anger behind it. Esmeralda reared up, hissing, and Lily’s eyes fixed on her and dilated. “I only told her that you were stupid to make her hate herself and me!”

“She said in her letter that you told her Dark Arts were okay and having an affinity for them was okay!” James was waving his hands around.

“I said that she wasn’t evil because she had an affinity for them! It’s still her choice if she practices them and what she does with them!”

“You shouldn’t have said that to her at all! You shouldn’t have revealed your Parseltongue at all!”

“Well, it’s too late for that, so what are you going to do about it now? Just push away two of your children and concentrate all your efforts on warping Brian’s perceptions about magic and snakes until he can’t function?”

“Harry,” Lily whispered before James could shout anything this time. “Harry, please send the snake away. I can’t concentrate when she’s here. It makes me feel—like I’m drowning. Like I’m dying.”

Harry narrowed his eyes and spoke in a sharply-etched tone Tom was glad to hear. “Maybe if you tell me why you fear snakes so much, I will.”

“You shouldn’t need an explanation to do something your parents ask you—” James started to complain.

“Just as parents shouldn’t turn against their children because of gifts and affinities they can’t control?” Tom asked delicately. He had wanted to let Harry handle the majority of this confrontation, and so far, Harry was doing well, but Tom couldn’t let what James had said pass unchallenged. “Just as you should listen to someone you love instead of immediately rejecting them and sending them Howlers?”

James glared at him. Lily whispered, “I can’t stand snakes. I can’t stand them.” She had started to shake.

“But if she leaves, I don’t think we stand a chance of hearing why you’re so afraid of them,” Harry said. “And I don’t want you to lie to me, or pretend it doesn’t matter, which I’m pretty sure you would do if Esmeralda left. Tell me, Mother.” His voice was gentler than it had been, but with a coldness underneath it that Tom wondered if the Potters heard.

You have one more chance, I think. Just one.

Esmeralda did calm down when Harry touched her neck. Tom could feel Nagini waiting with patient deadliness behind him. She didn’t think she needed to rear and hiss the way the impatient young one did. She knew what she could do, she knew she could kill both the Potters in instants if Tom asked her to, and so she waited.

“We don’t have to tell you,” Lily said.

“Dad told me. Why not you?”

Lily closed her eyes and swayed on her feet. James gasped and reached for her. Tom saw the way Harry tightened his muscles to avoid doing the same thing, and put a hand on Harry’s back, tracing slowly up and down his spine.

He cares so much for others. He spoke up for his sister as he failed to speak up for himself all those years. He would back off and probably just accept that it was too difficult for his mother to speak of if I was not here.

But that was one of the reasons Tom was, and so they both stood there and said nothing until Lily recovered from her fainting fit. She looked up and stared at them, keeping her eyes as much away from Nagini and Esmeralda as possible, Tom noticed.

“I will tell the story,” she whispered. “And only once.”

Only once was all Tom would need. His Legilimency would allow him to recall the memory perfectly even years later, and call the words to mind in an instant if the Potters tried to say something that contradicted it. He leaned a little harder against Harry’s shoulder. Harry leaned back.

Lily licked her lips. “There was a Slytherin witch called Bellatrix Black.” Tom blinked, once. He remembered Bellatrix, of course. She wasn’t the sort of witch one forgot. But she had left Hogwarts several years before Lily and James finished their seventh year, so he hadn’t realized they had ever interacted. “She had come to visit one of her cousins in Slytherin. They were daring each other to play a prank on the Gryffindors, and Bellatrix came with them. She—she challenged me to a duel.”

“Well, that was stupid of you,” Tom said, before he could think better of the words. “She always knew more Dark Arts than she had any business knowing.”

Lily gave him a single stare from flat, burning green eyes that looked as if they had nothing in common with his chosen’s, but continued speaking. “I thought I could hold my own. Even though Bellatrix was said to cast Dark Arts like she breathed, I was powerful. And I knew more defensive magic than she did.”

Tom raised his eyebrows a little, but said nothing. The last he’d known of Bellatrix, she’d been working as a Shadow Witch for the International Confederation of Wizards. Officially, Shadow Witches and Wizards were elite bodyguards. Unofficially, they were the best of assassins, and the ICW sent them out to take care of political problems before those problems could spread beyond charismatic individuals. Supposedly they even worked in the Muggle world on occasion.

Bellatrix would have had to have known defensive magic of some capacity, to survive more than a year in such a job.

“She challenged you to a duel,” Harry said, folding his arms. “Go on.”

Lily swallowed. “We met in the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest to duel.” She cast a fearful glance at the trees, although they were far enough away from them that Tom thought he could see fewer trees than grass. “I held her back with some defensive spells at first, but then she cursed me with something that froze me in place. Not like the Body-Bind. I couldn’t even breathe. I felt as if I was dying.

“While I was feeling that, she conjured a snake to crawl on top of me. It crushed me, and I could feel the pain even through the spell. I tried to scream, which of course used up more air.” Lily closed her eyes. Tom hoped she was feeling a little humiliation along with the fear and pain of the memory. That was an elementary mistake. “It wound around me and bit me on—on the chest. It bit me several more times, and then Bellatrix dismissed it and ended the spell before I could die. She was laughing so hard it was difficult for her to talk, but she told me the snake’s bite had cursed me. And the curse would be passed on to my children.”

Harry was rigid beside Tom. James, meanwhile, was cradling Lily in his arms and babbling comforting sounds to her. Lily slumped over, crying but conscious.

“Is that why I have Parseltongue?” Harry whispered. “Because of a curse that this snake put on my mother’s womb?”

Tom shook his head as he rested his hand on Harry’s shoulder again. Esmeralda was swaying between them, hissing soft anxious sounds that weren’t words, and Harry reached down to comfort her, but he kept his eyes on Tom. “I am familiar with the curse that Bellatrix used. It is incapable of causing Parseltongue. Several students have used it on others at this school. I would have found other Parselmouths before now if it could create them. Their children attended Hogwarts as well, and they would have had no reason to conceal the gift from me.”

“Did the cursed snake bite them on their—”

Harry stopped. Apparently he had trouble talking about his mother’s breasts and genitals. Tom simply nodded. “At least some of them. That is what the curse is supposed to do—create a powerful belief in the recipient that their wombs or seed are poisoned and they will pass on that taint to their children. Make them relieve the experience until it twists their minds. Of course, not everyone cursed with it would have considered Parseltongue or an affinity for the Dark Arts a taint. That is your parents’ unique interpretation.”

Harry sighed and nodded. “So she probably feared me so much because she believed she passed it on to me.”

“Yes. Which does not excuse the way she treated you.”

Harry hesitated for a moment, then said, “No. Of course not.”

“Harry. What is that hesitation?”

“I didn’t know she was cursed. I didn’t know it would be so bad—”

“It does not matter how bad it was. She had no right to take it out on her children. That is what makes her a poor parent, not being cursed or fearing snakes. Or do you disagree with me?” For a moment, Tom’s hand went to Harry’s arm and gripped, ready to pull him closer if Harry tried to step asway.

Harry slowly shook his head. “I just—I’m afraid that I won’t seem compassionate to them if I—”

“You are as compassionate as you need to be,” Tom whispered back. “Think of your siblings, if you must, who never did anything that could be classed as evil, either. Think of what they might do to your brother if they believe you have your approval. Or Angela.”

Harry’s back straightened again, and he nodded. Then he turned to his mother, who took a deep breath and focused her eyes on him.

“I understand now where your fear of snakes comes from,” Harry said. He kept one hand on Esmeralda’s neck and one hand on Tom’s arm, and Tom saw the way his parents didn’t fail to note that. “But what you did to me was still wrong. Telling me to hide my Parseltongue, acting as if I was evil, making Angela fear you would hate her when she discovered that she had a Dark Arts affinity, trying to turn my siblings against me. Everything.”

“You were cursed, Harry—”

“And if you’d explained that to me, then I might have believed you and agreed with you,” Harry interrupted. “I was thirteen. I still believed everything you said, then. But you didn’t tell me that. You just acted as if I was evil, and told me I had to hide it. Why did you do that?”

Neither of the Potters said anything.

“It seems obvious to me,” Tom said lazily. “Your mother believed it was her fault that you had Parseltongue. But she couldn’t face up to it. Perhaps she’d spent years burying the memory. Perhaps she’d decided that because it was a curse, and therefore evil, any child who came out of her cursed womb was in fact evil. Either way, she couldn’t tell you. And it was so much easier to simply tell you to suppress your Parseltongue, after all. Easier to Obliviate a Healer. Easier to warn you against me than to tell you the truth. Easier to build this house of cards and never think it would fall.” Tom didn’t take his eyes from Lily and James, who looked white and red, respectively. “And now it has. And you’re on the verge of losing two of your children. Perhaps all three. What will happen if your youngest one turns out to have a gift you think of as Dark? Will you alienate him, too?”

“They shouldn’t be using those things!” James bellowed. “Parseltongue is Dark and so are the Dark Arts!”

“A tautology if there ever was one,” Tom said.

“Harry, why couldn’t you have just—just believed us?” Lily whispered. “Why couldn’t you have suppressed your Parseltongue and sent that snake away?”

*

Harry shook his head a little. He felt old and sad, and wished it hadn’t come to this, that his parents had been even a little reasonable before this. Being cursed didn’t excuse being terrible parents, or thinking that your children were evil.

“Because you made the wrong choices,” he said wearily. “Because you had the chance to make me think that you were right, and you didn’t take it. Because you blamed me instead of explaining. Because you decided that Parseltongue was something to be hidden, and it can’t be. Parselmouths need each other.”

“If you’ve touched our son—” James began, glaring at Tom.

“I’m not your son.”

The words made the air between them turn dark and jagged, and then suddenly as clear as glass. Harry gasped, feeling as if something had been ripped away from him and cleansed from him at the same time. He shook his head a little.

If someone tried to speak the name Potter in combination with his first name now, Harry knew, it wouldn’t work.

Usually, this would have gone the other way around, with the parents disowning the child. But doing it this way wasn’t unheard of, just uncommon. Harry lifted his head and looked at his parents—his former parents.

James looked perfectly stunned. Lily looked so pale that Harry could see every one of her freckles.

“You—why did you do that?” Lily whispered.

“Do you want me to name all the reasons again?” Harry demanded, and then fell silent as he felt Tom’s hand on his arm.

“Don’t bother,” Tom said, staring at Lily and James without moving. “They’re never going to understand. And you deserve the peace of not having to speak to them anymore. They have no claim on you now.”

Harry nodded slowly. There was that. There was a reason that he had felt lighter after disowning his parents.

“That means that you have no claim to being Angela and Brian’s brother, either,” James said abruptly.

Harry blinked at them. “I said I wasn’t your son, not that I wasn’t their brother.”

“But without the last name Potter—”

“Consider,” Tom said softly, “whether you want to drive all your children into giving up their last names. That kind of magic recognizes no legal age, and you know it, if you think. Do you want your thirteen-year-old daughter to end up under her brother’s custody because she feared you enough to give up her last name? Do you fear the Dark Arts more than you love her?”

The Potters were silent. Harry turned away.

Part of him still lingered in regret, wishing for a different ending. But all he had to do to stifle it was remember that, here, at the end, they had still insisted on him trying to suppress his Parseltongue and give up his familiar.

And Tom.

They had all come too far for that.

It was best to walk away.