lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of the story.

Part Four

“Kneel.”

The command was in Parseltongue, but Harry would have known what it was even if he didn’t speak the language. Hadn’t he just watched another five men and boys kneel and take the Mark? Harry fell to one knee himself, lifting his arm above his head.

“Hold still.”

That wasn’t an order the others had received. They’d just knelt, and the Dark Lord had branded them with the Mark. Harry twitched, a little, but held as still as possible as that yew wand descended.

The Dark Lord touched higher up Harry’s arm with the wand than he had the others, above the elbow. Harry took a deep breath and tried to tell himself that the Dark Lord wouldn’t cut it off or anything. Harry would be more useful with two arms.

“You are indeed my blood.”

It took a lot of work for Harry to keep his head bowed instead of snapping it up, but Regulus had warned him ahead of time that meeting the Dark Lord’s eyes during the ceremony could be a death sentence. He just kept it bowed, barely breathing, as the Dark Lord’s wand traced in a circle. But it didn’t cut or burn or anything like that yet.

“Do you know how I learned of this?”

“No, my lord,” Harry whispered back, and heard more than one strangled gasp or exclamation. He didn’t wrinkle his nose, but it was a near thing. Everyone here tonight was either a Death Eater or one of his Slytherin classmates. Did they think that Harry wouldn’t dare speak Parseltongue in front of the Dark Lord? Or did they think, even after all these years, that Harry was faking it?

“I went back in time through the Slytherin treasures. They can show the past and the future to those who touch them delicately.” At the moment, Harry couldn’t imagine a more delicate touch than the tickling one of the Dark Lord’s wand on his arm. “And I found that two generations ago, there was a Squib child cast on the doorstep of a Muggle family. The woman who bore it was ashamed and did not want her family to know she had become pregnant by a Muggle.”

“I see, my lord,” Harry whispered. The firelight in the huge, quiet room beneath Malfoy Manor swam along the sides of his vision. He wondered if the Dark Lord was going to kill him now, for the shame of Harry having both Squib and Muggle ancestors.

“You do not. Not yet.”

Harry bowed his head as far as he could while keeping his left arm uplifted. “I am sorry, my lord.”

“Forgiven.” Harry hadn’t realized the Dark Lord even knew the word. The wand traced another tickling circle on his arm, and then moved higher up, towards the shoulder. “And I saw your mother. She knew almost nothing about where she came from, but she knew that if she had a child who could speak to snakes, she should not be afraid, and that he or she would be special and must be protected.”

Harry’s heart ached at the thought of his mother, but he bowed further, coaxing a little bit of motion out of his neck somehow. He thought he could hear the tendons creak. “Thank you, my lord.”

“I know why she died when she had the Memory Charm cast on her.”

“My lord?” Harry whispered it as a question, but it wasn’t really one. By now, he was listening more with his skin and his breath and his blood than his ears.

“A curse was cast on that line of Squibs by the uncle of your foremother, who had found out she had had a child with a Muggle. He was not appeased even though the child was a Squib and would never be part of the magical world. He cast a curse that would call for early deaths for all of you, but because he cast it in Parseltongue, it took odd turns. It interacted oddly with any other spells that might have been cast on those Squibs, in particular, and will never affect a wizard such as yourself..”

Harry swallowed back a sob. It was too bad that the Gaunt who had cast that spell was dead probably generations back, because Harry would have liked to kill him.

“Thank you, my lord.”

“Hmmm.” The Dark Lord made even that neutral sound seem sinister, given that he had spoken it in Parseltongue. His wand traced higher. “Your mark will be different from the others, Harry Potter, because you carry my blood.”

“Yes, my lord. Your will, my lord.”

“Indeed, my will,” said the Dark Lord, with a sound like a cobra laughing, and his wand finally descended.

Harry gave a whistling cry, unlike the full-throated scream of the others, as the Mark seared into him. He felt the pain reaching for him, and at the same time a sensation of power that seemed to boil up through the middle of his chest, as though his own magic sought to ease his pain.

Magic, or shared blood.

Harry reared back at last and shifted his arm to stare at it. The Mark began in the same place as the Dark Marks on the arms of the others, but reached far up Harry’s left arm, to coil around the bottom of his shoulder. It was a snake alone, without a skull, a huge red creature marked with strands of gold and green. The head was lifted and tilted back along Harry’s arm, facing him where he would see it easily when he pulled back his left sleeve. The snake’s eyes were a brilliant red that made Harry shiver a little.

“I have marked you as mine, Harry Potter. Do not disappoint me,” the Dark Lord said, and only the last words were the same as those he had spoken to the others after their Marking.

“I will not, my lord,” Harry whispered, and bowed one more time, his chin brushing the floor, before he stood and wobbled over to join Regulus. Regulus gave him a concerned look, but said nothing.

*

Later, when they were alone in his bedroom at Grimmauld Place, Regulus slid Harry’s shirt off and trailed his fingers along the snake. Harry jumped and hissed, which made Asilos hiss back at him, although of course Regulus couldn’t understand either one of them.

“Harry?” Regulus murmured.

“I was just thinking that I have to hope the Dark Lord wins now. There’s no way that anyone on Dumbledore’s side will ever trust me again.”

“That’s not entirely true. You can still try to find that advantage you told me you wanted, the one that would give you some hold over the Dark Lord and convince Dumbledore and his people that you were loyal if they win.”

“How can I get them to listen to me, with this Mark on me?”

Regulus knew what he meant, even though Harry had asked the question in an odd way. His own Mark seemed to throb like an extra kind of blood through his veins, and he felt as if the Dark Lord were standing behind him with a hand on his shoulder. It was hard to even think about betraying him.

But he thought of Harry possibly suffering worse than he might from the Order of the Phoenix because of the unusual nature of his Mark, and that pushed some of the pounding, watching feeling away.

“We’ll search for it anyway,” Regulus said, and cupped his hand around the back of Harry’s neck. “For now, come here.”

The last word was said in his best imitation of Parseltongue, and as always, it made Harry laugh, which was one of Regulus’s main purposes in life. He leaned back on the bed, and Harry followed, with eager hands and lips and tongue.

*

On the outskirts of Ottery St. Catchpole, Harry faced James in battle for the first time.

The Dark Lord had ordered Harry to accompany Regulus and three other Death Eaters, all young but older than Harry and Regulus, on this raid. He was to stand back but not intervene unless it was a matter of life or death for one of the others, the Dark Lord had told Harry sternly. And he was to remove himself from the scene if it seemed as though he would die.

Harry had accepted that on the surface, but underneath it, he never intended to leave Regulus behind. If he had to, he would grab him and Apparate out, leaving the others to suffer.

Regulus and the other “ordinary” Death Eaters had barely begun to set buildings on fire before a series of sharp pops sounded. Harry swung around, feeling the odd constriction of the golden mask over his face—the others wore white—and saw James and Sirius and a few other people, like Lily Evans, running towards them with determined expressions.

Harry didn’t even think about it, or about keeping out of the battle. He blew the dirt at James’s feet open. He went down into a hole, tripped, and fell. His wand rolled out of his fingers.

Harry Summoned it and then lifted his leg. His body seemed to be moving without conscious decision. He didn’t know what he was doing until he broke James’s wand over his knee.

“James!”

That was Sirius’s shout, and Harry ducked as a curse flew over his head. Then one came from the side. It seemed that Lily Evans had come to care for James after all, and she was cursing Harry from around the edges of a shield while she stood in front of James.

Harry snorted a little and spun to watch Regulus. Regulus had laid one of the people attacking with Sirius and James on the ground, where he was seizing, but he was looking towards Sirius with an indecisive expression on his face behind the mask.

Harry called softly, “Black!”

It seemed to free Regulus from the trance, and he turned away, shaking his head. A lash of his wand, and the building in front of him exploded into flames.

“Murderer!” Evans called, turning Harry’s attention back to her. She was practically stamping her feet, her eyes wide and feral. They were a shade of green identical to his own, Harry noted idly. “Why don’t you fight me?”

“You think a wizard murdered when his wand is broken, Miss Evans?”

She stared at Harry as if she hadn’t expected him to answer her. Then she said coldly, “You don’t get to speak to me like that.”

“And why not? If—”

Evans raised her wand and sent a long, crackling purple spell at him that Harry had learned from a specialized tome Regulus had. He laughed a little, breathlessly, as he countered it. “Hypocrite.”

“No one can ever be considered a hypocrite when fighting bastards like—”

Movement from the corner of his eye caught Harry’s attention, and he spun to face it. Sirius had been creeping up on him, his expression twisted into a crazed mask of its own. Harry dropped him with a Stunner and turned around and Stunned Evans when she started to speak again.

He didn’t need to kill, he thought. These children were pathetically untrained and too prone to making righteous speeches.

“Come on, Harry!”

All the buildings around them were alight now, and the Dark Mark was hovering in the sky over the tallest of them, which Harry thought was a bookshop. He shook his head a little as he reached out for Regulus’s hand. Half the Dark Lord’s targets didn’t make sense to him. Why would he want to burn down a bookshop?

But that wasn’t really Harry’s problem, he thought as he and Regulus Disapparated. He had sworn to serve.

*

“Sirius didn’t know me.”

Regulus didn’t mean to speak those words. He and Harry had been lucky enough to come away from the raid unscathed, and now they were lying tangled in Regulus’s bed, where they spent so much time when they weren’t in Hogwarts or attending the Dark Lord. Harry had left the Potter house the moment he turned seventeen without so much as a glance back.

“You mean, in the raid?” Harry raised himself on one elbow, his concerned eyes fixed on Regulus.

Regulus let one hand brush over Harry’s chest, and nodded. “I thought he would. I thought we would have this grand confrontation where we would finally say all the words that we—didn’t get to say. Scream it all out. And instead he ignored me and concentrated on you.”

“Maybe he knew it was you but didn’t want to confront you. Didn’t want to fight you.”

“I’d like to think that, but no. I don’t think he knows me anymore. I would have thought my hair would be distinctive even if my face wasn’t with the mask, but…”

“Did he ever know you?”

Regulus rolled over to look at Harry. “What do you mean?”

Harry gave him a gentle look, pushing Regulus’s hair out of his eyes. “You were closer as children, but did he know you? Did he know what you valued, why you hoped to go into Slytherin other than just because your family was always Sorted there, why you liked snakes, what magic appealed to you? Did he understand why it was important to you to obey your parents even though they’d also abused you?”

Regulus slowly shook his head. Sirius’s way of rebellion had always been bigger and flashier than his, including his declaration the night he’d run away to live with the Potters and Mother had burned him off the tapestry. And—

“Are you ready to tell me?”

“Tell you what?” Regulus rolled over and blinked at Harry again.

“What happened the night that Sirius ran away.” Harry’s hand slid gently down the back of Regulus’s neck, his fingernails scratching softly. His gaze never wavered. “I know that something happened, and I didn’t push because it was clear that you didn’t want to talk about it. But I think you’re ready to tell me now.”

“How did you know that?” Regulus blurted, meaning all of it. Any of it.

Harry’s smile lit and warmed his face from the inside. “Because, Regulus, I know you.”

Regulus stared at him and wondered how in the world he had come to be so lucky to have Harry with him. But when Harry’s hand nudged insistently at his shoulder, Regulus remembered that he had a story to tell.

He leaned back, with his arms folded behind his head, and began to speak, not taking his eyes from Harry’s face.

*

Harry could see it, the story, unfolding in front of him, as if he were there.

Regulus stood beside the family tapestry, where he’d been tracing names and wondering if he was one of the ones who would end up being burned off. He didn’t think so, but then again, his cousin Andromeda had been for marrying a Mudblood, and once Regulus would have said she was the most favored child of their generation, the smartest and most loyal.

Sirius stormed into the room, with Walburga right behind him. He was screaming and waving his arms. Regulus turned towards him and caught only the end of an argument that must have gone on for hours and rooms.

“…not a pathetic family like this one!”

“How dare you call this family pathetic,” Mother whispered. Her voice was low, and that was when she was at her most dangerous. Regulus winced, hearing that. (Harry winced, hearing the story).

“You are! All of you, running about, scared to do anything without the Dark Lord’s fucking permission!” Sirius raised his voice. “Oh, please, Mr. Dark Lord, can I cower at your feet? Can I kiss the hem of your robes? Can I sacrifice my firstborn child to you—”

“And what about you?” Mother seemed to grow taller in her wrath. “You do not have principles that are the opposite of ours. You do not even understand half the things you mouth to me that the Potters taught you! You only say you believe them because James Potter does. At least the lord we follow is a great wizard, not a teenager with an ego the size of a country playing pathetic pranks—”

“Don’t call James pathetic!”

“Angry when I speak the truth, Sirius?”

Sirius drew his wand.

Mother didn’t draw hers against him, but flung a spell at the tapestry. Regulus ended up diving out of the way and rolling on his back. Mother had lit Sirius’s name on fire.

Sirius screamed. Regulus scrambled back around to look and saw Sirius beating out flames rising from his clothes.

“Get out,” Mother whispered.

Regulus just stared. He had had no idea that lighting the tapestry on fire would burn the person as well.

It gave him another perspective on Andromeda’s disowning, something that he had never thought about before.

“You’re mental,” Sirius breathed, backing away from Mother. “If you…you could have killed me! Doesn’t that matter to you?” His voice soared. “Does it matter that you’ve driven your son away?”

(It must have hurt Regulus to hear Sirius speak of himself as Walburga’s son and not worry about his brother, Harry thought).

“The only thing I regret about the spell I just cast is missing a vital spot,” Mother said, and stepped forwards, flicking in another curse. Regulus found himself tensing to spring in between, and then eased back in confusion. Sirius wouldn’t have stepped into the path of a curse for him, so why was Regulus acting as if he should do it for his brother?

Former brother, Regulus thought, glancing back at the black mark on the tapestry over Sirius’s name.

“Fine!” Sirius yelled. His voice was trembling, and he had tears in his eyes when he glanced over his shoulder for a moment. Regulus started to force himself to his feet, but Sirius didn’t even seem to see him. He just startled back and raised a hand when Mother turned her wand on him again. “I’ll—I can see when I’m not wanted! I’ll just go stay at the Potters’ permanently!”

“I was under the impression that you had already moved your things there. Yes, do go proclaim the allegiance you were always threatening to proclaim openly.”

Sirius stormed out of the room. Regulus did get up then, and ran after him.

(Harry winced when he heard that, already anticipating what would come next).

“Sirius, wait!”

Sirius glanced over his shoulder with vacant eyes that quickly filled back in with dark distrust. “Come to curse me, too, Reggie?”

“No, I would never—” Regulus stopped in confusion, wondering if he would really never do that, or if he would lift his wand to save Harry from Sirius. Or if the Dark Lord ordered him to cast the curse.

“Yeah, I bet.” Sirius gave a rusty laugh with a hint of a dog’s bark to it, something that had been happening more and more. “You don’t care about me, Reggie, and you never have since you were Sorted into Slytherin.”

“Did you really think that I would go into Gryffindor with you? Can’t you love me when I’m in a different House than you are?”

Regulus froze after that, because he hadn’t meant to say that. Not to talk about love in front of Sirius, who had acted for so many years as if he didn’t know what it was.

“I know that I have friends and a family, and they’re not here.”

Sirius flung himself up the stairs. Regulus followed, not expecting to slam into a ward outside Sirius’s room. Sirius was throwing books and clothes haphazardly into a trunk, shaking all the while. He acted as if he had forgotten what his wand was for.

“I’m still your brother,” Regulus whispered. “I still want to help you.”

“I only have one brother, and his name is James.”

Regulus stepped back, feeling winded, and watched as Sirius continued packing.

*

“So that’s it,” Regulus whispered into the silence of his room. “I have no brother now. Only my parents, and the cousins still loyal to us, and the Dark Lord.” He opened his eyes and stared at Harry. “And you.”

Harry crowded close to him, reaching out to caress Regulus’s face. His touch was like cool water after the scene that Regulus had relived when he’d told the story to Harry, and Regulus tilted his head into Harry’s gentle touch. He shut his eyes and listened to Harry’s hushed promises.

“I’ll always be there for you. I’ll never abandon you the way Sirius did. I know what it’s like…”

Regulus sighed and cuddled closer to Harry. His thoughts had been whirling around his head like birds in screaming flight, but they settled down now, and he reached out and closed his hand on Harry’s.

He was going to do whatever he had to do to make sure they were safe in the Dark Lord’s service. Take any mission. Accept any danger. Ask to go on raids.

He would find that advantage Harry had asked for. He would enter the Dark Lord’s confidence and become his most trusted, so that Harry and his family would be protected.

*

“Harry…”

Harry rolled over on Regulus’s bed and then opened his eyes wide. His lover was standing there with pale cheeks and dark hair that looked like streaks of ink plastered across his face. It took Harry a long moment to realize that Regulus’s hair was wet, and that was why it looked like that.

“What’s wrong?” Harry asked, scrambling over to Regulus. The hand he held out to absently clutch Harry’s was wet as well.

“The Dark Lord asked for a house-elf to test some kind of protection,” Regulus whispered. “I volunteered Kreacher. You know…”

He let his voice trail off, but Harry nodded. He knew that Regulus had been working as hard as he could to earn a high place in the Dark Lord’s ranks so that none of them need suffer if his temper became worse.

“Kreacher came back. But he almost died.” Regulus took a deep breath. “The Dark Lord was using him to test protections on an artifact that Kreacher said radiated Dark magic. And he’s felt magic like that before, when he served my grandfather and Arcturus bought artifacts from an old tomb.”

“What is it?”

“A Horcrux.”

Harry felt as though Regulus had slapped him. He had heard that name only once before, in a book so swarming with Dark magic that a dozen showers afterwards hadn’t felt like enough to wash him clean. “Then…”

“Yes. The Dark Lord has one.” Regulus closed his eyes, then opened them. “You know that would explain how erratic he’s becoming. The way his temper veers and no one can ever predict what he’ll do next.”

Harry nodded rapidly, his mind leaping up what felt like the rungs of a ladder. The Dark Lord was obsessed with immortality; he had to have been, to make a Horcrux. He’d hidden it behind protections that would have killed Kreacher if Regulus hadn’t ordered him to return home. They would never have known what had happened to Regulus’s faithful elf.

Here was their leverage.

“Get the Horcrux, and the Dark Lord would do anything to get it back,” Harry whispered. “We could give it to Dumbledore if we had to and say that this way, no one like Bellatrix could ever resurrect him again. If Dumbledore destroyed it.”

Regulus nodded. He was breathless now, where he hadn’t been before. He reached out and clasped Harry’s hand. “We have to be ready for anything. For the Dark Lord to go mental. For your vow to him to be discovered. For destroying the Horcrux ourselves.”

“Do you know how to do that?”

“No.” Regulus smiled at him. “But I think we can figure it out together.”

Harry surged forwards to kiss Regulus, one hand closing on his throat and holding him tight. Regulus’s arms, curving around Harry’s shoulders, were as firm.

*

“I don’t know how we’ll get past the potion,” Regulus said, as they stood on an island in the middle of a lake infested with Inferi, having passed the door that required blood to open.

Harry smiled at Regulus, and for the first time, Regulus could really see the family resemblance between Harry and the Dark Lord. It was in the sharp curves of his smile and his cheekbones as he held out his wand and said, “We can work with this because I’m a Parselmouth. Serpensortia.”

Asilos hissed from Harry’s shoulder as if recognizing the spell that had created her. Harry didn’t pay attention, though, his eyes locked on the adder that had appeared at his feet. Regulus didn’t understand the hissing, but the snake didn’t show any hesitation in crawling up Harry’s arm. Harry held it over the basin.

The adder began to drink.

Regulus watched, feeling something worse than pity as the adder jerked and whiplashed through the poison. When it died, Harry conjured another snake, and another when that one died. The last, a cobra, only had to drink a little poison, and Harry Vanished it with a soft hiss of what Regulus thought had to be thanks.

“Thank Merlin you’re a Parselmouth,” Regulus whispered, as Harry scooped up the locket and replaced it with the replica they’d made.

Harry nodded, but his attention was on the Horcrux, his nose wrinkled as he dropped it into the silk-lined bag Kreacher had given them. “The damn thing wants to get hold of me and convince me to do what it wants,” he said, with a shudder. “The chain feels slimy, even though I know it shouldn’t.”

“It can’t have you,” Regulus said, and pulled Harry close to him with one hand curled around Harry’s wrist. “You’re mine.”

Harry smiled at him, eyes brilliant, and Regulus leaned his head against Harry’s shoulder. He could imagine another lifetime where he would have come here, alone except for Kreacher, and drunk the potion himself, and died at the hands of the Inferi. He could imagine being infuriated enough at the Dark Lord’s treatment of Kreacher to do that.

But this was the real world, and he had Harry.

He would go on having Harry. They would go on being together.

And no matter what the Dark Lord or anyone else did to them, they would survive.

The End.