[From Litha to Lammas]: The Crimson Petal and the White, 3/5, Harry/Marcus, PG-13

[lomonaaeren]

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Part Three

“Good, Potter! Good!”

Flint’s hoarse shout seemed to only reach Harry after he had destroyed the blue curse sprinting towards him with the red countercurse Flint had taught him. He pulled his head back and took a deep, sobbing breath of air. His fingers flexed on the wand, and he ended up bending over and breathing harshly so that he wouldn’t throw up.

“Why was that so much better than the rest?” he gasped, when he straightened back up.

“Because you know the spell now.”

Harry, in the middle of flexing his fingers around his wand and on his knees, gave Flint a dirty look. Flint shrugged at him. “It really is that simple,” he said. “Now that you know the spells, you can counter the curses.”

But last time, I didn’t manage to burn up the whole curse, Harry thought. In the end, he decided that saying it probably wouldn’t add anything to the conversation. He forced himself to work on smoothing his breathing out.

Even though he didn’t spend as much time running around the battle room and climbing the ladders and the ropes in the training room as he had chasing after the Snitch in Quidditch practices, it was always harder to recover from. Harry supposed that had to do with his not having a broom to absorb some of the punishment in these “practices.”

Or maybe a year without Quidditch because of the Tournament really had made him as lazy as fuck.

“You think I can become even stronger?” he asked Flint, and watched Flint’s eyes rest critically on him for a moment.

“Yes, you can,” Flint said. “If you work at it, if you want it. And at the moment, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone want this more.”

Harry gave him a thin smile and lifted his wand. “Then let’s go again. Cast another curse at me, please.”

Flint stood so still for a second that Harry thought he wouldn’t, but then he brought his wand forwards and cast a Lightning Curse at Harry that would cause his muscles to seize up and twitch their way through a series of shocks, leaving him vulnerable to any enemy, if it landed.

Harry snapped up his wand and cast the countercurse in perfect response, even though he had only seen that counter in one of the images of a Flint ancestor in battle. The Lightning-Eater landed straight on the curse and launched itself inwards, hollowing the light out, so the curse dissolved in a rain of sparks.

Flint laughed.

Harry danced backwards, not sure what the laughter meant, but ready to go again if he had to.

Flint looked at him and smiled. His face would never be handsome, but Harry had found that it relaxed and looked kinder when he smiled. Harry could see some shadow lift from the corners of his mouth and his eyes.

“You’ll do, Potter. As long as you don’t get overconfident,” Flint added, and sent a curse at Harry that he had never seen before and meant he had to dodge.

But dodging was all right, as long as he didn’t do it all the time. He would get better. He would learn more countercurses. He would be able to protect other people to make sure that none of them died like Cedric.

And of course those people would include Flint.

Harry was aware that he owed Marcus Flint a lot. But he paid his debts. Flint was teaching him to be that kind of person, too.

*

Marcus turned the letter over curiously in his hands. It was from Headmaster Dumbledore, and it wasn’t either a threat of legal action or a rant about how he should surrender Potter to the protection of his “friends,” the way every other letter he had received from a Gryffindor so far was. It was just an invitation to tea.

“Do you know about this, Potter?” Marcus asked, as Potter walked into breakfast, concealing a yawn behind his hand. He had his wand held down at his side, Marcus noted approvingly. He knew that everything could be an attack.

“Know anything about what?”

“This letter from Dumbledore inviting me to tea?”

Potter stared at him with a dropped jaw, and then shook his head and sat down at the table. “No. Why would he do that? What does he think it’s going to gain him?”

“I honestly have no idea,” Marcus murmured. He put the letter down on the table and regarded it again with his chin on his palm.

“Are you—going to go?”

“Well, yeah. As long as you don’t mind missing an hour of training this afternoon.”

“No. I suppose I can read some of those theory books you gave me.”

Marcus blinked, and then realized the source of the misunderstanding. “Not just missing it because I’m not there to train you, Potter. Missing it because you’ll be coming with me.”

Potter stared at him hard, leaning forwards in the chair and resting his elbows on the table. Marcus entertained himself thinking about what his great-aunt Eleanor would have said about that. He was half-tempted to move her portrait into the dining room, but Potter didn’t deserve the scolding. “You would take me with you? Even though he hasn’t invited me?”

“Well, yeah?” Marcus eyed Potter, but the boy didn’t look like he was joking. “Why would you think I wouldn’t?”

Potter laughed shortly and took his elbows off the table to reach for a plate of sausages. “A lot of people wouldn’t. They don’t think I need to know. And Dumbledore didn’t tell me who I really was for the longest time. Not until he had to.”

Marcus shrugged. “Well, that’s stupid. It’s about you, so you should know.”

Potter ducked his head, his cheeks turning so red that he looked like he was bleeding. “Thanks, Flint,” he mumbled.

“And that’s stupid, too. We’re spending all this time together and we’re still calling each other by last names? Call me Marcus.”

Potter stared at him with such wide eyes that Marcus wondered if he felt uncomfortable sharing first names. But before he could open his mouth to take back the offer, Potter cleared his throat softly and said, “Thanks, Marcus. Please call me Harry.”

Marcus nodded, pleased. Now he thought they would make more progress with training, if he knew that he could trust the person he was training, and Harry could trust him.

And he would no longer be reminded of Malfoy’s whiny tone when he blamed Potter for Gryffindor’s Quidditch victories. That was a bonus, too.

*

“Mr. Flint. I see you have brought a guest along.”

Harry stared at Professor Dumbledore as they stepped into the office. Marcus had been granted access to the Floo through the Headmaster’s fireplace, and had told Harry to go first, since he wasn’t sure if the Floo would remain open for Harry if he went first.

Dumbledore’s eyes skipped over Harry as if he wasn’t there and returned to Marcus. Harry clenched his fists.

“This is about me,” he snapped. “I should be here.”

“You have had a traumatic shock and need time to recover,” Dumbledore said, folding his hands on the desk. “And you chose to stay with Mr. Flint instead of one of your friends or your godfather. I must admit I do not know why, Aaron.”

“Don’t call him Aaron, he hates that.” Marcus kicked the chair in front of Dumbledore’s desk over to Harry and Transfigured an empty perch for Fawkes into a chair of his own. He seemed to easily ignore the way Dumbledore was staring at him. “You made him Harry Potter, you can live with the consequences.”

Dumbledore looked back and forth between Harry and Marcus for a moment as though hoping that someone would start to make sense soon. In the end, he shook his head and leaned back, looking exhausted. “What did you want to discuss, Mr. Flint?”

“You’re the one who issued the invitation. I assumed you had something you wanted to discuss.”

“I did, but having Mr. Potter here changes the calculus.”

“Why? You should know that I’m just going to tell him everything later, even if you manage to make him leave.”

Dumbledore shook his head. “Mr. Flint, you are an adult. Have you never heard something you think would be better kept between adults than shared with children?”

Marcus frowned. “I mean, not when it’s about the kid.”

Harry sat up a little in his chair. He didn’t want Marcus to think of him as the kid. “And not when the person who’s talking about it lied a lot,” he said loudly. “Professor, why can’t you just tell me the truth?”

“You will not like it, Harry.”

“I didn’t like hearing that I’m a Squib-born kid with a magical necromantic imprint on me, either! Get it over with.”

Dumbledore stared at him in what seemed to be astonishment, but then nodded and cleared his throat when Harry glared at him some more. “I—there are many people who want to force you to be Aaron Silver. They insist that you not attend Hogwarts using the name Harry Potter. Some of them want you enrolled in first year again, or Sorted again, or both. Some of them are insisting that you cannot use the Potter family vault to buy your school supplies for next year. Others are—well, I cannot tell what they think they will accomplish, but essentially, they are insisting that you should not have appeared in the papers as much as you have and that you pay them back for their time and attention.”

“Bloody fucking ridiculous,” Marcus muttered, before Harry could figure out what he wanted to say.

“Mr. Flint!”

“Oh, come on, surely this office has heard worse,” Marcus said, and waved his hand at the ranks of portraits on the walls, most of which were awake and peering at them. “And it is bloody fucking ridiculous. It deserves the name.”

Harry took a deep breath. He had felt a knot forming in his chest as Dumbledore spoke, but it had eased a little with the way Marcus had sworn. He shot Marcus a grateful smile. Marcus nodded to him, a heavy frown on his face also easing a little.

“So I suppose I should be prepared for, what? Having my vault taken away?”

“No, no. The vault recognized you when you first went to Gringotts, and so did the key, so the necromantic imprint is deep enough for that. And because the original Harry Potter is dead, the goblins would not see it as stealing. But you will have to deal with a tide of poor public opinion.”

Harry thought back to the year just past, and then second year, and then snorted. “I wonder what that’s like.”

“I did want to warn you about it, dear boy.”

“And now you have,” Marcus said, and bounced his foot. “But that isn’t the kind of thing that you would have wanted to discuss just with me and want me to keep secret from Harry?”

Dumbledore sighed, long and slow. “You should be aware that there will be—more than one person who will try to kill or harm you for harboring Harry.”

“Yeah, I know about that. The wards have deal with a few threats already. That’s really it?"

"I would not want to panic Harry—”

“I’m not panicked!”

Dumbledore gave him an indulgent look. “Only because you have not thought about the long-term consequences, my dear boy.”

“What long-term consequences?”

“There will be people who want to harm you for being the child of Squibs or for, as they see it, deceiving them. Your life is likely going to become more difficult socially and emotionally than you are currently prepared for.”

“That’s one reason I’m training him,” Marcus interjected because Harry could decide on what to say. “He’ll be able to fight off any of those bastards who try to curse him.”

“Mr. Potter should certainly not need to—”

“Because relying on the people around me to stop people from gossiping or cursing me or entering me in deadly tournaments has worked so well up until now?”

Dumbledore paused, eyeing Harry uncertainly. Then he sighed and said, “You make a fair point, Harry. But if you curse someone who is trying to curse you, you will still receive detention. Or if you use a curse on someone who is merely talking about you.”

“If he survives because someone was trying to curse him, that’s worth detention,” Marcus said.

Harry grinned at him. “Yeah, it is.”

*

The conversation lasted a few more minutes after that, but to Marcus, none of what the Headmaster said was really that important. Yeah, Harry would have a hard time. They already knew that. Yeah, the Headmaster thought it would be harder because he hadn’t really been writing back to his friends and had only spoken with his godfather. Oh, well. He’d survive it.

Marcus was becoming impressed with just how much Harry could survive.

“Come on,” Marcus said, once they had come out of the Floo back into Hardstone Hall. “Let me show you how to push your magic into basalt and how it feeds you back, since you’ve been doing so well with granite and obsidian.”

Harry smiled up at him, eyes so bright that Marcus was kind of surprised he didn’t have a girlfriend or boyfriend already. “Thanks.”

Well, he probably doesn’t have one because people are stupid and let gossip do their thinking for them, Marcus decided as he followed Harry into the training room. Good thing that I’m not stupid enough for that.

*

“Harry.”

Sirius’s voice was small and exhausted. Harry stood tall and tried to give him the calmest smile he could. “Hi, Sirius.”

“Harry, you’re—still Harry.”

“Yeah?” Harry blinked uncertainly. “You—knew that, didn’t you? This isn’t an illusion that’s going to fade. It’s an imprint that’s sunk into my bones and magic.” Although not his blood, it seemed, not enough to resurrect Voldemort. Harry supposed he would have to ask Professor Dumbledore about that.

“Oh, thank Merlin.”

Sirius lunged forwards and grabbed Harry. He’d been standing by the fireplace since he came through it into Marcus’s sitting room, and now he picked up Harry and spun him in a circle, ignoring the way that Harry kicked and tried to get Sirius to put him down. Then he set Harry on the floor and put his hands on his shoulders.

“I want you to know that I’m still your godfather. No matter what.”

Harry took a deep breath, staring at what looked like tearstains on Sirius’s cheeks. “But you’re still upset that James Potter and his son both died, right?”

“What lives of them, lives in you,” Sirius said. “And you’re still the boy who saved my life from Dementors and wanted to come live with me and wrote to me last year.” He bent down and hugged Harry on the floor this time, so bone-crushing that Harry wriggled a little in his grasp. “I can’t get them back, but I can protect you. And—what does their dying mean, really, if part of them lives on?”

“Just the way I look?”

“It goes deeper than that, and you know it. You had to grow up with Harry Potter’s maternal relatives. You had to face Harry Potter’s greatest enemy.”

Harry nodded slowly. He hadn’t really thought about it like that. He just knew that he was Harry and he clung to that. He’d thought Sirius would take it worse.

“Remus?” he had to ask. Remus had written him one letter, which was mostly rambling and confused, and he hadn’t spoken to Harry through the Floo like Sirius had to set up this visit.

Sirius snorted. “Remus is too philosophical.”

“Huh?”

“He gets hung up on definitions of reality.” Sirius ran his hand gently through Harry’s hair. “Are you really Harry if you smell like Harry and look like Harry and thought you were Harry for thirteen years but were born to someone else? He doesn’t know. Until he works it out to his own satisfaction, he’ll find it hard to be with you.”

“Oh.” Harry drooped a bit.

Sirius hugged him one-armed. “I think he’ll come around. At least some of it is delayed grief for Lily and James.” He looked around the mostly bare, stone sitting room with interest. “So this is Hardstone Hall, huh?”

“Yeah, you know about it?”

“Oh, yeah. There was a Flint a few years above me, probably this one’s cousin. It was a standing challenge to try and get invited over so that you could study the wards from the inside and maybe build the same kind of sturdy ones around your own house.” Sirius nudged Harry towards the door with his elbow. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

Harry relaxed. He had been pretty sure that Marcus was telling him the truth about the wards, but it was nice to have outside confirmation.

“Come on, then, this is the way to the kitchens. Just don’t be disappointed if the food isn’t as good as Hogwarts’s. Marcus doesn’t have any house-elves, so he does all the cooking himself.”

“He what?”

*

“Flint.”

Sirius Black was trying his best to scowl intimidatingly as he reached out to squeeze Marcus’s fingers, but Marcus just snorted and shook his hand normally. Black was too scrawny to really make the threat stick.

Harry still got in between his godfather and Marcus as if he thought that he would have to prevent them from cursing each other, glancing back and forth with a bit of nervousness. “Sirius wants to join us for breakfast.”

“That’s fine, as long as he doesn’t need any fancy elf-made fare.”

“I lived in a cave for a year and ate rats, Flint, what does that tell you?”

“That you have no sense of taste?”

Harry coughed in a way that seemed to be trying to muffle his laughter as he escorted Black to a chair. “Here, Sirius, why don’t you sit here? I’ll sit opposite Marcus.”

“Why do you call him Marcus?”

“Because that’s his name?”

Now Marcus was the one having to cough to muffle his laughter as he saw Black’s constipated look. As long as Harry continued being himself and Black continued acting like a puppy whose nose had been slapped, they would get along famously.

*

Harry came slowly back to himself. He could hear shouting somewhere in the distance, but it didn’t seem important. Not as important as his own disappointment that he hadn’t managed to eat Marcus’s Bone-Breaking Curse with his own counter all the way through. He had stopped some of the concussive impact, so it hadn’t broken any bones, but it had still sent Harry sprawling to the floor and knocked him out. In a real fight, as Marcus was fond of telling him so often, he would be dead.

Sighing, Harry raised his head and then froze, staring with an open mouth at Sirius. He was currently hanging in what seemed to be almost invisible strands of webbing projecting from the ceiling, suspending him above the floor. Marcus stood in front of him with his wand resting along his arm and a bored look on his face.

“Uh, Sirius, Marcus, is everything all right?” Harry asked slowly, standing up and wobbling towards them. Marcus glanced at Harry and flicked his wand, healing a twisted ankle Harry hadn’t realized was causing him to walk funny. Harry nodded his thanks, looking uncertainly at Sirius.

“He knocked you unconscious!” Sirius was baring his teeth as if he would like nothing more than to turn into a dog and lunge at Marcus, knocking him over and ripping his throat out.

Harry sighed. “Sirius, he didn’t hurt me—”

“He knocked you unconscious! Of course he hurt you!”

“No, he just didn’t anticipate that I wouldn’t manage to eat the whole curse with my countercurse—”

“It’s ridiculous to teach a fourteen-year-old curses and countercurses like this! Ridiculous!”

“Hey, I’m fifteen tomorrow—”

“This is the kind of thing he needs to know to survive, Black,” Marcus interrupted, his voice calm and so grey that Harry thought it was as if one of the stones in the training room had opened its mouth to speak. “You can gasp and hide your head from the truth all you like, but this is what he needs. Death Eaters won’t go easy on him. The Dark Lord won’t, if he ever gets a body back. And depending on what the Dark Lord does with or without a body, Harry here might also need to hunt him down and deal with cursed objects or curses on the places he’s hiding. So this is the best training he can receive.”

“He’s a child!”

“People have told me that’s a reason not to talk to me,” Harry interrupted, and Sirius spun around in the tangled net, pawing at the air, to look at him. “I don’t want to hear it from you, Sirius. I want to survive, and that means studying with Marcus and learning to cast certain curses. And exercising. I’m already stronger and faster than I was at the start of summer.”

“I never wanted this for you,” Sirius whispered, sounding grieved.

“Yeah, but it’s the lot he has,” Marcus said. “Are you really going to try to keep him from training, Black? When he needs it, and loves it?”

Harry nodded, but he cast Marcus a startled glance that he didn’t think Marcus noticed, with the way he was looking at Sirius. Harry never would have thought to hear Marcus say that he loved battle training. Maybe not even notice that Harry did.

“You don’t know he needs it. If his blood couldn’t resurrect You-Know-Who…”

“Yeah, Black, tell me that the Dark Lord would give up trying to punish someone who defeated him as a toddler.”

“Harry didn’t!”

“But he might as well have. And there’s all the other defeats along the way. Even not letting the Dark Lord use his blood for the resurrection in the graveyard could be seen as a defeat.” Marcus slid his finger up his wand, watching Sirius intently. “Come on, I’ve only known you a few hours, and I know you’re smarter than that.”

After a long, long moment, Sirius bowed his head and exhaled a quiet breath. It sounded almost like a growl. “Yes, all right.”

“Thanks, Sirius,” Harry said, with a small smile at him, and turned to face Marcus. “What was wrong with the counter I cast?”

“You didn’t put enough strength behind it. You have to blast it with all your power to make sure you get the whole curse.”

“I should use more power? But it feels like I’ll blow something up!”

Marcus’s face transformed when he laughed. He wasn’t less ugly, exactly, but he looked as though he was laughing with his whole body. Harry stared with his mouth a little open, then became aware of Sirius watching him with a weird expression, and slammed his mouth shut. “Yes, you have to use more power. Let’s try it again.”

Harry fell back opposite Marcus and raised his wand. Marcus backed up one more step and raised his.

“Uh, Marcus, aren’t you going to release Sirius from the web?”

“Nah. He would get in the way.”

Harry opened his mouth to argue that, and then Marcus flung another Bone-Breaker at him, hard enough that Harry retaliated with a more powerful counter without thinking about it. Marcus went flying across the training ring and slammed to a halt on the ground, deathly still.

“Marcus!”

Harry sprinted across the floor, ignoring the way that Sirius was struggling and swearing in his web. He fell to his knees beside Marcus, wincing and cursing when he saw the large bruise forming on his temple. He had no idea how to heal a concussion. He’d only been drilling in curses and tests of strength—

A hand reached up and curled around his wrist. Harry paused and blinked down at Marcus’s eyes, which were opening. They didn’t look glazed or anything, at least with anything beyond pain.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

Marcus’s voice was deep, and his hand flexed on Harry’s wrist in a hold that made Harry grin back at Marcus, as dizzy as Marcus seemed to be feeling when he got up, judging by the way that he reached out to grasp at the wall. Harry sat back with a little shudder, and Marcus nodded.

“I have a concussion, but I have potions for that, don’t worry.”

“Good. I don’t want anything to hurt you.”

Marcus paused to stare at him. Harry stared back, in turn, feeling himself flush. He was glad Marcus was okay, and he would have liked to move forwards and spread his fingers across Marcus’s forehead, and he didn’t know why.

Marcus averted his eyes and went to pick up a vial of potion sitting on a rock ledge against the wall that Harry had never paid attention to, while Sirius threatened Marcus with bodily harm if he wasn’t let out of this web right now. Marcus did glance once back at Harry, and the look in his eyes made Harry flush harder and look down.

Yeah, I want him to look at me like that, too.