lomonaaeren

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Part Four

“What did the letter say?”

Harry started and turned around from where he’d been casting curses at a twisted mass of obsidian that had risen out of the floor. He wiped his arm across his forehead. “I didn’t hear you come in, Marcus.”

“Yeah, that’s obvious,” Marcus said, and watched as Harry flushed. “I still want to know what the letter said.”

“It’s not a Howler, isn’t that enough?”

“No. Not when it made you this upset.”

Harry closed his eyes for a second and leaned his forehead against the shelf standing next to him, which Marcus had moved into the battle room, filled with potions he’d bought in Diagon Alley, and warded when he realized how often Harry needed healing right away. “I just…Marcus, I don’t…”

“I know you don’t. I still need you to tell me what the letter said.”

Harry muttered something and reached into the pocket of his robes, pulling out a crumpled sheet of parchment. He thrust it towards Marcus and whirled around to being casting curses again.

He’d been doing that all morning. That was all right. Marcus would intervene soon enough. In the meantime, he unfolded the parchment.

Dear Harry,

I know that you were shocked to find out your real name is Aaron Silver. We were, too. But enough is enough. We really need to talk to you and sort this out.

If Flint won’t let you out of the house, that’s a bad sign. Come on and sneak out and meet us in Diagon Alley at the Leaky Cauldron. My mum will let us go meet you as long as we can bring you back with us. You’ll be more comfortable in the Burrow anyway.

Your best mate,
Ron.

Marcus crumpled up the letter again, glaring at it. Then he decided that wasn’t enough and tore it up so that little bits of parchment flew everywhere.

“Hey. That was my letter.”

Marcus looked up to find Harry’s eyes locked on the bits that were fluttering everywhere. He grunted. “Sorry.”

“You’re not. Don’t lie to me.”

Harry’s voice was tired. Marcus took a step forwards and pressed his hand down on Harry’s shoulder. “Fine. I’m not sorry and I’d like to hang Weasley upside-down and hit him with every hex to cause itching and boils I know. Does that help?”

Harry stared at him with a slightly open mouth. Marcus drank in the sight of his flushed cheeks and wide eyes. Had no one else ever seen him this way? Marcus thought not, or Harry wouldn’t only have two best friends and no one to date.

“But why?” Harry whispered.

“Because he’s an idiot. And a prat. Acting as though you should just come to the Burrow when you didn’t want to? Acting as though your real name is the one you’ve never gone by and don’t want to go by and had no choice about having stolen from you? He’s a prat.”

Harry blinked a little. Then he smiled. “You’re the only one who would see it that way.”

“The rest of your friends are prats, too. Also idiots.” Marcus thought about it and then added, “Maybe not Black. But the rest of them.”

“I really should write Ron back, so that he doesn’t think I’m being held against my will or something.”

Marcus grunted. “And he would believe you? He would accept any excuse for staying here instead of going to a Gryffindor’s? I don’t think that he would. I won’t tolerate him writing you more letters that make you upset.”

Harry wavered for a second. Then he said, “Let me write him one letter, and then you can set up the wards so that all the other letters he sends will go to a—can you just make them pile up in the Owlery or something? So I can read them when I’m ready?”

“All right,” Marcus said. He would have preferred to set the wards to burn them, but it was Harry’s decision. “In the meantime, come on. You need lunch.”

“It’s only ten o’clock.”

“And you’ve been casting curses without a break since eight. We’re going to go and have lunch, and then you can do something that’s less strenuous for the afternoon, like reading theory.”

Harry was giving him an odd look. Marcus tilted his eyebrows up. Harry cleared his throat and said, “I thought you would want me practicing spells at all hours of the day to save you from Voldemort.”

“You’re no good to me if you’re exhausted and collapse early on,” Marcus said, puzzled. “And you should rest and eat and do all that shit because it’s what anyone should do. Do you think that—you shouldn’t, for some reason?”

“I have to be better than this.”

“You’re fifteen,” Marcus said, and smiled a little. He had tried to give Harry a few hours off for his birthday, but Harry had just slept in an hour later and seemed a bit bewildered by the pie Marcus had made him. Marcus was pants at cakes, but he could do pies. “You have time to grow and train.”

“Not once I’m back at Hogwarts for the autumn.”

“Why not?”

“I won’t be able to spend as much time training, and there’s no place in Hogwarts like the battle room—”

“I used to hear rumors from the house-elves of a place that could do whatever you wanted. You could probably make it into a replace of the battle room, or at least one fairly similar. Ask them.” Marcus turned and herded Harry to the door before he could change his mind and start training again. “And now, come on. Eat. I won’t let you back in here until you do.”

Harry leaned against his side for a second, making Marcus pause and look down at him. “What? Did you get injured earlier and not tell me about it? You know that I told you—”

“Not that. Just—thanks, Marcus.”

“For what?”

“For being here. For looking after me. For giving me shelter and making sure that I don’t need to answer anyone’s questions before I’m ready. For…” Harry waved his hand vaguely as if trying to encompass several rooms of Hardstone Hall in the same gesture. “For being you. I suppose that’s what I wanted to say.”

Marcus swallowed thickly and nodded. “You’re welcome, Harry. Now, come on. You need some food in you before you cast one more spell.”

Harry smiled at him again, and slipped out into the corridor ahead of him, leaving Marcus to wonder at what that smile did to him.

*

“You’re ready this time?”

Harry looked at Marcus in the mirror. They had spent several days discussing the latest letter from Hermione, who was a little calmer than Ron but still seemed ready to have a tantrum at the idea that Harry wouldn’t visit them. And the thing was, Harry did want to see his friends. He just didn’t want their anger and he didn’t want their pity, and based on their letters so far, that seemed to be the likeliest things they would give him.

“Yeah.” Harry turned his hand so that the pebble made into a Portkey Marcus had given him was visible, strung on a slim black cord around Harry’s wrist. “Use this if it gets too much.”

“And after an hour, it activates anyway. And it activates if you get upset enough. And if anyone else touches you and tries to Apparate you elsewhere or force you into the Floo. And—”

“Yeah. It’ll keep me safe.” Harry touched the pebble, which Marcus had told him came from the walls of Hardstone Hall, with a kind of wonder. No one else had ever given him a gift like this.

He had wondered if he would be able to use the Portkey, after the one that had kidnapped him and taken him to the graveyard. But it had turned out to be easy. Marcus was just so different from anyone Harry had ever known, making promises and following up on them. Sometimes other people had been prevented from following them up, like Sirius, but still. It was different.

“It will.” Marcus’s hands settled on Harry’s shoulders and squeezed, once. “Remember that you matter, too. They’re upset, but you have more right to be upset, and you don’t have to let them yell at you.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Good.” Marcus squeezed once more, so hard that Harry could still feel that pressure on his shoulders as he went through the Floo to the Leaky Cauldron. He straightened up and winced as a few people turned to look at him, but Marcus had layered the illusions over Harry until he looked several years older. He was pretty sure no one else would recognize him.

Including Ron and Hermione, sitting at a table near the fireplace and exchanging nervous glances with each other every few seconds. Harry swallowed and walked towards them, coughing when they just looked at him and then away.

“Hey, you lot.”

“Harry!”

“Aaron!”

Harry couldn’t hide how he flinched, even as Hermione jumped up and wrapped her arms around him. “Don’t call me that,” he said, and winced a little at the look on Ron’s face as he sat down across the table from his best mate.

“Why not? It’s your name.”

“No, it used to be my name. The imprint I’m wearing isn’t ever going to fade and leave me looking the way I would have looked.” Instinctively, Harry raised his wand to raise some of the privacy spells Marcus had shown him around the table. They weren’t subtle and would repel people who tried to listen in physically, but at the moment, Harry didn’t care about that. He had the Portkey so he could escape. “My name is Harry.”

Ron and Hermione exchanged another glance. Then Ron said gently, “But don’t you want to try and figure out what you did look like? Who your real family was?”

“Dumbledore—”

“Professor Dumbledore—”

“Be quiet, Hermione,” Harry snapped, and ignored the way she flinched back from him, eyes wide. “No, I don’t need to call him that when he messed up my life. But he did tell me that the Silvers basically had no family left, especially since they were both Squibs and no magical family members would want to claim them. I believe him.”

“Don’t tell Hermione to be quiet, mate!”

“Don’t act like you’re the ones with the major right to be upset, Ron.”

Ron stared at him with his mouth slightly open instead of yelling the way Harry had thought he would. Hermione was the one who whispered, “Why is he changing you, Harry? Why are you letting Flint change you?”

“He’s the one who pointed out that you would be upset, but I’m the one who has the right to be upset.” Harry leaned back further in his chair and let his fingers rest for a moment on the pebble Portkey. “My life has been upended. I wasn’t lying to you about being Aaron Silver. I didn’t know I was born that way myself. I can see why it would surprise you, but you don’t get to lecture me and get angry about it when I’m the one it happened to!”

There was a moment of silence, with both Ron and Hermione staring at him with huge eyes. Harry leaned back and closed his own eyes and meditated a bit to try to get rid of the anger. If he was too upset, the Portkey would take him back to Hardstone Hall, and right now, he wasn’t ready for that.

“We weren’t angry,” Hermione finally said in a small voice.

“You sounded angry in your letters. You sounded angry now when you accused Marcus of changing me.”

“Since when do you call him Marcus?”

“Since he helped me and took me home and started training me in casting curses.”

“Harry, you don’t need to learn how to cast curses. You-Know-Who doesn’t even have a body yet!”

Harry took a breath that seemed to drag all across his lungs. He leaned back in his chair and looked at his friends. They looked back at him—concerned, but not frightened. Neither of them had been in that graveyard. Neither of them called Voldemort by his first name. Neither of them had been told they weren’t who they thought they were.

Harry would just have to be patient with them. He felt a lot older than they were. He didn’t have to get upset with them all the time, but he also didn’t need to just agree to everything they said, because they didn’t know his situation.

That calmed him down. Harry reached for a mug of butterbeer sitting on the table and said, “I do need to learn how to fight. Marcus is teaching me how to do that.”

“But if you needed to learn how to fight, Professor Dumbledore would have taught you!”

“You’d think he would also have got me out of the Tournament this year, but he didn’t.”

“Are you sure that you should be trusting Flint?” Ron asked, a little more nervous than Harry thought he would have been before. “I’m not saying that he’s a Death Eater, or a terrible person just because he was a Slytherin. But he might want all sorts of things that you don’t know about and that he gets by training you in curses.”

“Like what?”

“I—don’t know. But he must want something. What did he say he gets from training you?”

“He gets a savior.” Harry laughed a little at the expression on Ron’s face. “He was panicked when he realized that I wasn’t born Harry Potter and so Voldemort might not have someone to oppose him after all. He doesn’t want to be a Death Eater, and he doesn’t want to fight Voldemort himself. So he’s training me.”

“That’s—barbaric.”

“Interesting word, Hermione.” Harry turned towards her and tried to sound the way Marcus had when explaining one of the letters Harry had got to him. “Why would you say that?”

“Because he’s intending to sacrifice you on this altar of fighting for him! He doesn’t want to fight You-Know-Who himself! He—”

“You mean, like almost every other wizard in Britain?”

Hermione stared at him. Ron stared at him.

Harry leaned back and shook his head. “Marcus is different from all of them. He’s teaching me how to fight. He might not want to fight himself, or think he could win if he did, but at least he’s arming me.”

Hermione didn’t seem to know what to say. Ron looked at her, looked at Harry, and then cleared his throat. “Okay. So—you don’t think you’re doing this just because you’re not Harry?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t think that you ran away and started to live with an older Slytherin you barely know and started training to cast curses because you were in such shock over really being Aaron Silver? It’s really something you want to do and not just a way of hiding from your past?”

Harry snorted, amused despite himself at the way Ron had put things. “I think that I have the right to hide if I want to,” he said. “It was a pretty extreme shock.”

“But Harry, you need to face it, talk about it, maybe start going by Aaron—”

“I don’t bloody want to, Hermione!”

“It would be healthier—”

“Don’t tell me what’s fucking healthy for me!”

Harry didn’t get to hear what either Ron or Hermione said next, because he disappeared into swirling Portkey colors and appeared, staggering, in the Floo room of Hardstone Hall where Sirius had come through. Marcus rushed in the next second, his wand drawn.

He stopped when he saw Harry, and blinked at him, then frowned. “They said something stupid, didn’t they?”

“Yeah,” Harry said, and shook his head, trying to let the anger drain away. “That I should face my past and go by Aaron and not hide from the shock.”

“That was stupid.”

“You already said that.”

Marcus grunted a little. “I did, didn’t I?” He spent a moment considering Harry’s face. “You want to go train?”

Grateful that Marcus understood what he really needed, rather than to talk or take on a name that would never feel like his, Harry nodded fervently.

*

Harry stood in the middle of the battle room, his wand clenched in his hand and his eyes clenched on the far wall. “Ready,” he said softly.

Marcus nodded and took a step back. In truth, he was a little uncertain that Harry was ready to handle this feature of the battle room, but he wouldn’t know unless they began and Harry got badly injured.

If he did, well, they would stop, Marcus would heal him with one of those potions he had got from Diagon Alley, and they would continue stepping up the training so that someday Harry would be ready.

“Release,” Marcus said, making sure to deepen his voice and stress the second syllable of the word, the way his father had taught him.

The wall vibrated and rippled as though part of it had turned to water, and then a heavy stone warrior in the likeness of a Flint ancestor stepped out. It bore no wand, but its fists would allow it to cast certain battle curses, and it was heavy enough to make a formidable opponent.

Harry’s eyes narrowed, and he danced lightly to the side. The stone warrior pivoted to face him, and then snapped its hand forwards. The red light of a Blasting Curse had already begun to gather around the fingers.

“Begin,” Harry whispered.

Although he had no power to command the Flint ancestors, the Blasting Curse streamed forwards in apparent response. Harry ran towards the stone warrior, his wand rising and the countercurse leaving his lips.

Marcus sucked in a harsh breath as Harry’s counter ate the Blasting Curse up to the last particles of light and then went flying further, piercing the stone warrior. It stopped, rocking in place, and cracks spread all over the rock that made it up.

That is not a curse I taught him!

It wasn’t, and Marcus stood watching in fascination as the cracks spread further and further, joined together like cracks in a mirror, and then exploded. The warrior still stood when they had finished, but most of its chest was gone, blasted away.

The rest of the duel went on, Harry eating the warrior’s curses with countercurses and finally disintegrating it with a huge splash of acid. Marcus looked down on the dust that was all that was left of one of the battle room’s most powerful weapons, and shook his head.

“What?” Harry asked anxiously. Marcus looked up and saw Harry walking towards him, bouncing his wand on his hand. “Did I do something wrong?”

“You turned your countercurse into a Blasting Curse itself, and blew apart the warrior’s chest with it.”

“Yes? One of the books that you gave me had that theory in it. It said all you needed was to really think about changing the countercurse into a curse and will it to happen.”

“I just didn’t think you’d be able to do it.”

Harry relaxed and smiled a little. “But I did it right? Turning a defensive countercurse into an offensive curse?”

“Yes.”

Harry jerked his head up. Marcus wondered why for a moment, and then heard, like an echo in his ears, the deepened sound of his own voice. Harry’s eyes, lingering on him, were darker than normal. He licked his lips.

Marcus moved a step forwards.

He thought he might scare Harry, or at least startle him. But Harry stood there staring at him, and didn’t move.

Marcus reached out. He cupped Harry’s shoulder and dragged him closer. Harry stumbled a little, but followed the movement, his head tilted back and his throat bobbing as he stared up at Marcus.

Marcus didn’t entirely know what he was going to do next, and then he did. It was as if the movements had already been written, on the air or in the stars like destiny or some shit. He’d never seen them in his Divination training, but he knew.

He bent down, and Harry was there to meet him, head lifting fearlessly.

Marcus kissed Harry, the bravest person he knew and the most effective fighter and the one who would be great someday and save Britain and the world and him, and things slowed down and made sense. He’d struggled so hard in life: to pass his exams in Hogwarts, to survive on his own with his father in St. Mungo’s, to make a life for himself mostly alone. Little had ever made sense except on the Quidditch pitch.

This. This made sense. Which meant Marcus would fight to keep it, with all that he had.

*

Harry touched his lips and smiled at himself in the mirror. It was half an hour after Marcus had kissed him for the first time, and he thought he should look more different than he had, have a different eye color or walk with a different stride, maybe.

But he was still Harry, still himself, in the mirror. The only thing that had changed was the flush in his cheeks and the knowledge of what it felt like to kiss someone else.

Maybe that’s enough.

Harry leaned back and, for the first time since Dumbledore had told him the truth about who he’d been born as, really considered himself. His messy dark hair that everyone had said was inherited from his father and his green eyes everyone said came from his mum. The lightning bolt scar and his pale skin. The scar from the basilisk on his arm when he lifted his shirt to look at it.

Some of that wasn’t really his, he thought. The eyes and the hair were stolen, in a way. The skin color too, probably. The lightning bolt scar, definitely. The scar from the basilisk was maybe the only thing that anyone would say was truly his.

But Sirius didn’t think that way, and Marcus didn’t think that way.

It meant that Harry didn’t have to think that way, either.

He smiled, let his shirt sleeve fall, stood up, and went to find Marcus.