Chapter Forty-Two of 'Leopard's Choice'- The Flame-Lit Path

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Forty-Two—The Flame-Lit Path

He can’t keep the days separate anymore, or the classes, or the corridors.

Theo knows that, and hates it, even if he can’t remember all the things he’s losing. But the thing at the core of him, the thing he will forget last, even after his name and his devotion to Harry, is his intense pride. He hates being helped, the way that Blaise or Harry or Daphne have to linger near and whisper directions when they’re heading to some place as simple as the Great Hall or the Transfiguration classroom.

He always remembers the names and directions after they speak them. But then they vanish again into the cracks in his mind and soul, like fish disappearing in polluted water.

Theo cannot live like this. Even when he doesn’t remember exactly what happened five minutes ago, the knowledge of what caused it is burning in him like a hot coal, next to the pride and the name and the loyalty to Harry.

He will end it before it gets too bad. He promises himself that, and he thinks that Harry will understand when Theo tells him.

He will not forget this plan.

*

Sirius balls his hands into fists and paces back and forth in front of the fireplace, swearing. It’s the same thing he’s done after his last three conversations with Snape. He just doesn’t know what to do to keep Theo Nott from dying or his godson from breaking apart under the pressure to save him.

There is no way to save him. Not from the Soul-Breaker. But Sirius thinks Harry’s mind might break under that knowledge.

“Sirius?”

Remus is behind him in the doorway of the sitting room. Sirius turns and flings himself into his friend’s arms without a pause. Remus staggers, but catches himself with the immense strength of a werewolf, and holds him while Sirius struggles with his own burning eyes. They burn with something worse than tears. Tears would be a relief.

“I don’t know what to do,” Sirius whispers finally. “I’m Harry’s godfather. I’m supposed to fix his problems. But I don’t know how to do this! I don’t know how to make him see that he can’t do anything, either, or how to help him survive it if he loses his friend.”

Remus takes a sharp breath. “You think Harry might try to hurt himself? Kill himself?”

Sirius admires the steadiness of Remus’s voice. The very words make a vast recoiling sensation pass through him, and he clings harder to Remus. “I don’t know,” he whispers. “I don’t know what he might do. But it’ll break something inside of him, and he’ll never be the same.”

“Is there any possibility that we could learn some counter to the Soul-Breaker? That there might be something out there that would give Harry peace?”

“I’ve never heard of any,” Sirius says wearily, and makes himself pull away from Remus. “And my mother liked to talk about the Darkest of Arts. I know what the Soul-Breaker does, in detail. She used to threaten to cast it on me. I’m certain there’s no counter except the potion the caster has to brew, or she would have mentioned it, if only to tell me how unlikely it was that I could perform it.”

“We have a whole library—”

“I got rid of a lot of the Darkest books last year, Remus.”

Remus pauses. Then he says slowly, “We have another resource.”

“What? Who?” Harry is the most important thing in Sirius’s life. Sirius will do whatever he must, deal with whoever he must, to save Theo Nott and thus save Harry and his sense of self. Even Hecuba Selwyn.

“Bellatrix.”

Sirius knows his mouth is flapping open, but all he can do is gape at Remus. He tries to force words out of his mouth, and they make no sound.

“Hear me out.” Remus spreads his hands out in front of him. “I hate the thought of bargaining with her as much as you do—maybe even a little more. I met her on the battlefield more than once during the war, and she tried to kill me specifically because I was a werewolf. She’s the one who tortured me after that raid James and I were on—”

“What? You never told me that!”

“Because I thought you would want to hunt her down and kill her, and that was too dangerous—”

“I was plenty dangerous, too!”

“Sirius, can we concentrate on what matters here?”

Harry. Right. Sirius closes his eyes and forces himself to nod. “All right. So you hate her nearly as much as I do. Why do you think she could help with something like this? I don’t think that Bella ever studied the books in the Black library more intensely than I did. She didn’t grow up here.”

“No, but she specialized in the Dark Arts,” Remus says quietly. “So she might know a—another way to brew that potion we need to stop the Soul-Breaker. Or even, though I shudder to say it, another curse we could cast on Mr. Nott that would counter the Soul-Breaker. I think that Harry shouldn’t know about this yet. He’ll either pin too much hope on it and be devastated if we fail, or he’ll drive himself into studying this instead of the material for his classes. He’s already doing that with whatever he’s doing right now to try to save Nott.”

“I thought that from his letters, but—”

“I got an owl from Hermione. She’s sure of it.”

Sirius winces at the thought of keeping this secret from Harry, but it’s true that Sirius doesn’t want to see Harry either obsessive or desperately hoping. He ends up nodding. “But we do this as well as we can, Remus. I don’t want to release Bellatrix from her confinement for any reason other than that. We prepare.”

“Of course.” Remus gives him a relieved smile. “We set up some kind of enclosure for her so that she can’t escape from it, and we brew Veritaserum.”

“Or we brew a Punishment Potion.”

“Sirius.”

“I’m willing to do whatever I have to, Remus.”

Remus stares at him. Sirius stares back. Yes, he knows the Punishment Potion is only one step up from the Imperius Curse. Technically it leaves the drinker free will, but in reality, it punishes them with pain every time they try to act against the brewer’s orders.

It doesn’t matter. Sirius will do it. This is his godson they’re talking about, and his godson’s best friend.

“I—I can’t—”

“Consent to that? Do you know what will happen to Nott if we don’t do it? Do you remember Nott living here this summer, Remus? Do you remember that his father already abandoned him?”

Sirius uses the words like hammers, and sees how Remus shatters under them. Part of him aches, hating to do this, but…

This is the way it has to go. It must. Because Harry will shatter himself under the burden, and Harry is more innocent than either Sirius or Remus, and more important to Sirius than either one of them.

Remus takes a deep breath. “At least say that you’ll have Severus brew it.”

Sirius nods at once. He doesn’t think that his own skill is up to the Punishment Potion, and it’s important that everything be perfect. And although it will hurt Severus to keep a secret from Harry, he’s done it before.

And the man is breaking himself, under his inability to help Harry.

“Let’s do it, then.”

Remus half-smiles. It’s what Sirius said before so many of their pranks in Hogwarts. “Let’s.”

*

“Well, Potter? Have you thought about how the deaths will be your fault?”

Harry halts. Lion, on his shoulder, flutters his wings in agitation. But it’s more than that, and more than the fact that he must have wandered into Gryffindor territory without realizing it and this is Romilda Vane’s voice, that makes Harry halt.

The deaths will be your fault.

The way the words bounced around inside his head. The way he seemed to hear them, not just remember them. The way that they seemed to shave off little bits of his brain.

He turns around and stares at Vane, who’s standing a few meters away from him, her face flushed and her arms folded as if she’s trying to stop herself from reaching for her wand. Harry says slowly, “So is it the Vane family Gift to make someone remember the words that you say to them? As if you were standing in their brain and reciting them?”

Vane goes purplish-pale. She edges backwards, but stops when Harry levels his wand at her. Harry doesn’t remember drawing it. He’s barely thinking of how bad this will look, if he curses a girl who wanted him expelled. His heartbeat in his ears is too loud for anything else than his realization.

“You couldn’t get me expelled. So you decided that you would drive me mad.”

“It’s not—it’s not like that! I was trying to make you th-think—”

“You made me think. You made me think so much that I’ve driven myself mad sometimes.”

Harry wonders for a moment whether Vane’s magic is the reason that he’s driving himself mad over Theo, too, but he discards that idea after a moment. No, he would be doing that regardless. Theo is special, he’s important, and Harry will rescue him and not have him die, the way Chaos did.

But Vane’s magic might have made it worse.

“It’s n-not—” Vane trips as she scrambles backwards and barely catches herself against the wall of the corridor. Her eyes are so wide that they look as if they’re about to swallow her face.

“You haven’t denied that it’s a Gift. You haven’t denied that you targeted me deliberately.” Harry feels something smoldering under the surface of his temper, something that rises towards the surface of his mind and beats huge, lazy wings. It feels like he might have become part dragon himself. Lion’s hissing is a distant, soft thing. “You were trying to hurt me.”

“It was just to make you think! Why can’t you go away?”

“I wonder if you should do the same thing.”

Harry reaches out with his magic. It’s not a spell, because it’s not going through his wand. It’s more like turning and opening a secret door that he never realized was there in the wall of the castle. Suddenly his intent and his rage are focused, and they lunge through the door like Chaos lunging at someone, and the air all around him bursts into fire.

Black fire.

Vane gives a high, thin, pathetic scream. Harry realizes Lion has stopped hissing and retracted his head, coiling tightly around Harry’s throat.

She isn’t scared of Lion. She’s scared of Harry.

Harry smiles, and the black fire spreads out around him. Part of him thought it would be cold, but it’s warm. It rises and dances around his cheeks and chest, nipping at him briefly, but it’s more like standing in shade when the sun’s out than getting burned.

The obsidian tendrils extend towards Vane and wrap around her.

Her scream is high, shrill, piercing. Harry lifts his wand and flicks it, raising wards to keep in the sound in almost without thinking through what he’s doing.

Almost without thinking through what he’s doing. Because the main thought in his mind at the moment is that he can’t be found, because they would make him stop.

The flames don’t actually touch Vane, that Harry can see. For a moment, he suffers a stab of intense disappointment hotter than they are. But then he sees what’s happening to Vane where the shadow of the flame glides over her, and his breath catches.

Where that shadow passes, her flesh dies.

Or at least it looks like it. When the shadow sways and turns away again, Vane looks as healthy—and as afraid—as ever. But in the shadow itself, her flesh looks bruised and worse than purple-pale. It looks rotting. It looks ready to slough off.

Harry stares, enchanted. He’s sure he’s seeing the Potter family Gift really in operation for the first time, and it’s not necromancy, it’s not cold, but it might do what he needs it to do. And that will be enough.

Vane gives a low whimper, and Harry raises his eyes back to her face. She’s trying to slip off to the side, as if assuming that he’ll forget about her if she can melt into the shadows, but she freezes at the sight of him and stares.

“I won’t kill you,” Harry says. He doesn’t have anyone with him this time who could hide her body the way they hid Pettigrew’s. But it doesn’t matter. He flicks his wand and smiles as he watches the hot black flames rise from every part of his body this time, including the wand-tip. “I’ll just use you for practice.”

“I’ll tell! I’ll tell!”

“You think that matters to me right now?” Harry asks. “And you think that you would live past the day that you told someone?”

Obviously the second threat makes the greater impact on Vane. That’s all right. Harry moves a step forwards and stirs his wand through the air in a large whirlpool-like motion. He doesn’t know for sure what will happen, but he’s curious.

The flames surge up and then drape themselves around Vane. She whimpers again, though this time it’s more like a sob, but she stands still as the flames once again cast her in their shadow and make her look like she’s rotting away.

Harry understands, now, some of the reasons that he went wrong with Lyassa’s training. He doesn’t have the cold temperament that’s supposed to be good for necromancy, she’s right.

But with the Potter family Gift, he hardly needs it. He can work through fire.

He studies the shadow one more time, making sure that he understands the edges of the flame and the tricks of the way they dance, and then he snaps his wand forwards and makes them wrap around Vane and actually touch her skin.

It’s a fucking revelation.

Suddenly a patch of awareness blossoms in Harry’s mind, and he’s sure it’s connected to the patch of Vane’s skin that the flames are touching. He can manipulate that flesh. He can make it darken and turn livid, or become healthy, or scar, or—

Go.

Vane screams aloud as her flesh simply turns to liquid and cascades off the bone. Harry smiles thinly. It’s a good thing he has those anti-sound wards up.

Lion raises his head and flicks out his tongue. Harry looks at him in curiosity, wondering if the little snake is going to object to Harry using his Gift the way he did to Harry’s plan to learn necromancy.

But Lion says only, “This is part of you. This is right.” He doesn’t sound enthusiastic, but he doesn’t need to be. Harry doesn’t want to hurt Lion, and he could betray what Harry’s doing to other people even though they don’t speak Parseltongue.

But it sounds as though he’ll support Harry instead.

Good.

Harry experiments some more. He can affect other patches of Vane’s skin in much the same way, and when he removes the skin, then he can do it with muscle and bone, too. When he wants to, the disgusting flesh on the floor even slurps upwards and reattaches itself to Vane’s arm, becoming whole and fresh again in a moment.

Which means that Harry ought to be able to manipulate another body the same way.

His friends still have Pettigrew’s corpse hidden away.

And if he can manipulate the body to brew the cure…

Maybe it will count. Maybe it will work. Maybe it will mean that he doesn’t have to learn regular necromancy.

“Stop. Please stop.”

With a start, Harry snaps back to himself. He realizes that Vane seems to have been whispering those words for a while and he hasn’t noticed. He shakes his head and steps back from her. The moment he stops concentrating, the black flames vanish, and all the skin and flesh on her arms looks normal.

Maybe it is. Maybe he really has to concentrate and work the black flames into the body to make a permanent change.

But he knows, with one look at her face, that Vane will remember.

“I’d suggest that you go away and not bother me anymore,” Harry says softly. “Now that I know the words of guilt echoing around my head were your doing, maybe I would think that any guilt I feel is just the result of your Gift. Maybe I wouldn’t feel it anymore if something happened to you.”

Vane gives several quick nods, then backs away, babbles something that sounds a lot like, “Thank you for your mercy,” and runs down the corridors in the direction of Gryffindor Tower.

Merlin, Harry can barely remember being a Gryffindor. Can barely remember what the common room looked like or what it was like to sleep there.

If I were still a Gryffindor, maybe Theo wouldn’t have got hurt.

But maybe Theo would be dead at Tarquinius’s hands, and Umbridge would never have been driven away from the school, and Chaos would have died in her egg. Harry can’t know. He can only deal with what’s in front of him.

He straightens and flicks his wand to clean any dust off his robes. Then he starts back to the Slytherin common room to find Blaise. He’s the one who knows for sure where Pettigrew’s body is hidden.

“I do not like what you have to do,” Lion hisses sadly.

“Neither do I. But I have to do it.”