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lomonaaerenTitle: The Worst That Can Happen
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: AU (Harry is expelled at his Ministry hearing), psychological torture, solitary confinement, mental instability, graphic violence, gore, torture, Dark Harry, emotional manipulation, minor character deaths, child abuse
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 4100
Summary: AU. Dumbledore can’t keep Harry from being expelled by the Ministry, but he can work on ensuring that Harry will someday be accepted back into Hogwarts. In the meantime, he needs Harry to be safe, so he ships him back to the Dursleys to stay during what would have been Harry’s fifth year. When Harry comes back to the magical world, many people see him as either mad or possessed by Voldemort. Theo Nott sees an opportunity.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary” short fics being posted between the first of December and the winter solstice. It is extremely dark and violent, so be aware if you don’t like those things. It will have a second part, to be posted tomorrow.
The Worst That Can Happen
“Guilty.”
Harry heard the word echoing in his ears. It wasn’t louder than the snap of his wand breaking in the hands of the Ministry official, of course.
Dumbledore’s hand on his shoulder, his voice murmuring, “My dear boy…will fight for you to return to Hogwarts, of course…safe place to stay until then…”
“At least I can be with Sirius,” Harry whispered, fighting what felt like the whole-body equivalent of tears.
“Ah,” Dumbledore said, but waited until they were back in Grimmauld Place to discuss it.
Sirius was still a fugitive. And it wasn’t safe for Harry to be in the center of anti-Voldemort operations, although Dumbledore didn’t say precisely why. Harry tried to reassure him, over and over again, that Harry would never betray the Order, that he wasn’t another Peter, but Dumbledore just looked uncomfortable.
In fact, he looked off to the side, as though he didn’t want to meet Harry’s eyes.
Harry didn’t know what he said to convince the Dursleys to accept him back. All he knew was that he was sitting on the bed in Dudley’s second bedroom, with the door locked behind him, and silence echoing in his ears.
*
It was the silence that was the worst.
He didn’t get any owls for a week. When he got them, they were the same as they had been earlier in the summer.
Harry, we’re sorry, we can’t tell you anything…
Dumbledore says it’s not safe…
We do want to tell you things, we just can’t…
And the Dursleys didn’t speak to him at all. Apparently, that was a condition of their bargain with Dumbledore to take him back, that they didn’t have to interact with him. They didn’t have him do chores. They didn’t let him out of the room except to use the bathroom daily and to shower once a week. They pushed the food through the cat flap.
Harry didn’t know where Hedwig was.
He broke before long, slamming his fists into the door and screaming his aunt’s and uncle’s names over and over. He wouldn’t care if they locked him in the cupboard again or assigned him the most back-breaking chores in the world, as long as they spoke to him.
He screamed his cousin’s name, too, but Dudley never came, unlike Petunia, whose hand was the one that shoved the food through the flap.
Harry cried, and he screamed, and he swore, and he threw insults at them, but they said nothing.
*
Hedwig had come back! Harry reached out a trembling hand towards her, smiling, the smile trembling, too, glad that she had come back, that she was here, that she would listen to him talking—
She dissolved before his touch, into floating white speckles in the air.
*
There was nothing to do, other than read the books in Dudley’s bedroom that Harry had already read a dozen times, or read the letters from his friends that said nothing, or attempt to play with broken toys. And then the letters stopped coming.
Harry lay on his bed, staring into space. His brain burned. The air before him blazed with faces and his ears rang with laughter that didn’t exist.
He started to think that magic had been a dream, that nothing had ever been real but this room and this silence.
*
Autumn turned outside the window. Winter came in. Harry heard the Dursleys celebrating Christmas downstairs one morning. He didn’t attempt to call to them. It had been months since he’d called to them.
He still spoke to himself. Held conversations with an imaginary Hedwig, imaginary snakes, imaginary Siriuses and Rons and Hermiones. Berated them and scolded them and laughed with them and pleaded with them to come talk to him again.
But he didn’t speak to his relatives anymore.
*
He got a letter from Sirius the week after Christmas, all sorts of excuses about how he’d wanted to have Harry come stay with him in Grimmauld Place but it wasn’t safe, and the Order was busy guarding something. He ended by saying that he hoped Harry hadn’t had any nightmares lately.
Harry didn’t have a way to write back to him anyway—the owls always flew off right after Harry had untied the message—but he would have said that the nightmares, all about Voldemort questioning his Death Eaters and thinking about a corridor, were at least a bit of company.
*
Spring came, with no owls.
*
One night, there were hallucinations that spoke to him in gentle voices. Hallucinations of snakes, who spoke what Harry knew was Parseltongue. Harry lay back and listened to them, staring at the ceiling, for all that he knew they were his mind’s lies.
Lies could still speak the truth.
“They have forgotten you. Stranded you here forever,” said a large snake who looked like the Nagini Harry saw in his dreams, only dark blue instead of green.
“They will not permit you to return. Dumbledore has forgotten, or it is not convenient,” said the golden snake with bright green eyes.
“Inconvenient for the Ministry,” agreed a cobra with the pattern of falling leaves on its hood. “Inconvenient for the Dursleys. Inconvenient for everyone.”
“Don’t you want to be more than just inconvenient?” asked a white snake with almost transparent scales, black bands rippling over them.
And Harry, something shattered in him under the relentless silence and pieces of it grinding against the inside of his soul, decided he did.
*
The sound was a deep one, a loud one, worse than thunder. It jerked Arabella out of her sleep and made her run towards the front door, flinging it open and only then properly waking up. She ran down the pavement to the beginning of Privet Drive and then halted, staring open-mouthed, ignoring the cats who streamed around her ankles.
All but the foundations and a few lower walls of the Dursleys’ house was gone. There was smoke rising into the sky, and black fire that burned with utter silence after that first devasting emergence.
Arabella backed away, one hand going to her mouth. This was exactly what Albus had warned her of, had asked her to keep an eye out for. A Death Eater attack! Somehow, they had got through the blood protections after all.
She whirled and ran back to her house. She must Floo Albus at once.
*
Albus Apparated in to the edge of the Number Four on Privet Drive. It had taken the Ministry an unconscionably long time to send Obliviators who had planted the far more mundane images of a house fire in the minds of the Muggle watchers.
He stared now at the rubble and the crumbled walls and felt as though someone had broken his wand.
He had been so sure that Harry would be safe here. It seemed that Tom had found him after all.
Movement amid the ruins caught his eye. Albus blinked and stared and blinked again as Harry scrambled down the wall from what seemed to be the only remaining portion of the first floor, and then stepped out into air and walked as if down invisible steps.
When he came closer, Albus saw the feral blaze in his green eyes and heard the giggle that slipped through his eyes and understood. He looked at the ground, grieved.
Tom had managed to possess Harry, and perhaps now all was lost.
*
Harry was already pleased with himself for using his magic the way the snakes had told him. Now there was freedom! A lot more space, and a lot of light, even though it was nighttime! And he’d felt it when his pulse of magic destroyed the Dursleys. They were all dead in puddles of viscera his magic had dragged out of his mouths.
They hadn’t wanted to talk to him. Now they had a legitimate reason for not doing it.
Dumbledore was staring at the ground. Harry looked, but he couldn’t see anything. He shrugged. “Hello, sir! Are you here to take me to Grimmauld Place?”
“No…” Dumbledore said slowly, and part of Harry’s stomach flipped over, because someone was talking to him. “It must be another safehouse. It would not be safe for many people if you were at Grimmauld.”
“Okay. So will the Weasleys be there?” Harry felt like he didn’t remember Ron and Hermione, but he would like to get to know them again. Hug them. Shake their hands. Hold them against the wall with his magic until they told him why they hadn’t been writing to him.
“Your relatives will be there, Harry. Now that their home has been destroyed, they will be in need for shelter from Death Eaters as much as you.”
Harry blinked at Dumbledore, and then realized that he couldn’t expect the man to be attuned to the Dursleys like he was. “They’re dead, sir. All of them,” he added, when he saw Dumbledore open his mouth. He was probably going to argue that it didn’t matter if Vernon was, as long as either Petunia or Dudley was alive. “All gone.”
Dumbledore swallowed roughly several times. Then he said, “I am sorry, my boy. You must grieve their loss.”
“No, not really.”
Dumbledore shut his eyes and whispered something that sounded like, “Tom.” Harry laughed, and ignored the way that he could see some people on the street looking at them. He didn’t know if they were Muggles or not. He didn’t care. What had they done for him?
“No, I didn’t kill them because Voldemort would have. And he didn’t kill them. I did. For not talking to me. For shutting me up in a small room with nothing to do. Did you know that I didn’t learn any magic, sir? That I never came out of the bedroom except to use the loo and the shower? Were you fucking aware of that?”
Dumbledore was looking at him now, really looking at him for the first time in months, and he seemed honestly startled. “I am sorry, my boy. But it was still safer for you than being at Hogwarts would have been…”
Harry just listened, unimpressed, to the story of a Ministry-planted Defense teacher at Hogwarts and how she had driven Dumbledore out of his post and tortured students with Blood Quills. What did it matter if those students had been tortured? People were talking to them. And it hadn’t gone on day and night without end for months, the way his had.
What really mattered was that Dumbledore was speaking, and the words tumbled around Harry’s ears and washed into his brain like pebbles and bounced around and started sparks and started a fire burning.
“I know that I can’t go back to Hogwarts,” he said, when Dumbledore finished. “And I don’t want you to tell me anything about what the Order is doing, sir. I know you can’t. But have you got time to take me somewhere?”
Dumbledore hesitated long enough that Harry began to wonder why he was even here. Harry could run away to France. Or hide in a townhouse in the same neighborhood as Sirius’s and torment his godfather with silent Howlers.
“You can go back to Hogwarts,” Dumbledore said, at long last. “I did manage to win that concession from the Ministry, when they realized that the only Muggle who saw you perform the Patronus was your cousin, who was—already aware of magic.” He looked at the ruins of Number Four Privet Drive again. “Young Dudley, alas, deceased too soon.”
Harry wondered why Dumbledore wasn’t more upset about Harry killing his cousin, but maybe he did think it was Voldemort somehow, given his mutters about “Tom.” He was more interested in something else. “When did the Ministry tell you this?” he asked.
“Two months ago. I was going to come fetch you in June so that you could sit your OWLS during the summer and join your friends in sixth year.”
“Oh, I see. The fact that I didn’t have my fucking course books and I couldn’t do magic at all in the last year didn’t matter, right? The fact that no one sent me a fucking owl to tell me that? You just let me stay here?”
“I thought—I thought I was guaranteeing your safety. You truly do not understand how bad Hogwarts has become in the last year, Harry. And your friends could not write because Umbridge was watching all owl post.”
“What about Sirius? What about you?”
“She was watching all owl post,” Dumbledore repeated.
“But you and Sirius weren’t at Hogwarts. You didn’t write to me because you thought I was possessed, right? You didn’t want to have to deal with me personally in case it gave some kind of advantage to Voldemort, even though you probably have no idea what that advantage was and even though I was in that living hell—”
Harry’s voice was rising, and the people hovering at the edge of the pavement had begun to walk across the garden. (Harry was a little sorry about burning the roses to death). Dumbledore clenched down one hand on Harry’s arm without speaking and Apparated them.
*
“This isn’t you, Harry! This is You-Know-Who!”
That was what Sirius said every time Harry wanted to spend time alone, talk to Kreacher, read books in the library of Grimmauld Place, or sit in the kitchen and talk to adults like Kingsley Shacklebolt. Dumbledore had brought him to Sirius’s house after all.
Harry wasn’t sure about the reasoning there, but he had decided not to worry about it.
“It’s me, Sirius, not You-Know-Who,” Harry had tried to explain the first time Sirius tracked him down in the library and started to wrestle a book on the Dark Arts away from him. “I have to read, to catch up.”
“You don’t need to read that!”
“I already killed my relatives, what the fuck does a book matter?”
Sirius had looked at him with haunted eyes and whispered, “That was him, working through your magic, not you. You’re not the kind of person who would do that.”
“The person I used to be died in the room my relatives kept him in!” Harry yelled, but Sirius didn’t listen, and took the book away.
Harry just shook his head now and leaned back against the wall of Grimmauld Place’s attic. He’d found the door under a hovering concealment spell that he probably shouldn’t have been able to pierce, but he had. And now he was here, in a great dusty room full of cursed artifacts that rattled or lunged at him when he passed by.
It wasn’t a big deal, truly. Harry stayed out of their reach, and the one time that a trunk had grown a long wooden tail and swept it at him, his magic had lunged out of his body and vaporized it with a rush of dark flame.
The way it had done to the Dursleys’ house. And his relatives.
Well, no, I didn’t vaporize them, Harry conscientiously corrected himself. I tore them up inside and put their insides on their outsides.
It was important to have a correct memory of what had happened to him. Sirius and Dumbledore didn’t seem to, so Harry was probably the only one who would ever carry it around in his head.
Although maybe when Ron and Hermione finished the term at Hogwarts and came to Grimmauld Place, that would change.
*
It didn’t.
“We really couldn’t write to you, Harry! Umbridge was watching all the owls! Pigwidgeon got injured trying to avoid her! And she was watching the Floos, too! Look what she did to Ron’s hand!”
Harry looked indifferently at the scars on the back of Ron’s hand, saying something like I must not disobey my professors. He’d suffered worse himself. “And why didn’t you write to me at the beginning of the year? Before she started doing that?”
“We did, Harry!” Hermione’s hair was practically standing on end from the force of her fear and worry.
“No, I mean, anything substantial?”
“Dumbledore said—it could be dangerous if the owl was intercepted.” Ron’s voice was faint and husky. He sounded as if he might have injured it screaming.
Welcome to the club.
“What about you, Hermione? Is that your reason, too?”
Hermione swallowed when Harry turned to look at her, but she said, “Well, yes. The same way it was at the beginning of last summer.” Harry vaguely remembered that; it felt as if the memory had been locked in the cupboard. “And Dumbledore said that you might be having—that there might be some connection—” Her eyes flickered to Harry’s scar.
“Oh, I might be possessed by Voldemort?” Harry rolled his eyes. “No, what happened to my relatives is just what should happen because they locked me up in my room and tortured me for months.”
“They—they beat you? Oh, Harry!” Hermione’s hand was over her mouth.
“No, they didn’t talk to me. And they didn’t let me out except to use the bathroom and the shower.”
Harry was panting by the end of saying the words, but he could see almost immediately that it didn’t make a difference. Hermione and Ron exchanged worried glances, and then Hermione whispered, “Harry, that doesn’t sound like—it sounds like Voldemort would think they deserved death, but not you.”
Harry laughed. He bent over, laughing, and saw the pale, shocked faces of his friends wavering as though they were another hallucination. He straightened up, wiping his hand across his mouth—he always expected to feel blood there—and shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“No, we bloody don’t, mate!”
“Harry, you should learn Occlumency. It’s this mind art that I read about this year—maybe you read about it, too, it was briefly mentioned in the Defense book that Umbridge had us buy, even though she didn’t really teach us—”
“I didn’t have any of my bloody fucking books, Hermione! I learned nothing this last year!”
“I understand you’re upset, mate, but you don’t have to yell at her,” Ron snapped, stepping in between Harry and Hermione. “You wouldn’t have done that before, either.” Now he was the one looking uneasily at Harry’s scar.
Harry stared at them and then shook his head. They wouldn’t understand. “What is Hedwig?”
*
His friends had taken care of his owl during the last year. Harry supposed that did make them friends of a certain kind, still. He ran his hand over Hedwig’s feathers and told her how beautiful she was, and she sat on his shoulder and rode it down the stairs and into the kitchen. Mrs. Weasley argued about having an owl at the kitchen table. Harry ignored her.
(She served too much food and she got upset much more easily. Later, Harry found out that Arthur Weasley had died in the Ministry a few months ago, during one of those dreams that turned out to be real. It was sort of hard to care).
*
“I know you can study for your OWLS, Harry.”
Hermione had found him in the library. Harry sighed tiredly and looked at her over the top of his book. “No, I can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“No one’s taken me to get a wand. My old one was snapped by the Wizengamot,” Harry added, when she just gaped at him. Did she not know that? Maybe Dumbledore had forgotten to tell her.
Or maybe he thinks she was possessed by the spirit of McGonagall or something.
“Well, we can do that!” Hermione said, and stood up. “Sirius!”
*
One of the wand boxes started rattling the moment Harry walked into Ollivander’s shop, and when Ollivander opened it, there was a wand of yew waiting for him, with a dragon heartstring core. Harry didn’t pay attention to Ollivander’s words about what it would be good for; he just held the wand and let silent tears creep down his face.
*
In the end, Harry learned that he would be attending Hogwarts next term. The Ministry still refused to admit that Voldemort was back, but apparently they had found out that this Umbridge person had sent the Dementors after him. Reversing the Wizengamot’s decision without admitting wrongdoing on Fudge’s part was part of the compromise of returning Harry’s wand to him.
Harry would live in the same dormitory as the Gryffindor sixth-year boys, but attend class with the fifth-years. At some point, if the professors teaching him felt that he would be able to manage sixth-year work, they could arrange for him to sit the OWL in their course, and he would then spend the rest of the term in the sixth-year class.
Harry didn’t pay that much attention to the arrangements, although Hermione explained them again and again. He played with his new wand and smuggled books out of the Black library to take with him. He ignored the way that Sirius and Ron and Hermione gave him worried glances and whispered and shut up suddenly if he came into a room.
They thought he was possessed by Voldemort. Harry had told them what had happened and they hadn’t believed him.
They could go on whispering. Harry wasn’t going to concentrate on OWL material. What did it matter? He was going to learn real magic.
The kind that ensured he could kill people who tried to hurt him, and that no one could ever imprison him again.
*
Several Slytherins came to the train compartment Ron and Hermione and Harry were sharing to taunt them. Draco Malfoy was standing in the front, but there were others gathered behind him Harry didn’t recognize.
There were lots and lots of things he didn’t recognize, after a year in silence.
Malfoy said something about how he’d hoped Harry would be tortured to death, and Harry’s magic lashed out of him, black fire circling around Malfoy’s right arm and pulling. Malfoy screamed as Harry reshaped the bones, melting them like wax, pulling and tugging them out of alignment. Then Harry let go.
Malfoy ran away, screaming and yelping about something that hurt, yes, but lasted less than a minute. Harry rolled his eyes. “How would he hold up to months of worse than that?” he asked no one in particular.
Hermione had her hand over her mouth again. Ron looked like he was going to be sick. Crabbe and Goyle—right, those were the knuckle-dragging ones—stood blinking and then ran after Malfoy as if they didn’t know what else to do.
Two other Slytherins lingered. Harry dredged one name out of his mind after a bit. Pansy Parkinson, yes. The other, he had no idea about. Some skinny pale kid.
“I’m going to tell Snape what you did to Draco,” Parkinson said, but her voice was shaking.
Harry let black fire play on the tips of his fingers. Parkinson shrieked and ran away.
The pale kid stood there looking at Harry. Harry looked at him, and so did the fire. The kid inclined his head after a second and moved away, in silence.
Of course in silence.
“Harry, what you did to Malfoy…” Hermione’s face was pale, tears standing out on her cheeks.
“Look,” Harry said to her. “You saw me do it, and you think I’m possessed by Voldemort.” That produced a little wave of flinches that he didn’t understand. He was sure they would have got used to the name if Dumbledore was telling them about it. “Why are you staying close to me? You barely let me have a minute alone, but you think I’m evil.”
“I know that our friend is still in there,” Hermione said in a soft, determined voice, leaning forwards. “Ron does, too.” Ron gave a shallow nod that made Harry think he was less than convinced. “We’re not leaving you. We can help you subdue your worst impulses and separate your real self from Voldemort’s sadism.”
Harry laughed a little. “This is all me, Hermione. This is what I became after a year in that room. I told you that.”
“It was nine months, not a year.”
“Like it fucking matters. This is me.”
Hermione and Ron shook their heads, now apparently equally determined. Harry leaned against the wall of the compartment and wished the people who thought he was possessed were as ready to give up on him as the people who thought that he was mental for saying Voldemort was back.
*
Theo studied Draco’s arm as Pansy wept and Draco did much the same thing. Apparently, it didn’t hurt now the way it had done when Potter was twisting the bones, but it couldn’t be healed, either, no matter what spells Draco cast or how he concentrated his magic on it. Pansy was loudly sure that Madam Pomfrey could fix it.
Theo didn’t think she could.
He thought of the rumors that had swirled around Potter when he hadn’t come back to Hogwarts for their fifth year, the fact that he had done this to Draco’s bones silently and wandlessly, the way he had looked at Theo.
Theo looked at Draco’s arm again and thought, I want that. I could use that. I could offer him protection that no one else is offering.
Why shouldn’t we make an alliance of mutual convenience?
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: AU (Harry is expelled at his Ministry hearing), psychological torture, solitary confinement, mental instability, graphic violence, gore, torture, Dark Harry, emotional manipulation, minor character deaths, child abuse
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 4100
Summary: AU. Dumbledore can’t keep Harry from being expelled by the Ministry, but he can work on ensuring that Harry will someday be accepted back into Hogwarts. In the meantime, he needs Harry to be safe, so he ships him back to the Dursleys to stay during what would have been Harry’s fifth year. When Harry comes back to the magical world, many people see him as either mad or possessed by Voldemort. Theo Nott sees an opportunity.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary” short fics being posted between the first of December and the winter solstice. It is extremely dark and violent, so be aware if you don’t like those things. It will have a second part, to be posted tomorrow.
The Worst That Can Happen
“Guilty.”
Harry heard the word echoing in his ears. It wasn’t louder than the snap of his wand breaking in the hands of the Ministry official, of course.
Dumbledore’s hand on his shoulder, his voice murmuring, “My dear boy…will fight for you to return to Hogwarts, of course…safe place to stay until then…”
“At least I can be with Sirius,” Harry whispered, fighting what felt like the whole-body equivalent of tears.
“Ah,” Dumbledore said, but waited until they were back in Grimmauld Place to discuss it.
Sirius was still a fugitive. And it wasn’t safe for Harry to be in the center of anti-Voldemort operations, although Dumbledore didn’t say precisely why. Harry tried to reassure him, over and over again, that Harry would never betray the Order, that he wasn’t another Peter, but Dumbledore just looked uncomfortable.
In fact, he looked off to the side, as though he didn’t want to meet Harry’s eyes.
Harry didn’t know what he said to convince the Dursleys to accept him back. All he knew was that he was sitting on the bed in Dudley’s second bedroom, with the door locked behind him, and silence echoing in his ears.
*
It was the silence that was the worst.
He didn’t get any owls for a week. When he got them, they were the same as they had been earlier in the summer.
Harry, we’re sorry, we can’t tell you anything…
Dumbledore says it’s not safe…
We do want to tell you things, we just can’t…
And the Dursleys didn’t speak to him at all. Apparently, that was a condition of their bargain with Dumbledore to take him back, that they didn’t have to interact with him. They didn’t have him do chores. They didn’t let him out of the room except to use the bathroom daily and to shower once a week. They pushed the food through the cat flap.
Harry didn’t know where Hedwig was.
He broke before long, slamming his fists into the door and screaming his aunt’s and uncle’s names over and over. He wouldn’t care if they locked him in the cupboard again or assigned him the most back-breaking chores in the world, as long as they spoke to him.
He screamed his cousin’s name, too, but Dudley never came, unlike Petunia, whose hand was the one that shoved the food through the flap.
Harry cried, and he screamed, and he swore, and he threw insults at them, but they said nothing.
*
Hedwig had come back! Harry reached out a trembling hand towards her, smiling, the smile trembling, too, glad that she had come back, that she was here, that she would listen to him talking—
She dissolved before his touch, into floating white speckles in the air.
*
There was nothing to do, other than read the books in Dudley’s bedroom that Harry had already read a dozen times, or read the letters from his friends that said nothing, or attempt to play with broken toys. And then the letters stopped coming.
Harry lay on his bed, staring into space. His brain burned. The air before him blazed with faces and his ears rang with laughter that didn’t exist.
He started to think that magic had been a dream, that nothing had ever been real but this room and this silence.
*
Autumn turned outside the window. Winter came in. Harry heard the Dursleys celebrating Christmas downstairs one morning. He didn’t attempt to call to them. It had been months since he’d called to them.
He still spoke to himself. Held conversations with an imaginary Hedwig, imaginary snakes, imaginary Siriuses and Rons and Hermiones. Berated them and scolded them and laughed with them and pleaded with them to come talk to him again.
But he didn’t speak to his relatives anymore.
*
He got a letter from Sirius the week after Christmas, all sorts of excuses about how he’d wanted to have Harry come stay with him in Grimmauld Place but it wasn’t safe, and the Order was busy guarding something. He ended by saying that he hoped Harry hadn’t had any nightmares lately.
Harry didn’t have a way to write back to him anyway—the owls always flew off right after Harry had untied the message—but he would have said that the nightmares, all about Voldemort questioning his Death Eaters and thinking about a corridor, were at least a bit of company.
*
Spring came, with no owls.
*
One night, there were hallucinations that spoke to him in gentle voices. Hallucinations of snakes, who spoke what Harry knew was Parseltongue. Harry lay back and listened to them, staring at the ceiling, for all that he knew they were his mind’s lies.
Lies could still speak the truth.
“They have forgotten you. Stranded you here forever,” said a large snake who looked like the Nagini Harry saw in his dreams, only dark blue instead of green.
“They will not permit you to return. Dumbledore has forgotten, or it is not convenient,” said the golden snake with bright green eyes.
“Inconvenient for the Ministry,” agreed a cobra with the pattern of falling leaves on its hood. “Inconvenient for the Dursleys. Inconvenient for everyone.”
“Don’t you want to be more than just inconvenient?” asked a white snake with almost transparent scales, black bands rippling over them.
And Harry, something shattered in him under the relentless silence and pieces of it grinding against the inside of his soul, decided he did.
*
The sound was a deep one, a loud one, worse than thunder. It jerked Arabella out of her sleep and made her run towards the front door, flinging it open and only then properly waking up. She ran down the pavement to the beginning of Privet Drive and then halted, staring open-mouthed, ignoring the cats who streamed around her ankles.
All but the foundations and a few lower walls of the Dursleys’ house was gone. There was smoke rising into the sky, and black fire that burned with utter silence after that first devasting emergence.
Arabella backed away, one hand going to her mouth. This was exactly what Albus had warned her of, had asked her to keep an eye out for. A Death Eater attack! Somehow, they had got through the blood protections after all.
She whirled and ran back to her house. She must Floo Albus at once.
*
Albus Apparated in to the edge of the Number Four on Privet Drive. It had taken the Ministry an unconscionably long time to send Obliviators who had planted the far more mundane images of a house fire in the minds of the Muggle watchers.
He stared now at the rubble and the crumbled walls and felt as though someone had broken his wand.
He had been so sure that Harry would be safe here. It seemed that Tom had found him after all.
Movement amid the ruins caught his eye. Albus blinked and stared and blinked again as Harry scrambled down the wall from what seemed to be the only remaining portion of the first floor, and then stepped out into air and walked as if down invisible steps.
When he came closer, Albus saw the feral blaze in his green eyes and heard the giggle that slipped through his eyes and understood. He looked at the ground, grieved.
Tom had managed to possess Harry, and perhaps now all was lost.
*
Harry was already pleased with himself for using his magic the way the snakes had told him. Now there was freedom! A lot more space, and a lot of light, even though it was nighttime! And he’d felt it when his pulse of magic destroyed the Dursleys. They were all dead in puddles of viscera his magic had dragged out of his mouths.
They hadn’t wanted to talk to him. Now they had a legitimate reason for not doing it.
Dumbledore was staring at the ground. Harry looked, but he couldn’t see anything. He shrugged. “Hello, sir! Are you here to take me to Grimmauld Place?”
“No…” Dumbledore said slowly, and part of Harry’s stomach flipped over, because someone was talking to him. “It must be another safehouse. It would not be safe for many people if you were at Grimmauld.”
“Okay. So will the Weasleys be there?” Harry felt like he didn’t remember Ron and Hermione, but he would like to get to know them again. Hug them. Shake their hands. Hold them against the wall with his magic until they told him why they hadn’t been writing to him.
“Your relatives will be there, Harry. Now that their home has been destroyed, they will be in need for shelter from Death Eaters as much as you.”
Harry blinked at Dumbledore, and then realized that he couldn’t expect the man to be attuned to the Dursleys like he was. “They’re dead, sir. All of them,” he added, when he saw Dumbledore open his mouth. He was probably going to argue that it didn’t matter if Vernon was, as long as either Petunia or Dudley was alive. “All gone.”
Dumbledore swallowed roughly several times. Then he said, “I am sorry, my boy. You must grieve their loss.”
“No, not really.”
Dumbledore shut his eyes and whispered something that sounded like, “Tom.” Harry laughed, and ignored the way that he could see some people on the street looking at them. He didn’t know if they were Muggles or not. He didn’t care. What had they done for him?
“No, I didn’t kill them because Voldemort would have. And he didn’t kill them. I did. For not talking to me. For shutting me up in a small room with nothing to do. Did you know that I didn’t learn any magic, sir? That I never came out of the bedroom except to use the loo and the shower? Were you fucking aware of that?”
Dumbledore was looking at him now, really looking at him for the first time in months, and he seemed honestly startled. “I am sorry, my boy. But it was still safer for you than being at Hogwarts would have been…”
Harry just listened, unimpressed, to the story of a Ministry-planted Defense teacher at Hogwarts and how she had driven Dumbledore out of his post and tortured students with Blood Quills. What did it matter if those students had been tortured? People were talking to them. And it hadn’t gone on day and night without end for months, the way his had.
What really mattered was that Dumbledore was speaking, and the words tumbled around Harry’s ears and washed into his brain like pebbles and bounced around and started sparks and started a fire burning.
“I know that I can’t go back to Hogwarts,” he said, when Dumbledore finished. “And I don’t want you to tell me anything about what the Order is doing, sir. I know you can’t. But have you got time to take me somewhere?”
Dumbledore hesitated long enough that Harry began to wonder why he was even here. Harry could run away to France. Or hide in a townhouse in the same neighborhood as Sirius’s and torment his godfather with silent Howlers.
“You can go back to Hogwarts,” Dumbledore said, at long last. “I did manage to win that concession from the Ministry, when they realized that the only Muggle who saw you perform the Patronus was your cousin, who was—already aware of magic.” He looked at the ruins of Number Four Privet Drive again. “Young Dudley, alas, deceased too soon.”
Harry wondered why Dumbledore wasn’t more upset about Harry killing his cousin, but maybe he did think it was Voldemort somehow, given his mutters about “Tom.” He was more interested in something else. “When did the Ministry tell you this?” he asked.
“Two months ago. I was going to come fetch you in June so that you could sit your OWLS during the summer and join your friends in sixth year.”
“Oh, I see. The fact that I didn’t have my fucking course books and I couldn’t do magic at all in the last year didn’t matter, right? The fact that no one sent me a fucking owl to tell me that? You just let me stay here?”
“I thought—I thought I was guaranteeing your safety. You truly do not understand how bad Hogwarts has become in the last year, Harry. And your friends could not write because Umbridge was watching all owl post.”
“What about Sirius? What about you?”
“She was watching all owl post,” Dumbledore repeated.
“But you and Sirius weren’t at Hogwarts. You didn’t write to me because you thought I was possessed, right? You didn’t want to have to deal with me personally in case it gave some kind of advantage to Voldemort, even though you probably have no idea what that advantage was and even though I was in that living hell—”
Harry’s voice was rising, and the people hovering at the edge of the pavement had begun to walk across the garden. (Harry was a little sorry about burning the roses to death). Dumbledore clenched down one hand on Harry’s arm without speaking and Apparated them.
*
“This isn’t you, Harry! This is You-Know-Who!”
That was what Sirius said every time Harry wanted to spend time alone, talk to Kreacher, read books in the library of Grimmauld Place, or sit in the kitchen and talk to adults like Kingsley Shacklebolt. Dumbledore had brought him to Sirius’s house after all.
Harry wasn’t sure about the reasoning there, but he had decided not to worry about it.
“It’s me, Sirius, not You-Know-Who,” Harry had tried to explain the first time Sirius tracked him down in the library and started to wrestle a book on the Dark Arts away from him. “I have to read, to catch up.”
“You don’t need to read that!”
“I already killed my relatives, what the fuck does a book matter?”
Sirius had looked at him with haunted eyes and whispered, “That was him, working through your magic, not you. You’re not the kind of person who would do that.”
“The person I used to be died in the room my relatives kept him in!” Harry yelled, but Sirius didn’t listen, and took the book away.
Harry just shook his head now and leaned back against the wall of Grimmauld Place’s attic. He’d found the door under a hovering concealment spell that he probably shouldn’t have been able to pierce, but he had. And now he was here, in a great dusty room full of cursed artifacts that rattled or lunged at him when he passed by.
It wasn’t a big deal, truly. Harry stayed out of their reach, and the one time that a trunk had grown a long wooden tail and swept it at him, his magic had lunged out of his body and vaporized it with a rush of dark flame.
The way it had done to the Dursleys’ house. And his relatives.
Well, no, I didn’t vaporize them, Harry conscientiously corrected himself. I tore them up inside and put their insides on their outsides.
It was important to have a correct memory of what had happened to him. Sirius and Dumbledore didn’t seem to, so Harry was probably the only one who would ever carry it around in his head.
Although maybe when Ron and Hermione finished the term at Hogwarts and came to Grimmauld Place, that would change.
*
It didn’t.
“We really couldn’t write to you, Harry! Umbridge was watching all the owls! Pigwidgeon got injured trying to avoid her! And she was watching the Floos, too! Look what she did to Ron’s hand!”
Harry looked indifferently at the scars on the back of Ron’s hand, saying something like I must not disobey my professors. He’d suffered worse himself. “And why didn’t you write to me at the beginning of the year? Before she started doing that?”
“We did, Harry!” Hermione’s hair was practically standing on end from the force of her fear and worry.
“No, I mean, anything substantial?”
“Dumbledore said—it could be dangerous if the owl was intercepted.” Ron’s voice was faint and husky. He sounded as if he might have injured it screaming.
Welcome to the club.
“What about you, Hermione? Is that your reason, too?”
Hermione swallowed when Harry turned to look at her, but she said, “Well, yes. The same way it was at the beginning of last summer.” Harry vaguely remembered that; it felt as if the memory had been locked in the cupboard. “And Dumbledore said that you might be having—that there might be some connection—” Her eyes flickered to Harry’s scar.
“Oh, I might be possessed by Voldemort?” Harry rolled his eyes. “No, what happened to my relatives is just what should happen because they locked me up in my room and tortured me for months.”
“They—they beat you? Oh, Harry!” Hermione’s hand was over her mouth.
“No, they didn’t talk to me. And they didn’t let me out except to use the bathroom and the shower.”
Harry was panting by the end of saying the words, but he could see almost immediately that it didn’t make a difference. Hermione and Ron exchanged worried glances, and then Hermione whispered, “Harry, that doesn’t sound like—it sounds like Voldemort would think they deserved death, but not you.”
Harry laughed. He bent over, laughing, and saw the pale, shocked faces of his friends wavering as though they were another hallucination. He straightened up, wiping his hand across his mouth—he always expected to feel blood there—and shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“No, we bloody don’t, mate!”
“Harry, you should learn Occlumency. It’s this mind art that I read about this year—maybe you read about it, too, it was briefly mentioned in the Defense book that Umbridge had us buy, even though she didn’t really teach us—”
“I didn’t have any of my bloody fucking books, Hermione! I learned nothing this last year!”
“I understand you’re upset, mate, but you don’t have to yell at her,” Ron snapped, stepping in between Harry and Hermione. “You wouldn’t have done that before, either.” Now he was the one looking uneasily at Harry’s scar.
Harry stared at them and then shook his head. They wouldn’t understand. “What is Hedwig?”
*
His friends had taken care of his owl during the last year. Harry supposed that did make them friends of a certain kind, still. He ran his hand over Hedwig’s feathers and told her how beautiful she was, and she sat on his shoulder and rode it down the stairs and into the kitchen. Mrs. Weasley argued about having an owl at the kitchen table. Harry ignored her.
(She served too much food and she got upset much more easily. Later, Harry found out that Arthur Weasley had died in the Ministry a few months ago, during one of those dreams that turned out to be real. It was sort of hard to care).
*
“I know you can study for your OWLS, Harry.”
Hermione had found him in the library. Harry sighed tiredly and looked at her over the top of his book. “No, I can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“No one’s taken me to get a wand. My old one was snapped by the Wizengamot,” Harry added, when she just gaped at him. Did she not know that? Maybe Dumbledore had forgotten to tell her.
Or maybe he thinks she was possessed by the spirit of McGonagall or something.
“Well, we can do that!” Hermione said, and stood up. “Sirius!”
*
One of the wand boxes started rattling the moment Harry walked into Ollivander’s shop, and when Ollivander opened it, there was a wand of yew waiting for him, with a dragon heartstring core. Harry didn’t pay attention to Ollivander’s words about what it would be good for; he just held the wand and let silent tears creep down his face.
*
In the end, Harry learned that he would be attending Hogwarts next term. The Ministry still refused to admit that Voldemort was back, but apparently they had found out that this Umbridge person had sent the Dementors after him. Reversing the Wizengamot’s decision without admitting wrongdoing on Fudge’s part was part of the compromise of returning Harry’s wand to him.
Harry would live in the same dormitory as the Gryffindor sixth-year boys, but attend class with the fifth-years. At some point, if the professors teaching him felt that he would be able to manage sixth-year work, they could arrange for him to sit the OWL in their course, and he would then spend the rest of the term in the sixth-year class.
Harry didn’t pay that much attention to the arrangements, although Hermione explained them again and again. He played with his new wand and smuggled books out of the Black library to take with him. He ignored the way that Sirius and Ron and Hermione gave him worried glances and whispered and shut up suddenly if he came into a room.
They thought he was possessed by Voldemort. Harry had told them what had happened and they hadn’t believed him.
They could go on whispering. Harry wasn’t going to concentrate on OWL material. What did it matter? He was going to learn real magic.
The kind that ensured he could kill people who tried to hurt him, and that no one could ever imprison him again.
*
Several Slytherins came to the train compartment Ron and Hermione and Harry were sharing to taunt them. Draco Malfoy was standing in the front, but there were others gathered behind him Harry didn’t recognize.
There were lots and lots of things he didn’t recognize, after a year in silence.
Malfoy said something about how he’d hoped Harry would be tortured to death, and Harry’s magic lashed out of him, black fire circling around Malfoy’s right arm and pulling. Malfoy screamed as Harry reshaped the bones, melting them like wax, pulling and tugging them out of alignment. Then Harry let go.
Malfoy ran away, screaming and yelping about something that hurt, yes, but lasted less than a minute. Harry rolled his eyes. “How would he hold up to months of worse than that?” he asked no one in particular.
Hermione had her hand over her mouth again. Ron looked like he was going to be sick. Crabbe and Goyle—right, those were the knuckle-dragging ones—stood blinking and then ran after Malfoy as if they didn’t know what else to do.
Two other Slytherins lingered. Harry dredged one name out of his mind after a bit. Pansy Parkinson, yes. The other, he had no idea about. Some skinny pale kid.
“I’m going to tell Snape what you did to Draco,” Parkinson said, but her voice was shaking.
Harry let black fire play on the tips of his fingers. Parkinson shrieked and ran away.
The pale kid stood there looking at Harry. Harry looked at him, and so did the fire. The kid inclined his head after a second and moved away, in silence.
Of course in silence.
“Harry, what you did to Malfoy…” Hermione’s face was pale, tears standing out on her cheeks.
“Look,” Harry said to her. “You saw me do it, and you think I’m possessed by Voldemort.” That produced a little wave of flinches that he didn’t understand. He was sure they would have got used to the name if Dumbledore was telling them about it. “Why are you staying close to me? You barely let me have a minute alone, but you think I’m evil.”
“I know that our friend is still in there,” Hermione said in a soft, determined voice, leaning forwards. “Ron does, too.” Ron gave a shallow nod that made Harry think he was less than convinced. “We’re not leaving you. We can help you subdue your worst impulses and separate your real self from Voldemort’s sadism.”
Harry laughed a little. “This is all me, Hermione. This is what I became after a year in that room. I told you that.”
“It was nine months, not a year.”
“Like it fucking matters. This is me.”
Hermione and Ron shook their heads, now apparently equally determined. Harry leaned against the wall of the compartment and wished the people who thought he was possessed were as ready to give up on him as the people who thought that he was mental for saying Voldemort was back.
*
Theo studied Draco’s arm as Pansy wept and Draco did much the same thing. Apparently, it didn’t hurt now the way it had done when Potter was twisting the bones, but it couldn’t be healed, either, no matter what spells Draco cast or how he concentrated his magic on it. Pansy was loudly sure that Madam Pomfrey could fix it.
Theo didn’t think she could.
He thought of the rumors that had swirled around Potter when he hadn’t come back to Hogwarts for their fifth year, the fact that he had done this to Draco’s bones silently and wandlessly, the way he had looked at Theo.
Theo looked at Draco’s arm again and thought, I want that. I could use that. I could offer him protection that no one else is offering.
Why shouldn’t we make an alliance of mutual convenience?
