lomonaaeren

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

Part Seven

“You have everything you need?”

Harry spent a moment to touch the holster where he kept his wand, and to pat the pouch that Lucius had given him with a stone that could become an instant ward if he needed it to. The second pouch, with the most important item, already hung on his belt. Then he smiled at the shimmer to his left, which was Waterfall Disillusioned. “Yeah.”

“I wish I could come nearer than I dare.”

Harry smiled at Lucius and leaned in to kiss him, one hand grasping his shoulder. “I know. But the Longbottom wards are sensitized to feel a Dark Mark, and even though you removed it, it’s possible that—”

“I know. You explained to this to me. I agreed.”

“Then why argue about it now?”

“Because I care for you!”

Lucius immediately turned red when he’d spoken those words, and he looked as if he expected Harry to laugh. But he kept on glaring.

Harry caught his breath and delayed to lean in and kiss Lucius again. Lucius clung to his shoulders for a moment with desperate strength, before he visibly forced himself to step back and make a little motion with his hand.

“Go. Before we decide that we should have sent a letter to your brother after all.”

Harry nodded. They had thought of sending a letter to ask to speak with Ian, but that would give him too much time to prepare a trap and make him wonder why Harry had bothered with sending the message instead of just fleeing to him the moment the “potion” wore off. So Harry stepped away from Lucius, gripped his hand one more time, and said, “I’ll be all right.”

“I will make it so, if your brother tries to ensure that you cannot be.”

Harry smiled at him again, and then stepped out to the Apparition point, extending one hand. Waterfall’s strong fingers gripped his. “Master Harry will not be going too fast,” she said.

“No,” Harry murmured, and then he twisted and sprang through space, pulling the elf along. His eyes remained locked on Lucius’s until the darkness of Apparition came between them.

*

The moment he and Waterfall appeared outside the wards of Longbottom Manor, Harry drew his wand and dropped Waterfall’s hand. He panted and stared around, looking at the air as if he expected pursuit.

He knew the Longbottoms’ wards would tell Ian who was here. He would probably come out quickly enough.

“Harry!”

Yes, there was Ian, appearing at the front doors of the house and running towards Harry. Harry faced him with a tremulous smile, and then wrapped his arms around himself, trembling. That let his hand dip into the second pouch fastened on his belt, and take out the all-important book.

“Harry! What happened?” Ian skidded to a stop in front of Harry, staring at him, panting. “I sent Nightslayer with a message to you and he came back without it, and I know that you were with Lucius Malfoy—”

“What? Then why didn’t you come and rescue me?”

It was no effort to put hurt in his voice. Really, the only effort was to stop it from brimming over with anger as well.

Ian blinked and lifted a hand as if to fend off Harry’s attempt to touch him, even though Harry hadn’t made that attempt. “I thought that you probably wouldn’t listen to me. From what Malfoy said, you looked cozy with Lucius.”

So it was Draco who told Ian the truth. It made sense that Ian would have attempted to transfer the Horcrux if he’d thought Harry had gone over to the “enemy,” or if he thought Harry had had a chance to learn the truth. For all Harry knew, Lucius was famously accomplished with runes, and Ian knew that.

“He gave me a love potion.”

“What?” Ian’s face was splashed with shock. Harry didn’t remember him being this open in years, but he didn’t know if it was because Ian was really shocked, or because the ritual was failing, and with it, Ian’s perfect self-control.

“A love potion,” Harry said, and hung his head. His shivering was getting worse, and if Ian wanted to think it was disgust at the aftermath of a love potion instead of longing to hurt his brother, he could think that all he liked. “He said—he said that I wouldn’t—that I couldn’t be of any use to him unless I was completely enslaved to him. He seemed disappointed. I think he was trying to trick me the way he did when he sent me the letter talking about Horcruxes—”

“What?”

Harry blinked at Ian. “Yeah, he sent me a letter saying that there was something called a Horcrux that could threaten you and I had better come to him and let him reopen the courtship unless I wanted him to activate the Horcrux and make it take you over. So I went to Malfoy Manor. It was stupid, I know, but I really thought that he would tell me! And then he tried to make me betray you, and I said no, and he gave me a love potion.”

“Malfoy didn’t think you were potioned.”

“Draco?” Harry blinked again. “I don’t know. I remember him coming into the room, but it seems like a blur. I just knew that he seemed funny, and I told him I was going to be his stepfather, and I thought that was really funny. I don’t know why I thought that.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.”

What would you know about what I sound like?

Harry shook his head. “I was potioned until last night. And then I woke up, and I thought I heard your voice calling me. There was so much pain in my head. Lucius came into the room, but he didn’t seem convincing the way that I thought he was. I managed to pretend that he was, though, and even agreed to sit beside his bed for the night.”

“You haven’t slept with him yet?”

Why would that even matter? Except Harry thought it probably did to Ian, and that Ian would be convinced that Harry was wretched beyond redemption if he did that or something. Even if he was under a love potion at the time that would make the decision for him.

“No. He said that it was proper for us to wait until the courtship was complete.”

Ian laughed shakily. “Yeah, that sounds like him. A pureblood would think like that.”

You would think like that, dearest brother.

“But what about the Horcrux? He never told you about the Horcrux?”

Harry shook his head. “I tried to find information about it in the Longbottom library, before I went to him, but there was really nothing there, either.” He sighed, and let his shoulders slump. “I’m really tired, Ian. Do you think—do you think I could go to sleep before I talk to you about this? Just for a while?”

He waited to see what Ian would say. Lucius had been sure that he would deny the request, because he saw Harry only as a source of information, but Harry had to admit that he wanted to find out.

“I wish I could let you rest like that, Harry.” Ian looked sorrowful. “But Malfoy is probably going to come after you any minute, and we need to be ready to confront him. What exactly did he say to you about Horcruxes?”

He’s here already. Harry had heard the crack of Apparition, but Lucius had remained too far away to be detected by the Longbottom wards, as they’d agreed.

“All right,” Harry said, and let his fingers twitch. “He said that he used to have one, and that he was the one who gave it to Ginny in our second year. And that she was the one creeping around and Petrifying people when we all thought it was the Heir of Slytherin, and—”

“I’m not going to hear you talk about Ginny, Harry.”

How is it that the bastard is still impressive even though I hate him and know exactly what he did now?

But Harry had his own answer to this now, and he just met Ian’s clear, direct, self-righteous gaze with a small shake of his head. “I reckon that Horcruxes are things that can enchant people, so sort of act like an Imperius Curse in the form of a, a necklace or something. Or a book.”

Ian flinched. It was small, but it was there.

Yeah, he knew exactly what that diary was, but he still blamed me for things that were a lot more accidental and less bad than Petrifying people.

Harry felt his smile turn brittle. He opened his hand and revealed the enchanted book that Lucius had prepared. “He said this was one of them.”

“What? That’s impossible.”

“Well, he said that he gave Ginny a diary that enchanted her, and he seemed to know all about them. So it doesn’t seem impossible to me.”

“No, it’s impossible because the Horcruxes belonged to a specific person, and they’ve all been eradicated because that person was.” Despite what he was saying, Ian was standing with his eyes locked on the book. It looked as much like the diary as Lucius had been able to make it, from what he’d told Harry. It was small and black, and the initials T. M. R. were imprinted on it. “There’s no way that this can be…”

“Oh, okay,” Harry said. “So the other Horcrux wasn’t enchanted to reply to the people who wrote in it? Then I reckon you’re right, and this can’t be one.”

“Is that what this one does?”

“Well, you’ve already said that there’s no way this can be one, so—”

“Harry. Give it to me.”

Harry hesitated. Then he said, “Are you sure? This comes from the man who put me under a love potion, and although I took it from beside his bed and escaped this morning when the house-elves left me alone, maybe it was meant as a trap.”

Ian shook his head, that stubborn expression Harry hated settling over his features. It said that he knew better than Harry and always had. He held out his hand for the book.

He’s going to put himself into the trap. Quite literally.

“Give it to me, Harry.”

Harry looked down, and trembled, and handed the book over. Ian flipped the cover open. His gaze was intent in a way that Harry had never seen it be. Then again, he hadn’t actually seen Ian deal with any of the Horcruxes, either, since he’d been Petrified when Ian was dealing with the diary and left behind at Hogwarts on what must have been the Horcrux hunt.

“Do you have a quill?” Ian asked. He was staring at the blank pages as if he expected them to start bleeding ink.

Harry half-smiled. The enchantment that Lucius had put on the diary was already working. Normally, Ian was better about throwing off that kind of mental control, the same way that he was about the Imperius. “H-here,” he said, and fumbled in his robe pocket for a quill, taking it out.

Ian conjured ink, then pressed the quill on the book’s first page and scratched out a few words. Looking at them from over the top of the book, Harry thought they said, Hello, Tom.

The ink sank into the page, and bright sparks began racing over the paper. Ian tried to take a step back, wary for the first time, but his hands were stuck to the spine and front cover.

Harry laughed. “You idiot.”

Ian’s eyes shot to him. Harry had to give him grudging credit for some real mental strength, shrugging off the enchantment that way. “Harry! Are you still under the potion?”

“There was no potion.” Harry dropped his mask and leaned forwards with a little smile. “I’m with Lucius of my own free will. And he told me all about the ritual and the runes, and how you had a happy childhood at my expense, and how you blamed me for that idiot Ginny Weasley’s death in a way that was totally not my fault. I know you tried to transfer your own Horcrux to me a few days ago. I’ve learned a lot in the past few days.”

Ian’s face had gone white. He shook his head slowly back and forth. The scar on his forehead looked redder than it had in years. “No—no, Harry, you don’t understand, there’s nothing more important than preventing Voldemort from coming back, and without destroying the Horcrux—we can afford to lose you, but the magical world can’t afford to lose the Boy-Who-Lived—the werewolves and the house-elves and the Muggleborns and all the others who need representation—”

“Don’t worry, we’re going to take care of the chances of Voldemort coming back,” Harry said cheerfully. “Enjoy your prison, brother.”

The golden sparks dancing across the page reached out and spiraled around Ian, gripping him. He screamed. Harry laughed again as he watched his brother turn as pale gold and filled with sparks as any illusion, and then he was sucked straight into the book.

The front cover slammed shut and glowed with gold again as the book finished absorbing its victim. Harry smiled at it, and then stooped down and picked it up. It was harmless now that it had finished consuming Ian; it had only been reactive to the first person to write in it.

When he flipped the cover open, black scrawled words were racing across the page.

Can you hear me? Harry, where are you? This is madness! I don’t know what Malfoy managed to convince you of, but you have no idea how urgent it is to—

Harry rolled his eyes and flipped the book shut. He was already getting bored. Maybe he would write to Ian sometimes; in fact, he probably would, just to remind him that Harry was free and had the power to relieve Ian’s boredom if he wanted to. But he would never let him go.

Ian would never age, Lucius had said. Never die. No more than the Horcrux memory of Voldemort had, trapped in his diary. And this way, the Horcrux in Ian was safely contained forever, with no means of transferring it to Harry and no ability of Voldemort to escape and infect someone else.

"What did you do!"

Harry looked up. Neville was charging towards him through the front doors, his fists raised.

Harry raised his own lazy hand.

The air around Neville flared with runes, Nauthiz primary among them, and Neville scrambled and stumbled to a stop, slamming his hands across his eyes instead. It would do no good. The glow like a perverted sunrise was coming from within him.

Harry smiled at him, too, and didn’t care that Neville flinched back from him, eyes going wide with horror. “Harry!” he whispered. “What did you do?” His gaze lingered on the book lying in Harry’s hand. “How could you turn on the brother who loved you?”

“Loved me so much that he made me the sacrifice for his happiness and tried to make me the receptacle for his Horcrux?” Harry asked flatly.

A shiver shook Neville’s body as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff and looking down. But he didn’t flinch away from Harry’s gaze. “You don’t understand everything about what we needed to do. You don’t understand what sacrifices were necessary.”

“I was the sacrifice.” Harry nodded to the runes hovering around Neville. “And now you are.”

“What are you going to do to us?”

Harry savored the terror in Neville’s eyes. Lucius Apparated to his side, probably so that he could do the same thing, leaning his elbow on Harry’s shoulder. Harry smiled and said, “You tried so hard, all of you, to keep me in Longbottom Manor where I would be safe. Well, now you’ll stay there, safely, for the rest of your lives.”

Neville screamed wordlessly and lunged forwards. The runes swirled around him like glowing snow and drove him back and back, towards the front doors.

“Your house-elves can still get in and out,” Harry told him. “They can bring you food and tend the gardens. We don’t want you to starve to death, after all. That would be too quick.”

“Ian wasn’t the one who chose those runes! Or me! It was Gran and the Weasley parents!”

Harry shrugged. “You still benefited from them, and you knew exactly what was going on. I heard you and Ian talking. You were happy for me to die or suffer by carrying the Horcrux. I don’t want to trouble myself too much about your ultimate fate.”

“You fucker! You’ll bring Voldemort back!”

Lucius didn’t flinch this time. Harry leaned back and let his hand rest on Lucius’s hip. “Ian came closer to that than I ever did, because he didn’t let someone kill him. And now he’s in the book and he won’t get out. And neither will the Horcrux.”

“You fucker!”

“That is an inaccurate title at the moment,” Lucius interjected fussily. “But I will be happy to help Harry attain it in truth.”

Neville screamed incoherently in the moment before the runes pushed him back through the front doors and they slammed shut behind him. Harry grinned. That had been satisfying enough to send a low pulse of joy through him.

“Shall we go to the Burrow now?” Lucius extended his hand.

Harry turned to face him, curious about the tone in his voice, and laughed when he saw Lucius’s face. “You hate the Weasleys so much that you’re going to enjoy this, aren’t you?”

Lucius kissed the back of his hand. “I confess it.”

“You’re a bastard.”

“But you love me anyway.”

“I do,” Harry said, and leaned up to kiss Lucius, hoping Neville and Augusta were watching from the windows. He seized the diary that held his dear brother and let Lucius whirl them away.

*

“Harry Potter! What are you doing here?”

Harry stared for a moment as Molly Weasley opened the door. He had never known her as the kindly mother figure Ian had described her as, except for a few holidays when he had been invited to the Burrow. But he had enough fond memories of her to feel a pang as she stood with her hands on her hips, her face reddening until it looked like she might have a heart attack.

Then he reminded himself that she had also told him, both in person and through Howler, that he should have died instead of Ginny. And also that she had had a happy few decades because he had suffered. His resolve hardened.

Heads were appearing behind her, and Ron said, “Is that him? We can kill him, can’t we?”

“No violence, Ron!” That was Hermione’s voice. “I’m sure that we can work this out.”

“No, you can’t,” Harry said, and raised a shield in front of himself and Lucius as a spell streaked out the window of the kitchen. It hit the shield and rippled away with a soundless green splash. Not the Killing Curse, he thought, but still a nasty spell in much the same category. “You used the runes and the rituals to sacrifice me, and then dared to get upset at me about Ginny’s death when it was Carrow who killed her. I’m here to repay the debt.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Hermione. “Runes? Rituals?”

Both Ron and Mrs. Weasley had gone pale, though, and Harry knew they knew what he meant. Probably most of the others did, too. He smiled grimly at them and glanced at Lucius. “Do you want to do the honors?”

“It would be my very great pleasure,” Lucius said softly, and he really did look like an evil bastard, like the Death Eater he’d been, as he drew his wand. He spoke the words that made Sowilo and Prethro rise from the grass and hurtle towards the Burrow, and he was smiling as he did it.

Mrs. Weasley screamed as the runes crashed into the Burrow and flamed out of existence. Maybe she’d thought they meant to burn the house down. But when the runes faded and nothing happened, she seemed to get her courage back. “You needed to pay for Ginny’s death, and no one wanted you before that!”

“No, but someone should have been allowed to,” Harry said evenly. He felt Lucius’s arm curl around his waist from behind. “Ginny died because of her own recklessness, but before that, she had an idyllic childhood. You all did.” George’s and Fred’s faces had appeared now, and Harry looked at them deliberately. “Time to pay for it.”

“You can’t really think that we’ll stop coming after you,” Fred snapped.

“She was our little sister,” George added.

“You’ll turn your wands on yourselves now, instead,” Harry said, and laughed a little at their expressions of disbelief. “And if Ginny was that precious, maybe you should have tried harder to keep her safe.”

“This isn’t over, Harry Potter!” Mrs. Weasley said, over the sound of Hermione’s voice asking loud questions about the runes and the ritual. “We will make sure that you pay for what you broke!”

“You make it sound like Ginny was a bit of porcelain. I don’t think she’d like that.”

“You have no standing to say what she’d like!” There were tears in Mrs. Weasley’s voice, but Harry wasn’t entirely sure that came from Ginny’s death rather than the fact that he’d found out about the ritual and allowed Lucius to cast on the Burrow. “You never knew her! Why couldn’t you stay in the Muggle world where you belonged?”

“Oh, but then Ian couldn’t have tried to move the Horcrux into me, could he?”

Harry hadn’t been sure she would know about it, but of course she did. She was one of the people who had chosen the runes in the first place. She sagged and grabbed hold of the doorframe.

“Mum, what’s he talking about?”

“What’s a Horcrux, Mrs. Weasley?”

Harry laughed a little. He hoped Hermione did do her research and got properly horrified when she found out.

“He was going to do to me what he should have faced up to,” Harry said, and it didn’t really matter if Mrs. Weasley was the only one here who understood him. Well, and Arthur, if he was inside. He just wanted to say it. “He was the one who got the fame and the love and the righteousness of being the Boy-Who-Lived, which honestly might have been the most important thing to him. So he was the one who had the Horcrux. He should have lived up to that burden, too, instead of trying to dump it on me. I did nothing to him.”

“You don’t understand,” Mrs. Weasley whispered dazedly. “Ian is so important to the future of our world, we couldn’t just let him…”

“Was.”

“What?”

“He was important to the future of the world. He’s pretty much irrelevant now.”

“You killed him?”

That was several voices speaking all together, so that Harry honestly couldn’t tell who was more outraged. He grinned. “No, just trapped him somewhere to think about the error of his ways. And to prevent the Horcrux from escaping, of course. We couldn’t endanger the future of the world by letting Voldemort get resurrected, could we?”

Lucius leaned down and muffled his laughter in Harry’s shoulder. Harry reached back to cup Lucius’s cheek, feeling affection burn through him with cleansing fire.

“What is a Horcrux?” Hermione demanded.

“Do keep asking,” Harry said. “I imagine that you’ll find the answer enlightening.”

He turned away, raising a shield idly behind him to stop another curse, and touched Lucius’s shoulder. “I’m ready to go home.”

Lucius nodded and grabbed Harry’s waist. Harry heard the pop that was Waterfall going home ahead of them, and he laughed a little as he heard several voices scream questions that faded into the blackness of Apparition.

*

“May I tell you how perfect you are?”

Harry smiled up at Lucius. They’d barely come through the front doors and Lucius had pinned Harry against the wall in the corridor, his hands at Harry’s shoulders and his face so close that Harry could feel Lucius’s every breath on his mouth like a kiss. “Sure, I could stand that.”

Lucius laughed at him and bent down to kiss him further—

“Father, what are you doing?”

Harry groaned a little as Draco’s voice came from the direction of the library. Honestly, didn’t he have some other place to be? Apparently he lived most of the time in a house separate from Malfoy Manor with whichever poor woman he had Confunded into marrying him, so he shouldn’t need to be here.

“Kissing my betrothed,” Lucius said, without moving away from Harry, and only barely turning his head in the direction of Draco’s voice.

“But—he’s not your betrothed!”

“It is a little premature to describe me that way, Lucius,” Harry agreed, lifting his voice. “I haven’t even had the second courting gift.”

“Do the truth and a rune ritual and an enchanted book not count?” Lucius asked.

“No. I want this done properly, with flowers and clothes and books that I can actually read and—”

“Father! Get away from him! I already told Ian Potter the truth, you can’t even want someone who probably doesn’t belong to the Potter family anymore!”

Lucius tensed and then lifted his head. Harry looked at the expression on his face and wondered if swooning would be appropriate.

Well, probably not, but more appropriate than Draco’s gibbering terror, anyway.

“I did forget about that detail,” Lucius mused, making Harry want to say Bollocks. No, he hadn’t forgotten about it. He’d just put off dealing with it until everything else was accomplished. “Draco, you’re disowned.”

Harry gaped at him. He honestly hadn’t expected Lucius to do that.

“Father! You can’t! You don’t have any other children!”

“I shall adopt some and raise them with my beloved betrothed.”

“Soon-to-be betrothed.”

“They shall be Muggleborn.”

Draco stared at them for a moment, then two. Harry wondered if he’d accept it or argue further, but then Lucius waved a lazy hand and two enormous glowing fingers materialized from the wall, picked up Draco, and flung him out the doors, which closed.

Harry stared at him. “Those were the wards?”

“Yes, acting on a disowned Malfoy. They wouldn’t act on anyone else like that. But my ancestors did like making dramatic statements.”

Harry laughed aloud. Lucius visibly preened. Harry struggled to get his laughter under control in response and said, “You—would adopt children with me?”

“I shall have to now, shan’t I? We will have as many as you like. And their names shall be Malfoy, since you’ll be taking mine.”

Harry had no objections to that. The name Potter had never meant anything good for him. “And they’ll be Muggleborn?”

“As many as you like.”

Harry leaned up and kissed Lucius again, both hands wrapping around his neck. Lucius happily went back to kissing him against the wall.

Harry, on fire with happiness, and thinking that happiness should be shared, thought he might write to Ian later and tell him all about it.

Then he lost himself in his soon-to-be betrothed, and thoughts of joy.

The End.