lomonaaeren

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Chapter Fifty-Nine—Disappointing Results

“Did you do well on the Defense OWL, Mr. Potter?”

Harry glances up. Kingsley Shacklebolt is standing in front of him. He has a faint frown, as if he doesn’t know what Harry’s answer will be, but doesn’t think he’ll like it.

“I don’t know, sir,” Harry says. “Remember that the results don’t come out for several weeks.”

“How do you think you did?”

“Well, I impressed the proctors with my Patronus.”

It was an effort to call Prongs forth and not immediately turn him into the deadly creature that he is with the Potter Gift. But Harry managed. He needs to protect the knowledge of the magic that he can use and teach his friends, so he did.

“That is not an answer.”

Harry pauses, and then draws himself up, standing taller in a way that obviously surprises Shacklebolt, from the way his eyes widen. Harry leans a little nearer and drops his voice. “There is no answer you would be entitled to.”

Shacklebolt keeps looking at him for longer than Harry is comfortable with, but his enemy is uncomfortable, too, so that’s all right. Then the professor sighs. He reaches into a robe pocket, making his movements large and obvious, and takes out a small scroll of parchment. Harry won’t accept it, so Shacklebolt sets it floating in the air in front of them.

“If you need help battling Voldemort, there are Order of the Phoenix members who would answer your call.”

Harry raises his eyebrows. “Even though I would be using Dark Arts?”

“Not all of us think about Dark Arts the same way, or believe that soldiers need to be able to preserve their innocence.”

Harry gives him a thin smile and gathers the scroll up by conjuring a complex crystal cage around it. It’s a spell that he learned from books the Room of Requirement gave one of their practice sessions. “All right, sir.”

“But you won’t tell me anything right now?”

“I still don’t know how much of your loyalty is to Dumbledore, or if you’re one of the Order members who would consider that I’m mad or have to be restrained because I’m using Dark Arts. Or if you would think of me as a child.”

Shacklebolt closes his eyes in silence and turns away. Harry watches him go, then glances back at the scroll in the cage.

He’ll keep it, but he does think that he won’t often call on these people, if at all. He doesn’t want to waste time arguing about what Dark Arts are and whether anything he does to resist Voldemort is immoral.

At least, not unless he has to.

And he does have a few conversations he needs to have where he’ll have to argue more than a bit.

*

“Harry.”

Sirius’s voice is thick and fragile. Harry smiles at his godfather and reaches out to hug him. “Hey.”

“You’re really okay?” Sirius asks, holding Harry’s shoulders and staring Harry in the eye in a way that makes him feel a bit guilty. But he also knows that Severus would have told Sirius if Harry was suffering at all, and Sirius would have been at the school. Or he would have stayed after the ritual and demanded more answers then if he really didn’t think Harry was all right.

“Yeah. You wanted to talk to me?”

“Yes, I did.” Sirius’s face is graver than Harry’s seen it, and makes him look older, as he steps back from Harry and gestures towards the drawing room up the stairs. “I don’t mind telling you that you worried me.”

“You do know why, though.”

“Let’s get settled before we start having an argument.”

Harry nods and climbs the stairs, then settles into his favorite chair near the fireplace, while Sirius takes one across from him. Kreacher pops into the room with a plate of biscuits, looks back and forth between Harry and Sirius for a moment, and then grunts before he vanishes again.

Huh. Interesting. I wonder if I just had to start on the path to lordship to impress him.

“I know that you felt you couldn’t tell me the truth because of the leopard. But there are ways we could have found around that.”

“What are those?” Harry snags a chocolate biscuit from the tray. They really are good, the way that all of Kreacher’s are.

I wonder how much I should talk to house-elves about freeing them.

*

Sirius stares at Harry a little helplessly. Harry smiles back at him, his face calm and blanker than Sirius is used to seeing from him.

What did he do to himself in that bloody ritual?

But in the end, Sirius doesn’t have to ask about that. Because he has something else to say instead, and it’s honest and real, and Harry is going to listen to him.

“We could have set up a room full of light,” he says. “So that there would be no shadows and no way for the leopard to hide in them. Or you could have asked the Speakers to take you and me and Severus to their world so that we could speak of the truth there.” At least Sirius can acknowledge that Severus would both want to be included and deserves to be included. “Either of those would have been an option, and you’re smart enough to think of it yourself. But you didn’t want to.”

Harry puts down his teacup and looks interested for the first time. “Yes, we could have done that. Although the Speakers might not have wanted to help. I don’t even know if non-Parselmouths can actually enter their world.”

“But you acknowledge that the room full of light would have been an option.”

Harry blinks. “Yeah, we could have done that,” he repeats.

“Why didn’t you do it? Maybe you couldn’t have told us ahead of time why we had to meet in a place like that, but you could have set it up, and then we could have met, and then you could have told us about the leopard.”

Harry watches Sirius for a long time. It’s strange. He looks less foreign than Sirius thought, now that he gets a good look at his godson. Harry’s still looking directly at Sirius, and his smile is the same, and the general outline of his face.

It’s just the way that he’s using his voice and expressions that’s changed, and Sirius is more than a little infuriated with himself that he can’t even say why that really is.

“I didn’t think of it,” Harry says at last. “I had my brain full of all the other things that I was thinking about. Reversing the Soul-Breaker and making sure that Theo survived consumed me.”

“So much that you didn’t even think of how to explain the truth about the sacrifice to us?”

“So much so, that.”

Sirius swallows, because there’s only one conclusion he can draw from that, and it’s not one he wants to speak. But maybe hearing it from him will let Harry hear how utterly fucked-up it is. “Because you didn’t prioritize telling me or Severus the truth about whether you were really going to—kill yourself.”

Harry breathes out slowly. “Yeah. I’m sorry for that.”

“But not sorry enough not to have done it!”

Harry sits up and focuses on Sirius. And it wasn’t Sirius’s imagination, he does look different. His eyes seem deeper and greener, not as if something has been added to them, but as if a barrier has broken in the back of them and a wildness that was always there has been released. Harry looks older and sadder and more dangerous.

But not regretful.

“No,” Harry says quietly. “I’m sorry now, when I can focus on that. But—I don’t even really know how to explain what it was like, Sirius, to be as focused as I was on saving Theo. There was nothing in the world that didn’t serve that purpose. Even when I was doing something for other people, it was to test possible methods, or help them in a way that might help me later, or fool the leopard. That’s the way it was.”

Sirius licks his lips. He has to ask the question. “And will it be that way going forwards?”

“No.”

Sirius pauses. He didn’t expect the firmness in Harry’s voice, and he—well, he wants to trust Harry, but he already trusted that his godson wouldn’t endanger himself, and look what happened. Harry paid enough attention to Sirius and Severus to trap them neatly in those circles, and nothing more. “How can you be sure of that? What happens if another of your friends gets in trouble, gets hurt? Will you react the same way?”

“No.”

Again that sound of decision behind Harry’s word, as if it’s one that he’s already carved deep in the stone of his soul. Sirius hesitates again. “But why? How do you know?”

“Because of what I burned during the ritual.”

“What was that?” Sirius does vaguely remember the burning slips of parchment, although it’s not something he questioned at the time.

“I burned my reluctance to become a lord. My reluctance to tell other people what to do.” Harry’s eyes burn and shimmer as if reflecting the light of burning parchment right now. “We’re also unlikely to be facing an opponent like the leopard again who could spy on us wherever we were. And that means that next time, I would be able to tell people what I was doing, and accept them helping me.”

“Because you—I don’t even know what, see them more as minions now?”

“See them more as vassals.”

The word is familiar to Sirius from childhood, and he tries to restrain a grimace of distaste, although he knows he fails. His parents talked about the Dark Lord like that, as though they were his vassals—although from what Sirius can remember, neither of them actually swore oaths to him. And he didn’t swear oaths in return.

Even for his Death Eaters. For Regulus.

Sirius pushes the old hurt away. “It sounds like you’re setting yourself up to become a Dark Lord.”

Harry laughs a little, brokenly, putting one hand over his face for a second in a way that alarms Sirius. Sirius gets up and crosses the room to him, moved by the sight of his godson in pain, and puts his arms around Harry.

Harry leans against Sirius, shaking. It makes Sirius wonder, abruptly, how much Harry was putting on another kind of show when he was arrogantly declaring himself a lord, trying to convince himself as much as Sirius.

“I don’t want to be a Dark Lord,” Harry whispers. “I don’t want to become what Voldemort is. But if I had to become someone with some of the same traits but not as bad, so that I could defeat him? Yeah, I’d do that.”

Sirius swallows and holds onto Harry for a few more moments in silence. Harry even shakes and cries in silence. And there’s only a few tears, at that. Harry stills after such a short time and continues to let Sirius hold him, but Sirius knows it’s not because he needs it anymore.

“I wish you didn’t have to become this,” Sirius whispers, the first thing that comes to mind.

“I know. But any chance of that vanished when he cast the Killing Curse at me.”

Sirius swallows and tries out something that—might work. “Will you at least tell me what you’re planning to do from now on? Let me help?”

“Yeah, Most of the time, yeah, I would.”

“Most of the time?” Sirius can’t help asking, with sharp pain in his chest.

Harry sighs and pulls away, to look him in the eye. “If there was something I had to keep hidden from you because you had become possessed or the like? Because you had to be deceived into acting a certain way so that I could save you and others? Yes, I’d lie to you. I’d do whatever I had to, to keep you safe.”

Sirius closes his eyes. He supposes that he occupies a place of honor in Harry’s mind, next to the others, like Theo, that Harry would do anything to keep safe.

But he would rather be at Harry’s side.

“I’ll try not to get possessed, then,” he mutters.

Harry gives him a painful smile when Sirius opens his eyes again, and rests his hands on Sirius’s arms for a second. “Will you tell me what you did plan to do in the ritual, the plan I didn’t give you enough time to set up? It might be something I’d find useful in the future.”

Useful, useful, useful. Is that all he ever thinks about? When can he relax and think about fun and games like a normal fifteen-year-old?

But Sirius has the feeling he knows what Harry would say to that, as well. He would say that any chance for that vanished when the Killing Curse struck him.

And Sirius has to support the version of Harry that exists, not the version he wishes existed. So he steps back and reaches for one of the Dark Arts tomes that’s still piled beside his chair.

“It started when he had a talk with Bellatrix Lestrange…”

*

“I am ashamed.”

Harry sighs and turns around. He’s been walking through Grimmauld Place’s garden, which Sirius really expanded over the last school term. Harry thinks that some of the magic Sirius studied was to try and help him, but other kinds was just not to go mad from his own helplessness in the matter of Theo.

It benefits Harry, though. The garden is now half flowers and half wild hedges that are soothing to wander in.

Even if, at the moment, he’s confronting a Lyassa in snake form with her head drooping as she sways back and forth, and that is not soothing.

Harry stares at her and wonders what to say. He should be angrier about her letting Tarquinius escape, he supposes, when it means Voldemort is out there with a body again and it so nearly ruined the ritual.

But if he disembodied Voldemort once, Harry can do it again. He’s done it twice, and he knows more, now. And in the end, the ritual wasn’t ruined and his stated desire to sacrifice Theo’s father was a ploy to fool the leopard and try and make his friends not worry so much. So he doesn’t hate Lyassa for her failure.

Harry sighs a little and asks, “Why didn’t you notice that he was slipping free from your control?”

“I became arrogant.” Her head weaves restlessly back and forth, her tail scraping in the dirt of the garden. “I thought no challenges meant that he was truly on my leash. I didn’t anticipate that he was making small rebellions, or that he was smart enough to wait until he had gathered enough strength to act against me. I thought he was so arrogant that he would do something obvious if he was ever able to.”

Harry nods slowly. That description of Tarquinius sounds familiar, because it’s exactly what Harry thought would happen. “So what do you want me to do about your shame?”

“Do you still trust me to train you in Parseltongue magic?”

Harry thinks about it carefully, because answering her too fast would be bad for both of them. Then he says, “As long as you understand that I’ll have to prioritize learning other things as well. And as long as you don’t make this mistake of arrogance again.”

“No.” Lyassa lifts her head, thank Merlin, and sways a little faster. “I did leave Parseltongue wards around the Nott home that the corrupt Parselmouth could not pierce.”

“But…wouldn’t Tarquinius have the ability to speak the language if Voldemort is possessing him?”

“It will not matter. I have claimed the house for the Speakers, and Voldemort is so corrupt that he cannot enter territory we have claimed.”

Harry smiles a little. “Thank you.”

“It is the least I could do, after what else I have done. But if your friend Theo wants books or other things from the house, or to go home, he can.”

Lyassa slithers up to him and rests her chin on his shoulder for a moment. Lion is on Harry’s other shoulder, but he’s so still with awe that his wings aren’t even fluttering. Harry hesitates a moment, and then touches a hand gingerly to one of the scales on Lyassa’s neck.

“I want to talk more with you about Horcruxes soon. About ways that we might be able to destroy them.”

“Yes.”

Harry presses his fingers down hard into Lyassa’s scales. She leans back from him and turns into a point of light that blows through the gardens and vanishes into the darkness.

“The Speakers are mighty,” Lion whispers, and coils his tail around Harry’s throat hard enough that Harry thinks he’s going to choke. He reaches up and rearranges his pet’s tail so that doesn’t happen.

“Yes.”

“And yet they obey you. You are also mighty.”

Harry hesitates. He could say all sorts of things about how he has an alliance with the Speakers instead of them obeying him, but that might confuse Lion. And after seeing how Lyassa acted around him just now…

Maybe they do obey him, sometimes. When they’ve made mistakes.

“I don’t have a choice about being mighty,” Harry agrees, looking up at the stars. “But maybe after Voldemort is defeated, I will.”

“There are some trails you cannot go back on.”

How well Harry knows that.