[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Malfoys Like Snakes, Like a Malfoy series, gen, AU, 5/6

[lomonaaeren]

“Great Serpent, I bring you a treasure.”

“Place it on the altar.”

Harry walked up to the altar with steady steps and laid the Horcrux—wrapped in layer after layer of spells like a spiderweb so that he didn’t have to touch it with his bare skin—on the stone. The circle around him immediately ignited with excitedly swaying snakes, and the wave of hissing swept back and forth across the room.

Harry kept his eyes on the stone and the Horcrux, not the snake that had sprung up to loom above him.

“Do you know what this is?”

“Professor Dumbledore said it was the Resurrection Stone.”

There was a long pause, and then the Great Serpent said, “I have seen the man in your memories. I am surprised that you let him into the house.”

“Father invited him along so that we could hunt the Horcrux and dismantle the wards on it.” Harry stepped back and looked the Great Serpent in one golden eye. This was already going differently than he had planned on, nothing like the solemn ritual where he had sacrificed Sirius. “Can you destroy it?”

There was a pause long enough that Harry wondered if the Great Serpent would say no, and his stomach sank. But the golden eye was simply fixed on the Horcrux, and then it turned and fixed on him, so that Harry felt the full weight of its attention. “I can.”

“And the Resurrection Stone?”

“You want it spared?”

“Professor Dumbledore does. He says he’s desperate to apologize to someone.”

The Great Serpent gave another hiss that Harry mistook for anger at first, but then he was able to truly hear it. His god was amused. “He might not find the apology all that he has imagined,” it said, and then it turned and began to sway back and forth, bathing the Horcrux in is shadow, before Harry could ask what it meant.

The Horcrux sparked and jumped as the shadow passed across it. By the fourth time that the Great Serpent swayed, the wards and enchantments on the ring had almost entirely melted away. Harry watched it warily. The diadem and the locket had both been capable of possessing people. Would this Horcrux be, too?

But then it turned out that the thing had a different sort of defense.

The jagged black stone spun within the ring, turning over and over, and shadowy images formed between Harry and the altar.

James and Lily Potter.

Harry felt his stomach sink even further, until it felt like a coating of lead across his shoes. He tried to breathe, and coughed. He could hear Mother and Father shouting something, but it sounded strangely muffled.

“No words for us, son?” Lily’s green eyes were as bright as his own had once been, and they were searching Harry’s face desperately.

“We are your parents,” James said, taking a step forwards and looking around as though he thought someone would cast a spell at him for saying it. “We took you in, and we protected you from Voldemort, and we’re the reason that you survived. We love you, Harry.”

Harry took a deep breath. He would never have wanted to confront the Potters’ souls like this, not in front of other people, where they might have to see his conflicted feelings spilling out.

But he knew what he had to say. What he really felt, the realization that he had drifted into over long years of thinking about it.

“You loved me, and you protected me from Voldemort,” he said quietly. “And you were still wrong to accept someone else’s child who was kidnapped. Did you know?”

“Know what?” Lily was reaching towards him, although of course her transparent hand passed through Harry.

“That Sirius kidnapped me. That he took me from the Malfoys.”

Lily hesitated. “We—didn’t ask questions.”

“We suspected it was the Malfoys,” James said. “We knew they’d had twins, Sirius complained about it, and the way you looked when he brought you to us…it would be hard not to suspect.”

Harry felt an entirely unexpected pang of sorrow for poor little Aldebaran Malfoy, who might have cried for his mother and brother and never known why they were gone. It was as though that child had been a completely different person than he was, the way—

The way that Harry himself felt like a completely different person from the child Lily and James had raised for a year.

I am my own person. I am everything I have gone through. And I can choose.

“You loved me,” he said softly. “And you were wrong.”

“What?” They were both staring at him with wide eyes, and Harry wasn’t sure which of them had said the words.

“You loved me, and you were wrong to keep a child you knew or suspected had been kidnapped from someone else.” Harry shook his head. “Both things can be true at once. I can say that you loved me and you were wrong. You could have done your best to protect me and still did something worse than if you’d tried to return me to my birth family.”

“But the way you would have grown up if you were there—” James began.

“What they would have taught you, done to you—” Lily said.

“It doesn’t matter. I grew up with abusive Muggles because you died. And I know that you didn’t intend that, but it doesn’t matter,” Harry repeated, seeing the way their mouths opened and knowing what they would say. “It happened. I’m the person I am, and I can’t time-travel, and I won’t spend all my time regretting it. But I can still say that what you did was wrong.”

“Love can never be wrong,” Lily whispered.

“Of course it can.” Harry felt an enormous weariness, which he suspected wasn’t the kind of emotion the Stone had hoped the spirits would summon forth from him. But he moved forwards, and stepped through them, approaching the Stone. He felt no more than a faint, cold mist as he passed through the souls of the two people who had tried to be his parents.

“Love really can’t be wrong,” James said. Harry glanced back and saw that he stood with his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Their eyes were enormous and fixed on him.

“Yes,” Harry said. “It can.”

And he didn’t debate it with them anymore even though he could hear them trying to renew the debate. He turned and crouched down in front of the Horcrux, in the Great Serpent’s shadow.

His god hadn’t moved. Harry wondered why it hadn’t simply gone ahead and destroyed the Horcrux, which he was pretty sure it could have, but then reckoned that it had been curious and wanted to see what he would do.

Or maybe it had wanted to hear him state his commitment to the Malfoy family, or see what would happen if he confronted the souls of the Potters.

Harry locked his eyes on the Stone and said, “You can’t torment me that way. I reject the premise.”

The Stone shuddered, and a long crack ran down the middle of the symbol carved on it. Harry looked beyond it, at the ring, the true Horcrux, and watched the gold bubble and run as if it lay in the hottest fire.

“I reject you,” Harry said. “Stone and ring and the chance to see the dead. You are nothing to me but a tainted sliver of Voldemort’s soul.”

The ring seemed to convulse, and Harry had the distinct impression that it was trying to muster another defense, maybe another soul. He shook his head and leaned forwards, at the moment not caring if the ring could possess people, or that he wasn’t linked to Draco’s soul and magic the way he had been when they fought the diadem. He was sure that he could resist.

“No. There is nothing you can do that would tempt me.”

The Stone spun even harder in its setting, and then the Great Serpent’s head descended. Harry watched in dark satisfaction as its fangs pierced the gold of the ring, and black, blood-like liquid flooded out.

A shriek rose and rang on and on. Then the Resurrection Stone leaped out of the ring and fell at Harry’s feet.

Harry backed away from it. Even if it wasn’t cursed and he could use it to see souls, there was no one he wanted to see. His dear ones were alive.

He turned around, and caught a glimpse of tears streaking his mum’s face in the moment before she buried her head in his dad’s shoulder. Harry smiled gently at them.

“It’s done,” he said. “And now we only have one more thing to do.”

*

Narcissa felt as if she were filled and buoyed up by white fire, a clean and clear-burning flame, the sort of thing her mother had used to invoke as a symbol of purity.

Her son had chosen them. The long years of careful attempts to make sure that he felt at home in the family and adjust to his past and the things he believed had paid off.

She followed him into the cellars near the part of the Manor where his vision had apparently revealed Voldemort, her steps light and a song in her heart. She raised her wand when Henry hesitated outside a door made of splintered black wood.

“I think he’s in here—”

Narcissa gripped his shoulder and squeezed. “You need not worry about it, Henry,” she whispered. “I will take care of it.”

Henry looked up at her, and then he bit his lip, nodded, and stepped aside.

Narcissa had never seen the appeal of brooms, never played Quidditch. This floating, flying feeling was enough for her.

She burned the door to ashes with a white flame and stepped through, her wand already lifted.

The spirit that darted towards her was a flurry of ash and fire. It headed towards her for only a moment, however, and then spun around and aimed at Henry.

“Spiritus oppugno!” Narcissa incanted, and the wraith that was all that was left of Voldemort screamed.

Brillant bars of white light, like the fire she had used to destroy the door, spread throughout the cellar room. They spun and pressed in against the wraith, forcing it into a smaller and smaller space. The bars wouldn’t harm anyone clothed in flesh who touched them, but they would prevent a spirit from moving far away or fleeing to go elsewhere.

The bars shrank inwards until Narcissa was surprised herself at the smallness of the cage they formed. And then they snapped into the shape of a sphere and hovered in the air, glittering furiously, like a diamond with a flaw at the heart.

Narcissa reached out and caught the “diamond,” then turned and presented it to Henry with a little bow of her head. “For you.”

Henry was staring at her with his eyes huge. He swallowed a few times as he accepted the sphere, and then said, his voice uncertain, “I thought you taught me and Draco those spells because you wanted us to capture it.”

“I taught you so that you could defend yourself if you came upon him unexpectedly,” Narcissa said, and smiled at him. “But I never meant you to have to defend yourself if I was there.”

Henry blinked and then smiled. “I—thank you, Mum.”

Narcissa clutched the words to herself, to what she would have scorned to call her heart only a day ago, as they turned and walked back to the ritual room. Now, she could not imagine a name that would give her greater pleasure.

*

The Great Serpent manifested fully in the ritual room the moment Harry carried the sphere with Voldemort’s wraith imprisoned in it through the door. Harry heard his family’s overwhelmed gasps. They had only seen its shadow or its eye before.

Harry didn’t look at them as he walked over to place the sphere on the altar. He was the only one who could understand the Great Serpent’s eager hissing, after all.

“Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me…”

I suppose Voldemort has a fan, Harry thought, half-hysterical, as he released the glowing “jewel” and the Great Serpent’s head plunged down.

This time, the collision was more violent than it had been when the Great Serpent destroyed the Horcrux. The white light sparked and spread outwards, wavering back and forth for a moment before it vanished. And the wraith was visible as a piece of dark cloth or meat, it looked like, wavering back and forth itself, spitted on one fang.

“He wishes to say something to you.”

Harry blinked, and wondered what it was. Although it would probably just be hysterical shrieking from a madman.

And he remembered what else Voldemort had said to him—namely, the Killing Curse—and felt his resolve harden.

“I don’t wish to hear it.”

“Even if it would be quite interesting?”

“Even then.”

The Great Serpent studied him for a moment as though trying to understand why Harry would make that decision. Then it gave a sinuous roll of its shadow and power, which Harry thought was an imitation of a human shrug.

“Very well.”

And the Great Serpent’s head plunged down further, and its fangs pierced the shadow that was all that was left of Voldemort, and he shrieked himself to death while Harry watched with his scar and his heart pounding in symphony.

*

Albus started and half-stood from the couch where he had been enjoying a tray of excellent biscuits. Something had changed. The very air had shifted around him, grown lighter. It was as though a hovering, oppressive presence had vanished.

Did they destroy the Horcrux? What about the Stone?

There was a stirring towards the far end of the room, and the Malfoys walked in again. Albus studied them slowly. None of them looked battle-scarred. In fact, it seemed as though Narcissa Malfoy was filled with a shining kind of fire that made Albus worry a little about the spells she must have cast.

Last came Harry.

The scar on his forehead had faded to nothing more than a pale, silvery mark.

Albus choked and stood all the way up. “You destroyed the Horcrux?” he asked. “And then Voldemort’s spirit faded from existence?”

“It—wasn’t quite like that,” Harry said, and gave Albus a little smile that seemed deep and settled in ways Albus had never seen. “We had to capture his wraith, too, and destroy it. But he was hiding in the cellars here, because of the connection that some of my family used to have to his Dark Mark, so we could capture him and kill him that way.”

“You killed a spirit?” Albus whispered. He knew a few spells that would do it, but they were all incredibly Dark curses that left a taint on the body and souls of all who used them.

“Not exactly us.”

“How?”

Harry hesitated, then shook his head. “I don’t think that you need to know all the details, sir.”

Albus opened his mouth to protest, but then he caught Harry’s gaze, and he closed his mouth slowly. It was true that he had largely, if inadvertently, left the problem of defeating Tom up to Harry and his family. It was true that he had never once suspected that Sirius had kidnapped Harry from his birth family and brought him to the Potters. It was true that he had tried to force a connection between Harry and Sirius.

Maybe he had made enough mistakes, and didn’t need to add to them by forcing Harry to tell him the truth about this.

“And the Resurrection Stone?” he asked, because he had no choice with the thought of Ariana pulling at him.

“It survived the ritual,” Harry said. “But I don’t know if it works. It’s cracked, now.” He grimaced and took a small bundle wrapped in a silken handkerchief from his pocket to hand to Albus, being careful not to touch it with his bare skin.

Albus folded back the silk, and saw what Harry had meant. There was an incredibly deep crack straight down the middle of the symbol, down the line that represented the Elder Wand, and he thought it might have pierced deep enough to let all the magic out.

He looked up and swallowed. “I would like to keep it anyway, if I can.”

“You can, for all of me,” Harry said, leaning back with a careless shrug. “I don’t want it.”

“There is no one on the other side that you wish to speak to?”

“No,” Harry said, and gave him a soft smile. “Why would there be?”

Albus hesitated, then shook his head He had been about to bring up the Potters, but it seemed—he didn’t know how he knew this, but he did—that Harry had moved beyond any need of seeing them as his parents.

“Yes,” he murmured. “I suppose I can see that.”

Draco was sitting on Harry’s other side and Albus couldn’t see his face that well, but Narcissa was bending over Harry now with an expression that made Albus want to look away. It seemed that Lucius thought the same thing, because he cleared his throat and stood up in a way that blocked the sight of his wife and children from Albus.

“May I escort you to the gates, Headmaster?”

And after all, Albus had more than one reason to accept.

*

He thought Lucius would speak on the way there, but he never said a word. He only nodded curtly once they were beyond the gates and then turned, striding as if he couldn’t wait to return to the family he had parted from only a few minutes before.

Albus swallowed and stared at the Stone in his hand, still cradled in the piece of silk. He could understand that impulse, although he had parted from the family that most mattered to him decades and decades before.

Delicately, not touching his bare skin to the Stone, he turned it over.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

The air was still. Albus lifted his head and looked straight before him, where the lore he had studied about the Hallows said that Ariana’s soul should appear.

The air remained still. The world around him echoed with the rustling of leaves, wind, birdsong. An owl soared overhead, heading for the owlery that Albus suspected the Malfoys kept on the highest level of their Manor.

After a long moment, Albus nodded shallowly and tucked away the shattered Resurrection Stone into his robe pocket. He turned and walked towards the Apparition point, and he kept his stride as easy and natural as possible.

Only later, alone in his office but for Fawkes burning steadily on the back of his chair, did he break.