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lomonaaeren) wrote2024-12-10 10:10 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2024-12-10 10:10 pm
[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Birds of Victory, Love in the Time of Eagles series, Harry/Theo, 1/8
Title: Birds of Victory
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo, references to Ron/Hermione
Content Notes: AU (Harry and Theo are Ravenclaws), angst, violence, minor character death, gore, torture, Dark Harry, Dark Theo
Rating: : R
Summary: As Harry and Theo work on defeating Voldemort and destroying his Horcruxes, love, death, and mysteries stalk around them, making their task harder.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” chaptered stories being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. This story is the third in my “Love in the Time of Eagles” series, and the sequel to A Game of Eagles and Red in Beak and Talon. You should definitely read those first. This story should be eight or nine chapters.
Birds of Victory
“You know that you must master it.”
Harry nodded, his eyes locked on the runic array spread across the floor. They were in a deep room of the Nott cellars, one with purely stone walls and floor, and warded so heavily that Harry could feel the buzz in his teeth. The runes bore a flickering, sullen blue light at the moment.
“Master it.”
Harry turned around and nodded again to Eustace, who leaned against the doorway, cradling his blackened arm against him. “I know. How’s that different from what we talked about before?”
“You must know it so deeply that you can master every trick the magic would try to pull. So that you would know the moment it tries to leap out of your hold. So that you would be able to feel it if a rune was drawn wrong even before you begin to invoke the array.”
Harry paused. “All right. You’re talking about the difference between mastery and knowing.”
“Yes.”
Harry bit his lip and spent a moment longer studying the array. He felt like he did know it. He’d developed these runes working in tandem with Professor Babbling, although she didn’t know everything about what they were for, and Theo. And he felt like he knew Theo better than any person in the world.
“I think I can,” he said.
“It is good that this is still only a test, since you don’t sound certain,” Eustace said dryly, and went on before Harry could object that he was as certain as he could get, and you needed to experiment with Runes and Arithmancy most of the time to master them anyway. “You know how to escape if you have to.”
Harry nodded, one finger finding the Portkey to the grounds that Eustace had enchanted into a ring. The ring was a delicate silver one that Theo had insisted on choosing from some ancestral Nott jewelry and placing on Harry’s hand himself.
“You are distracted.”
Harry cleared his throat and tugged his thoughts away from his boyfriend. “Yes. I know how to escape if I have to.”
“Good,” Eustace said, and lingered one moment more, eyes heavy on Harry, before he shut the door and left Harry alone with his runes.
Harry spent a few minutes meditating, until it felt as if his mind were humming along with the magic from the runes. Then he faced the center of the array and said softly, “Sowilo,” invoking the first rune.
The rune flared with brilliant blue light, so bright that Harry had to fight against the impulse to cover his eyes. And then the light leaped from rune to rune, and Harry heard the ringing song building up.
He hadn’t been lying to Eustace. He was as close to mastery of these runes as anyone could be after studying them for so long.
Which meant he felt the moment they started to go wrong.
Harry yelped as the bridges of blue light leaping from rune to rune began to shake and tremble. It looked as if an earthquake were shaking them, and then they turned bright orange and began to burn.
Harry seized the Portkey, and there was a nauseating whirl of colors around him that had nothing to do with the runes. A few seconds later, he was standing on the Nott grounds not far from the gates of the house, bent over and wheezing.
He raised his head and looked worriedly at the house. None of the walls trembled and fell inwards or caught on fire, so he supposed that the runes had worked in at least one way they were supposed to, and contained the Fiendfyre.
Or the wards on the room did.
Harry swallowed dryly and trotted back to the house. Eustace and Sirius were waiting for him in the entrance hall and opened their mouths, perhaps to scold him, but Theo was the one who came stalking out of the library door and seized Harry’s shoulders, scanning his face closely. Only when Theo appeared to be satisfied that Harry really hadn’t received any burns did he grab him and haul him close for a kiss.
Eustace cleared his throat.
Harry leaned into the kiss, doing nothing to discourage his boyfriend.
Eustace cleared his throat more loudly.
Theo didn’t care, so Harry didn’t see why he should, either.
A jet of cold water hit them and soaked them both thoroughly enough to plaster their robes to their bodies. Harry let go of Theo with a gasp and seized his wand with trembling fingers so that he could dry and warm himself with charms.
“Black,” Theo hissed.
Sirius raised his wand and rolled his eyes at them with a haughty sniff that made Harry smile in spite of himself. “You needed to stop kissing and distressing your father, Theo. And in the meantime, we want to hear why Harry’s experiment failed.” He turned a heavy eye on Harry. “I thought you were sure of that rune array!”
“I was!” Harry ran a hand through his hair. He really had got away completely unscathed, but his hand was shaking with frustration. “I felt it when it began to go wrong, but I don’t understand why it went wrong in the first place.”
“This is why we need to combine Runes and Arithmancy,” Theo said with quiet firmness.
“Your professors made you promise not to experiment without their supervision.”
“Then why can’t we invite them here, Father?”
Eustace paused for long enough that Harry leaned around Theo to see what the problem was. There didn’t seem to be one, except that Eustace was blinking.
“I can’t think of the last time that the Notts played host to Hogwarts professors,” he said at last. “We don’t usually need them to deliver our Hogwarts letters or explain what it means to be accepted to a magical school, so…”
“All the more reason to do it now,” Theo said firmly, and started dragging Harry along with him. “We need to look at the array and what went wrong with it. Clearly, we need to work on it more to master Fiendfyre.”
Harry leaned on Theo and let his boyfriend sweep him along. Despite the urgency that their runic array succeed—and the reminder of their limited time in the black line climbing Eustace’s right arm—it was still a pleasure to see Theo so animated by his curiosity.
It was one reason Harry had fallen in love with him.
*
“We cannot help you unless we know what the runic array is meant to do.”
Theo sighed a little. He had been afraid Professor Babbling would say that.
Professor Vector, seated beside her fellow professor on the couch across from Theo and Harry in the sea-blue sitting room, nodded and lowered her teacup. “We appreciate the invitation, Mr. Nott, Mr. Potter. We also appreciate that you are holding by your oath. But we cannot decide what the problem is from theoretical discussions of the failure alone. We must see the array.”
“Particularly if you’re going to combine it with Arithmancy,” Babbling said, and bent that sharp gaze on Theo that always made him want to squirm like a little boy. “You know how dangerous that is by now, I hope?”
Theo nodded, swallowing another sigh. He still remembered the first time he and Harry had tried to combine Runes and Arithmancy equations, and Harry had ended up fainting.
“The problem is that we’ll have to swear you to secrecy if you do that.”
Theo sank a little back into the couch and let Harry lean forwards, commanding the room and the moment. Sometimes Harry didn’t seem to know just how good he was at that. Theo knew he didn’t have any ambition to be a hero or a leader, but when he wanted, he could effortlessly make people pay attention.
“What do you mean, Mr. Potter?”
“Because this runic array is important to the war with Voldemort.”
Babbling and Vector exchanged a glance that made Theo abruptly certain they’d been friends of long standing and not just decided to work together to supervise two troublesome students in combining their disciplines. He frowned. He shouldn’t have missed something that important.
“And who would we be swearing to keep this secret from?” Vector asked at last. Considerably taller than Babbling, she leaned forwards a little as if to assert her control over the conversation.
Harry just looked at her, unimpressed. “From the Headmaster, the Minister, and basically everyone outside this house.”
Another exchange of glances. Then Babbling said, blandly enough that Theo tensed, “It seems odd to me that you wish to keep the secret from the Headmaster. He is You-Know-Who’s greatest foe.”
“He’s also tried to keep secrets from me in the past and missed things like my godfather’s innocence.” Harry’s eyes flashed. “I think he would try to take over completely here and not tell me what he was doing, which could end up with him cursed at best and killing one of us at worst. So yes, you would have to keep the secret from him.”
“And you will not tell us what the array does without this?”
Theo hid a smile. Vector had been a Ravenclaw, too. He could see that she was already getting upset at the notion that she wouldn’t know the secret if they didn’t swear.
“Septima.”
“What, Bathsheda? You know as well as I do that they shouldn’t be experimenting on their own—”
“And we owe Albus loyalty as professors at Hogwarts!”
“We’ve never sworn an oath to him. We certainly never promised that we would tell him every experiment our students get up to.”
“What if it’s dangerous?”
“That’s why we should swear, so we can prevent it from being dangerous.”
The two women were only paying attention to each other. Theo nudged Harry in the side with an elbow when he looked as if he were going to interrupt. “We need to let them argue it out,” he whispered.
Harry looked dissatisfied with that, but he nodded and settled back. Theo used the chance to squeeze his hand and look him over one more time for any sign of burns or magical residue that the Fiendfyre might have left.
Theo was fairly sure by now that there was nothing like that left on Harry’s skin, but looking at Harry was never a hardship.
Harry hadn’t had time to flush fully at the way Theo was staring at him when the professors turned and stared at them. “You promise that you’ll tell us all the details of what you’re doing with the runic array if we swear the oath?” Babbling asked.
“We promise.”
It was beyond Theo how Harry managed to sound so naïve and earnest when he had already done things like manipulate the Minister into believing Harry was on his side, but he did manage, and better than Theo would have done.
“Then I’m willing to swear the oath.”
“So am I.”
Harry nodded and glanced at Theo. Harry was the one who had persuaded them, but Theo was the one who had worked out the wording of the oath they would want Babbling and Vector to swear and was carrying the parchment scrolls with that exact wording written on them.
“If you would, professors,” Theo said, with a deference that he was fairly sure they wouldn’t be able to tell was false, and extended the parchments.
Babbling and Vector studied them for a few minutes and then gave each other sharp looks, but neither of them looked like she was going to back down. Theo hid a smirk as they drew their wands to begin the oath. He thought Babbling had been a Slytherin, rather than a Ravenclaw, but for a certain kind of Slytherin, curiosity was just as deadly a trap.
*
“You won’t be able to trap and control Fiendfyre this way.”
“No wonder the runes didn’t work.”
Harry bit his lip and tried to control his blush. Vector and Babbling were stalking around the charred, smoking remains of the array on the floor in the Nott cellars. The walls and wards had contained the Fiendfyre and kept it from spreading, but not much of the original runes were left intact.
“The theory said it should,” Harry mumbled, trying not to sound defensive. Theo, who stood beside him, pressed a hand against his back, and Harry leaned into it. “I don’t know why it didn’t.”
“What color were the bridges the runes were building between them in the moment before you had to use the Portkey?” Babbling asked, with a tone of lecture in her voice that Harry could have done without.
Well, even if they were at home for the summer, they had invited Hogwarts professors to come and lecture them. So Harry breathed in and answered as calmly and neutrally as he could. “Blue.”
“And is that the color of Fiendfyre?” Babbling raised one finger. Vector, who was standing on the opposite side of the array, turned around and raised her eyebrows at them.
“Well, it could be? Blue is a color of fire sometimes—”
“In any of the books you studied?”
“No,” Harry admitted. Those books hadn’t had many descriptions of the colors of Fiendfyre and only one visual depiction, but it was true that both the image and the descriptions had only talked about red, gold, orange, and white.
Babbling nodded. “You used runes that should have theoretically given you control of Fiendfyre—but you neglected to consider all aspects of the theory. Color is one of them. A runic array that mastered Fiendfyre by itself would have to understand the spell inside and out. You would have had to spend years casting it.”
Harry made a sound of frustration under his breath. “We don’t have years.”
“Yes, we rather see that,” Vector said, in her usual calm and dry tone, before Babbling could say anything. Babbling threw up her hands and went back to looking at the blackened runes. “Which is why Arithmancy will balance the runes.”
“Why did you not try this in the beginning?” Babbling asked. “We know that you have a fondness for combining your powers.”
Harry’s ears burned hotter. It was Theo who glanced back and forth between him and their professors and then answered, voice calm and polite and with no trace of a smirk in it. “Because of the oath we swore to let you supervise us. We didn’t want to wait until the summer was done, and we didn’t think it was possible to get you to swear an oath if you realized the true purpose of the array.”
Babbling sighed and stared at the ceiling. Vector just shook her head. “Well, you will have our supervision now. And the equations can complement and balance the runes in a way that will prevent this error from happening again.”
Harry smiled. He didn’t think he was mistaking the undertone of excitement in her voice. “Why will the equations balance the runes so well, Professor?”
“Because the equations themselves, fluid and with many possible different answers, will compensate for the unknown qualities of Fiendfyre that your runes cannot embody…”
Theo was following along with more understanding, given his devotion to Arithmancy, but Harry felt his own curiosity get tugged on, and soon all four of them were having the kind of academic discussion Harry loved. In the middle of it, Theo tilted his head at Harry with a smirk, but a subtle one.
Told you that we could have involved them, that smirk said.
Harry kicked his ankle in such a way that Theo didn’t need to hop on it and interrupt the flow of the conversation.
*
“But can you be sure it’s safe?”
Professor Vector appeared to look down her nose at Sirius even though she didn’t move her head. “We are sure.”
“But Harry was sure that the runic array was safe, and look at what happened with that.”
“The boys were once again experimenting without supervision,” Babbling said, her eyes heavy on them. Harry ignored her. He knew why she was angry that he had used the runic array the way he had, but it had worked out. The professors probably would have refused the summons to the Nott house if it hadn’t been for that failure. “This time, they are not.”
“Should all of us be here for the first test, though? What happens if we need to escape?”
“We all have Portkeys, Sirius,” Harry said, turning and briefly hugging his godfather. He had found Sirius’s concern irritating when he was younger, but the older he got, the more he understood Sirius. He was mostly concerned about missing a threat and leaving Harry vulnerable to it the way he had when he’d run off after Pettigrew. “I promise, things will work out this time.”
Sirius huffed out a breath and clung to him for an instant. Then he stepped back and regally waved his hand as permission to go ahead. Harry could hear Theo stifle a snicker, and kicked him in the ankle again.
Theo kicked back.
It might have degenerated into a scuffle if Eustace hadn’t said, in a slightly bored voice, “The arrays and the equations will work, Black. If you do not believe the word of two experts, I can find someone else who might reassure you. Perhaps someone who will have had their head stuffed up Dumbledore’s arse?”
“Oh, fuck you, anyway. You know that I don’t believe the sun shines out of there anymore—”
Sirius and Eustace’s usual bickering made Harry smile. He turned to Theo and held out his hand. They both wore the glass bonding bracelets Eustace had gifted them for Christmas almost two years ago, which would let them combine their powers better. “Ready?” he asked softly.
“Like you don’t even know,” Theo said, and stepped towards him, holding Harry’s hand and staring into his eyes with all the seriousness he was capable of.
It was quite a lot. Harry cleared his mind of the memory of what Theo looked like when he was kissing him, cleared his throat, too, and turned to face the center of the array.
This time, the runes were carved into the stone, not merely drawn with chalk, and Arithmantic equations, half Theo’s work and half Professor Vector’s, ornamented them up and down the sides. Harry examined them one more time, and then nodded. The array looked balanced to him, which he could admit hadn’t been the case the first time he tested it.
He turned to face Theo, held his hands, and stepped with him into the middle of the array.
Because of the equations and runes being carved, they didn’t disturb anything. But the minute they landed in the middle of the array, it began to glow—with white and gold light this time, Harry noted, distantly.
He was bathing in the miracle of Theo’s magic meeting his.
It had always felt as if he were swimming in a clear lake, but the feeling was stronger this time, maybe because they’d already had one failure with the array and Theo was determined that it would work now. Harry gasped as the magic blended with his and he was twice as strong, twice as fast, smart, capable—
“Quit gazing into each other’s eyes and start!”
Harry flushed as Theo squeezed his hands in irritation. Theo didn’t understand Sirius nearly as well as Harry did.
But Sirius was right that they should start. Harry gave Theo a rueful smile and spoke the name of the rune that would begin it. “Sowilo.”
*
Theo couldn’t help the little jump and catch in his throat when Harry spoke the name of the rune. This hadn’t worked last time.
But on the other hand, he hadn’t been here last time, because Harry was better with Runes and it should have worked to use the runes by themselves to command Fiendfyre.
But it hadn’t, so Theo did his part and began to recite the first equation that was carved next to the Sowilo rune. As the rune blazed with white, the equation shone with gold. Red was coming from other runes, and orange from other numbers, as the connections between the runes and the equations sprang to life.
After Harry spoke the first rune, he’d gone on to speak others, his words gaining momentum. Theo found himself doing the same thing with the numbers, the equations tearing themselves out of him.
This was its own thing, a rising force that sucked up their mingled magic.
But it was also working the way it was supposed to work, and Theo turned and saw a phoenix’s fiery head rising from the left side of the array, at the same time as a flaming basilisk rose from the right.
The phoenix and the basilisk rose higher and higher. The wings and the scales mingled, and Theo was suddenly looking at a creature that was both, a deadly snake with an inferno of wings surrounding it and a scarlet plume crowning its head.
The creature turned and focused on them. Theo bowed his head slightly, in respect but not fear, as he met its brilliant eyes, milky as though blind.
Here I am.
The words thundered through the circle, and finally ended the long string of numbers that Theo had found himself compelled to recite. He took a hoarse breath and turned to find Harry, stretching out one hand towards the phoenix, which had separated from the basilisk again.
“Harry,” Theo said sharply. “It’s not really a phoenix.”
Harry paused, then sighed and pulled his hand back. Theo told himself the phoenix did not actually look disappointed. It was a creation of Fiendfyre. It couldn’t look disappointed or have any will of its own, not if their array had worked as planned to tame the beasts instead of letting them run riot the way the spell ordinarily did.
Harry and Theo turned in a slow circle. Theo thought of the winged basilisk, and the two creatures combined to form it. He thought of it mirroring their movements, and it did, as much as it could when it didn’t have legs.
“Remarkable,” Professor Vector breathed.
Theo smiled at her. He had sometimes disagreed with her on everything from the properties of equations to how much supervision he and Harry really needed when they were combining their magic, but right now, they were in accord. The power of Arithmancy, properly employed, could do so much more than make predictions.
“Eustace,” Harry asked, not taking his hand from Theo’s or his eyes from the Fiendfyre creatures. “Could you please go and get the Horcruxes?”
“I already have them here.”
Theo jerked his head over to look at his father. Father smiled back with a vicious clarity while he took three small, lead-lined caskets from his pocket.
Of course he has them, Theo thought, and his throat and chest swelled with love, and worry when his eyes fell on the black line bisecting his father’s right arm.
Their first priority after mastering this array was to find a way to heal the curse, even if it was one of the Dark Lord’s own creation. They would do it. They would rescue him, and they would have Father and their enemy defeated.
Theo would accept nothing less.
*
Harry dumped the caskets in the middle of the array. Immediately he felt the Dark compulsion from the diary to write in it, the temptation to touch the ring, the tug to put on the diadem and learn the treasures of Rowena Ravenclaw’s wisdom.
Professor Babbling made a wounded sound. “Is that Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem?”
“Yes. Riddle really sought out a lot of famous treasures to corrupt and shove his soul in,” Theo said.
“Riddle?”
Harry left Theo to explain. Even with Theo’s hand still in his and their magic mingling, Harry was the one who was more focused on the Fiendfyre and the Horcruxes right now.
These were three pieces of Voldemort’s soul. One of them had cursed Harry himself, and one of them had cursed Eustace so badly that he might have died. Harry could feel the hatred pounding in his throat as he looked at them.
I want to destroy them.
The winged basilisk gave a long hiss that made Harry jerk his head up and stare. He understood.
Well, of course he understood, he was a Parselmouth, but he hadn’t exactly been around a lot of literal snakes.
“We will destroy these for you.”
Harry glanced at Theo, who seemed to have understood the essence of the conversation if not the whole thing, and was enthusiastically nodding. Harry laced his fingers with Theo’s and gave a firm nod of his own.
“If you would,” he replied, making Vector and Babbling gasp. But they were already under an oath not to repeat anything they saw today to Dumbledore, so Harry thought it was all right for them to know about his Parseltongue, too.
Theo’s fingers spasmed in his as the basilisk tossed its plumed headdress and wings and descended on the Horcruxes.
They screamed as they died. Harry hadn’t expected that. He cringed back from the burning flame, but Theo held him steady, and they watched, and stepped away from a leak of black blood-like substance when it moved over from the Fiendfyre.
Then a flame snapped after that and swallowed it whole, and the last of the Horcruxes burned.
Harry watched and felt a real satisfaction rise up in him for the first time since Eustace had been cursed last summer.
We got three. We’re coming for the other pieces of you, Voldemort.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo, references to Ron/Hermione
Content Notes: AU (Harry and Theo are Ravenclaws), angst, violence, minor character death, gore, torture, Dark Harry, Dark Theo
Rating: : R
Summary: As Harry and Theo work on defeating Voldemort and destroying his Horcruxes, love, death, and mysteries stalk around them, making their task harder.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” chaptered stories being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. This story is the third in my “Love in the Time of Eagles” series, and the sequel to A Game of Eagles and Red in Beak and Talon. You should definitely read those first. This story should be eight or nine chapters.
Birds of Victory
“You know that you must master it.”
Harry nodded, his eyes locked on the runic array spread across the floor. They were in a deep room of the Nott cellars, one with purely stone walls and floor, and warded so heavily that Harry could feel the buzz in his teeth. The runes bore a flickering, sullen blue light at the moment.
“Master it.”
Harry turned around and nodded again to Eustace, who leaned against the doorway, cradling his blackened arm against him. “I know. How’s that different from what we talked about before?”
“You must know it so deeply that you can master every trick the magic would try to pull. So that you would know the moment it tries to leap out of your hold. So that you would be able to feel it if a rune was drawn wrong even before you begin to invoke the array.”
Harry paused. “All right. You’re talking about the difference between mastery and knowing.”
“Yes.”
Harry bit his lip and spent a moment longer studying the array. He felt like he did know it. He’d developed these runes working in tandem with Professor Babbling, although she didn’t know everything about what they were for, and Theo. And he felt like he knew Theo better than any person in the world.
“I think I can,” he said.
“It is good that this is still only a test, since you don’t sound certain,” Eustace said dryly, and went on before Harry could object that he was as certain as he could get, and you needed to experiment with Runes and Arithmancy most of the time to master them anyway. “You know how to escape if you have to.”
Harry nodded, one finger finding the Portkey to the grounds that Eustace had enchanted into a ring. The ring was a delicate silver one that Theo had insisted on choosing from some ancestral Nott jewelry and placing on Harry’s hand himself.
“You are distracted.”
Harry cleared his throat and tugged his thoughts away from his boyfriend. “Yes. I know how to escape if I have to.”
“Good,” Eustace said, and lingered one moment more, eyes heavy on Harry, before he shut the door and left Harry alone with his runes.
Harry spent a few minutes meditating, until it felt as if his mind were humming along with the magic from the runes. Then he faced the center of the array and said softly, “Sowilo,” invoking the first rune.
The rune flared with brilliant blue light, so bright that Harry had to fight against the impulse to cover his eyes. And then the light leaped from rune to rune, and Harry heard the ringing song building up.
He hadn’t been lying to Eustace. He was as close to mastery of these runes as anyone could be after studying them for so long.
Which meant he felt the moment they started to go wrong.
Harry yelped as the bridges of blue light leaping from rune to rune began to shake and tremble. It looked as if an earthquake were shaking them, and then they turned bright orange and began to burn.
Harry seized the Portkey, and there was a nauseating whirl of colors around him that had nothing to do with the runes. A few seconds later, he was standing on the Nott grounds not far from the gates of the house, bent over and wheezing.
He raised his head and looked worriedly at the house. None of the walls trembled and fell inwards or caught on fire, so he supposed that the runes had worked in at least one way they were supposed to, and contained the Fiendfyre.
Or the wards on the room did.
Harry swallowed dryly and trotted back to the house. Eustace and Sirius were waiting for him in the entrance hall and opened their mouths, perhaps to scold him, but Theo was the one who came stalking out of the library door and seized Harry’s shoulders, scanning his face closely. Only when Theo appeared to be satisfied that Harry really hadn’t received any burns did he grab him and haul him close for a kiss.
Eustace cleared his throat.
Harry leaned into the kiss, doing nothing to discourage his boyfriend.
Eustace cleared his throat more loudly.
Theo didn’t care, so Harry didn’t see why he should, either.
A jet of cold water hit them and soaked them both thoroughly enough to plaster their robes to their bodies. Harry let go of Theo with a gasp and seized his wand with trembling fingers so that he could dry and warm himself with charms.
“Black,” Theo hissed.
Sirius raised his wand and rolled his eyes at them with a haughty sniff that made Harry smile in spite of himself. “You needed to stop kissing and distressing your father, Theo. And in the meantime, we want to hear why Harry’s experiment failed.” He turned a heavy eye on Harry. “I thought you were sure of that rune array!”
“I was!” Harry ran a hand through his hair. He really had got away completely unscathed, but his hand was shaking with frustration. “I felt it when it began to go wrong, but I don’t understand why it went wrong in the first place.”
“This is why we need to combine Runes and Arithmancy,” Theo said with quiet firmness.
“Your professors made you promise not to experiment without their supervision.”
“Then why can’t we invite them here, Father?”
Eustace paused for long enough that Harry leaned around Theo to see what the problem was. There didn’t seem to be one, except that Eustace was blinking.
“I can’t think of the last time that the Notts played host to Hogwarts professors,” he said at last. “We don’t usually need them to deliver our Hogwarts letters or explain what it means to be accepted to a magical school, so…”
“All the more reason to do it now,” Theo said firmly, and started dragging Harry along with him. “We need to look at the array and what went wrong with it. Clearly, we need to work on it more to master Fiendfyre.”
Harry leaned on Theo and let his boyfriend sweep him along. Despite the urgency that their runic array succeed—and the reminder of their limited time in the black line climbing Eustace’s right arm—it was still a pleasure to see Theo so animated by his curiosity.
It was one reason Harry had fallen in love with him.
*
“We cannot help you unless we know what the runic array is meant to do.”
Theo sighed a little. He had been afraid Professor Babbling would say that.
Professor Vector, seated beside her fellow professor on the couch across from Theo and Harry in the sea-blue sitting room, nodded and lowered her teacup. “We appreciate the invitation, Mr. Nott, Mr. Potter. We also appreciate that you are holding by your oath. But we cannot decide what the problem is from theoretical discussions of the failure alone. We must see the array.”
“Particularly if you’re going to combine it with Arithmancy,” Babbling said, and bent that sharp gaze on Theo that always made him want to squirm like a little boy. “You know how dangerous that is by now, I hope?”
Theo nodded, swallowing another sigh. He still remembered the first time he and Harry had tried to combine Runes and Arithmancy equations, and Harry had ended up fainting.
“The problem is that we’ll have to swear you to secrecy if you do that.”
Theo sank a little back into the couch and let Harry lean forwards, commanding the room and the moment. Sometimes Harry didn’t seem to know just how good he was at that. Theo knew he didn’t have any ambition to be a hero or a leader, but when he wanted, he could effortlessly make people pay attention.
“What do you mean, Mr. Potter?”
“Because this runic array is important to the war with Voldemort.”
Babbling and Vector exchanged a glance that made Theo abruptly certain they’d been friends of long standing and not just decided to work together to supervise two troublesome students in combining their disciplines. He frowned. He shouldn’t have missed something that important.
“And who would we be swearing to keep this secret from?” Vector asked at last. Considerably taller than Babbling, she leaned forwards a little as if to assert her control over the conversation.
Harry just looked at her, unimpressed. “From the Headmaster, the Minister, and basically everyone outside this house.”
Another exchange of glances. Then Babbling said, blandly enough that Theo tensed, “It seems odd to me that you wish to keep the secret from the Headmaster. He is You-Know-Who’s greatest foe.”
“He’s also tried to keep secrets from me in the past and missed things like my godfather’s innocence.” Harry’s eyes flashed. “I think he would try to take over completely here and not tell me what he was doing, which could end up with him cursed at best and killing one of us at worst. So yes, you would have to keep the secret from him.”
“And you will not tell us what the array does without this?”
Theo hid a smile. Vector had been a Ravenclaw, too. He could see that she was already getting upset at the notion that she wouldn’t know the secret if they didn’t swear.
“Septima.”
“What, Bathsheda? You know as well as I do that they shouldn’t be experimenting on their own—”
“And we owe Albus loyalty as professors at Hogwarts!”
“We’ve never sworn an oath to him. We certainly never promised that we would tell him every experiment our students get up to.”
“What if it’s dangerous?”
“That’s why we should swear, so we can prevent it from being dangerous.”
The two women were only paying attention to each other. Theo nudged Harry in the side with an elbow when he looked as if he were going to interrupt. “We need to let them argue it out,” he whispered.
Harry looked dissatisfied with that, but he nodded and settled back. Theo used the chance to squeeze his hand and look him over one more time for any sign of burns or magical residue that the Fiendfyre might have left.
Theo was fairly sure by now that there was nothing like that left on Harry’s skin, but looking at Harry was never a hardship.
Harry hadn’t had time to flush fully at the way Theo was staring at him when the professors turned and stared at them. “You promise that you’ll tell us all the details of what you’re doing with the runic array if we swear the oath?” Babbling asked.
“We promise.”
It was beyond Theo how Harry managed to sound so naïve and earnest when he had already done things like manipulate the Minister into believing Harry was on his side, but he did manage, and better than Theo would have done.
“Then I’m willing to swear the oath.”
“So am I.”
Harry nodded and glanced at Theo. Harry was the one who had persuaded them, but Theo was the one who had worked out the wording of the oath they would want Babbling and Vector to swear and was carrying the parchment scrolls with that exact wording written on them.
“If you would, professors,” Theo said, with a deference that he was fairly sure they wouldn’t be able to tell was false, and extended the parchments.
Babbling and Vector studied them for a few minutes and then gave each other sharp looks, but neither of them looked like she was going to back down. Theo hid a smirk as they drew their wands to begin the oath. He thought Babbling had been a Slytherin, rather than a Ravenclaw, but for a certain kind of Slytherin, curiosity was just as deadly a trap.
*
“You won’t be able to trap and control Fiendfyre this way.”
“No wonder the runes didn’t work.”
Harry bit his lip and tried to control his blush. Vector and Babbling were stalking around the charred, smoking remains of the array on the floor in the Nott cellars. The walls and wards had contained the Fiendfyre and kept it from spreading, but not much of the original runes were left intact.
“The theory said it should,” Harry mumbled, trying not to sound defensive. Theo, who stood beside him, pressed a hand against his back, and Harry leaned into it. “I don’t know why it didn’t.”
“What color were the bridges the runes were building between them in the moment before you had to use the Portkey?” Babbling asked, with a tone of lecture in her voice that Harry could have done without.
Well, even if they were at home for the summer, they had invited Hogwarts professors to come and lecture them. So Harry breathed in and answered as calmly and neutrally as he could. “Blue.”
“And is that the color of Fiendfyre?” Babbling raised one finger. Vector, who was standing on the opposite side of the array, turned around and raised her eyebrows at them.
“Well, it could be? Blue is a color of fire sometimes—”
“In any of the books you studied?”
“No,” Harry admitted. Those books hadn’t had many descriptions of the colors of Fiendfyre and only one visual depiction, but it was true that both the image and the descriptions had only talked about red, gold, orange, and white.
Babbling nodded. “You used runes that should have theoretically given you control of Fiendfyre—but you neglected to consider all aspects of the theory. Color is one of them. A runic array that mastered Fiendfyre by itself would have to understand the spell inside and out. You would have had to spend years casting it.”
Harry made a sound of frustration under his breath. “We don’t have years.”
“Yes, we rather see that,” Vector said, in her usual calm and dry tone, before Babbling could say anything. Babbling threw up her hands and went back to looking at the blackened runes. “Which is why Arithmancy will balance the runes.”
“Why did you not try this in the beginning?” Babbling asked. “We know that you have a fondness for combining your powers.”
Harry’s ears burned hotter. It was Theo who glanced back and forth between him and their professors and then answered, voice calm and polite and with no trace of a smirk in it. “Because of the oath we swore to let you supervise us. We didn’t want to wait until the summer was done, and we didn’t think it was possible to get you to swear an oath if you realized the true purpose of the array.”
Babbling sighed and stared at the ceiling. Vector just shook her head. “Well, you will have our supervision now. And the equations can complement and balance the runes in a way that will prevent this error from happening again.”
Harry smiled. He didn’t think he was mistaking the undertone of excitement in her voice. “Why will the equations balance the runes so well, Professor?”
“Because the equations themselves, fluid and with many possible different answers, will compensate for the unknown qualities of Fiendfyre that your runes cannot embody…”
Theo was following along with more understanding, given his devotion to Arithmancy, but Harry felt his own curiosity get tugged on, and soon all four of them were having the kind of academic discussion Harry loved. In the middle of it, Theo tilted his head at Harry with a smirk, but a subtle one.
Told you that we could have involved them, that smirk said.
Harry kicked his ankle in such a way that Theo didn’t need to hop on it and interrupt the flow of the conversation.
*
“But can you be sure it’s safe?”
Professor Vector appeared to look down her nose at Sirius even though she didn’t move her head. “We are sure.”
“But Harry was sure that the runic array was safe, and look at what happened with that.”
“The boys were once again experimenting without supervision,” Babbling said, her eyes heavy on them. Harry ignored her. He knew why she was angry that he had used the runic array the way he had, but it had worked out. The professors probably would have refused the summons to the Nott house if it hadn’t been for that failure. “This time, they are not.”
“Should all of us be here for the first test, though? What happens if we need to escape?”
“We all have Portkeys, Sirius,” Harry said, turning and briefly hugging his godfather. He had found Sirius’s concern irritating when he was younger, but the older he got, the more he understood Sirius. He was mostly concerned about missing a threat and leaving Harry vulnerable to it the way he had when he’d run off after Pettigrew. “I promise, things will work out this time.”
Sirius huffed out a breath and clung to him for an instant. Then he stepped back and regally waved his hand as permission to go ahead. Harry could hear Theo stifle a snicker, and kicked him in the ankle again.
Theo kicked back.
It might have degenerated into a scuffle if Eustace hadn’t said, in a slightly bored voice, “The arrays and the equations will work, Black. If you do not believe the word of two experts, I can find someone else who might reassure you. Perhaps someone who will have had their head stuffed up Dumbledore’s arse?”
“Oh, fuck you, anyway. You know that I don’t believe the sun shines out of there anymore—”
Sirius and Eustace’s usual bickering made Harry smile. He turned to Theo and held out his hand. They both wore the glass bonding bracelets Eustace had gifted them for Christmas almost two years ago, which would let them combine their powers better. “Ready?” he asked softly.
“Like you don’t even know,” Theo said, and stepped towards him, holding Harry’s hand and staring into his eyes with all the seriousness he was capable of.
It was quite a lot. Harry cleared his mind of the memory of what Theo looked like when he was kissing him, cleared his throat, too, and turned to face the center of the array.
This time, the runes were carved into the stone, not merely drawn with chalk, and Arithmantic equations, half Theo’s work and half Professor Vector’s, ornamented them up and down the sides. Harry examined them one more time, and then nodded. The array looked balanced to him, which he could admit hadn’t been the case the first time he tested it.
He turned to face Theo, held his hands, and stepped with him into the middle of the array.
Because of the equations and runes being carved, they didn’t disturb anything. But the minute they landed in the middle of the array, it began to glow—with white and gold light this time, Harry noted, distantly.
He was bathing in the miracle of Theo’s magic meeting his.
It had always felt as if he were swimming in a clear lake, but the feeling was stronger this time, maybe because they’d already had one failure with the array and Theo was determined that it would work now. Harry gasped as the magic blended with his and he was twice as strong, twice as fast, smart, capable—
“Quit gazing into each other’s eyes and start!”
Harry flushed as Theo squeezed his hands in irritation. Theo didn’t understand Sirius nearly as well as Harry did.
But Sirius was right that they should start. Harry gave Theo a rueful smile and spoke the name of the rune that would begin it. “Sowilo.”
*
Theo couldn’t help the little jump and catch in his throat when Harry spoke the name of the rune. This hadn’t worked last time.
But on the other hand, he hadn’t been here last time, because Harry was better with Runes and it should have worked to use the runes by themselves to command Fiendfyre.
But it hadn’t, so Theo did his part and began to recite the first equation that was carved next to the Sowilo rune. As the rune blazed with white, the equation shone with gold. Red was coming from other runes, and orange from other numbers, as the connections between the runes and the equations sprang to life.
After Harry spoke the first rune, he’d gone on to speak others, his words gaining momentum. Theo found himself doing the same thing with the numbers, the equations tearing themselves out of him.
This was its own thing, a rising force that sucked up their mingled magic.
But it was also working the way it was supposed to work, and Theo turned and saw a phoenix’s fiery head rising from the left side of the array, at the same time as a flaming basilisk rose from the right.
The phoenix and the basilisk rose higher and higher. The wings and the scales mingled, and Theo was suddenly looking at a creature that was both, a deadly snake with an inferno of wings surrounding it and a scarlet plume crowning its head.
The creature turned and focused on them. Theo bowed his head slightly, in respect but not fear, as he met its brilliant eyes, milky as though blind.
Here I am.
The words thundered through the circle, and finally ended the long string of numbers that Theo had found himself compelled to recite. He took a hoarse breath and turned to find Harry, stretching out one hand towards the phoenix, which had separated from the basilisk again.
“Harry,” Theo said sharply. “It’s not really a phoenix.”
Harry paused, then sighed and pulled his hand back. Theo told himself the phoenix did not actually look disappointed. It was a creation of Fiendfyre. It couldn’t look disappointed or have any will of its own, not if their array had worked as planned to tame the beasts instead of letting them run riot the way the spell ordinarily did.
Harry and Theo turned in a slow circle. Theo thought of the winged basilisk, and the two creatures combined to form it. He thought of it mirroring their movements, and it did, as much as it could when it didn’t have legs.
“Remarkable,” Professor Vector breathed.
Theo smiled at her. He had sometimes disagreed with her on everything from the properties of equations to how much supervision he and Harry really needed when they were combining their magic, but right now, they were in accord. The power of Arithmancy, properly employed, could do so much more than make predictions.
“Eustace,” Harry asked, not taking his hand from Theo’s or his eyes from the Fiendfyre creatures. “Could you please go and get the Horcruxes?”
“I already have them here.”
Theo jerked his head over to look at his father. Father smiled back with a vicious clarity while he took three small, lead-lined caskets from his pocket.
Of course he has them, Theo thought, and his throat and chest swelled with love, and worry when his eyes fell on the black line bisecting his father’s right arm.
Their first priority after mastering this array was to find a way to heal the curse, even if it was one of the Dark Lord’s own creation. They would do it. They would rescue him, and they would have Father and their enemy defeated.
Theo would accept nothing less.
*
Harry dumped the caskets in the middle of the array. Immediately he felt the Dark compulsion from the diary to write in it, the temptation to touch the ring, the tug to put on the diadem and learn the treasures of Rowena Ravenclaw’s wisdom.
Professor Babbling made a wounded sound. “Is that Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem?”
“Yes. Riddle really sought out a lot of famous treasures to corrupt and shove his soul in,” Theo said.
“Riddle?”
Harry left Theo to explain. Even with Theo’s hand still in his and their magic mingling, Harry was the one who was more focused on the Fiendfyre and the Horcruxes right now.
These were three pieces of Voldemort’s soul. One of them had cursed Harry himself, and one of them had cursed Eustace so badly that he might have died. Harry could feel the hatred pounding in his throat as he looked at them.
I want to destroy them.
The winged basilisk gave a long hiss that made Harry jerk his head up and stare. He understood.
Well, of course he understood, he was a Parselmouth, but he hadn’t exactly been around a lot of literal snakes.
“We will destroy these for you.”
Harry glanced at Theo, who seemed to have understood the essence of the conversation if not the whole thing, and was enthusiastically nodding. Harry laced his fingers with Theo’s and gave a firm nod of his own.
“If you would,” he replied, making Vector and Babbling gasp. But they were already under an oath not to repeat anything they saw today to Dumbledore, so Harry thought it was all right for them to know about his Parseltongue, too.
Theo’s fingers spasmed in his as the basilisk tossed its plumed headdress and wings and descended on the Horcruxes.
They screamed as they died. Harry hadn’t expected that. He cringed back from the burning flame, but Theo held him steady, and they watched, and stepped away from a leak of black blood-like substance when it moved over from the Fiendfyre.
Then a flame snapped after that and swallowed it whole, and the last of the Horcruxes burned.
Harry watched and felt a real satisfaction rise up in him for the first time since Eustace had been cursed last summer.
We got three. We’re coming for the other pieces of you, Voldemort.