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Chapter Eighteen—Effectiveness

“And Slytherin wins!”

The Gryffindor commentator wasn’t bothering to put even fake enthusiasm in his voice, but it didn’t matter. Harry held up the Snitch and smiled as the Slytherin stands exploded into hoarse yells and cheers.

He sensed someone behind him and rolled easily on the broom, and the Bludger shot through the space where his head had been.

“Foul!” Marcus Flint screamed, sounding like he was going to strangle the Gryffindor who had done that himself. “Foul!”

“The game is over, it can’t be a foul!”

Harry’s eyes weren’t on Katie Bell, who was the one who had come over to argue with Flint. He was looking at Fred—or George—Weasley, who had his Beater’s bat in hand and his burning eyes locked on Harry.

They were still upset about their punishment last year, Harry thought. And probably the death of their sister. And maybe definitely losing the Quidditch Cup again this year.

Harry watched the twin for a moment. The other one was glaring at him, too, but it didn’t matter that much. Harry was going to make sure that his vengeance got both of them.

But later. If he did something now—even though he could, like conjuring a gust of wind to push the one who had shot the Bludger at him off his broom—it would be too obvious and too easily traced back to him.

Harry turned his back on the Weasley twins and flew to the ground, where he held up the Snitch higher than ever, and once again the Slytherins’ cheers outweighed the boos that were coming from the other stands. Draco landed beside him and looked him over carefully in a way that made Harry smile.

“They really didn’t hit you?”

“No. These brooms your father got are fast.”

As expected, those words distracted Draco completely. He started to preen and chatter about how much fun they would have over the Christmas holidays, now that Lucius Malfoy had invited Harry to Malfoy Manor. Harry walked with Draco back to the school, although his spine prickled a little, almost expecting another Bludger.

But nothing happened.

Harry would let that be the case, for a few days.

*

“Are you going to talk to the Weasley twins, Albus, or are you going to have Molly and Arthur do it?”

Albus sighed as he sat back in his chair. “Need I remind you, Lily, that the Bludger didn’t actually connect? And that we have no particular reason to single out one student that the twins attacked when we have tolerated their pranking for years?’

“But you know that they only targeted Harry because of last year!”

Albus shook his head slowly. Maybe he should have had this talk with Lily before she was pacing around her office, waving her hands, upset that her son—as she saw him—had almost been hit by a Bludger.

Something that happens in every Quidditch game.

“Lily, he is not your son.”

“Of course he is! Don’t tell me that you’re being affected now by the magical disownment—”

“No, of course not. But we have made every effort to reach out to him since he arrived at Hogwarts, and he has pushed away and disdained all of them. And we have researched all the spells we could in the ten years since then to break the disownment if we needed to. Not even a Time-Turner could do it.”

“We didn’t have a Time-Turner powerful enough! If the Unspeakables had shared instead of selfishly keeping—”

“They did let me have one.”

Lily spun to face him. Albus winced at the look in her eyes. It was easy to see why she had stood against Voldemort, he thought, and not just because she had been a Muggleborn or a Gryffindor, or married to and friends with people in the Order. That raging fire wasn’t the sort that would back down from Death Eater threats.

“Explain what you mean by that, Albus.”

Albus clasped his hands on his desk. He had faced worse in his lifetime than Lily Potter. Ariana and Gellert were in his mind, as they always were, and he had to almost physically push them away so that he could speak to Lily.

“The Unspeakables let me have a Time-Turner powerful enough to travel back to the evening that you cast the spells on Harry,” he said quietly. “I tried, Lily. I tried. But the storm of magic around that event prevented me from even getting close.”

“What do you mean, a storm of magic?”

Albus reached out and tapped the Elder Wand against the closest of the silver instruments that sat on his desk, one shaped like several silver rings coiled within each other, and topped with a sapphire at the tip. Lily narrowed her eyes, but watched obediently as Albus’s magic sparked and slid around it.

“Notice how the rings are starting to revolve around each other?”

“Of course.”

“And what do you see at the center?”

“Nothing.”

“Keep watching.”

Lily turned her eyes back to the instrument with obvious reluctance. Albus turned his own. He already knew what he would see—he had built this particular instrument to understand what had happened after he had returned from that failed time travel journey—but it would still hurt.

The center of the rings remained empty for a few breaths more. Then the sapphire finished funneling Albus’s magic into that space, and the power sparked and leaped and wrapped around the rings. Lily jerked back from the intense, focused brightness, one hand over her eyes.

Albus made himself keep watching, despite the dancing afterimages, until he thought he had made his point. Then he waved his wand and shut the instrument down.

“What was that?” Lily whispered, in the silence that lingered over them, lowering her hand and staring at him in bewilderment.

“That was the magic protecting itself,” Albus said softly. “What you and James did that evening, Lily—you’re both powerful. You invoked magic with more than an edge of desperation, trying to protect Harry from any chance of being discovered by Voldemort and the prophecy. The magic that came into existence is stronger than any single event I’ve ever seen. It wants to exist. It will protect itself. And it will protect Harry from being discovered.”

Lily swallowed what looked like a sticky lump in her throat, several times. Albus could only watch her, his heart aching. He thought it the height of cruelty that Lily and James’s intense love for their son had made it impossible for him to know them.

“You’re saying that we will never get him back,” Lily whispered. “That we have to resign ourselves to it.”

“Yes, I’m saying this.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about the Time-Turner before? Why—wait?”

Albus flinched in the face of her devastated eyes, but his answer was the same as it had been when the Unspeakables had lent him the bloody thing and he’d discovered himself barred from the night that Harry was disowned. “Because I thought that it was still possible that you could lure him back. I didn’t want to crush your hopes.”

“Instead, we’ve crushed them.” Lily put her hands over her face.

Albus stood from his desk and went over to pat her shoulder, knowing that he was muffing the job of comforting her, but not knowing what else to do. Fawkes crooned at Albus in an irritated way and flew over to land on Lily’s shoulder, nuzzling his head against her chin.

“I can’t give up.”

“What?” That had not been what Albus had thought she would say.

Lily dropped her hands and turned to face him. Albus swallowed and held still. At the moment, he felt much like prey who didn’t want a hawk to notice him.

“I can’t give up,” Lily repeated. “We have to keep trying. Perhaps we won’t get him to talk to us or trust us this year, or the next, or the next, or even before he finishes Hogwarts. But we have to try.”

“Lily…”

“I know that you think there’s no hope, Albus. But that’s my son. I can’t abandon him. I already did that once.”

Lily marched out of his office, with Fawkes flying back to his perch just before she would have taken him out the door. Albus stared helplessly after her, and then turned to look at his familiar.

“Do you think I should have done something different, Fawkes?”

Fawkes whistled at him, and the comforting sound made Albus smile, little as he might have thought he deserved to. He walked over to rub the phoenix’s breast feathers, and Fawkes nuzzled him in the way that he had nuzzled Lily.

“I can only hope that they will manage to reach out to young Harry,” Albus whispered. “That they will keep him from drowning in the darkness that waits to claim young men like him.”

Fawkes nuzzled him again.

*

Harry waited three weeks. Three weeks of people walking around him when he left the common room, not because they really liked him but because they didn’t want to risk Slytherin’s Seeker. And in the meantime, his anger seethed.

He decided to strike when it had been a week since the Weasley twins had last been heard voicing disgust for Slytherin’s Seeker and how they should have been allowed to strike at him for being a cheater, which he must be, for unspecified reasons. Harry slipped from shadow to shadow until he reached the bottom of the staircase that led up to Gryffindor Tower, and then he sat down and closed his eyes.

He had practiced and practiced this. One advantage of it was that he could do it while he was lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, and even sometimes in class, as long as he didn’t close his eyes for too long.

Now…

Now.

The water vapor thickened, even stronger than when he’d humiliated McLaggen in front of the others for Theo’s sake. Harry held it, concentrating, until he was sure that someone could only see it if they were looking in exactly the right place and there was enough light.

Then he sent it flowing towards Gryffindor Tower.

He had never tried to control the water vapor at such a distance, and he had only dared to do this in the first place because he’d spied on the Fat Lady’s portrait from the shadows and eavesdropped on Gryffindors describing the layout of the Tower. Now he sat with sweat starting on his brow and his magic aching as he let the water idle in front of the Fat Lady’s portrait.

Someone would come along eventually. Someone would open it.

And someone did. Harry didn’t pay any attention to who it was, other than that they had dark brown hair. It would be slightly amusing if it were Granger, but he didn’t allow that thought to crack his concentration.

The water vapor whirled through the common room and up the stairs on one side of it. Harry bit his lip as he concentrated even harder. He could do this, but he had to find the right room without the use of his eyes, only feeling the magic of the boys sleeping in the bedroom and comparing and contrasting it to magic he had felt in the past.

That was another reason that he had waited three weeks. He’d need that long to become familiar with the feeling of the twins’ magic.

He finally sensed a bedroom door that seemed to be the right one, and whirled through it, pressing the little droplets around the cracks in the sides of the doorway. And yes. There was the sense of the magic beneath him, sprawled across two flat objects that must be beds.

Harry waited for long moments to make sure that he couldn’t sense anyone awake and dangerously listening.

Nothing. The magic was quiet and eddying around their bodies the way it did when they were asleep. Or so Harry thought, since he hadn’t ventured this far into Gryffindor Tower and could only base his ideas about that on his sense of his sleeping roommates.

But it didn’t matter. He knew that with his bones.

I am doing this.

Harry spread out the water vapor and filtered it through the twins’ magic and into their bodies. And then he jerked it all together, so that what had been vapor and floating droplets turned into true water.

Inside their mouths. Inside their noses. Inside their lungs.

Their magic jerked and changed, and Harry knew they were coming awake. He lingered for a moment, just a moment, to observe, indirectly, how they flailed and hurt as they came near to drowning.

And then he pulled his awareness back to himself, started to his feet, and began to run.

He dared not be found outside the Slytherin common room when they started searching for the one who’d done this.

But satisfaction was his companion, purring louder than any cat, as he went back to his own dorm.

*

Theo glanced over at Harry when the news came that the Weasley twins had spent the night in the infirmary. Apparently they’d half-drowned as they lay in their beds last night.

As usual at breakfast, Harry was reading a book and appeared to be taking no notice of anything in the vicinity. But Theo knew he didn’t imagine the smile that curved up around the corner of Harry’s lips.

“What did you do?” Theo asked, leaning over to whisper into Harry’s ear. He didn’t think he was imagining the way that Harry shivered, either. Good. Theo needed some advantage over Draco now that Harry was going to be spending Christmas with the git, too.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sure you don’t.”

“I’m glad that you agree.”

Theo leaned a little closer. “I only meant that I know you had something to do with this. Other people might attribute it to the rest of the Quidditch team or a prank backfiring on the Weasley twins, but you? I know you did this.”

For a moment, Harry continued to read his book, and Theo thought it was possible that Harry would ignore him after all. But then he laid down his book on the table and turned to Theo, and Theo caught his breath in shock and delight.

There was an edge to Harry’s smile that reminded Theo of the dangerous, dancing fire that his father lit in the hearth each year on the anniversary of his wife’s death.

“You can think that,” Harry whispered. “You could never prove it. And if you managed to, I would destroy you, too.”

Theo thought, later, that his own response to that should not be almost swooning. But that was what it was, and he licked his lips as he locked his eyes on Harry’s face and saw a shadow of uncertainty pass over it.

“I would never try to undo the vengeance you committed,” Theo breathed. “I hold vengeance sacred myself. And they deserved it for what they did to you.”

“Then why question me about it?”

“Because I want to know what you did. I want to know everything about you, Harry.”

The shadow of uncertainty remained in the back of Harry’s eyes, but he gathered up his book and his toast with a little shrug of his shoulders.

“You won’t be the only one.”

No, Theo thought, as he eased back and reached for his teacup, I won’t. But I’m one of the first to notice, and unlike Draco, I don’t put off the things I need to do once I realize the necessity. It took me unforgivably long to realize, but now…

Over Christmas, the holiday he had resented because he wouldn’t spend it with Harry, Theo would go home and enact a ritual that his ancestors had used since time out of mind. He would meditate on the best courting gift that he could send to Harry.

He wanted it to be perfect.

*

Harry smiled a little as he mixed a few drops more of James Potter’s blood into the potion he was still preparing for the Dark Lord, because it was an interesting challenge. He had heard that day that George Weasley—the one who had tried to hit the Bludger at him, Flint had confirmed—had been transferred to St. Mungo’s. They didn’t know if the magical damage he had sustained as a result of his temporary drowning could be reversed or not.

It’s what he deserves.

Harry whistled under his breath as he stepped back and examined the cauldron. Unfortunately, he only had a few more minutes to spend with the potion. Then he would have to visit Professor Lupin and spin a few lies about what he had learned while “spying” in Slytherin.

He paused and caught his breath.

The potion was glowing silver and red, the color of a metallic ring with a ruby on it. The books had described that shade as the perfect one, but Harry had thought he was weeks or months from achieving it.

He took a step forwards, watching it, trying not to disturb the wonder in his mind. The brewer’s intent was important to the potion, and so far, Harry had thought that he wouldn’t be able to brew it because he hated Lily Potter far more than her husband.

But now, now it was there.

Because of the thoughts of vengeance I was having. Because I wanted to hurt someone, and I did. And because I can apply the same mindset to hurting James Potter. Not because he did anything to me in and of himself, but because his death will hurt Lily Potter.

Harry hastily dipped a silver cup into the potion and scooped some of it out. He held his breath again. Its colors might fade…

But when he held up the cup, it still shimmered, and it continued shimmering no matter how much Harry stared and held his breath. He supposed that the moment when he could have damaged it might have passed.

The Dark Lord would be pleased.