Chapter Fifty of 'Feather and Glass'- To a Head

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Fifty—To a Head

Aradia reels up from sleep. For a long moment, she sits in her bed, panting a little, thinking that perhaps she woke up from a nightmare, or that she felt something breach her wards.

Then she remembers what she was dreaming about, and scrambles for parchment and a quill.

The breakthrough came to her in the dream, perhaps the third time this has happened in her life. She was dreaming of watching Harry’s memories, upset and frustrated with herself that she couldn’t determine how Augusta’s spell had affected them. And then an idea of why they might be so blurred struck her in her face, pushing her out of the dream.

Now, Aradia brushes her hair out of the way and scribbles down the Arithmancy equations, the runes, and the names of the spells she will need to see if her idea is true. Then she leans back and stares at her writing in silence, hands clenching.

She could be wrong. She wasn’t looking in this direction because she assumed that Augusta simply wished to hide the truth of what happened that night, either to mask a traitor in her family, some act of weakness by a Longbottom, or even to give her grandson fame he did not deserve. Aradia was looking for venal motives.

But now she thinks she knows what actually happened.

Augusta wielded desperate magic that night because what happened in the cottage was the death of her grandson. It would explain why others remember the confrontation with the Dark Lord happening in Longbottom Manor. Because Augusta bound the magic of the Manor’s protective wards into the spell, so that they might have saved Neville if the Dark Lord had come there and if his mother had managed to die for him in a way that would prevent the Killing Curse from hitting him.

But that did not happen. Neville died, and Augusta turned reality itself inside out to bring him back.

There is, however, no magic that can return the dead to life as they were. Aradia is accustomed to hearing that saying in the context of Inferi. No matter how much grieving families might pay a necromancer to raise one, what returns to them will never be their loved one who died.

And Augusta did not manage to violate that rule. She has bound Neville to a reality bubble that is slowly collapsing. Within it, he is alive. Without it, he is not.

Aradia does not have regular contacts in countries outside Europe, but she would be willing to wager that if she did, they would be puzzled by her reporting Neville Longbottom as alive and a survivor of the Killing Curse. Perhaps they assume that all the reports published by British papers are exaggerations or just a lie to soothe the public who was nearly taken over by the Dark Lord. Or perhaps the ones who pay attention to British papers on the regular are affected by the spell.

Aradia shakes her head and puts down her quill to shake out, in turn, her cramped hand. It is an incredible feat of magic, and must mean that Augusta is more powerful than Aradia would have thought.

But its time is limited. And when the bubble contracts, Neville will be dead in the center of it, and the memories that have broken and changed around that night healed at last.

Aradia idly considers if she should attempt to intervene in the reality bubble’s destruction. On the one hand, she would definitely do it if Neville were still Harry’s friend. She would try to find a way to save him.

On the other…

Neville has injured her foster son. He does not deserve death just for that, but he has had twelve extra years of borrowed time already. Aradia will not strive to give him more.

She will be busy, actually, testing how she can replicate Augusta’s spell for a very limited and specific set of individuals.

*

“Come on, Remus! It’s been months, either in that room or just in your office here! I need out!”

Remus rubs his fingers over his eyes, and then puts down his quill to press them into his forehead. He thinks that he’s getting a headache. A side-effect of the Wolfsbane, maybe. It also seems as if his transformations are more painful lately, even though he always keeps his mind during them.

It might be the curse on the Defense post. It’s been quiet for months, and even if it did reach out to catch Sirius because he was substituting for Remus during those full moon days, it should have done something more than this.

“Remus, are you even listening to me?”

Remus sighs and lifts his hand away from his face. “Yes, Sirius. But it’s not safe for you to leave. They know you escaped, and everyone in the castle knows what your Animagus form looks like now.”

“But you could Transfigure my Animagus form!”

Remus pauses, interest a little piqued. This is at least something different. He peers over at Sirius, who’s sprawled on the couch in Remus’s office and does indeed look bored to death. He’s been having to change shape and dive behind the couch every time Remus welcomes a student in, or just go back to his room with a house-elf’s help. Remus can understand why this feels like a prison to him, maybe even more than Azkaban did.

“You really think I could Transfigure your Animagus form?” he asks carefully.

“Why not? You’re brilliant at Transfiguration. Got an Outstanding in it!” Sirius rolls over and thumps his feet on the floor, looking at Remus pleadingly. “It’s at least something different than just sitting here all day and listening to you talk about essays or listening to Dumbledore tell me I can’t go outside yet.”

“You can’t go outside yet—”

“But if you can Transfigure me, then I can just be a dog that you adopted! Or a wolf, I’ve always wanted to be a wolf! Please, Remus, please?”

Remus sighs. He’s always been bad at resisting Sirius, which is one reason why James and Peter had Sirius approach him with the plan of becoming Animagi and spending the full moon with him. He sits back in his chair. “I don’t know if I can Transfigure you into a wolf. Your Animagus’s legs and size are all wrong.”

“But a different kind of dog would be fine? Will you try?” Sirius transforms in a blur, and Padfoot lolls his tongue at Remus and yelps.

Remus rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. “I don’t even know if it would count as human Transfiguration or not,” he says weakly. Human Transfiguration can be as tricky as hell to reverse.

Padfoot just yelps at him again.

Remus sighs and draws his wand.

He has a dog in mind that might work: an Irish wolfhound one of his mother’s neighbors kept. The dog would be taller than Sirius, but would keep some of the length of leg and the general shape of the chest. And the fur would be somewhat the same, as well.

If he can manage it. If he doesn’t turn Sirius into a horrific monster or a blob of flesh, the way that Minerva graphically warned them could happen in NEWT Transfiguration.

Remus bites his lip, forces the unproductive fear away, and concentrates.

Let’s see, the wolfhound stood taller, yes—the head would be a little narrower, the eyes differently shaped, the fur grey—

Remus loses himself in the magic twisting under his wand, as well as the fact that Sirius stands there patiently, not dancing around and yelping. When he returns to himself with a gasp and a blink, Sirius is—

Well, he’s not completely an Irish wolfhound, and Remus will need to work on it again before letting Sirius out of his sight. But his fur is grey, he is taller, and he looks sort like a hybrid of a wolfhound and a Grim.

Remus is fairly sure that no one would recognize him.

But not sure enough to let Sirius out of the castle yet. He shakes his head a little and says, “I’ll have to try again later. Can you transform back?”

Sirius twists for a second as though fighting against invisible bonds, but before Remus has time to worry, he’s back in his human form. “You think you’ll be able to do it well enough for me to go outside in a few weeks?” he asks quickly.

Remus wants to say something about how many essays he has to grade, but really, Sirius has been more than patient. It’s the middle of March and he’s been in hiding for close to two months. The Ministry doesn’t seem to have any clue where he went, and neither does Mrs. Zabini, the one that Remus would be more afraid of.

So he nods. “I’ll do my best to grant you freedom, Sirius,” he says as gently as he can. “Even if I have to leave my students’ essays for a time to do it.”

A second later, he’s dodging with a laugh to avoid Sirius, who has turned back into Padfoot and is trying to lick his face off.

*

Albus closes another heavy book and leans back in his seat with a frown. Never before have the combined efforts of Hogwarts’s library and his own private collection failed him. But he hasn’t been able to find anything about a talent that would allow Tom to create a dust-dragon like the one he saw in the vision of Mr. Callahan’s death.

He wonders for a moment if the vision could have been mistaken, or showing him a metaphor instead of what literally happened. But he rejects that notion quickly. He has performed the ritual twice before, decades ago, and it always showed him the literal truth.

It seems he will have to travel abroad this summer and search for the truth in some libraries of his compatriots at the ICW and other students of old Nicholas’s. There may be a price for such knowledge, but Albus is willing to pay it. It is imperative to know why Voldemort wanted these students to die or disappear. Mr. Lestrange could perhaps have had some knowledge of his Death Eater relatives, but the motives behind Mr. Callahan’s and Miss Greengrass’s accidents bewilder Albus.

However, he thinks he has the time to wait. Voldemort has made no move in the months since Lestrange vanished. Perhaps he has exhausted his reach, or his agents at the school feared they would be caught. Or perhaps his list only carried three names.

Either way, Albus can wait for the summer to research without endangering his students. At the moment, that is all he can ask for.

*

“Excellent, Harry.”

Harry can’t help beaming at Steel as he watches his creation gambol around the room. This is the first time that he’s made something so large, so self-willed—without crossing over into true intelligence like Artemis or Ignis—and created from so many different components. The brown dog, who has floppy ears and bright green eyes, stops running around and barks at Harry, ears lifting up.

“The creature makes many loud sounds.”

“You can’t even hear properly,” Harry tells Artemis as he settles her on his shoulder. He doesn’t think she’s jealous of anything he makes, exactly, given that they’re never as smart or as important as she is. But she flicks her tongue at the dog in an unimpressed way.

“I can hear. You made me that way. I can hear Parseltongue.”

“Parseltongue is a magical language—”

Harry cuts himself off as he realizes that Steel has turned towards the door of their classroom and ceased to tap their claws together, the way they usually do when they’re thinking. Harry draws his wand, and Artemis rears up and hisses.

The dog faces the door and growls.

Steel listens intently, carefully, for a few long seconds, although Harry can’t hear anything and the dog, with better hearing than either him or Artemis, doesn’t react, either. Then they turn to Harry and give him a slight bow. “I am sorry, but I cannot remain in the castle right now.”

“Is something dangerous to you happening?” Harry asks, with not a little panic. The mere thought of Steel being threatened—what that threat could mean to him and Blaise—

“Not in the way that you would normally understand a threat.” Steel shakes their head. “But Albus Dumbledore is currently undertaking a ritual that would uncover my presence here, and I am not ready to face him.” They give another short bow to Harry. “I promise I will return next week. The ritual could not still be continuing at that time.”

“All right.” Harry bites his lip. “Stay safe.”

“It is so long since someone has wished me that.”

Harry winces a little. “I’m sorry, do you not like it? I just meant—”

“No. It is precious.” Steel gives Harry a soft smile, all the softer because it doesn’t reveal their fangs at the moment. “And for the sake of being able to return and help someone who would care for me, I must go.”

They abruptly melt into shadows and dust as they stand there, and Harry stares with his mouth open as he watches the dust fly out of the classroom. He puts his hands on his hips. Steel never said they knew how to do that. Harry will make them explain themselves when they come back.

If they come back.

No. They will. They aren’t like Black and Lupin. They won’t just dump me here and never return. I have to believe that.

Harry takes a deep breath and walks out of the dungeon classroom. He’s in time to meet Blaise, who is standing up from his leaning posture near the head of the staircase. Blaise blinks at the dog trotting along behind Harry, but doesn’t ask.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. But Steel had to leave. They said something about Dumbledore conducting a ritual that could have revealed their presence, and you know they hate Dumbledore.”

Blaise nods slowly, his brow furrowed. “I came because Ignis abruptly reacted, flapping his wings and hissing and almost breathing fire right in the Slytherin dormitory. I thought that you were in trouble.”

“No,” Harry says, his own brow furrowing now. “I didn’t actually get hurt or anything. But I was upset, because I was thinking it was something that could hurt you or me if Steel felt threatened, and—maybe Ignis was reacting to my emotions?”

“Maybe.” Blaise gives Ignis, who has crawled out onto his shoulder, a fond look, and turns to the dog. “What’s this?”

The dog barks at Blaise, ears up, and trots over to him with its tail wagging. Blaise pets its head, but keeps watching Harry.

“Steel had me make it out of dust, stone, air, and glass.” Blaise mouths, Glass? Harry indicates the dog’s eyes. “They said it was a pretty good construct. I can’t even see most of the components now.”

“No, they look like true fur and the other parts of a dog’s body.” Blaise crouches down and runs a hand along the dog’s back. It pants and rolls over to let him pet its belly. “Will you keep it around for a while? You might need to explain it appearing and disappearing.”

“I thought I’d take it to Hagrid. If it does dissipate once I’m no longer paying attention to it, then Hagrid will probably just think it ran away. I can say I found it wandering along the edge of the Forbidden Forest,” Harry adds, because Blaise looks profoundly skeptical about what Hagrid will believe of a random dog.

“I suppose that would work.”

“Of course it will work. It’s my plan. I’m a genius.”

Blaise laughs softly, not in the open way that Harry expected, and leans forwards to kiss Harry gently on the nose. “That you are.”

Harry starts kissing Blaise back, and only stops because the dog is leaping around them, barking in joy, and will probably bring someone along to investigate. At least Hagrid will enjoy the dog’s company and the dog will enjoy his.

And if it does last a while, instead of dissolving back into what it came from…

That will be an interesting experiment.

*

Severus drips a slow rain of green potion from his ladle back into the cauldron, watching narrowly. It snarls and bubbles and fizzes, the way it was meant to. Severus steps back with a sigh as slow as the fall.

Unlike Albus, he doesn’t have a phoenix willing to gift him feathers that will let him see the past. But he does have something almost as good in the art of Potions.

Now, if he brewed it correctly so that it won’t poison him or drive him mad…

Severus shakes his head. That way lies true madness, the worry that will consume him if he lets it even though he knows his skills are perfection. He dips a crystal flask into the potion and neatly swallows half of it.

The room around him blurs green and white, as if he is standing deep in the body of an ocean wave. It is an effect Severus has always found uniquely beautiful, and also a good sign that the potion is working the way it was meant to.

He concentrates on the day Adele Greengrass died in his classroom.

The potion shudders in his veins and in his vision, and then the table where the stubborn girl was working comes into view. Severus strides around it. The vision will not last long, and taking another dose of the potion before it spoils means he would have to have powerful healing potions on hand.

He sees Greengrass casting the ingredients in without a care. He sees the moment when the cauldron begins to explode.

He sees a flicker of motion off to the right of her table.

Severus tries to concentrate on it, but then the explosion happens, and even knowing he is not there in person, it makes him duck away from the cauldron. By the time he looks back again, the vision is beginning to fade and whoever was there—he is sure someone was there—is gone.

Although it is not recommended in any Potions text he has read, Severus enforces his will and makes the vision unfold again. He ignores the sick headache pounding in his temples with the ease of long practice. It used to be worse after Occlumency lessons, and it used to be worse after the Dark Lord’s Cruciatus.

However, he sees no more during this time than he did before. Just the blur of quicksilver motion, someone there and then gone. Severus is not even sure that the person actually did anything to Greengrass. He can’t see a hand throwing anything into her cauldron or the like.

And if they cast a spell that made her clutch at her heart, how could they have known that the result would be the potion exploding and erasing the evidence?

The vision steadies and then spins out again into his office. Severus clenches a fist as he stares at the cauldron of dangerous, tempting potion.

He can say, now, that Albus was right and Greengrass’s death was murder instead of an accident. But he still sees nothing to connect the Dark Lord to it, and nothing that says why someone would want Greengrass—dangerous only in the way any wealthy seventh-year Slytherin might be, neither especially powerful nor well-connected—dead.

The potion has raised more questions than answers. And still it waits, shimmering, as if telling Severus that he can see the truth if only he drinks the other half.

Since Severus does not particularly want to spend time under Poppy’s care or fetch the painkilling potions he would need, he silently Vanishes the liquid from the cauldron.

He has a lead. Perhaps not the one he wanted, but at least he is sure it exists.

*

“No! Bad boy!”

Sirius wags his tail to show that he’s heard Remus, but he doesn’t turn around and pant in apology. He’s too busy shoving his nose into a clump of flowers near the base of a tree. He doesn’t know their name and they make him sneeze, but they’re flowers, real ones, out in the sunshine.

That’s all that matters.

Sirius turns around and gallops back to Remus. It took him more time to learn how to get used to his new long legs than it did for Remus to Transfigure him into an Irish wolfhound in the first place.

But now he’s here, he’s free, and no one who saw him would connect him at all with Padfoot. Sirius wags and wags his tail as Remus whistles to him and they continue their walk along the edge of the Forbidden Forest.

Sirius slides to a stop a few strides later, though, and growls. He couldn’t even say why, until a foul scent drifts to his nose.

“Silver?”

Remus keeps his voice low as he uses the alias they’ve agreed on. But Sirius can’t stop as he breaks into a run. Remus shouts and runs after him.

Sirius rounds a tree, stumbling—damn these long legs—and sees Hagrid standing in front of him with two dogs next to him. Hagrid turns around and says something to Remus. Sirius can’t listen to what it is, because he’s too busy sniffing.

One of the dogs is an ordinary boarhound that Sirius has seen Hagrid with before, called Fang, who’s a hilarious coward. The other one, though, is a brown retriever-looking dog who looks normal but smells wrong.

Sirius accelerates forwards.

Hagrid shouts and steps in between Sirius and the dog. Sirius slams into the half-giant and bounces off. He’s used to being able to bowl a human over in his Animagus form if he has to, and he takes a long moment to recover, gasping, from the shock of not being able to do it this time.

By the time he’s shaken his head and stood upright, Remus has conjured a chain that he’s attached to the collar he insisted Sirius wear. Sirius barks at him, straining towards the source of the foul scent, but Remus pulls him back with a werewolf’s strength.

“Sorry about that, Hagrid,” Remus says sheepishly. “Silver is a stray I found wandering around Hogsmeade. I didn’t know that he would attack other dogs.”

“No harm done,” Hagrid says, although he looks hard at Sirius for a long moment. Sirius does his best to control himself. Hagrid must not have much sense of smell and might love the foul dog even if he did. He loves all creatures. “Seems to be a bit of an epidemic, that. Little Harry Potter brought me this dog that was wandering around Hogsmeade, too.”

“Did you say Harry?” Remus asks. Sirius might have tried to ask the question, too, but he remembers at the last moment that it would come out as a bark.

“Aye. Said that the wee thing was wandering and needed a home, bless him.” Hagrid bends down and pets the head of the wrong-smelling dog. Sirius growls, then yelps as Remus tugs on the chain again. “I’m calling him Swiftpaw. He does run fast!”

“I’m sure he’s a lovely dog,” Remus says warmly, and then bundles Sirius firmly towards the castle.

They don’t speak again until they’re back in Remus’s quarters, and then Remus is practically hissing at Sirius as he changes back. “What in the world was that, Sirius? You’re acting like you actually want to be caught!”

“Couldn’t you smell how wrong Swiftpaw was?” Sirius asks, and then shakes his head a little. No, it’s been more than a week since the full moon. Remus still has a better sense of smell than a human right now, but nothing like a dog’s. “Well, it was!”

“The dog might have just rolled in something foul, Sirius.”

“No, Remus. It was Dark magic. And if Harry found it, and Harry is staying with the Zabinis…”

Remus looks more than half horrified. “You think Harry practiced Dark magic on an innocent animal? I thought you were getting a better impression of him from the memories I showed you than you had before!”

“I was,” Sirius mumbles. The memories have shown him an extremely serious little Ravenclaw who always seems to know the answers to Remus’s questions, even when he won’t speak up, and spends a lot of time with Anthony Goldstein and Padma Patil from his House—even though he spends more time with Zabini and Nott. “I thought I was.”

“And now…?”

“The dog smelled foul, Remus. Wrong. I don’t think that Harry left it as a trap for Hagrid, necessarily,” Sirius adds, because he can see from the worry in Remus’s eyes that that’s going to be his next guess. “He might have just left it there when he was done with it. But there’s something terribly wrong there.”

Remus is silent, maybe searching his memory. Then he says quietly, “I suppose that the best thing for us to do is scout it out. For me to smell that dog again when I’m closer to the full moon and my sense of smell is stronger.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“No, Sirius, of course I do,” Remus says, so quickly that Sirius has to doubt him. “But we made a promise to each other that we wouldn’t move fast this time, remember? That we would do everything that was necessary to really understand Harry and not alienate him.”

“But if he’s practicing Dark Arts?”

“We don’t know that he is.”

“How do you explain that smell otherwise?”

Remus shakes his head, at a loss for words. Sirius calms down a little. He knows this particular mood of Remus’s. He’s always succeeded at talking Remus around in the end, when he feels this way. He just has to wait and see.

“I just—want to wait and see,” Remus says at last, unknowingly echoing Sirius’s thoughts. “To make sure we aren’t wrong and doing something stupid, the way we did last time.”

“Last time, we still thought we might be able to rescue Harry from the Zabinis and keep him from being corrupted by them.”

“And now you think, what, that he’s lost forever and he would have to be killed the way you wanted to kill that dog? Sirius.”

Sirius recoils. It’s no wonder that Remus is hesitating, if he thinks that of him. “Of course not! We just need to get him away from the Zabinis. And of course we can wait and gather all the data that we need to. But I do think we need to move before the end of this term, when he’ll go back to Italy and the curse might end your job.”

Remus nods slowly, his eyes dim. Sirius hates to see it after the joy he wore when they were walking along the edge of the Forest, but it’s necessary. “Of course. Yes. Our priority has to be—saving him.”

Sirius nods. He abandoned Harry once before. He won’t do it again.

And Harry is thirteen. Even if he did perform Dark Arts, he might have done it out of the kind of high spirits and desire to experiment that Sirius thinks drove some of Regulus’s nastier spells when they were children.

We can still save him.