lomonaaeren

“Potter.”

Harry had been moving through a back corridor that led to the library, one he’d taken many times before, when he heard the voice. He kept moving. There was nothing awful enough to make up for what Snape had done to him, so Harry would do nothing at all.

“Potter! I’m talking to you!”

Snape had appeared ahead of him in a portrait frame attached to the wall that had always been blank, and one of the attractions of this corridor to Harry. He stopped and looked up at his former professor, saying nothing.

His silence appeared to infuriate Snape. The man dug his painted hands into the portrait frame and snarled, “Aren’t you the least bit curious what you did to deserve the curse I cast on you?”

Harry knew he’d done nothing that could possibly be that bad, especially when Snape had cast the curse before interacting with Harry. He shook his head and walked past.

“Your father bullied me! He took my best friend away!”

That made Harry a little curious, but he already knew his father hadn’t killed someone when he was at Hogwarts, or people would have flung that back in Harry’s face when he was under the curse. He kept walking.

“Your mother was my best friend! He took her away! Convinced her to turn against me!”

That did explain some things like the form of the curse Snape had cast on him, but Harry still wasn’t interested enough to stop.

“You deserved everything that happened!”

That was untrue, but Harry just shook his head. There was nothing to be gained for him by engaging with Snape. No matter what the man said, he would just have another excuse. No matter what Harry said, his words wouldn’t make any impression on Snape.

And no matter what form of revenge Harry took, one of the other professors would say he’d gone too far.

“Why did you stay in Hogwarts instead of leaving, you little brat?”

Harry kept walking without answering. But really, he’d have thought Snape was “brilliant” enough to figure that out.

Harry hadn’t known that the curse extended mostly to the inhabitants of Hogwarts and would be less brutal or nonexistent with other magical people. (Hell, he hadn’t even known it didn’t affect Muggles until the summer after third year, since the Dursleys acted like that all the time). At least in Hogwarts, he was fed and the house-elves might hate him but didn’t try to poison him. If he’d left, he would have had to try to earn money and scrounge food elsewhere. It would have been less secure in Hogwarts in that respect.

And there was the Hogwarts library. Again, Harry wasn’t aware of such a collection of books that existed anywhere else in the British magical world. Maybe there was one in some pureblood house somewhere, but people would have done their best to keep it away from him, even if not because of the curse. Most of those purebloods had been Death Eaters.

While Harry had access to the library, he could learn all sorts of spells beyond the ones taught in class. He never would have made the progress that he did with the runes and stitching of spells beneath his skin if he hadn’t read the right books.

And since fourth year, Harry had been able to access the Restricted Section by using the Disillusionment Charm beneath his skin. He’d promptly started making copies of the books, but it took a long time, and he still wasn’t finished.

Once he was, if he finished before the end of the school term…

Yes, he would consider leaving Hogwarts for good at that point.

“You’re a worthless, idiotic brat with nothing of your mother in you!”

It was interesting, Harry thought as he slipped into another passage and down onto the staircase that would actually let him reach the library doors, that Snape got worse at insults the more furious he was. Snape’s curse had made damn sure that Harry had never really had a chance to get to know his parents from anyone who had known them. Why would he care about Snape’s opinion of his mother’s opinion of him?

Harry put it out of his mind as the door of the secret passage shut behind him and Snape’s shouts faded. He had a tome on rare potions to finish copying, and he wanted to gather some more ingredients from the Forbidden Forest, especially if he really would leave the school behind forever soon.

*

“I really do need to talk to you, Harry.”

This time, since Harry wasn’t showing up at the Defense class anymore, Black had resorted to confronting Harry when he was coming out of the library. Harry sighed as he stared at the man who had claimed the position of his godfather. Probably this would waste less time if he just let Black got through what he wanted to say, the way he had with Weasley.

“All right.”

“Not here.”

Black turned and swept off mysteriously down a corridor with his cloak flaring. Harry shook his head as he followed. He thought at least half the magical world’s problem was their addiction to drama.

Black turned around on a staircase that rarely got used because of its tendency to swing erratically back and forth without attaching to floors long enough for more than one person to get off. Maybe because Black was a professor, or “professor,” the steps stood still. Black’s hands clenched on the railings as he stood facing Harry.

“Don’t you want to learn about your parents?”

“Why would I?”

Black closed his eyes, then opened them. “I deserve that, I suppose.”

Harry’s comment hadn’t really been directed at what Black deserved or not, so he just waited.

Black licked his lips and said, “I found—Hagrid was assembling these. He wanted to give them to you, but he feels too bad about the part that he played in the curse.” He slowly got a packet of what looked like small slips of paper out of his pocket.

Harry cast several detection charms before he decided to accept them, and then cast a net-like charm in the air for Black to put the paper in. Black made a wounded little sound.

“You’re insane if you think that I’m touching those with bare skin.”

Black dumped the slips of paper into the net without looking at Harry.

Harry studied the slips. They turned out to be photographs, rather than just random slips of paper, after all. There were glimpses of a face that resembled his. Harry supposed that would be his prancing arse of a father.

His mother looked a little more interesting, with hair a bright shade of red that no one had ever described to Harry and green eyes that truly did look like his. Harry cocked his head and studied her. Then he tipped the magical net to the side and reached for one of the photographs of her.

Black seemed to be holding his breath.

The picture Harry had plucked was one of his mother in a wedding dress, or, Harry supposed, a wedding robe, white and lacy. She was clutching a bouquet full of white flowers and laughing at the camera. Harry wondered idly if she would have looked like that laughing at him, if she had lived and the curse had struck her.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think of them?”

“That they’re pretty?” Harry offered. It was true. Moving the picture of Lily had shown him a picture of James, and he had been handsome and tall and better suited to the wild black Potter hair than Harry was.

“But now you can get to know them! I can tell you stories about them!”

Harry shook his head. “I’m not curious about them.”

Black gave him a heartbroken look that probably fit well on his dog Animagus form. “But why not?” he whispered.

“The curiosity I could have had withered in my first year,” Harry said simply. He put the picture of Lily back in the net and then shoved the magical net at Black with a little effort of will. He grabbed it and held the pictures as if they were much heavier than Harry knew they were.

“But you don’t want to keep them? Every orphan wants photographs of their parents!”

“No.”

“I don’t understand you.”

Black sounded anguished, not like he was blaming Harry, so Harry shrugged and answered, “I had to grow beyond that. The only things I heard about my parents were about how much better they were than me, or how I had all my father’s negative traits. And even though it was Snape who cast the curse and Dumbledore’s portrait knows that now—”

“What?”

Harry studied him curiously. Black had been close to Dumbledore and Snape, he’d thought. At least, Granger and Weasley had hinted often enough that Snape was part of the secret group they had joined, along with Black. “Yeah. He cast the curse, and because Dumbledore trusted him and Dumbledore was connected to the wards of Hogwarts, the curse traveled through that link and affected everyone in the school. And apparently Dumbledore’s trust of Snape also made people trust their own perceptions of me and ignore the contradictions in their attitudes.”

Granted, that last part was speculation, but Harry was fairly sure it was true.

“They didn’t tell me any of this.”

Again, Black sounded heartbroken. Harry supposed it was his hobby. He shrugged. “They called me up to McGonagall’s office to have the portraits tell me. Until then, I thought Voldemort cast the curse.” Black jumped. Harry rolled his eyes. “Maybe they’ll tell you if you ask nicely.”

Black turned and ran the other direction.

Some of the photographs dropped to the floor. Harry looked at them, then turned and walked away.

*

“You need tutoring.”

Honestly, Harry should just keep his Surrounding Silence Charm up for every meal he’d eat at the Gryffindor table, he thought. He glanced sideways at Granger and shook his head.

“You must! Since you could barely concentrate in class or turn in your homework with—” Granger stopped and flushed.

“With what you were doing to me. Among other people.”

Granger flinched.

Harry shrugged and went back to eating. At this point, he thought that Granger might regret what she’d done but be too proud to admit it. Maybe the tutoring offer was supposed to serve as a redemption gesture.

But Harry had no interest in being the instrument of her redemption or anyone else’s. He had only defeated Voldemort in the first place because the man wouldn’t stop hunting him, and he had been as surprised as anyone else to survive the Killing Curse and finally be able to kill Voldemort.

“You need help.”

“If I don’t pass the NEWTS because of lingering bias, I’ll just retake them in the future.” Harry grabbed the last scone on the plate in front of him and stood up, careful not to let the marmalade spill on the floor.

“What about not passing them because you don’t know enough?”

“I know more than you.”

Granger puffed up like some of the more outraged owls Harry had seen over the years. Harry just shook his head and turned his back.

Before he could get out of the Great Hall, Black entered with a rapid stride. He looked around, saw Harry, and came over to him. His face was twisted with what looked like a complicated mixture of outrage and hatred. Harry sighed, wondering what Black had it in his head that Harry had done now.

“Here. This is yours.”

Black held out what looked like a handful of light to him. Harry cocked his head. He had never tried to hand a spell to someone, but it might make a great trap for someone stupid enough to touch it.

Come to think of it, he knew a lot of people like that. If only he wasn’t certain that he would have been blamed.

“It’s yours,” Black insisted, shaking his hand at Harry.

“It looks like a spell. Why are you giving me a spell?”

Black blinked at him, and then muttered something under his breath and shook his hand back. Now Harry could see that part of Black’s arm was invisible, and the handful of light he was holding glittered more like a weave of cloth. Harry blinked in turn.

It might be an Invisibility Cloak, but if so, Harry had never seen one as fine or well-made as this.

He peered at Black. “I’ve never seen this before,” he said, and ignored the obvious joke that he could already hear people making behind him, about how he wouldn’t have seen the Invisibility Cloak. “Why do you say it belongs to me?”

“Because it used to belong to your father, and Dumbledore borrowed it early on in the first war. He was supposed to give it back to you when you came to school, but he kept it.”

Harry slowly accepted the cloak. It slithered over his arms, mostly visible only where a fold of it here or there caught the shimmer of the candles overhead. Harry shivered absently. It felt cold in a way he couldn’t define.

“Why didn’t he give it back to me?” Harry almost asked, but caught the asinine question before it could escape his mouth. Of course he knew.

Black was talking anyway. “I went to demand some answers from his portrait about the things he never told me, and he was the one who confessed that the cloak was still hidden in a cabinet in his office. So I got it, and now you should have it. It belongs to you.” Black’s nostrils flared. “James always intended to send you to Hogwarts with it. He got sent that way.”

Harry supposed that he knew one good fact about his father, after all.

“What do you expect in return for this?” Harry asked, lifting his gaze to Black’s face.

“Nothing. It’s yours. Use it, or not.”

And Black turned and stormed out of the Great Hall. Harry ran the Cloak through his fingers, watching the way they appeared and disappeared, and then turned and tucked it into his robe pocket. He would have to cast some more detection charms to make sure the Cloak was really as harmless as it looked, although since Black had touched it with his bare skin, it probably was.

“That’s not going to be useful.”

“Hmmm?” Harry had almost forgotten Granger was there.

“Since everyone knows you have it, it’s not going to help you sneak around.”

Harry shrugged and didn’t say anything. Maybe Granger was right, but on the other hand, he was hardly going to be sneaking into people’s bedrooms to steal their secrets or their homework or whatever Granger was thinking. He would use it most of the time, if it didn’t hurt him, to disappear from the view of annoying people.

He stepped out of the Great Hall and faded into the rush of people, ignoring Granger calling from behind him.

*

As it turned out, the Invisibility Cloak was both free of harmful magic and excellent at helping Harry sneak into the Restricted Section, fooling the wards more successfully and for a longer time than the spells woven under Harry’s skin.

Harry hummed as he duplicated another large swath of the book on advanced potions-making into the notebook he’d chosen. The copying spells took quite a bit of magical energy, and now he could do more of them per night since he saved the strength that fooling the wards had taken.

Maybe he would have everything he wanted copied by the Christmas holiday, and he could leave Hogwarts after that.

Harry decided that would be a good goal to aim for.

*

“Harry?”

This time, it was Dumbledore stalking Harry from a portrait frame on a wall he passed that was usually empty. Harry just kept walking, as he had with Snape. Dumbledore could follow him, but he couldn’t make Harry pay attention.

“Did you not want to know what the locket and the diary you destroyed were?”

Dumbledore must mean their formal name, Harry thought as he sped up a little. And the answer was no, honestly. He was a little curious about the process Voldemort had used to implant pieces of his memories into objects, and he suspected there had been more he hadn’t known about that Dumbledore had probably destroyed, but he wasn’t curious enough to linger and talk to the Headmaster.

“And what you were?”

Harry couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder at that, and Dumbledore pressed closer to the edge of the portrait frame. “Yes, you,” Dumbledore said, loudly enough that Harry would have Silenced him in a corridor with anyone else nearby. “You carried a piece of Voldemort’s soul within your scar. You were what is known as a Horcrux.”

Harry blinked slowly. That name was news to him, and while he had of course suspected that something was odd about his survival of the Killing Curse at Voldemort’s hands, he had thought it was more likely to do with his mother’s sacrifice to save him.

She loved me, once.

Harry pushed away the memory that would do him no good, and shook his head. “I can understand why you didn’t tell me this when you were alive, because you didn’t trust me. But why keep it from me after you were dead?”

“It was—you might have told someone who did not know. Not even Minerva knows about the Horcruxes.”

“Who would I have had to tell? You helped make sure I had no one.”

Dumbledore gave him a sad frown. “I am trying to make sure that you have a life beyond the war, my boy, by explaining everything as clearly as I can. I know you are intelligent. Surely you wondered how you survived the Killing Curse?”

“You’re saying that the curse killed the Horcrux living in me instead of my own soul,” Harry said, ignoring the question.

“Yes, that is what I am saying.”

Harry nodded. It was good to have a minor mystery solved, although he could have gone for the rest of his life believing that it was his mother’s sacrifice that had saved him from the second Killing Curse, too. One explanation was as good as another. “I’m glad to understand that.”

He walked on, ignoring the way that Dumbledore called after him. The man wanted him to make a promise about something, maybe a promise not to talk about Horcruxes with anyone else.

Harry didn’t intend to make it. This secret was one Dumbledore had kept from him, and now it was up to Harry to decide whether he would keep it or not.

*

Harry let his head lean back on the stones near the top of the Astronomy Tower as he studied the constellations above him again. Yes, this time they were clear, and the starlight shining down on his equations told him what he had done wrong.

He scribbled two answers, adjusted a few numbers, and held up his parchment to the sky once more.

Something swooped across the stars, getting in his way. Harry frowned up at the darkness, wondering if someone was trying to approach him on a broom, and thinking about the most effective way to discourage them if so.

But instead, the shape turned and pivoted in front of his eyes again, revealing itself to be much smaller than a human on a broom. An owl, then. Harry raised his arms, ready to call up the most useful defenses against a hostile bird or a poisoned letter.

It neither attacked him nor tried to hand him a message. Instead, it landed on the stone parapet in front of him, hooting softly.

Harry stared. Even with the limited illumination the starlight provided, he knew those white feathers, those sharp talons, those golden eyes. It was Hedwig.

Harry closed his eyes, controlled the fine tremor in his limbs, then looked at her again.

Hedwig looked back at him with wide eyes that might be conveying sadness, for all Harry knew. How could one tell, with an owl? She shuffled closer to him, then stopped, her eyes focused on his hand.

His left hand, Harry thought, where she had scarred him when she flew away forever.

Or not forever.

For the first time in years, Harry didn’t know what to do. He had sometimes not known how he would do something, like dodging a patrol of Death Eaters or killing Voldemort, but his goals had always been clear.

Now, he supposed, he had a choice. Did he want to reject Hedwig, the way he’d rejected so many other people? Or accept her? There were excuses he could make, like the other people he’d rejected being human and Hedwig an animal, but ultimately, it came down to his own choice.

Harry took a deep breath and held out his arm.

Hedwig hopped onto it, her weight a warm comfort. She sidled towards him, then stopped, as if unsure of her welcome.

That fit with the way Harry was feeling. He lifted one shaking hand to hold out to her.

Hedwig nipped gently at his fingers, the way he remembered from the summer before first year all those lifetimes ago. Then she settled into place on his shoulder.

Harry bowed his head. He was still not going to forgive the others. He was still going to leave Hogwarts as soon as he could, as soon as the books in the Restricted Section were copied, and never look back. And he wasn’t there to redeem anybody or save them.

But it was a kind of redemption of the lonely little boy he’d been to sit there and feel Hedwig cuddled close to him, warm and accepting, and to know at least someone had come back to him the way they could have been, the way they used to be.

Harry rested his cheek on Hedwig’s feathers and leaned back to look at the stars.

The End.