[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Creatures of Wrath, These Creatures series, gen, R, 8/9

[lomonaaeren]

“Are you ever going to tell me the truth about what happened in that office?”

“I’m trying, Madam Pomfrey.”

The mediwitch only shook her head as she bustled around Harry’s bed in the infirmary, spelling a potion into his stomach with an efficient flick of her wand and then pausing to watch the diagnostic unfurling above him like a banner. Harry tilted his head, but he couldn’t see the runes and numbers from this angle. “You told me that the Headmaster cast the Cruciatus on you.”

“You can see the aftereffects, Madam Pomfrey. And unless you think that I would cast it on myself…”

“Of course not! But that Albus would use it…”

Harry shrugged. All he had said was that he thought the Headmaster had been under the control of some other influence. Madam Pomfrey apparently didn’t know the kinds of spells that could confirm possession.

On the other hand, she had seen the ring on the desk, immediately gasped, and raised a barrier around it that Harry thought would keep even him from approaching it. He’d been reluctantly impressed, and thought about studying more healing spells in case they would include a barrier like that. It had probably been meant to keep stubborn patients from escaping a bed.

“Was it that ring?”

“I think it must have been, Madam Pomfrey. You saw his hand.”

She nodded tightly and turned around to stare towards the curtained bed where the Headmaster lay. Harry looked with her, even though the curtains were drawn and he couldn’t see anything.

“Yes. And why Albus didn’t come to me for treatment on that, I can’t imagine—”

On and on she went, nattering along. Harry closed his eyes and let himself drift on the tide of words, all the while that his mind curled in faint amusement at them.

Yes, the ring could be to blame for everyone except Snape, Griselda, and those others who knew the truth. And in the meantime, Harry could think about his butchering plan, which was proceeding fine.

Somewhere in there, to his own surprise, given that he didn’t exactly consider himself in a safe place, he fell asleep.

*

“Harry.”

Harry blinked and turned his head. Griselda was sitting next to him, stabbing her cane into the side of the bed. He tried to sit up, and she promptly switched to pushing him back into the blankets with the cane.

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“Well, I was focused on getting treatment for the Cruciatus and the Headmaster’s burns, first. I didn’t exactly have time to send you an owl.”

Harry spoke lightly, but let his eyes travel over Griselda’s head in the direction of Madam Pomfrey. Griselda nodded sharply, understanding the story that he was spinning and the audience. She settled back in her chair and shook her head a little.

“Well, you need treatment at St. Mungo’s for the Cruciatus exposure, if nothing else.”

“I can treat him here,” Madam Pomfrey said, stiff. She had popped up behind Griselda and was wielding another dose of the thick green potion Harry had had to take for the aftereffects earlier. “I’ve treated my share of Cruciatus victims in my time.”

Griselda turned around. Madam Pomfrey withered in the face of her stare.

“I’ll say what’s best for my ward,” Griselda said, in that voice that could have stopped charging polar bears in their tracks, and stood up. With a wave of her wand and cane combined, Harry floated off the bed and into the air. He relaxed for the first time since he’d come into the hospital wing. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been around someone who could have been an enemy, and someone who had already proven himself to be.

And who might wake up as one, still.

“Madam Marchbanks!”

“Glad to see that you know my title,” Griselda snapped in the direction of Madam Pomfrey, and spun her wand. Harry floated smoothly towards the Floo. “I say that he needs more treatment.”

“Mr. Potter!”

Harry was glad enough to close his eyes and let his head droop a little. He could always pretend to have fainted when he got back and not heard her speaking to him at all.

And then there was the whoosh of the Floo and the heat of the green flames, and voices exclaiming around them, and Harry gladly abandoned consciousness.

*

“You were lucky.”

Harry nodded and bit into the stack of warm toast with butter that one of the mediwizards had brought him, probably because Griselda had all but ordered him to. “Yeah. I didn’t know he was going to challenge me in the middle of his office, and there weren’t that many places to run or dodge. And I didn’t know for sure that my hatred against the diary would work, either.”

He kept his voice low, just in case one of the Healers appeared around the corner. But they were in a private room, and Griselda’s proximity wards that would ring if someone approached lined the corridor. He thought they were as safe as they could be.

“I don’t like the thought of you surviving only because you were lucky.”

“What else should I carry with me? I know that you were going to research a means to tell when a Horcrux was near, but we would have to find a way to not have it sound the alarm because of me.”

“Then that thing’s still in you.”

Harry smiled despite himself. Griselda sounded disappointed. “Yeah, the battle wasn’t enough to get rid of it.”

“We have to find a way that will be.”

“One of the theoretical books I read from the Nott library said that a second Killing Curse cast by the Dark Lord might be. If it hit me, it might kill the Horcrux and not me.”

Griselda tried to wither him with a stare in turn. Harry merely took another bite of his toast.

“You’ll carry the Invisibility Cloak with you at all times,” Griselda said abruptly. Harry nodded; that was something he did anyway. “And you’ll make sure that you wear the torque I have with me.”

“Torque?”

Griselda reached down and did some rummaging in a box that apparently sat at her feet, muttering something about her hip and how no one made boxes or chairs like they used to. Harry would have offered to help if he’d been standing on his own two feet, but as it was, he knew better than to say anything.

Finally, Griselda held up a shining silver object that was most definitely a torque. Harry blinked. He had seen and even worn some examples in the past, but they had been smaller. This one looked like it could span his neck and stretch all the way down his chest.

“You want me to wear that?”

“It’s enchanted to reflect everything short of the Killing Curse. Including the Cruciatus.”

“How did you manage that?” It was possible to shield against the Cruciatus, but from what Harry knew, that shield couldn’t be implanted in an enchanted artifact. Or only with extreme difficulty.

“I stole it from the Department of Mysteries.”

Harry choked on air.

“Now I know you’re going soft.” Griselda picked up her cane and poked him in the chest. “You shouldn’t be upset at the thought of a theft. Or surprised that I would do something like this for you,” she added darkly.

“I’m not. I just—how did you get past their wards?”

“Bold of you to assume that I didn’t teach half those children their craft.” Griselda cackled when Harry stared at her. “I was an Unspeakable. I still can’t tell you the details of what I did there; those oaths bind. But I can tell you that I worked in the Department of Mysteries.”

“You never did before.”

“You never asked.”

Harry took a deep breath and then shook his head. Yes, all right. And there were things about his life with the Muggles that he’d never told Griselda, and things that had happened this year he might not have told her if they’d occurred earlier in his life. “So you simply walked in and—took this torque.”

“Yes. And you’ll wear it.”

“As long as it doesn’t cramp my movements. It looks heavy.”

Griselda rolled her eyes and turned the thing around so that Harry could see the runes carved into the back and sides of it. “And what do these spell out to you?”

Harry pressed his glasses more firmly onto his face and leaned forwards. The Healers didn’t believe in letting him read while he was “recovering,’ which meant Harry had had to practice whipping his glasses off his face incredibly fast at times and reading behind illusions. The runes seemed to shimmer and dance before his eyes.

“Lightness?”

“That’s a guess, isn’t it.”

“My eyes still burn sometimes.”

“Why didn’t you say so? What kind of incompetents have they been training here? When I get done speaking with the Hippocrates, then—”

“I’m fine,” Harry said with light determination. “It’s just always been hard for me to read something that far away, and I’ve been doing a lot of sneaking my books around the Healers lately.”

“And the Cruciatus aftereffects have nothing to do with it.”

“They might have something to do with it.”

Griselda narrowed her eyes at him, but did move the torque closer. And now Harry could see and understand the runes. He traced his fingers lightly through the air above them, not touching the metal. He could see now that the torque would bind with the skin it touched, and not be removed during life.

“I assume this was used if it was in the possession of the Department of Mysteries.”

“Of course.”

“But if it doesn’t come off until the death of the wearer, and someone died while wearing it, then what protection did it fail to provide?”

“Sometimes,” Griselda said, nudging him in the chest with her cane, “one can’t prevent someone from experimenting with the kind of Time-Turner that supposedly goes back months and hasn’t been tested and is made from chimera scales and the flesh of an undead baby dragon and doesn’t actually respond to runes.”

Harry blinked as he tried to imagine the consequences of that, and then winced. “I see.”

“Yes. It protects against ordinary spells, not extraordinary dangers. And not against the Killing Curse. Remember that.”

“I’m not going to step in front of the Killing Curse, Griselda. I promise.”

“Good. Then you and the torque should get along fine. Put it on now, quickly, before they show up with your next potion and try to forbid you.”

Harry bowed his head and let the torque slide around his shoulders. For a long moment, it hung like heavy silver on his neck, and Harry beat back his insistent panic that presented him with incredibly vivid imaginings of what would happen if he wasn’t able to dodge spells in a duel the way he’d had to do in his fight with Dumbledore.

And then the silver lightened and shimmered and vanished. Harry reached up and touched metal where there had been only skin, but it wasn’t raised. It was truly at the level of his skin.

It felt no heavier than his own body did.

“Thank you, Griselda,” Harry whispered. He could hear the Healers’ footsteps in the corridor, and didn’t dare linger in an attempted embrace, but he did raise his head and let his eyes and voice do the work for him. “I mean it.”

“Of course.” Griselda turned in her chair as the Healers entered the room and stared at them. They withered just the way Madam Pomfrey had.

“Why isn’t my charge being given potions that will fix his eyes?” Griselda demanded. “Or did you think that his going blind was fine as long as he had all his fingers and toes? How long did it take you to count them?”

“Madam Marchbanks—”

“Bring me to the Hippocrates this instant! Who does he think he is, approving this potion regimen that a sixteen-year-old could have brewed? Do we have to go abroad for competent care? Were all of you taught by that incompetent at Hogwarts who swoops around the room in black robes and thinks he’s terrifying people?”

Harry hid his laughter as he watched the Healers stumble over each other. He didn’t resent the insult to Snape, even though he was now working with the man. It was true about his teaching, if not his spy and fighting skills.

And for the moment, Harry had only to recover and think about what he would say when he inevitably had to return to Hogwarts and speak with Madam Pomfrey and Snape.

And, come to that, the Headmaster.

*

“I would have come to your aid.”

Zacharias’s voice was stiff, and he was clutching the side of the hospital bed. Harry sighed a little. He’d been returned to the Hogwarts hospital wing, after even Griselda had had to concede that the Healers had done all they could. Madam Pomfrey had still wanted him to rest. And somewhat surprisingly, Zacharias had been the first of his friends to make it up to see him.

“I know that.”

“I was working on a—surprise with my grandmother. A little more time, and we would have managed it, and brought Dumbledore to heel.”

“I know that.”

“We would have—wait, you do?”

Harry almost choked his laughter at the sight of the offended look on Zacharias’s face, but then decided that it would do both of them some good to hear it. Zacharias didn’t seem offended about this. He did blink and shift his weight, though.

“I know you had a plan,” Harry reassured him. “You stopped me in the Great Hall that day and told me as much, remember? But I didn’t know all the details.”

“You could have given us more time to move.”

“Dumbledore dragged me up to his office and attacked me right then. I didn’t have the time.”

“All right. As long as you know that we would have helped you.”

“I do trust that, Zacharias.”

Zacharias shifted his weight again and cleared his throat. “Well, all right. And what are you going to do about having burned Dumbledore?”

“Mr. Smith! Mr. Potter needs his rest.”

Harry didn’t think it was a coincidence that Madam Pomfrey had shown up right then or what she was demanding. Zacharias gave her a look of dislike and then glanced at Harry. Harry knew his friend was prepared to fight to stay if Harry wanted him to.

Because he knew that, Harry was able to smile and shake his head. “I do still get tired easily, Zacharias. But I should be out and able to attend regular classes again tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”

“Quite right, Mr. Potter. You’re sensible. Unlike some patients I could name, who insist on leaving the infirmary the moment they get to feeling a little better…”

Zacharias retreated, and Harry lay back on his bed and watched Madam Pomfrey bustle around the hospital wing from half-lowered eyelashes. He waited until she seemed to be done with organizing a few potions into new shelves and was coming towards him with a flask in one hand and an ominous expression.

“Do drink this up like a good boy, Mr. Potter, and we won’t have any more problems from your stomach or those nasty tremors.”

“I had a question first, Madam Pomfrey.”

“Yes, Mr. Potter?”

She held out the flask with a motion that seemed meant to smash the glass over his head if he wouldn’t take it, and so Harry obediently did. But he asked his question before she could demand that he drink it. “Why don’t you want me talking to people about what happened with the Headmaster?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Potter.”

“Well, you interrupted me just now when I was talking with Zacharias. And you looked like you wanted to interrupt me with Griselda during our conversation before she transferred me to St. Mungo’s. So I wanted to know what you meant by it.”

Madam Pomfrey opened her mouth, then closed it. Then she said, “I think you’re imagining things, Mr. Potter, which isn’t surprising after the shock you’ve had.”

“Oh, no, I’m sure that I’m in my right mind. That’s part of why I find it so interesting. Why do you want to?”

Harry kept his voice calm and friendly, and his gaze steady. It worked as well as he had thought it would, given that Madam Pomfrey was basically honest. She fidgeted with her hands for a moment, then blurted, “We decided—I mean, we, as in the professors—that it wouldn’t do for Headmaster Dumbledore’s madness to be too widely known.”

Harry stared at her.

“We don’t think it would be a good idea. After all, so many people trust in the Headmaster. The Minister, and the Ministry, and so many students, and their parents, and people who—who fight against the remnants of the Death Eaters and You-Know-Who.” Madam Pomfrey shook her head. “It just wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“I hope that you would permit me a conversation with him, at least?”

“It’s—it’s a good idea when you’ve both recovered a little more.”

“Then you can’t treat his burns?”

“I can treat them, of course.” Madam Pomfrey sounded on the verge of spitting, like she had when Griselda had transferred Harry to St. Mungo’s. “But they go very deep, and he has spiritual wounds, Mr. Potter. The kind that one always has after a possession. We must be very gentle with him.”

“When he attacked me in the middle of his office.”

“That wasn’t him.”

Harry could see, as easily as if he’d slid into her mind with Legilimency, how it would be. Dumbledore would be forgiven his possession the way that Ginny Weasley had been in Harry’s second year. Only Dumbledore wasn’t a young witch who had desperately wanted a friend and didn’t know who lived in the diary.

Dumbledore was to be allowed to get away with it.

No. No, he will not.

“But I’ll be allowed a conversation with him.”

“Yes, of course. You both know what happened, and there won’t be any—undermining of public confidence in a private conversation. A private conversation, mind.”

“So it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to tell my friends, is what you’re saying.”

“No. I’m glad that you’re a mature young man, Mr. Potter. You understand the political necessity of everything.”

Harry gave her a bright smile that he aimed to add a resigned tinge to. He must have succeeded, because Madam Pomfrey relaxed. “Yes. Thanks for informing me, Madam Pomfrey. I wouldn’t want to make a political mistake.”

“Good on you, Mr. Potter,” Madam Pomfrey said, and patted his shoulder. “Some people would be furious to be denied their vengeance, as it were. But vengeance isn’t good for the soul, of course not.”

It is for mine. For both of mine.

“Of course, Madam Pomfrey,” Harry said, and smiled, and pretended to take the potion, and pretended to half-swoon on the bed the way she would have expected him to after taking a sleeping draught of such potency.

All the while, his mind coursed down a track that was made of steel and anger, and his sight focused ahead.

He hadn’t made all his plans on what to do with Dumbledore, but he had one of them by the time Madam Pomfrey stopped bustling back and forth and went into her quarters, attached to the hospital wing, for the night. Harry raised a Silencing Charm around his bed even though he’d seen no movement and heard no noise from the direction of Dumbledore’s bed. This was no time to become sloppy.

“Kreacher.”

The word was low despite his charmwork, a mere hiss, but it worked. The house-elf immediately appeared beside his bed, his hands going to his ears as though he might be required to punish himself.

“What has happened to Master Harry, it is not good, Kreacher can sense the taint of the Dark Lord’s magic—”

Interesting. Harry leaned a little forwards. “There are a few things that I need you to do for me, Kreacher. I was tortured by someone possessed by the Dark Lord. I’d like you to heal me of that if you can.”

“Kreacher can! Kreacher will!”

This time, the tide of magic that rolled over Harry was brilliant and deep green and made him feel as if he’d been plunged into a cold minty bath. It didn’t matter much, though. When it faded, the muscle aches he’d become used to, and a constant low pain from his scar he hadn’t even noticed, had faded, too.

“Thank you, Kreacher. You’re a good elf.”

Harry kept his voice warm but not very confidential. He doubted that Kreacher wanted much praise or thanks. Just the little that Harry had given him would be enough to keep him as loyal as Harry needed him to be.

And, in fact, Kreacher dropped his hands away from his ears and fixed big eyes on Harry. “What else does Master Harry need Kreacher for?”

“I need you to bring me that scroll I was copying from during the summer, the one on the end of the fifth shelf of the third bookcase from the door in the library.”

Kreacher vanished and reappeared so quickly that he seemed to blur in Harry’s vision instead of disappearing, and held out the scroll reverently. Harry smiled and took it.

“And now I need you to wait here for a little while, Kreacher, so I can write a few letters to send to interested parties.”

“Kreacher can!”

And Harry’s house-elf stood there with his hands clasped, rocking a little in place, while Harry wrote letters to the Daily Prophet and a few other people who might not agree that Dumbledore’s secrets should remain kept for the good of “politics.” He did feel tired when he leaned back against the pillow finally, but he thought that probably came from the aftermath of Kreacher’s magic as much as anything else.

“Here you are,” Harry said, and held out the letters. “Take them and see them delivered if you would, Kreacher.”

“Master Harry is trusting Kreacher with this?”

“Why not? I trusted you with an even more urgent message to Griselda last year.”

Kreacher hopped and bowed and clutched his hands together and said a lot of things about how happy he was and how good he was and how loyal he was that Harry nodded to with a smile, without listening. Then the elf vanished, and Harry lay back and closed his eyes.

Whatever the outcome of my conversation with Dumbledore, his secrets are going to come out.

*

“Please allow me to express my condolences, Harry.”

“Condolences, Headmaster?”

“For what you are. For the choice you face.”

“But not your apologies for trying to kill me.”

“That was Tom, not me.”

Harry cocked his head. “And you assume that should excuse all of it? Trusting yourself to master the diary instead of succumbing to it? Torturing me? Not fighting the Dark Lord hard enough to keep from cursing me at all?”

“You will not fight him, and you have turned one of my most knowledgeable allies against me. I was on my own with the help of only a few trusted allies remaining. Yes, I wrote in the diary. It was imperative that I find information about Tom’s method of immortality, that I uncover them and make sure I could conquer them.”

“You can’t.”

“Is that a threat, Harry?”

“No, it’s only an observation. You failed with both the diary and the ring, and you knew ahead of time what the diary had managed to do to someone else and you had the diary’s knowledge about the ring—”

“The diary was the youngest Horcrux, or one of the youngest,” Dumbledore interrupted. “He had no idea how many other Horcruxes Tom had made, or where he’d hidden them, and what protections he’d put on them. I only managed to use the knowledge he shared with me to find the ring by luck.”

Harry narrowed his eyes a little, and his mind leaped the way it had when he’d begun to understand Arithmancy for the first time. “That’s how he possessed you in spite of your knowing what the diary did.”

“What?”

“That’s the reason he managed to possess you,” Harry repeated calmly. He knew that Dumbledore understood him perfectly well, which made exposing the man’s error a perverse kind of pleasure. “You were desperate for knowledge about how to defeat the Dark Lord. And you thought the Horcrux had some. He used that lever against you.”

“There’s no sense in which—”

“There’s plenty of sense in which. Even now, you’re speaking as if to defend the diary. And you value that knowledge more than you value my life.”

Dumbledore twisted his hands in his lap, the left one burned so badly it resembled the cursed right one, and said nothing.

Harry laughed a little. “That also explains why the Horcrux possessing you thought he should explain about ‘objects with pieces of soul in them’ to me. He hoped to use me as a hunting hound to find some of them. He thought I would get curious and go looking for them, and he could tag along behind me. Of course, I don’t know why he wanted to gather them in the first place—”

“To make sure that none of them could acquire a body and destroy him before he could acquire his own body. He also cherished a hope that you might die in the quest.”

“And, of course, he dangled the knowledge of other Horcruxes and my possible death in front of you to keep you quiescent. You wanted those things, and part of you was convinced that that meant your interests coincided. That meant you didn’t fight him as strongly as you could have.”

“I was fighting every second, every inch. You have no idea—”

Harry stared at him. Dumbledore shut up in the face of Harry’s contempt, which was the only positive thing he had done so far.

“I refuse to believe that,” Harry whispered. “Weasley fought him off for a year, and she’s much younger and less powerful than you are. You gave in to him.”

“I did not.” Dumbledore’s voice was shaking, but Harry couldn’t tell exactly which emotion was making it do that. “If you have any idea how much I flung myself against the barriers he built in my mind, what I thought, what I felt—”

“You did some of that. I’m sure. He probably went beyond the limits that you would have set for yourself pretty bloody fast. But he maintained his hold on you because you kept thinking about what you could learn from him.”

“You are not—you are not merely wrong. You are inhumane.”

“So are you. You tried to kill me, you tortured me, and you sit there and invent excuses for yourself.”

“That was not me, I told you—”

“It was both you and Tom, since that seems to be the Dark Lord’s real name. At that point, you were acting together. And you were under his control for months, and yet you seem to be relatively unscarred. Not even with the nightmares that Weasley told me she had when I questioned her.”

“You don’t deserve to know what I’m dealing with.”

“I would have at least appreciated an apology.” Harry shook his head as he stood. “It doesn’t matter. I’m glad that we had this conversation, because at least now we know where we stand.” And any shred of regret he might have had about alienating Dumbledore once the information in the scroll Kalder had given him came out had vanished.

“You don’t intend to apologize for burning me?”

“Oh, but you told me the truth. That wasn’t you.”

Dumbledore said nothing. Harry turned and left the hospital wing, ignoring the fact that Madam Pomfrey hadn’t technically dismissed him. He was going to do what he wished from now on.

And now, he could concentrate on soothing his friends’ fears and sneaking into Malfoy Manor. He lifted one hand to touch the torque imprinted weightlessly around his neck.

And making sure that he both stayed alive for Griselda and protected her. That was on the list, too, now and always.