[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Creatures of Wrath, These Creatures series, gen, R, 10/10

[lomonaaeren]

“You made several stupid mistakes, Mr. Potter.”

Narcissa Malfoy’s voice was as soft and cold as snowfall. Harry lay where he was, with his eyes closed, and decided that she must know he was awake.

And that he agreed with her.

Harry opened his eyes, and looked up into Mrs. Malfoy’s face. She was pacing around the stone block that he seemed to be bound to. Harry wondered for a moment why she was treating him so well, but then he dismissed the thought as useless.

He knew from flexing his fingers against the inside of his wrist that his wand was gone. So were the sensations of splinters pressing against his skin to peg Lucius’s skin to himself. He wanted to grimace, but that would show more emotion than he wanted to betray at the moment.

Fear chewed on the inside of his stomach, but Harry imagined the snowscape of his Occlumency and that the fear had been dropped into it. The cold swooped down on him and engulfed the panic in a howling winter wind. The dimming of the emotion made Harry feel more like himself again.

“Can you guess what those mistakes were?”

“I know that one of them was pressing on after I saw that one of your house-elves could see through my disguise.” Harry ought to have wondered more about that. Yes, Dobby seemed different from the usual run of house-elves, and that might mean that others couldn’t have seen him as anything but their master, but still. He hadn’t questioned it, had let himself be swept away by the little information he could get from Dobby, and he’d paid the price for his arrogance.

“What?”

Narcissa had paused. Interesting. Harry gave her the blandest smile he could muster and shook his head. “You heard what I said.”

“You will tell me what you mean.”

“Sorry, I can’t do that. But if you wanted to free me from these chains and let me stand upright to explain, then we could test it.”

Narcissa bent over him. “You will never go free again,” she whispered. “That torque you wear might keep me from casting any spells except at the back of your neck—”

Damn it.

“But it won’t keep me from casting the Killing Curse. And it won’t keep me from torturing you in other ways.” Narcissa stepped back without taking her eyes from them. “Zissy, Gorgon, bring in the captives.”

Two house-elves appeared in the middle of the room where Harry was chained, which seemed to be an underground chamber, and he turned his head. The house-elf on the left held a chained, furious, gagged Theo. The one on the right held Griselda.

Harry felt as though someone had slammed a punch into his stomach and driven out all the air, the way that Dudley used to.

I thought they couldn’t be a weakness. I was wrong.

“I found a most interesting Mark on the young man’s arm when I was having my elves subdue them,” Narcissa said casually. “I wonder what he is to you? And what torturing him might do to you in return?” Then she laughed a little. “And I know what the old woman is to you. The whole magical world knows.”

Harry met Griselda’s eyes. He wasn’t sure what he intended to convey himself. Affection? Apology? Agony?

Oddly, Griselda made no noise and no movement. She simply stared intently at Harry. Harry wondered if Narcissa had given her a potion to make her act like that. It wasn’t the way the Griselda he knew would have acted.

Harry’s hands formed fists on the block of stone beside him.

“If you harm them,” he said softly, and turned his head to look at Narcissa, “what happens to you will make your son’s fate look kind.”

Narcissa only nodded, as if he had confirmed something for her instead of denying it. “What you will suffer will make his fate look kind. I believe there is a potion I can concoct of the blood of a powerful mage that stands a chance of reviving him. And if it doesn’t work, I will still enjoy myself preparing it.” She gave Harry a smile that wouldn’t be out of place on the muzzle of a stalking leopard.

Like the one on Theo’s arm.

I keep coming back to them in my mind, no matter how much I try to distance myself.

“If you knew who I was all along, then why was I able to get through the wards?”

“Because I made sure they welcomed you, of course.”

Harry swallowed. He had been stupid beyond measure. And this time, he wasn’t the only one who might suffer from it.

No. He couldn’t think that way, or he would launch into thrashing, screaming panic. So he simply calmed himself down with forcible application of Occlumency, and asked, “And is the plan to give me to the Dark Lord?”

“Oh, eventually,” said Narcissa, her voice soft. “After I have taken all I can from you, and used it to help my son.”

Harry said nothing. Of course that would be the case. And of course he had brought this partially on himself, and partially on Griselda and Theo, by not taking account of all the magic and enchantments he carried with him.

Not that the torque would have come off short of death. But then, once he had put it on, he should have come up with a different plan to enter the Malfoys’ wards.

“I suppose there’s nothing that would make you let me go,” he said, sinking more deeply into his Occlumentic mindscape while raising his hatred. The only chance now was flames, or some other kind of deep and destructive magic, that would shatter the chains and distract Narcissa enough for him to get out.

“No. You took the only two people I ever loved away from me. I can’t make you suffer as I’ve suffered, but I deserve the chance to try.”

“And if I said that I knew a way to revive your son?”

“You said you didn’t.”

“Because of course I would tell the truth in a taunting letter to the enemy.”

Narcissa hesitated. Then she shook her head. “No. You can tell me what this method is that you know without my freeing you. And for every hesitation you suffer along the way, think of what I’ll do.” She walked over and pressed her wand against Griselda’s throat. “Now, recite this way that you think you have.”

Harry stared at her in blind hatred, and flame snapped and sparked behind Narcissa. She only pressed her wand harder into Griselda’s throat. “You know that I can speak the Killing Curse before you can destroy me,” she said softly.

It was true, it was all true, especially with Harry’s anger and hatred mixed with his self-loathing and partially buried in the snow of his mind. And he would have to devote part of his brain to coming up with a nonexistent method to lift someone from the coma he had inflicted on Draco.

It was still worth trying. Let Narcissa get involved in Harry’s recitation, distracted by her own hope, and he could manage it.

“All right,” he whispered. “But if you hurt Griselda while I’m speaking, then the bargain’s off, and if you kill her, you’ll die before you can revive him.”

“I’m listening, Potter.”

“The first thing that you’ll need is blackberries at the height of ripeness. They can’t be magically altered or encouraged to grow in any way by a spell. Then you need to make sure that you mash them with a glass stirring rod—”

“A stirring rod? Do you think me uneducated in Potions?”

“That’s not what I meant, Mrs. Malfoy. You need to use a stirring rod precisely because this is an uncommon cure, and so it’ll fail if you use a tool that most people would think more suited to the crushing of berries.”

Mrs. Malfoy nodded slowly. “And I suppose that you must gather the blackberries by hand as well?”

“Of course you must. And when you have gathered them, you have to use a glass bowl, not a steel one. The use of glass throughout the recipe is essential.”

“Why is that?”

“Because transparency of material must correlate to purity of intention. This cure won’t work if you think up ways that you could use it for yourself instead of the person in the coma. I suppose you won’t have any trouble on that front…”

Harry was focused on Griselda as he chattered away, inventing details of the “cure” out of thin air. His guardian stood still and quiet, her eyes more often on him than on Narcissa. Harry became aware that a small motion was running through her.

A tremor? A pain spell? If it was the latter, then Harry was prepared to intervene now.

But then he realized she was shaking her head. Eyeing him and shaking her head.

Does she think that this is a real cure for the coma I’m reciting, and I shouldn’t be trading it to Narcissa for as little as I’m paying for it?

Or does she think that Narcissa is going to realize that it’s bollocks?

Well, it didn’t matter one way or the other. Harry would take any risks he needed to save Griselda’s life, and Theo’s. And the long recitation was allowing him to gather his strength and free his hatred so that it flowed through his body like fire.

“This is a long cure, Mr. Potter.”

“What did you expect? There’s a reason that no one’s simply stumbled onto it before now.”

Narcissa narrowed her eyes, but nodded. “And what comes after the willingly given unicorn hairs? How did you get them in any case?”

“Raided the gamekeeper’s hut. He has a store of them since he’s friendly to the unicorns in the Forest. I don’t know if he’s noticed them missing yet. He never does anything with them one way or the other, or the other valuable ingredients he could find in the Forest.”

Harry was sure that part of the reason Narcissa relaxed then was the contempt filling his voice. “Very well. Then you place the unicorn hairs in the base, and what do you add to it?”’

“Crystal clear and absolutely pure water, which has to be gathered in a different glass bowl from the ones you gather the blackberries in. You can place a Purifying Charm on that, however, and avoid gathering tainted water by mistake…”

As Harry went rambling on, he glanced back at Griselda. Yes, she was shaking her head, small but persistent motions, and continually looking at Narcissa.

Maybe she thinks that Narcissa is apt to kill me no matter what I give her in return for its not happening.

That doesn’t matter. She won’t harm any of us.

Harry paused for breath, darted a glance at Theo to make sure that he was all right in the clutches of the Malfoy house-elves, and faced Narcissa again. “And you have to wait for a half moon to brew it.”

“Not full? Not new? Not crescent?”

Harry shook his head. “I tried it at those times, but the magic works best on the night of a half moon. Perhaps precisely because that time is considered less magical than others. There aren’t associations from other potions or spells to crowd the night.”

Narcissa murmured the words “crowd the night” to herself, while barely moving her lips. Harry wondered if he’d phrased it in a childish way.

That didn’t matter, either. Harry’s magic was foaming inside him now, and he could pour it out in hatred aimed straight at Narcissa.

“It may not work,” Narcissa said at last. “But I can review the Pensieve memories at any time, and have the cure that may awaken Draco.”

“Yes, you can.”

Narcissa smiled. “And I’ll also enjoy the Pensieve memories where you scream at the sight of your guardian dying—”

Harry struck.

Narcissa’s robes caught on fire. She shrieked aloud, bending over and beating at them with one hand as if she could quell the flames that way. Harry poured more hatred over her, more rage. He was going to destroy her, and he didn’t care who knew it.

Narcissa, however, must have had either Occlumency training or something similar that would let her keep her head in the middle of a charged situation. She spun away from Griselda and stared at him with eyes full of hatred of her own.

“Avada—”

Griselda grabbed Narcissa’s arm and wrenched her sideways.

For a long moment, they struggled, Harry’s guardian cursing and trying to grab the wand, Narcissa trying to aim it. Harry poured more and more of his hatred over Narcissa, trying to will her to disappear, the way he had with the training dummy on that occasion Theo liked mentioning. But it wasn’t working. His hatred wasn’t pure. Too much fear for others was diluting it, and Harry screamed aloud as he realized that.

“Harry!”

It was Theo, broken free from the Malfoy house-elves somehow. Harry didn’t care how. Theo was tossing something at him. Harry strained, one hand breaking free from the chains that he had to concentrate for a moment on dissolving, long, too long when Griselda was struggling, and then Harry was holding a thin wand.

Theo’s wand.

And the magic surging through it was Theo’s, pouring down the soul-bond.

Harry sprang to his feet, the other chains falling away around him, and spun to face Narcissa. And went still. Narcissa had won the struggle and once again held the wand to Griselda’s throat, her pants harsh and a large bruise blooming over her cheekbones.

Theo’s magic pawed at the inside of his wand, wanting to break loose and free. Harry couldn’t take the chance. The way Narcissa was standing, holding Griselda in front of her, argued that the magic would probably splash over both of them. Harry had never before tried to aim at only one target out of two.

“What do you want?” Harry asked, forcing his voice to calmness. His hatred shrieked in the back of his mind like a hippogriff.

“I want my son back, you bastard.”

Harry had to flinch from the venom in her voice. When her words had passed over his head and through his ears, there was silence in the stone room. Griselda was holding rigidly still, although from the twisted lines of her face, Harry was sure that she was furious.

“You can’t give me that. Do you even know whether the potion recipe you gave me would revive him?”

“I don’t. It’s experimental.”

Narcissa nodded. She had descended into the kind of frozen calm that Harry recognized from feeling it himself. He had never realized how dangerous it could be in another person. “It might be that I’ll get Draco back. But Lucius will never return to me. I had two people in the world to love, and you took them both.” Her eyes shone. “You might have fewer than I did, or more. I will take them all.”

She shifted her wand to press more firmly against Griselda’s skin. Harry tensed himself to move if she fired the Killing Curse. There would be no reason to wait if she did, no matter how much his magic might injure Griselda.

“You’ll be sorry for—”

“What a whiny little bitch you are,” Griselda said conversationally. “I never remember you being like this when you were a girl. If anything, I thought Bellatrix was the whiny child in your family. But, of course, she got sent to Azkaban for slobbering after that limbless torso you’ve got in the other room, so I suppose you had to step in to fill the gap.”

“Griselda!” Harry couldn’t help hissing. He couldn’t think of a less appropriate time for her to antagonize an enemy. He thought Narcissa was the sort to just snap her wand around and fire off a torture curse.

“Crucio.”

Griselda’s scream echoed through the room, but there was something triumphant in it. She was writhing in Narcissa’s grip and her heels were drumming the floor and she was screaming, but there was—

“Harry!”

Theo, trying to get his attention and push him to act again. And Harry knew he had to. He tore his horrified gaze away from how Griselda was suffering and aimed Theo’s wand straight at Narcissa’s legs.

The magic that tore out of him was part ice and part fire, shining in a way that made Harry unable to identify it. And it was alight with pain and hatred and fear and carried Theo’s magic with it, so maybe it wasn’t a surprise that when it crashed into Narcissa, it flayed the skin off her legs instead of burning her or making her vanish.

Narcissa screamed in turn, and spun to face Harry, aiming her wand at him. Harry raised Theo’s wand. He thought he could dodge the Killing Curse if that came to it, and that was the only spell that Griselda’s torque couldn’t deflect.

Except it didn’t deflect the Stupefy that she aimed at me earlier, either—

“Avada Kedavra!”

Harry started to conjure a stone wall in front of himself.

Griselda lunged up and into the path of the green spell.

Harry screamed this time, and the sound went on and on. Griselda fell motionless in front of him, and her eyes were wide and still. Her cane fell beside her. He didn’t even know how she had moved so fast. He didn’t know how to stop screaming. He didn’t know how to deal with the feeling like tingling snow that had settled onto his skin.

“Harry!”

Harry raised his head as if in a dream. Narcissa had stepped past Griselda and was watching him with bright, sane eyes.

“That’s what I wanted,” Narcissa whispered. “And more than I knew I wanted. Now. Avada Kedavra.”

Harry didn’t know if he could raise his wand, Theo’s wand, in time. He didn’t know if he’d stopped screaming yet. Everything was underwater. Everything was so bright and brilliant and slow and piercing, and there was a light shining in his eyes that seemed to come from his chest, and there was—

The green bolt of the Killing Curse came towards him in slow motion.

For the first time, Harry didn’t know if he wanted to survive.

The green bolt hit him.

And deflected.

Harry stared in numb shock as the bolt lashed straight back at Narcissa, who had a moment to look terribly surprised before her life ended. Harry saw her eyes widen, and then her body fell.

“Harry!”

Theo was calling his name. Harry couldn’t speak. He crumpled to his knees. The bright light glowing from his chest had faded back into the light that he thought should be there. He couldn’t stop panting. He couldn’t raise his head. He couldn’t unclench his fists.

“Harry!”

Theo was kneeling beside him now, shaking his arm and his neck. Harry couldn’t move. He could only stare at the two bodies on the floor, the one that he had killed without even being aware of how he’d done it and the one that—

Griselda.

Something foundational at the bottom of Harry’s soul cracked open. He shrieked, the sound soaring up until Theo shouted at him and clapped his hands over his ears. Harry was aware that Theo was doing that, but he wasn’t aware of why. He continued to scream, and then he shoved Theo out of the way with what might have been a punch of magic instead of his arms and scrambled over to kneel beside Griselda.

Her face was twisted in a mask of triumph. Her eyes were open.

“Harry.”

Harry kept his head bowed. He knew that Theo was trying to get his attention, that he should get back up and walk away, that he should find the Dark Lord and stop him as he’d come into Malfoy Manor to do in the first place.

But he couldn’t now.

It was his fault that Griselda had died. His overconfidence, his failure to speak with her about the torque and what it could deflect and what it couldn’t—he hadn’t even thought to ask if it would stop a Stunner or not—his fault, he’d done this and there was no hiding from it, no fleeing and saying that it was someone else’s fault—

If he could deflect the Killing Curse, why hadn’t he managed to do it when it was aimed at Griselda? Why had Griselda told him that the torque couldn’t deflect the Killing Curse, if it could?

“Harry. Gone soft.”

Harry spun around on his knees, staring. Griselda hovered over him. A silvery version of her, a ghost, like Hermione. Her eyes pierced him, and then she shook her head a little.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing kneeling there, over an empty shell? Get up, or I’m going to think that you went as soft as feathers. And there’s no worse thing to be.”

“Griselda,” Harry whispered as he stumbled to his feet.

“Who else?” Griselda spent a moment examining her arms as though she thought that they ought to be longer, then snorted and folded them. “Get up off the floor—ah, you did. Good. Now, are you going to listen to me, or do I have to wait to explain?”

“Please. Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

“I made a mistake with the torque,” Griselda said, and grimaced. The grimace looked so much like the faces she had made when she was alive that Harry swallowed a sob. “It wasn’t the location on the back of the neck, the way she thought. I left it open to spells that Healers might cast. Of course I had to when we were in St. Mungo’s, but I should have told you about that, and changed it once we were out. I only started thinking about that after Theo here told me that you weren’t supposed to take any foreign magic into the wards, and I thought about the torque, and I thought about what it was vulnerable to.”

“I’m sorry, my lord,” Theo said from the side. Harry glanced at him, a distant dread moving in him, but if he’d hurt Theo physically, there was no sign of it now. Theo only looked agonized, gazing at him. “I would have told you that you couldn’t enter the wards with the torque on if you’d known about it.”

“You didn’t,” Harry said. “Because I didn’t tell you. My secrets killed Griselda.”

“No,” Griselda said sharply before he could descend into the maelstrom inside of his head again. “Narcissa Malfoy did it. And I repaid her.”

“You?” Theo asked, while Harry’s pulse drummed so fast and thick in his mouth that he couldn’t say anything at all.

“Yes, of course, me.” Griselda was grinning, that skull’s rictus Harry had seen so many times and had thought he would never see again. “That’s why I was trying to taunt her into killing me once I realized what it would mean that you were wearing the torque and so she’d be able to see you and must be manipulating the wards to let you in. I could have killed the house-elves who tried to take us, but I let them bring me here. So I could be here if you needed me.”

“And look how much good I did you,” Harry whispered.

“I was there to do you good, not the other way around. Do keep up. I knew Narcissa would recognize the torque, and that she’d use the Killing Curse on you sooner or later. Wasn’t going to let that happen, was I? So I did the same thing your mother did.”

“What?” Again, it was Theo who asked the question. Harry stared at Griselda while galaxies whirled and danced in his mind.

“Surely you must have determined by now that it was Harry’s mother’s sacrifice that saved him from the Killing Curse when he was a baby.” Griselda rolled her eyes at Theo as if he were a beginning student in Runes failing to tell her what Sowilo did. “I did some study of that during the last few years, but nothing was ever found at the scene, even by the Unspeakables. No trace of a ritual or a rune circle or the like. So I determined that it must have been Harry’s mother sacrificing herself out of pure love that defended him.”

“Then why didn’t it work with anyone else?” Theo demanded. “Other parents—they would have sacrificed themselves for their children, I know they would have—”

“Of course. But they didn’t do it intending to create a shield, did they? Because they didn’t know it was possible.”

“So you’re saying that she was the only one who tried to use her death specifically as a shield from the Killing Curse?” Theo asked. Harry stood in numbness and ice, and stared up at Griselda, who was ice and silver, floating above him.

“That’s it.” Griselda pointed a finger at Theo. “I’m not saying that she couldn’t have read up on some kind of unique sacrificial magic that talked about purity of intent and the mechanics of willing human sacrifice. But if she did, no one had ever thought that kind of sacrifice could be used as a shield for the Killing Curse, because it’s well-known there’s no way to shield from it. But she tried, and because she did and I knew it was possible, I tried.”

“It wouldn’t have worked if someone other than Narcissa Malfoy had cast the Killing Curse at Harry, though.”

“No. So you needn’t think that you’re going to be going and confronting the Dark Lord any time soon, Harry.”

“I don’t want to,” Harry whispered. “I want you back.”

“I’m still here,” Griselda said, although she sighed a little when Harry stared at her. “I know what you mean. But while it might be possible to use a human sacrifice with purity of intent to bring me back to life, I would have to be willing, too. And I wouldn’t let you do it.”

“You’re not doing it,” Theo snarled, clamping his hand down on Harry’s arm.

Harry wondered vaguely why Theo was determined to protect him after Harry’s own overconfidence had put him in danger and nearly got him killed and had got Griselda killed, but then he remembered the soul-bond. Theo must be worried about what would happen to him if Harry died.

“I won’t do it,” Harry said. Because he still did want to survive. It was just that the desire to have Griselda back was as strong.

Not stronger. But that strong.

“Good.” Theo swallowed and closed his eyes. “So the Killing Curse backlashed and killed Narcissa. Not turned her into a wraith that could possess people, the way it did the Dark Lord.”

“She didn’t make the preparations for immortality that he did.” Griselda cackled. “Short-sighted of her.”

“Why did you do it?” Harry whispered.

“I already answered that question.” Griselda reached out and poked his shoulder, although Harry felt nothing more than a brief jolt of cold. “Because I love you and wanted to defend you.” She said that even though Theo was there and even though she was glaring sternly at Harry. “You should listen when I talk.”

“Griselda…I need to talk to you privately.”

“No!” Theo snapped.

“I’m not going to do anything to myself, Theo, I promise. I won’t commit suicide or sacrifice myself or cut off a limb or do anything else that you’re worried about. I promise.”

Theo hesitated, searching Harry’s face with his eyes, but he must have been able to tell from the soul-bond that Harry meant it. In the end, he nodded reluctantly and walked out of the room through a far door, although not without many glances back. Harry waited until Theo had shut the door and concentrated on the sensation of his friend he got through the soul-bond, to be sure that Theo had moved far enough away not to use eavesdropping spells or the like.

Then Harry took a deep breath and turned back to Griselda.

She was watching him with eyes that hadn’t lost any of their sharpness in death. “You want to know how you can bring me back.”

“Yes.” Harry should have known she would see it. And that she would know his willingness to make a sacrifice, later if not now.

“Are you sure that you want to?”

“Yes.”

“You lapsed into Parseltongue in your stress.” Griselda floated slowly around him, and Harry turned in a circle so he could keep looking at her. “You ought to know that I would be willing to come back. But…”

“Yes?” Harry’s hands were clenched so hard that he could feel the ache traveling up through them into his arms.

“I don’t want you to do this just because you think it’s a way to make up for your mistake. You know as well as I do that this was a confluence of factors, including me not telling you about the torque’s limitations and not knowing that any foreign magical influence coming through the Malfoy wards was a bad idea. Are you doing this just to make up for your mistake?”

“No. I want you back.”

Harry stopped after that, because he had given a cry like a child, and he thought Griselda would mock that. Instead, she floated towards him, her face set in a soft smile that Harry knew he never would have seen if Theo had stayed.

A smile he had never seen while she was alive, in fact.

“And I want to come back. But I don’t want you to prioritize this over other things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your studies. Your efforts to protect yourself. Your own life.”

“My studies?”

Griselda laughed, and that hadn’t changed. It was a searing roar that cracked right through the middle of Harry’s soul, or what he supposed had to be his soul, and made him stop and stare at her.

“Yes, your studies,” she said, when she’d managed to stop laughing, which she only did through the mechanism of pressing her hand flat on her chest and pounding it a few times. “You think I want you to stop studying Potions and History and all the rest of it so that you can concentrate on ways to bring me back? Promise me you won’t.”

“But what do they matter?”

“Do you want to successful in life? Do you want other people to respect you, maybe enough to give you access to their private libraries and their tomes on necromancy? Do you want me to come back in the first place instead of haunting you until you pass your NEWTS?”

Harry had to close his eyes. It was like Griselda was still alive and whispering those words with a threatening shake of her cane. It was as if she hadn’t died.

But he knew she had.

“Self-loathing. That softens you up as nothing else. Promise me that you won’t succumb to it, either, or else get used to my lurking around every corner with the kind of lecture that I used to unleash on Dumbledore.”

“It’s not—right that I made a mistake and you were the one who died,” Harry whispered, keeping his head bowed. “You don’t deserve that. I deserve everything bad—”

This time, he felt Griselda’s touch. It wasn’t a slap, the way he felt he might have deserved. It was a clamp on his shoulder that sank into his bones and skin and made him reel back with a gasp.

Griselda’s pressure grew stronger and stronger, and she stared down at him, her words echoing like thunder in his skull. “You are not to think like that. It would rot your will and your character and any commitment you might make to reviving me or anything else. Do you understand?”

“I—but you know what I did—”

“And I’ve explained my part in it, and Narcissa Malfoy’s. And she’s dead.” Griselda cast Narcissa’s body a look so vicious that Harry was a little surprised she didn’t conjure flames of her own. “You need to accept that you can’t change the past, and work on changing the future instead.”

Harry took a deep breath, and then nodded slowly. The shattered pieces of himself were coming back together, he thought, even if they would never assemble in the same configuration again. He knew he had to listen to Griselda, and he knew he had to concentrate on things other than his part in her death.

If only so that he wouldn’t go mad.

“I suppose I should look for the Dark Lord,” he whispered. “He ought to be helpless, if Narcissa was the one looking after him.”

“I’ll float through some of the walls and look for him,” Griselda offered. “And come back every time you need me to pull you out of your brooding.”

Harry gave her a wan smile, and then closed his eyes and stood there for a moment after she had floated through a wall.

He had made mistakes. He had done things that had cost Griselda her life, even if she wanted to emphasize other people’s part in it.

He would never do that again.

His desire to survive and his desire to bring Griselda back were still the strongest. But he would make sure that other people around him lived, too. That desire was now his second strongest, and he intended to prove to Theo and Zacharias and Michael and Parvati and Kalder and Hermione that they mattered to him.

From now on, it would be his enemies who made the sacrifices. Not his friends.

*

They looked throughout Malfoy Manor. Harry found his wand and books and enchanted artifacts and a few hidden objects of dubious purpose that he wanted to take with him.

There was no trace of the Dark Lord, no clue where he might have gone.

*

“You don’t know that you’ll be able to bring Griselda back. No one ever has.”

Harry shook his head. He was deep in the dungeons with Theo at yet another secret place they had found for themselves. All around him were shelves that contained the books he had claimed from Malfoy Manor, combined with books on necromancy from the Nott library and the Grimmauld Place library. “I know.”

“Then why do this research? If you know that no one ever has? And if you acknowledge that your former overconfidence is what cost Griselda her life?”

“Please keep doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Telling me when you think I’m overconfident. I need to make sure that I won’t ever cost anyone who depends on me their life again.”

Theo stared at Harry with his mouth slightly open. Harry looked back, and felt the cold shock pouring down the soul-bond. It seemed that Theo thought that he wouldn’t have been allowed to correct Harry before this.

Harry pushed irritated reassurance back. Yes, Theo could correct him. In fact, Harry would need that more than ever, in the future.

“You think—you need me to tell you that.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll do my best to make sure that I don’t endanger any of you in the future, but I thought I was doing that already, and I was wrong.”

Theo closed his eyes, then opened them. Harry wasn’t sure what emotion flooded down the soul-bond. He frowned a little at Theo.

“I know you weren’t like this before,” Theo whispered. “I felt how little you cared about most people. How could you have changed so quickly? Why did you?”

“I lost her,” Harry said, and he let enough of a snarl into his voice that Theo looked simultaneously reassured and unnerved. “I did it through my own mistakes. I’m not going to do that again. I nearly shattered myself. I can pick up the pieces and stick them into new patterns if that means never experiencing this again.”

“So this is still about protecting yourself.”

“Yes. A large part of it.”

“And you’re not going to rush into just—trying out necromancy or resurrection on Griselda without experiments first?”

“No. I’ll practice with animals first, and test the potions theory that I might need to the edges of reality and back. Of course, if I can find the Deathly Hallows, I might not need to do that. But that’s a quest I can perform alongside my one for the Dark Lord’s Horcruxes.”

Theo blinked. “You—intend to look for them? Even though that’s what Dumbledore wanted you to do?”

“Yes. What the Dark Lord knows about immortality might help me resurrect Griselda.”

Theo seemed more reassured by that. Harry turned the conversation to other matters, wondering a little, as he did, that Theo didn’t seem to have considered the most obvious candidate Harry could offer to practice his magic on.

Hermione might not want to live again, but Harry thought that unlikely.

*

Harry stood on the wall of the Astronomy Tower and watched the stars appearing above the Forbidden Forest. Tomorrow, he would go back to Griselda’s house—his house, now. He would share a compartment with his friends, and reassure Zacharias that he was going to live, and Michael that he was open to debate about his mistakes, and Parvati that she was still welcome to spend the summer with him.

He would make contact with his tutors. He would explain what he wanted to study, how he would prepare simultaneously for his NEWTS and the quests of his life.

He would go on.

But part of him had broken forever. Part of him wouldn’t heal even when Griselda returned. When, not if. Harry wouldn’t let himself think of if.

Part of him was buried inside those walls at Malfoy Manor, beside Narcissa Malfoy’s unburied body.

Let someone like Theo call it Harry’s naivete if they wanted. His unshakable confidence. His pride.

Harry knew it was something of himself. And he knew that he would have to go forwards without it.

Griselda appeared beside him. She was tethered to him, and not to a room or corridor as most of Hogwarts’s ghosts were. She sat down on the crenellation and regarded him.

“I thought you came up here to weep,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Did you try?”

Harry nodded. He had tried pinching himself to the point that tears should have flowed from his eyes if they were going to. And he had imagined what his life would be like without Griselda, and he had screamed.

But he couldn’t weep. The tears were broken inside of him, shattered pieces of ice. They lay there, and he would have to pick his way over them and rebuild them into something new.

“I could try to help you.”

“Thank you, but no. I know what I am, now. I paid a huge price for that knowledge, and so did you, but I know.”

“What are you?”

Harry turned to look at Griselda, whose face was a bright silver, brighter than the stars, as she peered at him.

“Determined,” Harry told her, and stepped closer for a cold touch before he turned and made his way down the stairs of the Tower, towards the future that he would pick up and sculpt much more carefully than he ever had before.

The End.