lomonaaeren

Chapter Eight.

Title: Ancient and Noble Houses (9/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, past Harry/Ginny
Warnings: Angst, violence
Rating: R
Summary: Harry finds out that being the heir to the Black fortune—at least once he’s of age and residing in Grimmauld Place full-time—is a lot different than just inheriting some vaults and property. He’s changing in ways he doesn’t understand, both body and mind. Even with Draco Malfoy to help him, the chance that Harry can resist becoming the perfect Black heir, with all that implies, seems slim.
Author’s Notes: This story came from wondering exactly what the house part of “The Ancient and Noble House of Black” might mean. This fic will have short chapters, and update every Friday and Saturday.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Nine—Changes Coming

“Harry?”

It was Ron. Harry pushed his face further into the pillow and said nothing. What was there to say? Ron didn’t know what had happened between Harry and Malfoy in the corridor, but he’d seen Harry flee the Great Hall, and he had to know something was wrong.

Ron, though, didn’t take the silent hint to fuck off. He tucked Harry’s bed curtains out of the way and stared at him. Harry could feel that stare burning on the back of his neck, and it stung and made raw all the places where Malfoy’s stare of contempt had already landed.

“Mate—”

Harry rolled over and held up his wand. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t know what he would say. If he opened his mouth, a spell was as likely to come out as a scolding.

Ron stood still, as though confronting a wild animal. Then he put up his hands and backed away, one step, another, letting the curtain fall. Harry found that he couldn’t release his grip on the wand until he was sure that Ron was on the other side of the bedroom, from the short, panting breaths he was releasing.

Harry dropped his head, then, and buried his face in his shaking hands.

What was happening to him?

Well, Malfoy had given him part of the answer. But Harry didn’t know how the house could affect him when he was still out of it. He hadn’t even seen Kreacher since the day he’d fled. He hadn’t had to kill anything. He’d dealt with surges of rage, but his friends had put that down to the aftereffects of the war, and after a while, so had Harry.

If he couldn’t be sane anymore, what did that mean?

Harry sat up. No. He refused to just accept that he would be like this for the rest of his life, until he went mad or died. He had beaten Voldemort. No moldy house was going to defeat him.

He still didn’t want to go back to Grimmauld Place, not alone, but there was something else he could do. He waited until he heard the sounds of Ron leaving the room, and then called, “Kreacher! Come quietly.”

Kreacher was there in seconds, inside the curtains beside the bed, and bowing over and over again. He said nothing, but there was an expression of twisted delight on his face that made Harry flinch before he decided that, damn it, he was going to keep this conversation going. Kreacher couldn’t frighten him into letting him go, either. If Harry was the heir of the House of Black, then he had the right to question his house-elf.

“I want you to tell me if I look like a Black to you,” Harry said, gesturing at his face.

Kreacher beamed at him, with a tender side to the smile that Harry had never seen before, and which therefore scared the shit out of him. “Master looks like a most marvelous Black, yes, yes,” Kreacher whispered.

Harry shut his eyes. It made sense that Malfoy would know more about that than anyone else, but it was still a bit devastating to have it confirmed.

“Master should be coming back home,” Kreacher whispered, so soft and smooth that Harry could have pretended it was a voice in his dreams, except that he wasn’t that expert at lying to himself. “Master can be resting in his bedroom. Master can be thinking with the shadows. Master is being of the house now.”

Harry felt his eyes open as if they belonged to someone else, but the voice that spoke was his, directly connected to his thoughts. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he whispered. “So the house can eat me, and you can have your precious Blacks back?”

Kreacher stared at him, hands making small random circles in the air. “Master is not feeling well?” he asked hesitantly. “The house is not eating Master Black. It is helping you recover and have an heir.”

Harry laughed. He thought he heard someone else rustle in bed beyond his tightly-drawn curtains, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that right now. “You want me to have a kid,” he said. “So you can make that kid into a proper heir, and then get rid of me. Oh, I see it all now. You’re probably planning to have a wall swallow me or something.”

Kreacher tugged on his ears and bowed low. “Kreacher is beings very sorry for distressing Master Black,” he whispered. “Master is telling Kreacher whats he can do to make it up to him.”

“Nothing,” Harry snarled. “You were the one who knew about the danger and didn’t warn me! Sirius should have known, but maybe he didn’t! But you’ve been there a long time. You were the one who told me about the kills that all the heirs of Black have to make. You should have told me and let me leave!”

Kreacher blinked again. Harry had the distant sense that this evening was probably one of the most puzzling in his life, but Harry shoved aside the insight. Like hell did he care.

“But why is Master Harry wanting to leave?” Kreacher whispered. “It is being his home.”

Harry clenched his hands. He wanted to draw his wand and curse Kreacher, but that wouldn’t hurt enough. Nothing could make up for the betrayal of Kreacher knowing and not telling him, or the way he acted now, as though he had no idea why Harry would want to escape having his soul corrupted.

“Kreacher,” he hissed. “Master is displeased.”

Kreacher’s eyes seemed to clear a little, even as he cowered on the floor and covered his head with his hands. “Yes,” he whispered. “What is Master wanting Kreacher to do?”

“Punish yourself,” Harry said. “As hard as you can without leaving you useless for me to work with.”

“Master,” Kreacher said, with a long bow. He straightened from the bow into a blur of motion, rushing at the wall opposite the bed.

Harry watched with an odd sound coming out of his mouth. He knew what it was when he listened: the kind of whine that he had heard when Bellatrix Lestrange was watching someone writhe under the Cruciatus Curse.

Harry didn’t want to be making that noise. With one part of him, anyway. But the part that wanted it must have been stronger, because he went on making it, and watched as Kreacher bashed his head against the wall, and blood began to flow slowly down. It was darker and thicker than human blood, something Harry couldn’t remember noticing when he had watched Dobby bleed to death.

Dobby was wrong.

The thought sliced into his head like a knife, like the lightning bolt he had used to kill the Kneazle. Harry sat still, and watched Kreacher pound his head until one eye was swollen shut, and blood covered his face from a cut on his forehead, and his nose was broken and the nostrils pointing in different directions like the sights of a misaimed gun.

Kreacher limped slowly back at last. “Kreacher is pleasing master,” he whispered, sinking to the floor in front of the bed.

Harry found that he was finally able to shut his mouth and cut off that whining noise. “You pleased me very much, Kreacher,” he whispered, sliding out of bed and kneeling beside the house-elf. “You paid for your betrayal and not telling me the truth about the house that I inherited and have to live in.”

Kreacher rolled his head back and gave Harry a dazed, bloodied grin. “Master is being pleased,” he whispered. “This compensates Kreacher for everything.”

Then he passed out. Or so Harry assumed, because he was still, and yet Harry could still feel a heartbeat under his fingers.

Harry closed his eyes. There was a drifting satisfaction in his thoughts, coiling and uncoiling like mist. He wanted to stroke Kreacher’s head, even with the greasy hair there, and so he did it, sliding the strands through his fingers.

The mist gradually withdrew to the back of his mind, although Harry imagined he could still feel it floating there, ready to come out again when he was ready.

And then clarity returned, which wasn’t the same thing as the mere absence of the mist.

Harry sprang to his feet, staring at Kreacher. Kreacher didn’t move, and there was no sign that anyone else in the room had heard him, either. Kreacher must have used his own magic to keep his punishment silent.

The punishment Harry had ordered him to undergo.

Harry turned his head to the side and was noisily sick. Then he sat back, rubbing his hand across his mouth and shuddering again and again.

When he thought about it, his decision was made. He stood up and picked up Kreacher, casting a Disillusionment Charm on both of them and a few healing spells on Kreacher’s wounds.

The only person who seemed to know anything about this was Malfoy, and he was the one Harry had to go to.