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lomonaaerenTitle: The Seven Wild Weasleys
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Severus/Lily, past Lily/James
Content Notes: Fairy tale AU, omniscient POV, angst, minor character death, extremely dubious love-potioned consent
Wordcount: 6200
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry is the stepson of a cruel man, who can only find solace in his friends the Weasleys. But when Snape finds out how close the Weasleys are to Harry, he curses them to turn into foxes. There is a way for Harry to break the curse, if he can suffer through it… Based on the fairytale “The Wild Swans” by Hans Christian Anderson.
Author’s Notes: Another of my July Celebration fics. Deliberately a bit surreal. As well, while the love potion aspect/dub-con aspect of this story is not graphic or very much depicted, it is there, so be aware of that as you read.
The Seven Wild Weasleys
Once upon a far time, once upon a fair time, in a place where wizards did not need to use wands, there lived a small boy named Harry Potter. His father was a powerful man with a deep laugh called James, and his mother a lovely woman with a quick wit named Lily. They dwelt together in a cottage near a thick forest that was filled with giant spiders and unicorns and centaurs, just like the Forest some wizards think of as forbidden now, and they walked in the forest and rejoiced, because none of the creatures ever bothered them. Those that tried were charmed by Lily’s words or frightened away by James’s power. Harry ran circles around his parents as they walked, and bragged about how someday he, too, would be a great wizard.
But magic cannot cure all ills. James sickened suddenly, within a fortnight, his face turning green and his heart slowing and blood trickling from his mouth, and none of the witchery Lily could wield cured him. Within another fortnight, he was gone. She and Harry stood stricken at the side of James’s grave, and then Lily reached out and squeezed her son’s shoulder very gently. Harry looked up at her with eyes that were green and wet and sparkling like the forest after a rainstorm.
“From now on, we shall have to be all in all to each other, Harry,” Lily said, slowly and seriously, in the way that an Augurey might speak if it could speak. “We shall have to be each other’s power and love and laughter. Can you do that for me? And I will do it for you.”
Harry nodded. He was young still, you know, far younger than some humans will ever be, but losing his father had aged him. He promised. “I will do that for you, Mother.”
And Lily hugged him and was still.
*
But they had only a few years of being each other’s power and love and laughter. Lily taught Harry magic, the kind that they worked then, with soil and gesture and asking and kindness. She showed him how to garden, and how to beg aid of the foxes. That’s a lost art, if you like, the fox-witchery. There’s no one they’ll come to now.
Harry learned to bow to trees, and to approach a unicorn and lay hands on it, and how to call the lightning so that he could walk safely through a storm by making the lightning strike everywhere he wasn’t. He freed a centaur leader from the log that his hoof was caught under, and the centaur honored him with a ride on his back. Harry learned to find wild berries and nuts and mushrooms and which ones he could safely eat and which must be cooked and which he should never even touch. Lily laughed sometimes, although not as freely as she had when James was alive. And then they would go into the forest and walk, and brilliant eyes peered at them from the undergrowth but left them alone.
That all changed when Severus Snape came.
*
Harry returned from the forest one evening when he had been charming the trees to bend over him and bring some of their nuts nearer to him, and found his mother sitting across a table from a man with eyes and hair as black as coal. Harry actually thought he was a coal-golem at first, one of those creations that puts itself together and lurches around the forest when you’re not looking. He shouted out the charm to banish a golem.
But Lily only laughed and blushed, and the man smiled coldly, and Lily said, “Harry, this is Severus Snape. He is…a wizard I used to know. From a faraway place.”
Looking at Snape, Harry wished he would go back there.
But it was clear Snape had come to stay. He soon had black robes hanging up in the closet where Harry’s father’s robes used to hang like the corpses of slaughtered ravens. Harry saw him crouching in Lily’s garden with his hands mired in the dirt and his head bowed as if he was sucking all the goodness out of the flowers through his nostrils. He used a dead piece of wood to create light and uproot the flowers and plant herbs of his own making.
And he was always sneering at Harry, whispering tales of how James Potter had hurt him, and how Severus Snape would take all he held dear. Harry tried to talk to his mother about these things, but Lily shook her head and flapped her apron at him. She spent more time in the kitchen than she ever had, just then, making things that the horrible Snape man liked to eat.
“Oh, Harry, go on, do. You don’t understand Severus. He doesn’t mean it when he says things like that. He’s just caught up in this old rivalry with James and doesn’t really like to think about him. But he’s here to make me happy.”
All Harry could think was two things: that only mad people didn’t realize when one of their rivals was dead; and that maybe Snape was there to make his mother happy, but not Harry.
Snape and Lily were bonded at the end of summer, and Harry unhappily walked with them through the forest and caught the nuts that the trees dropped only because he was there. Lily had eyes for nothing but Snape, eyes that were always a bit glazed.
Snape had eyes for nothing but cruelty. The morning after the bonding, Harry found the flowers he had laid on his father’s grave the day before blasted to black and greasy shreds.
*
In this time when his mother and stepfather walked linked arm-in-arm and happiness seemed to turn its back on him, Harry found joy only in the company of his friends, the Weasleys. They were a family that lived deep in the forest, rejoicing in the magic of earth and water and leaves. They threw handfuls of leaves at each other and interfered in each other’s baking and enchanted the trees to hide them in their games. They had hair as bright as the pelts of the foxes Harry loved. It was a good family.
The Weasley parents, Arthur and Molly, had not been as powerful as Harry’s father had been nor as charming as his mother had been, but they had been kinder than fate was to either of Harry’s parents. Arthur had showed a smaller Harry how he had made a machine to move earth without magic, and Molly had stuffed his mouth full of biscuits until Harry thought he would burst. But they had died in a forest fire three years before, and it was their seven children who were Harry’s friends.
Bill, the eldest, knew wolf magic. The first time Harry met him, he was riding on the back of a great grey wolf so dark that he looked black. Harry had gulped and stared at him nervously, but Bill welcomed him with the courtesy of wolves, and took Harry back to his parents’ home to meet his family.
Charlie, the second eldest, knew the magic of fire. During the summer evenings Harry spent at the Weasley home, Charlie would light enormous bonfires outside and wait until the sun had set completely and the moon was coming up. Then he would dance between the flames, gathering them around himself until they formed a cloak of red and gold. He would whirl and stamp and leap, and Harry and the Weasleys would laugh and applaud as he suspended himself in the middle of a cloud of fire and air.
Percy, the third eldest, knew the magic of books. He was the first person Harry met who wrote down his wisdom instead of remembering it and passing it on. Harry didn’t know if he always liked the books, but he liked to touch them, stroking their bindings that Percy had made himself out of tanned leather and sinew, while Percy lectured him on the spells. Luckily, Percy didn’t care if his audience listened; he only wanted them not to run away.
Fred and George were fourth and fifth eldest, but in truth, they were twins, so close that Harry thought of them as together. Together, they knew the magic of hands. They drew coins from behind Harry’s ear and inside his hair that he knew he hadn’t put there (even though they told him when Harry protested that his hair was so shaggy that he couldn’t know what had fallen into it). They waved their fingers, and doves appeared between them. They stood close together and drew apart, and there was a spinning tornado of blue light and darkness between their hands that hadn’t existed before.
Ron, the sixth eldest, knew the magic of games. He could come up with new games and rules on the spot, and it was always a delight to play them. From him Harry learned the old game of chess, and how the pieces could leap and spin across the board and still mean something. Harry learned it happily; chess had been one of his father’s favorite games. Since Snape had come, his mother had put the old board away and never played it or let it be seen.
Ginny, the youngest, knew the magic of air. The first time Harry saw her, she spread her arms and floated off the ground. Then she showed him how she could use a broom, spinning around the trunks of trees so fast that not even Bill’s wolves or Charlie’s fire could keep up with her. Harry liked to run in dizzy circles trying, though.
They laughed and enjoyed each other’s company and taught Harry new magic and joy and learning, and he started to spend more and more time at their house instead of with his stepfather and mother. She didn’t notice his absences, anyway.
But there was someone who noticed his newfound happiness, and plotted to end it.
*
One green spring morning, Harry went far into the woods to meet the Weasleys. They had told him that they were preparing a great entertainment that would use all of their various kinds of magic to create something new and beautiful. Harry couldn’t wait to see it.
He lingered beneath the trees to watch them spread out their leaves, and talked to one of the centaurs who found him and wished to know where he had learned to walk so lightly, and did not notice the shadow following him.
When he arrived at the broad meadow where he was to meet the Weasleys, he found Bill grooming one of his wolves, Charlie tending a bonfire, Percy turning pages as he muttered to himself, Fred and George gesturing at each other with hands full of powder and leaves, Ron setting up a massive chessboard, and Ginny giggling as she darted between the trees. Harry laughed and flung himself down on the grass next to Charlie. “Hey, you lot.”
They turned around and greeted him, and George came over to pull a coin from behind Harry’s ear. It gleamed gold, unlike most of the times they did that. Harry laughed and winced away from them. “What did you do, rob a goblin?”
“Don’t even joke about that, Harrikins!” Fred cried in mock horror. He spun the gold coin into the air.
A hand snatched on its descent, and Severus Snape loomed out of the woods, his eyes more than ever like pits of coal. “No, they robbed me,” he sneered. “I hated your father, Harry Potter, and when I married your mother, your life was to become a hole. Not this.” He gestured around the meadow, and Bill’s wolf whined and Charlie’s fire crouched low. “For depriving me of my revenge, they shall suffer.”
Bill tried to charge him, but Snape was already waving his piece of dead wood he called a wand, muttering under his breath. Charlie picked up a fireball, but he was already shrinking. Percy flung down his book and stood, but he was already falling forwards onto all fours. Fred and George tried to attack Snape, but they were already losing their hands, melting them into the smoothness of paws. Ron shouted, but his voice was already turning high and keen, a bark instead of words. Ginny swooped from above with a shriek, but her brilliant red hair was already blowing out to cover the whole of her body.
In far less than seven minutes, seven small foxes in various sheds of red were bounding around the meadow.
“Now, Harry Potter,” Snape said, putting away his wand with his eyes glittering like two black diamonds, “perhaps now your joy will die as it was supposed to do.”
Harry faced Severus Snape, and he was not afraid. “Every curse has an ending,” he said. “Conditions that will end it if someone fulfills them. You must tell me what they are.”
Snape laughed at him, a dark, grating sound that filled the woods, but still Harry faced him and was not afraid. “Very well,” Snape said. “Although you will never come near to fulfilling them, you are right that I must speak. You will spend seven years mastering the different kinds of magic that your friends knew. For those years, you must not smile. You must not laugh. You must, at the end of those seven years, be able to recreate the mess they would have made today, in this very meadow. Then, and only then, will your friends be restored to their proper shapes.”
“I accept,” Harry said. His eyes were like two pools of living green.
Snape turned and vanished into the woods. He was certain that the son of his hated nemesis would never master all those various kinds of magic. James Potter had been stupid enough to ignore Severus Snape and to drink a potion that had come ultimately from his hands, and his son was the same kind of foolish.
Harry looked at his friends as they gathered around him. Perhaps he would not have been able to communicate with them, and certainly no modern wizard would have been able to, but he knew the fox-witchery, and used it to speak to them in the language of bark and grass and air and water. “I will break the curse. I will learn the kinds of magic that you know. But you must help me.”
Six dog foxes came forwards to press about his legs, while the small vixen swooped into the air and flew around Harry’s head, gently touching his cheeks with her brush.
Harry did not smile, and began to work.
*
Learning wolf magic was difficult.
Harry lived in the forest the first year. He learned how to speak with wolves, because he had to, but there was no wolf-witchery as there was fox-witchery. He had to concentrate on the mind of the wolf and reach out to it, holding the concentration all the time, never letting go. It was like walking across a river on a fallen tree that was rotting and with hungry fish leaping at your legs.
Bill helped as much as he could. He was the largest of the dog foxes, with a small patch of black fur on his head like the fur of some wolves he had ridden, and he spent hours sitting on Harry’s leg, yapping when Harry got the concentration wrong, and howling to bring more wolves to them. Harry stroked his fur and focused on the reaching.
It was a grand day when he at last managed to sit quietly by a stream and think of the way soft paws would pad and a long tail would wave and the mind of the pack would flow and connect—and he looked up and found two yearling wolves, brother and sister wandering from their pack to find a new one, standing across the stream and regarding him with stark curiosity.
From there, Harry learned to ride them. The dread wolves, as Bill called them, were the only ones big enough to ride. Harry had to reach even deeper into the forest to find them, had to run into the darkness as you would know if you wanted to cast Dark Arts and howl with his mouth as well as his mind.
And the dread wolves would come to him then, absolutely silent—with no howls of their own—and with black fur always and with golden eyes that blazed like the heart of the sun.
That was how Harry learned that you could have joy without smiling or laughing. When he was astride a dread wolf, racing through the forest, the deer bounding away in terror and the pack rushing behind and on either side and ahead, with the new moon hovering invisible in high clouds, there was a kind of joy to it. Savage and beautiful.
And Harry lost, too, his terror of the darkness that was the color of Snape’s eyes and hair. When you are part of it, you forget to be afraid of it.
Thus the first year passed.
*
Learning fire magic was dangerous.
The first time Harry built a bonfire, he burned himself. Charlie, who had the brightest red fur of the seven in his fox form, yelped a chorus of indignation at him and practically turned somersaults over the woven bark plate of partridge Harry had given him.
Harry shook his burned hand and eyed Charlie warily. He was starting to think his friend must have been mad, to learn this magic.
But he was not, or it was only one kind of madness. Harry learned to dance the fires, to leap into the air and come down again and somersault the way Charlie used to, the way Charlie did and would again. Harry learned the best material to burn, how to judge the dryness of wood and grass with a glance, and how to respect the creatures who sometimes came to dance in the flames he conjured, salamander and djinn. He would bow to them, and they bowed to him in turn, and then they would whirl around each other until Harry’s clothes were full of sparks and he was breathless with holding back his laughter.
It became the kind of madness Harry could bury himself within whenever he saw flames beginning. He would sit in front of the hearth at the house he now lived in only in name, because his mother had glazed eyes for Snape and Snape alone, and trace the path of the fire with his eyes, and know how to dance to it.
Then Snape would kick him out in the cold to sleep alone, and fill Lily’s tea with the clear drops of the potion he was using then, and Harry would go and find his friends and dance under the stars.
Thus the second year passed.
*
Learning book magic was tedious.
It did not help that Percy’s books were often tedious, and that he himself was the slowest and most patient of the foxes. Sometimes it helped him with stalking prey, but other times he became lost in the philosophical finer points of eating animals when he was an animal himself, and Harry would have to catch and feed him mice.
(As Harry become more immersed in the philosophy books Percy had left, he was able to persuade his friend that he had always been an animal, and so he could not starve himself now unless he was able to go back in time and starve himself when he had been a human).
Book magic became a great source of quiet to Harry; it was that quiet he learned. He would sit in the woods with Percy curled beside him, Percy using his brush to point to certain passages and show how they fit into the harmony of the whole. It was that harmony Harry had been missing, the weaving of words and the peace that flowed out of them as he felt himself transformed, or charmed, or lifted, or angered.
Harry did not want to remember harmony. It invoked old memories of life with his parents to him, and a forgotten peace that should remain forgotten. He was also aware that the peace made him want to smile, and to break Snape’s curse on the Weasleys, he could not smile.
But Percy would glance up at him trustingly, and point to more passages, and Harry became aware that he was learning more about his old friend than he had ever known. Percy had seemed more distant to him than most of the Weasleys, but now he was not.
And Harry began to write down his own words, words that linked together and bore him away in their airy nets. He recited poems on frogs so like their calls that it made the real frogs begin to call from the ponds in the spring. He delved deep into the darkness and spoke the silence that surrounded the dread wolves. He came up with a tale of fire magic and the lonely salamander who fell in love with a djinn that the Weasleys insisted on hearing again and again.
If he did not learn how to make and bind his own books, he learned how to care for the ones Percy had left, and he could write his stories in shining words on their endpapers. And he saw how Snape’s words cut, and how they made even his entranced, drugged mother flinch sometimes, and he learned to see past them and rise above them and resist the wounds they would inflict.
Thus the third year passed.
*
Learning hand magic was long.
Harry thought it would be simple, because he had two hands, and maybe that was part of the delay. When he reached for coins and cards and leaves and other things Fred and George used to hide, he couldn’t find them. He would sit back and regard his hands in baffled agony, while the twins pressed up against his sides and nudged him with soft wet noses.
There was also the fact that the twins could not show him, with their own hands, how to make the magic the way that Percy could point out passages in the books or Bill could describe the way to reach a dread wolf’s mind. George often drummed his hind feet on the ground in frustration at that, and Fred would go away and stalk a frog.
Harry listened to them with his head bowed, and watched his own hands. They were clever, but Snape’s hands were cleverer, with his wand and his herbs. How could Harry match him?
Then George nipped his elbow, and Fred brought back the frog and threw it in his face with a glorious squish, and Harry resisted the urge to laugh only with difficulty.
Slowly, hesitating all the time, they found the way. Harry would spread out his hand, and Fred and George would spread out their paws and show him some of their tricks in slow time and half-scale, the way that you might write out a potions recipe that takes a whole month now. Harry would imitate gestures with his fingers. He grew his nails as long as theirs, so that they would more perfectly mimic what Fred and George wanted to show him. He learned the feel of old friends, rolling coins along his knuckles and going to sleep with them clutched in his hands until he knew them better than he knew Percy’s books. He picked up leaves of all kinds and learned the trees by their fallen natures. He felt the different thicknesses of a pack of cards and stretched his fingers out around them until he could imagine nothing more familiar.
His first triumph came when he pulled a piece of silver from behind a dread wolf’s ear. The wolf started and nearly fell into the fire burning nearby. Harry bowed his head in remorse. It was not easy not to laugh, until he thought of the courtesy he had neglected. Then he could apologize.
And move on.
He showered Ginny with cards that appeared from midair, and she chased them and played with them. He adorned oaks with the leaves of elms and caused centaurs to question what kinds of trees they were. For a final triumph, he crossed a clearing without a unicorn noticing him and presented it with a hair from its own silkenswept tail.
Fred and George, with the loudest voices of all the foxes, capered into the clearing and laughed with him, with their mocking barks, as Harry could not.
Thus the fourth and fifth years passed.
*
Learning game magic was humbling.
Harry had never been wonderful at games. Ron was the one who was, and every time he learned a new one, Harry would play it with him, but that was because Ron was his friend and Harry wanted to give him the pleasure of playing and winning. Harry had never won except when Ron was tired.
Ron, whose eyes were the gentlest and bluest of all the foxes’, was a patient teacher. He would sit on the other side of the chessboard and give small signals when Harry was about to make different errors—a “yip” when Harry was about to move the pieces in a way that would see him checkmated in the next instant, a “bark” when Harry was ignoring an obvious trap, a “huff” when he violated the rules. Harry didn’t know if he would ever be able to see seven moves ahead the way his friend could, but he did learn.
Slowly, slowly, he learned that special magic that comes from seeing balls and chess pieces and boards and nets as having a mind of their own, as needing the respect that Harry gave of his own free will to living things like the dread wolves and the salamanders. When he touched a chessboard for the first time and felt it almost hum under his hand, he did not smile, but he came close. Perhaps his sensitivity was increased because of what he had learned of hand magic from Fred and George before then.
Perhaps not. When Harry was able to play a game by himself, as both sides, and win one, he saw it as an art of the mind, of quiet, peaceful strategy that need not end in annihilation.
As he had learned to trust his hands when working under Fred and George and think them capable of beating Snape’s, Harry learned to trust his thoughts. The first time he played Ron at chess and beat him, Ron flung back his head and danced all over the board (incidentally destroying Harry’s checkmate arrangement), Harry did not second-guess himself or wonder if Ron had let him win. That was what he would have thought if Ron was human.
But here, he accepted it with a nod, and reached out to place one hand on a knight and the other on Ron’s head.
Thus the sixth year passed.
*
Learning air magic was brilliant.
It did not come as naturally to Harry as it did to Ginny, who could frolic in the air as both a small girl and a small vixen. But he would sit out in the open meadow in the morning with the sun coming through the trees and breathe in, and Ginny would name the scents drifting on the breezes for him. This was the one gift of Snape’s curse: she could smell them far better as a fox than she could as a human. Harry learned to separate rain from dew from river water, and fox from wolf from dread wolf, by listening to her through the fox-witchery.
And Ginny taught him to fly.
Harry loved the learning process, and had to work harder not to laugh or smile here than he did at any point in the six years previous. Ginny would run across the meadow, and Harry would run beside her, imagining, as hard as he could, the air lifting to him, yielding to him, singing to him. Then Ginny’s paws would leave the ground, and Harry would leap after her—
And then he would crash face-down into the dirt, while Ginny drifted above his head and laughed for him in a chorus of shrill yelps.
Harry lay with his face in the dirt and fought not to smile. Only remembering that his friends would be foxes forever if he did enabled him to keep his lips still.
There did come the day when he flew. When he ran and then leaped and the air bore him up instead of curling away from him. When he rose and rose and rose like a dizzy tornado, Ginny making loops around him like a bird around a tree, and found himself above the canopy of the forest, trees stretching away like freedom in every direction.
That was the time, that was the moment, when he came the closest to forsaking his quest to break the curse and simply flee away from his responsibilities. He could fly in any direction if he wished—
His gaze fell on his father’s grave, not far from his mother’s door, and all impulse to laugh or flee left him.
Thus the seventh year passed.
*
The seven years passed, and Harry was a young man (although he did not know it, because he never learned mirror magic) with hair as dark as a dread wolf’s pelt, and eyes as bright as fire, and a voice as learned as a philosopher’s, and a right hand as quick as a fox’s paw, and a left hand as skilled as a stage magician’s, and a mind as strategical as a king’s, and a body as toned as a bird’s.
He invited his mother and stepfather to the meadow where the Weasleys would have given their entertainment seven years to the day that they would have given it. He was eighteen and in the flush of his pride and his youth. Lily Evans was a shadow of the woman who had once charmed giant spiders into leaving her family alone. Severus Snape was as unchanged as a mountain.
They came, and stood there, one with glazed eyes, one with hateful, before the empty meadow—empty save for Harry and the seven foxes gathered about his feet.
Snape sneered at him. His face was made for sneering, and he perhaps knew the magic of them, a withered art long left behind modern wizards. “Well? What is the thing you intend to show us?”
Seven years ago, that sneer would have intimidated Harry. But now he looked beyond it with eyes so intense it was hard for any who was not a fox to meet them, and he saw the fear there.
“Many things,” Harry said softly, and he turned and reached into the forest with his mind. A dread wolf came out, a creature of midnight in the brightness of the sun. It would never have been there for but for their love of Harry, the young man who had labored so hard to learn the wolf magic.
Harry asked, and the dread wolf came at a run. Even Lily was standing up a little then, her eyes fixed on the creature and growing more and more alert by the second. She had never seen a dread wolf.
Harry turned and extended his hand, and two fires burst into existence when he asked, burning on grass and the carefully arranged piles of wood. Harry had learned to ask, and now the salamanders came, flickering through the flames, lifting their heads and extending their tongues.
The dread wolf leaped into the air and ran across the fires on the edges of those tongues. Lily gasped and held her hands to her mouth. When the wolf reached the end, he soared high and came down into the middle of—
The woven net of words Harry was already speaking, the tale of a wolf who wished to be a fox so much that at last his wish was granted. Words bent reality, the magic struck the minds of its audience, and everyone there saw, for a flickering moment that was too real to be forgotten, the dread wolf shrinking, his black coat turning red, his yellow eyes turning merry, and how he leaped and frisked, as mad as a creature of the woods’ edge.
Harry spread his hands. From them leaped forth coins and cards by cascades and waterfalls. The dread wolf, shaking free of the magic of the words, leaped and began to swallow the gold and silver and paper into the terrible gullet of his stomach, from which meat did not emerge again. Harry strode forwards confidently, and made the fur of the dread wolf’s back and sides a forest of tumbling cards. Coins rolled from behind his ears, copper paved his paws’ way, and when Harry persuaded him to open his mouth and extend his tongue, it looked as if it had turned to pure leather with the book cover that was waiting there.
Lily smiled, and Snape looked thunderous.
Harry bowed, and turned the bow into a motion that cast the chessboard and pieces before him. The dread wolf took Ron’s place on the other side of the board, and the game began. Harry, dancing like the wizard his mind turned him into, played both sides and yet made it seem as if the dread wolf was responsible for moving his own pieces. Ron watched with his brush trembling furiously, but did not interfere. In the end, Harry called checkmate, and he and the dread wolf bowed to each other across the gameboard.
At this point, Snape grew furious and desperate. He had never believed that the useless son of the useless man who had mocked him for using a wand could truly master seven different kinds of magic in seven years, and so he had thought he was safe. But now he raised his wand and cast a curse at the dread wolf as he stepped towards Harry to begin the last part of the entertainment.
Harry glanced at the bolt of green light, and a breeze turned it aside. Then he spread his arms, and he and the dread wolf spiraled into the air. Ginny joined them, just outside their spiral, and then Ron pranced onto the gameboard and the twins spread their paws like hands and Percy placed his paws on four different books and Charlie leaped over the fire and Bill ran below the dread wolf in a bounding spring.
And Lily laughed.
The sound of her laughter spread like a ripple across the meadow. Suddenly Bill tore out of his whirl of fur and found himself trying to run on hands and knees, which made him collapse. Charlie leaped again and somersaulted, in human form, in fire and air. Percy tumbled to the ground, rolled off his books, and snatched up his favorite one. Fred and George clapped hands together as they transformed. Ron hastily crawled off the gameboard before he collapsed it. Ginny cried out for a second and hovered hastily to readjust her weight, suddenly much greater.
And Harry laughed in answer to his mother’s laughter, and landed beside her with a smile, shining in the light of all curses broken.
Lily placed her hand on her son’s shoulder, and if her eyes were not as intense as his they were brighter than they had been for almost eight years. “Severus Snape,” she said, her voice rolling like a thunderstorm, “you poisoned me with your hatred and your bitterness, and I know now that you poisoned my husband. I cast this curse upon you: that you remain in the form of a slug until you release your hatred and bitterness. Live, until then, and learn what forgiveness means.”
Snape brandished his wand, but it was too late, and the curse seized him like thunder dancing through boulders. In the form of a slug, he crept away in search of a garden, and it may be there is a garden with an immortal slug living in it yet, for mountains may wear down easier than the desire for revenge hatefully nurtured.
The Weasleys, human again, rode wolves and danced around fires and read from books and used their hands and played games and flew through the air. Harry and his mother went to put flowers on his father’s grave. Then Harry called cleansing winds and banished every trace of Snape from the cottage, and Lily threw away all the goblets that had held the tainted drinks Snape had enslaved her with.
Harry and Lily dwelt in great happiness, and it may be, as well, that one day a dashing prince or a beautiful lady or both together came through the forest and fell in love with that blazing young man and asked for his hand in marriage. And it may be that he lived in happiness for all of his days.
But that time, so long ago, so far, so fair, is limited in what eyes may glimpse of it; and we must close our eyes now, and hope to dream it again.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Severus/Lily, past Lily/James
Content Notes: Fairy tale AU, omniscient POV, angst, minor character death, extremely dubious love-potioned consent
Wordcount: 6200
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry is the stepson of a cruel man, who can only find solace in his friends the Weasleys. But when Snape finds out how close the Weasleys are to Harry, he curses them to turn into foxes. There is a way for Harry to break the curse, if he can suffer through it… Based on the fairytale “The Wild Swans” by Hans Christian Anderson.
Author’s Notes: Another of my July Celebration fics. Deliberately a bit surreal. As well, while the love potion aspect/dub-con aspect of this story is not graphic or very much depicted, it is there, so be aware of that as you read.
The Seven Wild Weasleys
Once upon a far time, once upon a fair time, in a place where wizards did not need to use wands, there lived a small boy named Harry Potter. His father was a powerful man with a deep laugh called James, and his mother a lovely woman with a quick wit named Lily. They dwelt together in a cottage near a thick forest that was filled with giant spiders and unicorns and centaurs, just like the Forest some wizards think of as forbidden now, and they walked in the forest and rejoiced, because none of the creatures ever bothered them. Those that tried were charmed by Lily’s words or frightened away by James’s power. Harry ran circles around his parents as they walked, and bragged about how someday he, too, would be a great wizard.
But magic cannot cure all ills. James sickened suddenly, within a fortnight, his face turning green and his heart slowing and blood trickling from his mouth, and none of the witchery Lily could wield cured him. Within another fortnight, he was gone. She and Harry stood stricken at the side of James’s grave, and then Lily reached out and squeezed her son’s shoulder very gently. Harry looked up at her with eyes that were green and wet and sparkling like the forest after a rainstorm.
“From now on, we shall have to be all in all to each other, Harry,” Lily said, slowly and seriously, in the way that an Augurey might speak if it could speak. “We shall have to be each other’s power and love and laughter. Can you do that for me? And I will do it for you.”
Harry nodded. He was young still, you know, far younger than some humans will ever be, but losing his father had aged him. He promised. “I will do that for you, Mother.”
And Lily hugged him and was still.
*
But they had only a few years of being each other’s power and love and laughter. Lily taught Harry magic, the kind that they worked then, with soil and gesture and asking and kindness. She showed him how to garden, and how to beg aid of the foxes. That’s a lost art, if you like, the fox-witchery. There’s no one they’ll come to now.
Harry learned to bow to trees, and to approach a unicorn and lay hands on it, and how to call the lightning so that he could walk safely through a storm by making the lightning strike everywhere he wasn’t. He freed a centaur leader from the log that his hoof was caught under, and the centaur honored him with a ride on his back. Harry learned to find wild berries and nuts and mushrooms and which ones he could safely eat and which must be cooked and which he should never even touch. Lily laughed sometimes, although not as freely as she had when James was alive. And then they would go into the forest and walk, and brilliant eyes peered at them from the undergrowth but left them alone.
That all changed when Severus Snape came.
*
Harry returned from the forest one evening when he had been charming the trees to bend over him and bring some of their nuts nearer to him, and found his mother sitting across a table from a man with eyes and hair as black as coal. Harry actually thought he was a coal-golem at first, one of those creations that puts itself together and lurches around the forest when you’re not looking. He shouted out the charm to banish a golem.
But Lily only laughed and blushed, and the man smiled coldly, and Lily said, “Harry, this is Severus Snape. He is…a wizard I used to know. From a faraway place.”
Looking at Snape, Harry wished he would go back there.
But it was clear Snape had come to stay. He soon had black robes hanging up in the closet where Harry’s father’s robes used to hang like the corpses of slaughtered ravens. Harry saw him crouching in Lily’s garden with his hands mired in the dirt and his head bowed as if he was sucking all the goodness out of the flowers through his nostrils. He used a dead piece of wood to create light and uproot the flowers and plant herbs of his own making.
And he was always sneering at Harry, whispering tales of how James Potter had hurt him, and how Severus Snape would take all he held dear. Harry tried to talk to his mother about these things, but Lily shook her head and flapped her apron at him. She spent more time in the kitchen than she ever had, just then, making things that the horrible Snape man liked to eat.
“Oh, Harry, go on, do. You don’t understand Severus. He doesn’t mean it when he says things like that. He’s just caught up in this old rivalry with James and doesn’t really like to think about him. But he’s here to make me happy.”
All Harry could think was two things: that only mad people didn’t realize when one of their rivals was dead; and that maybe Snape was there to make his mother happy, but not Harry.
Snape and Lily were bonded at the end of summer, and Harry unhappily walked with them through the forest and caught the nuts that the trees dropped only because he was there. Lily had eyes for nothing but Snape, eyes that were always a bit glazed.
Snape had eyes for nothing but cruelty. The morning after the bonding, Harry found the flowers he had laid on his father’s grave the day before blasted to black and greasy shreds.
*
In this time when his mother and stepfather walked linked arm-in-arm and happiness seemed to turn its back on him, Harry found joy only in the company of his friends, the Weasleys. They were a family that lived deep in the forest, rejoicing in the magic of earth and water and leaves. They threw handfuls of leaves at each other and interfered in each other’s baking and enchanted the trees to hide them in their games. They had hair as bright as the pelts of the foxes Harry loved. It was a good family.
The Weasley parents, Arthur and Molly, had not been as powerful as Harry’s father had been nor as charming as his mother had been, but they had been kinder than fate was to either of Harry’s parents. Arthur had showed a smaller Harry how he had made a machine to move earth without magic, and Molly had stuffed his mouth full of biscuits until Harry thought he would burst. But they had died in a forest fire three years before, and it was their seven children who were Harry’s friends.
Bill, the eldest, knew wolf magic. The first time Harry met him, he was riding on the back of a great grey wolf so dark that he looked black. Harry had gulped and stared at him nervously, but Bill welcomed him with the courtesy of wolves, and took Harry back to his parents’ home to meet his family.
Charlie, the second eldest, knew the magic of fire. During the summer evenings Harry spent at the Weasley home, Charlie would light enormous bonfires outside and wait until the sun had set completely and the moon was coming up. Then he would dance between the flames, gathering them around himself until they formed a cloak of red and gold. He would whirl and stamp and leap, and Harry and the Weasleys would laugh and applaud as he suspended himself in the middle of a cloud of fire and air.
Percy, the third eldest, knew the magic of books. He was the first person Harry met who wrote down his wisdom instead of remembering it and passing it on. Harry didn’t know if he always liked the books, but he liked to touch them, stroking their bindings that Percy had made himself out of tanned leather and sinew, while Percy lectured him on the spells. Luckily, Percy didn’t care if his audience listened; he only wanted them not to run away.
Fred and George were fourth and fifth eldest, but in truth, they were twins, so close that Harry thought of them as together. Together, they knew the magic of hands. They drew coins from behind Harry’s ear and inside his hair that he knew he hadn’t put there (even though they told him when Harry protested that his hair was so shaggy that he couldn’t know what had fallen into it). They waved their fingers, and doves appeared between them. They stood close together and drew apart, and there was a spinning tornado of blue light and darkness between their hands that hadn’t existed before.
Ron, the sixth eldest, knew the magic of games. He could come up with new games and rules on the spot, and it was always a delight to play them. From him Harry learned the old game of chess, and how the pieces could leap and spin across the board and still mean something. Harry learned it happily; chess had been one of his father’s favorite games. Since Snape had come, his mother had put the old board away and never played it or let it be seen.
Ginny, the youngest, knew the magic of air. The first time Harry saw her, she spread her arms and floated off the ground. Then she showed him how she could use a broom, spinning around the trunks of trees so fast that not even Bill’s wolves or Charlie’s fire could keep up with her. Harry liked to run in dizzy circles trying, though.
They laughed and enjoyed each other’s company and taught Harry new magic and joy and learning, and he started to spend more and more time at their house instead of with his stepfather and mother. She didn’t notice his absences, anyway.
But there was someone who noticed his newfound happiness, and plotted to end it.
*
One green spring morning, Harry went far into the woods to meet the Weasleys. They had told him that they were preparing a great entertainment that would use all of their various kinds of magic to create something new and beautiful. Harry couldn’t wait to see it.
He lingered beneath the trees to watch them spread out their leaves, and talked to one of the centaurs who found him and wished to know where he had learned to walk so lightly, and did not notice the shadow following him.
When he arrived at the broad meadow where he was to meet the Weasleys, he found Bill grooming one of his wolves, Charlie tending a bonfire, Percy turning pages as he muttered to himself, Fred and George gesturing at each other with hands full of powder and leaves, Ron setting up a massive chessboard, and Ginny giggling as she darted between the trees. Harry laughed and flung himself down on the grass next to Charlie. “Hey, you lot.”
They turned around and greeted him, and George came over to pull a coin from behind Harry’s ear. It gleamed gold, unlike most of the times they did that. Harry laughed and winced away from them. “What did you do, rob a goblin?”
“Don’t even joke about that, Harrikins!” Fred cried in mock horror. He spun the gold coin into the air.
A hand snatched on its descent, and Severus Snape loomed out of the woods, his eyes more than ever like pits of coal. “No, they robbed me,” he sneered. “I hated your father, Harry Potter, and when I married your mother, your life was to become a hole. Not this.” He gestured around the meadow, and Bill’s wolf whined and Charlie’s fire crouched low. “For depriving me of my revenge, they shall suffer.”
Bill tried to charge him, but Snape was already waving his piece of dead wood he called a wand, muttering under his breath. Charlie picked up a fireball, but he was already shrinking. Percy flung down his book and stood, but he was already falling forwards onto all fours. Fred and George tried to attack Snape, but they were already losing their hands, melting them into the smoothness of paws. Ron shouted, but his voice was already turning high and keen, a bark instead of words. Ginny swooped from above with a shriek, but her brilliant red hair was already blowing out to cover the whole of her body.
In far less than seven minutes, seven small foxes in various sheds of red were bounding around the meadow.
“Now, Harry Potter,” Snape said, putting away his wand with his eyes glittering like two black diamonds, “perhaps now your joy will die as it was supposed to do.”
Harry faced Severus Snape, and he was not afraid. “Every curse has an ending,” he said. “Conditions that will end it if someone fulfills them. You must tell me what they are.”
Snape laughed at him, a dark, grating sound that filled the woods, but still Harry faced him and was not afraid. “Very well,” Snape said. “Although you will never come near to fulfilling them, you are right that I must speak. You will spend seven years mastering the different kinds of magic that your friends knew. For those years, you must not smile. You must not laugh. You must, at the end of those seven years, be able to recreate the mess they would have made today, in this very meadow. Then, and only then, will your friends be restored to their proper shapes.”
“I accept,” Harry said. His eyes were like two pools of living green.
Snape turned and vanished into the woods. He was certain that the son of his hated nemesis would never master all those various kinds of magic. James Potter had been stupid enough to ignore Severus Snape and to drink a potion that had come ultimately from his hands, and his son was the same kind of foolish.
Harry looked at his friends as they gathered around him. Perhaps he would not have been able to communicate with them, and certainly no modern wizard would have been able to, but he knew the fox-witchery, and used it to speak to them in the language of bark and grass and air and water. “I will break the curse. I will learn the kinds of magic that you know. But you must help me.”
Six dog foxes came forwards to press about his legs, while the small vixen swooped into the air and flew around Harry’s head, gently touching his cheeks with her brush.
Harry did not smile, and began to work.
*
Learning wolf magic was difficult.
Harry lived in the forest the first year. He learned how to speak with wolves, because he had to, but there was no wolf-witchery as there was fox-witchery. He had to concentrate on the mind of the wolf and reach out to it, holding the concentration all the time, never letting go. It was like walking across a river on a fallen tree that was rotting and with hungry fish leaping at your legs.
Bill helped as much as he could. He was the largest of the dog foxes, with a small patch of black fur on his head like the fur of some wolves he had ridden, and he spent hours sitting on Harry’s leg, yapping when Harry got the concentration wrong, and howling to bring more wolves to them. Harry stroked his fur and focused on the reaching.
It was a grand day when he at last managed to sit quietly by a stream and think of the way soft paws would pad and a long tail would wave and the mind of the pack would flow and connect—and he looked up and found two yearling wolves, brother and sister wandering from their pack to find a new one, standing across the stream and regarding him with stark curiosity.
From there, Harry learned to ride them. The dread wolves, as Bill called them, were the only ones big enough to ride. Harry had to reach even deeper into the forest to find them, had to run into the darkness as you would know if you wanted to cast Dark Arts and howl with his mouth as well as his mind.
And the dread wolves would come to him then, absolutely silent—with no howls of their own—and with black fur always and with golden eyes that blazed like the heart of the sun.
That was how Harry learned that you could have joy without smiling or laughing. When he was astride a dread wolf, racing through the forest, the deer bounding away in terror and the pack rushing behind and on either side and ahead, with the new moon hovering invisible in high clouds, there was a kind of joy to it. Savage and beautiful.
And Harry lost, too, his terror of the darkness that was the color of Snape’s eyes and hair. When you are part of it, you forget to be afraid of it.
Thus the first year passed.
*
Learning fire magic was dangerous.
The first time Harry built a bonfire, he burned himself. Charlie, who had the brightest red fur of the seven in his fox form, yelped a chorus of indignation at him and practically turned somersaults over the woven bark plate of partridge Harry had given him.
Harry shook his burned hand and eyed Charlie warily. He was starting to think his friend must have been mad, to learn this magic.
But he was not, or it was only one kind of madness. Harry learned to dance the fires, to leap into the air and come down again and somersault the way Charlie used to, the way Charlie did and would again. Harry learned the best material to burn, how to judge the dryness of wood and grass with a glance, and how to respect the creatures who sometimes came to dance in the flames he conjured, salamander and djinn. He would bow to them, and they bowed to him in turn, and then they would whirl around each other until Harry’s clothes were full of sparks and he was breathless with holding back his laughter.
It became the kind of madness Harry could bury himself within whenever he saw flames beginning. He would sit in front of the hearth at the house he now lived in only in name, because his mother had glazed eyes for Snape and Snape alone, and trace the path of the fire with his eyes, and know how to dance to it.
Then Snape would kick him out in the cold to sleep alone, and fill Lily’s tea with the clear drops of the potion he was using then, and Harry would go and find his friends and dance under the stars.
Thus the second year passed.
*
Learning book magic was tedious.
It did not help that Percy’s books were often tedious, and that he himself was the slowest and most patient of the foxes. Sometimes it helped him with stalking prey, but other times he became lost in the philosophical finer points of eating animals when he was an animal himself, and Harry would have to catch and feed him mice.
(As Harry become more immersed in the philosophy books Percy had left, he was able to persuade his friend that he had always been an animal, and so he could not starve himself now unless he was able to go back in time and starve himself when he had been a human).
Book magic became a great source of quiet to Harry; it was that quiet he learned. He would sit in the woods with Percy curled beside him, Percy using his brush to point to certain passages and show how they fit into the harmony of the whole. It was that harmony Harry had been missing, the weaving of words and the peace that flowed out of them as he felt himself transformed, or charmed, or lifted, or angered.
Harry did not want to remember harmony. It invoked old memories of life with his parents to him, and a forgotten peace that should remain forgotten. He was also aware that the peace made him want to smile, and to break Snape’s curse on the Weasleys, he could not smile.
But Percy would glance up at him trustingly, and point to more passages, and Harry became aware that he was learning more about his old friend than he had ever known. Percy had seemed more distant to him than most of the Weasleys, but now he was not.
And Harry began to write down his own words, words that linked together and bore him away in their airy nets. He recited poems on frogs so like their calls that it made the real frogs begin to call from the ponds in the spring. He delved deep into the darkness and spoke the silence that surrounded the dread wolves. He came up with a tale of fire magic and the lonely salamander who fell in love with a djinn that the Weasleys insisted on hearing again and again.
If he did not learn how to make and bind his own books, he learned how to care for the ones Percy had left, and he could write his stories in shining words on their endpapers. And he saw how Snape’s words cut, and how they made even his entranced, drugged mother flinch sometimes, and he learned to see past them and rise above them and resist the wounds they would inflict.
Thus the third year passed.
*
Learning hand magic was long.
Harry thought it would be simple, because he had two hands, and maybe that was part of the delay. When he reached for coins and cards and leaves and other things Fred and George used to hide, he couldn’t find them. He would sit back and regard his hands in baffled agony, while the twins pressed up against his sides and nudged him with soft wet noses.
There was also the fact that the twins could not show him, with their own hands, how to make the magic the way that Percy could point out passages in the books or Bill could describe the way to reach a dread wolf’s mind. George often drummed his hind feet on the ground in frustration at that, and Fred would go away and stalk a frog.
Harry listened to them with his head bowed, and watched his own hands. They were clever, but Snape’s hands were cleverer, with his wand and his herbs. How could Harry match him?
Then George nipped his elbow, and Fred brought back the frog and threw it in his face with a glorious squish, and Harry resisted the urge to laugh only with difficulty.
Slowly, hesitating all the time, they found the way. Harry would spread out his hand, and Fred and George would spread out their paws and show him some of their tricks in slow time and half-scale, the way that you might write out a potions recipe that takes a whole month now. Harry would imitate gestures with his fingers. He grew his nails as long as theirs, so that they would more perfectly mimic what Fred and George wanted to show him. He learned the feel of old friends, rolling coins along his knuckles and going to sleep with them clutched in his hands until he knew them better than he knew Percy’s books. He picked up leaves of all kinds and learned the trees by their fallen natures. He felt the different thicknesses of a pack of cards and stretched his fingers out around them until he could imagine nothing more familiar.
His first triumph came when he pulled a piece of silver from behind a dread wolf’s ear. The wolf started and nearly fell into the fire burning nearby. Harry bowed his head in remorse. It was not easy not to laugh, until he thought of the courtesy he had neglected. Then he could apologize.
And move on.
He showered Ginny with cards that appeared from midair, and she chased them and played with them. He adorned oaks with the leaves of elms and caused centaurs to question what kinds of trees they were. For a final triumph, he crossed a clearing without a unicorn noticing him and presented it with a hair from its own silkenswept tail.
Fred and George, with the loudest voices of all the foxes, capered into the clearing and laughed with him, with their mocking barks, as Harry could not.
Thus the fourth and fifth years passed.
*
Learning game magic was humbling.
Harry had never been wonderful at games. Ron was the one who was, and every time he learned a new one, Harry would play it with him, but that was because Ron was his friend and Harry wanted to give him the pleasure of playing and winning. Harry had never won except when Ron was tired.
Ron, whose eyes were the gentlest and bluest of all the foxes’, was a patient teacher. He would sit on the other side of the chessboard and give small signals when Harry was about to make different errors—a “yip” when Harry was about to move the pieces in a way that would see him checkmated in the next instant, a “bark” when Harry was ignoring an obvious trap, a “huff” when he violated the rules. Harry didn’t know if he would ever be able to see seven moves ahead the way his friend could, but he did learn.
Slowly, slowly, he learned that special magic that comes from seeing balls and chess pieces and boards and nets as having a mind of their own, as needing the respect that Harry gave of his own free will to living things like the dread wolves and the salamanders. When he touched a chessboard for the first time and felt it almost hum under his hand, he did not smile, but he came close. Perhaps his sensitivity was increased because of what he had learned of hand magic from Fred and George before then.
Perhaps not. When Harry was able to play a game by himself, as both sides, and win one, he saw it as an art of the mind, of quiet, peaceful strategy that need not end in annihilation.
As he had learned to trust his hands when working under Fred and George and think them capable of beating Snape’s, Harry learned to trust his thoughts. The first time he played Ron at chess and beat him, Ron flung back his head and danced all over the board (incidentally destroying Harry’s checkmate arrangement), Harry did not second-guess himself or wonder if Ron had let him win. That was what he would have thought if Ron was human.
But here, he accepted it with a nod, and reached out to place one hand on a knight and the other on Ron’s head.
Thus the sixth year passed.
*
Learning air magic was brilliant.
It did not come as naturally to Harry as it did to Ginny, who could frolic in the air as both a small girl and a small vixen. But he would sit out in the open meadow in the morning with the sun coming through the trees and breathe in, and Ginny would name the scents drifting on the breezes for him. This was the one gift of Snape’s curse: she could smell them far better as a fox than she could as a human. Harry learned to separate rain from dew from river water, and fox from wolf from dread wolf, by listening to her through the fox-witchery.
And Ginny taught him to fly.
Harry loved the learning process, and had to work harder not to laugh or smile here than he did at any point in the six years previous. Ginny would run across the meadow, and Harry would run beside her, imagining, as hard as he could, the air lifting to him, yielding to him, singing to him. Then Ginny’s paws would leave the ground, and Harry would leap after her—
And then he would crash face-down into the dirt, while Ginny drifted above his head and laughed for him in a chorus of shrill yelps.
Harry lay with his face in the dirt and fought not to smile. Only remembering that his friends would be foxes forever if he did enabled him to keep his lips still.
There did come the day when he flew. When he ran and then leaped and the air bore him up instead of curling away from him. When he rose and rose and rose like a dizzy tornado, Ginny making loops around him like a bird around a tree, and found himself above the canopy of the forest, trees stretching away like freedom in every direction.
That was the time, that was the moment, when he came the closest to forsaking his quest to break the curse and simply flee away from his responsibilities. He could fly in any direction if he wished—
His gaze fell on his father’s grave, not far from his mother’s door, and all impulse to laugh or flee left him.
Thus the seventh year passed.
*
The seven years passed, and Harry was a young man (although he did not know it, because he never learned mirror magic) with hair as dark as a dread wolf’s pelt, and eyes as bright as fire, and a voice as learned as a philosopher’s, and a right hand as quick as a fox’s paw, and a left hand as skilled as a stage magician’s, and a mind as strategical as a king’s, and a body as toned as a bird’s.
He invited his mother and stepfather to the meadow where the Weasleys would have given their entertainment seven years to the day that they would have given it. He was eighteen and in the flush of his pride and his youth. Lily Evans was a shadow of the woman who had once charmed giant spiders into leaving her family alone. Severus Snape was as unchanged as a mountain.
They came, and stood there, one with glazed eyes, one with hateful, before the empty meadow—empty save for Harry and the seven foxes gathered about his feet.
Snape sneered at him. His face was made for sneering, and he perhaps knew the magic of them, a withered art long left behind modern wizards. “Well? What is the thing you intend to show us?”
Seven years ago, that sneer would have intimidated Harry. But now he looked beyond it with eyes so intense it was hard for any who was not a fox to meet them, and he saw the fear there.
“Many things,” Harry said softly, and he turned and reached into the forest with his mind. A dread wolf came out, a creature of midnight in the brightness of the sun. It would never have been there for but for their love of Harry, the young man who had labored so hard to learn the wolf magic.
Harry asked, and the dread wolf came at a run. Even Lily was standing up a little then, her eyes fixed on the creature and growing more and more alert by the second. She had never seen a dread wolf.
Harry turned and extended his hand, and two fires burst into existence when he asked, burning on grass and the carefully arranged piles of wood. Harry had learned to ask, and now the salamanders came, flickering through the flames, lifting their heads and extending their tongues.
The dread wolf leaped into the air and ran across the fires on the edges of those tongues. Lily gasped and held her hands to her mouth. When the wolf reached the end, he soared high and came down into the middle of—
The woven net of words Harry was already speaking, the tale of a wolf who wished to be a fox so much that at last his wish was granted. Words bent reality, the magic struck the minds of its audience, and everyone there saw, for a flickering moment that was too real to be forgotten, the dread wolf shrinking, his black coat turning red, his yellow eyes turning merry, and how he leaped and frisked, as mad as a creature of the woods’ edge.
Harry spread his hands. From them leaped forth coins and cards by cascades and waterfalls. The dread wolf, shaking free of the magic of the words, leaped and began to swallow the gold and silver and paper into the terrible gullet of his stomach, from which meat did not emerge again. Harry strode forwards confidently, and made the fur of the dread wolf’s back and sides a forest of tumbling cards. Coins rolled from behind his ears, copper paved his paws’ way, and when Harry persuaded him to open his mouth and extend his tongue, it looked as if it had turned to pure leather with the book cover that was waiting there.
Lily smiled, and Snape looked thunderous.
Harry bowed, and turned the bow into a motion that cast the chessboard and pieces before him. The dread wolf took Ron’s place on the other side of the board, and the game began. Harry, dancing like the wizard his mind turned him into, played both sides and yet made it seem as if the dread wolf was responsible for moving his own pieces. Ron watched with his brush trembling furiously, but did not interfere. In the end, Harry called checkmate, and he and the dread wolf bowed to each other across the gameboard.
At this point, Snape grew furious and desperate. He had never believed that the useless son of the useless man who had mocked him for using a wand could truly master seven different kinds of magic in seven years, and so he had thought he was safe. But now he raised his wand and cast a curse at the dread wolf as he stepped towards Harry to begin the last part of the entertainment.
Harry glanced at the bolt of green light, and a breeze turned it aside. Then he spread his arms, and he and the dread wolf spiraled into the air. Ginny joined them, just outside their spiral, and then Ron pranced onto the gameboard and the twins spread their paws like hands and Percy placed his paws on four different books and Charlie leaped over the fire and Bill ran below the dread wolf in a bounding spring.
And Lily laughed.
The sound of her laughter spread like a ripple across the meadow. Suddenly Bill tore out of his whirl of fur and found himself trying to run on hands and knees, which made him collapse. Charlie leaped again and somersaulted, in human form, in fire and air. Percy tumbled to the ground, rolled off his books, and snatched up his favorite one. Fred and George clapped hands together as they transformed. Ron hastily crawled off the gameboard before he collapsed it. Ginny cried out for a second and hovered hastily to readjust her weight, suddenly much greater.
And Harry laughed in answer to his mother’s laughter, and landed beside her with a smile, shining in the light of all curses broken.
Lily placed her hand on her son’s shoulder, and if her eyes were not as intense as his they were brighter than they had been for almost eight years. “Severus Snape,” she said, her voice rolling like a thunderstorm, “you poisoned me with your hatred and your bitterness, and I know now that you poisoned my husband. I cast this curse upon you: that you remain in the form of a slug until you release your hatred and bitterness. Live, until then, and learn what forgiveness means.”
Snape brandished his wand, but it was too late, and the curse seized him like thunder dancing through boulders. In the form of a slug, he crept away in search of a garden, and it may be there is a garden with an immortal slug living in it yet, for mountains may wear down easier than the desire for revenge hatefully nurtured.
The Weasleys, human again, rode wolves and danced around fires and read from books and used their hands and played games and flew through the air. Harry and his mother went to put flowers on his father’s grave. Then Harry called cleansing winds and banished every trace of Snape from the cottage, and Lily threw away all the goblets that had held the tainted drinks Snape had enslaved her with.
Harry and Lily dwelt in great happiness, and it may be, as well, that one day a dashing prince or a beautiful lady or both together came through the forest and fell in love with that blazing young man and asked for his hand in marriage. And it may be that he lived in happiness for all of his days.
But that time, so long ago, so far, so fair, is limited in what eyes may glimpse of it; and we must close our eyes now, and hope to dream it again.
The End.
