lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of Leopard’s Choice. The next in the series will be tentatively titled Stormbringer’s Choice.

Chapter Sixty—Burning the Future

Hermione can’t stop smiling. She’s having her first tour of the flats that her parents and Bill Weasley have prepared for Muggleborns and half-bloods who might need a place to hide, and it’s just—tremendous.

Most of the structure is still Muggle, of course, the better to blend in with the buildings around it. But the walls hum with wards, and the lifts move faster than normal and have an admittedly experimental ward that will detect ill intentions and slam the doors shut.

“The same wards are on the doors to the stairs,” Bill admits when Hermione asks him. “It won’t stop an invading Death Eater force, not precisely, but it will slow them down.”

“And you invented the wards with the goblins?”

Bill nods.

“Do you think they’d want to be more involved in our attempts to stop Voldemort? I mean, I know that Harry talked about reaching out to them…”

Bill hesitates, then shakes his head with noticeable reluctance. “There’s a faction pushing for them to become more involved, but they’re not strong enough to catch the elders’ attention yet. And what urgency there was got pushed back by the fact that Voldemort lost his body. They’re very aware that that gives them time to delay and debate.”

Hermione bites her tongue on the desire to say that it doesn’t give them much time, and they still need to be prepared. Harry did tell them about the ritual, and—well, Hermione thinks it was insanely dangerous, and she’s insanely proud of him, but it’s also not the kind of thing that she can share casually with someone who isn’t part of their group.

Bill is watching her keenly. “You have information you think the goblins should know?”

“Yes. But I wouldn’t be able to explain how I got it.”

“Would Harry be willing to explain?”

“I could write to him and ask him. I don’t want to say anything without him actually authorizing me to, though.”

“Authorizing?” Mum speaks up for the first time since they watched the wards slam the lift doors shut when Bill marched towards them with a scowl on his face and apparent thoughts in his head about hurting people. “That sounds odd, Hermione.”

Hermione sighs and turns to her parents. She hasn’t deliberately tried to keep what’s happening in the magical world from them—they know the basics of Voldemort trying to return and being disembodied and possessing people—but she hasn’t explained everything, either. Especially the way that people defer to Harry.

The way he came out of the ritual with his eyes shining and an easy, loose confidence to the way that he carries himself told Hermione he’s done politely listening to other people disparaging him.

“Well—Harry’s a leader among the kids our age, you know,” she begins, aware that Bill is also listening closely.

“Yes, I understand that. But you’re all working together for the war effort, right?”

“Yes, but…”

Hermione dithers for a moment, and can sense her parents growing more concerned. It isn’t really like her. But she wants to choose the right words to explain what’s happening. The truth, but spoken in the right way.

That’s not something I would have done once, either.

But she can’t find it in herself to regret that she’s thinking more like a responsible political actor and less like a reckless Gryffindor, so she smiles politely and says, “This is the way it is. A lot more people than just students look to Harry as a leader. Because he’s the Boy-Who-Lived, and because he’s survived so many attacks by Voldemort. They don’t know everything he’s doing, like helping with this project, but they would only think about him more as a leader if they did. And he saved the Minister’s life, so the Ministry thinks about him pretty positively at the moment.”

“And you?”

Mum’s eyes are bright and sharp. Hermione smiles at her and doesn’t back down. “I think of him as a leader, too,” she agrees. “He’s the only one who has the combination of fame and determination and power we need to win this war. And keep people safe in the meantime.” She looks around at the lobby they’re standing in.

“But?”

“But, what?”

“But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? Why would he have to give his authorization to something like this?”

Hermione’s parents are clever, but so is she. She shakes her head. “I wouldn’t have to get it for sharing information about the flats, or casting certain spells on them. I would have to get it because there’s personal information that relates to Harry. I won’t just go around telling my friends’ secrets without asking them first.”

“The word authorization implies it’s something else, Hermione.”

“Harry’s sort of a lord.”

“Sort of?” Mum says, at the same time as Dad says, “Lord?” in a deeply disapproving tone.

“He’s a leader,” Hermione says, and shrugs uncomfortably under the looks she’s getting. It wasn’t her idea to talk about this. And even if she’d been more careful about her language, she thinks she would be getting a version of this interrogation. “Of our study group, and the effort to resist Voldemort.”

“But lord sounds feudal.”

“It’s a little different in the magical world,” Bill interjects, before Hermione can start to argue with her parents for real. Hermione shoots him a grateful look. He winks without changing his earnest expression. “Voldemort is the Dark Lord, for example. It’s a title that gives an acknowledgment of leadership potential and magical power. But not rulership, which I gather from some of my history classes is the main difference between Muggle lords and ours.”

“As long as it’s not rulership,” Dad says, although he still looks a little shaken. “And you trust this friend of yours to be a—lord, Hermione?”

Hermione nods at once. She does, but more than that, she thinks Mum and Dad will be more reassured if she doesn’t explain her own hesitations.

Which aren’t even anything to do with Harry, really. It’s much more about the way that some people look to him, and how magical people treat lords, and a lot of other things that—well, they’re really her business.

She doesn’t intend to dump that huge load of anxiety and worry on Harry in the middle of a war.

“Well.” Mum sighs and shakes her head. “It’s not the strangest thing we’re taking into account when it comes to interacting with the magical world.” She turns briskly back to the lift. “What happens if someone under that Imperius Curse of yours comes here? Will the wards still detect their ill intentions?”

And that seems to be it.

Hermione gives Bill a wink of her own, and happily turns back to explaining the interaction between Muggle technology and magic to her parents, which they’re more interested in anyway.

*

“I hope, of course, that you will extend me the same consideration that you extend Black, about being more involved in your plans in the future.”

“Of course.”

Severus narrows his eyes at Harry. The boy’s deep in a book that seems to be about snakes, and marking down little notes on a piece of parchment that seem to be half in code. “Harry, are you listening to me?”

“Yes.” Harry looks up over the top of the book and flashes a quick smile. “You want to be more involved in my plans. You want to be equal to Sirius. Don’t worry, I have no intention of leaving you behind.”

“And yet…”

“You know the special circumstances that affected my decision this time. They won’t be like that again.”

“So you would be willing to talk to me before the ritual about what you’re going to do with something so dangerous?”

“Yes.”

Severus is listening closely, but he can’t find any lies in those statements. And they’re plainly stated enough that it would be hard for Harry to hide lies in them, anyway. As he has seen recently, Harry tends to lie through omissions and redirections and vague statements that he lets others interpret as they like.

“I know you want to keep me safe,” Harry says quietly, and lays aside the book entirely. They’re in the library, and Harry is highlighted behind by the early sun as he leans forwards. “I don’t want to trick you or lie to you. I did what I had to do—what I thought I had to do—because of what was at stake.”

“Mr. Nott.”

“Yes.”

“Would you do the same for any of your friends?”

“Many of them. Not all. There are some like Pansy who are mostly asking me for help for their own gain.” Harry’s mouth twists wryly. “But also, not a lot of them would be linked to me in my dreams or able to transform into Animagi that Voldemort could lure with Animagus rats like that. I don’t expect this particular situation to happen again.”

“This particular situation.”

Harry leans back in his chair, and his mouth quirks up the other way. “Not everything is a trap where I try to hide lies from you, Severus.”

“Only most things?”

Harry rolls his eyes a little. “No. Only most things in the last few months because I had to have them be.” He stands up and walks around his chair. Severus stands a little, unsure of what Harry will do.

But Harry only hugs him, longer and harder than he did when he came through the Floo from Black’s house yesterday. Severus hugs him back, and feels some of the fear in his stomach settle into a gentler pattern.

“Please do not do that to me again,” he whispers to Harry as he clings even tighter. “I understand why you did, but I do not think my heart can survive another incident.”

Harry holds him tighter and doesn’t back away, although Severus is chiding himself for the vulnerability that he does not need to load onto his child a minute later. When Harry does lean back, it’s only to catch Severus’s eye and say, “I can’t imagine a situation like this arising ever again. Father.”

Severus feels as though something has shattered inside him. Or has shattered long ago and been rebuilt. He clings harder, and Harry holds him back, and there is a current of warmth and love flowing between them that Severus knows he has not imagined.

The wounds that came about from the ritual can heal, after all.

*

“Ron, I need you to come down and eat dinner.”

Ron groans a little as he drags his attention away from the book he’s studying. “I promise I will in a bit, Mum.” It’s what he’s said before when he’s been doing some more studying to get some revenge on Voldemort, and it’s always appeased her.

This time, though, Mum looms immovably in the doorway of his room. “No, Ron. You will come down and eat dinner with the rest of the family. I don’t care how interested you are in that book right now.”

Ron clenches his hands on the edges of the book, but then remembers that he could damage it, and uncurls his fingers. He also reminds himself, as he does at least once a day, that his work resulted in Voldemort being called to Harry’s ritual and having to possess someone who’s not exactly loyal to him. “All right, Mum.”

Mum nods and walks down the stairs. Ron smooths the cover of the book and stares at it with longing before he follows her.

Ginny and the twins are at the table, huddling close. The twins originally planned to move into a little flat in Diagon Alley near their new shop after they finished Hogwarts, but with Dad gone…

With Dad gone, everything is different.

Ron sits down and looks at Mum. She ladles out a huge pot of soup, moving slowly. There’s a deep frown on her face that’s different from the sadness that’s always been there since Dad died. Unease prickles up and down Ron’s spine.

Mum finally sits down, facing them, and then blows out a long breath. “Since your father died, the Burrow hasn’t seemed safe enough to me.”

“What tipped you off?” mutters Fred across the table. From the way he winces a second later, George probably hit him hard in the ribs. Ron blinks a little. Good for George.

Mum ignores Fred, although her face tightens still further. “It makes me wonder if we should move into a—a house in Hogsmeade, or a flat in Diagon Alley, or something that will get us closer to the center of magical civilization.”

“No!” Ginny protests at once. “I want to stay here! Luna and everyone I grew up with is in Ottery St. Catchpole!”

“We would do this so that you could continue growing up, Ginny dear,” Mum says with a tight voice. “I only—”

“Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade are more likely to be targets of Death Eater attacks, honestly,” Ron says. “Since they’re more densely populated. Is there some reason that we can’t stay here and get wards put up?”

“They would cost too much.”

Mum speaks so quietly that Ron almost can’t hear her, but Fred and George immediately speak up. “Mum, that’s nothing! We have enough money—”

“Not for the quality of expensive wards that I would need to feel safe living here!” Mum yells, and then a second later immediately turns bright pink. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry, my dears.”

“Harry does, though.”

Everyone at the table turns to look at Ron. Ron lifts his eyebrows. “What?” he asks. “It’s true. Harry could pay a wardmaster for us. Or he might already know one who would do this kind of thing as a favor to him.” He no longer thinks he knows everything about his best friend, but Harry has brought Ron along as far as he can, so that’s fine.

“We couldn’t ask for charity, Ron.”

Mum’s voice is so firm that Ron would have dropped the argument most of the time. But that was before Dad died. “Yes, we can,” Ron says. “And anyway, it’s not charity. Not when Harry’s going to be a Lord now.”

“What?”

Ron blinks at the way her voice sounds. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “I thought you knew that? I thought I wrote to you about that?”

“I would have remembered you announcing that Harry Potter was going to be a Dark Lord,” Mum whispers, her voice trembling. Her hand grips the spoon and then puts it down. “And the others would have, too!”

Ron slowly shakes his head. “Not a Dark Lord, Mum. Just a Lord.”

“There’s no difference!”

“There might be,” Ginny says, an unexpected source of support. “I was doing some extra History reading that Luna recommended, and there were Lords once, who swore vassal oaths with people who wanted to follow them. You-Know-Who didn’t do it, because he would have had to be loyal in return. But they were real.”

“That is also a form of charity.”

But Mum’s voice is uncertain, probably just because the idea is so new, and Ron wastes no time pouncing. “No, it’s not,” he says. “You know that Harry would be thrilled to do this for us, and we don’t need to worry that it would put him out. I’m sure that he wants to do it, Mum.”

“The Burrow used to be his home, too,” whispers Ginny. “He came here for the summer. Remember? He would want to protect it.”

Ron hesitates as he watches Mum wavering. There’s something else he could say that would probably make sure they stayed here and she accepted Harry’s help for the wards, but he would be a bastard if he said it.

He watches Mum’s face firming, sees the decision not to ask Harry in her eyes, and thinks, Fuck it.

“You know how much time and magic Dad put into this place,” he says, his voice cracking down the middle, which he didn’t plan but which is a good thing, as far as convincing Mum goes. “You know that he would hate to see us abandon it.”

Mum puts her hand over her face. Her shoulders shake. Fred and George shoot Ron disapproving looks, but they don’t actually speak up and try to convince Mum that she shouldn’t accept Harry paying for the wardmaster.

“All right,” Mum whispers at last. “Please. I’ll—you can ask him, Ron. But you’re not planning to offer him a vassal oath, are you?”

Ron holds her gaze. He doesn’t want to lie. And anyway, she knows he’s changed. The hours he spends with his books would reveal that to her if nothing else did. “If he asks me to. I don’t know how soon he would. He said something about how he needed some sort of training as a Lord before he did.”

“Ron.”

“I don’t know exactly what I’m planning at the moment,” Ron says as carefully as he can. “I don’t know if he would even accept vassal oaths right now. But I’ll offer him one when he decides that he can take it.”

Mum’s face crumples, and she stares at her soup for a long moment. Then she takes a deep breath and looks up at him with courage that Ron knows the cost of.

“All right,” she whispers. “Please ask him.”

*

Theo steps into the house that haunted him all his childhood and stares around. The rooms are sparkling under Preservation Charms that Lyassa must have had his father cast. The books are in their places. The potions lab’s door is unlocked, and welcomes him with a soft click when he walks in.

When he calls, the house-elves appear.

“I order you to let no one enter the house that I have not approved,” he says. “That includes my father.” The snake wards on the house probably won’t let Father in anyway, probably would have parted only for a Parselmouth like Theo, but it doesn’t matter; he will enforce the command. “You are not to listen to his call, not to go to him, not to aid him in any way.”

“Master Theo…”

One of the elves, Allie, is wringing her ears. “He is still our master,” she whispers when Theo looks at her.

Theo shakes his head. It’s important that he makes them understand this, so he won’t have to fight against treachery within his own house. “He is possessed by the Dark Lord Voldemort.” That makes more than one elf jump and shriek. “He is not truly himself anymore, not Tarquinius Nott. My father is, in all essence, dead.”

It takes a little longer to convince them, but at last, he does. Allie is weeping soft tears of happiness. Theo knows that while the elves obeyed his father, and sometimes appeared to take joy in what they were ordered to do to Theo, most of them didn’t.

He lounges back in a chair in the library once he’s dismissed them, and smiles a little.

He is glad that he can rule here. He would disdain most of the Nott legacy in comparison to what he has gained from Harry. But it has something of worth to it, and he will use that in service of his lord.

Now, he has magical beasts to inspect.

*

Minerva raises an eyebrow as Mr. and Mrs. Flint sit down in the chairs in front of her desk. She had to admit, she didn’t think Marcus Flint’s parents would actually come to meet her.

But they are here. Although perhaps only because Marcus is not.

“Is it true?” Mr. Flint, whose first name is Herbert if Minerva remembers correctly, blurts, leaning forwards. “The Dark Lord is a half-blood?”

“He is.”

Herbert rocks back. Minerva wonders idly if he expected her to deny it. Or maybe he just thought that she would be lying, and he would be able to tell. Lots of people seem to think they should be able to spot lies just by looking at people’s faces.

“On your word alone?” Alicia, Mrs. Flint, asks, folding her arms. “All know him as the descendant of Slytherin, with the purest of blood—”

“May I ask on what evidence you base that conclusion, Mrs. Flint?”

Alicia stares at Minerva, but gives a sniff when she doesn’t back down. She still has the sour face and the dark hair that Minerva remembers from when she was a student here, although with more grey in the hair now. “Because he can speak Parseltongue, of course. Everyone in Slytherin House knew it.”

“So you base your opinion on the testimony of others who just happen to know,” Minerva says, and watches as Alicia’s face twists further. It would have been unworthy to bait the woman this way when she was a Slytherin student, but Minerva has to admit a bit of enjoyment now. “And as it happens, young Harry Potter is also a Parselmouth.”

“Lies!”

“If you simply accuse me of lying, we might as well cease having this conversation.”

Herbert jumps in again. “We are willing to consider what evidence you have,” he says stiffly. He looks shaken, probably by the reference to Harry being a Parselmouth. Did he not know? “I assume you have some documents?”

Minerva smiles and reaches down to the side of her desk. “In fact,” she says softly, “I have plenty.”

Their faces are still locked in scowls, but Minerva sees a chance of changing their minds. And a chance is all she needs.

It is less than she has had with some students she’s taught.

*

“But is he going to turn to us for help?”

“I don’t know, Bilius.”

Bilius Weasley’s face in the fire slowly shakes back and forth. “I expected better from him than this, Kingsley. I know that the boy has gone in some unexpected directions since Albus first tried to explain his purpose to him, but my nephew Ron’s his best friend. And he’d still refuse help from the Order?”

Kingsley sighs and wishes he could get up from kneeling in front of the Floo and have a Firewhisky. But he can’t, not until his conversation with Bilius is done. He thinks, instead, of how to distill the complicated dynamic he witnessed between Harry Potter and his circle in school down into a few sentences.

“I think that Ron has changed, too, as a result of his father’s loss,” Kingsley says at last. “But the war against You-Know-Who has gone in a whole different direction from what we first suspected when he started rising again. Potter seems to be focusing on training the students and fighting You-Know-Who when he appears instead of taking the battle to him.”

“What about that ritual you told me about?”

“The ritual I have no details about?”

It’s hard to embarrass Bilius. “Yeah. That.”

“I don’t know. Only that Potter performed a powerful ritual the day before the OWL exams began, and he didn’t seem too concerned about those exams. You know Elphias suggested that maybe he was increasing his intelligence to pass them?”

“Yeah, he told me that theory.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Why not? It would make sense that he would want to do well, those exams determine the course of a young wizard’s life—”

“But do they, when that wizard’s name is Harry Potter?”

Bilius frowns at him. “What do you mean?”

“Only that Potter seems to have more in mind than just taking his OWL exams and getting the job he wants in a few years. He seems to—I don’t know, be making political moves already. You know he saved the Minister’s life?”

“Yeah, and that gave him Fudge’s goodwill, but it’s not the same as fighting You-Know-Who!”

“No, but—” Kingsley hesitates again. It’s so hard to say the right things he wants to say without sounding alarmist. And he knows that Bilius will take alarm more easily than most members of the Order. He might not have been that close to his brother Arthur, but he still changed after Arthur died. “There’s a pattern here,” Kingsley says, instead of completely what he’s thinking. “I just can’t see it.”

“But you don’t think it has anything to do with the OWL exams.”

“No. I heard two of his Slytherin friends joking with each other that Potter would just sit the exams again if he didn’t do well, and that he’d probably have to.”

Bilius frowns harder. Then he gives a sigh and a disgusted wave of his hand. “I suppose we won’t know until he actually does something. And so we won’t have to activate the Order just yet.”

“No,” Kingsley agrees, and stands with a sigh when the Floo connection cuts out. Bilius never says goodbye. He goes over to get his Firewhisky and sip it while staring out the window of his house at the fields of waving white roses that an ancestor established. Usually, the sight soothes him, but not right now.

He doesn’t know what Potter’s doing. He doesn’t know what Potter was really about with the ritual. But Minerva’s words keep ringing in his mind, and the fact that Potter seemed to have changed at the end of the year, but he didn’t radiate Dark magic like Kingsley would have suspected if he’d become involved with those spells.

And he accepted the scroll with the Order members’ names who might be moved to help.

Kingsley shakes his head. He doesn’t think he can do anything but wait, and watch, and hope to participate in the struggle against You-Know-Who as it happens.

*

Yes. Here. There will be help here.

Tarquinius bites back the temptation to clash with his lord. It isn’t at all an easy thing, sharing minds and bodies. For one thing, the Dark Lord can see every disloyal thought Tarquinius has ever had, and he likes to peel through them and comment on them.

I can also hear that.

Tarquinius tries to close his mind to everything but his immediate task: breaking through the wards on the little casket in front of him. It was under the floor of a delipidated shack that looked Muggle, and he would have thought the contents wouldn’t be that well-protected, but it seems they are.

The wards shatter at last. The casket lid flips back, and Tarquinius gasps at the wave of compulsion he feels coming from the heavy golden ring lying inside. He doesn’t even resist the temptation that flashes through him to reach down and pick it up.

The cold magic that runs through him like a river in response makes him cry aloud, and the darkness in his head is filled with stars for a second. When he sits up, the ring is on his hand, and he knows that he is—

Changed.

There is knowledge of Dark magic moving through him that he has never had before. And knowledge of a ritual, in particular, that should give the Dark Lord his body back, one harder and stronger than either of the ones Potter destroyed. And knowledge that the darkness working up his arm from his hand is nothing to worry about.

The Dark Lord laughs, an odd sound, one that seems to have twin echoes, and Tarquinius laughs with him, to make it triple.

*

He hovers, singing, in midair.

It took a long time to make this decision. Or what a human would think of as a long time. But it is not something that troubles his own kind. Centuries could have passed before he would be truly disturbed by the length of time his thoughts were taking.

But he is constrained to act on a human timescale. And that meant he had a little more than a year to make his decision.

It is made.

Fawkes stoops through the air and vanishes in a flash of flame, reappearing in front of a burned, torpid body. He lowers his head, softly singing still, and begins to shed his healing tears over the burns created by dragonfire, the empty eyesocket, the sacrificed magic.

And as he does, he surrenders his own form, becoming flowing, swirling drops of purest flame. He runs them into the body, and he blends his essence with what remains of the soul who sacrificed his magic, which was not taken up but might still someday be, and sent himself into a magical hibernation in hopes that he might live to see his old enemy defeated.

Fawkes has gazed into the future, and he knows that the blending of human and Horcrux and Dark Lord will create a greater foe than they have faced yet. He knows that Harry Potter and his allies will face one half of that war. They need to face the other half.

For the first time in more than a year, Albus Dumbledore—with the soul of a phoenix, a phoenix’s magic, and a phoenix’s perspective burning inside him—starts and opens his eyes.

And he understands, now. There is nothing to be gained by meddling with humans and controlling them. There is another battle that is theirs to fight.

He transforms into his other shape and vanishes in a flash of fire to the place where he can best fight it.

The End.