lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Fifty-One—Curses of Various Kinds

“Harry.”

Harry starts and turns around. He didn’t expect Steel to materialize behind him, since they usually meet just in the one classroom. But now that he thinks about it, why shouldn’t Steel appear anywhere they want to?

“Yes, Steel?” he asks quietly, when he sees that his mentor doesn’t intend on turning back into smoke and fleeing.

(Harry still wants to know how they do that).

“I will not stay long. I know that you have to get to Defense.” Steel prowls forwards, their face grave and their claws still instead of tapping against each other, which makes Harry more uneasy than the rest of it. “But I wanted to ask you to carry a warning to Aradia. She has been my ally for a long time, and I would hate to see her trapped or uprooted.”

Harry nods fervently. “What’s the warning?”

“She is preparing a spell-trap for your tormentors based on the trap that someone else already established. However, she needs to consider what the consequences will be of casting that magic on someone already affected by it.”

“You think they could—what? Bounce the spell?”

“What does that mean?” Artemis insists, sticking her head out of his pocket.

“It is not exactly that.” Steel glances over their shoulder, movements more inhuman than Harry has seen them make in a while. They look like a large, glittering mantis. “But the establishment of this spell depends on very precise patterns, like weaving a ward, and it could cause ripples in the patterns that Aradia is trying to create.”

Harry doesn’t think he really understands that, but he doesn’t need to, to pass on the warning. He nods. “I’ll make sure that Aradia gets it.”

“Thank you.”

“Can you come back and we can have a lesson soon?”

Steel smiles at him. “Soon. Sooner if you pass on that warning. I will only want to return when your foster mother’s trap is sprung and I know it will not affect the spells that hide me from Dumbledore.”

Harry sighs. “Okay.”

“You will learn enough to keep you busy during that time,” Steels says with such confidence that Harry eyes them with a little misgiving. “I am going to give you a book that I want you to study in detail and learn from, since I cannot be here for you.” They produce a thick book from inside their cloak with what Harry knows better than to call a conjuring trick.

Harry does take it eagerly, since it might be the only way he can learn how to command his special magic for months. The Making of Souls, it says in silver-blue letters on the front, beneath a crystalline design. There seems to have been an author’s name under the title at one time, but it’s nothing more than worn cover now.

“What is this?” he asks.

“A book I think will help you.”

Harry rolls his eyes a little as he looks up at Steel. “You already said that.”

“And I meant it.” Steel’s claws flex and tap together, and at least they’re smiling at Harry now, without looking as harried as they did a few minutes ago. “But the book is different for each person who opens it. You will have to tell me what you find in there.”

“Can you tell me the general subject?”

Steel nods to the book’s title.

Harry opens his mouth to argue, and Steel turns their head, nostrils working like a hound’s. Artemis flickers her tongue at the same time, but she doesn’t smell what Steel does, Harry knows, because she would tell him about it if she did.

“I must go,” Steel murmurs, and turns into smoke and dust before Harry can protest that he wants to learn how to do that.

He can, though, say, “Safe journey,” and he watches Steel briefly brush a tendril of dark smoke against his shoulder before they fade into nothingness.

Then Harry looks at his watch, and swears, and really has to run to make it to Defense, after all.

*

Remus feels a nudge against his ankle from Sirius’s canine head when he stands up to dismiss the class, and sighs. Yes, he knows it will have to be today that they confront Harry about his use of Dark Arts, not because it’s so urgent but because Sirius can’t wait any longer.

“Mr. Potter, please stay after.”

Mr. Goldstein and Miss Patil promptly bristle, turning back in Remus’s direction as if they think that he’s going to try and harm Harry. Remus shakes his head. They have no reason to think that except the curse on the Defense post, since neither of them knows he’s a werewolf, but it’s still a bit hurtful.

“Mr. Goldstein, Miss Patil, I really do need to talk to Mr. Potter alone.”

“Why?” Goldstein asks bluntly.

“Sir,” Patil adds a second later, as if realizing she might get better results from Remus with politeness.

However, Remus can see right through the manipulation, even if it is Ravenclaw rather than Gryffindor or Slytherin. He gives the two students a tight smile. “That will be Mr. Potter’s business to tell you later. Or not, as he pleases.”

He turns back to Harry as the two students leave the classroom with many backwards glances. Harry stands in front of the desk, very still, his hands folded in front of him and his eyes resting on Remus. He looks ready to move at any instant.

Remus sighs. “I’m not going to hurt you, Mr. Potter.”

“That’s not what your record suggests.”

Remus winces. Harry can’t outright tell anyone that Remus is a werewolf, thanks to the geas around the school, but he can hint at it. “I promise that I’m not going to hurt you, Harry. But there is someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Harry takes a step back, and a strange white shimmer gathers around his hands. Remus clears his throat hastily as Sirius crawls out of his hiding place.

If Harry was about to use Dark Arts, Remus doesn’t want to find out.

He didn’t Transfigure Sirius today, just used Disillusionment Charms during the class, because they don’t want anyone to find out that “Silver” the wolfhound and Padfoot are one and the same. But Sirius transforms quickly back into a human, and faces Harry. Harry turns to look at him with eyes as remote as though he’s on the moon.

Maybe confronting him like this wasn’t the best idea—

“How could you use Dark Arts, Harry?” Sirius bursts out. “How could you experiment on an innocent animal?”

Harry blinks. “What are you talking about?”

“That dog!” Sirius walks a step closer to Harry, and Harry’s eyes go even more remote, until they look like the inside of a glacier. Remus wants to warn Sirius not to touch Harry, but luckily, Sirius stops well short of their godson, just waving his arms around. “I smelled it with Hagrid and it smelled foul!”

“I didn’t use any magic on the dog,” Harry says slowly.

Remus blinks. It’s a myth that werewolves can actually smell lies, but he can usually hear someone’s heartbeat pick up and smell their sweat if it’s close to a full moon, and those are often reliable indicators of deception. He isn’t getting them from Harry now.

“Yes, you did! I smelled it!”

Harry tilts his head a little forwards and gives Sirius a calm look. “You, the mad prison escapee. Who was certainly driven mad by Dementors after he went to Azkaban, even if he wasn’t before that, when he murdered someone in front of little Gryffindor kids in the common room.” His words are soft, cold, precise. “Your perceptions are completely to be trusted, of course.”

Remus swallows. He never thought he would doubt Sirius. He sounded so convincing and passionate when he talked about the dog.

But what if—

“You’re lying! I tried to give you a chance, and this is what you do, Harry? Getting into the Dark Arts? This is how you fucking repay me?”

Harry shifts forwards so that he’s lightly balanced on the balls of his feet. It doesn’t look to Remus like a flight position. It just seems to him that Harry’s getting ready to move in any possible direction, like he expects Sirius to lash out at him.

“I don’t owe you anything.” Harry’s voice is soft and remote again, like his eyes. “You left me and then tried to come back into my life, and rejected me and tried to separate me from Blaise and Aradia. Now you’re insisting that I used Dark Arts without even giving me the chance to defend myself. You’re more hypocritical than I knew you could be. I hate you.”

“What did you use on the dog if not Dark Arts?”

“I didn’t cast any magic on it.”

That also comes across to Remus’s senses as true. But he hesitates. He can’t trust them completely. It’s been long enough now since the full moon that maybe he’s mistaken.

“Bollocks! It smelled like that!”

“You’re insane.”

Sirius gives a pained sound that’s somewhere between a bark and a howl, and reaches for Harry’s arm.

Something dark spreads out from Harry. It doesn’t smell foul like Sirius kept insisting the dog did, but Remus has no idea what it is. It’s like nothingness, something that denies him any vision, any hearing, any senses at all within its reach. It streams towards Sirius and wraps itself around Remus’s best friend.

Then it’s gone, and Harry has fled, the door banging behind him.

Remus crouches down next to Sirius, shivering. His friend lies on the floor motionless for so long that Remus becomes afraid that this is it, that Harry has really killed him.

But then Sirius rolls over and sits slowly up. His eyes are blank and empty, and he blinks several times, putting a hand to his head.

“Remus?”

“I’m here, Sirius.”

“I—I don’t know what I feel.”

Remus tenderly tilts Sirius’s face into the light, looking for signs of a bruise or a concussion. It weighs on his mind that Harry now knows Sirius is here and could tell someone, but he needs to figure out what that magic was and if it harmed his friend first. “Are you having trouble seeing? Trouble smelling?”

“I. No, those are okay.” Sirius wrinkles his nose and takes a deep sniff, so like Padfoot that Remus smiles even in the depths of his concern. “I—something is missing, though.”

“Missing?”

Sirius raises a shaking hand and touches his chest. “It’s like. I still remember you, but. Remus.” He lifts haunted eyes. “I can’t feel what I did for you.”

“Sirius? You’re not making any sense.”

“The senses are what’s left to me,” Sirius whispers, and begin to shake. “He took it, Remus.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“He took the love I felt for you,” Sirius breathes. “The love I felt for James and Lily and him. I’m looking straight at you, but I don’t care—someone could come into this room and kill you, and that would be all right with me.”

Remus stares at him, and feels hollow all the way down to his bones.

*

It takes a while for Harry to stop running. He huddles into the corner of the corridor that he’s found, not sure whether he went up or down, and breathes hard. Artemis is winding around his neck, issuing a steady chorus of hisses that fail to comfort him.

“What can I do?” Artemis asks at last, her head resting comfortingly—or what should be comfortingly—in the hollow of his throat. “There should be something I can do and there is nothing I can do!”

It gets through to Harry, finally, that his snake is upset, and that brings him back to himself in a way that maybe nothing else except an injury to Blaise would have done. He strokes down her back. “It’s nothing you can do. It’s something I did.”

“But you must name the thing!”

“What? Why?”

“Because not knowing is upsetting you as much as the thing itself.”

Harry didn’t consider that. He bites his lip and forces his breathing into a more regular rhythm. Artemis hisses in pleasure and drapes herself harder around his shoulders. She sometimes seems to increase her weight when Harry isn’t looking, but, well. He did make her with her own will and her own ability to adapt, as her biting Lupin with venom proves.

He wishes she had bitten Black. He wants Black dead.

That kind of thing soothes his emotions a bit, and makes him wonder what he did do to Black. He only knows that he stared at his godfather, and hatred welled up in him and reached out, and it did—what it did.

“You have no idea?”

“I should—I knew that I wanted to hurt him with the worst magic I knew. But I didn’t cast a spell.”

Artemis flicks her tail. “Was it the worst magic you knew, or was it the most powerful?”

“Does that matter?”

“Of course it does. You may know curses that you could not cast, but your most powerful magic is your soul-making.”

“I didn’t make a creature in there, did I?” Harry has to admit that he was so out of control that he might not have noticed if he did.

“No. You reached out with the pure magic, the one that is usually contained in materials and the like.” Artemis pauses, but Harry doesn’t follow her. She taps his cheek with her tail and says patiently, “You affected his soul.”

“I—how? I can’t affect souls that are in bodies!”

“Why not? Have you ever tried?”

Harry has to admit that he hasn’t. All his training with Steel has concentrated on bringing little creatures to life and manipulating different materials, and until he learned about his power of perhaps making souls, he just assumed that manipulating the materials was the extent of his magic.

“What did you want to happen when you reached out?” Artemis keeps asking, calmly, persistently. “What were you imagining?”

“I wanted him dead. But that can’t be what happened, because he didn’t die.”

“Your magic does not affect bodies, or not the ones you have not created. But the soul?”

“I—made his soul die? But he was still alive.”

“Perhaps you are not strong enough to remove all of his soul. Perhaps you cracked it. Seized on a piece and removed it. But you still affected him. I could feel the change in his magic before we ran.”

Harry shudders all over. But it’s with wonder, not fear, and Artemis hisses in contentment as she curls around his neck again. Harry spends a moment petting her.

He needs to tell Aradia what Black tried to do. He also needs to tell her and Blaise about what he did in return. And he needs to see if there’s any way he can meet Steel outside the wards, because he has the feeling he needs training in this new ability right away.

But for right now, he luxuriates in the feeling spreading through him, and in Artemis’s soft hisses, as soothing as the purr of a cat.

I can defend myself. Even if I don’t cast curses or defensive spells well, I can protect myself.

*

Albus places a shaking hand over his eyes.

He has done so badly by Sirius. He convinced himself that keeping the man in this locked and warded dungeon room would be a good idea, because Sirius wasn’t ready to be introduced into the general population again, disguised or not. And he approved Remus’s idea to let Sirius out into his own office and quarters, as long as they took proper precautions.

But he didn’t pay attention to Sirius’s feelings, or his attempts to explain what was wrong with Harry. And now the result sits before him.

Sirius breathes, blinks, eats, can answer questions, and has a clear memory of what happened to him. But the essence, the soul, that made him who he is, is gone.

Harry might as well be a Dementor, Albus thinks bitterly. This is the most profound accidental magic he has ever heard of.

“Is there—nothing that can fix him?”

Remus’s voice is broken, too. Albus gives him a miserable glance and sees Remus hunched over with his head in his hands.

“I do not know what it would be,” Albus has to admit. “There is no treatment for the Dementor’s Kiss, and that is—what this most resembles.”

Remus shakes and shakes, his head bowed. Albus waits. He is not the one who spent every waking moment with Sirius for years on the quest to find Tom’s Horcruxes. He has no right to interrupt Remus’s grief.

Remus finally lifts his head, eyes the brightest amber Albus has ever seen them except on the day of a full moon. “I want Harry punished.”

“How?”

Remus flounders for a moment, and the glow leaves his eyes. “I mean—there must be some way—children are punished when they cast spells on other people, especially Dark curses—”

“They are,” Albus agrees quietly. “But this isn’t a curse. You said Harry didn’t lift his wand or say a word. It has to be accidental magic, especially given his performance in class and that he normally doesn’t have the power to cast complex spells. What would you suggest we do, Remus? Punish a cornered child for accidental magic used against a fugitive who is not supposed to be in the school?”

Remus closes his eyes again. Albus just waits. At this point, he thinks that perhaps Harry doesn’t intend to tell anyone about Sirius or he would already have received a Floo call from Aradia Zabini.

But truly, that is cold comfort for now.

“I don’t want him in my class anymore,” Remus whispers at last. “I can’t stand to look at him.”

“And what reason can we give for taking him out of the class?”

“The same one that I think he might already have tried, if he were thinking of us as people instead of obstacles.” Remus opens his eyes and gives Albus a look nearly as blank as Sirius’s. “We’ll say that my connection to his godfather is too close and that he’s wary of me blaming him for Sirius’s condition.”

“That will work,” Albus says softly. “I—you showed me the memory, Remus. Do you really think this is Dark Arts, instead of accidental magic?”

“I know that I can’t stand to look at him,” Remus repeats.

Albus bows his head.

*

Aradia opens her eyes. She is sitting in front of the table that contains the Pensieve of Harry’s memories of the night the Dark Lord confronted the Potters and the Longbottoms. Beside it is her working ward scheme.

She nods slowly. After Harry told her what happened and gave her the warning that Black’s changed state might also affect the spell she is casting on him, she had to meditate to escape her fury.

Things are well. Harry took a measure of revenge on Black for himself. He escaped. She knows how to account for the change in Black in the spell she will weave (in truth, she does not think it likely to affect anything). Steel has arranged to meet with Harry in a spot beyond the wards on the road to Hogsmeade. Blaise has comforted Harry and taken comfort himself from the messages that Aradia sent back to him. Harry will no longer attend Defense classes with Lupin, at the coward’s own suggestion, so that he will not have any chance to come into close contact with Lupin or Black.

It still makes her so angry that it is hard to breathe.

But the anger is banked, and that means it can be useful, like the fire that powers a forge.

Aradia rises to her feet and holds out her hands towards the ward scheme. It brightens and glows with the magic she is feeding into it, and Aradia turns and focuses on the only other object on the table, a small crystal cage containing a mouse.

The mouse is alive, not Transfigured from another object. To figure out how this spell affects living beings, Aradia needed one, and the difference between a truly living animal and one that was originally dust or stone might have thrown off the delicate Arithmantic calculations. Now, she raises her hands high.

She thinks that the best way to weave the spell is to literally weave it, to wrap it like folds of cloth around its targets. That does mean she will need to go to Hogwarts, but she can come up with an excuse for doing that. And once she masters the spell, she will not need to be close to all of her victims at the same time.

Apparently Black is still at the school, probably hidden wherever he was all this time, punished by Harry but not capable of feeling that punishment—

Aradia imagines a gentle winter freezing her fire, and nods. Yes, she must make sure that she can do this, before the moment comes to do it for real.

She clenches her hands in front of her mouth and breathes outwards.

The glittering silver threads blow into the air like dandelion fluff, but still connected to each other and tugging their fellow weaves behind them. They settle around the cage. The mouse pauses and squeaks, but doesn’t seem to know if it should be alarmed or not.

Yes, you should, Aradia thinks, soothed even further by the thought of taking her anger out on something, even if only a mouse, and weaves a hand around an invisible weft to pull the threads tight.

The mouse squeals breathlessly as Aradia presses her will down. It scrabbles at the cage bars and then falls over, motionless. Aradia steps closer and casts a diagnostic spell most often used by Magizoologists that will tell whether an animal is breathing or has a pulse.

Nothing responds. Indeed, Aradia thinks she would get a stronger response from a log.

Smiling, she steps back and moves her fingers through the air, breathing inwards at the same time, severing the spell and the wards.

There is a confused stirring in the air beside the cage, as Aradia severs the reality bubble that came to exist only by her will. And then the threads are gone, and the mouse is alive, cowering this time in a corner of the cage away from what it must instinctively understand is more dangerous than a predator.

Aradia smiles, exultation moving through her veins.

She can create a reality bubble in which her will is supreme. Granted that a mouse is different from humans, but she can will this one to live or die. She will conduct more tests, including killing the mouse and seeing if it lives in the reality bubble, but she thinks she can overcome any minor burdens like the soul-cracking that Harry has inflicted on Black.

In her reality bubble, Black will feel as much as she wants him to feel. She will restore his soul to him and watch the hope flare through Lupin and Dumbledore.

And then she will crush them. Black can both suffer from Harry’s revenge and suffer because he will have emotions as long as Aradia wills him to have them, until the bubble unravels and he spends the rest of his life in pain.

She will do exactly as she wishes, and punish the people who hurt her foster son and tried to hurt her blood son.

She will bring them to ruin.

*

Blaise smooths one hand down Harry’s shoulder and watches as Harry shapes dust and air and glass and cloth in a blur of speed. He doesn’t say anything, even though he and Harry argued about whether his idea was a wise one. Ultimately, it’s Harry’s magic and Harry’s choice.

And if Harry is using this to recover from the shock of what he did, to prove that he can still create as well as destroy, that isn’t the kind of thing Blaise can scold him about.

The materials come together with a bigger clash of magic than Blaise would have thought possible, given how light they all are, and Harry breathes out. Blaise blinks. Only some of the cloth was black, but the little snake who now raises his head in the middle of the classroom floor is all black.

No, wait. There are small silver ripples in his scales.

Harry stoops down and picks him up. He’s moving slowly. Blaise bites his lip and says nothing about the kind of magical exhaustion he thinks creating the snake might have imposed on Harry. If he has invested as much of his being in this snake as he has in Ignis and Artemis…

Well. Blaise will simply support him, as he will through the Defense lessons Harry is now receiving with Professor Snape.

And the discovery that Harry can crack souls, which is wondrous to Blaise but something that clearly seems to both impress and frighten Harry.

“Do you think Theo will like him?” Harry whispers, as he lets the snake play through his fingers. Artemis sticks her head down to brush tongues with the new creature.

“Yes,” Blaise says hoarsely. “I do. Very much.”