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Made of Common Clay	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 10987 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Nineteen—Where The Oldest Is As The Young
“I’ve certainly never heard of it. But from what you said about it, and the way that the mirror seems to react differently to different people, I think it probably is a warped version of the Mirror of Erised.”
Harry leans back on Ron and Hermione’s couch and looks up at the roses that drape across their ceiling. The pattern was just random lines a little while ago, but Hermione got bored with that. “But why would it be? It can’t be showing our greatest fear. It showed Shafiq something she wants.”
“I know. But what if it shows expectations instead? She really believes the pure-bloods will win the war. You know better than that. You think a war between wizards would result in ruins and destruction.”
“Now that’s a hypothesis.”
Hermione blushes at the way Harry’s looking at her. “You know that I’m not a genius. You and Ron keep acting like that, and it builds me up to heights that aren’t good for me.”
“I don’t know why,” Harry says, and he bats his eyelashes at her. “You were the genius who saved our arses during the war.”
“And now we have a different kind of war, and we can’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s exactly like the last one,” Hermione replies, shaking off his admiration with an ease that Harry envies. He struggles to contain his own rage and bitterness. He would like to pretend that he can ignore someone looking at him and expecting him to solve all their problems. “No, Harry, listen. You’re sort of acting the way you did in the last war.”
“I have actual plans this time!”
“I know, but you’re thinking that your enemy is a monolith. You’re focusing on Shafiq and her Kingmakers, and before that it was Parkinson. The Death Eaters got in your way during the first war, and now the other members of the Sun Chamber and probably people you don’t even think about are going to hinder you.”
“Including Ginny.”
Hermione gasps. “She’s figured it all out?”
“Oh, I doubt it. She doesn’t know about the—fires we’re going to set, for instance. But she called me over to her house to tell me that she’s set against me and she’s going to oppose me and my actions.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her that she’d never dated Muggleborns or been close to any of them except you, so she didn’t understand.”
“She dated Dean Thomas!”
“Who isn’t Muggleborn.”
“Well, but he didn’t know that at the time.” Harry has to nod. And Dean didn’t exactly take the revelation of his wizarding father well, given that he walked away from Dean’s mum. “Harry, that was unfair. You know that she does care about this. About people like me. Just like Rolf does. But both of them disapprove of our methods, and they’re allowed to disapprove. We have to allow them the freedom of their consciences, or we’re as bad as the Ministry we’re fighting to take down.”
“Rolf knows more than she does and still hasn’t decided to act against us. If she gets in the way, then I’m going to—”
“Harry, don’t kill her. You know that Ron would never really forgive you, and you don’t need to. She can be convinced to look elsewhere or start concentrating on something else so easily. Why do you insist on this?”
“I never planned to kill her. I think I might have to Obliviate her if she does get close to the truth, though. If she starts digging…”
Hermione sighs and walks across the room to put her arms around Harry. “Leave Ginny to me, why don’t you? I’ll be the voice of reason and explain to her why things like Muggleborn rights matter to us so much, and why we aren’t going to get them if we just wait around for the current Ministry to enact them. Maybe we can persuade her back to our side.”
Harry only snorts. He thinks that Ginny is the one who’s seeing everything as a monolith. He humiliated Simon in public, therefore he’s evil. And she’s far too dedicated to overlooking treatment of Muggleborns, because otherwise she would have to do something about it.
Ginny still has a conscience, but she’s got comfortable in the last few years, much like most of the Weasleys except Ron and George. They don’t want things to change because now they have what they want. Poor people are more likely to be revolutionaries, most of the time.
And Harry, because he doesn’t see any way to deal with this pile of shit except to burn it down.
“Just let me handle her. Go home and rest.”
Harry stands up and returns Hermione’s hug, then leaves her to work with the information he brought her on the Muggleborn Mirror. He knows Hermione worries. She thinks things might spiral out of control or the Elder Wand won’t perform the way they want it to. But she would never, ever turn on him and Ron the way Ginny is threatening to. She would have been honest about feeling like she couldn’t join them from the beginning.
Harry doesn’t understand why most wizards lack that honesty. Just say what you think, do what you want to do, and stop pretending that there’s some righteous purity of blood that will excuse the bigoted things.
It seems simple to him.
*
Harry wakes slowly, disoriented and confused. It feels as though someone has inserted a headache behind his eyes, or his scar, in a way he hasn’t felt since the war. For a moment, he wonders if he’s having one of his nightmares where Voldemort never died.
But then someone in the robes of the Sun Chamber steps in front of him, and he’s wide awake.
“I thought you’d be as careless as your wards implied, and I was right.” Draco Malfoy has his nose in the air. His face is flushed bright, and he has his father’s robes draped around his shoulders. “No protections in the wards against countercharms created by blood sacrifice. Sloppy, Potter, very sloppy.”
“Did your father die?” Harry asks in interest. The disorientation is wearing off now, and slight movements let him know that he’s bound by ropes.
“Are you threatening my father?” Draco’s voice is lower and stronger than Harry thought it could be, and he has his wand clasped in his hand. It looks as though he’s going to duel Harry. Lying there bound in ropes isn’t the ideal position for it, Harry has to admit.
“No. It’s just that you’re wearing his Sun Chamber robes, and I thought you couldn’t do that until he was dead.”
Draco sneers and conjures a knife with a turn of his wrist. It looks practiced. Harry is going to remember that. “That shows how much you know about true noble custom, Potter. He yielded his place as proxy to me.”
He suddenly lunges forwards and drives the knife into Harry’s shoulder. Harry yelps. He’s of the mindset that you should show your enemies the pain they’re looking for. It’s much more likely to make them careless and smug and over-confident.
Draco laughs. “Not as tough as you like to think you are, are you?”
“It’s impossible to be as tough as I like to think I am.”
Draco twitches and stares at him, and Harry takes the chance to look around himself once. Yes, he’s still in his bedroom, and there’s a haze over the windows. His wards are broken; he can feel the ringing in the back of his head. And his wand is nowhere in sight, and there’s a green fire burning on the floor, on the very carpet, that’s he read about but never seen.
“You can’t control it, can you? Any more than Crabbe could control that Fiendfyre.”
“You want to be careful when speaking of the dead, Potter.” Draco draws his lips back from his teeth. He was more genuinely threatening before, when he wasn’t trying all that hard. “You want to be very careful.”
Harry blinks at him. “All right,” he says, and nothing else. He knows that he’s not going to get sense out of Draco. He keeps an eye on the green fire, although he obligingly yelps when Draco drives the knife into his leg. The wounds are minor. Draco wants to see blood, but he also keeps flinching slightly before the blow lands, which defeats the purpose. Harry reckons that Voldemort and some of the other members of the Sun Chamber would have skinned him properly before now.
“Pay attention, Potter.”
Harry is. He’s paying attention to that fire, which is turning a darker green and starting to burn more than the carpet. It’s climbing up the curtains, for example, and he can hear the hissing of a dozen snakes inside the flames.
“What kind of blood sacrifice did you use?” he asks, as Draco draws back the knife for another strike.
Draco stares at him, then sneers. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Yes, I would. Then I could know whether the fire is going to explode out of control any time soon.”
“Of course it won’t, Potter. And I used a Muggle. My father prepared her and killed her for me.”
Harry sighs. “Why do I know more about the Dark Arts then you do, Malfoy? You should realize that the person who casts this spell is the one who has to control the fire. And an essential part of the casting is the blood sacrifice. That means your father should really be the one who’s here controlling the flames, and you—”
He flinches back in the ropes a little as Draco aims the knife for his eyes. The cut doesn’t blind him, but it is a shallow one on his forehead that makes the blood start rolling down into his line of vision. Harry clenches his hands in the bedclothes. They’re all going to go up in flames in a minute, unless he manages to do something drastic that Draco probably won’t allow him to do anyway.
“You can’t—” he began.
Draco leans over and spits in his face. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do, Potter. Son of a Mudblood, you should never have been allowed to inherit a double Lordship anyway! When I think what I could have done with that power—”
Harry’s eyes are locked on the green fire as it does begin to spit and hiss out of control. He extends a hand into the air and closes his fingers around all the magic he can feel with his unnaturally enhanced senses, and then yanks down as hard as he can.
Draco bows forwards on the bed, and drops the knife. The fire shoots towards him. Harry rolls out of the way as much as he can but thrusts an arm into the way. He hisses at the nearly unbearable pain as the flames scorch him.
But they also eat through the rope around his wrist. Harry promptly snatches the knife and slashes through the one that binds him on the other side. Then he lunges over to press the blade against Draco’s throat.
Draco goes silent with a gasp, his eyes darting around. Harry nods in recognition, panting. The fire still hovers above him, for the moment borne on the currents of other magic in the room, like the conjuring of the knife and the tattered remains of Harry’s wards.
“Go outside,” Harry says.
Draco doesn’t try to hesitate, but turns and runs with his Sun Chamber robes flaring behind him. Harry, meanwhile, stands up. The green fire descends towards him. It’s a potent weapon. Being too close to it for too long will confuse Harry, the way he felt confused when he woke up, which makes him even less likely to escape from it.
He keeps an eye on it as he cuts his legs free with the knife. The fire is slowly turning a darker green again, reflecting its inherently unstable nature. The one who made the sacrifice to create it should be the one to control it.
But Harry has done impossible things in his time, and he intends to do another one of them now.
“Look here!” he calls, and flings some random wandless magic into the air, making the room around him quake. The fire faces him at once, and reaches out choking green tendrils. Harry doubles and rolls, and the tendrils flow after him, along with the main body of the fire.
Harry runs through his house towards the front door, the same path that Draco took. The tingle of broken wards brushes against him as he bursts into the open. He dives past them, twisting, and the fire follows. For a moment, it pauses to swallow the magic of the wards eagerly.
Both Lucius and Draco are standing in front of him. Harry doesn’t spare them a glance. He turns and feeds more wandless magic to the fire, in a leading trail that coils around the remains of the wards. The fire darts into them. Harry brings his hands down, ignoring the way that his blood drips on the ground from the knife-cuts that Draco inflicted on him and Lucius is drawing his wand.
The fire flares all along the wards—and is caught inside them.
Harry flings his hand over his face as the wards ignite and burn like shredded paper in oil, so bright that it’s hard to catch his breath or see past them. But he also feels the pressure of magic off to the side, Dark magic, meaning Lucius has fired some sort of curse. Harry dives to one knee and throws the knife.
It hits; he hears a groan. But there’s more than just Lucius and Draco there, and Harry spins to his feet and leaps and dodges. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but the point is, neither do they.
One of them gets lucky, though, and hits him with a Stunner.
It’s not a very high-powered one. Harry falls to the ground and lies there quietly, his mouth open. Hands come over and flip him upside-down over a shoulder. Someone grunts and casts a Lightening Charm. Harry curls his lip since he’s virtually sure that his face is out of sight. Should have done that before you lifted someone who’s almost pure muscle, you fucker.
“What now, my Lord?”
“The point was to panic his friends and supporters.” Lucius’s voice is recognizable, if ragged. “The broken wards and the signs of the fire and the blood ought to do that. Draco.” There’s a slight struggle and the sound of tearing cloth. Harry doesn’t dare open his eyes, but he thinks that Lucius just took his Sun Chamber robes back from his son.
“Are we going to take him to the Manor?”
“Oh, I think so. He escaped the dungeons once. He ought to have another tour of them, don’t you think?”
Harry keeps his face limp and relaxed as he feels them Apparate. When they land outside strong wards, he estimates that he’s got one chance, and he snaps his hand down to his side and calls for his wand as strongly as he can with wandless magic.
Someone’s pocket rips, someone else swears, and Harry briefly feels the holly wood in his hand. Then someone cuts his wrist so deeply that he loses his hold. He opens his eyes to see Lucius holding the wand and staring at him with hatred so deep and complex that Harry’s almost flattered.
“Why do you hate me so much?” he asks.
“Someone whose mother was a Mudblood and who brought down the Lord I dedicated my life to should not have a double Lordship.”
Harry sighs. The first reason just isn’t interesting anymore. But the second one is at least a little better. “You don’t care all that he was an insane half-blood with a Muggle father? Not even a Muggleborn parent like I had?”
“I dedicated my life to him.”
“Oh, this is about your wounded pride. You should have said.”
Lucius’s fist cracks along his jaw. Harry turns his head with the blow, but groans convincingly. Draco comes up and stares down at him, but flinches when Harry sees some blood drip off the corner of his cheek.
Draco still doesn’t like killing, doesn’t like blood. Harry intends to use that. It may be his best chance of escaping.
“You will pay attention to me when I’m talking to you.”
And Harry was ignoring Lucius’s words altogether. That could be dangerous. He blinks and tries to focus, but from the way his head is spinning, he thinks he may have a concussion. He still manages to say, “Yes, Your Lordship.”
The title is mocking enough that Lucius hits him with a much harder Stunner, and the world goes away for a little while.
*
Kain: Harry did consider just taking out the people in power (he didn't know about the Sun Chamber then) a long time ago. But then he saw how complacent the wizarding public is, and how they just expect him or someone else to sovle their every problem, and he thinks that woudl end up with the corrupt people in charge in a little while. They'd just be different corrupt people.
Ron is unhappy about Ginny being their enemy (both she and Hermione will have told him by now). Harry wouldn't kill her unless it was necessary in self-defense, but he might well Obliviate her.
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Made of Common Clay