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The Art of Self-Fashioning	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 26077 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Twenty-Three—The House of Black

            Black wanted many things, Harry thought, most of them strange and self-contradictory.

            He put Harry in the middle of a magnificent library with huge bookshelves and even bigger piles of dust. Then he shook his head when Harry tried to use his wand—Black said he could, since the old spells on the house would mask the Trace—to clean up the dust. “No, I’m not having you do any chores. I have a notion those Muggles gave you too much already.”

            “It wouldn’t be chores if I could use magic,” Harry said.

            He sounded, he thought, calm and reasonable. Certainly calmer than Yar, who had come flying in two mornings ago with a thunderous clap of wings and eyes gone irredeemably wild. She’d flown around the dining room and shattered two large crystal vases Black owned when she tried to perch on them.

            Black had only laughed, which was something Harry knew no other adult would have done. Well, maybe Professor McGonagall would have come close. But she would be concerned about him at the same time.

            Most of the time, Black acted as if he didn’t care, either, except about things like Harry showing up on time for meals and not being rude to him. Then he would do things like this.

            “But there are house-elves to clean up the dust,” said Black, and snapped his fingers. Harry jumped when the house-elf appeared.

            He wore a thick towel around his waist, and his scowl was so dark that Harry almost thought the elf considered him another thing, like the dust, to sweep up. But instead, he looked intently at Harry’s claws, and his eyes, and sniffed. “Kreacher was not knowing about other creature in house,” he whispered harshly.

            “Yes, yes, Kreacher, I know,” said Black. “Just clean up the library, there’s a good fellow.”

            The elf bowed low. “Kreacher is doing whatever Master Black desires. Master Black is pure and is not lowering himself to consorting with filth—”

            “Yes, and I’m a good boy, my mother’s pride and joy,” Black said, with a sigh. Harry thought it was the first real sigh he’d heard. “Get to work, Kreacher.”

            To Harry, it seemed that the elf only clapped his hands, and the dust blew up and marched out the door. Harry blinked. That would be a neat trick to learn.

            But no one offered to teach him. Kreacher disappeared again once the dust was gone, and Black nodded to the books and then left the library. Harry looked up at the shelves. What did Black think he would research? Ways to get rid of the Lestranges? Harry already knew what he wanted to do to them.

            Then he took down the first one of the books, and found that it was all about the history of the House of Black.

            He pulled down another book. A biography of someone called Phineas Nigellus Black, who Harry assumed had been important.

            Books on manners. Books on culture as defined in the House of Black. Books on raising children, wizarding robe fashion, distinguishing Muggles from wizards, hunting magical creatures.

            All of them had the Black coat of arms on the front. Harry had already seen that in numerous places around the house, carved into walls and furniture and mirror frames, and gleaming in gilt from the backs of old tapestries turned into rags. The part of the tapestry that bore the coat of arms had never disintegrated, for some reason.

            Harry shook his head once he had the contents of three entire shelves spread out on the table. What did Black expect him to do with this? There wouldn’t be anything about Bellatrix Lestrange in these books, because they were too old. And there didn’t seem to be anything about the Lestrange family, either.

            Harry turned and walked towards the door. He would leave the books out. More than likely, Kreacher would take care of them.

            There was a sharp shimmer of light as he neared the door, and something white and fuzzy appeared in front of him. It growled. Harry kept walking.

            The white thing grew solid and crouched on the floor inside the doorway, staring hungrily at him. Harry sent a few of his mice forwards to investigate. They should be able to dodge before the thing started snapping them up, if it was real.

            Sure enough, they had to dodge, because the thing’s neck extended and its jaws clamped down on air. Harry called the mice back. He heard the beast’s teeth snapping. He wouldn’t risk his animals near it.

            The beast flexed its clawed feet into the wood once it saw that Harry wasn’t coming close to it. Harry watched the scratches that appeared in the floor, and tried to think.

            Why would Black think it was so important for Harry to stay here? Of course, he was mental, and this could be his way of punishing Harry for having the gall to break into his house in the first place. Or maybe he was curious about how good Harry was at Transfiguration, and expected him to Transfigure his way past the creature somehow.

            Harry wouldn’t do that without more reassurance that the beast wouldn’t hurt his creatures, though. He turned away and sat down at the table, listening to the scraping and huffing sounds behind him.

            They didn’t stop until he opened a book. But then Harry glanced over his shoulder and realized that, yes, the beast was gone. When he pushed the chair back and started to stand up, the white outlines of the shape appeared again, and Harry heard a faint snarl that was muffled by what sounded like walls.

            Again, sitting down and opening the biography of Phineas Nigellus Black made the thing vanish.

            Harry shook his head. Did Black want him to appreciate the family Sirius had come from? It was too late for that. Harry would have liked to hear more about Sirius, but other than that, his family was his parents. His only interest in Blacks lay in the ones that he could destroy.

            But he picked a few of the books and skimmed them anyway. There wasn’t much about Transfiguration or Lestranges or even Dark Arts in them. The Blacks liked to talk about themselves, though. Harry thought he could have learned the location of a Gringotts vault or two if he’d paid enough attention.

            If he’d cared.

            Harry lost track of time; the important thing was that whenever he glanced over his shoulder, the shadow of the white beast was still there. Well, until he glanced over and Black was there instead.

            “You can come to lunch, Harry,” said Black, and smiled at him. “Did you enjoy your history lesson?”

            Harry shrugged. He didn’t know why Black had wanted him to learn it. He controlled the impulse to push past Black and down the stairs, and only walked down them towards the full formal dining room.

            “I asked you a question.”

            Harry turned his head. “What are you going to do if I don’t answer it?” It was a question he should have asked earlier, he thought. He knew what the Dursleys would do, and the professors at Hogwarts, but not Black.

            “I’m going to assume that you’re slipping into the silence of the beast again, and add even more human therapy,” Black said promptly.

            Harry turned to stare at him. “This was therapy?”

            “You can think of it that way. I think of it that way.” Black smiled at him. “I doubt the Healers at St. Mungo’s would appreciate it. But maybe I’ll write up something about this when it’s done and submit it to them. It could be a foundation of a new kind of care. ‘Hauling Someone Back to Being Human Whether They Want To or Not.’”

            Harry only slowly shook his head. “Is this about Sirius?” he asked. “Or your boredom? Or something else?”



            Black turned so he was walking down the stairs backwards, and watched Harry with the kind of expert, appraising eye that Dudley used to use when he was calculating how long he could torment Harry before the end of the school day. “It can be about many things at once, Harry. It doesn’t have to be just one. Did no one ever teach you that?”

            Harry chose to look away again. If being silent made him look feral and frustrated Black, that was a good thing. Black would probably get tired of him before he made any changes and let him go in time. Everyone except Professor McGonagall and Neville and Terry got bored of him in time.

            “I suppose they didn’t,” said Black, and bounded down the stairs, facing forwards again. “Come on, now. We don’t want to be late to lunch.”

            Since there was never anyone but the two of them and sometimes Harry’s mice at the meals, Harry didn’t understand why, but he walked faster. The dining room was magnificent and gloomy and Black lit more candles with a careless wave of his wand, then sat down at the chair next to Harry’s, even though there was no place setting there.

            Harry looked at it, and didn’t say anything.

            “You could ask a question,” Black chided as he floated the plate and the cutlery over in front of him and took a huge bite of the roasted chicken waiting for them. He sighed, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and continued. “I think that’s one of the most worrying aspects, a sign of how far along the animal road you were. You’re silent too much of the time. A normal child would ask questions and permission. Or at least say something about manners or the way he ate at home. You never do.”

            Harry shrugged and started eating the chicken himself. He didn’t think he would get a straight answer to his questions anyway, so there was no point in asking them. Look what Black had done with the one on the stairs.

            “Harry?”

            He nodded, but Black shook his head and muttered, “We need to train you to be verbal. Answer me aloud, please.”

            It’s just like Snape doing stupid things in Potions, Harry thought, as he swallowed. Get through it, and sooner or later Black will have to let you go, the same way Snape had to let you out of detentions eventually. “Yes, Mr. Black?”



            “Better,” said Black, although his eyes had narrowed a little. “But you can call me Regulus. There’s really no one alive who calls me by my last name now, except people who want to sell me something in Diagon Alley. And I don’t think you want me considering you a shopkeeper.”

            Harry shook his head, and then saw Black frowning at him again. He said, “No, R-Regulus.” It was strange to use a first name for someone he didn’t like or trust. True, he used the Dursleys’ first names when he was around them, but most of the time they were just “the Dursleys” to him, a bunch of formless lumps like mashed potatoes.

            “Better again.” Black smiled at him. “You can learn. I find it remarkable that no one has divined that about you yet, Harry, and tried to pull you back onto the human road.”

            This time, Harry didn’t think that one needed an answer. He ate a few more bites of chicken and had more of the soup—some kind of bisque—without taking his eyes off Black, though.

            Black sighed. “There’s so much I want to know!” he said, whining like Harry was holding a toy out of his reach. “Why did no one else ever see how feral you are? Why did no one else try to turn you off this path? I can’t believe that Minerva wouldn’t try, if she knew.”

            He looked so unblinkingly at Harry that he reminded him of a snake. Harry looked away and said, “She didn’t know until just before I ran.”

            “So you did conceal it,” Black muttered, and shook his head. “I wondered, because I figured out something was wrong when I confronted you, but if no one else ever held you for a time and had the opportunity to study you…”

            Harry drank some of the water that had a faint creamy tinge to it, not sure what to respond. Black made him sound like one of the experimental animals that he’d read once were held in the Department of Mysteries.

            Then again, why would it be a bad thing to be that? To be an animal?

            “Tell me what the Muggles did to you.”

            Harry drew back a little. He didn’t understand why Black was constantly leaping from subject to subject, unless it was just to disconcert him. “I don’t want to do that, Mr. Black.”

            Black wagged a finger, and at the same time, Harry felt the sensation of one tapping his nose, from one of those spells Black was so fond of that could reach across the table. Harry jumped and hissed.

            “Why not?” Black turned and lounged sideways in his chair. “You must know that I’m not going to run out and blab all the details to the papers.”

            “The papers wouldn’t care that much about me, anyway.” Harry thought he might as well end any thoughts Black did have of doing that. “I’m not the Boy-Who-Lived, just his friend. And I haven’t done anything noteworthy.”

            “Nothing that you told anybody.” Black cocked his head. “That’s another thing I can’t figure out. Why wouldn’t you ask for help from your Transfiguration professor? She wouldn’t approve once she saw the claws and all the rest of it, but at the same time, it was clear that you didn’t know they would turn you feral. So there must be some other reason you were hiding it. What is it?”

            Harry pushed his plate away and sat in silence. Black was easily bored, he’d said that himself. That meant he had to jump to another subject soon.

            Black cast the nose-flicking charm again. Harry bared his teeth, and Black chuckled. “Answer the question. And call me Regulus. In fact, answer both questions. The one about your relatives and what they did to you.”

            “I can’t do that without sounding pathetic,” Harry said, which was one of the main reasons he was keeping it to himself.

            Black blinked at that. “Why would you sound pathetic?”

            “Because most of what they did to me isn’t bad,” said Harry. He winced as he forced the words out of his mouth, but on the other hand, there was always the chance that Black would get tired of him precisely because he sounded like a pathetic child. “Isn’t that bad, I mean. I knew it wasn’t normal. It wasn’t the way they treated Dudley.”

            “Dudley?”

            “My cousin.” Harry took another spoonful of soup, to see if that would affect Black’s desire to talk to him at all, but Black only put his elbow on the table in a patient sort of way. Harry had to swallow and go on. “I knew that most people didn’t sleep in a cupboard or not get much food or get told they were freaks. But it wasn’t as bad as using an Unforgivable Curse on me or beating me up all the time.”

            “They couldn’t curse you anyway, they’re Muggles.” Black was studying him as if hypnotized. “Is that the main reason you keep quiet about it? Because you think you’ll sound pathetic?”

            Harry shrugged. Most of the reason he kept quiet about it was because, frankly, it was no one’s business. And the abuse by itself was nothing compared to the burden Neville carried. He didn’t go around whining all the time, even when he was frightened. Harry thought the least he could do was keep quiet about something that wasn’t even happening right now. Lord Dudders was chasing Neville all the time.

            “Harry? I need an answer.”

            “No,” Harry finally said. “The main reason I keep quiet is because no one ever believed me when I did complain, and I could live without people making fun of me.”

            Black frowned as though struggling to understand something. “I didn’t know Muggles made fun of people who were hurt as children.”

            Harry thought of the impossible things he would have to explain: all the children at his primary school who Dudley had persuaded to hate him, and Uncle Vernon and his first kitten, and the way that other adults would listen to the Dursleys and decide that Harry was too much to bother with. He shrugged.

            “That shrug is going to get tiresome very soon.”

            Harry eyed Black without moving. There was no way that he could do anything else. Black hadn’t asked a question, and Harry was not going to talk about some of the other things the Dursleys had done.

            Black aimed his wand without much movement of his arm, calm and proper. “Harry,” he said.

            Harry hissed to relieve some of his tension, and said, “They believed the Dursleys when they said I was freakish. It was easier to believe them than think the Dursleys were the freaks, I suppose.”

            “Very good,” Black said unexpectedly. He put his wand down. Harry stared at him and blinked, and Black chuckled. “It heartens me that you can say that kind of thing about your supposed guardians. It means that you’re not broken, as I thought you were, down into some kind of spineless mess.”

            Harry just blinked and didn’t move. Was Black serious? He thought Harry would turn into a spineless mess from discussing the Dursleys? Preferring not to discuss them was different from being spineless.

            “You can blame them,” Black said, and lounged back with his feet up on the table and a confident smile on his face. Harry couldn’t help but look at the scuff marks his feet were making on the table’s wood. Black ignored that. “That means you’re not damaged for life, either. You can put the blame in the right direction. When you said that you didn’t tell people about your Muggles because you didn’t want to be thought pathetic, I thought you blamed yourself for setting them off somehow.”

            “No,” Harry said. “They hated me because of the way I was born. There’s nothing you can do with people who hate you for that. Trying to convince them otherwise was a waste of time.”

            Black paused, and one of his boots, which he’d started to raise like he’d cross his legs, dropped down with a thump. “So there was a time when you blamed yourself and tried to fit in with them.”

            “Yes. Does that make me worse in your eyes?”

            Black shook his head. “No. Only that you’re still so young, and you grew out of that stage so quickly.” He tilted his head, holding Harry’s eyes in a way that only Yar usually did. “I would have thought that most children like you would still be in it, holding out for one scrap of affection.”

            “I’m not.”

            “Yes,” Black said. He had gone back to his frown. “Although I think it did affect you. You went from wanting your relatives to like you to thinking no one would.”

            Harry blinked slowly. “My mice do. My eagle does. My cat does.”

            Black shook his head. “Animals, Harry. Not people. I told you about the dangers of becoming an animal yourself before.” He paused. “And we come back to the question of why you never told Minerva about your interest in Transfiguration and sought her help to become better.”

            “I did,” Harry said. “I talked to her about books, and she gave me some. And she told me I was a talented student. And she taught me the theory of the Wild.”

            “Theory? The Wild is all around us. For everyone who can feel it.”

            “I know,” Harry said, responding before he thought about it. “I feel it all the time. Every time I do a Transfiguration,” he added, when he saw Black peering at him curiously again.

            “That’s strange,” said Black, but he didn’t explain why it was strange. It’s predictable, the first time I want to talk about something, he won’t pursue it, Harry thought in exasperation. “And no, none of the things the Muggles did to you are normal. But it’s not right to become an animal to escape the consequences of what they did.”

            Harry said nothing. That wasn’t what had happened, and Black thinking it was was just another sign of how much he didn’t understand Harry.

            “I wonder,” said Black, staring off into the distance. Then he shook his head and stood up. “I’ll take you to the house where Bellatrix spent most of her childhood tonight. I want to show you the difference between trying to use the resonances and trying to use blood magic.”

            Harry stood slowly, thrown. None of the other adults he knew would change their minds this much, or at least they would provide some sign of what had made them change their minds. Professor McGonagall and Mrs. Longbottom probably would have explained.

            “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Black added, watching Harry now only from one eye, peering out from behind that curtain of dark hair. He was examining the peaches on his plate with the other eye, frowning in disgust. “To track down my dear cousin and kill her as painfully as possible?”

            Not kill her. Destroy her. That was another thing Harry couldn’t say, because he knew about loyalty to family. Black might think he would want to destroy Bellatrix until he saw Harry torturing her, and then he would probably intervene.

            But Harry nodded anyway.

            “Good, then,” Black said. “It occurs to me that you’ve been keeping your side of the bargain by staying with me and telling the truth, but I’ve done nothing to help you with your goal. Now you’ll see that.”

            Harry walked slowly away from the table. Black had changed tactics again, he thought. This was meant to make Harry confess something.

            He didn’t know what, though. Because Harry couldn’t be pressured to confess anything if he wasn’t with Black. He could spend time away from him building up his defenses, in fact, so he couldn’t be taken by surprise.

            Harry went back to read in a different library, one that had more books on pure magic, in a divided frame of mind. Black was trying to manipulate him. He knew that. And just because Black was bored didn’t give him the right to do that.

            But Black also didn’t seem to want to do anything with the manipulation. The Dursleys had wanted to convince everyone else that Harry was a freak and they shouldn’t have anything to do with him…but what did Black want?

            Until he figured that out, Harry thought grimly as he stroked his fingers along the edge of a book on Transfiguration theory, he wouldn’t be entirely safe.

            But then, he wouldn’t be really safe until he was away from Black, either.

            In the meantime, the book could teach him more, possibly, about healing his parents.

            He opened the book and began to read.

*

            Jester: I don’t know if it’s kind to make Harry talk about his past, but I know it’s something that Harry might need.
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The Art of Self-Fashioning