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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-Seven—Training

            Harry looked slowly around the room on the second floor of Grimmauld Place that Black had converted into a dueling arena. He had to admit he didn’t have much sense of what a dueling arena should look like. When their Defense professors had them practice dueling, it was always just in a classroom with the desks shoved back against the walls.

            This one, though, had softly shimmering shields that looked like gongs set along every meter of wall space. The floor itself was some flat, plain sand that didn’t slip like tile and wasn’t as hard as stone. Harry shifted his feet on it, getting used to it. He made a small jump, and waited, but the floor didn’t puff up around him like dust would, either.

            “Good?” Black asked, strolling in at the door. When he shut the door, it blended seamlessly with the wall behind him. He turned and cast several Locking Charms on it. “So no one gets any ideas about retreating too quickly,” he added.

            Harry nodded and continued examining the walls. There were small round circles that he had dismissed at first as part of the wallpaper, but now he could see that they were slightly varied in size and placement. He pointed to one and tilted his head at Black.

            Black ignored him. Harry frowned and then remembered one of the things they had agreed on before coming in here. He sighed and opened his mouth. “What are those circles?”

            Black smiled and answered at once. “They’re more defenses—or offenses, I suppose you could say. Spikes come out of them. They’re designed to discourage duelists from resting their backs against the wall or staying there too long when they’re flung. Ten seconds is what you get.”

            Harry blinked. “Some of this room looks like it was designed to injure people more than protect them,” he said, when Black propped his chin in his hand and waited patiently for Harry to speak what he wanted to say.

            “It was, in a way. It was supposed to train people to rely on their own bodies and skills and not something to support them.”

            Harry fumbled for the words he wanted, in his surprise, and then managed to ask, “Not even to rely on walls and other barriers?”

            “Barriers?” Black paced to the side and touched the wall above one of the round spots. “Is that the way you see them?”

            “In one of the battles I’ve fought, barriers were important.” Harry thought about the bookshelves crashing in Lupin’s room, and then thought of the way he’d dodged and circled when Dudley and his gang were chasing him around corners, and added, “Perhaps more than one.”

            “I believe that.” Black looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “We’ll work with conjured barriers later. When you’re fighting someone in a room that has a lot of objects, then they’re important. But for the moment, what I need to train out of you is that trust you have in objects.”

            “Trust?” Harry couldn’t think of anyone he trusted except his animals, and to a certain extent Neville and Professor McGonagall.

            “That they won’t move or otherwise hurt you. You need to learn that every object around you can be a weapon, and sometimes that’s a weapon against you.”

            On cue, the floor began to shake beneath Harry. He reacted the way his instincts and training prompted him, springing up, spinning around, and coming to rest on a different patch of floor.

            That one was shaking and rippling too, though, and more to the point, spreading up in an immense wave that shrugged dueling sand off its back as it moved. Harry tucked into a small ball, but he still had to come down, and the moment he did, the floor began to move again.

            “What are you going to do now?” Black called, twirling his wand between his fingers. He stood near the door, on the one patch of floor that of course wasn’t moving, a faint smile on his face. “You have to land somewhere, and the walls are too round to provide you with a good projecting edge!”

            That’s true, at least. Harry wanted to object that the room wasn’t really a natural dueling ground, that most of the time he would have a place to land and something to knock over the way he had in Lupin’s chambers. But he was too busy jumping to have the breath, and Black was too busy laughing to listen.

            Harry finally found the answer when he felt the passion to have a place to stand flooding through him. Most of the time, he found it difficult to Transfigure one object to another unless he had enough emotion for it, but right now, he certainly did.

            He flicked his wand and reached out with some of his wandless power, too, and the nearest wall twisted and flowed into a windowsill. Harry landed there and leaped again, making his muscles twist and push and flow before he truly thought about it. The less time he spent thinking about it, the less time Black had to react.

            He leaped straight at Black, and even when the man raised his wand, Harry was content. He could see the gaping mouth and knew Black had been taken by surprise.

            If Harry couldn’t win their first duel, he could do a few unexpected things still.

            Black’s next spell grabbed him and slammed him out of the air. Harry struggled against the invisible hand that was holding him in place. And there was another spell that was making the muscles in his legs jerk and twist in random patterns, like a lightning bolt that only affected that part. Harry knew it was probably a common jinx. It just hurt him more because those muscles were so much bigger in him than in other humans.

            He could admire Black, using simple spells to his advantage.

            But Harry wasn’t defeated.

            He aimed his wand at Black’s feet and whispered the first incantation that came to mind, remembering one of the spells that Professor McGonagall had showed them early on in second year. “Commuto caligas mures.”

            Black went over backwards as his boots abruptly Transfigured into rats. They first bit his feet and then scattered towards the sides of the room, looking for places to hide. Harry hadn’t tried to create them with any special qualities, which meant they acted like normal rats, and wisely wanted to get away from human beings as soon as possible.

            Sometimes Harry thought he should have imitated them.

            “You’re still only using Transfiguration!” Black snapped, as if it was a personal insult, hopping back to his feet. “Counter this with Transfiguration if you can! Cavea fulgoris!”

            The air all around Harry twinged in warning, and then he found himself enclosed in a cage whose bars were electric. When Harry tried to get to his feet, the ceiling, made of crackling, circling ball lightning, drifted down towards his head and gave off several warning charges. Harry lay down under it for a second and watched the ceiling come closer and closer.

            He had never tried to Transfigure lightning, the same way he hadn’t done it with fire, or smoke, or anything else that wasn’t a substantial object. Even water was tricky to work with unless it had been made into ice.

            But that didn’t mean Harry was about to give up.

            He Shrank the cage with the common charm that they’d all learned from Flitwick, and caught sight of Black’s startled face before the lightning struck him and burned through him.

            For a second, Harry couldn’t breathe, and his muscles jerked and burned and twitched worse than ever, only this time all over his body. But none of that was a new experience, from Dudley hitting him in the solar plexus before and Black shocking him a few minutes ago. He waited it out, forced his way through the pain, and twisted to his feet.

            “That didn’t come from Transfiguration,” Black murmured, but his voice was a little softer, and he regarded Harry with interest that Harry didn’t think was feigned.

            “I don’t need Transfiguration when I can bear pain,” Harry reminded him, and shot a hand out. When his claws came free, he ignored the trembling that still afflicted his muscles and drew his wand down the air in front of him. Black seemed inclined to stand still and stare at him in wonder, and that was fine with Harry; it made what he did now all the easier. “Ambo!”

            Black flinched and fell backwards, raising one hand to the fine scratches that now trailed down his right cheek. Harry had cast a charm that linked the air and his face, and should have made him bear deep and bleeding wounds.

            Should have. Harry stared at the faint scratches and frowned.

            “A good try,” Black said, with a nod. “And something I should have expected. But you’ve let too much strength leak into your Transfiguration and can’t put enough into your charms.”

            You want strength? Harry let his wand dangle, as if he was stupefied with doubt instead of aiming it, and then snarled, softly enough that he thought Black wouldn’t hear, “Reducto.”

            The Blasting Curse took the floor apart at Black’s floor, but he sprang back and out of the range of flying splinters that Harry had tried to cause. He shook his head. “You might not believe me, but the fact remains that your magic adapts to the channels in your mind and body that you want it to use. If you only concentrate on Transfiguration, then yes, charms and curses are going to be weak.”

            Harry cast again, this time a Blasting Curse at the shield behind Black. It bounced the way he wanted to, but Black twisted out of the way before it could hit him, and then Harry was the one ducking and weaving to avoid it.

            “You see,” Black said, not even breathing hard, as he stood back up. It occurred to Harry with a hostile prickling of nerves that Black wasn’t dueling him back, not anymore, only watching him and patiently explaining. As if Harry was a kitten trying to climb a tree and Black was the wise older cat sitting up there and watching him struggle. “You need to work on making your curses stronger and faster, and not getting—”

            This time, Harry used a wordless Blasting Curse, which he had heard was something you could do. But it only resulted in a faint shimmer to the side of Black, and then a little exploding noise. Black went on without seeming to notice it.

            “—Frustrated, because that just makes your aim weaker.”

            Harry tensed his hands against the immediate impulse to respond by lashing out. He tried to focus on what Black was saying, make sense of it.

            Say Black was right. Or pretend he was. Harry was skilled at that kind of game, even though he hadn’t played in years. He used to pretend that he could have friends around Muggles, that he could make the Dursleys love him, that he could get Dudley to stop beating him up.

            Say he was, just for a minute. What would it mean?

            It would mean that Harry needed to put more attention into studying charms and curses and countercurses, and stop getting so frustrated when Black did something he couldn’t. And he needed more work on non-verbal magic. He had just seen that for himself.

            While he stood there pondering, Black decided it was a duel again and shot a Blasting Curse at Harry. Harry leaped over it casually and went back to thinking.

            But would he need that kind of magic to heal his parents? Could he justify spending the time on it if all he did was win duels with Black?

            This time, the curse Black tried to use was one shaped like a tornado. Harry couldn’t remember the name, but he knew it would curl around him and imprison him in a whirling wind of dust. He leaped over that, too, and sent a couple of his mice to distract Black.

            The mice were nibbling at Black’s bare feet, and his dodging around them gave Harry the time to cast Finite Incantatem on the Tornado Curse, which had curled back around and tried to catch Harry in whirling tendrils from that direction. When the curse dissipated, Harry turned to bring down Black another way.

            Black was standing right in front of him with his wand glowing blue and the tip aimed straight at Harry’s collarbone.

            Harry stood up straight and breathed a little. He didn’t recognize the blue light, but he could feel its heat from this close, and see the sparks, metallic in color, that arced away from it and landed on the floor of the dueling room. He darted his eyes to Black.

            “A smart person would surrender at this point.” Black’s voice was soft and casual. “But that’s a smart person. I wonder what you will do.”

            Harry felt his hands tense again, but he couldn’t afford—one lesson he had already learned—to simply snap and flail around because he felt insulted or inadequate. There were things Black could teach him, and while they might not relate directly to healing his parents, Harry had already turned aside from that path. Taking vengeance on the Dursleys didn’t relate directly to that, either, or trying to hurt Black, or ruining Snape’s potions.

            He already had other goals. What he needed to do was accept them and assimilate them as part of his practice before that practice consumed him.

            He bowed his head slowly and said, “I surrender.” One of his mice crept up to Black’s heels and looked at him inquiringly, but Harry shook his head and reached down a hand to scoop them up.

            “Good.” Black stepped back and looked him over. “You surprised me a few times. But that’s a weakness as much as a strength, if you rely on it too much. Can you tell me why?”

            Harry closed his eyes. Black had said something about Harry surprising Bellatrix and the Lestranges, too, and it had certainly helped him to capture them. But when he thought about it, it wasn’t too hard to find the answer to Black’s questions.

            “Because surprise only works once,” he said. “Against new enemies. Old ones will either know better, or they might even tell new people about what I can do.” The words dragged and stuck in his throat. Harry didn’t want to say them, and not only because he felt silence was wiser most of the time. “The only way to prevent that would be to kill everyone the first time. And I don’t want to kill my enemies all the time.”

            “Exactly,” said Black, although he did give Harry a funny look on the last words. Maybe he didn’t believe that Harry didn’t want to kill people yet. Harry tried to stand there and radiate sincerity, but that only seemed to increase Black’s bafflement. “You need to learn other spells. Be fast and flexible as well as unexpected. That’s one thing we’ll work on.”

            He paused and then added, “But I can only really teach you some spells you probably already know and Dark Arts, since that was what I specialized in. I’m not a Defense professor or anything like it.”

            “That’s all right,” Harry reassured him. “We had horrible or fake Defense professors most of the last few years.”

            Black shook his head. “But that won’t make much difference if we want to do something bigger.”

            “Bigger how?” Once again, Black seemed to think his words were obvious, and Harry had to remind him they weren’t. His mice wriggled in his pockets, reacting to his distress.

            “I tried to do something opposing the Dark Lord when I was very young,” said Black, and his mouth turned downwards. “I failed. I survived, which was something I didn’t expect, but that was the thing that shocked me into realizing I couldn’t use Dark Arts all the time and expect them to do everything.”

            “I don’t care about Lord Dudders—”

            “Who?” This time there was no mistaking the expression on Black’s face. He was desperately trying to hold back a laugh.

            “That’s what I call Voldemort. After my cousin Dudley.” Harry shrugged when Black stared at him incredulously. “He seems just as spoiled. He wants to have everything he wants, and he doesn’t care who he has to destroy to do it.”

            Black blinked rapidly several times, and then seemed to find his way back to himself. “Well. Yes. I suppose one could see him that way. But why don’t you care about him? His Death Eaters were the ones who tortured your parents.”

            “And now I’m learning from one of his Death Eaters.”

            “Well. Yes,” Black said again.

            Harry nodded at him. He had made up his mind to listen and learn, which meant he could change directions rapidly. Distantly he wondered if Black would be able to keep up with him, and then decided that it didn’t much matter if he couldn’t. Harry would be the one choosing their path, in that case.

            “I want to heal my parents,” Harry said. “As you so cleverly discerned. And I want to study other things than Transfiguration. And I want to make the Lestranges pay. That isn’t the same as wanting to bring down Lord Dudders.”

            Black paused as if listening to some suggestion from another voice. Harry waited patiently. As long as Black wasn’t succumbing to the madness of the family that several books in the library had discussed, then he could take all the time he wanted.

            “But what if those things were connected?” Black asked slowly. “I want revenge, too. Revenge on the Dark Lord for making me waste so many years of my life, before I learned what was really important to me. And causing the death of my brother, indirectly.”

            “I thought Sirius didn’t matter to you.”

            “He matters more to me dead than he did alive.”

            Harry thought some more. In the end, he had to nod. He could understand the reasoning because he thought that his parents mattered more to him mad than they would have sane. If he’d just grown up with them like a normal kid, he would probably be a normal kid, and maybe he would even be like Dudley: spoiled. His parents had loved him a lot, Black said. That could lead to spoiling people.

            Harry sort of thought he preferred to be the way he was now.

            “I want to bring down the Dark Lord,” Black continued. “And you want to heal your parents, and do the other things you mentioned. We’ll find that easier to accomplish with allies.”

            “If you wanted to bring in Dumbledore and Snape, forget it,” said Harry flatly. “Dumbledore will never trust me, and I have my own reasons to dislike Snape.”

            Black laughed softly. “I could say exactly the same thing. Well. I wasn’t going to suggest them. I was going to suggest Professor McGonagall.”

            Harry folded his arms, feeling the mice sit up in his pockets in readiness. The rats he’d Transfigured Black’s boots into were huddling against the walls. Harry wondered if it would be worthwhile collecting them and trying to tame them. He hadn’t created them for a specific purpose, so they wouldn’t be intelligent and friendly of their own free will, unlike Amicus.

            “Why her? If it’s only because she’s the Transfiguration professor and you think you’ll bribe me by including her—”

            “What a little beast you are,” said Black, in a voice that was almost admiring. “Why you didn’t Sort Slytherin I’ll never know.”

            Harry stared at him. Black had figured out his deepest secret, and he decided this wasn’t exactly one. It was only that no one had ever asked him about it before because no one had ever thought he should be there. “The Sorting Hat told me I could go there.”

            “Why didn’t you?”

            “Lord Dudders. And I fought Malfoy on the train.”

            “Mal—oh, Lucius’s son. Of course.” Black shook his head. “Sometimes I lose track of who has what children, since it’s never been a concern of mine. That reassures me. If you’d Sorted Slytherin, then Severus would probably have got you under his control anyway.”

            “No,” said Harry positively. “I would never have liked him, and he would never have liked me.”

            Black’s shrug dismissed the matter as unimportant. “What I want Professor McGonagall for is that she does understand Transfiguration, and she’ll help you more than I can in adapting your battle skills. And she has the respect of other professors at Hogwarts—if not Severus—and connections to former Gryffindor students who hold high positions in the Ministry. That’s not something I would ever be able to provide. We need connections. We need a unified effort, but a decentralized one. One of the foolish things the Order of the Phoenix did in the first war was provide a large group of opponents for the Dark Lord to attack at once. It was no wonder so many of them died.”

            “What about Neville?”

            “Longbottom? I don’t think his grandmother would be pleased if we contacted him.” Then Black began to grin. “Of course, looked at the right way, that’s an incentive.”

            “What do you have against Neville?”

            “Against Longbottom? Nothing in particular.” Black shrugged. “I do think people have no idea how he defeated the Dark Lord and are putting too much hope and trust in him, and not enough in other methods of winning this war. That’s one reason I want to move. I’m not going to sit back and trust in Longbottom to save me.

            “But against Augusta Longbottom…she insulted me terribly at Sirius’s funeral. I haven’t forgotten it, and I won’t.”

            “So you won’t ally with her?”

            “I think allying with her grandson will be enough of a blow to her,” Black announced cheerfully. “What brought Longbottom to your mind? Do you think he would listen to Professor McGonagall if she agreed to ally with us? Would he come? He could be valuable if we can discover how he defeated the Dark Lord and whether he can do it again.”

            “He’s in Gryffindor,” said Harry slowly. He wondered if he should protect Neville from Black, and then decided that Professor McGonagall—if she even agreed at all—would help him do that. “And Neville is more than just someone to study.”

            “Then you can be his closer ally,” said Black. “I’m indifferent to it, really.”

            “But you want to ally with me? I’m the same age as Neville.”

            “You’re a much more experienced fighter. And you’re interesting. And you were Sirius’s godson.” Black propped his chin in his hand and studied Harry. “I’m sure I already said this. Are you going to go along with me or not?”

            Harry weighed the options in his head. He hadn’t signed any binding contracts with Black, or sworn any oaths. He could break away if he needed to. It would probably be even easier to do that if Professor McGonagall and Neville were here. Professor McGonagall was fierce and could fight back against Black if she needed to.

            “Yes.”

*

            The owl that brought her the letter was brown and white, not unusual, and Minerva opened it not expecting anything special. But when she recognized the handwriting scrawled on it, she had to put the letter aside for a time and bury her head in her arms on her desk, while she sobbed quietly with relief.

            Then she opened it and read through it.

            Hello Professor McGonagall,



            Please don’t tell anyone about this. My ally says that both Dumbledore and Snape can read minds, so you’ll want to make sure you don’t look them in the eye.

            I’m staying with Regulus Black. He’s already helped train me a little and protect me from a scrying attempt that was trying to find me. He says that he wants to ally with you and Neville, too. I was staying with Neville’s grandmother at first, but she ended up bringing me to a Black family house that was supposed to be empty, and Black caught me in it. So we don’t know if we’re going to ally with her yet.

            Could you ask Neville if he’d be willing to be involved? I know you and I can protect Black from using him, if he tries to.

            Please write me back.

            Thank you,

            Harry.

            Minerva had to wipe away tears steadily for five minutes before she was any use, and then she concealed her face in her hands. No one was walking into her office or even past it at the moment, but she still felt the need to do it.

            Then she sat up and reached for the quill and the ink.

            This is much better news than I ever thought to receive.
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The Art of Self-Fashioning