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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 Forty-Four—His Morality
“I cannot believe you did that, Harry.”
Minerva knew her voice shook. Well, she meant it to. She had never thought Harry would blind Severus. Fight him in battle, yes, and Minerva could even have understood killing him there. But this was completely cold-blooded, thought-through and then done.
“I didn’t think about blinding him before this.”
Minerva started. She knew Harry didn’t use Legilimency, but sometimes it seemed that he did, so clear and piercing was his gaze. “I didn’t mean that.”
“You were thinking of it.” Harry ran one of his claws slowly down the surface of an expensive ebony table. Minerva opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. If Regulus didn’t want Harry to do that, he could easily repair the damage later. Right now, he was in his rooms with the door locked. “Would it really be better if I’d hurt him like that at St. Mungo’s?”
“We could have understood it better.”
“You and Black.”
Minerva sighed, but she had long since come to the conclusion that Harry might never call Regulus by his first name. “Yes.”
Harry shook his head, slowly, but not as if he was contradicting her. “He moved towards me and he was going to hurt me. I reacted. I think that was the same as battle.”
“You—you reacted by scratching him,” Minerva said, forcing the words through her throat against the way Harry was looking at her so patiently. “But you held him down and chose to drive your claws through his eye.”
Harry just nodded, looking unsurprised. Minerva wished she knew what about. “Does Black think he can heal Snape’s eye?”
“Not completely. There’s always going to be a scar in it, at best. And he won’t gain back the sight no matter what we do. Regulus thinks the best his healing spells can accomplish is a little prettying-up so Severus looks as if he had two eyes.”
“Good.”
“Harry.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Harry replied, in a peaceful, empty voice. “You have your morals and that’s fine. But you can’t want me to be the same kind of person you are. I’m not. You knew that. I grew up the way I did, and I want what I want, and I’m taking it. You can’t sit there and tell me it’s okay to torture Bellatrix the way I did when I was calling on her deep magic, and then get upset when I do something that doesn’t even last as long. Snape isn’t going to give up trying to hurt me if I’m nice. Maybe now he will.”
Minerva looked at the floor, and swallowed. She wanted to say all sorts of things in response, but the only thing she could think of was her failure to get Harry away from the Dursleys before he learned lessons like this.
But you can’t want me to be the same kind of person you are. I’m not. You knew that.
Yes, she’d known that, Minerva had to admit. She might imperfectly have appreciated what it meant.
“I—would prefer it if you didn’t do anything like that again, Harry,” she said, looking up. “Regulus thinks Severus may never brew us a potion again, and some things he wants to do need those potions.”
“Oh.” Harry eased back in his seat a little and reached out to toy with a tome that lay on the library table. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“What?” Minerva asked, off-course entirely now.
“Something Black wants to do requires Snape’s cooperation,” said Harry, with a smart tilt of his head. “That’s different from you just wanting me to be a good person—whatever that is. I wouldn’t have hurt him if I knew that. But I still stand by my words that Snape would never stop trying to kill me. He’s almost gone insane. Couldn’t you feel the magic around his fingers?”
“No,” Minerva said. She knew Regulus was right about Severus having gone half-mad, but she still wanted to know what Harry meant.
“The Wild was almost making his hands glow. He’d done something to them. Wandless magic, deep magic, whatever you want to call it.” Harry shrugged. He really did remind Minerva of an animal in the way he reacted to danger sometimes, as if it wasn’t that important once he was past the initial moment of it. “If he’d touched me, he’d be able to hurt me a lot worse.”
“You can’t control him with his Dark Mark?”
“His is gone. There has to be at least a little left and changed with my Wild and Lord Dudders’s Wild in it. Snape is free. He chose to do this of his own free will.”
Minerva swallowed again. That wasn’t something she had thought was true, even knowing Harry had completely cleaned Severus’s left arm.
He could choose. He chose this.
Minerva managed a smile, with some difficulty, as she looked up and saw how intently Harry watched her. “I’m sorry, Harry. That makes some difference, knowing this.”
Harry shrugged. “If I messed up one of Black’s plans, I didn’t mean to. I do know Snape has some use when he’s thinking straight and willing to cooperate. I don’t think he is, not anymore.” He slid off the chair and turned to look thoughtfully at the doorway. “Now I have to go talk to someone else.”
“Did Neville contact you about help getting out of Hogwarts?” Minerva asked, hoping that was true.
Harry tilted his head at her. “What? Oh, no. It’s Terry. He knows what I did to Snape, and I think he’s upset about it.” He turned and walked out of the library before Minerva could ask any other questions.
Minerva winced a little. Mr. Boot didn’t have any complicity in Harry’s attack on Snape the way she and Regulus did. She hoped Harry would be gentle in the way he approached the issue.
Then again, I’m not sure Harry knows what the word “gentle” means.
*
“You can go back to Hogwarts, if you want.”
Terry started and glanced over his shoulder. Harry stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking around in mild interest, even though Terry had only hung up some of his clothes and charmed one of the walls to look like his favorite portion of the night sky from Astronomy class. He had a mouse on his arm he was petting.
“Why would I do that?” Terry asked. His voice croaked.
“You don’t seem comfortable with me anymore,” Harry answered, and his eyes narrowed in so sharp and hard that Terry flinched. It was like having glass shards dig into him, or maybe Harry’s eagle’s feet. “You know that I’m not a good person.”
Terry closed his eyes and sighed, “I don’t think you’re not good. I just think you’re really violent.”
“Are you going to attack me the way Snape did?”
“What? Of course not!”
“Then you don’t have to worry about me being violent towards you.”
Terry opened his eyes and said, “But there’s—just knowing I’m around someone who’s violent towards other people bothers me.”
“But then I don’t understand why you came here at all,” Harry said, sounding as if he was answering out of a well of deep peace. “You knew I was violent before you left. You knew I didn’t care about most people. And you found out about the things I was doing to Bellatrix and Snape the minute you came here. Why is this different?”
Terry fiddled with the edge of his covers, but found he couldn’t look away from Harry’s eyes. They were eagle’s eyes. They demanded an answer.
“Because you did something permanent,” Terry whispered. “You didn’t take away a Dark Mark or make someone suffer for a while. I heard Black and Professor McGonagall talking. They said he’ll never see out of that eye again.”
“Then he’ll never attack me again. Think about it, Terry. He had his Dark Mark gone. He could have left here once we were done with him and started a new life. Why do you think he attacked me?”
“He hates you.”
“Why?”
Terry hesitated, but he finally had to shake his head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine hating someone so much.”
“He values his hatred more than his freedom. He values it more than his sight. I think he intended to die when he attacked me. He would have died when Black attacked him in revenge, anyway, even if he managed to kill me.” Harry shook his head. “I would have left him alone if he’d left me alone. I wanted him to answer a question about the snake, and he said he had information. I think now he was lying to make me let him close to me.”
“Oh. It’s—it’s still not a good thing, what you did, Harry.”
A second later, Terry was surprised that Harry hadn’t launched a spider or his eagle at him. But he only smiled in what seemed like amusement and put the mouse back in his pocket. “I never said it was a good thing. It was a response.”
“Don’t you think you should try to control your responses?”
“If I hadn’t taken his eye, what do you think would have happened? Not your immediate impulse. Use that logical Ravenclaw brain of yours. Think it through.”
Terry forced himself to think about it, even though it was distasteful to spend that much time thinking about Professor Snape. Harry stroked the mouse’s back through the cloth of the pocket, and waited for him.
“He would have tried again,” said Terry at last, as certain as he could be about anything. “He would have decided that, I don’t know, he was only unlucky or something, and he would want his insane vengeance against you.”
“I know. And Black and Professor McGonagall might have been upset that he tried, but they wouldn’t be disappointed in him like they are in me. Why are they so disappointed in me? They know what I am. But he’s an adult, and he supposedly had a chance to redeem himself after the war. I don’t understand why they’re so hard on me.”
For a moment, his voice cracked, and he stared down at his hands. Then he clenched them as if he’d realized what he was doing, and shook his head, and turned away.
Terry waited until he was sure that Harry was really going to walk out the door and it wasn’t just a pretense before he spoke. Of course he should have known it wasn’t a pretense, he thought. Harry didn’t do things like that.
“I think they’re harder on you because they see more potential in you.” Harry paused, one hand on the doorframe, standing with his back to Terry as he listened. “They know that Snape wasted his potential long ago. Say that he did have a chance to redeem himself after the war. Well, that’s gone. He doesn’t care about it. He doesn’t care about anything except hurting other people. And you could be so much more. He’s stunted. You’re not.”
“I don’t care about anything except healing my parents.”
“Maybe that used to be true. It’s not now, or you wouldn’t care about things like not killing people when Black and Professor McGonagall ask you not to.”
Harry was silent in response, and he did walk out the door this time. But at least Terry was satisfied his words had been heard.
*
Neville shifted uneasily as he looked around. Gran had said that they would meet outside the school on the Hogsmeade road, that she would come and Apparate him away there. Apparition tired her out less than Flooing, and she had had no time to arrange a Portkey. And the thought of his grandmother flying was enough to make even Neville smile.
But it was half-an-hour past the time she had said she would be here, and she hadn’t come. Neville wished for the second millionth time that he knew how to cast a Patronus and send it as a messenger, or that he had a communication mirror to use with Gran the way some of the old families did.
“Neville!”
Neville spun around. Hermione was pelting towards him, her hair flying behind her and her eyes wide with fear. Neville instinctively glanced behind her, but nothing had chased her out of Hogwarts.
He held out his hands. Hermione grabbed hold of them and panted, bent almost double. Neville got concerned. He had never seen Hermione like this before. He patted her back and kept glancing around, his hand that wasn’t patting her closed around his wand.
Hermione got her breath back, enough to talk, in about thirty seconds. “I overheard Dumbledore talking,” she whispered. “I was late to dinner, and he was—talking to some—people in a room off the entrance hall. Aurors, Neville. He said—he said they had to help him. And they said they were—going to Longbottom Manor.”
“Gran.”
Neville didn’t even recognize his own voice. He let go of Hermione and turned back to Hogwarts. He wanted to go right back there and confront Dumbledore—
“No, Neville! That’s what he wants you to do!”
Hermione was right, Neville realized, and he stopped in misery. If he went back there, Dumbledore would probably never let him leave again, but he had no idea what to do to save Gran. He couldn’t Apparate, he couldn’t use any of the Floos in Hogwarts, and he couldn’t make a Portkey—
Wait.

“Do you think there’s any chance that he saw you coming out here?” he demanded of Hermione in a tone that made her look startled, but she answered immediately.
“I don’t know. I backed away from the door and ran to find you as soon as I heard what they were talking about, but they could have heard me.”
“Okay. This is what we’re going to do. Professor McGonagall’s office still doesn’t have anyone living in it, and those spells ‘guarding’ the door are a joke, because Umbridge said she had to be able to go in at any time, remember? We’re going to sneak in there and use the Floo to leave from there.”
“Oh, Neville, I don’t know.”
“I mean, you don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to,” Neville said, releasing her arm. She might not want to leave Hogwarts and Ron and Gryffindor. They’d never discussed it. “But I think this is the best chance. We have to go now, before Dumbledore can know that I know Gran’s not coming.”
Hermione opened her mouth, but Ron was the one who answered, tearing abruptly along the path behind them. He was so pale that Neville thought he had blood on his face for a second, before realizing it was his freckles.
“No time. The Aurors are coming. I heard Dumbledore talking. Saying they had to be sure of your loyalty, Nev, and there are more Aurors coming here.” Ron tossed something he’d been holding at Neville, and Neville caught it before he thought about it. It was a broom. “We have to get out of here, and there’s only one way to do it.”
“Oh, dear,” said Hermione in a faint voice. Neville didn’t feel much better himself. He’d broken his wrist in his very first flying lesson, and Gran had never let him forget it. Hermione might be worse, since Neville didn’t think she’d done any flying since Madam Hooch’s lessons in their first year. “No—Ron, we can’t—”
“Mr. Longbottom!”
The voice came from the school, and all Neville needed to see was a glimpse of a red robe. He honestly wasn’t staying for anything else. He turned and grabbed the broom, stuffing it under him. Then he took off.
There was a terrifying rush of wind past his ears, and Neville would have closed his eyes, except that would have been even worse. He heard himself making soft noises of pain and panic, and he glanced back only long enough to be sure that Ron and Hermione were both behind him. Ron was flying right next to Hermione, who had her hand stretched out to him and clasped around his arm.
The first Stunner swept past them.
“Swerve!” Ron yelled, and did it, tugging Hermione along with him. Hermione sounded like she thought she was going to fall off the broom with every twist of the wind.
Neville shivered. He should have been a great Quidditch player, some people had told him, and there was no ignoring the disappointment in their eyes when he had to tell them how scared he was of flying.
But it was like when Hermione had asked who he was more scared of disappointing, his Gran or Dumbledore. He swerved, and flew around in a spiral, and the next Stunner missed them, and by the time the Aurors thought to try something else, they were flying too high.
At least the small noises he could hear when he caught up with Ron and Hermione were hers, not his.
“Where to?” Ron asked, tilting his head at Neville.
Neville thought about it. Longbottom Manor wasn’t safe, not if they had Gran. He swallowed. They would have to go somewhere that had post-owls, because he didn’t have any other way to send a message to Harry.
“The only good thing about this,” said Hermione, her voice thin and high with fear but still audible across the distance, “is that Dumbledore won’t want to tell anyone what happened right away. To have them know he lost you and took your grandmother captive.”
Neville nodded. That decided him. His family wasn’t the only loyal one. “Can you find your way to the Burrow from here?” he asked, glancing at Ron.
Ron gave a faint, sickly smile, but it grew stronger as Neville watched, maybe because Hermione was there, too. “Did I ever tell you about the time that Fred and George took me along with them to fly most of England when I was seven?”
Neville had to laugh, and try to forget the yawning void beneath him. “Bet your Mum wasn’t too pleased.”
“‘Course she wasn’t. In fact…”
Hermione kept relaxing as Ron told the story, and Neville did the same thing. And they swept south under the running clouds, and Neville tried to hope that his grandmother was okay, and Dumbledore hadn’t done something horrible with her.
*
“You are the only one who can keep the boy safe by telling me where he is most likely to go, Augusta.”
Augusta said nothing. She remained in the chair of the desk in the warded classroom that Albus had decided to guard her in. It had taken a lot of influence with the Ministry to get them to arrest Augusta in the first place, and even more to make the Aurors release her to Albus’s custody. His favors were drained for a long time, now.
Albus shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead wearily. This had been a day of disasters, more than any other he could remember. He’d had to arrest the Boy-Who-Lived’s guardian, then the Boy-Who-Lived had slipped through his fingers, and although the Aurors who had been with Albus had sworn themselves to secrecy readily enough, not wanting to be embarrassed either, someone would notice Neville and his friends were gone quickly.
And if the Longbottoms had a safehouse somewhere that only members of the family could access—fairly common in the old and paranoid pure-blood lines—then Albus might never find Neville until long after the political questions had been decided.
“Neville is safe?”
“I don’t know,” Albus said instantly. Those were the first words Augusta had spoken since Albus and the Aurors had taken her into custody. “I need to know. That’s why I need you to tell me where he might have gone.”
Augusta frowned a little and touched the upper button of her robe. “Why should I reveal something I don’t know myself?”
“But you would know the location of all the Longbottom safehouses.”
Augusta seemed to muse a moment. “I want to know if Neville is safe right now before I reveal anything to you.”
Albus exhaled a small breath of relief. This sounded promising. “I can’t tell you that, not for sure. What I know is that he fled the school on brooms with his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. They turned south, the last we saw them. I know that the Aurors didn’t manage to Stun them, and Neville was safely balanced on the broom the last time I saw him.”
Augusta nodded distantly. Then she looked up, and Albus found himself recoiling a little at the hatred like a beacon in her eyes.
“I wondered,” said Augusta, “about the wisdom of entrusting Neville to you, when I saw the way you were having him trained. But I knew there was little chance Neville would survive the war if left on his own, so I allowed it. I wanted him to live more than I wanted him to grow up with an untroubled childhood.
“But now I see that he really is just a political pawn. You’ve been spending more time on rousing the Order of the Phoenix lately than you have on keeping the school safe. Act like the Headmaster you are, Albus, not a war general!”
Albus couldn’t get his breath to speak before Augusta spun the button on the top of her robes hard. There was a stomach-twisting spiral of colors, and Albus didn’t manage to lunge forwards quickly enough. Augusta dissolved and vanished, spirited away by the Portkey they’d never thought to search for.
He’d never thought she was that cunning.
Albus lowered his head and closed his eyes. Their confrontation with Umbridge, which he’d planned for this evening, was ruined. Aurors all over the castle meant it couldn’t proceed as he had wanted, and Dolores was indeed strutting around, not knowing why the Aurors were here but relishing in their apparent support.
He was losing the war.
And because of selfish boys and selfish old women who will not see that I may not be a war general in any formal fashion, but this way is the only hope we have of winning the war. If the Horcruxes are real…
Albus sighed out, and prepared to pick up the pieces and salvage what he could from them. He would still win the war.
But it was so much harder now, and so many more lives would be lost.
Selfish old woman.
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The Art of Self-Fashioning