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The Art of Self-Fashioning	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 26077 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
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Chapter Forty-Eight—Dark Answers
Regulus turned to face him. His face was pale and his eyes dark-set and shining. Harry watched him carefully for a second. Then he decided Regulus’s similarity to Snape in the seconds before he had attacked was only coincidence, and moved carefully to the side and away from the doorway, standing near a chair.
He didn’t sit down. He didn’t want to be taken off-guard if Regulus moved suddenly. He didn’t want to show that he was forgiving Regulus and this was casual, either.
It seemed like he wouldn’t get an answer, for long enough that Harry considered leaving. Then Regulus closed his eyes and said, “You know that I’d rejected the Dark Lord long before he returned, this—last time.”
Harry nodded, but said nothing. Hiding a Horcrux in his house didn’t really seem like rejecting Lord Dudders, at least not enough for Harry to trust him without an explanation.
I wouldn’t even give him this much of a chance if it wasn’t him. Or Professor McGonagall, although I can’t picture her doing anything like this.
“The Horcrux was part of that rejection.” Regulus opened his eyes and sighed. “I thought—I didn’t realize what it was. I knew it was important to him, and that he’d linked his soul to it somehow. But I thought it was a Deathless Box, which by definition you can only have one of it. I assumed that if I stole it and destroyed it, then he would be mortal again, and someone could easily kill him.”
“Assume that I don’t know what a Deathless Box is.” And Harry didn’t. He’d only learned as much as he knew about Horcruxes because Neville had told him what had been inside Nagini.
“It’s a tactic to cheat death that a lot of legendary sorcerers used.” Regulus sounded tired, and his face was still too pale. At the moment, though, Harry was more concerned about other things than whether he was going to faint. “You take something out of your body, in the legend, and hide it somewhere so that no one can touch it. It’s usually your heart. You can’t die, you can’t even be partially destroyed the way the Dark Lord was when he confronted Longbottom, until someone finds the box and takes your heart out. I just thought he’d used his soul instead of his heart.”
“Why did you think it was a Deathless Box instead of a Horcrux? And why only one?”
Regulus snorted breathlessly and opened his eyes. “I knew the Dark Lord was mad, but I didn’t think he was that mad. Splitting your soul into seven pieces? And making a Horcrux splits the soul. I didn’t think he wanted to do that, either. Just take his whole soul out of his body and put it in another place. I also thought that was why he demonstrated so little mercy. Because he didn’t have any of the softer emotions or greater depths that a soul is usually said to symbolize.”
Harry watched him closely, and then nodded. He supposed he was telling the truth, and he couldn’t really blame Regulus for getting Lord Dudders’s disgusting secret wrong. No one else had suspected it, either, unless Dumbledore knew for certain that Neville was a Horcrux and there were others. “Fine. But you couldn’t destroy this Horcrux.”
“No,” Regulus whispered. “No matter how much I tried. And the longer I kept trying, the more it—influenced me. Everything from horrific visions of my own death if I didn’t stop trying to temptations of wealth and power if I helped it. When I woke up from what I thought was a dream with my own hand holding a knife to my throat, I decided it was time to put the bloody thing away and stop messing with it. I always thought that at least I would have the Dark Lord’s Deathless Box under my control instead of in the trapped place where it was, and this way I could take care of it if I ever figured out a way.”
Harry nodded his head slowly. “There’s at least one way. Neville destroyed what must have been another Horcrux with a basilisk fang.”
“And where am I going to get one of those?”
“Where are we going to get it,” Harry corrected, wondering in what dreams of delusion Regulus thought he would be destroying the Horcrux alone. “And the answer is Hogwarts. I’m not completely sure, but I think that’s where the goldcrests went. So we have to go there anyway to destroy a Horcrux. We might as well get basilisk fangs while we’re there.”
Regulus stared at him, and snorted. “We’re going to walk into the heart of Dumbledore’s power?”
“It’s not just the heart of his power,” Harry said. “Professor McGonagall knows the castle really well. She hasn’t been there as long as Dumbledore—”
“And the ghosts and portraits don’t obey her, either!”
“We’re not going to walk through the front door,” Harry said. “Do you think the portraits and the ghosts actually pay attention to every little scuttling ant or mouse that moves past them?”
“I think Dumbledore is going to be on high alert, after what he knows about you.”
“He doesn’t know everything about me. Neither does Lord Dudders. I’m going to use the small creatures they don’t pay attention to, the ones who can escape their notice and cause lots of trouble, the way I used the birds.”
Regulus nodded slowly. “And what about your parents? Dumbledore might go and take them into custody if he does realize what we’re doing. Even if it’s after we’ve left with the Horcrux and the fang. He could justify it for the greater good the way he always does.”
The thick bitterness in his voice made Harry pause, wondering if Regulus had spoken to Dumbledore recently and he didn’t know about it. But it could be old, and he trusted Regulus enough to think that he would at least get more warning if Regulus was going to betray him. “I have plans for them.”
“What are they? Oh, come on,” Regulus added, when Harry hesitated. “You’re comfortable telling me all the rest of your plans but not this one? I can’t disapprove of it more than I did the idea of going to Hogwarts.”
Harry shrugged, because he thought that was actually perfectly possible, but said, “I don’t want to move my parents. That would alert Dumbledore, the way you said, and I don’t want them in the same house as me for right now. It would make Lord Dudders more likely to attack and kill both of us.”
“You think he won’t come after us sooner or later?”
“Maybe. But so far, he wants to pretend to negotiate and play mind games.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Set up a warning system that will prevent anything but simple cleaning spells and the like from being cast on them,” Harry said. “I thought about sending animals to protect them, but they’re a lot more likely to be noticed in St. Mungo’s than Hogwarts. I thought I would ask you and Professor McGonagall if you knew a spell like that.”
Regulus blinked slowly. “I do. Though it would involve going into St. Mungo’s to cast it.”
“And you don’t have any Polyjuice Potions stored? Or disguise charms you could use?”
Regulus laughed shortly. “Once you decided to let other people help you, you didn’t look back, did you?”
“This is the kind of thing I thought you wanted me to do. Rely on human help and not do it all myself. Was I wrong?” He might have been, Harry thought. Regulus had reacted strangely after Snape attacked Harry, too. If he was going to back out and become unreliable, then Harry would rather know now, when he wasn’t yet relying on the git for too much.
Regulus shut his eyes and breathed out. “No. It only—this is so much risk, and sometimes untried magic, at least talking about what you want to do with the Horcruxes.”
“My birds found them, and I know a basilisk fang has been tried on Horcruxes. What about it is new?”
“Destroying Horcruxes at all? Although I suppose I could say the Dark Lord making more than one of them was also new.”
“At one point, anyway,” Harry said, and wondered at Regulus’s stifled laugh. Well, as long as he was going to help, Harry didn’t need to understand absolutely everything Regulus did. “Will you help me?”
“Yes.”
Satisfied, Harry turned to leave the room. But he paused when Regulus whispered, “There was a time when I thought I wouldn’t.”
“After Snape attacked me?”
“I would say, after you attacked Snape.”
Harry only waited. They weren’t going to agree on that, and it truly wasn’t worth arguing about. Now that Snape had been punished, nothing about him was.
Regulus leaned forwards a little. “I thought I wouldn’t be able to look past that. It seemed to show a rather extreme lack of compassion, and I thought that perhaps you would turn on other allies. But you showed you didn’t. You really only want to inflict as much pain on people as they did on you, don’t you?”
“Not even always that,” Harry said. “The Dursleys are still alive.”
Regulus smiled in a way that made it seem as if he’d peeled the rest of his face away from behind his lips. “But with most people, you would leave them alone. There are only a few you would truly sacrifice yourself for, but also only a few that you would want to hurt.”
Harry considered that from a couple of different angles, to see if it was one of those statements Regulus made sometimes that were traps, but couldn’t see how it would be. “I suppose that’s true.”
“I can respect that,” Regulus said. “It’s not the way most people work, but we’ve established that you like your animal side.”
Harry nodded, pleased that Regulus understood him better than before. That should keep him from any misguided attempts to make Harry do something he wanted. “That’s it.”
Regulus gave another smile, but Harry couldn’t tell everything that was behind it. “I’ll need to look up the spell that you want me to cast in your parents’ room to make sure I remember all the specifics. And a ritual would probably work better.”
“I leave the details up to you.”
The smile fell away from Regulus’s face at once, but Harry didn’t get the feeling that he’d failed another of those invisible tests. Instead, Regulus seemed stunned by something. Harry studied him, but didn’t get an answer. In the end, he shrugged and left.
They all had things to do, and it was pointless to spend more time getting in each other’s way.
*
“He trusted me with protecting his parents, Minerva.”
Minerva nodded slowly. She hadn’t seen what the problem, or rather the indicator of the deep change in Harry, was until Regulus had explained it to her. But now she could better understand the way he hunched over the book in front of him and copied down instructions with an almost fanatical look in his eyes.
With Harry spreading his trust around, and relaxing his hold on his deepest obsession, it was worth doing.
“Did he say where the other Horcruxes were, other than here and in Hogwarts?” she asked, watching the way Regulus’s hand turned white-knuckled on his quill.
“No.”
Minerva bit her lip thoughtfully. She wanted to say that she had any good ideas, but she didn’t. She supposed she would have to wait for Harry and his birds to show the way.
“And the children going with us…?” Minerva knew Regulus wouldn’t think she was referring to Harry.
He turned to her with a slightly impatient glance. “I’m assuming you can keep them safe. Or me or Harry’s animals, come to that. They aren’t to attempt any heroics. I don’t think Boot would, anyway, but I’m not sure about your Gryffindors.”
“Gryffindors are not reckless merely by design,” Minerva said, the desire to defend her House snapping taut in her chest like a string.
Regulus snorted and didn’t look up again from his book, even when Minerva left the library and climbed the stairs to her own room.
She met Terry Boot on the stairs. He paused with his eyes traveling back and forth between her and a nearby door that Minerva thought led to a room no one was using. She blinked and waited for him to speak what was obviously on his mind.
“Can I talk to you, Professor?” he asked finally.
“Of course.” Minerva waited, and sure enough, Terry opened the door and led her into it. She supposed it might have been a sitting room once, but now it was more like a storage room, crowded with old chairs and sagging couches and tapestries that looked as if they had been shredded by doxies. Terry perched on the edge of a tilting table and stared at her.
Minerva cast a spell that removed dust from one of the couches and Transfigured a cushion from a dangling tassel attached to nothing. That served to cover one of the enormous cracks in the couch. When she leaned forwards, Terry nodded and swallowed.
“I just want to know if we’re going to have to fight—You-Know-Who.”
His voice shrank like a mouse in front of the cat. Minerva only shook her head, though, ignoring the instinct to pounce. “No. Not if you don’t want to. There’s no stopping Harry from doing it, and I think Mr. Longbottom has a part to play in this, however much Harry might not want him to.” Or how much he might not want to, but Minerva decided to leave that unsaid. Neville had seemed a little calmer lately, which might be the influence of having allies. “But the rest of you can stay behind.”
Terry shifted restlessly on the table. “That doesn’t make me feel very courageous.”
“If we must go by House stereotypes, Mr. Boot, you don’t have to fear not living up to the Gryffindor ideal of courage.” She thought Hermione and Ron were incredibly afraid of that, from some of the things they’d said to her since coming here.
“But Harry is! And Neville!”
“Neville has a role in this that he didn’t choose,” Minerva pointed out quietly. “And as far as Harry…you can’t tell me that you think you’re the same as him, Mr. Boot.”
“No.” Terry curled one hand into a slow fist. “But I want to do something. I want to go on the Horcrux hunt. I want to stand beside him. I want to make it clear that I’m someone he can depend on, not someone he has to protect.”
Minerva privately thought Terry wouldn’t rise to that level, at least in this war, but she knew better than to discourage him by saying it. Besides, one of the things she had learned through long years of teaching was that your students could surprise you, if you gave them a quarter of a chance. She nodded. “There are a few things I think you could do for him. For example, do any of his animals obey other people?”
Terry looked up with a slightly open mouth. “I can pet Spellmaker and Cross. And sometimes Yar will consent to be in the same room with me.”
Minerva snorted. She didn’t think Harry’s eagle would let anyone except Harry fly her. “What you can do is carry around some of the smaller animals that he’ll probably conjure to help him in this battle. Insects, mice, the like. As long as you don’t mind—”
“It’s girls who are scared of mice and bugs,” Terry interrupted her, with such a tone of scorn that Minerva abruptly remembered being fifteen. “Not boys. I’ll be fine.”
“Then you’ll have to talk to Harry, since I’m not sure any of the small animals he has now will consent to being used by anyone other than him,” Minerva told him, and didn’t even have the chance to stand before Terry pelted past her and down the stairs.
Minerva smiled, and went to find Hermione and Ron. She thought they were probably nursing the same doubts, but she would have to talk about being helpful to Neville, instead of Harry, whom they tolerated but didn’t trust or like.
And she would need to impress the need for staying back and letting the adults—and Harry—handle the Horcruxes, too.
As much as she didn’t want to admit it, Gryffindor stereotypes were sometimes true.
*
Harry quietly shut the door to the cell behind him. Nagini, sulking in the corner of the cage, snapped towards him, but stopped when she saw it was him and not Neville. Her tongue flickered out, and she watched him with unmoving eyes as he walked nearer.
Harry had his plans. He was going to protect his parents. He was going to destroy the Horcruxes. He was going to use Bellatrix and Lucius—and perhaps some of the other captured Death Eaters, although they hadn’t been as high-ranking and didn’t have as much of Lord Dudders’s Wild wound into their Marks—in trials to further perfect a way of healing his parents.
But he also knew they would have to fight Lord Dudders even when the Horcruxes were destroyed. And he had to make sure that something happened to make that easier.
Harry sat down on the floor in front of Nagini and closed his eyes. He would need several tries to make this come out right, he reminded himself. This was only a first experiment. He would have other chances, in and around the Horcrux hunts.
At the same time, he thought he should be able to get this right the first time. What was this but another, finer rendition of things he had already accomplished?
Finer may make the difference.
The krait stirred in his pocket. Harry soothed it back to sleep, and then went back to breathing, meditating, considering. His main problem was that he couldn’t immediately think of something to Transfigure his desired creature from. It was going to be so tiny. What could be made into it?
Perhaps I should worry about even having the ability to create it first, before I worry about what I’m going to make it from.
That seemed sensible, and Harry let his breathing slow down even more. He’d been reading a little, the way he had books about songbirds when they were what he wanted to make, but he honestly hadn’t found many helpful books. The Blacks were a traditional pure-blood family—not helpful in this case. And although Harry could study some of the general characteristics of the family of creatures he wanted to make, he really needed something unique, something that would cause devastation in a way even detailed books wouldn’t have told him about.
He began to picture the consequences he wanted. Time-delayed, so that Lord Dudders wouldn’t notice what he had on his hands until Neville was ready to confront him. Under Harry’s control even when it was separated from him, which it would have to be. Able to thrive in the body of a snake, because Nagini would be its host.
I’m going to have to design more than the object that I want to make this out of. I’m going to have to design the incantation.
Harry nodded. Of course. He had always made creatures that existed, before. He still had to work out how to hold all the traits he wanted in his imagination and touch the Wild, but once he knew what animal he wanted, he could slot its Latin name into the incantation.
This is going to take some work.
But he might as well make a preliminary test. Harry opened his eyes and took a beetle leg out of his pocket, placing it on the floor. It was too large, but he would begin with it for now. Then he marshalled all the thoughts that he’d just been training himself to think, all the traits he wanted his new creature to have.
“Commuto bracchium cacoethem!”
The air in front of him shimmered, and Harry saw a flicker of that shimmer, like heat, like growing dusk, settle around the beetle leg. Maybe this was going to work, or at least do something, on the first try, after all.
But the shimmer faded, and Harry nodded. He needed to work on his imagining of the characteristics for his killer as well as the incantation, probably.
He stood up and left the room, ignoring what were probably calls in Parseltongue behind him. Nagini could wait. He had someone else he wanted to visit.
*
Severus turned his head to focus on the door when it began to open. His hands curled. Every movement he made, nearly, reminded him that he had only one functional eye, and would only ever have one again.
Unless he managed to escape and get to Healers, or to the Dark Lord…
But no, the Dark Lord would not be forgiving of failure. He would as soon kill Severus as help him heal his eye.
Although killing me might be more merciful than the life I am forced to live now.
Potter stepped inside and looked at him with those silent, cat-like eyes. Severus wondered how he could ever have thought they were similar to Lily’s. They were a wild beast’s eyes, and nothing else. He wondered why neither Minerva nor Black could see that. He had thought they were both smarter.
Then again, he had also once thought he could rely on someone other than himself.
“Ready to leave, Snape?”
Severus jerked. “What—”
“Lord Dudders asked for a present. I chose you to be my token of good faith.”
The beast didn’t even say it with a smirk. This wasn’t humor. This was seriousness. And Severus was still staring when Potter reached out, cast a Full Body-Bind on Severus, and then pulled him out of the room.
He poured something into Severus’s pockets before he floated him up the stairs. Severus doubted it was Floo powder.
But he could do nothing but remain motionless, behind Potter, as the boy took him up into the sky, and draped him over the tail bristles of a broom, and flew off with him in the direction of the sunrise.
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The Art of Self-Fashioning