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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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Fifty-Four—The Shack
“That’s why I think it would be better if we went by ourselves.”
Minerva had already intended to Apparate Harry to the new Horcrux he sensed as soon as he mentioned going by themselves, but she’d held quiet to let him make his argument. It hadn’t been long, and it was as calm as always. Now she nodded and stood up from the sitting chair in the kitchen. “If we go now, we can probably be back before dark.”
“And use the basilisk fang on the Horcrux?” Harry followed her to the front of the house.
“Either that or Fiendfyre, if we can find an area that will ensure it won’t spread. Or enchant one.” Minerva could hardly believe the Blacks wouldn’t have the capability to do that. It was Dark magic that would contain Dark magic, of course, which was probably part of the reason Regulus hadn’t volunteered the details.
“Of course.”
Harry seemed silent and thoughtful, so Minerva led the way outside until they could get beyond the protections. Then she took a careful scan of the immediate environment. She’d learned to do that during the first war, and it was saddening how quickly the old habits came back.
She stiffened. There was the sensation of someone there, someone under a heavy Disillusionment Charm and a number of spells meant to deflect attention from the user. Minerva had incanted, without thought, a spell that would identify someone with a human scent hiding nearby, although it wouldn’t let her actually smell them unless she was in her feline form.
“What is it?” Harry spoke into her ear, his voice so soft that his mice probably couldn’t hear. His words were passionless.
“Someone under several charms to hide him. But only one person.” Would You-Know-Who have left a single sentry on the house? Minerva couldn’t imagine what use it would be. It might tell him who had left, but not where they had gone.
“Ahh,” said Harry, in a strangely satisfied way, and made a sharp motion with one hand. Minerva recoiled as that grey cat leaped to his shoulder and stared at her. Spellmaker, Harry called her. Minerva had tried to communicate with her once, and had received only a strangely disturbing, wooden response. Perhaps not a surprise in a cat made from a wand, but still.
“Why that one?”
“She can smell him. I assume the charm you used included the smell? And she knows how to part wizards from their wands.”
“It includes the smell,” said Minerva reluctantly, and cast it again. Spellmaker leaned forwards, her whiskers twitching. Then she leaped off Harry’s shoulder and sprinted into the darkness. Harry followed her, a faint smile on his face.
I wonder if he enjoys hunting or if it’s just the sensation of catching an enemy? Or following his cat?
Spellmaker halted before what looked like an ordinary patch of grass and darkness, but it immediately started moving when she meowed. Harry had his wand out in instants, casting a Stunning Charm that made a human-shaped figure flare red for a second. Then it fell over, rustling.
Minerva cast the necessary Finite and a few more complicated spells to end all the defensive magic their intruder had himself wrapped in. She thought Harry probably could have done it as well, but he seemed content to stand still and let her manage.
The spells whispered away to reveal a figure not much taller than Neville, with hair so pale that Minerva knew who it was at once.
“Why would Malfoy come here, do you think? Some attempt to rescue his father?” she asked, glancing at Harry.
Harry was still caught in what seemed like a web of private amusement. “Lord Dudders gave him some task after he killed Snape. This was probably it. Either to watch me or get revenge on me. And it was clever as far as it went. Regulus told me he has Black blood, so he could come this close without alerting the wards.” Harry snapped his wand up and down, and Malfoy went floating into the air, his head dangling. Minerva was the one who cast the cushioning charm under his cheek and kept his neck level. Harry nodded at her and marched back to the house. “Let me deposit him in the dungeon with the others, and then we can Apparate.”
Minerva shivered a little. “The dungeon with the others” was the sort of phrase she had once thought only a Death Eater would utter.
Then again, I should have stopped expecting “normal” the minute I found out what Harry could do.
*
They had to make several jumps across Britain, pausing and then listening to the song of the birds and readjusting their direction. Harry, already braced against the weight of Yar on his shoulder, didn’t mind it too much, but he knew Professor McGonagall was tiring. He touched her arm in reassurance as they appeared near the outskirts of a tiny village. “This is the place.”
“I certainly hope so.”
Harry hid a smile, launched Yar into the air with a twitch of his shoulder, and moved towards the noise of birdsong. The wrens had flown here, and the goldcrests, and other tiny birds, and they filled the air so persistently that Harry couldn’t make out individual notes.
The shack was smaller than he had thought it would be, and he hesitated. Would Lord Dudders have hidden a Horcrux in a place like this?
Then he shook his head, and recovered himself. Of course he would have. Otherwise, he had to doubt the birds, and he wouldn’t do that.
The door hung inwards, the partial skeleton of some small animal still clinging to it. Harry sent his krait in first and then kicked the door, harder than he could have without the kangaroo muscles in his leg.
Nothing came charging out at them. The birds crowded to the edges of the roof and began to sing harder than ever, though.
Harry followed the krait’s trail through the dust with his eyes. There were decaying remnants of furniture, so far gone that Harry couldn’t tell what had been a bed and what a chair. There were the remnants of an iron ring in the floor, and Harry silently marked it. He might look there for the Horcrux if he didn’t find another hiding place.
Cobwebs covered the walls, and Harry sensed the small, pulsing Wild of spiders withdrawing from them. There were also some beetles in the corners and here and there a place where a snake must have come to grab a meal. No sign of mice or rats, though. Harry found that interesting.
“Harry? Can’t you feel that Dark magic?”
Harry glanced over his shoulder, perplexed, only to find that Professor McGonagall was standing behind a veil of sticky black strands that stretched across the entrance to the cottage. He squinted and saw how pale her face was. She was probably seeing something other than the broken, decaying mess Harry did.
“I can feel it now,” Harry said. And he could. Freeing his senses from the maze of the Wild revealed yet another pulsing source of power. It felt like a Horcrux and a void both at once, the way the Death Eaters’ Dark Marks had. Harry cocked his head. Why was this Horcrux so different from the diadem?
It has an extra trap guarding it. That had to be it. Lord Dudders had probably thought the diadem was secure enough in the Room of Requirement, but this shack was more out in the open and might have people straying into it.
“How could you pass through that Dark magic without even noticing it?”
“It’s probably meant to keep humans out, and it considers me an animal. There are plenty of other animals here,” Harry muttered, absently. He was more interested, at the moment, in seeing if he could figure the trap out before he actually had to spring it.
“It might be a good idea to retreat and come back with Regulus. He understands more Dark magic than I do.”
Harry didn’t bother to reply. He would have let either Professor McGonagall or Regulus Apparate him here; he would have ignored either person’s advice to retreat.
“Harry? Can’t you feel it?”
“I feel something.” And Harry wished she would be quiet and let him get on with identifying it. Miraculously, Professor McGonagall did fall silent, but Harry could feel the tension radiating from behind him as he crept towards the corner with the thickest webs.
The trap, or feeling of the Horcrux, seemed to be coming from beneath the floor after all, but not the board where the large iron ring was fastened. Harry knelt down delicately and ignored the temptation to reach out. Instead, he Summoned a large puff of dusty web and Transfigured it into a black widow spider, then sent it scuttling across the floorboard.
The spider passed back and forth with no sign of trouble. Harry sat on his heels and nodded in response to Professor McGonagall asking, “Did that do anything?”
“No. He probably wouldn’t have wanted to use a spell that would kill large numbers of animals, after all. Someone might have got curious.” Harry reached out a steady hand and cupped it around the air above his spider.
“Harry!”
“I’m just feeling the Wild that comes from it,” Harry said. The corrupt, greasy feel of it was nothing new, but woven through it was the trap. Harry tilted his hand back and forth, letting the sensation cascade through him like water in a tube. Back and forth, back and forth, and he thought he might be able to separate out the Horcrux from the trap if he concentrated long enough.
Professor McGonagall shuffled further into the shack behind him, but Harry honestly didn’t pay her much attention. This was the thing he had to do, and he was going to concentrate on doing it.
Then Professor McGonagall parted the strands of the black web that hung in the air behind him, and gasped a little as she apparently saw the true interior of the house.
And the trap sprang.
Harry saw the black, slimy thing uncoiling from beneath the floor, and jumped out of the way without even thinking about it. The trap went sailing on towards Professor McGonagall, still a blur of black and grey magic and Wild, and Harry shot his hand out and squeezed around its Wild as hard as he could.
He managed to catch some of it, but not the rest. The rest drizzled out as hissing dark acid on the floorboards of the shack. Professor McGonagall backed away, staring, and blinking hard at the trembling thing in Harry’s hand.
Harry focused on it. It did have boundaries, but they blurred again almost the instant that he focused on them. He clasped his hand down and felt the sting beginning to creep into his veins. He immediately loosened it and backed away, breathing hard.
He had to crush it with nothing but his Wild, or it would poison him and probably kill him.
Harry leaned in, staring as hard at the shifting thing as he could. His mind leaped and bounded among memories. Forcing his own will into the void that lurked in Bellatrix’s Dark Mark. Unraveling Snape’s Mark with the help of Spellmaker. Manipulating Bellatrix to call on her deep magic. Finding the other Horcrux.
He would destroy this Horcrux with Fiendfyre or the basilisk fang. Whatever he needed. Whatever mattered. And no trap that was only in the way in the first place because of tainted magic was going to stop him.
The thing coiled tighter and tighter in on itself, like a nautilus shell. Harry didn’t touch it, because he wasn’t stupid. He simply knelt there and stared. The fist of his intent pushed and crushed the tainted Wild, into a closer and closer space, and—
It exploded finally, unable to bear any more of the crushing.
Harry was ready for that, and he leaped on Professor McGonagall and carried her to the ground. She went with a grunt, and luckily without trying to Transfigure him into something boneless. Harry held her still until the waves of horrid Dark power passed over them and died away.
He sat up, panting a little and with his eyes closed. He was weak enough that he had to drag his hands along the floor on knuckles like an ape.
“How did you know that you could save me from that, Harry?” Professor McGonagall’s voice was shaky.
“I didn’t know for certain,” Harry murmured, telling the truth before he thought about it. “But I knew where the trajectory of the released Wild was going to go, and I thought it would be a good idea not to be in its path.”
She was silent for a moment, breathing and thinking who knew what thoughts. She finally nodded. “Thank you, Harry.”
Harry tilted his head a little as he forced his eyes open. “Welcome.”
The floorboards were quiescent now, and Harry only had to watch as Professor McGonagall floated them up and then floated the Horcrux beneath them out. The birds’ song increased in intensity as it hung in the middle of the room. It was a ring, with a large stone on it carved with some sort of symbol.
“It feels so powerful,” Professor McGonagall whispered, staring at the thing. “Like it wants to be worn…” And she actually moved it towards her finger, as if she was going to put it on.
“Professor!”
Harry’s shout startled her badly enough that she dropped the ring. She blinked at where it lay on the floor for a moment. Then she paled dramatically and moved backwards. “What made me almost do that?” she whispered into the straining silence.
“A spell,” said Harry, and sent some of his ants to pick the ring up the way they had the basilisk fang. At least an ant couldn’t be tempted into putting it on. “Or perhaps a remnant of the trap I killed. The desire to connect with the kind of Wild that could be in that stone would be a simple thing for Lord Dudders to weave around the stone itself.”
“I don’t feel anything.”
“I don’t think most people would who hadn’t spent their lives training with it.” Harry stood up slowly and shambled over to the ring as his ants formed themselves into an arrow pointing at the door. “And now, I think, we ought to leave.”
They stumbled out of the shack’s door. Harry didn’t bother closing it behind them, but left it propped half-open. He turned back to found that Professor McGonagall had gone stiller than the stone in the ring.
Lord Dudders stood on the other side of the clearing from them, his robes not stirring any more than his eyes.
Harry was too weak to do much to resist him. But one thing he could do. The birds on the shack’s roof had gone silent the instant Harry moved the Horcrux out the door. He concentrated as hard as he could on what he wanted them to do, and then whistled.
The storm of small birds swept down from the shack’s roof and straight towards the ants. Lord Dudders didn’t have time to react before they curled around the ring and carried it off towards the horizon. Harry knew they would share the weight among themselves so that no one would get too tired and drop it.
Harry smiled. “Checkmate.”
Lord Dudders responded with a fist of magic that crushed him as Harry had crushed the trap around the Horcrux. Harry dropped back to his knees, but kept his eyes open and his head unbowed. Lord Dudders wouldn’t kill him, not until he knew for sure where Harry’s birds had carried his Horcrux.
And pain was nothing to be afraid of.
*
Minerva was shivering as she forced herself slowly forwards against the overwhelming cold. You-Know-Who wasn’t paying attention to her at the moment, entirely focused on Harry. But she knew it was up to her to stop him. Harry wasn’t only caught; he was magically exhausted from his battle with whatever the trap around the ring had really been.
She had to.
But fear still gripped her and made her want to freeze, with the primitive instinct that told prey to hold still, and predators wouldn’t be able to see them.
I am not prey, Minerva told herself, and gripped her wand. There were Transfigurations she had rarely performed in the last twenty years because they weren’t appropriate ones to teach children. She still knew how to do them, though, the potential resting in her fingers and wand.
Minerva blew out the fear until her mind was as pure as the inside of a crystal, the way that the Transfiguration professors she had studied with insisted it needed to be. Then she twitched her wand and launched the spell that she remembered once struggling so hard to master.
The incantation was non-verbal only, and it came welling up from the level of her heart and echoed around inside her skull.
Commuto ossem aquam.
The spell whistled out of her, an invisible, rippling wave of power—which was another advantage in the situation, Minerva thought in the crystalline portion of herself—and struck You-Know-Who. It had no effect for a moment, and Minerva swallowed. Perhaps the long years she had gone without practicing the spell had weakened it.
Then You-Know-Who screamed and clutched at his hand. Minerva backed a step away in sheer reaction to the noise, her stomach bubbling. But then his yew wand fell to the ground, and she knew she had succeeded.
You-Know-Who could not wield his wand if he had no hands to wield it, because his fingerbones were literally turning to water and sloshing around inside his skin.
Minerva didn’t hesitate. If she was going to die to protect Harry, she would do that gladly. She snatched the yew wand from the ground, because she suspected he would have anti-Summoning Charms on it, and began to run around the shack.
She heard the sound of him coming after her, the sound of him hissing, and suspected he was summoning snakes to help.
Minerva immediately clamped both wands, hers and You-Know-Who’s, between her teeth, and changed to cat form. Then she leaped to the roof of the shack, and after that to the nearest tree. There she clung, eyeing the next tree. It was within leaping distance, if barely, but that would be useless if she couldn’t make sure of where the snakes were coming from.
There was a writhing nest at the base of the shack’s wall, but they started slithering towards the tree she clung to as she watched. Minerva turned her back with a little flirt of her tail, and sprang towards the distant tree, claws out. She had to get as far away as she could with the wand before she circled back to help Harry.
She was soaring through the air when a wandless Stunner hit her.
Minerva felt her body relax, her head droop; a Stunner was more effective on her in feline form because she was smaller. She started to fall, and wondered, as the last remnants of consciousness left her, how long it would take her to die from the snakes’ venom.
She thought she felt something close around her, and wondered for a second why You-Know-Who had summoned constrictors instead before she dropped into the darkness.
*
Harry felt Lord Dudders’s magic release him, and he immediately threw his head back and screamed as harshly and as hard as he could.
He felt the air far above him stir. Then Yar began to slant down towards the battlefield, and Harry sent her wheeling towards Professor McGonagall to help her in any way she could. He trusted his eagle to make her mind up about how to do that.
Harry turned to face Lord Dudders, and saw him twisting his hands back and forth. It seemed he had managed to halt the Transfiguration, but his hands were useless, liquefying bags. Harry smiled at him.
Lord Dudders stared at him with hatred that was oppressive in its own way. Harry didn’t mind, though. He had a much more patient and poisonous hatred inside him, and he had accomplished several things already that Lord Dudders didn’t know about.
Well, now he knew that Harry knew about the Horcruxes. But that didn’t really matter. The only thing he might do in response was to tighten the guards around the last Horcrux in Diagon Alley, or remove it from its custody and keep it with him. And if that Horcrux was where Harry thought it was, the first option wouldn’t make much of a difference, and the second might actually help him.
“I do not understand it,” Lord Dudders hissed.
Harry only managed to understand him with intense concentration, because that really was nearly Parseltongue. “You don’t understand what?”
“How I could have marked one boy, and yet a different one is so much more effective in opposing me.”
“I understand. You only look at the surface instead of down deep, and that limits you. It’s probably why you aren’t as good at Transfiguration as I am.”
Lord Dudders started to answer, and then abruptly snapped his head to the side and cast a wandless Stunner with his eyes alone. Harry didn’t look. He had to assume it had probably hit Professor McGonagall, but he had also heard the air disturbed by wings.
Then Lord Dudders roared in incredulous anger, and Harry nodded. Yes, Yar had caught Professor McGonagall and carried her away. He was sure he had seen her blurring into cat form from the corner of his eye. The fact that another wandless Stunner didn’t try to catch his eagle proved to Harry that Lord Dudders had made an immense effort to use that kind of magic through his eyes and didn’t want to try again.
Weak, said a part of Harry that didn’t often speak. He nodded in response. They both were.
Lord Dudders faced him again. “You are not afraid.”
“I’m afraid of what’s proper. But what’s the use of fearing you?”
Harry only meant it as an explanation, not an insult, but Lord Dudders moved a lurching step towards him, before he stopped and stared at his arms. Harry laughed aloud. So Lord Dudders had only halted the Transfiguration, not reversed it. And his hands were growing more and more shapeless the longer he waited.
The snake-creature lifted its head and stared straight at him. Harry looked back, calmly. He wasn’t that afraid of his mind being read. Regulus had said it was harder than he’d expected, because so much of Harry’s mind was folded around his parents and was like an animal’s.
“I will destroy you. I will reduce your teacher to charred bones and scraps of skin. I will burn the Black house down around your other ally’s ears. I will crack open your parents’ bones and feast on the marrow.”
Harry only inclined his head a little. That meant he would need to move his parents as soon as possible, and to hell with the consequences of sneaking into St. Mungo’s.
“You are still unafraid.”
“What would be the use?”
Lord Dudders snarled, and windlessly Apparated out, shaking his hands once as if to emphasize that it was only Professor McGonagall’s use of Transfiguration that had made him leave. Harry didn’t care. He’d left, and that was what was important.
Yar circled back and settled with Professor McGonagall clutched in her talons. Harry noticed the talons had cut small bleeding wounds into the professor’s back, and frowned at his eagle. Yar stared back impassively.
Harry, moving slowly with his own exhaustion, held his wand out and concentrated. He managed to revive Professor McGonagall, who stared at him, dazed.
“Can you transform back to human and either Apparate us home or send a Patronus to Regulus?” Harry asked, with a yawn. “It’s been a long afternoon.”
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The Art of Self-Fashioning