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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 Fifty-Eight--Glimpses
Draco opened his eyes and blinked frantically. He had the impression that he'd been asleep for a long time, and his thoughts were scrambling and confused. What would the Dark Lord say, if he'd missed the chance to rescue his father?
Then he realized he was looking at a dark wall, and there were chains around his ankles and hands that clanked when he moved. And he didn't have his wand.
That should have been your first thought, said a shuddering voice in the back of his head. Draco was forced to ignore it as he whirled around on his knees. He shuddered even more when he saw the cellar wall behind him, creeping with moisture.
"You're younger than the others."
That voice spoke mostly in his nightmares. Draco forced himself to turn around and face the object of them. Potter pushed himself away from the wall and stalked towards him. His eyes shone, vivid and unnaturally wild, in the darkness. Draco brought a hand up as far as he could before the chains snapped him short to shield his head, even knowing it wouldn't do much good.
"I should probably just kill you," Potter said, his voice soft and flat and more terrifying than anything Draco had ever heard. "You'll end up being more of a burden, and not adding enough to my study of the Dark Mark to make it worth keeping you around."
Draco knew he was shivering so hard that it made his chains clang, but he couldn't seem to make himself stop. He braced himself. "Kill me, then. If you're going to do it. Don't stand here and make threats about it."
"You're willing to die when you might have a chance of rescuing your father?"
Draco shivered harder. "What do you mean? You're not just going to let him go."
Potters slid abruptly to one knee, staring at him. The liquid grace of that movement scared the shit out of Draco. He wouldn't have been surprised to see the Dark Lord move like that, or Professor Snape, or another trained warrior among the Death Eaters. Someone this young...
He had no business moving like that.
"No, I'm not. I'm going to make a bargain with you. I'll release you, and release your father in two days, if you do exactly as I tell you. If you deviate from my instructions in any way, then I'll still let you go, but I'll kill your father. And you'll know that you're responsible for letting him die."
Draco made himself stop shivering, but only with a supreme effort of will, the sort he'd never had to exert before. "How can you seem so much more dangerous than the Dark Lord?" He whispered the words without any thought of having them heard or answered.
But Potter did both, his hands stirring up the dust on the floor of the cellar. "Because I care about results. He cares about flouncing around in his dark robes and terrifying people."
Draco thought about the Dark Lord looking into his mind and seeing those words with Legilimency, and he turned his head and vomited on the floor.
Potter Vanished the mess and stood looking at him with motionless eyes. Draco finally snapped, "What do you want, damn it?"
"I want to know if you'll take a message to Lord Dudders and repeat it word-for-word, exactly as I give it to you."
"If he knows that you call him that and he reads the memory from my mind, then he might kill me anyway."
"The bargain is for your freedom and your father's freedom, not for your survival. If you're stupid enough to keep being a Death Eater after this, there's nothing anyone can do for you."
Draco closed his eyes. It was all true, and it made him sick and bitter, worse than the remaining taste of the vomit in the back of his throat. He never should have made an enemy of Harry Potter. That was all he could think of.
"What's the message?"
Potter leaned closer. Draco could hear and smell that much, although at the moment he refused to open his eyes to look at anything else.
"Tell him that I'm coming for him. He killed one of mine. He will suffer. It doesn't matter how long it takes. What matters is the amount of pain. I'll pack it all into one second if I have to. But he will suffer, and suffer, and die."
The word seemed to lift and then fall away into silence. Draco realized he was shivering so hard that his chains were clanking again. He forced his eyes open.
Potter crouched in front of him, eyes malevolent and wild. He cocked his head and lifted his eyebrows at Draco, as though asking silently what reaction Draco would have to the message.
Draco licked his lips and managed, "That's it?"
"The whole thing," Potter confirmed, and then reached out with his wand. Some spell Draco either didn't know or couldn't see severed the chains to either side of him, and the manacles fell down like dust. Draco brought his wrists slowly forward, rubbing them. There were no marks on his wrists, but he could feel them anyway, the tight clasp of where they had been.
"So you don't forget."
Draco stared into Potter's eyes, and wished that he didn't have to. On the other hand, he didn't have the choice and had to sit there as he whispered, "What do you mean? What reminder do I have?"
"That sensation of chains on the wrists will never leave you." Potter's eyebrows crept up, presumably at something in Draco's face that he didn't agree with. "You already were in chains as a Death Eater. This is only a visible sign of what you already chose to go along with."
Draco bowed his head and said nothing. Potter pulled him to his feet by the back of his robes and shoved him urgently towards the door. Draco went, his mind boiling with what the Dark Lord would say to him, what he might do--
No choice. There was never any choice about any of it.
*
Neville watched as Harry gently shut the bedroom door behind himself and then settled down in front of him, eyes quiet. Neville stroked Dapple in his lap and told himself to take courage. Harry made him better, stronger. He wouldn't have come to ask Neville to do something impossible, the way Dumbledore and Snape and even Professor McGonagall had.
(Sometimes Neville still opened his eyes in the morning and lay there wondering why there was a feeling of white sunlight shining inside him. Then he remembered that both Dumbledore and Snape were dead, and he stretched and stood and went about his day).
"You have a Horcrux inside you that I know can't be destroyed with Fiendfyre or basilisk venom, because that would kill you as a living body along with the Horcrux," Harry said quietly. "Regulus suggested you might be immune to basilisk venom since you took that bite and survived it, but we can't be sure since Fawkes cried to save you."
Neville shuddered, and Dapple clasped the side of his hand with his claws. "No, I don't want to risk it," he whispered. He could still remember the cold burn through him, the absolute conviction that he was dead and all his training was for nothing, before Fawkes showed up and wept the tears over his arm.
"We're not going to take the risk," Harry said. His face was calm and his eyes very clear. "What I'm going to ask you to agree to is taking a Killing Curse from Lord Dudders."
"Um, can we go back to Regulus's plan?"
"Of course. If you think he's right and the basilisk venom might be diffused through your veins after all."
Neville shut his eyes. That was the major problem with his friendship with Harry, he thought. He couldn't take a joke, or even recognize humor.
But he was leaving the choice of Neville's fate up to him, which was something Dumbledore and even Gran had never done. It was a horrible fate, but living with the Horcrux was no choice at all.
"I don't think there's a way that I can make myself stand in front of Voldemort when he throws a Killing Curse and not flinch," he finally whispered. He wondered if Harry would understand his cowardice. Sometimes he thought Harry had never felt fear.
"I know. We're going to get you there, and we're going to persuade Lord Dudders that we've come with a messy plan."
"A messy plan," Neville repeated blankly. If that was some kind of code, his training hadn't covered it.
"Yes." Harry's eyes were shining. He poked a hole with his claws in the blanket and then tried to smooth fuzz over it as Dapple hissed at him. "We'll convince him that we're trying something convoluted and daring, and plaster it with a veneer of some way to destroy his Horcruxes but make sure that you survive while playing half a dozen tricks. In reality, we're simply going to hit fast and hard. Get him to destroy his own Horcrux in you, and then kill him."
"We still need the one from the bank," Neville reminded him. It was a measure of the courage Harry had fostered in him that he could say that, could contradict someone he felt in awe of.
"I know. Details. We'll figure it out." Harry didn't look fearless now, but only serene. "We'll have that one gone before we go to hit him. But once we're there, that's really what we'll do. Strike as hard as we can, and make sure that you're in the path of the Killing Curse. That's all you need to do. Once you come back, the way Nagini did, then you're done."
Neville blinked. "What about the fact that I'm supposedly the only one who can kill him?"
"Vanquish, kill, does it matter? Really, the reason that Lord Dudders is still alive is because of the Horcruxes, and that includes the one in you." Harry reached out and held his hand firmly as Neville shuddered. "With that gone, his anchors to life are gone. And that means we can kill him. It never said your hand had to be the one to strike the final blow, only that you were important to destroying him. And you are."
"So who is going to strike the final blow, in your messy plan?"
"I am."
Neville had tried to avoid thinking about what it would be like to be Voldemort. He got enough thoughts and impressions of the monster from what he now knew was the bond with the Horcrux, anyway.
But standing and looking into Harry's eyes, he thought he could feel the terror and rage Voldemort would know in the moments before Harry slaughtered him.
And part of him, the same part that rejoiced each morning about Dumbledore and Snape being dead, coiled in satisfaction.
*
Harry leaned quietly against the outer door of Grimmauld Place, listening, feeling the sky. It was early morning, and no one else was awake. He had trouble seeing the stars with the lights of the great Muggle city all around, but at the moment, it didn't matter. That actually made it easier for him to reach out and feel the song of his birds, if he wasn't getting distracted by trying to trace the patterns of the constellations.
And...there.
Harry smiled a little as he opened his eyes and turned his head to the west. Lord Dudders could move his Horcruxes all he liked. It would take Harry's birds some time, and Lord Dudders had destroyed some of them, but the flocks that were left would fly and fly until they found another one, and then they would sit and sing.
Harry held out a hand, meaning to reach for the broom on the ground beside him, but someone caught it and held it.
"The wisdom I thought you'd acquired? That you would talk to someone before you ran away and tried to kill yourself? I see that I was too optimistic?"
Harry turned and silently bared his teeth at Regulus. Regulus just looked back at him. He was leaning on Harry's broom like it was a pillar, and he shook his head sadly as Harry moved towards him, teeth still bared.
"You're going to destroy the final Horcrux. There's no other reason that you would leave the house right now."
"It needn't concern you."
"It does when you're living in my house and you're determined to kill yourself as much as I'm determined to keep you alive."
"You don't know that I'll die, even if I come into confrontation with Lord Dudders. I might not."
Regulus continued to hold the broom with no sign of letting it go. "I thought you would spend more time with your parents, once you rescued them. Instead, the only thing you've done is linger inside their bedroom a few times."
Harry felt some emotion moving underneath the surface, thick and deep and glowing. He breathed softly so it wouldn't come out as rage, and then he said, "If I tried to tend to them now instead of going to find and end the Horcrux, I would care too much."
"I don't know what that means," said Regulus, with deep earnestness.
"It means I wouldn't want to do anything except heal them. Sit with them. Daydream about how it will be when--" Harry cut himself off. He trusted Regulus more than a lot of other people, enough to call him by his first name, but he trusted no one enough to voice what he'd been about to say. Regulus had that weird quality that made Harry forget sometimes, though. "I have to stay on the path that I'm going to stand on, and find the Horcrux that was in Diagon Alley, and destroy it. Then I'll set up the plan to destroy Lord Dudders and get the Horcrux out of Neville. And then I'll heal my parents."
Regulus listened, nodding a little. Then he leaned the broom against the wall of the house, still far enough behind him that Harry couldn't grab it, and said, "Do you know, you may be the most remarkable person I've ever met."
Harry made a small step to the side. It would be better to Apparate than ride the broom, assuming he could convince Regulus to come with him, but he was rapidly losing faith in his ability to convince him. "You need to move."
"You're remarkable because you focus everything on one goal, and then you go out and do it. Even when I forced you to change your mind about your only goal being your parents, you have that same single-mindedness about the war and destroying the Horcruxes."
"Move."
"But it doesn't mean that you can succeed every time. Only that you've succeeded so far, and some of that was aid from other people and being luckier than I ever knew a person could be." Regulus took a deep breath. "I don't think that you can face the Dark Lord and take away his last Horcrux by yourself, considering what happened when you and Minerva took the ring. You need me."
"You're willing to come with me instead of stopping me?"
"Since I doubt even being tied up in the cellar could stop you," Regulus said dryly, "yes. You'd Transfigure your chains into snakes, or some mouse would come and gnaw through the ropes. What I want is to make sure you survive."
"You still haven't told me why your brother's godson matters so much to you."
"You know some of the reasons," Regulus whispered back, his voice deep and soft as earth. "That I was bored and you rescued me, and that I wanted to fulfill some of the debts that Sirius left unfulfilled. Those are still true. But the rest is that you're a remarkable person, and let's make sure you survive."
Harry looked at him in silence, then shook his head. They could stand here and have this conversation that honestly didn't matter, and at some point someone would come out and interrupt them, or they could leave and find the Horcrux, which would be infinitely easier with Regulus's help.
"The Horcrux is to the west. I don't have Apparition coordinates at the moment. I need to concentrate more on the birdsong before I'll know where we have to go."
"Then concentrate," Regulus said, and held out his hand with a small smile. "We have all the time in the world."
*
In the end, they Apparated outside a dark, thick house that was made of cut logs rather than stone, the visual that had come through the eyes of the birds. The song softened and dimmed as Harry appeared. He nodded to his birds, gleaming black eyes peering through the branches, and then dropped into a crouch. He murmured to Regulus, "Do you recognize this place at all?"
"No," said Regulus. His eyebrows were pinched, and he studied the house with slightly parted lips. Harry thought he would say something else, but in the end he shook his head and repeated, "No."
"Then we need some sense of what it's like," Harry said, and dug one of his mice out of his pocket. "The shack wasn't big enough to need a separate scouting party inside, but this is."
The mouse ran into the manor, and Harry leaned back behind the clump of high bushes Regulus had Apparated them into. Regulus cast a spell on them with a murmured word, and settled on his heels.
"Did you actually see Terry die?"
"I couldn't hear his heartbeat or sense his Wild. There's no spell that can muffle the sense of the Wild like that. Lord Dudders can't manipulate it well enough. He took away a body, not a living hostage."
"You seem very sure about that."
"You seem sure that I'm remarkable until I do something that doesn't fit with the conclusions you've already reached."
Regulus scowled and shut up. Harry waited some more, feeling his breath move steadily in and out of his lungs, his body twitch a little sometimes and then calm down. No one knew they were here, he thought. After the message Harry had sent with Draco, Harry knew Lord Dudders wouldn't have been able to control himself if he thought Harry was anywhere around.
"But what would he want Terry's body for?"
Harry frowned at Regulus. "He dabbles in soul magic and Dark Arts that I don't know the name of. Surely a dead body could be used in those."
Regulus licked his lips. "You don't look as outraged about that as I thought you would."
"I've buried my rage."
It was nearly twenty minutes more before the mouse ran out, and Regulus didn't say another word, only frowned into the distance. Harry almost wanted to ask how he'd disappointed him, but he had nothing to say about it, and Harry knew he probably wouldn't be able to understand the explanation anyway.
The mouse ran in small circles in front of Harry, demonstrating the manor house's basic layout. Then it crouched in the middle of the design and shivered. Harry understood. The most frightening predator was there. Lord Dudders had his throne room in the center of the house, on purpose. He probably felt as if he were a spider in the web like that, keeping track of all his followers.
But more unclean than any spider, Harry thought, and stood up, checking the animals in his pockets one more time.
"Harry."
Harry showed he was listening with a small turn of his head. Regulus gripped his arm and squeezed.
"He may have taken Terry's body to make an Inferius," Regulus murmured. "If that's the case, I will be happy to destroy it for you. In case you find yourself unable to do so."
Harry wasn't sure that would be the case at all, but once again, he had better things to do and talk about. He tipped his head in acknowledgement and led the way towards the door of the manor house that looked like a cross-hatched section of logs.
*
The halls of the house were absolutely deserted. That made sense to Harry. Lord Dudders probably knew they were coming and didn't want to risk Harry taking over any more of his Death Eaters. Harry kept his gaze fastened ahead and walked in silence, following the guidance of his mice around corner after corner.
Regulus now and then cast spells behind him. They clung to the walls and melted in thick shadows down the sides of the house and into the doors. Harry knew they would keep any threat in those rooms subdued and muffle the sound of their passage. He didn't spend much time looking at them, trusting Regulus to keep them safe on this hunt.
The circular corridors had so many doors piercing them it was easy to find their way to the innermost ring where Lord Dudders had his throne room. Harry paused in front of the door he knew was the right one and reached back to touch Regulus's arm. Regulus squeezed his wrist, and said nothing.
Harry opened the door.
The room was made entirely of carved and shaped and polished wood, in better shape than the rest of the house they had walked through. The "throne" in the middle was made of what looked like one smooth block of mahogany, so glossy that Harry could see their shadows moving in it like faint fire. A sphere of crystal light hovered above the throne, and in it was a golden cup that reminded Harry unnervingly of the House Cup at Hogwarts.
Sitting on the throne was Lord Dudders, of course. A line of light bound his wand and the sphere above him. Lord Dudders gave them a smile that split his face and twitched his wand. The sphere hovered lower.
"Is this what you came for, Harry?"
Harry reached out with his sense of the Wild, and nodded when Regulus glanced at him. Yes, the twisted, tortured sense of life-force was alive--as much as a Horcrux could be alive--inside that cup. This wasn't a distraction or a mockery. Lord Dudders didn't know enough about the Wild to create one.
"Leave him to me," Regulus breathed into Harry's ear.
"Why?" Harry whispered back, turning his head over his shoulder. "You can't stop him. You're not strong enough, and you don't know Transfiguration like I do."
"Leave him to me."
"Not unless you can actually be sure of--"
Lord Dudders struck, fast as a wasp. His borrowed wand lashed out, and a wave of explosive force pressed against Harry and almost lifted him off his feet. Harry latched his claws into the nearest wall and sent mice towards Lord Dudders with a flick of his wrist.
It didn't seem to matter. The mice were popping like tiny balloons in the wake of the spell, and Lord Dudders was laughing, the laughter echoing around the room, and there was no wavering in the crystal bubble that contained the Horcrux.
Then Regulus stepped forwards, smiling slightly, and intoned, "Fero flammam."
And the room was alive with fire.
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The Art of Self-Fashioning