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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 Sixty-Two—Cacoethes

Harry felt as though fireworks were going off in his brain as he stepped back and studied the scattering of stones on the table. They were all jewels that he had pried from the non-magical jewelry Regulus had left him. He hadn’t wanted to touch the magical ones since they might have defensive spells on them.
But not even Regulus, he thought, could get upset about Harry using jewels for a purpose other than to decorate bracelets and necklaces.
Harry closed his eyes. The images from the books he had read yesterday—more refreshers than completely new information—flowed across his mind. He opened his eyes and stared at the topazes, garnets, rubies, onyxes, and tiger’s-eye stones on the table.
“Commuto gemmas tigrida!”
The air around him rippled. The Wild poured from Harry’s eyes and arms and skin. It flowed, heavy but invisible as wind, around the table, and then dived down. The gems sparked and soared into position.
Rubies for the tapetum lucidum, the tapestry of light behind the eye that would reflect the light and make them good at seeing in the dark. Topazes for the base of the coat, with layers of garnets over the top of them. Onyxes hovering crushed and transformed and remade on top of them, for the stripes.
Tiger’s-eye for everything else, including the outer eye.
The two great tigers Harry had made leaped off the table in the minute before their weight would have overloaded it and made it crumble to the floor. They paced slowly towards Harry, staring at him. Their eyes were glittering, savage gold. One of them reached out and put a paw on his shoulder.
Harry stood looking back at them. After a few minutes, when he was sure that they wouldn’t rebel or run away, he smiled.
One of the tigers made a chuffing noise and sat down, lowering her head to rub her chin against the top of his head. The one with the paw on his arm, who was male, lowered his paw and began a thorough, sniffing inspection of the room, soft tiger’s-eye whiskers trembling.
But both of them looked at Harry when he spoke.
“I made you because the books say that tigers eat more humans than any other great cat,” he told them. “And you don’t have the weaknesses of most tigers. You won’t be afraid of daylight, or startled by novelty to the point that you have to hide for a long time before you can approach it. And your claws are longer than normal.” He crouched down and picked up the paw of the tigress, squeezing it. He barely avoided the talons that popped out.
The tigress looked at him in something like approval.
“Your name is Formido,” Harry told her. “An object of dread, of terror. And you’re—”
He considered the male tiger for a minute. He had thought of calling him Regulus, but Regulus had been his own person, and he had been sarcastic and fierce in entirely different ways. So Harry chose a different name as he stared into the tiger’s inquiring golden eyes.
“Immolator,” Harry said softly, at last. “The sacrificer, who makes the sacrifice worth the cost.”
Immolator brushed his side against Harry as he stalked up to the door and used his mouth to manipulate the latch. Harry smiled slightly and went after, Formido pacing behind him. He supposed that he ought to be with his tigers when the others first saw him, so there would be less yelling and fainting.
And he wanted the chance, too, to say good-bye.
*
“If I don’t come back, Neville, then you should know I’ve made you the Heir to the House of Black.”
Neville stared at Harry. He hadn’t been able to stop staring at Harry since he came downstairs surrounded by tigers. Harry, being himself, acted as if this was totally normal, and only smiled at Neville, ate breakfast, and then made this particular announcement while one of the tigers circled the table slowly and the other stalked Yar, who pretended not to notice.
“Wh-why would you do that?”
“Because I wanted to.”
“No, I mean—you told me that you were going to come back alive from this. You told me.” Neville narrowed his eyes and struggled to keep his reaction under control. He wasn’t going to show less courage than Harry, who was actually going into battle to defeat the enemy that had always been Neville’s.
Harry stared at him with his eyebrows creeping up his face, which only made him feel more stupid. Then he smiled. “Well, just in case. The way Regulus thought he might survive, and thought he might die.” His face turned blank in an instant. “And he died.”
“Right,” Neville whispered. He swallowed. “I—Harry, I don’t even know how I can thank you for all you’ve done for me.”
“Live,” Harry said simply. “You’ve done more than anyone else in this war. You’ve done things I couldn’t have done. I couldn’t have faced the Killing Curse coming at me and not done something to counter it,” he added, when Neville blinked at him. “That’s a different kind of courage than mine.”
“I suppose it is.” Sometimes Neville had wondered if his Sorting into Gryffindor had been a mistake, since he wasn’t courageous in the way that Gran had always said his Dad was. But if there were different kinds, then that only made sense.
Harry gave him what was probably the sweetest smile Neville had ever seen from him, and stood up. “Minerva is going to have to Apparate me and all the other animals coming with me to the place I’m going to meet Lord Dudders.”
“You know where he is?”
Harry shook his head. “I have the Dark Marks from the Lestranges still. There’s enough Wild left in Rabastan’s to lead me to other Death Eaters who have the Marks. And I doubt they’re going to be very far from Lord Dudders. He probably thinks he can protect himself by having them around him.” He chuckled softly.
Neville swallowed and nodded. “I—I think I’ll still be here. So this is farewell.”
“For a few hours.”
Neville nodded again, then reached out and gave Harry an awkward hug. It was always hard to be sure what Harry would permit and what he wouldn’t. “Thank you for giving me my life,” he did mumble.
“You’re welcome.”
And Harry was away, striding out of Grimmauld Place’s kitchen as though someone had blown a trumpet summoning him to war. Neville sat down in his chair and stared at his breakfast plate. Nothing really happened to break his trance until Dapple hopped up into his lap and began to purr.
Neville lowered his head and wished he knew some way, any way, of sending his thoughts with Harry to keep him safe.
*
Minerva stared at the tigers Harry had made. They were flawless, as far as she could tell, although with that same different feeling of the Wild about them as always, separating them from tigers she would have Transfigured from objects.
“You’re going to have them eat the Death Eaters?”
“Fight them.” Harry pulled a dark piece of flesh out of his pocket, shifting the eagle on his shoulder to do so, and Minerva swallowed. Harry smiled at her. “Can you Apparate them? You might have to make two trips, but that’s not going to make a difference once we’ve followed the pull from the Dark Mark once.”
“I can do that,” Minerva said softly, and tightened her hands around Harry’s wrist and the ruff of one tiger as it turned its back and presented the neck to her. “Just tell the other one not to attack me when I come back for it.”
“Don’t do that, Formido.” Harry’s voice was lazy. He shifted a cage under his arm Minerva hadn’t noticed before, and an agitated hiss came out of it. Minerva tried to step away as much as possible without letting go of Harry or his tiger.
“It’s just Nagini, don’t worry,” Harry said. “I’ve Transfigured her fangs so that she can’t poison anyone now. I’ve never seen anything like her venom, and it would be annoying to have to figure it out after she bit someone.”
Annoying. Minerva, firmly, told herself not to laugh, and nodded. “Hold on, Harry,” she said. “And tell me the Apparition coordinates.”
She didn’t know what Harry was listening to or looking at as he ran his fingers over the black, severed flesh that had once been part of a snake and a skull, but she had no doubt it made sense to him. “It’s a large house with a broken fountain in front of it,” Harry murmured, eyes closed. “The fountain has a shattered serpent with a missing head. Everything in sight is made of granite and basalt. There’s a patch of white flowers I don’t recognize, as tall as the house, on the right side of the fountain….”
“That will be enough,” Minerva interrupted, feeling the strong current of her magic connect with the image building up inside her mind. She took a deep breath, clenched one hand on skin and bone and the other on fur, and then jumped through the darkness.
They came out beside the fountain to—no alarms sounding or wards tingling. Minerva opened her eyes and blinked around. “I rather assumed You-Know-Who would guard his property with Apparition wards,” she remarked.
“The Dark Mark got us through the wards. It’s keyed to them.” Harry turned and thrust the piece of flesh at her. “Here, you’d better take this so you can go back and get Formido.”
Her hand jerked for a moment, and then Minerva mastered herself and took the piece of meat. That was, in the end, all it was, she told herself, as she Apparated back to the grounds of Grimmauld Place and extended her hand to the tiger waiting. This one presented no more problems than the other had, and Minerva was back at Harry’s side in seconds.
Harry was already peering at the seemingly deserted manor house behind them, his face caught in a slight, amused smile. Minerva swallowed down fear and bile and everything else, and said, her voice as soft as she could make it, “I’ll be waiting here. Outside, by the fountain. Under a Disillusionment Charm.”
Harry turned and stared at her, eyes flaring. “No. Go back home. Come for me in a half-hour. If I’m not done by then and waiting for you, I’ll never be done.”
“Harry—”
“What I’m about to unleash here will consume every animal living except me and the creatures I’ve made of the Wild,” Harry told her quietly. “Please go away, Minerva. I don’t want you hurt.”
Minerva exhaled once, eyes on him, then hugged him hard and Apparated before she could lose her resolve, carrying the piece of Lestrange’s Dark Mark with her. She waited until she was inside the house to weep.
*
Harry walked through the illusion of darkness and silence that surrounded the manor, shaking his head. Stupid of Lord Dudders to have forgotten that Harry relied on his senses more than most other wizards, and there was no disguising the smell of so many human bodies packed in one place.
Not to mention their footprints in the dirt beside the fountain.
He made his way through endless looping corridors; the manor had probably belonged to some paranoid pureblood. Harry released mice from his pockets, and then spiders and ants and rats. They blended into the darkness. They would scout and spy, and Harry would have no need of them as guards or warriors except if his master plan failed.
And in that case, he would die anyway.
But he knew it would not fail.
He stepped into the grand room where the Death Eaters were massed, before a throne-like chair. Harry wanted to shake his head and laugh as he made his way forwards. Except for being made of stone, this room was a lot like the one where he and Regulus had confronted Lord Dudders over the cup Horcrux. Didn’t he learn?
The Death Eaters began to shift the moment they saw him, although a few of them paused when he scattered mice from his pocket. Harry smiled at them and glanced at the throne.
On it slumped what had once been Lord Dudders. He still bore the holes from the flames Regulus had inflicted on him, Harry was glad to see. Holes were chewed in his flesh on his skull, on his sides, and almost all the way through one arm. He was a monster with muscles and tongue and gums and bone gaping through the gaps.
Harry began to walk towards him. Formido and Immolator lurked behind him in the corridor, not yet showing themselves to the Death Eaters.
“Why have you come here?” Lord Dudders’s voice rasped and rang off the stones. “You know that my followers will kill you.”
“I came to kill you,” Harry answered. “To make you suffer before you died. For Regulus. For Terry. For Neville. For his parents, and mine, and all the other people you’ve killed or ordered murdered and tortured over the years.”
Some of the Death Eaters laughed, yawping giggles that sounded frankly more insane than Lord Dudders. Harry didn’t move now, but kept his eyes on the creature on the throne. He wondered why they were doing that. He hadn’t meant to give some grand speech. He was just answering the question.
“I might die,” said Lord Dudders, although even now, the solidity of his words told Harry that he didn’t believe it. “But my followers will murder you.”
Harry twitched his fingers behind his back. Immolator and Formido leaped into the room, with the great, coughing roar that distracted everyone and made a few people drop their wands. Formido soared from near the doorway to bear one of the taller, blond Death Eaters to the floor and suffocate him with an easy bite to the throat
“Two tigers only? You imagine they will suffice?” Lord Dudders asked, his teeth clattering together.
Harry smiled and let his will surge. “Now.”
And the swift flesh-eating bacteria that he had implanted in the altered Dark Marks of the returned Death Eaters sprang out and began to consume them and every scrap of living flesh that stood anywhere near them and wasn’t him or created of the Wild.
The smallest living things, Harry thought with a smile, and moved forwards, ignoring the way that dark purplish blooms of necrosis worked their way through Macnair and Yaxley’s bodies, and were spreading through severed, spinning bits of cast-off skin to the men and women beside them. Formido and Immolator guarded the door, disabling any Death Eaters who tried to escape the spread of the disease.
He moved to stand in front of Lord Dudders and looked up at him. There was enough left of his eyes to show fear.
“I will return. No matter what happens to this body, I will return.”
“With all your Horcruxes dead?” Harry asked softly, and heaved the cage containing Nagini, which had been floating down at his side, almost out of sight, into the air. The bacteria had her by now. “Did you ever think about what would happen when someone hit her with a Killing Curse? And Neville? And touched the cup and the diadem and the ring and the locket with Fiendfyre, and the diary with basilisk venom?”
Lord Dudders clattered to his feet, one hand reaching for the wand that he had borrowed last time.
“Cacoethes,” Harry said softly, the only word of the incantation he needed to speak aloud now, when he had spent so much time casting it into the Dark Marks of the Death Eaters the other evening.
The disease sprouted in the wounds that Regulus’s fire had left behind. Harry had made this one slower, though. The bacteria ate with less vehemence, but the holes in Lord Dudders’s face and arms were already turning purple and green and all sorts of other lovely colors.
Lord Dudders was screaming soundlessly. The bacteria would have eaten what remained of his tongue and vocal cords by now, Harry thought—although, come to think of it, the bastard had probably been using magic to speak. Harry stood there, watching the carnage, savoring in it.
Then something approached from the side, and drew his attention away from Lord Dudders. There should have been no Death Eater still capable of moving under their own power and getting past Formido and Immolator.
In a second, he understood what had happened. Both the disease and his tigers had been told to attack living beings, and the thing in front of him was neither. It was all that was left of Terry’s body—partially skeletonized along the arms—and it was reaching for him, and there was something behind the glassy eyes that looked terribly like a spark of awareness.
Harry stared calmly into the Inferius’s eyes, and swung his wand. The Blasting Curse destroyed the body and the boy and the petty vengeance that Lord Dudders had thought to inflict on him all at once.
He turned back to Lord Dudders and shook his head. “Are you still sane enough to realize that didn’t work?” he asked.
Lord Dudders was by now a shuddering mass of writhing color. Harry paused for a second, then shook his head regretfully. No, he must be too far gone to be able to really see or hear anything.
Formido stalked towards him, streaked with blood. Harry patted her head. “I suppose that you haven’t had much time to eat, and you wouldn’t want to eat that, anyway,” he said, nodding at the nearest puddle of mostly-bony corpse.
Formido looked over her shoulder and growled in response.
“No, don’t worry. We’ll find you something to eat before—”
“Potter.”
Harry whirled around, landing in a defensive crouch. It seemed that he’d been wrong, after all, about Lord Dudders being completely dead or gone. A wraith was rising out of that dissolving body, struggling, still half-trapped in the devoured skull, but present.
“I will destroy you, Potter.”
Harry raised his arm. A soft shadow moved across the ceiling, and ducked down towards Lord Dudders, who was still caught. Harry stood watching. This would be enough, he thought. He could feel it as surely as he could see that stooping shadow.
Yar came down with a flare of her wings and a thrust of her talons, straight through Lord Dudders’s eyes, into that rotting skull, into that porous brain. The next instant, Yar shook her claws and ripped the skull free of the neck with a sound like mucus tearing, and flew on, soaring straight towards the window she had come in through.
It was quick enough that Harry would have missed it if he hadn’t known his eagle was going to strike. He smiled. Yes, the spark behind his eyes, the spirit, had gone out just like the spark behind Terry’s had.
He turned and studied the room, the bodies that looked like nothing so much as bones with puddles around them anymore, the roaming mice, the stalking tigers. He didn’t see the Malfoys dead on the floor, and he supposed they had been smart enough to stay away from Lord Dudders after all, once they escaped.
That didn’t mean they would escape entirely, of course. The mice he had sent running to Malfoy Manor would reach them eventually, and keep an eye on them. If they ever made a move against Harry or his people again, then Harry would know in an instant.
Harry leaned slowly back against the throne, and sighed a little. The one problem with the method of elimination he had chosen was that it didn’t leave much proof Lord Dudders was dead. He could use a Pensieve memory if he had to, but he knew the Ministry would probably want something more tangible if they came knocking on his door.
Tangible…
Harry snapped his fingers and went out to chase Yar away from her prize.
*
Minerva stood beside the fountain when exactly half an hour had passed from the time she’d left. She had wanted, badly, to come back before that, but she knew Harry hadn’t been joking when he talked about the forces that would devour any living creature who wasn’t part of his Wild. She clenched her fingers when nothing happened at first.
Then Harry jogged towards her, clutching a cage with two things inside it. One of them appeared to be a skeleton of the snake he had brought with him earlier, You-Know-Who’s snake. Minerva blinked, puzzled as to why he wanted it.
She concentrated on the other, and nearly gagged.
“Ugly-looking, isn’t it?” Harry agreed, turning the cage around so that she could properly “admire” the skull. Minerva had to swallow very hard. The skull was bare of any flesh, just like the skeleton of the snake, but it had gaping holes in the cheeks that must have been present at the time of death. And large cracks above the eyes that…
“It looks like your eagle killed him.”
“Yes, she’s never got to use that precise strike before,” Harry agreed, his voice calm and normal. He held up his arm, and the eagle landed on his shoulder that must be padded beneath his robes with leather Minerva hadn’t noticed. “He was already mostly dead. But I thought I could let her finish the job for me.”
Minerva looked into the bird’s staring golden eyes, and remembered that Harry’s soul was essentially that of a raptor. She swallowed. “Would you like me to Apparate you and one of the tigers back first?”
Harry smiled a little and shook his head. “No, Formido and Immolator are going to stay here for a little while. Just in case there were any Death Eaters we missed in the—rubbish removal who might stop by later.” He smoothed his hand down the jaw of the tigress and moved towards Minerva. “They’ll make their way back to Grimmauld Place overland.”
“You don’t think they’ll be in danger from Muggles?”
“They’re tigers with human intelligence guiding them. I’m a little more worried for the Muggles than for them.”
Minerva had, in the end, to nod and reach out. And then the reaching turned into a hug before she could stop herself, and a fierce, hard hold that, for once, Harry didn’t object but nuzzled into.
“He’s dead,” Harry said, when some minutes had passed.
Minerva cleared her throat and stepped away. “He is. Let’s go home.”
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The Art of Self-Fashioning