Chapter 2:
Recovery
"Bloody hell, mate." The shade of Ronald Weasley gasped as he examined Harry's victim. "Have you lost your goddamn mind?"
Harry kept his silence. Partly due to his own shame at what he'd done, and partly because replacing the thick wad of gauze he'd barely managed to shove down his jock strap(which he decided ahead of time would be very necessary after the act of self-mutilation) took all of the concentration he had.
"I want to say the bastard deserved it, but I'd be lying."
Ron, having finished examining the deceased Malfoy heir, turned on the Snitch hovering beside Harry.
"Can it see me too?"
Harry turned to his other self as a new message appeared on its surface.
I can see through his eyes and hear through his ears.
Harry frowned.
"You can't see or hear anything on your own?" Ron questioned in Harry's stead.
Nope.
That didn't add up.
"Then how did you move around when I was unconscious?" Harry asked. "Do you have any means of, what's the word? - Perception?"
Kind of. It's like Echolocation? Maybe?
"Echo-what?" Ron asked in bafflement.
Harry found himself explaining to his dead friend how bats and dolphins can map the world around them in their head based on sound. For once Ron was actually attentive in his listening.
"Wicked!" He gasped as Harry finished the explanation.
By now Harry had managed to drag himself onto the bed. Ron tried to help him in the effort before remembering he was incorporeal. He propped himself up with the mountain of pillows he'd brought along. Some of them still smelled like Ron and Hermione.
"But how are you able to see and hear what Harry does?"
Well we are the same person. It's kinda -
The text cleared to make space for his Horcrux to continue
- like when we see through Voldemort.
The text cleared again.
But clearer.
"Also wicked." Ron said.
He was getting over Harry's murdering a defenseless man and making a Horcrux pretty fast.
"So can Harry see through your echo-whatever?"
Now wasn't that an interesting prospect?
Could be. It takes a lot of concentration for -
- me to perceive what he does but being -
disembodied might help with that.
"Okay we need to come up with some form of shorthand." Harry told the Snitch. "But we should definitely try that. Could be useful if I'm blindfolded, or blinded in general. I could keep you in my pocket and you can guide me."
Ron seemed to consider this.
"Can you also feel what Harry feels?"
Yes, and his injury is a lot more painful than he's
- letting on. Please call the elves.
Harry obliged.
"Dobby! Kreacher!"It hurt to yell.
The two popped into the tent as expected. Kreacher carrying a tray of piping hot soup, compliments of Misses Weasley nee Delacour, and Dobby carrying a tray with a single orange bottle on it. Harry recognized it as a Muggle pill bottle and gave the more hyperactive elf an inquisitive look.
"Dobby knew master Harry Potter Sir would be in pain. So Dobby ... borrowed painkillers from a pharmacy."
He sighed at the prospect of somebody stealing for him, but picked the bottle up to read the label without complaint. It was apparently called Codeine, and the warning labels announced its identity as an opioid. He didn't like the idea of potentially getting addicted to poppy based drugs, but he recognized the need for pain relief, and the drowsiness promised by the list of side-effects didn't sound so bad.
"Why are you using Muggle medicine?" Ron complained. "Surely you can get your hands on some potions to heal you up."
Harry shook his head as he took the soup tray from Kreacher and put the pill bottle aside. Best not to take it on an empty stomach after all.
"You can't magically heal or restore self-inflicted wounds made with magic." Harry explained. "You can only let them close and heal naturally. It's why You-Know-Who gave Wormtail a prosthetic, remember?"
That launched them into a discussion about how cursed items prevent magical healing and they were soon theorizing that the cursed objects somehow work on the logic that any person who finds themselves in a situation where they're being stabbed with a cursed knife, probably share some responsibility for getting into that situation. Like a wealthy man walking down a dangerous alley waving money around being partly responsible for his own mugging. They both disagreed with that logic, but curses are crafted to almost have a mind of their own and twist the effects of magic based on what amounted to abstract, subjective and bullshit philosophies craft by the caster. There's a reason constant use of dark magic causes insanity.
"You know we should really get Hermione in on this conversation. Can you bring back multiple people at once?" Ron suggested.
The Snitch retorted faster than Harry could.
Why? So you can dogpile us with more guilt?
"Yeah I'm with me on this one. I'll talk to Hermione one on one before having you both here. Let her rant and rave for awhile before dealing with both of you together."
Dobby and Kreacher stood aside patiently all throughout the conversation but Dobby eventually piped up.
"Is Master Harry Potter Sir okay?" He breached. "Yous is talking to yourself and it worries Dobby."
Oops.
"Um. Right." Harry broached. "I'm talking to Ron. And no I'm not crazy. This rock here lets me talk to the dead."
He showed them the resurrection stone but they seemed unconvinced. He dismissed them and vowed to be more careful about talking to dead people in front of the living.
His soup finished, he took the Codeine and tried to relax into his bed. Ron was having none of it.
"So am I the first person you brought back?"
Harry nodded.
"Why? I figured you'd want to dig for answers first. Talk to Dumbledore or something."
"I brought you back because you're great at cheering me up." Harry confessed. "And it worked, until now."
"Oh." Ron said before going quiet.
He lay there in silence as he felt the strange cloudiness the opiate brought.
"Should I go?"
"Yes. I'll talk to you tomorrow."
The next week passed in much the same manner.
He brought Hermione back first the next morning and suffered through an hour long rant on how stupid his actions were. His haziness from the Codeine was the only reason he was able to survive the avalanche of words. When she finally simmered down she helped him command Dobby and Kreacher through getting some of his affairs in order.
With her instruction he commanded the elves to put Draco's body, which was already going through rigor mortis, into stasis to prevent it from decaying before having them apply proper antibiotics to his wounds. It took all of that day for her to convince him to let the elves stitch it up, which was uncomfortable in every way conceivable. She at least had the decency to look embarrassed as she directed Kreacher.
The day after that he was able to hobble around the tent with a walking stick he transfigured from the end table and he brought both of them back together for the first time.
"I have to agree with Ron. This is wicked." Hermione admitted as the Snitch-Horcrux flitted around her.
They'd just finished explaining the way it perceives the world around it.
"Well that makes sense. How else would the little thing know to avoid people and run away when chased?"
"I never exactly put much thought into the inner workings of a bludger." Ron replied. "All I ever cared about is the rules of the game and my teammates."
It was good to have them back. He was happy to just sit there eating cream of wheat in bed while they talked back and forth. His Horcrux did most of the talking for him allowing him to rest.
"So did you create two Horcruxes?" Hermione eventually broached, looking Harry dead in the eye.
What?
"What?"
"Well the stone was in the Snitch when you turned it right?"
Harry nodded. The Snitch bobbed in what could be construed as a nod.
"So maybe it's a dual Horcrux."
Harry had to put down his breakfast and rub his temple.
Are you saying we split our soul three ways!
"No. It would probably just make one Horcrux that was two pieces." Hermione offered.
Wouldn't that make me more vulnerable?
"...Maybe." Hermione considered. "It could be that if either you or the ring is destroyed it destroys both of you. Or that both need to be destroyed."
Ron came to the rescue.
"Well we can't exactly risk testing that." He said. "We could try to destroy the stone conventionally, but if it isn't invulnerable we lose our greatest tool. If we try to use the sword we keep the stone but Harry goes mortal again and we lose the Snitch."
Ron was right, of course. He was planning to restore his soul eventually anyways. The process of doing so sounded even less appealing than creating a Horcrux in the first place, but he preferred that to destroying a piece of his own soul forever. He already missed being whole.
He lacked the words to explain this.
"The ring!" Hermione eventually gasped, leading Harry to wonder how she could do so without physical lung with which to gasp.
"I don't follow you." Ron and Harry echoed.
She rolled her eyes at them.
"You don't have to try and destroy the stone, just try to diffindo the band and if it breaks or fails to repair we can be reasonably certain the stone isn't a Horcrux too."
It was a good idea. There was just one problem with it.
"There was no band inside." Harry explained as he opened his hand, which he kept permanently clenched around the stone as of late. "Just the stone."
That cooled her enthusiasm.
"Oh... Check again?"
The Snitch opened up without further prompting and Harry took a closer look at its insides. He noticed a part of the cavity was a slightly faded shade of gold and what he'd mistook as part of the mechanism was in fact the band of the ring where the stone once sat. It was jammed in there pretty good but with some proper leverage he managed to yank it out.
One diffindo later and his fears of having a three part Horcrux was alleviated.
"Well that settles that." Ron muttered. "It might be best to repair it and reattach the stone so you don't have to work everything with a fist all the time."
Harry did so. He had to dismiss the two as he reattached the stone to the divot in the ring. When he next summoned them they remained by his side as he slid the ring on his middle finger.
"Much more comfortable." Harry told them. "So... what's the other side like?"
They both gave him a serious look. One he'd only seen them have when they prepared to give him bad news.
"We're not allowed to say, Harry." Ron apologized.
"We aren't even CAPABLE of saying. The laws governing the other side are stricter and stranger than the laws of magic." Hermione added, before seeming to worry that she'd said too much.
Harry apologized for asking. His curiosity had gotten the better of him. If he was honest with himself he expected that kind of response before he even broached the subject.
"So? Plans?" Ron suggested.
"Yes. I'd say some good old fashioned conspiracizing would do me a world of help right now." Harry said with a smile.
"We should probably stick to leaving Nagini for last, but the cup seems like a tall order. We need to find out what the mystery Horcrux is."
The Snitch bobbed at this.
Gryffindor or Ravenclaw?
"That's the million galleon question isn't it?" Ron said.
At Hermione's insistence Harry took out a quill and parchment to write down names of people they could bring back to question. People who had known Voldemort or been related to him.
Hepzibah may have had something else?
Harry added her name to the growing list right below Merope Gaunt and Tom Riddle Sr. He added Hokey, her house elf, below that along with Morfin and Marvolo Gaunt.
"Oh my goodness!" Hermione eventually shouted. "We're being so stupid!"
At Ron and Harry's inquisitive looks she continued.
"Why go through second-hand sources when we can go straight to the primary ones?"
At their blank stares she elaborated further.
"Gryffindor and Ravenclaw!" She exclaimed. "Why not just ask them?"
"Ohhh!" Ron and Harry echoed again.
Harry put the list aside and jumped onto that idea. It never even occurred to him that he could bring back the founders. Imagine what they could teach them? What magic has been forgotten in the interim since their death? There weren't even portraits of them in the headmasters office.
He held the resurrection stone daintily in his hand and turned it.
One.
Two.
Three.
"Rowena Ravenclaw."
The trio waited in silence. They were practically bouncing with excitement. As the seconds ticked by that excitement evaporated.
I don't think she's coming.
Harry tried again.
One.
Two.
Three.
"Godric Gryffindor."
Again. Nothing.
"Helga Hufflepuff? Salazar Slytherin? Arthur Pendragon? Merlin Ambrosius? Jesus of Nazareth! Fuck!"
With each failure he got more annoyed and at that last one it was all he could do to resist flinging the ring across the tent. The ever familiar silence returned as they all went deep into thought.
"Maybe it only brings back loved ones?" Ron eventually suggested.
"Or maybe they've been gone so long that their souls can no longer return?" Hermione offered.
"Or maybe they simply don't wish to come back." Harry countered. "Or they never existed at all."
The seconds ticked by as they all considered how to test these theories.
What does the book say about the stone?
Harry retrieved Tales of Beedle the Bard from the beaded bag and after finding the page read aloud.
"Then the second brother, who was an arrogant man, decided that he wanted to humiliate Death still further, and asked for the power to recall others from Death. So Death picked up a stone from the riverbank and gave it to the second brother, and told him that the stone would have the power to bring back the dead."
Harry glanced between the others.
"Nothing in there about restrictions." Ron admitted. "Maybe try to bring back somebody you hate?"
All eyes landed on the corpse beside the bed, now wrapped in linen. That's a bad idea.
"Peter Pettigrew." Harry whispered to the ring as he turned it thrice more.
Lo and behold, he appeared.
"You're dismissed." Harry said to the traitor before he could sputter the confused question on his lips.
So that idea was out.
"Let's try to bring back someone we know died a long time ago." Hermione suggested. "But who we know was real."
Ghosts?
They looked between the Snitch and each other. Now wasn't that an interesting experiment? What would happen if they used the stone on somebody whose ghost they had met? If a new shade appeared would that prove ghosts aren't what they seemed to be? It was worth a try.
"Sir Nicholas De Mimsy-porpington."
For a moment nothing happened and Harry worried that it failed again. But he noticed the stone felt suddenly cold against his palm and he couldn't stop the shudder rising up his spine.
Nearly Headless Nick didn't so much appear as he did crash through the canopy, stopping suddenly in front of him. If Harry were to theorize, he would guess that the Gryffindor house ghost had just flown the entire distance from Hogwarts to their tent in a matter of seconds as if dragged against his will by a long cable.
"WHAT IN MERLIN'S SAGGING BALL SACK DID YOU THREE JUST DO!"
Whoa.
"Um. Well. We." Hermione grasped for an explanation.
"He did it!" Ron yelled, pointing at Harry.
Bastard.
"Mister Potter." Sir Nicholas greeted by way of an exasperated sigh. "Why is it always you?"
Harry swallowed, suddenly fearful of a ghost for the first time since the day he was sorted.
"I've been asking myself that same question for years sir."
Nearly headless Nick deflated at that, and his head stopped wobbling as he cooled off.
"Please explain."
Harry pointed at the ring.
"Resurrection stone."
"Beg your pardon?" Said the ghost.
"Resurrection stone. Ancient powerful artifact capable of dragging the souls of the dead back to this side. I say the name and they appear."
Sir Nicholas approached skeptically and eyed the ring.
"Your adventures take you to truly strange places, you know that Mister Potter?"
He had no answer for that.
"Why did you call me here?"
"Sir Nicholas?" Hermione broached, getting the ghosts' attention. "We were trying to speak to the founders but they wouldn't answer, so we were trying to test its limits."
Sir Nicholas seemed to consider her for a moment.
"You do know Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin were their titles, not their actual names?"
They did now.
"Oh! Well can you tell us what their names were?" Ron asked.
"No."
"Well why not?" Ron moaned.
"Because I don't know it myself." Nearly Headless Nick admitted. "People in those days kept their surnames secret, using titles in public. Names have power, as this ring of yours demonstrates."
Well that solves that mystery. Harry, deciding not to question how the House Ghost could see Ron and Hermione, apologized and dismissed him. He vanished instantly and Harry could only hope the stone returned him to the castle. That answers their unasked question on the nature of ghosts.
"I've never seen him so angry." Hermione said just above a whisper.
"I didn't even know he could do angry." Ron added.
Their interviews with the dead brought up no new information regarding possible Horcruxes.
They kept their questions for the depressing Merope and her antagonistic relatives to heirlooms and artifacts of power. He dared not ask them their opinions on the state of things. Hepzibah smith was likewise useless, but did share with them the rumored powers of the Hufflepuff goblet.
It was somewhat underwhelming to think its only special properties were purification of liquids and fomentation of friendship between those who drank from it. Harry wondered if Voldemort turning it into a container somehow reversed these effects to where it would do the opposite, foment war between those who drake from it and poison liquids. He wasn't willing to drink from it to find out, assuming he ever got his hands on it.
They wasted another two days interviewing the dead, and in that time Harry finally recovered enough to walk unaided. He started every morning by gingerly testing his wound by stretching and knew he still had a ways to go before he made a full recovery. On Hermione's insistence he started weaning himself off the Codeine by cutting the pulls in half and then a quarter before taking them. They weren't sure if a single week was long enough to develop dependency, but they weren't willing to find out.
"Harry would you please just talk to Dumbledore already?"
Harry groaned at Hermione's insistent pestering. She truly believed he couldn't deny her forever, and she was wrong. Harry just knew the first thing their late headmaster would say is how he was meant to open the Snitch. Somehow he suspected the answer was going to make him feel like an idiot, and the disappointment in the old man's eyes would surely push him over the edge.
"If he knew he would have told me, Herm." He countered. "And I don't want to talk to him."
In the hours when he neared sleep and slowly woke up he would attempt to breach the connection between himself and ... himself. He was having marginal success seeing what the Snitch saw. It wasn't anything like echo-location. It was more like the sensation of touch, as if the Snitch had a magical field around it with which it could feel things in the room, especially things that moved. This is what he was trying to practice now.
"Then what are we going to do?" Ron asked, breaking Harry's meditative mood further, "The cup and Nagini are out of reach and we can't figure out what the mystery Horcrux is."
Harry sighed and gave up in his attempt at whatever mind art he was in the process of inventing.
"I'm going to recover and get stronger." Harry told them. "This is no longer just a hunt for Horcruxes. I'm a killer now and I have a lot of targets, more dangerous ones than him."
They all glanced at the proof of his crime for what must have been the thousandth time. Hermione looked like she wanted to contradict his claim of being a killer, but she'd tried and failed to console him enough times to not bother again.
"What are we going to do with him?" Ron asked.
"I dunno." Harry confessed. "I've been thinking. But everything I come up with is just too cruel."
Hermione glowered at him.
"Just tell us! We can't afford to be horrified anymore."
Sometime the girl just made sense.
"I was thinking about using it either to negotiate a trade of some kind with his parents, what for I don't know." He admitted. "Other than that I was thinking about making a gruesome example. Death eaters are fond of making public displays of their victims and I thought I'd return the favor."
He waited for the tirade of complaints and counter-arguments about how horrible that was, but it never came. Ron even looked like he was debating the merits of it in his head.
"I also thought about... practicing more things from the book."
"What book!" Hermione snapped.
Harry nodded to the lump of black, faded leather.
"Inferi?" Hermione asked, just above a whisper.
"Yeah." Harry answered, just as quietly. "There's a bit on how to create and control them in there. Among other things."
They returned to staring off into space. How have things changed so much that they were even contemplating such actions?
"We should take inventory." Ron said.
Harry looked at him.
"All of your assets. Let's just list them out and see if any ideas come up."
Harry obliged and, turning over the list of crossed-out names, wrote everything down.
Resurrection Stone
Death's Invisibility Cloak
Sword of Gryffindor(Basilisk Venom infused)
Slytherin's Locket
Cursed Knife
Marauder's Map
Horcrux Snitch
Deluminator
Radio
4 1/2 wands.
Mirror Shard
Fake Locket
Mokeskin Pouch
Beaded Handbag
Pretty much every school book ever
Too many clothes
Phineas Black Portrait
Perkin's Tent
Secrets of the Darkest Art
Tales of Beedle the Bard
Three months worth of food.
Codeine
Draco Malfoy's Corpse
He had a lot more than he realized, and yet so very little. He rummaged in his pockets to add however much money he had and noticed a few coins out of place.
DA coins, 3
Somehow he completely forgot about those.
"What about allies?" Ron prodded.
Kreacher and Dobby
Bill and Fleur Weasley
Griphook
Ollivander
Xenophilius and Luna
Hogwarts Students(Can't reach)
Surviving Order Members(Unknown)
The second list was much more sobering than the first. Still, it was better than he first imagined.
"Places we have access to?"
And so they continued. Ordering and reordering their assets and coming up with possible uses for them. Eventually he had an entire stack of papers, each one devoted to an individual asset. While ideas on using the fake locket to lure Voldemort into a trap were interesting it, and the genuine locket, were put aside for later schemes.
They decided it was best to keep certain items on his person at all times. With some alterations to his cloak, which took Hermione two days to teach him how to do, he had the deluminator, cursed knife, two of the wands, and Gryffindor's sword all within arms reach. He practiced retrieving them with Ron who treated the practice like a Quidditch drill. He would call out the name of the object and Harry would draw it. A few more modifications and the invisibility cloak fit inside of an enlarged pocket and he could cover himself with it at a moment's notice.
The ring never left his finger.
"I think we should try to find out how many order members are left." Hermione broached as Harry finished a set of jumping jacks without pain.
"How do you figure we do that?" Ron asked.
She glanced at Harry with the telltale hesitation.
"Well. We could use the ring to..."
"No." Harry interrupted.
"But it would only take ..."
"No." He said, more emphatically this time.
Attempting to recall each person one by one to find out which were dead would kill him and he knew it.
"We need allies Harry!" Hermione exploded.
"I know."
"And where do you suggest we go get them?"
"I don't know." He confessed. "But right now I think I could be more effective alone."
Understanding slowly dawned on Hermione.
"You want to study?"
That was one way of putting it.
"Just study?" Ron complained.
"Training." Harry explained waving the ring in front of his friends. "We have access to the greatest minds of our era. Many will happily help me learn how to be a more effective warrior."
There really wasn't much else he could do. The hunt for the Horcruxes was on hold and he couldn't get into Hogwarts to recover his friends. Even if he could, what then? They weren't killers. They would all die for him, just as he would for them, just as Ron and Hermione already had. But would they kill for him? He wasn't so sure.
"I suppose we should start with the madman himself?" Ron suggested.
Harry grinned. Yeah. If you wanted training, you couldn't do better than "Alastor Moody."
The shade of Alastor Moody wasn't what they expected. He had two legs for one. And both of his naturally dark eyes. And Smooth skin.
"Did we get the wrong person?" Ron voiced what they were all thinking.
"Nope. It's me." Said Moody, his gruff voice the same as always. "And you better have a good ass reason for interrupting the sloppy blowjob I was getting from the resident seraphim up there."