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Chapter Thirty-One—Two Young Lovers

"Let's see, mate. The papers have called you sadistic, evil, dark, smoldering, hateful, loathsome, masochistic—"

"That one obviously doesn't have people who know the proper vocabulary."

"Well, if they knew how much you hate the Ministry and how long you tried to reform it, then maybe they would be using it correctly."

Harry snorts and closes his eyes. He's lying on the couch in the safehouse in France, and Ron is with him, sorting through the papers that come from Britain, France, Ireland, and even further abroad. It seems that a lot of other wizarding communities are rejoicing at the thought that Britain is losing its savior to the Darkness.

Probably because we were a lot of smug wankers after the war with Voldemort, Harry thinks, and yawns. He received "invitations" from some of those countries to come over and defeat their Dark Lords after he killed Voldemort. That he told them to fuck off and handle their own problems did nothing to endear him to them.

Today, Harry would still tell them to fuck off. He just wouldn't make any noises about his duty to Britain while he did it.

"Oh, wait."

The note in Ron's voice makes Harry open one eye. "What is it, mate?"

Ron swallows and holds out the paper. Harry takes it and glances at the headline. It's another denunciation of him, nothing new, but then the photograph under the headline catches his gaze and holds it the way it must have held Ron's.

Ginny is in the picture, leaning against Simon Morreth. Both of them look a little lost. When he turns to the article, he finds that Ginny is saying that she never really knew him at all and had no idea that she was dating, and then friends with, a cold-blooded murderer. Simon is just bewildered how a Lord can act this way.

"What are you going to do?"

Ron's question is casual, but the expression on his face when Harry glances up isn't. Harry shrugs and hands the paper back to him. "Continue on my course. If Ginny wants to come talk to me, then she can. I wouldn't give Simon the time of day."

"But—you know she's going to be upset. Even though you made her forget everything."

"I know. But since when has one upset person stopped me?"

Ron folds his arms and stares at the floor. "It's just that she's my sister. I don't like to see her upset."

"Don't see her if she comes and tries to talk to you. Tell her that you don't know where I am, but that she might be able to find out by sending an owl. And then I can be the one to deal with her. Or Simon," Harry adds. He's just going to end up sending Simon away, but it might be fun, a harmless thing to do in the face of all the harm.

"All right." Ron stares down at his hands, then up at Harry again. "This is the best thing, right? Really?"

"It's the only thing," Harry tells him. He can recognize and appreciate Ron's qualms; he's even grateful that he has best friends like Ron and Hermione to tell him if he's about to get severely off-course. He just isn't about to let it matter to him right now. He can't let it matter to him, not when he has to continue. Things were too late from the moment he decided to dedicate the Elder Wand to its spell.

"I know. But I can think…"

"You can wish that things could have been different? Me, too."

Ron leans on the couch Harry's lying on for a second. Harry puts a hand on his elbow and holds it there until Ron shifts impatiently. Harry takes it away and examines the ceiling to give Ron a moment to recover.

"Are we ever going to look at that vault with all those Dark artifacts and get ready to unleash them?"

Harry grins a little, letting his eyes slip shut again. "Patience, my faithful minion."

When Ron punches him in the shoulder hard enough to numb his arm, Harry knows they're going to be all right.

Harry opens the vault door.

It's the real thing, a huge, gleaming steel-and-silver monstrosity in the bowels of the safehouse. It looms over them as if it wants to bite their heads off. Dark magic shimmers from it. Carvings of people strangling and otherwise dying horribly are scattered all across it.

Harry isn't impressed.

"I am the rightful owner of all you bastards," he tells the artifacts that shimmer enticingly from just beyond the door. "So don't give me any shit, right? I'm going to take you out so you can cause chaos. Just let me take you out."

He takes a step forwards.

The air around him turns thick and clogging in his lungs, and something weird and distant moans in his ears.

Harry holds up a hand. It seems to be moving more slowly than it should, but that's not his problem. He hits it against his shoulder, and the agony jolts up his nerve and blows away the fog as if it never existed.

Harry shakes his head. Sirius made him his heir. That's something even the artifacts have to respect, but that doesn't mean they won't test him.

He sighs. "I did ask for you to stop it with the shit, right?"

"Mate?"

Harry nods to Ron behind him, but doesn't turn back. He knows he must sound insane, talking to things, but sometimes a Dark Lord has to do with a Dark Lord has to do.

He gets into the vault, and the air around him howls and twists. Harry can see shelves if he squints, but they don't want him to see them. They hunch and shiver. Harry reaches out and puts his hands on either side of the vault doors, shutting his eyes.

The howls grow worse. The sense of an abyss just beyond his feet tugs at him. Harry tilts his head back and barks, "SHUT UP!"

There's stunned silence, or at least Harry would characterize it that way. He grins and strides forwards. The vault floor is an ordinary floor under him, with significantly less chance of opening up beneath him to introduce him to a bottomless pit.

The nearest shelves hold grimoires full of spells. Harry passes them with a thoughtful glance. It's not really new spells that he needs. It's something so elusive that it's hard to put a name to it, but he'll know it when he sees it.

Then come the weapons: knives, swords, lances, pikes, maces, and more exotic blades or chains or crushers of flesh and bone, hanging on the walls and lounging on the shelves. Harry does pause beside a sword with a plaque beneath it that says BLADE OF ULTIMATE DARKNESS, but in the end, shakes his head and keeps going. Those would mostly be if he wanted to look frightening, and he's already achieved that.

He circles more shelves, and hooks, and baskets, and thumping boxes with chains on them, and then stops when he sees a crystal pedestal in front of him. Waiting on top of it is what he's been looking for. He smiles and reaches out his hand to grasp it, ignoring the fact that it's buzzing warningly at him.

The carved crest of the Black family burns into his palm, but the burn is cold, as if he's suddenly contracted a Frostbite Curse there. Harry lifts the carving high. It's made of ebony, or obsidian, or something else black and expensive that he never bothered to learn the name of. It has the crest on one outstretched limb that Harry thinks is meant to be a wing. Its snarling face and jagged teeth and sleek body make it a little hard to tell what it's supposed to be, but Harry braces the other wing on the wall, and then he can see.

An enormous bat. Harry nods. This is what he wants.

The frostbite is becoming a bit annoying. Harry rolls his eyes. "You can't read my blood and get a close link to the Black family that way," he says. "I have Black relatives by marriage, but not by blood in the last few generations. But it's me, all right? Sirius's heir?"

That doesn't seem to matter to the bat's wing, which is still trying to eat his hand. Harry shakes his head and reaches down to grasp the family crest with his other hand, sending a shock of power into it.

There's a soundless screech that still manages to make some of the books fall off the shelves and Ron clamp his hands over his ears. Harry continues shocking it. He's had a few days to recover from the power that he expended against Shafiq and the other Ministry flunkies attacking Ron and Hermione's house. He can do this all afternoon.

The wing abruptly falls limp in his grasp. Harry pulls his hand back. He doesn't think he managed to break it, and it's not exactly the sort of limpness that—

The bat is alive.

It turns its head and considers him, teeth an inch or so from his face. The wing in his hand is dangling and warm, blood seeming to rush through it and heat his palm. It's welcome after the cold. Harry stares at the rodent—he thinks bats are rodents—blankly, waiting for it to make the next move.

The bat pulls away from him. Harry lets it go, but watches it warily. It swerves through the air for a few seconds, apparently beating its wings to make sure they're still there, and then settles firmly on Harry's shoulder. It's so big that the weight makes him stagger sideways. That gets him a look that he's sure is contempt.

"Why that thing?" Ron asks, his voice a squeak.

"Come on, Ron. It's not as though it's a spider."

"But why that thing?"

"Look at the pedestal." Harry gestures, and Ron steps around him so he can also read the words that say, A TOOL TO DARKEN THE MIND.

"I thought you wanted people to think, not get rid of their thoughts."

Harry shakes his head impatiently. "I gave them the chance to think, and they didn't take it. You think, Ron. Why would I want something that does this particular thing?"

Ron pauses, and then finally says with a faint grimace, "You want them to fear you and run in circles, not concentrating on putting you down the way they might otherwise."

"Exactly."

"I thought you'd caused enough fear already."

"I learned from Voldemort. You have to keep it building, or people will ignore you as long as possible, the way that Fudge did when Voldemort came back in fifth year and then didn't launch any attacks. It's possible that someone who has the time to slow down and think might get at the truth—that I don't really want to be a Dark Lord or rule the world, and that if I knock down the Ministry, maybe I won't replace it with myself. That would be disastrous. We have to keep them running."

Ron nods. Then he mutters, "So how does it actually work?"

Harry turns to the bat. It stretches its wings slowly, luxuriously, and then leaps off Harry's shoulder and rotates over his head.

Harry almost expects to fall senseless as the shadow of the wings passes over him. Instead, he finds himself wavering on his feet, staring at the far wall. He thought—he thought he came in here to find something, but now he no longer remembers what it was. And he thought—he thought he could walk in here because he's Sirius's adopted heir, but what—

He crumples to the floor. His breathing is too fast, he has to look at his spread hands, and he wonders for a second why he's in here at all. He should get up and walk out, but the fear, almost a separate thing from him at this point, holds him captive.

A shadow passes overhead. Harry looks up and sees something circling near the ceiling. He focuses on it, blinks at it.

The shadow touches him and—

Harry struggles back to his feet, shivering. That was unpleasant to experience. He extends his arm, not sure if it will work, but it does. The bat stops circling and lands on his shoulder. The wings flare in, and then it's clinging to his shoulder with claws and feet alone, its fangs wide in a grin.

"That thing is bloody dangerous," Ron whispers, as if he thinks too loud a voice might make the bat spring off Harry's shoulder and come after him. Harry nods.

"But it doesn't cause stampedes and it will weaken my enemies," he says, when he's sure that he's fully recovered his voice. "That's why I'm going to use it."

The bat chitters. Harry ignores the resemblance to cold human laughter, and walks out of the vault with the bat on his shoulder.

Harry narrows his eyes as he Apparates in near the Burrow. He isn't going in, of course. There are too many Weasleys who aren't in on his secrets and might ask him questions or even detain him when he has no interest in being detained. He came back to the Burrow merely because it's a convenient Apparition point for his hops across Britain.

But someone has heard the crack. Ginny turns her head and listens intently. Harry stands a good few meters behind her, the bat on his shoulder, and watches her. He's sure that she won't sense him. He's under a combination of a Disillusionment Charm and another spell that muffles sound and scent and keeps his footprints from appearing in the wet earth.

"Harry?"

Harry says nothing. He's sure that Ron and Bill and Hermione didn't betray him. It's merely a lucky guess, or maybe she listens to every crack of Apparition and hopes that it's him.

"I'm going to speak as if it's you," Ginny says steadily, "because I need you to hear this. And if it's Ron or someone else who knows where you are, then maybe they'll tell you. Try to get the message right, please." She draws herself upright, with a grace that Harry hasn't seen since they broke up, and begins.

"I have no idea what you're doing. I think that you mean to bring the Ministry low somehow, and then take over by force. And it's wrong. It's the same thing Voldemort did. You can't make it right just because you're the one doing it."

Harry grins without humor. She's yet another person fooled by the Dark Lord rhetoric that the papers have attached to him, then. They never would have suited even if they'd managed to stay together.

Ginny stares in the wrong direction and speaks passionately. "I would have thought you would know that, since you died to save the world. You have to let people be themselves. If that means that they do things you don't like, that's their right. You can still protest and work for change, because that's your right. But you can't forcibly take over and put them under your control as if they're house-elves."

How Hermione would hate to hear that comparison.

"I don't know what changed you so much. The man I loved never would have turned into a Dark Lord. Sometimes—" Ginny's voice falters and sinks. "Sometimes I wonder if I should have remained at your side. Then perhaps you wouldn't have turned to the Dark."

Don't flatter yourself.

"I want to know what's going on, Harry. I want to know what you think you're going to accomplish. But perhaps most of all, I want to be your friend again. Find the heart and the soul that I know live in you and bring them out. If you want to talk to me, then we can start on that basis. Forget about dating and the past. Just listen to me as you would one friend with another."

Too late.

"Will you carry that message to him, wherever he is? Tell him that I'm waiting and I'd like to talk to him."

Ginny stands as if listening, holding her breath. Harry stares at her and wonders for a moment if she could have joined him, if things were different.

But then, if things were different, he wouldn't be struggling to bring down the Ministry and spread the kind of freedom that the Elder Wand's spell promises.

Ginny's head finally droops. She nods and mutters, "It probably wasn't him anyway," and then turns and walks back into the Burrow. Harry nods at her back for a moment before he Apparates out.

It is sometimes pleasant to imagine things that might have been, but honestly, Harry can't think of a world in which he and Ginny would have suited. Some things are too wild for the imagination to bear.