Disclaimer: Nothing is mine; everything is J K Rowling's.
I had an admittedly cruel temptation to spend all my writing time today doing some proper proofreading for all the chapters, it would be a first, and hunting down all those missing words and typos. I have to read it all aloud and it takes as long as writing anything from scratch, but it does need to be done. Fortunately for anyone who wants the next chapter more than they care about my typos, I changed my mind.
Chapter 27
The grass was wet. For every two steps Harry made up the slight slope, he slid one backwards, but the tree line at the edge of the quidditch gradually grew closer. He would make it.
Pettigrew, the ice in his chest tightened viciously at the thought of the traitor, should still be here.
A shadow lurked, short and furtive, twitching beneath the pines.
Peter Pettigrew.
Something within the ice uncoiled, something hungry, something selfish. It raised its head, opening eyes within himself that Harry had never known he had had. With its awakening came memories. The fury of his uncle when he yelled that Harry was nothing but a freak, the quiet contempt and spite of his aunt, the learned hate and disgust of Dudley, and every moment he could recall in which he had believed, or known, or thought that something else might have been worth more than he was.
I will not become nothing.
He disillusioned himself.
The pine trees smelt just as he remembered when he smeared their sap across his fingertips. The sharp, sweet scent of pine resin that was forever associated with spilt unicorn blood, acromantula and werewolves, overpowered any scent he might leave. The instincts of a rat would not save Wormtail.
'Incarcerous,' Harry hissed triumphantly. The unmistakeable silhouette of the treacherous animagus flinched, but it was too late. His emotions twisted the intent of the spell beyond the black ropes he had intended. Thin, cruelly barbed wires, snared the rat in a net he could not have escaped in either of his forms, cutting into his skin. Hoarfrost coated the metal, lacing the iron with icy spines.
'Were you waiting for someone?' he asked, dispelling his invisibility. 'Another hapless student to hide with, an innocent victim to betray.'
'Harry,' Pettigrew's voiced wavered somewhere between relief and fear.
'Expecting some else?' he asked guilelessly, Tom Riddle's charming smile spreading across his face. Something flickered through Pettigrew's eyes. He had been waiting for someone, but Harry didn't care. He wasn't here for anyone else, there was no stone to save, no misled little girl and no wronged godfather. This moment was simply his.
'What are you going to do?' Wormtail whined. He tried moving, twisting within the wires, but they only cut more deeply into his skin. Blood began to run in tiny trickles across his pale, dirty skin.
'I'm not going to hurt you,' Harry promised.
'I know you aren't,' Pettigrew whispered, 'your parents would never want you to do something so cruel, but the wires are tight, Harry, they're hurting.'
'You know something, Peter?' Harry stretched his smile wider, pouring innocent emotion into his eyes. The creature of ice uncoiled further within his chest, its eyes narrowing, lips curling back before needle sharp teeth.
'No.' Pettigrew, for all his cowardice, was not stupid, he knew something was wrong and his voice was faint.
'I don't think,' his smile ceased all pretence of kindness, curving cold and cruel, 'that the dead want anything.' Pettigrew whimpered. 'I want something,' he continued, as Wormtail's eyes roved desperately.
'Revenge won't bring them back,' Pettigrew pleaded. 'If it did, I'd've turned the Dark Lord's wand against the monster himself the first chance I got. They were two of five people that cared about me. I was never brilliant like any of them, but they cared for me all the same. I wish, more than anything, that I'd remembered how to be brave when the Dark Lord found me. He was searching for Sirius and thought I might know. I wish I'd died then, and been remembered as I was for thirteen years, but I didn't, I wasn't, and I just want to live.'
'I spent eleven years wishing for parents,' Harry shared, with malice so sweet it seemed to drip from his tongue. 'Wishes like that, they just don't come true.'
The slim, ebony shape of his wand slipped from his sleeve again, eleven and a third inches of intent.
'If you kill me Sirius will never have his name cleared, take me to the aurors, to Dumbledore, to Azkaban, but kill me and he will never be free.'
It gave Harry pause. He had never considered that his action might have such severe consequences for his godfather.
Sirius didn't try to capture Pettigrew and clear his name, the voice, Riddle's voice, perhaps the horcrux's voice whispered. It was right. His godfather had wanted Peter dead, not a prisoner, or a soulless husk. The Ministry was unlikely to ever admit a mistake that had left an innocent man in Azkaban for more than a decade. Harry had met Fudge. The ice creature coiled tighter around his heart. Sirius would have wanted him to do this.
He deserves to die. He's already dead to the world.
Harry's grip on his wand tightened. Peter Pettigrew would be dead. The friend who had betrayed his parents would die to free him from the very fate his cowardice had condemned Harry to. It was almost poetic.
'Harry,' Pettigrew whispered desperately. 'Harry, please.'
His eyes were fixed on the tip of Harry's wand where, as his intent swelled, a point of bright green light had appeared.
Tom Riddle's smile twisted in a beautiful parody of triumph across Harry's face.
I won't be used. I won't be nothing.
The hot, black tip of Harry's wand, encased in incandescent green, came to hover between Pettigrew's eyes. It was perfectly still. The prospect of freedom, of escaping the fate he had all but resigned himself to in his naive, noble ignorant belief that sacrificing himself was the right way, had the creature of ice coiling and uncoiling in excitement within him.
'Do you know what the first two words I remember are?' he asked. The helpless Wormtail shook his head, squirming within the wires, staining both grey iron and white ice a bright crimson.
'I'm sure you can guess,' Harry told him pleasantly, mentally preparing himself for what was to come. The book and Riddle's notes had both spoken of pain beyond any name.
Tom Riddle's brilliant smile curved up on the left side of Harry's face, becoming his own.
There was a blinding green flash as Harry spoke the the first two words he had known. The pine trees were illuminated for an instant in the ghastly light of the curse he had been adamant he would never use. Their needles threw sharp shadows across the blank face of Peter Pettigrew.
Riddle's notes had contained the best clue at what came next. Two words, six letters, then four, the latter carved into the parchment.
Listen, the first instructed. The second was a warning. Pain.
There weren't words for magic like this, it was too abstract, too complex and emotional for simple latin to capture the intent. Harry could do no more than try to hear, to see, what he knew must be there.
The pine trees melted into nothing, the sound of their needles, the whisper and touch of the breeze, the smell of the resin, all faded from thought.
A thousand inky black fragments screamed within him.
Their screams were not a sound. They whispered, howled, gibbered and cried without ever making a noise.
It was deafening.
One of them is not me.
He concentrated on each individual fragment, listening to the sounds within each shard of the broken mirror that was his soul. There were more different, distorted, reflections of himself than he could have ever dreamt. Voldemort had wondered if they were all the possible outcomes from the event of fracturing the soul, every in between from fully recovering, to never healing.
Harry sought desperately for one that was not a reflection of him, but something else.
They were all of him.
No.
He refused to accept that. The horcrux was here and he would find it.
Harry listened again, more intently, embracing each image of himself as they came, until, eventually, there was an image of himself that came with an echo. It was a cold-eyed, brightly smiling Harry, with tousled, messy hair, no different from a hundred others, but underneath it there was a susurration of something else, someone else. Red eyes gleamed behind green.
The horcrux had been a part of him so long that it was intertwined with his own soul, and even now, fractured and screaming as Harry's essence was, the horcrux clung to him rather than breaking free.
Out, he hissed at it. Get out.
He set himself and tore.
The creature of ice shattered, melting away before the torrent of agony his action had unleashed. Nothing had ever felt half so wrong as what he had just attempted, but it had to happen. The piece of Voldemort had to go.
Harry steeled himself and ripped again.
Something gave, and the pieces screamed louder. Harry screamed too.
There was nothing outside of the terrible, unnatural torment. He could hear the pieces screaming, hear himself, vaguely, distantly crying out for anyone or anything. His wand had grown hot, so much so that that he knew it must be burning his hand, but he couldn't feel any pain but that of the tearing.
He could physically feel himself coming apart, splitting and lessening.
Something thick and sticky rolled down his face and he opened his eyes in shock.
In the reflection of Pettigrew's dead eyes he watched tears of ebony slowly crawling to his chin. They left inky trails down his cheeks and dripped heavily to the floor, spattering in poisonous hisses and then rising as a thick, swirling, black smoke.
For every tear the agony increased, bypassing what was bearable, what was not, and annihilating all coherent thoughts save one.
It has to come out.
The pain climbed higher still. Its shadow blotted out everything, obliterating any focus Harry might have hoped for. The writhing, ebony substance scattered and disappeared behind an explosion of white sparks that filled his vision.
It might have been better to die.
Suddenly the pain was gone and Harry was left on the ground, curled up into a ball, covered in dirt and surrounded by clawed, disrupted ground. He could smell the resin again, hear something that wasn't screaming.
For an instant it was bliss.
Then the pain returned, searing waves of it, all emanating from the cracked, blackened flesh of his wand-hand.
The slender piece of ebony was unmarred, but the entire inside of his palm and fingers were charred away. Harry glimpsed bone when he flexed his hand the crack stretched. He knew no healing charms, but hoped, rather desperately that Madam Pomfrey did.
It has to be fixable.
Madam Pomfrey had regrown his bones.
Cedric, he remembered, relieved, despite the pain. The dragon had hit hard enough that his landing had given him friction burns strong enough to strip the skin and muscle from his arm and side. Harry's hand was nothing compared to that.
Staggering to his feet he tugged his wand out of the ruin of his right hand. It came away easily, but the centre of Harry's palm came with it and a new wave of pain washed across the site.
Gripping it loosely in his other hand he transfigured Peter Pettigrew's body back into the rat he had spent thirteen years pretending to be. A weakly powered incendio set it on fire and Harry sent it flying far into the Forbidden Forest with a blasting curse. It would turn back to a body eventually, but Harry doubted there would be anything left to implicate him, if there was anything left at all. There were plenty of creatures in the Forbidden Forest that were unlikely to pass up an easy, free meal. He would have done more, but his magic was all but spent.
He swayed, instinctively putting out a hand to catch himself, but habit led to him extending his dominant hand and pain exploded from the charred flesh. He'd never really felt all that much remorse for Quirrell until now.
The hospital wing was too far to walk. Harry knew he would never make it in his condition, so he focused as hard as he could on the very top stair of the steps from the Chamber of Secrets, mustering what little of his magic he could find.
The world twisted back past him and he collapsed out of the stairs onto the still soaking floor of Myrtle's bathroom.
The water stung, but Harry was grateful for it. The new edge to the pain was keeping him focused enough to walk and think.
He disillusioned himself with his left hand. The charm was nowhere near as effective as it normally was, tiredness, pain and poor wand movement with his weaker hand all reducing his prowess, but it would have to do.
It took him over a thousand steps to reach the doors to the infirmary and by the time he did the edges of his vision were darkening.
'Mr Potter,' he heard the stern nurse exclaim as his charm and his legs finally failed him.
She rushed across, whipping her wand at the curtains around the other beds so they closed and kept him from view.
'Drink this,' she ordered. Something vile and peppery flooded down his throat. His next breathe was so cold it felt like he'd swallowed ice and he gasped hoarsely.
'Sweet Merlin,' Madam Pomfrey exclaimed. 'What did you do to your hand?'
'I burnt it,' Harry answered, still searching for a plausible reason behind his injury. The weeping, seeping cracks in the limb were oozing something clear and syrupy. Harry watched it fascinatedly. He'd never seen burns quite so, well, bad.
'What with!?' she burst out incredulously. 'I haven't seen burns like this since the last war. If I find out you were trying to cast Fiendfyre, Mr Potter-'
'I wasn't,' Harry interrupted. 'The last thing he needed was for someone to think he was beginning to dabble in dark magic.'
No matter how true it might be.
'Then how, exactly, did you do this?' Madam Pomfrey was running her wand tip over his mutilated limb and, ever so slowly, the flesh and skin began to creep back over the bone, filling in the horrible, pink cracks.
'The golden egg was guarded by a dragon,' Harry explained, hoping his excuse was good enough to stave off an interrogation by anyone else. 'I thought fire might make it reveal its secrets.'
'That was incredibly stupid of you,' she remonstrated, watching carefully as the blackened, ashen flesh sloughed off to make room for the regrowing hand.
'Not even a hint of the tongue of Mordor,' Harry joked weakly. Madam Pomfrey blinked, not understanding the reference, but whoever was in the bed next to him laughed.
'You're healed,' she sighed, tucking her wand away. 'I would insist you remain here for the night, so I can keep an eye on you, you've exhausted most of your magic with whatever you were doing, but I doubt you'd stay.'
'Already?' Harry inspected his newly restored hand, flexing it experimentally. It seemed as good as new.
'Yes, Mr Potter, already. Now, go, and this time take more care. I distinctly remember telling you that I did not want to see you here again at the beginning of the year.'
'Well,' he smirked, 'if you insist.' An overdramatic swirl of his wand later and he was gone beneath his disillusionment charm. It was almost perfect while he was stationary, but the dregs of magic he had drawn on were already running dry.
'Get out, Mr Potter,' Madam Pomfrey sighed.
He made it out of the door just before his charm failed completely.
Now he was healed and without pain he could think clearly enough to remember what had happened.
I failed.
He'd ripped Tom Riddle's horcrux, or whatever it had become, from himself, but he'd lost control before he could destroy it or push it into something else.
Harry needed to speak to Salazar, or read the book again. He had no idea what happened to a soul fragment once it was outside the body and released.
Retracing his steps he made his way back through the bathroom and down into the chamber.
'You came back,' Slytherin exclaimed the moment he must have heard the door open.
'What did you do?' he asked Harry the moment he became visible.
'I fractured my soul.' Strangely, all the disgust he had previously felt was gone.
'And?' Salazar was peering at him very carefully.
'I found the horcrux that Riddle left me,' Harry's revulsion resurfaced, 'it was almost a part of me, but I ripped it all away.'
Salazar Slytherin let out a most undignified sigh of relief. 'So it's gone.'
'I don't know,' Harry responded quietly. He listened,searching once more through the screams of his soul fragments, but could not find the image with the echo.
'How can you not know?' Salazar demanded. 'You ripped it out, didn't you?'
'I might have,' Harry muttered, remembering the sticky, tar-like, black tears and the swirling smoke. 'I lost control, it hurt.'
'Can you feel it?' Salazar asked intently. 'If you have a horcrux linked to you then you should be able to feel it. Any sort of feeling of warmth, familiarity or anything from anywhere or anything that was not there yesterday.'
Harry relaxed, but felt nothing unusual, only the warmth of his wand against the skin of his forearm.
'No,' he answered finally. 'There's nothing.'
'Then it it is either destroyed, or, more likely it returned to something it was linked to.'
'Something it was linked to?'
'Can you feel the piece of Tom Riddle's soul?'
'No,' Harry replied immediately. That distorted echo of himself was gone from amongst the myriad of inky, whispering reflections.
'I would hazard a guess that the horcrux returned to whatever it was most strongly linked to, Voldemort, and whatever you ripped off from yourself returned back where it belonged.' The founder did not seem particularly sure.
'A guess?'
'Soul magic is not my area of expertise,' the portrait reminded him. 'However, neither fragment can survive alone unbound to an artefact or living thing, and since there is no new link to you no part of your soul is out there. That leaves only two options. My guess or the alternative.'
'I'd like to know what you think the alternative is,' Harry decided. Salazar was playing a little too evasive.
'You reabsorbed both fragments completely.'
'So I could still be a horcrux.' A tiny pinprick of ice formed in his chest.
'If you cannot feel the piece of Riddle's soul in the state that your soul is in then I do not think it is possible that it remains within you and independent. It is either gone, or absorbed completely into your own.' The founder patted the head of his serpent companion as he thought. 'Absorbing a piece of soul was mentioned in the book and Tom Riddle's notes, but, like almost all of the material I read it was hypothetical and vague.'
Harry relaxed and the tiny shard of ice vanished. Salazar had yet to be wrong, if he did not think there was a chance that Harry was a horcrux then Harry believed him. I helped greatly that no matter how much soul-searching he did there remained no sign of the echo of Voldemort.
I'm free.
He was not really free, not completely, Voldemort would still come after, Dumbledore was unlikely to believe he was no longer a Horcrux and he was still alone, but he didn't have to die an unappreciated sacrifice.
He grinned. A genuine, bright, half-smile beaming up at his ancestor whose expression softened.
'Looks like you'll have to put up with having an heir who acts like Godric a little longer than I thought you would,' he joked.
'A tragedy I remain unable to correct,' Salazar sighed. For all the mock disappointment in his tone his expression remained soft, though Harry did detect a slightly victorious glint to his eyes. The founder was no doubt very glad that Harry had had a change of heart and his last living family members would not die killing each other.
'So what now?' Harry murmured. There was so much more he could do now the axe was no longer hanging over his neck.
'Focus on the tournament,' Salazar told him. 'Win it, the experience of using magic outside a classroom and in dangerous or testing circumstances will be invaluable. You will be far stronger for it.'
'Of course.' A slightly cold smile found its way onto his lips as he imagined outstripped the other champions. Fleur Delacour would be coming second, at best.
'You'll need to learn the charms to reverse self-transfigurations in case you make a mistake with your lungs. It's simple enough, an extension on the prior incantem, actually.'
'It is?' It seemed a long way from detecting the last charm a wand used to reversing it.
'The charm detects the exact strength, flow and intent of the piece of magic used and then applies its exact opposite. There are many different levels of it under different names and it's widely used by healers.'
'You know a lot of healing magic?' Harry queried.
'Snakes are not just associated with biting people,' he responded acidly. 'They were a symbol of healing and longevity before that was forgotten. I was never as gifted as Helga, she could use that charm to cure almost anything, but I was better than most. My skill at healing kept my wife alive for years longer than we thought possible after my other friends had passed.'
'How did the other founders die?'
'Rowena fell ill after he daughter was killed,' Salazar answered sadly. 'Godric was killed in a duel, searching after some wand he deemed too dangerous to be left in the hands of others well into his old age, the idiot. Helga outlived us all, perhaps she died peacefully.' Harry frowned. He had, for some reason, expected them to all to die peacefully. 'Mundane, in the end, weren't we?' Slytherin remarked bitterly. 'You cannot escape death, and those who try are often consumed by their attempt. Tom Riddle certainly was.'
'And you?' Harry dared to ask.
'I was consumed,' Salazar answered darkly. 'My search for a way to circumvent the barrier of death took everything I had. I died searching from my bed, too frail to do anything more than think and hope that my daughter might succeed in my place.'
'Did she?' Harry wondered.
'I would not know,' the painting responded sadly. 'Like all such creations I was enchanted to carry the knowledge of my original self from death. Anything that happened after that point I have needed to learn from an outside source. You, or Tom Riddle.'
'We were the only ones?' Harry asked, shocked. It had been a thousand years, a hundred generations of his family must have passed through these walls.
'It only takes our shared blood to open this chamber,' Salazar smiled ruefully, 'but far more is needed to ever find it, or want to. I overlooked that when I made it, assuming all my family members would be as I was. I told you my only company was the basilisk.'
'I thought you might have turned the other away,' Harry admitted. 'Found them unsuitable.'
'Found them unsuitable,' the painting frowned. 'They would have been my family, my legacy. You are as like Godric as me, an irony of time you cannot fully understand, but I did not turn you away just because you are not identical to myself. That is not how family works.'
It was how my family worked, Harry wanted to say. Vernon, Petunia and Dudley had hated anything that had not been the same as they were. He got the impression that the founder was offended he had ever considered the notion.
'Sorry,' he apologised. Slytherin should not be tarred with the same brush as the Dursleys.
'Apology accepted,' the founder said graciously. 'It was not, I think, a mistake entirely of your making and not the first time I have been accused of such.'
'I did not accuse you,' Harry denied, then his mind caught up to his mouth. 'Riddle said the same thing?'
'I told you that you were similar,' Salazar reminded him. 'It takes a crucible of terrible caliber to forge a person of such strength. The greatest wizards and witches are always born from adversity. Every single one you name suffered and was stronger for it. Some chose to rise above their pain and fears, others embraced them and chose revenge.'
'Tom Riddle succumbed,' Harry deduced.
'No,' an odd smile hovered about the painting's lips. 'Tom Riddle's path was not defined by revenge. Like you, he learned to simply let go of the things that hurt him. I do not know what drove and then consumed him. Logic and cunning were his masters, though he was proud to the point of arrogance and believed himself different to all other wizards, and he rarely gave in to emotions. I suspect it was partially his fear of death that caused him to become what he did, but I feel that there must be more than that to it. Everyone fears dying. Tom Riddle loathed it with inexplicable hatred.' The founder sighed and shook his head. 'It does not matter now, what he has become is more important than the path that led him there.'
'He cannot be allowed to return,' Harry agreed.
'Tom Riddle was rarely stopped from getting what he wanted,' Salazar warned. 'It will not be easy, especially when neither of us knows how he might attempt to return to a body.'
'The book was singularly unhelpful on that,' Harry remembered. Riddle's notes, which must have had an additional source to Secrets of the Darkest Arts, had only referred to metaphors of rebirth and the book itself only detailed how to create and destroy the horcruxes themselves.
'It is no longer a problem for the immediate future,' Salazar reminded him and Harry felt a jolt of pleasure knowing that it was true. 'You have a tournament to win. There are two wizards who want you dead, for one reason or another. Voldemort, and Albus Dumbledore. They aren't going to listen to a weak, ignorant fourteen year old who cannot earn their respect.'
'Voldemort is unlikely to listen at all,' Harry remarked.
'Do you think Albus Dumbledore will believe you either?' Slytherin asked his question with a degree of venom. 'He did not listen to Tom, when the boy warned him he would not be safe at the orphanage, and sent him back regardless.' It was the first time he had heard the founder refer to him by his first name alone and the first real hint of the affection Slytherin must have once had for the young wizard.
'I will not tell him,' Harry responded. 'Neither will listen, neither will change from their attempts to decide my fate. If they are my crucible then I shall rise above them and outstrip them both.'
'Such ambition,' Salazar smiled proudly. 'You, my heir, will make me every bit as proud as my own daughter did whenever she surpassed or bested me.'
AN: Please read and review! Thanks to everyone that has. A milestone has been reached.
