Let's Do it Right This Time, Chapter 23
AN: The second part of this scene contains a character death flashback, and while it's not gory, it is intense. Please be warned before you go further...and no, (the character) will not die in this timeline.
Aurelius left the ward room dizzily, swaying as he walked, only to fall against the wall about twenty feet from the entrance, overcome with exhaustion. He rested for a few moments and then got to his feet again, made it another ten feet, and then had to slump against the wall. Damn, he'd overused his magic. He had to get away from here before Dumbledore came to see what had happened to the wards- he couldn't occlude in this state, and he knew he couldn't defend himself. But he was sooo tired. He just wanted to slump to the floor and take a nap right there. Every bone in his body felt melted, and his brain was in a similar state- it seemed that using advanced parselmagic and then repairing thousand-year-old wards in one day was a little too much for his underdeveloped core, despite his magical strength. Really, who would have thought?
Aurelius made it another few feet, fingers trailing against the rough, cool stone of the wall in an effort to stabilize himself. Would it really hurt to lean against the wall for a few moments, just until he could conserve enough energy to keep going? He went around the corner, only to see that the path branched off into identical windowless corridors. Which one had the Baron led him through? Aurelius could not remember.
That wasn't good. Aurelius stared at the fork in the passageway, eyes wide and uncomprehending with exhaustion, and then, with a stroke of genius born of pure exhaustion, simply chose one and went down it, managing another ten feet before his legs gave out at the knee and he fell bodily against the wall. He lay against it for a moment, his cheek pressed tightly against the chilly dark stone of the dungeon floor, and then at last, through sheer force of will, braced his back against the wall and got to his feet, before a wave of exhaustion forced him to lean back against the wall again. Slowly, as he was beginning to have difficulty keeping his eyes open, he made it another two trembling steps. Then he decided moving was simply too difficult, and leaned against the wall. He was just going to rest his eyes for a few moments...
"Mr. Gaunt."
Was someone talking? Aurelius tried to open his eyes, but he just couldn't make himself move. And yet he had to! What if it was Dumbledore? Or Mcgonagall? His hand tightened on his wand as he struggled to move, as if he could draw strength from the inert holly and phoenix feather. Merlin, he could barely even move his eyelids!
"Mr. Gaunt," the voice repeated, and he felt a firm hand shaking his shoulder.
He opened his eyes with a concerted effort, head swimming, and tried to focus on the black blur in front of him. Wait...black blur? That voice...oh, thank Merlin, he was safe. It was professor Snape. "P'fessor Snape," he slurred, hating the numbness of his tongue. There was so much he wanted to say, but his brain was too fogged, his voice too slow and indistinct.
"Gaunt...happened...you...all right?" Professor Snape asked, the words fading in and out to Aurelius's hazy perceptions.
"Jus...couldn't make it...to...comm'n room," Aurelius told him with difficulty, trying to focus on the man's face. "Thank...'Erlin it...was...you." He tried to take a wobbling step, but collapsed almost immediately, and Professor Snape was suddenly there, catching him, strong arms supporting his shaking body. It felt undeniably good to be held, even if it were Snape. Aurelius couldn't help but snuggle into the thick dark cloth, inhaling the scent of herbs and pickled things in jars. A wave of wistfulness came over him then, as he wondered once again what would have happened if Lily had been able to chose Snape rather than James. What would have happened? Would he have been his father? Would he even have existed? Aurelius shook himself, trying to dispel the maudlin thoughts taking advantage of his distorted perceptions and hazy mind.
"Come on, let's...you...hospital wing," Snape was saying when he managed to refocus. He stiffened, eyes going wide. He couldn't! Madame Pomfrey was complicit in all the plotting that Dumbledore had ever made, or at least so Aurelius had concluded- magical blocks must be placed by a mediwitch only, and many of the controlling and psychotropic potions that had been administered to students and teachers alike in the previous timeline needed additional spells to initiate the effects, spells which could only be known by a mediwitch. Besides, she was the only one who had intimate access to everyone at Hogwarts that would not be questioned. Would she figure out who who he was? Would she collect a blood or core sample, or block his abilities?
"NO!" he burst out, fear giving him a last adrenaline rush.
Professor Snape stopped. "You're ill, you need to be treated," he replied, puzzled.
"You," Aurelius replied desperately, hoping Professor Snape would understand and listen to him, hoping that he would Not send him to that woman. "Not Pomfrey. She...serves..D..." Aurelius couldn't find the strength to go on, and his voice trailed off weakly, his head falling simply back to rest on the Potions Master's broad shoulder. "Don't...Albus...mustn't...know..."
"Mustn't know what?" asked Professor Snape urgently, sounding actually worried.
"Conniving...bastard...sticks...nose...none...business...chess...Azkaban...framed..." Gaunt managed before losing consciousness.
Aurelius dreamed. It was a deeper sleep than usual, and with it came dreams, as often happened now that he was in his younger body. In the original timeline, he had become addicted to dreamless sleep in the months after Voldemort's death, when he could no longer bear to dream of burying his friends. Overuse of that potion, among other problems, makes you unable to remember any dream you might have, even after you no longer take it- it literally excises your ability to consciously dream. He had not wanted to do that in this time, but sometimes he wishes he had, and this was one of them. Because once again he dreamed of war.
At first the dreams were formless, feverish and strange, featuring the Chamber of Secrets and then melting into psychedelic colors and strange, unnatural imagery: Ginny Weasley, with a flower sprouting from her pale back like some parasitic sort of wings, a sky with two moons which illuminated a landscape made all of crystal, Nagini shedding her skin, only under it there was nothing but a metal framework...disturbing, but manageable. And then, as always, it segued into memories replayed.
When the dream had began, he'd first felt a sort of melancholy happiness, remembering the sweet little child Teddy Lupin had been, when he was alive...until he realized in horror that it was not a dream, but a memory. The one which had supplanted Sirius's death as his worst memory, actually.
He had been sitting with blue-haired, giggling Teddy Lupin on the old leather divan in the flat he'd owned in the other timeline, blowing multicolored bubbles with his wand. When the boy tired of trying to pop them, he started to tell a story, one of the stories he told Teddy whenever the boy was fussy and tired.
"Once upon a time,"
"-At a school called Hogwarts-" Teddy broke in, anticipating.
"There was a boy called Remus Lupin, and his three best friends, Sirius, Pettigrew, and James Potter."(Aurelius winced at that last, slight distaste leaking into his voice, but Teddy was too young to notice.) "Now this boy was different from all the other little boys in the school, not just because he was the smartest," (Teddy giggled) "but because he was under a dangerous curse. He was a werewolf."
Teddy ooohed, despite the fact that he had heard this story thousands and thousands of times.
"Now, in those days, having lycanthropy was not seem as a good thing at all, and Remus was afraid to tell his friends, because he thought that they wouldn't want to be friends with him. Every full moon, the nurse would take him out to the the deep, dark, Forbidden Forest, and lock him up in a cabin so that nothing could hurt him while he transformed.
"A transformed werewolf is very dangerous. The change from wizard to wolf is very painful, and it also makes the wolf really hungry, and so the wolf would always be in a bad mood, and sometimes he would want to bite people; that is why people are scared of werewolves.
"Of course, his friends would not have been concerned that he was a werewolf, but he was too afraid to tell them, because he hated the curse and he thought it would make him a monster. And so he would make excuses, and worry, and curl under the covers at night worrying about what they would do to him when they found out. What Remus didn't know was that his friends already knew.
"Now, Remus, Sirius, Pettigrew and James did everything together. They pulled pranks together, and they studied together (well, more like Remus studied and Sirius did the essay due for the very next period and Pettigrew copied the homework that James had copied off of his girlfriend Laura Greengrass while James read a quiddich magazine)" (Teddy giggled again) "But anyway, they were always together, and the only time they weren't was when James was playing for Gryffindor on the quiddich pitch or one of them was in the hospital wing. So they quickly realized that Remus was always gone at the same time.
"Sirius was the one who figured out he was a werewolf." (Well, actually it had been James, but Aurelius hated him too much to give him the credit.) "Sirius told the other two friends, and together they decided that they had to do something to help him. They all knew that he was lonely and hurting in the forest one night every month, and they didn't have Wolfsbane then, like they do now. So they went into the library and looked up lycanthropy, which was really saying something about how much they liked their friend, because none of them ever read if it was not required for the core classes. They read, and they read, and they didn't find anything, and they were almost going to give it up when Sirius found something that said that a werewolf couldn't hurt you if you could turn into an animal."
"They looked up the spell for how to do that, which was really hard, and then they practiced, all without telling Remus that they knew. They practiced every night for two years, starting on the Christmas of their third year, and by the beginning of their fifth, they could turn into animals. Sirius was a big, shaggy black dog, like this-" Aurelius cast his patronus, now a dog, since he'd learned the truth about his father. "He was a dog because he loved to play- he was a puppy really."
Teddy sat straight at this part; it was his favorite.
"James became a big fat deer, with giant antlers, like this:" (Aurelius demonstrated the antlers with his hands) "because he was really vain and thought he was the best thing on planet earth-" (Teddy smiled sloppily at him) "and Pettigrew was a rat, because he was a sneaky backstabber and he wasn't really friends with the rest of them." (Well, neither was James, but Aurelius had begun to tell Teddy the stories before he learned what a slimeball James was, and Teddy really liked "Prongs".)
"So the next time Remus had to be locked in the cabin on the full moon, the other three snuck out of the castle under the cloak-"
"Prongs' cloak!" Teddy burst out, proud of himself, and Aurelius tried to conceal his wince.
"And they went to the cabin the nurse had left Remus in, and they unlocked the door. Remus was inside, and he was a wolf, and he was crying wolf tears because he was lonely and it hurt. And they came and opened the door and let him out, and they all ran around all over the forest that night in the moonlight until Remus fell asleep.
"And the next morning Remus woke up with nothing on, because when he'd turned into a wolf all his clothes had fallen off, and he looked around and saw all his friends around him, also naked, and asked what happened. And Sirius said 'we couldn't make the clothes change with us'. Remus asked what they were talking about, and Sirius said-"
"We wanted to be with you on the full moon!" Teddy yelled- this was his favorite part.
"And so that was how Remus and his friends spent every full moon after that." Aurelius summoned a glass of water, somehow thirsty in the dream. Do you want to go outside now, or have ice cream?"
"Ice cream, uncle Harry! And can you tell me the one about how mum met papa?"
It was not very late, and while Aurelius normally inforced a bedtime, he was feeling indulgent that evening. So he gave Teddy the ice cream (chocolate and apricot with sprinkles and a foodsafe color-changing charm, and shaped into a wolf and a chameleon- Moony and the form Tonks had been trying to achieve when she died, not that Teddy knew that). He bathed the reluctant boy with magical soap and tucked him in, telling him more stories on the little boy's demand.
He was on the third story, and thinking that he should wrap it up on the fourth, when there was a knock at the door. It was too insistent to be Neville or Luna and too polite to be any of his old dorm-mates (besides Neville, obviously). Perhaps it was the social worker who was working with Ginny? But at this time of night?
Aurelius subconsciously knew where this was headed, but he somehow couldn't force himself to wake up.
In the dream he went to the door, carrying a sleepy Teddy, only to see Dolores Umbridge and two aurors.
"Ms. Umbridge. May I ask what you are doing here?" Aurelius asked, very frigidly.
"Just my job, Mr. Potter," was her simperimg reply. "Where's the beast?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your godson, Mr. Potter," she said as if he was incredibly slow-witted. "The werewolf. Why have you not brought him for extermination?"
"Extermination?" Aurelius asked, his voice very quiet. "First of all, he never inherited lycanthropy. Secondly, I would not hand over any child to you, ever, especially for 'extermination'. Thirdly, it's eleven pm, and I do, contrary to popular belief, need my sleep."
"Of course he inherited it, even if it's recessive. Do you take me for an idiot?"
Aurelius applauded himself for not saying "yes.""That is impossible," he said instead. "The only way you can get lycanthropy is by blood contact, which means that a child can only get it from his mother. Secondly, there is no such thing as 'recessive lycanthropy' because it is not a genetic disease."
"Regardless, he's the son of a werewolf. The law demands that every werewolf be confined in the Ministry-run Sanitary Habitations within one year of turning, or within one month of the law having been passed- there was certainly adequate time to comply. Your godson was not turned in at the appointed date. Therefore he must face the consequences, for the good of society Mr. Potter."
"And what might the...consequences be for this imagined crime?"
"Extermination, of course, these are brutal, bloodthirsty beasts, Mr. Potter."
Teddy buried his face in Aurelius's neck, and Umbridge's eye latched onto the sudden movement.
"Hand it over, Mr. Potter."
Aurelius refused.
"The law is the law, Mr. Potter- noncompliance must be punished," she said again.
And then the aurors stunned him. And he had to watch twin beams of unnatural green strike the screaming, and then whimpering child, had to watch the vibrant teal hair turn white in death. And that was before he realized that he recognized the second auror.
Haha, cliffie everyone! I bet you can guess who the auror is...if you can't, you should probably try to follow the storyline more diligently lol.