I'm updating so early because I'm obsessed with writing this story. I admit it. I think about it when I should be thinking about homework instead.
Or maybe it's just this chapter. Which changes everything.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Harry And His Mother Have a Little ChatThings fell and shifted and crashed into place in Lily's mind, and she knew, now, what had sometimes made her pause in the last months and question her own sanity, that she had a sense of a person missing from the family.
Someone had been missing from the family. Someone who had just announced his return by lifting the spells that had obscured her memory of him.
Lily met her son's eyes, and saw the power that burned there, unbound. Harry might think he was shielding everyone else from the effects of his magic, but he wasn't, not really. Fear waited to tear Lily apart if she thought about it, heart-rending, soul-shrinking fear.
But the Headmaster had sent her a letter months ago, one that Lily had kept in spite of not knowing what it referred to. It had two lines on it. One was six words long.
The other said simply You will know what to do with this when the time comes.
And she did know what to do with it, Lily found, as she stared back at Harry. It would hurt to do it, but she would do it anyway. It was only one more sacrifice in a long string of them.
I am not, Lily thought, as she stared at her elder son, the son with her eyes and her soul, any stranger to sacrifices.
Harry waited. His mother only went on looking at him, as though she didn't know whether to hug him or burst into tears or lunge away in terror. Harry hoped it wouldn't be that last, but he feared it would be.
He couldn't speak, himself. The memories overwhelmed him. This was his mother, the woman who had trained him and given him purpose in life and made him so much of what he was, the aspects of his personality he had told Snape coddling him like a child would not change. She had hurt him. He could acknowledge that, even feel it. She had not done things the best way.
But she had taught him the meaning of sacrifice, and of facing war without flinching. That was the real reason Harry had wanted her back, so that he could look into her eyes and know that at least one other person understood what he had given up. Oh, Snape and Draco tried, but they could only glimpse memories before becoming upset (though he had probably compelled their anger and horror, too). Lily had been there with him all along. Hurt or no hurt, she understood him as no one else in the world would ever do.
And she had been a Gryffindor, and had made a decision to sacrifice her own child, perhaps both of them, if Connor had not stopped Voldemort that night. She was no stranger to courage. She took a deep breath now, and stepped away from the counter, all the time keeping her eyes on his face.
"Hello, Harry," she said.
Harry tucked all the emotions that wanted to burst out of him behind a calm mask. He wasn't entirely sure what would happen if he let them go now. A storm of laughter or a storm of tears, maybe. He took a deep breath in turn. "I suppose you're wondering what I did to you," he said.
"I do wonder what specific spell you used, yes." Lily's voice was as calm as his.
"Fugitivus Animus," said Harry. "On both you and Father. Sirius broke it months ago, but that's only because he has the compulsion gift."
Lily's eyes widened for a moment. Then they narrowed. "Dark magic?" she whispered. "Oh, Harry, I would have hoped you knew better."
Harry clasped his hands together behind his back. They writhed and twisted, and he wished Sylarana were with him, to do something that would soothe or drain away the intense feelings running through him. It was like having a river just under the surface of his skin.
"I know," he said. "But I wanted to use it. I was frightened that I would hurt you if you didn't ignore me, if you tried to talk to me, if you tried to hurt me as you had been doing."
Lily shook her head. "I thought you would have understood that any pain you went through was for Connor's sake," she said.
Harry swallowed. Then he swallowed again, and when he was sure he would speak words and not a spell, said, "Even the pain of the phoenix web?"
Lily jerked as if he'd hit her, but nodded. "Yes," she said. "You must know the circumstances of how you received the web now, if you're able to think so independently of it. You know that you consented, and that we did it because we were afraid for Connor's life."
Harry shook his head. "When we were four?"
"Yes," said Lily. "Your magic is unnatural, Harry, unnatural in its strength and the way it kept growing. We tried other bindings, and none of them worked. The magic shrugged them all off." She closed her eyes, and the memory of bitterness was in her face and her voice. "We lived in terror daily, waiting for the moment when you would turn on us."
"But I didn't," Harry whispered.
"You were bound before you could," Lily corrected him.
Harry swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed. "Why did you think I was like Voldemort?" He didn't realize the question was welling up his throat before he asked it. "Why not like Dumbledore?"
"Because your magic grew the way it did," said Lily softly. "You were siphoning off something else, Harry. Your magic came from some other source. It was the only explanation for the way it increased. Who knew when you would turn and start siphoning off us?" She closed her eyes. "It was like living with a vampire. I told Albus it was like living with a tiger, but a tiger only tears you limb from limb. A vampire feeds. Maybe you were even feeding from Connor. We didn't know. We couldn't tell."
Harry watched from the back of his mind while his thoughts reeled, as though someone had punched him in the solar plexus. He'd surrounded himself with a thick layer of fuzz and shock to keep from going completely mad at once.
Wonderful. Something else I can't control. Not only do I compel other wizards, I feed from them. Did even Voldemort do that?
"I've never felt myself doing it," he managed to say. The words crawled over the jumbled shards of sanity in his throat. "I don't think I did it."
"But you could have," said Lily, and in her eyes was the same terror that looked back at Harry from the mirror, when he bothered to confront it. "How could anyone ever know? So we bound you. We needed a secure future for Connor, Harry. Surely you can understand. You were made part of securing that future, instead of threatening it."
Harry felt the deep surge in his soul, the recognition, as the words touched the bit of the phoenix web that was left to him. He had trained to defend Connor. That had been his whole life until he went to Hogwarts. How could he dispute what Lily was saying? Wouldn't he have urged them to put the web on him, if he had known this about himself and understood the issues involved?
He swallowed. "You could have told me when I was old enough," he said. "Asked me if I wanted the web when I really understood it."
Why am I complaining?
But he knew the answer. It was the same reason he had lifted the Fugitivus Animus spell from Lily instead of simply letting her remain under it. A false peace was no peace at all. The kind of progress he could achieve with his mother ignoring him was nothing to the progress he could achieve if she backed him. And while he could work through the answers on his own, perhaps, fumble and stumble until he was finally as loyal to Connor as he had ever been, he wanted her to tell him. She had always reassured him before this. She must have the answers to this, too. He would drag out all the questions and have her answer them once and for all. Then he need never trouble with it again.
"We could not have," said Lily. "And four was old enough, Harry. Not for other children, but for you."
I want Sylarana. I want Connor. I want Draco. I want this to end.
But it would not end until he reached the end of it, until he'd heard everything, so Harry asked, "Why did you decide to train me into Connor's guardian, then? Was that another way of binding me? I know the training started even before the phoenix web was cast."
Lily shook her head. "That was the prophecy," she said. "The prophecy said that you were to play your destined role as Connor's guide and guardian. He needed someone to shield him. He needed someone who would always love him, no matter what happened, no matter what he might do. And we determined that that person was to be you."
Harry frowned. He debated not asking about the uncertainty that had just burst into his mind, but then it would just pop up again at some point, and he wanted this done with. He asked. "If the prophecy bound me to a certain future as Connor's guardian, then it should have happened anyway, whether or not you trained me as a weapon or to love him. And you shouldn't have needed the phoenix web. You knew that Connor had to live to defeat Voldemort, and I had to guard him until then, not drain his power."
The terror in Lily's eyes deepened exponentially. Harry blinked at her. Why would she fear me knowing about this thing? Why would she fear it more than my having my magic unbound?
"Harry," Lily whispered, "I never thought of it that way before."
Harry felt his eyes freeze. "What?"
Lily was staring past him at the wall. "How could I have?" she asked, and Harry had the feeling that she was talking to herself now. "I never—I never thought to ask how true the prophecy was. I just trusted Albus's word that it would come true, but that we all had to do our parts to make it come true the right way. And that sometimes prophecies are tricky, and it might actually let something bad happen to Connor while still letting him defeat Voldemort. Why did I never think about the contradiction between the wording and what we needed to do?" She stared at the floor. "I was so sure that you would hurt Connor, and you could have, and we were reeling from the War, but I…I never phrased it to myself like that. I just never." She hunched and stared at her hands without finishing the last sentence.
Harry took a step forward. He could feel himself quivering. His eyes stung as though dust had got into them, which he did not understand, but he was not going to worry about the sensation, not when his mother was in front of him speaking words he had never thought he would hear. "What?"
Lily's face was wizened with sorrow. "Oh, Merlin," she said, and Harry could barely hear her. "What have I done? What have I done to one of my children, in the name of war?"
A deep richness filled Harry's chest, and somewhere within him, a pain he hadn't realized he was feeling stopped. "What?" he whispered again.
Lily began to cry. She did it silently, and Harry knew the shudders that shook her were real, that the disgust and fear behind her shaking shoulders was real, that the way her voice trembled when she finally managed to speak was real. "I d-didn't, oh, Harry, oh in the name of magic." She had her head in her hands now, and the words sounded as though someone were tearing them out of her throat with a fishhook. "What have I done? What have I done?"
Harry put his hands up in front of his eyes. His own fingers shook against his skin. He had a headache. He swallowed again and again, and tried to remind himself of what Snape had said—that this was a befouled place, that he could not trust his mother.
This was his mother.
Yes, she is, he thought, and forced himself to speak again. "Mother, are you—are you sorry for what you did?"
"Yes," said Lily, and the word broke halfway through the middle into a huge, gasping sob. "I, I can't believe, such a blind fool, what the fuck was I thinking, oh Harry. Apologies aren't enough." She abruptly plunged a hand into her robe pocket and drew out her wand, lifting it towards her own temple.
Harry lunged forward, catching her wrist. Lily stared up at him, much smaller than he ever remembered her being, bleeding in heart if not in body, and terribly, terribly vulnerable. Harry knew that he could unleash the full force of his temper on her now, and she would never recover. Snape certainly would have urged him to do so.
Snape is more vengeful than I will ever be.
"What were you going to do?" he whispered.
"Kill myself," said Lily, her voice utterly flat. "I know that an Avada Kedavra is deadly from this close." She laughed, and the sound rattled in Harry's ears like bones bouncing off rocks. "I certainly had enough chances to see that in this war I've sacrificed everything in the name of, didn't I?"
Harry found himself able to breathe again. A soaring feeling filled his chest, as though he were in flight and aiming straight towards the sun.
She's my mother. And she loves me. And she's sorry.
"Don't," he said. "It would be too easy. And think about the way it would hurt Connor. And me," he was able to say, and it was without guilt for the first time in his life. "You have to stay here and face what you've done."
Lily's face had had little color left. Now it washed completely, and left her eyes shining in her face like a werewolf's through the darkness. "Everything?" she whispered.
"Everything," Harry confirmed. His tongue felt thick and heavy, and he groped for words. His heartbeat sounded in his ears, the door of a sepulcher closed over and over. "The sacrifices you demanded of me, the sacrifices you demanded of Peter, the sacrifices you demanded of Connor. He doesn't know anything about this. He should have known long ago. I should have told him, but so should you. We have to tell him why I made you and Dad forget me. We have to tell him that I've been guarding him. Everything. Everything."
He could have been standing on a field at sunrise, with a cool breeze from the east fanning his face. That complete was his hope, his joy, his feeling of sweetness.
It will take a lot of work, but… things are going to be all right. Things are really going to be all right. I'll have a family again. Mum will apologize for her mistakes. We'll endure Connor's anger, and get past it, and Dad's fear of himself, and get past it. We'll help Sirius and Remus. We'll be a family again.
Remus. I have to tell him that he was right about Mum, that she really is a good woman, that she would die before harming one of her children.
Harry felt his mother nod. It was a tiny, fragile moment, but he held her eyes, and silently challenged her to make it again.
She did.
Harry felt as though his heart would burst. It was too much for him to comprehend, that he was going to have something so much better than what he'd dared to look for. He would have peace. He would not have to worry any longer about training his magic, because his mother would help him train it. She had come up with a kind of complicated training that a child could still master, and increased it in complexity every year, so that he had gradually learned it, never pushing him too fast. She was a natural teacher. She could help him learn to control his compulsive and his feeding magic, too.
There's so much that's good in the world, he thought in wonder.
"Harry," Lily whispered. "I don't know how you can ever accept all the apologies I want to give."
"I'll manage," said Harry, smiling ridiculously and not caring who saw it. "Come on." He hugged her close. "Do you think you can stand up and make it up the stairs to Connor and Dad and Sirius?"
"Yes," Lily said, and gave a half-choked laugh. "Why not? I've done so much. Why not this?"
Harry laughed aloud, and then helped her stand up. He looked up at her, and knew that his eyes were shining. Hers were shadowed, but that was only to be expected.
Then he heard what she was saying.
"Expleo penuriam cum tex—"
She was trying to cast the phoenix web on him again.
After saying she understood. After saying she would try. After.
Realization crashed home. Harry felt the image of his beloved mother shatter into six pieces, into six thousand, into six million. She was gone, the woman who had done only what she thought best, the woman who had trained him out of concern for the fate of the world, the woman who had loved him.
She would never do this. Not if she loved me.
Lance to a boil, mercy cut to a throat, final and absolute betrayal of trust. Perhaps Harry was an evil person for thinking so, but he was not capable of forgiving her for this.
"—tura! Phoenix texturae!"
The spell came at him and bounced. Harry's magic was hovering in front of him, spread over him like enormous, shimmering wings. Of course the spell bounced. He was not going to let himself be bound, not ever again.
Harry looked at his mother, and felt the insanity rise, shrieking. Her eyes were wide with terror again, and he could do it. He could strike. He could deprive her of life, and how she deserved it for what she had done to him, how she—
No.
Harry seized control of the insanity. He was master here, not his rage. He kept saying so. It was time he proved it.
No one to demonstrate it to, this time, except himself.
And he did have a way of demonstrating it.
Harry took a deep breath, grasped his thoughts, and forced them into the channels that he had worked so hard to learn, the channels of pureblood ritual and tradition. Such a response would have been natural to a wizard raised in a pureblood home. Harry hadn't been, but he had studied until he could dance in his sleep.
And there was a dance for this. There was a dance for most everything.
He put out a hand. He was not sure that the item he wanted would come to him. For all he knew, James's grandparents might have destroyed it. Or perhaps his parents' ignorance of him for the last six months and his legal guardianship by Snape would confuse the thing.
Then I'll create one, he thought, and the thoughts rose and echoed from a vast silence within him, which matched the silence in the kitchen. But, for now, I want it.
And then it was there, slamming into being, settling into his palm very delicately for an item that had been called from Merlin knew how many miles away. Harry studied it for a long moment. As he had expected, it was a simple box, the sides made of rowan wood, with a silver lid. On the lid was engraved a simple P.
It was covered with dust. No Potter had used it in a very long time, then.
Harry raised his eyes to his mother's.
"What you have done to me cannot be forgiven," he said, beginning the ritual with a sense of relief. Already, the magic was taking hold, calming his own magic, bending it to this one specific task, and insuring that Lily could not leave and no one else could enter the room until it was finished. This dance was the best of them all for this particular moment, designed to contain anger and to end it. "I have no wish to face you in a duel, nor to arrange legal means of settling the insult. Both of them would involve seeing you again, and I have no wish to do that, either.
"Therefore, I will take a payment from you, a weregild for all that you have done to me. One time, one shattering price for another shattering price, one apology made in terms that I have decided. We need never see each other again. We will make the exchange, and it will be done." He took a deep breath, because this was the last conscious step of the dance, and the test. "Last time pays for all."
And it worked. The kitchen slammed into red and yellow light, as though fire had burst into being through the walls and the air. Harry could feel magic older and stronger than he had ever dealt with swirling through the room, sucking the breath from his lungs and binding Lily in place, to take the price from her that he had demanded.
I was right. She did do me an injustice. Had it not been a true injustice, then the dance would have failed and the magic would have snatched his chosen price from him instead, for daring to invoke it on an innocent.
Harry held the box aloft and opened it. He had no choice anymore. The magic of justice was clutching at him, and it was implacable. The same magic tugged the words from him, the words that always varied every time this ritual was performed, but were what the invoker must say.
"I can never be safe so long as you would bind me with the phoenix web. I am going to make sure you can't. And this is it. This is all I need to satisfy my anger. I never want to see you again."
The ritual acted. The red and golden glow became fire, a huge scarlet hand.
It reached out and stripped Lily's magic from her.
Lily screamed as the fingers swept through her body, down from the aura and within, searching out every last bit of power she possessed. Out it funneled as glowing blue light, a delicate counterpoint to the red and golden flame. For a moment, it hovered around her, as though reluctant to leave.
Justice tore it away, and flew to the box that Harry held, and deposited Lily's magic within it. The silver lid slammed down and locked.
Harry released the box. It spun in midair, the rowan wood sides bucking for a moment. Harry watched narrowly. It wasn't often that a reparations box was asked to contain a price so powerful. It was far more likely to hold a certain amount of blood or flesh than magic.
And then the sides settled, and another box appeared, spinning lazily beside the first one. This one was empty, as Harry could see from the flapping lid. It vanished, for use at a later time, and the first one, the full one, followed it.
That was it, Harry thought, as he watched them go. Anything put into a reparations box could never be pulled out again. He wouldn't use or swallow his mother's magic, no matter how much he might be tempted. He trusted the pureblood ritual as he did not trust himself.
His mother was crumpled on the floor now, and Harry understood the difference between the brokenness she had feigned to lure him close and the real thing. He didn't want to look at it for long. It simply made him feel tired.
A wind pushed at his back. The ritual had taken his justice for him, and now it remained up to him to obey his part of the bargain. He had said that he never wanted to see his mother again. The magic was not about to let him remain and contradict that by hexing her, especially when it had just made her a Muggle.
He would have to leave.
Harry had barely thought that when he realized that some of the red and gold shadows in the room had altered; they were growing brighter, instead of darker. Harry blinked and turned to face them. The magic of the ritual was supposed to be fading away, as long as he left. Had something gone wrong?
Then the red and gold burst into flame, and Fawkes flew over to him. He hovered in front of him, and Harry couldn't see anything except black eyes cocooned in a nest of golden feathers. Fawkes crooned gently to him. The sight of his wings shielded Harry from the sight of his mother.
Harry, raw and aching and with his magic wide open, could understand the phoenix's intention, though still not his words. He nodded.
"Yes, please," he whispered. "Show me where to go."
Fawkes spread his wings wider, until he appeared to float in the air, rather than flying there. Harry watched golden leaves sprout from those wings, shining things of light and song, flapping gently around him and enclosing him in bright walls. They reminded him of the phoenix web for a moment, but he quelled that thought, and instead studied the world that he now stood in.
Where am I?
He understood almost instantly. He was riding Fawkes's fire, in the world that Fawkes flew through, when he vanished and appeared between one place and another. It was a beautiful world. Gauzy veils of scarlet and orange overlapped each other. Blue and gold surged in dazzling fountains that sprang and built off one another, soaring upwards in arched loops. Now and then, a brilliant white point winked into existence, hovered, like the sun, too bright to look at, and then vanished.
And the heat. Heat everywhere.
Harry felt it chase into him and warm away the last bits of the freezing cold rage. He smiled, slightly. He wouldn't be able to share this with Fawkes every time, but he could share it right now, with his magic wondrously free and his mind purged of some of the poison it had carried for so long.
And he knew, beyond all doubt, that Fawkes had offered this up to him freely, that he had in no way compelled it.
He extended a hand. Fire licked around him, tame and playful this one time, wound on his fingers and purred like a Kneazle. Snakes of glittering red crowned his hair. Harry felt himself laughing as the flames poured down his throat and tickled him, and if he didn't sound entirely sane, well, he didn't think he was entirely sane at the moment. But then, neither was the fire.
A word began to echo around him, a word that he had only heard a few times, but which repeated and rustled like the fire, as though it were the voice of the flames.
Vates. Vatesvatesvatesvates.
I suppose I am that, then, Harry thought, with a calm that he knew was artificial, forced on him by the remnants of the ritual and Fawkes's magic. But so? A pureblood wizard would be able to accept this. He would be able to accept it, too, since he was thinking like a pureblood wizard at the moment. Far be it from a pureblood wizard to be afraid of his own magic.
For a moment, his grip on the thoughts slipped, and he saw the vast gulf beneath him, the gulf where he would have to think about what his mother had done—
And he twisted away, and renewed his grasp on the learned thoughts. It was over. It was done. He had claimed his payment from her, and it was done. This time, there truly was no turning back and letting her hurt him again. The magic of justice had agreed with him that there was justice to be done, and Connor and James and she would just have to learn to live with it.
Last time pays for all.
The rustling, rasping voices subsided, and then the fire fell away altogether. Harry caught a brief glimpse of a white world, and knew that Fawkes had borne him somewhere familiar, on a snowy night. But before the fire let him go completely, it exhaled and breathed out across the whiteness in a shining array of nets.
Harry stared in silence at the nets, and then the misty glimpses of figures they connected to, figures who appeared at the ends of the threads like fish on a line.
House elves. Centaurs. Dementors. Unicorns. Dragons. Goblins. Runespoors. Werewolves. Giants. Merfolk. Hundreds and hundreds of others, all connected, all bound, all tied.
All compelled.
The wizarding world was built on webs, hundreds of them, thousands of them, ancient and interconnected. Harry wondered how he could unbind all of them.
And then the vision vanished, and Harry saw Fawkes sitting on a bare, icy tree branch in front of him, regarding him calmly. His head was tilted to one side, his eye a glittering black gem in the midst of the feathers. He uttered a long, slow croon.
"He says that that is why you are the vates. You will figure out a way."
Harry turned and nodded to Dobby. He wasn't surprised to see the house elf. He was incapable of being surprised right now, he thought. Too much had happened, and he was holding very, very tightly to the patterns that were keeping him sane.
"Hello, Dobby," he said. "Will you please run and ask Mr. Malfoy if he minds very much having me as a guest for Christmas?"
Dobby bowed. "Dobby would be delighted," he said with dignity, and vanished.
Harry stamped his feet and blew on his hands, warming himself in the cold. All around him lay snow. Overhead lay stars. In front of him, surrounded by its wards like a crown of blades, lay Malfoy Manor.
"You brought me here for a reason, didn't you?" he asked Fawkes.
The phoenix crooned again, this time a smug sound, and then fluttered off his branch and landed on Harry's shoulder. Harry relaxed, letting the warmth from the feathers drain into him. He stroked Fawkes's neck and wondered idly if Lucius would really let him stay. He had sent no truce gift for solstice so far. Harry had thought he was allied with him, but he really had no idea what had happened since he kept away from Draco.
That will have to stop, he thought. Until they officially dissolve anything that we put between us, they are still my allies, and I can't afford to keep away from them.
Would his presence mean compelling Draco?
Harry forced himself not to worry about it. He would ask for guest-rights. Lucius could let him in or deny him. If he denied him, there were other places to go. If he accepted him, that meant he was accepting the risk of his son's mind possibly being influenced, not to mention his wife's and his own.
Draco would take it further than that, of course. He would insist that they settle matters on a more personal level. But Harry felt as though he could accept that. He could accept anything at the moment. There really was a dance for most everything.
Dobby appeared just then. "Mr. Malfoy says that Mr. Harry Potter is welcome in his home, sir," he said, bowing his head.
Harry smiled distantly. He was glad that Lucius had decided to stop being stupid.
Applies to more people than just him, doesn't it?
"Mr. Malfoy says that he hopes Mr. Harry Potter will accept his apologies," Dobby added, his too-large eyes peering hard at Harry.
Harry nodded. "Please go ahead of me, and tell him that if I can forgive him for the diary, then I can forgive him for this."
Dobby nodded, and vanished again, just as the Manor's door flew open and Draco's voice shouted, "Harry! Harry!"
Harry took a deep breath, and did the second hardest thing he'd done all evening: he started forward, instead of away. He was within the wards in moments, with them parting for him like curtains, and then he was walking across the snow, his feet making brisk sloppy sounds, Fawkes shifting on his shoulder as though to get more comfortable.
Fawkes was forced to take to the air with a startled squawk when Draco grabbed him and knocked them both into the snow, but Harry didn't really mind. He grabbed Draco, and held on tight, and thought about guest-rights and letting other pureblood wizards take risks, and nothing else.
What he really didn't understand, a moment later, was why the dusty feeling returned to his eyes, and his face twitched, and he then burst into tears. And he let Draco escort him into the warmth and light of the Manor, because while there really was a dance for most everything, there wasn't a dance for this.