Potter47
Part One
The Shadow of Death
"Truths that wake,
To perish never."
William Wordsworth
Chapter Five
Running in the Family
Wiping her eyes of the tears that blurred her vision, Ginny reached down and held her hand over her foot for what seemed like hours before she finally was able to get the nerve to touch it, to pull it out. When she did, she let out a scream that could wake the dead.
In fact, it nearly did so.
Petunia's eyes snapped open, and she felt her breath hitch—she coughed, and she could breathe.
She heard other breathing, breathing quite unlike her own. She looked over to her side and saw the girl, the red-haired girl, the one who looked like her. She was sobbing on the other bed and holding her hand over her foot, which was bleeding.
Petunia opened her mouth to speak, but could not articulate the words—she closed her eyes, took a breath, and tried again:
"You look just like her."
Petunia was sure that that was not what she had meant to say, and she cursed herself for saying it nonetheless. She realised that she felt much calmer than she had before she had woken up...before she had fallen asleep? When had she fallen asleep, anyway?
The girl looked up, breathing unsteadily.
"You're awake," she said, and Petunia tried to nod but only managed an odd sort of shiver.
The girl nodded, and Petunia realised that 'the girl' was not a very good title for this girl. Petunia felt that she was too important for such a measly reference as that, and she wondered why.
"What's your... who are..." Petunia tried to say.
"I'm... Ginny Weasley," said...Ginny hesitantly, breath still coming in sharp gasps and blood still coming in short spurts. She wrapped her foot in the bed sheet and Petunia thought that that couldn't be the best action.
"You look just like her," said Petunia once again, and she cursed herself. Why did she keep saying that?
"I know," said Ginny.
"You...know?"
Ginny nodded. "Your sister, right? I know."
Silence.
"Are you in love with my nephew?" was the next sentence that somehow popped its way out of Petunia's voice box.
Ginny blinked. "Nice to meet you too," she said, before gasping painfully. She unwrapped her foot slightly and peered at it, grimaced, and wrapped it up again. The sheet was turning red.
"Are you in love with my nephew?" said Petunia again for reasons she could not fathom, could not possibly understand for the simple reason that she did not believe they existed.
Ginny blinked again, winced, and stared at Petunia.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I am. What's it to you?"
Petunia didn't know. She was feeling a bit light-headed, and her vision was getting a little bit blurry.
"Oh, God," said Petunia suddenly, her memory returning to her with the force of a thousand anvils, "my family."
"What?" said Ginny. "What about your family?"
"They're gone," said Petunia, who now knew exactly what she was saying and wished decidedly that she didn't. "Both of them are—"
"How do you mea—" said Ginny, her voice trailing off in a squeak.
"Dementors. They... they... oh my God," she said, before falling upon her pillow once again.
"He hasn't gone!" Harry wanted to yell, but he couldn't, because he knew he had. Harry didn't know how, but he had. Harry didn't know how...Harry wanted to know how...
"How?" said Harry, and he felt tears cascade their way down his face, as the rain slides its way down a sloped roof, or blood trickles down from a wound.
Lupin shook his head, either unknowing or simply incapable of telling. Dumbledore appeared once more beside the werewolf, and Harry thought he saw true grief on the old man's face.
"Harry," he said, and there was an odd quality in the voice—quite possibly the same grief that graced his face. "I am so very sorry—"
Suddenly Harry could not stand to hear condolences—either he heard answers, or he didn't hear anything at all.
"HOW DID HE DIE?"
They all were taken aback by his tone. Dumbledore was the most calm, the most reasonable, the most willing to tell Harry what he wanted to hear:
"If you all would please excuse us...I have many things to explain to Harry now. Please let us alone."
Harry followed Dumbledore past the couch and into the kitchen—Harry recalled that it was only days ago that he and Ginny had kissed on this couch; how long ago that felt. As if he had died and come back to life in the time since. Harry shook himself, and sat down opposite the headmaster at the table once again.
"Now, Harry," said Dumbledore, "this may take a while to explain to you. I would appreciate it if you would not interrupt me, though I know for a fact that you will not heed this request. Listen, now: I'm going to tell you everything—everything that I know about this subject, at least."
Harry thought Dumbledore was wrong: he would not interrupt, not this time. He could not bring himself even to speak again.
All he could do was listen.
Ginny stood painfully and replaced the bloody bed sheet with a soon-to-be-bloody pillowcase, which she tied around her foot in a miserable imitation of a shoelace.
Wincing, Ginny made her way downstairs. She didn't really want to go—what if she walked into Harry?—but she felt she had to alert someone that Harry's aunt had awoke.
She stumbled down the last few steps and fell down right onto her mother, who somehow managed to stay upright.
"Ginny, dear, what's wrong? What happened to your foot?"
"I cut it," said Ginny, wincing. "Harry's—"
"—with Dumbledore," said Mrs Weasley. "He can't talk right now—"
"I mean that Harry's au—Dumbledore? What's Dumbledore doing here?"
And now Ginny noticed that there were tears in her mother's eyes, and her face looked more wrinkly than normal. Ginny's eyes widened.
"What happened?"
"Sirius is—was—a vampire, Harry. There is no other way to say it, unless I said that he was a vampyre with a 'y' instead of an 'i', but that spelling hasn't been used for ages."
Harry's mouth fell open and his eyes blinked several times. His first thought was an unexpected one: he realised then that Dumbledore's odd sayings and statements were not borne from the urge to be funny—no, Dumbledore was more like Luna, and the oddness was just a part of him, and he probably didn't realise that what he was saying was odd, all the time. Harry thought this now, of all times, because surely—surely—Dumbledore was not trying to be funny right now.
Harry's second thought was a bit different:
"No he wasn't!"
Dumbledore fixed his glasses up on his nose; they had been slipping. "Yes," he said gravely, "I'm afraid he was."
Harry blinked several more times, sure that this was yet another of his seemingly random dreams. But no—it was real. But what on earth...
"You're mad," said Harry, and he wondered if it was the first time anyone had ever called Dumbledore mad to his face—no, probably not; Dumbledore didn't seem to mind.
"I'm not mad, Harry—well, not about this, anyway. Sirius was a vampire. And I thought you said you'd let me explain."
Harry remembered this now too—apparently, Dumbledore knew him better than he knew himself.
Dumbledore cleared his throat, and began once more:
"Sirius was a vampire. I had never known, never suspected, until you mentioned the red substance in your dream—that was blood. According to legend, vampires drink blood, must drink blood, in order to stay alive—though it is not always quite as drastic as that. The blood in your dream was a clue from your subconscious that something was wrong."
"But how would my subconscious know anything about Sirius being a vampire?" The words felt odd as they slipped off of Harry's tongue, as if he were lying, or pretending, or ... or just as if he were speaking words that he knew were false.
"I have a theory," said Dumbledore, and he smirked slightly, just the tiniest bit, as if to say Don't I always seem to have a theory? "I believe that perhaps this event evolves from your connection with Voldemort."
What doesn't?
"I believe that as Voldemort grows ever stronger, and his perception of the world grows ... as he slowly attempts to become omniscient ... that your mind is beginning to perceive things ... thoughts, inklings ... that you otherwise could never be aware of."
"Hang on—did you just say Voldemort is trying to become omniscient? All-knowing?"
A pause. "Yes. Yes, I did. He may not even realise that he is attempting such a feat, but indeed he is. As he reaches out with his mind across the universe, he begins to learn of things that he never even cared to know, never cared to try to find out—and maybe he doesn't even know he knows them."
Harry shook his head, not really comprehending. "You were talking about Sirius being a vampire...?"
"Oh, yes, how did my train of thought get so dreadfully off the track? Where was I? Oh, yes. The blood. Your mind tried to warn you—or even, perhaps, warn Sirius. But it was too late—when I arrived at Grimmauld Place, Remus had already found him."
Harry took a breath. "How did he die? I mean...that's what I asked to begin with, right? And you haven't said—"
"He was pushed, Harry. Through a second-story window of headquarters. We are not sure who the pusher was, but we suspect it may have been—"
"Lestrange," said Harry suddenly, fiercely. "It was Bellatrix Lestrange."
Dumbledore hesitated a moment. "I do not doubt that."
"That murderer..." Harry had hated Bellatrix before, but now the hate was all-consuming, and at the moment he could feel nothing besides the white-hot searing of that hate within his every nerve. He would kill her...he would avenge Sirius—
"Harry, where are you going?" Dumbledore said now, and Harry realised that he'd stood and was walking towards the door. When had he drawn his wand?
He dropped it as he came back to awareness, and noted absently once again as he sat down that it wasn't his wand, that it was Voldemort's wand. And Harry hated the fact that he could mistake it so easily, despite its opposing form.
"Harry, Sirius was pushed from that window, but it was not the fall that killed him. He was pushed into the sunlight. I do trust that you know what sunlight does to vampires?"
Harry nodded. There had been unpleasant descriptions—and illustrations—in some of his course books, and he very much did not want to picture Sirius looking like that.
"That is what happened to Sirius, Harry," said Dumbledore. "That is how he died."
Harry sat in silence for a moment, and then realised that this story had not taken very long to tell at all. He knew in an instant that that meant Dumbledore had more to tell.
Ginny noticed now that Professor Lupin was also in the living room, sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. Was he crying as well?
"What happened?" said Ginny again.
"You see, Ginny," said Mrs Weasley, putting an arm round her daughter's shoulders, "something has hap—"
"Who died?" Ginny said suddenly, knowing that someone had to have without knowing why she knew that someone had to have.
Mrs Weasley caught her breath for a moment, seeming surprised—perhaps because Ginny had said what she'd said—before speaking:
"Sirius."
This was not as much of a shock to Ginny as she thought it would have been.
She wondered why.
"You may be wondering, though," said the headmaster, "how he came to be a vampire in the first place."
Harry still could not believe that there was any possibility that Sirius could have been a vampire, and so hardly could stand to hear the confidence in Dumbledore's voice, the sheer lack of doubt. It was as if Dumbledore was saying, "You must be wondering why the sky appears blue..."
"Yeah," said Harry, closing his eyes for a minute—the image of Sirius with burnt, crumbling skin haunted the insides of his eyelids.
"Quite simply, Harry," said Dumbledore, "it was hereditary. Sirius inherited it from his parents."
Harry furrowed his brow. That doesn't make sense, he thought.
"But the Blacks were crazy about blood-purity. You mean to tell me that they were all vampires?"
"No, not at all, Harry," said Dumbledore. "I merely mean that the vampire trait runs in the Black family. Not everyone turns out to be a vampire. In fact, the majority of the Blacks were not.
"Until today, I had assumed that Sirius too had not become one—his brother had, you know, Regulus—you see, the trait is a bit like an allergy that does not present itself until late in life. For example, I know a man who is allergic to attics. He has been for nearly all his life, but his brother did not develop the allergy until his just after his fortieth birthday."
Harry wondered why Dumbledore seemed to venture into the irrelevant so much today. "How can someone be allergic to attics?"
"I hardly think that that is relevant," said Dumbledore. "As I was saying, none of the Blacks had ever shown signs of becoming vampires once they were well into their adult lives. Most in their early thirties, some sooner. I had assumed that Sirius, being nearly forty, would never develop the...disease, if you will.
"(If you have ever wondered why Grimmauld Place's kitchen is located in the basement, without any windows...well, I surmise you can figure that out.)
"I was wrong, it seems, about Sirius. Sometime in the past few years, he has developed the disease, though for some reason he has not shared it with anyone—something that could have helped him a great deal. I realised today that it has been since before Sirius went to Azkaban that I had seen him in the sun in his human form. (I suspect that his dog form somehow protects against the sun, like that Muggle cream with the little girl and puppy on the bottle.)
"I don't know for certain how the Blacks originally developed the disease—I fear that one Black may have been bitten generations ago, and in-breeding has resulted in...these results."
"But what about how the Blacks were so maniacal about having pure blood?"
"Largely from insecurity, I would surmise," said Dumbledore. "When the Death Eaters found a vampire within their midst, fifteen years ago—Sirius's brother—they dealt with it the way true pureblood-maniacs would: they had him executed."
"Yeah, I know," said Harry. Dumbledore looked at him oddly, but did not comment.
"How Merlin's name did you cut your foot so badly? You've sliced the whole darn thing, right down the middle."
Ginny's face scrunched up in pain once more, and her mother leaned her onto the couch, beside Professor Lupin.
"Honestly, how many people have to get hurt in this house before somebody calls a
mediwitch?" Mrs Weasley walked towards the door to the kitchen, only to be given quite a fright when Dumbledore opened it right before her.
"Oh, goodness! I'd forgotten you were in there."
"You don't have to worry about that," said Dumbledore with an odd sort of half-smile that seemed beyond withered and made Mrs Weasley think for some reason that he did not speak of her poor memory. "I'll send Poppy over in a jiffy. She is always so very bored during the holidays, always hoping for someone to break a leg in a staff member's presence, or—even better—for a staff member to break a leg. She'll be happy to be of service."
"Er, thank you," said Mrs Weasley gratefully, if slightly reluctantly—she hadn't seriously meant to call a mediwitch. She had only meant to go stand by the fireplace and decide not to call a mediwitch, because surely she could handle it herself.
It was when Dumbledore disappeared suddenly, leaving for Madam Pomfrey, that they all noticed Harry. His face did not seem to show the least bit of emotion, which in itself is indifference, but Harry was not indifferent, that was obvious.
He sat down next to Ginny on the couch, not even mentioning her foot; it was as though he couldn't even see it.
There was an awkward silence for a moment, and it should have lasted longer than a moment by all logic. But no, in only a few short seconds, a crack! sounded the arrival of Madam Pomfrey. She seemed very excited.
"It's Potter, isn't it?" she said so quickly that the 'it's' was partly cut off my the crack! "I've always wondered how he manages to not get hurt all summer long."
"Er," said Mrs Weasley, taken aback my the mediwitch's sudden entrance. "No. It's Ginny—" Harry's head jerked up, as if just now noticing that Ginny had been hurt (as if, for that matter, he hadn't noticed Madam Pomfrey at all), "—and, and Harry's aunt, too. But Ginny's is more urgent."
Madam Pomfrey bustled over to Ginny and drew her wand. She knelt down on the floor before the girl and lifted up the injured foot.
She looked as though she wanted to know how Ginny had managed to slice her foot open, but she never asked questions about her patients; perhaps she was too afraid that they'd tell her the answers.
Madam Pomfrey ran her wand along the wound, slowly drawing an invisible circle round it. She muttered:
"Sutura venae! Sutura Dermis!" The blood stopped flowing instantly, and the skin mended itself together in a moment.
"That's it?" Mrs Weasley harrumphed. "Well, I could have done that. I just did it the other day for Har—"
"What is that?" said Madam Pomfrey suddenly, down at Ginny's head as she stood up once more. She walked round the couch quickly and began to feel the top of Ginny's head—its owner seemed perplexed, to say the least.
"What is what?" Ginny said, rolling her eyes up as far as they could go, in a futile attempt to see the top of her own head.
"This bump, here." Madam Pomfrey pressed lightly on it, making Ginny recoil in pain.
"That hurts!" she said, trying to control the urge to slap the woman's hand away.
"Of course it does. Did this bump develop magically? From a hex?"
Ginny shook her head, which was somehow painful, though it wouldn't have been only a moment ago. "I fell back in my chair a few days ago. I hit my head." Her eyes became distracted for a moment, before returning to normal. "It stopped hurting a long time ago."
Madam Pomfrey bit her lip, shaking her head, while she felt around the bump with her fingers as lightly as she could. The other people in the room watched in confusion.
"This is a magical bruise," Madam Pomfrey said firmly. "And a serious one at that."
Ginny's eyes widened, looking up at her mother, who looked as shocked as she did herself.
"Let me see," said Mrs Weasley, and Madam Pomfrey stepped over to allow Ginny's mother access to her head. Mrs Weasley shook her head vehemently. "It wasn't nearly this bad when I looked at it before. It just looked like a teeny bump."
"Oh Snitch," said Madam Pomfrey, epiphany in her eyes. "It couldn't be that, could it?" she said to herself. She stepped away from Ginny, a worried look in her eyes. "I must go. I must refer to a text I've just recalled... I believe it is in the Restricted Section at the school." She said this last part to herself, as if reminding herself aloud. "Miss Weasley is to stay off her feet. But...and you are sure to think this is odd, but I strongly suggest you do not fall asleep."
"What?" said Ginny, and Harry, and Mrs Weasley, and even Professor Lupin, who had been silent for the longest time.
"As I said," said Madam Pomfrey, "this is serious."
She disappeared with a crack!
So there you have it; Sirius is a vampire. Did you see it coming? Please post your thoughts.
I would like to state now that this is not just a twist for the sake of having a twist — I actually, truly believe that Sirius is, canonically, a vampire. The evidence is simply undeniable.
I don't really want to get into this in much detail here, but just a few notes on the theory (note on the notes: not all of the evidence has been taken advantage of in this story):
— Sirius has never been seen in the sunlight out of his Animagus form.
— The Grimmauld Place kitchen is in the basement.
— In PoA, Snape was convinced that Sirius could not have entered the castle alone. Vampires, according to legend, cannot cross a threshold without permission.
— Quirrell had a run-in with vampires in the Black Forest. Coincidence?
— Sirius was actually described as looking like a vampire, in PoA...something along the lines of, "Harry had never met a vampire, but..."
This theory is explained in much greater detail in "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS VAMPIRE?" an editorial by HJSnapePM and myself. It is located at:
polyjuice . 275mb . com / HHGP / index.html
Please review. And also, please comment on the message board at the site listed above — remove the spaces, please, or it will most certainly never work. Just for you all to know, this is why I haven't posted in such a long time: I've been waiting until we could have the theory up and ready, so that you all don't think I'm just barmy.
I certainly hope this doesn't sway you to think that I'm not, of course.
See you next time.
"Lost time is never found again."
Benjamin Franklin
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