Thank you again for the reviews on Chapter 61!
This chapter once again has a MASSIVE FREAKING CLIFFHANGER, but it is the last one in a row that does. Also, fic warnings are relevant again, especially the one about emotional upset, and Harry's, um, kind of not sane right now.
I assume that I will probably be posting another chapter tomorrow, but later in the evening.
The title of this chapter comes from a line in Swinburne's poem, "Hymn to Proserpine."
Chapter Sixty-Two: Deep Death WaitsI never knew, Harry thought, as he stepped away from the altar and approached Voldemort with his wand clutched tightly in his hand, that I could hate this much.
The hatred stole his breath. It rushed and throbbed in him like another heartbeat, or like the love that his mother had once trained him to have for Connor. It was everywhere he looked, making the sight of the gravestones or the Death Eaters pale into insignificance next to the two largest things in his life. There was Voldemort, and there was his pain—the one present in front of Harry, the other something he wanted to achieve.
Voldemort watched him come, head cocked to the side, smile lazy. His voice, when he spoke, was low and had just a slight twist that Harry knew meant he was probably speaking in Parseltongue.
"Do you not understand what will happen here, Harry? You are done with. Your chances are dead. Your magic is spilling out of you, and will run wild until you die at the end of my wand." He lifted his own wand slightly. "And there is no doubt that you will die. Have you thought about what our respective wands are made of?"
Harry halted a few feet from him and stared at him in silence. He didn't say anything back. He didn't think that Voldemort wanted a response, and besides, he couldn't have given one. The words would have emerged from his mouth not as words, but as a shriek. He could feel the magic he still had control of, the magic that could be channeled through a wand, gathering itself like a leopard ready to spring.
Voldemort swung his wand back and forth. "My wand is yew," he said. "Symbol of resurrection, of returning from death. And the phoenix feather within it is simply an extra promise. I was always going to return, Harry, and I was always going to defeat you.
"Whereas yours…" Voldemort made a grotesque motion with his mouth that Harry supposed was symbolic of curling his lip, since he had no lip to actually curl. "Your wand is cypress, Harry. Do you know the legend of cypress? It is the death tree. Cut it once, and it grows not again. The branches are hung in mourning, and for remembrance." Voldemort lifted his wand higher, smiling. "I shall enjoy facing and hurting you one more time, my young nemesis. But remember. This was only ever going to end one way."
He moved a step forward and swung his wand in a sharp cutting motion. "Imperio!"
Harry opened his mouth as the Unforgivable Curse hit him. He was laughing, but the laughter sounded like nothing he'd ever heard before. It was the choking sound of an animal dying in a trap.
He felt only intense contempt, flaying his throat from the inside out as it rose.
Does he think to take me with that? Does he really think my will can bend now?
The Imperius Curse hit his shields and faded into oblivion. Harry raised his eyebrows to Voldemort's stunned stare and smiled mockingly. This time, he thought he could manage to speak, and in fact, words came out when he strained for them. "I'm not bowing to you, Tom."
As he had suspected it might, the name made Voldemort bare his teeth in a silent snarl. He spoke in Parseltongue instead of English, again, his voice a low and intimate hiss. Harry wondered, faintly, if even Voldemort thought his words were ridiculous, and that was the reason he was speaking like this, instead of announcing it in such a way that all his Death Eaters could understand. "You have no idea what you are doing, boy. You will pay in a thousand waves of pain for every insult you have flung at me."
Harry lifted his head. He could feel hatred pouring from him in waves, as though he had just climbed out of a dark ocean. It was wonderful how it felt not to care about anything anymore, not to know or feel it when he surpassed a boundary. He was out of control anyway, his greatest weapon still spilling uselessly from his cauterized wrist. Why should he give a damn?
He aimed his wand at Voldemort, and called. His wand magic, old, faithful friend, the one he'd mastered long before he tried wandless, came rushing at his call as he whispered the words, remembering the beach last summer.
"Accendo intra cruore."
The Blood-Burning Curse came from him easily, fluidly, and he saw Voldemort's eyes go briefly wide before he waved his wand and countered it. Harry didn't mind. He'd expected that this would be no easy fight. Voldemort was newly returned to power, and he had always had more strength than Harry did. The trick was to keep moving, and to have another spell at the ready on your lips, and he did.
That acquaintance with Rosier was quite useful, after all.
"Cor cordium flammae!"
Voldemort hissed briefly, but countered it with a spell that Harry had never heard of, and which made him decide that Lucius must have been lying about there being no countercurse to Burning Heart but from another wizard's wand. Harry shrugged lightly. He didn't care. Everything around him felt light, drifting, and he didn't know why he'd been so frightened of madness in the first place. He was going to die, Voldemort had seen to that, so why shouldn't he have some fun before he went?
"Crucio," he cast, and the hatred was there to fuel the Unforgivable, and, perhaps because Voldemort hadn't been expecting it, that actually made him stagger for a bit. Then he dismissed it with a Finite and glared hard at Harry.
It came to Harry that he had an advantage in being so much smaller and lighter, and he really should use that. As Voldemort cast a Blasting Curse at him, he dropped to the ground and rolled behind a headstone.
The headstone took the force of the curse instead, which Harry thought was nice of it. He patted the stone in thanks, and then rose up from behind the marker, facing Voldemort again. He had had a thought. He turned it over in his head and admired it. It was pretty, if sharp.
"What do you think you are doing, Potter?" Voldemort whisper-hissed. "Do you really imagine that you can escape, even now?"
"No," said Harry absently. His thoughts continued to turn. He had lost control of his wandless magic, and right now it was doing nothing more than flashing in useless purple lights around him. But wand magic was controlled with incantations and movements of the hand. He should be able to accomplish what he wanted to do, as long as he wrapped it in a unique word and wrist movement. Intention was usually a third component of spells, but, given the hatred baying inside him right now, Harry didn't think that he would have a problem with that.
"Then what are you doing?"
"Hurting you," said Harry, and smiled at him, and decided that he had never heard of a spell that used this word before. Not cleaning charms, and not mediwizardry, and not ordinary spells. And the wand movement—hm. A quick swish to the side and then back up again at a ninety-degree angle would work, he thought. Most spells used angles less than that.
Harry heard himself, as if from far away, begin to hum.
Voldemort narrowed his eyes at him, but, this time, cast a spell in Parseltongue. Harry didn't recognize it, and had no preparation against the blow that caught his chest and began to squeeze about his lungs. It was literally turning the air in them to something else, he thought from his distance. Perhaps lead.
He concentrated, and said Finite Incantatem in his head, moving his wand in the proper motion. That spell was an old one, learned early in his training, and nonverbal magic was still magic that had to be done with a wand, most of the time. The sensation in his chest faded.
Yes, his word and his wrist movement were ready, and the intention aimed itself as Harry began to walk towards Voldemort.
Why not?
Harry lifted his wand. He could almost feel the dragon heartstring core tingle as he released his power in a stream through it, and he sang out the word he had chosen for his spell. "Exsculpo!"
The spell was new, and for just a moment, Harry could feel his magic fighting to take the shape he wanted, seeking a familiar incantation and not finding it. He gave a little sigh and pushed his will forward. Really, he wanted Voldemort to suffer. Was that so hard to achieve?
The spell trembled, and then obeyed him. A jet of purple light shot from his wand and landed on Voldemort's stomach, while the Dark Lord laughed aloud.
"You are trying to erase me as you would a slate, boy?" He sneered. "It is not that easy to get rid of me."
"Not erase," Harry whispered, smiling. "That's not the only thing that word means."
Voldemort had exactly half a second to look suspicious before his belly split open and the spell started trying to scoop his internal organs out.
Harry watched as a soup of gray and green and white—and really, why he had he expected Voldemort's insides to look at all like a normal person's?—started to fall to the ground. Voldemort tried to cast a healing spell on himself, but his voice was trembling with pain and shock and, Harry suspected, wounded pride. Little boys he'd set himself the task of killing were not supposed to do things like that.
Harry might have been content to watch and wait until Voldemort recovered, so that he could go on chipping at the man little by little and bit by bit, but just then something else happened.
The barriers around Harry, the ones that had bound his wandless magic in his body until Bellatrix cut his hand off and kept his allies away from him, fell.
Harry turned his head in that moment of deep silence, even though he knew he didn't have to look. He already knew what he would see.
The sun had set. Voldemort's sun-tied power, enormous though it was, had gone, and he had no ability to will Harry's magic motionless in the graveyard anymore.
Harry felt a smile flood his face, brilliant, dazzling, strong. He knew this was going to change nothing; he still expected Voldemort to kill him in the end. It was inevitable. Cleverness could only hold out against raw strength for so long, and Harry knew that this was the Dark Lord, who had spent years on years studying Dark magics, and doing sickening things to his body to keep himself alive at all costs. Of course he would win any duel they had.
But, for now, Harry was free to take a more complete vengeance than he had so far. He would give Voldemort something to remember him by.
He whistled softly, and got the attention of his wandless magic. It was no longer under his control, but it would at least pay attention when he called. Harry could feel its focus, as though it were a feral dog perking its ears to a once-familiar cry and deciding whether to come.
Harry asked if it was interested in hurting someone.
Tainted by his spiraling hatred, driven mad by his pain, it was.
Harry lifted his head, and fixed his eyes on Voldemort, who had repaired his belly. Through his eyes, from the bite on his left shoulder, from his severed wrist, the magic exploded. Harry didn't try to master it. He just threw a blast of absolute final force at Voldemort, and was happy in the doing of it.
The force caught Voldemort, wrenched him twice, spun him once, and tossed him into one of the grave markers. Harry heard a snap, though it wasn't the sound of a breaking bone; it sounded more like a twig. When Voldemort rolled back over, his left arm hung oddly.
Harry smiled at him.
Voldemort bared his jagged teeth in a soundless scream.
And his own magic rose around him, a Dark tsunami, deep and impossibly strong and unstoppable.
Harry found himself on his back, the magic swarming over him like snakes, held down by the strength of it just as he had been in first year. Knowledge and experience and old, old cruelty crouched over him. If Voldemort had ever been human, he had lost that distinction long ago.
Shall I teach you, child? his voice hissed from everywhere and nowhere, inside Harry's head and into his ears and just above his body. Shall I teach you what it is to hate?
And Harry felt it grab him and drag him and plunge him into foulness. This was Dark magic gone wrong, the force that had twisted and mutilated and fooled the Light magic into granting Voldemort the power to link to the sun through a false truce-dance. This was a force that bred webs, or broke them only for the Dark Lord's selfish ends. Harry felt dog vomit overcoming him, rising up, flooding his nostrils, filling his mouth and his ears with its weight and its stink.
He knew how his mother must have felt about him, now.
Drowning, he whistled again, and his magic cocked one ear.
Harry took a deep breath, gagging on the stench of evil not even present, and opened his siphoning ability.
The snake opened its jaws because it had decided that it wanted to, and began to swallow. The foul magic fell down its throat, and was not transferred to Harry, but borne elsewhere. Harry was just as glad. He was mad, maybe, but there was only so much of that stench and contamination that even he could take. He lay, and breathed, and felt the weight grow less and less.
Voldemort paused in that moment, and his inaudible voice laughed.
Harry, Harry, dear Harry. You are my magical heir, aren't you? I don't know how it happened, but that night, when I confronted you, I must have given you some of my own magical gifts. The Parseltongue was only one of them.
What you have forgotten, my heir, is that the ancestor is always better, faster, stronger.
Voldemort's own magic-eating ability became active. At least, Harry thought that must be what it was. It had teeth, though, not like his swallowing snake, and it swarmed his magic and ripped pieces out of it.
Harry screamed. This did not hurt as much as having his hand cut off, but it increased the sense of violation. His hand and his stump scrabbled at the ground, trying to stop the swallowing process. He did remember not to let go of his wand, but just barely.
So young, Voldemort's voice echoed gleefully in his mind. So innocent. So pure.
Harry drew a deep breath and reached out automatically to pull his power back into his body and out of danger. Once again, it slipped out of reach. Harry cursed, and sobbed, and asked the magic-swallowing snake to open its mouth wider, politely, the way he would have asked a magical creature.
The snake obliged, and swallowed more, faster and faster. As Voldemort's magic grew fat and swollen with what he was stealing from Harry, it also lost that strength right away into Harry's magic. They'd become a snake eating its own tail, Harry thought dazedly, or perhaps, given the stink of Voldemort's evil, a snake eating its own shit.
Voldemort snarled at last, "Enough!"
Harry was not sure whether the command was in English or Parseltongue, but it had its effect. The creature that his magic formed stopped ripping and sucking at Harry's magic. Voldemort turned, instead, to defend himself against the loss of more power.
The snake swallowed a bit more, but then Harry asked it to shut its jaws and stop. It obeyed. Harry gasped, trembling with the force of the relief, and wondering what would happen next. His magic lay next to him, swollen, grown, and diminished. Since he could not touch it or estimate it any more, he could not know by how much.
What happened next was a high, clear song.
Harry tilted his head back. A spot of golden light circled above him. It descended nearer to the graveyard, and Harry recognized Fawkes. He stifled a groan. Why had the phoenix come? Neither of them could escape, and Harry was sure, now, that he would soon have another death on his conscience.
Therefore, Harry thought, as he scrambled back to his feet, the best thing to do was ignore the phoenix.
Besides, he had the feeling that Fawkes would want him to stop feeling hatred. And he couldn't do that. He stared at Voldemort, and the hatred became intense desire to destroy—anything the man held dear, anything he valued. The trouble was, Harry didn't think he valued his Death Eaters all that much, and there was no chance of breaking his wand.
Perhaps memories would do just as well.
"I heard you were looking for your diary," said Harry casually, as they fell into a circling pattern. He didn't know if he spoke in English or Parseltongue. Certainly looking at Voldemort's inhuman eyes was enough to make him think of snakes and speak their language. "Did you ever find it?"
Voldemort's gaze snapped to his face, and he sucked in a deep breath. "Where is it?" he hissed.
"Somewhere you can't find it." Harry twirled his wand between his fingers, and circled to the right, and smiled. "Too bad that you're going to kill me before I can tell you about it, isn't it?"
Voldemort might have replied, but Fawkes swooped over him, golden claws aiming for his face. Voldemort ducked, and Fawkes swept around in a circle, voice loud and sweet and urgent.
Harry shook his head regretfully at him. Fawkes represented something wonderful that he couldn't ever go back to. His emotions refused to be caged. He would die spending his anger. There was at least that consolation. He would die with his guilt and his shame safely buried, too, because death would pay for the death of the child he had not saved and cover up the shame of failing so badly as to lose his own hand.
Voldemort hissed a curse at Fawkes, but Fawkes dodged it easily and came to hover over Harry, singing loudly.
Harry shoved at him. "Go away, stupid phoenix," he muttered absently, more interested in the spell Voldemort was readying than what Fawkes might think about this treatment. "You should have bonded to someone more worthy of you. I can't help anymore, sorry."
Fawkes chirped angrily. Harry looked up, his eyes narrowed. I'm tainted. I can't go back. Can't he see that?
It was a small thing, really, his irritation at Fawkes compared to his hatred of Voldemort, but that was the emotion his wandless magic chose to answer, and it abruptly leaped out of his severed wrist and attacked the phoenix.
Fawkes sang a lament as his tail feathers frosted over, and he flew higher and higher, still singing, and probably, Harry thought, shedding tears. Harry shrugged, glad that he was beyond any danger now. Harry wasn't worth saving.
Voldemort's spell hit him then—a simple Blasting Curse, but it flung Harry several feet. He rolled, standing up almost immediately, glad to have a situation that he understood better than most. He had trained for this. He had known that one day he would die fighting. He really never should have let anyone convince him otherwise.
For the next few minutes, he was blind to everything but the battle. Voldemort flung curses, and Harry dodged them or raised Shield Charms against them. He threw hexes, and Voldemort turned them aside, or caught them, changed them in midair, and threw them back at him. Harry decided that would be a useful skill to learn, and he should try and learn it—
Before he remembered that he was going to die here, and parted his mouth in a soundless laugh. That did rather make all his worries about his future seem pointless. And, well, he was sorry for Draco and Connor and Snape and the others—for Draco most of all—but he could already feel the gathering power around Voldemort, and knew the man was almost done playing with him. He was preparing a strike that would take Harry's life once and for all.
Dying in battle against the Dark Lord. The fate I wanted, the fate I chose the moment I dedicated myself to serving Connor. How can I say that I didn't see this coming, or that I'm not happy to be here now?
He decided that he might as well go out in a meaningful way, and that meant that he did want to take one of Voldemort's Death Eaters with him, after all. He turned his head, and saw Bellatrix leaning forward from the circle, her lips parted as she watched the duel. Harry narrowed his eyes at her, even as one of Voldemort's cutting hexes, like small knives flaying him all over his body, cut open the wound on his shoulder again. She wasn't good at defense. He didn't need his wandless magic to defeat her, the way he would have to have a chance against Voldemort.
He whirled to the side, presenting a tempting target for Voldemort. He knew the Dark Lord would hesitate a moment, though, unable to believe that Harry did not have some trick up his sleeve.
And Harry did. The trick just wasn't for Voldemort. He gripped his wand and raised it, aiming at Bellatrix, picturing her dead and glad of it. He opened his mouth, prepared to utter the Killing Curse for the first time.
"I'm bored," Evan Rosier, standing to Bellatrix's right side, announced abruptly, and then drew his wand and flung a hex at her.
Bellatrix, focused on Harry, didn't dodge it in time, and it caved in her ribs. As she fell to the ground, bubbling, Rosier winked at Harry, said, "I told you, you're interesting," and then turned to counter curses coming from the general direction of Greyback and Whitecheek.
Harry didn't have time to worry about Rosier. Voldemort was striding towards him, and this time, his magic rose like wings around him. Harry faced him, and knew this was the end. Voldemort might use the Killing Curse, or he would use something else—he probably would, so that Harry died in suffering—but his magic was like a looming wall, blocking out the last gleam of sunset and the last of Fawkes's song. Harry looked into death, and it looked back at him.
He didn't find it as fearsome as he might once have. Something had died within him when that boy did.
Voldemort smiled at him and made to speak, but then jerked his head to the side. Harry slowly followed his gaze, aware of a patch of silence there, but not knowing what he would see.
Dragonsbane Parkinson was striding forward between the gravestones, his black wrappings fluttering about him as if in a chill wind.
Words that Harry had nearly forgotten blazed into his head, words that Dragonsbane had spoken at last year's Walpurgis Night, when his prohibitions lifted and allowed him to talk to others with his mouth.
We will see each other again. And the next time but one is in a home of my kindred.
Harry had seen him with Hawthorn in the meeting in the Ministry at the end of August. And now he was here again, striding through a home of his kindred, a necropolis, a…
A graveyard.
The necromancer halted between two stone angels, and bowed to Harry, and lifted his hands.
And the dead arose.
Stone and earth cracked and creaked and groaned and shifted aside. Harry saw hands wrapped in bone, clad in cloth, wearing shards of wood as fingernails, scramble and tip aside the angels. Both of them missed Dragonsbane, who simply stood where he was, perhaps with his head bowed—it was hard to tell, given how swaddled he was—as the corpses stood and staggered past him, heading for the Death Eaters.
Most of the graves were breaking open now, and spilling out concoctions of dust and flesh, skeletons, nearly fresh bodies wrapped in shrouds, to advance on Voldemort's followers. Harry saw a few of the graves open but loose nothing save silver vapor. He supposed those were the ones with bodies so old that they had nothing to contribute to zombies, and could only produce something like spirits.
Dragonsbane stood in the middle of his kindred, and his hands flashed into view, pale and gleaming blue with the stone of his great ring, and he made several repeated motions, which Harry thought were part of his sign language. When he reached the end of the sequence, he began again.
Harry shook his head, not understanding, not wanting to understand, and turned back towards Voldemort. It didn't matter that Dragonsbane was here, any more that it mattered that Fawkes had appeared or Rosier had turned. None of them would manage to stand against Voldemort's magic. At best, the dead might take some of the Death Eaters, and Harry was vaguely glad of that.
He could feel an equally vague fear that if he allowed the arrival of his allies to matter, then he would have to live, drowning in his shame and guilt all the way. He thought he would prefer to die.
Voldemort aimed his wand. Harry could see that he was no longer playing, the arrogance that had driven him to this in the first place pressed flat by the weight of cold facts. He began to intone the spell that had no counter, no shield, and Harry knew he would not survive it this time. There were no barriers on his magic to be broken any more.
"Avada Ke—"
Something hit Harry full force and rolled him over. Harry found himself beneath a cold, solid weight, one that barely yielded when he pushed and struggled. Dragonsbane rolled off him at once, but he had done what he wanted to do. The Killing Curse had missed Harry, the green bolt of light soaring over his head to strike one of the masked Death Eaters and fell him. Harry heard Rosier's laugh, and knew that he yet lived, as if that would matter to him.
Harry glared at Dragonsbane. The necromancer was making no move to rise, lying on his back and making the same sequence of motions with his hands again and again. Harry found himself irritated that Dragonsbane was keeping his vows even now, as if they mattered more than telling Harry what the bloody hell was going on, but more annoyed still that Dragonsbane had deprived him of a relatively easy death.
A slight snarl was all the warning he had.
His wandless magic, the magic he could no longer control, sprang and then came down on Dragonsbane, howling as though Harry's irritation had been a surge of Dark, irrational fury.
Harry screamed and reached out his left wrist, without thinking. More magic spiraled loose from the stump and attacked Dragonsbane, ripping and snarling and clawing. In desperation, frantic, Harry tried to grab it and hold it back, snatching at it in any way he could imagine—with reins, with words, with his wand, with a web.
Nothing availed. The magic might as well have been a completely separate entity from him, even as it fulfilled the wishes it must have thought he had.
It tore Dragonsbane's chest apart, and Harry knew before he saw the pale hands stop moving and drop to the blood-matted grass that his ally was dead.
And as if someone had turned a key in the lock of his head, sanity returned to Harry with a click and a snap.
Harry went to his knees, screaming. He didn't know what emotion most drove the scream: fury, grief, guilt, self-loathing. But all of them were in there, and all of them made him feel, once again, as if he would rather die, notwithstanding Fawkes's song ringing overhead or Voldemort's delighted laughter behind him or what was happening to the Death Eaters.
You can't die. The thought returned to him with brutal suddenness. You thought you could, but you can't. There is yet one more way that you might get out of this, one thing you haven't tried. You should have thought of it before, and you didn't, and now he's dead, but you've thought of it now and you're going to use it now, damn you.
If nothing else, you owe Hawthorn and Pansy an explanation for how Dragonsbane died, and you'll have to get out of here to give it.
Harry turned. He lifted his wand. Voldemort had stopped laughing and watched him thoughtfully, his red eyes narrowed.
He understood what Harry intended in time to join in, but not in time to stop it. That was fine with Harry. Determination was riding him now, driving him as simple will to survive could not have done. He bore guilt, and he must pay the enormous debt he'd just incurred to the Parkinsons.
"Legilimens."
"Legilimens."
Harry and Voldemort spoke the spell at the same time, and, leaping, passed into each other's minds at the same moment. Harry rode the sensation of wind inside Voldemort's thoughts, clutching his goal to himself all the while.
Damage him. Wound him deeply enough that you can escape with your knowledge and he can't just follow you, or break loose from the graveyard and start hurting other people.
Hurt him.
Yes, I think I can do that. I'm already a murderer, aren't I?