Thank you for the reviews on the last chapter!

Harry does something very brave here. Or very stupid. I can't decide which.

Chapter Seven: Breakdown

Harry opened his eyes to find himself lying on grass that had once been intimately familiar to him, with the radiant full moon shining down in broken shards from overhead where its light passed through the isolation wards. He let out a sharp little breath. He had wondered if the wards would be intact, but he had imagined they would be. Lily had lived here by herself for more than a year, with only Dumbledore's house elves to tend her. Dumbledore would have wanted to be sure that she was well-protected, and the isolation wards that had stood around the house for fourteen years were stronger than anything he could have woven in just a few months.

Harry pulled himself slowly to his feet, blinking and staggering as his newly-healed bones protested, and then reached out and touched the holes in the wards. There were a few, mostly only large enough for owls. He repaired them, and then raised a thick ward of his own, twining together Shield Charms until a chain of Protego ran along behind the isolation wards, forming a dome, as they did.

He paused to study his work when he was done, and then nodded, once. The wards around the house were keyed to James, to Connor, to Remus, to Lily, to Dumbledore, and perhaps also to Peter, though Harry was fairly sure his father had changed that after Peter's intrusion in the summer before their third year at Hogwarts. That meant that they might be able to follow him here, particularly if Regulus managed to pass information through one of the former Death Eaters to Connor—

But even if they followed him here, they couldn't get in. The Shield Charms were keyed only to him, and would hold firm.

Harry turned towards the house, lying innocently in the moonlight, only to pause as he felt a tug of warmth in his mind. He shook his head in irritation, and raised his Occlumency walls even higher than he had before. Fawkes was trying to reach him. If Harry sealed the bond off like a tunnel, however, then the phoenix couldn't find him, and couldn't appear at his side. He had been in Godric's Hollow before, of course, but that had been with only the weaker wards in place and Harry welcoming him. Harry was fairly confident he could keep Fawkes out even as he would keep out Regulus.

This was something he had to do alone.

He reached the door of the house and opened it. It swung easily under his hand, not needing even an unlocking charm. Of course, Harry thought, Lily hadn't had the need to fear anyone intruding while the isolation wards stood, and she had expected to return with him this summer. No need to lock it all up tight when she believed that she'd come back with him from Hogwarts just a few minutes after leaving.

And now she's gone.

But not forever, Harry told himself, and that was the reason he was here at all. He stepped into the entrance room and flicked his hand. The lamps in the room lit with a blast of brilliance, sending light flooding across books and furniture and carpeting he hadn't seen in a year and a half.

Harry bit his lip as he studied them. He wondered if the best place to do what he intended would really be here. The room held memories, of course, but he didn't think it was enough. His training had taken place here, but also all around the house, and the most traumatic single event he could remember occurring here was Remus's finding out he had been abused.

His fingers flexed spasmodically as he thought about that.

You can say the word. You can think it.

It didn't help that he didn't really believe it yet, of course.

Never mind. That would cease to matter in a moment.

Harry shook his head and moved on into the kitchen. It was dusty from several days of neglect; the house elves must have left to go back to Hogwarts when they realized there was no longer any human here to care for. Harry could feel his breath rushing faster and faster, his spine stiffening, his hand clenching at his side. He didn't realize it was clenched until he tried to extend it to touch the table and found his fingers resisted moving, however.

This was the place where he had seen his mother for what he believed would be the last time, the day she had tried to renew the phoenix web on him.

This will do.

Harry forced his hand to open, and then seated himself on the floor, a careful distance from both table and cupboards. He didn't want to ram his head into anything, in case he made uncontrolled physical movements. He didn't want to fall, either. He half-closed his eyes and breathed for long moments in silence.

Carefully, he stripped away his consciousness of anything outside Godric's Hollow. The emotions he felt about his allies and Draco, Snape and Scrimgeour, his parents and Dumbledore, slid into Occlumency pools and left him alone. He could feel only his breathing, and the slinking of the truths beneath the surface of his mind.

Harry thought of the way he knew his own mind looked: a living thing, half-forest and half-tame, rustling with green leaves. Throughout it lay the Occlumency pools, and under them lay the bridges of his magic that he had established at the end of his second year, when he was trying furiously to contain it. A neat structure, he thought, and undergirded by training he hadn't ever tried to change. Training that ran deeper than the phoenix web, training that had made him into the person he was but the quality of which he hadn't paused to consider.

How could he have considered it, though? He had been told, when he received it, that it was infallibly right and good.

Well, now he knew better. And now, he could summon the cool, sleek resolve that had arisen in him when he pushed his emotions into Voldemort's mind, and had seen himself lying helpless on the ground.

He had sometimes been merciless to his enemies in the past, and certainly with people he had thought behaved stupidly.

He could be merciless with himself.

Couldn't he?

Yes. I can do that.

Harry took one final deep breath. Even the means to keep himself focused and concentrated on the task at hand would end up as the means of delaying it if he let them become so. He made himself promise that, when he let out this breath, he would begin the change, and then he let it out.

And he turned his own magic on his own mind.

He imagined his Legilimency as a dragon, withering, blasting flame-breath taking out the forest, crisping and drying the leaves, collapsing the half-woven hedges, tearing into the substance of his thoughts. He heard silent screaming, and knew it came from him, that it might even be emerging from his throat as audible sound. He pushed forward, even when his head began to burn with dull pain, willing himself to ignore it. He dug down and down, setting the heart of his memories and sanity carefully in the Occlumency pools, but burning everything else.

He imagined the leaves parting, revealing the old instincts and training at the bottom of them. He saw webs and bridges and wounds, old scarred things that had been made by carelessness or design and then allowed to recover as they would. He tore them open, and more pain raged around the inside of his head. Harry dove deeper, dragging his resolve along with him.

Pain.

Memories soared past him, images of himself as a child, of his parents, of Connor, of Draco, of Voldemort. One moment he was in the graveyard, the next facing Lucius Malfoy in his study, the next a child casting pain curses on himself so that he could learn to resist torture. He accepted the wild chaos and dug deeper, ravaging the things that made him who he was. Everything most essential, the things he absolutely had to have to recover, was stored in the Occlumency pools. Everything else could be destroyed.

Somewhere along the way, he lost the consciousness of his name, though he knew he could recover it if necessary. That was in the Occlumency pools, too, or in the memories that stormed around him. He would only have to wait, and one of them would fly to him and stick itself to his face and tell him what he needed to know.

He landed at last near the bottom. His head pounded with pain. He knew that he had torn most of the webs that had confined him, though at the moment it was hard to remember why he had wanted to tear them. He lay back, panting, and then reached out and cracked open the first Occlumency pool, not trying to choose one in particular—he no longer remembered which was which—and waited to see what would emerge.

What emerged was an image of his brother. Connor, that was his name, and they were examining fairies at the bottom of the garden. After a short struggle, he remembered that their home was called Godric's Hollow. He didn't know his own name, not yet. That was not part of the scene. It was only a small thing beside the overwhelming consciousness of his brother. He smiled, and listened to Connor make up stories about the fairies, and studied the web of love that bound them.

That was part of what made him who he was, then.

And he had made mistakes because of it, savage mistakes. He had thought, for example, that nothing mattered more than Connor, or rather that Connor mattered more than everyone else. And that was a mistake because, if everyone really did deserve the same chances, then Connor deserved the chances that other people had—but not more. The people who had taught him to love Connor, whom he didn't know, yet, had twisted that, and taught him that Connor did deserve more.

Why?

He blinked. He found it odd, but freeing, that he did not know why. It had something to do with the heart-shaped scar on his brother's forehead, though. He leaned forward, and peered at that attentively. The remembered him smiled. But there was nothing about the scar that particularly drew the attention, he thought. Hm. Perhaps he should reach into the Occlumency pools, again.

He did, and stamped down on the messy emotions that wanted to emerge. There would be time for them later.

Ah. The scar came from surviving a curse and killing a monster—but his brother had been only a baby when that happened. And Connor had not been the one who had survived the curse and killed the monster. That had been the remembered him. Himself, he supposed. He thought that was where the lightning bolt scar on his forehead had come from. But no one particularly revered him for that, and why should they? He had not been the one who had chosen to face the monster.

More rummaging. More peering into the Occlumency pool.

Oh. Oh. Other people had made the decision for him. His parents, of course, and another older man whose name he didn't wish to remember yet. Well, that made more sense. Parents should make the decisions for their children. And if they knew that one of their children could kill the monster, then—

They hadn't known.

He paused as that realization struck him, and considered it a moment. Then he pulled up a memory, seen as from a distance, of the night the monster had come to Godric's Hollow, and what had happened. He watched it in silence, as if seeing it for the first time, conscious that he wasn't, but allowing new emotions to flood across his mind.

They had just left him and his brother to face the monster alone. They had not known that one of them could defeat him, not for certain. They had only hoped.

That—that is hideous.

He was aware, distantly, that his indignation was more general than specific. He would have been upset about any parents who left their children to a monster without absolute trust in the defenses that guarded them. He had a sense, dimly, that it had been harder for him to be upset about himself being the baby in the cradle who had lain helpless as the monster swooped down.

Not so helpless.

But that had been an accident, a chance, a coincidence. It might have been predicted, but no one had known which way it was going to happen. He might easily have died, and the monster might have been destroyed by his brother. Or maybe something else would have happened that resulted in Connor dying. So the excuse of the good outcome couldn't be used to justify their leaving Connor and him alone. They had not known, their parents and this man named Albus Dumbledore.

He seized that insight and examined it for a moment. He had the feeling that it was important, though he did not know how. He cracked open yet another Occlumency pool, and waited to see what would emerge.

A torrent of emotions answered him, and as they flowed out, the memories they belonged to came and attacked him. Harry, Harry, that was his name, and he was fighting, gasping, struggling to stay on his feet and keep his balance in the midst of the current, remembering the resolve that had driven him here, knowing again who he was and what his training had been—

But he had hold of the insight, too, and it did not slip away. He slammed the insight into the memories flooding past him, and then he understood.

He had said once that his training didn't matter, because he had survived it. So it did not matter that some evil things had been done to him in the name of love, in the name of a twisted greater good, that he was a sacrifice. He had survived, and he accomplished many good things with the end result of that training. Why were Snape and the others so upset about it?

Well. Now he knew.

Harry could feel himself flinching from that insight, trying to fight it, marshalling all the old arguments. He raised steel cages of pure will and magic, cages that kept him from running. Wherever he turned, he saw only himself, reflected, and came to know and understand his part, because he had no choice.

They were upset for the same reason that he was upset about leaving children alone and helpless before a danger. Parents owed more care to their children than that. It did not matter that he was Harry, or that there was a prophecy involved, or that he had been taught to be a sacrifice. Other people still saw him as a child whose parents had not taken care of him. They saw him as a victim—

He really did revolt then, trying to knock himself unconscious rather than endure what was coming, but that merciless resolve gripped him and dragged him back. By Merlin, he would live through this. They were words, true words, and he would hear them.

He pulled himself through shattered glass, and he spoke them.

"They see me as a victim of child abuse because, to them, child abuse is a child's parents treating him with something other than proper love and care. And that's what my parents did."

Harry opened his eyes, and became aware that he was breathing harshly all the while. Blood ran from his lips when he licked them; he had bitten almost straight through the lower one. He could not care. Revelation rang in his head like a crystal bell, and overrode the dull pain from his destroyed mind.

So that is what they see. That is what they know, or think they know. It is no wonder that they think me a victim. They would see any child in that situation as a victim. It is not that I'm me, particularly, that makes them think I can't bear this. They would think the same thing of Connor if he had been trained to be a sacrifice for me. They would think the same thing of Draco. They would think the same thing of Millicent.

Wonder and relief flooded his heart. So it really was simple. It really was understandable. It really made sense, when he was able to consider himself the same as everyone else, or at least as other children in the same situation, and not as unique.

Knowing that the world had not gone mad, that he could share everyone else's perspective if he really tried, was a great comfort.

Harry cocked his head. "So what would I expect Connor, or Draco, or Millicent, to feel, in the same situation?" he whispered.

Anger. Regret. Fear. Terror. They certainly wouldn't want to testify to save Lily's freedom, or to exonerate Dumbledore.

That is what everyone else is expecting me to feel.

Well, no wonder they're so upset when I don't appear to feel it!

Harry hooked his hand behind his head and lay back, staring at the ceiling. He could feel memories of the phoenix web and Lily pressing on him, if he really cared to look for them, but at the moment he was occupied in considering something else.

And why don't I appear to feel it?

Harry frowned, half-closing his eyes. He supposed that this was where his answer would differ from other people's, again. They would say it was his training. Any child should be as outraged and fearful as they were imagining.

But all those expected emotions only made part of his response. He did, still, feel the pity and the forgiveness that had made him shrink from the thought of charging even Dumbledore, the one he cared for least among the three, with child abuse. Their lives would be ruined.

"They've ruined my life," he murmured, then paused. The words felt false. He understood, now, why other people would expect him to believe them. He could adopt that perspective by flicking his mind slightly to the side. Of course they had ruined his life by driving him into pain and uneasiness, by making him flinch with guilt whenever he wasn't doing something to serve Connor, by putting the phoenix web on him.

But a softer voice answered back to that: So what?

Harry examined the voice thoughtfully. Could he be sure that it was his, and not the voice of the training they had put him through, the voice—say it, Harry, they are only words, and words are easy—of an abused child?

Well. That was a stupid thought to have, really. If he was an abused child, then the voice of an abused child would be his own voice. So he couldn't say that it wasn't him talking.

The way he thought of it, he realized, lying back in the kitchen where he'd spent years learning his lessons and taken his mother's magic away, was that the ruin of his life was a thing to be comforted and dug up and healed until it was really healed, not just paved over. But ruining other people's lives was not going to heal him, any more than killing Voldemort would bring Sirius back to life. What killing Voldemort accomplished was killing Voldemort, nothing more or less. Oh, of course, the long-term consequences of that act would be a bit different, but they still wouldn't include Sirius coming back to life—or Sylarana, for that matter—or turning back time so that neither he nor Connor would ever bear their scars. What would happen was the protection of the future, so that Voldemort could not go on killing. Harry would protect the people still alive. He could do nothing for the dead. And it seemed a bit blind of Snape to believe that he could really make it as if Harry's childhood had never been.

Harry abruptly blinked and stared.

What if he doesn't think of it that way? What if he thinks of it the other way? What if he filed charges against my parents and Dumbledore not to change the past, but to change the future, and protect me from their ever doing me harm again?

If he did…if he did…

Then I am an idiot.

Harry blew out a breath, and blinked away angry tears for a moment. Then he changed his mind and let them come. There was no one here to see him. There was no one who could get through his wards. He could weep, and no one would scold him or pity him or be frightened when he could not stop crying.

And he could not stop crying.

He turned on his side and let the tears fall until his eyes were swollen and his breath came in hiccoughing sobs, drawn as though there were a thick, musty blanket in his lungs. He reveled in the peace and the certainty that followed the weeping. He didn't have anything to prove to anybody. He didn't have to keep up a brave face, or cry just the way other people would expect him to.

And he didn't have to pretend that he wasn't angry at Snape. He was still angry. Understanding why Snape had done it wasn't the same thing as agreeing with him.

How dare he? How could he? Why didn't he come to me and explain it like this? I know that he thought I was unreasonable, but then, he had the greater duty as the reasonable one to try to persuade me, instead of just letting these darts fly.

And, anyway, it doesn't matter if he was reasonable or not, I still have the right to be angry at him if I like.

The table exploded. Harry could feel his magic boiling around him, and took several deep, gasping breaths, trying to force it back under control.

Then he wondered, Why? It's not as though there's anyone here to get frightened or hurt. I can let it explode if I like.

He shook his head, and released his magic around him, much like the storm of his memories, pouring it fully and freely out for the first time. It stretched luxuriously, as deep as Voldemort's if not as strong, and surged. Harry smelled the scent of roses, and saw random flashes of light, and heard voices laughing and singing as the room appeared to tilt sideways. He was living in a disordered world that would have frightened anyone else.

It did not frighten him.

I don't need to be anything like what other people will expect me to be. I don't need to. I can understand them, and I can heal myself, but that doesn't mean that I need to be their perfect little portrait of the abused child, either. Why should I be? If this really is my life and my magic, my mind and my memories, and if I really do have the right to be a little selfish, the way that Draco said I could, then why should I have to react exactly the way they expect me to?

He did not have to, and in the same way he hurled his magic around his head in a loop and then let go of the tail by which he'd held it, smashing a hole open in the wall, he let go of the notion that he was ever going to be exactly what Snape wanted him to be, or Draco, or anyone else. Not everything he was needed to be healed. He was more than his wounds. He had to be, or he would rebuild himself in another image imposed on him from the outside. That this time it would be in the image of people who loved him, rather than people who feared him and wanted to control his magic, did not matter. It would still be someone else's picture of what he looked like.

He was more than that. He had been more than Lily's training, Dumbledore's warrior, James's neglected child. He was more than Snape's ward or Draco's love or Narcissa's adopted son, however much those roles might also be a part of him.

Harry stepped through the hole, his magic sliding around him, and looked up at the sky. The isolation wards, and his own Shield Charms, perceptibly dimmed the light of the full moon, but did not cause the same wavering effect on the stars, perhaps because the stars were too high and distant. Harry held out his hand, and, by a simple effort of will, enabled himself to see the starlight coiling in his palm.

Then he closed his fist, and turned some of his magic into thick black fog, and let it rise around him, and shut out the sight of even the house, and the grass, and the pond, and the moon. He was alone in the darkness, with the memory of the stars and the wind to sustain him, and another harsh truth.

Harry turned and faced it. His magic solidified into a mirror before him, a mirror that held no more than his own face. Of course, that was remarkable enough, since there was no light here to see the reflection by. So be it. He saw it anyway.

He quietly examined himself. Lightning bolt scar, missing hand—he had let the glamour fall away—bare arm where once Sylarana had clung. The other scars were not as visible, but present: Dragonsbane's death, Sirius's, the cracks that had parted him first from the rest of the world and then from his family, the mental damage Voldemort had inflicted on him, the hole where the phoenix web had been, the lack of knowledge about affection and social bonds that was instinctive to most other wizards he'd met, a wildness and raging temper, the broken barriers that had released his magic on the night Voldemort had come hunting, the dark stain caused by Rodolphus's murder and Mulciber's.

All marks of sacrifice. All places where he'd given something up or had something torn away. Even knowing that Dragonsbane had gone to his death willingly, that Sirius had committed suicide to keep Voldemort from using him against two boys he loved, that Sylarana had struck at Slytherin's basilisk in protective fury, that Rodolphus and Mulciber would have killed him if he hadn't killed them, could not change the fact of their deaths. Vengeance would never bring the dead back to life. Harry would never forget that.

There would be more casualties. The war had begun. He hadn't known what it really meant when he first trained for it. Connor had been the only human tie he'd had in the wider world when he left Godric's Hollow, the only one he was capable of having. So long as he kept him safe, Harry had not expected to feel the deaths of anyone else very much.

And he had. And other people had sacrificed enough, too, Merlin knew—freedom and innocence if nothing else. Power. Prestige. Life. Magic. Love.

And just as vengeance cannot answer vengeance…

Harry paused. If he were in an ordinary place, at an ordinary time, he might have said the words, and they would just be words. As he was now, before a mirror to which he could not lie, trying himself in the court of himself, he knew that saying the words would foster and force a change.

He stood on a hill and looked down into a darkened valley lit by lightning, and he thought that he still could have turned away.

Of course I could have. No one made me choose this. Most of the people who love me would prefer something less risky.

It was knowing that he had made the choice of his own free will which pushed him forward, made him say the words which echoed tinnily in the dimness.

"Sacrifice cannot answer sacrifice."

Aloud, the words did not sound like much.

Inside him, they snatched the flying memories, and welded them together with his steel resolve, and spun a new pattern for him, less a plan of action than a skeleton of will and desire.

By my desire and by my will, I will do this. I do not know how to recognize all the sacrifices I make, not completely, unless I descend into myself every time, and I can't do that.

White fire burned up the reluctance to speak, the desire to keep secrets. Harry yielded it not as a sacrifice, but as something he no longer needed, freely discarded. He drew a deep breath.

I will try to talk. I will ask Draco to help. He notices more than anyone else when I'm hiding. I can't fool him as well.

He chose another thing, and threw it on the fire.

I will have to learn to accept my own limits. It's better to apply a little clever finesse with small power and effort than to strike with great power, wildly flailing, all the time. I will have to ask my allies what spells they can teach me that might actually counteract Voldemort. The Unforgivable Curses don't do it, nor Rosier's spells, nor my own newly invented ones. I tried them all in the graveyard, and he defeated them all. It will have to be traps that take him, multiple combinations of spells, and not straightforward duels. I will ask. I must ask.

Harry took a breath that fanned the flames higher, and another piece of his training burned, another spike of the skeleton burst into flower with his memories and his magic secured over and under it. There were blank places left where Harry hoped he would grow the necessary emotions over time. For now, the will to do the necessary things must be enough.

To learn the spells, to battle Voldemort, to talk, I must have people who will teach and listen to me. That means asking for aid, and holding my patience and my tongue when others seem slow. They know plenty of things that I don't, from growing up with people who did not—abuse them. I should listen. I'll still hate it at first, but maybe I can learn to rejoice in it. Maybe.

He knew he had one more piece of himself left to burn, but this was the most precious, the most long-guarded, and one he was especially slow to give up because it might seem as though he yielded it just to have an easier life. Harry closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His Occlumency pools were almost all cracked open, the emotions they had contained blended with the new structure of his mind.

Save one.

Harry plunged his hand into it, and dragged forth his rage and his grief and his hatred and his confusion and his protective instincts over his parents.

He screamed, but not in pain. The darkness spasmed around him, and then broke, and Harry saw his magic spread, clawing at the ground like narrow roots. Where those roots passed, the grass and the earth they had touched simply ceased to exist. Slender grooves cut down and down into the dirt, their bottoms beyond Harry's eyesight. His magic crashed into the wards and the Shield Charms, and strained at them, devouring. Then it spread out and beyond them, and up. Harry lifted his head and bared his teeth at the stars.

I can hate them if I want. I can despise them for what they did to me. I can be madly glad that my magic's free, and not under their control any more.

Jagged dark patterns appeared above Harry, as if he were staring through bare branches at Midwinter. His magic ate the air, and left behind smooth, small traces of airless void.

I can feel pain, and know that I'll be dealing with what they did to me for the rest of my life.

His magic crashed into itself, screaming, and fell out of the sky in dark shards, landing around him in a pattering rain. Harry knew that Fawkes could find him now, but hoped the phoenix would know better than to try.

He held out his hand. The magic shot back to him and coiled there in a ball. Harry passed the stump of his left wrist into and out of it, and when he pulled it free, the skin was blue and numb with frostbite.

I can feel all those things. But ultimately, they're only emotions. And I'm free to feel other emotions towards them, too.

His magic burst free of the tiny ball, and golden light flooded the darkness around him. Deliberately, Harry made it the color of lamplight, not sunrise, the illumination that had once reached through the windows of Godric's Hollow to welcome Sirius or Remus home for the evening.

I can feel pity, if I want. I can feel protectiveness, when all the rest of the world does not feel it.

Harry felt the tears burst free again. Well, of course they would, given the way his thoughts were tending. As he knelt and wept because so much of his life and theirs had been wasted, the voice of his thoughts continued, wild and ringing.

I will not try to stop the trial from going forward. I will not lie. But along with not lying, I am going to tell everything, and that includes why I feel they deserve forgiveness now. If I do know exactly what they did to me, then I can forgive them. Hatred and forgiveness can exist in me at the same time. There is no one to say that they cannot.

Harry cast the last great reluctance within himself on the fire, and felt his mind flare and settle into the new pattern. It was incomplete. There were still things he would have to ask other people to help him with, including Draco and Snape and Connor and his allies and perhaps even the Seers, and Harry doubted that he would ever feel exactly what other people did—that every nuance of his earlier life was detestable, for example, or that love was easy. He might be equal to them, but he was not identical.

And then he was flung back from the distance he'd occupied as judge and jury and executioner of himself, as his mind united again, and the emotions and the tears overcame him entirely.

Sometime later, when his eyes were swollen until he nearly could not see and the eastern sky was lightening with dawn that he didn't remember having missed the beginning of, Harry sat up and stared to the south. He knew Malfoy Manor lay in that direction, and that he would have to go back there now that he'd created himself over again.

He didn't want to. He could acknowledge that.

But this was the first test that he had to put himself through. Before, when someone gave him a new prohibition, like Snape telling him that he must stay within the walls and wards of Hogwarts or Draco promising that he'd hit him with a Stunning Spell if he didn't stay out of danger, Harry hadn't taken it seriously. Those were only limits. He could surpass limits. There was no question but that he would have to, if someone else's life were in danger.

If he had really changed, if he really meant this, then he would have to go back to his very displeased allies, tell them the truth, and let them impose what punishments and restrictions they would. And he would have to do that of his own free will, and truly submit to them, not yield on the surface and plan to keep his promises only if it suited him.

Harry wished he knew how to assume the lynx form outside of dreams, so he had a tail to lash and ears to flatten.

Well. No one had demanded that he creep back with a penitent heart. Only that he come back.

Harry stood, and glanced once at Godric's Hollow. It looked different now, with the hole in the side of the house and half the isolation wards eaten away. It should, Harry thought. He'd gone through enough changes that he would have been shocked if the house had looked exactly the same.

He turned away again, and, drawing on his connection to the wards of Malfoy Manor, he went home.