Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!

After this chapter, I won't post for a day. This chapter upset everything, and now I have to go back and re-outline the story again. I'll post the next chapter on either Friday or Saturday, depending on where you live in the world.

Chapter Fifty-Nine: Hail, Joy

Harry put his forehead in his hand. "Right," he said, but his voice sounded hollow even to him. "So you received a wooden Snitch after you received a silver Snitch from a man you knew was Rosier?"

"Yes." Connor sounded sulky and defiant and embarrassed all at once. He had sounded that way ever since Hawthorn brought him back to the school and explained to Harry, in quiet but emphatic terms, his little adventure. Harry had then been forced to deal with Connor's explanation, which emphasized what he called "heroics" and played down what Harry was inclined to call "stupidity."

He would have asked Hawthorn to remain and add details, but the look in her eyes, frozen and dark, had made him realize how badly she needed to be alone. She had just realized that her daughter's murderer was still alive, her vengeance still incomplete, and unlikely to be completed any time soon, if the way that Indigena resisted her curses was any indication.

There were words Harry could have spoken about vengeance and obsession. The latter passion was one he knew himself, in at least half its variations. But he had thought it best to let her go.

I can't dictate the terms of her emotions to her, especially when the biggest step she took to get over grieving Pansy turns out to be a false one. And who knows? She may yet get to kill Indigena in battle. We're enemies.

So instead he sat in the Room of Requirement, the quietest place he could find on such short notice. The Gryffindor common room and the Slytherin one were both full of students studying or playing, since the weather outside was too foul to encourage anyone to go there, and Draco was studying Animagus training in their bedroom and wouldn't want to be disturbed. And anyway, he would have been too eager to help punish Connor.

"Why didn't you tell me about this Mark person?" Harry decided that was the most important thing to settle. He could accept his brother being this mistaken, actually. It wasn't even as bad as the willful stupidity Connor had set himself on in third year, when he had understood the general terms of the situation between Harry and Lily but refused to find out specifics. Harry couldn't figure out why Connor hadn't told him about Mark at all.

"Because his information matched the information that you were sending from Woodhouse, and I thought he was a real person," Connor explained. "And—well, I knew you would probably say it was dangerous, Harry. And you knew I was writing someone. A friend."

"I didn't know about the name, and the gifts."

Connor scoffed. "Tell me that you would have thought the name actually a clue, Harry. Yes, it was a pun on the Dark Mark, but there are real people named Mark, you know."

Harry controlled the impulse to grab his brother by the shoulders and shake him. For one thing, he only had one hand, and that meant it would hardly be an impressive gesture. For another, perhaps he wouldn't have picked it up, either. He had to admit the justice of Connor's observation.

But the Snitches were something else again.

"Why did you continue corresponding with him when he left Woodhouse?" he asked, controlling his own impulse to ask more questions about that. Connor had already admitted that he knew nothing about Mark but what "Mark" told him, and it was extremely unlikely Rosier would have given any information away when he started his little game in Hawthorn's garden. Harry wondered if Connor had yet worked out that Rosier's accurate information about Woodhouse meant they had a traitor somewhere in their ranks.

"I wanted to. He wrote me as a friend, not just because I was the brother of the Boy-Who-Lived." Connor shrugged, but the expression on his face was not entirely mutinous; it was wistful, too. "I'm sure you don't need reminding of this, Harry, but it gets a little lonely being in the shadow of that name."

Harry caged words that would have done more harm than good behind his teeth, and nodded. It would have been worse for Connor than for him, even, because Connor had had twelve years of believing that he was the Boy-Who-Lived, while Harry's training had managed to insulate him from jealousy and loneliness for nearly that long.

"That makes more sense, then," he said. "But the Snitches, Connor."

"I tested the wooden one for Portkey spells!" Connor folded his arms. "And other spells that I thought could harm me. But I didn't think to look for a time-delayed Portkey spell. Tell me that you would have thought to look for it, Harry. Look me in the eye and say that."

And then something very strange happened. Harry's first impulse was to sigh and glance away, again admitting the justice of what Connor said.

What he said was, "I wouldn't have needed to look for it, because I would have been suspicious about the second Snitch I received after the silver one, and taken it to someone like Peter, who could help me look for spells like that."

His tone was snappish, even. Harry blinked. Connor, sitting across from him, seemed taken aback.

The next moment, Harry held up his hand and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Connor. No. I didn't even know time-delayed Portkey spells were possible. But Rosier consistently does the impossible." He leaned forward. "I'm glad that you're all right, more than anything." Even though I want to yell at you for being stupid. But the yelling would only make Connor more mulish and stubborn and devoted to argument, and right now Harry needed the details of the battle from him. "Now, tell me everything that you can remember about the conversation Rosier and Yaxley had."

Connor relaxed and did. Harry bit his lip hard when he heard Yaxley's comment about bad dreams. He knew a man who had had more than his share of those in the past few months.

"And how did Rosier react?" he asked.

Connor shrugged. "He went mad. I don't know. I thought it was a reference to a private joke."

And there's the infected Dark Mark. Harry did not yet know what to make of that. Snape's Dark Mark had been infected before the Midsummer battle. So had Lucius's, Hawthorn's, Adalrico's, and Peter's. And Regulus's had been infected before he departed into the paintings. Harry had assumed at the time that it was some new trick of Voldemort's, and had ended when Harry cut the hole in his magical core, blocking his ability to reach out to his former Death Eaters across that distance.

But perhaps the potions Snape had brewed to ease the pain of the infected Marks both before and after the battle had had their effect. Lucius, who hadn't taken those potions until he was able to enter Hogwarts, had had the infection longer than the others. Rosier, meanwhile, had been without them entirely, and the red tracing Connor described around his Mark sounded familiar from the infection patterns Harry had seen.

Of course, there was the question of why Rosier and Yaxley would have lured Connor to Hawthorn's garden at all, and why Yaxley's question had made Rosier so angry, if he already knew the infected Dark Mark was connected to his nightmares.

"Harry?"

"Hmmm?" Harry looked up, to see Connor pushing his chair back from the table the room had conjured for them, and looking apologetic.

"Do you need any more details, or can I leave? Only I should tell Parvati that I'm back. Merlin knows if she's heard anything by now, but I want to tell her myself that I'm all right."

Harry nodded and smiled. "Yes, we're done. And be sure to tell her thanks again for her announcement this morning."

Connor's face softened, and a proud smile overtook it—a smile that Harry had sometimes felt on his face when he looked at Draco, or seen on Lucius's when he looked at Narcissa's. "She's something, isn't she?" he said quietly, and then turned away and left before Harry could answer.

Harry stood. He would contact the other former Death Eaters—well, he would speak face-to-face with Peter and Snape, and send a letter to Lucius—and ask them about bad dreams and infected Dark Marks. He expected a negative answer, though. Snape's dreams had been Sanctuary dreams, from what he knew, and Joseph would have been able to sense if there were evil intent within them. And none of his other allies had reported nightmares.

But there was the chance of—

What?

Well, he really could not say what, unless he knew what Yaxley and Rosier had planned. There was the question of Snape's dreams, and the Dark Marks, and the traitor in Woodhouse.

And there was the moment when Harry had snapped at Connor, allowing his anger and sarcasm brief rein, instead of the sympathy that he knew were most effective after the initial scolding.

Harry shook his head as he left the Room of Requirement. That one, I don't understand. Has some other barrier broken in me? Was it a sign that I'm letting myself go more? Joseph will know. I should seek his opinion on Snape's dreams, anyway.

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"No," said Joseph firmly. "Severus's dreams were normal for the Sanctuary, Harry. They brought him face-to-face with bad memories he'd suppressed. It's usually only those memories that any person faces, since they've had a chance to get past and heal from others. The rare exception is torments that keep recurring as if they were still happening, and then the dreams take care to show those entrenched sorrows from another angle. And the dreams have ceased now. He told you that?"

Harry nodded. "He said he'd returned to having dreams that he can hardly remember unless they're particularly vivid, and that's the normal state of things with him." Snape had scowled when he asked, and that more than anything else had reassured Harry he was growing stronger, beginning to escape from the long prison of his memories. The half-hysterical defensiveness he'd displayed at the beginning of the autumn term was still clear in Harry's own memory.

"That is Severus," Joseph agreed. He leaned forward and clasped his hands in front of him. "And you had some other reason for coming to talk to me today, Harry. What was it?"

Harry grinned ruefully. "Am I that obvious?"

"Now, you are."

Harry nodded and leaned back, half-closing his eyes as he sought to describe his unusual outburst with Connor. Joseph waited. Harry had learned to like the listening silence that surrounded the man, silence of a different quality than that around Vera, which always suggested half-heard answers. If nothing else, when Joseph was waiting to speak, he wasn't actually speaking the complex statements that made Harry reevaluate himself often and sometimes hate him a little.

"I spoke to Connor for one moment without controlling my emotions," Harry began carefully. "I told him that I would have taken the mysterious gifts he was receiving, which endangered his life today, at once to someone more experienced with Dark magic so he could check them for unknown spells. But the truth is that I might not have, so I was being hypocritical. Besides, it wasn't the best thing to say at that point in time. Connor needed comfort and gentleness and caring just then. He'd just been kidnapped by Rosier and nearly killed, for Merlin's sake. So I don't know why I said it. I wondered if it was a sign of something else strange happening in me, a barrier that's been let down which I didn't know was falling."

Joseph said nothing. Harry waited until he couldn't stand it any longer, and then peeked from under his eyelids so that he could see the expression on Joseph's face. Joseph had his mouth slightly open, and then he broke into delighted laughter as Harry watched. He blinked.

"Er. Sir?"

Joseph held up a hand and shook his head. Harry waited for the laughter to stop, smiling himself in the meantime, and trying not to let worry conquer his gladness at the sight of so much merriment. Was something wrong? Had he broken some barrier Joseph hadn't anticipated him breaking?

Finally, the laughter stopped enough to let the Seer speak. Joseph still had traces of it in his eyes and around his mouth as he leaned forward and fixed his gaze on Harry.

"What you have done is entirely normal," he said.

"For what stage of barrier-breaking?" Harry asked.

"I mean, normal," Joseph said. "We all make slips of the tongue, Harry. We all say insensitive things at the wrong moment. And we're all hypocrites sometimes. I've had a rather forceful reminder of that in the last five months, talking with Severus. He would have been breathing fire if you'd tried to have dreams and hide their contents from him in the same way he did with you. Yet he had no problem preserving those memories for conversations between us, and he deliberately made the conversations as uncomfortable for me as he could—the one thing he would have insisted that you not do in your own healing."

"So that means…what?" Harry waved his hand in the air and let it fall.

"Welcome to the real world, Harry." Joseph no longer had the laughter in his expression, but he smiled with his eyes and his lips and his whole face, the most sincere and deepest smile Harry had seen in a long time. "You've advanced to the point where you can make mistakes and not feel such guilt over them that you castigate yourself for days. And it's with your brother, no less, once the whole center and pivot of your existence. That is such a good sign that I cannot quite name how important it is."

"But—" Harry had a sudden horrible vision of himself prancing through the world and hurting people without realizing it. Merlin knew he did enough of that already, because he simply didn't understand some of the principles others took for granted. "Does that mean I'm doomed to be a hypocrite and inflict wounds on souls?"

"No more than all of us," said Joseph firmly. "And yes, Harry, that does happen—with me, with Severus, with your Malfoy, with your brother, with you, with everyone. What I think you've failed to understand this time is that those mistakes aren't unforgivable. One can be selfish and make up for it later. Or someone can take a wound that stings one day and forget about it entirely the next. Not everyone holds grudges for a lifetime. Not everyone will hate you and plot vengeance against you for a slight. And you need not beggar yourself, in time or money, making extravagant gestures of sympathy and appeal and submission to those you've wronged."

Harry blinked at the far wall. He'd known that all his life, of course, but it seemed like a revelation to him.

This is the first time I've felt it, I think. Before, I might have believed it, but it was only an intellectual belief. This is like the difference between someone telling me I can fly on a broom and actually doing it.

"So I don't have to be perfect," he whispered.

"If there are any traces of that remaining in you, Harry, get rid of them," Joseph responded, sounding serious now. "There is no way for you to be perfect anyway, but in the waters you've chosen to swim, it's especially important. If you flinch from every instance of hurting someone, you can't argue for free will in any capacity. If you try in haste to repair every mistake you make, you'll cause worse wounds. And if you think that you're doing all you can and no one can blame you for certain moves or motives, then you'll end up selfish without even realizing it. Someone can always blame you. Escaping blame isn't the thing that matters."

Harry immediately thought of the Horcruxes, and how his studying obsessively about them must have seemed selfish to Draco, and perhaps also to Regulus, who had risked his life for the information and felt so bad on the day he gave it to Harry. And what would have happened if Harry had insisted on intervening in Loki's sacrifice, simply because it made him feel bad to watch the death and he wanted Loki to live? Selfishness, again, though he could tell himself it wasn't because he was rescuing someone else from certain death and rescuing the pack from having to become cannibals.

Everything is selfish from some perspective.

Ideas he hadn't had before cracked like lightning across his mind. And what I need to do is establish a perspective I can trust. Self-critical, of course, because a vates needs to be. Honest, because I need to detect lies in myself. But critical of others, too, because they're not always whitewashed, and able to make declarations and enforce certain boundaries when they're hurting others—or me, I matter too—and able to forgive myself when I've done something that isn't really all that great a mistake.

He leaned forward and put his head in his hand.

"Harry?" Joseph had crossed the room in one stride and crouched beside him with his fingers resting on his arm.

"I'm all right," Harry whispered. "Just give me a moment."

He was seeing a new vision in his mind, which was also a very old one: the winding path of possibilities, twined in green and gold, the colors of Dark and Light, leading away before him, providing a chance to correct mistakes once made, and the more glorious for mistakes and errors and other times when the walker would slip and fall, flowering with all the grander chances and potential inherent in the soul.

Only this time, the path was his.

And he imagined that twining with all the paths that other people could take, snaking among them, intersecting with certain threads and cutting off others and tangling in a complicated relationship of snarl and counter-snarl with still more, and whirling apart and around and continuing on, but always coming back, dancing with Draco and his enemies and his friends and Connor and the centaurs and the house elves and the dead and Voldemort, because they all shared the same world. The dead, if nothing else, had a mental share in the world of the living.

He would still need to be careful, because his mistakes could cause more damage than the mistakes of others, thanks to the responsibilities he'd picked up. But he had the opportunity to do more good, too, and he would never fulfill those opportunities if he never took a risk and expanded his boundaries to learn what he could do. He had before only used confrontation and direct consultation when pushed. Even the conversations with Joseph, which had done him so much good, had taken Snape giving him a push to enter.

But that was silly. His own word should be enough. His own dedication should be enough, helped along but not solely provided by others. He had to be active in dancing his own path, because no one else was going to do it for him without making him less than he could be in the process.

A wave of light crashed into his mind.

And that's why Lily's treatment of me was wrong. I said once I mourned for all the people she could have been. But she took away the people I could have been, too. And that was wrong, as wrong with me as it would have been if she'd done it to Connor, if Lucius had done it to Draco, if Parvati's parents had done it to her.

People had told him that before. Harry had been willing to mouth the words.

Now, he felt it.

He realized he was crying, or, at least, something like tears rimmed his eyes. He touched them with a finger, and wondered if they came from sadness or joy. Was he thinking more about the past and the waste it had been, or the future and what he could still have, now that he knew this?

He did regret, fiercely, certain parts of Lily's training now that before he had valued, especially his ability to withdraw behind emotional walls. How much of life had it kept him from?

But he would not allow the regret to destroy him, any more than he could allow one obsession to consume him. He was changing, growing, and if she had marked him, she made up an increasingly smaller part of who he was. He had said as much when he defended her at the trial. Then, though, he had not thought of growing more. He had believed he would always retain the exact same balance of Lily's training and his own thoughts, the new ones.

He hadn't. He was moving on, had moved on already, and was starting to begin a new life.

He could make mistakes now, and it was all right. He could do normal things if he wanted to, and it was all right. And he could make the decisions that he still needed to make, because he was vates and this was war, and it was all right. And he could defend those decisions, because he needed to trust himself.

It was all right.

He stood and shook his head. Joseph drew slowly back from him, his eyes wide, focused in that way that Harry knew meant he was looking at the complex of his soul, not the surface of his body.

"I—" And Joseph was silent and shook his head. Harry wondered if he could explain what he saw. It was all right if he couldn't. Harry didn't think he could describe his own vision to the Seer right now, either. Perhaps later, when it wouldn't feel like blasphemy to put it into words.

He smiled at him, said, "Pardon me. There are things I need to do," and then turned and made his way rapidly back down the dungeon hallways, to a door he'd shut behind him not an hour before.

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Snape looked up sharply from his purple potion when a knock sounded on his door. He cast the last Permanence Charm he needed to keep the belladonna from reacting with the palm leaves while still watching the door mistrustfully. Who could be coming to see him at this time of day, on a Saturday? Harry had been here not long ago. Snape had no detentions planned. And he didn't want to talk to Joseph right now, because it would undoubtedly turn into a lecture on the morality of brewing poisons.

Whoever it was knocked again, and then Harry's voice called out, "Severus? Please, I need to talk to you."

Snape rapidly cast the standard stasis spell that would keep the potion in exactly the same state he left it, and then strode across his office. He could hear a catch in Harry's voice, and that he had called him by his first name without prompting—

He flung his door open, and found Harry leaning against the wall with his head bowed. Snape reached down, ready to gather him into his office, support him from falling, or do whatever else needed to be done.

Harry lifted his head.

Snape could only stare, transfixed. He had never seen pure, unclouded joy in Harry's eyes before. He was not sure he had seen it at all for fifteen years, since the day on which most people believed Voldemort to be defeated forever.

Harry laughed, and then flung his arms around Snape, a hug neither companionable nor consoling. Snape did not know what to make of it, and stood there, arms frozen, hands twitching.

"Thank you," Harry whispered. "I finally understand why you brought my parents and Dumbledore to trial, why you did it for the sake of my past as well as my future. And I forgive whatever anger I might still hold towards you. Thank you, Severus. Thank you."

Snape could put his arms around Harry's shoulders then, but it was half a nerveless fall; he didn't have the strength to keep them aloft any more. He closed his eyes, and wondered if this was what it felt like to have one of the more recent wounds in his soul heal itself.

"What brought this on?" he did manage to whisper.

"Joseph." Harry's voice had a sound of song. "And I'm sure sometimes I'll want to curse him as well as bless him, because being this open to the world means that I'm going to make a lot more mistakes from now on. But that hardly matters right now. I'm just—I feel human. Can you believe it?"

Snape was the one who needed the support of the doorway then. There were no words he had less expected to hear while he lived.

Harry held on a moment more, then spun away, as though he were a Snitch, too small and too light to stay in one place. "I have to go do something else," he said intensely. "I'll tell you about it after dinner. But I have to do it now." He started to run away up the hall.

"Is it dangerous?" Snape called after him.

Harry whirled around to smile at him, but didn't stop running. "Not this time," he said, which made no sense, but he vanished before Snape could stop him.

He stood there a long moment, staring after Harry, and realizing he had no idea what would happen next.

He went slowly back into his office, and shut the door behind him, then stood there, at a loss. Brewing a poison had suddenly lost its appeal.

And the most irritating thing was that he could not even say why.

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"Are you ready?"

Harry nodded, then realized Argutus wasn't looking at him, with the angle he was draped around his shoulders, and said, "Yes." He held his breath as Argutus shifted further into position, swinging his neck and head around like an extra arm.

There was a dark shine in his scales, a softened, blurred four-point star. Harry concentrated his attention on it, all his will, and then leaped forward.

He drew up his magic and dropped all but the flimsy barriers that Jing-Xi had said would prevent others from seeing his signs. He didn't want to unduly disrupt the life of Hogwarts, but he wanted to have as much strength available to him as possible.

He brought his magic down like a hammer on the last of Bellatrix's curses on his left wrist.

The dark star in Argutus's scales flared, sending out sharper points of blackness, trying to anticipate every curl of his power and deflect it. Harry heard a hissing in his ears that had nothing in common with Parseltongue. The curse hated him, or, at least, it hated any attempt to break it, and it wanted to remain where it was, and pollute his flesh, and prevent him from getting another hand.

Harry didn't want it to remain.

He wove his will into his magic, envisioning it as strands of white silk, as delicate and yet as subtly strong as the material of a spider's web. He wrapped his wanting and his desire and his objection to having the curse remain around the end of his wrist, and then he drew it tight. The sharp points of the dark star were cutting through his strands as fast as he could spin them, but that was all right. They were simply not numerous enough to cut through them all.

Harry wove tighter and tighter, and caught and crumpled one dark green point, and whirled in towards the center of the curse.

And then he was within it, seeing and understanding the spell in his mind even as he watched its reflection shift and change in Argutus's scales, and he wanted to laugh aloud. Bellatrix had been clever. This part of the curse depended on desire. The person who broke the curse had to want to actually break it. And the curse's outer shell was designed to softly discourage that, to cast the perception that everything was better off just as it was, and changing was too hard.

Harry brought up his image of the green and gold path in defiance of that passivity, a soft and seductive trap he knew all too well, and the curse hissed like someone sucking in his breath.

By my desire and by my will, this is the end, Harry replied, and then slammed forward, as strongly as he had when he had to break the egg-shaped stone the centaurs favored to save Draco's life, as strongly as he had when he wanted to set the house elves free, as determined as he had been to drain Voldemort's magic and cut a hole in his magical core.

This time, though, for himself.

And the world did not end, and he did not fall down writhing in self-doubt and self-blame and self-guilt.

The curse did end, though, with a ringing expansion of black that covered Harry's sight for a moment. He had to close his eyes. When he could look again, the first thing he glanced at was Argutus's scales.

They reflected only a normal left wrist, without magic of any kind on it.

Harry dropped back on his bed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until he was short of breath and tears ran down his face again. Argutus crawled from his neck and shoulders onto his chest to be more comfortable, a great warm length of glimmering flesh and muscle.

"That was fun," he said. "I think I should look into curse-breaking for the goblins. If they are all that fun, then I want to work for Gringotts. They would not have to pay me, except in dead rabbits."

Harry stroked Argutus's head, and Argutus flicked out his tongue to touch his hand. Harry held up his other wrist, his left wrist, and looked at it.

It served no one anymore for him not to get a hand. Just because he broke the curse for his own reasons, just because he sought a little of his own pleasure and his own joy, did not mean it would cost others their happiness.

Oh, there were decisions he could make and pleasures he could seek that would, of course. Voldemort was the living exemplar of that. But he would learn them, and know them, and keep away from them where he could, and keep dancing along that path his epiphany had shown him.

For the first time he could remember, Harry had the sense that life was there to be tasted, and taken, and sampled, and he wanted to live as intensely as he had ever wanted anything.

And if it becomes necessary for me to die in this war or to destroy a Horcrux, then I know what I'll be giving up, for the very first time. And if someone else dies as a sacrifice, this, this is what they'll be giving up.

The horror he'd felt at the thought of someone else dying sharpened into sheer appreciation of what such a death could mean. Harry took a deep breath, and then forced himself past that moment and into the moments that lay beyond it.

And the free yielding of such splendor as this is the greatest sacrifice, the grandest decision, anyone could make.

If people have to die to destroy the Horcruxes, they will be heroes. Heroes in a way that I don't think people can be just by living, or by dying.

But he would continue researching ways to get around that prohibition and the Unassailable Curse more fiercely than ever, now that he knew what it could entail giving up.

Harry sat up and stretched. Draco would return from dinner soon. Harry would need to eat, and he would research on Horcruxes for an hour, and he would do some schoolwork that really needed to be done.

Draco shouldn't have to push me back into life anymore. Now that I know it's always there to be lived, I'm going to do it myself.