Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!

Chapter Sixty-One: A Different Kind of Birthing Bed

"I don't know if the Daily Prophet will publish it," said Harry. It was all he could say, after he had finished reading Hermione's letter about house elves. It stunned him and moved him and made him feel as if he had been neglecting the magical creatures who might have suffered most under their webs and their direct subjugation to wizards. His hand shook as he lowered the paper to the table.

"Oh, I thought they wouldn't," said Hermione calmly. She sat on the other side of the table, with books from at least six different parts of the Library spread out around her. There was one about Dark magic, two on fantastic beasts, one on old Ministry laws, and three Harry hadn't had the chance to read the titles of, but was sure were all different. "I was thinking of sending letters directly to the owners of the house elves themselves. A letter-writing campaign. And letters could go to the Quibbler and the Vox Populi, of course."

"Especially the latter," Harry had to add. Dionysus Hornblower had not made up his mind if Harry was an evil traitor or a kind liberator yet this week, but he would pounce gleefully on the issue of house elves no matter which way his judgment fell. Harry studied Hermione's letter once more, then glanced up at her. "I'm humbled that you've cared about this so much, when I haven't paid that much attention to it," he murmured.

Hermione shook her head. "Why shouldn't I care about it? The more I look at house elves under their web, the more I think that some of the ways wizards treat house elves apply to how they treat people like me, too. We don't suffer as much, but there's a sense that our magic is just—there. House elves can do wonderful things, and most people don't bother to wonder about that, or to think why magical creatures who can perform such marvels without wands would ever have agreed to serve them. And they don't want to think about how magic sought us out, either, if it's only supposed to concentrate in pureblood lines. And the fact that we can make our way into the wizarding world successfully when we didn't even know it was there for the first eleven years of our lives is overlooked, too." Hermione's face took on a look of exultant rapture. "I'm thinking of writing a book studying the way that Muggleborn children grow used to the wizarding world, you know. It's not ever been studied. There are a few books that are supposed to help us adapt, but they're full of nonsense."

"If anyone can do it, it's you, Hermione," Harry said, and felt one more shimmer of awe run through him, joined by a frisson of happiness. At least he knew that other people were adopting his cause as their own, even if he didn't pay enough attention to them. It made him want to go and do wonderful things to help inspire still others. "I'll get started on writing my own letters."

"Good." Hermione pushed a long scroll across the table towards him. Harry unrolled it with both hand and Levitation Charm, and glanced at it curiously. It seemed to be a list of names.

"House elf owners," Hermione explained without looking up; she was already looking at a book that had Arts somewhere in the title. "The ones who don't have any connection to the Alliance of Sun and Shadow yet, and aren't your enemies, either. The neutrals we need to convince."

Harry smiled. "Thanks, Hermione." As he stood, he caught sight of Zacharias Smith hovering near the shelves. Harry wondered if he should scowl or give him an encouraging look. He didn't know the current state of things in the intellectual war between Zacharias and Hermione. He thought they were talking to one another again, but Zacharias still found small points to argue about, ignoring the larger issues that Hermione wanted to raise with him.

In the end, Harry settled for nodding to him and hurrying out of the library with his list of names. He would make plans for writing letters for an hour each day, and sending Hedwig and other school owls out with them in the evening. That wouldn't take much more time than his studying of Horcruxes did.

It had been more than a week now since he'd discovered that he could matter as much as the next person, and he could feel the insight slipping away from him, sometimes. There were moments he wanted to go back to the way he had been, flinging himself into obsessions without pausing to consider what might be the better course. And he had snapped at Draco sometimes, and been inconsiderate when Connor asked him for help on Transfiguration homework, so he was definitely no longer as good at balancing his needs and the needs of the world as he had been.

But the point was not to cling to the insight. The point was to live it, and there were ways that focusing on the house elves might help him do that.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

It was a few days after he'd started posting the letters that Padma approached him at breakfast with a very strange expression on her face. Harry swallowed his scrambled eggs—he'd finally figured out what shops in Hogsmeade could be trusted to cast the proper warming charms, and that made his meals considerably more pleasant—and cocked his head at her.

"Did you send my parents a letter about their house elves?" Padma asked without preamble.

Harry frowned for a moment, considering the mental list of names, then shook his head. "That was Hermione," he said. "Why? Is something wrong?" He couldn't imagine Hermione being less than polite, and the Patils were Light wizards well-disposed towards Muggleborns, so they wouldn't take it as an insult to get post from one of them. He hoped.

"She sent this," said Padma, and held it out.

Harry considered the sheet of parchment. Hermione had talked to him about them, but he hadn't seen one so far. It was a list of "Eleven Facts You Might Not Know About House Elves," and the logo above it, which picked out Elvish Liberation Front in elegant letters, marched across a shield which a scowling house elf gripped.

The facts were true, as far as Harry could see, including Number Four, which asked if the reader knew that warming charms were actually faster than similar house elf magic, though sometimes they didn't heat bread and drinks as thoroughly. He handed the list back to Padma. "What's wrong? Did it make your parents uncomfortable?"

"Well." Padma shifted her weight. "They wanted to know how much you supported this. How much the Elvish Liberation Front was Hermione's idea and how much it was yours."

Harry shrugged. "Well, I support it, of course. But the main idea was Hermione's, and the main bulk of the work has been Hermione's." He looked around Padma with a smile, to where Hermione was holding forth about E.L.F. in the middle of the Gryffindor table. Ron looked bored, but Connor was listening, though with the reluctant expression on his face that Harry knew to be his brother's way of trying not to let what he heard affect him. Harry looked back at Padma. "I am sorry for any discomfort your parents are experiencing. Hermione chose owners of house elves who weren't already in the Alliance of Sun and Shadow, not people whose children attended Hogwarts. If your parents are uncomfortable hearing about the Elvish Liberation Front, I'll ask her if she'll refrain from sending them post."

"But you won't make her stop." Padma had her lip between her teeth and was worrying it.

"No." Harry drank his pumpkin juice to hide his smile. This was exactly what he had hoped would happen when he first started thinking about freeing the magical creatures. The Centaur Committee and the Goblin Board of the Ministry were good starts, too, in a way, but Harry's rebellion had forced them both to happen. He wanted to see other witches and wizards growing passionate about the differences in equality between magical species without prompting. It would probably take the will and intelligence of a Hermione to found each organization, though. "I can't. E.L.F.'s not mine, but I do think what she's doing is great."

Padma blinked, a bit. "All right," she said slowly. "Only, I think the letters annoyed my mother."

Harry shrugged. "Hermione's goal isn't to annoy people." At least, that's not her primary goal. Anyone who merely found the reminder that house elves were enslaved annoying would be annoyed, and irritated, and worried at. "Like I said, I'll ask if she'll leave your parents off the next round of post she sends, but I don't think she'll agree to it."

Padma left with a faintly puzzled expression on her face, as if she thought that could have gone better but wasn't sure how. Harry turned around when someone tapped him on the shoulder, and found himself face-to-face with Draco.

"Are you going to send post to my father?" Draco's voice was casual, but he hadn't yet learned how to control the set of his shoulders, and Harry knew he was tense.

Harry shook his head. "He was in the Alliance of Sun and Shadow. He knows all about house elves. And I don't want to seem as though I'm acknowledging him." Lucius Malfoy kept sending Harry letters which recommended courses of action Harry wasn't comfortable with, including listening to Lucius's side of the story. So far as Harry could tell, Lucius's side of the story had a great deal of misplaced pride and unconvincing attempts to grovel.

Draco half-closed his eyes, and then said, "And what about me? Would you like it if I stopped eating meals house elves had cooked? If I cleaned my clothes instead of letting them do it?"

"Yes."

Draco's head snapped back as though he were preparing to be offended. Harry raised an eyebrow at him. "You said, would I like it if you did? Yes, I would. I didn't mean I would badger you into doing it." He turned back to his eggs, and tried to conceal his laughter. He wondered when Draco would notice that, in fact, Harry had been casting the charms to clean his robes, and not house elves at all; Harry regularly used a spell that cleaned all the cloth in the room.

The next time he remarks on how much more convenient house elves are than charms, I'll tell him, Harry decided.

Draco was looking at a forkful of sausages as though he didn't enjoy contemplating the source of his food. He stuffed them into his mouth when he saw Harry looking and made exaggerated sounds of pleasure.

Harry shrugged and ate some more. Perhaps he and Draco would have an argument when he found out about the cleaning charms, if only because Draco would be angry at being duped. But Harry had to admit that he was looking forward to it. If he no longer lived in his careful little world where his main purpose was not offending others, then he had to accept the bumps and bruises that would come with that.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Harry opened his eyes, and blinked. He stood in the middle of a snowy field, with flat, silvery grass stretching in every direction about him, and shadows from the moon carving deep lines into the silver. He turned slowly around, lifting his head now and then, trying to see more than moon and stars and snow and drifting clouds. It was difficult.

I haven't had a dream this vivid in a while. I wonder what will happen next? Harry braced himself for an attack by Falco or Voldemort.

"Harry."

That voice rang bells along his skin. Harry turned in the direction it came—from behind him, but he suspected it would have been from behind him no matter which way he faced when it first spoke—and took some time to recognize the creature who poured towards him. It was a heat shimmer of green and gold, like rippling leaves marked with sunlight and tossed by wind. But the enormous eyes that stared out of it, green and gold as well, he remembered.

"Dobby," he murmured, feeling a bit ridiculous in addressing a creature who was so far beyond his enslaved self by that house elf name.

The green eyes widened in what Harry thought was an expression of pleasure, though. "I need to hear it," he said, as if reading Harry's thoughts. "To remind myself of what has been, of what still is, and of what will be for others of my kind. I am roaming in other times now, and the past is easiest to forget." The eyes pinned Harry with sudden intensity. "I see that you are at last beginning to move on helping other house elves, as wizards choose to call us."

"Yes," said Harry quietly. He didn't think he could say anything else, or in any other tone, confronted by the enormous shapeshifter that wizards had caged and trapped in one form for so long—surely as great a sin, chaining something that mutable, as the work they made the house elves do for them. Harry himself had benefited from that work, and had Dobby's help before he freed him. The debt he owed, as a wizard, was so great that Harry didn't think he could pay it back by acting as vates. He would have to do what he could and hope it made a dent.

"You have waited."

"I have," said Harry simply, and guilt coiled in him like a whip. He took a deep breath and did his best to ride it. There was simply not enough time in the world to feel guilty for everything, but for this, he owed more than most. He had put off attending to house elves and their needs, even when he promised Dobby that he would think more about that.

It would have been easy to make excuses, to say that the werewolf problem had been more pressing, made so by Loki's actions, and that, when he had enough magic to replace the linchpins in the northern goblins' web, of course he had had to do so. But the fact remained that he had given a promise and broken it.

Dobby studied him with those enormous eyes, mirrors of a sun Harry had never seen, for a moment more, and then formed and held out a hand. "I've brought you into the midst of dreams to show you a chance that might help you make up for your mistakes," he said. "Death and life mingle in the air tonight, as they cross whenever one of us is born."

"Born?" Harry asked, even as he clasped the hand with his own. For a moment, just a moment, the skin under his own felt like the familiar, rubbery flesh of a house elf. Then it seemed to melt and change. Harry grasped after it, not understanding, until he saw his own body falling like rain.

"Yes," said Dobby. "One of my kind is born tonight, born into slavery. But there is a chance that we may free him, and his mother, without violating anyone's will, for death also lurks close tonight." He paused, and Harry tried not to yell as he felt his arms shred from his shoulders into rain, into light, into sound. "The birthing bed is far away, so we travel as music."

Harry thought about closing his eyes, but by then, he didn't have eyes to close anymore. He was a spasm of sound, of packed thought, of song that he could not hear because it was himself.

He could hear Dobby's song, though, changing chords and monstrous shifting tones, and as they flew through star-scattered darkness, with Dobby's music drawing him along in its wake like a dragon hatchling by its mother's side, Harry shivered with awe. The music extended further and wider and wilder than he had ever known. How had the ancient wizards even dared to think that creatures with souls like this should serve them? How had they dared to ask?

Of course, they didn't ask. They just enslaved, and then made both themselves and the house elves forget about the origin of the slavery. It's easier to live with if you don't have your guilt staring you in the face, after all.

They turned through whirling darkness and whirling symphonies, and finally settled into place in a dim room. Harry stared around. Nothing seemed familiar, though he could make out white walls that resembled those of some rooms at Malfoy Manor. But it was the sight in front of him that captured his attention—and was supposed to, he reminded himself sharply.

A female house elf lay gasping in a crude bed of cotton and rags. Other house elves surrounded her, moaning, their large hands moving over her forehead in trembling tenderness. Harry could see the blood soaking the rags around her, flowing from between her legs. He looked at Dobby, who had manifested as a green-golden shimmer at his side again, but seemed invisible to anyone in the room. His great eyes were fixed on the birthing bed.

"This is the moment when life and death cross," he murmured, sounding like a catechism. "Every life we bring into the world involves danger for the mother. Every life we give to Life is one that we may also give to Death." He detached a small slice of himself from the rest of his body, and Harry had the impression of a finger lifting to touch his lips. "Do you feel it, Harry? Do you feel her?"

Harry thought he meant the female house elf, and reached out obediently. But, perhaps because he was still transformed into music, his magic couldn't connect with the mother's suffering.

He started to say no, and then noticed the shadow in one corner of the room. It was an elegant black dog, smaller and slimmer than the one that followed Regulus, but in all other ways similar. The pointed muzzle aimed at the birthing bed. The eyes were glittering dark pits. Harry shivered. He had never seen Death before, and if someone had asked him to imagine her, he would not have imagined something so patient, so cool, such a poised hunter.

"This is the moment when life and death cross," Dobby said again. "And this is the moment when we may do what I will ask you to do without violating anyone's will, because the owner has resigned his claim to the mother. He believes she will die, and the babe with her. Will you save them, Harry?"

Harry glanced again at the black dog. "And she won't have something to say about it?"

"She is only one of the forces in this room," Dobby pointed out. "Life may yet win. She cannot prevent that from happening."

Harry vibrated slowly, which he thought meant a nod right now. "And if I put myself into the contest, then I'm struggling against her?" He could remember what that kind of struggle had cost Voldemort, and he was not sure that he wanted to enter it himself. He didn't understand house elf magic at all. More than that, he did not want to end up with the kind of thirst for immortality that struggling against death seemed to imply.

"Only as healers do," Dobby said softly. "As all life does, as the mother and her babe are doing even now. I ask you to struggle against death, and I ask you to cut the webs for this pair of house elves as you do so. Is that so great a sacrifice?"

Harry began to breathe more easily. And as he looked at the black dog, almost the image of the one Regulus carried on his arm and at his heels, it was much easier to think of Death as the cruel bitch—literally, in this case. She was a shadow, a powerful shadow, but not one he had to give in to. And if it came down to a contest between life and death, Harry knew which side he was on.

"Very well," he said softly. "But won't the other elves attack me when they see I'm there?"

"I will explain to them," Dobby said, and then Harry melted out of music and back into his bodily form.

He bent over the laboring house elf, while around him he heard a chorus of gasps and squeaks. Gently, he pulled the rags aside, and caught a glimpse of the baby's head, smaller and rounder and greener than the head of the only other newborn he'd been this close to, Millicent's sister Marian.

The mother's hand found and gripped his. Harry looked up and met her enormous eyes, gleaming like lamps in the dimness.

"Save Jiv's baby," she whispered. "I is too weak to make it."

Harry returned her fierce clasp without answering, and then looked back at the baby. The head was in the wrong position, he thought; that was at least part of the reason the mother had lost so much blood. He didn't dare touch it with his hand, and not only because he thought his wrist would be mashed to a pulp before the mother, Jiv, was done with it. He simply didn't know what he might break, what clumsiness he might perpetrate with his fingers.

He let his barriers down, and called fully on his magic. It came and flooded around him, and Harry shaped it with his will, instead of a spell. He knew of no spell that would do what he wanted, though a midwife probably would.

Arrange the baby so he can come free. Patch her wounds so that she can live while I work on the web.

He felt his magic flow forward around him, thick as a tide of blood, as determined and as patient. It met a force as determined and as patient. Harry looked up at the black dog in the corner of the room, and found her dark eyes focused on him, seeing him. He let out a slow breath, and told himself that Death saw everyone, all the time. She gave her personal notice to few. Even Regulus had had to work for it.

She will not make me die any faster, Harry reassured himself. There are other lives at stake here. He looked down at the bloody, torn green flesh, one more time, and then set his magic free to do as it needed to. Trails of glimmering, pale light, like spiderwebs fleshed in dew and sunshine, slid between Jiv's legs, and the baby cried weakly as the power urged his head gently in a different direction.

Jiv tried to sit up and see what was happening, her grip increasing on Harry's hand as she did so.

Harry waited a moment to be sure that he wouldn't just erupt in a cry of pain, then pushed her gently flat again. "Lie down," he whispered, and reached out and touched the web that bound her.

This wasn't like Dobby's half-tattered web, worked at and torn already by the work of Decus Lestrange. This was whole, and the thick strands of the slave web under the one that confined Jiv's power and magic made Harry wince. Jiv was so convinced she was a servant, born and made only to be so, that if her master walked into the room right now, she would try to leap to her feet and ask him what he wanted.

Harry moved his fingers in Jiv's clasp, trying to stroke her palm, a reassuring, soothing motion, and heard her cry again as the baby shifted position. Her long ears flapped, and her jaw worked.

Harry focused on the web. He remembered what he had done to break Dobby's web, the double slicing, and sought for weak points.

There. There was one of them, at the foot of the web. The wizard who owned Jiv had resigned his claim to her, convinced, as Dobby said, that she would die. And Harry could use that, unraveling the web that no longer had an anchor from that point of least resistance.

He swirled down in that direction, his magic pacing and preceding him. At the same time, he could feel his magic working to let Jiv's son emerge into the world, and if he concentrated, he would suddenly see a collage of blood and muscle and skin and Death's waiting presence. He tore himself away from that, though, and back to the web.

All his power was up, and flung into the task. Harry felt fully occupied as he hadn't done since the bursting of the phoenix web.

Then he forced himself to stop thinking about it, and turned to the task.

The first coil he slit easily enough, sliding down and through the linked slave web and magic-binding web. He felt Jiv convulse, her fingers pressing on his, but the sensation grew more distant as he entered the second knot of the web.

This one towered over him, slick and glistening like a fish, the two strands twined so tightly into one another that Harry didn't see how it was meant to come undone. Of course, it had never really been meant to come undone; those ancient wizards who wove the web had not wanted house elves free. But now Harry had to climb this mountain in the moonlight, and he was going to do it.

In the end, he did it with less finesse than he would have wanted. He shaped a pair of enormous jaws, not unlike the ones he had attacked Tom Riddle with in the Chamber of Secrets so long ago, and chewed through the mountain. He felt silk gum up in his teeth and spin through his brain, looking for a hold. Harry brought up his vates beliefs in defense against it, blazing.

The web snarled and swung away, dissipating and tattering further the further it moved. Harry hoped that meant it wouldn't be able to find a host at all, as it probably could in a wizard's mind more amenable to compulsion.

The sides of the web in front of him now led away as a helix, dancing separately from each other but crossing back together. Harry separated the jaws into two pieces, two skating figures that slid up and down and around each loop of the helix. It was important that he not lose track of which was which.

Up, down, around, upside down; his perception split and dizzied him as the figures skated, and dragged knives behind them. Harry was drawing on more magic than he had in a long time, the pull centering in his chest and his heart. It felt good, though. Now he knew he was using the magic, not merely wasting it, or locking it up and refusing to wield it, as Jing-Xi had told him rather sharply was what he had done in the past.

The web began to unravel in front of him, enough of it cut now so that its stability was compromised. Then the helix strands crossed over each other, and brought the skating figures briefly back together, and Harry gasped as he was rudely thrown into a union of all his magic, straining birth and staring Death and laboring heart and crushed fingers and unweaving tapestry.

He shook his head, and the perceptions shrank to manageable levels. He could still see his magic working to save Jiv's life if he looked, and feel his body if he wanted, but right now he was not looking and he did not want.

His perceptions sliced the last of the web, and then turned around, sensing an enemy behind them. Harry understood when he saw the net of autumn colors unfolding over Jiv's legs. The web had replicated itself, reaching for the new house elf entering the world, to make him a slave from the moment of his birth. It would not settle on him if he died, and the newness of it made its weaknesses apparent, but Harry still could not allow it to begin to bind. Jiv's son was too fragile. The promise of freedom and the nearness of death would reach out to him at the same time as the web, asking a young brain to deal with too many factors.

Harry stretched, throwing his momentum and his magic behind him, to break the strands of red and gold and orange.

And then a mightier power swirled around him like a stream in flood around rocks, and swept past him, and ate the web. Harry gaped for a moment, then understood. Jiv's magic was free, and she no longer thought of herself as a slave. She was acting to save her son and herself.

"Get out, Harry," he heard Dobby's voice say.

Harry pulled all his magic back together with a clap that sounded in his ears like thunder, though probably less impressive than that in the real world, and gasped; it felt strange, alien, to have only one perspective now, one way of seeing things. He opened his eyes and flexed his hand, and watched as, for the first time in countless generations, a mother house elf used her magic to serve her child instead of her master.

The magic resembled Dobby's only in the shots of green and gold that Harry could see drifting through it; it was much closer to blue-green, so that he seemed to watch the scene underwater. The magic curled and claimed the young house elf, dragging him the right way around at once. Jiv knew the proportions of the baby's body as she knew her own, Harry thought, and did not need to perform the same delicate, probing work that his magic had tried.

The web flexed forward like a stingray. Jiv's magic covered and cored it, and the web exploded into scattershots of light, small darting fish that hurried away in a panic and were gone.

Then Jiv's magic swung around again, in a current, and Harry had one moment of seeing her cradling her son in her arms, her head bowed, her ears flapping in that familiar house elf way, while around her the others cheered.

In the corner, Death bowed her head, and the black dog became a shadow, became a note of music, became nothingness. Harry felt a cold touch on the back of his neck, and she was gone.

Jiv and the baby began to expand. Their dark green skin turned to blue-green, and Harry saw a rising tidal wave of magic and water and light and foam. The wave crested, turned on glittering silvery toes, and then flowed outward into the universe. Harry wondered what forms Jiv and her son could take, what they would do, and was both glad and sad that he would never know. He would have liked to see it, but some knowledge should be beyond the reach of wizards.

Dobby touched his shoulder and turned him around. Harry smiled into his eyes, which were smiling back at him.

"You are still vates," said Dobby, as if making a prophecy. "This is still what you want to do for the rest of your life."

"It is," Harry said, and then blinked. He lay in his bed, his muscles sore, aching, his arms clasped around Draco, murmuring the words into Draco's hair.

"What is?" Draco asked with a yawn, only half-awake.

"Go back to sleep," Harry whispered. "I'll explain in the morning."

Draco obeyed. Harry lay there, and grinned at the ceiling of the four-poster, and felt the exhaustion of magic used and exercised in every part of him.

I am vates. That is still the core and the heart of what I want to do with my life, the most important thing. Thank you, Dobby, for reminding me.