Thanks for the review on the last chapter!
Chapter Eighty-Seven: Hawthorn, Dragonsbane, and Pansies
Rufus ran a hand through his hair in frustration. Then he tried to smooth it back into place, because it already looked enough like a lion's mane as it was, and he'd slept on it, so that it stood out around his head. He hadn't had time to use hair-straightening charms between the moment that Hope had awakened him with the news and the moment he came through the Floo into the office.
I don't remember May as a month of escalating crises, he thought, and had to stifle a yawn. On the other hand, I've only been Minister for three Mays. Perhaps the months take turns.
He sat up then, and took a deep breath. He couldn't afford to wander in mind. He had to be clear and focused to take this problem seriously.
The clipping was an article from the Daily Prophet—an article that the Prophet hadn't published. Apparently their reporter, a keen young Muggleborn witch with ambitions to become the next Rita Skeeter, had uncovered far different things than they thought she would, and so they'd sent the article on to the Ministry when she finished writing it.
WEREWOLF COMMUNITIES 'LETTING THE DAYLIGHT IN'
Muggle awareness is 'the pack of the future'
By: Irene Fairchild
Fairchild had been assigned to create a report about werewolf packs in London and how well they fit into the wizarding world, as far as Rufus could tell. The Prophet had evidently expected a story with some negative anecdotes, some positive ones, and little danger, since they'd assigned Fairchild to write it well before the full moon.
Instead, what she'd uncovered was that werewolf packs in London were making contact with Muggles—especially the Muggle family of their bitten members, and especially adolescents who seemed determined to follow any hint of magic or wonder into dark corners. From what Fairchild said, a few packs, led by alphas who "called themselves after birds," had even accepted Muggles, biting those who asked.
Rufus did not personally know anyone mad enough to ask for the curse of lycanthropy. He was glad of it.
And the Muggles crossing into the wizarding world…he felt half-helpless in his quest to understand them. Surely most of them were frightened of magic? He only had to read history to understand that, and he had, including the pieces they wouldn't teach in Hogwarts because they didn't want to scar fragile young minds. When had Muggle teenagers decided that they wanted to know the wizarding world, that they would rather run on four legs and watch people wave wands than watch the telly, or, well, do the other things that Muggles did?
Rufus's headache grew worse when he thought about the international scope of the problem. The other Ministers would be contacting him soon, politely asking why Britain seemed to have a problem keeping the International Statute of Secrecy intact yet again. Harry fighting a dragon above London, two siren attacks up the Thames in little more than a year, and now werewolves. And those were just the greatest violations. There had always been the minor ones, like a wizard losing his temper and casting a hex on a Muggle, or children carelessly riding brooms out of bounds. The Obliviators were always busy.
And the werewolves! They knew the rules of the wizarding world even if their new Muggle friends didn't. Why were they doing this?
That, actually, Rufus thought he could answer, and wished he couldn't. The werewolves had been ignored and stigmatized and pushed at and hunted for so long that most of them had formed into a cohesive community, satisfying both human and lupine social needs, and come to consider themselves as apart from wizarding society. Individuals could be attracted by the promise of power or rights into behaving as the Ministry wished, but the packs were much harder to court. Now they did have those rights, at least in law, but individuals were still maltreated, refused Wolfsbane, sneered at, and sacked without warning. And so the packs, with knowledge of the victory that could be won now, if they fought hard enough, and the hypocrisy breathed in their faces at every moment, and that old conviction that they weren't really wizards if wizards didn't acknowledge them, would not see much wrong in turning to Muggles. Being persecuted was nothing new to them.
Rufus could understand it. But the idea of it still maddened him.
So there was an international incident carefully deposited in the middle of his desk.
While he sat there contemplating it gloomily, an owl soared through the window. Rufus took the letter from it, wondering. He thought he had seen the owl before, but he received so much post that he could not remember where. At least he knew the owl and the letter it carried were not a threat; there were wards around the Ministry now that examined all birds for dangerous charms and curses.
He opened the letter, and realized it was a response to his request for information from Ignifer Apollonis. If the Liberator was a daughter of Cupressus Apollonis, as Rufus suspected, he wanted to know the plan of the old bastard's house and something about the traps he might have waiting before he entered.
The letter was disappointing, though.
May 16th, 1997
Dear Minister Scrimgeour:
I regret to say that there is little I can help you with. I have not been home except for short visits in fifteen years, and then I was restricted to one of two rooms: the entrance hall or the room where Cupressus habitually receives guests. I agree that the clues the Liberator gives sound like my family, and I do have a younger sister, named Candor, but I do not believe that Cupressus treats her so badly. He focused most of his attention on me. Candor was born five years before I left the family, which would make her young, like your Liberator. But I do not know her, as a person. I have no idea what the day-to-day life in that household is like, and I wish to never know again.
Regarding your other questions, it is true that Cupressus had dealings with the Unspeakables. I believe that they tried to blackmail him, and he resisted. But, once again, I cannot prove this for certain, and I would not trust memories fifteen years old when one is making a raid. I am sorry that I cannot be of more help.
Yours under the Dark,
Ignifer Pemberley.
Rufus folded the letter with sharp, angry movements, and made a mental note to tell Hope that the raid would have to wait until they knew there was some reason worth approaching the Apollonis house for.
In the meantime, the werewolf problem waited to be solved.
And Elder Juniper, who was gaining more and more prominence in the Wizengamot of late, hated werewolves.
Rufus wondered which Fate had been assigned to make his life more difficult, and why it had chosen May as the month to do so.
SSSSSSSSSSSSS
Harry eased gently off the bed. He'd just given Draco a thorough massage—that was much easier to do, now that he had two hands—and left him snoring. Draco had appeared in their bedroom with a headache caused by sorting through the documents Lucius had left for him. Harry trusted that he'd managed to soothe it well enough. Draco didn't even move as he walked towards the door, and Harry shut the door softly so that the noises of the common room wouldn't intrude.
He stood on the other side of the door a moment, considering. It was a Saturday, and no one expected him for classes. It was also a few days since he had healed Lily and Connor had gone to give his blood to James, and both Snape and Draco were slowly calming down and had stopped giving him the looks that meant they expected him to explode at any moment. Harry had tolerated them while they lasted, but they put him on edge.
He knew whom he should go and see. Hawthorn had returned to the Garden a few days ago. But Madam Pomfrey had tried to persuade her to stay longer. When Harry asked her why, the matron admitted that she didn't think Hawthorn was mentally recovered, whatever physical recovery she'd accomplished. Only one of the wounds had scarred after all, one high on her left shoulder that she could cover with the sleeve of her robe. But Hawthorn had still been in a black fury when she departed, helped along, Harry thought, by the werewolf temper Remus had once described to him.
He nodded. He would go and see her, and hope a few days back in her home had done her good. If they had not, well—
He would not see another of his allies lost to the desire for vengeance. He would not. It had caused too much trouble already. Deaths, and torture, and the tying-up of various of his allies in other things; Tybalt Starrise was still sorting out the legal and social problems his brother Pharos had caused, and trying to decide how much support he should give him in the courtroom and whether he should argue for Tullianum or restriction in St. Mungo's.
The stronger the Alliance of Sun and Shadow got, Harry thought as he started towards Snape's office to inform him of where he was going, the more careful he had to be about this, not less. More and more people watched them. More and more people stood a chance of being affected when Harry or one of his allies did something questionable, and more and more people stood a chance of being those who brought the questions. Harry stood in the center of his own web of influence, and connected to many others. Pluck one strand of a web, and the others vibrated.
He would not try to persuade Hawthorn out of her hatred. He would not try to make it seem as if her losses did not matter. But he would ask questions about her desire for vengeance, and hope that the answers would reveal how very little that desire mattered, against the real scope of things. And he would offer his presence as a silent support.
If Hawthorn would not talk to him, then Harry would simply wait outside the Garden for however long he needed to.
SSSSSSSSSSSS
Hawthorn dropped the vial, and it cracked open on the stone floor of her Potions lab. The silver liquid, the result of a good six hours' work on the lycanthropy cure, splattered all over the floor and walls.
She half-shrieked, which came out of her mouth as a howl. Then she sagged back against the wall, her breath slow and steady.
I can't do this.
She couldn't do this. She was trying to forget her desire to hunt down and kill Lucius Malfoy—who had left behind no traces, anyway, and nothing that could be used to track him—by working on something productive, something that would change her status back to a pureblood witch's, and relieve her of the major weakness that Lucius had turned against her in the first place. Once, forgetting such inconvenient, inappropriate emotions would have been a matter as simple as snapping her fingers. Once, she was a self-possessed, self-controlled pureblood, a player of the game.
And now she was a hunter who wanted blood.
The wards twanged, informing her that someone had appeared on the edge of the estate. Hawthorn snatched her wand, secretly glad, secretly hoping it was Evan Rosier. She would fight and destroy him without a qualm. And the hatred would be less overwhelming when she was done, calmer and quieter.
But she froze when she stepped out the front door and saw the figure walking calmly towards her across her neatly tended lawn, already thick with young grass and the shoots of flowers. It was Harry.
No. I don't want him to see me like this.
She retreated inside, and shut the door. She listened to Harry's footsteps come closer and closer until he rapped on the door, instinctively avoiding the parts of the wood that hid traps and wards, and closed her eyes, feeling sick. Why she hadn't told him to go away yet was beyond her.
Of course, part of me is weak. I do want his attention. If I could control my voice when I asked for it, and prevent him from seeing the tears, I might even invite him to come in.
"Hawthorn?" Harry asked, the way he never used to do. He had always called her "Mrs. Parkinson" until very recently. Hawthorn thought she might prefer it now. The formality would have the bracing effect of a chill wind, forcing her to stifle her emotional chaos and act like an adult. "I'm here to speak with you about Lucius Malfoy. May I come in? The wards allowed me to approach, but they aren't coming down, and of course I don't want to tear them down."
She tried to respond, and the words clogged in her throat like tears. She cleared them out with a cough and began over. "Whatever you wish to say to me about Lucius Malfoy can be said from behind a closed door."
There was a pause, as though Harry hadn't expected that. Hawthorn wondered if he would leave now. He had once been so easy to drive away; he would back off the moment he poked an emotional wound. But this new Harry was—well, more formidable, and less afraid that if he made one mistake, it meant consequences his ally would never recover from.
"Very well, Hawthorn," Harry said, and oh damn him, his voice was still warm and he sounded as if he understood her position. "Madam Pomfrey told me that you left the hospital wing still muttering about vengeance. Why?"
You are not that stupid, Hawthorn thought, as she bolted straight and stared at the door. I know that you are not that stupid, Harry.
"Why?" she whispered.
"That's what I said," said Harry. She could hear him arranging himself comfortably, probably folding his arms, and putting up a protective layer of magic around his skin to keep himself safe from wards. "And it's the whole substance of my first question, but I can rephrase it, if you would rather. Why did you leave the hospital wing muttering about vengeance?"
For a moment longer, Hawthorn tried to restrain herself, not to let the full storm of her temper burst on Harry. But this was too much. He knew exactly what Lucius had done to her, he had seen her at her weakest moment in Tullianum, he had helped her through other weak moments when Claudia was murdered and Pansy died, and he asked her this?
"Because he hurt me!" she shouted, and the words felt good as they ripped free of her, even if she would much rather be shouting them at Lucius. "Because this is the very last insult I can bear! I want to hurt him, to twist his neck until it breaks, to torture him until he knows as much pain as he's given me! I can reach him, or I should be able to, and I can't reach anyone else, and then he ran away! Traitor, coward, murderer—"
And the howl broke forth from her throat, streaming up in a prolonged, ululating cry that Hawthorn knew most people on the face of the earth would be nervous about. Even Muggles would shiver and rub their arms at the bloodthirsty call, and this near the full moon, those in the know about werewolves would run.
Harry was not most people. He remained silent until her howl faded, and then said, "May I come in, Hawthorn?"
Hawthorn lashed out. Her nails gashed long cuts in the door, and opened a series of holes through which she could see Harry's face peering in at her. He really was leaning against the doorway, with not more than a foot separating them. And he refused to draw back or flinch when her nails slit the wood.
Damn him. Damn him, damn him, damn him!
Hawthorn wanted someone to hurt. She had passed the line of caring who it was, just as she hadn't cared when she saw the vision of Pansy that Indigena and not Lucius had killed her. She showed a mouthful of teeth, and snarled, "If you come in here with me, Harry, I will cause you pain."
There was another pause, and then Harry, his voice thoughtful, said, "I would like to see you try."
That was too much.
Hawthorn tore the door off its hinges, with that strength she so rarely used but now reveled in, and sprang out. Harry straightened to meet her, and then moved out of the way just in time with a half-dancing step that looked like something he might have practiced in his childhood.
And his face remained calm and mobile and understanding, and his eyes were without a trace of fear.
Damn him.
Hawthorn refused the temptation to attack as blindly and mindlessly as she had with Lucius. Instead, she aimed her wand and cast one of the most irritating blood curses she knew, nonverbally. It wouldn't hurt Harry like the ones she'd used on Indigena, but it would make him feel as if he had ants marching up and down his veins.
Harry deflected it with a lazy wave of his hand and a wandless Shield Charm.
She fell back with a snarl before she could help herself. For a moment, human rationality struggled to the surface. She was facing an immensely powerful wizard, one who could swat her like an insect if he really wanted to. Wouldn't it be better to calm down and not fight him? He wasn't her enemy. And if she gave up the anger and spoke to him, then he might come around to her way of thinking.
But the beast surged up when she remembered that she would collapse if she gave up the anger.
She went back to the attack, calling on the grass to rise. Perhaps she was not quite on Indigena Yaxley's level, but the Parkinsons had once been called "green blood," for the amount of gardening talent that ran in her family. She could and would use the earth around the Garden to hurt intruders.
The ground beneath Harry's feet turned to mud, and he started to slide downward. None of the traditional counters for such a thing would work on this mud, Hawthorn knew, since the earth itself was obeying her, and could not be coaxed back to hardness.
Harry didn't try the traditional counters, which involved drying charms. Instead, he simply left the ground and hovered above it, his magic spreading around him in the shape of luminous wings.
Hawthorn felt the magic in the air, and forcibly restrained herself from charging. She considered turning the rest of the ground to mud, but knew it wouldn't work. There was no reason that Harry had to land any time soon.
Instead, she turned to a curse she had learned from Evan Rosier, but rarely used. That meant she had to speak it aloud, but if it was unfamiliar to Harry, it still wouldn't warn him in time. "Aer adamanteus!" she cried, and felt it in satisfaction as the air hardened in Harry's lungs, turning to sharp blades. They would cut through the fragile tissue and skin in a moment, and then sling forward and slit him from the inside out, unless he knew the counter.
One part of her temper screamed at her. Hawthorn ignored it. It felt far too good to release the anger and hatred at last.
Harry closed his eyes in what looked almost like an expression of ecstasy as the blades began to slice out. And then he breathed, and Hawthorn saw that he had turned her weapons into two harmless puffs of air. They danced around his head like smoke rings, and then safely dissipated into the atmosphere.
Hawthorn was restricted to spells, while Harry could use wandless magic. She could not hurt him. It was not fair.
No. There is one weapon you have which he cannot match.
And there was, and she bolted forward, legs coiling beneath her for the leap, claws reaching. This close to the full moon, a werewolf's claws could scar even in human form. And she wanted to scar something, hurt something, tear something, and the people who were justified targets of her vengeance were all too far away.
She felt herself leave the ground. She saw the moment when Harry hung before her, face pale, eyes wide and green, and she thought he would allow himself to be gripped, held, ripped, torn, and in the middle of her intense, insane hatred she felt a gratitude that hurt every bit as badly as Lucius's betrayal had—
And then a whirl of magic clasped her and turned her, and the golden wings folded around her, feeling warm and living, the feathers slithering past her face like leaves. Hawthorn fought, crying out.
Harry settled back to the ground with her held in those magical wings. When she would have struggled free, she felt his arms come around her, and instinct and human memory made her hesitate for a single moment.
Then Harry began to sing.
Hawthorn had heard the phoenix voice before. She would never have described herself as vulnerable to it. She had been awed when she heard him singing at Midwinter, but they all had. She would not have given up her vengeance for Pansy if she heard him singing on the Midsummer battlefield.
And she was so tired. Why did she have to be the reasonable one, the witch who bore losses and went on living? No other single one of Harry's allies had suffered as much as she had. She had lost her family to the war. Fenrir Greyback had bitten her. She had been abused and tortured, and had failed to kill her enemies, the one thing that might have eased the burning losses. She had accepted Harry back into her life even though he had killed her husband. Surely she had reached a breaking point of some sort, and ought to be allowed to pass it. Phoenix song should have had no attraction for her anymore, except as a kind of squeaky warbling.
And yet, it was happening.
Hawthorn found a vision forming in her head, fighting past the emotions that plagued her like a chick hammering its way out of the egg. It spread its own glittering wings, and Hawthorn realized she was looking at the aftermath of a battle. It might have been the Midsummer battle, though the vision was so arranged that she could not look behind her and see Hogwarts. There were bodies lying crumpled in front of her, and furrows in the ground coated with blood, and grass trampled and churned to broken earth, and twisted limbs and uprooted plants.
And the sun was rising.
She understood the vision. She was not stupid. Harry was calling on her—the song was calling on her—to realize that no matter how many battles wizards or Muggles fought, the sun went right on rising. The dead were dead, and gone. The living had to keep waking up and going forward, no matter how much it stung. They could not stop in one place and grieve, because they were not the dead, and for them it was not over.
Knowing that Harry had reason to understand that intimately made Hawthorn feel no better. She fought against the message, burying her head in her arms and moaning. The vision was inside her head. If she concentrated hard enough, then she could probably make it go away.
But she couldn't. And as the sun rose in her mind, its light caught and glittered on the dew, and the bodies began to vanish, as if someone had done the work of cleaning up the battlefield. The furrows slowly grew a new furze of grass, and the broken limbs became healthy young trees growing where they had fallen, and spring sprang out full blast on the spot. The earth forgot that there had been a battle fought here. And the sun ascended higher and higher, and the song blazed in her ears, demanding her compliance, calling her on.
If she were so weak that she would psychologically freeze herself out of life, then Harry would not have bothered. The phoenix would not have bothered. But Harry knew she was better than that, and that was why he called on her to rise. The only law of change was change.
It's not that easy, Hawthorn flung out in her head, as a bitter challenge. My husband and my daughter are dead.
And the vision changed, this time showing her the memorial she had planted in her garden, the hawthorn bush with the pansies and the dragonsbane growing around it. She had done this—sworn to remember them, planted living things for them, and then gone on walking down the path. It had been hard, but it had to be done. No one had ever said it was easy, in fact. The world was hard, and cruel. But it had to be lived in.
Hawthorn could, perhaps, have resisted sympathy. She would have resisted any vision of suffering equal to her own, which Light wizards in the past had used to try to persuade her that they were just as persecuted and hated as Death Eaters. But this vision of a hard and cruel world answered to her own expectations. The world could be ignored, but it did not cease to exist because one person grieved.
Every objection splintered and smashed against the reality of that song, against the growing need she had to answer it.
And then the song soared back steadily into the world of cruelty's mysteries, and it pulled her with it.
She was crying, the sobs racking her body, tears of fury and hatred burning down her cheeks. And Harry was singing still, wrapping her more with his voice than the hold of his arms, pouring into her ears vision after vision of roads to walk, of hills to climb, of ponds to scramble through.
It did not end until it ended.
And it did not matter how hard the burdens she had to carry were. She was not free to stop living. That was what she earned by being too fearless to kill herself. More life, and all the difficulty of it.
The last vision was of a path leading into a dusky gold sky, storm-colored, with weather Hawthorn couldn't see beyond that—perhaps sunlight, perhaps more storms. The phoenix song flirted its wings and tore forward, ending on a high-pitched, shining note of pure ringing uncertainty.
Hawthorn slowly lowered her hands from her eyes and stared at them.
"Perhaps that has purged it," Harry said quietly.
And Hawthorn didn't apologize, because she didn't think she would know what to say. She simply knelt there in silence, instead, and Harry's arms wrapped around her, and they were both still, there in the great storm-colored world.
SSSSSSSSSSSSS
Remus sniffed carefully at the air, and then let his tongue fall out to loll through his jaws. He loved full moon nights now with a heady impatient love he'd never felt when he was part of Loki's pack. Perhaps, then, the reins of purpose that stretched around his body, Loki's continual driving goal to win the war between wizards and werewolves, had never let him feel it.
He turned and nudged at the two wolves timidly crouched behind the corner. After a moment, wobbling on their paws like puppies, they trotted around it. Remus licked one face, nipped an ear, and prowled back and forth in front of them, examining them, studying their eyes for some hint of the glaze that would mean the Wolfsbane hadn't worked.
But it had. And he could forgive them their timidity. They were pups, in a sense. This was their first transformation. They had been Muggles until last month, when they had finally convinced Hawk that they wanted the bite, and weren't content to remain behind in the safehouse while the pack ran. Hawk had bitten them himself, but had waited until the last full moon night of April. He wanted them to have a month to get used to the notion that they would be exchanging one conformation of bone and muscle for another, a month to feel the moon singing in their blood and their senses growing sharper and their world shifting along with them.
The wolf on the right had been a Muggle girl called Georgina. Now she made a lovely fawn bitch, with brown brindles starting low on her sides and rippling over her legs. Her companion, who called himself simply Tal, was a slim black beast, built more for speed than the usual endurance.
And they would both join the bulk of the pack waiting for them, if Remus could only get them moving.
He made his nips fiercer this time, and bit them under their tails. Georgina squealed and started trotting. Tal resisted for a moment more, then tossed his head and tore down the street. Remus loped after them.
He felt the moment when it changed for them. Tal lifted his head and flicked back his ears. Georgina tilted her neck back to sniff the air, then almost sat down on her haunches with the wonder of it all.
Hawk's howl rose from ahead of them, calling them on, sweeping them up, adding a trill or note for each one of them. He was a good alpha, Remus had found in the past six months, never forgetting a pack member's name, and treasuring every single one of his wolves.
Georgina and Tal answered, and Remus, too, their voices blending with the voices of the eight other wolves, both the members of Hawk's original pack and the turned Muggles and wizards and witches of the last few months, who were padding forward now from around corners and up alleys. They would run London tonight, joining with other packs, and the Muggles would be half-sure they were feral dogs and half-sure they were something else. It didn't matter, though, how long or how far they chased; carefully-placed Concealment Charms, cast before the transformation and scattered around the city, and the werewolves' sheer speed insured that the Muggles never caught them.
And each day, their world and the wizarding one blended together just a little more.
Remus stretched his legs, and sped past both Georgina and Tal, making them try to catch him. They could try if they liked. Remus fully intended to show them his tail all the way through the run, which was made not for hunting's sake but for sheer joy.
As he bounded up a street towards where Hawk stood awaiting them on the doorstep of the neighboring pack's safehouse, the moon briefly blazed out from the clouds overhead, and Remus gave tongue again, in glory and exultation and glee at being alive.
