Beta: Digitize27
What happens if we take Pettigrew's metal hand and run with it?
Part II of 'The Fool'
Please let me know what you think, my writing is different now, or so I've been told. I was recently diagnosed with some psychotic symptoms and am on a lot of different drugs. Just let me know if you think I should take a break until I get better.
pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
Daphne swayed on her feet. Harry gently pushed her back towards the house.
"Get down and go out the back door. We'll meet up."
"Harry-"
"-Trust me," he insisted.
Had this guy set up an anti-apparition ward around them without Harry noticing or - perhaps more concerning - had they missed it and walked right into it.
But before all that -
"What can I do for you?" Harry called across the street.
Harry had his wand in his free hand and tightened his grip slowly. The temperature began to drop as he gathered power. Frost crept along the asphalt and his breath came out in silvery condensation.
"I'm here at the behest of my lord."
"Malachite?" Harry asked. "Or Voldemort?"
"You dare speak the Lord's name?" The man hissed back. Harry took a long look at him, finally able to meet his eyes.
Harry felt a flash of pain. He reached out and there was nothing. It was vile, unnatural and made him recoil. The sight of the man's face nearly had the same effect as the failed legilimency.
The man's eyes were made of metal, along with a portion of his head. There was a key behind the man's ear and it rotated like a wind-up clock. Like the man's whole head was some clock-maker's artifice.
"I do," Harry answered. Daphne should have reached the back door by now. Harry reached out with his mind. She was… watching him from the windows. He touched her presence with his own.
Run Daphne!
[Use your legilimency!]
Harry let his image of the man's face flow into Daphne's mind, but risked it all the same.
"Legilimens!" Harry cried out in pain from the attempt. There was nothing to latch onto. It was as though he had slammed into the ground head first and rattled his brain in his skull.
"Foolish boy." The man scoffed. The man's mind was as alien as the Tarasque's.
Harry felt Daphne's horror by proxy and cut the connection.
"Your master sent you to confront a centennial wizard," Harry said. "And you aren't one. Which of us is the fool?"
"My Lord has prepared me for you." The man smirked. His lower jaw was that same metal, along with the left half of his face leading up to those mercury eyes. "He mentioned that much like himself, you are gifted with the mind arts."
The modifications to the man… they were Voldemort's work? Was that why he hadn't felt him?
"What did you let him do to you?" Harry asked.
"My lord has a way with metal and rituals." The man answered. He reached down to the ground and picked up a small pebble between his fingers. A flex of his wrist and it was dust. "My master often gave gifts to his most loyal servants and repaired their bodies from injury."
As an aside, that was kind of brilliant. Harry absently wondered if Neville would let Harry do something similar. He was willing to bet he could do all kinds of things like - well off the top of his head - he could probably make someone immune to pain.
He shook his head. Thoughts like that led to Grindelwald's expulsion, and were no doubt steps on the path to becoming the monster that had done this in the first place.
"And your name?"
"I am a servant of my lord." The man sneered. "That is all."
"Of course you are." Harry grinned. "Doesn't matter, because unless he turned you into a faraday cage..." Harry lifted his wand casting protections with the slight movements as he finished gathering energy. "Fulminus."
The bolt lit up the world in emerald green. Harry felt surprise. He hadn't been focusing on color, only effect. The bolt collided with the man and behind the resulting incandescent flash he couldn't make out what happened until the light died down.
Harry could smell something burning over the overpowering scent of ozone. It was crisp and clean, the smell made Harry's mouth widen into a smirk, but when the light died down the smile fell from his face.
The man was standing there with his clothes melted off, pushed or otherwise tossed down the street. His body really was mostly metal with fleshy parts now mostly burned off of him. But the metal parts… they looked fine apart from the fact they were glowing, and the heat seemed to be flowing upwards, and-
Harry felt the energy he had emitted be… stolen from him? It was an odd pulling sensation until-
Harry summoned a shield of air and magic in front of him and was still driven back. He felt himself slide until he reached the Durlsey's former garage. There was a metallic screech from the man and the heat intensified.
A pop followed, he abruptly lost control of the air and-
Harry looked around inside the Dursley's garage. His whole body aching. He had been thrown right through the thin metal of the garage door.
He glanced down. His bark skin had protected him, to a degree, until it just… cracked. Fissures ran across his arms and blood welled from within, running in little crimson rivulets across his skin.
"Episkey," he tried, before remembering his flesh was no longer normal flesh and instead transfigured it back together. He finished in time to see the garage door be ripped off the hinges and flung down into the street by an unholy amalgamation of metal and scorched flesh. It raised a dark, smouldering wand at him.
Harry flicked his own hand up and pulled his opponent's wand upward with the air. Three spells shot wide - stunners by the look of them, although they could have just as easily been the dark red of the cruciatus.
Harry clenched his fist but try as he might he couldn't crush the – for lack of a better word – cyborg's arm. He screamed and pressed his magic to the limit, honing the air into a thousand blades to slice and dice the man's flesh.
The windows in the garage blew out along with the door into the house to Harry's right. The man was flung out into the street and bounced across it with a metallic clank. His arms and chest were still glowing from the heat when he started to stand once more.
"Harry, are things going well?" He heard Daphne call.
Harry stood up and ran into the house as fast as he could. Then he forced the air around him to move him even faster. He tore through the house, literally ripping down walls until he found Daphne.
He screamed something unintelligible and grabbed her. His heart beat frantically until it reached his throat.
I could escape… but it may mean leaving Daphne behind to be killed.
That wasn't an option. She was all he had.
He literally flew towards the backdoor on the wing of wind and will until he burst straight through it. He waved his wand and from it flew explosive meteors. They flew back into the house and detonated inside. Harry shielded himself and Daphne as best as he could and never stopped running.
He didn't bother to look back as he burst through the fence in the Dursley's back yard and kept half-running, half-flying.
We should be out of the anti-apparition ward here.
Harry attempted to move through space, imagining Hogsmeade first and foremost as he tried to shove them both through a pinprick in the world.
He experienced the uncomfortable sensation of his organs being pushed back as the attempt failed.
Daphne retched next to him but he didn't have time to stop.
The anti-apparition ward was moving. It was moving quickly towards him from the direction of inside the collapsing house.
Harry heard the man curse as he was buried beneath falling material.
It wasn't something he would have thought of, tying entrapment wards to a single person. It shouldn't have been possible. It was impossible. But the thing chasing them wasn't a person. Maybe once, but not anymore.
Wards like these should have been tied to an object, which made the question of whether the manton effect still applied to the man fairly prevalent. If Harry enchanted a ward-stone then put it into someone the effect of the ward should stop at the surface of the person's skin.
It wasn't something Harry knew how to confront, which was likely why the man's modifications had been done. Escape was his and Daphne's best chance. He inhaled a breath of dusty air. The wreckage of the Dursley's house had thrown dirt and wood into the air. The drywall probably wasn't healthy to breath. A shame that, assuming the man still needed to breath.
He took a moment to hope there was nobody between him and the front of the next house and grabbed Daphne tight. "Praefigo!" He thrust his wand forward, following it with his body, and flew. It wasn't a true spell - let alone the piercing hex - or something he had even ever practiced, but it was a part of his control of air and he moved in a rush of wind straight through the house in a heartbeat before bouncing hard off the car parked in the garage.
He got up again.
He wasn't making enough progress to keep running.
Someone somewhere knew he was here from the spells he had cast but there was no doubt that most people sent would be killed.
"Put this on." He tossed her his invisibility cloak. "Now!"
She fumbled with it.
"Wha- Your cloak? I'm not just going to-"
"I can't fight it and keep you safe at the same time, put the cloak on! I'll try to apparate out, but I can't put it down long enough if I have to keep running with you."
The no-longer-a-man was free of the Dursley's rubble. Harry could feel it moving through the air and into the house.
There was a muggle child in the house, it was the girl, the one he had sent home. She was standing in the kitchen looking through the hole all the way out into the garage and back out into the backyard. Her eyes were wide with terror and it was obvious when she noticed the thing that should have belonged in a James Cameron film.
She screamed at the sight of the gleaming silver ribcage and sternum of the man. His half-flesh face was burned and bruised and the merging between flesh and metal wasn't seamless. It looked like it had been bolted to his skull.
Harry turned away and pushed Daphne towards the corner of the garage. He flexed his wrist a moment later and blew the side door of the garage off of its hinges.
"Hide! Please!" He begged.
Harry stepped back to look through the hole and saw the metal man stepping over a corpse. Brains and blood oozed from the girl's ears and mouth. The top half of her face was a bloody crushed mess. He had crushed her like an orange. Her body twitched as blood began to pool on the tiles. Someone else in the house screamed and the man looked away.
"Reducto!" Harry's spell caught the man center of mass and blew him all the way back to the fence. Beneath the man's sternum Harry saw twisting gears and a soft inner light as he struggled to stand up again.
Harry tore his way out of the garage and out into the street, trusting the aspect of Death to keep Daphne safe.
He strongly suspected the man was under orders to leave no witnesses. Though whoever ordered him to do so seemed to have not realized the man's cruel and brutal edge. It made him think twice about leaving Daphne but if she were to run she would be safe and he could fight unabated.
He never thought he would face a wizard he couldn`t use legilimency against, and so far it was terrifying. How did people get by without knowing whether someone was lying? How could they react in time to the wide variety spells which existed when they didn't know which spell was being cast? Maybe he was being petulant but he liked to know what his enemies were about to do.
Harry felt as much as he heard the man kill someone else in the house and cast minute meteor a dozen times.
The man tore the front door off of its hinges and casually through it out onto the lawn. Metal gleamed in both arms and legs. Gears turned around the man's shoulders and hips as he stepped towards Harry.
"Are you done running, boy?" The man spoke. "I lack the patience to chase you but I shall do as my master commands. You will come with me. Incarcerous!" Dark ropes leapt from his wand toward Harry.
"Impetresco." They crumbled to dust in mid-air. The man whipped his wand through the air and Harry couldn't see whatever effect it had. He felt a disturbance behind him and intensified the disintegration.
Some transfiguration was reaching out to grab him and simply fell apart instead.
Harry wheezed, sucking in air. He had been exhausted yesterday and it seemed he had yet to recover his full strength. As a side the disintegration curse took a lot out of him.
Harry let the meteors shower the man in a barrage, turning the lawn into a hellscape of shrapnel and fire. He reached out and began to pull the heat towards him. It was like a reverse flame thrower with the fire flowing towards his outstretched hand.
The man walked through the blast like he was experiencing a headwind, lifting his arm to shield his eyes, Harry could feel the heat rushing to the automaton at the same time it rushed towards him, it was a race to see who could gather the energy back.
The man's cybernetic parts began to glow a phosphorescent orange before he released all that pent-up energy in a single, powerful burst. The fire incinerated what was left of the lawn before spreading over the asphalt in a wave.
The asphalt began to run down the gutter as a liquid while Harry manipulated the air. The heat whipped around him but never touched him, rushing instead into his open hand. A metal arm ripped through the air and fire and grabbed at Harry. A rush of air carried him away from the grasping hand and to the opposite sidewalk.
He raised his wand and conducted the lightning through him. The man was a blur and sidestepped the bolt.
The green bolt struck the house instead and collided with the interior, cleanly missing his opponent. The retort was a clear, near-invisible spell that raced towards Harry. When it struck his shield, the spell stopped but it made a gonging sound that rocked Harry on his feet.
He stumbled and reached a hand up towards his ears, his fingers coming away red. Harry refocused, ignoring the ringing in his ears and pulling at the world around him, he still needed the energy.
Rocks flew towards him, ripping chunks of asphalt that whirled towards his face. He sidestepped one, ducked under another, and shattered a third. He transfigured the fragments into a flock of birds which back-wheeled towards the man with talons extended.
It granted him hardly a moment against the unstoppable juggernaut of blackened flesh and steel. The man caught one of the birds out of the air and crushed it. The teen was able to see wires glowing, starting from the man's abdomen and then stretching outwards until the heat burst out.
He fired half a dozen spells in a heartbeat, then half a dozen more. Spells like the bone breaking curse would be useless, there were no bones in the man's body to break.
He didn't need to win though. He just needed to hold the man off until help could arrive. Surely someone knew he was here and that he wasn't stopping casting. As soon as Dumbledore found out he would be on his way.
The puncturing curse, body-locking hex, and the cutting curse all rocketed towards the man. The Death-Eater carefully and casually blocked the body-locking hex with a shimmering golden barrier. He allowed the others to splash harmlessly against his body.
Harry allowed himself a moment to breath and the man capitalized on it. He summoned the pavement to grab at Harry's feet and Harry stepped back, stumbling over the grasping hands. The automaton took careful aim and fired spells all meant to stun or immobilize his young opponent.
Harry blocked them all with shining barrier of crystal-clear ice. The assault shattered the barrier and Harry sent the shards of fragmented material towards the man with a wave of his hand. He followed it up with a bludgeoning hex.
The man stepped through the ice but was knocked to the ground by the spell. Harry cast the Reductor Curse again, taking careful aim. The moment seemed to slow down as he focused and fired. Metal fragments flew from the thing's body as the spell struck and the wave of force sent the man skidding across the street.
Harry stepped forwards and kicked a metallic rib, the piece he had been aiming for, away from them both.
The man darted his wand outwards towards Harry, a golden circle appearing before the wand and promptly collapsed, shattering into a score of glowing golden darts. The darts raced towards Harry who flew on his will perpendicular away, but the spell changed directions without slowing down and he felt each one strike his body distantly.
His head slammed into the pavement, hard, which left his thoughts swimming. He struggled to stand-up, but found his arms limp and unresponsive. He almost vomited and knew he was concussed.
He looked up in time to see the man standing over him. Harry tried to use the wind to dart away but the man's arm lashed out faster than Harry could hope to escape from.
There was a distant sounding crunch as his arm snapped under the metallic fingers. He screamed, but found his voice cut out when the man's other hand reached and grabbed his throat.
He felt himself rise into the air and reached his remaining arm out and grasped in futility at the metallic limb around his neck.
Harry could only flail awkwardly as his vision tunneled, grasping desperately at the dimming world. Searching for anything, anything at all to turn the fight back in his favor, preferably before he passed out.
pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
Daphne had never felt so useless in her entire life as she watched the fight unfold. She could only peer from beneath the cloak, standing to the side of the house as Harry unleashed a storm of lights at the cyborg. They exploded with enough force that a tree in the front yard splintered, sending shards of wood in every direction. She hit the ground to try and protect herself from the flying shrapnel and her nostrils were filled with the scent of dirt.
She got to her feet and watched the bolt of lightning strike the house. She wasn't sure how Harry did it. She herself wasn't a fighter and she had always seen him as more of the scholarly type.
Her legs shook as she watched the viscera dripping from the man's hand. Perhaps it was for the best he had given her the cloak. She was just in his way, like Malachite had said. She resented it, but it was hard to argue with the results when he blocked the man's spells with ice-like glass and shot the fragments back. He just seemed to flow.
She couldn't compete with that.
But then again he had told her not to compete with her. That that was what drove a wedge between him and Hermione.
That had been scary, still was. If he could discard a friend like it meant nothing he could do it to her too.
Except he hadn't.
She felt the silvery material of the cloak between her fingers. It was smooth and it held nothing. There was nothing for her power to touch. It was as though the material really wasn't there at all. Even new things had memories, but this cloak had nothing at all.
Harry wounded the man. A silver rib bounced across the street near where she crouched hidden.
He looked so strong standing there alone.
She knew the truth, had felt it herself. He worried for her. He wanted her by his side. He wanted to help her and he wanted to be helped by her in turn. That was the difference between her and Hermione.
It had scared her, really. But he brought her here. She had seen what had been done to him, felt it to a degree, which was why this amnesiac cloak was a Godsend. It had been exhausting watching and feeling all that. Seeing a sniveling man murder his family had been bad, but even worse had been seeing the welts on her best friend's head from his aunt's frying pan.
Suddenly a great deal of his nature had clicked into place.
It was hard facing the truth, but Harry wasn't the sort of person who holding hands or kissing would mean things to. This place had made him that way. But then, now neither was she.
She could never tell that sort of thing to her easy-to-tease sister - just one bad nickname was all it took to get her flustered; she would never understand.
The truth was he let Hermione go because she wanted to go and he held Daphne so close to him yesterday because she didn't.
He brought her here. He trusted her. That did all kinds of things to her still uneasy gut. Good things mostly, but there were fears too. Everyone was like that though. Everyone had insecurities, especially regarding the people they care about.
She almost cried out when Harry hit the pavement. His body did a horrible bounce that made her legs queasy and she almost screamed with him when his arm snapped.
Yes, she had plans. Who didn't? Find out how her family's vaults were frozen, reclaim her old political power. Harry could help with that. It made her feel bad, like she was using him. But that was how friendship worked. You give and take and it's okay.
So it was an easy decision really; stay quiet, or do something, anything, for her crush. She mustered herself. Using her skills in Occlumency, honed over precious lessons, she dredged up her courage.
She raised her wand at the same time the man raised Harry and pulled the cloak off. She felt queasy, her stomach still all over from earlier.
She focused like the boy she loved had taught her. "Stupefy!"
pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
The spell glanced harmlessly off the man, who almost lazily turned back towards the house. To the side of it, mouth open in horror, was Daphne. Her eyes were set in determination, but she couldn't even attempt to hide her fear.
"Reducto!"
Harry's vision blurred as he hit the pavement hard, he wasn't sure whether the man had thrown him at the ground or merely dropped him.
From his view at the man's feet he saw the wand rise. He reached out and grabbed the man's leg and channeled his power. Ice crawled up the limb, higher and higher until it reached his torso. The man didn't appear to feel it at all, calmly levelling his wand at Daphne.
The frost crawled over his hand and wand as the man began the incantation to the killing curse. "Avada Ka- What?"
"Don't tell me…" Harry began, slowly picking himself up. The man struggled, but the gears and wires were frozen stiff. Harry almost fell over, but reclaimed his balance with only the slightest stagger and reached his feet. "Don't tell me Voldemort didn't winterize you."
Harry tackled the man and they both hit the ground with a dull thud. Ice shattered, and the man's newly freed hand reached down for the teen but Harry caught it in his own and froze it solid. The metal internals gave a low screech as the ice warped the frame.
The man snarled and Harry watched the internal circuitry in his chest light up again. That dangerous rush of heat the man contained would scorch him at this range. It wasn't hard to figure out what he was up to and Harry stuck his hand into the man's chest, freezing it as fast as it heated up.
The ice formed and thawed, gears were bent and twisted out of place. The cold seeped into every crack and expanded ruthlessly. Harry watched as pieces of the man fell clear from his body in the process of freezing and refreezing.
The man's chest was still heating up and growing warmer all the time. Harry jammed his fingers deeper and deeper in, ignoring the heat which licked at them and focused all his will, all his desire to protect Daphne. That fear was worked into a wicked cold edge that he mercilessly drove as deep as he could into the clockwork abomination.
Some of the heat Harry outright annihilated but in his effort to reach the maximum effect possible he was conducting some of it too. His whole body was heating up as he absorbed more and more energy. One moment he was sweating and felt like he was running a fever and in the next his body literally started to smoke.
Harry ignored the minor detail of possible self-immolation and pressed further, pushing flesh and wires aside to grasp at something beating at the very heart of the man.
Harry watched the last few gears shudder to a halting stop and he screamed in honest agony, his insides burning like coals. He could almost imagine his own organs glowing like his enemy's once had.
Then he collapsed and knew nothing.
pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
The Skaz of Pavel Bazhof: Excerpt 'Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What'
A table appeared, and on the table was wine and savoury meats; whatever the soul desired was there with the wishing. The merchant sighed for envy. "Come," said him, "let us make an exchange. Thou give me thy servant, and take from me what marvels thou likest best."
"But what marvels have ye then?"
"Look on and see!"
And the merchant drew out of his pocket a stone pebble. He turned it thrice in hand and out from the pebble a thousand ghosts stirred, no sooner had the ghosts stirred that a thousand more of the raised dead rose. They drew a light to them, at once belonging and without from this world. An army appeared, both horse and foot.
The merchant drew from beneath the folds of his garment a knotted stick, and began to tap with it: "Rap-tap!" out came a ship. "Rap-tap!" out came another ship. A hundred times he rapped, and made a hundred ships with sails and weapons. The dead manned the ships in their ghostly forms, a sword and spear each amongst them.
Third, the merchant produced his cloak and shielded beneath it, no harm could befall him, as he couldn't be found. Not by magical craft, nor any of the senses a man may possess.
And through all the ranks went the roll of martial music, and the armour of the warriors flashed like fire in the sunlight. The merchant rejoiced in it all.
pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
"Terror made him cruel" - Emily Bronte
pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq
This except of 'Go I know Not whither and Fetch I know not what' is not my own. The translation it belongs to is owned by Robert Nisbet Bain and has been modified for the sake of a non-profit fanfiction.
-WG