Chapter 12
The Grey Place
Draco was doing his best not to panic at the convulsing body splayed on his own bed. He had been fully aware of this curse and its effects since before he died, but had assumed Harry's sacrificial ritual had put a permanent stop to it's progress.
Clearly, he had been mistaken.
"When did he get hit?" Cresspool asked, the man seemingly on the brink of a panic. "Did you see him get hit?"
Warbeck shook her head.
"It's not a matter of when he was hit, but what he was hit with." Madame Warbeck said. "What are his symptoms."
"He's literally coughing up his liquified, rotted lungs." Draco explained. "Perhaps a variant of the organ necrosis curse specified to only effect the lungs?"
It was bullshit, but it was good bullshit. The kind that could forestall them realizing exactly how fucked Harry was.
"That's an impressive diagnosis, boy." Said Warbeck. "For a non-medically trained young man. Leave the speculation to the medically trained professionals. Hestia has been acting as his personal physician and would know more."
She lifted Potter's right sleeve and examined the blackened flesh beneath.
"Based on the condition of this arm I don't think this is a wound he received from the battle today. I don't recognize this type of tissue damage. And if it's a curse I haven't heard of then he's in big trouble. Especially if he's been carrying it for some time now." She speculated.
Draco nodded. His stalling tactic failed. Time for a different strategy.
"If you'll forgive me taking command of the situation." Draco began. "If one of you to go back to the House of Black to fetch Hestia, then the three of you together will give him better odds and I'm guessing you can't do anything until you know what she knows?"
Warbeck and Cresswell both nodded solemnly before turning to the unconscious, but not stilled, man.
"Histania." They both cast simultaneously at Harry's still-convulsing form.
His convulsing didn't stop, but it did slow down. It was clearly a medically applied "impedimenta" jinx to keep him in stasis and stave off death. Seemed like a useful spell.
"I will stand watch over him. I can't imagine a safer place for him to be than under the watch of a lord in his own ancestral home." He told them. "Cresspool, go get Hestia, and Warbeck, the medical room is down the hall across the master suite. Could you please go prepare it for Hestia's arrival?"
The two nodded and the pair left the room. One to go down the hall, the other to find the apparation point. With a few waves of his wand he locked himself in the room and got to work. It felt good to use his own wand again, with the single spell he suddenly felt alive for the first time since he rose from that surgery table. But he shook off the euphoria before it could take hold. He didn't have much time.
Carefully, ever so carefully, he removed the glove from Harry's left hand. For all he knew removing the ring from his killer's hand would sever his tentative connection to life. It gave him life, surely it could take it away.
He placed a single finger on the ring and whispered the name.
"Mungo Bonham."
The shade of a dark-skinned man appeared and considered him. He then considered the body next to him and sighed.
"He and I already discussed this. I told him I don't know what the curse could possibly be, let alone how to counter it." Mungo told him angrily. "And if a curse is dark and esoteric enough that even I haven't heard of it, then he's in deep trouble."
Draco nodded to every word, patiently letting the man rant a rant he had heard before.
"Well, we need a miracle now. If not a cure, then an amelioration of his symptoms. If only enough to get him in fighting condition long enough to finish this war." Draco pleaded. "Or until the next fight."
Mungo harrumphed.
"What are his latest symptoms?" Mungo demanded.
"Hyper-rapid decay and rotting of internal organs. As of now, his lungs. He's barely breathing." Draco explained.
Mungo hummed.
"I would recommend a transplant, but the curse would quickly overtake those new too and we will be back to where we are now." He explained. "The best long-term option right now is an iron lung. Miniaturized and installed into his chest cavity. After removing what's already in there."
That didn't sound like it would make Harry particularly battle worthy. Even if you made iron lungs small enough to be implanted, they would never allow him the endurance necessary to go for a light jog, let alone duel Voldemort.
"I know his cousin is here but not if he is a match for providing a transplant." Draco said. "That would probably be a better stop gap solution. Put him under, remove his organs as needed, regrow them." Draco said.
The death glare Mungo gave him could chill a lake of fire.
"That goes against every principle of medical ethics and basic human decency." Mungo chastised. "And probably wouldn't work, as the potion routine necessary to regrow a lung is rather intensive, and most potions are less effective on Muggles. The transplanted lung could decay and fail before a new one grows back, and you can only take one at a time."
Well, there goes that idea.
Before he could concoct another the medical duo burst in, pushing in the wheelchair-bound Hestia.
Draco managed to appear like he was maintaining a pulse check on Harry's wrist and let go of the resurrection stone. Mungo disappeared from his perception the moment he ended contact with it.
"How is he?" Hestia started.
"His pulse keeps ending and restarting." Draco said, not actually bluffing. "It's like he keeps dying and coming back."
There. Let them chew on that strangeness. He doubted they knew of or understood the existence of Horcruxi and how Harry could be trapped between the here and forever after as his body fails and restarts.
"So, the curse finally reached his organs but isn't allowing him to die?" Hestia deduced, wheeling herself over to his bedside and pushing Draco aside.
"That was my conclusion as well." Warbeck confirmed. "But I have no clue what the nature of his curse is. It bears a resemblance to ancient Egyptian mummification curses. I once had to treat a curse-breaker who got caught by one and there was nothing we could do."
Lost, ancient and dark magic of the world was impossible to counter. All knowledge of their fundamental principles was long gone, and so too was any chance of countering it. It was like trying to solve a math problem in a dead language, if that dead language counted in an unknown base and used unique modifiers you never heard of.
"Did you at least cremate him?" Hestia asked. "Such curses usually trap the soul in the desiccated bodies, so they suffer the pain of death eternally."
Warbeck nodded as if she were offended by the question.
"So, it's incurable and now terminal." Said Cresspool. "Should we start building the funeral pyre now?"
"No." Said Hestia. "There is at least one way to circumvent the curse. It is not attached to the body. It is attached to his magic."
She paused to let Warbeck and Cresspool digest this tidbit.
"So, if we give him transplants that are non-magical and are physically separated from his flesh by a proper barrier, then the curse won't affect those organs." Hestia explained. "We could take lungs from a doner, wrap it in a titanium mesh and it would protect most of it."
"What about the pulmonary artery?" Asked Cresspool. "We would need to connect the lungs to it with some artificial valve. And if we're going that far we might as well enchant the valve with a blood-cleansing ward for extra precaution. To prevent any contamination of the new organs with any muscle or fat tissue that could have gotten into his bloodstream."
"And we would have to soak that mesh in a metal elasticating potion so it doesn't constrict his lung capacity." Warbeck added.
Draco, at this point, tuned it all out. This was all way beyond his ability to understand. He backed out of the room and went in search of Harry's cousin.
All about him was grey and viscous smoke.
The experience, at first, strongly resembled falling into a pensive. But the grey mist refused to form anything recognizable as a shape. The only thing that did change about it was its thickness. As he fell deeper and deeper into the grey place the suffocating mass of mist varied from being comparable to smoke, to the pressure of the deep water, to full on mud. Never once was it thin enough to see more than the outline of his own hands and body. It was maddening. If this was hell, for surely any just god would condemn him to such, then it was a slower torture.
Then, all at once, his fall ended and his feet met silver.
The world was a mirror. An endless plane of reflective quicksilver. Echoes of his steps flowed across its surface from where it landed like a pebble thrown into an undisturbed pond, but for how far they permeated he did not know. The fog was still ever-present.
Harry dared not speak. For one, he wasn't sure he had the ability. For another thing, he had the sneaking suspicion he wasn't alone. A visceral instinct told him there was something else here. And he wasn't welcome.
It might have been his imagination but he thought the fog was beginning to thin a bit. Mustering up his courage he took one tentative step forward. Forward seemed as good a direction as any.
Drip.
That was the sound it made. The sound of a drop of water echoed as he took a step, and a similarly perfect wave flowed across the glassy surface beneath him with it. Curiosity begged him to investigate the ground thoroughly, but good sense told him no understanding would come from being in this place. Only of his situation.
He was dead. Not permanently so, obviously. The Horcrux tethered him to the real world, and he would return to it in time. But for now, he was on the other side of the veil. The veil! That's what this place reminded him of. The curtains of the veil in the death chamber. Or perhaps the liquified substance that Hogwarts ghosts were made of. Both comparisons were appropriate.
Feeling more confident in his better understanding of his surroundings, or more likely the illusion thereof, he took another, gentler step.
Drip.
It was just as loud as with the first step. Experimenting he stamped his foot.
Drip.
It wasn't any louder nor quieter that time. Seeing sneaking was pointing he took off.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
And on he trotted through the mist. The sound of his footsteps following him all the while. It took an entire minute before he realized he wasn't breathing. At all. It only gave him momentary pause, as that made the most sense of anything here so far. As did his lack of bodily pain or physical sensations in general.
He wondered why he was even given the self-delusion of having a body at all. Surely that wasn't necessary. But he had to admit it was preferable to being a shapeless mass. And with that thought the world around him changed as he came to an epiphany. That simple thought, slightly altered perspective, was enough to allow him to see them.
The mist? Turns out it was people. Lots of people. And animals. And cities. Yes, cities. All of which were transparent and incorporeal, and each living thing remained for only a moment. Flying through the realm as if merely passing through then vanishing.
The storm of birds, people, fish and insects - deer god were there so many insects! - and even plants poured in from every direction, passing through each other and each seemingly asleep by appearance. The buildings, on the other hand, were permanent fixtures of the skyscape and looked just a bit more solid. Enough that he was sure he could climb them if they were but a bit closer. Skyscrapers, cottages, pillars, pyramids, bathhouses, castles and modes of construction from civilization's long forgotten formed an asteroid field above his head.
This was a death realm. Where the souls of the dead passed through to the unknown beyond. And things or places with proto souls, cities and buildings and places who passed from memory remained here, for no beyond waited for them. He wondered if some of the buildings in the infinity above him were Atlantean, or even older Lemurian or older still Muan. The entire universe around him was an infinitely large archeological site waiting to be shifted through.
Hermione would love this place. Harry, on the other hand? Not so much.
Curiosity getting the better of him he gazed down at himself and wished he hadn't. Half of his body appeared corporal. The other half a deep shade of black. Separating the two was a long, jagged schism of golden thread, like a lightning bolt. So, half of him was here, in the beyond. If this wasn't a confirmation that the Horcrux had worked, then nothing would do. Whatever reason he was here, it was a temporary state for him. This warranted throwing caution to the wind.
"Hello?" He dared to speak, and his voice clapped like thunder across the infinite.
Yup. Silence was probably the best policy. He hoped nobody heard his call, but that was akin to hoping there was nobody and nothing else present in this entire realm. And he was no longer naive enough to hold such hopes.
"Dursley, right?" Draco asked unsure as he approached the wall of muscle in his dining room.
Draco found him eating leftover spinach quiche in the kitchen. The man was covered in dust, ash, dirt and a little bit of blood that he suspected didn't belong to him. But he was eating in the dining room, with his elbows off of the table, mouth closed as he chewed and he had a napkin properly folded in his lap. These basic table manners endeared Dudley Dursley in the mind of Draco more than the other man could have ever known.
Finally! A civilized human being.
"Your cousin needs an organ transplant." Draco opened without preamble. "If you are a match, we can put you on life support and regrow anything we take out."
The blonde Muggle chewed his food deliberately as he eyed Draco and his suggestion before swallowing and wiping his mouth.
"Different blood type." Dursley said simply. "I'm AB positive. He's B negative. Same as mum."
He then took another bite.
"Well where is she?!" Draco said in desperation. "We kind of need him alive and functional if we're all to survive."
Dudley shook his head solemnly.
"Dead. Killed by a vampire." He said.
That sobered Draco a bit more. Not completely, but between Harry's incapacitation and his guest's terrible revelation he was quickly losing his buzz.
"Oh. I'm sorry." He apologized.
"Don't be. I lit his ass on fire and staked him through the heart with a pool cue." Dudley said with a nonchalance he couldn't have possibly felt.
"I take it this didn't happen recently enough that we can do a postmortem transplant?" Draco asked.
Dudley had to pause at that.
"Not for our kind of surgery. But would a less than two-week-old dead person be able to transplant if you guys do it with magic?" Dudley offered.
Draco breathed a sigh of relief. That was within the window of a magical transplant, if only just.
"Assuming she is his biological aunt and she's been kept on ice, yes." Draco said. "These assumptions are true, aren't they?"
Dudley nodded.
"Dad's been buried but they still have mum in the morgue for their investigation into her death." Dudley explained.
"And was she infected by the vampire?" Draco continued.
Dudley shook his head.
"Ripped her throat out." Dursly explained.
Good thing Harry didn't need a new pair of tonsils. His internal attempt at levity failed to meet his lips. He, unlike Potter and Weasley, had that kind of filter instilled into him.
For several moments Draco struggled with coming up for a compassionate, or at least respectful, way to say this next sentence.
"So. Do you know where we need to go to, um, salvage her body?" Draco gagged on the words as they left.
The look of mild amusement on the blonde Muggle's face made him feel slightly less awful about his situation. But still. They both had some serious mother problems to work through.
"I know which morgue it is, yes. Who will be joining me on the mission and when do we deploy?" with conviction as he pushed his plate away and stood up.
"You put it together. And immediately." Draco ordered.
"Will you be joining me?" Dursley asked.
"Can't." Said Draco. "I'm under orders from Harry to be a prisoner here in my ancestral home. If I'm captured or killed this place will no longer be safe."
"How does that work?" Dursley asked.
"The magic that protects this place is passed down by blood. It is in my name. Names have power, and my father's fathers earned a lot of power for the name they passed down to me. Only I can access it. If I die, the magic dies." Draco explained.
Dudley shook his head. Draco tried his hardest to empathize with the man, magic must seem as incomprehensible to him as Muggle electronics did to the average wizard.
"So, I'm to recover her body?" He calcified.
"Yes. In the meantime, we should send a team out to get supplies. Iron lung for now, hopefully we can perform the procedure Hestia has in mind if we can't get him transplants. It does seem like the best chance." Draco thought aloud.
"Hey Cresspool!" Dudley yelled at the ceiling, making Draco jump.
"What?Q" The annoyed and far-away voice of the healer-in-training responded.
"Get a team together! You're breaking into Mungos! Whatever that is!" Dudley commanded.
"Neat!" Came the answer. "And it's our magical hospital."
Draco was caught between sighing and laughing at the antics of his new allies. What a ragtag team they all were. Well, his work for the day was done. Time to go talk to mum.
Harry's run through the realm of the veil was forever accompanied by the constant drip, drip, drip of his feet on the mirror-like ground. It was maddening to the point Harry imagined this is what Chinese water torture felt like.
He would pause occasionally to catch his breath. Metaphorically, of course. He didn't breath here. Nothing did.
He noticed several other aberrations like himself. Broken souls, like a human being bisected by a bright golden ark of lightning. They, too, wandered aimlessly.
They were rare, but numerous. The vast majority wearing garb of the ancient Greeks or older civilization's. Harry deduced several things from these observations.
First, that Horcruxes weren't invented by Herpo the Foul, but rediscovered or else the knowledge unearthed. Second, they were a plague upon the earth in Egyptian and pre-Egyptian times. Did everyone in the old kingdom make one of those accursed things?
At least now he had sentient people to speak to, though none of them were from a time or culture who spoke English. So, he set out to find one of two who could and whom he knew were here. Or at least a part of them.
He soon found himself climbing a ziggurat, possibly of Sumerian make but he couldn't be sure, that was trapped against the mirror-like ground. He chose to climb it because he noticed a forlorn figure sitting on an alter atop it gazing out at the infinite.
He recognized those handsome feature anywhere. The single half of his body with any coloration at all told Harry this was of a Horcrux with exactly half a soul in it and the pattern of golden wounds emanating from his chest outward we're exactly as Harry remembered from when he killed the teen.
"Hello Tom." Harry greeted the part of Voldemort once trapped in the diary.
Tom Riddle, still in his Hogwarts clothes, slowly blinked out of his reverie, turning to Harry. They stared at each other for some time, until recognition dawned on his features.
"Harry?" He questioned, the confusion evident. "You... shouldn't be here."
That Voldemort himself couldn't grasp the reality of Harry's fall from the light should have horrified him. But he had no horror left in him.
"What is this place, Tom?" Harry asked without the usual pleasantries.
He tilted his head to the side, as if trying to decide if Harry was actually there or not. It was a decidedly odd gesture, for only fractions of him were present but still moved as if connected to a full body. It was as if he rubbed invisibility ink all over himself but missed blotches, so that a seemingly shredded quarter of his head, a bit of his chin, bits and pieces of his torso and fractures of his arms and legs floated independently. the edges of his form had that same golden hue as it had when Harry stabbed the diary what felt like an eternity ago. Altogether these pieces probably added up to half a body, proportional to the amount of Tom Riddle's soul had been trapped in the diary and the same amount of Harry's soul standing there before his enemy. He wondered if, to Tom's eye, Harry had a similar appearance.
"Apathy. Despondence. Non-remembrance" Tom answered. "An antithetical existence to life and death alike, as if unto antilife."
If Harry had a spine, a shiver would have run down it.
"A place of magic unlike our magic, one of many such places theorized to exist separate from places men should walk." Tom went on, standing up. "I admit, you are one of the less unpleasant hallucinations. Surely you, of all people, couldn't create a horcrux. Although I can imagine how you came across the knowledge."
Harry considered lying and going the hallucination route, try to coax information out of him. Maybe learn the identity of the unknown Horcrux? But he didn't have it in him. This Tom looked to have suffered enough.
"Life has been unkind to me." Harry admitted, shaking his head. "And I did commit that sin. I fully intend to destroy it myself, after I finish destroying all seven of yours."
Tom stared at him for a time. Then he began walking and Harry walked with him. Time passed. Slow, quiet, yet it passed in the blink of an eye. They were walking together along what looked like a shattered, floating piece of the great wall of China when Tom decided to break their mutual, comfortable silent contemplation.
"But... How are you here if your horcrux has not been destroyed? Are you not the horcrux?" Tom asked.
Harry shook his head again.
"I am the man. My body is breaking down, I think I died." Harry explained. "I'm sure my people will resuscitate me, so my time here is short. Is it possible your older self was trapped here for a time during his missing thirteen years of wraithiness?"
This time Tom shook his head.
"No. This is the place the destroyed Horcruxes go. If your body was destroyed your soul would still be trapped in the physical plane. You are a Horcrux." Tom revealed.
Harry raised an eyebrow. Tom didn't have all of the information. He was both correct and incorrect. Magic could be weird like that.
"So, you already know I created seven? Or at least I had planned to. If you came here specifically to try and ask me where or what they are, I'm sorry to say I'm not privy to that information." Tom said.
Harry laughed at the attempt to deceive.
"Tell me, what object of Rowena Ravenclaw did you seek out?"
Tom raised an eyebrow back at him.
"The lost diadem." He confessed. "I seduced the Grey Lady, turns out she's Rowena's daughter."
"Small world." Harry commented dryly.
"Quite. Anyways, after a long Hamletian story of love, betrayal and murder-suicide it turns out she hid it in a tree in the forests o Albania." Tom explained. "I'm sure I would have hunted it down after graduating. And if I found it, it would become one piece of the seven I'm sure you're aware of. And then it would have found a new home. A safe home. Where? I know not."
Harry nodded. He had a what, and a where to start searching. Finally! A lead he could act on. Plans to attack Gringotts's still needed ripening. Still, something reeked of this situation.
"You're being awfully cooperative." Harry pointed out. "Why the sudden interest in helping me?"
Tom stopped walking and Harry stopped with him. They were on some tiled patio beneath a pagoda. It's surface, like the surface of all things here, was being reduced to dust and reformed in a constant state of undecay.
"I have been here a long time, though by the look of you not as long as it felt." To explained. "It's an existence I do not particularly enjoy, and outside of trying to find other damned souls to talk to, only to discover that Herpo doesn't exactly speak modern English, all I've had is time to think and I have decided I want to pass on. That cannot happen until all of me is destroyed."
Harry nodded, even if he didn't quite buy the explanation.
"And on what basis do you think that will be the undoing of your torment?" He asked.
"It just feels right." Tom answered with a shrug. "I also just want to get things off of my chest, and I feel no qualms sharing it with somebody who won't remember this conversation in but a few moments."
Harry was instantly on the defensive. Crouched down, fists up ready for a fight.
Tom merely raised an eyebrow at him.
"Um. No, I wasn't threatening you. You're leaving this place. It looks like you were right when you said your followers would resuscitate you, and when they do this entire interaction will be less than a forgotten dream to you." Tom explained. "Look at yourself."
Harry did, and indeed the grey and white was being driven from his form and replaced with color. As if blood was once again in his veins and heat on his skin. He looked back up at Tom.
"It's a shame too." Said Tom. "I have so many regrets I wish to confess, who better to confess to than somebody who will both understand, and not remember? But it will have to wait until next time we meet. Until then, I have other mes to hunt down in here. Don't suppose you'll tell me how many you destroyed?"
Harry was actually going to tell him, but before the word "three" could escape his lips he was dragged through nothingness. Pain and an accompanying stench and taste of filth greeted him on his awakening.
He was in a brightly lit room, blindingly white curtains and ceilings hung over him, but he could barely concentrate on any of it over the taste of rot and metal in his mouth and the stench of the same. Where was he? The last thing he remembered was the battle of the Taboo, coming back to Malfoy Manor, then... nothing.
"Oh god the stasis has worn off! Get me the vacuum tube before he chokes on his own blood!" Came an older woman's voice whose identity eluded him in his delirium.
The ache of a recently patched injury, the dual soreness and cutting pain of a sealed surgery, erupted along his entire abdomen and right limbs. Like your mouth after a dentist extracted a tooth, but everywhere. He strained against his disobedient body to try and turn, to see his surroundings, but then just as suddenly as it had come the pain and disgust vanished and he was falling, weightless, into an endless mist of grey.
An endless mirror stretched to the horizon, though where the horizon line was would be anybody's guess. The thick grey mist that tore at him like a vicious wind obscured his vision so totally that he could barely see ten meters in any direction. It reminded him a great deal of the curtains Sirius had fallen through nearly three years ago, but such comparisons would bring him no closer to understanding.
He occasionally heard voices, whispers, or perhaps muttering. Some were even in English, but all were far away or moved by him faster than he could identify.
Was he dead?
No. His Horcrux was intact, even if he couldn't feel it in that moment. This was in his head, or at least partly was, but his experience with mind magics told him that in no way made it less real. In fact, it very much resembled a pensieve. Perhaps he had retreated into his own mind as his body broke down? The relationship between soul and mind was complicated, but very real. It certainly resembled what he imagined the inside of his head would look like. Vast emptiness and murky confusion.
Were these voices ghosts of memories lost? His subconscious trying to talk to him? Full on hallucinations? The world may never know because his time in this place was up. His mind went blank, the feeling of life returned to him, and the grey mist subsided.
He was on a table. Petunia was on another table beside him. Both of their torsos were cut wide open, and from Harry's torso was a litany of tubes and clasps. Most prominent of these was one connected to a large machine that drew from him black, oxygen deprived blood and pumped red blood back into his veins.
There were people about the sterile room, going to and from, presumably operating on him and his dead aunt, whose presence took up the majority of his death-addled minds processing power. What little of it he had in his delirium. What remained after that was trying to parse the confusion of where he was, how he got there and what he had just been doing. He remembered feeling... something, but it slipped his mental grasp.
He reached out with his good arm, trying to touch the tubes attached to his insides, but a firm had stopped him and wrested his limb back to his side. Harry looked up to try and see the person who grasped it. His face was blurry and indistinct, as it ought to be without his glasses on.
A moment later the face faded into a grey mist, along with the rest of the room and everything in it. And so, Harry fell, endlessly, into a grey mist that went on forever in all directions, save below where his feet made contact with shimmering silver.
Johnathan Cresspool was rather surprised when Harry sat bolt upright, and even more surprised when he found himself grasped by the throat and bodily lifted by his patient only to be slammed against the wall.
"Do NOT allow me to go under again." His master snarled through the respirator and feeding tube.
He could only nod piteously against the palm enclosed round his throat but was mercifully released. Harry promptly collapsed against the nearby chair, holding himself upright with his good hand.
"Report." He ordered.
Johnathan stood upright and did so.
"Taboo destroyed. Captives at Malfoy manor free and in training. Malfoy has kept everything in order for the three days you were under."
Harry nodded and began testing his limbs as he listened.
"The location of the concentration camp where muggleborns and half-breeds are being kept?" He asked.
"Confirmed and in the process of being scouted." Cresspool told him.
"By whom?" Potter demanded.
"Jessica and her little golden friend."
Harry seemed pleased by this. After all, these were all the orders he left in the event he was incapacitated or unavailable. He kept whole week of forethought available for all to read, and likely had more to be released if he did perish before the war ended.
"And what have you and Warbeck done to me?" Potter asked.
"Transplanted your heart and lungs, implanted blood purifying catheter-like device." He explained. "Your aunt was the donor. We've... well there's no good way to put it, we've harvested and begun preparing the rest of her for when, WHEN NOT IF, the rest of you starts to go."
Harry nodded as he paid particular attention to his blackened right hand, arm and fingers.
"Did you do something to my joints?" He asked, perceptively.
"Indeed. Replaced them with peek - it's a plastic with great strength and low friction - and coated the bones on your right side with a thin varnish of titanium with more peek embedded into it."
"The titanium binds to the bones, the peek reduces friction with my necrotic muscles and tendons, thus somewhat alleviating my constant agony." Harry concluded aloud. "Is there a particular reason you didn't do this with my left side?"
Johnathan raised his hands apologetically.
"Our oath..."
"Ah! Yes. Preventative surgery like that would fall under the purview of 'do no harm' that prevents mediwizards from practicing magical plastic surgery or male genital mutilation of babies or female circumcision of women or other unconscionable practices of Muggle physicians." Harry said in understanding, reciting the exact verbiage of the most popular dissertation on the Hippocratic oath. "The most you can do is attempt to slow or stop the spread and make further augmentations as they become necessary?"
Johnathan nodded in confirmation to Potter's words.
"I see. And how long until I can take off this respirator?" He asked.
"We don't know. Your aunt's lungs were neither as large as your old ones, nor as well trained. Your body may never fully adapt to them." He explained.
Potter nodded but then disrobed. Johnathan cast his eyes downward as Harry removed the medical gown to examine himself. He performed a squat and a couple lunges before deciding he was content.
"Cloak me." He commanded.
With a flick of Johnathan's wand Potter was restored to his usual decency.
"What are your orders, my lord?" Johnathan asked, defferentially.
Hary snorted but must not have felt up to the task of trying to battle against the title they had all given him.
"Come. We have work to do." Was his simple order.
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