ccxxv. the illusion of safety

If one of the Aurors on duty in the reception area of Azkaban prison had thought to pay attention, they would have heard counting coming from the only occupied holding cell.

"One. Two. Three!"

Feathers rustled, and a body collided with a solid surface. A groan followed the soft thump, completed by a low utterance of "Shit."

On the cell floor lay a scrawny witch not yet fifteen years old, eyes pressed closed as she rubbed her sore arm. Dirt covered her Muggle clothes, smeared across the jacket, staining her denim trousers. It painted hazy, careless tracks across her skinny cheekbones and darkened her unclipped nails. The girl groaned, and she opened her eyes. Dark circles were smeared underneath them as if pressed into the skin by ink-stained fingertips.

Harriet Potter wasn't entirely sure what she'd expected of Azkaban after listening to Sirius' stories about it. She'd never intended to visit, so hadn't given it much thought. She guessed she had it better off than he had, what with being in a holding cell rather than in the prisoner block. She had a bed, void of mattress though it might be, and access to the loo if she griped at the Aurors enough. The window set high on the wall provided some murky sunlight and fresh air in the daytime. There was a table with two plain, wooden chairs stuck to the floor, facing each other.

Really, it was better than the cupboard had been.

Harriet sorted the Aurors she'd seen into three groups. The first treated her the best, those that saw a teenager in Azkaban and didn't think it right, regardless of guilt. The second group thought her guilty of Terry's death and mostly ignored her, while the third group was the Aurors who belonged to the Guardians of the Magical Right. Harriet looked for the pins on their lapels and was clever enough not to talk to them.

They wouldn't tell her anything anyway. No one had told her a bit of information after they'd pulled her from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and dragged her across the North Sea by boat. Harriet's first glimpse of the prison had been through a veil of mist glowing in the dying evening light. It had made the place look like it was on fire.

She didn't know how much time had passed since then. Meals were irregular, and though the Dementors didn't linger overlong near this section of the tower, their influence sat heavy overhead, so much so that standing up straight could be challenging, and sleep came in erratic, nightmare-filled bursts. She knew Elara and Hermione and everyone else had to be looking for her, but she had to wonder why no one had come yet.

How long has it been? A day? A week? I can't tell.

Staring up at the rough stones of the ceiling, Harriet inhaled a deep breath, her chest rising and falling. Holding it, she curled her knees toward her chest, then shot her legs straight out, using the momentum to spring to her feet. Her muscles ached, the prison not exactly the best place for her injuries to recuperate, especially her arm. Harriet pressed her fingers into the spot where Crouch had plunged the dagger, and it hurt. It shouldn't, not after Madam Pomfrey had finished patching her up, but it did.

Sighing, Harriet redirected her attention to the window. It was perhaps a meter or so over her head, a little more than two meters off the floor. "One. Two. Three!"

She reached for the tightly wound ball of magic inside herself, and it unspooled, rolling over her like a thin, cold sheet. Her body shifted in an instant, and Harriet braced her little bird legs, jumping before frantically beating her wings. For an instant, she thought she might collide with the wall again, but she managed to rise sharper this time, and her claws scrambled at the window's stone edge. Harriet clacked her beak in satisfaction.

Finally!

Naturally, they'd warded the windows against Animagi—probably having done so once the details of Sirius' escape came to light—but the air felt nice, and practicing gave Harriet's mind something to latch onto instead of circling the drain. She liked being in her second form. Her thoughts hurt less.

Mr. Flamel had said she was a carrion crow—just like Hugh—but younger, with the blue eyes of a juvenile and a tuft of messy feathers sticking up from her crown. He'd held her up in front of a mirror, and Harriet had hopped about in a circle to see all her feathers, Mr. Flamel laughing when she'd very nearly careened off her perch onto the floor. It had been a brief moment of levity in a week otherwise saturated by darkness.

The bird didn't have the same brain as Harriet did in her proper form. Her worries lessened, lost urgency; she was still Harriet, but crows lived more in the moment, and that thinking reflected itself in her mind. She concerned herself more with the harshness of Azkaban and the drudgery of time than the crippling remorse and guilt of what happened in Riddle Manor.

She looked toward the gray, frothing water, the sharp, colorless walls of the prison formed by magic, not by hand. No sea birds rode the waves—only the black, haunting shapes of Dementors roving in the mist like some horrid creature out of a child's nightmare.

Restless, her wings churned, little talons tapping on the cold stone. She hummed softly in her own thoughts. "Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hoggy Warty Hogwarts! Teach us something please—."

Still, the darkness intruded.

"I'll let them know how hard you tried in the end. How very well their pet did—."

Her hold over her magic warbled, her shape losing its unfamiliar form. Harriet's knee scraped the sill as she fell backward and hit the floor with a thump.

"Ouch."

No Auror came to inspect the noise. In fact, Harriet hadn't heard much of anything out of them for a few hours. She peeled herself off the stones again, and instead of having another go at transforming, she sunk onto one of the chairs, kicking her trainers against the floor. She'd had enough of falling on her arse for today.

"Hiding already, little Harriet? My, I didn't think I was such a bad host. You haven't even seen the best part!" The Basilisk's heavy coils caused the Aerie to groan under its weight—.

Fire crawled up her throat and burst from her in a mist of red. Poison, poison, she'd been—.

Harriet leaned forward, dropping her head onto the table with a groan.

At a distance, she heard footsteps. That in and of itself wasn't odd; Harriet heard footsteps all the time, and the long, solid walls of Azkaban lent themselves to echoing. It was the softness of the steps that caught her ear, how they sounded against the surrounding silence. She hadn't realized how quiet it'd become. Where were the Aurors? Where were the guards?

Nervous, Harriet sat up as the steps came closer—and her heart dropped from her chest when the iron door opened, and the person came into view. Gaunt stood at the threshold, drops of water darkening his stately coat, not that he seemed to notice. He stared at her, and as she watched, a smile unfurled across his face like the slow creeping of thorn-covered vines.

Set stirred in the murky shadows thrown by the yellow candlelight, pulling and pushing at Gaunt's feet like an unseen tide. Harriet let herself glance toward him, then away.

"Good afternoon, Miss Potter."

She didn't answer as the wizard entered the cell, and the iron bars at his back clattered closed. On instinct, she tried to rise and move away from him, but Gaunt lifted his hand, and a sudden force stuck Harriet, slamming her backside into the chair. She struggled and tried again to move, and the magic pressed against her as if someone physically held her down.

Gaunt approached and slid into the seat opposite Harriet, though not before he dipped his hand into his cloak's pocket and removed something. He tossed it onto the table, to the side, and Harriet could only give the strange object a momentary glance before facing Gaunt again. It looked a bit like a stamp someone might find in a library, meant to press the date into the return slip. Why he had that, she hadn't a clue.

"Have you enjoyed your stay so far, Harriet?" Gaunt asked. "I may call you Harriet, yes?"

"No," she replied. "No, I haven't. And no, you may not."

"It's in your best interest not to be difficult." Gaunt tilted his head, resting his pale hand on the table. "After all, you're going to be here for a while."

Liar. Harriet didn't know much about laws and whatnot, but Elara did, and Harriet listened when her friends talked. She knew her friends would not stop looking for her, and there'd been many witnesses on the platform who saw the Aurors grab her. Elara had told her about Azkaban before, and she knew they couldn't hold her here indefinitely unless she was convicted of a violent crime. For that to happen, she had to be brought out for trial.

"They're coming for me."

"Are you so sure?"

Her throat tightened, panic lurking, threatening. "I don't know what you want, and I don't care," Harriet told him, forcing her voice to be bolder than she truly felt. "You've expended a lot of effort for nothing."

"I wouldn't expect you to understand anything, Potter." He leaned forward, delighting in her discomfort. He exuded exultation—as smug as any pure-blood git Harriet had ever met, though she knew better. He was less a pure-blood than she was. "No…too busy kept in the dark by Dumbledore and Slytherin. But they're not here now. It's just you and me."

Harriet dropped her gaze to her legs. Her hands balled themselves into fists and shook against the chair's arms with the effort to pull themselves free.

"Well, let's not linger on pleasantries. I've better places to be." Gaunt sniffed, and his tone darkened. "What do you know about Hallowe'en, 1981? Hmm? What has the old man confessed to you?"

What is he talking about? The night Voldemort tried to off me?

"Look at me."

She squeezed her eyes shut. I won't answer, she thought. I won't give him what he wants. I won't.

"LOOK AT ME!"

Harriet couldn't stop herself from obeying, taken aback by the volume of his voice. It echoed in the cell and out into the passage, Gaunt's eyes blazing when they met her own. He seemed almost startled by his own outburst, his amusement gone, one hand rising to comb back the loose strands of his styled hair.

There's a monster in him, Harriet reminded herself. It could be difficult to remember sometimes—veiled as he was by the charming smile, the handsome face. Certainly she didn't like Gaunt—or Slytherin, for that matter—but what they were inside went beyond petty emotions. The sheer wrongness of them could come spilling out like a tipped jar of beetles, glittering, crawling, swarming. The blackness inside of them pantomimed normality, dressed up every morning and put on a pretty, human face, but Harriet knew the Dark Lord must have abandoned humanity long, long ago.

She was trapped here, stuck alone with one of Voldemort's Horcruxes, a piece of the bastard up and walking around on its own without permission.

In a flash, Gaunt's arm rose from the table, and he closed his fingers over Harriet's jaw, holding her in place. She startled and tried to pull away, his nails driving into her skin. His eyes bore into her own.

"Legilimens!"

The red of his irises spiraled, and Harriet plunged downward as if through a long tunnel, smothered by an otherworldly blast of cold feeling. It pressed forward, deeper, and her mouth opened to shout, but no sound escaped.

She passed the Muggle Studies professor in the corridor, the funny bloke with a turban. Harriet thought he was looking at her but—

"If you scream, I will kill you—."

The turban unspooled from the wizard's misshapen head, garlic dropping to the floor—.

"You're not worth the time I wasted brewing that poison—."

Fire, it came like fire, burning, rising from her gullet until it burst out in a curtain of red mist, and Pansy shrieked—.

"I can give them back to you, silly girl. What Voldemort takes away, he can return…."

Harriet kicked against the sensation, lashing out as if with both her feet, landing a solid blow. The feeling thrashed like an alligator in a death roll, frigid pain spiking behind Harriet's sightless eyes.

"I will let you share in that eternal life, Harriet…. You and your family could live forever—."

She leaned into the side of a curly-haired wizard on a garden bench, haloed by the white moonlight. "Sometimes I'm afraid I'll be tempted again—."

A flicker, a reflection in an enchanted mirror, a green-eyed man and a red-haired woman smiling—.

"But I know better now. I know nothing is forever—."

"Get out of my head!" Harriet gasped, reeling. The Minister crouched in her mind like a thing made out of metal, scouring her brain with sharp, bladed prongs. "Stop it, stop it—!"

Dumbledore looked down at her small form lying in a hospital bed. "You are one of his mistakes, Harriet," the elderly wizard said. "Greater than you know—."

Gaunt grunted—a singular, frustrated noise. Harriet attempted to blink the world back into being, and it came in blurred blotches, her temples pounding. Then, Gaunt was on his feet and around the table, affording her no chance to breathe before the spell came again.

She was back in the storage closet under Quirrell's wand. "He thought to trap me, Dumbledore, that wretched old fool—."

Shards of a broken mirror pinging upon the stones—.

Want suffused her being as she gazed into the glass at her parents holding onto the younger siblings she'd never have—.

Gaunt ripped through her mind with impatience, roving like a madman in a library, yanking books from the shelves in search of something without ever considering the titles. Harriet's memories tried to drift and connect in natural patterns—but Gaunt kept jerking her back to that afternoon, that horrible day trapped in the closet with Quirrell and the Dark Lord.

"Master, I do not know what to do—!"

A lipless mouth opened and sharp teeth shone, red eyes peering right at her—.

Quirrell raised the wand and, still smiling, said, "Avada Kedavra—!"

Green light, green light like that night—.

"No, please, not Harriet—take me instead!"

It collided with Quirrell, throwing him back—.

Voldemort screamed—.

Gaunt pulled free, and Harriet choked, trembling under his punishing grip. Her scar blazed like a thousand suns confined under her skin, digging trenches into her bones, into her soul, scalding, molten—.

She swallowed her scream and glared at Gaunt, the wizard looking at her as if unsure of what he was seeing. Curiosity gleamed in his gaze, as malevolent as anything else in his cold little heart, brimming with new fervor. Harriet watched his eyes bounce back and forth, and a deep furrow dug between his brows.

Whatever answer he sought, Gaunt hadn't gotten what he wished.

His eyes narrowed, and he began to pace the small space allotted between the wall and the table. Harriet didn't care what he did so long as he stayed out of her head. Her skull's insides felt as mashed up as the feed Hagrid fed to his flobberworms, and her thoughts came sluggish and dazed as if pickaxes had carved up the roads they usually took.

It worsened the Dementors' lingering pall.

"What has he told you?" Harriet realized Gaunt towered over her again, and she flinched, shutting her eyes when his cold, careless fingers formed a fist in her hair to jerk her head upright. "What do you know about the prophecy?"

Harriet found she could move her hands again and clapped them over her face, hiding it from Gaunt, not caring how his grip stung at her scalp.

The wizard scoffed. "No matter," he muttered. "I'll find the truth of things myself."

A gesture of his free hand summoned the odd object from the tabletop to him, and he grasped it by the wooden handle, swiveling it to inspect the head. It really did look very much like a stamp with its twistable dials—but there was no ink.

"Normally, this is reserved for permanent residents," Gaunt hissed, clicking different numbers and symbols into place. "But, ah, let's make an exception this one time, shall we?"

He yanked her head to the side, and Harriet dropped her hands in time to see the object lower toward her bared neck—.

"This is going to hurt," the Minister crooned.

A brand, it's a fucking brand—!

Gaunt pressed down, and Harriet screamed.

xXx

Hours later, Harriet sat trembling in the dark, holding her head between her knees as the cold permeated her chest. She knew he'd ordered the Dementors closer after he'd left. She knew he'd done it just to be spiteful. Harriet sat alone with all her worst memories as company, the air settling like despair in her quivering lungs.

"Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hoggy Warty Hogwarts," she breathed through chapped lips, clinging to something familiar, something happy. "Teach us something please."

What if I never return? What if—? What if—?

Her neck ached. She could feel the symbols raised against her clammy flesh under her dirty fingertips.

"Did you like that, little girl?" Riddle crowed—.

Greyback found them, his lumbering shape at the ravine's start, peering through the crevasse with wicked delight. Only one yellow eye remained, and the other dripped red beads like pomegranate seeds—.

"Look at it," Snape ordered. "Look at it, Potter! You wanted to know so badly! I told him because I was a Death Eater! Because it was my job to do so—!"

"Frigid little thing, aren't you?" Crouch asked, lip curling. He shuffled closer, pale face looking up into Harriet's own—.

Voldemort pointed his wand at her. "Then it will be just me—."

Harriet drove her fingers into her hair and pulled, rocking with her back against the wall. All the little pieces of herself felt strange, misaligned, loosening at the seams no matter how she grasped the threads and attempted to tighten them. She didn't cry. Harriet refused to cry anymore. She simply held onto herself as best she could and choked on her misery.

Then, from above, came the sweet, gentle warbling of birdsong. It glowed summer-warm on her skin, and Harriet sucked in a breath, looking up.

"Fawkes," she whispered upon spotting the phoenix perched on the opposing side of the window bars, his red wings and neck hunched in the cramped space. He didn't look particularly happy, but he sang all the same, and the music fell on Harriet like a warm blanket. She shut her eyes.

She was there in Professor Dumbledore's office, sunshine easing through the tall windows, the silver instruments chiming, the portraits softly snoring. The venerated wizard sat behind his desk, a quill in his hand, the nib scratching over a piece of parchment. She could smell lemon sherbet.

Her family stayed with her—the Flamels, ensconced in the lurid melody of easy French, Sirius and Remus lost in stories of boyhood, the former letting out a loud bark of familiar laughter. Hermione and Elara chatted about Charms by the fire, and next to Harriet sat Snape. She couldn't see him, but his presence had a palpable heat, and she breathed in the cloves and pine that clung to his wool cloak.

"As the Headmaster is so fond of sayingyou are not alone."

Harriet eased her eyes open to the grim, austere interior of her Azkaban cell. "Thank you, Fawkes," she told the bird overhead, and he kept singing. Harriet leaned against the wall with her arms wrapped about her legs, staring into the middle-distance, clinging to that small, tenuous bubble of safety, even if it was just an illusion.

They're coming for me, she told herself, her heart steeled against doubt. They're coming. They're coming.


A/N: I'll get into this more in later chapters, but the DoM is not like it was in canon. If you're wondering why Gaunt hasn't sauntered in to hear the prophecy himself, it's because he can't, and so far it hasn't mattered to him.