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Chapter Eighteen—Unfolded
Theo feels a swipe of something that might be a paw pass above him. He stalks forwards, slinking, keeping close to the ground, or what might be the ground or the floor of this strange blue-green, glassy world.
There's another snarl, and something huge hits him.
Theo lets himself roll and fall, his paws raised and rising above him as he rolls on his back. His instincts shriek at him, telling him that he's leaving himself utterly vulnerable to a killing strike that could tear his intestines free, but he manages to silence those instincts. He is only a leopard in form, not in mind, and his human mind is in control.
And he is rewarded when he manages to clasp his front legs around the enormous claws. He surges up and bites down.
He only manages to take one bite before the leg he holds goes soft and misty on him, and flows away towards the walls. But that was enough to reveal that his enemy is made of flesh, or something like it, cold and rank and dusty.
A spitting, snarling, coughing roar echoes through the enclosed world, which turns darker and greener. Theo thinks he can see the fronds of enormous plants out of the corner of his eye, but he ignores them. He has to, focused as he is on the enemy who will do more than destroy him if it catches him.
The shape swirls together in the middle of the fold, a leopard made of grey shadows and larger than a dragon.
It doesn't matter. Theo is still here, and he still has to protect Harry from attack, since there's no one else. He doesn't bother snarling before he springs.
They were right. I was wrong. We should have confronted Umbridge before this.
Harry ducks a strike from her wand. She wanted him to stand still, and that means he won't. Disobeying Umbridge is right at the top of his list of methods for staying alive right now.
But now that Umbridge is fighting, Harry knows he'll have to confront her wand-to-wand sooner or later.
No reason he can't give himself an advantage, though. She made him put Lion out in the corridor, which might indicate she fears snakes or fears his Parseltongue. Harry hisses and conjures the green snakes that Lyassa has been teaching him to call, which arch out of the stone and rear up and all hiss at Umbridge at once. Harry knows he's the only one who can hear the taunts in their voices, but Umbridge turns purple anyway.
"What is this, Mr. Potter?"
Harry doesn't waste his breath on answering. He retreats behind the first of the snakes as he sends them forwards. Umbridge is dodging cautiously, although Harry still can't tell if that's out of fear or just because she doesn't know what the snakes can do.
"I am going to give you one chance, Mr. Potter," Umbridge says, and takes her eyes off his serpents briefly to frown at him. "If you will stand still and allow me to cast one spell on you, I will consider all debts—"
"Take her," Harry hisses, and two of the snakes strike at the same time.
One of them manages to bite Umbridge's boot, but not the foot inside. If they had, Harry knew, she would have collapsed. The other one misses as Umbridge utters a high sound and leaps back to collide with her desk.
Fear of snakes, then, Harry decides, and conjures a golden serpent to twine around his arm, the way that Lion would. This one is only an illusion and not capable of biting, but when it opens its mouth and hisses at Umbridge between dripping fangs, it doesn't look that way.
"Mr. Potter, stop this at once!" Umbridge's voice is a high, thin shriek.
"No," Harry says. He can't risk the chance of taking his attention off her and looking back at Theo, but his whole being sings with fear for his friend. "Not until you bring Theo back and let us go."
Umbridge's face turns purple enough to rival what Uncle Vernon's used to look like. "Crucio!"
The other leopard takes form just as Theo lands with all his paws out, all his weight. There's a rumbling snarl, and teeth the size of his legs in this form flash at him and then sink into his side.
Pain is pain, but Theo is used to it, has been from the time he was a child. He raises his hind legs and rolls, sliding himself beneath the other cat's belly before it can work out what he's doing or turn into mist again. Then Theo rakes them in the disemboweling stroke.
His enemy squalls in what sounds like surprise, and turns into mist again. Theo scrambles back to his feet, bleeding and limping. The drops of blood fade away the moment they touch the strange glossy floor of the fold they're in. Theo turns his head back and forth, letting his whiskers twitch and his nostrils work.
Something behind me.
The thought echoes in his head after he's begun to move, leaping into the air and forwards, so that he collides with another glossy wall and rebounds off it. He manages to come in at an angle, and that means he lands on the enemy's foreleg again before it begins to withdraw, and bites.
The leopard snarls, but doesn't fade out again. Instead, sharp teeth close on one of Theo's shoulders. Theo drops his weight limply to the ground, and the leopard pauses as if trying to readjust its grip.
Theo uses his claws again, and this time, he rips open a big, jagged, bloody wound that gushes spectacularly, although not as well as it would in some place where the blood didn't fade the moment it touched the glass. He still gets a cry, and the leopard twists and tries to rake Theo with its hind feet the way he already did to it.
Theo rolls and springs, combining some of the human dueling moves he knows with a leopard's body, and ends up half-clinging to the glassy wall that cuts him off from Harry, staring with his ears pinned back against his skull. At least he gets a chance to look at his enemy for a second before it charges him.
It's limping and bleeding from the last wound he inflicted. Somewhat to Theo's disappointment, he didn't get its guts to spill out of its belly. He can see a few glistening pink loops, though, and that inspires him to try again.
Before he can spring, the leopard flattens its own ears and snarls.
Except the sound is only a snarl at the beginning. It changes midway into a voice that he knows, a voice that haunts his nightmares.
His mother's voice.
"Theodore. Theodore. What are you doing? What do you think you're doing? I never wanted you to do this, to become this dark creature trying to avenge me. I wanted you to live a life of peace and plenty…"
Theo can imagine his mother saying something like that. And the imitation is perfect. He thinks his enemy probably meant to break him.
And it works. But not in the way his foe probably hoped.
Theo feels it, the smooth snap in his mind that happened for the first time when he saw his mother lying dead on the floor of their home. His fur crackles with magic. He cries out like a mad thing—which at least silences the mimicry, the mockery, of his mother's voice—and leaps on the leopard, aiming straight for its face.
His claws take its left eye, and then he's not the only mad creature fighting in the glassy world.
Harry falls to his knees to escape the Crucatius Curse, but Umbridge was aiming it in a slightly different direction than he thought, and it manages to clip his shoulder. He cries out, once, at the sudden flash of searing pain that dashes through him.
The snakes react to his agony by surging forwards. Umbridge loses her smile as she backs up in front of them, her wand swinging in her hand as if she wants to cast a spell to hold them off but can't imagine the best one.
"Call them off, Potter!"
Harry stares at her. His head feels as though someone has dumped a whole bucket of cold water into his mind.
Umbridge did do something to him in his last detention. It amazes him, now, that he could ever have thought he'd just fallen asleep from the sheer boredom of copying lines. But maybe the thing she did made him think that, too.
If she would hit him with a torture curse now, she practically has no limit. And that makes him want to hurt her.
Harry snaps to his feet and uses a spell that he found in a book in the Black library this summer and Sirius made him practice to get right. "Congelo cordem!"
Umbridge's wand falls from her hand as she gropes at her chest, and then she sinks to her knees. Harry watches her with narrowed eyes, feeling nothing but satisfaction. He knows exactly what that spell does, because Sirius also made him experience it, so he wouldn't use it casually.
It makes someone's heart feel as if it's getting colder and colder. As if it's slowing down and stopping. It's not exactly the same as a heart attack, but it could be if Harry lets it go on long enough.
It surprises him, a little, how much he wants to let it. He wants Umbridge dead for what she did to him, and to Theo. He shoots a swift glance at the glassy wall behind him, but he can't see through it, can only see struggling grey shapes that make him hope Theo isn't dead yet.
"Master! She has her wand!"
Harry swings around. Umbridge does have her wand pointed at him, and she has a twisted scowl on her face that makes him understand that he's driven her further than he meant to. She looks half-mad, and as if she's no longer thinking about what spells are illegal or will get her in trouble with the Ministry.
"Avada Kedavra!"
The leopard is shaking him back and forth as if all it wants is to end his existence against the glassy walls. That would be fine with Theo if he can kill the thing. He clings to its face, shifting his teeth and claws back and forth as much as he can in the midst of the battering, trying to find its other eye or drive something into its brain.
Is it mortal? Can it die? Theo finds the questions interesting, more interesting than the flares of pain that are spreading through his body as it's battered. He must at least have caused it pain when he wounded it, or it wouldn't be reacting like it is.
Teeth grab his spine, or it feels like that, and part of Theo that went to sleep at the sound of his mother's voice wakes up again. It reminds him, dimly, that he has more responsibilities than just killing this thing or making it pay for imitating his mother. He is bound to Harry and is supposed to guard his mind against nightmares.
He was supposed to find out what's going on with Umbridge. Something he can't do when he's locked away here or if he dies in the battle.
Theo snaps his eyes open and braces his paws as best as he can against the nearest wall. Now his entire body is screaming at him. But that's happened before, under his father's wand, and Theo once again ignores it. He rips his teeth around and to the side and snaps them shut on what feels like a clump of fur.
It turns out to be the other leopard's cheek. He gets a squall that turns into a half-roar, and then the thing tears free from him. Theo drops to all fours for what feels like the first time in a very long time and stares at the creature as he licks its blood from his lips.
It's bleeding all over, sluggish streams of red with a grey tinge. It has more color than it has had at any point in the battle, brilliant yellow with black spots that float back into grey as Theo watches. It snarls at him, and Theo is beyond pleased to see that he's broken—with his body or his own jaws—two of the curving fangs it was using to grip him. And of course its left eye is an utter ruin.
Theo tries to move forwards, and becomes aware that his left foreleg is broken. He frowns. That's annoying.
Something seems to shift inside him, and for a moment, Theo has to be concerned that the blood he swallowed is poisoning him. But then it blooms into awareness, and he knows something about the beast in front of him.
The same way it found out about his mother, and the name she called him, and how to imitate his voice. Because the knowledge flowed through his blood.
Theo lifts his lips to show his own fangs, the closest he can come to a smile in this form. He knows that this beast fears snakes, and that Parselmouths are its ancient enemies. He thinks Harry will be interested to know that.
And he knows how deep its fear is. It can grow in power, and it can diminish, and it can go to sleep, but it cannot heal wounds it takes that are deeper than a few bites through fur. Its eye is gone, forever.
Unless it kills him.
And Theo thinks it would probably try, but it's too scared of him to do so. While Theo has next to no fear of it, wiped out by his hatred and his madness. Only the longing to survive so that he can continue to protect Harry.
He takes a step forwards, balanced on three legs.
And the leopard screams, and vanishes.
With it go the glassy walls, and Theo sees what Umbridge is doing to Harry.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
It's the only spell that will come to Harry at the moment, and he Levitates one of the snakes he conjured into the wake of the Killing Curse. It jerks and falls still. Harry swallows as its body collapses to the floor. Despite the fact that it was conjured and would have had no life at all apart from his magic—
It would have sacrificed itself for me if I'd asked.
He didn't ask. And now the snake is limp and dead.
Umbridge moves a step forwards, and then goes down on the floor under the leap of a ragged, bleeding leopard with at least one broken leg. Harry shudders as he stares at the place on Theo's back where something's teeth grabbed him around the spine. Theo could have been paralyzed or had his back broken.
He didn't, obviously. But now he's leaning down to breathe hotly into Umbridge's face, and she faints, her wand rolling from her limp fingers.
Theo looks as if he's going to tear her face off.
"Theo, no!"
The leopard shudders and turns towards him. And at the moment, Harry thinks, with a detached air, while his heart fills his ears with thunder, it is a leopard. Not Theo. The eyes are absolutely mad, brilliant clear green like glass lit with feral fire.
A Stunner strikes from the door and fells Theo.
Harry stumbles around to face this new threat, his knees nearly giving from beneath him, and sees Severus there, holding out his wand and staring around the room as if he expects to have to defend Harry from something else any second. Harry runs towards him and throws himself into Severus's arms, not caring at the moment how weak he looks.
He's shaking with pain and fear and fury and sorrow, and he needs this.
Severus wraps his arms around Harry's shoulders. He knows he's shaking himself, and part of him hopes that he's out of sight of Fred and George Weasley, who came to alert him when their monitoring spells on Umbridge told them about her throwing Unforgivable Curses. If they notice, then he will probably have to resort to Memory Charms to keep them properly respectful.
But for now, the thought is a presence in only a distant portion of his mind. Instead, his arms are around Harry, who's clinging back and trembling, and is alive and not bleeding and not dead.
"I made a mistake in allowing you to go to this detention," Severus whispers to him. "From now on, I trust that you will listen to me when I tell you I would like you to do something."
Harry just nods against him, his hair rustling a little against the cloth of Severus's robes. "Thank you for keeping Theo from becoming a killer," he whispers. "And thank you for saving me."
Those words sound like music in Severus's mind. He locks them away, to savor later, and allows himself to stand embracing Harry for one more moment before motioning the Weasley twins forwards to join them.