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Chapter Forty-Nine—Luring Out
Harry Potter.
The words drift through his head, pulling him from the senseless depths of sleep to a place where he's standing on grass at the edge of a wood. Harry opens his eyes and finds himself staring down a long slope.
It looks familiar, although the house in the distance doesn't. Maybe it's just the effect of darkness?
"You told me that I had not challenged you enough."
Harry turns his head to look at the monster behind him standing barefoot on the grass. His main emotion at the moment is impatience, not fear. He is too busy to deal with Voldemort right now. "I didn't use those words."
"You are bored with my illusions." Voldemort seems determined to keep using Parseltongue with Harry despite how often Harry has made it clear that he won't respond in it. He turns over his yew wand in his hands. "Very well. So I will attack those you have no choice but to defend."
He thrusts the wand before him, and a long spray of fire lights up the night. Harry whirls around, seeing clearly now that the flames are filling the darkness with radiance, and makes out the house in the distance.
The Burrow.
The flames, manifesting as lions and chimeras and dragons with neck-spikes of sharp ruby and crimson, are chewing through its wards.
"What do you think, Harry Potter? When your friends the Weasleys are homeless, what will they do?" Voldemort laughs, the sound thrumming through Harry's body while fury and fear and guilt eat up his mind. "Especially when I have placed anti-Apparition wards so that they cannot escape?"
The first thing Harry needs is out of this fucking dream.
He shoves all the chaos and pain he's feeling at Voldemort down their link, the way he did with the physical pain of the scar. It seems that Voldemort doesn't know how to cope with the emotions, either, or maybe with their sheer chaos. He sways back with a cry, stumbling, and the dream fractures around Harry.
Harry rolls out of his bed in an instant, stumbling a little as he touches the floor. He's not surprised to see the curtains fly open on Theo's and Blaise's and Draco's beds. "Harry?" Blaise asks, rubbing his hands down his face. "What—"
"Voldemort attacked Ron's house," Harry says shortly, and snatches Lion from the pillow where he's still spreading his wings in confusion. He runs down the stairs, towards the common room, ignoring the spreading chaos behind him the way he ignored it when the emotions were spreading in his head.
He stumbles a little, skidding, at the bottom of the stairs, but comes to a halt before the fireplace and shouts. A sleepy seventh-year near the fireplace is waking up and complaining. Harry doesn't give a shit. "Lyassa, I need you!"
There's silence for a long enough moment that Harry draws breath to shout again, and he doesn't care if he's giving away the secrets of the Speakers to, as Lyassa would probably say, a "common audience"—
Then the air in front of him tears and fills with light, and Lyassa sways into being as an enormous golden serpent, rather than the half-human form she usually takes. They both ignore the seventh-year crying out with fear. Lyassa half-bows her head to Harry. "What do you wish of me?" she asks in Parseltongue.
"Voldemort is attacking Ron's house. I need you to take me there."
"You, by yourself?"
"I don't think the others can keep their heads in the midst of battle."
"Harry!" Theo shouts behind him. From the sound of it, he's reached the bottom of the stairs, and has also almost reached Harry and Lyassa.
"He sounds like he wants to come." Lyassa leans around Harry, and Theo's scrambling footsteps slow but don't halt. He comes to a stop at Harry's side, panting and alternately glaring at Harry and at Lyassa.
"Were you just going to leave me behind?" he asks in a stiff voice that also contains enough hurt to make Harry wince.
"You know the problems with your mind," Harry says, because he doesn't have time for this, and also a few more people than he noticed are leaning forwards from alcoves around the common room and he doesn't want to say anything too obvious in front of them. "Do you really want to find yourself in the midst of a battle?"
"To support you? Anything."
Harry sighs and closes his eyes for a moment, then forces them open again as he remembers the fire that Voldemort conjured. He waves his wand and his stag Patronus appears. "Go to Severus and tell him about the fire at the Burrow," he says. "Then go to Sirius Black and do the same thing. Can you make it?"
His Patronus leans forwards and rubs its muzzle over Harry's face, then leaps lightly through the wall. Harry faces Lyassa. "Do it."
Lyassa seems to see something in Harry's face that changes her mind. She wraps a coil of her tail around him and leaps through light.
Theo swears aloud as his reaching hand misses Harry by literal inches. Then he steps back and glares around the common room.
Various people look down at the floor and up at the ceiling. Blaise, who's followed him panting down from their dormitory, says, "What happened?"
"He went somewhere I can't follow," Theo says, and fractured lines spread through his mind for a second before he calms himself with a jerk on mental reins. No. Harry didn't leave him behind because he thinks Theo is weak and always will be. He left him behind because Theo would be a liability in battle. Right now.
Theo will prove that he is not.
And he can do that by carrying out the only instructions Harry left, whether or not he realized he was leaving them. He turns to face Blaise. "He sent Patronuses to Professor Snape and Black. Do you want to go and tell the Headmistress, or should I?"
Blaise pauses for a long second. "You think he would want her to know?"
"What can she do about it?" asks a sixth-year Slytherin who's standing gaping off to the side.
Theo withers that person with a single look, and faces Blaise again. "She might be able to provide help and support. Tell the Weasleys. Or because Voldemort sent her that exploding owl, this might mean he has more resources and is coming for her next."
Blaise nods, his face intent, and sprints out the common room door. Theo is just as glad. He's pretending well enough that people are backing away from him, and certainly no one is murmuring about how he's an invalid, but…
The cracks are spreading. He has to turn and walk up to the dormitory again, where he sits on his bed and clasps his arms around his ears.
I am here. I exist. I am real.
It's harder than it should be to think that.
Harry comes down outside the burning wards of the Burrow. Lyassa uncoils her tail from around his leg and sways back and forth in steady silence for a moment, her tongue extending.
Then she hisses, "I smell living beings within the fire. I do not know this human spell or how to gain control of it."
That's all right. Harry is going to find a way or die trying.
He lunges out, not in the physical world but down the bond that ties his mind and magic to Voldemort's. He discovers the monster laughing on the other side of the wards, his thoughts thrumming with what's probably the closest to happiness he gets.
Harry spins himself further. He knows that he can feel Voldemort's emotions, they can touch each other's minds in dreams, and they share a soul. That should mean that sharing Voldemort's magic isn't beyond his reach.
It isn't. Harry discovers the thread that ties Voldemort to the Fiendfyre consuming the Burrow, and he grasps hold of it and yanks so hard that he tumbles back on the grass. Lion leaves his shoulder to fly around him in concerned circles, hissing.
"Harry?"
Lyassa is concerned, too. No wonder, Harry thinks hazily when he opens his eyes. The Fiendfyre has noticed them. Swirls of red and gold, blue and white and silver, and phoenixes with talons like daggers are turning in their direction.
Harry rises to his feet. The Fiendfyre has a will. Its will is to burn shit.
Harry's will is for it to stop burning.
Their wills clash in a whirling blaze that fills the night air between them with shimmering, invisible heat. Harry bears down with all the heartless remorse that he's brought to the search for Theo's cure. He will cure Theo. But he will also save Ron's family—those who remain alive—
For a moment, that thought slips through his mental control and pierces him with grief. The Fiendfyre surges up into a blast that's taller than the house, its center the bulk of a dragon that has its mouth open to vomit more fire.
Harry wraps it in strands made of his will, and pulls like he pulled to get it away from Voldemort.
The Fiendfyre screeches and snaps its neck back and forth. Harry just wraps it up, more and more, again and again. His breathing is steady and even. He ignores the fact that Lion and Lyassa are staring at him in silence. It doesn't matter.
It. Does. Not. Matter. Nothing matters right now except stopping the Fiendfyre.
The dragon begins to shrink. The flames coil around it and wrap its wings and feet and neck and horns and spikes in a golden web. Then Harry shrinks it further, until a fireball of pure concentrated horror is hovering in front of him.
Harry lets his breath out.
A sharp pop comes from the side. Voldemort has Apparated right in front of him. His mouth is open in a silent scream, and Harry can feel the corresponding pull on his magic, Voldemort yanking back control of the Fiendfyre.
Harry lets it go.
The fireball flies straight at Voldemort, and unfurls its wings in his face.
Voldemort screams, something hissing and horrible, and Harry can feel him grabbing at the Fiendfyre. But something is wrong, it's too concentrated or it's still partially connected to Harry's magic or it's because Harry flung and shoved it instead of trying to retain control of it, and the wings open, and—
Voldemort stops screaming, because he has nothing left to scream with.
Harry grabs the Fiendfyre again as it turns away from the fall of thick black ash, binding it under control with greater ease than before. Maybe that's because he's done it once already, but he thinks it's because it's just killed something.
"Harry?"
Harry can't answer Lyassa until he's bound the Fiendfyre in chains of will again, and then concentrated harder to snuff it. He sags to the ground, panting. Then he turns his head and answers Lyassa sluggishly. "Yes?"
"Do you want me to go and check on the humans?"
Harry would like to send her, but he knows what the Weasleys will probably think to see a giant snake crawling towards them. At worst, that it's Voldemort's. He shakes his head and manages to stand. "I can speak with them, I think. I don't know who's still alive."
Lyassa turns her head back and forth, tongue darting again, and then shrugs in a rippling motion that runs all down her body. "I cannot smell their scents enough to distinguish. The scent of the fire is above all."
Knowing what he does about Fiendfyre, Harry isn't surprised. He nods. "All right. Then—can you support me while I walk up to the house?"
"That I can do."
Lyassa ducks down and then rears back up to the exact height where her head is underneath his hand. Harry leans hard on her as he limps towards the Burrow. Half of it is just gone, as if sheared away instead of burned. The little shed where Mr. Weasley likes to tinker with his Muggle projects is gone.
Harry swallows. He will just have to hope that the rest of them aren't.
Gone, gone, gone…
Molly can't speak or weep. Her grief is too deep for tears. She folds Arthur's burned hands on his breast and settles back on her haunches, next to him. Her own hair is singed, her hands burned from where she was casting close to the fire to hold it back.
Part of her, sitting in the deep pool of her sorrow, thinks that at least none of the children were at home. Their loss would be harder to bear.
But because she knows she is not bearing the worst does not make this easy.
"Mrs. Weasley?"
Molly looks up. She knows that something intervened to stop the Fiendfyre, because it never would have just gone away on its own. But she didn't know that she would see Harry standing where the wards had been and blinking at her, biting his lip.
His stricken eyes go to Arthur. "I'm sorry," Harry whispers. "I didn't get here in time. I didn't save him."
"What you did is miraculous," Molly says. She doesn't need him to say that he stopped the fire. That's obvious. And she doesn't care about the giant snake next to him, which coils up and hisses softly at her when she stands. Harry wouldn't permit the serpent to harm her. "At least I survived, and my children will have most of a house to come home to."
"I—what happened?"
"We heard the fire start," Molly says. As long as she lives, she'll be able to hear that deep boom like a dragon drawing fire into its lungs in her ears. She wonders absently if she'll be able to bear sitting next to a normal fire after this. Shakes the irrelevant idea off when she sees the way Harry is staring at her. "Arthur said something about how the wards would take care of it, and then we felt the wards burning. And then the house."
"You felt the house burning?"
Molly nods and reaches up to touch one clump of her singed hair, which comes away crispy and black at her touch. "Yes. We bound ourselves to the house because otherwise, some of the magical modifications we made to it might not have lasted beyond a few years. The price you pay when you do that is that damage to the house damages you."
Harry is still staring at her with huge eyes. Molly looks around at the blackened earth. She's not even sure that the blackness is ash, and not just the remains of the dirt when it's been charred by a fire so magical and strong.
"None of the children were home," she whispers. "They lived."
"Yes, they're alive. The ones I know of at Hogwarts, at least, and I haven't heard anything about Bill and Charlie and Percy."
Molly blinks and glances at Harry. He's standing taller than he should have to, speaking the words in a tone of deep reassurance. He shouldn't have to do that, either, Molly thinks, her head swimming with pain and grief and exhaustion. If anything, she should be the one comforting him.
"Harry, you don't need to—"
"It was Voldemort," Harry says, staring right at her, and Molly has been training herself out of the flinch at the name but she flinches anyway, because Harry seems larger than life right now, radiance crackling like banked Fiendfyre in his eyes. "He came here and set fire to the house because he knows you're my friends and my family and he wanted to get to me. But I promise you, Mrs. Weasley, I'm going to stop him. I promise."
"It could just as well have been because Minerva and I are publishing the news that his name is Tom Riddle, Harry," Molly murmurs, but she has to close her eyes. Half her self is dead on the ground over there. That might be the reason that she feels as though something has been wrenched in her chest, she's so deeply moved.
"It's probably all of those things. It's all right, Mrs. Weasley. I'll kill him. He doesn't deserve to live. I burned his body to ash, so he's probably a wraith right now, but I'll do worse."
Molly feels jolted back into her body, part of her skin and emotions again, for the first time since she saw Arthur lying dead. She reaches out a trembling hand. "Harry. Harry, don't—don't get caught up in the kind of vengeance that demands that. It's not your fault what he did—"
"He wouldn't have done it if not for me."
"Or me. We said that."
"You wouldn't have got involved in the effort to publish the news about him if not for me, either." Harry stares at her, and there's something worse than dead in his eyes. "I promise, Mrs. Weasley. I promise."
The large snake next to him gives what sounds like a warning hiss. Molly smiles at it as broadly as she can. She hopes that perhaps this magic snake will bring Harry back to sanity where she's failing.
Harry lunges forwards and hugs her, suddenly. "I'll tell Ron and Ginny and the twins," he whispers. "You don't have to tell them."
"Harry—"
He's already turning to the serpent and saying something to it in Parseltongue. The snake hisses back something that Molly, of course, can't understand, but its tail curls around Harry's ankle, and they both dissolve into light and seem to turn sideways to vanish through a dark door.
Molly closes her eyes, and doesn't open them even when the cracks of Apparition signal people arriving. Then she goes back to Arthur.
"Harry."
Theo whispers the word. He can barely remember the hurt of earlier when Harry left him behind, but all he can do now is stare at the boy with burning eyes who's standing beside his bed, his hand reaching out to lie on the pillow next to Theo's head.
"I had to tell Ron and Ginny and the twins that their dad died."
"In—Voldemort's attack?" The words seem to stick in Theo's throat, and he thinks some of that is the effect of the curse, but not all.
Harry nods. His eyes are still blazing, and it's painful to look at him. He reaches out and squeezes Theo's shoulder. "You can go to sleep, Theo," he says, and then he strides over and disappears behind his bed curtains.
Theo watches them for a long time, but they don't stir. He goes back to bed himself, feeling helpless and wishing that any plans he comes up with would endure rather than fall through the cracks in his mind.
Behind his bed curtains, Harry lies awake, staring up at the canopy and ignoring Lion's soft worried hisses.
I am going to stop him. I am going to stop Tarquinius and the leopard. I am going to stop all of them.