CW: Heavily Implied Murder and the emotional consequences.


Lesson 3: The Value of a Life

November 1996

They were preparing yet another corpse for burial. Harry had long since stopped wondering where the bodies came from. In the last few months, he had learned more about human anatomy than he had ever thought possible without actually receiving lessons on anatomy, itself.

That was, incidentally, how he had found out that the skeleton in the Defence classroom was not actually a Thestral but a Granian. Because Harry was clearly incompetent when choosing books by himself and had somehow, inexplicably ended up with one that described the differences between various related animal species rather than one focusing on the human body. It had been interesting at least. He had gone to Hermione for help after that.

"Could you prepare more ink, please?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "What did you think I was doing earlier?"

Nott sighed audibly, put down the brush he had been writing with and turned to him. "I understand that you are as reluctant to work with me as I am to work with you, Potter. But the fact of the matter is that we have to cooperate on somewhat friendly terms for any of this to work."

"But we are already working together."

Harry received an arched eyebrow at that. "Are we? I do not remember you communicating to me in any way that you were preparing more ink while I was busy cleaning the body."

"Well, I told you just now, didn't I?"

"You did, in fact, not. You merely insinuated within your snarky reply. I would appreciate to be treated with a little bit more respect."

Harry eyed the other boy. "I don't trust you."

Nott looked back at him calmly. "That is not what I am asking for." He paused. "I can take a fair guess as to your reason for attending these lessons, but you must by now know that the Forbidden Arts cannot simply be learned and practiced by just anyone for whatever reason strikes their fancy."

Harry narrowed his eyes. "Oh, like you're one to talk! Who's to say you aren't doing this so you can pass along the information to Lord Voldemort later?"

Nott, predictably, flinched when Harry said the name – just like everyone else always did. It only served to annoy Harry more.

"I am not one of his followers."

"Aren't you? And where is the proof of that? Don't think I've forgotten about your father's involvement both times I've had to face Voldemort since he returned."

"My father –"

"Your father is a Death Eater!"

Harry almost didn't hear the quiet, "I am not my father." – for in that moment, the door to the room opened, letting Fawley and Lémure inside.

"Oh, are we talking about Theo's father?" Lémure said in an inappropriately cheerful tone. "He's a real piece of shit."

"Language, Rhea," Fawley admonished the other girl. "Although you are, of course, entirely correct. Uncle Nereus deserves to rot in Azkaban," she cut her eyes at Harry, "right next to my own father."

Stepping inside behind them, Professor Totengräber tutted. "We don't talk about Lysander, dear. He is a disgrace to our name."

Lémure pursed her lips into a pout. "He doesn't even bear either of our names."

Professor Totengräber mildly raised her eyebrow at her granddaughter. "Now, now, Antheraea dearest – you know the legacy of our families extends far beyond a mere name." The old woman turned to Fawley. "Is Nereus Nott much the same, then?"

"Yes. And he, too, is a Death Eater."

"Death Eater," Professor Totengräber repeated, in a tone as if she were testing out the words for the first time. "What a confounding term."

"It is the term the Dark Lord's followers use for themselves," Fawley said.

Harry was left feeling oddly off balance as he listened to her explain what a Death Eater was to Professor Totengräber, who had apparently never heard of the term before.

"You really shouldn't judge a person by their parents," Lémure said to Harry, startling him out of his thoughts.

"What?"

"You of all people should know better, considering how Professor Snape oh-so loves to compare you to the father you never met."

The reminder of his parents made Harry's chest constrict painfully. Seeing his mum on Halloween – No, he wouldn't think about that. Not now.

"That's not the same at all," he told Lémure.

"Isn't it?" She tilted her head in contemplation. "Hm … I can't think of a plainer example off the top of my head. Always so difficult, you Gryffindors."

Harry frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"Simply that my own house understands far subtler implications." Lémure shrugged. "But we all know that it always helps to be direct with Gryffindors. They usually don't act any friendlier, but the reactions are generally less hostile than our usual methods of subterfuge. Even telling you this is rather uncomfortably direct for me."

Harry stared at her incredulously. "Do you manipulate everything in your life?"

"Of course not. We are just people, too."

Fawley huffed. "Debatable."

"Except for your father, obviously. But we can't all have tragic backstories about monsters pretending to be parental figures."

Monsters pretending to be parental figures, Harry's mind repeated numbly.

"Some of us have fathers who are perfectly ordinary." Lémure continued and then paused. "As ordinary as our kind can be, anyway."

"Yes, but your father is soft." From her tone and expression alone, Harry couldn't tell whether Fawley thought this was a good or a bad thing.

"I know, I know," Lémure replied wistfully. "Mother keeps rubbing it into our faces. I don't understand what she sees in him."

Next to him, Harry heard Nott sigh loudly.

"Great," Nott muttered with an exhausted air about him. "Once you get them started, there is no stopping them. We might as well continue without them."

"Yes, quite," Professor Totengräber said, watching her granddaughters with an amused smile. "So how are the preparations coming along, you two? Is there anything you still need help with or can you manage on your own now?"

Still feeling entirely off balance, Harry let Nott answer for them as he tried to wrap his head around what had just happened.

In the background, Lémure and Fawley continued to bicker among themselves.

o

In the weeks following the most bizarre lesson Harry had had so far – and that was saying something – he tried to change his attitude towards Nott not to be – well, not nicer, exactly, but … not disrespectful, at least. Harry knew rather intimately what it was like to be treated with disrespect. Harry still did not fully understand all that she had been trying to tell him, but Lémure hadn't been wrong with her analogy to Snape's behaviour.

Nott never said a word, but Harry thought he caught the faintest hint of a smile sometimes when he had to hold himself back from snapping at the other boy.

They even held civilised conversations, occasionally, although they weren't necessarily ordinary conversations most of the time.

"No, they're all insane," Nott was saying in reply to Harry's question about the oddities he had noticed about Lémure and Fawley. "If you're done on your side, can you hand me the quill, please?"

Harry gave him a look as he passed him the quill and an inkwell. "Insane."

Nott shrugged. "I grew up with Lynea and I still sometimes forget she's only second cousins with Rhea."

"What does that have to do with –"

"Honestly, Potter." Nott looked up from his work just to roll his eyes at Harry. "Let me rephrase, then: Sometimes, I forget Lynea is more closely related to me than to Rhea. They could be actual sisters and it would make no difference."

Harry frowned. "But they look nothing alike."

"That's not what I'm talking about, Potter. Merlin, they each have actual siblings and it's not the same at all."

Harry still didn't understand.

"If they are insane as you say," he said instead of voicing his confusion, "then why do you hang out with them constantly?"

"Watching me, Potter? Well, when the only other options are either Draco's group or Pansy's, it's hardly a choice at all."

"Have you ever considered hanging out with people that aren't in Slytherin? Or, I don't know, hanging out with yourself?"

"I'm not a Ravenclaw."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

That earned Harry a pitying look.

"You really don't know the first thing about the other houses, do you?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"That Hufflepuff would have been a good choice for you. Alright, I think we're done."

Harry looked at his watch. "And just in time, too."

Less than five minutes later, punctual as always, Professor Totengräber entered the classroom.

"Well done," she praised as she examined the body Nott and Harry had prepared. "I see the routine is becoming familiar to you. Well, then. You may perform the rites now and then we will go out for today's lesson."

"Where are we going?" Harry asked after they had sent the body off to await his funeral.

"Mainland Europe," Professor Totengräber told them, placing a broken clay pot on the table that reminded Harry of a vase. Or an urn. It had probably once been an urn. "Gather around, now."

"Are the others not coming?"

The smile the old woman sent his way suddenly made Harry all too aware of who and what exactly he was talking to. "They have already long since internalised what I am going to teach you today."

Ignoring the dread settling uncomfortably in his stomach, Harry reached out to touch the urn.

The portkey brought them right to the doorsteps of an old castle, its turrets looming right above them, high walls surrounding them on all sides. Professor Totengräber gave them no time to really take in their surroundings before leading them straight inside, paying the uniformed guards next to the heavy wooden doors no mind.

They were muggles, Harry realised, catching glimpses of the guns they carried. The inside of the building was terribly bleak, the atmosphere reminding Harry of the orphanage Tom Riddle had grown up in but worse. Metal doors lined the walls off long corridors in an odd contrast to the worn stone the castle had been built with. Bright electric lamps bathed everything in cold light. Everything seemed muted, somehow, even though their steps echoed through the halls.

It took Harry longer than he would have liked to admit to realise that this was a prison. By that point, they had already reached their destination, Professor Totengräber talking to some of the guards in a language Harry didn't recognise. He could feel the subtle magic she was weaving, however.

The room they entered was plain, the walls bare, only a simple table with some uncomfortable-looking chairs standing to the side.

"They will bring in the prisoners shortly," Professor Totengräber told them, taking a seat at the table and gesturing for Harry and Nott to do the same. "Today, you will learn the value of a life."

The dread sitting low in Harry's stomach intensified.

"I am somewhat aware of the moral conflicts that plague even some of our kind, so I thought I would make it a little bit easier for you by choosing those whose lives have already been forfeited. They have all been sentenced to death."

"I thought the death penalty had been abolished," Nott said quietly.

"Not in every country. Now, there are countless ways to take a life. I will show you how a necromancer does it next time. Today, we will simply take care not to spill too much blood as this room is not actually an execution chamber."

Harry's mind went blank.

He distantly noted the way Nott started shaking. "We – You want us to –"

"You will never know the true value of life until you have taken one, yourself."

"What about – Lyn and Rhea?"

"I have taught you that we necromancers would never dare to take from Death what is not ours to take. The Lémures interpret this differently than we Totengräbers do. Regardless, my dearest children and their children's children all know the value of life, having followed the ways of necromancy from infancy, but we will bring Lynea and Antheraea along another time. Just because the Lémures believe a necromancer shouldn't take any lives whatsoever, doesn't mean they can't learn how to do it."

Harry blanched. This was not going to be a one-time-only lesson? She was expecting them to – And then –

"Now, while we wait, let me explain some of the ways to do it …"

o

The guilt was not the worst of it.

Realistically, rationally, Harry knew the prisoners would have died either way. They had already been sentenced to death, after all. He couldn't have saved them. He didn't even know whether he would have wanted to after having heard what crimes they had been sentenced for. That, somehow, was worse – the thought of not feeling guilty over not wanting to save them. No one deserved the death penalty.

The flashbacks were not the worst of it, either.

He kept seeing the man's face as the life had drained from his body and his eyes had dulled. His hands kept shaking and he knew from the way Hermione and Ron kept looking at him in concern that they noticed. (They weren't even talking to each other at the moment, yet they both kept bringing up the same concerns.) At least he didn't have to run to the bathroom to throw up anymore whenever the memories resurfaced.

Nott wasn't doing much better from what Harry could see. Even Fawley seemed shaken after it was her and Lémure's turn. (Lémure seemed, by all appearances, completely unaffected.)

But they weren't facing what Harry was facing.

Because the worst of it was the fear of what this meant going forward.

Voldemort killed people without remorse. Voldemort would have delighted in learning different ways to effectively kill people – Sephoneia Totengräber could murder dozens with a single sweep of her hand without batting an eye.

Harry still remembered the parallels a teenage Voldemort had drawn between them back when he had confronted the Tom Riddle's Diary in his second year. Harry still lay awake at night sometimes, wondering what it would take for him to turn down the same dark path. 'Not a lot' was the uncomfortable realisation every single time.

It didn't take much to turn into the monster from your nightmares.

Harry did not want to end up like Voldemort. He took what little comfort he could find in that thought.

The necromancy lessons continued on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Harry found comfort in the routine, but working so closely with the dead was bound to drag up unwanted memories every single time.

Especially when the corpse looked so much like the man he had –

Harry turned away from the table. "I can't do this anymore."

"Potter?"

"Why would –" He clenched his hands into fists. "Why would she do this?! Why would she – I thought the point of this was to respect Death!"

There was a moment of silence.

Then, slowly, Nott spoke up, Harry's back still turned to him. "The point is not to numb you to the experience. The point is not to get you used to murder. Professor Totengräber is teaching us the value of a life, Potter. I – Lynea told me how easy it is to lose yourself in the art, to lose sight of what matters. But a necromancer must always value Death and you cannot value Death if you do not truly know the value of life."

Harry could hear the truth ringing in those words.

Nott was right. Professor Totengräber had told them right at the beginning that the lesson was to learn the value of a life. And the consequences were devastating, but the fact that Harry felt this way and the fact that their teacher hadn't further enforced the lesson meant – it must have meant that Harry was doing it right, or not? He was feeling terribly guilty and terribly concerned and terribly nauseated by it all because he valued life.

When asked about it, Professor Totengräber merely looked at Harry and said, „Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein."


AN

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche

Oh gods. Writing emotions is hard. What was I thinking. Help.