Chapter Seventy-Nine of IAATB: And Death Is a Sleep
And another title from “Hymn to Proserpine,” the concluding lines: “So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep./ For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.”
This is the chapter I’ve been envisioning since I started writing the very first story.
Let’s take it home.
Chapter Seventy-Nine: And Death Is a Sleep
Draco did not really like the look in Harry’s eyes when he came out of the impromptu potions lab Snape had constructed on the second floor of Silver-Mirror. His face was-not sane. And he slipped a vial into his robe pocket as Draco watched, a vial full of a silver potion that looked familiar. Draco frowned. That’s not Snape’s Imperius potion, is it? He can’t be planning on using that, can he?
And then he dismissed the idea, because Harry was vates, and he would never use compulsion like that, whether it was in the form of a curse, the compulsion gift, or a potion. And Harry was smiling at him, his eyes so bright that Draco could almost pretend he was all there.
Harry would need healing in the wake of what had happened, of course, just as Connor did. But now they were going to defeat the Dark Lord.
Draco could hardly think of it; his thoughts charged up to the idea and then stopped as if at a wall. He had lived all his life under the shadow of the Dark Lord; the tales of him were the first he could remember Lucius whispering about, rather than simply telling, and that had increased the attraction of them to a child greedy for secrets. Draco had lived with the notions that he would serve him, that his father would serve him, and that he would fight Voldemort all along.
And now, he was going to be destroyed?
It seemed too real to be believed.
Sane or not, Harry was taking them along: Peter, Draco, and Snape. The others had been told enough to content them, but Harry had very firmly refused to take anyone else. Draco actually understood that, this time. Peter was necessary to the prophecy, and he and Snape could not bear to be parted from Harry, but taking too many people would just put them all in danger. They could not hope to overcome Voldemort by strength of magic. It needed Harry and Peter and the prophecy. And if Harry wanted to brew healing potions for Connor, the way he had done, then that was his right. At least, if Voldemort used his dying moments to inflict some horrible strike on Connor, then he was much less likely to die with Harry’s healing potions right there.
Draco wondered what he should say to his brother-in-law when he saw him again, and then shrugged. He would find the right thing in the moment when it happened, and not before.
A hand smoothed over his arm, and he looked up into Harry’s face. “Ready?” Harry asked.
Draco nodded. “It’s going to be strange when we get out of there,” he said, and tried to laugh. “Who do you think is going to react worse to the news of Voldemort’s disappearance? All those people who still secretly sympathized with the Death Eaters? Or the Light wizards who won’t have an enemy to fight any more?”
“Probably the Pact,” said Harry, and Draco swallowed what he’d meant to say next, because, good Merlin, Harry’s eyes were green. “I love you, Draco.”
“I love you, too,” Draco responded, wondering what had brought this suddenly on.
Harry leaned forward and kissed him. It was the softest, gentlest, most passionate kiss Draco could ever remember them sharing. He was still staring at Harry when his partner pulled away, but Harry had turned to talk to Snape and Peter, and didn’t seem to notice.
I hope there are more kisses like that in our future, Draco decided, dazedly. I want them.
He would consider, later, that it had been meant as a way to say goodbye.
*
Emotions raced through Harry’s head, colliding with the sides of his skull, softening the world around him, making him see everything through his haze. It was rather like his dream of the sea, where there had been a black glass box that contained him and the water, and the grief had pounded outside. Outside him, now, were all the people who thought differently than he did, and doubtless would tell him he was mad.
Inside were him, and his selfishness.
Slytherins were selfish. It was one of the defining traits of the House, at least according to the wild Dark when it had accepted Draco’s Declaration. And that was the reason Harry had been Sorted there in first year, he now believed: he really hadn’t cared about anything but serving Connor, which, though it was an unselfish end in itself, involved him in a rather suffocating and constricted world as far as people other than his brother went.
As it began, so it ends.
In more than one way, Harry thought, while they landed on the edge of the ruined wall containing Godric’s Hollow. He had wrapped all of them in the Extabesco plene, so that Voldemort’s senses and magic could not detect them. They could, however, still see and otherwise sense each other.
In truth, he did not believe they needed it. He believed that Voldemort would have let Harry walk openly into the burrow and come to his brother, because Voldemort did not think Harry would have the strength to kill Connor. It was true that Harry might have brought along someone intended as a willing sacrifice-he glanced sideways at Peter-and that could break the Unassailable Curse Voldemort had cast on Connor. But then there would still be the problem of getting the shard of soul out of Connor’s body.
The example of Evan Rosier suggested that a shard embedded in a living body would not leave it, had no reason to leave it, unless that body was killed. They preferred bodies to objects. Harry could ask Peter to die, but he would still have had to kill his brother to make the shard of soul fly, and that he would not do, would never do.
It was too bad that Voldemort underestimated him in other ways, Harry thought, clinically detached. Really too bad.
His hand brushed against the vial of Switching Potion in his pocket as they walked towards the entrance of the burrow. Harry could feel wards plucking at his skin, but it was easy enough to shunt them aside. They were confused, anyway, by the distinct similarity between his magic and Voldemort’s. Soon enough they stood staring down into the vast hole in the dirt. Harry could see steps if he squinted, and make out footprints in them. He wondered whose footprints they were. Voldemort’s alone? Indigena’s? Had Connor walked here?
You will walk up them, brother. You will walk away. I have sacrificed too much already. I can be selfish too, and with my emotions free, it’s so much easier to be that way, to be human. I’m tired. I don’t want to see more sacrifices. I don’t want to see more people die, and I can’t see you die, and I can’t see Draco die, or Snape, or Peter, or anyone else.
Now and then, like a muffled thump against the glass from the part of him that was still sane, came a reminder that he was a bit mad. A bit, Harry corrected himself. He had a plan. It was a good one.
“Shall we descend?” Draco asked at last, when they’d stood there for some minutes in uncomfortable silence.
Harry nodded. “I’m not sure where Connor is, or Voldemort,” he lied. He knew Connor would be slightly to the north of them, under the ruined bedroom where they’d both been marked, and he could feel Voldemort at the end of the tunnel of magic stretching between them, in a burrow that squatted to the west and south. “We should go down and feel for them. Maybe I can sense something then.”
He would have to be careful, he thought, as he descended the stairs, shielding Draco, Snape, and Peter. Depending on the conformation of the tunnel, he might have to take drastic measures to keep them from following him.
The healing potions in his pocket bumped against his ribs, clink, clack, rattle, and the Switching Potion, larger and more majestic than they were, seemed to be breathing. Harry wondered if such perceptions were part of his madness. He didn’t much care if they were. His emotions were free now, he was human, and that was what the prophecy and all the people around him had wanted, wasn’t it?
As it turned out, no drastic measures were needed. The tunnel in front of them split two ways, one leading to the room where Harry knew Connor lay, the other turning into an alcove which Voldemort had probably used for storage at some point. Harry smiled slightly, and his magic began to stir around him. He could feel Voldemort watching him, confident, curious to see what he would do.
You are going to die, Harry thought, but quietly, since he didn’t know what Voldemort might be able to pick up with Legilimency.
Abruptly, he stiffened and stared into the alcove, as if he saw something. It worked for two of them. Snape and Peter both stepped forwards into it, wands drawn. Draco stayed by his shoulder.
He was always the difficult one, Harry thought with fond exasperation, remembering the child who had clung to his side like a burr in his first year to prevent him from associating with Gryffindors. He lifted a hand, and his magic responded to his order, howling around Draco as a wind and giving him a gentle but firm shove after Peter and Snape.
Draco stared at him. They all stared at him.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said quietly. “I love you. Goodbye.”
And then he conjured a stone wall across the front of the alcove, sealing it off. Air could flow under it and around the sides, so they wouldn’t suffocate, but there was no way for so much as a finger to fit through a crack. Harry then carefully cast an Unassailable Curse on the wall. Only a Light wizard, or the Light itself, would be able to surpass it, crack the wall, and let the three of them out-and it couldn’t be someone on the inside, which meant Peter couldn’t tear it down. That effectively protected them from Voldemort, who was Dark in every sense of the word. Harry was confident that Connor himself, or someone else who could decipher the notes he’d left in his bedroom on a half-hidden scrap of paper, would come eventually and let them out.
Draco’s fist hit the wall. “Harry,” he said, with so much misery in his voice that Harry had to close his eyes for a moment. “What in Merlin’s name do you think you’re doing?”
“Connor’s the final Horcrux,” Harry said calmly. “And I don’t intend to let him die. I’m going to take care of that.”
Shocked silence. Harry turned up the tunnel that led to his brother.
“Harry,” Peter said.
“Harry!” Snape called.
Draco’s response was a wordless wail.
Harry set his sights forward, and trotted. He’d done everything for them that he could. He had to do something for his brother now, and for himself.
The Switching Potion bumped and bumped and bumped against him, at least until he gripped the vial to hold it still and make sure it wouldn’t break.
*
Harry was indeed glad that he’d brought the healing potions when he saw his brother. Connor lay on the dirt without a chain or rope-speaking further to Voldemort’s scornful confidence, that Harry would never destroy his brother-but he had fingers still badly broken and harshly reset, and his limbs twitched in small, regular convulsions. Harry knelt down beside him, dropped the Extabesco plene, and smoothed a hand over his brow, over the scar that concealed the Horcrux. Connor shivered and opened his eyes.
The tears in his eyes said clearly that he thought he was seeing a dream. “Harry?” he whispered.
“Here, brother.” Harry had never known that his own voice could sound so calm, so steady. He tipped a few of the healing potions down Connor’s throat, until his breathing eased and he could sit up. Connor leaned against the dirt wall. Harry put the rest of the healing potions carefully within his reach, and then drew out the Switching Potion. The red line in the middle separated half from half, and he nodded and uncorked the vial.
“Harry?” Connor whispered. “What are you doing?”
Harry ignored him for the moment. Now was not the time to let Connor talk him out of anything. He would explain once he was done, because his twin deserved to hear it, but not before.
He drank half of the potion, down to the red line.
The effect was immediate, though very odd-not at all like the other times he had used it. Then again, he’d never been the one to whom the dreams or knowledge was transferred. He felt another tunnel open across his brow, this one connecting his scar to Connor’s, and a mighty yank made his head bob forward. Then his mind filled with the heavy sense that he could compel people if he wanted to. Harry let out a slow breath. That, of course, was not a true compulsion gift, but just the form that this shard of Tom Riddle’s soul had taken.
“Harry?” Connor repeated, insistently.
Harry looked up at him, and smiled as gently as he could under the circumstances. He had the feeling that it was more exhausted than tender. “You were a Horcrux, Connor,” he said quietly. “That’s why I couldn’t kill Voldemort, why he prevented his Death Eaters from killing you, and why he took you. It happened that night he came hunting us in Godric’s Hollow. A shard of soul became embedded in you.”
Connor stared at him with an open mouth, then whispered, “How?”
Harry shrugged. His head really did feel heavier. “Ask the prophecy. Ask the odd combination of magic going on in the room that night. My guess is that the Killing Curse he cast at you, and which got interrupted by my rebounded one, split his soul again, using him as both the murder victim and the source of the shard, and then the shard took the only available path it could and flew into you.”
Connor swallowed several times, then said, “But that means-that means-“ He stopped.
“It did,” Harry corrected him, taking pity. He would not make Connor say that he would have to die for the safety of the world. “I used the Switching Potion to transfer the Horcrux into myself.”
More silence. Harry thought it had been perhaps two minutes since he took the Potion now.
“Why?” Connor said, both a demand and a rebuke at once.
“Because I’m so damn tired of sacrifices.” Harry yawned. He would wait just a few more minutes, to say farewell to his twin and make sure that he understood the truth and what he needed to do, and then he would kill himself. He was looking forward to the sleep that awaited him. Perhaps there would be sounds of the sea, or beloved voices, but he would prefer soundless oblivion. “I couldn’t bear to see you die. Voldemort knows it. Even if I could bear to stand by and watch, say, Peter sacrifice himself to break the Unassailable Curse on you, we would still have to destroy your body to get the shard out so I could swallow it. I couldn’t kill you. But I can, quite willingly and happily, die. That will be the willing sacrifice that breaks the Curse, and the one that destroys the body so that the shard will have to flee.”
“And what if the shard just possesses me?” Connor demanded tensely. “I was its home for seventeen years.“ He shuddered as if he had swallowed something foul-tasting.
Harry laughed softly. “That won’t happen, Connor. When I die, my magic is going to snap right back to Voldemort. The shard will go with it, I think, drawn along by the sheer pull. Then Voldemort will have two pieces of his soul in the same body again, but no more Horcruxes. He can be killed.’ He lifted his head. The air was filling with sweet thunder. “The prophecy will insure it,” he added. “You’re the younger now, Connor, and you can kill Voldemort just like I could have. He’s a powerful wizard, but he’ll be mortal in a few moments. A successful Killing Curse will slay him just like anyone else.”
The prophecy, somewhat to Harry’s surprise, didn’t continue congealing. It hung in the air like a miasma instead, as if waiting for something. Harry frowned at a corner where it seemed strongest, wondering what it wanted.
“You think,” Connor said, voice like a whiplash. “What premise is that to hang the safety of the world on, Harry?”
“When otherwise we would have no chance at all? A very good one.” Harry started to lie down.
“What about everyone who needs you?” Connor demanded. “The magical creatures? Draco? Snape? Me?”
“I’ve done what I can for them,” said Harry, and lowered his head to rest on his hands. “Now I’ve run up against something I can’t do. It’s just like asking me to kill Draco to save the world. I can’t change what I am. But I can do this, Connor.” He sighed. His eyes wanted to droop shut, but he had a few more things to say first. “I will miss you. But I can’t go on now. I’ve finally learned to be human, just like the prophecy said.”
Prophecies, inevitably, run out, sang the line in his mind.
Connor was staring at him. His chest heaved as if he were struggling for air, but no sound escaped his mouth. His eyes were bright and very hollow.
“Snape, Peter, and Draco are trapped behind a wall down the corridor that only a Light wizard can break,” Harry said. “Your wand is in my robe pocket. I-“
Connor lunged.
Harry reared backwards instinctively, but it wasn’t him Connor was going for. He realized what it was too late.
Connor snatched the vial of Switching Potion, and gulped down the second half.
Harry didn’t know the voice with which he screamed. The burrow shook with it, though, and he thought he could hear Voldemort’s laughter as the Horcrux flew from his body back to Connor’s.
Connor’s hands were still moving. He picked up one of the healing potions lying beside him and dashed it down his throat.
The prophecies sang like wildfire. Three heavy weights whirled down, one right after the other, and landed like iron barbells in the corner.
Letters overrode his vision, information Harry remembered from Medicamenta Meatus Verus, where he had first discovered the Switching Potion.
There are three ways in which the Switching Potion is fatal. One is if another potion is consumed within five minutes of drinking half the draft.
Connor coughed.
Blood burst from his ears, and trickled down his cheeks in lazy patterns of red. Then another stream of blood answered from his nose. Connor sagged to the ground, and Harry could hear his internal organs rupturing, one after another.
But he was smiling.
Harry grasped his hand. “No,” he said, but it was the helpless noise of a child denied something it badly wanted.
Connor grinned up at him, and answered as if he had asked, “Why?” “Because the world needs you more than me, Harry. Merlin knows I love Parvati, I love my life, I love what I am-“ He broke off to cough. Red flecked his lips. He finished, with a determination that Harry could only stare at. “I love you. But I choose to lay it down, I choose to sacrifice it.” He touched Harry’s cheek with a trembling hand. “And that ought to take care of both the willing sacrifice and the body the Horcrux is hiding in, just as you said it would.”
The elder will stand at his right shoulder, loving him, but the younger will love the whole of the wizarding world…
Never, in all his dreams and his interpretations of the prophecy, had Harry imagined that one moment of loving the whole of the wizarding world-the kind of moment just long enough to contain one of Connor’s impulsive actions-might be the answer to the third round of the prophecy.
“I love you, Harry,” Connor said, steadily. “But this hurts as much as anything Voldemort did to me.” Harry heard something burst in his chest cavity, and Connor’s face went white. “Please,” he said. “Knock me unconscious now.”
Harry could not stop weeping, and he could not disobey his brother’s last request. “I love you,” he said, and touched Connor’s scar, and quietly shut down the center of his brain that kept him awake, so that he would not be aware and in the midst of pain when he died.
Connor smiled at him, and closed his eyes.
He did not open them again.
*
The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches.
The shard of soul had indeed fled from Connor’s body the moment he was dead. Harry had caught and shredded it like a bat, taking it apart down to the tendons, absorbing the magic inside him. He had no pity for things like this, things of Voldemort, not anymore.
Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies.
He and Connor had indeed both been born here, at the end of July in 1980, to parents like that. They had entered the world only fifteen minutes apart.
He is the younger of two, and he shall have the power the Dark Lord knows not.
Connor indeed had loved. And Voldemort had never anticipated the power that could have, or he would have taken far greater measures to guard his last Horcrux than he had.
Harry’s footsteps as he left the room where his brother lay dead were as soft as a leopard’s.
For the elder is power, but the younger is power united with love.
No one had ever said that that power in the second phrase had to be magical power. It could be determination. Harry himself had used the Dark, not sheer magical power alone, to defeat Falco.
Harry passed the stone wall. He could hear that, ahead of him, Voldemort was no longer laughing. He did not appear to know what had happened. Or perhaps he simply assumed that he should have felt something more, if his Horcrux was really gone.
O guard him, O shield him, for the darkness through which he passes otherwise is vicious and hideous, and love has but a scant chance of surviving.
And it had been. Connor had been kidnapped and had nearly succumbed to insanity. And he had not survived.
The final tunnel gaped before Harry. He could feel his own magic rising, dark as Voldemort’s, dark as deep water, violent as the sea in storm.
The elder will stand at his right shoulder, loving him, but the younger will love the whole of the wizarding world.
For one moment; Connor had loved the world that he thought needed Harry, and sacrificed himself and died before he could change his mind. But one moment had been enough.
Harry lifted his head and shook it. When he glanced to the right, the bird with claws on its wings and teeth in its beak hovered there. When he glanced to the left, a black dog with silver eyes tilted her head and looked wisely up at him.
Power to the right of me, death to the left of me, Harry thought, and stepped forward.
The Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, and in so doing mark his heart.
Cause a heart-shaped scar, and give him a piece of his soul, such as Voldemort himself bore. Such a pity no one had ever thought of that interpretation.
Lady Death might have raised her voice like a hunting horn, to warn her prey they were coming. But she did not. This was the proper place for silence, and she moved in it, though every hair on her body bristled. Ahead of them waited one who had escaped her for far too long, Harry knew.
The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches, born as the seventh month dies.
The bird’s wings were loud in the silence.
Harry came to the entrance of the room.
Three on three the old one coils,
Three in its times, three in its choices.
And yes, it had been. Draco and Harry, Snape and Harry, Harry and Connor. The prophecy could have made another choice even now, Harry knew: Peter and Connor, for example, or maybe Peter and Harry, if Harry had died and Peter had been the one to kill Voldemort. That had been the reason it had hesitated the way it had. Until the very last moment, the choice could have fallen either way, and it had had to wait to come true until Connor did something irrevocable.
With a soft snort, Harry wondered what a necromancer would have seen if trying to foresee his and Connor’s deaths.
Something confusing, Lady Death said into his head, in a voice like cold dust.
So much pain running without a halter,
More than is traded every day in gold.
Yet remember that even prophecies falter,
And it is up to human hands to hold
And cling together at the end of all things.
Prophecies will, inevitably, run out.
It is on humans to take up wings,
And makes themselves human past the doubt.
Connor was human. Always human. Selfish, bratty, limited, ordinary, and capable of such sweetness and generosity as could stun you.
Three prophecies come true, all entangled, and Voldemort mortal now.
Harry stepped into the room.
Voldemort rose to face him. His power mounted around him, still grand, still great, still more than anything Harry could call. But he was confused, hesitating, having felt the prophecies but not knowing what they meant, or perhaps frightened by the sight of the great black hound at Harry’s left side.
The hound belled.
The bird shrieked.
Harry said, “Avada Kedavra.”
The green light blazed and beamed between them. No time for Voldemort to change his expression, nothing that he could do to alter things, and no time to make another Horcrux.
No time for anything at all.
The green light struck home. Voldemort fell dead. Harry stared at him, and wondered if it could all be over, as simply as that-though the madness whispering in the back of his mind, caused by the torture of his brother and heightened by the loss of his brother, said it could not be.
And then he fell to his knees, screaming.
Voldemort’s power had begun the transfer to his magical heir.
It came upon Harry in thin lines, stretching from claw-shaped marks on Voldemort’s forehead and shoulders, arms and hands and body, to him. Wounds flared on his body in the matching places-the scratches that the bird had inflicted on him during his fifth and sixth years, Harry remembered dreamily. The bird itself flew back and forth over the flowing magic, cawing and cooing happily. Love, love, love! it said into Harry’s head. Love you now!
So much magic. Harry had never imagined so much magic. As the tunnel contracted, on and on it poured, not a flood of water but a flood of pebbles, then a flood of boulders, then a flood of darkness that lay in caves and had never seen the light, intent on crushing him flat with its evil and tainting his power.
But Harry had lived in his body for seventeen years, and with the powerful magic that Voldemort had accidentally granted him when he shattered Harry’s barriers with the Killing Curse for sixteen. He had a core of his own magic, untouched, untapped by the shared connection, and loyal to him only.
No! I say no! he shouted, and wielded his will and the absorbere gift against the magic, constraining it, swallowing and crushing it, forcing it to do as he said.
The power roared and romped and blazed around him, and the fragile balance in Harry’s mind tipped. He felt his sanity fall and smash like a little clay figurine on rocks.
He scrambled to his feet, aware that the magic moved with him, but still sulkily, still slyly, as if it would strain to win control over him the moment it could. Harry knew he was probably the most powerful wizard in the world now.
Nothing could have mattered less to him.
No magic in the world could pierce the barriers of death to call his brother back.
He raised his head, and his arms. Wings opened behind him, glittering black things edged in horns and spikes, and with a wordless cry he sprang skyward-
And was elsewhere, on gray sand where waves dashed up to meet him with an equally wordless roar.
On a beach in Northumbria.
Harry cast himself down, and gave himself to the tumble of magic and madness and rioting inside him. Love was a shard to cling to, but it was very small, a raft of ice against a sea of lava. He would have to bring himself back if he were to come back.
Harry closed his eyes, and curled in on himself, and wept like something dying, and the sea answered with cry after rushing cry of pain.