Sisters
"I wonder," said Minerva McGonagall grimly, "if Lord Voldemort has left us any more little post mortem surprises."
Poppy Pomfrey, who was reporting to her about Lily Evans Potter's state of health, answered in the same tone: "I would say that this one is quite enough to get on with, Headmistress. Harry Potter is in a pitiable state, and I do not like at all his mother's condition."
"What do you mean?" asked Minerva somewhat sharply, looking at Poppy in the eyes.
"I mean that she has any amount of remnants of Dark Magic on her, and it is interfering with her system in ways that make it difficult to cure or exorcise her. Seventeen years under a joint imperio curse and animagus spell are no joke, Min... Headmistress. Honestly, I do not know where to begin."
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Lily Evans lay in a bed in the college infirmary, trying to hold on to a train of thought. She felt fragments of spells flow and clash within her, and images that did not belong with each other clashed in her head. Two large mirrors had been placed around her bed, so that, in moments of bewilderment, her eyes might give her witness as to what she was.
Lily Evans. Lily Evans, with that great head of red hair, pale smooth skin and bright green eyes. With two arms and two legs, and toes on her legs and fingers on her hands.
There was that in her which found all this repulsive. Human... repulsive. Only good for eating.
Sometimes, when Lily lost control of her fragmented mind, her limbs started twitching.
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They came down the main staircase and left the castle via the entrance hall. They wanted to find Harry - and did not. They wanted to comfort him - but did not know how. They were in a hurry - yet nervous, and not altogether willing to go.
In the end Harry was not hard to find. He was sitting under a great tree on the lake shore, nervously fiddling with his wand, continuously casting and undoing sequences of footling, irrelevant spells. They approached him slowly and, without saying a word, they sat down near him - Ginny by his side, a hand timidly resting on his elbow; Ron and Hermione a bit further off, facing him, hand in hand.
It was then that they noticed - Ginny first, then Ron, then Hermione - that the knuckles on both fists were bruised and bloody.
For a second, nobody knew what to do or say. Then Ginny drew closer, picked up his bloodied right hand, and very gently - a bare brush of her lips, like the touch of a feather - kissed each torn knuckle in turn. Before she could do the same for his left, it reached out and sank itself in her dense cloud of red hair; moving downwards, it caressed the back of her head and her neck, rested on her shoulders - then suddenly jerked her to him. And she felt him clinging to her as if to a rock in a storm; she felt his ribcage, pressing against her, heaving in an uncontrollable fit of dry, silent sobs, as she too pressed back, holding as hard to him as he was holding to her.
The moment passed; his hold slackened, and she let herself sink back to the grass, though neither let go of the other. Her head rested on his shoulder. Harry looked at Ron and Hermione, and tried to sketch a smile at them. They both reached out and touched him and Ginny.
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On the magical top of Slievehallion, nearly a hundred miles from Hogwarts as the crow flies, a dozen or so bedraggled-looking figures were completing a very hurried but powerful set of wards and defensive spells, in case of pursuit. It took a few minutes before, one by one, they stopped working and dropped down weakly on the summer grass, exhausted and emotionally worn.
"Well, thank Hell and the Dark Powers for that, anyhow," said the heavily-built, hairy figure of Antonin Dolohov.
"Do you suppose he meant it?" asked Bellatrix Lestrange, lying flat on her back with her arms and legs spread out carelessly, for all the world like a puppet with its wires cut.
"I would say not at all," answered Fenrir Grayback.
"And why not?" answered Bellatrix. There had been a slight but visible jerk in her, as if the werewolf's dismissive tone had switched on a source of energy.
"Why ever should he, my dear?" - and there was an insolence in that My Dear that the proud daughter of the Blacks felt like the hiss of a whip. "His whole prospect was to live for ever. It would have been against everything he believed in, to plan for his death. And to imagine that any of us were dear enough to him for him to plan for our protection, is to pile absurdity upon impossibility. We were of help to him. That's all."
Bellatrix was on her feet by now, and trembling with rage. She pushed her dark, yet bloodless, fanatical face, almost to the point where she was touching the werewolf's savage one; and though there was something in Greyback's features that could have intimidated almost anyone, there was no fear at all in hers - only arrogance and conviction. "You are speaking, werewolf," she hissed, "of the greatest, the wisest and most far-sighted wizard who ever lived. And, as usual, you judge him by your own muddy and earthbound standards. What Lord Voldemort knew, you can never know; the best of us would be lucky if they could glimpse his many purposes through curtains of fire. And when you find that you are, against all odds, alive and free thanks to his actions, you should not act as though it were some random piece of luck."
Greyback's mouth curled into an unpleasant smile. "And much good it has done to you. If your lord" - "Your lord?" broke in Bellatrix in disgusted disbelief - "if your lord is responsible for the situation you are in now, he has made you a landless escapee with almost no friends left and a very strong expectation of winding up back in Azkaban in the next few days. If that is his wisdom, I would rather believe in luck myself."
Bellatrix was preparing to answer back, when the long, pale figure of her sister stood between them. "Peace," she said. "Be friends, you English fools, be friends! We have French quarrels enow, if you would know how to reckon. Bella," she turned to her sister, and her tone softened, "we know that you are and always have been the most loyal of all of us, and you have a right to be proud of it, and to be proud of His memory. Fenrir, what our Lord may or may not have meant, we shall never know now; but we have to hang together if we are to stand the least chance."
"That," said the werewolf in a plain sneer, "may be the case for you. Or at least, what you think it is." Grayback had a certain tendency to stoop, as if his huge and misproportioned trunk and massive arms were too much for his legs to quite bear; even as a man, his arms seemed at times to seek the ground. But now he stood unwontedly straight, towering over both sisters. "To me, this is barely a setback. I followed your lord because it worked for me and mine, but my power is with the Packs and always has been. I have no concern with your future, and if you valued my assistance, you would take less hoity-toity airs and graces, Narcissa Black Malfoy!"
All the wizards had now risen and were standing, unconsciously forming a ragged half-circle around the man-beast. He looked at them with malice glittering in his eyes, as he went on: "Of everyone here, I am the only one who has not lost everything. The Packs and the forest are there as they always have been. But you have no resources left. You can only hide from the Ministry until you are found - and as long as you hide, my rich friends, how will you manage to live in the style you are accustomed to? Look at you!" - and the Malfoys, the Lestranges and the other purebloods surround him were suddenly aware, as if they had never noticed before, of their torn and dusty robes, of their dirt and wounds. "What do you have to offer me? You know something? I am coming to the conclusion that I will be better off without you."
He turned, without even paying attention to what any of them would say or do, and scuttled down the mountain with a strange half-stumbling, yet amazingly swift lope. From the back, he looked even less human, with his malformed trunk leaning forward from his waist, nearly hiding his head at it leaned forward, and his arms swinging in an odd sideways motion, as if seeking for something to hold and crush. Bellatrix raised her wand; but then, even before her sister had quite managed to put her hand on her forearm, lowered it again. She looked at Narcissa and, "You're right," she said, "he is not worth the trouble."
"No," repeated Narcissa, "he is not worth the trouble. He will lose himself in petty terror against minor wizards and Muggles; he will become less human and less intelligent as time goes; and one day, two, three, four years from now, he will stumble into a silver bullet, and sink into the final darkness... having achieved precisely nothing." Four or five heads around her nodded sombrely.
"As for us," she concluded, rolling up her sleeve, to show a Dark Mark already fading, "as for us, we do have to think now what we shall do next."
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"Well," said Harry, with Ginny still in his arms, "shall we show that we still know how to speak?" He made a sketchy and rather pale smile, and though his pallor and the poverty of the joke showed all too clearly his tension and exhaustion, nevertheless Ron and Hermione breathed a sigh of relief. Their nervousness lifted like morning fog.
He started speaking himself, without need for asking. "I don't even know how I feel. I feel like I had just been torn in a thousand pieces and all the pieces thrown away. I feel scared and horrified and I keep thinking that I have been plunged in another world. I keep telling myself that it's unreal.
"She was there all the time, my mother, she was there in that monster's hands, serving his commands. And all the time, if you had asked me what I wanted most in the world, what I would have given my life for... would have been to see her alive. And now I have to think of her in that hideous thing... and you know, there is something else, something that makes me feel guilty. Guilty that she tried to die for me and fell into that monster's power, and then guilty that I do not feel happy now that she is back. And I am scared of the future, scared of what can happen to her, and scared of whether we will be able to understand each other at all - and what if there is still some of Voldemort's magic in her? Some of Nagini?"
Hermione just nodded unhappily. Ginny, however, said: "I can imagine... I think I can, at least. But, Harry, you will not make things any better by staying away from her. You have to see her as soon as you can."
"You think so?" asked the young man.
"I think so. I think that few things could be worse than the state you are in now. Even if she turns out to be Nagini in human form, at least you will no longer be... how can I say it... hanging in a void and tossed around by doubts and guilt."
"You are maybe right. I don't know. But I don't have the courage... I don't, Ginny. I just can't go now."
Ginny's impulse was to answer back, to try and reason with him. But then her eyes fell on his hands... on those bloodied knuckles, bearing still the splinters of the trees against which they had been smashed. She had a dreadful vision of the man she loved, lashing out in search of pain and destruction, hitting solid wood, and hitting it again and again. She wondered at the pain that could lead to do things like that.
"Harry, I am on your side. That is all. I am on your side always."
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When Narcissa Malfoy, later in life, told the story of that day (not that she ever liked to), she would always start from the behaviour of the Dursleys. None of the former Death Eaters knew much about Harry Potter's aunt and uncle; and Narcissa and Rabastan Lestrange in particular were astonished by the sheer crudity and bad manners of Mr.Dursley. Unlike Bellatrix and most of the others, they had had some minor experience of contact with Muggles, and were used, at least, to a veneer of manners. And the green and polished appearance of Little Whinging's winding residential streets in the sunlight - a strange, and to most of them unusual, half-way house between green countryside and crowded town - had left the same impression, of a polite world, at least on the surface.
But these were wizards. They were, in their own way, British; but their society was much smaller and more intimate than that of the average English Muggle, and their experience also a lot more international. They were wizards first, English second. And they did not know, if they had ever known it, the strange secret of England: how every house, almost every man, is an island; how each of them, rarely discussing anything important with anyone except perhaps a few friends and relations, grow increasingly individual and strange in their thinking; how each of them is - as their poet said - enisled in the sea of life, till they take the strange superstitions and attitudes developed in their isolation for normal, and reveal, once you have gone beyond the surface, opinions and forms of behaviour not very distant from madness. Though similar in shape, in size, in their gardens and cars, each of these houses cold well be a separate society, indeed a separate world.
And the Dursleys had been, if possible, even more self-enclosed than the rest. Separated from the Evans family first by Petunia's jealousy of her sister, then by her death (the Evans cousins were not even aware of Harry Potter's existence), and from the Dursleys by general distance - only a few Dursley cousins lived - and Vernon's bad temper, they had also tended to keep apart from immediate neighbours. The reason, which neighbours mostly ascribed to arrogance, was rather simpler: the Dursleys were not so stupid as not to know that if their treatment of their ward Harry Potter ever came to the ears of Social Services, the boy would have been taken away, and there would have been a frightful scandal. This left him a small enough social circle - mostly business associates and subordinates at work - and her none at all. Indeed, Petunia Dursley did not have one single real friend. The more careful, then, she was to dominate her family with a rod of iron disguised in caster-sugar. Vernon Dursley, a tyrant at work, was meekness itself at home; and he could sometimes be seen to shake his ox-like head heavily on his neck, as though he were trying to remember something - like the idea that his father had imprinted in him long ago, that he should be the master in his own house.
Vernon had learned a few things from his disastrous earlier encounters with Hagrid, the Weasley family, Harry's several friends including Moody and Lupin, and finally with Dumbledore himself. Mostly, that it was not wise to make a wizard angry, and that they tended to have their way. But it did not dispose him any better towards them. And when he saw them through the big bow window of his sitting room - and recognized them for what they were with hardly any effort - anger nearly choked him. Not that he had any expectation that he could be safe from them in his house; Dumbledore had cured him of that particular hope. But now that the infernal brat was seventeen and an adult by his own weird laws, he had hoped never to have to suffer their attentions again. When they knocked on his door, he did not even trouble to disguise his emotions.
So it was that Narcissa, who had expected a certain amount of manners and blandness, was so shocked by his reception that she actually took a step backward. It was not even the words, though they were rude enough - "Yes? What do you want?" - as much as the plain, visible ill-will behind them, which struck her like a blow.
Rudolphus took matters in his own hands. His decision to be as rude as Vernon himself was probably the right one, though at the moment it looked as if they were about to have a punch-up. "We want to see the sister of Lily Evans. You do not interest us." Vernon was trying to think of a retort, when his wife appeared behind him. She had heard voices at the door, and, in her usual fashion, had come over to take control of whatever was going on. But when she saw who it was - she could not mistake them, even after two decades - she went pale. She sidled up to her husband and whispered in his ear: "Don't let them into the house," hoping that she had kept her voice low enough for them not to understand.
It did not work. Rabastan snapped back: "And what is that supposed to mean?" at the same time as Vernon asked irritably: "How am I supposed to? They are - well, you know what they are!"
Petunia shrugged and answered: "There are some spells on this house. Now that Harry is gone, most of them have lost their worth, but there still is enough to insure that nobody can enter it uninvited. And I don't want you in my house because I know who you are. You, the Lestrange brothers, and you, the Black sisters. Do you think my sister never told me about anything? She warned me against you and your friends, several times. I do not like any wizard, but you I do not trust, either."
Rabastan and some of the others were about to lose their temper, but Narcissa stepped forward again. "Then we will say what we have to right here on the threshold. A threshold is a magical space, after all. Quite suitable."
About one minute after that, Petunia let out a screech that resounded through the quiet cul-de-sacs of Little Whinging, and slowly collapsed in a dead faint. And Vernon, no less stunned by the news they bore, looked in bewilderment back and forth, to his wife and to the wizards, to the wizards and his wife. His bullishness had altogether gone out of him, and what was left was an irresolute, unintelligent man, far out of his depth. When one of... these people, the people he was supposed to loathe... stepped forward with his wand drawn, he did not even manage to summon the will to stop him. The wand was pointed at his fallen wife, and a strange word rang out: "enervate!"
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"And why should I believe you? Practically the last thing Lily ever said to me was that she had heard you had gone over to the Dark Side - the people who killed her and who want to kill Harry. And now you come here and tell me a crazy story - you of all people. I'd have to be stupid..."
"It's like I keep telling you," answered Narcissa with a visible effort to keep her calm. "Get in touch with Hogwarts and find out. She is in the medical section there."
"I will not touch anything magical, especially with you near. It could be a trap."
Bellatrix had had enough. She stepped forward. The self-control she had had to impose on herself at her sister's bidding was a strain, and she was very angry. "You are a fool, Muggle. Our master is dead, and our company destroyed. If it was not, we could not even come close to this house. You should know enough of Dumbledore's spell to know that", she hissed. "The very fact that we are here is evidence that what we say is true." And suddenly there was grief in her voice. "Our Master is dead. We all saw his corpse collapse before Harry Potter. We all saw him die. And now I have to stand here and answer back to some Muggle who is too bloody clever by half... well, Dumbledore is dead too, do you hear me? And the war is over. The war is over! And we bring you news that wizards or witches would pay gold for, and you keep on quibbling and trying to be clever. Well, it is nothing to me. I do not care whether you are dead or alive. It was Narcissa who thought she could reason with you."
The outburst seemed to have silenced everyone. In the stillness, Narcissa's words rang out, clear and cold.
"Your sister is alive. We all saw her recover her shape as our Master died. But she is probably in very grave trauma, and you are probably the only person who can help her."
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Nagini was thinking of hunting. She remembered the pleasant feel of grass and crunchy pebbles under the strong, tensile muscles of her stomach, as she silently propelled herself towards an unsuspecting goat; then the sudden jump, the squeals and noises from the animal as her jaws took pitiless hold, the feel of bones cracking and the pleasant taste of blood and other organic fluids as her fangs sank into the shattered body; and finally that delicious, drowsy fullness that came from having a whole other body inside hers, slowly to be digested and destroyed as she slept. And before she slept, a glimpse of her "friend," taking it all in, smiling. If Nagini had had a mind, she would have wondered at this creature - four-limbed and upright, yet feeling like a snake and not like one of them. But Nagini's brain was small - only enough to drive the immense pillar of bone and muscle at her prey, and to taste the pleasures of it afterwards. Mind was something alien to her...
...her mind. And it was a terrible thing for a human mind and soul to be imprisoned in an animal. The brain functions were so much smaller, so restricted and cramped, that they were a private Hell in and of themselves. There was pain, nothing but pain, in her last sixteen years of memories; pain so ugly and overwhelming that she could hardly get used to the fact that it had ceased; that even the freedom of her mind seemed strange and wrong; so that the memory of past pain and the reality of present freedom both conspired to terrify her and drive her back into her false snake self. Something in her tried to cling to the thinking, four-limbed, upright thing that she really was; but her thoughts were too fragmented, too fleeting and tormented, almost incapable of catching each other and forming a shape, a continuous line, a thread of single and growing thought. Scared, splintering, twitching, she felt her mind falling back, falling back again into the snake...
...she caught voices from outside the infirmary room, heard them come closer. Before she consciously realized anything, her mind focused on them - on one of them - the door opened.
Petunia. The word, the name, was in her mind before she very well knew - and with the name, the preson. Petunia in the middle of a crowd of other people, coming towards her. Petunia: now there was an answer, a correspondence, between her mind and her perception, between her self and reality outside. At once, her thoughts were anchored on her, her sister, on her - in one moment, they were in each other's arms - the warmth of the four-limbed body, the love, the contact, so different from anything a snake knew. The very texture and feel of the world had changed - physically and mentally both, she knew what she was now. She let the sweet warmth of her sister's body penetrate hers, to tell her that she was, in everything, skin, hair, bones, blood,, muscles, body, heartbeat, breath, touch, hearing, voice, sight, thought, mind, spirit, soul, the human being Lily Evans, Lily Potter, and not a snake. The snake mind, imposed by force over seventeen years of Hell, ceased to have any meaning; it faded in the light of a reborn identity, like morning mist under the sun.
"Petunia-a-a..." Her voice, from long disuse, was hoarse, stuttering, ugly. But she did not have to try it very hard; once their embrace had broken, and Petunia had allowed her to sink back on her bed, it did not take her long to launch on a flow of talk that freed Lily from the need to do anything but try and look like a good listener.
Around them, a dozen or so wizards and witches stood rather embarrasedly, not quite knowing whether to join the conversation or to leave. In the end, one by one, they drifted away, leaving Petunia to talk and Lily to listen.
"I do not quite see your interest in this," said Headmistress McGonagall to Narcissa Malfoy as they were leaving the room."
"Well, the war is over. It has done a lot of damage, and I thought I could help straighten out some of it." Beside her strode the ungainly form of Vernon Dursley, brooding, silent, and perceivably hostile. "You had not thought of the effect such Dark Magic could have on a human mind? If you had, you would have sent for her sister immediately. She needed an anchor."
"No," said Minerva McGonagall. "Dumbledore might have thought of it. Or maybe not even he. We are not used to Dark Magic or to its effects."
Narcissa could not help but feel that there was more meaning in the last sentence than the surface showed. And she did not fail to notice, either, that neither Madam Pomfrey nor any of the other witches and wizards who had gone with them into the infirmary showed any disposition to leave her and Dursley. All their wands were visible, some held in their hands.
"Shall I be frank? I do not see myself as guilty of this war. It was started by others and we had to choose a side. I do think, however, that I can claim responsibility for undoing one of its worst effects" - she casually pointed at the infirmary door behind her - "and I want to try and do more. I want to undo as much of the evil left behind as I can. This should be a time for healing, not for vengeance."
"Of course," answered Minerva coldly, "you would see it that way. But I am afraid there has been a bit too much grief spread, a few too many war crimes, rather too much evil done for fun or for private vengeance, to talk about healing quite so easily. A lot of people used Voldemort as an excuse to indulge their own sick pleasures, or committed crimes of their own free choice only to please him. Nothing can be healed - as you call it - without some vigorous justice."
"I told you so, Narcissa," said the hulking figure of Vernon Dursley by her side, bleakly and dully. "They would never let go of vengeance. I mean, would you, in their place? This was a crazy scheme. There was no hope in it." Suddenly there was a wand in his right hand. As Minerva began to realize that she knew that wand, and as Narcissa suddenly swerved and threw herself at him, Dursley pointed it at his chest and whispered a few words.
Nobody could hear what was said, not over Narcissa's agonized shriek: "BELLA!! NO!!" - but everyone recognized the green light that filled the room. It was the Avada Kedavra, the death curse; and as Vernon Dursley's figure started toppling down, it seemed to shrink and change - smaller, leaner, darker, till it came to rest on the gold-woven Hogwarts carpet over ancient flagstones.
Narcissa seized and cradled the corpse, sobbing till she shook. And everyone in the room felt images come into their minds - the memories of two girl children, one dark and one fair, playing together, hiding from each other under hedges, cradling a pet rabbit in their arms, sneaking Mother's lipstick and trying it on, laughing and running together in the sun - heartbroken images radiating from Narcissa's mind, from magic that she did not even trouble to control now, with the lean and tormented body of her once playmate in her arms.
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"I don't care, now," sobbed Narcissa to Minerva, still holding her sister's corpse, "I don't care what you do to me any more. Send me to Azkaban if you must. But please, please, please, let me give her a decent burial first. Don't shove her body out like so many have been in this war. She was my sister, and I loved her."
There were grim looks and angrily indrawn breaths from more than one of the surrounding wizards. But Minerva McGonagall shook her head.
"I would not deny anyone a proper burial and someone to weep on their tomb. Not even to Bellatrix Black Lestrange," she said.