Sirius is full of shit.
This isn’t a surprise nor a realization. It’s a fact Harry has always known. He’s lived with his godfather for more years than he even had with his parents before their deaths, so Harry is well aware of the utter nonsense Sirius is willing to let spew from his mouth to achieve his end goal, whatever it may be.
He wants to piss off Aunt Walburga? “Linda, or at least I think her name was Linda, had some really lovely dahlias on her ass. Shame to realize mid-fuck that she wasn’t my soulmate, but hey, you win some, you lose most.”
He wants to goad Remus? “You know, Moony, it’s been decades and every time I see the asphodel on your back I am still so in love with that beautiful irony.”
He wants to comfort his orphan godson about the collar of black roses encircling his neck? “You know, that particular color of roses represents many things, Pronglet, not just . . . well one of them is hope for the strength to succeed in new beginnings, so I’ll buy you a bouquet of them to celebrate your new job, Professor Potter!”
He’d rolled his eyes every time he caught sight of the giant arrangement of deep red, purple and black roses that sat on his desk up in the North Tower, but he could admit to himself that it was nice to see the flowers outside of glimpses in the mirror.
Sirius had bought him a new bouquet every month since he’d started here three years ago, and Harry never got tired of watching the deep wine red and blackened eggplant roses that Sirius had originally bought to congratulate Hogwarts’ newest Divination professor on his new job as they gradually shifted to the all-black variants that marked his skin. It was comforting, in a way, that reminder that these omens of death and despair he wore encircling his throat had all meant something else once, before they succumbed to the blackness of death.
But now, jolting up from where he’d sat grading at his desk and drawing his wand as he watched a late-night intruder burst through the door of his office and begin to tear down his extensive security wards with heavy slashes of a long, pale wand, Harry is once again reminded that 1) all his roses are shaded the deepest black and are thorny beyond belief and 2) Sirius’s optimism was, indeed, fake as fuck.
His godfather technically wasn’t full of shit when he told a tearful, ten-year old Harry that the thorny, black roses decorating his neck could actually represent hope. Harry’d done his own research, obviously, and had also come across that interpretation. Still, that didn’t negate the much more prominent symbolism of tragic death and mourning. Things that are about to become very relevant to his life, if this cloaked intruder’s competence is as real as it seems from the way he’s dismantling some of Harry’s very best spellwork.
Harry’s wand moves just as fast, flinging cerulean sparks of magic to each of the four corners that ground the protections he’d laid when he first took up residence in the tower. He’d anchored so many wards within his chambers that Remus always sneezed from the magical residue whenever he came to visit, and now that they’re being attacked, they were all flaring to life inside Harry’s core, tugging on his magic to keep the power flowing.
A patronus forms from the tip of his wand at his next thought. Go to Sirius, tell him someone has come for me, someone powerful. Send help. Except, his stag circles the room, butting up against a barrier that Harry hadn’t even known could trap a patronus. The taunt rings loud even amidst the sounds of both their spellcasting, “There’ll be no help for you tonight, little seer.”
Harry sighs at that and pushes the spark of interest at the smooth, rich tones of the man’s voice down to somewhere unacknowledged. Instead of thinking further on the visceral reactions he’s having to His. Fucking. Attacker., Harry reaches into the pocket of his robes with his left hand, feeling for the set of knuckle bones he always keeps on him, even while his wand hand doesn’t slow its movement. He can’t afford to slow down his casting speed. There’s only one reason for someone to seek Harry out in the black of night, just minutes before the witching hour begins on the night of the new moon. It’s very likely someone is dying tonight.
A quick shake of his dragon knuckle bones tells him it’s pretty balanced odds that it’ll be the intruder. Of course, that means it’s equally as likely it’ll be Harry who greets death tonight.
Harry isn’t terrified or despondent though. No, he’s honestly pissed, because it’s going to be a huge hassle for everyone if he dies, and even if he lives, does this asshole know how long it’s going to take for Harry to recast each and every layer of those interlocked wards? Well, there’s actually a good chance he does, since he’s able to unravel them, which only makes Harry angrier. Conscious inconsideracy.
This guy has been working to break through them for almost eight minutes now, and none of the magic in the air has actually been combat magic yet. No, the room rings of both protection and containment. Trapped. He’s trapped in his own cave, Trophonios with no escape.
His wannabe abductor is cloaked in dueling robes that also have a cowled hood, clearly enchanted to keep his face shadowed and hidden. He’s tall, imposing especially compared to Harry’s shorter form. This guy has similarly lean muscles, like Harry’s own, the skin of his arm is pale ivory where his sleeves end at the elbows. As the man’s hands continue to move fluidly through the air while he tears down the wards, Harry sees the man’s left palm and the pale pink petals that fade into white before connecting into a golden center that trail all the way down the inside of his forearm up into where the sleeve possibly blocks more flowers.
Eglantine. How beautiful. Such a soft, self-conscious soul flower for a man who is literally here to use Harry in a ritual to foresee the moment of his death.
His adversary fights with a ferocious grace that Harry would admire if the wanker weren’t trying his darndest to force a seer’s unwilful submission. Such a phenomenon being a ritual ingredient is one of Harry’s greatest complaints to the universe. It is third on his list of woes when he vents to the stars every other Tuesday.
God, Harry hates that fucking ritual, hates that its whole purpose is to see the moment of death in such clarity so as to prevent ever being in that exact set up. It’s so fucking foolish.
Harry could tell you, better than almost anyone else, how impossible it is to try and evade a seen death. Once the whole scene plays out, it becomes your cemented future. A glimpse? Merely a possibility. Omens? They make you pause, reconsider a path, avoid an end. But this ritual will trap the caster as strongly as Harry is trapped now, something that is becoming more and more evident as the intruder’s magic pervades through the room and presses heavily on the waning magic of Harry’s wards.
Completing that ritual doesn’t prevent death, it confirms death. Harry’s death, if this man really follows through with this godforsaken ritual, will be pointless. Utterly pointless
Harry can feel his buried ward stones rumbling with the influx of power they’re trying to hold off. The magic of them trembles in air of the sphere they enclose, and the runes he painstakingly carved feel like they’re burning into his muscles under his skin, begging for more power as they expend the whole source Harry has been funneling into them for years in this one desperate bid to keep the enemy out.
He grits his teeth as the magic that connects him to the rune stones grows hotter, truly leaving burn marks in his flesh. He doesn’t hesitate in his casting, despite the pain. Any lapse in his concentration will condemn him to the one fate he is most determined to avoid.
The man is still not able to break past the physical barrier of Harry’s magic, but it only takes another few minutes of his ward stones pulling on his power and for the other man’s heady magic to sink deeper into the room and smother Harry’s own before Harry realizes it’s futile to try and keep the man away. He’s powerful, the kind of powerful that would have turned Harry’s head during the daylight hours. This man, tall, strong, and literally dripping with magic is the rubric for what he told Sirius he hoped to find in his life’s partner.
The irony that instead he finds it in his death’s partner neither amuses nor escapes him.
Harry feels the final, physical layer of his protective shields shatter, the blowback like a final fiery exhale that sweeps over his body, even as he is mid-twist in a dodge of what seems like the thousandth binding spell this guy has flung his way in the past few minutes since he got the shield that prevented spells from crossing the barrier to fall.
Desolate resignation pulses in Harry’s chest as the last ward crumbles.
Even with all his preparations, the power he’s hidden and amassed for exactly this moment, Harry can read the spread unfolding before him.
Every piece of protection has been shredded. Help isn’t coming. And the intruder is, at the very least, his equal as a dueler on any given day. But it’s not any given day. It’s eleven at night after a full day of teaching, and Harry was completely unprepared for a confrontation tonight. Hubris, a seer’s downfall, has chosen to claim him.
He should never have stopped refortifying on the night of the new moon.
But after countless foiled attempts due to the brief glimpses of scheming faces, the twinges at the base of his spine and the tingling in his fingertips, the reversed Hanged Man always appearing in his readings once a plan has been hatched, Harry had become complacent.
Stupid, so stupid, he thinks as he feels sweat dripping down his back and making his unruly curls dampen and stick to the skin at his temples.
Of course he wouldn’t see a successful attempt. Of course he wouldn’t feel his magic reacting protectively to the possibility of an abductor.
Seers receive no precognition of their own death.
Harry has to fight not to close his eyes as his holly wand flies out of his grip and he feels invisible restraints clamp around his ankles, his waist, his chest.
The intruder rushes close, invading his space in just a few steps and tightening the restraints with a single flick of his wand.
Harry doesn’t even have the time to spit out a final curse before the man’s flower-covered left palm wraps around his throat and slams him into the wall. The intruder’s fingers squeeze harshly, and gasping pain blooms around Harry’s neck and at the back of his head where he hit the stones. The pain around his throat only gets worse, stinging and aching and pinching as if the thorns of Harry’s roses agree with the intruder’s treatment of Harry (fucking bastards). Hell, it feels like the thorny roses are wriggling around, either in protest or in elation . . .
Oh.
Harry’s eyes widen and his hands come up of their own accord to grasp at the forearm, wrist, hand, anything of the arm that’s cutting off his air supply.
The man laughs cruelly at what he thinks is Harry’s attempt to loosen his grip, and the despair hits Harry ten times heavier than it had earlier. This is hubris of a different kind, a shared misplaced self-assurance that is going to destroy both Harry and the man in front of him.
Seers receive no precognition of their own death . . . or the meeting of their soulmate.
The fingers tighten even further and Harry knows in that moment that the echoes of the heavy, clinging magic they both flung around the room are preventing this man from feeling the movement of his own soul flowers. The beautiful, delicate sweet briar blooms that cover his soulmate’s skin aren’t forceful enough flowers to demand recognition, not like Harry’s brutal roses.
He will die at the hands, hand, of the other half of his soul.
It’d almost be poetic if it weren’t so tragic. Or, maybe, the tragedy of it all affirms this moment as poetry.
Harry looks into the depth of the cowled hood, wishing fruitlessly that he could at least see his soulmate’s visage before he asphyxiates. He hopes when his soulmate rennervates him for the ritual, he’ll finally find out what the other man looks like.
He’s gone past lightheaded and moved into that fuzzy territory that directly precedes unconsciousness, but he hangs on long enough for his searching fingers to brush the inside of the other man’s forearm and crawl up to his wrist. Finally accepting he’ll likely never know the face of his soulmate, Harry’s eyes slip closed, and his last sliver of strength goes towards stroking the flowers he can sense under his fingertips. They feel so welcoming, so comforting, in this last moment. His lips curl up in a smile right as his soulmate hand tightens for the last time and Harry is dragged under.