orange_crushed (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
orange_crushed) wrote2006-01-23 04:35 pm
orange_crushed) wrote2006-01-23 04:35 pm
He is Studied.
Sort of back. And I love you guys- thanks for all the well-wishing. I missed you ! Strange mostly meant bizarre, the changes between the new job and the wedding plans and other things became fairly overwhelming for a time. But I'm feeling in control again and really, really excited about everything. I'm sorry to have alarmed anyone.
So. Small thing.
Harry, Sirius, the veil; the ugly, ugly future. PG-13 for language. Mostly rambling with smelly, foolish aspirations of prose.
Why would Godric Gryffindor, Harry sometimes wonders, have preferred it to a hat that keeps opinions to itself ? Did it talk all the time, like a demented guidance counselor ? Did it sound muffled when Godric held onto it in a brisk wind ? Did it sleep on a shelf ? Does it sleep ?
This is the problem with being a goddam wizard in the first place: the concern for things that will happen over and over and over again. Without end or relief. He comes back. Sirius smells like old beer and the rind of soft cheese, and doesn't remember falling. He asks for a friend and they give him a blanket for his shoulders; instead he wraps his arms around it and holds on for dear life, crying, calling it by human names.
He is studied.
Eventually they discover that he is not a ghost or a trick or a time-bomb spell, only an old man with bitter, busted teeth and a pocket full of air fresheners that he stole on the way to St. Mungo's. This is less of a relief than it should be. Because that's how the dark lord went, you see; and if this helpless sot made his way back from the big beyond, then everybody is actually up shit's creek without a paddle.
It is decided that the veil will be destroyed.
They try very hard, and they fail. They throw dead dementors into it and they blast it with fire and they summon it to itself and they try to break it and send the pieces through the veil in the past, with time-turners. That was Tonk's suggestion, for which she is promoted. Again. Harry even offers to jump into it and kill the dark lord a second time, with a kind of mad glint in his eye; but they say that's alright, will you just please take your uncle or whoever this is home now ?
So he does. The old man goes willingly, stroking Harry's black scalp when he thinks nobody is watching, and whispering in bumbly hobo-talk. He'll eat broiled steak but not mushrooms. He finally does speak in real phrases, but it's only to say James, hey, please with his hand on Harry's thigh. There's nobody around, so Harry obliviates him and puts him to sleep; and locks the door after changing for bed. He doesn't know what they did when they were young, or what they forgot to say to one another.
In the morning the newspaper are lettered in black and maroon: THE VEIL IS BROKEN, they say, THE DARK LORD IS ON THE LOOSE. Somewhere Draco Malfoy is choking on a bite of scone, and being thumped on the back by servants. Harry wishes that he was an investment banker's son.
Sirius, oddly, has no opinion; but he does smell better than yesterday.
Yet another problem with being a wizard: preoccupation with ritual and tradition and moldy this-and-that and tombs of ancestors and a fucking hat that has a real mouth. The illogic is at times staggering. Why would Godric Gryffindor, Harry sometimes wonders, have preferred it to a hat that keeps opinions to itself ? Did it talk all the time, like a demented guidance counselor ? Did it sound muffled when Godric held onto it in a brisk wind ? Did it sleep on a shelf ? Does it sleep ?
Harry has plenty of time to think about these things after the hat is stolen. Presumably by the dark lord, presumably to make another horcrux.
Round and round.
By the time the tingle in his arm wakes him from sleep, Harry has remembered why he forgot about Grimmauld Place to begin with. Because it smelled like the fucking dead.
But the tingle is an alarm, a subtle calling of the blood wards to a half-hearted master. So he's got to do something. He reaches for his wand and puts pants on in that order, and then hears the banging on the wall that is between his room and Sirius's. There's a low moan that accompanies it.
When he opens the door Sirius is glowing at him like a television set. There is a crackling around the edges of his eyes that suggests a sudden and unwanted spillover. Harry finds himself gasping. He's forgotten that this man, not dead, is the blood and bone of house Black. The wards are buzzing him, but they are goddam furious with Sirius. Together they apparate, though only Harry remembers to speak the words.
Grimmauld Place is unpleasantly predictable. It smells, it rots in ways thought impossible. It is shrieking in Sirius's heart because there has been a major trespass, a trespass not allowed. Sirius runs forward and there's nothing to do but follow. For a man who barely rises from the couch for days on end, his sprint is undamaged. The doors opens without being touched; Harry realizes that Sirius did not bring, and does not have a wand.
There is a man in the house.
It could be a joke: it has sent Tom back as a beautiful young man, and given Sirius bandy legs and grey hair growing in his ears. Maybe the veil has slept for so long that it's grown a sense of humor. Tom looks up from the bottom of the cabinet and asks them for it, the thing he stole, the thing that's his by right, because he had the stones to take it.
Sirius tells him to fuck off. Actually, no, that's not true, Harry can hear the angry tone and he gets what he's trying to say; but it comes out as Fug off, hairy nutter. Ass.
Tom laughs at him.
Sirius digs in his pocket while the dark lord raises a stolen wand, and Harry screams and curses out loud, but it goes wide in his terror and hits an armoire. The dark lord is still aiming at Sirius and calling him a fool and a skeleton, and Sirius is still digging around in his goddam pockets like a mouse that's forgotten where it laid in winter store. He sniffs and scratches and he is going to die. Harry is hit by Tom's countercurse and goes backwards out the door, down the front steps, slick with rain. Sirius rifles through his underwear, pulls out a knife stuck into the band.
Tom laughs harder, if possible. You going to kill me with that toy ?
"No. No haystack." Sirius coughs. There is a shimmer of lucidity. "Burn in hell, fatty." he says, and slits his wrists.
The fury of the house is absolute.
Harry goes to Tonks afterwards, several days afterwards, when the bandage on his head is gone.
"What would it have done for a papercut ?" he asks, half wondering. "Are all blood wards that way ?"
"Oh, no." she says. "You have to want to die for it to work."
They sit together in her living room and she pours drinks that they don't drink, until they do, and the bottles empty quietly. Tonks wears her Order of Merlin whenever she drinks, not quite ironically, since it was Remus who began that tradition; and she glows a little over her glass. Harry remembers other funerals, and wonders when he will have to do this again. Maybe this is the last time. The last time, to end all last times.
Round and round.
So. Small thing.
Harry, Sirius, the veil; the ugly, ugly future. PG-13 for language. Mostly rambling with smelly, foolish aspirations of prose.
Why would Godric Gryffindor, Harry sometimes wonders, have preferred it to a hat that keeps opinions to itself ? Did it talk all the time, like a demented guidance counselor ? Did it sound muffled when Godric held onto it in a brisk wind ? Did it sleep on a shelf ? Does it sleep ?
This is the problem with being a goddam wizard in the first place: the concern for things that will happen over and over and over again. Without end or relief. He comes back. Sirius smells like old beer and the rind of soft cheese, and doesn't remember falling. He asks for a friend and they give him a blanket for his shoulders; instead he wraps his arms around it and holds on for dear life, crying, calling it by human names.
He is studied.
Eventually they discover that he is not a ghost or a trick or a time-bomb spell, only an old man with bitter, busted teeth and a pocket full of air fresheners that he stole on the way to St. Mungo's. This is less of a relief than it should be. Because that's how the dark lord went, you see; and if this helpless sot made his way back from the big beyond, then everybody is actually up shit's creek without a paddle.
It is decided that the veil will be destroyed.
They try very hard, and they fail. They throw dead dementors into it and they blast it with fire and they summon it to itself and they try to break it and send the pieces through the veil in the past, with time-turners. That was Tonk's suggestion, for which she is promoted. Again. Harry even offers to jump into it and kill the dark lord a second time, with a kind of mad glint in his eye; but they say that's alright, will you just please take your uncle or whoever this is home now ?
So he does. The old man goes willingly, stroking Harry's black scalp when he thinks nobody is watching, and whispering in bumbly hobo-talk. He'll eat broiled steak but not mushrooms. He finally does speak in real phrases, but it's only to say James, hey, please with his hand on Harry's thigh. There's nobody around, so Harry obliviates him and puts him to sleep; and locks the door after changing for bed. He doesn't know what they did when they were young, or what they forgot to say to one another.
In the morning the newspaper are lettered in black and maroon: THE VEIL IS BROKEN, they say, THE DARK LORD IS ON THE LOOSE. Somewhere Draco Malfoy is choking on a bite of scone, and being thumped on the back by servants. Harry wishes that he was an investment banker's son.
Sirius, oddly, has no opinion; but he does smell better than yesterday.
Yet another problem with being a wizard: preoccupation with ritual and tradition and moldy this-and-that and tombs of ancestors and a fucking hat that has a real mouth. The illogic is at times staggering. Why would Godric Gryffindor, Harry sometimes wonders, have preferred it to a hat that keeps opinions to itself ? Did it talk all the time, like a demented guidance counselor ? Did it sound muffled when Godric held onto it in a brisk wind ? Did it sleep on a shelf ? Does it sleep ?
Harry has plenty of time to think about these things after the hat is stolen. Presumably by the dark lord, presumably to make another horcrux.
Round and round.
By the time the tingle in his arm wakes him from sleep, Harry has remembered why he forgot about Grimmauld Place to begin with. Because it smelled like the fucking dead.
But the tingle is an alarm, a subtle calling of the blood wards to a half-hearted master. So he's got to do something. He reaches for his wand and puts pants on in that order, and then hears the banging on the wall that is between his room and Sirius's. There's a low moan that accompanies it.
When he opens the door Sirius is glowing at him like a television set. There is a crackling around the edges of his eyes that suggests a sudden and unwanted spillover. Harry finds himself gasping. He's forgotten that this man, not dead, is the blood and bone of house Black. The wards are buzzing him, but they are goddam furious with Sirius. Together they apparate, though only Harry remembers to speak the words.
Grimmauld Place is unpleasantly predictable. It smells, it rots in ways thought impossible. It is shrieking in Sirius's heart because there has been a major trespass, a trespass not allowed. Sirius runs forward and there's nothing to do but follow. For a man who barely rises from the couch for days on end, his sprint is undamaged. The doors opens without being touched; Harry realizes that Sirius did not bring, and does not have a wand.
There is a man in the house.
It could be a joke: it has sent Tom back as a beautiful young man, and given Sirius bandy legs and grey hair growing in his ears. Maybe the veil has slept for so long that it's grown a sense of humor. Tom looks up from the bottom of the cabinet and asks them for it, the thing he stole, the thing that's his by right, because he had the stones to take it.
Sirius tells him to fuck off. Actually, no, that's not true, Harry can hear the angry tone and he gets what he's trying to say; but it comes out as Fug off, hairy nutter. Ass.
Tom laughs at him.
Sirius digs in his pocket while the dark lord raises a stolen wand, and Harry screams and curses out loud, but it goes wide in his terror and hits an armoire. The dark lord is still aiming at Sirius and calling him a fool and a skeleton, and Sirius is still digging around in his goddam pockets like a mouse that's forgotten where it laid in winter store. He sniffs and scratches and he is going to die. Harry is hit by Tom's countercurse and goes backwards out the door, down the front steps, slick with rain. Sirius rifles through his underwear, pulls out a knife stuck into the band.
Tom laughs harder, if possible. You going to kill me with that toy ?
"No. No haystack." Sirius coughs. There is a shimmer of lucidity. "Burn in hell, fatty." he says, and slits his wrists.
The fury of the house is absolute.
Harry goes to Tonks afterwards, several days afterwards, when the bandage on his head is gone.
"What would it have done for a papercut ?" he asks, half wondering. "Are all blood wards that way ?"
"Oh, no." she says. "You have to want to die for it to work."
They sit together in her living room and she pours drinks that they don't drink, until they do, and the bottles empty quietly. Tonks wears her Order of Merlin whenever she drinks, not quite ironically, since it was Remus who began that tradition; and she glows a little over her glass. Harry remembers other funerals, and wonders when he will have to do this again. Maybe this is the last time. The last time, to end all last times.
Round and round.