Pretty Good Year

11.

concurrently.

*

He has been here for years.

His body, deprived of a regular sleep cycle, no longer knows the difference between night and day. When he closes his eyes—it is so rarely safe to do so—he drops immediately into deepest, dreamless sleep.

The first month of his training, Moody cursed him in his sleep every single night—Tarantallegra, bringing him to his feet before his eyes were open, Avis, covering his body in stings and welts from head to foot. A moment of frantic struggle, then the point of Moody's wand at the base of his throat. "You're dead, boy," the soft growl in his ear reminding him of where he is, what failures have brought him to this point.

Eventually he came to register the muffled thump of Moody's wooden leg in time to wake and gather himself, but it didn't help. The first time he managed to disarm Moody in the dark he had taken a moment to gloat before raising a light, and in that moment he felt the unfamiliar sting of a cold length of steel against his throat.

Moody hissed—"You think that makes you safe? You're trapped under blankets in a dark room with an enemy you can't see, and you think you're safe? You're an idiot, Potter. And you're dead. Again."

After the first month, Moody stops coming every night. He comes every other night, then at random. This only makes it harder to sleep.

But Harry knows it is no more than he deserves.

*

He hates Moody.

He had been happy, even excited when Dumbledore explained where he was going, and who was going to train him. He thought he knew Moody. He thought Moody was his friend, a late addition to his collection of father figures. He'd thought going away with Moody would be a retreat, a chance to be safe and recover from the chaos that had entered his soul after the siege at Hogsmeade. A week after he arrived, he remembered Dumbledore's words at the end of his fourth year. "You have never known the real Alastor Moody," he had said. Now Harry knows he was right.

Moody won't let him heal his wounds with magic. "You're going to get used to the idea of consequences, before you get another chance to inflict them on someone else," he said after ambushing Harry and covering him with lacerations from head to foot.

"I trusted you," Harry had said around clenched teeth, glaring up at him through a curtain of bloody hair.

"If you did," Moody had replied, "you wouldn't have let me hit you."

*

He sees Ron and Ginny once a week. When they arrived nine days ago, Harry had fallen into their arms and sobbed, past the point of remembering a time when this would have embarrassed him. Their wide, worried eyes were the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

He hears them arguing later. Ron wants to take him away, make Dumbledore put someone else in charge of his training. Ginny doesn't agree, although it is clear that she wants to. She cries quietly while Ron rants, then shakes her head. "He needs this," is all she will say.

Harry is grateful to Ron. But he knows that Ginny is right. Every day he is here, he is dying a little more, and that is just as it should be. The Harry that kills Voldemort cannot be the same person who led ten people into a doomed fight at the Department of Mysteries. The Harry who wins the war cannot be the arrogant child who got a third of Hogwarts killed by bringing the siege of Hogsmeade down on their heads.

When Ron and Ginny are allowed to see him, he doesn't waste time talking. They tell him of their family, and of Hermione, and he sits and smiles and basks in their presence. When Moody comes to drive them off, he blinks away tears.

At the end of Ron and Ginny's first two visits, Moody simply comes to the door and waits while they say goodbye. At the end of the third visit, he turns the corner rapidly, and, before anyone knows what is happening, he has cursed Ginny, who falls, frozen, from her chair to the floor.

Harry dives and rolls to shield her with his body, as a second curse hits Ron, who has not moved except to stand up and stare at Moody, sputtering in outrage. Only then does Harry manage to fire a hex off at Moody, disarming him.

He lies, panting, on the floor next to Ginny, and stares incredulously up at the monstrous face looming over them.

"Now it's them that's dead, Potter," he says, jerking his head down at Ginny. "When are you going to learn?"

He summons his wand from Harry's slack hand, and walks off.

Harry breaks the curses on his friends, shaking.

He is changing

*

"The first rule of fighting," says Moody, as they stand facing each other, four yards apart, "is this: win."

Harry chokes down the half dozen impudent responses that come to mind. Seven years of classes with Snape have trained him well in this regard.

"The second rule of fighting," Moody continues, "is to understand what winning means."

Harry has several smart replies to that statement also, but after the words have sunk in for a moment he is intrigued, to the point where curiosity grows stronger than the reflexive desire to scoff. "What are you talking about?"

"Think back five years ago, to the night you saw Voldemort return."

"In the graveyard?"

"Exactly. You fought him that night. You beat him. How?"

Harry has asked himself this question too many times, and answered it too unsuccessfully, to be glib, but he has no answer—or at least, no answers that are likely to satisfy Moody. "I don't know. I surprised him, I guess...."

"Wrong." Harry flushes, and shuts his mouth. Moody begins to circle him, and Harry has to keep moving in order to maintain eye contact. "Wasn't anything you did. You were marked for death that night. Ever since that night, you've been a walking dead man. And death is jealous, boy. She'll keep coming for you until she gets her due."

Heat fills and constricts his throat. His nostrils flare, and by clenching his fist at his side he is able to keep most of the irritation from his voice. "Right. So basically I'm wasting my time, then."

He sees Moody's wand hand twitch toward the sheathe in his left sleeve, and without thinking he jumps to the left, rolls, and comes up with his wand. Moody's wand flies from his fingertips, and Harry catches it.

Moody grins, and extends his hand wordlessly. His wand comes sailing back toward him. "I said she'd keep coming for you. But you're a lucky bastard. And the more you know, the luckier you'll get. No one outruns death forever. But that's not the point."

Harry gets to his feet, not bothering to dust the grass and dirt from his elbows.

"You beat Voldemort that night because he let you. Because he had you cornered and he wanted to wank over it. You didn't care about scaring him, making him feel anything. You wanted to live. And you did."

Moody's voice becomes graver and Harry stares at him, unable to move or speak, as though he were a child enraptured by an old, evil fairy tale. "But he learned his lesson. The next time you saw him he was ready to kill you straight away, and it took Dumbledore to get you out of that one. But Voldemort won't have forgotten, and the next time you face him, he'll be even faster."

"So, what? He wants to kill me." Harry is impatient to hear the point of Moody's lecture, certain that it has to end on a better note than it began. "I get that."

"The so what is, take a leaf from his book. When the enemy is before you, it's not winning to have him on his knees. It's not winning if he's pissed himself with fear. If you're proud, if you're glad, if you're angry, then you're wasting time. You identify the enemy. You kill him. You move on."

Harry sinks down on one of the sitting stones nearby, because he is tired, and because he wants to think, but also because the next time Moody curses him he can roll behind the rocks for cover. This is the way he has learned to think. "They say you're the best Auror that ever was. But Sirius told me that during the first war you never killed unless you had to. "

"I'm not you, Potter." Moody's magical eye is still for once, trained straight on him. "I was a soldier. You are a weapon. I won't tell you lies—--it's a fine line, not becoming the thing you're fighting. But if you don't win, it won't matter what you are. Not for you, not for any of us."

For all the times he's said as much to himself, and for all the time the sentiment has hung, unspoken, in the air between himself and other members of the Order, this is the first time anyone has said it out loud.

"It might even be better," he says slowly, not looking at Moody, "if I do cross that line."

He looks up. Moody is watching him.

He goes on. "Maybe the whole point of this prophecy....destiny....thing is that I'm not really special at all. I'm just, you know. A sacrifice."

His voice is shaking but he ignores it. "Maybe the universe has a price for getting rid of Voldemort. Maybe it's me. Not just my life, cause that would be too easy. My....soul....for our safety. That's the trade off."

Moody gazes at him, and for a second it seems that he has to struggle not to flinch."I don't have an answer to that Potter. Do you want my opinion?"

"Sure."

"I think that whatever you become, it's not the end. You can keep becoming. You won't ever be the same again. But you won't need to be."

Harry smiles. "You really believe that?"

"I need you to believe it."

When Moody turns and walks away Harry keeps his seat, sure that he's being set up for another ambush. But Moody doesn't come back for the rest of the day.

That is when it occurs to Harry that he is becoming something now that even Moody doesn't recognize.

That is when he begins to hope.

*

Things begin to happen quickly after that.

He is out with Ron and Ginny, preparing to paddle a canoe out onto the lake, despite the fact that none of them have ever been in a boat before. Ginny falls in as they are pushing off the dock, and Ron immediately doubles over laughing. Harry cracks a grin, but is too busy admiring the cling of Ginny's wet clothing to join in.

When the crack of Apparition comes from behind them, Harry pushes Ron to the ground and whirls, wand in hand. Moody is standing on the bank a few feet off. Harry stands and waits, but Moody does not advance, or attack.

"Follow me," Moody calls. "Pomfrey's hut." He disappears.

Harry looks at Ginny, and at Ron, who is no longer laughing. Then he too Disapparates.

Moody is waiting by the door of the small brown house where Lupin hides during his transformations, and where Neville goes to recover from his fits. Moody opens the door without speaking, and looks back at Harry, who is confused, and still wary of ambush.

"Dumbledore," is all Moody says. Harry's heart leaps, and he smiles, feeling uncomplicated emotion for the first time since coming here. He walks past Moody into the hut, and stops just after crossing the threshold.

The hut is dark, lit by a single candle. Through the shadows he can just make out Dumbledore, lying on a bed in the corner of the room.

"Professor?" Harry walks slowly toward the side of the bed, and when Dumbledore opens his eyes he has to force himself not to jump. It is startling to see those eyes, bright and alert, in the still, wasted body.

"Harry," Dumbledore breathes. "How are you?"

"All right, I guess." He stops, as suspicions begun to race like needles under his skin. "Are you ill, sir? No one told me."

"There was no time." Dumbledore's voice sounds very far away, and Harry cannot see his face. A voice at the back of his brain asks why the Headmaster isn't sitting up, why he doesn't even turn his face in Harry's direction, but he does not let himself consider the question for long. "Have a seat, please."

Harry glances around and sees a chair at the side of Dumbledore's bed. He has to force his legs to carry him there with a conscious effort.

Even after he has taken his seat mere inches away from Dumbledore, he can neither hear him breathing, nor perceive the rise and fall of his chest. When Dumbledore speaks again, Harry exhales heavily, and only then does he realize that he has been holding his own breath.

"There is something I must show you, Harry." His lips barely move at all when he speaks. "Something I must give you."

His wand appears suddenly in hand, and before Harry can ask, or even wonder, what is happening, Dumbledore has whispered, "Forgive me."

And all questions are forgot.

*

An hour later Harry stumbles from the hut and straight into the arms of a waiting Moody, who catches him by the shoulders and forces him to take a step back. He is looking into Harry's face, but Harry cannot see him. Everything before his eyes is white.

"Harry?"

"He's dead."

"What did he say to you?" His vision begins to clear and he can see Moody's magical eye, looking straight through him. There is a hunger in his voice, in his face, that makes Harry tear away from his grip.

Moody looks at him for a long moment, then shakes his head. "No. Never mind." He sighs heavily. "Never mind." He lifts his chin. "You all right?"

"No."

Harry turns and looks around for a place to sit. There is nothing close, so he lets himself fall to the grass, and sits with his elbows on his knees. There is an ant crawling on a blade of grass between his feet, and he focuses there, suddenly entranced by the complexity and miracle of it.

The images crowding his mind do not belong to him. They are blurred, as though in motion, and he cannot concentrate on any one of them for except for a second, just long enough to gain an impression of their quality. The emotions they provoke are also blurred, confused, as though every picture belonged to the memories of a dozen different people.

His head feels strange. Not painful, not even violated, but....open. His mind is full of pictures but they are weightless. Behind them all is a light that blinds without burning.

He hardly knows what has happened. What Dumbledore has done to him. Given to him. But there is an impulsion behind the uncertainty that causes him to speak before he knows what he is saying.

"Am I ready?"

"What?"

"Am I ready. Are we done training. Are you close to cutting me loose. You know." He keeps his gaze fixed on the grass.

"For what you have to do? I don't think you can be ready." Moody's voice, at first anxious, bewildered, is calm and sure now. Harry can feel Moody's eyes bearing down on the top of his head. "But if I had to make a call, I'd say this: I'd trust you. With my life. With the lives of others."

Harry nods, and feels the last pieces merging. Shifting into place. "I need something." He gets to his feet and looks at Moody. "I need Wormtail. Bring him here."

He half expects Moody to laugh at him. He is half appalled at himself, and a voice like Snape's hisses in his mind, calls him names—presumptuous, and arrogant. He has denied these imprecations for nine years, and he has always secretly known they were true, at least in part.

But Moody does not laugh. He stares at him for a long moment, then nods, slowly, and in that moment Harry realizes that the changes at work in him these many months are now complete. That if Moody will not question Harry in this, then he has become something entirely other: no longer a child, no longer a liability, but a figure of prophecy, destined by birth and the belief of wizards greater than he.

Without another word, Moody Disapparates. Harry stands where he is, and starts to shiver.

*

Moody comes to him as he sleeps that night. Harry wakes as the wooden leg stumps rhythmically down the hall and has his wand at Moody's throat as soon as the door is open.

Moody looks down on him and doesn't blink. "Come with me."

Harry nods immediately, understanding, and sheathes his wand, closing his door behind him. Moody turns, and together they walk down the corridor and into the darkness. There is a hidden trapdoor in the kitchen, which leads into the cellar. They lower themselves through it, dropping six feet to the packed earth floor below.

Moody points to something in the darkness that Harry does not see at first. Then his eyes adjust, and he begins to discern the shape of a heavy wooden door, sealed with bands of iron.

“He’s in there. Pyralis Proctor and Razi Sinistra are guarding him.” Moody gives him a small smile, crooked and grim, as all Moody’s smiles are. “When you’re done with him, give your instructions to Razi and Proctor. They’ll do whatever you say.”

Harry cannot help but smile back. “Anything?” Days ago, he would have been dizzy, bewildered by the authority. Now he is merely satisfied.

“That’s what I said.” Moody taps the door with his wand, and it opens silently into the dimly lit room beyond.

Harry is cold, and the entire scenario bears the taint of unreality. But he turns to Moody, and nods. "This won't take long," he says, then steps inside. The door swings shut behind him.

He has not seen Peter Pettigrew since the night Cedric died. The intervening five years have not been kind to either of them, but the signs of waste are palpable in the older man. He has lost the few tufts of colorless hair he used to have, and his cheekbones are sharp above the hollows of his face. His hands, gripping the arms of his chair with white knuckles, are small and childlike.

Harry has clear memories of those hands. He had watched Voldemort create one of them.

One of them had created the thin, crescent shaped scar on the inside of Harry’s arm. It is not a magical scar, but in that moment he can feel the heat and point of the knife, twisting in his flesh again.

He has carried a knife since the night Moody held one to his throat. The weight of it is secure, strapped against his ankle. He glances from Peter to the two Aurors standing silent in the corners of the room, at Sinistra's dark eyes and olive skin, Proctor’s fleshy, bank clerk’s face. He finds their absolute lack of expression a comfort.

Pettigrew’s head hangs down, his chin pointed at his breast. He does not look up until Harry pulls his knife from the sheathe at his ankle. There is barely time for Pettigrew’s eyes to grow wide before Harry has stepped up close to him, sliced the bonds from the wrist of his right hand, and twisted his arm so that the sleeve falls back.

"Hello," Harry says, and with all the strength in his wrist presses the blade into the loose, pale flesh of Pettigrew's forearm.

His screams are wild, born, Harry thinks, more of fear than pain. He has suffered far worse injuries in silence. Both of them have.

Harry holds the bloody edge of the knife up to Pettigrew's throat, and instantly the screams dim to a whimper.

"I'm not going to kill you unless I have to, Wormtail," he says, his voice calmer than it should be. "Not tonight, anyway. This?" He reaches down and grips the no longer plump wrist. "Was just a reminder. You owe me blood."

"Please." The room is cold but there is sweat on his face. "I never meant to hurt you, Harry. I never meant to hurt anyone."

Harry releases him, and takes a step back. Pity, revulsion, hatred—he cannot conjure any of the emotions he is used to feeling for his parents' betrayer. He is content to have Pettigrew here, in his power. He is pleased to make use of him. That is all.

Almost all. There is emptiness too, in the place of what had been consuming passion. He is freer now. Older, and farther away.

"I have a message for Voldemort." Harry fixes the small, watering eyes in his gaze. "You're going to give it to him."

From the pocket of his robes, Harry produces a small bowl, about the size of a coffee cup. He taps it with his wand, and it grows into a full sized Pensieve, spinning on the surface of the table like a flipped coin landing on its side.

He draws the memory of his final conversation with Dumbledore from his mind and places it in the Pensieve. His shoulders lighten, as though relieved of a physical burden.

"Have a look," he says, and taking the bowl in one hand, forces Pettigrew's face down into the swirling mess with the other.

While the memory is in the Pensieve, Harry cannot recall it for himself. But he retains the intellectual knowledge of what Pettigrew is seeing. Knows why the rat like face is growing pale and the thin mouth hanging open.

Pettigrew's head jerks up, at last, and he stares at Harry, as though he has never seen him before.

Harry grins. Possibly the first genuine smile to have graced his lips in months.

"Tell him what you saw. Tell him....that I have eaten death. And that I'm coming for him."

Pettigrew's hands grow slack and the Pensieve begins to slip from his fingers. Harry grabs it, and shrinks it again. He places it in his pocket, and with one last look at Pettigrew, turns to the Aurors in the corner.

"Take him back where you found him," he says, and leaves.

*

Moody is waiting for him outside the door.

Harry stands facing him, hands in his pockets, until Moody nods in the direction of the room. "You played that nicely."

Harry does not bother asking, or even wondering, how Moody knew what transpired so far out of his ear shot. Fred and George Weasley have an exclusive contract with the Order for Extendable Ears. "Do you think it'll work?"

"He won't run straight back to Voldemort. He's no fool. But if we can find him, Voldemort can too. And that'll be enough."

Harry nods. Rolls pebbles under the sole of his boot and shifts his weight from side to side, though he knows it makes him look like a child.

"For whatever it's worth, Potter," Moody adds after a moment, "I'm proud of you. Dumbledore was too, though I don't doubt he told you so."

Harry laughs sharply, unable to control himself. In the last weeks he has come to possess an overdeveloped sense of irony, and though through the numbness he knows that Moody's words are important to him, he is preoccupied with the brand new sensation of having drawn blood from another human being, and having enjoyed it.

Moody's wild eyebrows, hunched low over his eyes, hint that he has guessed some part of what Harry is thinking. He continues, "Whatever happens now, you're doing what you can. And that's what matters."

The laugh quiets to a smile as Harry recalls three months' worth of insinuation that he is incapable of appreciating consequence. "To who?"

"To me," Moody says, as though he means it. Then with a sharp crack, he is gone.

Harry continues to stand in the darkness. A few moments later he finds he is breathing quickly and heavily, and makes a conscious effort to slow his pulse.

His best is not enough. Not for him. But then, Moody knows that. He is counting on it.

*

Harry Apparates to the kitchen above the cellar, and heads for the corridor where everyone who isn't training to kill Voldemort sleeps. The window at the end of the hall is open, curtains fluttering, in a warm breeze. The floor and walls glow silver in the moonlight. He can hear faint moans from behind the door at the end of the corridor, Neville, caught in the grip of his nightmares. There is no respite for any of them, sleeping or waking.

He stands at Ron's door, knowing that, in the next room, Ginny will hear his knock and come to join them. It is hours yet until dawn, but he knows they will not mind his waking them. They will not blame him for anything he does. If he spreads his hands to show them Pettigrew's blood, black against his fingers, they will wash the stain away with their handkerchiefs and tell him that he never meant to hurt anyone. They do not understand how rapidly he is growing beyond the reach of their sympathies. They do not understand that in order to save them he will have to betray them, set aside the Harry who is their friend and become someone else entirely.

"Love, you know already," Dumbledore had whispered, his voice stronger than before. "But Death is not given to any of us to understand, save at the end. Voldemort believes he has conquered it, but he is a fool. Death is not for conquering."

Harry takes a step back from Ron's door, then turns and walks toward the window. The moonlight makes him think of death, and of Dumbledore, his spectacles and brilliant white beard. He thinks of the night Sirius died, the battle with Voldemort before the Fountain of Magical Brethren. Voldemort had possessed him, then released him, because he could not bear to inhabit a soul capable of love. With the grief of Sirius' death still so near, it had been natural to give himself over to those feelings. The most natural thing in the world, to be himself at his rawest, saddest moment.

"I am dying, Harry." He knows how weak Dumbledore's voice was toward the end, but in Harry's memory he sounds as he did the day they first met, strong, wise, comforting. "There is one final gift I can try to give you, but you must not underestimate the price of accepting it. Once you have touched death, you will be marked forever. It will change you in ways I cannot foresee."

Now, he has no idea how to be himself.

He turns back down the hall and walks toward Ron's room and raises his hand, knocks on the door. Loudly, because this is the last thing he will ask of them.

A moment later there are footsteps, and the door opens to reveal Ron's pale, sleep-befuddled face, his hair sticking up over his ears. "Harry?" He blinks once, then rubs the back of his hand over his eyes. "Something wrong?"

"Hi, Ron. No, nothing's wrong." He stands there, asking nothing, only waiting.

"Oh. Okay. Um, come in." Ron takes a step back and opens the door a little wider.

Harry steps through the door and sits on the edge of Ron's bed. Ron sits farther up from him, clutching a pillow. Harry waits for a moment, then says, "Heard about Dumbledore?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Moody came and told us." Ron is still, and against the looming oak backboard he seems smaller than usual.

"I'm....I'm going to have to go away soon," Harry says, and the hand resting on his knee becomes a fist.

"Oh, Harry." He looks to the left and sees Ginny standing at the door adjoining her room and Ron's, cinching her robe at the neck, her eyes wide.

"I'm sorry." Harry looks away.

Ginny crosses to the bed and sits down between the two of them. Reaches toward him and covers his hand with hers.

"'S all right,"Ron says, though his eyes are dark and worried as his sister's.

Harry nods, and lets himself relax in their concern. This is all he wanted, one last tableau to carry with him into the darkness.

This near the end, they are the last indulgence he will allow himself.