A Scent of Memory

Out of Order

As he stepped through the door, the smell of grime and rot wafted over him. The house of Black had withstood the Order, resisting past the redoubled efforts of Mrs. Weasley, past the strengthening of their numbers, past the war. Even Voldemort had not fought as the house had fought, and now it sat smugly, like a great fungal growth upon the otherwise unblemished Muggle street. Harry tiptoed through the front hall. There was little here besides the portraits, and they slumped silently in their frames as though the torpor of the place had, at last, overcome even them. No one had been here in months and he stifled a cough as he kicked up great clouds of dust. It was the first time he had been here since fifth year, the first time since Sirius... Dead moths, he thought, thousands of dead moths had left this blanket, making the house itself furred like a giant moth wing. It would take cleaning spells. Hundreds and hundreds of cleaning spells. Maybe he could ask Mrs. Weasley what she used...

Shutting up an ordinary house leaves a feeling of waiting, of expectation. Someone will lift these dustcovers, divesting the house of its sleeping mask. Someone will prowl through the quiet halls with the pride of new ownership on his face. The house is like a great breath waiting to be released with the opening of its front door and the breaking of its silence. But the house of Black waited for no one. After all, who was left to come home?

Perhaps the house had laughed to itself like a great toad on hearing of the death of its last true master. Harry imagined the voice of Phineas Nigellus echoing from every painting, crying out at the loss, unbelieving in its search. He would have started with his own portrait, but moved on and on, crying from every painted portal, "Sirius". And, in the end, the echoes would have died away into silence and swirling dust.

The house would have smiled to itself, knowing that there were others, others from the great gnarling family tree that hung still in the drawing room. Harry pushed open the door and there it was. Floor to ceiling, the tapestry glimmered in the darkness, as though its golden threads contained their own muted light, running from the beginning of time through vegetal veins, branching and branching until it drained away in clumps and burns at the bottom of the cloth. The name of Black had gone with the only truly fit one of the lot and Harry traced the burn mark with his finger. Blotted from the family tree, cast from life, the blank was tiny and unconnected. No alliance, no issue. The end.

But perhaps the house would have accepted one of another name, provided that their blood was dark and pure and ran with all the malevolence of their race. Perhaps it had waited for Bellatrix or Narcissa to return. A second child of either would not have been needed in its father's house. A second son, though the lesser Malfoy or Lestrange, would have been all the more a Black. The name would have stayed with the house, and no one would have forgotten, though another name lived on there. Yes, he was sure it had waited in dark and drowsy hopes for its own kind to return. But there were no more.

The Malfoys were slippery like snakes, but even a snake can be caught and eaten up by the faster mongoose, and even a little snake cannot squeeze itself out of a box when there is no hole at all. He had not seen her, only read the news after the trial of how they had found her, her pale hair spread out like seaweed and her skin like the porcelain of the bath… And he had dreamed that night of the swirling scarlet flowers that had bloomed from her, one from each wrist, welling up like springs and growing through the water, to float upon the surface like lotus leaves. He had dreamed of her chest moving slightly with the lapping of the water as though in breath.

He had never dreamed of Bellatrix. He had never had the satisfaction. Where Narcissa was ice and coldness, Bellatrix was the night. She was the eclipse that covers everything in its darkness till even the memory of light fades from your mind. And she was the mind and memory itself, its beginning and its end. Bellatrix had never been a mother, she had only killed, and Harry had lain in wait for her in the dark after lying awake because of her for so many nights and she had seen him anyway, but still he had won.

She was very like Sirius with his taunting and his fatal look of surprise as he had fallen. Bellatrix too had taunted him with the memory of his Crucio that slid like an itch along her skin. But he was older and he had learned that pain, even the pain that wears and eats your soul, is not the same as bloodlust, and despair and cruelty are good for different spells. His spell had caught her across the chest, spraying outward in a fine mist and ending in a great gouge in her belly and she had birthed a litter of bloody snakes and he had slashed her again. When they found her, they said that it looked as though a great dog had taken her up in its teeth and rent and ripped her and worried at all her soft places. Harry did not believe that Bellatrix Lestrange had had anything approaching softness, but he had worn a look of surprise all the same and suggested that she might have failed the Dark Lord once too often and been punished for her failure. They had shaken their heads and lamented the excesses of the Enemy even against its own kind. It had been a year, nine months and seven days since Sirius' death. It had made him warm again. It had been good press.

It was after that that Voldemort had called him out for their final duel. And Harry hadn't even reacted when he had suggested that they were now exactly the same. The Dark Lord had expected some response, he thought, though what he would have said, he was unsure. There had been a difference between them still, but he couldn't have said that he – Harry – was unable to perform an unforgivable curse. Bellatrix, beginning and end, had taught him that, and so Harry had had nothing to counter them with and lashed out in desperation, and Voldemort had died not in a conflagration of green lightning, but in an ignominious fall, breaking his neck and the backbone of his power on the corner of a tombstone.

And that was all there was to it: no Blacks remained to darken the doorway of number 12, Grimmauld Place and no daughters of the Blacks remained to send second sons. Perhaps all of the old families were as interrelated as Sirius had said, but nothing remained of the true house of Black.

It was still, nominally, the home of the Order, but it had become Harry's at Sirius' death. He had not thought to ask about a will, but Dumbledore had come to him in sixth year and told him and he could not give it up, even if it was a place that had only caused them pain. It was, at least, a link. He had told Dumbledore that the Order could continue to use it, but that was during the height of the war and they were seldom there now. The house needed a caretaker, and he had graduated and there was really no one else.

The dust motes drifted past the weaving branches of the tree and he followed them back to their shining source in the names of Dionysia and Wulfhere Black. From them, this whole tangle descended, diluting and diluting until it ended in the welter of cigarette burns and broken links. He thought of the litter at the base of a great tree and lifted his wand and Bellatrix burned away, her golden and shining name snuffed out.

The kitchen still held a hint of human habitation. Mrs. Weasley had managed to clean it properly before the war effort had started in earnest and it had not fallen back into the same coma and decay as the rest of the house, but Harry could not bear to stay there for long. Kreacher was gone, but Harry imagined that a faint miasma of loathing and pleasure leaked from behind the boiler cupboard door. He could not feel grateful to the house elf. Hermione told him that it had been a heroic death, that in the end, Kreacher had defended his home like any good house elf; that many of the Order, caught unawares, would have died if he had not sacrificed himself. Harry did not care. The creature had deserved a pointless, trivial death, falling backwards in surprise to end in the flick of a curtain and then nothing. His name even sounded like ‘creature' or maybe ‘sneak' or ‘screech' or ‘leach'. He imagined the very name leaching any remaining happiness from the house. Sniveling, crawling monster! If only Sirius hadn't underestimated him. If only he had been more cautious.

Harry leaned against the kitchen door, shaking. He could never forget it for long. Why did you laugh, You Bastard? Why weren't you faster? Why did you leave me alone! With difficulty, he banished the look of surprise and the long and graceful twisting motion from his mind. At least Sirius had had that much. It had been a battle, with the clean glory of righteous anger. At least he knew that there was no body to find, no point in searching. He thought of other losses, mysterious and quiet. Some had been taken unawares from behind and never knew. Some had been tortured. Some were simply gone, without even the swaying of a curtain in a unidirectional wind. At least Sirius was missed with an aching poignancy that shaded some mornings with dark grief and a weight on his chest that made him want to sink down into the bed and never rise again. And he wondered again about hollow places, not in hearts, but in minds, where the memories faded away from lack of care and all that was left was a faint crawling feeling, like you got in your stomach before tests from nice teachers and class with nasty ones. And he wondered if things would have been different if they had just trusted him once in a while. But he imagined that they would not.

He hadn't yelled that time. There was none of the hot and brilliant pain of Sirius, none of the denial, no need to scream or smash. He had not waited to be told.

Professor Snape hasn't been to class in a month.

No.

Well?

We're still looking.

But Dumbledore had looked older than even before and Harry had known they would find nothing, and Professor Plimpsoll had finished out the term and continued on the next year. It was only one more blot on that terrible time and he did not have the energy to wonder about it beyond the pain of Sirius. It had all been black news then, all aching and dreadful, though muted by bigger and more pressing pains. But Harry had found that some pains gnaw at the very root of you and slip in unnoticed, so that he felt a sort of discomfort about Snape that he never had about Sirius, a niggling and gnawing at the back of his mind that he should have remembered something or done something or… who knew?

He wandered back upstairs, through the front hall and up the staircase covered in carvings of snakes and the horned faces of men that leered at him from wooden riots of vegetation. He followed their winding progress up and up to Sirius' mother's room at the top of the house where Buckbeak had once been kept. He was back with Hagrid now, but the room still held a whiff of something untamed about it. Harry could imagine Sirius here, curry comb in hand, lank hair tangling about his wasted face, cleaning his fantastic steed and dreaming of better times, of escape, of flying free over London and away over the countryside. The wind would have streamed in his hair, and for a moment, he would have been the handsome, laughing boy that Harry had seen in photographs of his parents' school days. They could have ridden together. He could almost feel Sirius' strong arms wrapped around him, bracing him against the wind that smelled of summer fields and rain and far away places they had yet to visit. They would have visited them someday, he was sure, together. It should have been Sirius' face that swam anxiously in and out of focus in the infirmary and Sirius who had clung to him laughing and crying and told him that they had won at last. But instead, there had been only a long silence, and still he was branded a criminal. They had never found so much as a whisker of Peter Pettigrew, and the Ministry would not take his word for Sirius' innocence, and in any case, they had more important questions that that of a dead man's charges, just or unjust though they might be. And so, Sirius who had lived for liberty and died for nothing at all was still not free.

But he had been no saint. Harry remembered again the horrible scene from Snape's pensieve, and the smiling face in his memory took on a sneering cast, an evil joy more common to the face of a Malfoy... But then wasn't Draco Sirius' nephew? And Harry wondered about families and blood and Narcissa awash in her red sea.

As Harry slept that night, in a vast canopied bed with curtains embroidered with stars, he dreamed that he could see Sirius floating out among them, a black shape against the black velvet folds of the night and he stretched out his hand to Harry and Harry found that he was staring into a deep pool of water that reflected the stars and he leaned lower and lower until he passed without resistance through the surface of the water, and the figure held him in its clammy grasp and he saw that it was not Sirius at all, but Professor Snape, or it was something that had been Snape, but he had bloated after so long in the water and his impressive nose was mostly gone to the tiny fish that flickered about them as they sank through the gloom. His mouth opened and from it issued a thousand curling shadows and a sound like heartbroken birds over a battlefield of bodies. And still they sank and the corpse's hair swam around him in great wings of black and tangled with his arms and, pinioned, he drifted into the depths of the water where there was no more light.

He woke in waves of sweat-damp sheets, his skin wet and cold as though it had been lately submerged. The bed curtains were heavy and opaque, but pinpoints of moonlight shone through where they were embroidered with their flood of stars. He slipped from the womb-like enclosure, issuing out into the chilly room. The floor still retained some hint of daytime warmth, but a strange cold draft breathed against his bare skin. The nighttime murmurings of the house were all about him, as he passed into the hallway and down the stairs. The carved faces in the railing seemed to wink at him in the light from his wand, but when he bent close to look, they were still.

The curtains in the drawing room were open and moonlight streamed in, bright, like a warped daylight that lit but gave no heat, and Harry had a feeling of presence. He swung about, but there was no one there.

Was he imagining things? He was on the point of returning to bed when he noticed the tapestry. The intricate gold filaments of the family tree glowed where the moonlight struck them, but not only the tapestry that he had seen in daylight. This family tree extended even to the holes in the tapestry. He knelt. Over the burned places in the fabric, shining ghosts of names hovered. Andromeda Black was joined by Ted Tonks, and below them, Nymphadora Tonks sparkled over a blank spot. He touched the name and it rippled with a chiming sound. Mystified, he turned to the other names. Andromeda let out another chime, but Narcissa remained static and dulled, while Bellatrix shrank away from his touch. Draco Malfoy was another chime, this one a little deeper. Sirius Black. His stomach gave a terrible wrench; even now, he couldn't face the name. The family tree seemed to reflect his pain, painting that name a darker, redder gold than the others. It pulsed angrily under his fingers and the sound, when it came, was like the tolling of a far off church bell, ringing out over a funeral. He jerked his hand away, and the sound dwindled to a dull shiver at the edge of his hearing, but the ripples continued to move outwards, each node of the family tree brightening slightly as a wave passed it. Downstairs, the portrait of Sirius' mother screamed.

Harry sprang to his feet. There must be an intruder in the house after all! Soon, all of the portraits were shrieking, and he dashed towards the front hall, wand out and ready... But there was no one there. He pushed open a door, and then another and another, but the floor seemed to be deserted. The paintings gradually quieted, but Harry couldn't stifle the feeling that there had indeed been someone there. He knew he had felt it, as though someone were watching, lurking, and the faint snap in the wake of an Apparating wizard would have been lost in the cacophony. He prowled about the house until the light in the drawing room changed from milky pale to bright silver to the warm golden glow of morning before finally returning to bed.

This time, he slept without dreaming and awoke, bleary and disoriented to the stuffy warmth of the afternoon. Hedwig was drowsing in her cage, but she grudgingly accepted his letter to Dumbledore and took off in a flurry of irritation. Harry went out.

He Apparated into Diagon Alley in front of Gringotts. The building was as unchanging as the goblins that ran it, and Harry felt calmer faced with its mammoth and enduring bulk. He wandered about, window-shopping and reminiscing. Here was where he had bought his first robes. (The memory of a sneering eleven year-old Draco Malfoy made him hurry on.) There was where Ron had finally asked Hermione out over ice cream at the beginning of seventh year, but Harry had no stomach for sweets today. Here, they had met the irrepressible Gilderoy Lockhart and bought a great many dull textbooks. He wondered whether there was anything more interesting in the depths of the bookstore, but passed on without buying. There, Hermione had gotten Crookshanks. Magical Menagerie had a sale on birds, he noticed, but Eeylops Owl Emporium was clearly superior, and anyway he had an owl already. He thought fondly of his first site of Hedwig. He had been buying a wand... Here in fact. He pushed open the door to Ollivander's and the scent of the place surrounded him. The store smelled of exotic woods and prosaic polishes. Mr. Ollivander fixed him with a beady eye.

"Mr. Potter. It has been some time."

He nodded absently.

"And you have done great things. Just as I knew you would."

"I suppose."

"And what do you plan to do now that you have defeated He Who Must Not Be Named?"

Harry shrugged. "I haven't any plans just yet."

"Oh. I see." His expression turned from blank to cunning and back to blank all in a moment. "And how may I help you today? Not a new wand, surely?"

"No..." He didn't know himself, but ‘window shopping' didn't' seem a sufficient excuse.

"Some polish, perhaps?"

"Yes. Thanks. Polish." He paid and pocketed it.

"I shall be watching your future career with interest, Mr. Potter."

Harry imagined that Mr. Ollivander would have a boring time of it. The career of Harry Potter, vanquisher of dark lords, was over. Now he was just the boy who had to go on living.