Switch

Harm

by Verity & SnogMonkey

“What makes most people feel happy- Leads us headlong into harm.” – Paint A Vulgar Picture, The Smiths

[Sequel to Switch and Ask. NOTE: This fic is rated R for sexual content, language, adult situations, violence, and the author’s judicious screwing of the characters’ minds. You’ve been warned.]

Snogmonkey had the very interesting dream upon which all this is based, and by her feedback and discussion has more than earned the term co-writer! *grin* I’ve taken some liberties with the plot which was presented to me, but for the most part it remains intact.

I would like to caution you that if you’re not comfortable with the unusual, or if you’re uncomfortable with anything even slightly squicky, you will want to turn back now. Harmmakes Switch look rather tame by comparison.

Thanks to everyone who’s reviewed!

- Verity

:01

They always meet in the classroom.

It’s February, dank cold and muddy snow, a month whose only redeeming virtue is the friendliness of the common rooms where all of the students sip rich chocolate cocoa as they lean closer to the calidity of the fireplace. Except for one.

That student is finding warmth in a very different place.

The stones that tile the Potions classroom are as cold as slabs of ice. He shivers as she presses him into the floor. He always shivers. But she is forever warm, the heat of her skin and the floor contrasting and combining to throw him into a tumult of passionate delirium. She never feels the cold. The fight against Voldemort rages on around them.

At times, he wonders if she understands the depths of that battle, of the reality of anything, beyond the world behind her eyes.

One day she’s especially vicious – her nails dig into his shoulders as she gives him the only peace he has left – release. Her caresses draw blood.

“What?” he asks her, gasping, his forehead shiny with sweat.

“Voldemort,” she answers. “My parents. Gone.”

He itches to put an arm around her, hold her, comfort her – but he doesn’t quite dare. She is a voluptuous young goddess, unsullied with evil – but she knows how to hate. And take what is her due.

He fears her.

“You should,” she says to his unspoken statement. He nods.

:02

She entertains herself with dreams of torture – how she’ll tear Voldemort’s body apart, slit him open from neck to navel, baring his intestines for the birds. She wants him to know pain. Fear. Like her parents did before they finally, mercifully released their grip on life. Innocents, the both of them.

She never forgets whom she’s fucking.

The mark is a shadow, a ghost against his pale skin, but it is there… and isn’t it right that things should go this way? That it should all be given up to the night in the end? She finds it very pretty and fitting that Voldemort will be stabbed in the back by one of his own devotees. Oh, yes, it will all work very well. And she’ll be rid of her problems too.

Tonight, she’s a little rough with him. She hopes his back scars. A punishment for cowering before her, she tells herself, though that’s not it at all… He is nothing to her, she tells herself firmly.

When she leaves, wrapping her borrowed Invisibility Cloak around her, she heads to the library. Where they always meet. Though of course she’s there first. Not the Restricted Section – just a little cluster of bookshelves, holding old, yellowed manuscripts held together by Preservation charms and more than a little good luck. Madame Pince has paid them little attention for the last century, merely dusting them once every few years and chasing the firsties off when they stand too close to the mahogany shelves.

The shelves form a rough triangle. And within that triangle, there are four stern, leathery dragonhide wing chairs; ancient moldering skin, nearly seven feet in height; all very forbidding. And in the center of all of this, there is a table. And on that table, there is a light that never goes out, though it is visible only to four people.

They call themselves the Secret Alliance Against Voldemort, though really it’s more like Proactive Teenagers Trying To Do Things Out Of Their League Because Dumbledore Is Such A Fucking Pacifist. She is in charge – of course. It’s always been that way. Harry’s her second in command. And of course the other two are handy when she needs them.

She takes down the manuscript she needs, reading over the page again. Vita pro vita. The only effective spell against immortality, though it will only render Voldemort human again.

That’s okay, she thinks, sitting the manuscript aside when she hears the footsteps of the other three. After all, she’d rather he not have a clean death…

:03

So he follows her.

That’s the danger, he understands now, of playing with volatile compounds. Like throwing a dram of dragon’s blood in with unicorn nail clippings. The outcome is uncertain, but any way that it goes – whoever’s in the room when the explosion happens is going to come out the loser.

She had been volatile, but only a little – so close to stable, like hydrogen, just in search of one electron to fill up her orbit; but unlike hydrogen – she was far too rare and beautiful. And bright. Oh yes, bright as the stars, he should have thought of that first. Astatine, that was it. Seldom found in nature. Just one column away from being a Noble gas, fulfilled and self-assured…

He has kissed her, and destroyed her, and destroyed himself in the bargain. Love – that’s not it. Love has never been so terrifying – it was a bond he was always able to sever. He can’t tear himself from her grasp now. Hate. Worship. Fear. Adoration. This is what it is to serve a goddess.

Her footsteps - sweet scufflings on the ancient floor – lead him to a darkened corner in the library.

Then they come. Three of them, each from different corners of the library – he doesn’t understand why, but it has the feeling of ritual. For some reason, he imagines that they are guided by some form of unseen light.

She speaks first. Of course she would. “I have found a way.”

“What?” a female voice says eagerly. Virginia Weasley.

“It won’t kill him. But it will make him mortal again.”

“The Vita pro Vita -” a male voice whispers sharply. Harry Potter.

She cuts him off. “I’ve figured how to work it. It won’t kill one of us.”

“It requires murder. Of an innocent!” the Potter boy protests.

“It’s Dark Magic,” a fourth voice mutters. Ronald Weasley. Of course.

“Yes. That’s why I’m casting it. And not you,” she says firmly.

“Who will the sacrifice be?” James’s son asks wearily.

“A child,” she answers him. “A child who would die anyway, and this way – at least the child will die nobly.”

“Terminally ill?” Virginia Weasley speaks again. The compassion in his student’s voice surprises him.

“Yes.”

“Then – if it will bring him down-”

“It will -”

“Then you should cast it. Ron?”

Her brother hesitates for a moment. “Yes,” he says finally, grudgingly.

“Harry?”

There is silence from the young Mr. Potter. At last, he replies. “It’s evil.”

“Yes.” Her voice. “And we will have committed an act of evil. All of us.”

“No,” the boy says. “No.”

“But yes,” she says, and Obliviates all of them, until they remember no more of this meeting than their agreement to let her use some sort of charm to destroy Voldemort, whenever they next should meet. “You were right, Harry,” she whispers to herself when they all have gone, “Evil can never be allowed to touch you. Only me. Only me...”

:04

She doesn’t have to wait long for her chance to steep herself in sin.

A trip to Hogsmeade, of course. How convenient.

The four of them go out of their way to make themselves accessible all afternoon, but to no avail – until Ginny comes up with the bright idea of taking an unsupervised walk on the moors. In the invisibility cloak.

Ten minutes later, they, as one, step on the Portkey.

The Death Eaters were never expecting prepared arrivals, so they’re easily Stunned and disarmed by the quartet. She shivers with excitement; a fevered delight.

It’s too convenient for Voldemort to be in this part of Malfoy Manor, of course; but she can guess where he’s gone. The tower.

They are lost in the labyrinthine passageways of the manor house for quite sometime, unseen by house-elves and those Malfoys who reside in the canvases that litter the walls. Night has fallen, stars shattered against the sky, by the time they find the Dark Lord.

She Stuns the others. It’s her battle now.

“Power?” the Dark Lord asks her, a sibilant, harsh voice emanating from beneath a hooded cape. “Love? Money?”

“Madness,” she says, her only explanation.

Voldemort’s laugh is very unpleasant, she decides. She asks the same questions of him.

“Which,” the cloaked figure hisses, “the immortality or the murders?”

“Both.”

“Because I liked the taste of their blood.”

She studies him for a while, her eyes scrutinizing the reptilian figure she can see faintly with the hood.

“You’re a pretty little pure-blood,” the Dark Lord murmurs, “have I met you before? A remarkable wit, really. I’m sure that… if you decided to apprentice yourself… you might be worthy of the amusements of eternal life.”

“I enjoy causing pain,” she whispers in a confidential tone. To you is left unspoken.

“Oh yes,” says Voldemort.

“But only death is forever, don’t you know?” she continues in that same, bedroom-secrets voice, as she slips the wand from her sleeve with one hand, leaving the other wrapped casually around her stomach. “VITA PRO VITA!”

Unconsciously, she transfigures the wand into a knife, and then, the deed is done, with such simplicity. Her second murder. It’s all too easy.

“I have become you, haven’t I?” A murmur to a serpentine, eviscerated corpse lying in a pool of red blood. “All too easily…”

The cramps take her then, and she feels the first of the blood sliding down the insides of her thighs.

:05

It’s two days before the Ministry gets them out of Malfoy Manor; three days before the official celebration commences.

On the fourth day, they walk into the Great Hall. He, seated at the staff table, sees it all.

Ginny and Ron Weasley enter first, to thunderous applause from Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff.

But that’s nothing compared to the entrance of Harry Potter. Someone at the Gryffindor table sets off a confetti bomb. The Weasley twins’ Ravenclaw equivalents produce Filibuster Fireworks and Prentiss Pyrotechnics. The Hufflepuffs charm blinking red-and-yellow lights around the perimeter of the room. Even some of the Slytherins clap a little.

Then she enters.

His anxiety resurfaces. She’s so pale, so drawn – her eyes look uneasy and worried. For some reason she seems less alive, more like a mass of skin and bone and flesh than a girl, more like something ethereal and alien to mortality. But a dark fire still burns in her eyes.

The applause stills. And everyone turns to face her.

She glares defiantly at them all. What is her secret? he wonders. What makes them all so frightened?

But they’re not frightened, he realizes. They’re angry; blinded by hatred.

“Yes,” she says, at last. “Yes.” Her voice louder this time. “So the rumors are true. He’s dead. That’s all that matters. I killed him. Did they tell you that?”

“Your hands were covered in blood!” some Ravenclaw upstart calls out. “Did you like it? Was it fun? Sacrificing babies?”

He doesn’t understand. Sacrifice? Dumbledore never mentioned – he glances at the old man. His face is set, hard, in a way he has never seen the Headmaster’s face before.

“It would have died anyway!” she screams. “Don’t you understand? There was no other way!”

“You could have killed yourself,” the Potter boy says, quietly, not turning to look at her. “It would have been better.”

She opens her mouth, as if to say something – but no words come out. She looks to Dumbledore, to Ron, to Ginny, to anyone for absolution-

Finally, she looks to him. And he says nothing, merely stares back at her, his gaze cold and hard.

He remembers Dark magic, the erotic thrill and fascination of it, the way he trembled every time he cast the Killing curse. It is not whose child she so cruelly aborted that troubles him.

Something breaks in her, then, and she turns, walking dejectedly out of the doors of the Great Hall. A goddess, stripped of her powers, cast down from her throne.

She walks, and walks, and he does not tear his eyes from her parting figure until the doors abruptly close.

The celebration begins anew.

:06

She walks, and she walks, and she walks. So long and so far that she can barely remember what she left, barely remember her own name.

The last bit of magic she does is the creation of a new identity for herself. And then she breaks her wand in two. It winds up in the trash eventually.

Not before she tries to slit her wrists with the fragments, though.

Medical research is her field. Muggle, of course; she’s going to save lives. Not like she can save her own, of course, but still. Her visits to the hospital are either to the emergency ward or the research center. Both have a depressingly reassuring sense of familiarity. Just like her collection of scars.

Transduction, transformation, conjugation – she memorizes the terms, files them away in her brain. Science. She loves the illogic of it. She lives alone, in a small flat in a bad part of town. But no one bothers her.

The emergency ward visits end abruptly on the eve of her twentieth birthday. She walks into a club – Velvet, it’s called – just on a whim, a light, delicate, fancy of a whim…

Not knowing, of course, what might be in there, or that it might have been everything she’s ever dreamed of since leaving a school she can no longer put a name to. She signs a form, undresses like an automaton. The whip cracks on her back, and she tastes ecstasy. In penance.

Like a factory, the sounds drown her, a flesh-born symphony of whippings, a cacophony of chains, the screams of others – in elation, or in pain? For her, they’re all the same. A particularly eloquent sonata. The noise inside her head crescendos until she can barely stifle her urge to cry out, wet with desire and joy.

Bandages hide the wounds so easily. But there will be more scars to count.

She likes that idea.

:07

Three years of searching for her.

Not three. Not really. Not in the active sense. He asked Dumbledore, of course, only a year ago, if her location was known; but he’d been wondering. Who ultimately destroyed who, in the end? He’d thought she’d already been destroyed, shattered beyond all hope of repair.

He was wrong then.

The club is called Velvet – Potter found it for him, Potter’s way of paying a debt long-owed. He doesn’t think it’s very aptly named – mostly there’s mirrors, and bodies, and things he tries not to look at. He smells the murky scents of unhappiness, sweat, and blood all around him, a suffocating stench of pain and pleasure.

She’s in the very back, in a room all by herself. A man steps out, dressed in leather, permeated with the stink of the place; he sidesteps the man and enters, locking the door behind him.

The room is all white, white and pure, except for the mirrored floor. She’s crouched in the center, looking terribly thin, hands tied behind her, a faint smile on her mouth. Her eyes are bright – with delirium?

And her back is red, the thick red of fresh blood, dozen of marks where the whip bit into her tender, scarred white skin. She says nothing – he doubts she even sees him – as he walks around and unties her. “Hermione?” he whispers. She never says anything, never moves to hide her nakedness from him, never even blinks.

He gently wraps his cloak around her huddled form, and then takes one of her hands in his. They Disapparate.

She stands up when she lands softly on the floor of her apartment, handing him her cloak, and walks off into what he presumes is the bathroom. The shower starts running a few moments later. He imagines the water sliding off the slender planes of her body, a mixture of water and blood forming a rosy soup before it drains off the floor of the shower.

Something leans against his ankles – he looks down to find Crookshanks, her ever-faithful feline companion, who meows piteously. The cat, once fat and supple, is a scrawny mass of fur. She hasn’t been feeding him.

The apartment is not emaciated, but merely blank: there is no furniture there, no evidence to suggest it has ever been lived in. Except a few wastebaskets that litter the floor, full of bloodstained medical gauze.

He comes back to himself after a time, realizing that the water in the shower has long since ceased its flow.

She is in the bedroom, fast asleep on her stomach, her head turned to the side. She is tiny and frail against the sheets, which are soaked with spots of the blood that has seeped from the deep gashes across her back.

“We are both the same, you know,” he murmurs to her as he sits on the edge of the bed. She sighs in her sleep; her face is remarkably young and clean. “Both the same, and you can never love me. You have never loved yourself.”

He sees the scars that wrap around her wrists, and looks at those on his own. She called them beautiful once. When she still believed in beauty. He buries his face in his hands.

Then he feels a light hand on his shoulder, and looks up.

“I warned you,” Potter snaps at him. “I told you what you would find.” The Boy Who Lived looks solemn and tired, far older than the girl who was once his classmate does.

“I know. I owed it to her to come.”

“To apologize?”

“It’s too late for that.”

:08

When she wakes up, they are gone, and she’s really not too sure if they were a dream or a figment of her delirious imagination or what. At last she decides on their being a mere fantasy, as she wraps gauze around her back, carefully pulling it tight.

The elevator is broken again, so she walks down the dingy stairs, hoping none of the grime will show up on the pristine white of her lab coat. To work she goes, walking the whole way, through the slums and ghettoes of London, her black flats tapping rhythmically against the aged concrete.

She loves the hospital. It’s her refuge, so orderly and spotless and controlled. She loves her office, on the ground floor, where she takes apart diseases and makes them heed her whims. Life and death, over a cup of cold Columbian coffee.

Jack Thompson, one of her fellow researchers, approaches her. “Jen?” he says, using the name she adopted three years ago. “You’re bleeding. It’s all over the back of your coat.” She says nothing, taking another sip of her sickly sweet coffee. “Jen…”

In response she only shakes her head and puts another slide under the microscope.

Suddenly, he takes her by the shoulders, shaking her frantically. “Jen, don’t you see what you’re doing to yourself? You’re bleeding! You’ve barely eaten for weeks! You’re killing yourself!”

“Jack, be reasonable.” She removes herself from his grasp. “I have work to do. Thank you.”

She turns back to her world of retroviruses and littler beings.

:09

The wistful swirling lights of a disco club drown her, the refracted dreams scattering up and over her…

The alarm on her watch goes off and Devon Ansel jerks her head up from her desk. Time to go home, at last. She slings her rucksack over one shoulder – papers rustling amicably within – and strides determinedly toward the door. The time on her watch is 4.45 – not quite quitting time but late enough that it’s unlikely Dr. Emory will bother her about it.

She walks down the linoleum-floored hall, passing Jen Riddle’s office. The bloodied back of her intern’s lab coat can be seen through the smudged window, but Devon does not stop – she only continues onward, focused, presumably unaware of her surroundings.

Jack Stapleton is staring out of his window, tea untouched in his mother’s antique china cup, a spoon still balanced over it. His boss walks past this vignette too, unseeing, deep in her own thoughts.

Devon Ansel only notices two people on her way out of the hospital – but only for a moment, and only because their presence is an unusual contravention of routine. Two men sit in the lobby, clad in black robes, both with black hair stark against white skin – they look so alike in coloring that she almost fancies for a moment that they are father and son, perhaps of some strange religious sect.

The elder man, his long black hair tied back from his face, says to the younger as she passes by, “It was never meant to be a love story.”

“I know,” his shorter-haired companion replies, “But can you have a story without love?”

But she forgets this as soon as the words pass her ears, because of all the splendid possibilities the evening holds, and the many interpretations of her strange dream crowding out the other thoughts in her head. The tempting prospect of singing along to Siouxsie and the Banshees in the car while she muses lures her out the door.

Devon crosses the threshold, and is swallowed up by the dazzling brilliance outside.

“But you could have said no - If you'd wanted to - You could have walked away - ...Couldn't you?”

– Paint A Vulgar Picture, The Smiths