Freedom and Not Peace

1

Freedom and Not Peace

By Lightening On the Wave

Summary: Sequel to Comes Out of Darkness Morn. Harry Potter’s life is split between duty and freely chosen responsibility, and as his dark dreams of Voldemort grow, it becomes a desperate balancing act.
But we, our master, we
Whose hearts, uplift to thee,
Ache with the pulse of thy remembered song,
We ask not nor await
From the clenched hands of fate,
As thou, remission of the world's old wrong;
Respite we ask not, nor release;
Freedom a man may have, he shall not peace.
-Algernon Charles Swinburne, "To Victor Hugo."
~*~*~*~*~*

Chapter One: Lux Aeterna
“This is the holiest time,” James whispered. “This is the time of longest Light.”
Harry’s hands trembled as he clasped the little paper boat. He fought to still them. He reminded himself that he had chosen to come here, and that this ceremony was no different than the many pureblood rituals of the Dark wizards he had learned when he was a child.
But that was a lie, and Harry was getting better at realizing when he lied to himself. This was different. The pureblood rituals had never been something that he himself took part in during day-to-day life with his family. They had been exercises that he learned for the sake of winning his brother allies sometime in the future. This was a ritual of the Light, one that his own grandparents had celebrated, and his father as a child.
James looked almost like a child now, with his trousers rolled up above his ankles, as he took the first step forward into the gray waters of the North Sea, shivering at the waves’ chill touch. The water shone like stone, Harry thought. Even the foam curling in to the sweeping amber sand of the Northumberland beach looked sharp, as though it were made of broken glass.
“This is Midsummer morning,” James went on, his voice soft and solemn, “the moment when the sun shines in all its power, and magic can happen with its rising.” He placed the boat he himself held gently on the water.
The first wave to come towards it seemed set to swamp it. It was such a simple little thing, Harry thought, the sides made of folded parchment, the mast a twig that James had broken from one of Lux Aeterna’s yews, the sail a bit of brightly-colored cloth that had come from what James said was one of his childhood jumpers. James hadn’t even waved a wand or incanted a spell to protect it.
But, inexplicably, the wave shied away from the boat and swept around it instead of over it. The next one went under it, and bore it up. Harry caught his breath. He couldn’t feel the surge of magic that he would have expected, even the oddly directionless force that he associated with wandless magic, but there was something there, a faint golden glow that limned the boat. It grew brighter as Harry watched, and then the boat began to blaze like the sun. James let out a shaky breath. Harry darted a glance at his father. He was smiling.
“We sail our ships,” he whispered, “to welcome in the sun, to salute it, as we once sailed out of the sun on a Midsummer morning.”
Harry glanced at Connor, and found that his twin’s eyes were wide. Connor obviously didn’t know what to think, either. Harry flashed him a small smile, and then waded forward into the water and released his own boat.
The sunlight curled around it, and sent it skidding forward, away from the shore, following the path of James’s boat. Harry watched as it bobbed and skipped. He could feel the magic reaching out to him this time, a purring warmth that slipped into his bones and took up residence there, as if his stomach had turned into its own cat.
Connor’s boat followed his, nodding its mast like a head as it slid after the other two. Harry watched them until a shining gray wave took the three shimmering craft from sight. He was barely aware that his father had reached out and taken hold of his hand until he felt James tug gently at him, urging them both back to shore.
Harry walked as if in a daze. He could feel the sunlight traveling with him, lingering, exploring his bones with leisurely fingers. He had never been conscious of how bright everything in the world was. When he turned his head, individual grains of sand flashed as if polished. The birds darting overhead were too brilliant to look at. Harry exhaled a little breath and put out a hand.
He would have sworn that a great warm tongue licked his palm before it vanished.
James looked faintly uneasy as they reached shore again, but nodded bracingly when Harry glanced at him. “The sun is welcoming you, that’s all,” he said. “Potters have performed this ritual for hundreds of years. This is just the summer and the sun and the light getting a good look at you.”
“It tickles!” Connor complained abruptly, and Harry saw that his eyes, for once, weren’t dulled with nightmares of Sirius’s death or Voldemort’s capture and torture of him. He was grabbing at his jumper, laughing and swatting, as if insects were biting him. “I’ve never felt the sun tickle me before!”
“You’ve never been here before,” said James, his pensive frown passing away, “on this day, at this time.” He grabbed Connor and ruffled his hair. “Dawn on Midsummer is special, like sunset. Aren’t you glad I dragged you out of bed?”
“Not if it was just to tickle me!” Connor squirmed out of his father’s grasp, and laughed again. “I didn’t know that this would involve making everything so bright I couldn’t see, and tickling!”
Harry sighed quietly in relief. He had been doing what he could to heal his brother, to quell his trauma, to make him see that there was life even after everything he had been through, but he hadn’t achieved a result this dramatic. Harry thought the wind and the light had as much to do with that as his father did, though.
He glanced around again. The land around them was thick with birds and spray and the noticeable wind and light, but empty of people. The beach curved down to meet the sea like an extended hand. The sea roared in to meet it meanwhile, flinging its waves a good distance up the sand before trickling away between its fingers. The noise was constant, smooth, reassuring, steady as a heartbeat. Harry found himself comforted to think that he could die, and still the sea would go on washing up on the sand.
“Harry?”
Harry looked up, blinking. Connor had run ahead towards the Portkey that would take them back to Lux Aeterna, but James was walking at his side, peering closely at his face.
“Didn’t you enjoy the ritual?” he asked.
Harry smiled. “Of course I did. It was wonderful to meet Light magic, in a way I haven’t before. I didn’t know that dances of any kind survived among the Light wizards. I’m glad they do.”
“You looked so…” James fumbled for a word. Harry waited patiently. They were new at this, all of them. It would do no good if he hurried his father along, through the very pause that might be part of the reason James was learning to trust him. “So intent,” his father said at last.
“I was thinking of Connor,” said Harry. “He’s much happier now than he was when we left the school.”
James stopped, fidgeting from foot to foot. Harry stopped, too, gazing into his face. He was somewhat startled to find that he didn’t have to crane his head back as far as he remembered. Of course, part of that came from not being around James for months at a time, but part of it was probably the growth spurt that James insisted he was finally entering.
“You know,” said James at last, every word a step on an eggshell, “that you can think of yourself, too? You can talk to me about anything that’s bothering you? I’ll help take care of Connor, Harry. I know you can’t stop completely. But I want you to have the chance to be taken care of, too.” He stared off into the distance. Harry wondered if he was watching Connor. He hoped so. Death Eaters were unlikely to attack here, but they were still outside Lux Aeterna’s wards, and accidents could happen. “Especially since Snape can’t visit you.”
Harry sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I knew that might happen.” Lux Aeterna’s wards would accept Draco, who hadn’t practiced enough Dark magic to make a difference to them, but a combination of Snape’s Dark Mark, his magic, and James’s dislike for him had made the Potter linchpin reject the Potions Master. Harry had promised to meet him at some point during the summer before they went back to Hogwarts, but right now he was still struggling to fit back with his family and learn new ways of being comfortable around them. And Connor still had at least one nightmare every night. Harry didn’t think he could leave.
“You don’t sound upset,” James ventured, and finally met his eyes again. Harry was glad. It was easier to reassure people that he really was fine when they did that.
“I’m not,” said Harry, with a shrug. “Like I said, I knew that might happen.”
James was silent. He simply looked at Harry, and Harry let him look. His father understood him better after those silent, locked gazes.
“Are you going to let Hedwig fly from here?” James asked when he’d apparently done his fill of looking.
Harry started, and then flushed. In truth, with the ritual and then his worry over Connor, he’d nearly forgotten that he’d brought his owl along, and why. “Yes,” he murmured, and then hurried over to where the snowy owl waited, preening her feathers on a boulder and looking at the seabirds as though to say that she could out fly them all.
She perked up when Harry pulled a parchment from his pocket and bound it carefully to her leg. He spent a moment stroking her feathers, gazing into her golden eyes. Unlike the looks he shared with his father, his brother, and sometimes, it seemed, everyone else, this was an uncomplicated one.
“Hedwig,” he whispered. “Malfoy Manor, girl, to Lucius Malfoy. It’s his Midsummer gift.”
Hedwig hooted her understanding, and clambered onto his arm as Harry extended it. Harry winced at the prickle of her claws, but spun and launched her into the air, the way that one should launch an owl at this point in the truce-dance.
Dazzling light spread around Hedwig as her wings caught the wind, her feathers glinting like the foam. Harry watched her as she turned south, towards Wiltshire, her pace precise and swift. She was out of sight in seconds.
Harry sighed, hoping the circle of light was a good omen. He had chosen his truce-gift carefully. It was the only one in the dance that he would initiate, given that Lucius had started this out by courting him. He had chosen to send a list of his own dearest ambitions and hopes, and what he perceived as his duties.
He wanted Lucius to understand what he would and would not do.
Draco would no doubt flush at the news. Snape would no doubt rail that he had been stupid. Even Narcissa Malfoy might raise an eyebrow. Harry was well-aware that she loved her husband, but did not entirely trust him.
Harry hoped that Lucius would respond with a similar list.
It’s no good hating and distrusting people until they’ve proven beyond all doubt that they can be hated and distrusted, he thought as he accompanied his father back to the Portkey. If I’d done that in the past, I would have rejected Draco just based on his being a Malfoy, and Hawthorn and Adalrico just based on their once being Death Eaters, and I would have lost the chance to reconcile with my father and brother. It’s better to ask, if you can, and see what they tell you.
*******

Harry hesitated, one hand on the door handle. After all, James hadn’t forbidden him to enter this room. He’d just said that it might not be a good idea.
And Connor was peacefully asleep now, his nightmares calmed by a Dreamless Sleep potion, and James was at least dozing, if not outright asleep, and Remus was still recovering from the full moon. And Harry was sick of dreaming of dark forests and a cold, high-pitched voice murmuring constantly of the sun. And his scar didn’t usually bleed when he was awake.
Besides, he’d explored the rest of Lux Aeterna and found fascinating things—mirrors that only reflected pureblood wizards, windows that gazed into different worlds, rooms so perfectly proportioned that the light flooding them formed constructs like cathedrals with walls of sun and air. Nothing had harmed him. Harry couldn’t see that this would be much different.
He did blink as a pulse of warmth hit him, but the door yielded when he pushed it, and nothing sprang out at him as he crossed the threshold.
Beyond the threshold, a wave of magic stopped him where he stood. Harry had never felt anything like it. He gazed at the structure in front of him, and understood why. No wizard, Light or Dark, had made this thing. It had come from…somewhere else.
The Maze was a glittering, overlapping labyrinth of tunnels, though Harry found it extremely hard to tell where one ended and another began, the same way that he found it hard to distinguish the ending of one sleeve when his jumper was sprawled on the floor. Light made it even harder to pick them out, wavering over the edges and the curves like a heat shimmer. Harry couldn’t tell its color. Was it white, or silver, or gold, or something else? Perhaps it was the blue-white hue at the hearts of diamonds. Harry couldn’t see the end of the Maze, but he could tell it filled almost the whole of the enormous room.
This was the structure his father had entered to face his mistakes, to learn what needed to be done for his family and his friends.
Harry felt the heat on his face, and could understand the why of that, too. This was Light as honest as a blade. Touch it, and it would cut you, but it would sear away all the impurities, too, and cut away the bruised and bleeding flesh. What was left would be scoured clean.
Harry didn’t enter it. He wasn’t that great a fool. But he walked carefully around the edge of the burning wards, and studied the Maze.
A few moments later, as the heat and the light focused and sharpened, he became aware that it was watching him back.
Harry blinked, and lifted his chin. So far, everything he had met in Lux Aeterna had not attacked him for the Dark magic that he had used in the past; his Potter blood had protected him. He was becoming aware that this might be the exception. He had imagined the Maze, but this was beyond his imagining. Just being in the same room with the Maze made him feel as if he were about to burst into a phoenix’s cleansing flames.
A trill sounded above him, and Harry felt the Maze’s attention shift, then relax. After all, the bird that had just entered the room was a creature of light. Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix who for some reason had abandoned the Headmaster and come with Harry, settled on his shoulder and rubbed his head against Harry’s cheek.
Harry yawned. Sleep hadn’t sounded at all appealing just a moment ago, and now it did. He cast a suspicious glance at Fawkes. Fawkes blinked one dark eye and sang a song of heat that blended into the warm rustle of blankets and the pleasant drowse of half-wakefulness at the end.
Harry yawned again. “I don’t want to go to bed,” he muttered, but he was being childish and he knew it.
Fawkes crooned, and Harry’s eyes almost fell shut. He shook his head slowly. “I might wake Connor up if I went back now…”
The Maze abruptly reached out to him.
Harry froze, his heart banging hard and chasing away the spell of sleep Fawkes had tried to weave. Harry felt the light move over him, piercing, flickering, a few steps away from flame. Fawkes sat silent but respectful under it. Harry found himself remembering every time he had used Dark magic, every time he had hurt someone else even by accident, and especially the Walpurgis Night celebration, where he had danced wildly among the Dark wizards and gone through a portal of blackness that was supposed to free him utterly.
The Light let him go. Harry blinked and pushed his glasses up his nose. The Maze was still watching him, but now it was an indulgent kind of watchfulness, the kind a mother might give to a favored child.
Harry winced, and wished that comparison had not occurred to him.
Behind him, the door opened. The burning wards around the Maze slowly expanded, herding him towards it. Harry sighed and went.
“I’ll just come back, you know,” he told the Maze.
The barely discernible hum in his head had a tone of amusement to it this time.
Harry huffed and went to bed. He hated it when people—well, that included magical objects—treated him like a child. But he supposed that if anything could get away with it, an enormously powerful magical artifact not originally of Earth could.
This time, he didn’t go to bed alone. Fawkes came along, the glow of his feathers muted when Harry hissed at him that he might wake Connor up, and perched on his pillow, and sang. Harry tried to resist, but his eyes fell shut, and he drifted away into a sleep that was dreamless, if one didn’t count the image of himself walking along a path of white thorns and glass roses, trying to find the one trail that would lead to freedom for everybody.
Phoenix song accompanied him all the way.
*******