I Am Also Thy Brother

1

Title: I Am Also Thy Brother

By Lighting on the Wave
Summary: AU, part 7 of Sacrifices. In the wake of death and disaster, Harry struggles to be everything he is: leader, lover, son, brother. Yet what will survive the war diminishes every day he does not find and destroy a Horcrux.
Notes: Welcome to the seventh, and last, story in the Sacrifices Arc, the sequel to A Song In Time of Revolution. This is by far the darkest, and there are long stretches absent of any sort of fluff, with lots of scenes that may be triggering for people. And lots and lots of characters don’t survive this one. Feel free to stop reading at any time.
The titles of this story and a good many of its chapters come from Swinburne’s poem “Hymn to Proserpine,” one of the most glorious and tragic poems ever written (in my opinion, of course).

~*~*~*~*

Chapter One: Last and Darkest
Harry woke in the night to the sound of sobbing.
He sat up slowly, fumbling at his glasses, his sleep-fogged mind trying to understand how someone else had arrived in his and Draco’s bedroom. The tug of a heavy arm around his midriff proved that Draco was still asleep, and shouldn’t have been standing in the darkness beside his bed and crying. Neither did he stir when Harry moved, though, which he thought unusual, until he remembered that Draco had gone to sleep wearing the Dreamer’s Crown. He would be caught up in his lucid dreams and the choices he made in them until morning.
“Lumos,” Harry whispered, holding up his left hand. Pale yellow light sparked through the darkness, revealing one of the last faces he would ever have expected.
“Professor Trelawney?” he asked, staring.
She stared back at him, with the expression of a wrecked woman. Her hair hung loose in frizzing curls around her face, and her eyes showed the effects of too many sleepless nights and too many cups of sherry. Remembering what had happened last night—in fact, he believed he’d be thinking of it on his deathbed—Harry shifted cautiously backwards. He had reason to fear people not sleeping well as he thought few other wizards in the world did.
“I tried to resist it,” Professor Trelawney whispered, and her head shook as though it were a balloon tied to the end of a stick. “I tried. But it brought me here. It won’t let me leave the room until I do what it wants.” She folded her arms around her torso and bowed her head, while Harry looked in several different directions, trying to see the magic she meant. “It wants to be said,” Trelawney whispered.
The splinters of ice that Harry had felt lodged in his heart for a day now seemed to extend outward.
“A prophecy,” he said, and his own voice sounded hollow. Well. I knew there was one coming. I just didn’t know it was now.
“Yes.” Trelawney stared at him with wrecked eyes again, glittering behind her glasses. “I have to be a Seer and know what I said now, for only the second time in my life. Will you listen?”
The pain in her face testified to how long she’d tried to resist this. Harry didn’t want to know the prophecy, but there was too much pain in the world that he could not ease right now, and this suffering, he could. Besides, he had to know it. It might, if he could figure it out, provide valuable clues to how the future war with Voldemort went.
It was strange, when he thought back on it later, that he hadn’t ever dreamed the prophecy wouldn’t concern the war with Voldemort. Of course it had to. That was the central reality of his life right now.
He gripped Trelawney’s hand and nodded to her, once.
She gave a little whimper of relief and spoke quietly, shakily. Harry heard the words anyway. He thought she could have whispered them in a catacomb and he would have heard them. The prophecy wanted to be said, but even more than that, Harry thought, it wanted to be heard. And the thunder that filled the room as the professor spoke proved that this was a true prophecy, the fourth she’d made in her life, the last and the darkest.
“At the end of all things,
Prophecies run out.
It is on humans to take wings
And makes themselves human past the doubt.
“The first thing is the smallest thing,
But the center of many hearts still.
But, oh, savior, watch for the sting,
For the smallest things may kill.
“The second, no one can afford
To ignore the curse that seems a wall.
But that curse is true, and from the Lord,
And its only destruction is a fall.
“The third, amid the shining roses,
Waits for hearts to inevitably harden.
But there will be others’ important choices
Within night’s poisoned garden.
“The fourth, in the old hatred curled
Has found its way to move and end.
Beware, for when you most wish to hide from the world,
You’ll be taken by one who’s a friend.
“So much pain running without a halter,
More than is traded every day in gold.
Yet remember that even prophecies falter,
And it is up to human hands to hold
“And cling together at the end of all things.
Prophecies will, inevitably, run out.
It is on humans to take up wings,
And makes themselves human past the doubt.”
Trelawney’s head sagged back, and her mouth fell open and slack, as though she had sung something wonderful. Harry swallowed, and his skin prickled as he felt eyes on him. He glanced to the side.
A sleek black dog sat in the corner of the room, wreathed with what looked like a golden-green bridle. Harry had seen a similar vision once before: in the Department of Mysteries, when the Stone tried to turn time against him. The dog’s eyes were rich, deep, expectant—the eyes of Lady Death, the eyes of the Grim that waited on Regulus Black’s arm in place of the Dark Mark and had enabled him to resist the call from Voldemort.
The dog tilted back her head and gave voice to a soundless howl. At the same instant, the thunder stopped rolling around them, and Trelawney vanished from the room. The dog watched Harry a moment more, then collapsed into shadow and faded, too. Harry was left alone in the company of his own rushing breath and a deeply sleeping Draco.
No. Not just those. I still have my mind.
And Harry knew that he had to make a decision. Now, when he would be almost alone except for the sworn companion he had to take with him, was the best time to make it.
He scribbled a note for Draco and left it on the table beside the bed. Then he slipped out into the Slytherin common room. He’d intended to cross to the seventh-year boys’ room and wake Owen Rosier-Henlin up, but he paused when he saw Owen sitting in the middle of the common room. He rose to his feet when he saw Harry and gave him a soft smile.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, by way of explanation. “And knew you would want company.” He touched his left arm, which bore the lightning bolt shape of his swearing to Harry. “Upwards?”
Harry nodded. “The Astronomy Tower.”
Owen looked startled for a moment. “I thought the Headmistress had sealed that off.”
She very well might have, Harry thought distractedly. He knew McGonagall had been awake since early that morning, firmly telling the other professors that Hogwarts would stay open until at least the end of the term, and that she trusted Severus Snape to behave himself until she was up and walking around the hospital wing. But Harry hadn’t been aware of whatever other decrees she might have made. The day had been—long, telling the Bulstrodes, Narcissa, Draco, and the Weasleys of what he had seen, and doing what he could to comfort them against their losses to death or Voldemort, and also doing what he could to comfort Snape.
“As close as we can get, then,” he said, and set off towards the common room door. “I need to feel fresh air on my face, and I don’t think that I dare go outside the wards right now.”
He could feel Owen’s startled, thoughtful glance on his shoulder blades. It wasn’t long before that Harry would have resented having a guardian, resented the idea that he shouldn’t leave the wards, and sneaked off on his own just to prove that he could. Owen would be wondering what had changed him.
Last night did, Harry answered, though not aloud. Voldemort can reach most anywhere, and not many other people than me have a hope of standing up to him. I have to think of my own safety more than I have. I can’t go flying on my broom to think, and the Astronomy Tower is still well within the wards.
There are decisions I need to make.
*******
It had begun with a flare in the Floo connection, which he kept open night and day now, and someone he hadn’t recognized at first shouting, “Sir! Sir! Elder Juniper! Minister Scrimgeour is dead!”
It had turned out to be one of the Aurors who had started moving closer to him after Scrimgeour’s mindless debacle with Cupressus Apollonis. Accusing a prominent Light wizard of child abuse when nothing of the sort had been happening would, of course, lose the Minister followers. He hadn’t seemed to care about that before he made his move, though.
Struggling into his dressing gown, Erasmus Juniper demanded the story over again, and received it. The Minister’s still body. The death of Percy Weasley, his closest companion. How the Aurors standing outside the door had heard nothing, but had gone in to find three bodies, including that of the young woman who had helped the Minister against the Dark Lord Falco Parkinson, sprawled on the floor. The broken wall, and the hovering Dark Mark.
The Thorn Bitch’s work. You-Know-Who’s work.
But Erasmus knew a different name for it, and when he’d snapped an order to the Auror to back out of the Floo connection so he could come through, it was humming in his head.
The Dark’s work.
Times had changed. This was the full-blown beginning of the Second War, not that pitiful contest between Lords two years ago. The magical world needed to remember the lessons of the First War, and it needed a strong leader who would work for the Light, which was the Dark’s opponent.
Erasmus Juniper knew he was that leader.
He moved fast, because it was necessary. He listened to the Aurors’ stories. He viewed the bodies for himself, wincing at the destruction of Percy Weasley’s, and ordered the victims’ families to be notified. He stooped over Rufus, who had died looking oddly peaceful, and made a private vow that none of the others heard.
“You left them in my care. I’m going to take care of them, I promise. As one Light-sworn wizard to another, I promise.” And if I take better care of them than you did, well, that is only to be expected. The world has just become simpler than it was when you were Minister. Whilst you had to move cautiously, I may move openly, and I will not use or bargain with the Dark as you did.
He had ordered the Wizengamot to be gathered. Technically, he didn’t have the authority to do so, but the people around him cried out for some kind of authority, perfectly legitimate or not. They hurried to do as he had commanded, and the news of the Minister’s death spread throughout the Ministry. Erasmus passed many people crying as he made his way to Courtroom Ten. And why not? Rufus had been disliked, but almost always for political reasons. As a person, people had liked him.
Erasmus shook his head. It was that likeability that had killed him. Despite the third body on the floor in his office and its lack of a Dark Mark, he was sure that the young woman who called herself the Liberator had provided the key to Rufus’s destruction. Perhaps she had been a witting pawn, perhaps not, but somehow she had let Indigena Yaxley into the Ministry. What Britain needed now was a Minister who would never allow such a thing.
There were other things he would never allow, either. During the First War, the Aurors had been briefly granted permission to use the Unforgivables legally, which had led to endless torture of innocents when the Aurors had a grudge against them or were drunk on power. Erasmus would not order such measures, ever. He would do what was right, not what was expedient.
Courtroom Ten slowly filled. Most of the eyes Erasmus looked into shimmered with tears, or terror, or both. There were a few exceptions, like Griselda Marchbanks, but not many. They had all heard the news now; those who might not have heard it before they arrived knew it the moment they stepped into the courtroom. Their world was leaderless, sent reeling. Something had to be done.
Erasmus would be the man to do it—not because he was politically ambitious, but because he was the best wizard for the position, and he knew it.
“Wizards and witches of the Wizengamot,” he said, drawing their attention immediately, “what you have heard is true. Minister Rufus Scrimgeour has been assassinated, killed by the hand of Indigena Yaxley, the Thorn Bitch working in You-Know-Who’s service. She entered the Ministry, by means as yet unknown, and slew everyone in his office, then broke free again.”
Loud murmurs and complaints made it impossible to continue for a moment. Erasmus waited, one arm curled around his hip. He was wearing, under his formal cloak, the robe with the depiction of the firebird on it, the oldest symbol of organized Light. The stitched talon curved around his hip. He thought he could feel gathering warmth from it, as though the old Light approved of his measures.
“I grieve for the death of Rufus, as all of you do,” he went on, lifting his voice. “But there is no time to spare. We must act, to prevent panic and its attendant plagues from sweeping the whole of Britain. This is a war against the Dark, and the Light must rise.”
“I suppose you have a plan for that?” Griselda asked, her voice creaky and soft but able to make itself heard nonetheless, her eyes on him.
Erasmus nodded to her. She was one of the few opponents who might be able to convince the others to elect her Acting Minister, if he allowed her time. He did not intend to allow her that time. Griselda would be a disaster, through no fault of her own. She had obligations to the goblins that would make her hesitant to do some of what must be done for fear she would be held personally accountable for any injuries to them. And she was too close to the vates.
Erasmus’s mouth tightened as he thought of the vates. More news was coming in, though he had not heard all of it before he summoned the Wizengamot, talking about an attack at Hogwarts. Nothing was said of the vates being dead, but Erasmus was sure that he and his Death Eaters were tied to this somehow.
Well, no matter. He will yield, or he will be counted as a tool of Voldemort. This is no time for personal disputes. He must work with the Ministry. We cannot afford a civil war, or a war on two fronts.
“I do,” said Erasmus. “I have built an alliance with several prominent Light wizards, and where they go, their families and allies will follow. Their members include Aurora Whitestag—whom I think most of you might have some reason to remember—Cupressus Apollonis, Terin Griffinsnest, and others.” He took the prepared scroll out of his robe pocket. “Here is the list of names. I will pass it around the courtroom so that others can see it.”
“And what is your proposal, Juniper?” Griselda asked, with that relentless, tiresome patience.
“That the Wizengamot appoint me Acting Minister, for now,” said Erasmus calmly. “That the alliance of Light wizards be allowed some power in the Ministry, enough to organize the Aurors and other Departments against this threat. That we examine the recent decrees and promises that Rufus made and see how many of them are necessary now, and how much it will cost us to keep them if they are determined to be so. That the Ministry shift to a war footing immediately. That some of those we know to be high risks be brought in for questioning.” He stood, eyes locked on Griselda’s, waiting for her to challenge some part of a proposal built all on calm reasoning.
Griselda opened her mouth, but another Wizengamot member, Linda Hooplan, overwhelmed her. “I agree,” she said, fear falling from her mouth, her eyes. “We must do something to counteract the Dark, and I agree.”