He Nearly Killed the Cat
The Last Horcrux
By Anne B. Walsh
Let me see here. A power-hungry, purity-obsessed madman in my homeworld alters my bloodline for reasons of his own. Five years later and a world away, I'm using that altered bloodline to frustrate the purposes of not only that original power-hungry, purity-obsessed madman but also a completely different group of power-hungry, purity-obsessed madmen.
The newest Legendbreaker trotted through the front door of the elaborate manor house, feeling the protective charms brush against her skin and, thanks to those alterations in her blood, dismiss her as no threat.
Isn't irony marvelous?
For the first time since she had entered this world, she transformed, shooting upwards from the form of a tricolored cat into that of a slender young witch in soft blue robes, arching her back with a quiet groan of pleasure.
She didn't look exactly like the girl who had awakened in Eve and Suzie's house in Outer Time those two years ago. Her hair, several tones lighter than it had once been, hung in sleek waves over her shoulders rather than frizzing out in the unmanageable bushy mass she'd learned to tame with patience and liberal applications of potion. Her skin had grown fairer to match, making the slender vertical scar under her left eye stand out more than it originally had, and her features had sharpened slightly.
All of which ought to have happened to me when I was thirteen, except that a certain person wanted to keep the other half of my blood-bond looking the same, and the easiest way to do that was to freeze both of us.
But that still doesn't explain the eyes.
Her original brown, tan, and hazel, and her blood-twin's blond, porcelain, and gray, could have combined in any of a million different ways. None of them, as far as she was aware, should have resulted in her eyes turning their current shade of brilliant and startling cobalt blue.
Subconscious desire, maybe? Or just a quirk of genetics? I know it doesn't matter, but it's going to bother me until I figure it out. And I'm wasting time, which I really shouldn't do. It won't be long before the Death Eaters realize that something's gone wrong with their Master's expedition to Godric's Hollow.
As soft-footed as though she were still in her cat form, she padded down the corridor, calling up a mental map from a long-ago dream game of hide and go seek.
Not this turn, but the next one… skip two, take the next… and the very first door on my left should be…
She stepped into a small, sumptuously appointed room with a floor of polished planks, covered by a rug woven in a sinuous pattern of green and tan. Flipping the rug back at the top left corner, she knelt and slid her hands along the floor.
I've only done this in dreams… here's hoping it works the same way in real life!
Deliberately thinking of small and commonplace things, like the taste of chocolate still lingering on her tongue and the sweet, subtly chalky scent now pervading the room, she let her hands go to work. One found a slight irregularity in a plank and pressed down on it, and the other darted into the space thus created and fit its fingers into the slender slots therein. She squeezed and lifted, and a section of the floor came away, revealing a cavity large enough for three adults to crouch side by side had it not been half-filled with bags, bottles, scrolls, cups, jewelry, chests, and one incongruous wooden chair.
None of which is the thing I'm looking for… where is it?
Retransforming, she sniffed at the inside of the cavity, then sneezed. Dusty in there. Clearly they don't allow the house-elf to clean inside it. Speaking of which, can I do something about that? Should I?
The first was an open question, solvable only through experiment, but the second was far simpler. She was a Legendbreaker, a changer of those patterns which harmed more than they helped. From what she knew of this situation, a change to this pattern could bring nothing but good.
Especially since the family won't be needing his services after tonight.
She snickered, cat-style, which let a taste of the room's air into her mouth and the extra-sensitive scent receptors there. That chalky smell is getting stronger. I should know what it is, I'll figure it out in a second and feel stupid for not getting it before—
"Tat?"
She kept from yowling in shock only by a strong act of will, and was unable to stop herself from whipping around, paws splayed, ears laid back, tail bushed out.
That would be baby powder.
Clinging to the doorjamb, the pajama-clad son of the house regarded her with wide gray eyes. "Tat," he proclaimed with certainty, pointing at her. "I want!"
Yes, I'm sure you do, but you can't have this one. She bared her teeth and hissed, making the eyes go even wider. Go back to bed and leave me alone. I have work to do, and I can't afford time for sentimentality.
It occurred to her one moment too late, as his lower lip began to tremble, that she might have mishandled the situation.
Why can't I ever think before I act? If he cries, he'll rouse at least the house-elf, possibly his parents, and either way, there goes my chance of finishing this cleanly. Maybe I can still fix it, though.
"Tat," the little boy whimpered, reaching out a hand to her. "Want tat!"
And honestly, who could resist that face?
With a mental sigh, she trotted across the room and nuzzled his chest, eliciting a wordless crow and an overenthusiastic pat on the head. All right, little one, all right. Here's your cat. She winced away from another eager caress. Just not quite so hard, please? Let's be gentle…
The child removed his hand from her back and looked at her solemnly, extending a startlingly fair-skinned arm covered with fine white-blond down. Carefully, deliberately, he stroked his hand down his forearm. "Jeh," he said, transferring the stroking motion to her head. "I jeh."
Her feline instincts took over, starting her purr without input from her human mind, which was a good thing as said human mind was still trying to deal with the ramifications of this little demonstration.
Jeh. For gentle. And the same movements that our parents used to use to explain to us, when we were very little, how to be gentle with things like cats.
But how can he know that? He's not my brother, he just looks like him, and even if he were, my brother didn't come to us until we were both nearly four. This boy's not even one and a half yet. This is a coincidence, it has to be…
The little boy made an impatient noise and stomped his foot. "No," he declared. "No!" His hand closed around her scruff, not quite painfully but with enough force to make her squeak. "Neenie. I want Neenie!"
For one second, the cat gaped at him in sheer stupefaction. How can he—this can't be happening—
Shoving aside useless confusion, she planted a front paw firmly on his bare foot. Skin to skin. That's the only way to know for sure. Don't hope, don't wonder, don't even conjecture, just find out the truth, then act on what you find. That's the Legendbreakers way, and whatever else I am, I'm a Legendbreaker now.
But if this is true, I might still be more than that.
The child's mind was a welter of emotions and disorganized thoughts, just beginning to sort themselves out into words. Uppermost in it was simple amazement at finding a real live cat in his house in the middle of the night. Underneath that was worry—he knew he wasn't supposed to be out of bed at this hour, and he'd be in trouble if he got caught—and under that was restlessness, a trace of hunger, and late-night boredom, the same combination she was used to scenting from Harry when he woke up fussy in the wee hours of the morning.
Everything as it should be. Nothing out of place—
Neenie!
Except that.
The call had been faint and fading even as it sounded in her mental ear, but she hadn't studied tracking all her life for nothing. I'm coming! she called back, sparing one moment to envelop the little boy in a nonverbal sleeping spell. It wouldn't have worked on anyone else, but it didn't have to.
He would have to fall right on top of me. Good thing he's not too heavy yet—
Then she was hurtling through the chaotic mental landscape she'd already briefly touched, homing in on the source of that distant, disbelieving voice.
He must have used almost everything he had to get control long enough to say my name aloud. And if he hadn't—
She shook this off. No. No bad thoughts. Not when I'm this close, not when the one thing I've wanted, the one thing I thought I could never have again, might be right here under my paws—
Abruptly, a chasm yawned in front of her.
She skidded to a halt and assumed the form she liked best for dreamsculpting, a combination of the two she could take in the waking world, human in basic outline but with a furred face and upright ears, angling forward now to catch the sound of hoarse breathing from the bottom of the narrow gash in the dreamscape's rocky ground.
A pit. He didn't rate so much as a cage from them. For some reason, this blatant disrespect fired her anger as very little had in the past two years. Even the Death Eaters consider us equivalent to animals…
But then, you have to take care of an animal you put in a cage. When something is useless to you, when you never want to see it again, you throw it into a hole. And then hide the hole.
Too bad they didn't hide this one well enough.
She plucked a hair from her head and rubbed it between her palms. Rope, she willed, and rope it became, soft, supple, and strong. A quick twiddle of two fingers, and the rock at the edge of the pit developed an upthrust projection, slender but sturdy enough to take more than her weight. Lashing the rope to it and reinforcing her hasty knots with the silent command Stay, she began her descent.
Reaching the bottom of the pit took no time at all, and took every second of the two years she'd spent alone. Whenever she felt her mind spiraling out of control, spinning off into horrifying possibilities about what she would find, she forced herself to refocus on two critical pieces of knowledge.
Wishes have power, nowhere more than inside the human mind.
He knew my name.
Her feet touched earth just as she was repeating her mantras for the seventh time. She decided to take that as a good omen.
The blackness inside the pit was enveloping, but not total. Enough ambient light existed for her partially feline eyes to pick out the slumped figure with its back towards her, its only movement the rise and fall of one shoulder as it breathed. Yet the breathing, the scent, the shape all told her the same story, and her own breath caught in her throat in a little sob.
The figure froze for a long moment, then turned toward her, shifting positions with a care that spoke of great weariness. The eyes that rose to meet hers, though round-pupiled instead of slit, were in all other respects identical to her own.
"Are you real this time, then?" her twin asked, his bantering tone poorly masking the desperate, clawing need in his voice.
"As real as you are, at least," she retorted, following his lead. "Probably more."
We can't fall apart, not here, not now. I have to go back, finish what I was doing, get him into Outer Time with me, and then we can blubber all over each other. As long as we can keep it light, keep it a little silly, pretend it doesn't mean as much to both of us as we know it does…
"I always loved that answer. It sounds so very reassuring, and yet it tells me absolutely nothing of value." Her twin pushed himself further upright on the rocks. "So you did get away. We thought you had, but we couldn't be sure. You always were the lucky one."
"We'll argue about lucky and unlucky another time. Can you stand?"
"I'll have to, won't I?" He made the attempt, leaning heavily on the rock wall beside him, but his knees refused to take his weight. "Or maybe not. You know, this is exactly the way I always imagined it happening. You show up out of nowhere, perfectly groomed and in control of everything, and I can't even stand on my own two feet."
"I'll be sure to put laughing at your weakness on my calendar for, oh, let's say never." She crossed the pit in two steps and went to her knees beside him, closing her hand around his, reveling in the rough skin of his callused palm against hers as she let a carefully rationed portion of her strength bleed into him. "Do you have anything here you need to take with you?"
"You think they'd let me keep anything?" The bitterness in the question was old, the sharpness worn off its edges by time. "My memories and the robes on my back, that's all. And the robes aren't much to look at."
"They mean you're not naked, which is always a good thing. You're unsightly enough with your clothes on." She braced her free hand against the floor. "Try it now."
With one hand clutching hers and the other on the wall, her twin slowly pulled himself to his feet. "Would you look at that. Something's finally going right."
"Don't say that!" She unwrapped the rope from around her waist and smacked him on the top of the head with it before winding it around them both. "You'll jinx it!"
"Shutting up." He transferred his grip from the wall to the rope, but kept his hand around hers as she tugged twice on the rope and mentally ordered it to lift them both back to the surface. It obeyed, and they made the trip in slow and stately majesty.
Once at the top, she had to squirm to get her shoulders out of the hole. For one terrible moment, she thought he wouldn't fit at all, but a little judicious breaking of rock and a fair amount of wiggling and scraped skin later, they sat together on the surface of the dreamscape, still holding hands.
She broke the silence. "It wasn't that tight when I went down."
"No," was all he said, but under the one word she could hear the barely-controlled terror of endless months staring up at an ever-shrinking slice of sky, catching confused glimpses of his host's vision and garbled snatches of sound, wondering, always wondering, if this would be the day when the lips of the greedy mouth above would finally close for good, leaving him forever in the dark.
It didn't happen. And the longer he dwells on it, the worse off he'll be. "We need to move. Can you take control here? Was there anything stopping you other than…" She gestured to the chasm behind them, now no wider than the span of her two hands.
He heaved a theatrical sigh. "I suppose I can manage it. What are you going to do? Destroy the diary?"
She beamed at him. "You read my mind!"
"No, you're reading mine. Or his, but…" He waved a hand vaguely around them. "Same difference. He hasn't got much personality yet, which is probably the only reason I've lasted this long, and I don't exactly have a body of my own to go back to anymore."
Which answers one of my questions, and raises another. "So I have to take him if I want you?"
"Well, I was hoping for some role reversal. Though obviously I'll do better for him than that!" He stabbed a finger towards where the hole had been. "We ought to be able to make him a nice little playpen, somewhere he can be happy. Which is something he'd never have a chance to be if he stuck around here, particularly with what you seem to be up to. How far did you get?"
"This was my last stop for treasure hunting. And beyond that…" She smoothed her free hand across the air, leaving in its wake a moving picture of what she had done earlier that evening.
He gaped for one moment at the spectacle of Voldemort prone in the Potters' front hall, then burst into semi-hysterical laughter as it was replaced by James's voice explaining how he'd removed the evening's least wanted visitor. "Neenie, you're a genius! Trip him, drop the wand, and let events take their course from there…"
Which reminds me. "Thank you. But there's something you have to know before we move on. Whatever you do, from this point forward, don't use my name. It attracts unwanted attention."
"But I just—no, you mean your full name, don't you? Can I use mine?"
It's nice having someone around who catches on so quickly. "No. We can use Fox for you and Neenie for me, and we'll want to come up with something else for us both once we get where we're going, but from now on our real names are basically Taboo."
He shrugged one shoulder. "Never been particularly fond of mine anyway. But you knew that. Shall we go?"
She squeezed his hand one more time. "Yes. Let's."
Because the sooner we get going, the sooner I can show you our little slice of Outer Time, and get you safely sealed to it. You'll take your four and give your two, and from then on that's where you'll belong. And that means they can hurt you, they can kill you, but they can never do this to you again.
Besides, you still owe me a week's worth of dishes from before this all started!
The thought kept her smiling as they began to do what had to be done.
Dobby was a seriously confused house-elf. He hadn't known he had a young mistress, and frankly didn't understand where she could have come from, but there she sat on the drawing room floor, the young master on her lap, a book in one hand and a sock in the other. She was definitely a mistress—a house-elf could always tell these things—but something was strange about the way she was a mistress, and that he didn't understand either.
It is not necessary for a house-elf to understand, he reminded himself. What is necessary for a house-elf is to listen, and to watch, and to obey.
Though perhaps, just perhaps, obedience will not be necessary for too much longer.
The young mistress was smiling. It looked a bit like the master's smile, the one he wore when he was about to crush someone in the gaming arena, but it didn't frighten Dobby the way that smile did. Possibly because the things she was saying had filled his mind so full of bafflement that there was no room left for fear.
"So He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is defeated, mistress?" he asked once more.
"Almost, Dobby. Almost defeated." The young mistress set the book down in the center of the floor, between her and Dobby. "He… linked his life to certain objects with magic. To be sure that even if his body was killed, he wouldn't die as long as those objects were intact. But they're not intact, not anymore, at least not most of them. This diary is the last one."
"So when the diary is destroyed, then he is defeated?" He glanced at the young mistress's face again and decided to take a risk he'd never have dared with the known members of the family. "Should Dobby heat up the oven for it, then?"
She laughed. Her face lit up warm and friendly, the young master caught her mood and clapped his hands, and in that moment Dobby would have done anything for her. "No, I'm afraid the oven won't do it. This has to be destroyed with a very special kind of fire. What I need your help with is making sure that fire doesn't get out of control. Usually I would take this somewhere else, somewhere far away from people, but I need to finish this right away, tonight. Which means I have to do it here."
"Yes, mistress. Dobby will be glad to help his young mistress with this."
"Excellent. I thought you would. And once you have…" She dangled the sock for the young master to snatch at, making him giggle. "This will be yours. Always assuming you want it. If you'd rather hang about here, stay faithful to your family—your mistress might get out of being arrested even if your master doesn't—"
Dobby, daring more greatly than before, made a rude noise, and the young mistress laughed again, standing up to set the young master on a chair. "I did have a feeling. The sock it shall be, and then we'll get out of your hair. So to speak."
"We, mistress?" Dobby asked, though the way the young master was clinging to the young mistress had already given him the answer.
"Yes, we. I've taken a shine to this little brat, so he's coming with me." She ruffled a hand through the young master's soft hair and raised an eyebrow at Dobby. "You could, if you think she deserves it, let his mother know that he'll be taken care of. That he's alive, and as safe as anyone can ever expect to be in this crazy mixed-up universe of ours. It may be cowardly, but I'm leaving that decision entirely up to you."
"Not cowardly, mistress." Dobby spoke with authority, bringing the smile to the young mistress's face once more. "It is a dirty job, and dirty jobs are what house-elves do best. Dobby will make sure his mistress knows that the young master is alive and well."
And nothing else.
Being the agent of justice, Dobby thought, felt nearly as good as freedom.
He was sure his young mistress would agree.
Author Notes:
Wow, what a great reaction from everybody! Thanks so much!
I have Chapter 3 of this story almost completed already, and it doesn't look like it'll be slowing down anytime soon, so expect frequent updates! Let me know if you have questions, suggestions, comments, or hopes, and please keep reading!