A/N: I know, I know. It's been forever since I posted a chapter. I won't bore you with the details, but writing has been exponentially difficult lately without the benefit of a computer. Sorry for that, but I won't delay you any further…
The Growing Darkness & the Fading Light
Chapter 7
The malice blossoming in Snape's eyes chilled Harry's blood as he ventured past the threshold of the Dark Arts classroom. The Potions Master was hovering just beyond the first row of columns with his arms folded crisply across his chest and his trademark sneer souring his face. He offered Harry no word of greeting, allowing his black eyes to speak his intentions with startling clarity.
In the week since Harry had begun his summer lessons, he had become accustomed to the violent dance between himself and Professor Snape. Their lessons went well beyond practical application and settled into therapy sessions for both them as each exorcised their own demons upon the other.
Amidst the flurry of spells fueled by hate, grief, and madness, Harry had proven himself to be an adept pupil. Snape never gave praise or any words of encouragement, but Harry understood that the increased rigor of their exchanges was a veiled effort by Snape to find the limits of Harry's ability to operate. With the overwhelming anxiety he was feeling at his separation from Hermione and an acute concern for her safety, he had an enormous vault of dangerous emotions to draw upon when he faced his new mentor.
Despite this wealth of ability, it was through no small effort that Harry survived his tutelage. Snape was a deadly efficient dueler, wasting little effort in his confrontations. He possessed an uncanny ability to anticipate virtually every action of Harry's and on those occasional moments when the young wizard surprised him, his reflexes were lightning quick and his injuries minimal.
Despite an inherent wariness at this knowledge, Harry summoned all of his Gryffindor courage and met Snape's intense stare with a forced air of nonchalance. To not give Snape that mental edge was paramount. More than anything, these duels proved to be a battle of wills between the two men. The Dark Arts themselves were no more than the chess pieces lying amidst the tattered classroom that was their playing board as they sought to outmaneuver each other in a macabre game of methodical, focused emotions and unrestrained malcontent.
Belying his apparent lack of concern, Harry's body was tense with anticipation of the climactic moment when they would begin their next lesson. Snape had yet to initiate the conflict under the same set of circumstances as any of their previous encounters. In a feeble attempt to maintain an air of instruction, the Snape built each subsequent session on the last, creating new levels of pain and discord as they went.
In the last lesson, Harry had perfected the ability to shatter bones with a subtle wave of his wand and a single scornful thought. He fingered his wand, happily recalling the blissful sensation of channeling the black magic and the almost orgasmic feedback as the spell struck home. With this in mind, he contemplated taking the initiative as he bypassed the Potions Master to deposit his bag and text and the rear of the room. As tempting as the notions was, he deciding against it, though, and was forced to walk backwards once he had passed Snape, dropping his cavalier act in the process so that he might continue to study his adversary, ready for the slight twitch that would signal the impending tempest.
Snape, for his part, seemingly rotated on the spot without any evidence of doing so. He did not blink, shuffle his feet, or even incline his head, but he was now standing with his back rigidly facing the door leading to the corridor from which Harry had entered.
Harry had almost reached the back of the room when he sensed the violation. Snape's mouth never moved to indicate an incantation, nor did his breathing alter in the slightest, but the steady drone of a foreign heartbeat emerged to dance in rhythm with own, if only slightly out of step.
So we're back to this again, Harry thought.
Harry had finally reached the table at the rear of the classroom and dropped his bag and book on the tabletop without sparing it a glance. His mind cried out at the loss of the seductive warmth of the Dark Arts text, but unfamiliar staccato of two heartbeats in his mind and the rush of adrenaline surging through his veins took precedence over his attachment to the text.
Harry stepped back into the aisle way created by the columns and stood facing Snape examining his face, posture, and breathing for the slightest suggestion of what was to come.
The beating rang louder in his ears, threatening to upset his concentration on the Potions Master. And in the space between breath and thought, there it was, subtle and deadly by its very nature. The oily curtain of hair suspended on either side of the Potions Master's head swayed slightly, barely perceptible, but betraying the shift in his body weight nonetheless as he began to raise his wand and spoke the incantation.
Harry reacted instantly diving behind a column, casting a protection charm as he moved. The echo of Snape's incantation was drowned out by the eruption of stone and mortar from the pillar Harry was sheltering behind. The breaking spell was not well aimed and Harry had learned the hard way that Snape was deadly accurate. He could not remain where he was; Snape was trying to corral him.
As Harry's heart accelerated from the adrenaline coursing thorough his veins, the slow, rhythmic drumming of the foreign heartbeat became more obvious.
Harry pushed the distraction from his mind and focused on the here and now. In a flash of insight, he grabbed up a loose piece of stone and focused on it for the slightest moment. His skills now were advanced enough that he no longer needed to speak the incantation to charm the stone. A violent jerk from the pit of his stomach tugged him harshly as the portkey transported him to the other end of the classroom. He arrived abruptly and quietly enough to see Snape's unsuspecting form disappear behind the second row of columns. Once the Potion's Master was out of sight, Harry darkened the room and silenced his movements, but intentionally did not utilize the Black Sight. The carrying hiss of Snape's voice sounded throughout the chamber, telling Harry that Snape had indeed charmed his own vision to see in the magically induced darkness.
As he began to feel his heart race on to greater speeds in anticipation of catching Snape unprepared, Harry forced the organ back to a state of calm and it soon fell into step beside the secondary pulsations in his mind.
This was where the gamble came in. Weaving in and out of the columns, Harry followed the path he suspected Snape was taking. If all went well, he would be able to catch Snape just before Snape was ready to spring his own trap. Finally, the last row of pillars approached and if Harry had guessed right, Snape would be circling the column and about to cast his spell right-
With a fiendish smirk, Harry charmed the fragment of stone in his hand just as Snape cried out his own incantation from behind Harry.
Angoris!
Harry collapsed to the ground in a heap. Awash in the agony of Snape's spell, Harry didn't hear the scream of pain from Snape as the bit of stone fell loose from his hand and impacted the ground solidly emitting a magically enhanced flash of light when it struck. With his magically enhanced sight, Snape would be blinded by the flash of heat and light and would remain so until he was able to visit a healer.
It was to be Harry's defining moment, the time he bested Snape without question. But looking back on this moment, Harry felt the Potions Master received the lesser of their two evils as Harry was subjected to visions of terror erupting from his past and fueled by the breadth of his fears and regret.
At first, the chilling screams of his mother's dying breath pressed in on his ears. Over and over again he heard her voice, laced with fear, abruptly cut short and wilt away as Voldemort completed the killing curse. Against the visions of Cedric Diggory's lifeless eyes starting accusatorily at him from beyond the grave he closed his eyes stubbornly, daring to avoid the vision. But sewing his eyes shut would not have kept his from the agony of losing Hermione.
His hands were bloodied with the trauma of nearly losing her in the Department of Mysteries. She had dismissed his guilt as unnecessary, but this moment, this spell resurrected that grief into a demon of his past, haunting in its intensity. The pained changed and now it was no longer the mistakes of his past, but a staggering version of the future.
Lucius Malfoy stood above his Hermione's half-naked form, dressing casually as if departing for a weekend holiday. The last crimson drops of blood spilled forth from between her legs and her cold, lifeless face was shrouded in terror at the final moments of her life.
Somewhere behind his consciousness and the suffering he was enduring, he acknowledged the spell as the birthright of a dementor. Subjected to this kind of mental abuse for a substantial enough period of time would transform the recipient into a shadow of a soul. They resultant distortion of humanity would become a being so desperate for any measure of happiness that it will use its own magical prowess to consume joy from any and all beings that have the misfortune to cross its path.
The misery rained down on him in torrents as Snape's enchantment continued its work. Harry clutched the ground, desperate to crawl away from the pain, wearing the flesh of his fingertips raw as he pulled himself in some vague direction.
Anywhere, but here.
The thought interjected itself among his whimpers as Harry's body shuddered from the overdose of despair seeping from his pores. And still the beating pounded his skull. In this state, he was unable to contain his cries and never heard the stumbling of Snape's footsteps following Harry's tormented noises as he made his way through the darkness to exact his revenge on the younger wizard.
The final tendrils of Snape's magic expended themselves and Harry was released from enveloping wretchedness he was experiencing. Able to think clearly once again, Harry snapped to his feet and steadied himself against the nearest pillar. Uncertain of the Potions Master's location, he immediately lifted the artificial darkness he had previously invoked. He quickly found Snape working his way from pillar to pillar toward Harry, his unseeing eyes wide and his head cocked to the side, straining to catch any and all sounds.
Harry's mind still suffered from the echoes of his torment and in this haze, every ounce of his hate, grief, and suffering found a focus in his approaching mentor. The spell leapt to his mind, cleaving all his existing thoughts in two and reforming them into a hurricane of fury and anguish. The spell summoned from the depths of his mind was nothing more than an obscure entry he had absently noted while immersed in his Dark Arts studies several nights ago. Despite this murky recollection, the words were on his tongue with little more thought than to inflict as much pain as possible upon the crippled wizard stumbling amongst the stone columns.
"Letum Alutus!," Harry roared, channeling every ounce of his intensity into those two words. Like many Dark Arts spells, the sensation was nearly orgasmic. The magic flowed from every cell in his body to his wand arm lighting the tip of his wand in an unearthly glow. The light exploded into individual droplets of light, raining to the ground between Snape and Harry. Every stone that was touched by the light droplets tore itself free from the mortar attaching it to the floor and rose to hover in the air between the rivals. Harry smiled darkly at the shock of realization dawning on Snape's face through the field of floating stones. He gave a slight flick of his wrist and the stones launched themselves at the fleeing Snape, transfiguring into a murder of crows as they careened through the air.
The crows began to attack Snape in a whirling mass of black bodies and thundering wings. Snape suffered immensely, for his part, and was forced to pick the birds off one by one, but the inability to clearly identify his targets made the myriad of spells at his disposal go awry. The price for Snape's violation on Harry's psyche came in the form of clawed flesh and repeated attempts to peck his sightless eyes from his skull.
Harry sat back in the afterglow of the spell, enjoying the spectacle of Snape's defeat like a fine wine. The last of the crows fell to the ground amongst the heap of carrion surrounding the Potions Master. Snape had miraculously saved his vision at the cost of his flesh. In his exhaustion, Snape fell to his knees, fighting to maintain consciousness and do some minor healing of his wounds.
Seeing this, Harry rose and pocketed his wand. He was coming down from the high of the spell and saw no point in sticking around. Snape would survive and the lesson was clearly over.
He smiled one last time at the sight of Snape's shredded garments and summoned his book and bag from the back of the classroom. He shifted his thoughts from the Dark Arts lesson to the renewed thundering in his head. The headaches were the worst part of performing the Dark Arts. They grew worse as the severity of the spell was magnified and he supposed he would get used to them in time, but it was a price he was willing to pay. With the payoffs he had just experienced, the thundering in his head amidst the beating of his now calm heart and the excited pace of the foreign heartbeat was tolerable.
A/N: This chapter was considerably shorter than I had originally planned, but as Dell has yet to fully extract it's head from it's ass, I still don't have my laptop back and functional after a month and a half. To make a long story short, I decided to post up this scene (kludged together over 4 or so different computers) and will continue on with Chapter 8 being sort of an extension of this scene.
Also, I am not totally happy with this scene either. I feel I may have made Harry slip to far to the dark side a little too quickly. I guess I am too close to the material to say for certain.
Again, I apologize for the wait on this chapter. Cheers and thanks for reading!
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