Betrayal of the Best Kind
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By Draco664
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Harry looked back at the teachers. They had spread out, holding their wands at the ready. Harry turned again, and looked at the group of over a dozen Death Eaters. Everyone stopped moving, and the tension was palpable. Two groups, facing the other down, a thin, ragged boy between them.
"Harry," The headmaster said in a strained voice. "Walk slowly towards us."
"Now why on earth would the boy want to do that?"
Harry stiffened. He knew that voice. The voice that filled his nightmares. The voice that joked and laughed at his pain in the cemetery. The voice, that cold voice, that ordered Cedric's death.
Harry watched as a single tall figure made his way through the ranks of the Death Eaters. The speaker was neither hooded nor masked, though his face was terrible to behold.
"Voldemort," Harry whispered
"Yes, young Harry," Voldemort said smiling, stopping at the front of the group of Death Eaters. "It is good to see you again."
Dumbledore spoke. "Tom, leave him be. I will not allow you to harm him in any way."
"Ah, but I don't think he believes you, Albus," replied Voldemort. "I wouldn't either, if I was in his position."
Harry prepared to transform. He couldn't fight Voldemort, he had no wand.
"Besides," Voldemort continued. "I have no wish to harm the boy. On the contrary, I have a proposition for him."
Harry couldn't have moved if he wanted to. Lord Voldemort was standing no more than two dozen paces from him, yet was not offering any sort of threat.
"Harry! Don't listen to him. Come to us," pleaded professor McGonagall.
"So you can put him in prison again? Why on earth do you think he would do that?" sneered Voldemort.
"We know you are innocent, Harry. Snuffles has given me information that exonerates you. Come with us," Dumbledore said to him.
"Is that why you set a trap and ambushed him not more than two hours ago? Tut tut, lying to a student, what would the other parents say?"
"It is no lie, Harry. Here, catch!" Dumbledore pulled a second wand from his robes and threw it to Harry. With one hand, Harry caught it. A sudden warmth flooded up his arm and the wand hummed, driving away the pain and fatigue of the last few hours. Harry stared at the wand in his hand. His wand.
"Y-you didn't snap it?" he asked.
Voldemort snorted. "Of course not, it wouldn't do to snap the only brother to the wand I possess."
Dumbledore was radiating power as Harry had only seen him a couple of times before. "Enough lies, Tom. I tell you one last time, leave him be."
"Oh, Albus. You are amusing at times." Focusing on Harry, Voldmort said, "You could go back with them. Even if they don't put you in Azkaban, you'll still be an outcast. Look at your godfather; completely innocent, yet cannot show his face. Dumbledore hasn't exactly been lightning quick in having him pardoned now, has he?"
Harry shook his head absently, almost hypnotised by the gaze of the dark lord.
"Or, you could come with me. I will personally teach you things that no professor at Hogwarts would dream of showing a student. You will be able to show all those who abandoned you that you are better than them. That they made a mistake in not trusting you. Just think, Harry. You could have vengeance on the people who claim to be your friends, yet forced you into a tiny cell in the most hellish place on earth."
Professor McGonagall spoke up. "Harry, don't listen to him. He cannot be trusted to keep his word."
"Ah, note if you will, please Harry, that the first point your former professor made was that you cannot trust me. Not that you can trust them." Voldemort looked at Harry's bewildered expression. "Interesting slip, don't you think?"
With a giant mental shove, Harry forced himself to focus. Turning back to the teachers, he said, "You think that just by giving me my wand back will make me trust you again?"
Dismay clouded the features of the teachers. "No, Harry, but please, trust us this once. Do not throw the chance to clear your name away," Dumbledore begged him.
"Well, Harry?" Voldemort continued, as if he hadn't heard the professors. He waited until Harry turned to face him. "What do you say? Stand with them, untrusted and reviled, until my victory. At which point you will die with them." He gestured to the unmoving Death Eaters around him. "Or join me. Realise your true potential. Understand the meaning of power. With our victory, you will be able do anything you want to those who betrayed you. Never again, would you be alone."
"Please, Harry. Come with us," an unfamiliar croaking voice pleaded. Harry turned in surprise to see tears running down professor McGonagall's stern face. "Don't let the mistakes of the past cause you to make mistakes now."
Harry's head turned from one group to the other, indecision clearly showing on his gaunt features.
Cho's sobs eventually subsided. Raising her face from Sirius' neck, she looked into his now gentle eyes. "You wouldn't have hurt me, would you?" she asked.
Sirius sighed. "I don't know. I was ready to, but your feelings for Harry stopped me. I remembered that Harry would never want me to ever hurt someone, even in revenge. He already stopped me once."
Cho frowned. "You said that before. You said that Harry stopped you from committing the crime you were imprisoned for. How? Harry was a baby then."
Sirius looked at her with a sad smile. "I never killed those people. I never killed Peter Pettigrew. I never betrayed Harry's parents, though I blamed myself for their deaths for over a decade. Do you think Dumbledore would let me anywhere near Harry if I'd done any of those things?"
She shook her head. "Then when?"
Again, a sad smile appeared on Sirius' face. "It was at the end of Harry's third year. I had escaped and had made my way to Hogwarts."
Cho nodded. "I remember. All the students had to sleep in the Great Hall the night you attacked the painting in front of Gryffindor Tower."
Sirius blushed in embarrassment. "Yes, I did a lot of things I regret now. I was still mentally unbalanced from my stay in Azkaban. Most people think I had come to Hogwarts to kill Harry. I actually came to kill his best friend's rat."
Cho blinked in confusion. "You escaped the inescapable prison, just to kill a rat?"
"Not just a rat. An illegal animagus."
Cho frowned in thought. "Pettigrew," she blurted.
Sirius looked at her in surprise. "Exactly. You're pretty smart."
Cho smiled shyly. "I'm in Ravenclaw," she explained.
Sirius nodded. "That would explain it then." He smiled and continued. "I found the stinking rat, and managed to bring him and his owner Ron here. Harry's reaction was, of course, predictable."
Cho's smile turned sad. "He tried to rescue his friend."
"Yes. Almost succeeded. Managed to disarm me. Shocked me a bit I can tell you. A pair of third year students, managed to bring down the infamous Sirius Black."
"Harry is extraordinary."
"I agree. Anyway, professor Lupin arrived and talked Harry out of killing me. Not that he would have!" Sirius said quickly, looking sharply at Cho. "Lupin and I are old friends. Peter had betrayed one of our best friends, James Potter. We forced Pettigrew out of his animagus shape, and into a man. Remus and I were going to kill him, but Harry stopped us."
Cho looked into Sirius' eyes. "Thus stopping you from committing the crime you were imprisoned for."
"Exactly. I swear that boy worries as much about me as I do about him."
Cho smiled, then wrinkled her nose, looking down at her robes. "Do you have a bath here?"
Sirius immediately looked embarrassed. "Yes! Sorry, let's get you cleaned up." He stood, and helped Cho to her feet.
Minutes later, Cho was seeping in a hot bath, while Sirius cast cleaning charms on her clothes in the main room. Once she was clean, she rose, and wrapped a towel around her body. She walked out into the main room. "Mr. Black?"
Sirius smiled. "Mr. Black was my father. Call me Sirius. Or Padfoot. If you need to talk about me with Harry or Dumbledore, call me Snuffles."
Cho frowned. Is 'Padfoot' your nickname?"
Sirius nodded. "Harry's father gave it to me, a long time ago." He looked down at the floor. "I'm sorry for scaring you before. I was just so angry that you'd hurt Harry."
Cho suppressed a shudder. It would be a long time before she forgot how scared she had been. "It's OK. I must admit, most of the fear I felt was of your reputation."
Sirius nodded sadly. "My reputation isn't deserved. But it is useful for scaring people you want information from."
"It worked. May I ask you a question?"
He nodded. "Ask what you will. If we are going to work together to help Harry, there should be no secrets between us."
"You said you brought Ron and Peter 'here'. Where are we? What is this place?"
Sirius looked around the derelict interior of the shack. "When Moony was a student, this place was set up for him, he would come here during the full moon."
"Moony? Are you talking about professor Lupin?"
Sirius nodded. "He would come here to change. His howls gave the place its name. This is the Shrieking Shack, near Hogsmeade."
Cho looked around. "How did he get in here?"
"See that hole over there?"
"Yes"
"That is the start of a passageway to Hogwarts, that ends at the base of the Whomping Willow."
Cho turned to face him, and asked him a question she had been dying to know for a couple of years. "How did you escape?"
Sirius looked at her with an odd expression. "You will probably not believe it unless I show you." he said cryptically.
Sho almost fell over in surprise, as Sirius turned into a black hound, easily the size of a pony. Sirius trotted over to her and looked at her with dark, liquid eyes. Cho knelt down in awe, and reach slowly out to touch the fur on the back of Sirius' head."
"Snuffles, indeed." she said.
The dog disappeared, and Sirius stood in it's place. "'Mr. Padfoot', Harry's father used to call me."
Cho looked at him. He bent over and picked up her now clean clothes. He passed them to her and turned around. Cho dressed quickly. "I'm done," she told him.
Sirius turned to face her again. He took the damp towel from her and hung it over a chair.
Cho sat down and hugged her knees to her chest. "Sirius, both you and Peter are illegal animagi, and professor Lupin is a werewolf." He nodded. "Was Harry's father an amimagus too?"
A broad grin split Sirius' face, making him look ten years younger. "Indeed. Mr. Prongs was a particularly impressive animagus."
Cho grinned. "Mr. Prongs, huh? Impressive, eh? Let's see. He was a creature with horns?"
Sirius nodded.
"But impressive. That rules out things like cows and goats." She sat in thought. "What horned animals are impressive?"
Sirius looked at her in amusement.
"There are plenty of impressive magical horned creatures. Unicorns and so forth, but in Tranfiguration we learned that animagi can only turn into normal animals."
Sirius almost hurt himself keeping his face straight at this.
"Actually, there are a lot of the magical horned creature's heads as trophies in one of the rooms at Hogwarts." Her eyes widened in realisation. "Trophies! Hunting! Was he a deer? A stag?"
Sirius looked pleased. "Very good, Ms. Chang. Very good indeed."
Cho looked at him speculatively. "Harry is an animagus too." she guessed.
"What makes you say that."
"He escaped from Azkaban too, and survived falling from a cliff."
"How could he possibly have learned to be an animagus?"
"I'm sure there are books in the library that he could have read."
"Dumbledore has removed all the relevant books from the library at Hogwarts, he told me himself."
"Then you must have taught him."
"When on earth would I have had time to teach him to be an animagus?"
She smiled victoriously. "That's not the same as 'no', is it?"
A/N