Chapter Thirteen of 'Valerian'- Wake the Dead

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twelve.

Chapter One.

Title: Valerian (13/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Severus and Draco/Astoria, past Harry/Draco
Content Notes: Angst, manipulation, past infidelity
Rating: R
Summary: Harry dated Draco until Draco fell in love with Astoria, and never really got over his broken heart. Now Draco is getting married, and wants Harry to construct a unique magical gift for his bride on the grounds of Malfoy Manor. As Harry labors on his creation, telling himself not to be petty, Severus Snape watches to make sure that he doesn’t mess it up—and also, soon, for other reasons.
Author’s Notes: Several people are angsty and not at their nicest here. Don’t read if that bothers you. Also, this is a sequel to my short fic “Aconite,” which you should probably read first, and while this will be much longer than that story, it will be irregularly updated.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Thirteen—Wake the Dead

“Potter. POTTER!”

Harry, who had been up early reading because he’d anticipated just such an occurrence, nonetheless made sure to mess up his hair and take off his glasses as if he’d just rolled out of bed. Then he stumbled out of the bedroom, caught himself on a corner of a cabinet, and gaped at Draco’s head floating in the fireplace.

“Draco, what is it?” He broke off halfway through the sentence to yawn, which was necessary to control his laughter at the sight of the easy outrage shining like sunrise over Draco’s face.

“What the fuck did you do?” Draco screamed. His head shifted back and forth as if he was dancing impatiently on his knees in front of the fireplace. “What did you do?”

“Um, last night I ate dinner and went to bed.” Harry lowered his eyes. He had thought this part of the game would be easy, feigning deference and apologetic cringing to Draco. After all, he’d done it for years, he should know how to do it. But he was still having trouble not laughing. “I’m sorry I didn’t stay up working on Astoria’s gift, but—”

“Not that! I meant this!” Harry looked up in time to see Draco flourishing the Daily Prophet, or at least he knew that was what it was, but he would have only been able to see a square object through the fire with his glasses off.

Harry obediently squinted, and then said, “Um, did one of the owls who was bringing me materials for the maze deliver it to you instead? I’m sorry! It won’t happen again. I promise, Draco—”

“It’s the Prophet for this morning.” Draco’s voice was a low, frustrated growl, a step away from “idiot.” Harry cowered in response, and Draco took a deep breath and tried to modify his tone. “I need to know what you told them.”

“Nothing.” Harry shook his head. He had to fight to keep the bubbling laughter down again, but this time it was a little easier because he had to focus on lying so that Draco’s Legilimency wouldn’t pick up on it. At least Draco’s question had been phrased so that it was possible to lie, because Harry had talked to a reporter who would sell stories to the Prophet but not the paper itself. “I hate the Prophet. You know that. You remember, right?” He managed to work a pathetic whinge into his voice. “When we were dating—when we—”

“Shut up. God, you’re disgusting when you snivel.”

But you were enamored enough of my money to keep dating me for three years. Harry kept his eyes on the floor and didn’t let them flicker up. “Sorry,” he whispered.

“It says,” Draco said, as if he were placing the winning chess piece, “that I forced you to give your money away to charities for the emotionally abused, and then I collected that money. You know that’s a lie.”

“Of course it is!” Harry cried, while inwardly rejoicing in how much fun it was to say that and mean it and fool Draco’s attempts to catch him out. “You never would have forced me to do that. It’s ridiculous.”

“I didn’t collect it, either!”

“Of course not.”

Draco stared at him in silent frustration. Harry kept his eyes focused in the general direction of the floor. He only knew the frustration because he could read Draco’s emotions this well even all these years later.

Will that ability fade, in time, and mean that I’m no longer so attuned to him?

Perhaps it would. But Harry hoped it wouldn’t do so until he’d had his revenge.

“Well, if you’re not spreading these stories,” Draco said at last, in a tone that was sulky because he hadn’t been allowed to vent his wrath on the person he thought was responsible, “who is?”

“I think it’s the Prophet just making things up.” Harry kept his voice soft and soothing. “You know they always like to make things up. About me and who I’m dating and the way that I use magic—”

“But they never made up stories about me before now!”

Because I shielded you. Because I answered all the questions about the reason we weren’t dating anymore with lies that would allow you to get away with acting the poor wronged suitor who had stayed as long as he could with his abusive partner.

But Harry’s anger had cooled to the point that he didn’t have to release it in random bursts now. He simply stood there with his eyes still lowered, and Draco finally hissed and snapped, “You’d better find out,” and then shut down the Floo connection with a whoosh that sounded petty.

Harry looked up, made sure that there was no chance Draco could have left the connection open on his side to listen in, and then burst out laughing.

*

“You look to be in a good mood.”

“I get part of my revenge on Astoria today. And the Prophet is already printing stories about my revenge on Draco, so part of that is accomplished.”

Severus paused in the doorway of the lab to watch Harry assembling the pieces of colored glass and baubles encircled by feathers in front of him. “You accept the rightness of it now?” he asked quietly. “Getting revenge? I thought that I might have to argue you into accepting it again when it began to actually happen.”

Harry snorted at him. “No, not now. The traces of the Legilimency Draco performed on me are entirely gone. And I have you to thank for that.” He tossed Severus a bright smile that would take anyone’s breath, and then stretched his arms as if in enjoyment of his freedom.

Severus let his eyes follow the play of muscles under Harry’s shirt and up his arms, and accepted, himself, that this was something he wanted and could have, because Harry had said that he could.

Harry gave him a quiet look that said he knew exactly what he was thinking, then enchanted the trinkets he’d gathered up to bob beside him. “Are you coming?”

“What are you going to do?”

“They’ll think that I’m coming to fix the image of them naked that keeps showing up in the glass. But I’m doing something else. Come and see?”

And in the opaque glint of an eye and the curve of a smile that he caught, how could Severus possibly refuse?

*

“Potter. Good that you’re here at last.”

Harry ducked his head, until his chin almost rested on his chest, and mumbled something that Draco’s ears would construe to his own satisfaction. Once again, it was mainly useful to conceal the laughter that danced on the edge of his tongue.

“Fix this.” Draco pointed to the image of him kneeling with his mouth on Astoria that hovered in the nearest glassy wall, and then stepped back and folded his arms, as if he was going to pass judgment on Harry’s method of fixing it while he performed it.

This is beyond you, even if you knew it wasn’t a mistake, Harry thought, and extended his wand to tap the collection of glass and feathers that floated next to him, mingled with a few mirrors. They spiraled out and into the maze, hovering over each wall or glass that reflected the fatal image. Harry looked at it once directly, himself, to see how much it would disrupt his concentration.

He was pleased to find that it didn’t. It was disgusting now, the way it should have been all along, instead of horrifying, or something that would make him wracked with guilt.

“What are you doing?”

“Setting up a nest of reflections that will get rid of the original,” Harry said, and let his tone fall into the distracted one that Draco hated. This was part of the performance, of course, but also for Severus, who stood a few meters behind Draco, staring at both of them. He would be the one who knew Harry’s true competence, and Harry liked the notion of showing off to him while driving Draco mad. “When the new mirrors shine onto the old glass and fold into themselves the weaves of Astoria’s soul—”

“I understand how it works perfectly, you dolt.”

Then why did you ask? Harry bit his lip, but he really did wonder why he had never asked that question before now. No, wait, he knew. He would have folded at Draco’s tone and spent the rest of the day touching that memory and flinching from it like an aching tooth.

“I’m sorry, Draco,” he said, and lowered his eyes for a second. But he kept his line of sight fixed on the floating mirrors and feathers, which would chase the reflection of that old memory away and would touch on Astoria’s soul.

They just wouldn’t do it in the way Draco thought they would.

Harry waited until the last mirror had floated into position, so that the invisible net of his power and influence was spread out over the maze, and then brought his wand down sharply. For a long moment, a soft silver glow was the only indication that anything was happening.

Then the glow burst into dazzling light.

Astoria cried out and shielded her eyes. Draco twitched, and Harry knew he was glaring. Harry pretended not to notice, consumed more with the feeling of what was unfurling in front of him than how it looked.

The whirl of reflections cascaded into the air in a spiral, the image of Draco and Astoria sucked out of the glass as if it had never existed. Harry thought he heard Severus catch his breath, but he didn’t know for sure. His own lips were moving in the near-silent chant that he needed at this point, to plant another influence in the mirrors instead.

An influence carried by the shine of that silver light, which had fallen on all of them, but would only affect Astoria.

Even as the glass and silver of the maze settled back into reflecting what was around them, they changed in subtle ways that only Harry could catch. They moved a step nearer to their final form, and they tangled, around corners and within the grass of the garden, Astoria’s soul.

She would wander in her dreams, caught in them, tracing abstract patterns in her mind again and again that would only lead her into dead ends and confront her with blank walls. She wouldn’t know a night’s rest again until Harry was ready to let her.

Really, Draco should never have let me design this as a maze in the first place.

Harry waited until the last of the silver light faded and he was sure that the last stitch of Astoria’s soul had been gathered into the far corners of the maze. Then he slashed his wand again, and the trinkets floated back to him and settled into a whirl around his head, powerless objects now.

“And that was it?” Draco’s voice was thick with contempt. “I could have done that to drive the images away.”

Harry heard Severus catch his breath with what was probably outrage, but it wasn’t worth confronting it. He just blinked at Draco and said, “Oh,” in a way that Draco took with a sneer.

“And if something like this happens again, Potter, then I won’t be paying you for the wedding gift,” Draco added, with a haughty lift of his nose that he probably imagined would give the world a view of his clean nostrils.

Severus made a hissing noise, but Draco was turned away from him and didn’t hear, and Astoria only gave him a cautious glance that Harry thought came more from what little good sense she had than anything else. Harry just nodded. “I promise it won’t happen again.” There was no need for it to happen again, not now that he had what he wanted.

Draco swanned back towards the house. Astoria left no time in following him.

“That was part of it against Astoria,” Severus said, softly, when they were out of sight. “But why spend so much time on her when it was Draco who mostly hurt you?”

Harry snorted. “You think that I’m going to let him get away with nothing more than embarrassment?” He didn’t like discussing his plan out in the open on the Malfoy Manor grounds, though, where Draco might have implanted eavesdropping spells in bushes for all he knew. He nodded towards the far side of the maze. “I have a little work to do to stabilize it, and then I have to go back to the lab. Unless you want to go to lunch?”

“Rather different from our last one, I hope.”

Harry grins. “Let’s hope so.”

*

“I wonder how different you are from the years when Draco was dating you.”

Harry put down his fork and leaned forwards to stare at Severus. “Do we really have to make this lunchtime conversation?” he murmured. “Or should we discuss how different you are from the years when you were teaching at Hogwarts?”

“I would not mind discussing it.”

Harry shut up at once, staring at Severus as if he didn’t make sense. Severus stared back placidly as he cut up his own salmon and lifted light, flaky pieces to his mouth. They were eating at a different restaurant than last time, of course, but still one with good food. Severus would have refused to visit it otherwise.

It was private, however, with thick dark walls stretching almost to head-height between the tables, and spells implanted in the wood that let through light, tinkling music but little else. Harry leaned back in his chair, his face unreadable now.

“Why wouldn’t you mind discussing it?” Harry asked.

“I have healed over the wounds from that time,” Severus answered. “Yes, I do not willingly strike up conversations with strangers in the streets, but that is rather different from talking about that time with the man I hope to take to my bed.”

Harry’s eyes returned to his plate, and he stirred his steak and mushrooms with his fork. “You don’t—have to.”

Severus watched him for a long moment. He had thought, once, that his fascination with Harry would fade when he’d solved the mystery of what made him play down his own magic and cringe in front of Draco. But he didn’t think, now, that he would ever be free of his desire to be close to the light that his own investigations had made shine.

“And if I wanted to?”

“I would still say that you don’t need to think I’m going to stop being allies with you if you don’t talk about it. Or friends.”

“I think we could use some speech about our pasts,” Severus said. “I know what I discovered in your mind, and you know the abuse I inflicted on you as a teacher.” Harry started; probably he hadn’t expected Severus to call it abuse. “But I think we might not want to leave the misconceptions to take care of themselves.”

Harry licked his lips. “All right,” he whispered.

Severus gestured slightly, a reaching out and a withdrawal of his hand. At the moment, he didn’t think that he should touch Harry, though he wasn’t sure what told him that. “You need not share anything you don’t wish to share, Harry. I hope you will feel free to share it someday, however.”

“It’s only that, now that I look back, I feel like such a fool to have worshipped Draco as long as I did.”

“That was not truly your fault, considering the binding he had placed in your mind,” Severus said. He did not want this meal, or the conversation they could have later, to fall victim to an attack of self-pity, either. “Let’s finish eating and go back to my home. Unless you would feel more comfortable in yours?”

Harry bit his lip, and Severus watched the flickering emotions dance and play on his face like shadows from candles, until his expression grew resolved.

“No. Let’s go to yours.”

*

The wine Severus had given him was rather dry and sweet, but Harry didn’t mind that. He didn’t think he could mind anything, not when he was still trying to understand Severus’s offer to talk over the past.

Of course he might think that he needed to offer something, that he knows too much about me and I don’t know enough about him.

But even that was more than slightly alien to Harry. Since when was Severus Snape capable of balancing the scales and feeling that things should be fair?

Since he decided to help me, Harry admitted to himself as he watched Severus settle in the dark green armchair across from him with a glass of his own wine. The fire, the only light in this windowless room, muttered softly to their left, and the high ceiling of the room was left in darkness. They might not have left the restaurant, except that Harry didn’t have to worry about the spells failing at an inopportune moment, now.

Harry studied Severus, and Severus raised his eyes and studied him back.

And maybe it’s time to admit that things have changed from the past. They certainly have for me.

Severus leaned a little closer. “Do you know what I see when I look at you?”

“What?” Harry took a quick gulp of wine, feeling that Severus was peering beneath his skin. That couldn’t be right, surely? They’d come here to discuss Severus’s past, not his. Severus already knew more about Harry than anyone but Ron and Hermione, anyway.

“Someone who’s spent so long stifling his light that he assumes no one will want to see it again.”

Harry blinked for a bit. Then he fought the urge to laugh. It was an absurd thing to say, but he did have the feeling that Severus meant it, and he didn’t want to drive the other man away or make him feel self-conscious.

Harry bit his lip and nodded. “All right. Maybe that’s true. But—Severus, I spent years thinking that I’d abused Draco and destroyed the best qualities in me, and that Draco had discovered all the magical innovations that I have to take the credit for now. I know part of that was due to the Legilimency Draco used on me, but you don’t go straight from that to hopping into someone else’s bed.”

“I know.”

“But at the restaurant, you said—”

“The man I hope to take to my bed. There was an implied someday there.” Severus studied him for a moment, then frowned in what looked like genuine bafflement. “Ah. I see. You didn’t realize that that was implied.”

“No.” Harry felt his face burn. He should have, he really should have, but he had always been a bit stupid about missing things like that.

“It is.” Severus sat for another moment in the silence where nothing but the fire talked. “I will wait as long as necessary, Harry.”

Harry fought back the need to ask for another reassurance. They hadn’t come here to discuss that. “All right. Um. Thanks.” And that probably wasn’t right, either, from the slight flash of amusement in Severus’s eyes, but he didn’t have any better words. It wasn’t like he was accustomed to receiving offers like this. “So. Why did you want to discuss what happened at Hogwarts?”

“Because I have seen what you are like with someone when you have the shadows of the past lingering between you, and I do not want to suffer from that.”

Harry stared at him. That would never have occurred to him even if someone had thought it directly into his brain. “Oh, come on. You didn’t do anything like Draco did!”

“Did I not?” Severus shifted so that the firelight only touched one side of his face. “I ripped into your mind with Legilimency. I taunted you in class. I—”

“I still don’t think you did anything like Draco did.”

“And why not?”

Harry drew a deep breath and prepared to say something difficult, something that would probably make Severus think strangely of him, but something that still had to be said. “Because you did it out of hatred for my father—maybe hatred that you shouldn’t have felt, but still, it was an emotion you felt and took out on me. Draco did it out of contempt, and greed, and tried to fool me because I caught him cheating with Astoria early on, and did something that could have broken my mind, and he didn’t care. Even now, I don’t think he hates me. He despises me. And he doesn’t want me to continue living my life or have any freedom or pride in myself. He wants me to prostrate myself at his feet.” By the end of the speech, Harry was panting, a little of his own loathing welling up in him and filling the center of his chest like flowing tar.

“Draco wanted a slave,” Harry whispered finally, when the fire had sunk a little lower and Severus had sat in utter stillness. “You don’t. You made mistakes, and you did horrible things. But there’s no one that’s not true of. Draco did far more horrible things, and he kept doing them even when he should have confessed them. You’ve changed and got better than the man you used to be. Draco’s grown worse.”

The silence stretched long enough for Harry to wonder what Severus was thinking. But the expected feeling of regret for saying as much as he had faded out. He had said it, and he wasn’t embarrassed. They were some of the words that he should have spoken to Draco long since.

*

I do not deserve this forgiveness.

But that wouldn’t prevent Severus from grasping it. He was not a fool like Draco was, to waste it.

“Thank you,” he murmured, and made Harry glance up at him, his face brilliant in the firelight. “I am—humbled by what you have seen.”

Harry laughed like a raven. “Not much to be humbled by. Comparing you to an arrogant, mind-breaking bully and finding you better isn’t—”

“But you have labored to see me as a good man,” Severus interrupted. “There were only two other people who ever did that, and I did not do as much to them as I did to you.”

Harry lowered his eyes for a moment, as though hearing the names that went unspoken in the silence. “It’s still true.”

Severus stood and crossed the distance between his chair and Harry’s. Harry looked up at him, and then stood. Severus leaned down to kiss him, a soft, chaste brush of lips for now.

They would still have to discuss their behavior in the past. Severus thought that conversation by no means over. But it would wait.

And because Harry had extended such forgiveness and trust to him, and Severus was not such a fool as to let it go, Severus would also make sure that Harry was safe from others who might try to take advantage of his nature.

I do not deserve this forgiveness. But I will fight to protect it.