lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews! You are probably unsurprised to realize that this has now grown to five parts. Damn fic.

Part Three

”You’ve been busy this year.”

Sirius knew his voice was faint, but he thought he had a right to be, what with Harry telling him about sneaking around the school, removing the Marauder’s Map from the Weasley twins who held it, stealing things from the Headmaster, and sneaking into the Chamber of Secrets. He leaned back on the couch with a long sigh.

They were in Grimmauld Place, somewhere that Sirius would have raised a lot more fuss about living if it hadn’t been made over into a sanctuary where he could stay with his godson. It was certainly a lot lighter and safer than it had ever been when Sirius was a child. And Kreacher served Harry with unwavering devotion, so there was that. Currently, Sirius was sitting on one couch and Harry was sitting across from him, while Kreacher prepared tea for Harry and Dobby did it for Sirius.

(Kreacher didn’t want to make food or drinks for Sirius and Sirius certainly never would have trusted him enough to eat or drink them, so that worked out).

“Yes,” Harry agreed without shame. “And I took a few books from Hogwarts’s library so I could look at them and study them at my leisure this summer. The next thing I have to go after has a lot of protections on it, and I only have vague ideas about what they are.”

“Take me with you,” Sirius said. He wasn’t proud of the way he almost whinged. But, well, while Harry had visited him every weekend and during the school hols this year, he’d been lonely with just the house-elves for company.

Harry paused and looked at him. “No.”

“Harry.”

“I just said I had almost no idea about the protections on this thing. And you want me to take you with me and put you in danger? We’re lucky the Ministry is too corrupt and cowardly to admit that you escaped, or they would have Aurors and Dementors looking for you.”

“Pleeeeease.” Sirius had decided that being proud didn’t have much to recommend it. He clasped his hands together and bowed himself down in front of Harry, the way he would have in Azkaban if he’d thought Harry was going to leave him there. “Pleeeeeeease.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.” But Harry’s voice trailed off, and when Sirius looked up, Harry was staring around the drawing room of Grimmauld Place as if considering something.

“All right,” Harry whispered. “I can’t do to you what they did to you in the past. I’ll take you with me. But you have to promise not to touch anything, Sirius. Do you make that promise?”

“Yes!” Sirius leaped off the couch and grabbed Harry up, swinging him around in circles and whooping. He would have to liked to change into a dog and leap around joyously barking, but the Mind-Healers Harry had brought in one by one and then Memory Charmed had told Sirius he should really spend as much time as possible as a human, so that he didn’t “hide from the emotions of the past” or whatever.

“Put me down, Sirius!”

Sirius did, because if he didn’t, then Kreacher would probably appear and yank Harry out of his arms, but he kept hugging him. Harry sighed and hugged him back.

“If it would be too dangerous for me to go, almost, then it would be bad for you to go on your own, too.” Sirius thought he was being wise. “We should make sure that we’re always together so no one can hurt one of us and the other one wouldn’t know about it.”

“If this is your attempt to get me to take Padfoot to Hogwarts, you’re out of luck.” Harry’s voice was muffled against Sirius’s shoulder. “And anyway, I wouldn’t be in as much danger as you think. I have the Elder Wand.”

“You have what?”

*

Severus turned around, and found himself pressed against the side of his desk. Not by choice. An invisible force was holding him there, and the source of it came out of the shadows after a moment, a small child with the most blazing green eyes Severus had ever seen.

Severus swallowed. Last year, having Harry Potter in his House hadn’t been anything like he thought it would be. Potter was almost pathologically quiet, avoidant of both detentions and conflict with other student, and if he chose to spend all his time with Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs, that wasn’t any business of Severus’s. He’d been too relieved that he wouldn’t have to be a true Head of House to Potter to question the boy.

And in class, he wasn’t irritatingly perfect, but he also didn’t make basic mistakes. He was the sort of student Severus could happily ignore.

Now, though…

Severus shivered as Potter stepped towards him and looked into his face. His eyes were clear and steady and so indifferent that Severus feared for his life in a way he hadn’t since his days of working as a Death Eater. He did force himself to stand as still as possible so that Potter could tilt his head back and forth and examine him.

“I thought you might be better than I’d heard you were,” Potter murmured. “Last year, you didn’t pick on the Gryffindors as much. Maybe because I wasn’t in that House.” He shook his head. “I should have known it couldn’t last.”

Severus opened his mouth to snap something, and found that his tongue wasn’t there. A shriek jolted his body, but never emerged. There was only a thick, garbled sound that made him shudder to hear.

“But this year, you started picking on Neville. You told him he should kill himself, that he’s a waste of magic, that he should never have been born. Because I wasn’t in Gryffindor to be your victim or your distraction, I suppose.” Potter moved closer, and his eyes flared like hellfires. “You won’t do it again.”

Severus was ready to agree to anything if Potter would restore his tongue and let him go. He nodded frantically. Potter surveyed him in a way that made Severus think of a dragon regarding a potentially interesting meal.

Then he moved his wand, and Severus’s tongue ended up back in his mouth. Severus slumped, shaking. This was more vicious than anything the Marauders had ever done to him.

But he felt none of the hatred he would have expected, especially given that this boy was the son of one of those Marauders and his stolen first love. He felt only icy-cold, piercing terror, that rolled through him and would not stop making him shake.

The force binding him against the desk vanished. Severus straightened slowly, not daring to say anything, and stared at the child whose placement in his House, and vanishing from Tuney’s custody, he was starting to think he should have questioned further.

“I can let you live,” Potter said, as if in answer to a silent question. “I know that you’re not uniformly a terrible person. And anything you heaped on my head could be argued as vengeance for what my father and godfather did to you, as little as I think of that excuse.

“But Neville? He did nothing to you except be Sorted into Gryffindor and not up to your standards of perfection. Leave him alone.”

Severus shrank further backwards, for all that the edge of the desk was cutting into his back. He could see actual frost forming on the floor of the office, and the last words were as close to Parseltongue as he thought a non-Parselmouth could come.

And he recognized them, from the force of his magic snapping alert in him, as an imposed vow. He couldn’t attack Longbottom now if he tried. He probably couldn’t say anything other than a warning or a compliment to him now, in fact.

It was Dark Arts of the deepest kind, essentially taking an Unbreakable Vow for someone else. The Dark Lord had sometimes inflicted it on Death Eaters who disobeyed him. Severus had no idea where Potter had learned it or why he would use it, but he knew one thing.

In the matter of Neville Longbottom, his magic now answered to Potter.

As his voice came back, he watched Potter turn around and walk towards the door of his office. He cleared his throat. Potter paused, although he didn’t glance back.

“Why not kill me?” Severus whispered. He would not prefer death, but the way that Potter had handled him made every doubt in Severus’s head that he could kill someone wash away.

“You’re capable of self-restraint,” Potter said indifferently. “You showed that last year, when you could have made trouble for me after I became a Slytherin, and you chose not to. You were friends with my mother. I don’t think she would be pleased if I killed you.”

Severus made a noise of disbelief. How did the child know that?

But then, how did the child know deep Dark Arts? How had he left the Dursley house with an elf? How did he maintain the posture of a perfectly ordinary boy for a year and then show what he was here and now?

Potter did look back then, and Severus found himself groping for his wand and then dropping it as the touch of the wood burned him. Potter was smiling, and it frightened Severus more than the Dark Lord had on the night he’d been Marked.

“Besides,” Potter said, “the vow I have on your magic will simply kill you if you try to hurt Neville again. Or talk about what I’ve made you do to anyone else, including the Headmaster. If you cause trouble for me, then the matter will take care of itself.”

“How can you ensure that the other vows I have sworn will not kill me when the Dark Lord rises again?”

Potter uttered a low laugh, and Severus gave in to the impulse to step behind the desk so that it was between him and the boy. No, the man. This was a man in a child’s body, no matter what he looked like, or how he acted most of the time in a more public setting.

“You think he’s going to be rising?” Potter asked him, and smiled, and departed.

Severus sat down and stared at the door for a long moment. He wished that he could tell Albus what he had witnessed, and warn the man that the culprit behind the unusual thefts last year was almost undoubtedly Potter. Despite the man’s Sorting into Slytherin, Albus had not suspected Potter of them, because Potter had acted the part of a slightly above average student so well.

But even though Severus doubted the vow would take his telling Albus about those things as interference, there was no way in hell Severus would risk it. Let Albus and the Dark Lord take their own chances against that—that thing that had walked out of Severus’s office.

Severus would stay carefully on the sidelines, where he belonged.

*

“I’m ready to know your secrets now.”

Weasley looked halfway between uncertain and annoyed, but Hermione ignored him. He wasn’t the one she had to convince, after all. She folded her arms and stared straight at Potter, who sat at the head of the little table in the library where he and Weasley and Susan Bones were studying as if he was sitting on a throne.

“Are you?” Potter examined her and then gave her a small smile. It didn’t really do anything for his face, which was sometimes ordinary and sometimes flushed or guarded at the oddest times. Hermione had watched him a lot last year, to see if she could learn the secrets on her own, but annoyingly, she hadn’t been able to. “Will you take a vow to protect them?”

“Why would I? I bet Weasley didn’t have to!”

“You’re not me, Granger!”

Hermione turned back to Potter in time to surprise a faint, fond smile flickering on his lips. She stared at him, but he didn’t explain why. He just shrugged and stood up. “Ron is my best friend. I trust him. I like you and I think you’re a good student, but I don’t trust you yet.”

I want to.

He didn’t speak those words, but Hermione was sure she heard them. She didn’t know why Potter would want to trust her, if it was because he thought she was a good student or what, but she seized the advantage.

“Yes, I’ll make a vow. Tell me what to do.” She took out her wand and then looked down at it uncertainly. She hadn’t read much about vows, since it wasn’t one of the subjects that had interested her, and had no idea what to do next.

“You don’t need your wand.” Potter extended his hands. They were just ordinary hands, but Hermione eyed them carefully anyway as she took them. It wouldn’t have surprised her to see them start glowing, or for Potter to produce a wand out of thin air. He was so magical sometimes that it stole her breath.

Wait, it does?

Hermione looked up at Potter with wide eyes as memories seemed to cascade back into her head. She’d seen Potter vanish beneath a shimmer of a spell or something else one time when she was walking down the corridor behind him last year, hadn’t she? And his wand had changed, she knew it had! The look of it. And once he’d been talking to someone she hadn’t seen, but he’d mentioned the name Fawkes.

“Did you take my memories away?” Hermione demanded, but her voice came out much smaller than she’d intended.

“I’m sorry, but yes, I did,” Potter said, gently but without shame. “Sometimes you’re too perceptive for your own good, Hermione, and so I used a spell to tuck those memories into a corner of your mind where they could emerge when you were ready to make a vow or otherwise act to protect my secrets.”

Hermione bit her lip. Something in her was telling her to pull away from him, drop his hands, and put as much distance as she could between herself and Potter and his secrets. There was no way this would end well, she thought.

But the rest of her was even more impatient and alive and agog to know how a first-year student, just like her, had managed all those things. And she also wanted to know how to do that kind of magic herself, and how to protect herself against it.

“How do I make the vow?” she asked.

*

Neville Longbottom was quiet, and he knew that made a lot of people overlook him. Gryffindor was supposed to be the House of the loud, after all. Either actually loud people like Fred and George Weasley, or people like Hermione Granger who were proud to proclaim their knowledge and their accomplishments.

But quiet wasn’t the same thing as stupid. And when Professor Snape abruptly began avoiding him, except to snap a warning in class if Neville was about to add the ingredients in the wrong order or stir the potion in the wrong direction, then Neville knew he had someone to thank for it. Professor Snape wouldn’t have done that on his own.

Who’s the strangest person in Hogwarts? Neville asked himself, and had the answer immediately.

Harry Potter, the Slytherin whose best friend was in Gryffindor. Harry Potter, who spent time with all the students from other Houses more than he did his own. Harry Potter, who always seemed slightly preoccupied with things other than classes but had never once given the wrong answer when called upon. Harry Potter, whose spells didn’t go wrong but also didn’t go right the first time. They always built on themselves in carefully modulated escalations instead, until they got to the point that they’d achieved the result that the professors wanted.

Neville thought it was also slightly strange that no one else appeared to have noticed. But maybe more people concentrated on their own efforts to get things right, instead of sitting back and observing like Neville did because he assumed he wouldn’t get a good mark without hours of practice on his own anyway.

He went to thank Potter on a day when he was leaving Herbology and the Slytherins were walking towards it. He slowed his steps, and although they hadn’t spoken beyond a few polite words here and there, Potter immediately turned towards him and lifted his eyebrows expectantly.

Neville took a deep breath. That was another thing he would have expected more people to notice. Potter always reacted as if he was slightly ahead of everyone else, anticipating things they couldn’t see, knowing how things would already go.

But at least it meant this would be a little easier for Neville.

“Th-thank you,” he whispered. “I don’t know what you did but Professor S-Snape leaves me alone now.”

Despite everything, he still expected Potter to frown in confusion or deny it. Because, after all, Neville was wrong most of the time. His grandmother said so. Why should he be right about this?

But instead, Potter gave him a broad, secretive smile and bowed at the waist, sweeping his hand out in front of him.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Come by our table in the library any time, Neville. Maybe we can arrange for a little accident to happen to your wand so that you’ll get one that’s more suited to you.”

Neville’s mouth fell open, and he watched as Potter nodded to him and kept following the other Slytherins to Herbology. Most of them seemed to ignoring him, but then again, Neville thought, feeling faint, they would be used to Potter talking to Gryffindors by now.

Potter had spoken to him like a friend.

Yes, Neville was going by that table in the library. And if he happened to accidentally break his father’s wand and needed to go and get a new one, that was what would happen.

*

“I told you not to touch it.”

Sirius pouted, and then winced as Harry leaned over and brought the sharpened knife he’d conjured down very carefully on Sirius’s right middle finger. He’d given Sirius a numbing potion before this, and Sirius felt nothing as the blade cut through muscle and tendon and his blackened finger fell to the floor.

But it was still disgusting to see.

“I don’t know what came over me, Harry, sorry,” Sirius said sheepishly. Even he couldn’t have mistaken how Dark that ring buried under the floorboards of the shack in Little Hangleton was, although he had rejected his family’s Dark heritage and practices as hard as he could. “The minute I saw it…I just had to touch it.”

“Which I told you would happen.” Harry shook his head at him and gathered up the black, stinking finger in a handkerchief. The instant Sirius had touched the ring, Harry had cast some spell that had contained the curse in his finger. “You’re lucky that Healers know the right spells to regrow things like this.”

“You’re going to Floo one and Memory Charm them like you did the Mind-Healers?” Sirius sat back against the couch and flexed his stump a little. It really didn’t hurt, and Harry had cut it off so close to the hand that it wasn’t big, either.

Sirius felt a sudden, fierce regret that James wasn’t still alive, so Sirius could amuse him by waving the stump at him. Or that Harry didn’t trust Remus enough to bring him into the secret.

“Yes.”

Sirius watched Harry thoughtfully as he burned the finger with an intense fire spell that Sirius didn’t recognize—not that there was anything unusual about that, really. Harry had stopped pretending to act like a normal child around him at all, once Sirius had told him he could drop the pretense. He’d said it was kind of a relief, which Sirius could understand. At Hogwarts, Harry had to act like a child, surrounded as he was by real children and adults who would lose their minds at the sight of what Harry was really capable of. And he had just reached the end of his second year of it. That had to be wearing.

Maybe Sirius was a bad godfather, that Harry’s talents no longer bothered him. But then again, he was exactly the kind of godfather Harry needed, the only one who would have been allowed into his life. That was enough for him.

Kreacher appeared and glared at Harry with his hands on his hips. “Master Harry is not to be lighting fires except in the fireplace!”

“Well, I had to burn a cursed finger,” Harry said, completely unfazed. “And it didn’t even burn the carpet, Kreacher, look.”

It seemed Kreacher didn’t want to look, because he stamped his foot. “Bad Master Harry! Bad Master Harry is not getting any treacle tart this evening!”

Harry immediately let his head droop and sighed sadly. “All right, Kreacher. I know you have to punish me sometimes. It was just I was so looking forward to it after the inferior kind that the house-elves make at Hogwarts…”

Sirius stuffed his fist in his mouth so he wouldn’t laugh aloud at Harry’s expert elf-manipulation. Kreacher was already softening, and patting Harry’s shoulder with a heavy hand that didn’t actually stir many bad memories in Sirius. Kreacher was just so different now.

“If Master Harry is completely getting rid of the cursed finger with the fire…”

“I did, Kreacher, I promise.” Harry smiled at him, and Sirius whistled softly this time. That was the kind of smile that could move armies if Harry really wanted it to.

Harry winked at him over his shoulder while Kreacher disappeared to get the treacle tart. Sirius leaned back on the couch and flexed his hand again. “I know that you’re going to destroy the ring, but what are you going to do after that?”

Harry waved his hand. “Destroy Gilderoy Lockhart’s reputation. He wasn’t coming back for a second year as Defense professor anyway, but he has to suffer for stealing people’s accomplishments and Obliviating them. I meant to do it earlier, but I got distracted with figuring out the protections on the ring.”

Sirius rolled his eyes. “I didn’t mean that. What’s your larger goal, Harry?”

“To make sure Voldemort dies and no one has to suffer under his rule ever again.”

Sirius shivered a little. Harry’s voice got darker than the night sky at moments like this, and he sounded as if he was contemplating murder and liking it. Sirius had never asked for the details of the deaths that he knew had occurred at Harry’s hands, but what he knew was enough to make him swallow.

“And after that? I mean, you must have some other goal, right? Something that’s overarching?”

Harry frowned a little. “Well, I want to stop the Death Eaters, of course, so they don’t pick right back up where Voldemort left off.”

After two years of practice, Sirius no longer flinched at the sound of You-Know-Who’s name. He wouldn’t say it himself, but Harry wouldn’t judge him for that, just like Sirius didn’t judge him for his murders.

He leaned insistently forwards. “But beyond that? What kind of life are you going to lead, Harry? Is it going to be all hunting down Dark wizards and trying to make people safe?”

“It always was before.”

Harry’s mutter was so soft that Sirius almost missed it. He lunged forwards and wrapped his arms around his godson. Harry stiffened all over for a second—damn those Muggles he had lived with—and then leaned against Sirius and let himself be hugged.

“Of course it can be more if you want it to be,” Sirius whispered into his ear. “You can travel the world if you want. We could travel the world. You could learn all the magic you wanted. You could go and become a snake breeder in the wilderness if you wanted. Just let me come with you.”

Harry’s arms abruptly tightened around Sirius with crushing strength. “You’d come with me?”

“I always want to be with you,” Sirius said fiercely, and stopped himself from saying something about how he should have been there for the nine years Harry had spent away from him. Harry just got upset when Sirius blamed himself for that.

Harry took a long, careful breath, and said, “Then I think we need to take care of Pettigrew sooner rather than later.”

“What?”

*

Remus turned his head slowly towards the boy who had come into the compartment, along with two Gryffindors. The Gryffindor boy smelled of sweat and heat and Weasley. Probably one of Molly and Arthur’s younger sons. The girl smelled like parchment and quills and was bickering with the boy.

And Harry smelled…

Like Dark magic.

Remus shivered. He had never smelled a wizard like that, at least not since the days of the first war. And he had probably ignored some of the evidence from his own nose then, or he wouldn’t have been caught so much by surprise at Sirius’s betrayal.

The odd thing about Harry’s scent, though, was that it didn’t smell like corruption of his natural magical talent, the way it always had when Remus smelled it around Death Eaters. Instead, it was as if he was supposed to smell like that, as if nothing was more natural. As if he had been born smelling like that.

Remus was very sure that he had not.

And he was also sure that the speed with which Harry turned towards him, tracking the extremely slight movements that Remus made as he feigned waking from sleep, was unnatural.

Remus had been spotted now, though, so he might as well make the best of it. He sat up and smiled at the children. “Hello. I’m Remus Lupin, and I’ll be your Defense Against the Dark Arts professor for this year. I wanted to know if you had any questions for me? Or alternatively if you could tell me anything about the curse that’s said to be on the position? I did notice that Mr. Lockhart survived.”

“Hello, Mr. Lupin!” The girl was almost bouncing in place, so excited to meet a professor that Remus had to smile. “I’m Hermione Granger, and these are my best friends Ron Weasley and Harry Potter! And you must not have seen today’s Prophet.”

Remus’s senses tingled, and only partially because of the quiet, dark smile on Harry’s face. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Granger. No, I haven’t had time to read it, what with the traveling. Do you happen to have a copy?”

Granger dug into her robes and held out a battered, folded paper. Remus opened it and stared at the picture of Gilderoy Lockhart trying to hide from the camera. The photograph was so focused on him that it didn’t show the faces of the people on either side of him, but there was little doubt that they were Aurors escorting him to prison.

FRAUD AND FAKE!: THE TRUE STORY OF GILDEROY LOCKHART!

Remus flipped through a few pages and shook his head. He had known that Lockhart’s werewolf book was nonsense, of course, but he hadn’t been sure about the others. “And so he really did nothing that he said he did?”

“Other than dispense fashion advice,” said Harry.

Remus put down the paper and focused on Harry again. He sat on the far side of the compartment from Remus but also from the Gryffindors, and his face held a faint, smug glow. It made Remus wonder how much he’d known about Lockhart’s fall before it happened, but there was no polite way to ask.

“I just can’t believe it!” Miss Granger was lamenting. “He always seemed so accomplished when he was teaching our classes—”

“When he was giving us quizzes about his favorite color?”

Mr. Weasley’s question set the Gryffindors off again in their bickering. Harry smiled and looked out the window.

Remus licked his lips. He probably wouldn’t have a better chance to ask Harry the questions he wanted to, what with his friends distracted.

“I wanted to tell you that I was a good friend of your parents,” he said softly to Harry. “I was saddened to hear of their passing.”

Harry swung around and stared at him, his eyes widening. Remus had the odd feeling that he wasn’t actually surprised about the revealed information, but what else could it be? “Thank you, Professor Lupin,” Harry said after a minute. “I didn’t hear anything good about them for the first years of my life, so it still helps when someone speaks nicely about them.”

Remus frowned. “Who would tell you bad things about them?” As far as he knew, everyone except Death Eaters regarded Lily and James as heroes, or at least was smart enough to say so in public.

“Oh, the people I lived with. My Muggle aunt and uncle, the Dursleys.” Harry’s face was blank as he spoke the words, but his eyes were the most intense Remus had ever seen.

Remus felt as though someone had punched him in the stomach, and he sank back into his seat again. Of course Sirius hadn’t been available to take Harry, and Remus had stayed at a distance because of his guilt over suspecting Sirius but not warning Lily and James quickly enough, plus his condition, but there had been no one else who could have—?

He swallowed. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Potter. I am truly sorry.”

For some reason, Harry relaxed at that. Perhaps he’d thought Remus had known his aunt and uncle, too, and would try to defend them? “It’s all right, Professor Lupin,” he said. “I’m much happier since I started Hogwarts.”

His eyes went to his friends, and there was something deep and kind in them. “Very happy,” he repeated softly.

At that moment, Remus decided that all the rumors he’d heard flying around about Harry—because he was in Slytherin, or because mysterious things happened at the school and some people had decided Harry was the most likely cause, for some reason—were false. No one who was as Dark and evil as Voldemort could have looked at his friends like that, with such protective devotion.

And Gryffindor friends, at that. Surely Harry ignoring the House rivalry proved what a big heart he had.

“I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Potter,” Remus murmured, and was rewarded with a beaming smile of his very own.