Chapter Twenty-Seven of 'Leopard's Choice'- Shards of Plenty

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Seven—Shards of Plenty

“We could do something about her.”

Theo murmurs that in Harry’s ear as Harry stands in front of the altered room where their study group is meeting today. Harry’s asked the room to conjure a place that’s half dueling room and half study room, and some people are practicing wandless magic or harder spells, while others—Hermione, for instance—are reading intently from the shelves the room has provided.

“Imagine what would happen if we did, Theo.”

Theo blinks and looks at him. Harry turns to face him, and he doesn’t think it’s his imagination that there’s a shadow of green in Theo’s grey eyes, or that he’s altered his stance a little so it looks like he’s crouching to spring. Harry knows that Azkaban changed Sirius, but even more, spending years as a dog did.

He wonders what forcing the Animagus transformation as fast and brutally as Theo has would do.

“She would stop talking about you?”

“She’s not a Slytherin to keep her fear to herself out of shame. She would go and blab something about it to somebody.” Harry shakes his head when Theo frowns harder. “Think about it, Theo. She already stood up in front of the entire Great Hall and tried to call for me to be expelled from the school. You think you could frighten her into keeping quiet? I don’t think so.”

“I meant—not scaring her.”

Harry leans closer. He and Theo are the only ones in this part of the room, with the nearest person being Blaise, who’s practicing conjuring serpents. He takes one look at them and focuses more determinedly than ever on the spell. “You’re talking about something more permanent.”

“Yes. At the least, scaring her so much that she asks to be taken out of school.”

“No.”

“But why? You know there are people you’re going to look weak in front of if you don’t do something about her.”

“Are any of these people whose opinions I care about?”

Theo pauses. For the first time since Vane tried to get Harry expelled, he seems to consider instead of just react. That’s good, Harry thinks. Theo is a great friend and more loyal than Harry probably deserves, but he also isn’t a leopard, and Harry needs to get him past acting like one when prey wanders by.

“Well, no,” Theo admits finally. “Some of the Gryffindors and the older Slytherins, maybe.”

“Right.” Harry sighs and wishes for the first time in a while that the Hat hadn’t put him into Slytherin. He would have liked being able to take his frustrations out on the Quidditch field. “We’ll leave Romilda Vane alone.”

“What happens if she continues calling for your expulsion?”

“She still can’t make a dent. You saw how the Headmistress refused to support her, and none of the Slytherins did, either.”

Theo has an odd expression on his face. “Yes,” he says leadingly.

Harry waits. Theo likes to play word games and dance around the truth—except when he’s calling Harry a Lord, apparently—but Harry has more patience than he does, sometimes. And this is one of those times. Theo finally makes a noise of disgust and mutters, “Those older Slytherins who might think you weak supported you. Why do you think that is?”

“I think that was more about the House, not me. It would set a terrible precedent if a small group of students was able to call for someone’s expulsion. Those older students don’t have a lot of fans even among us.”

Theo sighs and folds his arms. “Or they know that you might protect them and they’re signaling to you—although so subtly I’m not surprised you missed it—that they’re willing to support you in return.”

“Or you’re wrong and it was about protecting themselves.”

“Maybe it’s both.”

They turn around. Hermione has come up to them, the heavy book she’s been reading cradled in the crook of her arm. She looks at Theo for a second, as though cataloguing all the changes that he’s been showing since he achieved the Animagus transformation, and then turns and focuses on Harry. “Maybe it’s both,” she repeats.

“Okay,” Harry says, after a moment’s struggle. Hermione is smart, he knows that, and just because he thinks he’s right doesn’t mean he should reject what she’s saying. “But until one of them actually shows up and asks to work with us here, or, I don’t know, says something to people like Vane, I’m just going to continue treating them the same way I always have.”

Hermione nods in satisfaction and turns to help Ron with a spell that’s meant to blind a dummy and which he’s casting too emphatically to make it work.

“How much motivation do you think they have to change if you don’t reach out to them?” Theo asks softly.

“What?”

“A lot of those older students have Death Eater parents, or relatives. Some of them are unpopular because they’ve been bullies in the past, or because they hurt younger students, or because they have a reputation for cheating. They’re signaling to you that they might change, but if you don’t reach out to them, they’ll stay the same as they always have.”

“I didn’t let Ravenclaw bullies into this group,” Harry says, and for a second, his eyes go to Luna. She’s humming under her breath while drawing runes on the floor in ash. “Why should I accept Slytherin ones?”

“I didn’t necessarily mean into our study group specifically. But if you were to reach out and make allies of them…”

“You’ve been talking to some of them?”

Theo nods.

Harry sighs. He should have known Theo would do this, he supposes, especially because Theo seems to think he’s in charge of—Harry’s political campaign, or something. “The problem is, I don’t know them well enough. I don’t want to try and make an exception for them or save them from their Death Eater parents only for them to run off to those parents and tattle on us.”

Theo’s expression is odd. “You made an exception for me.”

“At a time when I thought I could trust your dad. And then it turned out I couldn’t, but I could still trust you.”

Theo smiles, although his eyes remain intense. “That’s true. Can I at least keep talking to them and see if some of them would be willing to make an oath or definitely declare against Voldemort?”

Harry nods and starts to respond, but just then, he becomes aware that Ron, Hermione, and Blaise have all stopped working and are staring at the door. Luna looks up once and goes back to her work. Zacharias whistles softly under his breath.

Draco is standing in the doorway, one hand clenched down by his side, obviously uncertain of his welcome.

Harry smiles at him and walks towards him with a deliberately slow stride, letting everyone see that he isn’t alarmed. He reaches out with one hand and puts it on Draco’s shoulder, turning a little so that no one else can see them and possibly read his lips. “Have you made your choice?” he whispers.

Draco hesitates long enough that Harry thinks he might just turn around and leave again. Then he nods.

“Then welcome back.” Harry winks at him and turns around to meet Daphne’s eyes. He knows that she didn’t have the same problem with Draco that some of them did; she was more worried about Draco weakening Harry’s position and thus his ability to protect her and Astoria than any insults he’d offered Harry himself. “Daphne, would you show him that new kind of meditation we’ve been practicing to get you ready for wandless magic?”

“Sure,” Daphne says, her eyes narrowing a little, but Harry beams at her and nods encouragingly, and she seems to decide that it’s better than letting Draco wander back out again and possibly tell someone about their new study room. She walks over to Draco and nods to him. He nods back. Harry watches closely, but he doesn’t think the nods are that frosty.

“Well done,” Theo says softly behind him.

Harry glances at Theo and beams. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“For someone who doesn’t want to be a Lord, you handle it awfully well.”

Harry rolls his eyes and goes back to practicing his wandless casting.

*

SHOULD HOGWARTS BE CALLING FOR HARRY POTTER’S EXPULSION?

“I hate that bitch,” Sirius mutters, clutching the paper so hard that it crumples and nearly knocks the sugar bowl over.

“Sirius,” Remus sighs from across the table, but he has his own frown on his face. At least Sirius isn’t alone in thinking that Rita Skeeter would be best severed by being taken down a peg or two.

“Did you see that dreadful article they published about your boy, Sirius?”

And now Narcissa is walking into the kitchen, her frown pinched across her forehead. Sirius studies her and wonders if this means that Draco is back on speaking terms with Harry. Narcissa would probably only be this worried about Harry’s publicity if that’s the case. Otherwise, she hasn’t seemed to care that much.

“Yes, and I’d like to do something about it. Do you have a plan?” Narcissa isn’t a better leader than he is, maybe, at least according to their loose circle of allies, but she knows the way gossip spreads much better.

Narcissa sits at the table and taps her finger for a moment against her lips. Then she smiles. “What if I said I knew a way to get Skeeter on our side, and give her something more juicy to report on, at the same time?” she asks softly.

Sirius blinks. “I would ask why you didn’t say something about this before now.”

Narcissa gives a little dismissive flick of her fingers. “It didn’t seem to me that she was so persistent an enemy as to give up the valuable knowledge I hold. And if we didn’t give her something juicy to report on, then there’s every chance she would resent us enough to find some way around the restrictions we could place on her.”

“What restrictions?” Sirius asks, a little warily.

Narcissa smiles.

*

“You know that you’re going to have to respond at some point.”

“A politics lesson? Again?” Harry doesn’t look up from the potion that he’s brewing under Severus’s supervision. Severus has to admit that he has got better and better at that, something that his self from three years ago would never have believed.

Then again, his self from three years ago would still have been trying to cope with the news that Harry Potter is a successful Slytherin.

“I have never ceased to give you politics lessons,” Severus says, waiting for a moment when Harry can truly pause in the stirring and place the potion under a Stasis Charm. He’s pleased to see that Harry recognizes that moment for himself and places the charm without Severus having to tell him he can do so. “But I disregarded Skeeter as the menace she is. Losing some respect among the Ministry’s flunkies doesn’t matter, or doesn’t matter more than the uneasy truce you have with the Minister at present. But if you lose too much respect among the students here, they have ways they could hurt you.”

Harry sighs. “I have protections against them.”

“Enough for everything they could do?”

“…No,” Harry admits sourly a minute later. “But I have to walk a fine line, don’t I? Blaise told me that some of the other Slytherins were upset when I spoke Parseltongue. If I scare them with that, and they’re upset at the articles or think I’m mental because of them, then they’ll try to hurt me anyway.”

“You must show them how they can benefit.”

“From believing I’m sane?”

“From following you.”

“This again,” Harry says, but not in a tone that’s so full of complaint Severus feels he has to give up hope. “You and Theo.”

Severus arches his eyebrows. “I was unaware that Mr. Nott thought you should encourage some of the Slytherins who are not part of your circle to believe you and follow you.”

Harry shakes his head. “Not that. He’s got it in his brain that I’m some kind of undeclared Lord and that I have to get people to follow me by loudly declaring what I am.” He rolls his eyes a little. “Mind, I’m not sure he’s wrong. But I can say that the last thing I want is to have a bunch of people following me because they’re afraid of me.”

Severus narrows his eyes. It seems he has more to speak with Mr. Nott about than he at first believed. “And were you planning to reach out to them?”

“I don’t know how. My Parseltongue frightens them. They’d just get upset and suspicious if I tried to treat them like friends or made overtures of friendship to them, probably. Driving Umbridge out of the school and making friends of sorts with the Minister didn’t impress them, and I don’t know how I can get a greater political coup than that.”

Severus smiles slowly. “That is where a certain kind of politics lessons we have not spent much time on yet could come in handy.”

Harry sighs and folds his arms, but turns away from his cauldron and flops down on a chair behind him, not showing the signs of resistance to Severus’s instruction that he would have expected. It seems Mr. Nott has truly convinced him. “All right. Let’s have them.”

*

“Are we doing this now?” Blaise whispers, just on the edge of too loud, as he turns so that he’s got his back to the rest of the common room and is facing Harry, who’s looking towards the fire.

“Yes,” Harry says, and then pokes Blaise in the leg as he starts jouncing it up and down. “Assuming that you don’t get so eager that you telegraph it to everybody.”

“Telegraph?” Blaise blinks.

“Never mind. Muggle saying.”

Blaise makes large eyes at him and then raises his voice a little, not enough to be obvious but enough to attract attention, or so Harry assumes Severus would say. “And you’re sure that that’s the Dark Lord’s reason for making you look insane? Because he’s afraid of you?”

The whole room goes silent in record time. Harry smiles at Blaise, and ignores the stares he can feel boring into his back. He asked Severus how to get through to the Slytherins, and Severus told him.

Offer them protection from Voldemort and a rising power to follow.

“If you think about it, what other reason does he have for sending me dreams and lying to me?” Harry asks lightly. “One thing I heard over and over again when I read newspaper articles about the first war was that he never lied, because he didn’t have any need to. He could just show his power to people, and they would roll over. But he lied to me and made me believe that a bunch of Muggles were dead. Why? Why the differences? Unless he’s afraid of me and the support I could gather and felt the need to try and make me look insane.”

“The Dark Lord is afraid of no one!” calls someone sitting near the fire. Harry doesn’t know her well, but he thinks her last name is Allen.

“Well, and he supposedly doesn’t lie, either,” Harry says as peacefully as he can when he wants to correct all of them that the right name is Voldemort. “But he lied to me. What does that tell you?”

There’s a chorus of murmuring, surging voices near the fireplace. Harry turns back to Blaise. “So I don’t see any other reason that he would lie to me,” he says, with a shrug. “He didn’t even lie for amusement in the first war, so why now?”

“Why would he be afraid of you?” someone else calls.

“I survived the Killing Curse,” Harry says, and glances over them with a quick, reluctant flash of his eyes, as if they aren’t worth looking at for long. “I drove him from his host body in my first year. I stopped the Heir of Slytherin’s attacks on Muggleborns in my second year.” He doesn’t like leaving out the details about that, but Severus doesn’t think it would be a good idea if Voldemort learned of them, and Harry has to agree. “I was kidnapped last year, sure, but I survived, and my own dragon destroyed one of his most fervent supporters.” He has to stop himself from reaching for Chaos’s firestone, stop the pulse of grief inside himself from influencing his voice. “Why wouldn’t he be afraid of me?”

There’s a little silence. Harry turns back to Blaise, who’s biting his lip with the effort not to grin. “So, yeah, I think he’s afraid of me, and sitting back and accepting attacks like this has never been my style. Sorted Gryffindor first, you know? I’ll carry the battle to him.”

“You’re mad, Potter.”

That’s Goyle’s voice. Harry lifts his shoulder in a small shrug. “It’s not like I have much choice about fighting, considering Voldemort’s little obsession with me,” he says dryly, and ignores the way that some people reel back from the name. “Or much choice about protecting my friends, whom he wouldn’t spare. But what I can do is make the fight a good one, and make sure that everyone who fights with me is protected as much as possible.”

“How can you possibly do that?” Crabbe is trying to sound superior, but Harry can see the way his hands shake.

“By teaching you how to defend yourself,” Harry says softly, leaning forwards. “Better than any Defense teacher has ever done. By showing you some of the magic that I’ve learned, and that Voldemort has no idea exists.” He lifts his hand and twitches it, and suddenly there are a dozen hissing snakes in the middle of the floor.

Some people scream. Harry twitches his hand again, and vanishes them.

“That was wandless,” says Pansy, her eyes so wide that Harry thinks they might fall out of her head.

Harry gives her a thin smile and faces the others again. “So. Think about it. About why Voldemort is resorting to lies when he never did before, resorting to trying to make people think that I’m mad instead of fighting his own battles. If I really am just an unimportant little boy and not a major enemy of his.”

He stands up and goes to bed in the middle of a humming silence. As he pulls the door of their bedroom shut behind him, he sighs.

I just hope this works.