lomonaaeren

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Chapter Sixteen—Excellence

“You saw that vile article Skeeter wrote, mate?” Ron was hovering in the doorway of Harry’s dining room, where Jamie was sitting at the table with a bowl of porridge and chattering away to Sapphire about how much fun they were going to have with Scorpius today. Ron’s eyes darted to Jamie, then back to Harry.

“Yeah.” Harry dragged his hands over his face. It hadn’t mattered that Skeeter hadn’t got anything out of him the other day, or that the Animagus wards now barred her from the school. She had written a nonsensical article anyway, and attacked Draco and the other parents who sent their children to the school, delicately suggesting that they could be corrupted by their closeness to “a false hero” who “needed to spend more time in St. Mungo’s than he did.”

“You haven’t—”

Harry shook his head. “Jamie has no idea.” Jamie could technically read simple words, but not whole articles, and Harry had taken care to keep the paper turned away from him that morning, so he couldn’t see the lead photograph, of Harry stumbling shell-shocked out of St. Mungo’s the first time he’d heard about Bandler’s betrayal.

“Daddy?”

Harry turned around, shoulders tense, but Jamie just wriggled in his seat and said, “Are we going over to Scorp’s house?”

“Yes, just a few minutes, Jamie,” Harry hissed soothingly.

“Okay.” Jamie went back to stirring patterns in the porridge with his spoon.

Harry sighed and turned back to Ron, only to find his best friend staring at him with narrowed eyes. “What?”

“You really are more comfortable with Parseltongue than you used to be. I didn’t think I’d ever see the day.”

Harry shrugged and stayed silent. He didn’t want to say anything about Ginny, not when Ron was her brother, and the recent things he had discussed with Draco were—private, which left silence.

“I’ll see what we can do about that.” Ron nodded at the article. “I don’t think Skeeter ever did register her Animagus form. A threat from Hermione might make her back off.”

“I think Draco will want to do something about it first. Wait until he does?”

“You call him by his first name?”

“I’m more comfortable with a lot of things, Ron.”

Ron paused, and opened his mouth as if to say something, and then shook his head and closed it. He clapped Harry on the shoulder, glared one more time at the photograph and headline, and then turned and walked back to the Floo, vanishing in a rush of green flames.

Harry sighed, rubbed his forehead, and glanced at Sela. “I should have let you bite that confounded woman.”

“She is behind the article?”

Harry nodded as he started walking towards his own room, to change into the robes that he wore when teaching. “She’s using a picture that someone else took, I think, but that article and its terrible wording is all her.”

“Allow me to bite her if Draco does not do whatever you think he will do.”

Harry half-laughed. “You understood that conversation in English I had with Ron, then? I think your abilities are growing more than you told me about.” He deposited her on the bed as he took off his pyjamas and went to reach for his teaching robes.

“I am growing much stronger,” Sela said in a tone so smug that Harry could have petted the strands of it hanging in the air. “And you are growing closer in your bond with me, so that you can use one of my tricks if you want.”

Harry glanced back at her as he settled the collar of the robe around his neck. “What are you talking about?”

“Hold out your hand and think about how much you dislike the Skeeter woman.”

That wasn’t hard, and it didn’t sound like it would hurt anyone even if it somehow went wrong, so Harry stuck his hand out and thought about it, letting his eyelids droop as he concentrated on the woman writing those stupid articles about him and Hermione during the Tri-Wizard Tournament, the book she had written about Dumbledore, the way she had come up to him more than once when he had Jamie with him—

“Look at your hand,” Sela said, at the same moment as Harry felt a drop of something like rainwater land on his skin.

Harry blinked and looked. There was water pooled there, or so he thought for a moment. Then he turned his head, and the liquid caught the light and scintillated in a way that made it look more like Veritaserum.

“What is this?”

“Venom,” Sela said happily, and wriggled back and forth on the bed while Harry clenched his muscles so he wouldn’t try to fling the liquid across the room. Sela wouldn’t have had him do something that could hurt him, he repeated in his head. “Now, when you want to, you can produce venom from your hands the way I can from my fangs.”

Harry carefully cleared his throat. “How do I make sure that it doesn’t harm me or Jamie?”

“This venom will do no harm to anyone you like or anyone who is a Parselmouth,” Sela said, and drew herself up in a haughty motion as though she was Edwina and coiled that way all the time. “So you cannot use it if you get irritated with your Draco. But you could use it on Skeeter or Bandler or any of the others who annoy you.”

“What will it do to them?”

“Make them suffer.”

Harry shot a glance at Sela from the corner of his eye, but she only hissed happily to herself and slithered to the edge of the bed, staring at him again. “I need something that’s more specific than that.”

Sela’s tongue shot out, but she didn’t sound sulky when she said, “It will cause them intense pain along their nerves—yes, that is what you call them. If you concentrate on making them suffer more, it will cause them stronger pain.”

Harry stared at the venom on his palm. “And how do I make it stop forming?”

“Wish for it.” Sela’s tone now said he was stupid.

Harry clenched his hands together and closed his eyes. He thought of having dry hands, of not excreting venom from them anymore, and felt the wetness vanish. He turned his hands over, and found nothing there anymore. He sighed and let his arms slump down by his side before he turned to look at Sela.

“That’s dangerous.”

“It is, but so are all serpents.”

Harry flexed his hand back and forth for a moment, and then nodded slowly. He supposed it was no worse than casting some of the spells like the one that he had used in Diagon Alley. And he could turn it on and off easily enough that he didn’t think he would poison anyone with a casual touch.

Yes, he could do this. And knowing that he could fight Skeeter if he had to…

It made a cold smile break over his face as he turned to scoop up Sela from the bed, even knowing he might not ever use it.

*

“The article?”

Draco nodded to Harry and turned on his heel with a snap of his cloak, too furious to want to speak within earshot of the children. Harry seemed to understand him, and fell in behind him without attempting to stay and speak to the children the way he usually did after his lessons.

Draco made his way towards his office with the anger steadily growing inside him. Edwina looped her tail around his neck and turned back to look at Harry and Sela, unexpectedly speaking directly to them. “Do either of you know why this woman wants to stalk you like prey?”

Harry drew in a little hissing breath of surprise, but he answered quietly, after what Draco thought was a glance at Sela. “She wants me to do interviews with her—speak with her and tell her my secrets. She wants me to be vulnerable prey. I declined to be, and one of my friends discovered a secret of hers and used it to make her do what we wanted.”

“She is stupid, then. She should have been stronger, and she has no right to punish you for being the strong one.”

“I agree,” said Sela. “And now that Harry can produce my venom, there is no reason for him to be weak at all, or cringe before her.”

Draco blinked and turned around. Harry came to a stop and blinked at him. “You can produce venom?” Draco asked slowly. That was something he couldn’t do with Edwina, although to be fair, she had shared other gifts with him that had made him not miss this one.

“Yes, from my hands. She swears that it won’t harm other Parselmouths or anyone I don’t want it to,” Harry added hastily, as if he thought Draco would be worried about the students in the school. “I promise that I won’t use it on anyone who’s not a threat.”

Draco smiled slowly. “I don’t worry about that kind of thing when it comes to you, Harry. You’re the least likely person I can think of to harm someone unnecessarily.”

Harry shot him a startled glance, and then looked at the floor, a flush making its way over his cheeks. Draco would have liked to stand there and watch it proceed, but they did have to talk about what their response to Skeeter’s article would be, fantasies of poisoning her aside. He opened the door to his office and waved Harry into it. Harry walked in and sat down at the chair in front of the desk.

He looked startled again when Draco dragged his own chair out from behind the desk to sit down next to him.

Draco kept himself from shaking his head as he sat because Harry was sure to misunderstand it, but he wanted to. They had so far to go, still. Harry needing a friend was only the beginning. He simply expected nothing from anyone who wasn’t a close friend or a member of the Weasley family.

Maybe it had been vital for him, in some ways. He appeared determined to do something about Skeeter’s article, not surprised by it, the way Draco had been. He had managed to go on living after his wife had rejected their son, and not blame her.

But it was still bloody infuriating.

“Where do you want to begin?” Harry asked. “Dissociating me from the school?”

Draco glared at him. “No. I think that we should begin with a direct assault. Get our own article out there.”

“How? The Quibbler won’t publish again for a month, and I don’t think the Prophet would publish anything I sent them.”

“Not you by yourself. But the two of us? Along with several other well-placed Parselmouths, all of whom happen to be purebloods? Yes, they will.”

Harry blinked hard, visibly reminding himself that he had allies now, evidently. Draco swallowed his irritation and reached for ink and parchment. “Do you want me to take the lead on this?”

“Yes, please,” Harry said, and his mouth twisted a little. “In the past, when I tried to defend myself, people haven’t…believed me that readily.”

“That’s because of Bandler.”

“No, it happened in Hogwarts, too,” Harry said quietly. “No one believed me when I said I wasn’t the Heir of Slytherin except my closest friends. Even one of them doubted me when I said I hadn’t put my name in the Goblet of Fire. The Prophet and the Ministry spent a year calling me and Dumbledore liars.” He sighed. “I don’t know why people are so eager to believe the worst of me, but it hasn’t changed much over the years.”

Draco kept his head bowed so that he didn’t have to meet Harry’s eyes as he scribbled down some notes about where the article should begin. He could have said that Harry was one of the magical world’s few celebrities and they consequently focused so much of their attention on him that the slightest fall from grace could affect him, but Harry would have found it depressing, not reassuring.

“I’ll begin by announcing my full confidence in you as a teacher at our school,” he said, and began to write.

Harry watched in silence, other than now and then speaking to Sela in a soft tone that Draco did his best not to concentrate on. At least once, Harry was asking Sela to go find Jamie and come back with news of where he was, which was apparently at lunch and doing fine. It reminded Draco of how much trust Harry had shown him by letting his son spend the night at Draco’s house.

And when he was trying his best to concentrate on pointed, honeyed words, that kind of thing was distracting.

“All right,” Draco said at last, sitting back and stretching his arm over his head to flex his fingers. “Listen to this. I recently hired Mr. Harry Potter to be a professor at my school. I rely on him because of his Parseltongue, not in spite of it. He is one of the few people who was known as a Parselmouth before the fall of Voldemort, and one of the few who can explain to our children the prejudice that Parselmouths still labor under—a fact confirmed by the previous article about Mr. Potter in this paper.”

Harry laughed quietly. Draco smiled up at him, enjoyed the way his eyes sparkled, and lowered his eyes to the parchment again.

“Miss Pansy Parkinson says… and we’ll get a quote from her. Mr. Gregory Goyle says… and likewise.”

“Would they be willing to speak up for me? I mean, you’re my friend, but they’re not.”

Draco snorted a little, ignoring the warm feeling that swelled in the middle of his chest. He should be encouraging Harry to have more friends, not fewer. “They’re fellow Parselmouths, Harry. And they’re my friends. I know that they can see as well as I can the advantages of having you on the teaching staff and supporting the school, even if all else fails.”

Harry nodded. “What about the rest of the article?”

“A delicate reminder that you’ve already been damned for your Parseltongue, and yet the deadline Leroy Bandler set, that you would go mad and kill someone because of it inside two years, has come and gone without any sort of incident.”

Harry stared. “I’d forgotten he said that.”

“I probably wouldn’t have remembered it, either, but I read the article where Bandler said that recently. Don’t worry, I’m going to prepare some exquisite revenge on him as well.”

Edwina hissed in approval, but Harry’s face blanched, and he leaned forwards. “Draco, if anything happens to him, I’ll be blamed. I’ll be investigated. This time, they might find something or manage to arrest me and have it stick. That’s why I had to use the Memory Charm on him.”

Draco sighed. “Harry, you’re under my protection now, and I told you one reason why this article is going to get published. That reason will shelter you from persecution by the Aurors and Bandler, too.”

Harry was silent, one hand rising to stroke Sela, who was back on his shoulder after her errand to find Jamie.

“You don’t trust me?” Despite himself, Draco couldn’t keep the bite out of his voice.

Harry sighed. “I trust you. I don’t trust the Ministry, or the justice system, or the Prophet, or Skeeter. She’ll probably just publish another article on me after this one comes out, maybe even interview Bandler for it, and we’ll be in some kind of escalating cycle that—I know it’s going to harm Jamie. I know it will.”

“You have my word that I’ll protect the two of you.”

“But Skeeter—”

“Isn’t all-powerful, Harry. Hell, Granger and Weasley helped you cope with her when you were still in school. Did you really think that she could just get her way now without my stepping in to stop her?”

“I was—afraid that she’d be able to influence public opinion no matter what. Hermione tamed her for a little while, but it didn’t stop her.”

Draco snorted. “If she publishes another article after the one we put out, and she quotes Bandler, then we’ll publish one about how she’s an illegal Animagus. That ought to get her enough attention to concentrate on someone other than us.”

Harry blinked a little. “Not turn her over to the Aurors?”

“We’d have to explain how we knew and, if it came out that we’d known for a while, why we didn’t do anything about it until now. Now, we can pretend that we found out because of the wards on the school, and we were so highly emotional about it because of her articles that we struck back in a public forum. Of course, we shouldn’t have done that, but—” Draco lowered his eyes contritely. “Our emotions were running too high. It’s tragic that we didn’t think of the consequences, but, oh, well.”

Harry laughed. Draco looked up at him and felt his chest tighten at the light in Harry’s eyes. It wasn’t one that he thought many people had ever seen, especially since the end of the war.

“All right, Draco. You win. And I do trust you. You know that.”

Harry’s voice was low, charged, intimate. Draco met his gaze and found it hard as hell to look away. Only Edwina’s tail curling hard around his throat made him cough and look down at the parchment.

“Is there anything you can think of that you’d want to add?”

“No. Honestly, I’m not much of a writer. Do what you need to do.”

But, as it turned out, Harry had a few suggestions when Draco asked the right questions, and they spent another pleasant fifteen minutes hashing out the contents of the article before Harry had to go teach another lesson. Draco sat back and studied his draft, and even the lines he had crossed out, in satisfaction.

“You would like to mate with him.”

“Yes,” Draco agreed. He didn’t see the point in contradicting Edwina when she was right.

“Does he know that?”

Draco snorted softly as he reached up to caress her scales. “Probably not.”

“He should.”

“I think,” Draco said as he stared at the door, “that I’ll tell him when it’s the right time.”