lomonaaeren

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Chapter Thirty-One—Challenges Made, Challenges Faced

It takes Harry a long time, almost the entire walk to the Slytherin common room, to realize what he’s feeling. There was the pain of the dream with Voldemort, and the relief of knowing Theo wasn’t hurt that badly, and the giddy happiness of seeing the headline with Voldemort’s real name in the paper…

He’s pissed off.

He’s pissed off beyond reason that people in the Slytherin common room just have to make some fuss and some political ploy that draws him away from Theo’s side. That he has to play politics. And Theo thought he had to play politics to boost Harry’s standing, or something. Burke thought he had to unleash that spell. Skeeter thought she had to write those articles about Harry. Vane thought she had to call for Harry’s expulsion.

He’s under a lot of pressure, and he’s doing the best he can, and all of this just keeps happening.

He stalks through the common room door. Lion is rearing and fluttering on his shoulder, sensing his mood, but Harry puts a hand up to touch his friend and quietly asks Lion to lie down and stop rearing.

At least it ought to conceal his mood a little from the other Slytherins, who turn to face him. It’s mostly sixth- and seventh-years lingering, since NEWT classes tend to be a little later in general and a lot of them have a free period for a class they didn’t continue with. Their eyes are fixed on him, and their faces are eager. Burke is actually towards the back and doesn’t seem to be interested in facing him, but he’s probably urging them on.

Pansy darts towards him. Harry listens silently as she says, “Some of them heard about Burke, but they decided that he wasn’t really hurt since Professor Snape healed the wounds right away. And then he made a speech, but they’ve decided that you’re really sheltering beneath Professor Snape’s wing and he’s the one they have to worry about, not you.”

Harry’s hands clench. He nods to Pansy, and she skips out of the way so that he can face the older Slytherins.

“You’re a bunch of idiots,” he tells them.

They stare at him. Presumably they think his open anger is too Gryffindor or something stupid like that. Presumably they expected clever insults and a display of Dark Arts, or they just expected him to back down, since Harry’s sure a lot of them don’t really believe he’s dangerous.

Fuck that, frankly. Harry has no time to waste on playing word games with stupid people.

“You really want to serve someone who’ll brand you as a slave, who tortures his followers, who’s a half-blood himself but spouts nonsense about blood purity? Yeah, you’re a bunch of idiots.” Harry rakes his gaze down the line of people who are beginning to fume. “Wankers and idiots.”

There’s a rustle by the fireplace, and a seventh-year girl stands up. Harry doesn’t know her very well, but he knows her name is Sybel Fawley, and that most of her sneers since he came into Slytherin have been directed at him. She has that kind of thin, high face Sirius does that speaks of lots of inbreeding, and her hand is gripping her wand. “What did you call us?”

“What? I don’t really think calling you an idiot and a wanker is much of an insult compared to ‘Mudblood,’ do you?”

Fawley’s wand levels at him. Harry doesn’t draw his. He’s going to demonstrate something that he hopes will get them off his back forever, and make them stop attacking his friends. “Say that again, little boy.”

“Why? Are you too stupid to understand it?”

Fawley doesn’t speak, but a bright red curse fizzles from her wand and towards him.

Harry gestures, and the air in between them fills with a writhing snake, bright golden and green with big yellow eyes. The curse hits the snake and makes it dissolve in a flash of smoke, but he’s proven his point. He can already hear the whispers starting around the common room, “Wandless—that was wandless!”

Fawley rears back and studies him. Her expression is controlled enough that Harry can’t tell if she’s afraid of him or just reconsidering him because he reacted in a way that she didn’t expect.

“I suppose you think that you’re smart?” she whispers.

“Smarter than you when you need the word wanker explained.”

This time, Fawley slashes her wand around in a spell that Harry does recognize, since Shacklebolt was talking about it the other day. The Chain Lightning Curse, it’s meant to sink into your skin and not only shock you but go on shocking you for a long time past the moment when another spell would have faded.

Harry meets it by filling the air with small falling snakes. Most of them fade after the Chain Lightning Curse strikes them, but a few survive to land on the floor. They’re about three inches long and bright yellow. They start crawling towards Fawley.

She steps back from them.

“What are you doing?” Harry asks. “They’re just little snakes, after all, like the ones that bit Burke. They’re nothing to be afraid of, right? You can stand up to them. It’s strange to be frightened of little snakes when you’re not frightened of a little boy.”

“Behind you!” Lion hisses.

Harry wheels around and draws his wand this time, conjuring a Shield Charm. It catches the Blasting Curse flying towards him and redirects it so that it slams into the chairs where the loudest bunch of upper-year students were sitting until a moment ago. They shout and shriek as they scatter from suddenly airborne pieces of wood.

The boy standing behind him isn’t one Harry knows the name of off the top of his head, but he looks like he might be related to Bletchley, who used to be on the Quidditch team. And he has a stronger stomach than Fawley. He just gives Harry an unpleasant smile and starts to whisper another spell.

“You are outnumbered,” says Lion, sounding unhappy.

“Not for long,” Harry says, and as he hoped, speaking Parseltongue makes the people around him pause for at least a second. Some of them flinch from it, although not the boy who looks like Bletchley. He just laughs and raises his wand again.

“Come to me. Support me. Help me,” Harry says, and speaks to the snakes carved on the chair legs and the fireplace mantel and the chandeliers and the corners of the ceiling and the portrait frames and all sorts of other places that he never paid much attention to before this moment.

There’s a rustling stir of movement that courses through the room and makes more than one person duck. Then Fawley shrieks, and stumbles away not just from the little yellow snakes in front of her but one of the big stone ones writhing away from the fireplace. Other people are under attack by snakes creeping down the curtains or slithering up towards their arses on the chairs they’re in.

Harry gestures hard, and a green snake springs into being to twine around Bletchley’s ankles. It doesn’t do much good, only making him stumble instead of fall, but at least it knocks the spell he was going to fire at Harry off-course. Harry springs forwards and Stuns him, since he seems to be one of the nastiest and more courageous fighters, and then looks around the common room.

People are staring at him in fear. It occurs to Harry that this was the very thing Blaise warned him not to do, because it would make people so scared of him that they—

Might attack him.

Harry sneers a little to himself. Blaise was wrong about that, then. It’s gone the other way around in his case.

“Potter! Potter, stop!”

Fawley is yelling from where she stands atop a hastily conjured wooden platform, which hovers a few inches above the floor. It’s not going to help her with the bigger stone snakes, who are busy looping their bodies up the sides of it. Harry waves his hand and hisses, “Stop,” and the snakes freeze.

“Why? Are you going to leave me alone now?”

“You’re—you’re a—”

“Parselmouth, yes. I believed you knew that.” Harry glances around, catching eye after eye that proves people might have known that, but they didn’t understand it.

“You’re a child. You won’t get away with defying the Dark Lord!” Fawley smooths out her robe, which has a tear in it, probably from a pair of stone fangs. “And you want us to—what? Stand up and defy him, too? When we’re all going to die because he’s going to be so angry at you and anyone who follows you?”

“I want you to leave me alone,” Harry snaps. “And leave my friends alone. Don’t stand up to him if you don’t want to. I know courage isn’t a stereotypical Slytherin trait. But if you don’t want to accept my offer of protection or fight on my side, then get out of my bloody way.” He turns his wrist over, and every snake in the room rears and hisses, an echoing and weird sound when it comes out of throats of stone and wood and cloth.

The older students stare at him. Fawley looks as if she’d like to come down off the platform she’s standing on and duel him, but she doesn’t.

Harry wonders wearily if a lot of politics is like this, just scaring people into compliance. He doesn’t want to be like Voldemort. But he doesn’t want to get cursed in the back, either, or have his friends feel compelled to jump in and defend him. He crosses his arms and waits. Lion is rearing again and hissing at people, flapping his wings, and this time, Harry doesn’t feel inclined to stop him.

“What if we made a truce?” Fawley asks abruptly.

“With me?”

“Yes. We swear not to bother you. And you don’t do this again.” Fawley looks down at the stone snake who’s climbed part of the way up the wooden platform to get to her, and then away again.

“Can you really guarantee that everyone in here would listen to you? What about the older students who aren’t here? The ones in my year who might not want to listen? The ones below me who might think they could gain Voldemort’s favor by attacking me?”

Fawley studies him, then looks around the room. Harry has never particularly noticed that she’s a leader, but maybe she’s counting on the experience of fearing his snakes to unite them. “What do the rest of you think? Could we make sure that no one else attacks Potter because they fear the Dark Lord?”

“Yes,” says Bletchley, or the boy Harry thinks is Bletchley, who the emerald snake tripped. He’s glaring at Harry in hatred, but if he’s willing to agree to a truce despite that, Harry assumes most of the other Slytherin students will, too.

There’s another murmur of agreement, even from Burke. Harry thinks about it and has an idea. “If Professor Snape will let me borrow his Pensieve, then you could share the memory with some people who might be reluctant to agree?”

He asks it as a question, and can already hear Theo lecturing him in his head about making it a statement. But Fawley jerks her head back in something that might be surprise, then nods curtly to him. “That could work.”

Harry just manages to refrain from checking his watch. He knows he doesn’t have that long to get to Transfiguration. “Fine,” he says. “So happy doing business with you. And if someone violates the truce, then this is going to look like a mild prank. Return to your positions.”

The snakes on the chairs and mantel and floor and walls turn around and do what they’re told. Bletchley’s eyes are round when Harry sneaks a glance at him, although he sneers as soon as he sees Harry looking. “Think you would be so high and mighty any place but the Slytherin common room, Potter?”

“Why did you confront me here, then?”

That causes Bletchley to turn around and stride away without even attempting an answer.

“Don’t worry about him,” Fawley says. She’s stepped down from the platform and is watching Harry with another unreadable expression on her face. “He won’t cause any trouble as long as we’re all abiding by the truce.”

Harry holds back his snort. She obviously expects him to break the agreement first, which is just stupid, but he can’t tell her why. He tilts his head towards her, and then turns around and walks out of the common room, on his way to Transfiguration.

It occurs to him when he’s halfway there that he’s missed breakfast, but he shrugs off the realization. This is far from the first meal he’s missed.

*

“I wish I’d been there.”

Hermione laughs into her notes. Ron has been waxing poetic about what Harry told them for the last ten minutes. He clearly thinks that Harry facing down Slytherins is like playing Quidditch and not like the deadly serious political move that Hermione knows it was.

Granted, she mostly knows that because of the grim look on Harry’s face when he told them about it, and the looks on some of the other Slytherins’ faces. She doesn’t always understand them as well as she does Harry, but anything that makes Theo smile and Daphne look a little sick and Blaise seem grimly satisfied is serious.

But, well, why should anyone have to explain that to Ron? Let him just think about it like this. From the way Harry’s face is lightening as he looks at him, he appreciates having someone around who just thinks it’s brilliant and doesn’t want to dissect it with him the way his Slytherin friends probably will later.

“It might have been fun to watch,” Harry says with a slight smile.

“Can you conjure snakes like that here?” Ron asks eagerly.

Harry blinks for a long moment. Maybe because he thought Ron wouldn’t want to see things like that, Hermione thinks, peering over the top of the bound sheaf of notes. (The Room of Requirement is great about giving them books on just about any subject they can ask for; the problem is just figuring out how to ask about things like the connection that links Harry and Voldemort).

“I don’t think exactly like them,” Harry says cautiously. “The snakes I create are made of magic, not marble or wood like the ones in the Slytherin common room. But—you’d want to see them?”

“Yeah, mate. It’s pretty brilliant, when you think about it.”

Harry’s face is a study. In the end, he nods. “All right, I’ll conjure some. And maybe we can borrow Severus’s Pensieve and look at the memory.”

“I’d like that.”

Harry half-shrugs and conjures some serpents for Ron to watch. Parkinson, on the other side of the room, cranes her neck for a second, and then goes back to whispering with Luna. Hermione isn’t entirely sure of what they’re planning, but enough to be wary.

She turns back to her own research. The connection between Voldemort and Harry puzzles her, because while it obviously involves some elements of Legilimency, it’s not enough that she can attribute everything to that. Most people still need to use Legilimency by looking into someone else’s eyes. Professor Snape certainly does. And she can find references to sharing dreams, but only when two people are blood-related or have bound themselves in some way in a ritual.

For a little while, she was excited, thinking that she’d found the clue when it came to the resurrection ritual that Voldemort used Harry in. But then she remembered the connection existed before that.

So does it all go back to that night in Godric’s Hollow when Harry’s parents died?

Probably, Hermione thinks, riffling through pages in annoyance. But I can’t see how.

She waits until she’s sure that Harry is deeply involved in the discussion of snake magic with Ron, and then catches Theo’s eye and motions him over with her chin. He raises his eyebrows, but walks over.

Hermione is still a little afraid of him sometimes. Not afraid that he’s going to mock her or call her a Mudblood, but just—he’s so focused. And she has the impression that he would let them all burn if that meant he could save Harry, or if Harry ordered him to.

“Can you tell me more about the dreams that you’ve pulled Harry out of when Voldemort was there?” she asks quietly.

“Not without his permission.”

Hermione sighs. She thought it would probably come to this. “Harry’s already written that down for me,” she says, and pulls the note out of the back of a book to brandish at him. “Because he thought you would probably object.”

Theo blinks a few times. Then he smiles faintly and sits down next to her. “You’re trying to figure out the nature of the link they have?”

Hermione nods and spreads out the book she’s holding so he can get a look at it. “Nothing fits. There’s blood-bonds—but this existed before the resurrection ritual. Ritual links—the same thing. Voldemort certainly wouldn’t willingly create a bond with Harry, and it doesn’t always give him an advantage, given what happened in the last dream they shared. And the effects are strange. Dreams? Physical pain in those dreams? Voldemort being able to establish them but Harry being able to hurt him? And where is it anchored? How could the connection have been there during all the years when Voldemort was a wraith and managed to survive when he almost didn’t?”

“All good questions.” Theo stretches out beside her. “Yes, all right. Ask me anything you want about the dreams.”

Hermione sighs in relief and starts plying him with questions. Harry’s observations of the dreams are good, but they’re always hyper-focused on the threat of Voldemort. Theo might have noticed something else.

And Hermione is going to figure this out, and with it, a way to protect Harry.

And—although she hasn’t confessed this to anyone else yet—free him from that link, and the bloody Dark Lord on the other end of it.