lomonaaeren

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Chapter Two—Calling Home

“Back in Black!”

While Harry waited for the Floo to connect to Sirius’s house, he rolled his eyes. His godfather had had numerous names for his houses or flats over the years, but Harry thought the last one was particularly ridiculous.

“Harry?” Sirius’s head appeared in the Floo, while his jaws stretched in the kind of enormous yawn that he mostly used as a dog. Then it passed and he was grinning at Harry normally. “Harry, how are you?”

“Well, Snape and Mother called me home, as you know.”

“Wait, you’re not Flooing me from their house, are you?”

“They don’t realize I’m in contact with you, Sirius, so of course not.”

Sirius sighed a little and shook his head. “I thought you were going to tell Lily.”

“And I thought you were going to write a letter to her that wasn’t loaded with insults. Or wasn’t a Howler.”

“That was only one!”

Harry raised his eyebrows higher. Sirius sighed again. “Yes, yes, all right, neither of us is telling her as much as we probably should.”

Harry nodded. Sirius (and Remus, although mostly by proxy) and Lily had had some huge fight when Harry was three or so, about the same time she had decided to marry Snape. Sirius had hunted down and killed Peter Pettigrew, who had betrayed them to Voldemort, and because he’d done it bloodily, messily, and in public on a Muggle street on France, he was a wanted fugitive in two countries. From what Sirius had said, he had tried to send Harry letters when Harry was seven or eight, but Lily and Snape had confiscated and burned them all.

Only when Harry went to Hogwarts was Sirius able to write freely to him, and meet up with him sometimes during the holidays—all of which Harry spent at school except the summers—and, later, on Hogsmeade weekends. Harry was glad to have a relationship with his dad’s best mates, but it was a little uncomfortable, having to hide it from his mother.

He also wished he could have rubbed it in Snape’s face, but that was neither here nor there.

“Why did they call you back to that miserable house of theirs?”

“They say I that can’t see Jennifer and Rosanna on a regular basis unless I pass the Potions NEWT.”

“What?”

Sirius’s shout was so bark-like that Harry wasn’t surprised to hear Remus’s voice coming from the other side of the flames, although slightly surprised Sirius hadn’t outright transformed into a dog. Harry leaned back with his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling, while Sirius explained the outrageous thing to an equally outraged Remus.

“And you’re going along with this?”

Harry grimaced and rubbed his forehead. The old scar there tingled a little under his touch. He wondered if it was being back under the wards at Lily and Snape’s house—even though he was in the Leaky Cauldron right now. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I? I tried to write to them, and the letters got intercepted. I tried to visit at Christmas that year after I finished at Hogwarts, and got told Snape didn’t want me around his children. I want some kind of relationship with them, Sirius. They’re—the only blood family I have.”

Sirius softened a second later. “I know. It’s just ridiculous!”

“I know.” Harry rolled his eyes. “But Mother’s just going along with Snape’s whims the way she always does. Too busy locked away in the Department of Mysteries or her office at the house studying—whatever she’s studying.”

“You’ve never worked that out?”

Harry shook his head. He knew the Unspeakables were split into various groups based on whether they studied death or time or truth or something else, but he didn’t know which area his mother worked in. “Snape probably knows. I don’t think even Jennifer or Rosanna do, though.”

“So, is the greasy git teaching you Potions?” Remus asked, shoving his head into the Floo beside Sirius’s and causing a bit of jostling.

“No, that would be a disaster for us both,” Harry said, rolling his eyes at the thought of it. “It’s some bloke they’ve hired who was apprenticed to a famous brewer or something. He’s called Tom Gaunt.”

“Gaunt?”

Sirius’s eyes were narrowed, his lips pulled back from his teeth. Remus reached out and settled a hand gently on Sirius’s face. Harry shrugged. “I know, but I asked him and he said that he didn’t share those ideals.”

He kept to himself what had made him uneasy about Gaunt, his sheer intensity. That wasn’t something he could easily explain in words, and if he managed, it would probably make Sirius think about charging back to Britain to “rescue” Harry or something. He had to stay in Italy if possible. He and Remus had settled there, Remus had found employment in a community that didn’t care he was a werewolf, and Harry didn’t want them to uproot their lives for him.

Remus gave him a tired smile, as if he knew exactly what Harry was thinking. “When do you have to take the NEWT?”

“By summer.”

“Then I suppose we won’t be seeing much of you before then.”

Harry nodded. It was a hard Apparition jump from France to Italy, but he could make it. “Sorry. Just too much chance now that one of them would catch me sneaking off. And I probably need all that time to study for the stupid NEWT anyway.”

“You weren’t a bad Potions student at Hogwarts, from what you told me.”

“But never up to Snape’s standards. And I didn’t get the natural gift that Mother and Jennifer and Rosanna all seem to have for it.”

“James liked potions all right, but it wasn’t his forte,” Sirius spoke up. “I remember one time that he was so busy staring at your mum he dropped two gooseberries into the Draught of Sweet Sleep instead of one…”

Harry leaned back on his elbows and listened with a smile as Sirius spoke. He knew that it was one way for the last Marauders to feel close to Harry’s Dad and mourn his death.

And if it led to them swearing revenge on Snape and thinking up ideas that made Harry laugh…

Well, that was a good time, even if Harry wouldn’t get to put them into practice.

*

“Harry.”

Harry looked up. He’d come into the house fairly early, taking the Floo from the Leaky Cauldron, and he had thought Snape would already be locked up in his lab and Lily would be at work. But here she was standing in front of him, her face pale and her eyes wide.

“Mother?” Harry asked slowly, straightening. “Did something happen?”

Lily abruptly lunged forwards and hugged him so hard that Harry made a little “oof” sound. He couldn’t remember the last time she had held him like this, tightly, like he was precious and he would fade away if she looked in the other direction. In fact, he thought it was probably just before Snape had come into their lives.

That’s right. She held me like this all the time right after Dad died. She didn’t let me go anywhere for months without her. She slept beside my bed with her hand on my chest, or my forehead. I remember.

Why haven’t I thought of that?

“It has to work,” Lily whispered against his shoulder. “I promise, Harry, I’m going to try my hardest to make it work.”

“Make what work?” Harry whispered back. He had the feeling that they were on the verge of something precious and real, maybe more real than they’d had since he went off to Hogwarts.

“The experiment. The reason you have—”

The Floo behind Harry flared, and he nearly stumbled trying to get out of the way. Gaunt unfolded himself from within it, handsome and smoothly-moving even with the simple spell he was casting to get the soot off his robes. He paused when he saw Harry in Lily’s embrace, and his eyebrows crept up.

“I can leave, if you need me to,” he offered, a hardness underneath his voice that Harry didn’t trust. It was all gentle on the surface, of course.

“No,” Lily said, and pulled back, rubbing at her eyes. Already she was settling back into the distant woman Harry knew. She gave Harry a smile that didn’t have a tremble to it. “I have to go into work. I hope that you’ll get on well, Harry, Mr. Gaunt.” She turned and swept away with a motion of her cloak, shutting the door of her study behind her with such a decisive click that Harry could almost imagine the whole hug had been a dream.

Harry stared at the door, gleaming with golden, crisscrossing wards.

What was that about?

“Are you all right, Harry?”

Harry started and turned to face Gaunt. It oughtn’t to be easy to forget someone so powerful and skilled and odd, but he had. Harry shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Something about an experiment she was working on.”

Maybe she was going to say, “The reason you have a distant mother.”

Hope tried to well up in him like water. Harry tamped it down expertly. He had given up hope of a real parent a long time ago. His father had loved him enough to die for him. That would have to be satisfactory.

“Hmmm.” Gaunt twitched his head to the side. “What area of the Unspeakables does she work in?”

“I have no idea.”

“What?”

“I have no idea,” Harry repeated, frowning at Gaunt a little. “She doesn’t talk about work. They don’t, you know. That’s why they’re called Unspeakables.”

Gaunt blinked a little, and then gave a low chuckle. “Yes, yes, I should have known. Let’s go to the library and begin on our study, Harry.” He slid a hand into place on Harry’s back, as if it had always been there, and escorted him along the corridor.

Harry stepped away from him pointedly, and walked the distance alone.

He had the feeling that Gaunt’s eyes were locked on his back with amusement more real than what had been in the chuckle, but he didn’t turn around to check.

*

“You are not dicing the lacewings correctly.”

Harry glared at Gaunt over the top of the cauldron simmering between them. The flame beneath it was turned down low, a trick Gaunt said could be used when one was doing a potion with many steps. It was one of several useful things Harry had already learned from him that Slughorn had never taught them.

“I know how to dice things.”

“Not these. They’re small and delicate, and you’re ruining their potential to give the potion strength.”

“Want to show me how, then?”

Harry half-expected Gaunt to flush and storm out of the room, the way Snape would have done if challenged like that. But Gaunt only smiled and stepped away from the wall he was leaning against. “I would enjoy that.”

Harry stared at him, caught off-guard, and Gaunt chuckled a little as he slid an arm behind Harry’s shoulder and down Harry’s own arm. His fingers entwined with Harry’s, and Harry shuddered as he felt warm breath on his ear.

“Like this,” Gaunt whispered.

Harry watched in half a daze as Gaunt diced the lacewings in such a way that thin slivers of wings fell away from their bodies and their thoraxes collapsed in multiple shining drifts of chitin. He was twisting Harry’s hand only a little, flexing and snapping the knife in ways that Harry had never seen before, but knew he could imitate since he had felt them.

Gaunt pulled his hand back, slowly, fingers sliding up Harry’s skin to his shoulder. Harry arched his neck and then pulled himself flat-footed and down. It wasn’t Gaunt’s fault that Harry hadn’t had sex in almost a year.

But it was Gaunt’s fault that he had taught Harry to dice lacewings like that. So Harry turned around with a smile and said, “If you touch me again like that without permission, I’ll curse your bollocks off.”

“You know such a curse?”

“I work at a magical creature sanctuary where we also have ordinary livestock to help provide food for some of our creatures and wilder plants. I’ve gelded several.”

Gaunt stared at him. Then he said, “Such curses that are meant to work on an animal would not work on a human.”

“Who says that I only studied the ones that work on animals?”

Harry was lying, a bit. There were no comparable curses that worked on humans; the Castration Curse would just chop someone’s cock off, not their bollocks. But Harry had done some studying of spell modification, and altered that one, with Snape in mind.

Not that he would ever get to strike back at his stepfather. But even imagining that he could was enough to soothe some distant pain in him.

Gaunt threw his head back and laughed. The laughter seemed to crawl through the library, and Harry shuddered a little, turning back to regard the glittering piles of lacewing fragments around the cauldron.

“I would underestimate you at my peril,” Gaunt murmured, moving up behind Harry again. But despite the warm shadow of his body heat a millimeter or what felt like a millimeter away, he didn’t touch Harry again. “Still, I believe that you know how to chop lacewings now.”

Harry reached out and picked up the knife, then another set of lacewings. And yeah, he knew. It was as if Gaunt’s motions and touch had sunk into his skin, to wait beneath it and operate like a second skeleton beneath his own.

He shouldn’t have reacted that way. Harry had had lovers he wasn’t that in tune with.

He tucked the idea silently away inside his head, another mystery about Tom Gaunt.

*

“You handle Potions instruments well for someone who needs so much instruction in them.”

Harry wasn’t sure what Gaunt meant. He shrugged and continued eating his sandwich. He’d gone to the kitchen to make one for himself, and Gaunt had followed. Harry had ended up making one for him, too.

He was afraid that otherwise, Gaunt would try to “guide” him again.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what you want me to say,” Harry told him plainly, and looked into the man’s eyes as he sipped from his mug of butterbeer. “Is it a compliment? An invitation to complain about my stepfather? I don’t know.”

“Do you often complain about your stepfather?”

Harry shrugged again and returned to his meal. He had cast detection charms on all the cheese and tomatoes and mustard he had put on his sandwich and Gaunt’s. He wouldn’t put it past Snape to have slipped potions or poisons into them.

“I understand that your sisters are at Hogwarts,” Gaunt said, spreading one hand flat on the table as if yielding gracefully to Harry’s silence.

Harry didn’t think Gaunt had ever really yielded gracefully in his life, but he accepted the subject change and nodded. “Yeah. Jennifer’s a fifth-year and Rosanna’s a second-year.”

“And you have next to no relationship with them.”

The mustard tried to curdle in his stomach. Harry shrugged a third time and went back to eating. He wanted to say Not for lack of trying, but there were things he could tell Sirius and Remus that he would never be able to tell Gaunt.

“Harry?”

“Potter’s fine.”

“I wish to call you Harry.” Gaunt’s voice was low and insistent, and he leaned across the table a little. Harry watched him, wondering what his game was. He might have been trying to get close to the Boy-Who-Lived, but he hadn’t made any allusions to Harry’s fame after the first day, or hinted slyly about the benefits that knowing Harry could confer on him. “And I wish for you to call me Tom.”

“Why?”

“I have had few people I could be close to, in my life. My parents…” Gaunt shook his head. “They were out of my life quickly enough. And my master hardly encouraged me to do anything but learn Potions. She was demanding. I have had few relationships with my equals, either. Now that I have the potential for one, I want to savor it.”

Gaunt even said the word savor as though he were running his hand up Harry’s leg or neck, Harry thought sourly. “I’m not your equal.”

“Oh?” Gaunt’s head tilted slowly. “I did not think that you thought yourself above me, but I suppose you might. Famous all over Britain, magically powerful, talented in Defense from all I have heard, working at such a prestigious job—”

“I meant that you’re a lot more powerful than I am,” Harry snapped. “And don’t pretend that we’re intellectual equals. I’m not stupid, but I’m not as smart as you.”

Gaunt paused. His face went blank. In the silence, a slice of tomato slipped out of his sandwich and landed in the middle of his plate with a plop. Harry snorted a little and kept eating, hoping the awkward lunch would be finished soon so they could go back to studying.

“You think I’m more powerful than you are?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“This is not about my prowess with Potions.”

Harry stared at Gaunt. “Why are you playing obtuse?”

“I am not.” Gaunt’s voice was deep, soft, the kind of thing that a lover might use to whisper endearments in the dark. Harry shuddered and told himself to stop thinking that way. Gaunt was definitely playing the game, but that didn’t mean Harry had to give in to it. “I truly wish to know how you sense my magic.”

“It buzzes around you,” Harry said, dusting the crumbs of the sandwich off his hands. “Not the way that Mother’s power buzzes around her, or Snape’s. Snape’s is this silent, pointed thing that I can only barely hear, like the swish of a blade past my head. And Mother is just—an almost silent breathing. But yours is louder, so it must be stronger.”

“I have never heard of anyone who could hear magic.”

“It’s a strained metaphor.”

“It’s brilliant.”

Gaunt was staring at him as if he wanted to—

Harry turned away, not enjoying the way his cheeks were scalding. And because of the way he turned, or the angle he was sitting at in the chair, or something else, he happened to see the glint of light in a corner near the ceiling that should not have been there.

“Harry,” Gaunt whispered.

Harry held up a hand and rose slowly to his feet, keeping an eye on the gleam of light. When he tilted his head to the side, it disappeared, but by then, he’d recognized it.

The light like the wards on the doors of Mother’s study.

What was it doing here? There would be no need to ward a random corner of the kitchen ceiling.

Harry walked over to stand beneath the glint and drew his wand. A quick spell made it light up, and he frowned. “I can’t tell what kind of charm that is.”

“A listening charm.”

Harry spun around to see that Gaunt had his wand out and was staring up at the charm, too. “I noticed one earlier in the library,” he murmured. “I didn’t make the connection.”

“Mother is listening to us?”

“Yes.” Gaunt’s eyes returned to Harry’s face, his expression one of heavy calm. “Why would she want to do that, I wonder.”

“I don’t know,” Harry whispered, but inside him was a burning, sinking sensation.

Mother and Snape had invited Gaunt here for more than Potions tutoring, he was now sure. But for what?

I don’t know.