lomonaaeren

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Chapter Five—The Trade

“Two more counterclockwise stirs.”

Harry narrowed his eyes as he stared down at the rapidly pinkening potion in the cauldron. It was supposed to be Veritas Potion, a forerunner of Veritaserum, which simply put the drinker in a mood where they wanted to tell the truth instead of compelling them to do so. Yet Harry had the distinct feeling it wasn’t supposed to be this rose color right now.

“Why did you stop, Potter?”

“Two more counterclockwise stirs didn’t feel right,” Harry said, turning to stare at Gaunt without taking most of his attention off the potion. He twitched the stirring rod a little, left and right, keeping the ingredients “active.” Gaunt had taught him that, counter to what Snape had claimed when Harry was little, most potions couldn’t be left completely alone unless they were under Stasis Charms or already had ingredients in them that would continue a lively reaction.

Gaunt, who had been copying notes from a book on the history of a war with the centaurs, abruptly stood up. “What does, then?” he asked softly, his eyes fastened on Harry.

Harry lifted his chin. He wasn’t used to Gaunt’s version of taking him seriously, but he wouldn’t show that. “Three more stirs clockwise, then one counterclockwise.”

He expected Gaunt to laugh and make fun of him, which was the only reaction Snape would have had to Harry’s audacity, but Gaunt’s lips parted in a small smile. “Do it.”

Harry turned back to the potion to make the pattern of stirs, ignoring the way that Gaunt’s stare prickled on his back.

The Veritas Potion made a spitting, hissing sound, like soup bubbling in a pot, and Harry flinched. But then it turned a smooth, creamy color, with a hint of blue. Harry blinked. That was a color of the Veritas Potion. It was just a color that usually happened two steps after the one where he’d been.

Harry stared at it and could think of nothing to say. No, wait, he could think of one thing to say. “What the hell.”

Gaunt laughed and prowled towards him. Harry moved out of the way, and Gaunt bent over the potion after only a slight hesitation. He’d probably been trying to get behind Harry and bend over him and act creepy again, but Harry had denied him the chance. Gaunt took a long inhale of the potion and laughed again.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Harry said. Well, less said than demanded.

Gaunt turned towards him, head cocked at an angle that made him appear to be listening to something. “You intuited the nature of the potion you needed to create and resisted my advice, which, while standard, would not have produced as good a result or as fast. Well done.”

“Not as good? So you were trying to sabotage me?”

“Not at all. What I told you would have created a standard Veritas Potion that would work on almost all wizards or witches, except those who are masters of Occlumency or otherwise well-attuned to their own minds and moods. What you have is a powerful potion that would convince even those people to tell the truth.”

Harry pushed the idea of using this potion on Snape out of his head. Snape would probably read it in his thoughts with Legilimency anyway before Harry got the chance to use it. “How did I do that?”

“You are good at Potions.”

“Look, Gaunt, come off it. Why are you here if I’m good at them?”

Gaunt spread his hands. “You are good in a different way than the rest of your family, a manner connected to your talent at spellcrafting. Do you want me to explain, or do you want to hiss at me like an angry Kneazle?”

Harry swallowed back the impulse to swear. “Yes, all right, go on.”

“Straightforward Potions talent can be defined as knowing how to follow recipes. An amazing Potions talent is something like the one your stepfather wields, where he hears and feels the magic of a potion and can make changes to it, or brew it almost in his sleep if it’s a normal, non-experimental draught.

“Intuitive Potions talent is something else again.” Gaunt’s voice almost caressed the words, and he leaned forwards. Harry found himself leaning in even though he didn’t really want to. “That leaps straight to the right result without understanding why, without knowing how to make the changes to the recipes or stirring patterns or ingredients, only what feels right. It’s often less well-regarded than the kind of gift Snape has, because it only works with some potions and only on its own mysterious schedule. But that is what you have.”

Harry stared at the Veritas Potion sparkling smugly on the table and murmured, “You said you would explain how it was connected to my talent in spellcrafting.”

“Have you never thought of a modification to a spell that suddenly appeared in your mind without any buildup?”

“I thought—I thought my meditation and doing Arithmancy was the buildup.”

“It may put you in the right frame of mind and make it quicker than it would otherwise be. But that leap, that final moment when you cast your thoughts high and reach for the seemingly impossible…that is all you.”

Gaunt’s voice was so soft that Harry was straining to hear him. Which was probably what the bastard wanted, Harry decided a second later. He took a step away and shook his head, shrugging off the spell as much as possible. “I think you’re wrong. If I had Potions talent of any kind, Snape would have spotted it.”

“The man who admitted to hating you? To thinking that even your father should have lived rather than you, when he despised your father?”

Harry sighed and drummed his fingers on the table for a moment, staring at the Veritas Potion. “You’re here because you said that you can get me marks on the NEWT good enough to pass.”

“We discussed another arrangement.”

“So we did.” Harry turned to the side to face Gaunt again. “I think I want to be a good enough standard brewer to improve my value to my job and to people in the future who might think about collaborating or hiring me. I don’t think this intuition-based brewing is something that I want to depend on.”

“So we should not spend time on it?”

“Not now.”

Gaunt nodded slowly, eyes fixed on Harry. No, wait, on the scar on his forehead. Harry supposed Gaunt, who had come here expecting to find a Harry spoiled by his fame, couldn’t help looking at it now and then. “Very well. I will remember your words and should have guessed that you might feel alienated from your own talent.”

Harry’s skin crawled. Sometimes, it didn’t feel as though Gaunt were talking to him.

*

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it much, either, Sirius,” Harry said, and rolled his shoulders. They were speaking through the Floo again, and Harry had told Sirius a lot: his strange confrontations with Lily and Snape, Gaunt’s explanation of his intuition-based talent, and how he had made Gaunt back off.

Although not about the bargain he and Gaunt had made. Or the strange locket he’d found in Lily’s office.

It still felt too much like admitting things he shouldn’t if he did that. Sirius, Gryffindor that he was despite breaking the law all the time, would disapprove of Harry and Gaunt using each other for the connections they could forge. And he would definitely think Harry should have just asked his mother what she was doing instead of breaking into her office.

Sirius had always been on Harry’s side, but sometimes Harry couldn’t explain things that seemed perfectly obvious from his own perspective.

“Then why are you still doing it?”

“For Jennifer and Rosanna—”

“Who could contact you when they’re adults if they want to!” Sirius slammed his hand down on the hearth beyond his own fireplace, and then howled. “Ouch, ouch, that’s marble, ouch.”

Harry laughed, but did his best to turn it into a cough when Sirius glared at him. “Jennifer only has two years until she’s seventeen, but Rosanna has five,” he explained, again. He’d said this before; Sirius just tended to ignore it. Harry thought his sisters being Snape’s daughters overruled everything else for Sirius. He kept expecting them to be as bad as their father. “Who knows what poison Snape would pour into her ears until then? She might not want a relationship with me at all when she’s an adult.”

“You could still write to her then and find out.”

“Or I can get good marks on my NEWTS and find out now. Besides, I don’t want to ask them to hide this from their parents.”

“Do you really believe Snape will let you talk to them at all even if you do get an Outstanding?”

“I think that Mother seems invested in this bargain for some reason. Or in having Tom Gaunt in the house.” Harry shook his head. He had hinted that Lily had been involved in the Potions tutoring, but he hadn’t told Sirius or Remus the full extent of the Listening Charms he and Gaunt had discovered. “I think she’ll make Snape keep his word.”

“Do you want me to come to Britain? Because I will, you know that.” Sirius leaned forwards, grey eyes bright and lucid. “I would do anything, for you.”

Harry smiled at him, touched. “I know, but I think it’s better if I handle this on my own.”

“Are you sure?”

Because the question was coming from Remus, who had stepped up behind Sirius and was leaning with his hand on Sirius’s shoulder, Harry gave it some thought instead of replying immediately. He finally nodded. “Yes. I can’t think of any way that I would be able to concentrate on Gaunt and Mother and Snape and the Potions NEWT if I knew that you were in the country."

"The godfather is supposed to worry about the safety of his godson, not the other way around,” Sirius grumbled.

Harry laughed a little. “And we’ve always done things the normal way?”

At least that meant the conversation dissolved into teasing, which made Harry relax a little. He hadn’t told the whole truth about Gaunt and Lily, but he meant it about this. If Sirius was in Britain, Harry would worry constantly about him being captured, and he knew his godfather was too reckless to look after his own safety.

This was something Harry had to tackle alone.

*

“Have your nose in a book again?”

It seemed he had managed to surprise Gaunt. He had been writing in a small black book that Harry had seen him bring to Snape’s house the other day, but now he slapped the book cover closed and whirled about.

It didn’t happen before Harry got a glimpse into the book, though, and he raised an eyebrow. Words were forming on the pages, spilling along in spiky blood-red writing that seemed to gleam with rage.

“Potter, I didn’t know you had arrived.”

“And I didn’t know that you could make books that talked back. Why would you need my spellcrafting skills, in that case? That’s miles beyond anything I could create.”

“Spells are rather different than artifacts,” Gaunt said, although his voice cracked along the edges, and his hand tightened on the book as if he assumed that Harry would try to steal it from him.

Harry snorted a little. “Not so different that you need me. Why make the bargain, Gaunt?”

“That business is my own. As this book is my own.”

“As your potential future ally, I think I need to know.”

“I think that if you wish to remain my potential future ally, you will not ask.”

Harry felt the air grow charged between them as he and Gaunt stared at each other. It felt oddly like the times that Gaunt had leaned against him and touched him, but thicker, perhaps because Harry really did feel this time as if he might like Gaunt to touch him. He was someone who had always thrived on challenges.

It’s ridiculous to find him more attractive when he’s snapping at me than when he’s praising me. But maybe that makes sense, with the way I grew up.

The reminder made Harry avert his eyes from Gaunt and lift a hand in his direction. “All right. But if that book turns out to be something dangerous and it threatens me, I hope you’ll know that I’ll do my best to destroy it.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Harry bared his teeth. Challenge accepted, he thought, and his mind lingered on the book as he and Gaunt went into the library to try brewing the Wit-Sharpening Potion, another potion Gaunt said Harry should be able to leap ahead in due to his intuition-based talent. Gaunt had probably enspelled such a powerful artifact with all the wards and protections he could think of.

That didn’t mean Harry couldn’t break them.

*

“You are ridiculous and useless.”

“Yeah, love you, too, Snape.”

Snape paused. Harry kept walking out the door, ignoring him. It was his own bad luck that he had just been leaving for Ron and Hermione’s when Snape picked the moment to ooze into the house.

“Come back here.”

Harry glanced back and saw Snape’s hand resting on his robe pocket, where he probably held a potion capped and ready to throw. With a groan, Harry turned back in his direction. His own hand was on his wand, but that was only common sense, even if Snape chose to say something about it.

“You are a disappointment and a disgrace,” Snape began. “If you were my son, you would have been disciplined long ago, to stop you mouthing off to your betters—”

“Do you see any betters here?”

Snape snarled and pulled the capped bottle entirely out of his pocket. Harry looked at it calmly, for all that his heart was thundering in his chest. This had been the way that several encounters had begun when he was younger, all of them ending with a potion exploding on him or a curse hitting him.

He wondered if his mother had ever known the full extent of what her husband had done. Harry would like to think not, but he didn’t know how old those Listening Charms were or when she’d placed them.

Snape abruptly took a hand off the potion and let it drop back into his pocket. He was smiling. Harry watched him warily. If Snape didn’t plan to use an exploding potion on Harry, it was only because he’d thought of something better by his lights, which meant crueler.

“Do you know why your mother spends so much time locked in her office here and doing frantic research in the Department of Mysteries?” Snape asked lightly.

“No, and I’m sure you won’t tell me.”

“She is looking for the secret of your survival.”

Harry blinked and stared at Snape. “The secret of my survival from the Killing Curse?” he asked, just to make sure. Snape loved playing word games and would take any chance he could to twist this back on Harry.

“What else would it be, you idiot boy?” But Snape’s voice was calmer and more tolerant than usual. He leaned a little forwards. “She does not know why you survived. She wants to know. It is her consuming obsession.”

“I thought everyone knew the story. My father’s love, his dying to save me—”

“And you think your father so special that he could defy the Dark Lord when so many other parents did the same and did not manage to save their children?” Snape laughed, less high-pitched but just as cold as the laughter Harry sometimes heard in his dreams, the laughter he had thought might be Voldemort’s. “The son of the sainted James Potter would certainly think so. But of course that isn’t it. It’s something else, some accident or a combination of the Dark Arts and some sacrificial magic Potter used.”

“My father sacrificed himself—”

“He prepared some other kind of magic. Maybe he intended to sacrifice your mother. Maybe an innocent. Maybe you. He learned—”

“You’re upset because no one else has ever loved you enough to die for you, Snape.”

This time, it was Snape’s wand that flicked out and not a potion. Harry ducked, but it was too late. He felt a sharp graze across his forehead, and then a black veil seemed to unfold and fall over his eyes. He was blind.

Panicked, Harry dodged. That didn’t do any good, either. Snape’s foot still smashed into his left knee and knocked him to the floor. Harry braced his hands on the wood and gathered his magic around him. He might not see the next strike coming, but he would still do a lot of damage as Snape tried to land it.

There was the sound of harsh breathing in front of him, and then Snape said softly, “Let us see you achieve an O in Potions with blindness that lasts all month, Potter.”

A world of loathing in that name.

Harry knelt there in silence until he heard Snape walk away. Then he set, grimly, to trying to reverse the blindness.

And to wondering what would happen if Gaunt or his mother found Harry first.