lomonaaeren

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Part Five

“No wonder you were so skinny.”

Harry sighed and lounged against the wall, watching as Blaise watched his younger self cooking breakfast. Of course, Dudley kept snatching bacon from the pan and eating it, while shoving his younger self and snickering. “Yeah. My cousin would steal most of it.”

“And you just…stayed here?”

Harry shook his head when Blaise glanced at him with furious eyes. “Where else would I have gone? I had no relatives in the magical world. These were my only ones from my mother’s side. I had a few friends, but not so close they would invite me over for an extended holiday visit.”

Blaise glanced once more at the younger Harry Potter, then drew Harry out of the kitchen. “Listen, I have to ask you something,” he said, his voice very soft. “Have you ever heard of someone called Sirius Black?”

Harry blinked. “Sure. He was the Death Eater who betrayed my parents and Neville’s.”

Blaise swallowed. “There are things you don’t know, things you need to know,” he said, his voice even lower now. “But we need to talk about them in the waking world.” He slid his hand up to cup Harry’s face. “I wish the bond was already established enough that we could do that right away.”

“What are you talking about?” Harry asked. “Of course the bond is established.” He leaned in to kiss Blaise, who swayed towards him. Harry had always enjoyed that about Blaise, how he gave up himself up completely to the act of kissing, accepting and giving pleasure.

Blaise pulled himself back with a little moan. “No, Harry mine, it isn’t. Here, it is. Not in the waking world, not yet.” He trailed his fingers into Harry’s hair and yanked, and Harry closed his eyes in pleasure. “If you knew…”

“Knew what?” Harry asked, barely able to keep from moaning himself.

“Knew,” Blaise repeated, nonsensically, and then moved away again when Harry tried to continue kissing him. “No, wait.”

Harry stopped, reluctantly, and waited. He still remembered the early days of their bond, when he had sometimes been more ardent than he should have been and his partners had sometimes wanted more from him than he could give. He would pause and let Blaise do as he wished, even if it was literally hard.

“We need to have this conversation,” Blaise said, his voice firmer now. His hand skimmed down the side of Harry’s face. “And you’re lovely, and I like having you to myself right now, but we need the others.”

“Of course,” Harry murmured. He couldn’t imagine making a big decision—and it sounded like this was a big one—without Theo and Draco at their sides. All of them were equals in the bond, for all that they could also be with whoever they wanted, speak with whoever they wanted, cast with whoever they wanted, in the middle of it.

“Good.” Blaise squeezed his hand. “Now, wake up.”

*

Harry scrambled out of sleep and lay panting and staring at the ceiling, one hand clenched in wordless rage at his side.

He—

He hated these dreams. He hated this bond. He hated the world he was living in right now.

But he closed his eyes and drew himself into himself and again thought about the terms of the treaty. This was still a mistake on their part, Harry thought, even if the Death Eaters had had a reason for asking for him specifically instead of Neville or one of the others. Harry could still annoy them and hold himself at a distance.

He had to be able to.

A sharp knock on the door. Harry eyed it. “Go away, I’m feeling sorry for myself!” he yelled, on the off chance that would work.

The door opened, of course, and Nott stepped through, carrying a breakfast tray. Harry opened his mouth, and Nott promptly opened his in response. “I promise that I made this with my own hands, and you don’t need to worry about it,” he said pompously, putting the tray down across Harry’s legs in the bed.

Harry still didn’t move to eat it, even though the smell of sliced fruit and toast and marmalade and pumpkin juice and a juicy piece of ham was making his stomach rumble. Nott shook his head and reached out to pick up a piece of toast. “You’ll eat,” he said, calm, pleasant.

“What’s with all these strange dreams?” Harry snapped.

“Had another one last night, did you? Well, it was probably with Blaise, not Draco, given that Blaise is the one muttering about murdering your relatives and difficult conversations today.” Nott didn’t look up from spreading the perfect amount of butter on his toast. “We’ll go speak with him and Draco as soon as you finish eating.”

“I don’t want to speak with them,” Harry said, not caring if he sounded sulky and childish right now, and crammed a piece of toast in his mouth.

Nott did look at him then, with eyes as dark grey as the magic Harry had seen spread out around him in the ritual. “You don’t want to know what Sirius Black has to do with you?”

Harry closed his eyes and tried to persuade himself that it wasn’t important, that it was just some death of an Azkaban prisoner years ago and Hermione would have brought it up before this if it were important.

But…

“Yeah, fine,” he snapped, and bit into the toast hard enough to spray crumbs everywhere, purely for the fun of seeing Nott flinch.

*

“Sirius Black was your godfather.”

Harry stared at Malfoy. All four of them were sitting in a small room on the ground floor with glittering glass windows that looked out over the gardens. Harry could see the peacocks prancing back and forth, spreading their white tails.

“That’s not…no one ever told me that.” Harry hated the way his voice trembled, although not as much as the way that Malfoy immediately reached towards him to offer comfort. Harry tucked his chin down into his shoulder and stared blindly out at the peacocks.

“They probably thought it wasn’t relevant information,” Zabini said quietly. “Or that it would hurt you more.”

“Or they never cared at all,” Nott said, his voice a slithering, feathery weight. “How much attention did Longbottom and his friends really pay to you, Harry? How much would they have cared about telling you something like this, something that Longbottom and Weasley might have known all their lives?”

Harry swallowed roughly. He wanted to say that Neville was a close, dear friend. But that wasn’t really true. Harry had had the thought himself.

It didn’t prevent him from being here and trying to do all he could for Neville’s side. It just meant that he felt a lot like it was Neville’s side, not just his.

“Regardless,” Zabini went on, with a flip of his hand that Harry saw out of the corner of his eye, “Black was your godfather. For whatever reason, he left you all his money when he died. Who knows why? Maybe just because he never thought of changing his will before he betrayed your parents, or because he thought it would be more suspicious, or because he died in Azkaban and couldn’t do anything from there.”

“I never—heard about that.”

“The Ministry hushed it up,” Malfoy said. His hand came to rest on Harry’s knee, and Harry flinched a little, but it stayed there. “They didn’t want to deal with Black’s betrayal at all, frankly. I know that Fudge even tried to suppress some of the articles about his death, because he claimed there was no need to ‘rake it up.’ But my father discovered it when he went to investigate what had happened to Black’s assets. He thought I might have some claim to the heirlooms, at least.”

“What? Why?’

“My mother is from the Black family,” Malfoy said, staring a little at Harry. Harry shrugged back. That was probably something that Neville had known, or Ron, but it wasn’t something important for Harry to know. “Imagine my father’s surprise when he discovered that all the money was bound to you.”

“You didn’t let me know about it, either. You’re hardly better than the Ministry.”

“They had a reason to tell you. We didn’t, at the time. We hadn’t narrowed down the candidates for the fourth person in our bond to the point that we could tell it was definitively you.” Malfoy shifted a little in his seat. “But we found that someone had a claim to the money if they used it for your good. So we used it to buy you the Firebolt. And we plan to hand over the vaults to you as soon as we can trust you out of the house.”

Harry said nothing. He felt as if he had been hit on the head. Or the way he had felt when Hagrid had escorted him to Diagon Alley and he had discovered that his parents had left him some money after all.

“We want to tell you all the secrets we can, the secrets we’ve been keeping.” Nott leaned forwards and spoke coaxingly. “So there’s none between us.”

“There will always be some.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I’m not telling you anything about Neville’s battle plans.”

“Now that’s interesting,” Zabini said. Harry sneered at him, opening his mouth to explain about loyalty to one’s friends, but Zabini continued on, calm and cheerful. “I didn’t realize that you actually knew any.”

“I know plenty—”

Harry paused.

“Ah,” Nott said, his eyes bright with something that wasn’t mockery and wasn’t humor. “Now he understands.”

“How long in advance did Neville know that you were going to ask for me in the treaty?” Harry whispered.

“Two months,” Zabini cut in. “That’s how long it took to hammer out the timeline, the provisions for how you would be treated, what would happen if you escaped, how to give the proof that you were still alive, and so on.”

Harry closed his eyes. Yeah, that was about the time when Ron and Neville would sometimes stop talking when Harry walked into the room, and Hermione had been busy with something else that meant their sessions about house-elves were canceled.

But it made sense, of course it did. He would soon have been living among their enemies. Why would they tell him anything?

Why didn’t they discuss the provisions of the treaty with you, since you were the one they most directly applied to? Why didn’t they explain that it was specifically you the treaty was asking for, instead of your being settled on as a substitute for someone else or being negotiated over?

Harry shook his head. He would probably never know. He just had to keep going, keep refusing the temptation to become corrupt and trust the Death Eaters too much. He opened his eyes and did his best to project calm.

“You look constipated.”

Harry didn’t want to, but he laughed at Malfoy’s words. Nott leaned a little back in his chair, and Zabini nodded.

“You believe us now?”

“Yeah. And thanks for telling me about Sirius Black. But fundamentally, it doesn’t matter.”

“In what way?”

“Things still haven’t changed,” Harry said. “You might treat me well and spend money on me, but you kidnapped people. You tortured people. I still have no urge to take up the Dark Arts books and use those spells to kill people.”

“You haven’t cast much magic since you arrived here,” Nott said. “I think you could use a bit of a workout.”

“I still don’t want to duel you.”

“I wasn’t going to suggest that, Harry.” Nott flowed to his feet in a smooth motion. “I was going to suggest the kind of demonstration that they’ve instigated at Hogwarts since we finished. Experts coming in and casting the strongest spells they can, or rare ones, to show students what magic is capable of.”

Harry hesitated. It was true that his magic was roaming around inside his body like a caged creature, and if it had strengthened since the ritual they’d forced him to participate in, carrying it around like a caged creature might not be the best idea.

“We can bring you a copy of the treaty,” Nott said, his voice edged with soft mockery. “You can look at exactly what kinds of spells you can cast and not cast, and see how restrained we are from hurting you.”

Harry jerked his chin up and stalked towards the door of the sitting room without a word. He would show Nott what he could do.

And if he drew on the amplified magic of the bond to do it, well, that might give them some warning about trying to make him do things.

*

“The walls in here are reflective of magic,” Nott said. “They’ll mirror what you do to allow you to study it, and continue holding the image even after the spell dies. It’s a way to improve casting technique.”

Harry nodded absently, glad that he was standing in front of Nott and the walls didn’t show any reflections right now. He knew he was gaping like an idiot.

This seemed as if it might have been a ballroom once, but the walls, which could have been marble or wood, were sheathed in shining silver metal. It didn’t reflect light, but shimmered like water, and Harry could hear a song on the far edges of his awareness. He thought the song would become much louder when someone cast a spell.

“Cast the most powerful spell you know,” Nott said. Harry glanced over his shoulder to see Nott standing with his arms folded. “Don’t think about whether it’s Dark Arts or not. There’s no one here you can hurt.”

His voice still sounded mocking. Harry took his wand out of the holster. “Sorry that people having morals disturbs you, Nott,” he said, and then before Nott could come up with some retort, he whirled to the side and cast.

The spell was wordless, and it lit up the entire room, the way Harry had thought it might. Fireworks of purple and gold and green light whistled and soared through the air, and Harry had to half-close his eyes to avoid blinding himself. When the real light faded, the mirrored image lingered, as promised. Harry smiled at it.

“That’s no spell I know.”

Harry glanced over his shoulder and smirked at Nott, whose eyes were locked on the walls. So maybe the smirk was wasted. That was all right. Harry would have plenty more chances to use it. “It’s one I modified.”

“From what?” Nott’s eyes came back to him.

“Lumos.”

“That’s not possible.”

Harry laughed and poked at his arm, where the snake marking rested. “You’re going to tell me that something’s not possible when you’ve been carrying something like this around for years, Theo?”

Nott stilled. Then he said, “I wouldn’t say it was impossible because of the strength it would take. I would say it was impossible because Lumos is a simple charm that can’t support the Arithmantic matrices or the mental runes necessary to alter it to such a high degree.”

“Just pretend that I understood half of that.”

“How did you change it, then?”

Nott’s voice was soft and strained. Harry grinned. Maybe he could change a few minds this way, too. Maybe Nott was having to reconsider the fact that high-level magic wasn’t related to blood, if a pretty stupid and academically unengaged half-blood could do it.

“I concentrated and cast the spell again and again, until it started changing into what I wanted. Then I started casting it wordlessly, and after a while, the silent incantation altered to match the effects, too.”

“Why did you want to alter it in the first place?” Nott turned away as if Harry was exasperating—Harry sure hoped so—and studied the reflection hovering in the mirrors on the walls. “It seems like you would need a powerful motivation for something like this.”

Harry took a deep breath. “Because I wanted it to resemble the Weasley twins’ fireworks.”

“The Weasley twins. One of them died at the Battle of Hogwarts.”

“Yeah. George.” Harry winced, remembering Fred’s empty eyes. Fred had kept up the joke shop, but it wasn’t the same.

“Hmmm.”

A few more moments passed in silence, while Harry stared at Nott’s back and Nott stared at the reflections. Harry was pretty sure that he got bored before Nott did. “Anyway,” he said. “Did you want to see another spell, or what?”

Nott spun around and stalked towards him. The reflection of his magic seemed to shine in his eyes, on fire. In fact, if Harry squinted, he thought he could make out those bright grey images floating around Nott the way they had when Harry was seeing them right after the ritual circle. “I want you to teach me how to cast this one.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “Fair warning. I’ve never tried to teach this to someone before. I’ve only shown it to the Weasleys, and they appreciated it, but they didn’t want to learn.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Why ask me about their motivations? Go ask them.”

“I merely thought you would know something about it,” Nott said smoothly, taking his wand from his holster. Harry craned his neck to look at it, and decided that it did look a little like yew wood. “Because they are your close friends.”

“We’re friendly. Not close.”

“What is the distinction?”

“What, do Slytherins have trouble understanding words like that?”

“I wish you would stop stereotyping us as Slytherins and Death Eaters. We’re the people you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. It’s time that you understood that, Harry.”

Harry decided to ignore that. The more he could annoy them, the more he could put them off, the less they would want to spend time with them, and that might make the bond fail of its own accord. “I asked you a question.”

Nott took a long breath. “No, I understood what you meant. I simply didn’t think that—from the outside, it seemed as if you were part of Longbottom’s group. Not as close to him as Weasley and Granger, certainly, but a part of the group.”

“And your friends?”

“If I call someone friend, it’s because I’m close to them. Loose acquaintances couldn’t be trusted in my position.” Nott turned a little to look Harry in the eye. “If I call someone my bondmate, it’s because I’m not inclined to give them up.”

Harry sighed. “Do you want to learn to cast this spell or not?”

Nott continued watching him, but then nodded, a gracious little motion of his head that Harry found annoying. “I would.”

“All right,” Harry said. “This is the wand motion…”

*

“I don’t think I can do it.”

Nott sounded defeated, exhausted. Harry glanced over at him. Nott was leaning forwards, hands resting on his knees, dark hair hanging tangled and disheveled around his face. He was panting, and only shook his head when Harry asked him if he wanted water.

“This is magical, internal, more than it is physical.” Nott straightened up and shoved his hair away from his face. He looked better like this, Harry thought, less put-together. “Of course, it might have something to do with the fact that in the last few years, I cast with Blaise or Draco every time I wanted to learn a new spell.”

“Sounds clumsy.”

“It’s beautiful in a way that you’ll understand.”

Harry paused. “Shouldn’t that be you’ll never understand?”

Nott snorted at him and cast a Drying Charm that removed the sweat from his cheeks. Harry kind of missed it. “No, you have the capacity to understand. You could if you wanted to. But you won’t open the bond, which means that you’ll miss out on this for as long as you keep it closed.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Opening the bond wouldn’t make you any better at this spell.”

“Of course it would.” Nott straightened up and flung his hair back out of his face again. “We can cast with each other’s magic and each other’s knowledge when we open the bond. I can use spells that I never learned in school but that Blaise was taught by his mother, for example. It allows us access to each other’s power and memories.”

“Bully for you.”

“Are you so opposed?”

“Yes.” Harry spread his arms. “What would I use the power for? I know that you were using it in your battles against Neville or something, but—”

“To help free house-elves.”

Harry hesitated. Nott had somehow cut through all the protestations he might have made and straight to the heart of Harry’s deepest desires. Harry didn’t like it. “Well, but cursing people wouldn’t change their minds.”

“Are you sure about that?” Nott’s smile quirked up one corner of his mouth instead of lighting his whole face the way Zabini’s did. Harry poked suspiciously at the bond in his mind, but it remained shut, so he reckoned he was only noticing because these were the people he had been spending all his time around in the last few days. “Besides, there’s a difference between cursing someone and threatening to curse someone.”

“I don’t want to threaten people, either!”

“Funny. You’ve certainly done enough of it with us.”

“Not the same way that you did with the people you kidnapped—”

“All of whom are back with their families now.” Nott took a long step towards him. “It’s almost time for the first weekly proof that you’re alive. Do you want to request that the Lovegood girl and the others with captured family members bring them along to the meeting so that you can be sure they’re alive?”

Harry folded his arms. “Yeah, actually. I would like that.”

“Then I’ll arrange that.”

Harry blinked, feeling as if he had missed a stair that he was supposed to step down onto. “Wait, what?”

“I said I would arrange it.” Nott looked at him with beautiful, distant eyes, still seeming to reflect the light of the magic, before he turned his head away. “You are our bondmate now. What matters is that we can help you.” He turned and strode towards the door of the showroom.

“Nott. Theo. Wait.”

Nott glanced over his shoulder. Harry thought it was probably the first name that had done it, since Harry hadn’t called him that before. “What?”

“I’d like to open the bond enough to show you how to cast the spell,” Harry said, speaking with some determination. He felt as though perhaps he was making the wrong decision, but he could only be himself, regardless of what the others did. And he had certain standards for his own behavior. “Just—to show you what it’s like.” See what it’s like, he’d almost said.

Nott blinked a little, shifted his weight, and finally said, “Well, if you’re sure, then we should do it.”

He closed his eyes, and Harry shut his at the same time. It didn’t take much work to feel for the bond. It was like a giant, throbbing wound on the edge of his perceptions, always there and at all times, not allowing him to forget about it.

He took down the barriers, and joy and pleasure showered over him.

Harry bent the way Nott had when he was struggling to catch his breath from learning the spell. His veins were filled with light, his mind, his heart, his soul. He could feel a distant pulse of exhaustion from Nott, but even that was healing, dwindling to a trickle of nothingness in the wake of the open bond.

“You—even heal faster when the bond’s open?” he asked hoarsely. His voice seemed to have a dozen distant echoes, no doubt from the way that he could hear Malfoy and Zabini, along with Nott, murmuring in his head.

Call me Blaise, please.

Call me Draco.

Their voices swirled and dived around each other, combined and separate, understandable and vast, and Harry knew then that the bond was far more than the sum of its parts.

I don’t know if we heal faster or not. We were never complete before.

Neither was Harry.

Harry felt lifted out of himself, and turned to Theo, holding out one hand. Theo clasped it, his eyes shining like steel but the depths of his soul opening underneath, and Harry understood, and Theo understood, and lifted his wand.

The Fireworks Spell danced out of it, filling the mirrors on the walls with shining patterns of light.

Much like the light that Harry felt bursting inside himself.

He gravitated closer to Theo. It wasn’t something that he chose, or thought about; it was just that he was doing it, and there he was, and he was standing in front of him, and Theo was watching him with dark, passionate eyes, and Harry was leaning in, and their lips were touching, and more pleasure arced through him like the scrape of a hippogriff’s claws, painful and wild.

Theo’s hands settled on Harry’s shoulders, a firm hold. Harry felt himself backed up into the mirrors, and at the same time knew what it was like to touch himself. He felt the kiss from both sides, knew—

Knew the dark pleasure of someone writhing under his wand, which for Theo wasn’t so much different from the pleasure he got from kissing Harry.

Harry yanked himself away and took several steps back. It was physically painful. His hands tingled as though they wanted to touch Theo, his mouth ached for the touch of his, and even his back missed the feeling of touching the mirrors. But Harry forced himself to raise the barrier across the bond.

It was difficult, and Harry was still getting swirling traces of emotion and thought, as though the wall had holes in it. He wished, more than he had wished for years, that he’d managed to really master Occlumency during his year in Hogwarts with the Carrows.

“You are magnificent,” Theo breathed.

Nott, Nott, Harry told himself. He remembered now that he’d called Nott by his first name, and more than once. The name had simply swept past his guard, as if that guard didn’t exist. He shuddered and buried his face in his hands.

Footsteps crossed the floor, halting in front of him. Harry lifted his head. He could hear Blaise and Malfoy murmuring to him mentally, but their voices were less clear and cruel than the faint smile on Nott’s face.

“We told you.”

“Told me what?” Harry snarled. He lurched forwards and tried to lift his wand to rest against Nott’s throat. But his hand wouldn’t move.

“Told you that if you did not bring yourself to embrace the bond, you would be brought.”

“There has to be a way to get free from this! There has to!”

“Does there?” Nott reached up and caressed Harry’s hair back from his face, fingers sliding for a moment over the stupid lightning bolt scar that Harry had got somewhere, before he dropped his hand again. “I don’t think so. We looked for that in the first year, you know.”

“Looked for what?” Harry hated himself for the surge of pleasure that tore through him at Nott’s touch.

“A way out of the bond. We didn’t want to be tied to each other. We were acquaintances then, not close friends. And we didn’t like the idea that we would have to spend the rest of our lives together, if we wanted to travel or enter fields that weren’t available in magical Britain at all.” Theo shook his head. “It didn’t matter. In two years we were thoroughly and desperately in love with each other.”

“You were fourteen.”

“Yes?”

“No one knows what true love is like at fourteen.” Harry had been nurturing crushes on Ginny and Cho Chang then and watching Ron and Hermione dance and bicker around each other. “You didn’t, either.”

“We were bonded. The way you are, now.”

“I’ll find some way out of this!”

“Do try. You’ll find that you can’t injure yourself and you can’t injure us.” Theo bowed his head, his smile curling up his face, dark and sadistically delighted. “And when you’re ready to embrace it, we’ll be waiting.”

He turned and left the room as quietly as he had come, letting the door fall shut behind him.

Harry collapsed, shuddering, against the wall.

*

“Why didn’t you ever use magic against him?”

Harry glanced up with a faint frown. He didn’t really want Draco to watch his cousin chasing him across the school playground and then holding him down and almost beating his face in. “I didn’t know what magic was then. I only knew that strange things happened around me sometimes. The idea that I could control them somehow was mad.”

Draco looked back at him instead of watching the younger version of Harry chased and beaten by Dudley, and Harry was grateful. He stepped up to Draco and brushed his lips across his cheek. “I suppose it doesn’t seem much next to watching a giant snake eat people, but—”

“No.”

“I was saying that—”

“And I’m saying, don’t say that.” Draco faced Harry, turning him so that neither of them was watching the memory that played out on the dirt and sand. “Your pain matters, too. You’re important, too. I have the feeling that no one ever really told you that,” he added darkly. “All those people who acted as though Longbottom’s pain and trials were the only ones that mattered. I’m sorry they were so cruel to you, Harry.”

“I…” Harry rubbed the back of his neck and said something he hadn’t known he thought. “I mean, they mattered. People would get upset when Snape scolded me in class or something. But it was like there was only so much sympathy to go around, and Neville got most of it.”

There. He’d said it. Harry found himself almost holding his breath.

“What?” Draco cocked his head at him.

“I—it felt as if the world should collapse.” Harry laughed a little. “The world that we’re standing in, anyway,” he added, because he knew now that this was a dream. That was the only way that Draco would ever have consented to visit Little Whinging.

“You have the right to say it and feel it.” Draco reached up and shaped Harry’s face with his hands. “I always wondered why you never lashed out in school, you know. All those people ignoring you.”

“Oh, come off it, Draco, I didn’t matter to you then. You would have sought out every choice before me.”

“No,” Draco said simply. “We just had to make sure whose presence would complement our bond. We were being thorough, not disdainful.” He drew Harry close to him when Harry opened his mouth to protest. “It’s true. Theo actually wanted to approach you in fifth year, did you know that? But Blaise and I talked him out of it.”

Harry blinked. “Why?” Now that he thought of it, fifth year would have been—well, he could have used the kind of support that the bond had promised. Umbridge and her fucking detentions. Harry had had fewer than Neville, because everyone had fewer than Neville, but there had been enough to leave him with scars. “I mean, why didn’t you?”

“We decided that we couldn’t do anything safely until the Dark Lord was dead.” Draco’s face was regretful. “And then, well, he died and we found out you were violently opposed to us.”

“Can you blame me?” Harry asked softly, letting his hand rise and skitter up Draco’s jaw.

“No, of course not. But we had thought we would be able to be—not neutral in the war, but not front and center the way we were. We didn’t anticipate that I would be forced to take the Dark Mark the way I was.”

“So you thought you would be able to approach me safely.”

Draco nodded. “And then we—we discovered that we were still hunted, after the war.” His nostrils flared. “When we should have paid our debt to society by Azkaban terms and fines and the like, we were still hunted.”

Harry frowned. “What do you mean?”

“No one told you?”

“No,” Harry said. “Or I wouldn’t be asking, would I?”

Draco smiled. “There’s the sharp edge of your tongue that I was missing. Well, Longbottom went after us. Theo served a year in Azkaban, and then when he came out, Longbottom had sent an owl telling Theo that it wouldn’t be enough and he would hunt Theo down like a dog.”

Harry stared at him, shaken.

“And Blaise had an owl from Longbottom saying that he would be hunted if he ever returned to the country. And you know about me.” Draco gestured towards his right arm, towards the scar that ran down it and up towards the shoulder behind his snake marking.

Harry lowered his eyes and nodded. That had been where the Aurors who had supposedly been going to escort Draco to an interview with the Minister and do a wand check had tried to split him open.

“I’m sorry.”

Draco sighed and cupped his cheek. “It wasn’t your fault. But that was why we had to form Holly and Yew and protect ourselves. We can’t hope for justice at Longbottom’s hands.”

“And after you formed the organization, it was too late for you to hope I would listen to you.” Harry let his head fall forwards against Draco’s chest. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Draco said, and his hand gently stroked the nape of Harry’s neck. “What we have with you now isn’t ideal, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to exist.”

Harry made a doubtful noise despite himself, but Draco just laughed and kissed him.

*

Waking this time, Harry felt the knowledge dragging at him like chains. He wandered down to the kitchens and spoke to the elves and tried to smile when they smiled, but it was difficult.

Had Neville done those things? The others couldn’t lie to him, Harry knew that, but they might see the truth in a slanted way.

He avoided all his bondmates for most of the morning, and they let him. Harry polished the Firebolt with gleaming beeswax, his heart aching, trying to understand why Sirius Black would have betrayed his parents but left all his money to Harry anyway.

If I’d known about it, I could have moved away from the Dursleys’ when I was fifteen. Fourteen. Living on my own in Knockturn Alley would have been better than that.

Harry closed his eyes. He hadn’t tried to leave the Dursleys because he didn’t have any other relatives, and he’d thought that wizards or Muggles who saw him on his own would just take him back there, and he’d counted the money in his vault and knew it wasn’t enough to get him through school and pay someone to look after him in a different place.

If he’d known.

But the Ministry had been the corrupt ones who had kept that knowledge from him, and it hadn’t been Neville’s fault. Or the Death Eaters’.

It was almost a relief, to find that something was the fault of someone who Harry hadn’t trusted or didn’t have to live with.

Towards noon, a tug on the bond brought his head around. Blaise was sitting on the grass a few meters away from him. Harry sighed and turned to face him.

“Come to herd me back inside like a good little boy?”

“I’ve come to ask you if you want to meet Longbottom a day early. He sent an owl that said—well, he doesn’t believe that you’re still alive, basically. He wants to see you.”

Harry blinked, and a small bit of warmth worked through him. He ignored the coldness he was pretty sure was coming from the other side of the bond. “I don’t mind that. Where are we meeting? Is anyone else going to be with him?”

“The terms of the treaty say that we both have to have an equal number of people in the room, so he’ll have three others. I assume either Weasley or Granger is going to be one of them, but I don’t know that he’ll risk them both.”

Harry swallowed. With everything he had learned about Neville, he still wanted to talk to him. And ask him questions. And—

Well, you won’t serve anyone, even yourself, by just accusing him of sending you to your probable death because he doesn’t care about you. It makes sense that he doesn’t care about you as much as he does about his real friends.

“I want to go, yes,” he said, and turned to face Blaise fully. “Can I be the one to talk to him?”

Blaise studied him in silence. He had worn short sleeves today, so that the snake marking on his arm was fully on display, seeming to dance in the sunlight pouring over them. He said, “If one of us gets asked a question, we’ll have to respond.”

“Yes, that’s fine. I just—need to ask him—”

Harry’s throat seemed to close up, but Blaise just gave him a long, silent, compassionate look, and nodded. “Yes, that can be arranged.”

Harry nodded sharply and looked down at the Firebolt for a moment. His hand skimmed along the shaft. Then he said, soft and as viciously sharp as the nod had been, “I want you to give me the money that should have been mine.”

“That can be arranged,” Blaise repeated. He hesitated, then said quietly, “We’ll go to Diagon Alley after we meet with Longbottom. We’ll have to be in disguise in Diagon Alley, but that won’t matter so much to the goblins.”

“Good.”

Blaise hesitated once, but seemed to understand this wasn’t the time to push Harry. He turned away and walked back to the house.

Harry sat where he was, ripping up handfuls of grass and staring into the distance.