lomonaaeren

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Chapter Seven—Knowledge

“Come on, Harry, enough is enough.”

Harry stops outside the Potions classroom with a groan. Theo was in class today, but he shot Harry all sorts of strange glances, and Harry can’t help but worry that someone else managed to get to him with Amortentia again. He just wants to go find Theo and make sure he’s all right.

But Ron and Hermione are dogging his tail with stubborn expressions, and Harry turns around, shaking his head. “What?”

“This secret girlfriend of yours,” Ron says, and folds his arms. He’s grown tall enough to be intimidating to someone who doesn’t know him. Right now, his eyes are full of worry, which is worse than anger, as far as Harry’s concerned. “When are you going to introduce us? Do you think we’ll be angry that you’re not dating Ginny?”

“Yes,” Harry says without much thought.

Ron flushes bright red, and Hermione steps up to put her hand on his arm. “I promise, Harry,” she says, “it’s not that.”

“All right. So do you mind sharing all the details of your last snogging session?”

“What?”

Hermione is as red as Ron now. Harry snorts. “I didn’t know it was that juicy. And all I meant is that I wanted to have some secrets of my own. The same way you keep it secret where you sneak off to to snog.”

In fact, Harry is sure that he knows where they’re going. Ron’s muttered to Neville about “secret staircases,” looking very pleased with himself. There’s a staircase that’s part of a secret passage even a third-year can find, but it’s hidden enough to feel private.

“I—that’s different. You know we’re dating, mate. What about you?”

Harry gazes at them steadily. The thing is, he doesn’t want to say that he’s dating Theo. It feels disrespectful, given what Theo is dealing with when it comes to the Amortentia and all. And he also doesn’t want to just tell them about Theo. Theo’s privacy matters, a lot more than Ron and Hermione just being nosy.

There’s one thing he could tell them that would probably make them back off, though.

“I’m not dating someone,” he says, and carries on over Ron opening his mouth and Hermione giving him a look of pity. “I promise, I’m not. What I’m doing is working to help someone who’s suffering a lot right now, and who doesn’t want their situation known all over the castle. Or even to someone other than me. I stumbled into it by accident, but they don’t want it spread further.”

“You could have told us that, mate. Why—”

“They were on the other side of the war,” Harry says, which is true in very broad strokes. From what he knows about Theo, he doubts Theo ever bowed to pressure enough to make more than token gestures of support for the Death Eaters. And he certainly doesn’t have the Mark. “I thought you might object.”

Ron and Hermione exchange long looks. Then Ron says, “If it’s Malfoy, mate, you’ve done enough to help the little git.”

“It’s not.”

“But a Death Eater?”

“Remember when I said they didn’t want their situation known?”

“You could still tell us.”

“Not even you.”

“That’s—Harry, don’t you think it’s a good idea to tell us anyway? If he was a Death Eater and he’s telling you to keep secrets, then maybe he’s trying to get you involved in resurrecting Voldemort.”

Hermione’s eyes are bright with fear, but Harry just shakes his head. He thinks that telling them more detail would be worse than trying to soothe Hermione’s upset. She would want to help, but her idea of helping someone who’s dealing with being dosed with Amortentia would be to tell the professors.

And Harry will do anything to protect Theo from the professors. Who knows what they would say? Everything from dismissing Theo’s fears to trying to coddle him and place him under protections that—Harry knows—Theo would hate.

Especially since they would be years behind when he really needed them.

“I’m not going to help them resurrect Voldemort.”

“How do you know—”

“Hermione, who here among us has actually attended a resurrection and knows what it looks like?”

Hermione flushes bright red and lowers her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But you can’t blame me for being—upset.” For a second, her hand shakes where it touches her right arm, the one that still sometimes has tremors from Bellatrix Lestrange’s Cruciatus curse.

Harry comes over to hug her, and she clings to him. “I know,” he says quietly. “But it’s still not my secret to tell. I’ll respect their privacy until they outright tell me it’s okay to say something. That’s just the way it is. All right?”

“And they don’t care that you’re the Boy-Who-Lived?”

Harry smiles. “No.” If anything, Theo is more frustrated over what he calls in mutters Harry’s “sodding Gryffindor righteousness,” which means that he can’t owe or repay any debts to Harry.

“Well,” Ron says. “All right. But if we see you acting strangely, like you’ve been put under the Imperius or something, we’re going to intervene, all right?”

Harry doesn’t even have time to object before Hermione says, “Harry can’t be put under the Imperius, Ron, you know that—”

And Harry laughs and basks for a few moments in the company of his best friends before going to see what he can do for his newest one.

*

“Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Don’t give me that, Theo.”

After a moment, Theo concedes the point with a nod. He met up with Harry not far from the Potions classroom, after Harry managed to shake the clingy Gryffindors, and they went back to the classroom deep in the dungeons where Harry is learning to meditate. But Theo is still the one who managed to get dosed with Amortentia a second time.

Before the second time happened, Theo thought he would kill the people responsible when he found them. Now, he won’t. There are so many worse things he could do.

“I did something last night that I wanted to tell you about. That’s why I was looking at you in Potions the way I was.”

Harry is about to sit down on the conjured cushion he uses when he’s relaxing enough to meditate, but he pauses and shoots Theo a sharp, concerned look, gaze raking up and down his body as though searching for wounds. Theo flushes.

“All right,” Harry says at last, as much a comment on what Theo must look like to him as a response. He finishes sitting down and leans forwards, his hands on his knees. No one in the world can match the intensity of those green eyes when they’re fixed on someone, Theo thinks. He’s amazed that Harry doesn’t already have girls crawling all over him.

A good thing he doesn’t. We’d never be able to meet up.

“You’re not going to ask what it was.”

“You said you wanted to tell me. So I reckoned you would.”

Theo narrows his eyes, but he does have to admit that he wouldn’t want to be either pressured or coddled about it. He nods and sits down across from Harry. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went and cursed Snape’s portrait.”

“You what?”

Harry is gaping at him, and Theo feels a warm current of emotion moving through him that’s so strange now he almost doesn’t recognize it. Then he does. Harry is impressed, and Theo is—glad that he could make him feel that way, when Harry has been so effortlessly impressing Theo and running around saving him and disclaiming debts and performing feats of impossible magic.

Theo wants to do it again. He wants to see Harry stare at him with the look of awe on his face, one hand squirming on his knee as though he wants to touch Theo but knows it wouldn’t be welcome.

“Yes, I cursed him.”

“Why? Did you think that he was helping the people who were dosing you with the Amortentia or something?”

Theo’s eyebrows rise. “No. That’s not a suspicion I had. I cursed him for the way that he ripped into your mind when he tried to teach you Occlumency. It was nothing less than mental torture, and he had no right to do it.”

Harry blinks and stares some more. Then he lowers his eyes and whispers, “How do you even curse a portrait? I thought they were immune to everything unless you managed to destroy the portrait itself, and then they just ceased to exist.”

Theo smiles a little. “I might have done that if I thought it would be a real threat to him. But Professor Snape was always a miserable bastard when he was alive. Destroying the portrait would be too kind. I cursed him to feel all the guilt and sorrow of his life that’s normally left behind when a portrait is painted. The soul impression that comes alive after death doesn’t feel those emotions. Now he does.”

“Is there—is there some way that he can break that curse?”

“No.”

Harry’s look changes again. Now he looks at Theo as if he’s ready to worship him, grab him and swing him around and laugh, or drop to his knees in thanks. Theo sometimes saw Crabbe and Goyle look at Draco like that when he helped them pass a class.

Now—

This is the expression that I really want to see again. This is the one I want.

Theo draws in a sharp breath and shuts his eyes. He barely thought anything about sex or romance during the war; he had other things to survive. And he hasn’t thought about it, at least he would say so, since he was dosed with Amortentia. There’s just no way that he could let his enemies think they were getting to him.

But with Harry? He thinks about everything from dates to Hogsmeade to Harry kneeling at his feet to thank him. It’s a dizzying whirl of images to be hit with all at once, and Theo shudders the way he did when he felt the first creeping warmth of Amortentia along his skin last night.

“Are you all right, Theo?”

Harry’s voice is low, and he carefully doesn’t move away from his cushion, just watching Theo with concerned eyes. Theo blows out air through his nose and nods forcefully enough to give himself a headache.

“Yes. It’s nothing, Harry. I did want to tell you about what I did to Snape. I’m a little surprised you took it so well.”

There. If he can get some emotional distance from it and make it sound less important than—

“I’ve had people who would fight for me and kill for me and care for me,” Harry says quietly. He’s meeting Theo’s eyes, and frankly Theo doesn’t know where he’s getting all this courage, but he could use some. “I’ve never had someone who would curse someone permanently for me. Most of the people I know would consider that too violent. So, yes. Thank you.”

Fuck.

The emotions that are shifting through Theo right now make him feel as though he could lash out with strong curses for minutes on end and not purge them. He swallows and takes his seat on a cushion facing Harry. “Are you ready to start meditation?” he asks.

Harry just nods and closes his eyes, thank Merlin. Theo has to wrestle himself under control and think harder about calm ponds and ocean breezes than he has in years to achieve his own meditative state.

He’s been concentrating so fiercely on finding his enemies and avenging himself upon them that he hasn’t thought about what would come after.

So now that’s what he does. No matter how irrelevant this might ultimately become—because who says that Harry would want anything to do with him after Theo stops being someone he can save?—he has to go through these thoughts so he can think about other things.

That’s what he does, for nearly an hour, but he doesn’t think he’s free of them even then.

*

Harry leans against the corridor wall and closes his eyes. His body is still ringing as though Theo reached out and struck a bell in the center of it with his words about the curse.

It’s—not something he knew he wanted.

If someone asked him, of course, Harry would shake his head and say that of course he didn’t want someone to curse people (or portraits, not that he knew it was possible to curse portraits) for him. That’s not what a good person does. Until this year, Harry would have said that he wanted to be friends with good people. Fight beside them.

Date one.

But he can’t deny what Theo’s words mean to him. Maybe it’s just because no one else ever hated Snape for that. Dumbledore acknowledged that the Occlumency lessons didn’t work but never apologized. Sirius just hated Snape on principle. Ron and Hermione knew where he was going but thought he should go because Dumbledore said so.

It’s not their fault. But it’s nice to finally have someone say that that way of learning Occlumency wasn’t going to work and Harry should never have been subjected to it in the first place.

It’s nice.

“Potter!”

The tone of voice makes Harry whirl around and drop into a low crouch with his wand in his hand. He stares at an empty corridor for long moments before movement catches his attention, and he looks up at a portrait of woods to see Snape standing in the middle of them, his arms folded and his face distorted with fury.

“What?” Harry asks. He lowers his wand and looks at Snape, tilting his head back and forth, to see if he can see a sign of the curse Theo talked about.

“Tell him to remove it.”

“No.”

Snape looks like he was about to continue speaking, but when he hears Harry, he stops, and blinks at him, and then puts his hands very carefully on the edge of the portrait. His eyes are intense as they sweep up and down Harry. Harry is a little surprised that he doesn’t feel the tingle of Legilimency, but maybe that’s a talent beyond portraits.

“Do you even know what he has done?”

“Oh, yeah. Theo told me all about it.” Harry winks a little, enjoying the way that Snape’s face flushes with rage. “It’s just long-delayed retribution as far as I’m concerned. You had no right to rip my mind up like that even if you thought it was the best way to teach me Occlumency.”

And Harry is fairly sure that Snape didn’t think that. He was either doing that so he had plausible deniability with Voldemort or he was too impatient to really teach Harry and was doing the minimum to satisfy Dumbledore.

It was about the war, of course, in the end. Not about Harry and his safety. It never was.

Snape saved his life and gave Harry the memories that he needed to save the world. But he couldn’t be arsed to teach him Occlumency in a way that didn’t leave his head aching and his connection with Voldemort unaffected.

Harry bares his teeth and says nothing.

“You will do this, Potter. You will tell him to remove the curse.”

“Or what?”

“Or I will do something you will not like.”

Harry laughs a little and shakes his head. “What’s that? You’re going to go and complain to Dumbledore’s portrait? You know that he cried when he saw me alive, he was so happy? He’ll just tell you to let it go, dear boy, we should have learned to get along, dear boy, and that’ll be it.”

Snape stares at him so hard that Harry almost believes the portrait has frozen. Then he says, “You leave me no choice,” and turns and strides away.

Harry shrugs. If Snape does go and complain to the Headmistress or to Dumbledore’s portrait, he’ll put up with it. He’s pretty sure that the curse Theo used on Snape’s portrait isn’t illegal, or he wouldn’t have bragged about it so openly.

My Theo is smarter than that.

*

Hermione is waiting for Harry in the common room when he comes down the stairs the next morning, rubbing his eyes and yawning. She stands up and says in a freezing voice, “Harry, you were trying to help a Death Eater.”

There are only a few people around, one of them Ginny in the corner who only gives them a half-curious glance, but Harry’s magic still bursts out of his body and sets up a bubble of silence around them. He leans towards her and hisses, “What are you talking about?”

Hermione’s eyes are wide. “Did you just—do that wandlessly?”

“Tell me what you mean, Hermione.”

She folds her arms and huffs at him. “Professor Snape told me. The person you were trying to help is Theodore Nott. And all right, I suppose he might not be a Death Eater himself, but he’s a Death Eater’s son! And he cast a highly Dark curse on Professor Snape’s portrait, apparently because you told him to! Harry, how can you explain that? Did you know that a curse cast on a portrait is forever? How could you let him do it?”

Harry stares at her and feels as though the world has dropped out from beneath him.