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lomonaaerenTitle: Summer World
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Mild angst, ignores the epilogue, present tense, bullying
Wordcount: 2300
Summary: After the war, Theo watches with some bitterness as Draco Malfoy takes a greater place than Theo thinks he should have, all because Potter spoke for him at the Death Eater trials. He doesn’t know that Potter is watching, too—or what will happen when Potter decides to cut Malfoy down to size.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice.
Summer World
“What do you know, Nott?”
Theo freezes, his shoulders prickling. He wanted to eat breakfast in the Great Hall, and he wanted to sleep in. He shouldn’t have let himself indulge in those desires, not when he knows that Malfoy likes to come in to breakfast about the same time.
“Well? I asked you a question, Nott.”
Theo sits down at the Slytherin table, because he won’t get any peace if he tries to leave, and just shakes his head as he picks up a bowl of porridge. “I don’t know anything,” he whispers, and keeps his head bowed.
“That’s right.”
Theo stares bitterly at Malfoy’s back as Malfoy turns around to laugh with his one remaining minion, Goyle. Theo’s smarter than Malfoy, more cunning, and more brilliant at magic. It used to be that that was enough to keep Malfoy in his place.
Firmly beneath Theo, and not bothering him when they did cross paths.
But since the war, it’s not about marks or plans or even magical power. It’s about connections, and it doesn’t matter that two of the Malfoy family bore Dark Marks. Potter reduced Lucius’s sentence to house arrest and ensured that Malfoy the younger got no sentence at all, except for random wand checks by the Aurors now and then.
Theo eats as quickly as possible—it’s been a while since meals were a pleasure with Malfoy at them—and reaches for his pumpkin juice to take a sip. He jerks back with a surprised cry when blue tentacles surface in the juice. The cup sloshes all over his robe and down his knees, a stain that it’ll take house-elves to clean.
“What’s the matter, Nott, octopus got your tongue?”
Theo keeps his head bowed as people laugh at him, none louder and more brayingly than Pansy, who needs Malfoy’s good humor to survive in a Hogwarts where people blame her for Potter almost dying at the end of the Dark Lord’s wand. He spells away what pumpkin juice his spells can help and starts to stand.
“Malfoy.”
Potter’s voice isn’t raised. It’s cool and calm and simply etches Malfoy’s name on the air in tones of utter disapproval, like someone carving on glass with a diamond.
Malfoy’s laughter dies. Theo dares to look over his shoulder, and sees Potter standing in front of the Slytherin table, arms folded and gaze cool to match his voice, fixed on Malfoy.
“What do you want, Potter?”
“I want you to stop being a stupid bigoted bully.” Potter still doesn’t raise his voice, but by now, so many people have fallen silent throughout the Great Hall that everyone can probably hear him. “Do you remember the conversation you and I had after your trial?”
“Shut up, Potter!”
Malfoy’s cheeks look like blazing roses. That would be enough to make this memory one of Theo’s most treasured, but Potter goes a step further. He moves forwards and says in a gentle, jabbing voice, “That you wouldn’t bully others. That you would stop with the blood purist comments. That you wouldn’t use spells against other students except to defend yourself.”
“That wasn’t a spell! It was a potion! And Nott doesn’t mind!”
Potter turns to Theo as if Malfoy has ceased to exist. “Is that true, Nott?”
Theo looks deep into Potter’s eyes. They’re the eyes of a judge, and at that moment, Theo fully believes that Potter died and came back, which he never did before.
Time to form some connections of my own.
“No,” he says. “I mind. And the tentacles are the result of a potion, but you have to cast a spell on the liquid you put the potion in to make them surface at exactly the right moment.”
Potter nods. “Thanks for telling me the truth, Nott.”
“He’s lying!”
“Prove it,” Potter says, and he turns back to Malfoy. “I did think you changed after the war, you know. That your terror when Voldemort made you torture people was real and worked a change in you. But it seems that you’re as much of a braggart and a bully and a coward as you ever were when you worked for him.”
Malfoy stares around with panicked eyes. People are gaping back at him, but some of them start to turn away even before the echoes of Potter’s words die. Potter has just socially destroyed Malfoy, and all those people anxious to cuddle up to him before because they thought he had Potter’s favor will be strangers now.
Not to mention that he exposed one of Malfoy’s biggest secrets, about what Voldemort forced him to do, in public.
Theo smiles, and ignores the stain.
Potter glances at him, and then whips out his wand. Theo tenses a little as Potter traces his wand in a complicated pattern aimed at Theo, but that’s more a legacy of the Carrows than anything else. One never knew what those twisted bastards would command.
The stain vanishes.
Theo draws in a sharp breath. People have talked before about how powerful Potter’s magic is, but he never knew that it could be like this, when an overpowered Cleaning Charm both did house-elf work and managed to make it feel like nothing more than a warm breeze.
“Will you come with me, Nott? I want to talk to you about something.”
Theo can see people whispering as they reevaluate his social standing in turn. But most of his attention is taken by Potter, who is waiting for him with a patience Theo thinks isn’t typical for him.
“Of course.”
Potter smiles and turns on his heel. Theo follows him out of the Great Hall, not even looking back at Malfoy. It would ruin his moment of triumph.
*
They end up going up a staircase, through a tapestry that Theo never knew opened onto a secret passage, and out onto a balcony that projects from the side of Ravenclaw Tower. Theo blinks in the fresh air and takes a deep breath of the rain scent.
“Are you okay? I never noticed that Malfoy was tormenting you before.”
Theo turns around and leans back against the railing behind him. Potter is watching him, and as much as Theo values his attention for the way it’ll improve his standing in Slytherin, it’s—overwhelming, to be this close. Like staring back at a nesting dragon.
“Why would you have noticed? I don’t blame you.”
Potter lowers his eyes and stands there for a long moment. Then he says, “I should notice when someone’s being bullied. And especially by someone I vouched for and really did think had changed.”
“Well, I’m not one of your close friends or someone you testified for after the war. So it doesn’t surprise me that you didn’t notice.”
“That just makes it worse!”
Theo blinks. Then he says, “Sorry, are you asking me to comfort you for not being enough of a martyr?”
To his intense relief, that makes Potter blink a moment, and then throw his head back and laugh. Theo stares at him unabashedly. His power and attention are a lot easier to take when he’s not staring Theo right in the eye.
Unfortunately (fortunately), he goes right back to that just a few seconds later. “Sorry, no,” Potter says, and chuckles and shakes his head. “You’re right, that would be silly. But it is worse of me not to notice that someone is being bullied because they’re the sort of person I don’t generally pay attention to. If I’m serious about stopping bullying at Hogwarts, then I need to be paying attention to everyone.”
“That’s your great crusade? Stopping bullying here?”
“Only for this year. After that, I’m going to get the education I need to really make Hogwarts better.”
“You want to be a professor? You’d probably be a better professor for Defense Against the Dark Arts already than most of the fools we’ve been saddled with.”
For some reason, that makes Potter smile and mutter something that sounds like “D.A.” under his breath. “I’d like to be a professor, but even more, I’d like to be someone who takes care of magical children and makes sure they don’t suffer. Either because of blood purity or terrible relatives or arseholes like Voldemort.” Theo is still choking on the combination of “arseholes” and the name he’s feared since he was a toddler when Potter adds casually, “And I’d like to make sure that another war doesn’t happen right away.”
“Another war?”
“Mr. Malfoy is already spreading around tales that he was under the Imperius and not responsible for his actions. People who were Death Eaters are emerging from hiding to say the same thing. So are some of the collaborators like Umbridge who were tormenting Muggleborns last year. I’m not going to let them get away with it.”
Potter’s eyes are as bright now as lenses concentrating sunlight. Theo whistles under his breath, impressed despite himself. “With that level of ambition, you should have been Sorted into Slytherin.”
“The Hat considered it.”
“What?”
Potter laughs again, although it just puts crinkles around the corners of his eyes rather than making him toss his head back this time. “Yeah. It told me I would be great there. But I’d already met another arsehole named Draco Malfoy who was certain I needed to abandon Ron to make friends with the ‘right sort,’ and then I saw him Sorted into Slytherin, and, well.” Potter shrugs as if his confession means nothing.
Theo, meanwhile, is thinking about how it might have helped him to have someone as strong and protective as Potter turned out to be in his House. “I’m going to kill Draco,” he mutters.
“He’s not that bad.”
“I didn’t mean it literally.”
Potter just nods. Theo cocks his head. “And do you forgive people all the time you think might have meant to kill someone? Why take me so seriously and then believe me when I say I was joking?”
“I think you’re a truthful person.”
“What?”
Now Potter is staring off into the distance, towards the Forbidden Forest, and a blush is definitely rising on his cheeks. “I—there’s more than one reason that I was upset about Malfoy tormenting you, and not just because of the promise he broke.”
“All right. What, then?”
The only thing Theo can think of is that Potter wishes he had spoken up for other people locked here in the school and tormented into following the Carrows’ will, but Potter can’t think they were all innocents. Even Theo did what he had to do to survive. He’s no innocent. Just not an oathbreaker, the way Malfoy is.
Potter seems intensely interested in the distant gleam of the Forest. Then he whispers something under his breath that sounds like, “Come on, Potter, do it,” and he turns around and faces Theo, his face solemn.
And open.
And shining.
The focus of that shining seems to be Theo.
Theo’s breath catches.
“I watched the way that you just wanted to survive,” Potter says quietly. “Neville and the rest told me that you never raised your wand to anyone unless the Carrows forced you to, and then you used lesser pain spells. Since you cast them silently, the Carrows couldn’t tell that you hadn’t followed their orders. And you—you came back to the school, and you didn’t play for status like the rest of the Slytherins. You kept your head down, and you’re doing great in your classes.”
“You—that matters to you?”
“It’s something I never managed to do except in Defense, and I’m even finding that hard, without all the Dark-Lord-hunting things I used to get involved in. I get bored easily by classwork.” Potter shrugs. “Look, I like you. I’ve been more interested in you than I am in people who were heroes last year, or who just do well in their classes.”
Theo stares at him. “I—that doesn’t sound like much of a basis for attraction, Potter.”
“Yeah, I don’t know why it is, either. Maybe we can figure it out together?”
Potter’s smile flashes across his face. Theo has never had cause to think about it before as he might when it’s aimed at him. It was just aimed at people who never deserved it, like Malfoy, and some people who did, like Granger and Weasley, but who wouldn’t share it with Theo.
And now it’s aimed at him.
Theo shivers in wonder. And while he would tell Potter that he’s envied the status his protection gave Malfoy if he were completely honest, well, he’s not completely honest. He even dares to think that that might be part of what Potter finds attractive about him.
“Yes.”
“Yeah?”
“I said yes. How much more of an invitation do you want?”
Potter throws his head back with another joyous laugh, this one answered by a sharp, interested fluttering in Theo’s stomach. Potter leans forwards and clasps one of Theo’s hands, touching him for the first time.
It’s wondrous.
“Thank you,” Potter murmurs. “I know you might not feel comfortable with me calling you by your first name yet, but I would be honored if you called me Harry.”
“Harry,” Theo says softly back, without offering his first name in return. Not yet. Because, despite appearances, he is a Slytherin, and he knows that some things are chased and coveted the more intensely if offered at a remove.
He wants Harry to chase him.
He wants Harry to court him.
He wants Harry to show enough interest that Theo can reciprocate it, and trust him, and never be unprotected again, and never need to let go.
Harry’s smile is as perfect as Malfoy’s humiliation earlier. Theo looks forward to seeing how much brighter he can make him smile, how it will make the world as bright as summer.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Mild angst, ignores the epilogue, present tense, bullying
Wordcount: 2300
Summary: After the war, Theo watches with some bitterness as Draco Malfoy takes a greater place than Theo thinks he should have, all because Potter spoke for him at the Death Eater trials. He doesn’t know that Potter is watching, too—or what will happen when Potter decides to cut Malfoy down to size.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice.
Summer World
“What do you know, Nott?”
Theo freezes, his shoulders prickling. He wanted to eat breakfast in the Great Hall, and he wanted to sleep in. He shouldn’t have let himself indulge in those desires, not when he knows that Malfoy likes to come in to breakfast about the same time.
“Well? I asked you a question, Nott.”
Theo sits down at the Slytherin table, because he won’t get any peace if he tries to leave, and just shakes his head as he picks up a bowl of porridge. “I don’t know anything,” he whispers, and keeps his head bowed.
“That’s right.”
Theo stares bitterly at Malfoy’s back as Malfoy turns around to laugh with his one remaining minion, Goyle. Theo’s smarter than Malfoy, more cunning, and more brilliant at magic. It used to be that that was enough to keep Malfoy in his place.
Firmly beneath Theo, and not bothering him when they did cross paths.
But since the war, it’s not about marks or plans or even magical power. It’s about connections, and it doesn’t matter that two of the Malfoy family bore Dark Marks. Potter reduced Lucius’s sentence to house arrest and ensured that Malfoy the younger got no sentence at all, except for random wand checks by the Aurors now and then.
Theo eats as quickly as possible—it’s been a while since meals were a pleasure with Malfoy at them—and reaches for his pumpkin juice to take a sip. He jerks back with a surprised cry when blue tentacles surface in the juice. The cup sloshes all over his robe and down his knees, a stain that it’ll take house-elves to clean.
“What’s the matter, Nott, octopus got your tongue?”
Theo keeps his head bowed as people laugh at him, none louder and more brayingly than Pansy, who needs Malfoy’s good humor to survive in a Hogwarts where people blame her for Potter almost dying at the end of the Dark Lord’s wand. He spells away what pumpkin juice his spells can help and starts to stand.
“Malfoy.”
Potter’s voice isn’t raised. It’s cool and calm and simply etches Malfoy’s name on the air in tones of utter disapproval, like someone carving on glass with a diamond.
Malfoy’s laughter dies. Theo dares to look over his shoulder, and sees Potter standing in front of the Slytherin table, arms folded and gaze cool to match his voice, fixed on Malfoy.
“What do you want, Potter?”
“I want you to stop being a stupid bigoted bully.” Potter still doesn’t raise his voice, but by now, so many people have fallen silent throughout the Great Hall that everyone can probably hear him. “Do you remember the conversation you and I had after your trial?”
“Shut up, Potter!”
Malfoy’s cheeks look like blazing roses. That would be enough to make this memory one of Theo’s most treasured, but Potter goes a step further. He moves forwards and says in a gentle, jabbing voice, “That you wouldn’t bully others. That you would stop with the blood purist comments. That you wouldn’t use spells against other students except to defend yourself.”
“That wasn’t a spell! It was a potion! And Nott doesn’t mind!”
Potter turns to Theo as if Malfoy has ceased to exist. “Is that true, Nott?”
Theo looks deep into Potter’s eyes. They’re the eyes of a judge, and at that moment, Theo fully believes that Potter died and came back, which he never did before.
Time to form some connections of my own.
“No,” he says. “I mind. And the tentacles are the result of a potion, but you have to cast a spell on the liquid you put the potion in to make them surface at exactly the right moment.”
Potter nods. “Thanks for telling me the truth, Nott.”
“He’s lying!”
“Prove it,” Potter says, and he turns back to Malfoy. “I did think you changed after the war, you know. That your terror when Voldemort made you torture people was real and worked a change in you. But it seems that you’re as much of a braggart and a bully and a coward as you ever were when you worked for him.”
Malfoy stares around with panicked eyes. People are gaping back at him, but some of them start to turn away even before the echoes of Potter’s words die. Potter has just socially destroyed Malfoy, and all those people anxious to cuddle up to him before because they thought he had Potter’s favor will be strangers now.
Not to mention that he exposed one of Malfoy’s biggest secrets, about what Voldemort forced him to do, in public.
Theo smiles, and ignores the stain.
Potter glances at him, and then whips out his wand. Theo tenses a little as Potter traces his wand in a complicated pattern aimed at Theo, but that’s more a legacy of the Carrows than anything else. One never knew what those twisted bastards would command.
The stain vanishes.
Theo draws in a sharp breath. People have talked before about how powerful Potter’s magic is, but he never knew that it could be like this, when an overpowered Cleaning Charm both did house-elf work and managed to make it feel like nothing more than a warm breeze.
“Will you come with me, Nott? I want to talk to you about something.”
Theo can see people whispering as they reevaluate his social standing in turn. But most of his attention is taken by Potter, who is waiting for him with a patience Theo thinks isn’t typical for him.
“Of course.”
Potter smiles and turns on his heel. Theo follows him out of the Great Hall, not even looking back at Malfoy. It would ruin his moment of triumph.
*
They end up going up a staircase, through a tapestry that Theo never knew opened onto a secret passage, and out onto a balcony that projects from the side of Ravenclaw Tower. Theo blinks in the fresh air and takes a deep breath of the rain scent.
“Are you okay? I never noticed that Malfoy was tormenting you before.”
Theo turns around and leans back against the railing behind him. Potter is watching him, and as much as Theo values his attention for the way it’ll improve his standing in Slytherin, it’s—overwhelming, to be this close. Like staring back at a nesting dragon.
“Why would you have noticed? I don’t blame you.”
Potter lowers his eyes and stands there for a long moment. Then he says, “I should notice when someone’s being bullied. And especially by someone I vouched for and really did think had changed.”
“Well, I’m not one of your close friends or someone you testified for after the war. So it doesn’t surprise me that you didn’t notice.”
“That just makes it worse!”
Theo blinks. Then he says, “Sorry, are you asking me to comfort you for not being enough of a martyr?”
To his intense relief, that makes Potter blink a moment, and then throw his head back and laugh. Theo stares at him unabashedly. His power and attention are a lot easier to take when he’s not staring Theo right in the eye.
Unfortunately (fortunately), he goes right back to that just a few seconds later. “Sorry, no,” Potter says, and chuckles and shakes his head. “You’re right, that would be silly. But it is worse of me not to notice that someone is being bullied because they’re the sort of person I don’t generally pay attention to. If I’m serious about stopping bullying at Hogwarts, then I need to be paying attention to everyone.”
“That’s your great crusade? Stopping bullying here?”
“Only for this year. After that, I’m going to get the education I need to really make Hogwarts better.”
“You want to be a professor? You’d probably be a better professor for Defense Against the Dark Arts already than most of the fools we’ve been saddled with.”
For some reason, that makes Potter smile and mutter something that sounds like “D.A.” under his breath. “I’d like to be a professor, but even more, I’d like to be someone who takes care of magical children and makes sure they don’t suffer. Either because of blood purity or terrible relatives or arseholes like Voldemort.” Theo is still choking on the combination of “arseholes” and the name he’s feared since he was a toddler when Potter adds casually, “And I’d like to make sure that another war doesn’t happen right away.”
“Another war?”
“Mr. Malfoy is already spreading around tales that he was under the Imperius and not responsible for his actions. People who were Death Eaters are emerging from hiding to say the same thing. So are some of the collaborators like Umbridge who were tormenting Muggleborns last year. I’m not going to let them get away with it.”
Potter’s eyes are as bright now as lenses concentrating sunlight. Theo whistles under his breath, impressed despite himself. “With that level of ambition, you should have been Sorted into Slytherin.”
“The Hat considered it.”
“What?”
Potter laughs again, although it just puts crinkles around the corners of his eyes rather than making him toss his head back this time. “Yeah. It told me I would be great there. But I’d already met another arsehole named Draco Malfoy who was certain I needed to abandon Ron to make friends with the ‘right sort,’ and then I saw him Sorted into Slytherin, and, well.” Potter shrugs as if his confession means nothing.
Theo, meanwhile, is thinking about how it might have helped him to have someone as strong and protective as Potter turned out to be in his House. “I’m going to kill Draco,” he mutters.
“He’s not that bad.”
“I didn’t mean it literally.”
Potter just nods. Theo cocks his head. “And do you forgive people all the time you think might have meant to kill someone? Why take me so seriously and then believe me when I say I was joking?”
“I think you’re a truthful person.”
“What?”
Now Potter is staring off into the distance, towards the Forbidden Forest, and a blush is definitely rising on his cheeks. “I—there’s more than one reason that I was upset about Malfoy tormenting you, and not just because of the promise he broke.”
“All right. What, then?”
The only thing Theo can think of is that Potter wishes he had spoken up for other people locked here in the school and tormented into following the Carrows’ will, but Potter can’t think they were all innocents. Even Theo did what he had to do to survive. He’s no innocent. Just not an oathbreaker, the way Malfoy is.
Potter seems intensely interested in the distant gleam of the Forest. Then he whispers something under his breath that sounds like, “Come on, Potter, do it,” and he turns around and faces Theo, his face solemn.
And open.
And shining.
The focus of that shining seems to be Theo.
Theo’s breath catches.
“I watched the way that you just wanted to survive,” Potter says quietly. “Neville and the rest told me that you never raised your wand to anyone unless the Carrows forced you to, and then you used lesser pain spells. Since you cast them silently, the Carrows couldn’t tell that you hadn’t followed their orders. And you—you came back to the school, and you didn’t play for status like the rest of the Slytherins. You kept your head down, and you’re doing great in your classes.”
“You—that matters to you?”
“It’s something I never managed to do except in Defense, and I’m even finding that hard, without all the Dark-Lord-hunting things I used to get involved in. I get bored easily by classwork.” Potter shrugs. “Look, I like you. I’ve been more interested in you than I am in people who were heroes last year, or who just do well in their classes.”
Theo stares at him. “I—that doesn’t sound like much of a basis for attraction, Potter.”
“Yeah, I don’t know why it is, either. Maybe we can figure it out together?”
Potter’s smile flashes across his face. Theo has never had cause to think about it before as he might when it’s aimed at him. It was just aimed at people who never deserved it, like Malfoy, and some people who did, like Granger and Weasley, but who wouldn’t share it with Theo.
And now it’s aimed at him.
Theo shivers in wonder. And while he would tell Potter that he’s envied the status his protection gave Malfoy if he were completely honest, well, he’s not completely honest. He even dares to think that that might be part of what Potter finds attractive about him.
“Yes.”
“Yeah?”
“I said yes. How much more of an invitation do you want?”
Potter throws his head back with another joyous laugh, this one answered by a sharp, interested fluttering in Theo’s stomach. Potter leans forwards and clasps one of Theo’s hands, touching him for the first time.
It’s wondrous.
“Thank you,” Potter murmurs. “I know you might not feel comfortable with me calling you by your first name yet, but I would be honored if you called me Harry.”
“Harry,” Theo says softly back, without offering his first name in return. Not yet. Because, despite appearances, he is a Slytherin, and he knows that some things are chased and coveted the more intensely if offered at a remove.
He wants Harry to chase him.
He wants Harry to court him.
He wants Harry to show enough interest that Theo can reciprocate it, and trust him, and never be unprotected again, and never need to let go.
Harry’s smile is as perfect as Malfoy’s humiliation earlier. Theo looks forward to seeing how much brighter he can make him smile, how it will make the world as bright as summer.
The End.
