lomonaaeren

“We’re doing it.”

Harry just nodded to Hermione and leaned backwards in his chair to sip from his mug of warm hot chocolate. He hadn’t told Hermione, but he’d called Dobby and asked him to bring that to Harry each morning. Dobby had been happy to do it.

Maybe it was wrong. Maybe Dobby was as much a slave, despite working for pay, as Harry was at the Dursleys’.

But right now, it was hard for Harry to care about anything more than himself, and surviving, and the thestrals in the Forest.

And Nott.

His eyes went to the Slytherin table, and found a pair of dark eyes waiting for him. Nott tipped his own mug in Harry’s direction and drank deep. Harry wouldn’t be surprised if Nott had something else instead of pumpkin juice, too.

“Your attention, please, students.”

Harry glanced towards the professors’ table, a little surprised to see Dumbledore standing up there. He’d been gone so much in the last few days, apparently talking to people at the Ministry or even in front of the Wizengamot, that Harry had thought he’d been sacked as Headmaster and someone would take his place.

Probably Umbridge. Her stay in the hospital wing hadn’t taught her much. She’d scheduled another detention for Harry that evening, in fact.

“Professor Umbridge is dead.”

Harry dropped his mug of hot chocolate, and stared at Dumbledore with an open mouth while chocolate soaked his robes. He ignored the cries of shock (and joy) from some of the students and turned his head to catch Nott’s eyes again.

Nott was smiling. It was the first time Harry had seen him do it. It was dark and captivating and Harry immediately wanted to see him do it again. Wanted to cause it.

Maybe I sort of caused it because he killed Umbridge for me. Harry had absolutely no doubt that Nott was behind Umbridge’s death, or the reason he’d done it.

But I want to cause it more directly.

“Professor Umbridge appears to have succumbed to a poisonous infusion in her food or drink,” Dumbledore went on, causing the student voices to surge up again. This time, though, Professor McGonagall produced a thunderclap from her wand that cut through it and allowed Dumbledore to keep speaking. “I urge you to check on your Potions ingredients and any brewing you are done carefully. Accidents can happen.”

And so can things that aren’t accidents.

Harry bit his lip when Dumbledore sat down and gave him one quick glance before he went to talking to Professor McGonagall. Harry wouldn’t be surprised if he had a summons to the Headmaster’s office waiting for him that evening. It seemed that Dumbledore wanted to talk to Harry if he thought Harry was capable of murder.

I didn’t do this.

But I approve of Nott doing this.

Strangely, that didn’t rouse much guilt in Harry at all.

*

Harry stood in the corridor outside the gargoyle that led to Dumbledore’s office, clenching his fists and breathing in a way that made white sparks leap and dash around his vision.

“I only want to know if you did this, Harry.”

“Why do you want to know, sir?”

And the Headmaster had sighed, and avoided his eyes, and murmured something about outside influences and how he hoped that Harry would understand that any loss of human life was a tragedy.

Harry had shoved his hand towards the Headmaster, but Dumbledore had turned away, and not looked, and—wasn’t that just an emblem of the way that everything was going this year? He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to notice.

Bloody useless, this lot of professors, supposedly they couldn’t stop her but a fifteen-year-old managed to stop her—

A moving silence made Harry look up. Nott was standing near the corner, looking at him as if he thought he might need to leave fast. If Dumbledore came down the stairs behind Harry calling for him, for instance.

Not that that will happen.

But Harry didn’t want to ruin this moment with Nott with bitter, angry words, or any words at all, really. He stepped up and let his hand come gently to rest on Nott’s cheek for a long minute. Nott’s eyes fluttered shut and he stood there as if he couldn’t believe that someone was touching him.

Harry lost track of how long they stood there, the way he often lost track with the thestrals in the Forest. Then he stepped back, and smiled, so that the force of his smile was what Nott saw when he opened his eyes.

Nott stood still and watched Harry go.

*

“So you didn’t do it.”

Harry sighed a little. “No, Hermione. I don’t think I’m capable of murder.”

Maybe I would be, if someone threatened Nott.

It was a new idea, and Harry wanted to pause and think it. But Hermione was walking ahead of him towards the library, and Harry had to jog a little to catch up with her. Her voice filled the silence.

“I just wondered…because of your nightmares, and…Ron says that you wake up hissing.”

Harry blinked several times, and then reminded himself that his friends were scared. They hadn’t been called to Umbridge’s detentions. They’d seen the scars on his hand, but not endured them themselves. And they believed him about Voldemort, but they hadn’t been in the graveyard.

They hadn’t been in the Forest, feeding thestrals with chunks of fresh and bloody meat.

“Yes, sometimes,” he said, when he got his tongue under control. “But I haven’t had any more of the dreams that make me do that for a few weeks now.” Since Umbridge had died, in fact. He shrugged and lowered his voice as they stepped into the library. “I think Umbridge was making it worse, but now that she’s gone, I can focus more on that.”

“That?”

“Him. Controlling the dreams.”

Hermione smiled at him, so relieved that Harry paused. He hadn’t realized she was that afraid. “Does that mean that you’ll consider running the Defense group? Since Auror Dawlish is barely letting us practice anything in class.”

Harry snorted. Dawlish was drilling them on spells, but reluctantly, as if he believed they could storm the Ministry (or kill him) with any spells above third year. “Maybe if it means that other people aren’t going to dismiss my words as the ravings of a madman. And we don’t have to keep it secret now.”

“They won’t dismiss you as mad.”

Hermione sounded confident.

*

She was wrong.

Harry stepped into the Forbidden Forest and walked a careful pathway of leaves towards the usual spot where the thestrals would be waiting. His feet crushed and crushed the leaves. His mind whirled through so many thoughts that it hurt.

He had controlled himself, though. He’d just turned and walked out of the room when Seamus and the rest had begun to spout the usual drivel.

“How do we know that he didn’t kill Cedric? He was the only one there, and he came back with the body!”

“I’ve heard him hissing at night!”

“He hated Umbridge, and she died! How do we know that he’s not going to poison us, too?”

Harry began to run.

He came to a stop in a clearing where a single thestral waited for him, a silver mare so bright that Harry wondered for a second how she managed to hide in the dark Forest. Then she came a step closer, and Harry realized that he didn’t have any meat for her.

He raised his wand and cut the back of his hand, right atop the faded letters from Umbridge’s detention, without stopping to think. He held out his hand, and the mare began to lap.

Someone moved behind him. Harry closed his eyes and eased back to lean against Nott’s chest.

They stood that way for a long time.

*

“I saw you coming out of the Forbidden Forest, Potter. Do you go there to practice Dark Arts?”

“Maybe he’s burying more people he murdered, like Umbridge and poor Cedric.”

“How do we know that You-Know-Who came back? It’s just Potter’s word, and if Potter is the one who did everything…”

It went from words to hexes. From hexes to curses. From silent visits to Madam Pomfrey, who shook her head and clucked over his wounds and never asked him how they happened, to silent communion with the thestrals and Nott in the Forest.

Hermione and Ron were there for him, but they didn’t seem to have any idea what could be done. Harry raised the idea of cursing the other students back, and Hermione said that was wrong and Ron said it would only make it worse. Harry went to Professor McGonagall, and she just shook her head and said that the Ministry was still trying to interfere in Hogwarts by sending Dawlish, and they would send other Aurors if Harry gave them a reason. They already wanted to do that, investigate Umbridge’s death. Harry couldn’t give them a reason. He didn’t want anyone to track Nott down.

Harry tried going to Dumbledore’s office, and the gargoyle wouldn’t let him in. He tried speaking to Professor Flitwick, who looked sad but asked if he knew the names of the students ambushing him. Harry pointed out that it was always from behind, and Flitwick just shook his head and said they needed to know the names of the culprits.

Harry wrote to Sirius. Sirius told him that Dumbledore was trying to stop the Ministry from interfering and the whispers would die down when he did.

The Prophet articles got worse.

Nott brushed his hand silently down Harry’s chest in the Forest one night, an apology for having killed Umbridge and started all this. Harry shook his head and leaned back harder against him, a silent refusal of that apology.

Nott had done that for him, when no one else had done anything all year or had stood around helplessly and then done nothing. Nott was the only person who mattered to him.

*

Harry opened his eyes one night in the hospital wing. He had had to stay overnight because someone had cursed all the bones in both arms to break. Now he had to lie still with his arms resting on the coverlets beside him, but he knew something had changed. He frowned and turned his head back and forth, searching.

There was…

It felt as though someone had spread an invisible blanket over him. One that hovered above his body, not quite touching, but there.

Then it was gone.

Harry lay uneasily until morning, at which point he slipped into an equally uneasy sleep. Yes, something had changed, but he still didn’t know what it was.

*

“Good-for-nothing traitor, murderer—”

The first hex blazed towards Harry from the wand of an upper-year Slytherin who probably didn’t even believe what she was saying and just wanted an excuse to jinx him, and the air between them ignited.

Harry stood there staring with an open mouth as something like a tilted-sideways pool of yellow flame burned between him and his attackers, and swallowed that hex and the other curses that they had sent against him. They cast three times more before they stopped. And then the corridor was silent but for the flicker and crackle of the flames.

“Mr. Potter!”

The Slytherins scattered. Professor Sprout was striding towards Harry down the corridor, her eyes wide and startled, shaking her head as though she didn’t know what to do with him.

“In all my born days, I never…”

The flames disappeared as Professor Sprout came to a halt beside him. She looked back and forth between Harry and the empty air, and said, “I don’t suppose that you had anything to do with this, Mr. Potter?’

“No, Professor.”

“Hmmm.” She studied him in silence for a moment, and Harry just waited. He was remembering that she had been kind in class, and also that she had let her Hufflepuff students wear Potter Stinks badges in class last year. “Well, this sort of protection can only be the result of ritual work. We’re going to see the Headmaster.”

Harry followed in silence. It stung to hear her speak as though she was blaming him for casting the ritual and didn’t trust him when he said he didn’t know anything about it, but at least this way he would get to talk to Dumbledore.

They passed a side corridor where someone looked out at them from behind a tapestry, and Harry offered Nott a smile that he could see made dark eyes widen, before Sprout swept him around a corner and they were gone.

*

“I don’t know what kind of ritual this is, Pomona. A defensive one, but I don’t know more than that.”

That was all Dumbledore said, all the while acting as though their coming to his office had interrupted some important paperwork. He’d sighed and shaken his head when Professor Sprout described what the ritual did, and then declared that he had no time for this. Then he’d rustled parchment until they’d gone away.

He hadn’t looked at or spoken to Harry at all.

Harry leaned against a large tree on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. He’d come to seek the thestrals, and he hadn’t come to seek the thestrals. He knew that he badly needed to see Nott, though.

Footsteps sounded, coming towards him. It occurred to Harry, idly, that it was the most noise he and Nott had ever made in each other’s presence.

He straightened from where he was slumped against the tree. He and Nott stood and looked at each other in the deepening shadows.

Nott looked ragged and worn. Harry didn’t know for sure if it was the ritual he had done or something else. He did know that he owed Nott a debt he couldn’t repay, and he wasn’t sure what to do now.

Nott said nothing. Harry said nothing. The Forest had become almost too dark for them to see each other before Nott raised a silent Lumos on his wand and led the way forwards. Harry followed promptly.

Nott had brought a package of raw meat for the thestrals. They both fed it to the thestrals who came to them, the coal-black stallion and the silver mare and a dancing, squealing foal Harry hadn’t seen before, who ran around them and threw its hooves into the air and was generally a nuisance.

Harry smiled at the foal. Then he became aware that Nott had turned and was looking at him.

Without meeting Nott’s eyes, Harry held his other hand, the one not occupied with trying to keep the meat from falling into the leaves while the foal pranced, out.

A second later, he felt Nott’s bloody fingers wrap around his own.

*

“Won’t we have to worry about that ritual shield on the Quidditch pitch?”

“Why? It’s not like I can play Quidditch, either, when I have a lifetime ban from it.”

Harry kept his head bowed over his Transfiguration homework, and ignored the uneasy silence to the side of him. The lifetime ban hadn’t been reversed after Umbridge died, although McGonagall had said it probably would be for his sixth year. Right now, she thought it assisted him in “keeping his head down.”

Harry could have told her it wouldn’t work. The Ministry wouldn’t forget about him, and neither would the people who still muttered and made loud snide remarks, even if they couldn’t hex him now.

“Harry?”

He sighed and turned to fully face Angelina. “It won’t matter,” he said. “If I play Quidditch again, it’s going to be next year. That’s what McGonagall told me.”

Angelina shook her head and then watched him for a long moment. Harry watched her back. “It’s like you don’t care.”

“Don’t care about what?”

“Don’t care about the way that people think you murdered Umbridge, or that they think you’re mad.” Harry bit his lip to avoid saying that he cared a lot but he couldn’t do anything about it, and Angelina went on in a thoughtful voice. “If you would just say that you didn’t kill her, and stop talking about You-Know-Who, I think they would stop hexing you.”

“I did say that I didn’t kill her. And I haven’t talked about Voldemort that much in weeks.” Angelina flinched. Harry sighed. “They don’t believe me about the one and they keep trying to hex me even though I don’t talk about Voldemort anymore.”

“But now there’s the shield.”

“What about it?”

“The only kind of ritual that could create that is Dark, Harry. Really Dark.” Angelina licked her lips and sat back a little against the couch as if she could escape Harry’s flat stare. “So if you dropped the shield and said that you didn’t kill Umbridge and stopped talking about—You-Know-Who, then I think that would make a difference. But all together, it just makes you seem Dark and mental.”

“So the people who are hexing me are right?”

“I never said that.”

“But you think I should drop the shield.”

“Did you do the ritual to create it?”

“No!”

“Then you don’t have anything to fear from dropping it, because there won’t be any backlash to you from it.”

Harry laughed in her face before he could stop himself. Angelina leaned a little further away from him, her eyes wide.

“All I have to do is make myself as vulnerable as possible to everyone in the school, including some of the people in our own House, and cringe, and apologize, and lie, and then keep telling the truth even though no one believes it.” Harry shook his head. “What, are people coming to you and saying they won’t play on the team with me next year unless I do those things?”

Angelina made a strangled croaking sound, and Harry stood up, ignoring the way that his homework fell to the floor for a second. “They are, aren’t they.”

“I—I never told you that—”

“No, it was just reasonable from the way you were acting.”

“It’s just—maybe even this wouldn’t be enough by itself, but people also still think that you cheated to enter the Tournament last year, and—”

“And even telling them the truth there didn’t make a bloody bit of difference,” Harry finished. He could feel the hexes slamming against his body if he thought about it enough. The same thing had happened in the Defense club that Hermione had insisted he could lead, with people “accidentally” jinxing him and then claiming with wide eyes that they’d never meant to, while their friends laughed at Harry silently. “I’m done pandering to idiots.”

“That shield is Dark!”

“And some of those hexes that people fired at me were, too. But you’re not scolding McLaggen and Finnigan and the rest of them.”

“Harry, I—”

Harry gathered up his homework and his books, and turned and walked away.