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lomonaaerenTitle: The Accidental Courtship
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Soulmate-identifying marks, ignores the epilogue, angst, jealousy, minor Harry/others, Theo/others, mentions of violence and torture
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 2900
Summary: Harry gets a soul-mark during his eighth year at Hogwarts, and is hopeful that he can finally be sure he’ll have someone who loves him for himself. When Theodore Nott rejects him, Harry steps back and goes to live his own life. Theo, who doesn’t want to be trapped in the limelight at Potter’s side, finds himself falling in love anyway.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary” short fics being posted between the first of December and the winter solstice. It will have three chapters, with the others to be posted over the next few days.
The Accidental Courtship
Harry took a deep breath and straightened his robes. Then he looked in the mirror and straightened them again.
“What is up with you, mate?” Ron asked around a huge yawn. He was throwing on his own Hogwarts robes any which way, hitting the wrinkles with a charm that made them settle once and then puff out gently. He paused and took a better look at Harry. “Where are your robes?”
“I’m wearing robes.”
“Not the uniform!”
Harry glared at Ron in the mirror, then shook his head. “I got a soul-mark last night,” he muttered, low enough that Neville and Dean and Seamus probably wouldn’t hear.
Ron undid that immediately by leaning towards him and saying, “You got a what?”
Someone made an indistinct sound of agony in the bedroom. Harry rolled his eyes at Ron and said, “You heard me well enough.”
“Those are rare, Harry! Wicked!” For a minute, Ron’s expression wavered back and forth between excitement and what was probably jealousy, and then he took a deep breath and got past it. Harry doubted Ron would have wanted anyone but Hermione, anyway, no matter what kind of soul-mark he might get. “Can I see it?”
“I want to show it to him first.”
“Him?”
Harry blinked, wondering if Ron was going to succumb to a prejudice he hadn’t thought he’d face here, and then smiled a little. “Yeah, it’s not Ginny. Sorry.”
“Oh.” Ron frowned, then shrugged. “She’ll be disappointed.”
“Too bad.”
Ron took a long step away from him. “Yeah, just tell me when you’re going to tell her that, so I can be on the other side of the planet.”
Harry laughed and left the bathroom. His face was tingling with excitement and heat, his hands shaking with nerves. He had read a book on soul-marks yesterday, after he’d woken up with it encircling his wrist, that said you were supposed to bring a gift to the first meeting with your soulmate to show you knew them.
The problem was, Harry didn’t know Theodore Nott, at all, other than as a Slytherin and someone who sometimes laughed along with Malfoy’s jokes.
No, Harry would just bring himself, and hope it worked out.
He didn’t care that Nott was a Slytherin. He didn’t care that his dad, or grandfather, was probably the Death Eater who had shown up when Voldemort called them in the graveyard in his fourth year.
This was a new beginning, a new adventure, and Harry couldn’t wait to dive into it.
*
Theo stared dully down at the mark around his wrist, written in bold, decisive, messy letters. Harry Potter.
He’d woken up yesterday planning nothing more than quiet hours of studying in the library, and instead, he was forced to deal with this.
And the worst thing was, no one else would really understand if he told them why he didn’t want this mark. Theo could imagine Blaise bathing in the limelight, and even Draco, who would be annoyed at first, valuing the connection between him and Potter that would let him reach his goals.
Theo, though, just wanted quiet. Wanted people to ignore him as much as possible. Wanted to be the sort of researcher who corresponded exclusively by owl and received the occasional polite note of admiration for his intellect.
Potter would never let him be that. Potter was loud and sought attention. Look at that speech he had given when he killed the Dark Lord. He couldn’t just—sort it out the way Theo would have if he were ever placed in that impossible position. He had to narrate it.
Potter wasn’t an intellectual, either, and he’d never been good at Potions, Theo’s favorite subject after pure Arithmantic research. He would either swagger up to Theo with disdain or assume he could change him.
Theo had no intention of being changed.
He heard footsteps heading towards him, and straightened up. Father hadn’t talked much about soul-marks, since they only appeared for one magical person in ten thousand, but he’d been thorough in the one lesson he did give Theo. Their marks would draw them together soon after they appeared and would ensure they met in private.
And there was Potter, coming around the corner into this dungeon corridor, practically prancing. In bright blue robes.
Theo blinked. He hadn’t even known Potter owned robes other than the Hogwarts ones and the dress set he’d worn to the long-ago Yule Ball.
“Hullo,” Potter said, his eyes bright as he looked at Theo. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring a gift the way I was supposed to, but I didn’t know what you would like.”
The words strengthened the resolve Theo had formed before he’d been caught off-guard in the last moment. Potter didn’t know him. Soul-marks might be more about potential, the way Father had lectured him, but it wasn’t potential Theo wanted.
“Actually, Potter, I don’t mind the lack of a gift.”
“Oh, good! Then can I get you something later?”
Potter was looking right at him with the kind of sparkling eyes and broad smile that probably worked for him most of the time when he wanted to charm people. But Theo wasn’t most people. He was himself. He strengthened his resolve.
“No,” he said softly.
Potter blinked at him, then nodded quickly. “You’re not a gift person? That’s fine. I can do something else for you. What would you like? I want to get to know you.”
Theo took a deep breath. It was harder than he had thought to resist Potter when he was focusing all that attention on Theo. It was like turning his back on a roaring fire to walk into a roaring winter storm.
But he was still himself, not Potter. Not Potter’s.
“I want a soulmate who’s more like me, someone who would already know what I’d like,” Theo said. Potter went very still, attentive. Theo couldn’t let himself think much about that, either. Otherwise, he might start thinking he could train Potter, and he couldn’t. That was the point. Potter was himself, too, loud and oblivious and brash and self-sacrificing. None of that applied to Theo. “Not someone who’s constantly in the papers and the public eye. I could never be at peace there. So I don’t want to be with you, Potter.”
Potter closed his eyes and then opened them again. “All right,” he whispered. “I—you won’t give me a chance to change your mind?”
“No. Don’t send me owls, Potter. Don’t tell anyone about this. Don’t speak to me unless we’re at some public function where it would be noticeable that we’re not doing so.”
Potter’s face was pale. “All right,” was all he said.
Theo turned around and walked away. He thought he could feel Potter’s eyes on his back, could feel the shock radiating from him. But, he reminded himself, that shock was simply because Potter wouldn’t be able to believe that someone didn’t want to be with him.
Theo didn’t need him. Theo didn’t want him. He had survived the war against all odds, and now he would go on to change the world through his Arithmancy.
He was free.
*
When he was sure Nott was gone and no one else would come back down the corridor, Harry slowly slid down the wall and put his arms around his head.
His pulse throbbed wildly behind his temples. His mouth was dry. The mark on his wrist seemed to burn and itch in a way it hadn’t when it had appeared yesterday.
The agony tore through him, and Harry sat there and let it.
He’d thought having a soulmate meant there was someone he could date who would care just for him. Just Harry. Not the limelight or the fame or the notoriety. Instead, all of that had driven away the person whose name he bore.
It seemed like it was hours before he heard footsteps and Ron’s worried voice asking, “Mate?”
Harry spent a long moment more indulging in the desire to just lean against the wall forever, and then he stood up and wiped his face. He hadn’t actually cried. Huh.
“Mate, are you all right?”
Harry could only imagine how his face looked when he turned around, because Ron made a little shocked noise and ran up to him, drawing his wand. Harry leaned on the wall and sighed. “I’m all right, Ron.”
“Where’s your soulmate? Did he not show up?”
“He rejected me.”
“What?”
Harry sighed. At least his best friend was indignant for him. “Yeah. He said—he couldn’t deal with being in the papers all the time. And he said he wanted someone who already knew what he was like. I didn’t.”
Ron stared at him, and then glared around the empty corridor. “Where did he go? I can go after him and drag him right back here and explain the errors of his ways, no problem.” He thumped his wand pointedly into his open palm.
Harry laughed a little and pushed himself back upright. “No, Ron. He asked me not to owl him or speak to him or ever contact him again. He also asked me not to talk about this, but I reckoned you deserved to know that I won’t be dating him, and so did Hermione.”
“Who is he?”
Harry shook his head. He wouldn’t put it past his friends to go harass Nott and try to drive him into being with Harry—the best of intentions, but the worst outcome. “I’m not going to say. That’s all I can do as far as honoring his request not to talk to anyone about this.”
“Well,” Ron said, and then wrapped his arms around Harry and pulled him into a hug. Harry relaxed against him. “Whoever he is, he’s a fool and doesn’t deserve you.”
Harry hummed vaguely. He didn’t think Nott was a fool. Just someone who knew very well what he wanted, and whose vision of life didn’t include Harry.
That didn’t make him a fool. It just made him determined, and someone who had decided against the potential between them. Harry would have to accept that and move on, as much as he regretted the loss of the potential.
He took in a breath, breathed out, and straightened up. He could survive this. He’d endured worse. “Come on, let’s get to breakfast.”
*
Theo stared at the Daily Prophet. It was no surprise that Potter was on the front page—they’d been hungrier for stories about him than ever since the war—but it was a surprise that he was saying Death Eaters deserved fair trials.
Frowning, Theo looked down at the story, looking for the quote by Potter.
“I’ve seen what happens when someone is denied a fair trial,” Potter says as he leans across the table in the Three Broomsticks, his eyes flashing. “They rot in Azkaban for twelve years for something they didn’t do. That was my godfather, Sirius Black, and everything might have been different if he’d got one.
“Do I like the majority of the Death Eaters who will be getting trials? No, of course not. Do I think they deserve to rot in Azkaban for something they didn’t do? No. They should be tried and put away because of what they did do, not just what people think they might have done. And it’ll mean less bitterness bubbling up later one because someone has a parent or other relative who didn’t receive a trial. Like my godfather didn’t.”
Theo put the paper on the table in front of him, where Blaise promptly stole it. Theo ignored that, staring across the Great Hall at the Gryffindor table, where Potter was rolling his eyes. Someone Theo only vaguely recognized, some younger Gryffindor, was waving the paper at Potter as they shouted.
Why talk about this? Does he think that he can score some kind of point with me by recommending that my father receive a fair trial?
Theo stabbed his eggs with his fork. If that was the case, Potter would learn quickly that it was not going to work. Theo wasn’t so weak as to yield and swoon about Potter’s sense of fairness and justice or whatever his motive was.
He stared at Potter again, but Potter didn’t glance at him and didn’t acknowledge him. Theo knew, logically, that that was what he had asked for. Potter wasn’t betraying to anyone who his soulmate was. Theo knew he would have found himself assaulted by at least two Gryffindors if he had talked.
But emotionally, Theo would have appreciated a hopeful glance, so he could curse it down.
“Theo, what did those eggs ever do to you?”
Blaise had noticed. Theo pulled his fork up and shook his head, checking out of the corner of his eye to make sure that the thick silver cuff bracelet that had been a present from his father for Theo’s seventeenth birthday was clasped over Potter’s name. Theo had never worn it before.
No. He was not going to allow Potter to have this amount of control over his life. He was going to ignore it, and continue on.
He was not defined by a name printed on his wrist.
“Nothing, of course,” Theo told Blaise when his friend kept looking at him expectantly. “I’m merely thinking about Father’s upcoming trial.”
“Ah.” Blaise’s face cleared, and he gripped Theo’s arm under the table, where no one would see. “Of course.”
Theo gave him a half smile. Subtle, restrained, discreet. The kind of thing that Potter would never be.
He had made the right choice. Just the thought of having people stare at him and ask what he thought of the situation, as Potter’s soulmate and the son of a Death Eater, made his soul shrivel.
*
“But we were going to be Aurors, mate!”
“I know, Ron.” Harry smiled at Ron, who looked about half a second away from stomping his foot. “But I’ve decided that I don’t really want to hunt down Dark wizards anymore.”
“Oh, Harry, did you look at those pamphlets I gave you about Healing?” Hermione leaned towards him, her eyes alight, from the other side of Ron’s bed. “I knew you would feel that career would suit you if you only thought about it!”
Harry shook his head. “I’m going to learn some Healing magic, but I want to do something else.”
“What?”
“Protect people.”
His friends exchanged baffled glances. Harry hid his smile behind his hand. The right hand, the one with Nott’s name on his wrist.
It doesn’t matter, it can’t mater, it won’t matter, Harry chanted to himself, and looked up in time to hear Hermione ask, “So what does that mean, exactly?”
“Our world is still a mess,” Harry said flatly. “All those people who are still blood purists, they’re just not saying it. All those Muggleborns who got their property and their wands taken away and never got reparations. All those repairs that aren’t getting made to Hogwarts because the Board of Governors claims they don’t have the money. All those Muggleborn children who didn’t get to go to Hogwarts the last two years.”
That last one in particular made Harry sick. Of course his “first” seventh year, the Muggleborns had mostly been in hiding, but then in his eighth year, the one just finished, no professors had been sent out with the letters. The Muggleborn children still in hiding, the ones who might have thought it was a joke, the ones whose families tore up their letters, well, they just didn’t have the professors to do it, Headmistress McGonagall had said.
And Harry did understand that. He didn’t think she was being malicious.
It was still wrong.
“So you’re going to heal abused children?” Hermione had a soft but complicated expression on her face that Harry couldn’t look at too long.
“I’m going to help people,” Harry said. “Make myself equal to the task, no matter what it is. Learn more defensive magic, Healing magic, the laws that surround donations and helping children and magical creatures, the kind of Transfigurations that would let me make the Hogwarts repairs myself.”
“That sounds—really ambitious, Harry.”
Harry rolled his eyes at her. “You know that ambition isn’t just a Slytherin thing, Hermione.”
“No, I mean. It sounds—I’d like to help you.”
Harry blinked. “But I thought you were going to work in the Magical Creatures Department—”
“I thought I could make the necessary changes from the inside,” Hermione said flatly, her eyes sparking. “But you’re right. The system is more corrupt than anything. It would be better to work from the outside, and we can raise the money that we need from all those interviews and speaking engagements people are so eager to pay us for.”
Ron looked back and forth between them.
“You don’t have to,” Harry told him gently. “You can still be an Auror.”
“Don’t want to, not without you, mate,” Ron said, and took a deep breath. “Yeah. That sounds like a continuation of what we were doing at Hogwarts when we were trying to protect people from Death Eaters or the monster in the Chamber of Secrets. Let’s do it.”
He leaned forwards and held out his hand. Hermione’s and Harry’s clasped it at the same time, and Harry smiled a little. Soulmate rejecting him or not, he would always have his friends.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Soulmate-identifying marks, ignores the epilogue, angst, jealousy, minor Harry/others, Theo/others, mentions of violence and torture
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 2900
Summary: Harry gets a soul-mark during his eighth year at Hogwarts, and is hopeful that he can finally be sure he’ll have someone who loves him for himself. When Theodore Nott rejects him, Harry steps back and goes to live his own life. Theo, who doesn’t want to be trapped in the limelight at Potter’s side, finds himself falling in love anyway.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary” short fics being posted between the first of December and the winter solstice. It will have three chapters, with the others to be posted over the next few days.
The Accidental Courtship
Harry took a deep breath and straightened his robes. Then he looked in the mirror and straightened them again.
“What is up with you, mate?” Ron asked around a huge yawn. He was throwing on his own Hogwarts robes any which way, hitting the wrinkles with a charm that made them settle once and then puff out gently. He paused and took a better look at Harry. “Where are your robes?”
“I’m wearing robes.”
“Not the uniform!”
Harry glared at Ron in the mirror, then shook his head. “I got a soul-mark last night,” he muttered, low enough that Neville and Dean and Seamus probably wouldn’t hear.
Ron undid that immediately by leaning towards him and saying, “You got a what?”
Someone made an indistinct sound of agony in the bedroom. Harry rolled his eyes at Ron and said, “You heard me well enough.”
“Those are rare, Harry! Wicked!” For a minute, Ron’s expression wavered back and forth between excitement and what was probably jealousy, and then he took a deep breath and got past it. Harry doubted Ron would have wanted anyone but Hermione, anyway, no matter what kind of soul-mark he might get. “Can I see it?”
“I want to show it to him first.”
“Him?”
Harry blinked, wondering if Ron was going to succumb to a prejudice he hadn’t thought he’d face here, and then smiled a little. “Yeah, it’s not Ginny. Sorry.”
“Oh.” Ron frowned, then shrugged. “She’ll be disappointed.”
“Too bad.”
Ron took a long step away from him. “Yeah, just tell me when you’re going to tell her that, so I can be on the other side of the planet.”
Harry laughed and left the bathroom. His face was tingling with excitement and heat, his hands shaking with nerves. He had read a book on soul-marks yesterday, after he’d woken up with it encircling his wrist, that said you were supposed to bring a gift to the first meeting with your soulmate to show you knew them.
The problem was, Harry didn’t know Theodore Nott, at all, other than as a Slytherin and someone who sometimes laughed along with Malfoy’s jokes.
No, Harry would just bring himself, and hope it worked out.
He didn’t care that Nott was a Slytherin. He didn’t care that his dad, or grandfather, was probably the Death Eater who had shown up when Voldemort called them in the graveyard in his fourth year.
This was a new beginning, a new adventure, and Harry couldn’t wait to dive into it.
*
Theo stared dully down at the mark around his wrist, written in bold, decisive, messy letters. Harry Potter.
He’d woken up yesterday planning nothing more than quiet hours of studying in the library, and instead, he was forced to deal with this.
And the worst thing was, no one else would really understand if he told them why he didn’t want this mark. Theo could imagine Blaise bathing in the limelight, and even Draco, who would be annoyed at first, valuing the connection between him and Potter that would let him reach his goals.
Theo, though, just wanted quiet. Wanted people to ignore him as much as possible. Wanted to be the sort of researcher who corresponded exclusively by owl and received the occasional polite note of admiration for his intellect.
Potter would never let him be that. Potter was loud and sought attention. Look at that speech he had given when he killed the Dark Lord. He couldn’t just—sort it out the way Theo would have if he were ever placed in that impossible position. He had to narrate it.
Potter wasn’t an intellectual, either, and he’d never been good at Potions, Theo’s favorite subject after pure Arithmantic research. He would either swagger up to Theo with disdain or assume he could change him.
Theo had no intention of being changed.
He heard footsteps heading towards him, and straightened up. Father hadn’t talked much about soul-marks, since they only appeared for one magical person in ten thousand, but he’d been thorough in the one lesson he did give Theo. Their marks would draw them together soon after they appeared and would ensure they met in private.
And there was Potter, coming around the corner into this dungeon corridor, practically prancing. In bright blue robes.
Theo blinked. He hadn’t even known Potter owned robes other than the Hogwarts ones and the dress set he’d worn to the long-ago Yule Ball.
“Hullo,” Potter said, his eyes bright as he looked at Theo. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring a gift the way I was supposed to, but I didn’t know what you would like.”
The words strengthened the resolve Theo had formed before he’d been caught off-guard in the last moment. Potter didn’t know him. Soul-marks might be more about potential, the way Father had lectured him, but it wasn’t potential Theo wanted.
“Actually, Potter, I don’t mind the lack of a gift.”
“Oh, good! Then can I get you something later?”
Potter was looking right at him with the kind of sparkling eyes and broad smile that probably worked for him most of the time when he wanted to charm people. But Theo wasn’t most people. He was himself. He strengthened his resolve.
“No,” he said softly.
Potter blinked at him, then nodded quickly. “You’re not a gift person? That’s fine. I can do something else for you. What would you like? I want to get to know you.”
Theo took a deep breath. It was harder than he had thought to resist Potter when he was focusing all that attention on Theo. It was like turning his back on a roaring fire to walk into a roaring winter storm.
But he was still himself, not Potter. Not Potter’s.
“I want a soulmate who’s more like me, someone who would already know what I’d like,” Theo said. Potter went very still, attentive. Theo couldn’t let himself think much about that, either. Otherwise, he might start thinking he could train Potter, and he couldn’t. That was the point. Potter was himself, too, loud and oblivious and brash and self-sacrificing. None of that applied to Theo. “Not someone who’s constantly in the papers and the public eye. I could never be at peace there. So I don’t want to be with you, Potter.”
Potter closed his eyes and then opened them again. “All right,” he whispered. “I—you won’t give me a chance to change your mind?”
“No. Don’t send me owls, Potter. Don’t tell anyone about this. Don’t speak to me unless we’re at some public function where it would be noticeable that we’re not doing so.”
Potter’s face was pale. “All right,” was all he said.
Theo turned around and walked away. He thought he could feel Potter’s eyes on his back, could feel the shock radiating from him. But, he reminded himself, that shock was simply because Potter wouldn’t be able to believe that someone didn’t want to be with him.
Theo didn’t need him. Theo didn’t want him. He had survived the war against all odds, and now he would go on to change the world through his Arithmancy.
He was free.
*
When he was sure Nott was gone and no one else would come back down the corridor, Harry slowly slid down the wall and put his arms around his head.
His pulse throbbed wildly behind his temples. His mouth was dry. The mark on his wrist seemed to burn and itch in a way it hadn’t when it had appeared yesterday.
The agony tore through him, and Harry sat there and let it.
He’d thought having a soulmate meant there was someone he could date who would care just for him. Just Harry. Not the limelight or the fame or the notoriety. Instead, all of that had driven away the person whose name he bore.
It seemed like it was hours before he heard footsteps and Ron’s worried voice asking, “Mate?”
Harry spent a long moment more indulging in the desire to just lean against the wall forever, and then he stood up and wiped his face. He hadn’t actually cried. Huh.
“Mate, are you all right?”
Harry could only imagine how his face looked when he turned around, because Ron made a little shocked noise and ran up to him, drawing his wand. Harry leaned on the wall and sighed. “I’m all right, Ron.”
“Where’s your soulmate? Did he not show up?”
“He rejected me.”
“What?”
Harry sighed. At least his best friend was indignant for him. “Yeah. He said—he couldn’t deal with being in the papers all the time. And he said he wanted someone who already knew what he was like. I didn’t.”
Ron stared at him, and then glared around the empty corridor. “Where did he go? I can go after him and drag him right back here and explain the errors of his ways, no problem.” He thumped his wand pointedly into his open palm.
Harry laughed a little and pushed himself back upright. “No, Ron. He asked me not to owl him or speak to him or ever contact him again. He also asked me not to talk about this, but I reckoned you deserved to know that I won’t be dating him, and so did Hermione.”
“Who is he?”
Harry shook his head. He wouldn’t put it past his friends to go harass Nott and try to drive him into being with Harry—the best of intentions, but the worst outcome. “I’m not going to say. That’s all I can do as far as honoring his request not to talk to anyone about this.”
“Well,” Ron said, and then wrapped his arms around Harry and pulled him into a hug. Harry relaxed against him. “Whoever he is, he’s a fool and doesn’t deserve you.”
Harry hummed vaguely. He didn’t think Nott was a fool. Just someone who knew very well what he wanted, and whose vision of life didn’t include Harry.
That didn’t make him a fool. It just made him determined, and someone who had decided against the potential between them. Harry would have to accept that and move on, as much as he regretted the loss of the potential.
He took in a breath, breathed out, and straightened up. He could survive this. He’d endured worse. “Come on, let’s get to breakfast.”
*
Theo stared at the Daily Prophet. It was no surprise that Potter was on the front page—they’d been hungrier for stories about him than ever since the war—but it was a surprise that he was saying Death Eaters deserved fair trials.
Frowning, Theo looked down at the story, looking for the quote by Potter.
“I’ve seen what happens when someone is denied a fair trial,” Potter says as he leans across the table in the Three Broomsticks, his eyes flashing. “They rot in Azkaban for twelve years for something they didn’t do. That was my godfather, Sirius Black, and everything might have been different if he’d got one.
“Do I like the majority of the Death Eaters who will be getting trials? No, of course not. Do I think they deserve to rot in Azkaban for something they didn’t do? No. They should be tried and put away because of what they did do, not just what people think they might have done. And it’ll mean less bitterness bubbling up later one because someone has a parent or other relative who didn’t receive a trial. Like my godfather didn’t.”
Theo put the paper on the table in front of him, where Blaise promptly stole it. Theo ignored that, staring across the Great Hall at the Gryffindor table, where Potter was rolling his eyes. Someone Theo only vaguely recognized, some younger Gryffindor, was waving the paper at Potter as they shouted.
Why talk about this? Does he think that he can score some kind of point with me by recommending that my father receive a fair trial?
Theo stabbed his eggs with his fork. If that was the case, Potter would learn quickly that it was not going to work. Theo wasn’t so weak as to yield and swoon about Potter’s sense of fairness and justice or whatever his motive was.
He stared at Potter again, but Potter didn’t glance at him and didn’t acknowledge him. Theo knew, logically, that that was what he had asked for. Potter wasn’t betraying to anyone who his soulmate was. Theo knew he would have found himself assaulted by at least two Gryffindors if he had talked.
But emotionally, Theo would have appreciated a hopeful glance, so he could curse it down.
“Theo, what did those eggs ever do to you?”
Blaise had noticed. Theo pulled his fork up and shook his head, checking out of the corner of his eye to make sure that the thick silver cuff bracelet that had been a present from his father for Theo’s seventeenth birthday was clasped over Potter’s name. Theo had never worn it before.
No. He was not going to allow Potter to have this amount of control over his life. He was going to ignore it, and continue on.
He was not defined by a name printed on his wrist.
“Nothing, of course,” Theo told Blaise when his friend kept looking at him expectantly. “I’m merely thinking about Father’s upcoming trial.”
“Ah.” Blaise’s face cleared, and he gripped Theo’s arm under the table, where no one would see. “Of course.”
Theo gave him a half smile. Subtle, restrained, discreet. The kind of thing that Potter would never be.
He had made the right choice. Just the thought of having people stare at him and ask what he thought of the situation, as Potter’s soulmate and the son of a Death Eater, made his soul shrivel.
*
“But we were going to be Aurors, mate!”
“I know, Ron.” Harry smiled at Ron, who looked about half a second away from stomping his foot. “But I’ve decided that I don’t really want to hunt down Dark wizards anymore.”
“Oh, Harry, did you look at those pamphlets I gave you about Healing?” Hermione leaned towards him, her eyes alight, from the other side of Ron’s bed. “I knew you would feel that career would suit you if you only thought about it!”
Harry shook his head. “I’m going to learn some Healing magic, but I want to do something else.”
“What?”
“Protect people.”
His friends exchanged baffled glances. Harry hid his smile behind his hand. The right hand, the one with Nott’s name on his wrist.
It doesn’t matter, it can’t mater, it won’t matter, Harry chanted to himself, and looked up in time to hear Hermione ask, “So what does that mean, exactly?”
“Our world is still a mess,” Harry said flatly. “All those people who are still blood purists, they’re just not saying it. All those Muggleborns who got their property and their wands taken away and never got reparations. All those repairs that aren’t getting made to Hogwarts because the Board of Governors claims they don’t have the money. All those Muggleborn children who didn’t get to go to Hogwarts the last two years.”
That last one in particular made Harry sick. Of course his “first” seventh year, the Muggleborns had mostly been in hiding, but then in his eighth year, the one just finished, no professors had been sent out with the letters. The Muggleborn children still in hiding, the ones who might have thought it was a joke, the ones whose families tore up their letters, well, they just didn’t have the professors to do it, Headmistress McGonagall had said.
And Harry did understand that. He didn’t think she was being malicious.
It was still wrong.
“So you’re going to heal abused children?” Hermione had a soft but complicated expression on her face that Harry couldn’t look at too long.
“I’m going to help people,” Harry said. “Make myself equal to the task, no matter what it is. Learn more defensive magic, Healing magic, the laws that surround donations and helping children and magical creatures, the kind of Transfigurations that would let me make the Hogwarts repairs myself.”
“That sounds—really ambitious, Harry.”
Harry rolled his eyes at her. “You know that ambition isn’t just a Slytherin thing, Hermione.”
“No, I mean. It sounds—I’d like to help you.”
Harry blinked. “But I thought you were going to work in the Magical Creatures Department—”
“I thought I could make the necessary changes from the inside,” Hermione said flatly, her eyes sparking. “But you’re right. The system is more corrupt than anything. It would be better to work from the outside, and we can raise the money that we need from all those interviews and speaking engagements people are so eager to pay us for.”
Ron looked back and forth between them.
“You don’t have to,” Harry told him gently. “You can still be an Auror.”
“Don’t want to, not without you, mate,” Ron said, and took a deep breath. “Yeah. That sounds like a continuation of what we were doing at Hogwarts when we were trying to protect people from Death Eaters or the monster in the Chamber of Secrets. Let’s do it.”
He leaned forwards and held out his hand. Hermione’s and Harry’s clasped it at the same time, and Harry smiled a little. Soulmate rejecting him or not, he would always have his friends.
