[Songs of Summer]: Broken Glass Life, gen, 2/4

[lomonaaeren]

Harry wakes up in another room that proves Voldemort has a stunning sense of melodrama. There’s black everywhere. The sheets of the bed beneath him are black. The canopy overhead is black—no, wait, dark blue, decorated with small glittering stars. The pillows behind him are, yeah, black when Harry reaches back to feel them.

Harry sits up and buries his head in his hands.

“Master sir’s son.”

There’s a house-elf appearing beside him. Harry stares. This house-elf is taller and stronger-looking than Dobby or Winky or Kreacher, and has intense black eyes that sort of remind him of a shark’s. She peers at Harry and then nods.

“Master sir’s son is to soon join master sir.”

Harry wants to say that he’ll escape instead, but he has no idea where he is, and maybe the elf will tell him. “Is this where—he lives?” Harry can’t bring himself to say “my father.” It’s just not true in reality, no matter what blood or magic claims.

“Yes, sir’s son, of course! I am Belyan, and I am your elf.”

“I mean—I don’t really need a house-elf.”

“Yes, you do.”

Harry blinks. He’s never seen a house-elf this assertive, although to be fair, most of his experience is with elves who are—different. “Okay, but what are you supposed to do? It’s not as though I need help bathing, and I don’t have any clothes here, and there’s no—”

“Sir’s son is having clothes.”

Belyan snaps her fingers, and a wardrobe (black) that Harry didn’t notice along the wall (black) flies open. Harry stares at rank after rank after rank of robes. He can see black school ones, of course, but also dark blue dress robes, and green ones that remind him of the set he wore to the Yule Ball, and red ones…

Harry shakes his head in a daze. “Where did all of these come from?”

“Master sir provides them.”

Harry just stares at Belyan for a second. “Well, yeah, but how did he—”

Then he closes his eyes and reminds himself of his situation for a second. It doesn’t really matter how Voldemort got his measurements.

The only thing that matters is survival.

“Okay,” he says. “Which ones do you think I should wear, Belyan?”

*

“At last.”

Harry halts in the doorway of the dining room that Belyan directed him to. He doesn’t know why, but he assumed he would be dining alone with Voldemort, and maybe that he would have to watch out for poison in the food. Of course, if Voldemort kidnapped him, and with the way he goes on about his “son and heir,” maybe he wouldn’t poison Harry, but how does Harry know that? His “father’s” mad.

However, although Voldemort is standing at the head of an intricate dining table in dark wood with gold edging and wooden chairs (black) gathered around it, he’s not alone. There are Death Eaters surrounding him. Lucius Malfoy. Narcissa Malfoy. Draco, with wide eyes and a visible pulse pounding in his throat. Bellatrix Lestrange, whom Harry wants to kill. A few men he doesn’t recognize.

Snape.

Harry stares at Snape. Snape just looks at Harry with a slight sneer, as if he’s made a mistake with a Shrinking Solution.

Help me, Harry tries to mouth, but Snape doesn’t move.

“Come into the room.”

Harry obeys Voldemort and walks over to the chair that is obviously being saved for him, on Voldemort’s right hand. Voldemort leans in and studies him for a long moment. Harry blinks, not expecting that forked tongue to dart out enough to brush his cheek.

“You are bathed. Good.”

It was what Belyan had insisted on before she’d let Harry put on the robe (black). Harry just did as he was told.

“Yes.”

Voldemort gives him a chiding look as he draws Harry’s chair out further. “You will be expected to speak the noble tongue of the serpent in my presence, and in that of my servants.”

Harry wants to close his eyes and beat his head against the wall. But instead, he just responds as he often did to Uncle Vernon. “Yes, sir.”

“Better.”

Harry obediently sits down in the chair, wondering as he does about the directive to speak Parseltongue. Does Voldemort think it will make Harry more impressive to the Death Eaters, or something? Is that even a concern? Or does Voldemort think Harry will try to plot with the Death Eaters, and get away?

As if any of them would help me.

Harry keeps his gaze on his plate, and eats the delicate dishes of fruit and cheese that appear there, and answers Voldemort’s occasional question. He ignores the eyes of the others on him. After all the staring at Hogwarts, he’s at least used to that.

“Isidore.”

Harry starts and looks up. Voldemort is addressing one of the men Harry doesn’t know, an older one with black eyes and grey along his temples. Harry thinks he might have seen him in the graveyard. The man turns towards Voldemort now and inclines his head with no sign of fear. “My lord.”

“You will bring your son to the next meeting.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The man goes back to eating. Harry still has no idea who he is, and he feels a little jealous when he sees slices of a delicious-looking roast on his plate.

Well, he can probably get answers to a couple of questions, especially since he’ll ask them in Parseltongue and not reveal any weakness or “weakness” to Voldemort’s Death Eaters. “Who is that man? And why does he have meat when I don’t?”

Voldemort swings his neck to look at him. “His name is Isidore Nott. He has a son in your year, who can be a companion to you. Children are supposed to have other children to play with.”

“What?”

“I have questioned Lucius and Isidore. They said so.”

Harry chokes back another hysterical laugh at the thought of Voldemort asking for parenting advice. Voldemort probably wouldn’t find it at all funny. “All right, but what about the meat? Can I have some?”

“I had thought your stomach would be delicate, recovering as you are from prolonged starvation.”

Harry just shakes his head. “Can I have some anyway?”

“Certainly. My son and heir will have whatever he wants. But do not blame me if you get sick later.”

“I wouldn’t ever blame you.”

Harry barely finishes speaking when the roast materializes on his plate. He picks up his fork and starts eating, ignoring the conversation that swirls around him again. Voldemort doesn’t address him for the rest of the meal, but excuses Harry in Parseltongue when the Death Eaters start shifting and getting up.

“Pay strict attention, my heir.”

Harry looks up at him, at his blazing red eyes that he once feared more than he thinks he could fear anything now, and waits.

“You are to obey any orders that I give you, or Belyan. You are not to obey anyone else. They are beneath you, and you are above. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

It’s simplest. And really, what else has Harry been doing most of his life? Just listening to orders and obeying them. Uncle Vernon. Snape. Dumbledore. This aspect of his life has only changed a little.

“You may speak to the Death Eaters’ children, Draco and Theodore when he arrives, in English. They will form the core of your court, and need to be able to understand you. If the others are about, you will maintain Parseltongue.”

“They’re going to be my what?”

“The core of your court,” Voldemort repeats with a patience that sounds like a dish that’s about to break apart against the floor. “They are yours, as Isidore and Severus and the Malfoys and the Lestranges are mine. They are there to protect you, amuse you, teach you, learn with you.”

Harry’s throat is very dry. The last thing he anticipated, even given everything else, was Voldemort-made friends. “Do you—what kinds of things do you want me to learn?”

“Dark Arts at the very least. Severus will teach you Potions—”

“He hates me!”

Voldemort laughs at him, a sound like dry smoke. “Oh? He hated you for the sins of your supposed father, who is not your father. And he sees your mother in you. He was her best friend. Once he knew that her child was the target of the prophecy, he begged me to spare her. That is why I offered her the chance to step aside. Of course, I would have offered her even more had I known that she had borne my heir.”

The world swims and vibrates around Harry. His Occlumency and his numbness and his conviction that he had to just keep obeying and he would get through this all break apart and pierce him with glassy, transparent shards.

“What?”

“You knew none of this? I thought Dumbledore had told you more than that.”

Voldemort seems displeased, but Harry is lost in wonder and hatred as he stares at Snape. Snape meets his gaze for one moment, then turns his head away dismissively, throw working as he swallows a gulp of wine.

Harry hisses aloud in agony.

Snape grabs his throat and cries out. Then he bends over, hacking. There isn’t wine spilling from his mouth the way Harry assumed there would be. There are the coils of a snake, brilliant green and red, with a head that emerges a moment later and snaps at Snape.

Harry watches with his mouth wide open and his mind still blank as the snake slumps to the table and winds back on itself, trying to bite Snape in the hand. Snape backs away. His eyes are wide with fear.

The first time Harry has ever seen him look like that.

Harry did that.

Harry licks his lips, feeling power surge through him. He glances at Voldemort, and then back at the table, in time to see the wine still in Snape’s glass turn into a smaller cluster of scarlet snakes. They pile out and towards Snape. Snape draws his wand to fend them off.

“You will not draw your wand in my presence, Severus.”

Harry nearly jumps when he hears Voldemort speaking English. Snape hesitates, then puts his wand away. He remains still, although his eyes are very wide and his face paler than usual, as the snakes climb up his body and hiss in his face.

But they don’t bite him.

“Why don’t they bite him?” Harry whispers, unable to look away from the vision of his professor surrounded by serpents that Harry—conjured? Transfigured? He honestly has no idea.

“They obey your will, my dearest heir.”

Harry jumps for real this time and looks up at Voldemort, who has his wand out. Harry thinks that he’s going to use it to punish Harry the way he threatened, but he is staring at Harry with wide eyes of his own. Nagini, his massive serpent, has slithered in at some point, and now she sways beside Voldemort, her stare on the snakes across the table.

“What?”

“It is a gift of the Slytherin family, the way that the Metamorphmagus talent is of the Black family.” Voldemort’s smile is wide and feral. “The conjuring of snakes who act in accordance with one’s will. It has not been seen in so long.” He bends down and sways his neck for a moment above Harry. “It proves you are truly of my blood, if you had doubts.”

Harry did. He still does. He—he just doesn’t have any proof, and he still doesn’t see how Voldemort possessing Harry could have told him who Harry’s father is.

But now, watching the green and red snake he initially conjured coil around Snape’s arm and poise, ready to bite, it’s much harder to do so.

He swallows and looks at the floor. “May I be excused, Father?” It’s a name that doesn’t mean anything, because it doesn’t belong to James Potter anymore, but he can say it, to survive.

Voldemort’s hand curls underneath his chin and forces his eyes up. Harry looks, although he’s not sure what Voldemort is going to want him to do. Maybe he’ll use Legilimency on Harry?

But Voldemort peers at him instead, and then waves a hand that seems to have longer nails at the tips than Harry remembers. “You are excused, my heir.”

As Harry slips out of the room, he wonders if “heir” has different connotations than “son.”

And what Snape is going to tell Dumbledore about what happened today.

*

“Master Heir is coming to the receiving room!”

That’s what Belyan said before she made him put on a set of blue robes edged in silver. She said it made him look nice. Harry stared into the mirror at his own pale face, with his green eyes—the only inheritance he wants to claim—standing out like the eyes of a desperate ghost, and laughed.

But he came downstairs, and now he walks into a delicate room with ivory chairs and tables that make Harry think they’ll break if he sits down on one.

Draco Malfoy and Theodore Nott are already waiting for him. They stand up the minute they see Harry and bow, Malfoy jerkily, Nott with a slow grace that Harry thinks is meant to allow the other boy to have a chance to consider him. Certainly Nott’s eyes rake up and down Harry as he straightens.

“Good morning, my lord,” Nott says, and Malfoy scrambles to echo him a moment later.

Harry puts his hand to his head. “Could you not do that?”

“I think your esteemed parent might be angry if you were addressed any other way,” Nott says, with a tone in his voice that Harry can’t quite figure out. “And that would not be good for our continued health.”

“Yeah, I agree with Theo,” Malfoy mutters.

Wondering how he never noticed before how much of a follower Malfoy is, Harry looks carefully at Nott. He’s still watching Harry, and he looks prepared to bow again, too. But there’s a hard glint in his eyes that—well, Harry isn’t good at figuring things like that out, he’s no Legilmens no matter who his father is, so he just asks outright. “What exactly are you feeling about being made to bow to me, Nott?”

Malfoy looks anxious. Nott, though, gives a smile as hard as the look in his eyes and says, “I think that your being the Dark Lord’s son is the most hilarious thing that I’ve ever lived through.”

“Theo!” yelps Malfoy.

Nott ignores him and keeps talking. “You were a symbol of the Dark Lord’s loss and of a miracle, because no one had ever survived the Killing Curse. So many political hopes were pinned on you, and then never supported, because you were a child and because the people who came up with them thought your symbolism was enough. Now one side of the war is going to collapse faster than an Exploding Snap tower, and I get to be one of the people who’s bearing witness to it. Yes, I think it’s awfully funny.”

“Awfully funny.”

“Yes, that.”

Harry shakes his head, but what he’s thinking is that Nott is a kindred spirit, in a way. Why else has Harry constantly been on the edge of laughter since he came here? What else can he do but look at the proof of his Slytherin blood, and Voldemort treating him better than the Dursleys, and the Horcruxes, and the prophecy, and everything else, and laugh?

“I don’t like it,” Harry says. “I don’t like the idea that I might be the death of my friends and thousands of innocent people who haven’t done anything wrong.”

“But you can dislike it and still laugh.”

Harry thinks about this, and then shrugs. “Laughing doesn’t mean I like it.”

“You already said that. My lord, excuse me, but I shall have to point it out if you’re going to be this repetitive all the time.”

Harry laughs again, and it feels like it’s the most normal sound that he’s made since he came to Malfoy Manor. He inclines his head to Nott, because reverse-bowing like that amuses him, and says, “Why don’t you tell me what you think it means, to be someone’s court, and we can go from there?”

*

Harry is sitting in a front room of Malfoy Manor, awaiting the tutor in the Dark Arts that Voldemort has promised him, and thinking about what Nott and Malfoy said.

Malfoy stammered a lot, but managed to get across the notion that Voldemort’s court—the Death Eaters he named to Harry—are sort of like his advisors. Harry thinks that they probably approve his ideas more than they disagree with him. But maybe someone like Snape or Isidore Nott is secure enough to say more.

Someone told Voldemort that Harry ought to have other children to play with, after all.

Nott was more interesting. He said that a Dark Lord’s court helps form him, and protect him, and teach him. He offered to duel Harry, although they didn’t do that yesterday. They argued about politics and Muggleborns for a while without coming to any conclusions. Nott seems awfully convinced that Muggleborns would want to kill purebloods if they could get away with it, and so purebloods should do it to them preemptively.

But when he said the word Mudblood and Harry snapped, “Don’t call my mum and Hermione that!”, Nott bowed with no sense of irony and said, “Yes, my lord.”

That made Harry think, Maybe—maybe I can make a few people better, if I have to do this anyway.

Harry shakes himself a second later. That’s the exact kind of thing Voldemort wants him to do, he thinks. Assume that not only does he have to try and survive, but that he can do good things with his position as the Dark Lord’s son.

It’s not true. Harry can try to reduce the harm, but he can’t make things better, not completely.

An owl abruptly darts through the window. Harry stares. That’s Pigwidgeon. How in the world did he get here? Harry assumed Voldemort would have up wards that kept out owls from everyone except a few approved people, and if he didn’t, then the Malfoys would.

Harry reaches out an arm, moving slowly, in what feels like a dream, and Pig lands with an excited flutter of his wings. Harry takes the letter from him and opens it.

It’s in Ron’s handwriting, and it’s short. All it says is, I’m sorry, mate, but we can’t meet you to do our shopping in Diagon Alley this year. Mum says that it’s especially not safe. I hope that you’ll be okay without us! See you on the first!

Harry swallows, imaginary glass shards crunching in his throat, and then looks up as the door opens. Narcissa Malfoy steps in and pauses, surveying him.

“Whose owl is that?”

“One of my friends’.” Harry knows his voice is dead, but he doesn’t really care. He shoos Pig off, and the little owl goes. He wasn’t told to wait for a response, then.

Harry’s friends must not know he’s missing, or the Order, either. Why would they? They just want him trapped in the Dursleys’ house all the time, they don’t think he’s worth knowing anything, they don’t want to—

The glass in all the windows blows out in a spectacular explosion. Harry can hear shattering from beyond the door Narcissa came through, and startled cries, and he reckons that his temper must have reached out further than this one room.

He has no notion how far. He sits there and stares, and Narcissa comes and takes the letter from his hand and reads it with no resistance.

“Hm,” is all she says, and then she stands back and eyes Harry. “I would postpone your first lesson, but my lord is most insistent that it be today.”

Harry swallows again. His throat crunches some more.

He can’t do anything to keep his friends safe, not really. He can’t do anything to make a difference, or warn them. But he can at least make sure that Narcissa doesn’t get in trouble with Voldemort.

He stands up. “I’m ready to begin,” he says, because what else would he say?