Chapter Thirty-Two of 'Feather and Glass'- The Storm

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Thirty-Two—The Storm

“Are you all right, Harry?”

Harry nods, but he doesn’t say anything in response. He just keeps being curled up around his knees while he pets Artemis. He’s been sitting like that since they Apparated back to the villa and Harry ran out into the garden.

“Harry. I need you to talk to me.”

Harry blinks and turns his head to focus on Blaise. “You do?”

Blaise controls his immediate reaction, which is rage at Black and not helpful here. He nods and sits down on the grass next to Harry, one hand held out. Artemis promptly crawls off Harry’s arm and onto Blaise’s. Blaise lifts Artemis to his shoulder and strokes her scales. She hisses something he can’t understand and wraps around his fingers.

“Oh.”

Blaise glances at Harry, his eyebrows rising. It shouldn’t be news to Harry how friendly Blaise is with Artemis.

“I was in shock.”

Blaise sighs in relief. “Yeah, I think you were. Was it just seeing Black at the train station that made you feel like that?” He’s been worried about Harry and Harry’s reaction ever since he saw the wide-eyed, glassy way that Harry stared at Black. Or, well, maybe he wouldn’t have been worried if Harry had recovered when they came back to the villa, but that he didn’t…

“He didn’t look the way he thought I would. I mean, he sort of did, but—”

Blaise waits a moment, but Harry doesn’t continue. Blaise asks, “You just weren’t prepared to see him in person?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Harry glances at Blaise, his face still ghost-pale, his eyes standing out. Blaise wonders whether it’s sadness or fear that will come out, and whether he should tell Mother to reconsider inviting Black to the villa.

In the end, though, Harry whispers, “I never knew I could be this angry. It’s frightening.”

Blaise hisses softly in triumph. He would much rather Harry feel anger at the way he’s treated than the kind of grief that he did after the end of his friendship with Longbottom. “Yes. I see. But in the end, he’ll get what’s coming to him for betraying you.”

“Do you think it was really betrayal? I mean—”

“Yes. He had a child to care for. He could have had someone go on whatever stupid quest he got assigned. Or he could have made sure that you had someone to take care of you who wasn’t a Muggle. The Potters had friends, even if they didn’t have relatives. Someone would have been able to do it.”

Harry swallows and nods. “The Dursleys were so awful that I can’t imagine anyone who cared even a little about me would have thought they were good guardians. I don’t think Black cared enough, but I bet he never went and saw them.”

“No.”

“But he’ll understand all about them soon enough.”

Harry’s lip is curled up in what appears to be a silent snarl. Blaise smiles back. “You’ll have whatever you need for your vengeance on him, Harry. I promise it.”

“I know.”

Harry’s hand finds Blaise’s, and they both squeeze hard.

*

“Mr. Longbottom?”

Severus stepped out of the Floo at Longbottom Manor anticipating the sour greeting from Augusta Longbottom. She knows that he’s here to train her grandson in Occlumency, but that doesn’t make her a pleasant person to be around. Severus thinks that all capacity for pleasantness probably died out of Augusta with her son.

But he did not expect to find Mr. Longbottom drooping despondently in the greenhouses, to which Augusta directed him.

“Oh, Professor Snape, sir!” Longbottom scrambles to his feet, and then looks down and flushes with obvious shame at his dirt-stained robe hems and hands. “I—should we go inside—I d-don’t know—”

“No, we may hold the Occlumency lessons out here.” Severus eyes the boy thoughtfully. He knew, of course, that Harry’s friendship with Longbottom had ended, but this seems beyond the kind of melancholy such an event might inspire. “Is something wrong, Mr. Longbottom?”

“I—I made some bad decisions.”

Severus nods and remains silent, his hands linked together behind his back. In reality, he does not care about Longbottom in the way that he does about Harry, but Longbottom is still the Boy-Who-Lived, and someone Severus is sworn to protect. It will be easier if he listens to Longbottom and can answer any questions Albus has.

If those questions turn out to be relevant.

Longbottom bites his lip some more, and then seems to decide that Severus is a better confessor than none at all. “I thought Harry was the Heir of Slytherin, or maybe Theo Nott, and it turned out to be Ginny,” he says in a rush. “I mean, not really Ginny, she was possessed, but not a Slytherin, you know? And now I feel stupid and I don’t know how to say that I was wrong.”

“Do you think Mr. Potter would forgive you?”

“No.”

That is increasingly Severus’s impression of Harry. He is someone who would speak the words of forgiveness but not return the emotions. He would probably be polite to Longbottom for years on end without wishing to deepen their friendship.

It also means that he might not care if Severus were harsher on Longbottom during their Occlumency lessons than he has been in the past.

But Severus has had the chance to do some self-reflection this year and thinking in the moments when he’s been brewing with Harry, and he knows now that treating Longbottom badly serves no one well. It makes the boy less confident, which could decrease his efficacy when the Dark Lord comes back. It increases his hesitation and mistakes in Potions class, when Severus already has a headache trying to monitor twenty students at once.

And it makes Occlumency more wearing and boring and nerve-tearing for Severus himself. Whether or not Harry likes it or asks for it, Severus does intend to be gentler with Longbottom during this set of lessons.

But that does not mean, of course, that he will offer the mentorship that seems to be growing between him and Harry. There are limits.

“Sir?”

Severus blinks, more than a little shocked to realize that he has become comfortable enough in Longbottom’s presence to drift off into his thoughts like that. He returns to himself with a jerk. “Yes, Mr. Longbottom?”

“C-Could you p-please call me Neville?”

Severus feels his eyebrows ascend into his hairline. But he doesn’t immediately reject the suggestion. It does seem as though the loss of his friendship with Harry has damaged Longbottom’s confidence, and that will have some of the same effects on him that Severus continuing to approach him in lessons as he has been doing would have.

And for another, it might be as well to have the Boy-Who-Lived trust Severus. Not be close to him, that would be disastrous for several reasons, but ask for support and confess the thoughts racing through his cloudy head? Yes, Severus can put with that.

He nods. “Very well, Neville. As long as you understand that I will do it in these Occlumency lessons and perhaps other interactions outside the school, but I must return to your last name in the embrace of Hogwarts.”

Longbottom looks so relieved that Severus tilts his head. But that doesn’t make the boy cower the way he would have not so long ago. He simply nods. “Thank you, sir! I won’t make you regret it.”

“See that you do not. Now, show me what kind of Occlumency you have been practicing since last time.”

*

Sirius comes out of the Apparition and staggers a little. Then he looks up at the villa—and looks, and looks. He snorts and shakes his head at Remus. “Think she accidentally gave us the Apparition coordinates for a palace instead?”

“You know she didn’t.”

Sirius looks at his friend in surprise. Remus’s voice is clipped and tight, and he shakes all over for a second. Then he relaxes with a sigh. “The wards were prickling at me,” he says, when Sirius keeps on staring at him pointedly. “Probably because I’m a Dark creature.”

“You’re not a Dark creature! And if she’s been filling Harry’s head with nonsense about werewolves—”

Remus gives him a slashing look, and Sirius shuts up. Remus doesn’t look at him like that often, but Sirius supposes he can understand why he does it now. Not many people know that Remus is a werewolf, but they will if Sirius just goes around announcing it.

In the meantime…

The villa is big. Pretentious. It does make Sirius wonder how Harry has been growing up.

“Promise me you’ll at least try, Padfoot,” Remus murmurs as they walk through the wards and towards the villa. The wards do welcome them, but also nip testingly at Sirius’s skin in a way that he doesn’t like. They remind him of the wards on Grimmauld Place. “You know that the Zabinis have stood as Harry’s family.”

“They shouldn’t have.”

“I agree.”

“The Dursleys should have.”

“No, we should have.”

“But you know why we couldn’t.”

Remus doesn’t say anything. He just keeps looking at the front door of the villa, where a figure in sleek robes is standing and waiting for them. Sirius grimaces at the sight, despite doing his best to keep his expression polite. No one needs to wear robes like that. What kind of taste is Harry going to grow up to have, if he just thinks that you should wear robes like that all the time?

“Mrs. Zabini.”

Remus is bowing to her, which is over-the-top and something Sirius will tease him for later. But right now, maybe it’s the wisest course to soften her up. He bows, too. “Mrs. Zabini,” he says.

“Mr. Black. Mr. Lupin.” For a moment, with the way that Mrs. Zabini stares at them, Sirius becomes sure that she’s seeing beneath their skulls to their very brains. But he doesn’t feel any of the telltale push of Legilimency. She nods finally and turns to face the inside of the house. “If you’ll come this way.”

“When can we see Harry?”

“As a matter of fact, Harry wanted to speak with you in the gardens.”

Sirius holds back the temptation to comment that of course she has multiple gardens. For that matter, so did Grimmauld Place. It’s just that by the time Sirius was growing up, they were a tangled mess of weeds and wild and dangerous places.

Probably the sort of place a Zabini would have.

“If you could tell us, please, Mrs. Zabini,” Remus says, because he’s great at being polite to terrible people. “How did you come to meet Harry? I know that he didn’t grow up within the magical world.”

“Oh, we met when he came to Diagon Alley to buy his school supplies. Blaise and I happened to be there that day.”

“You went shopping in Diagon Alley?”

Mrs. Zabini looks over her shoulder without missing a step, her face so bright with amusement that Sirius bristles. “Where else should we do our shopping, Mr. Black? Blaise wanted to attend Hogwarts, and shopping there is traditional.”

“And there is nowhere else that would have suited you better?”

Mrs. Zabini shakes her head without answering, while Remus prods at Sirius’s side as if he wants to tattoo Sirius’s ribs with his elbow. Sirius scowls at him. He thinks his questions make sense. After all, the Zabinis aren’t known for their excess of charity that would lead to them adopting a powerless orphan.

And given that Harry is so low in power and isn’t even in the same House as the Zabini son, Sirius has to wonder what the cause was.

“We went to Diagon Alley, and that is how we met Harry. I believe that was the question.”

“Had he already run away from his Muggle family?” Remus interjects, nudging Sirius hard enough in the meantime that he grunts. “I know that there were blood protections on the house, which is one reason we had some concerns about Harry living outside them.”

“Blood protections?”

“Well, spells that were established because of the blood link between Mrs. Potter and her Muggle sister. I believe that Albus set them up.”

“Such protections don’t take when one of the people involved is a Muggle.”

Sirius snorts as they step through an arched doorway and into a huge, bright garden that looks like it’s some sort of spell practice area. “That’s prejudiced and inaccurate. Albus knows that the protections took. He tested them himself.”

“Mr. Black?”

The sunlight from above has been so bright that Sirius didn’t notice his godson until now. He gasps. Nearer at hand than he was on the train platform, there’s no mistaking the bright green shimmer of Harry’s eyes.

“Harry,” he whispers.

“Hi, Mr. Black.”

“Can’t you call me Sirius?” Sirius blurts, even though he felt Remus’s elbow on his ribs again the moment he started talking. “And this is Remus Lupin, my best friend, who I’m sure would want you to call him Remus.”

Harry gives them an uncertain smile. Sirius thinks that he’s adorable and precious, and luckily doesn’t seem to be corrupted by the Zabinis at all. “Well, I don’t know you very well yet. Maybe when I know you better.”

“Hello, Mr. Black, Mr. Lupin.”

Sirius has to swallow his next plea for Harry to call them what he should call them and turn to face the Zabini boy then. He’s taller than Harry, handsome in a cold way that promises he’ll be a fit rival to his mother, if anyone cares.

“Hello, Mr. Zabini,” Sirius says, hoping to discomfit the boy in turn, but Zabini only nods as if that’s his due.

“I’ll leave while you speak with Harry, of course,” he says, and reaches back to skim a hand along Harry’s wrist in a way that makes all of Sirius’s hair stand up. Is he trying to charm Harry? Control him with a touch? “But Mother and I won’t be far away. And we’ll be here in an instant if you try to hurt or kidnap Harry.”

“We would never—”

“If you thought that it was better for him to be with you instead of us? Yes, you would.”

Sirius stares after the Zabinis as they leave. He really wasn’t thinking of kidnapping Harry, but maybe he should, if only to get him away from people as weird as this.

“Why didn’t you come and get me?”

Harry’s voice is small. Sirius turns to face him, and sees that Harry has a hand stuck in his robe pocket, his head tilted back so that he can look Sirius and Remus in the eye. Sirius swallows.

“I—what do you mean, Harry?”

“Why did you make me stay with the Muggles? Why didn’t you come back and get me?”

The way he says the word Muggles makes Sirius want to turn into a dog so he can raise all his hackles. “You know Muggles are human, don’t you, Harry?”

“Of course? What else would they be?”

“You sounded as if you were prejudiced against them.”

“Oh. I mean, I hate the Dursleys, they didn’t treat me well, but I suppose most Muggles are fine. I just never associated much with them.”

“How could you have grown up in the Muggle world and not associated more with them?” Remus asks. Sirius is grateful to him for taking over the question. Remus can do wide eyes and a wondering voice more effectively than Sirius can, especially because outrage is brewing in Sirius right now, wondering what the Zabinis told Harry about Muggles. “That seems odd to me.”

“Well, the kids in my primary school didn’t like me because Dudley, that’s my cousin, would chase them away and bully me and then if I tried to make friends with them. And the teachers didn’t like me because they listened to the Dursleys and thought I was a freak.”

“Why did they think you were a—freak, Harry?”

“Well, my aunt and uncle knew I had magic. But I didn’t. I knew odd things happened around me, but I didn’t know anything about being a wizard or how my parents really died or anything. Until I was eleven.”

Sirius blows out a near-silent puff of breath. It makes sense to him now, what happened. Harry arrived in Diagon Alley with no knowledge of magical politics and got scooped up by the Zabinis, and he’s a trusting kid. He would have tried to defend them against people he thought were being mean to them.

“But you know most Muggles are fine.”

“Yes, that’s what I said?”

“You know that most of them aren’t like your relatives?”

“I said that, too.”

Harry’s eyes dart back and forth between Sirius and Remus as if trying to figure out a hidden meaning to what they’re saying. Sirius catches Remus’s eye, and isn’t surprised when Remus shakes his head violently. He wants them to give up this line of conversation, probably because he thinks nothing good will come of it.

But before they do, Sirius has one more thing to say. “Do you believe that your relatives mistreated you?”

“They did, Mr. Black.”

“But maybe people who don’t like Muggles encouraged you to think that way. Maybe they said that—”

“They called me a freak and made me sleep in a cupboard and chased me all the time and swung frying pans at my head.” Harry’s eyes seem to glow from within for a moment. Sirius wonders why it’s so familiar, and then remembers with a jolt how Lily used to look when she was angry. “Yes, I think they mistreated me. They did.”

Remus is once again trying to break one of Sirius’s ribs with his nudges. Sirius forces himself to smile. “All right, all right, Harry. I was just trying to make sure that no one tried to influence you against Muggles.”

“Why would they want to do that? I’m no one in particular. I’m not the Boy-Who-Lived.”

“But Albus tells me that you’re friends with him. So that might be one way for them to try and influence Longbottom.”

“Neville and I aren’t friends anymore.”

Harry sounds sad about it, but also definite. Sirius blinks and looks at Remus. Remus looks grim and unhappy, but also as if he isn’t very surprised.

Because he thinks that Harry was always going to drift apart from Longbottom when he’s focused on the Zabinis?

“Do you want to tell me what happened, Harry?” Remus asks gently. “Or both of us? It might help to talk about it with someone.”

“Oh, I’ve talked about it with people. But it can’t change things. Someone at school was Petrifying people, the Heir of Slytherin, and Neville thought it might be either me or one of my Slytherin friends. But in the end, it turned out to be a Gryffindor.”

Sirius stares at Harry. He knew about the Petrifications, of course, but he knows of no reason why anyone would suspect Harry, gentle little Harry who just gaped at Sirius on the train platform, to be the Heir. “Did he say why?”

Harry sighs. “Because I spent time with Slytherins, and he thinks that I kept secrets from him. I mean, I didn’t tell him everything I tell Blaise, but I’m allowed to have secrets, right? And when he found them out, he wasn’t just disappointed that I didn’t tell him. He accused me of being the Heir. There’s no going back from that.”

“Yes, there is! He could forgive you.”

“He could forgive me?”

Sirius hesitates. Somehow, there’s a bright, hard glitter in Harry’s eyes that he didn’t think they would be capable of. At the same moment, Remus has sucked in a breath and touched Sirius’s shoulder. Sirius nods shallowly. Yes, he recognizes the danger, although he doesn’t know where it’s coming from.

“You don’t really think that he has anything to forgive you for?”

“I think that I didn’t do anything to him! And he was so sure that it was a Slytherin. He didn’t even admit that he was wrong when we told him it was a Gryffindor. I don’t think he believed that for himself until he went into the hospital wing and saw her. So why should I have to apologize to him instead of the other way around?”

“Well, sometimes it’s best to just accept that you need to apologize, whether or not you did anything, to get the friendship back and keep the peace.”

“And what happens the next time he thinks I spend too much time around Slytherins? Blaise is my best friend. You think I should stop spending time with him to—”

“Yeah, I do.”

Harry shuts his mouth and stares at Sirius. Sirius raises his hands in front of him. Harry really can glare hard when he wants to.

“Why?”

“Because he’s not good for you,” Sirius says, deciding that he just needs to lay everything out. Harry should listen and maybe accept that he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. “He already made you lose one friend. He’s cold and uncaring. He must be, as Mrs. Zabini’s son,” Sirius adds, because he’s sure that Harry’s opening his mouth to demand how he knows that.

“He’s not cold and uncaring!”

“I’m just saying that he’s a bad friend for you. For someone specifically like you. You need someone who would care for you and look after all your needs. The Zabinis are murderers and the kind of people who would—”

“Abandon a child on a doorstep?”

Sirius swallows. There’s a wealth of pain in Harry’s voice, so much—he wonders if even Harry realizes how much he was hurt by Sirius’s actions. He reaches out tentatively, but Harry backs away from his hand and shakes his head.

“You just sound like you want the Zabinis to abandon me because you don’t think I deserve to have anyone to take care of me.”

“That’s not true! Oh, Harry, of course not!”

“Then why should they abandon me?”

“They just aren’t the kind of people you need! I’m coming back to Britain now, and I can really be your godfather!”

“But you haven’t up until this point. Why should I think that you’re going to be any better going forwards?”

Sirius hates the tone of betrayal in Harry’s voice, and hates even more that he really did do something to deserve it. He bows his head in the face of Harry’s wrath and keeps his voice low as he says, “I can raise you the way your parents would have wanted.”

“Maybe if they’d wanted to have a say in how I was raised, they should have told someone that I shouldn’t live with those Muggles.”

“Harry, you can’t hate a whole group of people just because—”

“If you’re going to say that I can’t hate the Dursleys, then you should fuck off.”

Sirius gapes at him. Harry stares back at him, and there’s a coiled power in his body that Sirius saw no trace of before. His eyes blaze, and he looks worse than Lily did at her scariest when she was getting angry about pranks that James and Sirius pulled.

“Sirius, this isn’t working.”

Remus’s voice is low and charged, and Sirius is sure that he knows what his best friend would prefer. Remus would like to pull back and make some approach later, when maybe both of them would have calmed down and they can talk to Harry with gentler words than the ones Sirius has used so far.

But Sirius thinks they’ve put this conversation off long enough. And he really needs Harry to understand that he can’t hate Muggles. He just can’t. Whether or not Sirius ever gets to spend much time with him, Harry needs to understand that that kind of hatred is wrong.

“I’m saying that maybe you can dislike your relatives,” Sirius concedes. He finds it hard to believe everything Harry’s said about them. Why would Albus have chosen a home like that for Harry? “But you talk about them as Muggles, not the Dursleys. If you do that, it sounds like you hate a whole group. Do you see?”

“And it sounds like you hate the Zabinis and Slytherins and anyone who tried to give me a better life! That’s a whole group, too!”

Harry’s shouting, his cheeks flaring with color. Sirius stares at him. He doesn’t know his godson at all, he thinks. How can the hatred of one family—who have committed murders—compare to the hatred of a group like Muggles?

“Harry, please calm down,” Remus says, and he sounds a little breathless. Sirius wonders if he’s thinking the same thing as Sirius is, or if he’s just shocked by the way that Harry has got so loud. “You should know that we don’t hate the Zabinis or Slytherins, not exactly. We just want to make sure that they’ve done a good job of being your foster family.”

“No, you want to take me away from them, and take yourselves away from me, too! You don’t care about who raises me, you just want to make sure that—”

Mrs. Zabini glides back into the room and puts a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry shuts his mouth and flushes. Sirius narrows his eyes. That’s a sign of abuse if he ever saw one.

“What seems to be the problem here?”

“I want Harry to not hate Muggles!”

Mrs. Zabini stares at him blankly. Sirius ignores that. He’s sure that she was listening in to his conversation with Harry, and that means she knows every detail of their argument about the Dursleys.

We wouldn’t have had one if she wasn’t encouraging Harry to be prejudiced!

“I think that perhaps the time for a productive conversation is at an end,” Mrs. Zabini says, her voice ringing like little bells. “Perhaps we should have a meal instead. Would you like that, Harry?”

Harry stares up at her with his eyes so wide that Sirius thinks he sees something else behind them. But then he hangs his head and nods.

“Yeah, Aradia.”

“Come, then,” Mrs. Zabini says, and guides Harry out of the room, her hand not moving from his shoulder.

Remus shakes his head the minute the door closes behind them. “Sirius, you can’t—”

“I won’t have my godson being a bigot!”

“You need to talk about other things with him before you can talk about that. Why we left Britain. More about James and Lily and how close we were to them. Why you accept him and love him the way he is.”

Sirius takes a huge breath, and finally nods stiffly. Now that he thinks about it, he can see the sense in what Remus is saying.

It’s just—hard, to watch his godson acting the prejudiced wanker.

“All right,” he says, and follows Remus to lunch.

*

Harry can hardly control himself as he watches the dish full of his despair placed across from Black. Black gives him a big smile and pick up his fork. He seems to have decided that their argument never happened.

“Thanks for inviting me, Harry, Mrs. Zabini,” he says, and digs the fork in.

He doesn’t have time to lift up a bite before Mr. Lupin abruptly stands and strikes his hand down on the table hard enough to make the dish lift into the air. Harry stares with an open mouth as it soars up, and up, and then shatters against the wall in the wake of what seems to be a blast of pure, uncoordinated wandless magic from Lupin.

In the ensuing silence, Lupin turns and stares at Aradia with eyes that glow amber.

“You will tell me why that food smelled of the Darkest of magics,” he says, with a snarl in his throat, “and you will tell me now.”