lomonaaeren

Harry spent a lot of time in the underground chambers and tunnels that Theo’s father had used to contain Sacred.

The wards that wrapped around the place were impenetrable to the basilisk, and Harry didn’t really know why. It wasn’t because of Parseltongue; he could move through them easily, and so could Theo. But the minute Sacred tried, she was stopped. Harry would stand and stare at the empty space that had stopped her for up to an hour. It never did anything but halt her. There didn’t seem to be any visible effect.

It drove Harry mental, but he kept researching.

Theo had shown him the hidden room where he had slept himself, sometimes, as a child, when he wanted to avoid the chance of Alexander Nott showing up and cursing him out of sleep. There was a bed and a fireplace and a small bathroom. Harry slept there when Alexander Nott spent time around Theo and Theo had to act as if he were still broken by the blood curse.

It just made Harry want to curse Theo’s father more, of course.

He spent hours reading the books Theo brought, sitting with his leg and hip and arm pressed against Theo’s. Theo breathed softly, stretched across the bed and scribbling notes on a parchment beside his own book.

Harry got more and more used to his presence. And more used to the lonely fact that nobody ever wrote to him, which meant the enchantments on the homunculus were holding up, and letters directed to Harry Potter were finding their way to it.

No one had noticed, yet. No one had come and got him, or brought Harry around Dumbledore or anyone else powerful enough to notice and unravel the magic.

The homunculus was probably still at Privet Drive.

Where Harry would have been, if not for Theo.

He thought about that, the thoughts rattling around in his head as he lay in the borrowed bed and stared up at the canopy, and—

It pretty much broke him of any temptation to go to Dumbledore and tell him about Voldemort’s soul piece, even if it didn’t completely reconcile him to everything Theo had said.

And Theo was—

Being patient. Not acting any different than he had been before Sacred had told Harry that Theo wanted him for a mate or something, except that he was more open about touching Harry. He always waited to see if Harry would tell him to leave, though.

Harry never did.

He might tell himself it was just because without Theo, he would be alone here, but he knew that wasn’t the truth.

*

“A trial for underage magic?”

“Yeah.”

Theo’s eyes were sharp as he watched Harry stare at the front page of the Prophet Theo had handed him. Harry shook his head, dazed. He really hadn’t expected anything to happen with the homunculus unless Dumbledore or someone equivalent did decide to show up at the Dursleys’ over the summer.

Instead, it seemed Dementors had decided to show up.

Harry read through the article, numb. The details were scanty, at least for a Prophet reporter who wasn’t also Rita Skeeter. The article rambled on about how Harry Potter lived with Muggles, and how he had claimed Dementors were in the area but no one knew for sure, and how the Ministry was giving him such a chance by taking him seriously and giving him a trial before the full Wizengamot.

Harry paused at the end of the article and looked up at Theo. “It sounds like they interviewed the homunculus.”

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

“How?”

Theo leaned back and shrugged. “The article in that one—” he nodded at the second Prophet folded up on the table nearby “—says that Harry Potter is being watched over by concerned guardians. But it came out three days later. So it sounds like Dumbledore, or whoever has your double now, might have waited a few days before they came and got him.”

Harry closed his eyes and rubbed his scar, then realized what he was doing and snatched his hand away. Theo got upset whenever he touched his scar, probably thinking that Harry would start clawing at it the way he had after finding out about the soul-piece. “Yes, that sounds like the sort of thing they would do.”

“Who?”

“Dumbledore. The Prophet. Both of them. Or Professor Lupin and Sirius, if they’re the ones who have the homunculus now.”

It hurt more than Harry could say, that he’d seen Sirius so rarely during his fourth year and that Lupin had never written to him. Or that they couldn’t tell the difference between a homunculus version of Harry and himself.

He knew, of course, that Sirius had never spent very much time with him and that Lupin felt such intense self-loathing because of his lycanthropy, he probably did believe that Harry was better off without him.

It still hurt.

“You can feel hurt, no matter what their motivations are.”

Harry looked up, shivering a little. He spoke Parseltongue rarely enough now outside of the times he was with Sacred that it sounded—sharp. Stinging. And Theo of course was leaning forwards, his eyes as sharp and intense as they had ever been.

“I can, but it’s not fair to them.”

“Please speak our language with me, Harry.”

“Look, what if I never want to date you?”

“Then you never want to date me. I can wait and see if you do someday, or if you make the decision final. It still makes you the one who saved my life and gave me this gift and is working with me to free Sacred.”

Harry bowed his head. “When we free her, I want—I want to buy a place of my own with the Galleons that we made selling the basilisk parts. I don’t want to be stuck here forever.”

“Of course not. I hope you’ll welcome me there, of course. Once Sacred is free, I have no reason to come back here, either.”

“Even to curse your father?”

Theo’s expression was complicated. “I learned long ago that vengeance against him would be more costly than I can afford right now. Maybe later, when I’ve learned enough magic to survive a duel against him? Then I will try.”

Harry nodded. He could appreciate Theo’s cool pragmatism, even if he also thought it wasn’t a very Gryffindor way to approach things.

Theo eased closer to him on the bed. “Can I hold you?”

“Yeah.”

And as always, it was a relief to lean back against Theo’s warmth. Whatever traits he had taken from being connected to Sacred at a young age, having a cool body temperature wasn’t one of them.

Harry closed his eyes and let all the confused, confusing feelings ebb away for a bit.

*

Harry had reached the point of frustration in his research that he was trying random things to free Sacred. He stood in the middle of her chamber casting at the walls, and the wards that kept her from leaving the place, while Sacred swayed back and forth and watched him with interested eyes.

“Theo says that you do not like being a Speaker of the Dark.”

“No, I don’t.” Harry took a step back and stared around the prison. It seemed that all the floors and walls were completely solid stone. Of course, they couldn’t be, not with the passages woven into them, but if they had a curse on one particular stone, or if the wards were anchored in one place, he couldn’t see them.

“Why not?”

“The bastard who gave me this piece of soul also killed my mother and father.”

“But your gift is your own, and you are yourself.”

“You sound a lot like Theo.”

“I taught Theo to be sensible.”

Harry turned to face her, both to escape the inescapable fact that he didn’t know how to free her, and because he was interested. “What did you teach him?”

“To be sensible.” Sacred’s tail twitched in a way that said she didn’t like having to repeat herself.

Harry just nodded and looked around the chamber that imprisoned her again, straining his eyes to see the least flicker of wards or spells that guarded secret passages or something that kept her here.

“I have looked and scented.” Sacred lowered her head to Harry’s level and touched his arm with her tongue, making him jump. “I do not think it can be discovered that way.”

Harry lifted his head, not yet ready to give up, and then stopped with a long breath, his eyes locked on the “stars” that dotted the ceiling of the chamber.

“What are you looking at?”

“Those lights up there. Do you know why your captor put them there?”

“No. They were there the first time I woke here, after I tried to kill him in the first room he kept me in, and he Stunned and moved me.” Sacred curled her neck back over her scales to look up, her tongue darting out. “Do you think they are important?”

“Maybe not. They could just be for light. And if you haven’t scented anything about them in all the years you’ve been here, they might just be that.”

“Test them.”

Harry nodded, stepped back, and aimed his wand. The stars seemed to sparkle in his vision as he narrowed his gaze. “Reducto!”

The spell went flying up, and up. And then it stopped in midair and went out in a fizzle of sparks, caught in a net of wards Harry hadn’t noticed half a handspan away from the lights of the “stars.”

Harry let out a slow, satisfied breath. This didn’t solve the problem, but at least now he knew which direction to look in.

*

“They acquitted him.”

Harry blinked at Theo over the top of a book on wards. So far, he’d found nothing that seemed to apply to the wards Mr. Nott had used on Sacred’s chamber, but at least he was learning. “What?”

“They acquitted the homunculus. He went before the Wizengamot for a full trial, which he shouldn’t have done if it was only for a Patronus to drive Dementors away, but that’s what happened.”

Harry blinked again and slowly picked up the paper that Theo had dropped in front of him. He read through it, shaking his head a little. “He shouldn’t have been able to cast a Patronus without a wand, should he?” They couldn’t have given the homunculus a real wand, of course, but it shouldn’t have mattered when they’d thought that he would have the excuse of not doing magic during the summer anyway. They’d given him a Transfigured stick that should at least satisfy people that “Harry” had a wand.

“No. But it’s possible that the magic binding him—it—would have reacted to keep itself together in the face of a Dementor by doing the only thing that would save him. It.”

Harry nodded absently, still reading through the article. Apparently Dumbledore had been at the trial, and Fudge, and someone named Dolores Umbridge, who had given a quote about how there couldn’t have been any Dementors in Little Whinging. Then he put down the paper and turned to face Theo. “But you don’t think that the magic reacted like that.”

“No. It would be unprecedented for a homunculus to be able to produce any spell as powerful as a Patronus.”

“So?”

“Someone else cast it. And they’re covering for him.”

“And you think they probably know that he’s not me.”

Theo nodded, eyes locked on him. “What have you—have you thought about what Sacred said? What I feel?”

Harry closed his eyes. Honestly, he’d buried himself in research for the past few weeks as a way to avoid that. But he no longer wanted to run straight to Dumbledore and tell him about the soul-piece in his head.

Even when Dumbledore—or someone—probably knew the homunculus wasn’t Harry, they didn’t send him a Howler or make an effort to have his friends find him. They just kept the secret and worked on it in silence.

Harry couldn’t trust them to be open and honest with him, so he couldn’t trust them in general.

“I have a question to ask you.”

“Yes?”

Harry understood now why Theo kept retreating into Parseltongue to handle emotionally difficult conversations. He’d spoken telepathically with Sacred down the years when it was the only way he had to communicate with her. Speaking to a snake, like a snake, with a snake, made Theo feel more at ease.

“What do you feel about me, really? I know that you built me up into a savior in your head, but now you’ve been saved. What now? I have enough Galleons to buy a house of my own, and I’ll need to do it anyway in case your father starts coming down into these tunnels again. Or after this summer, if he doesn’t. But what do you feel about me?”

Theo remained quiet, giving the question the consideration it deserved. His eyes were still intense, and Harry didn’t think he was wrong that they had begun to gain slit pupils. Becoming a Parselmouth because someone fed you a snake heart evidently had different effects than being born with it or—

Acquiring it the way Harry had.

Theo finally nodded and spoke. “I agree that it would be safer to have you move out, But I wouldn’t want you further away, if it were possible to keep you close. I want you here to touch, to smell, to hold. I’ve been saved, but it makes me want more and more of you. I don’t know if what I feel is love, Harry, because I don’t know that I’ve ever felt it. But I want to be with you.”

“Even if I—don’t love you right now?”

“You heard what I said about what I feel.”

Harry nodded, casting his eyes to the floor. There was value in honesty. And Theo had told him the truth when Sacred had said it. He hadn’t tried to prevent her from telling Harry that. There was value in that, too.

“Do you not want to date a boy?”

“I’m worried about the amount of danger that dating me might put you in. I’m worried about what will happen at the end of summer, when people find out about the homunculus and that kind of thing.” Harry looked up. “But no, it’s not because you’re a boy, Theo. I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Theo sat on the bed beside him and reached for his hand. Harry held it out without much thought, and shivered a little as Theo bent his head to touch his lips to the back of it, eyes not moving from Harry’s.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen when I was a child,” Theo whispered. “I made a vow to free Sacred not knowing if I could ever do that. I longed to communicate with her and didn’t know if I would ever manage better than the telepathy spell. I still did it. Do you know why?”

“No,” Harry whispered, shivering again.

“Because doing it is better than not doing it. Because being uncertain is no reason to give up.”

Harry nodded slowly. Yes, he was that kind of person too, he thought. It was why he had wanted to investigate the Philosopher’s Stone and the Heir of Slytherin even if some people would have said it was none of his business. Because he couldn’t just sit still once he knew there was danger to other people out there.

“Harry.”

Harry looked up. Theo was leaning towards him, and Harry didn’t know if he was deliberately swaying like a snake, but he might be. Harry twitched his hand in Theo’s grasp, but didn’t pull away.

“Yeah?”

“Can I kiss you?”

“You have been.”

“On the lips. Not the hand.”

Harry hesitated. But Theo didn’t move or back off—or press him, either. He just waited. And Harry thought that Theo might have been uncertain of the answer, but he had asked anyway.

And that made Harry’s own resolve firm, because fuck it, he wanted to see what this was like.

“You can,” he said, and leaned forwards into the swaying, still, slit-pupiled, crazy boy who had brought him here.

Theo kissed like he was starving, his hands moving at once to Harry’s shoulders, gripping, tight, almost painful, but Harry knew he could pull back and free if he wanted. He didn’t want. There was Theo’s tongue, flickering and darting against his, and Harry turned his head and gave himself up to the kiss.

It was warm.

It was heady.

It was something that he might give his life for.

When they pulled apart from each other, Harry’s eyes were wet. He cleared his throat and didn’t call attention to it. Theo just watched him, a slight smile tugging at his lips. At least Harry knew that the smile wasn’t mocking.

“Have you found out anything more about the lights in the top of Sacred’s cavern?”

“I have not. The books that are probably about the wards are in my father’s study, and I don’t dare go there.”

Harry nodded and responded to Theo’s unspoken request for him to speak Parseltongue. “I don’t want you to risk your life or your health or even just him noticing that you’re not under the blood curse anymore. We’ll find something out in these books.”

“The house-elves are delighted that someone is requesting them from the library. My father hasn’t read them in years.”

“What does he do all day?”

Theo’s expression was as cold and slow and complicated as Sacred’s. “He drinks and practices obscure Dark Arts and mourns my mother.”

“Did he kill her?”

“Yes. But it was while she was in the middle of trying to kill him, so someone could call it self-defense. The Aurors who investigated the case did.” Theo’s expression said what he thought of that. “He mourns the enemy who could challenge him, not the woman he loved. He has never loved anyone in his life.”

Harry nodded slowly. In this respect, he thought he was luckier than Theo. At least he’d had parents who loved him, even if he’d only had them for a year. And Sirius loved him, even if they couldn’t be together right now. And he’d even been raised by an aunt and uncle who loved each other and their son.

At least he knew what it looked like, even if he had no idea whether what he felt for Theo right now was love.

“We’ll get revenge on him someday.”

Theo looked at him, the warmth with which he’d kissed Harry dancing across his face in invisible waves. “Yes. We will.”