[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Chapter Eighteen of 'Adagio'- A Certain Kind of Nothing

[lomonaaeren]

“Have you heard any rumors about the Tournament, sir?”

“You could call me by my first name when we’re inside my office, Harry.”

Harry smiled, an expression that darted across his face like a small creature running to hide in a burrow. “All right, Severus. I meant what the Tasks will be, or how the Champions will be chosen.”

“No.” Severus put down the deadly rose he’d been peeling and gave Harry his full attention. He didn’t want to either poison himself or miss something in his ward’s posture and tone of voice. “Why? Are people in Slytherin telling you something about it?”

“It’s more—what isn’t there.”

Harry fell into silence, but Severus was good at waiting games of all kinds, and sure enough, Harry sighed and gave in before long. “It’s more that no one in Slytherin refers to what happened at the Quidditch World Cup.”

“Perhaps they do not trust you enough to do so in front of you.”

Harry shook his head at once, firmly. “Nott would do it, and Malfoy, if no one else.”

Severus tilted his head. He wanted to ask why Harry was so sure of Draco when, as far as Severus knew, there was the gift of a broom between them and nothing else.

But in the end, he didn’t ask. Harry looked shifty enough that Severus was fairly sure his ward would lie about how he was handling the Slytherin politics, and, well. Severus didn’t want to force him into some kind of denial.

“I see,” he said. “So you think something else is coming? Something worse?”

“Something that might involve me.”

“I can say no one has said anything to me. The only odd conversation I have had was with Moody, and I told you about that.”

“Yeah. That he thinks I might make a good Auror recruit. Hilarious.”

Harry’s smile was hard, and so were his eyes. Severus gave him a smile in return and asked, “Would you like me to ask Albus about the Tournament? If he wants to keep secrets, he would not give me many, knowing I would pass them on to you, but he might still let something useful slip.”

Harry gave him an unexpectedly intense glance. “It’s your Occlumency that allows you to fool him, isn’t it?”

“You mean make him think that I believe different things than I do? Yes, it is.”

“Now you see why I wanted to learn it.”

Severus didn’t think he saw everything about that, because it still seemed to him that Harry had more than one motive for everything he did, but he nodded. “Occlumency will also be what allows me to survive what is coming.”

“You mean, if the Dark Lord returns and you have to fool him into thinking you’re still on his side.”

“Yes.” It was the only thing Severus could say without revealing more of Albus’s plans. Albus would be angry if he did so unless he knew Harry was already a powerful Occlumens and could hide that secret.

And Severus had no intention of telling Albus that.

“I know, sir.” Harry had retreated behind his invisible walls again, the polite mask Severus knew was all most of his other professors ever saw. “Don’t worry. I have no intention of doing anything that will allow you to get killed.”

“You have no idea how much that relieves me, Mr. Potter,” Severus said dryly, for the pleasure of seeing Harry’s smile flash like heat lightning before he slipped out.

Severus returned to stripping the deadly rose petals, determinedly putting aside thoughts of everything else for now.

*

“The Goblet of Fire!”

Severus grimaced as he stood in front of the Great Hall with his hands locked behind his back. Albus had let nothing about that slip.

As Albus discussed how the Goblet of Fire would choose the Champions, Severus’s gaze crossed Harry’s. The boy was sitting at the Slytherin table with his usual blank expression and his hands folded in front of him.

And his court around him.

Severus narrowed his eyes. He had not noticed it before, partially because he rarely looked at Harry in the Great Hall so that Albus would not see the depth of the connection between them. But yes, now that he was looking for it, he saw the way Draco and Nott flanked Harry, and a few unexpected others as well. Pansy Parkinson, Cassius Warrington, and Alicia Bole in the year above Harry.

He looked away before Albus could notice, but his throat felt a bit tight. Did Harry harbor ambitions of being a Dark Lord on his own?

Severus would have said no only an hour past. But the fact that he hadn’t noticed all the Slytherins gathering around Harry made him wonder what else he had missed.

*

“Nothing happened.”

“No,” Severus said quietly, as he made the final cut to a flobberworm and tucked the severed bits away in a tray with a Preservation Charm on it. Harry had slipped into his office and sat there with his head drooping almost ten minutes ago. These were his first words since. “Are you disappointed?”

Harry blinked at him as if wondering what Severus was talking about, and then gave a rusty laugh. “No. Relieved.”

Severus nodded. Yes, he could see that. Relief so profound would keep someone as silent as sadness. “Disappointed that the Hogwarts Champion is not a Slytherin?”

Harry gave another laugh, this one darker. “Who cares about the victor in a Tournament like this? They’ll be forgotten in a few decades anyway. And I have much more money than the prize Galleons in my vault.”

“I am glad that you are so sensible.”

Harry smiled at him, a smile that made Severus start; this one was more like the ones he saw so often in the mirror. “Is it sensible or is it making the best decision that I could have with my circumstances?”

“I do not know that there is a material difference.”

Harry seemed to think about that, and then nodded. “You’re right, sir. There’s nothing I want that the Tournament can give me, anyway.”

“Money you have. And you value safety above attention.”

“Above all attention.”

“Then you wish you were not the Boy-Who-Lived?” Severus asked. He had suspected that for years, but they had never spoken openly about it before this.

Harry gave him an ancient look. “Of course, sir. Of course I wish that my parents were still alive, and I had grown up someone ordinary and ignored. I can’t have that, but I can wish for it.”

“Wishes do little good.”

Harry smiled, and now his teeth were bared. They seemed sharper than Severus remembered them being. “Yes, they do,” he murmured. “I’ve reached the point where I don’t spend much time on them anymore, but I do still think about them. Maybe someday I’ll get to the point where I can purge those thoughts completely.”

“That would not be very human.”

“Being human is overrated.”

Severus blinked at Harry for a moment, and then lowered his head to concentrate much of his attention on casting the perfect Preservation Charm on the flobberworms again. He was shaken not so much to hear the sentiment as because it was something he had thought at Harry’s age.

But he did hope that he had preserved Harry from the kind of childhood he had had. Harry was at least not bullied in Slytherin, the way Severus had been, and if he had few friends either, he did not seem to want any. Surely it was—

Surely he was not destined for a path such as Theodore Nott would walk, such as the Dark Lord had trod.

Surely.

And if Severus was wrong, what else could he do to keep Harry from that?