lomonaaeren

Ron and Hermione were waiting for Harry when he got back to Gryffindor Tower.

Harry smiled at them, feeling as if his blood had been replaced by champagne, and sat down on the couch opposite them. A few other people who had been at Slughorn’s party were gaping at him, but he ignored them. They could either eavesdrop, which they probably would, or ask him later. “What do you want to know?”

“Adrian Pucey? Why him?”

“Why not?”

That appeared to perplex Hermione, so Ron was the one who jumped in. “My sister fancies you! You could have gone on a date with her!”

Harry blinked at Ron. He had been aware that Ginny had had a crush on him in second year, but he’d barely spent any time around her since then, so he hadn’t been aware it had endured. “Oh. Well, I like Adrian.”

“But you could have gone with her!”

“But I like Adrian. And I’m dating him.”

“Are you gay, Harry?” Hermione cut in, stepping on Ron’s foot for a second, probably because she wanted him to calm down.

“I suppose so,” Harry said. “I mean, I’ve had a few crushes on girls, but I haven’t looked at anyone but Adrian since we got together.” He grinned. “And I don’t want to look at anyone else, either.”

“But you could have told us.”

Harry decided that even though he had forgiven them for last summer, there was no reason he couldn’t use it as a bit of a weapon now. He leaned forwards. “The way that you told me that you were staying with my godfather last summer?”

“That was dangerous! This isn’t!”

“It could have been, with Adrian’s family.” Harry knew he was exaggerating a little, but that was all right. It wasn’t going to hurt his friends, and if they had their feelings a bit hurt by not knowing about his boyfriend until now, so what? Adrian’s safety was more important. “Things have changed, but it could have been dangerous.”

“You should tell us these things, Harry! We deserve to know!”

“And were you going to tell me that you started snogging last summer, or is that also the sort of thing it would be dangerous to put in a letter?”

Ron and Hermione stared at him with faces so red that Harry had to fight to keep from snorting in laughter. He leaned back in his chair and just grinned at them. Hopefully they would see now how silly it was to feel that keeping Adrian a secret for a while had been some horrible betrayal.

“How did you know about that?”

“It was obvious.”

Ron and Hermione exchanged glances, and then Ron swallowed and said, “It was just a bit of kissing. Nothing we had to tell you about.”

“And Adrian and I have just done a bit of kissing and spending time together, too. Nothing I had to tell you about.”

Ron and Hermione looked as if they wanted to disagree, but didn’t know how. Harry shook his head and stood. “I’m friends with both of you, but just like I don’t need to know about every single romantic thing you do together, you don’t need to know about mine.”

“What if he was a Death Eater?”

“What if one of you was one?”

“Harry!”

“He’s had plenty of chances to betray me, and he hasn’t,” Harry said gently. “So I don’t think he is one, and there’s no reason for me to sit around arguing with you about how he’s actually fine.”

Ron and Hermione still looked as if they wanted to ask more questions, but Harry turned and went up the stairs to his room, where he checked the paper on Adrian’s Christmas gift. He would love seeing Adrian’s face when he opened it.

*

“What is it?”

“You could open it and find out.”

Adrian shot Harry a dirty look and then tore into the silver wrapping paper. Harry had thought he was lucky to find not only paper that was a color associated with Slytherin, but one that had little golden Snitches all over it. He leaned back against the wall of the abandoned classroom they were meeting in this year, and watched his boyfriend.

Adrian seemed to have grown another half a meter since the start of the year, and his dark hair was longer than it had been, hanging around his shoulders. He would always be handsome to Harry, but Harry admired the new looks as improvements.

“Harry,” Adrian whispered.

“Do you like it?”

“Do I like it, the bloke says.” Adrian turned the crystal globe that had been inside the paper around with reverent fingers. It sat on a blue base and glowed softly with radiant inner light. “I love it. Which memory did you use for it?”

“A bunch of them, but the first one was you rescuing me from a Muggle car on your broom. You madman.”

Adrian sat back, and his smile bloomed again. He turned the crystal around and around in his hands. It would radiate the emotions that the wizard or witch enchanting it had infused it with. In this case, Harry had chosen happiness and warmth—and love.

He could admit, if only to himself, that he was in love with Adrian.

Given the expression on Adrian’s face as he sat staring at the crystal, Harry thought, he should say it aloud now. Who knew what would happen in the war? Adrian had made the choice to be known as Harry’s boyfriend, but that didn’t mean that Voldemort wouldn’t target him, and he could die in the fighting.

Harry leaned forwards and said softly, “I love you.”

Adrian froze, staring at him, and Harry wondered for a moment if he shouldn’t have said that after all. But then Adrian leaned in and kissed him impulsively, and Harry wrapped his arms around his boyfriend’s neck and kissed him back.

“I love you,” Adrian said, in the kind of whisper that told Harry he probably wouldn’t ever confess it in public.

“Good.” Harry closed his eyes and leaned his head against Adrian’s chest.

They sat like that for a moment, and then Adrian cleared his throat and leaned back, reaching for a package in orange paper next to him. “Here, here’s yours.”

“Why orange?”

“Compromise when it comes to Gryffindor red.”

Harry smiled at him and tore it open. There was a thick book inside that looked a little familiar, but didn’t seem to have a title or anything.

When he flipped it open, he found out why it looked familiar. There were pictures on all the pages, it was a photo album, but the pictures were of him and Adrian. Harry gaped at the photos, the perfect photos, of them laughing and playing Quidditch and sitting next to each other in the little house on the Puceys’ property where he’d hidden, but he knew that no one had actually taken pictures of them there.

He lowered the book and stared at Adrian, who looked as if his whole face was on fire.

With the air of someone confessing a crime, Adrian said, “There’s a potion that can transfer Pensieve memories into photos. It’s complicated and expensive, but I got it for you.”

Harry flung himself forwards and kissed Adrian again, his fingers working into his boyfriend’s collar. “I don’t think I’ve told you yet how very brilliant you are,” he breathed into Adrian’s ear.

Adrian uttered a choked little laugh. “Well, don’t stop on my account.”

So Harry didn’t.

*

“Ron and Hermione say that you have a boyfriend.”

Harry leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table and looked up at Sirius. His godfather had been pretty unsubtle in lingering behind after dinner and coming up with excuses as to why everyone else should go do something in another room or go back through the Floo to their own house. Harry hadn’t known this was exactly what Sirius would want to talk to him about, but he supposed he should have guessed.

“I do. His name’s Adrian Pucey.”

“Not Death Eaters, but lots of Slytherins in that family. And they’d betray you as soon as look at you.”

“Adrian’s different.”

Sirius was silent for a long moment, tracing his spoon through the remnants of the porridge in his dish. Then he looked up and asked, “Does this have something to do with the Order not seeing you outside of the house on Privet Drive for the last two summers?”

“I was wondering how long it would take you lot to catch on,” Harry said casually, although his heart was drumming hard enough that he thought Sirius could probably hear it.

“Harry.”

“No one’s explained why I have to stay there,” Harry snapped. “The blood protections on the house? The kind that I looked up and the books said they had to be powered by love or considering the house a home? Well, they’ve failed on both counts! And my best friends getting to stay with my godfather and me not being able to, everyone keeping secrets, everyone acting as though the summer after fifth year was just as dangerous as the one that Voldemort got resurrected in! I’m sick of the bloody secrets, Sirius! And you going along with them!”

Harry stopped, panting. He hadn’t known he was going to say all that. From Sirius’s wide eyes, neither had he.

“All right,” Sirius said. “I get it. That doesn’t mean that you need to run off and spend time with your Slytherin boyfriend for a whole summer. I could have talked Albus into letting you come here.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Sirius winced and looked down. “Harry, there’s something very important that I can’t tell you—”

Harry stood up. Sirius stared at him with an agonized expression.

“Sick. Of. The. Bloody. Secrets,” Harry repeated, and then turned and stomped upstairs.

Ron and Hermione were lingering on the staircase that led to the bedrooms. Harry ignored them, walked into the library, and leaned back in a chair with his eyes closed.

They’d had to accept Adrian just because of the matter-of-fact way that Harry had gone about everything, but they still thought that he shouldn’t keep secrets and they could. Harry was sick of it, and he wasn’t going to put up with it anymore.

*

“Harry, can we talk?”

“Going to tell me any secrets?”

Sirius paused, and then jerked his head in an agonized way. “I—I can’t do that—because of what you might reveal to him.”

“Voldemort?”

Normally, Harry wouldn’t have enjoyed the way his godfather jumped and then stared around as if expecting Voldemort to materialize from the wall, but at this point, he was done. He was so sick of people creeping around and lying to him and expecting him to take it in good part.

“It doesn’t even make sense, you know,” he said aloud. Sirius walked into the library and sat down on the chair across from Harry, watching him with a yearning expression. “Ron and Hermione are almost as much at risk as I am. Everyone knows that we’re friends. If you trust them with secrets, Voldemort could grab them and read it out of their minds.”

“Not Ron,” Sirius said quickly. “Molly thinks that he’s too young for the Order meetings, and I have to agree.”

“Hermione?”

Sirius hesitated.

Harry sighed and turned to stare into the fire that Kreacher kept burning all the time, even though he looked upset that Harry was using the library.

“She’s of age,” Sirius said. “She can’t help it that she’s older than you are.”

“But she doesn’t know Occlumency, either. Voldemort could grab her and read whatever you’ve trusted her with out of her head.” Harry shook his head. “You’re making exceptions for me, sure, because I’m the Boy-Who-Lived, but it’s never the good exceptions. I don’t get to stay with my own godfather, or stay at Hogwarts for the summers, or know secrets concerning my own life. Why does Hermione need to know those secrets, for Merlin’s sake?”

His voice was raised at the end, and he turned to face Sirius. Sirius kept his eyes closed. Then he whispered, “You deserve the chance to just be a child. To have a normal childhood. That’s what Albus said.”

“I’m half a year away from being seventeen, Sirius,” Harry said, exaggerating a little, but he didn’t think Sirius was going to call him on it. “Any childhood I had was done and over with a long time ago.”

“You enjoyed being at home, didn’t you?”

“With the Muggles who abused me? No.”

Sirius stared at him with his mouth a little open, and Harry half-smiled. “I suppose Dumbledore didn’t tell you? I told him when he came to get me for a mission this summer.”

“I—no, he didn’t tell me.” Sirius bowed his head. “Do you think that he thought I shouldn’t know?”

“I think he probably just forgot,” Harry said, which he did actually think was likely. “Or else that he’s keeping so many secrets he forgot which one was which and who knew what.”

“That’s not fair, Harry. He’s trying to make the best decisions he can.”

“And sometimes they’re not the best ones.” Harry shook his head. “He won’t tell me why Voldemort went after me specifically, what the lot of you are guarding in the Department of Mysteries, what happened to make his hand look the way it does…I just think that if he’s going to keep all these secrets, I’m entitled to a few of my own.”

“But yours could put you in danger! Dumbledore’s won’t.”

“Really? You don’t think that I might need to know why Voldemort came after me, or how soon that curse on Dumbledore’s hand is going to kill him?”

“You think the curse on his hand is going to kill him?”

“It’s getting worse,” Harry said quietly. That was one thing he had figured out during the “lessons” that Dumbledore kept giving him, although he still hadn’t figured out the purpose of the memories or what kind of memory Dumbledore thought he should get from Professor Slughorn. “It’s spreading further up his arm. But when I asked him what it was or how he felt, he just waved his hand and changed the subject.”

“Oh.” Sirius slumped back heavily.

“Compared to that, my keeping the secret of my boyfriend for a few months really isn’t a big deal.”

“I suppose not.” Sirius hesitated and looked at him. “But Ron and Hermione seemed really hurt that you did.”

“I was hurt that they kept sending me silly letters that said nothing for two summers in a row and didn’t tell me they did at least a big of snogging last summer.” Harry honestly wasn’t sure if it was more than snogging. Ron and Hermione tended to both turn red and tell him two entirely different stories.

“But you’re—friendly with them.”

“I got over it. I forgave them. They’ll just have to do the same thing.”

*

“Is it really the best use of your time to date Adrian Pucey, my dear boy?”

“At least as good a use of my time as sitting through these lessons that you won’t explain, sir.”

Dumbledore paused and peered at Harry over his glasses. Harry stared back, and then glanced pointedly at Dumbledore’s blackened hand, which now looked as though it had some malevolent fungus growing all over it.

“We are not here to discuss that,” Dumbledore said, and shook his sleeve over his hand.

“I don’t think we’re here to discuss Adrian, either.”

“I simply wonder if he is…distracting you.”

“No, sir,” Harry said blandly.

“Really? Because you do not yet appear to have got that memory from Professor Slughorn.”

“Sir,” Harry said, hiding a little sigh, “you haven’t even told me what memory you want me to get. There’s no way I could get it. And he hasn’t exactly been a close friend or anything, so he would get suspicious if I just showed up and started talking about memories. What exactly is the memory you want me to get, and what is the point of it?”

Dumbledore stared at Harry. Then he said, “I’m sure that I told you what memory it was, Harry.”

“No, sir. You didn’t.”

A pause. Dumbledore was a Legilimens, and Harry thought he must be able to tell that Harry was telling the truth.

The Headmaster looked down and cleared his throat. Harry watched him closely. He was…embarrassed?

“I am so sorry, Harry,” Dumbledore whispered. “Now that you mention it—I have no clear memory of telling you which one I wanted you to retrieve from Horace. I was sure that I’d done it, but I can’t find a trace of it…”

“Is the curse on your hand starting to affect your memory, sir?”

“We are not here to talk about the curse on my hand, Harry.”

“If it’s affecting your memory and making you think you told me things that you didn’t, sir, then I think we should.”

Dumbledore looked away from him for a moment. Then he said, “I will of course show you the memory that Horace gave me, which I suspect is altered—in fact, it is obvious it is altered—and then tell you more about the one I want you to retrieve from him.”

Harry sighed aloud this time. At least he was getting some answers about this supposedly important task he needed to perform, but he couldn’t help but think that it would be more productive if they just talked about the curse on Dumbledore’s hand.

Then he started learning about Horcruxes, and forgot all about that.

*

“He made Horcruxes?”

Harry blinked. He had heard Adrian express a few different emotions about Voldemort, mostly fear and defiance, but this sounded like outrage.

“You know what they are?”

“My family has books on everything,” Adrian snarled, pacing back and forth in the little stretch of deserted corridor where they’d met this time. It was nice not to have to keep everything a secret, but having people pointing at them and giggling got old. “Just in case it’ll be useful someday. I read about Horcruxes years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“Whatever book you read that in. That can’t have been pleasant. I wanted to take a shower just hearing about them.”

Adrian turned and stared at him, mouth a little open, and then flushed red all down his chest. It was a nice chest. Harry craned his neck to watch where the blush disappeared into Adrian’s robes.

“Thanks,” Adrian said at last, softly, sitting down next to Harry on the bench they’d Transfigured from part of the wall. “But I just meant—there’s only a little magic I can think of Darker than that. And multiple Horcruxes? No one’s done that, as far as I know. He’s insane.”

“And probably thinks he’s so clever.”

“Hmmm.” Adrian put his hand on Harry’s back. “Dumbledore told you that that diary from second year was a Horcrux?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we know at least one thing that works against them. Basilisk venom.”

“You want to help me destroy them?”

Adrian leaned closer and looked into his eyes. “Did you hit your head on a Bludger or a floor that you didn’t tell me about?” he asked dryly. “Of course I’m going to help you destroy them. I’ll be by your side every step of the way.”

Harry thought that this statement deserved a kiss, and from the enthusiastic way Adrian returned the kiss, he wasn’t about to argue with him.