[Songs of the Stormy Season]: Not With That Attitude, 12/15, Harry/Adrian Pucey, PG-13

[lomonaaeren]

“What if the power that he knows not is the Horcrux, and you don’t have it now that we got rid of it by hiding it in Dumbledore’s body?”

Harry laughed a little and let himself sprawl in Adrian’s lap. Adrian stroked his hair the way Harry had done for him the other night, but he seemed abstracted, worried.

“I don’t think that is,” Harry said. “Dumbledore believes the power is love. I don’t really think that, at least not in the same way he means it, but I’m not worried.”

“Why not?” Adrian bent the full force of his thoughtful scowl on Harry.

“Because I think the power he knows not is you and your love for me,” Harry said softly, wrapping his hand around the back of Adrian’s neck. “And no one can ever take that away from me unless you decide you want to leave me.”

Adrian spun towards him and pushed him down on the bench, utterly focused on him. Harry swallowed, a rough little thrill running through him at the way that Adrian’s hands flexed on him and his eyes darkened.

“No. I would never do that.”

“Well, then,” Harry said in contentment, and leaned up to kiss Adrian and do other things that no one needed to know about except the two of them.

*

“It will be tonight.”

Harry bit his lip as he looked into Dumbledore’s eyes. The Headmaster had cornered Harry outside the Great Hall, during the perhaps one hour of Harry’s day when he would be alone. He’d been on his way back from NEWT Potions to Gryffindor Tower while Ron went to lunch and Hermione rushed off to exchange books, and Harry had been going to meet Adrian after lunch.

“The plan with Professor Snape that you told me about,” Harry said very quietly.

“Yes.”

Professor Dumbledore’s face was incredibly sad. Harry resisted the temptation to look towards his blackened hand. It was probably hidden under his sleeve anyway.

“Okay,” Harry said, exhaling.

“Originally I planned to take you with me to where one of the artifacts is hidden,” Dumbledore said, with a significant look that made Harry’s heart start pounding like a drum in his ears. “But I decided it would be better to let you remain in the school and deal with the potential chaos.”

“Chaos? Why? Just from your—death?”

“There are other things happening that you may not have known about,” Dumbledore said vaguely. “I will give you the notes on the artifact’s placement. Just keep in mind that the place is incredibly dangerous.”

“And will you ever stop being vague when you talk about secrets you haven’t given me yet?”

Dumbledore blinked at him. Harry stared back.

Then the Headmaster sighed. “Perhaps I deserve that. But, Harry, some things must happen in order to save souls.” And he pressed a piece of folded parchment into Harry’s hand that was probably his notes on the artifact’s placement, before turning and hurrying away.

Harry clenched his hand around the note so hard that he crumpled it.

“What was that? A note from Professor Dumbledore?”

Harry smoothed his face and turned around. Hermione had got back more quickly than he’d thought she would. He nodded. “Something that relates to the lessons he was giving me,” he said, with perfect truth, and slid the note into a robe pocket.

Hermione followed its path with her eyes, but said nothing as they went into lunch. Harry was grateful that they seemed to be on the track of repairing their friendship, and learning that they all had secrets to keep.

*

“Harry.”

Harry jogged towards Adrian. They’d originally been going to meet on the pitch for a practice, but Adrian had sent Harry a note through Hedwig that asked him to come to their quiet dungeon corridor. From the way Adrian was pacing back and forth, his face fixed in lines of rage, Harry thought that something terrible must have happened. He was already looking for wounds on Adrian’s skin as he came up to his boyfriend.

“I’m all right,” Adrian said. He gripped Harry’s arms and practically spat the next words. “But I figured out what was going to happen and cause the chaos that the Headmaster mentioned to you.”

“What?”

“Malfoy had some task from Voldemort. I don’t know all the details, but I know that he’d found a way to let Death Eaters into the castle.”

Harry stared at Adrian, still and shocked in a way that he rarely got nowadays. But he was so disgusted that he was trembling.

Innocent people would have been in danger and could have died if that had happened. Had Dumbledore really thought it was worth it to let Malfoy do that just so that Snape could—what? Prove himself in front of a larger audience of Death Eaters?

Harry swallowed back rage and shook his head. “But you stopped Malfoy.”

“It’s a good thing that I’m so good at fire spells. He’s tied up in bonds of flame in a corner of the dungeons where few people go. If he tries to get out, something spontaneous will happen.” Adrian smiled with one corner of his mouth, but it disappeared quickly. “I can’t believe that he would have…”

It didn’t really matter whether “he” was Dumbledore, Snape, or Malfoy. It could apply to all of them, Harry thought bitterly. He reached out and took his boyfriend in his arms, drawing Adrian close to rest his head on Harry’s shoulder, even though Adrian was taller than he was. At the moment, he thought Adrian needed the comfort as much as Harry ever had.

“You’re the only pure and good person I know,” Adrian whispered into his hair. “And Dumbledore would have let you die so that he could protect Malfoy. That had to be what he meant when he talked about saving souls.”

Harry nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure that Dumbledore would have let him die—he wanted Harry to survive and finish the task of tracking down the Horcruxes—but he hadn’t warned him, either. He had taken a last secret to his grave.

“What are we going to do now?”

“Make sure that we know where Dumbledore is and what he’s up to,” Adrian said, straightening and swallowing, “and tell him that he’s going to have to come up with some other way for Snape to demonstrate his loyalty.”

*

The password to the gargoyle was the same as the one that Dumbledore had used when they conducted the ritual to take the Horcrux from him. Only later did Harry think about what that meant.

They stepped into the office, and Snape swung around to glare at them. Then he aimed his wand at Dumbledore, who was slumped behind his desk. The black, cracked skin on his hand had worked most of the way up his arm.

“Avada Kedavra!” Snape spat.

Harry cried out and started forwards, but Adrian’s arm came down in front of him. He lifted a shield of fire. Snape cast them a quick glance, looked back at the man dead behind the desk, and then turned and ran.

“He thought there was some other audience coming,” Harry whispered, noting the way that Snape seemed confused for a single second before he vanished down the moving staircase.

“The other Death Eaters, likely.” Adrian shook his head in disgust. “It seems that just as Dumbledore didn’t tell us about Malfoy, he didn’t tell Snape that we already knew the truth of this little ploy.”

Harry sighed, and spent a moment staring at the Headmaster’s slumped form. He was—he had been such a big part of Harry’s life for so many years, even if he hadn’t actually interacted with Harry that much for some of them.

But now he was dead, and Harry and Adrian had to take up his work.

He turned and led Adrian out of the office, to spread the word about Dumbledore being dead. After all, there was nothing else they could do here.

*

“Will you tell us about what you were researching, now?”

Hermione’s chin was up, and she looked so determined that Harry knew he wouldn’t be able to slip out of this conversation with a platitude about how good Adrian was at research. Ron was standing behind Hermione with his arms folded, and that was a bad sign, too.

Harry cast an apologetic look at Adrian, who had sat beside him throughout Dumbledore’s funeral. Adrian just squeezed his arm, nodded, and then turned and walked away towards the lake.

“All right. But I need to raise a Privacy Charm.”

Harry and Adrian had already talked about how much they would reveal to Hermione and Ron about Horcruxes. Dumbledore would probably have wanted Harry to tell them everything, but Harry was nearly of age now, and had been failed by the Headmaster often enough that he wouldn’t do something just because Dumbledore would have wanted him to do it.

Ron and Hermione nodded, and watched in silence as Harry led them a little way away from the crowd and raised the charm. Then he turned around and folded his own arms.

“Voldemort created a failsafe so that even if he apparently died, the way he did when my mum defeated him, he wouldn’t entirely leave the world. It captures and holds his soul. It’s like—a net.” Harry moved his hands around in the air, trying to embody it. This should give them enough of the truth that they could help, if they wanted to, but not enough for them to run off and look up Horcruxes on their own.

I hate that I have to lie to my best friends this way.

But Harry didn’t think that Ron or Hermione would ever take it well that he and Adrian had transferred the Horcrux to Dumbledore before he died. They might not even take it well that basilisk venom and Fiendfyre—a spell Adrian had looked up—were ways to destroy the Horcruxes. Well, the venom might not bother them, but Fiendfyre would. There weren’t many spells Darker.

And they wouldn’t take it well, either, that Harry had known about the plan for Snape to kill Dumbledore, and hadn’t told them.

“A net?” Ron asked, sounding skeptical.

Harry nodded. “There are various anchor points that hold his spirit to the world, and keep the net in existence. Keep him pinned down, instead of fleeing the way that most souls would?” He could see that Ron and Hermione looked more disbelieving, not less. He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not explaining this well. Dumbledore said that he had to explain it this way because I wouldn’t understand all the magical theory.”

As he had thought it might, the invocation of Dumbledore made his friends relax and smile a little, although they still looked sorrowful. “A net,” Hermione said, nodding. “And you need to find the anchor points?”

“Yes. And destroy them. The problem is, we don’t know where all of them are. He protected them and hid them as carefully as he could.”

“Did the Headmaster find one? Is that what cursed his hand?”

Harry nodded again, grateful that he could weave some truth into the lie. “He didn’t give me all the details about how he intended to destroy it. But he did leave a few notes for me about where the next one is.”

“Come on! We have to find it right away!”

Harry gave Ron a stern look, and tried not to feel bad when he drooped. “We can’t just dash off and destroy it like that, Ron. It’s well-protected. We need to study the defenses, get ready to get past them first. Maybe do a scouting expedition.”

“Do you think we’ll be ready during the summer?” Hermione was biting her lip. “It sounds like we might need to study spells that we haven’t studied before and take a lot of time to study the defenses, too…”

Here it came. Harry braced himself. “Yeah, it’ll take more time, especially since I won’t be able to do magic legally for part of the summer. That’s why I’m not coming back to Hogwarts next year.”

“What?”

*

“It seemed to take a long time for you to explain that to them.”

“Yeah, well. Hermione isn’t used to thinking that there are more important things than marks. But once I explained why it was so important for us to destroy these things, then she accepted it.”

“They’re going with us, then?”

Harry still felt a warm squirm of affection in his stomach at the way that Adrian complained, but also made it clear that Ron and Hermione’s presence wouldn’t scare him away from accompanying Harry. “Yeah, afraid so.”

Adrian rolled his eyes—Harry could hear that without looking at him—and draped his arm around Harry’s shoulder. They were sitting by the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch for what might be the last time. Harry wasn’t going to discount the fact that it would be incredibly dangerous to hunt the Horcruxes, and he might die in the war.

Adrian was not going to die. Harry would sacrifice his life if he had to, to ensure that.

“You going to follow that plan we talked about leaving anchors at the various places?”

Harry nodded in silence. He would make sure to plant a vicious-looking stone or something similar at the cave that Dumbledore had left notes on, and any other places they found, and allow Ron and Hermione to destroy that while he found the actual Horcrux and took it away to destroy later.

“You shouldn’t have to go out of your way to fool them like this.”

“I know, but it’s the way it is. And it’s better than having to argue with them about things like transferring the Horcrux into Dumbledore.”

Adrian chuckled next to his ear and pulled Harry into a close embrace. “No. They wouldn’t appreciate how ruthless and practical you’ve become. And there’s another thing they wouldn’t appreciate.”

“Yeah?”

“How hot you are when you’re like that.”

Harry smiled, tilted his head back, and let his boyfriend’s kiss sweep him away from the present.