Chapter Thirty-Six of 'Feather and Glass'- Uneasiness

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Thirty-Six—Uneasiness

Neville doesn’t know why he’s so uneasy around Sirius Black.

On the one hand, of course, the man is new, an unknown quantity. Now and then Gran talked about him when she was speaking of something the Order of the Phoenix did in the past, but he’s lived outside Britain for the whole of Neville’s life. Neville doesn’t know him.

But on the other, the man doesn’t threaten Neville, either. On the days when Professor Lupin gets sick—which seems to happen a lot—and Black has to fill in for him in class, he’s cheerful and funny. Neville laughs when Black turns into a dog as an example of the kind of unexpected thing that might distract an enemy in battle.

Ron and Hermione are as close to him as ever, although they seem to have more frequent arguments with him, and they don’t see anything wrong with Black. Or with Lupin, for that matter, although Neville is a little suspicious of the man’s frequent illnesses. After the debacle last year with the Heir of Slytherin, Neville doesn’t think that he can discount anything strange.

(He suppresses a flinch when he sees Harry walking down the corridors with his Slytherin or his Ravenclaw friends, laughing. Harry never looks at him).

Ron and Hermione, meanwhile, think it’s beyond strange that Neville is starting to think of Professor Snape as a mentor.

“He doesn’t have to give you so many bloody private lessons, does he?” Ron asks, scowling at Neville over a chessboard in the common room one afternoon. “He must know that you’re never going to be a great brewer.”

Neville swallows back hurt. Ron doesn’t mean to say things like that, he reminds himself. He just gets jealous easily, a result of being overshadowed by his brothers. “We talk about other things, too,” Neville says, and moves a pawn.

“Like what? What else could the greasy git possibly have to teach?”

“Oh, well, he knows a lot about the war, you know. He fought in it. So he tells me about defensive tactics and techniques sometimes. He won’t soften the stories that some of the older people like Gran do because they think I’m too young to hear about it.”

And that is sort of the truth, Neville tells himself. Occlumency is a defensive strategy for the mind. And Snape is gentler than he used to be, but he doesn’t offer praise easily.

“But you could tell us.”

“Professor Snape asked me not to.”

That’s the truth, as well. Neville did offer Ron some hints about Occlumency when he first began learning it, but Professor Snape said he shouldn’t this time. There’s too much chance that one of Neville’s close friends could end up possessed or snatched, and the less they know about intimate matters like the way Neville defends his mind, the better.

Neville doesn’t even mind doing this as much as he thought he would. He might have last year, but sometimes—

Sometimes, jealousy or not, Ron really is a complete git.

“Since when do you listen to him?”

“Since he started really teaching me, and doesn’t go after me in Potions anymore.”

Ron scowls and makes an excuse to end the game a lot earlier than Neville knows he would have otherwise. Neville sighs and leans back with his eyes closed as he listens to Ron stomping up the stairs to their room.

“He’s right, you know.”

“About me not listening to Professor Snape?” Neville asks, keeping his eyes closed.

“No. That you could tell us. Keeping secrets from us is—it’s sort of a Slytherin trait, isn’t it?”

Neville opens his eyes so that he can stare incredulously at Hermione, who shifts in place but doesn’t back down. “People know almost everything about me! Just people out in the world, from my birthday to my parents’ deaths. And you think I should tell you more?”

“I—that is—I didn’t think—”

Hermione’s eyelashes furiously flutter, and then she stands up and runs towards the girls’ dormitory. She’s so upset that she leaves her book behind. Neville can see more than one person, including Lavender and Parvati, leaning towards each other and whispering while they watch him.

Neville swallows. And then he lifts his head and stands up.

He might not have the kind of pride Gran tried to teach him, the one that would make him into a symbol of charisma against Voldemort for anyone to follow. But he has his own, and he walks quietly out of the common room without saying anything to anyone and goes to a classroom he’s growing his plants in.

By himself, now that he doesn’t have Harry or Zabini anymore.

Maybe everyone he cares about will leave him. But Neville still has plants to tend, and a mind to learn how to protect, and Voldemort to fight. When it comes down to it, it’s more important that he can do that than how many friends he has.

*

“Harry! I want to talk to you.”

Harry feels his spine stiffen, even though he hates giving away even that much to Black. But he turns around. He’s on his way back from a lesson with Steel, and he can’t act as though he has a secret he wants to hide. Black would try to find it out, of course, and then he would probably declare that working with a vampire is prejudiced against Muggles because something something something.

Harry bends his mouth into a smile with effort. “Hello, Mr. Black.”

“Can’t you call me Sirius?” Black has halted a few steps away and is smiling in a way that he’s probably used to making people fond of him.

Harry blinks. “You don’t understand that I hate you, do you?”

“Well, hate is a strong word—”

“One that I feel perfectly comfortable applying to you.”

Black’s smile falters. Harry watches him and wonders if the idiot really didn’t understand that Harry hates him. It’s almost the end of October and Black hasn’t approached him before this, so Harry thought he did.

But maybe he thinks that a day before Harry’s parents died is the perfect time for some reason that makes sense in his twisted brain.

“I—I had a gift for you.” Black clears his throat with an awkward chuckle. “It was one of your mother’s favorite books. I wanted to give it to you for your birthday, but, um, that didn’t work out.” He holds out the book.

Harry studies it without moving. It’s a Muggle book, he thinks, not a magical one. The cover shows a picture of a boy’s face that isn’t moving, and it’s a bit battered. Black probably had to dig it up from somewhere.

“Is this the one she owned?”

“Oh, no. I don’t know what happened to that one.” Black looks a little shifty in a way that makes Harry narrow his eyes. Black does too know what happened to the book, but he can’t share that knowledge with his orphaned godson, of course not. “But it has magic in it! She said that it helped her accept magic being real.”

That explains why Harry’s never seen it before, he thinks, looking at the title. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Dursleys never would have allowed Dudley to read anything that had magic in it.

Harry sort of wants to read it. But he wants to avoid giving Black power over him even more.

“Maybe I’ll find a copy someday,” he says, with a shrug. “Or look for the one Mum had. Maybe it’s in the Potter vault at Gringotts or something. But I don’t want this one, thank you very much.” He speaks firmly while pressing an elbow against his robe pocket, to keep Artemis, who’s hissing defensively, from sticking her head out and getting involved in the situation with Black. It’s best for all involved if Black, Lupin, and Dumbledore never know about her or that Harry is a Parselmouth.

“Because it’s Muggle, right?”

“No. Because someone I hate is trying to give it to me.”

“We undertook that quest to save the whole world! So that everyone would have a safe place to grow up, which includes you!”

Harry blinks at the vehemence in Black’s voice, then shrugs. It really isn’t his problem. “It doesn’t matter to me. What does is that I had to grow up with abusive Muggles because my godfather didn’t do his bloody duty.”

“But I was! To the world as a whole—”

“I wish you’d died,” Harry says, as clearly and coldly as he can. Maybe this will make Black shut up and go away. “Then at least I wouldn’t know that you’re such a coward you both abandoned me and you keep trying to make excuses for the abandonment.”

Black stares at him, so shocked that Harry wants to shout at him. What right does he have to be this shocked? What right does he have to think that Harry is the wrong one, the one who made the mistakes?

Then Black’s expression smooths out and grows stubborn again. “You really need to come with me and speak to someone who can help you accept your past instead of just hating Muggles—”

“If you make a move towards Harry, you’ll suffer.”

Blaise’s voice is soft. Harry turns towards him with his heart pounding and dancing in relief. Harry could resist if Black tried to grab him, but his best protective abilities are the ones that he has to keep secret.

Blaise has his wand aimed at Black, and he walks over to stand beside Harry. Harry leans against him for a second before he stands upright and turns to face Black. Harry and Blaise were supposed to meet up in one of their private classrooms, but Blaise must have started hunting for him down the likeliest corridors when Harry was late.

“Zabini—”

“Try it, Black. Do you want to find out what I can do when pushed?”

Black’s mouth works for a moment. Then he stands up and folds his arms in an absurd way. “You think that you can just get away with threatening one of your professors?”

“You’re threatening one of your students. Believe me, I can have someone here in seconds who’ll help me hide your body. But you can keep pushing if you’re that anxious to die. Maybe it would finally satisfy your martyr complex.”

Harry hides a smile in Blaise’s shoulder. He knows that Blaise is telling the simple truth. Professor Babbling would show up and help Blaise in an instant if Black tried to kidnap Harry and take him out of here.

“What’s it going to be, Professor Black? Do we both walk away from this? Or do we stand here until you give up on your idiocy?”

There’s a long enough pause that Harry thinks Black really will lunge and try to grab him. But in the end, Black lowers his head and plods up the corridor with his head low like a scolded dog.

Harry takes a deep breath and nods to Blaise. “Thank you.”

“I don’t know the best way to handle him,” Blaise says softly, and Harry realizes that his best friend hasn’t relaxed, his eyes still lingering on the corner that Black turned. “Killing him is inadvisable, given the fuss that Dumbledore and Lupin would make. Hurting him permanently is too noticeable, as Mother said, about what kinds of magic we’re being trained in. And he doesn’t seem to want to leave you alone.”

Harry cocks his head, thinking. “Then there’s only one option we have.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something we should discuss in private.”

Blaise starts, his eyes flickering around the corridor for a moment, although this is one without any portraits in it. Then he nods and turns, his arm still around Harry’s shoulder, to guide him towards their private classroom.

Harry relaxes further as he walks. He hates and fears Black, and to some extent Lupin, but at least he has Blaise beside him. At least he knows his best friend will always be there to fight for him.

*

“We have to make it look like an accident.”

Blaise lifts his eyebrows as he looks at Harry. Harry is sprawled beside their brazier, staring into it. Artemis is curled around his shoulders and hissing what Blaise doesn’t need Harry to translate as a stream of insults about Black. The more agitated that Artemis gets, however, the calmer Harry seems.

Blaise doesn’t know for sure that there’s a sympathetic relationship between Harry and Artemis like that, but it would make sense, since she’s literally made of his magic.

“His death.”

“Yes. Or his pain.” Harry breathes out and rolls over to look at Blaise. “I don’t care that much about him dying as opposed to being hurt. I just want to make sure that he’ll suffer and then never hurt me again.”

“Humiliating him socially might accomplish the same thing,” Blaise offers, because he thinks Mother would want him to bring up the more peaceful solution.

“I’m not sure that we can. The Headmaster is protecting him, and even though most people in Britain probably don’t care that much about him now, he’s still a pureblood who has lots of money. And their not caring about him means that he wouldn’t be a subject of gossip for long, either.”

Blaise nods thoughtfully. He has to struggle with his own impulses to hold them down. He is even more of a sadist than Mother knows, but both she and Bathsheda are right that letting other people know that often does more harm than good. “So his accidental death?”

“Or an accident that will follow him and plague him for a long time.”

“But you don’t know how to do that.”

“I have an idea, but it’s not like I know how to implement it.”

“Well, tell me and let’s work on it.”

Harry laughs a little and turns to face Blaise more fully. His eyes shine with reflected fire, and Blaise smiles. He wonders a little what his own eyes look like to Harry, but he knows that he can’t ask. It would sound strange.

Or would it? Blaise is pretty sure that he could say anything to Harry and Harry would nod and accept it.

But that uncertainty holds him back, and in the meantime, Harry has started to talk, kicking his heels up behind him as he does.

“I know that it’s hard to become an Animagus because you can have all kinds of painful and humiliating accidents on the way. I would love to trap him in his Animagus form, or halfway between human and dog, for the rest of his life. But I know I’m not powerful enough at wanded magic for that, and you aren’t that interested in Transfiguration.”

“Finding out how to do something like that might make me good enough,” Blaise murmurs. “But it would be hard to hide such sudden interest in a subject that I do only well enough to earn an EE in.”

“Unless it was me who did the research, and you who cast the spell.”

“What are you thinking, Harry?”

“McGonagall already stopped me once on the way out of Transfiguration class and said to let her know if I needed the remedial lessons again.” Harry grins, the jagged thing that makes Blaise want to brag to everyone else that they’ll never know the real Harry Potter. “I could accept the offer and use that to access the kinds of books and research we would need to trap someone in their Animagus form.”

“She could suspect. It would be difficult. Tricky.”

“I think we have to accept that this could take a long time.”

“Then how are we going to accomplish it? You know that Lupin’s only going to last a year as Defense professor, and when he leaves, Black will go with him.”

Harry snorts. “All I have to do is hint that I’m about to forgive him, and Black will come running.”

Blaise nods. That’s true enough. “All right. In the meantime, I think that you should accept the offer of remedial lessons, and I’ll see if there’s anything I can learn from Bathsheda in my lessons that would help.”

“Lessons in how to become an assassin?”

“She’s already told me all about how I can use Charms and even simple jinxes to accomplish my assassinations. What matters is your finesse, not the power of the magic you use. Didn’t I tell you about how she told me she’d killed someone by scrubbing their floor?”

Harry laughs and settles in to listen, and Blaise feels a burst of happiness as Artemis stops cursing Black’s name and curls around Harry’s forearm to listen, too. Ignis climbs out on Blaise’s shoulder to join in.

Blaise hopes that they will have many future days like this, laughing and talking about their lessons and how they will give revenge on their enemies.

*

Severus shakes his head as he watches Neville depart his office. The boy is getting better at Occlumency, but slowly. He has a mind that seems naturally resistant to bending into certain shapes, indicating a stubbornness that Severus does not see much sign of elsewhere in his life.

Unless his dedication to Herbology over Augusta’s disparaging of the subject is a sign of it.

Severus takes one of his own brews for a headache—Neville might learn Occlumency enough to keep the Dark Lord out of his mind by the time said Dark Lord is resurrected—and then goes about setting up the cauldrons for his lesson with Harry. By the time the boy knocks, Severus has the bases for a Shrinking Solution ready.

But Harry doesn’t immediately start asking questions about the potion, which is his usual modus operandi. Instead, he fixes huge eyes on Severus and asks, “Sir, did my mum give you a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?”

Severus feels himself freeze in a way that he has never done since that terrible night when he heard that Lily had died. He closes his eyes and wrestles his emotions back under control. He would like to blame his loss of that control on his wearying hour of Occlumency with Neville, but he knows he cannot.

“Why do you ask?” he whispers.

“Because Black tried to give me a copy of the book, when he said my mum loved it. And he said that he didn’t know what had happened to the actual copy she used to own, which is the only one I’d be interested in. But I thought she might have given it to you.”

“Because Black would not want to admit we were once friends.”

“Yes. Do you have it?”

Severus takes a deep breath and forces himself to admit the truth. “No. It was—one of the Death Eaters that I worked—beside found it and—forced me to burn it.”

Harry stares at him. Severus braces himself. He no longer thinks that this confession will be the end of any connection with Harry, but he can’t blame the boy if he turns and walks out of the office. Merlin knows that Severus would do the same if someone admitted to burning something that belonged to Eileen Prince, and she was not the sort of loving mother that Harry knows Lily to have been.

Then a disturbing thought impresses itself upon Severus’s mind.

Does the boy know that?

But Harry interrupts before Severus can get too involved in a debate with himself. “That’s terrible, sir. I’m sorry that you lost a piece of her like that.”

Severus swallows and forces himself to delve further into his discomfort instead of simply moving on from it the way that Harry is offering. “You lost more. You should not have had to learn of her favorite book years after her death.”

“No. But that’s what happened.” Harry hesitates. “Sir, was there—I don’t know many details about how my parents died.”

“They were in the same house as the Longbottoms,” Severus says, and for once, he damns the oaths he swore to Albus that constrain him from offering the full context, about how he carried the prophecy that affected two boys’ lives. It is the first time he has ever wanted to speak about overhearing the prophecy, since he reported it to the Dark Lord. “Their friend Peter Pettigrew betrayed them, and—”

“Professor Flitwick told me that they were in their own house.”

Severus pauses. Then he says slowly, “No. They were visiting the Longbottoms. I am quite certain on this. I do not know for sure that the Killing Curse slew your parents as well as Frank and Alice Longbottom, but I know they were together.”

“How do you know, sir?”

“Because the Dark Lord was talking about how he would take all his enemies at once, the evening before. I did not question myself or think about it deeply enough, at the time.” Severus shuts his eyes.

“But then why would the story be that they were in their own house?”

“I do not know,” Severus admits. “I am sure of my information. I am an Occlumens of great enough skill that I would have noticed if the Dark Lord had tried to alter my memory. And I do not think he would have wanted to, unless he had survived the attack but failed to kill anyone and been angry about his failure.”

Harry frowns. He appears to be thinking deeply. He finally says, “Black and Lupin would know the truth.”

“Indeed.” Severus takes petty but undeniable pleasure in the hatred in Harry’s voice when he speaks of the man who tried to feed Severus to a werewolf and the creature who would have eaten him.

“Professor Flitwick said that Lupin and Black showed up in time to save me.”

“I do not know anything about that.”

“You weren’t there at the time of the attack, either.”

“I was not. It remains one of the bitterest moments of my life that I was not.”

Harry nods, his eyes distant. Severus watches him and wonders what he sees. Harry seems at times as though he is innocent, at other times as though he is wild, and at others as though he is hiding secrets far deeper than the true nature of his personality.

“But you based your ideas on what happened to my parents solely on a statement made by the Dark Lord the evening before.”

Severus grimaces. In truth, he has not confronted the weakness of that idea before, because he has never discussed this with anyone, except Albus in the immediate aftermath of the Dark Lord’s defeat. “Yes, that is true. I could have been mistaken. He could have meant simply that he would have the Longbottoms and Neville Longbottom in the same place at the same time.”

“But then how would he have broken through their Fidelius? Was Peter Pettigrew also their Secret-Keeper?”

“It is a fact that he betrayed your parents,” Severus says slowly. “And many have assumed that he knew the secret to the Longbottoms’ home as well. Or that they were not under Fidelius at all.”

“It seems that there’s a lot of confusion around such an iconic event,” Harry says, and his voice is detached and cool. Severus recognizes the tactic for dealing with intense emotion, given that he has employed it often himself. “I realized there was confusion about how Longbottom defeated the Dark Lord, but not all the rest of this.”

“Black and Lupin have not contested the official stories of the account. So perhaps they did find your parents dead in your home and came in time to rescue you after all.”

“But you didn’t contest them, either, sir.”

“I knew that I was hardly in a position to do so, as an accused Death Eater who escaped Azkaban only because the Headmaster vouched for me.”

“So someone else could know the truth. Someone who hasn’t come forwards because they also think they won’t be believed. Or because they know that the truth would paint them in a bad light.”

“Pettigrew might know.”

Harry utters a long hiss, one that makes his snake appear from a pocket Severus honestly did not know was there. Then again, he suspects Harry regularly adds pockets to his robes to shelter Artemis. It is certainly something Severus would do, if he had a snake familiar. “And Black and Lupin haven’t been able to find him.”

“I believe that to seek him is one of the reasons they went to the Continent.”

“And you don’t need to be that scrupulously fair about them, honestly, Professor. I hate them, and I only haven’t killed Black because it would be obvious who did it and Lupin might sense it coming.”

Severus blinks. The reference to Lupin’s senses neatly skirts the geas that Albus put in place, and makes Severus more curious about what happened in Harry’s confrontation with Black and Lupin. But he only nods and says, “But you might want to leave them alive so that they can tell you what really happened.”

“Yes.”

Harry continues to stare into the distance for a moment, and Severus to watch him. But then Harry shakes his head and snaps himself free from his stillness, and fixes Severus with an eager smile. “What are we going to do with the potions today, sir?”

And that does appear to be the end of it. But as Severus guides Harry through the initial steps of lighting the fires for this particularly tricky brew, he thinks that it is only the end for the moment.

It will be pleasant for him, watching Black and Lupin underestimate Harry.

*

“I didn’t mean I would kidnap him, Remus. I only meant that I really want the chance to be in Harry’s life the way I should have been!”

“I know, Sirius. I know.”

Remus sighs a little as he watches Sirius drink Firewhisky and whinge about Harry. He can see his friend’s intentions all too clearly, and he can also see the wariness that Sirius’s words would have inspired in Harry, and even Zabini.

And even if Remus might personally wish they would give Sirius a little more grace…

He is starting to suspect that nothing will ever reconcile Harry to them, and that they might need to give up trying.