Chapter Thirty-Seven of 'Feather and Glass'- Protocols

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Thirty-Seven—Protocols

“Sir? Would it help if I pictured my Occlumency defense as a wall of plants?”

Severus pauses and blinks at Neville. The boy looks back, his mouth trembling a little. The scar on his forehead isn’t a brighter red than usual, but it seems to glare at Severus through Neville’s fringe.

“Perhaps,” Severus says slowly. “But you know that plants can be easily cut and pierced, and picturing them that way might actually weaken your Occlumency.”

“The ones I’m going to think of can’t be cut or pierced that easily.”

Severus is just as glad to take a short break from the Occlumency teaching that involves him pushing harder, and harder, and harder, against the lack of Neville’s talent in defending his mind. He nods. “Tell me about what you’re planning.”

Neville takes a step back and spends a long moment drinking from the conjured goblet of cool water on the table next to him. Then he looks at Severus. He already seems calmer, and Severus makes a mental note that discussion of Herbology helps. “Have you ever heard of the sundew, Professor?”

Of course I have, I’m a Potions brewer. But sarcasm only discourages Neville, so Severus nods.

“That’s what I want to picture in my mind. A whole barrier of plants that will keep a Legilimens out because any attack will stick to them.”

Severus raises his brows. It’s an innovative technique, when most people rely on ice or water or glass or something else that flows or has reflective properties. Some use mazes, as well, but that’s the kind of thing that Severus thinks can only work well when one has a level of native skill Mr. Longbottom lacks.

“It’s—it’s probably a stupid idea—”

Severus sighs and restrains the temptation to do more than that. He remained silent for too long, and now Neville is folding up on himself, his head bowing and his shoulders rounding. Severus has to remind himself, again and again, that the boy is not as self-sufficient or strong as Harry, and will read rejection in a pause. “It is an interesting idea,” he corrects, as gently as he can. “I do think that you will have to practice longer than some people who use ice or water or the more common tools, but also that you are more likely to succeed in the end.”

“Do I have the time? I mean, before Vol—sorry, You-Know-Who starts trying to read my mind?”

“I think so. He is not yet in a state where he could do so.” Severus has to believe that. If the Dark Lord has managed to return to a body and managed to resist the temptation to darken the Death Eaters’ Marks or call any of them to gloat, he has become so dangerous that Neville will not be able to defeat him.

“All right, sir. So can I think about sundews?”

“You can. Tell me when you feel ready to begin your Occlumency training again.”

Neville nods and closes his eyes. Severus watches him and wonders.

Have we all done him such a disservice? Can he be the hero the world believes him if we only allow him to do it in his own way?

*

Neville drags himself up to the common room and flops into a chair when he gets there, closing his eyes. His head aches, a little, but less than it has on the other days that he’s practiced Occlumency.

Using the wall of sundews, and maybe other plants if he needs them, will work better for him than just practicing traditional Occlumency. Neville already has an idea about tangling vines and how they can tie up someone who’s trying to hack their way into his mind.

“Hey, Nev.”

Neville opens his eyes curiously Of course he recognizes Ron’s voice, but Ron has been slow to approach him since the day they argued over Professor Snape telling him to keep the secret of his Occlumency lessons.

Ron is rubbing the back of his neck, and looks faintly embarrassed. “Do you think we can—do you think we can talk?” he blurts, and then stares at the floor.

“Sure, if you want to. But I still can’t tell you everything you want to know.”

Ron’s mouth tightens for a second. But he doesn’t storm off the way Neville half-expects. Instead, he perches awkwardly on the couch in front of him and tucks his hands in between his knees, then clears his throat several times.

“I’m sorry,” Ron says at last. “I’m not really sure why I said that.”

“Hermione said something about you being jealous because of my fame and you being a younger brother, and I get that, but I can’t talk about all my secrets just because you want me to.”

Ron stares at him for a second, then back at the floor. “I know,” he whispers. “But do you really think that learning from Snape is the best thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Fred and George were messing around last year, and—well, they didn’t tell me this then because, I don’t know, they thought I wasn’t old enough to know or something.” Ron’s expression says very well what he thinks of that, and Neville holds his breath for a second, thinking Ron will go off into another rant about how his brothers treat him. But instead, Ron just sighs and continues, “They found old records that Professor Dumbledore keeps, and—and Snape was a Death Eater.”

Neville stares at him. “What?”

“Yeah. He was. Dumbledore kept him out of prison.”

Neville hesitates for a long moment. But he decides, in the end, that he doesn’t want to lie to Ron, who’s been his best friend for so long, even if it means that they don’t end up being best friends any longer. He blurts, “I know.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Gran—well, she’d been hinting around for a while, but she told me this last summer. That’s because Snape was coming over to my house every day to teach me Occlumency. She thought I had to know.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“What should I have done? Written you an owl telling you that I learned it the moment I learned it? The way you told me the moment you learned it from the twins?”

Ron opens his mouth, then looks down at his feet. “Okay. I—that’s fair. That’s fair. But—I really want to know what you know, Nev. I want to share your secrets. Your adventures.”

The words crystallize something for Neville that he didn’t know was going to crystallize. He takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “I—Ron, I’m not having adventures. Things like training to keep Voldemort away from me and fight him are deadly dangerous. They’re not just the fun kind of thing that will make people look at you in admiration the way they might if you were on the Quidditch team.”

It takes a moment, but Ron turns a slow, deep red. He still closes his eyes and mutters something that might be counting under his breath, though, instead of exploding the way he usually would.

Did Hermione talk to him? Or maybe the twins did. Neville doesn’t know Fred and George all that well, but it’s true that they have unexpected moments of seriousness in between their jokes.

“I want to help,” Ron says at last.

“I don’t really see how you can.”

Ron bites his lip savagely enough that Neville thinks it might really bleed for a second. Then Ron says, “But if we play chess together, then maybe I can—teach you strategy? The kind of thing that will help you when you fight You-Know-Who in the future?”

Neville holds back a sigh. More and more, from the kinds of things Professor Snape has been telling him and Professor Dumbledore has been hinting at, he thinks this war is going to come down to him facing Voldemort one-on-one, in his mind or a duel. He won’t be leading an army.

But Ron looks pretty desperate to be included, and Neville does miss his best friend. So he smiles and says, “We could try that.”

Ron beams and says he’ll go get his chess set. Neville leans back in his chair and shakes his head.

He doesn’t know how long this reconciliation will last. But he thinks he’ll enjoy what he has while he has it.

*

“Protego!”

The shield Lupin has been showing them, which he says is good to defend against a variety of hexes and jinxes, wavers and vanishes. Harry lowers his wand with a sigh. He does sometimes get defensive spells more quickly than normal charms or Transfiguration, given that he can see the value of it for survival more. But he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised that he’ll fail the first time at a powerful wanded spell.

“Harry, stay after class, please.”

“Why, sir?” Harry asks, looking up at Lupin as he steps around another clump of students practicing the Shield Charm and gives Harry that fake gentle look.

“We need to discuss your Shield Charm.”

“As long as it’s not my godfather, sir.”

Lupin’s smile falters for a moment, and he looks like he’s going to sigh, but then he inclines his head and turns away. Harry thinks he still might try, but at least he can’t claim to be surprised by Harry’s reaction if he does.

Harry turns back to his wand and frowns at it. Of course he could get better at spells like this if he didn’t have so much of his magic tied up in Artemis, but he wouldn’t give her up for the world.

“We can practice later.”

Harry just strokes the outside of his robe pocket without responding. He doesn’t want to speak Parseltongue anywhere in Lupin’s hearing.

And unfortunately, that range is much wider than it is for normal humans.

Harry sighs and lifts his wand again.

*

“Why do you have so much trouble with the Shield Charm, Harry?”

“I’m a weak wizard, sir.”

Remus pauses with his wand still poised above the teacup. Then he goes ahead and moves it in such a way as to perfectly heat the tea inside. But he’s a little shaken.

Neither Lily nor James was weak. What happened to Harry? Did someone cast a curse on him? Could Zabini have been jealous of Harry’s strong magic when he met him, and persuaded his mother to bind it?

Remus shakes his head. He can’t know. He tucks his wand away as the tea within comes to a perfect boil, and hands the cup to Harry. Harry takes the cup and holds it with an expression of stubborn pleasantness. He doesn’t drink.

“You can call me Remus when I’m alone, if you want.”

“I don’t want.”

Remus swallows back the hurt and sits down in the chair across from Harry. Harry just watches him, and Remus manages to ask, “Do you know why you’re weak, Harry? It wasn’t your parents. They both had strong magic.”

“I have a few theories, sir.”

Harry puts the teacup on the table beside his chair and continues watching Remus. Remus breathes in and out, then picks up his own cup and sips from it. Harry just waits, and Remus finally asks, “What theories are those?”

“Oh, well, living with Muggles can cause it when the child wants to suppress their magic to fit in with their Muggle family. That’s not the cause in my case, I think, but it can happen. There’s also the theory that malnutrition can hinder the development of a wizard’s powers. That might be more likely with me, given the way that the Dursleys denied me food.”

Remus’s hands tighten on his cup, and he swallows air alone. “Harry, talking that way about the Dursleys around the Zabinis…it could make Mrs. Zabini and her son hate them more.”

“At least you’re not saying that I lied about the way they treated me, this time. I suppose that’s progress.”

Remus closes his eyes and turns his head away. Harry just sits there. Remus finally stirs and whispers, “Will you—will you accept tutoring to make sure that you are keeping up with your peers when it comes to casting spells like the Shield Charm?”

“Not from you, sir.”

Remus blinks, and blinks a little bit more. “I am the Defense professor.”

“And you want to lecture me and talk to me about things that have nothing to do with my class performance. You’re trying to detach me from my best friend, and you abandoned me for more than a decade. I don’t trust you.”

Remus feels as though someone has reached into his abdomen and torn his guts out. This hurts worse than Greyback’s bite did. He closes his eyes and whispers, “I see.”

“Is there anything else, sir? Only I’m about to be late for a study group with my friends.”

Remus opens his eyes and stares at Harry, feeling at a loss for words. Harry just looks back, and that expression of pleasant stubbornness is still on his face. “You may go,” Remus says at last.

“Thank you for the tea, sir,” Harry says, with a faint smile, and stands up and walks out the door.

Remus sits staring at the teacup and wonders how in the world they could have failed James’s son so badly, and how they’ll reach him now.

*

“It’s pretty brilliant that you can conjure a knife like that.”

“Yes.” Blaise smiles at Harry as he tucks away the knife that he’s bonded with. He’s getting better and better at calling it to his hand, after Bathsheda’s lessons. “What about your lessons with Steel? Are you getting better at forming creatures? Or faster?”

“Right now, they’re having me study theory, as much as magical theory can help with this sort of thing. Steel doesn’t know anyone else who had the gift except one vampire who could also make creatures out of blood. And they had to kill her.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. But there’s one thing I can do that I couldn’t do before. I just don’t always do it when Steel’s around.”

“Show me?”

Harry smiles at Blaise and holds out his hand in front of him. For a moment, it seems to Blaise that pure air is dancing above Harry’s palm, although he can only see that because of the dust motes whirling back and forth there. Then Harry breathes out, and the dust motes whirl together and form a perfect replica of Blaise’s dagger.

“Wow,” Blaise breathes.

“It’s neat, isn’t it?”

“You couldn’t do that before, could you? Only living things?”

“Well, I had to concentrate more to hold it. My magic seems to prefer living things. That’s the language Steel uses.” Harry lets the dust form of the dagger collapse, and sits back down next to their brazier, arranging Artemis around his shoulders. “But now I can do non-living things if I want.”

“Good,” Blaise says softly. “Do you think—” He breaks off.

“You can tell me anything, Blaise.”

And Blaise knows he can. The problem is, he doesn’t know if Harry will like what he’s about to say. And Blaise would rather lapse into silence for days on end than have an argument with his best friend.

Harry waits a bit, Artemis hissing to him. Harry strokes her back, still focused on Blaise, and then repeats, “Anything.”

Blaise straightens his back. “You know one reason my mother wants me to have the training that I’m getting with Bathsheda is that I’ll have to feed the Suns one day in her place.”

“Yes.” No hesitation there, no surprise, no anger. Blaise partially relaxes.

“I was thinking that if we learned enough magic that would kill as well as defend ourselves, you could join me in that. And in finding and eliminating—problems for other people. I don’t know that you’ve ever considered being an assassin, but I wanted to propose it to you.”

Harry blinks a little. Then he smiles, bright as a jagged slice of glass. “I’m flattered, Blaise. And I haven’t made up my mind what I might want to do for a career. Researcher and Potions brewer and snake-keeper all crossed my mind.”

“Potions brewer?”

“Well, I thought it was one of the very few kinds of magic that I could do without a wand. And I am getting much better at it than I was under Professor Snape’s tutelage. But I hadn’t thought about it as something that I loved so much I couldn’t put it aside for something else. Just a career that would be practical.”

“You know that I would make sure you would never suffer from your lack of wanded magic.”

“I know.” Harry’s gaze is soft and utterly trusting, and Blaise would kill someone right now to prove himself worthy of it. “But now that you mention it, it would be pretty easy to at least help you break into people’s houses and the like with my animals.”

“That’s another possibility.”

“What is?”

“Theft. Or blackmail. You could break into someone’s house to steal information as easily as you could money.”

Harry laughs softly. “You see? All sorts of possibilities. I won’t say that I want to be an assassin for certain right now, but I’ll think about it.” He pauses to listen to something Artemis is saying, and then snorts.

“What?”

“Artemis thinks I ought to make a career of breaking into the houses of people who have rare rodents on hand, to steal some for her. She wants to taste some of the less common ones.”

Harry turns to answer Artemis, and Blaise sits back with a last, long flood of happiness moving through his bones. Yes, Harry will be perfectly fine with helping Blaise, or with living with him if he doesn’t decide to be an assassin on his own.

Harry’s loyalty is to me more than to any morals or principles that other people might call “good.” I shouldn’t have doubted it.

*

“Harry. Can we talk?”

Harry turns around with a faint grimace that he doesn’t bother hiding. Black is standing behind him, and once again, he’s found Harry in the corridor that leads to the classroom where Harry spends time with Blaise. Or from that classroom, in this case. Harry was on his way back to Ravenclaw Tower.

He presses his hand against Artemis’s pocket to tell her to stay down and says, “I thought we said everything we had to say last time.”

In truth, he does want to lure Black closer to exact his revenge at some point. But he thought it would take longer for Black to recover from the last conversation.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. He’s a dog. They’re eternal optimists.

“No. Please. Remus—told me about the talk he had with you. How you think that it might be malnutrition that weakened your magic.”

“Going to tell me again how horrible it is to hate my relatives?”

“No.” Black shakes his head fast enough that his hair flies around and whips his cheeks. “I just—I want to know more about that.”

“I don’t see why you need to. You’re not my guardian, and you would just use anything I admitted against me.”

Harry lets his voice waver, though, his eyes turn away as if he’s considering it and just doesn’t know if Black would be sympathetic enough. From the corner of his eye, he sees Black take a long, lurching step forwards.

“Please. I do want to know. I won’t scold you about it if you—don’t say things like all Muggles needing to die.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “I never said that.”

“I thought—” But Black cuts himself off before Harry can say anything. He is at least trying to control his temptation to say that Harry hates all Muggles, then, Harry thinks. Well. It seems Black is a little smarter, or a little more determined to be part of his life, than Harry thought. “Well. It doesn’t matter. Can you tell me?”

Harry watches Black and decides that he’ll tell him a little. Not much, not the kind of thing that would become a weapon Black could wield against Harry if he decides to tell someone else. But a little.

“They didn’t feed me much,” he says. “They made me do most of the cooking, but I would get crumbs or a stale piece of toast while my cousin and my uncle ate huge plates of sausages and eggs and bread.”

“Why?”

“They hated magic. My aunt and uncle knew about it, even though they never told me. They called me a freak.”

“And they thought that freaks deserved to starve.”

Black’s voice is dull. Harry has to hide a smile. It’s not the same as feeding Black his own despair, but it does seem as if Black is capable of feeling some of it. “Yeah.”

“No one ever came and talked to you about magic?”

“Well, Hagrid did, when he brought me my letter.”

“But not before that?”

“Who would have? I didn’t even know that my parents had been magical. And no one came and checked up on me.”

Black swallows so hard that Harry can hear the click in his throat. “We thought we were keeping you safe,” he whispers. “We were so sure that we were keeping you safe.”

Harry shrugs. “Well, you weren’t.”

“Are you ever going to forgive me?”

“I mean, at the moment you haven’t done much to make it up to me. You’ve accused the woman who took me in and has been the best foster mother I could ask for of corrupting me. You hate my best friend. You act as though I’m a terrible person because I’m not a Gryffindor who wants to chant the praises of Muggles all day long.”

Black shuts his eyes, then opens them again. “I suppose I deserve that.”

That, and more. But Harry holds his peace and just nods.

“I—would you ever be able to make a place for me in your life, Harry? Do you think you could?”

“I still haven’t heard what you intend to do to make it up to me.”

Black opens his mouth, and Harry watches him. He can practically see Black sorting through impulses and words and all sorts of things he could say. Probably including things like Why do you have to make it so transactional? and Why do you have to stay in Italy?

Black finally nods and says, “All right. I’ll—what you would you like me to do first?”

Oh, no. I’m not making it so easy for you.

“You’ll need to come up with something,” Harry says lightly. “You can ask me if I’ll approve of it, but I do insist that at least the ideas be your own.”

“I don’t know how!”

“Probably because the idea of atonement seems to be foreign to you.” Harry shrugs. “Well, if you can’t, you can’t. We can just go ahead and maintain no relationship if you really think that you’re so right you don’t have anything to make up for.”

“It’s not that I think I’m right! I don’t know how!”

“Figure it out,” Harry says, and gives him another faint smile, and turns his back. His spine prickles all the way up the corridor, wondering if Black is going to cast a hex at him.

But Black probably wouldn’t do that, because he would want to curse Harry to his face. Harry sighs when he’s a few corners away and can lean against the wall, closing his eyes. He takes Artemis out of his pocket then. It’s getting annoying as hell having to refrain from talking to her because of Lupin’s werewolf senses and Black’s hearing, which is probably sharper than normal since he’s an Animagus.

“I do not like him. I do not like him at all.”

“Neither do I. But there’s the chance that we’ll get our revenge on him, and it’ll even be subtle enough for Aradia.”

“I do not understand why it must be more subtle than venom.”

Harry laughs a little. “I keep telling you, you’re not venomous.”

“You could make me so.”
‘
Harry touches his cheek to her scales. “No need. You’re perfect the way you are.”

Artemis dances in his hand as they go up to the Tower, and Harry laughs as she insults Black in a lot of ways based on scent. He’s not even sure that he’s translating some of the Parseltongue words accurately in his mind, but he also thinks it doesn’t matter.

She knows exactly what I want to hear.

*

Sirius stands staring after Harry for long moments when he’s gone, and then he puts his head down and plods back towards the quarters that he shares with Remus.

He can’t strangle his own hope, but he also thinks that it’s so fragile he can barely stand to look at it.

A chance. That’s all he’s been given, he knows. A chance. And he could still mess it up in any number of ways.

But he’ll work on it. He’ll think of something to start making up what he did to Harry, and maybe eventually he can act in ways that are more comfortable for him, like spoiling Harry with gifts.

And Harry didn’t say that Sirius can’t get ideas from other people.

Sirius grins and picks up the pace. Remus will have some ideas. He must. He’s always been more concerned about the idea of atonement than Sirius has.

But if I have to do that to get along with Harry, I will. Anything is worth it, to have him back.