lomonaaeren

Ron watched Harry carefully over the next few days, evaluating the way that he interacted with Nott and spoke to other Slytherins and shook his head and smiled and frowned. Sometimes Harry saw him watching and looked back with a steady gaze that Ron didn’t remember in his friend. Harry ducked his head a lot and walked fast when people were staring at him.

Although, come to think of it, it didn’t seem as though Harry was doing that lately, even given the people who sneered at him over the Prophet’s lies. He just kept walking, his head up and Nott at his side.

It was obvious, now that Ron was looking for it, how much Nott and Harry stuck together. They sat beside each other at meals and in classes, and were always whispering together. Maybe they snogged in deserted corridors, too, but that wasn’t the kind of thing Ron thought he needed to know about. The important part was that they were close together, and Malfoy didn’t spend a lot of time around them.

Maybe Malfoy was the one who had convinced Harry to join the Quidditch team, but Ron was less suspicious even of that as he watched the way that Harry continued to ignore the git.

No, Nott was the one who was there, and it was strange to Ron that he had never even noticed Nott before. He was quiet in classes, or had been before this year, and he hadn’t even laughed at most of Malfoy’s jokes most of the time. He just had his nose buried in books, or he was looking on with a resigned air that had made Ron wonder what his problem was.

Now he thought that Nott had just been waiting for someone to come along he could corrupt easily enough.

According to Hermione, Harry might not really be corrupted. But it wasn’t like Nott would know that, either way.

And Nott had noticed Ron’s staring, even if Harry was still pretending not to. Nott waited for Ron outside the Potions classroom one day, spinning his wand in his fingers. Harry was nowhere around.

“Why are you watching my boyfriend so intently, Weasley? Want him for yourself?”

Ron spluttered, his ears turning hot. He was glad that Hermione had lingered to ask Snape a question, in hopes of finding out a little more about the way Harry interacted inside the Slytherin common room, and that Harry had gone ahead. “What? Of course not!”

“But you’re staring. All the time.”

“Because he’s my best mate! Because I want him back!”

Nott half-smiled, in a way that made Ron far warier of him than he’d been even a moment ago. “I think you should give up on waiting for the little naïve Gryffindor you knew to come back. He’s preparing for something far more powerful and life-defining than anything that he went through when you knew him.”

Absurdly, Ron’s first thought was that they’d found another basilisk for Harry to fight. And then he thought about the way that Nott’s hand was lingering above his own left arm, and his blood ran cold.

“No,” he blurted.

“What? Do you think he can’t have life-defining experiences apart from you?”

“I mean that he’s not going to become a Death Eater!”

“Because there are no other options when he’s a Slytherin now, and has been for months?” Nott shook his head, clucking his tongue hard enough that it sounded like raindrops on steel. “You really don’t know him at all, Weasley. Not the kind of person that he turned into after seeing the Dark Lord resurrected last year, and then being left alone all summer.”

“We’ve told him over and over again that that isn’t our fault!”

“Theo?”

Harry was peering around the corner. His eyes narrowed a little when he saw Ron. “Is everything all right?” he asked slowly.

“No!” Ron jerked towards him. Maybe this wouldn’t work any better than their other pleas to Harry had, but they had to at least try. “Mate, come on! Would you really become a Death Eater?’

“Would you care, after the way that you left me alone? I could have run off and joined Voldemort during the summer and neither you or Dumbledore would have had any idea. He had such good watchers on the house that Dementors could sneak up and almost eat me. They wouldn’t have noticed I was gone until they saw me again wearing a white mask.”

“Mate, no,” Ron whispered. He had believed that Harry was angry at them, that he might have some plan, and that he might be working towards a way to have revenge on them like Hermione believed, but he’d never—he’d never really thought that Harry would just become a servant of the man who’d killed his parents. “Anything but that!”

“Anything?”

“Weasley has no idea what he’s talking about,” Nott said, and draped his arm around Harry’s shoulder in a familiar gesture that made Ron ache inside. It was all the worse when Harry lowered his head to rest against Nott’s collarbone. “Come on. Let’s go and have lunch with people who make better conversation than this. By which I mean even Crabbe.”

Harry laughed, that cold sound that had become his usual form of laughter since he’d joined Slytherin, and walked away with Nott’s arm still around his shoulders. Nott was the one who glanced back once, his face cruel with enjoyment, and mouthed, I hope you understand what you lost.

Ron was still standing there and staring after them when Hermione came out of the Potions classroom. “It’s no good, I think Snape knew what I was asking and—Ron?”

“Harry’s gone,” Ron whispered.

“No, I told you, I think he has some plan that’s meant to allow him to get allies and information, but he won’t be going over to the completely—”

“He just talked about becoming a Death Eater.”

Hermione fell silent when Ron turned towards her, maybe seeing in his face how deeply he believed it. She swallowed. “He—he doesn’t really mean it, Ron. He was only saying it because Nott was there, right?”

“I wish we could be sure,” Ron whispered. “I really wish we could be sure, Hermione.”

But in his heart, he was already sure of what had happened. Harry might have started out playing a part, but he had gone too deeply into it.

Harry was gone.

*

Hermione had decided that she absolutely had to find a way into the Slytherin common room, so she could watch the way that Harry interacted with other people there. And it didn’t matter how much Nott would be suspicious, or what Snape would say if he caught her. She had to be there.

She didn’t have a choice, not when she might be losing one of her best friends to the Death Eaters.

She prepared carefully. This wasn’t second year when she had brewed Polyjuice in happy confidence that nothing too bad could possibly happen. She couldn’t afford a mistake that would require her to spend a month in the hospital wing this time.

But neither could she afford to wait. Wait too long, and Harry would be vanished fully into the world where he was a Death Eater and a supporter of the man who had killed his parents.

(Hermione couldn’t fathom what he was thinking. But she was afraid that he wasn’t really thinking at all, and just following the tide of anger and hurt that was pulling him along. That, and the “secrets” that the Slytherins had probably promised to reveal to him).

When she was ready, she waited under a Disillusionment Charm near the entrance of the common room. Ron and Harry’s description from second year had been good enough for her to find it. She did her best to calm her mind, her breathing, her magic. For all she knew, someone would be able to sense her that way.

The door slid open, and Nott and Harry stepped out. Nott was giving Harry a tense look. Harry simply walked along in the midst of some silent world of his own. Hermione had seen him look much the same when they were separating so that Harry could walk through the fire and go after Professor Quirrell.

“You must be sure,” Nott said, in a voice so low that Hermione wouldn’t have heard them if she were further away. “Once you make this decision, you can’t take it back.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Harry turned around. Hermione regretted that she couldn’t see his face well from her position, but whatever expression he wore was enough to make Nott shut up. Nott even lifted his hands and shook his head a little.

“I just want to be sure that you know what you’re doing.”

“I do.”

They didn’t speak after that, just kept walking, and Hermione followed. She’d cast Silencing Charms on her boots, too, mindful of the weakness of Harry’s Invisibility Cloak. You could hear someone under it walking if you were close enough.

(Maybe she should be glad that they hadn’t brought the Cloak along. Although Hermione didn’t want to believe Harry would trust the Slytherins with the secret of its existence, she was rapidly losing faith in lots of things about Harry).

Harry and Nott turned a few corners, and once went through a secret passage that opened with a tap of Nott’s wand to a particular stone. Hermione wouldn’t have been able to follow them at all if she were further back. She hurried, and ducked into the passage after them, keeping all her swearing internal.

They were inside a dark, cramped passage with cobwebs clinging to the high ceiling and some of the lower walls. Hermione would bet that not many people had walked this path at all before someone had recently come through and cleaned it up.

Nott and Harry kept walking. Hermione renewed her Silencing Charm—wordlessly, something she’d only recently begun to be able to do—and followed, creeping bent almost in half at points. The walls and ceiling of the passage both twisted and lowered and rose again on a regular basis. Hermione had no idea where they were going, and her only consolation was that no side tunnels branched off this one. It should be simple enough to find her way back.

When the halt came, it was abrupt. Hermione nearly banged into Harry’s back. She clenched her hands and bit her lip to keep from screaming as she balanced on her toes, an inch from brushing Harry’s robes.

She managed not to.

Harry gave no sign that he even noticed.

Hermione settled back with a silent exhalation, and waited.

“This is the place of your testing,” Nott said, in cadences that made Hermione think of a priest chanting sacred phrases. “You will face your true self here, and you will see whether your decision is well-made, or not.”

“I accept the place of my testing.”

With tiny shuffles that she hoped wouldn’t move the dust too much or make herself heard, Hermione worked her way around to the side. She almost choked. Harry’s eyes were lit with a radiant, cold fire she had never seen.

What is he doing?

Nott stepped back and swept a long bow to Harry, which was about the oddest thing that Hermione had ever seen him do. Harry just nodded to Nott as if he had anticipated that and accepted it, whatever it was, and then moved past Nott and through the door in front of him.

Hermione strained her neck to see through the door. She could make out flickering candles in the second before the door slammed shut and made her jump.

“Who’s that?”

Nott must have heard her. He’d spun around, his hand on his wand, his eyes luckily darting straight past her. He probably assumed that most of the people who’d followed them here wouldn’t know the Disillusionment Charm.

Either that, or my charm is just that good.

Hermione stood still, of course, and watched Nott’s eyes pass across her translucent form several times before he relaxed with a long, gusty sigh and a shake of his head. “Imagining things,” he said softly to himself before he turned and faced the door Harry had gone through. He fell into a position that Hermione supposed was meant to be that of someone holding a vigil, his hands tucked together behind his back.

Hermione studied the door itself, meanwhile. There were carvings on it that she thought represented bright torches like the candles that had been lit inside the room, but the torches looked as if they were being held in the clawed hands of tall creatures. Gargoyles? They looked a little like the one outside Professor Dumbledore’s office, anyway.

Nott apparently wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was Harry. Hermione leaned against the wall, quietly, and then slid down just as quietly, centimeter by centimeter, while Nott’s attention was elsewhere. She finally sat on the floor with her legs folded neatly beneath her.

And waited.

And waited.

Hermione was almost asleep when the door flew open abruptly and crashed against the wall beside it. She clapped a hand across her mouth to keep in any squeal that might have escaped as she stared at the boy who stood in the doorway.

He was Harry, and yet—

There was something different about him. Something wrong.

For a long moment, Hermione wondered if Voldemort had managed to possess him, the way that she knew Professor Dumbledore had worried about. And then Harry turned his head, and Hermione had to really bite her tongue to hold in an exclamation.

Harry’s scar was gone.

Hermione’s breath blew out of her. She had known him with the scar for so long that his face looked wrong without it.

Harry’s eyes locked on her for a moment, and Hermione was sure that he knew she was there. But he didn’t reveal her to Nott. He turned around and said quietly, “It worked.”

“It worked?” Nott whispered. His eyes were locked on Harry’s forehead, too. Hermione had the feeling that he had noticed right away, and yet he hadn’t expected this result. “Why did you—why did you choose this way?”

“Because it was the right one.”

It’s maddening not knowing what they’re talking about.

“Without the properties the scar conveyed, you cannot be sure of defeating him,” Nott breathed. “I thought your talk about allying yourself with the Dark Lord was only talk, but it seems that—” He broke off and stared again.

“I had something else in mind.”

What?

But Harry didn’t answer Hermione’s silent question any more than it seemed he had really answered Nott’s. Instead, he stepped forwards and looked Nott in the eye from just a short distance away, and despite Nott being taller, Hermione had the feeling that Harry was the one in control here.

“I appreciate all the assistance that you gave me,” Harry said, voice distant and formal. “But it doesn’t mean that I want to continue all the permutations that we talked about now that I have what I most want.”

“You think it was assistance? And permutations?”

“What else would you call it?”

Nott leaned forwards until his forehead rested against Harry’s smooth ones. His eyes were blazing in a way that made Hermione want to avert her own, but she had to watch in case she missed some nuance that would let her figure out Harry’s plan.

“I would call it coming as close as I can to falling in love,” Nott whispered.

Harry started. He kept watching Nott, but his hand flexed and shut at his side as if he wanted his wand.

“You—told me that you could give me little,” Harry said, swallowing. “And that all of it would be transactional. And that I would most likely have to agree to become a Death Eater for you to give me anything at all.”

And you trusted him? Hermione thought, but she clamped her hand into place over her mouth and said nothing.

“Things have changed.”

“Tell me what.”

“That’s the kind of conversation we need to have in private.”

And to Hermione’s immense frustration, they turned and walked away, further into the tunnel. Hermione hesitated, then followed them, but she came around a corner too late, and saw a stone door rumbling shut behind them.

She stayed for a bit, pondering. Should she inform someone else that Nott had taken Harry into an isolated part of the dungeons and might be planning to hurt him?

But then she pictured the condescending look she would get from most of the professors. They would just think that Nott had taken Harry there to fuck him, and not pay any attention to her warning at all.

Except for Professor Dumbledore.

Hermione turned to make her long way back down the corridor, mouth set in a grim line. It didn’t matter how much time she used up reaching the Headmaster, or what he thought of her warning. At least Hermione would know that she had given one.

*

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Weasley, Miss Granger.”

Ron was biting his lip savagely as he stepped into Dumbledore’s office. He didn’t know what to think of the scroll that Fred, of all people, had brought them during breakfast, with the invitation to visit the Headmaster. Harry hadn’t been at breakfast, although Nott had, eating his stupid bacon and eggs without a care in the world.

Ron just hoped that they weren’t being invited up here to be told of Harry’s death.

They couldn’t be, he realized after a moment. Because Harry was standing beside Dumbledore’s desk, looking tired and pale, but definitely alive.

“Harry!” Hermione blurted, and then hesitated, maybe because she was remembering the kinds of things he had done in the recent past. “Are you—where did your scar go? Are you okay?”

“So you were the one spying on us in the passage, right?”

Hermione flushed in a way that made Ron put his arm around her shoulders. But she also lifted her head and spoke in the way that made her so Hermione, facing up to someone who disapproved of her existence. “Yes. I saw you when you came out without your scar. And I heard what you said to Nott about thinking the whole thing was transactional and rested on you being a Death Eater. Harry—how could you?”

“The same way you could not write to me.”

Ron stepped forwards. “Mate, you need to stop harping on that. Hate us forever for it if you want, but you need to stop blaming us for it.”

“I mean that I did it on Headmaster Dumbledore’s orders.”

Ron felt as though someone had slapped him in the face. He turned around and stared at the Headmaster. Dumbledore gave Ron a faint smile, although he still looked as tired as he had when Ron and Hermione had come to speak to him earlier that week.

“What?” Ron whispered.

“Yes.”

“You—you agreed to be re-Sorted into Slytherin on his orders?”

“Yeah. He told me some concerning things about my connection with Voldemort, but he also sealed the connection with a mind art called Occlumency the day he told me, so nothing would get back to You-Know-Who. He did ask me to get into Slytherin and learn all I could about what the young Death Eaters, or the Death Eaters’ children, are planning. None of them is Marked yet.”

Ron sat down hard in one of the chairs in front of the desk. “And you couldn’t tell us this?” he asked Dumbledore.

“Forgive me, Mr. Weasley, but there is no way that you or Miss Granger could have acted convincingly if you had known.”

Ron swallowed. It was true that he and Hermione might not have acted like Harry had rejected them if they had known, because—because their best friend wouldn’t have rejected them. But his heart and soul felt like some giant, painful bruise.

“Are you coming back to Gryffindor now?” he whispered.

“No.” Harry gave Ron the kind of narrow smile that Ron had learned to hate seeing on Nott’s face. “I never thought that I would manage to find a way among the Slytherins to free Sirius or destroy my connection to Voldemort entirely, but I did. That means that there’s even more waiting there for me to discover. So I’ll continue acting like a good little Slytherin, and just make sure that I get to meet up with the two of you now and then. Probably when Professor Dumbledore calls us to his office to make it look like he’s trying to resolve our ‘spat.’”

“And you’ll stop pretending to be Nott’s boyfriend, too?”

Harry was silent.

“Harry! You have to!” Hermione had sat down in the chair beside Ron’s, but now she looked as if she were about to vibrate out of it. “He—he’s going to be a Death Eater! He wants you to be one!”

“And if I could be a spy?”

Ron shook his head. “How can you do that? They know that you don’t have a connection to V-Voldemort now. Voldemort will know it soon, too. Won’t he either decide that you’re an enemy again, or just lose interest in you?”

Harry gave a short, ugly laugh. Ron would have given a lot not to hear it again. “He won’t lose interest in me. Promise.”

“How can you know that?”

“More information that I don’t think the Headmaster would want me to share with you,” Harry said in a sweet voice.

Dumbledore only sighed when Ron turned to him. “It is true that the particular information Harry is talking about is connected to why Voldemort attacked him and his parents, and that I would limit the transference of it as much as possible,” he said. “I did not expect Mr. Nott to share it with him.”

“You didn’t even tell Harry?” Hermione sounded like she hadn’t expected that.

“No. He said I was too young for it.”

Ron uneasily eyed the way that Harry was staring at Dumbledore. He wondered if Harry had only agreed to become the Headmaster’s spy in Slytherin because he thought knowing things was better than being shut away from the information. If maybe he was still just as angry at Dumbledore as he had been at the beginning of the summer.

If he was…

Ron didn’t know what they were going to do.

“I made the decision, and I cannot go back and change my actions,” Dumbledore said, in a tone of voice that made Ron think they wouldn’t really get to question either the decision or the information Harry was talking about. “Now. It is true that Harry will have to remain in Slytherin. I did have a talk with the Hat about Sorting him back into Gryffindor, but the Hat wouldn’t do it.”

“Why not?” Hermione demanded. “Harry—you have to know that what you can learn in Slytherin is going to be really limited now. They won’t like that your scar vanished—”

“I know how Slytherins work better than you do, Hermione.”

Harry didn’t sound upset so much as bored. Ron kept staring at him. There was so much they didn’t know here, so much that was wrong.

But Harry didn’t look as though he was going to collapse or anything. He listened to Hermione talk about the advantages to them all with him being back in Gryffindor, and shrugged. Shrugged.

“The Hat made its decision,” he said. “I can’t change it. Maybe some of the reasons that I asked to be Sorted there in the first place were wrong ones, but now I’m here. I might as well do some good while I can.”

“And break up with Nott,” Hermione insisted.

“That would certainly help with making him not suspect me, of course. The first meeting I have alone with both my Gryffindor friends in months and I break up with him instantly?”

“He’s a Death Eater, Harry!”

“No. He even hinted that he would turn away from Voldemort if he had an option.”

“He’s lying.” Hermione was leaning forwards so far that she looked as if she were going to fall off the chair. Ron put one hand on her arm, watching Harry’s face and the sneer that twisted his mouth, but she kept going. “You have to see how much he was responsible for your corruption—”

“You mean, the role I agreed to play at the Headmaster’s insistence?”

Hermione turned a deep look of betrayal on Dumbledore, which Ron honestly hadn’t ever expected to see. “Sir, how could you insist that he do something like that?”

“I had no choice,” Dumbledore whispered.

Ron’s eyes darted back and forth between Harry and the Headmaster. Belief settled like a heavy rock in his gut.

They’re lying. One or both of them. I think Harry is playing the role at Dumbledore’s insistence now, but he wasn’t at first. He chose to be Sorted into Slytherin all on his own.

What if Dumbledore only agreed to let Harry play spy because he thought that was the way to get him back?

Ron swallowed the cold lump in his throat and tuned out the way that Hermione was ranting there was always a choice, and Dumbledore could have done something that wouldn’t have led to Harry having a Death Eater boyfriend. Harry was leaning a hip against the desk, watching as Hermione ranted on with an amused smile.

He looked almost like the Harry of old, but that Harry wouldn’t have thought this was as funny as this one seemed to. He would have been fond, not—

Or am I fooling myself?

“Will you keep dating Nott if this lasts all the way through Hogwarts?” Ron asked, not caring that he was interrupting Hermione. “Beyond that? I mean, what happens when the war ends and if we defeat Voldemort? What’s Nott going to say?”

“The ending of the war is so far away at this point that I don’t think anyone can predict it. And if Voldemort dies, then I think Theo will come along with me. He’s the practical sort, and dating the Boy-Who-Lived would give him a certain cachet.”

“I can’t believe you’d date someone that—that cold.”

“I appreciate his honesty.”

Ron flinched away from the knife in those words, and ended up turning to Dumbledore. “So we’ll meet him here sometimes, sir, and have a discussion? Are we—are we all going to talk to each other about everything Harry finds out?”

“I do think it for the best,” Dumbledore said, his gaze lingering on Harry, “if we have no more secrets from each other.”

A smile that wasn’t at all reassuring flashed across Harry’s face, and he inclined his head.

*

Hermione listened in silence to Ron’s theory about Professor Dumbledore only going along with Harry’s “plan” because Harry had strongarmed him into it, and said slowly, “I find it hard to believe that anyone would have been able to manipulate Professor Dumbledore.”

“Maybe most people couldn’t. But Harry is—kind of unique. And you know that Dumbledore has bent rules for him in the past.”

Hermione nodded absently, thinking of Harry playing Quidditch as a first-year and getting last-minute points to give the House Cup to Gryffindor in their first year, too. Dumbledore probably wouldn’t have done that if Harry wasn’t the Boy-Who-Lived.

“I still think that he could have suggested the plan to Harry and Harry might have followed it on his own.”

Ron gave a slight snort. “Sure. Dumbledore, who Harry was so irritated by because he told us not to write to Harry, told him that he should go be a spy in Slytherin, and Harry just agreed enthusiastically.”

Hermione bit her lip. Put like that, it did sound a little ridiculous.

“Do you think that he will go back to the boy we knew at any point?” she whispered. “Or is he just changed forever?”

Ron looked around. Hermione raised Privacy Charms, even though no one was coming towards them or sitting near their small, darkened corner of the Gryffindor common room. They were more popular than they’d been now that they were running Dumbledore’s Army, but not a lot of people spent time with them other than that.

“I think that Harry might be playing the odds,” Ron whispered. “Just like Nott. Going to the side that can give him what he wants, like Sirius being pardoned, and then coming back to ours when something happens that makes the Slytherin side less attractive, like managing to get rid of the scar.”

“How did he do that?”

“You were in the dungeons when he did it, Hermione.”

She had to shake her head. She couldn’t imagine what had happened, and not just because she hadn’t got much of a glimpse into the room Harry had entered before the door slammed shut. She didn’t know anything that would be able to remove a curse scar so old, or a connection to a murderous Dark Lord. “So you think we can’t depend on him.”

“I think it would be unwise.”

Hermione closed her eyes, longing for the simple world of last year, before they had lost Harry to the Slytherins, before Harry, for some reason, had just decided that he should date someone who was openly opportunistic about using him.

But they couldn’t go back. So they had to go forwards.

Hermione nodded and opened her eyes. “We’ll keep a guard on our tongues and be careful of what we say about him. And I think we should stop approaching him outside the times that we visit him in Dumbledore’s office. It’ll encourage the idea that Dumbledore is the only person forcing us together.”

“Yes.” Ron reached out and took her hand, entwining his fingers with hers. Hermione smiled at him. “At least we have each other.”

“Yes. At least we do.”

Hermione turned to look into the fire. The vividness of the flames reminded her of Harry’s eyes after he’d walked out of that room in the dungeons, even though the color didn’t. She tried to imagine asking Harry about what had happened in there. What would he say?

The Harry in her mind smiled at her and said simply, Something you cannot imagine.

Hermione mentally shuddered back from that idea, and returned to creating the lesson plans for the D.A. This was something she could do, simple and straightforward resistance to Umbridge’s tyranny.

Why can’t Harry do that?

The picture of Harry in her head laughed.

Hermione shoved away the image again, and decided that only time would see if their friend returned to them. Then she kept speaking to one of the few people she could trust, and moved her thoughts away from the person who would be, from now on, not one of her best friends, but simply a vital ally in the war.

The End.