Chapter Twenty-Four of 'For the Game'

[lomonaaeren]

“Harry, can we talk to you?”

Harry sighed. Blaise and Theo had stalked him to the library, and apparently intended to hover there until he said yes. He turned around to face them. “Can you make it quick? I have to study for Transfiguration.” McGonagall was being harder on him now, as if she thought keeping him busy with homework meant he wouldn’t have time to go after any more basilisks.

Theo swallowed. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“You arse, it’s obvious for what,” Theo snapped. “I called you weird, and I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m sorry. But I never meant for you to go after a basilisk by yourself! If you’d died, I would have—” He cut himself off.

“You would have what? Had a moment of sadness before you started worrying if you had to admit to Snape that you’d played a part in my death?”

“Harry,” Blaise whispered. His eyes were enormous. “You think—if you’d died, would you have—”

“I’d have done my best to come back and haunt you as a ghost until I drove you mad.”

Blaise and Theo both stared at him. Harry looked back. He sort of wanted to turn around and start working on his Transfiguration essay again, but he also wanted to talk to them. Have this out.

Find out if they were ever going to be his friends again.

“I knew you were scary, but I didn’t think you would turn it on us. Theo didn’t know that you would react that badly.”

Harry felt a moment of impatience, the desire to turn back to his book again. There were just so many things they didn’t know, didn’t understand, and wouldn’t understand even if he explained them.

But he would have to try. Otherwise, he did think that he would lose his friends forever, and he—didn’t want to. Even though he also thought it would probably happen. At least it wouldn’t happen because he hadn’t tried.

“The Muggles called me a freak all the time. My aunt and uncle knew about magic even though they never told me until they had to, until Hagrid showed up. They told their neighbors that I was a criminal and blamed me for everything that went wrong, and the neighbors believed them and shunned me. I thought it was going to be different at Hogwarts, but—”

His voice cracked. Horrified, Harry cast a Privacy Charm around himself quickly and then rushed on. He had to finish this, but he wasn’t going to give them the chance to laugh at him. He was going to run the minute he was finished.

“I’m different, weird, freakish. Because of my fame and my Parseltongue and my blood status. All I ever wanted was people who would be friends with me and wouldn’t laugh at me, and—I thought I found them. I thought you were two of them. But now I know you aren’t, and—just leave me alone from now on, all right?”

Harry spun back to the table and snatched up his book. Then he tried to grab his scroll and his inkwell, but the ink spilled, and a black tide flowed down onto his chair and the floor, and Madam Pince was going to kill him—

“Scourgify.”

Blaise’s gentle spell cleaned up the ink, and Harry turned back, his shoulders hunched, fearing the blow that would follow them. But Blaise just shook his head and put his wand away, and Theo raised his hands in front of him as though trying to calm a frightened animal.

“I promise, we aren’t going to hurt you,” Theo whispered. “Please, can we go somewhere and talk about this?”

Harry closed his eyes. He still vibrated with the need to run. All he could imagine doing was leaving them behind.

Then his mind served up what would happen next. Theo and Blaise wouldn’t chase him the way Dudley and his friends had. They would stay behind, and they would probably never approach Harry again. Or at least they would be more cautious about doing so.

That’s what I want.

But it wasn’t what Harry wanted, not in his heart of hearts. He wanted to have friends. He wanted to laugh and joke with them. He wanted to hear more about what really drove Theo and Blaise, the way that Theo had told Harry he wanted someone strong and sincere to protect him.

But can I trust them?

Harry took a long, deep breath, and managed, he thought, to push some of the coldness forwards in himself that he had felt when he went down to face the basilisk. When he opened his eyes, both Blaise and Theo stepped back.

“I’m going to give you one chance,” Harry said, and made his voice as sharp and icy as he could. He would conjure icicles and stab Blaise and Theo with them if they betrayed him. He would. “And that’s all. If you laugh at me or you mock me, I’ll hurt you.”

He didn’t really want to hurt them, either. But he had to protect himself, because no one else was going to do it.

“I promise, mate,” Blaise said, his voice soft and hoarse. “All we want is to be your friends and talk about this.”

Harry glanced at Theo, who hadn’t said anything about that. Theo promptly nodded quickly, so quickly that it looked like he’d hurt his neck.

“I promise,” he said. “No calling you weird ever again.”

Harry thought that a promise like that wouldn’t solve the problem, not the whole problem. But he wanted to be with his friends again. He was sick of being alone, with Ron and Hermione avoiding him because they seemed embarrassed about their plan to find the Heir of Slytherin failing and the professors staring at him like he really was a freak.

He turned and walked after his friends. His maybe friends. His used-to-be, maybe-someday-again friends.

He was so sick of being alone.

*

“No one will disturb us here.”

Harry looked dubiously around the classroom that Blaise had led them to without a word. It was deep in the dungeons, but it also had carvings on the walls as though it were a place the older students used for Ancient Runes practice.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because of the charm that I just put on the door.”

Blaise was tucking his wand away as he came back to the center of the room. Harry bit his lip, hard, But either he trusted Blaise enough to talk to him behind what was probably just a Privacy Charm, or he should have run away back when they were in the library.

“Why did you go after the basilisk by yourself?”

It was Theo who asked the first question, kind of contrary to what Harry had thought would happen. Harry turned to face him. Theo had looked pale against the dark grey stone of the classroom when they first came into it, but now his cheeks were flushed as if he had a fever.

“No one else was doing anything about it.”

“But that doesn’t make it your job.”

“Doesn’t it? No one else was standing up to Malfoy, either. Or preventing the snake from attacking someone in the middle of the common room. Or facing down the Dark Lord during the first war, if you want to go back that far. It kind of is my job. It always has been.”

“I don’t want it to be.”

Harry blinked at Theo. “What?”

“I don’t want it to be your job,” Theo said, slowly, every word as precise as if it were a nail he were hammering into a piece of wood. “I want you to feel free to relax and run away and leave things up to someone else. I want you to feel free to lean on us and trust us to help you.”

“It would have been too dangerous for you.”

“Bollocks,” Blaise drawled, standing near the wall of the classroom with his arms folded.

Harry turned to glare at him. “It would have!”

“We’re the same bloody age as you, Harry!” Theo yelled, and it was the first time that Harry had ever heard that. He hadn’t thought Theo could yell. Theo’s face was red down all the way to his robe collar, and he was waving his arms back and forth as he paced around in a circle. “Even a little older! Why would it be too dangerous for us and not you?”

“You’re not Parselmouths.”

“And you fought the basilisk with your Parseltongue, right?”

“Not exactly. But I needed it to get into the Chamber.”

“Then you could have opened the doors, and you could have taken us with you.”

“But I didn’t want you in danger!”

“And we didn’t want you in danger, either!” Theo yelled, looking as if he would truly turn as purple as Uncle Vernon always did any minute. “You absolute fucking idiot!”

Harry stared at him. Opened his mouth. Closed it.

“You truly don’t get it,” Blaise whispered. He was all cool softness while Theo was still panting with anger, but Harry didn’t make the mistake of thinking him less dangerous because of it. “Do you? You think that we’re different from you, somehow. That we shouldn’t be exposed to danger, but it’s fine for you.”

“You have people who will miss you. I don’t.”

There. It was out, the most freakish thing about him. Harry waited for their response.

“I think I’ve proven conclusively that we would miss you, you absolute fucking—”

“What dearest Theo means to say,” Blaise said, turning a glare on Theo that shut him up immediately, “is that we would miss you. Because we’re your friends.”

“You might think you would, but you wouldn’t.”

Blaise tilted his head and lifted his eyebrows, and Harry flushed. He had seen Blaise look at people like that in the common room, all cool disdain, and he hadn’t known how it would hurt to have it turned on him. “Allow us the courtesy of knowing our own emotions,” Blaise said, at his most distant. “Yes, we would miss you.”

Harry couldn’t help what he asked next. “Why?”

“Why?” Blaise echoed.

“Yeah, why. You must feel that you’ve long ago paid back any debt you could have owed me for saving your lives in first year. So, why?”

Blaise stared at him, and Harry was a little glad to see that he had shattered his friend’s, or “friend’s,” composure after all. Then Blaise let out a long breath through his nose and turned to Theo. “Do you want to handle this one?”

“Fine.” Theo’s eyes were pointed chips of ice, and Harry braced himself for words like a winter wind. But instead, Theo just took a step towards him, a little paler than he had been before, and said sharply, “Because we like you. Because we laugh at how you handle Malfoy. Because we admire the way that you adapted to being in Slytherin when you couldn’t possibly have thought the Hat would put you here. Because we asked to know your secrets, and we couldn’t have known how fascinating they would be.”

Harry blinked several times. Then he said weakly, “Well, being interested in what I’ll do next isn’t the same thing as friendship.”

“Did you ignore the part where I told you why we like you?”

“But that’s not a reason to like me!”

Theo spread his arms. “It’s what we have. Take it or leave it.”

Harry stared back and forth between Theo and Blaise. Theo seemed weary. Blaise had retreated behind a cold mask that Harry knew well. It might be days or weeks before that mask cracked again.

Could it really be that simple?

Harry had seen Dudley with his friends, and yeah, a lot of it just seemed to come from liking to do the same things, like chase smaller kids around. And Ron and Hermione bickered half the time, but they liked investigating mysteries and protecting people.

Could it really be that simple?

I think it is. I think—maybe what I was looking for isn’t the same thing as what exists.

Harry breathed out slowly, shakily. He glanced at Blaise. Blaise nodded. “That goes for me, too,” he said. “We’re your friends, and we would miss you if you died.”

“And—you don’t think I’m weird.”

Blaise gave a sharp laugh, cut off in the middle. Harry blinked at him. Blaise just shook his head.

“If you knew anything about the way I had grown up,” he murmured, “you would know that my standards for weirdness are quite high.”

Harry winced a little. The rumors that went around Slytherin about Blaise were wild, but he was so sensitive about his mother that Harry had never asked for confirmation. “Ah, right.” He turned and glanced at Theo.

“I was joking,” Theo explained.

Harry swallowed. “All right.”

“Are you going to get upset again if I say something careless?” Theo studied him with eyes that seemed to pierce Harry the way he had imagined piercing Theo earlier. “Because I might. I will. I’m—not the best when it comes to normal friendships, either. It’s inevitable that I’ll mess up. I don’t want you to go off and face a basilisk or something every time you get upset with me.”

Harry studied him in return. Then he asked, “Were you really upset when I went after the basilisk?”

“Yes!” Theo said, and suddenly he was back to shouting. “Of course I was! When I thought that one of my best friends might be dead—” He shook his head and shut his eyes. “If you really can’t accept that I was, Harry, this can’t work.”

“I just—needed to make sure.”

Blaise cleared his throat. “Did you really think that no one would care if you died fighting the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets?”

“I thought that you didn’t care about me, and Ron and Hermione were upset with me, and Professor Snape had had the chance to go after the Heir and didn’t. And then the professors just seemed more upset when I came back because I might have defeated the basilisk, but I hadn’t captured the Heir. So yeah, I thought no one cared if I lived or died.”

“The snake?”

“It wants me to give it food. That’s all. Someone else could do that as well as I could, or it could go off and become a wild snake. I don’t deceive myself into thinking it cares about me.”

“Well, we do,” Blaise said, and he closed his eyes. “Harry, in my life I’ve only allowed myself to trust two people, and you were the second. All right? So stop saying that no one would care and no one would—be upset. Theo and I might not be the best at expressing it, but we would be very fucking upset if you died.”

Harry wanted to ask all sorts of things, such as why they hadn’t said this before, and why Blaise didn’t seem to trust his own mother. But he knew that he had pressed matters as far as they could go, and it was a big deal that Blaise and Theo had expressed themselves as openly as they had.

“All right,” he whispered. “I—thank you.”

Theo abruptly lunged forwards, and despite everything, Harry almost drew his wand. But then Theo was hugging him, and Harry could do nothing but stand there and stare with wide eyes over Theo’s shoulder at Blaise, who just looked amused.

“Don’t expect a hug from me. Sorry, I don’t do them.”

Theo broke away from Harry, flushing, and cleared his throat. “Most of the time, I don’t, either. I don’t know what came over me.”

“I’m glad it did, whatever it was.”

Theo looked at him with soft eyes, or as soft as they would probably ever get, and smiled. “No more basilisks.”

“I don’t think there are any more left.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Harry said.

And he walked back to the common room with his two friends, almost floating, and ignored the strange looks that they got when they walked in together. He ignored the peeved tone of the snake when it demanded more young, featherless birds.

He was alive. He had people who cared that he kept being so.

Maybe he would never make the professors care, and maybe Ron and Hermione wouldn’t exactly, either, but right now, he felt alive.