lomonaaeren

“You’re nervous about the O.W.L.S.”

“Yeah.” Harry smiles at Theo over the top of his steaming teacup. They’re taking tea together in the Room of Requirement again, just the two of them. With their class schedules and study schedules, they didn’t get to see much of each other this week. “Although I’m more worried about disappointing other people than failing an exam.”

“Because they want you to do better than you want to do?”

Harry struggles for a second to express his feelings, then shrugs. “Doing well would be nice. And I’ll try for at least Exceeds Expectations on every practical exam. But I don’t know how well I’ll do on the written ones. Hermione works and works with me, but I still don’t always get what she’s talking about.”

“You look calm about it.”

“I’m trying to keep calm so other people don’t get upset, like Blaise,” Harry admits, and then rolls his shoulders. “But some of the tension goes into my shoulders and my spine.”

“Hmm.”

Theo puts down his teacup and stands. His expression is so devious that Harry eyes him cautiously, but he doesn’t object when Theo steps around behind him and the chair Harry is sitting in. One thing he knows is that Theo would never hurt him.

Well.

Unless it came to a crazy plan to get the Horcrux out of his head, as Hermione would say.

Then Harry loses all his thoughts as Theo’s hands descend on his shoulders and begin to massage him. Harry lets out a groan before he can think about it, and then he knows that he blushes bright red.

“Shhh,” Theo murmurs, as if hearing Harry’s confused thoughts that say he really should pull back. “You don’t have to worry. You can just let me touch you. This is something I want to do, Harry.” Then he adds, softly enough that Harry doesn’t know if he was meant to hear it, “You have no idea how much.”

So Harry closes his eyes and lets some of his eternal on-guardedness fall away. Theo finds the tiniest knots in his shoulders and rubs them until they seem to dissolve into warm water. He rubs Harry’s spine briskly, then slowly, and Harry groans again and lets his head collapse forwards into his arms.

“You really were tense.” Theo’s voice is as soft as the sensations creeping down Harry’s back. “You could have asked me for this at any time, you know.”

It feels like enormous pressure to move his tongue when it feels made of cotton, but Harry manages. “I—never would have thought to ask you.”

“Hmm. Why not?”

“Never had this before,” Harry admits, his head lolling.

Theo shuts up after that and just continues to massage Harry’s shoulders and back. It occurs to Harry that Theo’s hands are trembling a little. It also occurs to him that he should make sure that’s because Theo did really want to touch Harry and not because of something else like his own extreme tiredness.

But somewhere in between his decision that he should ask that and his actual ability to ask that, Harry drifts off to sleep.

*

“So what happened between you and Theo?”

Harry blushes, the way he’s been doing all morning when he looks over at the Slytherin table and Theo, and then hastily applies himself to the porridge with berries in front of him. “None of your business,” he mumbles.

“Oh, really?”

Hermione is teasing him, Harry finally realizes, and glares at her a little. She laughs and shakes her head. “I’m glad that he’s good for you.”

“So you don’t resent him anymore for the things he and Susan did?”

“Oh, no, of course I resent him for that,” Hermione says, so cheerful that Harry blinks at her a bit. “But that’s separate from feeling that he’s good or not good for you.” She digs out a huge sheaf of parchment that doesn’t even look like it should fit from the satchel on her shoulder. “And in the meantime, we can keep studying Charms.”

“My eyes are crossing from studying, Hermione.”

“You don’t want that to happen on the actual written exam, do you?”

Harry sighs and gives in, shaking his head a little when Theo raises his eyebrows. He probably would step in and try to rescue Harry from Hermione’s study schedule, but Harry doesn’t want to give Hermione another reason to resent Theo.

Besides. He does have to pass the O.W.L.S., if only so that Sirius will be proud of him.

*

The exams are torture.

Well, not all of them. Harry does enjoy showing off his Niffler Patronus to the witch proctoring the Defense Against the Dark Arts practical, and he also enjoys the fact that he knows he does better on the Potions practical than he ever did when Snape was teaching. And the Transfiguration written exam is a lot easier than he thought it would be thanks to all the studying.

But the rest? Sitting in a room full of other tense students and trying to remember what the right answer is for a question about who invented an obscure charm in 1870?

Harry hates it, and he doesn’t think he does that well, even if he has faithfully studied and struggled with the material instead of just hiding away from it the way he would have liked to do. He promised Hermione. He promised Blaise. He promised Sirius.

He still walks out of the Astronomy exam feeling as though someone has pummeled him in the chest, and nearly falls asleep walking down the stairs. Only Ahalam’s urgent hisses not to crush the prettiest snake save him.

Considerately, Voldemort waits until the History of Magic exam, which Harry has no real interest in passing, to interrupt him.

*

Harry has just finished writing a short essay about Uric the Oddball—who didn’t do anything that memorable, really—when he hears a wave of screams behind him. He turns around and stares.

Voldemort is walking into the classroom between the scrambling students. His eyes are fixed on Harry.

Harry rubs his own eyes, sure that he’s daydreaming, because even Voldemort is less horrifying than the History of Magic exam. But no, Voldemort is really there, and really stalking forwards, and really floating a gigantic box wrapped with a crimson bow behind him.

“This is the polite way to approach you, your guardian said.”

It occurs to Harry, who is feeling lightheaded and dizzy, that he never did read the letter Sirius sent off to Voldemort. He assumed it was just a snippy complaint about how Voldemort violated pureblood etiquette by not talking to Harry’s godfather about courting him, but what if Sirius did say something about how Voldemort should come to Hogwarts with a giant gift?

The second he has the thought, Harry is sure that he’s right.

For fuck’s sake, Sirius.

But it’s his place as both Harry Potter and Lord Slytherin to spare people who will never be able to stand up to Voldemort the task, so he takes a deep breath and gets to his feet. “Did he say to do it in the middle of an exam?” he demands.

Voldemort pauses, still a few strides away from Harry. The student in the desk next to him has fainted dead away. “He did not specify.”

Sirius and I are going to have words.

But in the meantime, Harry has to make sure that both he and everyone else survives this crazy encounter. So he takes another deep breath and looks into Voldemort’s eyes. “You should realize that he didn’t want you to interrupt my exams.”

Voldemort is silent for a long moment, his neck weaving back and forth. Then he says, “So you will not open the gift?”

“I’ll accept the gift, but I won’t open it now.” Harry gestures impatiently around at the classroom full of staring students and the trembling proctor. “Do you think this is a conducive atmosphere to opening it?”

Voldemort slowly stares around. “Yes?”

“Well, I don’t. I’m not all you, you know. The Horcrux has been changed by contact with my living soul.”

Harry half-hopes that will make Voldemort give up, the idea that it’s not really himself he’s courting. Distressingly, he just looks more interested. “You are indeed different from me. I had not considered that.”

Harry folds his arms and tries to look commanding. “Well, consider it now. You need to leave and choose a more convenient time.”

“You will not respond to my attempts to court you.”

“I’m responding to this one, aren’t I? But it needs to be a time and place I find appropriate, as well as my guardian.”

Voldemort’s eyes flash for a second, and Harry tenses, ready to ask Hogwarts for help in protecting the students. But instead, Voldemort reaches out and lets his fingers skim down Harry’s cheek. Harry stands and stares at him unflinchingly, because that’s part of what he’s for, in the end, is to defy Voldemort.

“You are brave and beyond price,” Voldemort whispers. “Lord Voldemort will withdraw for now. But, make no mistake, my brave one, I will be waiting for your response to my courting gesture.”

He nods regally, as if half-bowing to the Horcrux in Harry, and then turns and flows out of the examination room. Harry exhales a breath.

Then, of course, is when people really start screaming.

*

“I thought that you banished him from the school in your fight in the Chamber of Secrets!”

Harry shakes his head. “Just for that night, I think. Or else he could come into Hogwarts through the wards because he honestly didn’t have any malicious intentions.”

“He’s Voldemort, he always has malicious intentions!”

“Not this time,” Harry mutters, staring down at the huge box in front of him. The exam proctor, showing some good sense, made Harry tuck it away in a corner of the classroom while the test went on. But Harry floated it unceremoniously up the stairs to Sirius’s quarters the moment he finished scribbling his stupid answers that don’t matter anyway.

I knew studying for History of Magic was a waste of time.

He probably can’t say that around Hermione, though, who looks like she might expire from simultaneous curiosity and anger.

“I didn’t give him permission to interrupt your exams,” Sirius says for the fifth time.

One of Harry’s friends kept interrupting the other times he said that. Sure enough, Ernie opens his mouth now. Harry turns his back as if he didn’t see it and frowns at Sirius. “So what exactly did you say to him in that letter? You told me that you just scolded him for not following pureblood courting etiquette.”

“You did what?” Ron is the one who looks on the verge of expiring now.

“He didn’t have the right to contact you without my permission,” Sirius mutters sulkily.

“No one’s arguing that,” Harry says, although a few people in the room look like they might try. “I just want to know what you said.”

Sirius sighs dramatically and collapses on the black leather couch that he keeps in one corner of the room. In the few months that he’s been here, he’s changed the décor about five times. Harry ignores it now, keeping his eyes on his godfather until he squirms and cracks.

“I told him that if he was serious about courting you, he had to come to Hogwarts to do it. And bring a huge present.”

“Professor Black,” Hermione says, and Harry hastily conjures a chair behind her. She looks like she needs it a lot more than Sirius needs the couch right now. “Why would you—why would you say such a thing?”

“I didn’t think he’d do it!” Sirius waves his hands around.

“But why did you tell him in the first place?” Hermione insists.

Sirius leans intently forwards. Harry finds himself doing the same thing. And Hermione doesn’t need the chair after all, considering that she looks as if she might run over to the couch Sirius is lounging on in the next second.

“Because,” Sirius says slowly, “I didn’t think he’d do it.”

Hermione covers her face with her hands.

Harry knows exactly how she feels, but in the meantime, they have this gigantic box to deal with, which is big enough to contain a desk. And he knows the one person who should have a say in it. He turns around and looks at Theo, who is near the doorway of Sirius’s quarters, his eyes on the box and a dreamily murderous look on his face.

“Do we open it?” Harry asks.

“Mate, are you mental?”

“Harry, I’m sorry I gave him permission! I said that!”

“I must advise against the opening of the box, my lord!”

“What if it is a big wheel of cheese?”

Harry ignores all of them, eyes fastened on Theo.

Theo continues looking at him carefully for a long moment. Then he smiles and inclines his head. “I would advise opening the box, my lord,” he says calmly. “After all, it is part of the courtship process that I have the right to see what my rivals send to you.”

“He’s not a rival for you.”

Everyone else is saying various things, but Harry knows only his words need to get to Theo, and so they do. Theo’s smile becomes even calmer and more genuine. “I know that, my lord. I meant in the traditional sense.”

Harry sighs and aims his wand at the box.

“My lord, you might set off a trap!” And Harry might have ignored what Ernie’s saying, but then the self-sacrificing idiot runs right over and stands in front of the box, his arms spread. “At least let us set up protective wards first!”

That’s good sense. Harry nods and steps back, and watches Sirius cast the wards. They’re good ones. It does seem that he’s genuinely contrite over what he told Voldemort to do.

Ahalam is swaying on Harry’s shoulder. Harry reaches up to him. “Do you sense something?” If Voldemort did add some kind of Parseltongue magic to the box, then Ahalam might be the best one to figure it out, since it is literally part of his being.

“Tell them not to damage the cheese.”

“It isn’t cheese.”

“You do not know that until the box is opened. It could be cheese until the box is opened. Therefore, tell them not to damage it.”

There’s probably some profound insight there, but Harry isn’t in the mood to figure it out. He just makes random soothing noises at Ahalam and watch as Sirius’s wards congregate around the box. It’s hard to even see the wood now, beneath the glittering knots and weaves of the wards. But that’s fine by Harry. He would much rather go overboard in protecting his followers and godfather and familiar from a trap.

At least, now that he’s been reminded of it.

He shakes off his embarrassment and watches as Sirius casts the spell that makes the box wobble under the wards. Then the slats unfold and fall to the floor, and Harry blinks at what sits revealed in the box.

“It is not cheese.”

“No, it certainly isn’t,” Harry mutters, still staring. When he realizes that no one else is probably going to move until he does, he edges towards the thing, pointing at it with his wand instead of his hand, even though he really wants to do that.

It’s made of white marble, which seems to have been infused with charms so that it glows from the inside, as if softly lit. And it’s a—

A statue of Voldemort, clad from the waist down in robes, while from the waist up, his chest is bare and he has his arms lifted the way that Harry sometimes remembers seeing superheroes do on the telly.

Sirius chokes behind him. Harry wants to do the same thing.

“He really is mad,” Ernie whispers.

For some reason, that’s the thing that makes everyone dissolve in giggles. Harry has to keep from gasping and choking when he bends at the waist, not least because Ahalam starts complaining that Harry is about to drop him on the floor. And his reaction isn’t as extreme as the way Hermione is literally on the floor or Sirius has turned into a dog to howl better.

Amid the chaos, Harry turns helplessly to Theo, who is staring at the statue with huge eyes.

Theo glances back at him and shakes his head slowly.

And that’s all that Harry needs to know. Voldemort is certainly no competition for Theo, and Theo doesn’t feel threatened by him.

Good.

Now Harry just has to figure out what to do with the thing.