Chapter Twenty-Eight of 'Winged Victory'- What They Feared

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Eight—What They Feared

“I just really don’t understand why they do it.”

“Why they do what?” Theo asks absently. He is paying attention to Harry, but he’s also focusing on the construct in front of him that he gathered the parts for. His plan relies on creating a temporary artifact, which has to be assembled out of different ingredients, like a potion.

“Why they would want to bully Luna. She’s harmless and sweet. And even if she’s a little annoying, I could name a dozen people here who are more annoying. Including the professors.”

Theo leans back and smiles at his boyfriend, who after all still has the core of that innocence Theo wanted to preserve in him. Harry is lying on the green couch in their classroom, his arms folded and a scowl on his face. It threatens to be permanent, but Theo is certain he can kiss it away after they’re done avenging Luna.

(The main impetus and plan is still Theo’s, but of course Harry joined in, the way Theo knew he would want to).

“Some people just want a little taste of power because they don’t have any in their personal lives. Others think that being annoyed is somehow a matter for revenge. And still others will do it because they assume they need to follow the crowd or fear being bullied themselves.”

“But those are stupid reasons. Cowardly ones.”

“Such a Gryffindor.”

Harry scowls at Theo, who smiles back. “Not everything about my House is bad or fits into a stereotype.”

“Of course not. But I’m saying that it won’t usually occur to some of these people that they’re cowards. If it does, they’ll do their best not to think about it, maybe by bullying someone else. And some of them value their self-preservation or their need for power over any honest self-reflection.”

“Why do you think Snape does it?” Harry asks abruptly. “Bullies me?”

“He’s annoyed and wants revenge on your father.”

“So he’s a coward, then. Because he’s not stupid.”

“I think someone can be brilliant in their particular area and stupid at something else.” Theo tests the crow feathers that hang in the silver net rigging. That’s something he could never have woven himself, but after he used a fire to melt some Sickles and placed the molten metal near the other ingredients, it began to take form of itself, the way that some ingredients in Potions become new things entirely. “I would say that Snape is a genius at Potions, but would you call him smart at relating to other people?”

Harry laughs.

Theo grins over at him and then faces the rigging one more time. The silver net is strung between several pieces of wood that he collected from the Forbidden Forest and cut and smoothed and shaped with various spells. The most important thing is that he has to do it himself. So Father taught him long ago.

Theo doesn’t like thinking about Father, but he has to admit that some of the knowledge is useful.

“What is that?”

Harry has kept his questions to an admirable minimum, and Theo smiles at him over his shoulder again. “The thing that’s going to keep my revenge on Luna’s bullies looking untraceable.”

“Why would you want to? If they don’t know it’s you, how would they be scared off doing it again?”

“And sometimes, you’re as practical as any Slytherin,” Theo murmurs, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Harry blush. “In this case, it’s important to avoid Dumbledore’s attention. We’ve been drawing too much of it. Snape’s, the same. You know they would blame us for anything they’re able to.”

“Okay. So how does this thing work? And how will it prevent them from bullying her?”

“Bones and Macmillan care a lot about their public reputations, so I don’t think they’re going to even hint to their Housemates that they’re bullying Luna, or brag about it.” Theo drew one finger down the silver and then over one of the stakes of wood. It soared into the air, stretching the netting between it and the other stakes until the thing looked like an elongated, tilted rectangle. “This will make sure that everything they do to her is returned to them twofold the first time they bully her. Then threefold. And so on.”

“So they won’t tell other people about it.”

“Precisely. Because they’ll know exactly why it’s happening to them, but they can’t actually complain about the cause. And someone who investigated might decide that it’s a karmic curse, but karmic curses only work on the basis of actual harm, not imagined harm. Someone who believed they deserved the bullying wouldn’t be able to cast one, for example.”

“So they have to admit to bullying her if they want to talk about it.”

“And I don’t think they will.”

“You’re sort of gambling, though, on deciding they won’t.”

“And have I been wrong yet?” Theo rises to his feet with a fluid twist of his waist and a long arm-stretch. Kneeling to tend to the apparatus is part of the ritual that creates it, but his back does ache. “Have I been wrong about my gamble to make friends of you or date you?”

“You were wrong about Ron and Hermione and Sirius not ever coming to our side.”

Theo laughs and joins Harry on the couch. “But look how long it took. I don’t believe I was wrong about them in essence, even if in facts.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Well, come over here and kiss me in facts, because the theoretical imagination of it isn’t cutting it.”

Theo smiles and leans in, more than happy to obey.

*

“What is it?”

Luna’s eyes are wide and fascinated, which makes Theo happy. He doesn’t like to think about them filled with tears and worry the way they were the other day. It’s because Luna is his friend, and that makes him uncomfortable.

(He might not need any friends other than Harry, but he is still determined to protect the ones he has).

“An apparatus that will help you get revenge on your bullies,” Theo says. He ignores Luna’s slightly worried look at both the words “revenge” and “bullies.” The apparatus operates on her pain and fear, not whether she calls them nargles or not. “It’ll revisit everything they do on them twofold.”

“It’s pretty, but how will I hide it?”

“I’m going to have to link it to your magical signature, which means that it will turn invisible and follow you around.” The actual magical theory is more complicated than that, but Theo isn’t inclined to explain it right now, even if Luna, as a Ravenclaw, would have a higher chance of understanding it. They’re doing this in haste before Potions, and he’ll have to run to get there. “When your bullies do something to you, it’ll start working.”

“Like a karmic curse?”

“Exactly like a karmic curse.”

“But they could tell someone…”

“Do you think they will? With as secretly as they’ve gone after you so far, and with their reputations to keep?”

Luna’s mouth forms a perfectly round little O. “I thought it was strange that they kept coming up to me when no one else was around,” she whispers. “The—the other nargles always did it in front of other people.”

Theo nods tightly. He doesn’t know if Luna’s still being bothered by the “other nargles,” but he will take care of it if she is. “Well, this will float along with you and make sure they suffer.”

“But they’ll accuse me.”

“Can they?”

Theo watches Luna work through it herself, and then she begins to smile. “If they try to accuse me, they have to admit it.”

“Yes, exactly.” Theo reaches over and pats Luna’s shoulder. “Are you ready for me to connect the apparatus to you, so that it will follow you everywhere and protect you?”

“Yes.” Luna leans forwards and studies the netting and wood for a moment. “Can I call him Charles? He looks like a Charles.”

“Whatever you like,” Theo murmurs, already working the last spell that will make sure the construct’s loyalty is to Luna and not him. There’s a spark that leaps between the netting and him, then between “Charles” and Luna, and the spell ends. The construct vanishes with a little sparkle of magic that makes Luna laugh in delight.

“I know it’s not really about me, you know,” Luna says directly to Theo. “I know it’s about Harry, their thinking that he cheated to get into the Tournament and steal Cedric’s glory, and that he was the Heir of Slytherin in second year who got away with Petrifying people.”

“I know. But this is about you.”

Luna gives him a misty little smile and a quivering lip. Theo is just as glad that he has the excuse of classes to go to so he can escape an emotional scene.

Luna is his friend, but Theo really only does emotions well with Harry.

*

Somewhat to Theo’s surprise, Bones and Macmillan don’t wait that long to go after Luna. Maybe they saw him come near her and assumed that he would do something to stop the bullying, then grew bolder when they didn’t see any immediate consequences from it. Foolish. They should have known Slytherins wait.

Bones and Macmillan both come to dinner pale and quiet, limping. Theo smiles at them. They shiver and glance away.

“What did the Hufflepuff table do to annoy you today?” Blaise asks, leaning on his elbow as he looks back and forth between Theo and the badgers.

“Oh, it turns out that two of them thought a person being annoying, or being friends with someone they consider a cheater, was enough reason to go after her.”

“I see. Would this person be sitting at the Ravenclaw table with a big smile on her face?”

“She might be.”

Blaise leans nearer and flicks a privacy charm into existence with a tap of his fingers. “Was it a karmic curse?”

“Something like that, but in the shape of an artifact.”

“Really.”

“I consider Luna a dear friend,” Theo says, popping the privacy charm and speaking a little louder in case people at the Slytherin table are just dying to listen. “It would be a mistake to think she was vulnerable because she’s not in our House or not my boyfriend.”

Blaise lets a smile flicker across his face. “I would like to learn more about this, sometime,” he says, and turns back to his potatoes.

Theo gives Harry a serene expression when his boyfriend looks in his direction. Harry smiles, too, and returns to eating, just like Blaise.

Knowing that Harry trusts him to handle this makes Theo’s veins tingle with something sweeter than wine.

*

“I know you had something to do with this.”

Oh, this is too good, Theo thinks, although he keeps his delight carefully concealed as he turns around to look at Ernie Macmillan and Susan Bones. They followed him from dinner, and Theo heard them, but he didn’t expect a direct confrontation, much less in one of the first corridors leading off the Great Hall.

He adopts an expression of confusion. “Pardon me?”

“Why our feet are bleeding!”

“I don’t know why your feet are bleeding. Do you think I cursed you? Why?”

Bones pauses. She has an expression of self-righteousness on her face that makes Theo wonder why people describe her as one of the prettiest girls in school. Maybe those people don’t often see her with this expression.

“You don’t like us,” Ernie Macmillan snaps. “Everyone knows how close you are to Harry Potter.” He inflects the word with an emotion that makes Theo’s hand itch for his wand. “And we know that he was the Heir of Slytherin and never punished in our second year. We know.”

“Then why did I wait until now to curse you? And why did I make your feet bleed?”

They shift back and forth. Macmillan hisses. Theo smiles. Luna was barefooted, which probably made hers hurt more, but the curses they used won’t be comfortable even bandaged and inside shoes.

“You do know something! You’re smiling!”

“I can dislike people who hate my boyfriend for no reason without having cursed you.”

“He deserved it!”

“Then why didn’t you curse him?” Theo raises his eyebrows. “Because then there would be no doubt that I would have retaliated.”

They stare at him. Theo reminds himself to act a little calmer. The whole point is to turn suspicion away from him, not have Bones and Macmillan run to the professors with some tale that Dumbledore will of course believe.

“We—it’s been a long time,” Macmillan finally mumbles. “No one would believe us, and no one punished him.”

“Have you considered that there was nothing to punish? That he saved the school, just the way Dumbledore said?”

“It’s right that there be a punishment,” Bones says fiercely, tossing her hair. “The rule of law requires it!”

Ah, now Theo can see why she’s the niece of Amelia Bones. Maybe Madam Bones was just like Susan when she was younger. The difference is that she grew into accepting it wasn’t always her right to administer that punishment, and her niece hasn’t.

“Then curse him,” Theo says. “I dare you. But I had nothing to do with what you’re experiencing now, because you didn’t attack him.”

“We did—”

“Ernie.”

Bones’s voice is sharp. Macmillan shrinks into himself. Theo faces Bones, faintly glad that he knows who’s in charge of this dangerous pair. “Yes? Did you have something that you wanted to say?”

Bones glares at him some more. Then she says, “All right. If he wasn’t the Heir of Slytherin, who was?”

“Voldemort.”

Both the Hufflepuffs flinch in such a way that if they were on a staircase, they would have fallen down. Theo bites his lip and reminds himself desperately that this is not for his entertainment. This is the serious business of revenge.

Then again, there’s no reason it can’t be entertaining at the same time, with “opponents” like Bones and Macmillan.

“That’s—you’re just saying that because you know we don’t have a way to prove it,” Macmillan says weakly.

“Or a way to punish him,” Bones adds. Theo feels a little sorry for people who date her in the future, if she’s this focused on punishment. She would probably be a nightmare to break up with.

“No, I’m not saying it for that reason,” Theo says calmly. He might have tossed Weasley to the badgers without a care, but she was nice enough to let them watch her Pensieve memory, so he just says, “Voldemort is a descendant of Slytherin. A true Heir. He woke the basilisk and Petrified people the last time the Chamber was open, fifty years ago, when he was a student here. He managed to mask his activities that time, but this time, his spirit possessed a student and had them open the Chamber.”

“Who was the student?”

“Someone who was appropriately punished,” Theo says. It turns out to be pretty easy to lie to Bones. She calms down. “But Harry’s not Slytherin’s Heir.”

“He’s a Parselmouth!”

“And I have dark hair, and he has dark hair,” Theo says dryly. “That must make us the same person, don’t you think?”

Macmillan wavers. “But how is he a Parselmouth if he’s not Slytherin’s Heir?”

“Odd magical gifts get mixed up all the time in bloodlines,” Theo says dismissively. He’s actually parodying magical theory forty years out of date, but Macmillan is the sort of pureblood who still believes that stuff, and Bones is the sort of half-blood who pretends to believe it so as not to be left out of pureblood society. “If Harry had a distant Slytherin ancestor who passed down the gift…”

“Then he could have it even though other Potters didn’t,” Bones finishes. “Does that really happen even after generations, though?”

“Of course it does, Susan, don’t be naïve.”

Over the sound of Bones apologizing, Theo sighs to conceal his laughter. She’s the smarter of the two, yes, but still bound and defined by her self-righteousness.

“So who cursed us?” Bones asks, bringing the matter back to their bleeding feet.

“I don’t know. Would someone have reason to use that curse on you?”

An uncomfortable silence stretches over them while Theo smiles, and smiles, and Bones finally sighs and shakes her head. “No.”

“But Susan…”

“Be quiet, Ernie,” Bones says in a fierce undertone, and turns back to Theo. “All right, fine. Sorry for accusing you.”

“Apology accepted,” Theo says smoothly, because that will make it all the harder for Bones to turn on him if she decides that Theo did have something to do with this.

“And if it’s karmic—”

“I said, be quiet, Ernie,” Bones snaps, and nudges him with an elbow that leaves him wheezing before she turns to speak to Theo again. “I think we know what we need to do to stop this from happening again. Whoever cast this.”

“I wish you good luck, then,” Theo says politely, and watch them walk away, breaking into an argument before they’re even around the corner. Granted, they keep their voices low enough that he can’t tell what they’re saying, but it’s the spirit of the thing.

“That went well.”

Theo starts and turns around. He honestly didn’t realize Harry was right there. As his boyfriend straightens and comes forwards with a smile, Theo supposes it’s a good thing, in a way. He subconsciously trusts Harry enough not to see him as threat or be so vigilant that he must notice everyone in the vicinity.

As long as it doesn’t start happening with people other than Harry, Theo thinks as he leans forwards to nuzzle his boyfriend’s cheek.

“Upset that I left you out of the revenge?” he breathes against Harry’s cheek, delighted by the way he blushes and squirms.

“Not as long as they really do stay away from Luna.”

“I think Bones is smart enough to, at least. And if Macmillan tries again, then Charlie will have fun with him.”

“Charlie?”

“Luna thought it looked like a Charlie,” Theo explains gravely.

Harry blinks at him, and then bursts out in delighted laughter. Theo loops an arm around his shoulders and leads him to Potions. He ignores the hostile glances he can feel at their backs, and the hostile one they receive when they get to the classroom.

Let Snape glare. He won’t be able to hurt Harry without Theo totally destroying him. and just like Bones, Snape is smart enough to know that.

Theo smiles a little at his professor as he hands in his finished potion, and can see the way Snape flinches and then hates himself for it.

He hates himself more than me. As it should be.

No one who has done so much to hurt Harry deserves a calm heart.