[This Lordship Business]: Seeking Whom He May Exasperate, 7/?, Harry/Theo

[lomonaaeren]

“Harry. Harry! Wake up!”

Harry groans and rolls over, wondering what it is now. Are they going to have to soothe some other impatient ambassador from Regulus? It feels like that’s half of what he does now. Regulus still doesn’t fully trust Harry, and Sirius is a mess whenever he goes to talk to his brother, so Harry isn’t sure—

“Harry!”

Okay, whatever it is seems urgent enough that Harry ungraciously rolls out of bed and whips his robes around himself. Salazar stands up with his claws fastened on the bars of the cage and makes a little inquiring sound. Ahalam promptly crawls off his pillow and onto his shoulder, complaining in a small voice.

“I want cheese. I am the prettiest snake. I deserve cheese.”

“You had a lot yesterday,” Harry says out of habit as he straightens his robes, brushes a hand across the disaster of his hair, and turns to run down the stairs.

“Harry!”

Harry blinks. He’s only really registering it now, but it seems that the voice is Ron’s, not Sirius’s.

Fear for the Weasley family—did the Ministry go after them? Did something else happen?—gives Harry’s feet wings. He leaps over the last two steps of the staircase and runs into the kitchen, where Ron is sitting in front of a huge plate of eggs and bacon.

And Sirius is sitting across the table with his arms folded.

“What’s going on?” Harry asks warily. He becomes aware that he’s drawn his wand. He doesn’t even remember doing that. He flicks it back into his holster and sits down between Ron and Sirius, looking back and forth between their faces.

Kreacher dumps a huge plate of eggs in front of Harry and glares at him until he picks up his fork to take a bite.

“No cheese.”

“You don’t need cheese, Ahalam.”

“But I want it.”

Harry declines to get involved in a philosophical discussion with his snake at the moment, and so goes on chewing, waiting for someone to tell him what’s happening. Now that he’s actually there, of course, no one seems to be in a hurry to do it.

“Tell him about the stupid thing you did,” Sirius finally says, voice heavy.

“It’s a bit rich, Sirius, you calling anyone else stupid,” Ron mutters.

“What you did,” Sirius says, his voice measured in a way that Harry can’t remember ever hearing before, “is a stupid thing.”

“What is going on?” Harry demands, putting down his fork. Kreacher gives a little hiss. Harry scowls at him.

“Ron challenged Darius Umbridge to a duel,” Sirius says flatly.

“What?”

Harry stares at Ron. Ron stares at his plate. Harry shakes his head and makes a little noise, but Ron doesn’t look up at him.

“Ron, look at me, please.”

Ron does. His ears are so red that he looks as if he’s about to burst into flame. “Someone had to do something, Harry! He’s swaggering around giving interviews to the Prophet about how he’s going to court you and you don’t have any choice about it! There was another one in the paper yesterday!”

Harry blinks. He doesn’t even remember that. Then again, he doesn’t think he remembers reading the paper yesterday. “Okay, but let him say what he wants. He’s stupid, and everyone ought to know that I would never marry someone with the last name Umbridge anyway.”

“But he keeps saying it.”

“Who cares?”

“I do!” Ron slams his hand into the middle of the table. His plate goes flying. Kreacher leaps to catch it, hissing again under his breath. Ron doesn’t appear to notice. “I want to protect you! You’re my best friend, and you’re my lord if you want to think about it that way, and he doesn’t have the right to say things like that!”

“But other people could do it,” Sirius says, gritting his teeth. “I could do it, as Harry’s godfather. Theo would have the right to do it, as Harry’s betrothed. Why are you getting into it? Why would you volunteer to duel someone who’s much older than you and a lot more dangerous?”

“I told you why.” Ron lifts his nose into the air. “I’m going to go ahead and do it. I want to make sure that Harry doesn’t get his reputation tarnished or something by associating with this bloke who doesn’t even want to speak with him face-to-face.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Ron,” Harry says gently. “But I would prefer to fight my own duels.”

“But you could get hurt!”

“So could you, though. And that really bothers me.”

Ron’s ears turn bright red again. “Mate…”

“It still bothers me,” Harry says. Gentle, firm, that’s what he has to be now. “I’d like you to withdraw the offer and let someone else duel him in your place.”

“Even though it might make me look fickle? Or you like you don’t trust your subordinates to fight for you?”

“I don’t care about that,” Harry says, fighting to keep his voice from breaking out into an impatient howl. “I promise, Ron. I’ll contact Umbridge if you want me to and explain that I don’t plan to duel him unless he makes himself more of a nuisance.”

“What would he need to do?”

“Start actually attacking my followers.”

Harry and Ron match stare for stare for a long moment. Then Ron leans back, tilts his head up to face the ceiling, and gives a little scream, waving his arms around as though he’s trying to wipe away invisible spiderwebs. “Fine. Fine. I’ll owl the little toad and explain that I’m backing out. If he taunts me, though, don’t expect me to just hold back and take it.”

“Thank you, Ron.” Harry keeps his voice gentle. “I appreciate it.”

“I am going to do something else, though.”

“What is that, Ron?”

“Tell Theo about this.”

And Ron stands and marches towards the Floo, ignoring the little hiss Kreacher gives when he leaves his food uneaten. Harry shakes his head at Ron’s back. It’s all very well for his friends and followers to want to protect him, that’s normal, but Harry doesn’t want them to start duels with random people because those people are making fun of him.

Someone has always made fun of Harry, and turned on him, and thought he was the Heir of Slytherin, and been upset with him for not fitting their picture of the Boy-Who-Lived, and fawned over him. That isn’t going to change no matter how many duels people might fight in his honor.

“What do you think spawned that?” Sirius asks the empty kitchen.

“Just seeing the stuff about Umbridge, I suppose.” Harry picks up Ahalam, who has crawled around the whole table and is upset about the lack of cheese, and puts him back on his shoulder. “And I suppose I should be more upset about it than I am, but…”

“You’re used to it,” Sirius finishes. His eyes are gentle as he reaches across the table to wreak havoc on Harry’s hair. “Ah, kiddo. I wish you could just be an ordinary boy with an ordinary life, most of the time.”

“I used to think the same thing.”

“Only used to?”

“Now I think about how things would be if I wasn’t Lord Slytherin, what the Tournament might have done, and if you would be free, and what might have happened to people like Theo and Draco who have Death Eater families. And I wouldn’t have Ahalam.”

“I could still have got you a snake,” Sirius objects, but he wilts a little when Harry stares at him. “All right, I wouldn’t have done it just because I knew you were a Parselmouth. Only if you were really embracing your Parseltongue.”

Harry smiles at him. “But you did, and things worked out the way they did. Even most of Voldemort’s Horcruxes are gone.”

He wants to raise a hand to his own forehead, where the Horcrux once lingered. But he doesn’t. Sirius would worry about that, maybe think his scar is hurting, and Harry hasn’t noticed a twinge from it since that day when Theo and Susan manipulated the situation so Voldemort would cast the Killing Curse at Harry.

Harry does kind of shake his head when he thinks that sentence. Theo and Susan are mad.

“What is this thing?”

Harry looks over to see Ahalam poking at an apple tart that Kreacher must have made for Sirius. “That’s a tart flavored with apple. You’ve had it before, remember? You said that apple was one of the flavors you didn’t like.”

“Make it smaller for me.”

Harry rolls his eyes as he begins to rip the apple tart into smaller pieces. “You can do this if you want, but you’re not going to like it any better than you did last time.”

“That is what you think,” Ahalam says serenely, and slithers up Harry’s arm to settle on his shoulder. Harry extends one of the smaller pieces of apple tart to him, and watches his little snake unhinge his jaw

Ahalam swallows it, and then freezes. Harry raises an eyebrow. “What?” From what he can see, the tart is making a little lump in the middle of Ahalam’s body, but it isn’t choking him or anything.

“I don’t like it.”

Ahalam ends up bringing up the piece of tart in the middle of the table, much to Kreacher’s vocal disgust and Sirius’s laughter. Harry shakes his head and steps out of the way to let Kreacher clean up the table, since the elf is glaring at Harry for possibly trying to do it himself.

“I told you that you wouldn’t like it.”

“You do not know me.”

“Next time, maybe you should listen to me and not try the apple tart.”

“You do not know me.”

*

“I do so look forward to dueling Darius Umbridge, my lord.”

Harry covers his eyes with a hand and groans. Nothing was said about any duels between his followers and Umbridge in the last few weeks, and with the pressure of getting ready to go back to Hogwarts, meeting with Regulus’s emissaries, buying the supplies for school, and some emergency conversations with goblins, Harry forgot about it.

Which is one reason that they’re standing outside the “Lord Slytherin and Company” compartment on the Hogwarts Express, and Theo’s just made this announcement.

“But you don’t need to.”

“Of course I do, my lord. As your betrothed, it’s expressly my place to discourage competition for your hand.”

“But you didn’t want to duel everyone else who sent a marriage contract offer for me!”

“Only because you wouldn’t let me know all their names.”

Hermine pops her head out of the compartment. “Are you lot coming in? Oh, and Theo, I think I remember most of their names. I convinced my parents to let me buy a Pensieve for an early birthday present. I’d be happy to show you my memories.”

Theo offers her a flourishing bow, all his weight on one leg for a moment, that makes Harry struggle with the temptation to push him to the floor. “Why, Miss Granger, I would be honored.”

“Don’t do this, Theo.”

“Is that an order, my lord?”

Theo’s straightened up, and his face is very solemn as he bows his head in Harry’s direction. It looks nothing like the mocking gesture he made to Hermione. Harry hesitates for a long moment, and then says, “Not an order, but I need you to consider how these duels might influence the way people think of me as Lord Slytherin.”

There, that ought to hold him back.

“You don’t need to worry about that, my lord.”

“Oh, good.”

“I wouldn’t have offered to duel Darius Umbridge if I didn’t think I would win.”

“Theo.”

“Does he have a stone for me?” Ahalam asks, sticking his head out of Harry’s sleeve. “If he has a stone, then I will forgive him for not having any treats for me.”

Harry opens his mouth to argue that Ahalam never even demanded treats from Theo once, but Theo offers another flourishing bow in Ahalam’s direction and holds out a small grey thing in what seems to be a crystal box. Harry stares at it.

“Is that…a mouse stuffed with cheese?”

“Cheese!”

“Of course it is. You should know that I make an effort to remember every important fact about you, my lord, and one of them is that your snake is always hungry on every train ride. At the same time, I remembered that you didn’t want him feasting on pure cheese alone, and that means that he should have some of his natural food instead.”

Harry squints at Theo, while Ahalam dances impatiently on his shoulder. Then he sighs and takes the crystal box. He knows that he’ll never hear the end of it if he tries to throw it away or something—from Theo and Ahalam. And probably Hermione, at that, who talked to him very seriously over the summer about how accepting courting gifts from his betrothed would convince some of the people who sent him marriage offers that their cases are hopeless.

“Thank you, Theo.”

“You’re welcome, Harry.”

Theo steps forwards and kisses Harry chastely, probably because Ron is coming down the corridor and promptly starts making gagging noises. Theo winks at Harry and slips into the Lord Slytherin compartment. Ron glances at the box in Harry’s hand.

“A mouse,” Harry explains to him gravely. “Stuffed with cheese.”

“Uh.” Ron is going practically cross-eyed in his direction. “Whatever you say, mate.”

“Cheese, cheese now!”

“You can wait until we sit down.”

“There is only sitting for you, not me. And my poor stomach, it’s aching! I need cheeeese!”

Harry blinks. He’s pretty sure that snakes don’t get stomachaches, or at least not from hunger, so that must be a concept that Ahalam’s picked up from humans. He shakes his head as he sits down and offers Ahalam the mouse.

Theo and Hermione are whispering in the corner. Harry decides not to listen in, and instead starts a conversation with Justin when he enters about what his summer, spent mostly in Italy, has been like.

He and Justin are laughing about one of the times that Justin tried to speak Italian in a restaurant and ended up ordering the owner’s brother when Blaise bursts into the compartment. Harry finds himself touching his hand to his wand. Blaise’s eyes are so wide that he thinks something is wrong.

But instead, Blaise collapses into the seat beside Harry and blurts, “I got perfect marks on my Defense OWL!”

Harry smiles, remembering how insistent Blaise was on learning the Patronus Charm last year. “Congratulations!”

“Yes! And now maybe I’ll be the Defense professor someday!”

“You want to be?” Justin demands. “When the job is cursed and there are no laws on the books that can force the Headmaster to look into it? I spent the last few holidays searching through everything I could, but—”

“It was just a suggestion, Justin.”

“Suggestions often acquire the force of esoteric truth,” Daphne says, drifting through the door.

“You aren’t using esoteric correctly in that context,” Hermione complains, popping up from her conversation with Theo, and that promptly starts an argument with Daphne, in which Blaise and Theo occasionally join in.

Justin leans over as the compartment fills with earnest complaints and murmurs, “I didn’t hear anything about who the Defense professor was going to be this year. Have you?”

Harry shakes his head with a little frown. That’s a bit suspicious, now that he thinks about it. “I suppose we’ll find out when we get there.”

“As long as it isn’t Umbridge again, I can deal with it.”

*

Harry thinks he can, too, until Dumbledore, rather blandly, introduces Darius Umbridge as the new Defense professor, and Harry has to put his head down on the table for a moment.