Chapter Thirty-Nine of 'For the Game'

[lomonaaeren]

“Come in, Harry.”

Harry slipped into the office that Professor Lupin looked as if he had already mostly packed up. The grindylow was still in its tank in the center, and there was a large trunk sitting off to the side that hadn’t been there before, but Harry didn’t think that it would take Lupin long to pack those.

“I understand you have something to say to me.”

Harry turned to face Lupin and locked his hands together behind his back. He had left the snake in his dormitory, since it was irritated enough with Lupin that it might really have tried to bite him. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Sorry for what?”

“Sorry for what the Headmaster believes I did.”

Lupin paused for a long second. Then he said, “The Headmaster must have knowledge that you did it, Harry, not merely belief, or he wouldn’t have asked you to apologize to me.”

“Can werewolves smell deception?”

Lupin’s face crinkled in disgust. “I’m a person, Harry, not merely a werewolf.”

“You’re both.”

Lupin paused again, staring at Harry as if he suspected him of lying. Harry stared back, flatly. The moments passed, long and slow enough that the grindylow started to tap boredly against the side of its tank.

Then Lupin murmured, “You think of me as a person, but you did this to me.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, we can smell when someone’s lying. More or less.” Lupin gave a quick, irritated jerk of his head. “That doesn’t mean that I’m about to serve as your portable Veritaserum, or whatever it is that you have in mind.”

“I didn’t do this to you.”

Lupin stared at him, and then took a long, harsh sniff. Harry kept staring at him, and Lupin turned around with a soft curse under his breath, pacing back and forth in his office for a moment.

“That’s not—that can’t be true.”

“The Headmaster said the same thing when I told him the truth, and he ignored what his Legilimency was telling him.”

“But if you didn’t tell people, who did?”

“Well, it wasn’t me. I had no idea you were a werewolf.”

“But why did it happen now?”

“I have no idea how long the curse on the Defense post takes to work. But I know there is one. Surely it could have chosen a different time to work, but it could also be this one, couldn’t it?”

For a long moment, Lupin stood there with his eyes closed. Then he turned back and said in a stiff voice, “It seems that I owe you an apology, Mr. Potter.”

Sound more like someone’s puppeting you with a hand up your arse, why don’t you. But Harry just inclined his head shallowly and said, “All right.”

“Why did the Headmaster disbelieve you?”

“He hates me for not being a Gryffindor.”

Again the stare, again the sniff. But it was the truth as far as Harry knew, and after another long moment, Lupin looked away from him, his lips curling up as he nodded.

“It was a disappointment to a lot of people when you became a Slytherin.”

This is where I belong, Harry thought, even as he considered that that might not have been true three years ago. Maybe he’d become who he’d become because of the Sorting Hat, and everything would have been different if he’d gone into Gryffindor.

He would have been closer friends with Ron and Hermione. He’d probably have more of Snape’s hatred and Dumbledore’s support than he had at the moment.

He wouldn’t have been friends with Blaise and Theo.

That feels like a loss.

“Well, I can’t help that,” Harry said mildly, when he realized that Lupin was looking at him, even leaning forwards a little, as if straining after the answer. “That’s just the way that things are.”

“What if people wanted to change them?”

“They can want that all they like.”

There was a long moment when Harry thought that Lupin might say something else, something that would change things—

But the charged moment slid past. Lupin raised a hand and wiped it across his eyes. “This was my first steady job in five years,” he whispered. “I so hoped that I would be able to find a way to defeat the curse and stay at Hogwarts. And instead, I’m being pushed out and shunned, as ever.”

Harry wanted to say something. Something about how he hadn’t been the one to do it, and he’d thought Lupin believed him. Something about how Lupin at least sometimes had a steady job to support himself, while Harry had been suffering and starving at the Dursleys’ house.

But what he would have wanted most of all was to go back in time and make Lupin take care of him, and that was impossible on any number of levels.

So instead, he shrugged and stepped back, and said, “Good luck, Professor.”

Lupin studied him for a long moment, wanting something that Harry didn’t think he would have been able to give even if he’d known what it was. Then he nodded, seeming to shrink, and packed away the grindylow tank and the trunk with a single wave of his wand.

When he can do magic like that, more fluidly than I’ve seen some of the adults here do it, why in the world is he starving so much?

But Harry knew that was another question he would probably never know the answer to. He stood back as Lupin bustled out of the office. Lupin seemed to flinch, as if he thought contact with Harry would contaminate him.

Or he would contaminate me?

Harry shook his head. He had read enough about werewolves by now to know that was impossible unless it was the full moon.

But then, he knew already that Lupin had never been the most rational of wizards.

*

“I have a confession to make.”

Harry leaned back against the shelf of books, partially because he was still tired from their exams the day before and partially because he wanted to prevent Hermione from seeing exactly which books of hexes and curses and jinxes he was looking at. “You do?”

Hermione nodded firmly. There were dark circles under her eyes, but with as many subjects as she was taking and how often she tended to fling herself into studying, Harry wasn’t surprised about that.

“Yes. I—I wanted to apologize for not being around this year. The thing is, that I had—a secret as to why I could take all the classes I did.”

“You do?”

Harry stared as Hermione nodded again, reached under her robe, and took out a glittering golden hourglass that hung on a chain like a pendant. “This is called a Time-Turner,” Hermione explained, while Harry continued to stare. “It allows me to turn back time a couple of hours. I could attend classes that were at the same hour that way.”

It took Harry what felt like ages to find his voice. “And who gave it to you?”

“Professor McGonagall. She said sometimes the Ministry allowed students to have them to study like I do, but it’s very rare. And I had to keep it secret and take good care of it.”

Harry swallowed and ignored the bitterness that probably no professor would ever do something like that for him. He examined Hermione’s face. “Did you get any sleep?”

Hermione’s cheeks darkened with a blush. “Um.”

“You forgot to turn it often enough to give yourself time to sleep, didn’t you?” Harry sighed. “You were studying. If you didn’t have to appear in the Great Hall for meals, you might not have eaten, either.”

“I promise that I’ve learned my lesson, Harry!” Hermione said earnestly. “It’s really not worth it, trying to take that many classes. I’m only really interested in Arithmancy and Ancient Runes and Care of Magical Creatures out of the electives anyway. Professor McGonagall promised she would make arrangements for me to attend the classes I wanted next year without having to skip about in time.”

“Well, I’m glad you told me,” Harry said as gently as he could. “Did you tell Ron, too? I know he was worried about you.”

“He was?”

“Well, I mean, you know how Ron gets. The more worried about something he is, the angrier he gets.”

“Yes.” Hermione sighed. “I know.”

“So I think you should tell him as soon as you can.”

“Thanks, Harry. You’re a good friend.” And Hermione leaned forwards and gave him a quick hug before leaving.

Harry watched her go, and then shook his head and turned back to the books he was going to copy pages out of to study this summer. If he’d had a Time-Turner, he probably wouldn’t have used it for classes, anyway. He would have just used it to get extra time to train with Millicent and Blaise, and sneak around so that Dumbledore couldn’t keep accusing him of things he hadn’t done.

A small flicker of flame curled through the air above his palm. Harry took a deep breath and pulled his anger back before it exploded out of him and burned something.

I hate when that happens.

Harry had become quite used to not getting things he wanted. There was no reason to throw a tantrum about it.

*

Harry hid an impatient sigh as he rode the stairs up to the Headmaster’s office, yet again. This was getting tiresome. He was sure that Dumbledore had found something new to blame him for, but Harry had no idea what.

“Do come in, Harry.”

Dumbledore sounding cheerful was probably a bad sign. Harry walked in and aimed for the chair they usually made him sit in, then paused. There was someone else sitting in the chair beside it.

“Um. Hello, Harry.”

Sirius Black smiled at him. He’d been cleaned up and had hair that didn’t look as if worms or fleas were hiding in it. Harry gave him a strained smile and sat down. “Hello,” he said as shyly as he could.

“Sirius has been acquitted of any wrongdoing,” Dumbledore said. “They’re going to wait until after you’ve gone home to announce it, as there’s certain to be an uproar, and we didn’t think you needed to deal with that in school.”

“Um. Thanks.” He wouldn’t be nice to me without a reason, so what’s his game? If anything, I’d think he’d want the uproar to see how unsettled it would make me.

Then Harry added a mental shrug to his ideas. He didn’t actually know Dumbledore that well. It was possible that the old bastard would be fine with Harry going back to the Dursleys’ house (he thought) and going through the uproar from there, as long as it would serve some plan he had.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Black began.

“We talked about this, Sirius.”

Harry braced himself. Dumbledore was using a variation of the gentle, chiding tone that he used with Harry. He waited for Black to act humble and apologize.

Instead, Black turned around, glared at Dumbledore, and said, “Yeah, we did. And I didn’t agree. My priority is Harry.”

Huh?

The sense of astonishment was so vast that the words honestly didn’t register to Harry at first. He just stared at Black, and felt as if he were falling from a great height into cold water. The sensation of slamming into something hard wouldn’t have been any greater.

But things were real, and Harry couldn’t let his astonishment drag him down, the same way he hadn’t been able to do the first time he’d dueled Malfoy. He sat up a little and said, “What did you want to ask me?”

“Whether you want to come live with me. In my house.”

Again, it was like slamming into cold water at the bottom of a cliff. Harry stared at Black, and he knew he had his mouth a little open. It seemed there wasn’t much he could do about that, and he honestly wasn’t sure that he wanted to try.

“I—you’d let me do that?”

“Of course. You’re my godson. My priority. I said that.”

“Harry has lived with his family his whole life,” Dumbledore decided that the time was right to say. “His aunt and uncle and cousin are his only remaining blood kin. It would be well to remember that and—”

“And they hate me,” Harry said. “They lock me in a cupboard and threaten to take my food away and call me a freak and make me do chores while they sit around watching the telly. They hate me, and I hate them.”

Dumbledore paused. Then he said slowly, “I can make allowances for a teenager’s understandable emotions, Harry, but you don’t mean that.”

“I do. I hate them. They hate me.”

“That—I didn’t know that.”

Dumbledore sounded honestly shaken, honestly confused. Harry turned to face Black, who was watching him with the oddest expression. “Do you still want to offer me a place in your house, knowing I hate my family?”

“We have that in common.”

“We do?”

“My mother was one of the vilest—witches to ever walk this planet. And there were curses and locking me in the attic and all the rest.” Black grimaced and shook his head. “I had a little brother I loved, but who also got the brunt of my parents’ good attention. I can’t promise that we’re the same, but we have some things that are.”

Harry leaned forwards. “And what do you think of me being in Slytherin?”

“I don’t know what to think. James would never have been. I don’t think Lily would have, either. But maybe that had more to do with her being Muggleborn at a time when being a Muggleborn in Slytherin House would have been suicidal than anything else. I don’t know.”

Harry nodded slowly, watching Black’s face.

“Harry, your family does love you,” Dumbledore said.

“They don’t. But it doesn’t matter, sir, not if I hate them.”

“Harry,” Dumbledore whispered.

“The house I’ll be taking you to is old and dirty and needs cleaning,” Black said. “But we can work on doing that with spells I’ll teach you. There’s—lots of stuff we need to talk about and lots of things we need to do. I shouldn’t have left you alone as long as I did. I’m sorry. But will you come with me?”

There was the cliff. The fall into dark water. But there was also someone offering their hand to Harry. For the first time, not one of his friends.

I can always run away to Knockturn Alley if it doesn’t work out. Or maybe Ron or Hermione would let me stay with them.

“Yes,” Harry whispered. “All right.”

Black’s face utterly transformed when he smiled.