[This Lordship Business]: Seeking Whom He May Exasperate, 16/?, Harry/Theo

[lomonaaeren]

In the end, breaking the illusion on the Ministry employee is no trouble for Theo when he has the key to the rune sequence that Babbling’s provided him. Harry leans back against the wall of the Room of Requirement and watches, narrow-eyed, as purple smoke appears around Dotson’s body, whirls, and dissipates.

For a moment, nothing happens. Then Susan mutters something under his breath and wakes Doston with a well-placed Ennervate.

Doston thrashes and squeaks in the chair they’ve bound her to. She has brown hair with streaks of black and eyes so wide that they seem to be trying to break out of her face. “Wh—who—who—”

“I think you know very well who I am,” Harry says, and ignores the way that Doston’s throat bobs. “The question is, why were you trying to lure me to Babbling’s office?”

“I wasn’t—I wasn’t intending to do anything—”

Harry just laughs and waits for Doston’s spluttering denials to die. Then he leans forwards. “You were trying to do something, and I want to know what it is.”

For long seconds, he doesn’t think Dotson will answer, even though she has to know she’s been caught by now. Ahalam squirms out onto Harry’s shoulder, looks at Dotson, and lets his tongue flick out. “She would not be a good chaperone.”

“Don’t do that!”

Harry stares at Dotson. “Don’t do what?”

“D—don’t speak to the snake like that!” Dotson is flinching back and lifting a hand in front of her face, even though Harry hasn’t done anything. He’s about to point out that he didn’t even speak back to Ahalam, when she says in a hushed voice, “I hate snakes. Oh, Merlin, I hate them.”

Theo catches Harry’s eye and grins.

“But he might like you,” Harry says thoughtfully, stepping closer to Doston and holding out his arm. Ahalam crawls out onto it, although his hisses at the moment are skeptical. “Don’t you want to hold him?”

“No! No!”

“You make a poor choice for a spy on Lord Slytherin, if you can’t stand the sight of a snake,” Theo sneers.

“I wasn’t—spying!”

“Then what were you doing?”

Dotson clenches her mouth shut. Harry shakes his head sadly and turns to Ahalam. “I’m afraid that I might have to have you eat her.”

“She is too big and stinky to eat.”

“Stinky?”

“She smells of fear.”

“Don’t do that!”

Harry turns back to Dotson, his eyebrows raised. “I wish you’d tell me what your objection is. I was inviting him to eat you, and he was saying that you would make too big a meal for him anyway. Do you want to be eaten?”

“Take him away! Take him away!”

“She does not like the prettiest snake?”

“She’s afraid of you.”

“Stop it! Stop it!”

Harry rolls his eyes at Dotson. “I’m amazed that you managed to come up to me in the corridor with Ahalam on my arm, if you hate him this much.”

“Not hatred,” Dotson says in a small voice, cowering down as if that will make Ahalam disappear. “Terror.”

“Then tell me what I want to know.”

Susan and Hermione are giving him weird looks. Harry hides a wince. He supposes that it is a bit much for him to be essentially torturing this woman with her phobia, but he’s losing patience every second.

“The—the Ministry wanted to know more about what you did on a day-to-day basis,” Dotson whispers, with some effort. “They wanted to know if there was someone else in your inner circle, beyond the first traitor, who could be brought to talk to Minister Fudge about your plans. I was supposed to approach you and talk to you in private. Sow some doubts, if I—could.” She sneaks a glance at Ahalam and shudders.

“She’s afraid of me?” Ahalam says in a small, heartbroken voice.

“She is,” Harry hisses back, while he keeps a close eye on Dotson. She flops around like a fish in the chair with her flinch.

“That sounds like spying to me,” Theo drawls.

“She should not be afraid of me. I am the prettiest snake.”

Ahalam curls into a small, heartbroken ball on Harry’s shoulder, but only for a moment. Then he turns and slithers back under Harry’s robe collar. Harry sighs and touches the cloth of the robe that covers him.

“It wasn’t spying!” Dotson relaxes a little now that Ahalam is out of sight and flicks her head. “It was—sabotage.”

“Because that’s so much better.”

Harry takes a step forwards and rests his hand on Theo’s shoulder. He understands exactly how Theo feels, but Dotson now looks as if she’s exchanged her fear of snakes for a fear of Notts. Harry doesn’t want her fainting before she talks to them. “Explain why the Ministry sent you instead of someone else.”

“I have enough rune skills to act like Babbling in certain situations.”

Harry waits. And waits. Then he snorts. “That’s it?”

“I didn’t know if a student would come up to me and ask me a question that they wanted to ask her! Rune skills were necessary.”

“But they didn’t pick someone familiar with the situation? With the laws governing Lords? Who at least didn’t have a crippling fear of snakes?” Justin asks in disgust from next to the wall. Harry didn’t even see him get here.

“Why would they need someone like that?”

Theo closes his eyes for a long moment.

Harry gently rubs his boyfriend’s shoulder, then takes his hand back with a sigh and a shake of his head. “And who’s the traitor in the inner circle that they already have? Why did you think you could persuade someone else to turn traitor?”

“I have rune skills.”

“So you would have forced someone to tell you the truth about their doubts in Harry with a runic circle?” Hermione breaks in. She looks appalled. “That’s—scandalous. Horrible.” She takes a deep breath and then speaks the next words in the tone of someone talking about how many people have died in an earthquake. “A perversion of knowledge.”

Dotson just flicks her hair again.

“I think she’s not scared enough,” Theo mutters, not far enough under his breath. “Bring out the snake again.”

Harry steps forwards instead, because it seems like too big a task right now to explain that Ahalam is upset because someone is afraid of him. “You really came into the school to spy on me—”

“Sabotage! Don’t you know the difference, you stupid little boy?”

Harry doesn’t even manage to blink before Susan’s crossed the distance dividing her from Dotson and jabbed her wand under Dotson’s chin, tilting her head back at what has to be an agonizing angle. “You don’t speak like that to the Lord Slytherin,” Susan snarls into Dotson’s face, while the other woman stares at her with eyes wide enough to hurt, too. “You give him all the respect and deference he deserves.”

Harry glances at Theo and surprises a smug little smile on his face. So he supposes Susan and Theo are taking turns playing the scary one. He sighs and steps forwards. “Susan.”

“Are you going to deny that she’s offering you disrespect, my lord?” Susan doesn’t turn away from Dotson to look at him. “I’ll step back if you can explain to me how her comment was in any way respectful.”

“I don’t think it is. But I also don’t want to kill her.”

“There’s something else we can do, my lord.” Susan keeps her wand in place, but glances over her shoulder and towards the small bundle of Ahalam on Harry’s.

“That would be torture,” Harry says softly. He doesn’t need to say that he thinks it would be torture for Ahalam instead of Dotson. They’re free to think whatever they want.

“Would it be? Or would it be a non-violent method of getting her to speak?” Susan snorts and turns back to Dotson, whom she seems to think has got too comfortable, jabbing in her wand again. Dotson squeaks breathlessly. “Because we prefer violent ones, but we defer to what you want.”

Harry sighs and turns to Dotson. “You’re not going to tell me who the traitor is?”

Dotson glares in silence.

“All right,” Harry says sadly, and draws his wand. “Then I suppose I’ll have to conjure a venomous snake, since my little one doesn’t have the poison to punish you as you deserve.” He turns to a blank patch of floor. “Serpen—”

“Please don’t!” Dotson shrieks loudly enough that Susan grimaces at the noise and steps back with her hands over her ears. Dotson’s returned to flinging her head against the back of the chair. “Don’t! Please!”

“Then will you tell us about the traitor?” Harry keeps his wand suspended above the middle of the floor.

“I only know their initials!”

“That’s enough,” Susan says, sounding like she’s on the verge of licking her lips. Harry would roll his eyes, but he’s sure that someone would see it and take offense.

“O.W.! That’s all I know!”

Harry catches his breath. He feels as if someone’s punched him in the stomach. He sags backwards, but there’s no wall behind him, and he nearly falls down. Theo is there to catch him, hooking an arm around his waist and whispering into his ear.

“I have you, my lord. It’s fine. I promise. I’m going to catch you in all situations like this and it’ll be fine.”

“Does she mean—” Ron begins.

“Oliver Wood,” Harry whispers.

*

“You know that you can’t just go charging off and confront him.”

“I know.”

Hermione pauses in her lecture, looking so surprised that Harry manages a smile that he didn’t think he would manage for weeks to come. “You do?”

“Of course.” Harry sighs and tilts his head back, staring up at the ceiling of the Gryffindor common room. He and Ron and Hermione have moved over to occupy a corner near the hearth, and although the twins followed them, they withdrew with little nods when Harry asked them to. Hermione put up a Privacy Charm, which means that Katie Bell and Colin and the rest staring at them with concern can’t hear what they’re discussing. This is a matter for Lord Slytherin’s inner circle only.

Inner circle. Ugh, I sound like Voldemort.

But Harry shakes off the comparison. He’s just doing what he has to do, which is discuss the situation with people who can give him advice. “It wouldn’t do any good. Oliver might have a good alibi, or he might already have been taken into protective Ministry custody if it was—if they thought he was useful enough. And he would deny it, and so would most of the people around us.”

“I sort of deny it,” Ron mutters, crossing his arms. “I can’t think of anyone who’s a bigger fan of you than Oliver is.”

“Could he have been tricked?” Hermione asks.

Harry shakes his head gloomily. “He knows that I don’t like Fudge. He doesn’t like Fudge either, I thought. He wasn’t here when they tried to hold the Tournament, but he certainly heard about their plans for canceling it.”

“Those Howlers he sent to Dumbledore,” Hermione says, and her mouth trembles for a second.

Harry half-smiles, pain stabbing him in the center of his chest. He wishes he could speak to Ahalam for comfort, but Ahalam hasn’t spoken since they left the hidden passage where Theo gave Dotson a potion to keep her unconscious.

It’s going to be all right. They’ll recover. Ahalam will get his confidence back, and Harry will recover from this betrayal and make sure that no one close to him can betray him again. He knows that Theo and Susan and Hermione and everyone else will help as much as they can. And he can still feel the strands of the web that connect them to him. They don’t distrust him and they’re still in the web, despite it being a stupid mistake on his part not to figure out that Oliver betrayed him.

If Oliver broke the web…

Harry knows that he could never forgive him then.

As it is, he just wants to know what the hell Oliver thought he was doing.

“It’s probably for what he thought was a good reason,” Ron says. “You know Oliver. He’s not—he’s not the sort that plots betrayal. Even his insistence that everyone keep our strategic plays secret from Slytherin was because he thought Slytherin would cheat, not because he wanted to cheat himself.”

“Politics isn’t Quidditch, Ron.”

“I know that! I’m just saying that this is Oliver. The man whose idea of subtlety is have three Chasers try a play instead of two!”

Harry laughs weakly. Yeah, he can see what Ron means. The idea of Oliver betraying him is so unthinkable that Harry will try any excuse he can to flee from it in his head.

But he still has to wonder and worry. What if the Ministry pressured someone Oliver cares about, and that’s why? But even then, Oliver could have come to him and asked Harry to do something about it instead.

He should have come to Harry instead.

Harry swallows and asks, “Do you think there’s anyone I could send to question him? The twins, maybe, since they were on the team with him? Katie? Angelina? Someone he would tell the truth to?”

“I think he’d tell the truth to you,” Hermione says softly. “The point is to confront him and make him admit it.”

“I thought you said I couldn’t confront him.”

“You can’t go charging off and confront him,” Hermione corrects him primly. “It has to be planned. But we’ll find an answer to this, Harry. And it’s for the best that it be you instead of someone else.”

“You really think so?”

“You should do it. Before Theo or Susan comes up with a way to do it.”

Harry grimaces. He’s grateful, always, for the loyalty of his people, but Theo and Susan do try to take it to extremes. “I suppose I should send Oliver a letter and ask to see him on a Hogsmeade weekend? At least we can probably keep the damage contained if we meet him outside or in the Hog’s Head or something.”

“If we do it in the Hog’s Head, the damage would probably improve the ambience,” Ron mutters.

“Ron!”

Harry blinks and glances between Ron and Hermione. Hermione is sitting up with her eyes very wide, as if Ron said a swear word. Harry raises his eyebrows. “What?”

“What?” Ron echoes him, blinking at Hermione himself.

“You said ambience!” Hermione claps her hands. “I’m so proud of you!”

Ron slouches down into his chair, his face turning so red that he looks like he’s on fire. Well, no, his hair already makes him look like this, but he looks as if he might consume the chair that he’s sitting on right now. “Shut up,” he mutters.

“I just think it’s adorable.”

Harry laughs a little, and then feels a stirring on his shoulder. He turns away from Ron and Hermione as they start an argument with each other about exactly who and what’s adorable, and asks softly, “Are you all right?”

“That woman was scared of me. But I’m not scary.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Not the way that Fawkes is scary. He could burn someone to death or leave them to die. I can only have them admire me. If she were a mouse, I could be scary. But she isn’t a mouse.”

“No.” Harry gently touches Ahalam’s face near his eye, and Ahalam leans against him for comfort, something he hasn’t done since he was a hatchling two years ago. “It’s not your fault. Sometimes people are just terrified of snakes for no good reason, and it has nothing to do with whether the snake in question is actually dangerous.”

“There is only one thing to be done.”

“What’s that?”

“There shall be cheese. So much cheese that it can make the prettiest snake forget being upset.”

Harry kisses the side of Ahalam’s head. “Of course. Let me get some.”

Ahalam wraps tightly around Harry’s neck and says, so softly that Harry can barely hear him, “You will get me cheese?”

“Of course. You’re the prettiest snake.”

“And you,” Ahalam says, as he lays his head under Harry’s chin and holds it there, “are the kindest human.”