Chapter Forty-Five of 'For the Game'

[lomonaaeren]

“What did you want to talk about?”

Ron and Hermione exchanged a loaded glance. Harry hid a sigh. He did want to talk to his Gryffindor friends, and not lose them. But they’d sent him a weird letter asking to visit him at Grimmauld Place, and now they were just sitting around the table and staring into their tea and not talking.

“It’s about what you did at the Quidditch World Cup.”

“I’m sorry, Hermione. I didn’t realize that my Omnioculars were blocking your view of the pitch.”

Hermione stared at him with her mouth slightly open. Then she said, “Harry Potter, this is not the time for jokes.”

“I don’t think it’s the time for subtlety, either. Why don’t you tell me what you’re concerned about?”

Hermione exchanged a glance with Ron that Harry couldn’t interpret, but which didn’t remind him of the silent conversations Theo and Blaise had. Then she sighed and faced Harry. “We’re worried because you killed someone.”

“Set the snake on them. I didn’t curse them myself.”

“You still killed someone.”

“Yeah. I did.”

Hermione and Ron both blinked. Harry wondered if they’d thought he would deny it, or if they’d expected him to be upset and cry on their shoulders.

He wanted to sigh at the thought. Didn’t his friends know him by now? Even the ones he didn’t share a House with?

“Why did you do it?” Ron asked softly.

“I hated what they were doing to that poor Muggle family,” Harry said simply. “I thought about them dropping the children, or killing one of them. I don’t know that it would have happened. But with so many people running the other way instead of staying to help, there’s every chance that it could have.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Because Sirius and I interfered, Hermione. Who knows what would have happened if we’d turned and run like everyone else?”

Hermione flinched.

And abruptly, Harry was sure that he knew what this was about. He’d thought it was just the killing. Maybe the fact that he’d killed someone when he was still a Hogwarts student. Maybe because Ron and Hermione were worried that having Slytherin friends was leading Harry “down Dark paths.”

But no, now he knew.

“I don’t blame you for running,” he told Hermione softly. “It was chaos, and you couldn’t know that you could help them.”

“That’s not—that’s not what I’m upset about.”

“Oh?” Harry asked gently. He focused on Hermione and found her blinking furiously, to hold back tears that he hadn’t actually seen in her eyes. “I think it is. I’m not upset with you for not being there. It’s not wrong for you to have run. Even the bloody Aurors didn’t get there in time. Sirius and I were the ones who had to do it. And the snake. At least Sirius is an adult and the snake doesn’t care about who it’s biting.”

“And you?”

Ron’s voice was a little high-pitched. Harry faced him and spoke the truth as he understood it. “I’m trained.”

“Trained in what?”

“Sirius has been training me in defensive spells so that what happened to him in the past won’t happen to me.”

Harry left out all his practice with Millicent, and with Blaise, and with the curses he’d studied, and Sirius’s other motivations. He’d accepted during his second year that his friendship with Ron and Hermione came with conditions. For that matter, so did the one with Theo and Blaise. He could joke with Ron and Hermione about their parents, for example, but never with his Slytherin friends.

The tradeoffs were worth it, to have all of them.

And if he sometimes wished for unconditional friendship…well, now he had unconditional love from Sirius. He got to feel it.

There were some things Ron and Hermione didn’t need to know.

“I wish we’d been with you,” Hermione whispered. “Then you wouldn’t have had to kill someone.”

“Yeah, maybe Dad and Bill could have handled them,” Ron said.

“I didn’t really get to talk to Bill. You said he was a Curse-Breaker?”

“Yeah. Honestly, I think it’s a really brilliant job, even though I want to be an Auror. And Bill’s pretty brilliant, too.”

“Did he ever say how he got trained for it? I think it sounds interesting.”

“He’s always had an aptitude for defensive spells and curses, and he got fascinated by enchanted artifacts in his sixth year…”

Harry listened to Ron ramble with a smile. Curse-Breaking was actually a career he’d considered, and that Sirius was urging him towards. Not because Sirius thought it was the best thing in the world, Harry had decided, but simply because Sirius was always unequivocally encouraging about everything Harry showed an interest in.

He felt Hermione’s glance. When he looked at her, she looked down at her hands.

Harry wanted to sigh. They would probably have to discuss this sometime in the future, a discussion he was already dreading. He didn’t know the right words to both reassure his friends and convince them that he wasn’t evil, or whatever.

But he knew that he wasn’t going to back down or confess his guilt or attend Mind-Healing sessions or whatever other solution Hermione might have suggested.

If Sirius suggested it, now…

Harry frowned at the leap in his heart. He hadn’t realized Sirius had so much power over him.

I’ll have to be careful of that.

He turned to Ron and asked another question about Curse-Breaking, and the rest of the afternoon passed smoothly.

*

“Did you hear about the rumors?”

Harry blinked and looked up. He’d been sharing a compartment with Ron and Hermione for this part of the trip, but Ron had gone to the bathroom and Hermione had vanished into a compartment filled with people Harry thought were mostly Ravenclaws to argue about something or other. Now Malfoy, of all people, was posing in the doorway. “What are you talking about?” Harry asked slowly.

His heartbeat had picked up a little, wondering if Malfoy had heard something about the dead man at the Quidditch World Cup—whose name Harry still didn’t know—and was about to attack him for it. The snake stirred and hissed on his shoulder, ready to strike.

“Let me poison him. The world would lose nothing tasty or interesting.”

Harry fought not to smile. It would make Malfoy think he was more important than he was.

“There’s something wonderful coming to Hogwarts,” Malfoy whispered. He walked into the compartment and sat down across from Harry like he had a right to be there. Harry stared at him, but that didn’t change anything. “I can’t tell you about it right now because my father made me promise not to, but it’ll be revealed tonight anyway.”

“All right.”

“I thought you might have heard the rumors going around the Ministry.”

“I don’t spend time at the Ministry,” Harry said, more than a little puzzled. Had Malfoy heard from someone else that Harry did?

“Not even to get the compensation Black’s due?”

“What compensation?”

Malfoy faltered for the first time. “They must have paid him something for being shut up in Azkaban for twelve years without being guilty.”

“If they did, he hasn’t mentioned the number to me. And he probably got paid already.”

“But aren’t you interested in it?”

“Not particularly? Sirius would tell me if he wanted me to know.”

“But the money! What if he dies and you found out that he spent it all when you could have inherited it?”

Harry rose to his feet and shoved his wand into Malfoy’s throat before he even considered the action. Malfoy choked and coughed and raised a hand as if he was going to grab Harry’s arm, but the snake crawled out onto Harry’s arm and hissed. Malfoy froze.

Ron, who’d come back from going to the bathroom, chortled. “Good one, mate.”

“Sirius is not going to die, and you’re not going to talk about his death,” Harry said to Malfoy, barely keeping himself from breaking into Parseltongue. It was something that was a lot harder when he was angry. “Get away from me.”

Malfoy flailed backwards, barely catching himself before he slammed into Ron. Ron tried to shove him, but Malfoy pulled back and up. His face was pale and his hands were trembling, but there were two red spots of fury on his cheeks as well. “You’re going to regret that so much, Potter,” he said softly.

“Then I will. But not as much as you’ll regret talking about Sirius’s death in front of me if you keep doing it.”

Malfoy opened his mouth. Harry leaned forwards. Malfoy promptly turned and ran for his life.

“What did he want?” Ron asked, almost collapsing onto the seat across from Harry. He was grinning to the point that it looked likely to hurt his face.

“He wanted to tell me about some rumors that are going around the Ministry and something that’ll be announced at Hogwarts tonight. The feast, I reckon.” Harry sat down and rolled his shoulders, getting rid of some of the stiffness. “And then he said that I should have heard about it already because I should have been at the Ministry due to the compensation they offered Sirius. And I would inherit the money when Sirius died. I just…”

The mere thought of Sirius dying sent outright panic tearing through Harry’s stomach. He couldn’t stand thinking about it. It had been hard enough to hug Sirius this morning and then turn and walk onto the train. He didn’t want to think about Sirius going away forever, instead of just the few months that it would be before Harry saw him again.

“Did they offer Sirius compensation?”

“He never discussed the details with me.”

“Huh. My dad would have.”

Harry just shrugged. He really didn’t know Mr. Weasley outside a few conversations like the one at the World Cup, and Ron’s father probably would have been a different person anyway if he’d spent a lot of time in Azkaban.

But there was no use in saying that to Ron.

*

“We missed you on the train.”

Harry jumped when Blaise reached up from behind him to ruffle the hair against his neck. He licked his lips and responded, “I was sitting with Ron and Hermione. We’ve had a bit of a difficult relationship lately, and I knew I’d get to spend more time with you later.”

“We would still have wanted to sit with you.”

Harry turned around and smiled at Theo, catching a glimpse of Malfoy on the way. The other boy was sitting at the far end of the Slytherin table from Harry and decidedly not looking at him. “Yeah, that would have worked so well.”

“You’re the only person I know who doesn’t want all of their friends to get along.”

“It’s not going to happen. I’ve accepted that.”

“Harry.”

Millicent had sat down across from him with a faint smile, although it didn’t reach her eyes. Harry supposed she was waiting to see if he would welcome her, or if he’d decided their friendship was inconvenient.

“Hi, Millicent,” he told her. “What did you do during the summer?”

Millicent leaned forwards and looked a little at Harry, as if making sure that he really wanted her to speak. Harry maintained a calm, iron smile. Of course he did, and Millicent was his friend like Blaise and Theo were.

All right, so they weren’t as close. But that didn’t mean he would stand for other people making fun of Millicent or driving her away.

“I went to Italy with my Mum and Dad.”

“Did you? I’ve never been. Did you stay in a magical or a Muggle place?”

Millicent sent an anxious glance down the table, probably because she reckoned that someone would be listening to them and figuring out that she might have gone somewhere Muggle. Harry ignored that. He knew she was a half-blood, and most of the rest of Slytherin probably did as well, and Harry’s wand was always ready to strike if they wanted to make something of it.

Millicent licked her lips and looked at him, tilting her head a little to the side, before she seemed to decide that she believed his silent promise. “Muggle for the first week,” she said slowly. “Then on the magical side.”

“What was your favorite?”

“There was this tiny place where one little witch made all the food by herself…”

Harry nodded and listened and smiled, and sent a threatening look at Parkinson when she started to whinge about Muggles. Parkinson shut up. Harry enjoyed chatting with Millicent for most of the rest of the meal, except for the part where Dumbledore had to stand up to announce the Tri-Wizard Tournament.

Harry sighed a little. “Of course it’s something like that,” he muttered.

“You hadn’t heard the rumors?” Blaise asked, leaning close to Harry.

Harry shook his head. “Why would I have? I don’t pay that much attention to politics or what the Ministry’s doing.”

“And yet, you were in the papers as a new favorite of Minister Fudge for stopping Death Eaters,” Theo muttered.

Harry eyed him, wondering why Theo sounded disgruntled about it when Harry already knew that he hadn’t killed anyone Theo valued. “Yeah, at the time, but he’s forgotten all about me again. And that was about defending people, not about impressing the Minister.”

“Defending Muggles.”

Malfoy had apparently decided to take over where Parkinson had left off. Harry turned towards him and smiled in a way that made Malfoy flinch. “They’re still human.”

“No, they’re not!”

Harry didn’t give a Crup’s smallest shit about blood status, but Sirius had told him a few things about the Malfoys when he’d come back from “dealing with” Narcissa that he’d thought might be useful. Harry adopted a thoughtful expression and used one now. “Then why did you have a few half-blood ancestors yourself? Are you saying that your ancestors practiced bestiality?”

“No! That’s not—no! And I did not have half-blood ancestors!”

“Amaranthe Farley. Sure, her last name sounded like Fawley, but she was a half-blood who took her Muggle father’s last name.”

“No, it was Fawley!”

“Not what your parents said.”

It was probably only Narcissa who had told Sirius that, or Sirius had already known it. But it made Malfoy splutter satisfyingly. Harry smiled and turned back to Millicent.

He caught sight of Blaise and Theo staring at him on the way, and had to concentrate on not rolling his eyes. He would probably need to endure some lecture on caring about politics the wrong way later.

For now, he wasn’t going to care at all. His conversation with Millicent was more important.

*

“I thought you didn’t care about politics.”

“I don’t.”

“Or blood purity, either.”

“I don’t.”

“Then what was the conversation with Malfoy at dinner about?”

Harry rolled his eyes and turned towards Blaise and Theo. They were both sprawled on the outside of their beds, with a careful Silencing Charm shimmering in the air above them. Harry knew that it would keep Crabbe, Goyle, or Malfoy from hearing anything.

“He came into my compartment on the train and made fun of Sirius,” Harry said simply. “I wasn’t going to let him get away with making fun of me, too.”

“But your choice of insults?”

“Blackmail Sirius gave me on the Malfoys.”

Blaise and Theo exchanged one of their longest and most intense glances yet, one that made Harry think they could have traded hundreds of words in the silence, or their equivalent. He watched them and felt his longing swell inside of him.

It would have to wait, though. Maybe someday he would be as close to them as they were to each other.

“So you were basically using whatever tactic worked,” Theo said slowly.

“Yes? When have you ever known me not to do that? That’s why I ran away from the Dark Lord, and why I attacked the basilisk the way I did, and why I treated Sirius like I did when I thought he was a madman who’d betrayed my parents.”

“I—didn’t think it extended to being willing to call Muggles beasts.”

“If you think that’s what I was doing, Theo, you’re as stupid as Malfoy.”

Theo’s eyes shone for a second, but with an emotion that Harry didn’t think he could have named. Then he laughed abruptly and reached out to squeeze Harry’s shoulder. “All right. I think you’re right, and blackmail like that is the only thing that would have made Draco shut up for even a little while.”

“Then why the interrogation?”

“We were trying to understand you better, that’s all.”

“Bollocks.”

Blaise and Theo gave each other glances, and Harry shrugged. As long as they were his friends and not blood purists and included him sometimes, it would be fine.

He lay down and listened to the snake’s wistful hisses.

“All house-elves should be as wise as the one you took. There would be naked baby birds running about the den, and eggs on the pillows, and nests of young mice waiting in the morning…”

Despite everything trying about the day, Harry was smiling as he fell asleep.