lomonaaeren

Title: Practicing Liars (6/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Summary: AU of HBP. Harry found out that he was Snape’s son two years ago, and he’s carefully concealed it. But now Snape is his Defense teacher, and Draco Malfoy is up to something, and Dumbledore is dying, and the final battle is coming up, and everything is getting very, very complicated.
Pairings: Background Ron/Hermione and Ron/Lavender. Harry and Draco have a ‘complicated friendship’ which will become a preslash relationship. For obvious reasons, Snape/Lily is mentioned.
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence (lots of violence), profanity, angst, character death (not Snape, Harry, or Draco), slash and het hints.
Author’s Notes: While I’m hoping to make this plot at least somewhat original, I know that I’m treading on well-covered ground. I don’t know yet how long the story will be, except that it will be novel-length. Practicing Liars is being written for my dear soft2smooth2000, who has helped me wonderfully with keeping track of and linking to my fics on LJ.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Six—A Change in Strategy

“But I don’t understand.” Zacharias Smith had his upper lip stuck out. Harry managed not to roll his eyes, but it took a lot of effort. Smith was always pouting like that, and Harry had no idea how Hermione managed to stay patient with him. At least Harry didn’t have to teach him. “Why can’t we use the Shield Charm to deflect the Severing Curse? It’s just like the Blasting Curse, and—”

“No, it isn’t,” Hermione said. Harry watched Ginny’s horse Patronus gallop around the room, and traded smiles with her. The smile was partially for Hermione, though no one else needed to know that. Probably the reason his friend could work so well with Smith was the fact that she just talked over him when he tried to argue. “They have completely different incantations, and just because you heard one person mutter something that sounded like one of them once doesn’t mean they’re identical.”

Harry glanced over his shoulder. Smith cowered in front of Hermione and then started practicing the Shield Charm again. Harry moved on to check the way that Neville was drilling three of the younger Ravenclaws in the Patronus Charm.

Neville grinned at him. He’d grown this year—Harry tried not to feel resentful that Neville was taller than he was, now—and there was sweat on his forehead and muscles along his arms. His wand moved with efficient quickness. He was one of the few other students that Harry would have trusted in battle with him. “Some of them want to know why they’re practicing the Patronus Charm,” he advised Harry in a whisper. “They complain that they want to learn something new.”

Harry hesitated. He hadn’t told anyone about the strange Dementors he’d thought he’d seen in the dungeons because—well, the more he thought about it, the more he couldn’t believe they had been Dementors. But at the same time, he didn’t want Dumbledore’s Army to get out of practice in the Patronus Charm.

“It’s a good indication of how much magic someone can focus,” he said, which was true, but not the main reason. It sounded good, though, and Neville nodded seriously. “If they can do a corporal Patronus, then it’s a sign they’re strong,” Harry added.

Neville shook his head. “You know no one other than you can do that consistently, Harry.”

Harry felt a rush of warmth through his chest. He would remember that the next time he had to fight, he told himself, and make sure to take Neville along. “Well, some of them might if they practice enough,” he said, and moved on to the next small group, this one under Ron’s leadership, learning the Disarming Charm.

As Harry stepped up next to Ron, one of the fifth-year Hufflepuffs went sprawling to the ground with the force of the charm that had hit him. Ron laughed, and the boy scrambled back to his feet with his face all red.

Harry gave his best friend an evil look, which Ron didn’t notice because he’d already turned to shout encouragement to someone else. Harry shook his head and went up to the boy. “What’s your name?” he whispered.

The boy hunched in on himself the way that some of them did when Harry came close. Harry had tried to figure out why and wasn’t able to come up with a good answer. Was he that scary? They were going to have problems if they ever had to face Voldemort, then.

“Um,” the boy finally said, when he realized that Harry wasn’t going to go away. “Edgar Buttons.”

“All right, Buttons,” Harry said, using the brisk tone that he appreciated when a professor like McGonagall used it with him—especially when Harry had made a mistake in Transfiguration and didn’t want everyone in the class thinking about it anymore than they already were. “You’re going to practice Expelliarmus with me.” He fell back a step and drew his wand. Buttons stared at him open-mouthed. He had wide blue eyes that watered when he blinked them.

“I don’t—but you’re really good,” Buttons said, as though Harry’s offer had been made to humiliate him. He kept hunching his shoulders and shooting Harry distrustful glances that suggested he believed exactly that. “It won’t be much of a challenge for you.”

“Believe me, I’ve got plenty of challenges,” Harry said wryly, thinking about the way that Snape had behaved in Defense for the last fortnight. He kept turning towards Harry as if he would ask him to demonstrate something, and Harry would tense in response, but in the end Snape would always turn away and choose someone else. That person would usually get something wrong. Harry was holding his tongue with an effort, but he wondered how much longer he could stand to watch idiots act out their idiocy in front of the class. “I want to teach people, too. Just relax, yeah?”

Buttons gave a stiff nod. “My mum says you’re not supposed to say ‘yeah,’” he volunteered.

“Well, yes, then,” Harry said, and tried not to picture Buttons’s mother as looking something like Aunt Petunia. “Lift your wand—like that—and hold it as loosely as you can without dropping it, all right? I think part of your problem was that you were freezing up and your wand wouldn’t move every way you wanted it to.”

Buttons stared at him a moment, then arranged himself with a few shuffles and flappings of his robes. His face was brilliant red. Harry realized that most of the people in the Room of Requirement were watching them with interest.

He shrugged. Not much he could do about that. People would watch him with interest every day of his life, he was starting to think. The best he could do was make sure it was for the right reasons.

“Now, on a count of three,” Harry said. “One, two, three, Expelliarmus!”

The familiar burst of magic up his arm was answered by a pitiful flip from Buttons, which resulted in his wand flying across the room before Harry’s spell caught it and pulled it back to his hand. Buttons was red for another reason now, and he came stomping across the room to get his wand when Harry held it out to him.

“I’m not any good, and I’m not ever going to be any good,” he muttered.

“Well, no, you’re not, not if you keep saying things like that,” Harry answered frankly. Buttons stared at him. Harry grinned back. “Do you always give up after one try?”

Slowly, Buttons grinned in answer.

*

“Why’d you spend so much time helping that twit anyway, Harry?”

Harry rolled his eyes as he and Ron stepped out of the Room of Requirement. “Buttons isn’t a twit, Ron. Did you notice that Lavender was having the same problems with the Disarming Charm? But you were a lot more patient with her than you were with Buttons.” He glanced sideways at Ron, who had turned red enough to drown his freckles. “Why’s that?”

“Shut up,” Ron muttered.

“Does it have anything to do with the way Hermione ran out of the room like her arse was on fire?” Harry asked innocently.

“Shut up, I said.” Ron was walking away from him now with a determined stride, and Harry laughed and hurried to catch up with him.

He was never sure what made him turn around and look back down the corridor. Maybe old habits left over from last year, when they had to be careful that Umbridge didn’t catch them training with the D.A.

But anyway, that was why he saw Draco Malfoy dart out of a shadowed corner and hurry towards a door that had just appeared. Harry knew the door was the one to the Room of Requirement—it was in the right place—but it was much smaller than the one that led to their training room, made of dark wood with crisscrossed patterns on it. Harry watched with an open mouth as Malfoy pulled the door shut behind him and the wall sealed itself over it.

“Ron!” Harry whispered when he could get his breath back. Except, because he had to whisper it, Ron didn’t hear him, and Harry had to run up the corridor and pull him back so that he could show him the spot where the door had disappeared, and by then, it didn’t seem as exciting or important as it had when he actually watched the door disappear.

“Malfoy?” Ron put a hand over his mouth to conceal the yawn. Harry grimaced. He would have held the meetings of Dumbledore’s Army earlier, but Hermione insisted that they had to finish all their homework first before they could go to them, and so it was almost midnight. “But what would he be doing up here? He’s never tried to join us or interrupt us, and now he has no one to report us to, since Dumbledore knows about it.”

“I don’t know,” Harry said doubtfully. The initial excitement had gone away. He gnawed his lip. Malfoy could easily get them in trouble with Snape if he wanted to, but he hadn’t. And yet he obviously knew they were in there, because he had waited until everyone was gone before he ran in. That argued he’d been standing in the shadows and watching.

Is he spying on us for Voldemort? But that still didn’t make sense, because the only thing Malfoy could have told Voldemort for sure was who was in the D.A. The Room would prevent him from seeing inside.

“It’s weird, mate,” Ron agreed with a shake of his head. “But he probably just goes in there to wank or something. Come on. The prefects are prowling around looking for us.” He tugged Harry’s shoulder.

Harry went along, though he kept looking over his shoulder at the door of the Room. And his dreams that night were of chasing Malfoy through a confused, twisting corridor between piles of what looked like books and wooden doors.

*

At least the idiots are gone. Draco touched his wand to the Vanishing Cabinet and spoke the spell that he’d got from the book Snape lent him, concentrating on the pulses of Dark energy he could feel working their way up his arm and into his wand core.

“Adigo integritatem!” It was an involuntary healing spell, used in the past to force the victims of torture to become whole and healthy so that they could be tortured again. If Draco had made the right calculations based on what the book said, then it should repair the damage to the cabinet and make it a perfect copy of the one he had seen in Borgin and Burke’s.

The spell flowed over the cabinet in a dazzle of black and blue lightning. Draco stepped back, catching his breath. It was more beautiful than he had expected—and it had taken more out of him, too, so that he was panting as he stood there. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to cast it more than once.

Then the lightning coiled into a tight ball above the Vanishing Cabinet. Draco frowned. The book hadn’t described the spell acting like this.

The ball of lightning shot towards him, humming so hard that Draco could feel the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

Draco yelped and ducked. The ball soared over his head, luckily, and he heard it ignite something in the background. A puff, and leather and paper, from the smell, began to burn. Draco hastily hopped back to his feet and put the source of the fire, one of the numerous books gathered in the Room of Hidden Things, out.

Then he turned back to the Vanishing Cabinet, shaking his head. He was exhausted. The effort of keeping up his marks in Potions and Defense—one a class that shouldn’t have been challenging but was because Professor Slughorn didn’t like him, the other challenging because Professor Snape was teaching it—was beginning to tell on him.

Along with trying to save his parents when no one else in the entire world cared about them.

Draco closed his eyes and took a composed, careful breath. He had to stop thinking like that. He had to stop remembering the owl his mother had sent him, reassuring him that everything was going fine at the Manor and that they could even hope to have his father out of prison sooner rather than later.

He had to stop thinking about the way the letters were shaky and ill-formed, how they straggled across the page.

His mother had always written neatly. In fact, she had insisted on teaching Draco how to handle a quill herself, because she had said that no one at Hogwarts or anywhere else would teach him how to do it properly.

Draco shivered and opened his eyes. Then he set his feet and faced the Vanishing Cabinet again.

He would fix this. He would do something that would make his parents proud of him and even make the Dark Lord proud of him.

No one else was ever going to help him, but what did that matter? Malfoys weren’t supposed to need help from anyone anyway.

*

The more he watched Malfoy, the more Harry became certain he was doing something important and wrong.

It was hard to think how he hadn’t noticed it before. He reckoned he’d just got out of the habit of looking at Malfoy, because Malfoy hadn’t taunted him much this year except when he came out into the dungeons that night—but even that was strange, because Malfoy hadn’t shown that kind of restraint the other years.

Keep alert, Harry scolded himself as he watched Malfoy’s head droop over his Defense book. They were waiting for Snape to come in. Most of the class had already learned how important it was to get there early. Snape had a nasty habit of taking points off if you weren’t there when he came through the door, no matter what the clock said. When students complained, he gave a nasty smile and asked them how they were going to deal with Dark wizards, if they couldn’t deal with school hours.

Harry gritted his teeth. Thinking about Snape just made him impatient and angry—and worried about what Snape might have seen that night two weeks ago. Harry didn’t think he had to be that concerned, because the glamour faded slowly most of the time, until the last few minutes of its duration when it vanished all at once. Malfoy might have seen something before Harry could restore his normal face, but not Snape.

Think about Malfoy instead.

Yeah, Malfoy was almost asleep—not at all normal or natural. He managed to be alert in class even when he hated the subject, like Care of Magical Creatures. And Harry thought he was paler than usual, and his cheekbones were more pointy.

Good thing I have the spell on. I would look even more like him without it.

Malfoy also had dark circles under his eyes, and his hands trembled where they were folded over each other. Harry cocked his head. Was he afraid? Or hungry? Sometimes his hands trembled that way at the Dursleys’.

Harry decided that he would have to keep an eye on Malfoy. He was the kind of person that some of the notes in that wonderful book he’d found to help him with Potions told him to watch out for: an enemy who looked harmless. Harry had already done something stupid by forgetting about him so far. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Snape swept through the door then. The talking immediately stopped. But Malfoy didn’t wake up, and in fact, Parkinson, who Harry thought must have cheated on the Defense exam, had to nudge him in the ribs. Malfoy lifted his head, gasping.

Not normal at all.

Harry frowned one more time and turned back to face the front, prepared for another day of tension when Snape looked at him—tension that would never turn into anything, because Snape seemed to have decided that the better part of valor was not calling on Harry.

He called on Parkinson instead, and she stood in front of the class and fumbled the simplest shield charm other than Protego, the Daylight Shield that would protect you by blinding your opponent. Snape made sneering comments, something he didn’t usually do to his Slytherins. Parkinson got all flustered and tried to cast it again, but she must have messed something up in the Latin, because she ended up blinding herself and staggering in circles with a hand over her eyes.

Snape sneered. He said nothing, but he stood there, coldly studying Parkinson, and Harry knew that he would just let her go on stumbling until the spell wore off, which could be twenty minutes. No one else would dare do or say anything because they were afraid of Snape.

Harry ground his teeth. He shouldn’t, he probably shouldn’t, but he was sick and tired of wasting time and watching Snape allow people to suffer from their mistakes instead of teaching them how to correct those mistakes. And other people didn’t learn anything, either, because they didn’t know the proper incantation or what the wrong people had done wrong.

“Why don’t you pick on someone who has the skill to challenge you, sir?” he asked, and didn’t care how disrespectful he sounded as he stood up and drew his wand. What could Snape do to him? Put him in detention or take points? That was nothing compared to Voldemort, and maybe not even compared to whatever secret Malfoy was hiding.

Snape turned to face him at once, coming to rest in a deadly stillness that made his robes flutter away from him and then land like bats’ wings around him. Harry sneered at him. He’d seen more complicated and scary things from the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries.

“And you believe that you do, Mr. Potter?” Snape’s voice was cold and heavy. Harry knew, from the sound of it, that he hated the fact that Harry had stood up and challenged him. He was trying to intimidate him into sitting back down.

“Yes, I do,” Harry said coolly. “I think you haven’t called on me because you were afraid of looking like an idiot.”

Someone in the audience let out a shocked titter. Snape didn’t even look around for the source of it, which surprised Harry. He just drew his wand instead, his eyes never leaving Harry’s face, and cast the Finite to make the spell blinding Parkinson vanish. She scurried back to her seat and stared at them both.

“Very well,” Snape whispered, his words sharper than ever. Harry smiled. It didn’t matter that Snape had wanted him to do this two weeks ago; he must have given up the notion of getting Harry to cooperate, because he would never have waited so long otherwise. And the personal insults couldn’t make this pleasant for him. “Show me what you can—do, Potter.”

Harry walked out into the middle of the floor and faced Snape. “The Daylight Shield goes like this,” he said, using his wand to draw a quick cross in the air in front of him. “And the incantation is Me adviglio luce!”

He barely had time to shout out the last words before Snape was sending a swarm of brilliant red ants at him. Harry took a neat step back and watched the yellow Daylight Shield flare into being between them, its light making Snape throw a hand in front of his eyes. Harry knew he wasn’t incapacitated, but it would take a little while for him to look again. Harry used the time to send the Cold Arrow spells at the ants that would freeze and kill them.

Snape dropped his hand sooner than Harry would have expected and began to circle as he spat out a complex series of spells. Harry consciously recognized only half of them—the Bone-Breaking Curse, the Blasting Curse, the Wand Transfiguration Charm, the Coward’s Heart Jinx, the Summoning of Elder Wounds, the Curse of Tithonus—but it didn’t matter. His own hands were flying in response, lifting shields, casting the countercharm, or creating a dazzling nuisance that Snape had to stop and deal with before he could continue to cast his own spells.

Faster, and faster, and faster, and the air between them was a blur of power and light.

Harry’s breath was coming in rapid, shallow pants. He didn’t care. Sweat was running into his eyes from his forehead, and some blood, because the edge of the Summoning of Elder Wounds had nipped through his defenses and torn open a shallow cut near his scar that he had received years ago. He didn’t care. Snape was chanting spells now that Harry barely remembered studying, spells tucked in the very back of the Defense book he’d spent all summer reading.

He didn’t care.

This was what he was born to do. It was like flying, like Quidditch, except that he’d never had to study to ride a broom; it had been natural from the first time he did it. This was the result of study, and the result of the promise he’d made that this year would be different in honor of Sirius, and he was doing it.

How could he ever have wanted to hide this?

Finally, Snape lowered his wand and passed it in front of his body in the motion that traditionally signaled the end of a formal duel which had reached a draw. Harry regarded him suspiciously, keeping his own wand up. He wouldn’t put it past Snape to use the traditions for his own ends.

Snape gave him the smallest of smiles, and inclined his head at him. Harry stared at him in wonder. Just for that one moment—that moment Harry would have dismissed as a delusion like the white Dementors, except that he had learned to see spells that lasted for a shorter time—his smile wasn’t a smirk, wasn’t condescending. It showed genuine approval, respect and admiration for a talented opponent.

Then Snape turned around, stared at the rest of the class with a withering expression, and said, “Why have none of you done a tenth as well?”

Harry went back to his seat with his head bursting. He had new ideas for the next meeting of Dumbledore’s Army—and new ideas for his own self-training—and new ideas for ways that he could keep track of Malfoy without Malfoy knowing that Harry was keeping track of him.

And a new thought, that Snape wasn’t all that terrible and maybe he could help if Harry really thought about it. And took precautions to make sure that Snape didn’t influence him too much and that he always had his glamour up around the man.

Harry tried to send the thought away. But it was like a bee that had got trapped in his room that summer, only this bee was trapped between the bones of his skull, and it buzzed, and it wouldn’t go.

*

Severus had an urge he hadn’t felt in years, to show his victorious smile to all concerned. It was a miracle that he managed to maintain a stern eye and disapproving face as he watched Potter walk back to his seat.

He had decided on his strategy two weeks ago. Ignore Potter, let the boy believe that he would be able to hide his talents for all Severus cared, and meanwhile pick on the rest of the class while Potter watched and grew more and more agitated with their lack of competence.

Eventually, Potter would have to interfere. He could deny his power all he liked—he probably thought he had to, with a Gryffindor’s martyr complex—but it was Severus’s experience that no one who was truly gifted could stand to see morons tackle his area of expertise for long. Potter would leap into the ring because he could not help himself, any more than he would have been able to watch someone abuse a fine broom without speaking up.

Besides, the experience of spying on Potter as he trained Dumbledore’s Army had convinced Severus, if reluctantly, that the boy had the soul of a teacher. Teachers could not simply stand about with a smile while their students fumbled through problems they knew the answer to.

And now it had happened, and Severus had sent the second part of his plan into motion when he dueled the boy the way he would have dueled another Death Eater. Force Potter to exercise his talent; show him how good it felt.

And the third part, the part he had picked up from watching the boy meet with Albus: show him a bit of approval in the very moment when he would be flying high and be the most vulnerable to someone sharing his triumph.

The boy’s eyes had sparked, and his grin had turned effulgent with exhilaration.

Severus had no doubt that Potter would cooperate with him in their training sessions now. Slowly, of course. Reluctantly, at first.

But it was a beginning.

Chapter Seven.