lomonaaeren

Title: Practicing Liars (13/?)
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 Thirteen—A Dance of Deceptions

Draco grinned at the back of Potter’s head as Potter shut the door behind them. He had been clever enough to realize that there was a certain type of lie that should work with Madam Pomfrey. She thought that everyone was as naturally concerned about people as she was, being a Healer, so Draco had gone to her and confessed in a shy voice, looking over his shoulder every few seconds, that he was really worried about “Harry” and wanted to know what kind of condition he’d come in with the other night.

Pomfrey had still pretended loftily that she couldn’t tell him, but this time, with the way she frowned and stared at the floor and hemmed over basic details like Potter’s welts, Draco recognized the symptoms of a Memory Charm. He’d seen them used often enough in the Dark Lord’s ranks by now, mostly on Muggles.

Draco grimaced and rubbed the Dark Mark on his arm, then froze as Potter turned around again. He didn’t want to think about the Dark Lord and his incomplete task right now. He wanted to pry the truth out of Potter. He could do that because he’d been so clever.

I wonder if that’s why I want to know about him so badly, Draco thought as he eyed Potter in expectation. It gives me something else to think about than my doom and takes me out of my own head.

“Well?” Draco prompted, when it seemed Potter had chosen the sensible but limited course of staying silent.

Potter lifted his head and stared at Draco. His fingers clenched in his sleeves. Then he sighed. “All right,” he said. “But it’s not my fault if you don’t believe me.”

Draco smiled. This sounded good.

“I woke up, and Madam Pomfrey was standing over me with this…expression.” Potter shuddered and looked away from Draco, his eyes wide and haunted. “I recognized it. I never wanted to see it again, but I recognized it.”

“What was it, Potter, for God’s sake?” Draco burst out. A moment later, he blushed. Both his father and Professor Snape would have been ashamed of him for speaking like that, showing his emotions to someone whom he should convince of his indifference.

Potter didn’t seem to have noticed. That’s because he’s bloody stupid, Draco thought in satisfaction. I never knew there was something good about dealing with Gryffindors.

“It was the expression that someone wears who’s under the Imperius Curse,” Potter whispered.

Draco became aware his mouth was hanging open, and shut it. He knew what that expression looked like, too—intimately. He’d had to perform the lesser two Unforgivables before the Dark Lord would let him take the Mark. And Potter was right, those slightly glazed eyes and relaxed, listening expression didn’t look like anything else.

“Who could have put her under Imperius?” he whispered.

Potter drew himself up and gave him an impatient glance. “Well, really, Malfoy, who do you think?”

Draco shook his head. “The Dark Lord wouldn’t bother with someone like her. If he comes too close to the Hogwarts wards, I think Dumbledore would detect him.”

Potter sighed. “Yes, but what if someone is in the school with a mission to put Imperius on people? Someone else like you, a Death Eater? Madam Pomfrey would be a great one to get like that. She knows a lot about the students, and Voldemort—”

Draco hissed. The name seemed to make the scar on his arm burn hotter. But Potter, beyond a faint smirk, just went on.

“—must know that I’m in and out of the hospital wing all the time. So all he had to do was wait until I came in with some sickness or injury and have her hurt me. And I couldn’t chance that word about the things I’m seeing and feeling would get back to him. I don’t even know what those things are. I don’t want him finding out.”

Draco shivered, trying to think how he would feel if he was the one with a weakness exposed to the Dark Lord’s probing eyes. Yes, anything could be excused as an attempt to defend against that.

*

He bought it.

Harry hadn’t been sure that particular lie would work, although it was one he’d thought of over the summer if he had to explain why he was hiding things. Everyone was afraid of the Imperius Curse, and there were plenty of people in the first war who had been cursed or claimed they had, like Lucius Malfoy. Why shouldn’t someone use it now in order to put people on Voldemort’s side?

He didn’t think he could have come up with it immediately. But now Malfoy was watching him with shadowed eyes and nodding slightly. He didn’t look the way Hermione or Ron did when they didn’t believe Harry’s lies.

“I have to defend myself,” Harry finished. “I didn’t want to do it, but it was better than some other things I could have done.”

Malfoy started smiling, for some reason. Harry reached down and gripped his wand. If Malfoy was about to show him what other things he needed to do and why, then Harry would have to cast a spell quickly.

“Now that I know one of your secrets,” Malfoy said thoughtfully, “and you know one of mine, we’re even.”

“Good,” Harry said, and nodded, and started for the door.

“Why are you leaving?” Malfoy had the gall to sound surprised.

Harry turned around and stared at him. “Because we’re even, like you said,” was all he could think of to mutter. “I won’t betray your secret to anyone, you won’t tell anyone about me Obliviating Madam Pomfrey, and everything’s fine. What else could we have to say to one another?”

Malfoy lowered his eyelids over his eyes in a way that he probably thought made him look wise and mysterious. “I thought we could talk about the experiences we have that no one else in the school does, Potter,” he drawled.

“There’s whoever put Madam Pomfrey under the Imperius Curse,” Harry pointed out hastily. Malfoy’s words were probably a trick; Harry was supposed to agree, and then Malfoy would accuse him of forgetting about the mysterious other person in Hogwarts who was also on a mission for Voldemort.

Malfoy leaned forwards and stared at him. “Sometimes you seem so smart, and then you act stupid,” he said. “That other spy is hardly someone we can talk to.”

Harry flushed. Yeah, he should have known that. If Malfoy bought his lie, he wouldn’t go around questioning it so soon, and if he hadn’t bought it, then Harry should have tried harder in the first place. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “All right, but why would you want to talk to me? I mean, you have Snape.”

Malfoy said nothing, but gave him a slow smile and a shake of his head. Harry blinked. Malfoy looked so—human was the only thing Harry could think of to say, which was ridiculous, because he’d always been human.

Maybe open and warm and relaxed were better choices.

Harry’s chest tightened in an odd way, as if he was holding his breath. He deliberately exhaled and shifted towards Malfoy, because he thought shifting towards the door would have been a bad idea right now, in front of someone who had reasons to suspect him.

“I want someone my own age to speak to.” Malfoy sounded almost wistful. “All of my friends are cut off from me now, because I can’t tell any of them the details. And if your friends understand what it’s like to be close to the Dark Lord the way you are, I’ll eat my hand.” His eyes gleamed, inviting Harry to share in the joke.

Harry did the impossible, something he would never have dreamed of, something it would have given Ron a heart attack to see.

He smiled back.

*

Three of the bricks were out of the wall.

This was delicate, Legilimency on oneself, attacking a memory wall that had stood there so long it had practically become part of his mind. Severus already knew that he would not finish tonight. His hands were shaking and his legs trembled as though someone was shocking the muscles in them with Muggle electricity. He would have fallen long ago, except that he had had the foresight to seat himself on his bed so that he would not suffer such a loss of dignity.

But he remained determined to destroy it nonetheless. As the wall began to tumble, fragments of light and color and sound came through. Severus could not yet tell what the memory was about, but he could tell what surrounded it.

It had taken place in a pub, from the sounds, or some of it had. That only strengthened Severus’s curiosity. He would have expected screams, if Albus had blocked his memory of a raid. Or there might have been the deep and deadly silence that tended to cover him when he was brewing experimental potions. Perhaps Albus had wanted him to forget that he had created a particularly deadly poison. He had not always approved of Severus’s research.

He likes to pretend that research can exist in isolation, that it is not done for a purpose, Severus thought with a sneer as he drew back for another rush at the wall. It disturbs him when other people will not let him pretend that.

He charged.

It was not like a punch or a blow, the way that some books recommended destroying Memory Charms and which Severus considered responsible for pitiable cases like Lockhart’s. This was a wind, a faint breeze that whispered along the wall, around it, and through the cracks in the mortar.

It might seem like nothing to someone who wasn’t deeply acquainted with Legilimency. But the same people were liable to forget that it was wind that could wear down mountains and turn buildings into sand.

Another brick shivered, eroded, and fell. Severus could feel a face hovering there, waiting for him, the face of someone important to the memory. He “rose” slightly so that he could see through the gap.

Lily’s face stared back.

Severus paused in shock, and the break in concentration knocked him back to the surface of his mind. He opened his eyes and found himself panting as though he had run a long race, his throat scorchingly dry. He reached for the water he had had standing ready on a table and sipped carefully, eyes shut.

Lily would have been alive at that time, of course. But she had already married Potter—Severus had been able to pinpoint the age of the wall more precisely as his destruction of it commenced—and had turned away from him. She would have had no reason to be with him, no reason to be on a raid, no reason to try and sneak into the Dark Lord’s hiding places. Her face, and her husband’s, were too well-known for them to play spy, and without Severus, the Order had not had a competent brewer who could make Polyjuice.

And yet, she was associated with the memory.

Severus ground his teeth. If he were younger and stupider, he would have gone back to destroying the wall, frantic to have the truth tonight.

But his skull already felt like a thin iron barrier around jostling, splashing jelly, and he stood a chance of transforming his brain into jelly if he kept at it. No, he would hurt himself if he tried again tonight. And it would take too much time to achieve the delicate trance that would let him use Legilimency on himself a second time if he was to wake for classes tomorrow.

He lay down and forced himself to shut his eyes. His heart wouldn’t cease its excited gallop for long minutes, but that was as well. Sleep would come.

It did, but it brought with it odd dreams full of Lily’s face, and Potter’s, and his own.

And, over all the images, the maddened ringing of a bell that sounded like one of his nagging echoes of thought translated into audible form.

*

The next few days were some of the most confusing that Harry could remember.

Ron and Hermione were together, and fighting. Or fighting because they weren’t together. Harry couldn’t entirely make it out. He had known, in a vague sort of way, that Ron and Hermione liked each other, but he had also assumed that shyness would keep them from speaking about it until they were all sixty or seventy, so he hadn’t thought their row was about that at first. And now it was, and Ron was also dating Lavender at the same time, or he wasn’t and was just snogging her to make Hermione jealous.

Hermione told Harry that one evening when she seemed more in control of herself. They were sitting in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room just after practice with Dumbledore’s Army and she had her arms wrapped around herself, eyes big as she stared into the flames.

“It can’t be real,” she whispered. “Because why would he get involved with a bint like her otherwise?”

Harry opened his mouth to say that Lavender was pretty and he’d always heard she was a good kisser; apparently Seamus had briefly dated her last year.

Then he took a close, careful look at Hermione’s face and shut his mouth again.

“But I don’t understand why he keeps on with it,” Hermione said. “Because he has to see by now that it isn’t working.”

“Er…right,” Harry muttered, looking at Hermione’s red cheeks, and then bent over his Potions homework again. The only bad thing about doing it now that Snape wasn’t teaching the class anymore was that he kept wanting to look at the spells scribbled in the margins of the Half-Blood Prince’s book instead of at the actual instructions. There was a spell labeled For enemies that Harry half-hoped Voldemort wouldn’t know about. The Prince seemed to know lots of strange things, why not unusual spells?

“I’ll go and tell him so,” Hermione said, and got up and wandered out of the room.

Harry counted to ten under his breath. Shouting erupted before he got there.

So his friends were occupied, and sometimes they wanted to talk to Harry about it and sometimes they wanted to brood, but either way, neither of them seemed to notice the other confusing thing about the past few days: the attention Malfoy was paying him.

Malfoy had apparently meant it when he said the other night that they should talk to each other. He nodded to Harry every morning at breakfast, even if it was with a sneer, and usually tried to bump shoulders with him when they were walking to Potions or Defense. There hadn’t been time for conversation, really, but Malfoy passed flying dragon notes constantly to him in front of Slughorn, who could be counted on not to notice when he had his head down a cauldron.

Mostly, the notes said things like Blaise is a prat. He thinks it’s an honor to be chosen to go on a mission for the Dark Lord and he has no idea what it really means, or I can’t believe that Pansy gets uglier every day. She must have some sort of special cream she applies.

Harry responded cautiously, with the kinds of ordinary words that seemed appropriate. He tried to keep the conversation focused on Malfoy instead of himself (which, since Malfoy was so self-absorbed he made Dudley look outgoing, wasn’t difficult). He also tried to keep the doubts about the wisdom of this from the front of his mind.

After all, it really seemed that Malfoy did just need someone to talk to about things that troubled him, not someone to plot with.

And it kept Harry from thinking about things like why Snape watched him with a burning, brooding gaze now. He seemed to spend a lot of time in particular staring into Harry’s eyes.

*

Draco grinned as he leaned against the wall outside the Great Hall. It had become a tradition to surprise Potter in the last few days. He always showed up in at least one place and during one time that the prat thought he wouldn’t, and then walked and talked with him until Potter relaxed and stopped acting like Draco was about to cut his scar open.

Tonight it would be after dinner. Potter’s friends hadn’t even come to dinner, probably because Granger was sulking and Weasel was trying to recover from the spell she’d performed on him that stuck his tongue down his throat, backwards. So Potter strolled out alone, and it was the most natural thing in the world for Draco to fall into step beside him.

Potter started and then glared. Draco glanced over his shoulder just to make sure that no one had followed, but it was unusually early. He judged that they could get outside the castle, which was safer than staying inside, without being seen.

“Miss me?” he asked, and pursed his lips in a mock pout when Potter’s glare sharpened.

“How can I miss you when I saw you not two hours ago?” Potter retorted, and shoved his shoulder.

Draco shoved back, and then Potter slammed an elbow, hard, into the skin under his ribs, and Draco had to punch back, and they ended up struggling together for several moments until they broke apart, panting. Potter had the odd ability to look good when hair was hanging in his eyes and his cheeks were flushed, Draco thought with some admiration. In fact, it was practically natural for him to look that way. Draco pictured the way he’d looked dressed up in fancy robes for the Yule Ball two years ago, and snickered.

Potter scowled. “What are you laughing at?”

Draco shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Come on.” And he turned and dashed down the corridor, knowing that Potter’s instincts would inevitably compel him to follow.

They burst out through the doors onto the grounds and made for the Quidditch pitch. They had to avoid Hagrid, who was calling “Spot!”—undoubtedly the name of some creature of gigantic size and ferocious temperament—and two Hufflepuffs who seemed to think that tonight was the perfect night to come outside and snog. Finally they were in the Ravenclaw stands, and Draco flopped down on one of the seats. Potter hesitated, turned to look back at the castle and then up into the air as if just now realizing that he was alone with a Slytherin, and then shrugged and sat down next to Draco.

“I didn’t bring you here to ambush you.” Draco cocked his head at Potter. He knew he wasn’t grinning like an idiot, because his mother had taught him better than that, but there was a shadow of a smile around his lips that he couldn’t seem to get rid of.

“You never know,” Potter muttered, but leaned forwards with his arms around his knees. “Why did we come out here?”

Draco took a deep breath. He knew what he wanted to discuss; he just wasn’t sure that Potter would want to hold up his end of the conversation. But he’d been to the Room of Hidden Things again that afternoon for another hopeless try at fixing the stupid cabinet, and he’d received a letter from his mother with several blurred words, and trying to act calm and collected in front of the Slytherins, who knew nothing about it, was just too much.

I’m only doing what’s sensible, Draco told himself defensively. Father always said that you should find an outlet for your passions before they overwhelm you. He finds his in sneering at people like the Weasleys. Potter can be mine.

“It’s hard, working for him,” he said slowly.

Potter snorted and pushed up his fringe. Draco thought that his scar looked redder than it normally did. “Try being connected to the bloody bastard.”

“I am.” Draco slapped his left arm and glared at Potter before he could think better of it.

Potter’s eyes widened, and he let out a small breath, nibbling his lip. “Oh. I didn’t think about that.” He hunched his shoulders and looked down at his feet as if he was somehow counting his toes through his shoes, then looked back up. “Why did you agree to?”

“You really think I had a choice?” Draco shuddered and closed his eyes as he thought of that night. He didn’t, often. The darkness was one thing, but the heat and the hatred and the nearness of the Dark Lord as the Mark had burned into his arm was something else again. “Unless I wanted to die, but not everyone’s a noble Gryffindor who would choose death before dishonor.”

“I’m not sure I would, either.” Potter shifted towards him. Draco heard him, but he didn’t open his eyes and look. He wanted to be alone with his memories right now. Potter touched his shoulder, gingerly, as if he thought Draco might be hot. “Did—I mean, did your parents think it was for the best? Or did they try to stop you?”

“I think my mother was going to,” Draco whispered. “She had some plan. But Aunt Bellatrix found out about it and betrayed her, and now the Dark Lord spends his time torturing her.”

“Bellatrix,” Potter whispered. “I have reason to hate her, too.” His hand tightened, and he leaned closer. Draco looked up to see his eyes wide and intent behind his glasses.

“I’m sorry,” Potter said.

“For putting my father in Azkaban?” Draco asked. He was in a mood to be nasty. He rubbed at his eyes and looked away. “Or for not really getting rid of him when you were a baby, so that he could come back and torture me and my parents?”

Potter flinched. Then he licked his lips with a loud smacking sound and said, “I’m just sorry. That’s all.” He hesitated, and then leaned nearer so that his shoulder touched Draco’s the way it did when they were walking to Defense.

They sat there and watched the moon rise. Sometimes Potter shivered. The third time he did, Draco took out his wand and cast a Warming Charm. Potter gave a little gasp when it settled around him, then turned his head and eyed Draco.

“You always seem to forget that you’re a wizard,” Draco said flatly. “I don’t.”

Potter muttered something that sounded like “…try living until you’re eleven years old…”

“What?”

Potter shook his head. “Nothing important. Not like what you said was important.” He squeezed Draco’s shoulder again, and fell silent.

Draco found that he was content for it to be so.

*

The last brick of the memory wall fell.

Severus saw what was to be seen, and heard what was to be heard.

Alcohol in his throat, and Lily’s voice in his ears, offering apologies and accusations and demands for explanations.

The sheets beneath them, and the way Lily had cried out when she reached her climax, in what seemed to be surprise.

The way it had felt for him, the way it had never felt with anyone else.

How Lily had turned around in the morning, hair full of light and eyes full of guilt, and lifted her wand, and whispered, “This isn’t the way I want to live. I’m sorry, Severus. Obliviate.”

And the way the memories trembled and vanished at once behind the solid black wall of the charm, shutting away the very last sight he would ever have of Lily, and something he would never have wished to forget.

Severus opened his eyes and felt for sleep in the corners. But this was no dream.

Chapter Fourteen.