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lomonaaerenTitle: Practicing Liars (14/?)
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 Fourteen—Practice Makes Perfect
“But I don’t know what I should do,” Ron said, for the seventeenth time in three minutes, or at least it felt like that to Harry. He sighed and stared into the fire, folding his hands beneath his chin. He was sprawled on the floor, and Harry thought he should have been relaxed, but instead he looked as though someone had told him he wasn’t getting anything for Christmas. “Hermione or Lavender? It’s a hard choice.”
Harry contemplated tearing his hair out, and then decided there was a high chance that Ron wouldn’t even notice. In the end, he took a deep breath and sat down near Ron, instead of going up to their room to study the spells from his Potions book the way he’d been planning to. “Look, mate,” he said, and tried very, very hard to sound patient. “Which one do you really like? I didn’t think you liked Lavender. I thought you were only trying to make Hermione jealous.”
“Hmmm?” Ron looked over at him, blinking tragically. “I changed my mind.”
Harry grimaced. He’d always thought Lavender giggled too much, and if Ron dated her for a long time, it would be hard to put up with her. But he didn’t know exactly why Ron had changed his mind. Maybe it was a good reason. “Why?” he asked warily.
“She’s a good kisser,” Ron said. “Loads better than Hermione.”
Harry stared at him. “Have you ever kissed Hermione?”
“No,” Ron said. He stared at the fire again and sighed. Harry would have thought he’d be angry about this, but Ron had spent a lot of time angry in the last few weeks. Maybe he was enjoying the melancholy as a break from his hard work of fury.
Harry waited, but Ron didn’t look at him or speak again. Harry was the one who had to say, carefully, “And you don’t see the contradiction here?”
Ron groaned and put his hands over his ears. “Don’t use big words on me, Harry. Hermione does that all the time, and it’s annoying.”
Harry rolled his eyes and rose to his feet. “I hope you figure it out, mate,” he said, making for the stairs. Not least because it will enable the rest of us to have some peace.
Neville looked up when Harry stepped into their room; he was curled up on the bed with his Defense book, studying feverishly. “Did Ron tell you why he looks like that?” Neville asked.
Harry said, “Better not to ask.” He dug out his Potions book and leaned against the pillow. “I wouldn’t worry as much about that,” he added, nodding to Neville’s book. “You’ve already done half the spells that Snape’s tried to teach us in the last week in the D.A, and you did them better than Snape could teach them.”
“I know,” Neville said, which surprised and pleased Harry. Neville would have denied the praise last year. “But I know that Snape’s looking for any excuse to fail me, so I thought I should know about the theory, too.” He paused thoughtfully, and then lowered his voice and went on. “And sometimes—sometimes I think it would be a good thing to surprise him and force him to compliment me, you know? He hates so many people that getting a sign of approval from him would be like getting a hundred points from McGonagall.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, though, no matter how long we spend studying and training,” he had to point out. “We’re still Gryffindors.”
Neville smiled. “I know. It’s a silly fantasy. But I have to have those sometimes.” He turned back to his book.
Harry thought about it as he opened the Half-Blood Prince’s book. What would he do with Snape’s approval if he had it? Would he really be that thrilled to get a single glance that had something like pride in it?
Then he pulled his thoughts up short and snorted so loudly Neville looked over briefly. Right. Snape’s approval would mean something different to him, because Harry would have to think about what he would say if he knew that he’d slept with Harry’s mum to conceive Harry. It was different. He would be horrified, and then he would think up ways to blame Harry for existing in a whole different style than he thought up ways to blame Harry for existing right now.
Harry shook his head. There would always be hatred no matter what happened, so why should he hope for the same thing that Neville did?
In fact, that made it all the more imperative that he keep the secret, because his life would change into a living hell at Hogwarts as well as at Privet Drive if Snape learned it.
Determinedly, he started studying the spells that the Prince had scribbled in the margins again.
*
It seemed incredible that he had to get up, and teach class, and eat breakfast at the High Table with Albus and colleagues he despised, in a world that was so different from what it had been when he went to his rooms last night.
And yet, for it to be otherwise would mean that others knew about the memory, and his secret, and his rage.
And his pleasure.
Severus had never endured such conflicting emotions, and the conflict, not the strength of his passions, was what made it difficult to hold his face immobile when he was sitting in the Great Hall or teaching Defense classes full of incompetents. He had held back his anger and fear kneeling at the Dark Lord’s feet before. He had managed to rein in his irritation with Potter for five years. He had endured the Marauders’ taunting and still emerged on the other side, while two of them were dead now.
But he had never suffered such a maelstrom all at once, and what he would have preferred to do was sit at his desk and stare at the far wall until they subsided into a single pool that he could examine at his leisure.
Shock was the strongest. That it had happened, that he had never suspected it, that Lily would have come to him and slept with him even though they had both been drunk…
She had been there. She had shared a bed with him.
She had reached out to him.
That day when he had insulted her and thought he had severed their friendship forever was not the end, after all.
Severus had pictured his life before with a dramatic crack in the middle of it. There was his childhood, redeemed from blight into a narrow garden by Lily’s presence, and there was the chasm, and on the other side of it his adulthood was barren and stony atonement. He had never known there was a bridge across the chasm, that Lily had inhabited both parts of his existence.
He had examined the memory carefully, and, drunk though they had been, he did not believe there was any angle from which he could accuse himself of rape. That had been the first conclusion. How could he not suspect himself, when he had been a Death Eater at the time?
But things had been different.
Things had always been different than he had thought. Because the memory had been blocked did not mean that it had not existed.
Students stumbled and flailed in front of him, were unable to block simple spells and (if they were Potter) did not practice Occlumency as well as they should, and still Severus was unable to come to the end of his shock.
But rage was not far beneath the surface of that emotion, and it was the rage that extended a hairline crack across his newly discovered bridge.
She had come to him. She had slept with him.
How dare she take herself, and the memory, from him?
She had done it because of James Potter. Severus knew that as well as he knew his own name. It was there in the way she had told him that she couldn’t live like this just before she used the Memory Charm. She couldn’t live with him because she was living with her husband. She couldn’t sleep with him because she had decided that she should share James’s bed, and James’s bed only.
And the rage went deeper than that, extending poisonous black roots into the depths of his being.
He had been happy when he could think of Lily as virtuous, after her death, and himself as someone evil who needed to make up for hurting her. This did not lessen his guilt, but it did destroy that perfect image that had sustained him for so long.
How dare she do that?
Severus’s idol had been smashed in front of his eyes, and he did not know what to do about it or where to turn next. At times he thought that he would have liked to preserve the memory of Lily unaltered, but then, it was through the actions of Lily herself that he had possessed that saintly image for so long.
There was no way to turn. There was no way out of the trap that he was scrambling in, no way to resist the changes that the memory inflicted on his life.
And mixed with the rage, flavoring it as surely as sugar could flavor a poison, was pleasure.
She had come to him, at least once. She had come with him, at least once. Severus knew what he knew about human bodies from long observation of faces and muscles and the minutest expressions, and he knew what he had seen in Lily’s eyes as she shuddered beneath him.
Had James still been alive, had Lily been alive, Severus never could have looked at her without remembering that. And he could not now look at his memories of her without adding that emotion silently to them.
All was changed. Severus felt as if he had spent most of his life in a box and had it break away from him suddenly in a rush and roar of glory and destruction.
He did not know how to deal with it, but he knew one thing was true. He could not speak of it to anyone else until he calmed his emotions and decided how to deal with it. Confession had worked for him only once in his life, when he first went to Albus and began to atone, and he would not change or challenge that record now.
*
“Potter! Wait up.”
Potter turned around in front of Draco, his face pale, the corners of his mouth tucked down. Draco had already learnt that that meant he was feeling harassed.
He wondered if he should be noticing such things, and then reminded himself how transparent and on the surface Potter was. Draco would have seen things like this long ago if he had only looked.
“Where did you think you were going?” Draco asked, halting to walk beside him and not bothering to remove the accusatory tone from his voice. He knew Potter was vulnerable to it. It worked as well as ever; Potter’s eyes softened and he turned his head away.
“I have a—meeting,” he said. “I was supposed to be there five minutes ago, but I lost track of the time because I was reading.” He rubbed his forehead and glanced sideways at Draco, as if those obviously incomplete and partial statements should make him back off.
“You,” Draco said, stressing the word with a slow drawl because it fully deserved that, “have a meeting. At seven-o’clock at night. In a corridor on the seventh floor.” He glanced around, ostentatiously pretending to examine the corners for people hiding in them. In reality, he knew they were in the corridor where the Room of Hidden Things was, but he was curious how closely Potter’s lie and that circumstance were connected.
“Fine,” Potter said, with a huff that Draco thought unnecessary. “It’s the same group that we ran last year, when Umbridge wouldn’t let us learn anything in Defense. I’m training a bunch of the students in different things, and some of the others are helping me. Ron and Hermione and Neville are quite good at it.”
Draco reached up and clasped his head. “My brain is about to fall out of my ears with all the contradictions that you’re handing me, Potter,” he said. “Longbottom a good teacher? And you’re keeping up this group even though we finally have a competent Defense teacher who lets us learn things?”
“Most of the students don’t learn anything in Snape’s class,” Potter said. His voice was so vicious that Draco looked up again in surprise, to find his face twisted. “Oh, sure, he teaches us the names of spells and the gestures, but he doesn’t spend nearly enough time on individual curses and countercurses. He just assumes that everyone can learn as fast as he can and goes on. It’s Potions all over again, except this time there are less instructions to follow.”
Draco blinked. “But…you’re good at Defense.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Potter gave him a sharp, exasperated look.
Draco shook his head. “Why are you so concerned about how the other students learn? You know that you’re getting a good mark no matter what.”
Potter made a faint gurgling sound in the back of his throat. Then he said, “Maybe my best friends aren’t much fun right now, as obsessed with their love lives as they are, but they’re a sight better than you.” And he turned and passed quickly up and down the corridor, then seized the handle of the door that appeared and stepped into the room. Draco made a rush after him, but Potter shut the door behind him again, and it vanished.
Draco was left standing there with his hands hanging by his sides. Slowly, they curled into fists, and he turned away.
He’d tried. He’d been understanding of Potter’s strangeness and talked to him about things that he never would have heard of otherwise and hadn’t exposed his secret to anyone else, even though he could have got Potter in legal trouble for using a Memory Charm on Madam Pomfrey. And then Potter walked away from him with an expression of disgust and wouldn’t even tell him what he’d done wrong.
I should have known better than to try and be friends with a Gryffindor.
Except that Draco had begun to know himself a little better—a very little—after all the lies he’d told about how he didn’t want help or someone to confide in when his mission for the Dark Lord was a secret, and he recognized this for another lie. He would go back to Potter, because he needed a friend and because Potter was the best outlet he had and because he still wanted to be with him.
It was painful, and as hard as the stone under his feet as he walked slowly up the corridor in the direction of the stairs. But it was true.
*
“What’s the matter with you, Harry? I’ve never seen you as distracted as you are tonight.”
Harry glanced up with a faint smile as Ginny sat down next to him. He’d stepped back from the mock duels the D.A. was holding because he’d almost hit Neville with a curse that had way too much power behind it, and he’d spent the last few minutes sitting in a corner and breathing slowly. He hadn’t known Ginny would come over and talk to him about it, but then, Ron and Hermione were still occupied in hissing at each other and trying to cast spells on each other that the other one couldn’t attribute to them.
“Tired,” Harry said. “The professors all seem to think that this is our N.E.W.T. year.”
“Bollocks,” Ginny said.
Harry stared at her with his mouth open. Ginny rolled her eyes. “You don’t look tired,” she said. “You look upset. You look the way you get when you think you need to rescue someone and you don’t know what to do. You had—” She seemed to decide better on whatever she was going to say, and Harry was grateful, because he thought it would have been a reference to Sirius, and he couldn’t stand that. “I mean, I know that you’re not just exhausted with studying. Who are you trying to save? I think my brother and Hermione will just have to go rushing down the slope until they hit the tree at the bottom.”
Harry chuckled weakly, more concerned with the idea that Ginny could read him so well. He hadn’t known that, and he disliked it. If she was paying that much attention to him, what else would she notice? That his face underwent small changes from time to time when the glamour began fading, for instance?
The thought provoked an immediate, intense surge of panic, worse than it had been near the beginning of the year. Harry swallowed.
I can never let anyone know. Too many people have come close.
Harry wrenched his mind away from that thought and focused it on the current problem. Just because he was obsessed with the fact that James Potter hadn’t given him life (although he was still Harry’s dad in all the ways that mattered) didn’t mean everyone was.
But he couldn’t exactly tell Ginny about the current problem, either. Not without betraying Malfoy and what Harry had learned about him.
And why does this bother you? You heard what he said before you came in here. He still acts as though everything’s fine as long as nothing happens to him, personally. He’s still as much of a cold-blooded heartless bastard as he ever was. I don’t know why I keep listening to him and expecting something different.
Harry sighed. He felt as if he were drowning, sometimes, and needed someone to throw him a rope. But his own decisions had made that impossible.
He glanced up and realized that Ginny was still watching him with a worried frown. He smiled as broadly as he could, considering everything else preying on his mind. “I can’t tell you right now,” he said quietly, “because of a promise I made to Dumbledore.” The lie walked off his tongue easily. It was the only name he could think of that would get Ginny to back off. “When I can, I promise I will.”
Ginny relaxed. “Well, if Dumbledore knows about it, then I’m sure he can give you good advice,” she said, and patted his arm before going to duel with a younger Hufflepuff girl who didn’t have a partner.
Harry rubbed his forehead. He’d practiced his lies for so long because he had been sure that someone would confront him otherwise and he’d have no option but silence, blurting out the truth, or saying something profoundly stupid and unbelievable. But he hadn’t practiced for this situation, and it had still worked.
Maybe practicing you some lies makes you better at others.
For a minute, he worried about that. Where would he stop, if he became really good at it? Would he start lying the way Minister Fudge and Umbridge had lied despite all the evidence they had last year that Voldemort was back?
He shrugged and stood up. The problem was that he would just have to keep asking those questions in his head and hoping that he found an answer somewhere, because he had no one else to ask.
*
The world had changed. But Severus, when he began to climb at last out of the pit of revelations into which his restored memory had cast him, began to realize that not everything around him had.
His students were still idiots, and had noticed no change in his manner. Albus was still researching into Dark artifacts and refusing to confess the whole of his plan to Severus. Draco still needed help, and a plan to rescue his mother from the Dark Lord.
Potter was still unexpectedly strong and talented.
Severus watched him now, when they dueled and when they practiced Occlumency—and Potter had managed to subdue a little, a very little, of the ceaseless chatter of his mind—and when they were in class together. Potter had more of Lily than her eyes. He had her chin, Severus realized, and her stubborn way of looking at a book or a new spell as if she was about to dive into it. Seeing Lily in his head, even though he remembered the way her face looked perfectly well, seemed to have startled Severus into a new awareness. Yes, there was something of Lily in her son.
Including a propensity to using Memory Charms, Severus thought, but since the boy had finally showed some signs, with that, of developing the paranoid instincts that he needed to have, Severus was not disposed to interfere.
He did notice that things had changed between Potter and Draco, settling into a frozen coolness. A bit of careful Legilimency revealed the cause of the quarrel, and he could have laughed aloud, as nothing since the crumbling of the memory wall had made him laugh. Draco had acted like Draco, and Potter had been offended.
That was a good thing, the realization that Potter was still his father’s son in every way that mattered. Lily’s stubbornness in him was twisted and melted and reforged as insolent Gryffindor pride that could not tolerate the slightest ambiguity in phrasing or morals, or even the slip of a tongue.
But the row, for whatever reason, was making Draco miserable, and he might make slips in his melancholy. Potter was also looking a bit too obviously at Draco in class, his nostrils pinched, and he would make a scene soon that would collect suspicious eyes.
It was for these reasons, and others, that Severus decided he would begin to lay out his plan to rescue Narcissa. He himself could use the distraction. He needed to think about something other than shuddering pleasure and a sunlit bed and Lily’s voice whispering an apology.
It was the simplest thing in the world to give both boys detention in a single class. Draco’s lack of attention to anything but his own affairs and determined inattention to Potter made him slip up quickly. Potter was still arrogant and would raise mocking eyes to Severus’s face after the successful completion of a spell; if Severus chose to assign a detention rather than take points for disrespect, then that was his prerogative.
Potter hesitated when he stepped through Severus’s office door for what he doubtless thought was a regular Occlumency lesson and found Draco there. “Sir?” he asked, his hand on his wand in his robe pocket. “Is something the matter?”
Severus spoke in a brisk and business-like tone. Too much indulgence of emotion was not what he needed right now, after the week he had had. “I have collected my thoughts, and I mean to begin the rescue of Narcissa Malfoy from the Dark Lord’s hold this weekend.”
Draco immediately looked more hopeful, of course, and Potter straightened his shoulders and threw his head back. Mention of a rescue would do that to him.
It was the way Lily looked when—
Severus turned his thoughts deftly aside. It had been easy enough to pass years without connecting Lily and her son together in his mind. He would learn to do it again.
“Tell me, Potter,” he said, “is it true that Peter Pettigrew owes you a life-debt?”
Chapter Fifteen.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-18 07:49 am (UTC)As it so happens, I go to a school that offers a Harry-Potter-as-Literature type course. Lovely little class :) and leaves you lots of time to come up with magical genetics and physiology theories.
-Jolene
no subject
Date: 2009-11-21 12:19 am (UTC)