lomonaaeren

Title: Practicing Liars (17/?)
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 Seventeen—A Talk

Harry froze, his eyes so wide and his muscles so tight that they hurt. Contradictory impulses clanged and dashed through his head. He had never imagined this happening, that Snape would be able to find out the truth when Harry was in a position when he couldn’t do anything about it.

Obliviate him!

But Harry knew that he couldn’t get away with that in the hospital wing, and Snape would probably see the motion of his hand towards his wand and guess what was going to happen, and, and, and…

Then Harry reminded himself about his plans from the summer. He’d made plans for every situation he could think of. Why not this one? They just needed to be adapted a bit.

It’s a wild idea. No one will ever believe it unless they’re forced to. It’s mad. It’s new.

You can still destroy Snape’s belief in it. All you have to do is deny it.

*

Severus had never seen such a pure expression of panic. His eyes narrowed. It was what he might well expect Potter to feel on having the truth proven to him beyond a doubt, but why should he be feeling it now? Shock, anger, denial he would have anticipated on the first suggestion, but not this.

For some reason, in the intense silence that hung between him and Pott—the boy as he struggled with Severus’s statement, the most pressing sound was the low-voiced discussion about Narcissa’s health behind them. At least it reminded Severus that others might hear this. He took up his wand and cast a privacy bubble, in the meantime looking over his shoulder to make sure they had not attracted his attention. He saw no startled looks, no stares.

When he turned back, the boy wore a carefully crafted mask of bewilderment.

“Your son, sir?” he asked in a flat voice. “How can—that doesn’t make sense. Did someone tell you this?” He glared up at Severus. “I don’t know why you decided to believe them, but it was pretty stupid of you.”

Severus felt the familiar stirring of anger and had to take a deep breath against it. His hand might have clenched and snapped the wand, but he told himself he’d been prepared for denial and anger.

“No one told me,” he said, “except the evidence of your own features. They look much more like your mother’s blended with mine than I could ever have known if I had not seen the glamour removed.”

The panic that flared in the boy’s eyes this time made his previous panic look small. He snatched up his wand. Severus tensed, but Potter—

(How hard it will be not to think of him by that name).

—aimed it at his own face instead of Severus. When he started to whisper desperate words, Severus had a notion of what he was doing. He reached out and gently but firmly closed his fingers around the boy’s wrist, shaking it slightly when Potter struggled against him.

“No, I think not,” Severus said. He could not help the sneer that crept into his voice. He could not help it. He felt as much shock as though he’d been dropped from a great height. How was anyone supposed to deal with the sudden discovery of a—a child, and the child of the woman he had loved? “You are much better-looking with your natural face, do you not agree?”

The boy glared at him again. Severus marveled. It seemed impossible to him that he could have seen this face once before and not marked the resemblance of sharper cheekbones and longer jaw, but the passage of a short time or his own knowledge had changed things. The boy’s expression in anger was exactly like his.

Part of the shock passed away, and he unconsciously tightened his grip around the boy’s wrist.

Like me. Mine.

“No, I don’t agree,” said Potter, with a vicious sneer that Severus thought his mouth formed for. “I want to look like my dad. And James Potter was my dad. He died for me! He loved me, which is more than you’ll ever do!” He lunged forwards as if he was going to escape Severus’s grip, but that was firm enough that all he ended up doing was pulling their faces closer together.

“I hate you,” Potter whispered. “I’ll always hate you. I don’t want you for a father, and I don’t care what you want.”

*

Harry wanted to cower when he saw the way Snape’s jaw clenched and felt how the hand holding him tightened, but he’d expected Snape to hurt him, hadn’t he? Voldemort hurt him more. He could put up with having his wrist crushed, especially since they were in the hospital wing and Madam Pomfrey could heal him as soon as Snape left.

The real thing, the most important thing, was to hurt Snape, to make him so angry that he would walk away and want nothing to do with Harry. Harry didn’t know how Snape thought about blood relatives, but he knew that Snape liked to torture him, and why should that change just because Harry was a drunken mistake between his mum and Snape? Harry had to make him go away. Then he could go on living with the Dursleys, which wasn’t ideal but was much better than bloody Snape. At least the Dursleys couldn’t use the Cruciatus Curse on him.

And there’s probably some wizarding law that wizards can use the Cruciatus Curse on their children if they’re Death Eaters or something, Harry thought, leaning forwards even more so that his eyes were an inch away from Snape’s. He’d never dared do this before, but he would take weeks of detention over being forced to live with Snape. Detention ended. It’s just the sort of bloody stupid law that the Wizengamot would pass.

“James Potter was not your father,” Snape said, his voice whipping out like a scorpion’s tail. “Do you understand that? It does not matter how much he loved you. I am the one who sired you.”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. I have to make him go away! “I should be grateful for that, then? Because you and my mum had a drunken moment and I’m here, I should fall groveling at your feet?”

Snape’s face changed terribly. Harry found himself shrinking away, but he immediately set his shoulders and bowed his head a little so that any blow wouldn’t break his face, the way he did with Dudley. No matter what happened, he would deal with it. He didn’t think Snape could kill him before Madam Pomfrey saw him and interfered, even if Snape had cast a privacy spell around them.

“A drunken moment?” Snape whispered. “How did you know that?”

Oh, shit! Shit, shit, shit!

“Because only someone who was drunk would sleep with you,” Harry snapped back, but he had lost and he knew it.

He flinched as Snape bent towards him again, and lifted his free arm to shield his face. Even though Dudley had just beaten him up and left him there, Snape would probably leave him for dead.

*

The brat knew.

He had known.

He had known that his mother and Severus were intimate, and he had left that knowledge lying in the dark.

He had known, and he had not told Severus.

Severus had to take several deep breaths before he could recover enough to think rationally. And it was absolutely necessary that he think rationally. Too much harm had been done already by relying on what people should have done.

There was no way that Potter could have accessed Severus’s own buried memories; whatever unexpected talents the boy might have, Severus was sure that he was not that good a Legilimens. Severus was also confident that Albus, strange as he might be, would not have told the boy before he told Severus himself. He would probably have revealed it to them both at the same time, in fact, with a chuckle in his throat and a twinkle in his eye, hoping to “reconcile” them to each other.

That left Potter learning some other way. Perhaps Black had known—though Severus could not imagine that he would have been so cordial to the boy if he had. Perhaps the werewolf—

“You will tell me,” he whispered, and tightened his grip on the brat again when he tried to pull away, “how you learned this, and how long you have known it, and why you thought it right to keep my son from me.”

Potter tensed, his face whitening. Severus listened and heard his teeth grinding. Good. He deserves to feel at least one half of the anger I do.

Severus’s rage was increasing as he sat there, burning up the shock, burning up his uncertainty about what he was going to do with the boy now that he had him and knew he had beaten James Potter forever. How dare they do that? Lily had taken a choice of remembering away from him, and now his son had taken a choice of action and recognition away from him.

Was there to be no end to the way that other people chose to deceive and use him? What had he ever done, that he should be subject to such lies from those who should care about him most?

“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Potter said, voice ugly and so low that Severus was not sure of what he was hearing at first. “Because you don’t want me. What the fuck would we do with each other?” Severus opened his mouth to reprimand the boy for his language, but that rush of tumbling words went on like a stream, and he couldn’t interrupt. He thought Potter might never speak again if he did. “Your son is some imaginary person who spent his entire life with you. I’m not that. You would spend time peering into my face and trying to see someone who isn’t there if I agreed with you. You would have hurt me if you knew about me, because you would be so disappointed that I was your son and not some perfect Slytherin who followed Daddy into serving Voldemort.

“There’s no reason for us to connect with each other. There’s no reason that we should let this change anything, except that you’ll hate me more than you used to. Fine. Hogwarts is only for another year and a half. And in a few months, I’ll be of age and you don’t have to worry about me being a child anymore. Fine. Nothing has to change. Nothing should change. What does blood mean, anyway? One more reason to hate people.”

The boy fell silent except for his rapid breathing, his eyes locked on Severus’s face. Severus, for his part, could only sit motionless and stare back at him.

Potter was transparent now. His eyes were like great windows of green glass leading inwards to his soul, and Severus could see the slightest moods and motions turning and shuffling there.

Everything he had said was true—for him. He hated Severus. He thought Severus would treat him badly. He saw no reason that the ties of blood need connect them at all.

And truly, Severus thought, his thoughts moving far more slowly than the boy’s spate of words had, is he not correct?

There was no way that he could speak the truth in front of most of the school. Claiming a public triumph over James Potter was impossible. It would have necessitated a confession about the circumstances of the boy’s conception, and then someone would certainly have accused him of rape or needing to make a woman drunk in order to seduce her. Severus never meant to be a victim of schoolboy taunts again.

The blood connection did not change the fact that the boy was a Gryffindor and a spoiled prince. He was probably glad to grow up without parents, for they would have forever been telling him what to do. At the very least, Severus could avow that no son of his would have behaved as Pott—this boy had done for the last six years.

And he was the Chosen One. Severus had no place in a life so glamorized, so filled with the attention the boy loved.

He felt as though the discovery should change things, but why? Old, outdated, sentimental notions of blood being thicker than water? He was growing as bad as Lucius Malfoy, who brooded constantly on the future of his family and could talk of little else.

He released the boy’s wrist. Immediately, Potter curled up into the blankets at the head of the bed, eyes wide and watchful, wrist cradled in his other hand as though Severus had actually hurt it.

Severus sneered and stood, breaking the privacy bubble to stride out of the hospital wing. No, this spoiled, puling brat was as far from the perfect child as he could imagine having.

It was only when he was opening the door of his private quarters that something occurred to him, something that made him stand quite still for a moment.

Potter had managed to avoid telling Severus how he had known the truth, and for how long.

He used my anger against me. He—manipulated me.

Severus closed the door of his quarters very slowly behind him. All the objections against acknowledging the blood connection were still present. One insight could not so easily dismiss them.

But the insight did give him many things to think about, and others to reevaluate.

*

He went away. Good.

Harry lay with his eyes shut and his mind whirling around so busily that he thought he could hear it clattering. Madam Pomfrey had taken one glance at him and insisted that he lie down and sleep. She had wanted him to take a potion, but Harry had put on a pathetic expression and assured her that he was so tired he didn’t need one. She had only been satisfied when he closed his eyes and faked some snores, of course.

But Harry couldn’t sleep. He needed the time to think.

And to rub his wrist. Snape had pressed tendon and bone together, so that Harry had a hard time keeping from crying out. But he wasn’t going to cry out in front of Snape.

Nothing had changed. The man was still the greasy git of the dungeons, the Head of Slytherin House, the Defense teacher Harry wished he’d never had. Everything Harry hated and feared and didn’t want. The way he’d held Harry’s wrist proved that he could hurt him and not even notice.

In some ways, Harry thought cautiously, it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d thought it would be. Snape was angry about the truth being kept from him. As long as he didn’t actually use the Cruciatus Curse, Harry decided, he could survive this. Snape would brood over it and snarl and hurl insults, but so what? He did that all the time anyway. This was another sin to add to the list of Harry’s sins that he spent so much time imagining. In the end, nothing would change.

Harry had to depend on that. Nothing would change because it couldn’t. He would rather go back to the Dursleys a hundred times over than spend time with someone who had looked at him the way Snape looked at him just now.

And really, when he thought about it, weren’t all the things he’d said to enrage Snape true? James Potter was the father who had loved him and died for him. Snape happened to conceive him, but he would never want or care for Harry (and Harry didn’t want him to). Even if he hadn’t known anything about Harry and tried the experiment of adopting him, he would be disappointed because Harry wasn’t clever or ambitious or good at potions.

Harry had spent years of his life trying to make the Dursleys love him, sure that if he just cleaned a bit better or went without food for another day or smiled at his aunt and uncle often enough, they would turn around and hug him. Love had conditions, for him. He understood that. He only had to make them see him as something other than a freak.

But then he’d come to Hogwarts, and met Ron and Hermione, and started understanding things differently. There were people who could like him for him, because they did things together, instead of hating him because he couldn’t meet an impossible standard.

He wasn’t going to go back to the impossible standards bit and slave away to try and make Snape love him. It was the sort of thing the bastard would like.

Nothing has to change, Harry reassured himself as he fell slowly asleep. I was silly to fear it would.

*

What could one do?

No matter how much he thought about it, Severus could reach no conclusion. It was as though he had stepped out over an abyss and discovered that he could not fall into it, but had no way to reach the other side, either. Confusion did not change things. Nor did anger, or spite, or blustering, or fear.

For the next few days, though he tried not to watch Pott—the boy more intently than usual, he was aware that he did not succeed. He might as well have, however. The boy seemed to notice no difference. He had restored the glamour and once again looked like James Potter’s spawn. He kept his head down in class and avoided Severus’s eyes even in the practice duels in Defense. He came to Occlumency lessons and private duels and acted no differently than before, except that the ignorance of the things Severus wanted him to learn was a determined ignorance, as if he wanted to show how little he wished to learn from someone he hated.

But he was picking up his books to scuttle out of class two days after the night in the hospital wing, and Severus saw the ragged sleeve slide away from a mark on his left wrist. He stepped closer, staring. The mark was all too clearly shadowy blue bruises made by fingers.

Did I do that?

From the way the boy’s spine stiffened, he felt Severus’s nearness and his gaze, but he simply scooped his books up and strode away. His spine was very straight, and his head canted on his neck as if he thought it would fall off if he didn’t concentrate on holding it up.

Looking after that very different posture, Severus suddenly found himself remembering the way Potter had hunched when he first confronted him about the broken glamour and again in the hospital wing. As if he was hunching himself to resist blows, but couldn’t quite subdue the instinct that made him outface his tormentor.

It was the way Severus had seen a few abused children in Slytherin react, particularly those from pure-blood families who had risen to fear mad relatives who might use the Unforgivable Curses on them. It was the way that Severus himself had hunched in front of his father, though Tobias Snape used far more insults than blows.

The boy saw him in the same light.

Another question followed that first one, dancing and sparking like a bead of light along a spiderweb.

Where did he learn such a posture?

There seemed to be no chance of finding out from the boy himself, who kept his eyes averted from Severus so much of the time, who had made such a pointed effort at cutting Severus out of his world. Severus cast eavesdropping charms that would let him hear what the boy was saying from across the Great Hall, and found him talking with his friends as though nothing had happened. He went to Quidditch practice and did his classwork and visited Narcissa Malfoy—who was wearing a glamour that made her look related to Poppy, to prevent the news from spreading—in the hospital wing as though nothing had happened.

Nothing had truly changed for him.

Of course, why should Severus suspect that anything would? By his own admission, the boy had known the truth for some time and had failed to inform Severus.

That remembrance enraged him again, until he thought of what would have happened had the boy come to him the instant he knew. He would have said something about Severus being his father, and Severus would have laughed, sneered, and told him to leave. He would have thought him foolish and sentimental even after he learned the truth.

If the boy wished to avoid his sneers, he had done exactly what he should have. And since it was a dangerous secret given the war, Severus might have been inclined to praise him for keeping quiet.

Everything the boy did that cut him off from Severus also made him closer to Severus’s image of an ideal son. Not that Potter would ever match that, because he could not, as he himself had said. “The son of Severus Snape” and “Harry Potter”—with or without his false last name—were separate people and always would be.

But those thoughts only returned Severus to where he had been, floating above the abyss with no way forwards.

*

Snape left him alone.

It was all that Harry could expect, and so he did his best to ignore the eyes that followed him and the hard stares he regularly received. So what? Snape had always stared at him hard. He had always thought that Harry wasn’t working up to his potential, that he wasn’t the warrior he should be, that he was unfairly the Chosen One.

Where Harry had feared that hatred, he now relied on it. It was the strongest protection he had against Snape trying to interfere in his life, now that the shield of secrecy was torn away.

The more time went by, the more Harry relaxed. He had felt exposed at first. He realized that was silly now.

Nothing will change.

Still, his effort to ignore Snape needed objects of distraction, so he practiced harder at Quidditch and with the D.A. than ever, and he did his best to look interested when Ron and Hermione squabbled about Lavender. He was mildly amazed their row had gone on for so long.

Is that what I would be like if I didn’t have Voldemort to distract me? Fighting about girls and worrying about who I should snog?

When Harry thought about it that way, he could be almost grateful for He Who Lived to Kiss Snakes.

And, of course, there was Draco and his mother.

Dumbledore had heard the news without surprise, according to Madam Pomfrey, and had only ordered that Mrs. Malfoy be well taken care of. So Harry visited her in the hospital wing every day, and listened to her talk. It seemed she needed to talk about what had happened to her in Malfoy Manor, and Malfoy—Draco—wasn’t enough audience.

“The spells made my nerves feel like columns of ants marching down my arms,” Mrs. Malfoy said one afternoon, her stare fixed on the far wall. “That was before they began to burn, of course.”

Or: “My fingers trembled so badly I could not grip the blanket to shift it.”

Or: “I could feel my heart knocking so hard that it felt as though it would explode past my ribs and burst into flight, like a dove.”

Harry listened. These were the kinds of things that happened to people in war. He could hear them. And Mrs. Malfoy seemed to think it was natural he should listen. Maybe she thought he had already experienced a lot of torture.

Besides, it made Draco look at something besides his mother and leave the hospital wing at points so he could eat and get his homework done. When he was there, he gripped Harry’s arm, hard.

Harry said nothing. He thought he could understand.

Once, Draco started to say something about Bellatrix. Harry shook his head and said, “I know she was your aunt. But I’m not going to say I’m sorry.”

Draco gave him a shocked look and said, “I wouldn’t expect that. She was one of the ones who tortured Mother.” His voice hardened. “I’m glad she’s dead.”

“Good.” Harry took Draco’s arm and gripped it hard in return.

He could not feel sorry about Bellatrix. He knew that people were supposed to feel shaky after their first kill, and guilty, and haunted by the face of the dead person. They were supposed to cry and confess and share things because otherwise the pain would kill them.

But when he sought out his feelings, there was only a hard, bright seed of gladness in him, and no guilt at all.

It was another reason to listen instead of talk, because it hid how much about him was strange.

*

Draco had waited, and waited. He thought it was obvious and that Potter was only waiting because he didn’t know how to bring it up.

But Potter never said anything. So, one evening after his mother was asleep and they were the only ones sitting in the hospital wing, watching her, with the lights low and Madam Pomfrey busy somewhere else, Draco spoke about what he had overheard more than a week ago.

“So, you’re Snape’s son,” he said.

Potter turned to him with a white face, and bent close. Draco flinched. His breath was harsh and hissing and hot. “Who have you told?” he demanded.

“N-no one.” Draco swallowed. This was the Potter who had killed his aunt. “I heard, but then I didn’t hear anything else because Professor Snape put the privacy spell up, a-and—”

“And you won’t tell anyone, either?”

Draco stared at Potter—or did he have a different name now?—in silence for a few minutes. He looked as though he could kill. He looked as though he could tear Draco apart.

“No,” Draco said quietly. “I won’t tell anyone. Who would believe me?” he added.

And that seemed to be the reassurance Potter needed, because he relaxed and started talking about Charms class as though nothing had happened. He never mentioned Defense any more, Draco thought. It was the only sign that something had changed.

Draco put his chin on his hand and watched Potter. He was normal, if you looked at him this way. Happy. Chatting. Strong. Protective.

But Draco, from his experience of trying to ignore the way the Dark Lord affected him, didn’t think anyone could possibly be that normal when they were ignoring who they were.

If he needs me, I’ll be here to help.

Chapter Eighteen.