lomonaaeren | Chapter Nineteen of 'Practicing Liars'- Discussions, Rows, Quarrels, and Confrontations

Title: Practicing Liars (19/?)
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 Nineteen—Discussions, Rows, Quarrels, and Confrontations

“My husband is dead.”

It took Harry a long, slow period of time to realize what he was listening to. He’d been lost in a hazy calculation of how long it had been since he slept. He’d thought he might have fallen asleep briefly during the night when he was watching over Draco, but he didn’t think so now.

And yet, he didn’t feel tired. He didn’t want to do anything except sit next to Draco, watch over him, and occasionally check the door to make sure nothing was coming through that could hurt him.

This is why I want to be an Auror. Exhilaration rushed through him, so thick and deep that it felt as if he was walking on syrup. I don’t care how hard I have to work. It would be worth it to save people.

Now, though, Draco was sleeping soundly, and Mrs. Malfoy was speaking. After a lot of blinking, Harry managed to focus. She was staring at the far wall like usual.

“Yes?” he asked, as encouragingly as he could. He’d never liked Lucius, but he was dead, and he had died in a horrible way, and there was no one else here who could listen right now. It was the least Harry could do.

“I never knew,” Narcissa whispered, crossing her arms over each other. She looked pale even with the glamour, as if a moon was shining from inside her, or as if she’d been dipped in milk. Harry mentally shook his head at himself. He had no idea what he was thinking. Maybe his mind was tired even though his body wasn’t. He hoped not, though. He would need his mind and his body to defend Draco against threats. “I never knew that he was in danger. I didn’t have a chance to save him.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Harry said, startled. It sounded as though she was blaming herself, which he didn’t understand. “If you didn’t know, how could you save him?”

Narcissa turned her head and fixed him with mournful eyes. The glamour she wore gave her green eyes instead of blue, but that didn’t matter. Harry would have understood the grief in those eyes no matter what they looked like. “I should have realized that the Dark Lord would target him next,” she said. “I should have told Severus to do whatever he could to get him out of Azkaban.”

Harry grimaced. He hated it when people talked about Snape with affection or respect. Perhaps nothing was worse than Dumbledore trying to get him to say Professor Snape, but this was a close second.

It wasn’t his place to object, though. He was here to listen. That was the point. He kept silent and did it.

“I don’t know what he could have done,” Narcissa said. She rocked herself, her eyes shut and her face a mask of suffering. “But he came in and rescued me when I would have said that could not be done. I should have said something. This is my fault.”

“No, it isn’t,” Harry said firmly. “There’s no point picking up unnecessary guilt. It’ll only go on piling up and then you won’t get anything done. What you should do is blame yourself for the things that are your fault and then work to atone.” He stroked Draco’s hair. Draco had moaned and shifted uneasily. Now he straightened out again and started breathing softly. Harry smiled down at him.

He probably thinks that I would despise him for being weak, if he could see me now. Nothing’s further from the truth. He needs help, and I can give it to him.

Narcissa was staring at him when he looked up again.

“Is that something you did?” she asked.

Harry winced as he thought of Sirius and the way he hadn’t moved to save Cedric at all. “Yes,” he said. “In fact, you could say that it’s my fault your husband’s dead, too, if you really wanted to. You could say I should have anticipated that, because I probably understand Voldemort better than anyone else.” He kept himself from touching his scar, but it was hard. He didn’t want Mrs. Malfoy to suspect the connection between him and Voldemort, though. “But I’d rather comfort the people your husband died trying to protect than blame myself for it and not do anything.”

Narcissa leaned back against the pillows and looked up at the ceiling. She didn’t say anything else right now, and Harry was glad, because it let him give more attention to Draco. He didn’t really know what to make of Malfoy’s mother. Half the time he thought she was just talking to him because he was there and she needed to talk to someone, and half the time he thought she couldn’t ever be that unguarded.

Draco could.

Harry smiled at him again. He wasn’t weak. He might think he was, but he’d survived the pain of having the Dark Mark burn and the pain of seeing his father’s severed head speak to him without immediately going mad. Harry thought it was more than he could have done if he’d seen one of his parents murdered in front of him.

Then he remembered that he had, technically. He could hear his mother scream every time a Dementor came near.

Harry shrugged irritably and shifted sideways in the chair to get a little more comfortable. So what? He’d been so young, and for the longest time, he hadn’t even known what the memory meant. That wasn’t the same thing as losing a parent that you were close to, that you’d known all your life.

You could, perhaps, still see a parent die.

Harry snorted loudly enough that Narcissa glanced over at him for a minute and Draco stirred again. Yes, of course. It sometimes seemed as though he’d told Hermione the truth about Snape and his mum sleeping together after all. His mind offered him enough unsolicited advice on the subject.

He’s not my father. Not in any of the ways that matter. I would be sorry to see him die for the same reasons I would be sorry to see anyone else die. But I don’t like him, he doesn’t like me, and it’s not going to happen.

He paused, but his mind didn’t snap back at him this time. Harry shrugged and burrowed deeper into the chair. Sometimes, it depressed him, how different he was from other people. He would have liked to be normal.

Other times, like now, he was grateful. If he was normal, he wouldn’t have known what to do to help Draco, or rescue Mrs. Malfoy, or kill Bellatrix.

If he was normal, he couldn’t do what he needed to do.

*

Draco woke to a heated argument that he had the feeling people were trying to conduct in whispers. If they were trying to avoid waking him up—which was a proper ambition—then he could only blame them. He’d woken up anyway.

“But why? It’s just—it doesn’t make sense, Harry.” That was a female voice, and Draco only knew one of those that would sound so earnest and would call Potter “Harry” at the same time. “When did it happen? We were right here, and we never realized that you were paying more attention to Malfoy now.”

“Right here,” Potter drawled, with a skepticism that did him credit, Draco thought. “Of course. In the parallel dimension where your own rows about snogging were more important than anything I was doing.”

“But we would have noticed you being friends with the git, mate!” Weasley, of course. Draco was accustomed to thinking of Weasley and Granger as twin symptoms of a disease; one could not plague you without the other. “Don’t pretend that we were ignoring you that badly. I—”

“You were.”

In the short silence that followed, Draco managed to slide his head sideways far enough that he thought opening his eyes wouldn’t be immediately noticed, and peek out from beneath his lowered lids.

Potter was standing between him and the other people in the room, to his annoyance. But he could see from the tight set of his shoulders that Potter probably had his arms folded, and his hands were in front of him. If he was holding his wand on his best friends, then Draco regretted more than ever that he couldn’t see it.

By shifting a bit, Draco could see a part of Granger’s face. Her expression was sad and hopeless. Draco mentally sneered at her. I fought for my parents. Can’t she even fight for her best friend? Or does she assume that being friends with a Slytherin automatically means that he’s not good for anything else ever again?

“We were wrong,” Granger said. “But something happened to you, Harry. Something big. Didn’t it? I wish you’d come to us and tried to talk about it anyway.”

Potter’s shoulders grew less tense. “Yeah, well,” he said, swiping a hand through his hair. “I probably should have. But I got exasperated with the way you were behaving.” He paused, and then added in a thick voice, “Would you be here now if you hadn’t seen the way I ran across the Great Hall to protect Draco? Did it take something that big to shatter the barriers and get through to you?”

“Mate,” Weasley said, and Draco thought he was going to reach forwards and grip Potter and they would all collapse into a soppy Gryffindor hug. Draco was beginning to regret that he’d woken up. Instead, Weasley continued, “You call him Draco?”

“That’s what you focus on.” Potter’s voice was very flat, and so the words didn’t come out like a question. “Yes, I do. We’ve become close enough that he deserves that from me.”

That’s not all I deserve from you, Draco thought, and then blinked. The thought wasn’t exactly new to him. The hunger in it was.

He started to remember what Potter had been protecting him from, why he’d needed Potter’s help in the first place, and his breathing sped up and his eyes tried to shut. He managed to force down the grief far enough to fix his attention on the conversation again, and for now that was all he wanted.

Yes, he needed Potter still. But he would distract Potter from an argument with his best friends if he interrupted now. And Draco had been waiting to hear that argument for a long time.

“I just don’t understand how this happened,” Granger whispered. The distress in her voice made Draco grin. For a little know-it-all like Granger, not knowing something had to be the greatest punishment.

“I don’t, either, all the time.” Potter sounded weary. But luckily, he wasn’t moving from between Draco and his friends. “I still want to be friends with you. I just want you to bloody pay attention to something besides your love lives once in a while, all right?”

“You call him Draco,” Weasley said, sounding as dazed as though someone had hit him over the head with a Blasting Curse.

“Yes.” Perhaps Potter would use a Blasting Curse in the next second, Draco thought hopefully. He sounded angry enough to do it. “I’m friends with him, and I’m friends with you, and I’m friends with just about everybody who isn’t a Death Eater, all right? I’m friends with the rest of Dumbledore’s Army, and a lot of Gryffindors, and maybe I could even be friends with more Slytherins if I thought they needed my help and if they would stop being stubborn and stupid and talk to me. I’m not going to stop being friends with other people just because you think I should.”

Draco grimaced. I don’t want him to be friends with other people exactly the way he’s friends with me. I want to be special to him.

Maybe he’d moved. He must have, because Potter turned around suddenly and smiled at him. “Draco!” he said, hurrying over to the bed with gratifying speed. “How are you feeling?”

Draco saw no reason why he should pass up such a prime opportunity to make the Gryffindors uncomfortable. He sighed and turned large eyes up at Potter. “I still want peace and quiet,” he whispered. “Can I have that?”

Potter studied him with a narrowed gaze for a minute, even as Weasley spluttered something about how he was lying and Granger said, “We weren’t disturbing him! We all thought he was asleep until now!”

Then Potter put his hand on Draco’s shoulder and squeezed. “I think we can arrange that,” he said. “Your—I mean, the other person in the hospital wing’s asleep right now, and Madam Pomfrey said that she would only disturb you if she needs to bring you food or potions. And I can leave.”

“No!” Draco snapped, grabbing Potter’s wrist and squeezing so hard that Potter winced. Draco wondered what that would look like to the smug Gryffindors and tried to release his hold a bit. It was hard. “You promised that you would stay with me, and I want you to do that.”

“He does still have to attend class,” Granger pointed out, in a tone of calm reason that Draco had always hated when his father used it with him.

Father. He had to shut his eyes and turn away, because suddenly his throat was tight and his eyes stung, and the argument seemed as silly and stupid as it was next to the fact that his father was dead.

“Fine, go away,” he said thickly, releasing Potter’s wrist. “If you want to so badly. I need to think.” He needed to curl up and think about this wound, was what he meant, and how he was going to live the rest of his life. There would be no more calm, stern voice telling him that he had done something wrong. There would be no more quick squeeze on the shoulder when he had got something right. And he would hear the Dark Lord’s voice through his father’s lips forever. How could he do anything else?

“Go away,” Potter said to his friends, in a flat voice that Draco would have enjoyed, except that he couldn’t imagine taking pleasure in anything right now. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“But Harry—” A Weasley whinge if there ever was one, Draco thought, but the thought was distant and unimportant. He was concentrating far harder on the fact that the bed bent in where Potter leaned against it and that the hand was back on his shoulder.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Potter said forcefully. “We’re still friends. We’ll discuss it. But later.”

Granger had more sense than Weasley, not that that was a surprise. Draco heard her urge Weasley out of the hospital wing. He took a shaky breath and leaned back towards Potter, offering a tentative hand.

Potter gripped it and used it to tug Draco closer to him. “I won’t go, if you really need me,” he said. “I just thought you might prefer to be alone with your mother.”

“Later,” Draco said, and would have smiled to think that he was sounding so much like Potter, except that he felt like he would never smile again right now. “I need—I need you.” He rolled over and grabbed Potter’s shoulders and waist and hair. His hand seemed to land everywhere except someplace that would let him have a solid grip.

Potter grabbed Draco’s arm and adjusted it around his waist. “It’s all right,” he said, voice so deep and soothing that Draco could have sunk into it like a blanket. “I promised to stay with you. I’ll keep that promise.”

Yes, you will, Draco thought, and wondered if Potter knew what it meant that he tightened his grip again.

*

“Enter.” Severus lifted his head from the stack of essays he had been marking— managing to mark only because it was such an old chore. In reality, his attention had been fixed beyond that door, on the boy who entered now.

“Sir.”

Potter’s eyes were wide and wary, and he watched every movement Severus made in rising up from the desk and casting locking charms on the door. He couldn’t keep from giving a small, nervous twitch of his head when the charm flew past his ear. Severus promised himself that he would remember that movement, and stepped closer.

The silence wore on the boy’s nerves, as Severus had suspected it would. “Are we going to practice Occlumency first, sir?” he asked, drawing his wand. “You said that this session would be different. Are we going to combine Occlumency and practicing dueling?”

Severus shook his head. “It is different,” he said. “It is not exactly a session.”

The boy’s head snapped up, and he hunched his shoulders in that blow-absorbing posture. Severus paused. He wanted, badly, to know the origin of that movement, but he suspected it would be best pursued when some more obvious barriers had been broken through first.

“Sir?” The boy’s voice was high now, but with anger, not nervousness, at least if Severus was a judge of adolescent students.

“We should have discussed long since,” Severus said, his voice layered with calm, “what certain things that lie between us mean.”

“They don’t mean anything, sir.” The boy’s voice sank, and those eyes were hard with a contempt that Severus knew was all inherited from him. It certainly had never haunted Lily’s eyes. Lily, for all the darkness she had seen and lived through, had never known bitterness so pure. “We’ve established that.”

“I would like a chance to change the definitions.” Severus inclined his head in what he hoped the boy would see as a friendly nod, a gesture to an equal. It only earned him a hostile stare. He decided that he had no choice but to speak directly. “You are more than I thought you. I would like a chance to have a say in your future.”

“Yeah,” Potter breathed, “I’ll bet you would. Having power over me makes you happy. Well, you don’t get this kind of power.”

Severus grimaced. He could have phrased his request better. Yet he could not say that he wished to be a father to the boy. Not only did he not know if that was possible at the moment, but he was not sure it was consonant with his own desires. To be closer, yes; to claim the boy’s time and attention in some way, yes. But more than that? He did not know.

“You mistake me,” he said. “It is connection I seek, and not power.”

“We’re connected,” Potter said stubbornly. “You’re a teacher, and I’m a student.”

“You know it is more than that,” Severus said. “My blood flows in your veins.” It was the first time he had ever said something similar, and he stood there, blinking in the strangeness of the phrase.

He wished later he had not, as it had given Potter the chance to hurtle ahead and try to change their contest.

“And I don’t care about that,” Potter whispered. “Don’t you understand? It means nothing to me. If I were a kid, sure. If I’d had lots of fantasies about parents coming to rescue me, sure. But I’m almost of age, and I gave up those fantasies before I was eight years old, thanks.”

Severus noted silently that Potter apparently had needed fantasies of rescue for some reason. That fit in with the hunching posture to make him wonder more about the life Potter had experienced before he had come to Hogwarts. “I did not wish to rescue you, or imply that you were weak,” he said. “I meant that I wish a closer connection.”

Potter stubbornly shook his head, his dark hair whipping around his face. Severus found his eyes lingering there, as they never had. He had always seen that defiant hair as simply another facet of inheritance from James Potter. Now he was reluctantly fascinated. What combination of his blood and Lily’s had produced it?

“I don’t want one,” Potter said.

“And you believe that your own desires are the only ones that matter here?” Severus felt his anger rising to match his—his son’s, and he glided a step forwards. That made Potter bare his teeth and lift his wand at once, but at least it commanded his attention. “You believe that it is not important if I wish to have a claim to your time? To you?”

Potter clenched his fists and lifted his shoulders even more into that posture that so intrigued Severus. “You don’t have a claim,” he said, voice low and ugly, and in it again Severus heard the harmonics of his heritage. “None at all. You didn’t know about me. And now it’s the same as if you only knew about me after I died.”

Severus stared at him, baffled. He had expected the anger and the hatred, but not the particular form this anger and hatred had taken. Not when he had seen Potter’s longing glances at the Weasley parents and Black in Grimmauld Place, not when he had believed that Potter yearned for a home with someone who was related to him. “It is not,” he said slowly. “I am not yet certain of the form this connection should take, but it is undeniable.”

“Why?” Potter demanded. “Why does blood matter so much? Just because you’re pure-blood—”

“I am not, in fact,” Severus said. He would normally never have shared this with a student, but he thought it…right—for certain definitions of that word—for his son to know about their heritage. “My father was a Muggle.”

Potter stared at him with a slightly open mouth. Then he slammed it shut and shook his head. “It still doesn’t matter,” he said. “In fact, I don’t know why you keep insisting on this. Blood can’t be that important. Why does it change everything? Why is it undeniable? Why can’t we simply keep going the way we were before?”

“We cannot,” Severus said. Once again, the unexpected direction of Potter’s emotions made him slow to respond. “I cannot forget, and neither can you. You are the son of a woman who was my friend. And my son. You are not the son of the man I hated most. That means that many things I have thought about you are not true.”

“None of the things you think about me are true,” Potter said with quick force. He had not picked up on the hint about Lily, to Severus’s disappointment. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. And anyway, I do have people related to me by blood who take care of me and are my guardians. So you can’t offer me anything new there.” He stood up straight and looked mockingly into Snape’s eyes. “You thought I was spoiled. Well, I am. My aunt and uncle would do anything for me.”

Too swift, too blunt, too honest, which renders it unnatural. Severus had begun to see that Potter was good at concealing secrets. That made the truth he did willingly show off all the more suspect.

And there was the evidence of Potter’s behavior, and the fact that he had so easily, so quickly, expected nothing but hatred and neglect from Severus.

“I do not think,” Severus murmured, watching Potter’s face so that he would have a chance to catch every flicker of expression, “that that is true at all.”

Potter’s eyes widened while his face drained of color. Then he swung around, and Severus’s locking charm dissolved with a single sweep of his wand.

Severus moved forwards, but he wasn’t fast enough. Potter opened the door and tore out of the office, the sound of his footsteps quickly fading.

*

Harry lowered his head and ran. He didn’t care where he was going. He just wanted to get away from everyone.

He had thought it was safe, to finally leave Draco alone in the hospital wing and start attending classes and practice sessions with Snape again. He knew Draco was past the worst of his grief, and there was no danger from the Dark Mark, but he wanted to stay hidden from the rest of the school, and Harry couldn’t blame him.

Snape was safe. He was safe because he was ignoring everything, and that meant he was going to let it not matter. Harry needed that.

But instead, Snape had to say…

Harry shuddered and ran faster.

He slammed into something warm and solid, and sat down on the floor with a grunt. Someone trilled, and someone else said, “Oh, dear. I am sorry, Harry. I didn’t mean to be in the way.”

Harry blinked and looked up. Dumbledore stood over him, with Fawkes on his shoulder. The phoenix cocked his head and trilled again. Harry hoped he wasn’t laughing at him.

Dumbledore held out his hand to help Harry up. “But this is a fortunate meeting,” he added softly. “There is something I have been wanting to talk to you about, Harry, for a…very long time.” His eyes flickered to the scar on Harry’s forehead.

Chapter Twenty.