lomonaaeren

Title: Practicing Liars (25/?)
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 Twenty-Five—Compulsion

Harry made sure that he’d cast locking and silencing charms on the door before he turned around and surveyed his friends.

Ron and Hermione sat close together on the floor of Umbridge’s old office, staring at him with nervous excitement. Draco stood on the other side of the room, his arms folded and his sneer embedded on his face as if it never left. Harry rolled his eyes at the distance between them and tried to choose exactly the middle point to stand, so he could see all of them at once.

“I’ve finally decided to tell you the truth,” he said to Ron and Hermione, “because I need your help to defeat Voldemort.”

Ron gave a nervous little squeak that he promptly tried to pretend was a deep, manly cough. Hermione leaned forwards and nodded calmly, though Harry could see the way her hand had gone white where she gripped Ron’s hand. “All right, Harry. But I thought you were the one who was supposed to defeat him?”

Harry shuddered, and tried not to think about the Horcrux fastened to his soul. He was trying, because he had to and life was better than death, but he still couldn’t see any way around the death sentence that Dumbledore had said he bore. If someone could destroy the soul in a Horcrux without destroying the physical object that contained it, wouldn’t Dumbledore have figured that out when he was researching them in the first place?

For now, though, it was enough to know he and Snape were working on it, and he could work on it with Draco if Draco wanted to. He was going to tell Ron and Hermione just enough that they would know what the problem was. He didn’t want to tell them about him being a Horcrux yet, because then Hermione would start crying and Ron would start protesting and giving Draco suspicious glances, and Harry just didn’t want to deal with that right now.

I’m so tired, he thought absently. Trying to live is more exhausting than just drifting along, resigned to death.

“Yes, I am,” he said, when he realized that some time had gone by in silence and Hermione’s stare had got sharper. “But Voldemort has created some powerful Dark artifacts that help to sustain his life. We’re going to have to find and destroy the last one before I can kill him.”

Draco cleared his throat. Harry glared at him. He hoped that his friends would take it as anger at the interruption, but Draco should take it the way it was meant: no, Harry wouldn’t tell his friends about the true last Horcrux right now.

Draco nodded and said, “What are these artifacts? How easy is it to destroy them?”

Harry relaxed, and couldn’t help smiling at Draco. Draco stared back at him, his cheeks flushing a bit. Harry raised a curious eyebrow as he faced Ron and Hermione again. Is it that unusual for me to smile at him since we started being friends? I didn’t realize.

“They’re called Horcruxes,” Harry said. “Dumbledore told me that,” he added, because he could see Hermione’s mouth opening to ask the question. “Voldemort makes them by attaching part of his soul to an object. Dumbledore’s destroyed most of them so far, and I destroyed one of them back in second year.”

“The diary!” Hermione exclaimed, clapping her hands.

Ron nodded, but he looked considerably less excited by the revelation. “Are you sure that we can do this, mate?” he asked. “After all, the diary needed a basilisk fang to get rid of.”

Harry nodded. “I know,” he said. “But right now, I mostly need your help in finding the last one.” Once again, he could feel Draco’s glare stabbing into the back of his neck, but he didn’t turn around. “Dumbledore can’t locate it. He’s sure it’s the tiara that belonged to Rowena Ravenclaw, though. Or at least mostly sure,” he added. The more he thought back on his conversation with Dumbledore, the less he was sure he could trust all the Headmaster’s words and expressions. “Voldemort likes artifacts that belonged to the Founders, and Dumbledore’s already destroyed the Slytherin and Hufflepuff ones.”

“And he wouldn’t bother touching an artifact of Gryffindor, of course,” Hermione said with a thoughtful nod.

Harry shot her a wistful smile. She grasps it right away. She does this so well. I wonder why Fate or Voldemort or whoever chose me as the one to fight him instead of her?

“And the tiara is the most famous artifact of Rowena Ravenclaw, though there are others,” Draco said. His tone was a copy of Hermione’s, which Harry appreciated. Harry still avoided looking at him, though. “I think the Dark Lord has no objection to fame.”

“If you don’t serve him anymore,” Ron said suddenly, “why can’t you call him by his name?”

Harry glanced at Draco, afraid that he would be upset. But Draco just raised his eyebrow and cocked his head to the side. “You first, Weasel,” he said.

Harry glared, but let the insult pass. Ron was the one who had decided to question Draco’s loyalty out of the blue.

Ron sat straight up and licked his lips. “V-Vol—” he said, and stopped.

Draco cupped a hand around his ear and leaned forwards politely. “Yes?”

“Oh, fine,” Ron said. “You-Know-Who. I can’t say it, all right? You can gloat now.” He turned around and folded his arms. Hermione hugged him, mouthing at Harry You need to make this all right.

“Neither can Draco,” Harry said. Draco tapped him hard on the shoulder. Harry ignored that. “And remember how long it took Hermione? I mostly said it when I was eleven because I didn’t know better. I hadn’t grown up with it. But you and Draco did. I don’t blame you for being afraid.”

Both Ron and Draco looked simultaneously soothed and ruffled by his words. Harry rubbed his eyes. Please, let us not kill each other before we find the tiara.

*

Severus was on his way out of the Great Hall when he heard excited chatter from behind the nearest pillar. He would have ignored it ordinarily—excited chatter was common at this time of the year, when the Ravenclaws began on their final projects in all their classes—but then he heard the word “Horcrux.”

Severus stopped, wishing he could Disillusion himself without notice, and managed to lean enough towards the pillar to identify the voices.

“I have a list of places that we should look,” Granger’s bossy voice was saying. “I mean, assuming it’s in Hogwarts. But I’ve checked the supposed sightings of the tiara outside the school, and all of them are either centuries old or were proven conclusively to be fakes later on by disinterested observers. Whereas the tiara was seen here twice in the years before V-Voldemort was a student.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” the voice of the second-youngest Weasley muttered. “After all, what if it was hidden somewhere and then You-Know-Who went searching and found it?”

“The school is where we can search right now,” Granger responded. “And I don’t think Dumbledore would have told Harry about the tiara with such particular emphasis if it was hidden somewhere really far away, somewhere we couldn’t reach. It would make more sense for him to go and find it himself, wouldn’t it?”

“Sometimes I worry about Dumbledore,” Weasley said.

That is the only thing we agree on, Severus thought, tensing his muscles against the impulse to swoop around the pillar and pounce on them for talking about such matters in public, where anyone could overhear them. Then he would have to reveal how he knew about Horcruxes and what he knew, and he was not yet willing to do that. It was possible that Granger and Weasley did not realize how powerful and dangerous the knowledge they possessed was. Encouraging them to believe otherwise would probably get them into more scrapes.

Instead, Severus withdrew into a shadowed corner and waited until he saw Potter leave the Great Hall. Then he fell into step beside him, so smoothly that the boy never had a chance to rejoin his friends.

“My office, now,” he breathed.

Startled, his son looked up at him. Severus’s heart clenched painfully. Ah, those eyes.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Harry said, falling back in front of him and looking around as if he wanted to find a group of Gryffindors he could bolt to for safety. “I was just walking here!”

Severus gave him a long, slow look of the kind that he had perfected when examining living bodies which would become Potions ingredients. As expected, it worked this time, too. The boy had been through many Dark and scarring experiences, but that hadn’t dulled his perception of more ordinary dangers. He put down his head and trudged after Severus to his office.

Severus made sure the door was triple-warded with locking and silencing charms before he turned around. The boy stood in the center of the floor, fists folded before him in the way that students adopted when they intended to fight him, his teeth gnawing his lip fiercely.

“I want to know what I did wrong, first,” Harry said, putting such haughtiness in his voice that Severus’s skin stung. He could remember sounding like that when he stood before a professor in his own student days, facing a punishment that he thought was undeserved.

And they were undeserved most of the time, Severus thought, before he shook the clinging fog of the resemblance away. He could not be allowed to let it interfere with the punishment of his son.

“You told your friends about Horcruxes,” Severus hissed. “Without thinking about the danger it could cause, and apparently without telling them that they should not discuss it in the open.”

Harry’s face turned pale, but he said, “I’ll warn them to put up silencing charms in the future, then.”

Severus prowled a step closer, not quite able to understand what he was seeing. In the past, the boy had displayed a better grasp of imminent danger than this. “Your crime was telling them about it at all,” he whispered, “without a discussion as to whether doing so would put you in more danger.”

Harry stared at him, mouth slightly open, and then shook his head. “I’m already in danger,” he said irritably. “When you mentioned that it could hurt them, I thought you meant them. Why should their knowing about Horcruxes make my situation more dangerous than it is with Voldemort hunting me and half the wizarding world depending on me to save them?”

Severus shook his head. “Because if someone learned about this, and made the connection that you are one—”

“I didn’t tell them that part,” Harry interrupted. “Just about the existence of Horcruxes in general, so they could help me find Ravenclaw’s tiara.”

“That was bad enough,” Severus said, ruthlessly crushing the tiny bit of relief that Harry’s chattering best friends didn’t know the worst secret. “Why did you not discuss this with me beforehand?”

Harry stared at him with his mouth open again. Then he said, “Why should I?”

Severus paused, his teeth clenching together. Yes, why should Harry have done so? Harry had proven before now that the ties of blood meant little to him and that he did not consider Severus’s mere existence as giving Severus any authority over him.

“In fact,” Harry went on, seeming to grow bolder from his silence, “why shouldn’t I talk to Dumbledore instead? He’s the one who gave me this information. He should probably have some say in who knows about it. But I notice that you didn’t send me off to consult with him.” He gave Severus another of those dark smiles and then pushed past him, aiming for the door.

Severus’s hand shot out as if it was a separate part of him and grabbed the boy’s shoulder. His voice said, as if also separate from him, “This conversation is done when I say it is done.”

Harry gasped once and then stood still. The dark smile didn’t seem to have faded from his face at all when he tilted his head back and met Severus’s eyes.

“I told you,” he breathed.

“Told me what?” Severus stepped closer to the boy, compulsions warring and clashing in him. There was the compulsion to discipline, the one to save and protect, the one to prove Harry wrong and show him that his actions were dangerous, and the one that made him want to strive until he saw Harry’s eyes soften and his head bow in agreement. The agreement would be a triumph, because it would mean he had been right, but it would also mean that Harry had decided to listen to and consult him in the future, and that would be a sweetness.

“I told you you would hurt me.” Harry glanced archly at the hand on his shoulder. “Because blood relatives always do.”

Severus had control of his hand again. It snapped sideways as if burned. Then he swallowed and said, “Did I hurt you?”

“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t mean to,” Harry said, his voice smooth and his eyes mercilessly brilliant. He pushed up the sleeve so that the bare skin of his shoulder showed. There was a bruise there, Severus saw, though the glance also let him know that it would not be nearly so lasting as the one he had inflicted on Harry’s wrist when he first learned the boy was his son. “I’m sure it’s that my skin bruises easily,” Harry continued, and now his tone was very bright. “Or that you don’t know your own strength. Or that I wouldn’t deserve it if I wasn’t such a little freak.”

Severus shuddered. “Stop echoing their justifications,” he whispered.

“Then stop echoing their actions,” Harry retorted, and slipped out the door.

Severus grimaced and shut his eyes, shaking his head. Sometimes he wondered if this whole endeavor to become a father was doomed to be failure.

The only scrap of comfort he had was that Harry had not told his friends about his being a Horcrux. At least that was something.

*

“Draco? Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Draco glanced up. He’d been talking with his mother for several hours now, letting his voice wander quietly through memories of his father. Narcissa had let him take her hand, which had been rare even when they were in the privacy of their home. She withdrew it now, but Draco could have sworn he felt it turn cold before it left his.

“Harry?” he asked, easing back from his mother’s bed, though aware of the way she watched him, with her eyes darting from Harry’s face to his and then back again. “Of course. What did you want to talk about?”

Harry swallowed and glanced sideways at Narcissa. Draco cocked his head. He couldn’t think of anything that Harry would be shy to talk about in front of his mother. Well, maybe the Horcruxes, but if he wanted to talk about that, he wouldn’t have sought Draco out in the hospital wing, where he must know that Draco would be visiting with his mother.

Unless his need was just too great, Draco thought suddenly, and warmth shot from his throat to his heart like the mulled wine that his father had sometimes let him taste. Unless he couldn’t help himself and he had to come find me.

Draco liked the thought of that kind of helpless need. He knew his voice was softer when he spoke again, and he thought his eyes were brighter, though he didn’t see how he could help that. Harry really had no idea what the mere thought of possessing his friendship did to Draco. “What is it?”

Harry turned back to face him, and then stared, caught a moment. But he shook his head and plunged past that with one of his sudden fearless dashes that Draco loved.

“Did you ever hate your father?” Harry blurted. “I mean—what did you do if you really hoped for something and then he took it away or wouldn’t get it for you? Did it ever really hurt? Because I can’t—I want—” He bit his lip and looked at Narcissa again. “I just learned something about my father,” he whispered, “about what kind of person he was when he was alive. And I’m feeling like I don’t like him much anymore.”

Draco wanted to roll his eyes, though he wasn’t sure if it was because of the way Harry still insisted on keeping Professor Snape a secret or because of the way he was speaking now, as if his feelings weren’t perfectly normal.

To him, they aren’t, Draco had to remind himself then. He didn’t grow up with them. He probably grew up dreaming and hoping about his parents, but didn’t expect ever to see them again.

And that let Draco understand, a little, the shock it must have been to Harry when he realized that one of those parents was still alive.

“I felt that kind of thing towards my own mother,” Narcissa remarked.

Draco stared at her. He had never known her to venture a personal comment in front of a stranger before. Usually, it took months of begging from him before she would share a personal memory from her childhood.

He might have felt jealous, but he was too hopeful about what it might mean that she had chosen Harry to share this memory with. He tried to fade into the background, except for the supportive hand that he laid on Harry’s shoulder.

“Did you?” Harry whispered. “Why? What did you do?”

Narcissa smiled, and Draco thought it was like and unlike the cold and lovely smiles he was used to from her. It made her look more like the portrait of a woman he had seen in his mother’s bedroom once, a miniature portrait with a scratch on the frame from being hidden away. His mother had said only that it was his Aunt Andromeda, who had run off with a Muggle, and Draco must never ask about her.

“I wished for a Kneazle kitten,” Narcissa answered. “A small white one with blue eyes, which would be elegant enough for a house such as ours.” Harry flinched a bit, as if he wanted to disagree that the Black family had been elegant, but he didn’t say anything, and Draco was grateful for his forbearance. “My mother feared the shedding of hair. But a cousin gave me one as a present for my birthday, and I had something else to love for three days.”

“Why only three days?” Harry asked. Draco had already decided that he knew the end of the story, though he’d never heard it before, and he drew near Harry. He doubted that the ending would make Harry happy.

“I came home and found that my mother had strangled it with one of my curtain cords,” his mother said, so calm, so steady, that Draco would have thought she no longer cared if not for the cold flicker in her eyes. “She held the body up before me and told me that the same thing would happen to me the moment I thought of rebelling against her again, by accepting a gift that she would have sent away, and which she expected her daughters to send away if they were at all worthy of their upbringing and family name. She forced me to tell my cousin that I had carelessly left the door open and the kitten had run away.”

The silence seemed far more intense to Draco than it would have ordinarily, because he had heard those sorts of stories from his mother before. Harry held his breath, then shouted, “But that wasn’t fair!”

“Of course not,” Narcissa said. “And for long days, I hated her. I do not think I ever completely forgave her,” she added, in a musing tone. “Later, there were other things, better things, to resent her for. But I could not break the ties of blood. I still had to live with her. I still had to obey her. I still had to subdue my resentment and pretend that I could smile.”

Harry swallowed. “So, did you ever start feeling that you loved her? Or was that something you only felt until she strangled the kitten?”

“There were moments,” Narcissa said, her voice barely audible. “Moments when she touched my shoulder or admired my gowns, or told me that I was certainly the prettiest and cleverest of her daughters.” She touched her shoulder now as if she could feel the echoes of that long-ago caress. “Of course, with such competition as Bellatrix and Andromeda, the compliment was not as great as it would have been in some other families.”

Draco hid a smile. He knew his mother, and he knew that she valued her mother’s words more than she would show.

“But you felt that way sometimes,” Harry said. “And you managed to live with her even though you hated her most of the time.”

Narcissa nodded to him. “That is correct.”

“Then maybe I can live with this,” Harry muttered, wrapping his arms around himself. He did it as if he had never had anyone to hug him and never expected to have anyone.

Draco stepped forwards impulsively and embraced Harry. He made a startled sound and tried to jump away, but Draco’s grip was too firm for that. Harry sighed after a minute and rested his head on Draco’s shoulder. “I’m only doing this because you won’t let me go,” he whispered.

Draco shivered because of the way Harry’s breath touched his ear. “Of course,” he whispered back.

Harry stood there and let Draco hold him for five minutes before pushing at his shoulders. Draco let him go reluctantly. His arms seemed to have been made to fit the shapes of Harry’s shoulders, his hands meant to rest along his ribs and stroke back and forth. The only thing better would have been if he was touching bare skin.

The shock of the thought made Draco pause. But moments later, it no longer seemed strange, and he could mumble a response to Harry’s farewell and watch him in only a slight daze as he left the hospital wing.

Well, so now I know what I want. I think most of me knew it before. I just hadn’t put it in those words.

He stirred and looked back at his mother, who was watching him with a small, knowing smile. Draco coughed and hoped he wasn’t blushing. “Why did you tell him about that?” he asked, to distract himself, and, he hoped, her. “You’ve never even told me that story, and you said once that you didn’t share memories of the family outside the family, because it could make them look bad.”

“He saved my life,” his mother said quietly, lying back. “And he was connected to my cousin Sirius and he killed my sister, so he is entitled to know something about the Blacks.” Draco blinked; for some reason, that sounded strange, even though it wouldn’t ordinarily. I’m still kind of hearing with Harry’s ears, I think. “And I can see what’s right in front of my eyes,” Narcissa continued. “He came to you for reassurance, not his friends. He allowed you to hug him, far longer than he has ever allowed his little friends to do so that I have seen. He protects you. He values you. I know where this will end.”

Draco knew he flushed this time, but he decided that he could be mature and acknowledge reality, since his mother had. He leaned in with some dignity to kiss her cheek. “Thank you,” he murmured.

Narcissa’s hand closed on his. Draco looked at her in surprise and saw that her eyes were bright. It was the closest she had come to tears since her rescue.

“Your father was never happy enough,” she whispered. “He took much of his pleasure in tormenting others. He relied on them too much, for relief and satisfaction and adoration and fear. Try to have your happiness in yourself, Draco. I want you to be happy.”

Draco didn’t know any words that could respond to a wish like that, so he simply squeezed her hand back.

And if he thought about Harry with a little more complacency and smugness and yearning after that, well, it was only natural.

Chapter Twenty-Six.