lomonaaeren | Chapter Thirty-Four of 'Practicing Liars'- The Stretched String Snaps

Chapter Thirty-Three.

Title: Practicing Liars (34/?)
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 Thirty-Four—The Stretched String Snaps

Harry hurried out of the dungeons and paused only a moment to look around before he darted off towards the library. This time of night, Draco was likely to be in there, studying, especially since they had a Potions exam the next day.

I should probably study, too, Harry thought as he watched for any professors who would yell at him for running. But then, I have the Half-Blood Prince’s book, so I really don’t have to.

He winced under a small spasm of guilt. Sometimes he felt bad about not revealing how much the book was responsible for his improvement in Potions. He wasn’t fooling Hermione, but Slughorn continued to praise him and assume he had a natural talent just like his mother, and Harry hadn’t missed the incredulous looks Draco sometimes gave him.

Even more, it felt like concealing something from Snape.

But Snape and Draco would understand, Harry argued to himself as he dodged around a corner and leaped the gap between the corridor he’d come out into and the last step of a staircase just beginning to move. After all, they’re both Slytherins, and they know that sometimes you just need an advantage in a subject you’re not very good at. Besides, if I hadn’t read the book, I wouldn’t have been able to save my life with Sectumsempra.

Those were good arguments. Solid, even. Harry could almost picture Draco nodding in approval.

Strangely, it was a lot harder to picture it for Snape.

Harry blamed his preoccupation with that idea for not letting him look where he was going. He scrambled off the end of the moving staircase and straight into someone tall and solid. Harry let out an oof and grabbed the nearest wall so he wouldn’t fall back onto the staircase.

Good old survival instincts, he thought as he looked up.

Dumbledore peered down at him with gently twinkling eyes. It was the most normal Harry had seen him look since the start of the school year. “Hello, Harry,” he said, in the gentle, grandfatherly voice Harry remembered from last year when he’d explained the prophecy. “I was coming to seek you. There is something important you need to know.”

Harry could feel himself flushing as he straightened. The emotions twisting his heart when he looked at Dumbledore were all uncomfortable: resentment, curiosity, uncertainty…

And pity. A lot of that.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, and then added, “Sir.” He wasn’t sure he felt like adding it, but he didn’t think he felt like being rude, either.

“Listen closely,” said Dumbledore, and suddenly his voice was deeper, his eyes so bright and strong that Harry wouldn’t have been surprised if flame had flashed from them. “You need to listen to me, now. When the time comes, you must remember these words and trust to them, no matter what else happens.”

Harry stared up at him, mystified. Then he nodded slowly and said, “All right, sir. What are the words?”

Dumbledore bent closer, looking around suspiciously in the meantime, as if he thought someone was lurking in the shadows to take the words away. His voice was a whisper so faint Harry wouldn’t have heard it if he hadn’t been listening as closely as Dumbledore told him to.

“It is not gone,” Dumbledore said. “But it is fading. And better a fading thing fight the ultimate darkness than a bright, strong light that would burn out when it tried.”

He was gone in the next moment, though Harry never knew how. It ought to have been easy to look around and see those bright blue robes, decorated with silver stars and moons, billowing up the corridor. But Harry stared into the shadows of the torches, and around the next corner, and back down the moving staircase, and didn’t see them.

He hesitated for two seconds. Then he was running to the library again, briskly rubbing the inside of his arms to try and soothe the gooseflesh.

*

“Draco.”

Draco lifted his head lazily. Harry had come and dragged him out of the library, saying he had something important to tell him. Draco had been more than willing to go along with that, since Harry’s face was strange and pale. But once they got to Umbridge’s abandoned office, all Harry had done was snog him, until they were lying entwined on the floor and Draco felt almost too warm and smug to move.

“What?” he asked.

“I wanted to tell Ron and Hermione about us,” Harry said, in such a rush that Draco lost half the words and had to put them in afterwards. It didn’t help that Harry had his head buried in Draco’s shoulder and so a tendency to drip his words down Draco’s robe. “I didn’t tell them yet, because it’s your secret too and I didn’t have your permission, but I want them to know. They won’t betray it, I promise. I’ll ask them not to. But Ron won’t be happy, and he might hurt you, and I don’t even want to think about that, and I wonder if it’s a good idea after all, and—”

“Hush,” Draco said firmly, and pressed down on the back of Harry’s neck until he stopped talking. Then he lay there, blinking at the wall and trying to deal with everything he’d just heard.

Harry wanted to tell his friends about them. Well. That was good, right? That was a sign that he didn’t intend to abandon Draco the moment things got hard, and he was putting Draco before Weasley and Granger, or at least putting them side-by-side.

But Draco winced at the thought of what would happen once they knew. The Weasel would probably be lying in ambush around every corner, waiting for him, and he couldn’t see them keeping this a secret, whatever they promised Harry. The Slytherins still left Draco alone because Professor Snape had not-so-subtly informed them that Draco was under his protection, but knowing that he was dating a Gryffindor might make someone bold enough to try something. Draco’s life could become more miserable than any he’d ever lived.

Isn’t it worth it, for Harry?

Draco smiled to himself. His mother and father would say that love was very sweet, and then caution him not to lose himself to it. Or his mother would. His father would—perhaps have said different things. Draco would never know.

He caught his breath in loss for a minute and lay there with his eyes shut. He felt Harry kiss his ear and heard him whisper, “Draco?”

“Why did you decide to tell your friends?” Draco murmured to him. “It seems—sudden. You just realized your feelings yourself. Why now?”

“Does that mean you don’t want me to do it?” Harry sounded half-disappointed, half-relieved. “Because we can wait, if you want—”

“No,” Draco said, lifting himself on his elbow and squirming around until he could see Harry. It meant disrupting the comfortable position they were lying in, for which he was sorry, but he had to see Harry now. “I just want to know why.” He ran his fingers through Harry’s hair, which made his eyes flutter shut, and then poked him in the shoulder until he looked again.

Harry ducked his head, blushing. Draco smirked, but decided that the immediate reason for the blush that came to his mind wasn’t the one for Harry’s decision. After all, he would hardly tell his friends about any…interesting dreams he might have had of Draco.

“I was thinking about myself,” Harry said, in a voice so small Draco could have lost it in his cupped hands. “I told you part of that. How I thought about what I’d done in the past, and how hard I actually tried to learn when I was in school, and decided that I hadn’t learned much because I was so insistent on stopping Voldemort.” He paused and sucked nervously at the inside of his cheek.

“Yes,” Draco murmured, careful to keep his voice cheerful and not accusatory, “you said that.” He dragged Harry back down and curled up on his chest again.

“I decided that I’d kept enough secrets, too,” Harry said. His voice was swirling dark and bitter now, reminding Draco of an underground river. “I had to keep the secret from everyone at primary school about how the Dursleys treated me. I kept that when I came here, too. And I couldn’t tell anyone about my nightmares and what I suffered when I did fight Voldemort, because it might be dangerous. I kept things that happened to me in my first and second year, things Dumbledore told me, hidden.” He hesitated, and Draco could have sworn he felt Harry’s smile before he heard it. “I didn’t tell you that the Sorting Hat wanted to put me in Slytherin, did I?”

“And you rejected it?” Draco blurted before he could stop himself. “Are you mad?”

“Not mad,” Harry said dryly. “Just overly influenced by you, even then. I didn’t want to be in the House you were in.”

Draco lay there trying to decide if he should be insulted or not. On the one hand, Harry had been so determined to avoid him that he had gone into Gryffindor, and made friends with a bunch of people as uptight as Granger or as appalling as Weasley. And Draco couldn’t help wistfully imagining what might have happened, a lot earlier than this, if he and Harry had been in the same House.

On the other hand, Harry had been so determined to avoid him that he had gone into Gryffindor.

That was a lot of power for someone to wield over the Boy-Who-Lived when he was only eleven years old. Even though Draco had never suspected he had it, he couldn’t help calming down and preening a bit as he considered the matter.

“And there are other secrets, too,” Harry went on. “You know some of them. I was thinking of how Ron and Hermione had ignored me for their own private love affair, and resenting it, and then the revelation burst on me: how could I accuse them of that when I’d ignored them in favor of my own private secrets for so long? Even when I was with them more often and told them a lot, it still wasn’t everything.”

“You don’t owe them that much consideration,” Draco couldn’t help saying sulkily. It seemed to him that Harry didn’t owe them any, but he knew he couldn’t really change a Gryffindor friendship. What he had to do was influence how much time Harry spent with them.

“Yes, I do,” Harry said, and with the frosty tone in his voice that told Draco not to press further. “Anyway. I changed my mind, and I want to tell them about us because it’s the best secret in my life.”

Draco found himself caught without a response. He cleared his throat, and blinked, and cleared it, and blinked some more. Then he said, “Well, all right. But only because you said that, you know.”

“I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true,” Harry said, and then caught Draco around the neck and kissed him so soundly that all his other thoughts drifted away on a river of warmth.

*

“Are you all right, Harry?”

Trust Hermione to be observant, Harry thought, and jerked his eyes away from the spot on the floor where he and Draco had been lying the last time he was in this room. “Fine, fine,” he said hurriedly. “But I did call you here to explain other things to you.” He faced Ron and Hermione and took a deep breath.

Hermione nodded. She’d conjured three comfortable chairs for them, or, for all Harry knew, Transfigured them from dust motes, and formed them into a triangle. She was the only one sitting down. Harry was standing indecisively near the door, and Ron seemed determined not to sit down until Harry did.

Putting this off wouldn’t make things any better, Harry thought, and finally resigned himself to what he had to do. “I have two secrets to tell you,” he said. “I got permission from both of the other people who were concerned in them, so it’s not betraying a confidence or anything.”

Ron snorted. “You’re sounding formal,” he explained when Harry looked at him. “You always sound more formal when you’re about to say something we won’t like.” He paused and studied Harry critically. “In fact, you almost sound like Snape.”

Harry must have jumped, because Hermione said, “I knew it had something to do with Snape.”

“There’s no easy way to say this,” Harry said. “So I might as well stop trying to almost spit it out and actually do it.” He tried to smile, but his lips were dry and his heartbeat shrill with terror. “Snape’s my father.”

“Don’t joke,” Ron said.

“He is,” Harry insisted. “I found out a few summers ago. There was a letter from my mum among these old papers at my aunt’s house, and she told me in it that she—she slept with Snape and figured out he was my dad after I was born.” He knew he was blushing, but really, was there any easy way to talk about your parents having sex? “There was a letter to him, too, but I never knew what that one said.”

Hermione sat as if she’d been turned to stone, staring at him. Ron was shaking his head over and over, the way Harry had seen him do last summer when he was trying to shake off a bee. “No,” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I didn’t think it did when I first heard about it,” Harry said, trying to cling to his calm and remember the startled, wondering look in Snape’s eyes the last few times they’d spoken. Your friends are important, but so is he. If they get angry at you, Draco and him will still be there. Remember that. And you can talk them back around. This isn’t your only chance. “But I can’t think of why my mum would write me a lie like that, either. I mean, why? Even if she got angry at my dad—James—writing a letter that she didn’t know he’d live to see isn’t the best revenge she could have. And she didn’t write this to any of the Death Eaters or Voldemort’s enemies, either, so it’s not like she was trying to use it as a weapon or a defense for me.”

Ron went on shaking his head. Hermione leaned forwards and said, “But do you actually have any proof of this, Harry?”

Harry nodded. “That disease I had, where I was seeing the white Dementors.” Please let them believe me about this. Please don’t make me remove the glamour. “It’s not really a disease. It’s a bloodline curse. Snape’s mother’s family was cursed with it a long time ago.” He decided not to say that Snape wasn’t a pure-blood; that was a secret he hadn’t asked for permission to reveal. “There would be no reason for me to get it if I wasn’t part of his family.”

“But what about it being a Potter bloodline curse?” Ron asked, so breathlessly that he sounded as if he’d snatched the idea from a race it was losing. “It could be that, couldn’t it? And that would explain everything!”

Harry shook his head. “It isn’t,” he said. “I looked it up in a book about bloodline curses when I first started suspecting what it was. The Potter bloodline curses were all different. I didn’t see it listed under Snape’s family, either,” he added, when he saw Ron’s mouth opening, “but I was looking under the wrong last name.”

Ron drooped. Hermione spoke quietly. “Does Professor Snape know, Harry? I noticed that he’d been paying more attention to you lately.”

Harry nodded. “He figured it out when he put certain facts together.” No need to mention right away what those facts had been, either. When he’d first decided to tell these secrets, Harry had imagined that he would want to get rid of everything he’d hidden at once, but that was proving to be impossible. “He confronted me with the truth, and I didn’t deny it fast enough to satisfy him. Since then, we’ve been kind of trying to figure out what we should do.” He shrugged helplessly, while Hermione stood up and walked towards him and Ron avoided looking at him altogether. “I mean, it’s not every day that you learn you have a father when you’ve already been alive for sixteen years, right?”

“I don’t believe it,” Ron said. His voice was soft and quiet and heartbroken. Harry took a step towards him, but Ron moved away a step, and Harry stopped. “You’re making it up. You’re playing a joke. You’re lying. I know you are.”

“I don’t think he is,” Hermione said. She had a hand on Harry’s elbow now, and he started; he hadn’t even really noticed her coming closer. Her eyes were very kind and looked enormous. “It’s like he said. Just like his mum would have no reason to lie to him about Professor Snape being his father, he would have no reason to tell us this if it wasn’t true.” She squeezed Harry’s arm. “And that’s why he’s brewing the potion that will get rid of the Horcrux in your head. Or part of it.”

Harry nodded. “Maybe he would have done that anyway, but yeah. He was furious when he found out that Dumbledore didn’t know any way to get the Horcrux out of me and was just going to kill me.” Hermione’s eyes darkened with anger, but Harry spoke hastily. If she started talking about Dumbledore now, he thought she would never stop. “He decided that he could find some way to take care of it. So he did.”

“You’re a stranger,” Ron said, and again his voice was so soft it hurt. “I don’t know you at all.”

“I’m still me,” Harry said as steadily as he could when he wanted to scream. “I promise, Ron. I haven’t done anything that should make you hate me or turn on me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Ron said, his voice drearily precise. “I just don’t know you.”

Harry wanted to walk out of the room, but he had promised himself that he would see this through. And he could always talk Ron around later, he thought again.

He was almost sure.

He feared.

He hoped.

He was more determined than ever not to remove the glamour if he didn’t have to. That would make Ron all the more certain he was a stranger, and it would be another secret for Hermione to chide him for having kept from them.

I reckon there are limits to my courage, after all, he thought, and turned back to face Hermione. He didn’t want to look at Ron while he recited this particular, second truth.

“The other secret is that I’m dating Draco Malfoy,” he said. “He gave me permission to tell you, too.”

Ron made a terrible sound. Hermione didn’t, but she didn’t look much better, either.

“Draco Malfoy?” she asked. “Has he apologized for insulting me and telling me I should die and not attend Hogwarts? Is he going to make you like him?”

“Yes, no, and no,” Harry said. He clenched his fists. This was hard, this was too hard. He almost wished he had told Draco to come with him, but his presence would have made this even worse, if that was possible. “He hasn’t tried to change me, and I haven’t tried to change him. You can’t change people you’re dating, Hermione. You ought to know that.” He glanced swiftly at Ron, hoping she would pick up on what he meant.

“I think there’s a difference between trying to break someone of the habit of talking with his mouth full and trying to make someone a decent person!” Hermione’s voice rose. “I can’t believe you would do something like this, Harry!”

“I can’t help who I like!” Harry threw his hands in the air. “Do you think I would have chosen to have a crush on Cho, when first she ignored me and then she cried on me? I would have chosen a crush on someone nice and safe, someone Voldemort would always ignore and who wouldn’t mind that I was in danger. And Snape’s son,” he added, looking at Ron. Ron had turned his head a little earlier, but he had his back solidly to Harry by this point. “And anyway, he’s helped me deal with these stupid secrets and explained the theory of the potion Snape is brewing to me when I didn’t understand it.” He wanted to talk about the other things that Draco had done for him, but the words tangled around his tongue, and he thought Hermione wouldn’t understand anyway, from her hostile expression.

“It’s—it’s the way it is,” he said at last. “I didn’t know what was happening for a long time, and now that I do, I can’t give him up. It would be unfair for both of us if you tried to make me give him up, too,” he added, just so that Hermione didn’t get any ideas.

“But what if he starts insulting me?” Hermione’s voice was dangerously low, dangerously sweet, dangerously everything. “Will you take my side or his? Will you tell him to stop, or give me that same speech about how we can’t change people?”

“I would tell him to stop,” Harry said. “And if you started scolding him out of the blue, or if Ron tried to hex him for being a Slytherin, then I would tell you to stop, too.”

Hermione shivered. Harry expected another tirade, but instead she said, with unexpected pity popping up in her voice like a bubble, “Oh, Harry. It can’t be easy, balancing between all of us like this.”

“No,” Harry said, glad that someone else had at least acknowledged that. “It isn’t.”

“So why don’t you stop?” Hermione was plucking at his sleeve and looking up into his face with earnest eyes that Harry found it hard to turn away from. “Harry, we’re your oldest friends. I just—I can’t understand why you would want to date Malfoy. I can’t. You have nothing in common.”

“I do have some things in common,” Harry said. “Keeping a secret. A dead parent—or at least one dead parent,” he added. “And—it’s hard to explain, Hermione. But they’re there.”

Hermione looked heavily at the ground. Harry could picture her looking that way if she’d received news that Voldemort had attacked her house and tortured her parents to death.

“I can’t understand it,” she whispered.

“Then don’t try it,” Harry said, tension wearing his nerves thin until he had no choice but to snap. “Just accept it.”

Hermione looked up at him with burning eyes. Then she walked across the room and started to open the door.

“You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?” Harry asked. He’d been so caught up in what he was feeling that he’d nearly forgotten to ask them for that promise.

“Like anyone would believe us,” Ron muttered bitterly, and followed Hermione.

Hermione looked back, sounded as if she were taking a deep breath, and said, “No, Harry. Not if you don’t want us to. And I’m—honored—that you decided to tell us.” She gave Harry a smile like a blow. “Even if I don’t feel that way.”

Then they were gone.

Harry, feeling as if he’d barely escaped a fall from a cliff, stood there shivering for a minute. It wasn’t as awful as it could have been, he reminded himself. There was still the chance that he could talk them around. There were no insults, nothing they’d said that he couldn’t forgive, just denials.

But he still had to leave that room and find Draco as soon as possible.

Chapter Thirty-Five.