lomonaaeren

Chapter Thirty-Four.

Title: Practicing Liars (35/?)
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-Five—The Pain Begins

“Did they insult you?” Draco’s hand was light and steady in Harry’s hair, and Harry pressed close to him, although he’d been standing here getting his hair stroked for at least six minutes. That ought to be long enough for any person who wasn’t weak, he thought.

Then he remembered that sometimes he had held Draco and stroked his hair for longer than that, and got confused, because he didn’t think Draco was weak.

“Harry?” Draco’s voice had a strange, gentle sharpness to it, as if he wanted to make sure that Harry didn’t forget about eating a piece of treacle tart left on his plate. “Did they insult you? What did they say?”

Harry took a deep breath and lifted his head. He had come to Draco in the library with no words, but a face that had made Draco immediately take him deep into the dungeons, to an alcove where apparently no one came. And since then, they’d been standing here while Draco soothed him and asked questions that Harry hadn’t answered. Draco probably thought that the meeting with Ron and Hermione had gone a lot worse than it had.

That isn’t fair, Harry thought, wiping at his face, although he still hadn’t cried. Not fair to Draco, to make him worry that much, and not fair to Ron and Hermione. They weren’t that bad.

So why do I still feel like I did when I found out that Dad—James—acted like Dudley in school?

“No matter what it is,” Draco said, his voice so soft and deep it seemed to come out of the earth, “you can tell me what happened.”

“I know,” Harry said. He decided to just talk, without trying to choose his words, unless Draco started reacting badly and thinking things about Ron and Hermione that weren’t true. Harry still wanted to be fair to everyone, if he could. “It wasn’t awful. That’s the strange thing. Ron told me that he thought I was a stranger now, and that hurt. Hermione didn’t want me to date you because you called her a Mudblood. She wanted me to break up with you. Ron thought it was horrible that Snape was my father. But neither of them called me a traitor or hexed me or told me they wouldn’t be my friend. So I don’t know why I feel this bad.”

“I do,” Draco said, again in that low voice. “How dare Weasley think that you were a stranger to him because Professor Snape was your father? What did he think you were going to do, suddenly grow a Slytherin tie and a talent for potions? Or start looking like him? If you haven’t by now, you probably won’t.”

Harry shifted uneasily in place, but he still wasn’t ready to tell anyone about the glamour, so he didn’t mention it now. “I reckon he thought that because family’s important to him,” he whispered. “He wants to be different from his brothers, but he would be lonely if he wasn’t also like them. And he thought of me as the son of heroes. Now I’m the son of a hero and a Death Eater. He isn’t going to deal well with that.”

“How ridiculous,” Draco said, scorn dripping from every word. “As if the way you were born matters, when Professor Snape didn’t raise you.”

Harry paused and blinked, then stepped back enough so he could stare into Draco’s eyes. “Why are you saying that? You’ve always thought blood was important, too. You didn’t want Hermione in school because of her blood. You despise Ron because of his blood. So why are you saying that it doesn’t matter who my father is? Of all the people I know, I’d think it would matter to you the most.”

*

Draco sighed. He had hoped that he wouldn’t have to talk about this with anyone until he had the right words to understand it for himself.

But he had some of the thoughts, and that would have to be enough.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, slowly and painfully. The image of his father’s head hovering in front of him and speaking those words, the Dark Lord’s words, still hung before his eyes like a mist if he concentrated too much on it. “I’m not completely what my father raised me to be. I’m not completely like my mother, either. I’ve been visiting her since she went into the safehouse, and writing to her, and she thinks differently than I do. I didn’t realize how differently.”

Harry’s hand cupped the back of his head, and stroked as gently through his hair as Draco had been stroking his a minute ago. Draco leaned against him and closed his eyes with a sigh. He’s so good at comforting. Does he know that? But he probably does, since he takes to it so naturally.

Draco reminded himself not to get too deep in the comfort even as he reveled in it for being there. He didn’t want to forget what Harry’s friends had said, or that Harry was suffering and needed him, too.

“What do you mean?” Harry asked.

“She talks about vengeance,” Draco whispered. “For what was done to her. For what was done to Father. For Father serving the Dark Lord in the first place, even though he chose that. And I—I talk about living. I’m sorry that Father died, and I hope that you kill the Dark Lord, but I think more about missing him and the ways he would disapprove of what I’m doing now, and I think about you and Horcruxes and Professor Snape and what I’m going to do if I survive the school year. That kind of thing.”

He took a deep breath and licked his lips. These weren’t the right words. The right words would be eloquent and warm and make Harry see the truth and be able to reconcile the past and the present. But they were the words he had.

“So,” he said, “if blood isn’t the only thing that made me, and I can be different from my parents, and I’m separate from the rest of the family, then that can happen to other people, too. You can be separate from your family. Weasley can be separate from his—but I don’t think he is,” he added quickly, before Harry could use those words to try and force him and the Weasel into some kind of reconciliation. “And Granger can be separate from hers, even. Weasley should at least let you have some time to prove that you act like Professor Snape or that you don’t before he decides that you’re your blood and nothing more.”

Harry drew Draco’s head back. Draco squeaked. Had he said something wrong? He’d thought it had been going so well, but Harry was pulling on his hair like he was angry—

Then Draco discovered that Harry had only been getting his head into position so that he could kiss him.

Extremely thoroughly. Hard and passionately and leaning in so much that Draco thought they were going to fall over any minute. With lots of tongue—not that Draco objected to that when he was able to breathe around it—but it was noticeable because, um, Harry had never used this much before.

Then they did fall, and Draco had the breath driven out of him when they landed on the hard stone floor. Harry laughed happily above him and dragged him up to his knees, then dropped down to his knees in front of Draco and held his shoulders, staring searchingly into his eyes.

“I just—I love you,” Harry said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Draco blinked and stared at him. His chest hurt.

Harry laughed aloud and kissed him again, bearing him down to the floor with his body. Draco felt his hair brush stone, and knew they had to be close to one of the alcove’s walls, but he hardly cared. Oh, his knees ached and his head ached and his lungs ached but he didn’t care, because Harry’s words were in his brain like fireworks in his eyes.

Harry’s tongue slipped deeper. His hands clenched on Draco’s sides, and he whispered into Draco’s mouth, during one of the brief times that he pulled back to breathe or at least do something other than kiss, “You made me feel better, and I’m not sure how you did that, but maybe it was just because your words were more real than Ron’s. Thank you.” Then he was kissing Draco again.

Draco knew he would cherish that private triumph over the Weasel forever.

But he would cherish the way Harry was kissing him and licking him and almost slobbering into his mouth for longer.

*

Severus narrowed his eyes. No one else would have noticed it, because no one else would have looked. Everyone was used to seeing Granger and Weasley sitting tightly beside Harry, linked to him by invisible threads that nothing could break. And, indeed, they were still sitting beside Harry during dinner and other meals in the Great Hall.

But now, there was a slight but definite distance between them.

The three still sat together in his Defense classroom. They still spoke together. They still acted as though no one in the world was important but the three of them—an attitude that Severus thought was responsible for his son not having more friends. But the distance was there, in the way Granger’s and Weasley’s voices would suddenly break off in the middle of a word or how they shifted when Harry sat down.

None of that told Severus how well the confrontation had gone. Draco was glaring at Granger and Weasley, but he did that often in any case when he wanted a glance from Harry and they were dominating his attention. Severus did not know if he was unusually angry.

He tried to rely on the signals from Granger and Weasley towards him, wondering if that would tell him something. Weasley refused to look him in the eye, but that had been true since last year; Severus thought it was because Weasley had discovered he was a Legilimens. Granger perhaps had a bit more of frozen politeness and less eagerness to answer questions in her manner than usual.

Perhaps.

By the time Harry came to him, Draco walking at his side like a golden shadow, one evening, Severus was nearly mad with impatience.

“Well?” he asked at last, when Harry was examining the vial of Entwining Potion on his desk. His voice snapped. He did not mean to make it do that. But it had happened before he could stop it, and at least it made Harry look up at him with an expression of honest surprise instead of the careful mask of normality that he seemed to wear when around Granger and Weasley.

“Well, what?” Harry asked.

“You spoke of me to your friends,” Severus said. “How did they take it?”

“Not well,” said Harry. His face started to close again, but Draco put his hand on the small of Harry’s back, and Harry relaxed. Severus felt a fierce ache of jealousy, like a bee-sting on the roof of his mouth. He wanted to touch his son that casually, and for Harry to allow it instead of flinching when he lifted his hand. “Not Ron, at least. I think Hermione can live with it. But Ron thinks it makes me into a stranger.”

Severus could not entirely argue with that perception. After all, learning the truth had been the reason that he was able to see Harry differently from James Potter. Of course, he was adult enough to know that one’s own perceptions, ideals, and preconceptions colored what one saw, and he did not think Weasley was. To Weasley, if he began encountering strangeness in Harry, it would be something that had always been there, but was “concealed” by “heroic blood.”

It is not. He is my son.

Severus shook his head to rid himself of the agonizingly possessive thought; it was not one that it would do any good to express to Harry at the moment. He said, “You are only a stranger to your friends if you wish to be.”

Harry glared at him as if he had said something about how Weasley was a fool for ever thinking of Harry as Potter’s son. “That’s easy to say,” he said. “But I can’t actually choose how they react, and I can’t choose how their reactions affect me.”

Severus opened his mouth to argue against that—after all, he could have chosen to become a pathetic weakling before the bullying of James Potter or he could have chosen to fight back, as he had—but Draco interrupted, perhaps feeling Harry’s tension through the hand still on his back. “Shouldn’t we talk about the Entwining Potion, Professor Snape? You said that you’d tested it, and that it worked at all times.”

“It did,” Severus said, grateful to Draco for the distraction and irritated that he had let himself almost get into a row with Harry over something as small as a matter of wording. He turned towards the vial and lifted it. The finished potion had a shifting, red-gold glow, like light reflecting off the scales of a Chinese Fireball. “I have two vials of this. We will test this one first. Then we will begin with the second when we make sure that this has worked.”

Harry stared at him. “How are we going to test it? After all, if the first vial pulls the piece of his soul out of me, then that means we’ve solved the problem.”

Severus shook his head. “It still requires testing. Because it works on a rat does not mean it will work on a human; it only means that I feel no disastrous consequences will occur if it is fed to one.”

“Oh, thanks,” Harry muttered, sticking his hands in his robe pockets. “That makes me feel worlds better.”

Severus could not help himself this time. He moved near so rapidly that Harry did not have time to retreat, and bent down to his eye level. “Do you still distrust me this much?” he asked quietly. “Trust to my brewing skill if not to my—perception of you.” He thought Harry would laugh if he mentioned the words “relationship” or “compassion.” “I would not offer you this potion unless I thought it was perfectly safe.”

Harry glared at him. “People do things all the time that won’t kill me,” he said, lips barely parted, so that the words hissed out. “But they hurt me. It’s bad enough to know that I’m going to have to suffer through having this Horcrux torn out of my body. But that something else could happen, too, which might not kill me but could make me wish I hadn’t got out of bed this morning? Yeah, I’m not looking forwards to that.”

Severus narrowed his eyes. See what you have wrought, Albus. He can trust someone enough to undergo an ordeal of torture, but not to believe in their words.

“I won’t let that happen,” Draco whispered to him. He looked up at Severus. “Won’t you test the potion on me first, Professor Snape? That way, Harry can see there’s nothing to be afraid of.” His hand on Harry’s back began to rub soothing circles.

Noble as Draco was—and for the first time, Severus acknowledged that he deserved that adjective—he had misjudged Harry. Harry gave him a stiff glance. “I won’t let you get hurt because of me,” he said. From his expression, Severus thought he hadn’t liked the crack about being afraid, either.

“No,” Severus said. Draco’s expression began to become unyielding, but Severus had reasons for his denial, reasons that Draco would listen to because of his knowledge of Potions, and he spoke them. “You have no Horcrux within you. The potion would have nothing to fasten to, and we would not know if it worked or not.”

He turned to Harry. “There are other reasons to test the potion. It may contain ingredients to which you are allergic, in which case I will need to design it again. And if there is suffering it causes that can be mitigated without sacrificing the potion’s effect, this dose will tell me, so that I may modify the next draught before you take it to banish the Horcrux.”

Harry had hunched his shoulders, and his eyes flickered back and forth between Severus and the vial in his hand. “It’s not as powerful as the second one will be?” he asked.

“No,” Severus said. “Or the third, if it turns out that I need to redesign the potion and so the second dose becomes the true test.”

Harry stared at the potion with silent eyes, and a silent face. It was one of the few times Severus truly had not been able to tell what he was thinking. All those times, he realized suddenly, had occurred either after he had learned Harry was his son or shortly before. Harry was different from the boy he had been when he was younger, and part of that difference was learning to mask some of his emotions.

Talk to me, Severus thought, but he was not foolish enough to make the demand aloud.

Harry finally inclined his head, shivered a bit as though he was considering jumping off a cliff, and then said, “All right. I’ll take it.”

As Severus settled Harry into the chair he had prepared and put Draco beside him to watch his face closely and tell him if there was any immediate allergic reaction to the potion, he tried to catch Harry’s eye, to see what he was thinking. He wanted to know the reason behind Harry’s final decision.

Harry didn’t look at him, and Severus resigned himself at last to his own advice. As he must learn to trust me without demanding a complete explanation for everything I do, I must learn the same.

That did not make the experience less bitter, or his rage against Dumbledore and the Muggles who had raised Harry less deep.

*

Harry shut his eyes when he felt the glass of the potion vial against his lips. His hands were clenched at his sides, and he wished he had asked Snape for more details, even though it would have made him lie awake at night worrying about them. He wished he knew how much this was going to hurt. At least being in his cupboard and even fighting Voldemort were all experiences he’d got used to.

But this was entirely new.

He really thought he might have flown out of the chair if not for Draco’s calm—well, mostly calm—presence at his side.

In the end, it was that that did the most good. He thought, Draco will panic if he sees you panicking, and the reminder that someone else depended on him, that his reactions didn’t affect only him, made him concentrate on the present instead of the future.

Then the pain began, and the future became the present.

The pain lit a fire in his belly. Then it seemed to be chewing holes in his feet. Then his jaw ached as though it was broken. Then a thin wire seemed to pass in through one ear and out through the other.

Harry could feel the tears leaking through the corners of his eyes. But he didn’t want to scream, so he kept quiet as long as he could. When he did have to release the pain, it was in a series of low whimpers at first, which began building up as he forgot more and more about Draco and concentrated more and more on what he was feeling.

“Sir, I think something’s really wrong,” he heard Draco’s voice say from a distance. He thought it was alarmed, but he seemed to have lost all possibility of distinguishing people’s emotions other than his own.

The pain filled the world.

“Has he—” Snape.

“No. None of the things you mentioned. But he’s—look at his face, sir.” Draco.

“I cannot believe that he could endure that much without screaming.”

“Come closer and look at his expression, and you might see that screaming isn’t the only way to show pain.”

Harry lost track of who was speaking first, and then of the voices. The pain in his gut was so severe that it felt as if his stomach had burst open. There were acids in the stomach, weren’t there? And they could be inflicted on other organs, that would melt, and maybe it would feel something like this.

He felt a hand on his. Something about it, maybe the length of the fingers and the nails, made him pay attention to it even in the midst of his agony. He forced open his hazy eyes and looked to see who was holding his hand.

Snape.

Harry stared at him wordlessly. That Snape would hold his hand, to try to comfort him or anything else, was absurd, so that meant it wasn’t happening. His brain had probably made this up and it was a delusion.

“It hurts,” Snape said. “I know that.” His voice was soft and urgent, and why could Harry hear it so clearly? His own screams ought to be louder than that. “But it hurts because it is parting your soul from another’s soul, and it is touching the familiar and unfamiliar parts both at once. Can you bear it? You will need to bear it when the second potion comes.”

I’ll have to do this again.

Harry flinched, a whole-body flinch of the kind that he would have tried to hide from Snape if he could, and pulled his hand away. He couldn’t escape the pain, he knew, but he wanted to curl up and hide. That would be for the best.

Someone was holding his shoulder—Draco¬—and Snape caught his hand again. “I am sorry for this,” he said.

Yeah, well, that didn’t keep you from doing it. Harry gritted his teeth, and then screamed, because it felt as though they were all being ripped from his head.

“Only a few moments now,” Snape murmured. He didn’t sound upset that Harry had pulled away from him, though Harry would have expected him to be if his motives were genuine. “I am sorry for this,” he repeated.

Harry stared at him, blinking stupidly. What he says can’t be true.

Then the pain was gone. Harry exhaled and stretched his arms out to either side, feeling for it. But no, it was really gone.

He would have sobbed with relief, but he was remembering some things now, like the way he had cried in front of Snape. He tried to duck his head and shield his face with his arm, or shove himself back in the chair—he couldn’t get out of it since Draco was on one side and Snape was in front of him—or do something that would shield him and let all of them pretend that this had never happened.

Then Snape hauled him forwards.

Harry flinched, but by that time, Snape had him firmly in his arms, holding his body still as he extended one arm. Harry felt something soft and cool rubbed into it, probably a potion. The ache still in his muscles subsided.

After that, he held out his other limbs willingly, especially when Draco came to help hold him, but he ducked his head and shook it wildly when Snape tried to press another potions vial between his lips.

“This is a Dreamless Sleep Potion,” Snape said, voice absolutely calm. “Nothing more than that.”

It was the calmness that made Harry open his mouth and allow the potion in. Kindness would have been too much, and he would have done anything rather than endure the mockery he’d thought Snape would aim at him.

The potion was thick and cold, half-sweet and blessedly familiar from the times that Madam Pomfrey had used it on him in the hospital wing. Harry sighed and went limp.

Two thoughts accompanied him into the darkness.

The first one was: He said he was sorry. Twice, even.

The second one was: The next time is going to be worse.

Chapter Thirty-Six.