Chapter Thirty-Six of 'Practicing Liars'- Private Wars

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Thirty-Five.

Title: Practicing Liars (36/?)
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-Six—Private Wars

Harry seemed to come awake all at once, surging out of the chair in his private quarters that Severus had placed him in and staring around as if he didn’t remember how he got there. Severus narrowed his eyes and stood up. He would have to intervene if that were so. The potion was not supposed to affect the memory.

But Harry swallowed a large gasp of air and sank back in the chair, shaking his head. “That wasn’t a dream,” he whispered, scratching at his scalp as if he were a dog. Severus controlled the temptation to tell him to take his hand out of his hair. “Not even a nightmare.”

“Harry?” Draco, who’d been asleep on the couch, opened his eyes and sat up anxiously. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, Draco, I’m fine.” Harry turned his head and smiled gently. Severus blinked, a bit startled by how quickly he seemed to recover. At one moment he was still trying to reassure himself; in the next, he had made the transition to helping someone else.

I wonder whether it being Draco makes any difference for him, or if he would reassure anyone who needed it.

I wonder if he lets anyone comfort him.

As if Harry had heard the silent question, or felt the pressure of his eyes, he turned his head and briefly glanced at Severus. The next moment, he lowered his eyes and swallowed awkwardly. “Thank you for trying to help me, sir.” His words were stiff and rushed, and he looked at the floor the way that students did when Severus assigned them detention in Potions for spilling one of their wretched concoctions.

“The test was successful,” Severus said, because he thought Harry would take information from him more readily than he would take anything else. “You are allergic to nothing in the potion, and it disturbed the position of the Horcrux in your soul. That means that we can hope for good results when I use the second dose of the potion, and perhaps for the Dark Lord’s taint to be removed from you altogether.”

Harry lifted his head and blinked at him, perhaps uncertain of what he was hearing. Severus waited for him to ask how he could tell that the Horcrux had shifted position in his soul, or anything else.

But his son was not naturally gifted with curiosity, or at least not with the temptation to exercise it. He bowed his head, exhaled noisily, and said, “Thank you. I wanted—I mean, I’m glad that we won’t have to go through a third test.”

“So am I,” Severus said.

Harry looked at him quickly, but it wasn’t the expression of total incomprehension that would have inspired Severus to ask whether Harry thought he had not suffered from the potion, too. Harry hopped out of the chair then and came over to Draco, murmuring something into his ear. Draco pulled back and stared at Harry.

Severus tensed, wondering if something was wrong, and Harry wanted Draco to communicate it to him. But then Draco nodded, said, “Well. If you’re sure,” and sauntered into Severus’s bathroom and shut the door behind him.

That, Severus realized as Harry turned to him, effectively left them alone. Perhaps Draco would be listening at the door, but Severus didn’t think so. Not if Harry had asked him not to—and Harry probably would have done so. He rarely seemed to forget that these were Slytherins he was dealing with.

Harry faced Severus as if they were going to duel again. His hands were clasped in front of him, and his pulse beat wildly at the base of his throat. But his voice was steady, if a bit dry, when he said, “I wanted to tell you that—thanks for the potion. It’ll help I didn’t want to go through the pain, but it was the only way.” He sighed and shut his eyes. “I’m just so tired of it being the only way.”

“Someday, it will not be,” Severus said, hardly daring to move his own lips in case he should frighten the boy away. “After the Dark Lord dies, there will be other choices.”

Harry opened his eyes and stared straight at him. Then he said, “What if Dumbledore says there aren’t? What if he wants us to keep this secret, or if he wants me to go back to the Dursleys’ again?”

Severus felt a sharp prickling at the back of his neck, as if a blade was laid there. He had waited for a direct kind of challenge or acknowledgment from his son, though he had not suspected it would come this way. After all, Harry had barely admitted the truth about his Muggle family at all. Severus had thought the question of where he would live in the future, or at least after the Dark Lord died, would wait until he could say that his relatives abused him.

But I am up to the challenge.

“I will make other choices,” Severus said calmly. “That is what parents do for their children.”

Harry shook his head. “But you never knew about me. Never wanted me. Never would have known, if you hadn’t—if you hadn’t known about Mum.”

“Would you have kept it from me forever, then?” Severus hissed the words. With any luck, Harry would think the sharpness came from irritation rather than hurt.

“I don’t know.” Harry looked much younger than he was at the moment, eyes solemn and large. “I probably would have tried.”

“Have you thought about what I would have wanted?” Severus demanded. “To know my son, even if I had not known at the time—”

“But it was me,” Harry said. “I mean, yeah, a son in general, I can see that, after everything you said about blood. But what about me? You hated me. You know you did,” he said, rushing past Severus’s instinctive attempt to defend himself. “That’s why I didn’t want to come forwards. Even now, I need to know—is this about having a son? Or do you really want me, even though I look like James Potter?” He seemed to have forgotten the glamour.

This was not the moment to fight a private war with himself, but that was what Severus found himself doing.

He could tell the truth, and alienate Harry. He could lie, and alienate him further when he found out. (And that he would find out, Severus had no doubt; he seemed good at putting together perceptions and overheard words into a whole, at least when it concerned him, if not Potions). He could tell half the truth and risk muddling things so much that he would not remember which half he had told later, when he might feel comfortable enough with Harry to speak more freely. Or he could spend hours trying to choose which half was least harmful.

There was no one to tell him what was right or wrong, no one to tell him what was just or fair. Once, Albus would have fulfilled that role for him, and Severus was surprised, now, to find how sharply he missed him.

He had to make his own decisions.

He looked up and into Harry’s eyes. Luckily, Harry didn’t seem to be one of those people to whom a less-than-immediate answer indicated less than perfect honesty. He simply waited, his eyes once again large, his hands clenched in front of him as if he wanted to be able to seize his wand or turn in any direction on the instant.

Perhaps he is preparing to run, Severus thought, and chose the riskiest course. It was the only one where the risk existed solely in the present and not the future.

“When I first realized that you were my son,” he said, “I resented the fact. I wanted a son, yes, but I did not want the boy I thought you were—the Gryffindor I had sculpted from memories and dreams. James Potter’s son.”

“I didn’t have his blood,” Harry said. He had the same careful tone in his voice that Severus did, and that gratified part of Severus’s ambition and vanity even as he steeled himself to listen to the words. “And I know that was what you based your hatred on, but later on you hated me for other reasons, didn’t you?”

Severus struggled to keep his eyes from turning away. Some mistakes had to be looked in the face, no matter how hard it might be.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought you arrogant mostly based on your bloodline, but your recklessness and your refusal to use your brain I have seen for myself.”

“Of course a teacher cares when a student fails to use his brain,” Harry said, with a grim smile that made Severus wonder who hadn’t cared for him to think, the Dursleys or Albus. “And the thing is, I can’t believe that that’s gone away. You can say that you’re changing your mind about me, but not that it’s changed. It’s still mostly for my blood that you want me, and because I’m my mum’s son.”

Severus wanted so strongly to snap something and end this line of inquiry that he almost did. His anger rose in self-defense. He wanted to change things, yes, but he knew that it would be hard. He could have an easier road if he ended this now and made it clear that there were some things Harry was simply not permitted to ask. After all, there were areas of the boy’s life that he was not supposed to pry into, weren’t there? If Harry possessed secrets he didn’t want to voice, why couldn’t Severus get away with the same thing?

You sound like a child. More, a Gryffindor child, who thinks that each treatment of others should always be fair.

It was hard to tame himself, yes, but that reminder helped. Severus brought his head slowly down and said, “I am in the process of changing my mind. I believe it is more than that, now, that I want to help you and protect you for other reasons than your blood, but I cannot tell what you may have seen in my behavior to convince you otherwise.”

Harry watched him quietly. Only when he gulped did Severus realize that his son might be as nervous as he was himself, as at war with old habits, as much caught in a struggle to understand what were his preconceptions and what were reality.

“I just—I don’t understand,” Harry said. “You helped me with the potion, and you didn’t have to. You—you touched me while I was suffering under that potion.” He made it sound as though Severus had picked up a thrashing adder who might bite instead of touching a child’s hand. “Those seem like—well, they’re like something, but I know you couldn’t have changed your mind that quickly.”

“Then say that they are part of the process of changing my mind,” Severus said, “and leave it at that.”

“I can’t.” Harry’s voice was angry now, and soaring on wings of that anger, to what destination Severus didn’t know. “I have to know. Are they real? I mean, are they gestures that you make because you really feel something, or because you want me to think you feel something?”

“They are gestures that I am taking to inspire the growth of the feelings within myself.” Severus spoke swiftly, before the truth could choke him with its sheer immensity. “I have not completely changed my mind yet, but things like this help me to do so. Why does it matter so much if they are real or not?”

“Because I want them to be,” Harry said. “So much.”

Then he stopped and clenched his fists as if he’d said something he didn’t mean to. The next minute, he ducked across the room and knocked on the door of Severus’s bathroom. Draco came out, a question on his face, and Harry ducked past him and out the door of Severus’s rooms as if he were being hunted.

Leaving Severus with a pounding heart and a changing mind.

“What did you say to him?” Draco asked, sounding mildly perplexed instead of angry. “He told me to stay out of the room so he could talk to you privately and find out a few things. Did he?”

“I think he learned enough,” Severus said. “I would like you to leave now, Draco. Go after him and comfort him if you can.”

Draco gave him a scornful look that was softer than Lucius Malfoy’s would have been, but not by much. “As if I was going to do anything else,” he muttered, and then shot out into the corridor, shutting the door behind him.

Severus took one of the chairs he’d used to watch Harry sleep during most of the night and shut his eyes.

He wished he knew whether he should feel hopeful or not, and whether he had harmed his son more than he had helped him.

He wished he knew whether he had won the war.

*

Draco had only stayed behind in Professor Snape’s quarters a short time, but that seemed to be enough time for Harry to get an uncomfortable distance ahead. He hurried around corners, following the sound of pounding feet. Harry was already out of the dungeons. Draco thought he was going outside for a minute, but instead he ran across the entrance hall and towards the stairs.

Probably heading for Gryffindor Tower, Draco thought, and grimaced, trying to wring more speed out of his legs even though they were already trembling. I definitely want to catch him before he gets there.

As it turned out, he had to wait for one of the moving staircases Harry had taken to swing back around, until he decided it wouldn’t move and leaped the gap of empty air between him and the steps. When he caught up with Harry again on the third floor, someone else had found him, too.

The whine of Weasley’s voice was unmistakable. “Did someone hurt you, Harry? Where are you going so fast?”

Draco held onto the wall, trying not to move so that the torch sconce wouldn’t throw his shadow out into the open, and peered cautiously around the corner. Weasley and Granger were both standing in front of Harry, Weasley with his arms spread as if he’d prevented Harry from running further. Harry’s face was red with exertion and something Draco thought was close to tears. He hoped not. He would hate to see Harry cry in front of his worthless friends.

Granger stood on the other side of Harry, and she had one hand raised as if to touch his arm, but her hand was just hanging there uselessly, not doing anything else. “What’s wrong?” she whispered. “Can we help?”

Harry closed his eyes, and Draco could see the way he fought himself back under control. Draco wished he hadn’t had to, that he could have gone to an unused classroom or the Tower or wherever he was going to cry and swear and hex the furniture in peace.

“I don’t think so,” Harry said at last, with a desperate attempt at calmness that just made Granger and Weasley look at him with sharper stares. “I just—it’s something to do with what I told you the other day, and I don’t want to discuss that with you. So let me by.” He took an assured step forwards, as if he thought Weasley would get out of the way.

Wesley hunched his shoulders and spread his arms further, apparently assuming his good deed for the day would be keeping Harry here. “You’re too upset, mate,” he said. “I want to know why.”

Harry stopped walking, but Draco could see the cold look he gave Weasley, and he knew what was behind it. Harry would spill everything out if Weasley kept pushing, in sheer anger or because the tension had to go somewhere.

And Draco didn’t want that to happen. Harry should be able to choose whom he told his secrets to.

“Excuse me,” he said, stepping around the corner and smiling brightly. “But has it occurred to you that maybe he doesn’t want to tell you because you haven’t cared that he’s upset in the last week?”

Granger acted like someone in Defense, turning around and raising her wand right away. A Shield Charm spread over her. Draco kept his snort to himself as much as possible. He was trying to be a distraction, but not get cursed. The Shield Charm had a flaw, though, right down near the bottom, that someone could get through. Granger spends too much time on theory and not enough on the practicals.

“Shove off, Malfoy,” Weasley said, and turned red enough that he would probably die of asphyxiation and blame it on Draco. “No one has to listen to a word you say.”

“Yes, you do,” Harry said. He sounded better—more, Draco realized with a little blink, like Professor Snape. He walked back down the corridor until he was standing next to Draco, and Weasley just stood there and let him do it. Harry put his arm around Draco’s shoulders and said, “Look, are you ready to talk about this?”

“I don’t see what we can talk about,” Granger said, lowering the Shield Charm but speaking with that marble tone in her voice that Draco had seen hurt Harry in the middle of every class he had with the both of them. “You’re still dating someone who wishes I was dead, Harry. That’s a bit hard to get over.” She gave Draco a glance so hard that he could have bounced diamonds off it.

Harry opened his mouth, but Draco touched his cheek and shook his head. Harry looked at him. Draco nodded, trying to silently tell Harry that he’d prefer to be the one who spoke up and told them that he’d changed.

Among other things, that would let him decide how honest he wanted to be about it.

“I don’t wish you were dead anymore,” he told Granger. “Not because I think you’re a great and shining example of a person, but because your death would hurt Harry.”

Granger looked at him hard. Draco looked back, having no need to make his face innocent. He had said what he really felt, and it was up to her if she liked it or not.

“That’s like you, Malfoy,” she said at last. “You’re only doing it because you care about Harry, not because—” And then she stopped, and the most ridiculous expression of consternation came over her face.

Draco laughed at her. “Yes, that’s a little hard to despise me for when you think that I care about Harry, isn’t it?” he asked her.

Granger shook her head, apparently unable to speak for the moment, but Weasley soon supplied her deficiency. “I don’t think you do,” he said, eyes squinted so much that it was impossible to see them. “What have you done for the past five years but hurt us? You were part of the Inquisitorial Squad last year, Malfoy. There’s nothing you could have done more clearly to say that you were evil, and that was the end of it.”

Draco winced. It would have been easier, in some ways, if Weasley had yelled insults about his parents and in other ways made himself look rude. Draco would have known how to answer that. It was harder to answer these cruel but clear words.

Which is undoubtedly the reason that Weasley made his accusations in this way.

“I was,” he said. “That’s the key word. That was last year. I did change, and Harry was a big part of that change.” Granger was leaning forwards now, staring at him in disbelief. Draco tried to ignore the way that it made him feel like a captive specimen in one of Professor Snape’s jars. “If he’s going to date me, I know that I can’t be that way anymore. And I was thinking about blood, and how it didn’t matter to me as much as it used to. When Harry rescued me, he wasn’t doing it because he was my cousin, or because he was my brother, or because he’d been raised with me and felt some kind of obligation. It was just because he cared. If I’m not defined by blood, well, maybe some other people aren’t, either.” He wasn’t going to talk about his parents to Weasley and Granger the way he had to Harry; there was a limit to how much self-exposure he was willing to do.

“You can’t have changed your mind that way,” Weasley said. “Not so quickly.”

The way that Professor Snape couldn’t have accepted his son or Harry couldn’t have fallen in love with me? Draco wanted to snap, but he knew that Harry would be hurt if he did that. So he did his best to take a deep breath and answer honestly instead of angrily.

“Why not? Haven’t you changed your mind fairly fast sometimes? But in this case, Harry also helped rescue my mother and helped me when my father died. That makes a difference. I’ve been thinking, that’s all. I might not like you. But I won’t go out of my way to hex you, or insult you, or wish that you were dead. Take that for what you will.” He was proud of the way he finished. He sounded very calm and mature.

Granger and Weasley stood there like statues, as if his refusal to play the game the way they wanted—and the way, Draco had to admit, that he’d wanted to—had turned them to stone. Then Granger stirred and shook her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said, but her voice was small and shocked and Draco knew that his speaking like this had made a difference to her. “I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Then I don’t have to listen to you, either,” Draco said, losing his temper in a sudden rush. I tried, and this is the way they decided to answer me. “If you tell me that you’re a better person and that you’re Harry’s best friend and that he should stop dating me, I don’t have to believe you.”

Granger clenched her fists down. “You thought I should die,” she said. “You despise people like me.”

Draco looked at her steadily. He’d always thought that Granger was smarter than Weasley, but it appeared that she was just as good at being oblivious when she didn’t like the words she was hearing. “I’m learning not to.”

Granger shut her eyes. Her mouth was trembling.

“I don’t like you,” Weasley said. “I don’t trust you.” He leaned forwards, as if he could get around Draco somehow and see Harry alone. Since Harry and Draco were standing exactly side-by-side, that didn’t work, but he acted as if it did.

“Harry,” he whispered, “remember the time he dressed up as a Dementor and tried to scare you?”

“Remember the times we rowed,” Harry said, his voice flat and emotionless, “and you decided to act like I wasn’t your best friend anymore?”

Weasley frowned. “But I said I was sorry.”

“Draco said the same.” Harry shook his head when Weasley tried to speak. “You don’t have to believe him right now. That’s fine. It’ll take time. I can’t blame you for taking the time when we are, too.” Draco felt a flare of excitement at the word we and the casual squeeze that Harry gave his shoulder, as if he took their standing together almost for granted. “But you won’t be able to separate us. So stop trying to convince me that he’s evil. It’s insulting, and it wastes your time and mine.”

He turned and walked away down the corridor. Draco followed him, glancing over his shoulder. Granger stood deep in thought, staring at the floor. Weasley was talking to her, or maybe himself, shaking his head, but Draco couldn’t hear what he was saying.

“Thank you.”

Draco looked back at Harry, and smiled. Harry still looked too pale and exhausted, but less upset than he had. “Are you all right?”

“Not yet,” Harry said. “Better.” Then he leaned in and kissed Draco until he was panting and breathless, and he might have done more if someone hadn’t cleared his throat gently behind them.

Draco would have given a great deal if, when he turned around, almost anyone except Dumbledore had been standing there.

Chapter Thirty-Seven.

Comments

[evan-malfoy.livejournal.com]

Yay another chapter! I'm glad progress is being made all around! And yeah. More with the wanting to smash Hermione's hands with large, heavy books. >_> And AUGH DUMBLEDORE. WHY MUST YOU INTERFERE??? T_T