lomonaaeren

Chapter Forty-Two.

Title: Practicing Liars (43/?)
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 Forty-Three—Being a Father

Harry stared at the tray of food that Snape had balanced on his knees, and shook his head.

“What is it?” Snape was stirring a bowl of something thick that looked like sauce, or mash, or maybe soup. Harry didn’t know, because he’d never seen anything that brown-orange color before. It smelled good, though.

“I don’t need all of this.” Harry swept his hand along the tray. It took a while to make the sweep. There was sauce, and the maybe-sauce, and soup, and bread, and a bowl of sliced pears, and pumpkin juice, and a plate of meat in slices so small they were almost transparent, and stewed (or something) carrots. Then Harry came up with a theory that made sense and would keep him from feeling baffled and ungrateful. He darted a look at Snape. “Are you eating with me, sir?”

“Of course.” Snape nodded to another tray that sat on the table next to the bed.

Well, so much for that idea. Harry shook his head. “Then you don’t need to give me this much, sir,” he said. “There’s no way that I would be able to eat all of it.” He looked at Snape to see how he would react to common sense. Probably not well, if the past was any indication.

Snape gave him a level look. “And what happens if you don’t eat all of it?” he asked in a calmly interested tone.

“Er,” Harry said, and took a wild guess. “You yell at me because you want me to eat all of it?”

Snape shook his head, and went on with the level look, as though Harry were a small child who had done something amusing. Harry shifted. He often felt like a small child around Snape these last few days, and it was maddening, because Snape didn’t treat him like one in the way that Dumbledore or Sirius had last year. It was just a combination of the looks he gave Harry and the quietly arbitrary way that he would tell him he’d had too much excitement for the present and had to rest. It wasn’t something that could be fought, because Harry had trouble defining it. But it was there.

“I would not,” Snape said. “But all this food is nourishing and necessary for someone who has suffered the pain you have. If you do not finish some of it, then it will be returned to the kitchens.”

Harry frowned. “But that’s wasteful, isn’t it?”

“Why?” Snape raised his eyebrows. “The house-elves will either use this food in the preparation of more food or eat it themselves. It will not be thrown away, as seems to be your fear.” Brusqueness crept into the edges of his voice, which was something Harry didn’t want to see happen.

“Er, all right,” Harry said, and picked up the cup of pumpkin juice to gulp from it. If he could only make Snape happy by eating this meal, then he should do it. After all, Snape had absolute control over him right now.

Snape’s hand closed on his wrist. Harry jumped in spite of himself. Snape hadn’t touched him much in the last few days, as if he liked looking at Harry but was worried about what would happen if his hand glanced him. Or maybe he was worried about how Harry would react.

“Harry,” Snape said gently. Harry wasn’t used to hearing him be so gentle, and he stared at the tray. “Look at me, please.”

It would have been easy to refuse if only he hadn’t said please, Harry thought in some confusion and resentment, raising his eyes. Snape leaned forwards and held his gaze. And that wasn’t fair, either, because it made it harder for Harry to pretend he’d seen something interesting on the other side of the room and look away.

“This is a source of confusion and fear for you, isn’t it?” Snape asked. “Why? You need not fear that I will punish you for eating or not eating, unless you resort to such childish tricks as smearing your food on the walls.”

Harry had to smile in spite of himself, because he could just picture Snape’s expression if he came into the room and Harry had covered the walls with butter. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just—I don’t eat this much food, that’s all. Even if I’ve been sick.” Especially then.

“Ah.” Snape paused reflectively. Harry watched him and wondered what he was going to say next. He seemed to have lost his power to predict Snape once the most likely words out of the man’s mouth were no longer insults. Then Snape looked at Harry and asked, “By choice, or by necessity?”

“What do you mean?” Harry asked casually, though his heart was speeding up.

“I think you know what I mean.” Snape leaned closer, and his dark eyes were the whole world. Harry squirmed uncomfortably, and Snape backed off a bit, but he didn’t release Harry’s hand or change the softness and intensity of his voice. “Do you not eat much food because you are never hungry, because it is your choice? Or because you were prevented from eating that much food?”

Harry stared down again. Suddenly Snape’s eyes weren’t so hypnotic after all. And his heart was speeding up again and his face was flushing and he had to bite his lip because there was a stupid prickling in the corners of his eyes.

Why should this upset you so much? Harry asked himself in scorn. Baby. It’s only the bloody Dursleys, and you can talk about them if you want. They’re behind you. They don’t matter. Snape will never let you go back to them, you don’t have to worry about them, you shouldn’t cry like a stupid baby.

“Harry.” Snape didn’t make the word a question. He simply said the name so that Harry would know he was there if Harry needed him.

Finally, Harry swallowed, and looked Snape in the eye, which was the bravest thing he thought he’d ever done, and said, “Necessity,” and then reached out and picked up one of the sliced pears to eat.

Snape released his wrist and sat back. Harry gave him a glance that he knew was probably too hopeful, but which he couldn’t help. Was he going to stop talking about this now? Was the confession that the Dursleys had starved Harry enough to put him off? Harry bit into a pear and decided that maybe Snape would think the same thing he did: now that it was over, they didn’t need to think about it anymore. Snape might be angry, but he would give up worrying about the Dursleys and just think about the future.

Snape cleared his throat, and Harry looked at him and realized that that would never happen. Snape’s eyes were burning with fury, although his face was calm enough that Harry thought most people would have mistaken the fury for something else.

“Forgive me,” Snape said. “But I must know more. This has affected far more than your immediate behavior.” He nodded at the tray, as if it was supposed to be some sort of evidence in and of itself. “You hesitated when you saw the amount of food here. You appeared to believe that I wouldn’t allow you to eat all of it, or that I had given you too much. Did you really believe I would do that?”

Harry hesitated. Then he swallowed the bite of pear in his mouth and picked up the glass of juice. “No,” he said, and swallowed a gulp of juice.

“Explain to me what you were thinking,” Snape said, a gentle demand, if there was such a thing.

“I don’t,” Harry said, which wasn’t a cut-off sentence but a sentence in itself, and then picked up a piece of bread and bit into it.

“Do you believe I would hurt you?” Snape was sitting up straight in his chair, voice tight and dry. “As I understand it, one of the reasons you put off revealing our blood relationship to me for so long was the fear that I would abuse you.”

Harry still flinched at the word “abuse.” Let’s not talk about it, he wanted to say, but he knew that would only—at best—make Snape put it off until some other time, and at worst, Snape would get angry. This had to be faced, just like Voldemort did.

“No,” he said. “Not when you’ve taken care of me like this and you haven’t bruised me in a long time. And I know that the Entwining Potion wasn’t your fault,” he added forcefully, because he hoped Snape would stop blaming himself for that if Harry just said it often enough. “My ideas about food are stupid.”

“Not stupid if they belong to you and trouble you,” Snape said. “Tell me.”

Harry looked up at him and wanted to make a joke. Isn’t it strange that we’re sitting here and talking like this? Remember a few months ago when you hated me and this never could have happened?

But that would probably get Snape upset, too, so Harry nodded gloomily and said, “Yeah, I didn’t think there should be that much food. I mean, I’d never eat that much. And the Dur—I mean, I wasn’t allowed to eat a lot of food at a time. When I did get some, I had to make sure that I didn’t waste any of it.”

“Because you never knew when you would get to eat again,” Snape said. “Am I correct?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Harry said. He would have liked to fold himself into a ball and curl up against the pillow, but the tray was in the way. He settled for scowling at Snape, who let out a soft sigh of—relief? Sometimes Harry thought he would never understand him.

“Then tell me what it was like.” Snape didn’t sound hard or mocking, the way that some of Harry’s primary school teachers had when he tried to explain about food. He simply sat beside Harry’s bed and looked into his eyes and seemed content to do that all day, if that was what he had to do.

“I got to eat if I did all my chores,” Harry said. “And did them well. And if they weren’t too angry—I mean, if I hadn’t done something wrong that day.” He knew he probably sounded more than a little pathetic, trying to pretend the Dursleys didn’t have anything to do with his stupid food issues, but he needed to do it. And Snape nodded as if he accepted the story Harry was telling instead of the one he was listening for.

“How much food would you get to eat in a typical day?” he asked.

“There were no typical days,” Harry said, irritated by how much ignorance that question displayed. “Sometimes I finished all my chores to their satisfactions, and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I cooked dinner, and I could snatch a few extra handfuls, or I burned bits of the food and they gave me those. Sometimes I dug through the rubbish.” He could feel his cheeks heating, and he turned his head away.

Snape remained silent for some time. Harry wondered if he was struggling to find the words, or struggling to control his own anger, which did seem stronger than Harry would have thought it could be. Finally, he said, “But you did not think I would take this food away from you. You thought, instead, that you did not deserve that much food.”

“I wondered what I was going to do with all of it,” Harry said, and ate one of the transparent slices of meat. “That’s all.”

“Why not what I said?” Snape asked.

Harry paused and looked at him suspiciously, but Snape sounded only mildly interested, the way he would be if someone had finished a potion in a way that wasn’t in the textbook, so Harry could answer. “Because I don’t like people to talk about deserving,” he said. “I know where that goes. All those horrid conversations that adults have with kids about whether they think they deserved what was happening to them. I’m not that stupid. I hate the Dursleys. I don’t defend them.”

A small twitch of Snape’s lip seemed to suggest he was about to disagree, but instead he said, “Very well. But if you need more food over the holidays, I wish you to feel comfortable asking for it.”

Harry blinked, caught off-guard. “Over the holidays? What do you mean?”

“The Christmas holidays, of course.” Snape was looking at him now as if he assumed that not eating some food when he was a child had hurt Harry’s brain. “When you stay with me, I want you to be reassured that you will have all the food you want.”

“But over the Christmas holidays, I usually just stay at Hogwarts,” Harry said, feeling numb and confused and excited. He wanted to shove the tray away so that he could pull his knees up towards his chest, but there was nowhere for it to go—at least, not without spilling food all over the sheets. “Don’t you, too?”

“You will stay close to me,” Snape said, as if they’d spent years discussing it and it was all settled. “While I remain at Hogwarts, you will be staying with me, and not in Gryffindor Tower.”

“But that means that everyone will have to know we’re father and son,” Harry said. “And no one’s going to take that well. The newspapers will shriek, and some people will call for you to be put in Azkaban. And what if Voldemort’s not dead yet?”

“Then we will keep it quiet,” Snape said, with a fluid little shrug of his shoulders that seemed to suggest he didn’t see any problems. “It will be easier than usual, because there will not be as many students around to discover secrets.” He arched a challenging eyebrow at Harry. Maybe he wanted him to remember that he was one of those students.

Harry opened his mouth to make another objection—

And then looked into Snape’s eyes.

There was hope there, and anger, and something that Harry decided it would be painful to try and name. But what was there, most of all, was some kind of desperate need to accept, and have Harry accept, what he was trying to say.

It doesn’t matter to him that much if we can stay together over the holidays, Harry thought, feeling incredibly slow for not seeing that earlier. What matters is that he wants to make plans like that, and he wants me to agree with them. He wants to know that I want him as a father.

That was a dizzying number of wants, and Harry had to pause before he said, “Yes. All right. We can try.”

Snape shut his eyes. Harry was the one who turned politely away this time, and continued eating his food.

“This is good,” he added, because he thought Snape ought to know that.

Snape gave him another look that was hard to describe and made the stupid flush start up in his cheeks again.

*

Being a father was like nothing else Severus had experienced. Or rather, knowing that he was a father was like nothing else Severus had experienced. Before he knew, Harry could have lived and died and had children before he died, and Severus would only have known or cared if the world forced the Boy-Who-Lived on his notice.

But now, it was as though he had a continually open wound, one that could be torn wide open at any moment. If something happened to Harry, if he was injured, if he still suffered from the abuse his Muggle relatives had inflicted upon him, then Severus knew he would feel that pain, too. And no matter what happened, there was no way to heal the wound or make the chance of pain less, except for courses—such as blocking his memory of his relationship with Harry—that Severus refused to undergo.

The most he could do was to try and make sure that Harry was safer. And that was what had led him to create the lie that not only had Harry been injured in his detention, but the potion he had been making had exploded in a spectacular mess that had sealed them inside Severus’s office for the past few days. An auditory glamour cast on the office had created the sounds of moans, groans, and curses for those curious ones who might want to listen. The rest of the Hogwarts staff said they were “working on it,” but the students didn’t know that Harry and Severus were comfortably ensconced in his private quarters.

Severus had to Disillusion himself when he wished to move about the corridors, but he was used to doing that during his patrols when he stalked snogging students, so that didn’t matter. He used the Disillusionment to visit Minerva and learn what the Aurors had extracted from Cravens.

“She became a Death Eater shortly after You-Know-Who’s return,” Minerva told him, holding a cup of the ridiculously strong tea she had always favored and sipping slowly from it. Severus had known that no one could simply drink that tea without consequences. “She apparently hoped to obtain protection during the war and knowledge of powerful new spells from it. And yes, she was the one who poisoned Mr. Malfoy.”

Severus closed his eyes and exhaled. That was one less worry. He worried for Draco, but more for Harry, and if Draco’s poisoner was safely gone from the school, then Harry would not be hurt by Draco’s injury. “Good,” he said. “Anything else? Why did she do it?”

“As revenge for the way that Mr. Malfoy betrayed You-Know-Who, and his mother escaped,” Minerva said. She was one of the few professors in the school, excluding Albus, who knew the whole story of the venture into Malfoy Manor. “She did not know of any other motive,” she added, watching his face closely.

“What other motive would there be?” Severus asked, giving her a bland look. “I merely asked because it seemed a strange time to strike, several weeks after the escape.”

“Perhaps You-Know-Who wanted to wait until he discerned that he could not find Mrs. Malfoy and make her pay personally,” Minerva said, with a slight shrug. “As for the other reason, Severus, please do not assume that because my sight is poor, I am blind in all the things that matter. I know that Mr. Malfoy and Mr. Potter are starting a relationship.”

Severus blinked and stared at her despite himself. The Gryffindor Head of House rarely appeared to pay much attention to the Slytherins. He had expected her to miss the signs completely.

“I have taught for decades, Severus,” Minerva said tolerantly. “I assure you, every generation of students thinks they’ve invented some new way to keep their passions secret, and I refuse to disappoint them by pointing out how many times I’ve seen those particular deceptions before.” She shook her head. “James Potter’s father also tried to pretend that he’d just ‘happened’ to start liking and protecting a Slytherin. How these things do run, from father to son.”

Severus clenched his teeth against his immediate response, which was to bark jealously that Harry was his son and not James’s. The secret had done something strange to his normal methods for concealing himself. When it came to matters related to his Slytherins or the war, it was easy to hold back his emotions. When it came to Harry, it was not. He knew of no logical reason for the difference; he only knew that it was so.

“Very well,” he said. “Then you know why it is more important than ever that we not allow Draco to be hurt again.”

Minerva gave him a harsh look. “I might dislike a student’s parents or his politics, Severus, but I would not let that deter me from defending him.”

Severus inclined his head in apology, and continued, “Apparently Albus told Mr. Potter that there was a certain time You-Know-Who would attack the school.” He watched Minerva sit up in her chair and wondered if he ought not to have told her before this. He had assumed without thinking that the Head of Gryffindor would be loyal to the Headmaster, but perhaps not. “He has not confirmed a date, however, merely hinting that Mr. Potter should come speak to him in private if he wants to know more. For various reasons, it is desirable that Mr. Potter not be alone with Albus right now. Do you think you could ask Albus for the date and wrench it from him with none of his silly riddles or delays?”

“Why would he delay information like this?” Minerva murmured, her eyes on the fire. Then her face seemed to cloud over, and she sighed. “Because he likes to control the flow of information so much,” she answered her own question. “Of course. Yes. Well. I will try to speak to him, Severus, though I cannot guarantee results.”

Severus nodded, more than satisfied to accept that response. Minerva had resources of personality and connection to Albus that he did not, and would cling tenaciously to Albus past his vague responses now that she knew what to look for.

Besides, it was past time that he get back to his son.

*

Draco stepped cautiously into Professor Snape’s bedroom, which had become Harry’s bedroom. He had visited before, but only in short snatches, with the professor hovering nearby the entire time and Granger and Weasley behind him. He could hardly tell Harry about everything he needed to say when he had an audience.

But now, Professor Snape seemed to have decided that Harry was well enough to receive visitors, and Draco was alone, and Harry was sitting up in bed and holding out a hand with a sweet smile.

Draco came up to him and wrapped his arms around him. Harry lifted his head for a kiss.

Draco lost track of time during the kiss, and even place. When he became conscious again, he was sitting in bed with Harry, half-sprawled across his lap, and Harry was playing with his hair and sighing into his ear.

“God, I missed you,” Harry whispered.

Draco forgot his resentments about having no private time with Harry for three whole days. He hugged him back, and murmured meaningless nonsense, and just sat there in dazed happiness for a little while.

“How’s your mother?” Harry asked.

Draco looked up at him in silence for a minute. Harry didn’t appear to be concerned, and just traced the lobe and shell of Draco’s ear as he waited for him to speak.

My father would say that I’m weak, needing someone so much. Mother would smile, but also caution me. Does he care for me as much as I do for him? How do I know that? Am I too vulnerable to him, too open? Should I spend more time holding back from him and making him pursue me? Do I know that he’ll hang onto me the way I want him to, or defend me from his friends? Do I know anything except my own intense happiness, and is that a bad thing? She would think so.

Before, Draco had decided that the answers to those questions were ones that would satisfy both himself and his parents. But looking at Harry like this, he decided that the answers could be the “wrong” ones and he still wouldn’t care. He would be vulnerable and open to Harry all his life, and maybe he would care for Harry more, and Harry could ignore him sometimes, and Draco would still come back.

That would have been pathetic—except that Draco had no doubt at all that Harry cared for him back, and would show it, even if his method of showing it wouldn’t fall exactly within the Malfoy standards. And there would be times when Draco would ignore Harry, and row with him, and despise his stupid friends. That was just the way their lives were.

A warm glow in both his mind and his belly, Draco folded his legs up beneath him and started to talk.