Chapter Forty-Five of 'Practicing Liars'- Epiphanies

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Forty-Four.

Title: Practicing Liars (45/49)
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.


Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Forty-Five—Epiphanies

It took Harry a long minute to catch his breath; Dumbledore’s announcement had surprised him so much. And there were a lot of things he had to react to. Dumbledore’s wound. The idea that he was really weakening in his magic after all, and wouldn’t get it back. Harry had assumed without thinking that the weakness wouldn’t last, because it couldn’t last. This was Dumbledore. He would pull off some last-minute miracle to ensure that he wouldn’t have to lose his magic. That was the kind of thing he did.

And then that last announcement.

Snape’s hand was pressing on his shoulder with such force that Harry knew it would start to hurt in a minute. He cleared his throat and moved away. Snape grabbed him and dragged him backwards again. Harry sighed, then reached up and squeezed Snape’s hand in turn, something he had discovered would probably make him loosen his grip a bit. Sure enough, Snape relaxed and let Harry edge away.

Well, a few inches away, anyway.

“What do you mean?” Harry asked Dumbledore. “The prophecy says that I’m the one who has to kill him.”

“But it does not say which weapons you must use,” Dumbledore said, as quietly and gently as though they were discussing something reasonable.

“Well, no,” Harry agreed slowly. Snape had resumed his grip again. Harry sighed and leaned against him. It was probably the only thing that would calm him down right now.

“And your wand is useless against him because your wand and his are brothers.” Dumbledore looked at Fawkes with a tender smile. Fawkes, who had been looking at Harry ever since they arrived, turned his head back and eyed Dumbledore again. His croon was soft and gentle, so warm that Harry thought he got a dim glimpse of the long bond that Fawkes and the Headmaster must have.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “But that still doesn’t mean you can defeat him.”

“I do not believe that you can,” Snape said, his voice crow-like, and Harry knew he would be trouble. “Lying again, Albus? Now? I would have thought the circumstances would have persuaded you to tell the truth. I should have realized—”

“Hush, Severus,” Dumbledore said, and Harry thought Snape would shut up. Dumbledore’s voice was gentle, but also smothering, as though he was tossing a heavy blanket over the top of a fire.

Harry had underestimated Snape. His tone just got lower and uglier, and by this point he was stooping over Harry, as though he was going to wrap him up in his robe and take him away. “I will not. We came here in good faith. You promised us answers. You knew beforehand that I would come with Harry. And then this happens. What do you mean? Tell us straight out, for once, with none of your dodging. Or is that something that you’re incapable of, now?”

“I am trying to,” Dumbledore said, with a dart of his eyes that was the first sign of irritation Harry had seen from him. A moment later, he was drawing in his breath carefully and releasing it with equal care. “Forgive me, my boys,” he said. “I should have said this long ago.”

“At least five minutes ago,” Snape said, but Harry leaned against him, and he shut up out of surprise.

Harry was thinking. Dumbledore had talked about weapons, and he had said that Harry wouldn’t be able to use his wand to defeat Voldemort, or at least not just his wand, which Harry already knew. But he had said that he would be the one to defeat Voldemort, which Harry knew couldn’t be true, because of the prophecy.

Now he looked up and said, “Sir, are you going to give me your magic to defeat him?”

Snape went still. Dumbledore turned and looked at Harry with an enormous smile, full of relief and gratitude. Harry wondered suddenly how long it had been since anyone had made Dumbledore’s life easier for him.

That doesn’t mean you need to, he promptly reminded himself. And a lot of the problems he brought on himself, like the way he wanted to sacrifice me.

“That will not work,” Snape said, and his voice was crow-like again. He would actually have stepped in front of Harry, but Harry leaned harder against his legs, and Snape had to concentrate on keeping his balance. “If your magic is as weakened as you say it is, then how can you hope to make a difference? And the spells that would pass your magic on to another wizard are Dark Arts.”

“Not all of them.” Dumbledore was watching Harry with an even gentler smile now. It reminded Harry somewhat of the rare—very rare—times that he saw Aunt Petunia smiling at Dudley, and knew that she was remembering the way he had looked when he was a baby. “There is one that will give my power up to Harry with nothing darker on my part than a specific incantation. And while my magic is weakened, Severus, it is still greater than that of many other wizards.”

“You cannot make him bear that,” Snape said, his breath rustling and crackling and snapping in his lungs like cartilage. “You cannot.”

“Will everyone stop talking over my head and tell me what I’m supposed to be able to bear or not?” Harry demanded.

“Yes,” Dumbledore said, with a slight scolding tone in his voice that Harry didn’t like. It made him think Dumbledore was enjoying this too much. “We should tell the boy the truth, after all.” He turned to Harry while Snape was probably still trying to find breath.

“I will cast a spell that involves a promise to surrender my magic,” Dumbledore said. “All of it, every bit of my magical core. It is not a Dark spell because there is no way to compel someone to perform it. If the victim is under the slightest bit of coercion, the spell will fail.”

Harry folded his arms. “And what happens when you give all those bits of magic to me, sir?”

Dumbledore didn’t look away. “I die.”

Harry shivered. He rubbed his arms and wondered why gooseflesh had suddenly started up on them.

“No,” Snape said again. He didn’t have much voice behind the word, but when he could hold someone the way he was currently holding Harry, he didn’t necessarily have to have it.

“Just—let me think about this, all right?” Harry said. His voice was too quiet. He cleared his throat and tried to speak up more confidently. This was big and complicated, like forgiving Dumbledore for wanting him to die when he found out Harry was a Horcrux. He had to think carefully about it, or he was going to make a mistake, maybe one that he would regret for the rest of his life.

Assuming that the rest of my life is long.

“You should consider it, yes,” Dumbledore said. “I would not wish to force anything on you against your will, Harry—”

Snape’s bitter snort was everything Harry could have said about that subject, so he didn’t say anything.

“But Voldemort should attack soon,” Dumbledore said. “Therefore, you will not have much time to make your decision.”

“He will not be making the decision at all,” Snape said. “It should not lie on his shoulders, to have to choose whether other people live or die. That is a role that you have been more than eager to play.” He had both hands on Harry’s shoulders now, pressing down, drawing him close, clenching like claws. “To have made this offer is only another way of gaining control, not of making up for your mistakes.”

“It is the only way I can think of,” Dumbledore said, deep and gentle. He glanced at Harry. “I would offer you my wand, Harry, which is powerful and would enable you to escape the problem of your wand and Voldemort’s being brothers, but it would require weeks of training before it would consent to serve you. And I am afraid that would still not allow you to match Voldemort’s raw power.”

Harry nodded. “Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it?” he said. “Life or death. Whether I’m going to live or die. I was training hard because I thought it was all about spells, but then I found out about the Horcruxes. And Voldemort still has all the advantages. He’ll cheat. He’ll use Dark Arts. I know he will. This is why you’re making this decision to offer me your power, isn’t it, sir?” He found it comforting when he could reason out things like that for himself. Not only did it reassure him that he was smart enough to understand the sometimes incomprehensible decisions that the adults around him made, but it meant he could consider the problems from other angles and see paths they might have missed.

“Yes, my dear boy,” Dumbledore said. He looked at Harry with the same expression Harry knew he must have worn when Hagrid explained the wizarding world and his parents’ deaths to him—the expression that said he was seen, finally, for what he was, and that it was a wonderful feeling. “That is the truth.”

“No,” Snape said.

He didn’t speak it loudly, but there was a finality in his voice anyway, like a tomb door shutting, that told Harry they would have trouble with him. He sighed and turned to face his father.

*

Severus felt as if he were standing in the face of a tragedy happening right this moment. A child sacrifice, perhaps. That was the usual form that Dumbledore’s tragedies took.

And Harry was agreeing that it was a good thing he should be tied down to the altar. He had a thoughtful look in his eyes, as though this was something that could be considered dispassionately, argued and agreed with. He glanced at Severus as if assuming that his agreement was inevitable.

“No,” Severus said.

Harry turned towards him, that thoughtful look still in his eyes, and Severus knew at once that he should never have permitted Harry to come to Dumbledore’s office, even if he, Draco, Weasley, Granger, and Rita Skeeter had been with him. Dumbledore carried a sickness in his rhetoric and ideas, an invisible illness that was prone to infect Gryffindors. Severus was safe from it himself, but he should have remembered what House his son was Sorted into.

“Will you listen to me?” Harry asked, his voice placating. “Just listen.”

“I said no.” It was the same voice Severus had used to such great effect when the boy was sick and had no choice but to obey him. And to the credit of Harry’s inherited intelligence, he hesitated now. But he shook his head in the end.

“No,” he said. “This is different. This isn’t something that jeopardizes my safety. Is it?” he added, with a glance at Severus rather than Dumbledore that warmed the small unpanicked part of Severus, because it showed his son thought of him as an authority and a source of knowledge rather than the Headmaster.

“It has nothing to do with safety,” Severus said. “It has to do with adulthood and the Headmaster’s decision to treat you as a monstrous compendium of adult and child, rather than the person you are.” He glared at Albus, and he must have put something in his expression that hadn’t been there at other times, because Albus flinched and looked suddenly uncomfortable.

“That’s an answer, then,” Harry said. “The spell he casts will affect me positively, or not at all.” He stood up a little taller and looked at his father with eyes that Severus wanted to reach out and shut, because they had no business looking like that.

“I’m not a normal person,” Harry said, voice as soft as snowfall. “I know that. Having to fight Voldemort four times in five years isn’t normal. Normal people aren’t Horcruxes.” He touched his scar. “And so that should have a good side as well as a bad one. Let me be trusted with my own decisions for once. I can do this.”

“I do not wish you to make those decisions,” Severus said. “He has no right to impose this burden on you.”

“I don’t think he wants to,” Harry said, without so much as a glance at Dumbledore to try and extract the truth from him on that issue. “I think he just has to, because that’s the way circumstances are.”

Severus snarled; he absolutely could not help himself. “He will use such excuses to make you believe him without question,” he said.

Harry smiled, and there was so much in the expression that reminded Severus of Lily that he had to look away. “Do you really think this is me giving in to him without question?” Harry asked. “Because I don’t think so.”

“You are still a child,” Severus said.

“Not really,” Harry said. “Yes, in some ways. I don’t have all the knowledge that you do, or all the experience. I haven’t—” He cut himself off from whatever he was about to say. “But I’ve known how to make hard decisions for a while, and I’ve known what it’s like to stand up to people around me for a while. I knew I would have to make a hard decision when I heard the prophecy—the choice to murder someone. So I’m kind of prepared for this. That makes things better, doesn’t it?” He sounded as if he were pleading with Severus to agree.

Severus looked at him. Harry had a thick wrinkle across his forehead above the scar, the result of deep thinking that Severus didn’t think had all been conducted in this one afternoon. As Harry had said, he would have had sleepless nights and slow evenings and a whole summer trapped alone and starving in the house of his Muggle relatives to consider what was going to happen. He wasn’t coming to this blindly, no matter how much Severus might like to think he was.

But that did not change certain facts. “Too much has been asked of you already,” Severus said. “Too many sacrifices. And now a man asks you to choose whether he lives or dies. That is yet another sacrifice, this time of your innocence.”

Harry snorted. “What innocence?” But he shook his head when Severus tried to speak. “I know what you mean. I told you, I know that you have more experience than I do. But this really isn’t one of those things. If Dumbledore had just performed the spell and given me the magic, that would be something I was angry about, because I wouldn’t have a choice. But in this case, I can still refuse.”

“He knows you won’t,” Severus said, backed against a wall but refusing to cease his efforts to make Harry understand. “That is simply the rhetoric he offers to make his manipulation of you seem less stark.”

“Then it’s rhetoric I choose to accept,” Harry said. “It makes what I’m doing—accepting magic from a dying man—seem less objectionable.” He turned around and nodded to Dumbledore. “I accept. When are you going to perform the spell?”

“In a week’s time.” Dumbledore’s face was pale, but he had closed his eyes, and Severus was not sure if the pallor came from exhaustion, being brought face-to-face with the martyrdom he had sought, or something else. “Voldemort will either attack shortly or not at all, persuading himself to wait.” He opened his eyes then, and any weakness he might have revealed was hidden behind the steely general’s mask Severus knew so well. “And you will not be able to hang onto my magic for very long after you have it, Harry. There is another reason this spell is not often performed. The gift is meant to accomplish a specific task, the one the giver wills. After you defeat Tom, it will go away.”

“Good,” Harry responded with such immense relief that Severus could not think he was joking. “I don’t want to be powerful.”

Severus shook his head. Harry was the most powerful one in the room at this moment, the only one able to give Dumbledore license to cast that spell, the only one capable of overruling Severus’s protests. Did he not realize that?

Or perhaps the boy has simply been too crudely trained to recognize the different varieties of power. That is a deficiency in his education that I must see to, after the battle.

“After the battle” was a paradise that Severus was growing increasingly certain would never come, and so he did not wish to consider it. Instead, he asked Dumbledore, not bothering to conceal his distrust, “How will we know when you perform the spell?”

“I will invite you into the room where I intend to die,” Dumbledore said. “While I don’t think that the spell will go astray, it would still be better if the magic didn’t have a great distance to travel before it found Harry and became part of him.” His eyes touched Harry’s face, and shone. His voice descended to a whisper. “Have I told you how very, very proud I am of you, my boy?”

Harry darted a look at Severus. Severus understood. Harry felt the uneasy side of the fury that swept through Severus then. Dumbledore did not have the right to be proud. He had not raised the boy, and his guidance had been weak and wavering at best.

“We cannot know that will happen,” Severus said.

“Take my word,” Dumbledore said, and his face grew long and pale again, which Severus welcomed because it was the only sign that he was causing pain to someone he still considered an enemy. “I know that is hard for you to do,” he added. “But I have considered my sins, including keeping information from you in the past, and this is the only way I can make up for them.”

“And this is the only way he can earn my forgiveness for planning to kill me,” Harry said.

Dumbledore gave Harry a swift, blinking look. He smoothed it over a moment later, of course, but Severus had seen, and he treasured the meaning of it. Harry had a harder, crueler side, and he was not above using it to ensure that Dumbledore kept both his promises.

“Quite so,” said Dumbledore, though with a wounded quiver to his mouth that made Severus suspect he hated having to acknowledge such a thing. He tried to smile, and couldn’t quite manage to do it. “Is there anything else that you wanted to say to me?”

Severus took great pleasure in turning his back and moving towards the door. Harry followed him, though he did say something to Dumbledore that Severus didn’t try to listen to. He did not think his son foolish enough (anymore) to promise his life or his unconditional belief for the Headmaster’s sake, and nothing else could worry him.

As they traveled down on the moving staircase, Harry said, not looking at him, “I know you’re just trying to protect me.”

Severus inclined his head and said nothing.

“And I appreciate it. But.” Harry looked up at him, face so weary that Severus was tempted to order him back into bed, before he remembered that Harry was living out of the dungeons again and was not so immediately under his authority. “I don’t think I can act like a normal child. I went without being parented for too long. So sometimes I’m going to resist and just not listen to you. Can you put up with that?”

Severus placed his hand on Harry’s shoulder by way of an answer.

*

“So that’s it,” Harry finished, his fingers stroking the small of Draco’s back as if it were the source he drew strength from. “Dumbledore’s going to die. Of course, he was already dying, but this spell really will kill him, and he’ll pass his magic on to me, and I’ll use it to defeat Voldemort.”

Draco reflexively flinched at the name, but so did Weasley, so he didn’t mind. He was more interested in the sick helplessness in Harry’s voice. He had made his decision, but he wasn’t happy about it.

Draco would have said something, but they were with Harry’s friends at the moment, in the old classroom where they had met several times, and Draco’s words didn’t need an audience.

“That’s awful, Harry,” Granger said, her face white. Draco thought she probably cared more about Dumbledore dying than she did about the effect on Harry, but he couldn’t prove it, so he kept quiet about that, too. “But you trust him this time?”

Harry nodded. “As much as I can. There’s still part of me that says he won’t keep his word this time, because he’s never kept it before. But I’ve been thinking about all those little hints and clues he was dropping—how he talked about an old light fading and dying while a new one shone, for example. I think that’s what he meant. He was planning to sacrifice himself so that I could defeat Voldemort all along.”

“I wish he’d told you before,” Weasley said, watching Harry like a wise dog. Draco had started, reluctantly, a little, to begin to approve of Weasley. He was more sensitive to Harry’s moods and in some ways more insightful than Granger, whose knowledge opened and shut with books. “A week isn’t much time to get used to this.”

“Maybe it was impossible for him to face up to it himself,” Harry said. “Or maybe I’ll have longer; he did seem to think that the time when Voldemort might attack was a little uncertain. But the decision’s made now, and I just wish it was over with.”

Draco knew he had to stay, then. Granger and Weasley talked to Harry more, but it was about unimportant things, as if they could affect the fate of the war now. They finally left, and Harry sighed and leaned against Draco.

“Do you know how much strength you give me?” he whispered to Draco. “I’m becoming friends with them again, but it’s still awkward. You know more about me right now than they do.” He was playing with Draco’s fingers.

Always, Draco thought but didn’t say; he didn’t plan to give up his place as Harry’s confidant, no matter how sensitive Granger and Weasley might seem sometimes. He raked his fingers through Harry’s hair in answer, and said, “I wish you didn’t have to do this.”

Harry didn’t respond.

“He had no right to make you face that decision,” Draco continued. “You’ve been through too much already.”

Harry shrugged his shoulder against Draco’s. “I don’t think I’m really real to him, sometimes,” he said. “I’m someone he has to use and think about and maybe kill, but I’m not real.” He laughed, and the sound was so bitter Draco turned his head to smother Harry’s lips in a kiss. But Harry went on speaking when the kiss was done. “He claims he cares for me. I wonder what he would have done if he didn’t care for me?”

Draco said nothing. He had wanted to speak the secret burning inside him earlier—it was the main reason he had wanted to wait until they were alone, in fact—but now he thought it would only hurt Harry to hear that he thought Dumbledore was getting what he deserved.

He snogged Harry instead, and sent him back to Gryffindor Tower full of smiles and at least resignation if not happiness, and then he went down to brew potions in the dungeon with Professor Snape. The professor had found him and given him the message earlier.

There were certain potions that could protect Harry if Dumbledore changed his mind and tried to kill him after all. Professor Snape planned to brew them all and had invited Draco to help him.

Sorry, Harry, Draco thought, as he nodded to the professor and began to chop up the leaves of wolfsbane. I wish I could trust him as much as you do. But I’m not Gryffindor, and I’m not that forgiving.