Chapter Twenty-Six of 'Practicing Liars'- The Downfall
Title: Practicing Liars (26/?)
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 Twenty-Six-The Downfall
Harry had such trouble falling asleep that night that he wondered for a minute if Voldemort was back haunting his dreams. But he hadn’t had dreams like that for a long time, and he didn’t think Voldemort would want to show him false visions again. What out there could be important enough, like the prophecy, to try and lure Harry to him?
Well, he might want to kill you.
Harry shifted uneasily. He hated it when his mind had a reasonable response to his efforts to defend himself.
Well, other than that, why would Voldemort have an interest in sending him false visions like last year?
This time Harry couldn’t think of an answer, and nodded in satisfaction. He smiled and rolled on his back, spreading his arms lazily around his head so that they almost covered the pillow.
But the satisfaction faded instantly when he remembered that, if Voldemort wasn’t trying to get into his mind, then he had to come up with another reason he had such trouble falling asleep.
This time, the answer was swift and brutal, and Harry sighed and dragged one arm over his eyes, as if that could block out the real reason.
If what Mrs. Malfoy and Draco said was true, then maybe you just have to live with the way that Snape is always going to be. Maybe he didn’t mean to hurt you, or not all the time. Harry grimaced as he thought of his first day in Potions class, when Snape had struck unprovoked. Maybe there are times when he really just wants to keep you safe, and he’s thinking you make it difficult.
But his mind slammed against the same barrier he had always raised before, the question that no one could answer for him. Why was Snape going to be so different from his other blood relatives? Except for his parents, one of whom Harry couldn’t say was a blood relative anymore, all of them had always treated him nastily. So why should he trust Snape now?
Draco seemed to think there was something special about the fact that Snape was his father. So did Snape. And that was what made the whole thing a tangled mess in Harry’s head. People seemed to think there was something specially important and wonderful about blood relatives, and Harry thought they shouldn’t get any more consideration than anyone else unless they actually treated you with respect. Ron had a wonderful family, but Harry knew other people didn’t. Why should you have to love someone just because he was your father? If your sister tried to murder you, did you not defend yourself because she was your sister and just lie there protesting that this was probably because you should have loved her more?
Harry shook his head. He already knew these wouldn’t sound like reasonable questions to anyone else. Hermione would urge him to make up with Snape if she knew. Ron wouldn’t, but he would be revolted in a way that said even he thought there was something special and important about blood connections. And Harry already knew what Snape and Draco thought.
Then Harry paused, and his eyes narrowed in thought.
When did Snape and Draco become important enough for me to put them in the same thoughts with my friends?
Harry opened his eyes and sat up, casting a weak Lumos that he hoped wouldn’t disturb the other boys in the room. He wasn’t getting to sleep anyway, and his thoughts were going around in circles. He should do something productive and decide which spells he was going to teach at the next session of the D.A. Some of the spells Snape had taught him were appropriate, but others definitely weren’t.
Harry had only made a list of two spells when he saw a flicker out of the corner of his eyes. He looked up, thinking that Ron had opened the curtains to check on him. A reassuring lie was already on his tongue.
But the flicker came back, and he realized he saw a white Dementor drifting across the curtains.
Harry’s heart briefly became so still he could feel the wash of coldness in his chest. Then it beat again, and he swallowed and sat up. He understood this now, which meant he didn’t have to be afraid of it. So he saw white Dementors. He knew it was the bloodline curse, and so far that hadn’t hurt him, if you didn’t count welts and wounds that went away after a little while.
There’s no reason to scream and wake anyone up.
The white Dementor he’d seen at first multiplied, until a whole crowd of them surrounded the bed, slowly circling it. Harry could feel their eyes on him, though he couldn’t see those eyes, just like with ordinary Dementors.
He forced himself to look away from them and back at the parchment he’d pulled from beneath the bed. Spells, he told himself firmly. Think of the names of spells.
Then the first white Dementor appeared on the parchment.
Harry flinched and threw it away from him before he thought. It drifted to the floor beside the bed, he knew that, but the way he saw it was that it swirled up and became part of the robe of one of the Dementors. That Dementor joined the others in their stately circling, but closer to the bed, so now there were two rings of them.
The inner ring was almost close enough to touch him.
Harry gritted his teeth. Part of him wanted to call out for help, but what could anyone in Gryffindor Tower do? They weren’t Snapes and didn’t have this stupid fucking bloodline curse on them. The only thing he could really do was go to Madam Pomfrey-which he didn’t want to do unless he was actually suffering from things, because since he had Obliviated her she wouldn’t know what to do anyway-or to Snape.
And Harry didn’t want to go to Snape. The bruise on his shoulder was a reminder of what happened when he did. Maybe Snape hadn’t meant to do it, but Harry was still going to give it a few days before he ventured within touching distance of the bastard again. He could listen to Snape and try to act like they were related and he could tolerate him without getting close enough to touch.
He lay down, canceled the charm on his wand, and closed his eyes.
When the first cold touch ran down his arm and he felt his skin pucker and then break, Harry gritted his teeth and said nothing. He’d had worse.
*
Something was wrong with Harry.
Draco was certain of it. When he looked at him, Harry didn’t look back. When he spoke to him, Harry took a minute to answer. When his friends were around him, chattering, Harry stared at the wall instead of listening to their chatter the way he always used to do.
That last reaction was only right and rational, but not right for Harry, because his brain was apparently meant to like mindless chatter from Weasley and Granger.
But when Draco tried to take it up with Harry, he only got strange looks and deliberate turns of the conversation. And Harry kept shying away from him when Draco tried to touch his shoulder or his arm, then acting offended and as if he didn’t know what Draco was talking about when Draco tried to mention that.
Right now, they were having another meeting to talk about the Horcrux hunt, and Harry was cautioning Weasley and Granger not to mention the word “Horcrux” in front of anyone. Granger had looked guilty and shaken her head. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she said. “I thought for sure that I’d set silencing charms.”
Harry smiled. “Don’t worry about it. But it might be best if we only talk about it in secure rooms like this.” They were meeting in Umbridge’s old office again, and once more Draco sat on one side of the room and Weasley and Granger on the other, with Harry on his feet between them. They had adopted that arrangement without discussion, as if it was natural.
What wasn’t natural was the way Harry was swaying slightly back and forth. Draco could see it clearly. As much as it would irritate Harry, he opened his mouth to ask about it. Granger would immediately become concerned, even if Weasley didn’t, and the pressure of two or three friends ought to be enough to force the truth from Harry where one wouldn’t do it.
Then Draco hesitated again, thinking of how irritated Harry had been when Professor Snape and Draco had pulled that trick on him in the past.
But what if it’s a secret that really hurts him? Is that different from the secrets about the Horcruxes or his family?
Draco bit his lip hard. It wasn’t, was it? Those secrets had hurt Harry, too, to the point where they affected his physical and mental health, but Harry had still defended them fiercely and insisted he was fine. What made Draco think that this time would be different, or that Harry was privately yearning for someone to ask and make him better?
What makes me think I have the right?
Draco shut his mouth. No one had really noticed that he opened it, though Weasley gave him a warning look, probably on general principles. Harry and Granger were talking about two places where the Horcrux definitely was not-Gryffindor Tower and the library-and about a spell that Granger thought she could develop to force the Horcruxes to reveal themselves.
“Why did you look in Gryffindor Tower at all?” Draco asked, so that he would look as if he were thinking about the search instead of other things. “After all, the Dark Lord hates your lot, so he wouldn’t be likely to hide a precious artifact there.”
Granger shook her head and sat upright, looking very calm and adult and, to Draco’s horror, a bit like his mother. “I don’t think we know enough about the Dark Lord’s psychology to say that,” she began in a lecture-like tone. “After all, on the one hand, he does hate us. He considers himself the Heir of Slytherin, and that seems to mean fulfilling all of Slytherin’s old prejudices. There’s no denying that. But he also knows that his enemies know that fact. So he might have tried hiding it in Gryffindor Tower because he knew that was the one place his enemies would never suspect.”
Draco shivered. “I don’t think the Dark Lord is that complicated,” he said absently, thinking about his meetings with him during the summer. “He prides himself on his prejudices, yes, but he’s also mad. And he has no empathy at all. That limits his ability to think like other people do. He thinks like himself, instead, and he’s bloody proud of it.”
“That’s useful to know, Malfoy,” Weasley said, sitting up in turn and staring at him. “Why did you never tell us that before?” His voice deepened, and his hand strayed towards his wand.
“Because I didn’t think of it,” Draco snapped. “And because we were talking about the Dark Lord’s magic before this, not his mind.” He found himself looking at Harry in appeal, and wondered if he should. But there was no one else in the room who was on his side.
He was just in time to catch Harry shoving his sleeve back down over his arm, part of which was a brilliant red. Draco narrowed his eyes. Did he scald himself? Or did someone cast a curse on him that he feels like he ought to hide? But most of the time, he’s not going to hesitate to get someone in trouble for doing something so stupid. I don’t understand...
“Yes, we were,” Harry said. Whatever his private concerns, it appeared that he could still follow the conversation effortlessly. “Ron, you can’t blame Draco for not mentioning every piece of knowledge he had about Voldemort right away, unless you’re also going to blame me for not telling you about the Horcruxes right away.” He moved so that he was more firmly between them than before, and it wasn’t even subtle.
Weasley grumbled something that Draco didn’t bother to pay attention to. He watched the way that Harry folded his arms and tilted his head and wondered if he was really doing it to keep his balance, the way it seemed.
I wish I knew what to do, how I could help him without losing his trust, Draco thought wistfully.
“Good,” Harry said. “So, I think the next place we should look is the Slytherin common room. Voldemort spent more time there than anywhere else when he was a student, I should think.” He turned around, and Draco suddenly found himself the focus of attention from three pairs of eyes. “Draco, can you do that for us?”
“I can teach you the spell that I’m developing to detect the presence of Dark magic in the Horcruxes,” Granger offered eagerly.
Draco looked down so that he wouldn’t show his astonishment at Granger being eager about anything that involved him. He looked mainly at Harry, and the pleading in his eyes, mingled with exhaustion. It looked as if he hadn’t been getting enough sleep, but even if Draco only mentioned that and nothing else, he would probably seem like he was too concerned. Weasley would laugh and say that he wasn’t Harry’s mother.
Harry doesn’t have a mum, but he does have a father.
Draco clenched one fist against the temptation to run out the door immediately in search of Professor Snape. He would be more than interested to hear about this. He was one of the few people who could stand up to Harry in stubbornness and who would do it consistently (Draco knew Granger was stubborn, too, but it seemed that she yielded to Harry far too often). And Draco had already involved him, a bit, by talking about Harry’s secrets where he could hear them.
But if he ran to Professor Snape now, Draco knew he would lose every bit of Harry’s trust he had.
He couldn’t bear that. Besides, what if he was wrong and Harry was only tired and a bit sick and hiding those things out of pride? Then Draco would have forced himself away from Harry’s side for nothing, and in the meantime, when Harry really was in danger, he wouldn’t be near to protect Harry from himself.
Draco swallowed most of what he wanted to say and nodded. “All right,” he said. “But I can’t say how long the search might take.”
“Because there’s so much Dark magic in Slytherin that we can’t be sure which bit comes from the Horcrux?” muttered Weasley.
Among all the worries and frustrations plaguing Draco at the moment, it was at least pleasant to be able to nod to Weasley, say, “Exactly,” and watch the way his mouth fell open.
“That’s all we ask, that you try,” Harry said, and his smile warmed Draco’s soul and soothed a few of his fears-if only a few-about not saying something right away.
*
“The purging potions don’t work,” Harry said as he watched Severus’s latest attempt turn to sludge on the bottom of the cauldron. “What else are we going to try?”
Severus waited a moment so that he could listen to his son’s tone and analyze it. No, it was not hostile. It was simply blank, as if Harry wanted to be sure that disappointment and gloating alike were kept back.
Severus looked at him. As he had done since he came in the door of the office for their session that night, however, Harry avoided his gaze. He had cast a spell to grow his fringe, Severus thought with slowly mounting annoyance, or else it was being more obnoxious than he usually found it. It worked perfectly to shield the boy’s eyes as well as his scar. Severus wondered when the day would come that the boy realized hiding his scar did nothing to hide who he was and he should look the world in the face.
“I will begin with an Entwining Potion,” Severus answered. “If we cannot purge the Horcrux from your soul, perhaps we can pull it out.”
“What does the Entwining Potion do?” Harry’s head rose, but only slightly. Severus set his back teeth together with a quiet click. Once, he would have thought his dearest desire was to see the boy’s head bowed with some semblance of humility. But not only was it boring to see it so, it was worrisome. He wanted defiance and a direct gaze. Even that dark smile and the blame he had seen the other day when he bruised his shoulder would have been welcome, as a kind of life.
“It tangles together the essences of objects, and makes one into a magnet for the other,” Severus said, letting himself fall into lecture mode as he summoned the necessary potions from the shelves. It seemed safest. “Observe.” He decanted the simplest of the Entwining Potions, the Metallic, and conjured pewter and gold filings on the table before dripping the potion onto one of the particles of gold.
It glittered and briefly became covered with what looked like a transparent umbrella as the potion analyzed the nearest metal to the gold. Severus smiled grimly. He had once been so unwise as to use this potion without conjuring another kind of metal that the gold could safely attract, and it had simply reached for the nearest one in the immediate area, which was iron. Nails had come flying out of the doors in a deadly hail, and Severus’s cauldrons had disordered themselves so badly that he had been all day about placing them back in their proper positions. While it was a useful property to know in case he ever figured out a way to use it on an enemy, it was not an ability he was anxious to demonstrate while showing the potion to his son.
He looked again at Harry, but he had leaned forwards over the table. Nothing as interesting as gold and pewter had ever existed, apparently.
Severus glanced back at the gold filing, to look at something that would keep to its normal course and enable him, in turn, to keep his patience. The umbrella had settled back into the particle, and Severus nodded and picked it up. “Observe,” he murmured, as he moved it above the table.
The pewter filings sprang into motion, the first one connecting to the gold and the others connecting either to it or to the other gold filings on the table. The boy leaned forwards with his mouth open. Severus could see that much before he picked up his jaw and obviously tried to look controlled and mature. Severus permitted himself a smug smile. It was a minor potion, an obvious show compared to the many subtle and wonderful things that his art could do, but at least it impressed his son.
And it allowed Severus to be in the same room with him with no chance of hurting him.
He grimaced and shook his head, forcing himself to move past the lingering hurt for now. He had seen too much of his own pain to find it interesting anymore. “So the essences of gold and pewter are entwined,” he murmured, stirring the chain in several directions to show the boy that the metals remained faithful to each other. “The joining can be disrupted with a spell or another potion, but one must shape either carefully. There are many different kinds of Entwining Potions, and what works to part gold and pewter-” he uncorked the vial of a grey liquid and scattered a few drops on the chain he held, to show the boy how they clicked and fell apart “-will not work at all on a joining of stones, or potions, or living flesh.”
“Or souls,” the boy breathed. He was gripping the edge of the table by now, and he stared at the gold and pewter filings that still clung to each other as if they were his salvation. “Can you really do that, though?” He blinked and looked up for the first time. “And what two things would you be mingling the essence of, anyway?”
It took Severus an inexcusably long moment to answer. The green eyes were filled with pain, dull with fatigue. He did not understand how he could have gone so long without seeing this. Though it had been a few cautious days before Harry returned to him after their last altercation, he had seen him in class and the corridors since, and no signs of pain had revealed themselves.
Harry began to draw back from him, shaking his fringe into place and lowering his face again, and Severus hurried to respond.
“Ideally, we would be mingling the essence of the Horcrux and a common object that we would only need to pass down your body,” Severus said. “Then the piece of the Dark Lord’s soul would fly free and join to that object, which could be destroyed in the same way that the Headmaster destroyed the other Horcruxes he found.” He hoped that he kept his voice sufficiently neutral when he spoke of Albus. On the other hand, the boy appeared so involved in his own emotions at the moment that it might not have mattered.
“But it’s already entwined in my soul,” Harry said, sinking his fingers into his arms as if his firm grip would keep him in place. It did not escape Severus’s eye that the boy shuddered and flinched in the next instant and pulled his hands back hastily. “How are you going to pull his soul away from my soul?”
“That is the question,” Severus admitted, mildly impressed by the boy’s intelligence in spite of himself. “It might be that we will need two Entwining Potions. And there are other options,” he added. “If this does not work, we will find something else that does.”
Harry just shut his eyes and shook his head. Severus did not think it was denial of his words, but it did not express belief in them, either.
Harry moved then, and his left sleeve fell heavily away from his arm. Harry gasped, and his face went white.
Had it been anyone else, Severus would have feared that the motion meant a new Dark Mark. But in this case, there was no chance of that, and he was also quick enough to see that the sleeve was soaked in blood and what looked like white powder.
“Luceo,” he said sharply.
Harry whipped around towards him, mouth open in denial, but the spell had already worked to conjure a special sort of light for Severus’s eyes that made the cloth of Harry’s sleeves transparent.
His arms were soaked with blood from large welts that took up more space, from his wrist to his shoulder, than regular skin did. The welts resembled the ones Severus had seen when the boy claimed to have seen the white Dementors, but these were worse. Far worse.
And, from the look of them, the boy had been concealing them for days at least. Perhaps weeks.
He looked up in time to meet Harry’s eyes, so furious that Severus actually froze. And that was enough time for Harry to hiss, “How many times are you going to spy on me?” and take off through the door of the office.
*
Harry pounded along, his steps frantic, his breath whistling in his ears, his eyes seeing the world as a ghost through a thick crowd of white Dementors that kept perfect pace with him, his brain a whirl of betrayal.
Why can’t they just understand that I don’t want to talk about it? Why can’t the bastard just leave me alone?
The white Dementors never left him alone now. His arms hadn’t stopped bleeding for days. Harry knew that was bad, but he also just wanted to be left alone, and how could he tell Ron and Hermione without explaining, and how he could he tell Snape or Draco without admitting they were right and he was wrong to keep his secrets? He was so tired of being wrong.
Grass hissed beneath his feet. He was beyond the school’s wards, he knew vaguely, and a sharp root that made him stumble told him he was in the Forbidden Forest. He kept running anyway. He wanted a private place, a place where no one could find him.
Then the grass did more than hiss at him. It gave way beneath him.
Harry dropped heavily into darkness that did not seem to end, but even there, the white Dementors followed him, and his arms ached and burned.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.