Chapter Five of 'Light of the Life That Is'- Gentle Light
Chapter Four.
Title: Light of the Life That Is (5/8)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco (mostly preslash at first), Ron/Hermione, Blaise/Pansy
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, AU, brief violence, age difference (Harry is 18 and Draco is 24)
Summary: Harry Potter’s shade marched through the Forbidden Forest for six years after the Battle of Hogwarts-until Draco stopped it, and brought Harry back to life. The great question both of them face is: What now? Sequel to ‘Shadows of a Future Passed.’
Author’s Notes: This is a fic for
animegirl0087, who generously donated to help victims of the typhoon in the Philippines, and asked for a sequel to ‘Shadows of a Future Passed,’ a one-shot I posted two years ago. This story picks up immediately after that, and won’t make much sense without having read that fic. “Light of the Life That Is” should be six to eight chapters, posted irregularly.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Five--Gentle Light
"But, Mr. Potter," said McGonagall, and really she did sound reasonable, and if it hadn't been Harry under discussion, then Draco would be inclined to agree with her. "You must realize that you cannot simply tell me that you don't wish to be a regular student here, and then discuss your standing as a student here. That is not the way it works."
Harry leaned back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. Draco was distinctly impressed with him so far. He hadn't raised his voice, hadn't whined, hadn't indulged in any of the objectionable behaviors that McGonagall so obviously expected from a teenager and thought would happen with him, too. "Really? Then you admit that I'm a regular student, the same as anyone else?"
McGonagall hesitated. Caught in her own trap, Draco thought, not without sympathy. They'd been talking about extra security measures to keep reporters and so on from spying on Harry, and Draco had agreed that those were a good idea.
But McGonagall couldn't act at one and the same time as if security measures would be necessary, and then that Harry's course of study would be the same as any other student's.
"It sounds as though you're trying to resist discipline and detentions, or argue that you shouldn't be subjected to them," McGonagall chose to say at last. "And really, I cannot allow that to stand, not when you might still break the rules."
Harry sighed a little. "You're treating me as though I was an ordinary student, with parents or guardians, who insists on breaking rules for no reason. I'm an adult, Headmistress. In terms of the wizarding world, and in terms of the amount of time I spent defending that world."
McGonagall sat back a little in her chair, her eyebrows rising. "So now we come to the real reason," she said, and she sounded almost amused. "You see yourself as an adult and not a teenager."
"You're making a mistake if you don't see him that way," Draco warned her quietly, and not just because he could see Harry opening his mouth to make the same argument. He didn't want this to devolve into a shouting match, and it might if Harry said it. Draco respected his maturity, but not always his skill at phrasing things.
McGonagall studied him with squinted eyes, then turned back to Harry. "You see yourself as an adult, Mr. Potter?"
"I do," said Harry. "If you want to have me in your school, it has to be on my own terms. I can't and I won't put up with rules that are designed to protect children from the consequences of the real world. I've been in that real world long enough now that I can't give up living as part of it. And if that's not possible at Hogwarts, then I'll go off and have private tutors, and only visit here when I want to see Draco." He glanced up at the portrait frames behind McGonagall's desk. "Or other people, perhaps."
"I do want you to stay at Hogwarts," McGongall said quietly, sounding a little hurt. Draco thought she probably wanted to spare Harry from some of the nastier parts of living outside the school's protective wards, not just keep a celebrity for her own, and he could applaud her for that. "But I can't make an exception of the kind you're talking about."
Harry studied her, then dipped his head. "Then private tutors of the kind I was talking about, until I get my NEWTs." He turned to Draco. "Can I hope that I can live with you, and you'll tutor me in Potions?"
"Wait a moment," McGonagall began, sounding startled.
“You’re welcome to live with me,” said Draco. “But still, I think that you might be discarding the option of Hogwarts too quickly.”
“I won’t act as though I’m the same as everyone else,” said Harry, and carried on looking at Draco. “I’m not. People have been telling me that since I was eleven years old. I finally believe them. I’m not, and I won’t act as though I am.”
“There are people who would question the kind of favoritism that you want me to use,” said McGonagall, her hand on a piece of parchment on her desk. Draco wondered idly if was a petition for Harry to stay here or something. “The Board of Governors, for example.”
Harry snorted. “So they don’t believe that I’m Harry Potter, or they don’t believe that I saved the world? Or both.”
“Your return is making enormous shock waves in the wizarding world. I believe it would be proper to give people time to adjust to that, emotionally, and one way they can is if they see you behaving as someone ordinary.”
Harry sighed at the ceiling and turned around to look at Draco. “Would you have time to tutor me in Potions yourself, or would you recommend someone else?”
“Someone else, probably,” Draco said, keeping his eyes averted from McGonagall’s face so he wouldn’t start grinning. “My heavy class and marking load would keep me from paying as much attention to your education as I’d want to. One of my previous Potions masters takes students he likes or who impresses him, not just those who are good at Potions. I’ll write to him and see what he says.”
“Mister Malfoy.”
“Professor Malfoy, I thought,” said Draco, facing her. “Unless you intend to sack me for supporting Harry.”
McGonagall blinked, then sagged back in her chair. “I was only trying to make points that I thought made sense,” she said.
Harry smiled at her. “And so someone wouldn’t accuse you of unfairness or bias. That’s a good reason. But the wizarding world is never going to think I’m ordinary, Headmistress. I could be back for a hundred years and they wouldn’t think that. Working with that view is the best course open to me, instead of trying to pretend that what happened didn’t happen.”
McGonagall looked at Draco. Draco nodded. He was no better a responsible adult than Harry was, but if McGonagall wanted to know whether Draco really supported Harry in his plans, Draco could give her his reassurance that he did.
“Very well, then,” said McGonagall. “I will allow you to attend classes and turn in essays and sit exams-as long as you can demonstrate the knowledge to be allowed in NEWT classes.”
Harry’s smile seemed to come from inside the same soft light that Draco had first seen his shade in. “Thank you.”
“What will you do about subjects like Potions where you do not have the NEWT knowledge?” McGonagall persisted.
“See first if I do,” said Harry, and glanced at Draco. “I think that the current professor will let me sit a preparatory OWL exam and determine whether I should be accepted into the class from there. If not, I’ll find a tutor.”
“I fear it will be lonely here without any students you knew, except perhaps some as first years.”
Harry shrugged. “I can see my friends regularly, and I can visit with Draco. And I’d like to stay in the Room of Requirement, too, if you don’t mind, Headmistress. It would probably disrupt a lot of things if I was to go into Gryffindor Tower now, with a group of boys who knew each other from the time they were first-years.”
Draco expected McGonagall to object to that most of all, but perhaps because Harry had won his first battle, she nodded and leaned back in her chair. “You’re probably right. I hope that the classes will go well. I don’t want students staring at you in the middle of them and concentrating on you instead of their classwork.”
“I can always go and find private tutors if you think that’s going to be a problem.”
McGonagall shot Harry a look that made Draco relax. She wanted Harry as a student in her school more than she wanted to avoid criticism. Everything would be all right as long as that was true. “You need not. I will make an announcement to the students tomorrow, and explain what kind of behavior I expect from them.”
“And professors can reinforce you,” Draco added mildly. “I suspect that Flitwick and the others who are still here from the time Harry was a student will be glad to have him back and want to protect him from the staring.”
“And the others I’ve hired are no-nonsense. Like you, Professor Malfoy.” McGonagall looked at him over her glasses. Draco smiled back. “Good. Then it’s settled. I expect to see you in the Great Hall bright and early for breakfast, Mr. Potter.”
As they left the Headmistress’s office, Draco thought of something they hadn’t addressed. “What House table are you going to eat at?” he asked Harry.
“I was thinking of alternating,” said Harry. “I don’t really feel much like a Gryffindor anymore. If I sit with everyone in turn, then they’ll all get used to me, and they probably won’t be afraid of me. It’s hard to be afraid of someone when you’ve seen him with crumbs all over his face.”
“Clearly we should have arranged an incident like that with the Dark Lord.”
Draco realized a moment after he made the joke that he perhaps shouldn’t have , but Harry gave him that spring-like smile again. “You’re the only one who would dare laugh about it with me. Thank you.”
Draco relished the jolt of warmth that came to life in his chest, and flooded his veins with summer wine. He wasn’t sure what to do about it, but perhaps he didn’t need to do anything. Perhaps he could enjoy it.
*
Harry scowled at the exam in front of him. How should he remember what ingredients the Draught of Peace had? It wasn’t like he’d exactly had the chance to brew it much in the past few years!
But then he sighed. This was the challenge that he had wanted Draco to set for him. And Draco had adapted an OWL exam, not made him sit a NEWT one. Besides, Draco was on the other side of the office, frowning at the essays he was marking, but lifting his head every time Harry so much as shifted in his seat. Harry knew he wasn’t being unfair.
“Is something wrong?” Draco asked now. It was probably the sigh.
“I’m just not used to this anymore,” Harry told him, and then plunged back into the list of ingredients before Draco could question him further. He wasn’t used to it, but he would get used to it. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his mental life marching in circles around the place in the mental King’s Cross where the shard of Voldemort’s soul lay, either. He would get his NEWTs.
Including his Potions NEWT. Harry had sat in one of Draco’s classes now, and while he wouldn’t say that Draco was an easy teacher, he was miles better than Snape. He didn’t try to sabotage people, he didn’t insult them; he only quietly shook his head or offered advice in a voice that was almost neutral.
It made his students want to please him, Harry had noticed. And Harry wanted to please him as well, although for different reasons.
With some concentration, he managed to wrestle the ingredients of the Draught of Peace from his reluctant brain, and then went on to the next question, about what would happen if one combined fluxweed with foxglove. By the time he answered that one, Draco was setting up the cauldron for the practical part of the exam.
Harry wrote in the response to the final question-he was almost sure it was right-and then stood up and walked over to the cauldron. He took a second to just smooth his palm down the side, luxuriating in the feel of the metal. It was cold and heavy and real in a way that nothing in the white-shrouded world of his soul had been.
Draco allowed him to do it, watching with a half-smile that Harry knew concealed perfect understanding, even if it didn’t look like it, before he picked up a wire brush. “You’re going to brew a Blood-Giving Draught,” he said.
It was the harder and longer-lasting version of a Blood-Replenishing potion. And at the moment, Harry’s mind felt absolutely blank when he tried to concentrate on it.
“You may begin any time,” said Draco, and stepped away from the table of ingredients, going back to his desk.
Harry sighed and faced the ingredients. He knew that everything he needed was here, if he could just figure out what that was and what order he needed to use them in. He picked up a vial of opal dust and laid it down near the cauldron. He vaguely remembered that that needed to go first.
But did he combine it with liquid ingredients or sift it in as the base? He had to clutch at the edges of the table to calm himself down.
Draco didn’t look up from making his essays. Harry glared at him wildly for a moment. Even the lines of his hair looked calm, not to mention the lines of his shoulders.
There had to be a way to get past this. Draco wouldn’t issue him an impossible challenge. And it would be unfair if he did, since the other students would have had to brew easier potions to get their NEWT class.
So there was a way he could figure this out. Harry began to move around the table, studying the maple leaves there, and the foxglove, and the spray of flowers that he didn’t recognize, and the diamond, and the special enchanted mortar and pestle that he reckoned was to grind the diamond down-if he needed it-and the piece of what looked like bone. When he picked it up and felt it, it was bone. He’d felt it enough times in other Potions classes to know.
He laid it gently down and picked up the mortar and pestle. He could remember something of making a Blood-Replenishing Potion, and he knew that the Draught was similar to that. And the challenge wasn’t impossible. He kept telling himself that, and some of his panic receded.
Harry ground the leaves first, into pulp and paste. Then he paused, and filled the cauldron with water, the way he would if he was preparing a Blood-Replenishing Potion.
Draco never looked up while he was doing that. Nonetheless, Harry was sure he would spring to his feet and move in an instant if either Harry or the lab was in danger.
Harry’s shoulders dropped and his spine seemed to uncoil as he realized that. That actually really reassured him. Especially since he wouldn’t have trusted Snape to do anything but react too late in such a situation. For all that Snape said he was concerned about explosions in the classroom and preventing them, they happened on a regular basis. But Draco hadn’t had one yet, from what he said.
And from what the other students said.
Harry concentrated on combining the leaf pulp with the opal dust. In the end, he glanced at the diamond and decided to leave it out. He knew it was used to give potions transparency, and long-lasting effect. But the Blood-Giving Draught had to be used almost as soon as it was made. The diamond was probably a distraction, unlikely to be used in it.
The flowers, he shredded and laid aside. He might have to use them, but he was going to try and figure out what they were first.
The foxglove was poisonous. Was he sure he was supposed to use it? Harry sniffed at it gingerly, and then nodded. Yes, he remembered the same smell from an ingredient in the Blood-Replenishing Potion. He just hadn’t been sure that ingredient was foxglove until now.
Then he paused. He hadn’t thought that he had that good a nose, let alone that good a memory for smells.
It was ridiculous, but he shook his head, refusing to turn back and question his instincts now. They had brought him this far. They could bring him more luck, and let him actually brew the potion.
He pulped the foxglove, too, and combined that with the water. Then he gave it lots of stirs. He couldn’t remember the exact number for the Blood-Giving Draught, so he did the number he would have for a Blood-Replenishing Potion. The liquid inside the cauldron was purple, which Harry thought it was supposed to be.
Thought. But he was trying mostly not to do too badly, because he knew he couldn’t do everything perfectly.
He glanced at the blue flowers. So far, everything he had done was an almost perfect replication of the Blood-Replenishing Potion. But one thing he did remember well was that the Blood-Giving Draught was more potent. The flowers were the only thing-excepting the diamond, which he really didn’t trust-that might make that difference in potency.
So he reached for them and picked up the largest leaf, and tossed it into the cauldron.
There was an immediate reaction, a hissing and a bubbling as though the potion was trying to climb the sides of the cauldron. Harry flinched, but noticed that Draco was sitting behind his desk and frowning down at a piece of parchment as though nothing was wrong.
So nothing must be severely wrong, or Draco would already be between Harry and the cauldron, wand in place to defend him. Harry knew that like he knew he had been wrong to stay in the in-between world guarding the last part of the Horcrux.
He relaxed with a long unwinding of his limbs again, and checked the potion. It had stayed in the cauldron, and now it was bright blue, or maybe indigo. Anyway, the color had drifted away from purple.
And that triggered a memory of a picture in one of his textbooks. That was what the Blood-Giving Draught looked like.
Harry snorted a little to himself and reached for the rest of the flowers. He doubted this potion would go perfectly, but he would give it his best effort.
For Draco, even more than for himself. He didn’t want anyone saying that Draco had let an inferior student into his classroom because of life-debts or because he had tried to bring that student back from the dead or for any other reason.
*
Draco knew that something had gone right when he saw Harry reach for the irises and start shredding them more finely, using the knife off to the right when he couldn’t get them fine enough for his own instincts.
He had still made a few mistakes; it had taken all Draco’s strength to keep himself clamped to the chair, rather than shooting up to defend Harry, when he had flinched back from the potion. But he had done a lot right, and had ignored the diamond. He could have crushed it with that pestle and mortar, but it would have been exactly the wrong addition to the potion. Either memory or instincts or something else had saved him.
Or just intelligence.
Draco gave the sort of hidden smile that he’d become expert in over the years, when showing too much happiness could be as dangerous as showing none, and bent over his parchment again. Snape would have laughed that particular estimate to scorn. But Snape wasn’t here, and Draco was, and he could observe.
It wasn’t just that he admired Harry and wanted him to have what he wanted. He really did think that Harry was a good deal smarter than Draco had ever given him credit for when they were both students.
And it was time to let that shine.
Harry spent a lot of time with the irises, experimenting with whole petals and shredded ones and crushed ones, until he went with his first instinct and used the shredded ones. By then, he was almost wholly brewing the potion, with both hands and with his mind, continually checking on the progress of the potion in the cauldron even as he prepared further ingredients to go in.
Draco paused. For some reason, Harry reminded him of himself and other Potions mastery students he had seen in his studies, more than he did of the students at Hogwarts. Of course, part of that was relative age-he did think Harry was an adult, no matter what anyone else said-but it was something else as well. It wasn’t like Harry had acquired Potions skills when he guarded the Horcrux.
Maybe it was the quality of focus. Draco knew most of his students were distracted, even during exams, with worries about friends and family, other classes and Quidditch, the people they were dating and House points. A lot of them found that impossible to put aside for an hour or more. One of the few things he had admired about Granger when he was more short-sighted was her ability to do that, and show what really mattered, what was in front of her. You had to do that in Potions, or you would never get anywhere.
Harry wasn’t an expert, but he already had a skill that was extremely hard to learn. That made Draco want to smile and celebrate.
And that made him wonder why Harry’s success was so important to him. It wasn’t just the chance to have him in class.
Draco flexed one hand, which had cramped around the quill, carefully, so that his motion wouldn’t distract Harry. If anything could distract Harry right now; he was incredibly fixated on the cauldron in front of him, checking the ingredients and maybe the color against some invisible chart in his head.
Well, he knew the answer to why Harry’s success was important to him. It was impossible to think that he could have heard Harry’s declaration that Draco was his constant without being affected by it.
That just made him wonder what he wanted to do about it. Teaching Harry would be a first step. Perhaps he should follow the advice he had just mentally given Harry, and focus on what was in front of him, instead of attempting to see beyond it.
Harry abruptly gave a little huff, a sound that made it seem as if he was trying to expel poisonous fumes from his lungs. Draco stood up in spite of himself, but Harry turning towards him with a smile that made him relax.
“I think I did it,” Harry said. He didn’t tilt the cauldron; perhaps he knew that would disrupt the potion’s still fragile consistency. He stepped back instead, and let Draco come over and examine the color and viscosity in situ.
It wasn’t a perfect Blood-Giving Draught; Draco would have wanted to give it a few more stirs and add some more iris petals for greater strength, and he would have hesitated to give it to a child, since they often needed the potions brewed by an expert. But it was pretty bloody nice, given that Harry had initially looked as if he had no more idea how to brew the potion than how to fly without a broom.
“Very good,” said Draco.
“I know it is.”
Draco looked up, about to tease Harry about his lack of modesty, but Harry’s eyes were fixed intently on his face. “Your smile told me so,” he said.
Draco hadn’t been aware he was smiling. He hadn’t been aware that he was so caught up in the drama that was Harry’s silent exam until he felt the tension leave his shoulders. He hadn’t been aware that he was reaching out a hand to Harry until Harry caught it.
Harry squeezed it once, and let it go. Draco felt the burning imprint of his fingers for a long time afterwards.
The only consolation-or reward, perhaps he should think of it that way-was that Harry’s hands shook a little as he took the cauldron away to dump it, and he kept glancing back, as if he wanted to make sure that Draco really was right behind him and not about to vanish out the door now that the exam was done.
Focus on the thing in front of you, Draco told himself sternly, when he might have opened his mouth and said something stupid.
And right now, there were the essays to mark.
Draco went back to his essays and worked, hearing the companionable sounds of Harry working across from him.
Chapter Six.
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