Chapter Fifteen of 'A Brother to Basilisks'- The Sullen Glow
Chapter Fourteen.
Title: A Brother to Basilisks (15/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Eventual Harry/Draco and Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Angst, violence, some gore, AU from Prisoner of Azkaban onwards
Rating: R
Summary: AU of PoA. Harry wakes in the night to a voice calling him from somewhere in the castle-and when he follows it, everything changes. Updated every Friday.
Author’s Notes: This is a canon-divergent AU that starts after Chapter 7 of Prisoner of Azkaban. It will probably run to at least the mid-point of The Half-Blood Prince. It will also be long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fifteen-The Sullen Glow
“What’s up with you, mate?” Ron demanded, out of the blue as far as Harry was concerned.
Harry blinked and looked at Ron. They were sitting at the Gryffindor table for breakfast, and so far, Ron had mostly been interested in filling his mouth with food. Harry shared that desire. He still hadn’t got used to being able to eat as much as he liked of eggs and buttered toast, which Dudley and Vernon usually consumed all of.
“What?” Harry asked, and tried Dash with an egg. As usual, Dash flicked out a tongue and touched the shell, then retreated at once.
I prefer raw eggs only. I like to kill my own prey.
You can’t kill an egg.
That only proves that you’ve never tried to smell the young chicken in the egg.
Harry cracked the boiled egg against the edge of his plate and ate it himself, shaking his head at Ron. “I still don’t know what you mean,” he added helpfully, when Ron went on staring at him.
Ron gave an explosive sigh. “You’ve acted as though someone took away your best friend for the past two days. And since I’m still sitting right here, that can’t be it.”
Harry managed a mechanical smile, but he knew Ron noticed the difference from the real thing, especially when Hermione leaned around Harry’s other side and chimed in. “Yes, and you didn’t seem to mind Potions so much, either, but now you’re back to scowling at Snape again. And he hasn’t gone back to his bad treatment of you. Honestly, Harry, there’s so much theory in Potions that can help you when you give it the chance…”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Harry muttered, and extended a spoonful of his porridge to Dash. Sometimes Dash would consent to eat food made from plants in a way that he wouldn’t food made from animals unless he managed to kill it himself.
This morning, Dash graciously sipped from his spoon, and then said, Your friends are right, you know. This anger that you have towards everything in general and Snape in particular is silly. You know full well that you only have to be angry at the old man, and perhaps the smelly dog-man.
Why can you call Snape by his name and not Sirius? Harry asked in irritation.
He smells better.
Ron interrupted again. “But I want you to talk about it, mate, since I never know whether you’re going to be surly or give me that fake smile that you try on me when you think no one can see through you.” He resisted the glare that Harry gave him, only smiling faintly as if he thought Harry’s anger was amusing. “Come on, then. If it doesn’t have to do with us, then you can tell us, right? And if it has to do with Snape, I want to hear.” He shoved himself close to Harry and cocked his head.
Harry shot a quick glance at the Head Table before he could help himself. Snape gave him a bland look and went back to eating. Harry tensed in spite of himself, but Snape appeared utterly content to ignore him and only pay attention to his breakfast.
Harry sighed and turned back. “Fine. I-I had a conversation with Snape that didn’t go well.”
You can talk about things that displease you after all, Dash said, and curled his tail around Harry’s ear like a seashell.
Harry swatted it off, and continued. “It was weird. He wanted to know-things about the Dursleys.” It couldn’t hurt to tell Ron and Hermione that much. By now, he trusted them enough to know they wouldn’t betray him to an adult. “And he gave me tea, and he acted nice. But then he said things that made me think this is just some contest he’s having with Dumbledore.” Harry scowled, feeling the ache begin deep down in his chest. It would have been nice to have Snape put him first, the way Sirius did, but be interested in things other than pranks and Quidditch and telling stories about Harry’s dad. But he was stupid to expect it.
“What things?” Hermione sounded like she was a hound getting ready to track down a runaway criminal.
Harry shook his head at her. “It’s hard to explain.” He had to pause as he realized that Sirius and Snape knew about him almost being Sorted into Slytherin, but he hadn’t mentioned it to his friends. “Listen. When I got here, you remember that the Sorting Hat took a long time trying to decide where I belonged?”
“I remember that!” said Ron. “Percy said it was strange. Thought you were a Gryffindor for sure.”
Harry hoped he didn’t look like he was grimacing too obviously. He felt like everyone knew his parents better than he did, and the role they’d expected him to fit. Maybe he would have fit it if he’d known anything before he came to Hogwarts.
I think that you fill your most important role neatly, said Dash, and draped his tail more heavily along the back of Harry’s neck when Harry grunted a question. Companion to a basilisk.
Harry managed a smile, and then said, “It’s because the Hat was trying to decide where I would go. It said that I could do well in Slytherin. I held onto the stool and thought Not Slytherin, not Slytherin at it because Malfoy was in there and I couldn’t stand the git, and then it said that I should be Gryffindor instead.”
Ron stared at him with his mouth open. Dash reached over and nudged Ron’s jaw with his head. Ron didn’t even seem to notice that it was the first time Dash had touched him; he shut his mouth, and went on peering intently at Harry.
“Blimey!” he finally whispered. “Why didn’t you tell us that before, mate?”
“Because I didn’t want it to be something that would get you upset,” Harry muttered, and turned to look at Hermione, who was as silent as though she had found an ancient book and hadn’t heard him at all.
Hermione had one hand held up to her mouth, though, and her eyes sparkled. “The Hat said the same thing to me,” she whispered.
“Am I the only one here who was supposed to be in Gryffindor?” Ron asked, sounding a little hurt.
“Oh, no,” said Hermione. “I mean, it told me that I could do well in Ravenclaw, not Slytherin. But it did tell me that.” She gave Harry a measuring look. “I thought Gryffindor was the best House, though, and I wanted to come here. Remember, I told you that on the train?”
Harry nodded, more relieved than he could say. At least he wasn’t alone, and this wasn’t about him really being “a snake at heart” or something. “That’s right. And you chose your House the way I chose mine.”
“Not even that,” Hermione said. She had paid rather more attention to the story than Harry had thought she had, and she leaned forwards, her eyes focused on him. “You didn’t say that you wanted to go to Gryffindor, right? You just told the Hat to put you in the best House, and after Slytherin it chose Gryffindor.”
Harry shrugged. “Right. I didn’t want to be where Malfoy was, but I didn’t know that much about the other Houses, so I couldn’t choose between them.”
“You could have been with me, mate,” Ron said indignantly.
“Oh, Ron, don’t be silly,” Hermione interrupted before Harry could say anything. “You hadn’t been Sorted when the Hat was having that discussion with Harry! How could he know where you were going to go? For all he knew, you’d be in Hufflepuff. And you should choose your House based on what you want, not what you think other people should want.”
“I told him I was sure to be in Gryffindor,” Ron muttered, a little sulky.
“It doesn’t matter that much,” said Harry. “But I think that Snape thinks it matters a lot. So he’s been trying to talk to me about it. But he’s mostly angry that Dumbledore never told him about it. I don’t want to be part of whatever revenge he wants on Dumbledore.” He ignored Dash’s low mutter that Snape might want other things more than he wanted revenge on Dumbledore. Maybe that was true, but Harry couldn’t trust Snape that far.
“That makes sense,” said Hermione. “Professor Snape is a great teacher-” she ignored Ron’s snort a lot better than she would have done last year “-but he does have a lot of complicated relationships with other adults. Sometimes I think his relationship with Professor Dumbledore is the most complicated of all.” She stared thoughtfully at the Head Table. “And did you notice the way he glares at Professor Lupin?”
“He probably just doesn’t like him because he’s a friend of Sirius’s,” said Harry, and then jumped when Dash poked him abruptly in the side with his tail. “What?” he added, staring at Dash.
While you sat here talking, the professors and other students began to leave, said Dash calmly. I think you must hurry if you do not want to be late.
Harry jumped to his feet, swearing. And it was Potions first thing this morning, too.
*
Blaise sighed and closed his eyes, rubbing his forehead. He wanted to know why it was up to him to solve these problems, he really did.
Of course, Draco was the source of the problems, and it was asking a little much for him to watch himself. Vince and Greg would only notice the problem if it involved food, and then they would just eat it. Theo never noticed anything he didn’t want to see.
As for the Slytherin girls, Blaise was a little wary of asking them for help. He liked to think he had a healthy respect for girls, having grown up with his mum the way she was, but that respect included a healthy amount of terror, too.
So that meant it was up to him to go up to Draco’s trunk when Draco was out somewhere in the dungeons, the way he often was these days, and break some of the ridiculously easy protection spells Draco had put on the trunk to defend it. Blaise didn’t reveal his talent a lot. Of course, lots of other people were talented in the Dark Arts or equally dangerous spells, and they tended to brag and swan around.
They might not like it if they knew that someone was in the House who could find his way past the heaviest protections due to intensive tutoring, though.
One ear cocked in case Draco came back, Blaise knelt next to the trunk and threw back the lid. A second later, he swore softly to himself. Right on top of everything else was a heavy book that looked as if it had come from a library. Well, the library. The Library of Hogwarts. And it had an S on the front that Blaise recognized, from the time his mother’s seventh husband had stolen an artifact he claimed belonged to Salazar Slytherin.
Isn’t this just wonderful, Blaise thought. He wasn’t entirely sure what Draco was doing, although he thought he could guess, but messing around with the Dark magic that protected Slytherin’s own possessions was asking for trouble.
He cast a few spells to make sure Draco hadn’t put individual protective enchantments on the book, and then nudged it. It fell open right away to a page that was marked with a streak of soot. Blaise nodded grimly. It was a Divination spell that was supposed to let someone find something of Slytherin’s.
And Blaise could think of only one thing in the school that Draco would want to find that badly.
Footsteps were coming up the stairs. Blaise flipped the trunk lid shut again and recast the spells with a negligent flick of his wand, then moved over to his bed.
He had just flopped down and picked up a book when Draco ducked into the room. He looked suspiciously around, but that was nothing new; he always looked suspiciously around. Blaise met his look, because it would have been more suspicious not to, and then shrugged and turned back to his book.
But he was watching out of the corner of his eye as Draco sat down on his bed and took out a long scroll of parchment. Unlike the essays they wrote, this one was strung on a wooden spindle of the kind that someone would use to roll up a book in an older library. Once again, Blaise was grateful for his mother’s training; he wouldn’t have known what it was if she hadn’t insisted on teaching him so much history and even showing him images of things like the old books.
And now that Draco was holding paper and Blaise was holding paper…
Blaise found a blank section of the margin in his book and traced his wand over it as if he was practicing the gestures of a spell, moving his lips only in the spell. As his mother had taught him, nonverbal magic might take a long time to master, but there was no reason that you had to shout when you cast aloud.
The words on Draco’s scroll began to appear in the margin of Blaise’s book. The limited space meant they quickly appeared, rose up the page, and disappeared for more to appear beneath them, but Blaise could still read several.
…so that the mighty gift of Parseltongue should not die out, Salazar Slytherin arranged a ritual by which one could gain knowledge of it. This ritual involves the bite of an asp at the full moon. When the one who would be master of snakes goes to the dark place on the night of the full moon and bears the asp to his breast…
“Something interesting, Blaise?”
Blaise decided he must have gasped aloud or something else to show that he wasn’t as involved in the book as he pretended. Or that he was involved in a way unusual for a textbook. He smiled slightly and glanced up at Draco, shaking his head. He mourned the words he would let get away, but at least he could throw off suspicion.
“Just learning the number of people who think that Herbology has a use in the world,” he said. “Instead of providing an occupation for Hufflepuffs.”
Not too long ago, Draco would have relaxed and agreed with him, or at least made teasing remarks about Blaise being surprised about anything when it came to Hufflepuffs. Now, he only stared with hard eyes for a few seconds before he turned back to his scroll.
Blaise looked down and read along again in the margin of his book. It was now onto what seemed to be the consequences of the ritual performed on the night of the full moon, which included such ominous phrases as when the one who has lain as dead.
He had established that Draco was mental. Anyone who ran around planning to let poisonous snakes bite him on the full moon was. Now, of course, the only task that remained was what to do about it.
*
“I really got it because of you, you know,” said Sirius, throwing open a door and coughing a little. Harry had noticed that his confident manner had faded more and more the closer they got to the house, and now he was watching Harry constantly as if he thought that Harry would wildly reject everything Sirius might try to give him. “I mean, I could have gone on living in those rooms at Hogwarts just fine. Happiest time of my life, Hogwarts. But I thought you’d like to have a home of your own.”
Harry walked into the house trying not to show how much those words meant to him. Of course, Dash touched his tongue to Harry’s ear and murmured, You should tell him.
You don’t have much say in that, do you? Since you dislike Sirius anyway, Harry retorted, and looked around the little entrance hall he’d stepped into.
It was a house on the outskirts of Hogsmeade, such a nice one that Harry had fleetingly wondered how much it had cost Sirius to buy it. But there were no mad thoughts about paying Sirius back. Harry didn’t have that much, and, well-
It was nice to know that someone had wanted to do something just for him. And Harry didn’t really want to pay them back or return the favor, even though that made him selfish.
It makes you practical, Dash told him, and then dropped down from Harry’s shoulder and began to slither through the house, pausing now and then to stick his tongue out and brush it against the walls, the banisters, the chairs, the tapestries that hung on the walls and were even more wonderful than the ones at Hogwarts.
Harry felt Sirius’s hand on his shoulder, and turned around to find Sirius nervously beaming at him. “I don’t know what sort of thing you like,” he explained. “I mean, I put some Quidditch posters in your room, but that’s just common sense, really. I don’t know what else…” He waved his hand at the house.
“It’s great,” Harry assured him, and Sirius broke into a smile.
“Let’s take the tour, then,” he said, and hauled Harry out of the entrance hall, which was patterned in dark wood and had a few tapestries of stags running through green forests, into the drawing room beyond.
It sprawled, and Harry thought it was probably the biggest room in the house. There was paneling on the walls here, too, and stone, but Sirius had already painted or enchanted them or something, so they were pale and the room felt light and airy. Harry noticed that the only windows were enchanted ones, both showing an ocean view, and Sirius waved a hand. “Just taking some precautions.”
Harry nodded, unconcerned. All the precautions Sirius had to take couldn’t possibly be as onerous to live with as the conditions to set up the blood wards at the Dursleys’ had been.
He wandered out of the drawing room, which had almost no furniture except for some empty bookshelves and an enormous blue couch, into the dining room that lay right next to it, with a shimmering curtain of cloth the only door in between them. There was a table in the middle of the room, and Harry’s eyes widened. “Brilliant,” he said.
The table was one like you might see in a pub, Harry thought, like the Leaky Cauldron, made of dark wood, with some scars on top of it. Sirius grinned and pointed to a mark with long lines like a star right in the center of the top. “See that? That’s where a fireball that an Auror hurled at a fleeing criminal landed, they told me. Right there. It would have burned through the whole table, except this is pretty tough wood. Black oak.”
“Brilliant,” Harry said again. He knew he was repeating himself, but he couldn’t come up with another word, and Sirius laughed.
“Then there’s the kitchen, where a few elves from Hogwarts will work for us,” Sirius said, and nodded through a pair of swinging doors. Harry didn’t really feel any desire to explore the kitchen; he knew he wouldn’t be expected to cook there, and that was enough for him. “And a room I have outfitted as a potions lab.”
“You do?” Harry glanced sideways at Sirius.
Sirius snorted. “Hey, just because Sniv-Snape ruined it for you doesn’t mean we all had it ruined for us! I was lucky enough to have a professor who was easy.” He winked at Harry. “And this way, I can make my own potions that are useful in pranks.”
Harry didn’t feel like saying anything about Snape and his complicated relationship with the man at the moment, so he turned and ran back into the drawing room. There was a set of stairs there, running between banisters that had carved dragon heads on them. Harry stopped to study one of the dragon heads, and jumped back when it opened its mouth and breathed out a puff of smoke at him.
“One of the few enchantments I remember liking at home, when I was a kid,” Sirius said. “I thought I’d duplicate it here.”
“It makes me feel like I’m living in a real wizarding house,” Harry breathed out, and then flushed a little, wondering if he would sound stupid.
But Sirius only grabbed him and ruffled his hair. “The way you should have been all along. Do you want to see your room?”
“Yes,” Harry said, and left Sirius laughing behind him as he ran up the stairs.
There were only four doors at the top of the stairs, and one was made of glass panes, so Harry could see it was a bathroom, and one had a heavy lock on the door, and one was ajar and had Sirius’s Room floating above it in yellow letters on a magical banner that made it seem as if they were pinned to the door. So Harry turned to the one room that was left, and flung open the door.
He stopped, paralyzed. Even though he hadn’t known before this exactly what he would put into a room of his own, he felt as though Sirius had reached into his head, and scooped out the answer, and put it down. Harry wandered further into the room, in a daze.
The glittering, turning images above him were constellations, the ones that Harry saw every time he went up on the Astronomy Tower and looked through a telescope for class. But there were lines drawn among the stars so that they made up a dog and a stag, and they ran and curved through the ceiling, endlessly chasing each other. Harry did see the Quidditch posters on the wall with moving figures, but for now, he found it hard to look away from those constellations.
When he managed, he saw the four-poster bed with red and gold sheets, a quilt that had a flying phoenix embroidered on it, heavy curtains, and a table right beside the bed that had three Galleons on it. Harry wandered over and picked up the Galleons, blinking. Three more images of them immediately appeared where they’d been, and Harry reached curiously for them, but his hand went through them.
“Money-controlling spell,” Sirius explained from behind him. “You have to spend those before you get more, and you only ever get three at a time.”
Harry shook a little. He had thought-he had thought that Sirius would house him and feed him, and all right, maybe buy him clothes, but he hadn’t known, he didn’t ¬think-
He spun around and hugged Sirius around the waist. Sirius blinked, Harry saw that, in the moment before he closed his eyes. Then Sirius gently touched his hair.
“Hey,” Sirius said. “It’s okay.”
“It is now,” Harry said.
Yes, said Dash, and crawled up his leg and wrapped himself around Harry’s waist like a knotted cloth. It’s okay now.
Chapter Sixteen.
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