26: Blood of the Covenant

Neville 

Once, when he was a child, Neville had sneaked into his parents’ room—left packed away by his grandmother, everything neatly put into cupboards or drawers where it belonged, not a speck of dust, somewhere between a storage room and a shrine. The elves cleaned it; no one else went inside, but the door wasn’t locked, and when Neville pushed it open, the airy space felt far too large, too exposed, with the bed-curtains taken down and the mattress stripped bare, portraits gone from the walls, personal clutter swept off any flat surface out of sight. It echoed hollowly with his steps and with the creak of the wardrobe when Neville pulled it open. 

That morning, Neville had smelled Grandmother’s perfume and been struck by a sudden wave of anxiety, as if she had been about to walk through the door, only to realize it was just the lilies an elf had left in a flower arrangement outside the informal sitting room and Grandmother wasn’t home early after all. And then he had thought—he had just wanted to know…  

But when he reached into the wardrobe to the fabric hanging there, robes and dresses in adult sizes, perfectly maintained, there wasn’t a trace of any human smell to be found. Just the faintly musty scent of charms to keep moths out of your woolens and the stale undertone of air left undisturbed too long. Nothing left of the people who’d once worn them. 

Why he did it, Neville still didn’t know, but he’d gotten one of Dad’s robes down and tried it on and stood in front of the room’s tall mirror and tried to imagine being grown enough to fit these wide shoulders, the full length of fabric that puddled on the floor around his ankles. 

Then of course he’d looked at the time and realized Grandmother wasn’t home yet but would be soon and Neville hadn’t done his lessons, so he yanked the robe off and stuffed it back in the wardrobe on account of he was too short to climb up to the hanging rack at the top, and twitched guiltily at every strange noise for days until he could be pretty sure the elves weren’t about to tell on him. 

Neville had never gone back into that echoing too-empty room. 

He was reminded of it now, in feeling if not appearance, walking into the Chamber and seeing none of the mishmash of furniture the Vipers had slowly brought in over time, no trace of occupation. Sounds bounced wetly off the curved tile walls. The space was big, and empty, and waiting for presence to fill it—a presence large enough to fill it. The Vipers had never quite managed, though collectively they took up enough space to pretend. 

At least, he thought wryly, his robes fit him right.

“Harry,” he called, and winced at the unexpected way the pools of water caught his voice and threw it back to him. That hadn’t happened in ages, what with furniture in the way and other people’s ambient noise to soften everything. “Are you…” 

“Here.” His friend’s voice came out of the statue’s mouth, and a moment later Harry himself followed it, hopping down with a twist of magic to slow his descent as natural as breathing. 

It was child’s play by now to shove away the impulse towards jealousy at Harry’s ease with his own magic. “You wanted to talk..?” 

“Just… don’t want to forget anything.” 

A shifty cast to Harry’s eyes suggested this was maybe not the full truth, but Neville could roll with it for now. “I can’t think of anything else. Are you sure…” 

“It’s a useful stronghold, but Voldemort…” Harry shrugged. “Its magic bends to me as the Heir, and I think it prefers whoever’s in Hogwarts—this place is for Hogwarts, not for Slytherins, when you get down to it—but I can’t be sure there’s no other way for the head of the family to get down here.” 

And they did not want Voldemort able to get at them in person instead of just through the minds of a few of their friends. Just, Neville caught himself thinking, and winced, remembering the drawn-tight angles of Theo’s face and the way he wouldn’t linger in any room that had Harry in it outside of classes and meals. That wasn’t just anything. 

“The twins sent Hermione their notes on experimental expansion charms,” said Neville instead of any of that. “Maybe she can persuade the Knights’ Room to get bigger. Or we can find somewhere else…” 

Harry made a vaguely assenting noise and started walking towards the exit. 

Neville fell in with him and let the silence stretch. It was only when they had cleared the Chamber proper and gotten into the passages that wound through the school that he decided to push. “I get the sense you wanted to talk to me about more than just clearing out the Chamber.” 

“Oh… yes,” Harry said, like his attention was coming back from very far away. “Yeah, I—how are your parents doing?” 

Whatever Neville had been expecting, that question most emphatically wasn’t it. “Er… alright, they’re… healing pretty well, or as well as can be expected. Responding to treatment, anyway.” 

Frank Longbottom was much smaller now than he had been in his prime. It unsettled Neville to sit next to Father and feel how very frail he was. 

Neville might have gotten Mother and Father back, but he still did not have parents. 

Harry stopped so abruptly Neville went on past him a few steps and then had to double back. By the time he returned, mystified, to Harry’s side, his friend had thrown up two wards and was halfway through a very long enchantment for a third, tracing runes in the air with his wand and concentrating fiercely. 

Magic ghosted over Neville’s senses and a shiver went down his spine. This was… this was powerful. Harry was not fucking around. 

“Are you about to pass on state secrets?” he said when Harry had finished. 

“Ah… well.” Harry grimaced. “This does not go past the two of us, okay?” 

“Okay.” 

“I mean it, Nev. None of the Vipers.” 

“I promise.” 

Harry looked him straight in the eye. “Sirius is alive.” 

What in the name of— “Fucking Merlin, Harry, how—but you said—” 

“I didn’t, actually,” said Harry grimly, and Neville’s mind spun to a halt. 

No, he realize. No, Harry had never said it out loud. Harry had announced a funeral, and shown up bearing the ring and title of Lord Black, and put a body on the pyre—

“The body. How…” 

“If someone dies under polyjuice, they don’t turn back.” 

Neville’s blood ran cold. “Harry… who…” 

“A Muggle. He was dying already,” Harry said, anticipating the next question, and Neville grimaced, because that was still fucked up but less so than if Harry went and murdered someone for his decoy corpse. “Went to a hospice care place. Found a bloke about to pass on. I did bring our healer,” once again Harry knew what Neville was about to ask, “but he said there was nothing to be done, so we gave him the potion and waited. Swapped his body out for a transfigured replica good enough to fool Muggles.” 

That wouldn’t have fooled any magical autopsy, Neville knew, and transfiguration on that scale was tricky, especially the bit where you had to get your fake body to look exactly like a specific person. Several of the funeral attendees had known Sirius well. Any discrepancy—even a hint of one—

But a polyjuiced person was for all intents and purposes the exact same as the person they’d copied, and a polyjuiced corpse was just stuck like that, magically inert. Neville figured there must be ways to identify that but who would think to check? Especially when he was sure Harry had funded the autopsy. “So… you did a ritual? To claim the title, I mean.” 

“It wasn’t hard. The family magic practically jumped onto me.” Harry rolled his shoulders, and yeah, that did explain a little of the way he had carried himself since the holiday, not weighed down exactly but like he was conscious of some new pressure. “He was really badly off. Only woke up a few days ago—we weren’t sure he was going to pull through. There’s only three of us that know, Nev. You, me, and our Healer, who’s bound by oath and contract to silence.” 

Neville’s attention finally slipped out of that initial shock and landed firmly on the magnitude of trust Harry had just shown him. “I promise, I won’t breathe a word of it, Harry. Not to anyone.” 

“Well… your parents might need to be told, and your gran.” The shifty look had come back to Harry’s eyes now. “He can’t defend himself. He’s—he’s vulnerable, and anyone who knows even a bit about me knows all they need to do is get their hands on Sirius, and then—”

Then Harry would belong to them. 

Neville thought of Theo, looking both hunter and hunted and getting more so every day, of Draco’s shadowed eyes and tendency to fall asleep in class, of Pansy wiping tears from her eyes and blood traitor off her schoolbag, Hermione sitting by a window so lost in occlumency that when you went over to her it was like being looked at by a clever bit of clockwork instead of a person. Yeah. He didn’t have to reach far to think of someone who’d want Sirius for that purpose. 

“And he can’t recover here,” Harry went on. “The stress is… bad for him, apparently. But I’m being watched. Everything’s being watched. Leaving the country especially. Long-distance Floo’s not secure, neither is apparating—”

“They’re that embedded in Magical Transportation?” 

“I’ve been reliably informed such is the case,” said Harry evasively, which was code for Barty told me. “Or at least it was implied, and I don’t want to take that risk. I can’t.” 

“Right, yeah, of course. So…” 

“So, Nev,” said Harry, “how would you feel about moving your parents to an exclusive private healing clinic in the Swiss Alps for their convalescence?” 

Neville saw what he was thinking then, and grinned despite himself. “Smuggle Sirius out with them? That’s brilliant. No one would think twice about them going away.” 

Not to mention it would get his still-weak parents out of harm’s way themselves. Neville and Gran had talked about it, once or twice, but they hadn’t been strong enough to move at any rate, so any such plans had been postponed. Now… 

“It’ll be a few weeks before we can move him. We have time to plan it.” Harry put a hand on Neville’s shoulder. “I… I know this is a risk for you to take. I need your help, Neville.” 

“Yes. I—yeah, Harry, you don’t even need to ask. Of course I’ll help.” 

They stared at each other in the cool dark passageway. Neville felt oddly as though he were standing outside of himself. As though those words meant a lot more than his simple clumsy phrasing ever should have.

“Also,” said Neville, “I have to ask, did it hurt you to say that out loud?” 

The tension broke and Harry laughed, short and sharp. His hand fell away. “You know me too well.”

“I think I know you just the right amount, actually,” said Neville, channeling the primly superior tone Hermione got when she was making fun of you, just to keep the smile on Harry’s face a little longer. Then he took a breath and refocused. “Is… do you already have a plan?” 

“The beginnings of one, but you and I will have to hammer most of it out together. I’m thinking we move them during Easter break…”

They began walking again, a few of Harry’s wards following along, the ones that were mobile. He carefully avoided specifics even so, not mentioning a third patient at all while he and Neville talked about the logistics of moving one or more weak, vulnerable patients via magical means, and what the clinic was like, and whether Neville’s parents would be safe there. 

Later, Neville sat down, safe with a lap-desk in bed behind curtains charmed shut and silent, to write Gran. Might be a good idea to send Mum and Dad away, he scrawled, and secure in another country behind very good wards, and Make sure they’re safe, for their sake and for those of our friends. 

With a jerk Neville realized—he was writing as if to a peer, almost. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Gran might balk at Neville putting forward a suggestion like this, a suggestion that was more of a statement of fact: This is what we’re going to do. Who the bloody hell did he think he was, to just—just decide that his parents would be going away? To go home and tell Dad— 

No matter they’d both say yes in a heartbeat once they knew about Sirius, no matter they’d both do a lot more than provide cover to smuggle a wounded old friend to safety—Neville hadn’t stopped to ask. 

He looked down and swore, yanking quill away from the letter, but too late. He’d frozen in place for too long and an ink blotch, still slowly spreading, had ruined a good chunk of the letter. A few of Hermione’s charms were applied in quick succession, but to no avail; Neville had never been very good at that sort of magic, and anyway it was almost impossible to get just the spill off without also taking the ink of your words, not when both were the same type of ink and had been applied at almost the same time. 

Neville crumpled up the ruined note, set it on top of his lap desk, stared at it for a few seconds, and then lit it on fire with a vicious jab of his wand. Curls of smoke with the acrid underscent of scorched ink wafted up between his red curtains and Neville didn’t bother charming them away. 

Rather to his own surprise, his hands were steady when he finally reached for another sheet and started over. Though a different letter was probably for the best: this time Neville would ask, and he should include a note for his parents too. This was a different sort of thing, and besides, Neville reassured himself, doing it this way would tell them something was different about this request, something more serious than the usual letters they exchanged several times a week, trying to get to know each other. This did not belong with the earnest overflowing paragraphs of writing that it took to catch Neville’s parents up on all the years they’d missed. 

It was the strangest thing, to feel as though your life were too big for you. Too loose about the shoulders. Neville leaned forward and rested his forehead on the parchment and thought about how awful it would be if the plan went wrong and how desperately he didn’t want this. Let him stay on his knees in the greenhouse where he belonged. Let him grow things and laugh and be happy. Let someone else fight this fucking war. 

He could do it, too, he knew. Pack up himself and Gran along with his parents. Leave—

But Neville knew he’d never be able to live with himself if he did that. 

Knew there was no one else—never anyone else. Only him, only this, only now. 

So he inked his quill and started again. 

Dear Gran, and Mum and Dad… 

Harry 

Instinct alone drove Harry to the Knights’ Room. Neville had gone back to Gryffindor, and at this time of the afternoon, most of the Vipers tended to be elsewhere. If someone was in the Knights’ Room already he thought distantly that he could just ask them to leave, or get his bag from the room and find somewhere else—he just needed to be alone. 

When Harry stepped out of the passageway into the Vipers’ oldest private gathering place, he saw Noah right away, already in the middle of packing up a Transfiguration practice assignment. They exchanged no more than a cursory greeting on Noah’s way out of the room. 

Harry found himself standing in the empty room. A queasy swooping feeling in his stomach, like missing a step going down the stairs, forced him to shut his eyes and inhale until the world stopped threatening to tilt and spin around him. Only when he was sure he wouldn’t just topple over did he properly go in and sit down at the old, spell- and ink-scarred worktable. 

I have to choose, Harry thought to himself. Maybe repeating it would make it feel more true and less like a loss. On the one hand there was the future he had been wanting for years now: graduation, potions apprenticeship and and then Mastery studies, time to travel and see the world—

And on the other hand: a laundry list of expectations, obligations. People he had to protect. Choices he had to make, or that had been made for him. 

If Harry told Neville and the rest—no, when he told them, because he’d have to—about this particular choice, there would be so many unspoken I-told-you-sos hanging in the air. Neville at least would be gracious enough to not say it. Justin, though, or Pansy—yeah, Harry didn’t look forward to that conversation, but it would have to happen at some point, they’d been right, as much as it grated. What could I give up? Harry had demanded of them in this very room not so long ago. 

Well, here was something. Having thought of it himself, Harry mostly just wondered why no one else had suggested it sooner. 

He got out writing supplies. Stared at the tauntingly blank piece of parchment. Inked his quill and set it to the paper and began to write, each swooping curl of script heavy as lead barring doors Harry had hoped to keep open. 

The letter was done in one draft. Harry normally at least proofread all his correspondence, but he couldn’t make himself go over this a second time, just rolled it up tightly without looking at his own writing, and set off at a mechanical fast clip to the Owlery. 

Handing the letter off to Alekta did not make him feel any lighter. The opposite, really. There’d be no going back once he let her fly off. No more comforting himself with the slimmest possibility of— 

But he’d made his choices, Harry reminded himself. He was Lord Black now. He could not just graduate and fuck off to the Americas for five years. He had responsibilities, he had a life, he had to let this go. 

“Fly safe, girl,” he murmured to his owl, and tossed her towards the window and the setting evening sun. She was gone in a flurry of gold-limned wings. The letter would reach Gatlin soon; Harry expected a reply within three days, maybe four. 

What would the old man say? Harry tried to put it out of his mind as he set off for the Slytherin commons, but the question kept coming back, and no matter how hard he struggled for the calm of occlumency it remained just beyond his reach. He’d cracked himself open for that talk with Neville. Laid things bare that he hated sharing with anyone, chosen to take a horrible risk both in revealing that Sirius was alive and in committing to this path of smuggling his godfather out of the country. If they were caught, if something went wrong and Sirius’ health declined, if, if, if—and now this raw wounded feeling of having his dreams ripped out of his hands that hurt even if it had technically been Harry’s choice—his mind spun. Every flicker of a torch made him twitch, feeling hunted by whoever had poisoned the quidditch team, by malicious whispers of Mudblood lover and Death Eater stalking the school, by his own precarious tightrope position. On either side loomed more losses and the slightest slip could be enough to wreck his balance beyond repair. Focus, he told himself, but he couldn’t, and not even the Slytherin common room, which had long represented relative security if not real safety, was a comforting prospect; Harry just got tenser the closer he got to it, as thoughts of Seaton, of Theo and Pansy and Daphne’s problems, the undefined issue with Blaise, crowded into his mind too. 

The hidden door slid open in response to this week’s password, labyrinth, which Harry was convinced Snape had picked as some kind of sadistic joke considering the maze of complicated choices it seemed like every single Slytherin was trapped in lately, and a burst of sound hit him. Harry stopped in his tracks, wand snapping out into his grip before he consciously realized what had put him on such instant alert. That was Theo’s voice. Shouting Shut UP and You miserable little— 

Harry’s eyes unerringly found his friend standing wild-eyed and wand out by the windows into the lake, frenetic energy all the more obvious compared to the frozen shocked stillness of everyone else present—and in front of him, small, shoulders hunched in, a figure Harry knew. Veronica. 

Harry slid his wand away. He wouldn’t need it for this; his voice could slice through the common room just fine without magic. “Enough.” 

Theo cut off like someone had cast a silencing charm. Veronica slumped, slowly and then all at once, a deflating balloon. Harry stared over her head at Theo until Theo looked up and met his eyes. “With me,” Harry said icily, and then raked his eyes over the rest of the common room. Even Seaton didn’t so much as smirk when Harry looked towards his corner. “This does not leave Slytherin.” 

He didn’t wait around for any kind of an answer. Times like these he appreciated his House’s culture of secrecy. The House unity rule had kind of broken down lately but even with the rising tension no one had broken it outright, and secrets were more valuable even than standing together in this social climate. They wouldn’t tell. Nor did he need to look back to know that Theo would follow. 

Nor, he realized, should he look back. Anger had frozen Harry’s shoulders into a rigid line and locked his jaw up tight. He felt like spring ice ready to shatter and the minute he made eye contact with Theo he might just crack. 

It was only when he turned onto the Great Stairs that Harry realized he had been making, on autopilot, for one of the easiest ways to get to the Chamber. But they weren’t going down to the Chamber anymore. Couldn’t, not with the risk of Voldemort being able to access the room somehow. But the Knights’ Room was out of the question, anywhere else they might go bore too high a risk of someone coming in unless Harry spent precious minutes he didn’t have setting wards in place—

Fuck it. Harry walked faster. Plowed into Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom and went right up to the sink that he could open with a word to go down to the Chamber. It would be so easy. Behind him the door opened and shut again as Theo came in and fell still. So easy to whisper Open and descend into what had been his place of safety since second year. But even that was lost to him now. Instead of ancient wards and calming water he had a slightly dingy out-of-order girls’ loo. Instead of the uncomplicated friendship from years past he had—Harry looked up and met Theo’s eyes in the mirror—this. 

“What,” he said, “the fuck was that, Theo?” 

Maybe if he didn’t turn around it would be easier. 

Theo stood motionless. His voice was as empty and quiet as a starless sky. “A mistake.” 

“Yeah, I’d worked that out myself, thanks. Explain.” 

“We had a disagreement, it wasn’t anything serious—”

“Clearly it was serious enough to be worth shouting insults in front of half our House.” 

A pause. “I told her to do something and she wouldn’t,” Theo said, a muscle jumping in his jaw. 

Harry straightened up all the way and turned around. “Just tell me, in as much detail as you can remember, who said what and in what order.” 

There was another pause, longer. Harry waited in the brittle silence. 

“I asked her and Graham to take a few things back to the library for me.” Now Theo’s voice had lost any trace of inflection; not a flicker of expression gave his feelings away. “She said no, it was too close to curfew. I repeated myself. We argued, briefly. I can’t quote the exchange verbatim but she and Graham kept refusing. Specifically she kept insisting that I didn’t get to tell her what to do.” 

Harry just barely kept himself from responding out loud. 

“And then,” Theo continued, “she said You’re not Harry, and I—lost my temper.” 

Ah. Yeah, that would do it. 

“None of which excuses you berating a twelve-year old and in public. Everyone in Slytherin will have heard by breakfast, and by lunch tomorrow half their parents will know too! For fuck’s sake! You cannot do this shit!” Anger and fear brought a shake to his hands. Harry flexed his fingers. “You cannot draw that kind of attention, you—how long until it’s not just words, Theo? How long until you lose it and curse someone? You’re of age, you’ll go to Azkaban—” 

“What,” said Theo, taunting, furious, “don’t you trust me, Harry?” 

“Your control? Absolutely the fuck not.” 

Theo flinched. 

It was minute, a flicker of an eyelid, the tiniest tilt of his head, but Harry saw it, saw that his words had hit deeper than he meant them to. 

Still. It was honest. It was something Theo needed to hear. 

“You’re a liability,” he said flatly. “As long as you go on like this you are gambling with all of us, not just yourself. I’ve let it slide too long.” 

“I see.” Theo blinked several times. Exhaled through his nose and turned around. 

“Where are you going?” 

Theo’s hand fell still, and then dropped back to his side without touching the doorknob. “If that’s how it is, I might as well just leave.” 

“Did I tell you to go?” Harry didn’t know where the words came from, what had possessed him, only that—he needed to do something, and he couldn’t talk, there were so many things he couldn’t tell Theo for fear of someone seeing them in Theo’s mind, but he had to fix this. Had to fix at least one small part of this.

“What more do you fucking want, Harry?” Theo snarled, whipping back around. “You don’t tell me shit, and don’t think I don’t know why, don’t think I don’t fucking get it—” 

“Curse me.” 

Theo paused, looking as surprised for a moment as Harry himself felt by the words. “What?” 

“Go on.” Harry pointed at the wand in Theo’s hand, saw Theo look down at it and flinch, as if he hadn’t realized he’d drawn it. “Curse me. You want to, right?” He made himself smile, goading. “Don’t think I don’t get it myself. You think I don’t trust you, I’ve been cutting you out, you know what kinds of wards I’ve put up here to hide the Chamber, we won’t be interrupted, so fuck it, go on, curse me! Better me than a fucking kid in front of forty witnesses unless you want to go to Azkaban and barter your way back out with a tattoo on your arm—” 

“Fuck you!” Theo roared. He slashed his wand up in one vicious movement. A gout of fire erupted between them, twisting with faces that screamed with hate and hunger. 

It splashed harmlessly against a shield. Faded away and left nothing but an acrid smoke-smell behind. 

Harry lowered his hand and let his shield dissolve. Called his own wand to his hand. Smiled at Theo again, more genuine and less kind than most of his smiles ever were. “That’s more like it.” 

There was a moment of frozen stillness. 

Both of them burst into movement at once. Harry shielded once, twice, domes of protective magic splintering under curses Theo needed no words to cast. A jet of sickly purple slammed into a mirror. Glass cracked into shards whose edges blackened and peeled as they fell. The next spell Harry had never seen before. He ducked rather than shield. Felt a malevolent hiss pass through the air over his head. 

Theo wasn’t fucking around. Well, fine, then. 

Harry had learned from Death Eaters too. 

He spun out from his cover behind the sinks in a half crouch, wand moving through the opening shapes of a flaying hex, then boneburn curse, not the nastiest spells Barty ever taught him but ones Harry could cast without a word. 

Now it was Theo on the defensive, twisting away from the first curse, buying time to summon a wall of stone with a shout. The boneburn curse hit it with a crunch and a shower of rock dust. 

Harry pushed the advantage. Hexes peppered the stone barrier, impacto, reducto, confringo, fire and pressure exploding amidst the cracking retorts of breaking stone. Theo couldn’t hide behind there much— 

Pain and force hit Harry in the side. His feet left the ground. In midair he twisted, free hand coming up for a wandless cushioning charm, but Theo knew all his tricks and an impedimenta clipped him, sent him spinning past his own charm to crash into a wall. Harry gritted his teeth, it hurt but less than a crucio so fuck that, he forced his arm to lift and his mind to focus on pulling the strongest shield spell he knew into shape, a dome of magical energy so bright it almost burned. Spots danced in his eyes—whether from the pain or the glare of curses bouncing off the shield Harry didn’t know. 

Focus. 

He rolled over and to his feet. Dislocated shoulder, but the left one, he could still duel. Probably some cracked ribs. The spell-barrage stopped. Through the dome he saw Theo half-lower his wand and pace a slow circle, trying to get around the edge of the shield. Harry put his back to the wall. He had seconds, maybe less, while Theo figured out a way to break through. 

With his free hand he drew two runes in the air, made himself concentrate and push their power into the shield so it would stand on its own for even a short time. Freeing his wand up for a pain charm and a joint-shoring one. Harry could heal cracked ribs after this, not a punctured lung. Had to keep his bones in place. 

Theo was casting again now, not curses but a complicated dance of an enchantment, face tight with concentration; Harry’s shield began to unravel around the edges. 

Couldn’t give Theo that advantage. Harry closed his eyes and brought his wand up with a wordless shout. The shield burst all at once, burning out in a blinding flash. Instantly Harry flooded the area with smoke, ducked, and rolled aside. Spells cut through the air where he’d been standing: Theo’s aim was impeccable as always, even casting blind at where he last saw his opponent. His next move would be an amplius auri; Theo’s occlumency was never good enough to use a more complex spell-sense in a fight. 

It would be too slow. Harry had begun casting a silent homenum revelio mid-motion. Mind clicked smoothly into place with partitioned attention: here, focused on the extra sense the spell gave him, pinning Theo down; here, on his limbs, coming smoothly up out of the roll to a light dueling stance; here, on the opening motions of a spell chain, a string of curses Harry knew cold and silent. 

Stupefy. Confringo. Os fracto. Éagewyddern. Another os fracto. Étoucoeur— 

A choked noise and a soft thud came from Theo’s direction—then a rushed desperate whisper, an incantation Harry didn’t catch, followed by a sound like lightning. 

The red jet of spell-light that shot out of the smoke at him caught Harry completely by surprise. He jerked back into motion, slipping away to the side—thought ventus, and a powerful air current spun through the room, blew the smoke away to reveal Theo, back on his feet even after taking a heartstopper curse. There was blood on his teeth and smoke curling off his hands. 

Fire exploded through the room again. Harry crouched, shielded. Felt the heat crackle around the edges of his protection, and the almost-smile twisting his lips up away from his teeth. 

The instant the fire began to fade he was moving. Shield down, wand up, hexes spilling out, impedimenta, os fracto, part of Harry’s mind holding onto control again now, no more eye-withering or heartstopping curses—

And he could tell from the spells Theo shot back at him that Theo had responded in kind, dialed it back to stupefy, a blood-slowing curse, a frostbite jinx, hexes for joint-reversal and nerve-blocking. Their shields spun in swirling plates of light. Spells cracked against the walls and ceiling. Shattered bits of glass spun through the air, sent wild reflections of spell-light and spinning tile glancing through the room, biting into Harry’s legs and arms and face with barely-noticeable pain. Blood ran down the side of Theo’s face from shrapnel or a spell. 

There was a rhythm to the duel now. Give and take. Cast and shield. Dodge and duck and return fire. Like play, almost, on the edge of danger but pulled back from the brink both of them had been at before, the two of them circling in sync. 

One final furious chain of spells, a battering ram of stunning hexes one after another after another with a nasty little blinding jinx slipped in between the last two—Theo stumbled for half a second, and Harry brought up his wand for the decisive cast—

A blearmentis left his wand, shot across the room, Harry knew to his bones it would hit true. 

The blunt force of a knockback jinx struck him in the stomach. Much weaker, Harry thought distantly, than Theo’s earlier use of the same spell, and then he hit the floor and everything went black for a moment. 

Ow. Fuck. Everything hurt. Harry blinked his eyes. Wondered why the world wouldn’t focus—oh, his glasses had been knocked askew, that would explain it. Harry shoved them back up into place—even just moving his hand hurt—and struggled up to sit against the base of one of the sinks. 

The bathroom looked like a dozen irate bludgers had been let loose inside it for a few hours. Bits of tile, toilets, and glass littered the floor, small craters pocked the walls where spells had gone astray, one of the sinks was leaking water in a spreading puddle across the floor. Harry tilted his head and a hundred fractured reflections of his face did the same in tandem, flashes of his eyes, mouth, nose looking back at him from broken mirror-shards, or wavering in blurred resemblance between ripples in the water. 

Theo lay flat on his back ten or so feet away. His chest rose and fell in harsh pants. Much like Harry felt, really. “You fucking prat. Feel… like someone… took an ice pick to my brain.” 

“You’re the one that taught me the dazing jinx,” Harry shot back. His voice rasped. He paused, coughed, tried again. “Besides which, you tried to blow me up. Arsehole.” 

For a moment all he could hear was leaking water and their breathing. Harry considered standing up, but just the thought of doing so made him very aware of exactly how weak and jellyish his legs felt, so that was probably a bad idea. 

“Sorry,” Theo said to the ceiling. “Well. Kind of sorry. You tried to stop my fucking heart.” 

Harry grimaced. “Yeah. I—wasn’t thinking straight.” 

“Me neither.” Theo rolled over and pushed himself up.

“How’d you counter… I didn’t really think that one would hit.” 

“Charm Daph taught me last year. Restarts someone’s heart in an emergency. You’re not supposed to use it on yourself, and I think I just electrocuted myself more than anything, but, I still have a pulse, so.” 

“You should have Daph check you over later.” 

Theo made a yeah, yeah sort of gesture. 

He looked about as awful as Harry felt. Both of their robes sported dozens of tiny tears and snags from flying debris. Every inch of Harry’s exposed skin stung with small scratches; Theo, he could see, was in the same condition. Dust clung to the sweat on their faces. The numbing charm was starting to wear off and Harry’s ribs made their unhappiness known. 

“You rely more on shields than most duelists,” Theo said after a while. 

“I know enough spells,” said Harry. Blocking serious curses was an iffy prospect, even with a more robust shield than the basic protego, unless you could reliably identify at least the general intent or behavior of the curses coming your way. Harry had power to burn and lots of obscure magical theory in his head by now. In a pinch he at least had a decent chance of successfully blocking anything short of an Unforgivable. 

Theo made a vague assenting noise. “It’s interesting.” 

“Mm.” 

Another stretch of silence. 

“Why?” said Theo softly. 

“You needed to burn off some steam.” Harry looked down at his hands: they were steady, but only because he was too fucking battered and exhausted from that fight for his muscles to be shaking. “And… so did I, honestly.” Better get it over with. “I wrote Gatlin this afternoon. Gave up the apprenticeship.” 

Theo inhaled sharply. “Really?” 

“It was one thing too many.” Harry tipped his head back against the wrecked sink and stared at the ceiling. “With Sirius gone…” He heard a catch in Theo’s breath and deliberately didn’t look. “I can’t just… leave. Not with the way things are. I have to be Lord Black.” 

“You could…” 

But Theo trailed off, and Harry did not fill the following silence. Both of them knew exactly why Harry wouldn’t be able to find any other way out. 

“It’s fine,” said Harry, even though it wasn’t. “There’ll be other apprenticeships. Later. Once things… stabilize. Gatlin might even consider taking me on again in a few years.” 

“He better.” 

Harry huffed. “I don’t think he’s the sort of person who likes being told he had better do anything. More the type to refuse out of petty spite.” 

“Not like you’d know anything about that personality trait.” 

Harry picked up a chunk of broken stone and threw it halfheartedly at Theo, who didn’t even bother to move. The stone splashed into the puddle two feet shy of its ostensible target. “Wow,” said Theo, deadpan. “I feel so threatened.” 

That did it. Harry burst out into half-hysterical laughter. A second later Theo joined in, shoulders shaking, both of them mostly silent even in their mirth. Pain sparked across Harry’s ribs and back with every convulsion. Laughter turned quickly to an unhappy wheeze; he forced himself to fall still, breathing slowly until it faded again. “Don’t make me laugh.” 

“Looks like we both need Daph. Merlin, she’s going to think we’re so stupid.” 

“Well,” Harry waved around at the ruined bathroom, “she’s right.” 

“Reparo,” said Theo, with a halfhearted flick of his wand. A section of wall repaired itself though the response was much more sluggish than Theo’s charms work tended to be. 

Merlin. Fuck. Yeah, they’d have to fix the place, or at least try, before they left, or else Myrtle would pitch the mother of all fits when she found the mess, and Harry did not need any extra attention coming down on this specific bathroom. It wasn’t as if Jules or Dumbledore were unaware the entrance to the Chamber hid in here. 

Harry levered himself up to his feet. Pain made his breath catch, and he paused, leaning heavily against a cracked sink, until it subsided enough to breathe easily again. Well. Easily as long as he didn’t try to inhale too much. He lifted his arm and tried to cast a reparo and got a headache instead. 

“Me too.” 

Harry glanced over at Theo and saw his friend was likewise wincing, one hand pressed to his temple. 

“Feels like someone took a meat tenderizer to my brain,” Harry said. 

“A what?” 

“Oh. Muggle thing. Little… metal hammer with bumps on the flat end that you use to tenderize steak and whatever before you cook it.” 

“Sounds exhausting.” 

Harry shrugged. Most non-magical things sounded exhausting to wizards but he didn’t remember it as being all that bad. Or at least it wasn’t measurably worse than most Muggle cooking techniques. Not that Harry ever intended to wind up back in a kitchen relying solely on Muggle things again. 

He and Theo set about fixing the room. Casting was an effort and it immediately became clear that there would be an inverse relationship between the condition of the bathroom and Harry’s mental state. What felt like the twentieth charm completely failed, and he had to resort to verbal casting. Which was just embarrassing. Luckily for his pride Theo had to do the same thing half a minute later. 

The tinkling of various shards rattling back into place and the overlapping echoes of their incantations numbed the mind. “Reparo,” said Harry, and then again “Reparo,” and again, twining with Theo’s voice saying the same thing over and over, reparo, reparo, I’m scared— 

Wait. No. Harry paused and played that back in his head. The words swam into comprehension. He looked sharply at Theo, saw Theo staring blankly at a mostly-repaired wall with his wand hanging leaden at his side. 

“Of what?” Harry said. 

“Lots of things.” Theo flicked a hand. “But mostly of breaking.” 

Harry had the sense not to ask Breaking what? “You won’t,” he said instead. 

“How do you know?” 

I won’t let you, Harry almost said, but that wasn’t really up to him, in the end. It was up to Theo. “You’re stronger than that.” 

Did he see a grimace in the corner of Theo’s mouth? Harry couldn’t tell, and didn’t expect to ever find out, as whatever expression it had been vanished again almost instantly. 

“We’ll see,” was all Theo said. 

Harry would be proven right. He was sure of it. He had to be. 

But the brittle energy was gone from Theo’s posture now, replaced by a slight inward curl of his shoulders that put Harry in mind of a hermit crab that had crawled out of its shell to shiver in the cold ocean, and Harry couldn’t make himself keep pushing the issue. Not when whatever peace lay between them now still felt so fragile. “This is as good as it’s going to get,” he said instead. “And we’d better get going, it’s definitely past curfew.” 

Hopefully Myrtle wouldn’t notice the missing tiles in a few corners. Or the place where one sink’s edge still had a chip from a piece of tile debris that never reappeared, presumably vaporized by some curse or other. Reparo could only do so much. Harry debated trying to transfigure fixes for the remaining damage but just the thought of a spell as willpower-intensive as transfiguration made his headache spike angrily towards the back of his eyes, so that wasn’t going to happen. 

At least the door was still in good shape. Harry held it open for Theo and followed him out into the corridor. They set off for the Slytherin common room. Neither spoke during the walk, but Harry didn’t mind: for the first time in months the silence between them was as easy as it used to be.  

Jules 

Time blew by in a whirlwind of howling snowstorms and homework after Dumbledore’s latest lesson. Jules had never known the days to vanish so quickly. With every one that passed, the urgency of his mission with Slughorn sat heavier in his throat, but he still had no bloody idea how to even approach the man—what, should he just walk up and say Hello Professor sir, can you please tell me about the super illegal Dark magic that you told Voldemort back when he was a baby maniac with a body count still in the single digits? 

“Yes, you should,” Parvati said, when he asked. “Just be direct about it, that’s almost always best.”

“But what if he says no?” 

“He’ll say no eventually regardless, if he’s going to say it at all. You might as well get there as early as possible so you have more time to persuade him.” 

“Butter him up a little more first, mate,” was Ron’s contribution. “He loves you already, it probably won’t be hard, but Harry and some of the snakes have been kissing arse lately.” 

Parvati kicked him in the ankle. “That’s my sister you’re talking about too, prat. And doing well in class isn’t the same as kissing arse.” 

Ron kicked her back, said, “But your sister has been getting real friendly with them lately, yeah—” 

“I mean, he has a point,” Jules said to Parvati. “And it’s been a while since I… talked to him. Properly.” 

“You’ve been avoiding it,” she countered. “You skipped the last two of his little lunch things—” 

“Slug Club,” Ron said, contemptuously. 

“—and there’s only so long you can go on being brilliant, isn’t there, before that book runs out of ideas or someone figures out how to beat its solutions. I know how much experimenting Padma does on her own time and I’d bet Harry and some of the other Slytherins do as much or more.” 

“Then I guess I better be extra bloody brilliant next class,” said Jules. 

Parvati leaned over and poked him in the knee. “And you’d better actually talk to him after. You can’t ask him in front of the whole NEWT potions class.” 

Yes I could, Jules wanted to say, but that was childish, that was knee-jerk trying to bollocks up this task that he hated having to do in the first place. Parvati was right. 

Unfortunately, this was one of Slughorn’s “surprise” weeks, when they didn’t find out in their lecture periods what they’d be doing in that week’s practical brewing class. Jules flipped back and forth halfheartedly through the Prince’s book the night before their practical. Bits of it were starting to sort of make sense, if he either thought really hard or tried not to think about it at all—glimpses of patterns or component interactions that someone like Harry must know back to front by now. If Jules had really sat down and spent hours digging into the theory behind all the Prince’s innovations he could figure it out. Eventually. Probably. But he didn’t have hours to spend on that, or even any real interest in the subject, and when he didn’t even know what bloody potion they’d be brewing he had no idea how to start preparing for the next class. 

He could ask Harry for help. 

Jules shook his head sharply even though he was completely alone in the library. Absolutely not. Bad enough he was over here taking advantage of someone else’s work to do so well in a class he didn’t even like on a subject he’d only taken for the sake of the Auror program and beating the kids who actually cared in the process—asking for Harry’s help to beat his estranged twin at Potions yet again would just be salt in the wound. 

Not to mention asking Harry for help would mean revealing the existence of the Prince’s book. And everything in it. Jules glanced down at one of the notes cribbed in the margins, an incantation rather than a potions note: Inversempro, marked “Partial success” with no explanation of what the thing did. He’d seen a similar spell in here he could only assume was a curse labeled “For enemies,” and others with slightly more description, including one that supposedly turned all the blood in someone’s left hand to mercury. Dark magic, undoubtedly. The sort of thing Moody would say you had to use, sometimes, fight fire with fire, boy, if they’re shooting to kill you can’t always shoot to stun in return, but still, these weren’t common knowledge, and if Jules put them in Harry’s hands who knew how far they’d go? 

But then again—wasn’t that exactly the sort of thing he wanted not to do anymore? Doubting Harry? Should Jules doubt him like this? Andromeda would say yes, Ethan would lecture him for even considering it, Dumbledore would—actually Jules didn’t know what Dumbledore thought of Harry. Not that he planned to ask Dumbledore, or anyone, what to do here. That’s what he’d promised Harry, wasn’t it, that he’d try, that he’d have to be the one to do better; and Jules had promised himself to make up his own mind. It wasn’t fair to assume Harry would run off and use these spells for—for malice, or put them in the hands of Death Eaters. 

Jules made himself consider the worst case scenario anyway. Both Moody and Andromeda had drilled that into him. Always think about the less optimal outcome and figure out how you’d deal with it. That’s how you keep fear from crippling you, Moody’d said once. Know that the worse outcome isn’t too much for you to handle. Then you can focus on making the best one real. Harry knew lots of worse spells than these, Jules had seen him cast things you’d expect to hear about in a Death Eater trial transcript, so how bad could it really be if he got a couple more experimental curses in his repertoire? Or for that matter if the Death Eaters found them? 

Not measurably worse, Jules decided. But he still wouldn’t be asking Harry for help for the first reason he’d thought of—rubbing Harry’s nose in the fact that Jules was cheating to beat him at Harry’s favorite subject would absolutely not go over well. 

Harry would have gotten the memory out of Slughorn by now. Jules scowled at the thought—well, more out of irritation at his own failure—as he set off up the stairs back to Gryffindor Tower, leaving the library well behind. Harry was the manipulative one. He’d do some, some Andromeda level bullshite and in five minutes Slughorn would hand it over, probably with gift-wrap to boot. 

“Where you been, mate?” said Ron sleepily when Jules came back to the dorm. 

“Library.” Jules chucked his bag in the direction of his trunk and flopped onto the bed. He’d get up to shower and change in a minute. Or three. 

“Swot,” said Ron, not unkindly. 

Jules aimed a rude gesture in Ron’s general direction, as he could not see his friend while lying facedown on his blankets. “Shut up.” 

“You could make like Granger,” Ron said, and adopted a high, querulous tone, “Excuse me, Mister Dark Lord, but that spell is illegal under section four of this Really Bloody Old Law—”

“Shut up,” said Neville, with a lot more vitriol than Jules had, “about Hermione.”

A shifting rustle from Ron’s bed heralded problems. “Merlin, Nev, it was a joke. And you gotta admit, if anyone would have the balls to tell old Moldyshorts to his face what laws he’s breaking, it’d be her.”

“Stop,” said Jules into his quilt. “Both of you just stuff it.”

Uneasy silence descended.

Fuck this. Jules rolled over, sat up, grabbed his things in a huff, and all but stomped out of the room. Dean or Seamus could do something if Ron and Neville got into it. Jules was sick and bloody tired of other people’s problems.

Right before the bathroom door slammed behind him, Jules heard Neville mutter “Sorry,” and an answering “’S okay, my fault, really” from Ron. He stopped and leaned back against the door with a long exhale. This was fine. They were fine. Things were bloody fine, dammit.

Jules woke up in a bad mood that stubbornly refused to evaporate. By lunch he’d been so snappish both Parvati and Ron sat with other people, leaving Jules to moodily eat his sandwiches alone. The next words he exchanged with anyone were nearly an hour later when everyone lined up outside the Potions classroom and Parvati said, in an undertone, “Are you ready?” and Jules muttered “Yeah” and brushed by her to shove the door open. He’d always been bad at lying to Parvati.

The rest of the class filed in behind him, minus a few stragglers who hadn’t shown up yet. Parvati pointedly went and thunked her cauldron down at a table with Granger, Greengrass, and Zabini. Ernie took her usual place at the same workstation as Jules, Ron, and Susan. “Hullo,” he said. “Fascinating lecture this week, wasn’t it?”

Jules, who had spent most of the potions lecture earlier in the week stewing over the memory and thus remembered almost none of it, grunted in reply.

Ron, when Ernie turned to him, shrugged. “I dunno, honestly, I wasn’t supposed to be in this class at all, but if I scrape by the NEWT I don’t have to take it in the Auror Academy.”

“That’s fair enough,” said Ernie, which Jules was pretty sure translated to I can’t think of anything nice to say but I don’t want to lie. “Personally I find the coursework a stellar intellectual challenge. I’ve put in six hours of work this week so far reading Hoarwick’s Compendium of Potions Hearsay, you know, the text Professor Slughorn mentioned last fall—”

Susan rolled her eyes. Why she liked Ernie so much Jules didn’t really understand, but this had the air of a fond and well-trodden argument. “It’s specifically full of potions rumors and theories that are wrong—”

“Precisely!” Ernie punctuated this by banging his cauldron down on the table with a slightly manic smile. “What better way to master the nuances of a subject than studying the mistakes others have made and the ways they were corrected?”

Jules heard a coughing fit from the direction of Parvati’s table that sounded a lot like Doyourownexperiments, and grinned reluctantly, hiding the expression in his own potions kit so Ernie didn’t see. Parvati caught the motion and arched one dark brow at him with the faintest of smiles tugging at her mouth. Yeah, Jules would have to apologize later, he’d been a prat, but at least she didn’t seem too mad.

“Alright, settle down now, settle down,” Slughorn called, and the general din in the room died down, conversations quieting as people turned to face the front. “We’ve a great deal to do this afternoon, I’d like to save as much time for practical work as possible—now—if someone could remind the class of Golpalott’s Third Law—? Mister Black?”

Harry’s voice was crisp and unhesitating. “Golpalott’s Third Law states that a blended poison must be treated as its own unique potion for the purposes of brewing an antidote, which is to say, you can’t just mix the antidotes for each of the component poisons together to counter the blended result.”

Right, that sounded familiar.

Oh. Shite. Jules suddenly had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Correct, very good—that will be ten points to Slytherin—”

In the corner of his eye Jules saw Harry settle back into his seat, expression equal parts sharply focused and coolly satisfied. Nott leaned over to whisper something. Harry didn’t even react. Jules didn’t know exactly when the easy comfort between those two had vanished, but it was certainly, noticeably absent.

“Now,” Slughorn continued, “today we will be using Scarpin’s Revelaspell—you should all recall it from last month—to identify the components of a blended poison I have prepared in advance.” He gestured towards a small table at the front of the room; a red cloth draped over it rolled up and vanished with a snap in some of Slughorn’s habitual theatricality, revealing a row of vials, each containing a small quantity of murky liquid. “You are to attempt an antidote to this blended poison by the end of the lesson. Begin by identifying its components—part of the homework will rely on the list of component poisons, so be sure to take note—and proceed to brewing as quickly as possible.” 

Several people started to move, but Slughorn held up a hand. “Now, now, I commend your eagerness, but a few safety considerations must be addressed first! None of the component poisons nor the blended result release toxic fumes, though the resulting odor can be rather unpleasant, I’m afraid. I expect all of you are sufficiently experienced by now to avoid any truly dangerous mishaps but if at any point you are concerned that you’re releasing a dangerous inhalant, use the standard containment spells and call for help. And of course, remember all your usual safety enchantments!” 

A few seconds of anticipatory silence passed: was he done? 

Slughorn smiled wider. “Begin!” 

The silence evaporated in an immediate murmur of incantations. Jules’ voice blended in with the rest, the spells to keep his work station safe coming easily by now. Snape may have been an arsehole but he got that bit right—the whole NEWT potions class could do spells like these in their sleep. Jules took issue with some of Snape’s methods—the day he had them brew a potion whose fumes caused a miserable headache just to see who’d slacked on practicing the air filtration charms came to mind—but one couldn’t argue that his methods did bloody work. 

Then again Snape’s methods also made people hate him and by extension his subject, which Jules figured was probably the opposite of what a teacher should want to do. 

Practiced they all were with these spells, though, Jules had been drilling general casting with Moody and on his own for months. He was one of the first people done with the set-up for the assignment and made a beeline for the table at the front. A few others had made it there quickly—Jules caught an elbow in the ribs from an overenthusiastic Terry Boot, lost a second glaring at the Ravenclaw’s retreating back, and turned back around only to almost run smack into Theodore Nott. 

“Careful,” said Nott, eyes ticking down to the poison in his hand then back up to Jules’ face. His smile was cheerful and unconvincing. “Wouldn’t want to slip with shite like this around.” 

Fuck these stupid Slytherin games, that was a threat and anyone with ears could tell, but Slughorn was off cruising around the room checking people’s safety spells and Nott had spoken too quietly for anyone else to hear over the general noise. Jules stared flatly back at him. “No. We wouldn’t. So maybe stop blocking the bloody aisle.” 

Nott stepped back, still with that infuriating stupid smile. “Oops. My bad.” 

Jules only just kept himself from shoving past the taller boy. They really shouldn’t be messing around like that with unknown poisons in play. Also, he wasn’t thirteen anymore. But Merlin it was tempting. 

The room very quickly filled up with steam and the noise of yet more casting. Jules decanted a measure of his poison sample into a small iron cauldron. Best start with the wide-range identifying spells first. He couldn’t yet do specialis revelio silently—neither, apparently, could Ernie Macmillan, whose voice carried through the whole room—but who cared, this wasn’t DADA and Slughorn let them cast out loud if they wanted. 

Unfortunately, the spell’s results were unenlightening. Jules chewed his lip. That was Mary’s Amalgamate, they’d studied it last month so he could parse that much from the spell at least, but there were at least two or three other poisons mixed in that Jules just didn’t know enough to recognize. 

Jules bent over the Prince’s book and flipped quickly to the section on antidotes. He’d gone over it yesterday, in passing, and seen nothing, but maybe with a closer look he could find… 

There wasn’t much. The odd note in a margin, Slow acting or Explodes when neutralized next to one poison or another, but the Prince, like around half of Jules’ class, seemed to have had little difficulty following the theory of Golpalott’s Law. 

Then he saw, scrawled across the sixth page of the listed poisons—in a messy hand, as if the Prince had gotten impatient—Just infuse a bezoar. 

Bezoars… yeah, Jules knew something about those, they were an alright general antidote—shelf stable, durable, relatively attainable if not cheap. But for all Moody kept one on his person at all times, the paranoid old Auror had also warned they weren’t reliable as an antidote unless you downed it almost immediately after the poison, and that only if the poison was something you swallowed, not something you got through contact or breathing. He’d never heard of dissolving a bezoar. Just throw it in a glass of water and boil? Well… it wasn’t the worst idea. 

Jules fumbled for his potions kit. Did he have a bezoar in here? Apparently not, and Moody would jinx him for it. Maybe in the ingredients store. Jules abandoned his workstation in favor of joining the near-constant queue for the student supply cupboard as people discovered new things they needed that weren’t in the standard ingredients kit. 

He exchanged a quick, grim smile with Susan, an At least we both hate this sort of expression, and then once she was out of the way started rifling through boxes of supplies. Ground hippogriff claws, pickled tongues of some species of snake, dried mugwort, where the bloody hell was Snape when you needed him, at least he kept the boxes in here alphabetically organized— 

Aha. Bezoars, dried. Jules pried the top off the stiff paper box. Two little brown things rolled around inside; he grabbed both, and all but ran back to his seat.  

He’d lost time trying to identify the blended poisons and then going through the book. Jules dashed three full measures of distilled water into his cauldron and set the flame underneath as high as it would go. Like an idiot, he hadn’t set it going earlier to warm the cauldron up; now the water was going to take forever to boil… should he try and grind up the bezoar first?  

The book said infuse. That was adding something slowly, letting it… seep, or absorb, sort of. Jules definitely wasn’t getting the technical terms here but he knew the gist of infusion versus dissolution and he knew they were different. 

Infusion it was. He leaned over the cauldron, got a faceful of hot steam, and yanked his head back. That had been a mistake. And it wasn’t even close to boiling. Pure water had a really high boiling point, Jules remembered that much…

Abruptly Jules remembered something he’d seen in the Prince’s book, scribbled alongside an earlier chapter’s discussion of cacao as a potions ingredient. He bent over the book and turned its pages so quickly they threatened to tear. Where was it, where was it…

There! Aqua vitae for purity, vitality, healing. Test with cacao or coffee bean?

Jules had no idea what happened if you mixed cacao with aqua vitae, but he did have a bottle of standard aqua vitae potions base and a second cauldron, so he got that out and started it heating up too. Looking around, he was glad to see other people had two or in Zabini’s case even three cauldrons going in front of them; Harry chopped ingredients so fast his hands were nearly a blur.

Pay attention, idiot. Jules checked his cauldrons again. The water bubbled furiously, and the aqua vitae seemed to be boiling too, more sluggishly. He wasn’t going to get any better ideas by waiting, so fuck it, Jules just tossed one bezoar in each cauldron and lowered the heat a little bit. Hopefully the movement of the simmering water would knock the bezoars around and break them up a little bit, to release whatever made it act as an antidote. 

The end of class drew uncomfortably near. Jules resisted the urge to peek into his cauldron too much but his intermittent glances did show him what appeared to be brownish water and a smaller, lumpier bezoar. So it was dissolving like it should. Probably. He thought.

Slughorn’s voice boomed. “Ten minutes!”

Merlin’s saggy balls, that came up fast. Jules prodded at the flame. Should he take it off the fire? It had to cool down, right? Maybe another minute, and then…

“Five minutes!”

Okay. Close enough. Jules turned the enchanted flames down to nothing. Around him, people moved feverishly; Jules himself felt way too obviously still, so he shuffled ingredients around, got out a few vials and glass stoppers, and tried to look busy.

“And… time!” Slughorn called. “Equipment down, please, and let’s get those cauldrons off the heat, Mr. Macmillan—now—Miss Perks, what have you got for me?”

Slowly Slughorn moved around the room, peering into cauldrons and commenting on their contents. Jules half-listened to Slughorn’s feedback. A lot of it went over his head. As far as Jules was concerned, if he could follow the instructions for a potion and have it more or less do what it was supposed to at the end, he’d be happy. He did pay more attention when it came to Hannah, who he knew pretty well from the DA, and who had apparently done well today. Slughorn spent a long few minutes examining her potion before awarding five points to Hufflepuff. She beamed, and Ernie leaned over to clap her on the back. At this rate, Jules thought, they’d all be late to dinner, but no one moved to leave; most of the class were far too competitive for that, and the few who didn’t care—Jules included—weren’t going to disrupt things too much by leaving early.

Padma, Zabini, and Hermione had done well, though as usual some of Zabini’s innovations seemed of some concern. “Excellent work, Mr. Zabini, though the purgative effect would be quite harsh—perhaps a gentler solution—neutralize the poison and then heal its effects rather than dispel it from the body before it can cause damage—”

Even Jules had noticed from Slughorn’s consistent feedback that Zabini prioritized faster results over the comfort of whoever drank his potions. The tall Slytherin half-sneered at Slughorn’s back as the professor turned away without awarding any points.

While Hannah’s success came as a surprise to many of them—she was competent, highly ranked in their year overall, but not usually the same sort of innovative potioner as some of the other NEWT Potions students—no one could have failed to see Harry’s success coming. “My, my! A complete antidote, and within an hour!” Slughorn bent over the cauldron, wafted the fumes into his rather large nose, cast several spells, and finally decanted a sample into a vial which he held up to the light and peered at. All Jules could see was a murky sort of liquid but Slughorn apparently found much of interest.

After a bit of hmming and squinting he finally set it down and turned to the rest of the class. “An exemplary result. Mr. Black has managed to identify all of the components, extrapolate the interactions that occur when they are blended, and create an elegant antidote that would efficiently counteract it within minutes of administration. Twenty points to Slytherin today, I think—why, you take after your mother, she had the same intuitive knack for brewing—though I must say, I have only ever taught one other student whose work could rival this—and you appear to have learned well from him!”

Jules blinked, and then it clicked. Slughorn had just compared Harry’s work to that of Snape at their age—Snape, who was, if an absolute arsehole, widely acknowledged as one of the best potions masters in England, maybe even all of Europe, and also held a record in Britain for youngest person to ever achieve a mastery in the subject.

Harry’s smile was nothing short of triumphant. “Thank you, sir.”

“I’m afraid I must punish your success, however.” Slughorn winked at him. “In lieu of this week’s homework, if you could write two feet on your solution to today’s assignment—?”

“Gladly. Due the same day as the original assignment?”

“Naturally, naturally… very well done, Mr. Black.”

Harry probably would be glad to have different, harder homework, the wanker.

Slughorn moved on after one last glance into Harry’s cauldron. Several resentful looks flashed in Harry’s direction while their professor wasn’t looking. Harry, for his part, did not seem to notice, or perhaps he just didn’t give a shit, but Jules instinctively made a mental note of who seemed most upset—Boot and Goldstein, which wasn’t odd, both were competitive as anything about classwork, and Malfoy, which was odd, because Jules had thought he and Harry were friends.

The reason for Malfoy’s apparent resentment became clear moments later when Slughorn reached his cauldron. Malfoy was another one who consistently came out near the top of the class in all their potions practicals. He’d always liked the subject. Admittedly Jules had needed to readjust; he’d always thought the greater part of Malfoy’s success in Potions was just Snape’s blatant favoritism, but no, Malfoy was actually pretty good at this. Today, though, Slughorn’s expecant half-smile, instead of broadening into approval, collapsed into confusion and then disappointment the moment he looked at Malfoy’s antidote.

“Oh, dear me—not quite the result I imagine you wanted, Mr. Malfoy—do I smell fish oil? Interesting, but a misguided addition, in this case—yes, I think I’d like an additional eight inches with the homework exploring your thought process with that ingredient and why it failed to emulsify—”

Malfoy flushed a dull, angry red. Ron sniggered, and Jules kicked him under the table; sure, it was kind of funny watching the stuck-up prat screw up for once, but everyone had bad days and they didn’t need to make it worse by publicly laughing at him. It did make him wonder, though—just why was Malfoy so off today? The blond even looked bad, now that Jules was checking—bags under his eyes, hair limp, so pale he looked sickly instead of just a sunburn waiting to happen.

There was no more time to think about it, though: Slughorn had finally made his way to Jules’ side of the room. Ron’s cauldron contained something that reeked of rotten eggs, Susan’s potion earned her a positive comment and a shorter homework assignment though no points, Ernie had done alright but focused too much on treating individual components rather than the blended poison as its own thing—and then it was Jules’ turn.

“And you, Mr. Potter,” said Slughorn, expectant, “what have you got to show me?”

Jules held out his two vials. “Infusion of bezoar, sir—one with distilled water, the other with aqua vitae.”

For a full ten seconds Slughorn stared down at the two samples sitting innocently in Jules’ palm. Jules held his breath, and the rest of the class had likewise frozen in anticipation, but Moody-honed situational awareness had Jules’ prickling under the weight of his classmates’ stares.

Finally—

Slughorn threw back his head and roared with laughter.

A little of the tension seeped out of Jules’ stomach. Thank Merlin, at least he hadn’t completely mucked up his mission.

“You’ve got a nerve!” Slughorn took the vials and held them up so the class could see. “Infusing a bezoar into two different bases—yes, either of these would work perfectly well against the poison sample today—”

Even Susan, sweaty-faced with soot on her nose, looked annoyed. Jules did not dare look past the table at the rest of his peers. Smart and taltented, all of them, who’d worked hard to be here in this class—and Jules had just shown them all up basically by doing nothing.

“A word of caution is in order—bezoars are rather expensive, and there are poisons they won’t counter—still, fifteen points to Gryffindor for sheer cheek, this is exactly the individual spirit a real potioner needs! You and Mr. Black both seem to have inherited your mother’s gift… Keep those, Mr. Potter, both are effective general antidotes, and one never knows when such may be needed… And that,” he checked his pocket watch, “is well over our usual class time, my apologies—off you go, best not miss dinner—”

Jules kept his head down and his attention on his workstation. Ron made some grumbling noises about “could have shared the tip,” but not loudly, seeing as he knew why Jules was sucking up to Slughorn. Susan on the other hand didn’t say a word to him at all and marched out of the classroom with Ernie and Hannah and did not so much as wave.

“Real classy,” Parvati said drily. “Walk me to dinner, Potter?”

“Er—no—” Jules glanced at the front of the classroom, where Slughorn had begun packing up the leftover poison samples and supplies. “I’ve got to talk to him.” Surely today was as good a time as any, when Slughorn seemed so pleased with Jules’ work.

“Good.” Parvati poked him in the shoulder. “Be polite, get it over with. C’mon, Ron.”

“Good luck, mate,” said Ron, flipping Jules the V as Parvati towed him away.

Jules slipped his two antidote vials in his pocket. Got out his wand. Started cleaning his cauldrons out. Half the class had gone already, the ones whose workstations cleaned up easy; Greengrass looked stuck scrubbing something out of one of her cauldrons, and Sally-Anne Perks had gone up to talk to Slughorn, which, bloody hell, now Jules would have to wait for her to leave—

“Feeling pretty good about yourself?”

This wanker again? Jules wanted to go lie down; he just could not catch a break today. “Feeling like I did pretty good on today’s assignment,” he told Nott instead of any of the expletive-laden things he wanted to say.

Nott put a hand on the edge of Jules’ worktable, leaned forward in a way that might have been casual if not for the look on his face, all eager cruelty. “Enjoy it while it lasts, Potter. You’ll get what’s coming to you,” he said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear.

“Did you just threaten me?” Jules’ wand hand twitched. Stop it, he told himself, this was not one of Moody’s training sessions, this was a controlled environment in a school with a classmate, dammit.

Never mind that said classmate was a very good duelist, an arsehole, and a Death Eater’s son. They weren’t at war. Not in here.

“Oh no. Just making an observation. To be helpful.” Nott stood up straight and grinned at him, with teeth. “See you around.”

Jules scowled at the Slytherin’s back. Bloody smug, arrogant, rude—

Then he looked past Nott’s retreating form at Harry, and Jules’ stomach did a backflip. Harry stared back at him with an expression so rigidly blank it might fracture into fury any second. For a moment they just held each other’s gaze across the emptying classroom. Then Harry slammed his potions kit shut, shoved it in his bag, and turned harshly away, making for the door—and Jules thought back to however many conversations with Andromeda about siblings being swayed by their friends into bad choices, pictured Harry catching up to Nott in the corridor to complain about Jules, remembered Harry telling him to prove himself.

Screw talking to Slughorn. Jules could do that any day. Harry was out there, pissed at him, right now, and it was obvious Jules couldn’t let this go on.

He swept his stuff into his bag all at once. Sort that out later. Jules dodged around Hannah and Hermione, burst into the corridor, and ran after Harry.

His twin whipped around. “What?” he snapped.

Jules slowed. “I just—wanted to—”

“I think you’ve done enough today.”

“Look, can we just talk? Please?”

That at least gave Harry pause. “Here?”

“Privately.”

Harry looked narrowly over Jules’ shoulder; Jules could hear others coming out of the classroom, knew they didn’t have a lot of time.

“Please,” Jules said again.

“Fine,” said Harry. “Come on.”

Jules consciously didn’t let himself hesitate to follow Harry into a side corridor away from any other students.

Harry stopped around a corner that would keep them out of sight from anyone passing by, and cast a few wards—nothing too robust, Jules thought he could punch through them with some of the broad-spectrum ward-busters Moody had taught him, but definitely enough to keep their conversation from other students.

“Okay.” Harry put his wand away and crossed his arms. “Talk.”

Might as well get it over with. “I’m basically cheating in Slughorn’s class because I have to make him like me so he tells me something secret he knows about Voldemort that’s really important if we ever want to kill the bastard.”

Clearly, Harry had expected something else. He blinked, opened his mouth, closed it again, and finally said, “I knew there was no way you suddenly got that good.”

Jules laughed. It came out a little high-pitched on account of he suddenly didn’t fear an imminent explosion. More explaining, sure, but Harry seemed calmer. “Yeah, no, absolutely not. I can follow instructions but that’s about it.”

“Okay, but how are you cheating? Because we’ve been trying to figure it out for months. It’s driving me mad.”

“Well…” This had to be a test. Jules thought fast. He’d already done the mental maths about whether letting Harry see the book at all was a risk. No reason not to, then. “Here.”

Jules wrestled the Prince’s book out of the impossible jumble of stuff in his bag and handed it over.

Harry opened it and flipped through. Then he went back to the beginning and turned the pages more slowly, mouthing words to himself at times and almost seeming to forget Jules was even there. Jules watched the way Harry’s eyes widened a fraction when he saw a good idea or narrowed when he had to pause over something to understand it. Tiny changes, yeah, but visible ones. So this was what Harry looked like when he was really caught up working on something.

Part of Jules wished he could have seen it sooner. Another part was just glad he still had a chance to see it now.

“Merlin’s fucking balls, this is fascinating. Where did you get this?”

“On accident, actually. I got an E on the OWL, remember? I didn’t buy a textbook in advance—this was just the one I got out of the supply cabinet.”

“Someone must be really mad they lost this,” said Harry. “I’d be livid if it were mine and went missing. Is there a name in it or anything?”

“Just this.” Jules flipped to the page with Property of the Half-Blood Prince written on it in spiky script, and then pointed to the print date. “Haven’t been able to work out who the Prince was, but I bet they were a student ages ago, this edition is from 1957.”

Harry nodded, eyes thoughtful. “So you just kept it… understandable. All to ingratiate yourself with Slughorn?”

“Yeah…” Jules grimaced. How much could he say? “I… Dumbledore’s been teaching me about Voldemort this year. Where he came from, why he’s like this… how to kill him. There’s something Slughorn knows. He won’t give it to Dumbledore, and Dumbledore won’t outright ask him, they’re playing some stupid old man game of chicken where neither of them wants to be the first to be direct about it, so instead Dumbledore’s shoved the job off on me. I’ve been, er, meaning to go and… get him all nostalgic about—about Mum. And then ask. Hadn’t got around to it yet. But I need him to like me and if I suddenly start failing his class…”

“Right, he’s not an idiot, he’d work out you were cheating or at least getting by unfairly.”

“I don’t like it,” said Jules. “Using someone else’s work, I mean. I’ve been trying to understand it so I at least know what it is I’m doing, but there’s so much theory I’m missing and I just don’t have the time to go catch up on it all. Or the interest, really. Potions isn’t my thing. I’m fine just being competent. But it isn’t fair to you or anyone else who’s actually done all that work. I can’t explain to the others, but you—after last winter—”

He broke off; no way Harry didn’t remember their grating conversation, Jules’ stumbling, sincere attempt at an apology.

“Alright,” said Harry slowly. “I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it, and at least you know you’re being a prat.”

“As opposed to you, who never stops being a prat,” Jules shot back.

Harry cracked. Just a little, but it was there, a half-smile in response to the jab. Yes. Jules was, against all odds, making this work.

“Undeniable logic. A point to the Gryffindor.” Harry held up the book. “Can I make a copy of this?”

“Go ahead. Someone might as well get something out of there, because I’m sure not learning much.”

“You learned enough to guess at aqua vitae as a base for that infusion. I mean, I was doing that in fourth year, but you know, we all start somewhere.”

Jules snorted. “Yeah, I deserve that.”

“You do,” Harry agreed. “There it is—knew I had one in here somewhere.”

His arm emerged from the depths of his bag holding… another book? An empty one so pointedly boring that Jules’ eyes wanted to skip right over its blankness.

Wait. He’d heard of— “Is that a copybook?”

“Yes.” Harry held it against the Prince’s book; it began to morph into an exact replica. “Useful things.”

“Illegal things,” Jules muttered.

“Remind me again who’s running a secret student vigilante defense club?”

“Probably both of us.”

“I,” said Harry, “have a study group, thank you very much.”

Jules grinned. “Right, a study group, my bad. Well, while we’re on the subject—” Today was apparently the day for taking blind leaps. “You wouldn’t happen to know any Slytherins that might want to join my study group?”

“Your… definitely not an anti-Voldemort, sort-of-anti-Ministry secret student vigilante defense club? That study group?”

“That’s the one.”

Silence stretched. Jules’ brief optimism started to shrivel up in the face of anxious doubts. Had he pushed too hard? He couldn’t take this newfound peace between them for granted, he’d thought it would be a good gesture—

“I might know a few people, yes,” said Harry.

“I—really? That’s—great, okay, er… who?”

Jules could not believe that fucking worked.

“I’ll have to ask them first, but Daphne, most likely. Pansy. Blaise might be interested… A few of the younger students would almost certainly go. Several of my friends can’t publicly or even quasi-secretly associate with your sort. Their families…”

Yeah, Jules could extrapolate. That did raise a different concern, though. “Is there anyone who… wants to get out? Because we can—we can help someone disappear. Or, like, move, if they just need to not live at home.”

“Not at the moment. Most of us have too much to lose.”

“How about… Parkinson? Didn’t she get kicked out of her house or something?”

Harry’s jaw tightened. “She… ran, actually. The Dark Lord was about to coerce her into taking the Mark by torturing people until she agreed to it.”

Well that was just fucked up. Jules knew things like that happened, obviously, but to a classmate, someone he sat near in lessons and bickered with in the halls, whether or not he liked her personally—

Obviously, he thought, angry at himself, it happened to his classmates. Obviously it was happening all around him already. Just because Parkinson would’ve never told him about it—

“She won’t take the help, though. It’s personal.”

Harry’s tone did not invite further questions on the matter of Pansy Parkinson. Jules could take a hint, and dropped it. “Alright, well, she’s welcome at the DA, and whoever else. They might, er… some of us have had less than positive experience with Slytherins, generally. I’ll make sure it doesn’t go too far but some of yours might have to deal with rudeness at first and if they curse back—”

“We know how to be discreet.”

“Okay. Just… send the ones that want to come with Hermione, she can bring them at the next meeting.”

"That does remind me,” said Harry, “we can’t publicly be friendly with each other. You and me, that is.”

Jules paused. Thought about it for two seconds. “Oh. Voldemort?”

“He wants the Black assets. Right now… I haven’t swung too hard one way or the other. I can’t give him cause to think there’s a risk of me walking away. Too many people I care about are in danger from him.”

Don’t trust him, Andromeda whispered in Jules’ head. That sounded a lot like what an actual ally or sympathizer would say if they wanted to weasel their way into the other side’s trust on the side. Jules shoved that niggling doubt away. Today was the day for stupid risks. “I get it, yeah. I’ll be sure to… call you a name in class this week or something.”

“After that Potions practical, I don’t think anyone would blame me for cursing you a little bit,” said Harry with a smirk.

“You still want to, don’t you?”

Harry smiled. It was a nasty expression Jules hoped not to see too often. “I get why you’re doing it, but it still stings.”

“Right.” Jules glanced warily down at Harry’s hands, but no, he still held only the copy of the Prince’s book, not wand. “Well… we should probably get to dinner.”

“Afraid to be alone with me in a dark corridor?” Harry started walking, and Jules fell in next to him, wards dissolving as the two passed through.

“Afraid, no, but I wouldn’t put a few jinxes past you, and I know how my life looks but I don’t actually like getting myself into trouble.”

“It does just seem to find you,” Harry agreed.

Jules did feel some relief once they were back in the brither light of the main corridors. Though this was still the dungeon, so “brighter” was relative. He shoved his hands in his robe pockets and tried not to think too hard. But all his doubts kept getting louder to drown out the silence and eventually he couldn’t take it anymore. What was something Harry liked, that Jules could ask about? Quidditch? No, that was just boring, anyone could talk about Quidditch. Maybe—Harry liked politics, right?

“How are you doing with preparing for the Imbolc session and all that?” Jules said.

Harry stopped so abruptly that Jules carried on past him for three steps before he realized Harry wasn’t with him, turned back to check, and caught Harry in the middle of dawning horror and irritation. That had to be the most expression Jules had seen on Harry’s face at one time all year.

“Bloody buggering fuck,” said Harry, with emphasis.

And Jules’ day was right back to being a disaster. “Er… sorry.”

“It’s not you.” Harry pulled his glasses off and pressed one hand against his eyes. “I have several feet of parchment to read on the subject, actually, and I completely forgot. When’s the session? Not on the exact day of Imbolc, right?”

“The… fourth, I think.”

“So it’s imminent. Fantastic. Looks like I don’t get any sleep tonight.” Harry jammed his glasses back on and started walking again with a lot more purpose. “I wonder if I can bribe the house-elves into giving me coffee. Normally they don’t this late at night, but they like Muggle candy…”

“You need to sleep sometime.”

Harry waved this away. “I’ll sleep afterwards. There’s no one I can hand the work off to. Not for this. I’ll get… Pansy or someone to help make sure I don’t miss anything stupid.”

“Right,” said Jules slowly. “You know, I’m suddenly a lot less worried about you cursing me and a lot more worried about you, period.”

“I know about your habit of jogging around the lake at the arsecrack of dawn. Don’t be a hypocrite.”

“How the fuck do you know about that?”

Harry smirked at him. “I didn’t know who it was, not for sure, just that someone from Gryffindor had been doing that. Thanks for confirming though.”

“You bastard.”

“If I’m a bastard then so are you. Unless our parents got married in a real hurry between my official time of birth and yours.”

Jules groaned. “How has no one hexed you yet for being bloody annoying?”

“Luck.”

“I should’ve just asked about Quidditch.”