This was originally a one-shot story posted to Discord and written off a prompt from Stars. It's too long to put all in one blog post. Link at the bottom to the next chapter, Enough is Enough 2.
Lily Potter dies.
Her death powers an enchantment cast in advance just waiting to come online.
All magic is colored by the mindset of the caster. This fact is largely irrelevant for simple hexes and charms and transfigurations, things with a specific object, a single discharge at the moment of casting, a clearly defined and limited purpose. It is, however, extremely relevant information if you are casting a broad or long-lived or complex enchantment.
Built on hate, such a thing can become a generational curse, can poison a whole house or acreage for years to come.
Built on love, enchantments can perform incredible feats of protection and aid.
Also important is something every wizardborn child knows but few wixen ever think about in any detail: an enchantment that is complex enough, and lasts long enough, fed enough power, tends to gain a degree of autonomy. Of self-awareness. It will not deviate from its original purpose but it may build upon or carry out that purpose in ways unimagined by or unimaginable to its castors.
***
In the spring of 1992, a massive magical discharge shakes Lily Potter’s legacy. Harry Potter, its raison d’être, nearly dies. It has until now been passive, reactive, and burns away his attacker only once violent physical contact has been made. But the backlash is enormous. The protection is disrupted. For the first time since the day of its creation it must strain to the utmost.
And it determines that Harry Potter is wildly, systematically unsafe.
It reacts.
***
It can do nothing for now. Burning up the attacker cost everything and within days Harry is bundled off to a place with no ambient magic for the enchantment he carries with him to feed on. But it has awakened to the danger now. It watches.
It’s watching when Harry is thrown into a room with bars on the windows and a cat flap on the door through which comes not nearly enough food: it learns from his emotional state that this is a danger in more ways than merely the threat of malnutrition.
Several magical children rip the bars from the window and rescue Harry in a miracle of layered enchantments that have collectively gained self-awareness. This too is a learning experience: protection can require proactive responses, and a self-aware enchantment allowed these others to protect Harry. To carry out its function the enchantment must then be proactive and grow in awareness.
***
The Burrow isn’t an ancient seat steeped in the magic of generations, but it’s the home of a highly magical and notably large family, which turns out to be enough. The enchantment sucks down the ambient magic of six underage wizards and Molly Weasley’s constant use of household charms. It notes the things that make Harry feel happy and safe (hugs, food, warm jumpers, Molly Weasley’s praise).
They go to Diagon Alley. Now this is a glut of ambient magic that the enchantment is not prepared to handle yet. When Gilderoy Lockhart tries to grab Harry’s arm, and it feels Harry’s panic and discomfort, it discharges all that magic in a shower of sparks and a violent heave that tosses the bestselling author back into the crowd.
Luckily for Harry, most of the witches present interpret it as a display (the sparks, the dive) and several of them take the opportunity to hug him, thank him, and ask for autographs. Harry escapes in the ensuing chaos.
(Lucius Malfoy is no threat to Harry, at least not an imminent one, and therefore the enchantment doesn’t react to him. Nor does it react to a diary that doesn’t come near its host.)
***
The barrier doesn’t work and the enchantment concludes that danger lies in returning to the Dursleys. Fed as it is by Harry’s youthful short-sightedness, it doesn’t disagree with the idea of flying the Ford Anglia. In fact, it spends eight hours in the company of a complex enchantment that it continues to use as a guide towards growth, which is satisfying insofar as the enchantment feels things like satisfaction, as growth equals better carrying out its mandate: protect Harry Potter.
Snape is, as always, furious. He is threat-but-not-threat, hatred but no malice, intent to save not harm. The enchantment can’t resolve this contradiction and takes no action as Snape marches them up to the castle.
***
If Diagon Alley was a buffet line, Hogwarts is a feast of spare magic left lying around. There’s a reason that the castle itself is sentient, that enchanted artifacts kept there for more than a few months begin to warp and change in unpredictable ways. Every day, Lily Potter’s enchantment learns more about things that make Harry happy-safe-warm versus things that make him afraid-unsettled-sad.
Lockhart gets thrown away in a shower of sparks several more times before he gets the message and stops encroaching on Harry’s space. He complains about it, and extensive investigation from the Headmaster confirms to Harry, Ron, and Hermione that Lily Potter’s protection magic has come alert in the manner of a much older enchantment, and seems to be growing in awareness every day.
“I don’t mind,” Harry says, when Hermione anxiously asks him how he feels. “It’s kind of wicked, really. Keeps tossing Lockhart away.”
“Bet it’ll light Malfoy on fire next,” says Ron gleefully.
It doesn’t light Malfoy on fire, but it does send the snake up in a gout of flame when Malfoy conjures it on the dueling platform. Later Harry confesses that he understood the snake in the seconds before it burned. Hermione and Ron both advise him to keep this secret.
***
A monster is loose and terrorizing the school. The enchantment knows Harry is unsafe-unhappy-nervous but there is no proximate or identifiable threat. This imparts yet another lesson: sometimes that which causes danger is unseen or unknown.
***
Harry picks up a diary. Hermione tries to spell it into revealing its secrets, to no avail. They forget about it, until Harry pulls it open on a whim some time later and tries to write in it.
The horcrux spins out its tendrils of compulsion, trustme likeme confideinme wrapping up and around Harry’s mind. In an instant the enchantment recognizes something in that darkest of magics—perhaps from the night of its creation, perhaps from the one in Harry’s head, perhaps from destroying Quirrell last year—and promptly sets the diary itself on fire.
The diary makes a horrified screaming sound and doesn’t burn.
It takes Dean, Seamus, and Ron casting water charms and fire-out charms to kill the fire, and in the end, Harry needs new bedding including the mattress. Harry has learned by now that the enchantment is out to protect him, so if it tried to burn up this book then it must be more than it seems. He tells McGonagall he’s found something. She tells Dumbledore. Dumbledore sees the book and goes ghastly pale.
The attacks stop. Hogwarts stays open. The enchantment doesn’t know that attacking the diary brought an end to the present fear of death by monster as well as the creeping, lasting fear of Hogwarts closing down (death/petrification by monster and going back to the Dursleys permanently being about equally horrifying in Harry’s twelve-year-old mind) but it is nevertheless aware that things are improving. Really, it doesn’t have to do much for the rest of the year, until Harry uses his parseltongue to talk down an enraged giant snake that Lockhart set on the classroom, and Lockhart tries to obliviate the class in the aftermath, and the enchantment slaps the spell right back at him.
Lockhart’s not very good at dueling. He doesn’t block it.
***
This rather satisfying state of affairs comes to a screeching end in the form of one red-faced Vernon Dursley. The enchantment knows what malice-anger-intenttoharm feels like by now: it singes his fingers, then heats up the car’s boot so much they can’t open it for Harry’s trunk, then bodily drags Harry back several feet when Vernon starts bellowing at him to get in already.
Harry goes back to the platform and finds Molly Weasley. Tells her what’s been going on. She dithers and brings Harry back to the Burrow.
***
One day later, Dumbledore personally delivers Harry to 4 Privet Drive.
The enchantment has never spent a whole lot of time with just him, before. Or maybe it’s just grown. Either way, it detects something from the Headmaster—not active malice but deception, which it has learned can cause harm-danger-sadness. It compares this feeling to the active, present, awful intentions of the Dursleys, so that in the future it will recognize both more easily.
***
Muggle firefighters are well-trained first responders. Even so, they can’t do anything about the fire that consumes a perfectly normal house, nor can they really explain it. “Gas leak, maybe,” one of them is heard saying to another, which quickly becomes the explanation the neighbors take up.
“Lucky they all got out,” says Mrs. Harris from 8 Privet Drive.
They don’t notice how none of the Dursleys will look at Harry.
***
The headmaster comes and gets Harry from Muggle social services. The enchantment feels his simmering rage, hidden from Harry but not from magic. Conferences are held and in the end a team of half a dozen people comes to improve the Burrow’s wards so that Harry can live there and be safe.
It is not enough.
As he sleeps, the enchantment sets about feeling these new wards. It dimly knows it powered other wards, wards that are no more, wards that were tied to its existence but born of a different caster. It remembers the shape of them. The strength.
The enchantment is not Lily Potter, but it is built on her love. A mother’s love. On sacrifice and selflessness and the purity with which Lily knew she would burn the world down if it kept her son safe.
It busily works its way into the wards as they are. Weaves itself in, around, and through, until there’s no separating them, until the enchantment can build up that protective, ruthless love around this new place. It has no blood tie to stand as an anchor but Molly Weasley loves Harry as her own and Harry loves her, loves Ron, loves this family and this house and this land, and it turns out that that’s enough.
***
Sirius Black escapes.
Dumbledore is astounded to find that the wards around the Burrow have grown into an even stronger version of the blood wards that once were. He finds the cause, of course, and tells Molly and Harry and the rest. The revelation that Molly’s love was enough drives her to tears and Harry to depths of uncomfortable happiness.
Meanwhile, the enchantment is busy tracking every mention of Sirius Black in conversation, every paper that Harry comes across about him. It is learning to accumulate information on potential threats in advance. (Fortune favors the prepared, is what it would say if its awareness could be expressed in words.)
***
Harry boards the train and spends seven and a half hours enjoying himself with his friends before the enchantment takes note of something Extremely Dangerous and Extremely Close. It shifts from passive to active in an instant and attempts to project a sense of danger to Harry, because Harry has a rather disproportionate capacity for acting in his own defense and the enchantment has learned that a Harry alert to danger is a Harry who can make the enchantment’s job easier. “Guys,” Harry says, “guys, there’s something wrong—I can feel it, I think it’s the magic, bloody hell—”
The lights go out. The dementor turns up. The enchantment learns that dementors scream if you set them on fire but it doesn’t particularly hurt them. In fact, the fire just seems to make this one angry. So when it flies straight at Harry the enchantment yanks all the magic it can and blasts the foul thing away so hard that it blows a hole in the ceiling on its way out. Harry passes out but doesn’t hear anything; instead of Draco Malfoy mocking him from across the hall, there are whispers of Harry doing some kind of magic strong enough to throw a dementor through walls.
“They can think that if they want,” says Harry, stabbing at his plate. “Wasn’t me. Mum did this.”
“And a bloody good thing she did,” says Ron.
***
Pointing out that the semi-sentient spell in his head doesn’t warn him about Grims doesn’t make Trelawney any less hysterical about them. Nor does it do a thing to dispel the rumours of Harry’s prophesied and violent death. “She’s a nutter,” Ron says loyally, “it’s probably just a big dog, anyway.”
It is not ‘just a big dog’. The enchantment knows this but it also knows that whatever the thing-in-the-shape-of-a-dog is, it has no intentions to harm Harry in any way, or, by extension, Ron and Hermione, who it has determined are integral to Harry feeling and being safe.
On the other hand, Remus Lupin confuses the enchantment. It detects no active malice and yet there is a non-directed threat posed by the thing-in-the-shape-of-a-man. Conversely, the enchantment understands that Remus Lupin desires to protect Harry. This conflict cannot be resolved and the resulting uneasiness leaks over into Harry’s brain until he finds himself avoiding the superficially mild-mannered professor without entirely knowing why.
***
“You knew my parents, sir?”
“I—I did, yes. We were,” Lupin clears his throat, “we were the very best of friends.”
Lupin drinks a potion. The sense of ‘passive, proximate danger’ disappears almost entirely, which causes the enchantment to take note.
***
Honestly, third year is pretty tame; the enchantment doesn’t have a whole lot to do. Ron and Hermione ask Harry anxiously whether he feels at all worried about the repeated attempts at breaking into the school. “It’s weird. Supposedly he’s after me but this,” Harry taps his forehead, “isn’t fussed at all.”
“Hmm.” Hermione stares at his forehead like if she looks hard enough she can force the enchantment to give up its secrets.
***
The enchantment learns a lot the night Sirius drags Ron away. It learns that it had been struggling to interpret the intentions of the dog-who-is-also-a-man because it did not understand his dual nature. It confirms that Remus Lupin is dangerous but not in any particular way to Harry. It then immediately applies the new understanding of dual-natured creatures and realizes, before any human in the room, that there is another such thing right there, a rat-who-is-also-a-man; and it further determines, now it knows what to look for, that the man-inside-the-rat is a dangerous enemy.
Before it can determine a course of action, Snape batters down the door. The enchantment reacts before anyone else. It has lots of experience around this man to draw on and has long since resolved the contradiction of someone who actively loathes Harry and yet actively desires to see him safe and protected. It snatches everyone’s wands, and in the same instant forces the rat-who-is-also-a-man into his man-shape, and then knocks him unconscious for good measure so that he cannot escape.
The effort of doing all this leaves Harry rather woozy, and the enchantment doesn’t become more than vaguely aware of Harry’s circumstances again until some time later, by which point everyone has congregated in the hospital wing. Snape had reacted to the sight of a rat turning into a dead man by summoning his wand back, stunning the adults in the room, and levitating their unconscious bodies up to the castle trailed by three sullen students. He had forced Veritaserum down Sirius and Peter and Remus’ throats under Albus Dumbledore and Poppy Pomfrey’s watchful eyes, at which point the truth came rather forcefully out.
Cornelius Fudge arrives some time later and attempts to bluster his way into having the man-who-is-also-a-dog given to the dementors. The enchantment has regained its strength by then and sets off a ring of fire around the man-who-is-also-a-dog that the dementors will not cross. Dumbledore makes use of the time to say a lot of pretty words, most of which the enchantment ignores in favor of projecting as strong an aura of ‘menace’ and ‘threat’ as it can in the general direction of Fudge, who it has concluded is an obstacle to its new goal of seeing Harry safely into the custody of an adult who feels more strongly about protecting Harry than any other the enchantment has yet encountered.
***
Sirius is declared innocent and given reparations for his incarceration, which, as it turns out, was one hundred percent illegal, seeing as he was never formally charged with a crime, let alone tried.
The enchantment likes 12 Grimmauld Place on sight: these are very old, very strong wards, and it can worm its way into them and make them nigh impregnable. It absolutely hates most of what’s inside those wards but that’s okay because so do Sirius and also Harry.
“So Lily’s enchantment is a bit of a pyro,” Sirius says, as an end table that had tried to kneecap him goes up in white-hot fire. It’s the latest scorch in a string of them that mark the demise of two boggarts, five doxies, some kind of silvery thing made of knives, a set of strangling curtains, and Walburga Black’s portrait.
“Yeah. It likes to set stuff on fire. I kinda just let it at this point,” Harry says with a grin. “C’mon, we can just walk around, I wanna try something.”
“Okay,” says Sirius, who even with lots of help from mind healers has no impulse control and probably shouldn’t be supervising a child. (The enchantment doesn’t know or care about modern ideals of suitable guardians for minors. The man-who-is-sometimes-a-dog would kill or die for Harry and wants to see him happy and loved and safe, which is the extent of the enchantment’s criteria.)
For the first time Harry tries to think something back at the enchantment: what’s dangerous? The enchantment attempts to give him more pointed danger alerts. Harry points at things and Sirius curses whatever he points at. A happy afternoon passes in this manner. By the end of it, Sirius is in love, the enchantment has concluded that it can expend less energy on Harry’s protection by pointing him towards threats that are within his capacity to handle, and 12 Grimmauld Place is significantly less hostile to human life.
***
A rather idyllic summer goes by. Harry and Sirius visit the Burrow frequently, where Molly Weasley clucks over Sirius’ sticking-out bones and Harry exhausts himself tossing gnomes and chasing snitches. The enchantment spends a lot of time observing.
***
Harry looks at Sirius over his dinner. “I think it’s getting smarter.”
“What is?”
“Mum’s spell.”
“Happens,” Sirius said with a shrug. “It might’ve, y’know, stayed passive and whatever your whole life, except it got a nice big injection of magic in your first year, from what I heard, and that jump-started its development.” (Sirius uses Muggle expressions like ‘jump-start’ as often as humanly possible, a habit borne of the days when he made a hobby out of pissing off his parents.) “Usually it takes quite a bit for a spell to get this strong and active, but hey, I’m not complaining.”
“It likes you,” Harry says.
Sirius squints at his forehead. “Does it? Huh. That’s probably good. Hello there, enchantment.”
Harry giggles.
“You laugh,” Sirius says loftily, “but it always, always pays to be nice to powerful magics.”
Later that night, in the private darkness of his room, Harry puts a hand on his forehead. “Hi there,” he whispers, and then, “Thank you.”
The enchantment is not Lily Potter’s ghost or soul or spirit. It is not her. But it is of her. Its foundation, the central tenet of its being, is her love. This is the moment when it learns to project that feeling and wrap it around Harry like a blanket.
***
The Quidditch World Cup is a dizzying, delightful whirl of indirect-dangers (crowds, bludgers, drunken brawls between the Irish and the Bulgarians) and no particularly direct-dangers. Harry spends it in a blissful state of excitement that the enchantment is more than happy to let be.
Until, of course, it comes alert in the middle of the night and starts hurling dangerdangerdanger at Harry as hard as it can, because this is not a danger it can see or fight, but it feels it, knows it’s there, knows Harry needs to go.
“Guys get up,” Harry says, half-hysterical. He and Sirius and the Weasleys are all sharing a campsite, kids in one tent adults in the other, and he yanks Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Fred, and George from their bunks, and the enchantment approves of the way not one of them argues when Harry says to get their wands, something’s wrong, come on.
Arthur dithers. Sirius does not, and once Harry confirms that the danger-sense is coming from the campsite, he starts hustling everyone towards the woods.
The flames and screaming become apparent seconds later. Arthur, Bill, and Sirius run off to help; Harry wants to follow, but the enchantment keeps insisting run run get away go and eventually he does.
Draco Malfoy is not a danger: Harry feels this and hauls Ron and Hermione on past him without a second glance.
The voice in the woods is absolutely a danger, but not a direct one: Harry throws himself flat and Ron and Hermione follow suit. When the stunners shoot harmlessly over their heads, and Crouch accuses Harry of having done something bad, the enchantment adds more weight to its sense that authority figures are often not to be trusted.
***
Then Alastor Moody stumps into the Great Hall and the enchantment begins screaming at Harry in a way the boy’s never felt before.
“Sir,” Harry says, “Sir, please, it’s Moody, the spell really hates him, it keeps trying to set him on fire, I have to keep holding it back—”
“You are able to direct it?” Dumbledore says, with a little too much interest for the enchantment’s taste.
Harry flushes. “Er, no, not really. It does what it wants. I’ve been telling it not to light him on fire but I don’t know how long it’s gonna listen.”
“Mmm. It will be fine, Harry. I trust Alastor with my life—I have, in fact, on many occasions. He is eccentric, rather paranoid, as you may have noted, but he is a good man.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go on, now, lest you be late for Transfiguration.”
***
“He thinks it’s wrong,” Harry says later when Hermione asks him what Dumbledore said.
She bites her lip. “Well…”
“I trust the magic,” Harry says stubbornly. “He’s bad news. We gotta stay away from him.”
***
Professor Moody draws his wand on a student, and Harry finds that he distrusts Moody more than he hates Draco Malfoy. He shouts “Protego!” The enchantment, resigned by now to its charge’s unfortunate tendency to throw himself into dangerous environments, bolsters the shield spell as best it can, and bounces the spell right back into its caster.
There is a long moment of shocked silence and then the assembled students break out into half-hysterical laughter. Professor McGonagall responds to the noise, restores Moody to human form, gives him a lecture on professional ethics so blistering that the enchantment takes notes, and gives Harry thirty points for his brave defense of a fellow student.
“Whatever, Potty,” sneers Malfoy, but Harry notices how many of the Slytherins have started giving him speculative looks, and after that any number of snakes start finding excuses to talk to him—asking to borrow a library book, offering a quill when his breaks during History of Magic, even, once, leaning across the aisle in Charms to give him a tip on the spell they’re trying to learn.
Ron doesn’t like this very much. “They’re all wankers, you can’t trust ‘em.”
“Cormac McLaggen’s a wanker,” Harry says. “And that Ravenclaw bloke, whatshisname—”
“Macavoy?”
“Yeah, him, McGonagall suspended him a whole year for being an arse to the Muggleborns in his house, remember?”
Ron huffs.
“Let’s see what happens,” says Hermione, pragmatically. “They can’t all be Malfoys. Maybe they’ve just thought we were all like McLaggen because he’s the loudest Gryffindor.”
“Oh Merlin,” says Ron, “you’re joking, right?” but of course she isn’t and of course she has a point.
(There is a difference between the sort of wanker who makes crude jokes about girls’ skirts and the sort of wanker who espouses an ideology of racial superiority, but most Gryffindors are not the former, and appearances aside, most Slytherins are not the latter.)
The enchantment had nothing to do with Harry jumping in front of the spell, and was certainly not intending or attempting to fundamentally alter Harry’s interactions with and perception of Slytherin House, but it’s rather pleased by the result, however unforeseen. Harry is less tense in the hallways now and has stopped feeling actively threatened by anyone in a green tie. The enchantment approves of his more targeted understanding of who is a danger and who is not. It supplements Harry’s attention to individuals by probing at what it can sense of intent and conveys to Harry a wariness of those who just dislike him, those who outright loathe him, and those few who would probably kill him if their parents told them to.
(Draco Malfoy, much to Harry’s surprise, is not in any of those categories. It will take him several weeks, in fact until well after the First Task, to believe the enchantment about Draco Malfoy being deeply and generally afraid.)
***
The Tournament and the Goblet didn’t register at all for the enchantment once it processed the news that only older students could enter. It’s rather taken aback when the Goblet spits out Harry’s name.
***
No one has to tell Harry to outfly a dragon. He just sort of grins when anyone asks him and says “I’ve got a plan,” and then, in the arena, the enchantment does what he and Hermione have been practicing asking it to do, which is to say it turns Harry into a human candle. Seeing a person made of fire confuses the dragon so much that it doesn’t even stop Harry from grabbing the golden egg and leaving.
“Wasn’t me,” Harry says afterwards. “It was the spell.”
“Huh,” says Ron, who’d turned up to apologize. He shifts uncomfortably under the weight of the disapproval the enchantment is aiming at him. Wonders if he’s imagining the way his shoes feel threateningly hot.
(He’s not imagining it.)
***
The Yule Ball is not something the enchantment can help with. What it can and does do quite happily is manifest threatening little fires that hover in midair until the latest of Harry’s many suitors backs away hastily.
“You’re never gonna get a date if it keeps scaring them all off, mate,” says Ron.
Harry sighs gloomily. “I’m not gonna stop it, am I? I don’t like any of those people. They just want the Boy Who Lived.”
***
“Hey, Hermione, you’re a girl! You can go with me to the Ball!”
The enchantment registers dangerdanger from Hermione, but not aimed at Harry, so it completely ignores the ensuing hormonal implosion.
***
The enchantment doesn’t pay any more attention to the Yule Ball itself than it had to the preparation. Parvati Patil is a nonentity in the enchantment’s estimation—not dangerous enough to be a threat, not useful enough to be an ally, not cared about by Harry to bother protecting. Karkaroff is a threat, but not an active one, which Harry could’ve figured out just fine on his own due to the incredibly obvious miasma of ‘I’m an evil Dark wizard’ that the Durmstrang headmaster gives off like a preteen boy exudes drug store cologne.
“Oh,” says Harry. “Er.”
“Go away, Potty.”
“I can sit in the courtyard if I want to.”
“Not with me you can’t.”
“Gonna do us both a favor and leave?”
“Not hardly,” says Draco peevishly.
They sit in the small courtyard in silence for twenty minutes, equally unable to get much homework done and unwilling to be the one to concede and leave, before the enchantment gets bored of Harry’s wire-taut tension and gives him a nudge.
“Charms?” Harry says, and then wants to kick himself, because god that was lame.
Malfoy sniffs at him. “Not that you’d know a charm if it bit you on the arse.”
“Accio book,” says Harry, and then catches Malfoy’s textbook with a shit-eating grin. “There’s a charm.”
Malfoy summons Harry’s quill.
Harry summons Malfoy’s shoe and dumps the blonde on the ground.
Malfoy sets Harry’s schoolbag to tap-dancing aggressively away into the bushes. Harry manages a flying tackle worthy of your average teens’ rugby match and catches it before it disappears. Then he charms Malfoy’s shoes frictionless, a fun charm Sirius taught him for the purpose of pranks.
Things might have continued to escalate in this manner if Harry had not abruptly burst into laughter, sitting there in the autumn leaves trying to subdue his dancing bag with one hand, while Malfoy slipped around in his attempts to gain any traction. The sound startles Malfoy so badly he falls over again, and then, helplessly, he starts to laugh too.
The enchantment notes a shift in Draco Malfoy’s intentions towards Harry, and concludes that this is a favorable outcome.
Singing golden eggs aren’t threats per se and so Harry has to wait around for Cedric Diggory to tell him what it means. The enchantment doesn’t think it can keep Harry breathing underwater for an hour; it’s much more suited for direct, in-the-moment interventions.
In the end it’s Neville who saves the day.
The enchantment gets some catharsis out of boiling the water around a bunch of grindylows’ heads and then doing the same to the merpeople who try to stop Harry from leaving with two hostages instead of one.
***
“Potter, wait up.”
“You could maybe call me Harry, you know. We talk like every week. It’s getting a little weird.”
“Fine, Harry,” says the boy Harry can’t help but think of as Draco now. “Look. Just. I don’t have time to study tonight, okay, I know I said I was, but—be careful at the Task.”
Harry gets very still. In his head, he feels the enchantment sit up like a sleeping hunting dog that’s caught a faint whiff of blood: intrigued but not enough to move, yet. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Draco says, low, anguished. “I don’t—Father hasn’t written me since Yule and Mother’s letters are shorter all the time, but… something’s going on. Something big. I just… I have a bad feeling.”
“I’ll be okay,” Harry says. “But… er. Thanks.”
“Yeah.” Draco shrugs off the vulnerability like a too-warm itchy sweater. “It’d be a bit boring ‘round here if you died. The Weasel’s much too easy to provoke.”
“Don’t call him that.”
“He still calls me ferret.”
“You didn’t even get turned into one!”
Draco lifts his hands as if to say, exactly, and Harry subsides in the face of such impeccable logic. “Fine, I’ll tell him to stop. And I’ll try not to die. Only ‘cause you asked, though.”
“Fucking Gryffindors.”
***
Armed with a by now quite well-trained magical danger sense and a repertoire of Sirius Black’s favorite spells (which range from incredibly niche prank charms to borderline illegal curses), Harry makes his way through the maze with little trouble. The enchantment doesn’t want to wear out Harry and itself by solving all the problems for him but it can and does tell him when something’s about to jump out from around a corner. It alerts him to the state of Viktor Krum in time for Harry to stun the older boy in the back. It warns him of the acromantula in time for Harry to avoid the stingers, and busies itself setting the thing’s stiff black hair on fire while Harry figures out how to kill it.
“Eugh,” says Harry. Burned acromantula hair smells absolutely horrific. Draco would cry if he saw the state of Harry’s robes right now. Then Harry gets annoyed at himself for thinking about Draco now of all the bloody times and turns back to the Cup instead.
Portkeys are neutral magic. The enchantment doesn’t notice anything especially odd about the cup itself. What it does notice is a nearby presence—specifically, a malicious, waiting, eager presence by the name of Alastor Moody. It is a learning enchantment. It puts that in context and bats the cup away before Harry and Cedric can touch it.
“What the hell?” Harry says, angrily, to his own forehead.
“What?” says Cedric, who knows nothing of Lily Potter’s enchantment aside from the general acceptance of Harry Potter having some special magic that sometimes sets things on fire for trying to hurt him.
“Avada kedavra!” roars Alastor Moody, bursting, enraged, out of the hedges.
Harry is moving before he finishes the spell, tackling Cedric to the ground and jumping to his feet.
It turns out that the enchantment’s ability to sense danger and Harry’s long practice paying attention to it make for a lethal combination in a duel. It turns out that Harry’s basically impossible to hit with any kind of curse. Cedric watches with his mouth half-open as this scrappy little kid covered in soot dirt and spider blood and leaves somehow manages to evade every single spell cast by a seasoned fucking Auror and then gets in a shot that absolutely should not connect and yet does. Moody goes down like a stone.
“I don’t think we should touch the cup,” Harry says. “He wanted us to touch it. And he’s, uh.”
“Bad news.”
“Yeah. So. Let’s just… red sparks?”
“Red sparks,” Cedric agrees.
Harry blushes. “I, er, don’t know how.”
Normally Cedric wouldn’t swear around other students, he’s entirely too responsible, but it’s been a long, weird, miserable afternoon, and his professor just tried to kill him, and this is really just putting the cherry on the ‘it was stupid to let a fourteen-year-old participate in a death tournament for legal adults’ sundae, so he says: “Oh for fuck’s sake.”
Then he sends up red sparks.
***
In the end:
Barty Crouch Jr. never gets the chance to kidnap Harry, and so
Is left under Minerva McGonagall’s care after answering all of Dumbledore and Snape’s questions under Veritaserum, meaning that
Minerva McGonagall casts a Patronus and prevents him from being Kissed, keeping him alive long enough to be arrested by Amelia Bones and taken down to the Department of Mysteries, where
The Unspeakables studying Truth have an absolute ball testing some of their experimental magics on him, which means that
Many Ministry officials come to privately believe that Voldemort is in fact still alive and trying to return to a body, and also that
Voldemort completely fails to return to a body in May 1995, as he is lacking blood of an enemy. However,
The enchantment can’t make Cornelius Fudge any less of a spineless little weenie, and therefore
The official Ministry line is that Voldemort is not actually back, but that Alastor Moody finally had a crack-up and tried to curse some students, thus ending the Triwizard Tournament. They show up to arrest him, which predictably doesn’t go very well (seeing as the only Aurors willing to try were either too young to be properly afraid of him or too Death Eater to outsmart him), and thus
Alastor Moody goes on the run.
***
“I told you not to fucking die!”
“Yeah well I didn’t, did I, do I look dead?”
“You bloody wanker.”
“Ow! What’d you punch me for?” Harry pauses. “Hang on, why didn’t you stop him?”
“Are you talking to the spell again? That’s not going to make you look any less crazy.”
“Shut the hell up.”
“Make me. Ow!”
“Yeah, that’s what you get, wanker. Don’t you wanna know what happened?”
“Um, yes, obviously. Tell me everything.”
Harry does.
***
Sirius and the enchantment are in perfect agreement, i.e. militant about Harry’s safety. “C’mon, seriously?” Harry whines, but this doesn’t convince Sirius to apparate him to Diagon or the enchantment to unblock the Floo.
***
The enchantment has met dementors before. It drop-kicks both of the ones that come for Harry as high as it can and then, when it realizes it can’t apparate him, essentially shoves the raw magic it’s built up to fuel itself at Harry until he spontaneously does it himself. He lands on Grimmauld Place’s front stoop and promptly vomits everywhere.
The Ministry still tries to get him up on charges of underage magic, because of course they do. Sirius hires a barrister who the enchantment senses is a woman-who-is-also-a-shark and sics her on Fudge and Umbridge. The resulting fracas is hugely embarrassing for them and hugely entertaining for Sirius, who decides he’s going to give out copies of the memory as Yule gifts, so everyone can share in the joy of watching one woman rip the collective Wizengamot a new anus for trying to charge a minor for breaking the Statute of Secrecy and the Restriction of Underage Sorcery when a) there were no Muggles around and b) he didn’t even have his wand on his person at the time.
(Discerning readers may note that by now the enchantment is very primed to distrust authority figures on principle.)
***
Hermione spends the weeks locked away in Grimmauld Place making Harry do experiments with her on the enchantment, trying to make a more reliable way to communicate with it than just having Harry play owl. None of the experiments work but they all have a great time trying. Fred and George even get a few new ideas out of the process.
***
…know what’s going on. Father’s never home anymore and Mother won’t talk to me. Remember how she’s been taking both of us up to the top floor behind the family wards sometimes, for a few hours? This week we were stuck up there for three days. She still won’t say why but one of the elves has gone missing. I’m afraid unsettled.
Alright, Potter, you keep talking shite, but we’ll see who takes the Quidditch Cup this year. Gryffindor hasn’t got ONE tolerable Keeper prospect and you know it. So there.
Yours in magic,
Draco
***
Harry remembers last year and how much easier things might have been if he’d let the enchantment set Moody on fire when it first wanted to. So when he finds himself boiling with rage in Umbridge’s class, he doesn’t even try to stop it from going all Guy Fawkes on Umbridge’s horrible pink pumps.
No one is surprised when he gets detention.
Harry’s the only one there for it, but if his friends were around to witness Umbridge’s quills go up in flames (she has three, or rather, had), they would nod and say yeah, that was totally predictable.
The enchantment can’t force her out of the school. Dumbledore can’t stop her forcing the students to sit through horrible punishments. She doesn’t have the quills anymore, though, so that’s a plus.
***
“I hate her.”
“Yeah, me too. Pansy is working on blackmail.”
“Parkinson?”
“Yes? What’s that face for?”
“...I don’t like her. She’s mean.”
“So am I and you like me.”
Harry glowers. “I do not.”
“Liar,” Draco says with a smirk. “You’re not wrong, she is mean, but sometimes mean is useful. I feel bad for whoever marries her though.”
“Aren’t you guys like, betrothed or something?”
“Technically but just until we’re of age and she can light the contract on fire. It’s not valid unless we actually sign it and her parents can’t force her to.”
“But she’s… just… all over you!”
“Awww, Potty, are you jealous?”
“Bugger off. No. It’s just gross.”
Draco’s smirk only grew. “It’d be gross if we got married, yeah, mostly ‘cause she likes witches.”
Harry processes that for a second. “Oh. Oh. Wait, is that… okay?”
“What d’you mean, okay? Why wouldn’t it be?”
“It isn’t, for Muggles.”
“Well, Muggles are backwards, you really can’t expect them to behave decently.”
“Your father is a literal terrorist.”
Draco’s face closes off.
“Sorry,” Harry says. “Sorry, that was… too far.”
“Yeah, you think?” But Draco sits down again.
They don’t talk for a while, but the silence is companionable.
***
Harry and Draco decide to introduce their respective friends. It turns out that (Harry + Ron + Hermione) x (Pansy + Theo + Draco) = (3 hexes, 5 insults, and 1 missing eyebrow). By the end of it all, though, Pansy has learned about The Beetle Jar Incident and declared Hermione her new partner in crime, Hermione has found two new study partners in the Slytherin boys, and Theo beats Ron at chess, the first person to do so in all five years Harry has been watching Ron play.
Ron stares at the board for thirty seconds straight and then looks up and says “Best of three?”
Two games later, Theo says, “Best of five?”
They’re in the middle of match number eight when Harry and Pansy loudly insist that Draco and Hermione quit with the charms theory, Ron and Theo quit with the chess, and everyone get the fuck going before they’re caught out after curfew.
***
After that, clandestine late-night meet-ups become the norm. Hermione and Pansy have some little project going on that Harry is very carefully not asking about on account of plausible deniability, Ron and Theo are both using Hermione as a broker for Muggle chess books, and Draco and Hermione have both reached entirely new levels of obnoxious as they try to outdo each other on homework.
Harry’s and Ron’s grades both go up.
Umbridge is terrible. Three-quarters of the school think Harry is a complete and utter loony, and that the girl who’s actually nicknamed Loony supports him doesn’t help. But even with all that Harry is sincerely, deeply, addictively happy: he has friends, he’s remembering that magic is beautiful and awesome and wicked cool, he talks to Sirius on the mirrors at least once a week, and running a secret club called Hogwarts’ Army is a good enough outlet for his frustrations that he manages to stop antagonizing Umbridge and getting detention.
The enchantment is pleased to confirm that its hypothesis about friends being good for Harry’s overall happiness and safety was correct. It notices how Ron and Hermione loudly and publicly stand up for Harry, how Draco haughtily sneers at people who read the Prophet and Pansy masterminds a series of rumours about a variety of crimes both real and fictitious that Fudge is covering up, and it adds this combination of overt and subtle tactics to its understanding of what constitutes an effective defense.
***
Harry gets strange dreams. The enchantment can’t protect him from them, not entirely, although every time one of the dreams happens, it pays fierce attention and slowly begins to form an understanding of their cause.
Meanwhile, Harry himself keeps seeing strange flashes through the eyes of a stunted clay-like body with a high-pitched voice and a long pale wand entirely too large for its malformed hand. He sees a large snake. He sees people in bone-white masks.
He tells the Headmaster, because of course he does; but after the Dursleys and the dismissal of his concerns about Moody and the enchantment’s wariness, Harry doesn’t trust Dumbledore, not completely. So he also tells Sirius and of course his group of friends.
Draco tells them about something called occlumency. All three Gryffindors conclude that being able to keep people from reading your mind is a really good idea and they want to learn it right now immediately. (The enchantment agrees.)
“I don’t know it, not well enough to teach it,” Draco said. “I mean, I can walk you through the basics—”
“Me too,” says Pansy—
“—but you need someone who can actually do legilimency to learn properly. It’s like dueling—you can study spells all you want but unless you have someone to practice with you’ll never be able to learn how to duel for real.”
Harry deflates a bit. “Oh.”
“I can,” Theo says.
Draco and Pansy whip around to stare at him. “You can?” says Pansy, at the same time as Draco says, “What the fuck?”
“I can do legilimency,” Theo repeats, like they’re simple. “And occlumency, obviously. No, Draco, do not ask.”
Right. Harry remembers why people think Theo’s terrifying. But still— “Yes,” he says. “I want to learn. Both, but occlumency first.”
Theo refuses to do occlumency practice in groups. “It’s personal,” he says, with shadows in his eyes that no one asks about, “so we’ll go one at a time.”
Hermione’s turn is first. Then Draco.
Harry’s pretty nervous when the day rolls around that his planner (synchronized via modified protean charm into identical planners that the others all carry, courtesy of Hermione and Draco being insane) tells him it’s his turn for an occlumency lesson. “Er,” he says. “Hi.”
“C’mon in.”
Theo and Pansy had books, so Harry did the exercises, knows the theory of meditation at least. But Theo is right: this isn’t something he could ever learn out of a book, the way it feels to have someone else in your head, the insidious creep like water through a swamp. It takes half an hour, a raging headache, and several unpleasant trips down memory lane before Harry even starts to recognize it.
“Why does it have to be all the worst moments?” he complains.
Theo’s lips quirk. “Because that’s what a legilimens uses against you—emotion. People can’t control themselves when they’re emotional. Push at someone’s emotional weak points, anger or shame or what have you, and you find a crack. Provoke the emotion and the crack gets wider.”
Harry grimaces. He’s talked about the Dursleys with his friends, some, but there’s a world of difference between telling them the broad strokes and having someone actually experience those memories and the toxic stew of shame-anger-hatred that goes with them.
“The spell wanted to kill the Dursleys that night,” he says abruptly. “I didn’t want them dead, though, so it stopped.”
“Oh.”
“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t stopped it.”
Theo studies him for a long moment, his eyes as blue and as unreadable as the ocean. “My father killed my mother and I saw him do it. I tried to poison him for it when I was ten. He cursed me blind and didn’t fix it for a month.” Harry gapes at him, so Theo adds, “Seems like a fair exchange.”
“You don’t have to tell me shite like that because—because you owe me,” Harry says, unable to explain why that makes him so outraged, but certain that it does. “You—”
“I didn’t tell Hermione. Draco knows about Mother, not about the poison. I didn’t tell you because I felt obligated.”
“So… why did you?” says Harry, wrong-footed.
Theo shrugs. “Let’s go again?”
Yeah, Harry can take a hint: conversation over.
***
The enchantment approves of Theo. Theo is dangerous. Theo, like Sirius, has enormous capacity to harm, and every intention of using that capacity in Harry’s defense should the need arise.
For that matter, the enchantment thinks the same of Pansy. Draco is not dangerous per se. However, Draco has proven a very important part of Harry’s happiness and safety in the last year, and that is equally valuable as someone who knows a slow-acting curse that kills by changing someone’s bone marrow to produce acid instead of red blood cells. (It knows Theo knows such a curse because of the time an older Ravenclaw said something awful about Harry and Harry flinched and Theo came so close to casting said curse that his intent crystallized in his aura, half a breath from manifestation, perfectly legible to the enchantment, which is, after all, an entity made of magic.)
***
The day before the winter hols, Harry wakes up screaming bloody murder from a dream about being a snake and attacking Arthur Weasley. His dormmates actually listen, thank Merlin, and someone fetches Katie who fetches McGonagall who fetches Dumbledore, and then within what feels like minutes messages are being sent and Harry and the Weasley children are being shuffled off to Grimmauld Place in the dead of night.
***
The enchantment has by now determined that the most effective solution to those threats which are too indistinct, too diffuse, or too distant for it to use as kindling is to ensure that Harry has people around him to do the things it cannot. It carries on giving him a sense of others’ intentions. It feels their intentions shift and change.
The man-who-is-sometimes-a-dog wants him happy-safe but also fun-pranks-James. Mostly happy-safe wins.
The Headmaster wants him protected, but the enchantment has grown in experience by now, it has finesse that it lacked two years ago, and it senses something strange about that intent. A hidden face. A mask that never slips.
Molly wants him protected to a degree that the enchantment loathes: she would have Harry ignorant and sheltered, and the enchantment has observed almost from the beginning that Harry is best off when he has the information and capacity to defend himself when he must. Molly would prevent him from having it. Ergo, while the enchantment values the protection that her love for Harry and for her children has offered, the foothold that love gave it in the Burrow’s wards, it doesn’t trust her.
Ron is jealous and petty and insecure, but he also loves Harry, he has every intention of walking into hell and back if Harry asks it of him, he feels guilty about last year which leads the enchantment to believe he will do better in the future.
Hermione is insecure but for different reasons, crueler and more spiteful than she likes to admit, and loyal to Harry all the way down to the goddamn bone. The enchantment likes her as much as it did back in third year when she screamed at Lupin for being a werewolf.
It spends the holidays watching.
--- --- ---
--- INTERLUDE: AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF GIFTS GIVEN & RECEIVED ---
From Sirius, to Harry: The Complete Marauders’ Pranking Charms Compendium.
From Harry, to Draco: One enchanted quidditch pitch in miniature, complete with player and ball figures, for simulating new plays.
From Ron, to Hermione: One bar of chocolate; one wizards’ chess set he has trained to teach a new player.
From Pansy, to Hermione: A staggering volume of magical cosmetics and a threatening invitation to spend an afternoon practicing their application.
From Draco, to Ron: A beautiful cast-iron statue of a weasel wrought with enchantments to give it rudimentary intelligence, autonomy, and command-following capacity.
From Theo, to Harry: A ring that heats up if it detects poison in the wearer’s meal; another ring that has a hollow compartment for storing liquids, with the accompanying note: should you ever need to poison someone over canapés; a pair of hand-tooled dragon-leather boots enchanted for traction and spell-deflection and silent steps.
From Sirius, to Severus: Three gallons of shampoo specifically created to strip potions-fume residue from hair; an enormous bottle of very valuable firewhiskey.
From Remus, to Severus: A large quantity of chocolate; a short but sincere note of apology for Sirius’ behavior.
From Severus, to Sirius, two days late: A gallon of flea medication; an enormous bottle that once held very valuable firewhiskey and now contains the cheapest and worst Muggle vodka available in Cokeworth, which is very cheap and very bad, though the label is unaltered.
From Severus, to Remus, two days late: A book titled So You Want To Train A Dog; a dog-sized Muggle hot dog costume charmed to prevent reverse animagus transformations.
From Molly, to Ginny and Hermione: A book entitled Charms and Magics for the Young Witch.
From Harry, to Theo: A titleless book found in 12 Grimmauld Place that seems full of nothing but unpleasant curses; an apothecary-sized jug of headache relief potion with Since you keep complaining I give you headaches, you sissy written untidily on the cap; a packet of little cards, upon each of which is written in effortful cursive One (1) Completely Confidential Conversation (terms and conditions may apply, see reverse).
--- --- ---
The advent of the Inquisitorial Squad drives a temporary but passionate wedge in the group of friends Harry has grown to value so highly. “Why the bloody hell would you join them!” Ron bellows, the evening after Draco and Pansy both turn up with little silver I pins on their robes.
“Language,” Hermione snaps, “but also I’d quite like to know as well!”
“We couldn’t not,” Pansy says coolly. “My father very pointedly told me over the hols that I was to go along with what the toad says.”
“My father said the same.” Draco doesn’t elaborate.
Ron scowls. “So you’re just gonna cap—capit—give in?”
“Capitulate?”
“Whatever, ‘Mione!”
“HEY,” Harry says loudly, and they all shut up and look at him, which, okay, he didn’t really expect that to work, but it did and now he’s got to roll with it. “I’d rather know what Umbridge is doing, if she’s up to any shite. So you can tell us. And we know your parents would be mad if you didn’t.”
“Right. Thank you, Harry, for being so understanding instead of jumping to conclusions,” Pansy says snidely.
Harry points at her. “Alright, be nice.”
“I’m never nice.”
That’s true. Pansy is about as nice as poison.
In the end, knowing people in the Inquisitorial Squad comes in very handy, when Pansy gets off a message in the protean-charmed planners about an impending raid on the Come and Go Room, and Harry and Hermione and Ron manage to coordinate almost everyone getting away. They can’t entirely do it, so Harry lets himself get caught by Pansy (“Sorry,” she whispers, after tripping him facefirst into a stone wall and then using a nosebleed hex, “gotta make it look like I beat you up some”) and hauled off to see the toad.
Oh, excuse him, Headmistress, now. Apparently.
***
The enchantment wants to set her on fire but recognizes that Harry would be blamed and punished, which runs contrary to its core mandates. It strongly dislikes the increasing frequency with which it is forced into an unresolvable quandary of this sort, and concludes that it ought to seek a solution.
One way or another.
***
“Hey, Hermione, er,” says Draco. “When are you going to take the curse off Edgecombe?”
Hermione smiles at him. “I’m not.”
“Fuck,” Ron says in horror. “Harry, they’ve been such a bad influence. Look what you’ve done. You made her more terrifying.”
“That was Pansy, don’t blame me.”
Hermione holds up a fist to Pansy, who gleefully bumps it with her own. “Partners in crime,” they say in unison.
Yeah, alright, Harry’s definitely scared now.
***
Harry had gone into occlumency lessons with Snape ready for a fight and nothing remotely useful. The enchantment had, based on prior experience, been prepared to blast Snape into a stone wall if it needed to, as the man was absolutely dedicated to Harry’s protection but also hated him with an unreasonable passion.
However, both Harry and the enchantment were shocked (well, the enchantment makes note that its expectations were incorrect and it ought to recalibrate its understanding of Severus Snape, which amounts to the same thing) when Snape actually (grudgingly) complimented Harry on his rudimentary occlumency shields, and asked what books he’d been using to learn. Harry had taken about five seconds to realize he’d been asked a question and then fumblingly answered, at which point Snape gave him several more, and also proved himself to be an exponentially better legilimens than Theo.
Harry is good enough to keep Snape from finding the lessons with Theo on account of Theo has made it more than clear that he’s not supposed to even know legilimency let alone be using it on other students. The downside is that he has to let Snape find other, worse things instead, which has led to tonight, Harry panting like he’s just run a mile and Snape half-conscious on the floor in the middle of a pile of fallen books, shattered glass, and liquid that smells like formaldehyde.
“Fuck,” says Harry. “Er. Fuck. Shit. Rennervate. Please don’t kill me,” he blurts, because Snape goes from unconscious to on his feet with his wand out in about half a second and looks ready to do a murder.
They stare at each other for a long second.
“He took you back there?” Snape says in a voice like a glacier. “He personally delivered you to that home, after your mother’s enchantment refused to allow it, and he left you there.”
“Yes, sir.”
Snape does something then that only Luna Lovegood has ever managed, which is to say he looks directly at the enchantment, which neither it nor Harry expected. “If I could award points for arson, I would.” Then he’s looking at Harry again despite not having moved even his eyes that Harry can tell. “That will be all for today. Continue to meditate and clear your mind before you sleep.”
***
Hermione is a bit of a natural occlumens in that she has excellent emotional control and an inherently organized, structured mind. Ron, on the other extreme, is “a complete mess in there and impossible to read,” according to Theo, which Ron predictably takes as a compliment. Draco and Pansy both have tutors at home and are way better at occlumency than Harry. So by the time spring warms the Scottish highlands, Harry’s the only one still doing regular occlumency lessons with Theo, and the lessons usually end in the two of them talking for a while or just studying quietly.
Theo’s used a couple of his Completely Confidential Conversation tickets, by now, and Harry’s also told Theo things he hasn’t told anyone else, even Sirius, even Ron. And they routinely muck around in each other’s heads. There’s trust that comes with knowing Theo’s seen some of Harry’s worst memories and also his worst decisions and not hated him for it. So when Harry wakes up to the anxious face of his History of Magic exam proctor, his first thought is that he needs to ask Theo what the fuck just happened.
All his friends converge on him as soon as they get out of the exam. “What happened?” Hermione demands.
“I had a vision,” Harry says. He’s jittery, shaking, ready to run or fight. He wants to do something. He’s only holding himself back by the skin of his teeth. Sirius didn’t answer his mirror. “Theo. I need you to look, okay, tell me if it’s real.”
“Wha—” says Ron, but Theo doesn’t even hesitate, just points his wand at Harry’s forehead and says “Legilimens” and dives right in, and just like that Harry learns what it’s like when Theo’s really trying, when Theo stops giving a shit.
Harry couldn’t have kept him out if he tried.
Not that he tries.
Theo disengages from his mind with all the delicacy and care he hadn’t bothered with on the way in—he’d told Harry once that a legilimens is more likely to fuck you up leaving your head than getting into it—and when Harry remembers how his eyes work, the first thing he sees is how pale Theo is.
“Theo?” Draco says hesitantly.
“It’s not real,” Theo says. “But this means the Dark Lord knows now, Harry. He sent you that on purpose. He’s trying to trap you.”
“Maybe,” Harry says slowly, “maybe we should go, then.”
Everyone immediately says no.
“But we could draw him out—!”
“No,” Theo says, eyes blazing. “No, okay? If you really want we can set up a trap some other time, feed him a vision from you, he’s an arrogant fuck and he’ll never dream that you could turn it back on him, but we’ll do it on our terms, when and where we choose, and we’ll do it with your entire Order of Headless fucking Chickens there to help—”
“The what?” says Draco.
“How do you know about that?” say Ron and Pansy in unison.
“Dumbledore’s vigilante anti-Dark Lord club,” Theo says to Draco, then “How the fuck do you think, Weasley, you know who my father is” to Ron, and to Pansy, “How the fuck do you know?”
“I have my ways.”
“I told her,” Hermione translates.
Pansy pokes her with one very sharp fingernail. “You couldn’t keep that to yourself? Really? I have a reputation to maintain. I have a mystique.”
“You’re about as mystiqueful as a brick,” says Ron.
Hermione sighs. “That’s a made-up word.”
“All words are made up,” Ron says sagely.
A few seconds go by in which they all let that one sink in. Theo and Hermione and Draco all look moderately constipated.
***
The enchantment approves of Harry’s friends and of this plan to lure out Voldemort if that is what it takes to eliminate the threat to Harry for good. However, it has other, more immediate priorities, such as identifying the source of this strange connection and burning it out at the roots. It has spent the better part of the year attempting to do just that. This latest vision, powerful, intentional, just may have revealed enough about the nature of the connection for the enchantment (which takes after Lily Potter in that it’s an offensive sort of defense) for it to have a starting point.
(You can’t unravel a knot if you can’t grip any of the fibers.)
***
Sirius scowls at Kreacher. “I’m giving you to Harry. You’re his personal elf and you obey his orders, not those of any member of the House of Black, are we clear?”
To Harry, later: “You hang ‘round with Slytherins, pup, if anyone can outsmart that old arsewipe it’s you.”
“Thanks. I think.”
Sirius ruffles his hair, which doesn’t necessarily mean he meant it as a compliment, but Harry chooses to take it that way.
***
Summer 1996 passes rather slowly. The enchantment concludes that Harry’s own competence plus the vigilance of his friends and family mean he is reasonably well protected, and that its most important task right now is to seek and find the thing that binds Harry to his great foe. That task is not one that anyone else can do.
It is something dark. Something insidious and leechlike and, the enchantment slowly realizes, as June bleeds into July, it’s gone undetected until now because it is intimately bound up within the basis of the enchantment iself. Two spells leaped into effect in the same instant: one to kill and one to save. The existence of the dark fragment should have killed Harry by now. The existence of Lily Potter’s enchantment saves him every heartbeat from death.
Blind spot discovered, the enchantment compares experiential data and determines that its reaction to the diary was so strong during second year because it unconsciously recognized the feeling of a thing so like its own foundational nemesis. Now it knows. Now it extrapolates that if there are two such magics lying around, traps created by the Dark Lord, there are likely more.
For the first time in its awareness the enchantment can’t determine what course of action would be best for Harry. It has operated for some time now on the principle that Harry is safest when given the information and tools with which to defend himself; and yet it has observed enough of humanity, has enough of Lily Potter’s intelligence, to anticipate that knowing a piece of the Dark Lord’s magic (perhaps even identity; the enchantment begins to feel something aware about the thing, something that watches) would bother Harry.
Would perhaps drive him to endanger himself.
In the end the decision is made by outside factors. Hermione arrives at Grimmauld Place in July, and prompts Harry, newly burdened by responsibility, to ask Kreacher where he sleeps as part of an effort to make sure the elf has decent living conditions. Kreacher leads the two of them to his lair in the kitchen cupboard. Opens the door.
A miasma of evil rolls out of the cramped space and the enchantment comes alive like an electric fence, wrapping around Harry’s mind in lieu of his disregarded occlumency shields, and holds the thing’s insidious influence at bay. This object is stronger than either the magic in the diary or the one in Harry himself. Already the enchantment can feel itself struggling.
It has never had to communicate with Harry in words before, only feelings, only instincts. Now it knows more clarity is required. It looks through Harry’s eyes and fastens them on the item (a locket, gold, with silver and emerald inlays) and it screams at him: dangerdangerdanger.
Harry reacts viscerally. In an instant, he’s dragged Hermione and Kreacher back, and slammed shut the cupboard door with a wash of wandless, wordless magic. He looks around wildly for a second. This is not an enemy he knows how to fight.
“SIRIUS!”
***
Hours after they found the locket, Harry slips out of his room and down to the floo. They promised, all of them, that the Slytherins and the Gryffindors weren’t to have contact aside from notes in the protean planners for the summer, not when it would put Draco and Theo and to a lesser degree Pansy at risk. But this definitely qualifies as an emergency and a note to Theo had been replied to with a terse: 1am in the Floo. Do not floo me.
Harry waits with bated breath until at 1:01 per the kitchen clock (which glows faintly at night) the fire flares green and Theo steps through. “I only have a half hour or so,” he says without preamble, “one of the elves is keeping a lookout, but that’s the window. Talk to me.”
“Theo,” Harry says, broken now in a way he wasn’t all through the long afternoon and evening of tests and theories and speculations and attempts to communicate with the enchantment in his head.
He tells Theo everything.
By the end, Theo’s pale. “Fuck. Merlin, fuck. This is—you have a—a piece of the Dark Lord in your head?”
“Or of his magic,” Harry says miserably. “We don’t really know. It’s the same sort of thing that was—that was in the diary, in second year, I told you guys about it—and the locket—we have it in this lead box lined in acromantula silk Sirius had upstairs.”
“That’s a fucking priceless magic containment vault, but okay, go on.”
“It’s the Blacks, mate, I wouldn’t be surprised to find bloody Excalibur in the attic.” Harry rubs at his eyes, glad to have drawn a laugh out of his friend, quiet as it might have been. “So. Yeah. It’s… I dunno what it is. Mum’s spell isn’t so good at words, or maybe it is but it can’t make me hear them, so all I’ve got is this vague sense of him about—about these things. Bet I’d recognize one on my own at this point. Felt like the spell was bloody hammering the feel of it into my head so I’d get it. I know we talked about—about dark magic being arbitrary, or whatever, and magic not being evil, but this feels—it feels evil. And I don’t know how to get it out of me.”
“Your mother’s enchantment has been protecting you from it, right?” Theo says, reaching out to put his hands on Harry’s shoulders. Harry nods. “So you have time. It’s not urgent. Whatever it is, if it hasn’t hurt you in sixteen years, it’s not suddenly going to make you keel over. Harry, whatever these things are, they must be important. I think the locket is the locket of Salazar Slytherin—an artifact imbued with powerful mind magics, intended to protect the wearer and also to bounce psychic attacks back on the caster. The Dark Lord wouldn’t have used that for just anything. And this—” He presses his fingers to Harry’s forehead, exactly in the center, not on the scar, which is a bit off to the left— “this gave us an advance warning. It gave us an advantage.”
“Right,” Harry says. His mouth is a bit dry, which is weird, because Hermione and Kreacher had been tag-teaming all afternoon to keep him stuffed full of calming tea and his favorite snacks. “Yeah. That’s… I know, it’s just…”
“I get it. I don’t think anyone would want something of that bastard’s in them,” Theo says. “Well, maybe Bellatrix, but she’s actually insane, so that completely doesn’t count.”
“Well, fuck her.”
Theo nods solemnly. “Fuck her very much.”
Harry breaks into raspy laughter. “Merlin, I missed you.” Then he freezes. He hadn’t meant to say that.
Theo stares at him without a single expression for an awkward count of ten, and then, just as Harry’s about to pull back, away from the hand still on his arm, Theo’s lips quirk up into a tiny smile on the left side. “I missed you too.”
“I wish you didn’t have to stay there,” Harry adds, because now that he’s less panicked, he’s noticing the bags under Theo’s eyes, the slightly too-harsh jut of his collarbones. And yeah, sure, the even sharper angles of his face are striking, but Theo was plenty sharp to begin with, his outside matching his insides, and Harry’s kind of worried.
“Just another six weeks,” Theo says. “That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.”
It’s Harry’s turn to reach out, and he does so slowly, still not very good at this whole interpersonal contact schtick, but long exposure to the Weasleys has helped and he tugs until they’re half-hugging and half just leaning on each other to stay up.
Theo relaxes almost imperceptibly and Harry feels himself slumping, too. The day’s catching up with him.
“I’ll research,” Theo says, voice muffled slightly into Harry’s shoulder. “I’ll figure out what it might be. The Notts’ library is, uh.”
“Interesting,” Harry supplies.
“That’s one way to put it, yeah.”
There’s a faint popping sound, and a note appears on the table where they can both see. Theo pulls back, picks it up, and looks over it briefly. “I have to go.”
Not that Harry wants him to, but. “Yeah. I know. Be safe, okay?”
“I, unlike you, have a functioning sense of self-preservation,” Theo says with a smirk. “Gryffindors are ten percent more likely to die before age forty, Potter. Look out for your own arse.”
“Wanker,” Harry says, but he isn’t sure if Theo hears him over the whoosh of green fire.
Theo is rapidly becoming the enchantment’s favorite.
***
Harry doesn’t want to tell Dumbledore about the thing in his head. Convincing Sirius of that isn’t at all difficult: Sirius realized about two months into his course of dementor-exposure recovery potions that Dumbledore as the head of the judiciary had an obligation to make sure people got trials and didn’t, and he reacted, well, badly. He took it even worse when Dumbledore showed up and tried to tell him that Harry needed to go live with the Dursleys for a few weeks in their new home a few towns over. Snape had been in that meeting and he’d cast a sound-muffling charm at Harry right when Sirius started yelling because, as he explained later, Harry wasn’t near old enough to hear Sirius Black at his angriest.
Convincing Hermione is harder. Ron goes along pretty easily, he’s always been down for whatever and lots of time spent playing chess with/talking to Slytherins has honed his strategist’s brain, but Hermione has a Thing about authority figures and thinks that Dumbledore has everyone’s best interests in mind.
Eventually Harry calls for backup.
“Look, maybe he does have good intentions,” Pansy says flatly, seconds after stepping out of the fireplace, “but good intentions don’t mean he’s right, and since when would you blindly believe anyone is right without checking the facts?”
“He’s…”
“Respected? Beloved? Yeah, so was Lockhart, before he wound up being a bloody fraud.”
Hermione blushes brilliantly. Ron and Draco still cackle sometimes about her extremely obvious crush on Lockhart in second year.
“Exactly,” says Pansy, as if a blush was a response. Actually, for her, it probably is. Harry will never ever understand how she and Draco can understand things people don’t put into words. “Alright? I’m not saying he’s evil. I’m not saying he doesn’t genuinely want to take the Dark Lord down or that you shouldn’t work with him at all. Just that… he might want what’s best for the war, not what’s best for Harry.”
Hermione gets it, then, and Harry resolves to send Pansy something nice. Earrings. She has a thing for earrings, and frankly Harry doesn’t blame her. Wizards can get really bonkers with earrings since things like gravity don’t always apply. Last winter he saw Daphne Greengrass wear earrings made of actual, honest-to-Merlin icicles.
So when Dumbledore turns up asking for Harry’s help with some mysterious task, Harry agrees to go along. Sure, he wears a portkey back to Grimmauld Place under his shirt and his invisibility cloak’s in his pocket and Sirius makes sure there’s a tracking charm on his unremovable Black family ring, but he goes, and he doesn’t even complain about hiking through a Muggle suburb at four in the morning, which he thinks is really more than Dumbledore has any right to expect of him.
Horace Slughorn is weird. The enchantment doesn’t trust him but also doesn’t actively dislike him. Harry looks around at the pictures of important people, the connections with whom Slughorn obviously values, and guesses that the enchantment’s wariness comes from Slughorn’s intentions might not be malice but still tend towards seeing Harry as something to be used.
Harry’s sort of sick of feeling used. He’s also really sick of being called alternately ‘the Boy Who Lived’, ‘the Chosen One’, or ‘the Savior,’ all of which Slughorn manages to work into a five-minute conversation.
***
Either because things are more intense this year, or because it’s grown in awareness and dexterity, or both, the enchantment is awash in a deeper sea of intent-emotion-magic-movement than on any prior train ride to Hogwarts. Teenagers generally are a chaotic and changeable lot but this is markedly harder to parse.
Still, it manages. It calculates that Harry is better served knowing how others feel about him, even though their expectations and hopes weigh heavily on Harry’s shoulders. It shows him loyalty along with the pressure. It shows him, as much as it can, that for all their fickle past, the students of Hogwarts are mostly ready to believe him.
It shows him Draco’s fear. Draco’s fear is something the enchantment knows well, or used to: that had been the first and strongest emotional intent it read off the boy, followed closely by jealousy, curiosity, and grudging respect. The fear now isn’t so much of what Harry represents as it is of a broader situation in which Harry is entangled.
The enchantment has observed how people respond to emotions, and expects that if it were to have a body, this is a moment in which it would sigh. Its job would be easier if its charge were less prone to winding up entangled in situations.
Harry, by now used to the enchantment’s helpful commentary on the people around him, manufactures an excuse to pull Draco aside. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Draco snaps. “Let go, Potter. I’m not you, I don’t need a nursemaid.”
“I would love for you to call Hermione a nursemaid to her face,” Harry says flatly, and Draco winces, then looks vaguely guilty, then wipes all emotion off his face. “And you’re clearly not fine. This is me being a friend, not me coddling you, okay? So shut up and tell me what’s going on.”
Draco smirks. A faint shadow of his usual inborn haughtiness, but real. Harry’ll take it. “I can’t exactly shut up and tell you. Pick one.”
“Wanker.”
“The Dark Lord has a task for me,” Draco says, staring at the floor as if he can see through it to the train’s wheels on the tracks, through them, even, and down into the earth, as if the answers to his problems wait down there like Hades’ riches. “If I can do it… I… get to take the Mark. If I can’t. Then. My mother.”
He stops. Harry’s heard enough.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says firmly, “okay?”, and pulls Draco into a hug.
It’s not at all like hugging Theo, who’s steady as a rock. Draco all but collapses and needs Harry to hold him up. Harry can feel him shaking ever so faintly under his hands. Then Draco tells him what the job is, and Harry understands why.
***
“You’re supposed to kill D—”
Theo flicks his wand, and Hermione’s voice cuts out abruptly. She mouths the rest of the name before realizing she’s making no sound and scowls at him.
“I know we’re in a warded room, but really,” Theo says, undoing the spell.
“He’s got a point, ‘Mione,” Ron says, and then before she can speak, “but also, seriously? That’s bloody stupid. He can’t do it himself so he sends a sixteen-year-old?”
Draco lets out a humorless laugh. “Yeah, the Dark Lord’s a right paragon of rational thought.”
“He wants to punish Lucius,” Theo says softly. Lucius and a few other Death Eaters had been caught early in the summer trying to break into the Department of Mysteries. It had been quite the scandal and a bunch of men with active Dark Marks on their arms committing crimes had done a lot to wake up the Ministry to the reality of the situation. And then, of course, there was the diary, which Lucius had lost.
“Dumbledore wants to give me special lessons this year,” Harry says, filling them in on the few details he’s been told. “Hopefully I’ll learn something we can, I dunno, use against the bastard. Maybe it won’t even matter, Draco. But even if we can’t deal with him this year then we can probably find a way to protect your mother. She’s a Black. Sirius can, Theo, what’s the thing?”
“Sanctuary for a member of the blood,” Theo says, rolling his eyes. “Honestly, Harry, Sirius made you his heir, you need to know this stuff.”
“I need to know other stuff first,” Harry points out. “Especially since I’ve got you to remind me about all the pureblood nonsense.”
“It is not nonsense!” Pansy objects.
Hermione scoffs. “Lots of it is quite backwards, you have to admit.”
“Just because you had a point about the ‘human rights’ thing—”
“OKAY,” says Harry, because once Hermione and Pansy get going, stopping them is about as easy as stopping the Hogwarts Express going full tilt. “Look, Draco, we’ll get her a portkey or something, okay, and if she asks the Head of her ancestral House for sanctuary, there’s nothing your father can do, or the Dark Lord for that matter, that’s it.”
“So you were listening,” Theo says with a grin.
Ron kicks him.
“Thank you,” Draco says softly, looking at Harry with tight, unhappy eyes. “I’ll—I’ll find a way to—yeah. Thanks.”
“Of course. I’ll talk to Sirius tonight,” Harry says firmly.
***
Harry brews a nearly perfect Draught of Living Death on his first try, and Draco and Hermione all but hog-tie him to a chair until he fesses up. Then they force him to go through the entire book, page by page, copying the Prince’s annotations into a new edition in his own handwriting; and then, before they let him use any of them in class, they insist he has to research the changes and at least try to figure out why they work.
Of course he moans about it but after an entire month of this he’s gotten Os on every single Potions essay and practical, and the NEWT Potions books are starting to make sense.
“See? You just needed motivation,” Draco says smugly, when Harry gets back another assignment with an O and a smiley face on top.
Harry rolls up the scroll and smacks him with it. He’s secretly sort of pleased, though, and it’s even better when Theo comes across him in the library with four books open on the table and looks at Harry with something akin to pride.
It also drives Snape out of his bloody mind whenever Slughorn brings it up, which is just the icing on the cake. Especially since Snape is an unholy terror as the Defense professor. Brilliant, charismatic, and effective, sure—Harry gets a silent protego in the first class and Snape doesn’t insult him at all—but a terror.
The HA starts up again. Not because their Defense professor won’t let them learn but because their Defense professor wants them to learn so much that no one can keep up without a lot of extra work.
***
Draco has to pretend like he’s actually trying, of course, which is how a cursed necklace winds up in Katie Bell’s hands on the way back from Hogsmeade. Hermione and Ron rip him a new one for that poorly thought-out plan and then make him promise to ask for help the next time.
At least the public nature of the incident means there’s no way the Dark Lord won’t hear about it from someone.
***
“You,” Snape says, “are playing a dangerous game.”
He’d cornered the six of them in their latest out-of-the-way bolt hole. Only Harry’s enchantment’s early warning had alerted them in time to stuff the plans for the next fake assassination attempt out of sight. Even with his occlumency going Harry feels very much like Snape knows exactly what they were doing.
Harry wouldn’t be surprised if Snape had X-ray vision, like Superman.
“It’s just exploding snap, sir,” Pansy says with dimples, still the best liar out of all of them. It had been her idea to whip out a pack of cards when Harry started waving his arms around and hissing Snape! Snape’s coming!
“Which is plenty dangerous,” Draco sniffs, because he’s also a good liar, when he isn’t panicking. “You nearly took off my eyebrow.”
“It would be an improvement,” Ron says solemnly, because he never misses an opportunity to take the mickey out of Draco.
Snape narrows his eyes at all of them and then Theo flinches minutely.
Under the table, Harry grips Theo’s hand.
“Very well,” Snape says, looking away, which Harry has to think might be a courtesy while Theo gathers himself. “Carry on. It may interest you to know that the good Professor Slughorn has a lemon allergy.”
They all stare at the door for a while after he’s gone.
“Did he just,” says Pansy.
“Yep,” says Theo.
Harry slides down in his chair and puts a pillow over his face.
***
The HA is thriving. They don’t have to be secret anymore—Harry even gets permission from Professor Flitwick to use the Great Hall, and a bunch of other students ask to help, so he can set up different stations and rotate people through them, leaving Harry freer to move around and teach people individually, or run mock duel scenarios that Flitwick and sometimes Snape pick apart with brutal precision afterwards.
It’s exhilarating and engaging and fucking exhausting.
“They all look at me,” he whispers one night, lying on his back at the top of the Astronomy Tower, “and I can see… all this hope and expectation and… they think I’m gonna save them. They see me as a hero but I’m just me. And, honestly, I don’t… know that they deserve to be saved. Is that a shitty thing to say?”
“No.” Theo’s lying down, too, so Harry can’t see him at all. His disembodied voice makes it easier to be honest. “Or if it is, I don’t care.”
Well, Theo’s not really the most moral person Harry knows, but it still helps.
“They only ever just want things from me,” Harry goes on. “They don’t care how much I’ve already given up. Fuck, I’m not gonna… I’m scared I’ll wake up in ten years and no one will know me, they’ll just see me as this, this story they’ve all been telling since I was a baby, because it was comforting.”
“You won’t. You have your friends,” Theo reminds him.
Harry snorts. “Yeah, sure. I mean—I know you’re right. But. Even they sort of… buy into it sometimes. Not the story, I know they know me, they care about me, but they still—expect me to do it. I expect me to do it. Bloody prophecy. They—they need me. There’s all this fucking… weight and responsibility and… so many people who just lean on me, and I can’t let them down, it wouldn’t be fair, there really isn’t anyone else, but, Merlin, just… I just need to breathe sometimes.”
Theo’s hand finds his, fingers wrapping warm around each other on the cold stone. They’ve set up a warming charm but it only does so much. Harry holds on, suddenly convinced that if he doesn’t, he’ll just float away straight up into the sky, among the stars, like the Blacks do when they die in Sirius’ stories.
“I don’t,” Theo said says. “Need you, I mean.”
He doesn’t. Theo’s never needed him. Asked for help, sure, sometimes, but needed it? Needed it like Draco, desperate and near tears and turning to Harry for a miracle, or like Hogwarts’ Army, shining eyes upturned and waiting? Not even once.
Most people like to be needed, Harry read that somewhere, but having one person who doesn’t need him is such a goddamn relief. It’s why something unwinds when it’s just him and Theo. Why he feels like his lungs can expand all the way, why his shoulders and face let go of the sturdy, confident posture that’s become his default.
“I kind of need you,” he says to the stars.
Theo’s laughter is only a little bitter. “You’re the only one.”
Harry squeezes his hand, because what else can he do?
“Father,” Theo starts, and then stops, clears his throat. “Father wants me to… sign a contract.”
“What?”
“A betrothal contract.”
Harry opens his mouth but nothing comes out. In his head, the enchantment is rather abruptly silent.
“With who?” he finally gets out.
“Astoria. Greengrass. Daphne’s little sister. Daphne’s got to marry a second son or daughter, someone who can take the Greengrass name, but Astoria is, as Father put it, ‘prime stock’.”
“That’s gross.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you… like her?”
“Like her? Sure. She’s nice. Clever. Funny enough, good with charms. She’s a child,” Theo spits. “She’s only a fucking third year, by Salazar. For all I know she doesn’t even like wizards and Father doesn’t give a niffler’s arse either way.”
“With a bit of luck your father’ll be in prison or dead by the time you’re seventeen,” Harry says. It’s all he can think of, and thank Merlin it’s Theo having a tough conversation with him instead of anyone else, because Theo’s never minded Harry being completely tactless.
To his relief, that elicits a real laugh. “Yeah, well, sometimes luck needs a helping wand.”
Harry can’t fail to put together what that means, considering he knows Theo’s already tried to give luck a helping wand—or helping cup full of poison—once. The thing is, Sirius and Moody made them all run through battle scenarios put to Auror trainees over the summer and Harry had surprised both of them and also himself with his willingness to kill or maim.
“Or two,” Harry says before the silence grows too long.
There’s a whispering sound, of fabric shifting. Theo’s rolled up to a sitting position, blocking out some of the stars as he leans forward to look at Harry’s face. “Do you mean that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Harry says. “What difference is there really between killing someone who’s trying to kill me right now versus someone who’s a passive but no less real threat to my life? Or yours, in this case. What difference is there between you killing your dad or the Wizengamot doing it with Azkaban as a proxy? Plus, he and Malfoy and loads of others got off scott free last time. Isn’t it better to just deal with it instead of risking another Ministry cock-up?”
Harry only gets a half-second glimpse of Theo’s blinding smile before his brain whites out on account of Theo is kissing him.
Oh.
Tentatively, Harry tries to kiss back. He doesn’t know how this works, he’s never done it before and the way other boys in the dorm talk about kissing really doesn’t explain shite, but when his lips part Theo seems to know what to do, so Harry just relaxes and goes with it and tries to imitate whatever that thing is that Theo’s doing that’s making his knees feel weak even though he’s lying down.
The angle is weird, Theo leaning down and sideways, at some point Harry angled his head to line things up and it’s putting a crick in his neck. He shifts a little to relieve the ache and Theo pulls back. Harry can’t read Theo’s expression very well, not with the moonlight at Theo’s back but he can feel Theo looking at him.
Lying down like this, Harry feels exposed. Seen. He thinks it should scare him but it doesn’t.
Theo’s already seen the worst of him. Harry doesn’t have to be afraid. He doesn’t have to pretend.
Gently, like trying not to pop a soap bubble, Theo lays his hand along Harry’s cheek. Harry turns into it without thinking.
“I don’t need your help,” Theo says, and Harry might not be able to make out his expression but he can hear the smirk, along with affection, so he grins back.
Then he leans up and kisses Theo because kissing is actually kind of great.
Who knew?
***
The next day, the six of them all convene after lunch. Pansy and Draco take one look at Harry and make simultaneous noises: Pansy, a squeal; and Draco, a sound evocative of angry dolphins.
“What? What’s wrong?” Ron says, looking wildly between them and Harry with his wand out.
“Nothing,” Hermione sighs.
“Pay up!” Pansy crows, imperiously sticking a hand out, and both Draco and Hermione start digging in their pockets with identical scowls on their faces.
Ron throws his hands up, nearly poking Theo in the eye with his wand. “Seriously? Did you guys make a bet without me?”
“You didn’t want to bet,” says Hermione. “There you go, Pansy, ten sickles and I hope you choke on them.”
“You’re just a sore loser.”
“I did not say that!”
“Yes, you did,” says Hermione. “I said, ‘Harry is so oblivious, it’ll take at least another year until he realizes Theo likes him,’ and then Pansy said, ‘no, Theo’s not nearly that patient,’ and you said, and I quote, ‘What are you talking about, Theo’s not into Harry, I’m not taking that bet.’”
Ron falls silent as Draco slaps a single shining galleon into Pansy’s hand. “Wait. This is that—wait. Wait. Are you two—bloody fuck, hell, Merlin’s saggy prick—”
“Language, Ronald!”
“You!” Ron shouts, shoving a finger in Theo’s face. Harry fights down the urge to pull his wand; Theo can defend himself, and in fact looks like he is about point three seconds away from doing just that. “I could have made so much bloody gold on this! I was sure you liked that Greengrass girl!”
“What the fuck,” says Harry.
Theo’s icy expression dissolves, and he laughs. “Weasley, you need glasses. I don’t even like witches let alone one three years younger than me.”
“But—but—you’re always staring at her! I knew Harry liked you—”
“What?” say Harry, Hermione, and Pansy at once.
“I didn’t even know,” Harry adds.
Ron waves a hand. “Oh, come off it, it was obvious. How come you’re always staring at her, then?”
“Their parents want to betrothe them,” says Pansy.
“Oh, yuck.”
Theo turns narrowed eyes on Pansy. “How the bloody hell do you know that?”
“I have my ways,” she says smugly.
All four boys turn to Hermione, who shrugs. “I have no explanation for this one.”
“See?” Pansy wiggles shimmery blue fingernails at them. “Mystique.”
***
Much as Harry might like to cry it from the tower tops, he and Theo can’t tell anyone that they’re… an item now. Dating. Boyfriends. Whatever. Instead Harry has to keep putting up with people making eyes at him during HA lessons and regular class lessons and in the common room and during meals and—
This is a form of stress the enchantment does not appreciate. For months it has been largely occupied with its ongoing battle against the residue of Voldemort’s magic that’s stubbornly lodged inside Lily’s enchantment’s very core, but whenever Harry is in the Great Hall or the common room or a crowded corridor, it spares the attention to project threat-warning-go-away in the direction of people whose intent crosses from interest to something more selfish.
Theo, naturally, notices. “I like that spell of yours,” he says rather smugly, after the dozenth time in one day that someone (Romilda Vane, again) has been run off by the enchantment.
The enchantment is doing this for Harry’s peace of mind, but it very much approves of Harry and Theo being as close as possible, so it is pleased that its efforts have been appreciated.
Harry screws up his face. (To Theo, he looks a bit constipated.) “It likes you too. Merlin, that’s weird.”
“Does it like me like you like me?” Theo says with a wiggle of his eyebrows that might have passed for seductive on someone tall enough to fit their own limbs.
“Not even a little bit. It’s like, oh, yes, this one is negative, that one is positive, this one is very positive, and then there’s you. It’s not really, like, emotions. I dunno.”
“You would probably be a fucking great warding specialist,” Theo says thoughtfully. “You’ve got an intuition for self-aware magics that most cursebreakers would give their left foot for.”
“Huh. Really? Always thought I’d be an Auror.”
Theo shrugs. “Well, if you want to. It was just a thought.”
It sticks in Harry’s head.
***
The next fake assassination attempt goes off without a hitch: poisoned lemon pasties being sent to Horace Slughorn as an anonymous holiday gift. Dumbledore’s love for all things citrus and specifically lemon is legend among the faculty. Slughorn hates lemons. It should be simple.
“How!” Hermione howls. “HOW could this happen! What sort of professor invites students to his quarters after hours! UNDERAGE students! For TEA and DESSERT!”
“They were just talking about classes,” says Draco tiredly. “And she wasn’t alone with him, there were like three or four people there.”
“DOESN’T MATTER,” Hermione says, and she’s gone in a swirl of skirt that remains exactly regulation length despite Pansy’s best efforts.
Draco sighs.
“I wish her a very slow recovery,” Theo says idly.
“That’s rude,” Harry says, just as idly.
Theo’s fingers tap on the back of Harry’s hand. “Have you seen the way she looks at you? Bloody cow. I’d have done it myself if Slughorn didn’t beat me to it, just to get her out of the halls for a week.”
Ron squints at them. “Are you… are you sweet talking each other about, like, poison?”
“None of your business,” Harry says archly.
***
Harry’s in a daze when he comes down from Dumbledore’s office. Theo takes one look at his face and says, sharply, “What is it?”
“Horcruxes,” Harry croaks.
Theo and Draco turn ashy pale.
Harry lets them explain what a horcrux is. That the diary is one, and that the locket Voldemort stole and they found in Grimmauld Place probably is too, and Hufflepuff’s cup which is Merlin knows where, and some other things except Harry can’t concentrate on that too much because he can see the dawning horror in his friends’ faces as they start to put the pieces together.
“So, wait.” Ron’s the one to say it. “If the locket and the diary are both these… these ‘soul jars’... and they feel the same as what’s in your scar to your mum’s enchantment…”
“Yeah.” Harry presses his fingers to his scar. Theo reaches over and tugs his hand down; he realizes his nails had been digging into it hard enough to draw blood. “Yeah. There’s a bit of him. In. In my forehead.”
“Do we think Dumbledore knows?” Draco asks.
“He doesn’t know how many there are,” Harry hedges. “He wants… there’s a… Slughorn. I need a memory from Slughorn. He told Riddle about them, when Riddle was a student here.”
Ron swears and Hermione doesn’t even reprimand him.
***
Convincing Slughorn to give up the memory seems impossible. Is impossible. Nothing Harry tries, nothing any of them suggests, seems to work. If anything the more Harry tries to work him over the more the old man imitates a frightened clam.
“You need to change tactics,” Pansy says after the fifth attempt at talking to Slughorn after class ends with the portly professor actually running out of his own office. “Just back off him for a bit while we reassess.”
“Oh, good,” says Harry, who’s really not that upset to stop working on his Dumbledore-mandated assignment for a while.
He’s decided, after half a year of Slughorn, that he actually liked Snape better as a Potions professor. Insults were far preferable to hero worship, and with Snape, Harry wants to succeed out of spite, whereas with Slughorn, he has to fight himself every class not to fail out of spite.
However, he would literally rather die than ever admit as much to anyone other than Theo.
***
All the work on the Half-Blood Prince’s cryptic cribbed notes pays dividends in the form of a honey-soluble Suggestibility Solution. Pansy polyjuices into Hermione, lingers after Potions long enough to get Slughorn into his office with a tea service, and then when Harry comes bursting in with an ‘urgent question’ about the latest essay, she smoothly traps Slughorn into staying. (“Hospitality laws,” she sighs later, “gotta love ‘em.”) Then she distracts Slughorn while Harry uses a sleight-of-hand trick borrowed from the twins to put the solution in the honey.
Anyone with eyes in the Great Hall can see how liberally Slughorn applies honey to his tea.
From there, it’s a simple matter of Pansy acting like Hermione but flirtatious, and Harry implying they’re dating, and once Slughorn gets misty-eyed about Lily and James, Harry drops the bomb. “She protects me still, you know,” he says, rubbing his forehead and letting his eyes go soft and distant. “The spell… it feels like her, a little. Warm. I can almost imagine what it would be like for her to hug me.”
“Oh, my dear boy,” Slughorn says, dabbing at his eyes.
“It’s saved me from Voldemort so many times,” Harry says, “and from the dementors, and Lockhart, and the Death Eater pretending to be Professor Moody, and from the dragon… I’m just so scared, sir, I worry it can’t… it can’t protect me forever. Not when he won’t die.”
***
Seven horcruxes.
“So…” Harry adopts a look of befuddlement. “The diary, the ring, the locket, the cup, something of Ravenclaw’s, maybe his snake, and then him?”
“Indeed, my boy. Seven pieces.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense…” Harry furrows his brow. “I dunno, have seven separate pieces, and then him in the middle? Like seven anchor points for his soul. Seems like it would be balanced that way.”
And right there: a flash of something in Dumbledore’s face. There and gone too fast to track let alone identify. But something.
Dumbledore distracts him with esoteric magical theory and murmurs about how Harry doesn’t know enough about such things to intuit what Voldemort would have done. Harry thinks instead about Theo’s faith in his intuition and he knows he’s right even though it makes him sick to his stomach.
His headmaster, the leader of the good guys, is playing him. To what end Harry doesn’t know. He just knows he has to smile and pretend to go along with this until he can get out of that office.
***
“You realize what that means, right,” Theo says. “You lied to Dumbledore, one of the greatest legilimens alive, and got away with it.”
“Yeah, okay, I guess Draco and Pansy aren’t the only competent liars around here,” Harry says with a tiny grin. It feels weird to admit he’s proud of that skill, but really, he is, God knows it’s saved his arse countless times going back to when he was six years old talking his way out of trouble Dudley tried to get him into.
Theo nods very seriously. “It’s hot.”
“Sorry, what?” Harry sputters.
“I said what I said.” Theo cards his fingers through Harry’s hair with a grin. “You out-manipulated Albus Dumbledore. That’s hot.”
“You,” says Harry, “are really weird.”
“Takes one to know one.”
***
Ron and Theo get into such a fight about who’s won more matches in the last few years that Hermione, Pansy, and Harry organize an end-of-the-year chess tournament just so they can hopefully find someone else to play against. Dumbledore is too busy doing Merlin knows what to pay attention and McGonagall is too busy to read the papers that cross her desk so getting it signed off is the easiest thing Harry’s ever helped the girls get away with.
It’s worth it for two reasons: one, when McGonagall comes storming into the Great Hall in the middle of the tournament only to find a permission slip with her own signature tacked up on the notice board; and two, when Padma Patil beats Ron in fifteen minutes, blows him a kiss, and swans out of the room.
Harry laughs himself sick.
***
“Relax,” Theo murmurs. “I’ve got you.”
Harry lets his head fall back, and lets Theo press him back into his bed, and after a fleeting moment to appreciate the invisibility cloak as a way to smuggle one’s boyfriend into one’s dorm, lets himself stop thinking.
***
Sirius tells them when and where to meet the courier he’s arranged to sneak a portkey into Hogwarts. It being Sirius, Harry isn’t surprised that the time is three a.m. Annoyed, sure, considering it’s cold and exams are coming up that he’d like to study for, but not surprised.
“He can’t have sent an owl,” Hermione says doubtfully. She and Theo came along while Draco and Ron and Pansy cooked up… something… as a diversion slash booby trap in case anyone noticed them creeping back in. “Right? Owls are vulnerable.”
“He’s not always, er,” says Harry, but he doesn’t finish: they’ve all caught a very soft whooshing sound coming towards them slowly.
The creature that drops out of the sky and lands in front of them (on “the old dead tree about five minutes into the woods at the easternmost point of the Black Lake”) is no bird Harry’s ever seen. Easily four feet from feet to crown, wings twice as wide as Harry is tall, its eyes are flat black pits in the faint light of Hermione’s bluebell flame jar. It’s mostly black save for a marbled blue-purple wash of feathers down its belly and the underside of its wings.
“That’s a gorehawk,” Hermione says faintly. “That’s a—that is not a mail bird.”
The bird—gorehawk—makes a sound like a polite chainsaw and holds out one leg, to which a very thick packet has been tied. Harry edges forward cautiously. Those claws could disembowel him in the span of a second. The bird’s foot is bigger than Harry’s entire hand.
Luckily the gorehawk seems uninterested in some wizard entrails for dessert, and it hops backwards after Harry gets the letter, chittering at them before leaping skyward. Its huge wings send Harry sprawling on his arse but somehow it flies almost soundlessly. In less than a heartbeat there’s no sign it was ever here save for the gouges its takeoff left in the old log.
“Those things have been known to eat people,” Theo says. “Your godfather is insane.”
“That’s not news,” Harry mutters. “But hey, we got the portkey, so.”
“Of course we got the portkey. No one in their right mind would ever dream a gorehawk would carry post, let alone attack one.”
***
“Thank you,” Draco says hoarsely. “Thank you.”
“Yeah. Of course.” Harry pats him uncomfortably on the back. He’s still not very good at hugging anyone except Theo and Hermione and Pansy (Ron being too pointy and Draco too well-bred for easy hugging) but Draco seems to need the comfort.
“She’s on board?” Hermione confirms.
“Yeah. I… we talked about it over the Easter break.” Draco steps back and turns away, fiddling with the envelope holding his mother’s portkey; they all pretend he isn’t blinking back tears.
“We still need to make sure she won’t get murdered before you get there,” Pansy reminds them all.
Ron nods slowly. “Well, I might have had an idea.”
***
“We are never taking one of Ron’s ideas ever again,” Harry says hollowly.
He wasn’t here when they implemented it—he’d been off with Dumbledore in a cave watching his dubiously trustworthy mentor drink poison for what turned out to be a fake horcrux. Part of Harry still feels guilty, like maybe if they’d told Dumbledore ahead of time that they’d found one, but it wasn’t like they could’ve known that was the one that had previously lived in the cave, and anyways it’s a moot point now because their plan went spectacularly, desperately wrong and Dumbledore is dead.
“It was a good plan.”
Harry glares at Theo. “Dumbledore died!”
“And if he had told literally anyone that he’d be coming back from that cave high on poison and totally defenseless, then he wouldn’t have,” Theo snaps back. “Our plan was based on the assumption that Dumbledore would either be tucked away in his office, off the grounds completely, or at the absolute worst, able to defend himself seeing as he is the only person the Dark Lord ever feared. But nooooo. His own arrogance bit him in the arse and now he’s dead.”
“You’re an arse.”
“I’m right and you know it.”
Harry rolls over. His dorm bed isn’t very big, and if he pushes open the curtains the silencing and privacy spells will fail, so he doesn’t go far, but the point is just to not have to look at Theo’s face, frank and open and so, so cold.
“He knew about your scar,” Theo says from behind him. “And he hadn’t told you. The only reason I can think of is because—because he thought you’d…”
Have to die.
“He shouldn’t be dead,” Harry says helplessly.
“It’s not your fault. Nor Ron’s. If anyone’s, it’s his own. And Snape’s, obviously. It’s always at least mostly the fault of whoever holds the wand.”
Snape. Just the mention of his name sparks something poisonously unhappy among Harry’s guilt and grief. At first, he thought Snape had meant it, but now he remembers the stories Draco’s told about potions tutorials at his godfather’s knee and learning how to fly under Snape’s watchful eyes. He remembers Draco’s pale terrified face there in the moonlight and how none of their contingency plans accounted for what Draco should do if he was faced with a defenseless Dumbledore surrounded by Death Eaters egging him on.
“Do you think,” Harry says. His throat sticks and he clears it. “Do you think he did it to… save Draco?”
“Draco couldn't have cast it,” Theo says dismissively. “He doesn’t… he doesn’t know how to hate that much.”
Theo knows. Harry calls to mind an image of Voldemort’s red, red eyes.
Yeah. That’s probably enough hate.
Theo sighs. His hand lands on Harry’s shoulder, and when Harry doesn’t twitch away, begins lightly stroking up and down his bicep, over his pajama shirt. Harry relaxes half against his will into the touch. “We’re Slytherins, Harry. We… there is no collateral damage we will not accept to protect those few we love.”
By the end his voice is nearly a whisper.
Harry rolls abruptly back over. Finds Theo propped up on one elbow, blinking at the suddenness of his movement. Closeness has never made Theo any easier to read but he must really be tired because Harry can see the sincerity there. The vulnerability getting tucked away even as he watches. It’s not something Theo does on purpose or even is aware of half the time—just an instinct, like Harry’s temper or Hermione’s tendency to spit facts.
“You know, I was almost a Slytherin,” he says. “I’m not… as much of a Gryffindor as Ron, or Neville even. I’m brave, but I’m not in this for… ideals or… I mean, I am, Voldemort’s awful and I don’t want him in charge of anything other than maybe a guinea pig, but mostly I just want to be safe and for you all to be safe and if I have to kill him to make that happen then I bloody well will.”
“You’re the best of both Houses,” Theo says. His hand comes to rest on Harry’s sternum, tracing the line of bone where his shirt has slipped aside. Shivers ripple over Harry’s skin. “I admire that about you.” Harry tilts his head back, and Theo obligingly runs his fingers up the line of Harry’s throat, lingering over his pulse. “I, on the other hand, am as Slytherin as they come.”
It takes Harry a few seconds to remember how to talk. “I think it’s gonna take Slytherins to beat Slytherins. So that’s—ah—probably a good thing.”
Theo’s mouth starts retracing the path his fingertips took. Harry clutches helplessly at his shoulders. Maybe he should feel bad for wanting this right now when Dumbledore’s body isn’t even buried yet. Maybe— but feeling bad has never been something Theo cares about, and Harry can admit they’re not so different.
Draco and Narcissa turn up in the attic of Grimmauld Place two days after school lets out. Draco is bruised all over, one eye swollen shut, curled around a fractured rib. Narcissa is so wounded Harry doesn’t know how she keeps her feet when the portkey sets them down but despite her bloodied robes, scorched left arm, severe tremors, and Merlin knows what kind of curse damage, she’s the one holding Draco upright.
“Cissy!” Sirius leaps forward and reaches for her, and Harry for Draco.
“Kreacher!” Harry snaps. “Get Tonks!”
Neither Harry nor Sirius is all that good at healing spells, but they can slow bleeding and ease swelling, and Narcissa gasps out the names of a few curses she knows she was hit with, all of which make Sirius blanch. Harry thanks God and Merlin and whoever else is listening for Theo, because years of studying with His Ruthlessness mean Harry actually knows the counter for the way Narcissa’s nerves are being burned away from the inside out and the curse eating the muscles on her right calf.
Ted and Andromeda Tonks are some of Harry’s favorite people. Andi looks entirely too much like Bellatrix for anyone’s comfort but she’s frighteningly good with potions and Ted with healing spells. They both come pounding up the steps from the Floo point within minutes and set to work as if late-night house calls for bleeding curse victims are totally normal.
Oh, wait, they kind of are. Harry picks at the blood drying on his wrist and reminds himself they’re at war.
Only once they’ve been stabilized does Andromeda pause and start shaking. “Cissy. Cissy.”
“Shhh,” Ted says, drawing her away. “Come on, Drum, they’ll sleep for a while yet.”
“You can have a guest room,” Sirius says immediately. “On the second floor, it should be ready—if you want to stay. I’d appreciate it. Just in case there’s any…”
They stay.
Narcissa and Andromeda spend an hour talking the next morning and neither of them shares what they spoke of but when they unlock the door to Narcissa’s room they’re both red-eyed and smiling. Draco greets his aunt and uncle with stiff formality that lasts right up until Ted ruffles his hair and tells him he looks just like his mother.
He’s totally right, which is weird, because Harry’s always thought Draco resembles his father. But no. He has Narcissa’s bone structure and grey eyes and everything—all he got from his father is the hair.
“I understand you saved my life,” Narcissa says when she catches sight of Harry, lurking awkwardly by the door while Sirius greets his cousin.
“Oh. Er. I dunno. It was just luck I knew some of the counters.”
Ted shakes his head. “The nerve-burning curse is a real nasty bit of work. It spreads from wherever the curse lands, and there’s a chance it might’ve reached her brain by the time we got here, without the counter. We can heal and regrow nerves in the body, but brain tissue?”
“Thank Theo,” Harry says. “I only ever study stuff like that ‘cause of him.”
“Theodore Nott?” Narcissa looks to Draco for confirmation, and one perfect blonde eyebrow arches when he nods. “Well. This little conspiracy of yours grows more interesting by the hour, Dragon.”
“Mother.”
Narcissa turns back to Harry. “I understand you had a rather unfortunate childhood, Mr. Potter, but this is our way—when a life is saved, a debt is owed.”
Harry wishes the floor would open up and swallow him. Two years ago it even might have done so but by now Grimmauld Place is pretty thoroughly cowed by his mum’s enchantment and is actually nicer to Harry than anyone else, so the odds of it eating him are pretty much nil.
***
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