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Inter Vivos	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 42948 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this writing.

Chapter List
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Title: Inter Vivos

Disclaimer: J. K.
Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun
and not profit.

Pairings: Harry/Draco,
Ron/Hermione, Dean/Ginny. There�s also a Harry-Snape mentor relationship and
strong Trio friendship.

Rating: R/M

Warnings: AU,
starting off on a tangent in second year and then getting progressively farther
away from canon events. Mentions of child abuse (the Dursleys� canon abuse of Harry), profanity, angst,
violence, eventual�very eventual�slash sex.

Summary: AU. The Parseltongue incident in second year caused a more violent
explosion in Gryffindor House than anyone could have foreseen. Harry, trying to
withdraw from everyone except his two best friends, finds himself helped by
people he couldn�t have foreseen either, first Snape and then Draco Malfoy. Sometimes,
all it takes is one sudden impulsive throwing of a stone for the ripples of
change to spread through several lives.

Author�s Notes: This
is a fic for heeroluva, who
made a very generous donation to marriage equality through the LJ comm livelongnmarry. She asked
for an AU fic in which Harry tries to withdraw from
everyone after a betrayal, but Snape helps him, eventually becoming his mentor,
and Draco slowly becomes first his friend and then his lover. �Inter Vivos� will probably be twenty-six chapters long, and the
chapters will vary greatly in length, usually covering at least a few weeks or months.
The title is Latin for �between the living,� and also describes a kind of legal
trust in which property is given to another person while the owner is still
alive, as well as living organ donation.

Inter Vivos

Chapter
One�Vividness

�� Harry shook
his head as he slowly climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Ron and Hermione had
dragged him up to the Gryffindor common room as if they were afraid that
someone would be chasing them after what he�d said to the snake, and the way
they�d talked about Parseltongue�

�� It�s not as though I knew what it was before
I spoke it, Harry thought angrily as he pushed open the door. I didn�t even know it was evil or that that
was the reason Slytherin�s symbol is a snake. No one
ever tells me anything like that!

�� He sighed
and shook his head again, then stumbled over to his bed and collapsed in the
middle of it. He could just imagine what kind of rumors were going to fly
around the school tomorrow, probably saying that he was the Heir of Slytherin
and a Dark Lord bent on taking over Hogwarts and all the rest. The mere thought made him tired.

�� I might as well get some rest now, before it
starts happening, he thought, and closed his eyes.
Sleep dived on him like a phoenix, and Harry exhaled once, a silent plea to
anyone who might be watching, and who might care, and who might have the power
to make it better.

*

�� Harry woke feeling
as though someone had filled his head with cotton. He heard voices yelling, but
they drifted as if on the other side of a veil. He rubbed his eyes with one
hand and slowly forced them open, against the sticky pressure of sleep that
wanted him to keep them shut.

�� His limbs
were too heavy. His mouth was full of a bad-tasting yellow liquid. Harry
scowled and spat. What had happened to him? Had he slept twelve hours, like he
did the time after the Dursleys made him miss sixteen
meals and he stayed awake for two days after they did let him eat wondering if he was going to die from it?

�� Harry!�

�� Someone
flung open his curtains and dragged him out of his bed. Harry stumbled. He
still couldn�t get his eyes to let him see properly, and his hand shook as he
tried to find his glasses.

�� But then he
smelled fire, and that jolted him enough to make him open his eyes.

�� There was a
smoldering pile of�things�in the middle of the room, with a spell wrapped
around it that seemed to keep the fire from creeping towards the beds. Harry
snatched his wand in one motion and jammed his glasses on his face. He thought
he could remember a water charm that Professor Flitwick
had taught them the other day if he needed to.

�� And then he
heard the yelling and frowned. Dean was saying, �Seamus,
how could you?� Neville was just
repeating Seamus�s name over and over again at the
top of his lungs. Ron was crowding close to Harry and snapping something at
Seamus so low and fast that Harry couldn�t even understand it. Had Seamus
caused that fire? Why?

�� And then he
saw that the top of his trunk was open.

�� Harry
froze. Whatever spell had made his sleep heavy, and he thought now it must be a
spell, seemed to have come back full force. He strained his eyes, without
moving, for a glimpse of his Invisibility Cloak and photo album.

�� They were
gone.

�� They were gone.

�� Harry
looked back at the fire again, and clenched his hands into fists. He wanted to
curse and cry and swear, and at the same time, he doubted anything would be
enough to express his feelings. When he blinked and stared past the smoke, he
saw that crumbled bits of his Nimbus were part of the fire, too. The three
objects he loved most, gone.

�� At least Hedwig is safe, he thought
wearily, and closed his eyes. She would
have flown away if Seamus went after her. He was sure she was smart enough
to tell the difference between someone who wanted to pet her and someone who
wanted to kill her.

�� Why did
you do that, Seamus?� Dean hissed the question and stepped past the bed, from
the sound of his footsteps, to put a hand on Harry�s shoulder. Harry leaned
into the touch for a moment, dully grateful that some of his friends cared
enough to protect him.

�� Why in the
bloody hell?� Ron asked, saying the words really carefully, in a way that Harry
knew would make Mrs. Weasley gasp if she heard them.

�� Look,�
said Seamus, who sounded defensive and gleeful at the same time. Like Dudley,
Harry thought, and scrubbed at his eyes. �My mother had a cousin who was a Parselmouth, and they burned all his things and turned him
out of the house. It removed the curse he put on the members of his family.
These are the only things I had time to burn, but they�re his most precious
things. He�ll have to leave Gryffindor Tower now.�

�� There was a
long silence.

�� You�re a
right idiot,� Dean said.

�� Expelliarmus!� snapped Ron, the spell they�d learned
in the dueling club that afternoon, and Seamus went flying backwards.

�� Harry
d-didn�t curse anybody,� Neville said, and for once Harry thought his stammer
came from how upset he was rather than from fear. �You c-cursed somebody. You made
him sleep so he wouldn�t hear you when you c-came in and took the things from
his trunk, didn�t you?�

�� He has to
leave,� Seamus repeated, and under the surface of his voice Harry could hear
fear. �He has to. He�s a Parselmouth. That just means that he fooled the rest of us
all this time and he was evil.�

�� Harry had
heard enough. He opened his eyes and locked them with Seamus�s,
and Seamus flinched and folded his arms around himself as if he expected to
drop dead just from looking at Harry.�

�� Then Harry
shook his head and turned away. He had nothing to say.

*

�� And he
continued to have nothing to say, during the days and weeks afterwards. If
asked questions in class, he would reply in a monotone, and usually to say, �I
don�t know.� When Professor McGonagall summoned him to discuss the
confrontation with Seamus, he shrugged or nodded or shook his head as her
questions required. When everyone tried to talk to him during class or in the
corridors or at meals, he�d turn away. He especially couldn�t bear the sight of
Seamus flinching from him, looking upset most of the time, but triumphant the
rest.

�� Most people
were happy enough to leave him alone, given the constant hum of rumors that he
was the Heir of Slytherin. Harry knew some of the protective amulets being sold
were engraved with his name; they were specifically meant to protect someone
against him.

�� He turned
away from everyone who tried to talk to him�except Ron and Hermione.

�� They
wouldn�t be left behind. They wouldn�t be left out. They followed him to the
lake and sat against the trees whilst he threw stones in, chattering quietly
between themselves. They waited for him after
McGonagall�s interrogation and escorted him to an empty classroom they�d found
where Harry could watch, in silence, as they practiced a few of the spells picked
up in the Dueling Club. Hermione insisted on lending him her notes on a few
occasions when Harry was too depressed to go to class. Ron owled his mother for
protective incantations and placed them around Harry�s bed and trunk himself,
giving a dark look at Seamus all the while. Seamus had had a month of
detentions with Filch. Neither Ron nor Hermione appeared to think it was
enough, but Harry managed to stop them from taking revenge on Seamus. They�d be
the ones suspected immediately if any new trouble happened to him, after all.

�� Harry kept
his head down as much as possible and did the bare minimum of what was required
of him. Classes and days blurred. He couldn�t even muster any enthusiasm for
the plan they�d come up with to find out about the Chamber of Secrets. Of
course he was staying at the school for Christmas, because why would he want to
go to the Dursleys�? But when Hermione reminded him
about the Polyjuice Potion, Harry just stared at her
and shrugged.

�� She
exchanged a worried look with Ron, but didn�t mention it again.

*

�� As always,
the Potter brat had learned a harsh lesson from life and responded in an
inappropriate way. Last year, he had been marked by danger; he continued to
seek it out. And this time he had learned that Gryffindors were not all the
shining avatars of light he had thought they were, and responded by shunning
most of his friends and acting as if the world had ended.

�� Severus
Snape disliked such behavior. It seemed to him to undervalue the actual end of the world, which would
come about when the Dark Lord willed it or the Muggles managed to poison each
other in any of a hundred ways. He sometimes held academic
debates with himself at night over which way would be nastier.

�� He first deigned
to notice Potter�s stupidly changed behavior during a class session in which
the boy stopped halfway through making his potion. He stared at the far side of
the room with blank, glazed eyes, his hands trembling slightly. Miss Granger
scolded him in a harsh running whisper and tried to smuggle the necessary
ingredients into his cauldron, but this particular potion, the Lizard�s Tail,
suitable for correcting minor physical deformities caused by hexes, was too
complicated and she had to keep most of the attention on her own potion.

�� Severus
circled closer step by step, breaking Longbottom�s
confidence into pieces on the way, to give Potter�s dread time to build.

�� He saw,
when he reached the boy�s side, that he might have saved himself the effort.
Potter hadn�t noticed him. His eyes were so distant that Severus was reminded
of an afternoon when Lily�

�� But the past is another country, he
thought, and snapped his fingers in front of Potter�s face. The boy started
violently backwards and tripped over his own robes. His head hit the cauldron
on the way down and knocked it flying. Several of his Slytherins laughed when
streaks of green and red covered the faces of the Gryffindors behind Potter.

�� Severus
permitted himself a slight sneer. Yes, it was potentially amusing. But he preferred to save his laughter for
genuine irony and keen wit and other things that none of this current crop of
Slytherins would understand if they cut their throats on them.

�� Potter,�
he hissed, stooping down so that the boy would be the main one to hear his
words. �What are you doing?�

�� He received
no answer, which had become the boy�s usual modus
operandi. He simply sat on the floor with potion in his hair and stared at
Severus.

�� Severus
briefly formed one hand into a fist under the cover of the right sleeve of his
robe. He had better things to do than play nursemaid to Potter�s overset
balance. But the Headmaster would expect him to do certain things after confronting
Potter so dramatically in class, the first of his professors to do so.

�� Detention,�
he said, straightening, �for your continued disrespect of a professor. And ten
points from Gryffindor for your continual
incompetence.� He Vanished the inert, harmless
potion from the other amoeba-brained idiots with a wave of his wand and turned
to look at Potter.

�� It wasn�t
his fault!� Granger began.

�� Ten points
from Gryffindor for continually intruding your nose where it is not wanted,�
Severus snapped, and lowered his voice for her, too. �And where Potter doesn�t
want it either, I imagine.�

�� She
promptly flushed, her eyes widened, and her overlarge front teeth stabbed into
her lip as if he had cast the Killing Curse at her. The Weasley boy, of course,
glared daggers from the side. Severus wanted to rub at the headache he could
feel forming behind his temples. Was it even possible for someone to be so young? Obviously it must be, since he
could see the evidence existing right in front of him, but he did entertain
certain wild hopes that someday he might wake from the nightmare that the last
eleven years had been and discover that he had actual intelligent students.

�� I want her
to.�

�� Potter�s
words were without fire, uninteresting sounds produced solely to reassure his
friend. Granger looked as if the sun had risen, nevertheless. Weasley relaxed
slightly as he put a hand on Granger�s shoulder.

�� And Severus
changed several of the calculations he had already made, because if Potter
retained a connection to his friends, that might be a way to reach him.

�� Detention
at seven-o�clock tonight, Potter,� he said. �If you are late, you will discover
that frog liver is not the only
acceptable ingredient in a Lizard�s Tail Potion.� And he swept away, not
waiting for the nod of acknowledgment, which he knew he would not get.

�� He was
almost glad for the task that confronted him now. No one else would break
through the barriers of apathy closing Potter off from the world because they
pitied him too much. Severus at least did not have that obstacle.

*

�� Draco bit
his lip thoughtfully as he bottled his Lizard�s Tail Potion�perfect as usual,
of course�and took it up to the front of the classroom. He�d caught a glimpse
of Potter�s face when Professor Snape was scolding him.

�� It bothered
him. Potter had been alive just a few
weeks ago, challenging Draco at the Dueling Club as if he had an idea how to
fight and then charging in like the bloody hero he was to �save� Finch-Fletchley from that snake. Now he looked as if he didn�t care
at all.

�� That really bothered Draco. Potter should be
angry. He shouldn�t weep. That didn�t coincide with Draco�s sense of the
fitness of things.

�� And from
the way Professor Snape was sneaking sidelong glances at Potter, he thought
much the same thing. Draco made up his mind in that moment that he was going to
watch the detention Potter had tonight as closely and as quietly as he could.
If Professor Snape brought Potter back to life, that was fine. Draco could have
his rival again and everything would be right with the world. He could
concentrate on having fun at Hogwarts during the holidays and writing letters
to his parents that pretended he was sorry to miss an endless round of boring
parties.

�� If Professor Snape didn�t succeed�

�� Draco felt
his nostrils flare as his lips clamped together in a thin line. Well, then he
would have to do what he always did when Vincent and Gregory didn�t understand
his orders, which was most of the time: he�d do it himself.
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Inter Vivos