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Other People's Choices	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 24374 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story

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Chapter Ten—It
Harry gets on the train with his shoulders so tense that he thinks curses might bounce off them. He looks around suspiciously, but no one seems to be watching him. People are more occupied chasing their cats and shrieking to each other and hugging and promising to write.
Harry sighs and sits down in the compartment Ron and Hermione have saved. “Nothing yet,” he tells them.
“Do you think Professor Dumbledore is going to come after the train?” Hermione’s eyes are big.
“No, he would have stopped Harry in the school,” Ron tells her, and then turns to Harry. “You’re sure he didn’t put a spell on you to make you Apparate back there or something? I mean, when the train is moving and none of us can stop it to make it go back and get you.”
“Ron! Professor Dumbledore wouldn’t do that.”
Ron scowls and slumps back in his seat with his arms folded. “I don’t know about that,” he grumbles. “I’m starting to think he might do almost anything he takes a mind to.”
Harry gives him a quick smile. It’s nice to know that someone is on his side. Well, two people, really. He knows Hermione doesn’t think he should go back to the Dursleys, either. She just doesn’t distrust Dumbledore as much as he does.
Harry takes a deep breath and looks out the window, watching last-minute people bustle onto the train. He doesn’t see any of the Slytherins, but several Gryffindors. He swallows back the pang and thinks about things.
Snape can tell him stories about his mum. Blaise wants to be his real friend. Harry isn’t sure which one of those shocks him the most, but he does know he would rather think about them than about the way Malfoy’s going to taunt Harry when the summer’s done.
Dumbledore doesn’t come out and scoop him off the train, though. Neither does Snape. People finally stop scrambling around, and then there’s a shriek and a blast of steam and the Express starts rolling.
Harry leans back in his seat and closes his eyes. So he’s on his way back to the Dursleys. Well, there will be a way to escape them. Maybe Theo’s father will even come and get him before he can leave King’s Cross Station.
Snape’s face looms in front of his hidden eyes. You shouldn’t want that. Not a Death Eater.
But what alternate does he have? He has to belong somewhere. He’s never belonged at Privet Drive. He’ll never belong in Slytherin. He knows, deep inside himself, that that’s the real reason he’s fought to never go back to the Dursleys, which he didn’t do before. He had Gryffindor before.
Now he doesn’t.
“Are you okay, Harry? You look awfully upset.”
Harry manages to open his eyes and sit up. “Just hoping everything will work out. Hey, Ron, do you want to play Exploding Snap?” That will drown out their voices as well as his despair. He hopes.
*
Theo leans intently towards the window, and ignores both Blaise’s attempts to talk to him and Malfoy’s unimaginative taunts about Theo hoping to spy a possible girlfriend that way. Malfoy’s less inspired than usual. Theo would wonder what’s happened to him, but it’s honestly not worth a moment’s consideration.
More time, and more countryside, passes than Theo thought would. He’s about to give in to Blaise’s conversational overtures after all when he sees a flickering curl of red mist. Theo sits back and sighs deeply.
“What is it?” Blaise follows his gaze out the window, but he won’t know what the red mist is. No one can know that except Theo.
Theo answers anyway, by pointing his chin. “This might do something for Harry.”
“Harry? You call him Harry?”
Even Draco’s most creative taunts wouldn’t grab Theo’s attention now. He keeps looking, and he can make out tendrils of mist reaching out to embrace the train, and eyes floating on the tendrils, and the opening and closing of different mouths in it.
He hopes Harry hates the Muggles as much as he’s always claimed to.
“Your father,” Blaise murmurs almost into his ear. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with those violations of the Experimental Breeding Ban he was charged with once, would it?”
Theo reminds himself to tell Father that Blaise knows about that, somehow, and just smiles. The red tendrils have curled around the wheels of the train, but they don’t stop it. They simply keep rising, brushing against the windows, seeking out the flavor of the mind—pulsing with the right name—that Father will have told them to seek out.
This wouldn’t work if Harry didn’t remember who he was or if he’d decided in the last day to change his name. But given the circumstances, Theo thinks he hardly needs to worry about failure.
Which is probably why Father chose to send the Mirror of Mouths instead of one of the others.
*
“What is that?” Ron stops playing Exploding Snap and leans over to stare out the window.
Harry glances out, too, although he doesn’t really think he’s going to see anything. Ron and Hermione have kept giving him more and more worried glances as the ride goes on, and whispering to each other. They probably want to cheer him up, and it would be like Ron to pretend to see something interesting so that—
But then a huge eye on a tentacle flattens itself against the window, and Harry jumps to his feet. It looks like the Giant Squid if it could have crawled out of the lake and chased them all the way from Hogwarts. The tentacle flails around for a minute and then slides down the window glass, leaving behind a delicate smear of something that doesn’t look like blood.
“What the bloody hell?” Ron breathes. Hermione doesn’t even scold him for language.
“I think it’s attacking the train,” she says decisively, and starts casting some spells on the window that Harry doesn’t recognize. He thinks they might be meant to strengthen the glass or something. He finds it hard to take his fascinated gaze away from the glass and the creature hovering beyond it, even when he hears other students screaming.
And then it proves he was right to keep paying attention, because a tentacle comes curling back and smashes the window with a little tinkle, and reaches in and grabs him.
“Harry!” “Mate!”
The tentacle doesn’t squeeze. Instead, a different one with one of the eyes comes back and hovers outside the window, and stares straight into Harry’s face.
Do you hate the Muggles? The voice in his head is low, moaning, the way Harry thinks a ghost’s voice would probably sound.
Harry braces his hands against the tentacle—which doesn’t feel like anything except mist, cold and clammy—and nods. “Yes. They kept me in a cupboard and they don’t love me and they don’t feed me enough.”
“Harry!”
The eye in front of him is huge and blue, veined with red. It reminds Harry of the eyes of drunk people he’s sometimes caught a glimpse of on the telly. It studies him with such intense concentration that Harry feels like his brain is cooking. But honestly, he doesn’t know what it wants. This must be the distraction Theo and his father promised, but that doesn’t mean Harry knows what’s about to happen next.
Hermione casts some kind of hex at the beast. The spell simply blurs into the misty tentacle around Harry’s waist and fades from sight.
Do you remember why they have no right to do this to you? The voice is stronger this time, and seems to boom around inside Harry’s head.
He nods, but the beast is still waiting, so he says, “They don’t have the right to do it to me because they should have treated me better. And I should be able to go some place that has people who at least take care of me. I don’t care that much if they like me,” he adds, because that’s the truth, the truth that hides behind all his happiness about going to the Burrow and his fear of owing the Notts a debt. “It would be better if they did, though.”
The beast pauses, as if listening. Harry’s not sure if the train has stopped or if the screams are stopping. Ron and Hermione are wrestling with the tentacle reaching through the window, but they can’t move it or even really touch it; Harry sees it sliding through their hands like water.
You will need to become part of me for the journey. You cannot be solid, for we travel too fast. You must speak your name aloud.
Harry swallows. He opens his mouth, and hears Hermione scream, “Don’t do it, Harry!”
But Harry can’t pay attention to her, can’t pay attention to anything but the huge bloodshot blue eyes watching him. He doesn’t think it’ll devour him. He doesn’t think the Notts want to kill him, because what would be the point? Theo thinks he can make changes in Slytherin. He can’t do that if he’s dead.
And he needs this. He needs something to build off of or he won’t survive. He knows that as easily as he knows his name, as easily as he speaks it.
“Harry Potter.”
The world around him blurs in odd patches, as if Harry is part of a cloth that isn’t getting washed correctly. Then he’s floating out the window, yanked along by the tentacle. He’s as light as a balloon.
He can still hear the screams of his friends, but they’re oddly flattened, turned sideways, as if he is hearing them through a magical mesh across his ears. And Harry, now, is not afraid. He’s part of the mist, and when the beast turns and begins to float across the country, moving far more rapidly than the train, he’s cradled inside it. Safe. Not able to be taken out by many magical means—he knows that because the beast knows it about itself—and no Muggle ones.
The price for this may be more than he’s willing to pay, if he thinks about it. But he knows what the other price would have been, and that knowledge means he’s smiling as he flows away with the beast.
*
What the hell was that?
Draco is asking the same question of Theo, but aloud, and Blaise knows Theo won’t answer. Besides, Draco is probably only asking because he knows that Theo’s father breeds experimental beasts and he can’t keep his mouth shut, not because he knows Theo was planning to kidnap Harry.
Is it kidnapping if he goes willingly?
Blaise shakes his head and licks his lips. His face still feels frozen, not because there’s cold around like there would be from Dementors but simply because the beast is so strange. He watches the little smile playing around Theo’s lips and hopes that he’s right, that Theo values Harry and the changes he can make to Slytherin too much to hurt him.
Or rather, perhaps he should hope Theo’s father values him that way.
The door of their compartment abruptly bangs open. Blaise isn’t the only Slytherin to spin around with his wand in his hand. Granger stands there, and Weasley behind her, braced like lions, their own wands pointed at Draco and Blaise.
“Which one of you did it?”
Blaise only shakes his head. “What are you talking about?”
“That thing that attacked the train ran off with Harry.” Granger stalks a few steps further into the compartment, and if she sees the wands pointing at her, she’s really good at pretending that she doesn’t. Her entire, burning, radiating attention is pointed at Blaise. “You were talking to him sometimes. He mentioned it. He said you call him by his first name. Did you trick him into going away with that thing? Did you?”
“No,” Blaise says. It’s the truth, after all, and maybe he can find out a little more about what happened from Granger. It’s not like he was in the compartment with Harry to see. “He went away with it on his own? Willingly?”
For the first time, Granger falters, and shivers. Weasley surges forwards as if to back her up, but Granger isn’t interested in striking out at them right now, Blaise can tell. “I—don’t know. It reached a tentacle into the carriage, and he said some things…it made it sound like he was answering questions the beast asked him. Why would he do that?”
“What kinds of questions?” Blaise doesn’t have the first idea what the beast is, so he doesn’t know what it would have asked.
“He said his name, and he said that he didn’t mind going somewhere where people didn’t like him, but it would be better if they did.” Granger blinks hard and focuses on Theo, who has eased out from behind Blaise. Blaise doesn’t know why Theo is doing that when most of the time he takes care to stay in the shadows, but he turns around, too. “Do you know about this?”
“Even if he went with the beast willingly,” Theo says softly, “you’re asking who when you should be asking a more important question.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why.” Granger flinches, and Theo continues, “What’s waiting for him that’s so bad Harry would go with an unknown magical creature to get away from it?”
“Nothing! I mean—not nothing. But it was going to work out. And the beast could do anything. It could kill him. It could eat him. It could lock him away somewhere and leave him without any way to see us ever again.”
“What a pity that would be,” Draco interjects, his voice thick with smugness.
Blaise rolls his eyes, but keeps it to himself, because Weasley has turned on Draco, roaring, “Shut up, Malfoy! I bet it was you who arranged this, eh? Daddy keep that beast in his cellars?”
“I most certainly did not do such a vulgar thing—”
“This isn’t going to do any good, Ron!” Granger is tugging on Weasley’s arm, and Blaise finds himself glad that they’re going to be spared a full on Malfoy-Weasley fight. They’re never any fun, not least because Draco sulks for days afterwards. “We have to find a way to get a message to Professor Dumbledore! He has to know that something took Harry!”
“What about getting a message to Professor Snape?” Blaise asks. Granger stares at him, and he adds, “I mean, he is Harry’s Head of House. And that means that he’s in charge of his well-being while he’s anywhere near Hogwarts. That includes the train.”
“I don’t have any way to get a message, anyway,” Granger snaps. “So it’s moot.”
“But you could still contact Professor Snape when you have a way to send one.”
“There’s a way to send one.”
Blaise glances at Draco, wondering what game he’s playing now. If he has a secret Portkey, he’s kept it well-hidden. Of course, maybe he’s just going to offer Granger the use of his eagle-owl, as out of character as that would be for him.
“There are a few seventh-year Slytherins who specialize in message charms,” Draco says casually. “It happens that one of them owes me a favor.”
Blaise knows exactly who he’s talking about—Kyle Avery—and he gapes before he can stop himself. Then he realizes that maybe Draco wants to see people gaping, and he closes his mouth hastily.
Behind him, Theo is listening, silent and still.
“Why would you do that?” Granger asks.
“Because I want you to send the message to Professor Snape.” Draco steps forwards. “I want you to acknowledge that your perfect Potter is a Slytherin. And if he went with that beast willingly, maybe he even plotted with someone to escape the train and your precious Professor Dumbledore. I want you to say that. Actually, never mind, I’ll send the message, because Avery would only insult you anyway.” He opens the door of the compartment and vanishes out of it before anyone can stop him.
Blaise keeps from looking at Theo with a massive effort. He wonders if he should have said something, but. Well. Too late now.
*
Theo can’t help frowning a little as he listens. Professor Snape, at least, knows about the deal that Harry made with Theo and his father.
On the other hand, he has no idea how fast the Mirror of Mouths moves. And he has no idea where Father stores it when he’s not using it. Neither does Theo, so not even reading Theo’s mind will reveal the secret to him.
Granger and Weasley tumble after Draco, so that leaves only Blaise as a potential problem. Theo looks at him, and holds his eyes until Blaise says softly, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I do. And more, my family does.”
Theo goes back to looking out the window. He’s actually fairly curious to find out whether Father will let him meet Harry when he gets home.
*
Kain: Yes, Blaise's mother still kills her husbands in this version. And Harry doesn't necessarily want to dismiss Blaise, but he's also suspcious that the Slytherins are using him for something.
Maybe it shouldn't have been called a distraction? Because this is it. I didn't want you to accidentally think that it's not Theo's father behind the creature taking Harry from the train! He most assuredly is.
Severus never thought Theo's father would move so soon, or he would not have let Harry leave the school.
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