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A Brother to Basilisks	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 85172 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 15
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One—Getting Rid of the Problems
Severus rubbed his hand through his hair. His eyes ached and the skin of his face felt as if it was made of dust. But he knew what advice he was going to give, and it would have been the same if Harry had come to fetch him in the morning or now, past midnight.
“We are going to get rid of her body and pretend this never happened. Let the Ministry think she ran away to join the Dark Lord or self-combusted in her arrogance. But a body would only cause us problems right now.”
Dash lifted his head to give Severus a small nod. Severus turned to face Harry. Having his plan approved by the basilisk was a start, but he knew he needed to convince the person who would be the most affected by it.
Harry was nibbling his lip, his brow so furrowed that it almost hid his scar. “But I’m not good at lying. And what if they feed me Veritaserum? Or if they have someone skilled at Legilimency?”
“That is why we have been working on your Occlumency. And if the Ministry force-fed you Veritaserum, they would have much bigger legal problems to worry about than the apparent disappearance of an adult witch who can leave on her own if she wants to.”
“But…”
Severus sighed and knelt down in front of Harry. The Gryffindor common room was still covered with the soft wards he had set up the instant he entered, to keep noise muffled and cast a sleeping spell over the children in their rooms. The wards shimmered like cobwebs lit from within by the moon, covering Harry’s face with softly shifting shadows. “Harry. I know you want to do the right thing. But sometimes the right thing is also the thing that will cause the least fuss and bother.”
“One of my allies might ask where she went.”
“That would be an excellent way to test their loyalty. Spread two rumors and see which one reached the ears of the Ministry first.”
Harry stared at him. Then he said, “You can’t believe that they’re all plotting to betray me.”
“Not all of them. But there’s a reason that you have Elena working on that device to test loyalty, don’t you?” Severus frowned a little. Elena still had not confided her research to him.
“Yes. I know. I just don’t want to think…”
Harry sounded distressed enough that Severus reached out to touch him on the shoulder. “I do understand that. But we have to do what makes the most sense for us, and rooting out traitors among our allies is one of them. Besides, Bellatrix has proven that we can’t anticipate all the magic they know. Leave this to me, please, Harry.”
Harry wavered for a second. Then he said, “I won’t look weak if—”
“No. They would expect an adult, your guardian, to handle it anyway.”
“And you won’t be in danger.”
Harry had taken a step demandingly near to him before he said that, and now his eyes blazed up at Severus like twin embers. Touched, Severus stood up and let his hands rest fully on Harry’s shoulders for a moment, gazing at him with what even he knew was deeper love than he’d ever felt before.
He’d loved Lily. He’d loved Albus, once. But this was—something else.
“No, I won’t. The Ministry won’t dare harm someone like me openly, and I don’t think we’ll see an assassin in the night.”
Harry swallowed and nodded. “All right. Are Dash and I just going to go back to bed and act like we don’t know anything about this? What if Umbridge told someone where she was going before she came here, though?” He hesitated, then added, “And what about the Fat Lady? She knows Umbridge was outside asking to come in.”
“I’ll speak to her.” Severus’s mind was already moving ahead. Minerva commanded the loyalty of most of the portraits in the school now that she had taken on the Headmistress’s role. She would help him with this. “And yes, of course you go back to bed. You need your sleep.”
Harry looked at him as if he was mad, but luckily for Severus, Dash seemed to understand what he meant. He came over and gently herded Harry up the stairs towards his bedroom, glancing back at Severus once to flicker out his tongue and look content and placid.
Severus nodded back and exited the portrait hole. The Fat Lady looked at him with wide, innocent eyes.
“I’ll talk to the Headmistress about it,” Severus said. “But for now, I need you to pretend that you never saw Dolores Umbridge in the corridor today or let her in. Can you do that?”
“Saw who?”
Severus smiled thinly. Even if he would need Minerva’s help to get the portrait’s ultimate aid, he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that the Gryffindor guardian had disliked Umbridge.
In fact, Severus thought to himself as he started towards the gargoyle that guarded Minerva’s office, I wonder if anyone did? She probably simpered and played up to Minister Fudge, but could he stand her? Did she die alone and friendless?
Once, that might have mattered to him in an abstract way. He had assumed for decades that that was the way he would die.
But not now. Not now.
*
Harry came slowly down the stairs the next morning. It really did feel almost like a dream. Well, either that or he was going to come around the corner and someone was going to point sternly at Umbridge’s body lying there with a huge hole in her shoulder and tell him he was accountable for this.
But when he looked around cautiously, he didn’t see anything. Well, maybe there was a faint spot of blood on a rug, but Dash coiled neatly on top of it before anyone could point it out. Harry nodded gratefully to him and tried to listen to Ron speculating about whether they would have a boring class with Umbridge or a really boring class.
What did Severus do with the body, since you didn’t eat it?
He put it in a powerful acidic potion. I could smell some of the ingredients he was using the minute he got them out of storage. The air currents in the school do odd things to my sense of smell.
Harry turned around and stared at Dash, actually appalled. Ron frowned at him, but then grimaced and nodded. “Yeah, sorry, mate. I keep forgetting how she wants to put you in detention.”
He dissolved her body in acid?
Of course he did. It would cause too much lingering magic in the air if he Vanished it, and the smell would be distinctive even to humans if he burned it. Dash slithered forwards without taking his tail off the spot of blood and wound gently around Harry. Are you all right? What’s the matter?
Harry swallowed roughly. This was probably one of those things Dash would never understand enough to be bothered by.
Yes, you’re right, Dash said. It’s an efficient means of getting rid of the body. Does it need to be anything else?
He sounded really curious. Harry straightened his shoulders and explained as best he could. It’s just not the right way to dispose of a body. I can’t think of anyone’s body I would get rid of that way. He tried to think about it, to make sure, but his mind kept returning to a conjured image of Umbridge dissolving in acid. No one. Ever.
Dash gave a rippling shake of his spine. We disagree.
“Mate?”
Harry managed to look up and contain his sickly smile when he saw how concerned Ron was looking. “I’m all right. I just got graphic details of his last meal from Dash, and I did not need that when we’re about to head down to breakfast.”
Ron shuddered. “No. Don’t tell me. And speaking of breakfast, we’re going and not waiting for Hermione. If she wants to stay up until midnight studying some book about who-knows-what, then she can find her own way.”
Even as Ron dragged him out of the portrait hole and Dash followed, Harry had to admire Ron’s discretion. It more than likely that Hermione was researching Horcruxes and they would all benefit from it, but he wasn’t going to mention anything even close to that where there were other people to hear.
Yes, admire his discretion. It means that you aren’t thinking silly things about your enemies.
Harry tightened his grip on his own rebelling stomach and said, It’s still wrong, Dash. Maybe we had to do it to protect—ourselves. But it was wrong. I never want to forget my feelings about this, or I might wake up a Dark Lord someday.
Dash started laughing. He didn’t stop all the way to the Great Hall. He kept it up when Harry caught Severus’s eye and Severus nodded back to him, pale but composed. Twenty minutes into breakfast, when Hermione finally came flying in through the doors carrying a heavy book and Harry felt he could meet Draco’s eye without blushing, Dash was still rolling over and over on his back, his laughter hissing through Harry’s head.
Stop it! Harry finally snapped. He’d tried to feed Dash, and Dash had actually refused food, something that had never happened before, as far as Harry could work out. What the fuck are you laughing at?
Maybe it was the swear word that Harry so rarely used, but Dash managed to pull himself upright long enough to take a bite of food from Harry’s fingers and answer. You. As if you would ever become a Dark Lord. You don’t have the cruelty or the ambition or the will to hurt people. Giving your guardian permission to do what he needs to do to remove a body is hardly going to make you one. And odd prejudices that you have about dissolving it in acid aside—
Harry shuddered and almost put the bread back on his plate as he thought about that. Dash shot his head forwards and snagged the treat on the tip of one of his fangs before he pulled back, looking pleased with himself.
You can think about it this way if you want, Harry. If I’d eaten her, then she would have been at least partially dissolved in my stomach acids. Even they might not have been able to do anything about the jowls, but you can’t ask for miracles from a basilisk’s stomach. I am enough of a miracle by myself.
Harry shuddered again. I still don’t want to forget my morals.
If I think you are, then I’ll say something about it. And you can’t even ignore me because our minds are connected. What about that?
I don’t trust your moral compass.
You kill one little toad, and everyone turns against you.
Harry sighed, and went to class with Dash sulking in the back of his head. Honestly, he didn’t know what Dash wanted. Of course Harry was going to feel bad about Umbridge’s body being destroyed by acid. That was the kind of person he was.
*
Only Harry, Draco thought, as he held Harry’s hand behind a shield in the library and listened to him pour out his fears for his own soul, would worry about something like this. But that’s the kind of person he is.
“So what do you think?”
“That you should have sold tickets to Umbridge’s poisoning so everyone who hated her could watch.”
Harry gave a small smile and looked down at the table. “But that’s what you say when you’re joking, Draco. Will you be serious for a minute? What do you think about it? Should I have held Dash back?"
Draco spent a minute looking at Dash, who was coiled around one leg of Harry’s chair. Dash lifted his head and gave Draco the definition of a patient look, or at least a patient look through clear, closed eyelids.
Draco decided that meant he couldn’t tell Harry everything he thought. He simply turned back and shook his head. “I wouldn’t have. But you already know that I’m not as nice a person as you are.”
Harry opened his mouth to answer for a moment, then ended up closing it and saying weakly, “Well, I mean, you’re not a horrible person.”
Draco laughed. Harry hastily added, “You fight for what you believe in, and you try to protect the people who are important to you. It’s not always nice, but you don’t need that to be a—a loyal person.”
Draco nodded. “And you know that Professor Snape isn’t always a nice person, either. Would you call him a good one?”
“In a way?” Harry grimaced a second later. “No, I know he is. He took me in when no one else would have. Or could,” he added in a low voice. “I know the Weasleys wanted to, but they’re struggling as it is, and I don’t know if they could have faced up to the fame and the newspapers and—everything.”
Draco wanted to roll his eyes, but held himself back. He also wanted to say that the Weasleys would have eaten up the attention and maybe used some of the money that Harry’s presence would have brought in, once people in the wizarding world knew where he was, to fix up their ratty clothes and equally ratty house.
But he knew Harry liked the Weasleys, so he didn’t.
“Let’s lay aside the self-deprecation for a bit,” Draco said, and ignored the glare Harry gave him. “Yes, you’re right. He did something he wanted to do, and he did it without the selfish reasons lots and lots of other people would have brought to the table. Does that make what he did purely good?”
“Some of the things he’s done aren’t.”
Draco nodded. Harry had come back from some of those discussions with Professor Snape with haunted eyes, and Draco had decided that he wasn’t going to ask. “But it’s up to you how you deal with that, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Harry sat up and focused on him.
“You don’t have to say that he can’t be your guardian and he’s a horrible person just because he does things you don’t approve of. It’s not all or nothing, Harry. Not black or white. I know you can see more nuance in the world than that.” Draco gentled his voice a little when he saw how distressed Harry looked, and reached out a hand. “What’s the matter with seeing it in this action?”
Harry looked away and chewed on his thumb. Then he took his wand out and tapped it on the table. Draco kept looking at him. He didn’t think Harry really wanted to lie. He wanted to say something, and presumably he would say it before they died of hunger or Madam Pince came around the corner to scold them for the noise they were making.
Harry finally swallowed and said, “I hate how much I liked it.”
“What? The—thing Dash did this morning?” Draco was completely confused. Harry wasn’t acting like he blamed Dash for anything, but himself for not restraining Dash. That was sadly typical.
Harry looked up at him with brilliant, haunted eyes, and Draco felt something shift in himself. He’d do a lot to keep Harry from ever looking like that, but he also loved him when he did. He loved Harry in all his moods, even when he was being stupid and self-deprecating.
“What Dash did,” Harry whispered. “And what Severus did. There’s part of me that liked it. That’s happy about it. Even though the rest of me is horrified. What kind of person does that make me?”
Draco understood then. Harry was refusing to see the black and white in this situation because he was afraid he would lose the white forever if he did.
Still, Draco wasn’t going to lie and say that he thought Harry was a horrible person. Harry would only get angrier at him later on for lying than he would right now.
“A totally normal one,” Draco said, and captured Harry’s hand when he would have drawn it away. “Someone who isn’t always going around plotting revenge on his enemies, but is perfectly happy when it happens to them.”
“She wasn’t—”
“I don’t care if she didn’t start out that way!” Draco barely remembered to lower his voice, remembering the people who might overhear them past the shield if he should loudly enough. “She was by the time she came up to the common room last night! She was threatening to torture and kill you, you said so yourself!”
“But if I have a basilisk and I’m as powerful as everyone keeps insisting I am, then isn’t hurting someone like her—overkill?”
Draco sighed and shook his head. Then he said, “No one else is going to blame you and give you the whip that you’re looking for, Harry.”
Harry’s eyes promptly narrowed, something Draco was glad to see. “I’m not looking for someone to whip me!”
His voice had got loud. An older Ravenclaw leaned around the shelf and glared at them until Dash lazily lifted his head. Then she gulped and ducked back out of sight.
“You keep acting like it,” Draco snapped, waiting until he was sure that no more nosy Ravenclaws would intrude on their conversation. “Like you want someone to blame you for not restraining Dash, and all sorts of things that aren’t your fault.”
“It would be easier.”
“Too bad.”
Harry started and looked up. Draco took his hand away and stood up. He was frustrated by the way that Harry kept seeking out someone else to tell him he was wrong. It was wallowing, and that was just as self-indulgent as someone who never thought he was wrong and went through life expecting everyone to cater to him.
“You’re not an evil person,” Draco said. “I’m not going to tell you that you are just because it would make you feel better and more like what your life was with the Dursleys.”
Harry’s face immediately turned as red as his Gryffindor Quidditch uniform, and he jumped to his feet. “I don’t wish they were back in my life! You take that back!”
Draco didn’t even have time to snap, since at that moment Madam Pince swooped down on them and shoved them outside the library doors so fast she might have forcibly Apparated them. Harry ended up staring as Dash slithered out on his own, luxuriantly stretching and rolling his coils. Draco rubbed his face and decided that he would go work on his essays in his bedroom, since he doubted they’d be welcome in the library again any time soon.
“Draco?”
“I do love you,” Draco said, quietly, not looking back. “But I’d like you a lot more at the moment if you got over this self-blame and this urge to think that everything that goes well in your life is about to go wrong.”
He felt Harry standing there, staring at him, as he strode down the corridor and out of sight. But he still didn’t look back.
*
That could have gone better.
Harry winced a little as the thought came from Dash and turned around. “Yeah, it could have,” he muttered, and began the slow walk down to the dungeons, where Severus was waiting to practice Dark Arts with him.
His mind was on the way Draco’s face had looked when he accused Harry of wanting his life with the Dursleys back. So angry and impatient and frustrated. Harry didn’t want to make people look like that. Especially people he loved.
He wanted that more than he wanted to worry about whether he was a bad person for not worrying about Umbridge’s death.
He came to a stop in the middle of the corridor, staring at the wall. A Hufflepuff first-year made an annoyed noise and walked around him. Dash coiled up beside Harry, almost balancing on his tail as he stared inquiringly into his face. What grand revelation have you had now?

Holy shit. What I was trying to do to myself was really twisted.
Dash bobbed his head. Of course. And you see now why I didn’t try to reason you out of it? You were so sure that I was the bad—basilisk in this scenario that you wouldn’t have listened to me. Or Severus, either, since he did something “evil.” It had to be Draco. I’m glad that he finally made you see sense.
Harry blew out his breath softly and kept walking. He’d send Draco an owl, he decided, apologizing and telling him that now he saw what he meant. That way, if Draco didn’t want to talk to him right now, he didn’t have to.
You are growing wiser every day, Dash said, with an approving flick of his tail and flick of his voice down the bond. I must admit I look forward to the time when you require no such reassurance, but it is hardly your fault that it happened today.
“So do I, Dash,” Harry muttered aloud. At least I think I’m in better control of it now.
*
Severus had braced himself for recriminations when Harry came into the classroom where they did most of their Dark Arts practice, but Harry only gave him a slightly embarrassed smile and said, “I’m ready to cast the spells now. Could you conjure the dummies?”
Silently, Severus did so, his narrowed, interested eyes fastened on the boy’s face. Harry took a step back and drew his wand. Then he whirled into the practice with fewer hesitations than Severus had ever seen. Severus watched as dummies erupted into straw and ripped apart as if fracturing before a great wind and blew apart into dangling chunks. He shook his head a little as he watched.
“What brought this on?” he finally asked, when Harry paused for a sip of water that Dash insisted he take.
Harry blinked and looked up. Severus had to stare. He didn’t think he had ever seen those green eyes so clear.
“Some friends shook some sense into me,” Harry said. “And I realized that if other people can live through hiding bodies and using Dark Arts without being corrupted, there’s no reason I can’t.” He grinned a little. “I was acting like I was special and had it worse than other people. You know? The way you always told me I was.”
“Those days are behind us now.”
“Yes. For all sorts of reasons.”
Harry grinned at him again and walked out of the classroom. Severus found himself staring after, and then meeting the basilisk’s eyes. Only when Dash gave him a little nod did he relax completely.
Not what I expected. But I am glad to see my lessons finally bearing fruit.
*
SickPuppy: Thank you! I promise that Harry isn't going to take steps backwards now; Draco and Dash both smack him when he tries.
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A Brother to Basilisks