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Other People's Choices	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 24374 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirteen—Tumult
Harry can’t say all he feels.
On the one hand, part of him does feel that the Dursleys being dead is horrible, because anyone being dead is horrible. There was one day when Uncle Vernon saw a story on the telly about a train crash and thought for some reason it was the train Aunt Marge was on; he spent hours ringing and yelling at people before he was satisfied his sister was safe. Harry went about with a strange feeling in his stomach even though it would have meant he didn’t have to see Aunt Marge ever again.
This is the same way.
On the other hand…
If the Dursleys were still alive, Dumbledore would find a way to send Harry back to them. Harry knows that with the deepest part of his heart. It doesn’t matter what Mr. Nott or Snape says. They would get him.
So it’s good they’re dead.
“Mr. Potter? Are you all right?”
That’s Snape, and Harry looks up and tosses the paper on the floor. Maybe that’s not a polite thing to do, but at the moment, he’s done with being polite. “What were you going to teach me, sir?” he asks. “Or was there some other reason you wanted to see me?”
Snape studies him with sharp eyes. Harry shrugs some sense back into himself and waits. Snape finally says, “Do you want to be alone to think about your relatives’ death?”
“No.” Harry thinks it was probably swift. He’s almost sure that the snake Mr. Nott sent did it. He doesn’t think he would make their deaths not swift, because another Muggle could walk in or something. Mr. Nott doesn’t strike Harry as someone who would take a chance that way.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Sure, sir,” Harry adds, when he sees Snape still watching him as if he’s going to make Harry sit down and put his head between his knees. One time a primary school teacher made Harry do that after he’d been punched in the stomach by Dudley, and Dudley thought it was so funny that he kept pushing Harry’s head between his knees for two weeks afterwards.
Dudley.
Harry pushes away the hope that Dudley might have survived. He’s not sure that he really wants that, unless there’s no chance that he’ll ever have to see or talk to Dudley again. If Dudley is still alive, then maybe Dumbledore would try to use him to reestablish the blood protections.
“That is not the way most children would react to deaths in the family.” Snape is still studying him, and Harry gets impatient.
“They weren’t my family, sir. Family doesn’t hate you and insult you for existing.” Harry shakes his head. “If you want to talk about the Dursleys, then you can go back and talk to Dumbledore. No offense,” he adds, when he sees the way Snape’s face darkens.
“And then arrange your next visit later,” Mr. Nott says helpfully. “In fact, that might be for the best, Severus. You look as if you’re the one who’s had a shock.”
“I am fully recovered, thank you.” Snape’s voice is so cool that it reminds Harry of the fruit juice the Nott house-elves served for breakfast this morning. He turns to Harry. “I want to teach you Potions. And Defense.”
“You can teach Defense?” Harry stares at him and says the first thing that comes to mind. “Then why don’t you?”
“Dumbledore prefers to keep my—talents to Potions.” Snape’s voice and mouth are both thin. “At any rate. I will teach you. And talk to you. Make sure that you do not suffer more than you are thinking of at the moment.”
“Still hoping to see some sign that the boy’s suffering, Severus?”
Snape turns his head and gives Mr. Nott another stare. Harry doesn’t know what’s behind it, but it makes Mr. Nott give a kind of little half-smile, as if he knows something Snape doesn’t, and walk out of the room. The door shuts with a snap and blends in with the rest of the wall.
Snape turns to Harry at once and leans forwards, lowering his voice. “Has he tried to hurt you?”
Harry blinks. “No.” He supposes that Snape might think Mr. Nott is trying to corrupt him or literally twist his arm to make him do something, but it’s a little stupid of him to think that.
“I’m not only talking physically,” Snape says. He takes a moment to pace around the room, staring at the fireplace as if he thinks some beast is going to come bursting out of it and wrap him in its claws. “I meant mentally, too. Has he lied to you? Told you he’s the only alternative to the Dursleys? We—could have found something else. He didn’t have to kill them.”
Harry ignores the way Snape wants him to respond, because he doesn’t think that Snape would like what Harry has to say anyway. “He was perfectly fine. He had his house-elves feed me, and it’s a lot more than I ever got at home. And then he had me stand in front of the Silver Hourglass.” Snape spins around, and Harry seizes the chance. “Why didn’t anyone ever suggest I get tested by that at school, sir? Or was I tested when I was really young and everyone just forgot I wouldn’t remember it? Do you think someone would have the records from that?”
*
He put the boy in front of the Silver Hourglass?
Tarquinius is a bastard. Clever in ways Severus has not anticipated. Because of course he would look straight into the boy’s heart and see how desperately Harry wants to be admired and loved—but for what he is, his native talents, the way his Housemates honor him for being good at Quidditch. Not for being the Boy-Who-Lived.
And the Silver Hourglass, which so regularly reveals unexpected talents, is a masterful way of doing that.
Severus pours cool water on his distress and, yes, his envy, and inclines his head. “As far as I know, you were never tested when you were a baby. Eighteen months is young, and Silver Hourglasses cannot be easily moved or made. The nearest one was probably in the Potter house, and for obvious reasons, your parents did not want to go there.”
Harry’s eyes dim a bit, and Severus remembers the other baited hook he threw out in Hogwarts, the one that might convince the boy to swim to him eventually.
“But I can tell you stories about your mother. About other things that you do not remember.”
Harry doesn’t smile the way Severus expected. He tilts his head a little. “What would you want for them?”
Severus says, “Pardon? You cannot pay me for them. They are my memories to freely choose to share, or not. I will not put a price on them.”
Harry’s face burns. Severus sees it with some satisfaction. At least the boy himself is not clever enough yet to see through that intimidating language to what Severus is doing.
There is a price, yes. But it is not one either Severus or Harry can force the other to pay. It is simply a yielding, a curiosity, an agreement to listen to Severus more than he listens to some other people.
Like the man whose house they are standing in.
“Well, if you want to tell them to me, you can tell them to me.”
Harry is grumpy and looking the other way, and he’s made no promise to listen. But he if had, that would alarm Severus more than soothe him. It would indicate that Harry’s far gone into the kind of intrigue and word games that most Slytherins take several years longer than he’s old to learn.
Severus is ready to deal with a Slytherin Harry Potter, but perhaps not one quite that Slytherin.
“Very well,” he says. “In the meantime, I think we should start with basic Potions instruction—of the kind that might get disrupted in your ordinary classroom by the people you know as well as I will not get named here.” He adds that because Harry is opening his mouth as if to interject something.
Harry shuts his mouth and nods, but his eyes are also a little clouded. “Are you going to yell at me and call me names the way you usually do?”
Severus blinks. It takes something that simple to win the boy’s trust? “No.”
“All right.”
There’s still a tense wariness in Harry’s body that Severus doesn’t know the cause of. However, for now he doesn’t need to. He takes out a shrunken cauldron from his pocket and restores it to normal size, then casts the spells he always does to cleanse it of any particles of dust or dirt it may have picked up from the cloth of his robe.
“Why are you doing that?”
A question that he doesn’t think Harry would have asked before. Severus is happy enough to answer it. “Brewing means that you must have a surface clean of impurities…”
*
Theo looks up as Harry enters the library. Harry pauses when he sees him, then nods and comes towards him.
“Snape’s a lot nicer when he doesn’t have your lot to show off for.”
It’s not what Theo expected at all as far as talk about summer lessons goes, but he does have to smile. “Your lot? Have you forgotten that you’re a Slytherin now?”
“Not the same,” Harry says, and Theo can’t disagree. He dumps himself into the chair next to Theo and looks curiously at the book he’s holding. “What are you reading?”
Theo sees no reason to hide it, and extends the book. Harry flickers through a few pages and shudders, probably because he caught sight of the picture of someone dying from Death’s Head Potion. “Ugh. Why do you want to know about poisons?”
“I’m of a family that often has assassination attempts planned on it,” Theo says quietly, and puts the book back on the table in front of him. Looking at it is less important right now than talking to Harry. “It’s good to be able to recognize poisons and resist them.”
Harry gives him a faintly horrified look. “People plan assassination attempts on you?”
Theo nods. “My father’s an important man, Harry, and he’s killed a lot of people,” he adds, when Harry stares at him. “Some of them are people who have the means to try revenge on him. Some are people who might try revenge on me instead. So I have to know Defense and Potions and Dark Arts and poisons and lots of other things.”
Harry looks sick and horrified now. He swallows several times. “Did—did someone use poison to kill your mother? I knew she wasn’t around, but—I didn’t want to ask about her. In case it was something sensitive.”
“Yes, poison killed her,” Theo says, speaking the perfect truth. “So you can see it’s even more important to me to recognize it.”
“Oh.”
“But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” Theo doesn’t think his father will leave them alone for long, especially now that Harry’s mentioned poison and Theo’s mother in the same sentence. He has wards that pick up that kind of thing. “I wanted to talk to you about the debt you owe us.”
“Oh. That.” Harry sounds indifferent, not nervous. “Is it to you or your father or both of you?”
Theo blinks. “I—was going to ask you which one you consider it to.”
Harry eyes him. “To both of you. Because you told your father to get me out, and he was the one who got me out. And he’s said that he’ll let me live with you both during the summer and teach me magic.”
Theo smiles a little at the longing in Harry’s voice. Draco has a tendency to say that Muggleborns and Muggle-raised wizards can’t possibly like magic enough to want to use it all the time, because they weren’t around it from birth. Other wizards think the same thing, although Draco is one of the few crass enough to say it aloud.
He would change his mind if he could see Harry’s face in that moment. This is Harry’s heritage, and he’ll seize it with all his heart.
“Good,” Theo says. “Then let me choose how I want to be repaid, okay?” He turns his head. Part of the magic of the house obeys him—Father can’t change that, it’s because Theo’s his heir—and he knows Father is coming nearer and nearer. “Don’t ask me about it until I tell you what I want. And don’t talk about it in front of Father.”
Theo expects questions about why, especially since Harry thinks Father has been so nice to him. But he gets a narrow-eyed look that wouldn’t shame an eagle, and then Harry nodding and saying, “I know what it’s like not to trust adults. Okay.”
Theo stares at him in wonder, and finds himself whispering, “You must at least suspect that Father killed your Muggles.”
“I know he did.”
“Then—how can you sit here and be so calm?”
“I don’t know all of it. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to kill them if someone offered me the chance.” Harry looks away and touches the edge of the table as if he’s going to carve a rune there that will answer Theo’s questions. “But I don’t mind that they’re dead.”
Theo doesn’t have the chance to ask him more about that, to figure out if his sense that there’s something more going on under Harry’s quiet surface is correct. Father says pleasantly from the door, “I didn’t think you’d mind, Mr. Potter. Come, tell me what you learned from Severus today. I know him, of course, but I never learned from him as a student—except sometimes on the other side of a battlefield.”
Harry laughs. Theo sits and wonders if he can’t see it’s a joke, or if the unexpected insight that meant Harry realized the debt might be owed to more than one person is working here, and Harry just doesn’t see the point in talking about literal battlefields right now.
Theo hopes for his sake that it’s the latter.
*
“You’re very intent on your letter, Blaise.”
Blaise tilts his head in response to Mother’s implied question. “Yes. We’re making friends with Harry Potter, you know. Theo and I. But he’s staying at Theo’s house for the summer. That means I have to work extra hard to make sure he doesn’t forget me. The letter has to be perfect.”
“How ambitious of you, darling.” His mother leans over the highly polished table where Blaise sits working, in a room filled with summer sunlight. Blaise looks at the dim reflection of her face in the ebony rather than directly at her. “Entertaining reaching out to the opposite side of the war?”
“I never knew we had a side.” Blaise signs his name and picks up some sand from the small bowl of it on the edge of the table to scatter over the ink to dry it. There are charms that will dry it in an instant, but they’re tricky for a second-year to manage without vanishing the entire message.
“The side we might claim as our own. The side that Bernard thinks we should claim as our own.”
Blaise doesn’t frown, because he has more control over his self and his face than that, but he does wonder why in the world Mother’s latest boy has so much influence over her actions. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
Mother studies his reflection—probably—a little longer in the tabletop, and then chuckles indulgently and steps back. “No reason for you not to build friendships and alliances, of course. You told me Potter lives with those dreadful Muggles. He might be more easily swayed to whatever side we do choose than someone with a strong family behind them.”
Not anymore, Blaise thinks even as he nods obediently. He recognized the name in the paper in ways he thinks his mother didn’t, because she didn’t know they were called the Dursleys. “He lets me call him by his first name. And now he knows the significance of that, because we explained it to him.”
“Do keep in mind, darling,” Mother says, face perfectly placid when he looks at her, “that it may someday not have to be we with you and Theo.”
“Don’t worry, Mother. I keep a lot of things in mind, and I know those things can change in an instant.”
Mother laughs in delight and touches his hair once before she sweeps away. Blaise watches her go. He’s heard a few of the girls in Slytherin giggle about how handsome he is, and he holds onto the knowledge because any knowledge like that, any advantage, is a good one to have. But he knows his face doesn’t have the austere beauty of his mother’s, and his hair will never be that dark and thick and shining.
If it comes down to a contest between him and Mother, Blaise knows he will lose.
Which is why it must not, not until he knows he can win.
He stands up and makes his way towards the owlery.
*
Kain: The main reason Harry doesn't want to get close to Dumbledore again is that he still thinks Dumbledore's going to send him somewhere. Maybe try to set it up for him to live with Dudley, if Dudley's still alive. Harry utterly distrusts Dumbledore now. He'd like to stay with the Weasleys, but only if he has some guarantee they won't listen to Dumbledore.
Harry is pretty wary of Tarquinius. But he also doesn't think Tarquinius is any harder to deal with than Snape, if that makes sense. He knows now that they've both killed and they're both dangerous. He just has to continue being useful, as Tarquinius would put it, to both of them. It's fairly similar to being useful to the Dursleys by doing chores.
Dedicated_Reader: Thanks! Well, he would still reject the Dark Arts. But he's not going to reject as much of Slytherin ethics as he was at first.
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