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Water from a Stone	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14851 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Two—The Night In Which Harry Got No Sleep

            “Do you understand what you have done, Mr. Potter?”

            Harry stared at his fingers. Currently, they were piled together and making small explorations across the backs of his hands. Harry wished them luck. Perhaps they would find their way to a country that was distant from the Headmistress’s formidable, piercing gaze.

            “I asked you, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall went on, in a lower voice, “if you know why what happened, happened.”

            “Those are two different questions,” Harry pointed out helpfully, and then winced as McGonagall tried to use her eyes as nails.

            “Answer them,” McGonagall said, and Harry decided that he should be glad he got the chance to, instead of simply being measured for his coffin.

            “I didn’t know that an oath like that was possible, ma’am,” he said. “It just—I got so fed up with the Slytherins being attacked, and so I said that. I didn’t know the Great Hall would take it as an oath. I didn’t know that the words would tie me so literally.” I didn’t know that Malfoy would be so bloody pleased about it, but I should have. He’s probably been waiting to take revenge on me since the war.

            But Harry didn’t say that last part aloud, because there were quicker ways to commit suicide.

            “Someone should have explained this to you,” McGonagall said, and pulled her glasses off to clean them with a weary sigh. “I blame myself more than you. It seems I never had time, and of course I am used to students who come from pure-blood families or who learn the secrets of Hogwarts from gossip within their Houses. But you have always stayed close to your best friends exclusively and not leaned much on the knowledge of others within Gryffindor.”

            Harry scowled. He couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like she was still trying to blame him.

            “Why did no one else notice what was happening to the Slytherins, Headmistress?” he asked. “I mean, that prefect smashed Malfoy’s plate in the middle of the Great Hall, but no one did anything.”

            “I saw nothing,” said McGonagall. “As for the rest, I had heard rumors, but seen nothing substantial. I will not punish until I do.”

            “Well,” said Harry, “now you’ve heard and seen. Will you start working to keep the Slytherins safe?” He held his breath. Even a little help would make it easier for him to keep this impossible oath.

            “I assume you heard the same rumors, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall said, with that mild manner she had that still made Harry want to sink through the floor. “But you made no motion to act until today. Why?”

            “Because I thought they deserved some of what they got,” Harry muttered. It sounded horrible, said aloud, but it was also true. “It would have been too good for them if they’d come back to the school and everyone just ignored them. I know that they tried to survive last year, but some of them also participated in the torture. People aren’t going to forget that some people did that, even if it was to survive. And how can someone tell the difference between that and the few people who probably enjoyed it, just by thinking about it?”

            “Yet you don’t seem to think that an argument yourself, from the way you responded to Mr. Matthieson’s taunting of Mr. Malfoy,” McGonagall said.

            “I didn’t once I saw that,” Harry said. “Teasing is one thing. Turning their backs or refusing to be in the same room with Slytherins is one thing. I wouldn’t want to be in the same room with Bellatrix Lestrange, either.” He shivered in spite of knowing that she was several months dead. He didn’t know if he would ever stop having nightmares about her, or nightmares where she blurred and twisted into other figures: Voldemort, Uncle Vernon, Fenrir Greyback. “But hurting them badly and then hanging around and waiting for them to do something else is wrong. So is beating them up,” he added, thinking of the way Terry and Michael had gone after Parkinson last night.

            “That was not what happened today,” McGonagall said. “That is not why you made the oath.”

            Harry touched his chest automatically, and then snatched his hand away. He hoped that wouldn’t become one of his immediate gestures, the way touching his forehead still was. It would look creepy and suggestive. “Yeah, but, Headmistress, why are you talking to me like this? Ron says an oath like this can’t be broken, and Malfoy told me what the consequence is. You’re sounding like you want to blame me. Why?”

            McGonagall hesitated. Then she said, “I do not think that you should have to play hero, still. I am concerned that you made the oath because you feel the urge to cast yourself in that role. And as unfair as it is when I am the Headmistress of the whole school, I do feel more concern for the mental health of one of my Gryffindors.”

            Harry smiled a little. “I made the oath without thinking, and I didn’t know what it would do. I thought it would just make people hesitate when they went after Slytherins, because they would have to deal with me if I heard about it. I was thinking the other night that I wanted to stop being a hero, in fact.”

            And I’m thinking you should have done something about it before now.

            “Very well,” McGonagall said. “Then I will not attempt to hinder your fulfillment of the oath. But I do ask that you not kill anyone, and that you not torture anyone, and that you not wound them more than you have to.”

            Harry stared at her. She must really think I’m bloody deranged.

            Or maybe she knows something about the oath that I don’t.

            “I won’t do that,” he said, and his quiet tone seemed to reassure her, because she nodded and leaned back in her chair as though he had walked behind her and lifted a huge weight from her shoulders.

            “Very well,” she said. “Then I will hold you here no longer.” Another smile worked its way across her face. “I assume that your friends will be anxious to discuss this with you.”

*

            “Oh, Harry, how could you?”

            Harry scowled. Hermione was practically crying, and he had no idea why. Both she and McGonagall think I did this on purpose, when the expression I was wearing after the oath should have told them I didn’t. “I don’t know, Hermione,” he snapped. “It’s not like I woke up this morning and thought, ‘I know! I’ll put myself in a potentially life-threatening situation for the sake of people I don’t even like! I haven’t had enough of that in my life already!’”

            That at least made Ron grin, if reluctantly, and Hermione laugh through her tears. She wiped them away and tried to be stern, saying, “You shouldn’t be so irreverent, Harry. This is serious.”

            “Yes, I know,” Harry said, and then cast a little Stinging Hex without turning around.

            Lavender squealed and rose from behind the couch he, Hermione, and Ron were sitting on as if someone had stung her on the arse, which in fact was exactly what had happened. Harry scowled at her. “Why don’t you go sit somewhere else? You’re not close to the fire back there, you’re not with your friends, you’re not doing anything but spying on us. It’s a little obvious.”

            He thought Lavender might have answered back if it was anyone else, but that awe people had of him was a useful weapon sometimes. Lavender nodded, shamefaced, and went back to her usual corner of the Gryffindor common room. Harry kept an eye on her until he was sure she had. He wouldn’t have been that wary with most people, but Lavender was dating Terry Boot.

            He wondered how much Terry had told her about beating up Parkinson and getting stopped by Harry, assuming he had told her anything at all. Lavender was a gossip and might have spread the secret around school where the professors couldn’t help but overhear it.

            Unless they were determined not to.

            Harry put aside that disturbing thought for later, although he knew he would have to consider it, since McGonagall had said some things that made him think it. For now, he told Hermione and Ron, “I have to fulfill the oath. So that’s what I’ll do.”

            “I’m worried about you, Harry,” Hermione said, and took his hand. “What if the oath destroys you because someone did something against the Slytherins that you don’t know about and have no way of finding out? I wish you hadn’t been so reckless.”

            “I didn’t bloody know,” Harry said.

            “The oaths don’t work like that,” Ron said, cutting across the beginning of Hermione’s lecture about language. “At least, not the ones that leave scars. They want to be fulfilled. They aren’t going to destroy Harry for something he doesn’t know about, only if he turns his back and ignores the persecution of Slytherins.” He looked as though he was about to swallow a lemon. Harry assumed it was because he’d had to use the words “persecution” and “Slytherins” in the same sentence without approving of their linking.

            Hermione blinked. Ron smirked at her. Harry grinned back. It was nice to see Ron enjoying his rare triumph of knowing something that Hermione didn’t.

            “Well,” Hermione muttered, and settled her robes around her with a quick shake, the way she tended to do when she was uncomfortable. “That’s good, at least. But how will the oath let Harry know that he needs to do something?”

            Ron shrugged. “I don’t actually know anyone who has an oath-scar like that. My father just said that the oaths have an alarm aspect or something.”

*

            Harry found out the “alarm aspect” that evening, about an hour after he’d gone to bed and spent enough time staring at the canopy and wondering how in the world he was going to fulfill that stupid oath that he probably hadn’t slept more than fifteen minutes.

            Someone had launched a Stinging Hex at his chest. No, it was a Burning Hex. Harry sat up with a gasp and clapped his hand to his chest. Over his heart. Over his scar.

            And now it felt as though someone was behind him, shoving him, gripping his shoulders, and shaking him all at the same time. Harry groaned as he sat up and pushed his way out of the curtains, throwing his school robes over his pyjamas. At least the oath was telling him in what direction the persecution of Slytherins was.

            He yawned and trotted down the steps, through the common room, and through the portrait hole in a daze. And then he woke up, because there was a scream coming from just down the corridor. Harry snarled and started running. It sounded as though someone had decided to start tormenting a Slytherin right next to Gryffindor Tower, maybe because that was where they had caught them but probably because they could.

            No prefects in the corridors. No professors. So much for the school being patrolled at night, Harry thought wryly as he turned a corner. Of course, since Snape’s death, there didn’t seem to be anyone who had the same gift of turning up right where Harry was and where he wished they wouldn’t be.

            Any melancholy thoughts about Snape were interrupted by the scene he found when he got to the end of the corridor. Michael and Terry stood there again, floating a wand out of the reach of a second-year Slytherin girl, who looked as though she was about to dissolve in tears. She was jumping for the wand, but of course she couldn’t reach it. Michael and Terry just moved the wand higher when she tried, then dropped it temptingly lower again.

            And they were right at the head of a staircase, which the little girl’s jumps carried her further and further towards.

            “Don’t you two learn?” Harry snapped, and, as they turned to gape at him, hit them with a Neptune’s Net.

            The spell was one he’d picked up this summer, when it had occurred to him that he ought to start studying if he was going to be an Auror. It acted like water at first, but it settled over Terry and Michael in solidifying lines, dripping and tangling their movements until they looked more like shambling crystal statues than people. Harry sneered at them, shook his head, and turned to the Slytherin girl. She was staring at him with huge eyes and hadn’t made an attempt to retrieve her wand, although it was hovering right above her head.

            “Are you all right?” Harry asked.

            She didn’t say anything, just clasping her hands behind her back and twitching a little. Maybe she thought he was there to attack her, Harry thought. He had assumed that the news of his oath would have spread among the Slytherins by now, but clearly not.

            “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. He reached up and snared the wand with one hand, then held it out to her. She came towards him, staring like a deer, and snatched it, then scuttled out of reach.

            “It’s all right,” Harry began, but she turned and scampered away. Harry stared after her and sighed.

            Then he solidified the hold of the Neptune’s Net on Terry and Michael, so that it wouldn’t dissolve before morning, and went back to bed, wondering what would happen when he had to deal with someone in Slytherin who was older and more likely to lash out instead of be frightened of him.

*

            The scar dragged him out of bed this time after two hours of brooding and ten minutes of sleep. Harry stamped all the way through the common room and ignored the sleepy protests that followed him. If he and the Slytherins had to suffer, so did everyone else. Maybe that would inspire them to stop being stupid.

            Because, this time, the two people who had a Slytherin cornered near the hospital wing—and who thought it was a good idea to put all these stairs in Hogwarts? Harry reckoned he had to blame the Founders—were Gryffindor sixth-years, friends of Ginny’s. Harry didn’t remember their names, and he didn’t think he should ask. He just waited a minute to be sure that they were the ones doing the fighting, and to make sure that they didn’t bother responding to his shouted warning. Then he lashed out and tied them up to the wall by their hands and ankles. It wasn’t painful, but it was uncomfortable, and it would also last all night.

            Then he turned around and realized the Slytherin they had cornered was Malfoy.

            Harry stared for a minute. Then he looked back at the girls and asked, “Was this a set-up? I know you could have fought them, Malfoy.”

            “As flattering as your opinion of me is,” Malfoy said, a little breathlessly, smoothing down his rumpled shirt and picking up his wand from where it had dropped when the girls flew into the wall, “it is rather hard to do that when they have my wand and blood is dripping into my eyes.” He tilted his head, and Harry realized for the first time that his distinctive hair was dark with blood from a wound on his scalp. It was no wonder Harry hadn’t realized it was Malfoy right away.

            “Idiots,” Harry told the girls on the wall, for good measure, and ignored the way their eyes got big and they whimpered. At least they were being quiet. Harry didn’t want to listen to more self-justifications right now. He moved towards Malfoy, calculating the amount of blood on the floor. It was enough to make him curse under his breath. “Do you need to go to the infirmary? Or can you heal yourself?”

            “What, Potter, no noble offer to heal me?” Malfoy fluttered his eyelashes. Now that he was closer, Harry could see how long they were. It made him wonder why no one who wanted to hurt Malfoy had tried cutting them. Surely that would damage his ego at least a little. “I’d thought you’d want to do that, hero as you’ve bound yourself to be.” He paused meaningfully. “Of course, considering Kane came back to us tonight screaming about how scary you are, perhaps you only made that oath to draw attention to you.”

            “Oh, shut the fuck up,” Harry snapped, and cast one of the few healing charms he knew, one that was supposed to close shallow wounds and scrapes. Malfoy gasped, which probably meant it worked. Harry knew it felt as though someone had splashed cold water on his head when Hermione used it. “I tried to help her. But she ran away because she thought I was going to hurt her too, I reckon.”

            “A word of advice, Potter.” Malfoy tossed and caught his wand, never taking his eyes from Harry’s face. “If you want to be Savior to the Slytherins—and I can’t blame you, since there seems to be a distinct lack of other jobs for saviors at this particular point in time—then you’ll have to act as if you like us in the future.”

            “I didn’t get into this because I like you,” Harry replied briefly, and wheeled away. Malfoy was safe, the girls were humiliated, and he was going back to bed.

            “Aren’t you going to escort me to the dungeons?” Malfoy pitched his voice higher. “I might be in danger on the way there. Someone could try to put a Harry Potter mask on me, and you have no idea what damage that would do to my reputation.”

            “What reputation?” Harry said. “The one where you’re a Death Eater, or the one where you’re a coward?”

            Malfoy caught his breath as though someone had tried to choke him. Harry stood where he was, clenching his fists, and told himself that he was not going to apologize. Malfoy was taunting him, again. He might be a victim this time, but he couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had seen Harry make an oath in front of everyone, he had seen Harry go after someone who bothered him in front of everyone, and that still wasn’t fucking enough for him.

            “Low, Potter,” Malfoy whispered at last. That surprised Harry, because he’d thought the git would have retreated to his precious dungeons by now. He looked over his shoulder and saw Malfoy staring at him with his eyes narrowed. “Even for you.”

            Harry turned around and stalked back towards him. He was fed up, and no one else could listen to him because no one was awake, and the Slytherins seemed convinced that either he was going to beat them up in turn or that he was someone they could tease at will. So he’d dump those frustrations on Malfoy’s head.

            “I didn’t do this because I like you,” he told the prat, who folded his arms in response. Great, now he’s part of the club that thinks that will intimidate me, too. “I didn’t do this because I want to be in your good graces. I didn’t do this because I admire the Slytherins, or because I think Snape was a brave bastard who didn’t deserve the ending he got. He was still a bastard. You’re still a bastard. Because they bother you doesn’t make all of you into brave martyrs. I promised to protect you because you don’t deserve the shite you were getting. That’s all.”

            Malfoy’s breathing was too quick. “When you just hurt me worse than anyone has managed to so far, this year,” he whispered, “I think I have a right to object.”

            Harry stared at him. “I give up,” he said. “I absolutely give up on comprehending you. That’s the kind of insult that you would laugh off from any other Gryffindor, and you know it. I talked to Ron and Hermione, and they said that they’ve both seen you take worse this year with that stone face you showed Matthieson. Why do I get elected to the position of Dispenser of Unforgivable Insults?”

            There was silence for a moment in the corridor, although Harry realized he didn’t know if you could count it as silence when it was filled with the noise of Malfoy breathing like a bellows. Then Malfoy turned his head aside and muttered something before he took off running towards the dungeons.

            Harry blinked after him. The mutter had sounded like, “If you don’t understand by now, then you never will.”

            The only thing Harry could think of was that Malfoy still thought the worst of him, assumed that he loved all the attention he was getting and that he would do anything to keep it. It would make sense, because he thought Harry had made that oath to get love from the Slytherins in turn. And so he would get angry when Harry insulted him because Harry was receiving the attention he thought he should have got.

            Or something.

            “I absolutely give up,” Harry told the air again, and then told the girls on the wall, “I’m remembering your faces, and if you do that again, then I’m going to turn your faces inside out. So your eyes are only staring at the back of your skulls.”

            They stared at him in horror. Harry stomped off to bed, only partially consoled by the notion that at least he could still frighten people he needed to frighten.

*

            The third time the scar called him out of bed, some Gryffindor he vaguely knew was turning a Slytherin boy upside-down in the entrance hall. Harry turned him upside-down with Levicorpus and shook him so hard that not only his wand but a collection of dirt, stones, feathers, and stolen Potions ingredients fluttered out of his pockets, and his teeth rattled in his head.

            Then Harry tied him to the ceiling with another Neptune’s Net, gave the Slytherin boy’s wand back, touched his own wand to his throat, cast Sonorus, and screamed into the depths of the castle, “Go to sleep!”

            Whether that worked or not, he never knew, but at least he did lie awake in the bed, fuming, for the rest of the night. He didn’t close his eyes, but then again, no one else decided to try Slytherin-hunting, either.

*

            The next morning, half the school was looking at Harry crossly. That didn’t include the Slytherins, who were looking at him as though he was a basilisk who had tried to Petrify pure-bloods. Harry focused on his food and did his best to ignore them.

            He was in such a mess.

            McGonagall did stand up at the High Table that morning and make a little speech about how attacks against fellow students wouldn’t be tolerated. That would mean exactly nothing, Harry thought, stirring his spoon moodily through his porridge, especially since the other professors didn’t pay a whit of attention. Someone could probably still get away with hurting the Slytherins on their watch.

            It made Harry furious, and sick. It made him think of primary school and the teachers who had known what Dudley was doing but hadn’t cared, or had looked away. Why wouldn’t they interfere? Why was it up to him, who was just a student even if he was a hero, too, to do their job?

            It would make it a bit easier if someone had ever taught the Slytherins to defend themselves—

            Harry’s head came up, and he cackled. The cackle must have been at least a little evil, because Ron and Hermione both looked at him in concern. Harry waved a hand and muttered, “Just had a new idea, that’s all.”

            Why couldn’t he conduct something like the Dumbledore’s Army for Slytherins? Assuming any of them would show up, of course, and not run in terror like Kane or rage like Malfoy. But Harry had to think that some of them were more moderate in their response, more rational, like Parkinson. They would probably come.

            Now he had to decide when and where to hold it.

            “Oi, Potter!”

            Harry jerked his head up. He knew the voice had come from in front of him, but what he focused on more than anything else was the white object hurtling at him. A jar, a jug, a plate, it didn’t matter, since it hit him in the face and threw him back violently enough to ram his head into the wall.

            Well, he thought sardonically in the moment before the pain knocked him unconscious, maybe an open attack on me will be what’s needed to sting the professors out of their complacency.

            In the moment of the pain actually knocking him unconscious, Harry thought of something he hadn’t in years: the vacant grin Dudley used to wear when he was planning something particularly stupid.

            Stupid, but it still ended up with Harry getting hurt.

*

            paigeey07: Thanks!

            Amiyom: Thank you.

            Clau: From the terms of the original oath he swore, it probably only applies within Hogwarts, but this is the kind of thing that it’s going to be difficult for Harry to learn to deal with.

            Right now, as far as Harry is concerned, the Slytherins are being gits.

            polka dot: You guessed correctly!

            mariahs_fantasy: Thanks for reviewing.

            SP777: Well, at the moment Harry is still challenging opponents who don’t take him seriously. Later on, probably they will.

            Thrnbrooke: Thanks!

            Wölkchen: I appreciate the concern. Don’t worry, though. When it gets absolutely unendurable, I take breaks. I actually feel more tired (most of the time) by not writing than by writing. The exception is when something else happens in my life that takes up all my emotional energy, and those days are relatively rare.
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Water from a Stone