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Parsimony	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14122 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Three—Messages Come By Owl

            “It looks brilliant, doesn’t it?”

            Harry nodded back to Ron’s whisper, although he didn’t know why they were whispering when everyone else around them seemed to be chattering and shouting at the tops of their lungs. The Great Hall had been restored by a lot of magic, although Harry knew that McGonagall had done most of the work, along with the other professors. The House tables sat proudly in their places as if they had never moved, and the ceiling reflected the cloudy sky outside better than it ever had.

            Harry took a deep breath and decided that he’d had enough of contemplating the ceiling and pretending he was interested in it. He turned to eye the Slytherins instead as they filed to the table. There were an awful lot of them who hadn’t come back, and he couldn’t blame them. If one of their enemies was casting spells on them to make them hate each other, they wouldn’t be able to trust anyone outside their House at school, either.

            Or maybe inside it.

            His gaze crossed with Malfoy’s. Malfoy turned away as if they’d never spoken. Harry shrugged. He was sure Malfoy would deny it if anyone asked him. Well, Harry had expected that. He turned to study the other Slytherins instead.

            Parkinson and Goyle had taken seats close to each other, and were whispering intently. Harry couldn’t hear them from this distance and with all the other noise, of course, but he thought he couldn’t make a mistake about the way their heads were bobbing. Now and then, they cast glances at Malfoy that made Harry have to remind himself he couldn’t do everything for everybody. If they were stupid enough to start trouble here in the Hall, then one of the professors would see and interfere.

            Zabini sat in one of the empty seats between them and Malfoy, his scowl thick on his face as he stared at Malfoy. The spell must have affected him, too, then, Harry thought. He had never paid that much attention to Zabini before, but as far as he remembered, he hadn’t been that open with his emotions.

            Millicent Bulstrode was paying more attention to her cat than anyone at the table. She had it in her lap, an enormous black beast bigger than Crookshanks, and was scratching behind its ears as she cooed at it. The cat gave her a long-suffering look that made Harry snort behind his hand, and have to make up a hasty lie about how he’d just seen a Hufflepuff prefect intervene in a fight when Hermione asked. Then the cat curled up and lashed its tail in a circle. Bulstrode looked angry.

            Hard to tell whether she was affected by the spell or not right now.

            The other tiny group of seventh-year Slytherins consisted of Theodore Nott and—what was her name—Daphne Greengrass, Harry thought. They sat so close together they might be dating, but they also cast looks at Malfoy when they thought he wouldn’t notice. He met the majority of them with bleak glances before he turned and faced the line of firsties coming in for the Sorting.

            Harry winced. What must that be like, to have most of your friends hate you? He knew that he wouldn’t have lasted through most of his first years here without Ron and Hermione, never mind the Horcrux hunt. He’d been miserable whenever they rowed. Miserable when he thought there was no way he could help Ron with his grief. Miserable when he realized how much Hermione doubted being able to reverse her parents’ Memory Charm.

            Probably worse for Malfoy, even if Harry didn’t think Malfoy could be as close to the other Slytherins as Harry was to his friends.

            The first girl in the line, a gap-toothed, curly-headed kid who Harry thought would probably try to get away with everything because she was cute, was Sorted into Gryffindor. Harry clapped for her, and then leaned around Ron to get a look at the High Table. He hadn’t heard anything about who their Defense Against the Dark Arts professor was going to be, even when he got his letter from McGonagall.

            It seemed to be a tall woman with a pinched face and the ugliest glasses Harry had ever seen, even worse than the first pair Aunt Petunia had got him. She had white hair in a thick braid and peered here and there, as if she wanted to know all the faces of her students before she had her first class. Harry shuddered. She looked like she’d assign lots of homework.

            Well, at least Hermione ought to like her.

            Most of the children that year seemed to be either Gryffindors or Hufflepuffs, with only a few Ravenclaws and even fewer Slytherins. Some of the decisions took a long time, too. Harry watched the kids squirming on the stool and wondered how many of them were begging not to be put in Slytherin.

            That’s too bad, really. I think some of them could be decent now that the war’s over and they don’t have to worry about serving Voldemort.

            On the other hand, I wouldn’t have wanted to be put there.

            Harry shook his head. He really couldn’t imagine that, trying to be friends with Malfoy and knowing that half the people around him probably wanted to hand him over to their parents. How would he ever have relaxed, or worried about anything mundane like homework, when he had spying eyes on him? It would have been worse even than the Dursleys, where he could at least get away from them in his cupboard.

            I wish they had more Slytherins this year, but I can’t regret that I wasn’t one of them.

            The Sorting finished at last, and McGonagall coughed and rose to her feet. She looked around the room slowly, even after the last mutters had died. Harry watched her and wondered what she was waiting for. He thought he could see sadness in her eyes when they rested on the Slytherin table, but not worse than when she looked at the chair at the Gryffindor one that Colin Creevey should have had.

            “A new year begins,” she said into the silence, finally. “I am your new Headmistress, and you will find that I am different from Professor Dumbledore.” She had to pause and clear her throat, and Harry wondered if the new Gryffindors knew why. “I will endeavor to be fair, but for the moment, I am still coping with my duties as Transfiguration teacher and transition to full Headmistress. If you find me a bit short, I apologize in advance.”

            Harry had to grin when he thought of some of the detentions that she might dish out, given that warning.

            “Some rules haven’t changed,” McGonagall said, and Harry thought her eyes could have given Malfoy’s cold tones and glares competition. “You will still stay away from the Forbidden Forest, or I will know why.” She managed to make that sound more threatening than Dumbledore ever had, Harry thought, impressed. Half the time, Dumbledore’s warnings had sounded more like a joke shared between him and the students. “Mr. Filch reminds me that more tricks and pranks and magical devices than ever are off-limits now; the complete list is available in my office. Anyone who attempts to become an Animagus without registering with the Ministry and consulting me will wish they had messed up the spell.

            “I must also introduce our new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Matilda Klein.” McGonagall nodded at the tall woman, who seemed unable to relax her face long enough to smile. “She informs me that she looks forward to remedying the sad lack of a proper education that most of our students received, not only last year, but the years before that.” She paused, and a shadow seemed to sit on her face. “She is also the new Acting Head of Gryffindor House.”

            There was a burst of noise from their table, but most people shut up quickly. Glancing around, Harry saw both Ron and Hermione glaring at some of the louder ones, and grinned. They were prefects, and they made good ones. They’d be reminding anyone who still complained later that McGonagall had more than enough to do without also watching over Gryffindor.

            “And now,” McGonagall said, and clapped her hands so that food appeared on the plates, “I think that more than one person has been waiting impatiently for me to get on with the speech so that they might eat.” Her gaze crossed over to Harry, and he hunched his shoulders a little, then smiled at her. The shadow had left her face. “Let us eat well, in remembrance of the old year, and celebration of the new.”

            That got her a cheer, and Harry thought her face was a bit pink as she sat down. He thought about nodding encouragingly to her, but he didn’t think she would like that. She was still a professor, and he was only a student.

            I’ve got one more year for that to be true.

            “A new Head of House,” Ron said under his breath, and even though he had made other people shut up about it, there was no hiding the complaint in his voice as he helped himself to a heap of buttered scones. “Wonder what that means for us? Was she even a Gryffindor? She looks too sour to be one.”

            “I’ve heard of her,” Hermione said, as though that should settle everything, and picked up a steaming spoonful of small carrots. “She publishes a lot in the major Defense journals, and she has a very good reputation.”

            “Yeah, but was she really a Gryffindor?” Ron sent a dubious glance up at Klein once more. Harry looked with him, and wondered how she was managing to eat when she never seemed to not purse her lips. “That’s what I want to know. She’s not going to be a good Head if she expects us all to be like Ravenclaws. Or Slytherins.” He shuddered.

            “I’m sure that McGonagall warned her about us,” Hermione said, and picked up some peas in turn. Harry snorted behind his hand. She hadn’t eaten half that healthy this summer while she was at the Burrow. He wondered if she was trying to make a good impression on someone, or if she had decided that summer was a holiday and being back at school wasn’t. “That we don’t study, that we’re foolishly reckless, that some of us think we saved the world and are going to be strutting around with our noses in the air—”

            “Harry doesn’t act like that,” complained Ron through a mouthful of cold chicken before he caught on to what Hermione was talking about and yanked on her robe. She laughed at him, and Harry leaned a little away from them so that the resulting food fight didn’t get his hair stuffed with bits of half-chewed food.

            He looked at Klein as he ate. She appeared to commune with her plate, and sometimes one of the other professors if they asked her a question. She was so tight and rigid that he had to agree with Ron; she didn’t look like she would be a good Head of House for people who had just lived through a war and who almost always broke the rules.

            Oh, well. She might be like McGonagall, and stern but fair. He’d just have to wait to find out.

            He was almost finished eating, and eyeing the treacle tart for a second helping, when a flight of owls appeared overhead. Harry ignored them. He knew they’d be carrying extra owl orders and packages and anxious greetings, mostly for the first-years, and he’d done all his shopping before he left Diagon Alley.

            But one of the owls landed in front of him and hooted insistently. Harry stared at it as he took the message. It wasn’t distinctive, though, just a silver-grey post-owl, like most of the rest. Ruder than some of the rest, though, if the way it snatched at his tart was any indication. Harry fed it a bit of ham instead and opened the letter, which was a simple envelope without the kind of fancy writing that lots of people tried to catch his attention when they sent him a letter.

            Hermione broke off the fight with Ron to say in alarm, “Harry! You didn’t cast the charms that check for hexes and Dark magic!”

            “I already did,” Harry said dryly, and pulled out the single sheet of parchment inside. “I’m so good at them now that I can do them nonverbally.” He did cast another one then, just to be safe and to demonstrate.

            Hermione looked stricken. “Oh, Harry, I’m sorry—”

            “Don’t be,” Harry murmured, realizing that the handwriting on the letter was familiar, and not in a good way.

            Potter:

            I would not write to you, but there is no one else I can turn to. I have no other chance of a fair hearing in the trial-thick world that we have now.

            You know me. You know that I helped you during the war. You know that I was never given a proper funeral, as my body was not found.

            I will be waiting for you near the place of my death, to discuss what arrangements we might make for hiding me.

            There was no name, but there didn’t need to be, not with that combination of clues and that kind of handwriting—it had to be carefully changed and disguised, of course, but whoever had sent this joke of a letter would have counted on him recognizing it. Harry sat staring at the letter for a long time before disgust welled up in him and he crumpled the letter and threw it aside.

            “What does it say?” Hermione asked, bending down and picking it back up. “I haven’t seen you so disgusted since Romilda Vane sent you a marriage proposal.”

            “It doesn’t say anything,” Harry said roughly, but of course that didn’t prevent her from opening it up and reading it. She understood at once why it had made him so angry—she recognized the handwriting, or the handwriting it was meant to look like, too—and her lips trembled as she folded up the letter and stuck it in her pocket. Ron was looking back and forth between them, but Hermione caught his eye and shook her head, mouthing that she would tell him later. Ron accepted that with a good grace and went back to his meal.

            “You still shouldn’t leave it lying around,” she murmured. “Not when it has your name on it. Someone could find it, and recognize—what they’re trying to do, and not know that it’s a joke.”

            “It’s a bloody bad joke,” Harry hissed, leaning close to her, ignoring the way that eyes fastened eagerly on him. Of course people were always going to think that there was something going on when he talked urgently to one of his friends, and they would always be uncommonly interested in any letter he received, since he was Harry Bloody Potter. He couldn’t make them stop staring, so his best step was to pretend that he didn’t notice. “Snape’s dead.”

            Hermione sighed. “I know, but it’s the kind of joke a few people might play just to upset you.”

            Harry shrugged. “I don’t know why or how. No one but us knows what Snape gave me before he died.” He wouldn’t speak of the memories of his mother and Snape as children aloud where anyone else could hear him, even though it was highly likely that no one who listened would know what he was talking about. “No one but you or Ron could think that I would be upset by something like this.”

            “Why not?” Hermione asked, and her tone of calm good sense made Harry think about it, as always. “You were the one who spoke up to the papers when they asked you about Snape and said that he’d always been a hero and was really a spy for Dumbledore. You were the one who refused your chance to blame him when they wanted you to. Someone could think that they’d upset you with a trick like this, even if they had no idea why Snape did what he did.”

            Harry took a breath and nodded. That much was true, and he was getting paranoid over the need to protect Snape’s privacy. He knew that neither of his friends would betray him, and he hadn’t put the memories in a Pensieve or mentioned them since he first told Ron and Hermione. There was no way for someone else to find out.

            “It still makes me angry,” he said, and scowled at Hermoine’s pocket that held the letter. “That they think they can make me believe he’s still alive.”

            “I know,” Hermione said, patted his hand, and, glancing over, added in quite a different voice, “Ron, the goal is not to choke yourself with your food!”

            Harry dutifully chuckled and went back to finishing up his own dessert. With an effort, he kept himself from looking around the Great Hall for a pair of eyes that might be watching him with satisfaction instead of curiosity.

            It’s not real. It can’t be real. I saw him die myself, and although someone might have stolen his body, that doesn’t mean he got up and walked out of there.

            And even if he was carrying a bezoar or something that means he could have survived the poison, I don’t know any potion that would have allowed someone to survive having his throat bloody torn out by a giant snake.

*

            Harry woke near three, or at least his whispered Tempus Charm told him that was the time, dazed and foggy-headed in that way he always was when he woke up in the middle of the night. He shook his head and glanced around, wondering if one of the other boys had planted a Wheeze under his bed. Gred and Forge—well, just Gred now—had a few that would disrupt the soundest sleep, with a subtle noise that was hard to trace.

            But there was no noise he could hear, even when he concentrated. Instead, there was an owl that landed on his bed with a wriggle and a thump of its wings, and began staring at him with its head thrust aggressively forwards and its talon scraping the bedcovers. Harry scratched his back, muttered about stupid owls and their owners long enough to encourage the bird to fly away—at least, that should have encouraged it, but it just sat there and stared at him—and finally cast Lumos. His curtains were drawn, although swaying from the owl’s flight past them, and he shouldn’t wake anyone else up.

            The letter had no name on it, and no hexes or nasty charms on it when he tested it. Harry hesitated in front of it for a long time nonetheless. He didn’t know that it would contain anything different from the joke letter he had read at the feast.

            Finally, he sighed and slid a finger under the flap of the envelope to open it. The owl bobbed its head up and down in a way that Harry thought was meant to say finally! Harry rolled his eyes at it and looked down at the letter.

            There were splashes and blobs of ink this time, as though the person writing it had dashed them across the paper in his extreme anger. But it was still the same handwriting—or disguised handwriting—that had been on the last letter.

            Potter:

            So you think my letter a joke? So you think that I would appeal to you for any other reason than because I have no choice? I have my eyes on you as necessary. I am without many options to save myself, but I can cast the spells for such a small undertaking as this.

            I am not joking. I would not have chosen you, except I know you will do the right thing no matter what the reaction of others. I am relying on that extreme good-will and self-righteousness to save me now.

            If you need proof, remember what you saw in my Pensieve during your fifth year—the memory of your mother rejecting me because of the name I called her. The same name that Draco Malfoy called your little friend one year.

            Come to the place of my death. And hurry up.

            Harry sat there for some time, staring at the lack of a signature. Then again, if this was from the person it pretended to be, he could hardly expect one.

            He realized, as if distantly, that his hands were shaking. He closed his eyes and shook his head, sitting there until the shaking calmed.

            He had done so well, he thought. He’d had a private funeral for Snape and everything. He’d put the man away where he belonged, in the shadows of the past. Only now did he realize how easy that had been, how much of it had depended on Snape not being alive. Harry didn’t think he would deal well with the man if he was.

            If he was. The letters could still be tricks.

            On the other hand, the only other people Harry had so much as hinted about the Pensieve memory to were either dead or people Harry trusted absolutely. He couldn’t imagine Hermione talking about it, and while Ron might have mentioned something in front of his brothers or sister, they were all too somber at the moment to find something like this funny. Especially when joking about someone coming back to life was…too close to some of their fantasies.

            I reckon it could be George trying to gain back the life he needs to live again. On the other hand, I really don’t think so, and if it was, I’d go along with it cheerfully, because anything that might bring him back should be encouraged.

            Harry sighed and turned to the bird. “It looks like we’re going,” he muttered, and started to drag his Invisibility Cloak over his head. He dreaded to think about what would happen if the sour-faced Professor Klein caught him while patrolling the corridors. “Whether or not Snape is really out there.”

            The owl wheeled out silently between the curtains, in a way that made Harry suspect what kinds of spells Snape might be using to “keep an eye” on him.

            If that’s really Snape.

            Harry shook his head, sighed, and began to move. Luckily, he’d got plenty of practice at sneaking around during the war, and even sometimes this summer at the Burrow, when he wanted to talk to his friends late at night or snatch a moment for himself. Soon he was out the entrance hall and moving across the dark grounds.

            For a moment, he wondered if he’d been stupid not to wake Ron up and tell him what he was going on. But he’d left the letter on the bed, and Hermione had the first one. If something happened to him, his friends would know where to look.

            He realized that his hands were shaking again when he stood in front of the Whomping Willow. Harry hesitated, bit his lip, and then shook his head and conjured a small ball. Bending low, he tossed it at the knot in the trunk, and watched the branches freeze. He thought he heard the wings of the owl whisper by overhead, but when he looked up, he could see nothing in the darkness.

            Here goes everything.

            Trying not to remember that the last time he’d come through this tunnel, it was to witness Snape’s death, not his resurrection, he dropped to his knees and started crawling.

*

            unneeded: It will be for a long time, but Harry’s trying to be more rational about it now, and ignoring some of the impulses to help that come along.

            SP777: Well, good! It should be, with Harry at a younger age and trying to be more mature at the same time.

            Mostly, how selfish someone can reasonably be.
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Parsimony