Work Text:
“Just promise me you won’t do anything foolish,” Professor McGonagall said sternly, and at first, Harry wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or to Snape.
“I promise I’ll be very careful,” Harry said, dully, because it was all he knew how to say; Severus’s gaze snapped to him, and the older man sighed.
“Potter,” he said, then stopped.
“Mister Malfoy has been gone for less than twenty-four hours,” the Deputy Headmistress said with a tinge of asperity. “The fact is that he could easily be on a jaunt to Hogsmeade. Moreover, given he’s a Malfoy, he could easily be on a jaunt to the south of France.”
“He hasn’t gone off to the south of France,” Harry said, with fraying patience. “He’s been taken. I know he has!”
“Mister Potter,” she replied, in her best little-suffering-of-fools voice, “you’ve a tendency to jump at shadows. No wonder, given your history, but when a boy goes off for a day, it’s sometimes the case that he’s skiving off of his classes.”
“And you’ve a history of ignoring me when I report trouble!” Harry shot back. Part of him was distantly horrified at himself for shouting at his Head of House when she likely wasn’t even saying what he was hearing; but the rest of him felt sick, gripped by a panic he couldn’t justify with the facts alone.
McGonagall went stiff with offended dignity. “Of course we have the House Elves searching for Mister Malfoy,” she said in a voice of would-be calm, “but with the boy gone for such a short period of time, there is no need to panic.”
So I’m hysterical, now, am I? Harry was about to protest, but then Professor Snape of all people herded him out of the Deputy Headmistress’s office and began to stride down the hall with purpose, Harry trotting in his wake.
“You’ll do something, won’t you, sir?” Harry said, and his professor stopped mid-stride, the line of his back stiffening.
Snape whirled, and Harry really had to figure out how he made his robes swirl so dramatically; it was like watching the strike of a viper, really, all elegant and beautiful and knowing you were doomed. “What did you say, Potter?”
Harry swallowed, but regained his storied fire in a moment’s time. “That isn’t fair – you know I can’t answer you honestly!”
“I don’t,” said Snape – a stark reminder to Harry to regain his temper, because his words had stopped lining up with what he meant to say.
Harry raised his pressed palms to his lips in supplication; he took in a deep breath and pushed it out. Calm. Stay calm, he thought. You’re calm, now. Like a waterfall. Like a cloud. Like Hermione before a pile of homework. Breathe.
“You believe me that he’s really missing – don’t you, professor?” Harry tried.
“I do,” Snape said, and Harry felt so relieved that the next breath that whooshed from his mouth held the strains of a sob.
“And you’ll try and find him,” Harry checked.
“No, you cannot,” Snape snapped, black eyes flashing.
Harry parsed; he translated. He was getting better at it. After this was all over, he wondered, would ever be able to unlearn what he knew? “You’ll search. And I won’t. I promise. I’ll be very careful.”
A spasm seemed to take over Professor Snape’s face, as though Harry had stabbed him. Then, Professor Snape reached out to Harry, who froze in surprise.
His professor’s right hand cupped Harry’s left cheek for an instant, before Harry felt the drag of potions-roughened fingers sliding away, and then the sensation was gone as soon as it had come. And yet Harry felt as though he’d been dropped into ice-water and fished out again.
“Be careful,” Snape ordered sharply, and Harry was barely aware of trusting himself to speak, before,
“I just promised I would,” emerged in his own voice. Professor Snape offered up that same, strangely wounded look before he was off, swiftly striding down the corridors – probably, Harry thought through a haze of confusion, to check on some Death Eater contacts and find out what had become of Draco.
The sensation of Snape’s fingers against his cheek was so persistent and so odd that Harry wondered at first if the man had cast some sort of spell. He wouldn’t put a tracing spell past Severus Snape, to make sure Harry would keep his promise and not go haring off on a quest to find Malfoy.
But maybe it was that no one had cupped his cheek like that in living memory. Once in awhile, his Aunt Petunia had gripped his chin in fierce fingers, painted nails digging into his skin, but the sensation wasn’t remotely the same. Harry’s skin buzzed where Snape had recently cupped it, and Harry had the near-overwhelming urge to chase after Snape and demand he explain himself. But then Harry saw the strange, pained look in Snape’s eyes as he did it, as though it hurt him to touch Harry; and that gave him pause.
What was it that made him look like that at Harry Potter of all people? What was it that Harry had said, just before?
It was then that he made up his mind.
He had to know what careful meant in the lexicon of Harry Potter.
That was easier said than done, of course.
Of all the people now at Hogwarts, it was only Severus Snape and Harry himself who heard what people truly meant by what they said, and Harry wasn’t about to ask Snape.
So Harry plotted and planned, all the while very aware that he was purposely distracting himself – focussing determinedly on some other mystery, since he’d sworn he wouldn’t go haring off to look for Draco Malfoy.
It wasn’t as though he didn’t see the sense in Snape’s insistence. Beyond Malfoy’s father coming to visit earlier, it wasn’t as though Harry had any useful clues. And if it was something to do with the Death Eaters, Snape had a much better chance of figuring it all out than Harry did.
Harry felt strangely certain that Snape would approve of distracting himself with lesser mischief; so he hardly felt a pang of guilt at all when he snuck silently into the Potions classroom that evening and stole a bottle of student-brewed Veritaserum – Hermione’s, he wasn’t stupid – and placed a few drops on his tongue.
Harry felt a strange, dreamy surreality subsume him, and he thought that it was rather unsurprising that the feeling was awfully similar to being under the Imperius Curse. Then, he remembered what he ought to say:
“I promise I’ll be very careful.”
And that was precisely how it emerged.
Harry frowned. Normally, he would not be distressed that he’d said words he’d intended to say, just as he’d intended to say them. And yet.
He gave it another go.
“I’ll be very careful,” he said, solemnly. “Very careful.”
Nothing. He became aware of himself as others might see him, mumbling to himself in the empty Potions classroom, and winced. He cautiously replaced the Veritaserum on its shelf and made certain that the sticker with Hermione’s and Neville’s name was still firmly affixed.
Perhaps Neville had ruined the Potion. Perhaps it wasn’t strong enough...
When Harry had tried the only other student batch that remained from his and Draco’s explosion, though, he had to admit the truth – ha! – which was that Veritaserum couldn’t compel Harry to speak the truth if he didn’t know it, himself. He wasn’t under a truth spell in the first place, really, was the thing: it was what he meant by what he said that he was hearing, under the influence of his and Draco’s botched potion.
It had been 23 hours since Draco had gone missing.
Harry lingered after Potions the next day.
“What?” Snape snapped, slamming a pile of scrolls down on his desk when Harry only stood there silently, shuffling his feet.
“Any news?”
“I am not but so cruel,” Snape growled. “I would have said something.”
“It’s just, the longer he’s missing, the more likely it is that he’s really hurt,” Harry said.
“What is Draco Malfoy to you?” Snape said, folding his arms.
Harry looked up through his fringe, taken aback. “I – what?”
“...Was I right about the messy-haired, grey-eyed children, I wonder?” Professor Snape muttered to himself.
“Seriously,” Harry barked. “He’s...”
“Do go on, Potter. I’m curious to see how that sentence ends.”
Harry was, too. For the first time, he realized that he could use this curse to find things out about himself that he had never been able to discern, before. Things he would never, ever know about himself without magical intervention. It was a dizzying thought.
“Well?”
“He’s my classmate,” Harry blurted. “Now tell me what I said.”
Professor Snape raised one brow at being so casually ordered, but he was quite clearly as curious as Harry himself was. So he lifted the chalk by the board and wrote by hand:
He’s important.
Harry snorted. Well – duh, to borrow from his cousin. Of course Malfoy was important, or Harry wouldn’t be driving himself to distraction. He hadn’t even supposed for a moment that it was just because it was probably Death Eater-related. No, he was worried over Malfoy himself. Surely there was something deeper. Perhaps if he started off with some deeper truth, its context would tell him even more.
“I’m worried because he’s important to me,” Harry parroted intently. “Now, tell me what I said.”
It’s my duty to save him, Severus Snape wrote with a sneer.
Harry sighed. This was only leading him in circles. “Thanks,” he said, anyway, for his professor’s uncharacteristic compliance. Feeling Snape’s gaze on him, Harry looked up over the rim of his glasses only to be swamped by the sense-memory of Snape’s hand cupping the side of his face, the drag of his fingers as they slid away. He burned with a teenager’s embarrassment and simultaneously wished the other man would do it again. In that tiny moment when Snape’s hands were on him, the relentless need to do something faded, as though Snape had absorbed the responsibility through Harry’s skin.
“It is not your duty,” Snape said, as though he’d read Harry’s mind; but of course, he was only responding to what Harry had meant a moment ago. “I know you do not listen when I speak, Potter, or you would know that is what I have been trying to tell you all these years. If you go to seek Malfoy, you will only risk the lives of those sent to find you, not return with him scooped in your arms like some damosel in distress. You hurl yourself into trouble without a moment’s thought for those who seek to protect you.”
“I’ll be more careful, I promise,” Harry said, reflexively. “Wait, wait – what did I say, just now?”
But Severus only shook his head and chivvied Harry out of the classroom.
Thirty-six hours, he thought.
“Suppose you do a reversal spell on the Map to see if you can find out how he left Hogwarts, anyway,” Hermione said around the fire. The November wind was whistling shrilly outside, stealing heat from the walls, and most everyone was in bed, already. Hermione and Ron had stayed with him out of solidarity and perhaps a habitual need to help Harry solve a mystery. They both seemed baffled by his side project.
“I swore I wouldn’t get into any trouble,” Harry said mutinously.
“Never stopped you before, mate,” Ron protested.
“Honestly, Ron, don’t discourage a sensible impulse in Harry! He has few enough as it is!”
Harry’s lips quirked. He rather liked Hermione when he could hear what she really meant to say.
“It’s just that I’m not sure why you’re listening to that great greasy git this time, when you haven’t ever before,” Ron said and, as usual, the movement of his lips lined up exactly to what Harry heard.
“Do your parents ever,” said Harry, suddenly. “I mean – that is to say... just reach out and...” Harry mimed reaching forward at shoulder-level.
“What?” said Ron.
“Yes, all the time,” Hermione replied. “It’s protective. It means they treasure me.”
“Sure,” Ron said. “It’s normal.” His eyes narrowed. “What has that got to do with Snape?”
“Nothing,” Harry said, swiftly, glad Snape wasn’t around to hear the lie. “I was just thinking.”
“Thinking about what parents do?” said Hermione.
Harry shrugged. “I guess.”
“Suppose Malfoy just scarpered,” said Ron after another beat of silence. “I mean, suppose he realized it was time to be where good old Lucius wasn’t?”
“That thought isn’t half-bad, Ron,” Hermione said. “Sometimes I forget you’re so clever.” She paused. “Sometimes I think you do, too.”
“Always the tone of surprise,” said Ron, which meant that, while Hermione might not have said that exactly, something in her voice had betrayed her feelings on the matter. “Anyway, maybe we can check his family tree at the library or something – see if he’s got any relations he might be hiding out with, especially any who’ve been struck off the register. Send them a letter, if we do.”
Harry looked up, surprised. “Thanks, Ron.”
“Well,” Ron said, “I did punch him full in the face, figure I owe him.” He grinned in pleased reminiscence. “Did you hear that crack?”
The next day, the school finally seemed to be taking the matter seriously. Professor McGonagall assured Harry that she had sent a letter home inquiring if Draco had “come to visit his parents unexpectedly”. She had also alerted members of the Order to keep an eye out for Draco. It seemed that was all that had been done so far, but McGonagall planned to alert the Aurors if she didn’t like the answer she received from the Malfoys. She didn’t say as much, but she meant it, and that meant Harry heard.
Still.
“Keep an eye out,” Harry grumbled that day at lunch. “It’s still like they think he’s wandered off to the chippy. Merlin’s beard! There should be... search parties, and – and dogs!”
“Yes, Malfoy-sniffing dogs,” Ron said agreeably, shoving a pasty into his mouth.
“Honestly, Ron,” Hermione chided. “Harry, we’ve already sent out our letter to the only disgraced Malfoy we could find. All we can do now is wait. Plus, you’re beginning to really worry me. A few weeks ago, you hated Draco Malfoy’s guts, and now you’re driving yourself to distraction!”
Harry stabbed at his egg with prejudice. “I don’t know how everyone else can be so unconcerned!” he exclaimed. “What, is it because he’s a Slytherin? Because he’s a pureblood? Because he hasn’t got a lot of friends? Because he’s a jerk a lot of the time?” Harry felt compelled to add, in the interests of honesty. “What is it that makes his life so worthless to everybody else?”
There was a ringing silence from Ron and Hermione – such a dead silence that Harry knew immediately that they’d stopped eating and moving at all.
“Harry,” said Hermione. “That’s not.” She paused.
Was she remembering that he could tell what she meant? Was she afraid of what he’d hear when she spoke about Malfoy’s worth?
“That’s not fair, mate,” Ron said lowly. “I care if he’s dead. Merlin’s arse, what a thing to accuse us of,” he muttered.
Hermione’s lips parted, but Harry would never know what she’d wanted to say, or what she would have meant by it, because at that moment, an unfamiliar owl swooped down to land in front of Harry and proffered its talon so that Harry could untie the letter from its foot. Harry fed it a bit of egg and it flew away.
He unfurled the tiny scroll which only had five words written on it, hand heavy enough to pierce the parchment in places.
Better if you stop looking.
It had been two days and eleven hours since Draco Malfoy had disappeared.
So Harry didn’t tear his hair free of his head, he delved even more deeply into his translation project.
He’d begun to think that an actual translation spell might be just what the doctor ordered. Unfortunately, there was no way of translating what people meant into the written word. If there were, Harry thought, the world might be a very different sort of place.
Still, he supposed he was maybe onto something.
Meanwhile, the rest of the school had finally, belatedly reacted to Malfoy’s absence: with hysterics. Parvati swore she’d seen a shadowy figure creeping around the Slytherin dorms, “but that was probably just a statue of armor in the dark,” she added matter-of-factly, at least to Harry’s ear. Millicent Bulstrode said that it was all nonsense and Malfoy was on a cruise through the Baltic – something Harry only heard secondhand, because whenever Harry listened to her speak, she seemed to be stammering that Malfoy had to be okay because no other state of affairs made any sense. Of course, there were gruesome rumors, too: that Malfoy was now an Inferi controlled by Voldemort who would return to kill them all was probably Harry’s favorite for sheer creativity.
Harry, on the other hand, grew no more panicked. He’d been certain Malfoy’s circumstances were dire from the very start.
“I don’t know why everyone’s but so confused,” Ron said that evening. “Whenever you eliminate the impossible and all that. Malfoy was taken off to become a Death Eater. End of.”
“If that’s the case, Ron, then why hasn’t he returned by now, smirking lots?”Hermione shot back. “For that matter, why not do it over the summer, or wait until the winter hols? No, if that’s the case, it’s against his will, and that’s why he’s not back, now.”
Ron considered this. “Reckon you’re right.” He shuddered. “That’s a fate I wouldn’t wish on... well, on Malfoy.”
Harry was gazing off into the middle distance when he realized that he was watching the twins, who were showing Neville a sugar quill with skiving snackbox ingredients inside. “A self-dictating quill,” he said, aloud.
“Harry?” Hermione said, but Harry was already seeing if he could borrow one. Then, he approached Fred and George.
“What can we do for you, o great financier?” Fred boomed.
“I need something invented. I think,” Harry said, offering up the quill.
“Aren’t I clever, then?” Fred said, wide-eyed.
“Aren’t I clever,” added George.
“Yeah, thanks,” Harry said. “I need it to record what I’m hearing as if it’s somebody else’s voice.”
“But that’d need to go through your brain,” said George, after a beat of silence. “Right dangerous, that is.”
“I’m clever enough to connect this request to your recent accident in Potions,” said Fred.
Harry shrugged.
“Yes!” crowed Fred. “It does!” Which didn’t quite line up to what Harry had heard, but it was close enough for him to discern that Fred had expressed his opinion, but that the need to demonstrate his own cleverness sat behind it.
“You want to know the truth of something you’re saying. You want to know what you mean,” said George.
“Innit what a mind-healer is for?” wondered Fred. “Has potty wee Potter really gone off the deep end, then?”
“Never mind,” Harry growled, and spun on his heel.
“Awww, wait, c’mon –” Harry heard before the portrait door closed behind him.
His father had invented the Marauder’s Map, Harry thought, looking down at the quill. He could do this, himself. He didn’t need anybody’s help, especially not two people for whom it took a great deal of focus not to mean aren’t I clever, then? over and over again when they spoke.
Harry made his way to the Room of Requirement and asked it for a workshop.
It gave him books and a workbench and tools, things with gears and screws and dials, things he did not know how to use. He opened the books that dryly discussed the creation of new magical objects and tried to ignore the thrumming in his chest that said, four days and sixteen hours.
“He’s with the Dark Lord,” said Snape when Harry lingered after class.
“He – what?” Harry blurted.
“His father took him, as I had suspected,” Snape went on. “Word is, the Dark Lord found out about the truth spell and is keeping Draco for his own amusements.”
Harry’s knees felt suddenly wobbly.
“His father mentioned that they were making him as comfortable as they could,” Snape went on, words spilling down, inexorable as an avalanche. “I suppose that means he’s a prisoner but he’s getting food and water. I hope Lucius Malfoy and all men like him would die, screaming,” he added conversationally.
“If wishes were horses,” Harry said, numbly.
“He’s alive.”
“But will he stay that way?”
“Likely not,” said Snape. “Likely the Dark Lord will tire of him and snap his neck; or maybe tire of him and send him back to Hogwarts. It’s hard to say. It all depends on his mood.”
“Then we need to rescue him!” Harry shouted. “If you can’t risk your position as a spy, show me where he is – show the Order – and we’ll go!”
“I don’t know where he is,” Professor Snape said.
Harry stared. “You’re lying. You can still lie with this, you know, if you really mean to lie.”
“Look me in the face, Potter,” Snape said, and Harry, drawn almost against his will, did. “I don’t know where they’re keeping Mister Malfoy. Very few do know: only the Dark Lord’s most trusted lieutenants. A category to which I clearly no longer belong.”
Harry stood stock-still, unable to believe it. They knew now for sure that Draco had been taken, they knew it was against his will but with the implicit permission of his parents, they knew it was Voldemort who had him. And they knew Voldemort was capricious and that whatever reason he’d kept Draco alive so far might cease mattering to him at any moment.
“You have to go to Malfoy Manor, then,” Harry ordered, voice even. “See if his mum knows –”
“She does not,” said Snape and, at Harry’s incredulous expression, he added, “Narcissa Malfoy may be many things, but she is not a mother who would gladly imprison her child. No, my only hope was to convince Lucius Malfoy to reveal Draco’s location, but I failed; and now he has gone to ground.”
“What do we do next?” Harry pressed, entire body buzzing with adrenaline. “I – just tell me what I need to do, to help, to –”
“There is nothing for you to do,” Snape said plainly. “There is nothing for me to do. Most likely, Mister Malfoy will be dead in a matter of days.”
Despite the ice that had taken place of Harry’s blood in his veins, he saw this for sense and part of him tried to give it an honest go, accepting that. Malfoy is going to die, he thought. He’s maybe dead, already. Nothing you can do.
But it was like casting a seed into desert soil. It wouldn’t take root.
“I know there’s more to magic than I understand right now,” Harry said. “There are tracking spells and wards, and maybe we could find Voldemort’s?”
“Do not say the same –” said Snape.
Harry felt a surge of the same feeling that had overcome him when Quirrell was leading him to the Mirror of Erised: the same surge that had swept from the earth up his toes and through his head just before he walked into the maze at the Third Task. It was a grounding, energizing, powerful thing that made him feel connected to all of reality, capable of anything.
Harry mined for the truth within himself, knowing Snape would hear it regardless and wanting now, of all times, to be certain he understood what Snape was going to hear: to convince him not to give up, to keep searching. “You can’t leave someone alone to die because they set their feet on the wrong road. This wasn’t even a choice he made; it was just his father, pushing from behind. He’s too young, and it’s not fair.”
Snape’s features trembled, as though – as though, Harry realized with a wash of cold, he wished he could cry.
Harry shuffled in place, looked anywhere but up into Snape’s features, wondering what it was that Snape had heard; it surely wasn’t what Harry had. Briefly, warily, Harry wondered if Snape would cup his cheek again, but instead, Snape cupped the roundness of his shoulder; Harry was almost disappointed.
“Mister Malfoy is a clever young man. He may yet escape,” Snape said. “The chances are vanishingly small, but they do still exist. Take some heart, if you can. And don’t,” said Snape, then paused, shaking his head.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” Harry barked. “I just – I want to do something, but there’s nothing to do... ward detection. Yeah, that’s what I’ll try for next –”
Snape’s other hand clasped his other shoulder, and suddenly Harry was bracketed, trapped. He looked up in surprise.
“Must you,” said Snape, and it wasn’t a question.
“Yes!” Harry shot back. “That’s what I do, I always promise I’ll be careful, and I don’t know what you think that means –”
“But you are,” Snape interrupted. “She thought you were, didn’t she? And who else’s opinion can possibly matter to you? Are you really so ungrateful?”
Harry broke away. “I don’t want to hear about my mother, again,” he said, and something shattered in Snape’s normally rock-steady gaze.
“I – what?” he stammered.
But Harry was already heading for the door, breaking out into the hallway and running as fast as his legs could carry him to his books and his devices.
Harry found that he couldn’t concentrate. The words ran together and his hands felt rough and numb, lumps of clay swinging from each wrist as he made his way to the Room of Requirement with the idea that he would work on his fledgling device. But the ideas he had to create a recording device that would work in magical Hogwarts now seemed foolish and naive, the work of wishful thinking. It would just record what somebody else would hear, the way he’d fashioned it. It wouldn’t tell him the truth at all.
Harry threw it across the Room of Requirement, where it shattered against the wall.
Draco Malfoy had been missing for over a week.
It was strange, the way things went on, Harry thought, stabbing at the vegetables on his plate.
The other students didn’t seem at all concerned anymore, the initial hysteria giving way to apathy. Harry even heard one or two laughing in the hallways and caught the hint of Malfoy’s name, but he was too afraid of what he might learn if he lingered. What they might mean about Malfoy, if he stayed.
Ron and Hermione were respectful, but oddly, it was Ron who seemed to understand it all best.
“He was like your other side, Harry, your left to your right,” he said, belying the wise words by shoveling such a large mouthful of mashed potatoes into his gob that it was a full minute before he could go on. “Reckon you feel a bit wobbly now,” he finally added. “Like a stool with a leg missing.”
Hermione, having waited patiently for Ron to finish, sighed. “Sometimes I think it’s not your reaction that’s odd, Harry; it’s everybody else’s. They’re just going about their business, aren’t they?”
That was all very validating, but Harry wasn’t interested in why the others didn’t seem sorry or even worried for themselves. He was interested in finding Malfoy alive, and he was interested in his side project. And if he was interested in those things, now, to the exclusion of all else, it seemed only Ron and Hermione could tell. Maybe Snape, Harry allowed, gaze darting up to the head table. So it wasn’t as though he was in any trouble.
“Do you think that hearing Malfoy’s truth made you like him more?” Hermione wondered.
Harry didn’t bother to dissemble: he was pretty sure it was true, along with the effect of being thrown together as they had been. He shrugged.
“Was he a nicer person, like?” Ron said. “On the inside.”
“Stop talking about Draco Malfoy in the past tense,” Hermione ordered. “Honestly! There’s nothing to say that he’s really –”
Harry followed Hermione’s wide-eyed gaze to the air behind him, which was currently occupied by Professor Snape. Harry immediately saw what had arrested her; Snape’s face was pale as milk.
“I’m afraid Draco Malfoy has fallen off the registers at Hogwarts,” Snape said. “He is no longer a student here.”
Draco Malfoy had been missing for thirty-two days.
And it was time to stop counting.
Harry wondered if his uncharacteristic obedience hadn’t held, if he might’ve found and rescued Malfoy. If Malfoy mightn’t be alive, now, if it weren’t for the stupid truth spell.
Well. Of course, if it hadn’t been for the truth spell – that was probably why Malfoy had been kept, even if it wasn’t why he’d been taken. But Harry thought he never would have listened to Professor Snape if he hadn’t heard the man importuning him not to waste his mother’s sacrifice that day in Potions; if Snape hadn’t heard something so affecting that he reached out to touch Harry’s cheek. Harry hated Snape, or he had hated him, anyway, before all of this; and so maybe if he’d still hated Snape, he would have hared off after Malfoy. Oh, he almost certainly would have – with Ron and Hermione trailing after. If he’d had a lead to follow. If he’d had the slightest hint of where to go.
If he hadn’t listened to Snape, maybe they’d all be back. Maybe he’d have detention for a year, but Malfoy would be alive.
Maybe he would’ve died, but Malfoy would be alive.
That thought intruded with increasing frequency over the next several days. If Harry had found some way of stepping between Voldemort and Malfoy, then – but that was so nonsensical a thought that it scared him a little. Voldemort would have killed him and killed Malfoy a breath later, and it was all so stupid. But what he was thinking, the edge of it anyway, was that he could have taken Malfoy’s place somehow, if the circumstances were right.
Not that he wanted to; that was stupid, too. It was only that he wished he’d done something, and wondered what he might have done so often that it was maddening.
Knowing someone who’d died put his life into a new context. Harry understood for the first time that the universe could snatch someone away with no warning, and there was a gaping emptiness where their presence used to be; but most of the people at Hogwarts, even the people Malfoy had known well, didn’t seem to care, much. They moved around that empty space, gingerly at first, until they forgot that there used to be something – someone – there at all.
Harry took to spending his free time in high places: the Owlery, the Astronomy Tower. It meant he didn’t have to hear what people meant to say, and it let him feel those empty spaces where Malfoy used to be, probe them with his thoughts without disturbance. Thinking about death was easier in a place that was high and remote and lonesome, and not in the Common Room, surrounded by his friends.
Snape’s softening to Harry didn’t extend to his marks, but Harry found it easy to listen to Snape, now that Harry knew him better, and now that he heard what Snape meant to say. Snape always said funny, intriguing things in class, now, and sometimes inadvertently told stories if you could get him on a ramble about this or that ingredient during class.
Once, Snape meant on a dark, difficult day towards the end of December, when Malfoy had been gone for two months, I went up into the hills with old Thistlewaithe. It didn’t matter that Harry had no idea who ‘old Thistlewaithe’ was – part of the fun was in figuring out the context. We clambered about the hills, Thistlewaithe and Rebecca and me – Rebecca was still panting with the excitement of being taught by a Potions Master like Thistlewaithe, and Harry thought, huh, how he got his Potions Mastery, or something like, and grinned. We’d taken a pack mule up the side of the mountains – Mountains! Harry thought, leaning forward. ...in the Andes, but it began to storm, and the fool thing frighted and ran off with all our supplies. Thistlewaithe acted like it was all par for the course. So worldly! “What’s a little hunger in search of Darwin’s Slippers?” he said. But then he fainted of hypoglycemia and tumbled down a cliff, me and Rebecca chasing after. We had to source some of this very plant to dress the wounds.
After class, Harry sidled up to him. “How well did the Plantago work, then? On Thistlewaithe?”
Snape stared. Harry thought that at the beginning of the Potion’s action, he might have complained that he did not like Harry hearing his innermost thoughts; now he paused, tilting his head. “Well enough,” he replied, lips quirking. “We hunted for berries and edible roots, and fed him to get his strength back up. He was an old man who wanted to impress his young charges. Not,” he added, eyeing Harry severely, “an impulse I share.”
"How do you use it for wounds? Just crush the leaves and apply them?" Harry was picturing stumbling across an injured Draco, recognizing the plant, knowing just what to do. He knew that was implausible verging on absurd: he wasn't about to stumble across the other boy with a physical injury and conveniently be able to rescue him, but something about the thought was shockingly appealing.
Professor Snape was staring, and Harry realized he must've heard the spirit of that desire behind his words. "For Merlin's sake," he swore, sounding exhausted. "Go to class, Potter."
Hurt, Harry scarpered.
“I’m beginning to think there was something between them,” Hermione was saying before the fireplace, as Harry crept through the portrait-hole to Gryffindor Tower one evening.
Harry paused, one hand on the frame.
“It’s mental, that is,” Ron replied. Harry did a quick scan of the Common Room as he spoke; there was a knot of older students studying in the corner, but no one else was up so late. “It’s this spell business that made them close.”
“What, because you couldn’t stand it if Harry were interested in a boy?” it seemed like Hermione said, but the comment straddled what Hermione might actually say aloud if she were exasperated and what she might have meant by it; Harry couldn’t be sure if this was what Ron had heard her say.
“You’re right. I guess it doesn’t matter,” Ron said. “Knowing Harry, he’s feeling guilty about it, but it’s not his fault that Lucius Malfoy is a total nutter” - which answered that question.
“You know Harry,” Hermione said, and they sighed, together.
What was it that they knew about him? Harry wondered. That he’d feel guilty? Well, he did; there was no helping it.
There was a pause; the fire popped. Harry didn’t move from his position just in the doorway. He wanted to hear if they would say anything else to each other. He hadn’t wanted to eavesdrop on them awhile, with their addlepated twittering about love and sex, but now it was about him. He lurked.
Sure enough, eventually Hermione spoke again. “What do you suppose he does mean when he says I’ll be very careful?” she inquired.
Ron groaned, dragging both hands down his face. “Merlin, not this again.”
“Snape reacts really strongly to it,” Hermione offered up. “If I were Harry, I’d want to know, too.”
“Yeah, he wants it so much he’d hear it out of the Mirror of Erised,” Ron grumbled.
Harry reversed, creeping directly back out of the portrait hole. “Excuse me,” he said to the Fat Lady. “The Room of Requirement, it’s just down this hallway – you wouldn’t have happened to see anybody transport a big mirror out of it, would you?”
The Fat Lady peered down at him. “Why, yes – some time ago. Some House Elves carried it that way,” she said, pointing.
Harry followed her instructions by striding down the Seventh Floor corridor and asking the next portrait he saw. He had to double back a few times, because even the memories of portraits were not infallible; and sometimes they’d been out of their frames when the Mirror was moved, and he had to walk in a widening circle until he found the next portrait who’d seen the House Elves carrying it away. Finally, he arrived at a disused classroom with cobweb strung along the door; he swept it away with one flick of his wand and slipped inside.
There it was – albeit a bit smaller than he remembered. Harry crept forward, peering again at the inscription around the mirror’s outer edge, the gilt, the heft and weight of it that ran deeper than physical reality and into his magical senses. He wondered, briefly, if he would see his parents again – or even Malfoy, alive – but just as he had with the Stone, he focussed on what it was that he wanted to be able to see/hear: what Professor Snape heard when he spoke. What he would hear, if someone else had said what he had said, and meant it the way that he meant it.
Harry closed his eyes against his own, pale-faced reflection and pictured that Snape, not the Mirror, was before him. “I promise I’ll be very careful,” he said, aloud, and opened his eyes.
Why hadn’t he remembered that the Mirror had never had any sound? The Harry in the mirror’s reflection was definitely saying something else, something very different, but no sound emerged from the reflection.
“I promise I’ll be very careful,” Harry said, staring at his Other’s lips as they moved.
My – something – not – as? Something...
“I promise I’ll be very careful.”
My life isn’t as important as other people’s.
Harry shook his head free of the dark thought; he’d imagined it. And no wonder, with Malfoy gone and him feeling responsible –
“I promise I’ll be careful,” Harry whispered again, close enough to fog the glass.
It doesn’t matter what happens to me, his image mouthed, grim-faced and resolute.
Harry’s breaths were coming fast and shallow, now, and he gripped the edge of the mirror with both hands.
“I promise I’ll be very careful,” Harry said, or tried to say – it felt as though his throat was closing over the words. They emerged sounding like the voice of an old man.
I don’t mean anything to anybody, and I never will, his reflection said, silent – then blinked at him mutely, as though it was just as painful to say these things as it was for Harry to hear them – only – his reflection, it was only his reflection that was saying so. Which meant the misery was on his own face – which meant the misery was his own.
He strained to remember what Professor Snape had said to him when he’d said it all before; but wait, it was Malfoy who’d responded first, back before Harry even knew he had three dimensions:
If you only heard how that emerged, Potter, you’d laugh yourself sick. Draco had already known him well enough to know he hadn’t known what he was saying...
I don’t know why I bloody bother, Snape had said at one point, and it had struck Harry because he’d cursed. And another time, the odd look of humor on Snape’s dark features: you keep saying it, so it must be true. And then Snape’s progressive distress with each repetition. He must’ve realized, Harry thought wildly, that Harry really believed it, the more Snape heard it said aloud.
But Harry didn’t believe that. He didn’t. He was – important (in terms of what he could do for others, what he meant to others – ‘Blimey, it’s Harry Potter!’). He was loved (on the train, can I see the scar?). He was – he was –
No, Harry thought. No. No. No, and it was as though everything within him was rejecting this essential truth: that the only thing that had elevated him from the Dursleys’ house elf was a prophesy; that Snape was right, he was delighted to be a celebrity if it meant he was worth something to someone; that this was the only reason anyone kept him around; that he was only worth what he could do for others, and if that meant dying, that was what he’d been built for; that he was eager to sacrifice himself even for Draco Malfoy, who he barely knew, really, that he was miserable that he hadn’t had the chance, because that was all he was good for. That now everyone knew he was good-for-nothing – that his grief over Malfoy had been selfish, after all...
The feeling was so overwhelming, so horror-filled, that Harry at first honestly thought he was bleeding from the ears when he felt wetness there; but when he removed his hands, his fingertips were wet with a sparkling, clear liquid.
Faced with an unbearable truth, the modified Veritaserum had spilled away, draining from his ears and down each cheek, sparkling on his face like tears.
It was only when he saw Ron and Hermione bickering again that he was sure, though, because it really seemed as though they were debating the use of black ink over green.
“It’s harder to read, Ronald,” Hermione was saying. “Do you want to give your Professors eye strain?”
There was a strange moment of perceptual double-vision, then, when he heard/didn’t hear her say something about how the splotch of green ink at the end of Ron’s nose was fetching; and Harry realized that when Hermione leaned like that, and her gaze flickered down not to Ron’s lips – wanting to kiss him – but his nose – where there was a splotch of ink – well.
Now that he knew what to look for, it was harder not to see it.
“Are you all right, Mister Potter?” Snape said after Potions, and Harry found himself habitually checking the movement of his lips, as if there were still any need. Snape never would have asked him such an honest question before, so it was strange that now it really was what he was saying – and, quite possibly, what he meant. Harry wondered if Snape had given up holding up any walls between them; it was a phenomenal leap of faith for a spy, but maybe it was just Slytherin practicality: there was no point in not saying aloud exactly what he meant, from Snape’s point of view. At least then, he would know what he had told Harry.
Harry realized he’d fazed out a bit. “I’m,” he said, and paused. He realized he’d gotten into the habit, too, of saying just what he meant around Professor Snape. When I know what that is, anyway, he thought, bitterly. Speaking a falsehood or even dissembling now seemed unnatural – far more unsettling, now that he’d gotten out of the habit. “I can’t hear what people mean to say, anymore,” he admitted.
“Well, there was nothing to say it would ever be permanent,” Snape allowed. “What makes you certain it is gone?”
Lie, Harry thought. People lie every day. You lied every day. “I know what I’ll be really careful means,” Harry said, feeling a million miles away from his own body.
“What is it when you hear it?” Snape inquired, and for the first time Harry realized that Snape had literally never heard him say I’ll be very careful; he’d only ever heard the meaning behind it. Before Snape had yelled at him post-Potions accident about his mother and her sacrifice, he’d never felt it was important to reassure Professor Snape that he’d look after himself. Numbly, Harry wrote it up on the board: I promise I’ll be very careful.
Snape stared at him.
“Yeah, sorry,” Harry said.
“That’s the opposite of what you mean, what I hear you say –”
“I know that, now,” Harry interrupted. He wanted this over with; he wanted to be on some other planet.
“Potter,” said Snape. “Your mother – would have wanted more for you. Than to be a tool to someone else’s hand.”
Despite everything, Harry felt a bit touched – because with the spell broken, that was what Snape had really said to him aloud. Which was brave, and kind; not words he would have associated with Snape in the past.
“And I do,” Snape tacked on. “Want more for you.” He was turning pink, but he persisted. “Surely you recognize that out of all the adults in your life, I never wanted you to be a ... little celebrity. I wanted you to be a boy.”
“Oh,” Harry said. “No. No, I didn’t get that bit. I figured you just liked yelling.”
“I really, really do,” Snape agreed, “enjoy yelling. But that’s beside the point. Go to your next class, Potter. And after that, go to Hogsmeade, and drink a butterbeer, and be a person. You don’t owe anyone, just for surviving this long. You could fuck off to Siberia after your butterbeer, and that would be your choice.”
“You can fuck off to Siberia,” Harry said, aloud. “Thanks, Professor, I think that’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me.”
“Now get the hell out of my classroom,” Snape reiterated.
Harry made himself scarce. Because Snape could maybe still hear what Harry meant by what he said, and if he opened his mouth, now, he wasn’t sure what Severus Snape would hear.
Late winter melted to early spring, and there Draco Malfoy stood, just outside of their Care of Magical Creatures lesson.
“Sweet Merlin, Mister Malfoy!” exclaimed Hagrid. “What’re you doin’ here?”
“Looking for Harry Potter. Where is he?”
Harry broke free of the crowd to stare. Malfoy was paler, even, than he’d been before: he was like one of those gem-clear plants that one found underneath a rock that had grown and blossomed anyway. His hair was longer, but no longer glued to his head with charms and potions, and his eyes –
Harry reeled when those eyes latched onto his: they were dizzyingly direct and far-seeing, and open enough to seem blank. Had Draco Malfoy lost his mind?
He was wearing – grey, grey, grey, Harry’s mind chanted meaninglessly – he was wearing a light, modern cloak that fastened at the throat, perhaps something that he used to own, but its clean-lined ostentation no longer even remotely went with the rest of him. There was some thick chain about his neck, and a thin, cylindrical silver object in an inner pocket that flashed and winked in the sun as he shifted – no, stumbled, Harry realized, making an abortive lunge forward; but Malfoy caught himself, and shook his head to stare at Harry again. To stare like the sight of Harry was the sight of dry land after a long and perilous voyage.
“And Professor Snape,” Malfoy said, without taking his eyes off of Harry for a moment. Harry swallowed, throat dry enough to click. “I want to see Professor Snape.”
Hagrid said something in reply, but Harry didn’t hear him.
“I need your help,” Malfoy said – to Harry. Malfoy was alive, and needed his help. “Outside the wards, there’s – I need your help.”
“We thought you were dead,” Harry said. You’re not dead, he thought, exultant. It’s not my fault you’re dead because you’re not dead at all.
And suddenly, something animated Malfoy’s face, and he stopped looking so Unseelie and strange. His lip quirked like the ghost of smirks past. “Alive and well, as you can see,” he replied, only – alive, yes, definitely, but well? Harry wasn’t sure. But when Malfoy reached out and closed strong fingers around his wrist to yank him forward, he was stumbling along without protest.
“Wait just a minute,” said Ron. “You pop back here from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s side and somehow survive for months, which means of course you struck a deal with him, and you want Harry to go with you?”
Hermione looked nervous. “Maybe we should wait until Professor Snape gets here –”
“I’m taking him to the Dark Lord,” said Draco impatiently, “but not for the reason you think.”
Harry stared. You what?
“It’s important,” Draco added, with the clear-eyed certainty of the mad.
“Look,” Harry began, but Ron was talking over him.
“I don’t trust you any further than I can throw you,” Ron said. “Not especially now you’ve gone all funny.”
“Yes,” said Draco, “but for very good reason; and he’ll come right back.”
Harry narrowed his eyes; he wondered what Ron had meant that was so different from the straightforward statement he’d heard aloud.
“No,” Draco said to him calmly. “Don’t look at them; look at me.”
Harry obeyed, almost against his will; those grey eyes pinned and pulled him.
“Do you remember when I said I owed you?”
Harry did remember that: of course I owe you, Draco had said, back when Harry kind-of-maybe understood him a little. But now – but now...
Staring at Draco’s familiar features, Harry realized that this Draco Malfoy was the one he’d started to get to know: the one who refused to speak aloud; the one who swore that they were growing used to the truth. This was the final destination to the path that Draco Malfoy had begun walking, when Harry still spoke to him every day. The endgame.
And Harry trusted him, somehow, still.
He nodded.
“This is me, paying back,” Draco said, eyes intent and earnest. “You know I can’t lie to you. I’m going to tell you just what I mean. You know that. Right?”
I do, Harry thought. “Yes,” he said.
And then Malfoy’s hands were on him, and it was like he’d unlearned everything he’d ever known about personal space. Malfoy’s hands bracketed him in as Snape’s had, but Malfoy was much closer: peering into his features so carefully that Harry would not have been surprised if Malfoy rested his forehead against Harry’s.
“You will come out of the other side of this just fine,” Draco said with intent confidence, as though he meant to beam the truth of it directly into Harry’s brain by close proximity. “Better than fine.”
Yes, Harry thought. He turned to the Care of Magical Creatures crowd behind him. “Going with Malfoy,” he said, only half-aware of the words. “Be right back.” And he strode forward after the disappearing blond head.
Two months later and Harry was best friends with Thomas Riddle and Draco Malfoy, and only he and Severus Snape knew they didn’t belong there.
Ron and Hermione disapproved of his friendship with both, and the funny thing was – the funny thing, like there’s just one, Harry thought, helplessly – was that they disapproved of Malfoy more than Riddle. Hermione still very well remembered Malfoy calling her terrible names; the same could not be said of Riddle who, while a Slytherin, was a model student and unfailingly polite to everyone.
But like Malfoy, he was a little mad around the edges: he just talked a better game. Like me, too, Harry thought, remembering his strange, silent-movie image in the Mirror of Erised. Maybe like me, too.
One day, Harry found him sitting out by the Lake, dangling his toes into the water: and sometimes it struck Harry, that the Lord Voldemort who had ruined his life and murdered his parents was once this boy – this boy, without any family, like him, who took advantage of the cool water in the June summer heat by un-selfconsciously taking off his shoes and flexing his toes into the cool mud.
Well, maybe not unselfconsciously, Harry thought, lips quirking when Tom yanked his feet closer before he realized it was only Harry, and uncurled a jot.
“Hullo, Potter,” he said, amicably enough. “Done with your revising, yet?”
Harry plopped down beside him and shucked his own shoes before replying. “As far as Hermione is concerned, we’re never through revising. After exams, she’ll want to be revising.”
Tom laughed, politely, the way he did just about everything politely. Amused enough to flatter Harry, and not amused enough for anyone who overheard him to think he was being cruel to Hermione. It was maddening, sometimes, the line that Tom walked: it made you feel you never knew him.
“You?” Harry said, nudging him.
Touch always seemed to unseat Tom, and today was no exception; his lips quirked like he wasn’t sure whether or not he was permitted to smile. “Potions is troublesome as always,” he replied.
“You’ve the top score in Potions,” Harry said flatly. “Don’t play it up for those of us who’re barely scraping by.”
But that hunched Tom’s shoulders.
“It’s all right to be good at something,” Harry said. “You haven’t got to pretend. I don’t mind it. I’m better at Quidditch than you.”
“And Defense,” said Riddle, and Harry laughed aloud.
Tom never seemed to understand why Harry always thought that was so funny.
“I dropped the book off, the one that you thought Professor Snape might like,” Tom said, and Harry realized that Tom had been trying to circle towards this by speaking about Potions – it was Tom’s Slytherin way to casually sidle up to a topic of conversation that interested him rather than launching into it straightaway.
“Did he?” Harry said. “I know he was talking about that one last month.”
“He liked it, but he didn’t answer my question, quite,” Tom replied.
“What was your question about, anyway, that you felt like you had to butter Snape up?” Harry laughed.
Tom shrugged. “It’s not important,” he said.
“Come on, then,” Harry said. “I helped you figure out what he’d like.”
Tom looked up; he had eyes that were so dark a brown that they were nearly black. Something about him looked Mediterranean, now he was himself again: he had shiny, dark hair that waved, and skin with a golden hue. If he were more approachable, he’d have a girl on each arm, probably, Harry mused, but Tom kept to himself and was equally polite to every one of them. Still, there were probably a few not-so-secret crushes on the other boy, unless he missed his guess.
“I,” said Tom, before fluttering to a halt. Then, he rushed forward. “Have you ever been – worried over yourself?”
Harry thought of his doppelganger standing in the mirror, grim-faced and strange. “Yes,” he allowed.
Tom’s shoulders unwound. “Professor Snape said I should speak to Draco. That you and Draco would understand.”
“We might,” Harry said. “If you ever wanted to really talk about it, and not around it.”
Tom sighed. “That might be beyond me just now,” he admitted, squeezing his toes into the watery mud and then releasing their hold.
Without the flash of light or pop of displaced air that typically accompanied such manifestations, a dark window appeared in the air a few steps forward, out into the middle of the Lake; it held the shape of a door.
“What on earth,” said Tom. Harry’s gaze darted to him to see that he, too, had leapt to his feet and already was pointing his wand directly at the aperture. But when nothing sinister emerged, Harry sidled forward into the water; he snapped off a cattail and poked it through the blackened doorway; when he pulled his hand back, the cattail re-emerged unscathed.
Harry thought about how Ron and Hermione no longer shared his understanding of reality, and the barriers that had erected between them. He thought about how he still didn’t know who he was, or what he was for if not for other people, but that he wanted to find out. Mostly, he looked at what appeared to be a magical portal with fascination and what he realized now was a distinct indifference to his own continued existence. And Harry didn’t so much snap as heat through, molten, until he had settled into a new mold, a new shape.
“What are you doing?” Tom hissed, guarding Harry’s flank but still well back, where the water wove around reeds. “You don’t know what that is – it could be dangerous!”
He shot Tom a grin over his shoulder that would not have looked out of place on his father’s face. “It’s all right,” he said, tossing his hair back.
“After all,” he added, “I’ll be very careful.”