Chapter Text
Harry is happy for Zaira, and flattered that she allowed Blaise to invite them to what is clearly a very exclusive party, but he wishes he and Draco were still asleep. Or at least in bed.
“What’s up with you?”
He looks up to see Ron frowning at him, a glass of something that sizzling ominously in his hand. He’s been drinking anything on a floating tray since they got here but everyone else has stuck to one, considering they really don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of so many important people. Most of them are technically still underage, with Hermione, Ron, and Lavender being the exception. Not that this crowd really cares. The first time he met Amelia, he drank with her.
Lavender looks like she’s drinking a lot, but he’s seen her actually drunk enough times to know the difference. He assumes that she’s spelling her glass empty, but she also might just be switching glasses with Ron when no one’s looking.
Speaking of. “Where’s Lavender?” He looks around, but in a crowd of Zabinis, she doesn’t stand out much.
“Harassing some cousins who she overheard calling her gauche,” Ron says. “Now answer my question.”
He frowns. “Doesn’t she look gauche on purpose?”
“Yes, but it’s still rude for them to comment on it. If they can’t keep it to themselves, they should at least be better at ensuring she doesn’t overhear.” The fact that that makes sense probably means he’s been spending a little too much time with Slytherins. And Lavender. “Where’s Draco? Did you get in a fight?”
Why do people keep asking him that? He and Draco almost never get into fights these days.
“He’s looking for Blaise’s aunt,” he says, even though that doesn’t really narrow it down. Zaira is an only child but he’s been introduced to a dozen women who referred to themselves as Blaise’s aunts and he’s already lost track of the actual relation. It’s like being back at the Malfoy family dinner where most people went by cousin for simplicity’s sake. “No, we’re fine.”
Ron crosses his arms.
This is not the place to have this conversation. He looks around for a suitable distraction and thankfully one presents itself, heading right for them.
“Have you tried these?” Hermione asks, stopping in front of them and holding a plate of miniature cakes with white frosting and gold detailing. “I’ve had like eight already. They’re so good.”
Ron reaches for one and Hermione yanks the plate away from him, scowling.
He blinks, hand in midair. “You said you already had eight! Why did you bring them over here if you weren’t going to share?”
“To make sure they didn’t run out while I wasn’t looking,” she answers. “The table’s right over there. Go get your own.”
“Come on, just one,” he needles, hand creeping closer.
She narrows her eyes. “I can see you, that’s not going to work.”
Harry knows an opportunity when he sees one. He reaches for the cakes and Hermione turns her glare onto him even as she moves the plate away from him and closer to Ron.
Ron snatches one of the cakes off the plate and shoves it into his mouth in one bite. “Hey!” she shouts, scowling. Ron grins at her, mouth full of cake, and Harry takes the opportunity to disappear into the crowd while neither of them are paying attention to him. Being perhaps slightly shorter than average has to come in handy sometime. Ron definitely wouldn’t be able to use the same trick.
He's mostly walking aimlessly, smiling and nodding at various people who catch his eye. He likes it when he’s not the most interesting person in a crowd. Most of these people are Italian – he barely even rates a second glance.
“Lost?”
He looks up to see Perenelle leaning against a column, sipping at something golden. He doesn’t see Nicolas around anywhere, which isn’t that unusual, but he still feels oddly like he’s walking into a trap. He goes over to her anyway, glad for the drink he’s not even halfway through because it gives him something to do with his hands. “Bit hard to get lost, isn’t it? The areas not that big.” It’s less than the length of a quidditch pitch.
She raises an eyebrow. “Depends on your view, I suppose.”
Harry thinks of the room in the middle thin air that Millie had led him too and if there’s one, there’s probably more, and it wouldn’t surprise him if the Flamels had taken some time in the past six hundred years to uncover the secrets of the forum. “I was just looking for someone.”
He regrets saying that as soon as it leaves his mouth, because Perenelle asks the obvious follow up question, “Who?”
Draco is an easy answer, or one of his other friends, but instead he opens his mouth and says, “Snape.”
Just because he can’t stop thinking about him doesn’t mean he wants to talk to him. He needs a real night’s sleep and to talk to everyone before he does that. If he’d done that in the first place instead of jumping head first into Snape’s pensieve, he wouldn’t be in this position.
If Perenelle finds it odd that he’s looking for his notoriously most hated professor, she doesn’t show it. “He’s in the kitchens.”
“Kitchens?” he repeats, not bothering to wonder how she knows that. He looks around, but it’s all outside and he doesn’t see an oven or a grill or anything. He assumed the food was being summoned or transported through, but now that he thinks about it, he’d only seen people coming through the temporary floos, not food.
“I’ll show you,” she says, pushing herself off the column and leading him through the crowds.
He doesn’t want to actually talk to Snape right now, but he figures he can duck away once she shows him where the kitchens are. While he has her, and she seems willing to entertain him, he says, “I’m sort of surprised he’s here. I didn’t know he and Zaira were close.”
Based on when he bumped into him in the hall, Snape’s not even just here for the reception, but was there for the actual wedding ceremony between Zaira and Kingsley. He hasn’t seen any of his other professors here at all, besides the Flamels.
Her eyes cut back to him, and he’s definitely not fooling her, but he doesn’t feel bad about that. He figures it’s been a long time since someone’s fooled Perenelle. “They’re not. Kingsley invited him.”
That makes even less sense than Zaira. At least they were both Slytherins and attended Hogwarts together. Probably. Now that he’s thinking about, he has no idea how old Zaira is.
“Kingsley’s known Severus since he was eleven,” she continues, amused. “Based on rumor, I believe their friendship is based off of not putting up with your father and his friends and a mutual distrust of Albus.”
He forgot that Kingsley was in the same year as his parents, which meant the same year as Snape. Sirius mentioned that Kingsley moved out of their dorm because he was sick of them, but he can’t remember him ever acting coldly to Sirius or Remus. Besides, he can’t remember Kingsley and Snape interacting at all. “They seem to get along now. And you like Dumbledore.”
“Well, it was twenty years ago.” That doesn’t seem to make a difference to Snape and Sirius. Although Snape and Remus get along alright. Sometimes. “I do like Albus. I’ve also known him for the past century and while I’ve liked him through all of it, I haven’t trusted him through all of it.” Merlin, Dumbledore’s old. “A good man does not make a perfect man. But you know that better than most, don’t you Harry?”
He narrows his eyes, unsure if she’s talking about him or if she somehow knows about his journey through Snape’s memories of if she’s just commenting on the general state of his life. It sounds like something Sedna would say. He should probably stay away from the fountain.
Before he can make up his mind, Perenelle has led him to the edge of the forum and she reaches out in front of her, a spark of magic in her fingertips as she pushes open an invisible door. He sees people in short white robes over white trousers shouting orders, steam in the air, and several house elves moving so quickly that he knows it will make him nauseous if he watches them for too long. “Thank you,” he says, turning to Perenelle, but she’s already melting back into the crowd. He debates doing the same, but just because Perenelle isn’t looking at him doesn’t mean she isn’t watching him.
He ducks into the kitchen, nudging the door closed behind him.
Maybe he can find some more of those little cakes that Hermione had. They did look pretty good.
~
Draco isn’t at all surprised to see his parents here. He would have been more surprised if they hadn’t been invited.
“Aunt Sophia?” he says, looking between her and his father like this is some sort of trick. His mother is off chatting with Zaira and several other high society women, Ophelia Bulstrode among them, which is interesting, because if Millie’s father knew half of what his daughter got up to, he’d be apocalyptic, but Ophelia doesn’t seem concerned. Draco’s pretty sure that he’s still not over the Department of Mysteries even though that was years ago. Or, well, over a year ago. More than one year, which technically makes it years ago.
Wait, it had been near the end of the year, hadn’t it? So almost a year, which was basically the same as a little more than a year, so.
“Hello, Draco,” Sophia says.
She looks tired.
He wants to ask about Bellatrix, but also he doesn’t want to talk about her ever again, since it seems like every time the three of them are in the same room, Draco is asking Sophia to choose him over her. She hasn’t disappointed him yet, but it doesn’t make him feel any better about it.
But also Bellatrix is why he’s surprised to see her here, sort of. She and Kingsley work in the same department and he lets her get away with, well, literal murder, but Draco has never gotten the impression that he’d actually liked her. So far it seems the guest list is limited to people they’re related to and people who’s company they – or Blaise – genuinely seem to enjoy. He figures her obvious if tragic love affair with an insane Death Eater might have dampened whatever affection had existed between her and Kingsley. Which isn’t totally fair, considering both Sophia and Lucius are Death Eaters themselves.
“Aren’t you supposed to be having quidditch practice right about now?” his father asks, reaching out to tug his robes straight, even though they’re already straight, he’s not an animal.
He shrugs, actually knocking it askew since Lucius is still fiddling with the buttons. At least now he has something to properly set to right. “Flora will get over it.”
Lucius’s lips twitch. “Really.”
“No, she’s going to be pissed and stay pissed and probably make me run laps around the pitch next practice,” he sighs. “But she’s at least used to it by now.”
Sophia finally smacks Lucius’s hands away and he glares at her but keeps his hands to himself. It’s the first somewhat normal sibling behavior he can remember seeing from them, which makes even less sense than her being here. Sophia is mad at Lucius because he wrecked her marriage to Bellatrix. That’s still true. It’s always going to be true, unless Sophia’s willing to tank her career and resign herself to conjugal visits. Which, if she was, probably would have happened back before Bellatrix lost her last marble.
“How’s school? Working on any interesting projects?” she asks. “I assume you’re still the top of your year.”
“It’s pretty much down to me and Hermione in every class,” he says. She’s one of his dearest friends, but next year they’re also going to be enemies. Newts classes are so heavily weighted that it’s really going to make or break which one of them comes out ahead.
“He’s looking into something with the founders,” Lucius says. “Some sort of history project?”
“Binns hates talking about the founders,” Sophia says, blinking.
Draco vaguely remembers that from second year, but he’d thought that was because none of the teachers wanted them talking about the petrified students and not a personal dislike. “Why? Seems they’d be relevant for a history of magic course.”
Except they’re not, because everything they can verify about them is barely enough to fill up a foot of parchment. You’d think they’d have at least a day of classes on them, or something, but maybe they just save it for the sorting hat to sing about.
“That row he got into with Giffard, wasn’t it?” Sophia says.
Lucius shrugs. “Something like that. Never really did get a clear answer if they fought before or after he died.”
“Before Giffard died or before Binns died?” she asks.
“Both. Half the time Binns doesn’t even know he’s dead and getting alone time in the headmaster’s office was a nightmare, not that the portraits were ever any use. Well, besides Phineas, and only to the Blacks,” he adds.
Draco blinks several times. “What are you talking about?”
“What do you do in History of Magic?” Sophia asks.
“Study, mostly.” Professors handle the history portions of their own subjects, otherwise the school board would have insisted on banishing Binns ages ago, regardless of the quite large endowment he’d left to Hogwarts with the caveat he be welcome to teach there as long as he’s able. To be fair, the board that had agreed to those terms obviously hadn’t anticipated he’d continue showing up to bore students after his death. Goblin wars and the ilk are important, but merlin is he boring. The books he’d published before his death were rather good, though. As far as Draco knows, anyone who cares just reads those. He’s pretty sure Hermione’s memorized them by now.
Lucius’s lips twitch. “Well, times have changed.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“We used to try and get him to talk about literally anything besides history,” Sophia says. “Mostly gossip. We had a whole point system for it and everything. Mostly we got a whole lot of nothing, or stuff about people who we didn’t know. But apparently Binn’s strict lesson plan is at least partially the fault of Giffard Abbott, who was the headmaster who hired him. They got into a fight specifically about him teaching about the founders.”
“Allegedly,” Lucius says. “Giffard refused to confirm or deny, no matter how many times we were able to sneak into the headmaster’s office to ask him. Phineas tried goading him into answering, but that just pissed him off more.”
He’d forgotten that Hannah’s ancestor had been a headmaster some hundred or so years ago. It hadn’t meant much to him before, but if her desire to charm gold is related to some big family secret, then there’s a chance Giffard knows what it is. Not much of a chance of him spilling the beans to Draco, but he might be able to leverage whatever danger Susan is convinced Hannah is in to get him to talk. Of course, that means getting into Dumbledore’s office to speak to him. He might have a little trouble sweet talking the statue into letting him in again, considering what had happened last time.
Technically, Harry’s the one who cut Dumbledore’s hand off. And it had saved his life. Really, there’s no reason for that overgrown chicken to hold it against him at all.
Maybe he can get Harry to do it. Being the one to make the cut or not, he knows who’s a lot likelier to get access to the headmasters’ portraits.
“If you want to know about the founders, you’re probably better off bothering Bathilda,” Sophia says. “If she’ll talk to you.”
“I already told him about Batty,” his father says.
Another thing they’ll need Harry for, since she hates his family, apparently. Maybe he should start keeping a list.
“Why are you over here talking to us, anyway?” Sophia asks, nudging him gently in the side. “Aren’t you supposed to be with your friends?”
Right, he has plenty of time to scheme about uncovering all of Hannah’s secrets later. “They’re around. I’m actually looking Blaise’s aunt, the gladiator one?”
“Gelsomina?” Sophia says in surprise. He assumes Blaise only has the one gladiator aunt, but nothing’s impossible for the Zabinis. “Last I saw she was with Severus.”
“Snape?” he says, then continues, “Okay, never mind, I don’t want to talk to her that badly.”
Although he actually would prefer it if she and Harry had a chance to meet. It’ll increase the likelihood that she really will train him this summer.
Blaise is around here somewhere. Surely he can pry his aunt away from their potions professor.
~
Harry turns a corner, opens a door into what looks like another small kitchen in a labyrinth of them, and wonders if he’s cursed.
Snape is there, chopping something with a very large knife, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and his hair pulled back. Seated on the table, darting her fingers in between his fast moving blade to steal bites of whatever he’s chopping, is an extremely tall and muscular woman in a strappy yellow dress. She has very dark skin and tight blonde curls cut close to her head. She’s also looking at his terrible potions professor in a way that makes Harry almost regret not drinking more heavily.
Harry’s just intending to back away and pretend this never happened when she glances up at him and says, “We have a visitor.”
“Hm?” He turns to see Harry, and he’s still smiling, but he does roll his eyes.
Harry is frozen.
“Get lost,” he says, in a way where Harry’s not quite sure if it’s a question or a command.
The woman snorts. “Do you treat all celebrities like this?”
Snape stills for a moment, as if seriously thinking it over. “Yes.”
That’s true, actually.
“I’m not sure if I should be offended or flattered,” she says, smile going a little wider.
Snape is no longer paying attention to him, and Harry should really take this opportunity to back away quickly. Instead he blurts, “Are you really – but I thought,” he cuts himself off, staring at Snape’s arm, his dark mark and soulmark both displayed.
Fucking merlin. Did he really just say that? It should be illegal for him to interact with Snape on less than a full night’s rest.
He’s expecting fury, but instead Snape just looks confused. Somehow that’s worse.
“Are you thirsty, Severus?” She slides off the table. It doesn’t affect her height much.
“No, Somina,” he sighs.
She pats him on the shoulder. “I’ll get us some drinks, shall I?”
Harry wonders if he can follow her out, but when she passes by, she grabs his shoulder and shoves him further into the room before closing the door behind her.
Snape waves him over, still holding the knife. “At least make yourself useful. Cut the carrots like they’re mandrake roots for the deafening potion.”
There’s plenty of food outside. He doesn’t know why Snape’s bothering to cook anything himself. He hadn’t even known Snape could cook. There’s not much point in it since he lives at the castle. He steps closer, taking one of the knives from the wall to work across from him.
The silence lasts up through Harry’s first carrot, when Snape says, “Lily’s been dead for fifteen years. Even if we hadn’t gone our separate ways beforehand, that’s a long time.”
Harry stares at the vegetables, concentrating on cutting these correctly and sure that he won’t be able to have this conversation if he looks Snape in the eye during it. He doesn’t know why he’s bothering to answer him at all instead of just throwing him out of the room. “But you didn’t go your separate ways.” He licks his lips. “I looked in your pensieve.”
“Fifty points from Gryffindor.”
He looks up, outraged. “You – but you practically told me to look!”
“Did I?” he asks, but he did, and if he hadn’t then he wouldn’t be so calm right now. “See anything interesting?”
“You know what I saw,” he says.
Snape sighs, lighting up the stove with twitch of his index finger. “I have a lot of memories in that pensieve. You saw what you wanted to see, otherwise it wouldn’t have shown it to you. I have years worth of memories in there, if you have a question about something then you’re going to have to be specific.”
“Years?” he repeats incredulously. He’d thought these were key memories, maybe, but to have dumped years of his life into a pensieve –
“There are things that I don’t want to risk forgetting,” he says, “and others that I don’t care to remember. A pensieve, handily, accounts for both.”
Well, when he puts it like that.
“Hortensia Caracalla,” he says.
Snape almost smiles. “It really is a good thing that your father named you.”
“You can’t know that,” he says. They weren’t even friends. Snape wasn’t even there.
“If Lily had done it, you’d have had a couple more syllables and you’d share it with some scholar or poet she liked,” he says. “James picked it.”
This is exactly what Harry had wanted to avoid. It’s even worse now that he knows they cared about one another to the end. Snape speaks of his mother casually and familiarly and he simultaneously wants to demand he tell him more and also wants to run from this conversation.
“I saw a meeting you had with Voldemort,” he says, switching tracks until he can get his head under control.
There’s that familiar sneer. It’s actually weirdly comforting. “There are a lot of those in there.”
Fair enough. “It was during the first war. Lucius was there, and Bellatrix, and Voldemort mentioned you ruining his couch.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down as much as you might think,” he says. “I always went for the couch when I could. He insisted on getting it custom every time instead of just repairing it with magic. Pedantic bastard.”
This and similar behavior would certainly explain why Snape would so often look like he just got beat despite his supposed skill on the battlefield. “Voldemort was different.”
“Sane?” Snape offered. “For a given definition. A raving lunatic wouldn’t have gotten very far, after all. You met his teenage self in your second year. Miss Weasley is many things, but she’s neither stupid nor gullible, and yet he managed to charm her quite thoroughly into doing exactly what he wanted. Think of everything Lockhart got away with.”
He’s never really thought about the first war. Not in specifics, not in how it was different. “What happened to him? Was it the horcruxes?”
Snape’s lips press together and he gets to work on some sort of red meat.
They’ve talked about the possibility before, but, “Are you under an Unbreakable Vow?”
“You’re not chopping,” he says, which is a yes.
Harry picks up the knife again, trying to figure out how to get around this. He wishes Hermione were here. “Did you ever tell Voldemort the prophecy?”
Snape sends him a cutting look that he’s used to receiving when he gives the wrong answer during class. “If I had, he wouldn’t have been so determined to get it himself last year.”
Harry freezes, blinking slowly. “Wait – wait. Voldemort wanted you to get it for him. But – I thought he just knew you were a traitor and didn’t care if picking it up killed you, but–”
“He found out about my prior career,” he says. “Which of course meant that I was a traitor, since if I was loyal I would have been able to tell him the prophecy in full as soon as it was recorded. I could have picked it up and brought it to him, even, just like he wanted me to do in the Department of Mysteries.”
Harry stares. “You and Mum said the prophecy doesn’t say anything important.”
“It doesn’t,” he says. “But he was going to kill me whether I did it or not. My last act wasn’t going to be giving in to that asshole.”
Merlin.
He thinks of his mother, defiant to the end, pleading only as a distraction while she cast the spell that would push Voldemort from his body and save her son’s life. He thinks of himself, and his various encounters with Voldemort over the years.
“I saw the deal you made with Dumbledore,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell him the truth? About your job, and my mother.”
Snape rolls his eyes. “Fat lot of good that deal did. Arabella Fig couldn’t have been more useless if she tried. She wasn’t even able to keep you from taking the night bus after you blew up Marge. Black is on the loose, supposedly out to kill you, and what does she do? Takes her eyes off of you to owl Dumbledore.”
Wait. “Mrs. Fig is a witch?”
“Squib,” he says. “And appropriately ingratiated to Dumbledore for letting her feel useful that she didn’t do much more than make sure you were still breathing.”
“You’re not answering my question,” he says.
In different circumstance, that would get him a detention, but right now Snape just looks exasperated. “If you took a moment to think, you wouldn’t need me to. Dumbledore thought I was an enthusiastic Death Eater. He thought Lily and I still hated each other. He though I sold your family out to Voldemort. In spite of all of that, he still wanted to use me, and was willing to go to extreme measures to ensure he could. How much worse would it have been if he thought I was on his side? Enemies have to be handled with care. Allies not so much.”
Oh. That’s – well. Dumbledore must know now, if Voldemort had found out somehow. But Snape is still here. Discovering the truth hasn’t led to Dumbledore letting Snape go. Still, “He’s not that bad.”
Snape sneers, but Harry gets the impression that it’s not aimed at him. “What we’re dealing with now is a different kind of Voldemort and a different kind of war. Dumbledore, accordingly, used to be a different sort of ruthless.”
He glances up at Harry’s scar, something darker flashing across his face, gone almost as soon as it’s there.
“Well, you weren’t on his side anyway,” he says, only half paying attention to what he’s saying. What was that about? “You were on my mother’s.”
“Always,” he says easily, his voice full of an uncharacteristic fondness.
“Great,” he says, unable to stop the bitterness from welling up inside of him. “More things that are my fault.”
He’s expecting something cutting in return, but Snape just raises an eyebrow. “Plenty of things are your fault. I keep a list. What are you referring to?”
“This,” he says, then gestures at him, “You. Being stuck at Hogwarts, making everyone miserable, making me miserable. I couldn’t do what the stupid prophecy says and kill him and I couldn’t stop him from coming back and now he’s still out there and I still can’t do anything about it!”
Snape puts a lid on the pan and wipes his hands on a towel. “That’s your father in you, I’m afraid. The self-centerdness.”
“I’m not–” he starts angrily.
“You are,” Snape cuts him off. “Not everything is about you, Harry, despite Dumbledore’s best efforts. I don’t give Black a lot of credit, but surely he must have impressed upon you that a teenager is not responsible for ending a war?”
“But I am,” he says quietly. “It’s always up to me. Isn’t that what the prophecy said? Isn’t that why Voldemort has been after me this whole time?”
Isn’t it why his parents are dead and Sirius was in Azkaban and Remus was all alone? Maybe, without this working against them, Pettigrew might have even made a better choice.
Snape makes a noise of disgust at the back of his throat. “This is precisely what I’m talking about. I made that deal with Dumbledore as a grown man when you were still a baby. It might have been because of you, but that doesn’t make it your responsibility, a distinction you’d do well to learn.”
“Then why do you hate me?” he asks. “If you don’t blame me.”
“You’re irritating,” Snape answers. “You don’t listen. You very rarely learn. You are in possession of some of your father’s worse traits before he grew up.” He pauses, then adds, “Your mother’s too.”
“Awesome,” he says, even as parts of him want to ask which of his flaws Snape thinks he got from which parent. “Thanks.”
Snape continues as if he hasn’t said anything. “At first I thought if our relationship were antagonistic enough, Dumbledore would let me quit. It hadn’t worked with any of the other students, but I thought it might this time, with you. Then you just irritated me. Don’t take it personally.”
“How am I not supposed to take that personally?” he demands.
“I hate kids,” he says bluntly. “Never wanted them, never wanted to be around them, and the past fifteen years certainly haven’t done anything to change that. Most of you irritate me.”
Why the hell did he think that talking to Snape was a good idea?
Snape sighs. “Do you know what the prophecy says?”
Harry shakes his head, swallowing before he says, “I thought it didn’t matter.”
“Not anymore,” he says, “because while I do think it was about you both, you’ve already fulfilled it.”
He stares. “What?”
Snape rolls his eyes and recites, “The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches. Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies. The Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not. Either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives. The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies.”
Harry opens his mouth, then closes it. Now having heard the prophecy, it sounds exactly as useless as Snape said it was.
Snape’s lips quirk up. “The issue with prophecies is their vagueness. What exactly counts as defiance? Every Order member had defied Voldemort far more than three times. Born as the seventh month dies – easy enough, the end of July. But lots of children are born at the end of July. The thing about prophecies is that they’re about moments, rather than general information.”
“Moments?” he repeats, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
He taps his fingers against the counter. “This is a bit above your level, but time is at once changeable and immutable. Things that can be changed have already been changed, at least in our timeline. If one were to change something else, something not previously accounted for, then we’d break off and another timeline would form. This can be induced, especially by particularly erroneous time travelers, hence all the legislation around it, but it’s also happening naturally, probably a hundred times a day. A thousand.”
Harry really, really wishes he had Hermione or Draco here right now. Or Luna. This seems like the type of thing she’d be good at understanding.
Snape pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Say you’re driving down the road. You can go anywhere up ahead – left, right, or staying straight. But whatever route you’ve driven so far can’t be undriven. You have already made those choices. The choices ahead are still open to you. Seeing into the future is to see those roads up ahead and where they’ll lead. If you don’t like the road you’re on, it’s possible for you to get off the next exit, so to speak, and get on a different one. That’s why divining and visions are valuable, but also inherently unreliable. Seeing into the future doesn’t mean seeing into your future.”
Memories of a conversation he and his friends had last year are coming to the surface. “Except prophecies are about a fixed point.”
He hadn’t really understood what that meant at the time, but he thinks he’s starting to.
“Exactly,” Snape says. “There’s no forks in the road. No making other choices. Even if one were to go back in time and splinter the timeline, that fixed point would still occur. It’s immutable. Prophecies, then, cannot be about days or months or years or even how a war is ended. They’re about a single, immutable moment.”
“And you think this moment has already occurred?” he asks.
Snape nods. “There are dozens of ways that Lily and James can be said to have thrice defied Voldemort. You were born on the last day of July. Notice how the prophecy didn’t say defeated. It said vanquished, which isn’t quite the same thing. The power the Dark Lord knows not and either dying at the hands of the other – that’s the spell Lily used on you. It’s a power he didn’t know and either it was going to work, or you were going to die. Neither can live while the other survives – if for some reason you hadn’t died and he hadn’t been vanquished, he wouldn’t have just walked away. He would have killed you.”
Harry frowns. “But he didn’t die. He’s still alive.”
“Yes,” he says dryly, “because as you of all people know, death is a permanent state.” Okay, that’s fair. “After the spell rebounded, he was less than a ghost, and you wouldn’t describe a ghost as anything besides dead, would you? He died that night. Even with everything he’d done to prevent it, even with the darkest ritual he could find, he didn’t come back the same way he left. The Dark Lord Voldemort of the first war was vanquished. This war has its own challenges and its own horrors, but it’s nothing like what came before.”
That’s some terrible mix of comforting and disturbing.
“What about being marked as his equal?” Harry asks. “My scar?
Snape presses his lips together and says nothing.
He’s been so forthcoming about everything so far that it doesn’t make sense that this would be the thing he’d refuse to answer.
Unless he can’t answer.
“Dumbledore doesn’t agree with this interpretation of the prophecy,” Harry says. He doesn’t have to figure out how to get all the answers out of Snape right now. It’s not like he doesn’t know where he’ll be. Well, at least until the curse on the Defense Against Dark Arts position gets him.
Hopefully he’ll just be fired, but honestly if he dies then it will actually be a lot easier for Harry to get a straight answer out of him.
“No,” Snape says, lips curled back. “Not enough exposure to them, perhaps. They are rare.”
But Snape has been exposed to them. He made a career of it, even if it wasn’t his department, he knew enough about them to know how to remove them safely and was given free reign over the room where they were kept. He was an unspeakable. He’d know better than most.
Dumbledore hadn’t known that then. He must now, but by Snape’s reaction his opinion hasn’t changed. Then again, Dumbledore knows lot of things, and a lot of powerful people. He could know more about prophecies and their interpretation than a random unspeakable.
“The point,” Snape says, “is that whatever grand role you were cast in this war is one you’ve already played. You shouldn’t be involved in this now, and you certainly shouldn’t have been when you were younger. This war is not your responsibility or your fault. My circumstances, your mother’s, all of it, are not your fault. The harsher treatment you received from me was not your fault, and frankly wasn’t even about you. The only thing you’re at fault for is being an insufferable and arrogant child. Which, honestly, eleven to sixteen weren’t exactly my best years either. If even Black grew out of it, you surely will too.”
Harry stares.
He feels like he’s fourteen again, coming fresh the maze and feeling the weight of Voldemort’s return on his shoulders. He remembers Bill and Fleur’s outrage when he’d said he’d failed to stop Voldemort, Madame Pompfrey’s assertion that stopping Voldemort wasn’t his job.
It had been a nice sentiment, but it hadn’t rung true to him. If not him, who? He was the one that was there. He was always the one that was there. And maybe it’s because he couldn’t leave well enough alone, but what else was he supposed to do?
He has to find and destroy the horcruxes before Voldemort gets his body back otherwise things will start getting bad again.
“I understand that this is too little, too late,” Snape says, shifting to look him square in the eye. “You’re nearly an adult and you’re in this war. If Black and Lupin and the Weasleys haven’t been able to convince you, there’s nothing I can say to make you walk away from it. But no matter what anyone says, you should remember this. You’ve done more than your fair share to end things. You never should have been involved in any of this. If you never lift another finger to aid in defeating in Voldemort, it wouldn’t matter. You’ve done enough.”
“I,” he starts, and doesn’t know how to finish. No one’s ever said that to him before.
Maybe they thought it was obvious. Probably they did. But it’s strange to hear it out of Snape’s mouth, of all people.
“Not everything is about you,” he continues, but for once Harry doesn’t take it as a slight. “Don’t get caught up in thinking that it is and you need to do something because of it.”
Does Snape know that he’s planning to go after the horcruxes? Or is he talking about something else? He doesn’t know how to ask in a way that won’t get blocked by the vow.
“Okay,” he says, then, “So, am I going to get an apology for those years of exceptionally harsh and unfair treatment?”
Snape grins. It’s sort of terrifying. “Right, you and everyone else who’s ever been on the wrong end of my temper. Shall I go to Longbottom next? I’ll give you a formal apology right after Dumbledore does.”
Hm. For Dumbledore to apologize, he’d have to think he’d actually done something wrong. And that it had been unnecessary. And that he shouldn’t have done it. And he’d actually have to feel bad about it.
Also, not for nothing, but Harry had cut off his hand. It was for his own good, but something tells him that Dumbledore might say the same thing about him. Harry understood most of his choices anyway, even if he didn’t agree with them.
Or, well, he had. But Snape’s memories had shown him that there were things he didn’t know about Dumbledore. Which maybe should have been obvious, because there were lots of things he didn’t know, but he hadn’t expected – that.
Voldemort was different during the first war. To fight him, Dumbledore had needed to be different too.
Maybe this is what Perenelle had meant, when she’d said that she’d always liked Dumbledore, but she hadn’t always trusted him.
Harry rocks back on his heels. “Fine. Then I’m not saying thank you.”
“I’ll add it to the list,” Snape says, deadpan, and Harry has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.
Maybe not hating Snape wouldn’t be worst. But he absolutely refuses to like him.
~
Draco can’t imagine any of the Zabinis being overly impressed about meeting Harry, and so hadn’t been that concerned about leaving him to mingle in the crowd without him, but now it’s been several hours since he’s seen him last and he’s starting to feel concerned.
Which, of course, is when he finds Harry sitting crosslegged on the edge of the fountain and eating something from a bowl. “There you are,” he says, nudging him in the side.
Harry pushes back into him rather than tilting towards the water, giving it a suspicious glance before resting his head against Draco’s chest, glasses digging into his sternum.
He sighs, reaching up a hand to push it through Harry’s hair. He’s making a mess of it, but it’s not like it’ll look that much different either way. “If you’re that worried about the merpeople, I don’t know why you’re sitting here.”
“Less weird than standing in a corner,” Harry says. “Besides, I don’t think Sedna likes an audience, and there are a lot of people here.”
“You really didn’t need to stand in a corner at all. You could have found one of us,” Draco says, even though Harry obviously knows that. He wonders if something new managed to piss him off or if he’s still stuck in his head about the horcruxes and the killing curse and what it could mean. “Where’ve you been? What are you eating?”
“Stew,” he says, “Or, like, stir fry? Kind of.”
“Love,” he sighs.
Harry pulls back, but at least he’s smiling now. He holds out the bowl.
Draco frowns. “Where’d you get ratatouille?” He takes a bite, and his eyes widen. He tends to think of ratatouille as bland, especially combined with the mushy texture, but this is good. It’s not overcooked and there’s a shifting blend of flavors and spices.
“It’s a long story,” he says. Draco raises an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you later.”
Why do people keep saying that to him?
Now’s not the time. He hands him back the bowl, almost wants to suggest they ditch, but Blaise still has a secret to tell them, one he specifically wanted them all here for, and he doesn’t think it was just the identity of his mother’s newest husband. “Do you want to dance?”
Harry tilts his head up to squint at him.
Draco flicks the side of his glasses. “There aren’t even any newspapers here. Won’t it be nice to dance in public for once without ending up on the front of the society pages?”
“You get snippy if we’re mentioned past page three,” Harry says, which is true, but hardly the point. He sets the bowl aside and holds out his hands to Draco, who pulls him to his feet. He leans his forehead against Draco’s, sighing. “Our lives are weird.”
“By most metrics,” he agrees. “Is this a general observation or are you thinking about something in particular?”
Harry kisses him, quick and sweet, before hooking his hand in Draco’s elbow and heading towards the dance floor. “Both? I don’t know. What do you think our lives would be like if we were normal?”
He tries to give it serious thought, but he doesn’t get very far. “I don’t even know what that means. I’m the son of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, I was never going to normal. Do you mean if the war had never happened?”
Harry shrugs, taking the lead as they fall into a waltz. He’s much better at it now than when they were in fourth year. “Sure.”
“We’d have known each other longer,” he says. “Might not have made much of a difference, animosity wise, without a basilisk attack to shove us along and considering my family’s been on bad terms with the Weasleys for a lot longer than Voldemort’s been causing problems. This is probably the best we’ve gotten along in the past century, at least, but mostly because everyone tends to follow Dad’s leads with these types of things. The other Weasleys haven’t gotten the memo, but there are lots of people who just dislike each other without making it into a thing.”
He frowns. “I hadn’t realized how many Weasleys and Prewetts there were until Percy’s wedding.”
“Well, Arthur’s considered to be a bit odd,” Draco says. “Plus he and Molly took a very hard stance early on in the war, before things really got messy, and that they were right didn’t do much to clear the air with everyone else. But between you, the twins’ very successful shop, and Percy’s successful ousting, they’ve probably come around to idea that holding a grudge isn’t in their best interests. It doesn’t hurt that Arthur’s a lot more respected in the ministry these days, and that’s only a little bit because of Percy. Muggles are intermingling more in our world than ever before, which means keeping them from stumbling into something they shouldn’t is a lot more work than it ever was before.”
Harry opens his mouth, then pointedly closes it, refusing to be distracted. “What else?”
“Uh, my dad would probably have a lot more control in the ministry,” he says. “The last couple years wouldn’t have been quite as stressful. We wouldn’t have had to hide.”
“That’s it?” Harry asks. He sounds disappointed.
“I don’t really know what you’re looking for here,” Draco admits. “I don’t consider wars to be abnormal, unfortunately. Before Voldemort, there was Grindewald. And I’ve never wanted to be normal. I don’t really know what that means and I don’t particularly care to find out. I’ve always wanted to be exceptional which, by definition, is not normal. What do you think would be different?”
Harry would have grown up with his parents, never would have had to deal with the Dursleys, wouldn’t have been fighting off attempts on his life since he was eleven years old. But bringing all that up is pointless, because it’s obvious, and feels a little bit too much like cruelty.
“I don’t know,” he says, pulling Draco closer, leading him in something that’s not quite a waltz but he doesn’t worry about it. “Maybe things would be better. I’d be different. If I wasn’t-”
“Shut up,” he says sharply, going stock still and causing Harry to stumble at the sudden lack of movement. He’s sort of aware of everyone around them, but most of his attention has narrowed down to a pair of bewildered emerald eyes. “You wouldn’t be different. War or no war, you’d still be you.”
One side of Harry’s mouth pulls up and it at least looks genuine. “You can’t know that.”
“I can,” he says, and means it. “Because no war wouldn’t have changed me all that much, right?” There’d be some differences, less tensions, more power, but in a lot of ways he’d been able to grow up untouched by the war that had taken everything from Harry.
“Sure,” Harry says, clearly humoring him, but not disagreeing so he’ll take it.
He grabs Harry’s hip, placing his hand right over his iris etched on Harry’s skin. “We’re still soulmates. No matter our circumstances, war or no war, I was always going to have marigolds blooming on my skin. So there have to be just some things about you that are you, no matter what.”
His lips twist, almost but not quite a grimace. “That’s not – that doesn’t mean they’re good things. Sometimes soulmates have terrible things in common. Maybe we would have just both been worse. Or better. Or not soulmates at all, there’s no way to know. This is a stupid conversation, sorry, forget it.”
Draco thinks of McGonagall, of Voldemort’s mark on her arm. “We’d still be soulmates.”
“Draco,” he says, exasperated, nudging him into movement, as if getting him to dance again means moving on from this conversation. “It’s okay, never mind, I don’t even know what I was getting at. I’m just in a weird mood.”
Everyone seem to be in a weird mood recently and no one will tell him why. “I like you not normal. I meant what I said earlier, I’ve never wanted normal, so if you were normal then I wouldn’t want you, soulmark or not.”
Harry is smiling at him, crooked and real even though he doesn’t think this is what they were talking about, and he spins him, arm at the small of his back as he dips Draco on the dance floor and Draco lets him because he doesn’t know how not to. “Well, when you put it like that, maybe I don’t want to be normal.”
“Good,” Draco says, because he does mean it, and because Harry could never have been normal, not even in any strange alternate timeline that he’s imagining. Harry is so stubbornly himself in this one that he doesn’t know why he would think less obstacles, or even different ones, would make a difference.
~
Harry pushes everything from his mind, trying not to let it bother him when there’s nothing he can do about it, when he’s at a party with his friends and his boyfriend. He’s been worrying Draco a lot lately, and they haven’t had the time to talk about anything, and he can see its wearing at him. There’s not much he can do about it right this second, but he can at least stop being so maudlin about it all.
Of course, he has to do that without making it obvious that’s what he’s doing, because then Draco will get even more worried and he’ll be worse off than he started, which he knows from experience.
They dance until Pansy cuts in, whisking Harry away and leaving Draco there affronted. Harry sends him an apologetic look over her shoulder, but then they’re spinning and he loses sight of him in the crowd. “Aren’t you supposed to be schmoozing right now?”
“You’re confusing me with Lavender,” she says. She dances like Luna, leading without making it look like she’s leading, which Harry would be offended about except she does that with pretty much everyone she dances with. “I spent the summer after fourth year doing that, and honestly it’s not even very necessary with the Zabinis. Being Blaise’s friend is almost as useful as being yours.”
As far as he’s aware, being his friend hasn’t done Pansy any good at all, especially considering they were keeping it a secret up until last year. Then again, it’s not like Pansy would necessarily tell him if she were cashing in on his reputation, so maybe it has. “I haven’t seen Blaise in hours.”
“You probably wont until he rounds us up again,” she says. “He’s too busy getting his cheeks pinched and watching his family put Millie under a magnifying glass.”
Oh, Merlin. He really can’t think of anything she’d want to do less. Millie’s not uncomfortable with attention, exactly, but she doesn’t like being looked at. He cranes his neck around, trying to spot her, but there’s far too many people for that. “Does she need a rescue? Should we go get her?”
Pansy’s lips twitch. “Nah. Once Millie makes up her mind about something, she commits. If she weren’t willing to be judged by the entire Severan dynasty, she wouldn’t have agreed to date Blaise in the first place.”
Merlin. “Is her aunt being nice to her at least?” Actually. “Is her dad here?”
She stares at him. “Is her dad here?”
“Yes,” he says uncertainly. “I saw Ophelia earlier.”
“I’m pretty sure he knows a third of what Millie gets up to, at best, and he’s a bit of a shut in that wouldn’t be caught dead here. Think Luna’s dad, but less crazy,” she says.
“And more likable?” he tries. He doesn’t know all the dirty details of why Xeno is so disliked by the Malfoys, but at certain points during dinner and the mingling after the disdain had been almost palpable.
Her lips twitch. “And more likable. He’s a good guy, and he loves Millie, but he’s a bit high strung.”
It feels like an understatement, somehow, and he narrows his eyes at her but she changes the subject before he can press too deeply. He supposes he can just ask Millie. Her father’s never sounded like a touchy subject before but Merlin knows it wouldn’t be the first time he’s missed something that’s obvious to everyone else.
He ends up dancing with Hermione, a very pretty Zabini cousin, and Lavender before Draco manages to snag him once more. At one point they pass Ron and Nicolas dancing and arguing together, which is extra hilarious because Nicolas is around a foot shorter than Ron. Draco twists his head to keep them in sight as they go across the dance floor and says, “I will pay Ron real money to mock Dumbledore about stealing his man.”
“He’ll do it for free,” Harry says honestly and Draco is laughing, his hands warm and comfortable on him, and for the rest of the party he almost forgets all the things spiraling out his control and just focuses on his friends and his boyfriend and the good food and being able to party in the middle of the Roman Forum.
He’d almost forgot that they’d been interrupted earlier until Blaise is throwing an arm around his shoulders and nudging him away from the dwindling crowd.
“There you are,” Draco says, also getting dragged along by virtue of his hand in Harry’s. “You know, I’m really not used to not being able to just pick you and Ron out of crowd with a look.”
Many, many members of the Severan dynasty have height on their side. Harry feels about as short as everyone is always making fun of him for being.
“That’s how I feel every New Year’s at your place,” Blaise says absently. “Oh, Harry, Aunt Somina said she met you and she’s looking forward to training you this summer. Good work there.”
Draco startles, but Harry’s too busy staring at Blaise incredulously. “Somina is your gladiator aunt?”
Blaise frowns, looking down at him. “Yes? Didn’t she say?”
“Uh,” there is absolutely no way he can say that he interrupted Snape cooking for her and they didn’t really talk without thoroughly derailing whatever it is Blaise is dragging them towards. “It didn’t come up.”
Luckily whatever reply they have to that is interrupted by Millie showing up with Hermione on one arm and Ginny on the other. “Oh good, everyone else is inside already.”
They’re all squeezed into the room once more. Amelia’s lost her outer robe, her hair is pulled up into a messy bun, and she’s holding a glass of ice water to her forehead. Kingsley’s suit is significantly more rumpled than it was, but it’s still pristine white, which has to be due to a spell. Zaira’s only concession to the long hours of partying and mingling is her lipstick has been wiped off to reveal the natural pink to brown ombre color of her lips.
“Okay,” Blaise says impatiently, letting go of Harry to bounce on the balls of his feet. He doesn’t know if he can remember Blaise ever being this nervous, or at least being this overt about it. Millie is grinning, and it’s not like Harry had thought it was anything bad to begin with but it really can’t be if Millie’s happy about it. “Quickly, before something else interrupts us.”
“Go ahead,” Zaira says warmly. “I know you’ve wanted to tell them for a long time.”
Blaise scowls. “Mum.”
She raises an eyebrow and it’s Kingsley who says, “Aren’t you forgetting something, love?”
She blinks.
“The vow, Zaira,” Amelia says in exasperation.
Vow?
“Oh!” She takes out her wand and Blaise holds out his arm, shoving up his sleeve. Zaira taps her wand twice against his blank skin and then there’s a band of gold knotted around his wrist. “I release you from your vow.”
The gold briefly glows before flecking off, the pieces disappearing before they hit the ground.
“You put your son under an Unbreakable Vow?” Ron demands, aghast. Everyone else looks equally as appalled. “He could have died!”
“I didn’t make the consequences death,” she says, thankfully more amused than offended. “Just pain. A reminder, in case he ever slipped. How else can I reasonably expect a five year old to keep a secret?”
Blaise has been under an unbreakable vow sine he was five years old? That’s –
“What could possibly be worth all that?” Ginny asks.
Blaise rubs at his wrist, a grin stretching across his face. “I know who my father is.” Harry can be pretty slow on the uptake sometimes, but he’s already sliding his gaze over and up when he finishes, “It’s Kingsley Shackbolt.”
Pansy blurts, “Merlin’s balls! Your dad is Kingsley? Like, your actual blood related father?”
“As far as I’m aware,” Zaira says. Amelia slaps Kingsley’s shoulder. He sighs before repeating the action with Zaira, who only rolls her eyes.
Harry looks from Kingsley to Blaise, searching for any similarities, and is almost surprised when he finds them. When Blaise was younger, he took more after his mother, but now that he’s looking he can see Kingsley in the grown up planes of Blaise’s cheeks, in the sharpness of his jaw.
“I really did want to tell you earlier,” Blaise says, speaking to all of them, but looking imploringly at Draco. Harry gets the feeling this is something else he’s missed out on. One of the downsides about getting too in his own head about his problems is he can miss things about his soulmate’s, which he hates.
Draco is frowning, and he keeps it up for another three seconds where the tension ratchets higher. Then he grins, leaving Harry’s side to throw an arm around Blaise’s neck, yanking him down enough to rub at his head. His hair’s short enough that it doesn’t do much, but he does slap ineffectually at Draco’s torso. “You brat, you had me worried it was something bad. This is what the letter was about? What was the long face for?”
Blaise finally escapes Draco’s clutches, looking faintly embarrassed as he looks over all their heads. Well, beside Ron’s. “I just – I’ve been keeping it a secret for a long time. And you all know Dad. Now that they were getting together publicly and I could tell you, I was worried you’d be ma-”
“Shut up,” Draco says, elbowing him in the side. “It’s not like you just weren’t telling us for fun. You were under an Unbreakable Vow for Merlin’s sake!” He spares Zaira a glance. “Maybe it’s for the best our love never worked out.”
“It was Amelia’s idea,” Zaira says, lips pulled up in the corners.
“No,” she says. “It was my idea to implement some sort of magical warning system to keep it from getting out. You’re the one who jumped to an Unbreakable Vow, although a modified one, which I said was taking things a little far.”
“Does anyone else know?” Neville asks.
Kingsley makes a face. “Only Sophia.”
Draco’s mouth drops an inch before it snaps shut. “My aunt?” Kinglsey doesn’t have a chance to respond before he continues, mumbling to himself, “No wonder you let her get away with so much.”
“Yes,” he says dryly. “It’s quite convenient that she’s fully switched sides right before she loses all her leverage to blackmail me. She has quite a few overnight shifts in her future.”
Draco tilts his head to the side. “Wait, was she sort of on your side before? I thought, with Bellatrix, and all.”
Harry remembers in Snape’s memories that his mother had mentioned Sophia as someone Snape could inform on Voldemort to. He hadn’t thought too deeply about it, both because he had more pressing things to focus on at the time and as far as he’d known, she’d been completely loyal to Voldemort. Even his mother had said that Sophia put Bellatrix first.
Which, he supposes, isn’t unlike Snape and his mother. Snape joined up with Voldemort, but he always put Lily first. He’d even joined in the first place because of her.
“People will do crazy things for love,” Kingsley says, which both does and doesn’t answer Draco’s question.
It’s possible, despite her family, that Sophia joined up with Voldemort for Bellatrix’s sake.
Blaise’s eyes are narrowed as he looks between Amelia and Zaira. “Now that Mum’s with Dad, and Amelia’s the minister of magic, are you two going to,” he doesn’t finish the sentence, just tilts his head to the side.
They both seem to understand him anyway, an identical startled glance passing between them. Harry is gratified that at least this time everyone else seems as confused as he is. “Huh,” Zaira says, a quiet sort of wonder crinkling her eyes in the corners. “I suppose we could, couldn’t we?”
Amelia rubs at the side of her neck. This is the first time Harry can remember seeing her nervous. “If you’re not getting married again, then there’s no reason not to.”
Lavender raises a hand. “Can someone fill me in? I was following along pretty well up until now.”
Zaira only hesitates a moment before saying, “Amelia is my soulmate,” with the same sort of relish that Blaise had when telling them Kingsley is his father. In the half minute between Blaise bringing it up and now, she must have decided to go public with it if she’s comfortable telling all her son’s friends. They don’t exactly have an excellent record when it comes to secret keeping.
The silence is a combination of shocked and disbelieving. Harry’s gaze drops to the space below Zaira’s collarbone at the same time that Ron says, “I can literally see your soulmark. It’s still a black ring. Wait, is it fake?”
“There’s no way to fake a soulmark that holds up under close inspection,” she says, which Harry doesn’t understand the significance of until he remembers her seven dead husbands. “It would have been inconvenient for me to have a soulmate, considering. Especially if they managed to figure out it was Amelia.”
“But then how did you hide it?” Harry asks.
“We’ve never touched,” Amelia answers. He realizes then that she’s not rubbing her neck, or at least that’s not the point of it. With the way her hand is placed, her palm is right over the space the below her collarbone. Right where Zaira’s soulmark is, and presumably her own. He wonders how often she passed the gesture off as an attempt to massage away some tension. “Not skin to skin.”
Harry mentally runs back every time he’s ever seen them together. It’s not like he was paying attention to the specifics, but he can’t recall ever seeing them touch.
Luna blinks. “Haven’t you known each other for twenty years?”
“How do you know that you’re soulmates?” Hermione asks, voice higher than normal. “Just because they’re in same spot – lots of people have marks in the same spot! You’ve avoided touching for twenty years and you don’t even know!”
Zaira scoffs, although thankfully she seems more amused than offended. “As if there’s anything a mark on my skin can tell me about my own soul that I don’t already know.”
Amelia is rolling her eyes, fond and exasperated, like she so often is around Zaira. Which means she misses the moment Zaira turns, takes two steps closer, and grabs Amelia’s face with both hands, pulling her forward enough to place a kiss on the center of her forehead. They stand there, frozen for a moment before Zaira leans back. Both their eyes are closed. Harry remembers the searing pain on his hip when Draco had slapped his hand over his mouth, there in front of the whole dueling club, and how he’d forced himself to stay still and not react at all.
The black ring below Zaira’s collarbone is gone.
In its place, no more than inch wide, is the head of a spiky white flower that after a moment Harry places as a clover.
Amelia pulls her robe down and in the same spot, and the same size, she has a vibrant green four-leaf clover.
“I’m not even Irish,” Zaira says, reaching out to trace the edge of a leaf.
“I really don’t think that’s relevant,” Amelia says, trying for dry, but her voice is a little too soft to manage it.
They’d really known. From basically the moment they met, since they managed to avoid touching each other all this time. Although, Lucius and Narcissa didn’t know they were soulmates until their wedding day, so maybe it’s easier than it sounds. He can’t quite wrap his mind around it. Sometimes it seems an impossible feat that he and Draco managed to avoid touching each other for over a year, and they’d actively hated each other at the time.
“The society pages are going to be amazing!” Lavender bursts out with, nearly bouncing on the balls of her feet she’s so excited.
The atmosphere breaks after that, Kingsley’s booming laugh almost echoing and everyone else following soon after. Draco leans against him, pressing into Harry’s side where his purple iris is unfurled over his hip, and Harry doesn’t kiss him only because all their friends would make fun of him for it.
~
It’s the day – or, well, night – after Zaira and Kinglsey’s wedding, Draco’s been told all of his best friend’s secrets, which makes him significantly less cranky than he’d been the past couple of days. They’re all seated around the living room in the Shrieking Shack, where they’ve been for the past couple hours, and it’s not like Draco hadn’t noticed that Harry had been in an odd mood, he’d just really underestimated why.
Harry’s finished describing both Snape’s memories and recounting their conversation in the kitchens, but it takes a while for anyone to break the silence. Predictably, it’s Ginny, her leg pulled up and her chin resting on her knee. “You have the worst impulse control. You know that, right?”
Harry scowls, but doesn’t say anything. She has a point.
“Okay,” Millie says, leaning forward, having listened with more rapt attention than horror, which put her one up on the rest of them. “So Snape was an unspeakable with your mother, he knows about the horcruxes, and he’s under an Unbreakable Vow from Dumbledore not to tell anyone about the horcruxes. How was he even able to show you those memories?”
Harry shrugs. It’s Ron who answers, face twisted like he’s disgusted with himself for even saying the words. “Because he’s smart. He’s not telling anyone anything, that pensieve is full of way more memories than just ones about horcruxes, and he never told Harry to look in there. He even took away house points, although that may have been for his own enjoyment more than anything else.”
“It still seems risky,” Neville says.
They turn to Blaise, their current resident expert on Unbreakable Vows considering he’d been under one for a decade. He worries his bottom lip with his teeth before saying, “I wouldn’t risk it if I was him, since I really doubt Dumbledore gave a rogue Death Eater anything but the traditional consequences. But if the parameters were something like that he couldn’t tell anyone about the horcruxes, then the fact that he isn’t saying anything to Harry outright, that he could have gone through the pensieve and found nothing at all, might be enough. I mean it must be, since he’s not dead, but I wouldn’t exactly describe Dumbledore’s magic as merciful. Trying to wriggle around it at all is crazy.”
“So not all Unbreakable Vows are created equal?” Pansy asks. “I still don’t get why Zaira thought this was the most reasonable solution.”
“It was either that or never tell me my father’s identity, which would have been pretty awkward since she’d planned on marrying him. Plus Dad wasn’t too thrilled with being my Uncle Kingsley for the rest of our lives.” He shrugs. “Anyway, no. Mum made it pretty much impossible for me to do anything that would let people know who my dad was, but I also got, hm, kind of a warning system? A little pain if I was getting too close, lots of pain if I tried to say anything outright. Another bright side is that now Mum will let me practice being under imperio with someone that’s not her and I’ll finally be able to throw it.”
Draco blinks, one more thing that had never made sense to him falling into place. “Wait, that’s why she never let anyone practice on you?”
“Well, Dad did it too,” he says, “but it was sort of the same problem. She wasn’t going to let anyone else do it, just in case they asked about Dad, even as a joke. And it’s not like she could let some people and not others, because then the cover of her overprotectiveness wouldn’t work if she let, I don’t know, Draco’s mum do it but not her current husband.”
Okay, he can’t exactly fault that logic, even if he thinks it was probably worth the risks. Then again, Zaira likely hadn’t anticipated Blaise putting himself in quite so many situations where throwing off an imperio could be potentially useful, and by the time she’d known about it, it was when everything and everyone was more on edge than usual.
“You could go looking in his memories again,” Hermione suggests. “You know that you’re controlling them now. You can try and see what he knows about the horcruxes.”
Harry grimaces. It’s not a bad idea, but he knows that dealing with Snape drains Harry in a way that almost nothing else does.
“We have time,” Draco says. “We can do it later. I’ll come with you this time.”
This way he can be the one to fill everyone in and Harry won’t have to relive it all on his own. Part of him feels a little guilty for digging into Snape’s memories when the only one he’s given oblique permission to do that is Harry, but Snape will just have to deal with it.
“Okay,” Harry says, looking relieved enough that Draco decides he doesn’t care at all about how pissed Snape gets over it.
“Okay,” Draco repeats before he clears his throat. “Uh, in other news, my dad and aunt both suggested we talk to Bathilda Bagshot about the founders.”
“Batty?” Neville says in surprise.
Draco stares. “You call her that too?”
“Everyone calls her that,” Neville says. “Some people are just mean about it. She has tea with my grandmother sometimes.”
“Can you introduce us?” he asks. “Dad suggested I throw Harry at her like some sort of sacrifice of familiarity, but that would probably work better if we had a proper introduction instead of just showing up at her door.”
Neville gives a combination of shrug and nod. He’s done so much worse than contacting one of his grandmother’s friends for them that it barely seems to register as a favor.
“Also,” he says, turning to Harry, “I need some help breaking into the headmaster’s office.”
Ginny snorts. “What body part are you cutting off this time?”
“It was medicinal,” he snaps, nose in the air. “And none. I want to talk to an old headmaster, and the only portrait of him I know of is up there. And it’s not like Dumbledore will let me do that.”
“Yeah, sure,” Harry says, a request to break into Dumbledore’s office eliciting about as much reaction from him as Neville had showed at being asked to send a letter. “Do you think Snape’s right?” Before he can ask for clarification, Harry continues, “About the prophecy? That it was really about one specific moment that’s already passed?”
“Prophecies are about moments,” Hermione says. “He was right about that, all the reading says so. As for it already happening, I don’t know. His explanation makes sense, but I’m sure if Dumbledore gave his reasoning then I’d think that one made sense too.”
Ron pats Hermione on the knee. “You’re not exactly on the top of my list for interpreting prophecies and omens and whatnot. Luna?”
Luna fiddles with the ends of her hair, eyes not really looking at any of them but not like she’s avoiding their gazes on purpose. The silence stretches, but they all know better than to try and rush her. “It could be over,” she says finally. “Or not. It’s difficult to say. Everything that hangs over Harry is so heavy and loud. Is a prophecy louder than a blessing? Brighter than a curse?”
Draco is actually relieved at how much more aware Luna is when she’s saying weird things than she was when they were kids. Especially that year after her mother died, where sometimes Draco wasn’t sure she was even seeing him. Talking to her in almost exclusively Japanese had served a double purpose – Luna was almost never anything but fully present when speaking her mother’s tongue. Something about the lack of perfect fluency, he guesses, but once he figured out that trick, he used it shamelessly.
“I can ask my seer cousin,” Neville says. “She’s pretty good. I don’t know if she’s ever read anyone under a prophecy, but it can’t hurt.”
Luna blinks several times, meeting Neville’s eyes and her lips pulling back in a grin. “Okay. Thanks.”
Ginny’s mouth cracks into a yawn that Draco almost believes. “Okay, it’s been a long day.” A long couple of days, Merlin. “I’m going to get some sleep. Meet back up tomorrow after practice?”
There’s a groan among the quidditch players. Gryffindor has the pitch tomorrow, but Flora had said that she wasn’t wasting practice time on his punishment and ordered him to run laps around the pitch tomorrow instead.
Hermione huffs. “I’ll brew another batch of pepper up, then?”
“Could you use pepper up to make espresso?” Millie asks, idly tracing some sort of pattern on the back of Blaise’s hand. “Or espresso as a base for pepper up, whichever. I guess there’s not much point, since you could just drink it after, but if you could make it shelf stable you wouldn’t need to brew so much. Of either.”
Draco meets Hermione’s eyes immediately. He knows exactly what they’re going to be doing tomorrow. If he really puts in the effort, he can definitely get the laps done in time to meet up with Hermione before everyone else to brew, or fail to brew, some pepper up.
“Why would you even bring that up? You know pepper up modifications tend to end in explosions,” Pansy complains. “Is this how you manage to sleep less than the rest of us?”
Millie ducks her head to hide her smile. Harry’s looking between him and Hermione in concern, which Draco’s pretty sure is exactly why Millie decided to bring the idea up just then. It’ll give Harry something to worry about that isn’t everything else he’s worrying about. It would be better if he just didn’t worry about anything, but better Draco and Hermione’s possible potion mishaps than anything else.
All of them loudly debate the merits of different methods of combining them as they walk back to the castle. Ron and Neville stay out of it, but everyone else offers something, even if it’s just to watch he and Hermione make disgusted faces at the suggestion.
They enter through the greenhouse and everyone says their goodbyes and goes their separate ways, except Draco grabs Harry’s wrist and holds him back. This happens often enough that it doesn’t get much more than a second glance from anyone before they continue on to their dorms.
“Yeah?” Harry asks, shifting his arm loose in Draco’s grip, but only so he can thread their fingers together.
“Let’s spend the night in the chamber,” he suggests. The shack is more comfortable, with actual bedrooms for them to use, but it’s far from the castle and despite all the effort they’d put into the renovations, it doesn’t have same sense of familiarity and safety that the Chamber of Secrets does.
Harry’s eyebrows rise. “I’m usually the one suggesting that.”
Yeah, well, Draco’s busy. And easily distracted. But one of the things that can easily distract him is his boyfriend, so. “Don’t you want to?” Harry visibly hesitates, which isn’t a first, but is pretty close to one. “We can make out until we fall asleep.” And whatever Harry’s in the mood for in the morning. Draco’s much more amenable to things that don’t mess up his hair or his clothes for the day, and in the morning before he showers is actually the ideal time for that.
Harry lets out a breath that’s almost a sigh. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
They hold hands the rest of the way to the chamber. Harry goes down first, waiting at the bottom to scoop up Draco and lift him up before his feet touch the ground. Draco rolls his eyes at Harry’s hands on his ass, but he does wrap his legs around his waist and his arms around his neck, so it’s not exactly like he’s discouraging the behavior.
The cushions stacked in the corner fly over and meld together as Harry walks him over. Draco’s not doing it, so Harry must be. He really should point out how much better Harry is at wandless transfiguration when he’s not trying so hard, but saying it now would necessitate him removing his mouth from Harry’s, and he’s not particularly interested in that at the moment.
Draco expects to get tossed on the cushions, so he can’t contain the soft oof of surprise when Harry instead turns and falls on his back, barely keeping Draco from smacking their heads together with how closely he’s wrapped around him.
He glares, leaning back and noting that he’s straddling Harry’s hips, his hands by Harry’s head and lips so close. He gives a courtesy glance for snakes, but Nagini and Theophania are somewhere else, and then leans down to cover Harry’s smirk with his lips.
Draco tells himself that he’ll plan a real, proper date sometime soon, something that will get his and Harry’s minds off the variousness messes they’re into for more than an hour. Until then, there’s this.
And this is pretty good.