Author's Note: Please, please, please read and review!
Chapter Seven
A life debt, he guessed, probably required Zabini to save his life before it could be repaid. Anything beyond that, however, was unknown to Harry. And so, after Zabini had vanished from sight (the staircase had reattached to the landing only a minute later), Harry decided to forgo his Hogsmeade trip.
Instead, he made his way to the library.
It had felt odd to sit there and turn pages without Hermione speedily reading over his shoulder. It had felt even odder planning what to do without Ron being there to strategize with him. In the end, however, Harry learned that the magical bonds imposed by life debts had a compulsive influence on the person who owed the debt. Essentially, if Harry made an explicit request that would save his life, Zabini was magically compelled to comply and could not in the meantime act knowingly to endanger Harry in anyway until the debt was fulfilled.
If Zabini indeed was so extraordinary...Harry could take advantage of that fact.
The next morning, Harry confronted Zabini in front of the Grand Hall and asked to speak to him privately.
At first, it seemed that Zabini had regained his unflinching indifference. But then he watched, just near the end of his request, as Zabini's careful mask of nonchalance fractured a little, dark eyes flashing.
"If you know a place that is private…"
Zabini moved silently ahead of him and led Harry up many flights of stairs—without even a cringe, despite what had occurred the previous day—until they reached a large corridor that seemed to lead to a small broom closet.
Harry approached the broom closet with great skepticism, but Zabini opened the door without hesitation, shoved him inside, and followed shortly behind him.
Harry stumbled at the surprising forcefulness but quickly stilled as he took in the room before him. Despite the humble, wooden door at the front, the room itself was vast and magnificent: arched, gothic architecture reminiscent, indeed, of the Slytherin dormitories.
Harry quickly forgot his admiration for the architecture, however.
"To fulfill the life debt," he spoke slowly, "you need to save my life."
Zabini tilted his head with disparaging dark eyes, not gracing that obvious comment with an answer. It was fine. Let him think Harry was an idiot. He merely wanted to get certain fundamental facts out of the way before he approached the rockier part of their conversation.
"I've decided how you'll fulfill it," Harry continued, watching Zabini's reactions carefully.
Zabini's jaw tightened.
Harry hesitated for a moment. Because if Zabini somehow betrayed him, if the debt was not as binding as he thought, if… There were so many 'if's,' more than Harry could possibly conceive of.
But at his core, well, Harry was apparently still a gambling sort of person.
"You're going to help me kill Voldemort," he said quietly. The request echoed hauntingly through the enclosed hall. Harry closed his eyes for a moment before opening them again.
He watched as several emotions chased each other across Zabini's face. Then, words were hissed just as softly as Harry's previous ones. "I don't think you quite understand the meaning of a life debt. I don't have to carry out your dirty work."
"Normally, that would be true," Harry sighed, "but I am in a…unique set of circumstances. Let's just say that I have it on good notice that if I don't kill him, he's definitely going to kill me."
Zabini head snapped towards him, black eyes burning into Harry. "Who are you?"
Harry looked at the other with mild concern. "I think we, um, covered this already. Tom Gaunt."
Zabini's head tilted with the tightly controlled fury of a large predator. "No. No, I don't think so."
The mild concern dissipated rather rapidly. Harry bit his lips and wondered with trepidation what exactly had given him away. Was the situation salvageable? Unlikely. Something told him trying to persuade the Slytherin otherwise was a lost cause.
"You're right," Harry found himself admitting, "I'm not."
The following question was obvious to the both of them. And, after a moment, Harry decided he would answer it. First, because he imagined that knowing his true identity was necessary for Zabini to understand the monumentality of what opposed them. And second, well, because Harry just needed to tell someone.
After a blink, he breathed out in little more than a whisper. "Harry Potter."
For a moment, the two simply stared at each other. Harry waited for the inevitable laughter, the incredulity, and the scorn. It did not come.
"I'm Harry Potter," Harry repeated, uncomfortably and a little louder. Maybe Zabini had not heard him the first time.
Zabini looked at him, his cheeks flushed with tightly restrained fury. "And you… want me to prepare you for the war against the Dark Lord."
Harry's eyes widened, surprised that the other had taken his words at face value. "Yes. You could put it like that."
There was a moment of silence. Then:
"You want me to betray," Zabini hissed, his mouth taut, "generations of carefully maintained neutrality among my ancestors to tutor a boy who has demonstrated nothing more than mediocrity and the occasional stroke of good luck in pursuit of a life-long hopeless cause. To defeat a man who has been defeated by none. "
"I do know that. I guess that's more motivation for you to teach me well."
"Even I could not defeat the Dark Lord," Zabini snarled at him, color high in his cheeks, "Perhaps not even in fifty years and if he were to remain in a stasis. What makes you think that you could ever succeed?"
He shouldn't have been, but Harry was sorely amused. It was absurdly like having the worst of his subconscious personified, posing to him all the questions he asked himself in the dead of the night.
"I'm afraid I don't have a good answer for that one. But if it helps," Harry offered, "they do call me the Chosen One these days."
"You think this is a joke," Zabini stated, eyes blazing as he stalked forward. And then he grabbed Harry by his collar and shoved him into the wall.
At first, Harry withstood this abuse rather gracefully, if he said so himself. It was, he reasoned, what one could expect when cornering a person unaccustomed to be cornered. But then Zabini's words began to process in his head…and Harry grew angry. Because he could be accused of a lot of things—negligence, brashness, lack of tact and/or sufficient strength. But he could not be accused of willfully treating his circumstances like a joke.
"It's hard," Harry murmured into Zabini's ear, "you know—" he huffed out a grating bark of a laugh, "—it's kind of fucking hard to treat this all like a joke when the person who wants to kill you killed your parents now inhabits your body."
Zabini processed the information that Voldemort was in Harry Potter's body without a blink. At any other time, Harry would have been mildly impressed.
"Look," Harry snapped , "He's watching my friends and professors all the time. You…he has no reason to suspect that anyone in Slytherin would ever help me. Without these, well, extenuating circumstances…I don't think this is something even he could have planned for. "
"If you're trying to convince me that you can succeed," Zabini responded bitterly, "You might start with showing me that you can occlude."
"Occlu—What?"
Zabini's face was dark but unsurprised. "You are also unaware, therefore, that the Dark Lord is notorious for his ability to read others' minds."
Harry's stomach plummeted and shook his head mutely. Because of course wizards could read each other's minds, and he had not even known it was possible. Why did Hogwarts never teach him the things he needed to know? Well, after three failures of Defense Against the Dark Arts professors and only one good professor and the fact that he was not Hermione….what could he expect?
Zabini rolled up his sleeves as though preparing for a boxing match.
"You can do it," Harry guessed, watching Zabini with suspicious eyes. "Read other people's minds." That would certainly explain why Zabini had believed him so quickly.
"Yes," he answered through a tight jaw. "Professor Snape as well. As a teacher, however, he is prohibited from doing so at Hogwarts unless the headmaster permits him to."
That information did little to make Harry feel better.
"Close your eyes," Zabini instructed him coldly, "Try to clear your mind. We are not leaving this room until you learn to put up a screen and to resist me during a brute force Legimency attack. That is, unless you would prefer being killed by the Dark Lord at your next encounter."
Harry arrived at breakfast the next morning with a pounding headache that made him want to crumple in on himself. As Zabini had threatened, he had left the broom closet room only in the early hours of the morning and only after he had learned the necessary skills.
He served himself some warm porridge, mentally flinching as he recalled the previous night. Zabini-he had not been gentle; though, that had perhaps been the point. Harry had been forced to relive not only occasions of childhood bullying—some embarrassingly recent and many of which featured Harry himself being portrayed at his most impotent—but also…Cedric's death. After several hours of this personalized torture, his mind had finally figured out how to grasp and deflect the mental invasions by forcing the invader into insignificant memories (nonsensical images of him swirling his fingers in a bathtub or frying bacon on a pan)—a method known as misdirection. Then, he had been dismissed.
Harry realized, of course, that Zabini had seen him at his weakest now.
"Gaunt." A heavily perfumed figure slipped into the seat beside him.
Harry tilted his head slightly, amber eyes darting up.
"You look like death personified," Parkinson told him as though informing him of the weather. She reached across the table for a bread roll.
An overwhelming scent wafted in his direction with the motion. "Are you trying to kill my nose?" Harry grunted and leaned away from the cloying concoction of rose and something else his nose couldn't quite pick out.
"I should like to see your face when you get a sniff of Greengrass." Parkinson gave him a haughty raised brow. "Until then, consider this endurance training. Holiday season's coming up. Time for us to attract those holiday ball invitations through calculated demonstrations of intelligence, power, and charms. Unfortunately, the latter works far more effectively. Men especially are so simple at our age."
"Hm," Harry muttered, scooping up some porridge into his mouth.
"Oh, did I not tell you? It's not just a seasonal female affliction," she smirked mildly threateningly, "If you wish to establish yourself in this house, you get those invitations."
Harry shot Parkinson an indifferent look. He didn't need—and certainly did not want—to be 'well-known' in Slytherin. In fact, it would be stupid to gather attention. Mediocrity was exactly what Riddle was expecting of him and what he would, for all appearances, continue to promote; anything else and he would have a Dark Lord's attention and interference in his tentatively developing plans.
Parkinson, apparently, did not agree with his sentiments. She leaned uncomfortably close to him, all pretense of humor gone as she snarled, "You better get those invitations, Gaunt. I haven't put up with you this long to see you flop during the holiday season."
"And why have you been so generous with your advice so far, Parkinson?" Harry retorted swiftly, withstanding the alarmingly close proximity with a cold expression he had discovered he could make only in the past couple of weeks.
"You've drawn me in with your stunning looks, of course." In the blink of an eye, she had abandoned her façade of seething deadliness, her face now drawn in a mocking caricature of bashfulness.
Tilting his head, Harry watched her carefully.
Parkinson was subtler than the other Slytherins. Yes, she tended to sneer, jeer, and spit with the best of the Gryffindors, which was vastly different from the cold, calculated indifference most Slytherins seemed to adopt...but it also made her easy to underestimate. It was precisely because of her seeming inelegance that he had seen Parkinson's particular brand of manipulation fool so many Slytherins.
Harry smiled genially at that thought and then leaned forward without flinching into Parkinson's personal space.
Parkinson's eyes caught on Harry's smile with narrowing eyes, before she looked up once more.
Harry met her gaze head on and leaned even closer—dangerously closer—until their faces were only an inch apart. It was the kind of distance that could only be interpreted by others to lead to one thing.
She froze.
He knew—and she knew—that if he was seen at a seeming intimate distance from her with his low standing in the house, especially in public, her authority and reputation among the Slytherins would be ruined. It wouldn't matter what Parkinson had done in the past, who she had otherwise associated with, or how much money she had. Never before had he been grateful for Parkinson's idle gossip regarding inappropriate distances in pureblood culture. Harry, of course, did not take great pleasure in threatening Parkinson in this particular manner—even now, it was hard not to draw back and retreat before the situation escalated. At the same time, however, a small burst of adrenaline began to rush through him.
It was time to figure out what ulterior motives drove Pansy Parkinson.
Her face was painted in an ugly snarl. "You try it and my wand will rip out your throat before you can—"
"I don't think so," Harry interrupted bluntly, "I'd definitely move faster than you could pull out your wand."
Parkinson's face suddenly became coy. "Gaunt, don't be imbecilic. You won't even know if I'm telling the truth. I could tell you anything. Be a dear, now, and move an inch or two back."
It was delivered in a terribly saccharine, sarcastic tone, but it rang sweetly in Harry's ears because he knew enough now to recognize it for what it was: Parkinson was giving ground to him.
"Oh, I think I'll be able to tell. I've rather good instincts when it comes to these things, you know. If I don't believe you, I'll just follow through. So, well—if you do want to take the chance and lie—please try to make it exceptionally convincing."
Parkinson's eyes were slitted under dark brows before she tossed her hair back with a flash of teeth. "Very well, then, the truth. As you may have ascertained, I'm intelligent—not prodigiously smart—but bright enough. But I've always had, if I do say so myself, an extraordinary sense of intuition—"
Her gaze narrowed, eyeing the status-ruining distance between them with something very much like reluctant admiration. "There is something more to you, Gaunt. I think it's so well hidden, that you haven't even realized it yet. Me? Oh, I'm only helping you along your way. But of course, I expect that my gracious generosity will be compensated sometime in the future. At the...appropriate moment, naturally."
It was preposterous, Harry thought. Something 'more'? Hidden? Intuition? It was so ridiculous that it might have even been true. And that, he remembered with a clenched jaw, was exactly the type of dilemma Parkinson was so good at posing.
"Of course," Parkinson changed subjects casually, "You're extraorindarily good looking-that alone should get you many invitations."
Harry looked at her, a slightly disarmed expression on his face.
"The rest, of course," Parkinson told him with a smirk, "will require a demonstration of your power."
"And why is that?" he muttered.
Parkinson tilted her head towards Zabini, who was sat silently at the end of the table eating a piece of toast at the fringes of Malfoy's group. "No one in the other houses has any idea who controls the tides here. They think it's Malfoy, but he's merely the decoy; as one might poeticize-a blonde shadow for our dark prince. The people who lend Zabini is social power here are us—the Slytherins. To be powerful here, Gaunt, you have to make us know how dangerous you are first."
Harry grimaced, feeling the beginnings of a migraine.
Just when he thought she had finished and would leave him alone with his newfound headache, however, Parkinson paused again and tilted her head in a stage-worthy depiction of deep contemplation. Slowly, a saucy, vicious smile spread across her red lips.
"Threatening me with inappropriate intimacy, Gaunt," Parkinson smirked, "how positively rakish. I confess, you surprised me. I didn't exactly think I was your-" she shot him a look laden with meaning, pronouncing the word delicately-"type."
Harry returned her heavy stare with a raised eyebrow.
"In any case," Parkinson continued, her voice a mocking sing-song, "good luck with those invites."
And indeed, Harry closed his eyes and hoped the fates would provide him with some more sheer, dumb luck—preferably in the form of relieving him of one nagging, Pansy Parkinson. The means to kill Voldemort would also be acceptable.