Completed: (1/25/06) 9:35 PM
Posted: (1/26/06) 8:58 PM

Title: Deception & Concealment
Author: KissThis
Rating: PG-13/T language, partial nudity, "adult themes/humor"

Disclaimer: I own nothing Harry Potter related, but this totally-awesomely original plot is all mine.

Pairing: Hermione x James x Sirius

A/N: SORRY! I was loaded down with scholarships, and it's my senior year, and that's all I'm gonna say. Part II should hopefully be up by Sunday night/Monday morning.

And YES! To all of you fans out there. I will be finishing this story. I won't let it die, I swear.


"Stop! You're stirring the wrong—"

BOOM!

"...way."

Harry, along with half the Potions room was covered in a foul-smelling pink goop. Very slowly, he reached up and cleared two peach circles over his eyes. The third year he'd been tutoring cowered meekly behind his charred cauldron, potion dripping from his bangs in viscous strings.

"Okay," Harry said calmly. "Let's learn from this. What did we do wrong?"

The boy bit his lip, looking anywhere but at Harry. "Um...I stirred, well...I stirred it wrong."

"And what should you have done?"

"Uh...done it the, um...other way?" The questioning lilt at the end of his statement made it discreetly clear that the poor boy didn't know what he should have done. His guess hadn't been all that knowledgeable to begin with.

The potion was starting to harden and while the third year was now surreptitiously trying to free his wand from a goop-filled pocket without looking unattentive, Harry's attention was still on the boy; radiating stoicism even while looking as though he'd just walked through a giant bubble of chewing gum.

"This is an Anti-Theft potion – meaning it's countering burglary, right? Just remember this little phrase: 'counter potion, counterclockwise'."

When no reprimand or screaming profanities followed and he was not bodily thrown from the destroyed classroom, the boy stood a little straighter and a shy, hesitant smile started forming on his face. "T-Thanks."

Harry smiled and turned around. "Who wants to try next?"

The rest of the students he was tutoring stared back at him from their scattered desks, pink from head to toe. Someone shifted and their shoe squelched wetly.

His smile didn't falter. "Anyone?"

BANG!

The hodge-podge of assembled students jumped – with the exception of Harry, who turned serenely to the door as it reverberated shut again behind the new arrival. It was Snape.

"We thought you might be ill," explained Harry. "So we started without you."

Snape glowered at his partner and, with a wave of his wand, restored him to rights and to looking at least somewhat more presentable. Harry was, after all, a Gryffindor.

"What are you babbling about, Granger?"

Harry pointed to the wall clock; a quarter-sized splatter of pink obscured the 'five'. "You're nearly an hour late."

"Ridiculous!" he snapped, without looking. "I'm never late. You were merely rude enough to begin early."

A group of Ravenclaw girls started whispering to each other in the back of the room; however, Harry, on the other hand, was nonplussed by Snape's accusation. With a simple swishing flick he'd restored the room to its previous state, before the unfortunate cauldron explosion. The younger students looked around in awe, some even checking their pockets and desks for residual smatterings of pink.

"Are you sure, Severus?"

"Am I sure that I can read a clock?" His tone was scathing. "Why yes, Granger."

Harry nodded, rolling his wand between his fingers idly. "Of course, of course," he amended apologetically. "I only meant that...well, would all of these students skip dinner for a Potions lesson?"

Snape looked from Harry's patiently smiling face to the slightly frightened expressions of about a dozen and a half students. Then his eyes finally darted up to the clock. His annoyed look melted into a dark scowl when he realized he'd been tricked.

"Potter," he snarled.

Harry frowned as well, a thoughtful finger going to his chin. "This is getting ridiculous," he sighed. "I can't tutor like this."

Tapping his wand absently against the gooey cauldron, Harry addressed Snape. "If you didn't have to be here right now...what would you be doing?"

"I'd find those imbecilic friends of yours and—"

"And what?" Harry asked, as if inquiring as to whether his ginger root should be sliced or crushed. "What will you do to them?"

Snape's fists convulsed. "I'll kill them."

Harry shook his head – maybe at the unoriginality, or maybe at the dramatics – but lifted his wand. "Well, fair's fair, I suppose."

Snape was giving him a suspicious look, until the brunet waved his wand expertly and said in a clear voice, "Accio Invisibility Cloak!"

The shimmering mass of cloth flew into his outstretched hand and in the back corner of the room Sirius Black and James Potter had suddenly appeared – as if by magic – still hunched over slightly so they'd fit beneath the cloak. The students erupted in laughter and high-pitched chattering while the two Marauders looked at one another and then at Harry in horror.

Neatly folding the purloined cloak over his arm, Harry turned to Snape. "Class dismissed."

Snape looked like Christmas had come around again. The class scattered in a flurry of scrapping chairs and banging desks, a Hufflepuff boy squeaking in alarm when Snape drew his wand with a devious flourish and advanced on James and Sirius. They'd both drawn their wands as well and were trying to edge around the mass of tables and chairs while Snape merely levitated anything out of his way.

"Come on, Snivellus," James cajoled. "Just a joke, ya know..."

The Slytherin prefect snarled and the chair he'd been levitating spun off and hit the wall over James' head. The Head Boy gave a shout and ducked out of the way of falling shrapnel.

"Really," Sirius wheedled. He flashed a charming smile while sneaking around another table. "Must we resort to violence?"

The desk nearest him opened its lid in a wide snarl – broken quill tips abandoned inside it forming vicious teeth along the rim – and tried, almost successfully, to take a bite out of the Gryffindor.

"I reckon we must, mate!" said James. He started pushing Sirius towards the door. Bits of splintered wood were stuck in his hair.

"Let's leave him to it then, Prongsie-boy." Sirius suggested.

"Yes. Let's."

The end of Severus' incantation was cut off by a roar of laughter from the students who'd gathered on the other end of the class room. Two bright jets of flame shot out of the end of his wand and alighted on the robes of the Marauders. Harry just shook his head at their idiocy – trying to beat out the flames while their wands sat forgotten in their pockets. Were they wizards or weren't they?

With their bottoms still smoldering, the two Gryffindors bolted for their door with a raging Snape right behind them. The crowded students were slightly disappointed with the lackluster exit, until Sirius' head popped back in through the doorway startling Snape into stumbling backwards into a desk. Laughter abounded and there was no environment better for the proud Black to flourish in.

Saluting jauntily, Sirius grinned at the fuming Snape trying to disentangle himself from a chair and taunted, "Catch us if ya can!"

Harry sighed again, watching the three seventh years go tearing down the hall, but released the class to go and watch the havoc at their leisure, only calling out a reminder as the last giggling first year slipped out the door.

"Fourth years! Don't forget your essay drafts next time if you want them checked over and, oh! Drats..." They'd gone.

Gathering up his things and cleaning the classroom's cauldron, Harry followed them all out after turning out the lights and locking up the room behind him. To his right he could hear the sounds of laughter and rebounding spells and though it should have deepened his frown at the lawlessness of it, Harry couldn't help but smile a little as he started off in the opposite direction, book in hand and the library in mind.


The morning's amusement turned out to be the day's only saving point for only a few minutes after he'd settled in to read – "nested" as Peter called it – he developed the most god-awful headache. It throbbed just beneath the skin of his forehead and made his hairline itch furiously. He scratched, his curls tangled, and he tried to focus on Magical Anomalies. But the night before he'd reached the section on the empirical arithmetic values for Space and, while it was quite intriguing – he having read the book through once already – it was an in depth subject with many long and complicated sentences that several times he had to read twice over before they formed a coherent thought in his pounding mind.

To his credit, he persisted in this agonizing pursuit for an hour before his mistreated body cried bloody murder and he gave up trying to enjoy magiphysics. Tucking his book back under his arm, he decided that the most efficient thing to do would be to beg a Headache Potion off of Madame Pomfrey; thus ensuring that the rest of his evening would be substantially more productive than if he had to work through pain and spotted vision.

He set off towards the Infirmary with his usual brisk pace which almost immediately warranted correcting. The efficient cadence of his shoes against stone was now a debilitating hammer cleaving his agonized mind in two. A shoe hammer it was. And he very much wished for it to never be repeated again so he settled for an ungainly shuffle which every few steps developed a hop-skip because Subconscious and Anxious Harry wanted to get to the Infirmary now.

He honestly didn't know what he'd done to incur such an unmitigated, yet powerful, dosage of pain. Surely it wasn't karmic retribution for loosing Snape on those two bumbling fools. If he's told them once, he's told them enough times to justify drastic action – his potions lessons were off-limits to tampering, ogling, harassing, or mischief-making. Not to mention their blatant disregard of Harry's wishes on the "Snape Matter". Not that he fancied it before, but especially now that he and Snape were to be working together, he'd really rather not have to listen to tirades from either side of either side's stupidity and/or childish traumatization when all he wanted was just to get some work done.

Damnit. Now he'd gone and made it worse by thinking. The very neurons that sparked his deductive reasoning seemed to be sadistically linked to the sensors that were causing him such excruciating pain. Really, that seemed hardly fair. How was he suppose to properly analyze the affect of the shoe hammer if – ow! OW!

Thoroughly browbeaten into ceasing his higher levels of cognition, Harry – grudgingly – allowed the softened creators of the shoe hammers to guide him to his destination. One might call it "auto-pilot"; Harry called it laziness. He liked to think about where he was going, thank you very much. Followed by why, how, with whom, and with what priority. He liked to be precise.

It was while he was in this state – wallowing in the slothful unawareness that James and Sirius must live in every second of the day, and generally doing a horrible job of finding the Infirmary without the usual guidance of his, ahem, "precise" mind – that the truly horrid beginning of his problems, well, began.

"My kingdom for an advil..."

"What are you mumbling about, Granger?"

Piss off. Harry smiled sweetly; though, what he thought was polite and friendly was actually rather creepy and deranged looking with him slumped against the wall as he was, his pale head lolling on his shoulders. Just so it's said, he looked frightfully worse than his symptoms would indicate. He doubted, however, that Snape – for it was he who had so acerbically interrupted Harry's hopeless corridor meanderings – really cared much about a Gryffindor's state of affairs.

Frankly, Harry'd been surprised that Snape was willing to tutor with him, much less come within ten feet of him after that horrific kissing fiasco at Yule. He was sure, somewhere subconsciously, that he'd been traumatized for life.

"Oh nothing," he said. "Just mumbling under my breath about the utterly wretched Powers-That-Be who decided that this mind-splitting pain was anything worth having..."

Snape said nothing to this; he probably deemed the babbling beneath his realm of response. He did – to give him credit – finally speak, but only long enough to summarize the brunet's soliloquy for anyone else who might have stopped and overhead. "You have a headache."

Well, it didn't sound quite so dramatic when he said it like that. Harry thought it needed more drama. He was then promptly rewarded with another throb of pain for his efforts in to the extent of being "thoughtful", no matter how petulant.

"How very astute of you."

Snape glowered, but didn't continue onwards and Harry would have wondered about that if he hadn't found how soothing it was to close his eyes. He cracked them open again at the clearing of a throat.

"What?"

"Hmm," Snape looked aside, then back – but they seemed darker than before. "While your decorum is totally unappreciative, I figured this would be the opportunity to, well..." he cleared his throat again. "I've a batch of headache potion in the common room."

Harry blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You gave away Potter and his sidekick."

It took Harry a few seconds to connect the fragmented bits of their conversation. When he did, all he could say was, "Oh."

"I do not enjoy bartering favors. Take the potion and we'll be done."

Harry felt like an idiot as he blinked again; and though it took a marginal amount of pain to do so he reasoned out that Snape felt somehow indebted to him – for letting him revenge himself, if even a small bit. He ought not to – it had been just as rewarding experience for himself as it had been for the Slytherin. Sometimes the two boys just needed to be beat all to hell before they'd see reason.

"It was...my pleasure," he intoned truthfully. His eyes shuttered sporadically, desiring to be closed against the glare of light that shot straight into the throbbing core of his headache. "But if you'd be so helpful as to point me in the direction of the Hospital Wing, I'd be more than happy to absolve your unsettling delusion of debt."

"Damnit, Granger – just take the damn potion."

"What's the difference!" The brunet quipped back; their rising voices prompting him to cover his ears.

Snape sneered. "Well mine tastes a sight better than that old cow's. I can put it in Pumpkin Juice if you're that much of a Hufflepuff."

"Pumpkin Juice?" Harry knew all to well the ghastly taste of Madame Pomfrey's potions. And while he wouldn't go so far as to call her an 'old cow', he had noticed that while it made no difference to many of the potions if flavor was added, she didn't seem to care much if her patients liked her medicine, just as long as they drank it. The epitome of 'tough love'.

Harry looked up at Snape, his headache pounding in the empty space just behind his eyes, and found no obvious deceit in his gaze, no matter how darkly his obsidian eyes gleamed. He swallowed and managed a small, grateful smile.

"That would be...wonderful..."


The horridness was, er, deceptively veiled by consideration.

He'd waited outside the Slytherin Common Room while Snape fetched the potion from his dormitory, then assured Snape that his headache was indeed abating after drinking it. When Snape excused himself to go and check on their now-simmering potion in the abandoned classroom, Harry – having nothing else in mind to do – offered to walk with him.

"So, did you catch them?" The ground passed slowly beneath Harry's feet.

Snape frowned. "I could not keep hold of them as long as I would have liked..."

Harry chuckled. "I bet I'll be seeing your handiwork soon enough, anyhow." Snape actually smirked and turned his face downwards to his, before looking down the hall.

"Not my best work," he deadpanned. He fidgeted slightly with the cuffs of his uniform, the tip of his wand flashing out against the pale white of his wrist before disappearing again. "I was rushed."

"Oh, of course." Harry actually had to fight back a laugh, which was something he hadn't expected. "No one's going to think any less of you. I'm sure you did as much damage as you could."

"Those two weasels think I'm the slimy one." He scoffed. "They're just lucky that squirrel Pettrigrew showed up – slipped right out of my fingers."

Harry's lips quirked. "Say what you will about James and Sirius -- they're both a load of hippogriff dung – but I am going to have to draw the line at Peter."

Snape stopped walking, and while Harry slowed down, he looked back over his shoulder. "Really..." He sounded bemused.

His face felt tight, and it was like the muscles holding up his smile had atrophied, gone numb. It was still on his face – small and soft – but it was flat now; like the fizz had gone out of his candy pop. "Really."

"Well," Snape started up again. "I wouldn't fancy being on the receiving end of your wand, should I cross you and yours."

Harry let him match pace with him, seeing the nearing doorway of their storeroom. "See that you don't then."

Snape swiveled on the spot, walking the last few paces to the door backwards and meeting Harry's blankly amused face with a serious one of his own. He steepled his fingers together and tapped them thoughtfully against his chin. "But Potter and Black..."

"Still free game?" Harry laughed. "Oh, most definitely."


They stood talking a few minutes longer, exchange sundry words – bits and pieces of conversation, nothing lasting. Neither of them were much for talking, and though they had hardly much in common, it wasn't too awkward a time spent talking on classes and arithmetic sequences that might hinder their potion research. It was the arrival of two very unexpected guests – precipitated by needless shouting – that quickly ended their conversing.

"HARIETTA!"

The brunet winced and glanced quickly over his shoulder. "I, uh, better go..."

"Going to undo all my work?"

Harry saluted him with the book he'd kept tucked under his arm all that time. "Wouldn't even think it. I'm just gonna sit back and have a good laugh."

"You will, once you see them." Snape looked deeply pleased with himself.

"HARIEEEEEEEEEEEEEETTA!"

"I really should—" The Slytherin nodded, a dismissal of sorts, and Harry started jogging off towards the voices. Before he rounded the corner, he spun back around and gave a stunted sort of wave. "Thanks for the potion—" but Snape was already slipping into the classroom door, closing it behind him so quickly he nearly caught his robe hem on the frame. Harry was left staring at empty space.

"Oi!" A hand settled on his shoulder, turning him around. "We needs a word with you."

Harry burst out laughing. He never laughed. So it was more than disconcerting when the stoic young boy burst into laughter so heartily that tears sprung from his eyes and started rolling down his cheeks by the time he'd tried to cut them off; hunched over and trying not to look. Snape had certainly done a number on them.

James' hair was a blinding, horrific shade of yellow – sticking up in thick gooey clumps so atrocious, that Harry had a whole new appreciation for his hair's usual disorder. He was holding a washcloth around his throat like a sodden scarf, and it wasn't until he tried to talk to him, that the brunet realized the watered rag was covering a recently acquired set of gills.

He tried to say something like his name but it came out in a squawking garble and he lurched forward, favoring his left leg. So it was clear that it had been Sirius who'd been doing the bellowing and Harry knew at least that nothing had damaged his vocal cords, but that was all he was prepared for when the second half of the duo appeared beside the first.

Sirius' face – his secondary pride and joy next to his hair – was bubbled all up underneath the skin, great knobby bumps making his head look like a sheet of bubble rap. His nose was stretched out like a carrot – ridged and gobliny – over which his perfect bangs had been seared up to his hairline. He was walking a bit oddly too – more like shambling – and Harry could see with one quick glance that it was due to the large tail that had grown from the bottom of his spine. It was reptilian and iridescent blue – probably draconic.

"Harry!" Sirius exploded. "Look at my face!"

"I am looking," Harry laughed, snorting into his hand.

Sirius' hands went immediately to covering his face. "Aw, stuff it."

"He sure did do a number on you two."

James gargled and Sirius agreed. "Yeah – this is your fault!"

Harry waggled a finger at him; his mirth being taken over by a strain of solemnity no matter how amused his smiled seemed. "Uh uh. You aren't blaming this muck up on me. I told you not to interfere with my tutoring; I told you to stop bothering Snape—"

"—he had it coming!" Sirius's tail was swishing wildly behind him and it defeated the purpose of his anger by making Harry snicker.

"And," the brunet reproached, holding up a finger. "I told you to stop following me."

"Oh, well now, that we can't stop."

He was given a very lewd expression by Sirius, but on his goblin face it just looked repulsive. James gurgled at him and reached out with his free hand, a smacking pair of fish lips joining the gills. Harry nearly squealed trying to evade James' grasp and in the end he had to smack away his reaching hands with his book, laughing as he danced back just out of reach.

"Oh, no. There's no way I'm kissing either of you looking like that," he chuckled. "Remus might be able to restore you to rights, but sure as hellfire am I not going to help him. You two can undo this yourselves."

Sirius gaped and James kicked at the tail that kept swatting against his bad leg. "Come on, Harry!"

The brunet just smiled in response and walked away. With a saluting wave over his shoulder and a parting jab, he disappeared up the Grand Staircase.

"A little punishment will do you two a world of good..."


As the world darkened outside, so did Harry's mood; erasing all earlier joviality. Severus' potion maintained, and when he recovered from his irritable mood Harry would surely thank his expert skills, but for now the splitting, tearing pain had moved from his head to his stomach. If he'd eaten anything substantial at all that day, he'd feel justified in accusing the house of elves of poisoning him, but things being as they were, the source of his illness was unknown.

As when anyone is sick, even the calm and soft-spoken Harry Granger became snappish and curt, either utterly ignoring anyone who paused by him to talk or dismissing them firmly above pained moans. So, when the Marauders returned sometime around ten it was to a pale-faced Harry, curled up miserably on the couch of an empty common room.

"What the devil, Granger?" James grunted – now aesthetically de-fished.

"Go away..."

"No need to be such an ass," Peter teased. It was a testament to their friendship that Harry only gestured rudely at him instead of hexing him where he stood. It was also true that Peter's moments of brashness were fleeting and short. When he spoke again, sitting on the couch by Harry's bent legs, it was quieter, less provoking. "You, uh, don't look too good."

"I don't feel too good." Harry curled himself tighter around the throw pillow he'd stuffed into his arms and the movement caused him to make a small noise of discomfort.

"Best to just suck it up, you know – be a man," said Sirius. Then, to prove his point, he sat down heavily on Harry's curved side, arms crossed and looking smug.

Harry's voice came out strained from underneath the other boy's weight. "If you don't get off I am going to throw up."

Sirius jumped up like an Exploding Snap card had been set off under his arse, and he backed up a several paces behind James until he was sure that he was well out of range should any projectile vomiting occur. Harry groaned into the couch.

"Have you gone to Madame Pomfrey yet?" Remus asked in the kind manner he had. "A Pepper-Up ought to do the trick."

"Can't," Harry said, looking back out. His eyes looked puffy. "Eh, can't mix it...with the, hnn, headache potion from Severus," he said while trying to painlessly resituate his pillow.

James exploded.

"WHAT!"

Sirius followed.

"WHAT!"

"Do you have a death wish, Granger?" James all but yelled. Several first years scurried for the dorms.

"No, but you seem to. The next time you disrupt my tutoring class I'll set the whole Slytherin house on you!" The whole common room stared at Harry. He never yelled, much less at James. The brunet rubbed at his throat with a pathetic "ow" and collapsed back against the pillows looking paler and more drained than when the Marauders had first arrived. "Go away," he mumbled, despondently. "I'm sick..."

"Fine." James didn't look at him. He hadn't liked the affect Harry's words had had on him. "We just needed a lookout is all."

Lookout. Harry's teeth clenched automatically at James' brush off. Sure, he was good enough to drag off and snog at all hours of the day, but when Harry made him look bad in front of his "followers", he was deemed a last-resort lookout. Before he'd even realized he was doing it, Harry was on his feet.

"Fine." He answered back, curtly. "I'm going with you."

In the back of his mind he remembered Hermione and a stone and a vaguely similar situation. Maybe he hadn't changed as much as he thought. Maybe he was still that happy young bookworm deep inside.

Maybe it was time to go home.

"If you're sick—" Peter started.

"No," Harry refuted. He looked squarely at James. "I'm feeling much better now, thanks."

His stomach gave a disagreeing flip-flop.

"So, where are we going?"

"Filch's office," Remus answered.

"Not vandalizing, I hope...?" Harry made it a question.

"Not at all." Sirius was a little less moody than James, and though he wasn't all that happy with the little spat going on between the three of them, he gave him a small, reassuring smile. Harry felt better for it.

"Ah. Stealing then, is it?"

"He stole it from us first!" Peter defended stoutly.

"Stole it from you, you mean," James corrected and the shorter boy made a face at his back.

Harry smiled. Just a little. "What did Filch steal?"

Remus, who was pulling the silvery folds of the invisibility cloak out of his bag, grinned at him, and Harry experienced an unexplainable pang of foreboding.

"A map."