Thank you for the reviews on the last chapter!

This one was fun to write. No one is correct, but they are fun.

Chapter Seventeen: Not-So-Private Lessons

Regulus?

There was no answer.

Harry sighed and stepped into the abandoned classroom where he'd asked Connor to meet him for his lessons in leadership. He'd been reaching out for Regulus since he vanished, trying everything he could think of, from simple shouts of his name to slurs against his family, which might bring him roaring back in anger. There was nothing, and Harry thought that if Regulus could hear him, he would have responded.

That left him being gone, or dead.

Harry shook his head with a frown as he considered the second thought and set his magic to Vanishing the dust from the desks and corners. I don't believe that. I'm nearly certain that his body is in a Black house somewhere, and the wards are tight around all of them. How would Voldemort have broken through those, as weak as he is right now? And we'd soon know if he was back in his full power. He would have come after either Connor or me first, I think, instead of Regulus.

So I think his voice is gone for right now, but not his body. Harry bit his lip and sighed. And since I have no way of contacting him as he is right now, I think I had best contact Narcissa and tell her about my suspicions. If there's any way she can still get into Grimmauld Place, then she should.

Harry was just finishing the last of the dusting when he felt the fragile quiver behind his temple that indicated Draco wanted Harry to come and help him, or sit in admiring silence at his feet, or suggest books to look in for research on Julia Malfoy and her time period. Harry hesitated for a moment, then shook his head, with slow determination. Draco knew this was the time when Harry had promised to give Connor lessons, since it was Saturday and they had no classes. Harry had explained that to him, and he was sure Draco had understood. Harry didn't see the need to leave and go to him now.

Someone knocked on the door. Connor peeked around it, and Harry found his face relaxing into a smile. His brother's company seemed positively undemanding these days, next to Snape's, where Harry had to choke back many of the tendencies that had become natural around the Potions Master, and Draco's, where Harry was still making the wrong decisions half the time, as Draco's mind changed like quicksilver.

Of course, the first thing Connor said was, "Have you found the potion that could cure Dad's madness yet?"

Harry let the smile fall away from his face, and shook his head. "No, sorry, Connor." The fact was that he knew at least two ways of finding out the potion's ingredients and brewing an antidote, but both of them would make Snape very angry. Harry fought a small battle every day about whether risking his guardian's anger was worth letting his father suffer. The part of him that said he shouldn't make Snape angry was losing, slowly but steadily.

Connor sighed. "Let's just—"

The door creaked open again, and Ron stuck his head in. "Room for two?" he asked, when he caught Harry's eye.

Harry blinked. "I suppose so. But why?" He wouldn't have thought that Ron was very interested in the kinds of history and philosophy that Harry aimed to teach Connor, or at least knew about some of it already, through living in a pureblood family.

"Connor said that you're a good teacher, when you want to be." Ron shrugged and padded over to sit down at one of the tables, idly running his fingers over the clean surface. "And I'm bored. It's not going to be the same without Quidditch this year, you know." He said that with a deep disgust in his tone.

"They're not letting us play?" Harry reflected that nearly everyone else seemed to know more about what went on in the school than he did. Of course, he'd been busy with Snape and Draco and trying to find Regulus and writing suggestions to Skeeter for another article on the Minister in the past few days, but he wouldn't have thought he would miss an announcement like that.

Ron gave him a sharp look. "Yes. And the Headmaster just smiled mysteriously and refused to explain why. You must have heard him say that, Harry. It was just at dinner last night."

"Oh," said Harry, remembering. He'd been helping Draco research necromancy last night, and had lost track of enough time that he missed dinner. He shrugged. "Sorry, but I wonder why? You're absolutely sure that the Headmaster didn't say?" That might explain why the professors, except Snape, had been gossiping about lately, but Harry didn't see why the banning of Quidditch would concern anyone save the Heads of House.

"Just said that we'd understand later." Ron dropped his head on the desk. "I know he's a great man and all—Dad says he's brilliant—but he's barmy sometimes."

Harry privately agreed with that assessment. "All right, then, let's—"

The door creaked again, and Hermione came in, taking a place at a desk. Unlike Ron, she seemed to notice how clean it was, but she just raised an eyebrow at Harry and pulled a piece of parchment, her quill, and her inkwell out of the bag she was carrying, which Harry would normally expect to be full of books.

"And what are you doing here?" Harry asked. If there's one student in school that doesn't need extra lessons, it's Hermione.

"I'll go if you don't want me here," said Hermione.

Harry looked at her hard, hearing an injured tone in her voice. He sighed when he recognized it. It was true that he'd been rather neglecting Hermione lately. He didn't know how to make up for it. Politics and talking to Fawkes—who could only offer a limited array of chirps without a house elf to translate—and Draco and Snape had consumed a lot of his time, that was true, but he could still have found some hours to spend with her.

"No, that's fine," he said. "But I would have thought that you already knew everything I did."

Hermione's scowl grew pronounced. "I would have thought the library would have more information on pureblood rituals than it does," she muttered. "Too many of the books just say something like And of course this connects to the Rite of the Scorpion that the Starrise family performed on full moon nights of victory over their enemies, but then they don't explain what the Rite of the Scorpion is. I'm sure I'm missing a lot, and I have to know the whole thing."

Harry relaxed. Hermione's motivation was easier to deal with, at least. He wondered how she'd missed getting into Ravenclaw. "Well, teaching three people won't be much different than teaching one, I suppose."

"Six."

Harry raised his eyebrows as Cho entered, nodding cheerfully at him. Luna wandered in just behind her, giving Harry a rather vague smile. Padma Patil followed both of them. Harry eyed her warily, but if she had any of her sister Parvati's tendency to giggle, it didn't show in the way she carefully arranged her books and parchment on one of the desks.

"All right, then." Harry didn't ask why they'd come. They were Ravenclaws, and Ravenclaws who genuinely seemed to enjoy learning, from what he'd seen of them. "Then I'll start." He began, giving the classroom door one more suspicious look, but this time it didn't seem inclined to admit more people.

"I wanted to ask my brother who he thinks the main people he'd have to persuade to follow him are." He fastened his gaze on Connor, feeling no remorse at putting his brother on the spot. It was time Connor learned to deal with some of the attention that had been flicking away from him this year, as people whispered and giggled about Harry's abduction.

Connor flushed. "I, ah. Dark wizards?"

Harry cocked his head. "You think of them as a block?"

"Aren't they?"

Harry shook his head. "Dark wizards don't all want the same thing, and they don't even all share the same allegiance," he said, falling easily into the patterns of the book learning he'd had from his mother. "Really, there are two kinds of Dark wizards, even though they both get lumped together as the same thing most of the time. There are declared ones, sworn to a Dark Lord or some ideal—an ill-defined one, really—of keeping Dark magic legal. Then there are just wizards and witches who will use Dark spells." Hermione's quill was speeding across her parchment, Harry noticed in amusement. Well, he supposed he couldn't blame her. She studied everything, and their Defense Against the Dark Arts professors so far hadn't covered much of the history of how Dark and Light magic appeared among the wizarding families. "Both often practice what are called the Dark rituals and the Dark pureblood dances of manners. Then there are the same distinctions for Light wizards, except, of course, that they often follow Light Lords, and fight to keep everything the same as it has been a few centuries, since the last Minister who really tolerated Dark magic. Their rituals are different."

Hermione looked up, the dawning of consciousness in her eyes. "That was why I was finding so many different rituals," she whispered. "Some of them were Light, and some Dark."

Harry nodded. "As to how they're connected, and whether a certain ritual is Light or Dark…well, they might depend on free will or compulsion. Or they might depend on taming, bridling, and confining, or letting loose, freeing, unbinding. Or they might be concerned with identifying the truth, which is defined as Light magic, or hiding and subterfuge, which is Dark."

Connor, Harry saw, was following with a frown, and looking as though he wished he had brought some parchment. "But lots of people use glamours or illusions, and those aren't called Dark Arts," he said.

Harry nodded again. "They aren't called that. They are Dark, but only under one definition of the term. There are lots of definitions. Another one is the Light magic is often cooperative, done with many wizards working together, while many Dark spells and arts are solitary."

Hermione scribbled that down, too. "I knew that," she said defensively, when Harry looked at her. "But the way you explain it is a lot simpler and clearer."

Only she would think that, Harry thought with amusement, and then looked over Hermione's bowed head, something he was just getting used to being tall enough to do. Well, her and the Ravenclaws. Ron and Connor looked nearly overwhelmed. "I've had time to think about it, and to study it."

Hermione gave him a long, slow look. "I heard something about that," she said. "But not everything in detail. Why do you know so much about Dark Arts and spells and rituals, Harry?"

"Lucky, I guess," said Harry. "And I have a really good memory. I usually only have to read a book once to remember most of the information." It was true, as it happened, but it slid him neatly past the awkward moment when the Ravenclaw girls might have started asking why he'd been trained so much as a child. Harry was uncomfortable with them knowing what they might already, that he'd been trained as Connor's protector. He was not going to get into the phoenix web or what they would probably want to call abuse. They were sure not to understand what it had really been like. "So, Connor, you'll have to persuade Dark wizards declared and unaligned, and Light wizards declared and unaligned, and then of course those families and individual wizards who aren't either."

"And where do Muggleborns fit into all this?" Hermione asked. Harry thought she was honestly curious. It wasn't the kind of thing that most people talked about openly in Hogwarts, except maybe in Muggle Studies, wary as they were of stepping straight into subjects no one wanted to be forced to take a side on.

"Depends on whether or not they stay in the wizarding world, and where," said Harry. "Sometimes they declare for Dark or Light. Sometimes they marry into a family which has an allegiance, and adopt that. Sometimes they use both Dark and Light magic, anything short of the Unforgivable Curses, and stay in the middle. And a lot of them go back to the Muggle world, of course."

Hermione shook her head. "That's stupid."

"I quite agree, Granger," said a sharp voice from the doorway. "No sense in wasting education on people who are only going to misuse it."

Harry jerked his head up. This time, he hadn't heard the door creak. Draco was standing there, looking straight at him, and his face was furious.

Harry lowered his head, and piled shields on top of shields. He had been irritated at Draco for forgetting that he was going to spend the morning with Connor. But why had he been irritated? Of course Draco would want him to be there anyway.

He could feel his whole mind shifting and changing, adapting itself into the small quiet thing that it usually was of late around Draco, but a glance at his friend's face showed that was not going to be enough.

Draco tapped a finger on his book. Perhaps he'd been spoiled, but he'd got quite used to Harry showing up whenever he wanted him; he'd accepted that Harry was probably watching him by magical means for any such occurrence. And this was taking much longer than it should have, even if he was down in the Great Hall or out on the Quidditch Pitch when Draco thought about him.

Then he remembered that Harry had said something about teaching Connor lessons in leadership this morning.

As if that prat could learn anything, Draco thought, and stood, storming out of the library. He went to the classroom that Harry had used to try and "educate" Connor last year. They would be there, if they were anywhere. Harry had to learn that sometimes Draco needed him, too.

Except that they weren't there, and it took an unconscionably long time of wandering among the empty classrooms until Draco found them. By then, his temper was near the boiling point, and he entered just after some crack by Granger about how it would be stupid for Mudbloods to go back to the Muggle world. Draco felt compelled to agree with her.

He looked at Harry.

For a moment, a stir of unease struck him as he watched Harry's eyes widen and then drop from his face, and how his posture changed, flowing from an almost teacher-like one to one that Draco could well imagine standing or sitting near him, poised to give but not attract attention. It rather reminded him of last year, when Harry had sometimes acted like that around his brother. If there was one person whom Draco didn't want to be compared to, it was Connor Potter.

But then he shook off the idea. Harry was probably just apologetic for wasting his time here when he could have been with Draco. And hadn't Draco given him a lot of attention last year, and gone dashing off to his side whenever Harry wanted? It was nothing more than Harry owed him in return.

"Come here," he said, walking towards Harry.

Weasley was on his feet in an instant, getting between him and Harry. Draco sneered at him. He didn't have much time for Weasley. He had Harry and the potion to brew, and the potion and Harry, and that was enough for him right now. Oh, sure, sometimes he did talk to other people, because he couldn't spend all his time researching the potion or talking to Harry, but those people certainly didn't include Weasley.

"Out of the way," he said.

Weasley had the audacity to shake his head. His face was bright and flushed. Draco hoped, spitefully, that he had some idea of how unattractive he looked, despite the fact that he couldn't give him that much credit for intelligence. "How can you just order Harry around like that?" he demanded. "You can't just order him around like that."

Draco blinked. "I wasn't giving him an order. I was just telling him how things were going to be." He was sure that he had given Harry a choice with his tone. It hadn't been an order or a command. He knew that Harry would despise orders or commands, and that he spent as much time as he did with Draco because he genuinely wanted to spend time with him, nothing else. "Come on, Harry," he added, making sure his voice was coaxing this time, looking over Weasley's shoulder. Harry still didn't meet his gaze. "You do want to come work with me, don't you?"

Harry didn't respond. Draco could feel the anger bubbling up in his chest again. He needed Harry's help, and he didn't need Harry spending his time with these tossers, among whom, he saw with a faint sneer, was the Chang bitch. Why would Harry want to spend time with them, anyway? It wasn't as though they were his friends who'd risked their lives for him again and again, or who loved him the way that Draco did.

And if any of them do, they better not come near him.

Sometimes Draco felt as if he didn't understand his own mind through the dizzying swirl of emotions and ambitions that occupied it, but what he did understand told him distinctly that Harry was his and no one else's. He'd felt that for years, really, but now he knew why, and he wasn't about to let the realization go again.

The thing that really puzzled Draco was why Harry wasn't saying anything about this. He should have been, if he was so interested in coming to work with Draco, but he only sat there, his head bowed and drooping, his eyes on the floor. He seemed to be taking several deep breaths, as if to stave off a panic attack. But Draco knew when Harry's panic attacks happened. They happened after he was possessed by evil Dark Lords or when he had too many people staring at him. Neither was true now, so it couldn't be a panic attack.

"Come on, Harry," he said again, feeling angry at having to repeat himself.

A voice from the doorway said, "Merlin, but you're a pompous git, Malfoy."

If there was one thing that offended Zacharias Smith, it was lack of intelligence.

He was willing to concede that some people didn't know much about some things (from his experience at Hogwarts, "some people" amounted to "most of the other students"), but that ignorance could be corrected. If someone wanted to know something, they could ask. If someone realized they didn't know something, and no one else did either, they could seek to remedy the lack themselves. There was a library upstairs, and minds residing in the professors' heads, or at least most of them. Zacharias did not believe in native stupidity. It was only ignorance, what you got when other people didn't care enough to educate themselves.

But he did believe in a kind of willful stupidity, and he saw it in full flight when he wandered by the classroom where, just maybe, on the slimmest of chances, he might have seen Hermione Granger heading about ten minutes ago.

It offended him more than anything else in the world to see Draco Malfoy standing in front of Harry Potter and talking as if it wasn't perfectly obvious that Potter was going into what his great-grandmother called avuluchia. Zacharias considered that she knew what she was talking about, being a Veela and everything, and here it was. Potter wanted to do two things, very badly, and neither side was letting up, sending him into mental paralysis.

Merlin, Malfoy ought to have known something was wrong just by the way he's looking at the floor. Potter doesn't do that.

"Merlin, but you're a pompous git, Malfoy," Zacharias drawled, stepping through the door and leaning against it. His eyes lingered on Hermione as she turned to stare at the door, but that was just coincidence, really. And if he happened to notice that she had most of a parchment covered in writing, and wanted to nod in approval, what of it? Being smart was nothing to sneer at. "What gives you the right to treat Potter like your little plush dragon? Real wizards give up on playing with those dragons when they're six."

Malfoy flushed. Zacharias nodded, happy to have his suspicions confirmed. "You didn't, did you? You were probably playing with it until you got your Hogwarts letter, and then you put it away and pretended that you'd never heard of it."

"Shut up, Smith," Malfoy had the gall to hiss, as if he really thought he could shut someone up who had more than a scattering of intelligence that way. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, I do," said Zacharias, and stepped into the classroom. He noticed three Ravenclaws there, all girls of good family, good Light wizarding stock, and nodded to them. Really, Malfoy was an idiot, and not acting like one, to believe that Potter would be unsafe with this lot.

But he didn't believe in native idiocy, only in native ignorance, so that meant he could help educate Malfoy out of it.

Zacharias smiled. He was going to enjoy this.

"You put your little plush dragon away only a day before you got your Hogwarts letter, or the hour after it," he said, directing his attention to Malfoy again. Pompous git. Braggart, throwing his money and his weight around. I wonder if his father ever told him that his great-grandfather was one of the poorest purebloods around for a long time? Illegal gambling won most of the Malfoy property back, and ever since then, they've been acting as though they're old money. Old name, new money, not a lick of common sense. "And then it turned out not to matter, because you immediately found another plush dragon when you got here. You've been hanging on Potter as though he could grant your every wish."

Zacharias paused to study the wizard who, by now, had looked up and was staring hard at him. Potter's magic beat around him like a stream barely dammed, a river peering over the top of the obstruction and ready to flow. "Well," Zacharias amended, "he probably could grant your every wish."

He brought his gaze back to Malfoy's face. "But that doesn't mean that you get to ask him to try, you know. A Lord belongs to everybody. So does a vates." His great-grandmother had told him about the vates, during all the long days when Zacharias had sat by her chair with the instruction to "learn something." Zacharias had surely learned something. "So he doesn't get to just educate one person, or grant the wishes of one person. That's selfishness on your part, and it would be on his. He gets to belong to the whole of the wizarding world, and lavish his magic on the people he chooses to lavish it on."

Zacharias looked back at Potter, and if he chose to admire Hermione's face on the way, no one was there to notice. There were no natively stupid people, but Zacharias believed firmly that some people were more intelligent and observant than others, and of the people in this room, only Hermione was his match. She was allowed to notice his looking, if she wanted to.

Potter's eyes were fastened steadily on his now, and he seemed to be asking what, exactly, Zacharias wanted.

Heavens, he's not that far gone, is he? Zacharias frowned in thought. Maybe he was. He hadn't known that Malfoy's plush-dragoning of the other wizard had pushed Potter like this, or he would have interfered sooner.

Well, now he could.

"I give you permission to use Legilimency on me, Potter," he said. "I know you know it. Look into my mind, and see if I'm not speaking the truth about why the way Malfoy treats you is evil."

"Shut up, Smith!" Malfoy spat again, and took a step forward, his hands helplessly clenched.

Zacharias gave him a cool look. He could defend himself, if necessary. He didn't think he should depend on Potter to do it. "You shut up, Malfoy," he said. "You owe courtesy and precedent to a wizard as powerful as Potter, at least until he decides to decline the invitation to look into my mind."

He glanced back at Potter, who was looking helplessly at Malfoy. "Potter?" he asked.

Harry glanced at him in turn, and Zacharias narrowed his eyes. Oh, honestly. How hesitant can someone with strength like that get? When he's past this, I'm going to pick at him with everything in me. No one can afford for him to be this weak.

"Come on, Potter," he said. "It's a simple enough spell. One word, and I give you my full permission." He summoned the memories that he wanted Potter to see to the forefront of his mind. He didn't know Occlumency, but he knew that it would make it easiest for a wizard entering an unfamiliar mind if he didn't have to dig for memories. Zacharias was not keen on having it hurt him, either.

Potter whispered, "Legilimens."

Zacharias felt an odd twisting and pushing, as though someone had slid through an outer curtain to his thoughts he hadn't even been aware was there. He braced himself not to fight the intrusion, but after that first sensation, there was nothing appreciable. He braced himself with his hands on a desk and hummed, waiting.

The memories were right there, easily accessed.

"But I don't know what you mean, Grandma," said Zacharias, sitting at the Veela's feet in a fall of sunlight. Her room was always lit, enough to touch Zacharias's heart and cheer him up even on days when the winter sky was faint and pasty everywhere else. Here, the light was golden.

"I mean a vates, my dear, a creature of magic and freedom so extreme that nothing can contain her." Her hand smoothed across his forehead, and Zacharias shivered. He was too young to know much about what Veela could do, but because he was her blood, she could soothe and enchant him with a touch. "She has to know herself inside and out, and she'll lose her position in a moment if she tries to make someone do something she doesn't want to do, but when she's here, she'll heal and free all those poor creatures bound in webs to this day."

Zacharias thought ahead, even at that age. "But what happens if the vates is weak, or shuts herself in a cage?"

Grandma's voice went sad and cold, both at once. "Then she is dead, and something of beauty and freedom is forever lost to the world."

Potter pulled out of his head, and Zacharias opened his eyes as the memory ended. He saw Potter's trembling, and shook his head, clucking his tongue. Perhaps a bit of spurring right now wouldn't go amiss.

"Really, Potter," he said. "Did you think that no one else had noticed, that no one else would question it when suddenly you started acting differently?"

"He's just acting the way I wanted him to act," Malfoy said.

Zacharias gave him a smirk. Malfoy sounded like a pathetic little boy. "We did notice," he told Potter. "There's an awful lot of people at this school who notice everything you do. Everything. And we're not about to have our chance at a Lord, or something even better, ruined because you want to go and hide in a cage. I'm going to poke you with a stick until you get out of the cage. You'll have to find some other solution than hiding, Potter."

"And what if hiding is what other people want me to do?' Potter whispered, barely loud enough for Zacharias to hear him. "If I have to be their servant and their protector, then shouldn't I hide?"

"Then they're stupid," said Zacharias, and decided that perhaps he could believe in stupid people after all. "If they really do that, if they really want that, then they're destroying something that could flood their lives with light, too. How moronic would you have to be, to do that?" He looked sideways again, and added, "Well, you could be a moron or you could be Malfoy, who's worse."

Malfoy spat at him. Zacharias grinned. It'd been days since he had a good argument.

Hermione was nodding along with him, he saw. He felt a warm flush traveling up his chest that he dismissed as pride. It was good to see that the smartest witch in school could recognize good sense when she saw it.

Malfoy wasn't able to get his tongue yet, so Zacharias went on speaking to Potter, while locking his eyes with his future opponent. "You're too needed, Potter. You're going to have to balance what people want out of you with what other people want out of you, just as some magical creature should already have told you. They're not Malfoys. They can recognize what you are."

On the other hand, perhaps none of them were quite as bright as I am.

"And anyway, if they haven't, I'm telling it to you now," Zacharias added. "Be a friend, but be a vates and a Lord." He knew that "Lord" wasn't quite right, but he didn't know what the equivalent of a vates would be for wizards, or even if it had a name. "Stop letting people make a plush dragon out of you."

He could feel Potter's breathing growing swifter, his magic surging like the tide. Then Potter stood up and ran out of the room.

Malfoy moved to follow, but Zacharias was already busy tearing into him. "Perhaps I had it the wrong way around, didn't I, Malfoy? Perhaps he has you on a string. The dragon leading the moron, now there's a change."

Of course he had to turn around and answer that. Zacharias grinned, content. He was taking someone who definitely deserved it down a peg or two, Potter had listened to him and might stop acting like a toy, and Hermione was giggling behind her hand at his insults.

All was right with the world.

Harry leaned against the wall and panted for breath. He didn't know where he was exactly—somewhere on the third floor. He hadn't bothered to keep track as he ran. His mind was what occupied him, whirling with thoughts and ideas he hadn't considered before like sparks of light in a broken window.

Oh, he had thought some of them, but somehow, they hadn't impacted heavily on him. Harry closed his eyes, ran a hand through his hair, and took a deep breath. The glass shards flashed and cut deep.

I know that Snape and Draco matter, but they can't matter more than everybody else in the world. Why was I acting as though they did? I never would have, only a few months ago. No, only a month ago. Before Snape got so worried about me that he had to change his behavior, I would never have stood for…

And a whole bunch of things he would never have stood for stormed through his brain: Draco shoving his friends away, Draco dictating where he spent his time, Snape ordering him around the way he had, Snape humiliating his father.

So why am I standing for it now?

He knew the answer. He'd wanted to make up for his past behavior, the behavior that had made Snape and Draco so worried about him. He'd wanted to show them that he cared and yes, he could do what they wanted, be an entirely undemanding ward and friend, not take everything for himself, the way that he had been so far. He'd stumbled so badly in the past that he wanted to make sure he didn't stumble again.

But he had. He'd swung the balance, and overcorrected it.

Harry grimaced to himself and rubbed at one arm, where he could almost feel the truth making him bleed.

And I forgot. I forgot what I swore to myself in the Owlery when Connor freed my magic from the last of the phoenix web, what I swore to myself when I found out that I could be vates. I have to know myself. I have to know when I'm lying or making mistakes.

And this was a lie and mistake, both.

Harry hung his head for a moment, but already he could feel a stirring impatience inside him. He didn't want to go on mourning his mistakes. It was time to go about correcting them.

But what can I do? If I just change back again, that won't do any good, either, because that would deprive Snape and Draco of things they need. And I never want to take them for granted again.

Harry had to consider for only a few moments, though. He'd been put in Slytherin for a reason. And he had done something very similar to what he now planned in the past, when he had concealed certain gifts and tendencies even from Lily.

I can hide, but not in a cage, the way Zacharias put it—with masks. I can make sure that Snape and Draco still have what they want, what they need. And I can give other people what they want just by acting differently when I'm around them. When something happens to me that they wouldn't want to know about, I can just not tell them. If Snape and Draco start driving into other people's free wills or interfering with something I need to do as vates, then I can lie.

It was such a simple solution, so breathtaking, that Harry blinked, and wondered why he hadn't thought of it before.

But he knew the answer even to that one, of course. Because I was so desperate for affection from Snape and Draco. I didn't want them to abandon me. I thought I had to do this so they wouldn't.

And that was a mistake. I got along perfectly fine with just a word of approval here and there when I was with Lily. I can do the same thing now.

Harry sucked in air until he could feel his chest bending to hold it all, and then blew it out. He draped his Occlumency shields over his mind again, since he could hear footsteps hastening towards him.

"Harry?" Draco came around the corner, his face wounded. "Why did you abandon me like that?"

"Sorry, Draco," Harry said softly, and moved forward to hug the other boy. He could feel Draco's startlement in the stiffening of his shoulders, but he ignored that. Draco needed to be hugged more often. That was something Harry still didn't do a lot. "I thought you would be angry at me because Zacharias was attacking you through me."

"No, no," said Draco, his face radiating happiness. "Let's just go and work on the potion again, all right? And can you promise me that you won't listen to Smith anymore? What he said was stupid anyway."

"Of course, Draco," said Harry, the lie coming easily to his lips. He would remember it, and in this state, when he was with Draco and what Draco needed, it was an easy promise to keep.

He could do this. He had a very good memory. And he'd had rather a lot of practice at deception in the last few years. So long as he could give other people what they wanted and needed, there should be no harm in this.

And I'm watching myself now. The moment I see harm—and surely I'll fail again—I'll correct myself. This is for the best.

And, soon, I'll write the letter to Narcissa and make sure Snape doesn't find out about the way I'm going to reverse the potion against James. He'll only be angry if he finds out.