Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
Chapter Eighty-Four: A Week of Sunlight
Thursday
Harry wasn't by Draco's bed when he awakened, but he came in less than a moment later, carrying a huge book in his arms, and his smile when he saw Draco was as sweet as Draco could have hoped. "How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Awful," Draco said frankly, stretching his arms above his head and then wincing as pains shot through them. "What in the world happened last night?" He could remember the glimpse of a white eagle and a dark wolf traveling towards him, and then nothing after that.
"Falco attacked you," Harry said quietly. "Hit you with an arrow made of poison that tried to corrupt your body." His hand stroked Draco's shoulder as though he wanted to convince himself Draco was still healthy, living flesh, and present in the same room with him. "I grew angry and attacked him in turn, but he managed to throw me off. Then Snape struck, and when Falco drove him back, I finally mustered the rage to defeat him."
"Is Professor Snape all right?" Draco asked, attempting to keep down his jealousy that other people had got to see that sight and he hadn't.
"Yes, he is. Recovering from a sudden healing of a broken leg, but Madam Pomfrey says he'll be fine." Harry wrinkled his brow at him. "Draco, what's the matter? You're biting your lip and trying not to grimace."
"I love the sight of you when you're in the full flood of your power," Draco said, deciding that he couldn't conceal his jealousy well enough. "And other people were able to see that, and I wasn't."
Harry put the book down on the edge of the bed, keeping his head attentively bent over the pages for a moment. Draco saw the muscles in his cheek quivering, and knew it was to hide a smile. He scowled, and then scowled harder when Harry began to laugh, quietly.
"If you think it's that funny," Draco began.
Harry waved his left hand at him, light striking silver from the dog's-head emblem in the center. "Not at all. Oh, Draco. Some things about you will never change, and I do love that." He leaned forward and kissed Draco, nicely enough that Draco felt a bit mollified when he drew back. "I'll put the memory into a Pensieve for you when you're well enough to appreciate it. Now. Madam Pomfrey said you would be feeling awful when you woke up, so I brought a book to read to you and keep you entertained. But first, do you want anything to eat?"
"No," Draco said. His stomach felt like a hollow, but it was a churning hollow. He was sure that he would vomit up anything he tried to eat. He arranged himself on the pillows and stared pathetically at Harry. "What book did you bring me? It had better not be for homework."
Harry shook his head and took a seat on a chair beside the bed, once again gathering up the book. "No. I asked your mother what your favorite book had been as a child, and she owled me this this morning."
Draco felt his mouth fall open. Perhaps he should have recognized the book at once, but he hadn't seen it for years, since his father had made a quiet little speech on his eighth birthday and told Draco it was time to put away childish stories and concentrate on pureblood rituals, history, and spellwork. But sure enough, Harry was turning it to reveal the bright green lettering on the brown leather cover that Draco remembered. Perhaps he should have found it garish. He had learned to appreciate it too young, however, to care. He associated that book with too many memories of his mum or house elves reading stories from it to him.
Of course, it would be embarrassing if anyone came into the hospital wing and found Harry reading children's stories to him. Draco tried to warn him about that. "Um, Harry, maybe you should put up a privacy ward?" He shook his head a moment later. "What on earth inspired you to ask my mum for that, anyway?"
"I almost lost you last night," Harry said bluntly. "It was Falco's mistake, ultimately. He could have paralyzed me if he'd taken you hostage—"
"Just like everyone else," Draco said, thinking of Rosier and Voldemort.
Harry picked up his hand and kissed the back of it. "But he tried to kill you," he said softly. "I was so angry, Draco. I think part of me is still reaching up into the night, trying to find the bit of my temper that flew away. I'd like you to hear stories that I know you'll enjoy. Please?"
Draco studied his face for a moment. He could have defended his dignity by saying that they were children's stories and of course he would want different reading material as an adult, but the truth was that he'd never enjoyed any other fiction he read with the pure, sheer pleasure of the book Harry held now.
"All right," he whispered.
Harry beamed at him and sat back to flip through the book. "Which one do you like best?" he asked.
It didn't take Draco long to answer that. "The Sword, the Cup, the Tree," he said. He had always felt the story flowing past him as a tide of wonder, of beautiful words and images. He had tried to memorize it, but every time he read or heard it, he became so caught up in the experience that he was left with only scattered debris at the end. He was lucky he was able to remember the title, he thought.
Harry sought a moment for it in the table of contents, then sat back and began to read. Draco closed his eyes, not to fall asleep but to let himself be drawn into the tale more intensely.
"'A sword as beautiful as morning! A cup like the bottom of a jewel! A tree that bears song in its boughs! Those are the gifts that I want for my joining, Mother, and I'll take no others.'"
Memories of warmth and love and comfort piled up around Draco, adding to the warmth of the blankets and the hand Harry placed on his, cocooning him in such contentment that he would have purred if he knew how. He let himself be swept away, once again.
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Friday
Snape lifted his head slowly. A small, soft sound had distracted him from his marking. He turned around, half-certain he would find the Potter brat crouching in a corner under his Invisibility Cloak and trying to distract him. It was the kind of thing the Potter brat would do.
Harry frowned at him over the potion he was brewing, a burn salve for the hospital wing. Snape had tried to explain that Harry didn't need to repay Madam Pomfrey for Draco's care, and Harry had said that he understood that but wanted to make the potion anyway. "Is something wrong, Severus?"
"I thought I heard…something." Snape drew his wand and cast several spells that would allow him to detect unseen intruders, assuming that any had got through his wards in the first place. He could find no one. Other than a spider spinning a web in a corner, Argutus, who was coiled around the legs of the table on which Harry brewed his potion, and a small army of ants come in from the Forbidden Forest who had found crumbs in the corner and were excitedly carrying them back to their nest, nothing was alive in the rooms but him and Harry.
"I didn't hear anything."
Snape at last nodded and turned back to his marking. This time, when the small sound started again, he didn't turn or lift his wand. He tried to sharpen his senses instead, imagining that his hearing extended beyond his head. He chopped away other stimuli by lowering his eyelids until a web of darkness occupied his sight and forcing his attention away from the texture of parchment and quill beneath his hands.
The sound was definitely coming from behind him, and not too distant. And it was musical, if one wanted to apply the term musical to such a tiny, faint noise. A hum? Yes, it could be a hum.
Snape's first thought was of a trapped insect, perhaps a bee, his spell hadn't managed to detect.
Then he had a far more interesting thought, and cast a spell on himself to give him absolute silence before he turned.
Harry was measuring the next batch of ingredients into the burn salve. Argutus gave a long, drawn-out hiss which Snape presumed was his version of advice. Harry hissed back at him, sounding more amused than anything, even given the often angry tone of Parseltongue.
And the small sound stopped, and then resumed again the moment Harry ended his hiss.
Harry was humming beneath his breath as he prepared the burn salve, seeming entirely unaware of it.
Snape watched him in silence for a long moment. Harry didn't stiffen or flinch or glance up at him, and that was also unusual; most of the time, he was too aware of his surroundings, to the point where Snap thought his training had made it impossible for him to fully relax. Now, though, he was focused, intent, and yet comfortable, and he hummed.
And Snape did not think it was just the burn salve, a relatively uncomplicated potion, that had made him so.
He likes being in the same room I am. He likes brewing potions when he knows that I'm here to watch him.
Snape shook his head slightly, and Harry caught a glimpse of the motion from his peripheral vision and stopped humming. "Is something wrong?" he asked again.
"The Gryffindor essays," Snape said with some dignity, "are particularly bad." That was no less than the truth.
Harry laughed, and in the sound was more delight than the situation warranted. Snape felt an unfamiliar emotion heave itself slowly over like a seal in his belly. Harry was—happy here with him.
"I'm sure you'll manage to show that House of dunderheads what's what," Harry told him.
Snape turned back to face the essays again. "I certainly will."
He waited for the humming to resume before he started the marking again.
It went on for approximately ten minutes, before Harry said, in English, "Argutus, don't touch that!" and there was a loud explosion and an Omen snake to be rescued from the thick blue paste that had adhered to his scales. But even that did not disconcert Snape. He credited the humming with putting him in a good mood beforehand.
He might have few enough moments like this with his son. He would take them when and how he could.
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Saturday
Harry paused for a moment when he heard voices ahead of him. He had assumed he was alone in the hallway just outside the library. He debated for a moment whether he should walk ahead and simply pass whoever they were; they seemed to be more intent on their conversation than going to the library, while Harry needed to continue with his Horcrux research.
Then he recognized one of the voices as Hermione's, and one of the voices as Zacharias's, and heard his own name. He hesitated. He didn't want to eavesdrop on them, but Draco would surely tell him he was stupid to miss a chance to hear what people were saying about him among themselves. And he listened to what Argutus told him of people's behavior, which was just another form of eavesdropping.
He promised himself he would move away the moment he heard something that made him uncomfortable, and laid his head on the wall.
"—makes it a lot more palatable," Zacharias was saying, his tone smug. Of course, Harry didn't think he had many voice tones that were not variants of "smug." "She even admitted that she might, might, come around to thinking better of the Grand Unified Theory, since Harry obviously doesn't feel that it denigrates his magic or makes him look less powerful than he really is."
"Of course, Harry's a halfblood," said Hermione, her voice relaxed and musing. Harry smiled as he pictured her standing in a posture other than with her hands on her hips, perhaps even leaning against Zacharias and closing her eyes. If anyone deserved the ability to put aside her burdens for a time and collapse like that, it was Hermione, especially since the end-of-the-year exams were approaching and Hermione would soon make life intolerable for herself and everyone else in Gryffindor Tower—if she wasn't already doing that. "That might mean that your mother would be less inclined to listen to him."
"She's not that prejudiced," said Zacharias, and Harry could feel the look Hermione gave him. "Or, well, all right, she is, but Harry's a special case. His magic tends to overrule her feelings about his blood. If that wasn't the case, she would never have fought beside him at Midsummer, or let me do so."
"Would you have done it anyway?" Hermione interrupted.
A reflective pause, and Zacharias said, "Yes. It would have distressed my mother, but yes."
Hermione made a soft, satisfied noise. Harry, meanwhile, tried to stifle his grin and failed. He hoped that no one would come up behind him and ask him why he was grinning like a fool.
"As I was saying," Zacharias continued, "she did think that Harry would feel insulted and belittled by the Grand Unified Theory, or not care that much about it. He still doesn't have that many Muggleborn allies, after all. His most influential campaigns have been about other species. But now I've told her that he supports it fully, which is true, and applauds the free will of magic that chose him apparently at whim."
Whim would be better than prophecy, Harry thought.
"And that made her say she'll think about it," Zacharias said. "It's a long way from outright conviction, but it's much better than absolute refusal."
"Good," said Hermione, and then there was a sound of kissing which seemed like it might endure for a while.
Harry softly backed off and took another corridor to the library. He still could not stop grinning like a fool, though a few of the students he passed gave him odd looks.
That's how it spreads, how it grows. A little at a time, tendril by tendril. Small things help it along more than large epiphanies. And most of the time, if I'm there, it's just as a guiding figure, not someone actively helping.
Harry lifted his head. House elves were speaking in their own voices now, thanks to Dobby. If wizards and witches could do the same thing, he was more than proud of what he had achieved so far.
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Sunday
Harry smiled, and stepped forward, firmly shaking the hand Periwinkle Lyrebird held out to him. She was a small woman, almost dwarfed by the enormous red robe she wore, marked with a dancing lyrebird. Harry eyed the patches in it, and nodded to himself. The Lyrebirds were not much richer than the Weasleys, if he read the signs correctly. They would benefit from the money he gave them, and the debt of gratitude would benefit him in more ways than just raising a few poverty-stricken pureblood families back to their old status.
"As we agreed, so it is done," said Periwinkle, in a soft, creaky voice that carried some distance, thanks to the spells Harry had quietly spread on the wind outside Hogwarts. The crowd of students, a few reporters, some Ministry officials, and other purebloods, Light and Dark, who had traveled to the school when they heard of what was going to happen today leaned forward. "We have the promise of your allegiance to protect us from enemies, vates, including Cupressus Apollonis. In return, you have our alliance and our support. And we have your promise of Galleons fulfilled." She turned to face the small group of wizards and witches behind her, all representatives of Light families who until recently had been too frightened to move against Apollonis. "Now we fulfill our promise as concerns our house elves."
The men and women gently led their house elves forward. Harry wondered if they would have been as gentle with them if this ceremony was in private, and then forced himself to dismiss that concern, and breathe in the warm, thin air and the soft May sunshine. It was public now, and they treated their house elves kindly for this one moment.
After this moment, it would no longer be a concern.
Periwinkle and the other humans stepped away, and Harry knelt so that he looked into the house elves' wide, earnest eyes. More than one pair was wet. Others gripped their ears and pulled on them in silence, or tried to hide their faces from Harry's gaze. They knew, at the moment, only that they were being shoved away by families they had faithfully served, and could not understand why.
Harry reached out for their webs. Essential weaknesses pervaded them already, weaknesses that would not have been there if the owners had not yielded their claims of their own free will. He closed his eyes, committed himself to a vision of transparent, tangled paths with enormous knots in the middle that tied the conventional freedom-binding webs to the ones that convinced the elves their service was of their own desire, and launched himself forward.
It was not easy, but it was as close to uneventful as any web-breaking Harry had ever done. He felt Draco, out of the hospital wing for the first time this morning, come forward and tighten his hand on his shoulder, but otherwise sensations from his own body were distant. He sliced through the webs like a knife, kicked at the knots, and bit his way through the tangles, and sometime in the middle he felt the elves' magic rise, helping him shrug the bonds off.
The moment the last strands came loose, he flung himself backward, drawing his magic up in golden-shining replicas of phoenix wings to let his audience know it was done.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the house elves' bodies dissolving in front of him, turning into a mixture of great green trains and silver veils of magic. They danced around each other, celebrating, losing shape and form until Harry could imagine they were portraying the primal matter their shapeshifting kind had come from. His eyes filled with tears as he watched the image that, for one moment, arranged itself out of the silver and the green: a healthy, living tree, with silver leaves and fruit, rooted in the earth deeper than any human could go and extending higher into the sky than any mortal tree could reach.
Then the magic collapsed into one long, straight beam, and soared off into the sky. Harry shaded his eyes with one hand, and thought they were aiming at the sun.
He glanced around, and saw more than one wet cheek, more than one pair of hastily wiped eyes, in the audience. Some people gaped with open awe on their faces. Harry smiled. Dobby's impact had spread far and wide, but this would go further. And some people already looked hungry for another sight of such wonder. Well, they could achieve it if they had house elves and would free them.
"Thank you for coming today," he said, and nodded to Periwinkle Lyrebird. "May all house elves, in the end, go free with such grace."
Once again, as yesterday, he was grinning like a fool, but this time he shared it with more than one person, including Draco, who turned him around and concealed his own foolish smile by pressing his mouth to Harry's.
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Monday
Connor paused when he reached his usual table for Charms study in the library. Harry was sitting there, bent over his Charms textbook and muttering imprecations under his breath which seemed to be directed at the fact that he couldn't find the bit of evidence he needed to make a point for his essay.
"Harry?" Connor ventured at last. He glanced around, to see if Ron was sitting at another table, but he hadn't arrived yet. Draco wasn't there, either, for that matter, and that surprised Connor even more. He would have thought his brother's boyfriend would be sitting right next to him the day after he finally managed to leave the hospital wing.
"Connor! Hullo." Harry grinned up at him, and nodded to his book. "Have you started on the essay for Flitwick yet?"
"Hermione tried to make me, but I didn't let her," said Connor blankly, sitting down and chiding himself for being so surprised. Why was it unusual for Harry to want to study with him?
Well, he's never done it before, that's why.
And because he was a Gryffindor and didn't need to attend to all the intricate emotional and verbal maneuvering that Slytherins seemed to perform around each other, Connor felt able to ask straight out. "Why are you here, Harry?"
"It occurred to me," said Harry, still flipping back and forth in the book, and then slowing and reading a paragraph that seemed to continue from one page to another, "that we don't spend much time together outside of Quidditch practice. Now, I like flying, but I don't think it should be the only interest common to both of us. And since I'm not playing this year, and you are, all I'm really doing is training you, while not benefiting Slytherin in any way." He grinned again, letting Connor know that he didn't really mean that last statement. "And I know that we both have some difficulty with Charms. I know specific spells, but not a lot of theory connecting them, because I mostly learned defensive magic, whether it was charms or curses or something else." Connor flinched a bit, expectantly, but Harry didn't look as though he was reliving bad memories of his childhood when he talked about his training. "You have the difficulty because—" Harry broke off and shook his head. "I don't know why, Connor, and I should. I should know that kind of thing about my own brother."
"I understand why you don't," said Connor, anxious in case Harry should start blaming himself again.
"I know," Harry whispered. "But I want to spend some more time with you, and find out. What is the biggest difficulty that you have with Charms?"
Connor let out a small, relieved breath, and opened his book. "Hermione's asked me that," he said. "And Parvati's asked me that. A lot." He scowled, thinking of the way that Parvati could flip her wand and perform the smallest and most delicate spells, ones that arranged her hair to fall just the way she wanted or moved her makeup around on her face without her needing to spend hours in front of the mirror the way Connor had heard some Muggle girls did. "And I don't know why. I don't think it's just one problem. Sometimes I understand a Charm well enough, and then don't understand any of the others related to it."
"Then let's look," Harry said, sliding over to sit in the chair next to him.
Connor couldn't help taking one more look around the library. "Have you seen Ron? We usually study together now."
"I know." Harry peered up at him from beneath his fringe. "I caught him earlier and asked him if we could have this hour alone. And I told Draco the same thing. You don't mind, do you? I know I should probably have asked first, but I wanted it to be a surprise."
"Not at all," said Connor, and felt a small and happy pit open in the center of his stomach as he bent over his Charms textbook beside Harry.
Harry concentrated, and the book fell open at the page Connor had studied most often and still didn't understand, the Bird-Calling Charm.
"How did you do that?" Connor asked, impressed. "Did you read my mind?"
Harry looked at him as if he were mad. "No, I felt the crease in the book and moved it so it fell open there," he said, holding up his hand, which Connor hadn't noticed under the binding.
Connor shook his head. He was still unused to Harry having a left hand, and had missed it. "Right."
It still didn't diminish his happiness.
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Tuesday
"Tell him he's a bastard," Millicent said helpfully, hanging over Harry's shoulder. "That's the worst insult for someone like him, to imply that he's not the rightful heir of his family's legacy." Then her eyes lit up. "No, use some of the proof from the Grand Unified Theory to show that he must be a halfblood or a Muggleborn, because of course no intelligence can possibly still exist in the pureblood lines."
Harry raised an eyebrow and noted to himself that Millicent seemed to resent the Grand Unified Theory more than he'd thought. Something to remember. "What do you think, Draco?"
Draco was reading Cupressus Apollonis's letter, which he'd sent to Harry when he found out his allies were abandoning him, in silence. Now he lifted his head and raised a lazy eyebrow.
"You didn't even notice the implication he gave that you both have an equal social standing?" he asked.
"What equal social standing?" demanded a Slytherin third-year, Josephine Hornblower, leaning forward. Harry had been aware that the letter was attracting attention outside the contingent of himself, Millicent, Owen, and Draco, but this was the first person who had intruded.
"Look at this." Draco unabashedly showed her the letter, ignoring Harry's attempt to snatch it back. "He's claiming that they're both Lords. That's insulting on at least two levels. Harry's not Declared and he won't use compulsion, and Apollonis doesn't have enough power to be a Lord."
"That was a turn of phrase," Harry muttered, disgusted. "I think it was just his wording that was bad. It's not what he meant, Draco."
Draco's second eyebrow joined the first. "So what?"
Harry opened his mouth to retort, but Josephine interrupted. "That's disgusting," she said roundly, and waved the letter like a banner. "He has no right to talk to anyone like that, much less someone stronger than he is and who just took his allies away from him. If he didn't have the power to keep them, then he shouldn't have extracted promises from them in the first place." She faced Harry. "I want to take this and have my cousin publish it. Can I?"
Harry imagined that letter in the Vox Populi and opened his mouth to refuse. It would insult Cupressus horribly, and probably make him all the more infuriated and likely to strike out blindly.
And then he thought of the insulting tone of the letter, which he would have found intolerable even when his training was in full effect, and how Cupressus seemed to believe that the allegiance of Periwinkle Lyrebird and the others was some sort of material possession that Harry had stolen and could simply hand back to him.
Does he deserve the courtesy of a reply?
No, he doesn't.
Harry shut his mouth and nodded to Josephine. "If you want to send it to your cousin Dionysus, you have my permission."
Josephine gave him a smile that resembled a shark's, and jumped up from the table to run to the Owlery.
"Was that the wisest idea?" Millicent asked, gingerly.
Harry shrugged and started eating again. "Maybe it would be better to keep it private," he said. "But then, I think, he would continue to believe that I was going to back down and yield to him. Elder Juniper of the Wizengamot thought the same way, as long as I accepted the way he owled me. And I have no time and no patience to dance with Cupressus Apollonis the way he wants me to. I have no respect for him, either, given what he did to his daughter." His daughters, perhaps. Scrimgeour had told him that he thought their nameless helper against Falco Parkinson was an Apollonis daughter, a younger sister of Ignifer's, from clues in her latest letter, and he was planning a raid to free her if possible. "This will at least set the terms of our feud out in the open."
"Of course it will," said Draco, looking serene. "That's why I showed the letter to Josephine in the first place."
Harry let him think that.
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Wednesday
"What is that?" Harry slammed to a stop just inside the room that Thomas had taken as his own, frankly staring. He had grown used to seeing scatterings of odd notes, equally odd diagrams, and sometimes spell residue in this room, but he had never seen anything like the white sphere that turned gyrations around Thomas's head. Harry thought at first it was following the course of his wand, but then he realized Thomas stood with his hands and his wand both hanging limply at his sides, laughing.
"There you are, Harry." Thomas motioned him closer. "This is what happened when I said Diffindo while holding my nose."
"While holding your nose."
"Yes, indeed," said Thomas, not noticing or disregarding his tone of voice. "I received some new research from Jing-Xi today. She said that the part of the body least affected by cutting spells like Diffindo was the nose." He touched his own nose, the strip of skin between the nostrils. "Probably because it refuses to have its openings simply sitting unconnected in the skin; they're surrounded on all sides by more skin."
"And so when you held your nose—"
"It influenced the course of the spell," Thomas said smugly. "The magic reaches back to the caster, and relies on the presence of an uncut nose to work. Jing-Xi thinks that those people with damaged noses, say, broken in battle, are the ones who can least successfully cast it. I hold my nose, and the magic can't sense either a wound or the ordinary place it depends on for its anchor. So it turns inside out and becomes this unbroken sphere instead." He grinned up at the white sphere. He held his hand out, and it came and hovered over his fingers, never quite alighting.
"That's really strange," said Harry, unable to help himself.
"No, it's not," Thomas said absently, still gazing at the sphere. Harry studied it, too, but it wasn't like a crystal ball; he couldn't see a reflection or a trace of a vision. It simply existed as a dove-colored round object. "It all makes sense. It's just that, most of the time, all the laws of magic are interconnected at levels that we ignore, or never suspect exist. But we're studying them right now."
"Do you think you'll ever understand them all successfully?" Harry asked, intrigued despite himself. Thomas's attitude towards magic in general reminded him of his attitude towards magical creatures. It did not really matter if the laws, or the magical species, had an impact on the future course of wizarding society, or were useful. It was enough that they existed.
"Of course not," said Thomas, looking momentarily distressed. "Or, at least, I hope that I'm dead by the time it happens, if it does. How boring, to live in a world like that."
He went back to peering at the sphere, and Harry went back to watching him and smiling, because he couldn't restrain that much of his amusement. He'd intended to ask Thomas if he'd found any traces of magical contamination in Draco's body.
But given Thomas's expression and the sudden, slow revolution of the sphere for no discernible reason, that could wait.
