Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Ten—Uncomfortable Conversations
Of course, Black and Harry just have to be gone to Black's first Mind-Healing appointment when Remus Lupin shows up.
The first Theo knows about it is Luna waltzing into the library, where Theo is deciphering an ancient text in the hopes that it will give him more Dark Arts spells of the level that Harry feels able to handle. And he does mean literally waltzing. Luna is spinning around, her arms positioned as if at the waist and shoulder of an invisible partner. Theo lowers his book and watches.
"Is that comfortable?" he finally asks, when Luna comes out of the last spin and gives a bow in the direction of the invisible partner, her fist over her heart.
"Oh, yes," Luna says serenely, and beams at him. "This way, I know that everyone is hearing the same music. It's so odd when you try to dance and your partner is going off in another direction, don't you agree? There's a werewolf at the gates. I find dancing most congenial when I can make up my own songs."
"There's a what?"
"It's most congenial when I can make up my own songs," Luna repeats patiently.
"No, there's a what at the gates?"
"He's a who, not a what," Luna says, and gives him a frown. "Most werewolves are whos and not whats. Not most trees, though. I do find birches an exception. My father says—"
But Theo doesn't wait around to find out what Luna's father says. He bolts from the room and runs down the stairs, arriving at the point in the entrance hall where it's easiest to trigger the wards overlooking the gates. He touches them, and Cassie appears at his side, her ears quivering.
"The stranger at the gates is being a werewolf, Master Theo," she whispers.
"Yes," Theo says slowly, studying the shabby, worn man at the gates. He looks prepared to wait patiently until the end of the world, and he does have the same face and the same patched robes as the Defense professor Theo remembers from third year. "I want you to stay in the house and be ready to lock it down if he transforms, Cassie." Not that Theo thinks Lupin is capable of a partial transformation, but he doesn't know that much about him.
"Master Theo is not going out there!"
"I have to," Theo says, and rests a hand on the elf's shoulder when she opens her mouth to argue. "You're the only one in the house I trust right now with access to the wards." He could give them to Blaise, but Merlin knows what experiments Blaise would think he should perform as a result. He could give them to Luna, but he wants the house to be standing when he gets back.
Cassie shivers for a long moment more, and then balls her hands into fists at her sides and nods determinedly. "Cassie understands."
"Thank you," Theo says, and walks out the front door with long, deliberate steps.
He's sure Lupin sees him or smells him or hears him long before Theo gets there, but he only turns his head away from studying a white camellia growing by the gats when Theo clears his throat. Then he nods, his expression locked in a weary gentleness lighted by a half-smile. "Hello, Mr. Nott."
"You'll understand that I feel I have to take some precautions to safeguard Harry."
"Yes, of course." Lupin doesn't even blink.
"What was my boggart?" Theo demands, and doesn't hide the fact that he has his wand aimed at Lupin. The wards are actually the bigger threat, but making a possible enemy look in a different direction has always been the Notts' favored tactic.
Lupin blinks once. Then he says, "Your father, holding your broken wand."
Theo nods tightly. He hates the thought of reliving that moment when his greatest fear came out in front of everyone—and he's pretty sure his boggart would be different now anyway—but it serves well as a test of Lupin's identity. He moves out of the way, and the gates swing open. "Please come in. I'll escort you to your rooms and show you the warded space where you'll spend the night of the full moon."
"Thank you," Lupin whispers, and picks up his single shabby trunk and walks in.
Theo keeps a careful eye on Lupin all the way back up to the house, but Lupin is watching the flowers in the gardens with a faint smile. "You like flowers?" Theo finally feels compelled to ask, when he begins to imagine Harry talking to Lupin about how Theo received him and Lupin mentioning the silence.
"Hmmm? Oh, yes, I do enjoy them. They smell so much more strongly to me as a result of my affliction, you know, and it's not always that strong smells are pleasant."
Theo blinks. He didn't consider that, but yes, he supposes he can agree. "I imagine that sweat and smells like that aren't pleasant."
"Those I can get used to. But the smell of decay is almost everywhere around us, and most people don't notice, so they don't have any reason to try and eliminate it." Lupin rolls his shoulders as they climb the steps of the house. "Although I'm sure that it's going to be fine in your house," he adds hastily.
Theo covers a snort as they step through the doors. Blaise is waiting for them with wide eyes. He shoots Theo an uneasy glance. Theo lifts a shoulder and drops it. Blaise will understand that as permission to stay in his room if he's too frightened to interact with Lupin.
Blaise being Blaise, he understands but also gets a stubborn look on his face. Really, with how easy it is to dare him, he should have been in Gryffindor. He comes forwards with no extended hand but a smile for Lupin that probably qualifies as sincere to Lupin's somewhat jaded senses. "Professor, good morning."
"Please, you don't need to call me Professor," Lupin says with a strained smile. "Mr. Lupin is fine, or Remus if you can manage it."
From the way Blaise stands, he's not going to be managing it any time soon, but someone else calls out from the staircase, "It's good to see you, Remus!" Luna comes floating down towards them, her smile bigger than it was. "I missed you when you left and we couldn't go feed thestrals in the forest anymore."
"Good morning, Miss Lovegood," Lupin says, and then coughs when Luna gives him an unexpectedly stern look Theo wouldn't have thought her capable of using. "I mean to say, Miss Luna."
"I would like it if you could take the Miss away, Remus."
"I'm afraid, Luna, that it needs to stay."
Luna seems to consider that and then nods. "If it has to." She takes Lupin's arm and starts pulling him up the stairs. "I can show you where you're going to be sleeping, and the warded room. The wards are nice and strong so that you don't feel afraid because of the wolf. I think it's silly to be afraid of a wolf at all, but some people are afraid, so…"
Her voice trails off as a door closes behind her. Blaise turns to Theo. "Did you know they were friends?"
"I had no idea."
"As long as I'm not the only one taken by surprise," Blaise says, in a strangely satisfied voice.
"Remus."
"Sirius."
From the looks of things, the only reason Lupin and Black don't start howling like the dogs they are is because Harry is standing in the entrance hall next to Black and beaming his face off. Theo catches his eye. Harry smiles at him but doesn't move from his place by Black's side.
That's all right. Theo is sure that he will get more than his share of attention from Harry later.
"When I heard…" Lupin takes what sounds like a deep and painful breath. "When I heard that you were free…"
"I know. I know you wanted to come. But I was worried about what it would mean for you if we had to have a warded room." Black looks at Harry with something that isn't a scowl but is a cousin to one. "And then Harry told me that he wrote to you and you agreed with him."
"We can't just run around the way we used to at Hogwarts, Sirius. Especially since we're guests in someone else's home."
Theo feels his eyebrows rise without his meaning to. That's more gracious than he expected of Lupin, and now Black looks a little abashed.
"Guests in a Death Eater home, Remus."
"All the more reason that we shouldn't break the china. Nott's probably got curses for that."
And Lupin turns and looks up at Theo, proving that his eyes or his nose or his common sense noticed Theo watching from the top of the staircase.
"I don't particularly care about the china," Theo says, sauntering slowly down the stairs, deciding in a moment how he wants to play this. "But try not to tear the tapestries off the wall and piss on the carpet."
Black stares at him with his mouth slightly open. Lupin smiles a little. "Not that I'll be doing that anyway, since I'll be in a warded room. A room I am very grateful to you for providing." He abruptly smooths a hand down his faded robes as if he's thinking about the visual he presents as a guest.
Theo waves a hand at him. "Gratitude is boring." From anyone who isn't Harry, he doesn't say. "Do what you need to to settle in the room and stay there on full moon nights. There'll only be a few of them before we go back to Hogwarts anyway." He turns to Black and Harry before Lupin can be boring again. "How did it go?"
"They're shocking me back into clarity," Black says.
Theo sighs. He supposes he shouldn't be surprised that Black chose the cheapest and simplest option. It was probably the only one he could fully understand. "All right. As lovely as this reunion is, I think we ought to—"
The Floo flares.
Theo spins and crouches, putting his body between it and Harry. He didn't give the Floo permission to do that, and it shouldn't have been able to. But the unexpected threat, who might be a Death Eater with some kind of access granted by the wards, will have to go through Theo before it gets to Harry.
Theo will deal with it and then find a way to revoke that access through the wards. Permanently.
The Floo darkens and spits out a shape, who is too short to be a Death Eater, at least since Pettigrew died. It also collapses on the floor and lies there gasping, and there's something familiar in the gasps.
"Neville!" Harry shouts, and darts straight towards Longbottom before Theo can stop him.
Honestly, doesn't he know better? At least Theo catches him up quickly, and makes Harry stay back with an arm extended across his chest. Harry glares at him and tries to get past, but Theo says quietly, "Harry, he just came through the Floo, and he shouldn't have been able to open it," and Harry calms down.
In the moments before Longbottom catches his breath and manages to sit up, Theo hits him with a series of silent charms that test him for illusions, Imperius, and Polyjuice. Harry and Longbottom won't recognize them. Theo would have used them on Lupin, but he had a question he could test Lupin with, and also, Lupin would probably have recognized them. Then Theo wouldn't have heard the end of it.
"It's him," Theo says at last, and lifts his arm.
Harry immediately runs over and kneels next to Longbottom, tenderly brushing some soot off his shoulders. Theo doesn't need to look back to know that Blaise is grinning, waiting to make some comment about Theo's jealousy. "Neville, what happened? Did someone try to hurt you? How did you get in here?"
Longbottom lifts his head, panting. Theo doesn't recoil from the pattern of dark lines crisscrossing his face, looking as if he's been burned on a grille, but he can feel more than one person behind him doing so. "Harry?"
"Yeah, I'm here. What happened?" Harry reaches out with one arm to help lever Longbottom back to his feet, but he doesn't take his eyes from him.
"I—there's a Floo in the Longbottom house that can connect to anywhere you want to go in Britain even if someone has blocked theirs," Longbottom whispers, and coughs. Theo stores the knowledge away. It's useful knowledge, and from what he knows of Longbottom, the bloke won't lie about something like this. "I'm sorry. I had to use it. My grandmother—I'm sorry."
"What did she do to you?"
Theo admires the flare in Harry's eyes, the coolness in his voice. Of course, Theo will make sure that Harry doesn't have to handle this alone, but he's still so tempting when he looks like that.
"She started saying how she thought that you were being corrupted and turned to the Death Eaters' side. She—" Longbottom coughs, and Theo steps in and waves his wand to puff the soot off both his robes and out of his lungs. Longbottom gives him a look of pathetic gratitude, which under the circumstances, Theo is inclined to accept. "She got really…strange. To the point where she said she might not let me go back to Hogwarts because your corruption was happening right under Professor Dumbledore's nose. And she wasn't happy with him, either."
Theo blinks. Then his mind leaps into flight.
Longbottom heard that about his grandmother perhaps not letting him come back to Hogwarts, and he panicked and ran. That means he isn't here with the permission of Mrs. Longbottom, no matter how unwillingly given.
Theo spins and tugs on the wards.
They raise themselves in a glittering shell over the house and grounds, beginning with the gates and the fence and digging into the ground even underneath that, so that no one can come at them from beneath. Theo cocks his head and isn't surprised to hear the sharp crack of Apparition from just outside them a second later.
"I think your grandmother is here," he tells Longbottom.
Of course Longbottom promptly looks on the verge of fainting. Theo sighs. He appreciates how good Longbottom is to Harry, but he does wish the boy had a little more of the spine Gryffindors supposedly all possess.
"I don't know how I'm going to face her," Longbottom whispers, but then he does something Theo would have thought beyond him. He turns to the door like he's going to try.
Theo steers him into a chair at the small table near the Floo. "No," he says quietly. "I'll do it."
"She'll think you kidnapped me!"
"Let her think that."
"But the political consequences—"
Smarter than Theo gave him credit for, too. He just smiles a little. "I have a plan, Longbottom. Don't worry about it."
"I'm coming with you," Harry says, his jaw set in that way he gets when he isn't going to hide from anything.
Theo studies him with a quick glance, and decides that he won't get Harry to stay in the house by any means short of Stunning him. He nods. "All right."
"Harry shouldn't go with you!" Black, of course.
"Are you quite sure that you know what you're doing, Mr. Nott?" Lupin.
Theo just nods to Lupin, says to Black, "You'll let me know when the Mind-Healing starts working, won't you?" and then steps out of the house, walking down the path to the gates. Harry walks beside him, shooting him narrow-eyed glances now and then.
"What do you plan on doing?" Harry asks softly, when it's absolutely certain that they're beyond the reach of even Lupin's werewolf ears. "Neville is right, this could be really bad for you, and you wouldn't just walk into it. What is it?"
Theo smiles and tilts his head at the wards that shimmer overhead like the world's biggest soap bubble. Of course, only someone as ridiculous as Longbottom would take their fragility for granted. "Did you know that the wards have many defensive properties? Not just ones that protect the house and the grounds and the inhabitants?"
"Fine, don't tell me."
Theo grins, and grins harder when Harry's hand finds its way into Theo's.
Harry won't like this, but Theo can't resist the temptation to show off.
Augusta Longbottom is indeed waiting at the edge of the wards. Theo stands behind the gates, thinning the wards carefully and specifically right in front of him so that she can easily see him. He doesn't do the same for Harry.
Mrs. Longbottom narrows her eyes at once. "You. Give me back my boy!"
"Your boy, as you call him, ran to us because he was afraid that you would keep him out of Hogwarts forever," Theo says mildly. "You're being unreasonably tyrannical and controlling, Mrs. Longbottom. All you need to do is promise that he'll be able to go back to school, and I'm sure he'll return to you. I'm no one's first choice."
Harry scowls and bumps Theo's side with his elbow. Theo flickers a whip-quick glance at him, not wanting to smile in case that alerts Mrs. Longbottom to his presence.
"I don't need to send him back to school! I'm in control of Neville's life!"
Even better than I hoped. Theo lets his eyes widen. "Mrs. Longbottom, please consider. Your grandson has a social life and friends, and he needs an education."
"I'm perfectly capable of giving him that!"
Theo lets his eyes wander up and down her. "All right, enlighten me. How much magic did you teach Neville before he came to Hogwarts?"
"I taught him to how read and write! I taught him his maths!"
"Allow me to repeat myself, Mrs. Longbottom. I said magic."
"I'll teach him what he needs to know!"
Theo frowns. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Longbottom, but this just isn't a good guarantee. When you were in control of his life before Hogwarts, you evidently didn't teach him any magic."
"You don't have a say in Neville's schooling, Death Eater!"
"I'm arguing for his free choice," Theo says mildly. "Neville's a wizard. He deserves to learn magic."
"You'll hand my grandson back to me right now or you won't like the consequences!"
Theo calmly gauges her mood. Her face is so flushed red and shiny that some of the seventh-years Theo has seen drunk on Firewhisky couldn't compare. Yes, he thinks it's time.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Longbottom, but if you don't let Neville learn magic, the consequences will be worse than anything you could do to me. He might end up like his parents, for example."
Mrs. Longbottom's eyes widen, and she lets out a shriek like a falcon's. Her wand aims straight at him and a curse comes flying, one that would fill Theo's chest and throat with smoke and stand a good chance of choking him.
The thinned wards let it through.
Theo falls over, choking, his hands clasped near his throat. Harry shouts and dives at him, but because he's still behind the wards where they're thickest, Mrs. Longbottom won't see him. The wards have closed over the point of access that Theo left for the curse he knew he could bait her into casting.
"Theo! Theo!"
Theo, as he raises his wand and silently casts the counter, does feel a bit bad about panicking Harry. But he was ninety percent sure that he knew the counter for any spell Mrs. Longbottom would choose.
And if he'd told Harry what he intended, Harry wouldn't have let him do it.
He sits up and nods to Harry. "I'm all right," he says, ignoring the way that Mrs. Longbottom hits the wards from outside with shrieks and bangs. She won't get through. It would take a full ritual circle of thirteen to do that. "Did you know one interesting property of the Nott wards?" He tilts his head and pulls on the wards with an effort of will, and the one nearest Harry's head thickens on the inside, turning silvery. "They can record the view from any angle I tell them to. Rather like a Pensieve."
Harry looks up and blinks as he hears the small, distant voices of Theo and Mrs. Longbottom emerging from the view.
"And I can send the memory to anyone I want. To anyone who might find it interesting to watch an adult curse a child. Like Wizengamot members, for example."
Harry blinks again, and then leans closer to Theo and says, "All right, that was clever. But you're not doing it again. I won't let you."
"You think you can stop me?"
"I'll Stun you."
"I'd like to see you try."
Even Harry's angry kisses are worth it.